AND NO SUCH THINGS GROW HERE


NANCY KRESS

Here life has death for neighbor,

And far from eye or ear

Wan waves and wet winds labor,

Weak ships and spirits steer;

They drive adrift, and wither

They wot not who make thither;

But no such winds blow hither

And no such things grow here.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne,
“The Garden of Proserpine

"DEE, I HAVE A problem,” Perri said.

Dee Stavros held the phone away from her ear and yawned hugely.

What the hell time was it, anyway? The clock had stopped in the night: another power outage. Her one window was still dark. The air was thick and hot.

“Dee, are you there?”

“I’m here,” Dee said to her sister. “So you’ve got a problem. What else is new?”

“This is different.”

“They’re all different.” Only they weren’t, really. Deadbeat boyfriends, a violent ex-husband, cars “sto­len,” a last-minute abortion, bad checks for overdue rent . . . Perri’s messy life changed only in the details. Dee yawned again.

Perri said, “I’ve been arrested for GMFA,” and Dee woke fully and sat up on the edge of the bed.

GMFA. Genetic Modification Felony Actions. The newest crime-fighting tool, newest draconian set of laws, newest felonies to catch the attention of a blood-crazy public who needed a scapegoat for . . . everything. But Perri? Feckless, bumbling,dumb Perri? Not possible.

Professional training took over. Dee said levelly, “Where are you now?”

“Rikers Island,” Perri said, and at the relief in her voice—It’llbeallright,Deewillcleanupaftermeagain—Dee had to struggle to hold her anger in check.

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“No. I thought you’d take care of that.”

Of course. And now that she was listening, Dee heard behind Perri all the muted miserable cacophony of Rik­ers Island, that chaotic hellhole where alleged perps for the larger hellhole of Manhattan were all taken, processed and mishandled. But Perri didn’t live in Manhat­tan. Nobody who could avoid it lived in Manhattan. The last time Dee had heard from her sister, Perri had been heading for the beaches of North Carolina.

For once, Perri anticipated her. “I think they took me to Rikers because it was an offshore offense. On a boat. A ship, really . . . . Get away! I’m not done, you bitch!”

Dee said rapidly, “Relinquish the phone, Perri, before you get hurt. You had your two minutes. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Oh, Dee, I’m—” The phone went dead.

Dee stood holding it uselessly. Perri was what? Sorry? Scared? Innocent? But Perri was always those things in her own mind. Maybe Dee should just leave her there. Get out of Perri’s life once and for all. Teach Perri a lesson. Just leave her there to fend for herself for once . . . .

But Dee was all too familiar with Rikers. She’d retired from the force less than a year ago. She started to dress.

“Why me?” Eliot Kramer said when he appeared at her fourth-floor, one-room apartment door just after dawn. Grimy sunshine glared through Dee’s big south window, the only nice thing about her room, other than its being on the far edge of Queens rather than the near edge. Many people were afraid of sunshine indoors. Ultravi­olet, skin cancers—even though they’d been told that glass filtered out the danger. Most people never listened to what they were told.

“Why you? Because you’re the only decent lawyer I know.”

“Twenty years with NYPD and you knowone decent lawyer? Come on, Dee.”

“Decent in both senses, Eliot. Usually the moral ones are incompetent and the competent ones have been bought.”

He shook his head. “Boy, I’m glad I don’t have your outlook on life.”

“You will. You’re just not old enough yet.”

“And how is old is this sister of yours?” Eliot asked as they hurried down the stairs. “What’s her name again?”

“Perri Stavros. She’s twenty-seven. My kid sister—I raised her after our parents died in a train wreck.”

“And what exactly happened?”

“Haven’t any idea,” Dee said. “And after she tells us, we still might not know.”

“Wonderful,” Eliot said unhappily.

They emerged into the street, into the pale green light under the thick trees. Young trees, saplings, twigs . . . this section of Queens had only been planting for six years, since the Crisis, and there were none of the large trees that richer neighborhoods had immediately im­ported from God-knew-where. Trees grew up through holes jackhammered into the aging sidewalk, up beside crumbling stoops, up from buckets until they were big enough to transplant. A whole row struggled to thrive in the street itself, which had been narrowed to one lane now that cars were so unaffordable. Fast-growing trees, poplars and aspens and cottonwoods, although all trees (and everything else green) grew rapidly now. Whenever possible, trees with broad leaves for the maximum amount of photosynthesis, maximum amount of carbon dioxide scrubbed from the thick and overheated air.

“Not too bad this morning,” Eliot said. “Pretty breathable.”

“Not if we don’t get rain,” Dee said. Enough water, always, was the concern. Will it rain today? Don’t you think it’s clouding up? Might it rain tomorrow? Water meant biomass growth, giving mankind a chance of get­ting back into control the atmospheric O2/CO2loop so dangerously rising toward 1 percent of CO2, the upper limit of breathability.

“It’ll rain,” Eliot said. “Put on your mask, we’re al­most at the subway. One more question—do you at least know what class of contraband your sister was caught with?”

“No,” Dee said. “It’s all felony, isn’t it?”

“There’s felonies and there’s felonies,” Eliot said, and put on his mask.

Perri had been caught with class-two contraband, which meant five to ten.

“But there are extenuating circumstances,” Perri said, looking pleadingly at Eliot, who merely nodded, dazed.

Dee was used to Perri’s effect on men. Even in the smelly, hot (God, it was hot, and only early June), win­dowless interrogation room, and even dirty and smelly herself, Perri’s beauty blazed. The perfect body, the long long legs, the thick honey-colored hair and full lips. But it was the eyes that always did it. Blue-green, larger than any other human eyes Dee had ever seen, fringed with long dark lashes. Perri’s eyes sparkled, never the same two seconds in a row, unless you counted their un­changing sweetness of expression. How did Perri keep that sweet expression, with the life she’d led? Dee didn’t know, hadn’t ever known.

Eliot said, his tone not quite professional, “Why don’t you just tell me the entire story from the beginning, Miss Stavros.”

“Perri, please.” She put her hand on his arm. “You will help me, won’t you, Eliot?” The gesture was un­studied, genuine. It finished Eliot.

“Everything’s going to be all right, Perri,” he said, and Dee snorted. No, it was not. Not this time. This time, Perri may have dug herself under too deep for Dee—or Eliot—to pull her out. No, please God,no . Dee knew about the kind of prisons that genemod offenders were sent to, and what happened to them there. In the current public climate, GMFA felons were the new pedophiles.

Perri said, “Well, it started when I went down to North Carolina. To the beaches. I heard that sometimes holo companies recruited actresses from there? It turned out not to be true, but by that time I’d met Carl and well, you know.” She lowered her amazing eyes, but not before Dee saw the flicker of pain.

“Go on,” Eliot said. “What’s Carl’s last name?”

“He said Hansen. But it might not be. Anyway, I got pregnant.”

Dee exploded, “How—”

“Don’t yell at me, Dee. I know it was my fault. The implant ran out and I forgot to go get another one. And then Carl disappeared, and I didn’t have the money for an abortion, so I started sort of asking around about a cheap one.”

Suddenly Dee noticed how pale Perri was. It wasn’t just the lack of makeup. Lips nearly the same color as her skin, dark smudges under her eyes . . . “You fool! Are you bleeding?”

“Oh, on,” Perri said. “Everything went fine, Dee, and anyway I’m strong as an ox. You know that.”

Eliot said, “Who performed the operation, Perri?”

“Well, that’s just it. I know him only as ‘Mike.’ This girl I know said he was safe, he’d done it for her friend, and he didn’t charge anything at all. He did it out of idealism.” Her lips curved in such a tender smile that Dee was instantly suspicious.

“Was this ‘Mike’ an actual licensed doctor?”

“He didn’t do the operation. My girlfriend introduced us at this bar on the beach, and Mike took me on a powerboat out to where the big ship was with the doctor aboard.”

And Perri had gone with him. Just like that. Un­fucking-believable.

Eliot said, “Names, Perri. The girlfriend; the doctor, anyone on the ship, the name of the ship itself.”

“I don’t know, except for my girlfriend. Betsy Jeffer­son.”

“Do you think that’s her real name?”

“Probably not,” Perri said. “The beach is the kind of place you get to be somebody else if you want to, you know?”

“Iknow,” Dee said grimly. “Perri, do you know how much crime and smuggling go through Hilton Head?”

“I do now.”

Eliot said patiently, “Go on with your story, Perri. Our time isn’t unlimited, unfortunately.”

“The doctor did the abortion. When I came to, I rested a while. Everyone was kind to me. Then Mike said he couldn’t take me back, the ship had to leave. But he would send me in a little ‘remote boat.” That’s a—”

“We know what it is,” Dee said harshly. “Smugglers use them all the time. They’re computer-guided to shore from out at sea, so if the feds are there to intercept the stuff, at least they don’t get the perps, too. Did the damn thing dump you in the ocean?”

“Oh, no. It brought me right to a public dock in . . . Long Island? I guess so. The ship must have sailed a long way while I was knocked out. It was daylight. Mike said the remote boats aren’t illegal. I would have been all right, except . . .”

“Except what?” Eliot said gently.

Perri didn’t answer for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was low. “The ship was full of plants. Flowers, little trees, all sorts of stuff growing on the deck in the sunshine. Beautiful. I . . . I wanted something to remem­ber Mike by. You don’t know how good he was to me, Dee, how kind. I felt . . . anyway. I picked a flower when nobody was looking and put it under my shirt. I was wearing this loose man’s shirt because since I got preg­nant, nothing of mine fit right. Nobody saw me take the flower.”

“One flower?” Dee said. “That’s all?”

“The flower wasn’t big. It had beautiful yellow petals that were the same color as Mike’s hair. That’s why I took it. Don’t look like that, Dee! A cop saw the remote boat land and came over to the dock because even though they’re so tiny I guess they’re pretty expensive and he was checking it out. And I staggered a little get­ting out of the boat because it hadn’t even been a day yet since the operation. I was feeling a little woozy. It was so hot, and it was a bad air day. The flower fell out from under my shirt. Below the petals along the stem were all these hard little balls, maybe two dozen of them. One burst apart when the flower fell, and the cop saw it and took me in. I don’t even know what it was!”

“I do,” Eliot said. “As your attorney, the charges were of course available to me and I downloaded them. The seed pods are awaiting complete analysis at the GFCA lab, but the prelim shows genetic modification for lethal insecticides. Airborne seeds, which makes it a class-two genemod felony.”

“But I didn’t know!” Perri cried. “And I never un­derstood what’s so bad about plants that kill insects, anyway! Don’t look like that, Dee, I’m not stupid! I know the history of the Crisis as well as you do. But those genemod plants that almost wiped out all the wheat in the Midwest were only one kind of engi­neered plant, and if people like Mike believe that other genemods can be—”

Dee cut her off. “People like Mike are criminals in it for the profit. And it wasn’t just the wheat-killing genemod that caused the Crisis. And you may not be stu­pid, Perri, but you surely have acted like it!”

Eliot held up his hand. “Ladies, the thing to focus on here is—”

“No, Dee’s right,” Perri said. She sat up straighter and her washed-out lovely face took on an odd dignity. “I’ve been a fool, and I know it. But I had no . . . what is it, Eliot? Criminal intent? Surely that counts for something.”

Eliot said quietly, “Not very much, I’m afraid. I don’t want to lie to you, Perri. The GMFA Act is intended to prosecute illegal genemod organizations working for profit and willing to do anything at all to protect that profit. The Act is wide-reaching and harsh because it’s modeled on RICO, the old Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization laws, and because genetic engi­neering represents such a danger to the entire planet since the Greenhouse Crisis. Or politicians think it does. Unfortunately, people like you fall under the Act as well, and I wouldn’t be doing my duty by you if I didn’t inform you honestly that your case isn’t going to play well in front of a jury of the usual hysterical citizens whose grandmothers and babies are having trouble breathing.”

“But the Greenhouse Crisis and the wheat kill-off were two separate things!” Perri cried, surprising Dee.

“But most people don’t separate them because they happened concurrently,” Eliot said. “All at once the air was ruined, there was no bread, prices for everything rocketed because the government made energy so expensive to try to control industrial emissions . . . all at once. In my experience, that’s how juries see it. Perri, I think you’re much better off pleading guilty and letting me plea bargain for you.”

Perri was silent. Dee said thickly, already knowing the answer, “Where will she do time?”

“Probably Cotsworth. It’s the usual place for the east coast.”

Cotsworth. It was notorious. Dee had never been inside, but she didn’t have to be. She’d seen other places like it. It wasn’t as bad as the men’s worst prisons—they never were—but a girl who looked like Perri . . .was like Perri . . . .

Perri said, “All right, Eliot. If you think I should plead guilty, I will.”

Trusting him completely, on a half-hour acquain­tance. Exactly how she got into this in the first place with “Carl,” with “Mike.” She would never learn.

Eliot said, “I’ll do everything I can for you, Perri.”

A wan smile, but the astonishing blue-green eyes dazzled. “I know you will. I trust you.”

Dee wasn’t Perri. She probed, tested, cut. “What if the FBI finds ‘Mike’?”

“They won’t find Mike,” Eliot said. They stood at the subway entrance before the hellish descent underground. Eliot was going to his office in Brooklyn, Dee to Queens. “God, you of all people know they won’t find Mike. The Genetic Modification Crimes section of the FBI is overworked, there aren’t enough of them, and Perri is such small potatoes they probably won’t even look for Mike.”

“The ship doesn’t sound like small potatoes.”

“They might not even believe the ship exists. Perri wouldn’t be the first perp to falsify events.”

“Do you think that’s what she’s doing?”

“No,” Eliot said. “I think she’s telling the absolute truth. I think she’s that rare find, a person incapable of dishonesty. But I don’t think the FBI or the federal at­torney will think so. They’re paid not to.”

“But you think the ship exists,” Dee persisted.

“Yes. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of them out there, in international waters where it’s much harder to do anything about them. They genemod everything from insect-killing supercrops for idealists who want to save the Earth, to insect-killing supercrops for profiteers who want to own it. And who don’t care if they inadvertently kill off an entire Third World country’s rice crop in the process. Oh, Perri’s ship is out there, all right, with ‘Mike’ running it. Although why he’s also performing abortions is a bit murky. But I’m going to downplay that aspect with the federal attorney. It makes Perri look irrespon­sible.”

“She is irresponsible.”

“Sometimes,” Eliot said, “what looks like irresponsi­bility is really innocence.”

Herewegoagain,Dee thought. But if a ridiculous infatuation would increase Eliot’s work on Perri’s behalf, let the poor sot be infatuated.

It was ironic. Raising Perri, she was always the one “mother” who wouldn’t let Perri take the bus by herself, walk home from school alone, go downtown. Cops were like that. Unlike the other mothers, Dee had known what was waiting out there in the street. And then the grown-up Perri sought out more trouble than any of her childhood friends.

Dee said, “So you don’t think the authorities will look for Mike. And even though it would help Perri’s plea, you won’t, either.”

Eliot said bluntly, “I can’t afford the resources to look. Can you?”

“No,” Dee said.

“Also, the case will be heard in under a week, prob­ably. They dispose of these small things as fast as they can, fair or not.You know that, Dee.”

“Yes, I know that. But finding the ship would aid an appeal for Perri.”

“Yes. But they’re not going to find it, Dee.”

“No,” she said. “But I am.”

THE COAST OF CAROLINA IS THE NEW FLORIDA! blared e-banners at the train station. Dee believed it. Ruin one area, making it so hot the ecology becomes frightening and the people leave, move on to another. Most of Florida was now genuine jungle, teeming with foreign plants and animals escaped from Miami International Airport, always the major import center for such things. Monkeys, caimans, lygodia, alligators, and insects carrying everything from dengue fever to new diseases without names. Some of them, of course, genemod. It was the diseases that had made West Palm retirees, South Beach fun seekers, and the Miami crim­inal underground all move north.

She took a cheap motel room far from the action and went shopping. To the experienced, cops were instantly identifiable. That included ex-cops. She bought a modest swimsuit which at least covered her nipples, added a loose sheer robe to veil her forty-four-year-old body, studied the locals and purchased something guaranteed to make her hair lie in flat sculptured loops along one side of her neck. She didn’t overdo it, another classic mistake of undercover cops. Her lipstick wasn’t too gold, her eye makeup not too blue. She bought her beach bag, sandals, and music cube at a used-stuff store. She would do.

The long stretch of white-sand beach, natural and artificial, turned out to be informally segregated: gay beach, retiree beach, kid beach, sex-and-criminal beach. “I’m looking for Betsy Jefferson,” she told the bartender at the first bar on the right beach.

The bartender gathered up glasses. He looked like he’d been behind the bar for a very long time. “Why do you want Betsy?”

“I need to talk to her. Do you know where she is?”

“No. Last I heard, she’s working someplace for her uncle.”

Of course. It was the number one response cops heard. You ask anybody what they, or anyone else, did for a living, and they said, “Work for my uncle.” The entire underworld was employed by uncles.

Dee said, “I’m really looking for Perri Burr. I’m her sister.” Perri had used “Burr” as her “beach key.”

The bartender squinted at Dee. “Yeah, you look a little like her,” he said, which was either kindness or blindness. “Around the nose. All right. Betsy’s working at the Adams. Out Surf Street.”

“Thanks.”Adams.Burr.Jefferson. Eighteenth-century WASP aliases for twenty-first-century punks. Dee wondered if they even knew who the originals had been.

The Adams was a sex-show-and-fizz club that wouldn’t even open until midnight. Dee went back to her motel and shopped again, this time for a cheap e-dress that shimmered strategically on and off around her body. Then she slept.

At one in the morning Betsy Jefferson started to perform. She was older than Perri, and older than she looked, gyrating her aging flesh through stage sequences as repulsive as anything Dee had seen when she’d worked Vice. Dee, her dress on full coverage, tried to picture Perri in this setting. She failed. Eliot was right: Perri’s fuck-ups had a quality of innocence foreign to the Adams, with its forced glitter and real sadism. Perri fucked up irresponsibly but not cruelly. When Betsy finished, blood from a dead monkey smeared the stage and her own naked body.

Dee sent a note backstage and the bouncer let her through. Betsy stood in a basin of water sluicing herself down. “Hi. I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Thanks for seeing me.”

Off-stage and covered, Betsy Jefferson looked even older and much wearier. “Perri talked about you. She looked up to you. You still work with homeless babies?”

Actual discretion on Perri’s part. Dee was grateful. “Yes. But it’s Perri I’m here to talk about. You know she was arrested on GMFA.”

“Yeah.” Betsy didn’t meet Dee’s eyes. “I heard.”

“She’s disappeared. Got away from a federal marshal. Fucked her way free.”

Betsy smiled. “Yeah? Good for her.”

“I think so, too. But I’m worried, Betsy, because she’s flatline broke. I want to give her money so she can go underground armed and flush.”

Betsy nodded. “She said you always took care of her.”

“And I always will. Do you know where I can find her? Has she turned up anywhere back on the beach?”

“Not that I heard.”

“Then do you know where I can find ‘Mike’? The guy that got her the abortion on the ship?”

“She told you about that, yeah?”

“Perri tells me everything,” Dee said. “She knows I just want to take care of her.”

“Yeah, she said. And you’re fucking right about one thing. Without money, she won’t last long here.”

“That’s what I figured.”

Betsy studied Dee. Dee didn’t have to fake concern. Abruptly Betsy said, “Perri never worked no place like this, you know.”

Dee was silent.

“She didn’t have to, with her looks. Wouldn’t have done it anyway. I told her to go back to you and get a decent life.”

“Thank you. Too bad she didn’t listen,” Dee said. For the first time, she saw why Perri had trusted Betsy, saw what wasn’t totally extinguished in the older woman. Dee wondered if Betsy had ever had any kids of her own. Who was Perri substituting for?

“You won’t find Mike, Dee. Not unless he wants to find you.”

“Can you make it so he does?”

“Maybe.”

“I really want Perri to have the money. It’s a lot. All I’ve saved.”

“Where you staying?”

Dee told her, and Betsy made a face. “Okay. Go back to Queens.”

“Back toQueens ?”

“Look,” Betsy said, “You’re new at this. Mike ain’t here anymore, not after Perri’s arrest. Perri ain’t here, either, or I’d of heard about it. People know I sort of looked out for her. But I know Mike, Mike knows people, people get around. Give me your address in Queens and go home.”

Dee had wacoed it. Her first contact on the beach and she’d exploded the possibility of more. If she didn’t go back to Queens, Betsy would hear about it and ques­tion why. Word would get around much faster than Dee could. Nobody would talk to her. Nobody.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling at Betsy.

At her sentencing Perri stood ashen and dry-eyed. She wore a loose gray coverall so old and laundered that the tired cloth draped softly around her body. With her hair unstyled she looked incongruously virginal, a maiden in innocent distress. Dee, the only spectator in the court, grasped the ancient wooden railing so hard that its oily grime became embedded in the creases of her palms. The courtroom was on half AC; apparently somebody had de­cided that federal judges deserved some relief from New York air, despite the exorbitant cost of all emissions-creating energy. Even so, Dee couldn’t breathe.

Eliot had made a deal with the feds. Dee suspected it had cost him all his markers. Perri pleaded guilty to class three genemod possession.

“The court has considered the federal prosecutor’s recommendations in this case,” the judge said in a bored voice, “and accepts them. Six months in prison, no time off for good behavior, followed by six years probation. Counselor, do you have anything to add?”

“No, your honor,” Eliot said.

“Bailiff, remove the prisoner.”

And that was all. Dee had seen it, participated in it, how many times? Dozens, maybe hundreds. But this was Perri.

“I love you, Dee!” she called as she was led away, and her attempt to smile for her sister’s sake cauterized Dee’s heart.

“You can visit next month,” Eliot said somberly.

“If she’s still alive by next month.”

He was practical. “Did you put the maximum amount allowable in her prison account?”

“Of course,” Dee snapped. “I know how the system works.”

“Unfortunately,” Eliot said. “Buy you lunch?”

“No. You stay inside—it’s a bad air day,” Dee said brutally. “I’m going home.”

“Dee . . . I did the best I could.”

He had. She was too enraged to give that to him.

At home she checked the non-traceable money chips hidden in her apartment, plus the legal surveillance equipment and illegal nerve gas. When Mike showed up, she would either buy her way to the ship, and to evidence for a legal appeal, or bring him down herself and let the authorities pursue it. Once they had a live body, they might actually do that. Maybe.

The money was safe. As she had done every night for a week, Dee swallowed the foul drink that would neutralize the nerve gas in her own lungs for twelve hours. Military stuff, it was highly illegal for her to have it. She no longer cared.

Then she tried to sleep.

The air was exceptionally bad today. Choked with greenhouse gases, CO2pushing maybe point seven-five, when had it gotten this bad? She was having trouble breathing,shecouldn’tbreathe . . . .

Dee awakened strangling. Cord bound her neck, her legs, her arms . . . no, one arm was still free. Desperately she worked a finger between her neck and the tightening cord; it gave slightly and she was able to pull it far enough away from her neck to gasp in a breath of fetid air. But that would only work for a moment, her assailant was sure to . . .

There was no assailant. She was alone in her apart­ment, strangled by tough green stems that had almost buried her in foliage. Dee screamed once, but then her cop reflexes kicked in. She flexed everything to see what was loose and found a frond not yet wrapped completely around both her body and her bed. She contorted her body so that her free hand, without removing the index finger from under the noose at her neck, brought the loose frond to her teeth, her only available weapon. She bit hard.

The stem parted and fell into two parts. She grabbed wildly with her limited reach for another stem. They were growing . . . she could actuallysee the stems grow­ing around her in tiny, fatal increments. She bit through a second stem and filled her mouth with bitter leaf. What if it was poison? Don’t think about it now. She bit another stem.

Writhing on the bed, half-pinned, Dee fought the mindless green with everything she had. At one point she thought she’d lost; there were too many tendrils. But the plantwas mindless. By calculating where the worst danger was and working her way doggedly toward that point, by reason and strength and sheer luck, she got a hand free enough to break the glass of water by her bedside and attack with the broken glass. Blood streamed over sheets, leaves, herself.

She was free. She rolled off the bed, leapt away, and collapsed on the floor, panting.

From here, the plant looked to be growing much more slowly. No more than six inches an hour.

Six inches an hour. She didn’t know that even the underground genemod labs had achieved that. Splice phototropism genes to growth ones, maybe? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She had almost died.

The nutrient box sat under the bed, maybe two feet square, tilted toward the big south window that was the reason she’d taken the apartment. It hadn’t been there when she’d gone to bed. Whoever had put it there had known how to disable the surveillance equipment and nerve gas. The plants had probably grown slowly, if at all, until dawn. Then the light had driven their super-efficient energy use to put everything into growth, a riotous deadly burst of it that had depleted them utterly. Already the oldest leaves were turning yellow at the edges. Live hard, grow fast, die young.

Dee looked for the patch. She found it on her ankle, peeled it off. Whatever had dripped into her bloodstream had kept her knocked out far into the light-rich morn­ing. It was almost noon.

She crouched on the floor and watched the spent kamikaze plant die.
* * *

“And the money was still there,” Eliot said.

“Not touched.”

“So they just wanted to kill you.”

“Head of the class, counselor,” Dee snarled. She was still shaky. They sat in a coffee shop near Dee’s building. The air was very bad today; some people wore masks even indoors. The room was stifling. Dee could remem­ber when air conditioning didn’t cost the Earth. Literally.

She continued, “I want to know what’s best to do, Eliot. If I call the authorities and take them up to see the evidence of a murder attempt, will it help Perri’s appeal?”

“I don’t see how,” Eliot said. He pulled his sticky shirt away from his chest for a moment. “You can’t prove who did it, or even that the murder attempt was in any way connected to Perri’s experiences. Yes, it was a genemod weapon, but that doesn’t link it to any specific illegal organization.”

“God, do you suppose I’ve got legions of people out to kill me? Who else could it be?”

“You’re an ex-cop,” Eliot said. “I don’t have to tell you that ex-cops get deviled by people they arrested and sent to jail, sometimes years after the fact. There are a lot of crazies out there. Your ‘evidence’ is circumstantial, Dee, and barely that. There’s no solid link.”

“And what would be a ‘solid link’? My actually turn­ing up dead?”

“Not that, either. Dee, you’re being stupid. You of all people ought to know that you can’t play in this league. You just can’t.”

“And the FBI won’t.”

“Only if they just happen to stumble across it. Oth­erwise it’s too small for them, and too big for you.Giveup,Dee. Do you want to go with me to see Perri this afternoon?”

Dee grew still. “I thought she couldn’t have visitors for the first month.”

“Doesn’t apply to me. I’m her attorney. I’ll get you in as part of her legal team.”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

Eliot opened his mouth as if to say more, closed it again. He finished his coffee.

Dee sat silent on the train to Cotsworth, preparing herself. Even so, it was a shock.

“Hello, Dee. Eliot,” Perri said. She succeeded in smil­ing through her swollen lips. One eye was completely closed with bruises. Even in the prison coverall it was obvious she’d lost weight.

“Perri . . . Perri.” Dee pulled herself together. “I told you not to fight back. With anybody.”

Eliot said gently, “Guards or inmates?”

“Both. Eliot, don’t file any complaints. It’ll only make it worse on me.”

He didn’t answer. He knew she was right. So did Dee, but rage rose in her throat, tasting of acid.

Eliot said, “I’ve filed an appeal, Perri.”

She brightened. Dee knew the appeal would be de­nied; there were no grounds. But anything to give her sister a little hope in this hell.

And Perri was magnificent. She chatted with Dee and Eliot. She asked after their lives. She did everything pos­sible to pretend she was not in pain and despair. When the short visit was over, and all the checkpoints had been passed, Dee turned to Eliot.

“Don’t ever tell me again to give up. Not ever.”

She looked two places: the activists and the criminals. She was looking for the overlap.

The environmental activists were not as numerous or as angry as they’d been before the Crisis, for the simple reason that they’d won. Dee understood that. She also understood what had to be their next move: semi-underground activism.

It went like this: You spend your life driven by the desire to outlaw genetic engineering, and then it’s out­lawed, and you’re spiritually unemployed. For a while you try other causes, but it’s not the same. So you or­ganize groups to attack suspected genemod violations, on the grounds the authorities are (pick one) lazy, cor­rupt, stupid, burdened by bureaucracy. You then can spend time ferreting out illegal labs and farms and de­stroying them. You’re back in the game. Of course, you’re also vigilantes and thus must fight the cops as well as the violators, but for a certain type of person, this only makes it more interesting.

Dee started with New Greenpeace. At her first meet­ing she met a woman angry enough to be a good can­didate for “subversive projects.” The woman, Paula Caradine, was suspicious of Dee, but Dee was used to suspicious informants.

“Why are you interested in subversion?” Paula asked. She was stocky, plain, very intense.

“My sister’s in jail for a genemod offense she didn’t commit. She was framed.”

“Oh? What’s her name?”

“Perri Stavros. I’m Demetria Stavros. I used to be a cop with the NYPD. Perri’s conviction changed things for me. The FBI isn’t getting the job done right, even though they’ve got the Act now, or Perri wouldn’t be Inside and the polluters Outside.”

Paula said, “Nothing’s going on right now,” which was probably a lie. Dee was used to being lied to. Everybody lied to cops: suspects, witnesses, victims. It was a fact of life on the street. Paula said no more, which was a good sign. She’d have Dee and Perri checked out, find out Dee’s story was true. It was a start. Building informants was a slow process.

In Manhattan, they were already built, at least the ones that hadn’t been killed or been jailed or died of “environmental conditions.” Dee had only been retired a year. However, a week of networking and bribery turned up nothing but the usual empty lies. Then she turned up Gum.

Nobody knew how old he was, not even Gum himself. He had purplish melanomas on his bald head and exposed arms. Disease, or sunlight, or bad luck. He refused medical treatment, air masks, false teeth. Gum lived everywhere, and nowhere. He remembered life before the Crisis, before the business flight from Manhat­tan, maybe before the turn of the century. He was old, and stinking, and dying, and his sheer survival this long had earned him a sort of mythic dimension, like a god. There were punks and scars and hyenas in the Park who actually believed that killing Gum would bring horrible retribution. Although Dee had trouble imagining anything more horrible than the life they were already lead­ing. The Park, along with several other sections of Manhattan, had slipped completely beyond police con­trol. No cop would go there, ever, for any reason.

Dee caught Gum in a bar near the rotting East River docks, on a street unofficially declared a neutral zone. “Hey, Gum.”

He peered at her blankly. Gum never recognized anybody overtly. Dee suspected he had an eidetic memory.

“It’s Dee Stavros. With the NYPD.”

“Hey.”

“You want a soda?” Gum never drank alcohol.

“Hey.” He hauled himself onto a stool next to her.

“Gum, I’m looking for somebody.”

Gum said in his cranky, oldman voice, “I been look­ing for God for a hunnert years.”

“Yeah, well, let me know if you find Him. Also a guy who could be calling himself ‘Mike.’ Or not. Runs a ge­nemod illegal on a ship. Also does abortions there.”

“Abortions?” Gum said doubtfully.

“Yeah, you know, rape-and-scrapes. Women’s stuff. You hear anything about that?”

“A hunnert years,” Gum said. “He went missing.”

Gum meant God, not Mike. Gum only talked when he was ready.

“You hear anything, I’d like to know about it.” She slipped him the money chips so unobtrusively not even the bouncer saw it.

“Just went missing, left us like this.”

“Don’t I know it, Gum.”

“A hunnert years.”

She went to another activist meeting, worked more on Paula Caradine. Before anything could happen, Eliot called her. His voice had the ultracontrolled monotone that a lot of lawyers used for something really serious.

“Dee, I want you to see something. Meet me at the genemod evidence center in an hour. You know where it is?”

“Of course I know where it is. Can you say—”

“No.” He clicked off.

The Genetic Modification Felony Actions Evidence Center for Greater New York was in Brooklyn. It was another bad air day; Dee wore her mask for the entire trip plus the fifteen minutes she hung around outside. No admittance to the heavily guarded building without five million authorizations. Finally Eliot showed up (“Another breakdown on the subway”), got them inside, and was shown to an e-locked room. Dee recognized the negative-pressure signs in this whole wing. Nothing, not even spores, could drift out. She and Eliot had changed into paper coveralls. They would have to go through decontamination to get out again.

Eliot keyed the e-locked door and it opened.

Dee gasped. Years of training couldn’t weigh against this. The single plant sat in the middle of the small room. A bush as tall as Dee’s shoulders, it had broad, very pale green leaves on woody branches. In the center of each leaf was a closed human eye. Eliot turned up the light and the eyes opened.

Perri’s eyes.

Each one was the startling blue-green that Dee had never seen on anyone else. Their pupils turned toward the light source. A hundred eyes, moving in unison, blind.

“The evidence biologist explained it to me,” Eliot said. “The eyes are light-sensitive but they can’t actually see. They’re not wired up to any brain. There’s a human eye gene, ‘aniridia,’ that can be introduced onto animals in weird places, insect wings or legs, and they’ll grow extra eyes. Nobody knew you could put it into plants.”

“Why?What is it?”

“It’s an art object,” Eliot said grimly. “A sculpture. Apparently the artist is wellknown in the underground circles that traffic in these things. He’s in custody.”

“Mike—”

“Was the supplier, of course. The eyes were grown from the stem cells from Perri’s aborted fetus. Stem cells are easiest to grow into any organ. But the so-called artist is refusing to talk. On advice of attorney.”

“Will he deal? If you offer enough?”

“I can’t offer anything, Dee. It’s not my case. But no, I don’t think he’ll talk. More and more of these genemod illegals are being acquired by organized crime. The FBI and NYPD have just established a joint task force on illegals. The artist would rather face the court than face the mob.”

“But it’s obvious these are Perri’s genes! They can do a DNA match!”

“Why bother? You can’t prove she didn’t give Mike the tissue, or sell it to him. It doesn’t clear her at all. I just thought you ought to see that the chances of getting Mike on other charges have gone way up. He’s con­nected to the artist who’s connected to the mob, so Mike is going to get serious attention. They’ll get him if they can.”

Dee faced him. “I don’t want revenge. I want Perri freed.”

“Are you sure you don’t want revenge? Perri’s told me a bit about her childhood. You overprotected her, Dee. You made her feel the entire world is dangerous.”

“It is.”

“But you also taught her she can’t cope with it without you. That without you, she’s bound to screw up. And like a good daughter, she’s been proving you right ever since.”

“She’s not my daughter, and—”

“She might as well be. You were the only mother she had.”

“You don’t know jack shit about it!”

“I know what Perri’s told me.”

Dee demanded, “You see her? A lot?”

“Every chance I can. Don’t look like that, Dee. She’s not a child anymore, and as you just pointed out, you’re not her mother.”

“Fuck you, Eliot. You’re fired. You’re not Perri’s at­torney any more.”

“That’s not your decision,” Eliot said.

“I pay her bills!”

“Not this one.” His gaze was steady.

Dee strode toward the door. Going through it, she slapped off the light. The blue-green eyes on the pale leaves, Perri’s eyes, blinked and closed.

“We’re hitting a farm tonight,” Paula said abruptly. “You can come along.”

“I checked out, huh?” Dee said.

“Why didn’t you mention that the bastards tried to kill you with a bio-weapon?”

“I thought I’d give you something to research,” Dee said. She hid her surprise that “the group”—preten­tiously, they had no other name—had turned up the attack in her apartment. They were better connected than she’d thought. No official police report had been filed.

“We meet here at twoA.M. ” Paula said. “Wear dark clothing that covers your arms and legs with at least three layers of cloth, and good boots. We’ll supply gloves and mask.”

“Got it. Paula . . . thanks.”

“I know how it is,” Paula said cryptically. Dee didn’t ask what she meant.

Sixteen people, packed into two vans with blackened windows and an opaque shield between driver and pas­sengers. No names, faces behind masks; Dee wouldn’t be able to identify anyone except Paula. They rode for at least forty minutes at variable speeds. When the van stopped, they could have been anywhere.

“Stay in single file,” their “group leader” said. He led them through the darkness, one flashlight in the front of the line, off the road through a small woods, then across at least three open fields divided by strips of un­derbrush. Finally the line halted.

The genemod farm was an acre lot of saplings. Sold as transplants, Dee guessed. Genemod illegals had learned not to fence or firewall their farms; it attracted too much aerial-surveillance attention. To Dee these saplings looked like any other stand of young trees. What were they genemod for? It didn’t matter. Their cre­ation was the kind of irresponsible activity that had caused the Crisis, when one food crop after another had been wiped out by fast-growing, herbicide-resistant, ge­netically created “super-plants” with no natural enemies. The kind of irresponsible activity that had, in the end, caused most of the Midwest to endure the controlled burn. The kind of irresponsible activity that had ruined agribusinesses, spurred hoarding, and weakened an al­ready staggering economy.

The kind of activity that had jailed Perri.

“Chop each tree clean through at the base,” the leader instructed. “Don’t work on adjacent trees or you risk cutting each other. Be quiet and quick. The acid team is right behind you.”

Dee took the row of trees he gave her. She buzzed her saw through its base, surprised at the savage pleasure it gave her. The air filled with muted buzz (much of the sound was white-noised somehow) and with the sharp smell of the acid poured over the fallen limbs and rooted stumps. Dee felt energy flow into her as she de­stroyed the crop. Over the havoc she listened for the sound of defending copters or guns, but no one came. She laughed aloud.

“What’s so funny?” Paula said, on the next row.

“I just remembered something. An old poem. ‘Only God can make a tree.’ ”

“Huh,” Paula said. “Forget poetry and just saw.”

Dee sawed, every vibration a vicious joy. When they were done, the activists slipped over the fields to the vans. Behind them, the carefully created grove lay in acrid burned waste.

“I found him,” Gum said.

Dee tensed. It had taken a long time to locate Gum again. She’d finally found him inside the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, living with a group of people armed with shoulder-launched missiles of some type. Where the hell had they gotten them? The things looked mili­tary. The whole setup was one Dee would never have approached at all if two different informants hadn’t said Gum was there. One, heavily bribed, had had the e-mail address. An electric cable snaked across the ground and into the bridge, undoubtedly stealing very expensive en­ergy until the power company discovered it. No longer Dee’s problem. She e-mailed Gum, and at the appointed hour he emerged from the Bridge looking as dirty and demented as ever.

They sat on packing crates set a hundred yards from the Bridge in an empty lot strewn with broken glass, rags, unidentifiable chunks of metal. Dee counted six rats in two minutes.

“Where is he?” she asked Gum.

“Everywheres. Nowheres. Gone and back. A hunnert years.”

“Not God, Gum! I thought you found Mike!”

“Gone and back. A hunnert years.”

Dee held on to her temper. This visit was too important, and too dangerous, to ruin. She waited.

Finally Gum said, “He watches Mike. He watches me. He watches you. He knows.”

“What does He know, Gum? Will you tell me so I can know, too?”

“He knows Mike din’t do it. The plants.”

“Mike didn’t take my sister to a ship illegal with genemod plants?”

“Oh, yeah. Praise the Lord.”

“Mike did take Perri to a genemod illegal?”

“Oh, yeah,” Gum said. Rheum oozed from his filmy eyes. “Gone and back.”

“He took her to the ship and he sent her back. But where is Mike now?”

“God sees.”

Dee put her hands on her knees and leaned forward. Another rat ran across the lot. Closer to the Bridge a man stood holding a rifle and looking right at her. “Gum, what are you doing with these people who live in the Bridge?”

“A hunnert years. Straight to God.”

“You’re their priest,” Dee said. It seemed unlikely, but not impossible. Since the Crisis, a hundred weird religions had sprung up to explain the Earth’s new harshness, atone for the Earth’s new harshness, find hope in the Earth’s new harshness, all kinds of shit. Even criminals, it seemed, could believe in God. Some sort of God. And it might explain what Gum, old and mumbling and shambling, was doing with these well-equipped felons who frankly scared the fuck out of Dee. Priesthood might explain it. Or it might not.

Gum said, “He din’t do it.”

“God?”

“Mike.”

“What didn’t Mike do, Gum?” They were going in circles.

“He din’t send that plant to kill you in your apart­ment.”

Dee’s breath stopped. “Do you know who did?”

“T’other side. A hunnert years.”

“Gum, what other side? Who sent the plant to kill me?”

“Look to God,” Gum said, and lurched to his feet.

Dee stood and grabbed at him. “You can’t go now! You have to tell me the rest!”

The old man tried to pull free. The guard raised his rifle. Hastily Dee released Gum. As he shuffled away, she called after him, “What other side, Gum? Who sent the plant?”

“It was in all the newspapers,” Gum said over his shoulder. “You was dead.”

“Gum . . .”

He was gone.

She kept at her informants, getting the word out, spend­ing her savings on sweeteners. She went on another raid with Paula’s group, destroying another open farm in Jer­sey. She visited Perri at Cotsworth, and each time Perri was thinner and quieter and walked with more difficulty. Dee papered the Correctional System with complaints and charges and anger, and none of it brought any changes whatsoever.

Paula’s group hit an arboretum in Connecticut. Under thick plastic grew bed after bed of lush foliage genemod for . . . what? It didn’t matter. By now, Dee wasn’t even curious. To get into the arboretum they had to blow open the glass with semtex. Instantly alarms wailed. They tossed in the flamers and scattered. Dee, following her instructions, circled widely to the left and ran through an underroad culvert full to her knees with stinking water. Spider webs tore from the roof onto her face. Lights raked the area from a tower she hadn’t known was there, and she could hear a copter roaring closer. But she made it to the van and back onto the highway and all the way to her apartment.

Only later did she hear that two activists died in the raid. One of them was Paula.

The next evening Eliot called. “Jesus Christ, Dee, what the fuck are youdoing? ”

He knew about the raid. No, impossible, how could he know? Then he’d heard about her working the street. Dee said nothing.

“How could you go down to see Perri and then gouge into her about what a screw-up she is? ‘You made bad choices, you’ve messed up your life, this prison time will follow you a round forever’. . . howcould you, Dee?”

“It’s all true.”

“So what? She’s barely hanging on in that hell-hole and she doesn’t need you to go in there and—”

“How the fuck do you know what she needs? I’ve taken care of her since she was two years old!”

“And you’ve made her believe she can’t take care of herself without you.You screwed up her life if anyone did. So stop this—”

Dee slammed her fist into the OFF key. She raged around the one-room apartment until her own fury scared her. Then she tried to calm down: deep breathing, lifting weights, a cup of hot tea. At midnight she finally slept.

At three she jerked awake. Someone was in the apartment.

Her hand slid under the blanket for her gun. Before she could grasp it, both arms were jerked above her head and cuffed. The light went on.

He took off his night-vision hood and pulled a chair beside her bed. Silently he studied her. He was medium height and build, late thirties, brown eyes. Hair the color of a yellow flower. Dee stared back, refusing to show fear. She said, “You’re Mike.”

“Yes. Although the name is Victor.”

She snorted and he smiled. “No, really. You don’t look much like Perri, Dee. Come on, we’re going out.”

She began to scream. The walls were thin; someone would hear. Immediately Victor slapped a gag strip over her mouth. He pulled off her blankets and cuffed her ankles, ignoring her kicks. Wrapping her in the blanket as if she were sick, he lifted her easily and carried her, a dead weight, down three flights of stairs. He was much stronger than he looked.

A car waited at the curb. Dee thought, incongruously,howlongsinceIrodeinacar? Years. Cars were emission-producing demons. People destroyed them like cockroaches. Only emergency vehicles were exempt, and this powerful sleek car was no emergency vehicle.

They drove through the empty, pot-holed streets, Victor and Dee in the back and the unseen driver behind a shield in the front. Victor removed her gag.

“Dee, no one is going to hurt you.” Oh, right, as if she believed that. “There’s something I want you to see.”

“Why?”

“Good question. I guess because I hate waste. You’ve wasted a lot of time raiding genemod illegals and ha­rassing ineffective authorities and putting out the word on me throughout Manhattan. Is that ankle cuff too tight for comfort?”

“No. It’s Perri whose time is being wasted.”

“I’m sorry about that. There was never any intention that she be charged with anything. I had no idea she’d take a genemod plant.”

“You merely took her fetal tissue,” Dee said.

“Yes. It’s the best tissue for human genetic engineer­ing, you know. Stem cells are malleable, the amniotic sac grows organs well, the placenta . . . but I don’t think you’re interested in scientific details. It should have been a mutual gain. Perri wanted to abort, I wanted the tissue.”

“To create plant ‘art’ that has her eyes.”

“No,” Victor said. He shifted on the back seat of the car. “I don’t dabble in decorative perversity. I sell the girls’ fetal tissue to whoever can pay well for it. Our real work requires money. No, don’t ask questions now. I want to show you.” And, incredibly, he leaned into a corner of the car and went to sleep.

Dee tested the door, her bonds, the seat belt. Nothing gave. Victor snored softly. She could probably kick him with both feet, but belted in like this, it would be a kick so feeble as to be pointless. Slack, his face looked oddly older. Forties, maybe. Even through her fear and outrage, he puzzled her. Something was off about him. He didn’t seem like any criminal she’d ever seen, not even the smooth-talking, easy-sleeping sociopaths.

The car stopped. Victor woke and carried Dee along a deserted dock. A remote boat waited, barely big enough for the two of them. Victor untied the mooring lines and pressed a hand-held, and the boat took off silently across the dark water.

The night was cloudy. Dee could see various lights, but she had no idea what they were. Ships? Land? Buoys? A wind blew and the sea became choppy. Water sloshed into the boat. Dee felt herself growing seasick.

Victor must have known the signs. Expertly he held her head over the side while she vomited. “Almost there!” he called over the rising wind. Dee threw up again.

The storm looked ready to break in earnest by the time they drew up alongside what seemed to her a huge ship, completely dark. A metal basket was lowered and Victor dumped her into it. Dee hated feeling helpless. Almost she would rather be knocked out than trussed up and hauled in like mackerel or cod.

She got her wish. Someone on deck leaned into the metal basket and slapped a patch onto her neck. No way to dislodge it, and in ten seconds everything disap­peared.

She woke in a narrow cabin as steady as if on land. Victor, looking much more rested, sat in a chair beside her bunk. Dee struggled for the dignity of sitting upright. “Where are we?”

“At sea. The storm passed while you were out. It’s a lovely day.” He lifted her and carried her into a narrow corridor where a wheelchair waited. The blanket slipped off her. Her pajamas smelled, but at least she’d been wearing them. What if she’d been naked when he kidnapped her? And what about her expensive, carefully installed nerve gas? This was the second time it had been disabled. Apparently all of underground New York had become security experts.

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Yes. Just a minute.” He wheeled her to another door, pushed the whole chair in, and closed the door.

Cursing, Dee stood up, still bound at wrists and an­kles. She managed to get her pjs down and everything accomplished, after which there was no choice except to kick at the door.

“It’s less stuffy on deck,” Victor said cheerfully. Dee scowled at him.

It was less stuffy on deck. Also painfully bright. Sunlight glared off a blue ocean. If there hadn’t been a breeze, the heat would have been unbearable. Dee said, “I can’t stay out here long. I assume that you have on sunblock.”

“So do you. Put on before you woke up. Anyway, we’re almost there.”

Where? Nothing but water in every direction. Dee folded her arms and said nothing. She wasn’t going to cooperate in his elaborate games. If he killed her, he killed her.

She knew she wasn’t really indifferent to death.

No one else appeared on this section of deck. Nor were the abundant plants that Perri had described anywhere in evidence. Maybe Victor thought that Dee, too, would steal one.

The ship moved over the ocean, although without reference points Dee had no idea how fast it was trav­eling. After about twenty minutes, Victor, who’d been lounging at the railing, straightened. “There. Four o’clock.”

At first Dee saw nothing. Then she did. The sea was changing color, from blue to a dense, oily black. She said, “An oil spill?”

“I wish.”

They drew closer. The blackness grew, until Dee could see it was actually a deep purple. It seemed to extend to the horizon. The ship moved a short way into the purple and stopped.

Victor lowered a grapple-looking thing over the side. “We can’t go in any farther without risk to the screws. But aerial surveillance shows that the bloom already covers sixty thousand square miles. Do you have any idea how big that is, Dee? Half the size of New Mexico. Here, look.”

He pulled up the grappler and held it toward her. It dripped what looked to Dee like seaweed; she was no marine expert.

“It’s not ordinary seaweed,” Victor said. “It’s genemod. Made from altered bacteria. It replicates at ideal bacterial rate, which is to say it doubles every twenty minutes. It has no natural enemies. Nothing eats it. But it blocks sunlight almost totally, and so everything underneath it dies. Do you understand about the food chain, Dee? Do you know what happens if the oceans die?”

“Who made it?”

“Unknown. Best guess is that it was an accident, a mistake. It might have been designed to blanket Third World estuary breeding grounds of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Or not. Anyway, it’s out.” Victor studied the dripping purple mass and Dee studied Victor. His expression was sad and thoughtful, not at all what she’d expected. How good an actor was he?

She said, “Did you put a genemod plant in my apart­ment to kill me?”

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No. But I can guess.”

“Who?”

He laid the seaweed on the deck. “What would have happened if that genemod plant had succeeded in killing you, Dee?”

She snapped, “Don’t play games with me. If it had killed me, I’d be dead.”

“Right. Then what? Eventually somebody would have broken into your apartment, if only because your corpse would have begun to smell. A friend, your landlord, a neighbor . . . somebody. They’d have called the cops. The media monitor police reports, and genemod hysteria grows worse all the time. You’d have been a news sensation: “Ex-Cop Murdered In Bed By Killer En­gineered Plant!’ Full re-creation sims on every channel.”

“Mikedin’tsendthatplanttokillyouinyourapart­ment,”Gum had said.“T’othersidedid.Itwasinallthenewspapers.Youwasdead.”

Victor pulled a vial from his pocket. “The publicity would have aided anti-genemod funding as well as anti­genemod feeling. It could have been GMFA supporters, it could have been one of the more fanatic of those ac­tivist groups you’ve gotten so fond of, it could have been a corporation that gains from public hysteria by keeping genemod products illegal.”

“The government wouldn’t—”

“I don’t think so, either. Watch, Dee.” Victor unstop­pered the vial and poured it over the purple seaweed on the deck.

“I don’t see anything.” She was still shaken over Vic­tor’s casual list of people who might have murdered her.

“Wait a bit.”

The purple seaweed began to dissolve. Only one cor­ner of the mass, and then the reaction stopped.

“It’s a genemod bacteria,” Victor said. “It eats the bloom. Unfortunately, the toxins emitted by the dying bloom cells kill the eaters. But it’s a start. Now that we have the right organism, we can go on tailoring it until it can successfully eliminate the entire bloom.”

Dee stared at the seaweed. “And you created that? Here?”

“Yes. We did. Because we’re not allowed to create it onshore.”

“Victor, that doesn’t make sense. Something like this, that could help clean up the ocean.”

“And that will in turn replicate and, maybe, create its own crisis. Who knows the effect of releasing this unknown bacteria into the sea? That’s what the activists say, and they’re right. Only I happen to think that once the pomegranate seeds are eaten, the only cure is more genetically engineered pomegranate seeds.”

“What? ‘Pomegranates’?”

“Forget it. The point is, this is vital work that can’t go forward if I, and people like me, have to spend half our time evading tracking by people like you. And like the FBI, of course.”

She shifted in her wheelchair. The deadly sunlight was growing hotter. Victor noticed and took the handles of her chair, pushing it along the deck. “But, Victor, even if the United States won’t or can’t let you do this genemod work, then surely other countries—the oceans af­fect everybody!”

“True. And so does international trade. The Keller Pact forbids any trade with any country trafficking in genetically modified organisms . . . remember? A very popular piece of legislation in an election year. Even so, we get some surreptitious funding from a few foreign companies. Not much.”

“But it isn’t going to stop you.”

“I can’t let it stop me. Here you are.”

They’d reached a section of deck with a remote boat winched up level with the railing. Victor dumped Dee into the tiny boat and pressed a button. The boat began to lower.

“Wait!” Dee called, panicked. “I can’t take that much sunlight all the way back—the ultraviolet—”

“Yes, you can,” Victor called down over the railing. “Your sunblock is genetically engineered. Good-bye, De­metria Stavros. Stop destroying the abundance that mankind creates in its new gardens and fields.”

The boat detached itself from the winch, turned itself around, and took off. On this flat sea Dee wasn’t sick. She noted the position of the sun; with that and the time elapsed before landing, maybe she could estimate where the ship had been. Although by that time, it would have already moved.

The involuntary boat ride was a long one. Dee had plenty of time to think.

When she entered the Cotsworth visitors’ room, Eliot was already seated with Perri.

Dee scowled; this was supposed to be her time with her sister, not that self-righteous prick Eliot’s. But then Dee looked again at Perri. Still thin, still sunken-eyed, but now Perri’s amazing blue-green eyes glowed. Something had happened.

“Dee!” Perri said from her side of the table. “Eliot and I are engaged!”

Dee froze.

“Aren’t you going to congratulate us?” Eliot said. She recognized the battle call in his voice.

“On what? Another screw-up for Perri, this time dragging you along with it? Or are you the one leading? You two can never make it work, Eliot, and you at least should have the experience and intelligence to know that.”

“And why can’t we make it?” Eliot asked in his at­torney voice. Calm. Seeking information. Deceptive. “You’re too different! God, you’re an upcoming de­fense lawyer and Perri is—”

“A criminal?” Eliot said. “A screw-up? That’s what you just called her. Your own sister. What are you afraid of, Dee?”

“ ‘Afraid’ my ass! Don’t try any lawyer rhetoric on me!”

“You are afraid. You’re terrified. You think you’ll lose her, and then whose life will you periodically and he­roically rescue from ruin to justify your own life?”

“You don’t know anything about—”

“I know you’ve done it to Perri all her life.”

“You think you—”

“Stop!” Perri shouted, loud enough that nearby inmates and their visitors stopped talking and turned to stare. The guard started toward them.

“Stop, Perri repeated, more calmly. “Dee, this isn’t your decision. It’s mine. Eliot, be quiet. I can justify my own decisions to my sister.”

The guard said, “Problem here, counselor?”

“No,” Eliot said. “Thank you.”

Perri said, “Dee, I wrote you something. Take it. And I’m going to marry Eliot.” She held out a small, tightly folded piece of paper toward Dee. On her left hand spar­kled a diamond ring.

“Don’t tell me I can’t wear the ring in here without somebody stealing it,” Perri said. “I know that. Eliot will take it with him. But in another three months I’ll be out, if I keep my nose clean. I can last that long. I can do this, Dee.”

ButIcan’t,Dee thought, and was suddenly afraid to know what she meant. She turned away. “I’m going, Perri. I’ll see you next time.”

“All right,” Perri said softly. Not panicking at Dee’s anger, not pleading with her to stay. Not needing her.

Dee passed through the tedious series of prison gates, checkpoints, locked areas. Outside, she walked toward the train. The air wasn’t too bad today, but it was very hot. She thought of Victor, out on the open sea, working to engineer an organism to stop the death of the oceans. To bring more changes, but different ones, known in purpose but not in consequence. How long would it take? Ahun­nertyears, Gum had rambled. But even Dee, no scientist, knew that a hundred years would be far too long.

She unfolded Perri’s note. To Dee’s surprise, it was a poem:

    Another love. I am weary of
    The starts of things. Too many springs,
    Too little winter make a bitter
    Everlasting yellow-green.
    Stop. Enough. Let harvest come.

She hadn’t even known that Perri wrote poetry.

Waiting for the train, Dee put her hands over her face. She didn’t know who was right. Victor, changing whole ecologies like some sort of god. Paula’s friends, preserving through destruction. The FBI, blindly enforc­ing a popular, vindictive law. Which one was bitter spring, which one healing winter? Dee couldn’t tell. No more than she could tell if Eliot’s terrible accusations about her were true. When was love actually destruc­tion? Could he be so sure that his love for Perri was not?

There was a raid tonight, a hit on a farm in Penn­sylvania that engineered biomodified trees to increase photosynthesis capacity. Some of the trees, Dee’s group leader had said, incorporated human genes as well as plant genes. Dee didn’t know if that was true, either. She knew only one thing for sure.

She wasn’t going on the raid. Not tonight, not ever.

Let harvest come.