The campus lay quiet, its surrounding fence dimly visible in the light shed by the nearest fires and spilled from the pools of orange cast by sodium-vapor lamps mounted on scattered poles. Once there had been more such lights in lines that traced the campus’s roads and walkways but replacements for broken bulbs had been unavailable for many months. Once perhaps there had also been phosphorescent shrubs and hedges, but if so the Engineers had exterminated them. They had left intact the shadows from which classrooms and dormitories loomed, windows reflecting sparks, their red-brick sides hulking ominously.
Sam was surprised when Narcissus Joy poked a finger into one end of a gas grenade and capped the resulting hole with a thumb. “They don’t have to explode,” she murmured quietly. “Watch…” He and Jackie Thyme followed her as she approached a makeshift tent and carefully, for just a moment, vented gas over each sleeping face. Around them, other bots were doing the same. “They won’t wake up till morning,” she said, still murmuring.
There were sentinels around the campus, patrolling just within the fence. To silence them, the bots ringed the campus just beyond the reach of the lights and, nearly simultaneously, lobbed gas grenades to burst with emphatic pops near their feet. As soon as the guards had fallen, wirecutters made short work of the fence.
“There’s Chervil Mint.” Sam followed the pointing arm and saw a figure clinging to the honeysuckle vines that covered the side of a classroom building.
Bots headed toward the dorms to wake and free the captive gengineers and lead them too to safety. Unfortunately, not all the guards had been on patrol. Later, Sam would tell himself that they should have known, that they had been luckier than anyone deserved to be. But for all that he was a historian and he had read much of past military actions, he had no actual experience at all of such things.
He was watching a building when someone inside opened a door. Light spilled onto a walkway and revealed a bot in unmistakable detail. Sam swore. There was a cry of alarm, and interior lights flicked on. Guards tumbled out of doors, crying, “It’s bots! Look at ’em! What are they doin’? Stop them! They’re heading for the dorms. It’s a break! Shoot ’em!”
Grenades arced through the darkness overhead and popped. Guards fell. Bots seized their guns. Other guards cried out more loudly, and more guards appeared in windows and doors. As the uproar grew quickly louder, lights came on in the dorms. Bot voices cried out in explanation, announcing freedom, urging haste. Gengineers ran from their buildings clad in coveralls, jeans, pajamas, nothing at all. Bots guided them toward the holes in the fence. Shots rattled against the night. Gengineers, bots, and guards fell, dead or wounded. Loud bangs announced that the shrapnel grenades had been unlimbered. The screams among the guards fell silent as more gas grenades were thrown.
As they withdrew, Sam could see faces at the dormitory windows. They had not rescued everyone, he thought. And of those who had tried to come with them, a few lay still on the ground behind them. So did a few of his companions, the bots. He was glad Sheila had stayed behind.
Was Chervil Mint with them? He hoped so, for she was the one prisoner whose plight had impelled them to come. Who else were they leading to their forest hiding place? Had they saved enough to make the deaths worthwhile? Or would they have done better to leave well enough alone?
At least, he told himself, the gas grenades had silenced all the guards in the end. No one was following them. They would not lead their enemy to the rest of their group.
* * * *
By dawn they were ten kilometers from the campus, hidden in a line of trees between two fields of waist-high corn. Most of the bots had sunk their roots in the earth. The humans, the gengineers they had rescued from the campus prison, were gathered near Sam Nickers as he worked over those wounded bots who had managed to keep up with the flight from the campus. From what he gathered, only the dead had been left behind or abandoned on the way. The rest, if they lived, had made it, though some had had to be carried.
The bots were silent. The gengineers were not. Some of them were cursing the long hike and the prospect of more. Some, the leaner ones, those who had been toughened by forced labor in landfill mines and oil plantations, seemed less worn by the flight. All wanted to know, “What next? Where do we go? Will they pursue us? Capture us again? Punish us? Kill us?”
Sam faced two of the most insistent. They had introduced themselves as Andy Gilman and Jeremy Duncan. “You’re free,” he told them. “For a while, at least. We’re taking you away from the Engineers. To a place where the rest of us are waiting. Where we’ve been hiding, where we’ve been safe so far. We hope we’ll stay that way. But, yes, they’re bound to pursue us. We’ll try to keep them from catching us. And yes, we’ll fight.”
“With what?” asked Duncan. “You just threw those guns away.”
“We had no more ammunition for them.”
“But you could have…”
Nearby, Narcissus Joy was bending over the display screen of a botbird bush. Three of the birds, tethered by their hair-like umbilicals, hovered high above the trees, watching the path the group had followed. “They’re looking for us,” she said. “There are gangs of Engineers on every road.” She moved aside to let Sam, Duncan, and Gilman see the screen. The aerial view showed the landscape like a map, green-turved roads twisting like snakes across the surface between the fields and woods. “The campus is over there.” She pointed toward one edge of the screen. Each road that crossed that edge swarmed with Engineers, milling, running, darting into the brush to either side, clearly looking for signs of their passage.
“It looks like an anthill that someone stirred with a stick,” said Duncan. “They’re not making much progress.”
“They will,” said Sam. “We’ll have to stay off the roads. That’ll slow us down.”
“That’s not just our guards,” said Gilman. “Too many of them. The protestors are after us too.”
The day wore on, and the flood of Engineers searching for them made little progress. But near the end of the afternoon, the botbird screen showed that small groups of Engineers with dogs were appearing ahead of the crowds on each road. Within an hour they had found the greenway the refugees had followed and their movement began to show a sense of direction.
“We can’t wait for dark,” said Narcissus Joy. “We have to go now. And we have to hurry.”
“Through the fields,” said Sam Nickers. “Send a team ahead to gas whoever they find. Watch out for the farmhouses.”
They did what he said, and by the next dawn they were far from their last resting spot. The hills that were their goal were visible ahead, the ground was rising, and the Engineers were still on their track, though they were somewhat further behind than they had been the afternoon before.
“Split up,” said Andy Gilman. “Scatter to give them too many tracks to follow. Give us each a bot for a guide.”
They followed his suggestion, and by noon they were home.
But they were not safe.
As each small group reached the farm, it was greeted with the news, picked up from the honeysuckle that grew everywhere, that the Engineers had not given up when the track they were following had split. Nor had they tried to follow every subtrail. They had split into just five groups, each with a small pack of dogs. Then they had chosen trails as if at random.
“They must,” said Narcissus Joy. “They must have been sure we all were going to the same place.”
“We were,” said Sam Nickers.
“They’ll be here soon.”
“Are we going to fight again?” asked Jackie Thyme.
“We have to,” said Narcissus Joy. “We don’t have anyplace else to go.”
“There’s a road, a greenway, down the hill a kilometer or so,” said Lemon Margaret. “It cuts their path. They’ll have to cross it. And some of us are already there, with gre
nades.”
* * * *
The initial skirmish left dead on both sides of the greenway, and there matters rested for hours. This time there was no basement shelter in which to hide. There was nowhere to go. There was, it seemed, no hope.
“What’s happening?” asked Sam Nickers. He sniffed as if that could tell him what he wanted to know, but all he detected was the scent of greenery. It was the smell of quiet, of peace, with only the aromatic scent of oil tree sap suggesting civilization and its conflicts.
Jackie Thyme roused herself, furled her leaves, and blinked. “If you were a bot,” she said. “You’d know. We’re all plugged into the honeysuckle, and that’s all we’re talking about.”
“So tell us,” said Sheila. She stood beside her husband, her hand gripping his, green on green except on their whitened knuckles. “Let us in on it.”
“They’re waiting,” said Jackie Thyme. “Some of them have turned back. They say they’re going to call for reinforcements, soldiers.”
“What for? Aren’t there enough of them out there now?”
“They say they don’t have enough guns.” Her expression turned distant. “Now someone is saying they don’t need them. They’ve noticed the oil trees. They’re saying…”
As she fell silent, Sam shuddered. He remembered the branch he had once thrown into the fire and how it had burst into flame, even though most of its flammable sap had long since evaporated. How vigorously would a living tree burn, its flesh permeated with that sap? How hot and fast and deadly would the woods around the farm burn? How long did they have?
Chapter Nineteen
Renny lay on the carpeted floor near the Station Director’s desk, his head resting on his crossed wrists, watching. Donna Rose reached toward her daughter, eyes bright with tears. Frederick Suida stood behind her, hands clenching and unclenching.
“No!” Alvar Hannoken’s cry was panicked, desperate. “Don’t touch it, Donna Rose!”
“But it’s my daughter!” She spoke as desperately as he, her tone distraught, her face a grimace of disgust and anger and shame. “We uproot these things!” she said, but she backed up against Frederick, into the arms that grasped her shoulders, away from the pot full of black, moist soil. Behind it, the office’s broad window admitted a flood of sunlight and showed, rather than the usual skeletal radio telescope, the shiny globe of the construction shack, its litter of Q-ships, most of them still under construction, and the fuel depot.
“But it’s the way I want it,” said Hannoken placatingly.
“You shouldn’t do that,” said Frederick.
A small beep and a flashing light on his desk announced an incoming call. “Athena, privacy.” Hannoken turned back toward Donna Rose, ignoring Frederick. “And it was in you. In your genes. I just removed the sentience, the brains. I wanted something more decorative than the kudzu. I…”
“Decorative?” said Frederick, frowning. His hands gripped Donna Rose as comfortingly, as reassuringly as he could. “I suppose it is, but…”
“Freddy!”
He fell silent, remembering that Donna Rose did not want him to intervene. She had told him so earlier, saying Hannoken had gone too far. “He has stolen a piece of me,” she had told him in their quarters, the tips of her leaves twitching convulsively about her chest. “I let him have the tissue sample, but he didn’t ask if he could do that with it. He went too far, Freddy.”
Frederick had remembered how he had felt when he realized what a cruel prank intelligence could be. He had been shaped to be a garbage disposal. Yet some gengineer had chosen to give him brains he could never use except to go mad from boredom and frustration. “It must feel like rape.”
“No.” She had shaken her head. “No, not like that. Sex isn’t quite so personal for us. But still…” He had thought then of pollen and wind and bees and thought he understood. “More like a burglar, perhaps?”
The purple-flowered kudzu was gone now, replaced by the scion Hannoken had grown from Donna Rose’s tissue sample. That child of her flesh was over half a meter high now. Its central stem was thick and pale, much like Donna Rose’s own, its surface sculpted into feminine curves and hollows. Long, tapering leaves fanned out from the bulb that bulged from the soil. But where a bot had a head and face, this plant had only a cluster of thumb-sized blossom buds and palm-sized flowers, deep red and blazing orange. There was no hint that the plant’s trunk would ever split to form legs. Nor was there any sign that arms would grow.
The plant was indeed decorative. But the bots prided themselves on the nearness of their approach to humanity. They prized their brains, their faces, their ability to withdraw their roots from the soil that nourished them and walk about, and he was not surprised to hear that they aborted what, to them, could be nothing other than the most severe of birth defects. From Donna Rose’s reaction, such deformities could not be rare. The gene complexes that made bots bots could not, perhaps, be stable. They must rearrange themselves spontaneously, reasserting the configurations of their ancestors, whose botanical portion had come largely from amaryllis plants. Hannoken must, he thought, have found it easy to gengineer her cells into this throwback.
“Kill it,” said Donna Rose. Her voice was anguished. There were tears on her cheeks. “I won’t have it. I can’t stand it. Kill it!”
“No,” said Hannoken. As she moved forward once more, her arms reaching toward the pot where her child basked in the mirror-channeled sunlight, he stepped in front of her, his own arms spread as if to block her advance. One elongated, black-clad foot tapped nervously against the floor. “It’s not a bot,” he said. “Not anymore. It’s just a plant.”
“But…”
Renny snarled at him. His hands clenched against the floor. Hannoken’s face took on a pained, “You, too?” expression, but he did not move. “No,” he said again.
Frederick thought of how the gengineers had once been accused of arrogance, of shaping life to their whims, of failing to respect the integrity of each being’s nature which eons of evolution had painfully established. It was that arrogance that had once given intelligence to a brainless pig, shaped to fit under a kitchen sink and endlessly reduce vegetable peelings and other garbage into slush that would flow through a house’s pipes. He had been rescued from the madness of boredom when a small boy had discovered him, alone behind the cupboard door. The same arrogance had provoked the creation of the bots’ ancestors, and Renny’s intelligence, and now…
The gengineers, he thought, had done the world—humanity—a lot of good. They had given it the resources it needed to stay civilized when fossil fuels and ores had been near exhaustion. They had given him a human body and Renny his hands. They were giving Lois McAlois her legs. But, yes, it was no surprise that they had antagonized so many people, that the Engineers had grown in numbers and vehemence and eventually had seized the reins of power on the Earth below Probe Station.
“But it’s mine,” said Donna Rose. “You cloned me. It’s me, and it’s deformed. You have to pull it up.”
When Hannoken just shook his head and refused to budge from his guardian stance, Frederick finally said, “You have a responsibility. Gengineering isn’t for making toys. You should be trying to maximize potential, making Donna Rose’s child more intelligent, not less.”
“You sound like a BRA bureaucrat,” said Hannoken.
“And you,” said Renny. “You sound like a selfish, self-centered pig.”
A knock on the door interrupted the argument before it could develop any further. “Come in,” said Hannoken, and the others turned to see a young man in a grey coverall. On his shoulder was the patch of the Station’s communications staff. In his hand was a single photograph.
“We tried to call, sir,” he said. “But…”
“What is it?”
“The spysats. We’ve been using them to
monitor the surface, and…” He hesitated. “It looks like a war.”
“What do you mean?” asked Frederick.
The clerk held out the photo. “The Engineers,” he said. “Their troops are massing, around this area.”
Frederick took the photo and stared at it for a long moment. “That looks like my town,” he finally said, pointing one finger toward the picture’s corner. “My city. Where are they?”
“Right here.” The clerk pointed to an area of woods and scattered fields a couple of hundred kilometers away. Puffs of cloud obscured the landscape in scattered patches. A broad plume of what looked like smoke trailed southward. “It’s hilly, and they’re on the roads, here and here and here. They seem to be surrounding…”
“What are they up to?” asked Hannoken.
The clerk shrugged. “We don’t know. We think they must have found some refugees.”
“Bots?” asked Donna Rose.
“Maybe. We have more, sir, but…”
“Athena, open,” said Hannoken. His desk promptly beeped again. “Answer it.”
The wall screen came alive with the face of another communications clerk, who promptly spotted her colleague in the Station Director’s office. “Sandor?” said the clerk.
“What have we got?” said the com tech who had invaded the Director’s office.
“Here. Live.”
The picture changed to show the surface of the planet below. The smoke plume was larger. “Infra-red,” said Sandor. The colors shifted, and the source of the plume glowed red. “It looks like a forest fire,” he said.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 89