Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “The Engineers,” said Frederick quietly, though he would have been surprised if Michaels were not aware of what was happening on Earth.

  “Yes.” The physicist nodded his head. His expression was sympathetic, his tone wry. “But we would like to be able to test such a drive and get word about the results back. If we can’t know whether it works, using a tunneling drive to flee the Engineers might amount to no more than an expensive way to commit suicide.”

  “Huh!” Renny’s exclamation was nearly a woof. “Staying within their reach might be cheaper, but it would still be suicide.”

  “It can’t be that bad, can it?” Director Hannoken’s face and voice both seemed skeptical, and Frederick remembered what he had read of history: In the twentieth century, when the German Nazis had been slaughtering Jews and other minorities by the millions, the world had refused to admit that such things could happen. Only when the death camps had been liberated by opposing troops had the evidence become inescapable. And before another generation was past, scholars had been writing books that claimed to prove that the death camps were only propaganda: There had been no poison-gas “showers,” no ovens, no mass shootings, no mass graves, no multiple decimations—decimation meant the death of one in ten, and fewer than that had survived—of the innocent.

  The news reports, he thought, were clear enough. No one would fake veedo footage such as that which had shown the attack on Donna Rose’s dorm in the city park. And Hannoken had said the Station got the news, had offered her sanctuary when Frederick called her a refugee, had suggested that more bots might seek freedom in the sky. Walt Massaba had indicated that they would be made welcome to the extent that the Station—perhaps even all the stations in orbit around the planet—had the room and resources to support them, and surely his words had been directed by his boss.

  Had Hannoken forgotten? Or did he think that what was going on on Earth was nothing more than the sort of persecution American blacks had endured for more than a century after the Civil War? Not the program of extermination Renny had just suggested?

  Chapter Ten

  Alice Belle and her two friends were a cluster of green on the side of the street, staring across the stream of Roachsters, Hoppers, and Armadons, Macks and Bernies and coveralled pedestrians that was the city’s traffic. For her that green was the green of long leaves coiled around her torso. For the Nickers, it was the green of genetically modified skin. For all three, it was the green of chlorophyll, the green of grass and tree that stand unmoving while the noisy tides of animal life and conflict flow past. Brighter colors entered the picture with Alice Belle’s blossoms, Sheila Nickers’ feathered scalp and ornamented cheek and jaw bones, both her and her husband’s patterned clothing.

  “There it is.” Alice Belle gestured toward the building across the way.

  There was nothing about the building’s exterior to distinguish it except that it bore no floater blisters and on its roof there was a small greenhouse. It did not have, as some buildings did, the slowly pulsing green bulge upon its roof that was a Bellows, part plant, part animal, a lung-like supplier of warmed or cooled, dried or moistened air. Central heating remained, but mechanical air-conditioning was an extinct luxury.

  Like many of the city’s buildings, it was an old structure of reinforced concrete. Once its window openings had been sealed with glass against the outside air. Many decades ago, the seals had been broken and more traditional windows had been installed, ones that could be opened to permit cooling cross-breezes or closed to conserve heat. The result was a gridwork of window frames and sills to which clung honeysuckle vines enough to add a layer of cooling shade.

  “I like it already,” said Sheila Nickers. “It looks like home.” Many of the windows were closed off by louvered grills, but she was able to point at one, another, another, that were not. The lighting that glowed within was far brighter than in most of the city’s apartments.

  Three concrete steps led up to a flagstone platform and the building’s entrance, a pair of high glass doors. Mounted above and behind the doors was a camera. Beyond them sat a pair of computers, one bioform rooted in a pot and one electronic device. “Image recognizers,” said Alice Belle as she stepped into the camera’s field of view. “They back each other up. The bioform’s immune to power failures, the other one to poisons or diseases. If they both fail, steel shutters fall down to cover the glass.”

  Sam Nickers gave the bot a sidelong glance. Paranoia? But what had happened to them, to him and Sheila? What had happened to those bots who lived in the dormitory in the park? Were similar outrages happening elsewhere, in other cities, other nations? Disquieting rumors suggested that the news reports of violence were being downplayed, and that some outrages were being hushed up entirely.

  He looked up at the slot that held the shutters and thought the steel looked thick enough to stop bare-handed rioters but not the impact of even a small Mack truck. But he said nothing as the doors’ lock clicked, Alice Belle pushed, and they entered. “We’ll give them a look at you later on,” she was saying. “The bioform will need a sniff as well.”

  The entranceway smelled of soil and growing things, and a few feet past the doors the flagstones gave way to bare dirt. Alice Belle removed her shoes. “You don’t have to,” she said. “But we do like the feel of dirt on our feet.”

  “So do we,” said Sheila, and she and Sam followed suit. “Though we don’t get many chances.”

  To himself alone, Sam smiled. He hadn’t gone barefoot on bare dirt since he had been a sprout. He remembered that the luxuriously cool feel of soil on his feet had been marred by the awkward, sometimes sharp projections of twigs and rocks. When he realized that such things were nearly absent from the soil that covered this building’s floors, he let his smile reach his face.

  “Your place will be on the third floor.” An elevator took them there, and Alice Belle led them along corridors whose doors, many of them open, exposed apartments whose carpets of soil swelled into mounds beneath bright lights. Honeysuckle vines crept over the sills of windows, both those open to the outdoor light and those blocked by louvers, and rooted in the soil. In some of the rooms they passed, mist was spraying from overhead pipes. A resident, stepping slowly across her apartment’s floor while her roots sifted through the soil like fingers searching through piles of coins, caught Sam’s eye. He paused to watch, and when he saw her roots heave a pebble to the surface, her green torso bend, and her hand pitch the small stone out the window, he understood why the soil was so soft and fine.

  Alice Belle and Sheila retraced their steps to join him at the door. “Narcissus Joy,” said Alice Belle. “She works in our gengineering lab.”

  A trio of bees hummed above Narcissus Joy’s scalp blossoms, creamy white with orange rims. She straightened, looked toward her visitors, and said, “Our new neighbors. May I help you?”

  “They’re curious,” said Alice Belle. “They’ve never been here. No humans have. It’s all new to them.”

  “Why do you…?” asked Sam with a gesture toward Narcissus Joy’s roots and the trail of sifted earth behind her.

  “There’s no need, really,” the bot said gently. “It’s a way to think, to meditate.”

  “Gengineering?” asked Sheila.

  Narcissus Joy swung to point toward the window. “You see the honeysuckle? It’s as old as our kind, and the roots interconnect, everywhere. We use them as our grapevine, a way to communicate. And the humans think the vines are a nuisance.”

  “BRA keeps releasing viruses to destroy them,” said Alice Belle.

  “And it’s a full-time job designing the genefixes to keep the vines alive. We need them badly. We depend on them.”

  “Most people,” said Alice Belle. “They think we’re barely more than walking plants. Janitors and other menials.”

  “We don’t,” said Sheila, aiming her voi
ce toward the gengineer. “We know Alice Belle, and I’d heard that some of you were scientists. But I’ve never met a botanical gengineer.”

  “We don’t parade our higher talents. And we do try to keep that one fairly quiet. We don’t apply for BRA licenses and permits. But our gengineers are good, and we have several labs.”

  “There’s one in this building?” asked Sam.

  Alice Belle and Narcissus Joy both nodded. A few minutes later the Nickers were standing in the door of another apartment. “Yours,” said Alice Belle. She gestured toward the workers who were trimming back the honeysuckle around the windows. “You won’t be able to use the vines, so…” Other workers were raking the apartment’s soil level and covering it with a conventional, fabric carpet. “And you can’t root.” She reached overhead to check a valve on a pipe above the doorway. “Your furniture can’t stand the rain we make.”

  The workers in the apartment might have been menial bots brought in from outside the building. They might have been residents, doing a stint of “community service.” There was no way to tell, for they wore no uniforms and no identifying badges like the patches many humans wore on their coveralls. The green leaves that curled around their torsoes were all the clothing they needed other than belts and aprons for their tools.

  The soil beneath the carpet gave the apartment’s floor the softness of a well-kept lawn. Sheila discovered this first and, grinning, invited her husband to join her in a little dance that wound up near one of the room’s windows. Sam took the opportunity to peer outside and immediately said, “Look.” They were above and to the left of what could only be the building’s service entrance. A large Mack had backed a cargo trailer against the lip of a loading dock, and a crew of bots were moving familiar furniture into the building. These bots wore tunics that swung as if they were made of some heavy fabric; Sam supposed they must need the protection against the scrapes and bruises that must be a mover’s occupational hazards. Their human supervisor was visible in the Mack’s cab, arms folded over a prodigious paunch, his chin tucked into the top of his chest, a billed cap pulled down over his eyes.

  * * * *

  “We were followed.”

  The apartment was now as nearly identical as it could be to the one the Nickers had been forced to leave. The living room had its lounges and low table, its veedo and potted plants. The kitchen had its cupboards filled with dishes, pots, pans, and small appliances. The bedroom had bed and dressers and a closet full of clothes. There were pictures on the walls. There were no birds; they had been released, since the new apartment had no screens and the Nickers had not wished to keep them caged.

  The movers were finished, and their chief, a battered looking bot whose arms and legs were thick with muscle, was holding an electronic invoice deck. She spoke as Sam Nickers inserted his niddic into the deck’s slot.

  “Followed?”

  “Yeah.” She pressed a button, and her deck spat Sam’s card back at him. He caught it deftly. “There was a couple of Engineers outside the building. One of ’em stayed there. The other one caught a cab. He was watchin’ us unload.”

  When she pointed one thick hand toward the window, Sheila Nickers followed the gesture with her feet. After a moment of scanning the sidewalk opposite, she said, “He’s still there.” Sam joined her at the window and soon spotted the distinctive blue coverall in the shadows at the mouth of an alley. He could make out no distinctive glint of metallic ornaments—of earrings, patches, or pins—though the honeysuckle that choked the alley behind the lurker was plain to see.

  When they turned away from the window, the movers were gone, but Alice Belle was still there. In the doorway behind her stood another bot. Sam thought he recognized her as Narcissus Joy, the gengineer. With her was another whose scalp blossoms were a pale blue with yellow centers.

  “It’s no secret,” said Alice Belle. “We can’t hide the fact that this building is full of bots, and we’ve never tried.”

  “But…” said the stranger, staring at the Nickers.

  “Shasta Lou,” said Narcissus Joy by way of introduction.

  “But,” said Shasta Lou. “Now it holds humans too, even if they are greenskins, and that may provoke the Engineers more than ever.”

  “Why?” asked Alice Belle. “Bots and humans mingle all the time, on the streets, on the job…”

  “But not like this. And they hate the thought of fraternization. Worse yet, they’re bound to build unfounded fantasies. Of conspiracies, miscegenation, perhaps even worse.”

  Sadly, wishing that he did not feel forced to agree, Sam nodded his head. “They are,” he said. “They’re like the ancient Ku Klux Klanners.” When Shasta Lou and Narcissus Joy both looked puzzled, he added, “Humans too. Whites. They thought of blacks in just that way.”

  Shasta Lou’s voice was quiet. “What did they do?”

  “Jailed them on slight excuse. Hung them. Shot them. Burned them, and their homes.” He paused, turned toward the window, and said reflectively, “But they weren’t the worst.”

  “Who was?”

  Sam was silent, trembling as he realized the similarity of this conversation to the last one he and Sheila had had with Lillian Bojemoy, the principal of their school, when she had told them… But Sheila seemed oblivious. “The Nazis,” she said. “They slaughtered Jews. And others. Anyone they didn’t like. And they did it very efficiently. They killed millions.”

  “That’s what we are,” said Sam when he was able to speak again. His voice was bitter. “Bots and greenskins. Niggers and kikes. Wops and wogs and gooks.”

  All three of the bots were shuddering, even though he had said nothing they did not already feel in their souls.

  * * * *

  The lurker near the building’s loading dock was still there the next day, or another Engineer much like the first. No one supposed that Engineers needed no sleep, or that they were not sane enough to work in shifts.

  The day after that, a pair of Engineers appeared across the street from the building’s main entrance. Others took up positions where they could watch the single door that opened from the basement onto a side street, the end of the fire escape, the second-story sundeck that was never used. Two even appeared on the roof of the building across the alley to the rear, as if that too were a potential escape route.

  But they did nothing. They did not interfere with the comings and goings of the building’s residents. They waved no signs. They did not heckle. They simply watched, though they could not see past the doorways and windows. Certainly, they could not see the Nickers settling into their new apartment, accepted by beings who were like them in color yet as unlike them in basic design as it was possible to be and still share genes, free of the prejudice that had plagued them in the outside world. Nor could they see Alice Belle bringing up the possibility that the Nickers might work as teachers in the building’s school, nor the greenskins’ eager response and the ensuing meetings with elder bots and teachers, nor their introduction to a classroom unlike any they had ever seen before.

  The children were old enough to be free of the nursery’s soil, and they were as active as the young of any species. Like kittens or puppies, they tumbled and wrestled and tangled in the honeysuckle vines that entered the room through every window opening. Like calves or colts, they kicked and galloped and rolled on the ground. Like young monkeys, apes, or humans, they poked and pried inquisitively at anything that seemed pokable or priable. Like flowers, they ignored the bees that wandered through the room.

  They ignored also the opening of the classroom door. Only when their teacher, an older bot whose scalp blossoms were a deep honey color, cleared her throat did the movement and the noise stop. Then, as the children took their places in orderly rows and columns, she crossed the room to a still-blaring veedo unit, turned toward the class, said, “The knobs?” caught what some anonymous han
d tossed her way, put the veedo’s knobs back in place, and eliminated the last source of noise.

  The Nickers still stood in the doorway, watching, smiling, recognizing familiar dynamics, appreciating the evidence of a teacher whose control of her class, while not absolute—as it should never be—was certainly unquestioned. Her name was Mary Gold.

  “There,” she said at last. “My class. Come in and meet them, and then we’ll have a lesson to show you how we do it.” Her face and tone still carried some of the skepticism she had voiced earlier. How, she had asked, could humans possibly teach her students anything at all? Or even help in the teaching process? The short bot lives dictated a pace of learning that a human could never match, neither as student nor as teacher, and the mode of that learning must be forever inaccessible to those who had no roots.

  The Nickers had not understood, and Mary Gold had been unwilling to explain in words. “I will show you,” she had said. “And then you will go find someplace else to meddle.”

  Now, a dogged determination plain upon her face, she turned abruptly to her class and said, “Roots out, now.” Some of the students groaned in protest. A few looked apprehensive, as if they dreaded what was coming. But all obeyed, and very shortly all were rooted in the room’s floor of soil.

  Mary Gold unfurled her roots as well. As they penetrated the soil, she said, “I mesh my roots with those of the honeysuckle. So do they. Then I select the lesson, some part of what I know, and pass it to the students. The honeysuckle roots link our nervous systems together, and the knowledge flows from my brain to theirs.”

  Sheila Nickers asked, “Can you link directly to them, without the honeysuckle?”

  “Just to one or two. The vine lets me work with a whole class at once.”

  Sam breathed a sigh. “Direct transfer,” he murmured to his wife. “We’ve wished for that for ages. Painless education.”