by Paul Melko
We watch Ryan and friend walk off down the alleyway, his angry laugh the last thing to disappear.
I guess there’ll be an audience for tomorrow.
“Eliud, can you fetch Subforeman Muckle?” Meda asks.
“Sure.”
Muckle curses for a few minutes when he hears that Ryan has been here.
“We should move the tractors,” Meda says.
“Sure, sure, that rat! I have another warehouse nearby.”
“It should be in the sun. We need to resupply the hydrogen.”
“Right, right. I don’t have any place with skylights.”
“A courtyard,” Meda suggests.
Or the field, adds Quant.
“Or the field, the Jergens contract, wherever that is.”
Muckle gives Meda a look. “That Ryan! Sure, we can take them to the field. When?”
“Tonight.”
“Okay, okay.”
We siphon what hydrogen is already compressed and stored in the first tractor to balance out the other three. The children lug bags of seed all afternoon, dumping them into the bins. We handle the fertilizer and the bacteria. We’ve tested the stuff, and after three years in the warehouse, the bacteria is still active.
I hope the seeds are too, Quant sends.
Manuel dumps a paper cup over on a table. The seed he placed in there on the first day in the warehouse has a whitish-green tail, the shoot coming off the seed.
Looks okay. I didn’t even add fertilizer or bacteria.
One is not a good sample set, Quant replies. That could be the only viable seed.
Not very likely, Manuel sends.
The quick consensus is that we will have to rely on the seeds having remained well preserved in the dry warehouse.
The desert is the best place to keep things safe, Strom sends.
We send the children back home before we leave, but Eliud is adamant in remaining.
“I want to drive,” he says.
“You’ll need six arms.”
“Not if I just want to drive,” he says. “I’d need six if I wanted to plant trees. Driving just needs two feet and two legs.”
He has a point, Manuel sends.
“You still can’t come with us.”
“You need a gopher,” he replies.
“I’m not paying for street rats,” Muckle says. “I ain’t no junior arbor club.”
“I’m not asking for anything,” Eliud says sharply. He looks at Meda and adds, “There’s nowhere else for me to go that’d I’d rather be.”
Moira’s heart softens, and the rest of us shrug.
“All right,” Meda says.
Eliud smiles wider than his face. “I can drive?”
“No, you can come.”
The streets are empty as we drive the four machines toward the desert that night. We drive them two at a time, unable to split less than a duo for the task of maneuvering through the streets. Even so, we feel swathed and numb, until several minutes into the drive. We use sign language between the cabs to maintain distance and indicate direction. Eliud mimics our signs from his seat in the back of the first tractor’s cab. He peers over Quant’s shoulder to watch what she does to control the tractor.
The field Muckle has contracted is ten kilometers downriver. It takes us two hours to find it, but when we do, we see a dozen arborists waiting by a fire. They cheer at the sight of the tractors, then detach a pair to guide us back to the warehouse on bicycles.
Strom flounders on the bicycle. Manuel sends him the memory of riding over and over again until he understands. At the warehouse, we latch the bicycles to the second pair of tractors and drive them to the site. Quant and Moira are tired—this is their sleep period—but we make the distance in a shorter time, and we all sleep by the fire in sleeping bags.
Eliud curls up against Meda, and as his arms reach around her neck, he touches her interface jack, and says, “My mom has one of those.”
He is asleep before we can respond. We let him slumber as we lie awake under the Ring. By chance, we have found what we are looking for.
The road is lined with arborists and onlookers the next morning.
“Wow,” Eliud says. “Look at all those people.”
They aren’t all happy, Quant sends.
Protestors, holding signs, are intermingled with casual observers. An hour after dawn the road is blocked with people. Muckle has brought in more of his crews to surround the arborobots.
Meda asks him, “Do you have anyone else working?”
Muckle shakes his head. “Do you know how much this project is worth? Jergens overbid this three years ago. His whole crew went in hock and he’s still in debtors’ prison. The land contract reverts to bids in two weeks, or it would have if I hadn’t bought it for next to nothing. Of course …” He shrugs.
“If we don’t complete the contract in two weeks?”
“Well, there’s those that will be happy to see that.”
“And for us?”
“You may get bumped a grade. Me, I’m facing prison.”
“You’re a brave man. You’re putting a lot of faith in us.”
Muckle looks at Meda squarely. “I’ve known some clusters in my time. And I know cluster biology is better than ours.” He shrugs. “Life is a big chance. Let’s get started, before we have a situation on our hands.”
The boys climb into one tractor and the girls the other. Manuel, with his adapted legs, acts as two operators. Eliud wants to be with us, but we send him to stand with Muckle.
The contract area is about forty hectares in a low saddle shape nestled against the river. Beyond the far hill is a developed low-density residential area. Behind us toward Hinterland are fields of teff. Across the river are more fields: wheat and corn. Our contract area is clearly fallow, covered in weeds and burned by the sun and lack of irrigation.
We line the tractors up as far from the road as we can and start plowing the dirt under. It is mostly sand, with some river silt piled into it. We raise dust plumes behind us until Quant directs us to spray the field with water as we go. But this limits how far we can go before having to refill the tanks.
It is slow progress.
But that means the protesters have little to protest and as many leave as arrive. By noon, we have plowed the whole plot. We start again at the far end, but this time, the boys’ tractor goes first, planting tree seeds—slow-growing oak, pine, and willow—while the second tractor follows, spraying the nutrient-fixing bacteria.
We have come across once and are coming back again when Muckle flags us down. His face is red.
“Where are the trees? Where are the trees?”
“We’re planting seeds,” Meda replies.
“Seeds? You can’t plant seeds. I need saplings to fulfill this contract!”
Manuel hands him the spec sheet on the seeds and the spec sheet on the bacteria.
“What’s this?”
“Have your crews start irrigating the fields,” Meda says.
Should we tell him? Moira asks.
Let him find out.
We finish half of the field by sunset. His crews have started digging irrigation ditches from the water pumps at the top of the hill. That project will take days.
Muckle is irritable. He catches us as we exit the cabs.
“If we load the trucks with sapling can we replant over the seeds?”
“Come on.”
We lead Muckle up to the top of the saddle.
“Watch your step,” Meda says.
Muckle double-steps, narrowly avoiding a sprout. He looks closely at the ground, then gets down on his hands and knees.
“Is that … ?”
“Yes.”
“But you planted it five hours ago.”
“It’s a gengineered tree. They grow quickly, then slow down.”
“How fast?” He is peering closely at the sprout.
Ten centimeters a day to two meters, Quant sends.
But who knows? The seed is ol
d, Manuel adds.
We’re lucky it sprouted at all.
And we may only get a twenty- to thirty-percent germination rate.
“We don’t know. Maybe half a meter a week for a month.”
“Holy shit. We’re going to need more people out here.”
Eliud is on his belly, staring at an oak sprout.
“This is so brill!” he says.
“It is,” Strom replies.
“How does it work?”
“Gengineering.”
“I know that! But how does it work?”
“The seeds have been modified to accelerate the early growth process. The plant and the earth can’t support that sort of thing, so a bacteria is added to the ground to fix the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Otherwise the plant would be dying by now. It’s an engineered symbiosis.”
“Oh.”
He stands up, dusting himself off. The rest of us are standing apart, pretending not to watch as he and Strom talk. The sun is setting, reflecting red-orange light off the Ring base elevator only a few hundred kilometers away.
Strom says, “We’d like to talk to your mom.”
Eliud crosses his arms. “Why?”
“She has an interface, and we’d like to find out where she got it.”
Eliud nods, relaxing a bit. “She got that from Father Arthemon. Everyone at the church did.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, about a month ago. Then she started spending a lot of time at the church and other places. They wanted to do it to me too, but my dad said no. My dad is tough.”
“Is your mom still at the church?”
Eliud shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe. She went to a lot of meetings.”
Leto’s in Hinterland.
With the setting sun, the wind has picked up from the south, pushing dust and sand over the edges of our artificial infant forest. Though the river valley is green, the land just beyond is empty desert, and it is easy to forget.
We eat dinner by the fire with a group of arborists. Though we are all in the same guild, none seem particularly friendly toward us. We know it not just because we are a pod. The hulking arborobots represent change. The spouting trees are alien. The protesters have their own fires, their own dinner in the dark.
We’d be less welcome there, Manuel sends. We are tired and sleep comes quickly.
We awaken to a low grumbling and shouts. Instantly, Strom is awake and in control, assessing.
The shouts rise from the protesters. They are at the edge of the field, pushing against the meager line of Muckle’s crew.
Why?
Look!
The sprouts are almost half a meter tall, treelike with leaves, their trunks woody.
They were expecting us to fail.
And now they will destroy it.
Quant has counted the sprouts. Sixty-four-percent germination rate. Not bad.
Strom’s mind dances through permutations, trying ways to save the fields, the tractors, Eliud. Seconds tick, and then he sends, Get Eliud. Mount up in the tractors.
Even in the cabins, we can hear the shouts, louder than before. A dozen men have broken into the field and are ripping at the saplings.
When they hear the tractors start, they think we are fleeing. But we round the tractors toward the protesters and spray them with the bacteria-laden fertilizer.
Their shouts turn to shrieks and they run.
“You’re not hurting them, are you?” Eliud asks.
“No,” Meda says. He is squeezed in the girls’ cabin, peering out the front window. “It’s harmless.”
But they don’t know that, Quant adds.
The mob of protesters break immediately, running for the river to douse themselves in water. In moments the road is clear and the field safe. We park the tractors on the road, colossi to guard their work.
The protesters do not regroup, floating instead down the river to the next town or across to the far side. Muckle’s crew bellows victory, even the ones who are covered in fertilizer mix. We turn the water hoses on and spray them down, and before long everyone is dancing in the water.
Muckle is back in the midmorning, alternatively ecstatic and angry.
“The Syndicate Board is holding a meeting. But you can’t deny we fulfilled the contract.” The saplings are growing fast enough that we can watch it. Muckle chortles, caressing a leaf. Then he frowns. “If the board rules against us, they may have us dig up the whole thing.”
“That’s absurd,” Meda says.
“You’re telling me. Anyway, we can’t use these tractors again until they rule.” He hands us an address in Hinterland. “Take ’em here. Store them. I’ll send some boys to help guard them.”
The river roads are crowded during the day, and it takes us three times as long to get back to the city. Even folded up, the arborobots take up two lanes of the road, and in most spots that’s all there is to the road.
Our slow pace and apparent notoriety draws a crowd, slowing us further as we drive the behemoths through the streets.
Look, Manuel sends.
He passes us an image of a man watching us. His short hair can’t hide the interface jack in his skull. We watch for more jacked people in the crowd, but spot none.
At the new warehouse, we consense.
Notoriety is not good at this point, Strom sends.
It is obvious we are pods.
Now everyone in Hinterland has seen us.
We need to find Eliud’s mother.
Agreed.
We leave the tractors in the keep of one of Muckle’s gangs, exiting through a back door into an alley. Eliud leads the way, through back ways and thin streets, to a small brick building in an out-of-the-way cul-de-sac.
“That’s Mom’s church,” he says, standing behind Meda.
We walk to the front door, past a bedraggled, dry front yard. The door is ajar, and Strom pushes it open. Heated air swells from within.
As our eyes adjust, we make out tipped pews and broken statuary.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to look, Quant sends.
We have little understanding of singleton religions, but clearly this destruction is not typical. Beetles scurry as we approach the front. A door leads from the church to a smaller sanctuary. We are greeted with the smell of death.
A man’s body, half eaten by insects, is planted facefirst onto a desk. Strom pulls Eliud back before he can see it and watches from the door. The boy pushes against him, but Strom is strength and there is no budging him.
With his face down, the interface jack is clearly visible at the back of his neck. In fact, the fiber-optical wires flowing up the brain stem are also visible, inedible to the ants and beetles: a gold and silicon skeleton. His clothes are black, except for the clerical collar at his neck.
Father Arthemon, I presume.
Manuel leans in and looks closely at the interface jack.
It’s been ripped apart.
Someone has taken a screwdriver to the interface socket, bending it out of the bone. The screwdriver is on the floor.
He did it himself.
We had considered the same course when Meda’s interface had been installed against her will. But there was no way known to pod science to remove the hardwired interface connection.
He didn’t whack himself in the head, though.
Father Arthemon had died from a skull fracture.
Let’s call the police.
We wait outside for the constable, a thin, lean woman with a stun gun and a baton on her harness. Her blond hair is cut short, but for all her toughness, she comes out of the church a little pale.
“Damn wireheads.”
“Do you see that a lot?” Meda asks.
“No. Not dead ones. But we see a lot of abandoned places like this, abandoned kids.” Her gaze falls on Eliud.
“He’s with us.”
She ignores us and calls in for an ambulance. Pulling out a microrecorder, she takes our statement. We explain that it is Eliud’s chu
rch and we were taking him there to visit when we found the corpse. The officer makes no comment.
When the recorder is off, Meda asks, “Where do the … wireheads congregate?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. We have detectives looking into it.”
“Who?”
She gives us a look. We take the hint. Out of earshot, we ask Eliud where he used to live.
“Not far. An apartment.”
“Show us.”
It is three flights up in a generic building in a line of the same. The door is locked, but Eliud hands us the key from his pocket. Inside, the room is clean, but smells dusty. It is stale and hot.
Eliud waits at the door again, this time of his own will. All the rooms are empty, with a thin layer of dust started on the horizontal surfaces.
What is Leto doing to these people?
After being jacked, Eliud’s mother willingly abandoned her son and apartment.
He’s making sure he doesn’t lose any.
He’s learned his lesson with Meda.
We have to find him.
Yes.
That night Muckle is back at the warehouse with dinner: more kabobs and a fermented drink of some kind that he forces into our hands.
“This is what all arborists drink. Guild law,” he says.
Not bad, Strom sends, though it tickles our noses and makes Quant cough. Moira takes just a sip and sets hers down.
“Bad news,” Muckle adds after we drink. “The guild ruled against genetically engineered plants.”
“What?” Meda says.
“We’ll have to tear up the field, default on the deal.”
“Then you’re in big trouble.”
This stuff is potent, Manuel sends, making fists with his feet.
I don’t feel so well, Meda sends.
“Well, I was. But I’ve made a deal to—”
As the words register, Strom takes control, throwing his mug into Muckle’s face. We are lurching to our feet, staggering.
“Shit!” Muckle yells.
Strom counts Muckle and the crew guarding the arborobots as enemy.
Retreat, he sends. He can’t trust us in our drugged state. We need safe haven.
Manuel grabs Eliud and we run for the back of the warehouse where an old Exit sign cants against the frame of a metal door.