Woodsman

by Thomas A Easton

  But if she hadn’t canceled the tickets…He turned to his bioform computer, tapped the sensitive spots on the specialized leaf that served as the keyboard, and…The tickets were still good. Donna Rose was still on the passenger roster, Renny still listed among the cargo. And there were empty seats on the spaceplane.

  The cab was a Yellow Hopper, a gengineered version of a grasshopper. It had never succeeded as a civilian vehicle because, even though the city’s streets were maintained far better than they had been in the Machine Age, it jounced constantly, as if the wheels it didn’t have were slamming in and out of potholes. Frederick gritted his teeth against the rattling gait, clung to the strap that hung from the wall of the passenger compartment, and watched the streets. Honey-bums peeked from their sheltering vines. Blue-clad Engineers stared insolently at bioform vehicles and modified humans and bots. A mother stood by, smiling, a small dog straining at a leash, while her child used a small metal shovel to pickup a lump of dog excrement and hurl it at a Mack.

  Frederick shuddered. He had done the right thing. This city, this country, this world was no place for a sensitive, intelligent being, genimal or bot or, indeed, even human. He had done it again when, before leaving his office for what might well be the last time, he had used his computer to spend most of his savings on a third, round-trip ticket on the afternoon spaceplane to orbit.

  The Hopper stopped at the door to his apartment building. “Wait,” he told the driver. Then he let himself in and packed a small bag. After a moment’s hesitation, he removed from the wall three holos, one of his late mate, Porculata, the living bagpipe, one of their children, and one of his old friend, Tom Cross, and his wife, Muffy. He tucked them into the center of the bag. Then he carefully watered his two house plants, a traditional coleus and a goldfish bush. He thought it might well be a futile gesture—he expected to return, but he had no idea whether it would be in hours, days, or weeks, by which time the plants would be withered sticks and dust. But he could not simply abandon a living thing.

  “The airport.”

  The cabby, though he wore the colorful head wrap of some Southeast Asian tribesman, was clearly Caucasian. For a moment, Frederick wondered whether he had been adopted by the descendants of immigrants, his ancestors included Asians, or emigrants to Asia, or he just thought the head-dress handsome. But he did not say anything after giving his simple instruction, and the cabby said nothing in return. The Hopper lurched through the city streets toward the greenways that led toward the suburbs and the airport, and Frederick stared glumly out the vehicle’s window.

  Frederick scowled as a trio of Roadrunners sped past the cab, honking, their red-clad riders bent low over their necks. When he had been a garbage disposal, when Tom had been a child, long before he had learned what pain meant, there had still been a few internal combustion automobiles and trucks on the roads, antiques, status symbols. Now they remained in storage, in museums, in the garages of collectors, emerging only for parades and similar special occasions. Motorcycles had remained in use the longest, for they had appealed to the Engineers despite the high cost of their fuel and the difficulty of finding parts except by cannibalizing other machines. They had succumbed within just the last few years. Now the Engineers used bicycles or took the Bernies.

  He peered at the sky. To one side, a column of smoke marked a fire. He wondered if the Engineers had torched a house. Ahead, a web of contrails radiated from the airport. Jetliners—Alitalia Cardinals, American Eagles, China Air Juncos, each identifiable by coloring or wing configuration—circled, waiting for their turns to land. Outlying hangars began to show beside the road, and he could see jets on the ground, with workers cleaning and restocking the passenger or cargo pods strapped to their backs and mechanics working over the engines strapped to the roots of their tails. The engines were essential because the great birds could never fly under muscle power alone. The advantage of gengineering was that it made the jets largely self-manufacturing, though they needed skeletal reinforcements, and if their engines failed, the muscles could provide at least some emergency control.

  A distant roar and an arrow-straight contrail, growing louder, closer, faster than any gengineered jetliner could possibly manage, even with strap-on assistance, marked the arrival of a spaceplane from orbit. “There,” said Frederick. “The Yonder terminal.”

  It was commonplace to find Engineers picketing the airline terminals with their “MACHINES NOT GENES” signs. Frederick had not expected to find them also protesting at the gateway to space, holding signs that said “UNFAIR” and “BRING THE MACHINES HOME.” Here if anywhere the Machine Age still lived in all its most glorious aspects. Rockets, spaceplanes, satellites, habitats, Moonbases. All were as mechanical as could be, as dependent on machines, as rejecting of bioforms as any Engineer could wish.

  Nor had he expected to see an Engineer bent over a sheet of cardboard flattened on the sidewalk. He was carefully painting a new sign. A finished version leaned against a pillar nearby. It read, “KEEP SPACE CLEAN. NO BOTS.” Frederick told himself that Donna Rose must have been noticed.

  The Engineers, he thought, did not appreciate how much of the world around them was still based on mechanism. There were still electronic computers, engines for Bioblimps and jets, strap-on passenger and cargo pods, and a thousand other things. The bioforms had been developed to fill all the roles they could, to replace mechanical devices wherever that was possible and thus to ease the strain on energy and mineral resources. One result had been that in many respects, mechanical technology had stagnated. Innovation had followed the bioforms and left spaceplanes and their kin much as they had been a century before.

  Yet bioforms could not do everything; space technology was simply the most blatant testimonial to that fact. Certainly bioforms were not suited to the harsh environment of space, airless, subject to extremes of heat and cold and solar radiation. Frederick did not think the pattern would ever change, nor would it need to, for the space environment, though harsh, held all the resources a mechanical technology needed or could use. It also held plenty of room for mechanical innovations.

  Yet that only taunted the Engineers, as if they were children above whose heads someone dangled candy. The Machine Age wasn’t dead, but it was definitely eclipsed by the dominant technology of gengineering. The machines remained gloriously strong only where they were far out of the Engineers’ reach, in space. And they would remain out of reach as long as the Engineers continued to echo the religious fundamentalists of another age who had refused to accept the discoveries of science. Their attitudes were such that no space-related operation would hire them. Their lack of tolerance for the new disqualified them for the very world they craved.

  The woman at the ticket counter wore a jet black coverall with silver piping and a golden sunburst above her left breast. When he handed her his National Identification Card, she slipped it into the slot of an electronic card drive much like that of the bioform floppy reader in his office computer. The NIDC or NIDC carried embedded in its magnetic surface all the data it needed to serve as both a passport and a checkbook; bills remained in use only for smaller purchases and bribes such as he had had to offer Donna Rose’s foreman.

  When the ticket clerk eyed him carefully, he knew that she was comparing his face with the picture the NIDC had thrown onto the screen of her terminal. When she placed a form on the pressure-sensitive surface of the counter and said, “Sign here,” he knew her computer was comparing his signature with that recorded in the NIDC.

  He accepted his ticket and checked his bag. “Gate Seventeen,” the clerk said. “It takes off in twenty minutes.”

  The Yonder terminal jutted farther from the main building than any other, and Gate Seventeen was at its far end. He walked, following the corridor through weapon scanners and bomb sniffers and past plate glass windows that offered views of feathered jetliners being fueled from truck trailers filled with meat gengineered to grow on sewage, of litterbugs cleaning up the jets’ waste deposits, o
f luggage carts drawn by small Macks to and from the jets’ cargo compartments. Only when he was passing Gate Twelve did he glimpse the spaceplane that was his destination, its needle-like prow stabbing the sky above the runway. As he drew closer, he could see more of its snow-white ceramic-coated metal hull, gleaming in the sun, long enough and high enough to dwarf any of the flying genimals he had passed already.

  A single black-clad attendant stood by the door to the spaceplane’s boarding ramp, glancing at his watch. Beyond him, Frederick could see a single pair of legs climbing toward the plane’s entrance hatch. “You’re the last,” said the attendant. “Just in time.”

  As soon as Frederick entered the surprisingly small passenger cabin—most of the spaceplane’s bulk was devoted to fuel tanks—he spotted Donna Rose’s distinctive yellow blossoms. The sight of an empty seat beside her tempted him to smile, but when he realized that the seats in front of and behind her were also empty, he scowled instead. The plane was by no means full, but still, there were no other clusters of empty seats as large. He hoped that most of the passengers were grounders on business trips; he expected more tolerance of habitat and station residents. Under his breath, he muttered, “Bigots!”

  He slipped into the seat beside the bot just as, behind him, the hatch chunked closed and, ahead of him, the “Fasten Seat Belts” signs above all the seats came on.

  “Mr. Suida!” she said. The tips of the long leaves that sheathed her chest drew away from her skin for just a moment.

  “Frederick,” he answered. “Call me that, please. Or even Freddy.”

  “But…”

  “They caught me,” he explained. “The boss got pissed when she found out what I’d done. And then she kicked me out, at least temporarily. So here I am.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I mean…” She laughed awkwardly and looked away. “Not that you’re fired, Frederick. That you’re…”

  “Here?” Frederick allowed himself a small smile, the first in longer than he wished to remember that had not been a purely mechanical social gesture, not that there had been many even of those. “So I am. That’s what I said. I’ve always wanted to visit a station.”

  The spaceplane’s engines rumbled, and the great vehicle began to move away from the terminal. In the reflections on the terminal’s vast windows, Frederick got his first glimpse of the plane’s narrow, swept-back wings.

  She was looking at him once more. “I was confused,” she said. “It took forever to find the terminal. I’ve never been here before.”

  “But you made it,” he said. “That’s what counts.” He hesitated, hoping that she would not take his next words as insulting her competence. “Where’s Renny?”

  “He’s okay,” she said. “They said they’d put his carrier in the warm hold.” Now it was her turn to hesitate. “I’m glad you’re here,” she finally added. “I was lonely.”

  “And so am I.” The spaceplane swung into position at the end of its assigned runway, the engine roar grew so loud that speech was impossible, and thrust pressed them into the backs of their seats as they began to move. Donna Rose clutched the arm of the seat rest between them with one hand. He laid his own hand over hers, yawned, and closed his eyes.

  A spaceplane was a hybrid vehicle. It began its journey from the ground as if it were an ordinary jet plane, burning fuel with air. As it gained speed and altitude, it became a ramjet, forcing air down a funnel throat, compressing it to maintain the flow of oxygen needed to burn the fuel. As the speed became too great and the air too thin for any ramjet to function, the plane’s carefully shaped underside came into play, channeling and compressing air into a channel where a spray of fuel could keep the thrust building. Only when the spaceplane had reached such a high altitude that there was too little air to exploit at all did it begin to function as a rocket.

  The advantages of the multi-mode propulsion system were two: First, unlike a pure rocket, the spaceplane needed to carry relatively little liquid oxygen with which to burn the fuel it used within the atmosphere; it could therefore carry a heavier payload to orbit. Second, the thrust never became oppressive; the passengers were pressed into their seats with only a little more force than they might have experienced in a rapidly climbing jet.

  The changes in the spaceplane’s mode of action revealed themselves in changes in the notes the engines sang. When it was a jet, the note was low, bass. As a ramjet, it sang higher, tenor, the note vibrating through the plane’s very frame as exterior sound was left behind the sound barrier. As a scramjet, the note was highest of all, a screaming operatic soprano. As a rocket, it dropped back to a bass that vibrated in the passengers’ bones, and shortly after that, it quit entirely. The spaceplane had achieved orbit. Now it could coast, adjusting its course if necessary with only small bursts of rocketry until it approached the long cylinder of Nexus Station. There any passengers going beyond to other destinations would have to change to local spacecraft.

  “Mech,” said Frederick. He was holding one hand over his mouth as if…

  “Do you need this?” Donna Rose reached into the pocket on the seatback in front of her and offered him a bluntly labeled “Barf Bag.”

  He shook his head. “I can control it. I think.” He accepted the bag, laid it in his lap, and swallowed. “Give me a minute. Never been in zero gee before.”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” said Donna Rose.

  He looked at her skeptically. She seemed to be trying very hard not to smile at his discomfort, and though he knew that such smiles were more of relief than of amusement, he grew irritated. He made a growling noise.

  “In fact,” she said. “In fact, it feels nice, like when I let my roots down and spread my leaves and soak up sun. Like floating.”

  “We are floating,” said Frederick. He was used to feeling the pressure of his seat against his butt. Now there was nothing, there was not even the opposite pressure of his seatbelt on his stomach, the vestibular apparatus in his middle ear was stubbornly insisting that he was falling, his stomach was floating, twisting, turning, fluid was churning, sloshing, lapping at the base of his esophagus, his stomach muscles were clenching, now slowly, now faster, his mouth began to water, and…

  He got it all in the bag.

  “There’s a pill,” said Donna Rose, pointing, and he saw it in a blister fastened to the base of the bag. He extracted it, swallowed it dry, closed his eyes, leaned back in his seat, and clutched the armrests, forcing himself into the cushions as if he could by sheer will supply the missing force of gravity. Within moments he could feel the pill begin to work.

  Thrusters made soft thudding noises. The spaceplane lurched, slowing for its approach to the Nexus dock. There was a clank of metal latches, a hiss and ear-pop of equalizing pressures, and the plane’s hatch opened once more. Following the other passengers, Frederick and Donna Rose pulled themselves from seatback to seatback, propelling themselves into the station’s receiving hall where their attention was seized by a dozen corridor mouths so ringed by signs that no one, no matter which way their feet were pointing, could fail to read them. They did not notice the pair of black-clad attendants waiting at the entrance until one said, “Where you going?”

  “Probe Station,” answered Frederick, and four hands seized and hurled him toward a corridor to the left. Two more attendants halted his flight, said, “Shuttle to the right,” and turned away to catch Donna Rose.

  The luggage must have traveled by some other route, for when they reached the shuttle’s berth, marked by a single circular opening in the wall and beyond that what was clearly the interior of a small spacecraft, Frederick’s bag was waiting for them. So too was a large plastic crate with a metal grill on one end. “Renny?” said Frederick.

  “I wondered if you’d make it, Freddy,” said the German shepherd. He sounded as if the trip had had no more effect on him than it had had on Donna Rose.

  A woman dressed in a pale green coverall with white chevrons down the sleeves emerged from the shuttle’s hat
ch. Her auburn hair was cropped short. So were her legs, which stopped at mid-thigh. If they had been intact, she would have been no more than a meter and a half tall. “What’s this?” she said. “It talks?”

  “Yes.” Donna Rose nodded. “We’re taking him…”

  “Then what’s he doing in that box?” She promptly unsnapped the catches that held the crate’s grill in place, and Renny pushed himself into view, his tail wagging furiously. Frederick immediately noticed that though Renny still wore his collar, the radio tracking device PETA had convinced the court to order was gone. Donna Rose caught the question in his glance at her and said, “I left it in a waste can at the airport.”

  “Nice dog,” said the woman in green. “I hear the boss did him himself.”

  As the German shepherd drifted across the corridor, he thrust his forelimbs straight out and curled his tail over his back as if he wanted to stretch, but the lack of gravity made the effort futile. The woman grabbed a handhold and pressed Renny toward the nearest wall.

  When his feet touched, Renny pushed, bowing his back until the joints popped. “Ahh,” he said. “Thanks. I like you.”

  Donna Rose laughed, while Frederick answered the woman’s own comment. “Years ago,” he said. “But they don’t want him down there.” Silently, he wondered at the woman’s lack of legs when the gengineers could easily stimulate their regrowth. Then he realized that the ticket clerk on Earth and the attendants who had helped him and Donna Rose on their way through Nexus Station had shown no signs of genetic modifications. Yet he had seen no signs of prejudice other than the zone of empty seats around the bot. Perhaps, he thought, it was simply that these people thought more in terms of controlling their environment, of metal and machines and externals, than of controlling their internal flesh.

  “Of course not.” The woman turned away, pulling herself back into the shuttle with one arm, keeping the other curled around Renny’s chest. The lack of legs offered no handicap in zero gee. Over her shoulder, she said, “I’m Lois.” She gestured toward her thighs. “An accident. Nothing to do with my piloting. And are you coming? There’s no one else.”