Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  The medics working over the wreckage of the Sparrow’s passenger pod kept the few survivors of the jet’s fall separate, for they would have to be interrogated. The dead were trucked away to morgues, though first a single officer recorded their features with a computer-compatible electronic camera. Later, he would record the living as well. Then the electronic images would be routed through the police department’s computers for comparison with their extensive files of known terrorists, and then through the worldwide computer net for a broader search. If any of the Sparrow’s passengers and crew members—alive or dead—had any past association at all with terrorism, the local authorities would soon know the details.

  Bernie, Connie, and Larry now were traffic cops. They waded through the chaos of the scene, guiding vehicles that had, in their efforts to escape, gotten tangled in the ditches or on the embankments, or even in the roadway, back into position on the road. Using pocket recorders, they took names, addresses, and phone numbers of witnesses for later interviewing. And in due time, the road began to resemble nothing so much as a vast parking lot, covered with serried ranks of vehicles awaiting some signal to move. Behind the congested zone, traffic had been diverted and no longer accumulated. To the rear of the jam, other cops were getting some of the stopped vehicles turned around and headed toward the nearest exit ramps.

  One of the last vehicles that Bernie checked was a Tortoise in full withdrawal. In front, only its nose poked out of the crack between its shell and plastron. Its eyes were safely hidden away from pecking beaks; the headlights mounted on the lip of the shell served as giant surrogates. To the sides, only the stub-clawed toes showed. Inside the passenger compartment, a man, a woman, and a child, holding a bob-tailed Cardinal feather, watched his approach. All were sweating heavily, although the vehicle’s windows were open. He guessed they had waited to unseal the Tortoise until the Sparrow was dead.

  He held their gaze with his own—the woman was attractive, but she was clearly unavailable, married—while he gestured for their attention. But then he let his eyes drop to the running board and the severed arm that lay upon it. It was a small arm, with a yellow plastic watchband around the wrist.

  He vomited again.

  When he looked up once more, the Tortoise’s head and legs had emerged from the shell. The door was open, and the driver was holding out a can of soda. “It’s cold,” he said. “We have a small fridge on board.”

  “Thanks.” Bernie rinsed the foulness from his mouth, spat, and drank the remaining ginger ale. He handed back the can. Then he bent, picked up the arm, and waved it overhead. His stomach remained still, though he was grateful that the limb, its shoulder end all torn and ragged, did not drip. From the corner of one eye, he noticed that the kid in the Tortoise’s back seat stared, wide-eyed. His parents paled, and his father covered his mouth with one hand as if he too had a rebellious stomach.

  In a moment, one of the medics, pale herself and shaking her head over the carnage, retrieved the arm. Only then did he turn on his recorder. “I’m collecting information on the witnesses,” he said. “Your names?”

  “Nick Gilman,” said the driver. He pointed at the woman unnecessarily. “My wife, Emily.”

  “I’m Andy,” said the kid. He waved his feather. “Boy, you really hit that Sparrow! Pow! It was eating everybody up!”

  Bernie hoped Andy would never meet worse, as Jasmine had. The kid was too young to truly appreciate horror such as he had just witnessed, though it would surely sink in eventually. He might even have nightmares tonight, as Bernie expected for himself.

  “Reason for being here?”

  “I was picking Emily up at the airport.”

  “I was flying in from Washington. I work for Neoform.”

  He collected their home and work addresses and numbers before saying to the woman, “You’re a gengineer, then?” When she nodded, he added, “Did you have anything to do with the Hawks?” Neoform, he knew, held the design patents.

  “That was before my time,” she said.

  He snorted. “Whoever it was, tell ‘em they’re great. I love ‘em.” He turned then to survey the road ahead of the Tortoise. A Starling short-hauler was unloading a crew of litterbugs to clean up the final, small scraps and the piles of dung left by both the Sparrow and its victims. Irrelevantly, the thought crossed his mind that some people called the cleanup genimals “shit-pickers.” Most people preferred the less offensive label, but there was a strong tendency for people to call a spade a spade, almost despite themselves. “Litter” was now just another synonym for manure.

  From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed an angular skeleton, like a tipsy rocket gantry against the sky, lurching toward them. It was the Crane from the airport’s repair yard, all stiltlike legs and reaching neck, its beak fitted out with metal hooks and pulleys. It was already coming for the Sparrow’s carcass.

  There seemed to be a clear lane past the beak of the Sparrow. Connie and Larry were already guiding traffic in that direction. He pointed, “Through there. We’ll be in touch for your statements.”

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  WHEN THE CLOCK radio came on, Emily wanted to ignore it. Andy had awakened screaming at three in the morning. When he had refused to go back to bed alone, Emily and Nick had taken him into their bed between them. He had then dropped off immediately. They had taken longer to return to sleep, and now she felt distinctly shortchanged.

  Nick pushed at her with the arm on which Andy’s head was pillowed—where her head ought to be—as if to remind her that she had to go to work. She pushed back, throwing one bare calf over his own; she could get no closer, with their son between them. She was asleep, cozy, safe, and she wanted to stay that way, all three. But then the news began, and it was all a repeat of the nightmare of the day before. She growled softly and rolled out of bed. By the time she had turned the electronic voice off, she was awake.

  She had not forgotten the carnage on the expressway, but every time she tried to think of it, or every time someone, or something—the radio—brought the subject up, her mind veered away to other thoughts. Right now, it reminded her that she and Nick had long ago decided that the best place for the radio was on a bureau several steps away from the bed. Mundane thoughts were a refuge to which she clung as if against her will.

  She dressed. She watered the hanky bush on the bathroom windowsill. She ate. By then Nick and Andy were up and bickering amicably over the profound question of whether doughnuts or toast would make a more satisfying breakfast. That settled, Andy went to the window to look at the bird feeder. “Mommy,” he said. “See the Chickadee?” She did. “It was there yesterday.” They watched it devouring the other smaller birds. After a moment, he added wistfully, “Can you make it go away?”

  “We’ll call the airport later, kid,” said Nick. “We’ll tell them to come and get it.”

  “That’s the only thing to do,” said Emily. “We don’t need that sort of reminder.” Then she kissed both her men goodbye, broke a chunk from one of the doughnuts on the table, and left the house, first touching the garage-door control by the front door. By the time she reached the garage, the Tortoise was already emerging. When it saw her, it cocked its head and lowered its shell for her just as it had for Nick and Andy the day before. When it saw the food in her hand, it also opened its cavernous mouth and uttered a soft “Whonk.” She tossed the bite of cake between its jaws and patted its nose before she boarded.

  She always took the Tortoise to work. She felt guilty, for the genimal was Nick’s, yes, but hers, like her father’s before her, was the need for daily transportation. She was fully and painfully aware that the Tortoise was the family’s only car, and that Nick often had shopping to do and errands to run. She was even more painfully aware that her father had been much less sensitive to her mother’s needs.

  She told herself that there was a mini-mall just a few blocks away, and that both he and Andy needed the exercise. Next year, when the boy entered school, might
be another story. From time to time, Nick said something about looking for a job then. If she reminded him that he hadn’t had the skills for a decent job before Andy had come along, he said that, just maybe, he would go back to school.

  So they would need a second vehicle. She wondered what it would be. A Beetle? A Roachster? Some other Buggy? Those had been awfully vulnerable on the expressway the day before. Another Tortoise? They had been safe, after all. How about something that could fly away from that sort of trouble? A Chickadee like the one on the lawn? But they needed airports.

  Perhaps she could alter the design of the jellyfish-based Bioblimp she was working on. It didn’t have to be the size of a moving van. If she could just halt its growth at some earlier stage, the result might be just right for a commuter. She would have to think about it.

  Like the airport, Neoform Laboratories was surrounded by green. Once a visitor had passed the security guard’s gate, there was a parking lot shaded by trees, with the lines of vehicles separated by concrete troughs through which ran fresh water. There were paddocks marked off by white board fences, as at a Kentucky horse farm. There was a track for testing the vehicular genimals. There were flower beds near every building, and the smell of flowers, and of hay, and of many kinds of litter.

  Most of the outbuildings were red-painted, white-trimmed barns that housed the experimental stock and prototypes. One was an inflated fabric dome, its triangular panels alternating blue and gold. Jutting high above everything else and stabilized by guy wires, it had been erected for Emily’s prototype Bioblimps. Later, she hoped, it would be the nursery for the first commercial models.

  A concrete walk led from the parking lot to the entrance of the main building, a classic structure of contoured ledges and artful setbacks, all white concrete and tinted glass. The metal ductwork of the air-conditioning system showed on the roof, and though the day was so far very nice, Emily knew that that system would be essential later on.

  Someday, she reflected, a bioform might replace the metal, pumping cooled air through the building with the bellows of its breath. Someday there might be bioform appliances in kitchens and toys in nurseries. There might even be broad-leaved philodendrons whose every leaf was a veedo screen, or bioform computers, or…

  There were people in Neoform’s labs, she knew, who were working on such things. At a recent seminar, she had seen how flat surfaces—leaves or skins—could generate high-resolution images, their pixels nothing more than single cells that emitted bioluminescence, like fireflies or ocean algae or deep-sea fish, on command. Neural logics and signal processors were also under development, and she could foresee the day when bioform vehicles and other devices would have their controlling computers built in, not plugged in. Houses and offices would be grown not as mere shells to be dried and painted and furnished, but complete, with furniture, appliances, communications, and computers as part of their flesh. Never again would humanity need to build mechanical or electronic devices. If she doubted that industry would give way entirely to a new version of agriculture, and that all the environmental problems that the world had learned accompanied mines and factories and machinery would disappear, well, she had been called a cynic.

  The Biological Revolution was young. Just as that earlier revolution marked by the internal combustion engine had begun with automobiles and aircraft, it had begun with their equivalents. Only much later had the internal combustion engine spawned power lawn mowers and weed-whackers. That bioform air conditioner might be decades away, though already she could glimpse how it would have to be designed: part tree, for the cooling power of transpiration, the same thing that made a tree’s shade so pleasant on a hot day; part beast, for the lungs that could make the cooled air move. Perhaps she could work on it, once the Bioblimp project was out of the way.

  There were advantages to being in on the ground floor of a technology and an industry. Later, it would become difficult to think of new things to gengineer. The bioform houses and hanky bushes, now just beginning to appear, would all have been invented. Now, there was plenty of room for creativity and fame and wealth. The future was limited only by the imaginations of gengineers like herself, working for companies like Neoform. And there were plenty of jobs for all the nongengineers who sold and serviced their products or worked at adjusting society to the impacts of the Biological Revolution, even in such simple ways as replacing pavement with turf.

  She stood before the Neoform building. Here were the offices of the company’s administrators, the conference rooms, the laboratories of half a dozen gengineers like Emily. But before Emily could proceed to her lab, she had to confront the gray-haired receptionist who insisted on being called “Miss Carol.”

  From her throne behind a low barricade just within the building’s door, Miss Carol presided over four things: a small switchboard, a computer terminal, an electronic pad on which each person entering or leaving the premises was obliged to sign his or her name, and the control for the turnstile that blocked all passage. When she spoke, she displayed a deep southern accent.

  Emily opened her thin briefcase for inspection, signed in, said she was glad to be back and yes-Miss-Carol she’d heard of the awful thing that had happened on the expressway and yes-Miss-Carol she expected that the memo on the meeting later on would be in her box. Finally, she squeezed through the turnstile and escaped. As soon as she was around the corner, she sighed with relief. When someone laughed, she started guiltily.

  The odor of pipe tobacco told her who the laugher was before she turned. Frank Janifer, one of the company’s few smokers, was standing in the doorway to the company library. “You didn’t give her much of an opening, did you?”

  Emily smiled. Frank was in marketing, and he knew everyone. “She’ll go for half an hour.”

  “But only if you encourage her.”

  She snorted. “All you have to do is stand still! If you have any dirt to give her…”

  There was nothing slow about Frank. “So you were there?” He stepped into the hallway to walk beside her while she said as little as she could about the day before. As always, he made her feel small when he began to move. He wasn’t tall, but he had the kind of bulk that came only with weight lifting, and that was indeed Frank’s hobby. He wore his blond hair past his ears, and Emily had heard the single women in his department remark that it was a pity that he was gay. “Will you be giving us something to market soon?”

  She shrugged. “We don’t have a patent, if that’s what you mean. But we do have a contract possibility.” When he raised his eyebrows, she added, “It’ll all come out at the meeting.”

  They parted at the door to her lab, where her technician, Alan Bryant, offered her the mug of coffee in his hand. “Thanks, Al.” Her nostrils flared as she inhaled the welcome scent. “Anything new?”

  He had a doctorate as good as hers, but he was younger, still new to the world of research. His position was the equivalent of the postdoc of the previous century. He took her briefcase and led the way toward her office cubby at the rear of the lab, in the corner by the window. “There’s that meeting…” They both ignored the computer workstation on the other side of the room. Its screen was running a simulation of the growth of a Bioblimp, from a hydrogen-filled egg floating in air to an adult blimp, its muscular tentacles unloading a ship.

  She rummaged through the pile of mail that had accumulated in the past two days and found the memo. The first item on the agenda was her report on the patent hearing. Second was…

  “And Chowdhury is pushing those armadillos of his.” Bryant’s tone was not approving. The man he had mentioned was abrasive toward everyone, but he seemed to take a special pleasure in his sneers at blacks. Grudgingly, Bryant added, “He’s got a prototype.”

  “He’s wasting his time. General Bodies has that market locked up with their Roachsters.” She paused, sipping at the coffee. Then she looked for her briefcase, found it on a chair, lifted it onto the desk, atop the litter of mail, and opened it. The sheaf of paper
s she wanted was on top of the stack. “Do we have any kangaroo DNA on hand?”

  Bryant shrugged. “I don’t think so. But we can get it overnight.”

  She pointed at a computer-generated sketch. “While I was gone, I talked to a VP for Mayflower Van Lines. He was at the hearing. He liked the blimp’s cargo-handling and thought it could make a good moving van. But only if it had built-in cargo holds.” The sketch showed a blimp hovering above a house. Tentacles were stuffing furniture into openmouthed pouches on either side of the blimp.

  “Gotcha.” He turned and stepped to the computer workstation. A touch of his finger canceled the growth-simulation program, and a genebank’s long list of genetic stock began to scroll up the oversize screen. The genebanks were accustomed to hurry-up orders. “I’ll get right on it.”

  The meeting was scheduled for ten. That gave Emily barely enough time to sort through the rest of her mail and pull her notes together. The company would want a formal, written report eventually. Right now, it wanted whatever she could give, in whatever form she could manage.

  When she and Alan walked into the conference room, the research head, Sean Gelarean, was already there, marking the air with a touch of lime aftershave. Come to the States with the last gurgle of the British Brain Drain, he had found that his Mediterranean coloring could, for a change, make life easier. He told the story often: In England, he had been just another wog, his Palestinian ancestry weighing more than three generations of loyalty to the Crown. Here, he had blended in among hybridized Italians, Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese, Afghanis, Lebanese, and more. The old Italian-American family, the Campanas, into which he had, in time, married had barely noticed that he was not one of their particular group. Rumor had it that he had never converted to their Catholicism, that, in fact, he kept a prayer rug in his office closet and unrolled it five times a day to pray to Mecca in the east.