Best Science Fiction of the Year 1984 Part 27

"Oh yes," she says casually as we unsuit in our cabin. 'I have had a very interesting talk with the Bionics Interplane-tary 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 alarm-ingly. 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 an-cestors, 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 G.o.ds-the Lord of the Millennium-floats the frail foetus (lu-minous 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 inter-est 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, look-ing 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 com-pany, 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 topromise 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 entre-preneur in a safe-looking conventional industry, sat comfort-ably 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 acc.u.mulated 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 sky-sc.r.a.pers 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 con-centrated by foliage, smelted by energy extracted from rotting compost, created the fleet of s.p.a.ceships whereby the freshly-rechristened Bionics Interplanetary would spread the irresist-ible message to the rest of the system. Blue-green algae on Mars.

Lichens on Venus.

All the acc.u.mulated 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, h.o.a.rded 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 promis-ing t.i.tan 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, strang-ers 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 s.p.a.ceport. As we exchange our vows, the drive is cut and we achieveweightlessness. We are swept off our feet, head over heels, revolving around each other in the great control bub-ble, 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, anch.o.r.ed to cleats in the walls, ringingly cheer us, delight and relief shining in their faces.

We land.

I step out of the s.p.a.ceship and straight into shock. Out-doors without protection, I imagine myself suffocating in the oxygen-rich atmosphere, i choke. Strange pollens and per-fumes irritate my respiratory system. I weep. Gravity clamps my feet to the ground. I stumble. The swaying green build-ings tower alarmingly above me.

I cling to Beanshoot for support. He is smiling expan-sively, entranced by the mobile plants which cl.u.s.ter around us, fronds upraised to savour our carbon dioxide, calyces begging our hands for pollination. My mother, ignoring ev-erything external, embraces us both in an excess of irrepress-ible joy.

The President of Bionics Interplanetary himself strides towards us, kicking aside the floral carpet which has pros-trated 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 gla.s.s and metal modules grafted to the branches of a tranquillised oak. Accompanied by a fussing retinue of BI primpers, bustling around us with clothes, jew-els, 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 p.u.b.escent 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 ma.s.sage 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 infor-mal reception at the top of the BI tower. We sit apart, both wrapped in the revived fantasies of our interrupted adoles-cence. Crowds line the streets, staring at us in silent awe. The whole city is in bloom, our floral portraits on huge h.o.a.rdings, 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 dizzy-ing 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 garments 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 exis-tence, 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 por-traits burn through the night.

The morning brings the President, stern and distant, in-forming 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.

My mother weeps and draws the blinds against the alien landscape, her triumph turned to bitterness.

Sad music emanates noncommittally from the holovision.

Above my aching heart, a hard seed is setting in the ovary of my breast flower.

My dancing dress has died and hangs limp and brown on the chairback.

A green tendril sneaks under the door sill, avoiding my mother's field of vision as she sobs in front of the dresser mirror. Hour by hour, it inches across the floor. I watch it silently. As dawn approaches, it reaches my bed and tugs at my hand. My mother is snoring in her chair. I put on my old s.p.a.cesuit liners and go out after it.

I am not in the well-trimmed streets through which we flew on rainbow birdwings amid showers of petals and cascades of multicoloured blossoms opening in sequence. I am not wor-shipped by adoring throngs but stalked by skulking tigers and shambling apes, their mean human faces poking through the transplanted fur. Most of the buildings have gone wild and are sprouting shapeless spare rooms in which these beasts have made their untidy nests. A bird the size of a light aircraft takes off, its ma.s.sive wings clattering, a shredded biotechnical garment dangling from its beak. Ugly ambulant plants sidle up and press their tumid calyces against me, dusting my liners with pollen.Before I have gone half a block, my mother catches up. "You cannot go out here! Have you any idea how dangerous it is? These people are animals!" Outside Snakey's All-Night Bio Parlour, a pride of mangy lions are tearing at a headless torso, their tacky manes clotted with blood. Ignoring my mother's disgust, I follow the vine to its conclusion.

We find Beanshoot in a tangle of service roots at the base of the BI tower. Only his head is visible above the blanketing undergrowth. He is lying in a bower of flowers, protected by a cage of thorns, his face as contented as when he suckled a bottle of milk on the Chief Technician's knee.

"What does he mean by this?" my mother yells; "doesn't he know we have been out of our minds with worry?"

Beanshoot turns his head and looks at us comfortably (insolently, I imagine my mother thinking), then turns back to the blossoms which congregate around his head.

"Has he no thought for others? Going off with a plant on his wedding night't These vegetables don't give a d.a.m.n about him. All he is to them is fertiliser-manure!"

She runs bellowing into the BI building to fetch the Presi-dent, who arrives in an armoured suit and respirator, leading an armoured team, mincing in trepidation around the poi-soned spurting spears that the plant has thrown up in self-defence. My mother is screaming even louder because now I am inside the deadly cage.

As soon as she had gone, he turned to me. The vine still in my hands contracted, the barricade of thorns parted, and I crawled inside the green shelter, pushing aside the cl.u.s.tering blossoms and pressing my head to his. Don't worry, I said. I stroked his cheek. It was cold and dewy. His skin looked greenish in the early light. His mouth moved without words. I have just kissed his clammy, pollen-crusted lips and am searching for his honeyed tongue when the President and his team move in, brandishing machetes, flamethrowers and her-bicidal aerosols.

Our thorns go into action.

All the plants in the square join in: flailing venomous tendrils, whiplashing vines, pods bursting like bombs. A stench of sap and roasting vegetables and unsmelt defensive pheno-mones that whip the unprotected into a screaming panic. ("Get out, Jeni, get out!" my mother shrieks, but by now I am bound to the ground by a web of tendrils.) The BI team move on, imperturbable in armour, hacking, burning and spraying, while my mother howls in desperation and I twist in the grip that binds me eye-to-eye with Beanshoot's terrified face.

My hair and liners are on fire. Weedkiller sears my lungs. My blood splatters our faces. A rain of toxic sap slops from the blades of the slashing machetes.

At last the resistance dies down and I lie, gently unbound, in a blackened, blighted thicket; staring into Beanshoot's foggy eyes as the team scrabble to unearth him. They clear the fallen petals from around his head and neck and then stagger back in shock as the unmistakable red/green sandwich of the Bionic Interface comes into view, followed by the wheezing sponge of a failing Green Heart.

From there down, he is all roots.

I faint.

I wake in a rectangular chamber filled with diffuse golden light.

I have no heart. I am not breathing. Pain sc.r.a.pes my eviscerated thorax. My raw skin still burns.

My mother hovers over my bed. "Dead!" she whimpers occasionally. The President paces the room, moving in and out of the field of vision of my unfocused, immobile eyes; his angry strides quaking thefloor. "It has gone much too far!" he mutters, throwing up some shade to let a white rectangle into the golden haze of the room. "Look at them all out there! They have taken over the world! How did we let it happen?"

"Dead," my mother sniffs again, "poor boy!" So it is not I who am dead! Something out of my sight is circulating and ventilating my blood. A new heart and lungs developing among the blood clots in my chest cavity.

"Kidnapped, raped and killed by a f.u.c.king autonomous vegetable!" the President bursts out, agonised.

"Poor boy," my mother says. "n.o.body should die in this day and age. Nole Whard Junior was so innocent." She has heard on the holovision that the plant entrapped him on the dancefloor-trussing him with its tendrils, ga.s.sing him with its perfume, hauling him down the side of the building with its vines.

How terrible it was to see her son-in-law in its rapa-cious clutches!

She sobs. ''Just for a moment, while I watched the rescue, I imagined-of course my mind was mostly on my poor daughter-but I thought I saw-for a second I thought that the silly boy had deliberately interfaced himself with the plant. Then I heard on the holo that the dying vegetable, its roots having already reduced his body to gnawed bones, had cut his throat with one last spiteful slash of its thorns, rather than surrender him. Oh my G.o.d. Jeni cannot hear me, can she?"

"No," says the President. "Your daughter will be uncon-scious for a long time yet. The shock. She has been very badly burned. But you must not worry. We are growing her a new skin. New b.r.e.a.s.t.s as well.

Your daughter will be lovelier than ever."

"The estate..." My continuing good looks a.s.sured, my mother is turning her mind to Nole Whard's billions.

"That will go to his son, of course."

"His son?"

My mother's spasm of alarm rocks my bed.

"Well, naturally, we had him cloned as soon as we could get a sample to the lab. Nole Whard III will be a lively blastocyst by now."

Tears fall onto my bandages. A quavering wail escapes my mother's throat. "My daughter]"

"No safer place for a clone than a female uterus," says the President benignly. I feel my mother relax. Joy eases her heart. Her daughter, virgin mother to the prophet of the steel and concrete renaissance, new skin glowing with radiant ma-ternity, new b.r.e.a.s.t.s swollen with celestial milk.

My mother's vanity squirms in my womb, sickening me. I try to protest. I have no breath. A drug paralyses me.

Smiling, on the arm of the President, my mother leaves the room.