Seed (26 page)

“Hey, what’s this?” Fiorivani squinted through the netting, then pivoted the spotting scope to point at the valley’s far rim. Dust rose there a kilometer out on the plain.

“Big caravan,” Doss observed through her own scope. A dozen wagons and trucks limped in from the east. PV panels, tiny windmills and kite turbines waved like antennae.

Fifty-odd migrants trudged among vehicles, cloth bundles balanced on their heads, scarves tied over their faces against the dust. As they neared, commotion spread through the valley. Its residents began to scramble. Some climbed the valley’s rim and simply stood watching. Others produced old rifles, slingshots, pistols.

“Looks like the home team don’t want to share its cereal,” Fiorivani guessed.

“Should be interesting,” Doss concurred.

The standoff ensued. Doss kept her eye to the scope. Four hundred valley residents barred the caravan’s way. Words were exchanged. Fingers pointed, then guns. The combat design stalked the gathering’s edge, then loped, panther-quick, back to the dome. She stood before it, face upturned, a penitent before an altar.

“Boss, look.” Fiorivani said.

“I see it.”

A vertical slit appeared before the combat design in the dome’s wall. It widened, two flaps of wall folding over with muscular effort. Doss saw within what looked like a snakeskin floor. Loops of glistening viscera hung from somewhere above. It reminded her of a gigantic abdomen that had been cut open.

A woman stood there. She wore a clean white shift. Doss zoomed her scope.

Saw smooth skin the color of black tea, preternaturally regular features. Recognized almond eyes that gleamed with a bird’s empty intensity.

“I believe I have eyes on primary. You second me on that, Lieutenant?”

“Fucking aye,” Fiorivani confirmed.

“About time,” Casanova said.

“Shut up.” Jake chucked the blond boy’s shoulder with a fist. “Duty, man.
Duty
.”

“You right. I apologize.”

“Don’t sing it to me.”

“You right. I apologize, Boss Momma.”

Doss turned, looked from one
La Chupe
to the other, let her gaze linger on Jake’s resolute face. She recognized, not for the first time, something ardent in the kid’s nature. Concluded this was a good thing.

“Learn from your friend,” she told Casanova. Jake’s chest swelled with pride. He smiled at Casanova. “Now shush,” Doss said.

She put her eye back to the Longshot’s scope. Watched the Designer touch the combat design atop the head. The combat design squirmed with pleasure, something between a child being praised and a dog being scratched.

The Designer strolled calmly up the valley’s side, the combat design following at an agile pace behind. When they reached the gathering, the Designer moved to its center, raised her hands and spoke. A moment later, guns lowered. Hands calloused from tilling soil clasped those dusty from the plains. Together, new comer and valley resident descended to the fields.

“Guess they have enough to go around,” Doss said. “Wonder if those crops’ll bear up once the heat comes.”

“I have a recommendation, Boss,” Fiorivani said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“We wait until just before dawn. Then run a sneak-and-snatch.”

Doss folded her hands over the scope and rested her chin atop them, digesting the notion. “How do we breach the dome undetected?” she asked after a moment. “That’s where the Designer will be.” Fiorivani thought for a minute, shook his head. “My thoughts exactly,” Doss said. She tabbed her mic three times, channeling Fort Riley. Several minutes ticked by. Finally Gomez’s voice, laced with the static of distance, sounded in Doss’ earpiece.

“Boss?”

“What’s the status of our freshly minted Rangers, Sergeant?”

“Wouldn’t call them Rangers, Boss. They can’t fight for shit.” A pause. “They do obey the laws of gravity, though. They’ll scare the hell out of anyone they land next to.”

“Lost any more?” asked Doss.

“Three more. Some of these old suits…” Doss heard a long stretch of static as Gomez let out a breath. “They’re for shit.”

“How about pilots?”

“Six pilots,” Gomez said. “All officially now with flight time under their belts.”

“Combat functional?” A long silence ensued. In it, Doss could almost hear the concept of “combat functional” groan as Gomez stretched it to the point of snapping.

“Affirmative, Boss,” he decided finally.

“Alright. Sergeant, I want four birds, four chalks ready to roll in two days.”

“Copy.”

“We’re on our way home. See you for breakfast. Out.” Doss tabbed off her mic, turned to Fiorivani. “We wait until dark, rendezvous with the zep, head home.”

“Maybe…” Fiorivani hesitated.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“Maybe we could use a prisoner. For interrogation. We wait until dark, then snatch one of those mudfish to take home with us. Wouldn’t be hard. I could do it myself.” His tone grew officious in a way that reminded Doss of Rippert, and squared his chin at her. “I volunteer.” Doss shook her head.

“I’m sorry about your sister, Lieutenant. But you are not going down there. Copy?” Fiorivani glared. Muscles pulsed in his jaw. Doss held his gaze. After a moment, he looked away and nodded. “Good,” Doss said. She checked the sun, then checked her watch. “Just past thirteen hundred.” She lay back, propped her head against the injection molded carbon of the Longshot’s stock. “Who brought the cards?”

“Right here, Boss Momma.” Jake produced a red-backed deck of cards from his pack. Then poked Casanova with a finger. Pointed with two fingers at his own eyes, like: eyes on me. “You learning yet?” Casanova’s face turned sour.

“Only what your mama taught me.”

CHAPTER 16

as it summer yet? It didn’t seem like it. The sun felt like a friend. It pressed red through Brood’s eyelids, filled his skull with soft warmth. Something skittered beside his head. He opened his eyes, saw a fat blue beetle scrambling over a clot of earth and wondered for a moment if the creature was edible. Then remembered he didn’t have to eat it, even if it was. Viv stirred beside him, slid a tanned thigh over his hip.

They lay naked beside a cold pool where the stream meandered in a broad arc downstream from the strange flesh dome that turned green in the sunlight. The clean scent of water rolled over him. His skin tingled as it dried. Laughter echoed faintly up the valley. Pleasure stirred in Brood’s soul and he smiled. Things had been worse.

“I feel like the fat lady,” Viv murmured. Brood let the memory of recent meals trickle through his mind. Eggplant cooked together with tomatoes. A tomato-and-corn soup made in peanut shell broth. Soft meatballs spit forth from a series of fat vines hanging down the dome’s side. Prepared by the Corn Mother’s strange and beautiful people. Brood felt like a stray dog found. He felt full.

“What fat lady?” he asked. Viv rolled onto her side. Her lips moved close against Brood’s cheek as she spoke.

“She used to sit at the crossroad by Hermosillo. We used to see her every spring when we come north. She was huge. Gigantic.” She held a hand out far, indicating girth. “
Fat
.”

“Never seen a fat person,” Brood said.

“She was fat. She would just sit there at the crossroad, naked. Huge. Kind of beautiful, though. People’d leave her food. Like religious offerings, all heaped up in front of her. Nobody never stole nothing, neither. Not that I ever heard.” Viv’s fingertips ran up Brood’s belly, which actually bulged with food. “She never said nothing. She stared in front of her like you weren’t even there. We always left her corn, and whatever meat we could spare. Anna was big into that. Offerings to the Mother. She wasn’t there this year.” Viv paused. Her brow creased for an instant with troubled thoughts, then she shrugged. “We still left offerings for her, though.” She lay on her stomach, propped her chin in her hands and watched Brood. “You remind me of my dad,” she said. Brood’s eyes drifted closed.

“Ain’t no old man,” he murmured, and ran a finger along Viv’s back. Her spine no longer protruded. She felt profoundly clean.

“No. But you’re mean like he was.”

“
Gracias
.”

Her voice turned serious. “No, it’s a good thing. He saved me. We were in Houston when the levees broke. He had to fight an entire crowd to get me and Billy onto a boat. I was young but I remember. He did it. He had a pistol, and he shot people. He got us on that boat.” She went quiet. Brood lifted one eyelid, found Viv staring into the space between them, her jaw clenched with grief. “Let the dead be dead,” she whispered. “I remember his face.”

A Tet spasm worked its way suddenly up her arm. Her jaws clenched tight, her back arched.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she told Brood when her body finally relaxed. “I ain’t dead yet.”

“Maybe we can get her to see you,” Brood said. He’d seen the Corn Mother only once since they’d arrived. She’d stood beside the stream at the valley’s low end, hairless and ghostly in a white shift, supervising as her people planted a bone lattice in the ground—the foundation of a second dome. She’d spoken with no migrants; her people had let no one close. Viv shook her head.

“She don’t see nobody she don’t summon.”

“Maybe people ain’t tried hard enough.” Brood ran fingers through her wet hair. Pulled her close, kissed her forehead. They lay quietly. A hot breeze blew down the valley, rustling a nearby field of weirdly dense corn.

A shadow fell across them. Brood squinted, saw two of the Corn Mother’s strange people. Landraces, the migrants here called them. A tall slender woman, a short burly male.

“Hello.” The woman’s voice was so smooth it sounded greased. Brood sat up. The two were naked—the man rectilinear, the woman all perfect circles and fluidly curved lines, a landscape of soft skin-dunes in the late afternoon sun. “My name is Corona,” she said to Viv. As she spoke, Brood saw the woman’s sleek belly protruding, a pregnant sphere. “Pihadassa would like to see you.”

“Pihadassa?” Viv asked. The woman regarded her with a pleasantly blank expression.

“The Corn Mother,” she said. “You have the Tet. Pihadassa will help you.”

The heavy-browed man grunted once, amiably. Viv smiled at Brood and kissed him, then stood and gathered her FEMAs. The two landraces led her away along the pool’s edge, to the edge of a cornfield. Viv looked back and smiled once more, then disappeared between thick folds of supernaturally green corn.

….

Brood waded into the mud. He’d tied his hair back with a leather thong. His nakedness had become so natural he’d forgotten it. The topsoil turned easily under his hoe as he dug and pulled. The earth smelled musky, fecund and alive. Pink earthworms, suddenly exposed, flexed and cowered as his hoe turned their burrows inside out. He worked apace with the landraces, steady but unhurried. They did not joke or laugh or sing but seemed fixed on their tasks.

An emptiness came over Brood as he labored. Hunger did not distract him. No worries tightened his chest. He knew only the rhythmic chop of the hoe’s blade into the mud, the sting of blisters forming on his palms. He worked and sweat. The earth turned.

“Hey!”

Brood looked up. A pale kid stood over a fresh furrow a few feet away, leaning on a shovel. Tats covered his face.

“I know you from Texas,” he said, grinning. Brood stared for a few seconds before it clicked. He chuckled.

“Yeah.
Que onda
, whiteboy?”

“Nothing, man. Just working the good work, you know?” He extended his hand and Brood shook it. Whiteboy looked around them at the valley, still grinning. “Fucking Eden here, man. Fucking Shangri La.” He gave Brood a speculative look. “How’d you wind up here?”

Brood thought about it for a moment. His fingers absently touched the still tender wound on his side.

“Just did, I guess.”

Whiteboy’s smile faded a notch. He nodded, his eyes pinching around some hard memory of his own.

“Yeah. Me too, I guess.” He smiled again. “The road don’t matter, though. Just the destination.”

“I guess.”

They stood there for a moment, both of them thinking to say something, neither of them knowing what. Finally Brood extended his hand again.

“Catch you around, homie.”

“Alright then.” Whiteboy took Brood’s hand and shook it with heart.

….

“Five harvests before September,” Raimi said. They sat with Anna, Billy and Jorgen in a small field of dense grass situated directly east of the flesh dome. The valley’s migrants had gathered there, unwashed and weary from the fields, for the evening meal. “They’ve already had one,” Raimi said. “They’re almost ready for a second.” He motioned at a burly crop of nearby corn, geometric in its uniformity, then held his hand extended as though gauging the weight of an invisible object. His face had thickened in the past days.

Two naked landraces—the tall kind, a male and female, as identical to each other as corn plants—cooked at a bulky stone hearth that rose incongruous, crude, beside the dome’s suntanned skin. They moved fluidly, like tricks of the long evening light. Poked at nets of vegetables set to steam over a heavy iron cauldron. Stoked a fire burning in the hearth with hunks of gene-tweaked grapevine that grew along the valley’s rim, thick as Brood’s forearm.