Several heads shook slowly back and forth. Finca nodded her own vigorously. “Yes, that too.”
“Then…” Her throat seemed to swell, and her voice choked off.
“I’m afraid so, Sheila. I’m sorry.” Her expression did not match her words. “I have to adjust my positioning a bit, you understand. There are more and more conservative voters out there, and…” Her sweeping gesture said it all. She herself and all the others in the room, all except for Sheila Nickers, were unmodified humans. Sheila was the bright green standout, the conspicuous liberal who would surely cost Finca crucial votes.
“Is there anything…?”
Finca d’Antonio simply shook her head. There was no place for Sheila Nickers on the politician’s staff. Nor was there anything the teacher could do to change her mind.
Sheila got home much earlier than usual. Sam was still on the lounge, still basking, still drinking, though the level in the bottle had not really gone down very greatly. Sheila entered the room, swore, seized his glass, and drained it.
“Get one of your own, honey,” her husband said. He was just drunk enough to speak his words slowly and carefully. “What happened?”
The liquor cabinet hid behind one of the room’s palms. She got a glass and a bottle of the sherry she preferred when she drank. She told him what had happened. “She doesn’t want me,” she said at last, the tears bright in her eyes, the pain thick in her voice. “She doesn’t want me anymore, not at all, not anywhere in the campaign. Not even licking envelopes. My spit might contaminate the voters. Turn them all green! I wish it would!”
She was stripping as she spoke. Now she sat down beside him. When he laid a gentle hand on her thigh, she said, “You’ve had enough sun. Make you fat.”
“Need a cuddle, huh?” He set his glass down, closed his eyes, and sighed. “So do I.”
She nodded, groped for his hand, and squeezed it. Minutes later, she was squeezing the control node on their Slugabed, and the genimal’s warm flesh was curling around their bodies, sheltering them from a world that was turning crueler every day.
A few days later, they found their Beetle dead. Someone had used an axe to sever its legs and head and cave in the side of the passenger compartment. Green paint had then been sprayed over the seats and dashboard.
The police were unsympathetic, though they did not quite tell the Nickers it was their own fault. They did say, “What did you expect? You must have known that what you did to yourselves would draw attention. So it did. It got them mad. And now…” Yes, there were laws, but…
Fingerprints? On the Beetle? The cops were sure they must have been there, but the corpse had already been fed to the city’s buses. Not that it mattered. The crime was only vandalism, after all.
“And,” said Sam as they walked wearily home. “I’ll bet there isn’t a judge in the city…”
“In the state,” Sheila interrupted.
“The country, even,” he said. “Not one who would convict an Engineer. They wouldn’t dare.”
“It’s too bad we’re not covered by the discrimination laws.”
“They cover only race, religion, sex, and handicaps. Not liberalism, not rationality.”
“Not us.” Sheila led the way into their building, past the neighbors who now, for the first time in memory, refused to meet their eyes, past the super who…He would not let them pass. “Here,” he said, and he held out a long white envelope.
“We’re being evicted, right?” Sam spoke sourly. When the super gave a tight grin and a shrug, he added, “That’s all that’s left to happen.”
The eviction notice was spread upon the table. It expressed regrets, but the message was plain enough: Their sunlamps were ruining the apartment’s paint. They themselves were attracting unwelcome attention. They were thus a hazard to their neighbors. And there were rumors that the viral vectors the gengineers had used to make their changes could be contagious. The company that owned the building trusted that they, the Nickers, understood why they had until the end of the month to move.
Sheila pointed at the wall. “The lights aren’t doing any harm at all,” she said.
“The unwelcome attention is real enough,” said Sam. “And if it gets bad enough…” He pushed several ragged-edged pieces of paper toward their old friend. “Look at these, Alice. They were on the door. Under the door. Even in the elevator. What the hell can we do?”
The crude drawings, some of them photocopied, some of them original, were not pretty. The words, block-printed, scrawled, pieced together from scraps of this and that, were worse. They were hatred and venom and prejudice, all distilled from millennia of fear of strangers and change.
“The worst of it,” said Sam. “The worst of it is that the building has a security system. A good one. People can’t just come in off the street. It has to be other tenants.”
“We didn’t show them to the cops,” said Sheila. “They weren’t any help before, and we didn’t expect…” Her posture slumped dejectedly. They had told their visitor about the Beetle and the school. They had also told her of how their volunteer work had ended.
Alice Belle’s sigh was the sound of wind over tall grass. Sam thought that he should not feel surprised. Her ancestors were far more truly, more completely, plants than his. They had been amaryllises; to them, gengineers had added human genes. Over many generations, they had become progressively more human-like. Now they had legs and could walk, though they wore bushy ruffs of fibrous roots around their shins. They had torsoes, though they were sheathed in long, blade-like, spiraling leaves. They had heads and eyes and mouths and lungs. They had brains, though a smaller secondary brain was housed in the bulb they carried between their legs. They did not have hair; their scalps were covered instead by lawns of tiny blossoms. Alice Belle’s blossoms were orange with veins of scarlet on their petals.
Alice Belle was a bot, a botanical. Sheila had first met her when she was trying to recruit outsiders to visit her classes and explain their work. She had been fascinated to learn that some bots occupied high-level positions as administrators, scientists, and even gengineers. Alice Belle was an administrator with a small research lab.
Over the bot’s head buzzed a small bee. Sam did not know whether it had followed her into their apartment or discovered her there. Bees often orbited bot heads; for all he knew, they even fertilized the bots’ flowers, though he had heard that when bots wished to mate, they bowed to each other and let their blossoms touch to exchange pollen. Both parents then set seed; there were no separate males and females.
At last, she spoke: “You will have to move, I think. Even if you could fight this eviction, and even if you could win, you would not want to stay. The environment would be too hostile. You would expect awful things to happen, as indeed they did, to your Beetle. You would turn paranoid.” She shook her head. “I would hate to see that happen. Paranoids are not very pleasant people.”
“I wish we had a place to move to,” said Sam. “But there aren’t many empty apartments in the city, and those we’ve tried to see…” His face was crystallized frustration.
“As soon as the agents see us,” said Sheila. “Forget it. It was just rented. Or it’s being renovated. Or the rent is suddenly sky-high. Or—once! as blatant as can be—it’s not for greenies. Or bots.”
“The suburbs?” asked their friend. “The Engineers aren’t as strong there.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Sam. “We’ve looked there too.”
“There aren’t even any jobs for us,” added Sheila.
Alice Belle sighed again. “I wish I could help. I wish I could share…”
Sam snorted. “Outdoors? We’re not so close to nature. We need a roof.” From time to time, there were veedo specials on how the bots lived, working at night and returning by day to fenced enclosures in the city’s parks where they could unfurl both roots and leaves and feed from soil and sun while they gossiped, told stories, and sang songs, some of them the ancient spirituals of another race,
another age.
“You don’t understand.” Alice Belle scowled at him as if he should know better, as if he were being no better than the Engineers who persecuted him. She waved an arm to encompass the apartment, its walls, its bright lights, its greenery. “I work during the day, like you, on a human schedule. I rest at night, and I need lights, like these. Photosynthesis is much more important for us. So I have to have a place much like this. And there are others like me. We even have our own building. We own it.”
“In the city?” asked Sheila.
“Any vacancies?” Alice Belle opened her mouth to speak, but then she hesitated. Finally, she said, “Yes, there are, but…” She took a deep breath. “It’s just us, you understand? Just bots. It would be perfect for you, and you’re good people. You deserve a safe place to live. But, but there’s a rule.”
Sam slumped, defeated. Sheila stared at the bot, their friend, for along moment. “Is there anyone you can speak to?”
Alice Belle slowly nodded. “The management committee.”
“Would you? Please?”
She nodded again. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”
There was another moment of silence. Sheila broke it at last by picking up the worst of the papers they had found pinned to their door and offering it to Alice Belle. “Maybe it would help,” she said. “Show them this.”
“I will.”
* * *
CHAPTER 4
“It’s a waste of money.” Salamon Domenici was one of the Bioform Regulatory Administration’s senior program managers. Now he was glaring at Frederick Suida, leaning aggressively over his portion of the conference table. “Let ‘em have the mechin’ dog!”
The woman beside Frederick stretched an arm in his direction. He did not try to avoid it. He knew what was coming, for she had done it before. When she touched his head and patted, he stiffened; he successfully suppressed the glare he wished to give her, and all those who dared to smile. “Freddy can’t do that, Sal. You’re forgetting…”
“Of course,” said another of Frederick’s BRA colleagues. “He’s not exactly unbiased.”
“He’s an axe-grinder. The way he bulled that conversion lab through on us…We should shut it down before the public hears about it.”
“They should hear about it,” said Berut Amoun. His dark skin and heavy-lidded eyes spoke of Near-Eastern ancestors. He was one of the very few BRA staffers Frederick counted among his friends. “If they thought their new boss might have been the dog they kicked last year, they might act a little more civilized.”
Someone laughed. “More like, we’d have a mob kicking down the door.”
“And it’s bound to leak.”
“It’s a waste of money too.”
“Enough.” Judith Breger, the agency’s Assistant Director, was slender, dark of skin and hair, her coverall a silvery sheath whose metallic finish proclaimed efficiency. She did not speak loudly, but her voice was firm enough to halt the jabber of rivalry and condescension and outright enmity. “Of course Mr. Suida is biased. That’s why he has the responsibility for protecting gengineered sentients. It’s also why you, Mr. Domenici, do not. Frankly, I have trouble imagining that you would give the assignment anything like the same amount of energy.”
There was laughter. Salamon Domenici was well known in the agency for his long lunch hours and padded expense vouchers.
Frederick clenched his teeth and sighed. He should have expected this reaction to his progress report on the attempt to save Renny from PETA’s short-sighted protectionism. Even within the Bioform Regulatory Administration…PETA and other animal-rights activists had once named the attitude “speciesism.” Now it was just specism. His colleagues were specists. The worst of them held his origin as a gengineered pig, a garbage disposal, against him. Despite his sentience, despite the human form the gengineers’ viruses had given him, they did not see him as fully human. They called him “Freddy” as if he were a child, or a pet. They sneered at him for trying to pass for human. They tried to block his efforts to help others to pass, or to avoid persecution.
The Assistant Director interrupted with, “Now, we have a number of permits to decide on.”
“Do we really need any more bioform gadgets?”
The Assistant Director’s sigh did not stave off Domenici. “I move we table them.”
“No,” she said. “You’ve tried this before. Let’s get on with it.”
The meeting had not begun until near the end of the afternoon, and it had run late. Now the building was empty, its lights dimmed, its hallways quiet. But Frederick had not yet left. He had retreated to his office, his mind continuing to churn with anger. Even in BRA, he told himself. Not just on the streets. Not just the mad Engineers. “Specists!” he muttered aloud.
“Idiots,” said Renny. The gengineered German shepherd was stretched on the carpeted floor near his feet.
Frederick nodded. Even in BRA, he repeated to himself. It did not seem possible. Ideologues who wanted to restrict gengineering, and not just by holding up permits for new prototypes or production models. The next item on the agenda had been licenses for those new graduates of gengineering programs who had passed their qualifying exams. There had been a move to hold those up as well, on the grounds that society had quite enough gengineers already. He suspected that some of his colleagues had put their true sympathies with the Engineers.
Bioluminescent vines covered his office ceiling, glowing as brightly as fluorescent fixtures. By the window sat a snackbush; its small, cylindrical fruits tasted like sausage. Around the window’s edge hovered the leaves and blossoms of the honeysuckle vines that climbed the building’s exterior; a few tendrils crawled over the sill. A shelf held a small, boxy veedo unit, its screen accompanying the soft music the unit was bringing into the room with a constantly changing display of random blobs in pastel hues.
Frederick’s office computer was a state-of-the-art bioform. A pot full of dirt erected a thick, woody trunk beside his desk. Branches held broad, stiff leaves before him. One leaf, covered with touch-sensitive spots, served as a keyboard. Four others hung side by side to serve as a monitor, currently displaying the file on Renny’s upcoming court hearing. A box of oblong gigabyte floppy-cards, each in a protective sleeve, sat to one side. One of the sleeves lay empty on the desk. Its floppy lay like the filling in a sandwich between two specialized leaves that could read the pattern of magnetization that encoded all the information the floppy held. The floppies themselves were manufactured; the rest was grown.
Distant sounds, not quite covered up by the music from his veedo unit, caught at his attention. Rattling metal, squeaking wheels, humming machinery, voices. The evening cleaning crew had arrived to vacuum hallway floors, tidy offices, wash windows, water plants. Frederick sighed. He didn’t usually stay so late, even after a meeting. But he made no move to leave.
The voices drew nearer. They were high-pitched, feminine, and there seemed to be three of them, bantering cheerfully back and forth. Frederick felt his anger fade to be replaced by a deep wistfulness. “I wish….” he said, and he stopped.
“What do you wish, Freddy?” asked the dog. His tail was wagging gently.
What he really wished was the same sort of camaraderie in his own life. Once he had had it. He had had friends. He had had fans. He had been happy. But the Engineers had killed them all. And then he had let the Endangered Species Replacement Program try to console him with a human body. That had distanced him from other people more than his original body ever had.
The dog had called him Freddy, and it hadn’t stung the way it had in the meeting. Perhaps Renny…? He dismissed the urge to say anything other than, “I wish I could make out what they’re saying.”
The dog snorted. “Singing in the cotton fields, Freddy.” He pricked his more acute ears toward the door. “One’s asking, ‘When you goin’ to seta little seed, honey?’” He changed his voice: “The other says, ‘We know you’re sweet on her. There’s bees all round your head
all day.’” His voice shifted again: “‘That’s why you wear that kerchief. Save that pollen!’” And then again to sing, “‘Shakin’ my anther for you!’”
Frederick sighed. “They’re bots, of course.”
Renny didn’t answer. Instead, his tail went stiff and he growled softly as a heavier tread sounded in the hall and a rough voice said, “Haven’t you got started yet? Enough goofin’ off!”
The man winced. Such a tone had never been aimed his way, but those that had were bad enough. Too few humans—full, natural-born humans—were not overbearing, abusive, disdainful, condescending, rude. He wondered if the bots were any happier than he in their dormitory ghettoes, away from their human masters and supervisors, their overlords.
Frederick got out of his chair with a grunt. He stepped to the window, looked out at a sky with a thin band of light still hovering on the western horizon. The city’s lights were on, marking windows, streets, and flowing traffic. He shrugged and turned toward the snackbush at his elbow. He picked a sausage. He looked at the dog and half smiled to see his ears pricked toward him, his face expectant. He picked another, tossed it, and turned again to the window.
He stared at the sausage in his hand. Once, he thought, he had had no hands. His mouth had been aimed at the underside of a sink, and later at the ceiling. Someone else had had to put food into his mouth. He hadn’t even been able to feed himself.
And now he worked for BRA. He shook his head at the irony and put the sausage in his mouth. His wife had been in the same fix as he. So had their kids, the calliope shoats. Now Porculata was gone. The kids? He would have liked to send them to Duncan, but Barnum was dead, poisoned by an attendant who had turned out to be an Engineer sympathizer. The other three, Ringling and Baraboo and Bailey, had permanent gigs playing circus music for a New Orleans disney. And when he had offered, they had refused. They were happy where they were. He sometimes thought they were smarter than he, though they had never been able to speak.
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