“I’m glad.” They both were silent, while her hand stroked the skin of his abdomen, over his ribs and belly.
He had something to stroke as well. “And they’ve been determined. They’ve tried to get you back.” He hesitated. “Do you think we’ll find out why? Do you think my father—Jack—really wants to turn you into a plant?”
“Mmmm,” she said sleepily.
“It can be done, I guess. I prove that, don’t I?”
“We don’t even know for sure that he’s behind it all. Or that he’s still alive. It was your Mom, remember, who said he wanted to turn me into a potted plant. And the honey can give you some pretty strange ideas.”
He grinned in the darkness, recalling the day she had tried to convince him that two humans and one spider could make a great dance team. “But…”
“Who knows? For now…You’re your father’s son, aren’t you? The gengineer’s, I mean.”
Her fingers closed around his bud, and she was unfurling the leaf-like structures that wrapped around it, where any other man would have a foreskin. It was too dark for them to see, but both knew the leaves, his sepals, were green. The bud within was as pink as one might expect, and it had stiffened and lengthened quite normally.
“Have I ever told you…?” His first awareness that his penis was different from those of most other human males had come very early. He did not remember the moment of realization, but he did recall the first time he had said anything about it. He had been just four years old, his mother had been giving him a bath, and water had been all over the bathroom floor. He smiled gently, fondly, as he told Muffy about the six-inch goldfish with which he had shared the tub. He had insisted on picking it for his bath, not caring that the warm water and the soap would soon kill it—he could always pick another, couldn’t he?—and he had laughed as it swam between his feet, nibbling at his toes. If it had been aware that it had grown upon a shrub beside a pumpkin’s doorstep, it had not seemed to care.
Nor had Tom. As far as he knew, goldfish had always come from bushes. He would not have been surprised to hear that children were found beneath cabbage plants, though the gengineers had not yet gone that far. Nor had Petra and Ralph Cross ever told him such a thing, even as a story.
His mother had shrieked when a wave splashed her blouse. The goldfish had swum between Tom’s legs and tickled. The boy had clutched at himself and arched his hips out of the water. “Mommy,” he had said. “Why isn’t my thing like Daddy’s?” He remembered that he had pointed it at her.
She had smiled at his innocence. “It’ll get bigger,” she had told him. “And the hair will grow. When you’re older.”
He had shaken his head. “I know that.” Then he had paused, not quite sure of what to say. “Daddy’s isn’t green. Jimmy’s isn’t either.”
Petra’s face had grown serious, but only a year or so later had she warned him to keep his difference to himself. She had brushed a strand of hair, as wet and dark as her son’s, from her cheek. The two boys had played together constantly, and it had hardly been surprising that they had seen each other’s bodies.
Muffy murmured in his ear, “It would have been useless, but I bet she wished you hadn’t noticed for awhile.”
Tom nodded in the darkness. “She handled it well,” he said. He was silent for a moment. At last he said, “She said, ‘You’re special in lots of ways. You’re my little boy. And you have more freckles than anyone I know.’”
She had poked a finger at the tip of his nose, then, and he had giggled. As he described the scene, Muffy echoed the action. The freckles once had covered the flanks of his nose, his cheeks, even his chin and forehead, like a dusting of pollen. Now they were sparser, though they were still there.
He did not giggle now, though. Instead, his voice grew thick with the grief of loss. He wished he knew what loss he was feeling—he had lost his mother once when he had run away from home, angry at what he felt as betrayal. He had lost her again when he discovered the honey bum she had become.
“She called it my bud,” he said. “And she told me it would change color as it grew, just like a goldfish bud.”
“It did, too.” Muffy cupped it in her hand.
Tom cupped something else in his. “When I told her Jim called his a wienie, she said the polite word was ‘penis.’” He laughed gently.
“I like ‘bud’ better.”
“So do I.”
“If my Porculata was here, we’d make you look like a pair of incompetents,” growled Freddy. “So hurry up, why don’cha? Get down to business and let’s get some sleep.”
* * *
CHAPTER 9
“What…?”
“I hear it’s the Engineers.”
“How did you cramp their holes?”
“Anybody get hurt?”
“How’s Tige?”
“The veedo news said they tried to grab you at the zoo.”
“But why…?”
“Turn you all into aardvarks.”
The Farm’s many truckers came by their table in ones and twos and small groups. They pushed aside the nearest of the dining hall’s tables. They yanked chairs into position, straddled them, asked their questions, and moved on, abandoning their seats to their successors.
The attention was unnerving. Tom Cross and Muffy Bowen forced themselves to eat quietly, dropping the occasional doughnut or melon chunk down Freddy’s gullet, while Jim and Julia answered the questions and did their best to dispel the rumors.
Finally, a break in the flow of truckers let Jim Brane sip his coffee, find it cold, and mutter, “Mech.” He eyed the food he had so far been unable to touch. “We should have gone out.”
Julia Templeton poked at her stiffening eggs. “I guess, but…”
“Go away!” yelled Freddy. They looked up to see another of the Farm’s many truckers, the tallest and skinniest of them all, approaching. Jim murmured, “Bill Forsneck,” by way of introduction. Behind Forsneck came still more. “Give’em a chance to eat,” said the pig. “Or they’ll all get ulcers just like mine.”
“You don’t have an ulcer,” said Tom.
“I’m working on one right now,” said the pig. “And my stomach does too hurt.”
Forsneck stopped, looked at the table, turned, and began to give orders. In a moment, a pot of hot coffee was on the table, fresh eggs were in front of Julia, and he was holding a plate with three wriggling goldfish on it. “For the spider?” he said. “The kitchen doesn’t carry live rats, but there’s a bush by the window.”
Muffy laughed, said, “Thanks,” and set the plate on the floor. Randy approached and palped its contents cautiously, unsure of what to do with the strange offering. Her uncertainty did not last long. She was hungry, and the goldfish felt like meat. Three quick nips paralyzed them with her venom, silk wrapped them safely, and she began to suck their fluids.
Meanwhile, Forsneck was shooing the other journeymen away. He was even staying away himself, though clearly, just like the rest, he wanted to find out what had been happening. But, for now, he stayed seated three tables away, where he could play watchdog for their privacy.
In due time, once her plate was clean, Julia crossed the room to him. “Thanks, Bill,” she said. “We’ll tell you everything when we get the chance. But now, I think, we’d better check the dispatch board.”
He nodded and made a sympathetic face. “Yeah. You’re on it, too.”
“Mechin’ litterheads!” She checked, and he was right. The dispatchers apparently felt that Jim had his Mack back and needed no more handholding sympathy. She was down for the belly run, hauling groceries from warehouses to the markets, and she would be at it for most of the day.
Jim Brane, on the other hand, was not on the board. The dispatchers either had no need for him, or they thought that he would be worthless until he or someone caught the truck thieves. Perhaps, for that matter, they felt that turning loose one of their own was only right, for hunting down such thieves did serve the Farm and all i
ts truckers. Nickers had suggested as much the night before, and maybe he had said something elsewhere. Or perhaps they thought that he would want to help his friend hunt Muffy’s kidnappers, both for friendship and—since they had, after all, tried to seize Julia at the zoo—for revenge.
So why wasn’t Julia free as well? Didn’t they realize that she too had a motive?
Jim wondered how much his superiors really knew about what was going on. Were they, for instance, aware that the truck thieves and the kidnappers seemed to be the same people? Or was his freedom sheer chance? He was not about to ask, for fear that, thus reminded, they would put him back on active duty.
There were now, Tom saw, two abandoned shirts on the cluttered floor between the workbenches and the shelf-laden wall. Joe-Dee Alvidrez noticed the direction of his gaze, shrugged, and said, “Yeah, Kimmer made me change. Said I was beginning to smell.”
“You were, Dad.” Kimmer said from her position near the door. Today she wore a yellow coverall on which dark blue lines emphasized the borders of her form. Lightly embroidered vines curled around the blue as if it represented a trellis. Her hair, its yellow too light to go with that of the suit, was wrapped in a scarf of lighter blue. “In fact, you still do. You need a bath.”
Muffy Bowen, standing beside her mate, grinned as if to agree. She wore green and yellow in a curvilinear pattern that emphasized her breasts. Her dark hair hid her neck, and the chain that bore her worrystone showed only at her throat. Kimmer had no chain, nor any other sign of a worrystone.
“At least I shaved,” said Alvidrez.
“After I brought you the razor.”
Diplomatically, Tom Cross said nothing. Neither did Muffy or Jim, nor Freddy, though it would have surprised no one if he had agreed loudly. Tige was parked as before in the drive before the house, and Randy had leaped off Muffy’s shoulder to explore the kudzu. She was, perhaps, hoping to find some warm-blooded prey more to her taste than half-vegetable goldfish.
Alvidrez grinned at their silence. “Don’t want to piss me off, eh? Mech, I know I don’t pay enough attention to such things. That’s why I can’t work for any of the big companies. They fire me too fast. So…“He gestured at the array of computer equipment around him. “It’s worked out pretty well.”
“Did you…?” Tom’s question was tentative, as if he dared not hope for success.
Alvidrez laughed and pointed at Tom with his mouse-glove. “I found out your Dad’s a lot like me. Or he was. C’mere.” He scooted his throne down the rail until he faced a large screen filled with text. They followed him, walking beside the rail and dodging the corners of keyboards and other computer paraphernalia that jutted from the workbenches.
“The worm turned up several mentions—leases, payrolls, taxes, and soon—but this is the only thing that really says much.” He paused for effect. “And it says a lot. He was seeing a shrink at one point, and most shrinks use the Tandy Psychiatric Process-Recording System. This one was no exception. His computer recorded every word spoken by Jack or the doc. It even flagged the doc’s subvocal comments. And he never wiped the file. Look.”
He slid aside just enough to let his three young visitors, and his daughter, see the screen. Since Freddy was in Tom’s arms, he too could read:
SESSION TRANSCRIPT: SESSION 1
PATIENT: Jack D. Rivard, 832-076-1074
OCCUPATION: Genetic Engineer
DATE: August 3, 2052
You want the history, right, Doctor? But it goes back a long ways, you know. All the way to Grandpa.
Yes, Jack. I need to know all the details if I am to help you with your little problem.
It’s not really so little. And I don’t think it’s a problem.
Tell me about it anyway.
Yeah. Okay. It was the company that sent me here, you know. I didn’t come on my own. Every gengineer plays with himself. But they said I had gone too far.
It is always better when clients come for their own reasons. But tell me whatever you can, please. In your own words, and at your own pace.
Well. Grandpa. He was a computer hacker. To hear him tell it, the bug hit about the same time he got interested in girls. When they wouldn’t have anything to do with him, he got a computer. And in between the sci-fi and feelthy magazines that gave him a taste of what he was missing, he played with his equipment. He wrote programs and cracked databases. He invented viruses.
Me, I was just like him. Except for the computers. I had to become a gene-hacker. My folks got me a Little Helix gene-splicing kit when I was ten, and I played around with frogs and pea plants and so on. But the germplasm that came with the kit had some pretty stiff constraints built into it. I couldn’t do much besides change colors and leaf shapes and numbers of eyes. I certainly couldn’t replace the frog’s eyes with pea blossoms. It seemed like such a neat idea, mixing up plants and animals. But I just couldn’t do it then, though I tried. So I got bored.
But then it hit. Puberty. That’s when I started playing with myself. Gene-hackers do that a lot.
I tried to date girls. I asked them out. But they never said yes. They were going with the jocks, the football players. They preferred muscles to brains.
Dr.‘s subvoc: So what else is new?
But that’s not what they told me. They sneered. They could have just said no, but they had to be insulting about it. It’s no wonder I hate them.
Do you really?
Yes! No. Sometimes. I did then. But I yearned for them too! That’s why I spent so much time with the dirty books and magazines and veedo tapes. Just like Grandpa.
They were safe. They wouldn’t insult me. And besides, the models and veedo characters, and even the writers, they were obviously scum.
But did you hate them? Or was it a matter of…?
Just looking down on them? Because they were safe? Worthless people who couldn’t criticize me?
Maybe so. It sounds right. People are like that, aren’t they? They runaway from people whose approval matters to them, from people whose existence is a threat. They turn to those who don’t matter, who don’t threaten. Maybe that’s why teens join subhuman gangs, or turn to drugs and crime.
But sometimes it’s the other way around, isn’t it? I mean, some kids join the army. But the people there threaten everybody. The kid isn’t singled out. So he’s safe.
But I didn’t go that route. Or the other one, really. I just holed up with my porn and my dreams and my Little Helix kit. I took a growth gene out of my own cells, and I made it work in one of my mother’s African violets. I made that sucker huge! So big it was starting to crowd me out of my room. I had to use weed killer on it.
That’s when I began to wonder if I could put any part of a plant into me. Maybe it would make me more attractive. Or…You know anything about how gengineering works?
I had a basic course in medical school, but that’s surely out of date by now.
Hmmph. I guess. What you do now is, you take a virus, and you fiddle the proteins in its shell so they’ll bind to whatever cells you want to plug a new gene into. Then you splice the new gene in among the virus’s genes. And inject the virus. It attaches to the target cells, injects its DNA, and plugs the new gene into place. If all goes well, the gene then works just the way you wanted it to.
That’s what I did. I took a gene cluster out of an amaryllis plant my mother had and loaded the virus. Then I injected it into myself.
What were you hoping to change?
You can guess. You know what my “problem” is. I didn’t know if anything would happen at all, since it’s always been harder to make plant genes work in animals than vice versa. And I figured, if something went wrong, it would be an easy mistake to cover up. And besides, it didn’t seem very likely that I would ever have any real use for…You know.
But it worked. A few days later, I began to turn green down there, and the whole thing shriveled up and got hard. It was like a little bud. It still worked, though, when I had to pee.
That must
have been a relief.
Tom looked up from the screen to find Muffy looking back at him, a wicked grin on her lips. She winked, and he felt his face turning hot. He hoped no one else was watching, but he hoped in vain. As he turned back toward the text, he caught Joe-Dee’s eye. The other man looked puzzled.
I’ll say. I was worried for awhile, but…The change seemed to be pretty innocuous, and there was something about it that took a little of the edge off my yearnings. That was when I went off to college. I was a bio major, concentrating in molecular biology. I knew I wanted to be a gengineer, you see?
Four years, and then two more to get the engineering degree. And all that while, my bud kept growing larger.
Just like on a plant.
Right. At the same time, though, something else happened that was more alarming. My testicles changed. They stretched, you know? Right up the sides of the bud. But there wasn’t any pain, and I figured I would find out what it meant when the bud opened. And that couldn’t be too far off. If I looked, I could see grooves between the leaves that wrapped around it.
I tried to figure it out. The plant genes were modifying my own body parts, sure. I had expected that. But I didn’t understand why they would be affecting my testicles. The targetting on the virus had been more specific than that. But the experts, I knew, were still working on how genes interacted. Even in the lab, with full gene maps and the glossiest splicing machines, they couldn’t always predict the results of their modifications. And what I had done had been pretty crude. Face it, I had been a kid, shooting blind.
Did your relationships with the opposite sex change any during those years?
You mean, did I get laid? Find anyone I wanted to marry? Stop hating and fearing women?
That should cover it.
Not hardly. I didn’t even dare to shower when other guys were in the dorm’s shower room. I could just imagine what they would have said if they had seen my bud!
So I stank, too, right? And the girls commented. They laughed. So did the guys, and by my sophomore year I couldn’t find a roommate. Which was fine with me. I had always been a loner. I would always be a loner. I would, if I had to, find ways to satisfy all my needs by myself.
Greenhouse Page 13