Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  * * * *

  When Jim Brane woke, he too had a headache, but not because of what he had drunk. The back of his head was tender, swollen, and throbbing. Happily, however, his bed was not empty, for beside him, short auburn hair rumpled on her cheek, body warm against his own, face still puffy with sleep, was Julia Templeton. Nor did he himself feel so empty. He remembered immediately what had happened the day before, and though he felt as deprived by fate as Tom, his response was far more angry than depressed.

  He and Julia had their breakfast in the Farm’s journeyman dining hall, a broad and sunny room with a serving counter down one side. It looked much like the apprentice refectory, but where the apprentices sat at long trestle tables, the journeymen had tables sized for four and sat, mostly, in twos. Jim Brane and Julia Templeton could thus be joined by no more than one or two of their fellows at a time, eager for news of what had happened, full of commiseration and perhaps—more privately, of course—”There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Losing one’s truck was every trucker’s greatest dread. If happened late

  enough in life, it meant having to start one’s career over again with a new pup, doing years of local delivery work while the pup grew and learned and became able to handle the long hauls.

  The Farm’s dispatching office was next door to the dining hall. On their way out, Julia checked the assignment board hanging on the wall. Then she grinned. “They’ve left me free,” she said. “Must want me to hold your hand. Or this place has a heart after all.”

  Jim couldn’t help but grin back as he took her hand in his. “If this were the Wild West, and if we were cowboys, and if we had six-guns and saddles, we could round up a posse and go hunting the rustlers.”

  “But it isn’t,” she said. “We aren’t, we don’t, and we can’t. That’s the cops’ job.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “We haven’t been to the art museum?”

  The last thing he wanted to do was pretend that he wasn’t driving his truck on their joint labors because he was on holiday. Tige had been stolen. He was bereft, and he grieved. Yet he knew that nothing would be gained, he would subtract nothing from whatever time must pass before he and the Mack could be reunited by the police, if he moped around the Farm all day.

  He made a sour face. “So let’s.” They had been, at one time or another, to most of the city’s cultural institutions, but once they had discovered the museum of natural history, with its displays of ancient skeletons that seemed so promising of the Age of Bioforms, they had been satisfied to return again and again. Concerts, plays, and human history had lost their charm. Yet today, pteranodons and gomphotheres and glyptodonts did not appeal. They both needed something fresh.

  “Maybe it’ll take your mind off Tige.”

  “Mmph.” He grunted skeptically, as if to say he would be upset for days and weeks, and so would she if her Blackie were stolen.

  Blackie’s ancestral stock had included a strong strain of Boston bull. She was slimmer and longer-legged than Tige, who had owed more to the English variety of bulldog. But the stertorous breathing, at rest or in motion, was similar, and so was the size. Both dwarfed their drivers and could carry many tons upon their backs.

  The Farm’s Macks were kept in large barns, each in its own bay, each bay with its own door to the outside. The bays were lined with maintenance equipment. Ceiling hoists held cabs and cargo pods suspended in the air through the night, relieving the genimals of their weight. Most bays held at least two pods of different sizes, giving the truckers a chance to tailor their equipment to the jobs of the day. A hallway ran along the barn’s central axis, with human-sized doors letting the truckers reach their Macks.

  When they passed the door to Tige’s bay, Jim had to stop for just a moment. He opened the door, looked in at all the empty space, seeing it as no more vast and no emptier than the void in his heart. “Come on,” said Julia, her hand on his arm, and he closed the door. Blackie’s bay was next door, and there he helped her lower Blackie’s smallest pod, its cargo compartment no larger than the back of an old-time bread-van, from the ceiling and strap it into place. Then Julia tossed her Mack a biscuit. Once they were aboard, she found the computer cable on the floor and plugged it into the socket in

  Blackie’s spine. The socket was exposed in the center of an opening in the pod’s floor behind the control console, and it linked the pod’s computer directly into the Mack’s central nervous system.

  Within an hour they were admiring bronze sculptures, ancient paintings, and a display that tracked the development of biosculpture. “Down that way,” said Julia. She stopped thumbing through her guidebook long enough to point. “There’s modern art, paintings, ceramics, even fashion.”

  In reply, Jim pointed at the silent Atkinsons before them. “These are interesting,” he said. One was a furry double helix; its sound plaque said that it had been gengineered in part from a cat’s genes and that it had purred when stroked. He wished he could touch it, but it was enclosed in a glass case. “I wonder what it felt like when it was alive.”

  “Like a cat, of course. A skinny one. I like this one better.” She was staring at three bulb-tipped stalks whose bases bore scores of insectile legs. The stalks moved slowly about their enclosure, its top slotted to admit air, swaying and trembling, forming and reforming a triangular cluster.

  “What’s it do?” She shrugged, but he did not register the answer. Approaching them down the museum’s hallway was a young man who looked somehow familiar, as if, despite the giant spider riding upon his shoulder, he were someone Jim had once known well but had not seen for years, someone who had changed since last Jim had seen him, someone who had grown as much as had Jim himself, someone who…

  “Tommy. Tommy Cross.”

  The eyes that met his were rimmed with dark, and the mouth, like Jim’s own, held no smile at all. “Hi, Jimmy.”

  Jim turned to Julia to say, “We were friends in high school. Best friends. But then he…” He looked back at his old friend. “I haven’t seen you since you ran away from home with Freddy.”

  “We made it to the city.” Tom held one hand as if to add that that was past and now of no importance. “What have you been doing?” The hand moved to point at the other man’s shoulder and the patch it bore. “That…?”

  “Ah.” Jim’s tone faltered as if he were embarassed by a memory. “Dad got me interested in the Truck Farm. I’m a trucker now.” Jim turned just enough to wrap an arm about Julia’s shoulder and pull her close. “So’s Julia. Templeton. And…”

  “I see.” Tom’s expression fell even further.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Julia. “It sounds like you two should be happy to see each other, but you both look as if you’ve just lost your best friend. Not found him again.” She paused for a moment and added, “I know why Jimmy’s down. Someone knocked him on the head yesterday and stole his Mack. But you?”

  Tom Cross patted the spider on his shoulder and said, apparently irrelevantly, “This is Randy.” But his voice was suddenly choked with tears. In a moment, he went on. “Belongs to my girlfriend. Muffy Bowen.” Then he explained what had happened.

  “Oh, mech,” said Jim.

  “Yeah. I came here to talk to Freddy.”

  “You mean he’s here, too?”

  Julia looked puzzled.

  “In the music department, downstairs. He’s an exhibit, of all things.” Tom pointed toward the stairwell at the end of the hall. “That’s where I was going. Want to come?”

  * * * *

  The basement music room was actually a small auditorium. There were several arcs of seats for an audience, soft lighting, ceiling panels designed to improve the room’s acoustics, wall-mounted speakers, and a small stage. On the stage, a single man, slender, clean-shaven, grey-haired, clad in an anonymous grey coverall and vest, sat in
a straight-backed chair, his back to the missing audience. A briefcase leaned against the chair leg. Before him was a small table covered with papers. On the far side of the table were four padded frameworks that roughly resembled highchairs. Each of the frameworks held a genimal. One of the genimals, sitting upright with its snout in the air, looked precisely like the garbage disposals in Mr. Greengenes’ Appliance Garden. Another lay on its back with its legs jutting uselessly into the air. Its blunt snout projected upward much like that of the first genimal, though it was considerably more elongated and it was perforated by a number of holes, like the fingering holes of a flute. Its hide was checkered black and tan. The third and fourth genimals were smaller, and each had, poking toward the ceiling, more than the usual four legs.

  “That’s Freddy!” said Jim, pointing at the garbage disposal.

  “Call him Frederick,” said Tom. “He insists, ever since he became a serious musician. He sings,” he added, looking at Julia. “And Porculata. She’s a bagpipe.” He pointed at Porculata’s snout. “Sphincter muscles close off the holes. Her legs are just hollow tubes, and they used duck genes to give her air sacs. The little guys are their kids, the calliope shoats.” He shook his head, as if at the vagaries of uncontrolled hybridization. “Their apartment’s behind the stage.”

  “Do they have names?” asked Julia.

  “The kids? Barnum and Baraboo.”

  Randy shifted on Tom’s shoulder, lifting her body and waving her palps as if sifting the air for an odor that seemed familiar. Then she uttered a single “Meep,” scuttled down his front as easily as if she still had her full complement of legs, and charged down the auditorium’s central aisle. In a moment, she was racing across the stage toward Freddy—Frederick—the garbage disposal, the grey man was pulling his glossily shod feet beneath his chair with an air of distaste, and Frederick was yelling, “Randy!” and twitching as best he could his stubby limbs. Porculata and the shoats were squealing their own greetings. The commotion was anything but musical.

  The three young humans approached the stage more slowly, while Randy climbed over Frederick’s immobile form, palping and meeping. When they stepped onto the stage and Frederick could see them, the genimal said in a nasal bass, “Where’s Muffy? How’d Randy lose a leg? And hi, Jimmy, long time no see. Who’s the broad? She’s got nice…”

  Tom glanced at the grey man while Randy moved happily on to Porculata and the shoats. He wondered what he was doing there—the papers on the table looked intimidatingly official—but he ignored the man’s obvious irritation while he glumly explained what had happened the day before. When he was done, the grey man cleared his throat emphatically and spoke to Frederick: “You can chat with your friends later. Right now, we have important business to finish.”

  Surprised, Tom said, “What’s with this bird, Frederick?”

  His old friend made a rude noise, and his voice rose in pitch. “The man from BRA. He’s still wet behind the ears. He hasn’t been weaned yet. He…”

  “But…”

  “He says we’re guilty of unlicensed gengineering. Someone spotted Ringling and Bailey at the Met and asked questions.” He repeated the rude noise. Ringling and Bailey were Barnum’s and Baraboo’s sisters. “Now he wants to confiscate the kids.”

  The BRA agent glared impartially at everyone. “It is a serious offense,” he said. “The regulations are quite clear, and no plan was ever submitted. There was never any application for permission. There was no environmental impact statement. And the law requires all these things of all gengineers before production can possibly be allowed to begin. If they are not done, we must be sure there is no hazard. We must examine them. That’s what our laboratories are for.” As he spoke, his hands moved over his papers, pointing to the forms that had to be filed.

  “Litter,” said Tom Cross. “I suppose all those pieces of paper were submitted, in triplicate, before your production was begun?”

  “Quintuplicate,” said the BRA agent. “And I was born, not made. I had parents, and they reproduced quite naturally. There were no gengineers involved.” His expression was smug with self-righteous satisfaction.

  Randy was clinging to Frederick’s torso with all but two of her seven remaining legs. She turned to face the man from BRA, waving the free pair, and hissed.

  “So were the shoats,” said Frederick. “And we’re not gengineers, either.”

  “The curator told me you were responsible for producing them.”

  “They’re our kids, and they’re just as natural as any litterhead bureaucrat. Maybe more so!” When Frederick stopped, Porculata snarled, “Get out!” and began to play a martial tune of the sort for which bagpipes had long been meant. For the first time, Jim noticed that a compass rose was tattooed on her throat. The shoats added their own tones to her music, and there was none of the gaiety one might have expected from a pair of instruments whose name still meant “circus” even though the wandering shows for which calliopes had been designed had long been extinct.

  “You’d better. They’re not very mobile, but we are.” As Tom spoke, Jim picked up the agent’s briefcase and set it on the table. He and Julia then both grabbed fistsful of paper and crammed them into the case. After a moment of stunned immobility, the agent pushed them aside and finished the job himself. He did not try to straighten the crumpled mess they had made.

  When the auditorium door had closed behind him, Porculata screeched, the bagpipe still strong in her voice, “He’ll be back! I’m psychic, you know, and he’ll be back. Just as soon as he realizes the kids are legal, but we’re not!” Her voice trailed off at the last, bubbling into a sob. Frederick squirmed in his padded support frame and said, “Tommy? Move me next to her? Please?”

  Tom was obliging when Jim looked at the shoats, who had said nothing throughout the crisis. “Tommy? Can’t they…?”

  Tom shook his head as Frederick answered. “None of us can move much on our own. And they can’t talk. But they understand, and they hate that bastard. Right, boys?”

  They answered with strident blasts of sound.

  “Now,” said Frederick. “As they used to say: Shit!”

  When the humans looked puzzled by the archaic curse, he added, “You were telling me what happened to Muffy, and I never got a chance to react.”

  Tom shrugged. “I wanted to tell you, talk about it, you know? Get it off my chest. But you had troubles of your own. And so does Jim.”

  Briefly, Julia explained how Jim had lost his truck.

  “Huh.” The sound was a soft hooting noise. “Well, my problems are done now. You did a good job of chasing him off.”

  “We make a good team. Or we used to.”

  “What d’ya mean, used to? Sounds like you need some help now.”

  “It’s not the same thing…”

  Porculata squirmed in her seat and began to shriek: “You’d better not leave me! I won’t stand for it! I can’t take care of the kids all by myself! And if you do, you’d better forget right now any thought of deflowering any strange ladies!”

  Halfway through her tirade, Jim and Julia turned away to hide their grins. They were thus the first to see the man standing in the stage’s wings. He wasn’t very tall, his skin was ruddy, and his forehead stopped only when his hairline was even with the tops of his ears. He wore a tan coverall and a tweed jacket, and he was grinning back at them while holding a finger to his lips.

  “But Honey-buns, Pork-pie, Gravy-down-my-gullet Sweetums, the kids are almost as big as you are. The staff takes care of them. And I haven’t been anywhere in ages!”

  Porculata answered her mate more calmly, though her words were still punctuated by bagpipish squawks: “I’m psychic. You know it! And if you go, you’ll be a help, all right. But only if you stay away from the ladies, and that’s impossible, so you stay right here. I need you!”

&
nbsp; When she ran down, Frederick rolled his eyes as if to say, “See what I have to put up with?” The stranger in the wings stepped forward, still grinning, and said, “If you wish, Frederick, I can give you a leave of absence.” Then he looked at Tom Cross. “Did something happen? Where’s Muffy?”

  The garbage disposal made an unmusical noise. “The way you’re all shoving,” he said, “I guess I haven’t got much choice. So I’ll go.” He rolled his eyes. “Hey, Frankie, you know where to find that handcart I rode in on?” Then, as if realizing that Jim didn’t know who Frankie was and Julia didn’t know anything about the handcart, he added, “When we ran away from home, Tommy jammed me in beside his suitcase and trundled the whole schmear down the road. Pinched my toes and pounded my butt black and blue.” He sighed ostentatiously. “Now he’ll do it again. And he’s Franklin Peirce, the curator around here. He knows what’s in all the closets.”

  “I hope so,” said Peirce.

  Tom began to explain to the curator why Muffy wasn’t with him.

  Jim interrupted with, “He came here to see Freddy.”

  Porculata butted in with, “Just wanted aid and comfort.”

  Peirce said, “And I’m sure Frederick will give it to him.”

  The garbage disposal said, “Just call me Freddy. For the duration, anyway, since I won’t be a singer again till I get back.”

  Porculata began to sob, “I’ll never see you again!” But she didn’t say a word about being psychic.

  Julia Templeton said, “Shaddap everybody! Tom was talking!”

  In the sudden silence, he looked at her gratefully. Then he continued with the story. When he was done, Peirce shook his head and said, “I’m sorry. I really wish I could help. But the leave of absence is about all I can do.”