Nobody but the tender from the next tent over mentioned I could expect to lose a third of my charges. Never did catch his name. No shoes, beard down to his gut—the only other tender ever to visit my tent—even invited me into his, once, showed me how he’d tweaked the overheads and told me how much livelier his charges looked when he shut down half the fans down and ran the rest full blast. He said plenty more, too, that I couldn’t catch under the jerk and oscillation of the circulators and the battle between mildew and disinfectant that choked me more the farther in we went. He said it was nothing to worry about. I nodded as he twitched a smirk, his beard stained black and yellow and the unshut door of his shower box flaunting rivulets of shimmering filth. The peculiar disinfectant had a smell I couldn’t place, until back in my own tent I later recalled a time I’d smelled something like it. It was on my homestead as a child, when I’d set fire to a hunk of polystyrene and watched the blaze hover on the blistering, receding foam, until the mass became a coin-sized dollop hard as stone.
The man was gone by the time I had a chance to visit his tent again. The smell was gone, everything inside returned to standard, and in his place a squirrely, frantic tender who wouldn’t so much as raise his face when I called out to him from the entryway.
I haven’t left my own tent since.
The only other person I ever see now is my courier, Callie. The air warms when she steps through the entryway, and she takes the warmness with her when she leaves. From the first time she crossed my threshold she’s been like sunshine, golden hair tucked into her cap and hefty arms wrapped round those trays of inchoates. I never had a sister. My mother died before my father. I was 14 when I first heard girls had two holes, that not everything went into and came out the same place. I envision Callie’s golden fur-swathed holes and rake my mind for conversation. I mention they must’ve sacked the next tender over, only to see her smile falter. I get a warning afterwards from Admin not to fraternize—not with couriers, not with other tenders. Of course. Of course. I’m here to do a job. I confess I’m disappointed the recruiter’s promise of a bed in the Admin bunker wasn’t true, but all the same I want a permanent contract so bad I can taste it. I’ll do everything it takes to get it, too. Everything by the book. Toothbrush in my mouth and one more round before lights out.
Bed medium (1m from floor, 60cm wide) sampled at 6m intervals end to end. Overheads 4m from surface, temperature and microclimates consistent rear to entryway. The medium even smells like soil. When I close my eyes sometimes it’s like I never left my homestead.
But my homunculi aren’t coming up.
The manual says the bulbs peep through the surface after ten days tops, but doesn’t say what to do if that doesn’t happen. I query Admin. Follow up next day. Another day and no response. Maybe the medium’s too harsh? With what I made on the sale of my homestead I can spare the cost of a case of lime. In flows Callie’s scent, her smile and flesh so pale I can see every vein.
Another warning from Admin: Tenders must always request permission before placing any orders. Again I kick myself. Of course. They’d have supplied lime if I needed it. These bulbs just took a little longer to come of age, that’s all.
Once my homunculi have germinated I can pick out subtle differences in their size and shape and posture. I study each up close—with which among these hundreds might I build rapport? Buoyed, I relax into my routine, rising with the first glow of the overheads and swept along the winds from the circulators. I sing the songs my father taught me. Will homunculi like these melodies? Can’t wait for them to straighten. According to the manual the rounded part emerging from the medium is actually their upper backs, their buried facia still pointing toward their distal membra. It also says we’re allowed to ask for supplemental phosphorus once they’re blooming. Which they are. And I do.
But days go by without a sign of Callie.
I know I shouldn’t worry. Nearly all my charges are starting to straighten anyway. Some have even spread their flora. Soon their sentien caules will unfold and they’ll greet me with those toots and pips and coos homunculi are famous for. I can tell each one from the other now by the wrinkles in their superficie and by the hue and texture of the pilus on their crania. A few still hide their facia in the folds when I come close. I crouch down and try to look into their caules, hoping for a wink or some spark of recognition. To help the ones that haven’t straightened I push stakes into the medium, hoping they’ll latch on and raise themselves. All but a dozen have unburied their proximal membra. But it’s that dozen that worry me. I go back and forth among them, nudging their membra toward the stakes. Grab on! I want to holler at them. Gently but insistently, I prod. As soon as I let go they droop into a heap. Why, why, why, why?
Sleepless, I stare into the grainy void congealing around the ridge pole, nostalgic for the unfurling starscape of my childhood. Now that I think about it, it seems like even then I had a sense that it could easily be taken from me. But when I close my eyes I can still see the swirling galaxies above our house by night, the versicolour dawn, and that vast rolling blond expanse of ours spreading toward the haze. I can still see my father, too, his blighted forearms battered purple by the drip, his torso lurching up to cough but capable only of a drawn-out grating wheeze. The suits from Human Services came by to let me know there was no flesh left to stick a needle in. Next time they came it was to collect the body. I worked so I wouldn’t have to think, scalding my skin under those crops bred to be easy—aspage, berlon, calkri—in those fields of ours that now were my responsibility alone.
Up rode that recruiter nodding over my miserable dilapidated berlon, my shuddering macerated kalcri, my columns of aspage gone skeletal before they could even reach the trellises. An offer of room and board with all variables of cultivation guaranteed? How could I refuse? Not that there’s much left of the lump sum they gave me for my homestead, after I ordered that case of lime I didn’t even need.
But sometimes before my eyes open I see Callie standing candidly above me, her warmth washing away any notion that I ever needed more.
In the early light I see the silhouettes of my charges, facia raised, caules extended. I hoist myself from my cot to greet them. To croon at them. Make faces. They stare blankly back with… what? Boredom? Indifference? Contempt?
I admit I’ve already lost a few.
The vacant spots in the medium caught my sight first. Then I found those stiff dry- rotted carcasses that snapped off weightlessly at the trunk, their orifices agape and caules scumbled over. I try to stay calm as I notify Admin. They suck their teeth and temporize, refer me back to the manual. Somewhere I read homunculi that fail or flee are desperate for iron, folates, molybdenum. I order the largest quantities of all three. Callie brings the smallest. Admin, she says, told her my lot don’t need more than that. She apologizes as if I’m blaming her. I can’t stand the way my charges hide their facia. I’m tempted to poke them in the sclera just so they’ll react. Not that I ever would! I count eight missing now. Can’t imagine where they might have fled. It sounds paranoid, but could homunculi keep watch for each other while some climb out of the medium, slip themselves to the floor and out the entryway? Could they have done it after lights out, sneaking past my cot so silently I didn’t notice?
Total absentees now number 23, not counting the deceased. A substantial number of the remainder exhibit splotches or abrasions and infected-looking peeling at the crania. I drip supplements in their frontal orifices. Say aaah! If I didn’t know better I’d think they were being perverse, even that they despise me and are making effort not to show it. And yet, even so, there are those that seem to follow me with their caules when I make my rounds, watching me with something I might take for curious affection.
The thing is, I’m almost certain Admin know what happened to the 23 that disappeared. I arrange for a consultation, promising myself I won’t be too direct. They mention in passing that—oh yes—some of the trays of inchoates dispatched to my tent had already been marked as defective. Shouldn’t they have told me? There’s no protocol for providing tenders with that information, they say. Well. Is that why they never react to anything? Oh, those probably came from the aphotic incubators. Aphotic! I beg Admin to dispatch folain. Protocol calls for guananine, they say. Guaninine covers enough of the deficiencies to hike the statistical health of my lot overall, even if it means a few of my charges die from lack of folain. I look out at the miserable columns of my inscrutable homunculi, and can only hold my tongue.
I test samples at 2cm, 5cm and 10cm from the lower membra. Conduct analysis myself, send results to Admin for vetting. A day goes by with no response. And another. And another.
When I decide to leave my tent, all my charges seem to know. They turn to me in unison when I near the entryway and raise a doleful bellow. When I cross the threshold the wailing tumefies to a guttural pandemonium. I step outside. The sunlight burns my skin. They were right, of course—I’m lucky to be sequestered in my tent. The air itself blisters my nasal cavity, pushes acridly against me as I make my way across the courtyard. I can see the Admin bunker through the candid vapor. See it barely drawing nearer no matter how much ground I’ve covered. It must be a delusion cohering in the fumes, I think, until I can make out what I know to be the office window and the savage flailing of those suited limbs and those contorted faces remonstrating soundlessly to go back, go back, go back!
The heap of warnings waiting in my tent says I must never exceed 60 seconds outside.
The Inspector arrives in the morning. He heads straight for the beds without acknowledging me. That much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the way my charges lift their facia and crane out to suck his fingers. He won’t tell me how he does it, but only that I’ve insulted them and that they’re terrified of my cruelty. He bids me stand and keep my mouth shut while he works his way through his flowcharts. Orders me to douse every bed with a triple dose of guanimede. I protest that I thought we were using gaunanine. It’s the same thing, he says. I know it isn’t. He talks me through each step of the process, do this, now this. I fumble with the gassing canister, my hands soaked in the liquid. Do you mind if I wash my hands? It won’t hurt you, is all he says. I stand by another quarter hour while my skin goes numb. By the time the Inspector leaves my hands are covered in welts and oozing pustules. I beg Admin to send a medic. They promise to dispatch medicated gloves. The stink of guanimede fills my tent.
A stink like burning polystyrene.
On my homestead. Living off the gamy remains of last year’s aspage. How blessed I am to have a tent in the compound. Free from blight and surfeit. If only I could stop the pain. The agglutinating ululations driving me to the floor, wrists and fingers cracked and flaking bits of meat and dribbling pus across the walkway. Crawling on my elbows. Clambering from bed to bed to scream dementedly into those retracting caules. I know now that they hate me. They clench up and recoil at my howling desperate pulls with rotting hands to tweak the overheads, to fix the angles of the blasters, shut half down and fan the lot. Is the pole that ridge blocking up there, cross breeze, what’s what, even air, something? Something outside? Puckered facium. Fix the wind. Fix the wind. Fix it fix it fix fix...
I see Callie hovering in the entryway.
She’s brought the gloves. Finally. She’s brought them. I fall to her feet.
But she hasn’t brought the gloves. She’s brought another triple dose of guaninine.
She doesn’t understand. And I can’t hold back from railing. I can’t not show her my bloody hands. My disintegrating face. How I secretly inhaled every particle of her skin that floated in the sunbeams. The messages. Of course. My outburst was unacceptable. A dozen times each night I wake from the pain. I babble at the restless luffing of my withering charges. My untouched rations. The unshut door of my rancid shower box. Moribund, my charges clench their orifices. The manual says to wait at least a cycle before tossing the corpses in the discard pile. But already I can barely breathe. I stagger from bed to bed. Pull out the ones I know for sure are dead. The razor pain from fingertip to spine.
A man who must be a courier scratches his head in the entryway. Didn’t I see my termination notice?
I hold up my hands. He looks the other way.
Can I, please, just make one more round? To say goodbye. Although my remaining charges don’t seem to mind my leaving. I’m sure they know. I wonder what will become of them. Can’t ask the courier, of course. That would be against protocol. Strangely, though—or at least it’s strange to me, and maybe it shouldn’t be—they seem healthier than they ever did before. If I didn’t know better I’d think they were on the verge of recovery.
Tremain Xenos is a writer, translator, part-time teacher, mediocre flautist, and very clumsy paragliding pilot. He lives with his wife, cats and chickens in Japan’s smallest and least productive prefecture. His stories “Home” and “Agora Filias” appeared in Propagule, and his most recent stories appear in Fraidy Cat Press, ergot., and Twenty Two Twenty Eight.