Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  “Who was she?” asked Kimmer.

  “A twentieth century writer. She said, ‘You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.’”

  Freddy snorted with laughter. “She’d rather turn around and grab you by the…”

  “Freddy!” cried Porculata.

  Later, after a dinner of take-out Italian food fetched by Jan, the discussion turned more serious. Moving animal or human genes into plants as Jack Rivard had done, said Peirce, could obviously produce immense changes in the plants. But he didn’t think it could ever give the plants the necessary skeletal and muscular structures for mobility.

  “I should think,” said Julia, “that the same problem would exist for nervous systems and thought.”

  “Jack proved you wrong on that,” said Jim as he chased a last strand of spaghetti around his plate.

  “Still,” said Peirce. “I’d expect that in order to combine photosynthesis, sentience, and motility, one would have to start with an animal and add a smaller, easier-to-integrate number of genes. In fact, all a gengineer would have to do would be to persuade the animal cells to play host to blue-green algae. Precisely the same thing happened billions of years ago, when the one-celled ancestors of plants accepted similar algae as symbiotic tenants. Eventually, those algae became the chloroplasts that now handle the processes of photosynthesis in plants. Perhaps they could do the same for animals. Certainly, animal cells are entirely capable of playing host to symbiotes.”

  “Mitochondria,” said Tom. Mitochondria, he knew, gave animal—and plant—cells the ability to use oxygen to satisfy the bulk of their need for energy in useful form. And they were descended from primordial bacteria just as chloroplasts were from algae. They even had their own genes.

  “Some animal cells,” said Peirce. “Those of certain clams, for instance. They already contain algae. They supply the algae with certain essential nutrients, and the algae use the energy of sunlight to generate carbohydrates. And the clam cells eat the carbohydrates.”

  The hybridization of vastly different living forms was thus nothing new, Tom realized. And it could not be undone. If gengineers took the mitochondria out of animal cells, the animals would die. Only sluggish things, worms and slimes and animalcules, things that needed no more energy than bacteria and yeast and other organisms that lived without oxygen, would survive. If they removed chloroplasts from plant cells, again the consequence would be widespread death, catastrophe, for plant photosynthesis provided the raw material, the food, for all animal life. It also provided essential oxygen.

  “So,” Jim said. “Are we doomed? Will the amaryllises gain legs and replace us? Will we turn into plants?”

  Tom rummaged in a pocket and withdrew the few gold nodules, nuggets, he had collected in the valley outside the Frank Lloyd Wright house. When Jan asked, he explained. “Jack’s money garden,” he said. “It has to be how he paid the kidnappers, and bought the things he needed for the house. Furniture, lab supplies, food…” He paused. “We wouldn’t need to worry about money, would we? If we were plants?”

  “It would be peaceful enough,” said Muffy. “Like being on the wine all the time.”

  Jan had moved Freddy and Porculata into their support racks for the meal. Now Freddy twisted his gaze away from his wife. “Until someone decided to chop you down.”

  “It would be easy enough to destroy the amaryllises,” said Julia. “Just burn them out.”

  “But they’re intelligent,” said Porculata. “That would be murder.”

  “Not to most people.”

  “And what about the honeysuckle?” Ralph pointed at his immobile wife in her pot. “That’s what changes us to plants.”

  Franklin Peirce shook his head. “I don’t think we could destroy the vines.”

  “The gengineers would have to design a plague,” said Jim Brane. “And there’d be too big a chance that it might spread to other plants, like crops.”

  “And we can’t stop people from drinking the wine,” said Tom. Jan blushed and turned her head away. Muffy might have blushed, he thought, but she had indeed sworn off the wine. People had, like her, to stop themselves. “So the plant genes will keep moving into people. We can’t stop them.”

  Muffy poked him in the hip. “We can’t stop people genes from going the other way, either.”

  Freddy hooted and sang, “Shakin’ my anther…”

  Tom blushed. Several of the others laughed, for when the amaryllises had made him display himself, anyone who had not known of his peculiarity had certainly learned the truth. When they quieted, he said, “I don’t have the hots for giant flowers.”

  “But some of your kids might,” said Franklin Peirce. “Unless…”

  “I hope not,” said Tom emphatically.

  Jim turned toward his mate. “So burning out the greenhouse wouldn’t really work. It would slow things down a little, but…”

  Julia nodded. “A few years,” she said. “Maybe a generation.”

  “And the future would never notice,” said Peirce. “A generation is nothing on a biological time scale.”

  “So what do we do?” asked Tom. His voice had a bitter tinge. “Are we doomed?”

  “The amaryllises will get more human,” said the museum curator. “As for people turning into plants, all can do is put your mother on display. And program a sound plaque to explain how she got this way.”

  Freddy laughed. “What do you bet that’ll just make more people try the wine?”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 18

  “I’ve got to go,” said Jim Brane. “I’ve got my truck back, Tom has Muffy back, his mother is safe and sound. And they won’t let me off any longer, I’m sure. Tomorrow I’ll have to work.”

  “Me, too,” said Tom Cross. “I’ve been away from the store too long. And Muffy’s fans must have forgotten her by now.” He grinned at her, and she grinned back.

  “Fat chance,” she said. “And they’d only cheer louder if I forgot my fan.” She was, after all, a fan dancer, and Randy was the fan that really counted.

  “Want a ride, Ralph?” offered Julia Templeton, and soon the room held three humans less. Franklin Peirce and Kimmer Alvidrez were sitting on the padded floor with their backs against the pot that held Petra Cross and the amaryllis. They were holding hands as if they thought no one would notice. Tom and Muffy sat across the room, staring at his mother. Freddy and Porculata were still in their support racks, and Randy, Muffy’s spider, now rested beside them.

  Peirce looked up and over his shoulder at the contents of the pot behind him. “I suppose I could wait till tomorrow, and let the technicians do it.” He let his eyes slide toward Kimmer. “But I’d rather…Want to help, my dear?”

  She took a deep breath, licked her lips, and visibly squeezed his hand. “Help with what?”

  “Repotting these things. They’re heavy, but the two of us should be able to manage it.”

  Pheromones wafted from the amaryllis, and Jan, the only human present without a worrystone, cried, “No! Keep us together! Only then can I teach her. All she needs to know. And speak for her. Until she learns.”

  Peirce nodded. “At least, we can find a place to keep them.”

  Kimmer looked disappointed, but she nodded. They rose and trundled the handcart and its burden out of the pigs’ apartment. As the door closed behind them, Tom said, “I wish I knew how to end this.” As Jim had said, they had regained all that was lost, though not without change. Yet life went on. There would be further losses in the future, and some of them would not be recouped. There would be new adventures. But this one was over. He wished there were some way to mark its end.

  “We could sing a song,” said Freddy. It was a natural enough suggestion. When Tom and the pig had first run away from home, they had made their living as singers. Freddy was still a singer, a musician, and so was his wife. And a song had accompanied their quest.

  “Like what?”

  He wished he knew. But then Porculata began to pl
ay, and the words came to him, and to Muffy, Jan, and Freddy. Together, they sang a song that Tom had first met as a child, when he had spent two weeks at a summer camp in Maine. He supposed it had been a camp song as long as there had been camps.

  “Day is done,” they sang slowly, almost dolorously. “Gone the sun…Allis well…”

  “I’m used to gengineered things,” Tom later said to Muffy. They had left Freddy and his family in their apartment. Now they were walking down a dim basement hall. Soon, they would come to a staircase—they could see it ahead, marked by the red glow of an “Exit” sign—and leave the museum. They would walk home, or take a Bernie, and water their Alice. They would resume their lives.

  “I see them in the store all the time,” he went on. “And I’m one of them, aren’t I?” He was thinking of his bud. “So Jack didn’t surprise me, and the amaryllis ladies didn’t either. Though I suppose it did, what they did to him with their pheromones.”

  “What they did to you, too. Or what he did.” Muffy hugged his arm tightly, as if fearing that he would be yanked from her life, as she so nearly had been from his. “And the wine. That’s new, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. A door on the right, a little ahead, was ajar. “But you’re done with that now.”

  It was her turn to nod. “For good.” She produced an exaggerated shudder. Then she stopped walking and turned to face him, one hand on his chest. “They didn’t say, but do you think…? Did it make a difference that they knew what a hybrid you are? Do you think they knew they could make your pollen come in so easily?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t make any difference now.”

  “They’re happy, aren’t they? With those other men, I mean?”

  Tom shrugged and tried to start walking again. She held him back while he said, “It’ll take longer to equip them to make pollen, but yes. They have the raw material they need. There’s no sentimental connection…”

  “How can plants feel sentiment?”

  “They’re not just plants. And though they’ve changed Jack drastically, he did make them what they are. He is, or was, quite human, and if he could feel sentiment…”

  He finally pulled her into motion, but only for a step or two before she said, “It’ll be interesting to see what happens with our kids.”

  “Kids?” He stopped again, pulled free of her grip, and turned to stare at her.

  “You said that before.” She grinned. “At Jack’s place. But don’t you think we ought to get started?”

  “I’d love to.” Until just the day before, he had thought he was the only one of them who wanted a family. “So what’s stopping us?”

  “It’s too public here.” The hallway was deserted, and it would remain so until the next day, but Peirce and Kimmer were somewhere about, and surely there was a night watchman. “And I want your name.”

  “We have to get married?”

  “Uh-huh.” She hugged his arm again.

  “I suppose we could.” He was teasing. The idea, surprising as it was, delighted him. He had thought their life together would continue pretty much as it always had. Many couples never married, even when they chose to have children, and marriage had never seemed to him essential. But his parents had been married, hadn’t they? And now he and Muffy would become parents themselves.

  He sniffed. She did the same. They both grinned, and he whispered, “That amaryllis.” Then he touched his worrystone. Its silence said that the pheromones were not those of preemption or command.

  She pointed toward the half-open door just down the hall. “There?”

  They took the few steps that let them see what was within the room.

  Both of them inhaled sharply at what they saw.

  Franklin Peirce and Kimmer Alvidrez had indeed found a room for Petra Cross and her companion. It seemed to be a workroom for tending bioform artworks, several of which stood in pots on a table by the room’s far wall. On the floor nearby stood an empty planter about the size of the pot that held Petra and the amaryllis. A shelf held several smaller pots. Beneath the shelf stood three shovels, several trowels, a bag of peat moss, and a watering can.

  The pot they had hauled across Lake Michigan to this museum basement stood in the middle of the room, still shared by both Petra and the amaryllis. Near the pot, their backs to the door, stood Peirce and Kimmer. Just as they had been doing in Freddy’s apartment, they were holding hands.

  Both were naked except for the worrystones that hung around their necks.

  And Peirce was humming the tune to “Shaking My Anther.”

  * * *

  POSTLUDE

  It was dark beyond the greenhouse glass and the shading leaves of mindless plants, but lights once more blazed within the house that Jack Rivard once had grown in the shape of a head. The ventilator fans forced the air to move in its accustomed direction, from the Eldest of the amaryllis sisterhood downdrift, and acquire messages in order of dominance within the hierarchy.

  Five naked bodies lay on the greenhouse floor, arrayed near the inner wall, farthest from the glass and the heat it admitted in the day. Near them sat a pot containing a strange, bulb-stemmed plant resembling a bonsai baobabtree with leaves like those of honeysuckle vines. It had, until this day just past, been hidden almost perfectly from view among the other plants within the greenhouse. From it, tendrils extended toward the bodies and penetrated their skins. Those tendrils carried a fluid very similar to honeysuckle wine to keep the prisoners comatose while tailored viruses worked to change their cells and bodies.

  In the doorway to the greenhouse squatted Jack. His skin was flecked with dark bits of decayed organic matter, for one of his tasks that day had been to bury the dead BRA agent in a compost heap behind the house. He was rubbing his depleted anther and chuckling, perhaps at the thought of what his gengineered viruses were doing to the bodies on the floor, perhaps at the thought of how the modified honeysuckle plant that kept them from protesting their transformation might be received in the outer world, if only he would release it, or if it would escape. Honey bums might welcome it, for it would relieve them of even that effort necessary to pluck the blossoms of the honeysuckle vines.

  Perhaps he did not think at all. Jack’s mind was the mind of a child. The amaryllises had destroyed almost everything except his knowledge of gengineering, his ability to use that knowledge in their service, and his capacity to speak on their behalf. He was very much an idiot savant.

  His mistresses intended to leave the prisoners even less, for they would have only one function.

  “WE HAD NEW PISTILS

  And scion/seedling/sprout

  And he was ripe!

  His anther

  nearly ready!

  We saw double gonads

  Unnecessary

  Our pollen works

  On humans, too

  WE HAD OTHERS, TOO

  In our grasp

  But lost them all

  THEY RESISTED

  They were somehow

  Somehow immune

  BUT WE DO HAVE

  Ample raw material

  WE DO

  We traded

  Had to trade

  And soon!

  SOON!

  We will have

  New pollen”

  Already, in fact, the viruses had begun to modify the structures of the captives’ genitals. Penises were enlarging. Testicles were elongating, just as they once had in Jack himself, and the new gonads were taking on a golden hue.

  “New genes

  Shaking anthers!

  At our command

  WE WILL SET SEED

  And our scions/

  Seedlingssprouts

  New pistils, too

  Will be nearer

  Our designs

  AND ONE OF US IS GONE

  Transplanted

  SHE WILL POLLINATE

  Some human pistil

  Perhaps engender

  Anther-bearers

  Like our mast
er/pet’s

  Scion/seedling/sprout

  SHE HAS THE CHANCE

  To begin new beds

  And fork our line of history

  Our destiny

  But that destiny

  IS FOR THE FUTURE ONLY

  To reveal.”

  * * *

  APPENDIX

  The song “Shaking My Anther” appears in several places in this novel, but never all in one piece, with the verses in their proper order. To correct this deficiency, and to satisfy whatever curiosity you feel, dear reader, here is the compleat:

  SHAKING MY ANTHER

  You’ve got the question.

  Your perfume says it all.

  I’ve got the anther!

  Shakin’ my anther for you!

  You’re spreading your leaves.

  I smell it on the air.

  Showers of pollen!

  Shakin’ my anther for you!

  Open your petals.

  Let me sniff your blossom!

  Oh, I like your style!

  Shakin’ my anther for you!

  I’ve got the anther!

  And showers of pollen!

  I’ve got the anther!

  Shakin’ my anther for you!

  Did you wonder, back in Chapter 8, whether Joe-Dee Alvidrez’s Dingo Fantasy I was really edited from computer-generated garbage? It was, as I have described in articles in Analog, Pulpsmith, and The Leading Edge, and as A. K. Dewdney has discussed in Scientific American (June 1989). Has it really been published? No, though many others among my “computer-catalyzed” poems have. Did you feel frustrated when Our Heroes stopped Joe-Dee from displaying Dingo Fantasy II? All right, then. You asked for it. Just don’t forget what Freddy said: “It’s still tripe. Bull-litter.” And now, heeeere’s…

  DINGO FANTASY II

  Flexible lover,

  Flanked by ivories and

  Astounding earflaps,

  Banish bloody maidens

  And let red leaves conquer.

  Reversal!

  Proboscis pregnant, tattered child.