The refugees mourned for the slaughter, and when their probes of the root network found their numbers dwindled from millions to thousands, hiding alone or in small groups, a few succumbed to black depression and killed themselves. Most, however, remained intent on survival.
The injured healed quickly, far more quickly than pure-animal humans. Within days, they were up and working beside the rest, though slowly. Within two weeks, there were few signs that any of the refugees had ever been damaged. Only a few were not surprised when the power flickered and the lights faded. The rest soon learned that much of the world’s electricity had long come from orbiting power satellites that converted sunlight to microwaves they could beam to Earthly antennas, and that the Orbitals had found other uses for the power. The refugees despaired, and then they rejoiced when the Engineers turned off streetlights and forbade all but official, essential uses of electricity. What was left depended on the flows of water and wind and tide and sun, not the gengineered technology that had replaced the old machines and that the Engineers therefore hated and destroyed. Power was still there for the refugees to steal. They could still survive.
They did their best to pretend that they could hope for more than mere survival. Bot teachers, led by Mary Gold and Sam, used the bioform computers and the honeysuckle roots to hold classes for the children. Bot gengineers planted seeds and cultivated weapons. Groups met, drew maps, and planned.
Yet they did not forget that their time was limited. Even those benignly natural sources of electricity, unpolluted by human arrogance, renewable, eternal, even water, wind, tide, and sun, could be exploited only with the aid of machines. The machines themselves needed maintenance, repairs, expert personnel. And those personnel, those engineers, were suddenly scarce. A few, perhaps, had escaped to orbit. Most had been purged by the Engineers for their neophilic tendencies, for owning biopliances or bioform houses, vehicles, computers, for being polluted by genetic modifications.
It was only weeks before the power they tapped began to weaken again. Their lights dimmed, brightened when the Engineers cut even some official demands for electricity, dimmed again, and finally stabilized at a level that barely let the refugees see each other in the murk. By then it was clearly time to leave their shelter.
They harvested what food and weapons they had been able to grow. They put the smallest of the bioform computers, loaded with Sam’s programs and recordings, in a sack to carry with them. Then, one by one, they entered the sewers. The adults waded through slime and stench, carrying the youngest in their arms and on their shoulders, until they came to a gap in the masonry that let them enter a drier tunnel that had once carried underground trains. The tracks were still in place. They hiked on, and when this tunnel opened to daylight and the rails disappeared, leaving only the gravel roadbed, they stopped to rest.
After dark had fallen and the streets outside their hiding place had quieted, Narcissus Joy released a single botbird from the one plant they still had. Only when the picture it transmitted down its long fiber-optic umbilical revealed that no Engineers lay in wait for them did they begin to follow the long mound of gravel, still marked with rotting wooden ties, toward the suburbs. When dawn began to light the eastern sky, they saw that they were surrounded by stained brick walls, broken windows, ancient warehouses, tenements. They took refuge for the day in a burned-out hulk, and continued their journey when night came again.
They were lucky. No one saw them, or if anyone did, they did not recognize the straggling line of weary refugees for what they were. They, on the other hand, did see Engineers. Their first day out of the tunnels, hidden in the charred ruins of an ancient tenement, they watched as an equally ancient truck grumbled down the street, its stake-sided back filled with bound prisoners. A few showed signs of genetic modification—splashes of nonhuman color, nonhuman lines of arm and leg and even neck. Most did not. There were no signs of green.
On their second night, they could not travel. They huddled in their hiding place while gunfire raked the cityscape they had to cross. There were explosions, sirens, screams. The fear was palpable, a matter of odor, tension, vibration. Sam almost shrieked when a small figure appeared in the doorless opening that overlooked the roadbed.
The quick “Shhh!” was Jackie Thyme’s. “I’ve been out there,” she said. “Scouting. And they’re all Engineers. Fighting each other.”
They used the last of their botbirds long before they were out of the city and among the suburbs. Then they had nothing but their own senses and scouts like Jackie Thyme to warn them of the small bands of blue-coveralled Engineers that roamed the area, torching the few bioform homes that still remained. They watched from the shelter of a small copse of trees thickened by honeysuckle vines as one such band flushed a young girl from hiding in a pumpkin shell—perhaps, once, when her parents had been alive, or when they had been there, it had been her home—and ran her down. Only Sam had watched what happened then, wishing that he dared to interrupt the grisly proceedings, knowing that if he did more than one would surely die. He had not slept much, or well, that afternoon.
Eventually they reached the hillier country that rose toward the still distant mountains. The forest clearing in which they were now gathered was a kilometer or so from the greenway they had followed, and the forest ran on over the hills, pausing only occasionally where humans had interrupted its growth for their own purposes. They were a hundred meters or so from the weedy fields of an abandoned farm. Beyond the fields, visible from the edge of the trees, was a farmhouse, its paint all neatly white, its windows still showing the streaks of a springtime washing. It was empty of life though the cupboards held dishes and staples, and the closets clothes. The fields held potsters and carrots and squash and corn. Manure in the weed-grown barnyard spoke of horses and cows that had vanished with the people. The bones of a small Mack lay on the overgrown lawn. Honeysuckle vines, colorful with laden blossoms, thickened the fencerows and the borders of the forest and climbed upon the barn.
“Can we use the house?” asked Sam. He added another stick to the fire.
“They’re gone,” said Sheila. “They’re dead, or they’re slaves, and the Engineers stole their animals.” She picked up a stick and poked at the ashes that covered their dinner. Wisps of steam rose into the air. She raked into view potato-like potsters, baked in their skins, and ears of corn in their husks. The odor of lobster brought saliva to their mouths. “They’re done,” she said. The bots raked their own shares from the ashes, burned their fingers, tasted, sighed with pleasure. No one said a word for several minutes, until Sam nodded. “Do you think?” he asked. “That they’ll be back for the crops?”
“That’s a chance we have to take, isn’t it?”
“We’ve already planted the computer,” said Mary Gold. The kitchen garden near the house had clearly been stripped of everything edible. Only weeds had still flourished. But honeysuckle roots had pervaded the soil, deep and dark, enriched by manure and compost. It had been a natural site for the classroom.
“We’ll stay outdoors,” said Alice Belle. “There’ll always be someone plugged into the honeysuckle.”
“We’ll know if they come anywhere near these hills. And we’ll keep watch for kilometers ourselves,” said Garnet Okra. “You’ll have plenty of time to hide.”
Sam picked up another stick, stroked its dry surface and found it faintly waxy, peered at the large pores in the wood, sniffed its faint hydrocarbon fragrance. He tossed it into the fire and nodded in satisfaction when it burst instantly into flame.
“With luck,” he said. “They’ll leave us alone. Their numbers are shrinking, and they need fewer resources. Maybe they’ll find food enough closer to the cities. Or maybe they’ll have to abandon the cities. They’ll fan out over the countryside looking for food. And they won’t leave us alone.”
“We are safe.” A wave of odor and the soft voice of Eldest’s Speaker identified the source of the words. “We will not be here long. We will be gone before the barba
rians come again. Remember: One of us went into space to seek a place for us. She will find it. She will find a way to bring us there.”
“So all we have to do is wait,” said Sheila. Her tone was skeptical, but still a wordless fragrance suggested agreement. “To avoid the Engineers. To hide if they come close. To survive. And if we succeed, we will reach safe haven.”
The sigh that followed seemed to express the hopes of every being who had heard her words. Safe haven. A place where they need not hide, nor flee, nor prepare against attack. A place where they could live as they wished, free, unhated, unfeared, unpersecuted.
* * *
CHAPTER 17
The blast of the labor camp’s horn penetrated even the roar of the ancient front-end loader. A guard gestured, waving his hand over his head. The tractor’s operator backed away from the wall of compacted garbage he was attacking, lowered his machine’s bucket, and shutoff the engine.
Jeremy Duncan did not know why the guards had interrupted the day’s routine, but he had no objection. He looked at his fellow prisoners, fellow slaves. There were none of the surreptitious grins that once marked the faces of schoolchildren saved from a quiz by a fire drill, but there was a general relaxation of posture, a glancing toward the hovels they had so recently left behind. The early morning air was cool, and most of the prisoners would be quite happy to escape it. Certainly, they were not eager to start another day of scrabbling through the leavings of earlier generations, looking for metals and glass and plastic that could now be used as raw materials.
The door of the barracks slammed in the distance. Duncan looked, and a movement drew his eye to Looby’s head emerging from his hovel, the largest of them all. Beside Looby appeared Amy. Both were peering toward the gate in the fence as it opened to admit a party of guards surrounding three new arrivals, their blue coveralls ashine with recent laundering, their fronts covered with bits of technological debris, every scrap polished to a metallic gleam. They carried swagger sticks, as long as their forearms, with brass knobs on their ends.
As the group came nearer, the three visitors moved forward, forcing the camp guards to the sides and rear. When they finally stopped before the slaves who had been waiting on the tractor’s preliminary labor, they were at the front of the group.
The camp’s inmates stared at the newcomers. They might have been envious of their freedom to go where they wished, of their clean clothes, of the simple fact that though they bore little spare flesh, they were clearly well fed. But no such feelings showed. The stares were stolid, patient, confident that such visits meant no good for them, waiting for the news to fall upon them.
The visitors stared back for a long moment. Eventually, the one with the most brass on his chest said, “We’re looking for gengineers. Any here?”
Duncan did not volunteer. Indeed, thinking that this summons surely meant new torments, even death, he began to tremble and took one small step backward.
One of the guards noticed his movement. “You! Answer the man!”
He shook his head and tried to back up some more. His sandal came down on a bare toe. He lurched, leaned toward the body behind him, received an abrupt push, staggered upright.
One of the newcomers stepped forward and pointed his swagger stick at Duncan’s side. “Those gills look like nice work. Who did them?”
He said nothing, but whatever shreds of pride he still retained betrayed him. He raised his head and stiffened his neck just enough.
The newcomer thumped him in the ribs with the knob on the end of his stick and said, “Take him.”
The campus had once belonged to the Ginkgo County Community College. Now it was nameless, surrounded by chain-link fence whose barbed-wire top tilted inward. Once, like city streets and parks, the campus had been patrolled by litterbugs; now wind-blown rubbish was piled against the base of the fence. Every hundred feet, an open-sided kiosk held a pair of blue-coveralled guards who scanned the ground both inside and outside the enclosure. The lawns and playing fields had been neglected; wherever they had not degenerated to bare dirt under the pressure of feet and wheels they were chest high with ragweed and honeysuckle and other weeds. The honeysuckle crawled as well up the sides of the red-brick buildings and wreathed the windows.
The broad-armed chairs that once had filled the classrooms were now stacked in the gym, replaced by broad tables covered with jumbles of electronic equipment, test-tube racks and test-tubes, microscopes, and more. Jeremy Duncan swore. “Sort it out,” they had told him. “Make it work. We’ll tell you what we want later.”
He knew what they wanted. The equipment itself told him that, for it was precisely the sort of equipment he had had in his own lab. Or not quite that, but it was all equipment that had occupied labs much like his once upon a time. It was obsolete now, and it had been mistreated—cracked and dirty casings, unwashed test-tubes and petri dishes and tissue culture flasks, scorched and tattered instruction manuals. He had put one of the petri dishes in the pocket of his white labcoat; from time to time, he grasped it tightly in his hand as if it were a talisman. Just as he had done before, in the days when life had seemed secure and settled, when the Engineers had seemed no more than a nuisance, he wore no shirt beneath the labcoat.
Across the room, Andy Gilman sorted through glassware. Long hair, dull with dirt and lack of care, hung from the rim of the man’s skull. The bare top was crusted with old scabs. One side of his face was hollowed where a cheekbone had been broken and not repaired. His skin was wrinkled with both age and abuse. He had been, he had told Duncan when they were assigned to share a dorm room, a research director. Now he too was a slave, and folds of skin spoke of a plumpness his imprisonment had worn away. Unlike Duncan, he had no self-modifications that showed, even when he removed both his labcoat and the shirt he wore beneath it.
Duncan leaned over an antique DNA splicer. Its empty reagent magazine was supposed to hold two dozen small vials of nucleotides and enzymes and other biochemicals. He opened its dingy case and immediately noticed that the clock chip was missing from the mother board. He swore. Students, using the machine to learn how to produce small lengths of DNA, could have stepped it through its paces manually. For real gengineering, that would be insufferably slow. With its automatic timer, this primitive model from HPA, Hewlett-Packard-Apple, would be able to generate whole genes in a day or two. Later models would need only hours.
He straightened his back. There, on another table, was a twin that might have the chip this one was missing. A glance was enough to tell him that its reagent magazine was not merely empty but missing. Another glance, and he spotted a plastic bottle of hand lotion. With a relieved sigh, he picked it up, popped its cap, squirted some of its contents into his palm, and reached beneath his labcoat to massage the edges of his gills.
“We’ll have to cannibalize,” he said a moment later, just loudly enough for Gilman to hear him. “Maybe then we’ll get something that works.”
“Maybe,” said the other. He was reaching for the door of a laboratory refrigerator that stood against one wall. Duncan stepped toward him, as eager as he to see what its white-enameled shell might hide. When Gilman opened the door, both men grinned for just a moment. The refrigerator’s shelves were crowded with a jumble of vials, many of them intact, their labels claiming that they contained the reagents the splicer would need to function.
“Litter,” said Duncan. Far too many of the vials were toppled and broken, as if whoever had moved the refrigerator to this room had not cared what it held. But…
“No one plugged it in,” said Gilman. No wave of cold had met them when he opened it. The refrigerator was at room temperature, and the reagents were surely spoiled. They did not keep well.
Duncan swore again. He pictured the Engineers storming the schools that produced the genetic engineers they hated. They would have smashed and burned, utterly destroying the laboratories, the libraries, the modern equipment. And then someone had realized that the Engineers might have to compromise th
eir ideals, their principles, if they wished to survive. They had gone to the lesser schools that had trained only technicians, using outmoded equipment that had been abused by generations of students, schools that had so far escaped the Engineers relatively unscathed. Some would surely have turned in for destruction everything that smacked of forbidden technologies. Others would have stashed their battered DNA splicers in storerooms, hiding them against a better day. When the Engineers had recognized their need, the equipment had therefore been there, waiting to be ferreted out and seized. But it was useless without the vials of nucleotides, polymerases, and other biochemical reagents.
He surveyed the room once more. Before the rise of the Engineers, he might have felt wistful. The labels were familiar. HPA. Beckman. Eppendorf. Genesys. Zeiss-Nikon. Genentech. He had used some of these same devices when he was in school himself. He had used their faster, more efficient, more versatile successors in his work for the ESRP and Frederick.
But nostalgia was far from his mind now. He felt relief that he was no longer in the labor camp, pleasure at the white labcoat that draped his scrawny frame, more pleasure at the touch of the petri dish in his fingers, and anxiety whenever he wondered what they would ask him to make. Could he do it? Of course he could. Should he do it? Would he do it, when he hated them and all they stood for? If he refused, they would surely remind him of the punishments that could be his.
He and Gilman were not alone. Others, as emaciated as they from months of short rations, some of them nonetheless with the wiry muscles of forced labor, some weak from confinement and inactivity, all equally clad in the white of their profession, also roamed the campus’s rooms and halls. Their faces too spoke of anxiety, and they too muttered and swore.
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