Seed (29 page)

Sunlight filtered red through the dome’s flesh like a flashlight through a palm, casting strange shadows through geodesic bone-work. Brood stepped carefully behind the Corn Mother, the floor smooth and dry beneath his feet. He saw only a few yards ahead, but sensed motion in the far darkness. The Corn Mother halted a few paces inside, motioned at a collection of intestinal vines dangling overhead.

“Would you like meat?” She placed the tip of a delicate finger against one of the vines—vines like the ones outside, Brood realized. He held up his hand and the Corn Mother squeezed. The vine contracted, produced a few ounces of the grey meat in his palm.

“
Gracias
,” he said.

Two thick male landraces stood nearby. They watched Brood, muscles trembling with anticipation every time he moved. He smiled at them. They chuffed quietly.

“This is one of my favorite designs.” The Corn Mother ran her thumb down the length of one thick vine. “It is simple. Its base is a common Argentinean grape that once grew in nearly every semi-arid temperate zone on the planet. I combined it with a fowl, turkey that was unique to North America in the early part of the century, and also with an Asiatic, freshwater eel. It thrives. It produces even more than I had intended.”

Brood sucked the soft meat off his fingers. It tasted salty and light.

“It’s good,” he told her. The Corn Mother’s smile exuded calm self-satisfaction. The precision of her face transfixed Brood. Up close, it seemed geometric.

“Sometimes the helix makes its own choice. It dances.” She looked to the ceiling, where high overhead hung what looked like giant livers. Sacks, Brood realized, large enough to hold a small child, slick membranes stretched tight over…whatever they held. “It is my hope that the helix will dance here. That this valley will come alive in unexpected ways.” She brought her attention to Brood, so keen his eyes went involuntarily to the floor. It bore the same pattern as a diamondback. Brood’s spine tingled. The Corn Mother closed her eyes, breathed deep, as though testing Brood’s scent.

“My friend,” he said. “She got the Tet—”

The Corn Mother’s eyes snapped open. She reached languidly forth, her fingers encircled Brood’s jaw. She brought his face close to hers, began to examine him.

“You are dynamic. Well-formed. Small, but your aggression expresses peak primate functioning. Your helix drives you to the forefront of your breeding population. It wishes to reproduce itself. This is good.”

She closed her eyes again, her hand still lightly cupping Brood’s jaw. Her chest rose and fell sedately as she breathed four deliberate breaths. Her smooth brow rose as though, behind capacious eyelids, she found something intriguing. She peered once more at Brood.

“Malnourishment and parasites have inhibited your highest genetic potential. But you have…” Black eyes perused the space over Brood’s head, searching for the correct distillation of some broad idea, then clicked back to him. “Endurance.”

Brood gripped her wrist and forced her hand away. The landraces stepped forward, but the Corn Mother shook her head. They stilled.

“I’m looking for my friend.” Brood told her. “She got the Tet.”

“The Tet. A wild-born word, derived no doubt from the design’s physical symptoms, which resemble tetanus. Its process is nothing like tetanus, however. Its correct name is Crop Graft 3. It is more akin to multiple sclerosis. It causes entropic cascade in the human genome, beginning with the nervous system.”

Brood eyeballed the Corn Mother like maybe she’d just said something and maybe she hadn’t. Sucked a lip, pinched his chin between thumb and forefinger.

“My friend,” he repeated. “She got it.”

“It is not statistically uncommon. Between two point four and four point eight percent of the wild-born population has it. Those were our estimates given variables in crop yield and seed reharvesting over the past three seasons. I feel anything over four percent is optimistic, but Sumedha…”

She reminded Brood of people he had encountered on Texas badlands. People who had wandered too long alone, whose conversation felt like a valve venting pressure, the righting of a mind tilted by solitude. Brood hung on that word: “optimistic.”

“How you know that?” he asked. The Corn Mother’s eyes refocused. She regarded him keenly.

“Because I incorporated that particular graft into precisely five percent of all seed Satori distributed over the past three seasons.” Her head canted to one side as she made a quick calculation. “More this year.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

They watched each other. The Corn Mother’s face glowing with a child’s naked pride, Brood standing very still, hardly breathing.

“You made the Tet.” Barely more than a whisper.

“Yes,” the Corn Mother said. “I designed it. It was difficult to discern exactly how to—”

“You put it in the
seed
. In the crops. People ate it. It came from you.”

“Yes,” the Corn Mother said. Utterly matter-of-fact. Brood’s mind worked to comprehend. The countless bodies. Muscles binding up so tight they broke bones. The agony people felt before they died. The
Chupes
who collected them, who had collected Pollo.

“
Why
?”

The Corn Mother’s eyes darted back and forth, tracing in the space between her and Brood some strange chain of logic. The air around her seemed to go inert as she breathed.

“For the Fathers,” she said. “They wanted to evolve. They wanted to adapt to this world so that they might enter it anew. Everything was for them. Nothing was for Satori. Nothing was for us.” She smiled at Brood. Tears rimmed her eyes. “I miss Sumedha.”

Brood’s fists clenched at his sides. He took a step towards her.

“My friend,” he said. “Your people brought her here. Where is she?”

The Corn Mother seemed not to hear him. She reached up, ran fingers along rough bark of the turkey-grape vine. It seemed to comfort her. Her face relaxed, went dim as she lost herself to some unfathomable memory. Brood took in the exactness of her proportions, the acute grace of her neck. Watched the insectoid quickness with which her fingers inspected the vine. His spine tingled as though he’d just stepped on a snake.

“I miss him,” she whispered. Tears streamed down her cheeks now.

Brood hollered into her face: “
Dónde está
Viv!” The landraces started, began to move forward. The Corn Mother’s face snapped back to the moment. She regarded Brood placidly, like she had never been gone, the tears still wet on her cheek. She peered into him, seemed pleased by his sudden aggression. She stilled the landraces with a gesture, and smiled.

“She is back here. Come. Let me show you.” She turned, and Brood watched the aqueous motion of her body recede into the dome’s murky reaches. He followed.

Shapes emerged from the gloom. A thick female landrace stood beside a heap of newly harvested corn. As Brood watched, she took two thigh-sized ears in each hand and dropped them through a hole in the floor. The hole puckered with a sucking sound as the ears disappeared. Through the soles of his feet Brood felt a deep and rhythmic throb, like heavy bass from a big speaker. A heartbeat.

“She is there.” The Corn Mother swept an arm before her. Brood sensed they were close to the dome’s wall. Several small forms occupied a floor. He stepped forward, squinted.

Saw babies.

A score of them. They all sat upright, their naked bottoms buried in an expanse of thick fur growing from the floor. They seemed to sense company. In unison their wide faces turned and they stared, silent and weirdly attentive, at Brood. Umbilicals ran from their bellies towards the ceiling, where hung fat pods.

“
Dónde
?” Brood demanded. “
Dónde está
Viv?”

Confusion creased the Corn Mother’s brow. She took a step forward, placed her hand lightly atop one baby’s head. It looked her in the eye and grinned wet gums and cooed.

“Here,” she said. She moved to another baby, fondly touched its cheek. “And here.”

“That ain’t her.”

“But it is. Both these children bear portions of that girl’s helix.”

“But that ain’t
her
.”

“Perhaps not as you knew her.”

Heat rose in Brood’s chest. He struggled to breathe.

“You killed her.”

“The weak die.” The Corn Mother said this in the same tone as she might have said the sun rises. “This strengthens the greater expression. It has always been thus.” She pointed back the way they had come. “Your people out in the wild, they are merely one of the helix’s expressions of what human is. And far from the best one. They are the raw material from which my people awaken.” She smiled. “The girl of which you speak, she
lives
.” Her hand dropped close to the infant whose cheek she had touched. It reached up, blindingly quick, gripped her index finger. “I have taken the best of her, and improved upon it.”

Brood sensed motion to his right. He took a step that way, peered into the shadows.

Saw a low table made of bone lattice. A body splayed upon it. Skin peeled back, ribcage exposed. Viscera and organs exhumed and precisely arranged beside the body. It took him a moment to recognize the swirl of tattoos on the boy’s face.

Two of the tall landraces, a man and woman, knelt beside the table. Their hands buried deep inside whiteboy’s abdomen. The man noticed Brood and smiled in greeting.

“He is beautiful, yes?”

Brood retched. His knees gave out and he vomited across fur and scale.

“Did you not like the meat?” the Corn Mother wondered.

A sob wrenched its way from Brood’s gut. He stared at the tough skin of his knees, at a grey patch of fur, at his palms. At anything besides the body cut up on the table.

“Pollo.” The word filled him like cold cement. He raised his eyes to the Corn Mother. “That what your Satori people do to him?
Lo picaron
? Like he a piece of fucking meat?” The Corn Mother stared. Beside her, the babies stared, too. Recursive, implacable intelligence.

“I do not understand to whom you refer.”

“My brother.
La Chupes
take him. Thought he had the Tet.”

“If he contracted Crop Graft 3, then he most likely died in one of Sumedha’s pens.” The Corn Mother said it like it was easy math. “Nobody would dissect him. They would simply let Satori metabolize the body. Human remains can be used to produce considerable energy, when used as fuel.”

“He didn’t have it, though.” Pollo’s desolate moan as the
Chupes
had loaded him onto the wagon—it filled Brood’s skull, emerged from his throat. “No Tet.
Chupes
just thought he had it.”

The Corn Mother’s eyelids fluttered. Two precise blinks. She laughed—a sound that reminded Brood of wind chimes hanging outside his mother’s greenhouse.

“Then why would he die, if he did not contract it?” For a moment she stood completely still. Brood saw the pulse in her neck, a heart rate slower than the movement of planets. She turned, spoke to the shadows. “Mercy.” The quick woman who had attacked Brood slid from out of the nearby darkness. Hips swiveling, efficient and predatory. Pale eyes pinned Brood, and he froze with animal terror. Mercy grinned.

The Corn Mother gestured at Brood. “This one is sicklier than I thought. I do not need him after all.” Rage flashed across Mercy’s face, and she receded into the gloom. The Corn Mother turned and beckoned Brood. “I will take you back outside, boy. It is almost your evening feeding time.”

….

Brood stared at the food in his bowl. A robust lettuce salad with cherry tomatoes that looked like perfect little red planets. Peanuts. Crescent slices of gleaming cucumber. Sprouts. A dollop of pale meat from the turkey-grape vines.

Beside him, Billy wept.

“Kill those motherfuckers today,” the boy sobbed. “Kill ’em now.” He started to rise, but Anna, who had folded herself around him, held on tight. She whispered into his ear. Shushed him when the sobs wracked him.

Raimi sat nearby with his friend, a short white kid with a shaved head. They watched Billy and touched each other tenderly. Beyond them sat Jorgen, vacant and stony.

Brood stared at his food. The happy din of mealtime rose from the field around them, migrants reveling over their full bellies. The evening had turned pink and the kid with the guitar sang his sweet songs and Brood’s food seemed to laugh. He hoisted the turkey meat with two fingers, flipped it in the air. The dog caught it with a snap of its jaws.

“Motherfuckers,” Billy sobbed. “Kill that bitch now.” Anna kept her arms tight around him.

“We don’t have the numbers,” she said. “But we will. Soon.” She stroked Billy’s cheek. “Soon.” Brood pushed his bowl away and turned to Anna.

“I’m heading west,
Madre
.”

“To Denver,” Anna said, and Brood nodded. “When?” she asked.

“
Mañana
. First light.”

Billy fell to quiet weeping. Anna ran a hand over his cornrows, stroked his cheek, lightly kissed the top of his head. Tears welled in her eyes. Grief turned her face hard. She met Brood’s eye.

“Your brother’s dead, honey.”

“Probably,” Brood admitted. “But the Corn Mother say there’s a chance he ain’t.”

“You’re with us now.”

“
Sí
, I am. But I got to go. I’m all he’s got.” Brood scanned the western horizon, where, far away, heat lightning flashed white against the dusk. “He all I got.”

“You have us.” Anna reached out, placed a strong hand on Brood’s knee. “We’re your family.”

“If I find him, we’ll come back here.”

The
ese
with the guitar began a jaunty tune about a rodeo clown. A man nearby danced to it, slapping his FEMA’d knee. Nearby, someone laughed an easy laugh. The sound of the well-fed, the unworried.

“We’re your family,” Anna told him. Her grip tightened on his knee. “The Mother brought you to us. You stay with us.” Their eyes met for a beat, then Brood looked away.

“
Sale vale
.”

….

Brood woke in the dark chill of predawn. Two tall rows of corn between which he lay rustled, weirdly sentient, in a light breeze. He crawled from beneath his canvas blanket, rolled it up, tucked it beneath an arm. Bent, and with one hand picked up a shoddy plastic bag full of fat Satori vegetables, a plastic gallon jug of water with the other.