The Meat Tree (11 page)

Aranrhod said what, exactly?

Apprentice

‘I will swear a destiny on the boy that he will never have a wife from the race that is on this earth at present.'

Inspector of
Wrecks

Think, think. What other nations do they have on the
Earth? Animals in their various clans. You mated as an
animal, Gwydion. How satisfactory a wife do you think you would have made?

Apprentice

As a she-wolf? Perfectly fine, if you want a partner who can kill and hunt. I'm not sure that's what's required here. The
boy needs a wife who can hold her own at court. That
person's not a sow nor a hind, I guarantee it.

Inspector of
Wrecks

Let's approach the problem from another angle. What are the qualities we'd want in a wife? Beauty? Ability to reproduce?

Apprentice

To be faithful, and to be a companion to Lleu for the rest of his life, a comfort. To be a match. An answer.

Inspector of
Wrecks

To be… a flower. Why don't we make a woman from
flowers to be his wife? If we conjure her from this coming
season's growth she's not of a race already on the Earth.

Apprentice

A woman from flowers?

Inspector of
Wrecks

She'll be fruitful.

Apprentice

This must be a joke.

Inspector of
Wrecks

No, Math's very serious. It will take the two of them, him and Gwydion, to achieve it.

Apprentice

And what about her?

Inspector of
Wrecks

How do you mean?

Apprentice

Forced to be human, to follow a script dreamt up by two perverts in order to please a bastard created by incest?

Inspector of
Wrecks

It would seem a good solution all round. An elegant magic. I've never come across another tale with this motif in it. Striking, I'd say. Very desirable.

Apprentice

You make me sick!

Inspector of
Wrecks

It's a stroke of genius.

Apprentice

I'll have nothing to do with it.

Inspector of
Wrecks

Nona, you're breaking your part again. Gwydion…

Nona, don't do that. It's dangerous for me and for you to leave before we're finished. Nona! Come back!

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 10:10

Apprentice

So he says to me: ‘You can't storm out of the VR like that just because something in it offends you.'

And I go: ‘Oh no? Just watch me.'

‘And besides,' he says, ‘it's just a story about wizards
and flowers. I can't imagine what can be bothering you.'

‘Then you're more stupid than you look,' I say.

‘I beg your pardon?' he goes, looking ten times
more dense and he sputters on, ‘You can't try to
control a story like that, it's going against everything we're trying to do.'

‘Oh, is it? What are Math and Gwydion doing
except forcing a plot to go their way? And you're no better.'
That wiped the superior look off his face.

‘What do you mean?' he goes.

‘I know what you're trying to do with me. Mould me to be a little version of you. Because you're lonely.'

‘But it's my job to teach you.'

‘You're doing far more than that. You're hoping I'll make a Little You, to carry on your legacy.'

And by now he's going, ‘But, but, but', like a fish out of water.

So I go on: ‘If you think I can be pushed around
by a saddo who's failed to make a life for himself
and who can't cope with retiring, then you've got another thought coming. You're just a desiccated old fool and you're sucking me dry, draining the juice out of me!'

At that, he looked embarrassed and left me alone.

Inspector of
Wrecks

In all my years in the Service, I've never been spoken to like that. The woman's neurotic. All my training tells me that I have to maintain an adult demeanour and not descend to her level of hysteria.

I think back to the scenario in VR, to see what might have sparked such an outburst, but I can't see it. Gwydion and Math are just finding their way around a curse in a most delightful and original way, I can't wait to see what happens next.

What can have got into her? Should I read the Riot Act? Or ignore the outburst?

It's not that I haven't got a private life. My work life is it and when that's gone, what's left for me?

I told her to take an hour off and that I expected her to report to the VR suite at 11:30 to carry on. Won't do either of us any harm to cool down.

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 11:40

Inspector of
Wrecks

The girl's a No Show. I'm going to go on my own and finish the task in hand. I will not let the slip of a girl mess up my investigation, especially not my very last one.

Right, back to business. Here's Gwydion and Math in consultation together. I take the point of view of Math because I'm convinced that he has overall control of what's happening.

And suddenly I know the recipe for making a woman out of flowers.

Math says, ‘Bring me oak flowers, meadowsweet and broom.'

Gwydion says, ‘But none of those flowers are yet in bloom.'

Math: ‘You're a wizard, make it happen.'

I watch as Gwydion shuts his eyes. And although it's winter, I notice buds appearing on the oak nearby. The whole tree is quivering as if with desire. Time goes haywire. Days strobe on the patient branches and leaves protrude, shrugging and sighing
as the quick days pass. Then the catkins of male
flowers descend. A jay leaves a branch and a cloud of
pollen drifts to the next oak tree, where the subtle
female flowers swell close to the branches, sticky and red. Gwydion brings branches of the fertile oak to Math's feet.

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:03

Apprentice

You know when you're young and you have all day to look at things and dream? When grass is at eye level? And its seeds are your equal? How you make palaces from the sun as it filters through blades of grass and you can live in those mansions?

I wake exhausted from dreams of green. Creeping bent, sweet vernal-grass, wood fescue, Timothy,
great reedmace, wood millet. I remember how
we would loop its stalk around the broad-leaved plantain and decapitate its dry, brown flower. I recall the acidic smell of skin having skidded along grass, the cold, damp ache of its smudge into flesh.

But I was brought up on Mars. I know we used to play under the biosphere on the artificial pastures there but I never knew the names of Earth grasses.

I try to wake up, but I find it hard. A caffeine shot will help, some food before the next shift. I feel like a loom on which something is being woven.

Wall barley, grass, pendulous sedge…

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:14

Inspector of
Wrecks

‘That,' says Gwydion, ‘was late May or June.'

Then Math asks for flowers of the broom.

‘Why?' asks Gwydion.

‘Because it's tough. The oak can self-pollinate
but the broom blooms earlier, in late April, and its flowers appear before its leaves. Its seedpods explode in July when ripe. The medicines made from it are designed to purge, whereas the oak is astringent. And the country folk bring sprigs of broom to weddings as a gift.'

In the underbrush one leggy bush goes crazy and explodes in yellow, with a thick, rich smell of almond butter. Gwydion brings branches back to Math's feet.

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:23

Apprentice

My chlorophyll dreams don't leave me, nor do the names of plants. Sweet William, stitchwort, wood anemone… It's as if there's a feed from someone
else's mind into mine and I'm overhearing a world.

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:39

Inspector of
Wrecks

‘And last,' says Math, ‘the meadowsweet.'

‘My favourite flower,' says Gwydion. ‘Also known
as queen of the meadows or bridewort. Most
common of the fragrant weeds, whose blossoms
are culled in the middle of July. It's good for fevers and a woman made from that scent – sickly but
creamy – must be beautiful to look at. According
to Gerard, the smell of the leaves “Makes the heart
merry and delighteth the senses.” Sounds like a
winner to me.'

‘We'll have most of the summer covered then,'
says Math. ‘Broom early in spring; a fragrant meadow
­
­­
sweet July and high summer the oak with its flowers.'

So Gwydion stands there and pillages time to
conjure up meadowsweet. And the tall stalks shake as if in ecstasy. They bloom.

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 12:54

Apprentice

I stand erect. I have no eyes but a feel for gravity, from my dark, damp root up to the finest veins and the tips of my flowers. I'm a translator, a poet of the sun, transforming the spectrum into tiny hands that move in light's wake, stroking the world with blind but sensitive tendrils.

I have no ears, but my body bursts through the skin of buds, its surface area grows, and feels how vegetation scuffles, groans in competition for the light. I smell the stress that tearing, striving, being crushed, causes in wild garlic, dog's mercury and squill. And as the Earth turns, like a dancer with a pliant back, I shift my weight to stay upright in my perfect static pirouette until, with grace, I take my bow as darkness falls and close my leaves.

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 13:06

Inspector of
Wrecks

And then we join forces, Gwydion and I. We
imagine the perfect woman for Lleu. She's sultry as early spring days, long, slender and bright as the stalks of Genista. She's modest as meadowsweet but has a whole spectrum of emotional life, as complex as its fragrance. She's strong as oak, resilient as acorns that swell from the buds of the flowers. She pulls animals and birds in close to her, is a shelter.

And the body we conjure out of buds, flowers
and seeds isn't an orphan. She's our daughter – mine and Math's. It's our minds that give birth to her, in the shape of our delights, our fondness, our grief. Maybe our failings. And we lay her to grow in the best of ourselves, making room for a consciousness not our own, but that of the forest's. And it feels like pain but isn't as we've woven her out of everything that we both know about love and awareness and we're sure it's enough, that its generosity can make up for the loss of a mother, that our meaning well will do right by Lleu and create a home which is a form of justice that the boy deserves.

And in the middle of this I, Campion, ask: What
kind of being does a virtual world create? If two
negatives make a positive, then can two virtuals make an actual? Have we just conjured up a person who's real? Or one who is death?

*

Synapse Log 8 Feb 2210, 14:30

Apprentice

I lie here with my eyes half open and something works its way with me.

I dream of cells illuminated by a soft green light. Chloroplast. Ribosomes. Organelles, packed tight like batteries. I find galleries of green within myself, strings of proteins, they breathe through fibres. I'm in a forest of amino acids – protein chains which sway, like saplings, then blossom with molecular flowers. I move like mercury through the maze of matter. Cells throb, growth happens in jumps. I stretch, luxurious in the light, knowing that my intelligence is a web of filaments and filigrees, specialised in feeding on the tiniest amounts for the greatest results. Inside is sap which is drawn out by capillary action and soon a new energy runs up my spine, a pulse of excitement. How will things look from this new point of view?

Everything's possible, ripens in me. I follow the
sun and in the dark, I bow in obedience. I am
unknow­­able to Math and Gwydion, hum with
information that they just infer from their loud talk and posturing. I reach up to the spires of giant oaks and down into mosses where I gather myself in the heart of the root web. I flex my muscles with an old, old power.