“He’s been just like one all your life. And what about your mother?”
Tommy hesitated, staring down. “She’ll understand,” he finally said. “I think.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Yeah, you do that.” He closed and latched the suitcase. “Tell her I’ll be back someday.” He paused. “Maybe even in time for school in the fall.” And maybe not.
“Yeah.” Jimmy followed his friend into the kitchen. Together, they looked around, as if seeing it for the last time. Finally, Tommy opened the door to the cabinet under the sink. “Hey, Freddy. You coming?”
“You betcha!” came the gurgling reply. “I can hardly wait! How long do you think it’ll take to find me a girl?”
“Oh, shaddap. That’s not the point.”
Freddy rolled an eye in Tommy’s direction as the boy helped him get free of the plumbing. “You wouldn’t say that if you had blue balls like I got blue balls! You wouldn’t believe how long it’s been since…”
Jimmy laughed. “I don’t know what he’d hold on with.”
“Try me!”
Tommy snorted and picked Freddy up under one arm. Jimmy kicked the cabinet door shut.
Outside, Tommy set Freddy in a handcart. He wedged the suitcase in beside the creature, evoking an “Ouch! Goddammit, look out for my mechin’ toes!”
“Can it, porkchop, or I won’t even try to find you a girlfriend. I’ll just have you for lunch.” He finished bracing the pig against the jostling to come and, turning his back on the house he was leaving, picked up the cart’s handle.
“Uh, good-bye,” said Jimmy. He laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
Tommy turned his face to stare at the other. He set the cart down again. “Yeah. I’ll be seein’ you.” He wiped at his eyes with a shirt sleeve, and when Jimmy reached for him with his other hand as well, he surrendered to the hug.
Finally, he lifted the cart’s handle once more. Resolutely refusing to look back at house or friend, perhaps afraid that he might change his mind, he trundled his luggage and his liberated pig onto the path beside the greenway.
* * * *
Tommy was not used to the city. He had been there before, of course, but always with his parents. Never had he stood alone, staring at the line where the greenway of the residential countryside gave way to the hard pavement of commerce and industry.
He raised his eyes to the scene ahead of him. Stone and concrete, glass and steel, the buildings towered. Bioform vehicles—roachsters, medusas, horses, turtles—thronged on the streets and in the air. There were even strange things that resembled Freddy, but with longer limbs and scoop-shaped mouths. They scuttled along the roadway, gathering up the droppings of other creatures.
Intimidated by the crowds of people, dazzled by city lights, stunned by the stenches and roars of a million creatures, Tommy shuddered. Freddy tilted his head to look up at his friend. “You want to go back?”
The boy shook his head and took a deep breath. “We’ll get used to it.” He wiped his palms against his thighs and leaned into his load. They began to move toward the chaos that loomed over them like a wave.
* * * *
The first clue that something was wrong was obvious to the city’s dwellers, but not to Tommy: The streets he followed were as wide as ever, and as busy with people, but the bioform vehicles had turned scarce, and the scoop-mouthed garbage-eaters he had heard someone call litterbugs were no longer in evidence at all. And then the aroma of roasting meat reminded him that he had had nothing since breakfast except two pie-plant fruits. Eagerly, he followed his nose down a side street and around a corner.
Before him was a wide square. To one side, a platform held a small but loud band. In the center of the square, a column of smoke, the obvious source of the odor that had enticed him there, rose into the late afternoon air. Filling the space between him and it was a seething mass of people, most of them young, all of them clad in dark blue coveralls.
The square’s atmosphere was that of a carnival. Isolated groups gyrated to the music. Individuals bore slabs of bread draped with slices of meat and dripping with reddish-brown sauce. Voices surged like surf.
Freddy aimed his snout toward Tommy and said, as quietly as he could and still be heard, “I think we’d better get out of here.”
Tommy ignored him. He stared at the scene before him, wondering how to get close to the fire and claim one of those sandwiches.
The music stopped. A tall figure in an orange coverall stepped onto the platform and chanted into the mike, “Fry ’em! Roast ’em! Boil ’em! EAT the corruptions of life! Machines, not genes!”
Tommy craned his neck and saw that the carcass spitted over the fire had a distinctive shovel-like jaw. He began to understand, as from the mob arose a cry of “MECH AGE! MECH AGE!” And then someone screeched, “Fresh meat!”
Tommy turned toward the latest voice. The man was pointing at him, or rather at his handcart, at Freddy. Saliva fell from the corner of his mouth toward an emblem on the breast of his dirty coverall.
Tommy thought the emblem was a cogwheel, but he didn’t wait to make sure. Suddenly, as the man lunged for Freddy, he found himself agreeing with the pig’s latest words. He smashed the cart into the stranger’s knees, spun it around, and ran.
The crowd—or a part of it—was right behind him. He dashed out of the square, back down the street he had come by. Ahead, he glimpsed a door, ajar between two posters advertising “DRINKS! SEE THE SPIDER LADY! DINNER!” There was a space for a holographic display, too, though the hologram itself was turned off.
It was dark behind the door, but Tommy didn’t hesitate. He thrust himself and his cart through the opening, stopped, and spun to slam the door shut and fumble for a lock.
His pursuers were already pushing at the door outside. Tommy strained to keep the door shut, almost crying at his inability to find a button, a key, anything!
Something—someone—added weight to his own, and the door settled into its jamb. A hand rose above his head, and something clicked. “There,” said a voice. “You’re safe. Follow me.”
The light was too dim to see much, but Tommy could make out a man of middle height dressed in a white shirt and black suspenders. Behind him, in a ceramic tub, was a goldfish bush, its ripely twitching fruit glowing with color.
Obediently, he followed the man, pushing the cart before him into a large room. The light here was better, though still dim, and he recognized a bar, a stage, a clear area that must be for dancing, and the ranks of tables and chairs that defined a restaurant in this age as in any other.
The other turned and revealed himself as thin, balding, mustached, and smiling. “Welcome to The Spider’s Web. I’m Cal, bartender and manager.”
Tommy swallowed. “I’m…”
Cal laughed. “You’re new in town. I can see that. Or you’d have known enough to keep your pig away from those Engineers. Nothing they like better than a barbecue.”
When Tommy nodded, he added, “Looking for work?”
The boy didn’t know what to say to that, but Freddy did. “Bet your ass we are,” he rumbled. “We’re your new act.”
One of Cal’s eyebrows rose.
“Never seen a talking pig, huh?” Freddy twisted his head to aim an eye at the man. “That’s not the act. C’mon, Tom-tom. ‘Kafoozalum.’”
* * * *
Later, Tommy learned why Cal called his nightclub “The Spider’s Web.”
He and Freddy, Cal told them, were the warm-up act. Their job was to get the nightclub’s patrons in the right mood for the dancer and to fill in the gaps between her sets. More important, they were to encourage the patrons to refresh their drinks as often as possible. “Kafoozalum,” he added, was just the right sort of piece, but it wasn’t enough. He hoped they knew many more dirty so
ngs.
They did. Unfortunately, it took a while to show their stuff. When Tommy carried the pig onto the small stage and the spotlight clicked on to reveal Freddy’s distinctive barrel shape, his snout thrusting toward the ceiling, someone immediately yelled, “It’s a garbage disposal!”
The room rocked with laughter.
Tommy blinked in the bright spot. His mouth gaped. He froze.
Freddy poked him in the ribs with a hoof. “C’mon, boy. The mike! The mike!”
Tommy stepped into position and, after another sharp nudge, began to sing. So did Freddy.
“He’s a ventriloquist!”
“Oink! Oink!”
“Call the Engineers!”
They sang. First one bawdy song, and then one even bawdier. The crowd quieted as Tommy’s rich tenor soared through the room, with Freddy’s hoarse bass supporting it. After the third piece, someone even clapped, and after the fourth, the whole place applauded.
Tommy bowed. The spot blinked out, and he stepped into the shadow of the folding screen beside the small stage. A dim red light marked the door that led, Cal had told him, to the dressing room.
He was wiping sweat from his forehead when someone patted his shoulder and murmured, “Good job, guys.” The voice was soft, feminine, but when he turned, no one was there. He tried to say something, but a blare of recorded music drowned him out.
“Watch the stage, dummy,” said Freddy.
The glare of the spot clicked on again, and he saw: black hair, glistening in the light, falling halfway down a bare back: a mass of black fur cradled in a bare arm: a profile undimmed by cloth of any kind. She—she!—had touched him. Like that! He had never seen such… Never been so close to… He gasped in unison with the collective sigh of the nightclub’s patrons.
The music paused while Cal’s voice echoed from a hidden speaker: “Muffy! The Spider Lady!”
She flung her arms to the sides, leaving the mass of fur clinging to her belly. She began to dance, and the fur extended legs and began to crawl over her torso, now baring, now concealing.
A chill ran down Tommy’s back, and Freddy shuddered in his arms. “It’s a goddam…!” Tommy nodded. The audience whistled and howled. Muffy the Spider Lady danced, and her spider moved, a creepy-crawly fan for a fan-dancer who was anything but.
* * * *
It was a week before Tommy really met the dancer. Every night, when the stage went dark, she rode a current of perfume and sweat past him, and he trembled, his eyes straining to penetrate the shadows behind the screen. He felt the brush of her skin on his shoulder, his hip, even his hand, the rasp of spider fur, the sweep of her hair. But he saw almost nothing. Even the dim glow of the exit light gave him only hints of what she displayed so openly on the stage.
He never saw her talking to Cal. He never saw her arriving, dressed, her spider perhaps carried in a cage or led on a leash. He never saw her leaving the club for a home somewhere else. Did she, like him, have a room upstairs in the old hotel? He began to wonder whether it was all—the city, his singing, the money accumulating bit by bit in his pocket, Muffy herself—a dream.
* * * *
One morning, Tommy came down to breakfast and found Muffy at the long table in the kitchen ahead of him. She was wearing faded jeans and a brightly flowered blouse. Her spider sat on the table beside her, working on what seemed to be a rat swathed in silk.
“Randy catches them in the basement and hangs them under the stairs.” Muffy’s voice, no longer low to hide itself behind the offstage screen, was throaty and warm, a friendly sound that reminded Tommy of home. A clean plate was in front of her, and an empty mug. Another plate and mug sat across the table. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Tommy found his voice only when Freddy poked him with a hoof. “I hope you haven’t…”
“I have a room on the second floor.” She smiled. “Right under yours. I came down when I heard you moving about.”
“Oh.”
Eventually, he remembered breakfast. Still dazed, he made toast for them both, poured coffee, found butter and jam and milk and sugar. And they talked.
Or rather, he talked. Muffy thought he seemed awfully young to be singing in a club, even though—he could see it—she was not much older, and she wanted to know how he came there.
He told her everything. He said that he had left home because he didn’t know who his father really was. He said that he had taken Freddy with him because he was his best friend, and he deserved better than slavery. “And,” Freddy interrupted, “I want a girl.”
* * * *
Tommy had thought that he must sound like an idiot, but Muffy had not left the table. She had stayed. She had had another cup of coffee with him. And a few days later, she knocked on his door to say, “Want to go out? There’s a place I want to show you.”
He didn’t hesitate. Within minutes, he had retrieved the handcart from the storeroom behind the bar and loaded Freddy and Randy aboard. And they were off.
As they turned into the square Tommy had fled on his first day in town, he said, “I hope we don’t meet any of those Engineers.”
She laughed, and he stared at her hands beside his on the cart’s handle. He felt suddenly faint, and his gait faltered, though the tug of the cart quickly brought his mind back to his duty. “They’re noisy,” she agreed. “And they like to roast the litterbugs. But the things breed like flies, so we’d have to get rid of the surplus anyway. And they are delicious. They’re modified pigs, you know.”
Tommy hated to argue, not with her thigh brushing his as they pushed the cart along the walk, but his memories were fresh. “Freddy’s a pig too. And…” He told her of what he had fled.
The day was warm. When she shook her head, the scent that reached him was a blend of clean hair, fresh sweat, and a faint acridity of spider, distinct from the odor rising off the cart. That, he thought, was spider and pig, and the latter’s musk had to be part of his own odor.
Her hand moved sideways on the cart handle to pat his own. He let her steer him through the square and past the town library, past a park, past stables and office buildings and hotels, to a small museum with an exhibit of gengineered art works. They went in, and he saw a cloud of gnats that hovered in the shape of a head, changing constantly in expression, sex, age, and even species. There was a beast whose very breath was perfume, and whose form was… Freddy said it reminded him of leftover lobster stew, pouring warmly down his gullet after the family meal. There were corals that built colorful sculptures. There were flowers unlike anything ever seen in an Earthly garden. There were… There were bars on the windows, and a steel gate that could be dropped like a portcullis over the door. When Tommy asked the attendant, he was told simply, “Engineers.”
Freddy had just sighed and murmured, “Let’s get outa here,” when an inconspicuous doorway opened in one wall. From it stepped a small man whose forehead extended above his ears. He wore a white lab coat such as Tommy had often seen on the veedo shows. With one hand, he beckoned to them.
Muffy tugged on Tommy’s hand. “C’mon,” she said. “I know him.”
Tommy turned the handcart toward the doorway. The man held the door, waved them through, and let it shut behind. A short hallway stretched before them, ending in a single lighted room. “In there, please. The gengineers do go further than they should sometimes. But then they give us such lovely things, you know. That’s why we’re here. And…”
On a padded table sat a creature. Its hide was checkered black and tan. Its legs were four hollow tubes that jutted uselessly into the air. Its blunt snout projected upward much like Freddy’s.
“I’m Peirce,” the man said. “The curator. We call her Porculata.”
“Lovely,” said Freddy. He began to twitch, and Randy fled the cart for Muffy’s shoulder.
“I’
m a bagpipe,” said Porculata. She too could talk.
“The gengineers used duck genes to run air sacs into her limbs,” said Peirce. “Then…”
“Ohhh,” moaned Freddy. “Can I stay? We’ll make beautiful…”
Peirce looked at Tommy. “I can give you an ordinary disposal to take back to your parents, if you wish. And you can visit anytime.”
Tommy looked from Peirce to Muffy. “But…” Freddy was his friend. He needed him. But he had told himself, and Muffy, and Jimmy, and Freddy too, that he wanted to give his friend freedom.
“Please?” said Freddy.
Tommy sighed. He bent to lift Freddy from the cart. He held him, petting the bristly hide, sniffing the long-familiar aroma, bending his head to hide the tears. Finally, he set his friend down on the table.
Freddy moaned and began to twitch himself closer to Porculata.
Porculata swelled as she drew in air, and the room filled with sound. It resembled an oboe more than it did a real bagpipe.
“Do you want the replacement?” asked Peirce.
“I…” Surely his parents had bought a new garbage disposal by now. But how could he ask them? How could he face them?
Muffy moved closer to his side. Her hand stroked his arm gently. Randy’s bristles tickled his cheek. Both were comforting.
Finally, he managed to say, “I’ll have to think about it.”
Tommy didn’t have the heart to tear Freddy away from Porculata. He had to leave his old friend in Peirce’s hands, at least for awhile. At the same time, he knew that he would have to go home eventually. Thinking about trading Freddy for a new and mindless pig was simply stalling.
* * * *
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 8
