“Then why didn’t you just kidnap men? Why women? Why Muffy?”
Kimmer’s face twisted as if she might add, “Why me?” but she said nothing. Perhaps she couldn’t. Nor did Jack speak, and Tom wondered if the answer to his question were so complex. Some plants, like humans, kept their sexes separate, the male anther in one flower, even in the flowers of one plant, and the female pistil, style, and ovary in a second flower or plant. Amaryllises, like most plants, had both sexes, both sets of sex organs, in every flower. Perhaps, he thought, they were bored with playing the female role all the time. Perhaps they wanted to pollinate a human female as Jack once had done with Petra, and thus to transfer genes in the other direction. Yet if that were what they wished, and if both fertilization and gene-transfer worked, they would only slow their conquest, their conversion, of the world. Plants run through their generations far more quickly than humans.
When Jack and Kimmer finally spoke again, they sidestepped the question. They said: “That is not. Not how we. Put genes in humans. In humans. To make like plants.”
“I,” said Jack alone. “I made. The honeysuckle. First attempt. First try. Easy way. For everyone. For all. Drug. To make sleepy. Plantlike. Less burden. On our world. Used virus vectors. But the viruses. Vine sheds them. In the wine. Carry plant genes. Plug into. Human cells.”
“I think,” said Jim Brane. “That he is saying the honeysuckle was supposed to slow people down. It wasn’t supposed to change them into plants.”
Kimmer nodded but said nothing, and he went on. “We studied this in training. Many viruses plug themselves into genes, and the gengineers therefore use them, like pliers, to carry genes into cells. But the viruses can unplug themselves too, and sometimes they carry genes with them. That’s what the viruses he used to gengineer the honeysuckle vines do, and when people drink the wine, they get a dose of the honeysuckle genes.”
Now it was Kimmer’s turn to speak by herself: “Yes. Yes. Failure. Not success. Not what wanted. But it would work. Anyway. Would work. Slow humans down. Slow them. Plants. Turn them into plants. But too few drink. And drinkers drink. Too much. Before cells. Enough. Have the genes. And make the drinker. A plant. A plant like us.”
Together, the two said: “But not like us. They are still. Too much animal. Too smart. Stay on pavement. And when they don’t. They have roots. Many roots. Too many. Too viney. Honey suckly.”
“Sloppy work,” said Peirce. “If someone with those honeysuckle genes could somehow pollinate these amaryllises, or if they could pollinate her, there’s no telling what the result would be.”
“You can roast me for a litterbug,” said Freddy. “Before I try.”
“Now,” said Jack and Kimmer. “Your rooms. Upstairs. You will. Stay there. There. Until tomorrow. There is food. Plenty food.”
As they spoke, they gestured the other humans out of the greenhouse gallery, toward the staircase in the next room.
No one argued. No one tried to leave, even though Jack and—Tommy was sure—the amaryllis ladies were clearly powerless to stop them. Kimmer was somehow in their power, and no one was about to abandon her to whatever fate they might have in mind for her. Nor had they yet found any sign of Petra Cross.
As Jack and Kimmer climbed the stairs and the fragrances emitted by the amaryllises faded, what liveliness they had shown in the greenhouse also faded, until they seemed to move like sleepwalkers, or as if they were puppets that had been programmed to perform a set task with no help from their masters.
The staircase ended at a broad, roughly square landing that seemed to hang suspended beneath the upper arch of the greenhouse’s glass. A low railing seemed intended to keep the careless safe.
Still moving like automated puppets, Jack and Kimmer opened the doors of three rooms, of which the largest held a goldfish bush. Tom and Muffy claimed that one, saying Randy could eat the goldfish. Jim and Julia took the one that opened through the ear onto the balcony. To Franklin Peirce was left the third, and the smallest, though it had a bed quite large enough for two.
There was a fourth door from the landing, but that one remained closed. Presumably it led to a fourth small room like Peirce’s. But their hosts were not offering it to Kimmer. Tom thought they must intend to keep her downstairs, with Jack.
The fragrance of the greenhouse was almost unnoticeable on the second floor. “It’s fresher here,” said Julia. “I can breathe.”
Jim and Peirce nodded in agreement. Tom would have done the same, but he noticed that Jack had paled, there were drops of sweat on his forehead, and his hand had returned to his empty anther. Kimmer also looked uncomfortable as the two said in unison, more slowly and laboriously than ever: “Rest here. Wait. We will. Talk again. Now we. Must leave.”
As Kimmer turned away, Peirce grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward him. As he did so, his worrystone swung and touched the skin of her neck. Immediately, she stiffened, her mouth open as if in shock.
“Stay with us,” said Peirce.
Her mouth closed and opened again. She threw her arms around Peirce’s shoulders. She wailed: “What happened? I don’t remember anything! Jack had just said they were expecting…”
Jack left hurriedly, and Peirce said, “Stay close to me from now on.”
“What did they do to me?”
The others did their best to explain what they had seen and heard her do. None could say for sure just how she had been turned into a puppet, though when Tom repeated aloud his speculations about pheromones, all agreed that he must be right. Why had she snapped out of her trance of slavery? Perhaps she was simply out of reach of the signals from the amaryllis ladies. Or perhaps some program the plants had instilled in her brain had run its course. Certainly Jack had seemed to grow uncomfortable as his separation from the plants had lengthened, perhaps as his program had neared its end. He had fled as if he needed to be nearer the plants, and their commanding signals, in order to know what to do next.
* * *
CHAPTER 15
For some time after Jack had left, Kimmer Alvidrez did no more than cling to Franklin Peirce while he did his best to soothe her. He had somehow rescued her from a kind of mental slavery that none of them understood, and she was not about to let go. Nor did he seem to wish her to do so. Tom thought that they might never again wander further from each other than arm’s length, and the room Peirce had chosen would not be his alone.
While Peirce and Kimmer huddled together, Tom and the rest explored the second floor of the head house in which they had found Jack and the amaryllis ladies. The sun was high, and the greenhouse’s glass admitted ample light while open louvers let the heat escape. Gengineered philodendrons, their bioluminescence just barely visible in the shadows beneath their leaves, grew from pots near the wall and promised a night-time illumination bright enough to let one find one’s way from room to room. What amaryllis fragrance reached them from below was weak, and Tom felt no plucking at his mind. His worrystone was silent. The pheromones, he guessed, if they were there indeed, were so homogenized by the rising air currents that they lost all their power. Or perhaps the main flow of air kept them confined to the ground floor, sweeping the length of the greenhouse gallery, through the front hall, and back again, an endless loop of communication and control. That would account for Jack’s strange behavior.
The two larger rooms also overlooked the gallery. Peirce’s room, located beside Jim’s and Julia’s, alone had no view of the surrounding valley; it relied on electric light. One of its sides might have admitted eyelight from the head’s front room, which extended from ground to brow, but that side was closed off by a solid wall. The house’s second story amounted to a rectangle no more than half the head’s cross section in size.
They were standing on the landing outside their rooms, staring alternately at each other, the surrounding landscape, and the glass of the greenhouse wall, which reflected a blurred image of the amaryllises below. Tom tried the fourth door that opened onto the landing; behind it w
as, as he had suspected, another small bedroom, much like Peirce’s. He thought it would remain empty.
“We have to stop them,” he said. “Don’t we?”
“How can we?” said Julia. “The honeysuckle is everywhere. It would be impossible to destroy it all.”
“And it isn’t as if what they wanted for themselves was bad,” said Freddy. “It’s just legs and arms. A little freedom. I’d like that myself.”
Tom smiled sadly at the pig’s words. He could understand the point of view, but…“Their tactics aren’t so reasonable, though. And we’d all like to go home.”
“Do you think,” asked Jim. “Do you think they can hear us?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Muffy. She was leaning over the railing, peering through the foliage toward the amaryllises. “There’s Jack. And we’re here. They’ve got us where they want us, and I’ll bet the door to that porch doesn’t open.”
“I tried it,” said Julia. “It does. But there’s no way down from there.”
“Downstairs?” offered Peirce.
“Jack’s in the way,” said Muffy. “A guard.”
“And I’ll bet he can put anything he likes in our food,” said Jim. “If he wants to turn us all into plants, there’s nothing we can do to stop him.”
“Speaking of food…” said Freddy.
“Jack didn’t say a thing, did he?”
“I think I saw a sammitch bush,” said Tom, pointing toward the room he and Muffy would share.
“Is it safe?”
“He hasn’t had time to monkey with it, has he?”
“Then…”
When she saw the food, Kimmer agreed that she was starved and let go of Peirce. Peirce sighed as if with relief, though his eyes still followed her. When she returned to his side, food in hand, and pulled him down to sit beside her on the floor, he sighed again and grinned.
Later, after they had eaten, Peirce said, “It wouldn’t work. Not that way.”
“What do you mean?” asked Tom Cross as he dumped the rind of his sammitch fruit—it had tasted of swiss cheese and avocado—into the pot of its parent bush. The rind would quickly rot and return its component nutrients to the plant.
“He said he used a virus to make the honeysuckle. But the virus failed to merge permanently with the honeysuckle cells. It slipped loose, and when it did, it snipped some honeysuckle genes from the vine’s DNA. The virus, plus the new cargo genes, then got into the wine. Then, when people drank the wine, the virus infected their cells and gave them plant genes.”
“That’s what I thought he said.” Muffy finished her own sammitch and offered the rind to Freddy. The pig accepted it eagerly even though he had just consumed two whole fruit.
“But it doesn’t work that way.”
“Why not?” asked Jim. “Viruses insert into DNA, and later they do escape. And they can pull out genes and pieces of genes when they do.”
“Sure,” said Peirce. He glanced toward Kimmer at his side. “I’m no gengineer. But I’ve talked to enough artists to know that one of the tricks is targetting the vector virus. Wild viruses are fussy enough—they generally infect just one kind of organism, and even just one organ or tissue within the organism. But vector viruses…” He shook his head. “They just don’t change their targets by accident. Even the wild ones don’t change their targets that drastically, from plant to human. And the vector viruses don’t pick up new genes very easily, either.”
“Then…?” Tom was puzzled.
“He’s lying,” said Julia. “Jack has to be.”
“But why?” asked Muffy. “And what is he lying about?”
“Or they,” said Tom. “I think the amaryllises speak through him, using those pheromones.”
“That can’t be possible,” said Julia. “They can’t possibly convey enough information to work him like a puppet.” Peirce nodded his agreement.
“Then how do you explain…?” Tom looked toward Kimmer, who turned her head aside and clutched Peirce’s hand until her knuckles whitened.
No one had an answer.
They were left alone all the rest of that day. Nothing happened outside—no Bioblimps arrived, bearing hordes of kidnappers, with or without Tom’s mother—and Jack did not return upstairs. Nor did they feel impelled to flee, or to search the head house for Petra, or to wreak vengeful destruction. They talked, and ate again, and talked some more. Only with the fall of night, the replacement of daylight with dimmer electric lights in the gallery below, and the increasing glow of their living nightlights did their full initiative return.
Tom wondered if the amaryllises, able to control only Kimmer, and then only when she was downstairs, had replaced or supplemented their pheromones with some enervating tranquilizer. With night, he thought, they would lose the constant flow of energy they might need to power full consciousness and full production of their airborne chemicals. Electric lights were never as bright as full daylight. Or they might assume, unconsciously (if that was the proper word), that humans too would slow down in the dark and therefore need less control.
Jim was picking sammitch fruit and piling them near the head of the stairs.
“Haven’t we had enough?” asked Muffy.
“These are for Tige. He’s still out there, on the road.”
“Leave some for tomorrow,” said Freddy.
“There’s plenty.” A wave of Jim’s hand indicated two bushes no one had yet touched. “Come on.” He and Julia picked up the fruit and started down the stairs. Tom and Muffy followed, with Randy scuttling at her heels. Freddy remained behind with Kimmer and Franklin Peirce.
At the foot of the stairs, Jack’s room was empty, though a single dim light did glow near the rumpled bed. The door to the dark front of the house, which held the one exit to the outside, was open, and the house’s constant draft moved through that door and toward the greenhouse.
They found Jack sitting on the floor just beyond the door to the front room, his back against the pot that held the pie plant. His face, wherever his beard left the skin exposed, glistened with sticky juices. One hand was plucking at his empty pollen sacs. The other held a half-eaten fruit, and he was slowly chanting, in a forlorn, child-like voice:
“Open your petals.
Let me sniff your blossom!
Oh, I like your style!
Shakin’ my anther for you!”
He did not seem to notice them.
Tom Cross winced at the sight of his father. The man was oblivious, as if the amaryllis ladies’ pheromones were a psychoactive drug, or as if years of their control had destroyed his mind.
“The door’s not locked,” said Jim.
They stepped into the portico behind the house’s teeth, onto the lip, and then to the ground. Overhead, thin clouds veiled the stars and a crescent moon. A light wind rattled the brush around the house. Randy, Muffy’s pet spider, meeped loudly and dashed for the weeds that stood high beside the head house. Jim called: “Tige!” His voice was not loud, but he pitched it to carry to the gengineered dog’s keen ears, and in a moment they heard the truck’s feet pounding toward them along the road that curved toward the house.
“Good boy!” He had waited for them obediently. Now he panted, tongue lolling, clearly delighted to see his driver again. Jim tossed him the sammitch fruits he and Julia had brought, thumped the side of his head, and praised him again.
“Look at that!” cried Muffy Bowen. Randy had emerged from the weeds already. Now the tame predator was crouched over a sleekly furred body. Its coat was striped, its tail was long, and its ears were triangular, but its claws were sharply curved and pointed, visible even in their owner’s current state. Tom guessed that the creature’s ancestors had once been domestic cats. They had gone wild, though, moved into the woods, and returned to the hunting lifestyle of their ancestors. The animal whose juices Randy was sucking was as efficient a design as anything a gengineer could produce. The difference, Tom knew, was that evolution worked far more slowly.
�
��I’d rather eat dog biscuits,” said Julia.
Tom made an appropriate retching noise, while Jim merely nodded. They had all had enough of that sort of food. Muffy shivered, wrapping her hands around her elbows. The night air was cool. “Let’s leave. We’re out, we can tell the cops where to go, and that will be the end of it.”
“We still need the kidnappers,” said Tom. “And besides, now we know Jack isn’t much of a guard. We can get out anytime. Let’s go back.”
“Wait a minute!” said Jim. “The wolf hasn’t closed his jaws yet, but that doesn’t mean we should sit on his tongue! They could…”
“There’s still too much to learn,” said Tom. “It’s worth the chance.”
They left Tige parked beside the house and retraced their steps. When they reached Jack, he tilted his head back upon the scrawny column of his neck and looked up at them. His eyes held a shine of consciousness that had not been present when he had met them, on their arrival, in the greenhouse. Now he lifted his dripping pie plant fruit, poked one thumb through its rind, and said wistfully, “Little Jack Horner.”
“No,” said Tom. “Rivard. You’re Jack Rivard.”
Jack shook his head slowly and said, “Stuck in his thumb.”
Tom blinked the tears from his eyes. “And pulled out a plum,” he said. As if empathizing with his father’s gestures, he pulled his worrystone from within his coverall and stroked it with his thumb.
“Good boy,” said Jack.
“He must have heard us out there,” said Jim. “Talking to Tige.”
Muffy laid one hand on Tom’s arm. “His mind is gone, isn’t it?”
He covered hers with his own free hand. “Their pheromones,” he said. “They’ve been controlling him for so long. He snapped, or he just fled into himself. Or they literally destroyed his mind.”
“He was a bit off to begin with,” Jim Brane reminded him.
“I suppose he had to be.” Tom nodded, and the sound of footsteps on the stairs drew their attention to the room behind Jack’s back. In a moment, Franklin Peirce and Kimmer Alvidrez joined them. Kimmer was carrying Freddy, his worrystone sandwiched between his torso and her bosom.
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