The Pedestal

by Daniel Wimberley

  “It’s the spores,” he finally announces, standing erect again. “Thing’s growing right out of his lungs.”

  Fiona pipes in with a long sigh: “I guess that confirms my theory: Winkley must’ve breathed in the spores and suffered an allergic reaction.”

  Uh, or the spores germinated as he lay choking for breath.

  Grogan looks at us each in turn, gauging our take on Fiona’s flimsy explanation. He’s not buying it—and as far as I can tell, neither is anyone else out here. Nevertheless, I think we’re each too disturbed by our own theories to argue.

  Everyone but Grogan, that is. “But I thought the plants fed off the iron in the soil?” he insists.

  “They do.”

  “Isn’t blood colored red because it’s rich in iron?” I offer helpfully.

  “That’s true,” Fiona agrees. “But I don’t think that’s relevant.” Well, excuse me for trying to help. “I think these things can feed off just about anything. I’m headed to the lab to prepare a sampling kit.” With that, her audio signal whispers into electronic silence.

  Rogers swallows in a nervous gulp. “Want me to take care of it, boss?” His expression screams Please, say no! but I have to credit him for asking.

  Grogan stares at the defiled corpse. For a second, his hardened façade slips and I plainly see that he’s conflicted; I’d like to take heart in this, but the mask is back almost immediately. It bothers me that he’s so concerned with maintaining appearances—there’s nothing wrong with showing you’re human once in a while, is there? “Nah, just leave it.”

  Cutterly stiffens. “We can’t just leave him like this, Grog. They’re—eating him.”

  Grogan appraises him blankly. “You got a better suggestion?”

  “We could use the incinerator,” Rogers pipes in.

  “Yeah, that’s more flattering—torch him like a cube of trash. Nice.” Grogan turns away with a dismissive shrug. “He’s too big to incinerate anyway. Unless you want to hack him down to size, of course.” Before I can even register the terribleness of that thought, Grogan turns back to the group, mouth stretched in an odd, dark smirk. “Even better, maybe we could drag him to the caves, huh?”

  Cursing under his breath, Rogers kicks a rock, sending it through the air in a wide arc. The wind catches it just as it meets the ground and propels it back toward us, and then past us, until it’s swallowed by the approaching darkness.

  “Um, what caves?” I want to know.

  Cutterly and Rogers share a scant glance. This isn’t lost on Grogan, who snorts dryly without an ounce of amusement. “They’re more like skylights than caves,” he explains, lips skewed in a mischievous smirk. “Big holes that open straight down into old lava tubes. You get too close to the edge, and the ground’ll collapse and take you with it.” He pauses, leveling a cold gaze on Cutterly, and then Rogers. “Isn’t that right, fellas?”

  Cutterly scowls; Rogers turns beet red. What in the world is this all about? I wonder.

  Grogan turns to me and says: “Hope you don’t fancy yourself a spelunker, Wil; as far as hobbies go, caving is a killer around here. Just ask these guys.”

  Cutterly’s eyes darken. The air is suddenly electric with hostility.

  “Uh, okay,” I mutter.

  “Drop it, Grog. We’ve been over this; it was our decision to make.”

  “No, Cutterly, it wasn’t. Monty made a flippant decision that cost him his life, going into that stupid cave; your little rescue mission was even more irresponsible—it tied up company equipment and endangered personnel. You two nearly shut this entire operation down.” He crosses his arms—for effect rather than comfort, I gather from the stiffness of the gesture. “I’m glad you’re both still around—don’t get me wrong—but we’ve barely been getting along while you two heal.”

  Cutterly scoffs and shakes his head with disgust.

  “Cutterly, you may never walk the same again—you know that, right? And you, Rogers: how are you supposed to man the rover controls when your hands are too scarred to even feel what you’re doing?”

  Rogers’s face—normally bland, if not placid—contorts, twittering from the exertion of restraining himself. “I’m guessing they’ll be fine to ring your little neck, don’t you think?”

  Grogan shuffles back unconsciously, eyes glazed—cold, yet bewildered—gloved hands forming clumsy fists. “Don’t forget who you’re talking to,” he chides, his voice reedy with breathless uncertainty.

  Cutterly takes a broad step toward Grogan, towering over the younger man like a minor giant. “Let’s get something straight: we don’t work for you, Grogan—we tolerate you. And lately, our patience is running on fumes.”

  As Grogan opens his mouth to offer a retort, I realize that he’s not backing down—his ego has overtaken his better sense—and that the situation is about to irreversibly escalate. A scuffle out here has death written all over it. I’ve got to do something.

  “Everybody just cool down, all right?” I plead. “We need to get inside; it’s getting dark.” Cutterly and Rogers eye me in cold tandem, but they seem to relax.

  This bizarre tantrum explains a lot, I suppose. Then again, it raises even more questions than it answers. More than anything else, it exposes Grogan as opportunistic and downright cannibalistic when crossed. I’m not completely surprised, though I’m greatly disheartened.

  “Fine,” he growls, and though his voice is dull with the hollow timbre of defeat, there’s something hiding within it—something snide and childishly retaliatory. Just before he turns away, I catch a scarce glimpse of his filthy smirk. “The nearest cave is little over seven miles northeast of here, and Rover 5’s half taken apart,” he says. “Which one of you wants to dig up Winkley and carry him?”

  Grogan waits for one of us to volunteer, his back still to us. The wind whooshes along the ground in a gentle rasp. We’re Martian statues with nothing to say.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  After only two weeks, the crop field has me completely freaked out. The cuttings germinated overnight, sending forth sprouts that have doubled in size every day since. As of this morning, one plant can no longer be discerned from its neighbor, having forfeited its individual identity for the greater community of a giant purple rug. Frequently, the winds pick up spores and blow them around like bits of quartz in a sandstorm. It isn’t hard to distinguish them from the Martian dust, now that we’re aware of their presence; they have an effervescent quality that reveals itself as the particles tumble through the air.

  We continue to adhere vigilantly to our sterilization protocols, and every cough or harrumph is worthy of a sideways glance. I’m tormented by nightmares of ghoulish vines bursting through my chest, sending my heart into the air like a grotesque cork. It’s no way to live. As tired as I generally am, the ball and chain of constant fear leadens my every step.

  It’s Saturday. Not that weekends bear any significance in the employ of PMRC; basic survival here is a full-time affair, so we’re never really off the clock. I really shouldn’t complain—what the heck is there to do around here for fun anyway? Free time is pretty useless—but I find myself more and more agitated these days. I’m tempted to sleep through breakfast this morning, because the only thing more valuable to me than food is rest. But, while sleep is hard to come by, it can wait. Breakfast, on the other hand, won’t—my coworkers will divvy up my rations without a second thought if I’m more than fifteen minutes late. I should know—it’s happened on many occasions.

  With the groans and popping joints of a much older man, I dress for another day in paradise.

  “How do we know when they’re ready to harvest?”

  I hear the question even before I set foot into the mess hall. It’s a subject I’ve been meaning to raise myself—I just haven’t gotten around to it yet—so I’m glad to hear it spoken aloud. Ignoring my arrival, Fiona looks at Rogers with mild irritation, as if she’s been waiting for—perhaps even dreading—this very question. “It’s toug
h to say,” she replies. “My guess is we’ll know when we know.”

  “Uh, what does that mean?” I ask, sliding into my chair. It troubles me that our scientific leader can’t answer such a basic question with any certainty. My breakfast—faux scrambled eggs, strips of pseudo-bacon, and black coffee—is cold. But at least it’s still here.

  Not surprisingly, Grogan snaps to Fiona’s aid. I find myself rolling my eyes. “There isn’t any precedence for this, guys. Nothing like BP7 has ever been engineered before, much less agriculturally harnessed.”

  Cutterly doesn’t buy this, especially coming from Grogan. “It doesn’t strike me as very safe to experiment on this large of a scale. Shouldn’t we be doing this in the lab where it’s easier to control?”

  “In a perfect world, absolutely,” answers Fiona. “But we have a couple of problems. First: time. We’re coming up on our yearly review; if we aren’t prepared for show-and-tell, we’re looking at another year before we get another chance to present our findings.” She pauses to sip her coffee. This is a perfect opportunity for someone to argue, yet no one does. “Locally, we have a much more immediate problem: BP7 seems bound and determined to pollinate. At the moment, I can’t simulate that in the lab.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demand. This differs greatly from her previous explanations. “I thought they were asexual?”

  “I thought so, too; by all appearances, the BPs had switched between two asexually reproductive behaviors. But subsequent tests have indicated something else entirely: BP7 has actually adapted to sexually produce.”

  “Whoa, hold on a second,” interjects Cutterly. “I don’t mean to sound negative, but with all the guesswork going on, maybe we need to take a step back. Just seems like—”

  Grogan holds up a hand, tapering Cutterly off in midsentence. “Fiona assures me this is actually to our advantage,” he explains. Despite the hostility between Grogan and the other men, Cutterly and Rogers now seem to hang on his every word. I swear, there must be something in the water here.

  I’m not as easily swayed, and it bothers me that the others are. I suspect my incredulity is further bristled by decaffeination—I don’t care much for black coffee, and I despise it cold.

  “I can’t see how,” I grumble around a mouthful of rubbery eggs, eyeing Fiona with mounting suspicion. Her cheeks flush, and she nods.

  “A lot has changed since we last discussed this, Wilson. When I first became aware of BP7’s adaptation—”

  Adaptation? Is that a watered-down substitution for mutation?

  “—I feared the plants might be more difficult to contain. But since then, I’ve come to a less worrisome conclusion.”

  “Based on what evidence?” Rogers wants to know.

  “Based on the discovery that the specimens we’ve planted possess antheridia, but no archegonia.”

  Blank faces all around.

  “They’re all males.”

  Rogers chuckles, but it’s full of nerves rather than humor. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, what about the spores? Males can’t produce spores, can they?”

  “What we’re seeing blowing around out there isn’t spores; it’s sperm. BP7 is behaving more like a simple animal than a plant—coral, for example. It’s relying on the wind to facilitate fertilization in the same way coral rely on ocean currents to randomly disperse sperm across a reef.”

  “I don’t understand,” Cutterly interjects. “What about Winkley? You said he breathed in spores.”

  “He did. I studied many of them under magnification during the days that followed, and believe me, there’s no doubt. This is something different; our crops have definitively traded spores for sperm.”

  Grogan clears his throat. “Fiona, you didn’t alter the genetic profile of the cuttings, did you?”

  She shakes her head. “Of course not. It’s as if the cuttings retained an imprint of their death, like they knew on a cellular level that their spores had tried and failed.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Grogan mumbles.

  Here, here. It would be very easy to get hung up on this explanation—I feel the seams of my gullibility popping against it, in fact—but it hasn’t escaped my notice that she’s sidestepped Grogan’s larger implication—that the reins of this scientific venture have slipped from her fingers. Even simpletons like me can guess our fate if the BPs manage to snatch the upper hand. Still, I’m compelled to throw Miss Lovely a bone. Maybe I’ve misunderstood her, after all.

  “Just to be clear,” I say, “what you’re telling us is that the BPs were originally engineered to reproduce asexually, but somehow they began producing spores. Then, after we wiped them out, the remaining cuttings somehow learned from their mistakes—seemingly, anyway—and mutated again to produce sperm rather than spores. Am I on track?”

  “That may be oversimplifying things a bit, but in a nutshell, yes.”

  “That’s oversimplifying?” Cutterly chuckles. “Jeez, Doc; I’d hate to hear the complicated version.” He smiles, stretching cheeks that aren’t used to being stretched. He’s trying to smooth down ruffled feathers, I know. I appreciate the effort—as does Fiona, I’m sure—but it isn’t working. Even Rogers looks like he just swallowed a bug.

  Grogan’s expression is particularly brooding. “And on top of all that,” he injects, “this new strain needs to pollinate to reproduce, and we don’t have any females to pollinate?” He laughs. It’s a hollow, condescending sound that—despite the frustration I know we’re sharing—grates against my nerves. What’s with this guy that he’s so determined to belittle others? He was on her side not ten seconds ago. “Sounds to me like you’ve lost control of this, Fiona. At best, we’re at an impasse.”

  Fiona blushes. She wants to retaliate, I can tell. She certainly has the intelligence to match Grogan’s wit, yet she opts to keep her cool. Does she have something up her sleeve, I wonder, or is she legitimately ashamed? I feel torn to pick sides; logically, I’m with Grogan—the state of our work couldn’t be more precarious—but my heart is rooting for Fiona. She seems to intuit my sympathy and rewards it with a sidelong glance, embellished with a mysterious smirk.

  “Not quite,” she replies, eyes narrowing in challenge as they return to Grogan. “As luck would have it, we do have a female specimen in our midst.”

  Blank faces all around for a long second, followed by another.

  “The graveyard,” Rogers suddenly whispers. His cheeks are pale, eyes sparkling with disquiet.

  I look into Fiona’s face, waiting—wanting desperately—for her to debunk this obscene suggestion, yet her head nods in assent. This revelation strikes me with such force that I’m jerked to my feet.

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  I sulk to the window and look outside. I can’t see the graveyard plant from this vantage—I’m on the wrong side of the hive—but I can make out its shadow. In the last couple of weeks, the freakish thing has reached fifty feet tall, and half again as wide. By all appearances, it has completely broken free of its genetic lineage—it’s a bona fide tree now, with a base nearly two feet across. Something about it frightens me more than anything else here. I can’t put my finger on what has my warning bells clanging with such concentrated vigor—this BP is only one compared to an entire field of creepy flora, after all—but I feel that much more at unease now, realizing that something so sinister has become integral to our corporate success.

  Actually, in the days that follow, I suspect Rogers and Cutterly may have become even more wary than me—and that’s saying something. This isn’t a conclusion I’ve reached on a hunch, either. The evidence is in plain sight, and it’s impossible to ignore.

  First, neither is willing to approach the graveyard for any reason. Instead, either I or Grogan must check the tree for new buds, which are indicators that pollination has occurred. This doesn’t seem like a fair division of labor, but neither does it seem worth making a stink over.

  Secondly, I’ve walked into the utility room on
more than one occasion to find one or both of them staring out the window at the massive plant—not as if transfixed, exactly; it’s more like they’re keeping a watchful eye peeled, waiting fearfully for something to happen.

  The thing that has me wholly convinced, though, is their daily visits to the infirmary. While the rest of us are checked out weekly, as has been routine since Winkley left us, Rogers and Cutterly insist on a daily battery of tests. It isn’t lost on me that they haven’t encouraged me or Grogan to do likewise—they’re as thick as thieves, those two—and my gut tells me they know something. They know something that I don’t, and I have this nagging sense that if I’m going to live much longer, I’ve got to find out what it is.

  Grogan left this morning for one of his ambiguous supply runs. I watched his ship burn through the atmosphere and imagined I was aboard, headed back to Earth. Though I knew quite well that nothing good would come of it, I allowed myself a few minutes to long for home—for the taste of real food, the smell of flowers, the feel of a woman on my arm. Even the all but forgotten vibration of my NanoPrint. The sting of this careless reminiscence has left me emotionally perforated, as if each memory has punctured my heart until it can no longer retain any peace.

  The mother plant appears to have reached her full height, finally. It’s over a hundred feet tall now. With Grogan gone, Fiona assists me in deburring its trunk of gametophytes, which will be transplanted later to the crop field—as if we need more. Thanks to similar efforts, our garden of once-lonely sires has slowly garnered female companionship, the largest of which is already twenty feet tall. The females are easy to spot: like their mother, their leaves are blood red, void of spore nodes, and a little smaller than those of their male counterparts.

  The BPs don’t make me as nervous as they once did, yet I’m continually repulsed by the mother plant, knowing that she’s grown to such extraordinary size from the nutrient-rich innards of my friend. Winkley’s body is gone now, every bit of him absorbed greedily by the plant—flesh, bones, even his clothes.