Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  He knew he was being silly. If they were going to call, they would wait. They would want his nerves as much on edge as possible. They would want him to be grateful for the call, so that he would do what they wanted.

  And there was no way that Muffy had done it all herself. She wasn’t emotionally violent. She never had been, and honey suckers never were. The honey made them quiet, passive, content to do no more than sit and suck more honey. Muffy wasn’t as far gone as most, for she retained the energy to dance. But the tendencies were there. They had been there, perhaps, even before she discovered the honey’s charms.

  So he shouldn’t just wait. He should do something. He looked at his watch. Only twenty minutes had passed since he had entered the building. His stomach rumbled. He would, he thought, wait just a little longer. While he waited… The refrigerator was an old model, and while it kept food cold enough, its memory was failing. Once, long before Tom and Muffy had moved into the apartment, it had kept track of its contents and automatically printed out shopping lists. Now, when he touched its handle, it muttered lists of foods Tom and Muffy could not afford and of brand-names no one had seen in many years. “Haagen-Daaz,” it said. “Lobster tails. Sara Lee. Prime rib.”

  Modern food supposedly tasted much the same, though the sources had changed practically beyond all recognition. He thought of pie plants and sammitch bushes and broccoli trees and hamberries. Lobster could still be had, for a price, but for most people… The potster salad in the leftover container before him was made from a hybrid of potato and lobster, and if it tasted much like the latter, it looked and grew like the former.

  He forced himself to eat the salad before he reached for the phone again. Then, while he was waiting for the police to arrive, he paced. He held Randy in his arms, petting the bristly fur, and he remembered. He and Freddy had been on stage for the first time in their lives, singing dirty songs to warm Muffy’s audience up for her. There had been boozy cheers and catcalls when they had finished, and then someone had patted his shoulder and murmured, “Good job, guys.” The voice was soft, feminine, but when he turned, no one was there.

  “Watch the stage, dummy,” Freddy had told him.

  In the glare of the spot, he had seen: 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. He had gasped in unison with the collective sigh of the nightclub’s patrons.

  He had met her later, and later still she had joined him for breakfast in the nightclub’s kitchen. They had become friends. She had introduced him to the art museum where Freddy now lived. And then his bud had begun to swell and itch. It had grown painful, and one morning he had been unable to get out of bed.

  She had come to him then. She had helped him unfurl his leaves and open his bud.

  They had been inseparable ever since. Until now.

  The tears came. He let Randy climb upon his shoulder to taste them.

  He wished that she had never tasted honeysuckle wine.

  He heard the boom of Sparrowhawk wings in the air outside the window. The cops had arrived. He sighed at the thought of talking, of strangers poking through his and Muffy’s life, but he also felt a surge of hope. They would find her. They had to. That was their job.

  Chapter Two

  The chatters, wheezes, hums, and rattles of the city’s afternoon traffic flowed through the open truck window at Jim Brane’s elbow. The streets were full of bioform vehicles, and the sidewalks were a river of humanity clad in coveralls of a thousand colors and designs, with a million ornamentations of patches, embroideries, sashes, and medallions. Some individuals wore other garments—jackets, vests, even skirts—over their coveralls.

  Outside the truck window, just ahead, cocked backward to catch his voice, was an ear the size of a bedspread, held erect except for a flopping tip. On the right side of the Mack’s great brindle head, the ear was folded down. Tige’s shape made clear his canine ancestry. His only marking was a white circle around one eye.

  Jim’s markings were only a little more elaborate. He wore the blue coveralls of an indentured trucker. Shoulder patches tagged him with the Daisy Hill Truck Farm’s distinctive logo, a black-eared white beagle. The logo’s aptness was lost in the mists of time; the Farm’s products were descended not from beagles, but from bulldogs. A similar emblem adorned the side of the fiberglass pod strapped to the Mack’s back. The control compartment or cab in which Jim sat was at the forward end of the pod. The rear was for cargo.

  Greasy smoke and an enticing odor poured from a parking lot a block ahead and on the right. As Jim and Tige drew closer, they could see that the lot held no vehicles, except as wreckage. It had been taken over by a small mob of Engineers, a few of whom were still breaking up the shack that had sheltered the lot’s attendant from the elements. There was no sign of the attendant.

  The rest of the Engineers were gathered around a fire built of the broken lumber. Over it they had hung a gutted litterbug and chunks of Roachster tail and Hopper haunch. They faced the street, some of them holding bullhorns to their mouths, all of them screaming slogans such as, “EAT THE CORRUPTIONS OF LIFE!” When an old mechanical automobile passed by, they cheered. When the vehicle was a gengineered Roachster or Armadon or Beetle, they threw rocks.

  Someone even threw a rock at Tige. But where other vehicles dodged and accelerated and did their best to escape as quickly as they could the neighborhood of the parking lot, when the rock clattered on the pod’s side, the Mack just stopped. As horns then blared from behind, Tige turned his great head toward the lot and growled.

  The Engineers fell silent. They dropped their rocks. They turned away from the feast they had planned. Only a few dared to shake their fists.

  Jim leaned toward his righthand window and showed his teeth in as fierce a grin as he could manage. He could feel the heat of the fire, even above the heat emanating from the city’s pavements and buildings. He wished he dared to do more than make faces. He would love to turn Tige into the lot to chase the fanatics, screaming, back to their holes, to scatter the coals of the fire, to seize their meat, nearly done now, judging from the smell. Tige would love that. He would love that.

  His stomach rumbled, but he knew better. His instructors at the Farm had drummed it into his head over and over again, and into the heads of his fellow trainees, that reacting to the Engineers’ provocations could mean only trouble. It might be very, very satisfying, but though they were a minority, they were still a vocal force in society, and they had a great many silent sympathizers. If he attacked them, he would only help their cause.

  He yawned. He had been on the job since six that morning, and he should have quit two hours before. Then, as deliberately as he had grinned, he turned his attention back to the road. “Move it, Tige.” The department store that was his destination was not far away now. In fact, there was the alley that led to the loading dock.

  “Slow down, Tige. Ease right. A hair left. Let’s stop, now. Back up. Swing right, left, straight. Stop. Good boy, Tige.” Jim seemed to be steering his Mack truck by voice alone, but a careful observer might have noticed that as he spoke, his hands never left the steering wheel, while his feet danced from throttle to brake. The controls were mounted on a cabinet whose top was covered with rocker switches and flashing diodes, a control cabinet precisely the same as those found in all bioform vehicles. It held a computer which the government’s Bioform Regulatory Administration insisted always be connected to the genimal’s brain. Bioform vehicles were supposed to be plugged in, not trained, so that they obeyed the driver’s hands and feet, not his voice.

  Jim waved at the crew waiting on the loading dock. He recognized them all, for he had made many deliveries here, both as a student trucker and since his graduation last spring to journeyman status. “Hey, Sam!” he called to the crew’s silver-haired and dark-skinned chi
ef. “Let me get it open.” He yawned again, jumped from his compartment, patted the Mack’s shoulder, ducked a string of drool, tossed a biscuit the size of a football between the massive jaws, and touched—for luck—the chrome model of an old mechanical eighteen-wheeler that swung from the Mack’s collar. Automobiles still existed; the old freight-haulers had been extinct for decades. Then he went behind Tige, where the crew was waiting, and unlocked the pod’s cargo compartment.

  The doors swung open to reveal stacked bolts of multicolored fabric from the bacterial cultures of Chicago Micro. Sam Gundar, the crew chief, stepped onto the lip of the pod to survey the shipment. “Is that all? We’ve been expecting a load of mechin’ draperies. Not to mention underwear and shirts.”

  Jim yawned once more and waved a hand. “I can’t help you there,” he said. “I just pick up and deliver.”

  “I know that, son.” Sam spat onto the stained pavement below. “It’s those goddam biofabrics. They haven’t got the bugs out yet, is all.” He spat again, added, “They never will,” and turned toward the dock. “C’mon, guys.”

  Jim shrugged and took the invoice pack from its hook on the wall. As the store’s crew unloaded, he used its electronic wand to tick off the items. When the pod was empty, he held out the pack. Sam signed his acceptance of the shipment, Jim pushed a button, and the pack bleeped its record of the transaction through Tige’s computer to the office back at the Farm. At the bleep, Sam shook his head and said, “Don’t trust us much, do you?”

  Jim shrugged again. “I do. They don’t.”

  They didn’t, either, he thought as he talked and wrestled Tige out of the alley and back into the flow of traffic. They refused to take any chance that an invoice would be lost on the road back to the Farm, or that a trucker would have the time to falsify his records. They knew that the Farm stayed in business only as long as its reputation remained unblemished.

  The parking lot was empty now, the Engineers gone, their roast litterbug and Roachster and Hopper nothing but scraps of bone and shell. A live litterbug was nosing at that part of the mess; it would be gone within minutes. Police wreckers, great-clawed Crabs, were removing the vehicles the Engineers had destroyed. A man and a woman in fire department coveralls, slickers, and helmets were spraying water from backpack tanks over the still-smoldering remnants of the fire, raking the coals, and spraying more water. To one side of the lot, the attendant, returned from wherever he had taken refuge, was already guiding civilian vehicles into parking spaces.

  They didn’t trust, he thought again. But they weren’t too clamphole about it. They had given him two years of training as a trucker. They had let him choose his own pup. The price he had accepted—driving for the Farm for ten years—had seemed cheap enough when they had offered him the contract. It still did. In ten years, he’d be just thirty. And Tige would be all his, and he would be free, an independent trucker.

  He did not yet know whether he would continue to wear the shoulder patches. Some truckers did, as a badge of origin. They even continued to drive for their training Farms. Others didn’t.

  Jim thought he might. Both sides benefited from the deal, after all, and they owed each other loyalty. The Farm got a driver. And though the Farm didn’t pay well at all—at least until he worked off his indenture—he got his training, his Mack, and all the help he needed while it was growing. Not to mention a place to live. And Julia.

  He grinned to himself. Tige was still just a pup, though he was three years old and the size of a delivery van. Macks didn’t finish growing until they were eight. By then, Tige would be able to tow a multiple-wheel trailer to more distant places. He would wear only a small pod for his driver and the computer, and a hitch for the trailer. Already, Jim was looking forward to trading the local delivery work for the long hauls.

  What would Julia do? Julia Templeton was a year older than he, a year ahead in her career. She would qualify for the long hauls a year before him. But then! Then! He dreamed that they might run from coast to coast in convoy, together. They might even get married.

  A buzzing sound yanked Jim’s attention to the phonelike radio handset. He made a face, knowing that it had to be the Farm with a new assignment, a pickup that he could make if only he would go just a little bit out of his way. The dispatchers were like that, particularly with the indentured truckers, like him. They didn’t care that his shift had been over for two and a half hours already and that he was on the way home now and more than ready to put his feet up for the night. He was tempted to ignore the call and claim later that he had been out of hearing range. Unfortunately, he didn’t think they would believe him.

  He couldn’t refuse, he thought, and he couldn’t quit. Sometimes, loyalty or no, he thought he might as well be a slave.

  He reached for the handset, kicking at a loose cable on the cab’s floor. “Yes? … No, I’m not out of town yet. … Yeah, I can make the pickup. … Are you sure of that address? That’s a lousy part of town. … All right. All right. See you in an hour.”

  He hung up, thinking of how tired and sweaty he was and wondering how long it would be before he could have a cold shower. He sighed, tapped the brakes with his foot, and said, “Sorry, Tige. We’ve got to turn around.”

  The Mack bent his neck until one great eye peered at Jim through the open window. “That’s right,” he said. “One more job. And then we can go home. I’ll hose you down, too. That’s a promise.

  Tige snorted and shook his head, just as if he understood the words. Spittle flew. But he stopped and turned obediently.

  #

  His new destination was on the other side of town. If he could drive directly there, it would take him only minutes, but the afternoon rush hour was starting now, and the traffic on the city’s streets was getting thicker with every passing minute. He looked up, seeing the relatively few jellyfish-based Floaters that were leaving the upper floors of office buildings. They were moored to balconies throughout the day; at night, their owners kept them in blister-like garages on the sides of their high-rise apartment buildings. And they never got caught in traffic. He was sure the other drivers, like him, wished they had one of the things.

  Jim sighed and maneuvered Tige onto the turf-paved beltroad that circumnavigated the city’s center, hoping that that would be faster. But even there, traffic stopped, started, crawled, and honked. He sighed once more. This was one aspect of city life that had never changed and never would. He yawned. His stomach rumbled again. He rummaged in a cabinet, found a stale pastry, and ate it. He stared at the honeysuckle vines that festooned the banks along the road, gorgeous in their blooms, sickening in their odors, and thought that the Farm was surely right to grub up every sprout that dared to show its tip on or near the property. That was a student chore, and he was glad to be at last immune to it, but it had to be done, or the students, the staff, the truckers, even the trucks, might…

  There, he thought, under that overpass, strewn across the pavement of granite blocks that kept the embankment from eroding, were a dozen honey bums. If his dad hadn’t… He had been sucking honey himself, then. Lethargic, passive, interested in nothing but reaching for another of the blossoms so conveniently to hand. On his way, though he had still been washing and shaving. He made a face. Most of them didn’t even try to find food. Whatever nutrients were in the honeysuckle wine were all they got, and their bodies showed all the signs of malnutrition. So did their life expectancies. Yet they did not suffer. The wine saw to that.

  The honeysuckle vines were everywhere, along roads, in alleys, climbing up utility poles and the sides of buildings. They were not extirpated as on the Farm because most people thought them pretty, though their scent might be a bit cloying. Nor did most people worry about the honey bums. They were, said some, bums even without the honey. Useless specimens who would resign no matter what from the human race. Others were more charitable but still refused to exercise th
eir sympathies over the honey bums’ situation, perhaps because the bums posed no social problem other than visual clutter and a bit of rank body odor which was smothered anyway, most of the time, by the scent of honeysuckle. They were not given to crime, a blessing many credited to the euphoric in the honey. Or… In the past, drug addicts had been forced into crime to pay for their drugs. The wine was everywhere, and it was free.

  When the exit that he wanted came into view, Jim sighed with relief. It was clear, uncrowded. Only a few unfortunates like himself were driving into the city, and they had all the inbound roads to themselves. With luck, he thought, he would have the pod loaded and be on his way again in half an hour. Without luck—and surely that would be Murphy’s choice—the shipper’s representative would be a wizened old man, the cargo would be a hundred cases of vintage wine that had to be carried individually, one at a time, into the pod, he would have to do it all himself, and it would take hours.

  He swore. Julia Templeton was waiting at the Farm. She had had the day off, and both of them had been looking forward to his return, on time. But Murphy had had it in for them, hadn’t he? The Grey God hadn’t wanted them to have much time together, at least today.

  The beltway ramp had let him into a district of warehouses. As he searched for the address he needed, the buildings grew shabbier and more overgrown with honeysuckle vines, the streets dirtier, and the traffic sparser. There were few signs that the buildings were in use. Office windows were darkly lifeless, and the few shops—a diner here, its windows blocked with faded political placards; a newstand there, its racks thick with comic books, many of them revivals of ancient superheroes who resonated with an age of gengineered transformations—seemed to have been dead for decades.