The Genocides Read online

  The Genocides

  Thomas Michael Disch

  This spectacular novel established Thomas M. Disch as a major new force in science fiction. First published in 1965, it was immediately labeled a masterpiece reminiscent of the works of J.G. Ballard and H.G. Wells.

  Cover Artist: Richard Powers.

  In this harrowing novel, the world’s cities have been reduced to cinder and ash and alien plants have overtaken the earth. The plants, able to grow the size of maples in only a month and eventually reach six hundred feet, have commandeered the world’s soil and are sucking even the Great Lakes dry. In northern Minnesota, Anderson, an aging farmer armed with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, desperately leads the reduced citizenry of a small town in a daily struggle for meager existence. Throw into this fray Jeremiah Orville, a marauding outsider bent on a bizarre and private revenge, and the fight to live becomes a daunting task.

  THE GENOCIDES

  by Thomas M. Disch

  To Alan Iverson

  The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

  Jeremiah 8, 20

  ONE

  The Prodigal

  As the lesser and then the greater stars disappeared in the advancing light, the towering mass of the forest that walled in the cornfield retained for a while the utter blackness of the night. A light breeze blew in from the lake, rustling the leaves of the young corn, but the leaves of that dark forest did not stir. Now the eastern forest wall glowed gray-green, and the three men waiting in the field knew, though they could not yet see it, that the sun was up.

  Anderson spat—the day’s work had officially begun. He began to make his way up the gentle incline toward the eastern forest wall. Four rows away on either side of him, his sons followed—Neil, the younger and larger, on his right hand, and Buddy on the left.

  Each man carried two empty wooden buckets. None wore either shoes or shirts, for it was midsummer. Their denims were in tatters. Anderson and Buddy had on wide-brimmed hats woven of crude raffia, like the coolie hats you used to get at carnivals and state fairs. Neil had sunglasses but no hat. They were old; the bridge had been broken and mended with glue and a strip of that same fiber from which the hats had been made. His nose was calloused where the glasses rested.

  Buddy was the last to reach the top of the hill. His father smiled while he waited for him to catch up. Anderson’s smile was never a good sign.

  “You’re sore from yesterday?”

  “I’m fine. The stiffness comes out when I get working.”

  Neil laughed. “Buddy’s sore because he has to work. Ain’t that so, Buddy?”

  It was a joke. But Anderson, whose style it was to be laconic, never laughed at jokes, and Buddy rarely found very funny the jokes his half-brother made.

  “Don’t you get it?” Neil asked. “Sore. Buddy’s sore because he has to work.”

  “We all have to work,” Anderson said, and that pretty well ended what joke there had been.

  They began to work.

  Buddy withdrew a plug from his tree and inserted a metal tube where the plug had been. Below the makeshift spigot he hung one of the buckets. Pulling the plugs was hard work, for they had been in place a week and had stuck fast. The sap, drying about the plug, acted as a glue. This work seemed always to last just long enough for the soreness—of his fingers, his wrists, his arms, his back—to reassert itself, but never to abate.

  Before the terrible work of carrying the buckets began, Buddy stopped and stared at the sap trickling through the pipe and oozing, like lime-green honey, into the bucket. It was coming out slowly today. By the end of the summer this tree would be dying and ready to be cut down.

  Seen up close, it didn’t seem much like a tree at all. Its skin was smooth, like the stem of a flower. A proper tree this size would have split through its skin under the pressure of its own growth, and its trunk would be rough with bark. Farther back in the forest, you could find trees, big ones, which had reached the limit of their growth and begun at last to form something like bark. At least their trunks, though green, weren’t moist to the touch like this one. Those trees—or Plants, as Anderson called them—were six hundred feet tall, and their biggest leaves were the size of billboards. Here on the edge of the cornfield the growth was more recent—not more than two years—and the highest stood only a hundred and fifty feet tall. Even so, here as deeper in the forest, the sun came through the foliage at noonday as pale as moonlight on a clouded night.

  “Get the lead out!” Anderson called. He was already out in the field with his full buckets of sap, and the sap was brimming over Buddy’s buckets too, Why is there never time to think? Buddy envied Neil’s mulish capacity just to do things, to spin the wheel of his cage without wondering overmuch how it worked.

  “Right away!” Neil yelled from a distance.

  “Right away!” Buddy echoed, thankful his half-brother too had been caught up in his own thoughts, whatever they could be.

  Of the three men working in the field, Neil surely had the best body. Except for a receding chin that gave a false impression of weakness, he was strong and well proportioned. He was a good six inches taller than his father or Buddy, both short men. His shoulders were broader, his chest thicker, and his muscles, though not so well knit as Anderson’s, were bigger. There was, however, no economy in his movements. When he walked, he lumbered. When he stood, he slouched. He endured the strain of the day’s labor better than Buddy simply because he had more material to endure with. In this he was brutish, but worse than being brutish, Neil was dumb, and worse than being dumb, he was mean.

  He is mean, Buddy thought, and he is dangerous. Buddy set off down the row of corn, a full bucket of sap in either hand and his heart brimming with ill-will. It gave him a sort of strength, and he needed all the strength he could muster, from whatever source. His breakfast had been light, and lunch, he knew, wouldn’t be quite enough, and there’d be no dinner to speak of.

  Even hunger, he had learned, provided its own kind of strength: the will to wrest more food from the soil and more soil from the Plants.

  No matter how much care he took, the sap splattered his pants legs as he walked, and the tattered fabric stuck to his calf. Later, when the day was hotter, his whole body would be covered with sap. The sap would bake dry, and when he moved, the stiffened cloth would tear out the crusted hairs of his body, one by one. The worst of that was over now, thank heaven—the body has a finite number of hairs—but there were still the flies that swarmed over his flesh to feed on the sap. He hated the flies, which did not seem to be finite.

  When he had reached the foot of the decline and was in the middle of the field, Buddy set one bucket down and began to feed the thirsty young plants from the other. Each plant received about a pound of thick green nutrient—and to good effect. It wasn’t the Fourth yet, and already many plants were up over his knees. Corn would have grown well in the rich lake-bottom soil in any case, but with the additional nourishment they drew from the stolen sap, the plants throve phenomenally—as though they were in central Iowa instead of northern Minnesota. This unwitting parasitism of the corn served another purpose besides, for as the corn throve, the Plants whose sap they had drunk died, and each year the limit of the field could be pushed a bit farther.

  It had been Anderson’s idea to pit the Plant against itself this way, and every corn plant in the field was a testimony to his, judgment. Looking down the long rows, the old man felt like a prophet in full view of his prophecy. His regret now was that he hadn’t thought of it sooner—before the diaspora of his village, before the Plants had vanquished his and his neighbors’ farms.

  If only…

  But that was history, water under the bridge, spilt milk, and as suc
h it belonged to a winter evening in the commonroom when there was time for idle regrets. Now, and for the rest of that long day, there was work to do.

  Anderson looked about for his sons. They were straggling behind, still emptying their second buckets over the roots of the corn.

  “Get the lead out!” he yelled. Then, turning back up the hill with his two buckets empty, he smiled a thin, joyless smile, the smile of a prophet, and spat out, through the gap between his front teeth, a thin stream of the juice of the Plant that he had been chewing.

  He hated the Plants, and that hatred gave him strength.

  They worked, sweating in the sun, till noonday. Buddy’s legs were trembling from the strain and from hunger. But each trip down the rows of corn was shorter, and when he returned to the Plant there was a moment (and each a little longer than the last) before the buckets filled, when he could rest.

  Sometimes, though he did not like the vaguely aniselilce taste, he would stick his finger into the bucket and lick off the bittersweet syrup. It did not nourish, but it allayed for a while the worst of his hunger. He might have chewed the pulp carved from the phloem of the trunk, as his father and Neil did, but “chewing” reminded him of the life he had tried to escape ten years before, when he had left the farm for the city. His escape had failed, as surely as the cities themselves had failed. At last, just as in the parable, he would have been content with the husks the swine ate, and he had returned to Tassel and to his father’s farm.

  True to form, the fatted calf had been killed, and if his return had been a parable, it would have ended happily. But it was his life, and he was still, in his heart, a prodigal, and there were times when he wished he had died during the famine of the cities.

  But in a contest between the belly’s hunger and the mind’s variable predilections, the belly is likelier to win. The prodigal’s rebeffion had been reduced to catchwords and petty crochets: an obstinate refusal to use the word ain’t, an abiding contempt for country music, a distaste for “chewing,” and a loathing for the hick, the hayseed, and the dumb cluck. In a word, for Neil.

  The heat and his body’s weariness conspired to direct his thoughts to less troubled channels, and as he stood gazing into the slowly filling buckets, his mind surged with the remembered images of other times. Of Babylon, that great city.

  He remembered how at night the streets would be swiftflowing rivers of light and how the brilliant, antiseptic cars had streamed down those rivers. From hour to hour the sound would not abate nor the lights dim. There had been the drive-ins, and when there was less money, the White Castles. Girls in shorts waited on your car. Sometimes the shorts were edged with little, glittering fringes that bounced on tan thighs.

  In the summer, when the hicks had worked on the farms, there had been flood-lit beaches, and his parched tongue curled now remembering how—in the labyrinth of empty oil drums supporting the diving raft—he would have kissed Irene. Or someone. The names didn’t matter so much any more.

  He made another trip down the row, and while he fed the corn he remembered the names that didn’t matter now. Oh, the city had swarmed with girls. You could stand on a street corner, and in an hour hundreds would walk past. There had even been talk about a population problem then.

  Hundreds of thousands of people!

  He remembered the crowds in the winter in the heated auditorium on the university campus. He would have come there in a white shirt. The collar would be tight around his neck. In his imagination, he fingered the knot of a silk tie. Would it be striped or plain? He thought of the stores full of suits and jackets. Oh, the colors there had been! the music, and, afterward, the applause!

  But the worst of it, he thought, resting by at the Plant again, is that there isn’t anyone to talk to any more. The total population of Tassel was two hundred and forty-seven, and none of them, not one of them, could understand Buddy Anderson. A world had been lost, and they weren’t aware of it. It had never been their world, but it had been, briefly, Buddy’s, and it had been beautiful.

  The buckets were full, and Buddy grabbed hold of the handles and made his way back to the field. For the hundredth time that day, he stepped over the cankerous knob of tissue that had formed on the stump of the Plant that had irrigated these rows last year. This time his bare foot came down on a patch of the slick wood where there was a puddle of slippery sap. Weighted down by the buckets, he couldn’t recover his balance. He fell backward, the sap in the buckets spilling out over him. He lay in the dirt, and the sap spread across his chest and down his arms, and the myriad flies settled to feed.

  He didn’t try to get up.

  “Well, don’t just lay there,” Anderson said. “There’s work to do.” He stretched out a hand, kinder than his words, to help Buddy up.

  When he thanked his father, there was a just-perceptible quaver in his voice.

  “You all right?”

  “I guess so.” He felt his coccyx, which had struck against a knob of the stump, and winced.

  “Then go down to the stream and wash that crap off. We’re about ready to go and eat anyhow.”

  Buddy nodded. Grabbing the buckets (it was amazing how automatic the work had become, even for him), he set off down a forest path that led to the stream (once, farther inland, it had been Gooseberry River) from which the village drew its water. Seven years ago, this whole area—fields, forest and village—had been under ten to fifteen feet of water. But the Plants had siphoned off the water. They were still at it, and every day the North Shore of Lake Superior moved a few inches farther south, though the rate of its retreat seemed to be lessening, as all but the newest of the Plants reached the limits of their growth.

  He stripped and lay down full length in the stream. The tepid water moved languidly over his bare limbs, washing away sap and dirt and the dead flies that had caught on him as on flypaper. He held his breath and lowered his head slowly into the flowing water until he was totally submerged.

  With the water in his ears, he could hear slight sounds more distinctly: his back scratching against the pebbles in the bed of the stream, and, more distantly, another sound, a low rumbling that grew, too quickly, to a pounding. He knew the sound, and knew he shouldn’t be hearing it now, here.

  He lifted his head out of the water in time to see the cow running full-tilt toward him—and in time for her to see him. Gracie jumped, and her hind hooves came down within inches of his thigh. Then she ran on into the forest.

  More followed. Buddy counted them as they splashed across the stream: eight… eleven… twelve. Seven Herefords and five Guernseys. All of them.

  The yearning bellow of a bull sounded in the air, and Studs came into view—the village’s great, brown Hereford, with his flaring white topknot. He stared at Buddy with casual defiance, but there was more urgent business than the settling of old scores. He hurried on after the cows.

  That Studs had gotten out of his pen was bad news, for the cows were all of them half-gone with calves, and it would do them no good to be mounted by an eager bull. The news would be even worse for Neil, who was responsible for Studs. It could mean a whipping. This was not a thought to sadden Buddy deeply, but still he was concerned for the cattle. He hurried into his overalls, which were still sticky with sap.

  Before he’d gotten the straps over his shoulders, Jimmie Lee, the younger of Buddy’s two half-brothers, came running out of the forest on the bull’s trail. His face was flushed with the excitement of the chase, and even as he announced the calamity—“Studs broke out!”—a smile touched his lips.

  All children—and Jimmie was no exception—feel a demonic sympathy with those things that cause disorder in the grown-up world. The young thrive on earthquakes, tornadoes and escaped bulls.

  It would not do, Buddy realized, to let their father see that smile. For in Anderson the secret sympathy for the powers of destruction had been metamorphosed by the agency of time into a stern, humorless opposition to those same powers, a magnificent, raw willfulness as ruthless in it
s way as the enemy it opposed. Nothing could more surely elicit that ruthlessness than seeing this hectic flush in the cheeks of his youngest and (it was commonly supposed) dearest.

  “I’ll tell Father,” Buddy said. “You go on after Studs. Where’s everyone else?”

  “Clay’s getting together all the men he can find, and Lady and Blossom and the women are going out to scare the cows away from the corn if they go that way.” Jimmie shouted the information over his shoulder as he trotted along the broad trail blazed by the herd.

  He was a good boy, Jimmie Lee, and bright as a button. In the old world, Buddy was sure, he would have become another prodigal. It was always the bright one who rebelled. Now he’d be lucky to survive. They all would.

  The morning’s work accomplished, Anderson looked across his field and saw that it was good. At harvest the ears would not be large and juicy, as in the old times. They had left the bags of hybridized seed moldering in the abandoned storerooms of old Tassel. Hybrids gave the best yield, but they were sterile. Agriculture could no longer afford such fripperies. The variety he was using now was much closer hereditarily to the ancient Indian maize, the Aztec zea mays. His whole strategy against the usurping Plants was based on corn. Corn had become the life of his people: it was the bread they ate and the meat as well. In the summer Studs and his twelve wives might get along on the tender green roughage the children scraped from the sides of the Plants or they might graze among the seedlings along the lake shore, but when winter came corn sustained the cattle just as it sustained the villagers.

  Corn took care of itself almost as well as it took care of the others. It did not need a plowman to turn over the soil, only a sharp stick to scratch it and hands to drop in the four seeds and the lump of excrement that would be their first food. Nothing gave the yield per acre that corn did; nothing but rice gave as much nourishment per ounce. Land was at a premium now. The Plants exerted a constant pressure on the cornfields. Every day, the smaller children had to go out and hunt between the rows of corn for the lime-green shoots, which could grow in a week’s time to the size of saplings, and in a month would be big as grown maples.