Phytosphere

by Scott Mackay

She went to him, and took him in her arms like the child he was. And even when the generator clicked off because her car was full, she kept holding him because he couldn’t seem to get his sobbing under control. He didn’t cry often these days; she couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. But he was crying now. She heard his voice crack, and realized his voice was changing.

  “Let’s get in,” she said. “We’re full.”

  “Mom, are you happy I killed him?”

  And in a voice that was as dead as Denim Jacket, she said, “Yes, Jake, I’m happy you killed him.”

  She lifted Denim Jacket’s gun and brought it into the car with her.

  They drove up to the ground-floor level and out to the gate. Cedarvale continued to burn. Where was Whit? And the remaining residents? Were they all dead now? Had Whit made it to Detroit?

  She took some food out—four cans of Irish stew—stacked them on the curb next to the security kiosk, put Denim Jacket’s gun on top, and then drove off into the darkness. She wasn’t going to leave Buck and the others without a gun.

  25

  At Homestead, Neil studied the new downloads from the Department of Defense with misgiving. Only so many launch vehicles left, and according to his virus specs, dispersion would fall short by twenty-five percent if he didn’t come up with a solution. Secretary of Defense Sidower was indeed correct in his bleak assessment—except for what they had in the United States, and in U.S. bases abroad, launch infrastructure worldwide, particularly in terms of personnel, had been degraded to the point of zero capability.

  Was there a solution?

  He entered the parameters again, just in case he had made a mistake—lift requirements versus existing launch capabilities—and came up with the same dead-end numbers. But then he widened the data pool, and entered the parameters through a games-theory program Kafis had given him one summer at Marblehill, something the Pentagon computer geeks didn’t have, just to see what would happen. Outside, on the air base, the last of the sun was slowly disappearing.

  “Analyze,” he told his waferscreen.

  Sixty seconds later his waferscreen gave him an answer he hadn’t been expecting—the Moon.

  He scrutinized the data. It turned out that AviOrbit had dozens of interlunar shuttles crated in various warehouses, some out of service for decades, but all possessing, to varying degrees, launch potential. His waferscreen told him that if these shuttles were refurbished, they could be transformed into crude missiles.

  He sat back, glad that the Tarsalan software had taken into account this phantom resource. Was it possible, then? Could he win this chess game after all?

  He entered further parameters about the virus itself. Because it was a virus, it could be grown and cultured in a lab. Unlike the toxin, it didn’t need an existing chemical production infrastructure. Checking lunar inventory, he saw that the Moon in fact had the basic building blocks for his virus, and could manufacture it in significant quantities. They even had Tarsalan blood in cold storage—there for emergency purposes should the Tarsalans ever need the Moon in a medical capacity—and could therefore also devise the Tarsalanspecific virions.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. It could be done. And if it meant he had to pull another Luke Langstrom on the Moon, then that’s what he would do. Co-opt the Moon a second time. And truth be told, he was curious. His brother had come up with the flagella thing. But had he come up with anything since? It would be interesting to see exactly what his brother was doing.

  He lifted his phone— the phone—and entered a page. He wondered how long it would take the secretary of defense to get back to him.

  When a firefight erupted between the opposing factions an hour later, the secretary still hadn’t gotten back to him. The hole in the sky above the southeastern United States had now closed up entirely, and it was pelting rain vehemently.

  The firefight, as usual, was at the other end of the base, but Neil and his family still followed their established protocol. Neil got on the floor. The girls crawled under their cots.

  Louise didn’t follow the protocol this time. She kept rolling her paint roller, spreading yellow paint over the walls, as if she were sick of firefights.

  “Louise, get on the floor.”

  She continued to paint.

  “Mom, a stray bullet could reach here,” warned Ashley. “Or the soldiers might come.”

  “Sweetie, it’s all right. Colonel Bard never lets them get close to us. So let’s just continue with our lives.

  I’m not going to let them bother us anymore. And I’m almost finished with this painting. I want to get it done. What do you think of the color? I think it really brightens up the place.”

  Neil stared at his wife as she went back to painting. He heard more gunfire, but it was so distant he thought that maybe she was right—Colonel Bard would keep the breakaway airmen at the other end of the base forever. As he watched his wife work, he had to wonder if this frantic little woman who was painting the army barracks a sunny shade of autumn gold had become unhinged.

  He got up from his hiding spot on the floor and lifted a paintbrush. He poured some paint into an empty ration container, walked to the window, and started painting the window frame.

  “Dad, do you think that’s wise?” asked Melissa.

  “Your mom’s right.” He was feeling slightly unhinged himself. “I’m getting sick of hiding on the floor.”

  He dipped his paintbrush into the container, even as he heard the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire nearby.

  The old, bold confidence was gone, despite the prospect of getting the Moon’s help. He couldn’t help thinking of Kafis. Especially when Kafis’s pupils dilated to the halfway point. The halfway point always meant that Kafis thought Neil had missed something important.

  “Dad?” called Melissa.

  What did he even care about Kafis? He was going to beat Kafis. The virus module had backups to its backups. It had failsafes to its failsafes. He had thought it through again and again. He couldn’t have missed a single thing. And if they got the Moon on board…

  “Dad!” Melissa’s voice penetrated the racket outside.

  “Yes?”

  “Your phone.”

  He stiffened. He listened. His phone. How could he have missed something like that? He was only fifty-two. Was his hearing getting that bad?

  He put the paintbrush in the ration container, walked over to the table, and lifted his phone, his precious link to the secretary of defense. Only it wasn’t Sidower—it was Deputy Secretary of Defense Leanna Fonblanque.

  “Where’s Joe?” he asked.

  “We’ve moved the entire government to the 937 facility in New Mexico.”

  Neil took a moment, intellectually and emotionally, to assimilate this. “And you didn’t take me and my family?”

  “Were you notified?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re not on the list.” The deputy secretary sighed. “937 is a long-term facility.”

  “You don’t have to explain what it is. I helped develop it.”

  “Then you understand that theoretical science won’t be a number-one priority when we reemerge.

  Technical and infrastructure support will be. I’m sorry, Dr. Thorndike.”

  At that moment he felt betrayed by his government, and almost didn’t tell her about the Moon’s hidden launch capability. Fuck it. He had his own 937 in Marblehill. He didn’t need the president’s twenty square miles of underground bunker in New Mexico.

  “So are you in touch with Joe, then? And the president?”

  “I am.”

  “And they’ve left you in charge of this…this effort I’m making? Because I’ve come up with something they might be interested in.”

  Fonblanque paused, and he read a half-dozen things in that pause, chief of which was pity. “I understand you have problems at Homestead. A breakaway faction?”

  “Colonel Bard is containing it.”

  “Good.”

  “Are we
getting closer to a full-scale assault on the TMS?” he asked.

  “The Pentagon’s plans are proceeding apace, Dr. Thorndike. That’s all I’m authorized to tell you.”

  This, then, was another rebuff. He pictured the deputy secretary somewhere in her own safe house, in her sixties but sporting every cosmetic enhancement and procedure in the book so that she looked closer to thirty, helicopter ready outside for the moment she thought she had to go to 937.

  “You tell the president everything’s fine,” he said. “I’m firmly in control of the situation. And I have a great idea. Something that will improve the dispersion odds of the virus greatly.”

  “Is that gunfire I hear?”

  “I’ve come up with a solution for the launch shortage.”

  “Dr. Thorndike, we’re putting most of our effort into the TMS effort. So don’t worry too much.”

  Another revelation. They didn’t care about the virus anymore. The second line was on the back burner.

  They were making other plans. Plans to wrest control of the on-off switch from the Tarsalans.

  “I guarantee the virus is going to work.” The old, bold confidence was a brittle thing at best. “But we need launch capability.”

  “We’ve taken some of our older units out of mothballs. They’re being refurbished as we speak.”

  She gave him the number, and of course it wasn’t nearly enough.

  “I’ve run models,” he said. “Using Tarsalan games-theory software. The Moon—or AviOrbit, at least—has all kinds of old shuttles in storage. They can easily be converted into crude missiles.”

  The assistant secretary paused. “I’m listening.” And he realized from the tone of her voice that he had her on board again, that he had them all on board, and that he had come up with another great idea.

  “They’ve got over seven hundred crated away in various warehouses. Some are nearly a century old, but others are only ten or twenty years old.”

  She paused again. “You signed off against the Moon. I have the document right here. Lunar interference represents a category-eight risk. You’ve written it right here. How are they going to react?”

  He hated the taste of crow. “Nectaris is always asking for handouts. And this mayor they have…he won’t take much persuading if you make him understand it will be to his advantage. As for AviOrbit, promise them anything. Even subsidies. We have to hit the Tarsalans hard, and hit them fast. Our dispersion area has to be as wide as possible. We have to quickly reach the saturation point before the xenophyta’s natural defense system responds. Let’s see if we can get the Moon on board a second time.

  They’ve already given us Luke Langstrom. Maybe they’ll give us everything. Including some updates on what my brother is doing. Maybe he’s come up with something else besides this flagella thing. It could all turn into something useful.”

  The deputy secretary admitted it sounded promising. “I don’t think anybody considered the Moon as a launch resource, Dr. Thorndike. Excellent work.”

  Here it was again, the primary theme of his life—people in power telling him he had done good.

  Yet when he finally ended his call to the assistant secretary, he was anxious. The rain beat against the windows. Was he getting anywhere closer to solving the puzzle of the shroud? The gunfire abated and the girls crawled out from under their cots. And would the virus work on a mass scale, and not fizzle the way the hydrogen sulfide had?

  Where was his confidence? He had to tell himself that the virus would work. That it was going to turn the xenophyta into mush from the inside out, so that it would rain from the sky like Oobleck. Yes. Oobleck.

  The king said he was sorry, and the Oobleck stopped. Simple. The whole viral thrust was meant to be simple. And simple was best.

  Simple was the only way he could make sure he didn’t miss anything.

  26

  What Gerry didn’t like about it was how it felt like an intervention, the kind his wife, his brother, and his

  brother’s wife had staged before throwing him into Bellwood two years ago.

  He glanced at Ian, and could tell Ian knew nothing about it. Then at Ira, and what was Ira doing here, anyway, because Ira never came to these things? Then at Mitch, who stared at his hands like a Judas.

  But unlike his first intervention, where everything good in the world had materialized afterward, and he had finally found the peace he had always been looking for, and, wonder of wonders, had found it without the bottle, this intervention had all the hallmarks of a cancer and felt like it was leaching the life out of him.

  “But what about that first drop they sent?” he said. “They were so hard-assed. It was like a slap in the face. Telling us to butt out because they thought we would blow it. And my damn brother signing off on it because he thinks he’s king of the world.”

  Hulke looked away. Gerry could tell the mayor had mixed feelings about the whole thing. “Well, Ger, they sent us the blueprint for the virus, and Luke’s taken a look at it, and Luke seems to think it’s…how can I put this?…a kosher little bug and, unlike the toxin, something we can grow up here.”

  “I thought Luke wasn’t part of our effort anymore.”

  The mayor looked away. “We’ve kind of been using him all along. On a consulting basis…and keeping it hush-hush…because you seemed a little miffed at him when he broke camp with us.”

  Gerry shook his head. “I wasn’t miffed at him. I welcome his input. I was mad at the toxin. I knew it wasn’t going to work. And I was right. These are the Tarsalans. They’re going to think of all the obvious things. And now Neil wants to try a virus? A virus won’t work for the exact same reason.”

  “No, no…. Luke said it will. He said it will beat the crap out of the thing…. Maybe not in those exact words…” The door to the mayor’s office slid open. “And…well, well, well…speak of the devil…. Luke, we were just—”

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Dr. Langstrom, coming through the door.

  So. Here it was. The last nail. Why did things always arrange themselves this way in his life? Same thing at NCSU. Thought his job was safe, had no idea of the political intrigue brewing behind his back, and bang, we’re sorry, Dr. Thorndike, but the Ocean Sciences Department is in a precarious position right now, and yes, you’ve really bounced back since your unfortunate stay at Bellwood, but we’re looking at a serious lack of funding at the present time…and here it was all over again. Poor old Ger, only wanting to help, doing his damnedest to figure out Kafis’s little puzzle, and then having the rug pulled out from under him, and Langstrom bouncing through the door as if he belonged here more than Gerry did.

  “Hello, Luke,” he said, trying to stop the frost in his voice.

  The Martian scientist nodded deferentially. “Gerry.”

  The mayor tried to alleviate the tension with some blustering hospitality. “Wish I had a plate of bonbons, or something, Luke, because I know you like your sweets… but we’re getting… uh… drastically low in the supply side of things, and we… you know… got a little hoarding going on… so I guess all I can give you…”

  “Yes, crudités. Moon-grown?”

  “We grow a fine carrot.”

  “And the dip?”

  “Uh… synthetic. But real low-cal. In fact, zero-cal.”

  “You’re not insulted if I pass?”

  “Me, insulted? No, of course not. Have a seat. There’s a spot beside Ira. You know Ira, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we’ve met.”

  “Hi, Luke.”

  “Hello, Ira.”

  “We were just telling Ger, here… about Dr. Thorndike’s virus.”

  And this rankled Gerry as well, because he was “Ger” now, nothing else, while his brother was still Dr.

  Thorndike. He watched Luke take his spot beside Ira.

  Gerry glanced at Ira, a man in his early sixties with an odd birthmark on his right hand, a narrow face, intense blue eyes, a receding hairline, and an obvious Ashkenazi contour to his nose.
He had a benign but nearly frozen grin on his face. What was Ira getting out of all this? What kind of tariff concessions had the U.S. government made to the lunar contingent of AviOrbit?

  “I’ve developed a few vials of the virus according to Dr. Thorndike’s blueprint,” said Luke. “Lothar Hydroponics had the base tobacco mosaic virus on file. The Tarsalan components came from the Aldrin Health Sciences Center. The cross-species enzymes and catalysts were easy to synthesize using basic laboratory techniques. The beauty of this thing, Gerry, is that unlike the toxin, we can grow it here on the Moon. Kudos to your brother. We mount multiple warheads of the stuff on some of the old interlunar junk Ira has hanging around and we go in with a coordinated attack.”

  The unfairness of the situation struck him afresh. “Wait a minute. Ira can give my brother launch vehicles but he can’t give me another Smallmouth?”

  Ira’s grin transformed into a hard-faced frown. “It’s not that we can’t give you another Smallmouth, Gerry, it’s just that we don’t see the point. Mitch and I have talked about this, and we’ve basically concluded that your…research…Pardon me if I’m blunt, but your research is going nowhere.” He lifted his palms. “These flagella, for instance. Yes, the first Smallmouth has shown us that when they’re in the sphere, they’re active, and that they link each xenophyta organism to the next, but so what? And this expensive infrared equipment we’ve given you? What have you done with it? You’ve shown us some pretty colors and told us that the phytosphere has different temperatures in different places, and that there might be a cyclical weather system in it… but really, what have you given us in terms of a concrete scientific return, or even a first step toward a working solution?”

  Gerry’s anger flared. “Yes, but this cyclical weather system… I’m beginning to think it’s more than just a weather system—it’s a definite stress band. Did you read my report on it?”

  “You mean you’ve finally written a report?”

  Gerry frowned but pushed on. “The pattern’s too regular to be a weather system. If we can figure out what’s causing it, we could be one step closer to a solution. I’m hypothesizing that the stress band could be part of the phytosphere’s operating system.”