“Where does he live?” asked Bernie. As he spoke, he wrinkled his nose. He did not much care for hearty Englishmen. No matter how pure or impure their Saxon blood, they always struck him as having some shameful secret to conceal. He supposed many of them really did—didn’t everyone?—but why did they have to be so obvious about it?
“You’ve already had a call from Mayflower,” said Alan. “They want to know how long.”
“Greenacres,” said Emily. “I’ll get you the address.” She turned to Alan. “I hope you told them it would take a few months to grow and equip the things.”
“The eggs are in the tank already.”
“Have you ordered the control boards? The crew cabins? The engines? The…?”
At each item, Alan bobbed his head, his smile as wide as ever, until he struck Bernie as nodding like some small dark bird gobbling seeds from a feeder. Yet there was nothing of subservience in his manner. He was Emily’s technician and assistant, but he was more than an underling.
When Bernie looked at Emily, her mouth was splitting her face with as broad a band of white as Alan could possibly have shown. The way the two were sharing their relief and pride and joy was palpable.
He must have looked as puzzled as he felt, for when the excitement had calmed a little, they led him to a computer workstation, called up the necessary diagrams, and explained just what a Bioblimp was.
He shook his head in wonder. “It seems,” he said, “as difficult as Chowdhury’s Armadons.”
“Oh, no!” said Emily. “This is just a scale-up, like I was telling you. Except for the pouches. And they weren’t that difficult. Were they, Alan?”
“Fussy, maybe. But not hard.”
“Ralph is definitely the best of us.”
Bernie had talked to professionals before and found that they often felt they did not deserve their status or pay. What they did was easy, for them. What someone else did always seemed harder and more worthy. He wondered if Emily Gilman was deceiving herself in the same way.
Chapter Eleven
Daddy!
Nick was reading a news magazine. The lunch dishes were done. The house was clean. And he had just finished shoveling out the Tortoise’s stable for what seemed the ten-thousandth time. He deserved a break, he felt, but now here came that small, insistent voice. He had been told, years before, that there was for mothers and fathers a basic and incontrovertible law: Nature abhors a resting parent. It applied especially when the children were young, but when they were a little older, old enough to tiptoe from the room or house in search of unwatched mischief, their silence could be enough to bring a parent out of a coma.
“Coming.” Andy’s voice had seemed to echo from the kitchen. With a sigh, he set the magazine down, lurched from his easy chair, and headed for that room.
“Daddy! Hurry up!”
Yes, there he was, kneeling on the chair by the window, nose against the glass, staring toward the bird feeder. A coloring book and box of crayons sat neglected on the kitchen table. Nick grunted to signal his presence.
Andy turned his head enough to confirm that he was indeed there and paying attention. “Where’s the Chickadee, Daddy?”
The boy must have asked the same question three times each week ever since the Chickadee had flown off. It, and Nick’s patient, loving, sympathetic answer, had become a ritual that required periodic repetition. Was the boy, Nick wondered, rejecting, repressing, any hint that his mother’s life could have been in danger? Or did he simply have to hear again and again the news that his mother was indeed safe? And that therefore he was safe?
Cautiously, watching for signs of upset, wondering whether—when?—they might have to take their son to a psychologist, Nick explained once more that the Chickadee was dead. The bird that had flown at Mommy, the one with the orange stripes, had stabbed it with its beak, and the beak had been poisoned. The Chickadee had flown back to its home, at the airport, and died there. It had been a hero, for it had saved Mommy, and she would be home soon from work.
Not long after the incident, they had taken Andy to the local airport to show him where the Chickadee had died. He had not been impressed by the place’s unkempt runways, its dilapidated state of repair, its general air of decay. He might have been more impressed by the small airplanes and living jets that had once been based there, but with the arrest of the airport’s manager, the airport had closed and its tenants had left.
The boy turned his back on the window. “When I grow up, you know what, Daddy?”
“What?”
“When I grow up, I’m gonna have a Chickadee. Just like that one. All my own.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “And I won’t keep it anyplace like that airport. That was a dump.” The wisdom of a five-year-old. “I’ll keep it in my yard.”
This too was part of the ritual, as was the silent sequel, when Nick wondered anew each time at the workings of the unconscious mind. He guessed that Andy’s final resolution must reflect some conclusion that a Chickadee in the yard might preserve him too from harm. It would be a talisman, a luck piece, a charm against disaster.
And come to think of it, Nick’s own more private ritual continued, that might not be so far from the unconscious reason why he and Emily had installed the bird feeder in their yard in the first place. Certainly, when for some reason the birds went elsewhere and the feeder stayed empty for a day or two, or more, they felt bereft, as if their luck had abandoned them. When avian activity flurried around and on and under it, they felt blessed. They felt doubly blessed when the birds at the lunch counter they provided included unusual species. And triply so when something unique appeared. The Chickadee, seed-hog, devourer of swallows and other birds, had at first seemed more like a curse, but as events had developed, it had indeed been a blessing.
* * * *
The slap of Tortoise feet on the surface of the driveway announced Emily’s return home. As Nick stepped outside to meet her, he thought he could still detect the faint odor of the cleaning solution he had had to use to get the stain of the Chickadee’s litter off the brickwork of their house. He was glad the genimal would not be returning, for that, and repairing the roof, and washing the roof, had been work for which he had no enthusiasm.
The door to the Tortoise’s quarters slid down with a screech that announced a need for oil. He sighed at the thought of more work, even though the task was not a large one. Then he grinned at the sight of his wife running toward him.
“The patent! We got the patent!” Her voice was joyfully excited, and her impact against his chest almost knocked him over.
“Mommy!” The door banged behind Nick, and Andy pushed between them, holding up his arms. Emily scooched to hug their child. In a moment she looked up at Nick and told him the rest of the story: They already had orders for the Bioblimp, and there would be a celebration at the Gelarean house, in the Greenacres genurb.
“It’ll be interesting to see that place,” said Nick. “I wonder what kind of house Sean has.”
She shook her head. She didn’t know.
“Can I go too?” Andy’s voice was plaintive.
“It’s a work thing,” said his mother. The boy pouted, but he quieted immediately. If the occasion were not a “work thing,” he might persist and even win. Otherwise, he knew, he might as well forget it. “We’ll get the baby-sitter.”
* * * *
Sean Gelarean’s house proved to lie among fruit trees, lignum vitae, and summer-green forsythia bushes set in a carefully trimmed lawn. A Victorian gazebo of wooden latticework overlooked a small fishpond not far from the road. The house itself was a crook-necked squash that, once it had been grown to size, hollowed out, and dried, had been hoisted onto a stand that let its neck jut high into the air, above the surrounding trees. Later, that neck had been fitted with narrow windows and a spiral staircase. It had beco
me a tower, and the chamber at its apex had become Sean’s den. Broad windows were visible in its rounded roof, and lush greenery that suggested a love for houseplants.
The rest of the squash, painted white with dark brown crisscrossing lines, bulged like some Tudor tumor beside the parking apron at the head of the driveway. In it were the living and dining rooms, the kitchen, three bedrooms, and more. A porch, its construction echoing the lattices of the gazebo, framed the main entrance. Roses bordered the porch and spread their fragrance like a fog over the nearby lawn. A caterer’s van had rutted the turf near a side entrance.
Nick had met Sean before. He knew the man had come from England, and when he saw the house, he recognized immediately its restatement in the modern idiom of that English architectural theme, the towered manor house.
The driveway and the small parking area were filling rapidly with cars. Gelarean’s guests, most of them Neoform employees, most of them in pairs with friends or spouses, were wandering the nearby fringes of the yard, eyeing the plantings, the house, and the gazebo before trickling toward the porch, where their host and his wife awaited them. From what Nick could see of facial expressions and overhear of conversations, the consensus was that the Gelarean manor was a remarkable monstrosity.
When Nick and Emily finally reached the porch, Sean was wearing a rueful expression on his face. Grasping their hands, he introduced them to his wife, Victoria. She was a short, round woman, dressed in a red silk monk’s robe, its hood raised. whose mouth jerked into a smile nearly every time he spoke. Then Sean said, “It is a horror, isn’t it? But we couldn’t resist it when we saw it.”
Cool air flowed from the open door of the house behind them and made the fabric of Victoria’s robe sway. Nick welcomed the promise of relief from the heat of the outdoors, but he stayed on the porch long enough to laugh at his host’s pleasantry and say, “You must have been homesick.”
The other nodded, his cheeks shook, and his accent thickened briefly. “That I was, wasn’t I, Vicky? But it’s comfortable.” He leaned over the porch railing to pluck a newly opened rose, pinched off the thorns, and held it out. “Emily, my dear. Put it in your hair.” As she obeyed, he gestured toward the interior of the house. “Drinks on the left.”
In an alcove off the entranceway, one of Wilma Atkinson’s genetic sculptures moaned and writhed as people passed it by. Nick paused to examine it and found a pair of flexible rods that twined around each other to form a double helix, emblem of heredity, that twisted into a complex knot. He petted it, luxuriating in the short, silky fur that covered its surface. Its voice became a purr, and its motions grew less random, as if it were butting for attention. “This must be half cat,” he said softly to his wife.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” she answered. “Although she’s never said.”
They found the bar, dominated by an octopoid genimal whose arms were pigmented with green and white stripes, like sinuous barber poles. It was taking verbal orders, and the arms worked in pairs, serving four customers at a time, pouring, mixing, shaking, wiping up occasional spills.
“I’ve never seen one of those before,” said Nick.
“I saw a description in Genginews.” That was the industry’s trade paper. “But I didn’t know they were on the market yet.”
“They aren’t.”
Emily turned toward the speaker and cried, “Frank! What do you know about it?”
Frank Janifer lifted his glass to them with a grin. “I hear our host let a friend do him a favor.”
They laughed, and then they turned to note the buffet the caterers were assembling, vast seas of food surrounding islands of flower arrangements, and survey the rooms within their view. Polished tables, antique chairs, flower-filled vases, deeply cushioned sofas, thick carpets as soft as moss beneath their feet, all impressed Nick, and he murmured to his wife, “Much more tasteful inside.” They accepted small bits of meat wrapped in pastry crusts from a tray proffered by a perambulating waiter. And then people were leaving the circulating flow of guests to congratulate Emily on the patent, to speculate among the clinks of glasses on the applications of her Bioblimps, to wonder how they would contribute to the company’s fortunes.
“I hear the stock went up a bit already.”
“Have you thought of designing a walking suitcase?”
“Or an incubator for preemies.”
“Wait till the word about the Mayflower order gets out!”
“You could start with an ordinary kangaroo …”
“Should be something four-legged.”
“Use your options now!”
“Like a wallaby.”
“Delicious appetizers! You should try …”
“Whatever. Leave it just enough brains to follow you on a leash. And a couple of big pockets on its sides.”
“Make a great baby carriage!”
“Make it an imprinter, so if anyone else tries to open the pockets …”
“Chomp!”
Laughter. A small bell invited everyone to the buffet, where Nick found the centerpiece to be a whole roast litterbug, easily identifiable by its distinctive jaw. The roast, steam rising from its crusted back, was presided over by a Japanese chef wielding a carving knife the size of a samurai’s short sword and saying, over and over again, “Don’t worry. Grain-fed, perfectly healthy, very tasty!”
No one seemed to have trouble believing him, for the carcass was rapidly diminishing beneath the strokes of the carver’s blade. Nick obtained portions for himself and Emily, passed her a plate, and then, realizing that she was quite absorbed in her conversation, found a quiet corner beside a bookshelf on which he could rest his plate. Not far away, he recognized Bernie Fischer, the cop, likewise by himself, a plate in his hand, surveying the crowd.
He wondered how the detective had managed to be invited, but then he forgot the matter. A small man—gray-suited, his skin a shade darker than any tan could reasonably achieve, flat, reflecting panes of glass revealing only intermittently his dark brown eyes—was approaching. He was apparently looking for a niche like Nick’s own in which to eat his meal.
“You’re …” He groped for the name. “Ralph Ch …”
“Chowdhury. Ralph Chowdhury. I have a lab just down the hall from your dear wife’s.” He pushed a polished crystal knickknack aside and set his plate on the shelf below the one Nick was using.
Nick blinked in surprise before he realized that, of course, the man was shorter than he. “The armadillo man,” he said.
Chowdhury beamed as if delighted to be so known. “Your wife has told you of my poor efforts! I hope she hasn’t made too much of our silly rivalry. I am delighted that she has her patent!” He raised his glass in a gestured toast. Then he tasted his roast litterbug. “Delicious!”
“I didn’t see one outside,” said Nick.
Chowdhury’s laugh seemed strained, as if he were trying hard to be congenial. “I walked! I live not far away, right in the neighborhood. Besides, my Armadons are not yet ready for the road. Nor are they quite ready to take to Washington. But they will be. Soon! And then Neoform will dominate the transportation market in the sky and on the ground. Both!”
“It surely won’t be long before Sean is throwing a party like this for you.”
Chowdhury shrugged as if it didn’t matter, or as if … “Not for me. He likes your Emily much better.” A grin. “She’s prettier.”
Nick grinned back. “She is, but …” What could he say? He brought the subject back to the Armadons, and then, while Chowdhury described his genimal, concentrated on his food. The roast was indeed delicious, and he finished his serving quickly, but when he looked toward the buffet table, wondering whether there might not be a little more, he saw nothing but an empty space. The remnants had already been removed.
Chowdhury followed his gaze. “We had o
ur share,” he said. “Though I too would like some more.”
A thought occurred to Nick as he nodded. “Neoform doesn’t make the litterbugs, does it?” When the other indicated that he was right, he added, “Then serving one is quite symbolic, isn’t it?”
“Devouring the competition, you mean?” Chowdhury stared at him for a moment. Then his gaze flicked to the nearby policeman. “You have a poetic mind.”
Nick shrugged. “Perhaps I give Sean too much credit.”
“Or perhaps not.” Chowdhury’s tone became quieter, almost musing. “And you make me wonder. Are the police making any progress?”
“On …?”
“On those attempts on your Emily’s life.”
Bernie Fischer, just a few feet away, suddenly assumed a more erect posture, as if something he had just heard or seen had made him more alert. The movement drew Nick’s eye, and he wondered what the reason might have been. But he did not pursue the question. Chowdhury’s query still awaited an answer.
As far as Nick knew, the police had made no discernible progress at all. At least, no one had told him that they had any clues to who had programmed the Assassin bird to attack Emily. Yet, for some reason he did not himself understand, he said, “I’m not in their confidence.” He gestured toward Bernie Fischer. “There’s the one in charge, and he does his talking to my wife. But from what she tells me, they’re getting very close.”
“How nice!” Chowdhury showed his teeth in a broad, beaming grin, but Nick could see the corded lines in his neck that said his jaw muscles were tense. His body odor seemed to carry a touch of spice that Nick thought made it seem to fit the other man. The spice was … what? Then he had it. Curry.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 27
