Joe paused at the bar. “Pint of bitter?” he asked tentatively. Brenda glanced at him and nodded, then went back to loading the antique washing machine. Presently she pulled a clean glass down from the shelf and held it under the tap.
“Heard you’ve got farm trouble,” she said noncommitally as she worked the hand pump on the beer engine.
“Uh-huh.” Joe focused on the glass. “Where’d you get that?”
“Never you mind.” She put the glass down to give the head time to settle. “You want to talk to Arthur and Wendy the Rat about farms. They had one the other year.”
“Happens.” Joe took his pint. “Thanks, Brenda. The usual?”
“Yeah.” She turned back to the washer. Joe headed over to the far corner, where a pair of huge leather sofas, their arms and backs ripped and scarred by generations of Brenda’s semiferal cats, sat facing each other on either side of a cold hearth. “Art, Rats. What’s up?”
“Fine, thanks.” Wendy the Rat was well over seventy, one of those older folks who had taken the p53 chromosome hack and seemed to wither into timelessness: white dreadlocks, nose and ear studs dangling loosely from leathery holes, skin like a desert wind. Art had been her boy toy once, back before middle age set its teeth into him. He hadn’t had the hack, and looked older than she did. Together they ran a smallholding, mostly pharming vaccine chicks but also doing a brisk trade in high-nitrate fertilizer that came in on the nod and went out in sacks by moonlight.
“Heard you had a spot of bother?”
“’S true.” Joe took a cautious mouthful. “Mm, good. You ever had farm trouble?”
“Maybe.” Wendy looked at him askance, slitty-eyed. “What kinda trouble you got in mind?”
“Got a farm collective. Says it’s going to Jupiter or something. Bastard’s homesteading the woods down by old Jack’s stream. Listen . . . Jupiter?”
“Aye well, that’s one of the destinations, sure enough.” Art nodded wisely, as if he knew anything.
“Naah, that’s bad.” Wendy the Rat frowned. “Is it growing trees yet, do you know?”
“Trees?” Joe shook his head. “Haven’t gone and looked, to tell the truth. What the fuck makes people do that to themselves, anyway?”
“Who the fuck cares?” Wendy’s face split in a broad grin. “Such as don’t think they’re human anymore, meself.”
“It tried to sweet-talk us,” Joe said.
“Aye, they do that,” said Arthur, nodding emphatically. “Read somewhere they’re the ones as think we aren’t fully human. Tools an’ clothes and farmyard machines, like? Sustaining a pre-post-industrial lifestyle instead of updating our genome and living off the land like God intended?”
“’Ow the hell can something with nine legs and eyestalks call itself human?” Joe demanded, chugging back half his pint in one angry swallow.
“It used to be, once. Maybe used to be a bunch of people.” Wendy got a weird and witchy look in her eye. “’Ad a boyfriend back thirty, forty years ago, joined a Lamarckian clade. Swapping genes an’ all, the way you or me’d swap us underwear. Used to be a ’vironmentalist back when antiglobalization was about big corporations pissing on us all for profits. Got into gene hackery and self-sufficiency big-time. I slung his ass when he turned green and started photosynthesizing.”
“Bastards,” Joe muttered. It was deep green folk like that who’d killed off the agricultural-industrial complex in the early years of the century, turning large portions of the countryside into ecologically devastated wilderness gone to rack and ruin. Bad enough that they’d set millions of countryfolk out of work—but that they’d gone on to turn green, grow extra limbs, and emigrate to the outer solar system was adding insult to injury. And having a good time in the process, by all accounts. “Din’t you ’ave a farm problem, coupla years back?”
“Aye, did that,” said Art. He clutched his pint mug protectively.
“It went away,” Joe mused aloud.
“Yeah, well.” Wendy stared at him cautiously.
“No fireworks, like.” Joe caught her eye. “And no body. Huh.”
“Metabolism,” said Wendy, apparently coming to some kind of decision. “That’s where it’s at.”
“Meat—” Joe, no biogeek, rolled the unfamiliar word around his mouth irritably. “I used to be a software dude before I burned, Rats. You’ll have to ’splain the jargon fore using it.”
“You ever wondered how those farms get to Jupiter?” Wendy probed.
“Well.” Joe shook his head. “They, like, grow stage trees? Rocket logs? An’ then they estivate, and you are fucked if they do it next door, ’cause when those trees go up, they toast about a hundred hectares?”
“Very good,” Wendy said heavily. She picked up her mug in both hands and gnawed on the rim, edgily glancing around as if hunting for police gnats. “Let’s you and me take a hike.”
Pausing at the bar for Ole Brenda to refill her mug, Wendy led Joe out past Spiffy Buerke and her latest femme—a pair of throw-backs in green Wellingtons and Barbour jackets—out into what had once been a car park and was now a tattered wasteground behind the pub. It was dark, and no residual light pollution stained the sky: the Milky Way was visible overhead, along with the pea-sized red cloud of orbitals that had gradually swallowed Jupiter over the past few years. “You wired?” asked Wendy.
“No, why?”
She pulled out a fist-sized box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a light on its side to blink green, and nodded. “Fuckin’ polis bugs.”
“Isn’t that a—”
“Ask me no questions, an’ I’ll tell you no fibs.” Wendy grinned.
“Uh-huh.” Joe took a deep breath: he’d guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections, and this—a portable local jammer—was proof: any police bugs within two or three meters would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling sub-sentient coppers whose job it was to prevent conspiracy-to-commit offenses before they happened. It was a relic of the Internet age, when enthusiastic legislators had accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by demanding keyword monitoring of everything within range of a network terminal—not realizing that in another few decades “network terminals” would be self-replicating ’bots the size of fleas and about as common as dirt. (The net itself had collapsed shortly thereafter, under the weight of self-replicating viral libel lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance remained.) “Okay. Tell me about meta, metab—”
“Metabolism.” Wendy began walking toward the field behind the pub. “And stage trees. Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven—anyway. What you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just lignify and die in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and before the cells die they nitrate the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked enzymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s dead it’s ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight explosive—it detonates cell by cell, and some of the xylem tubes are, eh, well, the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae with a depolarizing membrane nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s about efficient as ’at old-time satellite-launcher rocket. Not very, but enough.”
“Uh.” Joe blinked. “That meant to mean something to me?”
“Oh ’eck, Joe.” Wendy shook her head. “Think I’d bend your ear if it wasn’t?”
“Okay.” He nodded, seriously. “What can I do?”
“Well.” Wendy stopped and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon train making its orbital transfer window, self-sufficient posthuman Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted, embarking on the long, slow transfer to Jupiter.
“Well?” He waited expectantly.
“You�
��re wondering where all that fertilizer’s from,” Wendy said elliptically.
“Fertilizer.” His mind blanked for a moment.
“Nitrates.”
He glanced down, saw her grinning at him. Her perfect fifth set of teeth glowed alarmingly in the greenish overspill from the light on her jammer box.
“Tha’ knows it make sense,” she added, then cut the jammer.
When Joe finally staggered home in the small hours, a thin plume of smoke was rising from Bob’s kennel. Joe paused in front of the kitchen door and sniffed anxiously, then relaxed. Letting go of the door handle, he walked over to the kennel and sat down outside. Bob was most particular about his den—even his own humans didn’t go in there without an invitation. So Joe waited.
A moment later there was an interrogative cough from inside. A dark, pointed snout came out, dribbling smoke from its nostrils like a particularly vulpine dragon. “Rrrrrrr?”
“ ’S me.”
“Uuurgh.” A metallic click. “Smoke good smoke joke cough tickle funny arf arf ?”
“Yeah, don’t mind if I do.”
The snout pulled back into the kennel; a moment later it reappeared, teeth clutching a length of hose with a mouthpiece on one end. Joe accepted it graciously, wiped off the mouthpiece, leaned against the side of the kennel, and inhaled. The weed was potent and smooth: within a few seconds it stilled the uneasy dialogue in his head.
“Wow, tha’s a good turnup.”
“Arf-arf-ayup.”
Joe felt himself relaxing. Maddie would be upstairs, snoring quietly in their decrepit bed: waiting for him, maybe. But sometimes a man just had to be alone with his dog and a good joint, doing man-and-dog stuff. Maddie understood this and left him his space. Still . . .
“’At farm been buggering around the pond?”
“Growl exclaim fuck-fuck yup! Sheep-shagger.”
“If it’s been at our lambs—”
“Nawwwwrr. Buggrit.”
“So whassup?”
“Grrrr, Maddie yap-yap farmtalk! Sheep-shagger.”
“Maddie’s been talking to it?”
“Grrr yes-yes!”
“Oh shit. Do you remember when she did her last backup?”
The dog coughed fragrant blue smoke. “Tank thump-thump full cow moo beef clone.”
“Yeah, I think so too. Better muck it out tomorrow. Just in case.”
“Yurrrrrp.” But while Joe was wondering whether this was agreement or just a canine eructation, a lean paw stole out of the kennel mouth and yanked the hookah back inside. The resulting slobbering noises and clouds of aromatic blue smoke left Joe feeling a little queasy: so he went inside.
The next morning, over breakfast, Maddie was even quieter than usual. Almost meditative.
“Bob said you’d been talking to that farm,” Joe commented over his eggs.
“Bob—” Maddie’s expression was unreadable. “Bloody dog.” She lifted the lid on the Rayburn’s hot plate and peered at the toast browning underneath. “Talks too much.”
“Did you?”
“Ayup.” She turned the toast and put the lid back down on it.
“Said much?”
“It’s a farm.” She looked out the window. “Not a fuckin’ worry in the world ’cept making its launch window for Jupiter.”
“It—”
“Him. Her. They.” Maddie sat down heavily in the other kitchen chair. “It’s a collective. Usedta be six people. Old, young, whatether, they’s decided ter go to Jupiter. One of ’em was telling me how it happened. How she’d been an accountant in Bradford, had a nervous breakdown. Wanted out. Self-sufficiency.” For a moment her expression turned bleak. “Felt herself growing older but not bigger, if you follow.”
“So how’s turning into a bioborg an improvement?” Joe grunted, forking up the last of his scrambled eggs.
“They’re still separate people: bodies are overrated, anyway. Think of the advantages: not growing older, being able to go places and survive anything, never being on your own, not bein’ trapped—” Maddie sniffed. “Fuckin’ toast’s on fire!”
Smoke began to trickle out from under the hot-plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.
“Bugger,” she remarked.
“You feel trapped?” Joe asked.
Again? he wondered.
Maddie grunted. “Not your fault, love. Just life.”
“Life.” Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. “Life!”
“Horizon’s closing in,” she said quietly. “Need a change of scenery.”
“Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven’t I?” said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away. “Got a shipment of fertilizer coming in.”
In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and surreptitiously EMPing every police ’bot on the farm into the electronic afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it assembled the gadgets he’d ordered—a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with its own oxygen supply.
Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed. She didn’t seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign: Joe kept his questions to himself.
It took another five days for the smallholding’s power field to concentrate enough juice to fuel up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-net in the most deniable and surreptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chitchat. He’d half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn’t say anything: just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she’d taken to going.
Finally, the tank was full. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armor, picked up his weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.
The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a green skirt that reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping willow; children had once played here, pretending to explore the wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental-control cameras.
That had been long ago. Today the woods really were wild. No kids, no picnicking city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket trolley of Precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shorted out. The bones of the technological epoch, poked from the treacherous surface of the fossil mud bath. And around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.
Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles were matte black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up all the available light: a network of taproots and lacy black grasslike stuff covered the ground around them. Joe’s breath wheezed noisily in his ears, and he sweated into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colorless, smoking liquid at the roots of each ballistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him uneasy. (As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one thing he’d been able to think of that was guaranteed to kill them stone dead without
igniting them. After all, they had cores that were made of gun cotton—highly explosive, liable to go off if you subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chain saw.) The tree he’d hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall sideways, and Joe stepped round it, efficiently squirting at the remaining roots. Right into the path of the distraught farm.
“My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my trees, my trees!
My trees!” Eyestalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. “Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!”
“Back off,” said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter as he reached for his air gun.
The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across angry blue irises. “How dare you?” demanded the farm. “My treasured treelings!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. “Think I’d let you burn my holding when tha’ rocket launched? Stay the fuck away,” he added as a tentacle began to extend from the farm’s back.
“My crop,” it moaned quietly: “My exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn’t fucked up! Who set you up to this, Rat Lady?” It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle atop its leg cluster.
Joe shot it.
Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyzes skeletal muscles, those that connect bones, move limbs, and sustain breathing. Etorphine is a ridiculously strong opiate—twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against the etorphine—but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a sperm whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time. It shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a syrette raised. “Why?” it asked plaintively in a voice that almost made him wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. “We could have gone together!”
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