It had not taken long to choose those males whose sticks were straightest and longest, best suited to pinning a tusked trotter to the ground. They were ready to leave when howls sounded in the forest and Wild Ones stepped from the trees. Now they too held sticks, some freshly broken, some dark from the People’s fire, salvaged from the fray that morning.
The People seized their sticks and charged. The Wild Ones hurled rocks and fruit. A few hurled their sticks and ran, but most held their ground until the People were within their reach, and then they used their sticks as flails. Before they too turned to run, they gave some wounds. Yet they also left three dead, for more of the People had learned to thrust.
Afterwards, Peter licked a scrape on one arm. Joseph approached, lips wrinkled, teeth showing, worried. “They learn,” he said.
Peter wrinkled his own lips. “They will learn more. They will kill us all.”
His leader growled. “We should kill them first.” But he looked uncertain. There were too many of the Wild Ones, too few of the People. “We need an answer.” The three bodies laid out beside the remains of the morning’s fire were not, he knew, enough.
Peter shook his head slowly from side to side. He had none. Joseph knew as well as he that they could move, seek another territory where the Wild Ones did not go. But that would mean surrendering their wait for the Makers. They might move into the valley itself, but that would mean facing down a fear, an awe, that had already nearly become a taboo. He had no answers other than those. While the Wild Ones aped their weapons, they were doomed.
The hunt was a success. The Wild Ones usually attacked from the east. The hunting party entered the forest to the west, and they did not go far before they found a slotted track, a fresh path made by a trotter herd on its way to food or water. They followed it and soon came upon the herd itself, lying under a nut-tree.
The herd was small, a family group, the boar half the size of Peter, the sow half that, the three young still smaller. The boar played sentinel, snorting to wake the others when the hunters appeared. They stumbled to their feet, hooked their tusks in air as a warning, peered toward the hunters, and turned to follow their master into the forest beyond the tree.
The hunters leaped to forestall their escape. Two jabbed at the boar, flipped it on its side, pierced its chest and groin. They jabbed again, their weight upon their sticks, and it died. Miguel attacked the sow, but it pivoted on its hooves and one tusk caught his leg. He twisted free, bleeding, as he fell, and when it charged him, he tore out its throat with the point of his stick. Peter thrust his stick through a young one and pinned it, struggling, to the ground. Others killed the remaining young.
Peter wished for a knife such as the Makers had used, but all tools save his fire-iron had gone with the ships. Perhaps they could make knives from half-burned wood, or from the rocks they lived among, or even from the trotters’ tusks. He had seen cubs who had sliced their fingers on broken rock chips. He saw now Miguel and his prey, leg gouged, throat ripped, each a testament to the other’s weapon. But they had no such things now.
The young and the sow were no problem. They could be dragged to the bluff. But the boar was massive, and he wanted to lighten it, to remove head and entrails and feet. When he said as much, Miguel exclaimed, “Leave him! We have enough.”
“And save two arms to carry you?”
There was laughter. Peter shook his head. They had enough, yes. More than enough, even without the boar. And meat rotted if it was not eaten soon after its death. But he thought he knew a use for the boar, and he prodded at its carcass with his bloody stick until he thought to spit it, throat to tail.
Then he called another hunter to lift one end of the stick while he seized the other. They strained, but they managed, and when two more joined them, one at either end, they carried the boar easily. Others copied them till all the trotters were spitted, and their progress homeward was fast. Miguel’s halting limp slowed them hardly at all.
Peter let his fellows deliver their meat to the rest of the People, while he led his boar-carriers toward the eastern forest. There they laid the boar atop a rock and withdrew the stick. When they finally joined the rest on the bluff, Miguel asked, “Why?” Peter answered, “It may satisfy the Wild Ones, and they will not attack.” He hoped he was right.
He thought he was when, though the Wild Ones howled, nothing fell among the People. He mounted a boulder to see a horde of bodies around the boar, but that attracted their attention. Another howl arose and rocks flew. He hopped down again, and silence fell except for a sound of tearing meat.
The People fed too, though they cooked their flesh at least a little. When they were done, Peter took the remains to the rock by the forest. It was empty now, surrounded by stains and bones and scraps of hide. He set out the People’s leavings, half of one young trotter and the whole of another. There was a sound among the trees beyond, less a howl than a questioning. It struck his ears as a sleepy noise, the sort he might make himself when roused after a heavy meal. He turned away, and he found himself facing Joseph. “They did not attack,” the first-Made said.
“This may be all we need to do,” said Peter. “Feed them. Show them that we are not enemies, that they can live better near us than apart. And there are trotters enough in the forest.”
“Yet the Wild Ones’ flavor is good.” Joseph seemed troubled.
“So is ours to them.” Peter wrinkled his lips. “And the Makers chose them as our parents. Do we eat our own?”
They returned to the bluff together. There they shared the People’s relief, the hope that offerings could buy peace, the fear that it could not last. What would happen if the hunt were poor? They could only wait and see. For now, they let Peter insist that they would eat no more Wild Ones. They even let him cast the bodies won that morning from the bluff as if they were in fact of the People.
They slept. Dawn came, and with it silence. The Wild Ones did not howl. The People could resume their vigil without the distraction of defense, though there were many glances from valley to forest, many voices that wondered when the attack would come as it must.
The hunt that day was as successful as the first, and this time the hunters needed no word or example from Peter to leave a portion of their kill on the Wild Ones’ rock. There was no attack that night, nor the following dawn. Once more the People made their offering, and again, and the story of peace repeated.
A day came when the hunters visited the rock to find it piled with ripe fruits and tree-nuts. They exchanged their meat for the Wild Ones’ gifts and bore them back to camp, where they were met with wonder.
“They learn, indeed,” said Joseph when he had seen.
“They agree, it seems,” said Miguel. Now healed, with only a pink and hairless scar to show for his injury, he had lead the hunters again. “Offerings are better than battle. No one dies, and all eat better.”
Peter rose from his fire. He had struck the flame when the hunters had first been seen returning. Now he laid on a final stick and said, “Then they think as well as we, though they have no speech. The Makers had little Making to do, when they wrought with parents such as those.”
“Yet they Made.” Joseph took a fruit from the pile before him. He opened his mouth for a bite. “And we differ. Perhaps the Makers will find more companions than they expect when they return.”
SPARROWHAWK
Of course, someone will hack the system.
Chapter One
Five-year-old Andy Gilman, towheaded and gap-toothed, was kneeling on a chair by the kitchen window. Half a dozen plastic Warbirds were scattered on the floor beneath him. With the tip of one finger, he was writing his name in the large smudge his nose had left on the glass. Suddenly he stiffened and pointed beyond the pane. “Look, Daddy!” he cried. “See the bird! By the feeder! A big one!”
Nick Gilman grinned and crossed t
he room in a stride. He looked, and the kid was right. A Chickadee, the size of an old-fashioned Piper Cub, was on the lawn beside the back porch. It wasn’t wearing its two-seater passenger or engine pods. As Nick watched, it cocked its head to one side, inserted its beak between the shelf and the overhanging roof of the feeder, and seized a mouthful of seeds. Then, shaking its head as if the treat had been more effort than it was worth, it stepped back a pace.
As it did so, nongengineered birds of more normal size approached to try to reach the seeds remaining in the feeder. Few succeeded, for as they fluttered past the Chickadee, they fell prey instead to its darting beak. Nick shuddered, remembering when all chickadees had been vegetarians. “C’mon, Andy. We’re in a rush. Gotta go get Mommy.”
“But, Daddy! I wanna watch!”
Nick had no time for nonsense. Emily’s jet would be late, of course, but it was due in an hour, and he had to be there just in case she was on time or—God forbid!—early. He should have left ten minutes before, but the casserole had needed its finishing touches and he had had to adjust the oven and he had had to run a comb through his hair and he had had to straighten the throw rug that had slid beneath his feet and … It wasn’t easy being a househusband.
The radio began to mutter that, on this hot and muggy Tuesday in July of 2044, terrorist attacks were becoming more frequent, but he had no time to listen. Nor did he care to think of what such a thing might mean for Emily, or him, or their towheaded son. He turned it off and grabbed his jacket. Then he picked the boy up in his arms, wiped the snot from his nose with a handkerchief, and rushed from the room.
Emily was a high-bracket gengineer, she would be back soon from her trip—she had flown to Washington on Sunday to testify before a patent board on Monday—he loved her dearly, and he didn’t want to leave her waiting. Sometimes he wished their roles were reversed, with him the one wandering the world on high adventures and she the one at home in their small, old-fashioned brick house. But his doctorate had been in Romantic Poets, there were fewer new college students than ever, few colleges were hiring young faculty, and his attempts at selling his own poems and short stories had earned him the grand total of $79.85. He could have bought a pair of shoes. Cheap ones.
Nick had opened the garage door that morning and led the Tortoise out for relief from the heat. Now the family vehicle was waiting in the drive, shaded by nearby trees. Nick had bought it when he was in college and single. It had been young then, with the passenger compartment in the shell just big enough, in a squeeze, for two. And he had squeezed more than one girl in it, he had, until he had found Emily and grown up a bit. As advertised, the Tortoise had grown too, maturing from the sports car stage to coupe. Eventually, timed by gengineers like Emily to match a family’s growth, it would gain the capacity of a station wagon.
The Tortoise didn’t look like a tortoise. Its chief ancestor had been a lean, low terrapin. The gengineers had given it size and speed, and a cavity beneath the shell. The General Bodies shops had fitted a windshield, side windows, and doors, installed plush seats, added headlights and taillights, and wired the controls into the Tortoise’s nervous system. At periodic checkups, they added new fittings and enlarged or refitted the old to keep pace with the creature’s growth.
Roachsters, half cockroach and half lobster; Hoppers, derived from grasshoppers; and other Buggies could keep pace with a family’s needs just as well. But Nick preferred the more classic lines of the Tortoise. Its shape reminded him of the gas burners his parents had driven when he had been a child, when the Machine Age had still been vigorous. The oil that had made that Age possible had been on the verge of exhaustion, and most liquid fuels were being produced—expensively—from coal. But people had not yet recognized that new forms of technology were essential if civilization were to continue, nor that the replacement technology was already taking shape. The Biological Revolution had by then been fermenting in the world’s laboratories for decades, and the gengineers had been on the verge of long-sought success.
As Nick and Andy left the house, the Tortoise’s barrellike head turned toward them. The legs on the side facing the house flexed, Nick stepped onto the offered lip of shell, resembling an old-time running board, and opened the door. Andy scooted across the bucket seats to let his father take his position behind the tiller.
Even before the door clicked into its frame, the Tortoise’s knees were rising and falling, pistonlike, in Nick’s peripheral vision. He steered it onto the greenway that had long since replaced paved streets in his suburb, guided it toward the expressway on-ramp, and accelerated. The Tortoise’s knees became a blur, its breathing an audible gale of wind.
* * * *
The expressway itself was still paved. The Public Works Department kept promising to have it grassed, for almost all vehicles were now bioforms, or genimals. But public money was as short as ever, and the Biological Revolution was still new. Many residential neighborhoods, unlike Nick’s, also still had paved streets. Only a few neighborhoods had yet gone to modern bioform houses, gengineered from pumpkins, squash, beanstalks, eggplants, and even more exotic stock.
Air transportation was somewhat more advanced. As Nick and Andy neared the airport, they passed a zone of bedraggled hangars and paved runways. Airplanes—Comanches, Beechcrafts, Boeings—stood about in varying states of dishabille. A few showed the faded, painted-over logos of major airlines. Most wore nothing but their serial numbers.
“What’s that, Daddy? Jets?” To him, the gengineered birds were the normal technology. These were strange variants, stiff and featherless, emblems of a realm set askew from the world he knew, but oddly reminiscent of it.
“Obsolete junkers, Andy.” The traffic had been light, they would be there in plenty of time, and Nick had relaxed. He spared a glance for the display beside the expressway. “Real airplanes. They used to carry people. Now it’s just cargo.” Many, the papers said, carried contraband—guns, illegal immigrants, fugitives from the law, laundered money—across the border. Many more carried banned bioforms such as cannibal grass, or cheap bootleg copies of glow-in-the-dark philodendrons and goldfish bushes.
Their Tortoise sped them past another airport zone. The runways were still paved, but the hangars were in better shape and the planes wore shiny coats of paint. “Hobbyists,” said Nick. “Weekend flyers.” One of the planes was a bulb-nosed giant, towering above all the others. On its tail was a stylized rabbit head.
“How do they fly?”
“They have engines, just like the jets. On the wings.” He pointed. “And propeller engines, in the nose. And see the windows up front?” When Andy nodded, Nick added, “People drive them, like the old-time cars.” He paused. “I took a few lessons once. On a small one.”
The terminal loomed ahead, all glass and steel and concrete, with mown grass beyond. The control tower held a faceted ball above everything. Nick fantasized some Paul Bunyan of a golfer poised to send that ball down the green runways. He pointed and said, “Fore!” Andy giggled.
There was a parking barn whose attendants would feed and water vehicles for weeks at a time, while, the rumors went, breeding strange, illicit hybrids. Nick avoided it, searching for and finding a space in an open lot nearer their destination. Once in the air-conditioned terminal, he checked a board to find that Emily’s flight would, as he had expected, be a few minutes late. Then, at Andy’s insistence, they took the escalator to the observation deck.
He let Andy lead him, running, to the edge of the deck. He braced himself against the warm wind, wished that they had stayed inside and cool, peered into the sky looking for his wife, and listened to the airport noises. The boy chinned himself on the railing, imitated his father’s searching gaze, and pointed into the distance.
A flight was coming in above the ranks of trees that filled in the middle distance beyond the runways. The trees had been gengineered from a tropical species to sta
nd more northern climates. Their diesel-fuellike sap provided the fuel needed for the engines of jets and the few other powered vehicles civilization still used.
The approaching jet was still too far away to show any detail, but they could make out the distinctive curve of the extended wings, the elevated, horizontal tail without an upright, the rounded bulge of the forepart. It came closer, and they could see the two engines mounted just in front of the tail, the fuel tanks, the passenger pod strapped to the back. Still closer, and the slate-gray upper surfaces separated from the lighter underside.
Andy cried, “That’s a Junco 47!” He had a plastic model of the huge genimal hanging from the ceiling of his room at home. Perhaps inevitably, the model had a more mechanical appearance than the real thing. So had the models of bombers and airliners and space shuttles that had decorated Nick’s childhood bedroom.
The junco extended its feet and cupped its wings. Now Nick could make out the China Airlines logo on the side of one fuel tank. The gengineers had triumphed with the airliners, he thought. Birds, ordinary birds, had been redesigned to such extremes of size that they could no longer fly on their own. The biggest, like the Junco, even needed metal-composite implants to strengthen their skeletons. Only the smallest, like that Chickadee at home, could get into the air without their jet engines and fuel tanks, and even they needed help when they were carrying passengers or freight. Still, Nick knew, larger creatures had once flown entirely under their own power. Periodically, the press reminded the public that millions of years ago, in the age of dinosaurs, there had been a pteranodon the size of an Air Force fighter.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 15