Dusk was beginning to settle and streetlights were flickering on. Most of the lights, in this part of town, remained dark, their bulbs burned out or broken, but there was still enough light for him to see, a little back from the mouths of the alleys he passed, buried in green honeysuckle gloom, adorned with the pink and cream of the blossoms, clusters of tiny shacks assembled from packing crates and cardboard. In front of them, escaping their cramped confines, sprawled and crouched the district’s honey bums.
The sound of a bumblebee drew his attention to a single Floater as it rose into view above the building to his left, its spinning propellor a translucent disk. He turned one more corner, and there was the warehouse where, the dispatcher had told him, he would find both a shipper and a cargo. But the building was as derelict as any he had ever seen, and far more derelict than any building he had ever seen in use. No pane of the glass that had once blocked weather from its small, high-up windows was left intact. The paving of the small loading area was cracked and potholed. The large door to the warehouse’s inside loading bay was undamaged, but the personnel door to one side was missing entirely. There were even gaps in the brick wall of the building, as if there, and there, and there, a giant child had kicked in pique. An alley to one side was choked with honeysuckle and crude shelters. There were no lights, and the dusk was growing thick enough to need them. He flicked on the headlights mounted on the leading edge of Tige’s pod, below the windshield, and aimed them at the empty doorway, but they did not penetrate the murk within the warehouse.
Anger washed his fatigue away. The address was right, he knew. So where was his cargo? Where was the shipper? The headlights showed no sign that anyone had ever been here. The honeysuckle shoots before the warehouse door had not been trampled. There were no tracks in the dirt. Was someone playing a mechin’ joke? Or had the dispatcher screwed up?
He opened the door to the pod and descended. Maybe there was another door, and lights or no lights they were inside waiting for him. Maybe they just weren’t here yet and he could stretch his legs. Or maybe they weren’t coming, and if he didn’t move around and exhaust some of the steam that was building up within him he would explode.
He paced around the loading area, looking for tracks. There were none. He looked back at Tige and realized that he had left the pod’s door swinging open, unlatched, unlocked. He told himself that didn’t matter, for he would be back inside in just a moment, whether the shipper and the cargo were here or not. He walked along the roadway and peered around the building’s corner, down an accessway a little narrower than most alleys, and too narrow for vehicular traffic. It was free of honeysuckle, Jim thought as he looked for another entrance, because its surface was unblemished, uncracked concrete. Vines rooted elsewhere avoided it because its narrowness excluded sunlight.
He could find no other entrance. Finally, angrily, kicking the honeysuckle out of his way as he stomped across the broken pavement, wishing he had someone to holler at, he approached the dark entrance to the warehouse.
He was leaning forward to peer into the deeper darkness within when he heard a rush of feet behind him. Tige uttered a single deep, imperative bark. He spun around, and there, silhouetted against Tige’s headlights, was a figure rushing toward him, a club of some sort in its upraised hand. He had just time to see that his attacker was not dressed in rags, was no honey bum, before a blow knocked him senseless.
When he awakened, he could barely make out the three figures bending over him. Night had completely come. The only light was a dim skyglow from more active parts of the city. But that light was enough for him to see the rags and know from that, and from the odors that washed over his prone body, that the three were honey bums. They had presumably emerged from their hovels in the nearby alleys once he had been still long enough. Now one was fingering his coverall. Another had a hand on his left shoe.
Dimly, he sensed that the alley bums might retain a vestige of ambition that those who dwelled beneath the highway overpasses had lost. Not only did they build rude shelters, but they could recognize an opportunity when they saw one. If he were dead, if he failed to protest, they would quite happily strip him for his clothes, as well as for whatever might be hidden in his pockets.
He groaned. He kicked. He flailed. The honey bums recoiled, and when he staggered to his feet, they fled. He felt the back of his head. It was already swollen, tender, and hot. It hurt, and he winced. The honey bums were assholes. Whoever had done this was a mechin’ asshole. Not a honey bum, no. A thief. He checked his pockets. His wallet was still there, holding still as many bills as it had before. Nothing was missing.
He turned, looking for Tige.
Tige wasn’t there.
So that was why the headlights weren’t on anymore.
He swore aloud: “Mechin’ Jeezuss on a crutch!”
His breast pocket held two pens and a small light. He unclipped the light, clicked it on, and scanned the roadway. Julia had given him the light, and he had carried it ever since, though he had never, till now, needed it. He wished he could remember what the occasion had been.
He staggered toward the corner and looked down the narrow alley. There was no sign of Tige. He backtracked and found no sign that Tige had been taken into the stygian blackness of the warehouse. There was only a small pile of Mack litter beside a pothole.
“Mech!”
Movement was making his head feel better. Now, he asked himself, where had those honey suckers gone? They couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with slugging him or stealing Tige. They didn’t have the energy, or the ambition. Or did they? They were ready enough to strip his dead body, if dead it was, and he supposed they could use money if they ever happened to get any. Could they have been hired? He remembered the silhouette. It hadn’t been that of a bum.
Might they have seen anything? He turned toward the alley full of honeysuckle vines and heard a scrabbling noise back among the flimsy walls of the bums’ improvised tenement. He strode forward, kicking the sheets of cardboard aside, flattening roofs and walls, crunching meager possessions. He dismissed the uneasy thought that he should feel guilt for his rampage, that honey bums were human too. He was, he told himself, mad, angry, pissed, and woe betide anyone who got in his way.
When one foot met a softer, more resilient mass, he used his light to be sure the mass was flesh, bent, grabbed its arm, and hauled it back to the loading area.
The bum had neither shaved nor washed for at least a year. He looked like what Jim raked out of Tige’s curry comb on a rainy day, and he smelled worse. His skin felt as if ropy tumors, stiff and rubbery, were growing beneath it, and dimly, in the darkness, Jim could make out dark, twisting markings wherever the skin was not covered with the rags that had once been a coverall.
Jim swallowed his revulsion, set the man down, squatted before him, and resolved to breathe through his mouth. Then he said, “Tell me. Or I’ll find a desert, and I’ll take you out in the middle of it, a hundred miles from honey, and I’ll leave you there.”
“Tell ’oo wha’?” The eyes were wide. The breath was foul. The gravelly voice was surprised and defiant, as any voice might be when its owner was interrupted by some rude stranger.
“You saw. The bastard hit me on the head and stole my Mack. Who was he? Which way did he go?”
The bum tipped sideways, caught himself on his hands, and began to crawl toward the alley. “Wan’ honey.”
Jim grabbed for the back of the filthy coverall. The fabric had been of some quality, once, but now it was thoroughly rotten. It tore away in his hand. He shook shreds of embroidery from his fingers, shifted his grip, fought renewed revulsion at the greasy filth of the hair and the strange feel of the skin, and yanked the bum back into place. “Where’d he go?”
The bum’s head swayed back and forth. “Don’ know. Don’ ’memmer. Wan’ honey.” He tipped back into his interru
pted crawl and Jim, disgusted, got up. He wiped his hands on the thighs of his coverall. He spat, a gesture of frustrated contempt for the uselessness of honey suckers, even of the human species in general.
He shuddered to think that he could have become the same sort of creature. There had been a time when the honey had seemed a reasonable escape from the problems of his young life. But then his Dad had taken him to the Farm, and he had met Tige, and… He shook his head, winced at the burst of pain he gave himself, and turned toward the streets he had driven Tige down on his way to this trap.
There were no pay phones in the derelict parts of the warehouse district. It took him half an hour to reach a more active region, one with more than one working street light to a block, with nightlights—and even desk lamps—burning in warehouse offices, with bus stops and—There!—a diner, still lit up, still doing business. A phone carrel was visible just inside the door.
The smells of grease and meat and coffee struck him as he opened the door, in infinite contrast to the stink of the honey bum he had tried to question. His stomach growled, reminding him that he had forgotten that he was hungry. He rummaged in a pocket. There were plenty of bills in his wallet, he knew, for a meal. But the phone demanded coins, and he had only one pentagonal Mitchell dollar.
He dialed his own room at the Farm. If Julia wasn’t there, the machine would return his coin and he could try the Farm’s main switchboard. But she was, and, “Jim! Where have you been?”
He explained. “They stole Tige.”
“Oh, no!” She understood. Any trucker would.
“Come get me?”
“Of course. But you’d better call the cops.”
“I’m outta Mitchells.”
“Get some change.”
“After I grab a bite. Or I’ll call when you get here. Use the radio.”
“Stingy ass. Maybe I’ll call ’em for you.”
“Thanks.”
He told her where he was, hung up, and turned toward the counter. He took his food to go and, minutes later, was sitting on the diner’s steps, eating and scanning the street and the mouths of those alleys that opened into it. He was hoping against hope that the thief or thieves would drive Tige past his gaze. But there was no traffic at all. All he saw, even here, was honeysuckle vines and honey bums hiding in their shadows.
He was nearly done with his meal when he heard the siren and a Sparrowhawk stooped out of the sky to land on the street before him. Its talons scraped against the pavement as it landed. It cocked its head, marked as if it wore an ancient warrior’s helm. A reddish crest, resembling a tonsure, suggested that those warriors might have been monks as well. The plumage was dark-spotted cream on the underside. The throat was white. A red-brown tail jerked, and a hooked beak opened and closed.
The pilot sat in a narrow bubble or pod of clear plastic, marked only by an oval doorframe, and within that, a small porthole. The police department markings were painted on the fittings that anchored the heavy straps that held the pod to the bird’s back. There was no need for structural metal or rotor-mountings, as in the helicopters that still were used at times. Two jet engines were strapped to the root of the bird’s tail.
Hawks had replaced helicopters for many police purposes because their built-in weaponry, by its nature—beaks and talons as sharp as scythe blades, and larger—had more deterrent effect on evil-doers than machine guns or rockets. The Hawks were also quite effective at catching those who fled the scenes of their crimes.
He hoped that this Hawk, and its pilot, could catch Tige’s thief.
Chapter Three
When Tom Cross first woke up, he knew something was wrong, for he felt empty, dead inside, his cheeks were stiff with dried tears, and he had the sort of headache that comes with having had too many self-pitying drinks. But what was that something? Memory served him not at all, and he felt a surge of panic as he peered within his skull for the answer he craved so badly.
The light that came through the bedroom window was grey, and the honeysuckle leaves beyond the glass glistened with wet. He rolled over with a grunt, slapping at the alarm with a clumsy hand to silence its insistent, strident, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” Then, realizing, he groped at the other side of the bed. But no curve of haunch or hip or breast met his hand. The bed was empty, cold, unwarmed all night by any other body, and the scent of honeysuckle wine that clung to the pillow was only a weak echo of what he was used to smelling in the morning.
He remembered. She was gone, missing, kidnapped. The police had come, and they had been sympathetic, but they had had little help to offer. “Wait,” they had said. “Maybe someone will call. Or maybe not. Sometimes the victims just disappear.” The woman who had said that had not been able to meet his eye.
He had cleaned up the apartment, picking up coins, wiping up honey, righting the only child they had known, their Alice. The landlord had arrived, with a loop of chain and a padlock for the apartment door, a promise that a locksmith would soon arrive to repair the door properly, and the news that insurance would cover all the damage. Though it could not, admittedly, get Muffy back.
When clouds had blotted out the stars and the night had grown cool at last, Tom had closed the apartment’s windows. Then he had had a drink. He had been tempted to try, in memory of Muffy and her own preference, the honeysuckle wine, but he had settled for the scotch in the cupboard. Then he had had another, sitting as near the phone as he could. He had not wanted to miss the call. But no call had come. He had cried, had another drink, cried some more, and finally gone to bed.
He sat up and put his legs over the side of the bed. The motion made his headache worse. He stared at the floor and considered the state of his body. His mouth was dry and foul. His belly felt full of acid, and it lurched quite involuntarily when Randy, responding to the signs that he was awake, leaped onto the mattress and presented her bristly back to be scratched. The scratch was an essential part of Randy’s morning ritual, and if Muffy wasn’t there, he would have to do. He sighed, met the spider’s demand as perfunctorily as possible, and brushed her aside.
He needed aspirin, a toothbrush, breakfast. Most of all he needed Muffy. Lacking that… Mech, but he missed Freddy. And with that thought, he knew what he wanted to do that day.
As soon as he could, he called the Garden: “Bert? I can’t make it today.”
“What you mean you can’t make it today?” His boss was loud in his surprise. Tom winced and wished the aspirin he had taken worked more rapidly. “We have a shipment to unload. Customers to take care of! And I cannot do it all, at all. Today is when the bills I must send out!”
Tom explained what he had found when he reached home the day before and said, “I want to see a friend. I need someone to talk to.”
Bert’s voice instantly turned sympathetic: “Of course, you must! Friends are a great help! Count on me! You can, if there is anything I can do. I know how it is. It never happened to me. It never happened to my parents. But my grandfather, it happened to him. Bad times those were, and it was the government that did it, the secret police. Not kidnappers. But I know. The stories! I heard them many times.” Tom could almost see him nodding sagaciously, insistently.
* * * *
The art museum’s main entrance, softened by the morning’s mist and rain, was framed by marble pillars in the classic mode, though more than a little etched and stained by many decades of exposure. Parked in the paved circle before the entrance was an antique mechanical limousine, its flanks bearing the BRA insignia of the Bioform Regulatory Administration. To either side of the original, central building were more modern wings of glass and concrete and beyond those, clusters of hollowed bioforms, pumpkins and squashes rearing their tumorous hulks against the green backdrop of parkland beyond. In the foreground of the southern cluster, a single dried and windowed eggplant swung from a concrete stem. Bro
ad lawns clumped with shrubbery and trees and twined across with gravel walkways separated the complex from the road.
Usually, the museum’s pumpkins gave Tom a pang of mingled guilt and homesickness. He had grown up in one, and he had left his mother—but not his father, never his father, not the real one—behind in one. Today, he registered the details only peripherally as he climbed the steps to the entrance. Randy was clinging to his shoulder, her fur scratching against his neck. The attendant at the ticket booth waved them through, saying, “Visitin’ again? Where ya girlfriend?”
Tom nodded and shrugged and thought the darkness on his face must be what provoked the attendant’s next comment: “Left ya, hah? They do it ever’time.” He didn’t try to set the other straight but stepped past him and into the cavern of the entrance rotunda, its floor tessellated with geometric patterns, its high walls hung with bronze sculptures. A gift-shop occupied a filigreed enclosure to one side. A sound-plaque mounted on a pedestal before him announced that the shop’s enclosure was an adaptation of the fibrous skeleton of the seed pod of the wild cucumber, and that the bronzes had been done during the Great Depression of the previous century, as government make-work projects. The bronzes had adorned public buildings such as post offices and courthouses for over a hundred years.
The music section was in the basement. Tom headed toward the stairs in the back of the building, passing paintings, woodwork, pottery, and more. Near the stairway was an exhibit of early biosculptures. Some still writhed or hummed or reflected iridescence from overhead spotlights. Some were aged, silent, dull. A few, like the very early Atkinsons, had long ago died of old age and been stuffed. Their value was now less that of art than that of history.
It was too early in the day for the museum to be crowded. There was only a single couple ahead of him, studying the biosculptures. The man looked familiar and, briefly, he wondered why. But he dismissed the question. His mind was on other things.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 42