Once down, she and Dink made short work of the loading. “Sign here,” said Alvidrez. Then, as the Barcanos watched and Spittle growled and barked, she and Dink steered the tips of the van’s tentacles to those pieces of furniture, cartons, and china barrels revealed when the van had set the roof aside. On command from McGee’s control console, the tentacles wrapped around their loads and hoisted them into the sky. As they neared the van, slits opened in the creature’s sides to receive the Barcano possessions. The tension of the cargo pods’ muscular walls kept the load secure.
As the exposed floor area cleared, Alvidrez and Dink steered the van’s tentacles deeper into the house. Wherever they found a bed, box, or barrel, they set a tentacle to the heavy work of lifting and pulling while they steered. Soon the house was empty. There remained only Nancy’s toy moving van and its miniature contents.
Alvidrez tore off the customer copy of the work order and handed it to Dick Barcano. “We’ll be in Cleveland in a week,” she said. Then she and her assistant stepped into the crooks of two tentacles, poised for all the world like the trunks of two elephants awaiting their trainers.
Suddenly Peter yelled, “Can I go with them?”
Jo Alvidrez met Dick Barcano’s eyes. She shrugged. “There’s room.”
Dick looked at his son. He ran one hand over his balding scalp, as if remembering some adventure of his youth. “What’s the fare?”
She named a price, and he nodded. “Why not?”
“Yayyyyy!” yelled Peter. Nancy began to whine, “I wanna go too!”
“You’re too young,” said her mother. Then, while Dick took out his wallet and Alvidrez signaled McGee to position a third tentacle, she ran down the stairs to dig a small suitcase out of the family Tortoise and fill it with clean underwear and socks and a toothbrush.
When she was ready, Peter, grinning as broadly as he could manage, stepped into the crook of the waiting tentacle. Alvidrez said, “Hold tight,” and the tentacles lifted them into the sky. Spittle howled to see his young master disappear.
The adult Barcanos waved until their son had vanished into the moving van. Then they dragged the dog and a still-protesting Nancy down the stairs that encircled the beanstalk’s trunk. A few minutes later, after they had rearranged the luggage disturbed for Peter’s sake, they were aboard the Tortoise. They too would be in Cleveland in a week.
* * * *
As the van let loose its grasp on the Barcano family’s empty residence, Peter Barcano leaned over one of the gondola’s windows. He watched as his family left the house, fussed with the luggage, waved one last time, got into the Tortoise, and drove off. His eyes watered and his throat grew tight, but then the van beneath which he was riding relaxed its bag muscles and drifted rapidly into the sky. He gulped and turned away from the window.
The moving van paddlefinned away to the west and the Barcano Tortoise lumbered down the greenway in the same direction. Left behind, its roof askew, the chalet on its beanstalk support seemed a drunken dowager. But that condition would not last long. Already, a second moving van, bedecked with the same maritime logo, loomed on the southern horizon. Soon it hovered overhead while tentacles drew household goods from its cargo pods and filled the chalet’s rooms and hallways. Among the goods were a number of over-sized cylinders; each one swelled at the base as if it contained a plant pot and a large plant.
These drew some curious comments from the movers, but they did not disturb the packages. They kept at their work, and when they were done they set the roof straight again.
Near the end, a smaller living blimp, with proportionally smaller tentacles and larger paddlefins, approached, tethered itself to the beanstalk, and settled to the deck. A single man, the chalet’s new resident, emerged from its gondola. He watched the last of the movers’ labors, paid the bill, accepted his receipt, and, as the van sailed off, entered his new house.
* * * *
“I’m Jo Alvidrez,” said the checker.
“You don’t look much like my mother,” said Peter.
“Ah, well,” said Jo. She looked briefly down at her coveralls. A mover’s job was lighter than it used to be, but it still involved some lifting and carrying. The coveralls were smudged. “I’m a working lady, you know. She’s.…” She shrugged and changed the subject by introducing Dink: “All back, no brain. He does the heavy lifting.” Peter knew she was joking, for he had seen the two of them on the ground, where she worked as hard as he. Then she pointed at McGee: “That’s Willy. He flies this thing.”
“He flies himself, he does. All I do is steer.” McGee opened a fresh can of beer, leaned back in his seat, and gestured out the gondola’s windows. He waggled the tiller with a knee. “See?”
Peter saw. It was the same neural inlink that controlled the Tortoise his father was driving on the road somewhere below them. He also understood that, at least to Willy McGee, the moving van had gender. “What’s he eat?” The Tortoise, which was a thoroughly neuter “it,” ate beans from the houseplant.
“Garbage,” said McGee. “When we get to Cleveland, the company’ll have a truckload of restaurant scraps waiting for him. When we get back east, it’ll be a mess of fish.”
“He likes the fish better,” said Dink.
Peter was disappointed. He knew the ancestors of the vans had been ocean-dwelling fish-eaters. But he had thought they might now have a taste for birds.
Jo Alvidrez was rummaging in a cupboard. “Hungry?” she asked. She held out a wrapped sandwich and a rack of plastic soda bottles. “We’ve got lots.”
The boy, despite his earlier snack, accepted. When he had eaten, he returned to the window to watch the landscape drifting past a thousand feet below.
* * * *
Peter was soon bored. The necessary guided tour of the van consisted of pointing out the gondola’s windows and saying, “Look! See the tentacles? The rope walkways? That one leads to the cargo pods. The gengineers used kangaroo genes to make them. No, we can’t go out there, not while we’re so high, not while we’re moving. We stay in here.” Then, aiming the pointing finger toward the interior of the gondola, “There’s the food cupboard, there’s the john, there’s your fold-down bunk.”
There wasn’t much to do aboard the moving van. There were no toys. There were no books or magazines a ten-year-old boy should be allowed to read. The only games were those inherent in a deck of cards, and Peter quickly exhausted the crew’s interest in go fish and hearts. They preferred endless rounds of cribbage, gin rummy, and poker, leaving Peter to listen to the crew, to eat, and to stare out the gondola’s windows.
The view was great, but its charm was worn very thin long before the week was up. In fact, the view had palled before the first afternoon was over, and Peter had already begun to regret his impetuous request to go along.
By the time they were over the mountains of western Pennsylvania, he was definitely regretting the request. The terrain made the air more turbulent, and the moving van no longer drifted smoothly, but wallowed past peaks and clouds, rocking, rolling, pitching, yawing. Jo Alvidrez gave the boy a Dramamine patch, but it did little good.
It actually helped when the van veered, the paddlefins accelerated their efforts, and, after a moment’s cursing, McGee threw up his hands and said, “That’s it! He’s stopped answering the helm.”
Peter forgot his stomach and dashed to a window, expecting to see bare ground, or a cliff, or perhaps a forested mountain slope, approaching far too fast. But he saw nothing, until Dink called out, “Over here, boy,” and pointed.
In the distance was what could only be another moving van. It bore the same sailing-ship logo as their own, it was surrounded by a halo of pink-glowing cloud, and they were headed directly for it.
“Pheromone,” said Dink. “That’s a female.”
“What.…?”
“We
can’t do a thing,” said McGee. “When she puts out that cloud, the nearest male van comes just as quick as he can.” He reached for a headset-and-mike rig that usually hung, ignored, from the edge of the console and began to talk. Unfortunately, his voice was an inaudible murmur.
Jo Alvidrez explained: “He’s calling the farm. They’ll send out a crew to collect the young. When they grow up, they’ll fit them out as more moving vans. Trucks and buses, too.”
Peter was fascinated. He hung by the window as the van he was riding approached the other. She too bore a gondola, and he could see her crew waving through the windows. “They say, ‘Welcome to the party,’ said McGee. ‘Got a cigar?’”
Alvidrez shuddered. “God! If anybody was dumb enough to smoke up here…!”
Their approach slowed. Their van began to bob up and down in the air, contracting and relaxing his bag muscles. His paddlefins flailed the air. He circled the female, lurching from side to side. He approached and withdrew.
“He’s dancing!” cried Peter.
“A courtin’ dance,” said Willy McGee. “Hang on,” he added, as a lurch threatened to spill him from his seat. Peter grabbed the railing beneath the window as firmly as he could.
“The damned gengineers weren’t paying attention,” said McGee. “Let it slip in with the kangaroo pouches.”
“Or maybe it rode along with some of the bird genes.”
The female was now answering their van’s dance, rising and falling and lurching in step with him, but letting him rise gradually higher. When Peter and the rest could look down on the other’s broad back, the dance slowed. A slit forty feet long opened in the gasbag beneath them, and from it poured a stream of.…
“Bubbles!” cried Peter. They were pink globules about the size of a basketball, each one trailing a ragged fringe of the tissue that had attached it to its mother’s interior. They floated in the air, rising slowly. Obviously, they were miniature gasbags, inflated with hydrogen.
“Eggs,” said Dink. “Now watch.”
Their own van extended a tentacle whose open tip made it resemble an elephant’s trunk. The hose-like organ began to pulse, and liquid sprayed over the eggs.
“That does it,” said McGee. He waggled the tiller again, and he grinned when the van showed signs of responding. “The harvesters will be here soon. But first.…”
He worked the controls. A tentacle snaked out, into the cloud of now-fertilized eggs, and seized one of the globules by its fringe. Alvidrez opened the doorway to the gondola and let the tentacle tip in to release its small burden, which promptly bobbed to the gondola’s ceiling.
“Look,” she said, and she pointed to the new embryo’s flank. “They develop fast.” Already a crude sailing vessel, embryonic emblem of its parents, was taking form.
* * * *
“That’s Cleveland,” said McGee. Below them were broad tracts of biohousing threaded by greenways. Ahead loomed a forest of towers of concrete and steel.
“South a bit,” said Alvidrez. “It’s a high-rise.”
“I hope it’s one of the new ones,” said Dink.
“Hate to work, huh?” said McGee. Most of the older high-rises still relied on ground-floor entrances and elevators for people. For movers, they had retrofitted large, openable windows. Van tentacles could snake in and out, though they had to drop their loads just inside the wall. Human backs and arms had to move furniture and boxes into other rooms, just as in the bad old days.
This much Peter had learned as he listened to the movers’ talk during the week of travel. “What are the new ones like?” he asked.
“You’ll see, Pete,” said McGee.
“There,” said Alvidrez. She consulted the clipboard on which she kept her work orders. “That’s the one.”
Tall, slender, fluted, stepped, it immediately struck Peter as a lovely structure. It was not the old house on the beanstalk. There was obviously no house plant, and the road below was paved, not turved. It was not home, but he would get used to it, he thought. It would do. Each apartment on this north-facing side had a broad balcony with a sturdy rail. He looked north himself: The view would be of high towers, of commuters paddlefinning homeward in their gengineered jellyfish, even—if the Barcano balcony were only high enough—of a fringe of lake beyond it all.
But the windows were all small. “How…?” he began to ask.
“You’ll see.” Dink grinned at the boy, but then the Barcano family stepped out of an apartment onto its balcony. Dick, Jane, and Nancy waved. Spittle bounced.
Peter sighed with pleasure. There they were, his family. Nancy had her old toy moving van under one arm. And the address over which his parents leaned, painted in numbers two feet high on the lip of the balcony, was 20-231. Apartment number 231. Twentieth floor. The view would be magnificent, though it could hardly match the one with which he had grown bored aboard the moving van.
McGee steered the van closer. A tentacle wrapped around the railing. Peter’s father stepped to the side of the building, opened a small hatch, and pushed a single button.
The apartment slid out of the building like an immense drawer in a colossal highboy. Empty rooms were revealed, open to the sky, and to the movers. “Let’s go,” said Alvidrez, and she, Dink, and Peter slid down a tentacle to the balcony.
“Get away from there!” screamed Jane. The whole apartment was now cantilevered over space. She hovered in the doorway, beckoning. The boy ran to hug her, his father, his sister, and to begin to tell of his adventures. But Dick said, “Later,” and they turned to supervise the installation of their belongings.
It took only minutes. Tentacles gently lowered all their goods into place, room by room. “It’s like a dollhouse,” said Nancy. And it was.
Then Jo Alvidrez was saying, “Sign here,” taking the wad of bills that was their payment, tousling Peter’s hair with a, “You’ve got a good kid,” and reaching for a crooked and waiting tentacle. The movers were done.
But.… “My things!” yelled Peter. “My suitcase! My.…!”
“We’re way ahead of you,” said Dink. He pointed. A tentacle was uncurling from the gondola’s hatch. It stretched down toward the balcony and stopped in front of Peter. He accepted the suitcase. “And there,” said Dink. He pointed again.
A second tentacle brought Peter his memento of the journey. It was no longer an embryo with a tattered fringe of its mother’s tissue. It had not grown much in size, but it had developed short tentacles that could twine around the boy’s wrist, and paddlefins of its own, that sent it rotating in the air above his head. The logo on its flank was crisp and brilliant. It lacked only a gondola to be a perfect miniature of its parents.
“What’s that?” asked Nancy.
“Take good care of her,” said Jo Alvidrez. “Feed her well, keep her away from cats, and in a year or two you can have her rigged. Then you’ll be able to ride her.” She stepped into the waiting tentacle crook, waved, and swung smoothly up to the moving van. Dink quickly followed her, and the van released the railing and was gone. Dick Barcano pushed the button that, with a hum of motors, slid the apartment back into its building.
“What is it?” asked Nancy again. She tugged at her brother’s hand.
“Yes,” said his father. “Where did you get it?”
Peter explained what had happened.
When he was done, Nancy threw her antique van onto the floor. One side door broke off and skittered across the floor with most of the truck’s load of doll furniture. She screamed, “I want one too!”
Peter knelt beside his little sister. “I’ll let you feed her, Nance,” he said. “And when she grows up, she’ll have babies.” He unwrapped the baby moving van’s tentacles from his wrist. “Hold out your hand.”
The tears didn’t stop, but Nancy did look interested. “What’s she eat?” she
asked. Unable to reach the globular gasbag above her head, she petted a tentacle.
“She likes fish.”
“Then we have to go fishing, right away.” Nancy’s tone was adamant.
Their father sighed. “We have to.…”
Jane shushed him with a hand. “Dog food will have to do for now.” She hesitated. “How much will she need, later on?”
Peter simply shrugged. He remembered what McGee had said, but he knew better than to repeat it now.
SOCIAL CLIMBER
You still haven’t heard the last of Jack!
They were neighbors.
Jack had a plush chalet atop a beanstalk.
Petra enjoyed quarters a little less plush in a hollow pumpkin next door.
Neither really belonged in a fairy tale. In fact, they lived in a perfectly valid reality, just a few short decades from right now. True, he lived on a beanstalk and she in a pumpkin, but that was only because the gengineers had met great success in their labors.
Neither was a fairy, either. Indeed, Jack was famous for his busy pollinating, and Petra was happily and faithfully married. She had no children, but she always said that was because they had decided to wait until the time was right. She filled the void—strictly temporary, of course—by caring for her pumpkin vine.
The beanstalk did not nearly reach the clouds. Twined around a concrete pillar, it was only some fifty feet high, but its stem was thick and woody and bore most of the weight of the chalet. The pillar was mostly for wind resistance.
The pumpkin was a six-room house shaded by the immense leaves of its parent vine. Once it had reached its full size, it had been levered onto a concrete stand and its flesh had been chiseled out with jack-hammers. The shell had been allowed to dry and coated with preservatives and sealants. Windows and doors had been cut, partitions and wiring and plumbing installed, and Petra and her husband had moved in. Now there were furniture and appliances, some of them alive, curtains at the windows, and pictures on the gently curving walls.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 4
