Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  The banishments were frequent. Chowdhury rarely passed a day without a temper tantrum and an “Out!” Sometimes the moment came after a meeting of the company’s researchers, as it had today. Sometimes it came after a phone call. Sometimes it seemed to come out of the blue, or swim up out of his first morning cup of tea, or rumble out of his bowels. Sometimes he called his people back in just an hour. Sometimes he let them work in the barn all day.

  The barn was isolated from Neoform’s main building and other workers, and it could be noisy, for many genimals, like their unmodified ancestors, had voices and used them. Yet, in some ways, the technicians preferred the place. Despite the noise, and sometimes the stink, it was peaceful. It was also comfortable, for the barn lab’s desks and benches were all of standard height, unlike the furniture Chowdhury preferred, and the seats were padded swivel chairs.

  Now Chowdhury hunched on his high stool, facing his high podium, and stared at nothing. His phone occupied a shelf beneath his desktop. His computer terminal rested on a table, flat-topped but of a height to match his desk, to his right. To his left, another table bore a saltwater aquarium.

  “Dillo Dillies!” His head twitched, and a vagrant sunbeam glanced off the flat planes of his spectacles to put a cursor on the wall. His Armadons would outdo those Roachsters! He knew it! They were warm-blooded, after all, and he would prove to the world what an immense advantage that could be as soon as he got an Armadon and a Roachster head-to-head on the track. Armadons would need more food for fuel, but that should be no problem. Roachsters had been the first bioform vehicles, designed to eat hay, grass clippings, household garbage, whatever was available. The waste disposal genimals had not at the time been widespread. Now there were airliners with prodigious appetites, and the gengineers had taken seriously an old adage of the environmental scientists—“A waste is simply a resource that is out of place.” They had redefined waste disposal as fuel production, and there was no shortage.

  The company was wasting its money on Emily Gilman’s Bioblimps. He turned to stare at his aquarium. It had been handy having a source of jellyfish on the premises. But there was no need for new cargo vehicles, and no money in them.

  They refused to see the truth. They even ridiculed him. And now the police were here. Here!

  His phone rang. He picked it up, listened, and was glad that he had thrown his technicians out. He could feel the beads of sweat upon his brow, knew that he was cringing, shrinking upon his stool.

  He said, “I know what I owe them. I know what I promised. And part of the package is ready now. The rest is almost ready.” There was a pause while he listened. Then he hung up and dropped his forehead into his hands, his fingers gripping his scalp. Years before, he had taken a vacation in Las Vegas. He had gambled. He had won. And when he had come home, there had been an invitation to a local club, a back room in a restaurant in an ordinary middle-class neighborhood. He had gambled again. And he had lost. They had offered him credit. And he had lost that.

  And then…

  He was perversely glad that the phone call had come from that particular caller. He knew the man, and though he had asked Chowdhury to do things of which he had never dreamed, and though he had uttered words that promised that Chowdhury would do far more hateful deeds, deeds he could never conceive of dreaming…He sighed. It would be still worse to be owned by some outsider.

  He knew why he had fallen into the trap. He had been born in this country. But his parents had been South African “coloureds.” His father had been a hybrid of Boer and African, his mother a sari-wearing descendant of Indian merchants. Both had been physicians and well off compared to other members of their underclass. But they had belonged to an underclass, and he had been weaned on the bitter tales of how neither had ever been allowed into such precincts of privilege and wealth as the local casinos. He had seized his opportunity with the eagerness of the culturally deprived.

  And then—the man before him had had the well-fed beefiness of the Boers who had tyrannized his parents. He sat at a broad desk, polished until his inverted reflection doubled the stares aimed Chowdhury’s way. One hand rested on a stack of yellow slips, the credit markers that measured Chowdhury’s foolishness. The other held a small glass vial. A pair of bodyguards flanked the door behind Chowdhury. A safe stood open in the paneled wall to the left.

  “We have let you get much too far into us, Dr. Chowdhury.”

  He stared at the large diamond that held the other’s black tie flat against his shirtfront.

  “You don’t seem to have wondered why.” A sigh. “They never do. But now it’s time to pay.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. You even have a choice of methods.” The other held up the vial and shook it to make the tiny capsule within it rattle. The glass sparkled in the light. “One way is to take this pill.”

  Chowdhury shrank within. He had heard. He knew. The Biological Revolution had put an end to drug smuggling, but not to addiction. Someone, early on, had fitted tapeworms and other parasites with the genes for heroin, cannabinol, cocaine, mescaline, and other substances. There were even parasites for alcoholics. The parasites’ eggs could be washed from an addict’s wastes and given to anyone who wished infection; some addicts carried a dozen different parasites, and their brains were a chemical stew unmatched since the drug-happy days of the 1960s.

  For the first time in history, addicts never had to come down, or worry about how to pay for their next hit. Overdoses were inevitable, for as the parasites grew, they secreted more and more of their drugs, but the addicts never thought of the death awaiting them.

  Nor did they think of how their convenience had hurt the drug trade. The man before Chowdhury had. “Take this,” he said. “And you will be a very happy man.”

  It would cost him his job, his career, his very wish to do the gengineering he loved. “And a dead one,” whispered Chowdhury. He could not take his eyes off the vial.

  The other shrugged. “Eventually. Or…”

  Did Chowdhury sense a possible reprieve? He looked up, from the vial to the diamond again, to the soft chin, the unblinking eyes.

  Another sigh. “These hedonic parasites cost us a very profitable line of business. But they do have a drawback—once one is infected, one is never again free of the drug, even if one should wish to be so. We have wondered whether it would be possible to gengineer an animal, or a plant, that would administer a drug only on command?”

  “A snake? A nettle?”

  The other’s smile showed teeth but did not touch his eyes. “Ah, you understand. And as soon as you bring us something along those lines, something marketable, you understand, we’ll tear these up.” He held the credit markers up. One of the bodyguards stepped past Chowdhury to take them, and the vial, and return them to the safe.

  “Shall we say—cocaine? Until then, I’m afraid, we can’t allow you to gamble any more of our money.”

  The cocaine nettle had been easy. Nettle leaves and stalks are covered with tiny, sharp-tipped, hollow hairs. Normally the hairs are filled with venom; when a person brushes against the plant, the hair tips break off and the hairs inject their venom into the skin; the result is an intense itching, burning sensation. All he had had to do was change the venom genes so that the hairs were filled with a strong cocaine solution.

  He had known what he was doing. He had known that he was developing a new way, a new variation, really, on an old way for people to kill themselves. He had done it anyway, telling himself that it was inevitable. New technology first went to major uses, such as Roachsters, Sparrows, and Armadons, even Bioblimps. Soon thereafter, even before it spread widely in legitimate industry, it began to affect crime, and the underworld use of the technology might even find its way to influencing the legitimate. Prohibition, he thought, had spurred automotive technology because liquor smugglers and moonshiners had devised ways to enhance the speed and power of their vehicles. Later, those same techniques had appeared in Detroit, and when Prohibition e
nded, racing had strengthened to provide a new impetus to the technology.

  He had delivered the cocaine nettle within a month, and he had done so proudly, if warily. Now its scions grew in pots all across the country, while those with the money to buy them, and their guests…

  The head of Neoform’s legal department had thrown a party for the company’s upper-level staff. He had gone, and in the man’s apartment he had seen his creation. A large nettle sat atop the baby grand piano, a second as a centerpiece amid the buffet, a third on the wet bar. The man had called it something new, something expensive, something marvelous, Neoform should have come up with it, see, just pet it, and feel great!

  Someone had tried it, and then another. Someone else had said, “That feels like cocaine!” and tried to explain how millions once had snorted white powder through narrow tubes, rolled dollar bills, rolled…Governments had been powerless as drug money fueled a criminal empire that stretched from South America around the world. But then the parasites had killed almost all the market. There were very few left who preferred their coke the old-fashioned way. Fortunately, she had once dated one of them.

  “Let’s try a leaf!” She had plucked one, rolled it, inserted it into her nose, and gasped. Her current boyfriend had made a hit when he suggested that the leaves might be applied elsewhere to good effect, and it had not been long before the lawyer’s three plants were reduced to stumps. Chowdhury had had to reassure him that they would quickly regrow from their roots, though he had not confessed his role in the plant’s creation.

  But his markers had not been destroyed. Someone else had called. A new master who would hold them as a club, while doling out money enough to buy a new Roachster, and talk of fame and wealth, if only he would produce a hedonic pet or two. They wanted genimals, this time. Something cute, perhaps. Something that only he, gengineer par excellence, could possibly create.

  He looked at his aquarium again. In it floated a small jellyfish. If it were wild, its tentacles would be studded with cnidoblasts. Some cnidoblasts, when touched, would expel minute threads to entangle prey. Others would expel sticky tubes. Still others would discharge barbed needles loaded with paralyzing toxin. His jellyfish had only the third type of cnidoblast. Its needles he had smoothed of barbs and filled with heroin. If he petted it…

  He didn’t think his masters from the underworld—did anyone still call it the Mafia? the Cosa Nostra?—would like the jellyfish. He would show it to them, but he expected they would prefer his tiny asp, its venom sacs loaded with drugs, the snake just of a size to coil around a lady’s throat and, on command, bite her pretty earlobe. Soon he would have a rattlesnake, a coral snake, a mamba. Drugs to be worn. Drugs as fashion. Perhaps he would try a bee, or a spider.

  If only his masters were Indian, or half Indian, like himself. Whites reminded him of the verdammt Boers, while blacks…

  Ah! The stories he had grown up on! His parents, young then, shoulder to shoulder with all the oppressed blacks and coloureds, resisting the Boers, giving them the Cape Town necklaces of flaming rubber tires, expelling them, those that survived, from the country. And then, with help from America, Europe, Russia, China, everywhere, rebuilding the nation’s shattered economy.

  His parents had not been there to see success. Through all of Africa, the merchants derived from India, China, and Southeast Asia were hated only a little less than the whites. And with the whites gone, the blacks had turned on their allies. The Chowdhurys had been among the few to escape the pogroms.

  He had chosen his technicians carefully. None were white. None were kaffirs, schwartzers. One, Chand, was of Indian ancestry. Potonegra was from Guatemala. Dong was Chinese. They were safe. He could work with them, unlike Emily Gilman, or her technician, Alan Bryant, the black.

  He became aware of a thread of music. One of his technicians—there, where Potonegra had been sitting—had left her radio on when she had obeyed his banishment order. He rose from his stool to turn it off. He preferred silence.

  When he returned to his desk, he activated the computer terminal. He called up the appropriate data base, and he found that Emily had been quite right. Armadillos did indeed jump straight upward when startled, and on highways that reflex did indeed lead to many deaths.

  He had his own copy of the armadillo genome, with every gene labeled. He called it up, found the genes that specified the neural circuits behind the reflex. Then he checked the Armadon genome. He shook his head when he found the same genes there. It must have the same circuitry, the same reflex. A quick simulation confirmed that an Armadon did not have the strength to jump, but, yes, it could tear its own wheels off. Just what the customer would want in an emergency. He chuckled.

  With the simulator, he explored the effects of modifying or deleting various genes and bits of circuitry. One change left the Armadon unable to move its legs at all. Another limited its speed. Still another…Finally, he found the change that removed only the startle reflex. He would have Micaela implement it immediately. Then they could grow another prototype, and he would have his fame and fortune without the underworld.

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  SOME THINGS NEVER change. Emily Gilman’s grandmother would have been bewildered by what now passed for airplanes and automobiles. But she would have felt quite at home in her granddaughter’s kitchen. The sink was stainless steel, and on the shelf above it sat a plastic bottle of lemon-scented detergent and a potted plant, a crown of thorns with two tiny blossoms the size, shape, and color of drops of blood. The table was wood, bright curtains flanked the windows, and the refrigerator, its top a repository for paper napkins and books and old gloves, was covered with kiddy art, notes, coupons, and lists, all held in place by magnetic fruit, lambs, and clowns. The rest of the appliances were all as recognizable—the dishwasher that roared its indigestion every evening, the blender, the coffee maker, the mixer, the range, the microwave, the toaster oven. The only changes that had come over the decades were in size and shape and placement of the knobs.

  That wasn’t fair, thought Emily. There were other changes as well. For one thing, it had been her grandmother who ruled her kitchen. Here and now, it was Nick, and this kitchen was far more his than hers. Almost the only thing she did in there was make bread. And she didn’t do that often enough, for it was less a way to feed her family than to sublimate aggression and work off frustration.

  Her grandmother would have thought the arrangement strange, even though in her time househusbands were not all that uncommon. Perhaps it was. Emily felt at times that their roles were far too reversed. She should be the nurturer, he the bread-winner. When they had met, in college, they had both been sure that that would be their pattern, as soon as his poems, perhaps as songs, or his fiction—would he wind up writing for the veedo?—made him rich and famous. It hadn’t worked out that way.

  And how about the computerized voice synthesizer in the toaster oven? She had sliced a bagel, laid it on the rack, and set the knobs for “Dark.” Now it chimed gently and announced in a warmly maternal tone, “I’m getting close.” In a moment, it would say, “I’m ready? Aren’t you? I’ll keep it warm.” If she did not respond, it would do just that, automatically adjusting its temperature to keep the bagel from burning.

  Too many of them talked like that. And it could drive you nuts. Of course, the voices could be turned off, but when you had a small child around the house, you let the gadgets talk. He loved it so. And it could save a parent so much nagging, as when the toilet said, “Don’t forget to wash your hands.”

  The bagel turned brown behind the toaster’s tiny, oblong window. The appliance spoke its piece, she pressed the latch bar, and it delivered up her breakfast. She spread cream cheese, poured coffee, and began to eat.

  Moments later, Andy ran into the kitchen, still in his pajamas, eyes still gummed with sleep, breath smelling of toothpaste, and yelled, “Mommy!” She hugged him with the arm whose hand did not hold half a bagel and offered him a bite.

&nbs
p; Nick appeared, hair uncombed, and said, “C’mon, kiddo. You’ve brushed, but you haven’t washed.”

  “Unh-unhhh!” Andy twisted away from his mother and threw himself across the room into the chair by the window. He knelt there and peered toward the bird feeder, his nose reinforcing the smudge on the glass. Emily took another bite of her bagel. Nick stepped toward their son, his hand outstretched.

  Andy pointed. “Look at that, Daddy! That’s a funny one!”

  Nick bent until his head was beside his son’s and he too could see out the window. “You’re right,” he said. Emily could see his attention withdraw from all thought of getting the boy washed up. “I’ve never seen one like that before. Look, dear.”

  Emily didn’t want to look at any goddamn birds. She had seen enough of them lately. She checked the gold-framed digital on her wrist. “I’m running late. Gotta rush.” She sipped her coffee, but then she discovered it was still too hot to drink rapidly.

  “Stop and smell the flowers, sweetheart. It’s got long legs and a beak like a dagger. Like a small heron or egret. But gray with orange streaks.” She winced and thought that, yes, he did know how to pause and appreciate the small accidents of life, flowers by the wayside, birds upon the lawn. Once she had been able to do the same. “Where’s the Peterson?” he asked.

  He found the bird guide on top of the refrigerator and flipped through the plates. He hesitated, flipped again, turned back, and held the page for her to see. “It’s not here,” he said. “But it looks kind of like a bittern.” The picture by his finger was of a drab brown bird, beady eyes framing a beak held straight upward to aid its camouflage among the reeds of a swamp.

  What, she wondered, would a bittern be doing in a suburban backyard? Surely, every swamp in the county had been drained and filled a century ago, or more. Was there some sort of race memory that sent bitterns back to the swamps of their ancestors? Had there once been a swamp beneath their yard? Or was it not really a bittern?