Editor’s Note: this is the first ever translation of an Italian short story featured in a 1972 edition of the speculative fiction magazine Mondo Giallo. The title of the publication literally means “Yellow World”, and combines two genre-specific references which hint at the flavour of the works contained therein: to mondo films, that peculiar strain of exploitative pseudo-documentary cinema featuring sensational portrayals of taboo practices amongst foreign cultures, and to giallo novels, the sex-and-violence-saturated paperback novels with bright yellow covers which flourished in Italy from the 1920s onwards.
The original title of the story is the beautifully suggestive “Crescità verso l’alto, Morte verso il basso” and has been rendered here as “Upward Growth, Downward Death.” The output of a still unidentified author, it is a remarkable piece of work, not just for its intriguing plot and shocking climax, but also for its supremely accurate anticipation of high-rise buildings festooned with living greenery which would become the lungs of the urban environment.
The Bosco Verticale development, two tower blocks covered with 900 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 11,000 floral plants, opened in central Milan in 2014. Whether its architects at the Boeri Studio were influenced at all by this prescient little piece of pulp fiction remains a fascinating subject for conjecture.
—
ONE
With the black tendrils of mascara running down her cheeks, and with her breath coming in shallow, frantic gasps, Cinzia moved clumsily backwards through the room, holding her hands out towards her attacker in a pathetic gesture of self-defence. Almost all of her carefully manicured nails were chipped; the little and ring fingers of her left hand were broken and already beginning to swell; the tanned skin of her forearms was marked by savage lacerations, some of them quite deep.
“I’m sorry!” she pleaded, inching her way through the overturned furniture and scattered belongings which now covered the floor of her apartment. “I didn’t do it on purpose! You know I didn’t! But I’ve been busy! I forgot, that’s all!”
In the near darkness, a silver glint flashed out towards Cinzia’s face. With a scream, she flinched, clutching her cheek. A scarlet line of fresh blood trickled around and between her fingers from this new wound. Cinzia looked at her hand and her eyes widened in terror.
“I said I was sorry! What more do you want?”
Cinzia accidentally kicked a fallen pot plant, a mature Philodendron xanadu which usually sat on a low glass table near the white bookcase. Immediately, another gleam of silver arced in her direction, but this time, she dodged to avoid the blow which would otherwise have caught her squarely in the throat. Stumbling backward, Cinzia found the handle of the sliding door to the balcony. Hauling it open, she just barely managed to force herself through it and to wrestle the door shut behind her as a third blow came her way. The metal implement banged against the glass and whipped back sharply out of view.
Nursing the wounds on her face and arms, Cinzia turned to look out over the city. Up here on the twenty-first floor, a sultry breeze surged up the side of the building and wrapped around the balcony, gently fluttering the leaves of the winter mimosa, Acacia dealbata, and the common ash, Fraxinus excelsior, which dominated the planting out here amongst the host of smaller shrubs and flowers.
Foliage muffled the night sounds of the city far below where cars drove by, their horns blaring emphatically, and where voices occasionally rose in laughter or anger on the street. If she could hardly hear them through the leaves, Cinzia reasoned, then they would have no chance of hearing her now. She tried to push her way through to the balustrade, but the thickly covered branches of the trees resisted her advance.
Frustrated, tired and bleeding, Cinzia fought against the grasp of the branches which enveloped and entangled her. Finally, seizing one branch of the mimosa tree in both hands, she pulled herself free, wrenching the six-foot length of branch away with her. The tree recoiled from the shock, sending a shower of ferny leaves and yellow flowers pouring down over Cinzia and over the floor of the balcony. The great swish it made as it surged back through the air almost sounded like a cry of pain hissed through gritted teeth.
Behind Cinzia came a click and the heavy rolling sound of the balcony door being opened. Slowly, unwillingly, she turned her head and shoulders to see what she already knew would be behind her. The figure approached her noiselessly. Cinzia looked at the branch in her hand and held it up imploringly.
“I didn’t mean to do that!” she shrieked. “I didn’t mean to do any of it! You have to forgive me!” she cried. “Forgive me! I’m only human!”
And with a titanic forward shove, the figure lunged out at Cinzia with great force, knocking her backwards at the point where the branches of the ash and the mimosa met. There was no resistance to her movement now, as if the trees had let go of one another’s hands in order to create this space, this space through which Cinzia now hurtled, up and over the balustrade and out into the warm evening air. Down she fell, still clutching the broken branch of the mimosa, which did absolutely nothing at all to slow her descent, until suddenly she made contact with the pavement outside the all-night chemist’s opposite the eastern flank of the building, and then, at last, she did come to an abrupt stop.
TWO
Inspector Nicolodi stood against the wall at one side of the apartment, looking around and taking in as much of the scene as possible. Although still mistrusted by many of her male colleagues, she had an undeniable reputation for solving many of the city’s more unusual suspicious deaths. She attributed this skill to the endless works by Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle which she had read voraciously since childhood. And she held as her maxim this phrase from The Hound of the Baskervilles: “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” She made it her business to observe everything wherever and whenever she could.
What was known so far was that at a little after 11.20pm on the previous night, one Cinzia Serena Righetti had died as a result of a fall (cause as yet uncertain) from a balcony near the top of this building. Up until last night, Righetti had been the tenant of Apartment 21C of the Torre degli Alberi, the Tower of Trees, an ambitious experimental high-rise building in the centre of the city which had been heavily laden with trees, flowers and other plants as part of a progressive new approach to environmental responsibility and urban regeneration by the city’s planners.
The post mortem had concluded that death was due to the massive injuries Righetti suffered when she hit the ground, and the lab reports had found no traces of alcohol or drugs in her system. There were no significant signs of violence, but the forensic examiner did remark upon the presence of several lateral wounds on her arms which did not appear consistent with the other injuries sustained after the fall. It was also noted that she was still gripping the branch of one of the trees from her balcony when she landed. It was conceivable that the wounds on her arm might have been caused by the branches of other trees on other balconies, past which she had fallen on her way down.
“Or maybe she was doing all that to herself,” offered Sergeant Corsetti as he continued his work of photographing the scene. “All these young women are doing it now, get themselves some attention. It’s fashionable, innit, being depressed? And Tomasini said he found a vibrator in her bedside cabinet, so…”
“So, what?” Nicolodi asked him sharply.
“So,” Corsetti continued, “if she was relying on that thing, probably means she hadn’t got a boyfriend… Must get a bit lonely, living in a city this big… And being stuck all the way up here must just make it worse. Maybe that’s why she jumped.”
“Corsetti, when you get home tonight, ask your wife where she keeps hers — and then ask her if she’s planning to jump off your balcony any time soon.”
Nicolodi turned and left Corsetti with his mouth gaping open. The apartment was very bright at this time of day, as the two glazed sides of the building let in floods of glorious sunshine. It felt cool, as well, despite the mounting summer temperatures outside. The specially tinted glass took care of that. This must be why there are so many plants in here, she thought to herself, noticing that the room was dotted with specimens of many shapes and sizes. Perfect growing conditions. Several of the plants had been knocked over in some kind of disturbance which had taken place here very recently. It seemed reasonable to assume that Righetti’s death might be linked to this disturbance. Perhaps she had surprised an intruder, a burglar or a would-be rapist. Perhaps she had jumped to her death in a desperate attempt to escape from her attacker, or else had fallen while making a much more concerted effort to climb to safety on a nearby balcony. Or perhaps her assailant had deliberately pushed or thrown her off the building. The state of the room strongly suggested that they were not looking at a case of suicide, but more likely manslaughter — or even murder.
Oksana, the young Russian cleaning lady, waited to begin tidying up. She stood at the open door to the balcony, smoking impatiently. She did not seem much concerned by what had happened to her employer, only by the additional workload this would add to her already demanding rounds in the building.
The front door opened. Nicolodi turned and was alarmed to see a large robot gliding into the room. About five feet tall and the dark grey colour of lead, the robot moved into the apartment and remained near the door, scanning the space all around it.
“What’s this?” Nicolodi asked aloud. “Who’s let this in?”
“It comes in by itself,” Oksana said, stubbing her cigarette out against the exterior wall and dropping the stub over the side. “It sees to the plants. The building has got lots of them. Most of the people who live here can’t be bothered to take care of the trees and stuff. So the bosses of the building have got these things now to do it for them.”
“And they can just come and go from people’s apartments whenever they like?”
“Yeah,” Oksana replied, “but usually on a timer. The people make appointments for the robots to come in, normally while they’re out, at work or something. She should have been at work now, so maybe she must have asked for it to come.”
The robot suddenly moved again, taking a steady course over to the nearest plant, a mature Spanish dagger, Yucca elephantipes. The robot inserted a thin probe into the soil at the base of the pot and promptly withdrew it. After a moment, a nozzle extended from the main body of the robot and a precisely measured amount of water was released around the base of the plant’s trunk.
The robot continued onward to the next plant, a sprawling green straggly thing with leaves like little open hands. This plant was one of those which had been knocked over in the struggle, and it sat on the floor next to a low table and a white bookcase. A robotic hand reached down to pick the plant up, while a vacuum cleaner proboscis started to remove the spilt soil.
“Somebody— Can somebody switch this thing off?” Nicolodi complained. “This is a crime scene! It’s interfering with potential evidence here!”
“I wouldn’t bother,” Oksana said, picking up her basket of cleaning products and squeezing past the robot as she went to the door. “They don’t listen. They just do what they want to do. They don’t like nobody interfering with the plants. But it’ll go soon enough if you just leave it to do its thing. And I’m gonna go and do mine. You’ll have to tell my manager I did come today, but you wouldn’t let me do no cleaning, alright?”
Oksana left without waiting for a reply. Nicolodi was observing something and could not give her attention to anything else right now. As she watched the robot at work, it very carefully extended a hand to take hold of a large leaf at the end of a broken stem. As its hand kept the leaf in place, a sharp silver blade slowly extended towards the base. After making several careful adjustments, the blade sliced swiftly through the stem, severing it neatly. Withdrawing the blade, the robot silently headed out to the balcony, where the hand extended out over the ledge and dropped the cutting off the side of the building.
The eighteen-inch-long stem glided gently down, with the leaf acting as an airbrake. Nicolodi peered over the edge to watch where it would end up. It landed on the kerb below, next to a badly parked scooter. No more than five metres away from the discarded plant fragment was the cordoned-off section of pavement from which Cinzia Righetti’s body had been removed less than eight hours before.
TREE
[Editor’s Note: the pun worked into this chapter heading by the translator does not exist in the original Italian, where the words for three, tre, and for tree, albero, have no eye-rhyme or ear-rhyme at all. The English pun has been retained in this draft but will most likely be excised at the second draft stage.]
Inspector Nicolodi sat uncomfortably in the huge comfortable rattan chair, waiting. It was almost 11pm. Two days had passed since she had first been called in here. The appointment she had made with Cinzia Righetti’s killer was scheduled for five minutes from now and she knew that the caller she was meeting would be faultlessly punctual.
She had spent the last forty-eight hours digging deeper into the history of the Torre degli Alberi, its architects and its constructors, its service designers and its maintenance teams, trying to get a better understanding of what it took to keep a building of this scale and a project of this importance running smoothly. And it needed to run smoothly, not merely in order to satisfy the wealthy and demanding residents or to justify its exorbitant monthly rental prices, but because this was the prototype upon which so much else depended: lucrative contracts for scores of other buildings just like it, certainly, but also the very future of how urban spaces might function in an increasingly climate-conscious future.
One thing above all had become clear: this experiment had to succeed, at any cost. Any.
Nicolodi had discovered something else in the course of cross-referencing files at the police station. There had been two other deaths at the Tower of Trees in the past six months. Two might reasonably just be a coincidence. But now there had been a third. And three was enough to start establishing the basis for a pattern.
A retired army colonel in his seventies, a resident of the second floor, had been found dead on the street outside the building during the winter. It had been assumed that he had slipped over on the icy pavement, ironically right under the balcony of his very own window. He had died of hypothermia, unable to get back inside despite his strenuous efforts: his hands and arms were covered with cuts and bruises from where had presumably attempted to drag himself along the ground.
And in April, a four-year-old child had fallen to his death from a balcony on the seventh floor. A tragic accident, the records stated, caused by the child leaning over the ledge to watch a passing Easter parade. The branch of the tree he had evidently been holding to support himself had given way, and over he had gone. His mother, aunt and two sisters were all in the apartment at the same time, in separate rooms. Someone else had been there, too, as Nicolodi had found out when she cross-checked the gardening robot schedules for that day. At the time when the child had his accident, a robot was there. And when she looked back at the colonel’s appointments for the day he died, she saw that a robot had been there in the middle of the evening, too, at around the time when the old man must have had his fall. Except instead of falling over in front of his apartment, Nicolodi now firmly believed he had in fact fallen from his apartment. And in the police photographs, she could clearly see the big purple flower of the poinsettia, Euphorbia pulcherrima, sitting there on the pavement no more than a foot away from his hand.
She thought back to how the robot had behaved after dropping that cutting over the balcony during her first visit to the apartment. The discarded stem had been removed, out of sight and out of mind, sent to a place where it could no longer disrupt the horticultural harmony of the world inside the Torre degli Alberi. Brandishing a tiny pair of scissors, the robot had trimmed the outer leaves of a bonsai-sized common boxwood, Buxus sempervirens, with infinite delicacy, almost tenderness. If the robot had been a human, Nicolodi thought, one would have said that they loved their plants. Her father had been a fiercely competitive vegetable grower in his later years, and at the age of eighty-six, had got into a fist-fight with a rival over the leeks they were exhibiting in a provincial show. There was never any telling how far someone would go, she thought to herself, in defence of their precious plants.
FLOOR
[Editor’s Note: as with the previous chapter, the pun worked into this heading by the translator does not exist in the original Italian either, where the words for four, quattro, and for floor, pavimento, bear no relation to one another. The unnecessary interpolation of these English puns will definitely not be included in the next draft.]
The reports which the building supervisor had reluctantly run for Inspector Nicolodi, listing the gardening robots’ movements on the three dates in question, could not, he insisted, show precisely which of the ten robots had visited the victims’ apartments. So it could just be one rogue robot which was to blame, she reasoned, or it could be all three. Or it could, just as likely, be that all ten of them had the same capacity to kill in order to protect the living things in their care. And, more than that — to protect the way of life, the system of new civic values, the whole burgeoning vision of the green cities of the future which were inextricably rooted in every detail of how the Tower of Trees operated.
The front door opened with a gentle squeak. Beyond it, a robot was silhouetted against the bright light of the corridor. In it came, making no sound, and the door closed behind it. It remained where it was, scanning, processing. Perhaps it was aware of her as a new presence in the apartment, trying to work out if she was a new plant which might need to be tended. Was it calculating her food and water needs, her optimum temperature range and her pruning requirements? Or perhaps it knew precisely who she was and precisely why she was here.
That was more than she herself knew. Having made this appointment, Nicolodi had not quite worked out what she would do when the robot actually arrived. She had little chance of proving her theory. And in any event, she could hardly make an arrest. But all the same, if this robot — or all of the robots — were to blame (and she was convinced this was the case), something clearly had to be done.
Ignoring her, the robot proceeded around the room, checking up on each plant in turn, adding a few drops of water onto the Mexican snowball, Echeveria elegans, and placing a tiny flag in the soil of a dragon tree, Dracaena marginata, which needed to be re-potted. The zebra plant, Aphelandra squarrosa, evidently needed nothing right at this moment, but instead of passing it by, the robot extended an artificial hand and almost seemed to caress the variegated leaf for no other reason than the pure pleasure of doing so.
Nicolodi suddenly realised what she must do to put her theory to the test. She strode over to the plant which she had seen the robot tidy up and trim on her first visit. The one whose cutting had been so casually tossed over the ledge. She grasped one of the longest stems in her hand. As soon as she did so, the robot rotated on the spot to face her. Very deliberately, Nicolodi snapped the stem off the plant and held it out towards the robot as if presenting it with a bouquet.
For a long moment, the robot did nothing. Inside it, a thousand electrical impulses processed this occurrence and the lines of code buried deep within its programming determined what the robot’s response should be. The silver blade silently emerged from the robot’s arm as Nicolodi had expected it would. She backed away towards the balcony door, still brandishing the plant stem in front of her. The robot moved forward, matching her pace. She eased the door open, but the robot did not suddenly charge; it simply continued to draw nearer at the same steady speed. Not taking her eyes off it for a moment, Nicolodi stepped back onto the balcony and rolled the door shut. The plant stem got trapped at the point where the door slid back into its frame, with the leaf poking into the room towards the robot. That same appendage which the robot had earlier extended to stroke the zebra plant now reached out to touch the Philodendron leaf, as if it were forlornly holding the hand of a loved one in the moments after their death.
Nicolodi looked around for something with which to defend herself, but because the robots were always on hand to take care of the plants, there were no tools of any kind out here which might help her. She searched instead for an escape route. The balconies on either side were too far away for her to risk attempting to jump. The one below looked promising, but with little to hold onto besides some thin overhanging creepers, it would be a hell of a long way down if she lost her grip or if the plants uprooted themselves. The balcony above seemed to be the obvious answer. By climbing up the sturdier of the two trees — not the one with the ferny leaves and yellow flowers; the other one — she felt sure she could make it if she could get going quickly before she had chance to lose her nerve.
The rattle of the sliding door made Nicolodi’s mind up for her. Without a backward glance, she put one foot on the metal container in which the tree was rooted, pushed herself up and grabbed a thick branch with both hands. Making the most of her upward momentum, she began to climb strongly through the central fork of the tree, sliding easily between the rustling leaves. The trunk bent out slightly into the open air but seemed to adjust to her presence with a discreet additional tension in the wood. Within a few more steps, Nicolodi noticed that the trunk was starting to get thinner and so were the branches, radiating out into a crown of leafy twigs which would not support her nearly so easily. She stopped, looking all around her in search of the next best direction to go. And below her, something caused the whole tree to shudder.
Looking down, Nicolodi saw that the robot was at the base of the tree, gripping the trunk with both hands, looking up at her. For a few seconds, they stared at one another, Nicolodi’s mind racing, the robot’s programmes scrolling. And then, decision made, the robot extended its telescopic arms, seized the same thick branch that she had herself first selected, and began to haul itself up after her.
Immediately, the tree bent over by a few extra degrees and this time did not flex back again. As Nicolodi watched, the robot began its awkward but relentless ascent. It scraped the bark and crunched up twigs and dislodged showers of leaves with its heavy hard-edged base, but it also carefully tested each handhold with its in-palm sensors before committing to any next step, pausing after each movement to recalculate its trajectory. It still held the green stem of the houseplant in one hand, like a suitor desperately pursuing the object of its affection with a single pathetic crushed rose.
The tree was now starting to sag even more under their combined weight, arcing further out over the ledge than before, and Nicolodi knew that if she did not make the effort to reach the upper balcony now, it would soon be out of reach altogether. With shaking hands, she took hold of some thinner branches above her and eased her feet along the branch on which she stood, which was now on a thirty-degree angle and somewhat easier to climb. But even this movement sent the whole upper storey of the tree leaning out into empty space by another metre or two. Gripping a bundle of branches over her head with both hands, she sidled cautiously along the branch and the tree bowed down by another couple of metres. She was now completely clear of the building. The nearest thing underneath her now was the pavement.
Overriding any concerns for its own safety coded into its core, the robot had made more confident progress and was now quite close. With its face tilted towards Nicolodi and still holding the stem in one hand, it stretched out its other arm and extended the silver blade to its fullest length. It glinted in the lights from the apartments all around. The robot moved its arm out to one side and whipped it sharply back, lashing out towards Nicolodi’s leg. It slashed across her calf. Nicolodi cried out in pain, tried to pull herself away, and in so doing, immediately lost her footing. Holding onto the branch above as tightly as she could, she swung her legs wildly, hoping to find something to push back against.
The robot wriggled itself forward and, with an awful hollow groan, the tree stooped lower still. The robot’s blade struck out again at the place where it calculated Nicolodi’s thigh should be, missed, struck out a third time, and missed again, her frantic twisting and turning keeping her just beyond its reach. Perhaps overloaded by the mass of rapid recalculations, or perhaps overcome with what might have been described as rage in a human, the robot now flailed its blade arm more erratically, slashing in every direction with a terrible, desperate force.
Nicolodi had nowhere left to go. The slender twigs and soft leaves at the top of the tree would scarcely have supported a sparrow’s weight, let alone hers. She craned around to face her pursuer. Now almost horizontal, the robot was less than a metre away. It took careful aim now, like a scorpion preparing to unleash its sting, and the blade flashed forward for the last time.
With this critical shift in the robot’s weight, the tree dipped down for a moment and with a sharp crack, the branches underneath the robot gave way and it disappeared down through the leaves as if released through a trap-door. Just as quickly, now relieved of this burden, the tree twanged back like a medieval engine of war, catapulting Nicolodi back towards the building and hurling her onto the balcony. Twigs and leaves rained down on her. The tree thrashed around like a wild horse that had triumphantly thrown an unwanted rider, before slowly settling down into stillness again.
Nicolodi picked herself up. From the street below, she heard the sound of blaring horns and agitated voices. Hesitantly approaching the ledge, she steeled herself to look over the side. The robot had landed on the roof of a taxi whose driver had been standing under a nearby lamppost on a cigarette break. The impact had half-flattened the car and the wreckage was sprayed out across the road and the pavement on all sides. Miraculously, no one on the ground appeared to have been hurt. Jammed into the crushed car roof, the robot lay on its side with its bodywork torn open, exposing the circuitry and wires which had powered its impulse to care and its impulse to kill. Twisted back at an awkward angle, the blade arm waved feebly around in a dying reflex. And in its other hand, the robot still held tight to the sad single stem of the Philodendron.
On either side of Nicolodi, the leaves rustled. She turned her head, gave a sharp gasp and scrabbled back across the balcony floor. To the left and right of where she had been standing, the other nine robots were lined up along the balustrade, having abandoned their duties with one silent accord to congregate here. The sliding glass door prevented Nicolodi from retreating any further. As she watched, each of the robots extended an arm out over the edge, and in each of their hands, they held either a flower or a stem or a twig, all clipped from the plants they looked after so devotedly, and which they had brought here now as a final tribute for their fallen comrade. A soundless signal passed between them and simultaneously they all let go of the tokens they held. Their parting gifts plummeted down to the street below, some quickly and some more slowly, landing on the road and on the pavement and on the mangled wreckage of the taxi and on the cold grey shell which had become a coffin for the intelligence which had once inhabited it.
The metal mourners remained motionless against the balustrade, but not for long. With one accord, the nine robots all rotated clockwise, turning their expressionless faces towards Nicolodi. Tiny lights blinked. Hard drives whirred. A new common directive stirred them all into collective action. Eighteen robotic arms reached out towards Nicolodi and before she could react, eighteen robotic hands took hold of her ankles and her thighs, her waist and her arms, her shoulders and her head. When she attempted to struggle, their grip simply tightened. When she attempted to cry out in pain and terror, one hand clamped itself firmly over her mouth. The robots took her over to the balustrade and, very carefully, almost ceremoniously, lifted her high above their heads, paused for a moment, blinked their lights in a sequence of obscure but emphatic meaning, and then cast their tenth and greatest funeral offering out over the side of the Tower of Trees.
