Frederick Learned Tilton–lead scientist, USS Belleforest [First] Terraforming Mission on PBR12 (a.k.a)”Garden Planet.”

That his American benefactors lacked the vision to capitalize on the panoply of opportunities that this planet presented only caused those opportunities to bloom in the mind that had been delivered here as Frederick Learned Tilton.

Peering into the surveillance screen, it suddenly occurs to Tilton that Kyshtym Korsikov and Aurelie Beers are, and have been, lovers for some time. Or were, and were lovers, as they are, at this moment, dying. He picks up on their dirty little secret in the one-last-time way that Kysh is holding Aurie and kissing her. They are and have been, or were and were, Tilton’s friends and partners here in their orbiting genetics lab. Kysh was a fine statistician, drinking problem notwithstanding. And Beers, well, he has to admit that this late discovery of her intimacy with Kysh is causing him a little pang of – what? No! Look at her she’s just an old rag.

Tilton gets a little erotic jolt, despite himself, watching the lovers melting into each other’s embrace. He zooms in with the remote camera. He is reminded of Noguchi’s Kiss: two people face-to-face carved out of one block of stone. Except, in this case, it’s transparent skin and fat and ridiculously fast arterial development. And yes, there definitely is a little alpha-male animosity here. “Kysh, I should kill you,” he thinks, “I AM killing you, I would have anyway, but here’s another good solid tribal reason for it.”

Tilton is aware that he thinks of all the women as chattel, and, while he’s too professional to rut among his team as such, he likes to maintain the hypothetical dominance that his title implies. “Surely,” he tells himself, sucking the uncontaminated air of his compartment into his cleanly-shaved nostrils, “she must have been thinking of me and settling for him. It goes without saying that all the women want the lead scientist.”

“And isn’t that funny, a lush, falling Aurelie Beers.”

Agro Planet: It’s Self-Defense

He thinks “Maybe I’ll go by my middle name from now on, Learned Tilton.” He’s firing on every synapse now, he can see it all, time has ceased and left a million-facetted gemstone at the center of his mind. Learned Tilton. He need only turn his head, his EYE, to see past, present and future, to pull strings and see the effects of his manipulation ripple through time and history. What is a little secret affair? What is a little jealousy? It’s nothing. It’s everything. It’s all connected. His cock, his mind, the alien dna unspooling the core of his being, respooling him into a god.

He sees his nobility, his frailty; they are all one. He loves and accepts himself, warts and all.

“The infection is really getting a hold now. ” He says aloud, for the benefit of the computer which is recording this. “Look at that, the two of them are just melting into one another, like cell division in reverse.” Onscreen Kyshtym and Auralie Beer’s clothes are slipping away like a pile of rags thrown onto too big of a mess. The protoplasm seems to be pushing them off like the hair and other non-living tissue. “It’s like the ARK process, and like what happened to Pieter, only much faster. The living tissue will probably ooze toward someplace dark and warm.”

As the six hundred other crew members aboard the Belleforest die similar deaths, and become the stuff of dreams, Tilton thinks, “I don’t have to worry anymore about who is fucking who,” he snorts, the thought stirs him. Having evacuated the hallways and sterilized the air, Tilton left the bridge, stepping over the body of Blimnel and taking a dirt car down to the common room.

Apart from the unfortunate necessity of shooting Blimnel, Tilton’s plan is going off without a hitch. The terrified crew members who had made it as far as the airlock, had boarded the escape pod before succumbing to the air-born infection. Now Tilton will sit on a bench in front of the big bay window in the common room and watch the penultimate phase of his operation, the launching of the infected crew members to Earth.

Though no one aboard her is in any condition to navigate, like a good pigeon, the escape pod knows just how to get home. At the other end of her twelve and a half-year trip the passengers will be unrecognizable. But Tilton’s communique will reach Earth well-ahead of Pod 9, explaining what they are carrying: the genetic equivalent of Promethean fire.

When the tiny craft arcs away from the glowing white bulk of the USS Belleforest, Tilton, feeling an odd mix of loneliness and light-headed self-satisfaction, walks up to the glass so the window fills his field of view.

The crew had worked hard on this project. Tilton was fairly sure that a few of them might have understood the steps that needed to be taken, but he could take no chances. This was too important. Sentimental humanism could sink the whole enterprise. Evolution was not a democratic process and had always been carried out by individuals who displayed superior fitness in the face of mounting environmental hostility.

The vast organism that had held PBR12 hostage for millions of years lay dying, effervescing like a salted slug, leaking oxygen, nitrogen other trace elements. Steam and ice erupted out of the ground, billowing miles into the sky, forming clouds and weather systems that shrouded the writhing beast below.

There are some dead pixels in his prescience around the Pod, some facets he can’t see into. He worries about his little ark of protoplasm. He has to make some alternate plans, but he is so tired. He’s not young anymore. His body is aching with the stress of carrying out this terrible mission. Aching with the vision, with the possession. “I will sleep,” he tells himself, “for a thousand years as soon as I deliver the final payload, the pièce de résistance to the primeval planet below me.”

The Pod burns it’s way through the gravitational pull of PBR12, and fades into the deep black belly of space. He presses his hand against the window. “Good bye” he says quietly, feeling through the thick transparent polymer, the frozen vacuum into which so much of… “what?” must ride. “And Godspeed.” He chuckles and turns back to his dirt car, instantly forgetting what he was just thinking. Because…

In his lifetime, he’s gone from the clumsy cloning of mammals in some shitty terrestrial laboratory, to this! “It was all in the PBR12 Telomeres!” he thinks “The Rosetta stone, the missing link. It had been on earth before, I’m sure of it now. In the very beginning. But it lost it’s essence. It became slow and rigid over millions and millions of years and eventually forgot its purpose. That’s why Earth is dying! That’s why I had to send it back. It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful! It’s beautiful” 

Tears stream out and blow back over his cheeks toward his earlobes. The knobby tires thrum against the steel deck as he speeds through the uncontaminated central corridor of the enormous ship, past intersections, closed on both sides, warning lights flashing. He has the ship to himself now. He could disrobe and walk these giant hallways naked, like some latter-day Adam, and no one but he and his new God would have anything to say about it. There is a rhythmic “whump” as recessed doors kick back the wind of his speeding dirt car. “vermiculture… whump, ” “compost… whump, ” “insect ecology… whump, ” “mycology… whump” an orbiting terraforming vessel, complete with night clubs and racket ball courts.

Garden Planet. Two hours later:

The infection has entered its dormant phase within it’s human hosts, their chromosomes have finished  their giddy protoplasmic victory dance, having plundering the very stuff of it’s would-be invaders.

Even as the PBR12’s indigenous lifeform is transformed into a loamy topsoil for the seeds of a new Earth, here, on the ship, it is triumphant.

These human crew–scientists,  farmers, cooks, artists and janitors will all sleep together in soupy puddles of cellular potential, flowing slowly toward the low spots and the drains in the floor, waiting patiently for further instructions, instructions that he, Learned Tilton, would be giving. 

The hallway stinks, as always, with the earthy smells of compost and animal husbandry, but Tilton catches a hint of something different now, beyond the obvious antiseptic spray. Is it the final breath of two hundred crew members who would never exhale again? Never see the glorious end of all their efforts? Is it some human pheromone? Fear? Perspiration?

At the far end of the hallway, he hears the hum of machinery. He pulls his dirtcar up close to the wall and drives very quietly. He stops just before he gets to the melting chamber, grabs his pistol and rolls out of his seat. He tiptoes up to and pressed his back up against the door to the melting chamber. Yes, the melting pot is running. That is actually good, there is a chance that whoever is in there wouldn’t have heard him coming.

He evacuated this area earlier, prior to releasing the invasive into the ventilation system, but it’s possible that someone stayed behind. And because he has intentionally not infected this part of the ship, it is possible that he could be coming up against healthy human resistance here.

Garden Planet, copyright Bryan Root. For more information about Garden Planet or Spacerex, contact us.

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