Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  In the doorway to the greenhouse squatted Jack. His skin was flecked with dark bits of decayed organic matter, for one of his tasks that day had been to bury the dead BRA agent in a compost heap behind the house. He was rubbing his depleted anther and chuckling, perhaps at the thought of what his gengineered viruses were doing to the bodies on the floor, perhaps at the thought of how the modified honeysuckle plant that kept them from protesting their transformation might be received in the outer world, if only he would release it, or if it would escape. Honey bums might welcome it, for it would relieve them of even that effort necessary to pluck the blossoms of the honeysuckle vines.

  Perhaps he did not think at all. Jack’s mind was the mind of a child. The amaryllises had destroyed almost everything except his knowledge of gengineering, his ability to use that knowledge in their service, and his capacity to speak on their behalf. He was very much an idiot savant.

  His mistresses intended to leave the prisoners even less, for they would have only one function.

  “WE HAD NEW PISTILS

  And scion/seedling/sprout

  And he was ripe!

  His anther nearly ready!

  We saw double gonads

  Unnecessary

  Our pollen works

  On humans, too

  WE HAD OTHERS, TOO

  In our grasp

  But lost them all

  THEY RESISTED

  They were somehow

  Somehow immune

  BUT WE DO HAVE

  Ample raw material

  WE DO

  We traded

  Had to trade

  And soon!

  SOON!

  We will have

  New pollen”

  Already, in fact, the viruses had begun to modify the structures of the captives’ genitals. Penises were enlarging. Testicles were elongating, just as they once had in Jack himself, and the new gonads were taking on a golden hue.

  “New genes

  Shaking anthers!

  At our command

  WE WILL SET SEED

  And our scions/

  /Seedlings/sprouts

  New pistils, too

  Will be nearer

  Our designs

  AND ONE OF US IS GONE

  Transplanted

  SHE WILL POLLINATE

  Some human pistil

  Perhaps engender

  Anther-bearers

  Like our master/pet’s

  Scion/seedling/sprout

  SHE HAS THE CHANCE

  To begin new beds

  And fork our line of history

  Our destiny

  But that destiny

  IS FOR THE FUTURE ONLY

  To reveal.”

  WOODSMAN

  If they’re really out to get you, all you can do is run.

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Once Martha’s home had been as massively solid as her own body. Then she had been banished to the yard outside and forced to watch, morosely pacing while that pile of stone and mortar was torn down and replaced by an oblong concrete rim. Her immense grey sadness lifted only when the construction crew positioned a Bioblimp, a genetically engineered jellyfish, over the rim, glued it down, added braces, killed and cleaned and dried it, and coated it with pungent sprays. The new building was a translucent dome whose thin leather walls trembled when the wind blew.

  Inside once more, Martha eyed the buffet with as much interest as the Bioblimp had ever provoked. The pressure of three hundred well-dressed bodies reaching for canapes and plastic cups of punch and coffee and wine was, bit by bit, nudging the long table closer to the bars of her enclosure. In just another moment…

  “I had my eye on that one!” Freddy the pig sounded outraged as he struggled to point with a stubby forelimb. “You can’t have it!”

  Martha seemed to understand. She showed the modified pig a sheepish, embarassed eye and extended her trunk toward him. Tom Cross shifted Freddy’s weight to one arm to free a hand and accept the small triangle of bread and shrimp salad. Then, as he tucked it into Freddy’s upright maw, the elephant dipped her trunk into the punchbowl.

  Some of the onlookers gasped in dismay, but Freddy laughed and Tom, his oldest friend, joined in. They were in the zoo’s new elephant hall. It held eight roomy cells, three of them occupied; the other elephants were outdoors. Toward the western end of the building was a temporary stage; behind the stage, the setting sun tinted the translucent wall a glowing orange-red. The occasion was a benefit concert intended to raise money to pay the last of the building’s costs. The stars of the concert would be Freddy and his wife, Porculata.

  Freddy sneezed and muttered, “The place stinks. Somebody should housebreak those monsters. Goddam perfumes, too. I’d stand it better if I had hands. Or even a trunk.” The pig wiggled a trotter. Once he had been a garbage disposal; the gengineers had shaped him so, to fit in the dark, cramped space beneath a kitchen sink, with no need for more than vestigial limbs. They had also played on him the cruel trick of intelligence, which Tom had discovered when he was a child of six. Later, the boy had given the genimal a freedom his body did not fit.

  Freddy’s wife was as crippled, and as intelligent, as he. “You and your wishes,” she said now. “They’re about as useless as, as these.” She waved her several legs in the air. There were more than four of them, all hollow tubes through which she could channel her breath. She was a living bagpipe.

  Tom’s wife, Muffy, reached out a hand to stroke Porculata’s tartan hide. “We’re working on it,” she said. In the crook of her other arm nestled Randy, the giant spider that at one time, when she had been an exotic dancer, had been her trademark prop. Behind her was a broad easel with a display of clippings about Freddy and Porculata and the musical performances that had made them both famous.

  A dignified sniff drew Tom’s and Muffy’s eyes toward a gentleman whose silvery grey coverall matched his swept-back hair. When he saw that he had their attention, he said, “A pig’s a pig, and they’ll stay that way. If God had intended…”

  “God!” Freddy snorted.

  “But BRA…” said Kimmer Peirce. Young and blonde, she stood beside her husband, Franklin, the balding curator of the art museum where the musical genimals lived. He was holding Porculata in his arms.

  At the interruptions, the sniffer muttered, “Animals!” and turned away. An older woman, her hair not quite as grey as his, made a face at his back. “The Bioform Regulatory Administration is dominated by the conservatives,” she said. Her dress coverall bore the emblem of the Endangered Species Replacement Program. “They don’t mind using gene replacement to turn people into animals. And we could go the other way, easy. The technology’s just the same. But no, that’s…”

  “We’ll persuade them, Calla,” said Muffy. Calla Laffiter was the director of the local office of the ESRP. “And then you can…”

  A gentle chime rang through the hall. “That’s our cue,” said Freddy. “Come on, let’s go!” As the crowd drifted toward the folding seats arrayed across the building’s floor, leaving the remaining canapes and punch to Martha, Franklin Peirce and Tom Cross carried their burdens toward the stage. To one side, a brass quintet was arranging sheet music on stands. In the center of the stage, illuminated by a single spotlight, gleamed a pair of chrome-plated support racks for the genimals. Behind them, the building’s wall glowed pink from the fading sunset.

  The sound of motorcycle engines penetrated the building’s walls a moment before the quintet began to play, but no one seemed to notice or to wonder what such antique vehicles should be doing in the pedestrian precincts of the zoo. They were too intent on the stirring brassiness of trumpets and trombones, the throaty
wailing of Porculata’s bagpiping, and the sheer virtuosity of Freddy’s scat-singing, which brought it all together. The audience was rapt.

  So too were the three pachyderms still in the building. Martha and her companions faced the stage head-on, swaying on their feet, their trunks curling, flexing. From time to time, one would raise its trunk forehead high and trumpet. Yet no member of the audience flinched or looked around. The voices of the elephants blended into the performance precisely as they should in that setting, precisely as if the score had called for them. The total effect was both weird and marvelous.

  Motorcycle engines roared again, closer now. The last glow of sunset cast shadows flickering on the wall behind the stage. The shadows loomed, larger, and yells interrupted the music. Shadow arms rose and fell, and the wall shook and boomed as it was struck.

  The music stopped. Someone shrieked, “Engineers!”

  A crudely shaped, heavy blade stabbed through the wall with the harsh hiss of parting leather. More blades expanded the single tear to a gaping rent. Yelling figures tumbled through, waving crude swords or machetes that in that frozen instant announced by curve and width and length their origins as ground-down automobile leaf springs. The invaders—unwashed, unshaven, red-eyed—wore blue coveralls with golden cogwheel patches. From their ears dangled brass springs and other bits of technological debris.

  The audience screamed as the Engineer terrorists charged. Wild swings of their swords knocked music stands off the stage and battered instruments into uselessness while the musicians scurried out of the way. Not all of them made it. One sword clove Porculata in two and sprayed blood across the stage. The pigs’ support racks toppled with metallic clangs. Freddy rolled under a chair and began to wail in terror and instant grief.

  The invaders stormed off the stage and into the audience, still swinging their swords. Muffy shrieked as one knocked Randy from her shoulder and stomped the spider into pulp. When she tried to grab the killer by one blood-spattered arm, reaching for his bearded face with clawlike fingers, another impaled her chest on a heavy staff. On the other end of the staff, a painted flag, its colors as black as Muffy’s hair, as red as her blood, said, “Machines, Not Genes!” When Tom shrieked as loudly as she and began to raise a chair above his head, a third terrorist buried a sword in his back.

  Bowels and bladders emptied in the reflexes of terror. Pungent odors competed with the coppery scent of blood but failed to win. Rivulets and floods spread across the floor, and the terrorists’ only casualty came when one slipped and fell. A concert-goer seized the man’s sword and thrust it through his throat. A moment later, he too was dead.

  The elephants trumpeted in alarm to match the humans’ screams. But when Martha tried to do something more by reaching through her bars to seize a grimy neck, a sword chopped through her trunk. Blood sprayed across the hall as she shrieked with pain and panic. Her companions echoed her, and the bars of their enclosures creaked and bent as they strove to come to her aid.

  Swords rose and fell. One terrorist cried, “Where’s that other pig?” Two or three thrust their blades between the bars and laughed as the elephants recoiled. Most ignored the animals. All seemed to relish the screams of the injured and dying humans.

  At last the siren calls of police Sparrowhawks resounded in the sky overhead. One of the Engineers seized a fistful of canapes from the still untoppled buffet table, and all turned to run. Seconds later, their motorcycles roared in flight.

  A single banner waved near the center of the elephant hall, its staff still embedded in Muffy’s chest. Around it sprawled a scene of carnage, of blood and moans and sobs and screams, both human and animal.

  On the stage, Freddy keened in anguished fear and loss, his gaze fixed on the body of his wife. “Porkchop!” he wailed. “Toommmyy!”

  The police arrived. With them came the medics, one of whom immediately slapped a sedative-secreting leech on Freddy’s neck.

  * * * *

  “Forty dead,” said Kimmer Peirce. Her eyes were hollow, her blonde hair disarrayed. It was the day after the Engineers’ attack on the concert, but she had neither slept nor used a comb. “Fifty more in the hospital.”

  Freddy stared at the familiar walls of his museum apartment, the mats and pillows, the tub, the fridge, the door to the attendant’s booth. The attendant was gone; Kimmer had banished her, insisting on taking over herself.

  They had brought him home while he was out. He knew that. He was nestled in familiar cushions, surrounded by familiar smells. But… “Porkchop?” he asked, hoping it had all been a nightmare.

  It had, but not in sleep. Kimmer nodded, squeezing his forelimbs just above the trotters. “She’s gone,” she said.

  “And Tommy?”

  Another nod, another squeeze. “And Muffy.” Kimmer’s eyes filled with tears; Muffy had been among her favorite people. “Randy, too.”

  Freddy emitted a shuddering sigh. “Litter. Shit.”

  She nodded again.

  “I’m glad the kids weren’t there.” Barnum and Baraboo, Ringling and Bailey. They could play in their ways as marvelously as their parents, but they had their own gigs elsewhere.

  “They’re on their way home.”

  “But they can’t talk.” All they could offer was their presence, and that was something. But they couldn’t talk. They just weren’t equipped for anything but music.

  “I can,” said Kimmer. “I’m here. You can talk to me.” She patted his side and tugged a pillow closer. “Franklin, too.”

  “He’s okay?”

  “Thank God.” She wiped at her tears. “I don’t know what I’d do if…”

  The door opened, and Franklin Peirce appeared as if they had summoned him. Beside him was Calla Laffiter, the local ESRP chief. She wore a coverall very like the one she had worn at the abortive concert, though it was distinctly plainer in cut.

  Franklin’s coverall was the light tan of his own position, but that was not all he wore. A heavy bandage decorated one forearm, and when Freddy began to open his mouth, he said, “Yeah, one of them nicked me before I could get out of the way. Reactionary bastards.” The Engineers had deified the machine. They wished, they said, to destroy the technology of gengineering and all that had sprung from it—Bioblimps and Roachsters and other vehicles, housing, new food crops, Freddies.

  “I wish,” said Kimmer. “I wish they’d stuck to litterbugs.” That was how the Engineers had begun, by turning their demonstrations into barbecues for the gengineered pigs that served society as street-cleaners. Then they had begun to attack gengineered vehicles. Now…

  “Still,” Franklin added. “There’s one good thing coming out of it.”

  His wife snorted, plainly saying that she doubted that was possible. “It can’t be good enough.”

  “There’s a lot of sympathy for you, Freddy. You’ve lost so much, and it’s in all the news. The zoo folks say they think even BRA will soften up a bit.”

  The pig closed his eyes. He sobbed aloud, and tears ran down his cheeks and neck; the gengineers had made him human in more than mere intelligence. “I wouldn’t trade,” he finally said. “No way. No way.”

  Kimmer squeezed his wrist again. Franklin sighed. “No, Freddy. But… compensation.”

  “It’s not worth it. It isn’t!”

  * * * *

  The press conference was being held in the museum’s basement auditorium. This was the same room in which Freddy and Porculata once, as musicians, had entertained their public. Their wooden support racks—not chromed, these—still stood on the right side of the stage. On the left, Kimmer Peirce occupied one end of a deeply cushioned sofa. Calla Laffiter was at the sofa’s other end. Between them sat a tall, slender man, round-faced and blunt-nosed. He had not yet been introduced.

  The front of the stage bore a podium festooned with microphones.
The first few rows of seats held two dozen reporters. From the ceiling hung several veedo cameras, crimson ready lights glowing, all aimed at the man behind the podium.

  Franklin Peirce was that man. “You know the background,” he was saying. “The Engineers have a lot of sympathizers. Many people yearn for the Good Old Days. They don’t like manure in the streets, or doing without their Roachster for weeks while it goes through its molt, or cleaning up leaves the size of bedsheets dropped by their bioform houses. They’ve heard stories of how neat and clean the streets were in the Age of Machines, of plug-in parts and care-free homes. They forget, if they ever knew, how foul the air was growing, how close we were to exhausting the fossil fuels and ores that made the machines possible, when the gengineers offered us an alternative. They gave us a way to raise everyone’s standard of living to what the Machine Age made possible only in a few nations, and then to keep it there.

  “It’s not really very surprising,” he went on. “Not surprising at all, that we should have the Engineers. Dissatisfaction is a basic human trait. It’s not something we can legislate out of existence. I doubt we could even gengineer it out of existence.” He paused to allow a murmur of laughter. “But they went too far when they attacked the concert.

  “Freddy was a pig. A pig with a human intelligence and human talents. He was, in fact, a human being stuck in a body designed for immobility. He might as well have been a quadriplegic. Certainly, he was just as handicapped. And he dared to wish for a body, a human body, a freedom that the gengineers had denied him. He dared to say that the technology exists, that a government program even encourages the use of gene replacement to turn human volunteers into members of endangered species.