Meanwhile, Thornton Cohen-Davies let the image of the bird play on the great screen of the decision room. He was troubled and puzzled. His function had long been that of Humanist Memory. He had been one of three whose task it was to go over and over the life of the ancients, as it had existed before the nuclear disaster, remembering and preserving, sorting and reminding. The other two, working at the time in genetics, had died under the sudden collapse of level five, far end. What was it about this bird? Surely it was unreal, nothing like those on the tapes he had seen. But it reminded him of something. What odd feet—like those of the fabled alligators that had haunted the bayous of the south before they had been boiled like jellies in the consuming fire.
Was he getting senile? Had his long-trained memory failed him? This was what he was for—knowing all about that bird, if it were a bird. A thought crossed his mind. Celeste, who had not spoken since a shock she had had in the genetics lab as a small child, was strange. She communicated largely through the machines, and with them she was superb. Her mathematical and conceptual abilities belied her ungainly walk and long, knobby legs. Her math was graceful and mature.
Cohen-Davies touched a code, and a voice said, “Comp 14.”
“Are you still in decontam? This is Cohen-Davies. I have some instructions for you.”
“Yes, Principal Davies. I am nearly done. Comp 19 and 3 have gone. I am alone.”
“Put your communication in 25–7 mode then, please.”
“Yes, Principal.”
“Now then, Bill, listen. Did it really look the way you said out there?”
“Yes, Thor. All desolate and forbidding. Is that what you wanted?”
“No. Celeste has light-drawn a bird. Let me project it to your viewscreen.” He pushed a button.
“Ugly thing. She certainly has a wild imagination. I guess it helps keep her sane down here—without interference, that is.”
“Yes, Bill. Think. The thing haunts me. I think I should know about it. Has it ever had a reality?”
“How would I know? I’ve never seen anything like it, of course.”
“Could it be possible that Celeste has gotten outside the levels. Could she have seen anything outside, perhaps?”
“Very unlikely, Thor. The alarm system would have sounded.”
“Perhaps, with her vast knowledge of the whole network, she found a way to silence it. What do you think?”
“I doubt it. But if she had entered the dome, a very faint radiation would still cling to her. The best thing would be to pass a counter near her—soon, before the radioactivity could be dissipated. If she had, too, there is the additional danger of unwanted organics.”
“Yes. I don’t want her in trouble. Could you, discreetly, make such a test? I will bring her by you in level two, far wing, at 3250. Is that acceptable?”
“Yes, Thor. Will do. Can you be free for a game later?”
“Perhaps. But let us settle this first. Now off. Someone comes.”
Eolyn’s approach slid the partition aside and she reentered. Celeste’s bird still played on the wall. “Shut it off, Thor. It has upset Butto again, I know, and he has disappeared. I fear he is getting dangerous and will need mind-washing.”
“That is pretty hard to do to him now. It’s drug residues, I think. And he is the only one we have left with any knowledge of genetics since the floor collapsed.”
“But I am worried. He seems to have a following. We are so few now. If he really convinces a body of us that all mankind ought to be eradicated, they may try it. We need to nullify that in advance.”
“Perhaps you are right. Well, I must go. I want to communicate with Celeste.”
“Would that such were possible.”
“I would like to get her hand-pollinating again. It seems to soothe her. She even hums a little to the flowers.”
“Poor Celeste. Damn her.”
Cohen-Davies left, passing down the dim, yellow-lit corridor. Later, as he and Celeste moved through level two, they passed the small, inconspicuous Comp 14, Cohen-Davies’ secret friend, whom he had lifted from his partial chemical lobotomy, lessening it slowly through counterdrugs, a private endeavor. They had been friends now for some years, playing electronic bridge through their own encodings, making remarks to each other, even finding a way to laugh electronically, sending the secret impulses from the spacious, file-filled quarters of Cohen-Davies on level one down to level five to the sterile cell of Comp 14, or Bill, as Cohen-Davies called him.
As Celeste and Cohen-Davies continued walking, a thin electronic whine told him that Celeste indeed had been out into the dome, how he could not imagine, because only the comps went there, due to the constraints demanded by radiation protection and freedom from microorganisms. The levels had long been pure.
Cohen-Davies abruptly turned the girl and marched her to the deserted gen-lab. She was frightened and sought an array of electronic buttons. Cohen-Davies made sure they stayed out of her reach. He sat her down on a lab table and said to her, not unkindly, “Now listen, Celeste. I know you have been in the dome.” She winced. “I will not tell. But you are radiation-contaminated—though only slightly. There will be organic contamination, too. We must decontaminate you quietly, so no one finds out. All right? Do you understand?”
She took his hand. He touched his belt communicator, and Comp 14 appeared and led her down the corridor. Soon he showed her how to make it seem, as was appropriate, that she was leading him.
Cohen-Davies sat musing. Perhaps she had reached the window. Perhaps there were such things as those birds. If that were so, then all the earth outside would not have been destroyed. Surely the birds would have to fly from somewhere to somewhere. Her second electronic picture indicated a flock of them. My God, what would that mean? But what of the radiation? Surely the rod had read that faithfully. They had run many tests on the equipment—at least all they could without risking exposure. If they had only had a real nuclear scientist with them at the time of the blast so many centuries ago. To be cut off without one, to have built knowledge here, in this prison, with the skills of drug technicians, engineers, and chemists. Well, they were fortunate enough to have survived at all. So much depended on them.
Then Cohen-Davies had another thought. If the birds survived, perhaps men did, too. Perhaps it had all been a waste. He began to laugh. He couldn’t stand that thought. But they had never picked up a single radio wave. The organic scanner of centuries ago had never found animal heat, even on its most sensitive settings.
Cohen-Davies put in the code for Eolyn. Her face appeared on a private screen. “I would like to confer with you,” Cohen-Davies began. “But I must ask your attitudes. Would you be averse to my telling you a thing about Celeste that—” Eolyn’s face contorted with impatience. “—that might amuse you?” Cohen-Davies said. “No. I see not.”
“Thor, this is no time for amusements. We have just lost our whole oil supply. And that insufferable girl. She should be converted to a comp. No. I am serious. She is damaged. We have so few people, and now no real geneticists. What will we do? What is it? You are not telling me something.”
Cohen-Davies shrugged. “Signing off,” he said. Then he sat, tapping his fingers for a time. Turning, he touched Bill’s code again.
A voice said, “Comp 14.”
“Bill, how good a view is there out the window in the dome?”
“Not very good. Except for the optics. The scanner.”
“Ah. I know nothing of it.”
“It lets you enlarge portions of the view. You can even freeze them on the screen for study, or store them. But we never do. There is nothing to see. Dirt and sky. Sometimes moving clouds.”
“Can you enlarge a small thing?”
“Oh, yes. If you want to look at gullies.”
“Thank you, Bill. Signing off,” said Cohen-Davies. He sat for a time, tapping his fingers again. Was it possible that Celeste could even work the scanner? No, that seemed hardly credible. He rose, sighing, and then s
tood, absently, thinking.
Meanwhile, on level three, near side, Ruthan directed the pollination of the new tomato crop, three rows, set in organic slurry, propped with hydrocarbon rods, with spring clamps. Each blossom was touched with a pollinating rod by hand, delicately, between dips in the starting solution. The deft comps could do many blossoms so carefully and well that each bore a perfectly round fruit under the shimmering bluish light strips. The paste from these tomatoes was cubed in with the protein from beans and rodents, then flaked for use with soy. The soy was a luxury, taking so long to mature, but it also grew easily. With slight individual care, for which labor was simple, soy produced bountifully. Genetic selection had bred beans double the size of the ancient ones.
Ruthan loved to chew them dried and raw, tough and resistant as they were, but she took care to let no one know. The custom and prejudice of the dome and levels called for eating processed food almost exclusively—so processed that its individual components were completely shrouded. Ruthan had heard rumors of the reasons behind this policy, but they were so macabre that she shivered whenever she thought of them.
The beans on the south side lengthened up the wall and started on the ceiling strings, reaching for the light. It was time to prune them back, taking each clipping carefully and tossing it into the funnel that fed the salad-cube processor. Soon she and the comps would train the vines downward again, slipping new light strips into the arbors so they were fed light from both sides of the vines. She thought of Dexter. It was pleasurable but also disconcerting. She would have to depress her feelings with drugs soon, ridding herself of tendencies toward ancient and useless strains of behavior. But still, what else did the dome and levels offer? She would think drug therapy over.
Dexter, meanwhile, in his quadrant on level five, was in charge of the rodentry, the only source of animal protein. He needed no comps since the whole operation slid smoothly along automatically, though occasionally he borrowed from the comp pool for general cleanup, or for company as much as anything.
At this moment he was not thinking of Ruthan. He stood on his hands, almost perfectly motionless, the knotted muscles of his arms tense but controlled, not yet trembling. Perched high, on each of his feet, a white rat hunched. Dexter was trying to convince another to climb to them. They had rehearsed it endlessly, but so far only the two had learned.
Dexter sighed, looking directly into the rat’s wobbling nose. “Come, Betsy,” he said. “Come on now. Like last time. That’s right. Hands on my arm. That’s right. Good. There is a food cube up there. You’d better get it before Minerva eats it. Come on, now.”
Betsy’s paws trembled. Her nose touched his arm, but she withdrew her pink paws to her chest and sat, slightly humped, looking at Dexter’s arm, which had begun to shake slightly.
“Come on, you little slime,” Dexter said, in soothing tones. “Put those hands back up there before I grind them off and make a bracelet out of sections of your bones. I will string a length of your useless rat gut around old Cohen-Davies’ neck for a bauble.”
Reassured by Dexter’s gentle voice, Betsy put her paws back, then ran up his arm and sat on his head, her naked tail dangling down in front of his nose.
“Up now. Good Betsy. Up my back. That’s it, you ground grubber.”
She began to stretch up, but Juno suddenly raced down his right leg and confronted Betsy with a squeal, teeth grinding. Dexter collapsed in a heap of laughter, dumping Minerva. Betsy scurried to the gate of her cage. Where was Juno? Dexter realized that he lay on top of her, and when he got up, he saw she was dead.
He stroked her, then picked her up and strode over to the vats. With two slices, several deft strokes, a twist, a cupping hand, and some jerks, he had gutted her, thrown the guts into the organic recycle, stripped off her skin, put it through the hair recovery feed, then took the hairless skin, peeled and trimmed the central square, recycled the rest, and dropped the meat and bone into the pickling tank in preparation for protein processing. The square of skin he placed against the roller and, touching the button, fed it into the curing mechanism.
Then he dipped his hands and held them up to the ultrasonic air flow. Turning, he saw nine ranks of cages, all occupied by white rats, large as cats, staring at him accusingly and silently. He bowed.
“I’m sorry, my friends. Juno had no business running beneath me. I regret her demise as much as you—yes, surely more, since you have expended no energies trying to train her. Now then, Minerva, Betsy, into your cells.”
He directed a small sonic herder at them, touched the activator, and steered them back into their own enclosures. Their weight tripped the doors—open, then closed. All was well again. Dexter, jumping, caught the trapeze he had mounted from the ceiling. “Now,” he said, “for my next act, I shall imitate the great man-apes of the ancients. Here, my lovelies. Watch this swing.” The rows of pinkish, quizzical eyes followed him, having forgotten Juno.
Dexter swung, again and again, expertly, finally reaching to touch his toes to the low ceiling, which was, like the rats, yellow in the bands of sodium strip light. He swung back again, then up, flipped, and landed on his feet. He turned and bowed again. From the upper tier, nine rats, all in a row, each with a blue mark on its cage door, clapped front paws repeatedly but listlessly.
Dexter shook his head. “Such an audience. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I leave you to your own contemplations. I must depart. Cohen-Davies is training me in the ways of the ancients. When he ages to oblivion, I must be stuffed full of their trivia. After all, today the Dow Jones averages are up several points.” He laughed and left the room doing cartwheels, the sliding panel barely opening before he passed through. The lights dimmed automatically, and a new food block descended. Soon the rows of rats munched quietly, with rapid teeth, to the accompaniment of ancient music, an electronic Unfinished Symphony.
Deep in level six, in a dim corner of the genetic-breeding cubicle, known as the Brat Shack, rows of glassy tubs sat covered, with slight bubbles seething through them. The atmosphere lay warm and humid. A pulse bumped gently and steadily, coming from a device with no other purpose than to produce it, slow and reassuring. In the tubs fetuses swam, growing slowly, tube-connected, some tiny and fishlike, others larger. These were now the charges of Butto, since the true geneticists had died in the collapse of the floor.
The panel slid. Celeste entered, as if stealing up on them. In the dim light she peered at each vat. Were they to be human? Surely that one was not. Look. Instead of tiny hands, curved claws lengthened. She drew in her breath. In her silence and isolation she still came back to this place of shock and horror. Celeste squinted with aversion into another vat. The slowly turning flesh dollop swam in a solution of the wrong color. It seemed to turn stiffly, to gather bubbles. No. Surely it was dead. So Butto knew nothing at all of this work. What would they do? She could not explain. Every time she tried to open her mouth to speak of it, her voice rebelled—ever since she had been down here and seen them making a comp. It wasn’t as it should have been. It wasn’t genetic transformation. Drugs, a slight struggle, violent malformation, and stunting of the body surgically—all whirled before her eyes. They didn’t know—not only Butto. None of them. The old skills had lapsed. She had checked the tapes in the privacy of her own chamber once she had trained herself in the codes. If they knew, what would they—a sound. Celeste shrank down under a tub frame.
Butto entered, sweating and naked, a strange gleam on his dark face. Three comps followed, naked too. Butto looked at the tubs, one by one, forty in all. “Comp 11,” he said.
“Yes, Principal Butto,” the comp muttered.
“Tub fourteen has gone bad. Recycle it. Wash it first. Filter the fluid. We will irradiate it for reuse.”
“Gone bad, Principal?”
“Do not ask. It was the geneticists. It is not my fault. They themselves had lost the skill, had forgotten the meaning of the tapes. It is all hit or miss now. Well, it does not matter. Better that we all die than th
at we so destroy the world again.”
“Yes, Principal. May we see the stars the next time?”
Butto whirled on him. “Never refer to that anywhere else. Never.”
“Yes, Principal. I am sorry, Principal.”
“We may see the stars, but only through the leaves. At 8900.”
“Yes, Principal.”
“You are free for 1250 after you flush fourteen.” Butto spun on his heels and left rapidly, his buttocks jouncing slightly.
The two comps, both small and spindly, wheeled the tub to the drain, pumped off the fluid, then whirled the tub-stand section over to the disposal and dumped the mass of flesh out of it. Celeste heard a slap and plop as it slopped into the wide tube leading to organic recycle.
“He was good this time,” said Comp 9.
“Yes. Better than pleasure. I want to see the stars, though.”
“It does not matter.”
“No. Nothing matters. Butto is right. And he will see to that.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I. I am only a comp, as you are. Let’s go to the dinner chamber. Comp 15 will be there. He will tell us about the dome.”
Celeste remained crouched for some time after they left. The slight bubbling sound continued, as did the pulse. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her tongue seemed to swell up and cry out by itself, but she made no sound. She would get out into the dome again. What did it matter now? Since the floor accident, everything had gone wrong—more wrong than before. If she only had a father. The ancients had fathers and mothers. She had tried to make Cohen-Davies one, but he had not understood. And if even he had not understood, then who could? She would return to the dome, then, and the door she had found—or a better one. The sky had been so gray and the air so chill. But the lines of birds really flew there. If she went soon, it would be the dark cycle. She would take her ultrasonic pointer and an exercise robe. She would take extra shoes too, one pair inside the other. And now that Cohen-Davies had had her decontaminated, she knew how to do that herself, too. No one would know.
The Dome in the Forest Page 3