Welcome to the Greenhouse (6 page)

“Mm-hm. Compromises and all.”

“Are you glad?”

Jane thinks a bit. “On the whole,” she says finally, “Yes, very glad.”

By the third day Jane and Kaylee have developed a routine. They’ve run out of bottled water for washing and cooking, so Kaylee hauls it a bucket at a time from the cistern—the pump house is gone but the cistern is below grade and is still there, still full—and Jane purifies it with tablets from the first-aid box. They take turns feeding and changing the hatchlings, all six of whom are eating and pooping up a storm, and have grown amazingly on bites of low-fat kibble; they’re all-over gray fuzz now, with open eyes and big yellow mouths. Jane and Kaylee don’t bother with a fire except at night, when they wash up all the dishes and then themselves with minimal amounts of water from the kettle. (Kaylee washes out her underwear, the only pair she’s got, and dries it by the embers.) They take naps after lunch. Kaylee’s period starts: no big deal, she’s got pads and cramp pills. Kaylee changes the bandage on Jane’s arm, which doesn’t seem infected and has started to heal, though if it doesn’t get stitched up soon she’ll have one humongous scar. They’ve shoved all the loose junk in the basement against the walls, so they have more room in there, and a clear path from the shelter to the window.

On the third afternoon it rains. Their ceiling, which is the upstairs floor, leaks in a few places, so they retreat to the shelter with their bedding and Jane’s chair, and bring the dogs back inside. “No fire tonight,” Jane prophesies, though they’ve anticipated rain, and brought some firewood inside to keep it dry. “We’ll have one in the morning if it’s still raining at dinnertime.” Jane breaks out an old board game, Clue, which they play by solar lantern light.

In the middle of the second game the dogs leap up and dash to the open window, barking wildly. A moment later they can both hear it: the deep nasal roar of a helicopter, flying low. Kaylee skins out of shelter, basement, and window in a flash, and jumps up and down in the rain, waving a blanket, yelling, “We’re here! We’re down here!” They couldn’t have actually heard her over the racket, but an amplified voice from heaven thunders, “We see you! Stand by!”

Jane comes carefully through the window too now, wearing a rain jacket, and waves too, and tells the dogs to be quiet. The chopper hovers, then gradually settles in the hayfield next to the garden, and a guy in a yellow rain slicker jumps out and hurries toward them. “Jane Goodman? Kaylee Perry? You ladies all right—any injuries?”

“Jane’s got a bad cut,” Kaylee says, dancing around in the rain, excited by the suddenness of rescue, “but I’m fine! Are my mom and dad okay?”

“They’re just dandy, and they sure do want to see you!” To Jane he says, “The tornado passed west of Lawrenceburg but Frankfort got clobbered. An EF3, they’re saying. We been busy.” He looks Jane over critically, sees she’s not too badly hurt. “Okay, let’s get going then,” the guy says, turning to head back to the chopper.

Kaylee starts to hurry after him, but stops abruptly. “The hatchlings! Wait, I have to get…” she doubles back and pops through the window.

While she’s stuffing a few things into her backpack, and putting the bowl of tree swallows into a rainproof plastic bag, she can hear them talking. “Baby birds,” Jane’s explaining. She’ll just be a second. But I’ve got two dogs here, I can’t leave them. I’ll stay till we can all be lifted out together. Or till the road’s open.” Kaylee’s mouth falls open; Jane’s not coming?

“What about the cut?” says the guy in the slicker, and Jane’s voice says, “It’ll keep.”

“Supplies?”

“Running low, but enough for another day or so.”

“We’ll drop you a bag of stuff on the next trip out. Should be able to pick you all up tomorrow.”

Jane’s not coming! Kaylee pops through the window between the dogs, who are barking again because of all the commotion, without the bowl of hatchlings or her backpack. “Jane, listen, if you’re not leaving, I’m not either. You need me to change your bandage.”

She’s the only one not wearing rain gear and she’s standing in the rain getting soaked. The adults look at her with surprise and consternation. “Honey, your parents need to see you, I’ll be fine here for another day or so.”

“We’ll be back tomorrow to pick up this lady and the dogs,” says the EMS guy. “You need to get on home.”

“No,” Kaylee says. She backs away from them. “I won’t go so don’t try to make me. Not till Jane does. As long as my parents know I’m fine, I’m staying here with her.”

“I appreciate it, hon, I really do,” Jane starts to say, “but—”

“No!”
She stamps her foot; why won’t they take her seriously? “I’m not leaving you here by yourself!”

The rain stops after all in time for them to have a hot supper, consisting of some of the food the chopper dropped off an hour before. Hot soup. Bacon and cheese sandwiches on fresh bread, mm. Apples. Bananas. Even Ding Dongs. Kaylee got the fire going herself, though not with one match. More like fifteen. “How long do you think it’ll take to get your new house built?” she asks now, licking Ding Dong off her lips. She feeds each dog a piece of banana.

Jane is staring into Kaylee’s fire. She looks up. “Hm?”

“To replace this one,” Kaylee says. “How long?”

“Oh—” Jane sighs heavily. “I don’t think… it doesn’t make much sense, does it? Everybody says I’m nuts anyway, living out here alone in the middle of nowhere. I’m almost seventy, Kaylee. I’d been hoping to hang on a while longer, but maybe the tornado just forced a decision I’ve been putting off.”

Kaylee sits up straight on the log. Her heart starts pounding. “What do you mean?”

“There’s a retirement community in Indiana I’ve been looking at. Maybe it’s time.”

Stricken, Kaylee says, “But—you have to build a new house
here!
What about the birds, what are they supposed to do if you’re not here? What would the
hatchlings
have done?”

Jane smiles. “The birds got along without me before I came. They’ll be okay. I gave them a nice boost for a while, that’s worth something; and as for the hatchlings, they have you to thank more than me.”

Abruptly Kaylee bursts into tears, startling herself and making Jane jump. “What about
me
then? How am
I
gonna learn everything if you go away? What if the
Hubbells
went somewhere, just when you found out you wanted to live like them and be like them, and come see them all the time and help out, and—and feed the goats when they cut their arms or whatever, how would
you
feel?” She wipes her face on her sleeve, but the tears won’t stop coming.

“Mercy,” Jane says mildly after a minute. “I apologize, Kaylee. I had no idea you felt like that.”

“Well, I do,” she says, sniffling.

“Well, in that case, I guess I might have to think again. No promises, mind, but I won’t decide anything just yet.” She smiles. “You came at me out of left field with that one.”

Kaylee wipes her sleeve across her eyes and smiles back shakily. “We’ll get you a cell phone. Then if something happens, you won’t be out here alone in the middle of nowhere ‘cause you can call
me.
You wouldn’t have to text message or anything.”

Bunky Sansom was the kind of man who knew that the time to say yes was when all around him were saying no. Or vice versa. That’s how he got to be a multibillionaire.

When he heard the United Nations Secretary-General say, “Climate change is now a reality. Nothing we can do in our lifetimes can reverse it,” Bunky’s answer was, “I don’t buy it, lady. Something can always be done.”

The Secretary-General’s image was superimposed on video of the last dike failing on the last of Kiribati’s storm-swept chain of islands. Bunky watched the remaining few thousand of the now drowned nation’s population forming forlorn lines and wading out to the U.N. flotilla that would take them to join the rest of their compatriots huddled in Australian and New Zealand refugee camps.

He told the hi-def to turn itself off and stepped out onto the balcony of his mountainside eyrie, with its grand-scale view of Vancouver’s golden towers, crowded together within the confines of the massive seawall that had been one of Canada’s bicentennial projects. But instead of looking down at the place where he had made his wealth, he looked up and saw the stars.

That’s when he got the idea. “We need help,” he said. “It’s gotta be out there, somewhere.”

Bunker Hill Sansom—though he told everyone to call him Bunky, and God help any who didn’t—had made his billions by finding new ways to do old things. Inarguably, his ways were better ways, provided your definition of “better” was “more fashionable.” He had pioneered the genetic redesign of key elements of the human genome—well, not the actual redesign, but the marketing of the application, through a worldwide string of franchise clinics that sold the fruits of other people’s genius to the eager masses.

So while others were eliminating hereditary disease or enhancing intelligence, Sansom was making it possible for parents to bear children with huge, dark eyes the size of silver dollars—you couldn’t look at them without saying, “Aw,”—or with the silky blue hair that, this year, was all the rage in Japan. He was already taking preorders for next year’s sensation: feathers!

As soon as he received his inspiration about help from the stars, Bunky put some people on it. They reported back that scientists had been scanning the stars for intelligent signals for about a century. “And what have they got?” he said.

“Well, nothing,” said his number-one baby-strangler. Actually, Bunky had never happened to need a baby strangled, but if he ever did, Number-One was there to take care of it.

“Nothing? A hundred years and they’ve got nothing?”

“They don’t have much money.”

“How much is not much?” Bunky said. He didn’t believe the number his people gave him. It was less than he’d spent on media alone when he’d launched the modification that let people have babies that produced excrement in about the same quantity and conformation as a rabbit’s. “Chicken feed,” he said. “Put a coupla billion into it.”

His people went away and put a couple of billion into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Every month, he got reports; every month, progress was skimpy. Like the time his team reported that they’d overheard signals from deeper in the galaxy that were definitely coherent, but the scientists decoding the transmissions concluded that the senders were insectoids.

“Insectoids?” Bunky said. “You mean, like, bugs?”

“Yes, sir,” said Number-One.

“Big bugs?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bunky shivered. “Give ‘em another billion but tell ‘em they gotta look somewheres else. Bugs ain’t gonna help us.”

More months went by. The sea barriers protecting lower Manhattan cracked then collapsed under the continuous battering from Atlantic waves. “I told ‘em they shouldn’ta let the mob finesse those construction contracts,” Bunky said. He called Number-One and said, “Whatta we hear from space?”

The man had just been about to call the boss. “Something good,” he said.

“Not bugs?”

“Not bugs. More like slugs, but smart slugs.”

“What’s good about smart slugs?” Bunky said.

“They sent through the schematics for a different kind of communicator. We can talk to them in real time, no more waiting years for messages to go out and come back.”

“That sounds good.”

A week went by. Number-One called back. “We made contact.”

“Excellent. Can they help us?”

“There’s a problem.”

“What problem?”

“Well, we established communication, but the only thing they wanted to know is did we have any
fafashertzz
we wanted to get rid of?”

“Fafashertzz?”
Bunky said. “What’s
fafashertzz?”

“They sent another schematic. It appears to be what our scientists call a transuranic element, but way heavier than anything we’ve ever conceived of. You’d need a cyclotron the size of the moon to make it.”

“So our guys told these slugs we were all out of
fafashertzz?”

“They did.”

“And?”

“Dial tone. No answer. Nada. Mukwoy.”

“Buncha jerks!” Bunky said. “Still, whatta ya expect from slugs?”

“But there’s good news,” said Number-One. “

Tell me.”

“The communicator works on other frequencies. Our brainiacs say it looks like we can start calling around, see if we can find someone not so single-minded.”

Bunky had built his business partly on an aggressive telemarketing campaign. “Put another billion into it,” he said, “build a few million of those things and hire India to make the calls.”

To himself, he said,
This works out, I could rule the world.
And when Bunky Sansom talked to himself, he never indulged in hyperbole.

“It’s looking good, boss.”

“It better,” Bunky said. For the umpteenth time, the worst-case global warming scenarios had proved to be too optimistic: now the U.N. climatologists were predicting that everything from the Gulf of Mexico to the Black Hills was going to end up as a warm, shallow sea. “So whatta we got?”

“We’re talking to about twenty civilizations, maybe half of them within
bluberiskint
distance.”

“What’s this
bluberiskint?”

“Seems to be the main purpose of
fafashertzz—some
kind of interstellar faster-than-light drive.”

“So, we’re talking to ten or a dozen kindsa space aliens,” Bunky said. A thought occurred to him. “How many of them are bugs?”

“Big bugs?”

“Size don’t matter.”

“Three.”

“And the rest? Can they help us?”

Number-One made an
it-ain’t-good-news
face. “Most of them first want to know if we’ve got any
fafashertzz.”

Bunky looked at the ceiling, which was painted with scenes of triumph from his long, contrarian career. “Give me somethin’ here,” he said, “’fore I drown.”

Number-One said, “There’s one good prospect.” He caught his boss’s sideways look and added, “And they’re not bugs or slugs. They look like big birds, although they’ve got teeth.”

Bunky tried it out in his head. “Birds aren’t so bad. How big?”

“Pretty big. Hard to tell. Maybe twenty feet high.”

“That’s some bird,” Bunky said. “And with teeth yet.”

“The thing is,” Number-One said, “they said they were glad we got in touch. They’re familiar with our world. When we told them it was heating up, the answer came back: ‘Not a problem.’”

“Not a problem?” Bunky said the words again, slowly. “I like their attitude. And they’re within whatsit distance?”

“They can be here in a month.”

Bunky didn’t get where he was by procrastinating. He slapped one plump hand down onto the marble top of his decision desk. “Sign ‘em to an exclusive contract. Give ‘em whatever they want.”

“Already done,” said Number-One. “Everything we proposed, they said, ‘Not a problem.’”

“I like these birds,” Bunky said. “Get the PR and media people in here. We gotta plan the announcement.”

The world took Bunky Sansom to its bosom like never before. He had more honorary citizenships, keys to cities, and propositions from hot celebrity babes than he knew what to do with. Not only did “Not a problem” become his signature phrase, but three countries and seven states adopted it as their official mottoes. Privately, he was already negotiating the protocols that would see him become
de facto
ruler of the world.

Three weeks after he made the big announcement, the first of the expected spaceships were detected decelerating out beyond the orbits of the gas giants. Two days later, the lead ship eased itself into orbit and then, after circling Earth a few times, descended gently into the atmosphere and came to hover over the coordinates Bunky’s people had sent. For his convenience, the contact site was the roof of the Sansom Enterprises head office, a vast, truncated pyramid overlooking the sea-girt island that was all that now remained of Vancouver.

The roof was huge, but even so, the ship was too large to land on it. It was too large to land on the shrunken city. Instead it hovered a few yards above where Bunky waited with the Secretary-General, a flock of presidents and prime ministers, a few kings and queens, and one ayatollah.

From the ship’s flat base, a long, wide ramp uncurled itself. There was a pregnant pause, then the first of the arrivals came down the sloping gangway.

“That’s some bird,” Bunky said to Number-One. “Twenty-feet, nothin’—that thing goes thirty.”

“I don’t think it’s a bird,” Number-One said. “It’s got feathers, all right, but those are arms, not wings. And those teeth—”

The Secretary-General was speaking. She offered a welcome from all the people of Earth, and thanked the newcomers for their kindness in coming to help with the problem of global warming. Bunky stepped up proudly beside her, carefully prepared speech in hand.

The huge feathered being opened its mouth in a kind of smile, revealing dozens of teeth shaped like curved daggers. Its voice was a series of hisses and squawks, but Bunky heard a translation from an earpiece that connected to a device that was also the result of the communicator schematic the slugs had sent through. He had already made a fresh billion from manufacturing it.

“We keep telling you,” the creature said, “it’s not a problem—it’s a solution.” It cast its plate-sized, yellow-irised eyes across the crowd of dignitaries, then focused on the king of Tonga. A clawed hand as wide as an armchair scooped up the portly monarch. Then, almost before the king could scream, the foot-long teeth bit off his top half.

The jaws crunched. A spray of blood, bone flakes, and meat scraps speckled the heads and shoulders of the dignitaries as they turned and fought each other to reach the roof’s single exit. Bunky heard the voice in his ear say, “Hey, didn’t I tell you they’d taste just like
sheeshrak?
Come on, try one!”

Then the claws closed around Bunky’s torso—he was the plumpest specimen still uncaught—and he was carried to the edge of the roof. He saw the big three-toed feet sink deep into the tar-and-gravel surface with each step. From behind his captor he heard a cacophony of screams and feeding sounds, while the translator conveyed the squabbles over the choicer morsels.

Soon it grew quiet. He twisted in the thing’s scaly grip and saw it looking out over the warm sea, its nostrils distending as it breathed in the thick and sultry air. Above it, the sky was now full of immense ships.

The great voice hissed and clacked, the translation duly fed into the billionaire’s ear: “It’s so good to be back. It’ll be like we never left.”

“Listen,” Bunky gasped, as he was lifted and the bloodstained jaws opened wide.

A moment later, the translator said, sliding down the dinosaur’s gullet, “Or maybe not
sheeshrak.
Maybe
chikkichuk.”