SIXTY-FOUR YEARS LATER
DAY 1
THE CRAWLERS IN THE GARDEN
1
LIAM CONNOR LOVED CORNELL. HE HAD TAUGHT AT THE university for more than half a century and expected full well to die shuffling between the Arts Quad and the Big Red Barn. Cornell was a chimera, both a member of the Ivy League and the New York state agricultural school. Nabokov wrote
The campus was perched on a hill overlooking the city of Ithaca, population twenty-nine thousand, tucked between a pair of glacier-carved gorges. It was founded in 1865 by the millionaire and philanthropist Ezra Cornell, founder of Western Union and a freethinker who believed that the practical sciences should be taught with the same zeal as the classics. Cornell had made his money on the telegraph, the new communication technology that had remade society as fundamentally as would the Internet one hundred and fifty years later. He used his fortune to create a new kind of university, utterly different from the religion- and tradition-bound schools of the era: “An institution where any person could find instruction in any study,” a quote that would become the school’s motto. Coed and nondenominational from the day it opened, the university graduated its first female student in 1873 and its first African American in 1897. Liam was proud of the university’s heritage-he had a deep appreciation and respect for the underdog. A person’s value, he believed, was set by who they were, not by how others treated them. For eight centuries, the Irish had been treated as little more than apes by the British, and Liam never forgot it.
LIAM’S LABORATORIES WERE TUCKED AWAY IN THE BASEMENT of the Physical Sciences Building, a new glass, steel, and stone structure in the center of campus wedged between the old facades of Rockefeller and Baker halls. This evening he stood in the middle of his lab, a pair of silver, sharp-point #5 tweezers in his hand. The old Irishman was eighty-six years old, dressed in brown dungarees, a gray sweater, and old white sneakers. During his sixty years at Cornell, Liam had put together one of the most unusual and diverse collections of living fungi on the planet. The Gardens of Decay, as he called them, consisted of ten thousand postage stamp-sized plots of different mycological species laid out on a square grid, a mottled menagerie of yellows, greens, and grays, like farmland seen from thirty thousand feet. They occupied three large custom-built granite-topped tables, each almost nine feet across and weighing half a ton. To count all the species, ticking off one a second, would take hours, a testament to the power and fecundity of evolution.
Each of the tiny plots was labeled by a pair of letters and a three-digit number. Plot #HV-324 was
Next to it was
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.”
“
“She makes fists.”
