Peirce laughed and stopped the procession before an elevator door, locked open for the night. As he ushered them in, rummaged for the appropriate key, and activated the machinery, Ralph said, “You wouldn’t put her on exhibit, would you? She is…”
“Your wife?” The elevator floor dropped under their feet, and Peirce nodded. “It might not even be safe. We need to keep the two near each other, so the amaryllis can help her develop as she should, if ‘should’ has any meaning here. But I wouldn’t dare put that amaryllis where its pheromones could…”
“Behind glass?” offered Muffy.
“No,” said Ralph. “Please.”
“We have an empty room or two, down here, near the music area.”
“But first!” said Freddy.
“Right!” Peirce laughed again. “Let’s get you home, and show Porculata and the kids what all the fuss has been about.”
They passed the entrance to the auditorium, rounded a corner, and opened a door. Beyond it was a small room furnished with a desk, a couch, and a pair of easy chairs. On a shelf stood a steaming coffee pot. Stretched out on the couch was a young woman holding a magazine as if she had been reading. Tom recognized her as Jan, the attendant he had last seen oiling Porculata’s hide; she still wore the light blue vest of her job, though this time over a coverall patterned in green and black chevrons. The room smelled of honeysuckle wine; on the desk stood an empty glass.
When she saw Peirce, and then Freddy, Jan’s face lit up. “You’re back!” she cried, rolling off the couch and reaching for the door in the far side of the room. “Wait till I tell…”
Peirce pointed at the glass on the desk. “Have you…?
Jan’s face fell as if to say that, yes, she had, and yes, she knew she shouldn’t have. “Just a little…”
“And Porculata?”
She nodded. “She insisted.”
Freddy laughed. “So that’s how she knew…” His wife wasn’t psychic. She had given that scatterbrained impression because she had tapped, albeit imperfectly, the amaryllis ladies’ grapevine.
Jan opened the door, and a blast of bagpipes and calliopes drowned him out. “Frederick! We heard!” A moment later, Porculata cried, “A maiden! Two maidens! You brought them home with you. And see what I meant? You couldn’t possibly deflower them!”
Porculata was nestled in a bed of soft cushions on the apartment’s padded floor, her hollow legs jutting into the air. Freddy winked at Tom as his old friend set the pig down beside his wife. Randy was already palping Barnum and Baraboo, the calliopes, meeping her delight at seeing them again. While Freddy and Porculata then writhed together in the best approximation they could manage of a human embrace of greeting, Ralph Cross, with Jan’s help, positioned the handcart and its burden to one side of the room, next to the booth in which on-duty attendants were supposed to spend their time.
Finally, Porculata said, “Jan, dear. Sit us up, please. And now, tell me everything!”
When they had obliged as best they could, she said, “The poor things!”
“What in the world do you mean?” asked Kimmer.
“Look,” said Julia. “Look at what they did to Petra, with that honeysuckle wine. And at what they were going to do with me. Think of what they’re surely doing now with the kidnappers and the…”
Porculata stopped her with a snicker. “They didn’t ask to be made,” she said. “Just like Frederick and me. And they don’t have our compensations. Our music. An audience.”
“And friends,” added Freddy.
She twitched her agreement. Then she turned one eye toward Barnum and Baraboo and said, “And I think it’s admirable, that they’re trying to make sure their children have a better life than they do by getting them more human genes. It would be lovely to have walking flowers in our audiences!”
Muffy nodded in agreement. “But,” said Tom. “They’re also trying to turn people into plants.”
“So what? We turn people into animals.”
“Only at the zoo, and only with their consent,” said Julia.
The others nodded. “Maybe,” said Freddy. “Maybe we could make people-plants in Botanic Gardens.”
“Or find volunteers,” said Jim. “For the amaryllis ladies to use.” When Julia shook her head at him, he added, “Or for research into making walking plants.”
Peirce was facing the handcart, one hand on his chin. “One thing they’ve proved,” he said. “Dorothy Parker was wrong.”
“Who was she?” asked Kimmer.
“A twentieth century writer. She said, ‘You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.’”
Freddy snorted with laughter. “She’d rather turn around and grab you by the…”
“Freddy!” cried Porculata.
* * * *
Later, after a dinner of take-out Italian food fetched by Jan, the discussion turned more serious. Moving animal or human genes into plants as Jack Rivard had done, said Peirce, could obviously produce immense changes in the plants. But he didn’t think it could ever give the plants the necessary skeletal and muscular structures for mobility.
“I should think,” said Julia, “that the same problem would exist for nervous systems and thought.”
“Jack proved you wrong on that,” said Jim as he chased a last strand of spaghetti around his plate.
“Still,” said Peirce. “I’d expect that in order to combine photosynthesis, sentience, and motility, one would have to start with an animal and add a smaller, easier-to-integrate number of genes. In fact, all a gengineer would have to do would be to persuade the animal cells to play host to blue-green algae. Precisely the same thing happened billions of years ago, when the one-celled ancestors of plants accepted similar algae as symbiotic tenants. Eventually, those algae became the chloroplasts that now handle the processes of photosynthesis in plants. Perhaps they could do the same for animals. Certainly, animal cells are entirely capable of playing host to symbiotes.”
“Mitochondria,” said Tom. Mitochondria, he knew, gave animal—and plant—cells the ability to use oxygen to satisfy the bulk of their need for energy in useful form. And they were descended from primordial bacteria just as chloroplasts were from algae. They even had their own genes.
“Some animal cells,” said Peirce. “Those of certain clams, for instance. They already contain algae. They supply the algae with certain essential nutrients, and the algae use the energy of sunlight to generate carbohydrates. And the clam cells eat the carbohydrates.”
The hybridization of vastly different living forms was thus nothing new, Tom realized. And it could not be undone. If gengineers took the mitochondria out of animal cells, the animals would die. Only sluggish things, worms and slimes and animalcules, things that needed no more energy than bacteria and yeast and other organisms that lived without oxygen, would survive. If they removed chloroplasts from plant cells, again the consequence would be widespread death, catastrophe, for plant photosynthesis provided the raw material, the food, for all animal life. It also provided essential oxygen.
“So,” Jim said. “Are we doomed? Will the amaryllises gain legs and replace us? Will we turn into plants?”
Tom rummaged in a pocket and withdrew the few gold nodules, nuggets, he had collected in the valley outside the Frank Lloyd Wright house. When Jan asked, he explained. “Jack’s money garden,” he said. “It has to be how he paid the kidnappers, and bought the things he needed for the house. Furniture, lab supplies, food…” He paused. “We wouldn’t need to worry about money, would we? If we were plants?”
“It would be peaceful enough,” said Muffy. “Like being on the wine all the time.”
Jan had moved Freddy and Porculata into their support racks for the meal. Now Freddy twisted his gaze away from his wife. “Until someone decided to chop you down.”
“It would be easy enough to destroy the amaryllises,” said Julia. “Just burn them out.”
“But they’re intelligent,” said Porculata. “That would be murder.”
“Not to most people.”
“And what about the honeysuckle?” Ralph pointed at his immobile wife in her pot. “That’s what changes us to plants.”
Franklin Peirce shook his head. “I don’t think we could destroy the vines.”
“The gengineers would have to design a plague,” said Jim Brane. “And there’d be too big a chance that it might spread to other plants, like crops.”
“And we can’t stop people from drinking the wine,” said Tom. Jan blushed and turned her head away. Muffy might have blushed, he thought, but she had indeed sworn off the wine. People had, like her, to stop themselves. “So the plant genes will keep moving into people. We can’t stop them.”
Muffy poked him in the hip. “We can’t stop people genes from going the other way, either.”
Freddy hooted and sang, “Shakin’ my anther…”
Tom blushed. Several of the others laughed, for when the amaryllises had made him display himself, anyone who had not known of his peculiarity had certainly learned the truth. When they quieted, he said, “I don’t have the hots for giant flowers.”
“But some of your kids might,” said Franklin Peirce. “Unless…”
“I hope not,” said Tom emphatically.
Jim turned toward his mate. “So burning out the greenhouse wouldn’t really work. It would slow things down a little, but…”
Julia nodded. “A few years,” she said. “Maybe a generation.”
“And the future would never notice,” said Peirce. “A generation is nothing on a biological time scale.”
“So what do we do?” asked Tom. His voice had a bitter tinge. “Are we doomed?”
“The amaryllises will get more human,” said the museum curator. “As for people turning into plants, all can do is put your mother on display. And program a sound plaque to explain how she got this way.”
Freddy laughed. “What do you bet that’ll just make more people try the wine?”
Chapter Eighteen
“I’ve got to go,” said Jim Brane. “I’ve got my truck back, Tom has Muffy back, his mother is safe and sound. And they won’t let me off any longer, I’m sure. Tomorrow I’ll have to work.”
“Me, too,” said Tom Cross. “I’ve been away from the store too long. And Muffy’s fans must have forgotten her by now.” He grinned at her, and she grinned back.
“Fat chance,” she said. “And they’d only cheer louder if I forgot my fan.” She was, after all, a fan dancer, and Randy was the fan that really counted.
“Want a ride, Ralph?” offered Julia Templeton, and soon the room held three humans less. Franklin Peirce and Kimmer Alvidrez were sitting on the padded floor with their backs against the pot that held Petra Cross and the amaryllis. They were holding hands as if they thought no one would notice. Tom and Muffy sat across the room, staring at his mother. Freddy and Porculata were still in their support racks, and Randy, Muffy’s spider, now rested beside them.
Peirce looked up and over his shoulder at the contents of the pot behind him. “I suppose I could wait till tomorrow, and let the technicians do it.” He let his eyes slide toward Kimmer. “But I’d rather… Want to help, my dear?”
She took a deep breath, licked her lips, and visibly squeezed his hand. “Help with what?”
“Repotting these things. They’re heavy, but the two of us should be able to manage it.”
Pheromones wafted from the amaryllis, and Jan, the only human present without a worrystone, cried, “No! Keep us together! Only then can I teach her. All she needs to know. And speak for her. Until she learns.”
Peirce nodded. “At least, we can find a place to keep them.”
Kimmer looked disappointed, but she nodded. They rose and trundled the handcart and its burden out of the pigs’ apartment. As the door closed behind them, Tom said, “I wish I knew how to end this.” As Jim had said, they had regained all that was lost, though not without change. Yet life went on. There would be further losses in the future, and some of them would not be recouped. There would be new adventures. But this one was over. He wished there were some way to mark its end.
“We could sing a song,” said Freddy. It was a natural enough suggestion. When Tom and the pig had first run away from home, they had made their living as singers. Freddy was still a singer, a musician, and so was his wife. And a song had accompanied their quest.
“Like what?”
He wished he knew. But then Porculata began to play, and the words came to him, and to Muffy, Jan, and Freddy. Together, they sang a song that Tom had first met as a child, when he had spent two weeks at a summer camp in Maine. He supposed it had been a camp song as long as there had been camps.
“Day is done,” they sang slowly, almost dolorously. “Gone the sun… All is well…”
* * * *
“I’m used to gengineered things,” Tom later said to Muffy. They had left Freddy and his family in their apartment. Now they were walking down a dim basement hall. Soon, they would come to a staircase—they could see it ahead, marked by the red glow of an “Exit” sign—and leave the museum. They would walk home, or take a Bernie, and water their Alice. They would resume their lives.
“I see them in the store all the time,” he went on. “And I’m one of them, aren’t I?” He was thinking of his bud. “So Jack didn’t surprise me, and the amaryllis ladies didn’t either. Though I suppose it did, what they did to him with their pheromones.”
“What they did to you, too. Or what he did.” Muffy hugged his arm tightly, as if fearing that he would be yanked from her life, as she so nearly had been from his. “And the wine. That’s new, isn’t it?”
He nodded. A door on the right, a little ahead, was ajar. “But you’re done with that now.”
It was her turn to nod. “For good.” She produced an exaggerated shudder. Then she stopped walking and turned to face him, one hand on his chest. “They didn’t say, but do you think…? Did it make a difference that they knew what a hybrid you are? Do you think they knew they could make your pollen come in so easily?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t make any difference now.”
“They’re happy, aren’t they? With those other men, I mean?”
Tom shrugged and tried to start walking again. She held him back while he said, “It’ll take longer to equip them to make pollen, but yes. They have the raw material they need. There’s no sentimental connection…”
“How can plants feel sentiment?”
“They’re not just plants. And though they’ve changed Jack drastically, he did make them what they are. He is, or was, quite human, and if he could feel sentiment…”
He finally pulled her into motion, but only for a step or two before she said, “It’ll be interesting to see what happens with our kids.”
“Kids?” He stopped again, pulled free of her grip, and turned to stare at her.
“You said that before.” She grinned. “At Jack’s place. But don’t you think we ought to get started?”
“I’d love to.” Until just the day before, he had thought he was the only one of them who wanted a family. “So what’s stopping us?”
“It’s too public here.” The hallway was deserted, and it would remain so until the next day, but Peirce and Kimmer were somewhere about, and surely there was a night watchman. “And I want your name.”
“We have to get married?”
“Uh-huh.” She hugged his arm again.
“I suppose we could.” He was teasing. The idea, surprising as it was, delighted him. He had thought their life together would continue pretty much as it always had. Ma
ny couples never married, even when they chose to have children, and marriage had never seemed to him essential. But his parents had been married, hadn’t they? And now he and Muffy would become parents themselves.
He sniffed. She did the same. They both grinned, and he whispered, “That amaryllis.” Then he touched his worrystone. Its silence said that the pheromones were not those of preemption or command.
She pointed toward the half-open door just down the hall. “There?”
They took the few steps that let them see what was within the room.
Both of them inhaled sharply at what they saw.
Franklin Peirce and Kimmer Alvidrez had indeed found a room for Petra Cross and her companion. It seemed to be a workroom for tending bioform artworks, several of which stood in pots on a table by the room’s far wall. On the floor nearby stood an empty planter about the size of the pot that held Petra and the amaryllis. A shelf held several smaller pots. Beneath the shelf stood three shovels, several trowels, a bag of peat moss, and a watering can.
The pot they had hauled across Lake Michigan to this museum basement stood in the middle of the room, still shared by both Petra and the amaryllis. Near the pot, their backs to the door, stood Peirce and Kimmer. Just as they had been doing in Freddy’s apartment, they were holding hands.
Both were naked except for the worrystones that hung around their necks.
And Peirce was humming the tune to “Shaking My Anther.”
Postlude
It was dark beyond the greenhouse glass and the shading leaves of mindless plants, but lights once more blazed within the house that Jack Rivard once had grown in the shape of a head. The ventilator fans forced the air to move in its accustomed direction, from the Eldest of the amaryllis sisterhood downdrift, and acquire messages in order of dominance within the hierarchy.
Five naked bodies lay on the greenhouse floor, arrayed near the inner wall, farthest from the glass and the heat it admitted in the day. Near them sat a pot containing a strange, bulb-stemmed plant resembling a bonsai baobab tree with leaves like those of honeysuckle vines. It had, until this day just past, been hidden almost perfectly from view among the other plants within the greenhouse. From it, tendrils extended toward the bodies and penetrated their skins. Those tendrils carried a fluid very similar to honeysuckle wine to keep the prisoners comatose while tailored viruses worked to change their cells and bodies.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 65