“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 semi-feral 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, do you know?”
“Trees?” Joe shook his head. “Haven’t gone and looked, 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 eye stalks 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 ’viromentalist back when antiglobalisation was about big corporations pissing on us all for profits. Got into gene hackery and self-sufficiency bigtime. I slung his fucking 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 Jupiter orbit 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 est-ee-vate 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—throwback in green Wellingtons and Barbour jacket—and her latest femme, out into what had once been a car park and was now a tattered wasteground out back 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.
“Uhhuh.” 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 metres would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling subsentient coppers whose job it was to prevent consipracy-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 realising 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 metal, meta—”
“Metabolism.” Wendy began walking towards 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 ’zymes 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 like 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 Ariane or Atlas 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 post-human 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 eliptically.