Black Steel (5 page)

Until U. edmondia.

Maybe.

Sampson Lewis Edmonds, acknowledged as the most brilliant applied botanist to have ever lived, along with his wife, Elith Liotulia, considered the second-most brilliant botanist in galactic history, had apparently worked a biological miracle upon the offshoot Bindodo cuttings they had transplanted to Mtu. The growth had a number of names, though those who worked with it usually just called it bramble. The resulting plant, though not a true Rubus, certainly looked the part.

At maturity, it was estimated that a thigh-thick trunk would reach perhaps two meters before spreading up into a weeping-willowlike spray that would rise another twenty meters. This would then spill over in a graceful arch that dangled the ends of the straight and barbed branches all the way back to the ground. The bramble at maturity would look like nothing so much as a giant, sparsely leaved blackberry bush, bigger than a house, without fruit, but with wicked thorns. It would be incredibly tough, the fibers of the branches being dense and very flexible; deep rooted, and genetically engineered to resist disease, insects and even fire. The wood would make great pipes for smoking, or violin bows.

The real achievement, however, would lie in a fist-shaped knot of burl that lay just under the ground between the trunk and roots. The size of a man's head, this burl would contain, if everything went as hoped for, a chemical compound that would safely allow human cells to bypass the Hayflick Limit without side effects-by a factor of five to seven.

Such a chemical elixir would give the possibility of an eight-hundred- to thousand-year life span. And various permutations of such a substance might, even if the primary purpose failed, cure virtually every known disease.

Certainly this was enough to keep the Confed from meddling in things. The payoff would be priceless, if it worked. Nobody wanted to risk killing this particular goose.

There was, however, a catch:

From first planting to maturity, it would take at least seventy-five years. The oldest patch of U. edmondia was but fifty years old. Although the plant achieved its full height within ten or fifteen years, the burl would not be ready for harvest for at least another three score after that. Computer projections and growth curves all predicted that the biological chemical factory that was the burl should work as designed, but there was no way to hurry it. Something about the processing defied artificial attempts to speed it up; certainly it had been tried. Tests on the fifty-year-old bramble showed that there was a good probability it would work, but there was no way to be sure until push came to shove at the end. Until then, the small army of biologists and support personnel would simply have to wait and see.

If it worked, then Sampson Lewis Edmonds and Elith Liotulia would etch so deeply a place in history it would never be erased as long as men lived-and men would live a long, long time indeed. A betting man wouldn't make much profit going against it, so the oddsmakers said. Current numbers were nine to one in favor, growing more likely all the time. Everybody wanted this one to work.

Reason blinked. "You certainly know an awful lot about all this," he said.

They were back in their rooms. The Pachelbel continued, spanning vast distances using its Bender drive, moving faster effectively in an eyeblink than light did in a hour. Or not moving at all, depending on how you interpreted the physics.

Sleel nodded. "Yeah, I know about it."

"I wouldn't have thought that a matador would be so up on esoteric biology."

Sleel shrugged.

Reason looked at Sleel. "You didn't learn about this in the matadors, though, did you?"

"No. Before."

"You want to tell me?"

"Not really, but what the hell. I grew up there, in The Brambles. "

"Your parents were scientists? They work with the plants'?"

Sleel took a deep breath and let it out. "Yeah, you might say that. They invented the damned stuff. "

Reason blinked, astonished, but whatever else he was, he wasn't slow. "Sampson Lewis Edmonds? Elith Liotulia?"

"Yeah. "

"The initials. S-l-e-e-"

"Yeah," Sleel cut in.

"Well, I'll be damned."

"Not while I work for you. Afterward, maybe."

Chapter FIVE

THE BOY WAS caught in the tree.

He was only ten or twelve meters up, where the ascending and straight branches were still thick enough to support the weight of a nine-year-old, and where the thorns were long but well spaced and usually easy to avoid.

Usually easy to avoid.

As sometimes happened, the wrist-thick risers would cross in long and narrow X-shapes. Normally this was good, 'cause it gave more support to a climber. This time, though, it just happened that three or four thorns bunched up on the inside of the top angle of the X, and when he'd put one foot there, the pressure had lodged his thin boot smack in the middle of the thorns. When he'd tried to move, he found he was caught. He'd tried to shake his foot loose, but that hadn't worked. He'd tried to pull his boot off, but the angles of the thorns only dug them in deeper. Some of the little spikes, each as long as his forefinger and needle-sharp, pointed upward and some of them pointed down, and at least two of them went completely through the boot's plastic and into his ankle. They hurt, and he'd cried for a while, but that hadn't done any good. He was caught, and unless somebody came to help him, he was going to stay caught.

It was almost noon; he could tell by the way the light slanted through the upper part of the arches. It was hot and damp, like usual, and he was dressed for climbing, with his no-snag suit on, so he was hotter still. The smell of the flowers above him filled the hot air with a rich dusty-spice odor, sharp and heavy in his sinuses.

Let go! He jerked his leg, but that only made another thorn stab his foot. Ow! Ow! Ow!

He was about a klick from home, on Prime Row, maybe five hundred boles away from First Tree. These were the largest of the crop, a long time from being harvested but still almost as big as they were going to get. The rows ran on for kilometers and kilometers; he'd once gone with his father in the fanner as far away as eight thousand boles and they hadn't even been close to the end. From Prime, you could see the way the boles came up, arrow-straight rows, each row with its arch of branches that came back to the ground, so that it looked like dozens and dozens of tunnels going off to the end of the world. There were planets where you could see the sky in other than long strips between rows of trees, he had seen them in edcom holoprojics, but they didn't seem real to him. It was hard to imagine such places. Sometimes he dreamed about being on a world where there were only scattered trees. Frightening dreams they were, being exposed out in the open under the big sky.

Stuck in a tree. The other children would never let him live it down. It was bad enough that he was the youngest at Prime Tree Station. And the smallest. It was going to be a lot worse if one of the teeners spotted him up here and laughed. And they would laugh, sure as shit stinks. They laughed at him a lot because he was so clumsy and so small. He couldn't keep up with them, and when their parents made them take him along for games or outings, they resented him. It wasn't his fault; he didn't want to go!

Well, that wasn't true. He did want to go, but not like that. He wanted them to like him, only they didn't.

He tried again to twist his foot out of the clamp that held it fast. One of the thorns sank deeper into his flesh. He could feel a trickle of blood run down to his toes inside the boot. Ow! Oh, ow! Somebody please!

His parents didn't understand. They looked at him like he was some kind of bug that had wandered into their house. His father would blink at him and look puzzled, as if he'd never seen him before. When his father was in the lab, he snapped out orders and had people running every which way. And his father was brilliant, a genius, everybody said so and it was even in the ed programs. His mother, too. They were two of the smartest people in. the whole galaxy, everybody knew that. Everybody.

Why hadn't any of that come to him? Why was he so stupid and clumsy and afraid of everything? Even too little to climb, the other children said, taunting him. Can't think, can't move, can't do squat!

What did they expect? That he would be as smart as his parents? Nobody was as smart as they were!

Why did he have to be? He couldn't. No way. And he was too little to be worth leaf puke, too. Couldn't even climb!

Oh, yeah? Well, he'd show them. He would climb a tree and pick a flower, they grew only up near where the arch began, and when the other children saw him walking around with one of the white flowers under his arm, then they'd see!

Right. Only thing was, now he was stuck and that was bad. Now he couldn't show anybody anything because he was going to stay here until he died. Nobody would even miss him. Not his parents. Not the other children. One day maybe they would look up and wonder why he wasn't around, but nobody would worry about it and nobody would even care.

Feeling pretty sorry for himself, he glanced up toward the canopy. He'd almost made it. There was one of the handsized flowers only another three meters or so away. You weren't supposed to pick them, but all the children did. A few flowers wouldn't make any difference, everybody knew that. The bugs didn't bother them, 'cept the pol-bees, and that was okay. They didn't fall off, the flowers, but just shriveled up at the end of each growing season and eventually turned into a little black lump. The new flowers came out of the lumps next season. It was against the law to pick them, but nobody ever said anything about it unless it was an outsider who did it, somebody who didn't live here. Rules were different for outsiders; the rules were designed to protect the trees from them because the trees were worth a whole lot.

Scientists who lived here were allowed to experiment on the trees but outsiders who did anything damaging to The Brambles went to rehab or jail, even. The Confed didn't let just anybody come here, and those who did had better be real careful.

A long time passed. At one point he had to untab his pants and pee, and that looked pretty interesting.

He'd never peed that far before. Odd how it broke up and turned into a spray of droplets before it hit the ground.

More time went by. He was getting pretty hungry and thirsty. He had a chocolate bar in the pocket of his no-snags and he carefully ate half of it, saving the rest for later. It made him thirstier to eat it, but it tasted real good.

He didn't have a chrono with him, he'd worried that it would get snagged, so he didn't know exactly what time it was, but it was getting pretty late. The sun dropped so that it wasn't far from dark. He figured he'd been in the tree for almost eight hours.

He was lucky that his foot was caught in such a way that he could lean almost all of his weight against one of the branches; even so, he was sore from where his hip and side pressed against the springy wood.

Good thing there weren't any thorns there.

Just before dark, he heard somebody calling his name.

After a few moments, two of the older boys, Morl and Lutain, came into sight below, about eight meters away. They were yelling. First they would shout out his name. Then they would add something nasty, like, "Where are you, you dickless little turd?" Or "Come out, whizz-brain fuckoff!"

At first he was thrilled to see them. He almost yelled back. Then the shame of his position and his embarrassment overwhelmed him. He didn't want them to see him. He would never, ever live it down, they would tease him until he died, that he got stuck in a tree. Sure, it had probably happened to other children, but that didn't matter. They would laugh at him, they would call him names, and it would be better to die up here than to have to suffer that.

The two older boys passed under his perch, and he kept silent. They didn't think to look up. Good.

When night came, the so-ho crickets started singing, that over and over so-ho, so-ho, the sound that gave them their names. There weren't any wild animals or anything that would bother him, even if they could climb up and get to him, but now he was afraid. He wished he had yelled to the boys now. Maybe he really was going to die up here in this tree, and that terrified him.

A couple of times he saw lights flashing under distant rows, and he yelled, but nobody heard him.

Through a break in the canopy to his left, he could see the Green Moon rising, and the Spearcaster constellation and Big Red star glimmering in the soggy skies. Probably it was going to rain; it usually did at least once a day and it hadn't yet. He was going to die in a tree, all alone, in the rain, and nobody would save him. If he was going to get away, it would be up to him.

But there wasn't any way. He had tried a thousand times to move his foot and it was not going anywhere, no matter how hard he twisted or jerked. His foot had gone numb; the thorns didn't even hurt anymore.

He tried hanging all his weight on his hands on one branch, then the other, to spread them away, but that hadn't worked. He tried pulling them together and separating them apart. No good. He'd checked his pockets for anything that could help and there wasn't anything. Sure, he had his penknife, but the blade was only three centimeters long and the wood was almost impossible to cut. And the thorns were harder than the branches; it took a saw or a laser to shear through one of them. He was doomed. Trapped.

Going to die . . .

The idea happened when he gave up and realized he wasn't going to get away. It was so simple he felt real stupid for not having thought of it before. Damn! Stupid!

He pulled his penknife and squatted as best he could. Careful, he had to be real careful, he couldn't drop the knife because it was his only chance.

In the dark and alone, the boy began to cut at his boot. It took a while, but finally he managed to slice away most of it. The thorns were still stuck into him, but it was the boot sole jammed into the crotch of the branches that mostly held his foot trapped.

The Green Moon gave him enough light so he could see that only three thorns were stuck into him. His blood looked black, but there wasn't all that much of it, and it had mostly dried. With his hands, he shoved the boot sole into the springy trap, pressing as hard as he could. It was awkward, but by bouncing on the hard plastic, he managed to back the thorns off a little.