New Decameron Twenty-Two: Marissa Lingen (Patreon)

Loosestrife 

by Marissa Lingen

I don't care for it when people call my aunt Cythera a mad scientist. It's not kind, and I don't even think it's accurate. It's more that she's very focused, and sometimes that focus can lead her in inconvenient directions.

That's what happened with the goats. Certainly nobody thought, what goats need is to be smarter. Aunt Cythera didn't think that either! She just thought that it would be more convenient if they preferentially sought out and ate invasive species like garlic mustard and purple loosestrife, and one thing led to another, and then another, and then another.

What they specifically led to was me standing in the middle of the home field at Aunt Cythera's farm counting genetically modified, incidentally intelligent goats and only getting to eleven. Which was a major problem, because there were supposed to be thirteen, and Aunt Cythera had donors coming for dinner.

"Yolo, where are the other two goats?" I asked.

"Neh," said Yolo.

Yolo was the prototype goat. They all had limited vocabulary, but Yolo's was the most limited, just yeh and neh. In this case I figured neh meant "I don't know." I tried to assess who was missing. Not Yolo, not Tomlin, who was the most successfully focused on eating purple loosestrife. Not Atossa or Razi, inseparable but not particularly useful.

Heidrun, I realized, and Frankie. Of course. The escape artist and the most single-minded goat of them all. I consulted the nearest goat who could say more than two things. "Tomlin, which way did Heidrun and Frankie go?"

"Outtt," she bleated.

"Thanks, that's a great help," I sighed. I would have to walk the fenceline and hope that Heidrun, who was a champion climber, had not just gone over it and taken Frankie with her.

Tomlin followed me. "Go back, Tomlin," I told her.

"Neh."

"Tomlin, go find Yolo."

"Herrrre."

I glanced behind her, and sure enough, Yolo was trailing along after, a broad leaf of buckthorn sticking out of the corner of his mouth.

"Yolo, go back to Aunt Cythera."

"Neh."

"Neh," Tomlin echoed contentedly. They tripped along at my heels, their bells tinkling gently. They had that old-world sound to them, like I was a puppet in the Sound of Music, like I was Heidi, instead of an ordinary person with at least three devices connected to the internet at all times, constant concerns about climate change, and a favorite Mars mission astronaut. (Robin, obviously. All my friends like Lila but mine is Robin.)

And an aunt who was going to lose her mind if I did not find those goats before her donors arrived. I shuddered to contemplate a world in which Aunt Cythera was an actual mad scientist.

Their escape route was extremely obvious. The goats had found a small hole in the fence, despite its extra electric reinforcement, despite its supposed nano-self-repair. Well, they were goats. Enhanced goats. They were going to do what they did. Which in this case meant a hole big enough I barely had to duck to get through it. Tomlin, silky and black, and Yolo, tufty and parti-colored, minced delicately through behind me.

"Please just...stay with me?" I groaned.

"Yeh," said Yolo contentedly. Tomlin committed to nothing.

I resolved not to work with goats in my own career. Nothing more intractable than sphagnum moss, which stays where you tell it to no matter how you tweak its genes. If you want peat to be resistant to temperature change, it doesn't wander off and eat things and make your neighbors angry and spoil your funding dinner.

I surveyed the prairie around me, trying to figure out which way they'd gone, hoping they'd stuck together. To my relief, the tall grass was undisturbed to the west. To the north, there was a trail of freshly cropped vegetation. Relieved, I followed it--doubling back along the fenceline for a bit, and then off into the prairie.

"Garrrrrlic," observed Tomlin.

"Neh," said Yolo.

I looked around. There did not appear to be any garlic mustard. Which argued for Frankie having cleared it, maybe, if there had been any. It was a pretty strong invasive in the area, but Aunt Cythera took the goats out as often as she could, partly as a test case for how far their discernment had taken hold.

It seemed to be pretty good--the different goats had different preferences and would talk about them, within the limits of their ability--but they were still goats. They would still eat a lot of things, when push came to shove, or even before. But apparently they'd gotten less hungry pretty quickly, because the trail disappeared.

"Uh, goats? Can you...tell where the other goats went?"

"Yeh," said Yolo comfortably.

I waited. Nothing.

"Would you please...tell me?"

Tomlin sighed like a dog, all shoulders and attitude. She picked her way delicately forward, and I followed, flanked by goats. At least I could keep track of these two. Even if I had no idea what any of them were up to. Even if I was getting farther and farther from the point where I'd be back in time to help Aunt Cythera with dinner.

As if summoned, my phone pinged. I wanted to ignore it, but I had a feeling it was Aunt Cythera, and I was right.

"Where are you?" she demanded.

"I'm out on the--"

"Do you have goats with you?"

"Y-eees," I said, hoping she didn't ask how many.

"Well, what are you doing out there?"

"I'm--"

"You're supposed to help me make dinner for the McLarens," she accused.

The McLarens were the funding. The McLarens were the only rich people I had ever met who cared about goats. To be fair, they were some of the only rich people I'd ever met at all. But I was pretty sure their goat interest was not rich person standard, or we'd have a very different world.

Smellier. But better.

"I'm sorry, I got caught up in a project," I said.

Aunt Cythera sighed so hard it sounded like something hit her phone. "That's the drawback of you being like me, not boring like your parents, I guess."

"My parents aren't--"

"Just get home as soon as you can, okay?"

"Sure, I--Yolo, what are you doing?" I had been walking as I talked, following Tomlin. But I realized Yolo's bell had stopped. When I turned around I didn't see him anywhere. Tomlin stopped and regarded me with amber-eyed curiosity, as unconcerned as a sheep.

"What is he doing?" asked Aunt Cythera through the phone.

"God knows," I said weakly.

"Well, get Heidrun to stop him, she's good at talking him out of things."

"Oh, thanks," I managed.

"And come back soon! The McLarens expect to meet all the goats! And you! And to have something like a civilized cheese plate to start their meal, and you know I'm terrible at display!"

I stabbed ferociously at the button to end the call. I was down three goats now instead of two. Tomlin did not seem concerned. I would have liked a civilized cheese plate myself. "Where did Yolo go, Tomlin?"

"Offfff."

"I see that, but--"

Tomlin blinked at me, slitted amber eyes as unconcerned as ever. I sighed. "Find Yolo first. Then the others."

"Neh."

"What do you mean, neh?"

"Neh."

Could goats be rebellious teenagers? Did she know something I didn't know? How did I get this information out of a damn goat? I threw my hands in the air. "Are you still willing to look for Heidrun and Frankie?"

"Yeh."

"Okay fine! Let's do that!"

She led me into a stand of birches, then out into the last of the late afternoon sunlight. The air was thick with pollen, birch and a bunch of wildflowers, only some of which I recognized. I sneezed.

"Bad rrrrrobot," Tomlin observed.

"I'm not a robot," I said, but then I did a double-take. It wasn't me who was a bad robot, it was the robot she was looking at, specifically the drone that had wedged its rotors into the dirt in front of her.

"What is that doing here?"

Tomlin did not answer. She picked her way around it, bell tinkling, giving it wide berth. Aunt Cythera lived an hour and a half from any medium-sized city. I didn't know why there would be a drone, but it didn't seem like a good thing.

They probably weren't spying on her, though. The goats, while an eccentric and in several cases beautiful lot, were not the sort of science you could do surveillance on, even if anyone cared, which I was mostly sure they did not. We only wished that someone wanted her research enough to do corporate--university? privately funded?--espionage for it. Which meant that the drone was looking at, or for, something else. In the middle of prairie with occasional farmland. With the goats wandering around it.

That did not make me feel better.

"Stuuuuuupid rrrrrrobot," said Tomlin very quietly.

I stopped to poke at the drone, but it had no power left, and I didn't want to try to coax goats back and carry it at the same time. We crossed a stream that didn't bother Tomlin any but got my boots wet. I was glad I was wearing shorts, but wet socks and boots would be bad enough. I squelched along glumly.

We were approaching the river bluffs, and me with wet feet. Things were about to get much worse if we didn't find the other goats soon. I began to wonder when it was the right thing to take Tomlin back to the barn and just tell Aunt Cythera what had happened, three goats gone and a crashed drone on the prairie. I did not relish the thought.

"Therrrre," said Tomlin, and bent her head to eat some loosestrife growing on the hill.

I looked around. Heidrun was nowhere immediately to be seen, and Tomlin's relaxed attitude toward her snack made me wonder what I was in for.

When I spotted Heidrun, I wanted to sit down on the ground and cry. She was living up to her name as the mythological climber on the roof of Valhalla, having scrambled all the way up to the top of the cliff wall above the river and then halfway up a tree growing on that.

"Heidrun, come down from there!" I shouted.

I don't think she heard me. Tomlin kept chewing. "Heidrun!" I clambered up most of the cliff wall and tried my instruction again.

"Neh."

Why would no one just do as they were told today, I asked myself, and then answered my own question: because they were goats. My phone pinged again. This time I ignored it.

"Heidrun! Aunt Cythera needs you!"

"Baaaad!"

"Yes, you're being very bad, you're being as bad as a sheep up there, get down!"

"Seeee baaaad!"

I looked around. I saw scrubby green fields, as I always did. A muddy river. A thick scattering of purple loosestrife on the riverbank, that ought to please her above anything. I could see a few of the neighbors' places, which looked ordinary enough, and Aunt Cythera's eccentric scattering of buildings, half old-world red farmhouse and half glittering high-tech supergenius lab.

"What do you see that's bad?"

"Eaaaaat baaaad!"

"Heidrun!" I tried to climb a little higher. The hill was too steep for me, and the sun had not been enough to dry out my boots. I squelched back down another few paces, skidding and trying not to lose my balance completely. "Aunt Cythera will be very angry if you don't come home."

"Tell Cytherrrrraaaaa," she said.

"You tell her."

She considered this. Finally, she backed out of the tree--I wish that was engineered in, but they're all like that, goats, they maneuver like helicopters. I was still clinging to the side of the hill at the steepest point I could reach, holding my breath that she would follow me, when my phone pinged again. I jumped, and slid down a good foot.

Heidrun paused.

"Come on! It's just my phone!"

It pinged again. She looked skeptical. I tried to stab the button to mute it but accidentally answered instead.

"Terra, aren't you back yet?"

"Can't talk now! Sorry!" I fumbled it off again and held my breath, now muddy instead of just wet.

Heidrun consented to come down the rest of the tree, then the hill. She and Tomlin sniffed each other delicately, muttering under their breaths.

"What possessed you to go off like that?"

"Baaad," said Heidrun.

"You're damn right it was bad! Aunt Cythera is going to kill us all!" I surveyed my mud-streaked legs, my boots and socks that were now completely clumped with mud. "Now where's Frankie?"

They sniffed. They consulted. They chose a path. Happily for me it was not back up the hillside, but skirting alongside it, an uneven gait that bounced me up and down and bothered the goats not at all.

"Tomlin, what are you--is she chewing on something?" I appealed to Heidrun, who was no help. I tried to hurry up behind them. Tomlin was definitely chewing something larger than a leaf. "What did you find? Give it! Spit it out!"

A goat's teeth were large, flat, and very, very strong. I definitely did not want to make a bad day worse by shoving my fingers between them against the goat's will the way I would with a dog or even a toddler. I looked in Tomlin's eyes. She glared into mine.

Genetic engineering had done nothing to change the terrifying nature of a goat's eyes close up, but something metallic was going crunch in her mouth.

I sat down in the scrubby grass on the hillside. I was still down two goats, I was going to be late no matter what, and now one of them had found something metal. And was not giving it up. Someone else's property, something that would hurt her, who knew.

I was ready to give up.

"Tomliiiiin," said Heidrun.

Tomlin sighed and spat. I looked at the goat-spittle covered object in the dirt at my feet. It looked like a sprinkler head.

I hadn't seen a sprinkler head since I'd left my parents' house in the suburbs a month ago.

"Tomlin, where did you get that?"

"Baaaack," said Tomlin.

I thought about asking her to show me exactly where. I thought about picking it up myself. Instead I said, "I'm sorry, Tomlin, you can bring that home with us," as the best way to show it to Aunt Cythera in case she thought it was as deeply weird as I did.

In case that helped with how angry she was going to be with me.

I was so glum, thinking about what a mess all this was, that I didn't notice that we'd come downhill a bit and into a field of wildflowers at all, didn't notice we were near the river, didn't notice that we'd found Frankie until I almost tripped over him.

"Frankie! Thank goodness!"

He did not look nearly so thrilled to see me and the other two goats--but he wasn't as blank-faced as Heidrun had been. He had a mouthful of greens, but he ran around us in a circle. "Gooood. Gooood heeeere seeeeeee."

"All right, I see you here," I said. "Let's go find Aunt Cythera, she's waiting, it's important."

"Thiiiiis."

"No, she's not going to come see this tonight, she's got her donors."

"Thiiiiiis!"

"Thiiiiis," agreed Heidrun.

Tomlin made a muffled noise around her sprinkler head.

"There will be plenty of lovely horrible garlic mustard at home, mmm, your favorite," I said.

"Heeeere." And he did not budge. The problem with going after creatures you could talk to is that you didn't assume you were going to have to hogtie them and throw them in a truck, so you didn't bring those things.

I didn't know how to hogtie a goat anyway. I was sure it could be done, but probably not by many people. Especially not Aunt Cythera's special goats. They'd probably team up on that person. So I'd better resort to my constantly failing powers of persuasion. This would be much better with mosses. When you found mosses you were looking for, you could just put them where you wanted them to be. "Frankie, what do you want?" I wailed.

"Morrrre," said Frankie, chewing methodically.

"But you've got--"

I stopped and considered. He kept chewing. He didn't need more garlic mustard, he had more of it than he could handle. "Does Heidrun also need more?"

"Haaaaas."

"Heidrun has more. And you, you have more."

"Morrrre."

I reconsidered Heidrun's perch. There was something bad I was supposed to see, something bad to eat. I looked around. The main thing I could see was that an entire solid swath of the field was purple loosestrife. Very, very purple loosestrife. Very.

My specialty was sphagnum moss. But something was very wrong with that loosestrife. I had enough plant botany to know that--and unfortunately, I'd seen enough of the noxious stuff. It was supposed to have sprays of brilliantly purple petals. What this batch had was...clusters, like a club, like you could beat a person with the loosestrife. And it had a funny, sour smell.

I turned to my expert. "Tomlin?"

"Neh, nehhhhh." She was hiding behind me, shaking her head. She had put down the sprinkler head to quake in fear.

"You don't like it?"

"Neh!"

"It's not good loosestrife?"

"Neh! Baaaad!"

"Okay, Tomlin, no one is going to make you eat the bad loosestrife."

She stopped shaking her head and peered up at me.

"I'm going to take some so Aunt Cythera sees it, all right? But you don't have to have any. No one is going to make you eat it."

She relaxed.

"Frankie, will you come home if we show Cythera the wrong loosestrife?"

He thought about that. "Yeh."

"Okay, good, we'll do that. We'll find Yolo--"

"Yeh," they all agreed.

"And we'll go home and Cythera will know what to do."

"Yeh. Yeh."

The problem was collecting a sample of the stuff. If it had been colder out I'd have had a jacket I could wrap it in. If the goats were that freaked out, I wasn't sure that carrying it back in my bare hands was a good idea. Wincing, I took off one of my muddy socks and put my boot back on barefoot. I'd have blisters by the time we got back to the farm, but at least I wouldn't have to touch the loosestrife.

The goats watched me in un-caprine silence as I carefully pulled some up, trying to maintain as much of the thick, woody root as I could manage. I'd never seen loosestrife this far up a riverbank before--it couldn't properly be called riverbank at all--and the roots were a beast to get even a good portion of. No wonder the stuff was almost impossible to get rid of. 

We found Yolo in a hollow on the way back, curled into a ball and shaking. "Neh," he said when he saw me, or perhaps when he saw the loosestrife. "Neh."

"Yolo, I'm not going to make you eat it. Look, I'm not even touching it myself."

"Neh?"

"I'm going to take it to Aunt Cythera." And the lab, but I didn't need to get into that with the goats. Just the broad outlines would do. "She'll know what to do." I hoped. Oh, I hoped.

He put his hooves back over his head to think about it, and I was afraid he was a lost cause. I had never seen a goat put his hooves over his head before. I began to think that giving them increased intelligence was not our kindest plan.

Then he stuck his head back out again and said, "Yeh?"

"Cytheraaaaa," said Heidrun kindly.

"Yeh," said Yolo, pathetic as a wet dog, and he staggered to his feet.

Happily we weren't too much farther from the back forty. We had all four goats. We had physical evidence. I could even see the fence when my phone binged again.

"Terra, where on earth are you, dear?" Her voice was much sweeter than last time, and for a moment I was confused. Then it hit me: the McLarens. They'd arrived early.

"The goats and I have made a discovery, Aunt Cee. You'll definitely want to see this."

"When are you going to be home?" The sweetness was definitely fraying.

"We're coming through the hole in the back fence now," I said.

"Through the what?"

"We're going to have to patch that."

"I should say--"

But at that point I hung up the call, because I was coming up behind Aunt Cythera, the rest of the herd of goats, and two people in suits.

To my relief, I counted heads and saw that no one else had strayed while we were gone.

The McLarens had immaculate golden hair, identical grey suits that were not particularly suited to a farm visit, and quizzical, condescending faces that barely moved. I was sweaty, goaty, muddy, and wearing only one sock. I brandished a clump of hyperabundant, sour-smelling weeds at them.

Tomlin chose that moment to spit the sprinkler head at their feet.

Aunt Cythera's face moved a great deal, encompassing disgust, horror, amusement, and an attempt to fake placidity. "Terra good heavens, you look like you've been in a war." 

"Tomlin has a sprinkler head that's watering the river valley," I said, "we spotted a downed drone, and one of your neighbors is making this." I waved the engineered loosestrife, wrapped in my muddy sock.

Aunt Cythera peered at it. "That's...what did they do to that?"

"I don't know, but it upsets the goats."

One of the McLarens laughed, an orchestrated laugh that made me take a step back. I peered at him. He was supposed to be one of the few rich people who cared about goats. Why was he laughing at the idea of upsetting them?

Aunt Cythera frowned too. "Really, Basil, this is serious."

"It's a weed, Cythera."

"It's an invasive. What you're supposed to be here to care about," I said. "Except this one is a mutant. It had covered a whole field, and something about it puts off goats who are specifically designed to eat the stuff, and you don't think that's fishy?"

"How would they know what your goats are designed to eat, Cythera?" said the other McLaren.

Aunt Cythera pressed her lips together. "Exactly. If I was engineering famous attack goats--"

"They couldn't be more trouble than these," I put in.

She glared at me and went on. "If my goats were famous, someone might have reason to make a plant to annoy or even poison them. But they're not. So the odds are, someone is doing this for their own purposes. That doesn't interest you at least a little? It interests me." 

"It strikes me as a distraction," said Basil McLaren. 

"Well, biology is full of distractions. If you don't want distractions, go into mathematics. The pay is terrible, but the peace is sublime."

"Ah yes," said the other McLaren. "The pay."

I think they expected her to cower or simper at that. To do something to show that, oh goodness, she remembered that they had money and she wanted some. Instead, Aunt Cythera cocked her head at them, exactly like Tomlin refusing to go look for Yolo when I asked. "Yes?" she said.

"We're not funding you to wander around your neighbors' gardens, we're funding you to build us environmental supergoats."

"Look at how super they are," I said. "They found you an even nastier invasive than you knew about. They're pretty smart goats, and you should have seen how thickly this stuff was growing. They knew it was bad news."

They looked at each other. Whatever calculations and communications they had to do, they did them silently.

"I don't know if this is a trick to get us to fund your niece's project," said Basil McLaren.

"I do moss," I said indignantly. "Does this look like moss to you?"

"But we're not going to do it. You haven't proven anything about this weed except that you don't like it."

"Pick it up, then," said Aunt Cythera.

"I beg your pardon?" said both McLarens, and I blurted, less elegantly, "Huh?"

"No matter what's going on with the loosestrife, we'll want it inside to look at further. If you're confident that it's a harmless dead end, you could just carry it in yourself."

"It's been wrapped in her niece's sock, Louis, don't do it," said Basil, curling his lip.

The other McLaren, apparently named Louis, looked around him. He threw his head back and bent to grasp the loosestrife like a person going after a snake, straightened like he was raising the a banner on Triton. Sneered triumphantly.

And then dropped it. "Ow, damn the stuff! It stings! You didn't tell me it was a stinging weed, what a mean trick!"

"It's not, generally," I said. "We'd better get your hand rinsed and bandaged." I could see tiny blisters rising.

Basil started, "We're still not going to--"

"Commit a dollar amount," Louis finished for him. 

Aunt Cythera put a hand on my shoulder, and the goats shouldered around us, which I think was meant to be comforting but instead gave me a seasick feeling and smelled rather strong. "That's fine. We'll figure it out. Not many people will care. But it's like the goats. Some will. Perhaps you'll come around, perhaps you won't."

"Yeh," said Yolo.

"Yeh," said Tomlin, and the others were around us, a chorus of caprine agreement.

Goats don't fund themselves. But the McLarens looked helpless, bemused, intrigued. And in Louis's case, distinctly uncomfortable.

"We're not committing on the plants," the other one repeated, "but I suppose we can keep on with the goats."

Aunt Cythera scowled. "Well, that was all I ever asked."

Dinner was going to be awkward. I hadn't helped with it anyway, and who knew what she had done with the pheasant we'd gotten for the occasion. Perhaps I'd stay out in the barns with the goats. I looked down on them fondly, then got a glimpse of Heidrun worrying carefully, delicately, at the cover for fence's control panel with her clever lips and teeth.

Perhaps I'd had enough goat for one day. Perhaps whatever came of it, they could deal with the consequences without me.

********************************************************

"Goats!" Maya says. "Genetically engineered goats. Goats that can talk."

"Roast pheasant and cheese plate?" he suggests. "I knew there'd be food."

"You're cheating. They didn't actually eat it," Maya says, but she takes some, a good sharp blue cheese and a slice of crumbling cheddar.

"It was mentioned, so it was there, that's good enough." He yawns. "When we've eaten this and washed our hands we'll go to sleep, all right? It's dark, and I'm tired."

"All right," Maya says, chewing the pheasant. "That was a good day. So many great things to read. What will we read tomorrow?"

"There are some poems from Jane Yolen to start off with," he says. "And after that, we'll go looking for some coffee, all right?"

"All right," Maya agrees.