Perfect.
“I’ll build tomorrow,” I told Zee as we headed back through the forest.
“Are you gonna make it light up?”
“Sure, if you get me a generator. Some LEDs. But I’ll need juice,” I told her. “Lots of juice.”
I got back to the compound just as it was getting dark, and the Creator was waiting on me outside Crow’s room.
“Success,” she said, her gray eyes tired but bright. “At least I think so. Usually we can repair someone with a small graft if they need it. But I’ve never tried to replace whole limbs before.”
I wondered for a moment what it would take for this woman to be someone who just fixed folk with her science. I mean, this here patching up people proved useful. It had saved Alpha. And maybe it had saved that old Rasta once, before Pop had set the dude free.
“So it worked?” I said.
“It appears so. We’ll know when your friend comes back around. I stimulated propagation, and the cells worked their magic. But whether or not his nervous system agrees with the plan, well, we’ll find out when he wakes up again.”
“How long?”
“He’ll sleep until morning. But what about you, Banyan? How did it go today?”
“You’ll see,” I said. “Tomorrow. When I get done. But tonight I get to see my old man. Right?”
She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder, giving me an awkward sort of squeeze. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you some of my work.”
The Creator led me across the snow, past the dome, and up to the large bunker. “This is our main staging area,” she said, as we shuffled through the snow. “Where we conduct dormancy, and where we’ll begin fusion.”
She swiped a plastic tag that caused two sets of steel doors to peel open. Then she led me inside a giant chamber of bright lights and bodies.
Human bodies.
They were all stretched out together, head to toe and side by side. Their eyes were sealed shut, faces beyond sleeping. And all of them were naked. Limbs pale and floppy. Arms wired up with cables that ran to a giant purple vat that hung from the ceiling.
I scanned the bodies, far as I could see, looking for a face that could be Alpha’s, knowing she was in there somewhere.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said the Creator, raising her voice above the drone of machinery. “But we’re not killing anyone. We’re transforming them. In fact, we’re providing them with everlasting life.”
“How do you reckon?” I said, buying for time while I kept checking for Alpha.
“We’re going to make them magnificent, Banyan. They’ll be the first of a whole new species. A locust-proof species. And they’ll self-propagate, just as the white trees on this island have done for centuries. Reproducing asexually. New plants off the same shared root system. Once we start planting on the mainland, the organism will keep on growing. Don’t you see? We’re granting these single bodies the chance to multiply. To be eternal. Part of a forest without end.”
I gazed across the field of human skin that’d soon be made of leaves and wood. I thought about the fire pit back in the factory, pictured Sal being cast into the flames because his DNA didn’t match up with what GenTech needed. No eternal life for him, then. Not unless you could live inside ashes.
“Can’t you just copy the bodies you want?”
“The gene pool needs diversity. We’ve had to match a core protein set, but the more variants we mix in now, the better off we’ll be.”
I kept scanning the faces. “So what keeps them sleeping?”
“Up there.” She pointed to the purple vat on the ceiling. “It’s a feeder. Keeps them under and gives them everything they need to get their bodies strong, get their cells ready. This time tomorrow, we’ll add a solution that prepares them for fusion. Soon after that, they’ll no longer be simply human.”
I just stared at her, and she beamed with pride.
“The first crop of a brand new species. Trees made ready for the mainland. Regenerating like the white tree but growing fruit like our apple tree. And now,” she said, taking my arm, “it’s time I showed you the source.”
She called the dome the Orchard, and it was smaller and much quieter than the bunker full of bodies. The Creator opened up the steel door with her plastic key. And once inside, I saw a glimpse of something from a broke-down dream.
I staggered and the Creator caught me. I would have pushed her away, pulled myself free. But I felt upside down, as dizzy as when I’d been sick back in the mud pit. All full of a fever that stretched out my mind.
I heard the Creator. She was speaking to me. Trying to explain what was going on. But she didn’t refer to the man as my father. Or Pop. Or anything like that.
She just called him the Producer.
Locked up, Zee had said. My dad was somewhere on the island. Locked up. But no one had really told me anything. Because no one had said one damn thing about this.
Pop didn’t need to be locked up.
He didn’t need to be wrapped up in chains.
He’d left me out near the cornfields. Down in the dirt. But now, seeing him again, it was like he was leaving me all over. And it was like I was just watching, turning to stone as he floated away.
They had him inside a big old tank of water. A tank glowed up with golden lights. There ain’t a way I can really tell what they’d done to him. There’s not words built for what they had going on.
I swayed forward. Part of me wanted to run up and press my face at the glass. But I just waited, watching as the Creator strolled up to the tank and checked the gadgets that were wired against it.
I counted seven saplings.
Each one of them was fresh, bright green, budding in the liquid. Two of the saplings had grown out of Pop’s legs, and one was growing on each of his hands. There was one on his head, one out the belly. And the smallest one curled out from his chest. Straight from his heart.
Pop’s skin was green and knotted. Fibrous. The hair on his scalp had grown twiggy and black. His face was buried under a mess of green roots, and right where his mouth should have been was where a sapling wound upward in the golden lights.
I remember being grateful Pop’s eyelids were sealed shut.
No faraway look in his faraway eyes.
Thought I might puke. Let it all spill out of me. But I just shuffled closer. My footsteps echoed as they scraped at the floor. I went ahead and got next to the glass, and I knelt down by the rubber wheels the tank had been placed upon.
No matter what you called the thing floating in there, it was still my father. What was left of him, anyway. And if what the woman said was true, he might somehow live on forever now. Just keep on going.
But not in the ways that mattered.
I closed my eyes and pictured that forest we’d talked of building. The metal trees and a house of our own. And I saw myself sitting amid the forest and every leaf and branch had turned rusty and broken and all the trees were nothing but holes. I had our old book in my hands, but I’d forgotten all the stories and I was ripping out the pages now, crumpling them and burning them along with Pop’s corn husk sombrero. And I’d quit eating so I was just made of bones and even the locusts wouldn’t touch me. And no one would touch me or see me or hear me as I began screaming for my father in the never ending night.
When I opened my eyes I was still screaming and the Creator had wrapped her arms around me and everything seemed to suffocate me. Heavy and loud. So I quit screaming. I just squatted there. Quiet. Still. The Creator crawled off me, sat on the concrete and watched me. And I knew I had to find a way to let go of this feeling. I had to find some way to keep in control. And I had to play things out right, in front of this woman. Everything depended on it.