But the stalling couldn’t work for long. When he and Muffy returned to The Spider’s Web, he had to explain to Cal why Freddy was not with them.
Cal’s reaction was simple: “You can’t perform alone.”
Of course not. Why hadn’t he thought of that? But…
“Sure, you can stay.” Cal sighed. “I could use another hand in the kitchen anyway.”
Tommy accepted the comedown. He had to. It kept him close to Muffy, and he could, as Peirce had promised, visit Freddy whenever he wished. But Freddy was growing distant.
“Listen,” Freddy said one day, and he and his new friend played duets far more sophisticated to Tommy’s ear than anything he had ever been a part of.
“Listen,” he said, and he sang a love song. “I made that one up.”
“Call me Frederick,” he said. “And have you heard? We’re going to have a litter! Ah, the pitter patter of little trotters! If they can walk.”
“We’re setting up a new exhibit,” Peirce told him after that. “We have to do it soon, or she’ll be too big to play. Though we’re looking forward to seeing what the hybrids will be like.”
“Right,” said Tommy, unable to keep a sour note from his voice. “A singing garbage disposal, with bagpipe accompaniment. They’ll be a great hit. And the shoats will be calliopes.”
“You and Freddy did all right at the Web,” said Muffy.
“Do you think the two of you could sing a song or two for old time’s sake?” asked Peirce.
“And you could invite your parents!” said Muffy.
He hesitated. Then, reluctantly, he shook his head.
“I’d be with you.”
He took Muffy’s hand in his. He sighed. He had succeeded in giving Freddy—Frederick—all he had ever wanted. But what about his own needs? His real father had walked out of his life before he had even been born. Now he had walked out of his mother’s life, and Ralph’s, and there was no going back. Not yet.
Frederick interrupted his thoughts: “I’ll bet you and Muffy could make some nice music too.”
Muffy’s hand squeezed his. He raised his eyes to look at her. She was grinning at him.
Somehow, when they were together, he was the one who did all the talking. He barely knew her.
But that was about to change. He could see it in her grin.
DOWN ON THE TRUCK FARM
All a boy really needs is…
The house was a Swiss chalet with a cantilevered deck. It looked like it would be quite at home on a mountainside, overhung by beetling cliffs, overlooking some deep valley through which ran a far-off thread of silver. Jimmy Brane could close his eyes and imagine the thin whistle of mountain wind, the echoing yodels of distant shepherds, the bleating of sheep and goats in some meadow just around the bulge of the alp. He didn’t have to imagine the smell of honeysuckle.
He knew he should laugh at himself, but he just didn’t have the energy. The house was supported not by a mountain but by a massive gengineered beanstalk, stiffened by a single concrete pillar. The deck was overhung by bean leaves the size of tabletops, and it overlooked only the yard next door.
It was no coincidence that Jimmy was leaning on the deck’s railing and staring at that yard now. That was where his best friend, Tommy, had lived. Now Tommy’s mother lay stretched out on a towel, dark haired and nearly bare, sunbathing, sipping again and again, as she did all day, every day, at.… Until very recently, she had always been puttering about her pumpkin house, touching up the sealants that had been sprayed onto the dried shell, washing windows, pruning the vine that still provided shade. But she had once fooled around with the chalet’s previous owner, and Tommy had found out. He had, in fact, learned that the man he had always called his father bore to him no blood relationship at all. That was when he had run away.
Tommy hadn’t even waited to graduate from high school. He had cut and run, leaving Jimmy to peer over the railing at the ground below and think that, yes, he was high enough. High school was behind him now, and he didn’t want to go to college—he hadn’t even applied!—and he didn’t want a job and his best friend was God knew where. He could climb up on the railing and bend his knees and dive out past the gnarly twists of bean stem and the billows of honeysuckle blossoms, their viney stems twined around the beanstalk, arch his body against the sky, and plunge down headfirst upon the flagstoned patch that held the family’s Neoform Armadon.
Instead, he leaned over the railing to wave away a drunken hummingbird and pluck a choice honeysuckle blossom, the size of a wine glass, its narrow base plump with nectar. He held it up to the light, marveling at its shadings of rose and cream, at how quickly the vine had grown that spring when the seed had appeared, dropped by some high-flying bird or planted by a wandering jonnyseeder, in the soil below. There had been no such thing just the year before. Now they were everywhere, and some people said they were a problem. But.…
Tommy’s mother, Petra, had just plucked another for herself. He gestured with his own, though he knew she would not see his acknowledgement of what they shared. Then he tipped the blossom up and drained its liquid contents down his throat. He shuddered at the cloying sweetness, but he did not regret the dose. There was a self-fermented alcoholic tingle as well, and beneath that a mellowing, relaxing, euphoric haze. He stopped caring about friends, jobs, schools, long falls to nowhere, everything except reaching for another blossom.
* * * *
“Hey, Ma! He’s been suckin’ honey again!”
Jimmy opened one eye. That was his kid brother, Caleb, taking a thirteen-year-old’s malicious pleasure in the shit that was about to fly Jimmy’s way. He was standing in the half-open door to the house, staring, grinning, at Jimmy sprawled in the wood-and-canvas deck chair, at the honeysuckle blossoms littering the floor around him, at one last blossom crushed in a sticky hand.
Jimmy wished his older sister were still at home. She would be more sympathetic. But she had gone off to college two years before, and.…
“Hey, Ma!”
It was not their mother who came to the door, one hand holding a glass of water, the other a pair of yellow pills. It was Dad, tall, thin to the point of gauntness, balding, his face lugubriously sad, his head shaking, his voice tsking, “Sober up, boy. You’re supposed to be helping us get the carpet up. Not.…” With the hand that held the pills he gestured toward the house next door. “You want to wind up like Petra? She lost her son, not just a friend.”
Jimmy made a face. Outlaw gengineers had turned the honeysuckle loose upon the world, and no one had been able to get rid of it since. But the biochemists, as ingenious in their way as the gengineers, had promptly devised an antidote for the euphoric in the nectar. The yellow pills contained a mixture of that antidote and the much older alcohol detoxicant. In mere moments, his system was free of both drugs and he was staring longingly once more at the pumpkin across the way. A best friend was not just a friend.
“C’mon, Jimmy.” He shook Caleb’s hand off his arm, levered himself out of his low seat, and followed his father into the living room. For a little while then, he helped move the couch, easy chairs, end tables, books and bookcase, into other rooms. Then he pried nails from the floorboards, rolled the old, worn carpet into a wormlike cylinder, sneezed at the dust he stirred, and marveled at the circular marks upon the wood beneath.
His mother blew her nose and ran her fingers across the marks. “Water stains,” she said. She was Dad’s total opposite, short, round, her hair thick and blonde. Caleb’s hair was like hers. Jimmy’s was thinner, drabber, like his father’s. “And ground-in dirt. And just a hair of indentation. Someone had flower pots in here once. Heavy ones.”
Jimmy wondered if that someone had been Tommy’s father. But that thought evaporated as the carpet company’s delivery van, a Bioblimp, arrived, lifted off the house’s roof with its muscular tentacles, an
d replaced the roll of old carpet with one of new. He stepped onto the deck once more to watch the van drift down the breeze, not yet using the propellor mounted on the rear of its crew pod. Its main ancestor had been some simple jellyfish. The gengineers had vastly enlarged it, swelled it up with hydrogen, given its tentacles muscles that belonged more properly to an octopus or squid, and equipped it with cargo pockets whose genes had come from kangaroos. Behind him, he could hear his mother running the vacuum cleaner across the bare floor, removing all the grit and dust that had sifted through and accumulated beneath the old carpet.
* * * *
When the new carpet was in place and the furniture was restored to its positions, the whole family took their seats—Jimmy’s mother and Caleb on the couch, Dad in his recliner, Jimmy in the antique wing chair—and admired the carpet. That was when Dad sighed and said, “Jim. We have got to do something about you.”
Jimmy shifted uncomfortably. Caleb snickered until his mother pinched his thigh.
“You’ve finished school,” Dad went on. “At least until you decide to go on. But you don’t seem to want a job. And you’re drinking far too much honeysuckle wine.”
“Yessir,” said Jimmy. He stared at the carpet between his feet, preferring its clean, fresh neutrality to the disapproval of his parents, or the glee of his little brother.
“If this keeps up,” said Dad. “If this goes on, you’ll be just another honey-suckin’ bum.”
Caleb managed to get out a single snicker before squeaking a muffled, “Ouch!”
Dad slapped his thigh. “So,” he said. “Tomorrow, I’m taking you out to the Daisy Hill Truck Farm.”
* * * *
It was a sad fact that the morning after tanking up on honeysuckle wine, antidote or no antidote, one had a headache, not the blinding sort, but a sullen, throbbing thing that would respond only to a nip of honey. The aspirins Jimmy found beside his breakfast plate were no help at all.
After breakfast, Dad led the way to the elevator that occupied the center of the beanstalk’s supporting pillar. He did not let Jimmy have a moment on the deck to grab a honeysuckle blossom, and when they reached the ground, his hand on his son’s shoulder kept Jimmy from stepping off the path.
“C’mon,” he said. “You have your license.” He steered Jimmy toward the door on the driver’s side of the family Armadon and held it open. It revealed the bucket seats and control panels that occupied the space grown in the genimal’s back, and when Jimmy climbed in, it closed with a solid “Chunkk!”
“But you still need practice. So you drive. I’ll tell you when to turn.”
The Armadon was a gengineered armadillo. Somewhat larger than a panel truck of the last century, it had no tail. The lower portion of its rigid hide swelled out to form four wheels, each one wearing a black rubber tire. The genimal’s legs were mounted high, above the wheels, their joints reversed; as they ran, they pushed against the tires, spun the wheels on their bony hubs, and propelled the vehicle down the grassy greenways that had replaced paved roads early in the Biological Revolution.
Obediently, Jimmy toggled the genimal out of its night-time dormancy and took the tiller in his hand. He didn’t have much to say. He knew about the truck farm, and he could guess why his Dad wanted to take him there—Dad hoped he would get inspired, discover a vocation, swear off the honey forevermore, and straighten out. Fat chance, he thought.
Fortunately, the trip would not take long. There was not far from their neighborhood an entrance to the major highway that led traffic away from the city and toward the countryside where the land was available for truck farms and other agricultural operations. At this time of day, most of the traffic was city-bound commuters in wheeled Armadons and Roachsters, legged Hoppers, Tortoises, and Beetles, and grand Mack trucks hauling pods and trailers full of goods, chrome eighteen-wheelers dangling from collars beneath their bulldog jowls. An occasional police Hawk hovered overhead. A construction site featured long-legged Cranes and earth-moving Box-turtles. An Alitalia Cardinal and an American Bald Eagle circled above the local jetport. Shovel-jawed litterbugs patrolled the shoulder, darting at every break in the traffic onto the greenway to retrieve the wastes inevitably left behind the vehicles.
Honeysuckle vines covered the embankments beyond the shoulder, and in the shadows beneath an overpass, Jimmy noticed several full-time honey-suckers. Jimmy read the papers and knew that they died of malnutrition and disease and exposure and then fell prey to the omnipresent litterbugs, but he was not at all sure their fate was so horrible. They were the honey-bums his father prayed he would not join. They were poor and tattered, but such was the power of the euphoric in the honey they loved that they were nevertheless carefree and content with their lot. Was that indeed what awaited Jimmy? He didn’t think that honeysuckle wine had that much of a hold on him, though he did love the stuff.
A Roadrunner roared past them, its rider bent low over the extended neck, his face hidden by a globular helmet. “Next exit,” said Dad, and the highway gave way to a smaller road poorly enough maintained that in spots, where the turf was thin, the pavement of a generation before showed through. A few more miles, and they began to see the white-boarded fences of the truck farm. The barns became visible beyond a grove of trees, and then they could see the iron-barred runs, some of them containing young trucks. A herd of cattle, mingled Guernseys and Black Angus, milk and meat, grazed a pasture. The barns grew nearer and the wide doors along their sides became visible, while Jimmy wondered at the lack of a farmhouse. By the road stood a low concrete building that looked like it must hold only offices. A truck, its trailer full of grain for feed, was backing into the farm’s main drive.
There was no honeysuckle to be seen. If it had ever taken root here, the farm’s staff had carefully eradicated it. Jimmy did not care whether the reason had been to keep the staff or the stock clean. He did care that it was absent, for he was beginning to crave a sip, just a sip, he told himself.
“Park there,” said Dad. He pointed toward the side of the office building.
Jimmy nosed the Armadon into a space between a Roachster and an antique automobile whose axles were supported by metal jacks. The antique’s paint was protected by a plastic tarpaulin. A medallion, left visible where the tarp did not cover, identified the car as an Oldsmobile.
As he shut their vehicle down, a door opened in the side of the building. Jimmy caught a glimpse of pastel walls, glass partitions, and elaborate computer workstations where, he would have guessed if he had cared, new trucks must be designed. Then he focused on the man stepping toward them. He was tall but heavy-set, and the roundness of his face was accentuated by a receding hairline.
“Mr. Brane!” He met Jimmy’s Dad with a broad smile and an outstretched hand as he stepped from the Armadon. “This is your boy. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you both.”
Jimmy scowled. He hadn’t cared for patronizing sons of bitches when he was in high school, and he didn’t like them now. He wished he dared to jump back in the Armadon and take off, but.… Honey or no honey, Dad would make his life miserable for sure. And he didn’t really want to disappoint his parents. He was depressed for loss of his friend, but he did still love them. He supposed he even loved Caleb.
Their host gestured toward the nearest barn. “Call me Mike. Mike Nickers. We can begin the tour in here.”
A narrow corridor ran down the center of the barn, with wooden doors opening into large bays. A small window in the nearest of the doors gave Jimmy a glimpse of something large and moving, but before he could identify it, their guide directed their attention to a large photo on one wall and said, “This is the bus barn. We’ve been trying to develop a good long-distance vehicle.” He tapped the photo with an outstretched finger. “Years ago, they tried to make a Greyhound, but the back wasn’t strong enough, and it didn’t have the stamina.”
De
spite himself, Jimmy was feeling some interest. “What about the Bernies? They’re all over town.”
Nickers nodded. “Their backs are okay, but they still can’t make the long trips.” He led them to the first of the barn’s bays and opened its door to reveal an immense genimal with six legs and a flattened back. The floor was covered with hay. A larger door at the other end of the bay opened to the outside. “We turned to peccary stock. We handled the back by giving it an extra pair of legs. Had to double the rib cage and pectoral girdle to make them work, but we got a double heart-lung system in the process, and that made the stamina beautiful.”
“Couldn’t you have done that with a Greyhound?” asked Jimmy’s Dad.
Nickers shrugged. “We tried. But it didn’t turn out very well. And besides, we liked the name we got this way. We call ’em Roadhogs.”
He led them past other bays. One contained a Roadhog with a bus-pod strapped on, and Jimmy realized why the gengineers had designed the back to be flat. Another contained a female Roadhog lying on its side while a litter of young rooted at her belly, nursing. In the last, a female displayed a bulging belly. “As you can see,” said Nickers, “we’ve entered the production phase. And in case you’re wondering, the mating is handled by artificial insemination. The Bioform Regulatory Agency insisted that we remove any ability to respond to heat pheromones.”
As he held the barn door open for them, he added, “Want some coffee?” Jimmy and his Dad both nodded. He pointed—”Over here. It’s the maternity ward for the trucks.”—and led them to a small waiting room in the next barn.
When Jimmy entered the room, he found two young people clad in coveralls. They were not much older than he, and they wore shoulder-patches marked with the farm’s distinctive logo, a black-eared white beagle. Nickers closed the door, and the stertorous sounds of idling trucks elsewhere in the barn were slightly muffled. “Two of our trainees,” he said. “Julia, Dan, this is Jimmy Brane.”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 9