Of course, that's no good. You don't want them to spread into lumps like mold. You want them to specialize into stems and leaves and roots and fruits and so on, so you challenge them with some brew or other, and you watch your osmotic pressures like a hawk, and, next thing you know, the little callus turns emerald green and it's ready "to be set out.
Most of what you get's no good at all, and at least half of it just dies. But the rest—well, that's where it all comes from, you see. Ski and Flo do stranger things than that, but they've never shown me how. You have to be pretty careful, too. Any time Shef comes near a new batch he's ruined it; he sweats too heavily. My husband, one morning when he stopped by and forgot what it was he wanted of me, ruined one whole crop because he kept sneezing. But it's still no more than cookery. If you can put a perfect chocolate souffle on the table two minutes after the last guest has finished his steak, you can do what I was allowed to do.
By the time I had the whole batch set out I noticed that Flo had moved. She was still on the dewpole, but she had turned around; she was looking toward where Ann Beck-lund still sat, and what she was looking at was Dot Letski.
I drifted over. Dot was studying Ann as carefully as I had, or somewhat more carefully, because she had the intelligence not to touch her.
I never start a conversation with any of my age cohort, but this time I broke my rule. I said, "She's been like that for days, Dot, and yesterday she said something like 'Chan-drasekhar's other limit.' Also she hit me with something."
I have some very good rules, and every time I break them I realize how good they are. Dot didn't say anything. She was peering into Ann's nostrils from an eyelash length away; but she must have given some indication, because I heard a noise from behind me and when I turned Flo was leaping toward us. Behind her the dewpole was still vibrating, and the little foil streamers that catch the moisture in the air and drip it onto the plants were shaking like pennons in a breeze. She wasn't looking at Dot or Ann. She was looking at me. She stopped in the middle of her rush, poised daintily on one foot—Did you ever see the Walt Disney dance of the hippopotamuses? That was Flo—and said several English words. They were, in order, "Dragonfly. Barrier. Roll the bones."
I did not of course understand her any more than I'd understood Ann after she hit me, and I liked this just as little because I had started an argument between my two dear friends. Freely translated, the conversation went like this:
Dot: "Why are you confusing the dummy?"
Flo: "She doesn't understand what Ann's doing."
I mean, that was the first two seconds, if that, and only a tiny fraction of it, and it wasn't in words. It had to be seen to be understood, like dance mime. It went like this:
Why—eyebrows up—you—chin thrust at Flo—confuse— eyes crossed, jaw dropped—dummy?—contemptuous twitch of the shoulder toward me.
And then Flo replying: She—same twitch toward me, less contemptuous, maybe, but no more affectionate—not comprehend— same idiot eyes and jaw—Ann—jerk of the head toward the screening rhubarb.
And then Dot laughed, and stabbed her chin, tongue out and fluttering, toward Flo, shaking her head: The image of fast chatter, with a sort of wrinkle of the nose to suggest that not only did I not understand Flo, either, but perhaps all that Flo had to say was not very important anyway. But you must not think that was all of it. Or even much. Because at the same time they were talking, in clipped, run-together, sketchy words, to each other and perhaps to me or even to distant unhearing Ann. Not in sequence, like the dialogue in a play. Simultaneously. Maybe even interactively, so that the sentence one was saying was modified before it finished by the input from the other. What a catfight! They sounded like cats. They spoke so fast that, even when they used language, the words flew by in growls and yowls and screams.
I couldn't follow what they said after the first few seconds, but it appeared that Dot was taking my side—or at least opposing Flo's— on the grounds of an outmoded adherence to causality. Was I grateful? Oh, was I ever not\ For to have Dot best Flo over me made Flo my enemy, and she was bad enough as my gene-splicing guru. I tried to look un-involved. Now and then a single word lay in my ear long enough to be heard, sometimes even a phrase. I caught a few epithets: "Stochastic bitch!" "Aleatory asshole!" "Serendipitous slob!"—for there were times when even the efficiency of quick-speech had to be sacrificed for the solid English-language impact of an insult in words. But whether the names were aimed at me, or at unhearing Ann, or at each other, I did not know. Or care. These same fights had been going on for a decade or more, and my greatest concern was to stay out of them. I didn't care to be in the middle, like the family dog with his head on his paws, looking from Him to Her as they bickered, with no hope but somewhere to catch an "Eat" or a "Come!" or, dream of Heaven!, an "Out?"
So when Dot, still jabbering away at the jabbering Flo, jerked her head to signify "Let's move on," and Flo shrugged "All right," I was not at all displeased. The jabber kept up unchecked until Flo and Dot were ten meters away, and then it stopped like the throwing of a switch. Dot kept on; Flo turned back to me.
All my little helpers had been standing slack-jawed and grinning, enjoying the fireworks that were not aimed at them. When Flo faced back they all instantly resumed their occupations, but it was me she was approaching.
She did not seem to be angry, exactly, or at least not exactly at me. She scowled and scratched her immense belly and wrinkled her face. She was making an effort to find words, and it took her some time. And at last she failed, for what she finally produced was one explosive sentence:
"Forget it," she snapped, and was gone, lumbering lightly up the slope of the shell, over the planted fields.
I slept not very well that night, and alone, which may have been the reason I did not sleep very well.
But when I woke, on the morning of Day 4243, I still had the feeling that I had had visitors in the night. It felt as though some child of my own, lost but loving, had crept into my bed in the middle of the night, but of course when I stretched out my hand there was nothing there. Sometimes waking to find that a pet had snuggled in beside me was comforting. Mostly it was principally sad. Even guilty, in a way, because to some extent it was my fault that Will had made the first pet. I could not accept that Ann's first little girl had died, and pleaded with Will to do for her what he had done for himself—and he did try, but there was not enough there to save, really. Or on that later time, when I came to the vegetable womb to touch and fuss over my own, and found the cabbage soft and cold. I could not accept that, either.
It left me pensive, though, and the always difficult task of getting myself going in the morning took even longer than usual. When I got out of the shower there actually was someone in my bed. I mean someone live. I could not see who; he had the flowerlets pulled over his head, and all I could see was the lump of flesh under the blanket of roses.
It was too big to be one of the work team, and too small to be one of my regular gentleman callers. "If that's you, Jeron," I warned, "you're going to be in big trouble."