Woodsman

by Thomas A Easton

  “He’s right in front of you,” said Franklin. He turned to face the sofa on the left of the stage. “Freddy? Would you stand up, please?” The man who had been sitting all this time between Kimmer Peirce and Calla Laffiter stood up. He offered the reporters a slight bow.

  Total silence greeted him. Freddy straightened and aimed his blunt-nosed face at the audience. His nostrils pointed forward just a little more than was usual for a human face, as if the ESRP had been unable to erase all vestiges of his origins. He stepped forward, and Franklin relinquished the microphone.

  “Call me,” he said when he had positioned the microphone to his liking. “Call me Frederick, now.”

  “Do you have a last name?” asked the woman from the Enquirer.

  “Suida. The scientific name of the pig family.” A titter of laughter ran among the reporters. “It recognizes my origins, but it is now only my legal name.” He stressed the “legal.”

  “Frederick Suida. But you’re still Freddy.”

  He nodded. “To my friends.”

  “Can you still sing?”

  “Yes! Give us a song! A song for your public!” For a long moment, Freddy stared at the reporters, his face blank. Franklin Peirce was just beginning to step toward the podium, ready to intervene, when the ex-pig’s mouth shaped a curve of pain, he shrugged, and he said, “I haven’t sung since…”

  “Then it’s time you did. C’mon.” Franklin looked at the woman from the Enquirer, his face grim. “Enough,” he said. “He’s been through too much to play with him.”

  “Our readers and viewers will want to know.”

  Freddy laid one hand on the curator’s sleeve. “No,” he said. “There’s no point in refusing to remember. I can stand it. I’ll sing.”

  Franklin stepped aside. He looked at his wife and Calla Laffiter, who had slid closer together to fill the gap Freddy had left on the couch. He smiled uneasily at them, and then he gave Freddy a “go ahead” gesture with one open palm.

  Freddy took a deep breath, said, “There’s no accompaniment,” and began to sing, “I was born about ten thousand years ago…”

  Franklin winced. Kimmer began to weep. The woman from the Enquirer smirked as if she were satisfied that her prejudices were so vindicated. Several of the other reporters sighed in sympathy, and the ready lights on most of the veedo cameras quietly winked out.

  Freddy’s voice was not the mellow bass it once had been. It croaked. It squeaked. It wobbled and skittered and scratched upon the eardrum.

  Calla Laffiter left the sofa and touched his shoulder. He fell quiet, tears glistening in his own eyes. Into the silence, she said, “He has been profoundly changed. You understand that. It’s no wonder that his voice is different, or that he is not yet used enough to it to control it well. Give him time.”

  The Times reporter raised his hand. “Mr. Suida. I’m sorry.”

  The woman from the Enquirer smirked again. “And what will you do now, Freddy?”

  He could only shrug. He did not know.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 2

  Beside the long, low building’s front door was a small brass plaque that said, “Agricultural Testing Service, Inc.” Frederick Suida snorted. The man he had come to see knew as much about farming as he did about mining the moon.

  Beside Frederick, a German shepherd with an over-large head growled as if in agreement with the snort. The man cut him off with a gentle thump and a scratch behind one ear. “Enough, Renny.” Then he shifted the dog’s collar, repositioning the small lump of the court-ordered radio tracker beneath his throat. The dog had supposedly been named for a star of ancient veedo tales of an even more ancient time when the cavalry had always been ready to ride to the rescue. The cavalry no longer existed. Nor was this an age of heroes.

  When the man opened the building’s door, the dog pushed past him, tail high and oscillating easily from side to side, sniffing, into a room that held a dust-filmed reception counter, a small couch, three molded chairs, and an arching tangle of bioluminescent vines rooted in a large pot. There was no receptionist, nor any sign of human occupancy. A single door, ajar, confirmed that there was more to the establishment.

  Frederick stared at the wall behind the reception counter and called, “Jeremy Duncan?” He winced at the sound of his voice. Ever since his conversion, his voice had been prone to squealing when he shouted.

  A sudden thudding bang suggested that someone had heard and dropped his feet from a desktop or windowsill to a carpeted floor. A moment later, a man stood in the room’s doorway, one hand holding a bottle of moisturizing lotion. He was short, chubby, and balding, and his chest was bare beneath an open white labcoat. The slits that marked his gills were red lines on the sides of his chest. The skin around them looked inflamed. It also glistened with lotion.

  “Dr. Duncan,” said Frederick, holding out his hand. “I never seem to find you with a shirt on.” He did not smile. It had been many years since he had felt he had anything to smile about.

  The other shrugged and set his lotion bottle on the reception counter. “Too tight,” he said, just as he did whenever Frederick made his ritual comment. “They hurt.” Once before, at an earlier meeting, he had explained that he had given himself the gills after he had taken up scuba-diving. He had wanted the freedom of the fish; only later had he learned that the reshaped tissue was excruciatingly sensitive to mechanical pressure. When Frederick had asked him why he had never changed his body back, or tried to remove the sensitivity, he had said, “They work just fine in the water.”

  Now Jeremy Duncan gestured his visitors into the depths of the building and said, “Haven’t seen you for awhile.”

  “Not since I brought the last check.” They were passing a door that opened on a dimly lit room equipped with two nutrient-bath tanks and a large freezer. Frederick paused, as he always did when he visited Jeremy Duncan’s place of work. The room resembled an operating room, as antiseptic in its gleaming tile and medicinal odors as if it were meant for physical surgery. It was even equipped with cardiac monitors and heart-lung machines. But there were no trays of laser scalpels and hemostats. Instead, there were racks for intravenous bottles. The bottles stood in a cabinet by the wall, together with packets of sterile tubing and needles. The bottles held the nutrients to supplement the bath in its sustaining of the patient while cells gained a pseudoembryonic malleability, tissues and organs reshaped, and the body restructured itself to obey new blueprints. In the freezer, Frederick knew, were more bottles filled with suspensions of tailored viruses.

  Similar viruses had changed Freddy’s porcine form to the one he wore now. He remembered only too well being laid in a tank filled with a thick, warm fluid they said would nourish him through the weeks of change. But these tanks, here and now, were empty. “You haven’t been very busy,” he finally said.

  Jeremy Duncan was standing in the more brightly lit doorway of his office a few steps down the hall. “You haven’t sent me many clients.”

  “We could send you back to the regular ESRP labs.” As he spoke, Frederick reached into the breast pocket of his green coverall. He held out an envelope.

  Duncan took the envelope and shuddered. The viruses the Endangered Species Replacement Program used had been designed to replace, bit by bit, the genes that made a human being human with those that specified an anteater, a rhinoceros, a giant tortoise, a…“Turning people into aardvarks and okapi? No thanks.” The ESRP had arisen when the technology of gengineering had made it possible for humanity to do something about the guilt it felt for allowing so many wild species to go extinct. It replaced the genes of volunteers with those of vanished animals, enough to turn them into physical duplicates and supply the zoos with exhibits. In time, said the gengineers, perhaps they would make the replacements so complete that they could let the vanished species return to the wild. Whether there would be a wild for them to return to was another question; the world was more crowded with human beings than it had ever been.

 
“The Engineers trashed my lab twice while I was working for the ESRP,” he added. “They haven’t found this place yet. There are advantages to being out here in the boonies.” He shook his head. “One of these days, they’re going to stop playing nice guy…” When Frederick looked pained, he said, “I know. I know. Relatively speaking. And I don’t want to be there when it happens. I’d rather spend my time twiddling my thumbs.” He brought his hands together in front of his paunch to demonstrate. Then he opened the envelope, extracted the check, and waved it in the air. “And letting you pay the bills.” He backed up at last, letting his visitors into his office. The room was dominated by a metal desk supporting an ancient PS/4 computer. A stained anti-static pad showed around the edges of the keyboard. The room’s walls were covered with shelves that sagged under the weight of books, technical journals, and disks. A stiff-looking armchair sat by the window.

  “There aren’t that many intelligent genimals.” It was illegal to give an animal the genes for human intelligence, but that only limited the number of gengineers who did it. The results were usually turned loose to fend for themselves. Occasionally, they later came to public attention, as Frederick once had himself.

  “So I have time to play consultant.” Duncan sat down in the softly padded swivel chair by the desk, tucked the check under the edge of the blotter, and swung toward the window. He gestured Frederick toward the armchair and said, “Is that one?” He pointed at the German shepherd, his expression hopeful. He did not make the mistakes of trying to pet the dog or speaking baby talk to it; experience had taught him that if Renny were indeed an intelligent genimal, he would not appreciate the condescension.

  Frederick shook his head as he took the seat, while Renny flopped onto the floor between the two men and barked a laugh. He slapped the carpet twice with his tail. “Bet your ass I am!” Duncan did not seem surprised by the rough but clear voice. He had obviously met many creatures that looked like animals but spoke like humans.

  “He seems to be happy the way he is.”

  The dog nodded, his tongue showing between his teeth. “I know better,” he said.

  “I’d think you’d want to be like us,” said Duncan.

  “Huh! Ordinary dogs, maybe,” said Renny. “We’re pack animals, sure, and they’ll take you apes for their pack. But not me. I’m too smart to fall for that con. I’d rather be what I am.” He lay down on the carpeted floor and rested his chin on his paws.

  “Though he’d like a mate,” said Frederick. “I introduced him to a female a few weeks ago. A lab. But…”

  “Dumb bitch,” growled Renny. “Smelled okay, but couldn’t say a word.”

  “I wish he’d change his mind,” said Frederick. “That’s why I set you up here. Why we fund you. To give genimals like him a chance to escape the limits of their bodies, the persecution of…”

  “PETA?”

  Frederick nodded, his expression grim. “He was working as a guide dog, and someone heard him talking.” That was when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had reported an illegal genimal and sued to have him destroyed. “They say he’s dangerous too. A vicious carnivore. No moral sense. We’re fighting it, but…”

  “A guide dog?” asked Duncan. “For what? Replacing eyes and limbs is easy.”

  “Christian Scientist,” said Frederick. “They still haven’t accepted even antibiotics and vaccines.”

  “So they’ll put me down.” Renny sighed heavily. “I’m ready, though the boss swore I was the best dog he’d ever had.” He paused. “They promise it won’t hurt.”

  Duncan emitted a short, sharp bark that might have been a laugh. “Huh! They’re afraid of the competition.”

  “Maybe so,” said Frederick. “They don’t like bots either, though they’re not…”

  “Then they shouldn’t be complaining,” interrupted Renny. “I was doing a job nobody else wanted. None of them, for sure.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid you’ll get ambitious,” said Duncan.

  “Or aggressive,” said Frederick.

  “They just think I’ve got too many teeth.” Renny grinned to show them just how many he had.

  Frederick looked at Jeremy Duncan. “I’ve talked to a technician who worked in the lab that made him. The word was that they’d designed out all Renny’s aggressiveness, but…” He shrugged. “It was only rumor. It won’t stand up in court. Even if it would, he’d still be an illegal.” He shrugged again. “But I’m trying.”

  “Can I help?”

  Frederick shook his head. “Not unless you know the gengineers who made him. I need to track them down and get them into court. With luck, they’ll testify that Renny is unaggressive, mild-mannered, and civic-minded, as nice and safe a pussy-cat as any human being.”

  The dog barked. “As what?”

  When Duncan laughed as well, Frederick let his face turn rueful. “Yes,” he said. “There’s no denying they have more law than justice on their side.” He shrugged eloquently. “But I have hopes.”

  Bureaucrat though he had now been for years, Frederick Suida had been as happy as he ever got to escape his office on the tenth floor of the Bioform Regulatory Administration’s building. The summer was hot, most of his colleagues were less than congenial, and the intensely cloying odor of honeysuckle blossoms penetrated every building in the city. The vines sought the sun everywhere. They choked the city’s parks and alleys. They curled around the edges of windows, even crossing sills to invade the pots of house plants. They were, in fact, as all-intrusive as any bureaucracy had ever been.

  He had almost smiled when he decided to go. He had then checked an Armadon, a vehicle genetically engineered from an armadillo, out of the BRA parking barn. The genimal was an official vehicle, its two doors each bearing the shield and monogram of his federal employer, but it was also long and low and sleek enough to tell all the world of its enhanced metabolism. Its lines were spoiled only by the essential bulges of its wheels and the strangely cocked angles of the limbs that ran atop them. The passenger compartment in the back was much less conspicuous. The computers that controlled the genimal’s nervous system, and thus its movements, were hidden in the dashboard.

  Now Frederick stepped out of Jeremy Duncan’s lab to face the almost deserted parking lot where he had left the Armadon. A line of shrubbery marked the edge of the lab’s lot. Beyond it was a turved greenway, and approaching on that road was a massive Mack truck. It panted stertorously as it hauled a heavy cargo pod along the road. There were no pedestrians.

  For a moment, Frederick came near to smiling. He had once known two truckers, friends of his own best friends. They had gone their way years before and thus survived the slaughter that had let him become the humorless thing that he was. He wondered where they were, what they were doing, whether they still drove their oversized bulldogs.

  He shrugged the memory away as the truck passed the building and grew swiftly smaller in the distance, though he turned to follow it with his eyes. As he did so, his eyes swept over the industrial park that concealed Duncan’s lab. It was a suburban backwater, half its units empty, the rest unobtrusive in their telemarketing and direct mail and small-scale manufactures. There were few signs, and fewer logo-marked cargo pods awaiting loading or unloading. Most of the businesses here relied on rental Macks.

  It was just the sort of place he had needed when…His thought paused while he appreciated the blessing it was that the anti-gengineering forces had not yet found this place. The government, through him, funded Duncan’s operation, but it was not an operation he wished the general public to know about. Publicity could be fatal, both figuratively and literally.

  The building he had just left was long, rounded, green, its windows opaqued by vertically slatted blinds. The other buildings of the park were just the same, a long file of similar buildings embedded in close-cropped grass. Nowhere was there any trace of the honeysuckle that was doing its best to inundate the landscape almost everywhere. Nor was there any trace of the gengineered v
ines whose fruit had been dried and carved and fitted out to make the bioform Quonset huts.

  “Zucchinis!” muttered Renny with a disdainful sniff. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They had left the Armadon in one of the many empty slots in the turved parking lot. Now they stepped to the vehicle’s front, where Frederick patted its neck and made sure it had had no trouble reaching the water that flowed through the broad gutter before it. Nearby, the heads of a few other bioform vehicles—other Armadons, Tortoises and Beetles, and the ever-present Roachsters—hovered watchfully over the water, waiting for them to leave before returning to their drinking. In the distance, a pair of litterbugs, scoop-jawed descendants of pigs, wandered desultorily about the parking lot as they sought the waste material that it was their mission to remove. Overhead, a wide-bodied Goose carried a pod of passengers toward some distant city. Near the southern horizon, a thick contrail marked the track of a space plane bound for orbit.

  Frederick opened the Armadon’s door. The dog leaped past him to the seat. The man shook his head, climbed in, and turned on the turbochargers mounted in the genimal’s throat. Their whine quickly rose in pitch until it became inaudible, and soon…For a few blessed hours, he had escaped the office, the honeysuckle, the government that employed him and his thousands of fellows. But such escapes could never last.

  Unless…Some people did escape. As the Armadon left the industrial park behind, the honeysuckle vines began to appear, covering the banks beside the greenways, wreathing trees, wrapping the walls of buildings. Among the vines, on curbs and benches and steps, sheltered by overpasses and walkways, honey-bums passed the waiting hours until they felt again the craving for the euphoric wine the vines collected in their giant blossoms. Buried here and there in the greenery were the living statues, smooth-barked, green-leaved, silent, that the honey-bums became if they lingered too long on open soil.

  Traffic slowed to a crawl when they finally left the greenways for paved city streets. Frederick swore, and Renny pointed with his nose. “Over there. That’s why.” The dog was staring toward a Mr. GreenGenes franchise. Behind the glass were Roachsters, Slugabeds, hanky bushes, padplants, flytraps, condombers, snackbushes, garbage disposals, litterbugs, fluorescent philodendrons, and other products of the gengineer’s art. Spilling across the sidewalk and into the street was a milling crowd of people in blue coveralls. Golden cogwheels were embroidered on patches that decorated their chests and shoulders. Many had small brass springs and gears dangling from their earlobes. They carried signs that screamed in vivid colors, “MACHINES NOT GENES!!”