Mary Rosenblum: The Botanist

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

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

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

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

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

Afraid of him. Her son.

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

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

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

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

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

“He might have been a doper.”

“And you were gonna save me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t even ask,” Jess said shortly.

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

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

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