Botanical engineer? Daniel stared into the darkness, straining to pick out the trunks of the trees he had sampled. And he wondered if his father knew about her. It occurred to him that if he did, and if he had said nothing about it all these years, then he was a different man than the one Daniel thought he knew.
Everyone was changing. Keri. His mother. Dad. Only Jess seemed irrevocably himself. Daniel smiled crookedly. And realized that Albert was watching him closely. That he had expected his name to mean something to Daniel.
“Will you show me what you do?” Daniel asked him. “Will you tell me what my mother did?”
“Yes.” He looked disappointed. “Yes, I will.”
He led Daniel through the greenhouse, pointing out each species of plant, describing its habitat, when it was last reported, why it had vanished from the drying, decreasing world. The survivalist’s ghost had followed them in and drifted along with them like a cooler current in the thick air.
“For awhile, we wanted to save every species that had ever existed.” Albert halted at the far end of the greenhouse in front of a narrow bench covered with shiny instruments and two microscopes. A cot had been wedged between the bench and the side wall. A rumpled sleeping bag lay on it, and a small laptop. “These days we’re much too busy feeding ourselves to worry much about other species outside the Preserves and the parks.” Albert tapped the microscope with one blunt finger. “That’s what your mother was doing. Finding ways to save our butts as we ran out of water for the usual crops.” Up close, he looked tired. Lines had begun to etch themselves permanently into his face, and silver glinted in his pale hair. He was older than Daniel had thought at first. “Funny,” he said heavily. “She was so intense. It was just a job to me—but I’m the one who stayed the course.”
Daniel didn’t answer. The syllables of his mother’s name lay between them, preventing casual conversation. He wandered over to the end of one growing bench. Plants with narrow leaves sprouted in their dishes of jelly. He examined the fine spiderweb of pale roots. A few of the plants had tightly furled white buds.
“What I do here… I use tissues from endangered species that aren’t on the List yet. I have a federal permit to collect them. I clone their cells and grow new plants from them to rebuild the populations.
From each cell, a new plant.
“What a waste.” Albert turned his back suddenly, shoulders bowed, fists clenched. “All that talent wasted. She should have been cured. She should have kept on with her work, but she just walked away. She could string DNA like beads, and she goes and marries some dumbshit backwater local. What the hell was wrong with her?”
“She loved horses. The wild ones.” Daniel spoke to the white flowered plant in front of him. “She said they died.”
“Did they?” Albert looked blank. “I don’t know. I was never involved with desert programs. She grew up in the desert, didn’t she? Nobody lives out there anymore.”
“It hurt her.” His mother had worked with this man—talked with him, maybe laughed at a joke he made. Just as with the place mats she had bought, the sudden sense of connection dizzied him. It was as if a window had opened and he had caught a glimpse of his mother walking through a life he had no knowledge of. He moved down the bench and picked up the orchid. “This is still on the List.”
“I told you it wasn’t.” Albert glowered at him.
Daniel touched a delicate leaf. “If it’s found in a park, or a Preserve, you can’t disturb anything around it. Not even to take out a single tree.”
“I told you these are all rare plants.” Albert’s gaze didn’t waver. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“Why don’t you change them?” Daniel looked at the bench full of instruments. “Why don’t you make them more adaptable?”
“Like the trees? Like the biomass bushes down in the valley—the ones you can irrigate with 30 percent seawater?” For the first time, a hint of uncertainty softened the man’s face. “If I did that they… they wouldn’t be the same plant.”
I am afraid, his mother had said. We are changing. The survivalist’s ghost had drifted away.
“How old are you?” Albert asked abruptly.
“Fourteen.” Daniel watched the man’s eyes flicker.
“I last… saw your mother almost fifteen years ago. You look like her.” For an instant, a bleak loneliness filled his face. “I had come back to… ask her to come with me. To beg her.” He turned his back on Daniel and pretended to do things with the instruments. “You can make a good living as a skilled tech. I could train you.”
The survivalist’s ghost drifted back, as if drawn by the yearning in Albert’s voice. It brushed Daniel’s face like a breath of cold clammy air. “Okay,” Daniel said slowly. “If you teach my friend, too.”
“All right.” But Albert frowned. “When can you come out here?”
“Late afternoons.” He could finish his shift in the plantation early if he didn’t take breaks, and still get home by dark. “See you tomorrow,” he said.
“What’s your friend’s name?” Albert called as he reached the door.
Daniel looked briefly over his shoulder. “Keri.” Then he ducked out into the fading night to retrieve his pack and go file his samples in the night-drop bin.
Keri was reluctant to go at first—distrustful of this stranger who had no monetary reason to be doing what he was doing. To her way of thinking, that made him crazy. They were both tapping the ripe insulin trees now. Jensen had assigned her to work with him instead of firing her. He came by every afternoon and Daniel watched him watch her, and watched her pretend not to notice. It made Daniel angry and clumsy, and he couldn’t be clumsy. Each tree had to be carefully cut—not too deep or it would cause irreparable harm—not too shallow, or the sap flow would be poor.
The tough plastic collection bags reminded Daniel of the IV bags that had hung above his mother’s bed during the last days of her life. Only those bags had shrunk, not swelled like these.
They bad to check the bags constantly to make sure that the tubing that led from the tap to the bag didn’t plug up. As each bag filled, it was labeled with the number of the individual tree, the sector number, and their ID. Then they lugged the bags out to the access road and packed them carefully into insulated plastic crates. Four times a day, the crates would be collected for processing. Jensen himself collected their bags. He didn’t collect from any other sector.
This plantation produced pharmaceuticals exclusively. They did the crude extraction of the drugs on-site and then sent the extracts to another plant for refining. All the bioform trees were cloned from a single tissue stock. The technicians who did the cloning made good money. So Keri let herself be persuaded, and they went to the greenhouse after their shift.
There, Albert taught them how to clone cells. He was a good teacher, and a demanding one. The main requirements were precision and sterile technique. He asked them about the town and themselves as they began to get comfortable with each other. He told them about the huge bush farms in the river valleys, where bio-mass from salt-tolerant bushes, digested into syrup by bacteria, fed the vats that produced everything from corn oil to orange juice. He told them how the seawater mix that watered the bushes left its white signature on the valley soil.
He didn’t talk about himself much. And when he did, his life rang hollow, like the shell of a wild tree whose heart had rotted out. “Why didn’t you ever get married?” Keri teased him one afternoon.