Improbable Botany Read online

  IMPROBABLE

  Botany

  _____

  CURATED BY WAYWARD

  EDITED BY GARY DALKIN

  Published by Wayward London Ltd.

  First published 2017

  Selection and editorial matter © Wayward London Ltd 2017.

  Further copyright information appears at the end of the book.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must not impose this same condition on any acquirer.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Design and art direction by Wayward

  Cover illustration and story illustrations by Jonathan Burton

  Editing by Gary Dalkin

  Typeset by Lizzie Frost and Russ Parker

  Printed and bound in the Czech Republic by GZ Media

  ISBN-13 978-1-9997715-1-5

  www.wayward.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  WAYWARD

  The Bicycle-Frame Tree Plantation Manager’s Redundancy

  KEN MACLEOD

  Black Phil

  ADAM ROBERTS

  Strange Fruit

  JUSTINA ROBSON

  Shine

  SIMON MORDEN

  Vegetable Love

  LISA TUTTLE

  The Ice Garden

  ERIC BROWN

  The Living Stones of Venice

  RACHEL ARMSTRONG

  The Adventure of the Apocalypse Vine

  or

  Moriarty’s Revenge

  CHERITH BALDRY

  You Bringers of Oxygen

  STEPHEN PALMER

  Who Lived in a Tree

  TRICIA SULLIVAN

  Advent

  JAMES KENNEDY

  About The Contributors

  WAYWARD

  Introduction

  In 2006, The Wayward Plant Registry was founded. What began as a series of plant adoption events for unwanted plants, a unique engagement model, soon evolved into the workings of a fully-fledged design practice. Today our studio has grown to become a collective of designers, artists and urban growers. Now known as Wayward, we have over a decade of strong cultural and community projects and stories behind us - in which time our practice has pioneered new methodologies in the creative use of underutilised land and further transformed derelict sites into large-scale, design-driven spaces that have engaged local communities and inspired international audiences.

  During our tenth anniversary celebrations, Wayward celebrated what excites and intrigues us about our future - the limitless potential of the biophilic city and of things to come. Science fiction, in granting us an ability to future-forecast, has been an influence throughout our body of work with narrative environments. Whether it is our fascination with xenobotany – such as Triffids, Vervoids and Baneberry vines, whose foundations lie in the blinding, toxic sap of the real life Giant Hogweed – or our quest for survival – as explored in author Andy Weir’s The Martian, when botanist turned space pirate Mark Watney plants potatoes, or in director Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running, where the ‘Valley Forge’ botanical space ark preserves plants for the reforestation of Earth – our work has always been guided by the realm of endless possibility.

  We have curated and published this anthology of science fiction short stories. Improbable Botany features newly commissioned works by eleven of today’s leading science fiction writers on the subject of botanical futures, many of which are set in London. So if, like us, you have ever wondered how you might escape a major city in the midst of an alien plant invasion, then this is the book for you. Part survival handbook, part page-turner, the collection acts as a fond companion to many of Wayward’s past collaborations. Notably with: “Scientist-in-residence” Dr. Brenda Parker, together with whom we developed science-design-artworks like the Algaegarden; author James Kennedy, who invited us to transform a Chicago warehouse into a garden of Improbable Botany (now the title of this book, an idea taken from his by-turns brilliant and bonkers young adult novel, The Order of Odd-Fish); and both Whitechapel Gallery and author Ken MacLeod with whom, as part of the Spirit of Utopia exhibition in 2013, we envisioned the possibilities and challenges of growing food on the moon and further developed a narrative collaboration - a landscape of bicycle trees - based upon the writer’s Arthur C. Clarke award-nominated novel, Intrusion. Our collaboration continues within these pages with the spin-off short story, ‘The Bicycle-Frame Tree Plantation Manager’s Redundancy’.

  Throughout all our endeavours, Wayward has been the fortunate recipient of support from so many people. We are indebted to the generosity of our friends, colleagues, families and communities whose support has enabled us to not only create this book but all our projects past, present and future. To all of you, our gratitude is immeasurable.

  KEN MACLEOD

  The Bicycle-Frame Tree Plantation Manager’s Redundancy

  Long ago, when Alec McCormick had been reading Synthetic Biology and Business Studies at Telford, he’d ride the top deck of the 43 bus from South Queensferry where he still lived with his parents to the stop before the Blackhall junction. There he’d get off to walk the last few hundred metres to the college. One morning in the spring term, gazing idly out of the window at the villas and bungalows of the suburbs around Drumbrae, with the big park on the left where children wended schoolward along dusty paths amid ancient trees, he’d experienced a perspective shift.

  It was like the perceptual flip of the Necker cube. One moment, he was seeing houses with trees in their gardens and a park and a wooded hillside. The next, he was seeing a forest, within which the houses and streets and the slow A90 in from the Forth Bridge to Edinburgh were clearings and paths. The landscape of trees, he saw, was the underlying reality, slow-changing on any human scale. The built environment was the provisional, the passing, the intrusion. It was a beachhead under constant attack from the implacable, imperceptible internal pressure of plant cells, and defended by as constant a flow of reinforcements. The subjects he was studying were going to change all that.

  But not soon: there would be a moment – a historical moment, meaning years – between the old and the new. He was not surprised when, a decade later, taking the slow expensive packed bus in from Perth on his monthly visit to the overcrowded tenement in Pilton where Peak Oil and Peak Debt had driven his parents, he saw so many of the villas and bungalows abandoned, some almost hidden by the growth of their gardens, others already being hauled apart by the long fractal claws of ivy or half-demolished by the crash onto their roofs of trees felled by age and storm. Smoke from squatters’ fires rose from behind the fallen walls. Ponies and donkeys cropped former lawns; pigs rooted through beechmast.

  Now, decades later again, with his parents snugly ensconced in an airy apartment in a retirement estate on the East Neuk that looked as if it had been crafted by elves, and himself circuitously returned to within walking distance of his birthplace, in what felt like defeat after a moderately successful career and a spectac
ularly failed marriage in the North of England, Alec had the same experience in reverse. As he walked up one of the many long, straight paths through his plantation, he saw the forest around him as a factory and the much-trodden grassy grid of pathways and the clumps of natural trees in the vicinity as a parkland, with the farm machines as birds and beasts.

  Each rectangular coppice was filled by a hundred identical trees, regularly spaced; each tree bore a spiral of sixteen identical branches in the angular shape of a bicycle frame. Amongst and above them all hummingbird drones flitted or hovered with watchful lenses, while on the forest floor soft robots somersaulted like Slinky toys, flexible cylinders with tentacles at each end for their camera eyes and manipulator clusters. The trees’ engineered toxins could do much to prevent the growth of lichens, mould, and infections, but they couldn’t do everything, so the robots had to do the rest, mindlessly and tirelessly cleaning until at harvest time they’d collaborate to snap off mature frames and carry them to the long sheds where they stacked them up.

  Alec stopped at the top of a rise and looked around. The plantation sprawled across the ups and downs of a low hilltop overlooking the Firth of Forth. From some of the rises you could see all three of the bridges. On this bright March morning the Pentlands to the south-east and the Ochils to the north-west were both dusted with snow. Closer by, frost glittered in the low sun on the square-topped tower of Dalmeny Kirk and the roofs of the village street. On a Fife hillside far across the Firth, a deceptively similar glitter reflected back from the multiple panes of a wing-mirror farm.

  As he slowly scanned his small domain for anything untoward whose significance the robots’ automated surveillance might have missed, Alec saw a flicker of movement at a junction of paths a hundred metres away. He reached into an inner pocket and pulled out his glasses, giving them a moment to demist before he settled them across his nose. Blinking, he zoomed. Nothing was visible but a robot lolloping across the path.

  He pulled the view back a little, and flipped to infrared. Now he could see three patches of heat – a fuzzy blob just under two metres off the ground, and two smaller patches at about half that height – bobbing and swinging along among the trees. A face and hands.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Stop where you are!’

  The heat patches continued to move, deeper into the trees.

  Alec flipped the glasses to normal vision with infrared overlay and hurried down the path. The frame trees had a more open structure than natural trees, but they overlapped in a way that made direct lines of sight through each coppice almost impossible. This arrangement also made it awkward to walk among the trees without damaging them. As he broke into a trot, Alec thumbed his phone and summoned drones. With one of them he spotted a figure heading for the centre of the coppice. He left the machine hovering, hawk-like, and sent two more down to buzz around the intruder, who swatted ineffectually then stood still.

  He called up a route on his glasses and followed it, arms close to his body, sometimes edging sideways to avoid brushing against buds and young leaves. He stopped a couple of metres from the intruder. A woman who seemed to be in her late forties, a little shorter and younger than he was, with loose black, blond and white hair falling from a bulky woollen hat around a sun-weathered face. The successive banding of the hair, he guessed, indicated the last two colouring-tabs she’d scrounged, and her recent lack of one. She wore a Barbour jacket greasy with age and a raw-edged woollen tartan skirt to mid-calf over battered high boots. Her hair and clothes had caught indeterminate bits of woody detritus. She didn’t stink – the strongest component of her smell was wood-smoke - but she hadn’t had a good wash for days and her clothes hadn’t been laundered for weeks. An over-packed frame rucksack hung about with oddments and mascots attached with bits of sisal and fishing line stood propped against her hip. In her other hand she held a long polished stick of natural wood, on which she leaned lightly.

  She glared at him as if the trespass were his.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. Her middle-class English accent belied her bag-lady look. “Get these things off me!”

  Alec waved the drones to a higher altitude, leaving them to circle above treetop height and out of earshot. Then he tapped his glasses and gave her a searching look.

  “Good morning,” he said, more to fill the time than anything else. “Alec McCormick. I’m the manager of this farm, and I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You’re trespassing,” he said. “And maybe damaging the crops.”

  She looked around. “I can’t see any damage.”

  “You can’t always see it,” he said.

  “Really?” She looked interested. “I didn’t know. How does that work?”

  He made an impatient gesture. “It doesn’t matter. Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  “Caitlin Freeman,” she said. “I’m here to scavenge for a bicycle frame.”

  By this time the search had returned results. Her name was what she said it was. She was forty-one years old, from Brighton, degree educated, married, divorced, no kids, no employment record after she’d been dismissed from an administrative job in a London local authority seven years earlier. No phone. Her progress from London to Scotland was marked by a northward series of petty offences: shop-lifting, trespassing, sleeping rough, breach of the peace, ignoring health advice, unlicensed employment… She seemed to live off social security and odd jobs, mostly on farms – and, no doubt, the proceeds of minor crime. Just as well he’d caught her!

  “But I see you already know who I am,” she said, sounding as if she were the one who’d got the lowdown on him.

  Alec jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Out,” he said. “Follow me.”

  He turned his back, keeping a flying eye on her, and stalked his way back between the branches and trunks. She hefted her pack and followed in his footsteps. When they were both on the path he paused to let her catch up. She fell into step beside him.

  Now that they were clear of the trees, he felt more relaxed, but still wary.

  “I’ll see you to the bus stop.”

  “I know where it is.” She sighed theatrically. “I’ll walk, anyway. I can’t spare the bus fare.”

  “‘I hope you’re not asking me for it.”

  “Oh, no, not at all!” She cast him a sly sideward glance. “I’m used to walking. But with a bike it would be so much easier. That’s why I came here.”

  He was reviewing the previous few hours’ surveillance on his glasses. He couldn’t see any alarms, or even alerts.

  “How did you get in?”

  “That would be telling.”

  He pointed to his glasses. “I’ll find out anyway.”

  “Oh, all right. The trick’s to run fast, then stand very still. The drones lose interest. Repeat at shorter intervals, then roll under the wire.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, and I’ll update the parameters,” he warned.

  She laughed. “There are other tricks.”

  “I’m sure. Well, you’ll have to rely on them from now on.”

  They reached the top of the rise, and headed down, then up towards the road and the house. As they passed the house Alec noticed her eyeing the yard, and at the same time saw that her face was pale under the dirt and tan. She must, he realised, be famished. He felt a pang of pity and shame.

  “Would you like a cup of tea and a bite?”

  “Oh, thanks awfully,” she said, in a light tone. He guessed she was trying to sound less grateful than she was.

  The old farmhouse kitchen was under a low roof of its own. Alec opened the back door to Caitlin, and while her back was to him, used his phone to lock the inner door to the rest of the house. Rather pointedly, he guided a drone in, to drift towards and settle on a shelf, keeping a lens on things. Useful to have a record, just in case. Caitlin sat herself down at the end of the table, propping her rucksack alongside. Alec busied him
self with the kettle, and as he opened the fridge remembered he hadn’t had much of a breakfast.

  “You a veggie?” he asked, flourishing a packet of bacon.

  “Not likely!” she said, smiling for the first time. ‘And yes, I’ll eat synthetic.”

  “Synthetic it is,” he said. “The eggs are real, though.”

  “Good,” she said. “Thanks.”

  He fried the eggs, microwaved the bacon, and warmed the rolls while the tea brewed. Even under the eye of the drone, he felt awkward and self-conscious. He hadn’t been alone in a room with a woman since his wife had pushed him onto the street in Sheffield and, minutes later, hurled a zip bag of snatched-up and stuffed-in belongings after him. Caitlin didn’t seem bothered at all, gazing around the room and now and again tearing a ravenous glance away from the food. Clumsily, he gestured to the situation as he laid the mug and plate in front of her.

  “You must run a lot of risks.” Like this, he didn’t need to add.

  She chewed and sipped for a minute.

  “With men? Any man who messes with me is running a risk.”

  “I guess.” He blew on the tea, munched into the roll. Any knife she carried was unlikely to have a blade more than 2.5 centimetres long – not much of a weapon unless you were adept in self-defence, in which case your unarmed skills would be enough. But there was the stick. And, he guessed, close to hand was some piece of steel, ceramic, or plastic – superficially innocuous, almost literally passing beneath police radar – that could in at moment’s notice be snapped to a wicked edge and a sharp point.

  When they’d eaten, he refilled the mugs and sat back.

  “Tell me,” he said, “if you don’t mind – why were you looking here for a bike frame? You must know they’re not full-grown yet.”

  “I was going to scrounge one of last year’s rejects.” She glanced towards the window. “I see you have a stack.” “You should have just come in the front gate,” he said. “Nipped in and nicked one. Come to think of it, you could have knocked on the door and asked.”