Improbable Botany Page 3

  “Not just any botanist,” the mayor had insisted. “Black Phil himself! I can’t believe that there are people in the world capable of such wickedness — to try and murder you!”

  Younghusband had left that same day. The chef du maison was saddened, but not surprised.

  ‘Black Phil’ had started out as a Twittergraph joke, and had spread swiftly, taking (Younghusband supposed) what meagre Little-John force it possessed from the fact that he was not black. He was indeed called Philip of course, but he was pale as milk, pale as a new moon in a bright sky. His daughter, working now at Mumbai University, had told him she thought it was cool, at any rate. “Makes you sound like a pirate,” she had said. His ex-wife, with whom relations were not cordial, had mocked him openly about the nickname. Not that there was anything he could do. Botanists were the rock stars of the age. Huge crowds mobbed him wherever he went. The more intense the celebrity the less agency Younghusband experienced. He was as purely passive a figure as any non-motile vegetable.

  From the window of the plane: a black land, black forests intersected by coke-line straight white roads. And then the ocean, as purple as a deep bruise.

  And so he had come to Syracuse, booking into a hotel at the Latomia dei Cappucci under a pseudonym. Somebody in the establishment had recognised him — somebody always recognised him — and told the mayoress. This must have happened, because she arrived with a deputation to welcome him officially to the district. Philip had had no choice but to meet her, shake her hand and force a winter smile for the myriad hovering cameras. She presented him with a rare 1849 edition of Matthias Schleiden’s Grundzüge der Wissenschaftlichen, the pages coated with that astonishing diaflex material that all books seemed to be treated with nowadays. And actually it was a gift that touched Philip, for his collection was one of the few things in his life still to bring him pleasure. But at the same time he recognised the point of it. A bribe. It was the mayoress’s way of pressuring him to stay awhile. Imagine the benefits if Syracuse could boast that Philip Younghusband was staying in their community!

  He went through his usual list of diffident disclaimers. He didn’t deserve such celebrity. He was from an older generation, one that expected its scientists to be humble souls, working patiently at their data. He was a tubby, balding Englishman in his late sixties; easily embarrassed, unprepared for and still unreconciled to his global celebrity. “I only did the work on modifying the anthocyanins to cascade chlorophyll mutation,” he said. “It was Shrivastava who did all the work on viral spread. He was the one with the vision.”

  “Ah,” said the mayoress. “The vision thing. Yes. The assassination of Shrivastava Acharya is one of the great tragedies of our age.”

  This was painful for Phil to hear. The currents and eddies of ressentiment that swirled through Phil’s being were, as is the English way, only partly repressed; and sometimes, as now, threw up localised spots of turbulence. “I was standing four yards from him when he was blown apart,” he told the lady. “Pieces of him were embedded in my flesh by the explosion. Months later they re-emerged in various boils and pustulations in my skin as my body rejected the foreign matter. It was revolting. This datum possesses neither the pity nor the terror required by Aristotle’s definition of tragedy.”

  “And yet,” the mayoress replied, quicker-witted than most of the officials Phil met on his travels, “did not this horrible fact actualise a literal form of catharsis?”

  As rapidly as it had boiled up, Phil’s spitefulness ebbed away. “I’m sorry,” he said, in his undersprung, plod-plod Italian. “I am tired. And, even after all these years, I’m not used to being treated as a celebrity. I am only a botanist.”

  “You are a botanist,” the mayoress repeated, with an inflection that fully inverted his meaning.

  “Thank you for your gift,” Phil told her, in a blank voice. Everything ends. Every ending must have a location, geographically speaking. Stand, sit down, lie down. Lie on your back, lie on your front. Orientation was significant. If he quietened the inner noise, he could just about hear the waterfall tumbling through his soul, a perpetual distant roaring, on the far-side of silence. Water was calling to him. The mayoress was making small-talk. They were walking together down the path into Latomia, the mayoress’s two bodyguards a few paces behind them. But news had spread, and locals were seeking out vantage points and places from which they could take a look at Black Phil. The landscape was a limestone quarry of immemorial age and long disuse, now clogged with centuries-worth of soil and overgrowth, windlessly hot under the hard sunlight. Black grass and shrubs grew on the flanks of the irregularly-shaped dell, alongside wild orchard trees — you could tell they were wild because the goosebumpy globes of the fruit were dark blue rather than the artificially primped primary colours of commercial crops. The path took them so deep into the valley the quality of the light shifted. It felt like dusk at midday. And I’ll go to bed at noon. Or, Phil thought, to a sort of bed.

  “Perhaps,” the mayoress said, “we can arrange a trip to the Etna elevator? Not a genuine space elevator, of course; I’m sure you know that.”

  Younghusband neither knew nor cared. Nonetheless he was ashamed enough of his early outburst to feign interest.

  “It reaches five kilometres into the sky, and terminates in a launch platform half a hectare in extension!”

  Marvellous.

  “It draws on what we have learned from Them, of course.” This whole sentence in Italian except for its last word, which was in English.

  Marvellous.

  As they walked back up, the mayoress said something else that suggested a quicker wit than the other local officials Phil had encountered. “You do not have a bodyguard,” she noted. “Perhaps you prefer your body to be unguarded?” And she smiled at him. She knew, he saw.

  Back at the hotel Phil took a bath. The young (of course young) room-attendant came unselfconsciously into the bathroom to change the towels and ask if he needed anything further — wholly unfazed by his nudity. Indeed, she apparently did not notice it at all, even though Phil rather drew attention to it by splashing about like a walrus as he reached for a flannel to cover his genitals. “No,” he gasped. “No, thank you.” Did she expect a tip? How was he supposed to tip her when he was as naked as the day he was born? But, no, it seemed she didn’t want a tip. She went out again, and Phil wallowed for a long time, pondering that mystery of generational mores. The received wisdom was that it had always been this way. But he found that hard to swallow. Surely he had never appeared so strange, so alien, to his parents’ and grandparents’ generations as these youngsters did to him? The young people around him were growing up in a radically different world to the one Phil had known in his youth. Black forests, oceans dyed dark purple. What he saw when he looked around was a world stained gloomily funereal. But they looked at the same landscapes and saw only — normality. Or they didn’t look around particularly at all. Their eyes were drawn up, to where the Soletta dangled in its solar lagrange.

  That was his fault, too.

  ~

  That night he had another conversation with Shrivastava. These exchanges were most likely to happen when his spirits were especially low, when something had unsettled him, when the whisky had failed to unpick his insomnia. There were new models of somnolants on the drug-market now, he knew, but he didn’t take them. Presumably some part of him enjoyed the sleeplessness. It wasn’t as if he had to be wide awake at 7am to clock-on at the University of Timbuktu any more. He could sleep all day if he wanted.

  Wanted was a poisonous word, though.

  Some nights the ghost was more properly communicative, but tonight Shriv appeared only to lecture him. “If a consequence is anticipated, from a strictly scientific point of view,” he asked Phil, “can it truly be called unintended? Ladies and gentlemen of the scientific establishment, I put it to you that all the consequences that have flowed from the development of melanophyll adaptations have worked for the larger good of mankind!”

&n
bsp; “Hi, Shriv,” Younghusband said. His old friend turned his half-face towards him and grinned. An image from nightmare. The whole left-side of his cranium had been knocked away, sphinx-nose-like, by the blast, and his ribcage had been snapped open like a claw. But the right side of his face was weirdly untouched, save for some lateral scorch marks. He worked the unblasted half of his jawbone now, and his red tongue wagged into open space, and yet — as always — his words emerged perfectly clearly.

  “Somebody tried to kill me in Tanganyika,” Phil told him. “Shot three Feat Bullets in my direction. According to the police I was lucky they were second-hand ordnance, or something. However that works. Lucky not to end up like you.”

  “It displays a degree of institutional naivety,” Shriv said, addressing the wall, “to think that our research intentions extended no further than refloriation of the Sahara and sub-Saharan wastes! Of course that was one consideration, but our ambitions were never so small scale.”

  “It was a pretty half-hearted attempt, I think,” said Phil. “Spur of the. Momentary spur. With more planning he could have got through to me. Sooner or later one of them will get me. They hate us, for what we did to the world. Not the colour, not that. The other thing — the thing with Them. I tell you what, Shriv: I’m almost looking forward to it.”

  “Another was the desire,” Shriv’s ruined mouth kept working, and the words came out with impossible clarity, “to increase the efficiency of vegetative output — a very real consideration for global farming, given the increased demands upon food supply made by the ballooning global population.”

  “Jesus,” coughed Phil. “Was that one of mine? Vegetative output? Jesus but mine is a terrible turn of phrase, and that’s the God’s honest. Why didn’t we hire professional speech-writers? What were we thinking? The mayoress of this town asked me: where is your staff. She expects me to have a whole staff! Fancy.”

  “The fact is, chlorophyll evolved at a time when sunlight was considerably redder than it is today. It does a superb job, chlorophyll; it is an elegant and durable chemical solution to a perennial problem. And it has shown remarkable staying power, evolutionarily speaking. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved! The spectrum has shifted, and a darker chlorophyll is more efficient at processing today’s light. This efficiency increases not just crop yield, but also increases the range of habitats in which plants can flourish.”

  “Tell them about your viral tweak, Shriv,” Phil said, lying back on his bed and gazing at the ceiling. “Tell them all about it.”

  The half-face turned again in Phil’s direction, again smiling with ghastly openness. Then, back to its imaginary audience. “The genetic modification gave the plants that carried it such a powerful advantage in evolutionary terms that the spread of the mutation was not a surprise. To those who say that the consequences were unintended, I say: not so!”

  “Tell them the whole truth, Shriv,” Phil said to the ceiling. “Don’t die in the middle of a lie. Tell them about your viral work. Tell them about you and me. Break the news to Anushri yourself, like you promised. You’re going to be dead in a few seconds.”

  “The pace of change has proved,” Shriv continued, angling his half-head, as if conceding a minor point, “has been at the upper-end of our predictions. That much is true.”

  “Fear of a black planet,” said Phil, wearily. He knew what was coming.

  “But global warming was a real problem before the melanophyll spread to ocean algae. That is simply fact. All that has happened subsequent to the rapid spread of the melanophyll is that the technological developments needed to address the consequences of climate change have been accelerated — a boon, rather than a curse, surely. The Soletta …” Shriv stopped, and turned his head away. That was when he had first heard the commotion at the back of the hall. What had been going through is head? Had he considered stopping his lecture, retreating backstage? Probably not. He had always been a determined fellow. He had been too stubborn to tell Anushri about the two of them when he was alive; and Phil had been too scared to tell her after his death. Lose-lose.

  “The Soletta, that has proved so effective in mitigating solar overexposure, was fundable in part because increased crop yields, and the reclamation of vast areas of previously desert land, have tripped global GDP over one hundred trillion euros for the first time ever. Riches! The melanophyll is the key to global plenty.”

  “They don’t hate us for the global warming, Shriv,” said Phil, from the bed. “They don’t hate us for the black landscapes. That’s not why they want us dead.”

  “Efficiency is beautiful!” Shriv announced, to the wall, lifting his right arm, and the stump of his left, as he moved into his peroration. “The advances Professor Younghusband and I have shepherded through were inevitable — as inevitable as they were desirable! We have nothing to apologise for. Our work has left humanity in a better place. All that has changed, and I concede that many things have changed, were inevitable changes. Inevitable, that is, provided humanity maintained its path towards progress and — ”

  That was when the projectile buzzed straight through, like a fat brass mosquito, and exploded close beside Shriv’s face. Inevitable was the word that clanked like a gong. Inevitable. No going back.

  “I miss you,” he said to the ceiling. But that sounded underpowered, to his own ears. It was the truth, and it hurt him, but the banality of it hurt him more.

  ~

  The following day the mayoress had organised a boat trip, and — passive as ever — Phil agreed to go along. “I hope there will be no journalists or mediabots present?” he asked, and was assured not.

  “The world is a different place because of you,” the mayoress told him, shaking her forefinger playfully in his face — a gesture that irritated him intensely. “You must expect some interest from the hoi polloi.”

  “Hoi means the,” Phil said, fitting his dark glasses over his eyes. “The the is superfluous.” Il il è superflua. He was old enough to remember when sunglasses had arms that reached along the side of a person’s head and hooked around their ears. “And anyway. As I always say, however much melanophyll accelerated global warming, the fact remains: that was a brute fact of the environment long before our research.”

  “Oh,” said the mayoress, as they stepped aboard the boat. “Global warming? Oh I’m not talking about global warming.”

  “I see,” said Phil, doing an inadvertent little dance as the deck angled itself ten degrees or so to the left, and then shrugged back to the horizontal. “You mean Them.”

  “Of course Them!” Them was the one English word in the flow of Italian, although with that Italian hard ‘Th’.

  “Well,” said Phil, taking his seat on the deck and fastening his seatbelt. “They were an unintended consequence. Anybody who says otherwise is walking around wearing a tin-foil hat.” The boat angled and straightened. The sky was a hard, bright blue.

  The mayoress replied, in English, “sorry, it was too fast for me”, and Phil realised that he had, without realising it, slipped into his native tongue. “I am sorry, I beg of you,” he told her in Italian, “forgive me. I am old, and absent-minded.”

  She smiled more widely than (surely!) was comfortable for her, and said something in reply; but her words were drowned by the noise of the boat engine starting up. In moments the craft was standing up on the water on hydrofoil legs, and was swooshing away from the land.

  For a while Phil let the force of the breeze now blowing against his face take away his worries and his cares. Are worries different to cares? Two days before somebody had tried to shoot him — not for radically and irrevocably changing the colour of the landscape, he reminded himself, but for Them. Looking over the side of the boat: the water was a clear, brilliant blue, striated with clear white streaks and gashes of foam from the prow. It was only, sitting back and looking to the distance, that the Mediterranean looked black.

  The mayoress leant close to him. “We often sightings of Them along this c
oast,” she yelled, against the wind, in English. “I am assured there is a base in the water, here or near.”

  Phil nodded, grinning, and feeling like a prize fool. Away to their right, the pale-blue dome of Etna was clearly visible; black-purple vegetation reaching right up to the snowline. Buildings were faintly visible at the top, and the elevator itself looked insubstantial as a single strand of spider-silk, reaching upwards and seeming (it was hard to say, except where the sun glinted from it) to curve away.

  “There have been landslides here,” the mayoress howled in his ear, pointing to the coast. And he could see that chunks of the blackened cliff-face had indeed been scalloped out by erosion. Even the superbly tenacious Acharya-Younghusband varieties of vegetation took time to regrow. So the coast stood as it had, before the changes; seamed with canyons that made it look like the rind of a melon.

  “There!” screamed the mayoress, and her two bodyguards unholstered their sidearms in startlement. Phil followed the line of her arm and saw one of Them, swooping down, perhaps from orbit. There was a flicker of white-blue as it banked and caught the sun, and then an elongated splash a few hundred metres away. Everybody on deck rushed to the side where it had come down, Phil with them. For a moment he thought it had sunk right down, but then he saw it, perhaps ten metres below them, mottled like a carp, shaped somewhere between a snake and a swift. It swept splendidly under the boat and was gone.