“We don’t got scissors.”
“No, but… look!” Somebody had broken a beer bottle a little ways away. It was out of sight of Grandma’s window, but Jason darted over, picked up a shard of glass, and ran back before she could notice. He lay on the ground beside the plant, sawing with the glass shard. The stem parted. Colin lay down next to him, to watch—he was a little doubtful about Grandma and the sharp beer bottle—with his ear pressed hard against the dusty ground, and that’s when the awesome thing happened.
“Jason!”
“What?” Jason had cut three blue flowers and was getting to his feet. “You got dirt on your face.”
“Everything is talking down there!”
“Talking? With words?”
“No, not words. But everything is making noises under the ground! Not the ground noises—the grass and flowers and the trees outside the fence!”
“Really? What kind of noises?”
Colin raised his head. The noises stopped. “Some are ultra and some are infra”—new words just learned from Rudy—“and some sound like the ones plants make when they’re thirsty, only coming in… in… like those guns in your video game. Ack-ack-ack.”
“Bursts,” Jason suggested.
“Yeah. Like that.”
“Are they shooting at each other?”
“No. It’s like… they’re sending secret messages.”
“Cool! You mean like the Internet! Do it again!”
Colin pressed his ear back onto the dirt. The noises started again. They were going through the dirt and Jason was right, it was like the Internet down there! All those noise e-mails going from one plant to another.
But what were they saying?
Colin arranged the sounds in rows in his head, with the ultra ones sort of like plants needing water except higher, right there in the front row. They came in bursts. Carefully he listened to the high bursts of sound until he was sure he could recognize them. He said, “Cut another flower.”
Jason did. The bursts of sound in the front row got faster and louder.
“Stop cutting!”
Jason did. The frantic bursts of sound stopped.
“Jase, the flowers are upset because you’re cutting them. I think they’re trying to tell the flowers over there!”
Jason frowned. You mean… like when that frog in Daddy’s swamp croaked real loud to warn the other frogs that we were coming?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“But,” Jason argued, “flowers can’t jump into water and swim away. No, wait, Daddy said something once… wait, I got it! He said that some plants gave out clouds of bad-smelling chemicals to scare away animals that might eat them. Maybe the flowers really are telling some other plants that I’m coming!”
Grandma and Tim came out of the trailer. Jason quickly dropped the broken beer bottle on the ground behind him. Grandma said, “There you two are! What have you got?”
“Flowers,” Jason said, holding them out. “For you.”
“Chicory,” Grandma said. “In really hard times in history, people would powder these to make coffee substitute. Thank you, boys!”
Colin looked doubtfully at the blue flowers; they didn’t look anything like Maxwell House. “Grandma,” he said, “can plants hurt?”
“Feel pain, you mean? No, honey, they don’t have nerve endings.”
That was a relief. It had troubled him.
She said, “Why do you ask?”
Colin looked up at her, knowing that he was so different from her, knowing too she liked him to tell the truth. Daddy also insisted on truth, or at least he did before he got sick. But maybe the truth didn’t have to include the beer bottle, if he said everything else. That was a fair trade.
“Grandma,” he said, “we—Jason and me—we got to tell you something.”
Far into the night, Marianne sat at her computer, reading journals to which she had never before paid much attention.
Plants did emit sounds that indicated thirst; the sounds came from the fracturing of overdry water-conducting tubules.
Corn roots clicked regularly, right at the lower edge of human hearing. No one knew why.
Researchers had known for two decades that plants emitted sounds as short-range deterrents or attractors for insects.
Plants could “hear” sounds, too—some orchids released pollen only for the high-frequency buzz of a certain bee.
Plant-to-plant communication with sound had all kinds of evolutionary advantages over communicating chemically—sounds were faster, required less energy, could go farther. How far? Since grass roots were highly connected underground and much of the world’s biomass was connected through fungi, the limits were unknown.
Sound moved easily through soil.
Other organisms without brains displayed mechanosensing, largely through changes in ion fluxes. Which plants certainly had.
Plants were influenced by nearby flora: Chili plants, to name just one, were shown as far back as 2013 to grow better near basil plants, even when the plants were isolated from sending each other chemical, touch, or light-transmitted signals.
Many mammals used infrasonics to communicate over distance: elephants, whales, hippos, rhinos, giraffes. Humans shared many gene sets with other mammals.
For over a hundred years scientists pooh-poohed the idea that bats could navigate by sound.
She got up to pour herself another glass of chardonnay. It was three in the morning but she didn’t feel sleepy. Carrying her glass, she slipped into the boys’ bedroom and looked down at Colin, curled into a ball in his locomotive-printed pajamas, his hair spiky on the pillow. In the dim light from the living room, he looked like a baby animal, a hedgehog or kitten.
The spore plague had activated sets of human immune-system genes that had lain dormant for 140,000 years. What other “junk genes” had they awakened in developing fetuses?
“Marianne,” Tim whispered in the doorway, “come to bed.”
His bed, he meant, although they made sure to each be in their own rooms before Colin and Jason awakened. But for the first time, Marianne did not feel the surge of desire.
She left the kids’ bedroom and closed the door. “Not tonight, Tim, okay? I’m pretty tired.”
“Okay.” His face was unreadable, but she could see the hard-on through his briefs. “Sleep well.”
“You, too.”
But sleep wouldn’t come. It wasn’t Tim she thought of, but Harrison. At Columbia, that Time magazine article had said, working on brain anomalies in mice. For scientific problems, Harrison had the tenacity of a pit bull. It was one of the things she’d loved about him.
Sleep was a long time coming.
“Marianne, it’s Jonah Stubbins.”
Of course it was. Marianne sat up groggily in bed. Christ—9:00 a.m.! The boys would be late for school. She heaved herself off the bed and threw on her robe.
“Marianne, you there?”
“Yes, but I can’t talk right now. I—”
The boys were gone. A note from Tim lay on the table in his block printing: TOOK KIDS TO SCHOOL.
“Never mind, Jonah. What is it?”
“What it always is. I want you and your grandchildren to move to the ship-build site, for safety’s sake. And your bodyguard, too, of course.”
Something in the way Stubbins said “your bodyguard” irritated Marianne. Her personal life was private, and whatever Stubbins thought he knew—or maybe even did know—was none of his business. But she kept her temper. “I told you, I can’t do that. I need to be close enough to my son’s facility to visit him. And my grandsons are settled in school.”
“We can helio you to Ryan whenever you want, and get a first-class tutor for the kids. I just want you to be safe, Marianne.”