The Botanist

by Mary Rosenblum

Illustration by Laurie Harden

“I don’t know if they’re ready to tap,” Keri said. She took his hand, and her touch drowned the tree song in Daniel’s head. “I’m way behind on my quota. Come help me, please?” She leaned toward him. “You always get through early. You’re never wrong.”

Daniel looked away, swallowing dry-mouthed as her breast brushed his arm. The mothwing touch of her flesh, coupled with the humming ripeness of the sap-trees, made him dizzy. Keri was sixteen to his just-fifteen, soft with new curves where last year she had been muscle-on-bone, like a yearling colt. In this same year, she had become almost a stranger, in a way that troubled his dreams at night. “Somebody’s using the old greenhouse,” he blurted out. “I was gonna go see.”

“Oh, it’s just some dope-grower starting plants.” Keri dismissed the mystery with a toss of her head. “Please help me, Daniel?”

He sighed, thinking about the thirty trees he had left to tap. Jensen, the super, would give him grief if he didn’t finish. He might fire Keri if she came up short on her quota again. “All right.” He retrieved his pack from where he had cached it against the swollen bole of a tree. The sample jars rattled as he dropped his bark knife into it and swung it over his shoulder.

“I cut a bunch of trees and they weren’t even close to ready.” Keri fell in beside him, arms swinging as they walked. “You never cut a tree that isn’t ripe. What do they do?” she asked lightly. “Talk to you?”

And that hurt, because she had understood, last summer. But all of a sudden, it was like they had never talked, never lain side by side in the tall meadow grass while clouds walked across the summer sky and he told her about the world he knew.

He had thought she understood, anyway.

“Let’s get those trees done,” he growled.

Her section was above his, just below the Scrub, where the mountain got too rocky to grow the deep-rooted bio-trees. Jensen had given her a small plot that produced some kind of polymer for manufacturing. Not very important—because he knew she wasn’t talented with trees. But he had hired her anyway. Daniel had never been able to figure that out. He walked quickly through the evenly spaced trunks, letting his fingertips brush the rough bark of the big trunks, feeling the humming song of the trees in his bones. Mostly they were green—too low a concentration of the engineered substance to be worth tapping, yet. But a few were ready. “That one. This one. And this one.” He touched them lightly, walked on, and left her to scurry after with a marking chalk. He was being rude, and he derived a bitter satisfaction from her scrambles.

He reached the end of her section and emerged from the shadows into the fading light of evening. Through the stunted, twisted trees of the Scrub, he saw an opalescent glow, like a landbound moon trapped in the wild growth. Shedding his heavy pack filled with sample-vials, he slipped into the shadows, tinghng with the wild trees’ song. It felt hke bubbles in his blood, all light and tingling. The glow came from the old greenhouse. Someone had replaced the broken panes of glass with translucent plastic, Daniel noticed. He edged closer, slipping his tapping knife from his pocket.

“Daniel!” Keri hissed from behind him. “What are you doing?” She grabbed his shirt. “Don’t!”

“Why not?” He shook her off, annoyed because—filled with the wild tree song—he hadn’t heard her sneaking up on him. “I want to see who’s there.”

“What if it’s the ghost?” She shivered and pulled herself against him. “The crazy survivalist who killed his wife and kids with a machine gun. My cousin Patti saw him one night.”

“I’m not afraid of the ghost.” It was a sad thing, like the scent of rotting melons on the night wind.

“Then they’re dopers, and they’ll kill you.”

“Not this close to the bio-trees.” The heat of her flesh burned him and made him shiver. He pulled free of her grip and began to slip purposefully toward the glowing arch of glass. “If you’re scared, go home.” Behind him, Keri drew in a hissing breath.

“You want to get yourself killed, you go right ahead, Daniel Garver! When are you going to grow up?” And she fled, making enough racket to wake the dead.

“I’m…” He bit off the words, because she was gone. She was mad. He clenched his teeth and turned his back on her absence, creeping closer, damned if he’d leave before he’d looked inside, and so what if they were dopers?

But his heart was hammering as he slipped his tapping blade through the corner of a plastic pane, and sliced out a tiny triangle of a peephole. Warm air seeped out, damp, sulfurous, and earthy. He pressed his eye to the space and forgot about ghosts and untapped trees. Above leaking hot water pipes, a thousand glass dishes sparkled on aluminum benches beneath banks of halide lamps. Green leaves sprouted from the dishes, and flowers glowed like scattered jewels—white, and pink, and yellow.

A hand closed on the back of his neck and Daniel yelled. The hand lifted him like you’d lift a puppy and shook him, then set him roughly down.

The sheer, casual strength of that gesture—so unlike his father’s labored violence—banished fear. Daniel stared up at the man who towered over him. He was as big as a TV wrestler, only his muscles were rock-hard and real. A tail of very blond hair fell down his back, as if in defiance of a receding hairline. His stark profile and high cheekbones looked vaguely familiar.

Daniel gulped in a labored breath, acutely aware of the fingers denting the flesh of his neck. “What are they?” He moved his chin fractionally toward the greenhouse. “They’re not dope.”

“No, they are neither marijuana nor genened coca, nor whatever else gets cropped around here.” The man lowered his chin and gave Daniel another, almost gentle, shake. “Beat it.” He let go and dropped Daniel to his feet.

“Why?” He staggered and caught his balance. The giant went into the greenhouse without answering. He moved like a bear, massively graceful. “Why grow the stuff, if it’s not dope?” Daniel trotted after him. “Is it worth a lot?”

“Is that all that matters?” The man rounded on him so fast that Daniel almost fell over. “How much something is worth?”

“Yeah.” Daniel studied the stranger. His eyes were so pale that they were almost lavender, and you couldn’t even see his eyebrows. He was even fairer than Keri. “Far as I know, everything costs money.”

“Just the junk.” The man went into the greenhouse and slammed the door. Daniel tried it. It wasn’t locked.

“I didn’t say it was a good thing.” He slipped inside, sweltering instantly in the thick, sulfurous air. “That’s just how it is. It stinks in here.”

“Geothermal heat.” The giant grunted. “Sulfur in the water. Who invited you?”

Daniel wandered over to peer at the delicate white blossoms. The plants grew in dishes of amber-colored jelly. At this end of the bench, a few dishes held squat plants with small furry leaves. They weren’t pretty plants. Nondescript green flowers barely showed among the foliage. His throat suddenly tight, Daniel touched one of the leaves. “That’s an orchid,” he said softly. “They grow where it’s damp. I thought… they were on the List.”

The man’s sudden and utter stillness made him look up.

He was staring at Daniel with a strange expression on his face. “Who told you?” he asked roughly.

“Everybody knows about the List.” Daniel shrugged. “My mom told me about the orchid.” He pushed the dish a tiny fraction of an inch away.

“It… people thought it was extinct. It isn’t. It’s… not on the List anymore.” The bear-man cleared his throat, his eyes still fixed on Daniel’s face. “They’re very rare. I… I clone them from tissue stocks. So they can be replanted. We… we’re losing what we had. Changing.” He looked away.

Changing. His mother’s words. They banished Daniel’s curiosity about why the man was lying. “I got to go,” he muttered, and headed for the door.

The man called after him, but Daniel didn’t stop to hear. He didn’t need to see to find his way through the bio-trees. Their singing on a warm night like this was deafening. Snatching up his pack, he slung it over his shoulder and ran upslope into the Scrub. After awhile, he crossed the line where the old trees had died as the rains dwindled, and the young ones grew sparsely, struggling for life. Their song was pain and patience, and the waxing moon poured down light on their quiet desperation. Daniel slowed to a walk, secure that the giant hadn’t chased him.

We are changing, his mother had cried one night. We have changed the Earth too much, and now she is changing us. I am so afraid.

Afraid of him. Her son.

Daniel stopped to pick a spindly fir bough. It was right. The lopsided orb of the moon crested the tips of distant firs as Daniel pushed through the huckleberry brush and out into the tiny clearing. It was an old burn scar that had never healed. Fireweed edged the low brush with a sweep of pink spikes, and blackberry canes sprawled across the thin soil.

Three horses stood in a small patch of grass and wildflowers. The stallion’s head was up, his mane lifting as he scented the wind, ears pricked with alarm as if he had caught a whiff of cougar scent. One of the mares still grazed, but the other had lifted her head, too, alerted by the stallion’s unease.

They were built entirely of branches—cedar, madrona, oak, maple, fir, alder, cascara, ash. All from the Scrub. All wild, old-type trees. Daniel stepped softly onto the lush, watered grass. The fir branch completed the curve of the stallion’s near shoulder. Pleased, he stepped back, eyes half closed, seeing them as he did in his dreams, all sinew and wary intelligence, nostrils flaring as they scented the dry wind that blew down the desert canyon. “Close?” he asked softly, and felt the cool touch of fingers against his cheek.

Footsteps crackled in the brush at the edge of the clearing. “I figured you’d come up here,” Keri called out.

“I thought you went home.” Daniel raised a hand against her flashlight beam.

“He might have been a doper.”

“And you were gonna save me?”

“That was stupid—walking in on him like that.” Keri flung herself down in the grass beside him, her flash streaking the meadow with stark black shadow before she clicked it off. “What if he’d had a gun?”

Daniel squatted beside her, his flip words silenced by the echo of recent fear in her voice. “You didn’t turn in your samples?” he asked gently. “Jensen is going to fire you.”

“He won’t,” she said abruptly. There was a sharpness in her tone that made him narrow his eyes.

She was looking at the horses, and he studied her surreptitiously. They had been friends forever. Two years ago, Keri’s mother—a gentle potter, direct descendant of the sixties-hippies who had lived here once—had hitchhiked to Medford and had never returned. Keri still lived in their cabin, easily evading the half-hearted visits of the occasional social worker. The change had really begun then, Daniel decided.

“How can they look so real?” Keri tossed a pebble at the stallion, pretending not to notice Daniel’s bristle. “It’s like I never really saw a horse until I looked at yours. I wish I could do art like that.”

“You do better than me. Your watercolors. And the horses… they aren’t…” He shrugged. “I’m just doing them, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” she drawled. “And if my watercolors are so good, how come nobody at the market will ever buy them?”

“Because people around here don’t know good when they see it,” Daniel said shortly.

“Ha.” Her tone was wistful. “If I could, I’d put in for a Federal Arts scholarship. Get out of these damn trees.”

He blinked at her, genuinely shocked. “What’s wrong with the trees?”

“It’s not the trees, it’s the people. Do you want to live out here forever?” She waved her arms at the dark Scrub. “You can work for a Company asshole like Jensen, or you can grow dope and get killed by a narc or a raider before you’re thirty. You’re a citizen’s kid.” She threw another stone at the horses. This one bounced off the grazing mare’s nose. “You can get an education. You can get out of here and do something.”

“Stop it.” He seized her wrist as she picked up another pebble. For a moment they strained against each other, not speaking. Her thin T-shirt lay softly against her ribcage, its print of flowers faded to a memory by too many washings. Her breasts swelled beneath the thin fabric, and Daniel had a sudden vision of her nipples beneath, pink and puckered. He let go of her abruptly, and she scrambled to her feet.

“I got to go.” She brushed grass from her too-tight jeans with brisk angry strokes. “Look at me. I’m a mess.”

“No, you’re not.” Sudden guilt seized him. “Let’s go tap some more of your trees. If you bring in a bunch of ripe samples, Jensen won’t be pissed.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” She tossed her hair back over her shoulder, talking down to him like he was a child. “Don’t worry about Jensen. He doesn’t care if I ever tap a ripe tree. And I’ve got a date. I wouldn’t have come up here except I was worried about you.” Her pale hair caught the light as she whirled and began to run. “Your dad is home,” she called back over her shoulder.

“Keri?” He scrambled to his feet, but by then she had vanished like a doe among the wild trees.

A date? Daniel stared after her, thoughts in a turmoil. Dad was home? He shook himself. Dad shouldn’t be home yet. Aware suddenly of the dew that chilled his face, he grabbed up his sampling pack, and headed down the slope at a brisk trot.

“Where have you been?” Jess said as Daniel opened the door. Fists on his hips, he loomed over Daniel in a stance that was wholly their father’s. “You’re late.” Behind him, the living room was lit by the glow of the big-screen TV. “The shift super left mail on the TV, asking where the hell you were.” He lowered his voice and glanced over his shoulder. “Bad timing, kid.”

“What happened?” Daniel whispered as he leaned his pack against the door. “I thought it was going to take three weeks to clean up that watershed.”

“Don’t even ask,” Jess said shortly.

“That you, Danny?” Their father emerged from the shadows, an unopened beer in his hand. “Your damn Company boss called here. First thing I see when I turn on the tube—a message from the prick telling me that my son can’t even do a wimpy Company job right.” He popped the top on the beer and shook foam from his fingers. “A son of mine does any job—even a Company job—he does it right.”

“I… was checking for mushrooms. Up in the Scrub. The buyer’s paying a hundred for chanterelles and I sort of… forgot about the time. I wanted to tell you I’m okay before I turned my samples in.”

His father grunted and turned away to flop down onto the sofa. He had downloaded some old movie from the sat-link. Which meant that the contract had been canceled, and not just postponed pending hearings. Daniel looked at Jess, who shrugged his massive shoulders. “A private survey turned up a List species,” he said under his breath. “Some stupid plant that’s been Listed since ’95.” He shrugged and headed for the bathroom.

“I went over every square foot of that contract acreage.” His father stared at a bloody shoot-out on the screen. “There wasn’t a List species on the whole hundred acres. Not a bird, not a bug, not a damn leaf. I didn’t have a miss on a contract for five solid years, and now every damn job I take, some List plant turns up. You tell me how those damn plants sprout overnight, huh? I’m not blind and senile, yet.”

Daniel jumped as his father’s beer can clanged off the wall. Foam splashed across the grimy plasterboard and the can rolled across the bare boards almost to his feet. Stiffly he bent to pick it up. “You’ll get another contract,” he said. “I mean, how many licensed fellers are there?”

“You know what Dan Farrow told me? The Forest Service honcho who hired me? He said I’m a jinx. You think they’re gonna hire me again? Who else is there? There’s no real timber ’cept the Preserves and the National Parks, and the Preserves have their own private crews. That out there…” He waved a hand at the walls and the plantation beyond. “That’s a farm, not a forest. Planted like turnips. So that people like you can go around sucking sap out of them. You don’t need any skills to suck a tree, or drive one of those remote cutters for the garbage trees they feed to the vats.” His lip curled. “A bush hand out of the valley could harvest crop trees. Hey, I got skill at least. When they hire me to fell a dying tree, I don’t break a branch on the good ones.”

“Hey, Dad, I’m off.” Jess emerged from the back of the house, buttoning his clean shirt. “I got a date.”

“You always got a date.” Their father reached for the remaining half of a six-pack on the floor. “You watch yourself, you hear? You can’t support a family as a feller until you got a rep with the Service.”

“Relax.” Jess grinned and winked. “I’m careful.”

“Yeah, right,” Dad grumbled as the front door slammed. “Hot-blooded kid.” He shook his head. “Just like I was. He better be careful, or the Company’ll own him. Like they own you.”

“They don’t own me.” Daniel wiped up the spilled beer with a towel and carried the can into the kitchen. “They just pay me money.”

“Yeah. You work for them, you belong to them.” His father hiccoughed.

“You had any dinner?”

“Nobody owns me. I paid for you to go to the Company’s school, and I pay for their doctor. ’Cause that’s the only clinic and the only school and we don’t take handouts from the government. I pay.” He paused to drink beer. “They don’t own me. Nobody ever owned a Garver, not for five generations. We worked for ourselves, good times and bad, always in timber. It’s in our blood.”

Our meant him and Jess. Daniel tossed the can into the recycle bag, a bitter taste in his mouth. He dropped the towel onto the pile of dirty laundry accumulating in the corner. His father’s cork boots lay on the floor beside the door, caked with ocher mud. On the table, a plastic bag held a wilting green plant still rooted in a clump of dirt. The List species? He touched the plastic gently. You could do federal time for digging up a List species.

“You listening to me?” His father yelled from the living room. “Your mother understood. You’re like her—more like her than me—right down to your tree sucking.”

Daniel took down a family-sized package of chili from the cupboard, emptied it into a bowl, added a package of precooked noodles and shoved the whole thing into the microwave.

“She understood,” his father yelled from the living room. “She understood about owning yourself. What’s your problem, Company boy?”

The timer sounded, and he removed the steaming bowl from the microwave, put two faded place mats down on the scarred kitchen table. His mother must have bought the place mats. He touched the frayed corner of one blue rectangle. He had never thought about that before—that this had been her choice at some store. He wondered what other colors she had rejected, what other patterns.

“You answer me when I speak to you!” His father appeared in the doorway, hands braced on the frame, breathing heavily. “Goddamn it, you show me a little respect, or…”

Daniel looked down to find his bark knife open in his hand, the narrow blade gleaming silver in the light. Razor sharp. “You killed her,” Daniel raised his eyes to his father’s face. Very deliberately, he closed the knife and slid it back into his pocket. Then he opened the back door, went out, and grabbed his sampling pack from the porch where he’d left it. Clearing the steps in a single bound, he sprinted into the darkness, pursued by silence.

Daniel felt the giant’s approach like a ripple moving through the tree’s ripe song even before he saw the glow of his flashlight. He ignored the man as he inserted his bark knife carefully into the smooth skin of a tree, making a small V-shaped incision through bark and cambium. Prying the wound open slightly with the knife, he opened a sample bag and applied its adhesive edge to the hp of cut bark beneath the point of the V. Sap was already beading up along the cut tissues, and as he stuck the small plastic rain awning to the bark above the cut, the first droplets trickled into the bag.

“What does this one produce?” the giant said. Light pooled at Daniel’s feet, making him squint.

“Human insulin. This whole section produces insulin.” Daniel closed his knife and checked the seals on the bag and awning to make sure that neither would fall off.

“Do you know what kind of tree it is?” The giant’s voice was harsh.

“They’re bio-trees.” Daniel turned around. “They’re made. But the engineers started with black locust, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I mean.” He swung his flashlight in a wide arc. “Do you always work at night or are you doing a little freelance harvesting on your own?”

“I’m not stealing. I didn’t finish this afternoon.” He tucked the wad of empty bags and the extra rain bonnets into his pack and stuck his knife into his pocket. “I’m finished now.”

“Does your mother know you’re out here?” the man asked abruptly. “Did you tell her about me?”

“She’s dead.” He shouldered his pack, listening to the strange echoes beneath the man’s words. “She died when I was seven.”

For a moment, the giant went very still, then he turned on his heel and started back toward the distant glow of the greenhouse. He walked uncertainly, as if he couldn’t see well in spite of the light he swung like an automaton. Daniel caught up with him as he reached the door of the greenhouse. The survivalist ghost was out tonight. Its vague yearning brushed the fringes of Daniel’s awareness like the touch of an unseen cobweb. “She had cancer.” Daniel answered the question that the giant hadn’t yet asked. “Liver cancer.”

“Why not a transplant?” The words had a strangled sound and he shook his head violently. “Never mind.”

“She didn’t get a transplant because she didn’t have that kind of health care,” Daniel said flatly. “You knew her, didn’t you?”

“I knew her.” He held the door open so that the humid sulfurous air flowed around them. “Dr. Carolyn Foster,” he said softly, and his words yearned like the survivalist’s ghost.

“Doctor?” Startled in spite of himself, Daniel said the word aloud. “What kind of doctor?”

“You didn’t know?” His voice was hushed. “She never told you? Maybe not.” Bitterness scored his words. “She was one of the people who designed those trees you just slashed. She was one of the best botanical engineers in the treecrop industry. A genius. Every company in the business tried to hire her. They offered her the damn moon to come run their R & D departments. God knows what she could have done if she hadn’t…” He drew a deep breath. “I… I worked for her. I was a technician back then—right out of school. She was so damn good.” He drew a deep breath. “I’m Albert. Albert Breslau.”

Botanical engineer? Daniel stared into the darkness, straining to pick out the trunks of the trees he had sampled. And he wondered if his father knew about her. It occurred to him that if he did, and if he had said nothing about it all these years, then he was a different man than the one Daniel thought he knew.

Everyone was changing. Keri. His mother. Dad. Only Jess seemed irrevocably himself. Daniel smiled crookedly. And realized that Albert was watching him closely. That he had expected his name to mean something to Daniel.

“Will you show me what you do?” Daniel asked him. “Will you tell me what my mother did?”

“Yes.” He looked disappointed. “Yes, I will.”

He led Daniel through the greenhouse, pointing out each species of plant, describing its habitat, when it was last reported, why it had vanished from the drying, decreasing world. The survivalist’s ghost had followed them in and drifted along with them like a cooler current in the thick air.

“For awhile, we wanted to save every species that had ever existed.” Albert halted at the far end of the greenhouse in front of a narrow bench covered with shiny instruments and two microscopes. A cot had been wedged between the bench and the side wall. A rumpled sleeping bag lay on it, and a small laptop. “These days we’re much too busy feeding ourselves to worry much about other species outside the Preserves and the parks.” Albert tapped the microscope with one blunt finger. “That’s what your mother was doing. Finding ways to save our butts as we ran out of water for the usual crops.” Up close, he looked tired. Lines had begun to etch themselves permanently into his face, and silver glinted in his pale hair. He was older than Daniel had thought at first. “Funny,” he said heavily. “She was so intense. It was just a job to me—but I’m the one who stayed the course.”

Daniel didn’t answer. The syllables of his mother’s name lay between them, preventing casual conversation. He wandered over to the end of one growing bench. Plants with narrow leaves sprouted in their dishes of jelly. He examined the fine spiderweb of pale roots. A few of the plants had tightly furled white buds.

“What I do here… I use tissues from endangered species that aren’t on the List yet. I have a federal permit to collect them. I clone their cells and grow new plants from them to rebuild the populations.

From each cell, a new plant.

“What a waste.” Albert turned his back suddenly, shoulders bowed, fists clenched. “All that talent wasted. She should have been cured. She should have kept on with her work, but she just walked away. She could string DNA like beads, and she goes and marries some dumbshit backwater local. What the hell was wrong with her?”

“She loved horses. The wild ones.” Daniel spoke to the white flowered plant in front of him. “She said they died.”

“Did they?” Albert looked blank. “I don’t know. I was never involved with desert programs. She grew up in the desert, didn’t she? Nobody lives out there anymore.”

“It hurt her.” His mother had worked with this man—talked with him, maybe laughed at a joke he made. Just as with the place mats she had bought, the sudden sense of connection dizzied him. It was as if a window had opened and he had caught a glimpse of his mother walking through a life he had no knowledge of. He moved down the bench and picked up the orchid. “This is still on the List.”

“I told you it wasn’t.” Albert glowered at him.

Daniel touched a delicate leaf. “If it’s found in a park, or a Preserve, you can’t disturb anything around it. Not even to take out a single tree.”

“I told you these are all rare plants.” Albert’s gaze didn’t waver. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Why don’t you change them?” Daniel looked at the bench full of instruments. “Why don’t you make them more adaptable?”

“Like the trees? Like the biomass bushes down in the valley—the ones you can irrigate with 30 percent seawater?” For the first time, a hint of uncertainty softened the man’s face. “If I did that they… they wouldn’t be the same plant.”

I am afraid, his mother had said. We are changing. The survivalist’s ghost had drifted away.

“How old are you?” Albert asked abruptly.

“Fourteen.” Daniel watched the man’s eyes flicker.

“I last… saw your mother almost fifteen years ago. You look like her.” For an instant, a bleak loneliness filled his face. “I had come back to… ask her to come with me. To beg her.” He turned his back on Daniel and pretended to do things with the instruments. “You can make a good living as a skilled tech. I could train you.”

The survivalist’s ghost drifted back, as if drawn by the yearning in Albert’s voice. It brushed Daniel’s face like a breath of cold clammy air. “Okay,” Daniel said slowly. “If you teach my friend, too.”

“All right.” But Albert frowned. “When can you come out here?”

“Late afternoons.” He could finish his shift in the plantation early if he didn’t take breaks, and still get home by dark. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

“What’s your friend’s name?” Albert called as he reached the door.

Daniel looked briefly over his shoulder. “Keri.” Then he ducked out into the fading night to retrieve his pack and go file his samples in the night-drop bin.

Keri was reluctant to go at first—distrustful of this stranger who had no monetary reason to be doing what he was doing. To her way of thinking, that made him crazy. They were both tapping the ripe insulin trees now. Jensen had assigned her to work with him instead of firing her. He came by every afternoon and Daniel watched him watch her, and watched her pretend not to notice. It made Daniel angry and clumsy, and he couldn’t be clumsy. Each tree had to be carefully cut—not too deep or it would cause irreparable harm—not too shallow, or the sap flow would be poor.

The tough plastic collection bags reminded Daniel of the IV bags that had hung above his mother’s bed during the last days of her life. Only those bags had shrunk, not swelled like these.

They bad to check the bags constantly to make sure that the tubing that led from the tap to the bag didn’t plug up. As each bag filled, it was labeled with the number of the individual tree, the sector number, and their ID. Then they lugged the bags out to the access road and packed them carefully into insulated plastic crates. Four times a day, the crates would be collected for processing. Jensen himself collected their bags. He didn’t collect from any other sector.

This plantation produced pharmaceuticals exclusively. They did the crude extraction of the drugs on-site and then sent the extracts to another plant for refining. All the bioform trees were cloned from a single tissue stock. The technicians who did the cloning made good money. So Keri let herself be persuaded, and they went to the greenhouse after their shift.

There, Albert taught them how to clone cells. He was a good teacher, and a demanding one. The main requirements were precision and sterile technique. He asked them about the town and themselves as they began to get comfortable with each other. He told them about the huge bush farms in the river valleys, where bio-mass from salt-tolerant bushes, digested into syrup by bacteria, fed the vats that produced everything from corn oil to orange juice. He told them how the seawater mix that watered the bushes left its white signature on the valley soil.

He didn’t talk about himself much. And when he did, his life rang hollow, like the shell of a wild tree whose heart had rotted out. “Why didn’t you ever get married?” Keri teased him one afternoon.

“I wanted to. I wanted kids,” he said. He sent them home early that day.

He kept on teaching them things even after they had mastered the cloning technique. “He just likes having us here,” Keri said as they left one evening. “He’s really lonely.”

“He was in love with my mother.”

“What?” Keri stopped and planted her fists on her hips. “How do you know that? And don’t tell me your ghosts told you!”

“They don’t talk. I just know.” The way he knew when someone was lying. Daniel looked at the jut of her hip beneath her hand, followed its curve. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Want to meet by the horses? Dad and Jess are leaving for another contract job in the morning and we can go hunt for mushrooms.”

“I can’t.” She veered away, following the trail that would take her to the cabin that she had shared with her mother. “You better hurry home or you’ll be late. Your dad’s new contract got postponed for a week.”

“Keri!” he called, but she merely waved and didn’t stop and he found that he couldn’t run after her. A few months ago—a year ago—she would have gone with him. Daniel scuffed his feet, scattering rotting needles and bits of bark.

The trees in this sector had been freshly tapped, and whatever it was in their sap, it had a sharp, not unpleasant smell. Daniel touched his finger to a clear drop that wept from the badly sealed tube of a tap, touched his tongue. The stuff tasted as bitter as tears. He wiped his finger on his jeans and headed upslope as the day died, up to the clearing where his horses grazed.

He hadn’t been back here much since that evening when he had met Albert. Between the tapping and the afternoon cloning lessons there hadn’t been much time—not when he was supposed to be home by dark. The truth was greater than that. Keri had been part of their creation, and her envy had tainted them. Because her paintings were something the horses weren’t.

They were hers.

Now he stood in the darkness, one hand on the crooked trunk of a young cedar, wrapped in chilly night. In the dark, it was easy to imagine them flesh and blood—dark bays or blacks, perhaps. And he realized suddenly that they were almost finished. Another twig, two maybe, and they would be done.

The moon rose finally, nearing the full again, casting its pale radiance into the meadow. The stallion seemed to bow its head to him, but that was just a trick of the uncertain light. A ghost brushed his awareness— old and clammy with years.

Daniel turned away and went home—down through the plantation darkness and the smell of raw sap.

He was late, but the only light he saw on in the house was the porch light. For a minute he thought that maybe Keri had been wrong, and Dad and Jess had left early to carefully remove the diseased and dying trees in the Wallowah Preserve. Then a figure appeared at the edge of the yard, emerging from the shadow of the trees into the yellow glow of the light.

Jess.

Hands in his pockets, he climbed the steps slowly, trailing a musky aura of satisfaction that disturbed Daniel the way Keri’s breasts had disturbed him. He started as Daniel bounded up onto the porch after him, turned around with a scowl. “What are you doing out this late?”

“What are you doing out this late?” Daniel perched on the rickety porch rail so that he could look his brother in the eye.

“I had a date.”

“Did you make love?” Daniel said softly.

“Maybe. What of it?” Jess reached for the door handle.

“Do you love her?

“None of your business, little brother.” Jess grinned. “Just wait a couple of years.”

A scent tickled Daniel’s nose—grass and old needles, and a musky animal scent that squeezed his loins. He sucked in a quick breath. “I want to know who it is.” He pushed past Jess to block the door. “Tell me, Jess!”

“What’s got into you?” His brother stared down with a bemused expression. “Do you really hate Dad?”

Daniel stared up at him, caught off guard by Jess’s unexpected words.

“Because of Mom? Because she could have gotten treatment if he’d worked for the Company instead of being an independent contractor? He thinks you hate him.” He looked sad. “When we’re out on a job together he’s… easy, you know? He jokes around. Laughs.”

“He thinks I’m not his kid.” The bitter words scorched Daniel’s throat. “Don’t you get it, Jess? She was with somebody else.”

In the instant of silence that followed his words, Daniel heard the distant cry of a screech owl hunting mice in the scrub. Then his brother’s palm exploded against the side of his head. He fell hard against the wall, and slid down to the floor, his vision swimming with red light.

“Don’t you ever say that again.” Jess loomed over him, fists clenched. “Or I’ll beat the shit out of you.” He turned away abruptly.

For a moment, the porch light shone full on his face, casting shadow beneath his stark cheekbones. Leaning on his elbows, Daniel stared up at him and swallowed. He finally understood. But before he could say anything, Jess had crossed the lighted yard and vanished into the darkness between the stems of the plantation trees. The distant owl hooted mockingly and the wind sighed in the branches of the plantation trees. Daniel got slowly to his feet. Leaning on the porch railing, he stared after his brother.

“Do you hate me?”

Daniel turned slowly, licking his lips. His father stood just beyond the screen door. They had avoided each other since that night in the kitchen—had both been polite and cautiously distant. Streaked with light, shadowed by the dusty mesh of the screen, he looked… old. “Do you?” he asked again, harshly.

“I guess.” Daniel looked out at the dark trees, unable to he. “She could have gotten cured.”

For a long time his father was silent, and Daniel wondered if he had gone back into the house.

“When she got pregnant with Jess, I told her I was going to take a job with the Company. It scared me that something could happen to her. Or to the baby. We’d only been married a month or two.” His voice came softly through the screen. “She said no. She said I would have to become a different person and she didn’t want me to change. She said she’d take her chances. And Jess got born okay, even though he was early. You, too.” Again there was a long pause. “When the doctor found the cancer, it was too late. Don’t ever blame yourself, she told me. It was her choice. But…” His voice faltered. “It was my choice, too, and it wasn’t me who did the paying.”

Daniel shifted on the warped boards of the porch, choked by words that could never be said.

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” his father went on in that same harsh tone. “I see her every time I look at you. You’re like her, too. You’ll do what you want, and do it real well.”

The screen mesh divided them, blurring the expression on his father’s face. “Did you know what she used to do?” Daniel asked softly. “Did you know who she was?”

“Yes.” He nodded once. “She made me promise never to tell anyone— not even you kids. She said it was too easy to let what other folks wanted from you take over your life and run it.”

He had known, and he had never said. And the love in his voice was as real as the yearning brush of the survivalist’s ghost. Daniel bolted off the porch, clearing the steps in a long leap, nearly losing his balance on the dew-wet grass as he staggered into a run.

“Daniel, wait!” his father called.

He kept on running, dodging the humming bio-trees as he stumbled through the darkness on his way to the paved road that led into town.

He entered the clearing in the pre-dawn dark. The stars had vanished and a rising wind gusted through the tree tops with the sound of angry whispering. Keri was there, sitting on the ground beneath a bent cedar. Arms crossed on her raised knees she stared at the horses, her pale hair shining like silver in the moonlight.

She was pregnant. He could feel the new life in her belly. A ghost drifted through the trees, a wisp of sensation. The life in her belly had the same distant feel of preoccupation. She looked up as he approached, but said nothing. A bruise on her throat drew Daniel’s eye, dark on her pale skin. His belly clenched like a fist beneath his sternum.

He sat down beside her, not quite touching her.

“I want to get out of here,” she whispered. “I want to be someone. I’ve got to have a job to do that.”

There was nothing to say.

“Or I could get married.” She tossed her head so that her loose hair fell like water down her back and the bruise on her throat glowed in the pale light. “Why not raise somebody’s kids? If I’m married, I can get an ID number. I can become a real citizen. Why not do that?”

“To Jess?”

“What if it is?” She tossed her head again, her profile stark. “So what?”

“It’s not you.”

His mother had said these words to his father. That sudden awareness silenced him briefly, but he held her angry stare. “You got to be what you want to be,” he whispered. “Jensen isn’t going to give it to you. Or Jess.”

Her sudden stillness was the frozen terror of a blacktail doe caught in a headlight beam. “I have to have the job,” she breathed. “I made him put me with you. Jess… loves me.”

Daniel swallowed, realizing that he had wanted her to deny his words more than he had ever wanted anything in the world. He forced himself to look at her, at the mark of his brother’s mouth on her throat. “Jess is leaving for good in the morning,” he said harshly. “He took a three-year contract with the Wallowah Preserve. He said to say good-bye to you.”

“No.” A sudden gust of wind tore the word from her mouth. Her hand slid unconsciously down to cover the taut flatness of her belly.

The body knew, Daniel thought bleakly. Even if she didn’t, yet. And because he had never before lied to her, not once in all their years of shared play and grief and dreams, he watched belief twist into hurt and acceptance. The pain of it tore at his own guts. She cried, and he couldn’t comfort her. Instead, he walked down through the wind-tossed trees to the greenhouse.

“I want to show you something,” Daniel said as he pushed his way into the damp sulfurous warmth.

“How about later?” Albert looked up from the workbench, his glass knife in his hand, a frown of concentration on his face. “I’m just starting a new batch of clones.”

“You need to see this.” Daniel let the truth of it come through in his words. “Right now.”

“All right.” Albert set down the knife on his sterile tray with precise care. “Are you in trouble?”

“No.” Daniel led the way through the dense trees that bled valuable chemicals when you cut them—because his mother had designed them to do that. So that they would survive, and so would the people who lived here. They wouldn’t die, like the desert horses. Albert followed close behind, sweeping his flashlight beam across the faint path in short irritable arcs.

“My mother changed these.” Daniel let his fingers brush the rough bark of a tree. “She knew the old trees wouldn’t survive, but she took their genes and turned them into something that we needed.”

“I told you that.” Albert paused to catch his breath.

“Then she realized what was happening.”

“Which is what?” Albert sounded irritable. “I loved your mother.” He swung the light beam across the tangled branches of the malformed firs and madronas and cedars. “I thought she loved me. But she ran away. From her work and from me. When I finally found her, she was married to this rube. Had his kid.” Bitterness edged his voice. “What was she doing? Punishing us? Herself? And she loved me.” He shone the light full on Daniel. “I found out that much at least, no matter how much she might want to pretend she didn’t. I proved it to her. You look like her,” he said abruptly. “And you…”

“No.” Daniel raised a hand against the light. “Not here,” he said. “Just a little farther. Then I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Albert looked puzzled, but it was a mask, and excitement shone through it as he followed Daniel into the scrub. “There was never anyone else in my life,” he said as they reached huckleberry brush. “I never wanted anyone else. I had to come back. To ask her…” He drew a deep sobbing breath. “When I saw you, and I realized… I want you to come with me.” He stepped in front of Daniel, blocking his path. “I took a leave from my university position, but I can go back any time. I’m a doctor, now, with a university. I can get you a scholarship. You can live with me. You can make something of yourself. You don’t have to be a loser.”

“Look first,” Daniel said and stepped around him, pushing quickly through the brush so that Albert had to follow.

He fell silent as they emerged from the scrub into the tiny clearing. “My God,” he said, and then stood silent again, playing the flash beam slowly across the nervous stallion and the grazing mares. After a while, he drew a long breath. Sighed. “Who did these?” he whispered.

“Keri.” Daniel faced him, offering the second lie of his life. “Don’t tell her I told you. She’ll just say somebody else did ’em. They mean something special to her.”

“They’re incredible,” Albert breathed. “She has real talent.”

Daniel looked away struggling with a sudden desire to tell this man that the horses were his, that he was what Albert had come here to find.

Only they weren’t, and he wasn’t either. “I am not your son,” he said. “Dad paid to have a DNA analysis run on me to make sure.” The third he, he thought. The last. Although it was also a truth. “I want to tell you about Keri,” he said softly. “Her mother deserted her years ago. She was a doper and Keri doesn’t have an ID number. You should see the paintings on the walls of their cabin. She uses kids’ watercolors. That’s all. And they’re… incredible. Only nobody is ever going to know,” he said fiercely. “She isn’t ever going to make it. Unless somebody helps her.”

“You mean me, right?” Albert slashed the light beam across the scrub like the blade of a sword. “You want me to take her home like a puppy I found in the woods?”

“You wanted to take me home with you.” Daniel watched him flinch. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”

The survivalist’s ghost had followed them from the greenhouse. It wrapped them both suddenly with a chill moment of yearning and loss. Albert shivered as it drifted away. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“You called my mother an artist,” Daniel said steadily. “Keri is one.”

“You want me to save her.” Albert looked down at him, angry. “You think I can do that.”

“I don’t know.” And now he could let himself tell the truth. “I don’t know if she’ll go with you, but she might.” He held Albert’s eyes. “She doesn’t belong here.”

“I don’t… know.”

“And she can show you how to get out of here with your skin in one piece.” He played his last card pitilessly. “They know about you, in town. They know what you’re doing up here.”

“What? Growing endangered plants?” He drew himself up. “That’s a damn crime around here?”

“There are a lot of people around here who work on freelance contracts for the Forest Service. You’re growing those plants for a big timber management company. They’re planting them where they’ll blow maintenance contracts awarded to freelancers like my dad.”

Albert flinched. “I… I didn’t know. They said they were with the Forest Service themselves.”

He was lying. Daniel crossed his arms and waited until Albert’s eyes slid away from his. “They’re coming up to wreck the greenhouse tonight. If you’re there, they might even kill you.”

“No.” Albert had gone white. “Maybe… maybe some of them are getting used… for the wrong purpose. But they’re getting planted. They’re growing. And I’ve made them… hardier. They’ll survive this time. Do you know how hard that was to do? I’m as good as your mother. I am. She wouldn’t run from me, now.”

Daniel looked at his angry, pleading face, and pitied him. You’ll never understand her, he thought sadly. “Keri has an old pickup that runs. You’ll have to buy gas, though.”

“I don’t believe any of this crap.”

Daniel shrugged and started to walk away.

“Wait.” Breathing hard, Albert ran after him. “All right. I’ll go with Keri. Taking her along is the price, right?”

“Uh-huh.” Daniel smiled.

Albert mumbled something under his breath, but he nodded once, jerkily. “All right,” he said. “I can probably get her a scholarship year at the school of art. If she doesn’t keep her grades up, I can’t help her.”

“She’ll keep her grades up,” Daniel said. “Her cabin is this way.”

He came back through the clearing just before dawn. Albert had gotten very quiet when he looked at Keri’s paintings. He wasn’t taking her along just because Daniel had coerced him. Not anymore. Maybe it would mean something to him, to have discovered a famous artist. It would give Keri the start she needed. He didn’t doubt that she would take it from there— even with a child. Keri had been reluctant, but not very.

In the graying light, the stallion scented the wind, testing for cougar. Daniel shed the daypack he was wearing, opened it and fished out the small plants it contained, cupping them lovingly.

People from town had destroyed the greenhouse during the night, but he had found these among the wrecked benches and broken equipment. Tiny green flowers peeped from among the leaves. The orchids his mother had showed him. They were nothing special to look at. As he scooped shallow holes beneath the horses and tucked the plants into the moist dirt around their hooves, he wondered briefly if Albert would ever find out that it was Daniel who had told people in town about his plants.

He didn’t care.

He straightened slowly. The horses were finished. Unexpected tears stung his eyes, because he wished they were his—that he had talent like Keri. As he stepped back, he felt his mother’s ghost. It surrounded him for an instant, brushing the edges of his mind with love and sorrow. “You felt them die, didn’t you?” Daniel murmured. The horses, wild tree species, all the plants and animals and people that couldn’t adapt. “Dad was like the horses, wasn’t he? Something from before—something that couldn’t change.” His tears spilled over and the horses blurred, seeming to shift restlessly, as if they would bolt into the woods at any second and vanish. “I’m not like you,” he whispered. “You knew that, too.”

Her ghost left him suddenly, the way they faded, dissipating on the wind. “Good-bye,” Daniel whispered. “I love you.”

The wind touched his cheek, drying the tears before they could fall. And he turned away, picking up the empty daypack, thinking of his tall powerful brother, who was built like a TV wrestler—thinking about Jess’s face—the way it had looked that last night beneath the porch light. Jess was Albert’s son. Unmistakably so.

He started home, tired, to tell Jess that Keri was gone. He and Dad would go out on the Wallowah contract, and maybe Jess really would go to work for a Preserve, because he wasn’t like Dad. He could change.

Clouds were boiling up in the west, and the first gusty breath of the coming storm riffled his hair as he reached the plantation trees. They swayed with the gust, and their singing filled his head. He knew, the way he knew things, that when he went back to the clearing, the horses would be gone. Scattered by the wind, you could say. Finished. “Good-bye,” Daniel said again, and felt the faintest brush of fingertips on his face.

Content

The Botanist
by Mary Rosenblum