Short Fiction Collected, page 40
“No!” I snapped and shoved away one of the shuffling bushes that seemed to want to nuzzle my leg. “Why, for the love of God, would you want a bunch of animated turnips baptized?”
“For the love of God,” the old Russian echoed in a gentle voice. “As Pascal wrote, a belief in Him may not help, but it cannot hurt. We have all to gain and nothing to lose. I should like to have His benedictium on my work here. Put these newly created little beings under His—”
“Only a being with an immortal soul can be baptized,” I interrupted. And that means only human beings. Mankind.”
“Who says? Mankind says!” the professor snorted scornfully. “I am a scientist, but I regard with irony the fact that human scientists devised the system of taxonomic classificatium, then set themselves up as the highest in the taxonomic order—Homo sapiens—Man the One Wise Thing. You are a theologium. Do you not regard with irony that it is man who says only man has a soul?”
“Man has the right to say so. It was man, and only man of all the creatures, that was created in the image of God.”
“Da? Tell me, young Martyr, do you believe God looks like you?”
“Well, not really. God is unknowable, the great mystery, something man can never adequately define or describe.”
“I agree. But science has probed every intricacy of the human body’s workings. Everything, anyway, except that brain which declares that it is wise, which declares that it has a soul. And we will know all about the brain someday, just as we know about the human digestium, reproductium and the rest. This makes man something less than the indescribable great mystery, nyet?”
“I reckon so. What are you getting at?”
“Regard your own circulatory system. A heart pumping about six quarts of blood through your arteries and veins. If you were built on the order of a syringe, young Martyr, your heart could squirt that blood to a height of maybe six feet.”
I squirmed. I don’t know whether it was the professor’s imagery, or the atmosphere in that glass house, or the near presence of Miss Yu, but I felt tingly all over.
“Now compare yourself to a sequoia tree, maybe three hundred feet tall. Every day that sequoia loses some three hundred gallons of its sap water to evaporatium and must continuously replace it. Means this it takes in through its roots three hundred gallons of water and pumps them three hundred feet in the air. If the sequoia had a circulatory system like yours, that job would require a heart nine thousand and two hundred times bigger than yours. About the size of five kingsize mattresses piled together.”
“Golly,” I said, impressed despite my distrust of the Russian. “But a tree doesn’t have a heart. How does it do the pumping?”
“No man knows. I am one of the world’s foremost botanists, and I do not know. As the tree loses water through its leafs, all its other trilliums of interconnected cells somehow exert their osmotic and turgor pressure in sequence to bring up more. But the cells are in size microscopic and can hold of water only a few molecules at a time. Ask me how every day they move three hundred gallons up three hundred feet, and even I, a Lenin Medalist in Botany, cannot tell you. Kilmer wrote that only God can make a tree. Maybe only God will ever know how it is made. So, if God is the one great impenetrable mystery, and if anything on this earth was made in His image. . . .”
“You verge on blasphemy, sir,” I warned. “On heresy.”
“Who says?” he snorted again. “Remember, God evicted the first humans from the Garden of Eden. He never quarreled with the garden.”
“I must go and discuss this with the Reverend Pabo—the Reverend Bob,” I said uncomfortably. “After all, this is his turf. But I’m quite sure that neither of us will ever accede. . . .”
“Can you find your own way back to the parsonage?” asked Miss Yu. “I think, if you will excuse me, I will stay and enjoy this super sauna for another little while.”
I didn’t like to, but I left her there and trudged back down the mountainside thinking—though I tried hard not to—of Miss Yu sitting in nothing but her golden-silken skin in that warm, moist, tingling, pulsating . . . I think I jumped when the professor spoke, as he let me out the gate of his estate:
“A plant has no heart, no brain and, you say, no soul. But it lives without a heart and, once it has the freedom of mobility, who is to say what its busy little cells may contrive as a brain substitute? Suppose it starts to think, and thinks it has a soul. Suppose one day a turnip walks into the SoPrim church and in unmistakable sign language asks to be baptized and accepted as a fellow Christium. Could you refuse such a—? THWACK! Zizzzz. . . .
Warblewarblewarble three, side one. The Reverend Figwort and I talked it out at length, in depth and every other way. First we asked ourselves: was this a matter which should be bucked upstairs to SoPrim World Headquarters? Yes, if Professor Smegmoff ever succeeded in his plan to make all the world’s salad greens ambulatory, no doubt every headquarters of every religion would be mulling the matter. But until then it was still parochial, and each SoPrim church is autonomous in making decisions which affect only itself. So we confined our discussion to the problem as it stood: should this church accept those plants I had encountered?
“I can only compare them with my Homo sapiens communicants,” said Bob. “Do these weeds play golf instead of attending Sunday services? No. Do they watch TV instead of coming to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting? No. Do they drink, smoke, swear, fornicate, fight, lie, steal, cheat, covet, envy, bear false witness . . .?”
“No,” I said. “They manifest no human attributes whatsoever. They cannot possess an immortal soul. I concur, Bob, they must not be baptized. Perhaps, since I’ll be leaving shortly, it would make for fewer hard feelings if I telephone the professor and tell him our decision.”
“Isprazhnyeniyo!” growled Smegmoff, which sounded like something I wouldn’t want translated. “Then coexistence is refused the green things. Very well, their own salvatium they will seek by force of numbers. Remember well this day, young Martyr! Do svidanya.”
It was some hours later, nearly midnight, and I was about to prepare for bed, when Bob burst into my room, both hands clutched to his perspiring knee, shouting,”Idiwa! I mean come at once. Oh, an awful emergency!”
A little wrinkled walnut of a Korean papa-san sat in the parlor, wearing the woven-horsehair plug hat, the voluminous white robe and pantaloons which proclaimed him a village elder. “This is Kim Tae Gu,” said Bob. “One of Professor Smegmoff’s long-time gardeners. Show the Reverend Mobey your hands, Kim-san.”
The old man shook them loose of the billowy sleeves, and for a moment I thought he was holding out two bunches of shriveled carrots. Then I gasped, as I realized that the brown-yellow roots sprouting a tangle of rootlets and root hairs were his hands.
“Ever since he recently ventured for the first time inside the professor’s greenhouse,” said Bob, “he has been noticing strange symptoms. A tendency to sit always in the lotus position, like a yoga faddist. An uncontrollable urge to take naps in the compost heap. Lately, bees have begun to take an interest in him. Humming birds poke in his nostrils. . . .”
“Wait, let me take notes!” I bounded to the desk and grabbed for a pencil and paper. “Ask him why has he waited until now to break this dreadful news.” The papa-san began to talk rapidly, but in a voice so small and weak that he might have been an elf shouting through a petunia megaphone.
Oddly, the pencil eluded my grasp, as if I had been wearing canvas garden gloves several sizes too big. I gasped and stared at my hideous hand. It didn’t look quite as far gone as old Kim’s carrots—more like runt parsnips—but definitely on its way to vegetabilization. It was a moment before I again became aware of Bob reporting:
“. . . These big pressure sprayers, like they use in orchards, and the professor has loaded them with some secret juice or something he mixed up himself. Kim’s a bit fuzzy on the details. But the professor is spraying the whole mountain-top.”
Forgetting my distorted hands, I leaped to the door, and Figwort and Kim followed. Fortunately there was a moon. We could see, in the otherwise cloudless and star-studded sky, the unnatural white cloud that obscured the upper half of Smegmoff’s mountain.
“In the open air,” I said to myself. “Then he has already evolved the educated leaf pores. The plants that don’t transpire. The freely mobile.”
“What?” said Bob.
“If it’s what I suspect, every tree growing on that mountain may be clambering down it before morning.” A sudden thought made me cry, “Yu Hyun Ki!” The papa-san pointed silently up to where we were looking. Ignoring the fact that I was in something of a predicament myself, I babbled, “Miss Yu is in dire peril. I must go for her. Bob, this is another Doctor Frankenberg and his monster! Rouse the villagers! Light torches! Mill about, shake your fists, yell ‘Rhubarb! Rhubarb!’ and storm the castle!”
“What castle?”
“Yours not to reason why. Just pray that you’ll find me and Miss Yu safe when you arrive in the nick of time!” And I was off.
The cloud was oozing down the mountainside at about the same rate I climbed up, but well before I ascended into the mist, I could hear the thump and throb of the powerful sprayers. When I got into the cloud I found it—as Miss Yu had predicted—not so thick as that in the greenhouse and not at all unpleasant to breathe. It would further dissipate, I supposed, as it emulsified into the atmosphere. Professor Smegmoff evidently had been right in everything he had said, but I still didn’t like the situation.
I remembered his remark—“by force of numbers”—and so, while I couldn’t imagine how a bunch of bushes could overpower me, I proceeded with caution. I could see a good hundred yards through the light fog (though I had to stop at intervals to wipe my spectacles clean), and I kept a sharp lookout for the berserk professor or any possibly still loyal Ygor-type henchmen, watchmen, or whatever. I came at last to the big greenhouse, found it unlocked and unguarded, and let myself into the dark, steamy, rustling interior.
“Miss Yu?” I called in a whisper.
“I do not have any clothes on,” said a soft and dreamy voice.
“It doesn’t matter. My spectacles are all fogged over.” I began groping about. “Where are you?” I kicked a shuffling ginkgo out of my way.
“Did you ever cry tears of joy,” asked the dim and drowsy voice, “and have butterflies come to sip from them?”
I tracked her by her faint voice, though I could more quickly have found her by the not-at-all-faint odor, like long-spoiled fruit. It could only be what the spicy-perfumed Miss Yu I once knew and loved had called the “appalling big smell” of a female ginkgo ripe for pollination. Except that it came from her.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I whispered, as I folded my arms around her. She had somehow been mistaken in believing she was unclothed. I couldn’t see a blessed thing, but I could feel that she was wearing something ruffly and crisp that crinkled at my touch.
Her faded and still-fading voice said, “Your stamens are tickling my—my—what are they?—my lips.” And she giggled.
“You are slightly delirious, my dearest. Just come with me,” I urged, as I half-carried her toward where I believed the door to be, every so often having to kick another of the misbegotten ambling ginkgos out of my way.
I found the door all right and quickly got us through into the clearer air of the foyer area, paused to clean my lenses—resisting any temptation to turn and look at the perhaps half-nude Miss Yu—then more guardedly opened the outer door and peered into the mistily moonlit grounds. There had been a stretch of empty lawn fronting the greenhouse; it was empty no longer. Across it came waddling a phalanx of stunted but determined-looking ginkgos and maybe some other vegetable breeds I couldn’t recognize, perhaps a hundred altogether. It looked like Birnam Wood advancing on Dunsinane.
“Cheese it, the copse!” I hissed, as I ducked back inside the door and started to slam it. But, with a rustle of foliage, something golden-green slipped past me into the silvery-blue night and ran to join the other walking trees.
“Miss Yu!” I wailed.
I think she turned her head for just a moment and I think she called something back to me. But a wind came up, a wind, and blew her words away. The other trees vanished with her into the swirling mist, and I was left alone, calling over and over again, “Miss Yu! Come back!” but getting for answer only the wind’s sad, soft, sighing . . . THWACK! Zzzzzz . . .
Click. So I start another whole new cassette, not really sure how I’m going to say what I want to say to it. To you, Miss Yu. . . .
To my other audience, however, my superior Reverend Wilberforce, I will report that I am convalescing as well as can be expected (the nurse’s words) and will be back in missionary action as soon as I am able. The treatment here at the U.S. Army Base Hospital in Pusan is briskly no-nonsense but not intolerable. When the Reverend Figwort brought me and Kim Tae Gu here, I expected our peculiar condition to excite some comment—if not become an instant medical cause celtbre—but the admitting sergeant only grunted:
“There ain’t no new kind of Korean Crud that can surprise me. Man, we got veedee cases here that even Walter Reed never heard of yet.”
Whatever my affliction is, it isn’t veedee, whatever that is. The examining doctors muttered cryptically of “hormone imbalance” and “fungoid spores in the centrifuge precipitate.” Of all things, what they seemed to find most intriguing was what they called my “staminate eyebrows.” Anyway, the curative treatment seems to consist mainly of my drinking a great deal of beef extract, and it seems to be working, as all the root hairs have already disappeared from my parsnips. I mean my fingers.
Reverend Figwort and the rest of Chinhae have kept any word of the whole affair from leaking to the outside world, and that is well. It seems the Comrade Professor Yurin Pskovich Smegmoff, in the middle of that frantic night, descended the steep cliff to the beach, where a black-painted and silent-sailing junk awaited him. The consensus is that he has fled to seek political asylum in Red China. If so, we may soon be calling it Green China.
Whatever he might have had in mind for South Korea or the rest of the Free World, we judge that it proved a failure, and through his own most grievous error. His nutty notion of religious freedom—when theologians Figwort and Mobey refuted it—impelled the fanatic Smegmoff to set free his animated trees too soon. He simply did not yet have enough of his secret potion to saturate enough atmosphere to keep those mobile plants mobile. There is no knowing how many of them he turned loose on the world, because, by the time daylight came and a posse could fan out in search of them, their ambulatory abilities had already failed and they had had to take root to survive. That, of course, is also well for the world, except that it means there will never be a way of telling which is Yu Hyun Ki.
So I am leaving a battery-powered tape-player and cassettes of this report with Reverend Bob, and I will ask him to play them, whenever he has a spare moment, under every young-looking female ginkgo sapling he encounters on his pastoral rounds. I know you can’t reply, Miss Yu, but there are two things I want to say, if you can hear them.
One is that I am sorry. I remember what you said in the greenhouse that night, when I mistakenly thought you were delirious. I have procured a book on elementary botany and have looked up stamens, pistils, pollen, and so forth. What I have read makes me feel like a vile seducer. When you were in my arms that night, I didn’t realize . . . I mean, I never intended to take advantage . . . I mean, I’m glad we had that much, but I’m sorry if . . . sniff . . . click.
Click. The other thing is . . . well, there are some Garden Club ladies nowadays who claim that talking lovingly to plants is good for them. Makes them grow and flourish and leaf out and blossom bountifully and bear abundantly. So, if Reverend Pabo-son can find the right ginkgo tree, and plays this love letter to you . . . well, since there is nothing else in this life that Crispin Mobey can wish for you now, I will wish with all my heart that those Garden Club ladies are right. Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, Miss Yu . . . click . . . miss yu . . . dick . . . miss yu . . . click . . . miss yu . . .
The Relic
Here is a polished thriller which happens to be one of the best stories about genetic manipulation that we’ve ever read.
Summa Theologica, ca. 1273
Whoever loves another does honor to that which remains after death. On this account it is our duty to pay honor to the relics of the dead, especially to the body, which was the temple and dwelling of the Holy Ghost, in which He dwelt and worked, and which in the Resurrection is to be made like to the body of Christ.
Athens, Greece, 1978 (AP)
Greek Orthodox monks on Mount Sinai have made public announcement of a major find of early Christian texts they discovered by accident in their St. Catherine’s Monastery two years ago. “It could be the most important find since the Dead Sea Scrolls,” a Salonika University professor told Associated Press.
He said the thousands of parchment and papyrus fragments, dating back to the early years of Christianity, include at least one real sensation—eight missing pages from the Codex Sinaiticus, an ancient and priceless manuscript now in the British Museum.
Rome, Italy, March 31, 1979
said the middle-aged man, though he was alone in the luxuriously appointed office, “have taken cognizance of all things pertinent to this proposed project.” He pressed the pause button of his desk tape recorder, sighed, then continued in a husky voice:
“We have pondered upon the nature of the relic long revered by our Belgian brothers in the estimable city of Bruges. We have examined copies of the texts discovered not long ago in the Sinai. Though not without trepidation, we have discussed with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences the latest advances in biological experimentation. We have taken heed of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ admonitions concerning the honor rightly to be paid to certain relics in expectation of the Resurrection. With exceedingly strenuous and devout supplication, we have prayed for guidance in this unprecedented undertaking proposed to us.”
