Woodsman

by Thomas A Easton

  “You do have friends,” said Renny.

  The man shrugged and returned to the chair behind his desk. “I’m not worried about them,” he said.

  Renny laughed doggily, his tongue lolling. “You’ll be out on your ear in a week.” Then he looked at Donna Rose, said, “Want a sausage?” and crossed the room to help himself.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  Frederick Suida yawned and flipped the long leash that linked Renny to his hand. A wave traveled down the leather strap and made the metal clips and rings at its end jangle together and rattle against the side of the radio tracker fastened to the collar.

  Another dog, a German shepherd much like him except for its smaller head and lighter coat, was being walked on the other side of the street. Renny stared stiffly toward it. Then he wagged his tail and growled, “Mechin’ leash!” just loudly enough for the man to hear.

  He got no answer except another yawn. Frederick had not slept well. Old nightmares—monsters tearing through the walls of the world, bleeding snakes, friends impaled and split and torn and dead—had returned as they always did, whenever he heard or read or saw on the veedo reports of Engineer atrocities. Sometimes the dreams were mild. Only rarely were they as bad as they had been this time. He wondered if the reason were the severity of the slaughter in the park, or the simple fact that Donna Rose gave him a personal, if slight, connection to it.

  Renny tugged as if to test the restraint Frederick had laid on him. The man yawned once more and said, “So I’ll move a little faster. Will that suit you better?” He looked up at the tall structures that surrounded them. They were old apartment buildings of corniced stone, their lower windows embraced by iron grills. High above, the dome-like blisters of floater garages clung to the stonework. Here and there, stained masonry and eroded carvings peeped through the honeysuckle vines that traced their every line.

  The leash, like the radio tracker, had been PETA’s idea. When Renny’s case had landed on his desk, Frederick had been appalled to learn that the dog was being kept in a kennel pending the outcome of PETA’s lawsuit. One of the first things he had done was to petition the court to have Renny released in his custody. PETA had objected, claiming the genimal had to be kept under lock and key. It had escaped the permitting process, its modifications were unexamined, and the public deserved protection from this potentially savage beast.

  The court had granted his petition, although it had let PETA demand the radio tracker and the leash, at least when Frederick had the dog outdoors. The court had refused PETA’s demand for a muzzle as well when Frederick had pointed out that such a thing would interfere with Renny’s ability to speak.

  Frederick had ignored the leash requirement on his trip to Jeremy Duncan’s lab. But now he could not. The long stroll from his apartment to the BRA building took him past too many witnesses, and if one of them were linked to PETA, it would not matter how well behaved the dog was being.

  The dog growled again. “Mechin’ conservatives. No freedom. No choice. Nothin’ but control! They don’t trust people.”

  “Are you people?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to prove?”

  Frederick had read enough history to recognize the truth of the dog’s complaint. Conservatives were paranoids, given to seeing threats everywhere they looked. They were the inventors of all the conspiracy theories of history, the ones behind all the witch hunts and pogroms and wars of extermination.

  “Wait till we get to the office,” he said. “Left, here.”

  “Wrong way!”

  “It’ll take us by the park. Wouldn’t you like to see?” But they were still two blocks from the park when they were diverted by a line of blue and yellow striped sawhorses that blocked the street. A single police officer, watched over by a massive Roachster parked on the sidewalk, gestured traffic away from the obstacle. When Frederick and Renny grew close enough, they could make out the officer’s constant patter of instruction, explanation, and comment. No one was being allowed to enter the park until the bodies had been removed and the fences rebuilt. No rubberneckers. No press. No gloating Engineers. Not even dog-walkers on their way to the park. Only local residents could pass the roadblock.

  Frederick wondered whether the bots had been allowed to return home to their dorm that morning, when they had left work. But when he asked the police officer, he learned nothing. “Haven’t seen ‘em,” the cop said. “Maybe they took ‘em out in the country. Plenty of dirt there.”

  “Frederick!” The main entrance to the BRA building was only a few steps away when the hail rang out behind him. He turned, and Berut Amoun was striding hurriedly to catch up.

  “Did you hear about the massacre?” asked his friend. Frederick made a disgusted face and said, “We were watching the veedo, Bert.” Renny growled, “They went nuts.”

  “I hear,” said Bert, gesturing Frederick out of the flow of other pedestrians and into the recessed entry of an abandoned genetic tattoo parlor. Only a few weeks before, its owner had been using a small airgun to shoot microscopic gold beads coated with pigment genes into her customers’ skin cells. Frederick had stepped in once, to watch as the woman had used the gun like a pencil to draw dark designs on white skin and light designs on dark skin; she had told him she could erase her work just as easily. But now the windows were shattered, the samples of artwork intended for display were splattered with paint and blood, and she was gone. When he turned away from his contemplation of the wreckage, Bert said, “I hear there won’t be any arrests.”

  Frederick looked surprised. The dog yelped, “What? They’ve got pictures!” A passerby eyed the leash skeptically, decided it was strong enough, glared, spat, and raised one hand to touch the silver gear that dangled from one earlobe. He did not wear the blue coverall of the Engineers.

  Bert shrugged. “Policy decision, the news said. ‘Heat of the moment.’ ‘Carried away.’ ‘Not responsible for their actions.’ And that was a lot of voters in the park last night.”

  Renny growled, and Frederick bent to stroke his head. “I’m not surprised,” he finally said. “I’m really not. I only hope…”

  When he opened his office door, he was for a moment surprised to see the tall plant silhouetted by the window, long leaves spread to the eastern sun. But before the sound of the latch had finished rattling in his head, the plant’s leaves whipped around its trunk and it turned to show itself as Donna Rose.

  “Good morning,” said the bot. Her eyes were dull with fatigue. Her face was drawn. Her cheeks were marked by wet streaks surrounded by lines of salt that showed where other tears had dried. Frederick stared at her while he thought: She is half plant, perhaps more than half. Yet she is human enough for tears. Then, silently, he unsnapped Renny’s leash. The dog trotted toward the metal tub in which the bot stood and sniffed Donna Rose’s legs. “So you’re still here,” said the genimal.

  “Where else would I go?” Donna Rose looked at the man.

  He made a face and said, “They’re not letting anyone into the park. I don’t know where your friends are now.” He gestured toward the window, which was open about a centimeter. A branch of the honeysuckle vine that climbed the outside of the building had taken advantage of the opening and entered the room. Its tip had found the soil of Donna Rose’s tub and seemed already to have taken root. “Did you open that?”

  The bot nodded hesitantly. “Shouldn’t I? I’m used to the outdoors. I wanted a little air, and…”

  “It’s all right,” said Frederick. “I open it myself sometimes, and even when it’s closed, it’s impossible to keep the honeysuckle out.” He showed her the fine tendrils that had squeezed under the window the day before; they still clung to the sill. Then he ran a hand down the new branch, gripped it firmly just above the soil of her tub, and said, “Damned weed. I’ll just…”

  “No!” said Donna Rose. When he looked up at her, puzzlement plain upon his face, she said, “Please. I like it there. It’s lonely in here at night.�
�

  Renny flopped on the carpet near Frederick’s desk. “After last night,” he said. “She needs company. Companionship. A pet, and what’s a better pet for a bot than a plant? Let it stay.”

  Frederick felt a memory tickle at the back of his mind. It came from another and a simpler time of his life, a time before he had lost his friends, and he wished it would jell. But it wouldn’t, though he knew it concerned the honeysuckle and its relation to the bots, and then even the tickle vanished in still another of his yawns.

  With a “Tchah” of exasperation—some things were like that, whenever he tried to look much beyond the events that had marked his conversion to humanity—he let go of the vine, grunted, and got to his feet. “I understand,” he said. “Can we get…Do you need water?” But the soil around her ankles was not dry, as if the vine had shared with her its sap, and she did not answer. Instead, she turned wordlessly back toward the window. Her leaves once more uncurled from her trunk, revealing smooth, pale skin, tinged with green, and the nippled breasts of a human woman. The breasts were useless on her, for bots did not suckle their young; they had come with the human genes that made her what she was. There was no navel.

  The man sighed. There was nothing he could do except give her space, a bit of dirt in which to root, a place of safety, if that were truly possible. He crossed to his desk, chose a floppy-card, set it between the leaves of the bioform card-drive, and booted his computer. “We still,” he told Renny. “We still have to find someone who can testify about your gengineering.”

  The German shepherd stared toward Donna Rose, who was still ignoring them, presumably communing with grief, mourning the friends who had died in the Engineer attack the night before. “Then you should try for the boss.”

  “It would help if you could tell me where Hannoken disappeared to.” The chief of the gengineering lab that had made Renny sentient had been Alvar Hannoken. If Frederick could track him down, if he could be persuaded to show up in court, he could testify to Renny’s harmlessness. He could confirm the technician’s claim that the dog’s natural aggressiveness had been curtailed.

  “No idea,” said Renny. “He was still there when they passed me on to the Seeing Eye program.”

  “How much longer will there even be such a program?” Frederick was willing to chat as he worked. He had already learned that Hannoken was not listed in the national computerized phone directory. BRA’s own records revealed that he had not renewed his gengineering license in the last two years. He was no longer on the rolls of his professional associations.

  “As long as anyone’s left who doesn’t want their eyes or nerves or visual cortex regrown.” In a world that could change a pig into a man, there was no need for any blind person to stay blind for more than a few days. Yet there were those who had learned how to deal with a world of darkness many years before the gengineers learned how to repair their damage. As they grew old and died, their numbers dwindled. There were also those, like Renny’s erstwhile employer, who rejected what the gengineers might do for them.

  Now the man keyed in a request for access to the Internal Revenue Service’s database. A moment later he was typing furiously, and then…“They’re searching,” he said. For some things, such as sheer calculation, bioform computers were slower than the older electronic machines. But biological memory was superb at searching out and retrieving small chunks of information hidden in large databases. Still, the IRS database was among the largest in the world. It would take a few minutes to learn whether that arm of government had any record of Hannoken’s current whereabouts.

  “Do you know,” he said to the dog while they were waiting. “I’m surprised it took so long to make a sentient dog. The techniques were there, and they were used.” He pointed a thumb at his own chest. “But…”

  “Maybe the gengineers liked dogs just fine the way they were,” said Renny. “Fawning slaves. Sycophants. Ass-lickers.”

  “Or it was too obvious. A sci-fi cliche.” The computer dinged to catch his attention. Frederick peered at the leafy screen. It held a view of Hannoken’s latest tax return. “There,” he said. He pointed at the top of the image. “We’ve got him. He’s on Probe Station.”

  There were many surveillance and communications satellites and a number of space stations in orbit around the Earth and its moon. There were even two small LaGrangian habitats, hollow cylinders each holding several thousand technicians, engineers, and workers dedicated to building solar power and other satellites, sharing the lunar orbit 60 degrees ahead of and behind the moon. They had been named Hugin and Munin, as if the Man in the Moon were the Norse god Odin. The names had once belonged to the pair of ravens that flew around the world each day to keep Odin informed of all that happened.

  Probe Station was also in the moon’s orbit, but nowhere near a LaGrange point. As a result, it needed to expend relatively large amounts of reaction mass to hold its unstable niche. What justified the expense was that the LaGrange points were, though stable, too polluted with dust, gas, and debris, both natural and the products of the habitats’ activities, to permit Probe’s large telescopes to explore the cosmos effectively. The station also held labs for assorted other disciplines.

  Renny stood up, stretched, curled his tail over his rump, and put his forepaws on the edge of Frederick’s desk. “He makes enough money, doesn’t he?”

  “And no dependents,” said Frederick. “I wonder what he’s doing there.”

  “So call him.”

  “I will.” He tapped his keyboard, and the image on the screen was replaced with a specialized orbital communications directory. He chose a number and told the computer to dial it. After a pause while the call routed through a comsat to its destination, the four leaves that comprised the computer’s monitor lit up with a line-drawing of the satellite in space, its name spelled out across the bottom of the screen, and the StarBell logo. A moment later, the drawing was replaced by the computer-generated image of an exceedingly buxom redhead. With a few more taps, he put a duplicate of the image on the screen of the veedo unit on the shelf.

  “May I help you?” Frederick turned up the volume, identified himself aloud, and named the man he wished to speak with. Three seconds later, the image responded to his words by nodding and switching to an internal communications line. The office’s two active screens flickered simultaneously, and Frederick was looking at the face of a man whose heavy jaw, blade-like nose, and thick mat of iron-grey hair spoke of an ancestral blend of Scandinavian and Slav.

  “Dr. Hannoken?” Because he did not wish to wait upon the three-second time-delay before Hannoken could answer him, he immediately introduced himself. Then he laid one hand on Renny’s neck. The dog was still leaning over his desk. “Do you remember this genimal? He came out of your lab a few years ago.” Renny opened his mouth and panted doggily; his tail wagged eagerly.

  The camera that sent images from the office toward Probe Station was mounted inconspicuously in the veedo unit near the wall, and Hannoken’s image on the veedo screen aimed the gengineer’s broad smile accurately toward the two faces leaning over Frederick’s desk. The image nearer their faces, because its viewpoint was not the same as the camera’s, seemed subtly askew.

  In a moment, Hannoken added to his smile, “Of course I do, Mr. Suida. We called you Renny, didn’t we? Rin-tin-tin. You’re looking well.”

  “But maybe not for much longer,” said Frederick. He explained the situation. “To save him, we need to be able to prove he’s not a threat to the public. I understand you removed his aggressive instincts, and I’d like you to come to Earth long enough to testify to that effect.”

  The distinguished face fell as Hannoken shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “A dog’s aggressive behavior is linked to its senses of territoriality and hierarchy and, yes, we weakened those senses. Renny isn’t very turf-conscious, and he won’t fight to be top dog. But any animal has to be able to defend itself and those it cares about. And he will certainly fight
if he feels threatened.”

  Frederick hoped that Hannoken’s words would make as much sense to the judge as they did to him. “Then there’s no danger that he would attack people on the street.”

  “Not unless someone threatens him. You say he was a seeing-eye dog? Or if they threatened his employer. A mugger, say.”

  “PETA.” Renny’s rough voice made the comment sound like a curse.

  “They’re certainly a threat,” said Frederick, glancing at the dog. He sighed. Their lawyers might well point that out and claim the dog could attack them right there in the courtroom. “The court date,” he added. “It’s…”

  But Hannoken was already shaking his head. “No. I’m sorry, but no. I came up here to get away from the Engineers and their craziness. They were picketing the lab, breaking in and wrecking equipment, ‘liberating’ our research animals. It was only a matter of time before something like that riot…” He broke off, paused for a moment while he seemed to scan what he could see in the screen before him. His eyebrows thickened as his face turned serious. “That was horrible, horrible. Obviously, you’re all right. And Renny. But…Is that a refugee behind you? Or…?”

  Frederick turned to see Donna Rose still in her tub, leaves open, staring out the window. She did not seem to be paying any attention. “Yes,” he said. “She didn’t have any place to go.”

  Hannoken sighed. “We don’t have any bots up here. And I’d love to get her into my lab. Her genetic structure must be fascinating.” Frederick interrupted as best he could in the face of the three-second time delay. “I didn’t realize there was any genetic research at Probe.”

  Hannoken shrugged. “If I’d stayed down there, I’d eventually have had to give it up completely, that or go into hiding. Here, at least, there’s no harassment. Though it’s barely a hobby. They made me Director of the station, and that keeps me too busy.” He shook his head. “Too busy for your court hearing.”