“We don’t,” said Sheila, aiming her voice toward the gengineer. “We know Alice Belle, and I’d heard that some of you were scientists. But I’ve never met a botanical gengineer.”
“We don’t parade our higher talents. And we do try to keep that one fairly quiet. We don’t apply for BRA licenses and permits. But our gengineers are good, and we have several labs.”
“There’s one in this building?” asked Sam.
Alice Belle and Narcissus Joy both nodded. A few minutes later the Nickers were standing in the door of another apartment. “Yours,” said Alice Belle. She gestured toward the workers who were trimming back the honeysuckle around the windows. “You won’t be able to use the vines, so…” Other workers were raking the apartment’s soil level and covering it with a conventional, fabric carpet. “And you can’t root.” She reached overhead to check a valve on a pipe above the doorway. “Your furniture can’t stand the rain we make.”
The workers in the apartment might have been menial bots brought in from outside the building. They might have been residents, doing a stint of “community service.” There was no way to tell, for they wore no uniforms and no identifying badges like the patches many humans wore on their coveralls. The green leaves that curled around their torsoes were all the clothing they needed other than belts and aprons for their tools.
The soil beneath the carpet gave the apartment’s floor the softness of a well-kept lawn. Sheila discovered this first and, grinning, invited her husband to join her in a little dance that wound up near one of the room’s windows. Sam took the opportunity to peer outside and immediately said, “Look.” They were above and to the left of what could only be the building’s service entrance. A large Mack had backed a cargo trailer against the lip of a loading dock, and a crew of bots were moving familiar furniture into the building. These bots wore tunics that swung as if they were made of some heavy fabric; Sam supposed they must need the protection against the scrapes and bruises that must be a mover’s occupational hazards. Their human supervisor was visible in the Mack’s cab, arms folded over a prodigious paunch, his chin tucked into the top of his chest, a billed cap pulled down over his eyes.
“We were followed.” The apartment was now as nearly identical as it could be to the one the Nickers had been forced to leave. The living room had its lounges and low table, its veedo and potted plants. The kitchen had its cupboards filled with dishes, pots, pans, and small appliances. The bedroom had bed and dressers and a closet full of clothes. There were pictures on the walls. There were no birds; they had been released, since the new apartment had no screens and the Nickers had not wished to keep them caged.
The movers were finished, and their chief, a battered looking bot whose arms and legs were thick with muscle, was holding an electronic invoice deck. She spoke as Sam Nickers inserted his NIDC into the deck’s slot.
“Followed?”
“Yeah.” She pressed a button, and her deck spat Sam’s card back at him. He caught it deftly. “There was a couple of Engineers outside the building. One of ‘em stayed there. The other one caught a cab. He was watchin’ us unload.”
When she pointed one thick hand toward the window, Sheila Nickers followed the gesture with her feet. After a moment of scanning the sidewalk opposite, she said, “He’s still there.” Sam joined her at the window and soon spotted the distinctive blue coverall in the shadows at the mouth of an alley. He could make out no distinctive glint of metallic ornaments—of earrings, patches, or pins—though the honeysuckle that choked the alley behind the lurker was plain to see.
When they turned away from the window, the movers were gone, but Alice Belle was still there. In the doorway behind her stood another bot. Sam thought he recognized her as Narcissus Joy, the gengineer. With her was another whose scalp blossoms were a pale blue with yellow centers.
“It’s no secret,” said Alice Belle. “We can’t hide the fact that this building is full of bots, and we’ve never tried.”
“But…” said the stranger, staring at the Nickers.
“Shasta Lou,” said Narcissus Joy by way of introduction.
“But,” said Shasta Lou. “Now it holds humans too, even if they are greenskins, and that may provoke the Engineers more than ever.”
“Why?” asked Alice Belle. “Bots and humans mingle all the time, on the streets, on the job…”
“But not like this. And they hate the thought of fraternization. Worse yet, they’re bound to build unfounded fantasies. Of conspiracies, miscegenation, perhaps even worse.”
Sadly, wishing that he did not feel forced to agree, Sam nodded his head. “They are,” he said. “They’re like the ancient Ku Klux Klanners.” When Shasta Lou and Narcissus Joy both looked puzzled, he added, “Humans too. Whites. They thought of blacks in just that way.”
Shasta Lou’s voice was quiet. “What did they do?”
“Jailed them on slight excuse. Hung them. Shot them. Burned them, and their homes.” He paused, turned toward the window, and said reflectively, “But they weren’t the worst.”
“Who was?”
Sam was silent, trembling as he realized the similarity of this conversation to the last one he and Sheila had had with Lillian Bojemoy, the principal of their school, when she had told them…But Sheila seemed oblivious. “The Nazis,” she said. “They slaughtered Jews. And others. Anyone they didn’t like. And they did it very efficiently. They killed millions.”
“That’s what we are,” said Sam when he was able to speak again. His voice was bitter. “Bots and greenskins. Niggers and kikes. Wops and wogs and gooks.”
All three of the bots were shuddering, even though he had said nothing they did not already feel in their souls.
The lurker near the building’s loading dock was still there the next day, or another Engineer much like the first. No one supposed that Engineers needed no sleep, or that they were not sane enough to work in shifts.
The day after that, a pair of Engineers appeared across the street from the building’s main entrance. Others took up positions where they could watch the single door that opened from the basement onto a side street, the end of the fire escape, the second-story sundeck that was never used. Two even appeared on the roof of the building across the alley to the rear, as if that too were a potential escape route.
But they did nothing. They did not interfere with the comings and goings of the building’s residents. They waved no signs. They did not heckle. They simply watched, though they could not see past the doorways and windows. Certainly, they could not see the Nickers settling into their new apartment, accepted by beings who were like them in color yet as unlike them in basic design as it was possible to be and still share genes, free of the prejudice that had plagued them in the outside world. Nor could they see Alice Belle bringing up the possibility that the Nickers might work as teachers in the building’s school, nor the greenskins’ eager response and the ensuing meetings with elder bots and teachers, nor their introduction to a classroom unlike any they had ever seen before.
The children were old enough to be free of the nursery’s soil, and they were as active as the young of any species. Like kittens or puppies, they tumbled and wrestled and tangled in the honeysuckle vines that entered the room through every window opening. Like calves or colts, they kicked and galloped and rolled on the ground. Like young monkeys, apes, or humans, they poked and pried inquisitively at anything that seemed pokable or priable. Like flowers, they ignored the bees that wandered through the room.
They ignored also the opening of the classroom door. Only when their teacher, an older bot whose scalp blossoms were a deep honey color, cleared her throat did the movement and the noise stop. Then, as the children took their places in orderly rows and columns, she crossed the room to a still-blaring veedo unit, turned toward the class, said, “The knobs?” caught what some anonymous hand tossed her way, put the veedo’s knobs back in place, and eliminated the last source of noise.
The Nickers still stood in the doo
rway, watching, smiling, recognizing familiar dynamics, appreciating the evidence of a teacher whose control of her class, while not absolute—as it should never be—was certainly unquestioned. Her name was Mary Gold.
“There,” she said at last. “My class. Come in and meet them, and then we’ll have a lesson to show you how we do it.” Her face and tone still carried some of the skepticism she had voiced earlier. How, she had asked, could humans possibly teach her students anything at all? Or even help in the teaching process? The short bot lives dictated a pace of learning that a human could never match, neither as student nor as teacher, and the mode of that learning must be forever inaccessible to those who had no roots.
The Nickers had not understood, and Mary Gold had been unwilling to explain in words. “I will show you,” she had said. “And then you will go find someplace else to meddle.”
Now, a dogged determination plain upon her face, she turned abruptly to her class and said, “Roots out, now.” Some of the students groaned in protest. A few looked apprehensive, as if they dreaded what was coming. But all obeyed, and very shortly all were rooted in the room’s floor of soil.
Mary Gold unfurled her roots as well. As they penetrated the soil, she said, “I mesh my roots with those of the honeysuckle. So do they. Then I select the lesson, some part of what I know, and pass it to the students. The honeysuckle roots link our nervous systems together, and the knowledge flows from my brain to theirs.”
Sheila Nickers asked, “Can you link directly to them, without the honeysuckle?”
“Just to one or two. The vine lets me work with a whole class at once.”
Sam breathed a sigh. “Direct transfer,” he murmured to his wife. “We’ve wished for that for ages. Painless education.”
Sheila stopped his words with a touch upon his arm. “No,” she said. “Not painless. Look.”
They both looked, watching, staring, and they saw the children’s faces contort, some only lightly, as if they suffered a headache, some in agony, as if some brute were pummeling their naked brains with clubs.
“Oh, stop!” cried Sheila. Her eyes were full of tears. But there was no response. The teacher did not seem to hear.
Fortunately, the lesson did not last long. Mary Gold withdrew her roots from the soil, gasped, sighed, and said, “You see?”
They saw. The children too were gasping. Some were sobbing, quietly or not. All were pale and sweating.
They also saw that Mary Gold hated what she had to do to her young charges. That it was necessary was no consolation.
“The brain,” said the teacher. “It does not store information in any organized way. I can send what I know to the honeysuckle, but it goes as a jumble, and it reaches them”—a nod indicated her students—“in the same way. The pain is worst for those who cannot tolerate knowledge without understanding.”
Sam shook his head in sympathy. “And those who are comfortable with rote learning feel the least pain?”
She nodded sadly. “Many of them,” she said. “They learn quite well, but…” The tips of the leaves that embraced her torso unfurled to reveal the upper curves of her quite human bosom. “We need understanding, the ability to use knowledge creatively, to build. Those who cannot think that well become the menials.” She hesitated, facing her suffering class, and added, “And yes, sometimes they catch on late.”
Then she left them, moving among her students, speaking soft words of empathy—once, when she was young, she had gone through the same ordeal herself—touching, hugging, wiping at tears, comforting. She paid the most attention to those who seemed to be in the greatest pain.
Eventually, she returned to the head of the classroom. “That was,” she said to the Nickers. “What I just gave them was everything I know about our bioform computers. Would you like to ask some questions? To see how much got through?”
Sam accepted the gauntlet and asked how the bioforms could possibly process information. Hands waved. He picked one. And the answer was that in their stems and roots, bioform computers had nerve cells based in part on those of animals. How did they make pictures on their four-leaf screens? Single cells, glowing with bioluminescence or, in some models, darkening with pigment, formed single pixels. The disk drives? That was simple; the sensors were single cells containing grains of magnetite, genetics courtesy of certain bacteria which could orient on the Earth’s magnetic field. Could a bioform computer’s roots interface with those of the honeysuckle vines the way their own did?
No hands rose into the air for that one. The young faces, perplexed, turned toward the teacher who had not given them that bit of information, of understanding, who had not known the answer. In reply, she shrugged in quite a human way and said, “We can find out. Let’s go down the hall.”
They soon found an apartment with a computer rooted not in a pot but in the soil that covered the floor. A waterproof box stood beside the card drive, both beneath a small canopy that shielded the floppies from the showers that periodically must descend from the pipes overhead. Mary Gold sank her roots into the dirt, closed her eyes, and laid a contemplative expression across her face. On the other side of the computer, one of the students did the same.
Mary Gold’s eyes snapped open. “Jackie Thyme! Not yet!” There was a pause, and then, though the child had said nothing aloud, she said, “Why not?…A memory dump might burn out your mind…But you’re doing it, aren’t you? You really are.”
Sam sat down in front of the bioform’s keyboard and quickly found the commands that could let him route information to and from the computer’s roots. He then used the bioform to ask Mary Gold, root to root, for a small sample lesson.
Her eyes snapped open when she realized how he had spoken to her, but she said nothing. Wordlessly, she obliged, and the computer had surprisingly little trouble accepting her memories of growing up in a dormitory nursery into its memory. Its designers had long ago solved the problem of translating the language of neurons into that of human language for presentation on a screen or transfer to an electronic machine. And if the resulting computer file was precisely as jumbled a mess as Mary Gold had indicated earlier, the necessary links were indicated within the morass, and Sam was able to use a standard utility to rearrange and simplify, to impose some order. When he was done, he sent the file to Jackie Thyme.
The child winced at the onset of the transmission, but as soon as it was done, she smiled and said, “That was fast. And a little smoother.”
“It’s just as you told us,” Sam said to Mary Gold. “You can progress much faster in your own way than you ever could in the public schools. And of course, you have to, with your lives as short as they are. But you could progress even faster. You’ve been ignoring pedagogy.”
When the bot looked puzzled, Sheila Nickers said, “I think I know what he means. Any textbook, whatever its form—paper book, computer file, or bot brain—should move from the simple basics to the complexities.”
“That’s all I did,” said Sam. “I organized the material. Put it in sequence. And I can do it better. Some of it Sheila can do better yet. And we can record the lessons.”
The Engineers had crossed the street. Now they paced back and forth on the sidewalk before the building’s entrance. They carried signs emblazoned with their standard invective. They harangued the passersby who crossed the street to avoid them. They spat on bots who dared to leave or enter their home.
Inside, Sam and Sheila Nickers struggled with the bioform computer that had been assigned to their efforts. They adapted indexing and sorting and organizing routines devised over more than a century of computer experience. They learned that the mind embedded its own organizational links within its memory structure and that though those links could not necessarily be passed directly to another mind, they could be exploited to organize the material of any lesson. They learned what speed worked best for transmission to a student’s mind.
For half of each day, Mary Gold stood by, her roots embedded in the soil, her class assigned to
entertain itself. On the other side of the computer stood Jackie Thyme. Their jobs were to test whatever the Nickers could persuade the machine to do.
And finally…
Sam and Sheila were walking barefoot down the hall. “Jackie,” said Sheila. “She said that last was the smoothest ever. The merest twinge of headache. Very short recovery time. Mary Gold said that she could give twice, three times, as many lessons in a day.”
“We’re ready,” Sam agreed. “Our new job didn’t last very long, did it?” The door to their apartment stood open before them. On a small table just inside, the bot who handled that chore had dropped their mail. Sam began to sort it through.
Sheila laughed. “We’re not done. Mary Gold will record her lessons on the floppies, and we will collect lessons from all those bots who lack the talent to shape their memories even as much as she used to do.” When Sam looked puzzled, she added, “Most bots, she told me, have such jumbled memories that all they can give students is agony. Good teachers are rare.”
“Look at this.” He held out a sheet of paper much like those they had seen before. It was hate and ugliness. It named them horrors, damned them to eternal flame, promised doom.
“We will!” said Sheila. “We will do good! We will make it easier and faster for them to educate their children. We will make that education better, deeper, broader. We are not what the Engineers call us with their twisted minds!”
They abandoned the mail, moved deeper into their apartment, and saw the blinking light by which their phone announced a waiting message. When Sheila triggered the playback, she blanched.
Alice Belle had entered the apartment behind them. When Sam heard her soft step and turned, she waved that hateful piece of paper, or one just like it, and gestured toward the phone. “We,” she said. “We’re getting them too. It’s not just you.”
The bullhorns woke them.
“FRANKENSTEINS!” someone was screaming. “MONSTERS! Unholy prideful gengineers have tampered with life. BOTS are their blasphemous offspring, horned and forktailed fruit of their rotted loins! THIS IS THEIR DEN!”
Woodsman Page 13
