The phone went back on her belt. She continued to stare at the screen, gauging the enemy’s progress. Finally, she said, “We only want the fighters up here now, Doc. You’d better go down now.” She looked at Jackie Thyme. “You too, and stay there this time. You’ll be safe as soon as they seal the doors. The Engineers will never find you.”
“What about…?” Where was Sheila? Was she upstairs? Downstairs?
“We have a few minutes,” said Narcissus Joy. “Don’t worry. We’ll send all the noncombatants down.”
Voices rang in the halls. Feet sounded in the hallway outside the apartment. Shasta Lou entered the room, followed by two bots carrying bushel baskets full of what looked like large fruits and seed pods. “And you?” asked Sam.
“You’re the rear guard,” said Jackie Thyme. “I…”
“No. You’re too young.” Narcissus Joy gave them both a mirthless, toothy grin.
“And so are you,” said Shasta Lou. She was pointing to show the other bots where to set their burdens. “Get out of here. Go with them.”
“We’ve got a war to fight.”
“I can sell myself just as dearly as you can. And a lot more dearly than any mechin’ Engineer. And we only need one of us at a window.”
When Narcissus Joy finally and reluctantly nodded, Shasta Lou turned to Sam and Jackie Thyme. “See?” she said. “She developed the botbirds herself. Others did these.” She held up one of the seed pods, brown and patterned with lines of small bumps. “Grenades. Mother Nature already had small ones, for spreading seeds. They beefed them up and grew them right here.”
A cry of alarm, echoing from another room, brought their attention to the window. Forgetting for a moment the risks posed by the snipers, they looked out and saw, kneeling on the sidewalk across the street, a missile-man. The streak of smoke and the explosion downstairs seemed to be simultaneous.
The building shook. There was the groan of stressed masonry, the rattle of falling walls and ceilings, the screams of the wounded and the dying. Sam prayed that Sheila was safe in the basement shelter, or higher in the building and on her way to safety, anywhere except within reach of the explosion.
Shasta Lou picked up a fruit whose pink and purple skin bore an unwholesome sheen. “And gas bombs,” she said. “It will cost them a lot to get into this building. Now go! Before they seal the shelter.”
They went, all three, leaving Shasta Lou to throw her grenades and gas bombs at the Engineers. In the hall they joined a steady flow of others toward the basement. An elevator door hissed open, and two bots elbowed them aside. They were carrying what seemed to Sam no more than a large plant, rooted in an oversized pot, and he wondered why they were bothering with their pets at this late moment. But other bots stepped out of the way, clearing an ample path into the elevator, and Jackie Thyme whispered an awed, “The Eldest! She wouldn’t leave until the last minute!”
“Let’s take the stairs,” said Sam. That word was enough to make him realize that he had finally seen one of the ancestral bots. It was as large as any member of the current generation, but it was legless, armless, more profusely leaved, its bulb embedded in the soil, its head a massive flower. Scent accompanied it, and a sense of mingled panic and resolve.
Chapter Thirteen
“Someone,” said Alvar Hannoken. He was standing before the broad picture window in his office, facing outward, his hands clasped behind his back. His fingers worked obsessively at a twist of leaves he had taken from the kudzu plant beside him; they were green with plant juice. From time to time his elongated, goat-like feet shifted restlessly on the carpeted floor. He was as frustrated as Frederick. “Someone doesn’t want you talking to anyone at BRA. You can’t call your boss. You can’t call your friend. Not at the office. Not at home. You can’t even call BRA employees you don’t know, and no one else here can call for you.”
“It’s like they built a wall between you and them,” growled Renny. His tail thumped the floor.
Frederick Suida sat backwards on a long-legged stool the Probe Station Director had produced from a cupboard in his office wall. His arms were crossed on its back-rest, his chin propped on his forearms, and his eyes fixed morosely on the room’s blank veedo screen. Two steps away, Donna Rose stared worriedly at his back. Neither spoke.
“Between us and them,” said Hannoken. “Probe Station can’t get through to BRA. No other station can get through unless it’s on their own business. If we ask them to call for us, boom! the circuits go out. Or so StarBell tells us.”
“They’re wired right into the computers,” said Lois McAlois. She was in her wheelchair, as she was whenever she ventured out of the low-gee zones in which her stump-legged body functioned most efficiently. One hand rested on Renny’s back, just behind the collar. “They have to be,” she added. “There’s no other way they could stop us every time.”
Renny pointed his nose at Frederick, jerking it upward almost as if he were trying to lift him out of his depression. “You’re not doing any good whining about it.” He added a small whimper as if to show them what he meant. “Maybe there’s a reason, and we’ll find out in due time. In the meantime, give Freddy something better to stare at than a blank wall. Turn on the news.”
Hannoken pivoted on one foot to look at Frederick, who continued to stare blindly at the empty screen. He did not seem to have heard a word, but still Hannoken said, “Athena, veedo on, news.”
The picture that came to life before them showed an aerial view of: an apartment building most of whose windows had been blocked on the inside; brief openings and arms hurling round objects that promptly vanished in clouds of vapor and shrapnel; snipers firing from windows across a street; pavement littered with blue-clad bodies; Engineers crouching behind shards of floater bubble to fire anti-tank missiles from shoulder-mounted launchers; gaping holes where missiles had penetrated walls; the shattered glass of the apartment building’s main entrance. Close-ups added detail: the arms that threw what could only be grenades were green; the snipers wore the same blue as the bodies in the street, with patches and medallions and ear ornaments that proclaimed their allegiance to the Engineers; within the holes the missiles had blasted were green bodies, red blood, wreckage. The sound was rattle and boom and shriek, the sound of gunfire and explosions and painful dying.
From time to time, the veedo showed them a glimpse of media Bioblimps, each one marked with the logo of a different network. The sky beyond was the blue of a summer day, flocked with small clouds, pierced by climbing jets, pocked by distant Bioblimps and floaters. It was nature’s disdain for human folly.
There was no hint of any official attempt to quell the violence. No police. No National Guard. The Engineers seemed far too free to do whatever they wished.
“Where’s the Army?” asked Renny. “Or the Marines?” They were the traditional back-ups when local forces proved inadequate to the task of restoring order, but there was no sign of them either.
“Most of their tanks are dead,” said Hannoken. “There are apparently a lot of Engineers and sympathizers in the armed forces, and they’ve bombed the farms and depots, turned the tanks on each other, poisoned the birds. We don’t even have a Navy anymore. They scuttled the blowfish subs.”
“They’re disarming their enemy,” said Lois, shaking her head. “They’re not planning to stop with…”
“I know that building,” said Donna Rose.
The others’ words had not been enough to penetrate Frederick’s depression. The veedo picture, though he was staring directly at it, had not even made him blink. But the pain in her voice, which was much like that the slaughter at the park had elicited, made him turn and ask, “What is it?”
She said nothing. She did not need to, for the newscaster finally spoke. “The Engineers,” he said, his voice sounding awed, excited, and alarmed together. “The Engineers seem to have
declared war on what they consider the enemies of civilization. The building you see on your veedo is owned and occupied by white-collar botanicals. As you can see, they are offering considerable resistance.”
The view zoomed in on the street just as a pair of round objects arced from a fourth-floor window toward the surface of the street. They were clearly vegetable in origin. “Grenades,” said the newscaster. “One sprays seeds with lethal force.” The close-up showed a knobby brown seedcase as it disappeared with a sharp bang. Immediately, the screen filled with a noxious looking fruit through whose split side a misty vapor was billowing. “The other emits a poisonous gas.”
Yet the bodies in the street must have accumulated in the first few moments of the bots’ return fire. Even a strong arm could not throw the grenades far, and it was not difficult for the Engineers to stay out of range, remaining within the facing buildings, gathering toward the ends of the block. Meanwhile, their guns and missiles continued to batter at the building, punching aside the barriers that blocked the windows, pruning away the arms that hurled the explosive fruit, blowing ever-larger holes in the street-level walls.
The newscaster sounded fearful when he spoke again: “There is little doubt of what the Engineers will do when the resistance to their attack ends. They will search out every botanical they can find and…” Slowly, with the rhythm of a dirge, the veedo screen pulsed with images taken from the recent past, images that had, till now, too rarely reached the news: killing at the park, raping greenskins in an alley, butchering Roachsters and litterbugs, chasing, hacking, burning… “And for that,” he said. His in-drawn breath was clearly audible. “For that display of anti-Engineer propaganda, I am surely doomed.”
He fell silent. In tribute to his courage, the audience in Hannoken’s office said nothing to break the speechless quiet. They could only watch as…
The screen flickered, and a new voice spoke, jovially avuncular: “We shouldn’t be alarmists, folks. The Engineers say they represent the will of the people, and I can’t believe the people could be that destructive. The Engineers are single-minded, but they’re not monomaniacs! Surely they know how essential gengineering is to modern society, and… Why look! The firing is dying down already.”
Nothing moved in the building’s windows. The snipers were falling silent. The missile-men were setting down their launchers, standing, stretching. No one was making any move to cross the street and invade the bots’ ravaged preserve.
The new voice resumed: “Only a few of the bots in the building were actively resisting the will of the people, as interpreted by the Engineers. They have given up now, and all that remains to be done is to round them up and bring them out for trial. The rest of the bots in there are surely innocent. They will be left unharmed. Just watch.”
The veedo screen showed three figures rounding the corner of the block. Two of them were carrying a heavy crate in a sling. The third was gesturing, pointing toward the nearest missile-man, stopping his porters beside the launcher, removing a pair of knob-headed, phallic missiles. When the trio moved on, the missile-man loaded his launcher and knelt, awaiting the command to fire.
That command came as soon as every missile-man was armed with the new missiles. Together then, simultaneously, they fired. The missiles smoked across the street and into broken doorways and windows. The ground floor of the bots’ apartment building erupted with smoke and flame.
“Incendiaries!” Hannoken’s voice was shocked.
The newscaster who had replaced the alarmist said nothing at all.
The missile-men reloaded and fired again, this time at the third-floor windows. Minutes later, the entire building was an inferno in which nothing could possibly be alive. Flaming lengths of honeysuckle vine were falling from the walls, landing in the street and even on the doorsteps of those buildings that had harbored the Engineer snipers.
The crackling sounds of burning wood and the roar of the flames themselves covered any special sounds that burning flesh might make, but the smoke from the fire had a greasy look to it. “I’ll bet it stinks,” said Renny.
Only then did the sound of sirens come over the veedo’s speaker.
Only then was there any sign that society recognized any responsibility to protect its members from catastrophe. Sadly, “catastrophe” did not seem to include what society, through its members, could do to itself. Only fire, and the danger that the flames might spread to other buildings.
The fire trucks arrived, immense, walking water bladders from which grew muscular hoses; their ancestors had once been elephants. A few police Roachsters accompanied them. Even though there seemed no attempt to pursue the Engineers, the latter melted away, around corners and into alleys. The camera followed them as they regrouped a block away, and then as they began marching down the street.
“Where are they going?” asked Lois McAlois.
“Oh, no,” said Donna Rose.
Frederick sighed and rested his forehead on his arms where they crossed his seat-back. “The park,” he said. “That’s the way to the park. Again.”
The view on the screen lifted to show several logoed media Bioblimps, all following the parade. No one, not even on the veedo, said a word until Hannoken finally broke the silence with, “Athena, com center.”
The voice that answered sounded shaky. “Yes, Director?”
“You were watching?”
“Yes, sir.” There was no hesitation, no question of what he meant.
“What’s happening elsewhere? Have they really stopped the news embargo?”
“Here’s the feed.”
The veedo flickered, showing other cities in their own land: nothing so bad, just riots and small massacres. But elsewhere: In Europe, a bot ghetto lay in ruins while military bombers circled overhead, their booming cries the sounds of demented, bass gulls. In England and Italy, green figures dangled from lamp-posts. In Asia, Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, Seoul, and Ulan-Bator were all aflame.
Frederick could not stand it. He left his perch so abruptly that the stool toppled. He turned off the veedo set. The room was suddenly dominated by Renny’s panting, Donna Rose’s sobs, Alvar Hannoken’s and Lois McAlois’s and his own harshly syncopated gasps.
For long moments no one spoke. Hannoken stamped one black-stockinged foot as if he had the polished hooves of the goats he had modeled his legs on. He turned once more toward his window as if he could indeed stare directly into space, as if there were no glass and no mirrors between him and the void. He reached toward one side of the window’s frame, touched a control, and the distant radio telescope began to drift toward one side. He had turned off the mechanism that kept the outside mirrors tracking a stable view. Now the rotation of the Station showed. Earth rolled into sight. He and the others stared at the world that had given them all birth, down at chaos and pain and death.
As abruptly as Frederick had knocked over his stool, Hannoken spun on one foot, stepped to the wall, and opened his liquour cache. He grabbed a bottle and glasses. He poured. “Here,” he said. “It’s my only single-malt Scotch, but…”
Frederick sipped and choked. “No water?”
Hannoken shook his head. “No. Never. ‘Whiskey’ comes from the Gaelic, you know. ‘Uisgebeatha.’ ‘The water of life.’ And life…” He paused. He lifted his glass as if in a toast. He tossed its amber contents into his throat as if he were a Russian with a tumbler full of vodka. “We’ll have to do something,” he said. “I wish I knew what.”
Lois McAlois imitated the Station Director’s gesture. So, with a skeptical expression, did Frederick; this time he managed not to choke. “We have to get them up here,” he said. No one asked him who he meant. “As many as we can.”
Hannoken nodded jerkily. “I’ll talk to the other station directors. See how many that is. And what else we can do.” Setting his glass on his desk, he walked out of the ro
om.
* * * *
Donna Rose was standing beside the trough of soil that was her bed. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest, her head bowed, her blossoms awash in sunlight.
Frederick stood beside her, staring at the limited view of the universe that their porthole provided. The sun, its brilliant fire softened by filters, filled most of the glass, and the stars were invisible, but still there was a sense of vast black distance beyond.
He was thinking: His first glimpse of the Engineers, the very day Tom Cross had trundled him down the road and into the city, had revealed them as greedy, short-sighted, destructive, violent. He and Tom had come upon them barbecuing litterbugs, and they had seen him, the pig from under the sink, as no more than a second course. He and Tom had only just escaped.
Later, years later, other Engineers had slaughtered Tom, Tom’s wife, his own wife, and more. The public’s horrified reaction had helped get Frederick his human body. But now? He shook his head silently. The public was no longer horrified by Engineer atrocities. It joined in. Reactionaries persecuted sentient genimals such as Renny. Sympathizers carried weapons to the city park and helped to slaughter bots, or they looked aside when Engineer troops marched on an apartment building. Anyone who objected, like that newscaster who had dared to forecast a massacre, was silenced.
Donna Rose must have been having similar thoughts, for her shoulders shook and a small moan escaped her lips. Frederick reached out and laid one hand on her shoulder. He squeezed. She turned. Her arms went around his chest, desperately constricting. Her tears soaked his coverall and were warm upon his skin.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 82