No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (42 page)

Chairs were scraping again, and had been for some little time. Looking up, I met the massed weary gaze of maybe a fifth of my command—eighty men and youths—drooping where they’d fallen into their chairs. Barely recovered from yesterday’s exertions, they slumped there, their legs stretched out before them, their arms hanging limp. But in little more than half an hour’s time, ready or not, they’d be joining battle again, trying to avenge the comrades they’d lost yesterday.

Lost comrades, yes.

My mind returned to its wanderings…

I thought of old Sellick and his garden, the day he called me over, maybe six weeks after the meteorite incident, to show me the ivy growing up the bole of a fifty-year-old magnolia.

“What do you make of that?” he said.

But of what? So-called “expert” that I was, that I am, I couldn’t see what he was on about, not at first. “The ivy?” I said. “It’s a decorative variety, probably an Asian strain of
Hedera helix
, a five-lobed climber that’s essentially fragile, and—”

“Six-lobed,” he cut in. “Down near the bottom there, last year’s growth: five-lobed. But up here, this new growth: each leaf has six lobes. And that’s not all. The outer lobes on each leaf have tiny hooks to fasten to the tree. It can grow a damn sight faster if it doesn’t have to root itself first. And it’s not so bloody fragile, either! This is a mutant strain, or I’m not an ex-Guards colonel. Eh, what?”

I almost laughed, half-laughed, but managed to hold it back while making a mental note to consult the ledgers at Kew. There would be notes on this one, for sure. But still—and perhaps a little flippantly—I couldn’t resist saying, “Colonel, you’ll be telling me next there are four-leaved clovers on your lawn!”

“Yes.” He nodded, deadly serious. “And quite a few with six leaves, too. Eh, what? I’ve been preserving them for posterity, pressing them under ‘flora’ in my old gardening dictionary, for at least a fortnight now!” Then he showed me his right forearm: a fresh red scratch deep enough to leave a scar. “See this? Got it from my ‘thornless’ roses—by God!” He scowled at the sore red gouge. “And what do you think of that? Eh, what?”

I scratched my head. “Something in the pollen? GM rapeseed maybe? I remember they were experimenting with it last year in a field not a quarter of a mile away. Some people from Friends of the Earth and a slew of other so-called eco-friendly groups were down there, ripping it out as quickly as they could plant it. But they didn’t get it all. The police were there dragging them away, putting a stop to it. And then, just lately, there’s been this problem with the bees.”

“Eh, bees?” the colonel queried, somewhat absentmindedly. “Never bother with the little buggers. Eh, what? Got enough on my hands with the greenfly, sod ’em all! I did get stung once, though.” Frowning, he sat down in one of his favourite places: a rustic oak bench where it circled the magnolia. And resting his back against the bole, he squinted up at me and asked, “So what’s that you were saying? Something about the bees? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a bee in quite a while.”

“That would be about right,” I told him. “It seems there’s something of a scarcity. The local beekeepers are complaining that the workers haven’t been making it back to their hives.”

Sellick clenched a military jaw, narrowed his eyes, gloomed out over his quarter acreage. “It’s not right,” he growled. “It doesn’t feel the same. This year—I don’t know—it’s like it isn’t my garden at all! Ever since that bloody meteorite! Well, bollocks to it! One way or the other, I’ll get my garden back.” And starting to his feet: “It’s Friday. Do you fancy a pint?”

And I did, so we took the river path and made our way down to the Olde Horse and Carriage…

The following Monday I spent an hour looking for Sellick’s ivy in the manuals at Kew Gardens. I never did find it, though. And I never will. It simply isn’t there, never will be unless I name it and register it myself; name it after old Sellick, perhaps?

If ever I get the chance.

If
we win this war with the rest of the damned foliage: the ivies, roses, and clovers—and the fungi, mosses, and ferns—these and every other botanical order and species that was ever catalogued, all of them changed now and forever changing. Every damned one of them. Hundreds, thousands of seething, continuously mutating species; most of them hostile to animal life, just as animal life was once inimical to them…

My mind went sideways again. Meteorites and shooting stars.

Those previously “crazy” people who believed that life came to Earth on meteorites or in the tails of comets. I mean, that was something I’d
never
been able to take on board! Here we had a world of soft oceans and rocks worn down into soils that were simply screaming to be inhabited; an oxygen rich atmosphere and free running rivers of fresh water; black smokers pouring their chemicals into the depths of soupy seas, and lifebuilding ribonucleic acids galore. Was it any wonder life happened here?

And then on the other hand we had this “ridiculous” theory of maggots from Mars and other places: space-rocks falling out of the skies to seed the predawn Earth with life. That was what I couldn’t get my head around: rocks, without air, water, any-damned-thing at all, cruising the universe’s most deadly environment, outer space, with these dormant seeds clinging to them. How in hell did those seeds get stuck on the meteorites, or in the comet’s tail, in the first place? Where did they come from?

And that’s not the end of it. For then this chunk of interstellar debris comes hurtling down at tens of thousands of mph, gets burned black from atmospheric friction—without damaging the seeds, of course—and slams down with sledgehammer force, releasing, but not hurting, its passenger/s. For me, that just wasn’t logical. Not then, anyway.

No, for then I’d believed in Gaia, Mother Earth, Ma Nature, the planet perceived as a living entity. And that was where I’d made my mistake, me and thousands of others. We’d been thinking on a less than cosmic scale—indeed a microscopic scale—that was typical of human egocentricity; thinking in terms of a tiny little mudball Earth-nature, and almost completely ignoring the fact of the great big universe out there. Much like the Inquisition, we’d considered our world as the “Center of Everything”, when the center of everything was an entire Big Bang away back at the beginning. What we should have been thinking wasn’t Gaia but Galactica, or at the very least Megagaia: not Earth-mother but Galaxy- or Universe-mother.

A nature through all space and time that’s just waiting for the right conditions. Planets form around a star; they cool; Ma Nature—Universal Nature—is waiting. She tried before, but her babies got burned up. No problem; she has plenty more; it’s just a matter of hitting the right place at the right time. For after all, how many dandelion seeds land on rocks or in deserts or oceans? A very hit-and-miss process, true: trial and error, but they get there in the end. And time is on Megagaia’s side.

So eventually the time is right; another rock falls out of the sky, slams down on the surface of this entirely conjectural planet. There are the makings of life on the new world, perhaps even the first amoebic stirrings on the fringes of soupy oceans, and that’s what Universal Ma Nature is looking for. That’s what she does. She assists. She releases the meteorite’s gasses, or whatever it is that those bloody things contain: the catalysts that form chains in the RNA, that bring about life or—where it already exists—accelerate its evolution!

It was guesswork, of course, science fiction, but…just suppose I was right? And now I’m not thinking some conjectural world but Earth again. If I was on the right track, then maybe this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Back then, after the big lizards and their killer rock, maybe there was another space pebble, something that balanced things up again, brought about mutations, caused life to continue. The dinosaur survivors became birds, and a certain branch of scared little mammal creatures became monkeys and then men.

And why not? I mean, they’re still looking for the missing link. And maybe I can tell them where to find it: behind glass in a museum in a town not far out of London…

Two and a half years ago, that might have been when I poisoned Kew—but accidentally, of course. Anyway, Kew wasn’t the only thing that was dying. Lots of things died.

I remember a certain story, a piece of fiction. (I used to read scads of macabre stuff, anything from E. A. Poe to Stephen King.) This one was by an American author whose name I’ve since forgotten. But he was very good. Coincidentally, it concerned a colour out of space, something that crashed out of the sky on a meteorite. It seems especially relevant now…though nowadays I can’t think why I chuckled at the idea of malevolent, shining mutant skunk cabbages! Or I can…but it no longer strikes me as funny…

It was the last Saturday of summer. I had been down to the Olde Horse and Carriage last night, but old man Sellick hadn’t shown up. That was peculiar; the colonel liked his Friday night pint. Something else that was rather odd: the pub’s usually excellent menu wasn’t nearly up to scratch. Meat, but no fresh vegetables…only frozen ones. Fish, but no homemade chips. And then, on overhearing a few snatches of conversation from a group of disappointed, would-be diners, I couldn’t help but feel troubled:

“Salad days? Forget it! Tried buying tomatoes or a lettuce just lately? Rotten soil, no rain, no spuds…not that
taste
like spuds, anyway!” And: “My apples are blistered to hell and full of yellow shit. Taste like it, too. I caught some village kids scrumping in the orchard. Next thing, they’re curled up in the grass crying and puking their guts out. Poor little buggers, I didn’t have the heart to give them a hard time. But I’ll give you odds they were shitting their pants all the way home!” And: “Don’t talk to me about apples. Last year, mine were eaten rotten from the inside out by wasps. This year I’d be pleased just to see a bloody wasp!”

Trouble with the veg, yes, but all very local. The restaurants were shipping veg in! Blame it on the weather or something…or something.

So then it was Saturday morning and I gave old man Sellick a call. His phone rang but the colonel didn’t answer. Yet from my upstairs balcony I could plainly make out something of him—the odd patch of suntanned skin, tatty jeans, and stained white shirt—stirring under the foliage in his garden. Not fifteen feet from his open door, he must surely hear the phone ringing—I could just about hear it myself—but he wasn’t making any attempt to answer it.

Something had to be wrong, so I went round to his place and into his garden to enquire personally.

I couldn’t believe how quiet the garden was as I approached down the crazy-paved path. No birds—not a one—and I truly missed the buzzing of bees. As to why I hadn’t noticed anything before, I mean in my own garden: that’s hard to say. I had been busier than usual, putting in a lot of overtime at Kew. There’d been a great many queries from the public about odd hybrid species; many specimens had arrived, been isolated, were being studied by various botanical specialists. Maybe that’s the answer: I’d had too much on my plate to notice what was going on in my own or Sellick’s garden, the weirdness that was happening.