by D B Hartwell
He turns and rises. It is Gangadhar, his friend, who holds out his empty arms in an embrace.
Abdul Karim lets his tears run over Gangadhar’s shirt. As waves of relief wash over him he knows that he has held Death at bay this time, but it will come. It will come, he has seen it. Archimedes and Ramanujan, Khayyam and Cantor died with epiphanies on their lips before an indifferent world. But this moment is eternal.
“Allah be praised!” says Abdul Karim.
CHARLES STROSS Charles Stross was born in Leeds, but has spent most of his adult life in Edinburgh, Scotland, an urban area rich in modern SF writers—lain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Hannu Rajaniemi—whose work articulates arrestingly original views about the challenges facing humans and the technosphere. Stross’s first published fiction appeared in 1985, making him the clear outlier among the twenty-first-century authors whose work this volume presents. But he shot to real prominence in 2001 with the publication in Asimov’s of “Lobsters,” which later became the opening of his 2005 novel Accelerando, called by the SF Encyclopedia “the fullest attempt yet in SF to depict the impact of a Singularity on human life.” By this time, Stross had also become an influential blogger, which he remains. In the decade since, he has also become one of the core figures of the modern SF field, winning Hugo Awards for short fiction twice and becoming the favorite SF writer of an entire generation of self-identified denizens of the hacker demimonde.
Set in a near future that is undergoing a continuing revolution driven by bioscience, after other technological and economic revolutions have wrought their own changes, 2003’s “Rogue Farm” exhibits a broad range of Stross’s talents: the wry voice, the density of invention, the eye for the second-order effects of just-over-the-horizon first-order changes. Not to mention, in the great SF tradition of literalizing metaphors, an entirely new twist on the concept of the “collective farm.”
ROGUE FARM
It was a bright, cool March morning: mares’ tails trailed across the southeastern sky toward the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it toward the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.
“Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farmhouse. “Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”
“Joe? Is that you? Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the house.
“Where are you?” he yelled back.
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“Bugger,” he said again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month . . .”
The sound of a toilet sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on the staircase; then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“Out front, about a quarter mile up the lane.”
“Right.” Hair wild and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard yet?”
“I was thinking you’d want to talk to it first.”
“Too right I want to talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near Edgar’s pond, I got some issues to discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and keep it off our property,” she called after him. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Joe nodded to himself, then carefully picked out the twelve-gauge and a preloaded magazine. The gun’s power-on self-test lights flickered erratically, but it seemed to have a full charge. Slinging it, he locked the cupboard carefully and went back out into the farmyard to warn off their unwelcome visitor.
The farm squatted, buzzing and clicking to itself, in the road outside Armitage End. Joe eyed it warily from behind the wooden gate, shotgun under his arm. It was a medium-size one, probably with half a dozen human components subsumed into it—a formidable collective. Already it was deep into farm-fugue, no longer relating very clearly to people outside its own communion of mind. Beneath its leathery black skin he could see hints of internal structure, cytocellular macroassemblies flexing and glooping in disturbing motions. Even though it was only a young adolescent, it was already the size of an antique heavy tank, and it blocked the road just as efficiently as an Apatosaurus would have. It smelled of yeast and gasoline.
Joe had an uneasy feeling that it was watching him. “Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” he muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here, waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labor could manage—the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. “What do you want with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.
“Brains, fresh brains for Baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a dozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farm’s back and then retracted again, coyly.
“Don’t want no brains around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go away.”
“I’m a nine-legged semiautomatic groove machine!” crooned the farm. “I’m on my way to Jupiter on a mission for love! Won’t you buy my brains?” Three curious eyes on stalks extruded from its upper glacis.
“Uh—” Joe was saved from having to dream up any more ways of saying “fuck off” by Maddie’s arrival. She’d managed to sneak her old battle dress home after a stint keeping the peace in Mesopotamia twenty years ago, and she’d managed to keep herself in shape enough to squeeze inside. Its left knee squealed ominously when she walked it about, which wasn’t often, but it still worked well enough to manage its main task—intimidating trespassers.
“You.” She raised one translucent arm, pointed at the farm. “Get off my land. Now.”
Taking his cue, Joe raised his shotgun and thumbed the selector to full auto. It wasn’t a patch on the hardware riding Maddie’s shoulders, but it underlined the point.
The farm hooted: “Why don’t you love me?” it asked plaintively.
“Get orf my land,” Maddie amplified, volume cranked up so high that Joe winced. “Ten seconds! Nine! Eight—” Thin rings sprang out from the sides of her arms, whining with the stress of long disuse as the Gauss gun powered up.
“I’m going! I’m going!” The farm lifted itself slightly, shuffling backwards. “Don’t understand. I only wanted to set you free to explore the universe. Nobody wants to buy my fresh fruit and brains. What’s wrong with the world?”
They waited until the farm had retreated round the bend at the top of the hill. Maddie was the first to relax, the rings retracting back into the arms of her battle dress, which solidified from ethereal translucency to neutral olive drab as it powered down. Joe safed his shotgun. “Bastard,” he said.
“Fucking-A.” Maddie looked haggard. “That was a bold one.” Her face was white and pinched-looking, Joe noted. Her fists were clenched. She had the shakes, he realized without surprise. Tonight was going to be another major nightmare night, and no mistake.
“The fence.” On again and off again for the past year they’d disc
ussed wiring up an outer wire to the CHP base-load from their little methane plant.
“Maybe this time. Maybe.” Maddie wasn’t keen on the idea of frying passers-by without warning, but if anything might bring her around, it would be the prospect of being overrun by a bunch of rogue farms. “Help me out of this, and I’ll cook breakfast,” she said.
“Got to muck out the barn,” Joe protested.
“It can wait on breakfast,” Maddie said shakily. “I need you.”
“Okay.” Joe nodded. She was looking bad; it had been a few years since her last fatal breakdown, but when Maddie said “I need you,” it was a bad idea to ignore her. That way led to backbreaking labor on the biofab and loading her backup tapes into the new body; always a messy business. He took her arm and steered her toward the back porch. They were nearly there when he paused.
“What is it?” asked Maddie.
“Haven’t seen Bob for a while,” he said slowly. “Sent him to let the cows into the north paddock after milking. Do you think—?”
“We can check from the control room,” she said tiredly. “Are you really worried? . . .”
“With that thing blundering around? What do you think?”
“He’s a good working dog,” Maddie said uncertainly. “It won’t hurt him. He’ll be all right; just you page him.”
• • • •
After Joe helped her out of her battle dress, and after Maddie spent a good long while calming down, they breakfasted on eggs from their own hens, homemade cheese, and toasted bread made with rye from the hippie commune on the other side of the valley. The stone-floored kitchen in the dilapidated house they’d squatted and rebuilt together over the past twenty years was warm and homely. The only purchase from outside the valley was the coffee, beans from a hardy GM strain that grew like a straggling teenager’s beard all along the Cumbrian hilltops. They didn’t say much: Joe, because he never did, and Maddie, because there wasn’t anything that she wanted to discuss. Silence kept her personal demons down. They’d known each other for many years, and even when there wasn’t anything to discuss, they could cope with each other’s silence. The voice radio on the windowsill opposite the cast-iron stove stayed off, along with the TV set hanging on the wall next to the fridge. Breakfast was a quiet time of day.
“Dog’s not answering,” Joe commented over the dregs of his coffee.
“He’s a good dog.” Maddie glanced at the yard gate uncertainly. “You afraid he’s going to run away to Jupiter?”
“He was with me in the shed.” Joe picked up his plate and carried it to the sink, began running hot water onto the dishes. “After I cleaned the lines I told him to go take the herd up the paddock while I did the barn.” He glanced up, looking out the window with a worried expression. The Massey Ferguson was parked right in front of the open barn doors as if holding at bay the mountain of dung, straw, and silage that mounded up inside like an invading odorous enemy, relic of a frosty winter past.
Maddie shoved him aside gently and picked up one of the walkie-talkies from the charge point on the windowsill. It bleeped and chuckled at her. “Bob, come in. Over.” She frowned. “He’s probably lost his headset again.”
Joe racked the wet plates to dry. “I’ll move the midden. You want to go find him?”
“I’ll do that.” Maddie’s frown promised a talking-to in store for the dog when she caught up with him. Not that Bob would mind: words ran off him like water off a duck’s back. “Cameras first.” She prodded the battered TV set to life, and grainy bisected views flickered across the screen, garden, yard, Dutch barn, north paddock, east paddock, main field, copse. “Hmm.”
She was still fiddling with the smallholding surveillance system when Joe clambered back into the driver’s seat of the tractor and fired it up once more. This time there was no cough of black smoke, and as he hauled the mess of manure out of the barn and piled it into a three-meter-high midden, a quarter of a ton at a time, he almost managed to forget about the morning’s unwelcome visitor. Almost.
By late morning, the midden was humming with flies and producing a remarkable stench, but the barn was clean enough to flush out with a hose and broom. Joe was about to begin hauling the midden over to the fermentation tanks buried round the far side of the house when he saw Maddie coming back up the path, shaking her head. He knew at once what was wrong.
“Bob,” he said, expectantly.
“Bob’s fine. I left him riding shotgun on the goats.” Her expression was peculiar. “But that farm—”
“Where?” he asked, hurrying after her.
“Squatting in the woods down by the stream,” she said tersely. “Just over our fence.”
“It’s not trespassing, then.”
“It’s put down feeder roots! Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I don’t—” Joe’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” She stared back at the outbuildings between their home and the woods at the bottom of their smallholding, and if looks could kill, the intruder would be dead a thousand times over. “It’s going to estivate, Joe, then it’s going to grow to maturity on our patch. And do you know where it said it was going to go when it finishes growing? Jupiter!”
“Bugger,” Joe said faintly, as the true gravity of their situation began to sink in. “We’ll have to deal with it first.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Maddie finished. But Joe was already on his way out the door. She watched him crossing the yard, then shook her head. “Why am I stuck here?” she asked, but the cooker wasn’t answering.
• • • •
The hamlet of Outer Cheswick lay four kilometers down the road from Armitage End, four kilometers past mostly derelict houses and broken-down barns, fields given over to weeds and walls damaged by trees. The first half of the twenty-first century had been cruel years for the British agrobusiness sector; even harsher if taken in combination with the decline in population and the consequent housing surplus. As a result, the dropouts of the forties and fifties were able to take their pick from among the gutted shells of once fine farmhouses. They chose the best and moved in, squatted in the derelict outbuildings, planted their seeds and tended their flocks and practiced their DIY skills, until a generation later a mansion fit for a squire stood in lonely isolation alongside a decaying road where no more cars drove. Or rather, it would have taken a generation had there been any children against whose lives it could be measured; these were the latter decades of the population crash, and what a previous century would have labeled downshifter dink couples were now in the majority, far outnumbering any breeder colonies. In this aspect of their life, Joe and Maddie were boringly conventional. In other respects they weren’t: Maddie’s nightmares, her aversion to alcohol, and her withdrawal from society were all relics of her time in Peaceforce. As for Joe, he liked it here. Hated cities, hated the Net, hated the burn of the new. Anything for a quiet life . . .
The Pig and Pizzle, on the outskirts of Outer Cheswick, was the only pub within about ten kilometers—certainly the only one within staggering distance for Joe when he’d had a skinful of mild—and it was naturally a seething den of local gossip, not least because Ole Brenda refused to allow electricity, much less bandwidth, into the premises. (This was not out of any sense of misplaced technophobia, but a side effect of Brenda’s previous life as an attack hacker with the European Defense Forces.)
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.
“Hear 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 hear 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 dread-locks, 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, do you know?”
“Trees?” Joe shook his head. “Haven’t gone and looked, 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.”