Welcome to the Greenhouse (25 page)

Except, as you now realize, the troopers will not find her body. Only bones.

Out of the last rays of sun, birds come by the hundreds. Except for the rushing of wings, there is no sound, no squawking as they land to tug out her hair and tear at the newly frozen skin, each bit of flesh aglow with her aura. A raven tears off a lip, its head pulled back and claws fighting for purchase on the asphalt. A tufted puffin pokes at an eye. A cormorant takes the other eye, its long throat lifted as it swallows.

A month after we lost the insurance case, two social workers arrived in goose-down jackets, their eyes full of sad smiles. Your father was a good man, they said. And you’re such good kids. Smiling sadly, they told us that the Woman from Ambler thought it best that we stay in familiar surroundings instead of in Anchorage or in foster care. Until we were old enough to make our own choices, our uncle, Preston Robert’s father, would be our legal guardian.

I never said a word in protest. Daddy was dead. I wouldn’t do the same to Gwimaq.

We lost the teacher housing because we no longer had a parent employed by the school. Gwimaq and I took an empty, two-room, low-ceilinged shack by the sea, near where Daddy died. We covered the tiny windows with cardboard to help keep out the cold and ran the potbelly stove when we could afford it. The end of the main room had collapsed. Water sloshed up between the planks and crept into a corner of the ancient linoleum when the tide was high. I left school. I couldn’t be in Daddy’s classroom anymore. There were too many memories.

I let numbers numb me, and I learned to close my eyes a lot.

After I had my first baby I would whisper to him whenever I tucked him into the sleeping bag on the highest and driest part of the floor.
You are descended from Maniilaq, a great shaman. He lived two hundred years ago and predicted the coming of the whites. He said that boats would fly in the air or be propelled by fire. He also said that Ambler would become an enormous city, but I have seen his vision a thousand times, and it is not a city on the tundra, it is a city in the sky. So sleep, my precious, because a city of stars is watching over you.

It was Gwimaq who suffered the most, I told myself. Like me with my job, he never saw the money for selling his Eskimo soul. He would stagger home exhausted every morning and babysit my son while I checked the bridge. Otherwise he usually sat in the corner, staring at the wall where he had hidden his.22, and waiting to hook up to the computer again. It was a habit, he said, that he despised but could not deny himself.

I was seven months into my second pregnancy—two hundred and twenty-two thousand, three hundred and twenty minutes after the home pregnancy test told me I was having another baby—when Gwimaq returned one morning so haggard that I thought he had aged a dozen years. He could not hold himself up. He sagged down, his back against the wall, knees up, forehead in his hands, elbows on his knees. Nothing I could do or say could make him budge. In the candlelight his eyes looked sunken, his cheeks like leather.

Finally he said, “Preston Robert plans to open a new market.”

Preston Robert and his friends already had entered the Russian market, helped by Gwimaq’s fluency, a gift Daddy tried to give me and, failing, insisted Gwimaq learn.

“Porn,” he said.

For starters they intended to rape a woman with an oosik, the penis bone of the walrus, which people of our island used to hunt a generation ago. They would capture the act on camera as the computer captured her emotions—to be fed to perverts throughout the world, he told me.

“Preston Robert said you’ll be wearing this.”

From his pocket he took out a collar studded with spikes, sparkling with false diamonds.

So it was not a question of who. But of when. Would they wait for the baby to be born?

That evening Gwimaq left for work without a word, only to return a few minutes later. From his jacket he took a cat’s claw pry-bar that, he said, he had lifted from the custodian closet. He started pulling out the nails of the boards behind which his rifle stood wrapped in plastic. The clip was beside it, in a Ziploc. He inserted the clip, checked the action and wiped the barrel, scope, and stock with a rag.

Then he kissed my forehead. He had to bend down over me, like a dark, gaunt angel as he placed his hands upon my cheeks. “Wait half an hour,” he said. “Then slide the boat into the water, put most of our things in it and start the kicker.” Daddy’s twelve-foot aluminum Lund, one of the few possessions Preston Robert had not taken, mainly because he used it all the time without asking anyway, was among the rocks beside the house.

I was to send the boat into the sea. The current would do the rest, even if the motor quit. Hopefully, everyone would think we had drowned. In the meantime, we would cross the bridge—not to the American mainland, but to Big Diomede. He said he knew a way to climb down the bridge and sneak across the border without the Russian guards spotting us. He had friends on the island.

“When Daddy was alive I wasn’t always out hunting cormorant,” he said, and headed toward the door, rifle in hand.

I stepped in front of him. “You don’t need to do this.”

But we both knew he did. For Daddy. And so Preston Robert and his friends would never touch anyone again.

“Russia no longer honors U.S. extradition requests,” Gwimaq said.

He pushed past me, opened the door and bowed through, the darkness flecked with snow. Then he was gone, shutting the door and working the wooden lever. The door was small, to help keep out bears in the old days.

I did what Gwimaq had asked. As I sent the Lund puttering into fog, moonlight glancing off the aluminum, I heard shots spaced several seconds apart—
bap! bap! bap!—from
the HUD house Preston Robert shared with his friends. The porch light was on. I saw Gwimaq emerge and run toward the bridge—without me. I rushed inside our house, gathered my son in my arms and what I planned to take with us, and was at the door when it opened. Even before Preston Robert bowed through I knew what lesson life was meant to teach me.

That fathers and brothers are forever leaving us.

Preston Robert looked down at me, a line of blood across his temple and scalp. He moved his fingers along the blood as though straightening back his hair, and touched the fingertips to his tongue.

“Your brother never could shoot worth a shit,” he said.

Now that you understand more than what your father and brother tried to teach you, and your aura has united with the aurora, you watch in fascination at the outpouring of numbers from the woman on the bridge, the woman you used to be. Birds peck at them like pebbles, gorge on them as they continue to tear off flesh to take home to youngling.

Thus do the numbers wend through the food chain, linking into sets, forming algorithms. Freed from minds that produced them, they seek justice for the girl, for all the damaged of the world, and for the world herself. There is little left of the ice caps, little of the ocean that has not been spoiled, little air that has not been defiled.

The aurora, linked to every aura, oversees the earth and gathers its intelligence as the numbers coalesce, becoming part of every biome. Your psyche flows inseparable from the numbers, inseparable from the earth, inseparable from the raped domain. You realize that physical causes do not send hurricanes, topple oil rigs, parch deserts, heat the sea. From the aurora, from its timeless moiling beneath the stars, you realize that the world warms not from humans or from sun cycles—but out of anger. She does not seek to heal herself but to kill herself. And all upon her.

You watch with grim satisfaction as water inexorably rises around the island you once called home.

I couldn’t wait until I turned thirteen, so I could play FarmEarth. I kept pestering all three of my parents every day to let me download the FarmEarth app into my memtax. What a little makulit I must have been! I see it now, from the grownup vantage of sixteen, and after all the trouble I eventually caused. Every minute with whines like “What difference does six months make?” And “But didn’t I get high marks in all my omics classes?” And what I thought was the irrefutable clincher, “But Benno got to play when he was only eleven!”

“Look now, please, Crispian,” my egg-Mom, Darla, would calmly answer, “six months makes a big difference when you’re just twelve-point-five. That’s four percent of your life up to this date. You can mature a lot in six months.”

Darla worked as an osteo-engineer, hyper-tweaking fab files for living prosthetics, as if you couldn’t tell.

“But Crispian,” my mito-Mom, Kianna, would imperturbably answer, “you also came close to failing integral social plectics, and you know that’s nearly as important for playing FarmEarth as your omics.”

Kianna worked as a hostess for the local NASDAQ Casino. She had hustled more drinks than the next two hostesses combined, and been number one in tips for the past three years.

“But Crispian,” my lone dad, Marcelo Tanjuatco, would irrefutably reply (I had taken “Tanjuatco,” his last name, as mine, which is why I mention it here), “Benno has a different mito-Mom than you. And you know how special and respected Zoysia is, and how long and hard even she had to petition to get Benno early acceptance.”

Dad didn’t work, at least not for anyone but the polybond. He stayed home, cooking meals, optimizing the house dynamics, and of course playing FarmEarth, just like every other person over thirteen who wasn’t a maximal grebnard.

The way Dad—and everyone else—pronounced Zoysia’s name— all smug, reverential, and dreamy—just denatured my proteome, and I had to protest.

“But Benno and I still share your genes and Darla’s! That’s ninety percent right there! Zoysia’s only ten percent.”

“And you share ninety-five percent of your genes with any random chimp,” said Darla. “And they can’t play FarmEarth either. At least not maybe until that new generation of kymes come online.”

I knew when I was beaten, so I mumbled and grumbled and retreated to the room I shared with Benno.

Of course, at an hour before suppertime he just had to be there… playing FarmEarth.

My big brother Benno was a default-amp kid. His resting brain state had been permanently overclocked in the womb, so even when he wasn’t consciously “thinking” he was processing information faster than you or me. And when he really focused on something, you could smell the neurons burning.

But no good fairy ever gave a gift without a catch. Benno’s outward affect was, well, “interiorized.” He always seemed to be listening to some silent voice, even when he was having a conversation with someone. And I’m not talking about the way all of us sometimes pay more attention to our auricular implants and the scenes displayed on our memtax than we do to the person facing us.

Needless to say, puffy-faced Benno didn’t have much of social life, even at age sixteen. Not that he seemed to care.

Lying on his back on the lower bunk of our sleeping pod, Benno stared at some unknown landscape in his memtax, working his haptic finger bling faster than the Mandarin’s grandson trying to take down Tony Stark’s clone in
Iron Man 10.

I tried to tap into his FarmEarth feed with my own memtax, even though I knew the dataflow was encrypted. But all that happened was that I got bounced to Benno’s public CitizenSpace.

I sat down on the edge of the mattress beside him, and poked him in the ribs. He didn’t flinch.

“Hey, B-man, whatcha doing?”

Benno’s voice was a monotone even when he was excited about something, and dealing with his noodgy little brother was low on his list of thrills.

“I’m grooming the desert-treeline ecotone in Mali. Now go away.”

“Wow! That is so stellar! Are you planting new trees?”

“No, I’m upgrading rhizome production on the existing ones.”

“What kind of effectuators are you using?”

“ST5000 Micromites. Now. Go. Away!”

I shoved Benno hard. “Jerk! Why don’t you ever share with me! I just wanna play too!”

I jumped up and stalked off before he could retaliate, but he didn’t bother to respond.

So there you have typical day in the latter half of my thirteenth year. Desperate pleas on my part to graduate to adulthood, followed by admonitions from my parents to be patient, then by jealousy and inattention from my big brother.

As you can well imagine, the six similar months till I turned thirteen passed by like a Plutonian year (just checked via memtax: 248 Earth years). But finally—finally!—I turned thirteen and got my very own log-on to FarmEarth.

And that’s when the real frustration started!

Kicking a living hacky sack is a lot more fun in meatspace than it is via memtax. You can feel muscles other than those in your fingers getting a workout. Your bare toes dig into the grass. You smell sweat and soil. You get sprayed with saltwater on a hot day. You even get to congratulatorily hug warm girls afterwards if any are in the circle with you. So while all the kids gripe about having to leave their houses every day for two whole shared hours of meatspace schooling at the nearest Greenpatch, I guess that, underneath all our complaints, we really like being face to face with our peers now and then.

That fateful day when we first decided to hack FarmEarth, there were six of us kicking around the sack. Me, Mallory, Cheo, Vernice, Anuta, and Williedell—my best friends.

The sack was an old one and didn’t have much life left in it. A splice of ctenophore, siphonophore, and a few other marine creatures, including bladder kelp, the soft warty green globe could barely jet enough salt water to change its midair course erratically as intended. Kicking it got too predictable pretty fast.

Sensing what we were all feeling and acting first, Cheo, tall and quick, grabbed the sack on one of its feeble arcs and tossed it like a basketball into the nearby aquarium—splash!—where it sank listlessly to the bottom of the tank. Poor old sponge.

“Two points!” said Vernice. Vernice loved basketball more than anything, and was convinced she was going to play for the Havana Ocelotes someday. She hugged Cheo, and that triggered a round of mutual embraces. I squeezed Anuta’s slim brown body—she wore just short-shorts and a belly shirt—a little extra, trying to convey some of the special feelings I had for her, but I couldn’t tell if any of my emotions got communicated. Girls are hard to figure sometimes.

Williedell ambled slow and easy in his usual way over to the solar-butane fridge and snagged six Cokes. We dropped to the grass under the shade of the big tulip-banyan at the edge of the Greenpatch and sucked down the cold soda greedily. Life was good.

And then our FarmEarth teacher had to show up.

Now, I know you’re saying, “Huh? I thought Crispian Tanjuatco was that guy who could hardly wait to turn thirteen so he could play FarmEarth. Isn’t that parity?”

Well, that was how I felt before I actually got FarmEarth beginner privileges, and came up against all the rules and restrictions and duties that went with our lowly ranking. True to form, the adults had managed to suck the excitement and fun and thrills out of what should have been sweet as planoforming—at least at the entry level for thirteen-year-olds, who were always getting the dirty end of the control rod.

“Hi, kids! Who’s ready to shoulder-surf some pseudomonads?”

The minutely flexing, faintly flickering OLED circuitry of my memtax, powered off my bioelectricity, painted my retinas with the grinning translucent face of Purvis Mumphrey. Past his ghostlike augie-real appearance, I could still see all my friends and their reactions.

Round as a moonpie, framed by wispy blond hair, Mumphrey’s face revealed, we all agreed, a deep sadness beneath his bayou bonhomie. His sadness related, in fact, to the assignment before us.

Everyone groaned, and that made our teacher look even sadder.

“Aw, Mr. Mumphrey, do we hafta?” “We’re too tired now from our game.” “Can’t we do it later?”

“Students, please. How will you ever get good enough at FarmEarth to move up to Master level, unless you practice now?”

Master level. That was the lure, the tease, the hook, the far-off pinnacle of freedom and responsibility that we all aspired to. Being in charge of a big mammal, or a whole forest, say. Who wouldn’t want that? Acting to help Gaia in her crippled condition, to make up for the shitty way our species had treated the planet, stewarding important things actually large enough to see.

But for now, six months into our novice status, all we had in front of us was riding herd on a zillion hungry bacteria. That was all the adults trusted us to handle. The prospect was about as exciting as watching your navel lint accumulate.

At this moment, Mr. Mumphrey looked about ready to cry. This assignment meant a lot to him.

Our teacher had been born in Louisiana, prior to the Deepwater Horizon blowout. He had been just our age, son of a shrimper, when that drilling rig went down and the big spew filled the Gulf with oil for too many months. Now, twenty years later, we were still cleaning up that mess.

So rather than see our teacher break down and weep, which would have been yotta-yucky, we groaned some more just to show we weren’t utterly buying his sales pitch, got into comfortable positions around the shade tree (I wished I could have put my head into Anuta’s lap, but I didn’t dare), and booted up our FarmEarth apps.

Mr. Mumphrey had access to our feeds, so he could monitor what we did. That just added an extra layer of insult to the way we were treated like babies.

Instantly, we were out of augie overlays and into full virt.

I was point-of-view embedded deep in the dark waters of the Gulf, in the middle of a swarm of oil-eating bacteria, thanks to the audiovideo feed from a host of macro-effectuators that hovered on their impellors, awaiting our orders. The cloud of otherwise invisible bugs around us glowed with fabricated luminescence. Fish swam into and out of the radiance, which was supplemented by spotlights onboard the effectuators.

Many of the fish showed yotta-yucky birth defects.

The scene in my memtax also displayed a bunch of useful supplementary data: our GPS location, thumbnails of other people running FarmEarth in our neighborhood, a window showing a view of the surface above our location, weather reports—common stuff like that. If I wanted to, I could bring up the individual unique ID numbers on the fish, and even for each single bacteria.

I got a hold of the effectuator assigned to me, feeling its controls through my haptic finger bling, and made it swerve at the machine being run by Anuta.

“Hey, Crispy Critter, watch it!” she said with that sexy Bollywood accent of hers.

Mumphs was not pleased. “Mr. Tanjuatco, you will please concentrate on the task at hand. Now, students, last week’s Hurricane Norbert churned up a swath of relatively shallow sediment north of our present site, revealing a lode of undigested hydrocarbons. It’s up to us to clean them up. Let’s drive these hungry bugs to the site.”

Williedell and Cheo and I made cowboy whoops, while the girls just clucked their tongues and got busy. Pretty soon, using water jets and shaped sonics aboard the effectuators, we had created a big invisible water bubble full of bugs that we could move at will. We headed north, over anemones and octopi, coral and brittle stars. Things looked pretty good, I had to say, considering all the crap the Gulf had been through. That’s what made FarmEarth so rewarding and addictive, seeing how you could improve on these old tragedies.

But herding bugs underwater was hardly high-profile or awesome, no matter how real the resulting upgrades were. It was basically like spinning the composter at your home: a useful duty that stunk.

We soon got the bugs to the site and mooshed them into the tarry glop where they could start remediating.

“Nom, nom, nom,” said Mallory. Mallory had the best sense of humor for a girl I had ever seen.

“Nom, nom, nom,” I answered back. Then all six of us were nom-nom-noming away, while Mumphs pretended not to find it funny.

But even that joke wore out after a while, and our task of keeping the bugs centered on their meal, rotating fresh stock in to replace sated ones, got so boring I was practically falling asleep.

Eventually, Mumphs said, “Okay, we have a quorum of replacement Farmers lined up, so you can all log out.”

I came out of FarmEarth a little disoriented, like people always do, especially when you’ve been stewarding in a really unusual environment. I didn’t know how my brother Benno kept any sense of reality after he spent so much time in so many exotic FarmEarth settings. The familiar Greenpatch itself looked odd to me, like my friends should have been fishes or something, instead of people. I could tell the others were feeling the same way, and so we broke up for the day with some quiet goodbyes.

By the time I got home, to find my fave supper of goat empanadas and cassava-leaf stew laid on by Dad, with both Moms there, too, I had already forgotten how bored and disappointed playing FarmEarth had left me.

But apparently, Cheo had not.

The vertical playsurface at Gecko Guy’s Climbzone was made out of MEMs, just like a pair of memtax. To the naked eye, the climbing surface looked like a gray plastic wall studded with permanent handholds and footholds, little grippable irregular nubbins. But the composition of near-nanoscopic addressable scales meant that the wall was instantly and infinitely configurable.

Which is why, halfway up the six-meter climb, I suddenly felt the hold under my right hand, which was supporting all my weight, evaporate, sending me scrabbling wildly for another.

But every square centimeter within my reach was flat.

The floor, though padded, was a long way off, and of course I had no safety line.

So even though I was reluctant to grebnard out, I activated the artificial setae in my gloves and booties, and slammed them against the wall.