“Rogue Tomato”
by
Michael Bishop
THE METAMORPHOSIS OF PHILIP K.
When Philip K. awoke, he found that overnight he had grown from a reasonably well shaped, bilaterally symmetrical human being into . . . a rotund and limbless planetary body circling a gigantic gauzy-red star. In fact, by the simple feel, by the total aura projected into the seeds of his consciousness, Philip K. concluded that he was a tomato. A tomato of approximately the same dimensions and mass as the planet Mars. That was it, certainly: a tomato of the hothouse variety. Turning leisurely on a vertical axis tilted seven or eight degrees out of the perpendicular, Philip K. basked in the angry light of the distant red giant. While basking, he had to admit that he was baffled. This had never happened to him before. He was a sober individual not given to tippling or other forms of riotous behavior, and that he should have been summarily turned into a Mars-sized tomato struck him as a brusque and unfair conversion. Why him? And how? “At least,” he reflected, “I still know who I am.” Even if in the guise of an immense tomato he now whirled around an unfamiliar sun, his consciousness was that of a human being, and still his own. “I am Philip K. and somehow I’m still breathing and there must be a scientific explanation for this” is a fairly accurate summary of the next several hours (an hour being measured, of course, in terms of one twenty-fourth of Philip K.‘s own period of rotation) of his thought processes.
AS I LIVE AND BREATHE
Several Philip K.-days passed. The sufferer of metamorphosis discovered that he had an amenable atmosphere, a topological integument (or crust, although for the skin of a void-dwelling variety of Lycopersicon esculentum the word crust didn’t seem altogether appropriate) at least a mile thick, and weather. Inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, Philip K. photosynthesized. Morning dew ran down his tenderest curvatures, and afternoon dew, too. Some of these drops were ocean-sized. Clouds formed over Philip K.‘s equatorial girth and unloaded tons and tons of refreshing rains. Winds generated by these meteorological phenomena and his own axial waltzing blew backward and forward, up and down, over his taut ripening skin. It was good to be alive, even in this disturbing morphology. Moreover, unlike that of Plato’s oysters, his pleasure was not mindless. Philip K. experienced the wind, the rain, the monumental turning of himself, the internal burgeoning of his juices, the sweetness of breathing, and he meditated on all these things. It was too bad that he was uninhabited (this was one of his frequent meditations), so much rich oxygen did he give off. Nor was there much hope of immediate colonization. Human beings would not very soon venture to the stars. Only two years before his metamorphosis Philip K. had been an aerospace worker in Houston, Texas, who had been laid off and then unable to find other employment. In fact, during the last four or five weeks Philip K. had kept himself alive on soup made out of hot water and dollops of ketchup. It was—upon reflection—a positive relief to be a tomato. Philip K. inhaling, exhaling, photosynthesizing, had the pleasurable existential notion that he had cut out the middleman.
THE PLOT THICKENS
Several Philip K.-months went by. As he perturbated about the fiery red giant, he began to fear that his orbit was decaying and that he was falling inevitably, inexorably, into the furnace of his primary, there to be untimely stewed. How large his sun had become. At last, toward the end of his first year as a planetary tomato, Philip K. realized that his orbit wasn’t decaying. No. Instead, he was growing, plumping out, generating the illimitable juiciness of life. However, since his orange-red epidermis contained an utterly continuous layer of optical cells, his “eyes,” or The Eye That He Was (depending on how you desire to consider the matter), had deceived him into believing the worst. What bliss to know that he had merely grown to the size of Uranus, thus putting his visual apparatus closer to the sun. Holoscopic vision, despite the manifold advantages it offered (such as the simultaneous apprehension of daylight and dark, 360-degree vigilance, and the comforting illusion of being at the center of the cosmos), could sometimes be a distinct handicap. But though his orbit was not decaying, a danger still existed. How much larger would he grow? Philip K. had no desire to suffer total eclipse in a solar oven.
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