"There are things you need to understand," the Chief Technician says. "Beanshoot it not Nole Whard's child. He is his clone. He is Earth's most precious asset. His brain is an exact duplicate of the one that held the most brilliant intellect the world had ever willingly harboured, but he has spent his formative years bathed in the morphogenetic influence of brainless sessile vegetables. All BI are doing in this secret project on Mars is to recapitulate a childhood for him before he returns to take his place as the master of Earth. Nothing sinister. We are so glad to have found him a friend of his own age to share his experience.
"I have never seen you in anything but a suit or liner," she reminds me. "Would you like to try some Earthly clothes?" She fetches me a shapeless suit, woven from gut, muscle, nerve and chameleon.
As soon as I step into the flaccid pinkish-grey bag, it blushes with brilliant colour and contracts to fit my shape. It seems to enhance my movements somehow. I feel less awkward. When I leave for home, I put my clothes on top of it, not wishing to take it off. It immediately changes colour to perfectly match my skin, imperceptible joints at wrists, ankles and waist. I peer down the neck of my liners. Even if my mother discovers that I am wearing a biotechnical artefact, she will probably approve of the way I have eliminated my sexual characteristics. How like a child I am again.
I wear my Earthly outfit constantly. It never needs washing. It digests all the dirt and produces a thin thread of excrement which I add to the diet of my microorganisms. When I reach the dome, I shed my suit and liners and wear it alone. Its colour and pattern vary with the weather and my mood, and alter as I move. Its hints to my muscles enliven the athletic games that Beanshoot and I now play in the garden, brachiating among the more climbable trees, projecting our fantasies into the hologram, imagining ourselves to be regressed gorillas swinging through the dizzy skyscrapers of Earth.
Sometimes Beanshoot is uneasy and wary of me. "A sign of maturity," the Chief Technician says. Soon they will take Nole Whard Junior back to Earth, leaving the dome to my microforms and Mars to my mother and her friends.
I don't want them to leave. I am happy. The biological food has cleared my skin. The biotechnical suit makes me graceful and shapely. My mother is more at ease with me now, assuming that my handpicked genes are asserting themselves at last. Until the day comes when she decides (not suspecting anything, of course, she is to tell me) to follow me on one of my outings.
How surprised she is to find me consorting with the enemy! She gasps at the hologram in disbelief. She boggles at my vivid biotechnical garments, the garden filled with our wild experiments, my companion, startling in his likeness to his progenitor. "My Godl No wonder you have been looking so smug!" She pushes into the complex. Beanshoot and I are left outside. For hours we sit against the wall, mindlessly reassembling the vegetation at hand, while they talk inside.
Beanshoot is lucky to have spent his whole childhood without parents, I tell him. Of course he has a dozen of them now, manipulating him not just with words but with wires, drugs, surgery, hypnotism, morphogenetic generators. I stroke his hair and feel the honeycomb of raw sockets beneath. He twitches my hand away.
Hours later my mother emerges. She does not look at me. She snaps into her mirror suit and leads me back to the colony, maintaining radio silence.
"Oh yes," she says casually as we unsuit in our cabin. 'I have had a very interesting talk with the Bionics Interplanetary people. Very interesting." She smiles. She steps out of her suit and liners. She is wearing a biotechnical suit like mine; a superior version, jewelled and shimmering. "They are charming people. Nole Whard Junior is a lovely boy. Why didn't you tell me about him? You must go and see him again soon."
She sounds like the BI Chief Technician. I am enraged. She detests everything that Bionics Interplanetary has ever done and yet she ingratiates herself with the people who are trying to recreate the man who was responsible for it all. Well, I am certainly not going back there to enrich the experience of their puppet clone!
I return to my morose rambles in the dunes, my sullen stints in the laboratory, profiling the soil. I bury my biotechnical suit in the sand. My active little friends consume it in a morning. The complexity profile of the area increases alarmingly. I expect a startling new lifeform to emerge imminently, preferably a carnivorous phage that preys on biotechnical garments and their wearers.
I shun the dome.
I shun the colony.
I patrol the limbo between.
Eventually the day comes when I brood so long in the fug of my exhalations and angst that my oxygen supply is insufficient to take me back to the tunnels. Either I go to the dome, or I am found dead on the dunes in the morning. Either way, my mother will be secretly relieved. I choose the dome.
The sun has set when 1 get there. Beanshoot opens the airlock himself. Inside the dome there is no hologram, only the dim image of the landscape I have just left, bathed in the last red flush of sunset and the yellow headlamps of the robots that relentlessly comb the dunes.
Beanshoot must have seen me coming.
He is trembling.
I take off my helmet and breathe with relief the fresh air that rushes from the solar photosynthesising battery, still gushing oxygen when the last solar photons have slid behind the planet.
The garden is naked in the dark. The flowers are closed. The food has all been picked. The trees in which we swung in our careless ape existence have lost their foliage. Our kitten, long fallen under the morphic influence of its vegetable ancestors, has taken root again, a fat furry bundle snoring in the soil.
The complex is partially dismantled, the laboratory stripped, the project records packed and stacked outside.
Beanshoot's education is complete. The terrifying Nole Whard, architect of the Bionic Revolution, bogeyman of Mars, destroyer of my mother's dreams, stands before me— the famous steely charismatic eyes devouring me from the flushed, twitching and rapacious face.
I shrink inside my suit.
He frightens me. I cannot bear to lose him. Inside this threatening reincarnation of the most recent of the Earthly gods—the Lord of the Millennium—floats the frail foetus (luminous in my imagination) whose helplessness burned my heart as I lay angry in hospital.
We touch.
My padded suit feels nothing.
My eyes challenge my old companion to emerge from this menacing stranger.
My body betrays me.
Inside my suit and liners, excited by a hormonal hair-trigger, I feel the bud on my breast stir, tingle, part and swell; a florid blossom throbbing against my thudding heart.
Vibrated by some pheromonal harmonic, the whole garden stirs.
My mother still sighs with nostalgia over the Earth of her childhood. The Green Heart and the Bionic Interface already dominated agriculture, but the origins of their food had never interested the inhabitants of the steel and concrete city in which she dwelt.
The sudden urban fashion for bionic artefacts did not interest her either. She loathed the tenements of her birth where the neighbourhood youth had suddenly sprouted horns, fangs, talons and stings and terrorised the district; sometimes, after a midnight orgy of howls and rooftop scramblings, leaving a gnawed and part-dismembered corpse in her sterile backyard, constantly scoured of biological enemies.
She despised the suburban gardens where animate plants frolicked among the newly exotic flora; the bourgeois living-rooms where rumbustious toddlers harmlessly clambered over the robust, self-renovating, seed-grown furniture while their mothers fiddled with the bright feathers and flowers growing in their hair.
Perhaps, as she flicked through the financial papers, looking for a man who would marry her and carry her away to a world of timeless prosperity untouched by fashion, she noticed the features of young Nole Whard, charismatic ecology-conscious promoter of biotechnical artefacts, whose company, Bionics Inc., was soaring to astonishing success on a wave of ecological angst and millenial fervour. If so, she was appalled at the vulgarity of both
his products and his sales pitch. The man was trying to make the whole world crawl with shame at the way the conventional industries had treated the planet, and then to promise an almost religious salvation if they turned from their sins and restored the biosphere to the green domain of their biological companions.
Not in barbary, but with all the comforts of a civilisation. Bionics International, as it was by then, had cornered, some say invented, applied morphogenesis. Nole Whard could grow anything. Machines were just crude imitations of living things, he would say; let us grow living things to do their work. Let us fashion from the soil all the comforts of the new age in which humanity would be reborn in a new garden of Eden; a second chance under skies scoured of industrial pollution; the raped and tormented Earth consoled at last by partnering a perfect new humanity in a bounteous, blissful and fruitful marriage.
The year 2000 was approaching. The skies were dark, acid, depleted of oxygen. The industrial culture had exhausted itself, the last few factories expelling their effluents into a landscape of rusting dereliction roamed by the despairing unemployed. My mother, having successfully climbed the ladder by virtue of her beauty and ambition, marrying an entrepreneur in a safe-looking conventional industry, sat comfortably in her sterile marble house surrounded by concrete walls, waiting for the tide to turn.
Catastrophe theory applies to morphogenetics. The moment came when the accumulated resonances from BI's inventions started to vibrate every organism on the planet. Nole Whard was quite suddenly swept to power as the prophet of the new Bionic age, his intense, shining face filling all the media windows, his vibrant voice promising to vanquish all four horsemen of the Apocalypse with the green sword of Bionics.
BI became the most successful company in the history of capitalism. Every other industry went under. My mother's husband jumped from the towering concrete emblem of his achievement just before the cities crumbled to fragments, their foundations shattered by the thrusting shoots of skyscrapers springing in entirety from a single seed. My mother's concrete courtyard buckled. Her sheltering walls collapsed. The seething, teeming, unstoppable life of the city irrupted into her once secure domain. Bitterly, she faced the future, seeing in this jubilant reflorescence only the revenge of the bugs, mould and excrement of her slum upbringing which she had been trying to expunge all her life.
The last surviving conventional industry, using metal concentrated by foliage, smelted by energy extracted from rotting compost, created the fleet of spaceships whereby the freshly-rechristened Bionics Interplanetary would spread the irresistible message to the rest of the system. Blue-green algae on Mars. Lichens on Venus.
All the accumulated wealth and pull of her husband's lost empire were just enough to secure my mother a place in the Martian colony. She was carrying her last, hoarded treasure: an embryo combining her beautiful, ambitious chromosomes with those of a certified genius of outstanding physique, all harmful genes enzymed out. Only slightly consoled by the news that Nole Whard, personally accompanying the promising Titan expedition in an invincible, infinitely-survivable ship, had met an uncalculated asteroid and been presumed pulverised, she turned her back on Earth.
She never intended to return.
But now she does.
All through the trip to Earth she prances through the ship in her sparkling biotechnical suit, rejoicing; her antipathy to all BI and I have wrought forgotten in her dizzying, preening pride. Her smiles irradiate the whole cabin. Beanshoot and I, instruments of her success, stare sullenly at each other, strangers again. We have not had a moment alone together since those last few seconds in the unfurling garden before the ever vigilant BI team rushed out and proposed a marriage between us. "How we hoped you would say yes," they said, after I had contemplated life without my refuge, and said it. "You have been part of the project all along, after all."
And so we are married on the flight deck of the ship at the moment that it enters Earth orbit for the final approach to the spaceport. As we exchange our vows, the drive is cut and we achieve weightlessness. We are swept off our feet, head over heels, revolving around each other in the great control bubble, our hair and clothes billowing. We cannot reach each other. I have to throw my bouquet into the wheeling crowd to project myself within grappling distance of my bridegroom who finally, fumblingly, puts a ring on my finger as the ship makes a ring around the planet. Dizzy and nauseous. We kiss. Our dry, doubting lips pressed apprehensively together. My mother and the BI team, anchored to cleats in the walls, ringingly cheer us, delight and relief shining in their faces.
We land.
I step out of the spaceship and straight into shock. Outdoors without protection, I imagine myself suffocating in the oxygen-rich atmosphere, i choke. Strange pollens and perfumes irritate my respiratory system. I weep. Gravity clamps my feet to the ground. I stumble. The swaying green buildings tower alarmingly above me.
I cling to Beanshoot for support. He is smiling expansively, entranced by the mobile plants which cluster around us, fronds upraised to savour our carbon dioxide, calyces begging our hands for pollination. My mother, ignoring everything external, embraces us both in an excess of irrepressible joy. The President of Bionics Interplanetary himself strides towards us, kicking aside the floral carpet which has prostrated itself at our feet.
A jostling crowd of news-crews surges an awed distance away, trying to encapsulate in this emotional tableau all the drama, poignancy and relief of the return to Earth of the miraculously-rescued, miraculously-restored avatar of the saviour of humanity on the day of his wedding to an ethereally-beautiful Martian child bride. A hushed human throng watches us from every level of the verdant towers.
We are driven in a closed carriage to the grandest hotel in the city, a rare haven of glass and metal modules grafted to the branches of a tranquillised oak. Accompanied by a fussing retinue of BI primpers, bustling around us with clothes, jewels, cosmetics and drugs. Just for a few moments we are left alone. Rigid on the plastic bed, afraid to spoil our perfect finish, we gaze into each other's dazed, glazed eyes.
Our nervous hands touch. Poor us. The only thing we have in common is that we have both been manipulated all our conscious lives. The last act of our tormentors has been to gently inject us with the pubescent hormones that BI have been suppressing since we became part of the project.
Desire suffuses me. I try to embrace my new husband. Our biotechnical dancing garments force us into a stylised clasp; wrists and elbows flexed, fingers spread and extended.
Beanshoot reddens. Our hot cheeks touch. Our lips meet. His pirouetting fingers brush my flower, erect petals pressing the restraining fabric. Pulling with all his strength at the neck of my dress, he bends his head to my blossom.
His lips encircle my corolla. His tongue probes my tingling petals. My pistil throbs. The fingers of his right hand gently massage my swollen sepals; his left hand whitens as he struggles with the strenuously-resisting neckline. My skirt binds my legs. I writhe on the bed. A sudden gush of hot saliva, swimming with inhaled pollen, floods my burning calyx.
They come for us. We sit up, blushing. The neck of my dress rises angrily to my throat.
We are driven in a low-flying winged chariot to an informal reception at the top of the BI tower. We sit apart, both wrapped in the revived fantasies of our interrupted adolescence. Crowds line the streets, staring at us in silent awe. The whole city is in bloom, our floral portraits on huge hoardings, a rain of scented petals spiralling down around us. As the sun goes down, photoluminescent bacteria light up.
The top of the BI tower is open to the sky. It is the original of our familiar hologram, disturbing again now that the dizzying drop is no longer an illusion. The President introduces us to various dignitaries. We eat and drink. We dance.
My mother takes the President by the hand and twirls him away in her twinkling galaxy of a dress, floating on wave after wave of vindicated ambition. Beanshoot and I cling together, hot faces touching, tender bodies brushing in our energetic garment
s which tirelessly circle the dance floor while we shuffle inside them aching with gravity, exhaustion, misery and desire.
The President bows and asks me for the pleasure and my mother pirouettes Beanshoot away in her tireless, rapturous ecstasy. I watch him over the President's shoulder. He is watching the plants, dreamily.
The President smiles affably. "No doubt you think Nole Whard Junior is the most important person in the world," he says. "You are right of course. The entire population of this planet is in resonance with his field. His father was their leader. Now they need to be led again."
Nole Whard Senior was a genius. But he was not really an astute businessperson. More a Messiah. Bionics has become a religion. Most of BI's products are now outside the economy, having reproduced or gone autonomous. They have to get back to steel and concrete. Nole Whard Junior and I must inspire the young; wean them away from their jungle existence, living free in the trees and on drugs, and get them back to robot jewellery and holographic clothes. He knows that we will do a good job, especially as our fields have been recannulated by our largely artificial environments.
He beams at his dreams. "Now I must return you to your husband." But where is he? I search for his golden corona among the gathering. "He was talking to the plants," my mother says; "he was fascinated by them."
We call to him. No answer.
We anxiously peer over the sickening drop. No crumpled body in the undergrowth. "He can climb like a monkey," I tell them.
"No sense in alarming anybody," says the President. He will take us back to the hotel where no doubt my husband will join us shortly.
We wait all night. I lie on the bed while next door my mother wails and paces the room. Our luminous floral portraits burn through the night.
The morning brings the President, stern and distant, informing us that Nole Whard Junior has still not been found. Fortunately the marriage has not been consummated, so there will be no problems about ending it.
Best Science Fiction of the Year 14 Page 28