Jose Arcadio Buendia's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Jose could not pay Slick's price. His corn money went into seed and repairs, not into buying a fat man's quiet. So he did the math again by lamplight. The buyers paid him well for corn. That same corn fed the clones. If he stopped selling, he cut their food. But he cut his own too. His farm ran on that money. He needed a new buyer before he could refuse the old one. He rode out to Dr. Elena Marsh's lab at first light. This was the woman he had found weeks ago among the glass tanks, feeding half-grown bodies in green fluid. She built the clones, then turned against her own work. He had checked her story and found it true. Now they were partners in a plan that could get them both killed. Marsh met him at the door in her white coat, glasses fogged from the cold air inside. She did not waste words. "You look like a man with a problem. You look like a man about to make it mine." "I can't stop selling corn," Jose said. "If I do, my farm starves with theirs." Marsh pulled him inside. She led him past the tanks to a pen at the back. A cow stood there, thick with white wool that hung to its knees. It chewed and watched him with wet eyes. "I made it," she said. "Before the clones. My own project. Wool and milk in one animal." She touched its fleece. "The buyers don't know it exists. It breeds true. The wool sells high in every market but theirs." Jose ran his hand through the fleece. It was soft and warm and thick as a blanket. He thought of the sweaters a woman could knit from one season's shearing. He thought of markets far from the gray building, where no one asked about corn. "You're giving me this," he said. "I'm giving you a reason to stop," Marsh said. "Sell wool. Sell milk. Feed your farm without feeding them." Her voice dropped flat. "I want them starved. I want it done." Jose loaded the cow onto his cart before noon. It rode calm the whole way home. That night he wrote to the corn buyers and told them his last harvest was sold. No more after this one. He would not name a reason. He sealed the letter and set it by the door. The cow slept in his barn. In the morning he would shear it and carry the wool to a market that had never heard of clones. His farm would not starve. Neither would his plan. But the letter changed everything. The buyers would ask why. They would look at the corn man who quit for no reason, and they would remember the missing hour, and the woman in the lab they already suspected. Jose had cut the food. Now the buyers had cause to hunt for who cut it.