Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  A shadow wheeled across the window, and both the room and the yard outside darkened momentarily. “The Chickadee’s back!” cried Andy’s delighted voice.

  Nick turned back to the window. “Hey! It’s grabbin’ for it, Emily! The stranger’s dodgin’, flappin’ its wings, trying to take off!”

  “It made it!” Andy crowed. He had a Warbird in his hand, red plastic in the shape of an Eagle bearing a pod bedecked with futuristic weaponry. Now he waved the toy in the air and shrilled a war cry.

  “Please!” Finally Emily set down her cup and crossed to the window to see what all the fuss was about. The strange bird was no longer in sight, though a few brown and orange feathers were just sashaying down through the air, settling to the ground. The Chickadee was staring into the sky, cocking its black-capped head toward the house, peering toward the nearest tree, and spinning with amazing lightness to seize a robin that only wanted to find a worm for its own breakfast. Then it proved once more that it was not a pure carnivore by stepping ponderously to the feeder on its post to clean it of its seeds.

  Emily felt her gorge beginning to rise. The incident on the expressway had been more than enough to wipe from her mind any tendency she had ever had to find overgrown, jet-assisted carnivores charming, with or without their jets. She swallowed convulsively and sipped coffee to clear the taste from her mouth. Then she tipped her mug to the ceiling and finished the last of it. “I thought you were going to call the airport?”

  Nick shrugged. “I did. And they came and got it.”

  She glared at him. “Obviously, it got loose again.”

  “You’re not going to call them again, are you, Daddy?”

  Emily put just a hint of steel in her voice. “You’d better.”

  Her husband waved one hand toward the ceiling, palm upward, fingers spread as if he were throwing a handful of bird seed into the air. He made a face that suggested, she supposed, resigned confusion. “But why bother? Andy loves it.”

  “Yeah!”

  She nodded. “I’d like strange birds to hang around long enough for me to see them.”

  He sighed. Yes, that was why they had installed the feeder in the first place, so they could watch the birds that came to dine on their offerings. They had always felt an extra thrill when a new kind of bird joined the feathered throng. “If you’d…”

  Yes, if she had gotten off her duff and looked when he had first invited her, if she weren’t turned off birds for now, if she hadn’t told herself she had to rush, if…She wasn’t being fair, and she knew it. Still, her voice rang with that stiffer gauge of steel she sometimes used when technicians, especially those who held doctorates as certificates of competence, made a royal mess of something critical: “I want that goddamn Chickadee gone. What normal birds it doesn’t eat, it scares away.” Andy stared at her, his eyes wide; this was a side of his mother he did not often see. She shook her head sharply, her hair swirling around her ears, and turned away. On the job, she could be pure boss, a tyrant on occasion as nasty as even Ralph Chowdhury at his worst. Here, at home, the situation was contaminated by emotions that never arose in the lab. She felt a tremor in her throat and a moistness—tears—hovering behind her eyes.

  She checked her watch again. It was time to go. If she lingered to argue, she would be late. “Just call.”

  “Watch,” said Alan Bryant. “We can get the kangaroo sequence from San Diego.” The only marsupial whose genes the commercial genebanks had proved to carry had been the common opossum; their stock was drawn almost exclusively from plants and animals common in the northern hemisphere. He had had to turn to the zoo’s more specialized bank, which supplied gengineers around the world with the basic components of more exotic species.

  He was sitting at the computer workstation in the lab. Emily was leaning over his shoulder, staring at the depiction of the Bioblimp’s genome on the screen. Several lines, each one coiled upon itself to avoid tangling, represented the genimal’s several chromosomes. Individual genes were identified by labels. Alan pointed. “It fits in right here. That puts it under the same control sequences as the tentacles, and then…”

  He wore on his right hand a mouse, a glove patterned in swirling arabesques meant to suggest the intricate array of circuitry and accelerometers embedded in the thin fabric. The glove was the lineal descendant of the ancient computer control device that had first borne its name. Now he pointed, used his thumb to press a switch set against the side of his index finger, and pointed again. A line segment, marked “Pouch,” moved into position beside the chromosome he had indicated. The chromosome broke, the “Pouch” gene moved into the gap, and the break resealed. He tapped the keyboard, used the mouse to choose the “Simulation” option on the menu that popped into view, and leaned back in his chair.

  An egg divided, and divided again. As the borders of the growing embryo approached the edges of the screen, the computer reset the scale, reducing the image once more to a glowing icon. It enlarged again, reset once more, grew and hollowed, added a dozen tentacles, and began to show grooves in the side of the gasbag above each tentacle’s base. The grooves became slits, and then pouches, and the genimal was complete. A new menu appeared, Alan chose “Animate,” and the tentacles began to flex and twine. A simple cube sprang into existence on the screen. A tentacle picked it up and stuffed it into a pouch.

  “We still need sphincters,” he said. “To seal the pouches when they’re full.”

  Emily straightened, one hand on the small of her back. “Very pretty,” she said.

  Alan rolled his chair back from the terminal to face her. “‘But…’” he said. “I can hear it in your voice.”

  She nodded. “You’ve done some real good work. But there are just too many pouches. They’re too small to work for a moving van. Give it just two, one on each side.”

  “That’ll violate the symmetry,” he said. As the new design now stood, the Bioblimp’s growth-regulating genes would make it grow a pouch every time it grew a tentacle. Getting around that would be tricky, for it was difficult to mix radial and bilateral symmetries in a single organism.

  “You can do it. Give the gene a new control sequence. Let the first two openings set up a gradient that inhibits other openings and breaks down the walls between pouches. Or we can cut the walls later.”

  He was nodding when the phone rang. It was Miss Carol at the desk downstairs. Detective Bernie Fischer was there to see Dr. Gilman. Was she available?

  By the time Emily led the police officer back into the lab, Alan Bryant was intent on his screen. A glance let her see one hand moving sporadically over the keyboard, the other, the one wearing the mouse, twitching back and forth. He was clearly struggling with the task she had set him, but from the small, satisfied grunts that issued periodically from his lips, he was making progress rapidly enough to please him. She expected it would please her as well.

  She was silent as she led the cop to her corner of the lab, pointed him at the seat by the window, and poured coffee. Then, as he set his briefcase on the corner of her desk and began to undo its latches, she said, “You wanted to know about how we control our genimals, Detective Fischer?”

  “Call me Bernie, Dr. Gilman.” If voices could be seen and not heard, she thought, his would be a soft and mellow brown. Nick’s, by contrast, would be orange, touched with red, a higher pitch, more brassy.

  “Then I’m Emily. But…”

  He withdrew from his briefcase a single glossy photo. She took it from his hand, and stared. “It’s a chip,” he said. “A PROM chip. A computer can read it but not write to it, though it is programmable with the right equipment. We have no idea what it does.”

  “From the Sparrow?” Her voice shook. She knew, too well, what the Sparrow itself had done.

  “That’s right.”

  “Where was it?”

  “Plugged into the main board—the motherboard—in the cockpit computer. The federal people, from the Air Board, have the original.”

  “Wh
at does it…?”

  He shook his head. “They haven’t analyzed it yet. I was hoping…”

  She stared at him. Nick was so slender, nonmuscular, almost as willowy as convention would have a poet. This Bernie was a sturdier soul, clearly of an age with her husband and her but thicker in the middle, stronger, more…more masculine. She had only just met him, really, though she knew she had seen him at the expressway and, briefly, the day before. But when he gestured with one of his large, square hands, she imagined his touch on her, on her breasts, her thighs, her…Her skin felt warm. Yet his appeal was not solely physical.

  She too shook her head, though more abruptly, and her hair flew around her ears. “I can’t tell you much from a photograph,” she said. “But I can tell you what it might have done, what the possibilities are.”

  “Please,” he said, smiling. He sipped his coffee. “That’s all I want.”

  She touched a switch and the screen of her own desktop workstation lit up. Her fingers rattled briefly over the keyboard. A schematic diagram appeared. “This is a Hawk,” she said. “Like yours.” She pointed. “There’s the brain, the spinal cord, the motor centers. There’s the passenger pod, the driver’s console, the controller. A cable, here, from the controller to the interface plug under the forward lip of the pod. Wires from that to the brain.” She explained how the controller, a computer, translated movements of the tiller or control yoke and the throttle and brake pedals into electrical signals and routed them as appropriate to the jets or the genimal’s motor centers, triggering the genimal’s own nervous system into commanding its muscles to serve its driver. All the necessary programming was built into the hardware, burned into PROM chips like the one pictured in his glossy.

  “It’s only a little different,” she added, “in a genimal whose passenger compartment is built in, like a Tortoise. There the controller cable could go directly to the brain, without an interface plug, though there is one to make maintenance easier. A Roachster’s plug is installed beneath the shell-secreting membrane, so molting will not affect it. To get at it, the techs have to cut through the shell.”

  He had nodded periodically as she talked, as if he understood it all. Perhaps he did. Now he said, “But the chip?”

  She felt her face grow warm. She had forgotten the point. “Anywhere in this pathway,” she said, pointing again at the circuitry of the controller. “Insert it, and it can lock out the driver. Then it can cancel legitimate commands and substitute its own. And its own commands might be very simple. That Sparrow—I think a block on the pilot’s commands, plus a trigger to the jet’s hunger center, might be enough. Especially if there were a timer on the chip, so it turned on only at a specific time, or when a source of food such as the expressway was in view.”

  She paused reflectively. “You could try to prevent this sort of hijacking by putting feedback circuits in the controller. They would check that the proper signals were getting through, but a chip could fake those too. There really isn’t any way to block such a thing.”

  He leaned forward, so close that she could smell the maleness of his body, studying the screen. “Couldn’t you make the beast smarter?”

  She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Intelligence just isn’t that easy to produce. They’ve been trying for a century to produce it in computers, and we haven’t made any better progress with the genimals.”

  “But what about transplanting human genes?”

  “That’s the other reason we don’t have smart genimals. There are sixty different humane societies out there, and when they got together, they had very little trouble persuading Washington to ban transplanting human genes to genimals. They said it would be reinventing slavery. So, for that matter, would be gengineering a nonhuman intelligence.” She hesitated before adding, “They’re probably right. At least, if we’re talking human-level intelligence.”

  He grunted as if to say he was listening, but his attention had turned back to the computer screen. With one blunt finger, he was tracing the circuitry she had tried to explain to him. Finally, he shook his head. “I can’t picture it.”

  “Then I’ll show you.” She sighed, reached out a hand, and pulled him to his feet. As they crossed the lab, she said, “Alan, we’re going out to Ralph’s prototype barn.”

  Emily and Bernie heard the flat cracks—one, a pause, another, a pause, a third—as they approached the barn. Bernie immediately identified the sounds as gunshots, drew his pistol from beneath his uniform jacket, and ran to the door. Emily followed so closely that she clearly heard him yell “Freeze!” and heard something clatter as it hit the floor.

  When she entered the cavernous room that housed the Armadon, she saw Chowdhury, legs spread, arms above his head, facing into the corrugated, scaly flank of his genimal. He was standing between its two waist-high left wheels, his arms straddling a doorway set into the bulge of the beast’s side and back. Stubby legs twitched beside his shoulders. The genimal’s long snout was bent back toward him, audibly sniffing, eyes blinking, tongue flicking. The long tail switched back and forth, stirring the hay that littered the barn floor. Above Chowdhury’s head, ample windows set into the beast’s side revealed an empty interior. Chowdhury was sweating, and his muscles trembled visibly.

  “What were you trying to do?” Bernie’s voice was an outraged bellow, as if he found personally offensive whatever he had seen Chowdhury doing.

  “Startle it.” Chowdhury’s voice was weak, but it strengthened as he glared at Emily. “I wanted to see whether I really would have to take the time to grow a new prototype.”

  Emily spoke to the policeman’s back. “We warned him that it might kick its legs off.” She briefly described the armadillo’s startle reflex.

  Bernie laughed. “Look,” he said, turning toward Emily for the first time since she had entered the room. “It’s just a .22. A popgun.” He retrieved it from the floor near his feet, aimed it at a bale of hay near the wall, and pulled the trigger. The noise was unimpressive. “My magnum, now…” He grasped his pistol in both hands, aimed, and fired.

  The Armadon convulsed. Chowdhury flew across the floor to land on his back, spectacles askew, eyes wide. There was a loud crackle, as of breaking wood or bone.

  Emily helped Chowdhury to his feet. “I’m sorry.” She did not say, “I told you so.” The point was far too obvious, for now the Armadon rested on its belly, its feet unable to reach the floor. Its tail quivered, its snout twitched, and a soft, panting whine crept from its throat. One of its wheels had rolled across the barn to fetch up against a wall, looking much like a wagon wheel decorating the set of a western movie. The other three splayed from the Armadon’s bulk, still attached by shreds of bone and skin, but useless.

  Bernie stared sympathetically at the genimal. It had feelings, he knew, but…When he looked at the people in the room with him, his expression grew sheepish. “You needed something louder,” he said.

  The other man straightened his glasses. He stared at the damage. He trembled harder. Then he took a deep breath, clenched his fists, and screamed at them: “What are you doing here?”

  Emily laid a hand on his rigid arm as if to calm him. He shook it off. She said, “I wanted to show him how a genimal’s controller works. He’s investigating the Sparrow attack on the expressway.”

  Chowdhury spun around to stare at the cop. In a moment, he said, “So show him. Then get out of here.” He turned his back on both of them. The Armadon whined again. He stepped to its side and laid a hand on its flank. After a moment he stalked toward the door into the lab that shared the barn building, leaving them alone with the crippled genimal.

  Bernie returned his gun to its holster. “Touchy, isn’t he?”

  “Almost always.” Emily patted the still-whining Armadon’s flank, opened its metal door, and waved him in. The door remained open behind them, and the windows in the genimal’s sides gave them a clear view of the outside room. The cabinet that held the control computer, obviously not fastened down, stood askew. Emily pres
umed it had been jolted out of position when Bernie had startled the Armadon. A control tiller jutted from the cabinet, and a single seat, a cylindrical hassock, lay on its side nearby.

  Emily stood the hassock upright, sat down, and removed the front panel from the computer cabinet. Then she repeated the lesson she had begun indoors. Now he nodded repeatedly, understanding what she said as long as he could see and touch a three-dimensional reality rather than some baffling, lifeless diagram.

  Absorbed in their work of instruction and absorption, they nevertheless heard the door to the lab open and close and noticed when Chowdhury came to stand, listening, by the Armadon’s doorway. Emily felt his presence as a weight upon her back. Eventually, she turned to include him in the conversation and noticed the syringe in his hand. It held at least a pint of clear yellow fluid. “Bernie says they found a foreign chip in the Sparrow, Ralph,” she said. “I’ve been showing him how such a thing might work. It probably had some sort of internal timer.”

  “It’s like a virus program,” said Bernie. “It sits there in the computer, just waiting for its moment, and then it takes over.”

  Chowdhury snorted, scowled, and shook his head. “It wouldn’t work,” he said. “There are too many redundant pathways between the controller and the genimal. No chip could possibly block them all. And anyway, it couldn’t hold a program for anything as complex as what that Sparrow was doing.”

  Why, wondered Emily, should redundant pathways make any difference? It should be electronic child’s play to program the chip to intercept them all. She said nothing about that objection, however. “It wouldn’t have to,” she put in. “The controller doesn’t control a genimal move by move anyway. It activates coordinative structures in the nervous system, hierarchies of reflexes and instincts that make it do what we want it to do. So why couldn’t this chip simply activate a different set of instincts? Or even a single drive, such as hunger? Instincts and drives we normally want suppressed?”