Peter sighed. He told himself that he, like Trudy, had been more successful. He was in control now, but if he stared too long at the scenery the wind would blow him past the mountain. He might then end up as lost as Mike.
He backed into his van’s pocket until he could once more use the control panel he had wired into the van’s nervous system. Carefully, he did as he had been instructed, and the van settled toward the shelf and its vast pile of loot.
Peter and Trudy touched the ground almost simultaneously. Carefully, they used their control computers to make their captive vans tether themselves to rocky projections. Only then did they dismount and say to each other, “Congratulations! We made it! It worked! Too bad about Mike. Poor guy. It could have been one of us. We knew it could happen. Thank God it didn’t. How much of this stuff can we take back with us?”
Untamed vans circled overhead, sweeping past the mountain shelf on the wind and then rising or falling to catch an air current that flowed the other way and could bring them back again. Peter and Trudy could feel the creatures’ disturbance. There was, they knew, no hatred, no enmity, no animosity, none of the nervous complexity needed to support such complex states of mind. But there was the sense of strangeness, of turf invaded, and the wish to return affairs to normal. There was also hunger. They knew they had to work fast.
They did. They almost ran as they inspected the latest deposits of stolen goods and yanked whatever seemed undamaged toward the bone-littered center of the nest. When they thought they had enough, they retreated to the shelter of their captive vans. Minutes later, under the iron commands of the computers, those vans had loaded their cargo pockets with all the luggage they could hold.
Later, Peter told himself, would be time enough to mourn Mike. They had never been close, but he had been the only other security man who had dared to try this stunt. Peter hoped he had been single. He had never thought to ask, and now it was too late.
* * * *
The airport’s PR crew had been busy: A glass-framed bay had already been added to the Complaints department near the luggage carousels. The lettering on the door—”LUGGAGE RETRIEVAL”—was still fresh, and three clerks were busily phoning those airline customers whose luggage Peter and Trudy had brought back on their first excursion. Trudy stood near Peter, both of them in green jumpsuits decorated with heroic pinstripes.
“So you’ve got your own office, now,” said Brock. “For awhile.”
The press had loved it. They had recorded hundreds of views of the two heroes, their new office, the captured vans, the harness apparatus, and the mound of rescued luggage. They had asked dozens of questions. Then most of them had fled, eager to make their various electronic deadlines. There remained only a few reporters from the remnants of the print media. Now one of them said, “Mr. Brock. You don’t sound very pleased. Are you jealous?”
Brock sighed and fingered the cigar in his breast pocket. “Maybe a little, to be honest. But it’s not that. Peter had a good idea, and he pushed it just the way he should. But he isn’t going to have the office long.”
“I’ll turn it over to Trudy as soon as I can. She looks a lot better than I do in the costume anyway.” Peter laughed and plucked at the hip of his jumpsuit.
“Then she won’t have it long,” said Brock. “She’ll add agents, and improve the crates you two rode in…”
She was nodding. “Hatches in the walls, so we needn’t leave our air. Parachutes. Something—perhaps just a cattle prod—to make the vans let go of us, or of the crates.”
“We’ve already been talking about that,” said Peter.
Brock gestured agreeably. “But we just won’t need live bait much longer. What do you want to bet the airport, or some airline, hasn’t already commissioned a gengineer to design a biological version of the control apparatus? Or an electronic version? Keep one in each luggage cart, or put one on each pile of luggage, and if a wild van grabs it, the thing automatically chews through its hide and enslaves it.”
“And what do you do with the vans?” another reporter wanted to know.
Peter shrugged. “We always need jet food.”
With that answer, the reporters began to drift away, and Peter realized that it was over. Brock clapped him on the shoulder and headed back to the airport’s security center. Trudy, as if he had already turned Luggage Retrieval over to her, was heading eagerly for the new office. The job, as Brock had hinted, might be strictly temp, but it beat being a log clerk. And if she did well while she had the chance, she would never be a log clerk again.
As for himself, he was, he knew, on his way to Brock’s job, if not at this airport than at another, but that wasn’t what made him grin. He had just realized that no one had asked him where he had gotten the idea. He didn’t have to try to explain and thereby embarrass Janna, or to lie, shrugging humbly and saying, “It just came to me.”
SING A SONG OF PORKCHOPS
If androids dream of electric sheep,
what do genimals dream of?
Tommy knew what the “pig” was: It was precisely what it had been in the Mechanical Age of the century before: A greedy devourer of scraps and leavings that sat beneath the kitchen sink. It was, in short, a garbage disposal. Gengineered from its rural eponym, it survived on whatever nutriment it could extract from whatever Tommy’s mother Petra flushed down the drain.
This much he had known from the time he could crawl, for small children explore every cupboard within their reach. But he was six before he truly discovered the pig. Only then did he crawl into the dark, odorous space beneath the kitchen sink and close the door behind him.
He would have been at school, except that the gengineers had not yet cured the common cold. His nose was running. He had a fever. His eyes hurt. And the dark was welcome balm.
He sniffled as he curled his body around the warm bulk of the garbage disposal. His hand stroked the short bristles of its hide, exploring its contours. Small hooves jutted from the barrel-like body, the limbs themselves reduced to vestigial stumps. It had no neck, its head rising from the shoulders, the mouth and throat aimed permanently upward to meet the sink’s drainpipe, its breath whuffling against the underside of the metal basin. It rested on broad haunches, plugged into a second pipe in the floor of the cabinet, fulfilling its intended function as an intermediate link in the plumbing.
Tommy sniffled again. He murmured self-pityingly, “I’m sick.”
A soft, gurgling grunt answered him. To him, it sounded rather like the sympathy he craved, which his mother, busy in another room, was not providing in sufficient quantity. He smiled, hugged the garbage disposal as best he could with his short arms, and added, “I hurt, too.”
The gurgling resolved itself into nasal words: “At least, you don’t have these goddamned pipes shoved up your ass and down your throat.”
Tommy drew back. “You’re not s’posed to talk like that!”
“Hell, I’m not supposed to talk at all. Those … those gengineers were supposed to make my brain as rudimentary as my legs, but somebody had to get cute. Probably thought it made a good joke.”
Tommy didn’t understand all the words, but the music was clear. The garbage disposal wasn’t happy either. He patted its shoulder in the dark. “How come you can talk?”
“Some smart-ass made me that way. And I picked up a lot waiting around in the warehouse, and then some more sitting right here. You’d be surprised what I’ve heard. Maybe I’ll even tell you, someday. If I don’t get outa here first.”
The boy tried to imagine being a gengineered pig, plugged into the plumbing under a sink. “The pipe…”
“You betcha. But they put my teeth and tongue way back in my throat, so I can chew the… Shhh.” It fell silent as footsteps sounded on the floor outside the cupboard.
“Tommy? Where are you?” With a sniffling sigh, Tommy pushed the c
upboard door open. “What are you doing in there? Oh! You need to blow your nose. And…”
Somehow, Tommy knew better than to tell his mother that the garbage disposal could talk. Quietly, he let himself be tucked back into the blankets on the living room couch, in front of the veedo.
* * * *
But he did not forget. Over the months that followed, the pig became Tommy’s friend and refuge. Whenever he was lonely or sad, whenever he wanted someone to talk with—and whenever his parents were not in the kitchen—he would crawl into the dark space to luxuriate in the friendly, warm odor, to hug and pet the garbage disposal, and to talk. And he learned. His new friend used dozens of words he had never heard before, and many which he somehow felt he had best not repeat, except when he was playing with his next-door friend Jimmy. Among them were “mech” and its derivatives, which the boy would one day realize echoed the Mechanical Age of the not so distant past.
His new friend had a novel viewpoint as well, that of a prisoner, or a slave, a possession that must not speak up or out. It spoke only for Tommy, and occasionally it would wish its life were otherwise: “If I had decent legs,” it would say, wiggling its stubs. “If only I had decent legs! I’d be gone. Free!”
“And then what?” Tommy would ask.
“I’d find me a girl, and someplace without any pipes, and…”
Tommy named the pig after a character in a dusty library book. And when he could, he gave Freddy treats—a piece of candy dropped discreetly down the sink drain; a pie plant fruit that was not, for a change, overripe; choice bits of porkchop or steak buried in the scraps of his meals.
Inevitably, his mother noticed. But she did not stop him. He found out why one evening when, lying wakeful in his bed, he heard her laugh. Quietly, he slipped from between his covers and tiptoed to the hall just outside the living room. Petra was saying, “He’s so cute! But I’m afraid he’ll get it so fat we’ll have to replace it.”
His father grunted, rather like Freddy. “Not likely. It’s gengineered to absorb only what it needs. Turns almost everything else into gas and heat. Guaranteed not to grow.”
“You should know, Ralphie.” Her husband’s job was purchasing biopliances for a large department store in the nearby city. He had told her once that the pig was the gengineers’ only successful attempt to reduce pollution at the source. They had tried to market a living toilet, but that effort had fallen flat. People had insisted on calling it a “grin.”
“But do you think we should get him a pet?” she added. “Maybe a dog?”
Tommy didn’t hear the rest, for one of them turned up the volume on the veedo set. When no one said anything about a pet the next day, he was just as glad. He had Freddy, and he didn’t need any other animal, especially not one that couldn’t talk. And Freddy was not an “it,” not anymore.
* * * *
One Saturday evening, not long after his fifteenth birthday, Tommy was alone in the house. His parents had gone to a show, and he was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. He was, in the way of teenagers, making faces at himself while picking at a pimple.
He was also in psychological agony. He had just lost his girl. He had made the mistake of telling her about Freddy, thinking that she might like to meet a talking garbage disposal, and she had called him “weird.” She had said normal people didn’t socialize with their appliances. She had wondered out loud what he did with his pig. And she had told him, just to rub it in, that she would let Solly McGee take her to the roachster races that night.
Tommy wondered what she was telling Solly now, but only for a moment. He wiggled his eyebrows at his mirror image. He flared his nostrils. He wasn’t ugly. Was he weird, really? Anybody would think Freddy was neat. Jimmy certainly did—he had told his friend years before.
The only thing about himself that he would admit was weird was his voice. It had begun to change three years before and, though he had loved to sing, he had given up in despair. He hadn’t dared a note in ages. But…
He looked himself in the eye. What should he try to sing? Something simple, for starters. He opened his mouth, and he began: “Jingle bells, jingle…”
His mouth closed with a snap. Was that his voice? So rich, so resonant?
He tried again: “Happy birthday to me, Happy…” The result was the same. His voice had finished changing, at last, at long last!
The bathroom door slammed as he charged into the kitchen. “Hey, Freddy! Listen to this!”
He slung open the door to the cupboard under the sink, thrust in his head—there was no longer room for more—and began to sing “Clementine.” A gurgling protest—”You’re bloody deafening me!”—promptly shut him off, but only until he could extricate the pig from the plumbing.
“Ouch! Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” The pig’s voice echoed up the drain and in the kitchen. “Stop pulling, dammit. Give me a chance, will you? Let me squinch down a bit.” His torso contracted and bent, and suddenly his head was free. “Now, pull.” Tommy pulled, and the pig emerged from his dark recess into the middle of the kitchen floor, leaving behind a pair of stubby pipes and a brief gust of pungency.
The pig peered nearsightedly around the sun-bright kitchen; the gengineers hadn’t thought he would ever need decent vision. “I’ve been stuck in there for years, and it’s goddamned good to be able to stretch.” His feet twitched and his barrel-like body writhed on the floor. He didn’t look like he was stretching. “Sort of. But now, let’s hear it.”
Finally, Freddy said, “Marvelous. Marvelous. But do you know ‘Kafoozalum’?”
Tommy didn’t, but he learned quickly—even the six verses no songbook ever publishes—and for the next two hours, until it was almost time for his parents to get home, he and the pig sat side by side on the floor, singing their hearts out, the boy’s new tenor blending miraculously with the garbage disposal’s raspy bass. In the process, Tommy learned a dozen other bawdy ballads as well. He also learned to appreciate the warehouse staff who had taught Freddy so much.
* * * *
“Tommy,” said Freddy, his voice echoing from the sink drain. “It’s time to get out of here.”
Tommy was almost seventeen. A shock of hair as black as his mother’s fell forward to cover the few scattered acne scars on his forehead. A head taller than any of his classmates, he could look down on both his parents. He stared into the sink, wondering what his oldest friend, his best friend, for all that he was a pig, had in mind.
“I’ve had enough of this cupboard,” said Freddy. “And you don’t belong here either. So c’mon, stop farting around and get me out of here.”
“What do you mean?” But the pig was silent until Tommy had drawn him from the cramped space beneath the sink. Then he said: “Into the bathroom.”
The boy obliged, tucking Freddy under one arm and carrying him into the indicated room. “Set me in the sink, and look in the mirror.”
Tommy did as he was told. “So now what?”
“Look at yourself. Jeesus! This porcelain is cold!” The pig squirmed in the sink basin. In a moment, he continued. “You know, I’ve been here ever since your folks moved in. Even before you were born.”
“So?” said Tommy. He had no idea what the pig was trying to say.
“Damn! I don’t know how to say this.” He hesitated, then he blurted it out: “Tommy, Ralph isn’t really your daddy.”
Tommy stared at himself in the mirror. “What do you mean?”
“Your mother had a thing for the guy who lived next door before Jimmy’s family moved in. I heard her talking to herself lots of times. And then he moved out, but just before that… I don’t know the details.”
“Maybe I should ask her.”
“Yeah, but not when Ralphie’s around.”
* * * *
For an hour after returning the pig to his p
lace, Tommy stared at the bathroom mirror, trying—and failing—to see some trace of Ralph in his features. He could see his mother in his hair, in the narrowness of his nose, in the slant of a cheekbone, even in the shape of an earlobe. But his “father”? Already he was putting quotes around the word!
When his mother came home, he said, “Mom.”
There was something in his voice and face that made Petra stop putting away the groceries she had brought home. “Tommy! What’s the matter?”
“Mom.” He hesitated. At last, he blurted it out: “Mom, is Ralph really my father?”
She opened her mouth. She closed it. She raised a hand as if to touch his face. She turned back to the kitchen counter, picked up a package of frozen succotash, and slammed it down. “No!”
More calmly, she turned back to her son. “He doesn’t know. I never told him. But…” She sighed. “I had an awful crush on Jack, but I thought…” She rushed on, as if glad to tell the tale at last. “I was visiting…”
When she finally fell silent, Tommy blindly reached out to his mother. She embraced him, and he said, “I wish I could meet him.”
Petra shook her head against his chest. “He moved away. I don’t know where.”
* * * *
“You’re making a big mistake,” said Jimmy. “You really ought to say good-bye to them.” The boys were alone in the house on that last morning of Tommy’s childhood. Ralph, as usual, was at work. Petra had gone shopping.
“He’s not my father,” said Tommy, throwing the last of his clothes into the small suitcase. “The hell with him. And Freddy’ll never be free if I don’t go now.” He was uncomfortably aware that if Freddy had not spilled the beans about his parentage, the pig would have stayed a slave forever. Then, too, if he did not feel some of the injustice of Freddy’s servitude… It had taken both to drive him to this secret departure.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 7