The customer leaned over to pat a light tan Slugabed. Over her shoulder blades, Tom could now see, her coverall had been embroidered with small wings. His own coverall bore no decorations other than the darker green figures woven into the fabric. “They’re not very thick, are they?” she asked.
“They don’t have to be. Try one, and you’ll see.”
She looked skeptical. “And the surface. I expected…”
“Something slimy?” When she stiffened, he thought that of course that was precisely what she had half expected, in the back of her mind, even as she craved to rest on the leading edge of fashion. He added, “Well, the basic genome did come from a slug. But then they added the genes for a real skin. And warm blood.”
“It feels just like human skin, without the hair.” She giggled at a thought. “Or the stubble.”
“I believe it’s a modified pigskin. Very smooth, very soft.”
She lay down. The Slugabed twisted under her, fitting itself to the contours of her body. It did not wrap around her, but rather cupped and cradled her as if she lay in the palm of some giant lover’s hand. It made Tom think of Muffy Bowen. They weren’t married, but they lived together, and she would be at home now, looking forward to his return. He wished that he were there now, and that he could afford a Slugabed for their bedroom, and that… He sighed, more loudly this time.
It was not the customer’s body that made him think of Muffy, but the way the Slugabed embraced her, and the way the ripples ran through the bioppliance’s substance, and the way she responded. Her nipples had erected quite visibly.
The Slugabed’s skin, he knew, was as soft and smooth as that of a baby’s butt. He had lain down on one when they first arrived and been depressed for a week. He wanted a child; Muffy didn’t; that was the greatest flaw in their relationship.
“Ooh!” the customer said. “I see what you mean. What do you feed it?”
“It absorbs your sweat and body oil and skin flakes. If that’s not enough…” Tom Cross pointed to a patch of skin near her head. It was slightly lighter in color than the rest of the Slugabed. “This spot turns bright pink, and you pour some milk on the bed, or gravy, or…” He shrugged. “Instructions come with it.”
He pointed to a small bump on the skin beside the hunger patch. “That’s the control node. Try squeezing it.” When she obeyed, the Slugabed fell away from her body and lay flat, quiet and passive, a mere mattress.
“Oh!” she said. She squeezed the node again, and the genimal once more molded itself to her.
“If you squeeze harder,” said Tom, “it’ll massage you.”
“Can you squeeze too hard?”
“The instructions warn against trying. It tries to scale its response to your command, and…”
She was ignoring his answer. She forced the living mattress flat with her hands, rolled on it, patted it, stroked it. “They don’t come with fur, do they?” He shook his head, thinking to himself that fur would make feeding a messy business. She rolled over again and pressed her face into the Slugabed’s surface. Then, finally, she sat up and said, “I think I’ll take it. You do deliver?”
* * * *
The Slugabed display was near the back of the store. After Tom Cross had written up the sale and arranged for delivery, he fetched a basket of apples and a bottle of nutrient spray from the nearby supply room. He was a salesman, but among his duties he also counted the chore of feeding the inventory.
The spray was for the Slugabeds, and it took him only minutes to distribute their rations. The apples were for the garbage disposals that sat in a row near the wall, held erect by U-shaped brackets. Each of the gengineered pigs had a barrel-shaped body, stubby, nearly vestigial limbs, and a blunt snout that pointed toward the ceiling. Once it was installed in a customer’s kitchen, the drainpipe from the sink would empty into its mouth and throat. It would then chew up whatever chunks the owner chose to put down the drain, extracting nutrient as necessary. The residues—solid and liquid—would pass through the genimal and into a second pipe. Here, in the Garden, the garbage disposals were connected only to the outlet pipes, short stubs that jutted upward from a larger pipe that ran beneath their row. Water ran continuously through this pipe. Odor was limited to the animal fragrance of the genimals’ bodies.
Tom stuffed an apple into each pig’s mouth. When the grinding noises had quieted, he gave the larger models a second helping. Then, the basket still in his hands, he made his rounds of the store, gathering overripe pie plant and sammitch bush fruits, withered goldfish blooms, yellowed leaves, and other organic garbage. He could feed it all to the pigs, he knew, and sometimes he did. But the Garden also stocked litterbugs. They were street and yard cleaners, designed to process huge quantities of dung and other litter, and all he had to do was dump the basket’s contents before them. Their shovel jaws made short work of his gleanings. When they were done, he scattered walnut-sized feed pellets on the floor of their pen. The store simply didn’t generate enough litter to satisfy their needs.
Tom’s boss was a Ukrainian immigrant who liked to brag of his prosperity. Looking sadly down at his flat belly, he would shake his head slowly back and forth and say, “My grandmother would be ashamed of me. In her day, a successful merchant would be fat!” But not him. He had, he would add, left the homeland just in time. The Ukraine had once been a breadbasket, but climate change had made it a dustbowl, and those of his relatives who were still there were starving. He did not say that many would be dead already if he did not send money, but Tom knew. Tom also knew that the amounts he sent were what kept him lean.
Albert Mettnitzky spent most of his time in an upstairs office. He displayed his own green coverall on the floor of his Greengenes franchise only when there were too many customers for Tom to handle or, as now, when it was time to lock up for the day.
“It’s been a good day, Tommy. A good day. You go home now, and kiss that Muffy for me.”
Tom grinned. He said almost the same words every day. “I’ll do that, Bert. See you tomorrow.”
* * * *
Tom Cross grimaced as the damp heat beyond the store’s door reminded him of the quiet hum of the heat pump that kept the store cool in summer and warm in winter. He grimaced again when he smelled…
Some days, the sidewalk in front of the store was totally blocked by Engineer demonstrators. Today, there was only one, wearing a blue coverall streaked with sweat stains, new and old. He wore a golden cogwheel, the emblem of the cult-like movement, on his breast pocket. His beard was unkempt and his body lean to the point of emaciation. His red-rimmed, glaring eyes refused to settle long on any particular part of the scenery, bouncing from the store’s display windows to the traffic of gengineered vehicles in the street to the pedestrians, most of whom did not share his obsession. He smiled only when he saw one of the rare automobiles whose owners could afford fuel and hand-made parts. Most of the old vehicles had long since lost their original bodies to rust. The sheet metal was usually replaced with hand-crafted wood and gleaming varnish.
The Engineer did not smile for bicycles, for they were too common. Though they were mechanical, their virtues of simplicity and convenience had let them survive intact the transition to a technology centered on biology.
The picketer’s sign said simply “MACHINES, NOT GENES!” Most Engineers expressed their hatred of the gengineering that had supplanted the Machine Age more violently. Full-scale demonstrations were often marked by litterbug barbecues or Roachster bakes.
Tom stood in the Garden’s doorway long enough to watch the man pace slowly past him, turn, and pace back as far as the strip of green that separated the Garden from the electronics store next door. That strip was heavily overgrown with the honeysuckle vines that had appeared everywhere in the past year or so, and the vines, as always, bore a heavy crop of blossoms the size of small wineglasses. Each one held
a mouthful of nectar, self-fermented and laced with a mildly euphoric drug.
The picketer plucked a blossom and drained its load of honeysuckle wine. His eyes promptly glazed. Tom shook his head and walked around the man. At the corner, he boarded a Bernie, a modified Saint Bernard with a passenger pod on its back. A few blocks later, he was on the street again, and whistling as he approached his apartment building. He was looking forward to the little time he would have with Muffy. She was still what she had been when he first had met her, the Spider Lady at The Spider’s Web. An exotic dancer, necessarily a night worker, and one with a following, too. But he was the only one of her fans to…
A high-backed Armadon, mad offspring of a gene-splicer and an armadillo, clattered down the road away from him. Like Roachsters, Armadons had wheels grown from their shells; their legs ran backwards atop the wheels to turn them, and that was what made the clatter. It had been parked near his own front door, but that did not disturb him. This was city, and the streets were lined with Roachsters, Hoppers, Beetles, and other vehicles. There were even a few internal combustion antiques.
He only glanced at the knee-high evergreen shrubs that lined the walkway between the sidewalk and the entrance to his building. He paid even less attention to the ancient paneling in the building’s small lobby, or the carved moldings, or the marble floor beneath his feet. He had registered the building’s signs of age when he and Muffy had first moved in, pegged them as too-ample sign that the place was a dump, and forgotten them. Now the building was home, even if there were three flights of stairs between the street and their apartment. He usually paused only long enough to see if Muffy had fetched the mail and to unlock the glass door.
This time, however, Tom ignored the rack of mailboxes to his right. The glass door was shattered, and the shards lay at the foot of the stairs, beyond the frame. Someone had not waited to be buzzed in, or to get out their key. It seemed, quite simply, that they had walked through the door as if it were not there.
He froze, thinking that it must have happened very recently. No one had begun to clean up the debris. Yet there were no cops around. Hadn’t anyone noticed?
He stepped through the door’s empty frame, careful not to catch his coverall on the jagged teeth that jutted from the rim. His feet crunched on broken glass, and when he caught himself swearing at the noise, he wondered: Whoever it was, could they still be here? What did they want? Whose apartment door had they broken down? Who were they raping, murdering, torturing, robbing?
Muffy?
The thought struck him like a blow. His knees sagged beneath him for just a second, but he quelled the involuntary response, looked upward as if he thought he could see through all the floors and walls between him and their apartment. Then he took a deep breath and ran up the stairs.
The first floor apartments were closed, their doors intact and undisturbed. The same was true on the second floor. But on the third—the door to Tom’s apartment was open. Beyond it, a throw rug had been kicked into a heap. A chair lay on its side. A spray of dirt told him that a fallen houseplant lay just to the left of his field of view.
He stilled his panting long enough to cry, “Muffy?”
When there was no answer, he repeated his call. Finally, he tested the door’s knob. The latch was broken.
He entered the apartment. “Muffy?”
The broken houseplant was an amaryllis, an “Alice” so gengineered that its blossom resembled a human face. It had just the one blossom, for the gengineers had merged the four large blooms typical of an unmodified amaryllis. They had also removed the amaryllis’s yearly rhythm, so that Alices needed no winter dormant period and indeed would produce new blooms as soon as the old ones faded.
At the moment, this one’s bloom, its face, looked as if, if only that were possible, it would cry. It had fallen from a dresser beside the door, along with a book, a photograph, and a small pottery dish in which they had kept odd coins. The dish was as shattered as the downstairs door. The coins were scattered on the floor.
Tom Cross picked up the photo and turned it over. It was of Muffy, one he had taken at the art museum. She was standing in front of a pointillist rendition of a human head formed by a cloud of gengineered gnats. What they pictured changed constantly in expression, sex, and apparent age; the camera had caught a fatherly figure, beaming proudly down upon Tom’s mate.
He set it back on the dresser. Where was Muffy? He called again, and again there was no answer. He searched the apartment, but it was small and it did not take him long to be sure she was not there. Nor, by the time he had finished, did he wonder what had happened. The bedroom was in perfect order. So was the kitchen. The back door was intact. The intruders, whoever they were, had broken in the front door and caught her immediately. She had struggled, but the signs were all here, in the living room. And then they had taken her away. But why?
He stood at the window. Its frame was wreathed in the ever-present honeysuckle vines. Most people, he thought, kept the vines trimmed back from their windows. Many even tried to keep them from growing in their yards, though the plants were insistent. But Muffy liked them. She wanted them hovering in the apartment windows, like drapes, she sometimes said, only fresher, prettier, more useful.
He had to admit the vines were prettier, though they did, as now, have a tendency to drape themselves over the sill. He picked up the intruding vegetation and pushed it outside. When it fell away from the masonry, he caught his breath. Had Muffy or her kidnappers grabbed at the vines? Had they struggled here? Had she tried to escape? He didn’t think the vines would hold her weight.
Some of the vines’ tendrils were broken. He picked fragments from the sill, fingered the stubs, and made a face at the stickiness of the sap that leaked from them. Where was she? Why had they taken her?
He took a step, and one foot made a “snick-ick” noise as he pulled against a stickiness. He looked. Three honeysuckle blossoms lay crushed upon the wooden floor, their pink and cream flesh discolored by dirt and bruises. The invasion had been too recent for their spilled nectar to dry entirely, but someone had stepped in one of the puddles and the footprints had had time to grow syrupy. Small insects hovered in the air around the sticky patches.
He sniffed. The sickly sweet odor of honeysuckle wine dominated the room. He wondered how Muffy could stand to drink the stuff. She had persuaded him to try it, but only once. He had not liked its taste or smell.
Nor had he liked what he thought it did to Muffy. She had once been vivacious, active, a joy to be with. But ever since she had taken up honey sucking, she had had spells of seeming tired, uninvolved, languid.
He knew that languidness. The wine had made him want to stretch out on a mossy bank, arms spread to the sun, smiling and uncaring, disconnected from the animal rush of life. He hadn’t liked the feeling.
A scrabbling noise behind the couch brought him out of his reverie and made his last hopes fall. He turned away from the window. “Randy?”
Randy scuttled from her hiding place, mute evidence that Muffy could not simply have left early for her job. The spider was the size of a cat, black and shaggy, and she was essential to Muffy’s work. And besides, the wreckage in the apartment could not be due to simple burglars, or vandals. Nothing seemed to be missing, except for Muffy. And the damage was hardly enough to satisfy vandals.
He noticed that one of Randy’s legs was trailing. When she reached Tom’s feet, she made a “Meep” noise and waved her palps.
She was usually silent, except when she was hungry or curious about some novel rustle in the vines outside the window. Tom bent and picked her up. She was quivering like a plucked string. “Hurting, are you?” The useless leg was crushed, as if someone had tried to kick the genimal out of the way, or to step on her. He petted her stiff and wiry fur, picked from it the kitties that had been under the couch, talked to her, tried to soothe her. I
n a few minutes, Randy bent in his hands, trying to reach the base of the broken limb with her mouth.
“I wish you could tell me what happened,” he said as she chewed. The leg came free and fell to the floor. He wondered whether it would grow back when she molted again. “You won’t be much good to her with only seven legs, will you?” Randy was both Muffy’s pet and the prop she used in her dancing. Her fan, her feather boa, her bubbles. That had impressed him once, when he had just run away from home, when he and Freddy had wanted to be singers together.
He had already lost his father. He had found out that his mother’s husband had not sired him. That had been a neighbor, a man who had moved away from the neighborhood before ever he had been born. Then, by running away, he had forfeited his mother, and he had never tried to return home. Now Muffy was gone. It felt like a retribution of the fates.
Even Freddy had moved on, and Tom hadn’t been able to sing alone. He had worked in the Web’s kitchen for a while. Then he had found his present job, and this apartment, and Muffy had moved in with him. And now…
His eyes watered. He took a deep, shuddering breath. Why? Why?
Had the Engineers, those perfervid reactionaries, taken offense at her dancing? At Randy? Had they taken offense at him and his job at the Garden? Was she gone forever? Or would the phone ring and some strange voice demand that he quit his job or burn the Garden or poison the stock? And then, only then, would they release her. They did such things. They had learned well the lessons of a century of terrorism.
He stepped across the room. The phone hung on the wall near the kitchen door. The cord was intact. He took it off its hook and held it to his ear. The dial tone was there, normal, undamaged. He hung up again, and he stared at the phone, willing it to ring, willing it to tell him what was going on. He even willed it to know what was going on, but the “message waiting” light remained stubbornly dark.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 40
