The quick Dipro fix gives a green flush to the skinny little leaves of the grass. I could hear them sigh with relief through the soles of my feet. But unless the saturasolution coming up from the IV grid found living roots, the whole thing would be a waste.
Carl looked grave as he put the sprayer back into the truck. “If it’s not looking better by Wednesday, call me,” he said to the Barbers. “You have my home phone number. We’ll stop by on Friday to adjust the IV solution, and I’ll check it then.”
“How much is this—going to cost?” Mr. Barber whispered, so his wife and the neighbors couldn’t hear. Carl gave him a mournful, disapproving look, and Mr. Barber turned away, ashamed.
“Hell, I understand where he’s coming from, though,” Carl told me when we were back on the road. “It used to be that when you bought a lawn you could get insurance, especially with a new house, but these days nobody is insured.
You can insure a tree, a potted one, anyway, or a cybershrub, and of course any kind of holo. But a living lawn? Jesus, Gail, no wonder the guy’s worried.”
Carl’s empathy is his best quality.
We stopped for lunch at Lord Byron’s on the Princeton bypass; it’s the only place that’ll allow a girl with no shoes. Lord Byron was a cook at a veterans’ hospital for twenty years before he saved enough to start his own place.
Because of this medical background, he thinks he’s a doctor.
“The usual,” said Carl. Two beers and a sloppy joe on a hard roll.
Lord Byron lifted my cap and his huge warm black hand covered the top of my head. “Just as I thought,” he said.
“Cold as ice. Sure you can’t find something on the menu you can eat, Gay?”
He never could say my name right either.
After lunch we changed the motherboard on a flower bed at a funeral home on Route 303. The display was one of those cheap, sixteen-bit jobs that you can’t walk through, that only looks right from a hundred yards or so. Carl had sold it to them last fall. It was supposedly upgradable, but in fact the company that made it had gone out of business over the winter, and now the chip was an orphan; you couldn’t change the variety or even the colors of the flowers without a whole new unit.
Carl explained this hesitantly, expecting an argument, but the funeral home manager signed for the new chip, a Hallmark clone, in a minute. “It’s one of these franchise operations, Gail,” Carl said on the way back to the shop.
“They don’t care what they spend. Hell, why should they? It’s all tax deductible under the Environmental Upgrade Act. I never liked flowers much anyway. Even organic ones.”
Tuesday was a better day because we got to dig. We put in ten meters of Patagonian Civet Hedge at Johnson, Johnson, & Johnson. Pat is not really Patagonian; the name is supposed to suggest some kind of hardy stock. It’s actually cyberhedge, a fert-saturated plastate lattice with dri-gro bud lodgements at 20 mm intervals on a 3-D grid.
But the tiny leaves that grow out of it are as real as I am. They bask in the sun and wave in the wind. The bugs, if there were any, would be fooled.
Carl was in a good mood. Ten meters of pat at $325 a meter is a nice piece of change. And since the roots themselves are not alive, you can put them directly into untreated ground. There’s something about the sliding of a shovel into the dirt that stirs the blood of a nurseryman.
“This is the life, right, Gail?” Carl said.
I nodded and grinned back at him. Even though something about the dirt didn’t smell right. It didn’t smell wrong.
It just didn’t smell at all.
After lunch at Lord Byron’s, Carl sold two electric trees at the Garden State Mall. The manager wanted the trees for a display at the main entrance, and Carl had to talk him out of organics. Carl doesn’t like the electrics any better than I do, but sometimes they are the only alternative.
“I sort of wanted real trees,” the manager said.
“Not outdoors you don’t,” Carl said. “Look, organic trees are too frail. Even if you could afford them—and you can’t—they get weird diseases, they fall over. You’ve got to feed them day and night, Let me show you these new Dutch Elms from Microsoft.” He threw the switch on the holoprojector while I started piecing together the sensofence.
“See how great they look?” Carl said. “Go ahead, walk all the way around them. We call them the Immortals. Bugs don’t eat on them, they never get sick, and all you have to feed them is 110. We can set this projector up on the roof, so you don’t have to worry about cars running over it.”
“I sort of wanted something that cast a shadow,” the manager said.
“You don’t want shadows here at the mall anyway,” said Carl, who had an answer for everything when he was selling. “And you won’t have to worry about shoppers walking through the trees”—he passed his hand through the trunk—“and spoiling the image, either. That’s what this fence is for, which my lovely assistant is setting up. Ready, Gail?”
I set two sections of white picket fence next to the tree and snapped them together.
