Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “None of us can climb it yet,” said Wanderer. The watchers of the recorded scene could see him struggling to keep his twitching fur from bristling in automatic challenge. “But the time will come.”

  “We will have learned enough to try,” said Shorttail.

  “We may have tails like our ancestors,” said Stonerapper. “But our brains are not made of stone.”

  “And our people will insist on trying,” said Wanderer, and now his fur was standing as madly erect as Leaf’s. So was that of every other Rac in the scene. “If we must, we will destroy all who stand in our way.”

  “Nooo!” screamed Leaf, and the rocks began to fly.

  Pearl Angelica refused to watch as the rocks struck flesh, blood flowed, and the strangers with their single friend turned and ran. She shifted her gaze to the screen that showed the present moment and a rising hysteria that seemed every bit as threatening as that which had sent the others fleeing.

  Only one Rac was now not screaming threats of murder. He squatted just outside the wall, to the left of the pyramid. “That’s Firetouch,” said Caledonia Emerald.

  “Bright boy,” said Ribbentrop. He indicated a strip of bark pinned to the wall above his console. On it Pearl Angelica could recognize drawings of dumbos’ wings.

  Blacktop’s voice softened with urgency and outrage: “They are only ourselves. They have tails, but they seek only what our Makers have told us to seek. Knowledge. And indeed, they understand what knowledge is far, far better than most of you.”

  The congregation sang threat in unison, but he stiffened his back once more, raised the fur of his shoulders, and refused to retreat.

  “You pick up the scraps our Makers drop and call them knowledge.” He gestured toward the basket atop the pole behind him. “You call them offerings. You insult the gods.”

  “They’ll kill him!” breathed Pearl Angelica.

  “I hope not,” said Ribbentrop. “He’s the best thing they’ve got going for them.”

  “Only one of you!” screeched Blacktop. “Only one of you knows how to pursue real knowledge! Only one of you knows that we do not deserve the Tower and its treasure if we do not study our world and learn and build. Only one of you, and the three strangers you nearly murdered!”

  “Does he mean Wetweed?”

  “Firetouch,” said Ribbentrop. He pointed once more at the bark strip that spoke of a wish to fly. “That was his offering to the gods.”

  “Us?” Pearl Angelica’s voice was disbelieving, but she could say nothing more. Blacktop’s words had quieted once more and even gained a hint of roughness. “We must,” he was saying. “We must learn enough to climb the Tower. We must build a foundation on which our Makers’ gift of knowledge can stand. We must earn that gift.”

  He paused, and the eavesdroppers could hear an ominously smooth tone rising from the congregation. He showed no sign of hearing it himself as he half turned to face the Tower. “You want it all,” he said. “Don’t you? You want it all right now, without waiting. You don’t want to struggle all your lives, and then all your children’s lives, so that your grandchildren can enter into paradise. But that is the nature of our Makers’ gift. We must struggle for as long as it takes, even if that means that by the time we reach the Tower’s peak we have learned all by ourselves everything our Makers know.

  “Be sure,” he said. “If that is what our future holds, our Makers will be delighted. It will mean we have obeyed in fullest measure the only commandment they have set down for us. And if we then go beyond their knowledge, they will even cede their place in paradise to us.”

  “We will?” asked Pearl Angelica.

  “Why not?” asked Ribbentrop. “Isn’t that what this kind of evolution is all about?”

  “Think!” Blacktop cried now. “The Tower cannot possibly contain all the knowledge of the universe. Our Makers can put there only what they know now, and they say themselves that there is a vast unknown waiting to be discovered beyond that little bit.

  “And even that they have given us. They gave us intelligence, the ability to learn for ourselves. If we use that ability and strengthen it, we may well surpass our gods.”

  He was not done. His mouth was still open. But his congregation had heard enough. Its song of threat and danger grew quickly louder. It became a scream. And when Leaf emerged from the front of the crowd that was quickly becoming a mob, her words were no surprise: “No!” she screamed just as she had before she had stoned the strangers from the valley. “They made us! But they wish to keep us helpless before their might! That is why they tantalize us with the Tower. There is nothing at its tip!”

  “No!” cried Blacktop.

  “Yes!” Leaf turned her back on him and screamed at the rest of the tribe. “He is their creature!” She whirled and pointed at Firetouch just outside the wall. He was gaping at the madness that seemed about to engulf them all. “So is he! Kill them both!”

  Someone tore a rock from the wall of the watching place and hurled it toward the pyramid. It fell short, but the next did not.

  Blacktop refused to run.

  Firetouch did not.

  * * * *

  “Why? Why can’t we keep them from such idiocy?” Pearl Angelica was sobbing. So was Caledonia Emerald, while Lucas Ribbentrop looked haggard.

  “They have to make their own mistakes.” The veedo images of Lois McAlois and Renny Schafer both shook their heads.

  “But why do they have to make the same mistakes humans have made?”

  Renny sighed. “I’m glad Freddy didn’t live to see this. But the pursuit of knowledge … It’s a grand ideal, but I guess some things have to come first. At least until we learn how to scrub such things as territoriality from the genes.”

  “We probably can’t,” said Ribbentrop. “It’s a biological imperative to protect the resources you need to survive.”

  “Did we make a mistake in building the Tower?” asked Pearl Angelica. “Should we have left well enough alone?”

  Lois McAlois looked to one side as Esteban stepped into the picture. “I heard,” he said. “And I don’t think so. It will stand there, won’t it? Until they’re ready for it?”

  “It’s high enough,” said Renny. “They won’t climb it by accident. They’ll have to learn a lot on their own.”

  “I wonder how long it will take,” said Pearl Angelica.

  “Not long enough,” said Caledonia Emerald. “It should be twice as high as it is.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Watching Place had grown over the decades. The end that faced the Worldtree remained open, giving an assembled congregation full view of the goal the gods had set all Rackind. The pyramid of steps that was the altar was broader and higher, and the pole and basket that mimicked the Worldtree was an obelisk of stone just rough enough to give purchase to the claws of climbing Racs. The stone walls were thick and tall, their massive blocks cut square and joined with mortar and ornamented with ten thousand carvings. Buttresses soared down to brace the walls against a ground whose native moss now shared space with honeysuckle, grass, flowering shrubs, flagged paths, and artificial streams filled with tasty-tails, dumbo larvae, for the delectation of priests and pilgrims. Roof beams thick as Rac torsos supported slabs of slate.

  But now the obelisk was fallen. Roof beams and slates were rubble in the nave. Holes gaped in the walls, and broken stone filled the streams and crushed moss, grass, honeysuckle, and other vegetation.

  Near the entrance to the Watching Place still stood a crude wooden statue, centuries old, of a male Rac. The top of his head was painted black with soot. Rusty red, blood the congregation had freely offered, marked chest and belly, back and limbs.

  The warrior Skyclaw had already bowed to the Founder. Now he stood beside the statue, clad in armor of bronze strips riveted to leather. He was l
ooking at the bodies that littered the ground between the Watching Place and the Worldtree, wrinkling his nose at the stink already rising from them, and wishing that fewer of them had the tails that marked his own people.

  But that was as it had to be. War meant death, of attackers as well as defenders. He looked at the blood already drying on his bronze sword. He was lucky it had not meant his own.

  He looked toward the fringes of the battlefield, where the local noncombatants, mates and children and parents, were bringing baskets full of food to feed the spirits of the slain for their journey to the Makers. He would not interfere, not with the mourners, nor with his own warriors who would claim the food to fill their own bellies. And if some of that food came his way, he would eat it.

  Yes. The price of victory could have been far worse. He bared his teeth in a grin at the thought that his tail had been shortened by his descent from the tailless Firetouch. But that same line of descent had shortened these tails much more. It had been his cousin who had devised the long-armed stonethrower.

  He climbed the pyramid in front of the Watching Place and glanced at the toppled obelisk. He held up his arms to the Worldtree, and he thought: There was no need for symbols when the real thing stood so plainly in view. There was no need to climb a stump when the Worldtree waited patiently, knowing that it could not be long before it welcomed its worshippers into its high sanctum.

  He nodded, filled with both awe and confidence. His people would not lose the valley now that it was theirs. They would retain control of the Worldtree. And they would be the ones to climb it. The treasure of knowledge its bulbous tip held would then be theirs, and theirs alone.

  SEEDS OF DESTINY

  Illegitimi non carborundum!

  Chapter One

  “Sir?”

  A hand reached toward Marcus Aurelius Hrecker from a shadowy alcove in the painted tunnel wall. Automatically, he raised a warding arm and shifted his step to stay out of reach. Olympia, burrowed into the bulk of the grandest mountain in the Solar System, was as safe as any place, safer than any city on Earth or the Moon. But you could never tell. Even in a crowded tunnel.

  “Sir? Please!”

  The hand belonged to a small woman, stooped and wrinkled and smelling of years. Her hair was so gray it was practically white. Almost against his will, he stopped and faced her. Other pedestrians flowed past behind him.

  “Did you know I’m being evicted? I had such a nice apartment. And they say they need it for someone else. They’re putting me in a home. Just one room and a cafeteria and a lounge full of old wrecks. Like me.”

  “I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “But there’s really nothing I can do.” Why was she even telling him? He didn’t know her, and he could imagine no reason why she would think he might change the housing office’s mind. Certainly he couldn’t take her home with him. His own apartment was barely large enough for him.

  “Of course you can’t!” She nodded rapidly, her eyes bright, her mouth set in a pursed line. “Not about that. But …” She reached into the shadows behind her. Light glinted on polished metal wheel-hubs and basket wire. He recognized a cart of the sort many people used when shopping. “I have to get rid of my flowers, you know. I can’t take them with me. They just won’t allow it. There’s no point in even asking. But you look like a nice fellow.”

  She swung back toward him, something in her hands. He shied away from her, stepping backward, thumping into a passerby, lurching forward again, and she thrust that something against his chest. “Here.” Suddenly he was holding a smooth-sided cylinder and staring at a spray of fuzzy green and white-edged, yellow-centered violet.

  Oh, no, he thought. Fear washed over him even as his fingertips stroked the side of the cylinder and told him it was made of some smooth ceramic. It was surely a local product, made of Martian soil. No one shipped raw clay or pottery between the worlds, not even in an era when Q drives tapped the raw energy of space itself to power rockets.

  No one made flowerpots either, and here was the handle and now it made sense.

  “Here,” she said again, and her nod was insistent, demanding, dogmatic. “You can have an African violet. All it needs is light and water, and maybe a little fertilizer.”

  But he was not listening. “No!” he cried. “You keep it! I can’t!”

  He pushed the mug full of greenery toward the old woman, but she seized his wrists and with surprising strength turned him toward the center of the tunnel. “No,” she said. “I really can’t, you know. They’re evicting me. But I can’t keep my flowers. And they’re so pretty, aren’t they? You take good care of it now.”

  “But—!”

  “Go on. I have lots more to give away.” There was a push at his back. He staggered a step, and the flow of traffic swept him up and on.

  Fortunately the shirt he wore did not have time-consuming buttons, snaps, zips, or strips. It wrapped diagonally across his chest, and he thought he got the flower out of sight before anyone could recognize it for what it was. An African violet, she had called it. A plant, of all things.

  At least she had sense enough to stay away from the more brightly lit portions of the tunnel.

  Plants were most definitely not approved personal possessions. They were acceptable only in agricultural domes and tunnels. House plants were prima facie evidence of Orbital/Gypsy sympathies at best, of disloyalty and treason at worst.

  If Security spotted the African violet, it would not matter a bit that his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather had all been Security agents. An uncle had even been chief of Security on the Munin habitat until a blowout caught him without a suit.

  He tried to look innocent.

  He tried not to stare at his fellow pedestrians. That just wasn’t done. Only the very young and the guilty failed to pretend they were alone in the tunnels, on the way to work or home or running errands.

  He tried not to search the tunnel walls and ceiling for Security cameras. But if he couldn’t look at the African violet and he couldn’t look at people, there was nothing else at which to aim his eyes.

  At least he could refrain from scanning, couldn’t he? Then he wouldn’t look like he was searching for cameras. He wouldn’t look guilty.

  Unless they watched for people who were obviously trying not to be noticed.

  In which case he had better not keep looking away from shopping carts. It was quite natural to peek, to see what people had found in their shopping, to learn what foods had come from the farms. Like that purple globe of eggplant, red-skinned onions, blue-green potsters, green broccoli, pale white fish.

  He forgot the fish as his eyes jerked back to the green and away.

  He wished he had a reader with him.

  There! Watch those! Illuminated signs that advertised beer and pizza and minerals formed when Mars had water a billion years ago. Crystals, the shop bragged. Mudstone marked with ripples. Wormtracks. Shells.

  There was a diskshop stocked with newsdisks, novels, textbooks, games, and more. Its entrance was never clear, for people moved steadily in and out.

  A tour shop, its entrance flanked by glass-cased, bright-lit posters showing the vast rise of Olympus Mons, the gorge of Marineris just as vast, Io spuming yellow, red, and black, the desolation of the lunar highlands, coral reefs on Earth, fishless and stark, Earth itself viewed from orbit. Next door a clothing store, its display assuring everyone it sold everything from the flimsiest of nightwear to Martian hardsuits.

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker let his attention settle on a tiny robot, legs flickering as it scurried along the floor, dodged feet, and raced up a ramp attached to the tunnel wall. There was another robot on the shelf that ran just above all the doorways and display cases and neon signs and usually kept the machines off the floor and out from underfoot. The first ignored the pull-outs, the ramps up and down
, and the access holes that led inside the walls. It met a third, and there was room to pass. It stopped. Its head rose, antennae wiggled as it optimized the signal it was receiving, and it began to move again, faster, running now, practically flying, taking the ramp that led to the next cross-path, arched riblike beneath the tunnel’s roof.

  The little robots removed dust and litter and debris, searched for defects in tunnels and ducts, repaired what they could, and signalled for human assistance when a problem was beyond their abilities. Marcus Aurelius Hrecker shared his people’s pride in the versatile machines even though he understood their major shortcoming. They were a triumph of mechanical and electronic technology, but they were no nearer the ultimate goal than they had been a century before. Only the sort of information storage one found in genes could permit a self-reproducing von Neumann machine to exist.

  Artificial intelligence? They had that, though hardly at a human level, not even at the level rumor hinted had been achieved some time before the Engineers’ final victory. He had heard the robots compared to cats and monkeys, and the reason for their limitation was once more that they were not organic. In some ways, living things had distinct design advantages.

  But not this African violet. Not at this moment. Not now. Not ever.

  It could kill him.

  He wished he dared to set the plant in its mug on one of those shelves, or on the floor. The machines would dispose of it. That was their job. They were everywhere. They cleaned clothes and floors, polished shoes, mended and repaired, stripped paint and replaced it, found and fetched lost items, and prepared food, tending Olympia and all its people just as they did in the cities of Mars and Earth, the Moon and the habitats, everywhere the Engineers chose to live.

  But no one did such things. If he did, one of his fellow pedestrians would surely notice and report his suspicious behavior. Or the cameras, wherever they were, would pick him up.