“And are you…?”
“A gengineer?” She managed to produce a faint smile. Her voice remained husky. “Not really. I was too young to work when…” The ragged tops of her leaves parted from her chest. Then, as if she realized she had nothing left to conceal, she let them unfurl, tilting them to catch the sunlight that entered through the window. “But I know the techniques. I know what to do.” Then, as if in afterthought, she added, “There wasn’t any honeysuckle on the island.”
Deep blue sky arched over the old farmhouse’s weedy garden. Burdock and honeysuckle sprawled. Trees strained to intercept the sun with leaves and needles. Clouds hovered on the southern horizon, hinting of the distant Gulf of Mexico and suggesting rain in the coming hours or days.
Sam Nickers sat on an upturned bucket in front of the keyboard of the bioform computer they had brought with them. The leaves that formed the computer’s screen were tilted toward him, displaying the lesson of the moment. Around him were scattered two dozen young bots, their roots embedded in the soil, meshed with the roots of the honeysuckle, ready to receive what the computer would send them as soon as he issued the necessary commands. Nearest him was Jackie Thyme. Three teachers, including Mary Gold, stood ready to monitor the flow of information and soothe any students who could not absorb it without pain. The pain was less likely than it had been before Sam had learned how to use the computer, but it could still strike, and there seemed no way to predict who the victim would be or what lesson would cause the most suffering.
Other bots stood nearby, their roots too touching the honeysuckle, but in watchfulness, scanning the landscape with honeysuckle senses for signs of intrusion, invasion, threat. More than once since the refugees had found this farm, these sentinels had alerted the rest to hide while horse-drawn wagons passed on the road. Once a young couple, walking, had paused at the end of the weed-choked drive, stared at the house, asked each other, “Do you think they’re alive?” and shaken their heads. They had not approached the house; if they had, they could not have missed the signs of occupancy.
The refugees had food. They had soil and water and sunshine. They had distance from the Engineers. They even retained some hope, though that grew more difficult day by day as the few bots who still survived outside of their small colony lost their connections to the honeysuckle net. They knew that the Engineers still hunted for prey, and that they still found it. It seemed more and more likely that it was only a matter of time before the Engineers found them, and then…There were no signs of rescue.
Sam was reaching for his keyboard when the image on the screen broke into static. “Litter!” he said as he rebooted.
“Wait!” said Mary Gold. A distant look spread over her face. “It’s a message…A bot, imprisoned…They finally put her where she could reach the honeysuckle.”
The details followed: The honeysuckle tendril Chervil Mint had put in the dirt of her pot had rooted. By then she had learned what the Engineers wanted of their captive gengineers. She knew the threat of the surrounding conservative Engineers. She knew where she was. And as soon as the honeysuckle roots had been ready for her touch, she had cried out upon the net. Against all hope, she had found others of her kind. But could they, would they, help?
No one spoke until Jackie Thyme said, “We have weapons, and Ginkgo County is not far away.” She pointed south and west. “We can do it. We should.”
“No!” said Mary Gold, the tips of her leaves opening and closing in a fearful flutter, her scalp blossoms trembling. “They’ll find us then. And we’ll be…”
“They’ll find us anyway,” said Jackie Thyme. “Eventually.” Sam thought of the human gengineers being forced to help the Engineers rebuild enough infrastructure to support a mechanical technology, of what would surely happen to them once they had succeeded, of what seemed all too likely even sooner, as soon as the faction outside the fence was sufficiently enflamed. “A meeting,” he said. “We need to consider what to do.”
The decision had not been quickly reached, but many of the bots had had enough of hiding safely while their kind, their creators, and their allies were all exterminated. And, as Jackie Thyme had pointed out, they did have weapons. A new crop of grenade plants, both gas and shrapnel, had ripened and their fruit were ready to use. New botbird plants had grown too. And the bots themselves had regained their strength. Two nights of steady marching on country roads would get them to the college. They could do it, if they only would. And with luck, the Engineers would not be able to follow them.
“I’m coming too,” said Sheila Nickers. She was wearing a pale blue coverall, armless, its back a cross of straps. Her green skin glowed in the sunlight. “You can’t leave me behind.”
“I’m the medic,” said Sam. “They’ll need me with them. And I need you here, safe, even if that makes me a fatuously overprotective male. I want to be sure my mate will survive even if I don’t.”
“Be careful then,” was all she said to indicate her acquiescence. Her arms tightened around his chest. Her head pressed beneath his chin. Her feathers tickled his nose. He tightened his own grip on her.
The first night of the journey passed without event. Sam marched near the head of the column, a sack of seedcase grenades heavy on his back. There was no moon, and clouds made the night so dark that when he turned, he could see only the few bots nearest him. Toward dawn, when a greying sky sent them looking for a grove of trees in which they could lie concealed till dark returned, it rained lightly. Sam did not find that comforting, though the bots smiled and spread their leaves.
The second night was as dark as the first until they topped a rise and, through scattered trees and empty buildings, made out the sparks of the campfires that ringed the Ginkgo County Community College campus. They were flickers, dying unfed while the Engineers slept. The small army concealed itself and readied its weapons. Botbirds flew, feeding images through their fiber optic umbilicals to the leafy screens of their parent bushes. Sam and his companions searched those images carefully but saw no sentinels among the fires. Only then did they split into small teams and dare to approach.
The campus lay quiet, its surrounding fence dimly visible in the light shed by the nearest fires and spilled from the pools of orange cast by sodium-vapor lamps mounted on scattered poles. Once there had been more such lights in lines that traced the campus’s roads and walkways but replacements for broken bulbs had been unavailable for many months. Once perhaps there had also been phosphorescent shrubs and hedges, but if so the Engineers had exterminated them. They had left intact the shadows from which classrooms and dormitories loomed, windows reflecting sparks, their red-brick sides hulking ominously.
Sam was surprised when Narcissus Joy poked a finger into one end of a gas grenade and capped the resulting hole with a thumb. “They don’t have to explode,” she murmured quietly. “Watch…” He and Jackie Thyme followed her as she approached a makeshift tent and carefully, for just a moment, vented gas over each sleeping face. Around them, other bots were doing the same. “They won’t wake up till morning,” she said, still murmuring.
There were sentinels around the campus, patrolling just within the fence. To silence them, the bots ringed the campus just beyond the reach of the lights and, nearly simultaneously, lobbed gas grenades to burst with emphatic pops near their feet. As soon as the guards had fallen, wirecutters made short work of the fence.
“There’s Chervil Mint.” Sam followed the pointing arm and saw a figure clinging to the honeysuckle vines that covered the side of a classroom building.
Bots headed toward the dorms to wake and free the captive gengineers and lead them too to safety. Unfortunately, not all the guards had been on patrol. Later, Sam would tell himself that they should have known, that they had been luckier than anyone deserved to be. But for all that he was a historian and he had read much of past military actions, he had no actual experience at all of such things.
He was watching a building when someone inside opened a door. Light spille
d onto a walkway and revealed a bot in unmistakable detail. Sam swore. There was a cry of alarm, and interior lights flicked on. Guards tumbled out of doors, crying, “It’s bots! Look at ‘em! What are they doin’? Stop them! They’re heading for the dorms. It’s a break! Shoot ‘em!”
Grenades arced through the darkness overhead and popped. Guards fell. Bots seized their guns. Other guards cried out more loudly, and more guards appeared in windows and doors. As the uproar grew quickly louder, lights came on in the dorms. Bot voices cried out in explanation, announcing freedom, urging haste. Gengineers ran from their buildings clad in coveralls, jeans, pajamas, nothing at all. Bots guided them toward the holes in the fence. Shots rattled against the night. Gengineers, bots, and guards fell, dead or wounded. Loud bangs announced that the shrapnel grenades had been unlimbered. The screams among the guards fell silent as more gas grenades were thrown.
As they withdrew, Sam could see faces at the dormitory windows. They had not rescued everyone, he thought. And of those who had tried to come with them, a few lay still on the ground behind them. So did a few of his companions, the bots. He was glad Sheila had stayed behind.
Was Chervil Mint with them? He hoped so, for she was the one prisoner whose plight had impelled them to come. Who else were they leading to their forest hiding place? Had they saved enough to make the deaths worthwhile? Or would they have done better to leave well enough alone?
At least, he told himself, the gas grenades had silenced all the guards in the end. No one was following them. They would not lead their enemy to the rest of their group.
By dawn they were ten kilometers from the campus, hidden in a line of trees between two fields of waist-high corn. Most of the bots had sunk their roots in the earth. The humans, the gengineers they had rescued from the campus prison, were gathered near Sam Nickers as he worked over those wounded bots who had managed to keep up with the flight from the campus. From what he gathered, only the dead had been left behind or abandoned on the way. The rest, if they lived, had made it, though some had had to be carried.
The bots were silent. The gengineers were not. Some of them were cursing the long hike and the prospect of more. Some, the leaner ones, those who had been toughened by forced labor in landfill mines and oil plantations, seemed less worn by the flight. All wanted to know, “What next? Where do we go? Will they pursue us? Capture us again? Punish us? Kill us?”
Sam faced two of the most insistent. They had introduced themselves as Andy Gilman and Jeremy Duncan. “You’re free,” he told them. “For awhile, at least. We’re taking you away from the Engineers. To a place where the rest of us are waiting. Where we’ve been hiding, where we’ve been safe so far. We hope we’ll stay that way. But, yes, they’re bound to pursue us. We’ll try to keep them from catching us. And yes, we’ll fight.”
“With what?” asked Duncan. “You just threw those guns away.”
“We had no more ammunition for them.”
“But you could have…”
Nearby, Narcissus Joy was bending over the display screen of a botbird bush. Three of the birds, tethered by their hair-like umbilicals, hovered high above the trees, watching the path the group had followed. “They’re looking for us,” she said. “There are gangs of Engineers on every road.” She moved aside to let Sam, Duncan, and Gilman see the screen. The aerial view showed the landscape like a map, green-turved roads twisting like snakes across the surface between the fields and woods. “The campus is over there.” She pointed toward one edge of the screen. Each road that crossed that edge swarmed with Engineers, milling, running, darting into the brush to either side, clearly looking for signs of their passage.
“It looks like an anthill that someone stirred with a stick,” said Duncan. “They’re not making much progress.”
“They will,” said Sam. “We’ll have to stay off the roads. That’ll slow us down.”
“That’s not just our guards,” said Gilman. “Too many of them. The protestors are after us too.”
The day wore on, and the flood of Engineers searching for them made little progress. But near the end of the afternoon, the botbird screen showed that small groups of Engineers with dogs were appearing ahead of the crowds on each road. Within an hour they had found the greenway the refugees had followed and their movement began to show a sense of direction.
“We can’t wait for dark,” said Narcissus Joy. “We have to go now. And we have to hurry.”
“Through the fields,” said Sam Nickers. “Send a team ahead to gas whoever they find. Watch out for the farmhouses.”
They did what he said, and by the next dawn they were far from their last resting spot. The hills that were their goal were visible ahead, the ground was rising, and the Engineers were still on their track, though they were somewhat further behind than they had been the afternoon before.
“Split up,” said Andy Gilman. “Scatter to give them too many tracks to follow. Give us each a bot for a guide.”
They followed his suggestion, and by noon they were home.
But they were not safe. As each small group reached the farm, it was greeted with the news, picked up from the honeysuckle that grew everywhere, that the Engineers had not given up when the track they were following had split. Nor had they tried to follow every subtrail. They had split into just five groups, each with a small pack of dogs. Then they had chosen trails as if at random.
“They must,” said Narcissus Joy. “They must have been sure we all were going to the same place.”
“We were,” said Sam Nickers.
“They’ll be here soon.”
“Are we going to fight again?” asked Jackie Thyme.
“We have to,” said Narcissus Joy. “We don’t have anyplace else to go.”
“There’s a road, a greenway, down the hill a kilometer or so,” said Lemon Margaret. “It cuts their path. They’ll have to cross it. And some of us are already there, with grenades.”
The initial skirmish left dead on both sides of the greenway, and there matters rested for hours. This time there was no basement shelter in which to hide. There was nowhere to go. There was, it seemed, no hope.
“What’s happening?” asked Sam Nickers. He sniffed as if that could tell him what he wanted to know, but all he detected was the scent of greenery. It was the smell of quiet, of peace, with only the aromatic scent of oil tree sap suggesting civilization and its conflicts.
Jackie Thyme roused herself, furled her leaves, and blinked. “If you were a bot,” she said. “You’d know. We’re all plugged into the honeysuckle, and that’s all we’re talking about.”
“So tell us,” said Sheila. She stood beside her husband, her hand gripping his, green on green except on their whitened knuckles. “Let us in on it.”
“They’re waiting,” said Jackie Thyme. “Some of them have turned back. They say they’re going to call for reinforcements, soldiers.”
“What for? Aren’t there enough of them out there now?”
“They say they don’t have enough guns.” Her expression turned distant. “Now someone is saying they don’t need them. They’ve noticed the oil trees. They’re saying…”
As she fell silent, Sam shuddered. He remembered the branch he had once thrown into the fire and how it had burst into flame, even though most of its flammable sap had long since evaporated. How vigorously would a living tree burn, its flesh permeated with that sap? How hot and fast and deadly would the woods around the farm burn? How long did they have?
* * *
CHAPTER 19
Renny lay on the carpeted floor near the Station Director’s desk, his head resting on his crossed wrists, watching. Donna Rose reached toward her daughter, eyes bright with tears. Frederick Suida stood behind her, hands clenching and unclenching.
“No!” Alvar Hannoken’s cry was panicked, desperate. “Don’t touch it, Donna Rose!”
“But it’s my daughter!” She spoke as desperately as he, her tone distraught, her face a grimace of disgust and anger and sham
e. “We uproot these things!” she said, but she backed up against Frederick, into the arms that grasped her shoulders, away from the pot full of black, moist soil. Behind it, the office’s broad window admitted a flood of sunlight and showed, rather than the usual skeletal radio telescope, the shiny globe of the construction shack, its litter of Q-ships, most of them still under construction, and the fuel depot.
“But it’s the way I want it,” said Hannoken placatingly.
“You shouldn’t do that,” said Frederick.
A small beep and a flashing light on his desk announced an incoming call. “Athena, privacy.” Hannoken turned back toward Donna Rose, ignoring Frederick. “And it was in you. In your genes. I just removed the sentience, the brains. I wanted something more decorative than the kudzu. I…”
“Decorative?” said Frederick, frowning. His hands gripped Donna Rose as comfortingly, as reassuringly as he could. “I suppose it is, but…”
“Freddy!”
He fell silent, remembering that Donna Rose did not want him to intervene. She had told him so earlier, saying Hannoken had gone too far. “He has stolen a piece of me,” she had told him in their quarters, the tips of her leaves twitching convulsively about her chest. “I let him have the tissue sample, but he didn’t ask if he could do that with it. He went too far, Freddy.”
Frederick had remembered how he had felt when he realized what a cruel prank intelligence could be. He had been shaped to be a garbage disposal. Yet some gengineer had chosen to give him brains he could never use except to go mad from boredom and frustration. “It must feel like rape.”
“No.” She had shaken her head. “No, not like that. Sex isn’t quite so personal for us. But still…” He had thought then of pollen and wind and bees and thought he understood. “More like a burglar, perhaps?”
The purple-flowered kudzu was gone now, replaced by the scion Hannoken had grown from Donna Rose’s tissue sample. That child of her flesh was over half a meter high now. Its central stem was thick and pale, much like Donna Rose’s own, its surface sculpted into feminine curves and hollows. Long, tapering leaves fanned out from the bulb that bulged from the soil. But where a bot had a head and face, this plant had only a cluster of thumb-sized blossom buds and palm-sized flowers, deep red and blazing orange. There was no hint that the plant’s trunk would ever split to form legs. Nor was there any sign that arms would grow.
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