Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Senator Trench: Dr. Rifkin, our concern here today is agricultural policy, not the desirability of genetic engineering.

  Harriet McKenzie, Ph.D., Professor of Agricultural Science, University of Kansas: Senator Trench, ladies, gentlemen. I must say that I agree with Mr. Pembroke, although for different reasons. The subsidies remain at least useful and perhaps even essential because they keep alive a form of agriculture that may be all that stands between us and catastrophe.

  We have not analyzed these new gengineered crops thoroughly enough at all! The Bioform Regulatory Administration is far too ready to grant permits and licenses. Worse yet, many products of gengineering are released without any pretense of regulation. And we have no idea what their long-term effects on the environment—and on us!—may turn out to be. In fact, there is no reason to think that the honeysuckle that has displaced the infamous kudzu and so vastly extended its range may not be the least of the curses hidden in the Pandora’s Box of gengineering!

  Senator Trench, continuing the subsidies gives our society an insurance policy. I do not say that gengineering is bound to turn sour. But it may. And if it does, we will need those who are skilled in the traditional modes of survival.

  In addition to the subsidies, I would like to see a firm moratorium on any further gengineering for agriculture. This would give us a chance to study carefully and thoroughly what we have done already. Only when we know what the long-term effects of all these new organisms may be should we permit any more gengineering. When that time comes, of course, we should analyze each new proposal to gengineer a plant or animal just as carefully and thoroughly. Only in this way may we hope to avoid disaster.

  Andrew Gilman, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A., Director, Research and Development, Neoform Laboratories: Senator Trench, gentlemen, ladies. Technology is not something whose undesirable side-effects can be foreseen except in the most general of ways. For instance, it was fairly easy, when gengineering was new, to predict that unscrupulous gengineers would use it to make drugs available in new ways. I’m thinking of “hedonic parasites,” and of the cocaine nettles and heroin-producing jellyfish that came later, and of the snakes with drugs in their venom.

  If we go back to the dawn of the age of automobiles, we can see a parallel example in the way people were predicting the mechanization of warfare. People were also complaining, even then, of the machines’ stink, and a prediction of air pollution problems was an entirely logical extrapolation.

  But no one predicted traffic jams, or suburbs, or shopping malls. Similarly, the first gengineers and their regulators could not have foreseen the bots and their domination of the menial labor market. Once that had been managed, however, it would have been no great trick to predict the resentment of human low-level laborers and the resulting protests.

  I have some sympathy for Dr. McKenzie’s go-slow attitude. Unfortunately, that attitude is grossly unrealistic. If we wish not only to survive but to thrive in the future, we have to take risks. We cannot embrace the no-risk ideology of the Engineers and their nostalgic sympathizers. That is a recipe for stagnation and decline.

  And the fact is that orgamech farming, with subsidies or without, simply cannot support the world in the style to which it has become accustomed. It requires too much fertile land, when past generations have permitted the loss of topsoil to erosion, covered the land with pavements and buildings, and emptied the underground aquifers of the water necessary for irrigation. And speaking of irrigation—that all by itself has ruined millions of hectares of land by the build-up of toxic salts in the soil.

  The only way the orgamechers could do the job would be if we reduced world population to a fraction of present levels. As things stand, there are just too many of us on the planet. We need too much food and clothing and housing. And the resources needed to maintain simultaneously both a mechanical agriculture and a mechanical civilization do not exist any longer. We do not have enough liquid fuels or metals for both tractors and jet engines, not to mention spacecraft.

  The Engineers and their fellow travelers yearn for the “Good Old Days” of the Machine Age, when there was plenty for all. They forget that that “plenty” existed only in the industrialized countries of the world. Everywhere else, for the vast majority of humanity, poverty and misery were the norm. Today, gengineering is raising the standard of living for all.

  If we turn our backs on gengineering, we will therefore have a world poor in resources, potential, and human happiness. It will be a world doomed to a “Good Old Days” of subsistence farming, of the inevitable crash of the world population to a level supportable by our ruined soils, of mass starvation and death.

  Only far too late will we realize that it was the gengineers who made possible the continuance of civilization past the time when the resources needed for mechanical civilization became scarce. Those resources will still exist, but not in great quantities. There will remain, as now, just enough to fool reactionary ideologues into believing that they can retreat into the past successfully.

  We can see the reactionaries trying to begin that retreat now. They are trying to ban, destroy, or hamstring all possible alternatives—such as gengineering—to their vision of the way the world ought to be. They ignore the way the world is. Tragically, if they have their way, they will have no destiny except disaster.

  I hope the committee will see the path of wisdom and recommend that Congress end all agricultural subsidies. They are no longer necessary. They are even dangerous, for they encourage the reluctant to continue in their refusal to accept reality, the future, and gengineering, with all its present benefits and future promise.

  Senator Trench: I see that we’re out of time for today. We will reconvene next week. Thank you all.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nine

  The room was about twice as long as the shelf-like bunk in one end and not much wider. The bunk, covered by an air-filled mattress, folded out of the wall. When down, it left only a narrow aisle between its edge and the walls. The aisle was so narrow that Frederick Suida found it difficult to walk beside the bed. Alvar Hannoken had much less trouble. His goatish legs and tip-toe gait were better fitted for tight spaces.

  The room’s brushed-aluminum walls were studded with the doors of small cupboards and the fronts of drawers, each one painted a different color. There were many more such storage spaces than Frederick had needed for the few possessions he had brought with him.

  A thin curtain divided the room a little past the foot of the bed, setting off an open space onto which opened a door. Above the door was mounted a small communicator grill. At the far end was a tiny closet of a bathroom much like those that had once graced the small trailers that vacationing families had dragged behind their automobiles: Even without the toilet seat—most of the Station’s quarters had not been designed for use in zero gee—there was barely room in it for Frederick to stand up and turn around.

  “I’ll have to sit to shower,” said Frederick. “I’d expected…”

  The Station Director shrugged with almost Gallic eloquence. “Fresh water,” he said, “is cheap in space. Space isn’t.”

  “What’s so cheap about water?” Renny cocked his head curiously. “Don’t you have to haul it up here?”

  “But only once,” said Hannoken. “After that, we’ve got all the sun we need to distill it from any wastes we make. Even bodies. We make compost out of the residue.”

  “Then you must grow plants,” said Donna Rose.

  “Of course,” he said. “For oxygen and food.” He looked at her with much the appraising eye some men turned upon attractive women. “And psychic ease,” he added.

  “And the space?” asked Frederick.

  “It’s expensive because the larger a station is, the more it leaks and the more often it gets hit by flying rocks. The construction materials are cheap enough. They’re from the Moon. Our
air is cheap too, and the energy to heat and cool the station. But every seam is a risk.”

  The bedless portion of the room held more cupboards and drawers, a fold-down desk, and several fold-out seats. There was also a porthole before which a work crew had set a metal trough half full of compost diverted from the Station’s gardens. The trough itself might once have been a piece of rocket casing. The porthole, of course, did not look directly out on space. It was the room’s floor that, as the Station’s hull, faced vacuum; mirrors linked the porthole and its view, which changed constantly as the Station rotated. Periodically, light flashed blinding bright despite the filters that betrayed their presence in sudden dimming.

  Renny lay on the thin carpet, his head on his paws, staring at Hannoken, who was standing in the room’s doorway, one hand on the frame, the other scratching at his scalp. The way the thick, grey hair resisted his fingers suggested the use of a stiffening agent. Hannoken was saying, “It’s yours while you’re here. It’s a little roomier than most, but our people have desks in their offices. They usually need only enough room for a bed.”

  “I don’t need that much,” said Donna Rose. Stubby legs had been welded to the trough’s rounded bottom to keep it from rocking, but still she stepped carefully onto the surface of the rich soil. Her roots unfurled and sank into the dirt. She uncoiled her leaves and spread them unselfconsciously to the light coming from the overheads and through the porthole.

  Frederick smiled when he realized that Hannoken was trying to pretend he did not notice the femininity of her form. Yet the Station Director’s sidelong glances were hardly subtle.

  Donna Rose sighed contentedly. “Nice,” she said. “There wasn’t even sand on the way.”

  “I’m okay too,” said Renny. “A patch of floor, a dish of water, a bone. That’s all I need.”

  Hannoken seemed startled for a moment. “I’d take you into my own room, but it’s a standard. If you want one of your own…”

  “Uh-uh.” The German Shepherd’s tail thumped the floor. “I’m used to Freddy now.”

  Hannoken looked faintly hurt as he handed Frederick an electronic keycard. He was, after all, the dog’s “father” in as real a sense as ever actual parenthood could provide. He had made Renny what he was, given him his intelligence, and Frederick thought he could not help but feel that the dog owed him some loyalty. And if anyone suggested that his unwillingness to come to Earth to help Renny had amounted to abandonment, had forfeited the loyalty he wished to see, he would have seemed surprised.

  “You can lock up if you wish. Some do.” Hannoken dismissed his hurt and Renny’s lack of loyalty with a blithe wave of one hand. “I don’t bother. And now, let’s get you to the dining area. You can have a bite, meet a few people.”

  Donna Rose reluctantly began to extricate herself from her trough. Renny sighed and got to his feet. Frederick nodded, and Hannoken opened the room’s door to reveal the unbroken pastels of the corridor walls. The dining hall and many of the Station’s offices, he said, were near the Station’s rim, where near-Earth-normal gees kept food on plates and papers on desks. The communications and control center was at one end of the Station, near the axis, where the lack of gees minimized fatigue and the equipment could be near the antennae.

  He paused where two open doors faced each other across the corridor. The rooms beyond both held tables, comfortable looking chairs, computer screens and keyboards; one held as well a pool table and a rack of cues. “The game room,” said Hannoken, gesturing. “We have over three hundred people here. It gets used a lot.” He pointed at the other door. “So does the library.” No one was in sight in either room at the moment, although creaks and clicks suggested that if they were to enter and turn a corner or go around a rack of shelves, they would find…

  The sounds of moving air and distant people, of quiet machineries and flexing metal, kept them company as they moved. They passed doorways and cross-corridors that Hannoken said led to laboratories, workshops, storerooms, and maintenance areas. They nodded at those members of the Station’s complement they happened to see at work or in the corridor. They passed by the elevators that offered access to the smaller interior decks. What equipment was visible, much as Frederick had expected, was almost all mechanical. There were very few bioform devices in sight.

  “We can’t have them,” said Hannoken. “If we get hit by something—and that’s always a possibility—a mechanical or electronic gadget will keep right on working. At worst, it will work again as soon as we plug the hole, restore the power, and replace the air. A bioform would be dead. If we depended on bioforms, so would we. We have enough food and oxygen in storage to last us, if necessary, until new crops can grow.”

  The Station’s corridors had been arranged to strike the eye as level. Only those that paralleled the Station’s axis ran long and straight. Those that circled the axis, following the curve of the Station’s skin, jigged and jogged and bent, never offering a view so long as to reveal the skin-curve. The result was an illusion, a sense that one was in a building much like any building on Earth, even though, Frederick knew, here one could lose weight simply by riding an elevator closer to the Station’s axis.

  The illusion shattered when they entered the dining hall. This room was so large that its floor, the inner surface of the Station’s hull, showed a disconcertingly visible curve, rising in the distance. The tables and chairs and people in it seemed, for just an instant, distorted as in a fun-house mirror. But the familiar odors of food and bodies, the sounds of voices and cutlery on china, the vision of long rows of snackbushes and conventional crop plants, of tomato, lettuce, onion, pepper, carrot, cabbage, and broccoli plants, of herbs and flowers—even a gengineered amaryllis or two with their face-like blossoms—all growing in knee-high planters stretched along the walls and extended through the room as dividers, all quickly restored the sense of the familiar.

  “Go on,” said Hannoken. “You can find your own way around here. We can talk some more later on. I’ve got to get back to…” As if to underline his words, a soft chime issued from a communicator grill set in the wall beside the door to the dining hall, and then a feminine voice: “Doctor Hannoken?”

  “On the way,” he said, and he was gone.

  Faces turned their way. Conversation and clatter halted. Someone said, “A bot!” There were scattered frowns, more smiles, a “Haven’t seen one of them since I came up here,” a “Visitors? Or refugees?” And a watchful silence, until Renny walked up to the nearest occupied table, stood on his hind legs to put his forepaws on the table edge, sniffed, and said, “How do we get something to eat around here?”

  The table’s occupants were an older man and two young women, his skin as dark as their hair, his hair a spring-coiled cap, tight and grizzled. One woman was a little taller than the other, whose Mediterranean heritage showed in larger bosom and darker, honeyed skin. All three were wearing patterned coveralls. When Frederick looked around the room, he realized that people here seemed to wear whatever they liked. There was no suggestion of Station or job uniform, other than the white labcoats worn by a few. Certainly there were no blue coveralls or gear emblems.

  The women at the table Renny had addressed smiled at the dog. The man laughed and said, “I will be damned. Corlynn? Show them where the food is? And then bring them back here.” Then he held out one hand, accepted the paw Renny offered in exchange, shook, and said, “I’m Walt Massaba. Security.”

  * * * *

  Frederick was sipping at a cup of tea and watching the room. The word had spread. More people had come into the dining hall while they were eating, and food did not seem to be more than an excuse. Hands held small snacks and beverages, yes, but the eyes kept converging on the table that held the security chief, his companions, and the Station’s newest visitors. The room was not silent, but softly abuzz with conversation and speculation.

  If he had
remembered how to smile, he might have. The eyes kept sliding past him to settle on Donna Rose and Renny. There were twitches as if people wished to come to them, introduce themselves, ask questions, but did not quite dare as long as they were with Massaba. The security chief was, after all, the Station’s voice of discipline and control, and while Frederick detected no hint of official repression, the Station’s people did show a definite reserve.

  Frederick was telling Massaba about the antipathies that had prompted him to send Renny and Donna Rose to space, and Massaba was listening intently, when two men approached the table. Their manner was diffident, tentative, though both had the muscles of manual workers. One had a face plentifully adorned with scars, the pocks of ancient acne, the lines of fights, the broken blood vessels of too many drinking bouts. The other’s face was almost childishly smooth. Side by side, they hovered, staring in turn at Donna Rose, Renny, and Frederick.

  Walt Massaba’s female companions, Corlynn and the shorter Tobe, pushed their coffee cups toward the center of the table and looked watchful. Frederick realized then that they were not just friends but members of the man’s staff, security agents, keepers of the peace, protectors of the Station. The thought that they presumably carried weapons somewhere on their persons relieved him.

  Finally, the smooth-faced stranger spoke: “You gonna send ’em back where they come from, Walt? We got enough trouble with the mechin’ plants, we don’t need ’em walking around.”

  “Cool it, Chuck,” said the scar-faced one.

  “Right,” said the Security chief. “There’s nothing wrong with bots. They’re smart, and they’re good workers. And if they make it up here, we’ll take all we can manage.”