“Well, anyway, there are two types of apomixous behaviors in ferns: apogamy and apospory. Apogamous plants grow from spores and seem to be regular plants. When they mature, they send out spores—seeds, if you prefer. From the seeds grow what are called gametophytes; they’re sort of like plant versions of a larva—not actually an adult, but a stepping stone toward adulthood. Okay? So, the gametophyte eventually buds off a sphorophyte, which grows into the final adult plant.”
I raise my hand. “Uh, is there gonna be a quiz over this?”
“Funny. Just keep up, would you? The thing is, the sphorophyte isn’t really a fertilized child in this scenario—the gametophyte has literally cloned itself, so it’s an exact copy of the mother plant, right down to the DNA. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were behaving like regular plants, because the reproduction happens on a scale that’s really only observable under a microscope. With me so far?”
I pretend to snore.
“Come on, it’s not that bad,” she giggles.
“Seriously, Doc, you lost me at ‘aprogilous.’”
“It’s apoximous, you dunce.”
I bat my eyes. “Sorry, we can’t all be pretty and highQ.”
“Stay with me: we’re halfway there.” I nod, but who am I kidding? “Okay,” she continues, “aposporous plants are a little different: they reproduce by sending out antheridia and archegonia—that’s the sperm- and egg-producing organs—on the edges of their leaves. If enough moisture is present, the plant literally reproduces with itself. This is the behavior we’ve engineered into the BPs; I wanted to maintain some control over reproduction, and controlling where spores land is impossible. And up to now, the aposporous genes seemed to be paying off in the lab.”
I’ve understood almost none of this nonsense—classic Fiona-speak, by the way—but I’m able to glean the barest sense that the BPs have unexpectedly changed behavioral patterns—on their own, and seemingly in a single generation.
“Okay,” I cede. “So, what happened exactly—I mean, what changed?”
“Well, I’m guessing the lack of moisture in the Martian soil triggered a mutation. To accelerate its maturity, I introduced a bamboo gene into BP7’s profile; it’s possible that the new gene is conflicting with properties in the base genome. Regardless of the catalyst—if my theory holds true—BP7 somehow morphed from a strain that doesn’t reproduce using spores to one that does.”
“Huh. Am I safe to assume that’s a bad thing?”
Fiona nods emphatically, kneading her forehead with the back of a white-knuckled fist. “Well, yeah. That means that every place a spore lands becomes a potential growth site for a gametophyte. In other words, we lose a fair amount of control over when and where the BPs grow—outside the lab, anyway. Based on what we’ve seen so far, they may be hard to keep under control.” She pauses to catch her breath, and for a moment, she looks as if she might cry. “Beyond that,” she says, voice suddenly wavering, “there’s something else.”
I’m hearing her words just fine, but her mannerisms are quickly gathering my undivided attention; they belie the woman hiding inside the scientist, and I’m transfixed by this rare glimpse of her. I’d just as soon drop this subject—it’s obviously hurting her—but her eyes are pleading, begging for permission to confess something terrible—something that might just change my perception of her irreversibly.
“What is it, Fiona?”
She swallows, hands wringing at her midriff. “Well, spores can sometimes trigger allergic reactions when inhaled.” A fat tear spills down her ivory cheek. “There are species of mold on Earth, for example, whose spores are toxic to humans.”
I can’t bear to see her so distraught. I want to reach out to her, to offer the comfort of my embrace—my lips, even better—but from some isolated fold of my brain, I recognize that I’ve slipped into the drunkenness of lust, and that—however much I’d like to imagine otherwise—Fiona hasn’t shown a single shred of interest in me outside the scope of research. I’ve confused her momentary vulnerability with something else, that’s all; I’ve projected my own need for affection onto her.
Despite my inner turmoil, the implication of her words isn’t lost on me. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t greatly blurred by the chemical shadow of my insistent hormones, yet I’m not completely oblivious of it; I suppose it just seems a little too alien to apply to real life, for the moment.
Graciously, Fiona seems to intuit nothing of my heartache; she looks at me for a few seconds—probing my poker face for any sign that I fault her for Winkley’s condition—then shifts her gaze right through me. I can almost hear that brilliant mind crunching away like a supercomputer.
A faint beep seems to draw her back into the moment. She smiles sheepishly and, wiping her cheeks dry with a sleeve, turns to the sick bay window. All I can see of her now is a diffused reflection in the glass. Her eyes widen suddenly, darting about the inner room with progressive urgency.
Something’s wrong.
I try to follow her gaze as it bounces from one piece of equipment to another, but the machinery is largely foreign to me; I don’t know what I’m looking at. At once, her expression collapses; she surges against the window like a crashing wave, pounding on the thick glass with her palms. “No!” she cries. Then, as quickly as it came from nowhere, the tide of her anger recedes, exposing an immense tide pool of sadness in its wake.
“What’s wrong?” I mutter.
Fiona sags on her feet and—with motherly kindness—rests a protective hand against the window, sobbing quietly. In a whisper so faint it might’ve been a breeze, she answers me.
“He’s gone, Wil.”
Fiona’s words don’t immediately register—he’s right there; can’t she see him?—yet even as I struggle to process her meaning, she barrels into the sick bay, pulling on her helmet and facemask almost as an afterthought. Through the glass, I hear her sniffle and whimper. As she approaches Winkley, the obvious finally dawns on me, and my heart falls into my stomach like a great, aching boulder.
Fiona makes an adjustment to a nearby monitor—for a brief, hopeful moment, I think maybe I’ve misunderstood—and then, disheartened by what she sees there, she powers off the device with a deflated sob. Dropping to her knees, she rests her head against Winkley’s cot and begins to weep.
I feel my own tears coming to life, yet—to my eternal shame—I can’t tell if they’re intended for Winkley, or if Fiona has drawn them out of me. Without forethought, I take a step toward the sick bay door. I can’t explain why, but I feel duty-bound to comfort her, to save her from this misery. My foot has scarcely left the floor when a hand grasps my shoulder and—with unnerving strength—restrains me from walking.
“Don’t,” warns Grogan. His voice is firm, yet full of uncharacteristic kindness. “There’s nothing you can do for him now.”
Him? I try to pull away, heaving against his iron grasp. I’m more than a little disturbed that I can’t break free; he’s either far stronger or more desperate than me. Either way, I’m not moving without escalating this confrontation. “Please,” I whisper.
Grogan’s grip relaxes just a little, but remains affixed. “It’s too dangerous, Wil. We can’t risk contamination.”
I realize that he’s right. Too, I recognize how warped my thinking has become that Fiona’s temporary emotional state has somehow won priority over the death of a friend.
Good Lord, what is happening to me?
Grogan once warned me that Mars is an unforgiving planet. I never imagined how stark that truth would prove to be. I wonder if he shared this wisdom with Winkley, and if not, if it might have made any difference. I guess I’ll never know.
We bury Winkley’s body a mile from the b-hive, alongside a mound of eroded stones that can only belong to Montague. I feel filthy for my participation in this ritual. It’s a perversion, to my mind; I realize people used to bury their dead on Earth, but it has been taboo for much longer than I’ve been alive. If asked why, I
could only venture a guess; maybe we ran out of virgin ground—who knows? All I know is that I’m incapable of overlooking the lingering mores of my Earthly culture; they’re too deeply engrained in me.
My psyche retches at what we’re doing.
Actually, now that I think about it, I suspect the source of my revulsion is broader than mere social peeves; maybe some part of me—a part I never knew existed, perhaps—finds it deeply sacrilegious that Winkley will never return to the earth, so to speak. Flesh doesn’t decay here, you see; there are no bacteria on Mars to aid in decomposition.
I deliberately mention this to Grogan, hoping that he’ll suddenly realize the obscenity of what we’re doing and call the whole thing off, but he merely shrugs, explaining that corpses do decompose—to some extent, anyway—by means of dehydration; their fluids are gradually absorbed into the soil, or sapped by the dry winds. He offers this as if it should be some consolation, and thank goodness—I feel so much better now.
Rogers and Fiona have remained behind at the lab, scouring the airlock and the infirmary with harsh cleaners to kill off any invisible spores. I’m glad for their effort, though I suspect no amount of sanitation will let me sleep tonight; I expect my skin will itch with phantom creepy-crawlies well into the wee hours of the morning, and I doubt I’ll be alone with that affliction.
Cutterly doesn’t say a word, but his demeanor reveals that he’s been greatly affected by the loss of Winkley; maybe he’s as horrified as I am by what we’re doing—after all, unless he lived under a rock on Earth, he must’ve grown up under the same umbrella of social norms as me.
When Winkley is no longer visible for the mountain of dirt and vesicle-pocked stones, I approach Cutterly. I feel compelled to console him—I know, I’m a regular camp counselor lately—so I place a timid hand on his shoulder and give it a gentle squeeze, the way Stewart once did when my childhood pet goldfish went to visit relatives while I was at school, and never came home. Cutterly looks at me wordlessly; his face is a collage of dark expressions—far too complex to interpret without a glass of Chardonnay and a pair of snooty bifocals.
Burning eyes flicker to Grogan and then back to me; to Grogan again, and back once more—if Cutterly was a dog, I’d think he was trying to tell me something.
What is it boy? Farmer Tom fell in a well? We’d better get help in a flash!
“Let’s go,” Grogan says, voice cutting through my inner monologue with an edge of—what is that, warning?
Cutterly’s gaze—already burning like an incandescent filament—brims with hot loathing, shifting to Grogan again. The two lock eyes; the intensity between them borders on explosive, a violent chemical reaction brewing between polar elements.
Clearly, I’ve misinterpreted Cutterly’s emotional condition; he doesn’t need a hug, he needs a Grogan-shaped punching bag. Or a nice sedative, perhaps.
He gives me a polite nod—which is the closest Cutterly and I have ever come to exchanging niceties—and begins limping back to the b-hive, dragging his shovel behind him like a broken rudder.
Jeez, what’s with those two?
My assumption—and also, my hope—is that BP8 will now enter the works, and that Fiona will revisit the drawing board with a more careful approach. I don’t blame her for Winkley’s death—how could she possibly have prepared for that?—but surely it has instilled a renewed sense of caution in all of us.
Dang, I hate being wrong.
Despite the havoc it has wreaked upon us, Fiona considers BP7 to be a success; it has proven to be stable and hearty, and it demonstrates many of the precise characteristics sought after by our employer. As for the danger it apparently poses to human life? Well, that’s merely a reason to be more cautious.
What can I say? I’m freaking speechless.
In the wake of Winkley’s death, we’ve implemented a minor litany of precautionary procedures. Firstly, our suits must be thoroughly sterilized following any direct contact with the plants. Secondly, no suit is to be brought across the airlock threshold into the complex. Thirdly, we must all endure weekly physicals, including minor bloodwork. Finally, all interaction with the BPs is to take place in the safety of groups—no solo excursions.
These protocols give me some peace of mind, but they are sharply eclipsed by a sense of general unease, knowing that—as if this planet doesn’t already pose enough physical danger—a new and formidable killer is among us. And though it hasn’t been said aloud, it’s evident to me that our lives are of little value to PRMC when measured against that of their new—and deadly—cash cows.
During breakfast, Fiona announces that today begins a new phase in the development of BP7. We’ve officially left the research phase behind us and will now concentrate on domesticating BP7 for mass production.
I’m completely taken off guard, and thereby horrified. I’ve never been clear on the endgame of our research until now. Looking around me, assessing the reactions of my coworkers, I realize that I’m completely alone in my distress. There’s no point in arguing the absurdity of it all; unlike me, these people have known since day one where this was headed. If any one of them harbored any reservations, he or she wouldn’t even be here.
After eating, Fiona leads us to the future site of our new BP farm. She and Grogan have carefully chosen acreage that is far enough from the b-hive to minimize the potential of the crops eating our buildings, yet close enough to comfortably reach on foot. There, we spend the next several hours plotting a matrix across the ground, marking points with aluminum spikes, which are then tethered together in a grid of white vinyl twine.
With the field mapped, Fiona delegates the excavation of shallow, evenly spaced pits throughout the matrix. It’s brutally laborious work; the ground is densely packed with permafrosted lava rock, which hardly lends itself well to shoveling. Also, I’m an office geek, remember? I’m not built for manual labor.
We pause briefly for lunch—with emphasis on briefly; even before our soup has begun to cool in our bellies, we’re hard at work again. By evening, we’ve carefully loaded the new farmstead with BP cuttings. Then Fiona departs for the lab, leaving the rest of us behind to tidy up. Nobody complains, but I think this entire exercise strikes most of us—Grogan included—as an unnecessary waste of energy; based on what we’ve seen of BP7, it doesn’t need our organized assistance to grow—and tidiness will certainly go out the window once the cuttings begin to take root, if the wind doesn’t first undo our work for us.
Returning to the b-hive, we almost don’t notice it. It’s easy to miss, really: we’re each exhausted and walking directly into the wind; the sun is low in the sky, painting unfamiliar faces on otherwise familiar landmarks. If not for Rogers’s keen eye, we might have overlooked it altogether. Even with him frozen in his tracks, pointing across the wastelands like a petrified road sign—See it? It’s right there, man—I still don’t see it right away.
At first, my gaze is drawn to the horizon, where one of Mars’s odd moons is perched; its tiny, angular physique dots the sky according to a schedule that I find impossible to nail down. But then I see something—a mass that closely resembles a boulder, or perhaps a crater lip—rustling in the wind.
“What the ... ?” says Grogan. He shields his facemask against the blowing dust, as if he distrusts what he’s just seen. “Fiona,” he barks. A few seconds pass, and then our helmet comms come to life with her disembodied voice.
“What is it?”
“Can you take a look out the window of the utility room for me?”
“Uh, sure. What am I looking for?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
Thirty seconds tick by in silence, and then: “Okay, I’m back. You gonna tell me what’s going—dear God!”
“We’re still a bit far off, Fiona; please tell me that’s not what I think it is.”
“How did this happen?” she demands. The anonymity of our wireless comms does nothing to soften the edge of her agitation.
Cutterly laughs ironi
cally. “You’re asking us, Doc?”
We adjust course slightly; fueled by the adrenaline of discovery—or perhaps our morbid curiosity—we pick up speed. The wind relents a little, and soon the details begin to fall into rapid focus. Even from a distance, the sight spooks me; it’s a tangled network of vines and leaves, thickly projecting from the ground in a volcano of rusty fauna. Unlike the other blood plants I’ve seen, this one truly lives up to its namesake—its leaves are the color of brackish gore.
“Isn’t that the graveyard?” Cutterly mutters. I glance around to get my bearings and, though everything looks a little foreign in the windy dusk, I think he’s right.
Grogan apparently agrees. “Fiona, the BP seems to be growing near Winkley’s grave.”
As we near the gravesite, however, it becomes clear that the plants—two or three, I think—aren’t merely growing near Winkley, but from him. His body has literally been dragged to the surface, crimson foliage spilling from him as if from some sort of organic flowerpot.
I feel my gorge rising—never a good thing in a pressurized helmet, incidentally—and quickly look away. Poor Winkley; he didn’t deserve this.
“Cripes, how the heck did that happen?” groans Rogers. “There wasn’t anything growing here a couple of days ago.”
We’d all like the answer to that question, naturally. But Grogan wants to know more than the rest of us; that, or he’s simply determined to show us up. Whatever his motivation, he steps casually into the foothills of this nightmare, nudging scouting fronds aside with the cleats of his boots.
He should be frightened—horrified, really—to be in the thick of such a grisly abomination; I’m about to pee myself just for watching, for crying out loud. But Grogan’s indifferent; he might as well be looking for four-leafed clovers in there, the way he’s hunched over, poking around with his facemask afloat in a sea of sickly leaves.
The Pedestal Page 18