Improbable Botany Read online

  “I do not care what the negative people say,” the mayoress declared, in (for some reason) English. “I consider them beautiful. Their intentions towards us — surely they are honourable.”

  Phil found that he was short of breath.

  “I saw one of Them once, walking,” the mayoress said, in rapid Italian, “walking, walking in a street in Milan. Children were running up and stroking its sides! It walked the whole length of the street and out of the town.”

  “Marvellous,” said Phil, sitting down and fitting his seatbelt about his paunch again. Down into the water, he thought. Down and down. The beguiling depths of the black ocean. What was the beast doing down there? Where was it going? “Only one way to go,” Philip said, and then realised he had said it aloud, in English. Everyone was looking at him. He didn’t add: down.

  ~

  Later there was an official banquet, from which, once again, Phil was too passive to excuse himself. What was the point of going? was balanced, exactly, in his head by: what was the point in not going? The mayor of Marseilles was in Syracuse for some mayoral summit, or mutual back-scratching, or something; and expressed himself very excited to meet the ‘great Professor.’ At the pre-dinner drinks, he expatiated volubly in French, without first checking whether Younghusband spoke the language (of course he did). Mayors nowadays had more actual power than heads of nationstates, he said. All the really important decisions were happening at local level. His name, Monsieur Gilles Monoir, struck Philip with weird, uncanny force. It echoed through his mind as the fellow chattered on. Monoir, monoir, monoir.

  He sat at a lozenge-shaped table with two dozen others. Younghusband was invited to make a speech, which he did in his sluggish Italian, keeping it brief, all the while thinking: monoir, monoir, monoir. Then he sat back down and picked lassitudinously at his food, and drank heartily of his wine. Mayor Monoir was talking in a loudly indiscrete voice, about the latest rumours from ‘high up’. ‘High up’ apparently meant: the corridors of UN power. It seemed the visitors (les visiteurs de l’autre quartier) were on the verge of moving to some new phase of their relations with humanity. Everything was about to change! You mark my words, ladies and gentlemen (écoutez-moi bien, mesdames et messieurs) tomorrow or the next day there was going to be a world-shattering announcement. Everything that les visiteurs de l’autre had previously done with and to humanity would soon be eclipsed by, and so on. And so forth.

  Phil tuned him out. Monoir, monoir, monoir, sounding in his head, like the Esmiss Esmoor in that old novel.

  What novel was that? He had read a lot of novels in his life, and found it hard to keep them all straight.

  Then the mayoress made her speech, switching from Italian to French to English in a slightly show-offy manner. Her name had made no impact upon Philip at all. The key thing, she opined, was that the new shades of chlorophyll had increased crop yields by as much as fifty percent. The man sitting at the table with them had done more for world hunger than anyone in history. Phil tried not to scowl, but he felt his smile must be a hideous rictus. Surely they noticed!

  It seemed they did not. They all raised their glasses and so he did too.

  He excused himself as eleven o’clock struck, and shuffled out to a standing ovation — actual applause, everyone round the table clapping and clapping. It was excruciating. In his room he ran himself another bath and lay in the tub, staring at the ceiling. No sign of Shriv.

  He didn’t come every night.

  From the bath he ordered up the TV. The whole of the far wall into a screen — images of Them, Presidents and prophets. Sportsmen and women. A light show. Chatter, chatter.

  He turned it off.

  The soak sobered him up. Back in his bedroom he sat in a dressing gown and added a paragraph to the letter he was writing to his ex-wife. He had started writing it before Shriv had died, but he added to it more regularly since. So much speculation about what They will say, what they will do. It’s all a matter of loss. It’s measurable in terms of the fall. It’s not that they’re so much more advanced than we are, although that’s. He stopped, and stared at nothing. What was the word? Axiomatic, he wrote. It’s the sense that we brought this on ourselves. That I brought this on ourselves. Shriv had this schtick about how we intended it all, but — look. I don’t want to keep writing this over and over, because I’m fully aware the more I repeat it the less likely I am to be believed, but it’s the truth. Shriv and I talked about eventually replacing all the green growth with black, but it was Shriv on his own who tweaked it to send it viral. And even in the worst-case, he stopped, erased that and wrote most extreme scenario I didn’t anticipate the ocean bloom going black. That wasn’t the plan. That wasn’t my plan.

  He stopped at that point, because he had experienced a sudden insight into why the Frenchman’s name had resonated so profoundly with him. Monoir — monde noir. Fear of the black planet. “It’s not even that,” he said, aloud.

  He went back into the bathroom, filled the bath to the brim, and sat on the toilet staring at the water. Not drunk enough, yet.

  Then, because he had too much pride to sit unscrewing and guzzling a dozen Lilliputian bottles from the minibar, he got dressed — slacks, shirt, bright green tie, waistcoat — and went down to the hotel bar. An instrumental version of ‘I Fought The Law’ was playing, apparently scored for lutes. Phil ordered a large whisky, but when it arrived it struck him as insultingly small, so he ordered a second and took them both over to a corner table. For a while he was undisturbed. The screen in the corner was playing the news with the sound turned down. He read the subtitles. Importanti novità riguardo i viaggiatori al di fuori del sistema solare. Ministers from the European Council were being interviewed. The lute-theme continued with a sinuous, Renaissance-flavoured cover of ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’.

  “Excuse me?” said a man, in English. “You are Professor Younghusband?”

  Too weary or intoxicated (or both) for niceties, Phil simply stared at him. Thirty-something, handsome, well-dressed. An accent. From whence? Out of the depths, I cry unto you. Out of water we are born, to water to return.

  “May I join you?” Because Phil did not say no, the stranger sat down.

  “May we speak in English? My English is not perfect English, but it is better than my Italian.”

  “You’re not Italian?” Phil asked, through a gummy mouth.

  “I am Turk. Aytaç Kadah is my name. It is an honour to meet you, sir. May I say sir?” But Phil only gaped at him, so he said. “I do not mean may I. It is not idiomatic. I meant, is it correct, that I call you sir?”

  “Phil,” said Phil.

  Kadah beamed, the smile adding lustre to his regular, well-proportioned face. “Indeed, an honour. May I say it surprises me that you drink alone? In public, I mean? After what happened to your colleague? Would not a bodyguard be a good idea, Phil?” Then he laughed. “So many questions! I do not mean to bombard you with questions.”

  It occurred to Younghusband, in a distant sort of way, that this young man had come to assassinate him. He couldn’t summon the energy to be alarmed. Both his whisky glasses were empty in front of him. The glasses were neatly set, side-by-side. As though the table was peering at him through goggles.

  “They say,” Aytaç Kadah said, “that the extra-terrestrials are making an announcement tomorrow. A profound announcement, an earth-shaking announcement. Making their intentions clear. Me, I do not believe they will make their intentions clear. I do not believe their intentions are clear. I mean to say, I do not believe that intentions are what these beings possess, not in the same way that we humans possess them.”

  “It’s the last scene of 2001,” Phil said, not articulating his words very clearly.

  “The year of my birth!” the man beamed.

  “Not the year. The film. I blame,” he added, rubbing his fat right hand up and down across his brow. “Myself.” Hand on forehead made a rasping noise. He stopped. “I blame myself,” he said again, with a sensation in hi
s solar plexus of unfolding lightness, a tingling, as if he had stumbled upon a profound truth that had previously, despite its very obviousness, or perhaps because of that, eluded him.

  “Blame?” said Kadah. “Praise!”

  “What happened to Professor Acharya will happen to me,” Phil said. “Professor Acharya, my friend.”

  Kadah looked serious. “There are people who are hostile to the changes that have happened, of course there are. People who wanted plants always to be green. People who dislike the black. But not the young — they have grown up with the black, and are used to it.”

  “Not that,” said Phil. “The other thing.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow the visitors will make gift to us the technology to make Earth a paradise! Then your name will be praised and thanked. Already we have learned much from them.”

  “What happened after the end of 2001,” Phil slurred. “I don’t figure that worked out well for the rest of us. I reckon that baby finished us off.” As he said baby he had a piercing visual memory of his daughter at the age of a few months. He felt the urge to weep, but of course held it back. The water was all outside him, and none of it was inside. He stared vacantly at his companion’s face.

  “For good or ill, you have changed the world,” Kadah said. Then he said, “Sen benim yakışıklı dostum dünya değişti,” and laid a hand, carefully, unambiguously, upon Phil’s leg.

  For a moment Younghusband stared at the hand. The pattern of hairs. “Twenty minutes,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Give me twenty minutes. I need to wash. Room eleven-ninety. Eleventh, eh, floor. Twenty minutes. Give me.”

  The stranger nodded slowly, seriously, and withdrew his hand. “Very well.”

  Unsteadily, Phil got to his feet. It felt like he had risen to deliver a speech, at a scientific conference, or a public event. Just the small sensation of standing. So, a speech was what he delivered. “Shriv used to say that it was inevitable,” he said. “They would have come eventually. But I say they came already. They clocked our planet’s albedo. I figure they were here to do that, though maybe they weren’t, maybe they did that from far away. At any rate, what’s certain is — since then they’ve been watching us. We sent out radio signals a century ago and they didn’t care. That didn’t mean anything to them. Or that wasn’t significant enough for them.” The more he spoke, the more rapidly the words came out. Kadah, still sitting, was gazing up at him adoringly. Or perhaps, uncomprehending. It didn’t matter. “TV signals, nuclear weapons testing, none of that drew them. But then — the albedo of our world changed. And that was the trigger! Then we had passed the test. We had graduated. It’s the truth. Now they take us seriously. Whatever Shriv says, he never anticipated that. But what does that mean to graduate. I guess we’ll find out. I guess we won’t like it. I think joining the interstellar species club means playing with DNA, not building bigger and bigger computers or bombs or — ” And the words died. He sighed, slouched, nearly sat again. But the sight of Kadah’s handsome face beaming at him twisted some metaphorical knife, somewhere. He nodded, and said, “give me thirty minutes, yeah?” and walked mazily through to the elevators.

  Back in his apartment the bath was brimming from when he had earlier filled it. The water was now lukewarm. A button by the taps snapped the plug free, producing a very somatic, rather comical gurgling, sucking sound. He undid his tie, fed the thin end into the plughole and pushed the button again. The plug snapped back into position, biting hard upon the end of the tie. Phil climbed into the bath, fully clothed, on all fours, like a dog. The tie had been a present from a beautiful Korean man called Yang Seo-Suk. He had been kind. A generous man, materially speaking, and emotionally. Shriv had also given him lovely ties, but he didn’t want to use of those for this purpose. He lowered his head and knocked his brow against the taps hard enough to make him swear. So he shuffled back in the bath. He lowered his head again. It occurred to him that he ought to finish the letter, or at least send the unfinished draft, but he had given himself half an hour, and that to focus his mind, and he didn’t have time to muck about. He hooked the tie round the back of his neck, and folded a slip-knot. He took the fat end in his right hand. Fewer than ten minutes. Fewer than five, probably. Would that be enough? He was a scientist. He could test the hypothesis, practically.

  JUSTINA ROBSON

  Strange Fruit

  The phone rang amid a variety of calls – I’m always getting them, for advice, to ask for fact checks, to evaluate this or that badly taken photograph of someone’s kitchen mould and identify it on the spot, is it dangerous, should they use bleach or call a specialist, do they have to sell the house or burn it down?

  “Hello,” said the voice on the other end of the line, no picture provided, just an ID tag that said they were Dr Tamsy Paphides from the University of London, Department of Morphobiology. She sounded tense and anxious, also weary, as if the day had run her ragged. I glanced at the time; just one more call and I could justify switching off for the rest of the day.

  “Hello,” I waited, and put my feet up on the windowsill of my office. Through the grimy, rain-washed pane and its fluttering outline of ivy leaves the heavy, green masses of Tottenham rose against a leaden grey sky, edges blurred by the wind in the leaves.

  “I’m sorry to call you so late but I’ve been asked by the police to act as an expert advisor on a matter of some urgency, and unfortunately my expertise has run rather dry.”

  I swung my feet down and sat up.

  “It will be quicker to show you than to explain everything over the ‘phone. Do you think you can make it out to the Skyrise Block, the solar deck, within the next hour?”

  A shiver ran across my scalp and down my back before I’d had a chance to think. Skyrise Block was part of the Broadway Glades and most people had moved out of it a long time ago. Because of its unpopularity as a residential area it teemed with criminal elements, but even they were the desperate ones with nowhere else to try hiding from the police. The stories about the Glades were filled with horrors of cross pollination and seeping morphological pathology. There was nowhere I’d rather go.

  “I’ll be there in forty minutes,” I said and hung up, halfway through packing my bag before I realised it was a bit late for that kind of trip. At least on the roof levels there would be light for longer, perhaps long enough to see and get out.

  I grabbed my parachute from the back of the door on the way out and wrestled it onto my shoulders. It made me awkward but I’d been in hairy evac situations on high rises before and I had no intention of being caught short again. A final look around confirmed all was functioning correctly, my instruments and lab equipment were quiet, samples glowed under various lights, the supply motors for the pumps and extractors hummed... I closed the workshed door and locked it with both handprints. From the outside it looked cosily warm and humble, perched on the green grass of the University’s Block D roof, a safe distance from anything overgrown or sheltering that could harbour nightflyers.

  The lab decks beneath me housed a lot of familiar faces in the daytime but few were working late, although two grad students looked up from the glasshouse of the main sequencing area and waved as I went past. “Goodnight Professor Brolin!”

  I picked up some freshly sterilised sample packs on the way past the admin offices and the night secretary smiled, “You look ready to tackle anything there.”

  “Got a tip off,” I said, unable to betray my eagerness as I signed out the equipment.

  “Well don’t get into trouble,” she murmured. “Where are you going? Wait, Skyrise – isn’t that under quarantine these days?”

  “Yep!” I said. “Got an invitation and a chaperone though. I’ll be fine. Thank you, Gloria.” I smiled warmly back at her. It’s nice to feel someone cares, even though she’s old enough to be your mother.

  I took the elevator direct to the podstop in the loading garage. There was no queue and after a couple of minutes an empty pod purr
ed up to the dock and opened its door. I asked for the Skyrise Apartments and it took a few minutes to check out my story through city traffic central while I sat inside double checking all my pockets and night vision goggles. Whoever had been in it last had been eating Thai takeout. My nostrils quivered and my stomach grumbled. I realised I had left my sandwich on the bench. Finally the pod closed its door and moved out into the flowing traffic.

  Rush hour was nearly over. Pods circulated at good speeds around each other, flowing like brightly coloured beads. To make the most of the sunlight downtown walks were clear of overhanging foliage, but even with the reflectors angled for maximum illumination the grey afternoon threatened spirits as much as the sky threatened rain. It had started to speckle the walks and caused the umbrella plants to open out over the major routes as I neared my destination. London teemed with green of all kinds, was held up by branches wrapped around its steel, vines over its concrete. In the autumn the air sometimes choked up like fogs again, with the vast spore clouds of fungi that ate and broke up old structures, leaving the way for the steeloak infiltrations if all went well, and dry rot if it didn’t. The city had changed forever from the grey, foursquare structures of my youth, with their inert, sterile glass and metal, into a warzone of chess between the biodevelopers and their creations. Humans mostly won. I went into places where they didn’t.

  Around Skyrise there was no traffic at all, but the particular block in question was marked out by the silently whirling blue lights of police pods and a circled nest of their anonymous white wagons near the central door. Residents from the lower levels were gathered under the sheltering boughs of the walk outside, but in numbers that made me think any action was over. I got out of the pod and crossed the drizzly tarmac, feet over flashes of azure light, until a uniform stopped me and asked for my ID.