Nightshade. Tom Henighan
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growled quietly and shook his head. “Come on, Clara! I took this trip to get away from thinking about myself, about my past life, my so-called problems — which aren’t that terrible, when you come right down to it. Maybe my shrink told me I needed some perspective on things, maybe I’m looking for my roots. I haven’t figured it out yet myself. If I’m going to think deep thoughts about anything, let’s make sure it’s about Daniel’s problems, not mine. If I’m sad, I’m sad. But I’d like to help you. And it would be nice to work on something that has nothing to do with lust or lucre.”
Clara reached out and patted his hand; they walked on in silence.
“Life with Daniel is fine,” she said after some minutes. “It doesn’t have much to do with lust or lucre either.” Her voice was low, self-reflective; she didn’t look at Sam. “Daniel is an artist. He couldn’t be anything else — he’d go crazy without it. That world inside him is like some Medusa he can’t look away from. He’s hooked on me in a different way. He understands I need people and challenges out there in the world. He knows I want to make a difference. That’s why I gave up law and went for teaching. I teach gifted kids and I seem to do it pretty well. Maybe because I like their creativity without assuming it makes them little gods. I started out with the underprivileged kids. They were difficult, but I loved helping them. Then I took on the opposite. You’d be surprised how much they have in common.”
“Like the lawbreakers and the lawmakers?”
They walked on, coming in sight of a green swath of lawn surrounded by neat walkways, wood-and-metal benches, and a bordering garden, one bright with mauve, white, and orange flowers. At its centre an equestrian statue on a marble slab topped a large plain stone block. The rider was a woman, her head turned heavenward, the long sword in her right hand raised in a gesture of defiance: Jeanne d’ Arc.
The garden was empty; sunlight speckled the statue’s greenish metal with points of light.
“If the Berthelets’ tourist notes don’t lie, that’s your patron saint over there,” Sam told her, “even though your name isn’t Joan. Whenever people with ideals come along — people like yourself and Daniel — they’re considered nutcases. You’d better watch your back at those parent–teacher meetings.”
“I haven’t taken on very much,” Clara said. “I don’t think I’ll be burned at the stake. A stiletto here and there maybe, but nothing too dramatic. But I’m afraid for Daniel.”
“Fill me in on this conference. This Linton fellow, he is — or was — a Canadian?”
“Yes, from McGill. He was one of the organizers, and he’s the tree man that Daniel was suspicious of. But there are a lot of Americans taking part — his co-researcher and business partner is an American. Arbor Vitae’s plan was to stay with the meetings here for two days and then to do two days in Ottawa. So far as Paul knows, they’re still going through with that, although the whole conference stopped for one day in memory of Dr. Linton, and most of the participating groups have pulled out completely.”
“I guess that’s broken their hearts.”
“For once your cynicism is off base. Apparently Linton was pretty popular, and it was a real tribute. He was an academic idealist who held himself to high research standards. He was also helpful to his younger colleagues and resistant to pressures from industry to tailor his work to their needs. Daniel researched his background real well. He even called a few of Linton’s colleagues, pretending to be a reporter, and got glowing testimonials.”
“If that’s the case, how come this tree research serves the big companies? That’s what you said Daniel believes.”
“But Linton didn’t believe it. He was convinced that society wouldn’t really change its fundamental greedy grasping, that we would go on consuming vital resources and polluting the planet. Only he thought he’d found a way to cope with that. He was going to use nature to compensate for the excesses, the bad effects, of human production. That’s why he wanted to modify the trees. It was either modify them or lose them, he thought.”
“And Daniel doesn’t agree?”
“Daniel sees it all differently. He doesn’t think we have a right to change nature to suit our own needs. Nature is the mother of us all, the primary medium. If we separate ourselves from it, if we try to act completely independently of the medium we live in, we cut off our own legs. We also commit a kind of sacrilege.”
Sam frowned. Sweeping assertions, cozy metaphors, always bothered him. He glanced first at Clara, then at Joan of Arc with her upraised, harmless sword, and said scathingly, “On the other hand, there’s big agriculture, mining, antibiotics, every kind of technological intervention, and some that go back a long way. Were we supposed to stay in the trees, pick up coconuts to feed our children, and die when we caught a bad cold?”
“Jesus, Sam, you know that’s not the issue. The issue is moderation, respect for boundaries, and a feeling for integration and beauty.”
Sam laughed. “Sure! Trouble is, we don’t have any reason to believe in those things any more. God is dead and we may be a product of blind forces that got themselves into shape through trial and error, or pure chance. All this Mother Nature stuff is outdated. A friend of mine wrote a poem a couple of years ago that says it all. Of course you know who Watson and Crick are, teacher — the scientists who started all this messing around with genes. My friend put it this way:
Watson and Crick
performed a neat trick.
They got the world keen
on exploiting the gene.
They showed how a suture
could sew up our future
and made “Mother Nature”
extinct nomenclature.
“That makes good sense to me.”
“Well, you’re going to have to talk to Daniel about it. And by the way, Sam, take it easy on Daniel. He’s been under a lot of stress recently. He’s not — well, he’s not exactly himself.”
Sam gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean by that?”
Clara shrugged her shoulders; they walked on, and when she spoke to him again it was in a much softer voice, one that Sam found curiously vulnerable.
“You know what a sweet-tempered, placid guy he is, ever since he gave up drinking and started to use more pot. Well, he’s still like that. Only recently he’s been given to outbursts.”
“Go on.”
“He seems to have a very short fuse. He screams and yells sometimes and even throws things around. He’s just not himself these days.”
“Since when?”
“Since he started working on this show. He seems almost possessed. To tell you the truth, the show’s not as funny as his exhibitions usually are. I told him that, and he burst out at me, accused me of not understanding him, of trying to put his imagination in a box. He’s never talked like that before. I think he’s —”
Sam interrupted her, stopped and pointed ahead. “See that block of stone sitting all by itself on the grass over there, just beyond that tree. It’s a monument. Not Joan of Arc this time. The Berthelets thought I should look at it …You were saying?”
“I’ve told you just about everything. I wouldn’t hold back on you.”
“But you were going to say something about Daniel.”
Clara took his hand. “I don’t see any reason to mention this to the police, not even to Paul. But Daniel’s been doing some new kinds of meditation and physical training recently. Every now and then he disappears, which is very unlike him. He tells me he goes out to some lake in the Gatineau to ‘re-immerse in nature.’ I have an idea, but only a vague idea, of what that involves. He told me the other week, ‘I’m trying to be the warrior I always should have