Unfortunately, the gengineers were able to forestall the balancing of nature’s equation. Population grew until, just before our Revolution, it had more than doubled. The last worldwide census put it at 12.3 billion.
As our ancestors were beginning to realize when gengineering first appeared, the technology of the Machine Age cannot support such numbers. Fortunately, we have already removed over two billion bots, greenskins, and other social contaminants. Yet, if we are to succeed in our aims, we will have to cleanse the human species of many more of its members. Recent estimates indicate that we do not have the resources to support more than two billion.
Our present difficulties in obtaining sufficient food, fuel, and materials may prove to be a blessing in disguise. By this time next year, the world population will be lean and trim, and we will be the healthier species of which we have long dreamed.
“They are mad.” Donna Rose’s voice was hushed. “They won’t have time to do anything but bury people.”
“Or eat them,” said Frederick with a shudder. “They’ll lose too much. Starvation means a generation of brain-damaged children. They may not have the intelligence to rebuild until centuries from now. But there’ll be disease, too, plague, and that will cost them even more. They’ll lose whatever technicians they have, or most of them.”
“Savages,” said Donna Rose. “The survivors will be hunters and gatherers. Subsistence farmers if they’re lucky.”
“Is there any more?”
Donna Rose touched a key on her board, and four more lines scrolled into view:
Unfortunately, our numbers may be so much reduced that it will prove difficult to maintain a mechanical technology unless we appeal to the Orbitals for raw materials and technical assistance. At the very least, they must keep their power sats in service. They cannot keep diverting the beams for their own purposes.
“Would they help, Freddy?” asked Donna Rose. They were together on Frederick’s bed, the lights dimmed, the softest of music in the background. “The Orbitals.”
“I don’t know.” Frederick sighed and tightened his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t think so. They destroyed the ground facilities. They rejected everything the Orbitals stand for.”
“Not machines.”
“But the new. New tech. New ideas.”
They were quiet, then, until Donna Rose said reflectively, “My child. I never set the seed, but…What will she be like?”
When Frederick had no answer for her, she said, “I need some sun.” She drew away from him, tugged a cover over him, and crossed the room. She uncovered the porthole, drew the curtain that kept the bright light from interfering with Frederick’s sleep, and stepped into her trough of soil.
Frederick watched quietly until the curtain hid her. Then he sighed deeply and closed his eyes. But he did not sleep.
He thought he had come to terms with his firing, his barring from Earth. He had told himself months before that it was for the best. He couldn’t go home. The spaceplanes were no longer flying. But even if they were, the chaos and animosity down below were such that if he did return, he would far too promptly die. He would accomplish nothing.
Now the Engineers themselves were telling him that even if the killing stopped, the dying would continue. It could not be prevented. The gengineers, and most of the biological infrastructure they had created to support civilization, were gone. The Orbitals had raw materials and energy and technical expertise in plenty, and they would surely be asked to help. He did not think they would.
If he wished to live, he could not go home again. If he wished to achieve anything at all in what remained of his life, he could not go home again. The Orbitals represented for now his—and humanity’s—only path into a positive future.
He was fortunate, wasn’t he? He had Donna Rose. He had Renny. He had lost everyone else many years ago. But what about Bert? And Jeremy Duncan?
They were down there, somewhere. He hoped they were still alive. He, himself…Hannoken had offered him a job. As soon as the Q-ship prototype had passed its tests, Hannoken had said, “We need to build more of these things. Bigger ones, for passengers and cargo. The ores will come from the Moon, just as they did for this.” He had thumped the wall of his office to indicate Probe Station and all the other stations and habitats in orbit around the troubled Earth. “You can be the coordinator. Want it?”
He had agreed. He could not remain an idle, useless refugee. Nor could Donna Rose, who had already been working in the com center. He had drafted her for his assistant. And then…
Hannoken was growing her a daughter. The Q-ships would be ready soon. The Gypsy was being prepared, though precisely what it was being prepared for still seemed uncertain.
He sighed again, and Donna Rose heard him. “Do you think,” she said. “Do you think there’ll be anyone left to rescue by the time we can go get them? Or are we, my daughter and I, the last of the bots?”
* * *
CHAPTER 16
The flickering light of the flames gave the foot-thick trees that surrounded the clearing an air of cathedral majesty. The scents of smoke and pine resin and honeysuckle made one think of incense. That of hydrocarbons spoke of burning candles and ancient, leaky, oil-burning furnaces.
The smell of forest duff, the coolness of the night breeze, the sound of branches moving overhead, the awareness of the fact that the flames were not those of a ranked host of votive candles but of a small bonfire, all these weakened the illusion. Yet Sam Nickers still smiled dreamily. He had visited France once, he and Sheila, and they had visited cathedrals and chateaux and museums and more cathedrals. He clung to the illusion, to the memory it evoked of more pleasant times, of times when they had not needed to flee for their lives, scurrying like mice through dark corners and hollow passages.
He thought of the ancient right of sanctuary and wished that it still held in any form. But churches were weak things now. They still existed. People still believed in God or gods. People still prayed, confessed, rang bells, burned incense. But sanctuary? He looked up at the rough-barked columns that surrounded him. This was all there was.
He wished that were not so. What had happened to the Daisy Hill Truck Farm where he had grown up? What had happened to his father, retired, still living in a cottage on the farm? He had heard nothing. But the farm was prominent, visible, easy to find, and the mob had been destroying the trucks. Surely they would not have neglected the farm.
He stared at the tree-trunk columns and wished that he could pray. If he could, he would ask that his father’s death had been quick.
Beside him, Sheila squeezed his hand as if she were sharing his thoughts, remembering the same things, wishing the same wishes, and as unable as he to talk about it all. He turned his head toward her. The feathers that covered her scalp were not as sleek as they once had been. The decorative inserts over her cheek and jaw bones were faded. Malnutrition did that, he thought. They could not, like the bots, sink roots into soil for the minerals they needed, nor use sunlight for more than a marginal gain of calories. Nor could they manufacture the vitamins plants could take for granted. They needed food, fresh vegetables and fruits, and there simply hadn’t been enough of that. They—and the bots—had been hungry ever since the apartment building had fallen and they had gone into hiding.
His mouth watered. He stared at the edge of the fire, not far from his feet. They had food now, all they could use, and some of it was cooking now, under coals and ashes heaped in a dike-like ring around the flames. It would be ready soon.
He blinked and looked toward Jackie Thyme. She stood on his other side, rooted in the forest soil, smiling as she enjoyed the luxurious sensation of being embedded in the world to the full depth of her roots, as she had not been for so long. There had been more soil than food in the shelter, but there had not been much of either. And she too would be happy to eat.
Past Jackie Thyme he could make out Narcissus Joy, Cindy Blue, Garnet Okra, Lemon Margaret, more. All the bots who had s
urvived the assault on their home and the months in the shelter and the long trek to this forest, over 300 kilometers from the city. And there, further from the fire, stood the Eldest, oldest of these bots, representative of an earlier generation in their development. The moths the fire had drawn hovered over the heads of all the bots but were thickest around her.
The bots thought their Eldest more knowledgeable, more wise, better fit to cope with the catastrophes of history. They did not recognize, Sam thought, that this catastrophe was unique. Similar tragedies had stricken humanity in the past, but not recently enough for any bot to remember. For them, it was unique indeed. The Eldest might really be the wisest bot of all, but she could have no relevant experience.
Or could she? Sam had heard a little of their beginnings. There had, after all, been little else to do but talk and listen while they hid in the shelter. The bots had been the product of illegal gengineering, unlicensed, illicit. They had felt obliged to hide, to protect themselves as best they could. And they had succeeded. Perhaps the Eldest was not irrelevant.
He sighed. The bots, half plant, had not thought of the fire. He had, and when he had it going, they had withdrawn their roots from the duff and moved closer. Once they had been used to working during the day, going rootless about their tasks in a civilization dominated by humans. They had rested, embedded in soil beneath bright artificial lighting, at night. The memory of that time had drawn them toward the light of the flames. Perhaps their more human half had also played a role, giving them a tropism for dancing flames, for a circle of illumination to bar the surrounding dark.
He sighed again. That dark was not just physical. They were surrounded by a night of the spirit as well, a night of savagery, of barbarism, of threat as vicious as anything that had ever darkened a Neanderthal’s or Cro-Magnon’s dreams. He wished, as his ancestral Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons must have wished, that the fire would indeed mean safety. Yet he had shed all his optimism many weeks before.
A fragrance rode toward him on an eddy of nighttime breeze. From the shadows beyond the Eldest, Eldest’s Speaker spoke. “We are safe,” she said. “Alone. No Engineers above our heads, behind our backs, seeking us. Now we can hide, stay hidden, live.”
Cindy Blue stirred in a bot’s shrug, the tips of her leaves unfurling just a little from her chest. “They will find us,” she murmured, just loudly enough to be heard. “They are everywhere. They are many. We are few.”
“But there are fewer of them every day,” said Narcissus Joy. “My roots touch the honeysuckle, and I know. They starve. They sicken. They die. They even kill each other. What they want they cannot have. The day of their sacred machines is past, and without that…”
Sam got to his feet and stepped away from the fire to gather an armful of fallen branches. They had spoken like this before, he thought. As if the honeysuckle had senses of its own. As if it could see what happened wherever it grew. He sighed quietly. And it grew everywhere. There could be no secrets in a world that held such a thing, and with it people—bots—who could use it as if it were a corps of secret agents. If the Engineers only knew, they would be three times as eager to destroy the bots . They might even try to destroy the honeysuckle. He chuckled slightly, sourly. On the other hand, many of them did like the wine.
When he returned, he dropped the wood he had gathered beside his place and chose a stick to add to the fire. It caught with a crackle, bursting into flames and pungent smoke and bright sparks that soared into the air above them all.
“It’s like it was soaked in oil,” said Sheila. Her knees were drawn up before her, her arms wrapped around them, her eyes staring into the fire.
Someone said, “It would be even worse if that branch was fresh.”
“Oil trees,” said Tansy Dill, a bot with faded green blossoms on her scalp. “The originals came from Brazil. Then, when the petroleum ran out, the gengineers adjusted them to live in cooler places.”
“The Greenhouse Effect,” said Sam. “Things warmed up a little too. That must have helped.”
Tansy Dill nodded. “I worked for a while on a plantation. We tapped the trees and shipped the oil to airports, for jet fuel.”
“Every pore in the living wood is filled with oil,” said Narcissus Joy. “It evaporates, but even long-dead branches still have enough to…”
“Do you think the Engineers still use them?” interrupted Jackie Thyme.
“They must,” said Sheila. “It must be the only fuel there is for the few old trucks and cars and motorcycles they have.”
“Are they that pragmatic?” asked Sam.
“If they didn’t destroy the plantations,” said Tansy Dill. “They had to realize they needed them, eventually.”
“And what if they did destroy them?” asked Sam.
“Then they’ll be looking for the wild trees. Plantations that were abandoned when the demand declined. Trees that seeded themselves in the forest, like these.” Tansy Dill gestured at the forest that surrounded them. Most of the trees were not oil trees. Their wood burned normally, slowly, not explosively. Only a few were so soaked with hydrocarbons that they could make the fire flare.
“It’s a wonder they survive,” said Sheila. She was still staring at the flames. “A forest fire…”
A shudder ran through the gathering of bots as her words reminded them of what they had survived once already.
Only a few of the bots, fighters like Shasta Lou, had died in the ruins of their apartment building. All the rest—nearly 300, counting the children—had been safely hidden in the shelter of a subbasement that had once served as a parking garage. The ramps that had led to the outside had long ago been sealed off. For a time, its cavernous, pillar-studded space had been used for storage. But when the bots had acquired the building, they had left it empty except for a few piles of surplus soil and whatever mildewing cartons happened to remain. Only later, when the Engineers had begun to gain strength, had they reinforced the pillars, added more supports for the ceiling, and begun to move in more soil, lights, and tools.
When the building fell, the pillars shook. The injured, lying still on thin pads of fabric or even on bare dirt, cried out. The lights went out as electrical lines were severed. The roof creaked and groaned and cracked. In one spot, near the elevator, it had actually broken, and scorched bits of masonry, glowing coals, baked soil had tumbled through. More rubble had poured down the stairwell, and smoke and fumes had begun to poison their air.
But that had been all. The pillars, the ceiling, they held. Flashlight beams came on. Someone cried, “Water! Put that out!”
Someone else tried a heavy valve on one wall, a cabinet above it holding the rotten shreds of a fire hose. Water gushed, buckets were brought and filled and emptied, and soon the coals beneath the gap in the ceiling and in the opening of the stairwell were dark.
Smoke, heavy in the air, began to drift toward the stairwell and elevator, where cracks in the rubble let it rise, too slowly. Sam and Sheila crouched, their heads near the floor where the air was cleaner. Beside them was a manhole cover; a musty draft issued from the crack around its rim.
Someone said, “We need power for the lights,” and Narcissus Joy began to shout orders. Two bots knelt beside Sam and Sheila to lift the manhole cover. Clear air blew the smoke aside, but brought a stench of sewage that made the humans gag. The bots did not seem to be bothered. Several promptly slipped into the tunnels that ran everywhere beneath the city.
By the end of the day, the bots had found and tapped several of the city’s underground electrical cables. Their lights were on. A small bioform Bellows drew air from the tunnels, not fresh but still bearing the oxygen the refugees needed. The air found its own way out through the rubble overhead.
“Won’t they notice the stink?” Sheila had asked. She was breathing through her mouth.
Sam had shaken his head. “If they do, they’ll think it’s us, rotting. And we’ll get used to it.”
Over the next few days, they had prepared their
shelter as if they intended to stay for a long time, perhaps until the Engineers had vanished into history. They spread the small amount of dirt they had available into a layer just thick enough to give the bots a taste of root-ease. They positioned the bioform computers and the few snackbushes they had brought with them beneath the brightest lights. They began to dredge muck from the sewage tunnels and add it to the soil. They pulled honeysuckle vines along the tunnels until they reached their refuge, where the stems could be buried in soil to produce new roots.
The honeysuckle stretched over entire continents, its roots passing under rivers and canals and straits. In principle it could inform them of events wherever it reached. Yet its very pervasiveness was its greatest problem: The further away one wished to see, the more different things were going on, the more information was being funneled toward the observer. Only within a range of a thousand kilometers or so was there any practical hope of sorting out the signals and making sense of the wide, wide world. Within that range, through the senses of the honeysuckle, and through the eyes of those root-linked bots still at large in the world above, the hidden refugees could watch what happened as the Engineers established their dominance.
Unfortunately, the honeysuckle was not intelligent. It could not tell what was important and what was not. Bots had to link to its roots and filter the reports of its senses, looking for significance. Best of all, bots could use it to tell their fellows what they themselves had seen, and when there were many bots, the vines functioned much like a telephone network, passing messages instead of simple sense reports. Now that the number of bots was shrinking, the flow of information slowed.
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