Spiral

Liam dug into one of the plots with his tweezers, uncovering a plastic bottle cap half covered with a grayish growth. He held it up to the light, his hand shaking slightly. The specimen was like most of the fungi in Liam’s gardens: a saprobe, or feeder on the dead. They fed on the fallen, from plants to people, and Liam was expanding their definition of food. With a combination of trial, error, and genetic engineering, he was teaching them to feed on the detritus of modern society, to break down everything from credit cards to corn husks.

“Pop-pop?” Dylan said.

Liam looked up at his redheaded nine-year-old great-grandson. “Yes?”

“What’s the difference between elephants and blueberries?”

Liam said, “Haven’t a clue.”

“They’re both blue, except for the elephant. What did Tarzan say when he saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”

“Tell me.”

“ ‘Here come the elephants.’ What did Jane say when she saw a thousand elephants coming over the hill?”

“Enlighten me.”

“She said, ‘Here come the blueberries.’ She was color-blind.”

They both laughed. Dylan had a thing for elephant jokes. “Pop-pop? You know pretty much everything, right?”

Liam turned to face him. “I know a few things,” he said.

“How do you know if a girl is… you know. Interested.”

Liam raised his eyebrows. “A woman’s smiles are hard to read, for a woman’s secrets are many indeed.”

“Come on. No rhymes.”

He put down his tweezers. “Well. Let’s see… How do you know? With your great-grandmother Edith, God rest her, it was simple. It was how she stood. She’d bend her leg, her right leg, so that her foot was on its toe. Then her heel would rotate in small circles. She claimed to find me as attractive as a spotted newt, but her heel said otherwise.”

“You’re making this up, aren’t you? You’re telling stories.”

“If I’m lying, I’ll hang in a tree, but her heel twisted for-”

“-none but me,” Dylan finished, laughing.

Liam brightened, glad to see Dylan light of heart. Since the car accident with his mom nearly a year before, he’d had a tough time of it, brushing up against death at an age when he should be engaged with grasshoppers and multiplication tables. Liam fretted about him, picturing himself gone just when the boy needed him most.

But maybe Dylan was finally turning a corner.

In the gardens, a MicroCrawler came running, barely a blur as it zipped down one of the packed-dirt passageways between the rows of fungal plots. The Crawler stopped and used its razor-sharp silicon legs to slice off a sample of fungus. It headed for the corner of the table, where it loaded the sample into a device that analyzed it for RNA and protein expression. The spider-sized silicon-and-metal micro-robots called MicroCrawlers were tenders of the gardens. There were fourteen in all, each smaller than a dime, watched by a camera overhead and directed by a computer in the corner. Dylan was in love with the little robots, gave them all names.

Liam looked at Dylan. “Who’s the girl?”

“Just someone. And I didn’t notice anything with her heel.”

“They’re all different. But they all do something. When you look at her, what does she do?”

“Her eyes get funny. Like she’s squinting.”

“Hmmm. That could go either way. What else?”

“She makes fists.”

“Are her thumbs on the inside or outside?”

“Inside.”

“Well, then, my boy, you are golden.”

Dylan smiled.

“Okay. Why do elephants paint the undersides of their feet yellow?”

Dylan worked it over. “You got me. No idea.”

“So they can hide upside down in bowls of custard.”

“That’s stupid.”

Liam shrugged. “Have you ever found an elephant in your custard?”

“No.”

“Then it clearly works.”

Dylan laughed, then focused on a spot a few feet away. “Pop-pop? Something’s wrong with Mickey.”

Mickey the MicroCrawler stood motionless a few rows over, frozen in place like a statue. Liam leaned over, nudged the Crawler with his tweezers. “Hmmm.” Liam picked it up, acutely conscious of its tiny silicon legs, edges as sharp as a scalpel. He dropped the Crawler in his palm and poked it again with his tweezers. Nothing. He flipped Mickey onto its back and immediately saw the problem. “See that little black spot? The control circuit burned out. Jake said they’d had trouble with this batch.”

“He can’t fix it?”

“Nope.”

“He’s completely, utterly dead?”

“Afraid so.”

Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve never seen one die before.”

“Crawlers are robust little buggers, but they’re not immortal. Nothing is.” Liam put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “What do you say we give Mickey a proper sendoff?”

Liam went to his computer, the Crawler still in hand. He clicked his way to iTunes and queued up the old Irish dirge “Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire.” He gave Dylan a wiggle of his eyebrows, but Dylan suddenly looked serious.

The dirge picked up:

My rider of the bright eyes

What happened to you yesterday?

I thought you in my heart

When I bought your fine clothes.

A man the world could not slay.