Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Trouble, he thought. He was who he was, and surely that could not be changed. Not entirely. He had behaved himself since coming to Worldtree Center. Most of the time.

  But he was who he was. Just let him think of something that seemed a good idea to do. It did not matter whether his elders would approve or not. Better, perhaps, if they would sing with rage when they found out, and knowing that, or thinking it, he had never been able to leave that good idea alone.

  Without his markings, he would surely be known as Dotson Eaten-by-Temptation. Or would he? Sly Evader might do as well, for the elders caught him far less often than he deserved.

  Would they catch him tonight?

  He really hoped they would not. He had never before plotted such an awful crime that was theft and sacrilege and blasphemy and heresy all at once.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  It still did.

  He squeezed his fingers more tightly about the lump of baked clay in his hand. He had been roaming the streets of Worldtree City above the bluffs when he had found the potter’s workshop. He had lingered in the door to watch one rotund worker kneading red-brown clay, another making bowls on a spinning wheel, a third painting glazes in patterns onto dry clay surfaces. He had returned again, and again, and one day he had found the shop empty. That was when he had stolen a handful of clay. He had shaped it later, making his lump, heating it in the oven of his apartment stove, hoping that was hot enough, then painting it with enamels. When he was finished, he was satisfied. It was not a perfect match for what he had wished to imitate, but it was close. Close enough.

  The only question then remaining was whether he would ever have a chance to use it. Would there ever be a time? Would he ever dare?

  Every year the honeysuckle spread, pushing its way into ground long held by the valley’s native moss. Gardeners pushed it back, but still it grew. It even grew outside the valley, spreading across the face of First-Stop much as had the Racs themselves.

  Some Racs thought the honeysuckle should be removed entirely, chopped and burned and dug up by the roots. The space, they said, could be given back to moss. Or it could be used for more dormitories or library space. Others said the vines were a relic of their Remakers, the alien strangers who had raised them from the beasts. They should remain, as much a remembrance and a promise as the Worldtree that dominated the valley and the Rac culture. So far, the traditionalists had always won.

  Dotson was grateful. The honeysuckle hid him where he crouched. It let him move unseen close to the walls of Worldtree Center, that complex of buildings that surrounded and leaned against the Worldtree the Remakers had left behind.

  He looked upward, toward those walls, those buildings. They were built of stone and mortar, designed to last forever. They were pierced by windows, many of them lit even so late at night. He saw shadows moving, heard voice and music, smelled food.

  Now there was a walk ahead of him, an open zone that he would have to cross to reach the Great Hall. He let his face ease gently through the screen of vines and peered first left, then right. No one was in sight. He could hear no crunch of gravel beneath distant feet.

  Still, someone might be watching from further off. From some high window, dark or lighted. He chose a darker portion of the path, slipped sideways from the honeysuckle, and stepped forward along the gravel as naturally and normally as he could manage. A few more steps, another shadow, and he slipped into the honeysuckle on the other side of the path. With luck, he thought, no watcher would have seen where he came from or where he went. There he was, following the path like any other stroller. They would assume they had not noticed him, that he had been there, on the path, all along and was still there somewhere, lost from sight once more in darkness.

  He bared his teeth in a Rac grin. He certainly hoped he was lost from sight.

  The honeysuckle on this side of the path was a thin screen, a ruff of vegetation at the base of the stone wall, a foundation for the vines that climbed the building’s side and peeped in at the windows. He thought the vines were surely sturdy enough to bear his weight. He was also happy that he did not have to trust his estimate. His target was low, near the ground, and here it was, glinting in the skylight just enough to see. He reached out one hand to touch the glass. It moved.

  He had been in the Center that afternoon, working in his lab, studying the copies of the Worldtree’s ceramic plaques that spelled out the basics of his field. A smudge had impelled him to seek out the archive, to check the original, and it was passing through the Great Hall on that errand that he had found the key, set down and forgotten. Where he found it told him what it must fit.

  His recognition of the moment he had long awaited had paralyzed him where he stood. But he had unfrozen before anyone could think his odd posture worth a question. He had palmed the key. Then …

  It had taken only minutes more to find this window and set it ajar.

  And no one had closed it.

  Once that would have been unthinkable. Once there had been guards who patrolled all of Worldtree Center, finding and closing off every route by which a stranger, an enemy, might invade.

  He swung the window wide and clambered over the sill into a small room. The dim skylight revealed a toilet, a door, and a sink. Beside the sink was a roll of paper towels.

  When his feet clung to the tile floor, he stopped. He wished he had had the foresight to know that honeysuckle nectar would spill, that he would walk in the sticky stuff, that it would cover his hands. He wished he had known he would leave such unmistakable signs of his presence.

  But if he had no foresight, he had luck. The Remakers must have smiled upon his plan when they led him to use the window in this room.

  He dampened a fistful of towels at the sink and scrubbed the worst of the stickiness from his fur and hands and feet. Only then did he slip through the door into the dim-lit corridors beyond.

  A mounted suit of ancient warrior armor—helm and breastplate and skirt of metal strips—made him start, but only for a moment. No one, no one real and live and apt to question his presence there, seemed to be in the building. There were no lines of light beneath office doors. No distant voices, no click of claws on floor tiles, no echoes of closing doors.

  There was no telling how long the silence would last. Surely there were still a few guards to patrol the building and protect its treasures. Surely they would come by soon, too soon.

  He stopped. Was that … ? No. Some small animal, scurrying above the ceiling panels. A creak of the building’s fabric.

  He hurried, and when the corridor he followed debouched into the building’s central chamber, he stopped again. Near one end of the vast room was the tenth-scale Worldtree, at its foot a small stepped pyramid on which the priests held forth each week, new students dedicated their lives to learning, and officials of Worldtree Center took their oaths of office.

  There were more displays of armor and weapons and the inventions that marked the ascent of Rackind from their raw beginnings. There was the great mural that covered the long far wall with a depiction of all Rac history from the creation to the building of Worldtree Center. Though the light was dim, it glowed with a brilliance of its own, or perhaps of memory. Every Rac knew this painting’s every detail as if it were the pattern of his fur.

  There was the valley filled with opposing armies that trampled moss and honeysuckle alike. There were the great box kites, anchored by wheeled winches, that had lifted observers above the battle. There was that one observer who had called for more rope and let the wind lift and lift and lift, until he could drop from his kite to the flange that ringed the Worldtree’s top. His deed had earned him a new name, Kitewing, and made him a hero for all of time.

  When he looked at that portion of the mural, Dotson touched the side of his flattened, chinless muzzle in an abbreviated version of the Rac g
reeting gesture. Few ever denied Kitewing that token of respect, for legend had always said that the Remakers had left a trove of knowledge in the chamber atop the Worldtree and that those Racs who possessed the valley and the Worldtree would, as soon as they could reach its top, rule the world.

  Not that war had stopped after Kitewing hoisted the first rope ladder up the Worldtree and brought the first few plaques down to be puzzled over and the kinship of their language to that spoken and written by the Racs slowly recognized. Since then the Rac tongue had shifted closer to that of the plaques. Now only the least educated and the primitives who did not live in the Land of the Worldtree could not understand the Remakers’ gifts.

  Nor had war ceased after the construction of Worldtree Center had begun. Nor after the dawn of industry, the making of vehicles and other machines. The mural recorded it all, the bright sunlit notes of triumph and progress, the somber, smoky, red-lit notes of further war, the tanks and fighters, guns and bombs, fleeing civilians, death, destruction.

  And always the opponents seemed to differ only in whether they did or did not have tails.

  Dotson Barbtail snorted gently, quietly, careful not to produce any sound that might draw attention to a room that should be empty at this hour. The historians said the battles for possession of the Worldtree and its secrets had been battles between tribes, later between nations and regions, later still between systems of belief, both political and religious, not between races of Racs. But the mural told its own story. He did not think it quite coincidence that tailed and tailless mostly lived in different nations, different regions, under different patterns of rule and religion. And the tensions remained. War could erupt anew at any moment, just as it had so many times in the century since the Remakers had left First-Stop and the Racs’ story had begun.

  Had it really been only a century, a little more, since Racs had lived in huts in the forest? Since they had been beasts without even the wit to build the crudest shelters? He turned to face the miniature of the Worldtree. The priests said their progress had been so fast, faster even than that of the Remakers before they had learned enough to become the gods of the Racs, because those gods had not only made them. They had also taught them … The lesson was inscribed on the shaft of the Worldtree icon at the head of the room, on the image of the Worldtree wherever it appeared in the mural, though he could not make it out in the dimness: “Knowledge is the road to heaven.” Once the Racs learned enough, they could climb the Worldtree. Once they learned still more, said the priests, they could join the Remakers in the sky.

  Perhaps that final goal was not far off. Rac engineers and physicists had learned how to fill metal towers like hollow Worldtrees with liquid hydrogen and oxygen and put devices into orbit around their world. The latest such thundertree was the largest; when it was finished, it would carry a pod containing three Racs into space. In a few years, First-Stop would have what the Remakers’ records called a space station. There would be trips to other planets of the Tau Ceti system. Eventually …

  Dotson Barbtail shook himself. This Great Hall was designed to awe, to fill Racs with a sense of history and destiny, to stop them in their headlong rush from task to task and awaken reflection. It rarely failed with him, not even when he knew he could not afford to give it the time it demanded.

  That lump of clay he had prepared was hot and damp in his hand. He turned again, away from the miniature Worldtree, away from the mural. There was what he sought. There, at the opposite end of the chamber, a glass display case in which rested the seamless metal casket Kitewing himself had found atop the Worldtree.

  Legend said that the two dozen seeds within the casket were the seeds of the Remakers themselves.

  No one knew how a walking, thinking, talking creature could possibly sprout from a seed like a plant, but that was what the legend said.

  Once the Racs mastered every lesson the Remakers had recorded on the plaques the Worldtree had also held, they should plant the seeds. The Remakers’ children would then be with them to guide them to where their parents dwelt among the stars.

  He unsnapped the flap of a pouch and removed the key he had found on top of the display case earlier that day.

  Would it fit?

  Would he trigger some silent alarm that would bring Worldtree Center’s guards running to seize him?

  He inserted it in the keyhole at the base of the case’s wooden side panel.

  It turned easily, and the panel swung down.

  He chose a seed, just one, and replaced it with the lump of painted clay he had carried all this time in his hand.

  He closed and locked the panel once more.

  He set the key on top of the case, precisely where he had found it.

  Then he fled.

  The pot full of rich valley loam was already waiting in his quarters.

  Chapter Three

  The new lab did not look much like the old. For one thing, Belt Center 83 had not been embedded in a very large rock. Its gravitational field was just barely strong enough to define a vertical and so slight that it took many seconds for a dropped tool to reach a floor. This meant that a few square centimeters of velcro were all it took to anchor cupboards, storage bins, display screens, and other gear against the walls. A grid of narrow metal bars was slung a meter below the ceilings. People pulled themselves from bar to bar as they traveled about the lab. The ubiquitous little robots ran atop the bars, though they could and did go everywhere in search of dust and litter and pinhole leaks in the tunnel lining. Many were equipped with small propellers and stubby control surfaces that made them look like ancient biplanes so they could move quickly despite the lack of weight. The same modifications also equipped them for zero-gee.

  For another, except in that portion of the Center occupied by Security and Administration, there were no individual offices or other rooms. There were only endless tunnels winding beneath the surface of the rock. Elastic cords and plastic sheets created walls and partial ceilings, but they only approximated privacy. The sheets, no thicker than a sheet of paper, were both flimsy and translucent, and Security forbade complete ceilings even over toilet facilities. Always, overhead, the way was clear for passersby to look in on whatever might be going on. An etiquette of averted eyes and hasty passage had quickly developed, but even when people did not look, they could only pretend to ignore smells and sounds. Everyone knew that there could be no real secrets of work or toilet, sleep or sex.

  The new lab differed in one other crucial feature as well: Security was everywhere. Guards hovered at every tunnel intersection. They daily scanned the records in every computer and read mail before addressees ever saw it. They peeped over every flimsy partition, and no one knew when they were listening.

  No plants were visible, but that was nothing new to those who had come to Belt Center 83 from Mars or the Moon where no scrap of green was permitted outside officially approved greenhouses and agricultural domes and tunnels. Yet in such places people at least had known the greenery was there. If one were careful, it could even be visited.

  Here, though, there were no such places. Those who craved a glimpse of green could only visit the vatrooms near the lab’s surface, where the light of a distant sun glowed through vast tanks of algae that absorbed carbon dioxide and wastes and supplied the lab with oxygen and a pasty goo to be processed into food.

  There were more guards in the vatrooms than anywhere else, and it was no mystery why. Those who craved green, those who had some sympathy for living things, could not be decent Engineers. They might even be secret Orbitals or Gypsies, or their silent allies. Certainly they could not be trusted.

  Few of Belt Center 83’s workers, not even those few from Earth who missed green the most, not even those few who did indeed doubt the wisdom of their masters, thought it worth being seen staring into the algae tanks.

  What passed for Marcus Aureli
us Hrecker’s private workspace looked much as it had at Olympus University. There was a desk, a screen, a keyboard. A veedo set and a shelf clung to the one wall that was solid. Self-stick memos stuck to the plastic sheeting of the others. There was, of course, no African violet. Nor was there a door, not when he and all his visitors dropped in from overhead.

  One frequent visitor was Tamiko Inoue. Half Hrecker’s mass, she seemed to smile whenever she looked at him with her deep black eyes. He knew he did the same.

  “They can spare you for a while?”

  She laughed and sat on the end of his desk nearest the veedo set. “I’m not that important.” She was one of several aides to Sergei Lyapunov, the Estonian general in charge of the Navy’s expeditionary force. The Navy was the Navy because it traveled in the sea of space; its commanders were generals because its ships flew.

  “Or do they send you out to spy on the peons?”

  She laughed again and shook her head. Her hair, as black as her eyes, was cut too short to swing and bounce, but he could imagine it longer, given life by motion and gravity. She wore a sleek coverall that brought every bulge and hollow to life. Hrecker did too, though his shape emphasized the outfit’s practicality. Clothing that flapped and billowed did not belong where gravity was not enough to keep it under control.

  “Can’t think why else you’d leave the castle.” The scientists and technicians in the rest of Belt Center 83 envied their administrators, who shared one end of the asteroid with the Security forces. The tunnels there opened into actual rooms, with doors and solid walls.

  “It gets lonely in there, even though there’s a lot of men would like to— Uh!”

  She jumped as the veedo set beside her turned itself on with a burst of sound.