Woodsman

by Thomas A Easton

  “Oh, no,” moaned Sam. “Oh, Jesus, no.” He shuddered with rage, with outrage, with sudden fear.

  “THIS IS THEIR DEN!” the strident scream repeated. “Where human Judases have joined them. Greenskins, yes. But they were human once. Now they have betrayed their kind. They have betrayed US. They have betrayed all humans. And they have done it twice. Once by letting the unholy gengineers pollute their very genes! And once by going over to the BOTS!”

  Sheila gripped his hand so tightly that he knew that if he were not one of those greenskins about which the Engineers were raving his skin surely would have blanched. “They didn’t do enough already?” she asked the air. She too was shuddering. “The mail wasn’t enough? The phone calls? The signs on our door? Getting kicked out of…”

  “GOD ONLY KNOWS WHAT THEY DO IN THERE! They won’t let us in. But God DOES know! And He knows it IS abomination!” The sound of sirens growing nearer filled the silence left when the ranting Engineer paused for breath.

  “Someone called,” said Sam with a sigh of relief. “One of the bots, or a neighbor.” It didn’t matter who. It mattered only that blessed silence, peace, would return, for a while. That the mob would not storm the building to stamp out abomination. That the pogrom would not—not yet—begin.

  He wished there were something he could do.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 11

  Like most people on Probe Station, Lois McAlois had a tiny box of an apartment just large enough for her bed to fold down and leave a narrow aisle. Unlike most of the Station’s residents, she lived in the low-gee zone. She also had more than enough room in her bed. The missing two-thirds of her legs left a broad expanse of blanket as flat as if the bed were empty.

  Yet that legless portion of her bed was not going unused. Curled atop the blanket lay Renny, his over-large head pointed toward her own, his eyes open as hers were not, watching.

  A soft click sounded from the wall near the head of the bed. Music began to play. The woman’s eyes opened. She grinned. “Hey, Renny,” she said. “It’s nice to have company in the morning.” One hand snaked from beneath the covers and reached to scratch the German shepherd’s ears.

  Renny followed as she slid out of bed and stood on the stubs of her thighs. “I couldn’t do this in full gee,” she said. With one hand, she flipped the switch that folded the bed back into the wall.

  She stretched, eyeing the dog speculatively, and stripped off the shift in which she had slept. Renny cocked his head, stared deliberately at her breasts and belly, whined, wagged his tail, and laughed. “You wouldn’t do that if I was a man,” he said.

  “Maybe I would.” She stepped into the bathroom, leaving its narrow door open. “I like you.” Only after she had brushed her teeth did she dress. The coverall she chose was dark brown with a pattern of light green and yellow maple leaves.

  Renny’s repeated whine suggested that the feeling was mutual, and that he was not concerned that he was missing anything by no longer accompanying Frederick and Donna Rose where they went. He had found in the pilot another focus for his attention.

  After breakfast, she took Renny with her to the Q-ship simulator. This was a room about twice the size of her apartment and even nearer the Station’s axis. Jointed arms mounted on its walls supported a rectangular metal box on whose side a metal hatch hung open. Inside, it looked identical to the cramped interior of the Q-ship prototype. The odors of stale sweat and fatigue surrounded it like a cloud.

  Arlan Michaels was standing beside the hatch, scratching in his blond hair with one hand. “Ready for another run?” he asked.

  “In that sweatbox? You sure we need it?”

  “Can’t afford any mistakes.”

  With a grunt and a roll of her eyes, the pilot agreed. Michaels’ grin told Renny that her protest and concession were a ritual they played through at least once for every training session. Once, perhaps, the words had been empty. Now, with the first flight almost upon them and the training having lasted for months, they bore more weight.

  “The dog going with you?” Michaels asked.

  “He’ll fit.” With a wave of one hand, she gestured Renny through the hatch. He lay down where her feet should have gone. “See?”

  Michaels nodded. “You plan to take him with you?”

  “Why not?” She pulled herself into the simulator’s small cabin. “Company’s nice to have.”

  The clang of the hatch cut off whatever reply Michaels might have made.

  “NORSAT 816. We have the feed.”

  “EUROSAT 153…”

  “AUSSAT 32…”

  “NIPPOSAT…”

  “SINOSAT…”

  “MOSSAT…”

  “PYRASAT…”

  “MECCASAT…”

  “CANSAT…”

  “LAPSAT…”

  Hands embedded in mouse-gloves twitched, pointed, gestured. Switches mounted in palms and along the sides of fingers clicked subliminally. Curses muttered. Keyboards rattled. Images appeared on veedo screens. The cloud-veiled outlines of continents and islands and peninsulas took shape, enlarged, and disappeared as views zoomed in on evidence of climate change: coastlines studded with drowned buildings. The world had warmed under the influence of carbon dioxide released by the Machine Age’s fossil exhalations and forest clearings. Yet the warming had had good effects as well; without it, it would never have been possible to have, even in areas once famous for frozen winters, genimals based on insects, reptiles, and tropical mammals.

  Further inland lay farmlands thick with gengineered crops; forests; broad tracts once fertile, now turned to dust or marsh, the outlines of abandoned fields and homesteads still visible. Cities sprawled, surrounded by suburbs, their thick ranks of homes a random mix of traditional wood and stone and brick and modern bioforms, pumpkins and eggplants and squash and bean plants and even plants in the guise of massive human heads, squatting on the landscape like the leavings of some mad executioner; in most, the bioforms dominated. In time, they might restore the climate to what it once had been, for the houses drew carbon from the air, while elsewhere forests grew less raped of lumber than they had been in centuries.

  City streets streamed with bioform traffic, Roachsters, Macks, Bernies, Beetles, Hoppers, and more. Pedestrians—bot and human—were not quite distinguishable on the sidewalks. Here and there, larger groups surrounded smaller ones, contracting and expanding like the irises of eyes or cameras. Several operators were scanning newscasts and other signals, the sound turned low but audible. Frederick could hear snippets of politicians’ speeches, weather forecasts, crime reports. There was footage of fires and floods, an earthquake, an announcement that the government had decided to retain its subsidies for traditional agriculture a little longer, a report that someone had poisoned a squadron of Air Force warbirds, another that a warbird had bombed a tank farm, killing fifty of the rhino-based genimals. Occasionally he heard brief mentions of “local disturbances.” There were no explicit admissions of any widespread trouble, no suggestion that Engineers throughout the world were giving up their signs and slogans and becoming more demanding, more aggressive, more violent.

  With delicate gestures, someone tried to tweak the enlargement on a satellite image just a little greater. When the image did not improve, another technician said, “I’ve found a minicam signal. No broadcast, but…” The image changed, and several of those in the room gasped at the evidence of what governments were keeping from the news. Alvar Hannoken pointed his prow of a nose toward the veedo screen and said, “It’s that bad.”

  Frederick Suida uttered an involuntary tsking noise. He was not surprised to see Engineers in the outer ring of an iris, nor bots and gengineered humans in the inner, nor knives and clubs and unzippered blue coveralls. He sighed. Murder and rape. Rape and murder. The traditional sports of reactionaries, revolutionaries, and other idiots. One of them the sport that had once cost him nearly every friend he had ever had. A smile was further from his face than ever.

&n
bsp; A bearded Engineer noticed the cameraman and waved a crude sword threateningly. The picture centered on the sword and remained steady as its wielder advanced. The weapon rose and fell, and the picture went dark.

  Frederick stood, his feet held to the deck by Velcro slippers. He was in Probe Station’s broad, low-ceilinged, low-gee communications center near the spin axis. The room was filled with perhaps two dozen electronic consoles and veedo screens. At each one sat an operator. At the nearest, beside his hip, the operator was Donna Rose. Her screen was one of those that did not display some view of the planet from which they had escaped.

  He shifted his attention to Donna Rose and spoke codes and passwords. Smoothly, rapidly, her fingers moved upon the keyboard before her. Three seconds later, time eaten by the passage of light from Station to Earth and back, the screen bloomed with acknowledgements. She had logged onto the computers of the Bioform Regulatory Administration. Now she should be able to access any of the various government networks that anyone on the Station could think of.

  “State?” asked Hannoken. Frederick gave Donna Rose the access code for the State Department’s intelligence net. Within minutes they were downloading reports of Engineer riots, lists of dead and injured, and analyses that identified the Engineers’ targets as anyone in any way connected to gengineering—bots, of course, and greenskins, and other gengineered humans, but also gengineers and their employees and the owners of bioform houses, vehicles, computers, and appliances. A research laboratory had been burned, a university gengineering department trashed. There were complaints that even embassy personnel were being attacked. There were requests for official protests to those foreign governments that turned blind eyes on Engineer activities. They found no sign that any such protests were filed. Nor did they see any sign that Washington was prepared to restrain the Engineers within their own nation’s borders.

  The screen blinked, wiped clean, and displayed a message:

  ACCESS TERMINATED.

  PLEASE INSERT YOUR NIDC IN YOUR CARD DRIVE.

  IDENTIFY YOURSELF

  BY CLEARANCE NUMBER

  AND ACCESS AUTHORIZATION.

  “Do we have enough?” asked Frederick. Donna Rose glanced up at him, the tips of the leaves that covered her chest twitching away from her skin just enough to reveal her collar bones. Hannoken nodded jerkily and made an abrupt, chopping motion with one hand. “Close it down.”

  The bot obeyed.

  As her screen cleared, however, another caught Frederick’s eye. The view it showed was familiar, horizontal, not sky-eye vertical, but…He pointed. “Turn up the sound.” It was a newscast: “Firefighters quickly extinguished the flames,” the announcer was saying as the camera centered on a broken window from which a tendril of smoke escaped.

  “But the damage had been done.” Another camera moved through an open rotunda, past a rubble of smashed souvenirs and filigreed grillwork that marked what had been a gift shop. The walls overhead still held, intact but soot-stained, antique WPA bronzes. The mouth of a corridor was partially blocked by the crushed and tattered remnants of biological sculptures and other products of the gengineer as artist.

  “The mob destroyed almost everything before the police arrived.” On the steps outside, bodies. In the auditorium where Frederick and his wife and their children had once entertained audiences with the music only they could make, more bodies. In an office…

  “Even the museum’s director. They found his wife in another part of the building.” The bodies looked small, the near-white hair stained with blood, the faces smoothed of wrinkles.

  “No,” said Frederick. Franklin and Kimmer Peirce had been his friends almost as long as Tom Cross. They had survived the massacre that had cost him Tom, and Porculata, and…They had helped him become what he was. And now…

  He hadn’t seen them in weeks. Not since before Renny’s case had landed on his desk. He should have visited them before he left for Probe Station. But he hadn’t had the time, and he hadn’t dreamed that they would not be there when he returned, and…

  He wanted to scream, to hit something, to burst out in tears. But he felt stunned, frozen. The tears refused to come. All he could do was turn away, head down, and stumble from the room.

  This time, the elephant—what had been her name? Martha?—had not been in the nightmare. But Tom and Muffy had been, and they had died as messily as they had in reality. So had Franklin and Kimmer, who had survived the massacre that had helped Frederick into manhood but now, in the dream, joined the others in death. Porculata, his wife, had died more messily. In reality, an Engineer’s sword had simply cut her in two. In his night-dark mind, she was cloven, stabbed, hacked, burned, boiled, dead a hundred times, a hundred ways, and more, and worse.

  When Frederick drew back the curtain that divided his quarters, he found Donna Rose facing him. Her eyes were closed, her back arched to thrust her breasts forward, her arms by her sides, their lower portions angled outward. Her leaves were unwound from her torso and draped over her forearms to soak in the beam of light that shone through the porthole behind her. The light was constant, steadied by the mirrors Hannoken had ordered installed. As in the Director’s office, a filter reduced the sun’s searing brightness to a near equivalent of a summer noon.

  For a moment, he stared at the spot where a navel would have been if she were human, or even truly mammalian. Then, suppressing the catch in his breath that her pose invited, he grunted morosely. “Are you trying to cheer me up?”

  Her eyes opened. Languidly, she refurled her leaves. She grinned. “I was just getting a last bit of sun before going back to work.”

  He grunted again. “I need some breakfast. Down there…” He gestured toward the porthole as if Earth were just outside. “Down there, I could just pick a sausage. Here the bushes are all in the cafeteria.”

  “Bots eat too,” she said. “Sometimes. And I’d like something now. So let’s go.” She drew her roots from the soil, shook her feet daintily to remove the crumbs of soil that clung to her soles, and stepped toward the door. He stood, leaving the bed down, unmade, and followed her. But before they could leave the room, the communicator spoke: “Frederick? Donna Rose? Director Hannoken would like to see you as soon as you’ve eaten. In his office.” When they reached Hannoken’s office, the Station’s Director was facing his picture window, his hands clasped behind his back, his face turned into the light. His kudzu plant stood nearby, a simple non sentient decoration. Withered purple petals had fallen to the floor around its pot.

  He turned to greet them and said, holding Donna Rose’s hand, “I knew you’d found a slot in the com center. I didn’t know how good you were until yesterday. I just hadn’t seen you in action.” He faced Frederick. “She’s good,” he told his guest. “She worked that console like a pro. And you say she was a menial. A cleaning bot.”

  Frederick nodded. When Hannoken added, “But why? That’s an utter waste. And how’d she learn?” he shrugged. He didn’t know how she had learned. He did know how to explain the waste. “People keep them out of every job they can,” he said. “Some are good enough to escape that, but most…” He shrugged again.

  “Ahhh.” Hannoken sighed. “I know, really. But…” He shook his head. “I thought I was doing something good,” he said. “When I became a gengineer. I saw what others had done before me. I thought I would benefit society, that it would welcome whatever I came up with. Not…”

  He turned toward Donna Rose. “That tissue sample I took,” he said. “It’s growing fine. And your genome.” He shook his head. “Anyone I know would have pieced it together in a very different way. But it works. Of course it does. And very nicely, too.” His eyes added another meaning to his words.

  “And they reject you too.” he said. “Look at this. Athena, veedo on. Play that last recording.” All three turned to face the veedo on the wall. The recording was that of a newscast, and it showed a street littered with bodies. Most showed green leaves or skin.

  “Ahhh!” Donna
Rose’s wordless cry shook with pain. Frederick said nothing at all. “One of those ‘local disturbances,’” said the Station Director as the tape reached its end and began again. “For some reason, they put this one on the news.”

  “Can’t you…?” She fell silent, staring at the veedo and its recording of blue-clad Engineers and others—others in more varied clothing, not uniforms, others who were not Engineers but sympathizers, fellow-travellers, perhaps just ordinary people who wished to be left alone and therefore allied themselves with what seemed the most threatening force in sight—as they walked among the scattered bodies, hacking with Engineer machetes, axes, kitchen knives, removing flowered scalps, the bulbs that hung between bot legs, and other trophies, smearing their clothes with blood as if it were some badge of honor. “They’ll be killed, won’t they? They’ll all be killed. Can’t you save them? Some of them? Bring the bots up here? To the stations?”

  The ensuing silence, though it did not last long, not even long enough for the recorded excerpt from the veedo news to begin once more, seemed oppressive. Finally, Alvar Hannoken raised one hand to his nose. He pinched the bridge and drew his fingers down. He sighed. “I wish we could,” he said. “But this Station could hold only a few. The habitats could do better, but even they are pretty close to their design capacity already. We just don’t have the room for many.”

  “The lifeboat problem,” said Frederick. When the others looked puzzled, he explained: “When people used to travel across the ocean in ships, the ships would sometimes strike a rock or an iceberg and sink. The passengers would get into smaller boats, the lifeboats. But the lifeboats could only hold a few, and the ships often did not carry enough for everyone. And if too many crowded into a lifeboat, that boat would sink too.”

  “Yes,” said Hannoken. “Not enough stations. Not enough habitats. And not enough spaceplanes or shuttles even if we did have places to put the ones we rescued.”