Woodsman

by Thomas A Easton

  Duncan wondered if the Engineers knew how lucky they were. Gengineers were often like artists. They felt driven to their work, and the best thing the Engineers could do to make them cooperate was to give them back their labs. If they could make this ancient equipment work, if they could find or make the necessary reagents, they would.

  Was that enough for him? He had chosen a job, running Freddy’s clandestine lab for converting intelligent genimals to humans, that left him idle much of the time. He had used that time for some work of his own, but much of it he had been content to waste, reading and thinking. He was not as driven as many of his colleagues. Yet the work undeniably attracted him.

  Gilman was standing by a dirty window fringed with honeysuckle leaves and blossoms, peering outward. Duncan joined him as the gate in the fence opened for a rust-splotched bus, salvage from some ancient junkyard. The bus creaked to a halt beside a dorm across the road, and a dozen ragged figures emerged.

  The Engineers had collected gengineers wherever they could find them. They had brought them here, to this one-time campus and intended research center. Duncan had no idea whether there were other such places. Their captors were not saying, though they were still collecting. Each day saw new arrivals, much like these.

  Another vehicle appeared in the distance. It was a horse-drawn wagon, its body packed with figures. More gengineers? But the guards were suddenly urgent, hurrying the new arrivals into the dorm, closing the gate, unslinging their weapons, taking up watchful positions. Duncan watched as the wagon drew nearer, stopped, disgorged a dozen Engineers in stained coveralls. One used a bullhorn to bellow, “NO GENES!” Others pulled weapons of their own from the bed of the wagon.

  They never had a chance to attack the fence. As soon as the weapons were visible, the guards opened fire.

  Duncan turned away as the first bodies fell. He had seen enough. The situation was plain. He was in the hands of progressives, Engineers who realized that some compromise was necessary. Out there were the conservatives, for whom all gengineering, whether it was essential to their survival or not, was anathema.

  “In there. Siddown. No talking.” The guards directed the gengineers into the lecture hall. Jeremy Duncan and Andy Gilman found seats together and tried to ignore the empty feelings in their stomachs. The food on the commandeered campus was not much more plentiful than it had been in the labor camp. The sweetish smell of severe malnutrition thickened the air of the lecture hall, at total odds with the image of civilization and prosperity presented by the sea of white coats that surrounded Duncan and Gilman and lapped against the walls of the lecture hall. Behind the lectern were several Engineers in clean, blue coveralls, their salvaged ornaments reflecting light from the ceiling fixtures.

  Duncan thought of the Engineers who had pulled him from the landfill mine. These were not the same, but they had the same air of elite polish and carried very similar swagger sticks. He wondered if he and his fellow gengineers were about to be told why they had been brought to this place, what they were supposed to do for their masters.

  Once all the gengineers were seated, one of the Engineers stepped forward and rapped the lectern with his swagger stick. “You know why you are here,” he said. He did not introduce himself. “We need you.” He made a face as if to say he wished they didn’t. “Our aim is to restore the Machine Age. But we must first rebuild the necessary infrastructure. And to do that, we must use genimals.”

  “Genimals.” He said the word as if it were a curse. For him and his kind, it was. “Unfortunately, we do not have them anymore. Some of our more enthusiastic supporters hunted them down. They destroyed almost all of them.”

  His glare dared anyone to laugh or even smile at the irony that the Engineers should now need what they had destroyed. “We still have potsters and snack bushes. There are still oil trees, though we need more. We don’t need goldfish bushes and Slugabeds and garbage disposals. We do need Mack trucks, Bioblimps, and box-turtle bulldozers. We need to restore the supercrops.”

  Someone in the audience muttered, just loud enough for all to hear, “What about cocaine nettles?”

  The Engineer scowled at his audience. When he said, “We do not need them. They are quite properly extinct,” Duncan snorted. He knew that not all Engineers shared that attitude. The guards at the labor camp had seemed quite happy to cultivate their drug-secreting plants.

  The scowl intensified in the ensuing silence. Finally, the Engineer continued. “Humans were meant to build their tools, not grow them. That is why God gave us hands, to glorify Him with the work of those hands. Machines are the culmination of our nature and our destiny.”

  He paused to scan the room. Then he sighed theatrically. “And yes. It was our dependence on machines that exhausted the supplies of the ores and fuels that they required. But the answer was not to replace our mechanical technology with a biological technology! What we needed then, and what we need now, is a biological technology harnessed in support of our machines. We need plants that produce fuel. We need plants or animals that can filter minerals from sea water. We need trucks and bulldozers and cranes, biological if need be, to build the factories with which we will then build the machines to replace them.

  “And we need you to make it all possible.” He bowed his head for a second as if in apology. “Yes. In our first enthusiasm, we destroyed much that we should have preserved. Now we need to rebuild it. And we are not gengineers. You are. We need you.”

  The room was silent, still. The pause lengthened, and then he said, “If you help us, you will once more be part of society. Honored parts. As valued and essential and honored as ever you were before.”

  “Do you believe them?” Duncan and Gilman were in their dorm room, squatting on the bare mattresses that were all they had for beds. The frames and springs had long ago been removed; eventually they would be melted down and turned into something the Engineers needed more than comforts for slave laborers, even if those laborers were now being promised honors and rewards. The layers of dust and dead insects in the corners and on the windowsill said that no one had bothered to clean the place before the gengineers had moved in, or after. Tendrils of honeysuckle vine pushed aside the sheet of cardboard with which someone had tried to patch a broken window pane.

  Duncan shook his head. He held one hand toward the room’s locked wooden door. They were prisoners still, and…“As soon as they have what they want from us…”

  Dinner had been a meager bowl of vegetable soup, served from a large kettle by a bored guard. They had sat at long wooden tables, where other guards had kept watch to prevent any attempts at conversation. The gengineers had had to content themselves with speculative glances at each other, surreptitious searches of the room for familiar faces, wary stares at the guards. After dinner, those guards had ushered the gengineers back to their rooms and clicked the locks behind them.

  Gilman nodded. He scratched at the border of his scalp, stared at his fingernails, and pulled free the strands of hair that had come loose. “They need us,” he said. “They’re desperate. What were you doing before this?”

  Duncan’s own scalp itched. He resisted the urge to scratch as he described the landfill mine.

  “They had me on an oil crew. They burned many of the plantations, and then they realized they still needed them. We were out in the woods, looking for wild ones.”

  “You find many?” asked Duncan.

  “Oh, yeah. They seed themselves pretty well. Lots of volunteers.”

  “Think they’ll make it work?”

  “Even with our help?”

  Duncan nodded.

  Gilman shook his head.

  “But we can…”

  “Sure we can. It’s politics that will doom them. They’re dominated by ideology. They’ll cut each other’s throats.”

  “The protestors,” said Duncan. “They’re already arguing with each other.”

  “And we’re in the hands of the losers,” said Gilman. “The extremists always win, at le
ast in the short run. They may lose in the long run—hell, in the long run, these Engineers will reinvent gengineering on their own—but we won’t be around for that.”

  “How bad can it get?”

  “We’ll be shot. Every sign of gengineering will be stamped out. Maybe even every sign of selective breeding. Pets and house plants and traditional crops. They’ll be back to hunting and gathering.”

  Duncan hoped his roommate was wrong. But he did not think he was. The fear of new technologies had been rising ever since the twentieth century, when the pace of change, of population growth, of urban spread, of occupational obsolescence, of the appearance of new devices and methods and risks, of technological progress, had grown too fast for minds that depended on a sense of tradition and stability to accept. The forces of reaction were now ascendant, and they would not fade until the conditions of life had grown worse than the fears that impelled those forces. Perhaps, as Gilman said, humanity would have to drop all the way back to savagery before it could rise again.

  That thought was no comfort. It would not help them.

  “But we have to try, don’t we?”

  Many of the obsolete instruments the Engineers had salvaged proved useless. Some, however, could be made to work, and within a month, Jeremy Duncan and Andy Gilman had a lab that could perform simple genetic engineering, at least in principle. Yet, in reality, it could do nothing. The two gengineers, like their fellows in the other makeshift, make-do labs on the Ginkgo campus, were spending much of their time at the window, staring toward the fence, watching the protestors arrive and be chased away and return, every day more numerous, more determined to close the campus down.

  “What’s the problem?” asked their supervisor. He was an Engineer who knew nothing of gengineering and, when they tried to explain even a little of how the technology worked, waved their words away. He wore a nametag that said simply “Calloman.” He did not carry a swagger stick, perhaps because his rank was too low, but from time to time he did slap his thigh with the flat of his hand.

  Calloman flicked a DNA splicer on. Its LEDs glowed red and green. Its motors hummed. The small display panel above the keyboard blinked patiently: “COMMAND?”

  “The machines work,” he said. “What else do you need?”

  “Restriction endonucleases,” said Gilman. He was seated at a computer that had been one of the few things to survive the destruction of the General Bodies research and development lab. The company’s logo decal still decorated the side of the veedo unit. Better yet, the databases in its polygig memory had proved intact. “Ligases and gyrases,” he added. “Oligonucleotide primers, polymerases, nucleotides.”

  “Chemicals,” said Duncan. “Biochemicals. The same ones every cell uses to replicate its genes.”

  “There’s a ton of them in that fridge.” The Engineer pointed and his ornaments jangled lightly. “I saw them yesterday.”

  “No good,” said Gilman. “They have to be kept cold, and that thing wasn’t even plugged in when we got here. They’re rotten.”

  “And we can’t get more,” said Duncan. Patiently, he explained that once, when they had been free, gengineers had been able to order every chemical they needed from a host of suppliers.

  As Duncan spoke, Gilman summoned a list of corporate names and addresses onto the veedo screen. “All gone now,” he said. “You destroyed the industry, the infrastructure.”

  “Then make them,” said Calloman, slapping his thigh. “You can do that, can’t you?”

  Gilman nodded. “That’s what the first gengineers did. But it takes time. It’ll slow us down.”

  “Not too much.” The Engineer frowned and turned toward the window. It was open, and the odor of honeysuckle wine was strong. “We need those genimals now. We have to be able show them…” He pointed. “We have to be able to show them a success, the equipment for building factories and machines, the machines themselves.”

  “You won’t,” said Duncan. “You can’t.”

  “We have to,” said Calloman. ”You have to.” He flicked off the splicer, turned, and left the lab.

  After a moment of silence, Andy Gilman looked up from the keyboard and screen before him. “We have the same problem they do,” he said. “Don’t we? No raw materials.”

  “We’ll have to make them,” said Duncan. “And we don’t have any slaves to help us out.”

  Both men knew that their technology had started out with less than they now had. They could—they would, just as had the founders of their field—find bacteria that made restriction endonucleases, grow them, and extract what they needed. They would then be able to gengineer other bacteria to make the protein tools in greater quantity. They would gengineer bacteria to make other enzymes, and nucleotides in quantity, and copies of genes.

  “At least,” said Gilman. “We know what to do. That’s a start. And we have the equipment we need. It should only take us a few months, not decades. And then we’ll be able to try making a Mack. That’s simple enough.”

  Duncan stepped toward the window. There were protesters outside the fence again, though they were quiet, not threatening, not drawing fire. Beyond them a scatter of small tents showed where they slept at night. A few wisps of smoke said how they cooked their meals.

  “I hope we have a few months,” he said. “If they run out of patience…Or if those…” He pointed. “If the conservatives takeover…”

  “Then we go back to the labor camps. Or we’re dead.”

  Duncan shook his head. He didn’t wish to see the landfill mine ever again. He didn’t want to die. Nor did he want the Engineers to overcome their problems.

  He slid his hand down his side, feeling the ridges of his gills, and thrust it into the pocket of his labcoat. His petri dish talisman was still there, waiting for his fingers. He clutched it. The protesters, he knew, were not likely to stay as quiet as they now were. He might live longer at the mine. Helping the Engineers, no matter whether he was doing what he loved to do, felt like licking the hand that beat him.

  He wished there were some way to return to the past. Or…He bent his gaze upward, but there was nothing visible except blue sky and scattered clouds. No sign of orbiting stations and habitats. No sign of Frederick. No hope of joining him, of escaping Earth entirely.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 18

  The door slammed open, and a familiar voice barked, “Gilman! Duncan!” Jeremy Duncan and Andy Gilman jerked their heads up from the array of culture flasks they were studying. “Calloman,” said Duncan. “No, we don’t have a Mack for you yet. We’re still working on…” He gestured abruptly at the flasks. “Enzyme factories. That’s all anyone is working on.”

  “You’re too damned slow.” Calloman stood aside from the doorway, and a pair of Engineers carried in a bot, her leaves ripped to reveal her breasts, her pale green scalp blossoms torn away in patches, her arms and legs bound. The bulb between her thighs looked bruised. “It says it knows a little gengineering. Maybe it’ll make a good assistant.”

  The bot said nothing as she was dumped unceremoniously on the floor between two tables covered with glassware. Two more Engineers appeared with a wooden crate filled with dirt. They set their burden down more carefully, near the window, and left the room.

  “It’s time we need, not hands,” said Gilman. He stared at the bot; her eyes were open wide, scanning the room as if searching for something familiar.

  Duncan knelt and began to struggle with the knots that held the bot’s legs motionless. “I thought there weren’t any left,” he said.

  Calloman shrugged. “Some kids found them. Just half a dozen, on an island in the river, in a thicket. There’s bound to be more out there somewhere. And time you haven’t got. We need progress, now.” He pointed toward the window. “There’s more of them out there than ever.”

  Gilman glanced toward the small tent city and the forest of placards beyond the fence. The protesters were quiet but, yes, their numbers grew every day. The armed guards, and perh
aps the sense that it was Engineers who governed what had once been the Gingko County Community College, kept them from storming the campus. “You think a Mack will help?” he asked. “Show it to them, and this place will be rubble in a day.”

  “Show it to the government, and we can get the troops to clear them out.” Calloman said nothing more as he turned and left, closing the door more gently than he had opened it.

  Duncan leaned back on his heels and stared at the mute solidity of the door. “Do you think we’d feel any safer?” he asked bitterly, even though he knew the Engineer could not hear him.

  Eventually, he turned back to the bot and undid the last of the ropes around her arms, grunted sympathetically at the vicious redness of the marks the bonds had left, and helped her to her feet. She staggered, steadied, shook off his hand, and stepped toward the crate of dirt. “No one’s safe,” she said in a husky voice. “Not anymore.” She leaned over the crate, felt the dirt, and added, “It’s dry. Water?”

  Andy Gilman brought a large beaker and poured its contents over the dirt. The water promptly disappeared. The bot stepped into the crate, root tendrils unfurling from her calves and palping the surface of the soil like so many slender tentacles. They worked their way into the soil, and the bot sighed. “They killed them all,” she said. Her voice choked. “I’m the only one.”

  The two men looked at each other awkwardly. Both were familiar with the Engineers’ attitude toward the products of gengineering. “I’m surprised,” said Duncan. “I’m astonished that even one survived. What’s your name?”

  There was a long pause while the bot reached one hand toward the window. The marks around her forearms were already fading. She found a honeysuckle tendril and drew it toward her, bent, and tucked its tip into the soil near the edge of the crate. Finally, she said, “Chervil Mint.”