Gene Wolfe - Talk of Mandrakes.pdf - fantasy - rhea137

Talk of Mandrakes by Gene Wolfe

published in Worlds of IF. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s

agents, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

***

THE MONS WERE NOT RUNNING. Peak coughed into his breather and turned

aside shivering. What do you do when you have to be someplace? And can’t get

there?

The man beside him pulled car keys from a pocket.

Beg. “You’re probably going to work,” Peak said. “I wasn’t. I was going to

Skybase Five.”

The owner of the keys turned to look at him. Both were breaking the great

unwritten rule of the city: Do not make eye contact .

“Here, sir,” Peak tried to make it smooth. “Let me show you.” His hand slid

into his worn raincoat, past jacket and sweater, and unbuttoned his shirt. Slowly

enough to let the owner of the keys see that it was not a weapon, he pulled out his

wallet and punched the combination. The pass had come by unasked by e-secure

and the picture was two years old, but it was still recognizable. “You can hold it if

you want, sir. I trust you.”

A thousand grumbling commuters swirled around them.

“Admit John Michael Peak, Ph.D.” The owner of the keys moved his lips

when he read. He skipped Peak’s number. “Thursday twenty-eight N eighty only,

eleven hundred to thirteen hundred only. Building one-one-four.” He looked from the

picture to Peak, then back at the picture. “Yeah. that’s you all right.”

“I’m in xbio,” Peak told him. “Doctor Selim wants to see me.” He did not

add that the mere fact might make his career.

“Okay...” The owner of the keys said.

“You’ve got a car, sir, and you could take me. Downtown will be gridlocked

already, with the mons down.”

The owner of the keys nodded slowly at first. “Yeah.” A more rapid nod. “I

could call in from out there. If they checked on me it’d be on the scan.”

“Sure.” Peak had struggled to keep his voice normal. It was going to work!

“Naturally I can’t tell the bastards why. Confidential. Come on!”

Together they left the station and rode the speedlator to the street. The car

was yellow, and bigger than Peak had expected.

“This Selim,” the owner said as they pulled into traffic, “he was one of them?”

“The only xbiologist they had. They didn’t really expect to find life.”

“You can turn off your breather,” the owner said. “My car’s got ox.”

“Thanks.” Peak closed the valve. “Nice of you.”

“Ram Boardman,” the owner said. He took a hand from the wheel.

Peak shook it. “Mike Peak.”

The wheel motors hummed as they whizzed past the stalled millions headed

toward the city. It took twenty minutes to get to the wire; after that it was all clear.

Tracking guns picked them up, and the owner slowed as he murmured, “Request

egress,” into the dash fone.

“Denied eight one seven H eight one JQ. Special circumstances?”

“We have special circumstances. Gov hicomf. John Michael Peak.”

“Yes, sir. Park space one-oh-eight, sir.”

The owner grinned at Peak. Peak grinned back.

The officer who showed Peak in wore cermet armor and carried a gun, but his

expression was deferential behind his visor. He saluted when Peak showed his pass,

and waved him through.

Doctor Selim joined him in the lobby half an hour later and actually said, “It’s

good of you to come, Doctor Peak.”

“The greatest privilege of my life, sir.”

“And good of you to say so. Get out this way much?”

“You can’t.” Peak shook his head. “Not without a pass.”

“So they tell me.” Selim sighed. He was middle-aged, short, slight, and dark.

“Got it now? I want to show you my lab.”

A new guard touched a button, and a light labeled SEC CHECK flashed

green. The wall said, “Pleased to see you, Doctor Selim. Is this man with you?”

“Yes, he is.”

A second light shone, this one marked VOC CHECK. The wall opened along

an invisible seam. When it had closed behind them, Peak said, “I suppose we’re still

being monitored for our own safety, sir?”

“We are, but not by human beings. Not unless the central processor tags the

record. So they tell me, and I think it’s the truth. It would take a lot of people to

listen to everything we say. I’ve looked for them, and they’re not here.”

Peak made finger motions, waves flying along a wire.

“Too vulnerable. Or anyway I hope so. I’m fifty years out of date, Doctor

Peak. Do you realize that?”

“I’m current, Doctor Selim. Just got my Ph.D. With your off-world

experience and my knowledge we’d make an unbeatable team.” He hoped it sounded

plausible.

“Then tell me, what is it they’re so frightened by?”

“Us.”

“Extraterrestrial biologists?”

“People who don’t work for them. You do, so they’re not afraid of you. I’d

like to work for them too—I’d love to, in fact—but I don’t.”

“We’re going to fix that.”

Peak swallowed. It was a hundred strides and more down a wide corridor

more modern than anything he had ever seen before he could talk again. “They think

we hate them,” he said at last, “and it’s true for a lot of us. A lot of people hate

science, any kind. Hate government. Not just ours, any government. They hold

science and government responsible for...” His voice trailed off. “For everything,”

he finished weakly. “For the way the world is.”

“I’ve seen it,” Selim said. “A little of it at least.”

“In the old days they had buildings downtown. Isn’t that right?”

Selim nodded. “Fifty years here. It was only eighteen for me. Did I tell you?”

“I read it.” Peak swallowed. “If people got angry back then they could

demonstrate. Throw rocks, maybe. My granddad did some of that. So they moved

everything out into the country and they keep everybody else inside. Now they do

things out here, and most people don’t know what they are. I don’t know what

you’re doing, Doctor Selim, and I’m dying to find out. And—and work with you on

it, if you’ll give me a chance.”

Selim nodded again.

“But whatever it is, that’s one of them.”

“I could tell you another, but the central processor might pick it up. Let’s just

say they’re thinking of moving farther away.”

Though tempted to nod, Peak was not sure he understood. “Today I was

going to ride the mon to Urban Cee-Cee and try to get a ride from there to keep my

appointment with you. I thought with the pass you sent me, one of the people

working at Cee-Cee might take me. Only the mons are down, so I got a man named

Ram Boardman to drive me. He’d like more than anything to get in here, just for a

minute or two, so he could say he’s been inside. I promised I’d try.”

“I assume he’s not involved in extraterrestrial biology?”

“He’s an exec, I think. He’s got an exec car.”

“I’ll tell the guards to admit him later. I doubt that we want him standing

around while we talk shop. Have you read my report?”

Peak shook his head. “They haven’t released it yet. Maybe they never will.

There was a summary on the news, but I don’t know how good it was.”

They turned a corner, and Selim opened a heavy metal door. “Welcome to my

parlor,” he said.

There were lab benches and scanscopes, things that looked like plants and

things in rectangular temperglass cases that did not look much like animals.

Dominating the laboratory was a wall of temperglass; behind it, a small heap of

blue-gray matter that scarcely seemed alive.

Selim led Peak toward it. “That is the focus of my collection, the most

important specimen I brought back and a form of life more wonderful than anything

Earth boasts. Do we begin with it or work up to it? You choose.”

Desperately afraid they would be interrupted, Peak said, “Begin with it, please,

Doctor.”

“Good. I will begin by telling you that like many other things you see here it is

neither plant nor animal as we understand those categories. Here’s a young one.”

Selim pointed toward a plant that resembled an African violet, save that it was black.

“It has leaves, as you see, spread areas for the absorption of sunlight. It even puts

down roots for such moisture and nourishment as it can obtain from the exhausted

soil in which it grows.”

“I see.” Peak rubbed his chin.

“But as it matures and stores enough energy to begin its reproductive cycle,

its structure exhibits less and less organization. It now utilizes light only poorly. It is

time for it to flower. You must see that for yourself. And for you to see it, it must

see you and not see me. That glass is preventing it from seeing either of us. For the

present, it perceives by ultraviolet, which is blocked by glass.”

Selim walked to the edge of the temperglass wall and pressed a button. The

wall rose swiftly and silently. “Go in, Doctor Peak. You’ll still be able to hear me in

there.”

“Is it safe to touch?” Peak asked.

“Perfectly.”

While the wall slid down behind him, he knelt before the blue-gray heap. It

was pocked with pores a millimeter or two in diameter; its surface felt like a dry

sponge. He said, “I suppose it must conserve water at this stage.”

Selim’s voice came from a speaker in the ceiling. “Exactly. It has lost its root

structure and is entirely dependent on the water, carbon, and nitrogen stored in what

was once its stem. Now it must hope for a visit from some mobile creature if it is

ever to become mobile itself.”

Peak turned to stare at him through the temperglass. “There’s a mobile form?”

“Yes, for the dissemination of seed. Even Earth has them, as you surely

know. Tumbleweeds, to give one example of many, discard their roots and roll as

they are driven by the wind, dropping seeds as they go. The remarkable thing about

this—what shall we call it?”

“ Selimus , of course,” Peak said.

“In all humility, there will be more than one creature that will bear my name.

Selimus dryas , perhaps. At any rate, the remarkable thing about this dryad is that it

has no fixed mobile form. It imitates, at least to a degree, the form of the first mobile

life of sufficient size to approach it. Touch it again where you touched it before.”

Gene Wolfe - Talk of Mandrakes.pdf

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