Rootless (22 page)

Zee told me that before the Darkness, the white trees had grown all over the west and all across what was now the Rift. They were called Populus, back in the old world. Populus tremuloides. But they were also called Quaking Aspen, because back then there were enough trees around that people gave them two names apiece.

The apple tree, though, was of a kind rare even before the Darkness. It grew in mountains in far off places. Malus sieversii. A type of wild apple that had grown for a long time unaltered, before people knew how to mess with such things.

But here on Promise Island, here on this frozen lump of trash, the trees didn’t need naming. They were just all that was left. And that night, after Zee had made the agents retrieve Crow and get him conscious, I carried what was left of the watcher to see what was left of the trees.

It was not a clear night, and it seemed somehow colder for the lack of moon, the absence of stars. I had Crow wrapped in blankets, and I’d tugged the blankets over my shoulder, then tied them around my waist. I was starting to get my strength back and made it up the hill
slow but without stopping. Top of the ridge and it was too dark to see the branches below.

“Hold on,” I said over my shoulder. “Not long now.”

What had been snow was now ice and I slipped and skidded down the slope until we were all the way to the bottom. At the edge of the forest, I unwound the blankets and set Crow down, holding him upright and pulling off his hood.

Our breath steamed in the darkness.

“Closer,” Crow mumbled, and I walked him nearer. “Lean me against it,” he said, and I balanced him so he could hold himself tall with the trees in his hands.

“You want to go in deeper?” I asked him.

“Not yet.”

I dug up some of the old leaves and showed them to him, but Crow just stayed staring at the bark between his fingers. It was so dark I could hardly tell, but I was pretty sure Crow was crying.

“I’m ready,” he said finally, and I lifted him and carried him before me as I made my way slowly through the forest.

At the center clearing, I took a break and we sat there, surrounded by the empty hole in the trees.

“Thank you for bringing me here, Banyan,” Crow said, and his voice had changed now so that it no longer sounded as if he was about to start laughing. More it sounded like he wasn’t ever going to laugh again.

“What do you think of them?” I asked.

“I think they’re Zion,” he said. “I think they’re worth living a life for. And I think if you hadn’t dragged me out of that wagon, then I wouldn’t be here now.”

“I think we can save them” was all I said.

“No. They don’t need us to save them.”

“Yeah they do. The trees need us. And the people need us even more. Else GenTech’s gonna kill a whole lot of people so they can own a whole lot of trees.”

“They been killing people and owning everything since the Darkness. Probably a long time before that, too. Nothing going to change.”

“There are more of us than them.”

“Us? Didn’t you say it’s your own mother that’s running this show?”

“She ain’t my mother. She ain’t nothing. We just have to bust the prisoners free. And we can take them.” I pointed at the trees. “Not these. New ones they’re building. We get our hands on those and we take the boat. Head down to the mainland.”

“The mainland? You mean the Rift.” Crow shook his head slowly. “I seen those lava fields from the south side.”

“We got taken up here, must be a way back down.”

“So we find a way through the lava and somehow get back there. What about the locusts? I always believed these trees would be different, but it’s just that they’re stuck out here, away from the swarms.”

“These new ones they’re making are different. GenTech’s got them built so the locusts can’t touch them, not for eating or nesting or nothing at all. Mixed up people and trees and scienced the hell out of them. That’s why they’ve been rounding up so many prisoners. So they can build these new trees and send a whole crop back for planting.”

“We may got the numbers,” Crow said, when he was done being silent. “But they got those prisoners doped up and sleeping.”

“Yeah. Dormancy’s what Zee called it. Some sort of preparation they do. They’re all right for about forty more hours. Then the splicing begins.”

“So what do you want to do?” Crow said, his eyes staring through the night like they were digging for something.

“I want to wake everyone up.”

Crow did laugh then. And his laugh sounded just the same as it used to. “Wake everyone up?”

“Just got to work the angles, that’s all. Like you said, I’m connected here. That woman. The Creator. I can get her wrapped around my finger, I play my cards out right.”

“And what about your father?”

“He’s here,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Somewhere. We’ll bust him out, too.”

“You want it all.”

“They’re making apple trees, Crow.”

“Apples?”

“Imagine bringing one of them back to Waterfall City.”

“The Prodigal Son,” Crow said quietly. “Returns to the Promised Land just to thieve it all away. Well, just like I always told you, Banyan. You’re one crazy cool son of a bitch. Jah as my witness, you are crazy cool.”

I’d gotten us back inside before we froze to death, and I set Crow up to rest in his room. Then I returned to the small room I’d first come awake in, making my way through the cluttered lab and the darkness, pushing inside the door, then clicking it shut behind me.

I lay on the bed, wrapped myself in the soft blankets. And it wasn’t long before I was out cold and sleeping. But not much longer and the Creator was there, too.

Just as I’d figured.

She had her hand on my head, rubbing my stubbly scalp, and I let her think I was still sleeping, sort of snuggling my head at her fingers and making drowsy little sounds.

Eventually though, I cracked my eyes open and upon seeing her I stretched back, scooted over in the bed, and turned away as she sat down beside me.

“I’ve missed you so much,” the woman whispered to the top of my head, her voice all scratched and skipping beats. I shook my head like I was keeping her words from touching me.

“You never came for me.”

“I tried, Banyan. GenTech wouldn’t let me. They didn’t want me distracted.” She lost her words for a moment. “And when I tried to stop working, to leave here, they told me you and your father had been killed.”

“It don’t sit right,” I told her. “I don’t remember nothing. I can’t even remember you holding me.”

Her body tensed beside me. And I knew I was in.

“That’s because you were so small,” she said. “When your father took you.”

“So you never knew me.”

“I used to imagine you here. I used to picture you growing up. I’d think of books we could have read together.”

“Pop read to me all the time,” I said.

“Really?” There was a hunger in her voice. I felt her bony arm try to wrap around me.

“Yeah. Lewis and Clark.”

“He always loved to read about the explorers. Well, I should be glad you two had something to read. They haven’t let me have books up here for five years. Kills productivity, they say.”

“I still don’t really get what it is you do.”

She almost said something, but I cut back in.

“And you say you missed me. But you don’t even know me.” I sat up in the bed so I could stare at her.

“We could become acquainted,” she said in a small sort of voice.

“And why would I do that?”

“Because I’m your mother.” She tried to sound stern about it, but she was just straight begging.

I made her wait. I watched her silver hair fall ragged across her face.

“I could build for you,” I said, surprising her. And that’s the best sort of lie. I watched her eyes go wide and her lips tremble. “And you could show me your work. Help me decide if I’m hopping the next boat out of here or not.”

“I could keep you here. If I wanted.”

“But you won’t. Not unless I want to stay. Zee probably thinks you’re as much of a mother as she could hope to have left. But I ain’t Zee. And you’re gonna have to earn me wanting to stick around.”

“So you want to build trees for me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Soon as I’ve seen my old man.”

“You can’t see him. Not now.” She stumbled on her words for a moment. “He’s busy.”

“Busy being locked up?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Sounds pretty simple to me. You had him locked up when he tried to stop your experiments.”

“It’s only because of me he’s still alive at all.”

I just shook my head, like I was weary as all hell just talking to her.

“Tomorrow night,” she said. “I can take you to him then.”

I didn’t say anything for a bit. It was just one more day, and I had to work this just right. So what choice did I have?

“First thing in the morning, I’ll start harvesting scrap,” I said. “The island’s full of metal. I can dig out the pieces I need.”

“And where will you build?”

“Right in the middle of your forest.”

“Where we’ve harvested?”

“Yeah. I’ll fill the gap you made.”

“And I can show you the progress we’ve been making.”

“I just want to see Pop.”

“You’ll see him.”

“There’s something else, though. My friend. The one who’s here resting. I need you to fix him for me.”

She leaned in and kissed my forehead, and I faked a quick smile before jerking away.

“I’ll try my best,” the Creator said, getting up off the bed. And I tell you, that grin didn’t look natural on her. Didn’t look like it had seen much use.

“My whole life I’ve been trying to fix things,” she said, heading for the door. “It’s the only thing I really know how to do.”

Then she left, and I lay wondering if through my memories or through my father, or through Hina or Zee, if somehow some part of
me did know this woman. If some part of what she was and all that she knew was lodged inside me. But I thought about what Hina had told me when we’d been stuck on that transport, my gun leveled at the Harvester’s head.

They can copy the body, she’d said. But not the mind.

And so it seemed to me that flesh and blood can give birth to another. But that’s where the giving is ended. And that’s where the debt stops as well.

When I finally slept, I fell into a dream about Alpha. Her skin felt real and her eyes blazed, and she was sweating as she raced across the plains to find me, her spiked hair silhouetted against a giant yellow moon.

You’ve forgotten, she kept telling me with her eyes. Because her lips weren’t moving. A patch of pink bark had been sewn over her mouth, and I couldn’t hear her beyond moaning, and I couldn’t find her teeth or her tongue. So I just kissed her shoulders and legs and the back of her head and the bark on her belly and finally the place where her lips should have been. And it began snowing and I was caught outside and naked, dragging Alpha’s body up over the hill to show her the trees.

Look, I kept saying, pointing at the white forest. Told you we’d make it.

But when I glanced back at Alpha, she was gone. And in her place stood a metal field of corn a hundred miles high, and inside the corn was the apple tree. And no one wanted the tree.

They just wanted the apples.

“What are you doing?” Zee asked when she found me in the middle of the forest, hacking away at the frozen ground.

“Mining,” I said. “There’s enough old tin and piping down here you could build trees a mile high.”

“Build trees?” Zee tugged off her hood so I could see the expression on her face. “What would you do that for?” She pointed up at the forest. “We’ve got all the trees we need right there.”

“Well, Zee. I reckon I’m a tree builder. Always will be. I reckon you either are something or you’re not.”

“That simple, huh?”

“Sure. Nice and easy.”

“You want to show what you can do,” she said, coming closer to where I’d been digging. “You want to show her, don’t you?”

“Way I see it, I show her something, and she’ll show me something.”

“What do you want to see?”

“My father,” I said. “Man I came here to find.”

“And you’re sure you want to see him?”

“Why? Can you take me to him?”

“Only the Creator can do that.”

I studied Zee. That beautiful face. And it seemed like it was the third time the world had seen it. The original had grown old but the next one hadn’t. And soon it’d be Zee’s turn to sparkle and shine.

Long as her lungs kept working, anyway.

She was my family. My flesh and blood. But I didn’t reckon I could trust her a damn bit. She was acting like she wanted us to have always been close. But back in the Tripnotyst’s tent, she’d either been trying to save me or was just switching her allies around, and I never had figured out which. And regardless, she seemed pretty cozy with what was going on here on Promise Island. It made sense, I guess. I mean the lass had done well for herself on this pile of junk. I remembered that night when I’d found her asleep in Frost’s house and her body had been bruised and battered, and how long had she had to live like that? How long had she suffered with Frost because our father had left Hina behind?

I’d take her with us. That’s what I decided. But she couldn’t know that. Not yet.

“Stick close, sister,” I said, busting my shovel at the snowy dirt again. “You might learn something.”

“Sister?” She gave me a funny kind of smile. “Well, if you’re really gonna do this, how about I round us up some help?”

Zee brought me agents. Whole dozen of the suckers. They arrived all buried inside hoods and purple fuzz, but they sure shed some layers once I put them to working.

Outside of the uniform, the agents were just people. Just no one. Just anyone. Men and women. Old and young. They didn’t share the
same face, so why’d they all dress the same? Why’d they sell themselves short to be part of someone else’s plan?

Because they were weak, that’s what I reckoned. Most of them had hardly done a real day of work in their lives. Too used to marching folk around from behind the trigger of a gun. Not at all used to creating, to the hard slog of building, the strength it takes to transform one thing into something else.

Their smooth skin blistered on the fiberglass shovels, and they wanted to jackhammer the dirt, blast my scrap right out of there. I told them that’d just blow the salvage to bits. Told them they’d better do less talking and do more digging.

By evening, I had a stack of aluminum tubes and some hubcaps, a load of old bottles and cans, a reel of thick cable, plastic piping, a metal drum. And one good, big old rusty sheet of iron.

Perfect.

“I’ll build tomorrow,” I told Zee as we headed back through the forest.

“Are you gonna make it light up?”

“Sure, if you get me a generator. Some LEDs. But I’ll need juice,” I told her. “Lots of juice.”

I got back to the compound just as it was getting dark, and the Creator was waiting on me outside Crow’s room.

“Success,” she said, her gray eyes tired but bright. “At least I think so. Usually we can repair someone with a small graft if they need it. But I’ve never tried to replace whole limbs before.”

I wondered for a moment what it would take for this woman to be someone who just fixed folk with her science. I mean, this here
patching up people proved useful. It had saved Alpha. And maybe it had saved that old Rasta once, before Pop had set the dude free.

“So it worked?” I said.

“It appears so. We’ll know when your friend comes back around. I stimulated propagation, and the cells worked their magic. But whether or not his nervous system agrees with the plan, well, we’ll find out when he wakes up again.”

“How long?”

“He’ll sleep until morning. But what about you, Banyan? How did it go today?”

“You’ll see,” I said. “Tomorrow. When I get done. But tonight I get to see my old man. Right?”

She smiled and put her hand on my shoulder, giving me an awkward sort of squeeze. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you some of my work.”

The Creator led me across the snow, past the dome, and up to the large bunker. “This is our main staging area,” she said, as we shuffled through the snow. “Where we conduct dormancy, and where we’ll begin fusion.”

She swiped a plastic tag that caused two sets of steel doors to peel open. Then she led me inside a giant chamber of bright lights and bodies.

Human bodies.

They were all stretched out together, head to toe and side by side. Their eyes were sealed shut, faces beyond sleeping. And all of them were naked. Limbs pale and floppy. Arms wired up with cables that ran to a giant purple vat that hung from the ceiling.

I scanned the bodies, far as I could see, looking for a face that could be Alpha’s, knowing she was in there somewhere.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the Creator, raising her voice above the drone of machinery. “But we’re not killing anyone. We’re transforming them. In fact, we’re providing them with everlasting life.”

“How do you reckon?” I said, buying for time while I kept checking for Alpha.

“We’re going to make them magnificent, Banyan. They’ll be the first of a whole new species. A locust-proof species. And they’ll self-propagate, just as the white trees on this island have done for centuries. Reproducing asexually. New plants off the same shared root system. Once we start planting on the mainland, the organism will keep on growing. Don’t you see? We’re granting these single bodies the chance to multiply. To be eternal. Part of a forest without end.”

I gazed across the field of human skin that’d soon be made of leaves and wood. I thought about the fire pit back in the factory, pictured Sal being cast into the flames because his DNA didn’t match up with what GenTech needed. No eternal life for him, then. Not unless you could live inside ashes.

“Can’t you just copy the bodies you want?”

“The gene pool needs diversity. We’ve had to match a core protein set, but the more variants we mix in now, the better off we’ll be.”

I kept scanning the faces. “So what keeps them sleeping?”

“Up there.” She pointed to the purple vat on the ceiling. “It’s a feeder. Keeps them under and gives them everything they need to get their bodies strong, get their cells ready. This time tomorrow, we’ll add a solution that prepares them for fusion. Soon after that, they’ll no longer be simply human.”

I just stared at her, and she beamed with pride.

“The first crop of a brand new species. Trees made ready for the mainland. Regenerating like the white tree but growing fruit like our apple tree. And now,” she said, taking my arm, “it’s time I showed you the source.”