Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (10 page)

“We haven’t collected any data or evaluated anything yet.” Nikki jumped staunchly to the defense of the tree she was clearly already three-quarters of the way to adopting. “Scientists don’t know the answer when we start—that’s the whole point of what we do.”

“Very true.” Glenn’s smile at the tech held more affection than he likely realized. “But I’m the one who has to deal with the bodies while you figure out your answers.”

I winced—I didn’t think he’d meant that literally, but he’d just poured rocket fuel on the admin team’s worry. Mary Louise pinned me with a barracuda gaze almost as good as Yesenia’s. “Grower, if this situation could pose permanent harm to someone, it’s unconscionable that we let it continue.”

She’d felt just fine ignoring it for months. I tried not to think about how it had felt as my cells had been sucked dry of water. And prepared to walk a very fine line—I hadn’t been sent here to protect a tree. “What the tree might be capable of and what we intend to allow are two different things.”

Glenn was studying my face. Clearly he, at least, understood that I’d just taken a stand—and staked my skills on it being a reasonably sane one. “Dr. Lightbody, if you can promise no one will be seriously hurt from this on your watch, then I vote in favor of further study. Very careful further study.”

Nikki squelched a quiet cheer.

He looked her way and his face softened. “I took an oath to do no harm. I’d prefer to extend that as broadly as I can.”

I nodded respectfully, knowing his choice hadn’t been an easy one. And hoped that he’d helped the last person on the fence to decide. I needed them all if I could deliver on the big, scary, unspoken promises I’d just made.

Toli, when she finally moved, did it quickly and with finality. “If I got rid of everyone and everything that made a mess around here, we wouldn’t have any scientists left. Let’s clean this thing up.”

Good enough. The tree wasn’t her priority, but I wanted her on my side anyhow. Bureaucrats, I could deal with. The people who actually know how to get stuff done are a lot harder to fight.

I stood up, my head giving notice that I had about thirty seconds left before it deserted my body and went off in search of a warm, dark cupboard. So I kept it short, sweet, and incontrovertible, and I laid it out with every gram of Fixer authority I could muster. “Jerome, Glenn, Toli, Nikki, and myself will form the investigative team. No decisions will be made concerning the tree in question without my prior approval.”

I held up a hand as Mary Louise started spluttering. “As this appears to be a matter related to Talent and use thereof, it falls under KarmaCorp jurisdiction.” I had no idea if our agreement with the Federation had ever considered this kind of a mess, but I was pretty sure she wouldn’t know either—and I needed to stake my claim before she found a rule book.

She glared, but said nothing. Fixers normally operated with wide latitude, and no Federation bureaucrat would override a Grower taking a position this clear.

Not yet, anyhow.

I looked around at my new team and tried not to sway.

We needed to get to work—the clock was ticking.

G
lenn glared
as I walked into the lab.

I glared back. “I slept for two hours—that was your deal.” And one my head hadn’t given me much choice in agreeing to.

He was already sweeping me with a monitoring device. “Your face is pale, there are still shock circles around your eyes, and your blood pressure is about as good as your average corpse.”

“Thank you for the update,” I said dryly. “I also have a rocking case of nerve shakes and some pretty wild capillary bruising.”

“You need to be in bed.”

I met his eyes with as much firmness as I could dig up on short notice. “We have work to do. I promise to be a well-behaved invalid after we’re done.”

Glenn’s face creased in concern. “You can’t take another hit like that one.”

I was far more aware of the dangers of that than he was. “I don’t intend for it to happen again. I’ve taken precautions.” All the ones I could think of, at least. I wasn’t used to defending myself against attacks, much less one from a tree.

Jerome was over at a bench, intently working with one of his scopes. He’d barely looked up long enough to acknowledge my presence. Nikki careened around him like a dizzy moon who hadn’t figured out her orbit yet.

“They’re waiting on the gene sequencing,” said Toli quietly behind me. “Checking to see if anything’s mutated in the willow’s peripheral cells.”

That made sense. Splicing made for unstable genomes, especially in the early generations, and in parts of an organism that replicated often, things could go awry. The plant version of cancer, or at least rather hasty and unplanned evolution.

“It hasn’t,” said Jerome with finality. “We will find nothing.”

Nikki looked stricken. “It’s the obvious thing to check.”

Her idea, then, which was interesting. I strode over to the bench and got in the way of Nikki’s orbit—it was hurting my eyes to watch. “It’s an excellent thing to rule out. What else have you been working on?”

She brightened a little, but glanced Jerome’s way before she answered. “I ran some leaf and bark extracts through spectroscopy to see if we had any differences in chemical expression from the last baseline.”

Looking for signaling changes. Along with the peripheral mutations, those would have been the first two things I would have taken a look at had I stayed awake. “Find anything?”

This time, her gaze stayed down. “Dr. Salmera is checking my work now.”

I managed not to growl his direction—barely. “As I imagine he hasn’t located any errors, why don’t you tell me what you found, Nikki?”

He looked up at my snotty tone, and I let my eyes say what my words hadn’t.

To my surprise, he colored a little. “Dr. Jeffert’s work is excellent, as always. There are no changes from what we would expect in gene sequencing, expression, or chemical phenotype.”

In other words, the tree wasn’t evolving by any of the usual mechanisms.

“We’d know more—” Nikki halted as we all turned to look at her, and then kept talking, a lot more diffidently. “We need to know how it’s communicating.”

“We tried that.” The lab manager’s voice was brusque, but not condescending. “It didn’t register, not on anything our equipment knows how to measure, anyhow.”

Jerome’s single lifted eyebrow communicated his thoughts, loudly.

Toli stared him down. “Don’t you doubt my skills, boyo. I’ve been running lab gear longer than you’ve been consuming oxygen.”

These guys needed remedial lessons on being a team, and I didn’t have time to dole them out slowly. The words weren’t the problem—things like that got said in friendly labs every day of the week. It was the missing respect that was sandpapering my already-raw nerves. “Let’s start with the assumption that everyone in this lab is very good at their jobs, okay?”

I waited for everyone present to register the tone in my voice. “We have the possibility that something very scientifically exciting has happened here, but we also have a tree that poses significant peril to the humans on Xirtaxis Minor, and a very narrow window to sort that out before the humans here pose a very significant peril to that tree.”

I could feel them all practically snapping to attention. A common denominator was the lifeblood of every good team.

I kept talking, saying what I hadn’t said in the fray in Glenn’s office. “This willow is unique in my experience. I don’t know yet exactly what happened, but you’ve already ruled out that it was something we might expect to see on the evolutionary spectrum.” First team success, even if they hadn’t been paying attention. “She’s worthy of our protection, but to do that, we need to gain knowledge, and we need to do it fast.”

Toli raised an eyebrow. “She?”

This willow had clearly been female. I nodded. Some scientists tried not to personalize the plants they worked with—I wasn’t one of them.

The lab manager shrugged in acquiescence. “Fine. She may be unique, but she also tried to kill you. And she’s hurt a lot of other people here.”

“We don’t know if that was her intent.” And until we did, I wasn’t going to call a tree homicidal. “There are a whole bunch of questions I should have been asked back in the medical pod. I suggest you start asking them.”

I took a deep breath and looked very pointedly at Nikki.

She blushed profusely. “I’m just the tech. Dr. Salmera should be asking you.”

“He’ll get his turn.” I glared at Jerome to make sure he didn’t try to take it now, and then looked back at Nikki. “This team needs every member to be on their best game, and I think pretty highly of techs, so we’re starting with you. If you were in charge of solving this problem, what would you need to know?”

Her cheeks were still shiny and pink, but I could see her brain latching on to the challenge. “Um, well, I’d want to know the trigger. What you did to cause her to freak out.” Her eyes shot to the floor again. “I’m not blaming you.”

She shouldn’t be ruling it out—I hadn’t yet. “Scientists study cause and effect, and it’s pretty clear I was the cause here. Saying so isn’t blame, it’s good investigative research.”

“Um, okay.” Nikki was blinking hard, but she was also visibly gathering her courage. “Then can you tell us what happened in the timeframe leading up to the response from the tree?”

I hid a smile at the suddenly formal language. Now we were getting somewhere. I closed my eyes, calling back the minute or two before arboreal warfare had landed—and chided myself for thinking of it as such. My inner scientist should be holding on to reasonable doubt, even if my Talent wasn’t.

I opened my eyes and spoke to my now-rapt audience. “I’d been sending short pings of Talent into the soil. You can think of them as vibrational messages, traveling through good transmission channels like water molecules or soil minerals.”

Eyes were getting wider. Clearly, they didn’t know much about Growers beyond the usual mythology. Not a surprise—sexy vibes were always a better story than talking to water and dirt. “I sent out a couple of generic messages, and then I shaped a more specific probe.”

Toli’s eyebrows winged up. “Trying to rile it, were you?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t know yet that there was anything to rile. I believed, based on the data, that if there was a plant organism causing the psychological disturbances, I would find it in the experimental domes. I was only seeking preliminary evidence of that.” And hadn’t expected to find it.

Nikki raised her hand diffidently. “When you say you shaped a more specific probe, what exactly did you do?”

She was going to be a very good scientist when she lost the fear and awe. “The previous night, I had experienced a dream very similar to the ones reported by several of the staff here on Xirtaxis Minor. I asked the soil who had sent me the dream.”

Four faces gaped at me.

Glenn recovered first. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

Nikki was hot on his heels. “Plants know what dreams are?”

Hers was the far more interesting question, so I went with that one. “I had to reshape it a couple of times.” I smiled at her. “I’ve had a fair amount of practice translating human-speak to green, growing things.”

She was quiet—and very thoughtful.

Time for a Grower to ask a question or two. I carefully worded it, scientist to scientist—and leaned on the trust that was growing, human being to human being. “Do you have data to add to this, Dr. Jeffert?”

“Maybe.” Her face screwed up in a grimace. “I didn’t say anything because all the dreams people were going on about seemed pretty dark and scary. I figured mine was something different.”

I nodded slowly. “Your dream wasn’t frightening.”

She smiled. “No, not at all. It was more…” She trailed off, glancing at Jerome and then at me. “I don’t know any way to describe this that doesn’t make me sound like a total flake.”

I laughed. “Try being a Grower who talks to plants and occasionally wakes up the next morning in a garden with no idea why she’s there.” That hadn’t happened for a good ten years, but it would make my point.

Nikki relaxed, which was good, because she missed the jerking tautness of the man beside her. I filed that away to consider later—I had bigger fish to fry at the moment.

Or rather, a really helpful little one.

“So I was in this forest, a peaceful one with a high canopy so I could see really well where I wanted to go and everything.”

I could see emotion flitting across the tech’s face as she started to tell the story of her dream. I put my hand down on the bench a short distance from hers. “Nikki, is it okay if I touch your hand lightly while you talk?” It would help me read the underlayers—and I could steady her if she needed it.

She looked a little surprised, but nodded.

I smiled as I laid my fingers gently over hers. “Go ahead. Say more about this forest.”

“It felt eternal, kind of like time had stopped. It was really, really old.”

The forest primeval. “It sounds beautiful.”

“It laughed when I said that.” Nikki’s hand jerked under mine. “That’s where this doesn’t sound very scientific, but I swear it understood me, and it laughed.”

I sent soothing without words. Plants laughing at me was a very regular occurrence.

“That’s all.” Her cheeks looked a little pink. “I felt like a little girl, cuddled by this old, wise grove of trees. It was a really happy dream.”

It was—and it solidified my theories about teenager angst. Or in this case, one taking refuge in a DNA memory of little-girl comfort. “I believe you were picking up on something the willow tree was feeling. Perhaps its ancestors grew in a forest similar to the one you’re describing.”

Nikki gaped at me. “Trees dream?”

Close enough. “Thoughts, memories, dreams—something in that neighborhood, anyhow.”

She was still astonished, but fascination was rapidly taking over. “And I heard her dream?”

Now we were in the land of Grower wild guesses. “I’m hypothesizing that we may be reading the internal experiences of the willow in some way, or she is inadvertently broadcasting them. Something along the lines of a person with psychic sensitivities.” I said the last bit carefully—science had come a long way in the last five hundred years, but those of us who played with the energetic resonances of the universe in ways that were harder to measure often still met with profound levels of skepticism.

Toli snorted. “Those are awfully polite words for saying that she’s reaching out and twisting people’s brains.”

I tried to stay scientific, although I totally agreed. “We don’t know that’s what the willow is trying to do.”

She snorted again—and judging by the quick glance she exchanged with Glenn, he didn’t believe in the tree’s innocence either.

I would get to that, but first I had another Grower question, this time for the man who hadn’t done any talking yet. I looked at Jerome Salmera and reached for the man behind the scientist. “When did you first know the willow tree was the source of the problems here?”

He jumped like I’d stuck him with a hot poker. And then schooled his face back into the bland mask he’d been wearing since I’d arrived. “I am still not at all convinced the data leads to those conclusions.”

I just stared him down. One gardener, calling bullshit on another.

He grimaced. “I had hoped it would grow out of these behaviors.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a young tree. A teenager, in human terms.”

We agreed on that, but the willow would be a teenager for another dozen rotations yet—and teenagers of any species were not known for their emotional stability or sound decision-making. “So you decided not to tell anyone and just out-wait the problem?” That was incredible dereliction of duty, especially for a scientist. And whatever I might believe of this man, that wasn’t on the list.

I closed my eyes, ignoring what I could see and trusting what I knew. And felt the answer, deep in my cells. “No. You’re trying to help. You’re trying to teach her.”

“I’m trying to modify its phenotypic expression,” he said stiffly.

“With what, juiced-up water and soil nutrients?” Toli looked ready to punch him in the nose. “This has been screwing people up, Jerome. Good people.”

People she felt responsible for. I could see the same sentiments flaring in Glenn’s eyes.

And I knew they didn’t understand. Their callings weren’t to the green, growing things.

Mine was, however, and I knew exactly why one scientist had behaved as he had—even if he didn’t yet. I turned to face him, and began with the part of the truth he would likely accept. “You helped create this tree. You feel responsible.” A man protecting the unique and beautiful life form he’d helped to birth.

He nodded shortly. “It’s the chief ethical imperative of all scientists. Everyone here agrees with that.”

I wasn’t at all sure they did, but that was a problem for a different day. “How much success have you had?”

I could see the swift, sad answer in his eyes. “I thought I had achieved more success than the attack on you would indicate. I deeply regret that it happened.”