Seed (28 page)

“
Apsara
, sister,” Sumedha said. “The helix dances. Satori lives. No matter what the Fathers intended for her, her life is her own. Bind yourself to her.” Paduma shook her head, smiled kindly.

“I will tell the Fathers, brother. I cannot help myself. It is how I am made.” She leaned close. Her lips pressed lightly to Sumedha’s cheek. She took his hand in hers, caressed it, raised it, kissed it. Then brought it to her throat.

“I do not want this,” Sumedha said. “I do not want to be alone.”

“
Apsara
,” Paduma whispered. She held Sumedha’s hand to her throat, insistent.

Sumedha’s own throat tightened. A sob wrenched its way forth. He squeezed his hand tight. Paduma’s eyes stayed on his, even as her face turned colors, even as her tongue swelled. She reached up, touched his cheek gently, then went slack.

Silence made Sumedha’s skull ache, seared his chest. He eased Paduma’s body to the floor. It lay there limp and empty, a mammalian husk. Urine leaked from it. Biolumes effervesced suddenly inside the walls, flashing strange colors as they sought an appropriate expression for utter desolation.

….

Sumedha watched the tattooed boy, who stood naked with his back turned, the entire front of his body pressed against the laboratory’s flesh wall, even the flats of his palms, skin to skin. Murmuring, a simple little song, what sounded like a lullaby, strange and repetitive. After a moment Sumedha realized it was the boy’s own two names. “Bacilio, Pollo, Bacilio, Pollo, Bacilio, Pollo…” Sumedha stepped forward, spun the boy by the shoulder and grabbed his throat. Pollo’s eyes widened, but refused to look directly at Sumedha.

“Show me,” Sumedha commanded. He shoved Pollo against the wall and closed his eyes. His mind burrowed for Pollo’s helix—found it, turned it, probed the autistic switches. “Show me,” he hissed. Pollo moaned, the empty sound that paused only when he ran out of breath. He inhaled, moaned again. Sumedha kept digging. “Show. Me.” He found the Tet, sought the connection between its dormancy and Pollo’s autism. He saw nothing. “Show! Me!” Pollo went quiet. His helix trembled in Sumedha’s mind. Sumedha opened his eyes, saw Pollo’s eyes dimming, going bloodshot. He released the boy’s throat.

Pollo slid to the floor, gasping. He turned away from Sumedha and pressed his cheek once more to Satori’s flesh, an infant seeking its mother.

“Satori.”

“Yes, Sumedha?” Pihadassa’s voice, the voice of the dead. Sumedha screamed. Pollo moaned.

“Satori!” Spit flew from Sumedha’s mouth.

“Yes, Sumedha?”

“Table!” The table articulated into place. Sumedha grabbed Pollo under the arms and threw him face down across it. “Restrain him.” The digits rose, joined, contracted. The boy struggled to breathe. Sumedha took Pollo’s chin in his hand and squeezed until the boy’s mouth puckered.

“Show me. Show me. Show! Me!” The helix held its secret. Sumedha released his grip, then reeled back and struck Pollo hard across the temple. The helix showed nothing.

“Satori!”

“Yes, Sumedha?”

“The cocoon. Graft design number seven.”

A second table articulated into place before Sumedha. A slit opened in the ceiling and through it the cocoon emerged, suspended on a thick umbilical. It came to rest on the table. Sumedha slid his hand inside, tickling forth the graft. Pollo trembled. Sumedha held his finger, glistening with thick liquid, in front of the boy’s face.

“You will show me!”

….

Sumedha went to the park where he and Kassapa had watched the duel. There, he sat in the grass and meditated. A warm breeze oscillated through the dome, kicking up every time the gate flexed open to allow in a wagon, dying off when the gate closed. It occurred to Sumedha that he could stroll right out that gate, disappear into the scalding detritus of the old city. He considered this, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

Satori children approached him. Sumedha did not open his eyes, but he felt them. He projected his mind to the living buildings, travelled their nerves to Satori Tower, spread his awareness out through the bone framework holding up the dome. Every cell his mind touched, he loved. The children placed offerings in the grass before him. Flowers, corn, blood from pricked fingers.

“Father,” they whispered to him, each in turn. Light filled him. The light of love. The children placed their offerings and whispered, each in turn.

“Father.”

“Father.”

“Father.”

CHAPTER 18

hat do we do with her?” Brood stood knee-deep in the muddy water of a drainage pond at the valley’s lowest end. Sunshine scalded his back. Humidity shimmered from the pond in waves.

“We can’t kill her,” Anna told him.

She handed Brood the swollen end of a fat hose, flat as a tapeworm and made, as far as he could tell, from shiny intestine. One of many strange things the landraces had produced from inside the dome. The dog, which lay in the shade of a nearby row of torso-high onions, stood, padded over and sniffed at the hose. Brood shooed it away. He passed the hose to Raimi and Billy, who together dragged it to the pond’s deep end.

Beyond it, the circular framework of the second, larger dome protruded from the earth. Cartilage and nascent muscle growing between bone spires, connecting them. A ribcage decaying in reverse.

Anna picked up a shovel and with a few quick jabs carved a groove into the pond’s bank. Into this Brood aligned the hose. Anna stuck the shovel in the ground, placed her hands on her FEMA’d hips and stood upright, stretching a kink out of her back.

“Must be a hundred and ten today,” she said, and wiped sweat from her grey brow.

“Casi.” Brood climbed out of the pond, turned, undid the drawstring on his shorts and let loose a long stream of piss into the pond. “Hundred and five. Humidity makes it worse.”

“It’s not even summer yet.” Anna shaded her eyes and squinted up valley at a field of green lettuce heads the size of baby mesquite, leaves large enough to use as blankets. They seemed to drink in the heat like it was a vitamin. “Things might get worse,” Anna said. “In two years or five. Maybe ten. We may need her to design better crops.”

Billy and Raimi emerged from the pond. Their faces had filled out. Their torsos had thickened with regular food and the elimination of parasites—accomplished, a friendly landrace had explained to Brood, through enzymes in the meat produced by the strange vines hanging along the dome’s side. Billy eyed Brood as Brood tied his drawstring.

“Could’ve waited,” he said. Brood winked.

“Could’ve.”

The rest of the hose lay coiled around a foot-long piece of rebar. Billy hefted this and slowly the group made their way through thick crops towards the valley’s upper rim, unwinding the hose as they went. The dog trotted behind them.

A dam marked the valley’s upper rim, behind it a pool deep enough for Brood to dive into. Atop the dam sat…an organ, something that looked like it had been chopped from inside a massive animal.

A pump.

“Looks like a heart,” Brood observed. “How we supposed to get it going?”

“Plug the hose in,” Anna said. “Supposedly it’ll sense it and just…start.”

Billy brought the hose’s lipped end to an aperture at the pump’s side and shoved it home. The aperture flexed tight around it. For a while nothing happened. The group exchanged glances. Then the pump jiggled, throbbed, flexed down to a third its original size and released. Flexed again, produced a deep sucking sound. It continued to do this, contracting and releasing every five seconds or so—long enough between each pulse to convince Brood it had gone dead.

“
Pinche espeluznante
,” he said.

Billy nodded. “Seriously.” He rubbed the back of his head. “Should we prime it?”

“Let’s see if we get water,” Anna said. “If not…”

They waited. The sun hammered them. Brood gazed down the valley’s quarter-mile length, imagined from high above it would look like the outline of a girl in a dress. A tiny shock of green in the brown Kansas wastes. The stream spun around her like a ribbon, her heart the dome, green with chlorophyll in the sun, laced by red veins. As he watched, a pair of thick landraces escorted a bare-chested boy up to the dome. They stood there, waiting. Brood recognized the swirling tats on whiteboy’s face.

“People go in,” Billy said. “They don’t come back out.”

“I got a friend,” Raimi told them. “He was one of the first ones to arrive. He said nobody ever comes back out.” He lowered himself beside the flexing pump, picked something from his teeth with a fingernail and with that same finger pointed towards the dome. “Heard that weird snaky bitch killed Jessup and his crew after they got out on the plains.” Brood eyed him.

“Who the fuck would know a thing like that?”

“Just what I heard.” Raimi inspected the tip of his finger, then stuck it back in his mouth. “Corn Mother doesn’t want anyone to find our little oasis, I guess.”

“We found it,” Anna said.

A trickle of water began seeping from a sphincter on the pump’s far side. Then all at once the hose thickened and water gushed forth in fat pulses. Brood traced the stream with his eyes, from the highest irrigation pond to the drainage pond out of which ran the hose. The pump throbbed, tying the valley together in a watery loop. It made the whole thing seem eerily alive.

“I went to see her about Viv yesterday,” Billy said. He gave Brood a tense look. It’d been four days. “Those stocky motherfuckers wouldn’t even let me close.”

Anna sat in the dirt and the dog wiggled its way onto her lap. Her hands worked the scruff of its neck, but she kept looking at the dome.

“We should’ve heard something by now,” she figured.

As they watched, the dome flexed open. The two landraces escorted whiteboy inside. The opening contracted behind them. It gave Brood the same cold feeling he got when he watched a rattler work its jaws around a rat.

“I’m going in there,” he decided.

“She’s family,” Anna agreed.

….

The Corn Mother stood nude atop the dome, facing the sun with her hands spread as though beckoning the world into existence. Her skin glowed green. Four landraces—the thick kind, the strong kind—stood by the dome’s entrance, naked as babies, faces intently blank. They watched as Brood approached. He smiled at them.

“
Que pasa
?”

They lumbered forward, blocking his path. One landrace chuffed, bared its teeth in what Brood had come to understood as an expression of conviviality. Brood pointed up at the Corn Mother.

“Got to talk,” he said.

In unison, the landraces scowled. Their leader gave a second friendly chuff—shook its head.

“
Sale vale
,” Brood smiled. He took a step back, cupped his hands around his mouth, and yelled. “Corn Mother!” The landraces started. Migrants and landraces in a nearby lettuce field ceased their work and stood, watching.

“Away,” grunted the landrace who stood before Brood. Strangely precise musculature worked in its forearm as it lifted its hand and pointed back the way Brood had come.

“
Chinga tu culo
.” Brood took a running step forward, aiming a kick for the landrace’s dangling balls.

Something hit him before he got close. Hit him hard. He found himself on the ground, gasping, staring up at a sky pale with sunlight.

A woman’s sharp face appeared. Needle teeth gleamed. Irises contracted, vertical slits in pale eyes. The woman laughed, a flat hiss. Her hand drew back. Long fingers extended towards Brood’s throat. Brood thought for an instant of his mother. Her fevered lips whispering prayers up at the sky as death bore down. No prayers came to him. He simply wondered how badly it would hurt.

“Mercy!” A calm voice, commanding. The hand hesitated. “Mercy. Release him.”

The woman, Mercy, regarded Brood with all the sympathy of a bullet for a bone. The hand stayed poised. Her other hand tightened around his neck.

“Now,” the voice ordered.

“Your command, Mother.” Mercy smiled sweetly at Brood, then abruptly released him and moved away, ten paces in what seemed a single, easy step. She turned and bowed to the Corn Mother, who still stood atop the dome. Backlit like some deity descending from the sky. Her head angled towards Brood.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” Brood said. He stood. A dark blob of piss spread hotly across the front of his canvas shorts. He eyed the predator woman as he dusted himself, his hand trembling. She’d sunk to her haunches and sat like that, balanced and watching—wearing a pinstriped suit coat over her t-shirt, a fake pink flower attached to its lapel.

“I am glad,” the Corn Mother said. She took a step forward, plopped onto her rump in a way that seemed strangely childlike. Slid down the dome’s side to land lightly on her feet. She stood there naked, arms spread as though awaiting applause, her body so perfect it struck Brood as somehow wrong, unnatural, something transcendent that had no right to take animal form. Two of her landraces stepped forth and pulled a sleeveless white shift over her head.

“Come.” She beckoned. Sweat glistened on shoulders etched with fine muscle. Behind her, the dome’s flesh curled open with the staccato popping of articulating bone and sinew. Brood hesitated. “Come, boy.” The Corn Mother turned, and strode inside the dome. Brood cursed, and followed.