Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  “Of course,” said Peirce. “Many plants can concentrate metals from the soil. It was only a matter of time before someone took advantage of the ability.”

  “And it gives whoever’s in there…” Tom’s face turned toward the head that still awaited them. “…plenty of money.” He dropped the nuggets in his pocket and said, “Let’s go.” A few minutes later, they stood before their destination.

  No one, not even Freddy, spoke as they stared up at the imposing visage, though Tom did think: Whatever gengineers had grown this bioform had to have been man-muckers. They had clearly used human genes, and that was illegal. Society, as represented by the Bioform Regulatory Administration, felt that manipulating human genes was somehow different from manipulating the genes of jellyfish, pigs, birds, and plants. It was obscene and sacrilegious, said many whose motives were founded in the inviolability of religious and social tradition, or in fear of unexpected consequences.

  No wonder the house was located in so isolated a spot, where no one could see it and mention it to the agents of BRA. Yet it was here, visible to anyone who wandered by on a hike, or flew overhead, or looked down from a satellite with camera or telescope. It signified a colossal ego, a man who might easily have given himself an anther and pollinated amaryllises and neighbor ladies, a man who judged the rightness of his behavior only by his own standards, if he bothered to so judge at all.

  The lower lip lay on the surface of the ground and was shaped to serve as a pair of steps; it was the consistency of wood. The gleaming teeth provided a portcullis to duck and a curb to step over. Behind them was a small portico that despite the fleshy contours of the walls reminded Tom of the entrance to the apartment building in which he and Muffy lived. There were, however, no mailboxes, and the door was not locked. When he turned the knob, it opened easily, releasing an almost visible cloud of complexly mingled fragrance.

  “Shouldn’t we call Tige a little closer?” whispered Kimmer. The Mack was still parked by the edge of the dirt road that had led them to the other side of the ridge.

  “Too noisy,” said Tom. He did not say whether he meant the calling or the truck’s response to the calling. “We don’t want to attract attention.”

  “But…”

  Jim shook his head. “Later.”

  Beyond the door, they found a single high room so narrow that they knew immediately that there had to be more. The room’s furnishings consisted only of a single small rug, a low table, and a large earthenware pot in which grew a pie plant. Beside the pot was the room’s one door; it was closed, and it said as clearly as the room’s narrowness that there was more to see.

  From this vantage, the eyes were circular, stained-glass bullseyes that admitted varicolored beams of light. They illuminated the flat, wooden floor on which they stood as effectively as might have artificial lights, but they left the room’s upper reaches, which stretched as far as they could tell all the way past the lofty forehead to the hairline, in deep shadow. A ventilator grill marked the inner opening of the nasal passages, and a cool breeze suggested that an air conditioner or ventilation fan was indeed installed behind the grill. Two other grills marked the ends of the opposite wall, one of them emitting a current of air. The odor that was so strong in the room seemed to ride upon this current.

  The only sign of the structure’s organic nature was the organic curve of the outer wall. The room was otherwise as square-cornered and flat-surfaced as in any more ordinary building. Certainly, no great mass of brain loomed over them.

  “It’s just a head,” said Julia. “An empty shell.”

  “No one’s home,” said Jim. “Not even the kidnappers.”

  “Just like a pumpkin,” said Muffy.

  “I bet it screamed,” said Freddy from his perch within Tom’s arms. “Or wanted to, when they cleaned it out.”

  Tom shuddered at the thought that preparing this house had meant that someone had had to scrape out a living brain, or that the giant head had briefly felt some tormented urge to shriek. But surely it was the fruit of some strange hybrid plant, with roots instead of lungs. It could never draw the breath it would need to protest its treatment. Nor, he hoped, would it have had a brain at all with which to suffer. The gengineer responsible would surely have foreseen the alarm such a scream would arouse throughout the county.

  Or had he? Had Frank Lloyd Wright screamed indeed? Was that perhaps why the people of Pinkley seemed to hate anything connected with gengineering? More likely, they had simply seen what sat within this valley like John the Baptist on his platter. Better yet, when the house was fully grown, workmen would have been needed to fit it out with doors and windows, walls and plumbing, and those workmen would have been local. And they would have talked.

  There could not have been a scream. No lungs, he thought, and too, his father, Jack, had to be the gengineer. Surely he would never have permitted a brain, an intelligence, this large to be slaughtered. Would he?

  “I think,” said Kimmer Alvidrez. “That it was grown empty. It had to be, or the heat generated by all that brain tissue would have cooked it.” After a moment’s pause, she added, “If I had a computer here, I could run the calculations.”

  Tom sighed and reached for the door. “Let’s see what’s in here.”

  They were met by a wave of odor—flowers, musk, sweat, and soil—and by humidity that in a cooler room or cavern would be dankness. Freddy made a gagging noise and said, “It smells like a whorehouse!”

  “How would you know?” said Tom. He flicked a single small switch beside the door, dispelled the darkness, and revealed a small room, empty except for an arrow bed and a heap of stained bedding. The ceiling here was of ordinary height, and an open staircase led upward. A door to one side indicated the presence of at least one more room. Another door in the far wall led, Tom guessed, to that portion of the head roofed by glass, the greenhouse. Above this door was another ventilation grill. Beside it was a bank of what looked like light switches, along with a pair of dials. One dial looked like a simple rheostat. The other bore more complex markings; it seemed likely to control the house’s ventilation system.

  The door to the greenhouse was ajar. When he pushed it open all the way, he heard several gasps behind him. “Alices!” said Muffy.

  After the dimness of the head’s interior, the light was bright. Tom blinked, and his eyes adjusted until he could see: The room was a long gallery curving along the house’s occiput. The switches and the rheostat beside the door, he thought, were presumably intended to control the room’s lighting. Somewhere there must be valves and timers to regulate the flow of water from the pipes he could see overhead.

  Near the outer, glass wall stood square concrete planters that held the palms, citrus trees, and vines whose leaves and fronds swung overhead and filtered the light. Down the center of the gallery marched an irregular line of over a dozen large earthenware pots, nearly identical to those they had seen in the trailer Tige had been pulling when they had rescued Muffy and Kimmer. Each of these pots held a thick, pale green stem sculpted into remarkably feminine curves. From the base of each stem grew a cluster of bladelike leaves that wrapped around the stem and, twitching as he watched, drew his eyes upward to flowers that looked far more like faces than those of any Alice he had ever seen. The blossoms’ centers varied in color from near white through palest yellow to an orange that was almost tan, each shade just a little pinker than the corresponding shade of skin; their rims were darker versions of the same colors and gave an impression of hair. Eyes they had, noses, mouths, all arranged of flower parts and shadings, and hence immobile.

  Freddy laughed, hooting so loudly next to Tom’s ear that the man winced. “The maidens!” he said. “Porculata was absolutely right for once!”

  Muffy grinned at him. “But you’d need an axe to…”

  The flowers were turning on their stalks to face toward Tom and his companions, and if the mouths did not move, if there was no hint of language to emerge from these strange beings, the eye
s held a glint that said far too plainly that they held as well a sense of vision. Like the Alices, like the head house, like the amaryllises Jack had pollinated, these flowers had human genes. They were, Tom felt sure, in fact the descendants of those very amaryllises.

  The draft produced by the house’s ventilation system felt cool against Tom’s face. Fragrance billowed and shifted almost visibly through the greenhouse gallery. “We’re glad to see you,” said a voice. It spoke slowly, as if the mind behind it worked only with great deliberation, or as if the speaker were trying to give that impression. “Glad we are, oh, yes. Glad. Glad.”

  Tom felt like twitching, as if something were plucking clumsily at strings within his brain. He turned, looking for the speaker, and saw Muffy batting one hand at the air in front of her face, as if at cobwebs. The others looked dazed.

  “We’ve been trying. Oh, yes. Trying. Here. Trying to get you here.”

  He turned back, scanned the gallery, and finally saw, crouched beside the largest of the pots, beneath the largest of the strange plants, and the one nearest the door, a small, naked man. His hair and beard were long and matted. He had an immense pot belly, and his limbs were emaciated. Except for the beard, he matched alarmingly well pictures Tom had seen of starving children.

  Grime encrusted his skin. From one corner of his mouth fell a string of drool. With one bony hand he constantly stroked and patted the two-foot long organ that jutted from between his legs. Its color was a greenish gold, and its flanks were draped in limp skin like the husks of drained blisters.

  Tom’s mouth fell open. He looked at Muffy. She was staring back at him, her face a mirror to his own shocked expression. “Jack?” he said.

  Was this man, this warped and twisted gnome, his father? He seemed utterly incapable of the intelligence essential to gengineering, especially at the level necessary to create the Alices, or even his massive anther. Nor did he seem capable of pollinating Petra Cross, or Muffy, or any other woman. The pollen that once had filled his sacs was long gone. Tom felt the promise of age brush him as if with the tips of feathered wings, even as he wondered, if he did not want women to pollinate, then what did he want them for? And he knew, just as if the thought were his own, what Muffy was thinking in her own astonishment: Is this, Tom, what will become of you?

  “Jack?”

  “We’ve been expecting. I. I’ve been expecting you. Just one or two. Or even three. Expecting you. The rest. The rest are bonus. And welcome too.” The man’s lips moved as he spoke, but his eyes were vacant. His molasses-like pace and his rhymes, inadvertent though they apparently were, made him seem utterly mad.

  Fragrance billowed once more, and again Tom felt the plucking at his mind. This time, however, he also noticed that the worrystone that hung within the top of his coverall, against the skin of his chest, was vibrating gently, humming almost inaudibly.

  As the vibration waxed, his head cleared. He looked at the others. Muffy, still staring at him, not Jack, had her hand over her chest, presumably covering her own stone. Julia was holding hers beside her ear, apparently listening to its faint song. Jim and Peirce both looked attentive.

  “We hope.” The man’s voice bore a rapidly fading sour note, as if something had displeased him.

  “We hope you’ll. Yes. Enjoy your stay.” This time it was two voices that slowly pronounced the words, as much in unison as if a single mind controlled them. Tom was startled to see Kimmer’s lips move. She alone did not seem to be aware of her surroundings. She stood, staring dumbly into space, inert except for her mouth.

  “Kimmer?” What was going on in this strange place? What had the kidnappers delivered his mother to? Tom scanned the gallery again. And where was his mother? He could see no sign of her.

  “Kimmer!” Muffy shook the woman who had shared her captivity, but to no avail. Kimmer was blind to Muffy and the rest, deaf to their words.

  “Mech!” said Freddy. “It’s like something took over her mind. But all that psychic business is hogwash, no matter what Porculata says.”

  “Then how…” Muffy moved closer to Tom, and he tightened his grip on Freddy with one arm. The other hand he held toward his mate. She clasped it tightly.

  Julia stared at them, not moving even though something was seriously wrong with one of their companions. “Let’s get her out of here!”

  “No,” said Jack and Kimmer simultaneously.

  Tom shook his head. “She’s in no danger. No more than us.” Then he faced Jack and asked, “Where’s my mother?” But Jack—if that was indeed who the naked man was, or once had been—ignored the question.

  Jack abandoned his anther, climbed to his feet, and gestured expansively with both arms. Kimmer imitated the man’s motions, though more clumsily. “You can. Stay. You can,” said the two simultaneously. They still spoke with excruciating slowness. “We have rooms. For all of you. Yes, rooms enough.”

  Tom stared at the huge plants in their pots. Their forms were disturbingly human, due he presumed to Jack’s continued infusions, generation after generation, of human genes. Long ago, the four blossoms of an unmodified amaryllis had merged into one and gained enough suggestion of a human face, and enough permanency of bloom, to be marketable as an Alice. These larger Alices—Queen Alices, amaryllis ladies, whatever they might be called—had a look of even greater permanency. He doubted that they ever shed their blooms, or did so only when they had been pollinated and must convert their floral tissues into seeds.

  “What if,” said Jim Brane. “What if we don’t want to stay?”

  A sigh seemed to run through the greenhouse gallery. Renewed fragrance, subtly different, filled the air and the worrystones hummed as if in response. Was that, wondered Tom, how they spoke? Did they emit the pheromones that the transcript of Jack’s psychiatric sessions had mentioned, and so control his, and now Kimmer’s, speech? Then why did those pheromones have no effect on the rest of them?

  Peirce had removed his worrystone from the inside of his coverall and now held it in one hand, looking thoughtful.

  “I cannot. Cannot. Cannot stop you,” said Jack. But his eyes twitched toward the planters near the glass. Tom looked in that direction and saw only normal greenery. There were not even any honeysuckle vines. The only strangeness was a swollen, bulb-like stem in the shadows, and that did not seem ominous.

  “From leaving,” added Kimmer as if she were speaking independently, yet still on behalf of the residents of this strange house. Or as if one amaryllis lady—or perhaps several—had chosen to direct its pheromones toward Jack, and another its toward her.

  “You wouldn’t have any trouble with my mother,” said Tom, thinking of the way he had last seen her. “Where is she?”

  Again he was ignored.

  After a moment of silence in which Jack, standing before the amaryllis ladies as if he were their spokesman, stared at the other humans, and they at him, Franklin Peirce moved to the front of the group, beside Tom, and said, “Are you the gengineer who made these?” He gestured toward the plants in their pots.

  For the first time, a spark of interest glowed in Jack’s eyes. He nodded jerkily and said, “Our grandfathers.”

  Kimmer spoke in slow step with him, with only the slightest of differences: “Our grandmothers.”

  “Were rapists. They were. Rapists. Smothered the land. They did. In concrete. Concrete and tar. And buildings, too. Destroyed forests. Forests, plains, and swamps. Swamps and oceans. Killed all. All that lived there. There! Destroyed habitats.”

  He sounded like a committee that had been asked to talk on one of its favorite topics. Pausing for breath, he rolled his eyes as if in anguish. “We are. We. We are no better. No. Bioforms and turf. Turf. And bioforms. All cover land too. Destroy habitats. Too. And species. And wild genimals. Bioblimps, yes! Yes. Escape. Devour wildlife. Eat it up. It’s gone. Gone. Gone!”

  While he breathed again, Kimmer continued: “No right. No, not either. We have no right. Have none. Cannot, should not. Change genes. Fo
r us. Our convenience.” Neither speaker seemed to be aware that they were espousing precisely the arrogance they were inveighing against.

  Jack and Kimmer continued in unison: “I. We. Resolved to fix. Make humans. Humans not. No longer able. Not able. Make them plants. Like plants. Yes, like plants.”

  The largest and closest of the amaryllis ladies then arched a long leaf as if to show off its sleek green surface, and Jack and Kimmer said together: “No hunger, then. Not either. Green leaves. Photo. Synthesis. Need only sun. Just that. No more. And water. Root bath. And world is safe. Forever. Forever more.”

  Despite the odd disjointedness of their speech, Tom had no difficulty in understanding them. Nor did the others. “But,” said Julia. “But then we’d all be vulnerable. To weather, and animals.”

  “Nature’s way,” said Jack alone.

  “Tough titty, kitty,” said Freddy with a chuckle. Tom Cross looked at him with annoyance clear in his expression, but the pig was unrepentant. Tom supposed the genimal could identify with the idea of turning gengineering against the gengineers. He was, after all, by any definition, handicapped. Tom straightened the pig’s worrystone and found it warmer than he thought that body heat could account for, but he said nothing.

  “And world. All the world,” said Jack and Kimmer slowly. “Will be safe. Yes, safe.”

  “But what about these?” asked Muffy Bowen, gesturing toward the amaryllis ladies. “You didn’t make them by turning people into plants.”

  “The transplants went the other way,” said Franklin Peirce.

  “We/they. They/we. Want minds/bodies/sentience. Motility. Think only fair. Make people like plants. Plants like people. Fair exchange. Our/their turn, now. Very fair.”

  “Why did you use just your own genes?” asked Tom.

  “All I/we had. No other pollen. But need now is great. Inbreeding. Recessives. Recessive genes emerge. Defects thus. Need fresh. Genomic input.”