Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Better he should leave the plant under his shirt.

  * * * *

  The short side-tunnel, filled with the pink-tinged light of Mars, opened into a concourse thirty meters high. Its far wall was a curve of steel-ribbed glass. Beyond that was the red-rock lip of the scarp that lifted Olympus Mons a kilometer above the lowlands beyond, and then those lowlands, softened and smoothed into plains by distance. The only signs of human presence were a distant dome and a cloud of yellow fumes beside the concentric rings of an open-pit mine.

  No one paid the spectacular view any attention at all. No one seemed disturbed by the far-off industrial stain on the landscape. Both were routine, backdrop, as accepted as the posters in the tour shop’s display cases.

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker was no exception. When he left the tunnel, his mind was on the plant tucked within his shirt, on his destination, on the tasks that awaited him. He turned sharp left, stepped aboard the escalator in front of him, rode to the next level up, and entered another tunnel marked by a small brass plaque that said “Olympus University.” When Hrecker passed it, it repeated its message aloud.

  Just within this tunnel was a directory board that displayed a map of the university’s tunnels and a list of departments, offices, and labs. Hrecker ignored this too. The Q-Drive Research Center where he was a junior researcher was straight ahead and right and right and left, past the administration’s side-tunnel and the dining hall and the freshman dorms, just before the turn into the athletic complex, and late on any afternoon the lab rocked with noise every time someone opened the main door to enter or leave. Sometimes the din even penetrated the solid rock of Mars itself.

  But the tunnels were quiet now. The day’s first classes were in session. He glanced through the entry to the dining hall and found it empty except for a few stragglers. The creak of exercise machinery was the only sign that anyone was in the athletics area at all.

  And here was the Research Center. He felt the flower mug with his wrist. Would he be able to reach his lab before someone spotted it? Would he be able to bury it in a wastebasket? Should he flush the plant and its soil down a toilet, wash its container, and pretend it had never held anything more incriminating than a wooden pencil?

  Of course, as soon as the entrance door swung shut behind him, Eric Silber came out of the com room, his hands full of paper. “What’s that? A tumor?”

  Silber was a mathematician, but his sharply angled, acne-scarred face and cawing voice had prompted more than one to suspect out loud that he was really a Security plant. Thereafter, no one quite dared to trust him or to object to his bitter gibes. And of course he had seen the bulge in Hrecker’s shirt.

  “Just a …” He made a garbled noise, waved one hand, and turned quickly into the hall that led toward his lab. When Eric did not follow him or say, “What?” he breathed a sigh of relief.

  But the relief did not last long.

  When he reached his tiny office safely, he peered beneath the metal desk and behind the books and knickknacks on the shelf. Once he was sure none of the tiny, insectoid robots were present, he set the plant in its mug beside the keyboard of his terminal. Then he wondered what the gyp he could do with it.

  He scratched his belly where the mug had pressed. He was carefully tucking in his shirt once more when the doorlatch clicked behind him.

  “Got a min—? What have you got there?”

  He spun and flushed and said, “Sorry. But—”

  “That’s dumb,” said Renard Saucier. “Suicidally dumb.”

  Hrecker did not think to ask why Saucier was in his doorway, belly straining against his traditional coverall, hairline arching toward the ceiling. As usual, the man’s upper eyelids folded down at their outer edges and he looked exhausted. He was in charge of this section of the lab, supervising several researchers and technicians, but he was rarely seen until after lunch. Mornings he spent on his own research.

  “A plant, of all things,” said Saucier. “Today, of all times. I was just in a meeting …”

  “An African violet.” Hrecker tried very hard to sound meek. “I was going to throw it away.”

  “Then why did you bring it here? If Security spotted it …”

  “I know.”

  “You’d never run another probability shifter, would you?”

  Hrecker shook his head. The lab had learned how to use the probability warp that made the Q drive possible to achieve macroscopic tunneling a decade ago. The trick had proved to be the key to faster-than-light travel, the heart of the tunnel drive the Gypsies had mastered before they fled the system more than a century before. More recently, they had been trying to use a variation of the technique to control the placement of ions in semiconductors. They hoped to build electronic memories that would match the capacity of biological ones.

  A shelf on the wall to the left of the doorway held a veedo set. Saucier turned toward it and touched its switch. Then he reached past Hrecker and picked up the plant. “I’ll dispose of it. You check the news.”

  Was that why he had appeared so early in the day? Was there something important happening in the world outside the lab? Something that might affect their work? Or … ?

  Obediently, Marcus Aurelius Hrecker watched the screen as it came to life. And when the image proved to be that of a familiar piece of Olympian tunnel, he reached blindly for his chair, rolled it away from the desk, turned it, and sat.

  A voice was saying: “Constant vigilance is the only way we can remain free of the green taint. Only half an hour ago, Security noticed this woman …” A small woman, elderly, silver-haired, her bent back against a shadowed alcove. Hrecker recognized her, and a premonition of her fate shivered down his spine. “Obviously a Gypsy sympathizer,” the voice went on conversationally. “Perhaps even an actual agent. She was distributing emblems of that subversive movement.” The camera swung toward one of the woman’s hands, the image enlarged, and the screen filled with a plump cactus rooted in a small glass jar. “She is in Security’s custody now, being interrogated. Once she has divulged the names of everyone who accepted one of her emblems, they too will be arrested and questioned. Then she will be—”

  “Executed.” Saucier was back. “So will they.”

  “She practically forced it on me!”

  “You should have screamed for help.”

  “For what? Assault with a deadly flower?”

  “It’s deadly enough when Security is watching.”

  Hrecker nodded. “Yeah. Is that what you wanted me to see?”

  The other shook his head as the weathergirl came on to speak of dust storms and unusual cold sweeping across the face of Mars. “I didn’t even know about that one. Give it another minute.”

  “But why? The last time anybody saw a Gypsy was a century ago. That was when we conquered the Orbitals and took over the whole system, not just Earth and the Moon.”

  “There might be a few left.”

  “Enough of them?” Hrecker asked. His tone was insistent. “Every time something goes wrong, every blowout, every equipment failure, every … Enough to take all the blame?”

  “They’re useful that way, aren’t they?”

  “There can’t possibly be a resistance movement!”

  Saucier nodded. “Don’t say that outside the lab.”

  “Do you think I’m suicidal?”

  “You had that flower.”

  He fell silent. So he had. He supposed he wouldn’t have if he hadn’t felt able to trust the lab. He would have found some way to refuse the cursed gift, or to get rid of it. He might even have cried out for Security to seize the treasonous old woman.

  He had been quite astoundingly foolish to do what he had done. He loved the lab for its tolerance of difference, for its atmosphere of intellectual independence, for its old-fashioned free speech. But talk
was one thing. Doing was quite another.

  “What did you want me to see?”

  The weathergirl was done. The soccer report from Earth was nearly over.

  “There it is.” Saucier didn’t really need to point as the screen filled with a Q-ship, all swollen nose and slender shaft jutting from a bundle of cylindrical reaction-mass tanks. “The Explorer.”

  The newscaster, his voice urgent with professional emotion, was saying:

  “… back from Tau Ceti, where they found a world with intelligent life. It may be the Gypsies’ First-Stop, according to Commander Dengh.”

  Pictures flashed across the screen. Humanoid aliens, large-skulled, round-bellied, and blunt-muzzled, standing erect but fur-covered, some with tails, some without. Cities and fields and roads, ships and trucks, a high, high tower centered in a nearly circular valley, a handful of artificial satellites. A world with two large continents separated by no more ocean than lay between Europe and Africa, each one wreathed in arcs of islands.

  “How long have they been back?” asked Hrecker.

  “A month. They’ve kept it quiet.”

  “Why? What’s the secret?”

  “The Gypsies. The best our people could tell, the age of the buildings, the size of the road network, the amount of environmental damage, all indicate a very young civilization. And that tower. The locals aren’t quite advanced enough to build it. And they speak a kind of English. Our biologists think the Gypsies must have gengineered them from animals.”

  “I hope they spent the month arguing over what to do,” said Hrecker.

  Saucier nodded. “We’re not our ancestors. But we do need to do something. If we don’t, the conservatives will gain power and we may turn as destructive as ever. Or the underground, if there really is one, will sense weakness.”

  “Then—”

  “That’s what that meeting was about.” When Hrecker looked puzzled, he added, “Just before you got here. That’s why I came in here in the first place, things to tell you, and then the rest. They’re moving us.”

  “Why?”

  “The Explorer’s our only starship, and it’s small. We need more and bigger if we’re to send a force to Tau Ceti.” He shook his head. “It will study the place in detail. It will see whether the Gypsies really did do anything. And then it will do whatever it thinks appropriate.”

  Hrecker closed his eyes and shuddered. “So they want more ships.”

  “The government is drafting every Q-drive designer and engineer there is.”

  “Whether they’re in the spaceship business or not.”

  “We used to be. We gave them the tunnel drive.”

  “But we’re not anymore. We’re scientists, not engineers, and we’ve moved on.”

  Saucier shrugged. “They want us too. We’re what they’ve got.”

  Marcus Aurelius Hrecker turned away from his supervisor. He looked at his desk, the keyboard with the smudges where his hands touched most often, the corkboard with the photos of his father and sisters on Earth, the … “And I’ll bet the university isn’t secure enough for them.”

  “We have the rest of the week to pack.”

  “Where?”

  “A construction base in the Belt.”

  Hrecker made a face. “Maybe Security should have spotted that plant.”

  “They’d have jailed you as a gypsymp, a Gypsy sympathizer.”

  “More work for the rest of you.”

  Saucier showed his teeth in a grim smile. “You wouldn’t be any better off yourself.”

  Chapter Two

  Once upon a time, the valley had been a bowl rimmed by steep bluffs, its floor purpled by a carpet of low, mosslike plants and watered by a small lake a little to the west of center. In the woods atop the bluffs had lived creatures about the size of German shepherds. They had eaten the plump white mossberries and drunk from the shore of the lake. They had caught small amphibians and fish and the larvae of the bird-like dumbos, dug for roots and grubs, raided the nests of egg-layers. Occasionally one group had met another, and then they had screeched and screamed and thrown things. Sometimes they had fought, all tooth and claw, blood on the ground, tufts of fur on the shrubbery, even a body or two to eat.

  Strangers had fallen from the sky on tongues of flame, burning the moss away where the bluffs flattened to the east, blackening the yellow soil with char. They had named the creatures Racs, studied every detail of their structure, and in time decided to tweak the blueprints that made them what they were. The new Racs that resulted walked erect, had hands instead of paws, and had larger brains.

  The lake was still there. The landing field was green again, covered with moss. The Racs picked berries there, played games, and on suitable occasions gathered by the thousands to stare into the heavens where their Remakers had gone.

  There were legends of that day, when the night-sky spark that was their vehicle, the Gypsy, had spouted flame and vanished.

  The center of the valley was still dominated by the Worldtree the strangers had grown before they left. Yet that Worldtree was no longer a simple spike that jutted from the ground, its tip swollen to hold the strangers’ heritage. Its base was surrounded by a complex of stone buildings several stories high. Beyond the buildings the moss remained, broken now by gravel paths, stone benches, and thickets of alien vines. It stretched almost to the bluffs, where dormitories and homes and shops for those who served the Worldtree formed a wall of masonry and wood as imposing as the bluffs alone had ever been.

  A Rac standing on one of the gravel paths that linked the valley’s center to its rim could have glimpsed, through arched passageways and alleys, the stream of traffic on the ring road that encircled the valley just outside the wall of buildings. The road’s tributaries led to the mouths of tunnels carved into the bluffs to reach a maze of natural caverns where masons had leveled floors, built walls and ramps, and installed reinforcing pillars. Roadways wound through the caverns, and the widest sloped ever upward, finally opening to other roads above the bluffs, outside the valley. Narrower ones led to warrens that had once sheltered Racs from war. Now they were storehouses and parking garages for the local citizenry’s vehicles.

  The forest atop the bluffs was gone. Once small villages had been scattered among the trees. Brush and thatch construction had given way to wood and stone. Farms and workshops had appeared. The population had grown, and the valley floor had remained empty, holy ground occupied only by the Worldtree and the ruins of the first Temple, used only for worship, for picking mossberries, and for battles between tribes and nations that craved possession of the Worldtree. Until …

  Dotson Barbtail trembled in the honeysuckle thicket. His pelt kept him from noticing the chill of the mid-autumn night, but his ears alternately pricked alert and flattened against his head. His voice sang with tension in his throat. Quiet, he thought. Quiet. Don’t move. Don’t make the vines shake. Don’t let anyone see you. And thank your Gypsy Remakers that it is not cold enough to turn your breath to clouds of steam.

  The pedestrian whose presence on the gravel path had made him freeze passed by obliviously. No others were in sight, which was as it should be. It was late at night, halfway between dusk and dawn, and every good Rac in the valley should be in bed.

  Except for late-working scholars.

  He shifted just enough to watch the pedestrian grow distant on the path. Did he have a tail? Was he a scholar? Or a tailless servant?

  Those were the choices, weren’t they? Everyone in bed but late workers, scholars and servants. And rogues like Dotson Barbtail.

  Was he really a rogue?

  One hand touched the traditional leather harness that crossed his shoulders and chest and circled his waist. It supported several small pouches for trinkets, money, tools. One held a key.

  Rogue. When he h
ad been small, they had called him that. His mother had cuffed him twice for every one she gave his brothers and sisters. Teachers had scolded and punished. Neighbors had looked at him, and their voices had changed from the roughness of contentment to the smooth song of anger.

  Perhaps he had just had too much initiative. Been too ready to act, too slow to anticipate costs and consequences.

  But he had also been smart. He had known how to learn quickly and well, and he had qualified to be a student at Worldtree Center. Now he tried to be as much a scholar as anyone. It was a life he loved.

  Why, he didn’t really have to hide in the honeysuckle, did he? He was a student, a scholar with research assignments all his own. He might be working late himself. He could walk the paths as freely as any other.

  But he didn’t want to be seen by anyone who might later recall his presence here on this night of all nights, when …

  He wished it were darker. The lights of the city that surrounded the valley made the sky glow. If someone saw him hiding there, they would have little trouble making out the distinctive color pattern of his fur. That was what had given him his name.

  The Worldtree stood high ahead of him, its silhouette piercing the skyglow. The buildings of Worldtree Center leaned against its shaft, holding up their peaked roofs, the crenellated walkways for the guards that had not been needed for a generation, the single high turret from which a stout rope ladder rose and rose and rose, vanishing from sight in its reach for the Worldtree’s distant, precious tip.

  He wished he wore an ordinary, undistinguished, anonymous coat. Then, if he were seen, he might have some hope of escaping unrecognized.

  He would have another name too, wouldn’t he? No barbtail markings. Just a reputation for getting into trouble.

  He snorted gently, quietly, and eased forward among the honeysuckle vines. Several of the cup-sized blooms tipped and spilled their sticky nectar on his fur. Their cloying odor filled the air. He wrinkled his nose and struggled not to sneeze. He promised himself a bath and a brush. Perhaps, when he was done, he would go by the lake.