The Meat Tree (12 page)

Death doesn't alarm me. That makes me alien to
them. I can make patterns from how things decay. I take joy in the humus and I bury light as easy as bask in it, so that the webs in between the fingers I
stretch to their limit, and my ears and my toes are translucent and beautiful as decay.

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 15:15

Inspector of
Wrecks

I leave the VR, exhausted. We haven't yet seen the
woman that Math and I've made from flowers. All
in good time.

I get to the module and I'm knocked sideways by the smell. Nona's been shopping, quite brazenly,
on the work computer and has bought, of all things, perfume.

She doesn't refer to the row we had earlier, but holds out her wrist for me to smell the fragrance she's chosen. It makes me feel sick.

Apprentice

Of course, I went for a chypre, as I'm a woman of mystery. Storax, labdanum and calamus – an oriental aroma since Roman times. Produced in France as Cyprus powder, with oak moss as its base. There used to be a fashion for tiny birds – oiselets de Chypre – moulded out of a perfume paste, requiring Benjamin,
cloves, cinnamon, calamus and gum tragacanth as
ingredients. They were hung in ornate cages.

I choose a dark fragrance. Floral or sweet doesn't
suit my character any more. My skin must be
changing, so I crave the aromatics that won't leave you alone, that you're not sure you like, but which your brain craves, like fermented food. It's the kind of perfume that's an acquired taste.

I tried quite a few, but came up with this modern
chypre. Base note of oak moss, patchouli, clary sage, with flowery notes of jasmine and hint of
bergamot, lemon.

Or there's this classic: Ma Griffe. In the base notes,
storax and oak moss predominate, with hints of
cinnamon, benzoin, labdanum and musk.

Or broom – Madame Rochas!

He

I don't know what to say to her. Such a cacophony
of strong perfumes in a confined space could be
construed as a form of assault.

I tell her, ‘Get rid of it.'

She looks at me blankly.

She

I find it hard to understand what he's saying. I feel heat on my back, as the sun swings round. I leave him and his anger; move inside to my bunk so that I can stretch out in the light. I can feel it coming through the hull as if there were no ship around us.

He

Women go funny once a month. I'll give her this
afternoon but if this continues tomorrow, I'll be going home early and dumping her. I don't care about the investigation or what they say. I can't have a subordinate behave in this way. Gwydion would never stand for it.

What did I just think?

12

Wife

Synapse Log 9 Feb 2210, 09:00

Inspector of
Wrecks

So she comes to me early and says: ‘Sorry about
yesterday. Won't happen again.' Everything's back to normal. Not a word about what happened. Call me a coward, but I let it rest. I'm just relieved that Nona's behaving like herself again.

Apprentice

And I tell him that I think that the game has moved
from the VR suite and into my head. He says
nothing for a little while then asks me, did I drink anything from the shipwrecked vessel's water supply?

He

My first thought was that she'd swallowed nano-bots,
a later form of
VR. It was the intermediary tech­
nology between the ancient VR and neuro games, now
children have the transistor implants into their frontal lobes when they get their jabs. But she says no.

She

I can try to control it. Do you ever hear sounds like a roaring of waters inside your head, perhaps the cerebrospinal fluids as they circulate round the dura
mater and the pia mater membranes? I've tried
listening to the noise, even as it drives me mad,
letting it roar to its full volume. Then, when I can't bear it any longer, I hold it still. So with yesterday's living dream. I saw it, I lived it and now I choose not to let it spill out of the VR frame and into my life. I can control it.

He

I pretend not to know what she means. But I do. So, I'm brusque and businesslike. We put on the helmets to see where we stand.

Joint Thought Channel 9 Feb 2210, 09:02

Inspector of
Wrecks

The scene in front of us looks like a tarot card: The
Lovers. Math stands between Lleu and his bride, whose back is to us.

Nona, if you like I'll take her part.

Apprentice

No, it's all right. You want to be Math for good reasons. I'll take her. It'll be all right.

Inspector of
Wrecks

If you're sure. I just think that Math is king of this realm and that I haven't paid enough attention to his interface.

Apprentice

With what?

Inspector of
Wrecks

That's the thing. I still need to find that out. So, you get to be bride.

Apprentice

And was there ever a bride like me? I'm the one who all
the girls are trying to be with their pinks and creams,
bouquets and manicures.

Inspector of
Wrecks

And Math officiates and the two are wed. What's she like?

Apprentice

Full of awareness and rage to live.

Inspector of
Wrecks

She looks all sweetness.

Apprentice

She isn't. She speaks in fragrances. Now her pores exude the smell of almond. I wonder, how keen is Lleu's sense of smell?

Inspector of
Wrecks

Math's very sensitive. Not sure about Lleu. He seems
impassive, looking very pale.

Math's a kind of scientist of the forest. This is what he
perceives: top notes made from the sexual secretions of
flowers, odours mimicking the animal's own sex pheromones. There's a faecal whiff there somewhere.

Middle notes: resins that also recall the sexual smells that attract creatures useful for pollination.

Top notes: floral. Innocuous, sweet. A cover for the real business below in the sex juices.

Apprentice

She's hypersensitive to light and has placed herself, like
a fashion model, to best effect under the spotlight of
available sun. It looks like vanity, but it's not. It's the drive to survive.

She dances without moving. Her mind makes large
gestures in scent.

Inspector of
Wrecks

I'm getting it, loud and clear. She's nervous but curious, puzzled by what's happened. There's stress in the mixture. A touch of toxin.

Apprentice

She stares at her husband. Her sight's acute but attuned to temperature. She senses the exact gradations of heat on his flesh, the scarlet groin and armpits, the way the body cools at its green extremities. To her he's a multicoloured body.

He turns to her and speaks. She can see his lips moving but can't hear noise, only as vibration. She turns to Math. He vibrates at her too.

Inspector of
Wrecks

Gwydion and I will have to work on that, she needs to learn language.

She

I'm a synaesthesiac. Noise runs through the filaments of nerves in this new… shape. I'm hungry and I need to eat light.

I look down at myself and feel a shock. What kind of a flower have I become?

The plant next to me takes my hand, his face grows larger. He smells disgusting and I pull away.

Then the full horror of what's happened to me hits me: I am a flower made of meat.

*

Synapse Log 9 Feb 2210, 16:00

Apprentice

Do you think the people who lived on this ship ever imagined that we'd be poking around, trying to find out what happened to them? If they had, surely they would have left more clues. An accurate log? An SOS before they all died? A message in a bottle?

Maybe they did but we just don't recognise it. Campion thinks that it's all in the VR but I'm trying to tell him that it's moved outside.

It's as if we are the imagination of the ship. What happens between us is what it wills. Only he doesn't yet know it.

I feel autistic, as if the world is standing too close for comfort. Movement's disturbing, as I have to track even the tiniest change of angle, disposition. I feel light moving around me, and I follow it, inching like an invalid around the module. I find I like to sit where the sun hits the hull and I turn my face to the wall, basking. I've moved my hammock to the other end of the capsule, to maximise my time in the light.

Lack of gravity confuses me now as it never did when I first came on board. I feel I'm growing in a vacuum and my mind doesn't know which way is up.

When Campion talks to me, I look at his mouth, hoping that lipreading will make some sense of the words but it doesn't. So I nod, make sounds back, don't know what I'm saying half the time.

What's different is that I feel his heat wherever he is. When Campion moves above me along the cabin sole, the shadow he throws moves across me. After
all, I'm married to light. I want the full glare of his
attention, though Campion never gives it. I need it like food and yet the man is fiddling with logs and with manuals in which I've lost all interest.

I send out tendrils of scent which he ignores. I can hear what he thinks.

Synapse Log 9 Feb 2210, 16:00

Inspector of
Wrecks

If I hadn't blocked my sense of smell after the
incident with the perfume, I don't know where
I'd be. It was easier than putting all the ship's air through a phero-filter, which would have taken hours and distracted us both from the task in hand. Time's running out.

She

My body still looks like itself, but I'm different. I feel phantom pain. I can't even locate it, but I know that I used to be more diffuse, much less protected, as if this flesh which I wear like a set of rotting clothes cases me in.

He

This marriage of Lleu and the woman of flowers, I wonder if it can be read as a metaphor for what
happened?

She

No, stupid, it's literal.

He

Funny. Where did that thought come from, out of the blue?

She

He'd have a fit if he knew that I hear him now.

He

So it's literal. An odd inspiration. I know that the human brain itself is a VR system, and that language is the second imaginative technology, at one remove
from original awareness. By the time you get to
VR – even the early systems like the one on board the shipwreck – it all looks like a hall of mirrors in perception's funfair.

She

Funfair? Now you're really showing your age!

He

Funny, I could have sworn that tone of voice was… no, that's ridiculous.

Apprentice

I'll try an experiment. If I make the rootlets of my
mind reach out into Campion's, how far can we
go? I close my eyes, and try to make myself discern
the areas of vibration, where the axons fire across
the synapses. I send out tendrils as fine as the most
delicate hair, up through his spinal column, round
his tongue, hungry for the taste of his mind. I feed on his eyes and bump into the dome of his skull, so I feel his impressions.

He

Of course, being Protestant I believe that it's all a question of symbols.

She

I can taste his thoughts…

He

But what if…?

She

That's right, stupid. What if it's far more miraculous than that? If imagination isn't something that stands to one side, making a discreet version of the world
but, instead, transforms the matter of every subject
it touches?

He

Yes, like the Catholic wafer, transubstantiation!

She

Trans- what?

He

You mean you don't know the difference between that and consubstantiation?

She

Just joking. I do.