Rogue
Farm
It was a bright, cool
March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the southeastern sky
toward the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat
as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to
muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had
seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe
routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of
thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind
as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised
the front scoop, and began turning it toward the open doors of the
barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the
road.
“Bugger,” swore Joe.
The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took
a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and
trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farmhouse.
“Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his
sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”
“Joe? Is that you?
Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the
house.
“Where are
you?” he yelled back.
“I’m in the
bathroom.”
“Bugger,” he said
again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month . .
.”
The sound of a toilet
sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on
the staircase, then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?”
she demanded.
“Out front, about a
quarter mile up the lane.”
“Right.” Hair wild
and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie
yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard
yet?”
“I was thinking you’d
want to talk to it first.”
“Too right I want to
talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near
Edgar’s pond, I got some issues to
discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to
unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and
keep it off our property,” she called after him. “I’ll be out in a
minute.”
Joe nodded to
himself, then carefully picked out the twelve-gauge and a preloaded
magazine. The gun’s power-on self-test lights flickered
erratically, but it seemed to have a full charge. Slinging it, he
locked the cupboard carefully and went back out into the farmyard
to warn off their unwelcome visitor.
The farm squatted,
buzzing and clicking to itself, in the road outside Armitage End.
Joe eyed it warily from behind the wooden gate, shotgun under his
arm. It was a medium-sized one, probably with half a dozen human
components subsumed into it—a formidable collective. Already it was
deep into farm-fugue, no longer relating very clearly to people
outside its own communion of mind. Beneath its leathery black skin
he could see hints of internal structure, cyto cellular
macroassemblies flexing and glooping in disturbing motions. Even
though it was only a young adolescent, it was already the size of
an antique heavy tank, and blocked the road just as efficiently as
an Apatosaurus would have. It smelled of yeast and
gasoline.
Joe had an uneasy
feeling that it was watching him. “Buggerit, I don’t have time for
this,” he muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned
spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in
manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he
shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing
out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his
labor could manage—the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble
mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them
with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. “What do you want
with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.
“Brains, fresh brains
for baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling
Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a dozen disturbing
cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farm’s back, then
retracted, coyly.
“Don’t want no brains
around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the
stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go
away.”
“I’m a nine-legged
semiautomatic groove machine!” crooned the farm. “I’m on my way to
Jupiter on a mission for love! Won’t you buy my brains?” Three
curious eyes on stalks extruded from its upper glacis.
“Uh—” Joe was saved
from having to dream up any more ways of saying fuck off by Maddie’s arrival. She’d managed to
sneak her old battle dress home after a stint keeping the peace in
Mesopotamia twenty years ago, and she’d managed to keep herself in
shape enough to squeeze inside. Its left knee squealed ominously
when she walked it about, which wasn’t often, but it still worked
well enough to manage its main task—intimidating
trespassers.
“You.” She raised one
translucent arm, pointed at the farm. “Get off my land.
Now.”
Taking his cue, Joe
raised his shotgun and thumbed the selector to full auto. It wasn’t
a patch on the hardware riding Maddie’s shoulders, but it
underlined the point. The farm hooted. “Why don’t you love me?” it
asked plaintively.
“Get orf my land,” Maddie amplified, volume cranked
up so high that Joe winced. “Ten seconds!
Nine! Eight—” Thin rings sprang out from the sides of her
arms, whining with the stress of long disuse as the Gauss gun
powered up.
“I’m going! I’m
going!” The farm lifted itself slightly, shuffling backward. “Don’t
understand. I only wanted to set you free to explore the universe.
Nobody wants to buy my fresh fruit and brains. What’s wrong with
you people?”
They waited until the
farm had retreated round the bend at the top of the hill. Maddie
was the first to relax, the rings retracting into the arms of her
battle dress, which solidified from ethereal translucency to
neutral olive drab as it powered down. Joe safed his shotgun.
“Bastard,” he said.
“Fucking A.” Maddie
looked haggard. “That was a bold one.” Her face was white and
pinched-looking, Joe noted: her fists were clenched. She had the
shakes, he realized without surprise. Tonight was going to be
another major nightmare night, and no mistake.
“The fence.” They’d
discussed wiring up an outer wire to the CHP baseload from their
little methane plant, on again and off again for the past
year.
“Maybe this time.
Maybe.” Maddie wasn’t keen on the idea of frying passersby without
warning, but if anything might bring her around, it would be the
prospect of being squatted by a rogue farm. “Help me out of this,
and I’ll cook breakfast,” she said.
“Got to muck out the
barn,” Joe protested.
“It can wait on
breakfast,” Maddie said shakily. “I need you.”
“Okay.” Joe nodded.
She was looking bad; it had been a few years since her last fatal
breakdown, but when Maddie said I need
you, it was a bad idea to ignore her. That way led to
backbreaking labor on the biofab and loading her backup tapes into
the new body; always a messy business. He took her arm and steered
her toward the back porch. They were nearly there when he
paused.
“What is it?” asked
Maddie.
“Haven’t seen Bob for
a while,” he said slowly. “Sent him to let the cows into the north
paddock after milking. Do you think—”
“We can check from
the control room,” she said tiredly. “Are you really worried . . .
?”
“With that thing
blundering around? What do you
think?”
“He’s a good working
dog,” Maddie said uncertainly. “It won’t hurt him. He’ll be
alright; just you page him.”
After Joe helped her
out of her battle dress, and after Maddie spent a good long while
calming down, they breakfasted on eggs from their own hens,
homemade cheese, and toasted bread made with rye from the hippie
commune on the other side of the valley. The stone-floored kitchen
in the dilapidated house they’d rebuilt together over the past
twenty years was warm and homely. The only purchase from outside
the valley was the coffee, beans from a hardy GM strain that grew
like a straggling teenager’s beard all along the Cumbrian hilltops.
They didn’t say much: Joe, because he never did, and Maddie,
because there wasn’t anything that she wanted to say. Silence kept
her personal demons down. They’d known each other for many years,
and even when there wasn’t anything to say they could cope with
each other’s silence. The voice radio on the windowsill opposite
the cast-iron stove stayed off, along with the TV set hanging on
the wall next to the fridge. Breakfast was a quiet time of
day.
“Dog’s not
answering,” Joe commented over the dregs of his
coffee.
“He’s a good dog.”
Maddie glanced at the yard gate uncertainly. “You afraid he’s going
to run away to Jupiter?”
“He was with me in
the shed.” Joe picked up his plate and carried it to the sink,
began running hot water onto the dishes. “After I cleaned the lines
I told him to go take the herd up the paddock while I did the
barn.” He glanced up, looking out the window with a worried
expression. The Massey Ferguson was parked right in front of the
open barn doors, as if to hold at bay the mountain of dung, straw,
and silage that mounded up inside like an invading odious enemy,
relic of a frosty winter past.
Maddie shoved him
aside gently and picked up one of the walkie-talkies from the
charge point on the windowsill. It bleeped and chuckled at her.
“Bob, come in, over.” She frowned. “He’s probably lost his headset
again.”
Joe racked the wet
plates to dry. “I’ll move the midden. You want to go find
him?”
“I’ll do that.”
Maddie’s frown promised a talking-to in store for the dog when she
caught up with him. Not that Bob would mind: words ran off him like
water off a duck’s back. “Cameras first.” She prodded the battered
TV set to life and grainy, bisected views flickered across the
screen: garden, yard, dutch barn, north paddock, east paddock, main
field, copse. “Hmm.”
She was still
fiddling with the smallholding surveillance system when Joe
clambered back into the driver’s seat of the tractor and fired it
up once more. This time there was no cough of black smoke, and as
he hauled the mess of manure out of the barn and piled it into a
three-meter-high midden, a quarter of a ton at a time, he almost
managed to forget about the morning’s unwelcome visitor.
Almost.
By late morning the
midden was humming with flies and producing a remarkable stench,
but the barn was clean enough to flush out with a hose and broom.
Joe was about to begin hauling the midden over to the fermentation
tanks buried round the far side of the house when he saw Maddie
coming back up the path, shaking her head. He knew at once what was
wrong.
“Bob,” he said,
expectantly.
“Bob’s fine. I left
him riding shotgun on the goats.” Her expression was peculiar. “But
that farm—”
“Where?” he asked,
hurrying after her.
“Squatting in the
woods down by the stream,” she said tersely. “Just over our
fence.”
“It’s not
trespassing, then.”
“It’s put down feeder
roots! Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I don’t—” Joe’s face
wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.” She stared back at the outbuildings between
their home and the woods at the bottom of their smallholding, and
if looks could kill, the intruder would be dead a thousand times
over. “It’s going to estivate, Joe, then it’s going to grow to
maturity on our patch. And do you know where it said it was going
to go when it finishes growing? Jupiter!”
“Bugger,” Joe said
faintly, as the true gravity of their situation began to sink in.
“We’ll have to deal with it first.”
“That wasn’t what I
meant,” Maddie finished. But Joe was already on his way out the
door. She watched him crossing the yard, then shook her head. “Why
am I stuck here?” she asked aloud, but the cooker wasn’t
answering.
The hamlet of Outer
Cheswick lay four kilometers down the road from Armitage End, four
kilometers past mostly derelict houses and broken-down barns,
fields given over to weeds and walls damaged by trees. The second
half of the twenty-first century had been cruel years for the
British agrobusiness sector; even harsher if taken in combination
with the decline in population and the consequent housing surplus.
As a result, the dropouts of the forties and fifties were able to
take their pick from among the gutted shells of once-fine
farmhouses. They chose the best and moved in, squatted in the
derelict outbuildings, planted their seeds and tended their flocks
and practiced their DIY skills, until a generation later a mansion
fit for a squire stood in lonely isolation alongside a decaying
road where no cars drove. Or rather, it would have taken a
generation had there been any children against whose lives it could
be measured; these were the latter decades of the population crash,
and what a previous century would have labeled downshifter dink
couples were now in the majority, far outnumbering the breeder
colonies. In this aspect of their life, Joe and Maddie were
boringly conventional. In other respects they weren’t: Maddie’s
nightmares, her aversion to alcohol, and her withdrawal from
society were all relics of her time in Peace-force. As for Joe, he
liked it here. Hated cities, hated the net, hated the burn of the
new. Anything for a quiet life . . .
The Pig and Pizzle,
on the outskirts of Outer Cheswick, was the only pub within about
ten kilometers—certainly the only one within staggering distance
for Joe when he’d had a skinful of mild—and it was naturally a
seething den of local gossip, not least because Ole Brenda refused
to allow electricity, much less bandwidth, into the premises. (This
was not out of any sense of misplaced technophobia, but a side
effect of Brenda’s previous life as an attack hacker with the
European Defense Forces.)
Joe paused at the
bar. “Pint of bitter?” he asked tentatively. Brenda glanced at him
and nodded, then went back to loading the antique washing machine.
Presently she pulled a clean glass down from the shelf and held it
under the tap.
“Heard you’ve got
farm trouble,” she said noncommitally as she worked the hand pump
on the beer engine.
“Uh-huh.” Joe focused
on the glass. “Where’d you get that?”
“Never you mind.” She
put the glass down to give the head time to settle. “You want to
talk to Arthur and Wendy the Rat about farms. They had one the
other year.”
“Happens.” Joe took
his pint. “Thanks, Brenda. The usual?”
“Yeah.” She turned
back to the washer. Joe headed over to the far corner, where a pair
of huge leather sofas, their arms and backs ripped and scarred by
generations of Brenda’s semiferal cats, sat facing each other on
either side of a cold hearth. “Art, Rats. What’s up?”
“Fine, thanks.” Wendy
the Rat was well over seventy, one of those older folks who had
taken the p53 chromosome hack and seemed to wither into
timelessness: white dreadlocks, nose and ear studs dangling loosely
from leathery holes, skin like a desert wind. Art had been her boy
toy once, back before middle age set its teeth into him. He hadn’t
had the hack, and looked older than she did. Together they ran a
smallholding, mostly pharming vaccine chicks but also doing a brisk
trade in high-nitrate fertilizer that came in on the nod and went
out in sacks by moonlight.
“Heard you had a spot
of bother?”
“’S true.” Joe took a
cautious mouthful. “Mm, good. You ever had farm
trouble?”
“Maybe.” Wendy looked
at him askance, slitty-eyed. “What kinda trouble you got in
mind?”
“Got a farm
collective. Says it’s going to Jupiter or something. Bastard’s
homesteading the woods down by old Jack’s stream. Listen . . .
Jupiter?”
“Aye well, that’s one
of the destinations, sure enough.” Art nodded wisely, as if he knew
anything.
“Naah, that’s bad.”
Wendy the Rat frowned. “Is it growing trees yet, do you
know?”
“Trees?” Joe shook
his head. “Haven’t gone and looked, to tell the truth. What the
fuck makes people do that to themselves, anyway?”
“Who the fuck cares?”
Wendy’s face split in a broad grin. “Such as don’t think they’re
human anymore, meself.”
“It tried to
sweet-talk us,” Joe said.
“Aye, they do that,”
said Arthur, nodding emphatically. “Read somewhere they’re the ones
as think we aren’t fully human. Tools an’ clothes and farmyard
machines, like? Sustaining a pre-post-industrial lifestyle instead
of updating our genome and living off the land like God
intended?”
“’Ow the hell can
something with nine legs and eyestalks call itself human?” Joe demanded, chugging back half his pint
in one angry swallow.
“It used to be, once.
Maybe used to be a bunch of people.” Wendy got a weird and witchy
look in her eye. “’Ad a boyfriend back thirty, forty years ago,
joined a Lamarckian clade. Swapping genes an’ all, the way you or
me’d swap us underwear. Used to be a ’vironmentalist back when
antiglobalization was about big corporations pissing on us all for
profits. Got into gene hackery and self-sufficiency big-time. I
slung his ass when he turned green and started
photosynthesizing.”
“Bastards,” Joe
muttered. It was deep green folk like that who’d killed off the
agricultural-industrial complex in the early years of the century,
turning large portions of the countryside into ecologically
devastated wilderness gone to rack and ruin. Bad enough that they’d
set millions of countryfolk out of work—but that they’d gone on to
turn green, grow extra limbs, and emigrate to the outer solar
system was adding insult to injury. And having a good time in the
process, by all accounts. “Din’t you ’ave a farm problem, coupla
years back?”
“Aye, did that,” said
Art. He clutched his pint mug protectively.
“It went away,” Joe
mused aloud.
“Yeah, well.” Wendy
stared at him cautiously.
“No fireworks, like.”
Joe caught her eye. “And no body. Huh.”
“Metabolism,” said
Wendy, apparently coming to some kind of decision. “That’s where
it’s at.”
“Meat—” Joe, no
biogeek, rolled the unfamiliar word around his mouth irritably. “I
used to be a software dude before I burned, Rats. You’ll have to
’splain the jargon fore using it.”
“You ever wondered
how those farms get to Jupiter?” Wendy
probed.
“Well.” Joe shook his
head. “They, like, grow stage trees? Rocket logs? An’ then they
estivate, and you are fucked if they do it next door, ’cause when
those trees go up, they toast about a hundred
hectares?”
“Very good,” Wendy
said heavily. She picked up her mug in both hands and gnawed on the
rim, edgily glancing around as if hunting for police gnats. “Let’s
you and me take a hike.”
Pausing at the bar
for Ole Brenda to refill her mug, Wendy led Joe out past Spiffy
Buerke and her latest femme—a pair of throw-backs in green
Wellingtons and Barbour jackets—out into what had once been a car
park and was now a tattered wasteground behind the pub. It was
dark, and no residual light pollution stained the sky: the Milky
Way was visible overhead, along with the pea-sized red cloud of
orbitals that had gradually swallowed Jupiter over the past few
years. “You wired?” asked Wendy.
“No,
why?”
She pulled out a
fist-sized box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a
light on its side to blink green, and nodded. “Fuckin’ polis
bugs.”
“Isn’t that
a—”
“Ask me no questions,
an’ I’ll tell you no fibs.” Wendy grinned.
“Uh-huh.” Joe took a
deep breath: he’d guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections, and
this—a portable local jammer—was proof: any police bugs within two
or three meters would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat
to the keyword-trawling sub-sentient coppers whose job it was to
prevent conspiracy-to-commit offenses before they happened. It was
a relic of the Internet age, when enthusiastic legislators had
accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by
demanding keyword monitoring of everything within range of a
network terminal—not realizing that in another few decades “network
terminals” would be self-replicating ’bots the size of fleas and
about as common as dirt. (The net itself had collapsed shortly
thereafter, under the weight of self-replicating viral libel
lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance remained.) “Okay.
Tell me about meta, metab—”
“Metabolism.” Wendy
began walking toward the field behind the pub. “And stage trees.
Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called
Niven—anyway. What you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it.
The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just
lignify and die in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and
before the cells die they nitrate the
cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked
enzymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than
trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s
dead it’s ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners
and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight
explosive—it detonates cell by cell, and some of the xylem tubes are, eh, well, the farm
grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae with a depolarizing membrane
nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s
about efficient as ’at old-time satellite-launcher rocket. Not
very, but enough.”
“Uh.” Joe blinked.
“That meant to mean something to me?”
“Oh ’eck, Joe.” Wendy
shook her head. “Think I’d bend your ear if it
wasn’t?”
“Okay.” He nodded,
seriously. “What can I do?”
“Well.” Wendy stopped
and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light
sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon
train making its orbital transfer window, self-sufficient posthuman
Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted, embarking on the long, slow
transfer to Jupiter.
“Well?” He waited
expectantly.
“You’re wondering
where all that fertilizer’s from,” Wendy said
elliptically.
“Fertilizer.” His
mind blanked for a moment.
“Nitrates.”
He glanced down, saw
her grinning at him. Her perfect fifth set of teeth glowed
alarmingly in the greenish overspill from the light on her jammer
box.
“Tha’ knows it make
sense,” she added, then cut the jammer.
When Joe finally
staggered home in the small hours, a thin plume of smoke was rising
from Bob’s kennel. Joe paused in front of the kitchen door and
sniffed anxiously, then relaxed. Letting go of the door handle, he
walked over to the kennel and sat down outside. Bob was most
particular about his den—even his own humans didn’t go in there
without an invitation. So Joe waited.
A moment later there
was an interrogative cough from inside. A dark, pointed snout came
out, dribbling smoke from its nostrils like a particularly vulpine
dragon. “Rrrrrrr?”
“ ’S
me.”
“Uuurgh.” A metallic
click. “Smoke good smoke joke cough tickle funny arf arf
?”
“Yeah, don’t mind if
I do.”
The snout pulled back
into the kennel; a moment later it reappeared, teeth clutching a
length of hose with a mouthpiece on one end. Joe accepted it
graciously, wiped off the mouthpiece, leaned against the side of
the kennel, and inhaled. The weed was potent and smooth: within a
few seconds it stilled the uneasy dialogue in his
head.
“Wow, tha’s a good
turnup.”
“Arf-arf-ayup.”
Joe felt himself
relaxing. Maddie would be upstairs, snoring quietly in their
decrepit bed: waiting for him, maybe. But sometimes a man just had
to be alone with his dog and a good joint, doing man-and-dog stuff.
Maddie understood this and left him his space. Still . .
.
“’At farm been
buggering around the pond?”
“Growl exclaim
fuck-fuck yup! Sheep-shagger.”
“If it’s been at our
lambs—”
“Nawwwwrr.
Buggrit.”
“So
whassup?”
“Grrrr, Maddie
yap-yap farmtalk! Sheep-shagger.”
“Maddie’s been
talking to it?”
“Grrr
yes-yes!”
“Oh shit. Do you
remember when she did her last backup?”
The dog coughed
fragrant blue smoke. “Tank thump-thump full cow moo beef
clone.”
“Yeah, I think so
too. Better muck it out tomorrow. Just in case.”
“Yurrrrrp.” But while
Joe was wondering whether this was agreement or just a canine
eructation, a lean paw stole out of the kennel mouth and yanked the
hookah back inside. The resulting slobbering noises and clouds of
aromatic blue smoke left Joe feeling a little queasy: so he went
inside.
The next morning,
over breakfast, Maddie was even quieter than usual. Almost
meditative.
“Bob said you’d been
talking to that farm,” Joe commented over his eggs.
“Bob—” Maddie’s
expression was unreadable. “Bloody dog.” She lifted the lid on the
Rayburn’s hot plate and peered at the toast browning underneath.
“Talks too much.”
“Did
you?”
“Ayup.” She turned
the toast and put the lid back down on it.
“Said
much?”
“It’s a farm.” She
looked out the window. “Not a fuckin’ worry in the world ’cept
making its launch window for Jupiter.”
“It—”
“Him. Her. They.”
Maddie sat down heavily in the other kitchen chair. “It’s a
collective. Usedta be six people. Old, young, whatether, they’s
decided ter go to Jupiter. One of ’em was telling me how it
happened. How she’d been an accountant in Bradford, had a nervous
breakdown. Wanted out.
Self-sufficiency.” For a moment her expression turned bleak. “Felt
herself growing older but not bigger, if you follow.”
“So how’s turning
into a bioborg an improvement?” Joe grunted, forking up the last of
his scrambled eggs.
“They’re still
separate people: bodies are overrated, anyway. Think of the
advantages: not growing older, being able to go places and survive
anything, never being on your own, not bein’ trapped—” Maddie
sniffed. “Fuckin’ toast’s on fire!”
Smoke began to
trickle out from under the hot-plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire
toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited
for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking
it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.
“Bugger,” she
remarked.
“You feel trapped?”
Joe asked. Again? he
wondered.
Maddie grunted. “Not
your fault, love. Just life.”
“Life.” Joe sniffed,
then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose.
“Life!”
“Horizon’s closing
in,” she said quietly. “Need a change of scenery.”
“Ayup, well, rust
never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven’t
I?” said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away. “Got
a shipment of fertilizer coming in.”
In between milking
the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and
surreptitiously EMPing every police ’bot on the farm into the
electronic afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to
running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and
whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it assembled
the gadgets he’d ordered—a modified crop sprayer with double-walled
tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent
cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with
its own oxygen supply.
Maddie made herself
scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing
during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl,
exhausted, into bed. She didn’t seem to be having nightmares, which
was a good sign: Joe kept his questions to himself.
It took another five
days for the smallholding’s power field to concentrate enough juice
to fuel up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house
off-net in the most deniable and surreptitiously plausible way, a
bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly
shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chitchat.
He’d half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn’t say anything:
just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower
Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she’d taken to going.
Finally, the tank was
full. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armor, picked up his
weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the
pond.
The woods around the
pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of
old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill,
smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a green skirt that
reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream
fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping
willow; children had once played here, pretending to explore the
wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental-control
cameras.
That had been long
ago. Today the woods really were wild.
No kids, no picnicking city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu
and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English
countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to
expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and
a supermarket trolley of Precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long
since shorted out. The bones of the technological epoch, poked from
the treacherous surface of the fossil mud bath. And around the edge
of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.
Joe switched on his
jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles
were matte black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the
better to soak up all the available light: a network of taproots
and lacy black grasslike stuff covered the ground around them.
Joe’s breath wheezed noisily in his ears, and he sweated into the
airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colorless, smoking
liquid at the roots of each ballistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and
evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it
touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him
uneasy. (As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one
thing he’d been able to think of that was guaranteed to kill them
stone dead without igniting them. After all, they had cores that
were made of gun cotton—highly explosive, liable to go off if you
subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chain
saw.) The tree he’d hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall
sideways, and Joe stepped round it, efficiently squirting at the
remaining roots. Right into the path of the distraught
farm.
“My holy garden of
earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight,
my trees, my trees! My trees!”
Eyestalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the
farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of
him. “Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling
vivisectionist!”
“Back off,” said Joe,
dropping his cryogenic squirter as he reached for his air
gun.
The farm came down
with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out
to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes
fluttering across angry blue irises. “How dare you?” demanded the farm. “My treasured
treelings!”
“Shut the fuck up,”
Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. “Think I’d let you burn my
holding when tha’ rocket launched? Stay the fuck away,” he added as a tentacle began to extend
from the farm’s back.
“My crop,” it moaned
quietly: “My exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this
well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains
for baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together
if you hadn’t fucked up! Who set you up to this, Rat Lady?” It
began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle
atop its leg cluster.
Joe shot
it.
Tubocurarine is a
muscle relaxant: it paralyzes skeletal muscles, those that connect
bones, move limbs, and sustain breathing. Etorphine is a
ridiculously strong opiate—twelve hundred times as potent as
heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and
consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against
the etorphine—but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a sperm
whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time. It
shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a
syrette raised. “Why?” it asked plaintively in a voice that almost
made him wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. “We could have gone
together!”
“Together?” he asked.
Already the eyestalks were drooping; the great lungs wheezed
effortfully as it struggled to frame a reply.
“I was going to ask
you,” said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a
thud like a baby earthquake. “Oh, Joe, if only . . .”
“Maddie?” he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping
the tranquil izer gun.
A mouth appeared in
the farm’s front, slurred words at him from familiar-seeming lips,
words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from
the farm. Passing the first dead tree, he dropped the nitrogen
tank: then an impulse he couldn’t articulate made him turn and run,
back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he
was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm,
the emergency pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his
arms, he found it was already dead.
“Bugger,” said Joe,
and he stood up, shaking his head. “Bugger.” He keyed his walkie-talkie. “Bob, come
in, Bob!”
“Rrrrowl?”
“Momma’s had another
breakdown. Is the tank clean, like I asked?”
“Yap!”
“Okay. I got ’er
backup tapes in t’office safe. Let’s get’t’ank warmed up for ’er
an’ then shift t’tractor down ’ere to muck out this
mess.”
That autumn, the
weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of
Armitage End.