Laughter at the Academy Read online

  How they laughed.

  2.

  “It is important we record the last days of the Planet Earth in their own languages, for these languages contain the concepts with which the meat-based life forms of that world were most familiar. They could no more express the delight of fresh sun falling upon their roots than an unbonded pod could explain the intricacies of a lady’s undergarments. By preserving the manners and culture of the planet in this way, we can better understand them and, should we ever encounter another such species, we can bring about an even swifter and more efficient conquest.”

  —from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing

  It was a Thursday afternoon when the advance scouts broke through the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, announcing their arrival with the usual chromatic displays. The lights drew attention across the globe, stargazers and young romantics alike clustering in the fields as they strained to watch these strange and heretofore undocumented rainbows of the night. I was less interested in the phenomenon, naturally; I have always done better during the daylight hours, and the things I do in open fields are better not shared with those of delicate mammalian sensibilities. I was seated in the parlor at home, working on my needlepoint and snacking from a tray of little sandwiches, when Sir Blackwood burst into the room, his hair mussed and his jacket askew.

  “Antheia!” he cried. “Why are you here, and not out on the veranda with the guests? They’re asking about you.”

  “I have no interest in watching the excited collision of atoms,” I said, tugging another loop of thread carefully through the muslin. A fine cabbage rose was taking form under my fingers—some of my best work, if I did say so myself. “The colors will be there with or without me to watch them, and besides, it was time for my tea. You do prefer that I continue to take my meals in private, do you not?”

  Arthur blanched. It had taken the household some time to adjust to my predilection for eating raw animal flesh and drinking only fresh blood. Sir Arthur’s sister, Julia, had adjusted faster than he had—she’d already known I was a beast, as evidenced by the fact that I had eaten her lady’s maid. Dear, sweet Arthur had devoted his life to the study of plants, and even the fact that I was not the first flesh-eater he had encountered had not prepared him for the notion that one day he might meet a flower who could smile and curtsey and request a hot bowl of pig’s blood for her supper.

  “Yes, but the lights—”

  “Are better left to those who can appreciate them.” I reached for a sandwich. The delightful smell of raw, fresh-sliced beef addressed my nose. “Really, I thought your sister had banned you from her stargazing party. Something about the noises coming from the basement?”

  “I don’t understand why she gets so upset,” he said, dropping into the seat on the other side of my sewing table with a loud thump. He automatically reached for my plate of sandwiches, and looked offended when I smacked his hand with my needlepoint frame. Rubbing his fingers, he continued, “My steam-powered sun will make us richer than she can imagine.”

  “You see, that is her trouble: she suffers from a shortage of imagination, and as such, cannot see where a loud, clanking clockwork machine could possibly improve her life.” I took a dainty nibble from my sandwich. “Remember, she forbade poor Jill to use any modern machinery in maintaining the house.”

  Arthur blanched again. He enjoyed being reminded that I’d eaten Jill even less than he enjoyed being reminded of the rest of my diet. “Julia is a traditional soul, that’s all,” he mumbled.

  “We live in an age of wonders,” I said. “The fact that she cannot embrace them is a shame. The fact that she can stand on her veranda marveling over a scientific curiosity while forbidding the pursuit of more concrete sciences is a sham. I will never understand how you can tolerate her willful interference with your business, Arthur.”

  “She’ll wed eventually. One of her hulking suitors will make an honest woman of her, and she’ll have no more grounds to interfere.” Arthur looked wistfully at my sandwiches, but didn’t stretch out his hand again. “What do you think of these lights?”

  “Natural atmospheric distortion, of no more interest than any of the other things one sees in the sky.” I nibbled my sandwich, swallowed, and added, “Excepting, of course, Her Majesty’s airship, which is a wonder and a blessing and is in no way an eyesore that blocks the sunlight from reaching my roses.”

  Arthur laughed. “I swear your tongue gets sharper every year, Antheia.”

  “What good is a rose that has no thorns?” I smiled, pleased when his cheeks reddened in reply. Blood-based circulatory systems are such traitorous things, betraying the emotions of their owners even as they struggle to keep them alive. “I presume you have some motive for asking these questions, apart from the pleasure of my company?”

  “I was speaking with Lord Harrington of the Royal Astronomical Society about the lights,” said Arthur, carefully. “I thought he might have something interesting to offer on the topic, and in fact, he did. He said similar lights—similar in color and design, although less grandiose in scope—were seen in various locations around the world some six years ago.”

  “Is that so?” I asked politely, before taking another nibble of my sandwich. The bread, made specially from bone meal and ground fish scales, was deliciously nourishing. I kept my eyes on Arthur, waiting for him to finish his explanation with the inevitable and begin the next phrase in our little dance.

  I had been waiting for so long, and as ever, Arthur did not disappoint. “The lights were last seen on the night before you appeared,” he said. “Antheia, I have always assumed, in some vague way, that you were one of the fairy-folk of legend, escaped from beneath the hill and come to grace us with your presence. Fairy-folk have sometimes been said to be green of skin, you see. But now I come to wonder…did you come from beneath the Earth? Did you come from the Earth at all?”

  I smiled dazzlingly, showing him my teeth in parody of the primate grimace he and his sister wore so often, and to such good effect. Jill had taught me my manners properly, you see: no deportment coach could have been better than my own internal lady’s maid. “I never claimed a terrestrial origin, you know. I simply felt such matters were better left behind us than discussed in polite company.”

  “Antheia…” Arthur frowned, his brows furrowing together as he looked at me with such gravity as to make my breath catch in my chest. “These lights. Are they more of your people?”

  “Oh, no,” I said blithely. He began to relax. “If this were merely more of my people, you would need only to lock up your lady’s maids and gentleman’s companions long enough to let them take their human forms from the less desirable levels of society—or at least from the parts of society where the people would be less dearly missed. This is the invasion.”

  His mouth fell open. He stared at me, shocked into silence, as I set my sandwich aside, picked up my teacup, and took a dainty sip of its bloody contents. He continued to stare. I put the cup down, folded my hands in my lap, and offered him a tight-lipped smile.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you knew.”

  3.

  “As with so many worlds, Earth’s dominant life forms were mammalian: hot-blooded, quick to anger and to passion, and unwilling to pace their lives to the rhythm of the world around them. This allowed for some incredible leaps forward of technology and science, and we should work to retain these streaks of stubborn inventiveness and, dare I say, emotional engagement, within our own cultivars. They may serve useful, after all, even if they did not serve the human race with particular efficacy.”

  —from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing

  Julia and her friends watched disdainfully as Arthur bundled me out of the house and into the waiting steam-drawn carriage below, as if the method of our conveyance somehow rendered us low-class and common. I spared a smile and a waggle of my fingers for Julia, who glared and turned her face away. Then I was in the c
arriage next to Arthur, and we were being carried into the night, with the rainbow blaze of ships piercing the atmosphere dancing in the sky above us.

  “I have already sent a telegram to Lord Harrington, asking him to be prepared for us,” said Arthur, watching out the window as if he expected my brethren to be stalking the streets already. “He’ll want to know everything you can tell him about this ‘invasion.’ No detail is too small. We’re all going to need to do our part to beat these blighters back!”

  “Well, what about the ray guns atop the palace and the Royal Observatory?” I asked. “Won’t they automatically take aim at anything larger than Her Majesty’s airship that enters England’s skies?”

  “Yes, and we can take comfort in that, but—and please don’t take this as a criticism of your fair self, my dear, you have never been anything but a blessing to my house—they didn’t shoot you down, and that leads me to worry about the strength of our aerial defense net.” Arthur looked at me solemnly. “Are you positive this is an invasion? Couldn’t it be a simple atmospheric disturbance?”

  “I am not positive, as I have been on this planet and in this form for six years, and that does rather limit one’s communications with one’s fellows,” I said. “That aside, six years is roughly the time needed to travel here from the nearest habitable star, if said travel is undertaken in faster than light seed-ships.”

  Arthur’s mouth fell open. “F-faster than light? But that’s beyond the reaches of modern science. Why, even Professor O’Malley’s moon-ship only traveled at a rate of seventeen thousand miles an hour. Light is—”

  “Light is a far faster beast,” I said agreeably. “I am sorry. I thought you knew.”

  It was a bald-faced lie, and not the first I had told him during our acquaintanceship. Lying is wrong, miss, said Jill’s small, stern voice.

  Ah, but the lies are coming to an end, and sometimes things which are wrong are also comforting, I told her. Now hush, be still. I have a scientist to attend to.

  “Faster than light travel would be a discovery great enough to put the British Empire ahead of the rest of the world forever,” said Arthur. “You must discuss this with Lord Harrington.”

  “I will, if you bid me, but I am no engineer.” I refolded my hands in my lap. “I’ve never seen the drives, nor do I understand the physics behind them.”

  Arthur frowned like he was seeing me for the first time. “So you remember yourself before you were—” He waved a hand, indicating my form in a most ungentlemanly manner. “This?”

  “You mean, do I remember my existence before I consumed Julia’s lady’s maid?” I asked, baldly. If he was going to forsake manners for expediency, then I saw no reason not to do the same. “Yes, and no. My seed was coaxed from a cutting of a specific cultivated line. I have never been anything but what I am: I was a seed, and then I was a sprout, and then I was the Lady Antheia, who has very much enjoyed your hospitality over these past six years. The line from which I was grown, however, is a strain of diplomats and explorers. All the seeds that came to this world with me were of that same strain.” Had any of them managed to sprout, I would have had siblings all across the globe—but alas, more and more, I had come to believe that I alone had found welcoming soil.

  “A…diplomat?” Arthur blinked at me as our carriage rattled to a stop, presumably in front of our destination. “But the first thing you did was eat my sister’s maid.”

  “I’m aware,” I said primly, gathering my skirts as I waited for the doors to slide open on their well-oiled tracks. “But I was sorry afterward, which is the very definition of diplomacy.”

  Arthur didn’t have an answer to that.

  4.

  “Being only a cultivar of our greatest diplomat, the honorable and merciful Rooted in Many Soils, I cannot possibly know what it is to have conquered more than one world. I have offered my genetic material back to the trunk which grew me, and my experiences will be preserved for future generations, as is only right and just. Still, I know enough of what my parent and original experienced during their own explorations to know that the conquest of Earth was entirely unique, and extremely common, all at the same time. But then, this is always the way when we encounter a sapient race: they are all different, and they are all sadly, tragically the same. Meat is not capable of much variance.”

  —from Lady Antheia’s Guide to Horticultural Warfare, first printing

  Lord Harrington was a walking mountain of a man, tall and broad-chested, with a ruddy complexion that spoke of much blood pumping very close to the surface. He always made me hungry in a faintly embarrassing way; it’s rude to stare at a man and think of how much his blood would do to nourish your vines.

  “Arthur,” he greeted, in his booming voice, before turning his attention on me. “And the Lady Antheia, who appears to be the woman of the hour, if what Arthur tells me is true. Do you know what’s causing the lights in the sky?”

  He knew the answer: I could hear it in his tone. I politely inclined my head, and asked, “How long ago did your telescope begin picking out the ships in the auroras?”

  “Perhaps half an hour; no more,” he said. “I never trusted you.”

  “I know.” I raised my head. “I did not press the issue. It seemed more sporting to allow you your rebellion, rather than charming it out of you. Sportsmanship is not a uniquely human trait, you know. Very little is unique about any world, although they all assume themselves to be.”

  Lord Harrington’s lips peeled back from his teeth as he drew the gun from his belt and pointed it at the spot where my heart would have been, had I possessed such an inconvenient thing. “Lady Antheia, by my authority as a Peer of the Crown, I place you under arrest for treason to the British Empire.”

  “Oh, lovely.” I clapped my hands. “That is fantastic news, because you see, as the diplomatic ambassador of the…well, there isn’t a term in English that’s quite right for what we are, because we’ve never encountered English before, and thus far I’m the only one who speaks it, so let us say, the Vegetable Empire? As the diplomatic ambassador of the Vegetable Empire, I refuse to be arrested, but I’m happy to be taken before your Queen, as it seems the invasion is about to properly begin.”

  As if on a timer, the guns atop the observatory fired, their steam-fueled chambers expelling rays of hot light that seared across the sky. Several seed ships would be destroyed in this barrage; it was natural. They didn’t yet know to make themselves smaller, and would learn only through those losses. Those which survived the initial wave of gunfire would split into multiple vessels, and continue their implacable descent. I couldn’t mourn for the dead of this wave. They would only be seeds, after all, and of no more consequence than a promise, always intended to be broken.

  The guns fired again. And so, in the din, did Lord Harrington. His aim was true: the ray gun hit me squarely in the chest, burning a hole in both my favorite bodice and the bright green skin below, until it was possible to look through me to the room beyond. Arthur cried out. I looked down, considering the wreckage of what had been my sternum.

  “Oh, I do wish you hadn’t done that,” I sighed, my voice rendered weak and reedy by the damage to my lungs.

  And then I lunged.

  Lord Harrington had always treated me as a strange sort of pet, a harmless trinket to be either studied or ignored, depending on his mood. To learn that he had mistrusted my intentions all that time was almost a relief, as it meant that he was not quite as stupid as I had assumed. Still, like most men of science, he believed only in the evidence of his eyes, and what his eyes saw when he looked at me was a woman. Green of skin and hair, yes, but apart from that? In every other regard? I was the very flower of English womanhood, with my curves trained to the corset’s embrace and my skirts hanging full and demure down past my ankles. Why, had it not been for my face, and for the narrow band of skin between top of glove and bottom of sleeve, he could easily have forgotten my vegetable origins, as so many others had tried to do. Poor man. What h
e did not consider was that skirts can conceal more than legs.

  He jerked backward as my hands found his throat, my thorn-sharp nails piercing the skin beneath his jaw and finding purchase there, the tiny barbs that lined them making it nigh-impossible to pull me free without killing him in the process. Lord Harrington pressed his gun against my stomach, firing again; much of my midsection joined my chest in nonexistence before I could wrap a vine around the ray gun’s muzzle and rip it from his hands, hurling it away. As I did that, the creeper vines and long, thick roots I normally kept concealed—as a proper British woman would, had she found herself burdened with such things—emerged from beneath my skirt and wrapped tight around him, binding him in place.

  Arthur was shouting behind me. I knew that civility meant responding to him, or at least begging his pardon, but my injuries were too great; Lord Harrington might not have known my anatomy, but he had done a remarkably good job of reducing my overall mass. So I committed the unforgiveable sin of ignoring my friend and patron as I drove my roots into the body of his colleague, linking them into his circulatory system.

  His blood tasted of fine wine and excellent breeding. Perhaps there was something to be said for the aristocracy after all.

  It only took me a few moments to drain the life and fluids from Lord Harrington’s body. I leaned back, glancing down, and was pleased to see that new growth had covered the holes in my chest and stomach, replacing the gaping holes with smooth, if somewhat indecent, green skin. It was paler than the rest of me, but the patchwork effect that it created was not unpleasant, and would be mostly covered by my clothing under normal circumstances. I pulled my roots from the husk of Lord Harrington, unwinding my creeper vines until he remained upright solely thanks to the nails which remained wedged in his throat. I yanked them free, and he fell with a hollow rattle, like a dried-out old seed pod.