Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “I don’t bet,” he said. He really didn’t bet and she knew it, for always before he had refused her invitations to the track, but he often played the game of deliberate balkiness. At the same time, his mind was dwelling on another woman.

  “So come anyway. You’ll have fun. And you need it.”

  The Roachster races were not just for Roachsters. There were events for Buggies of all kinds, including Hoppers, Beetles, and even Tortoises. The paved, oval track had been built nearly a century before for the gasoline-burning stock cars and dragsters that now made the stands tremble with their bellowing roars only on nostalgic special occasions. Most weekends were now much quieter affairs, though the crowds made as much noise as ever. Some things never changed.

  Bernie thought that racing Tortoises looked just plain silly, as did the Hoppers and Beetles. He favored the Roachsters, though he had never been able to decide which version he preferred. The wheeled Roachsters, with their stubby legs pushing on the wheel tops, made him think of wheelchairs built for paraplegic galley slaves. Legged Roachsters were derived from the spiny lobster of the Caribbean instead of the North Atlantic table lobster. They were so long-limbed that Bernie wondered how they could possibly run. In repose their limbs jutted like the masts and yards of some prickly sailing ship. In action, they flailed the ground to every side like a berserk bundle of knitting needles.

  He was not the only one to note the similarity, or to realize why “stilters” were rare on the highways. He didn’t bet, but Connie did, and she was shouting, “What do you think of ‘Tatter’s Hope’? or ‘Orkney Nightmare’?”

  “What about ‘Kentucky Whizzer’? or ‘Derby Dervish’?” he countered, speaking as loudly as she to be heard above the crowd. They were wheelers, and though they would not compete in the same races as the stilters, he knew she would bet on them as well. He had heard enough talk of her coups and setbacks to know.

  Connie disappeared to place her bets. “Waste of money,” he said and stayed to hold their seats. When the vendor passed nearby, he bought beer for both of them. He handed her hers when she returned and said, “It’s a hot day. They should do well.” The gengineers had made their arthropod-based designs more or less warm-blooded, with metabolisms that would function even in a temperate winter, but they remained true enough to their ancestors to work best in hot weather. They were useless in more northern winters, and Bernie sometimes wondered why the gengineers had bothered, except to prove what they could do and demonstrate their power over the square-cube law.

  She glanced sidelong at him, most of her attention on the track, where the first race’s stilters were taking their positions. She leaned closer; he bent to put his ear near her mouth. “How about you? Made a move on that Emily yet?”

  The starter’s gun banged in the distance as he shook his head. She squeezed his knee with her free hand and leaned forward to watch the race.

  The crowd roared as the stilters began to move. The start was slow, much slower than for wheelers or other Buggies, for the track was so narrow that the stilters had to set their flailing legs among their neighbors’ limbs to move at all. They managed it, however, and somehow without tangling, and as first one and then another broke from the pack’s leading edge, the pace picked up.

  He was left to wonder whether he had imagined a sense of satisfaction, even of possessiveness, in that squeeze. Connie had egged him on with Emily, but she had also invited him into her own bed. And this trip to the races had been her idea.

  * * * *

  Later events only kept him wondering. For dinner, they bought take-out ribs near one of the city’s parks and found a grassy niche beside a pond. There, Connie kicked off her shoes, stuck the toes of one foot up his pants leg, and said, “Go ahead, Bernie. Make a pass. I’ll bet you score.”

  He had called himself a predator, but not of that kind. He was not a skirtflipper. But why not go along with Connie, just to see what happened? “Maybe I will,” he said. He pointed at her with a rib bone, a scrap of meat dangling from one end. Connie had very little surplus flesh, and he didn’t dare to touch her with his sauce-coated fingers. “She’s bigger there.”

  The toes withdrew. Connie stuck out her tongue and turned her back on him. She was much leaner than Emily; Bernie could count the knobs of her vertebrae, though now he pointed somewhat lower.

  “And there.”

  She turned back. “I’ll bet it’s all flab. She doesn’t work out. “

  “She’s got a sit-down job. What do you expect?”

  “She’d be a marshmallow in bed. All soft and …”

  He grinned deliberately.

  “And weak!”

  His grin grew broader, but only for a moment. He stopped teasing her when she began to turn red. She was proud of her strength. He knew it, he enjoyed it, and she knew he enjoyed it. But there was an insecurity to her pride that left her vulnerable. He was beginning to doubt that she really meant it when she urged him to pursue Emily Gilman. He was beginning, in fact, to sense a cattiness, a jealousy of whatever time he spent with the attractive gengineer, even of what might in the future come of all her urging him in that direction.

  He watched her flush fade away, watched her turn to face him once more, watched the toes creep back up his leg. How jealous was she? he wondered. How jealous could she get? Might she be the one who had sicced the Assassin bird on Emily? But where would she have gotten it?

  He dismissed his suspicion. He recognized that she was by her behavior staking a definite claim upon him, and that if she were ever to get nasty in any competition over a man, she might get very nasty indeed. But he thought that she would be more direct, more explicitly confrontational. She was a traditionalist. She would look for a woman-to-woman hair-pulling, knock-down scream-fest.

  Suppressing his sudden urge either to laugh aloud or to speak, he took her hand and carefully, thoroughly licked every trace of the rib sauce from her fingers. She did the same for him, her eyes sparkling at him above her busy lips. When they were done, they walked the city’s streets hand in hand, window-shopping, debating the attractions of bars and movies while knowing that only one end to the day would suit them equally.

  He liked her. He did. He even told himself that if he ever chose to marry, another cop, one much like Connie, Connie herself, would be ideal, for she would understand the life, and the risks. She might, unlike his mother, even be able to survive his loss. He winced within as he realized that he had not considered the possibility that the loss might go the other way, especially if he married another cop. Could he survive such a loss? He did not know.

  He said nothing. He told himself that he had long since sworn himself to a single life, one without hostages, and besides, there was Emily. She had more status in his mind than Connie; she was a gengineer, a shaper, not a mere guardian, of society. She also probably had more money than either of them. Maybe he would make that pass Connie kept urging on him.

  * * * *

  Bernie had flown over the suburb of Greenacres before. Now he was on foot, circling the neighborhood where that girl, Jasmine, had been so brutally murdered. Lieutenant Alexander had braced him that morning, saying, “You’ve been spending too much time on the Sparrow case. Let the feds have it. I want you to go over the ground again on that rape. Search the neighborhood. Look for witnesses. Look for anything unusual! Check the garbage!”

  Garbage searches had been routine for decades, ever since the Supreme Court decided they were not an invasion of privacy. But the criminal they wanted had been smart, or lucky. There had been a pickup in this neighborhood even before the body had been found. There would be another early tomorrow morning, Tuesday. There would be nothing now. Nor would he find witnesses this way, unless he was very lucky.

  He had perched his Hawk on the lawn of the house where the crime had happened. Now his path brought him around the block to see i
t before him, the Hawk stropping its beak on the tree trunk to which he had tethered it. The house was a small, six-room pumpkin that had been grown on the lot that spring. Once it had reached the proper size, it had been cut from its stem, levered onto a concrete foundation, and allowed to dry. Then workers had cut holes, sprayed the shell with sealants and preservatives, and installed doors, windows, insulation, interior walls, plumbing, and appliances. It had been empty when the rapist had broken in with his victim. The owners had planned to move in later in the month. Now there was a “For Sale” sign on the lawn. Bernie was not surprised.

  There were three other pumpkin houses on the block, with curtains in the windows and children’s toys in the yard. Across the street, a beanstalk twined around a concrete pillar that supported a Swiss chalet. A gengineered baobab tree swelled grotesquely to contain a two-story duplex. A flowering vine dangled giant seed cases equipped as apartments above a shallow pool in which flickered Japanese koi, colorful carp.

  The lawns around the apartment vine and the baobab duplex were entirely a lush and normal green. That around the beanstalk was divided into two zones, an outer one of normal green and an inner of green with a tinge of pink, like new oak leaves. A stray dog lay sprawled just within the line that separated the two zones.

  This was cannibal grass. Once the householder had sprayed it with an “ID acceptor” pheromone, the whole family and its pets lay on the grass long enough for it to “learn” their odors. Reprogramming it required simultaneous exposure to both the pheromone and one or more of the original family members. Lacking that, whenever strange people or animals stepped onto the tinted grass nearest the house, its sharp blades would penetrate shoes, clothes, and skin, inject a paralytic agent, and sip away the victim’s blood. Death would not come for at least a day; the resident family therefore could, if it wished, rescue wandering neighborhood children, birds, and dogs. They could also deliver would-be burglars, peeping toms, and other undesirables to the police with neither hazard nor objection. The drawback was that temporary guests had to stay outside the protected zone; it was thus not practical for apartment complexes and public buildings. Nor was its sale legal, for the Bioform Regulatory Administration feared—probably justly—the consequences if it ever escaped into the woods and fields. The seed, like that for the cocaine nettles, was contraband.

  Greenacres held more conventional structures as well, but the “genurb” was a very good example of the new architecture. It was also not a cheap neighborhood. From the air, most of the dwellings vanished in the greenery of ample lawns and plantings, providing a landscape in which only the scattered orange dots of pumpkin houses and a few ordinary roofs stood out. The overall impression was of a carefully tended garden. Bernie thought that impression quite suitable for a place where so many of the houses were gengineered garden plants, though he supposed it wouldn’t last. Future developments would be more crowded. In this one, the lots might someday be subdivided, and the greenery might grow unkempt, while the masonry pillars that flanked some of the driveways would become covered with graffiti. It had happened to older neighborhoods of hand-built houses. In time it would be the turn of the grown houses. In time, the neighborhood might decay as far as any neighborhood could, into the human wilderness of an urban or suburban slum.

  As the detective in charge of the case, he had a key to the house. He used it, and once inside the door, he sniffed. The slaughterhouse odor of blood, feces, and urine was now almost undetectable, canceled by vigorous applications of soap and bleach, its remnants covered by perfumed sprays. He stepped into the living room and stood with the broad bay window at his back, letting the morning sunlight illuminate the scene. There were still traces of bloodstains on the hardwood floor and plaster walls. There were even a few spatters on the dome-curved ceiling. He could also make out remnants of the chalk lines that had marked out the body and its parts. He shook his head sadly. The “For Sale” sign would, he was sure, be fruitless until the owners applied new paint and installed a carpet. The new house’s brief but unfortunate history was far too visible.

  He settled against the windowsill and withdrew a packet of photos from a pocket of his uniform shirt. The Scene of the Crime—he could not help but add the capitals—as it had first been seen. Close-ups of the dismembered body, forlorn, pathetic. A single footprint on the floor, stamped in blood. It was small, as if made by a woman, but still too large for the victim, as if she could have walked. Or as if the killer had played puppet with her dying body. It had worn a man’s shoe, though, and it was clearly his. But definitely small. Was he a boy, not a man? Or …?

  He tapped the photos against the palm of one hand to align their edges. Man enough, he thought. He guessed. It must have been a man. He wished there had been some semen, even on the floor. If they ever found a suspect, DNA analysis would then quickly prove whether the semen was his. Bernie was not the first cop to wish that society had chosen to put tissue or blood samples—DNA samples, either way—of every one of its members on file, frozen in liquid nitrogen. DNA was far more individual than fingerprints, and it would be quite convenient if they could simply ask the evidence to whom it had belonged. Semen, bloodstains, sputum, skin scrapings from beneath a victim’s fingernails, even a hair or two, all would be able to tell the tale.

  Unfortunately, victim’s rights had advanced not at all in the last century. Suspects claimed the right not to incriminate themselves and court rulings robbed solid evidence of its potency. It was no wonder that so many people circled their homes with booby traps such as cannibal grass.

  The photos went back into his pocket. He explored the house, seeking any clues that might have been overlooked before. But the place had obviously been cleaned thoroughly, if not quite thoroughly enough to remove all the bloodstains. There had been a few neglected scraps of lumber and wallpaper, sawdust, bent nails, and the like in the corners of the rooms. Now they were gone.

  There was a wastebasket in the kitchen. Remembering the Count’s instructions, he checked and found it half full of the missing rubbish. On top of the basket’s contents, he saw a withered leaf. He picked it up, felt it, sniffed it, and identified it as a nettle leaf. When he realized that it had done nothing to him, he peered at it closely. The myriad fine hairs that covered nettle leaves were on this one all mashed flat, drained of whatever they had once contained.

  So there had been a junky on the premises. Maybe even the murderer. He tucked the scrap of evidence in a plastic bag and stored it in a pocket.

  Then he looked into the basket again. He thought he had seen … Yes, there they were. Two of the plastic wrappings from instant film packs, and though the police had taken many photos on these premises, they had used electronic cameras. Not the sort of thing most citizens would have.

  He put the scraps of plastic in another bag.

  * * * *

  Over the next three weeks, nothing happened. The Air Board made no progress on finding whoever had put the override chip in the Sparrow’s control computer. Bernie found no more clues that might lead to whoever had treated Jasmine Willison so cruelly. And neither criminal made any mistakes that might have swung their fates against them. Life was, reflected Bernie, not a novel, in which one could count on some coincidence that would precipitate the mystery and lead directly to a satisfying resolution.

  Later, he repeated that thought to Emily. They had lunch from time to time, whenever she was not in Washington, sculling her patent application slowly through the bureaucratic shoals, and their schedules meshed. Sometimes she went to lunch with her coworkers, or with representatives of van lines and other shipping concerns. Sometimes he was busy himself. But often enough he was able to find an excuse—some question about controllers, chips, neural overrides, reflexes, even how the firm for which she labored worked—to enjoy her company.

  * * * *

  “Tee gee aye off,” said Emily. “Thank God, it’s Friday!”
>
  They were coming back from lunch, navigating Neoform’s hallways on the way to Emily’s lab. Ralph Chowdhury turned a corner ahead of them, approached, and passed. His slight frame was leaning forward, fists clenched, mouth twisting around a glowering scowl. “Is he still worked up about the armadillo?” asked Bernie.

  Emily shook her head. “Uh-uh. I think he got that licked.”

  “So?”

  “He hasn’t been saying much.” She turned to look down the hall after the other man’s departing form. “I suppose something hasn’t been going right for him, but what it is …”

  She was reaching for the door to her lab when it opened. An older man, grey-haired, his round cheeks just beginning to sag, reached for her hand. “Emily,” he cried. “My dear! You’ll never guess!” Bernie smiled to himself at the sound of the other’s British accent. It seemed so pure, so ancient of nobility, while the permanently tanned skin and the prominent blade of the nose bespoke a recent immigration. He guessed that the man’s parents or grandparents had come from the eastern Mediterranean, or perhaps from somewhat farther into Asia. Certainly the last century had seen enough people departing the lands of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the like.

  “Sean. What’s happened? Oh …” She introduced Bernie as the detective investigating the Sparrow incident.

  “I didn’t realize that was still unsolved.”

  “This is my boss, Bernie. Sean Gelarean.” She stepped forward, forcing Sean to give way until all three were in the lab. Alan Bryant stood near the room’s window, grinning broadly.

  “Word from Washington,” said Sean. “We’ll have to celebrate.”

  “You mean …?” Her voice rose in a breathless note of excitement. Alan grinned even more broadly and nodded furiously.

  “The Bioblimp patent, yes!” Sean Gelarean showed a mouth as full of teeth as any horse’s. “Sunday, at my place. We’ll have everyone!” He seized her hand again, pumped it, said, “Everyone!” once more, even including Bernie in his inclusive glance around the room, and left.