Seed (14 page)

“I apologize, Fathers.” Sumedha took a meditative breath, let his heart rate drop, smoothed the tremor from his voice. “I came as quickly as I could.”

A Father shifted overhead, a pod gurgled. Sumedha waited, listening for the quiet rush of Satori’s metabolism. He could hear it, barely. Intestines, veins, nerves running behind the dead materials of the Temple’s old-world facade, pumping life and information into the Fathers’ bodies.

“We’ve waited.” The Fathers’ voice pitched up. “Too long.”

“Yes, Fa—”

“Results!” Plexi windows shook. Sumedha fell to his knees. The voice softened. “Poor child,” it cooed. “Shh, poor. Frightened…Stand, child.” Sumedha hesitated, then rose. “The bomb. Were you injured, Sumedha? Poor child?”

“No, Fathers.”

“You were…the target?”

“I do not believe I was directly targeted, Fathers.”

“Fathers,” Kassapa said. He bowed until the silence implied permission for him to continue. “My people tell me the bomb was meant to breach the outer wall. The wild-born posing as members of the
La Chupacabra
organization intended to try and gain access to seed. The bomb malfunctioned and detonated early, killing all those involved in the attempt.”

“Sumedha,” the Fathers said after a few beats of silence. “Why do you make us wait?”

Sumedha sensed Kassapa’s eyes, knew his brother’s mind—bent always on Satori’s security. He worked the puzzle of Pihadassa’s defection. How could Sumedha not have known?

Sumedha breathed. Sensation played through his body, as immediate and fleeting as weather. Guilt, fear, anger.

“I was at a critical moment in my work, Fathers,” he explained.

“Your work.” A moan resonated through the Temple. “So slow.”

“It is slow work, Fathers. The helix dances unpredictably.”

“The helix…” The words trailed off into a long chord, as though the Fathers had decided to contemplate their own voice. It went on, grew louder until it reverberated, rattling the windows, filling Sumedha’s skull like a cosmic event. Sumedha counted heartbeats, had reached thirty-four when the voices began to warble. Their harmony shattered, became an animal squeal, then ceased. Sumedha glanced to Kassapa and Paduma. Saw his siblings’ faces gone brittle with fear. From the silence, a single voice emerged:

“Shit.”

Sumedha had not heard the Fathers’ voices singly since before he had been born. Individually, they had whispered things to him in the womb. Imprinted their minds on his in limbic dream he had known before birth. He had always loved them. He recognized the voice of Father Bill, the Father who had brought Satori into being.

“Doped up retard in a wheelchair would work faster’n you, boy.” Pain, or something like it, warped Father Bill’s voice, distended its vowels. Sumedha parsed the phrase for meaning, found none, so simply bowed.

“Father.”

“Your analogy’s…lost.” Father David, Bill’s brother. His voice, too, sounded the result of great labor.

“Yours especially, Bill.” Father Prekash, the one who had created Sumedha and his twins.

“That’s what makes them…such damn good company.” Father Bill’s words trailed off in a long wail. A pod overhead bubbled and shook. “Fucking…Buddhist lemmings.”

“Told you.” Father Prekash’s voice strained through the words. “
Buddhian
. Methodology. No religious—”

“Christ. Hurts my soul listening to you.” A baleful hiss sounded through the Temple. “
Years
! Prekash. Prick. Ass.”

A long silence ensued. The amniotic sacks overhead stretched as the insectoid outlines of the Fathers’ bodies twisted within.

Pihadassa’s absence pulled like a vortex at Sumedha’s attention, drawing it to the empty star point where she should have stood. Nearby, the stuffed yellow Labrador also seemed to regard the spot, its glass eyes empty with melancholy, its pink tongue lolling, frozen on the verge of a yearning howl…

Sumedha caught himself. Breathed, closed his eyes, concentrated on his sudden urge to anthropomorphize. No, he decided, simply to externalize. He opened his eyes, saw Kassapa watching him, unblinking, calm as a mirror. The serene antithesis to Sumedha’s turmoil. Sumedha nodded. Detected something hard in his brother’s smile.

The Fathers began to vocalize once more, the bent sounds of animals achieving sentience. The voices coalesced, harmonized.

“Sumedha.”

“Yes, Fathers.”

“Results. Tell us.”

Sumedha bowed once more. His mind travelled the unspeakably difficult puzzle of random genetic variance.

“A genetic configuration should exist naturally,” he said, “that is stable enough to maintain organism identity when combined with a splice causing heightened adaptability. It is a statistical inevitability, given a large enough population.”

“Crop Graft 3,” groaned the Fathers.

“Yes, Fathers. It should reveal in the consuming population those who hold the markers we seek. Thus far it has yielded no results.”

Another moan filled the Temple.

“How will you know? When there are results?”

“Anyone with the proper genetic configuration who contracts the graft will survive,” Sumedha said simply.

“Results!”

Sumedha hesitated. Kassapa met his eye, waiting.

“I have concluded, Fathers, that the configuration is less common than first thought. We have increased our sample size this year by incorporating the graft into a larger percentage of seed.”

“How much?” The question echoed through the chamber.

“This year, all of it.”

“Good.” The pods overhead shook as the bodies within spasmed. “Years.
Years
!”

Empathy washed over Sumedha. He closed his eyes, imagined the Fathers’ pods lying on the Temple floor before him where he could stroke them under his palms, shush them, comfort them. He breathed. The sensation passed. He opened his eyes and spoke.

“Fathers. In the event that a stable configuration does not present itself in the wild-born population, I have begun building one from scratch.”

“Results!”

“She is my fifth attempt.” Sumedha recalled fear in the girl’s eyes, her attachment to the name Pihadassa had given her. “She has developed more rapidly than I expected, but I believe her quick development indicates stability. I am also testing a new version of the graft on her.” To his left, Paduma tensed. Sumedha saw her pupils widen, sensed her heart quicken. “I am optimistic.”

“How long?”

“Soon. Two days for preliminary indications. Gauging the long-term effects will take much longer.”

“How…
long
!”

“Only a few months longer, Fathers.”

The Fathers let out another low chord. Soon its harmony shattered.

“I want,” Father Bill hissed. Overhead appeared the outline of a hand against pod membrane. It pressed outward, skeletal, clutching. “I want…
Out
.”

….

Back in his abode, Sumedha stripped off his shift and stood before the undulating window, watching the city. Walls everywhere had begun to molt in the late February heat. A breeze blew through the dome’s open flaps, pimpling the city’s rosy new flesh with goose bumps. Fur drifted like black cotton down to the streets, where far below Satori’s landraces, its children, worked, bent behind push brooms, sweeping the fur into floppy cartilage buckets.

Pihadassa had loved the shedding. An animal release, she’d called it, the moment when the city was most alive. Sumedha turned from the window.

“Lotus,” he said, and a flat mound blossomed from the floor. He settled himself into its fur, bringing his feet up onto his thighs. He meditated.

“Satori,” he said after a time.

“Yes, Sumedha?” answered Pihadassa’s voice.

“Explain the phrase, ‘doped up retard in a wheelchair.’”

“I am sorry, Sumedha. I do not understand the phrase.”

“Neither do I.” He opened his eyes, stood and began to pace. “Satori.”

“Yes, Sumedha?”

“Tell me about lemmings.”

“Lemmings were small rodents, found usually in the Arctic, in tundra biomes. They are subniveal animals, and together with voles and muskrats, make up the subfamily Arvicolinae…” When Satori had finished, Sumedha sat on his fur stool, thinking.

“I do not understand,” he concluded. He recrossed his feet and resumed his mediation. “Satori,” he said after a time.

“Yes, Sumedha?”

“I love you.”

CHAPTER 9

itanium strutwork the size of a small city shrieked in sudden wind sheer as Doss nosed the zep down hard beneath the roiling press of a derecho that moved in from the west. She toggled the heads-up display to the sat map.

“We should be there.” She watched as the white dot representing the zep blinked towards the center of the Fort Riley Military Reservation, a red blob in the upper half of a larger, rectangular blob labeled “Kansas.”

“Elections,” Fiorivani said. He sat beside Doss in the zep’s copilot seat, fatigue-clad knees rising like camouflaged mountain peaks on either side of the half-wheel yoke. “You imagine that shit? Fucking mudfish making decisions?” His mouth soured with distaste.

“This country was all about the vote before ’72, homie,” Sergeant Gomez told him. The sergeant huddled behind Fiorivani in the zep’s nav/gunner seat, cradling a blue plastic sandbox bucket in both arms as though it were something precious. “Emergency Climate Act of ’72 suspended all elections. Supposed to be temporary.” The zep bucked in the wind and Gomez leaned his face close to the bucket. Almost casually, he wretched. “Motherfucking democracy,” he said, a tendril of bile dangling from his bottom lip.

Two black-helmeted guards had produced Gomez the previous morning. They’d kicked him—shackled ankle and foot and wearing a yellow prison jumpsuit—from the back of a stockade truck onto the cold tarmac of the D.C. airfield. They’d handed Doss a release form to sign, cautiously unlocked Gomez’s cuffs, then climbed back into their truck with the air of having unburdened themselves profoundly.

“Temporary,” Fiorivani scoffed. He craned his head over one big shoulder to peer at the sergeant. “I prefer it this way. Stable, you know?”

Gomez said nothing. Doss met his gaze sidelong and he smiled, a fake diamond flashing in one tooth. His cheek curled around a deep scar: a wound Doss had watched him take in Iran when he’d tried to toss a Chinese grenade back in the direction from which it had come. It had exploded a foot from his face.

“Stable’s stable, I guess,” he said finally. In the fingers of one hand he clutched a worry bracelet, a leather thong threaded through small bones, which Doss happened to know were human finger bones. Sudden turbulence shook the zep and Gomez put his face once more to the bucket and wretched.

“Looks mean, Colonel.” Fiorivani leaned forward, peered through the windscreen the way a child would, both hands pressed to the glass, watching the black wall of oncoming thunderhead. A new lieutenant’s bar gleamed on the collar of his pressed fatigues.

“You got anything, Gomez?” Doss asked over her shoulder.

“No beacons, Boss.”

The yoke vibrated in Doss’ hands. She squinted again at the glowing heads-up, then out at the prairie dusk, which had abruptly turned to night beneath the storm.

“We should be there.”

White light flashed close, blinding. Fiorivani laughed.

“Never seen lightning so close.”

“That ain’t lightning,” Gomez said. “That’s anti-AC fire.” Another flash. “See? Tracers.” Doss cursed.

“Charge up the RAM, Gomez.”

Gomez set the plastic bucket carefully on the plate-steel deck and began punching buttons on the gunner console, his face glowing demonic in the instrument panel’s red lume. A heavy clunk sounded through the floor plates as the rail gun on the zep’s belly came online and began to swivel, searching for targets. Doss put the headset to her ear and began shouting codes into the mic. More tracers flashed, closer this time.

“They aren’t very good,” Fiorivani observed. “How hard can it be to hit this whale?”

“Zero on the source,” Doss told Gomez. “Aim thirty-five degrees off. Fire when ready.”

Gomez immediately thumbed a red button. An electric sizzle filled the cabin as the RAM spooled up. Then came a tearing sound as the gun spit a needle of depleted uranium the size of a small suitcase out into the Kansas darkness at seven times the speed of sound. A white sun rose instantly off the prairie floor a few kilometers away, searing Doss’ retinas. Before she looked away she saw the rounded concrete hummocks of tornado-proofed hangars and out buildings, concrete strangely naked in the harsh blast light: Fort Riley. The storm overhead, abruptly illuminated, churned like flame.

The anti-AC fire ceased. Voices shouted frantically through Doss’ earpiece. She smiled.

“That did the trick.” She put her mouth to the mic. “Riley, this is Army Exec flight one. Clear my flight path. Elvis wants in to Graceland.

….

“I’m sorry for firing on you,” General Lewis said. They’d settled at the end of a long table row in an olive drab cafeteria deep beneath Riley’s surface. A prairie saint squawked from the tinny speaker of a Ham somewhere back in the kitchen, where a black kid in an apron manned a buffet of steaming stainless bins.

Lewis gestured at the aide who stood a pace off his right shoulder. A blond boy, maybe sixteen, tall and rangy from a recent growth spurt. Stiffly at ease, fatigues starched and tightly buttoned, gleaming sergeant’s chevrons on the shoulder.