Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 27
"Cool," said Thistle.
"Well," said Gene, "yes." He felt rather pleased with himself, with his powers of explication. Maybe he should have gone into teaching.
Nah.
The muddy path merged into another, slightly wider and more frequently traveled, muddy path. A short distance farther they passed under a sign that read DA TURTLE's HOSTEL.
"Who's Da Turtle?" asked Gene.
"Beats me," said Thistle. "I think it might be a joke. Or something."
"What's C.A.W. stand for?"
Thistle smiled, as though this were a joke also. "The Church of All Worlds," she said. "Jesse's a minister."
Gene tried to make this compute, but it did not.
The long miserable drive ended in an egg-shaped, gravel-surfaced parking area, the first inarguable sign of American civilization they had encountered for the past half hour.
"This is the place," said Thistle. Efficiently she gathered up her belongings—almost all of which actually were Gene's belongings. "Thanks for the lift."
Gene was surprised at how let-down he felt. He was disappointed to have this adventure come to such an unceremonious end. Not that he had been expecting anything else, in particular. (Want to come in for a beer? Say hi to my mom?) But at least to have a bit of his curiosity satisfied. Which is not to say that until this moment he had been aware of having any curiosity. Life is full of these surprises.
Thistle was out the door and down on the ground with her arms full of books and CD's and magazines. In what appeared to be pure afterthought, as she was shoving the door closed with a hip, she peered through the window at Gene and said, "Want to come in for a Jolt or something? Say hi to the Pod?"
He hoped she did not take it amiss when he laughed out loud.
BREAK-IN
The Adirondack-style hunting lodge Thistle led him to sat in a grove of tall sycamores, whose leaves made a distinctive whirring noise in the wind—something like the sound you would get if you cut off a few feet of garden hose and swirled it rapidly over your head. Gene wondered if anyone ever had thought about classifying higher plants according to the sounds they produce. He guessed not. Botany, as a science, is caught in a sort of prolonged adolescence, in which many of the lessons of childhood have been temporarily forgotten (to be brought back to mind, painfully, in the next century or so), but maturity and wisdom remain far out of reach.
Over the door of the lodge, someone had nailed a wood-burned sign like the kind you make at summer camp. It said
SANDERS & SCRAPERS
Thistle explained: "They've diversified."
The large, high-ceilinged, timber-trussed room inside the door was crisscrossed with shielded cables, decorated with posters of rock bands with names Gene did not recognize, and furnished principally with stacks of comic books, recycled paper and obsolete electronics. Toward the far wall a computer workstation had been set up on a big table. A blond-haired, barefoot teenage boy sat before this wearing black sweatpants, a sheepskin vest and a shiny helmet with two lethal-looking horns sticking out of it: a costume piece from the Gotterdammerung, possibly. From the sound-out port of the CPU, a wire led to the amplifier/subwoofer box of a SoundStage speaker system, out of which roared death metal of unbelievable volume and abrasiveness.
"Pretty good bass definition there," Gene said.
A second teenager, this one dark-skinned and burly, dressed like an extra from some Depression-era production of Huck Finn, turned to look at Gene and Thistle. He made a strange hand sign.
"Peace with honor," said Thistle.
The boy canted his head a few degrees, apparently unable to hear a word over the music. He came toward them and Thistle said: "Are we interrupting anything?"
Saintstephen shook his head. "Shadow's gone to war. He could be at this for hours."
Thistle introduced Gene. "I camped at his place for a couple of nights and he gave me a ride home. Gene, this is Saintstephen Bax. Over there that's Shadow. I guess he's busy."
Gene nodded. He wandered over toward the workstation to see what was happening on the huge Radius monitor. He noted a rather witty sign, done in antique-looking crewel work, that read HACK THE RICH.
"And what?" he said. "Download to the poor?"
"Exactly," said Saintstephen.
Gene supposed he could relate to that. The screen was filled with interesting columns of numbers, accompanied by multivariable charts with parameters labeled
PH-DILUENT (INTROJECTED)
PH-DISCHARGE
CALCIUM CONCENTRATION
TEMPERATURE-AMBIENT
TEMPERATURE-DILUENT
CO2 ENRICHMENT THRESHOLD
TOTAL LUMENS
TOTAL SALINITY
NUTRIENT INJECTION RATE
CYCLE TIME (0 = CONTINUOUS)
—and so forth. Gene thought it looked oddly familiar. "Is this some kind of simulation?" he asked.
The kid at the computer did not yet seem to have become aware of his presence, though Gene now stood close enough to wish the boy would break for a shower. Kernels of Smart Food popcorn (white cheddar flavor) smushed underfoot. Gene had no quarrel, nutritionally, with this, but he preferred the floor-texture of Cheez Doodles.
"Not exactly," said Saintstephen, who was following him. Thistle had vanished. "It's some kind of environmental regulator system, we're still trying to figure it all out."
"What's to figure out?" said Gene. "This is the kind of control system you'd have in a specialized greenhouse. If you were growing a single crop, say, and you wanted to optimize the variables for rapid foliage output, or for timed inflorescence, or root-mass buildup. Or whatever."
"No shit," said Shadow, still staring at the Radius.
"Yeah." Gene moved a little closer. Most of the objectionable smell seemed to come from the sheepskin vest, which was woolly and rough-textured, as though it had been yanked right off the animal with no fuss over tanning or cleaning. "What you've got here, I would say, is a system that's been set to nurture softwood seedlings, or possibly a batch of young clones. Probably you're dealing with a closed hydroponic loop here, a circulating nutrient mix that gets sampled and adjusted at preset intervals."
Shadow looked around, not at Gene but at Saintstephen. The two boys seemed to confer on a private wavelength.
"How robust is that?" Saintstephen asked.
"The system or the plants?" Gene reached down and adjusted the volume control on the speaker box. "Plants are pretty robust, as a rule. But when you make them part of a loop like this, they become sensitized to the overall state of the system to a much greater degree than you'd find in the wild. Sharp gradients—a cold night, for example—can be pretty disruptive."
Shadow ran a finger down the list of parameters on the screen. "How about a sudden nutrient dump?"
"Flood the system with nitrogen—something like that?" Gene paused to consider this.
"Yeah. And then back off right away. A one-shot deal."
"The plants ought to shake that off. Off-the-scale increases in nutrient levels can trigger a sort of paradoxical effect, where the plant actually drops its rate of uptake to the point that its growth gets stunted. Then what you've got is basically a normal healthy crop that's smaller than it ought to be."
"That won't do it," said Shadow.
Saintstephen tapped on calcium ion concentration. "What does that do?"
"Ah," said Gene. "That's actually pretty interesting. It would depend on where you were in the development cycle. But potentially—if the plants were quite immature—you could have some very bizarre root structures and leaf formation patterns and things of that sort."
Thistle returned with a 6-pack of Jolt Cola. Shadow and Saintstephen each took one, popped the caps, and touched the aluminum rims together.
"Cheers," said Saintstephen.
"Skoal," said Shadow.
They drank.
''Hey," Shadow said to Gene, "thanks, dude. You've really given us what we were looking for."
"Have fun," said Gene. He accepted a Jolt from Thistle, raised it to his mouth. In so doing, his eyes moved past her toward the door of the hunting lodge. Cola spumed painfully up his nostrils. "My god," he gurgled.
He had seen a wolf.
DA TURTLE'S HOSTEL (2)
Jesse Openhood stepped cautiously through the doorway. Beside him, Gus the timber wolf pawed the wide-planked floor.
"That your car down there?" Jesse asked Gene.
Gene's eyes were fixed on the wolf. It was a beautiful aiimal, its coat more charcoal than gray, with lighter markings around the flanks. The head was large and intelligent-looking.
"He won't eat you," said Thistle.
"Probably," Shadow qualified.
"Hasn't chewed on anybody for a while," added Saintstephen.
Jesse smiled and tickled Gus's ear.
By this time Gene had put it together—that this animal was a pet, that they were teasing him.
"Yes," he said. "That's my car."
Jesse nodded. "Nice." He didn't show much in the way of an expression. He was stocky and umber-skinned.
Gene felt disoriented. None of these people looked alike.
Thistle explained to Jesse: "Gene lives on the other side of the mountain. He's got a little bear at his house."
Jesse nodded, as though this were perfectly reasonable.
"Cool," said Shadow.
Gene said, "Well, not exactly living—"
"His name is Tex," Thistle interrupted.
"Nice name for a bear," said Saintstephen.
Jesse's eyebrows wrinkled. "A bear named Tex?" he said slowly. It didn't sound like a real question—more like the way you might repeat the title of the book you were hunting for, while you paced before the shelf. Then he smiled in a quiet way, as though he had found it. "Come on out," he told Gene. "We'll take a look around."
Gene wasn't sure what to think. He was standing in a hunting lodge deep in the forest with three teenagers, a man he took to be an American Indian, a high-powered computer, approximately 10,000 comic books and a full-blooded timber wolf. A can of Jolt Cola, which he despised, was in his hands. An infant Ursus americanus was in his living room, probably taking a dump.
"I'm a botanist," he announced unexpectedly. He felt a sudden need to establish his position in the world, unambiguously. "I came up here to study patterns of tree growth. My specialty is the genetic issues involved in reforestation."
"Ahh, soo," said Shadow and Saintstephen together. They eyed one another thoughtfully across their cola cans.
"That's pretty interesting," said Jesse.
"So okay," said Gene. "Sure. I'd love to take a look at your place."
They started on the Mosquito Path, which led up the hill toward Syzygy's.
"That's a stand of American ginseng in there," said Jesse, pointing. "We're trying to leave it alone."
Gene nodded. He recognized the plant from textbooks. Panax quinquefolium. The name meant 5-leaved panacea.
"They say it's more Yin than the Asian kind," Jesse went on. "I figure it's kind of like old-age insurance."
Some of the Panax plants were blooming: small white 5-petaled flowers, like wild strawberries. "More Yin?" Gene asked, politely.
Jesse nodded. "That's what they say."
The path wound steeply between rocks and huge clumps of ostrich fern, whose opening fronds rose head-high, then sprawled in a kind of giant bird's-nest configuration. From somewhere in the middle of them, a voice called out:
"Danger! Danger! Approach at your own risk!"
"That you, Ari?" said Jesse.
"Danger!" the voice called again. Something about it sounded alien, mechanical. Like the voice that reminds you to take your car keys out of the ignition.
Suddenly the fern-fronds exploded in a fury of motion, of emerald light and black shadow. Into the air, on powerful wings, rose a large bird whose feathers were dark and opalescent.
"It's Jack!" exclaimed Jesse. "Jack, where've you been, bro?"
The bird flew to a beech limb about 30 feet up, where it perched and looked everywhere but down at them.
Gene stared at the bird, then at Jesse. "You've got a talking raven?"
"All ravens are talking ravens," said Jesse. "Jack's a bilingual raven. He and Ari have been training each other."
Gene did not want to know what, exactly, Ari might be. The logical extrapolation was probably a college-educated mountain lion.
"Ari's our elf," Jesse told him.
Gene squeezed his eyes shut. It was worse than he had imagined. "Lead on," he said.
The raven followed them the way a cat does: keeping well back and pretending to pay no attention. They passed Syzygy's house, about which Jesse offered no comment. The grounds in its immediate vicinity had been cleared and—though this might not be the best term—landscaped. Dozens of good-sized local stones had been arranged in a 12-foot circle on top of what Gene thought must be the septic mound. Nearby, four white birch trees, standing in a nearly perfect square, were knitted together with a web-work of brown, pliant cord. The shrouds squeaked and groaned as wind bent the trees, stretching and then easing up on them.
"That's a death trap," said Jesse.
Gene flinched.
"Made out of deer gut," Jesse went on. "Each of the sides points a different direction. So when one of them breaks, you know that's the way death is coming from. You can take precautions."
Gene nodded. He guessed it was good to take precautions. "Did you make it yourself?"
Jesse laughed. (What was funny?) He shook his head. "That's Syzygy that does that," he said. "She's a natural."
"Ah," said Gene. "Right."
Now, here was a worrisome thing: Gene felt as though all of this was beginning to make a certain kind of sense to him. Not logical sense. Some other kind.
But what other kind was there?
That was the worrisome part.
Past Syzygy's house, the trail divided. The choices were marked with wooden signs nailed to a tree.
ROAD TO HELL-»
«-BEATRIX FARRAND MEMORIAL REFRIGERATOR WALK
TRAIL OF BEERS-»
"You call it," said Jesse.
It was hard to resist the refrigerator spirit walk. But in the end, the mythical impulse won out.
"I've always wondered," said Gene, "what the Road to Hell looked like."
Jesse nodded without smiling. There was no figuring this guy's sense of humor, or absence of one. He gestured for Gene to go first.
The Road to Hell looked pretty much like the Mosquito Path, only it was on the southern face of the hillside, where the ground warmed more quickly in spring, so the vegetation was further along. Trilliums had colonized a broad rockfall, spilling down its face as blood-purple as wine. Jesse and Gene descended quickly, stepping into damper and lusher terrain where the trees grew tall but sparsely. Water-seeps linked up to form runlets that smelled like the rocky insides of a cave, cold and faintly metallic. Mosses and lichens grew in bizarre profusion on everything that was keeping reasonably still.
At the bottom of the hill the trail settled into a groove between two slopes, running alongside a stream whose water could be heard burbling under a thatchwork of cattails and sedges and wild irises, their brown cast-off leaf blades beaten down by foot traffic. Gene guessed—it was out of his realm of expertise—that this must be a wildlife corridor. Paw prints of varying size and shape lay between boot-marks and barefoot kid-marks. If you ran into a bear heading up this trail in the opposite direction, there would be no obvious way to get around him.
Gene dallied a bit, feigning interest in a small native grass—a Chasmanthium, possibly—that bore a clear kinship with bamboo. He let Jesse step past him, then asked, "Where does this path go?"
Jesse paused, giving this question more thought than it properly deserved. "Not much of anywhere, I guess," he said finally.
They rested for a moment. The Road to Hell had led them to a marshy Nowhere. The sun was hot, and the first black flies of the year rose to hover near their faces, not yet mature enough to bite. Jesse could resist swatting at them. Gene could not.
"You want to see something interesting?" Jesse asked.
He pronounced interesting as a word of four equal syllables. Gene had always found this odd—as though the word really had something to do with interest, as opposed to being an all-purpose, essentially meaningless modifier.
"Sure," he said.
Jesse brushed aside a fan of cattail blades and plunged into the soggy undergrowth. Gene wasn't wearing the proper footgear for this, but he followed anyhow. He felt as though a challenge to his seriousness as a botanist was at hand. The black flies swarmed closer, entranced by his sweat. Off the path, you lost all sense of direction. Vegetation, water, tangled roots, sucking pools of organic muck, were distributed more or less randomly. In the middle of all this Jesse came to a stop, gesturing toward a rounded plant-mass that stood about waist-high.
"Know what that is?" he said.
Gene knew but he didn't. The plant was like a stunted tree, of spreading habit, propagating itself by a running rootstock. It shared a sizeable patch of wetland with keeled-over spruces and Labrador tea. It did not look like something that belonged here. Gene reached out and ran one finger down the sharp edge of one leaf. The foliage was stiff, evergreen but winter-burned, held up on thick and slightly bristled stalks.
"That right there," said Jesse, "is a palm tree."
Palm tree? Gene started to say. But before he could muster the proper incredulity, he realized that Jesse was exactly right.
"That's a saw palmetto," Jesse said.
"Rhapidophyllum hystrix," Gene murmured, as if a button had been pushed.
"I heard once," Jesse said, "that people grow palm trees up in Ireland, right at the edge of the North Sea. So I figured, why not see about growing a palm tree here in Maine? So Tex brought me up a few of the Southeastern ones, you know, from one of his business trips. And this is the one that took."
Gene held up a hand. Superfluous information would only jumble the picture here. "You're growing Rhapidophyllum in—what is this, Zone 4?"
"What's that?" said Jesse.
