Woodsman

by Thomas A Easton

  The dog growled. His tail stopped moving.

  Hannoken shrugged again and looked aside as if he could not stand to meet the German shepherd’s large, dark eyes, nor to think that he had been quite right to say that the dog could be aggressive when threatened. “I’m not coming back.”

  “Not even…”

  “No. Not even to save him.” Frederick knew, and he knew that Hannoken knew, that a subpoena would be useless. The distances and the times and the expense of travel were so great that the orbital community was in many ways like an independent foreign nation. Congress had not yet recognized this fact of modern life, but the courts had. They usually refused to subpoena orbital workers, knowing that such orders could all too easily be ignored.

  The silence of thought stretched well beyond the time delay inherent in any conversation across a third of a million kilometers. Finally, Frederick said, “Is there anyone else?”

  “No. Not that I know of. But…” Hannoken turned back toward the camera that captured his image for the veedo set. “Perhaps…He’d be safe if you could send him here, wouldn’t he?”

  “What do you think, Bert?” Frederick turned the mug of coffee in his hand. For half an hour after his talk with Hannoken, he had paced his office, muttering about the selfishness of human beings. Renny had chimed in from time to time. Donna Rose had been silent, her mind dwelling on her own tragedy.

  Eventually, he had closed his eyes and dozed for a few minutes. Then, feeling somewhat refreshed, he had left the room to the bot and the dog, locking them in while he walked down the hall to Berut Amoun’s office. The room was identical to his own, with a veedo unit on a shelf and a bioform computer by the desk. There was even a snackbush by the window, though this one produced clusters of crunchy, salty twigs, as much like potato sticks as pretzels.

  “Forget it,” said Amoun. “PETA would scream like hell. And the court would never go for it.”

  “Then he’s doomed.”

  “You knew that already.”

  Frederick shook his head. “No!” That was, he thought, the whole point of his assignment: to defend the genimal, to find some way to ward off the doom PETA wished for him. He had thought that meant fighting PETA in court, and he had been optimistic. But then Hannoken had offered a far surer path to safety, even as his refusal to testify made the court fight seem far less promising.

  “Yes. With the mood the world is in right now…”

  “He said he could put through a requisition for an experimental animal. Route it here instead of NSF’s purchasing department. Then we take it as approved and authorized and ship him the only animal we have. He called it creative mix-up, and he thought PETA wouldn’t mind it.”

  “Maybe not. But what the hell would they do with him?” Both men knew that Renny had no training for space, and without hands, even with training, there couldn’t be much for him to do. And space had little tolerance for idlers or parasites.

  “The only pets they have up there are little guys,” said Amoun. Usually that meant tropical fish. Mice were rare, said the Sunday supplements. So were gerbils and hamsters and crickets. They were all small enough, and they could all be kept in small cages that did not get in the way in cramped quarters. But if they got loose, they could all too easily get into crucial equipment and short out circuitry, chew wires, or plug small ducts.

  “Or they have roots.” The favorite plant-pets were goldfish bushes and pussy willows.

  “Renny’s too smart to be a pet,” said Amoun. “He’s also too big, and too mobile. They’ll have to move him to a habitat.” The two LaGrangian habitats raised the meat and milk and eggs that made their people the envy of the other satellites from plants, not animals, but they did have room.

  “He needs more than room,” said Frederick. Only after he had hung upon Hannoken had he thought to ask himself just how happy Renny would be on Probe Station. He would be alive, with no threat hanging over him. But he would be useless, and he, as much as any human being, prided himself on being useful to the society of which he was a part. Frederick did not think he would be happy as a pet.

  When he returned to his office, he found Donna Rose out of her tub and pacing about the office. Renny greeted him with, “Hannoken called back. She didn’t have any trouble at all with the download, and…” The dog was behind the man, sounding surprised, using his nose to push him toward the desk, where the computer’s leafy screen displayed a short block of text:

  “Yes, we can do it,” Hannoken had written. “We have a group that has been working on a new space drive. They’ll be ready soon for a test flight, and they’ll need a test pilot. They have a human volunteer already. But a dog would make a perfect copilot. They said it would remind everyone of the Russian Laika that was the first living thing to leave the Earth back in the 1950s. And it even makes sense to route the requisition through BRA, since there is a possibility that the new drive may change living material in unforeseen ways.”

  “Sounds great, doesn’t it?” said Renny. “I’ve always wanted to be a rocket jockey.”

  “Laika died,” said Frederick as he erased Hannoken’s message. The thought made him feel surprisingly apprehensive. He had not known Renny long, but he had become quite attached to him.

  “But this way I get to be a rocket jockey first. If I stay here…” No one said that if he stayed on Earth PETA or the Engineers would surely kill him, legally or illegally. There did not seem to be any truly desirable choices among his possible futures.

  Frederick used his keyboard to put through another call to Hannoken. Once the orbiting gengineer was on both computer and veedo screens, he said simply, “Huh?”

  Three seconds later, Hannoken laughed, set aside the floppy-card in his hand, and said, “What do you mean, ‘Huh’?”

  “A new drive?” said Frederick. “I haven’t heard…”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Hannoken with a grin. “I hope. We’ve kept this Q-drive quiet, though they tell me it should simplify things a bit.” Frederick was not surprised when the other man failed to go into detail. Defense departments and intelligence agencies played a much smaller role in the world than once they had, but they still existed, and they still coveted technological monopolies. There was no telling who might be eavesdropping on the communications signals from a known research satellite. “Sound good?”

  As they spoke, Donna Rose stepped back into her pot of dirt, spread just the tips of her leaves to the sun, touched a honeysuckle leaf with one hand, and assumed a thoughtful look. Frederick glanced toward her but did not wonder what she was doing. Instead, he asked Hannoken what he had meant when he said the drive could change living tissue.

  The other man shrugged lightly and said, “I don’t think it’s serious. As the Station chief, I have to know about any project like this. But I’m a biologist, too, and that got me involved a little deeper, as a consultant.” He hesitated before continuing. “Nobody really understands how the biohazard would work. Some of us don’t even think it’s all that serious a risk. I don’t.”

  “But some do,” said Renny. As before, he was leaning on Frederick’s desk, staring intently at the man who had made him what he was but would not come to Earth to help him now. His tail was twitching slightly, as if he were not sure how to feel toward the man.

  Hannoken stared out of the screens at the dog, not at Frederick. “That’s right,” he said. “Just as some physicists thought the first nuclear tests a century and a half ago might trigger a planetary chain reaction. But they tried the experiment anyway. It was the only answer, the only way to find out who was right.”

  “But the risk…!” cried Donna Rose from her place by the window. After the inevitable pause, Hannoken shifted his gaze toward her. “Yes,” he said. “But the ones in charge thought the pessimists were wrong.”

  “Couldn’t they have done it in space?” asked Renny. Frederick was the first of the two men to shake his head and say, “Not then. No rockets, no space travel.” Then Hannoken continued with, �
��That was even before Sputnik. Though it would have been a good thing if they had been out here like us, eh?”

  “And not down here.” Donna Rose was withdrawing her roots from the soil and stepping back onto the carpet. When Hannoken’s eyes turned back toward Renny, the genimal said, “I’m willing.” When Frederick grunted as if in surprise, the dog glanced in his direction and added, “I haven’t got much to lose, Freddy. Have I?”

  “You don’t have to,” said Hannoken. “Remember, we do have that human volunteer.”

  Frederick felt a sudden wave of relief as he guessed that much of the message Hannoken had left on his screen must have been meant for other eyes than his, eavesdroppers, chasers of those records that had once, before computers achieved their omnipresence, been called paper trails.

  Renny showed his teeth in a doggy grin. “You need to justify that requisition, right?” Without waiting for Hannoken’s agreeing nod, he said, “And if it’ll get me away from PETA, I’ll do anything.”

  After Hannoken’s image had blinked off the office’s two screens, Frederick leaned over his desk, his hands bracing his head at the temples. What was he getting himself into? He would save Renny from PETA, yes. But his BRA superiors would have words for him, he was sure. He might save Renny only at the cost of his own pigskin hide.

  Was the saving worth its price? Should he, perhaps, ignore the sneaky, under-handed, round-about solution to Renny’s problem, that “creative mix-up” that Alvar Hannoken had offered him? The philosophers claimed that doing wrong for the sake of good never worked. Saving Renny was good. Of course it was. But saving him in this way, by subterfuge and lies and misdirection? Was there any other way?

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. Slowly, he let go of his head and turned. Donna Rose stood beside him now, gazing at him sympathetically. Automatically, he covered her hand with his own and squeezed lightly.

  “Can I go too?” she asked.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  Sam Nickers stood on the crest of a small rise in the city park, his hands deep in the pockets of the coat he had put on over his coverall. The sky was overcast this evening. The breeze was unseasonably chill on his neck and face.

  “Sheila,” he said. She was beside him, wearing a long cloak. Ahead and to either side, the landscape of lawn and thicket and flowerbed and path was dotted by other couples, singletons, and small groups. The tennis courts were quiet, and no one at all was on the softball field. All were there to confirm the news reports that the park was open once more, the damage to the bot dorm had been repaired, and the bots were back in their home. Some of the watchers were surely Engineers; perhaps they had even been part of the murderous mob that had done the damage three days before, come to feed their dissatisfaction with the temporaries of their impact. Some, like the Nickers, fed fears of another sort. Only the honey-bums lurking in the shadows where clumps of trees struggled to emerge from tangles of honeysuckle did not seem to care.

  “Look at the nursery,” he said, pointing. They had been here before, in better times, when there had been neat rows of infant bots, rooted in the rich soil near the little duck pond, unable to move until their legs had shaped within their trunks and their nervous systems had matured enough to command their muscles. Until the age of two, they were little more than plants.

  Sheila’s breath caught in her throat as she said, “There were hundreds of them.” The bots were fertile creatures, as they needed to be to maintain their numbers. Few lived more than a decade.

  “And now…A dozen.” They had not been transplanted to some more sheltered garden. The small stumps still jutted from the ground.

  She shuddered. “It looks like a prison camp.” The guards were armed. The honeysuckle had been cleared from the ghetto border, leaving a strip of bare earth beside the fence. In that strip, mounds of dirt marked where dead honey-bums, rioters, and bots had been buried. The fence itself was higher, though admittedly the barbed-wire top angled outward, not inward. Most ominous of all, the bots within the fence seemed wilted. They milled about and chatted as they always had, but their movements seemed subdued, their voices were quieter, and there was no sound of song. Their leaves spread as before to the sun but seemed to remain closer to their trunks, as if in apprehension.

  “It may become one yet,” he said. They had months to go before the school year and their contracts ended. But they had still not found new jobs. No one wanted to hire greenskins. No one wanted to draw the attention of the Engineers and their friends. The forces of reaction were strong. He thought they would grow stronger yet.

  He was a teacher of history, historian enough. He knew there was nothing unprecedented about the situation, nothing abnormal, nothing strange. It had happened before, many, many, many times throughout humanity’s span of time.

  What he felt as he contemplated the future had been felt before, he was sure. By pre-21st-century American Blacks, 1940 Japanese-Americans, Bulgarian Turks in the 1990s, Jews in the England of the 2060s or in 19th-century Russia or 1930s Germany or medieval Spain…The minority, ethnic or racial or religious, called less than human, feared, demeaned, mistreated, persecuted. He felt sure the killing had only begun.

  And there was not a thing he could do about it. He could not even tell the killers how much they depended on the bots, who worked at jobs and for pay scales no human would accept, or on the gengineers, who had appeared just before the vaunted Machine Age must have used up the resources it required.

  He stepped sideways, closer to his wife, and wrapped an arm about her. He felt bleakly reassured when her own arm put an answering pressure on his lower ribs. Together then, supporting each other, comforting, praying to whatever gods they sheltered within their hearts while the lower edge of Sheila’s cloak flapped against their ankles, they stared over that piece of the world that had once been a peaceful, happy dormitory for the bots. The lower ones. The menials. He imagined that in due time the upper bots, the ones Alice Belle had said owned their own building and had apartments and worked by day, would join them there. And then…

  Humanity was too sweet to waste on the lower orders. They watched as armed guards yelled and gestured the bots into a long line before the gate. Some distance off, near the park’s main entrance, someone laughed and yelled, “Line ‘em up!” The source was a group of young Engineers in blue coveralls; they were hurriedly forming a double line on either side of the drive.

  The dorm gate swung open, and the column of bots began walking toward the city’s streets and their jobs. Guards walked at the head of the column and along its flanks, peeling off at the park entrance to press the Engineers gently, courteously back. That gentleness seemed oddly diffident, as if the guards were not sure whether the Engineers were friends or foes, or the bots were wards or prisoners. It did nothing to stop the heckling, the pokes and prods and grabs at blossoms that—Sam could see, even from his distance—left scalps red with blood.

  The bots speeded up their pace as they approached the park entrance, rushing to escape the gauntlet. Yet their faces grew ever bleaker. The gauntlet, they knew, did not end there.

  Sam could feel Sheila shivering at his side.

  It was warmer behind the walls of an apartment building whose windows glowed strangely bright, as if the lights that dispelled dusk from the rooms within were miniature suns.

  In a way, they were. This was Alice Belle’s home, a building owned by bots and adapted to their comforts, of which the bright lighting was only one. The floors had been waterproofed and covered with garden loam, just deep enough in most areas to ease the barefoot souls of strolling bots, a little deeper under the brightest lights, where the sentient plants would root and rest at night. Overhead, pipes served a sprinkler system that could mimic mists, showers, and driving rainstorms. The honeysuckle vines that arched over the windowsills and rooted in the soil were so thick that it was obvious they were welcome visitors. No one had ever trimmed them back. No one ever would.

  The room’s single occupant
did not seem to be a bot. It stood in the room’s best bed, where the soil was deepest and the light the brightest. It was as tall as any bot, and its leaves were as green. But its head and face seemed to be sculpted from a single massive flower, its color the deep red of an amaryllis, and its trunk was a simple, slender cylinder. There was the merest trace of human curves. There were no arms, nor a division of the lower trunk into legs. A single massive bulb swelled from the surface of the soil.

  The room’s door opened. Through the portal stepped a number of conventional bots. One by one, they paced barefooted across the soil and bowed their heads to the room’s strange occupant, almost as if it were their king or queen. Then they found positions in a ring around the object of their deference, scuffed their feet, let down their roots, and anchored themselves in the thin layer of loam. A smaller bot then entered the room, moving stiffly, and took up a position within the ring, close to the rim but facing the center. Her head was small, and the bulb between her legs was nearly twice as large as those of the others, as if it held a greater proportion of her brains; certainly, it was large enough to account for the awkwardness of her movements.

  Finally, Alice Belle appeared, one hand holding tightly a crumpled sheet of paper. She did not join the ring, but instead rooted herself a little to one side, not far from a window.

  The bots in the ring were what the papers they had filed with the city’s bureaus and the Internal Revenue Service called a “management committee.” Yet they were not quite that in truth. Yes, they managed the building, its maintenance and financing and tenanting. But they also managed the residents themselves, acting as a sort of governing council, and in this function their influence actually extended well beyond the building’s walls, largely because of what occupied the center of their circle.