The Cageless Zoo

by Thomas K. Carpenter

  The Cageless Zoo

  A Novelette

  By

  Thomas K. Carpenter

  Copyright Information

  The Cageless Zoo

  Copyright © 2011 by Thomas K. Carpenter

  "The Cageless Zoo" Copyright © 2011

  Published by Black Moon Books

  www.blackmoonbooks.com

  Cover Design Copyright © Rachel J. Carpenter

  © Robert King | Dreamstime.com

  Discover other titles by this author on:

  www.thomaskcarpenter.com

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The Cageless Zoo

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Sample: Gamers

  Start Reading Now

  The Cageless Zoo

  SEE THE GALAXY’S ONLY CAGELESS ZOO

  The glittery sign hung above the rows of vehicles. Melandre gripped Natalya’s slender shoulder and held her tight as a tour bus rumbled past.

  GRAB THE LION’S TAIL

  Letters scrolled across the hazy morning, right above the weather beaten green-copper domes, scattered across the grounds like giant moss-covered rocks. When they neared the zoo, Andrake had said it looked like a bunch of tortoises waiting to eat the people strolling through the entrance. His sister, Natalya, had told him that tortoises were vegetarian and then they’d argued until Melandre, with hushed intensity, told them to be quiet.

  SHAKE HANDS WITH THE CHTHULU-BEAST

  Andrake, her eleven-year old son, hung back, fiddling with a hacking wand.

  “That’s the ambreimareus,” her daughter said, indicating the sign with her free hand. “And it has tentacles, not hands.”

  “Hmm…” Melandre acknowledged the comment, then spun back, yelling at Andrake. “Quit dawdling!”

  She accessed her son's system and sent a flash of light across his eye-screens.

  “Didn’t have to do that, mum,” said Andrake as he shoved the hacking wand in his pocket and rubbed his eyes. “I was almost done.”

  MEET THE GALAXY'S MOST DEADLY PREDATORS ALL IN ONE ZOO

  He gave his mother a crooked you’re-always-hassling-me smirk and an eye roll.

  Melandre’s heart dropped a few inches. He looked just like his father when he did that and then before she could close that door in her mind she recalled the last time she saw Philippe—walking out the door with a knapsack slung over his shoulder, scruffy black hair barely hiding his gray eyes, smiling and winking as he slid into the Darwin Institute vehicle. He promised he’d be back in three months.

  Since his death, she hadn’t been sure she could raise their two children alone. They were still so young.

  “Who’s dawdling now, mum?” Andrake tugged at her shirt.

  Natalya gave her hand a squeeze. “You need to do this. We all do.” Her daughter’s eyes moistened at the corners. Melandre felt her own well up.

  “Plus, it’ll be fun!” And like that, the rainstorm was gone. At least for her daughter.

  Natalya ran ahead through the entrance, coffee-skin soaking up the light of the morning sun. Andrake chased his sister and they tumbled into the park, laughing and even holding hands.

  Melandre checked the horizon back toward Steelzine. Faint ochre-colored clouds perched above the city. Sand storm coming. Still an hour before it would overtake the zoo.

  Around the corner under the first dome, she found Natalya petting a lion laying in the shade of a great arching tree, tail undulating in the manufactured breeze. A few onlookers stood near: Tansies, Church-folk, Hyllers, Earthlings like herself, and the like. Not as many as she thought might visit. Varagen was still a new planet in the Federation.

  The way the lion stared peacefully in the distance while her daughter stroked its creamy fur unnerved her. She knew the eye-screens painted an augmented reality overtop to hide them behind. Made them appear as another lion on the savannah or not at all, depending on the program's logic matrix.

  But still, adrenaline shot through her veins, making her breath quicken. It’s unnatural to mingle with the beasts, she thought. They used to hunt us. And technology doesn’t always protect us, nor did it protect my husband. That’s when she saw the sign, as if it were waiting for her to remember.

  SEE THE FEARSOME HYWAKALAR—THE FLOWER-TOOTHED LIZARD

  A full-sized representation painted across her own eye-screens—an advertisement featuring one of the zoo's assorted creatures. Its horrid green body was low to the ground like a speedster. Long protruded nose sported a split-row of teeth that opened like some toothy flower, both horizontally and vertically. The beastie roared and she swore it mocked her.

  Turning her back on the phantom Hywakalar, she sensed Andrake causing trouble. She crept around a grove of trees to find him hiding between two colorful booths that printed up trinkets on demand, pointing his hacking wand at an acarnocrat in his thick, layered metallic garments. The man swatted at a giant ghost moth buzzing around his head as her son silently laughed at him from his hiding spot.

  Melandre grabbed him by the ear. “Turn it off.”

  “Ow!” When the acarnocrat stopped flailing, she took the tube and shoved it into her pocket. “You can have it back when we leave.”

  “I’m just having fun.” Andrake spread his hand passively and his boyish smile again reminded her of his father.

  Melandre collected her daughter and pulled up the map that downloaded to their systems when they'd arrived. A floating representation of interconnected domes hovered between them and when they tapped the domes, floating animals appeared. They could touch the animals and learn more about them, but they didn’t bother. Natalya had memorized facts about them all and had lectured them on the various abilities of the zoo’s predators while they rode from Steelzine.

  They agreed to see thirty animals, about a quarter of the park. It’s all Melandre thought she could handle. The Institute man could catch up when he arrived.

  Before they continued, Melandre found a guard in a blue checkered shirt that seemed both authoritarian and comical. His eyes blinked twice, slowly, as if he viewed her through a fog.

  “What happens if they get loose?” she asked.

  He blinked once again. “They are loose.”

  “No.” She felt foolish all at once for asking her question. “What if they attack someone? The animals?”

  “They won’t.”

  “But what if they do?” Her children pulled at her arm, but their embarrassment hardened her resolve.

  The guard sighed. “The central computer monitors all the guests. If any beast makes a move, it shocks them. Or if that doesn’t work, we can shock them. We have the codes.”

  She glanced around. “You’re the only guard I’ve seen.”

  He shrugged. “Were more of us when the park opened. But seeing nothing has happened, they let some of us go each year.”

  “Try to have some fun, mum,” she heard Natalya say. When the slender fingers, smaller, but yet similar to her own, entangled themselves, the tension that’d been building in her loosened slightly.

  “Okay,” she said thinking that her daughter was right. She’d be a fool to think something would happen today. Or any day for that matter. It’s just that her husband had told her that nothing would happen on his last expedition, too.

  She clapped her hands, trying to dispel any doubts about coming to the cageless zoo.

  “Which first—the crystalline creeper or the great white shark? They’re both close.” Melandre gave her children an honest smile, at least to the point that she’d try to have fun.

  “Oh, mum.” Andrake pushed his hand through h
is dark hair. “I programmed a route for us while you talked to the guard. Using that Catcher’s Dilemma algorithm you showed me last week optimizing against current crowd density and minimizing distance traveled.”

  She tussled his hair as he hooked his hand on the corner of her pocket. “I’m certain the Mechatronics Guild will be pleased when you sign up.”

  They wandered the domes, her kids running ahead to interact with the animals. Natalya had thought the darvi had been the cutest. An adjective Melandre couldn’t quite manage to conjure for the scaly swamp-hunter with jagged teeth, but she was her father’s daughter. She’d been bringing home nasty little oozes and stick bugs to care for as long as Melandre could remember.

  Melandre preferred the sterile computers and mechatronics that performed exactly as expected. But she did enjoy the enthusiasm that her husband Philippe and now Natalya had for the animal kingdom, as unreliable as the creatures were.

  After a dozen domes, the kids' excitement unwavering, they neared the backend of the zoo. Raspy wails from the sandstorm outside muted the swamp noises from the dome they’d just exited.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Calderon.” The voice startled her and erased the good feeling she been enjoying.

  “Mr. Hisler.” She shook his hand, remembering meeting him once with Philippe at a company gathering. His wispy black hair, sagging jowls and grayish skin reminder her then, and now, of a half-burnt candle.

  Her kids ran ahead to the next dome, passing through the wide hallways that connected them. They went to see the tempest, a creature from Giant’s Belt that looked like the mythical dragon.

  “I’m pleased you were able to come, Mrs. Calderon.” He paused and licked his lips. “May I call you Melandre? You can call me, Raul.”

  “Mrs. Calderon will do, Mr. Hisler.” She kept her hands clasped in front. As she brushed her leg, she realized that Andrake’s hacking wand was missing. Then she remembered him sidling next to her. If she didn’t have the Institute man to deal with she’d march ahead and give her son a lesson.

  A group of chattering Tansies in their flowery garb passed them. Raul Hisler waited until they were gone before speaking again. But as he opened his mouth, the wailing of the sandstorm blasting the zoo increased its volume.

  “I bet the sandstorm makes maintaining the zoo quite expensive,” Melandre said, looking upward.

  “Certainly,” Raul replied. “Last year we had a wall collapse in one of the domes. The sandstorm lasted three days and kept us from repairing it. Thankfully the vegetation in the dome was quite resilient and grew back quickly after the event.”

  “That’s lucky,” Melandre mumbled.

  After a long pause Raul spoke again. “We at the Darwin Institute are quite pleased that you’ve agreed to turn over your husband’s research files.” Raul parted his thin lips to reveal faded yellow teeth.

  “I haven’t agreed to turn over anything,” she said, more sharply than she had intended.

  She held back her desire to apologize, deciding that he didn’t deserve it.

  “By the agreements your husband signed, in return for funding for his research, all information was property of the Institute.”

  Melandre flared her nostrils. “I don’t care about those agreements. These are his private journal files.”

  “The agreements state that all information recorded during the length of the term, no matter what the location of the data, would be property of the Institute.”

  His tone reminded her of a lawyer. She paused under the archway, putting a hand on her hip.

  “So you’re going to tell me that if he sent me a love letter, that would be owned by you creeps?”

  He nodded almost apologetically. “Technically speaking, yes. But we’re only really interested in the epigenetic research. We’d probably delete any love letters.”

  Melandre knew that Raul’s words were true. She’d read the agreements herself, but she had hoped they wouldn’t try to enforce all of them. Philippe had been so desperate for funding, he’d signed away all his rights.

  “But the Institute will bury his research. It’ll never see the light of day.” She threw her hands in the air. “They only funded him so they could control the results.”

  Raul cleared his throat. “The Darwin Institute is a prestigious establishment with centuries of history. They would never bury research. Especially expensively funded research.”

  “Please don’t patronize me with your company bullshit, Mr. Hisler.” The anger rose up unexpected. “Philippe had been blocked on numerous occasions when he tried to publish his work. The Darwin family hegemony, who still controls a majority of the Institute, has some long standing feud with a dead Frenchman named Lamarck.”

  Raul peeled his lips back in a sneer. “Lamarck was a hack and a fraud that tried to promote that animals could change form from one generation to the next based on their environment. Even a school taught child knows that a giraffe’s neck doesn’t get longer because it needs to eat the higher levels. Only natural selection can do that and only over multiple generations.”

  Raul placed his hands behind his back, raised his chin and looked down his flattened nose. “So when your dear departed husband tried to regurgitate the works of this fraudster who's been discredited for centuries, he wasn’t blocked because of a feud. He was blocked because he was wrong and the research didn’t support it.”

  Melandre slapped him, hard. Raul put his hand to his jaw and continued speaking. “So you can thank the Institute’s generosity that it funded him at all and that it kept his inadequacies as a scientist from the general public.”

  She thought about slapping him again, but decided she’d gone far enough. She was afraid the kids might have seen her loss of control. Her moods brewed vicious storms these days when she least expected it.

  The kids appeared from the tunnel, laughing, but came up short when they saw their mother’s face.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said. “Let’s go to the next exhibit.”

  Raul gave her children his pasty smile. “Your mother was just explaining she would be handing over your father’s research so it can receive a treasured place in our revered Institute.”

  Natalya raised an eyebrow. “I thought you Darwin originalists hated my father's work? Couldn’t understand how it added to Darwin’s legacy, not reduced it.”

  “Well, little girl. How old are you?” Raul asked in a condescending tone.

  “Thirteen.” Natalya stared back undaunted.

  “Well, thirteen year-old girls can’t understand the complexities of biological research nor the scientific rigors of publication.” Raul smirked.

  Natalya spoke next in an airy sing-song voice. “Biological complexities?” Then she scrunched her face at the Institute man.

  Melandre had to contain a laugh. She could see the fierce look in her daughter’s eyes and knew the man was in trouble.

  Natalya put her hands behind her back, mimicking the same practiced pose that Raul had.

  “I guess it would be too difficult for ‘a little girl’ to understand how environmental stressors can create biological responses turning on and off the methyls that make up the epigenome, emphasizing one gene or the other and allowing traits to change from one generation to the next without changing DNA. And the epigenome — which is something of a misnomer of a term since it’s made up of a couple of systems that all regulate the effect of DNA in an individual — can be sensitive to any number of environmental effects like changing prey or predators, or temperatures, or anything really, if nature designs it so.”

  Natalya finished by sticking her tongue out at Raul, who looked more stunned than she thought possible. Melandre’s heart almost exploded from pride. Her daughter had done with words what she couldn’t do with a slap.

  Raul regained his composure. “All your posturing doesn’t change the fact that the Institute owns the data. Like it or not, you must hand over the data or face legal challenges.”

  Melandre held back her an
ger and decided to plead. “Do you not have any compassion that my husband gave his life for his research?” She noticed the dome they had come to and pointed to the sign at the edge of the jungle within. As if on cue, a hywakalith tramped out of the undergrowth of purple leaves and spiky fronds, and roared.

  “That’s the very species that killed him—the flower-toothed lizard.” Her skin crawled as she watched it stroll back into the jungle. She decided then she wasn’t going into the next dome.

  Raul stared at her, his eyes dead to her pleading, raising his voice above the noise of the sandstorm outside. “This is the type of nonsense your husband wanted to spread. It was the hywlarkana, the lightning lizard, a cousin to the hywakalith that killed him, though no one knows how that species came that far north out of its range.”

  “It didn’t roam from its territory,” Melandre said. “Philippe induced the environmental stressors from the southern badlands to affect the hywakalith so it would give birth to the hywlarkana. It’s not a different species, it keeps a variety of tools in its DNA and emphasizes one or the other depending on its location. The jungle can’t support its static blast due to the humidity so it represses that gene.” Melandre sighed. “If they’d actually captured one they could have proved it, but the one that killed him disappeared and the ones from the badlands have only been seen by the locals very rarely.”

  “All your arguments are pointless.” Raul sighed and rubbed his temple. “If I don’t collect the data today, they’ll just send someone else later. And while I don’t agree with Philippe’s continuation of Lamarck’s research, he did find and catalog many unknown species for the Institute and he is remembered fondly by the other researchers.”

  He was clearly trying to make amends for his earlier comments, though it irked her that Philippe hadn’t been remembered fondly by Raul. Melandre didn’t know why she was arguing with him, except that she needed to blame someone for her husband’s death. She realized she had her arms crossed and that her children were watching her. If they were going to do well without a father, she had to make sure they understood when battles were unwinnable and to move on.