Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Four Fifth Column

 

 

The supreme art of war
is to subdue the enemy
without fighting.

 — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 512 BCE)

 

The secret was to remove all the magnesium and most of the HE, because we didn’t want either sterilizing fire or even too much heat, just dispersive force, to spread the spores as widely as possible, and to do as little damage as could possibly be managed.

We were all of us perfectly capable of doing these modifications on the fly, of course, since flamethrowers and shoulder-fired missiles were our standard-issue weapons, and we could field-strip and repair either weapon blindfolded. We had to be, because a score of fifty out of sixty possible points in the practical examinations covering those very tasks were a mandatory part of our basic training requirements for graduation, and twelve points of those sixty were awarded for blindfolded disassembly and reassembly of those two weapons.

Unfortunately, this physical dexterity didn’t uniformly translate into equal facility in performing ‘field maintenance’ on their mental attitudes for several of our new recruits, two of whom had fallen into a black humor over their reduced circumstances and imagined loss of social status, even though the only society for which that actually mattered would be suicidal to approach. To me, this seemed profoundly silly. You might as well worry about the weather conditions on the Moon, or try to calculate exactly how quickly you’d have to flap your arms to have a good chance of flying there to see.

“Look,” I said to the two sad sacks, “right now, you’re a danger to all of us. If you persist in your crazy ‘plans’ to go ‘back home,’ you’ll never make it through the gates without going through a contamination inspection, and even at this early stage, the symptoms of infection by the plants are obvious. They’ll kill you out of hand, but worse, you’ll draw their attention to the fact that there are ‘wild humans’ living out here, and their inevitable course of action post-discovery would be to mount an expeditionary force to seek out and destroy us all.”

“But they might be able to help us!” one of the pair said, Chert, he was, and not even the stupidest by half. “Our doctors might know of some sort of cure for this abomination!”

“Believe me,” I said, “the only ‘cure’ they’re going to offer is endless freedom from the dreary task of breathing, and the wonderful opportunity to fertilize the ring wall of death that surrounds every keep held by the Horticulturists with your broken body. Haven’t you ever seen what happens to anyone with visible signs of hermaphrodism? Has the Citadel become so dainty and fastidious that their public executions are performed in private?”

“But those people deserved to die, because they’d neglected their sworn duties, or had been harboring mutinous thoughts!” the idiot protested.

“Oh, really? Well, then you two must have done the same, then, didn’t you? Since you’re obviously infected, you simply must have been doing one or the other, and your presence in your party, with the high number you formerly wore, strongly suggests that you were caught out in some infraction or another, which rather proves your point, doesn’t it? Why don’t we just hand you both machetes so you can chop each other’s heads off for your separate traitorous derelictions of duty? I’m afraid you’ll have to be very careful about the timing, though, and promise not to flinch, since it would be very awkward to beg for help with your throat cut, and I’m not at all sure that a slow and painful death wouldn’t provide a good morale booster for those of us with any sense, so you couldn’t count on me for the coup de grâce.”

“Don’t be an ass, Chert,” the smart one added, almost equally scathing. He — or rather she — was calling herself Beryl now, having quickly seen the logic of my own sketchy prophylactic strategy, although neither of us were terribly optimistic about our ability to pull off any long-term interaction with our former friends and allies. Still, she’d turned out quite nicely, and had an innate fashion sense that I thought was rather better than my own, if truth be told. “We’re all in the same soup, and we’ll all drown separately if we don’t all swim together.”

“But…,” he said, obviously starting off on another silly complaint.

“ ‘But,’ nothing!” I screamed at him. “Shut up and soldier! You’re still under military discipline here, so no more whining and malingering.”

“But, you’re planning to infect the entire Citadel!” he whined.

“Indeed I am, and indeed we will, together with the Castle and as many other of the failing Horticulturist strongholds as possible,” I said implacably. “I fully understand that some people might be hurt, but The Citadel and The Castle are both on the verge of collapse even now, about to be toppled by the plants that besiege them, probably accompanied by enormous loss of life, either through direct assault or starvation, since foraging is rapidly becoming either completely or essentially impossible to sustain because the casualties inherent in forays through the ring walls will inevitably outstrip the ability of the community to replace them. It’s only a matter of time before the plants manage to cut off all access to the outside world through new weapons in their arsenal, the sticky burrs, their emerging ability to coördinate their actions, not to mention the giant burrowers, which will eventually be able to undermine and topple the walls. If that happens, everyone will die, including the children and the human race entirely, or at least our local variety.”

“But what can we do to defeat the plants on our own?” Chert said, still unwilling to see that the game had changed while he wasn’t looking.

“Everything…, and nothing,” I said. “ ‘We surrender…,’ would be a good start, since the plants have overwhelming strength and resources available and we’re ultimately entirely dependent upon them, since they take care of transforming the Sun’s energy into useful forms for us, so the entire enterprise of ‘trying to beat the plants’ was schizophrenic to begin with, something like plunging a knife into your own heart because its constant beating was keeping you awake at night.”

“Surrender?” Chert asked, frightened by the thought.

“Surely you’ve noticed,” Beryl said, “That the plants aren’t particularly hostile toward us any more, other than that creepy thing in the lake, but it seems anxious to eat anything that comes along, not us in particular.”

To say that I was pleased by Beryl’s words would be grossly understated. She went on, “The world here in the city isn’t perfectly safe, of course, but it’s not implacably vicious the way it is around our former homes. Don’t ask me how it happened, but the plants are sensitive to how we feel about them, and pretty much mind their own business as soon as they figure out that we mean them no harm.” I studied Chert with some care. “By ‘surrender’ I mean giving up our own hatred toward the plants and seeing them for what they are, fellow creatures and inhabitants of our world, and the only truly necessary part of it, as far as we’re concerned, because almost all the food we eat is, or was, derived from plants. Even the few meat products we find unspoilt in the supermarkets are herbivores, although I’ve never actually seen a pork, or a beef, but they must have been commonplace at one time, before the current war erupted. Just a few miles beyond the ring walls, the world still abounds with wheat and other grasses, whose seeds were once commonly used to make bread, and can still be used so, because humans and grasses were never at war in the old days. In fact, the opposite was true, because humans took care of most true grasses, and protected them from other creatures which sought to exploit the same œcological niches, so wheat and corn thrived at the expense of dandelions and burdocks.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Chert said, bored already. “You’ve told us this fairytale before, about how the early horticulturists went crazy before, and went to war against every form of life that didn’t seem immediately useful. So what’s all that stuff got to do with us?”

I tried again, “You know how some soldiers are about their gear? always polishing it, fiddling with it, going way beyond reasonable and prudent maintenance and care into obsession? As if there were nothing in the world more important than how well their fatigue boots were polished, or how sharply-creased their dress trousers were? As if having their underwear ironed might make a difference as to whether or not their brains got eaten by a burdock burr? Or whether they were sliced into ribbons by a dandelion ‘pseudoshark?’ ”

“Yeah? So?”

“So, it’s a fairly common human reaction to high-stress environments, we develop obsessive ‘compulsions’ which give us the illusion of having control of our lives. At some point, for whatever reasons, humans became obsessive about dandelions, burdocks, and other ‘weeds,’ which put pressure on all of them either to change or die, and in the process seem to have become obsessive about us. They survived — we can see that — but I haven’t been able to find anything in the library that explains why or exactly how they were so successful, although there were a lot of people warning about this grave danger or that as we humans evidently released chemicals and something called ‘radioactivity’ into the environment, and at least some of them warned about the dangers of genetic mutations — damage to the fundamental structure of living things — so whatever it was, it went way beyond obsession and well into madness.”

Chert looked like he was going to say something stupid, but our conversation was interrupted by the distant thuds of three HE/Mag missiles going off in quick succession, which served to distract us all.

“Well,” I said, “it looks like Chert will have an opportunity to test his theory rather sooner than we expected.” I looked Chert in the eyes and said, “Well, Chert, how’s it going down? Do you want to walk out to greet your former companions with a friendly smile and a white flag? Or do you want to hang out here with us?”

He seemed startled by the stark and sudden opportunity to choose, and a look of panic flashed across his face as he thought about the actuality of confronting the prospect of disclosure rather than the fantasy of rescue. Perhaps his changes had already started to improve his thinking, because he said quite quickly, with no dithering at all, really, “I think your advice was best.” I’ll give him credit for the fact that he was able to keep most of his usual sullen resentment out of his voice.

I smiled to show that there were no hard feelings and said, “Good! We’d all of us miss you, you know. Every largish group needs a cautious voice to present the alternatives fairly.”

At that, he blushed and said, “I’m not sure it was an alternative as much as wishful thinking.”

“Well,” I answered. “It’s nice to have at least one optimist in every group as well. Too many realists makes for gloomy outings.” I gathered up my biggest duffle and said, “Speaking of which, it’s time to arrange our next encounter with the Horticulturists, and I’d prefer not to kill them. They can’t help being what they are, and some of them might have been pals of yours at one time, although I don’t doubt that they’d cheerfully kill you if they saw you and realized who you were right this very minute. I know that my own father handed my own mother over to the execution squad without a moment’s hesitation, and then stood calmly by as she was thrown down to her death from the top of the outer castle wall, but of course your own experience might differ. My own exposure to the military justice system was limited by my youth and then by my immediate dispatch on a doomed foraging expedition when I was just seventeen years of age. My father had arranged that as well, so if marriage and parental concern don’t count for much, I wouldn’t depend on casual friendship for anything special.”

 

 

We were all of us armed with crossbows and a good supply of quarrels, which seemed a good compromise between efficiency and lethality. Crossbows were intuitive enough for anyone clever enough to aim a flamethrower that they didn’t require special training, and unless the victim was extremely unlucky, we could probably save their life by feeding him a bit of cheese, which tended to accelerate all types of healing. I’d discovered this early on, although I hadn’t actually realized it until after I’d already begun to depend on it. I never said that I was the smartest guy in the room. If I’d been smarter, I’d never have been caught being idle on watch, and probably wouldn’t be out here at all, but I can’t say that I’m devastated about it, since I’d also figured out that being on the outside looking in was a lot safer than being on the inside looking out. In fact, as far as I could see, the wise guys who’d managed to sidle their way into all the cushy jobs in the castles were the saddest sacks of all, because they were all fighting each other for the privilege of being the last man standing when the plants overran the various fortresses around the world, which wouldn’t be long, I thought, considering exactly how dangerous they’d become even since I was a child. I remember cheering crowds standing by the gates as the courageous foraging parties marched out, but that didn’t happen any more, since very few of them came back, and the general officers had long since stopped taking turns.

 

 

We could almost feel them coming through the wheatgrass on the outskirts of our city, so we had plenty of time to deploy before they marched into view. I was visibly alone in the middle of the road when they finally appeared, and they stopped dead in their tracks, staring at me, before one of them, their Number One, walked forward.

“Who are you?” he asked, deep suspicion radiating from him, his face hostile, his tone arrogant, and his demeanor contemptuous, “and why aren’t you in a protective horticultural suit?”

“I’m not wearing one of those silly suits because I don’t need to. We’ve developed a vaccine which prevents hostile reactions from the plants, and you’re trespassing in our domain, so we’d appreciate it if you left, although we might be willing to trade for food, if you’ve brought trade goods of any sort, precious metals are always nice, although we’re also interested in shoulder-launched missiles.”

“We take what we need to survive!” he shouted angrily. “We certainly don’t bargain with women!”

“The more fools you are, then, because you’re at our mercy just now, and would do well to remember it.”

Now he was really ticked off. “Number Five! Burn her!”

One of them ran off to one side slightly, in a flanking position, the approved tactic for burning plants when taken by surprise.

It wasn’t a surprise to me, of course. ‘Gumball! This one’s almost edible!’ I thought, ‘and he’s got a lot of yummy volatile hydrocarbons on his back as well.’.

Quick as a flash, the ground dropped from beneath them both, then closed up again as quickly as Hades putting the snatch on Persephone, but neither of them were nearly as pretty. They were, however, just as gone.

The other guys were flummoxed, and had just started to bring their weapons up when I shouted, “Stand down! At ease!” in my very best Drill Sergeant voice.

Confused and appalled by the sudden disappearance of their officer, they did as they were told.

‘Gumball! Spit’em out!’ I thought. ‘You can eat the dandelion juice, since they stole it anyway.’

Up they came, both of them as naked as jaybirds, or so I imagined, since I’ve never actually seen a jaybird. Gumball was getting more clever by the day, so I let him know that I was very pleased, but told him to stay underground, just in case any one of our new prisoners got any bright ideas.

“Now,” I said, “Does anyone still imagine that bullying ‘the girl’ is a good idea? If so, the squad of sharpshooters behind you are quite ready to make it very difficult for you to sit down for many weeks to come, and that’s only if you manage to walk back home with your ass shot halfway to Harry’s Holy Hell.”

They’d just started to turn around when I shouted, “Eyes front!” then waited until they’d complied with my order. “Now I know you men find it a little strange to be taking orders from a woman, so I’m going to cut you a little slack. I’m sure you’ve heard about what happened to the last crew as well, and are understandably worried. You needn’t be. You’re all going home — if you don’t tick me off — and you’re going back with as much food as you can reasonably carry, so you’ll all be heroes. Not only that, but we’ll personally escort you through the defenses erected by the plants, so there shouldn’t be any further deaths.” I let that sink in for a bit, then asked, “Are there any questions?”

One of them worked up the nerve to ask, “Begging your pardon, Ma’am, but who are you? You talk like you’re part of the Horticulturist forces, but there are no women in the ranks.”

“You’re mistaken,” I said calmly. “On the West Coast, we’ve made several discoveries that have finally turned the tide in our long war against the plants, and I’m living proof. My husband is General Granite McKenzie, commanding the Vancouver Horticulturist Seventh Field Army, and I’m Lieutenant General Sapphire McKenzie of the Vancouver Women’s Horticultural Auxiliary Corps, the V-WHACKs, as we’re affectionately called back on the island.”

“V…Vancouver?! Isn’t that in Canada?!” my quasi-prisoner exclaimed.

I smiled. He didn’t look particularly reassured thereby. “Why, yes, it is, Soldier, but as you probably know we’ve had a joint command structure for almost two hundred years.” I smiled more pleasantly. “I don’t foresee any particular difficulties in accommodating the local idiosyncrasies of your small garrison.” I smiled again when I saw him blanch.

“But where’s your husband now!?” he said anxiously, as if any husband of mine could possibly control me.

“He’s gone ahead to liaise with New York Horticulturist Command, of course, and left me here to ‘hold the fort,’ as it were, in preparation for the full integration of the East Coast into our overall North American command structure.” I smiled again. There are few things more discomfiting to the military mind than the prospect of foisting change upon local structures from above. The fact that the superstructure of my Continental Army was completely fictional didn’t bother me at all, since I had access to many manual typewriters and had taught myself to use one using a book from the public library. It had been surprisingly easy to pick up the necessary techniques, and the addition of a plentiful supply of completely bogus forms that I’d run off at a local silk-screen shop gave me all the specious authority I needed. I was actually looking forward to my first meeting with the people from the Citadel so I smiled mysteriously for the benefit of all. ‘Life is filled with ironic reversals,’ I thought, ‘six months into my new life, I’ve gone from planning how to escape discovery to plotting the overthrow of the culture I was born into. How time flies when you’re having fun. It just goes to show that Carl von Clausewitz was right when he said that the best defense is a good offense, although he put it in somewhat more nuanced terms, since he tended more toward subtlety than bold declarations. Be flexible was more like his real approach to warfare. “Every attack becomes weaker as it progresses” was one of his real maxims, and never commit everything to one attack, but retain as much over as is necessary for an orderly retreat, but this commendable caution doesn’t lead quite so easily to pithy generalizations.’ The man was still staring at me, obviously mired in sexist presumptions, so I said, “Well? What are you waiting for? You’re dismissed!” Then I called out to Beryl, “Major Farquhar! Would you please collect the weapons of this sorry crew, and arrange a secure bivouac area for them until we can see them on their merry way tomorrow?”

“Our weapons, Ma’am?” another of them said.

“Did you not clearly hear me say, ‘Dismissed!’ Soldier?” I scowled at him in particular, but included them all in my general disapproval, especially the two naked guys. “Major Farquhar will sort you out, and not one of you can be trusted with weapons just yet, since you don’t know enough to distinguish our plant allies from our enemies. Your number One, however, should consider himself on report for ordering an unprovoked assault on a woman and a superior officer.”

He had the good sense to look frightened. Officers broken in rank did poorly in the general scheme of things, not that I had any real intention of carrying things that far unless provoked again.

Beryl strolled out into the road, dressed in a truly stunning ‘boho’ outfit from one of the upscale ‘department stores’ located near my former lodgings in the tall building, and chastized them, “I don’t know why I should bother with any of you, considering your sorry lack of discipline, but General McKenzie has evidently decided to treat you with compassion. I’m not quite as forgiving, though, so if any of you speak again before you’re spoken to, I’ll have a Sergeant stop by to give you a few stripes to think about. Am I making myself clear?”

“Yes, Ma’am!” they said in chorus, trying to look like soldiers.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now, if you’ll lay your weapons down on the road where you stand, you’ll find ample accommodations and food arranged for visitors over in that small dwelling.” She indicated an undamaged home just a hundred feet or so back in towards town, one of the ones I’d used to stash provisions in before I’d changed my plans, as it happened. “I’ll send a Sergeant by later to see if any of you have any needs beyond the obvious, but feel free to open and eat any of the provisions stacked in the rooms, with the usual caution not to waste anything that might help any of your citizens when you begin hauling it back for their use. There are beverages as well, but stay away from anything with alcohol in it, since we don’t want to have to rescue you from any trouble you might get into. We have a latrine arranged in the back yard, and ample bathroom tissues available, so please don’t go without. Remember to wash your hands. Any questions?”

“No, Ma’am! Thank you, Ma’am!” they said, a little more raggedly than they’d managed for me. I’d have to speak to Beryl about the proper attitude and deportment for officers. It’s all a matter of arrogance, that and the aura of menace one has to affect, of being ready to punish people without warning and without remorse. I’d had a good exemplar in my father, but most people weren’t quite that lucky.

 

 

The journey back to The Citadel was almost anticlimactic. The surrounding dandelions weren’t particularly clever, but they knew enough not to annoy the bandersnatches, and we made the men load their threatening ‘suits’ in with the rest of the booty from their expedition, so we waltzed right through and out onto the terrible plain of half-melted rock and ash which surrounded the castle. The sight depressed me, especially after having lived in freedom for many months. We stopped, and I handed over my forged authorization papers to one of the inmates, telling him to convey my apologies to his commander, but I had pressing business elsewhere. I wasn’t particularly worried about them, since we’d given them four of my wagons, each one of them piled high with food, as a consolation prize. One of our new gals had found a ‘warehouse’ — the proper name for those flat-topped buildings — with several dozen of them on hand, so I wasn’t worried about running out, and the four they had now could be used on their outward expeditions, for which we’d arranged to provide an escort, to keep them from getting up to any further mischief which might annoy the plants, and thereby set back my long-term plans a bit. The first infections would be setting in within a day or two, primarily amongst the officers and their dependents, unless I missed my guess, since they usually had first dibs on the choicest items retrieved from outside the castles, and my lovely cheese would qualify as choice, once all the ‘goodies’ had passed inspection.

 

 

Before leaving the copious vicus of the Citadel and its environs, we — Beryl and I alone — took a small detour upwind of its imposing walls, sending the others back with a cheerful wave of our hands, prompting me to make a mental note to salvage some lacy hankies from one of the better clothing stores back in the city. There was a gentle breeze from the west, which seemed fitting, somehow, and it was there in a clearing just behind the tallest dandelions and burdocks that we fired two missiles into the air, which made the plants nervous, of course, but they soon perceived that we meant no harm and settled back to their normal wary watchfulness.

Watching from the ground, we saw that our modifications to the propellent and the timer had been almost perfect, because the reduced charge set off a small explosion — more like a pop — just below the level of the highest plants, effectively shielding it from observation from within the citadel, but none-the-less reduced the cheese in the payload to minute particles of cheese dust, which puffed out like infinitesimal dandelion seeds before being caught by the wind and carried back toward the fortress, quickly dispersing into near invisibility.

“Well,” Beryl said, “That’s one down, in any case.” She began to pack up our gear and I helped. It wasn’t difficult, since the two missiles had been a large portion of the load.

“Probably, ” I finally answered her, our duffles packed up and already walking back toward the rough path home. “We’ll be back tomorrow, though, to ensure that the local command structure is fully aware of the ‘new orders’ regarding plant infections from ‘Central Command.’ I’d hate to seen any more innocents thrown from the wall we’ve just made more-or-less irrelevant. Many will find it difficult to cope with the transition from the old certitudes to the new reality, so I worry about the short-term consequences, even as I precipitate the inevitable onset of the future.” I grimaced as I thought about all that could possibly go wrong. “If you’re going to foment revolution, it helps a lot if you’re both cruel and callous to start with.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, staring off toward the open fields that surrounded the ring wall of beseiging plants, “the first thing that sharing a table in the enlisted mess taught me was that you eat what’s set before you, ’cause there won’t be anything better coming along later.”

I glanced at her with one eyebrow raised in wry apology, feeling chastized. “Sorry. I can assure you that the choices I had as the child of an officer were similarly circumscribed, although I admit to enjoying a slightly better menu. At the time, it didn’t seem particularly luxurious, but I suppose that I didn’t bother to wonder about what anyone else was eating either, so I’m not whining.”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Even as an enlisted member of the Corps, I had a better choice of eats available than the civilians did, so I guess we’re both guilty of profiting from the inequities we were born or stumbled into.”

For some reason, her admission cheered me up again. “Well, if what we’re doing succeeds — and I think it will in the long run — we’ve started down a path of freedom and reconciliation for all of us, not just the officers or the Horticulturist Corps in general. Once the people can leave their prisons behind, there’s a whole continent out there where we’ll be able to grow our own damned food instead of stealing it from people long dead, and it will be much more difficult to keep people in bondage of any sort, because all of them will be able to walk out the gates they’ve been hiding behind and have a good chance of making some kind of living on their own.”

Beryl looked sceptical. “Do you really think they will? We’ve lived as scavengers for so long, the idea of actually working for a living might not be all that attractive to many of our people.”

“Maybe not, and there are ample provisions in store to sustain them for quite some time, but the most adventurous will, and most importantly the ‘rugged individualists’ who chafed under regimentation and restrictions, which is probably what most pioneers have been like over the years.” I shrugged. “It’s a way of sorting people with minimal impact, because the people sort themselves.”

“But what do you get out of this?” she asked.

‘Crap!’ “I don’t really know,” I confessed. “Mostly, I’ve just been improvising, trying to stay alive, and to make sure that I have some way of surviving tomorrow.”

“Your plans seem rather elaborate for ‘just surviving,’ aren’t they?”

I laughed and said, “Well, I’ve always been prone to over-thinking, plus — after I was infected — I seemed to be able to reason things out more clearly for some reason. It was like I could see, or maybe feel would be a better word, connections between things that had seemed completely unrelated before.”

Beryl nodded. “I’ve felt the same way. Before I began to change, I just figured that the story the Horticultural Corps told us was true, that the plants had ‘revolted’ for some reason, so it was our duty to ‘destroy the rebels,’ which seemed as likely an explanation as anything, but then, without the slightest transition that I noticed, the whole story just…fell apart, and then seemed utterly, almost laughably, false, and I suddenly understood exactly what you were saying about the Corps bringing the whole sorry mess we were in toppling down around their own ears. Harry’s Hell, if I’d been the dandelions, I’d have been ticked off too.”

“It’s not just the dandelions,” I said confidently. “One of the ‘perks’ of being an officer’s child was that my Dad would sometimes pass on rumors that usually circulated only amongst the officers. The burdocks weren’t any problem at all, for example, just ten or twenty years ago, but now that’s changed, as you know. Further south, there’s supposed to be a plant called a ‘kudzu’ that’s even worse than the dandelions. It’s still a bit too cold for them to survive and thrive in our winters, but down there, they can supposedly grow fast enough to topple a castle wall overnight, pulling it apart with what they call ‘vines,’ something like blackberry vines, I guess, but without the thorns.”

“You’re joking!” Beryl exclaimed.

“Not that I know of, although I’ve never actually seen them. The local command believed it, though, and I see no particular reason not to believe it.” I thought for a minute, trying to remember what I’d heard. “They use mostly poison down there, because the kudzu has a big heart or something deep underground, so if you burn them, they’re already sprouting up again almost before your back is turned on them.”

“Whoa! Like zombies! Salad of the living dead!” she said, almost delighted.

I looked at her closely. “The crazy thing is that the damned things are edible, almost like a potato, or so they say, but they have to douse them with so much poison before they’re dead enough to stop strangling people that they’re too toxic to eat by the time they’re passive enough to cook. How in the world did you know that?”

“I already told you, Sapphire dear. Have you forgotten already? I’m understanding things differently than I ever could have done before. I’m even starting to feel how you communicate somehow with your bandersnatches. It… tickles… somehow inside my head, and every once in a while — not very often so far — I can even see, or think that I see, what they’re seeing, although I can’t even guess how they do it, because they don’t seem to have any eyes.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose up. “I feel it too, more often, I think, than you do, but then I’ve been changed longer than you have too. I wondered if I was imagining what I thought I was envisioning about the bandersnatches, though, because I’ve always had a pretty active imagination.”

“Not me,” she said cheerfully. “I was pretty much down-to-earth and boring.”

“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear you say that….” Then I stopped speaking when I realized what that might have sounded like. “Not that you’re boring, of course, but that someone else was experiencing the same strange sensations that I was. I’ve been a little worried about the possibility that I might be crazy, because I didn’t dare say what I was experiencing. At first I thought that they could hear me, just Gumball at first, although I couldn’t figure out what the bandersnatches used for ears, but then I realized that they could figure out what I wanted them to do even when I didn’t actually say anything. I finally realized that they could hear me even when I didn’t actually speak, which means that I can ‘talk’ to the bandersnatches, for example — or I think I can — and they ‘listen’ to me, even when they’re underground.”

“I had that impression, right from the start, but wasn’t quite sure whether you were the nutcase or I was.” She grinned at me.

I grinned back, to show her that there were no hard feelings. “Oh, you can’t help that. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad….”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Why do I have the impression that you’re making fun of me?”

“Oh, but I’m not at all,” I said quickly. “It’s a quote from a book I found in the library. I liked it because it featured talking plants, but it was realistic, since some of the plants weren’t friendly at all. On the other hand, it was hopeful, because everything turned out all right in the end.”

“They had books about intelligent plants?”

“Quite a few, actually, and some of them were quite frightening, like The Day of the Triffids, which seemed quite similar to our situation here, except that armed gangs of male thugs crept around trying to enslave one group of survivors or another, which seemed silly, since the plants were the real danger. Half the damned book was spent either quarrelling or escaping from any of several crazed groups of human beings, with very little attention being paid to their common enemy, the poisonous triffids.”

“But isn’t that almost exactly what we have here?” Beryl asked me. “We don’t have armed gangs walking around, sure — it’s too dangerous — but what in Harry’s Holy Hell are the officer corps and the city leaders other than an organized gang looking out mostly for themselves? When’s the last time you heard anyone talk about actually fighting the plants, or trying to win this endless war? We live like rats, sneaking around on the edges of the world inhabited by plants, daring only to sneak out to snatch bits of food, which we proudly bring back to the nest while the biggest rats take all the best stuff. You don’t see them volunteering for many of the dangerous assignments, do you?”

I blinked in surprise. I’d thought about that myself; aside from the Looies — who just barely qualified as officers — just a tad more elevated in status than the Sergeants, who often had considerably more real power, none of the officers walked out through the sally ports these days, and of course the civilian Castle officials never had, at least not that I knew of.

“You’re right, of course. They’re in exactly the positions that the ‘gang leaders’ in the story sought for themselves. In fact, the book addressed the problem of scavenging as a way of life, since it’s unsustainable in the long run. Eventually, we have to grow our own food or we’ll all starve.”

“Duuh! Just now figuring that out? Most everybody knows that, but nobody can figure out how to manage it in the face of the dangerous plants, and our ‘leaders’ are too timid to try. They’ve all got cushy jobs, and people to wait on them hand and foot, so why should they rock the boat?” She paused, looking me up and down and then said, “That’s why we like you, you know, and follow your lead, for the most part, because you actually lead instead of just ordering people around like most of the officers back home. When the scavenger crew from the Citadel arrived, you didn’t tell someone else to confront them, but told us all to hide while you put your own ass right on the front line.”

“Well, it didn’t seem right to ask you all to face up to what might be a fight between you and your former pals. It wouldn’t have been right.”

“Since when do officers worry about what’s ‘fair,’ much less ‘right?’ ” she asked wryly, not expecting any answer. “Not only do you never ask us to do anything you wouldn’t do, you explain what’s happening, and what you’re thinking, before you commit us to anything.” She stuck her tongue in her cheek for a moment. “In fact, as armies go, our small band of sisters is a hell of a democracy.”

I blushed.

 

 

The City looked odd from this direction. Where my ‘square mountain’ had stood out against the skyline approaching it from the west in the morning, with that vast expanse of glass still in shadow, approaching it from the Citadel meant that the glare of the sun on glass made it obvious that it had been made by human hands, and it was partially concealed behind quite a few lesser buildings most of which had their own windowy glare, so the entire settlement instantly resolved into unambiguous human artifice, not nature, which made me feel a little foolish, in retrospect.

We’d been jogging along for quite some time, trying to catch up with the rest of our party, when we heard the first of a closely-spaced series of unmistakeable HE explosions, which could mean only one thing, Horticulturists, probably from the Castle.

“Harry’s Stainless Steel Balls!” I shouted, already lengthening my stride. “Let’s go!” I hoped to hell my crew had sense enough to stay out of harm’s way until we got there.

As we ran, I did a mental inventory; all we had in the way of weapons was one rocket launcher with no rockets — ‘Note to self: Never use all your ammunition!’ — and the knowledge of where we’d stashed a cache of missiles. The rest of our crew had the crossbows and plenty of bolts, but if those idiots from the Castle were using napalm and rockets, they’d be hopelessly outmatched until Beryl and I got there.

In desperation, I cast ahead for any trace of Gumball and his pals, but I couldn’t sense their presence at all, and then I almost wept for grief and rage when I thought that they might have been killed by the Castle creeps.

I didn’t weep, though; I ran faster.

 

 

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved