That reminded Amy to look at her sister and say: “And guess what? Daddy got me a whole bag of Potster Chips!”
Sadie ignored the taunt. Betsy gave me a dirty look, as if to say, “Junk food!” I went to the kitchen for a beer.
* * * *
The next morning, I checked the tide table in the paper. The first low tide would be a little before ten. I figured that if we got down to the wharf by 9:30, Amy could fish till lunchtime and maybe even catch some fish. A rising tide was always best.
When we arrived, Ben Harms the Elder was there to sell us more bait, and Clem and Alf were already in place. They looked as if they had been on their bench, decrepit lobster traps between their legs, at least since dawn, and perhaps they had. Coastal folk tend to rise early.
Alf started our conversation: “Them genetic engineers don’t know everything. Can’t even keep a car in its garage.” He spat into the harbor.
I didn’t believe he had forgotten my profession. Every time a new product hit the market, the local paper called me up. It found me preferable to a university geneticist, for I was a local boy, even though I didn’t live here anymore.
I watched my daughter as I groped for a riposte. Her rod tip was twitching already, though the tide was slack. She reeled in, and I could see a small crab clinging to her hook. I said, “Lobstermen don’t seem much better, getting scared off by an overgrown lobster.”
Clem laughed.
I shook my head and added, “My own’s out there somewhere.”
“Forget it,” said Alf. “They only run off when they’re ready to molt.”
“That shucks the plates,” said Clem. As well as the lights and interior and all the rest, I reminded myself. Generally, Roachsters that were growing too tight in their shells—the owner could tell by their increasing sluggishness—went back to the dealer. In the shop, a hormone injection triggered the molt. As soon as the new shell had hardened, the dealer reinstalled the bumpers, lights, controls, doors, windows, and upholstery. Archie had gone through the process three times, each time coming home a little larger. He should have done it at least twice more before we had to trade him in on a trimmer model. Then depending on his condition and the demands of the market, he would be converted into a light truck, put out to stud on the company’s ranch, or turned into pet food.
As far as I knew, no one had suspected any link between the runaways and molting. “How do you know?” I asked.
“If it did come in here, you couldn’t tell it was yours,” said Alf.
“Ayuh,” I said. “It’s gone. But how do you know about the molting?”
They looked at each other. “Why?”
When I told them about the new assignment that had sent me home, they shrugged. “The old shells wash up on shore. But never on the islands.” Clem gestured toward the rounded shadows on the horizon. I got his point. The Roachsters obviously shed their harness soon after entering the water.
Then Alf said, “I know why they’re running away.”
I looked for Amy on her float. She had another pollock. Then I stared at him. He dressed for the tourists, yes. But he knew the coast, and I supposed he might know lobsters as well.
“Ayuh,” he said. “I know lobsters. Roaches, too. Spent a few years down to New York when I was a boy.”
Clem laughed. “Worked in a seafood place,” he told me. “Health department ran him out.”
Alf gestured with his hammer. “Whatever,” he said. “Least, I’ve never been arrested for fakin’ antiques.” He turned back to me: “Roaches,” he said. “They hate the light. Don’t surprise me none a’tall to see ’em running away at night.”
“But why the ocean?” I asked.
“That’s their lobster half.” He shrugged, as if to say that that much was obvious. Perhaps it was. I was already getting ideas about how to keep them in their stables. Maybe we could make them less photophobic, even photophilic, and keep them tethered to a nightlight. Certainly, I thought, we could strengthen the symptoms of impending molt and remove their ability to molt on their own at all.
A cry from the farthest float caught my attention. Amy was on her feet, her rod on the float-deck beside her feet. She was pointing toward the mouth of the harbor. I yelled, “What’s the matter?”
She waved her arm and shouted back, “What’s that?”
I shrugged and yelled, “I’ll find out!” “That” was a ship that looked like a miniature aircraft carrier. It had a flat deck with a two-story conning tower to one side. A heavy railing surrounded most of the deck, leaving an unrailed working area in the rear. I knew it was a working area because it was overhung by a stout derrick and coils of rope littered the deck.
“What is it?” I asked Clem and Alf.
“Used to be a ferry,” said Clem.
“Till the state put a new one on the run,” said Alf.
“Never did scrap the old one, though,” said Clem.
Several dark shapes were shifting back and forth in the railed section of the deck. “And those?”
“Sports,” said Alf.
“Ayuh,” Clem agreed. “Tasty, too. They sell ’em to the cannery.” He gestured to one of the decrepit buildings along the harbor’s waterfront. Steam was beginning to belch from a metal chimney.
As the converted ferry drew nearer, I saw that the dark shapes were actually roachsters. They were smaller than any on the roads, and they had no wheels, but.… “Ayuh,” said Clem. “Your runaways go wild and start breeding. And they ain’t the same.”
Of course, I told myself sheepishly. Not sport fishermen, not in the old sense. But fishers for mutants. For sports. Sports with claws, which might well make them dangerous to a small girl fishing by the edge of the sea. I swore that any more fishing we did we would do in fresh water. There were plenty of brooks and lakes around. “But how do you catch them?”
Alf shrugged. “No problem,” he said. He pointed toward the boat yard. Immediately, I saw what I had taken for a new addition as .… “Ayuh,” he said. “Don’t matter how big the lobsters get along the coast of Maine. We’ve always known how to build traps.”
I hollered to Amy and waved her in. When she reached me, I said, “Want to go see?”
She looked where I was pointing, at the ferry approaching the cannery, and nodded eagerly. We left the wharf and put her fishing gear back in the car. Then we walked down the shore to where we could watch as the ferry slid into a gap in the side of the cannery building and its bow railing folded down. Then the stern railing at the edge of the work area began to slide forward on rails, herding the milling Roachsters into the building. I noted that the swellings on their shells that would normally be carved into windowed compartments held a lower, more streamlined profile. I wondered how fast they would be on the road.
I found out soon enough. Shots echoed from the cannery building as workers began to process the catch. The catch objected, their bodies slamming against the interior of the building. We could see the walls shaking, and then the door to a loading bay sprang open. A Roachster charged into the open, saw freedom, and accelerated faster than my Escort had ever managed. But a single shot brought it tumbling to a halt.
“Happens all the time.” I turned to see Clem. He had followed us. Now, as a crew retrieved the fallen Roachster, he explained a little more. “They taste just like lobster, and that’s the way the company packs ’em.”
I guessed that just maybe a can that was labeled “Roach Meat” or even “Roachster” would fall rather flat in the supermarket.
“Cost-efficient, too,” said Clem. “’Least, that’s what they told my nephew. He works in there.”
“They pay much, for the critters, I mean?”
Clem shrugged. “Dollar a pound.”
And one of those wild Roachsters might run half a ton, easy. I could see why t
he cannery mislabeled its product and the sport fishermen kept quiet. They didn’t want competition. But I was beginning to get an idea.
* * * *
Over the next week, I did indeed take Amy fishing inland, and we caught a few trout. But I spent considerably more time talking to the sport fishermen and the cannery operators.
One evening toward the end of the week, I asked Betsy, “Do you still want to move to Maine?”
She looked at me as if I were crazy to ask. Perhaps I was. “Of course, dear. But your job’s in Cambridge. We have to settle for these ‘field trips.’”
“This one’s done,” I said. When her face fell, I told her about the molting connection. “All we have to do,” I said, “is strengthen the pre-molt sluggishness. Maybe even fix them so they refuse to move at all. The dealers would have to fetch them for servicing, but.…”
“But why did you ask about moving to Maine?” She had stepped closer to me while I chattered. Her hand was on my arm, and her eyes were anxious.
“Because we can do it. I want to quit.” I told her why, and she agreed that it was worth a try.
The next morning, she began looking for a house. Then I called Cambridge, told them how to fix the runaway problem, and said, “I quit.”
Then I opened my dealership.
That’s right. The sport fishermen bring their catch to me now. I pay twice what the cannery paid, install the necessary controls, glass, upholstery, and other trimmings, and sell them as high-status, high-price vehicles. I don’t touch their tendency to run away at the first opportunity. Sports cars are supposed to be high-spirited.
The cannery is still working, but it gets the sports only when they have grown too big for the road.
THE COMING OF THE MAYFLOWER
If future gengineers might be able to turn animals into cars, what about trucks?
The All-American Family was waiting for the movers. Ten-year-old Peter Barcano was playing with the dog, Spittle. His mother, Jane, was pacing from kitchen to living room, around the children, around her enthroned husband, Dick, and back again. At either end of each orbit, she paused to peer out a window. Every other orbit, Dick flapped his Wall Street Journal and said, “For heaven’s sake, Jane. Sit down! They won’t get here any faster if you wear out the carpet!”
Six-year-old Nancy didn’t seem to mind that her toy moving van had wheels. She knew that modern moving vans were very different things, and that soon she would see one for herself. In the meantime, she was loading doll furniture into the back of the toy truck. It had once belonged to her father, who had, he said, obtained it when his family had moved from Massachusetts to New Jersey. Now rust dotted its sides, and its paint was so worn away that only her father’s memory could tell what company it once had advertised.
“I want something to eat!” Peter had abandoned the dog, which now sat forlornly in the doorway to the kitchen. The color of dirty snow, its back marked with a large brown saddle, it was busily proving that it deserved its name by drooling on its toes.
“You’ll have to wait till we get on the road. All the food is packed,” said Jane. And indeed it was. Boxes and barrels of the Barcano family’s household goods were everywhere. There was enough room free only for Jane’s pacing, Dick’s easy chair, and the children’s quiet play.
“Not all!” said Nancy, leaving her truck by the wall.
“Yeah!” said Peter. “How about the houseplant?”
“Go ahead, then,” said their mother. “But don’t.…”
But they—and the dog—had already vanished out the door to the deck. There Peter clambered up the twining branches of the houseplant until he found a mature bean. He twisted it loose and dropped it to his sister. When he was once again on the deck, they dismembered the six-foot fruit, eating some of the pieces raw. Some they fed to Spittle. Most they threw from the deck to watch the parabolic arcs they made in their fall to the ground.
* * * *
The Barcano house was a cedar-shingled Swiss chalet lifted into the air on a giant beanstalk. The beanstalk did not nearly reach the clouds. Twined around a concrete pillar, it was only some fifty feet high, but its stem was thick and woody and bore most of the weight of the chalet. The pillar was mostly for wind resistance.
Like all mature bean plants, the beanstalk bore both blossoms and fruit. The flowers were pale blue and a foot across. The beans were, as Nancy and Peter knew, quite edible. They did not know that this was because the gengineers were idealists: When they had turned their talents from biopliances to housing, they had thought that a house that both sheltered and fed its occupants would be an important step toward utopia. Sadly, most people refused to touch “house-food.” That was for children, foreigners, and the hard-shelled poor.
Next door a six-room pumpkin house was shaded by the immense leaves of its parent vine. Grown in place, once it had reached its full size it had been levered onto a concrete stand and hollowed out. The shell had been allowed to dry and coated with preservatives and sealants. Windows and doors had been cut, and partitions, wiring, and plumbing installed.
The pumpkin vine bore only the one fruit; the gengineers had made it so, not caring to bury the countryside in empty homes. It did, however, have edible sterile flowers.
There were other vegetable dwellings as well. The prettiest were exaggerated forms of flower seed cases—the translucent paper of Chinese lanterns, the vented balls of short-stemmed poppies, the layered scales of hops. All grew on the outskirts of a medium-sized city, where once had been a landscape of malls, highways, and suburban ticky-tacky. Now the concrete had given way to gardens, patches of grass and shrubbery surrounding plots of carefully tilled, weeded, and fertilized earth, life support for ten thousand homes. The city proper, on the other hand, was much as it had always been. There, multi-story buildings of stone and steel provided more room than bioforms possibly could, and the streets were paved. Here the streets were grassy strips called greenways.
* * * *
“Look, Dick!” Jane had reached the living room end of her household orbit. As she leaned toward the window to search the distance for the movers, her blond hair swung to hide her face and her skirt rode up her calves. “See!” she cried. “Here they come!”
The children had also spotted the imminent van. “C’mon!” they yelled. “They’re coming!”
Dick and Jane joined their offspring on the deck. Peter was pointing into the distance, well to one side of the local greenway. “There they are,” he said. “See?”
It was still several miles away, but they could make out the stylized sailing ship blazoned on the side of the gasbag. Like so many things in their world, the moving van was a product of the gengineers. Its ancestor had been some sea-going jellyfish whom humans had given the ability to separate hydrogen from seawater, and then enlarged. Now, as impressive as any ancient blimp, the van swam through the sky toward the Barcano home, a gondola slung beneath its bulk for the crew and controls. Wing-like flaps, known as paddlefins, propelled and steered the creature. Long tentacles dangled in the air beneath, writhing as if in search of prey.
* * * *
In their own way, the members of the van’s crew were as All-American as the Barcanos. The driver, one Willy McGee, held one hand on the tiller that directed the paddlefins. He was a large man whose belly proclaimed that the beer can in his free hand was no isolated indulgence. Hair struggled to escape the neckline of a T-shirt that exposed arms wreathed in faded blue and red tattoos. The loader, Dink Faren, was as tattooed and hairy and marked by beer as McGee. He occupied a threadbare bucket seat near the gondola’s hatch. The only modern note was struck by the crew’s checker: Jo Alvidrez sat now at a fold-down table in the rear, going over the work order that had sent them to the Barcano home. She was young and attractive, but she seemed not at all uncomfortable in the presence of the men. Nor did they ogle, leer, or
pinch. Sexual harassment had finally become rare.
As they neared the coordinates they had been given for their destination, Alvidrez called out numbers. McGee watched a screen in the console before him as a veedocam mounted on the outside of the gondola scanned the landscape below. Computer-guided, it flicked from house to house, hesitating at each just long enough for McGee to read the address code.
Finally, he grunted and set his beer can aside. His thick fingers moved the slides that controlled the signals entering the van’s nervous system from the console. The paddlefins shifted from the fast and sweeping rhythm of locomotion to a twitchier beat, moving just enough to hold position against the day’s slight breeze. Alvidrez leaned over an out-slanted window and said, “That’s it.” She could see four figures, two large, two small, all waving. A General Bodies Tortoise, several pieces of luggage tied to its shell, waited in the driveway on the ground. Its shell had been gengineered to resemble an old-time automobile, but the impression of speed, she knew, was misleading. The passenger compartment in the shell left too little room for muscle, and besides, it was a Tortoise.
McGee’s fingers moved again. Muscles in the wall of the gasbag that was the van’s body contracted, compressing the hydrogen in the bag and increasing the van’s density. The van lowered. Its tentacles ceased their aimless movements and seized the corners of the Barcano family’s chalet. Its bag muscles relaxed, allowing hydrogen to expand again and increase the van’s lift. The roof lifted, moved aside and, as the van’s muscles contracted once more, settled askew, like a lid half on, half off a pot.
Alvidrez opened a hatch in one side of the gondola and, holding tightly to the frame, leaned out. When she saw the rope causeway still in place, linking the gondola to the base of a tentacle that was narrower than most, she called, “C’mon, Dink. Let’s go!” Then she traversed the causeway, wrapped her arms and legs around the tentacle, and began the long slide down to the Barcano living room floor.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 3