"Tha' knows it make sense," she added, then cut the jammer.

When Joe finally staggered home in the small hours, a thin plume of smoke was rising from Bob's kennel. Joe paused in front of the kitchen door and sniffed anxiously, then relaxed. Letting go of the door handle, he walked over to the kennel and sat down outside. Bob was most particular about his den-even his own humans didn't go in there without an invitation. So Joe waited.

A moment later there was an interrogative cough from inside. A dark, pointed snout came out, dribbling smoke from its nostrils like a particularly vulpine dragon. "Rrrrrrr?"

" 'S'me."

"Uuurgh." A metallic click. "Smoke good smoke joke cough tickle funny arf arf?"

"Yeah, don't mind if I do."

The snout pulled back into the kennel; a moment later it reappeared, teeth clutching a length of hose with a mouthpiece on one end. Joe accepted it graciously, wiped off the mouthpiece, leaned against the side of the kennel, and inhaled. The weed was potent and smooth: within a few seconds the uneasy dialogue in his head was still.

"Wow, tha's a good turnup."

"Arf-arf-ayup."

Joe felt himself relaxing. Maddie would be upstairs, snoring quietly in their decrepit bed: waiting for him, maybe. But sometimes a man just had to be alone with his dog and a good joint, doing man-and-dog stuff. Maddie understood this and left him his space. Still...

" 'At farm been buggering around the pond?"

"Growl exclaim fuck-fuck yup! Sheep-shagger."

"If it's been at our lambs-"

"Nawwwwrr. Buggrit."

"So whassup?"

"Grrrr, Maddie yap-yap farmtalk! Sheep-shagger."

"Maddie's been talking to it?"

"Grrr yes-yes!"

"Oh, shit. Do you remember when she did her last backup?"

The dog coughed fragrant blue smoke. "Tank thump-thump full cow moo beef clone."

"Yeah, I think so, too. Better muck it out tomorrow. Just in case."

"Yurrrrrp." But while Joe was wondering whether this was agreement or just a canine eructation a lean paw stole out of the kennel mouth and yanked the hookah back inside. The resulting slobbering noises and clouds of aromatic blue smoke left Joe feeling a little queasy: so he went inside.

The next morning, over breakfast, Maddie was even quieter than usual. Almost meditative.

"Bob said you'd been talking to that farm," Joe commented over his eggs.

"Bob-" Maddie's expression was unreadable. "Bloody dog." She lifted the Rayburn's hot plate lid and peered at the toast browning underneath. "Talks too much."

"Did you?"

"Ayup." She turned the toast and put the lid back down on it. "Said much?"

"It's a farm." She looked out the window. "Not a fuckin' worry in the world 'cept making its launch window for Jupiter."

"It-"

"Him. Her. They." Maddie sat down heavily in the other kitchen chair. "It's a collective. Usedta be six people. Old, young, whatever, they's decided ter go to Jupiter. One of 'em was telling me how it happened. How she'd been living like an accountant in Bradford, had a nervous breakdown. Wanted out . Self-sufficiency." For a moment her expression turned bleak. "Felt herself growing older but not bigger, if you follow."

"So how's turning into a bioborg an improvement?" Joe grunted, forking up the last of his scrambled eggs.

"They're still separate people: bodies are overrated, anyway. Think of the advantages: not growing older, being able to go places and survive anything, never being on your own, not bein' trapped-"

Maddie sniffed. "Fuckin' toast's on fire!"

Smoke began to trickle out from under the hot plate lid. Maddie yanked the wire toasting rack out from under it and dunked it into the sink, waited for waterlogged black crumbs to float to the surface before taking it out, opening it, and loading it with fresh bread.

"Bugger," she remarked.

"You feel trapped?" Joe asked. Again? He wondered.

Maddie grunted evasively. "Not your fault, love. Just life."

"Life." Joe sniffed, then sneezed violently as the acrid smoke tickled his nose. "Life!"

"Horizon's closing in," she said quietly. "Need a change of horizons."

"Ayup, well, rust never sleeps, right? Got to clean out the winter stables, haven't I?" said Joe. He grinned uncertainly at her as he turned away. "Got a shipment of fertilizer coming in."

In between milking the herd, feeding the sheep, mucking out the winter stables, and surreptitiously EMPing every police 'bot on the farm into the silicon afterlife, it took Joe a couple of days to get round to running up his toy on the household fabricator. It clicked and whirred to itself like a demented knitting machine as it ran up the gadgets he'd ordered-a modified crop sprayer with double-walled tanks and hoses, an air rifle with a dart loaded with a potent cocktail of tubocurarine and etorphine, and a breathing mask with its own oxygen supply.

Maddie made herself scarce, puttering around the control room but mostly disappearing during the daytime, coming back to the house after dark to crawl, exhausted, into bed. She didn't seem to be having nightmares, which was a good sign. Joe kept his questions to himself.

It took another five days for the smallholding's power field to concentrate enough juice to begin fueling up his murder weapons. During this time, Joe took the house off-Net in the most deniable and surreptitiously plausible way, a bastard coincidence of squirrel-induced cable fade and a badly shielded alternator on the backhoe to do for the wireless chitchat. He'd half expected Maddie to complain, but she didn't say anything-just spent more time away in Outer Cheswick or Lower Gruntlingthorpe or wherever she'd taken to holing up.

Finally, the tank was filled. So Joe girded his loins, donned his armor, picked up his weapons, and went to do battle with the dragon by the pond.

The woods around the pond had once been enclosed by a wooden fence, a charming copse of old-growth deciduous trees, elm and oak and beech growing uphill, smaller shrubs nestling at their ankles in a green skirt that reached all the way to the almost-stagnant waters. A little stream fed into it during rainy months, under the feet of a weeping willow; children had played here, pretending to explore the wilderness beneath the benevolent gaze of their parental control cameras.

That had been long ago. Today the woods really were wild. No kids, no picnicking city folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket trolley of Precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shortedout. The bones of the technological epoch, poking from the treacherous surface of a fossil mud bath. And around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.

Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their needles were matte black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up all the available light: a network of taproots and fuzzy black grasslike stuff covered the ground densely around them. Joe's breath wheezed noisily in his ears, and he sweated into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colorless smoking liquid at the roots of each ballistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to bleach the wood where it touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him uneasy. As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one thing he'd been able to think of that was guaranteed to kill the trees stone dead without igniting them. After all, they had cores that were basically made of gun cotton-highly explosive, liable to go off if you subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chainsaw. The tree he'd hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall sideways, and Joe stepped round it, efficiently squirting at the remaining roots. Right into the path of a distraught farm.

"My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my trees, my trees!" Eye stalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. "Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!"

"Back off," said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter and fumbling for his air gun.

The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across angry blue irises. "How dare you?" demanded the farm. "My treasured seedlings!"

"Shut the fuck up," Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. "Think I'd let you burn my holding when tha'

rocket launched? Stay the fuck away," he added as a tentacle began to extend from the farm's back.

"My crop," it moaned quietly. "My exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for Baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn't fucked up! Who set you up to this? Rat Lady?" It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle atop its leg cluster.

So Joe shot it.

Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyzes skeletal muscles, the kind over which human nervous systems typically exert conscious control. Etorphine is an insanely strong opiate-twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against the etorphine-but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a blue whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time.

It shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a Syrette raised. "Why?" it asked plaintively in a voice that almost made him wish he hadn't pulled the trigger. "We could have gone together!"

"Together?" he asked. Already the eye stalks were drooping; the great lungs wheezed effortfully as it struggled to frame a reply.

"I was going to ask you," said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a thud like a baby earthquake. "Oh, Joe, if only-"

"Joe? Maddie? " he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping the tranquilizer gun.

A mouth appeared in the farm's front, slurred words at him from familiar seeming lips, words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from the farm. Passing the first dead tree, he dropped the nitrogen tank: then an impulse he couldn't articulate made him turn and run, back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm, pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his arms, he found it was already dead.

"Bugger," said Joe, and he stood up, shaking his head. "Bugger." He keyed his walkie-talkie: "Bob, come in, Bob!"

"Rrrrowl?"

"Momma's had another break-down. Is the tank clean, like I asked?" "Yap!"

"Okay. I got 'er backup tapes in t'office safe. Let's get t' tank warmed up for 'er an' then shift t'

tractor down 'ere to muck out this mess."

That autumn, the weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of Armitage End.

The Violet's Embryos

ANGeLICA GORODISCHER.

translated by Sara Irausquin Angelica Gorodischer lives in Rosario, Argentina, and is the most notable living Argentine writer of SF and the fantastic. She says, in a Fantastic Metropolis interview by Gabriel Mesa, "At the age of thirty, the worst time to do these things, since I had a husband, three small children, a house, a garden, a dog, a cat, and a job (as a librarian) outside of the house, I said it's now or never and I started to write professionally. I won a crime fiction contest, and another contest with a book of short stories.... And one day I discovered science fiction, and I said, this is what I want to do. And I did, over the course of four or five books. I've written and published twenty books so far, not necessarily all SF, but the mark that SF leaves on a writer is very deep, and you definitely can't say that I am a 'realist' writer."

Gorodischer is in effect the Le Guin of Argentina, so it is fitting that her novel Kalpa Imperial, widely considered a classic of contemporary Spanish language fantastic fiction, was recently translated by Ursula Le Guin (2003). "The Violet's Embryos" was first published more than twenty years ago in Spanish, but first translated into English in 2003, and printed in the distinguished anthology, Cosmos Latinos. It would be a best story in any year. It reminds us of the fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. It is weird SF about happiness, wish fulfillment, gender and sexuality, and much more, packed with strange images and memorable lines.

He turned beneath the sheets; the torrents roared. He managed to cut short the end of a dream about Ulysses and listened to the soothing breath of the Vantedour night. At the foot of the bed, Bonifacio of Solomea stretched and stuck out his rose-colored tongue for his lazy morning toilet. But dawn had not yet come, and so the two of them went back to sleep. Tuk-o-tut was stretched out across the doorway, snoring.

On the other side of the sea, the matronas were rocking Carita Dulce. They had carefully moved the egg out into the open, watching where they stepped so they wouldn't stumble or jostle it, and then they had uncovered it. The huge cradle rocked to the rhythm of their song and the yellow sun shone through the leaves on the trees, licking at Carita Dulce's thighs. Whimpering, he moved about, rubbing himself against the smooth walls of the cradle. While the matronas sang, one of them caressed Carita Dulce's cheek, bringing a smile to his face and coaxing him back to sleep. The matronas sighed and looked at each other contentedly.

On the island, it was afternoon and the Sonata #17 in B-flat was playing on the clavichords.

Theophilus was getting ready to attack again; Saverius had finished his speech and was planning a brilliant riposte. But within Theophilus echoed the phrase, This soul, too, loves Cimarosa. Was he forgetting the words he had been planning to say, the importance of an adversative conjunction, the nuances of an adjective meant to cast a somewhat pejorative light on the presumed universal model of perception? It struck him that Saverius was beginning to look a little too satisfied.

Twisted up like a rope, unshaven and dirty, smelling of vomit and sweat, he tried again to sit down.

Using all his strength, he put his left hand on the ground and leaned upon it. Squeezing, squeezing so thatit wouldn't shake, he grabbed hold of a patch of tall grass. He lifted his right hand to grip the trunk of a tree and began to hoist himself up. He felt dizzy, and a bilious saliva was filling his mouth. He spit, and a little drool ran down his chin.

"Let's sing," he said. "Let's sing to life, to love, and to wine."

He had seven suns inside his head and two outside. One of them was orange and could be gazed at with impunity.

"I want a suit," he said. "This one is disgusting. A new suit made of green velvet. Green, yes, that's it, green. And a pair of tall boots, a cane, and a shirt. And some whiskey in beer steins."

But he was very far from the violet and didn't have the energy to walk.

The facade of the house was made of gray rock. The house itself was built into the mountain and inside were countless corridors where no light ever entered. The trophy rooms were empty; on the mountain, the hunters were roasting venison. There were rooms draped in black where the judges sometimes sat. Everything was silent, like it usually was; the windows would remain closed. In the basement was the torture chamber, which is where they took Lesvanoos, his hands tied behind his back.

Meanwhile, fifteen tired men were approaching in the darkness. Eleven had been chosen for their physical strength, their courage, and their ability to obey orders; the other four had been chosen for their knowledge. Seven of them were seated around a table in the only place that wasn't some type of multipurpose pit.

"We'll say ten hours more," said the commander.

Leonidas Terencio Sessler thought that too many things had already been said on this trip, and from what he could see, they were still-and would keep on-saying too much.

There had been arguments, fights, shouts, orders, apologies, explanations, and moralizing lectures (for which he alone was responsible). He had never intended to become the moralizer. But in his attempt to ease a little of what he knew would sound like cynicism to the others, something changed in the obscure process by which thoughts are transformed into words, and he wound up devastating everyone with morals. He had compared that process many times with the one he believed should occur during creation-a poem, for example: I know how to appear without waking the green star-and had reached the conclusion that the explosion of language, scream, language, name-again: I will inhabit my name-had been a monstrous error, or a bloody joke, depending on his mood. In the second case (when he reached the point where he could accept the possibility of the suspicion of a suspicion-the existence of God), unending and re-edited jokes, desolate autobiographies, recommendations and presumptions.

"We ought to get rid of words and communicate using music," he said.

The commander smiled, twisting his head around like a short-winged bird, suspicious.

"I don't mean just us," explained Leo Sessler, "but rather humans in general."

"So, my dear doctor," said Savan, the engineer, "according to you, we should, right now, be opening our mouths and singing a victory march?"

"Uh-huh."

"It's not the same if we cheer hip, hip, hooray?"

"Of course it's not."

"Twelve notes aren't very many," commented young Reidt, unexpectedly.

"And twenty-eight letters are too many," responded Leo Sessler.