After the Red Rain (20 page)

In his kitchen, Dr. Dimbali moved aside a large wooden plank to reveal a door. Another room? How much space did one man need?

But the door led not to a room but, rather, to a stairwell, its concrete walls stained and rancid with mold. Dr. Dimbali offered her a face mask and apologized for the smell. “I am used to it by now, but I understand it may bother you. No matter what I do, it just grows and grows and grows. In a way, it’s comforting to see something of nature so resilient, our best efforts to the contrary. Too bad it’s useless.”

Still clutching her mug of now-cool tea, her face mask secure,
she followed Dr. Dimbali into the stairwell and down several flights and landings and turns. “This was once the southern fire stair,” he explained as they descended, echoing slightly in their confines. It made him sound even more serious and somehow alien. “I suppose the old fire codes just didn’t apply anymore once they were desperate to house people, so it was boarded over. I discovered it quite by accident.”

Dr. Dimbali had a fluoro-tube; but for its shivering, bouncing beam just ahead, she was steeped in darkness.

They arrived at the last stair, with no further descent possible. Dr. Dimbali opened a door and flicked a switch—a series of lights sputtered to life overhead, varying in colors and intensities, bathing them in a vibrating, warm, flickering glow. Overhead, pipes sweated condensation—indoor drizzle. This space was huge, as big as Dr. Dimbali’s apartment, but not chopped into separate rooms; it sprawled the length and breadth of the building, it seemed, its area broken by tables, chairs, desks, some of them intact, others cobbled together from cinder blocks and boards and cushions. Large containers were scattered here and there, most of them with small, spindly green shoots of some sort poking up from them.

“My babies,” Dr. Dimbali said with a gentle smile. He leaned over to one. “How are you this fine day?” he asked it, then put his finger into the pot. “Your soil is a little dry. I’ll water you soon enough.”

Deedra turned away as he chatted briefly with the pots; she scanned the rest of the space. A variety of touch screens and older computers cluttered the desks, and a scratched and dusty SmartBoard flickered quietly to itself in one corner.

She recognized the image on it instantly.

Rose.

She lowered her face mask. The air here was musty but breathable.

“What is this place?”

“This is the old basement. No one was using it, so I appropriated it
for my needs.” He strode to the SmartBoard and tapped it. The image of Rose rotated and magnified. “At first, I worked alone. But for the past little while, Rose and I have been… collaborating.” He clucked his tongue absently. “Most of my collaborations have not gone so well, but this one has been rewarding.”

“This is where he stays?” she whispered, taking in the dank, dark basement. “He lives here?” She couldn’t imagine bright and enthusiastic Rose squatting here, but…

Dr. Dimbali blinked at her as though waking. “What’s that? Oh, no. Not here. He has a project of his own out there somewhere.” He gestured to encompass the Territory. Maybe the world. “I’ve offered a bit of assistance, but he spends most of his time without—” He seemed to catch himself, as though disgusted with his own rambling. “No matter. If he wishes to dillydally with his own ideas, that’s fine. As long as he comes back here to do the important work.”

“What’s the important work?” She held out the mug. “And what did you mean when you asked if he left me something like this tea?”

Dr. Dimbali rolled an old chair over to her, its wheels shrieking in complaint against the rough concrete floor. She sank into it, realizing that this was what he’d always wanted: an audience.

“You hypothesized before that Rose, perhaps, might actually
be
a rose. Reduced to its simplest terms, this was precisely
my
hypothesis, early on. He approached me one day, you see. He was endlessly curious. About
everything
.” Dr. Dimbali sighed and stared off into the middle distance. “After years and years of trying to get through to the incurious and the clueless, you cannot imagine what it was like to encounter someone who genuinely wanted to learn.

“Eventually he came to trust me with the mystery of his past and with the even more intriguing mystery of his present. Of his biology. We began conducting tests, right here in this facility I’ve cobbled together.”

“Why?”

A grunt. “My dear Ms. Ward, the pursuit of knowledge is its own reward.”

She wasn’t buying it. No one did anything just to do it. There had to be a reason. Though cold, the tea weighed heavy in her hands. She knew what Dr. Dimbali was going to tell her, but she didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want to know it. Even though she already did.

“When he first demonstrated his
powers
, as you called them,” Dr. Dimbali went on, “I was, perforce, stunned. But I quickly recovered and began to develop a series of theories.”

“That Rose really is a… rose.” It still sounded worse than absurd, when spoken aloud. She blushed.

“Simplistically put.” He swiped at the SmartBoard, and the image of Rose shrank and moved to one side. An image of an actual rose filled the remainder of the screen. “The two have nothing in common, phenotypically. Rose—our Rose—presents traits of an adolescent human male, androgynous in appearance, but possessed of all human exterior attributes, including fully developed primary sexual characteristics.”

Deedra thought of the day by the river and blushed deeper red. In the sallow light of the basement, she hoped Dr. Dimbali wouldn’t notice.

“Externally, he is insignificant. So I had to delve deeper.”

And then the SmartBoard image rotated, and as she watched, Rose’s skin peeled back to reveal strips of corded muscle and the tracery outlines of blood vessels. She recoiled; the tea sloshed over the brim of the cup and spattered onto the floor.

“I assure you I was quite humane,” Dr. Dimbali said with a mild note of rebuke. “He volunteered for the experiments, in the name of science. I am no butcher.” He considered. “Then again, Rose is no slab of beef.”

The reference flew past her. She didn’t know what a
slab of beef
could possibly be.

“Rose himself is unaware of his true nature. He’s been… struggling
with his sense of identity. He feels he isn’t human, and that makes him wonder what his place in this world is.”

“And now he knows?” It made a crude sort of sense to her and opened up a new possibility: Maybe Rose
had
killed Jaron. He’d always been so worried about his own humanity—if he discovered that he
wasn’t
human, wouldn’t that make it easier to commit murder?

“He still knows nothing. I finished my analysis only last night. Ironic timing on my part, perhaps, to arrive at the answer at precisely the moment when I cannot explain it to Rose himself.”

The SmartBoard zoomed in, past the tissues and the vessels. The new image was an interlinked series of balls, connected by pulsating beams of light. Letters ghosted the space near the balls:
OH, NH, H, CH, MG
…

“I’ve lectured on plant anatomy and biology at L-Twelve in the past. If you remember any of it, then you no doubt recognize the basic structure of the chlorophyll molecule and its distinctive porphyrin ring.”

She was surprised to find that she did have some dim memory of it, from one of Dr. Dimbali’s factory-floor pronouncements long ago. Chlorophyll. The molecule central to plant life. It was what made weeds grow.

“Is this in Rose’s blood?”

“If only it were that simple.” The molecule doubled and the new copy shifted. They were almost identical, but some of the letters had changed. “
This
is the heme molecule, building block of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the molecule in our blood that allows us to transmit oxygen through the bloodstream.”

She squinted at the SmartBoard. The heme and the chlorophyll could have practically been overlaid atop each other and fit precisely. “They look the same.”

He chuckled. “Indeed. The primary difference is that chlorophyll contains a molecule of magnesium, whereas hemoglobin contains iron.”

“Which one is Rose’s?”

Dr. Dimbali grinned—a truly joyous expression that caught her off guard. “My dear,
he has both
. That’s the whole reason I brought you down here. To explain. He has both.”

“So he
is
a rose?”

“No!” The joy vanished, replaced with the dour expression of resigned frustration she was so used to. “He’s not a rose. He has
both
types of molecules in his system. And through some process I have yet to discern, they shift from one to the other seemingly at random. His body is a playground between flora and fauna, an impossible blend of two incompatible life-forms, somehow coexisting. Rose is not a rose. Rose is not a human being. He’s
both
, Ms. Ward. He is, quite literally, a hybrid rose—as far as I know, the first and only specimen in a new breed. He would be… let’s see…” Dr. Dimbali stroked his chin and gazed at the ceiling. “Perhaps take genus from the plant kingdom…” he muttered under his breath, then snapped his fingers and grinned at her. “
Rosa sapiens
is probably as close as our taxonomy can get. No doubt we’ll need to invent a new one at some point. In any event, he is a bizarre and quite unforeseen combination of human and rose.”

She sat perfectly still for a long, long time, staring at the images on the SmartBoard until they bled together, as she imagined them blurring in Rose’s body.

Not human. Not entirely, at least. It was impossible. She closed her eyes as a long, high-pitched whine echoed and pierced her. She was going numb again, as when TI Markard had interrogated her. She was leaving the world.

Don’t. Don’t do this. Stay here. Stay strong.

“How can this be possible?” she whispered, and barely heard his response.

Dr. Dimbali snorted. “I’m sure I have absolutely no idea, young lady. But he is most assuredly a hybrid of the two species. You’ve no doubt witnessed strange mutations yourself: Tooth-weed. The hybrid
rats with blue fur. Science tells us this is impossible, but science has told us many things were impossible in the past. In fact, there is even the chance that this is no natural phenomenon, that Rose was actually genetically engineered or modified in some way. We’ve made tremendous strides in such things, as you know every time you eat rations.” He chuckled. “I’ll say this: If he
is
a genetic recombinant, whoever built him did truly excellent work.

“Ultimately,” he went on, waving a hand, “there will be an explanation, but for now I care less for the hows and whys and more for the simple whats. What can he do? What can we do with him? You and I excrete nitrogen and phosphorous—he devours them. Needs them, in fact, to live. He can breathe oxygen, as we do, but most often he inhales our carbon dioxide, as though he’s evolved to breathe the toxic brew we call an atmosphere. And he exhales pure oxygen, in such low supply these days. In short: He is the most splendid, absurd thing I have ever witnessed in my life.”

The whine died away, and her hearing returned to normal.

“Person, you mean.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You called him a thing. He’s a person.”

Dr. Dimbali smiled indulgently. “But of course he is, my dear. I was speaking metaphorically.”

She looked down at the tea. At the leaves floating in it. “These are from him, aren’t they? They came off him. Like a plant.”

“Rose hips. Not really tea leaves,” Dr. Dimbali admitted. “Harvested from one of his outgrowth appendages. A delicious tea, you’ll agree.”

No. Not a chance. He’s joking.

The thought of
drinking
part of Rose should have seemed grotesque, but she raised the mug to her lips and drank off half its contents. And she knew. Without the slightest room for doubt. She’d held Rose and been held by him. Touched him. Kissed him. This tea was
of
him.

Though cold, it was still delicious. Rose’s last gift to her, perhaps. Who was she to forsake it?

“Loaded with vitamin C,” Dr. Dimbali prattled on. “Much better for absorption than the supplements they hand out or the artificial levels of C impregnated in our usual rations.”

Could he just shut up for a minute? Or even just a few seconds? Just give her time to absorb not the vitamin C but, rather, the insanity of it all? Because, she realized, the most insane part wasn’t even that Rose was part-boy, part-flower. The most insane part was that it made perfect sense, that as soon as Dr. Dimbali had explained it, she’d felt as though she had remembered it, not learned it, as though Rose’s true nature had been a fact uncovered long ago and then lost in the jumble and fog of memory. It was the only explanation for… for
everything
. His loitering in the sunlight every morning. His absorbing the water through his fingers. All of it. She’d been drawn to him not because he was a boy and not because he did not recoil from her scar, but because he was different.
Different
was actually too small a word for it; there was no word in language for what Rose was.
Hybrid
, Dr. Dimbali had said. Even that word couldn’t capture it.

Rose was Rose. Singular and exceptional. In ways Deedra knew she never could be.

The tea soothed her. It brought her closer to Rose, brought him closer to her. And she didn’t care that everyone thought he’d killed Jaron. She only wanted him back. She wanted to tell him that she understood, at least part of it, and that she didn’t care about the parts she didn’t understand.

Dr. Dimbali was rambling about hemoglobin and iron and magnesium and photosynthesis, swiping and gesturing at the SmartBoard, causing molecules and atoms to dance. She broke in. “What now?”

Flustered and more than a bit annoyed at being interrupted, he turned away from the SmartBoard. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You asked if he’d left me anything. You mentioned the tea. You wanted to know if he left… a piece of himself. Right?”

With a sigh that seemed to well up from a place deeper even than this basement, Dr. Dimbali nodded sadly and removed his SmartSpex, rubbing his eyes. Without the SmartSpex, he was just a sad, old man, sunken-chested and weathered and conquered. She could not forget the image, even when he replaced the SmartSpex and fixed her with a gaze.