“You wouldn’t…!” But he scrambled out of reach and found another perch from which he could watch the screen.
She hadn’t dared to say a word the night before, much less threaten violence. Knowing she was powerless, she had forced herself to clamp her lips between her teeth. But then the Minister had rapped the stem of his pipe against the table and spoke what at first seemed much more reasonable words. “We’re not really that different, are we? Some people might have given your Racs all the education that was available just as soon as they showed they could talk.”
When she nodded, he went on. “Fortunately, that sort of soft-headed liberalism is long, long past. It nearly destroyed twentieth-century America, you know. You don’t? No matter. We do.” He waved one hand dismissively. “My point is that we, both the Engineers and the Gypsies, know that knowledge should not be freely available to all who ask for it. It must be held close, restricted, reserved for the advantage of society. Though you don’t hold it close enough.” He shook his head. “That Tower.”
“Research too,” said Hrecker from his post by the door.
“Ah, yes,” said the Minister. “You had to arrest—” He chopped the sentence off when Hrecker gestured as if toward the camera. “Ah, yes,” he said again. “Unrestricted access to knowledge. Unrestricted, unregulated research. They are what led to the evil of the gengineers, the loss of the first Machine Age, and the destruction of so much of Earth.”
He leaned toward the Pearl Angelica on the veedo screen. “Genetic engineering should have been banned at its very beginning.”
The bot in the cage shuddered as the people in the concourse around her murmured in approval of the Minister’s statement.
“You would have burned Gregor Mendel at the stake,” she had said sourly.
“Not that perhaps. Some good came of his discoveries, after all. Better crops. Cures for diseases. But…” He shook his head. “You do understand. We cannot permit another such disaster. We will not permit it. And we will destroy whatever we must to ensure that it does not happen. Certainly we will destroy your Tower as soon as we can reach Tau Ceti IV.”
Once more the concourse murmured with agreement. Pearl Angelica glanced toward the man who had fled her threatening root. He was nodding vigorously.
“And the Racs,” said another of the bot’s interrogators on the veedo screen. “They are abomination.”
The Minister for Education smiled at the bot. “It should be enough to leave them in their Stone Age, confined to their world. We don’t have to live there with them, after all.”
“But they are evil!”
“Unnatural!”
“Destroy them!”
When the veedo image was suddenly replaced by a commercial for a line of sextants and steam engines and other clothing ornaments that celebrated the dawn of the golden age of mechanical technology, Pearl Angelica understood that that was the last note her captors wished to sound for their audience. A goad to tell every Engineer on the Moon what was the proper way to think. A threat to the Orbitals and the Gypsies so far away. A compact with doom for Pearl Angelica herself.
And the audience had not missed the point. There were mutterings around her, dark glances. Someone threw a pebble. The man who had fled the edge of her planter cursed. A mother turned her child away from the wicked bot, glared over her shoulder, and fled the concourse.
She wanted to cry, but she knew that tears would only please the Engineers. She clamped her eyelids shut and held the water back.
* * * *
“It’s not fair.”
Pearl Angelica was taking what pleasure she could in the artificial sunlight that inundated the small leaves that covered her body. She refused to open her eyes, though the voice came from close by. Someone—male and rather past his youth—was sitting on the edge of her planter even though most of the lunar Engineers were keeping their distance after the threats the Minister for Education had made. “What isn’t fair?”
“Everything.” There was a pause and the sound of cloth rubbing rock as a body sought some more comfortable position. “The schools teach us only what we need for our jobs. Anything else, they say, is wasted effort. And dangerous. Like he said on the veedo.”
“You were watching.” It was not a question.
“Everyone’s seen it. They’ve shown it several times. And the way they treated the gengineers and the bots. There are rumors…” The voice hesitated. “Mass graves. Mass murder. Do they really want to wipe you out that way?”
“It’s true.” She opened her eyes and was not surprised to see a head of dark curls leaning against a bar of her cage. “They don’t admit that?”
The curls shook in negation. “I never heard it discussed at all until I was in high school, and then the textbooks and teachers all said it was a political thing. The Engineers won elections everywhere. When they passed laws to regulate gengineering, the gengineers and their sympathizers fled the planet. Then they destroyed all the Roachsters and other bioforms.”
“What’s your name?”
When he looked up at her, surprised at her interest, she saw a light brown skin, dark eyes, and a long, angular face that, with the hair, spoke of eastern Mediterranean ancestors. He seemed no more than a little older than she. “Anatol. Anatol Rivkin. I don’t remember it that way, you know. But I don’t remember murder either. I was just a kid. My mother never talked about it.”
“Your father?”
“I barely remember him. Maybe he…” He fell silent, though his voice was rising at the end as if he were about to ask, “Maybe he was murdered?”
“I didn’t see it myself,” said Pearl Angelica. “I wasn’t even born until after we left.”
“But I do remember…” He paused, licked his lips, looked around the concourse as if wary of being overheard. “We must be bugged. They do that all the time, you know.”
“They watch you all?”
“Not really all the time, I suppose. Though they could, especially if they used the computers.” He shrugged. “If they do, or if they just happen to have heard me, you’ll never see me again.”
“But why?”
“I didn’t accept the official line. I’m asking questions.”
“Then you shouldn’t say anything else.”
“It’s too late.” He hesitated as if wondering whether he were right. “I remember the bioforms,” he said at last. “We had a Tortoise. A pig under the sink. Snackbushes and hanky bushes. And then…”
“The Revolution.”
He nodded. “Yeah. We lost it all. Things got pretty tough. They’re better now, but it took a while.”
“Was it worth it?”
He shook his head and fell silent as others entered the concourse. They were only passing through, but they paused long enough to examine the specimen in its cage and say to Anatol, “Unnatural thing, ain’t it?”
“Perverted,” said Rivkin. “I hear they’re all female. Makes you wonder what those gengineers do with them at night.”
The others laughed. Pearl Angelica turned her face away and wished her feet were not anchored by her roots. Anatol Rivkin rose from his seat and followed his fellow Engineers from the concourse.
* * * *
Pearl Angelica knew why Anatol Rivkin had said what he did before he left. The words had hurt her, but she knew that if he had not sounded like any other Engineer he would have been suspect.
Was he suspect anyway? Would he be arrested, charged with treason to the holy cause, jailed, executed? It depended on… Were there mikes and cameras trained on her? Did Security’s people or computers watch her all the time? Did they listen to everything those around her said to her and to each other? Or was it spot checks only? Did Security see only what that roving camera-headed robot showed them? Might Anatol have spoken safely as long a
s the robot was not present? And if he had been overheard, did Security really care that much what people said?
She felt pleased to learn that the Engineers were not as unified in their ideology as they would like the Orbitals and Gypsies to believe. For a moment, she thought of ’Livrance and Prudence, who had seemed at least capable of sympathy, and wondered whether it was the contact with space that made the difference. There was more freedom there. Even confined to tunnels beneath the surface of the Moon, in spaces much the same as those beneath Detroit, she could sense… It was the buoyancy of lighter gravity, she guessed, that spoke of the closeness of vast distances and three dimensions in which to move. There was also more exposure to other ways of thinking in the occasional Orbital an Engineer might meet. Or perhaps there was simply more need for thought in an environment that let one take nothing for granted.
Certainly some of the lunar Engineers were as bigoted as anyone she had met on Earth. And some, such as this Anatol Rivkin, were not. She wondered if Anatols existed there, if she would have found sane and reasonable Earthlings if only she had been able to meet more people on the planet.
She had said nothing about her thoughts then. Nor did she mention them the next day, at noon, when Anatol returned. By then the worst of the public’s avoidance reaction had passed. Several Engineers had even brought their lunches to the concourse and found seats along the edges of the dais that held her planter. Anatol ignored them when he arrived, stepping between the rose and mock orange bushes and climbing up to touch the bars of her cage. He had a sandwich in his fist; lettuce, tomato slices, green pepper strips, and something unidentifiable were visible between the slices of bread. As soon as he sat down, she asked, “What’s—?
He didn’t wait for her to finish. “Soy sausage. It’s not bad. Do you eat? Is that enough for you?” With his free hand, he indicated the spotlight that illuminated her leaves.
She shook her head, and her stomach growled. He laughed and tore the sandwich in two.
“You came here because you wanted bees?” He murmured the words as if trying not to be overheard by his fellow Engineers or Security’s eavesdroppers.
“I told you. I wanted to see Earth.”
“But officially.”
“Then yes. Officially. And we really do need them.”
“Do you think you’ll get them?”
“What difference would it make? I wouldn’t be able to take them home with me.” She curled one hand tight around a bar. “I’m never going home.”
“But… They’re asking for a ransom, aren’t they? Won’t your people—?”
“They want a star-drive. You don’t think we’ll give it to them, do you? We can’t, not as long as you want to kill us.”
He winced at the change from “they” to “you,” but he did not try to argue with her. He fell silent. He bit into what was left of his sandwich and chewed. “Yeah,” he said at last.
“So I don’t need any bees, do I?” Her own portion of the sandwich was gone, and her voice was rising. “I’ll never go home. I’ll never see my people, my friends, my father, again.”
Anatol made a sympathetic noise. “He was dying when I left,” she added. “He may be dead already. And I won’t live much longer. I’ll die right here. Just as soon as they realize they aren’t going to get what they want.”
“How long?”
“I came with my aunt, you know. Now she’s on the way back to the Gypsy to say what happened. To say what ransom your people want. And as soon as she gets back here…”
“How long?” he asked again.
“Another month,” she said. “A little more. A little less. That’s all I’ve got.”
Anatol bowed his head. “And there’s no way out of it, is there?”
“You want us all dead.”
Pearl Angelica did not think that his silence was only because there were others nearby who might overhear his words. He simply could not answer her.
* * * *
She did not see Anatol again that day or the next. But the lunar base followed the rhythms of Earth. When night came, the corridor lights dimmed and the traffic in the base’s corridors diminished. A few people worked night shifts in control rooms and administrative offices, but most ate and socialized and eventually slept. In time even the veedo shut itself off. Silence reigned in the concourse as Pearl Angelica twisted her roots again and again through the recycled soil that filled her planter, tasting it, loosening it, plowing it. She hadn’t really needed, she thought, to come to Earth for bees. Paintbrushes worked, after all. And eventually they would find or gengineer something to serve the purpose. But she had wanted to see the home of her ancestors.
Root-home.
Folly.
Doom.
Earth was so unlike her dreams that she felt… No, disappointment was not the word. She felt foolish.
Frederick, her father, might be dead already. Or he would die before she could get home even if she left right now.
But she couldn’t leave. Her foolishness had cost her the chance to say a last good-bye to her father.
She had been kidnapped and raped and imprisoned, caged like a beast in a zoo. She was being held for a ransom that would—that could—never come. She was going to die here, a long, long way from home. Among strangers, and worse than strangers. Among enemies.
And all her other dreams and yearnings, all the potential that her fellow bots so treasured, would be forever lost.
The sound of feet sliding quietly across the concourse’s rocky floor brought her eyes open. The dim light was enough to let her recognize the head approaching her. “Marcus.”
Marcus Yamoto stood between two rose bushes near her feet. He smelled of beer and garlic even over the strong perfumes of the flowers. “I saw the show.”
“Didn’t everyone?”
He nodded. “Have you learned anything else since we talked?”
“Only that they’re not all as awful as I thought.”
“I could have told you that. They’re a little saner here. Some of them even realize that they have more in common with the Orbitals than with Earth.”
“Not very many.”
“The ideologues are still in control. And that doesn’t seem likely to change.” He shook his head. “I didn’t really expect you to have anything new for me this soon. But I’ve got to go away for a while. I’m a trader, right? So, back to the Orbitals.”
She grasped the bars of her cage with both hands and put her face as close to his as she could manage. “Tell them…” She stopped, not knowing what she wanted him to say for her, or who she wanted him to say it to. Lois McAlois could not yet be back. She took a deep breath.
He covered one of her hands with his own, squeezing it against the metal bar. “I’ll tell them you’re alive.”
“No.” She blinked as tears curdled her vision. “Or yes. That too. But say, say I’m not expecting to be ransomed. They shouldn’t. It’s not worth it.”
“Yes.” He nodded, squeezed her hand once more, and was gone.
She was still gripping the bars of her cage, teeth sunk into her lower lip, when Anatol Rivkin’s quiet voice, almost a whisper, made her open her eyes.
“Who was he? An Orbital, I know, but…” He was looking up at her, his pupils wide in the dimmed light.
“A trader.” She looked away from him, toward the corridor into which Marcus had disappeared. “A contact. A friend, I hope. He’ll tell them I’m okay. Alive, anyway.”
Anatol grunted as he sat on the edge of her planter, wrapping his own hand around a bar to help him keep his balance. “When you were talking to the Council down there…” He glanced briefly upward as if he could see Earth through the concourse’s ceiling. “Down” had two meanings on the Moon, at least for those who had come up from Earth. “You said you
were looking for root-home. That’s why you came here.”
“The land of my forebears. You saw that on the veedo too.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I can understand that. I want it too.”
“But you’re already home.”
“The way things used to be,” he said. “More like that, I guess.”
“When the Engineers were just a crank cult. When there was a Roachster in every garage and a pie plant in every kitchen.”
“A Tortoise. But yeah. The Good Old Days.”
“I never knew them.”
“A lot of us remember. Vaguely, anyway. And we aren’t all like…” His gesture included the Minister for Education and his anonymous colleagues, the Council of Engineers on Earth, and all the rest of his culture’s rulers. “It was nice then. There weren’t many machines, but there were a lot more people.”
“That’s why there weren’t—”
“I know. They don’t teach us that, but it’s easy enough to see. The resources had been drawn down too far and spread too thin. The bioforms really were the only way to meet people’s needs.”
“Birth control could have done it.”
“That would have solved some of the discontent too. Unemployment was bad enough even before the gengineers made carpenters and mechanics and miners superfluous. Afterward, there was a lot of anger.”
They fell silent.
He was leaning against the bars, one shoulder touching her knee, looking downward, studying the way her roots sprang from her shins and calves and burrowed into the dirt, the way her toes curled and dug as if they too could be roots. She leaned against the other side of the bars, her forehead pressed against one cold metal rod, her eyes ranging along the walls of the concourse from corridor mouth to corridor mouth, watching for anyone who might interrupt them, listening for approaching footsteps. For a moment, she thought, if he were caught being too friendly… But then she remembered that they were surely bugged. Hrecker and his men surely knew that Anatol was there, although perhaps his quiet voice had not been clearly heard and his face, kept distant during the day, now shadowed by night and bowed as well, had not been seen.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 111