The Seeds of Time (7 page)

They had been running across the field, so hard their lungs seared with pain, and they stopped, bent over, and gasped for breath. Petya was crying, in great quiet sobs. He knew enough not to cry out loud. Clio stood up and looked back. She should never have looked back. The farmhouse was blazing with light, the only light for miles, making it look like the last place left on Earth. Where Mom and Elsie were. And she started walking back, and Petya followed, though he was scared, for they always stayed together
.

When they got close enough to hear the screams from the house, they stopped and lay in the grass, holding each other. And Petya covered his ears when he heard it, but Clio just lay frozen in place and stared at the kitchen windows, where shadows passed now and then
.

Clio told Petya to stay still, and she made her way to the front of the house, where the DSDE van was parked, to see how many there were. Only one van. And no one outside at all. But then she heard the noise behind her and it was too late, a man stood there, and he had a gun, a strange-looking gun with a thick barrel and loops of wires, with light glinting off it from the front porch light. But the man himself was all darkness, a shadow against the darker
night, and he said, “Now what you want to be lying out here in the dirt for, girl?” And he told her to get up, but her legs were so weak with fear that she couldn’t move, and so he reached down and yanked her up. Then something crashed down on his head, in a bone-bruising slap, and he toppled. He was a heavy man, and his falling registered loudly. He was groaning, and there stood Petya with a shovel raised up to strike him again
.

But the man lunged at Petya’s ankles, and they both fell backward, leaving the gun lying next to Clio. She picked it up and walked over to where he was holding Petya down and aimed it at his head. She pressed the trigger button, and though there was no sound, his head was gone, flying off into fragments of bone and blood
.

On the outskirts of the transition farm, they came upon a small town announced by a sign reading,
NEW HOBART, “CLEAN AND GREEN,” POP
3388.

Zee said, “That’s kind of catchy. Clean and green.”

Hillis groaned.

They passed farms with their dusty, furrowed fields anchored by sagging farmhouses and, here and there, a lone tractor on patrol.

Clio pulled into a gas station, a theme station, painted green, with one cement wall a painted mural of sprouting seeds and rocket ships. Under the long-unused electric-panel section of the station, a table was set up for tourist souvenirs.

A woman in a sunbonnet covering a face like a potato pumped their gas and smiled at them as they stretched their legs. She nodded her head at the souvenir table. “You go ahead and have a look,” she said.

Zee took the cue and ambled over to the table.

The woman kept Clio and Hillis in her gaze, pressing home her sales pitch. “We’re lots cheaper than the park. Go into the museum, they’ll charge you twice what we got.” Hillis went off to find the bathroom. Clio smiled at the woman. There was no escaping the pale gnarls of her eyes.

“See you don’t have a bumper sticker. If you come to New Hobart, you’ll want to have a bumper sticker.”

“It’s rented. A rental car,” Clio said. She felt the need to explain, to be ordinary.

Despite the clear, hot day, a shadow fell across the woman’s face. “Where you from, that you got to rent a car?”

Clio opened her mouth, not sure what would come out. But Zee was standing next to her, holding a bumper sticker at arm’s length, examining it.

“ ‘Green Again,’ ” he announced. “For Hillis. Don’t you think?”

“Or we got ‘Clean and Green,’ you seen that one? That’s a good one. We got no Sickness here. We’re all families here.”

Zee nodded at her, turned back to Clio. “How about you? Buy you a souvenir, Clio? Price is no object.”

“No thanks.”

Zee’s face fell a little.

“Get Hillis that ‘Green Again’ one,” she said. “He’ll love it.”

“Think so?” Eagerly, he shelled out $10.98 for the thing.

On the road again, Zee drove as Hillis slouched in the backseat looking at his present. “Poor bastards. We’re their only hope, you know that? Those fields out there, that genetically altered crap, it doesn’t make a good harvest. Look at this place. Christ, it’s getting poorer every year. But the feds tell them happy days are here again, that Recon will bring home the bacon.”

“The seed,” Zee corrected, still cheerful. “The good seed.”

“Hell, any seed. Just needs to grow.”

“Wait’ll they get a hold of Leery seed,” Zee said. “Leery’s been on the transition farms, what, two years now? Leery’s going to make a difference. I heard they’ve got a grain, vegetables, trees, everything.”

“Well if that’s right,” Hillis said, “we can all retire. Green again. Hallelujah.”

Zee looked over at Clio, questioning. Hard to miss Hillis’ sarcasm. Clio smiled at him, a pay-no-attention-to-him smile.

As they drove down the main street of the town they saw tourist shops, mostly empty. They passed the Fuji Dollar Store, and the Wayback Café, sporting a homemade sign showing a rocket with a flower in its mouth, like a Spanish dancer. At New Hobart’s only traffic light, a church with a picket fence glared bright white in the morning sun. Its neon sign proclaimed,
FAMILY VALUES CONQUER DEATH
.

Clio felt like an alien, a foreign bee wandered into the wrong hive. If they knew who she was, who Hillis was, the Hobart bees would descend, stinging.

Clio reached back with her hand, rested it on top of the seat, and Hillis covered her hand with his own. “This place scares me,” she said.

“Nah,” he said. “If they knew who we were, they’d put us in a parade. They’re the political bloc that keeps Recon going. Without them, we’d be out of work. You’ve got to understand, Recon isn’t about science. It’s about jobs, agriculture. People vote with their pocketbooks. You’re their hero.”

“Funny,” Zee said. “Funny how this place gives you the jitters. An ordinary place like this.” He smiled at her.

Gods. He was so young, knew so little. He was like Petya, in a way. Different end of the IQ range, but a lot like Petya. He was absorbed in piecing things together, and he retained an innocence about him. He also seemed perfectly comfortable believing she and Hillis were together, but he still looked at her like a puppy in love. Looked at Hillis like that sometimes, too; desperate, perhaps, for friendship from any quarter. She wondered if Zee would know what to do with a woman. She had a fleeting impulse to teach him.

Outside the town they passed the New Hobart theme park and museum, surrounded by a sprawling, half-empty parking lot. Clio could see a ragtag collection of rides, including a Ferris wheel beckoning with its simple promise, an endless loop of pleasure.

After that, the land, government land, was empty, a buffer zone for the regreenery.

They reached the cutoff to the farm, marked with a sign that said,
FEDERAL REGREEN PROJECT, BIOTIME, INC., US WESTERN DIVISION
. A spattering of signs reading,
NERVE WIRES, EXTREME DANGER
.

The first checkpoint took the longest, as the guard scrutinized their IDs, but even that was quick. When he saw their clearances, he waved them through. These were no terrorists. These were from Vanda, these were Space Recon. What it’s all about.

They could see the domes up ahead, looking like helmets in the sand, and next to them, the great locust nets tented high above the fields. But Hillis wasn’t interested in the domes. He wanted to tour the fields, the real transition crops. Stuff in the domes was still getting hothouse treatment, not ready to go open, to expose itself to the critical eye of a new mother sun. She had been known to kill orphans like these before.

Strangers in the nest.

Out in the fields, the day’s heat lay on the land like a hammer. Beneath the wide-brimmed hats they’d been given, their faces prickled with the heat. Clio’s skin pumped sweat. The guide was answering Zee’s questions: this section was a tuber specimen, the regreen potato, it had to be covered at night, didn’t like dew. It was a high-viable, though, it had produced what might be called potatoes, small, very small, but edible.

Zee asked about how Earth bugs liked Leery potatoes, how fertile they were, what mechanism they used to fend off high UV. He seemed to think it was important to ask intelligent questions. Clio used to hate students like that. Showing off with questions the teachers loved.

Hillis was sour and quiet, stewing over being assigned to a guide, as though they were tourists. He trudged down the service paths scarcely looking at the crops. Searching for something, he scanned the fields in the distance. Finally
he angled off on an intersecting path, heading away from the group.

Their guide stopped. “Let’s all stay together,” he called after Hillis. “As a group.”

Hillis kept on walking, turning his head to answer. “OK, be right with you, I just want to see something.”

The guide left Clio and Zee, trying to rein Hillis in. “There’s just a stubble field over there, I don’t think we need to waste our time on it, and we really should all stay together.” He stopped, but Hillis didn’t. The guide turned back, looked at Zee in exasperation, hoping for backup, finding none, then hurried to catch up with Hillis. Clio and Zee followed.

The guide swung around to glare at them. Zee spread his hands, shrugging. “Well, we should all stay together, right?” The man made an ugly frown, squishing his features toward the middle of his face, and tramped over to Hillis.

Hillis was standing at the edge of the stubble field, crouching down to look at the yellowed stalks. “Run into some trouble here, did you?”

“I told you it was a stubble field. There’s nothing here. It’s been harvested.”

“Harvested. Interesting.” Hillis walked farther into the patch.

“There’s a reason we have guides on these tours. Not all these paths are safe. Some are wired. We can’t guarantee security of this farm without touch wires in the paths. You can screw up the whole system by walking off the tour paths, since you don’t seem to care.” His voice had risen in pitch as his face grew tight with anger.

Hillis stopped and regarded him with surprise. “Wires? You’re kidding.” He looked down at his feet with a worried expression.

“I’m not kidding,” the guide said, backing out, leading Hillis back to safety. Hillis followed him, stepping gingerly. “You’ve acted very foolishly, Mr. Hillis. We shouldn’t even be here.”

“No, I can see that. You should have told me. There should be markers.”

The guide shook his head. “That would be real stupid, wouldn’t it? Mark the paths so terrorists know the safe routes?” He looked at Hillis with contempt.

Hillis put his arm around Clio’s waist. “Let’s get out of here, honey.”

Clio snuggled into his side. “I knew this guy once, got his feet fizzed off by those burn wires. Back when they were legal for home security. And the thing was, it was his own house. He forgot where he buried the wires.”

“Jesus,” Zee said, eyes wide.

“I’m not kidding.” She had just made it up, catching Hillis’ mock fear of the paths. He was working hard at seeming ordinary, slow to catch on. She was petty sure this meant he had just caught on to something.

“It looks like a dead bug.”

Zee was driving; he liked to drive, and drove easily, carelessly, often looking at Clio and Hillis, not watching the road. He watched Hillis examine the remnant of stalk with fibrous roots, fluttering in the AC draft.

“Can you watch the road, Zee?” Clio leaned forward from the back seat to look at Hillis’ stolen weed.

“Rinoculis Leeriatum,”
Hillis said. He stuffed it into a baggie in his pack.

“So it’s from Leery.” Neither Hillis nor Clio had been on the Leery mission, had never pulled down a haul like Leery. When Clio thought of Leery it was with both hope and resentment; it was like an Olympic record, beckoning and judging.

“What did they harvest from it?”

“They didn’t harvest it. They mowed it down because it was already dead.”

Zee was steering, but watching Hillis. “You can’t just go stealing things, Hill. We could’ve got caught.”

Hillis shot a contemptuous look at Zee. “Maybe you still don’t get it. These saplings were from
Leery.”

Zee and Clio were quiet, letting Hillis vent.

“The fucking famous Leery haul.” He twisted the
brown, weedy thing absently between his fingers. “They’re dying.”

After a long silence, Zee ventured, “I thought Leery plants were going great.”

“Advance to the head of the class.” The bitterness in Hillis’ voice shut Zee up and he turned back to his driving.

The horizon shimmered ahead of them like melted glass. Here and there, motels and gas stations crouched under the sun, sagging and empty-looking. Zee slowed down in front of one of them. The Green Dreams Motel.

“We’re camping, Zee,” Clio said.

“I have a bad back.”

“You think we can just pull in and register, the three of us in one room? Or Mr. and Mrs. Hillis, without a marriage card?” Hillis asked, sarcastic. “Or the two of
us?
We could get Clio her own room, and we could register together. The locals would love that.”

Zee accelerated, leaving Green Dreams behind. “They don’t lynch people out here,” he said. “It’s just middle America.” Clio watched the back of Zee’s head. The westering sun splashed through the windshield, suffusing Zee’s ears with a pinkish glow. Sometimes she loved Zee for his worldview, loved the way he said
America
, invoking a land of happy farmers and ordinary, no-questions-asked motels. Part of Zee lived in 1990. Before the gay roundups, before quarries, before DSDE. Before the underground hospices. Before people had to hide to die in peace. Clio thought of her mother and Elsie, and the extra bedroom in their old house where the sick ones could die in peace. If they made it to Mother’s house, they could die in peace.

Toward sunset they found a side road, followed it up a narrow valley into the comforting folds of the hills. They ate a meal of sandwiches, using a meat spread that came out of a tube like glue.