The Pedestal (26 page)

Grogan seems to have regained his composure, regarding Cutterly with what might be frustration or irritable agreement. “Our thoughts exactly,” he says. “But the question is, where do we take him?”

“Back to Earth, of course!” Cutterly exclaims.

“Can’t do that,” whispers Fiona. “The USS would never allow it.”

“What does that mean?” I hear myself chime in. “Surely they’ll want to help.” Then again, they didn’t exactly fall over themselves to help me out, did they?

“Keep up or stay out of it, Wilson,” snaps Grogan. “Or better yet, why don’t you let the adults talk for a while?” I feel myself bend under the jibe; on Earth, I was someone worthy of marginal respect—at least, that’s the way I remember it. Here? I’m the lowest man on a sinking totem pole. And, for reasons that escape me, Grogan has made me his personal whipping boy. I’m prepared to lash back—I have plenty to say, believe me—but I choose to bite my tongue. Sooner or later, we’re gonna have to put this business to bed—Grogan and me—but Winkley is the obvious priority right now.

“Ease up, Grog,” snaps Rogers. “He isn’t the only one who’s not getting it.”

“It’s an infection, isn’t it?” Cutterly quietly interjects. “Some sort of lung infection?”

Fiona nods with a noncommittal shrug, adding: “Could be. The USS won’t risk introducing an unknown infection into their facility; we’re on our own, boys.”

Rogers and I breathe a mutual, “Oh.”

For most of the next morning, I camp outside of the infirmary, gazing impotently through the window upon the inanimate form of my friend. I feel like I should cry—my eyes seem hard at work trying—but I’m dried up, as if my soul has shriveled into a husk. There’s a stifling tightness in my chest, too, as if it’s piled with bricks. I can’t even remember what life was like before death left its slimy fingerprints all over me.

It seems the Abby curse remains in full effect, even on Mars.

“How are you doing?”

The voice catches me off guard—I didn’t even hear her come into the room—yet my reflexes are silent, numbed in the pickling elixir of shock. I tell Fiona that I’m fine, lying with uncharacteristic ease. I figure it’s what she wants to hear, anyway; she has enough on her plate as it is.

“Listen, Wil, I need to ask you about this morning. Did anything—
happen
out there? Anything out of the ordinary?”

I glance at her, my cheeks heating at her affectionate shortening of my name—what can I say? Love has no regard for things like timing. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I suppose I’m grasping at straws.”

“Well, for what it’s worth,” I say with what I hope is a charming smile, “I think you’re doing a great job. Under the circumstances, I mean.”

She looks at me blankly, like I’m miswired—and frankly, I’m beginning to wonder if I am; Asperger’s can set in at any age, right? “Sorry,” I cringe. “I just meant—” Suddenly my thoughts flicker and I feel my cheeks burn all the more. “Wait a second.”

Fiona’s face seems to unfold, eyes brightening with newfound hope. “You remember something?”

“I think so. There was a lot of dust,” I say.

She nods encouragingly. “What else?”

“That’s it,” I say. “I mean, it wasn’t like normal dust, you know? It was a lot stickier. And I’m pretty sure it was coming off the plants.”

“Off the plants? What do you mean, like spores?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Fiona’s gaze loses focus as she ponders this. “This is incredible,” she mutters after a moment. I wait for some further explanation, and she suddenly laughs. “Don’t you get it? The BPs are supposed to be apogamous!”

If we had crickets on Mars, this would be their cue to accentuate the dumb silence. “Sorry, Doc,” I offer in their stead. “You’re way over my head.” I catch a faint waft of her scent—a subtle blend of wildflowers and something rich like coffee, only not—and sigh. Funny, I don’t smell much these days; I suppose that only makes her smell all the sweeter. Of course, it’s possible that I’m imagining she has a smell at all. As Fiona has explained more than once, pheromones don’t necessarily require a discernably pleasant aroma, though the two often share company.

“Okay, Wil, time for some Botany 101.” If it was anyone other than Fiona talking, I’d be fumbling for an excuse to get out of here right now. But the truth is, I’d endure a lot worse than a mind-numbing lecture for the tradeoff of her company. And it certainly beats the heck out of watching Winkley die.

“Your rapt pupil awaits, my dear.”

Fiona smiles, eyes twinkling with scientific zeal. My heart skips a beat.

“Okay, so most plants are agamospermous—meaning they reproduce sexually—you know, flowers, pollen—birds and the bees and all that? The blood plants are genetically modeled from fern DNA; specifically, a species that naturally reproduces apomixously—that is, without traditional fertilization. On Earth, this was an evolutionary adaptation to harsh, dry environments, since normal reproduction in ferns requires enough moisture for sperm to literally swim to the egg for fertilization.”

“Whoa, that’s weird.”

She shrugs with a mild frown. “Not really; on Earth, farmers replaced agamospermous crops with genetically engineered apoximous varieties more than seventy-five years ago. Since then, regions once considered unfertile are consistently yielding substantial harvests. It was sort of an agricultural revolution; I’m surprised you’re not familiar with it.”

Translation:
Third graders know this stuff; why don’t you?
I shrug and bow my head in shame. Fiona sighs, slides her bangs behind her ears, then clears her throat.

“Well, anyway, there are two types of apomixous behaviors in ferns: apogamy and apospory. Apogamous plants grow from spores and seem to be regular plants. When they mature, they send out spores—seeds, if you prefer. From the seeds grow what are called gametophytes; they’re sort of like plant versions of a larva—not actually an adult, but a stepping stone toward adulthood. Okay? So, the gametophyte eventually buds off a sphorophyte, which grows into the final adult plant.”

I raise my hand. “Uh, is there gonna be a quiz over this?”

“Funny. Just keep up, would you? The thing is, the sphorophyte isn’t really a fertilized child in this scenario—the gametophyte has literally cloned itself, so it’s an exact copy of the mother plant, right down to the DNA. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were behaving like regular plants, because the reproduction happens on a scale that’s really only observable under a microscope. With me so far?”

I pretend to snore.

“Come on, it’s not that bad,” she giggles.

“Seriously, Doc, you lost me at ‘aprogilous.’”

“It’s
apoximous
, you dunce.”

I bat my eyes. “Sorry, we can’t all be pretty
and
highQ.”

“Stay with me: we’re halfway there.” I nod, but who am I kidding? “Okay,” she continues, “aposporous plants are a little different: they reproduce by sending out antheridia and archegonia—that’s the sperm- and egg-producing organs—on the edges of their leaves. If enough moisture is present, the plant literally reproduces with itself. This is the behavior we’ve engineered into the BPs; I wanted to maintain some control over reproduction, and controlling where spores land is impossible. And up to now, the aposporous genes seemed to be paying off in the lab.”

I’ve understood almost none of this nonsense—classic Fiona-speak, by the way—but I’m able to glean the barest sense that the BPs have unexpectedly changed behavioral patterns—on their own, and seemingly in a single generation.

“Okay,” I cede. “So, what happened exactly—I mean, what changed?”

“Well, I’m guessing the lack of moisture in the Martian soil triggered a mutation. To accelerate its maturity, I introduced a bamboo gene into BP7’s profile; it’s possible that the new gene is conflicting with properties in the base genome. Regardless of the catalyst—if my theory holds true—BP7 somehow morphed from a strain that doesn’t reproduce using spores to one that does.”

“Huh. Am I safe to assume that’s a bad thing?”

Fiona nods emphatically, kneading her forehead with the back of a white-knuckled fist. “Well, yeah. That means that every place a spore lands becomes a potential growth site for a gametophyte. In other words, we lose a fair amount of control over when and where the BPs grow—outside the lab, anyway. Based on what we’ve seen so far, they may be hard to keep under control.” She pauses to catch her breath, and for a moment, she looks as if she might cry. “Beyond that,” she says, voice suddenly wavering, “there’s something else.”

I’m hearing her words just fine, but her mannerisms are quickly gathering my undivided attention; they belie the woman hiding inside the scientist, and I’m transfixed by this rare glimpse of her. I’d just as soon drop this subject—it’s obviously hurting her—but her eyes are pleading, begging for permission to confess something terrible—something that might just change my perception of her irreversibly.

“What is it, Fiona?”

She swallows, hands wringing at her midriff. “Well, spores can sometimes trigger allergic reactions when inhaled.” A fat tear spills down her ivory cheek. “There are species of mold on Earth, for example, whose spores are toxic to humans.”

I can’t bear to see her so distraught. I want to reach out to her, to offer the comfort of my embrace—my lips, even better—but from some isolated fold of my brain, I recognize that I’ve slipped into the drunkenness of lust, and that—however much I’d like to imagine otherwise—Fiona hasn’t shown a single shred of interest in me outside the scope of research. I’ve confused her momentary vulnerability with something else, that’s all; I’ve projected my own need for affection onto her.

Despite my inner turmoil, the implication of her words isn’t lost on me. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t greatly blurred by the chemical shadow of my insistent hormones, yet I’m not completely oblivious of it; I suppose it just seems a little too alien to apply to real life, for the moment.

Graciously, Fiona seems to intuit nothing of my heartache; she looks at me for a few seconds—probing my poker face for any sign that I fault her for Winkley’s condition—then shifts her gaze right through me. I can almost hear that brilliant mind crunching away like a supercomputer.

A faint
beep
seems to draw her back into the moment. She smiles sheepishly and, wiping her cheeks dry with a sleeve, turns to the sick bay window. All I can see of her now is a diffused reflection in the glass. Her eyes widen suddenly, darting about the inner room with progressive urgency.

Something’s wrong.

I try to follow her gaze as it bounces from one piece of equipment to another, but the machinery is largely foreign to me; I don’t know what I’m looking at. At once, her expression collapses; she surges against the window like a crashing wave, pounding on the thick glass with her palms. “No!” she cries. Then, as quickly as it came from nowhere, the tide of her anger recedes, exposing an immense tide pool of sadness in its wake.

“What’s wrong?” I mutter.

Fiona sags on her feet and—with motherly kindness—rests a protective hand against the window, sobbing quietly. In a whisper so faint it might’ve been a breeze, she answers me.

“He’s gone, Wil.”

Fiona’s words don’t immediately register—he’s right there; can’t she see him?—yet even as I struggle to process her meaning, she barrels into the sick bay, pulling on her helmet and facemask almost as an afterthought. Through the glass, I hear her sniffle and whimper. As she approaches Winkley, the obvious finally dawns on me, and my heart falls into my stomach like a great, aching boulder.

Fiona makes an adjustment to a nearby monitor—for a brief, hopeful moment, I think maybe I’ve misunderstood—and then, disheartened by what she sees there, she powers off the device with a deflated sob. Dropping to her knees, she rests her head against Winkley’s cot and begins to weep.

I feel my own tears coming to life, yet—to my eternal shame—I can’t tell if they’re intended for Winkley, or if Fiona has drawn them out of me. Without forethought, I take a step toward the sick bay door. I can’t explain why, but I feel duty-bound to comfort her, to save her from this misery. My foot has scarcely left the floor when a hand grasps my shoulder and—with unnerving strength—restrains me from walking.