by Nancy Kress
“We’ll see. But Colin, I’d like to have you do another ear test. It will—”
“No,” Colin said instantly. He stuck out his bottom lip. “It’s stupid.”
“But it—”
“I’m sorry, Grandma,” he said, abruptly sounding very adult, “but no. I hated that doctor. And it’s stupid.”
“This won’t be a doctor. It’s a man who builds bridges, and he has special machines to hear bridges. You can touch the machines.”
“Really? Well … what about the elephant?”
They had reached a delicate stage in the negotiations. “Yes, but there aren’t any elephants in New York. If we go see the bridge man, then I promise you an elephant someplace, but it might take a while.”
Colin considered. “Okay.”
“You said that sometime you hear mice in the ground. When was that?”
“Only one time. In the old house. Not in the house, outside near the swamp. Daddy didn’t believe me. But I did hear them! I did!”
Internet reports of surviving mice sometimes included pictures. But the pictures could be pre–spore cloud and the sightings were as yet unsubstantiated by any scientifically reputable source. Still …
“Come eat before I throw it out!” Tim called.
“Careful, Grandma! Don’t step on my picture!”
“Never, sweetie,” Marianne said. She moved carefully around Colin’s drawing of an elephant with huge, floppy ears.
CHAPTER 18
S plus 6 years
On Saturday Grandma took Colin and Jason to the bridge man. That was where the wonderful thing happened, although not because of the bridge or the man.
They went in Tim’s blue car and they drove a long way out of New York, to a big field surrounded by a high fence with sharp wire on the top. The field had things all over it: machines that weren’t working right now, long steel bars, heavy bags, pieces of wood. It had a big trailer and a lot of trash, but it was still a field and there were patches of grass and dirt and wildflowers. In the river stood a big cement rectangle with part of the bridge built on it. Grandma and the bridge man, whose name was Rudy, hugged and said all the things grown-ups say, “Good to see you again” and “How long has it been” and all that stuff. Colin and Jason didn’t really listen. Tim checked out everything, looking for bad guys because that was his job.
To Colin’s disappointment, they couldn’t go onto the bridge. “Not safe, son,” Rudy said. “Not at this stage of construction.”
Instead they went into the trailer, which was just as messy as the field. Computers, dirty coffee cups, paper, machines, pizza boxes. Colin thought that Grandma didn’t approve, but she didn’t say anything.
“I appreciate your doing this, Rudy.”
“I’m not even sure what ‘this’ is. You want me to test this kid like he’s a bridge?”
“Yes.”
Jason said, “Can we go outside and look at the bridge?”
“You can, with Tim. Colin stays here.”
“No fair!” Colin cried, while Jason smirked.
“You can go outside too as soon as we’re done,” Grandma said. “Oh, there you are, Tim. Will you give Jason a tour of the construction machinery?”
Colin said, “I want to go, too!”
“Soon,” Grandma said in her no-fooling-around voice. “Rudy, you have both a laser vibrometer and an ultrasonic treatment evaluator? The new portable kinds?”
“Of course, but—”
“Can you use the vibrometer to find the lowest frequency he can hear and the evaluator for the highest?”
Rudy stared, shrugged, and laughed. “You always were weird, even when we were in high school and I had that terrible crush on you. Well, okay. Why not? You want some coffee first?”
“After. So we can talk.”
“Whatever you say, Marzidoats.”
Grandma smiled a tiny bit. “No one has called me that for forty years.”
“Time someone did. Okay, son, sit there. I’m going to point this thing out the window, at the bridge, and you raise your hand if you hear any noise. Like at the doctor, okay?”
“Yes,” Colin said. At least this time there weren’t earphones, and nobody was calling him “pumpkin.”
A computer screen lit up, and a low rumble sounded. Colin raised his hand.
Again.
Again.
Rudy stared at the computer screen, at Colin, at Grandma. He shook his head and started to say something but Grandma said, “Wait, please,” in her same no-fooling-around voice and Rudy closed his mouth.
First a lot of low sounds with one machine, then a lot of high sounds with a different machine. They were both pointed at the bridge, and Colin wondered if it could hear the noises. No—bridges weren’t alive. But the bridge was making noises—they were clear to him, different from the noises the machines made, and not very interesting. Colin got bored.
When they finally, finally finished, Rudy had a funny look on his face. Grandma said, “I’ll have that coffee now. Here come Tim and Jason. Colin, you can go outside with Jason, but you both stay where I can see you through this window here, which means you can see me.”
“Yes, Grandma.”
Tim said, “Hi, kid, tour in a minute,” and went inside the trailer.
Jason said, “What did they do to you?”
“I heard the bridge make noise.”
Jason nodded. He didn’t think Colin was weird. “Cool. Hey, let’s go climb on those big bags!”
“Grandma says we got to stay by the window.”
“Oh. Well, then—I got an idea—let’s pick some of those flowers for Grandma!”
“Okay.” The flowers were blue, just like Tim’s car, with petals sort of like squares. Rudy probably wouldn’t mind if they picked some because they looked like weeds. Colin grabbed the stem of one and pulled.
It was really tough! No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t break the stem. He tried another one, but that wouldn’t break. Jason couldn’t do it either.
“Stupid flowers!” Jason said. “We need a scissors.”
“We don’t got scissors.”
“No, but … look!” Somebody had broken a beer bottle a little ways away. It was out of sight of Grandma’s window, but Jason darted over, picked up a shard of glass, and ran back before she could notice. He lay on the ground beside the plant, sawing with the glass shard. The stem parted. Colin lay down next to him, to watch—he was a little doubtful about Grandma and the sharp beer bottle—with his ear pressed hard against the dusty ground, and that’s when the awesome thing happened.
“Jason!”
“What?” Jason had cut three blue flowers and was getting to his feet. “You got dirt on your face.”
“Everything is talking down there!”
“Talking? With words?”
“No, not words. But everything is making noises under the ground! Not the ground noises—the grass and flowers and the trees outside the fence!”
“Really? What kind of noises?”
Colin raised his head. The noises stopped. “Some are ultra and some are infra”—new words just learned from Rudy—“and some sound like the ones plants make when they’re thirsty, only coming in … in … like those guns in your video game. Ack-ack-ack.”
“Bursts,” Jason suggested.
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Are they shooting at each other?”
“No. It’s like … they’re sending secret messages.”
“Cool! You mean like the Internet! Do it again!”
Colin pressed his ear back onto the dirt. The noises started again. They were going through the dirt and Jason was right, it was like the Internet down there! All those noise e-mails going from one plant to another.
But what were they saying?
Colin arranged the sounds in rows in his head, with the ultra ones sort of like plants needing water except higher, right there in the front row. They came in bursts. Carefully he listened to the high bursts of sou
nd until he was sure he could recognize them. He said, “Cut another flower.”
Jason did. The bursts of sound in the front row got faster and louder.
“Stop cutting!”
Jason did. The frantic bursts of sound stopped.
“Jase, the flowers are upset because you’re cutting them. I think they’re trying to tell the flowers over there!”
Jason frowned. You mean … like when that frog in Daddy’s swamp croaked real loud to warn the other frogs that we were coming?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“But,” Jason argued, “flowers can’t jump into water and swim away. No, wait, Daddy said something once … wait, I got it! He said that some plants gave out clouds of bad-smelling chemicals to scare away animals that might eat them. Maybe the flowers really are telling some other plants that I’m coming!”
Grandma and Tim came out of the trailer. Jason quickly dropped the broken beer bottle on the ground behind him. Grandma said, “There you two are! What have you got?”
“Flowers,” Jason said, holding them out. “For you.”
“Chicory,” Grandma said. “In really hard times in history, people would powder these to make coffee substitute. Thank you, boys!”
Colin looked doubtfully at the blue flowers; they didn’t look anything like Maxwell House. “Grandma,” he said, “can plants hurt?”
“Feel pain, you mean? No, honey, they don’t have nerve endings.”
That was a relief. It had troubled him.
She said, “Why do you ask?”
Colin looked up at her, knowing that he was so different from her, knowing too she liked him to tell the truth. Daddy also insisted on truth, or at least he did before he got sick. But maybe the truth didn’t have to include the beer bottle, if he said everything else. That was a fair trade.
“Grandma,” he said, “we—Jason and me—we got to tell you something.”
* * *
Far into the night, Marianne sat at her computer, reading journals to which she had never before paid much attention.
Plants did emit sounds that indicated thirst; the sounds came from the fracturing of overdry water-conducting tubules.
Corn roots clicked regularly, right at the lower edge of human hearing. No one knew why.
Researchers had known for two decades that plants emitted sounds as short-range deterrents or attractors for insects.
Plants could “hear” sounds, too—some orchids released pollen only for the high-frequency buzz of a certain bee.
Plant-to-plant communication with sound had all kinds of evolutionary advantages over communicating chemically—sounds were faster, required less energy, could go farther. How far? Since grass roots were highly connected underground and much of the world’s biomass was connected through fungi, the limits were unknown.
Sound moved easily through soil.
Other organisms without brains displayed mechanosensing, largely through changes in ion fluxes. Which plants certainly had.
Plants were influenced by nearby flora: Chili plants, to name just one, were shown as far back as 2013 to grow better near basil plants, even when the plants were isolated from sending each other chemical, touch, or light-transmitted signals.
Many mammals used infrasonics to communicate over distance: elephants, whales, hippos, rhinos, giraffes. Humans shared many gene sets with other mammals.
For over a hundred years scientists pooh-poohed the idea that bats could navigate by sound.
She got up to pour herself another glass of chardonnay. It was three in the morning but she didn’t feel sleepy. Carrying her glass, she slipped into the boys’ bedroom and looked down at Colin, curled into a ball in his locomotive-printed pajamas, his hair spiky on the pillow. In the dim light from the living room, he looked like a baby animal, a hedgehog or kitten.
The spore plague had activated sets of human immune-system genes that had lain dormant for 140,000 years. What other “junk genes” had they awakened in developing fetuses?
“Marianne,” Tim whispered in the doorway, “come to bed.”
His bed, he meant, although they made sure to each be in their own rooms before Colin and Jason awakened. But for the first time, Marianne did not feel the surge of desire.
She left the kids’ bedroom and closed the door. “Not tonight, Tim, okay? I’m pretty tired.”
“Okay.” His face was unreadable, but she could see the hard-on through his briefs. “Sleep well.”
“You, too.”
But sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t Tim she thought of, but Harrison. At Columbia, that Time magazine article had said, working on brain anomalies in mice. For scientific problems, Harrison had the tenacity of a pit bull. It was one of the things she’d loved about him.
Sleep was a long time coming.
* * *
“Marianne, it’s Jonah Stubbins.”
Of course it was. Marianne sat up groggily in bed. Christ—9:00 a.m.! The boys would be late for school. She heaved herself off the bed and threw on her robe.
“Marianne, you there?”
“Yes, but I can’t talk right now. I—”
The boys were gone. A note from Tim lay on the table in his block printing: TOOK KIDS TO SCHOOL.
“Never mind, Jonah. What is it?”
“What it always is. I want you and your grandchildren to move to the ship-build site, for safety’s sake. And your bodyguard, too, of course.”
Something in the way Stubbins said “your bodyguard” irritated Marianne. Her personal life was private, and whatever Stubbins thought he knew—or maybe even did know—was none of his business. But she kept her temper. “I told you, I can’t do that. I need to be close enough to my son’s facility to visit him. And my grandsons are settled in school.”
“We can helio you to Ryan whenever you want, and get a first-class tutor for the kids. I just want you to be safe, Marianne.”
“And I appreciate it. But we’re fine here.”
“Okay. Whatever you say. I’m just offering.”
“Thanks. But while I have you on the line, I want to ask—”
“Call me later. Gotta go.” He cut the connection.
What had she been going to ask, anyway? Why are you bankrolling me and my family for a copywriting job that a thousand others could do at a fraction of the cost? Although maybe she wouldn’t have asked it anyway. Marianne could probably support herself and the boys, but she could never afford Ryan’s care. Much as she hated the fact, she needed Jonah Stubbins.
If she hurried, maybe she could be out of the apartment before Tim returned. And she would not bring her cell.
The taxi left her at the fortified gates of Columbia University, which she had no clearance to enter. “Look,” she told the conspicuously armed guard, “just call Dr. Harrison Rice and tell him I’m here. Dr. Marianne Jenner. He’ll clear me.”
The guard looked skeptical. “Dr. Rice doesn’t give interviews.”
“I’m not a journalist. Just call him! He will be unhappy when he finds out I was here and not admitted.”
“Why doesn’t he know you’re here? Why didn’t you tell him you’re coming so he could put you into the system?”
Because I didn’t want to give him the chance to refuse. “Just call him, please! Dr. Marianne Jenner!”
She waited. The September air held the smoky promise of autumn. “Okay,” the guard finally said. “You’re cleared. It’s building—”
“I know where it is.”
Familiar and yet strange—it had been two and a half years since she’d been here. The Columbia campus looked less shabby. Perhaps alumni donations had increased as the economy picked up. But it was a shock to find a soldier with an AK-47 in front of the building containing Harrison’s lab.
He met her in the lobby. “Marianne. Good to see you.”
“Hello, Harrison.”
Familiar and yet strange. They shook hands awkwardly as two sets of images played in Marianne’s mind: she and Harrison drinking win
e in bed, her naked leg thrown over his, both of them sated after sex, talking and talking about research. And Harrison the night Sarah had killed herself and Tim brought him home drunk, barely conscious, sodden and mumbling and stained with vomit.
“You look good,” he said. Marianne doubted that was true of her—she’d dressed quickly and hardly combed her hair—but it was true of him. His hair, now completely gray, hadn’t thinned much more, and his intelligent face was craggy in that handsome way aging men had and women did not. In his eyes, however, she could still see pain over Sarah, just as hers must be shadowed by Ryan and Noah.
“Thank you. Harrison, can we go somewhere to talk?”
She felt rather than saw his quick startlement, and so she added, “It’s not personal. It’s connected with your research. Something I think you should hear.” So—now she knew. His interest in her had not renewed. Had she hoped it had? But, of course, she was with Tim.
She had his professional attention. “Come to my office.”
It was the same preternaturally neat, impersonal environment she remembered so well. Harrison never kept around the framed plaques or silly mementos that other scientists did. Marianne had never even seen his Nobel medal.
In careful, precise sentences, she told him about Colin: the small earthquake on the Linden fault, Rudy’s testing of Colin in infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges, what the child had told her about managing the constant bombardment of sound by “putting them in rows in my mind.” As she talked, she watched his face—such a well-known face, such a stranger. She saw that he had already known about the hyper-hearing, which meant there must be other children like Colin. But his attention sharpened and he leaned forward in his chair at the “putting in rows.” He had not known that.
“He taught himself to do that?”
“Yes, although I don’t think it was as much self-teaching as unconscious compensation. How many more kids have you found with hyper-hearing?”
“It seems to be about five percent of the population, but it’s difficult to tell because so many parents use this damn Calminex to quell sensory overload. Compensators like Colin are a small percentage of that, but Colin is the first I’ve heard describe the mechanism, even metaphorically.”