The Pedestal (29 page)

“What we’re seeing blowing around out there isn’t spores; it’s sperm. BP7 is behaving more like a simple animal than a plant—coral, for example. It’s relying on the wind to facilitate fertilization in the same way coral rely on ocean currents to randomly disperse sperm across a reef.”

“I don’t understand,” Cutterly interjects. “What about Winkley? You said he breathed in spores.”

“He did. I studied many of them under magnification during the days that followed, and believe me, there’s no doubt. This is something different; our crops have definitively traded spores for sperm.”

Grogan clears his throat. “Fiona, you didn’t alter the genetic profile of the cuttings, did you?”

She shakes her head. “Of course not. It’s as if the cuttings retained an imprint of their death, like they knew on a cellular level that their spores had tried and failed.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Grogan mumbles.

Here, here.
It would be very easy to get hung up on this explanation—I feel the seams of my gullibility popping against it, in fact—but it hasn’t escaped my notice that she’s sidestepped Grogan’s larger implication—that the reins of this scientific venture have slipped from her fingers. Even simpletons like me can guess our fate if the BPs manage to snatch the upper hand. Still, I’m compelled to throw Miss Lovely a bone. Maybe I’ve misunderstood her, after all.

“Just to be clear,” I say, “what you’re telling us is that the BPs were originally engineered to reproduce asexually, but somehow they began producing spores. Then, after we wiped them out, the remaining cuttings somehow learned from their mistakes—seemingly, anyway—and mutated again to produce sperm rather than spores. Am I on track?”

“That may be oversimplifying things a bit, but in a nutshell, yes.”

“That’s oversimplifying?” Cutterly chuckles. “Jeez, Doc; I’d hate to hear the complicated version.” He smiles, stretching cheeks that aren’t used to being stretched. He’s trying to smooth down ruffled feathers, I know. I appreciate the effort—as does Fiona, I’m sure—but it isn’t working. Even Rogers looks like he just swallowed a bug.

Grogan’s expression is particularly brooding. “And on top of all that,” he injects, “this new strain needs to pollinate to reproduce, and we don’t have any females to pollinate?” He laughs. It’s a hollow, condescending sound that—despite the frustration I know we’re sharing—grates against my nerves. What’s with this guy that he’s so determined to belittle others? He was on her side not ten seconds ago. “Sounds to me like you’ve lost control of this, Fiona. At best, we’re at an impasse.”

Fiona blushes. She wants to retaliate, I can tell. She certainly has the intelligence to match Grogan’s wit, yet she opts to keep her cool. Does she have something up her sleeve, I wonder, or is she legitimately ashamed? I feel torn to pick sides; logically, I’m with Grogan—the state of our work couldn’t be more precarious—but my heart is rooting for Fiona. She seems to intuit my sympathy and rewards it with a sidelong glance, embellished with a mysterious smirk.

“Not quite,” she replies, eyes narrowing in challenge as they return to Grogan. “As luck would have it, we do have a female specimen in our midst.”

Blank faces all around for a long second, followed by another.

“The graveyard,” Rogers suddenly whispers. His cheeks are pale, eyes sparkling with disquiet.

I look into Fiona’s face, waiting—wanting desperately—for her to debunk this obscene suggestion, yet her head nods in assent. This revelation strikes me with such force that I’m jerked to my feet.

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

I sulk to the window and look outside. I can’t see the graveyard plant from this vantage—I’m on the wrong side of the hive—but I can make out its shadow. In the last couple of weeks, the freakish thing has reached fifty feet tall, and half again as wide. By all appearances, it has completely broken free of its genetic lineage—it’s a bona fide tree now, with a base nearly two feet across. Something about it frightens me more than anything else here. I can’t put my finger on what has my warning bells clanging with such concentrated vigor—this BP is only one compared to an entire field of creepy flora, after all—but I feel that much more at unease now, realizing that something so sinister has become integral to our corporate success.

Actually, in the days that follow, I suspect Rogers and Cutterly may have become even more wary than me—and that’s saying something. This isn’t a conclusion I’ve reached on a hunch, either. The evidence is in plain sight, and it’s impossible to ignore.

First, neither is willing to approach the graveyard for any reason. Instead, either I or Grogan must check the tree for new buds, which are indicators that pollination has occurred. This doesn’t seem like a fair division of labor, but neither does it seem worth making a stink over.

Secondly, I’ve walked into the utility room on more than one occasion to find one or both of them staring out the window at the massive plant—not as if transfixed, exactly; it’s more like they’re keeping a watchful eye peeled, waiting fearfully for something to happen.

The thing that has me wholly convinced, though, is their daily visits to the infirmary. While the rest of us are checked out weekly, as has been routine since Winkley left us, Rogers and Cutterly insist on a daily battery of tests. It isn’t lost on me that they haven’t encouraged me or Grogan to do likewise—they’re as thick as thieves, those two—and my gut tells me they know something. They know something that I don’t, and I have this nagging sense that if I’m going to live much longer, I’ve got to find out what it is.

Grogan left this morning for one of his ambiguous supply runs. I watched his ship burn through the atmosphere and imagined I was aboard, headed back to Earth. Though I knew quite well that nothing good would come of it, I allowed myself a few minutes to long for home—for the taste of real food, the smell of flowers, the feel of a woman on my arm. Even the all but forgotten vibration of my NanoPrint. The sting of this careless reminiscence has left me emotionally perforated, as if each memory has punctured my heart until it can no longer retain any peace.

The mother plant appears to have reached her full height, finally. It’s over a hundred feet tall now. With Grogan gone, Fiona assists me in deburring its trunk of gametophytes, which will be transplanted later to the crop field—as if we need more. Thanks to similar efforts, our garden of once-lonely sires has slowly garnered female companionship, the largest of which is already twenty feet tall. The females are easy to spot: like their mother, their leaves are blood red, void of spore nodes, and a little smaller than those of their male counterparts.

The BPs don’t make me as nervous as they once did, yet I’m continually repulsed by the mother plant, knowing that she’s grown to such extraordinary size from the nutrient-rich innards of my friend. Winkley’s body is gone now, every bit of him absorbed greedily by the plant—flesh, bones, even his clothes.

Filling my bag with tiny gametophytes—doing my best to forgive nature for her ugly ways—I suddenly glimpse something that nearly causes me to stumble over my own feet. Fiona sees it too and, being farther away than me, says, “Is that ...?”

Her thought is left hanging, but I think I know where it was headed. As I blink to reset my vision, however, I realize I have no idea what I’m looking at. From the corner of my eye, I see Fiona drop her bag and bounce toward me. Her smile is manic, strangely inviting. Confused, my pulse quickens, my arms open instinctively to accept her embrace.

I can’t believe this is happening!

But she brushes past me as if I’m not even here.

Man, I’m an idiot
.

Oblivious, Fiona hastens to examine the true object of her affection, which resembles a mango—or perhaps a small coconut—dangling overhead from a thick branch. It must’ve grown there overnight—it certainly wasn’t there yesterday. It’s too high above the ground to reach, so she peers up at it, standing on a swollen root at the base of the tree to get closer.

“It worked!” she gasps. “I can’t believe it!”

“What is it?” I inquire, still quietly mortified.

She doesn’t answer me. Instead, she bounces back to the b-hive, leaving me alone with the only other woman in my life—who, incidentally, would surely eat me if she could only get her hungry roots into me. I’m surprised by this, and a little hurt—Fiona’s normally a stickler for detail, and she’s broken one of her own highest commandments by abandoning me. In this way, it’s like I never left Earth—who knew the saga of rejection would follow me all the way to freaking Mars?

Several minutes later, she reappears—not with help, or even a sampling kit, mind you—but with a mop handle, of all things. Before I can even guess at her intentions—and without so much as a trite apology for deserting me—Fiona begins swinging ineffectively at the melon with her stick. It’s truly comical to watch—if she was one of the guys, I’d happily offer some crude commentary—but my mother raised a gentleman. Well, technically Stewart and Arthur did, but I suppose my mom got the ball rolling.

Nevertheless, I take over and knock the bulb free on my second try. It lands with an audible
thunk,
sending plumes of dust into the air before bouncing to a stop at our cleated feet. Fiona bends to retrieve it, beaming through her faceplate. I can’t help but beam, too—I’m feeling unnaturally proud of myself, and who knows: maybe she’ll want to reward my considerable contribution.

But alas, I’m forgotten again, almost instantly. Fiona examines the fallen gourd with unbridled curiosity, cooing and grinning down on it like a mother over her newborn. My mouth forms a childish scowl.

“Fiona?” I grumble. She turns to me and, seeing my consternation—along with no small amount of dejection, I’m sure—her smile flickers, exposing—what is that, embarrassment? Guilt? “What’s going on?” I demand. “What the heck is that thing?”

“It’s a seedpod, Wil.”

“A seedpod,” I parrot. “Why would a BP produce both gametophytes
and
seeds?”

Fiona giggles and bats her gorgeous eyes. Dang, she’s too cute. It’s like trying to stay mad at a puppy: my heart bubbles over like a cauldron on a roaring campfire.

“Don’t look so grim, Wil—”
Grim? My lust face looks
grim
?
“—this is what we’ve all been waiting for.”

“I don’t understand—we’ve been waiting for it to change reproductive behaviors ... again?”

She caresses the swollen pod for another moment, gloved fingers bumping over rounded striations on its surface, and then turns to face me squarely. “That’s not what this is, Wil.
This
,” she says, drawing attention to the pod by raising it between us, “isn’t an unplanned mutation.”

I shrug. “Okay, I’ll bite. So what makes you so confident?”

“Easy: I designed it this way. Normally, flowering plants provide fruit or nectar as an incentive for insects and animals to participate in their pollination. But for a long time, we’ve been able to genetically encourage the growth of seedless fruit—useful to us, useless to the plant. Same thing here, only somewhat reversed.”

Sigh.
“As usual, Doc, you’ve completely lost me.”

“What I mean is, this seedpod serves no reproductive purpose to the plant.”

I hope my denseness is at least remotely endearing, because it’s about to rear its ugly head again. “So, uh, what exactly is the point of it, then?”

“Don’t you see, Wil?”
Honestly, do you really have to ask, my dear?
“This is what we’ve been working for since day one—this is literally the fruit of our labor.”

Inside the pod, small capsules resembling the seeds of strawberries are suspended in a dense, gelatinous pulp. While they look convincingly like seeds to my unscientific eye, they don’t quite fit the formal definition—according to Fiona, anyway—since they’re incapable of germination. Nevertheless, for lack of a better word, I can’t help but think of them as seeds.

Remarkably, each one concentrates BP7’s enhanced medicinal properties into a very tiny—and naturally stable—package. The industrial payoff is huge: these seedlike capsules take up very little space, they’re relatively easy to harvest, and they’re naturally resilient against even the most extreme elements. And, of course, the plants themselves need not be hacked to pieces in the process of reaping, so the production cycle can be repeated outside of seasonal confines.