Daniel jumped as his father’s beer can clanged off the wall. Foam splashed across the grimy plasterboard and the can rolled across the bare boards almost to his feet. Stiffly he bent to pick it up. “You’ll get another contract,” he said. “I mean, how many licensed fellers are there?”
“You know what Dan Farrow told me? The Forest Service honcho who hired me? He said I’m a jinx. You think they’re gonna hire me again? Who else is there? There’s no real timber ’cept the Preserves and the National Parks, and the Preserves have their own private crews. That out there…” He waved a hand at the walls and the plantation beyond. “That’s a farm, not a forest. Planted like turnips. So that people like you can go around sucking sap out of them. You don’t need any skills to suck a tree, or drive one of those remote cutters for the garbage trees they feed to the vats.” His lip curled. “A bush hand out of the valley could harvest crop trees. Hey, I got skill at least. When they hire me to fell a dying tree, I don’t break a branch on the good ones.”
“Hey, Dad, I’m off.” Jess emerged from the back of the house, buttoning his clean shirt. “I got a date.”
“You always got a date.” Their father reached for the remaining half of a six-pack on the floor. “You watch yourself, you hear? You can’t support a family as a feller until you got a rep with the Service.”
“Relax.” Jess grinned and winked. “I’m careful.”
“Yeah, right,” Dad grumbled as the front door slammed. “Hot-blooded kid.” He shook his head. “Just like I was. He better be careful, or the Company’ll own him. Like they own you.”
“They don’t own me.” Daniel wiped up the spilled beer with a towel and carried the can into the kitchen. “They just pay me money.”
“Yeah. You work for them, you belong to them.” His father hiccoughed.
“You had any dinner?”
“Nobody owns me. I paid for you to go to the Company’s school, and I pay for their doctor. ’Cause that’s the only clinic and the only school and we don’t take handouts from the government. I pay.” He paused to drink beer. “They don’t own me. Nobody ever owned a Garver, not for five generations. We worked for ourselves, good times and bad, always in timber. It’s in our blood.”
Our meant him and Jess. Daniel tossed the can into the recycle bag, a bitter taste in his mouth. He dropped the towel onto the pile of dirty laundry accumulating in the corner. His father’s cork boots lay on the floor beside the door, caked with ocher mud. On the table, a plastic bag held a wilting green plant still rooted in a clump of dirt. The List species? He touched the plastic gently. You could do federal time for digging up a List species.
“You listening to me?” His father yelled from the living room. “Your mother understood. You’re like her—more like her than me—right down to your tree sucking.”
Daniel took down a family-sized package of chili from the cupboard, emptied it into a bowl, added a package of precooked noodles and shoved the whole thing into the microwave.
“She understood,” his father yelled from the living room. “She understood about owning yourself. What’s your problem, Company boy?”
The timer sounded, and he removed the steaming bowl from the microwave, put two faded place mats down on the scarred kitchen table. His mother must have bought the place mats. He touched the frayed corner of one blue rectangle. He had never thought about that before—that this had been her choice at some store. He wondered what other colors she had rejected, what other patterns.
“You answer me when I speak to you!” His father appeared in the doorway, hands braced on the frame, breathing heavily. “Goddamn it, you show me a little respect, or…”
Daniel looked down to find his bark knife open in his hand, the narrow blade gleaming silver in the light. Razor sharp. “You killed her,” Daniel raised his eyes to his father’s face. Very deliberately, he closed the knife and slid it back into his pocket. Then he opened the back door, went out, and grabbed his sampling pack from the porch where he’d left it. Clearing the steps in a single bound, he sprinted into the darkness, pursued by silence.
Daniel felt the giant’s approach like a ripple moving through the tree’s ripe song even before he saw the glow of his flashlight. He ignored the man as he inserted his bark knife carefully into the smooth skin of a tree, making a small V-shaped incision through bark and cambium. Prying the wound open slightly with the knife, he opened a sample bag and applied its adhesive edge to the hp of cut bark beneath the point of the V. Sap was already beading up along the cut tissues, and as he stuck the small plastic rain awning to the bark above the cut, the first droplets trickled into the bag.
“What does this one produce?” the giant said. Light pooled at Daniel’s feet, making him squint.
“Human insulin. This whole section produces insulin.” Daniel closed his knife and checked the seals on the bag and awning to make sure that neither would fall off.
“Do you know what kind of tree it is?” The giant’s voice was harsh.
“They’re bio-trees.” Daniel turned around. “They’re made. But the engineers started with black locust, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s what I mean.” He swung his flashlight in a wide arc. “Do you always work at night or are you doing a little freelance harvesting on your own?”
“I’m not stealing. I didn’t finish this afternoon.” He tucked the wad of empty bags and the extra rain bonnets into his pack and stuck his knife into his pocket. “I’m finished now.”
“Does your mother know you’re out here?” the man asked abruptly. “Did you tell her about me?”
“She’s dead.” He shouldered his pack, listening to the strange echoes beneath the man’s words. “She died when I was seven.”
For a moment, the giant went very still, then he turned on his heel and started back toward the distant glow of the greenhouse. He walked uncertainly, as if he couldn’t see well in spite of the light he swung like an automaton. Daniel caught up with him as he reached the door of the greenhouse. The survivalist ghost was out tonight. Its vague yearning brushed the fringes of Daniel’s awareness like the touch of an unseen cobweb. “She had cancer.” Daniel answered the question that the giant hadn’t yet asked. “Liver cancer.”
“Why not a transplant?” The words had a strangled sound and he shook his head violently. “Never mind.”
“She didn’t get a transplant because she didn’t have that kind of health care,” Daniel said flatly. “You knew her, didn’t you?”
“I knew her.” He held the door open so that the humid sulfurous air flowed around them. “Dr. Carolyn Foster,” he said softly, and his words yearned like the survivalist’s ghost.
“Doctor?” Startled in spite of himself, Daniel said the word aloud. “What kind of doctor?”
“You didn’t know?” His voice was hushed. “She never told you? Maybe not.” Bitterness scored his words. “She was one of the people who designed those trees you just slashed. She was one of the best botanical engineers in the treecrop industry. A genius. Every company in the business tried to hire her. They offered her the damn moon to come run their R & D departments. God knows what she could have done if she hadn’t…” He drew a deep breath. “I… I worked for her. I was a technician back then—right out of school. She was so damn good.” He drew a deep breath. “I’m Albert. Albert Breslau.”