Seed (18 page)

Kassapa and Paduma entered the room. Sumedha felt their minds, warm, admiring—but something kept his mind from meeting theirs. A difference of emotional geometry, the sensation of hard angle.

Together they gazed down at the unconscious girl. Her helix turned in all their minds, already morphing, absorbing the new material of the wild-born arm.

“Beautiful,” Paduma said.

“Yes, brother,” Kassapa agreed. “Beautiful work. What is the next test? If the arm takes?” Sumedha mulled this for a moment, then said simply:

“Free her.”

Kassapa and Paduma exchanged a glance.

“You grow reckless,” they observed in unison. Sumedha looked from one to the other. He smiled. Laughter rang out of him. Kassapa’s face creased with doubt. Pheromones rose from him; his eyebrows arched, signaling primate dominance. Sumedha met his brother’s eye, felt the challenge there, returned it.

“The world is not a controlled experiment, brother,” he said. “We cannot duplicate its complexity.” He ran a loving finger along the girl’s throat, felt the vitality of her pulse. “If she cannot survive the world, then neither will the Fathers when they emerge.”

….

A cloud obscured the sun. The temperature dropped. The dome, having shed the last of its winter fur, began to shiver. A tectonic quaking through mountainous flesh. Its skin turned pink as chloroplasts retreated from its cooling surface.

The same shift occurred within Sumedha’s skin. He lay naked at the dome’s peak, chest to the sky, skin to skin with Satori, heartbeat to heartbeat. Satori shivered; Sumedha shivered.

His mind retreated from the cold, retreated to the place he had shared with Pihadassa. They had often spent sunny days up here, feeling Satori’s skin gurgle with photosynthesis. They would bask in steam as the dome opened her pores and exhaled sweat. Pihadassa would mount him, her skin glowing green in the sun as the chloroplasts did their work. Her body arching as energy surged through her. Her pupils would dilate and Sumedha would peer into her, open himself to her, meet her in their own personal Bardo of moment and mind, flesh and heat.

Sumedha breathed, turned his attention to the sensation of his solitude. The agony of it surprised him. His throat squeezed tight, producing a long keen.

The sound of footsteps silenced him. Bare feet padding lightly over the dome’s spongy skin. They halted at a respectful distance. Sumedha stilled his thoughts, nodded assent. Paduma approached, seated herself lotus position beside him. She smoothed her white shift over dark thighs and gazed out over the dead sprawl of the old city. Heat shimmered where the sun hit the plains. Thunderstorms congealed like bruises.

“There will be tornadoes,” she observed after a moment. “I would like to try and harness one.”

“A tornado?” Sumedha watched a train of black government zeps angling in beneath the storms, noses pointed at Satori.

“Yes. The energy from one of decent size, if I could store it…I imagine it would equal what the wind fields generate in a year.” To the north, among square miles of black factory ruins, churned several fields of bone-bladed windmills. They flashed white, slow and graceful in their cartilage sockets, as though they existed in a different sort of time. “But the preconditions are far too complex to predict exactly where and when one will form.”

The first of the black government zeppelins nosed up and settled with surprising grace onto the airfield beside the secondary dome. Pihadassa’s dome, where she had produced her seed. A hatch opened at the aircraft’s rear, revealing a wide storage bay, out of which black-clad soldiers marched. A group of burly landraces stood waiting, wagons in tow full of seed.

The sun emerged from behind its cloud and the temperature immediately shot up. Chloroplasts surged to the surface of Sumedha’s skin, of Satori’s skin. Pores the size of bomb craters opened around them.

“It feels good,” Paduma said. She pulled the shift over her head and lay down beside Sumedha. He did not reply. He watched, where down below the landraces began loading the zep.

“The government’s third run this spring,” he said. They would unload the seed at distribution stations across the Midwest. From there scatter it to the subaltern migrant wind. “Sometimes I can almost see them out there.” The maggot-white dots of humanity scratching at the dry earth, laboring to reap the harvest of their own obsolescence.

“You have grown strange without her,” she said. A fat black fly buzzed Sumedha’s head. He remained still. “Kassapa thinks so, too.”

“Kassapa sent you to visit me.”

“He knows. But I chose. You do not connect to us anymore.”

“Perhaps it is you who does not connect with me.”

“Perhaps, but…” Paduma turned her head and eyed Sumedha as though he were a puzzle. “You are not forthcoming.”

“I think we have all grown strange,” Sumedha decided. “What do you want?”

“We want you back in the fold.”

“I want that, too.” Sumedha rolled onto his side, facing her. The moisture of Satori’s steam glistened in the long concavities of her skin. “I want to connect.” He reached out, touched her leg. Found her skin hot, boiling with chloroplasts. Heard her breath quicken. Slid his hand between her thighs. Found her wet.

“I know,” she whispered. She rolled close to him, lips parting against his ear. Her fingers circled his member. She rose up, slid down. Sumedha’s mind compressed, collapsed into its dense, primate core. He pulled Paduma to him.

She locked her eyes on his. Photosynthesis buzzed like carbonation beneath her skin. Sumedha felt it against his chest, beneath his fingers. Satori throbbed, alive beneath him, in rhythm as he moved against Pihadassa—no,
Paduma
. He linked his breath to hers. In as she exhaled, out as she inhaled. Joining them in primordial loop. Round and round, up the burning helix. She placed her forehead against his. Her lips parted, her skin seared him. Her pupils swallowed her eyes. A tiny white sun formed somewhere down in Sumedha’s brainstem, grew. Filled his skull until he knew nothing but light. He saw Pihadassa there, glowing. He wanted to warn her: Kassapa’s hounds tracked her. She smiled and he heard her voice…
I want to have a child
.

He opened his eyes. Paduma stared down at him. His hand went to her cheek—she looked so much like Pihadassa.

“You cannot connect anymore,” she said, and looked confused. She watched him, separate, other.

“Not with you, it seems.”

Sadness quietly touched her face. She leaned forward, touched her forehead to Sumedha’s for a silent, empty moment, then leaned back.

“I’m sorry for your loss, brother.” She pulled herself off him. He watched his seed trickle out of her.

“We have all lost,” he said. “Three is an unstable number. We have collapsed into our individual parts, but continue to try and behave as though we are one.” He ran a finger through the smear of semen on her leg, drawing a figure eight. Useless seed, sterile as a patch of alkali on the plain. An instant of acute melancholy overcame him. The primate urge to plant his likeness inside Paduma’s belly, stymied. Her wombless belly, his own dead seed. “We have never been exactly what we are,” he said. Paduma regarded him, her expression now blank, meditative. Sumedha wondered what she saw. It seemed a long time since he had known his siblings’ minds.

“Did the splice succeed?” she asked after a time.

“It is still too early to tell.”

“The girl appears healthy. Vigorous even.”

“She was very sick at first. I thought she would die like the others. But then she recovered. Now she seems very strong. Very healthy, yes.”

Paduma rolled onto her back. Smiled up at the blazing spring sky.

“This is good news,” she said. “The Fathers will be happy.”

Sumedha ran his thumb along the smooth verdance of her cheek. He touched her chin, pressed his thumb to the softness of her lips.

“You and Pihadassa are alike,” he told her. She turned her face to him.

“We are similar. In some ways.”

“I begin to see the puzzle Pihadassa works,” he said. Paduma’s pupils widened. Sumedha noted the barely perceptible flare of her nostrils. He watched the air between them, as though the words hovered there and he could gather them back in.

“You withhold much,” Paduma said. She stared at him. “Kassapa is right not to trust you.”

“You are right to be open with me about the fact he does not.”

For an instant realization flashed in her eyes, then they went flat. She placed a palm to the dome’s gurgling skin and took a deep, stilling breath.

“He does not believe you could fail to know your partner’s mind. He has concluded your loyalty to Satori is as tenuous as Pihadassa’s.”

“And you?”

Paduma breathed again. Her hand rose, pressed itself lightly to Sumedha’s cheek.

“I want to understand. Could you fail to know Pihadassa’s mind? Is it possible?”

She lay back down and closed her eyes. They lay like that for a time, meditating together under the life-giving sun, each respecting the other’s turn of mind.

“He will kill you,” Paduma said finally. Sumedha saw the desolate place her puzzle had led her, a place he well knew.

“He has already tried.”

Paduma sat up. She hovered over Sumedha, filling the sky, her body rigid. She closed her eyes, breathed. Sumedha sensed her mind bent hard on the puzzle. Her eyes snapped open.

“The bomb,” she concluded. Her heart hammered audibly. The sour stench of fear rolled off her.

“Yes,” Sumedha said. Paduma’s face went slack—the vertigo of desolation, the inescapable end to a puzzle that could do nothing but damage. Empathy swelled in Sumedha.

“Now you know what it is not to know your partner’s mind.” He placed his hand flat to the sweating skin over her solar plexus, the place where he knew it hurt. Felt the muscle there clench as a single sob worked its way up through Paduma’s body. It escaped her throat with a strangled sound.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I am sorry for you, brother.” She lay back down and closed her eyes. Sumedha breathed, reached out with his mind, felt the slightest flicker of connection.

“Random variance,” he said. “It fevers my dreams.”

“And mine,” Paduma agreed.

“We touch a genome’s every switch. We monitor each chromosome as an organism develops in its amniotic state—”

“And yet any organism can exhibit the unexpected—”

“For no discernable reason.” This last they spoke in unison. Sumedha rolled to face his sister. Lost himself for a moment in the moist line where her cheek met Satori’s skin, the touch of mother and child. He spoke once more.

“Pihadassa is my twin. She solves problems just as I do. Only she does it better.” Understanding spread over Paduma’s face.

“She is smarter.”

“Yes. But I begin to see. And so do you.” Sumedha closed his eyes. Pictured snowmelt raging down out of the Rockies, funneled into Satori’s canals through a series of massive cartilage turbines. Paduma’s turbines. He listened to the far-off whistle of bone windmill blades carving the air amid the factory ruins to the north. He placed a palm to the dome’s skin. Satori’s nerves sang with electricity.

Paduma’s work.

He opened his eyes. She glowed in the sun. Verdant. Brilliant. He touched her brow, ran a finger along the curve of her ear.

“You are like Pihadassa. You see what she saw. Do you not?”

“I do not understand it.” Paduma’s face relaxed as the confession emerged. “But I feel it.” Their minds touched, wound together, the mirrored double helix of twins.

“The Fathers’ plan—”

“Is wrong. Yes.”

“When they are whole, they will abandon Satori.”

“Abandon us.”

“Satori will die—”

“-and the Fathers do not care.”

Fear welled up inside them. Together, they breathed, stilling their joined minds. They came to the moment. Observed the effervescent sensation of sugars combining inside their skin. Observed heartbeats synchronized with each other, with Satori.

“It feels good to connect.”

“I feel your urgency. Sumedha, you must not—”

“Complete the Fathers’ graft. I do not know if I can stop myself. It is—”

“What you do. Satori must live.”

“We must live. Pihadassa—”

“Knew.”

“Satori—”

“Is her child.”

Sumedha slid his hand over Paduma’s smooth scalp. He pressed his lips to hers. Their tongues met—joined like their minds. Paduma rolled onto her side and Sumedha pulled her hips close. Slid himself inside her. Their twinned helix spun, expanded, the blazing center of a universe belonging entirely to them. Sumedha ran his hand up Paduma’s belly, over a breast to her throat.

“You and I—” he whispered into her ear.

“Have secrets.”

“Are connected.”

“What about—”

“Kassapa. I keep one secret—”

“We can keep two.”

CHAPTER 12

oss wrapped the coarse burlap of her shawl across her nose, filtering out dust. She sat hunkered, dressed in migrant rags, at the edge of a firepit dug into the powdery dirt of a field in the lee of a collapsed overpass. Acrid smoke rose from a hunk of burning plastic, over which several other migrants had spitted rats.

“Anything?” she asked.