Improbable Botany

by Wayward

  I smiled to myself. “And?”

  “And they’d really like a decision by midday tomorrow. I know you said you’d like a day or so...”

  “Jim” I said, “that’s okay. I’ll see you around ten, in the boardroom. I... I have some news which I think will put quite a different complexion on the matter.”

  He pressed me for an explanation, but I fobbed him off and cut the connection.

  I returned to Edward beside the fire. “Not bad news?” he asked.

  I sipped the whisky and stared into the flames for a long minute. At last I turned and looked at Edward, my great uncle who had experienced something amazing and unique.

  “I would like your advice, Edward,” I began, and told him all about Equable-Pharm’s dire financial predicament.

  He poured me another drink and, as darkness deepened beyond the walls of Halford Hall, and the stars came out across the icy heavens, we talked about how we might begin to save the world.

  RACHEL ARMSTRONG

  The Living Stones of Venice

  Are you, by any chance, expecting a bioarchitecture placement from the Università Iuav di Venezia?” Maria asks as she sets down her satchel.

  “You’re late,” Anna says, twisting a stick impatiently between her fingers as she perches on a bollard by the canal. “Never mind, now.”

  “I’m Salvi, the site manager” says a tall, powerfully built man with thick black eyebrows, sideburns, and a grey-flecked beard, extending his hand to help the younger woman on to the deck. “This is my boat. Welcome onboard.”

  Anna taps her way to the water’s edge. She wears a yellow safety hat and orange overalls. The strong sun illuminates her greying blonde hair and pale complexion. She pauses, feeling the gentle rocking of the surface and the occasional beat of wood against stone. Salvi touches her hand to guide her but she waves it away. He lifts her backpack into the flat-bottomed motorboat before steadying the vessel so that she can embark, which she does in one decisive movement.

  “First day then, Maria – are you excited?” asks Salvi, as he loosens the mooring and leans on a long oar to start the vessel moving.

  “Absolutely! I want to be a bioarchitect. I’ve admired Professor Vita’s work since my undergraduate days. I actually wrote my master’s thesis on the ethics of her idea of living architecture.” As her dissertation was a sustained critique of Anna’s work with living materials, she immediately regrets mentioning it. But the professor, she suspects, is unlikely to bother herself with master’s theses.

  “That’s what they all say,” Anna mutters. “Every month another eager student turns up, all enthusiastic to help out. Then their time’s up, they bugger off, and we start all over again.”

  “I’m a fast learner,” says Maria. “I don’t mind working hard.”

  “You’ll need to work harder than that.”

  Maria watches as Anna gracefully handles her stick, which is fitted with a tip like a watch brush, with which she lightly skims the water.

  “What do you feel with your cane?” asks Maria.

  “Well, we’re on the Grand Canal,” says Anna. “It’s about thirty to fifty metres wide. There are not many fish. Some mullet, turbot and mudsuckers lurking around nooks in the walls. It’s congested. The traffic keeps to the right and the vessels keep a distance of around thirty metres from the vessel in front.”

  “It should be fifty,” Salvi says.

  “Maybe,” retorts Anna. “But it’s not what they’re doing.”

  Salvi laughs.

  “You see better than the sighted,” he says.

  “I can find my way around water,” Anna replies, “but I’m less good at knowing what’s on land. Maria, kindly describe the nearest buildings.”

  Anna is more interested in what Maria will see and emphasise than in having the familiar surroundings described to her. She is willing to act the tourist to find out something about her latest recruit. Maria senses this might be the first of a series of tests. Being Venetian, she rather assumes that everyone is familiar with the historic buildings, and accordingly finds it difficult to describe them in a vivid or original way.

  “Well … their facades are richly coloured… pink, terracotta, lemon, cream... Their stones are ornamented with weaves, flowers, knots, gargoyles...” She tails off, having the distinct impression that Anna is totally uninterested in surface appearances.

  Salvi spits a wedge of chewing tobacco into the canal, cuts the throttle and takes out a paddle to steer them into a rio just past a caramel-coloured building with white window frames, like a gingerbread house. Then he slips a mooring knot.

  “Stay here a moment please,” he says. Anna feels the boat sway as he leaps off, and soon hears the clatter and clang of heavy, iron gates.

  “No! Guerrieri della Natura!” he shouts.

  There is a sharp rip of cloth and Maria sees the site manager tear down a large banner that is threaded through the railings – NO AI MOSTRI A VENEZIA!

  “Nature’s Warriors, my arse! They think we’re going to destroy Venice, strangle the life out of it.” He glances at Maria, “Cazzo! They’re an animal rights offshoot. They prefer their bricks to be stacked up and cemented together – and crumbling to pieces – and their plants to be in parks or window boxes, not in the water. And they’re willing to use violent means, if you believe their damn bloggers.”

  “I myself think we can save these historic buildings,” says Maria. “It’s why I’m here. You may criticise their methods but you have to concede their concerns are shared by many Venetians. Not everyone understands or accepts that living plants may represent salvation for our beautiful, crumbling city.”

  “They’re tilting at windmills,” Anna scowls.

  Salvi loosens the rope and the boat glides into the oxbow waterway.

  “This is where the trovanti live.”

  “Living stones,” Anna translates. “There’s been considerable growth here. The iodine’s strong.” She uses her stick to probe the water surface. “A high concentration of solutes. Bring us closer to the sides, Salvi – I want to touch them.”

  The site manager digs his oar into the canal with a twist and the boat crunches against an oyster reef studded with sea lettuce and barnacles. Anna reaches into the water and tugs on a dark red algal frond with a splayed head, like a lily pad. It has a large mustard-coloured eyespot in its centre. Its stem is encased in a terracotta conch-like shell from which fleshy roots protrude, studded with grippers that resemble octopus tentacles. It resists her grip, its tentacle-roots slipping through her fingers, and disappears.

  “They’re descended from a Mediterranean seaweed commonly known as the mermaid’s wineglass.”

  “I’ve seen these types of seaweeds off the coast of Sicily,” Maria says, “But just tiny things, a few centimetres high. That one was huge!”

  “We’re breeding them to create walls of vegetable matter,” Anna says. “They seem to be growing surprisingly quickly.”

  “That’s what scares the Guerrieri della Natura kids,” says Salvi, “They assume these plants are purely to make huge profits for multinational corporations.”

  “And aren’t they?” asks Maria. “Don’t you have investor ‘angels’ waiting in the wings?”

  “If only,” Anna grimaces. “A bit of cash wouldn’t go amiss now and then.”

  “I’m surprised,” Maria says. “What you’ve achieved with these living stones, as you call them, is remarkable – that they weren’t altered by genetic methods, but by techniques of environmental control. That you say they will function as ‘living’ modular units, or bricks that equip these buildings with the same kinds of survival tactics as living things. It’s no wonder people have reservations about your claims – they’re always suspicious of new technology at first – but this, it’s the future! And business always wants first bite of the future!”

  Anna dips her stick into the water.

  “We need to inspect one,” she says.

  Salvi scoops his paddle
into the turbid water and levers the boat to exactly the spot the white stick marks. Together they reach down into the water, where particles scatter the light in brilliant reflections. They feel for the plant’s slimy neck, but it effortlessly wriggles out of their grasp.

  “Maria, why don’t you try,” Salvi says. “It’s good you learn how to do this. You’ll grip it if you grab it by the bony corset, but watch your fingers. Even with protective gloves on they’re still as sharp as hell.”

  Maria reaches into the water, which is warm at the surface but progressively colder the further she stretches down. Her fingers start to ache and she can only just feel the thick shell’s edge. She thinks about pollution, the advice she has heard since a child to avoid contact with the waters of Venice. Suddenly, the living stone is in her hand, then it thumps on to the deck and thrashes its tentacles against the sides of the boat like a landed fish. It’s apical aperture, which looks just like an octopus eye, squeezes into a squint under the light. The trovant starts to rock the boat.

  “It’s far heavier than I expected!” says Maria.

  “Lively too – but she’s just playing with you,” says Salvi, “Cover her eyespot and see what happens.”

  Maria feels for the head and puts her hand over the centre. Instantly, the trovant is calm.

  “Amazing!”

  “They climb during the daytime and rest at night,” says Salvi. “Local residents said that was because they were hungry, but they seemed distressed to me. So, I figured that when they bolt to escape the best thing was to throw a cloth over them. Then they drop back into the water, sedated.”

  Salvi reaches for an oilskin under his seat, which has always been the best tool for this job, and covers the creature so that Maria has the use of her hand again.

  “How far do they climb?” she asks.

  “You see that tension wiring in the wall bolt next to you?” asks Salvi. “A bit further up, you’ll see the knot.”

  Maria nods.

  “It’s screwed into the brickwork and crisscrossed over the walls of this rio. It goes four storeys up. There are trovanti on the roof. They’re all curled up in knots and terribly tense, but they’re there all right.”

  “So what’s to stop them invading the entire city?”

  “Mirrors.”

  “Mirrors? That’s all?”

  “Yes, they intensify the light and confuse the plants. Don’t ask me how. I only know what they do. Mirrors freak them out. There are hundreds of living stones curled around the scaffolding above you. They are so thick they’re like a forest canopy. On the lower levels they’re more unfurled and relaxed – less exposed to the light. It makes them look like washing on a line. Ha, typically Venetian, eh? Slime washing line!”

  Maria looks anxiously at the trovant, which remains motionless under the oilskin.

  “Don’t worry, she’ll last for a week without light and water,” says Anna, “We’ll chuck her back in when we’re done.”

  She motions to Salvi to pull them even tighter into the side of the canal. The boat continues to grind against the reef. Anna takes a microphone and adhesive tape from her rucksack, switches the microphone on and secures it firmly against the wall. She removes her safety helmet and clamps a set of headphones over her ears.

  After several minutes the student’s curiosity gets the better of her.

  “What are you listening for?”

  “They’re communicating – Shh.”

  After another pause Maria has to ask, “What are they saying?”

  “Oh, I can’t tell that yet. But I am sure that with time we’ll know. In fact, you’ll help me find out.”

  “But what exactly are you listening to?” asks Salvi.

  “Clicking,” says Anna, “Probably water rising in the brickwork. It sounds something like popping bubble wrap. There is another sound that’s much more organised. It’s like Morse code – it has an incredible regularity and patterning. I don’t know what it means, but it’s certainly not random.”

  “I knew it,” says Salvi, “They gang up when you’re fitting a new tension wire; they’re either trying to help you, or stop you.”

  “There’s one more sound,” interrupts Anna. “More musical – running water.”

  With the microphone still taped to the wall, she reaches for her stick and starts to tap along the tension wire with its brush tip.

  “They’re relaying water up the rigging like a waterwheel,” she pauses and lifts the brush off the wall and drops her stick back into her lap, “I do believe they’re regulating their own climate.”

  “Is that good?” asks Maria.

  “Good? It’s bloody incredible!” says Anna. “Just think. These creatures were forced to adapt by being bred under certain stressful conditions; pressure, overcrowding, polluted water, oxygen starvation, desiccation, photo deprivation, and exposure to harsh sunlight. So, if the living stones can actually change their environment, then they’re directing their own evolution.” Maria looks blank. “It means we’re not exactly in control,” Anna explains.

  “Should we be worried?”

  Anna shrugs.

  The three of them sit quietly in the boat for a few minutes taking in the atmosphere of the rio, each of them trying to fathom in different ways, what this latest development might mean. Salvi watches a small shoal of fry nibble at fronds of sea lettuce, then a crab dances sideways over the back of a clam. Anna hears the sounds of an evolving marine community in the canal. Maria is thinking that bioarchitecture is not just about designing nature-like shapes, but dealing with the very processes of life. She is regretting not paying better attention in her high school biology classes. As she observes them up close, her long-held concerns about the entire premise of ‘living’ architecture are starting to be tinged with fascination

  “Let’s go further in,” says Salvi. He picks up his oar and paddles them along the waterway, two strokes one side, then the other.

  Anna raises her stick, touching the walls and tension wires as they go.

  “The whole of this area is structurally bound like hips and teeth,” says Salvi. “The scaffolding for the trovanti to climb uses the kind of tight lacing and braces that corset makers used when it was fashionable to have an hour glass figure.” Maria thinks he looks almost nostalgic for such days. It is hot. Humid. “The attachments and tautness of these geometries follow dental techniques in bracing, o-rings and bridging. It’s quite an experimental system.”

  “We’re always re-tuning the tension wires,” adds Anna. “We’re interested in how the living stones respond to the different systems and whether they show any preferences.”

  Maria, whose face is suddenly unnaturally pale, says, “I’m sorry, I’m feeling faint. The atmosphere is so dense here. Like before a storm. Can we stop a moment?”

  “It’s the large canopy of trovanti above us,” says Salvi, “They’re quite low.” He lifts the oar out of the water and the boat drifts stealthily towards a mussel bed.

  “You’ll be ok,” Anna says. “Just take a few deep breaths – it passes.” She carefully places her stick in the water. Tiny ripples on the canal surface begin to swell as if the water is boiling.

  “Fluttering! – It’s a bloom of hatchlings! I can feel them!”

  Salvi watches different shades of darkness blemish the surface of the water, then rolls up his sleeve and puts his hand into the water where the planes that lie between the light and shade intersect. Something, like a lock of hair, touches his fingers, and is gone.

  “From the moment these plants are born they cannot only be seen through, they can also ‘see’,” says Anna. “That means, they’ll either avoid you, or they’ll be singling you out...”

  A jet of water hits Salvi in the chest. Another hits him in the face then a shower sprays them as the boat rocks suddenly. A large trovant thumps on the deck, grabbing Salvi’s oar. He attempts to flick the plant away and as it wrestles with him, it pulls the oilskin off the ‘sleeping’ specimen on the deck. Within
seconds it has woken, climbed the side of the boat and slide into the rio. More living stones fall on the deck, causing the boat to lurch dangerously from side to side.

  “Throw them overboard, or we’ll capsize!” shouts Salvi.

  “Row back towards the Grand Canal,” says Anna, “They’re too many of them here to handle. If they decide to hit us all at once, we’re sunk.”

  Salvi digs his paddle into the water, unsteadily, as Anna feels the living stones thudding softly on the deck. She levers them off with her stick and Maria kicks them away. One drops directly on Anna’s arm. Its soft body grips her flesh and twists it sharply, like a Chinese burn. She wriggles out of its grasp. More tentacles grip and jerk her head, pulling sharply towards its rough shell. She can hear it clicking and squeaking like shrieking castanets. Maria tries to help but it will not loosen its grip.

  “Let go! You’re making it worse!” Anna cries. Maria goes to help Salvi instead, who is struggling with the drag on the boat. A growing mat of plants grip the hull and begin to drag it backwards. Salvi and Maria use the paddle like a crow bar to lever against the tension cable system inserts along the wall to force the boat forwards.

  The trovant is tightening its stranglehold on Anna. The cloudy pupils of her eyes are wide with fear. She strikes with the tip of her cane. The living stone repeats the noise the blow makes and follows it with another set of clicks. Salvi is struggling with a cluster of trovanti that are trying to wrestle the oar from him. In desperation, just as the lethally sharp edge begins to cut into her face along the cheekbone, Anna repeats the noises the trovant is making. Its grip loosens and the creature slides off her face onto the deck, then into the water. The others follow.

  The boat jolts forward as Salvi and Maria free the vessel of the agitated plants in a mighty push. They float towards the lock gate in silence. Anna sobs momentarily and holds a cotton handkerchief to her cheek to staunch the bleeding. Soon, the activity in the rio quells.