Grower's Omen (The Fixers, book #2: A KarmaCorp Novel) (8 page)

I
yawned
as I exited the lab decontamination chamber and pulled on the universal white lab coat over my skinsuit. I’d worn a bright purple one this morning, hoping it would help keep my eyelids from falling accidentally shut. Nocturnal walks in the garden were a pretty normal part of my repertoire—staying up for two hours afterward meditating and reinforcing a set of energy barriers in my room wasn’t, however. I was pretty sure my dreams would be uninterrupted moving forward, but it had cost me a lot of REM cycles.

However, missions didn’t go on hold just because Fixers were tired—and I was also very curious. I’d encountered a lot of intriguing resonances yesterday, and my scientist brain was ready to get to work. Carefully. Without spooking the locals.

I ambled slowly along the corridor that seemed to connect most of the labs. Some had the walls and seals of facilities that did delicate or environmentally sensitive work. Others were open to the corridor and burbled with the sleepy sounds of scientists and their experiments slowly waking up.

I noted a lab shelf sitting oddly empty—site of one of the most recent antisocial incidents, and one of the few that had taken place in the lab. Beakers tended to have a pretty short life, but they didn’t usually die in a fit of someone’s temper.

I imagined Toli would have the shelves filled again shortly. She didn’t seem the type to leave unattended wounds on her turf, even minor ones.

The rest of the shelves were interesting too, but for a different reason. Unlike the relatively low-tech gardens, the labs bristled with state-of-the art gadgetry. I could identify some of the obvious gizmos for gene splicing or chemical analysis. Others were the basic scopes and beakers and burners of labs everywhere. But a fair amount of it was mystifying, and I considered myself a pretty decent gadgetry geek.

I turned a neat ninety-degree corner and felt the smoldering lab tech before I saw him. He exuded an energy that was hard to miss—especially when he noticed me ambling into his territory. Clearly I was his type.

I kept walking. A Grower with her Talent turned on was anybody’s type. We know that attraction has everything to do with energy, and not nearly as much to do with externals as most people think. Or rather, the right energy can make any externals zing.

This lab tech would hardly be the first person in my career who had wanted to check out the mythos of Growers for themselves, but the level of intensity behind it had me thoughtful again. In healthy tribes, sexual energies got routed in useful and satisfying ways—not left smoldering behind lab benches.

Whatever else was going on here, Xirtaxis Minor had a pretty defective community. I wasn’t sure yet whether that was the cause of the troubles I’d been sent to investigate or just part of the reason why they hadn’t solved it themselves, but either way, it was something I intended to lean on before I left.

Lightbodies work the soil, always.

I turned corner number two in my transit of the lab’s square and found myself in the greenest section of research I’d encountered so far. Lots of growing things, although many of them were clearly in various stages of careful plotting, measurement, and dissection.

I stopped to peer at a shallow, wide planter bed that looked like a battlefield. Splotches of a tiny plant with sharp red spikes were clearly invading the short, stumpy grass that covered most of the planter. I thought back to the dinner conversation of the previous night and looked over at the tech who had just approached me. “Testing for invasive species?”

She nodded cheerfully and turned on a switch that cast a square grid of light beams over the planter bed. “Yup. This little spiky guy’s a right bastard—takes over every damn thing. But if we can get him modified a stitch, he’s super good at terraforming. Doesn’t take shit from anybody’s soil micro-organisms. We just need him to do it without beating up on all the native greenery.”

I grinned—she clearly loved both her work and the feisty bully of a plant she worked with. “Have you tried selenium in the soil enrichments?”

She raised a surprised eyebrow. “We did. Helps quite a bit for about half a rotation, and then the little bugger adapts.” Her eyes twinkled. “And you really don’t want to see what he does when he’s mad.”

I could only imagine. I reached a careful finger toward one of the spiky clumps. “Is it okay to touch?”

“Sure.” She leaned over, watching my finger. “You’re the Grower, right?”

I assumed scuttlebutt would have gotten that word around already—there likely weren’t all that many strangers wandering into the labs at the crack of dawn. “I am. You can call me Tee if you like.” I touched the spikes, which were just as prickly as they looked, and could feel the fearless spread-out-or-die mantra in every cell of the plant. “You’ve got your work cut out trying to modify this guy.”

“Tell me about it.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m Veronica, by the way. Everyone calls me Nikki. I’m the lowly beaker washer, and the one who gets to run counts by hand when Toli gets her knickers in a twist.”

More points for Toli. “The machine counts won’t see what your eyes will.”

Nikki grinned. “That’s what Toli says.”

I opened my mouth to offer to help count, and saw Nikki’s face shift. Gone was the friendly, talkative tech—and in her place, a low-level lab rat with a neutral expression, downcast eyes, and two hands on her tablet.

She reminded me oddly of a chameleon I’d seen once.

I turned around to see what surroundings she’d just shifted to match—and saw Jerome Salmera crossing the floor with a pleasant smile on his face.

That was interesting, and too good an opportunity to miss. I reached out a hand and briefly touched Nikki’s forearm. “Thank you for the explanation of your work.”

“Veronica is one of our best techs.” The complicated, charismatic scientist had arrived at my shoulder, and spoke quickly enough that I caught a flash of Nikki’s reaction before I lifted my hand away.

Adulation, almost. And a touch of fear.

That didn’t fit the man who had built the garden I visited last night, but it did fit the one standing in front of me now. King of his domain, and Nikki was just one of his peons.

“Good morning, Dr. Salmera.” I held out a hand in greeting, curious if he would take it. I wanted another reading.

He turned smoothly, as if he hadn’t seen my gesture. “Call me Jerome, please. Why don’t you come this way and I’ll take you in to some of our most experimental work. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

Nikki raised a surprised eyebrow.

Apparently I hadn’t been relegated to peon status. He wasn’t the person I’d come to find, but I could be flexible. I winked and waved goodbye to Nikki and her prickly marauder, and then shifted to join Jerome in a walk down the hallway, turning up the radar on my Talent as I did so. I wouldn’t pick up nearly as much as Kish without physical contact, but it added a layer to what my eyes could see.

He started up a monologue as we walked—the fairly meaningless babble of a tour guide, and not a particularly engaged one.

Curious glances flicked our way as we passed by, and then people went quietly and efficiently back to work. Which was just plain weird—back home, the labs were a riot of half-yelled conversations and teasing and the oddball camaraderie that happened when you stared into a scope or babysat beakers for way too many hours a day.

Work happened—but life happened too.

Not here, or at least not while the great Dr. Salmera was walking by. A similar vibe to the cafeteria last night, but with adulation glossed on top. Jerome was a star here. And however little attention he appeared to be paying to the peons, I was quite sure he was soaking it all in.

Which didn’t fit at all with the man who had designed last night’s gardens, and that was an inconsistency my Talent didn’t like. I still didn’t know what lived in this man’s cells, and my gut was back to thinking he was a key player in what was happening here on Xirtaxis Minor.

Time to get underneath his many masks. “So, why did you choose to work with experimental species?”

He looked surprised that I’d formed actual words. “I had a talent for it. I did my graduate studies in genetic engineering, but I appreciate the opportunity here to be hands-on.”

I wasn’t paying a lot of attention as he finished his answer. We’d turned yet another corner, and there were green, growing things as far as my eyes could see. I smiled, hearing the message they delivered loud and clear. The heart of the man beside me lived here too. These were growing beds, and very carefully tended ones. “These will all transfer to your gardens?”

“I hope so.”

I hid my smile. Under all the masks, this man was a gardener—and I knew how to work with that. I laid a hand on the nearest leafy head of soft green, letting my fingers hear. “This one is fragile, scared of having neighbors.” I reached for the variegated purple leaves interspersed in the same planting bed. “Ah, you’ve found it a nursemaid.” A subtle and wise pairing.

His eyebrows went up. “You’re very skilled.”

I was, but most people in the wild wouldn’t know that from so few words. Dr. Salmera knew more about Growers than he was letting on. I gestured toward another planter, this one with five or six different species intermixed. “May I?”

He hesitated a moment. “That one is in the very early experimental stages. There’s a lot of work to do yet.”

My fingers itched to feel. I held out my hands wordlessly, letting him see my interest. My compassion. One gardener, revealing herself to another.

He finally nodded.

I moved very gently this time. Brushing heads. Reading the whole before I swam down into the parts.

It wasn’t as clunky as I’d expected. Seven different species signatures, and three of them were already playing quite nicely together. Two of the others had cells that were still confused by very new DNA. I sank in a little deeper there, and smiled. Gene splicing was tricky business, especially when it tried to shift thousands of years of history. This had been done by someone with a skilled and compassionate hand. I turned my head, seeking eye contact with the man those hands belonged to. “The splicing is lovely. This is a tricky mix, but you’ve given them some clever new tools to work with.”

Something in his face softened and opened. “They can’t pick up and move like we can, so they have to adapt. Learn to live well with their neighbors.”

That was a pretty decent strategy for mobile species too, but I kept my mouth shut. The door into understanding Jerome Salmera had just cracked open, and I wanted in.

“They won’t all learn.” He touched a small planting of grasses, one of the species with the new splices. “This is the fourth modification of these meadow grasses I’ve attempted.”

I could hear the sadness in his voice for the first three generations that had failed. The love of a gardener for all green, growing things, even the ones that hadn’t developed the right manners for communal living.

I could feel the conflict inside me. My Talent still didn’t know what to make of this man, and my brain said he might well be at the heart of the problems here. But Tyra Lightbody, human being—she liked Jerome. Not a romantic like, and not a sexual one either. More like when I’d looked at a grubby, fierce ten-year-old girl with miner boots and blonde braids and furious eyes and decided she was going to be my new best friend. Something inside of me felt a connection to the soul that lived inside the charismatic, complicated scientist.

Apparently I was collecting orphans again.

I looked at his grasses and said what I would have said to a friend. “It will take time. You’re growing a family.”

Walls slammed into place. “I wouldn’t know. I never had one.”

Damn. I closed my eyes for a moment, letting the jarring resonances settle. “You’ve built one, then. I was in dome Alpha last night. Your gardens are absolutely beautiful—a harmony created by a man who understands what it is to depend on and love one another very well.”

I could see the confusion land in his eyes as the scientist tried to keep his walls up and the heart who had created the gardens tried to step into friendly light.

It didn’t surprise me when the scientist eventually won—but Growers didn’t give up that easily, and neither did Lightbodies. I reached out to his grasses and opened my Talent, reading the DNA of what grew under my fingers one more time. He was right, they were learning. Learning to share, learning to accept the presence of another in their space, learning to trust. Except for one thing. I looked at Jerome, my hand still on the grasses. “They’re afraid of running out of water.” Desert memories still ran strong. Light could be shared. Water needed to be hoarded.

He blinked. “They’re being developed for a tropical environment. They’ve never been short of water.”

Memories could be ferocious things, even when experience taught exactly the opposite. “It’s what I read from them.”

I could see the moment the scientist remembered he was staring at a Grower—and what that might mean. He looked down at his fourth-generation grasses, a gardener’s love tangling with a scientist’s skepticism. “You could help them shift. To be less afraid.”

I could, but in this case, it would be much more powerful if he did. “You could tell them. Talk to them, reassure them.”

Very gently, his fingers touched the grass—and then walls slammed down again, ones that made the previous version look like toothpicks. “I’ll examine their genetic code. Perhaps we can splice in a rainforest gene or two.”

My head was still ringing. We’d been momentarily connected through the grasses when he’d gone into shutdown, and it had shaken me. I wasn’t sure why—he was hardly the first scientist I’d seen reject my particular brand of woo.

My heart whispered that he was maybe the scientist who needed it the most.

Those who didn’t have the extreme fortune to be born into deep community sought it out in myriad ways, some a lot healthier than others. Fantasy was common, and the desire to control—and a research garden gave a lot of room for both of those.