Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  Tom was staring back toward the building. Jim Brane was getting to his feet, Julia beside him. Tom’s captor took a firmer grip on his shoulders. Another bent to seize his ankles, and he was being carried like a sack of grain across the street, Muffy beside him. At least, Jim thought, they were together this time.

  They were nearing the Armadon across the street. Someone opened the vehicle’s door, and as his friends were lifted into captivity, Jim opened his mouth and yelled, “Tige!”

  A howl of rage erupted from the Mack. Tom’s head spun toward the giant canine, as did those of his abductors, and he gaped at the sight of the wide-open jaws, streetlights reflecting from the fangs and drops of spittle, all getting nearer very quickly as ponderous legs propeled the genimal’s charge across the road. The kidnappers dropped their victims—Jim winced when he heard Muffy’s head strike the pavement—and leaped for the safety of their Armadon. The door slammed, and the smaller vehicle began to flail its limbs against the tops of its wheels.

  Tige loomed over Tom and Muffy, his feet avoiding their bodies as if by miraculous chance, and his jaws closed around the Armadon’s rear. Crunching sounds marked the damage his teeth were doing to the Armadon’s surface armor, to the root of the genimal’s tail, and to its left hind limb and wheel. The Armadon’s scream was incongruously shrill. On the other side of the street, Blackie’s throaty snarl played counterpoint and threatened that, if Tige were not enough, she would be all too pleased to join the fray.

  “Tige! Enough. Let go.” The Mack obeyed, and the Armadon spurted down the road away from them all. It now had only three useful wheels and propulsive limbs, and its left rear quarter dragged on the ground, but the adrenaline of fear gave it almost as much speed as it could have mustered when intact. It barely needed what must surely have been its masters’ panicky hands upon its throttle.

  Jim could not help but pity the genimal. A Roachster, like the one the Engineers had mutilated earlier, could be restored when it molted and replaced its shell. This Armadon, however, would have to be destroyed. It was not an exoskeletal animal, despite its appearance. It was a mammal, and its armor was bony plates embedded in its skin and covered by horn or scale, delicate and slow to heal. The wheels, great hollow bubbles of scale and bone, their rims covered with rubber treads, were irreplaceable.

  Jim and Julia helped Tom to his feet. Then, while Tom’s own adrenaline began to clear his head of the honeysuckle wine’s euphoric haze, he and Jim carried Muffy into the building and up the stairs. Julia handled the genimals, directing Tige back to his parking place and patting the side of Blackie’s snout to calm her down.

  Once in the apartment, Muffy collapsed onto the bed and began to snore. Tom managed to sit down on the couch before the residue of the wine forced him to close his eyes. Julia was the one who called the police and asked them to come pick up the body on the sidewalk. She did not tell them to look for a damaged Armadon. Macks were not supposed to have the freedom to do such things. Nor did she identify herself.

  After hanging up the phone, she told Jim how she had scooched over the body of the kidnapper Randy had bitten. While she had checked the fading pulse, Randy had emerged from the shrubbery and positioned herself as if proudly beside her victim’s head. Julia had stared and shaken her head respectfully. “Too bad,” she had said. “Too bad there’s only one of you.” Yet she had moved her hands slowly, warily, when they came near the spider. She was still, she told her mate, unsure of the genimal’s ability to discriminate between friend and foe.

  There was a cross on a chain around the kidnapper’s neck. She had checked his pupils and found them as constricted as if he had received a massive dose of heroin. He was comatose, unwakeable, and she had left him to pickup Freddy. The pig was undamaged but not speechless. When she leaned over him, he said, “I knew it! I can’t go anywhere with Tommy without something happening! I’m scratched. I have a headache. And my butt is even sorer than the last time.”

  In the apartment, she grinned and said to Jim, “Just imagine what that thug will say when he wakes up in a cell and learns that his friends left him behind, thinking he was dead.”

  “If he wakes up,” said Freddy, now propped in an easy chair. Randy was squatting by his side, uttering occasional quiet meeps. “And I hope he doesn’t.”

  * * *

  INTERLUDE 1

  The gallery faced west, and the rising sun could not shine its brilliant rays directly through the glass of roof and wall. The building of which the gallery was but one small part, albeit the part that gave it its reason for existence, was opaque toward the east, its walls pierced by no openings that could bring light to the Eldest and her sisters.

  Yet the sky above brightened quickly, and soon after the sun peeped above the horizon, that portion of its light that reached the gallery outshone the electric lights that sustained intent and dreams through the dark hours of night. The Eldest and her sisters awakened and spoke, Eldest first, the air currents carrying the messages along the line of speakers and listeners, permitting comment and expansion.

  “FAILURE,” was the Eldest’s first word, or not-word, an expression of scent and twisting sword-blade leaf. Almost as a footnote, she emitted scents to summon the hands that could turn off the artificial lights, open the louvers in the glass roof, and activate the sprinklers that would refresh them all with a morning shower.

  “Vine-borne word

  Yes, has come:

  Our master/pet

  Chose bulb-rotted agents

  Bulb-rot, root-rot

  WEAKNESS IS NO EXCUSE

  They had master/pet’s

  His scion/seedling/sprout’s

  Own pistil/mate

  Twice!

  And the scion/seedling/sprout himself

  And others too

  THEY LOST THEM

  No pollen for us

  No fresh genes

  And we have no more old

  No fruition and no rootstock

  No new pistils

  For us ourselves

  To pollinate

  WE WILL TRY AGAIN

  Unless our master/pet has lost all his usefulness

  If so…”

  The last speaker’s fronds drooped dejectedly. Soon, very soon, the next sister downdrift followed suit, and the next. Then the air currents wafted through the darker spaces of their dwelling and returned to the gallery’s updrift end, and the Eldest of the sisters began to echo the gesture. But, even as the signal reached the next in line, the Eldest stiffened her leaves and sternly pronounced:

  “NO! HE CANNOT, FOR IF HE HAS

  We are lost

  Cannot reach out

  Cannot do

  Cannot change

  WE WILL USE OUR MASTER/PET

  To order out his agents

  Once again

  To try again

  AND AGAIN

  As many times

  As necessary

  Until we have them all

  Have enough

  Do not forget

  Our master/pet’s own pistil/mate

  We need…”

  A vagrant breeze disrupted the phrase, but it did not matter. Frustration and regret had been expressed, and determination affirmed anew. Their plans would go on, until such time as all their hopes were fulfilled, or all hope was lost. They had time, and patience, and briskly scurrying allies who could and did upon command run their errands for them.

  As always, the discussion had taken time. The sun had moved from its low dawn position to high in the dome of sky. Now it shone down upon the Eldest and her sisters, through the glass above them, filtered by mute palms and other trees, given sparkling rainbows by the mist that issued from the pipes beneath the roof. The Eldest spread her sheath of leaves to soak in sun and mist, to bask in the forces of life, to grow, to think, to dream again, but more vigorously, empowered by the day-bright light.

  Her sisters followed suit. The gallery grew still, and the odors of communication died away.
r />   * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  Detective Bernard Fischer looked like an experienced cop. His hair was thin and grey, his nose round, his cheeks jowly, his belly a taut arc of flesh, and he walked with a stiff-legged limp. But his eyes were the same flinty blue they had surely been in his youth. They matched his uniform coverall.

  Muffy Bowen and Tom Cross were eating breakfast when they saw the Sparrowhawk land in the street outside their building. “They said,” said Tom, “that they would want to interview us.” He touched his worrystone. Muffy, her eyes caught by his, raised her hand in tentative imitation of his gesture. There was something hard at her throat, a stone like his. She blinked and smiled, suddenly remembering, aware of Peirce’s gift. The night before, her mind had been too fuzzed by honeysuckle wine to hold a thought.

  “I’m glad he’s not using the siren,” said Tom. Both of them had awakened with headaches. Aspirin and coffee were helping, but…

  “It better not take long,” Freddy grunted. The pig was propped with cushions in a chair beside Tom’s, his own worrystone dangling around his neck, and his mouth was full. The man had been feeding him chunks of toast covered with hamberry jam. “You’ve got Muffy back. And I want to get back to the museum. To my wife and kids. And my music. I’ve had enough already. You should have heard my heart last night! I had palpitations!”

  “Did we stop at a station?” Muffy ignored the genimal. She was far more conscious of her surroundings than she had been, but she still felt a little dazed, and her eyes kept straying toward the window with its fringe of honeysuckle vine and blossoms. She also ignored Randy, happily crouched beneath her chair. Beside the spider lay a husk of sparrow. She had gone out the window earlier to catch her own breakfast.

  Tom Cross smiled gently at his mate. “Of course. We had to tell them you were safe. And so was Jim’s Mack.”

  She looked again toward the honeysuckle vines. Her glossy black hair, clean now, trembled as she shuddered at the thought of the stupor the kidnappers had used them to induce in her, and at the further thought that she might willingly do the same thing to herself. She was still groggy.

  “Jim?” she finally said. “You’ve mentioned…” The entrance buzzer interrupted her. Tom rose from the table, used the viewer, said that their visitor was indeed the cop who had just landed, and let him in. Then he opened the apartment door to wait for their visitor to climb the stairs, the sounds of his climbing betraying his limp as surely as sight.

  Once Detective Fischer had introduced himself, Muffy pointed to a chair and said, “Coffee?”

  “Smells good,” said Fischer. “What’s that? A pig? At the table?”

  “I may not have a uniform,” said Freddy with a snort. “Or hands. But I’ve got as much brain as you do.”

  Even Muffy, dazed as she still was, could not help but smile at the expression on Fischer’s face. Tom said, “He’s a fluke. I’ve never seen another one like him.”

  “Neither have I,” said Fischer. “But you’d better keep him out of sight. BRA doesn’t like rogues.”

  “They know,” said Tom. He tried to explain where Freddy lived, and what he did there, but the pig interrupted, “They’re a pain in the…”

  Tom dropped another piece of toast into Freddy’s open mouth. Muffy rose, moving slowly but with a clear sense that her dancer’s grace was returning. When she returned, cup in hand, Fischer said “Thanks,” took out his recorder and began to ask his questions: Ms. Bowen had been kidnapped, right? How many kidnappers had there been? Did she get a good look at them? What kind of vehicle did they drive? Where did they keep her for the day she had been a captive? She didn’t know? They had kept her drunk on honeysuckle wine? And things were still a little fuzzy? He understood.

  He shook his head and turned his attention to Tom: And you, sir? You tracked the kidnappers down? How? By following the spider? What spider? That one? What in the world do you people keep a spider for? Oh.

  While Tom answered the questions, Muffy leaned forward, absorbed, as if she had never heard the tale before. She was sure she had. Tom would have told her everything when he had found her, but she had then been too benumbed by the wine she had drunk to register a word he had said. And she still had not entirely recovered her wits.

  The buzzer sounded again. Tom went to the window and looked at the street. A ring-eyed Mack was now parked behind Fischer’s Sparrowhawk. “That looks like Tige,” he said. The entrance viewer confirmed him as he let the newcomers in. “And both of them,” he added. “Jim and Julia.”

  “The Truck Farm was my next stop,” said Detective Fischer. He finished his coffee while Muffy poured two more cups and admitted that the two truckers seemed just barely familiar. Tom introduced her to his old friend, and his mate, all over again.

  Fischer cocked his head—perhaps he was skeptical of this part of the case—and turned to the truckers. He asked whether the dispatcher at the Farm recorded calls such as the one that had sent Mr. Brane to the abandoned warehouse. When they shook their heads and said they didn’t know, he sighed and said he would have to visit the Farm anyway. A recording would be handy, for it might allow a voice-print identification. Then he felt the still-tender spot on Jim’s head, where the man who had stolen Tige had clubbed him. He asked, Why hadn’t he locked the door? And when he finally found the missing Mack, he just called? Like this? “Tige!” he cried, as if he were calling a dog. He had had one, he explained, when he was a kid. And he came? Genimals weren’t supposed to do that, were they?

  Jim’s face turned pale. Muffy guessed that he had not intended to reveal as much as he had. He set his cup down, looked at the table top, seeming to think, and said at last, “I’ve been training him. I figured it might come in handy, you know? Like remote control, or if the control computer broke down.”

  “Or was sabotaged,” said Detective Fischer. He sounded thoughtful, as if he were remembering something other than a long-gone dog from his own past. In a moment, he smiled, and the expression had an air of conspiracy about it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I think I’ll leave that out of my report. It would get into the national database, and there’s no point in alerting BRA to the irregularity.”

  After a pause, he added, “And besides, you were riding another Mack anyway, weren’t you? And there was only the one exit from the courtyard? You must have blocked the exit, and then the kidnappers fled, and you reclaimed Tige. Wasn’t that more like it?”

  “No,” said Jim Brane. “The archway went through. I think there must have been another courtyard there. Or a street.”

  “But Tige came toward you?” Jim nodded, Fischer flicked his recorder off and everyone sighed their relief at the end of the questioning. “I can’t help much,” Fischer said then. “We probably won’t ever touch those fellows. We’ll never figure out who they were, and if we do, we won’t be able to prove a thing. Doping you—” he tilted his head toward Muffy”—with the wine was better than wearing masks. And last night, it was dark, their skins were blackened…” He shrugged and grinned. “And I’m sure they’re not driving an Armadon anymore.”

  Muffy Bowen glanced at Jim and struggled with her memory of the night before. Through the fog came a picture of how Tige had damaged the other genimal. Detective Fischer had seemed very sympathetic, very understanding, of the earlier anomaly, when they had called Tige and he had come. Now he seemed to be saying that he could guess what had really happened, that Tige could do more than simply come when called. The kidnappers surely would be driving something else. By now, she thought, they must have fed the Armadon to the litterbugs, something the veedo shows insisted was a common underworld tactic for disposing of biological evidence.

  Fischer sighed. “I wish that body we collected from the sidewalk last night had been more than that.”

  Julia stiffened. “He was alive when…”

  “When you called it in? I guessed it was you when I saw the address. Unfortunately, the fellow never woke up. Spider venom?” When Muffy nodde
d, Fischer turned his recorder on again and asked her and Tom a few questions about the attack of the night before—How many were there? They grabbed you both? But the four of you fought them off? And they fled?

  “What puzzles me,” said Fischer. “I can see why they would kidnap you.” He was pointing at Muffy with the middle finger of his left hand. There was a gold band on the finger beside it. “As Mr. Cross said, if they were Engineers, they could use you to put pressure on him, or on the store.” He shifted the target of his finger to Tom. “But why you? They want you both, and that says there has to be some other reason. I wish we knew what it was.”

  “So do we,” said Tom.

  “Maybe it’s his Daddy,” said Freddy. When Detective Fischer looked curious, the pig explained: “His real Daddy was a neighbor man, a gengineer. And his mother says he wants to turn Muffy into a plant. Maybe he wants to do it to Tom, too.” He paused while Fischer’s expression changed to bafflement, and then he added, “But she’s a honey bum.”

  Tom didn’t laugh, but Jim did, uneasily. Muffy smiled, and so did Detective Fischer. “Ah,” he said. “Maybe so. But they did try a second time. Maybe they’ll try again, whatever their reason. Perhaps you should lay low. Stay away from the places you usually go. Work. Even here. Make yourselves hard to find.”

  Tom nodded in agreement.

  “Litter!” said Freddy. “I wanted to go home. You’ll have to call Frankie for me, Tommy.” He twitched his limbs as if to remind his old friend of how useless they were.

  The city zoo was in no way unique. Like most zoos, it had quarters for birds, reptiles, small mammals, elephants, antelopes, buffalo, wolves, buildings and fenced enclosures, large and small. There were endangered species and common species and even domestic animals—goats and sheep and rabbits and fowl—for the children to pet and feed. There were concessions selling hot dogs and potster chips and popcorn and peanuts and cotton candy and caps and pennants and toy animals, both stuffed and plastic. There were benches for the tired and pedal boats for the romantic. There were elephant and camel and donkey rides. And litterbugs were everywhere; there was no shortage of food for them.