by Neil Clarke
2007
He was reading to Christina and Carlos when the call came. Or rather, Christina was reading while LT held the book, because Christina said he was only allowed to do the Hagrid and Dumbledore voices. Carlos, five years old, lolled at the end of the bed, seemingly oblivious but missing nothing.
Doran came to the bedroom holding the cordless. “Some guy wants to talk to you. He says he’s a friend of your father’s.”
The thick Tennessee accent opened a door to his childhood. Vernon Beck, hearty as ever. He apologized for bothering LT “up there in D.C.,” but he was worried about LT’s father. “He stopped coming to work. He didn’t quit, just stopped coming. Same with church. He won’t answer the phone at all.”
“Is he sick? Did he get hurt at the yard?”
“I went over there, and he finally came out to the porch. He said he was fine, just wanted folks to leave him alone. But I don’t know. It ain’t like him.”
They talked a few minutes more. Mr. Beck apologized again for bothering him, explained how he got his number from a cousin. LT reassured him that it was all right. Asked about his son, Hale, who turned out to be doing fine, still in Maryville, working maintenance for the hospital. Had a wife and four children, all boys.
LT thought about that day they ran from the thistles. Funny how you don’t know the last day you’ll see someone. He’d spent the rest of that winter when he was thirteen daydreaming about Hale, his first big crush. He didn’t mention that to Mr. Beck, and Mr. Beck didn’t ask about LT’s husband, or children. Southern Silence.
“One more thing,” Mr. Beck said. “Your dad, he’s let things go. You should be ready for that.”
Doran asked, “What happened to your father?”
“Maybe nothing. But I think I have to go lay eyes on him.”
Christina said, “I want to lay eyes on him!”
“Me too, kiddo,” Doran said. “But not like this.”
“Can we read now?” Carlos asked.
Doran didn’t want LT to travel south. All those famine refugees landing in Florida, and the citizen militias in Texas and New Mexico. LT said his Department of Agriculture credentials would get them through any checkpoint, and besides, Tennessee was nowhere near the trouble. “It’s like going into Wisconsin,” LT said, quoting one of their favorite movies. “In and out.”
“Fine,” Doran said, “but why not just call the local police, let them check it out?” But LT didn’t want to embarrass Dad, or get him fined if he wasn’t taking care of the house.
“I owe him this much,” LT said. And Doran said, “You think so?”
Doran stayed home with Carlos, and LT and Christina left before sunrise the next morning with a cooler full of food so they wouldn’t have to depend on roadside restaurants. Christina fell asleep immediately, slept through all the phone calls he made to the Department, and woke up outside of Roanoke. He put away the phone and they listened to music and he pointed out invasives and native plants alongside the interstate. They were driving through the battlefield of a slow-motion war. Old native species were finding novel ways to fight the aliens—sucking resources from them underground, literally throwing shade above—and new invasives kept popping up into ecological niches. “It’s all happening so incrementally,” he told her, “it’s hard to see.”
“Like global warming,” Christina said. He’d let her read the opening chapter of the book he was working on, and had taken her to see the Al Gore movie, so she understood boiling frogs. This had been his job for the past decade at the Department of Agriculture: explainer-in-chief, interpreter of policy, sometimes influencer of it. He missed the fieldwork, and longed to do original research again, but the government desk job provided stability for his family.
“Remember what I told you about animal speed?” he said. “Plant speed, and planet speed, that’s just a hard timescale for us mammals to keep our attention on.”
“I know. Wheels within wheels.”
“Exactly.”
After a day of driving and a two-hour wait for inspection at the Tennessee border, they entered the foothills. His hands knew the turns. He remembered the long drive home that last day of college—and realized for the first time that his father must have had to leave the hills at one in the morning to get to Illinois State by noon, and then had turned around and driven all the way back the same day. Drove it in silence, with a hungover, secretly heartbroken boy sulking in the passenger seat.
They pulled into the long gravel drive and parked beside the house. Christina said, “You used to live here?”
“Be nice. Your grandfather built this house.”
“No, it’s cool! It looks like a fairy castle.”
His childhood home was being overrun in the same slow, grasping process that had swallowed Christina’s village. The backyard grass, ordinary and native, had grown knee high. But covering the wall of the house was a flat-leafed ivy, brilliant and slick-looking as the heart of a kiwi fruit; definitely an invasive. Was this war, or détente?
Ivy also covered the back door. He tore away a clear space, and knocked. Knocked again. Called out, “Dad! It’s LT!”
He tried the door, and it swung open. “Wait here,” he said to Christina. He didn’t want her to see anything horrible.
The kitchen lights were off. There were dishes in the sink, a pair of pots on the stove.
He called for his father again. His toe snagged on something. A vine, snaking across the floor. No, many vines.
He stepped into the living room—and froze. Ivy covered everything. A carpet of green clung to the walls. The fireplace burst with green foliage, and the tall stone altar of the chimney had become a trellis. Vines curled through doorways, snaked along the stair rails. Greenish sunlight filtering through the leaf-covered windows made the room into an aquarium. The air was jungle thick and smelled of fruiting bodies.
He stepped closer toward the fireplace, spied dots of white and red nestled into the leaves. Was the ivy blooming?
“What are you doing here?”
LT startled. The voice had come from behind him.
“Dad?”
His father sat in his armchair, nestled into the vines. Leaves draped his shoulders like a shawl. He wore a once-white UT Vols sweatshirt that seemed too big for him. His hair was shaggy, a steel gray that matched the stubble on his face. He looked too thin, much older than he should. LT felt as if he’d been catapulted through time. He hadn’t seen or spoken to this man for almost twenty years, and now he wasn’t even the same person.
His father said, “Who’s this?”
LT thought, Oh God, not Alzheimer’s, and then realized that Christina had come into the room.
She was looking up at the walls, the high ceiling, slowly turning to take it all in. “Dad . . .” Her voice was strange.
“It’s okay, honey, there’s nothing to be—”
“This is awesome.”
She lifted her hands to her head as if to contain the shock. A sound like applause erupted around the room. The leaves were shaking.
She looked at the corner, then up. “Dad, do you see it?”
He could, a green shape against the green. Enmeshed in leaves, an oak-thick stalk rose up in the corner. At the top, a bulbous head a yard wide was bent against a cross-timber, so that it seemed to be looking down at them. Its right arm stretched across the room, where broad leaves splayed against the wall as if holding it up. Its other arm hung down. Finger leaves brushed the floor.
“Holy fucking—”
“Dad,” Christina chided. She walked toward the plant. Lifted her hands above her head. The leaves of its arms rattled like a hundred castanets.
She laughed, and bent at the waist. Slow Mo’s huge head eased left, then right.
LT’s father said, “Isn’t he a lovely boy?”
Geological time, plant time, animal time . . . and inside that, yet another, smaller wheel, spinning fast. His father’s body had become a container for cells that lived and replicated and
mutated at frightening speed.
On the second morning at Blount Memorial Hospital, Christina sat at the edge of her grandfather’s bed, curled her fingers around his (carefully not disturbing the IV tubes taped to the top of his hand), and said, “I read a pamphlet about colon cancer. Would you like me to tell you about it?”
His father laughed. “Are you going to be a scientist like your father?” He was remarkably cheery, now that equipment had rehydrated him and delivered a few choice opioids.
She shook her head. “I want to be a real doctor.”
LT, listening to on-hold music on his cell, said, “Hey!”
Doran came back on the line. “Okay, I got him an appointment with Lynn’s oncologist. Bring him here. I’ll move Carlos into Christina’s room.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“I would only do this for my favorite person. Besides, I don’t think anybody else is stepping up. You’re an only child, right?”
“Uh, kind of.” He’d have to explain later.
He gave Christina a five and told her to sneak some ice cream into the room. “He likes rocky road, but chocolate will do.”
His father watched her go. “She reminds me of your mother.”
LT thought, Sure, this tiny, dark-haired, brown-skinned girl is so much like your blonde, dancer-legged wife.
“I mean it,” his father said. “When she looks at me—it was like that with Belinda. That light.”
“Dad—”
“All the boys in that school, and she chose me.”
“Dad, I need to tell you some things.”
“I’m not leaving the house.”
“You can’t go back there. I had Mr. Beck check it out. There are roots running through the floorboards, wrapped around the pipes. The wiring’s been shorted out. You’re lucky the place didn’t burn down.”
“It’s my house. You can’t tell me—”
“No, it’s Mo’s house now. It’s been his for years.”
2028
On that last Thanksgiving he hosted in the Virginia house, the topic of conversation was, appropriately enough, food.
“We haven’t published yet, but the data’s solid,” Christina said. “We’ve got an eater.”
Cheers went up around the table. “Were you using the cyanobacteria?” LT asked. Just a few months ago, her gene-hacking team at McGill was making zero progress. “Or one of the Rhodophyta?”
“Let the woman speak!” LT’s mother said. Christina, sitting beside her, squeezed her arm and said, “Thanks, Mimi.”
“She needs no encouragement,” Christina’s husband said, and Carlos laughed.
“Here’s the amazing thing—we didn’t engineer it. We found the bacteria in the wild. Evolving on its own.”
“You’re kidding me,” LT said.
Christina shrugged. “It turns out we should have been paying more attention to the oceans.”
LT tried not to hear this as a rebuke. As the USDA’s deputy secretary, he orchestrated the research grants, helped set the agenda for managing the ongoing crisis. It was a political job more than a scientific one, and much of the time the money had to go into putting out fires. So even though everyone knew that most of the seeds had gone down in water, the difficulty in retrieving them meant that almost all the research on water-based invasives focused on ones near the surface: the white pods like bloated worms floating in Lake Superior, the fibrous beach balls bobbing in the Indian Ocean, the blue fans that attached themselves to Japanese tuna like superhero capes.
Christina said that the bacteria were found feeding on rainbow mats. The scientific community had missed the explosion of translucent invasives hovering in the ocean’s photic zone, until they linked and rose to the surface in a coruscating, multi-colored mass. The satellite pictures of it were lovely and terrifying. The alien plants were so efficient at sucking up carbon dioxide, in a few decades of unrestricted growth they could put a serious dent in global warming—while maybe killing everything else in the ocean.
But somehow, fast-evolving Earth organisms were trying to eat them first. Or at least, one species of them. But if one Earth organism had figured it out, maybe others had, too.
“You have to tell us how they’re breaking down those peptides,” LT said.
“Or not,” Carlos said.
“I have a story,” said Bella, Christina’s four-year-old daughter. “During craft time, this girl Neva? It was a disaster.”
“Wait your turn, darling,” Aaron said. Christina’s husband was a white man from Portland. He ran cool to Christina’s hot, which was good for Bella.
Through some quasi-Lamarckian process, LT’s children, and his children’s children, had inherited his most annoying conversational tendency. On Thanksgiving they didn’t go around the table saying what they were thankful for, but rather took turns explaining things to each other. Nothing made LT happier. All he wanted in the world was this: to be surrounded by his family, talking and talking. Much of the world was in dire shape, but they were rich enough to afford the traditional dry turkey breast, the cranberry sauce with the ridges from the can, sweet potato casserole piled with a layer of marshmallow.
“You know what this means,” Christina said. She caught LT’s eye. “Next year we’ll be eating sugar sticks like the aliens did.”
Perhaps only LT understood what she meant. Homo sapiens are only ten percent human; most of the DNA in their bodies comes from the tiny flora that they carry inside themselves to digest their food and perform a million tiny tasks that keep them alive. If humans could someday adopt these new bacteria into their microbiome, a host of invasives could become edible. It would be the end of the famine.
She saw the wonder in his face, and laughed. “Wheels within wheels, Dad.”
After dinner, the urge to nap descended like a cloud, and only little Bella was immune. Carlos offered to take her to the park, but LT said he would like that honor.
“Where the slides are?” she asked.
“All the slides,” he said. “Just let me tuck in Mimi.”
He led his mother to the master bedroom, which was on the ground floor and had the best mattress. She moved carefully, as if hearing faint music in the distance, but at eighty she was still sharp, still beautiful, still determined to stay up with fashion. Her hair was three different shades of red.
“Eighty-five outside,” she said, “and in here it’s a Chicago winter.”
“I’ll get an afghan,” he said, and opened the closet. When he turned around, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand out on the coverlet.
“You must miss Doran.”
The knot that he carried in his chest tightened a fraction. He nodded.
“It’s not fair,” she said. “All our men dying so young.”
“Arnaud’s still alive,” LT said. “At least he was last year. He sent me a Christmas card.”
“Good God, what an asshole,” she said. “It’s true what they say, then.”
“I was the teenage asshole. I don’t know how anybody put up with me.”
She lay down and folded her hands across her chest like Cleopatra. He spread the afghan so that it covered her feet.
“This is a lovely house,” she said.
“It’s too big for me now. Unless you move in.”
“I prefer living on my own these days. I do my painting in the nude, you know.”
“You do not.”
“But I could. That’s the point.”
Bella was waiting for him by the front door. “Papa!”
“Ciao, Bella!”
She jumped into his arms. It was a pleasure to be someone’s favorite person again, at least for the moment. “Ready for the slides?”
He wished she didn’t live so far away. He wished he wasn’t so busy. People were making noises about nominating him for secretary, but he could say no, get off the treadmill. He could move to Canada and be close to Christina and Aaron and Bella, finally finish the book. Make one more research trip. He�
�d like to visit New Guinea again, see how the land of his daughter was faring. Fifty-three years after the meteor storm, and there were still so many questions to answer, and so many new things to see.
He carried Bella out into the Virginia heat. Soon he’d have to put her down, but he wanted to carry her as long as he could, as long as she let him. “So,” he said to her. “What’s all this about a disaster at craft time?”
2062
The house was full of strangers. They kept touching his shoulder, leaning down into his face, wishing him happy birthday. Ninety-seven was a ridiculous age to celebrate. Not even a round number. They thought he wouldn’t make it to ninety-eight, much less a hundred. They’d probably been waiting for years for him to kick off, and this premature wake was the admission of their surrender.
A tiny gray-haired woman sat beside him. Christina. “You have to see this,” she said. She held a glass case, and suspended inside it was a glossy black shape flecked with silver. “It’s from the current Secretary of Agriculture. ‘For forty-five years of service to the nation and the world.’ This one came from Tennessee. You remember telling me about Mimi finding a seed?”
There was an ocean of days he couldn’t remember, but that day he recalled clearly. “Rock hound’s delight,” he said softly.
“What’s that, Dad?”
Ah. The strangers were watching, waiting for a proper response. He cleared his throat, and said loudly, “So have those alien bastards shown up yet?” Everyone laughed.
The afternoon stretched on interminably. Cake, singing, talking, so much talking. He asked for his jacket and a familiar-looking stranger brought it to him, helped him out of his chair. “I have to tell you, sir, your books made me want to be a scientist. The Distant Gardener was the first—”
LT lifted a hand. “Which way is the backyard?” He could still walk on his own. He was proud of that.
Outside, the sky was bright, the air too warm. He didn’t need his coat, after all. He stood in a garden, surrounded by towering trees. But whose garden, whose house? It wasn’t his home in Virginia, that was long gone. Not Chicago or Columbus. Was this Tennessee?