As they entered the small spacecraft, Frederick asked, “How’d you know about Renny?”
“It’s a small station,” Lois said. “Most secrets we don’t even try to keep, except from outsiders. I heard from the com tech who monitored your call.”
The shuttle was little more than a small cylinder whose stained and padded walls were equipped with straps for fastening passengers and cargo into place. Toward one end was a large veedo screen that let the pilot see in any direction she chose; beside it was a small porthole. Set in front of the screen was a padded bucket seat whose broad arms were covered with pressure and slide switches, the spacecraft’s controls.
“Strap down,” said Lois. “It can get a little bumpy.” Hardly was she in her own seat before she showed them what she meant. The shuttle’s thrusters separated the craft from Nexus Station gently enough, but then the engine fired and the sudden acceleration was enough to stagger anyone who wasn’t anchored.
The shuttle was not a fast ship. The trip to lunar orbit and Probe Station took most of the next day, for the distance was far greater than that between Earth’s surface and Nexus Station. Frederick and Renny passed part of the time napping, while Donna Rose asked the pilot to position the shuttle so that full sunlight shone in the small porthole and then spent the hours basking and photosynthesizing. “I have never,” she said. “I’ve never felt such thick sunlight. It’s delicious.”
When the Station finally came into view, it proved to be a slowly rotating cylinder whose ends had been stepped in toward the center. It looked like a pair of tin cans, one short and fat, the other longer, thinner, tucked inside the first so its ends protruded. Docking ports and communications antennae were visible on the ends. A radio telescope several kilometers in diameter, its supporting framework seeming impossibly delicate to eyes accustomed to gravity, hung off to one side, as did several smaller cylindrical stations. When Frederick asked what the latter were, their pilot said, “Research labs. We don’t do the messy stuff in the living room.”
A moment later, she said, “Brace yourselves. The docking collar’s an elastic sleeve, and…” There was a click as the shuttle’s hatch met the docking port, the sound of sliding metal, and the snap of closing latches. Then the shuttle began to turn as the docking collar confronted and conquered the ship’s inertia.
Alvar Hannoken was waiting for them inside the Station, his rugged face beaming as he spotted the dog he had gengineered. “Renny!” he cried.
The German shepherd barked his own greeting, and Frederick said, “Dr. Hannoken.” He looked at the other curiously. Gengineers had a reputation for modifying themselves in strange ways that only later showed up in the populace, and there was something he could not quite identify about the man’s body. Certainly, the legs of his coverall were looser than they were on most people, but…
“Frederick. I didn’t expect to see you too. But you’re welcome, of course.” When he turned toward Donna Rose, Frederick introduced the bot. “She’s a refugee,” he said.
Hannoken’s face sobered instantly. “We get the news. I’m sure we can find a place. And besides, we can always use the oxygen. If more bots follow the drinking gourd up here…”
“Actually, sir, I use more oxygen than I make.”
“That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.” He turned to Renny, smiling again. “And you, sir, are the first dog I’ve ever seen with a portable tree. Come on, now. Let’s get you some weight.”
“I’d like that,” said Frederick, and in a moment the three new arrivals were following Hannoken and Lois down a corridor, pulling themselves along with handholds fastened to the walls. They had not gone far before Frederick realized what was peculiar about the Station Director’s body: His coverall knees were creased, not smooth. His legs bent backward. In fact, the “knees” were really ankles; true knees made the fabric bulge near the hips. Hannoken had redesigned his legs to resemble those of a goat. The thighs were short and powerful, the feet elongated. There were no hooves, but the man wore black stockings as if to mimic their appearance and he would clearly walk upon his toes when they reached those parts of the Station where its rotation provided a centrifugal substitute for gravity. Frederick supposed that Hannoken’s modification might actually offer some advantage in low or zero gee, where so much movement was by jumping.
* * *
CHAPTER 8
Testimony from a hearing of
The Senate Committee on Agricultural Policy
Transcribed from GNN (Government NewsNet) for the Federal Register.
The Honorable Cecil D. Trench (DemSoc-NC), Committee Chair: Gentlemen and ladies, agricultural subsidies have been a tradition in this fine nation of ours for the last century and a half.
In my own state of North Carolina, the tobacco crop was supported in that way for many years. In the Midwest, subsidies have seen thousands of corn and wheat and hog farmers through years of drought and flood and foreign dumping.
Dairy farmers saw difficult times when new technologies such as bovine growth hormone came along. That was a product of the earliest of the genetic engineers. Later the udder tree came on the market. Both of these developments increased productivity enormously. So enormously in fact that the price of milk seemed bound to decline to virtually nothing. The farmers would have starved and gone bankrupt. The dairy industry would have collapsed entirely. And then the nation’s children would have been without their necessary and essential nutrition and the nation itself would have gone the malnourished and therefore brain-damaged way of Ethiopia and Bangladesh and Brazil. All that, and more, except for the price supports that kept the price of milk high and kept the dairy industry in business.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, some people are claiming that this noble tradition is no longer necessary. They say we can do away with crop subsidies. They say that the forces of our traditional free market system should be given free rein. They say that if farmers go out of business, that is only a sign of their superfluity. The gengineers, they say, will provide. For years, in fact, new crops have been in the fields. Some have been mere modifications of traditional crops, ones that make their own fertilizer and pesticide. Others have been new kinds of plants—house-plants with edible fruit or flowers, pie plants, and more. Still others have been strange hybrids of plant and animal—hamberries, potsters, sausage bushes, the udder trees, more. Yields have reached new heights, and the price of food has reached lower levels than any human being now alive can remember.
Yet—Yet!—some say this very boon for the consumer is a curse for the farmer who cannot get enough money for his unprecedented bumper crops to pay his mortgage or his taxes or even his seed bill. Some say the subsidies are more essential than ever before.
And some say the new crops are more profitable than ever were any of their predecessors. Some say those farmers who have embraced the new technology are banking more money than ever before, even as those who turn their backs on the fruits of gengineering go wailing to the wall.
That is what we are here today to discuss: Do agricultural subsidies remain a desirable way for our government to spend its tax revenues? And if so, who should get those subsidies?
Catherine Dubuque-Kinshasa, Ph.D., Deputy Assistant Secretary for Agricultural Demographics, Department of Agriculture: Senator Trench, gentlemen, ladies. Yes, there are people who favor continuing our system of agricultural subsidies. They argue that those farmers who accept the benefits of gengineering monopolize all the money to be made in farming, leaving only scraps for the few farmers who prefer more traditional crops and methods and thereby forcing the latter to abandon their farms and find other lines of work.
These people are, of course, absolutely correct. Gengineered agriculture is the dominant form of agriculture in this country today. It is dominant because it is more productive, more cost-effective, and more environmentally benign. If it forces traditional farmers out of farming, that is no tragedy. Traditional farming depletes the fertility of the soil. Constant plo
wing leads to erosion. The use of pesticides and fertilizers leads to water pollution and air pollution. Traditional agriculture demands heavy use of scarce energy and material resources. And its costs are a burden on the consumer, the taxpayer, and the government.
Gengineered agriculture needs very little in the way of fertilizer and pesticides and, last but not least, very little labor. Every crop that once had to be planted anew every year can now be produced on trees and shrubs that continue to bear for decades. Every crop that once required vast farms far from the consumer can now be grown in a family’s yard.
We should be delighted that the traditional farmer is virtually extinct. With him has gone any need for subsidies. Those modern farmers that we still need are profitable enough not to need them. As for the traditional farmers—soon, there will be none left to demand or receive the subsidies.
Oscar Pembroke, farmer, Upton, VT: Senator Trench, I’m here to tell you! Old-style farming is not extinct. No way is it extinct!
(Waves thick paperbound book in air.) This book, this one right here in my hand, it’s The Guide to Organic and Mechanical Farming. It’s a manual on how to make that kind of farming work! It used to be that mechanical farming, all that sod-busting and chemical fertilizing and pesticiding, wrecked the soil, yeah. But if you plow and plant and use organic techniques, if you use lots of manure and predator bugs to eat the pests, it’s good for the soil. It builds the soil!
The Honorable Earl P. Mitchum (LabRep-ME), committee member: Isn’t that still a form of biological engineering?
Mr. Pembroke: But it ain’t genetic engineering. Gengineering is the devil’s way. It’s not the way God meant for us to raise our food. There’s no denying that it’s good to the soil, and it’s productive, right enough, but it’s the path to hell. It puts farmers out of work. And because it means there’s not so many farms anymore, it means kids can’t go see where their food comes from. It puts people further and further from their roots, from the soil. Senator Trench, we need those subsidies!
Dr. Dubuque-Kinshasa: I should think gengineering would put people in closer touch with their roots. After all, they don’t have to visit farms when they have pie plants and sausage bushes growing in the living room and two-meter green beans or squash blossoms hanging on their house plants.
Arnold Rifkin, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., President, Foundation for Economic Trends: The health of the American farmer is not really the point. Genetic engineering is the most insidious form of pollution—of the human genome, of the biosphere—that human beings have ever had the temerity to devise. The Foundation I have the honor to represent here today has been fighting this genetic pollution ever since the first gene was spliced. I hope that you will seize the opportunity before you today to ban the technology, the gengineers, and all their products. There are more environmentally benign ways to ensure human survival!
Senator Trench: Dr. Rifkin, our concern here today is agricultural policy, not the desirability of genetic engineering.
Harriet McKenzie, Ph.D., Professor of Agricultural Science, University of Kansas: Senator Trench, ladies, gentlemen. I must say that I agree with Mr. Pembroke, although for different reasons. The subsidies remain at least useful and perhaps even essential because they keep alive a form of agriculture that may be all that stands between us and catastrophe.
We have not analyzed these new gengineered crops thoroughly enough at all! The Bioform Regulatory Administration is far too ready to grant permits and licenses. Worse yet, many products of gengineering are released without any pretense of regulation. And we have no idea what their long-term effects on the environment—and on us!—may turn out to be. In fact, there is no reason to think that the honeysuckle that has displaced the infamous kudzu and so vastly extended its range may not be the least of the curses hidden in the Pandora’s box of gengineering!
Senator Trench, continuing the subsidies gives our society an insurance policy. I do not say that gengineering is bound to turn sour. But it may. And if it does, we will need those who are skilled in the traditional modes of survival.
In addition to the subsidies, I would like to see a firm moratorium on any further gengineering for agriculture. This would give us a chance to study carefully and thoroughly what we have done already. Only when we know what the long-term effects of all these new organisms may be should we permit any more gengineering. When that time comes, of course, we should analyze each new proposal to gengineer a plant or animal just as carefully and thoroughly. Only in this way may we hope to avoid disaster.
Andrew Gilman, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., Director, Research and Development, Neoform Laboratories: Senator Trench, gentlemen, ladies. Technology is not something whose undesirable side-effects can be foreseen except in the most general of ways. For instance, it was fairly easy, when gengineering was new, to predict that unscrupulous gengineers would use it to make drugs available in new ways. I’m thinking of “hedonic parasites,” and of the cocaine nettles and heroin-producing jellyfish that came later, and of the snakes with drugs in their venom.
If we go back to the dawn of the age of automobiles, we can see a parallel example in the way people were predicting the mechanization of warfare. People were also complaining, even then, of the machines’ stink, and a prediction of air pollution problems was an entirely logical extrapolation.
But no one predicted traffic jams, or suburbs, or shopping malls. Similarly, the first gengineers and their regulators could not have foreseen the bots and their domination of the menial labor market. Once that had been managed, however, it would have been no great trick to predict the resentment of human low-level laborers and the resulting protests.
I have some sympathy for Dr. McKenzie’s go-slow attitude. Unfortunately, that attitude is grossly unrealistic. If we wish not only to survive but to thrive in the future, we have to take risks. We cannot embrace the no-risk ideology of the Engineers and their nostalgic sympathizers. That is a recipe for stagnation and decline.
And the fact is that orgamech farming, with subsidies or without, simply cannot support the world in the style to which it has become accustomed. It requires too much fertile land, when past generations have permitted the loss of topsoil to erosion, covered the land with pavements and buildings, and emptied the underground aquifers of the water necessary for irrigation. And speaking of irrigation—that all by itself has ruined millions of hectares of land by the build-up of toxic salts in the soil.
The only way the orgamechers could do the job would be if we reduced world population to a fraction of present levels. As things stand, there are just too many of us on the planet. We need too much food and clothing and housing. And the resources needed to maintain simultaneously both a mechanical agriculture and a mechanical civilization do not exist any longer. We do not have enough liquid fuels or metals for both tractors and jet engines, not to mention spacecraft.
The Engineers and their fellow travelers yearn for the “Good Old Days” of the Machine Age, when there was plenty for all. They forget that that “plenty” existed only in the industrialized countries of the world. Everywhere else, for the vast majority of humanity, poverty and misery were the norm. Today, gengineering is raising the standard of living for all.
If we turn our backs on gengineering, we will therefore have a world poor in resources, potential, and human happiness. It will be a world doomed to a “Good Old Days” of subsistence farming, of the inevitable crash of the world population to a level supportable by our ruined soils, of mass starvation and death.
Only far too late will we realize that it was the gengineers who made possible the continuance of civilization past the time when the resources needed for mechanical civilization became scarce. Those resources will still exist, but not in great quantities. There will remain, as now, just enough to fool reactionary ideologues into believing that they can retreat into the past successfully.
We can see the reactionaries trying to begin that retreat now. They are trying to ban, destroy, or hamstring all possible
alternatives—such as gengineering—to their vision of the way the world ought to be. They ignore the way the world is. Tragically, if they have their way, they will have no destiny except disaster.
I hope the committee will see the path of wisdom and recommend that Congress end all agricultural subsidies. They are no longer necessary. They are even dangerous, for they encourage the reluctant to continue in their refusal to accept reality, the future, and gengineering, with all its present benefits and future promise.
Senator Trench: I see that we’re out of time for today. We will reconvene next week.
Thank you all.
* * *
PART 2
* * *
CHAPTER 9
The room was about twice as long as the shelf-like bunk in one end and not much wider. The bunk, covered by an air-filled mattress, folded out of the wall. When down, it left only a narrow aisle between its edge and the walls. The aisle was so narrow that Frederick Suida found it difficult to walk beside the bed. Alvar Hannoken had much less trouble. His goatish legs and tip-toe gait were better fitted for tight spaces.
The room’s brushed-aluminum walls were studded with the doors of small cupboards and the fronts of drawers, each one painted a different color. There were many more such storage spaces than Frederick had needed for the few possessions he had brought with him.
A thin curtain divided the room a little past the foot of the bed, setting off an open space onto which opened a door. Above the door was mounted a small communicator grill. At the far end was a tiny closet of a bathroom much like those that had once graced the small trailers that vacationing families had dragged behind their automobiles: Even without the toilet seat—most of the Station’s quarters had not been designed for use in zero gee—there was barely room in it for Frederick to stand up and turn around.
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