Sky Coyote by Kage Baker Read Free Book Online

lied.
    “Hey!” Her eyes suddenly came to life. “You can see my work.”
    My heart sank. “Gee, that would be interesting,” I lied further. “So you’ve got a garden or something? I didn’t think you worked with any actual green plants anymore.”
    “I do compilation and analysis of other operatives’ field specimens, but everybody’s allowed some private projects. And look, here we are at Botany! Come on.” She fairly leaped from the sedan chair before the bearers had set it all the way down.
    “Happy Holidays. We must remind the Daughter of Heaven to remain within the conveyance until it has stopped moving,” one of the bearers informed her in aggrieved tones.
    “Yeah, yeah.” She waved a hand, not looking back. I followed her, thanking God she wasn’t something like an entomologist.
    Botany was less a pyramid and more a toppled megalith, long and low. We went through it past the labs and offices and out into the back, where a vast field was surrounded on three sides by pink stucco walls. I had figured on a greenhouse or something, which was kind of a silly expectation in the tropics. Under the open sky grew fruits and vegetables of obscene size, enough to fill the salad bars at the many excellent restaurants available for my dining pleasure and then some.
    “Now, get a load of this.” Mendoza hitched up her skirts and led me across the rows to a double line of green stalks. “Look at these big guys.”
    “You’re still fooling around with maize?” She’d been doing that back in 1554.
    “I could never quite give up on it. It’s so beautiful, see, but the stuff is worthless as a food staple. Well, nearly. Compared to soybeans or oats or wheat. Far less nourishing. And the bigger and more golden you make it, the less food value it generally has, even when you develop high-lysine varieties. But look at this
Zea mays
and look at these primitive varieties over here, these are cultivars that were abandoned because their yield was low or they were difficult to hull, and look at the oldest one here, teosinte,” she said it like a saint’s name. “If you analyze its genetic structure, you know what you find?”
    I was afraid she was going to tell me. She did, too, for the next forty-five minutes.
    “… so one day, one fine day when I’ve perfected it, this specimen’s descendant will leap from the stalk, rip open his husk, and yell, ‘Here I am! Supergrain! More nourishing than a speeding ear of triticale!’ And it’ll all be my work.” She fondled the golden tassels with such intimacy, I had to look away.
    “But you haven’t limited yourself to maize, have you? If I remember right, you used to be a real whiz on all the New World grains and other related stuff.”
    “Oh, sure.”
    “Like for example, you’d know about the kind of grain the Native Americans in California eat.”
    “Well, they don’t eat grain up there exactly, their main analogous staples are acorns and chia—” She broke off and swung around to look at me, terrible suspicion in her eyes. “Why, Joseph?”
    “No, no, I’ve got good news. Trust me. You remember back when you were just out of school, when you filled out a certain form PF215?”
    “Personal Goals and Preferences,” she responded, and then her mouth fell open and stayed that way. “Ohhhh…”
    “And you
said
, I mean, you know, it was you who filled this thing out, you did your best to convince the graduation board that you ought to be sent to the New World to work on its flora in remote areas, because you were this super expert on New World grains, and—”
    “No! No, no, no! That was in 1554!”
    “And you’ve been drafted for the California project, and that’s how it is, babe.”
    If any of those giant zucchini had connected, I’d have been seriously bruised.

CHAPTER EIGHT

    A S YOU MAY HAVE GATHERED , Mendoza is not the kind of woman to waste time on petty things like forgiveness. But somehow she rose above her inclinations enough to let