Frederick felt the muscles of his neck and shoulders suddenly cramp with tension. There were, he saw, police officers hovering near the fringes of the crowd, with a pair of lobster-clawed police Roachsters waiting on a side street. They were a necessary precaution, and he wished that the Engineers’ threat had been appreciated so well when he had been a pig.
He sighed with relief when he left the scene of the demonstration behind and traffic speeded up.
* * *
CHAPTER 3
Sam Nickers was basking in his living room when the doorbell chimed. He was naked, his green skin exposed to the array of sunlamps mounted on the ceiling, his chloroplasts churning out a flood of sugar that he found more satisfying than any pre-dinner drink had ever been. The greengenes had been his wife’s third anniversary present, just the year before. He had given Sheila a similar outfit, ornamented by a sleek cap of feathers that replaced her hair.
He lay on a padded lounge. Beside him, a second lounge lay empty, separated from his by a narrow bench-like table. A flatscreen veedo hung on one wall, its face half obscured by leaves and branches; a forest of small palms and other tropical vegetation filled the room with green. Orchids and bromeliads furnished splashes of color, as did the three small birds that perched and sang among the foliage. New droppings and older stains marked the short-piled carpet, a geometric array of brown and green; he told himself that it was time again to scrub; vacuuming never did the trick. The walls were painted white.
One of the birds swooped through the air and a buzzing he had not noticed suddenly became conspicuous by its absence. He stared toward the open window. The birds routinely tried to escape, but all they managed was…The half-drawn drapes revealed three bee-sized holes in the screen, and beyond them a sky gray with both clouds and twilight. It was the end of the day, a time for themselves alone, free of the hordes of kids they faced at work. “Are you coming back?” he called.
“As soon as this casserole is in the oven,” she answered him. “But I’ll have to get dressed soon. Finca’s putting out a mailing this week.” Sheila was a volunteer campaign manager for a city councilwoman, directing the stuffing of envelopes and the collection of signatures and the delivery of voters to the polls as the seasons of the woman’s terms demanded. Others wrote the press releases and newsletters and coached the councilwoman on the issues.
Sam shifted on his lounge. He volunteered his services to the community in another way. He taught history, but he had trained as well as an emergency medical technician. At least two evenings a week he assisted the ambulance crew at the local fire station. There was never any danger of boredom.
On the table by his side sat a small mail terminal, its screen glowing with a letter from his father. Mike Nickers had recently retired from his position as a recruiter for the Daisy Hill Truck Farm, and he was bored. He was thinking of traveling, of moving, of finding a replacement for his dead wife, Sam’s mother, of…
The doorbell sounded. The birds fell silent. Sam swore. Sheila appeared in the doorway, grinning, her green skin glowing in the bright light. He stared at her, struck as always by her beauty, and by what the genetic changes had done to enhance it. Her nipples and lips were so dark a green that they seemed almost black. The dark-brown and orange of her feathers, the black and yellow of the small butterfly-wing inserts over her cheekbones, the pink and gold of the snakeskin along her jawline caught the eye like the organic jewelry they were. He swore again. She laughed and held out his robe. “Here. I’ll get mine.”
Sheila was behind him when he opened the door to face a clean cut young couple. The man was dark-haired, slim, with the lines of his muscles cleanly limned beneath the cloth that covered them. The woman was blonde, red-lipped, wide-hipped, her nipples little spires on the broad domes beneath the fabric of her coverall. Together, they seemed designed to rivet the attention of whoever might answer their knock.
Yet as soon as they saw the Nickers, their eyes went suddenly wide, their mouths opened, their torsos leaned back, away, their hands full of pamphlets jerked upward as if to erect a paper barrier before them. They were so fully human, with no slightest trace of genetic modification, that Sam hardly needed their shocked recoil, nor their blue coveralls and golden cogwheel patches, to tell that they were Engineers. Nor did he wonder that they seemed surprised to find that the Nickers were not quite the traditional model of human being. Most of the apartment building’s tenants had no genetic modifications, or at least, none that showed.
Behind him, Sheila blew a short blast of air through her nose. He felt just as disgusted. “You’re wasting your time,” he said.
“No!” The man stepped forward, his pamphlets still raised.
Then, “Yes!” he said. “Gengineering is Abomination! It’s all in here.” He held out the pamphlets, one of the many jutting forward as if he were offering to perform a card trick. Sam Nickers did not take one.
“Especially the bots,” said the woman earnestly. She meant the plants to which the gengineers had added human genes, giving them something in the way of human appearance and intelligence. “And the genimals,” she added. “Especially the ones that think they’re so smart.”
“We need to get rid of them all,” said her partner. “Then we can get back to the Golden Age.” He tapped his cogwheel as if it were a religious emblem. For him, it was. “Utopia,” he said. “The Age of Machines.”
They held their heads so that, for the first time, reflections of light from the apartment at his back drew Sam’s attention to the single tiny, gold-shiny gears they wore in their right earlobes. The gears might have come from an antique watch.
“No more Macks,” said the woman. Now she offered her pamphlets. “Read, and you’ll see. No bots. No Roachsters or Bioblimps or…”
“No green…” The man fell silent, as if he had suddenly realized the threat he was about to offer the two he was trying to sway to their cause.
“Skins?” said Sheila from behind her husband. “Greenskins” was what the Engineers called people like her and Sam.
“But you can be repaired!” cried the woman. Yet already the missionary enthusiasm was fading from her face. She knew that she and her partner would find no converts here, no demonstrators, no soldiers for the revolution the Engineers claimed was essential to save humanity for its true, mechanical destiny.
Sam said nothing more to them, nothing about shortages of fuels for the machines, shortages of steel and other minerals, nor of the problems of chemical, industrial pollution that human civilization had largely left behind when it chose a more organic path. He simply shook his head and closed the door.
When Sheila said, “It wouldn’t help much if we were, would it?” he shook his head again. As always, throughout history, converts were suspect. If the Nickers had the gengineers undo their changes, that would only mean that they were once more consorting with the enemy. They would not be rejected—the Engineers would happily enlist anyone and everyone they could to achieve their ends—but later…Once they were in power, the Engineers, like all the other extremist groups that had gone before them, would surely purge all those allies who happened to be, or ever to have been, “contaminated.”
Would they ever be in power? Sam prayed that they would not, but their numbers, the numbers of their sympathizers, the volume of their protests and demands, the influence they exerted on governments and courts and media, all grew year by year. He feared…
The school was much as schools had been for centuries: a housing for hallways linking rooms full of chalkboards, books, desks, and young people, walls hidden behind lockers and posters and trophy cases and displays of student art. There were computers too, enough for all the students although, as if in obedience to educational tradition, the technology was a little out of date: inset in the surface of each desktop was an electronic screen and keyboard from long before the days of the gengineering revolution.
Sam Nickers looked out over his class of eighth-graders. Forty faces of all the shades of hu
man skin—no green like his, but black, brown, tan, pink, red, and yellow—stared back at him, eyes bouncing between his face and the clock on the wall behind him. He checked his screen; everyone had finished. He moved his mouse-gloved hand, clicked the button set on the side of his index finger, and the machine graded the quiz and displayed each student’s score, both on his and on the individual student’s screen. There were smiles, groans, shrugs, another mass glance at the clock.
A buzzer echoed in the hall. He too shrugged. “Class dismissed.”
The room promptly emptied, and silence fell. He was putting papers into his briefcase when the speaker on the wall grated, “Mr. Nickers?” He faced the little box, feeling just as he always had, ever since he had been a kid in school himself, and the squawk of the annunciator had meant that some mischief of his had been found out. “Yes?”
“Would you stop by the principal’s office before you leave?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll be just a minute.”
“Thank you.” A click confirmed that the conversation was over. What, he wondered, had it been about? What could the principal have to say to him? He didn’t think it could have anything to do with his work, for his evaluations were good. They always had been. Still, he could not help but worry. The worry only increased when he met Sheila in the hall outside the school’s office. She taught another grade, another subject. What could the principal possibly have to say to both of them?
The answer was not long in coming.
When Sam and Sheila stepped into the office, they found the door that normally bore on its closed face the sign, “Lillian Bojemoy, Principal,” standing open. The principal herself, a short, grey-haired woman who wore a loose robe instead of the usual coverall, was standing in the doorway, delivering stern instructions to the school librarian. When she saw the Nickers, she turned, gestured, and said, “Go right in. Sit down.” She did not smile, but that was not alarming. No one had ever seen her bend her tight-pressed lips in any friendly way.
A moment later, she was standing behind her desk and saying, “I felt we had to have a little talk. I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand.”
Sam looked at his wife. Her eyes were widening in alarm, just as, he was sure, were his own. He turned back to the principal. “What is there to misunderstand?”
She pushed a litter of papers aside to reveal a keyboard. She tapped keys, stared at the screen set to one side, and said, not quite as if she had not been studying the same information for hours or days, “Your record is fine. Your students do well on the achievement tests. And you yourselves…” The principal gestured as if to indicate their skin color. “You’re good examples. You show the kids what progress means. You demonstrate the silliness of prejudice.”
She paused. Sheila reached for her husband’s hand and squeezed it. Both their hands were damp. “But…” said Sheila.
“Yes.” The principal nodded. “But. I don’t have any problem with what you’ve done to yourselves.”
“The parents,” said Sam. His worry vanished. Now he knew what was coming, and it was as bad as he might have guessed.
She nodded again. “The district has a lot of Engineers and Engineer-sympathizers. And they don’t want their children learning tolerance, or the value of progress. They don’t want their children coming home and questioning their parents’ values or attitudes.”
“They don’t want their children exposed to us,” said Sheila.
The principal nodded. “So. I’m afraid…” She sighed. She turned one hand palm up, mutely imploring them not to create a scene. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to renew your contract for next fall. You can finish out the year, but…”
“Unless we return to normal?” asked Sam.
She nodded. “That would help, I’m sure.”
“No,” said Sheila. “Ask the Nazis. Once a Jew, always a Jew.” Her voice was tight, almost choking.
When the principal looked blank, Sam added, “Or the Ku Klux Klan. It didn’t matter what you looked like, once you—or your ancestors—had touched the tar brush. Once a nigger, always a nigger.”
When their boss still didn’t seem to get it, Sheila said, “We’ll start looking for new positions immediately, of course.”
“Of course.”
Later, walking home, Sam said, “Dr. Ohmigod!” The nickname had come from another teacher, one who knew a little Russian. He spat toward the gutter, prompting a patrolling litterbug to dart from behind a passing Tortoise. When it found nothing worth retrieving, it returned to its station in the stream of traffic.
“You’d think they’d learned something in school,” he added. “But no. They’d rather believe wishes. And there just aren’t the resources to…”
“Bigots,” said his wife. “Short-sighted, hide-bound, reactionary bigots!” They were passing a small neighborhood park separated from the sidewalk by a low brick wall. Behind the wall rose a billow of honeysuckle vines, their pink and yellow blossoms swaying upright, like wineglasses, on their stems. A number of men and women leaned against or sat on the wall, and one of them, blue-clad and golden-patched, lurched into their path. He stopped and raised one fist, a honeysuckle blossom crumpled in it. His features sagged as if he had left, somewhere, a trail of other blossoms. His breath reeked of honeysuckle wine.
“Who you callin’ a bigot, greenie?” he said.
The Nickers stopped. Sam tightened his grip on the handle of his briefcase—solid metal and wood, and heavy with books and papers—until his knuckles blanched. He glared. He put all the anger he was feeling, all the menace he could summon up, into his voice as he said, “Get out of our way.”
Surprise or shock made the other’s face go even slacker. He turned toward his friends along the wall as if to ask for help in cowing his prey, but they did not move. One shrugged and pointed toward the road with a stubbly chin. Sam snatched a look in that direction and saw a long-clawed police Roachster moving slowly in their direction. When he looked back, their accoster was no longer in their way.
When they reached home, they stopped first in the building’s basement stable. There they fed and watered their Beetle. A vehicle with a strong resemblance to one of the twentieth-century internal combustion automobiles now visible only in museums and parades, it had been gengineered from an insect by enlarging the body and legs, reinforcing the exoskeleton with an internal framework modeled on—but stronger than—that of mammals, and creating a passenger compartment in the abdomen. Its shell was bright red.
“We should have driven today,” said Sheila, patting the Beetle on its bristly brow.
Sam shook his head. “It wouldn’t have changed a thing. We still would have heard from Ohmigod.”
“But that bum!”
“The harm was already done. He just underlined it.” He put a hand on her elbow and turned her toward the building’s elevator. “Let’s get a little sun and check the mail.”
But the day’s trials were not done. Taped to the door of their apartment was a crudely rendered drawing of a tree, its trunk warped into a demented face, its branches twisted. Facing it, a man with a cogwheel prominent on his back raised an axe. “It’s a photocopy,” said Sheila. “They must be spreading them all over the place.”
“Nothing personal, you mean?” She grunted an assent that did not seem entirely confident. He activated the living room mail terminal then, and said, “Something from the squad.” A moment later, he said, ”That’s personal. Shit.”
He stepped aside to let her see the screen. The glowing characters spelled it out: The emergency medical squad to which Sam had volunteered his time for years did not need him any more. There had been complaints, concerns that the viral vectors used in his greening might invade an accident victim through a wound, threats of lawsuits if that should indeed happen.
Sheila’s arm wrapped around his waist. She leaned her head against his shoulder. His own arm circled her, his head leaned on hers. “Ignorant bastards. Cretins. Bigots.”
Two
days later, Sheila left Sam on his lounge, this time combining the effects of the sunlamps with those of rum, to attend a strategy session for Finca d’Antonio. She did not take the Beetle, for Finca’s ward was small and the meeting was within easy walking distance. When Albert d’Antonio let her into the townhouse, Sheila went directly to the spare bedroom that was the councilwoman’s headquarters.
Finca never had installed gengineered lighting or snackbushes. The room was brightly lit by overhead fluorescents. On a table to one side sat an electric coffee-maker and a tray of miniature Greek pastries. Half a dozen people sat at the larger table in the center of the room. Sheila Nickers knew all but one. There were no empty chairs.
“Sheila, dear!” The councilwoman stood up and crossed the room, her arms open for an embrace. She was black-haired, dusky-skinned, short, and, like many politicians, somewhat over her ideal weight. Her eyes were black and lively, and her voice was bright.
“I want you to meet,” she said, gesturing toward the stranger, a young man who was now looking at the tabletop. “Adrian Bartlett. He’ll be handling the petitions and mailings from now on.”
Those were two of Sheila’s jobs. She looked again at the table. It finally registered that the lack of an empty chair was deliberate. She said, “Voter transportation…”
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