Wireless (14 page)

“It used to be, once. Maybe used to be a bunch of people.” Wendy got a weird and witchy look in her eye. “’Ad a boyfriend back thirty, forty years ago, joined a Lamarckian clade. Swapping genes an’ all, the way you or me’d swap us underwear. Used to be a ’vironmentalist back when antiglobalization was about big corporations pissing on us all for profits. Got into gene hackery and self-sufficiency big-time. I slung his ass when he turned green and started photosynthesizing.”

“Bastards,” Joe muttered. It was deep green folk like that who’d killed off the agricultural-industrial complex in the early years of the century, turning large portions of the countryside into ecologically devastated wilderness gone to rack and ruin. Bad enough that they’d set millions of countryfolk out of work—but that they’d gone on to turn green, grow extra limbs, and emigrate to the outer solar system was adding insult to injury. And having a good time in the process, by all accounts. “Din’t you ’ave a farm problem, coupla years back?”

“Aye, did that,” said Art. He clutched his pint mug protectively.

“It went away,” Joe mused aloud.

“Yeah, well.” Wendy stared at him cautiously.

“No fireworks, like.” Joe caught her eye. “And no body. Huh.”

“Metabolism,” said Wendy, apparently coming to some kind of decision. “That’s where it’s at.”

“Meat—” Joe, no biogeek, rolled the unfamiliar word around his mouth irritably. “I used to be a software dude before I burned, Rats. You’ll have to ’splain the jargon fore using it.”

“You ever wondered how those farms
get
to Jupiter?” Wendy probed.

“Well.” Joe shook his head. “They, like, grow stage trees? Rocket logs? An’ then they estivate, and you are fucked if they do it next door, ’cause when those trees go up, they toast about a hundred hectares?”

“Very good,” Wendy said heavily. She picked up her mug in both hands and gnawed on the rim, edgily glancing around as if hunting for police gnats. “Let’s you and me take a hike.”

Pausing at the bar for Ole Brenda to refill her mug, Wendy led Joe out past Spiffy Buerke and her latest femme—a pair of throw-backs in green Wellingtons and Barbour jackets—out into what had once been a car park and was now a tattered wasteground behind the pub. It was dark, and no residual light pollution stained the sky: the Milky Way was visible overhead, along with the pea-sized red cloud of orbitals that had gradually swallowed Jupiter over the past few years. “You wired?” asked Wendy.

“No, why?”

She pulled out a fist-sized box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a light on its side to blink green, and nodded. “Fuckin’ polis bugs.”

“Isn’t that a—”

“Ask me no questions, an’ I’ll tell you no fibs.” Wendy grinned.

“Uh-huh.” Joe took a deep breath: he’d guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections, and this—a portable local jammer—was proof: any police bugs within two or three meters would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling sub-sentient coppers whose job it was to prevent conspiracy-to-commit offenses before they happened. It was a relic of the Internet age, when enthusiastic legislators had accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by demanding keyword monitoring of everything within range of a network terminal—not realizing that in another few decades “network terminals” would be self-replicating ’bots the size of fleas and about as common as dirt. (The net itself had collapsed shortly thereafter, under the weight of self-replicating viral libel lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance remained.) “Okay. Tell me about meta, metab—”

“Metabolism.” Wendy began walking toward the field behind the pub. “And stage trees. Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven—anyway. What you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just lignify and die in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and before the cells die they
nitrate
the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked enzymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s dead it’s ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight explosive—it detonates cell by cell, and
some
of the xylem tubes are, eh, well, the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae with a depolarizing membrane nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s about efficient as ’at old-time satellite-launcher rocket. Not very, but enough.”

“Uh.” Joe blinked. “That meant to mean something to me?”

“Oh ’eck, Joe.” Wendy shook her head. “Think I’d bend your ear if it wasn’t?”

“Okay.” He nodded, seriously. “What can I do?”

“Well.” Wendy stopped and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon train making its orbital transfer window, self-sufficient posthuman Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted, embarking on the long, slow transfer to Jupiter.

“Well?” He waited expectantly.

“You’re wondering where all that fertilizer’s from,” Wendy said elliptically.

“Fertilizer.” His mind blanked for a moment.

“Nitrates.”

He glanced down, saw her grinning at him. Her perfect fifth set of teeth glowed alarmingly in the greenish overspill from the light on her jammer box.

“Tha’ knows it make sense,” she added, then cut the jammer.

When Joe finally staggered home in the small hours, a thin plume of smoke was rising from Bob’s kennel. Joe paused in front of the kitchen door and sniffed anxiously, then relaxed. Letting go of the door handle, he walked over to the kennel and sat down outside. Bob was most particular about his den—even his own humans didn’t go in there without an invitation. So Joe waited.

A moment later there was an interrogative cough from inside. A dark, pointed snout came out, dribbling smoke from its nostrils like a particularly vulpine dragon. “Rrrrrrr?”

“ ’S me.”

“Uuurgh.” A metallic click. “Smoke good smoke joke cough tickle funny arf arf ?”

“Yeah, don’t mind if I do.”

The snout pulled back into the kennel; a moment later it reappeared, teeth clutching a length of hose with a mouthpiece on one end. Joe accepted it graciously, wiped off the mouthpiece, leaned against the side of the kennel, and inhaled. The weed was potent and smooth: within a few seconds it stilled the uneasy dialogue in his head.

“Wow, tha’s a good turnup.”

“Arf-arf-ayup.”

Joe felt himself relaxing. Maddie would be upstairs, snoring quietly in their decrepit bed: waiting for him, maybe. But sometimes a man just had to be alone with his dog and a good joint, doing man-and-dog stuff. Maddie understood this and left him his space. Still . . .

“’At farm been buggering around the pond?”

“Growl exclaim fuck-fuck yup! Sheep-shagger.”

“If it’s been at our lambs—”

“Nawwwwrr. Buggrit.”

“So whassup?”

“Grrrr, Maddie yap-yap farmtalk! Sheep-shagger.”

“Maddie’s been
talking
to it?”

“Grrr yes-yes!”

“Oh shit. Do you remember when she did her last backup?”

The dog coughed fragrant blue smoke. “Tank thump-thump full cow moo beef clone.”

“Yeah, I think so too. Better muck it out tomorrow. Just in case.”

“Yurrrrrp.” But while Joe was wondering whether this was agreement or just a canine eructation, a lean paw stole out of the kennel mouth and yanked the hookah back inside. The resulting slobbering noises and clouds of aromatic blue smoke left Joe feeling a little queasy: so he went inside.

The next morning, over breakfast, Maddie was even quieter than usual. Almost meditative.

“Bob said you’d been talking to that farm,” Joe commented over his eggs.

“Bob—” Maddie’s expression was unreadable. “Bloody dog.” She lifted the lid on the Rayburn’s hot plate and peered at the toast browning underneath. “Talks too much.”

“Did you?”

“Ayup.” She turned the toast and put the lid back down on it.

“Said much?”

“It’s a farm.” She looked out the window. “Not a fuckin’ worry in the world ’cept making its launch window for Jupiter.”

“It—”

“Him. Her. They.” Maddie sat down heavily in the other kitchen chair. “It’s a collective. Usedta be six people. Old, young, whatether, they’s decided ter go to Jupiter. One of ’em was telling me how it happened. How she’d been an accountant in Bradford, had a nervous breakdown. Wanted
out
. Self-sufficiency.” For a moment her expression turned bleak. “Felt herself growing older but not bigger, if you follow.”

“So how’s turning into a bioborg an improvement?” Joe grunted, forking up the last of his scrambled eggs.

“They’re still separate people: bodies are overrated, anyway. Think of the advantages: not growing older, being able to go places and survive anything, never being on your own, not bein’ trapped—” Maddie sniffed. “Fuckin’ toast’s on fire!”

Smoke began to trickle out from under the hot-plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.

“Bugger,” she remarked.

“You feel trapped?” Joe asked.
Again?
he wondered.

Maddie grunted. “Not your fault, love. Just life.”

“Life.” Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. “Life!”

“Horizon’s closing in,” she said quietly. “Need a change of scenery.”

“Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven’t I?” said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away. “Got a shipment of fertilizer coming in.”

In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and surreptitiously EMPing every police ’bot on the farm into the electronic afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it assembled the gadgets he’d ordered—a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with its own oxygen supply.

Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed. She didn’t seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign: Joe kept his questions to himself.

It took another five days for the smallholding’s power field to concentrate enough juice to fuel up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-net in the most deniable and surreptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chitchat. He’d half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn’t say anything: just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she’d taken to going.