Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  There were many surveillance and communications satellites and a number of space stations in orbit around the Earth and its moon. There were even two small LaGrangian habitats, hollow cylinders each holding several thousand technicians, engineers, and workers dedicated to building solar power and other satellites, sharing the lunar orbit 60 degrees ahead of and behind the moon. They had been named Hugin and Munin, as if the Man in the Moon were the Norse god Odin. The names had once belonged to the pair of ravens that flew around the world each day to keep Odin informed of all that happened.

  Probe Station was also in the moon’s orbit, but nowhere near a LaGrange point. As a result, it needed to expend relatively large amounts of reaction mass to hold its unstable niche. What justified the expense was that the LaGrange points were, though stable, too polluted with dust, gas, and debris, both natural and the products of the habitats’ activities, to permit Probe’s large telescopes to explore the cosmos effectively. The station also held labs for assorted other disciplines.

  Renny stood up, stretched, curled his tail over his rump, and put his forepaws on the edge of Frederick’s desk. “He makes enough money, doesn’t he?”

  “And no dependents,” said Frederick. “I wonder what he’s doing there.”

  “So call him.”

  “I will.” He tapped his keyboard, and the image on the screen was replaced with a specialized orbital communications directory. He chose a number and told the computer to dial it. After a pause while the call routed through a comsat to its destination, the four leaves that comprised the computer’s monitor lit up with a line-drawing of the satellite in space, its name spelled out across the bottom of the screen, and the StarBell logo. A moment later, the drawing was replaced by the computer-generated image of an exceedingly buxom redhead. With a few more taps, he put a duplicate of the image on the screen of the veedo unit on the shelf.

  “May I help you?” Frederick turned up the volume, identified himself aloud, and named the man he wished to speak with. Three seconds later, the image responded to his words by nodding and switching to an internal communications line. The office’s two active screens flickered simultaneously, and Frederick was looking at the face of a man whose heavy jaw, blade-like nose, and thick mat of iron-grey hair spoke of an ancestral blend of Scandinavian and Slav.

  “Dr. Hannoken?” Because he did not wish to wait upon the three-second time-delay before Hannoken could answer him, he immediately introduced himself. Then he laid one hand on Renny’s neck. The dog was still leaning over his desk. “Do you remember this genimal? He came out of your lab a few years ago.” Renny opened his mouth and panted doggily; his tail wagged eagerly.

  The camera that sent images from the office toward Probe Station was mounted inconspicuously in the veedo unit near the wall, and Hannoken’s image on the veedo screen aimed the gengineer’s broad smile accurately toward the two faces leaning over Frederick’s desk. The image nearer their faces, because its viewpoint was not the same as the camera’s, seemed subtly askew.

  In a moment, Hannoken added to his smile, “Of course I do, Mr. Suida. We called you Renny, didn’t we? Rin-tin-tin. You’re looking well.”

  “But maybe not for much longer,” said Frederick. He explained the situation. “To save him, we need to be able to prove he’s not a threat to the public. I understand you removed his aggressive instincts, and I’d like you to come to Earth long enough to testify to that effect.”

  The distinguished face fell as Hannoken shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said. “A dog’s aggressive behavior is linked to its senses of territoriality and hierarchy and, yes, we weakened those senses. Renny isn’t very turf-conscious, and he won’t fight to be top dog. But any animal has to be able to defend itself and those it cares about. And he will certainly fight if he feels threatened.”

  Frederick hoped that Hannoken’s words would make as much sense to the judge as they did to him. “Then there’s no danger that he would attack people on the street.”

  “Not unless someone threatens him. You say he was a seeing-eye dog? Or if they threatened his employer. A mugger, say.”

  “PETA.” Renny’s rough voice made the comment sound like a curse.

  “They’re certainly a threat,” said Frederick, glancing at the dog. He sighed. Their lawyers might well point that out and claim the dog could attack them right there in the courtroom. “The court date,” he added. “It’s…”

  But Hannoken was already shaking his head. “No. I’m sorry, but no. I came up here to get away from the Engineers and their craziness. They were picketing the lab, breaking in and wrecking equipment, ‘liberating’ our research animals. It was only a matter of time before something like that riot…” He broke off, paused for a moment while he seemed to scan what he could see in the screen before him. His eyebrows thickened as his face turned serious. “That was horrible, horrible. Obviously, you’re all right. And Renny. But… Is that a refugee behind you? Or…?”

  Frederick turned to see Donna Rose still in her tub, leaves open, staring out the window. She did not seem to be paying any attention. “Yes,” he said. “She didn’t have any place to go.”

  Hannoken sighed. “We don’t have any bots up here. And I’d love to get her into my lab. Her genetic structure must be fascinating.”

  Frederick interrupted as best he could in the face of the three-second time delay. “I didn’t realize there was any genetic research at Probe.”

  Hannoken shrugged. “If I’d stayed down there, I’d eventually have had to give it up completely, that or go into hiding. Here, at least, there’s no harassment. Though it’s barely a hobby. They made me Director of the station, and that keeps me too busy.” He shook his head. “Too busy for your court hearing.”

  The dog growled. His tail stopped moving.

  Hannoken shrugged again and looked aside as if he could not stand to meet the German shepherd’s large, dark eyes, nor to think that he had been quite right to say that the dog could be aggressive when threatened. “I’m not coming back.”

  “Not even…”

  “No. Not even to save him.”

  Frederick knew, and he knew that Hannoken knew, that a subpoena would be useless. The distances and the times and the expense of travel were so great that the orbital community was in many ways like an independent foreign nation. Congress had not yet recognized this fact of modern life, but the courts had. They usually refused to subpoena orbital workers, knowing that such orders could all too easily be ignored.

  The silence of thought stretched well beyond the time delay inherent in any conversation across a a third of a million kilometers. Finally, Frederick said, “Is there anyone else?”

  “No. Not that I know of. But…” Hannoken turned back toward the camera that captured his image for the veedo set. “Perhaps… He’d be safe if you could send him here, wouldn’t he?”

  * * * *

  “What do you think, Bert?” Frederick turned the mug of coffee in his hand. For half an hour after his talk with Hannoken, he had paced his office, muttering about the selfishness of human beings. Renny had chimed in from time to time. Donna Rose had been silent, her mind dwelling on her own tragedy.

  Eventually, he had closed his eyes and dozed for a few minutes. Then, feeling somewhat refreshed, he had left the room to the bot and the dog, locking them in while he walked down the hall to Berut Amoun’s office. The room was identical to his own, with a veedo unit on a shelf and a bioform computer by the desk. There was even a snackbush by the window, though this one produced clusters of crunchy, salty twigs, as much like potato sticks as pretzels.

  “Forget it,” said Amoun. “PETA would scream like hell. And the court would never go for it.”

  “Then he’s doomed.”

  “You knew that already.”

  Frederick shook his head. “No!” That was
, he thought, the whole point of his assignment: to defend the genimal, to find some way to ward off the doom PETA wished for him. He had thought that meant fighting PETA in court, and he had been optimistic. But then Hannoken had offered a far surer path to safety, even as his refusal to testify made the court fight seem far less promising.

  “Yes. With the mood the world is in right now…”

  “He said he could put through a requisition for an experimental animal. Route it here instead of NSF’s purchasing department. Then we take it as approved and authorized and ship him the only animal we have. He called it creative mix-up, and he thought PETA wouldn’t mind it.”

  “Maybe not. But what the hell would they do with him?” Both men knew that Renny had no training for space, and without hands, even with training, there couldn’t be much for him to do. And space had little tolerance for idlers or parasites.

  “The only pets they have up there are little guys,” said Amoun. Usually that meant tropical fish. Mice were rare, said the Sunday supplements. So were gerbils and hamsters and crickets. They were all small enough, and they could all be kept in small cages that did not get in the way in cramped quarters. But if they got loose, they could all too easily get into crucial equipment and short out circuitry, chew wires, or plug small ducts.

  “Or they have roots.” The favorite plant-pets were goldfish bushes and pussy willows.

  “Renny’s too smart to be a pet,” said Amoun. “He’s also too big, and too mobile. They’ll have to move him to a habitat.” The two LaGrangian habitats raised the meat and milk and eggs that made their people the envy of the other satellites from plants, not animals, but they did have room.

  “He needs more than room,” said Frederick. Only after he had hung up on Hannoken had he thought to ask himself just how happy Renny would be on Probe Station. He would be alive, with no threat hanging over him. But he would be useless, and he, as much as any human being, prided himself on being useful to the society of which he was a part. Frederick did not think he would be happy as a pet.

  When he returned to his office, he found Donna Rose out of her tub and pacing about the office. Renny greeted him with, “Hannoken called back. She didn’t have any trouble at all with the download, and…” The dog was behind the man, sounding surprised, using his nose to push him toward the desk, where the computer’s leafy screen displayed a short block of text:

  “Yes, we can do it,” Hannoken had written. “We have a group that has been working on a new space drive. They’ll be ready soon for a test flight, and they’ll need a test pilot. They have a human volunteer already. But a dog would make a perfect copilot. They said it would remind everyone of the Russian Laika that was the first living thing to leave the Earth back in the 1950s. And it even makes sense to route the requisition through BRA, since there is a possibility that the new drive may change living material in unforeseen ways.”

  “Sounds great, doesn’t it?” said Renny. “I’ve always wanted to be a rocket jockey.”

  “Laika died,” said Frederick as he erased Hannoken’s message. The thought made him feel surprisingly apprehensive. He had not known Renny long, but he had become quite attached to him.

  “But this way I get to be a rocket jockey first. If I stay here…”

  No one said that if he stayed on Earth PETA or the Engineers would surely kill him, legally or illegally. There did not seem to be any truly desirable choices among his possible futures.

  Frederick used his keyboard to put through another call to Hannoken. Once the orbiting gengineer was on both computer and veedo screens, he said simply, “Huh?”

  Three seconds later, Hannoken laughed, set aside the floppy-card in his hand, and said, “What do you mean, ‘Huh’?”

  “A new drive?” said Frederick. “I haven’t heard…”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Hannoken with a grin. “I hope. We’ve kept this Q-drive quiet, though they tell me it should simplify things a bit.” Frederick was not surprised when the other man failed to go into detail. Defense departments and intelligence agencies played a much smaller role in the world than once they had, but they still existed, and they still coveted technological monopolies. There was no telling who might be eavesdropping on the communications signals from a known research satellite. “Sound good?”

  As they spoke, Donna Rose stepped back into her pot of dirt, spread just the tips of her leaves to the sun, touched a honeysuckle leaf with one hand, and assumed a thoughtful look. Frederick glanced toward her but did not wonder what she was doing. Instead, he asked Hannoken what he had meant when he said the drive could change living tissue.

  The other man shrugged lightly and said, “I don’t think it’s serious. As the Station chief, I have to know about any project like this. But I’m a biologist, too, and that got me involved a little deeper, as a consultant.” He hesitated before continuing. “Nobody really understands how the biohazard would work. Some of us don’t even think it’s all that serious a risk. I don’t.”

  “But some do,” said Renny. As before, he was leaning on Frederick’s desk, staring intently at the man who had made him what he was but would not come to Earth to help him now. His tail was twitching slightly, as if he were not sure how to feel toward the man.

  Hannoken stared out of the screens at the dog, not at Frederick. “That’s right,” he said. “Just as some physicists thought the first nuclear tests a century and a half ago might trigger a planetary chain reaction. But they tried the experiment anyway. It was the only answer, the only way to find out who was right.”

  “But the risk…!” cried Donna Rose from her place by the window.

  After the inevitable pause, Hannoken shifted his gaze toward her. “Yes,” he said. “But the ones in charge thought the pessimists were wrong.”

  “Couldn’t they have done it in space?” asked Renny.

  Frederick was the first of the two men to shake his head and say, “Not then. No rockets, no space travel.” Then Hannoken continued with, “That was even before Sputnik. Though it would have been a good thing if they had been out here like us, eh?”

  “And not down here.” Donna Rose was withdrawing her roots from the soil and stepping back onto the carpet.

  When Hannoken’s eyes turned back toward Renny, the genimal said, “I’m willing.” When Frederick grunted as if in surprise, the dog glanced in his direction and added, “I haven’t got much to lose, Freddy. Have I?”

  “You don’t have to,” said Hannoken. “Remember, we do have that human volunteer.”

  Frederick felt a sudden wave of relief as he guessed that much of the message Hannoken had left on his screen must have been meant for other eyes than his, eavesdroppers, chasers of those records that had once, before computers achieved their omnipresence, been called paper trails.

  Renny showed his teeth in a doggy grin. “You need to justify that requisition, right?” Without waiting for Hannoken’s agreeing nod, he said, “And if it’ll get me away from PETA, I’ll do anything.”

  After Hannoken’s image had blinked off the office’s two screens, Frederick leaned over his desk, his hands bracing his head at the temples. What was he getting himself into? He would save Renny from PETA, yes. But his BRA superiors would have words for him, he was sure. He might save Renny only at the cost of his own pigskin hide.

  Was the saving worth its price? Should he, perhaps, ignore the sneaky, under-handed, round-about solution to Renny’s problem, that “creative mix-up” that Alvar Hannoken had offered him? The philosophers claimed that doing wrong for the sake of good never worked. Saving Renny was good. Of course it was. But saving him in this way, by subterfuge and lies and misdirection? Was there any other way?

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. Slowly, he let go of his head and turned. Donna Rose stood beside him now, gazing at him sympathetically. Automatically, he covered her hand with his ow
n and squeezed lightly.

  “Can I go too?” she asked.

  Chapter Six

  Sam Nickers stood on the crest of a small rise in the city park, his hands deep in the pockets of the coat he had put on over his coverall. The sky was overcast this evening. The breeze was unseasonably chill on his neck and face.

  “Sheila,” he said. She was beside him, wearing a long cloak. Ahead and to either side, the landscape of lawn and thicket and flowerbed and path was dotted by other couples, singletons, and small groups. The tennis courts were quiet, and no one at all was on the softball field. All were there to confirm the news reports that the park was open once more, the damage to the bot dorm had been repaired, and the bots were back in their home. Some of the watchers were surely Engineers; perhaps they had even been part of the murderous mob that had done the damage three days before, come to feed their dissatisfaction with the temporariness of their impact. Some, like the Nickers, fed fears of another sort. Only the honey-bums lurking in the shadows where clumps of trees struggled to emerge from tangles of honeysuckle did not seem to care.

  “Look at the nursery,” he said, pointing. They had been here before, in better times, when there had been neat rows of infant bots, rooted in the rich soil near the little duck pond, unable to move until their legs had shaped within their trunks and their nervous systems had matured enough to command their muscles. Until the age of two, they were little more than plants.

  Sheila’s breath caught in her throat as she said, “There were hundreds of them.” The bots were fertile creatures, as they needed to be to maintain their numbers. Few lived more than a decade.

  “And now… A dozen.” They had not been transplanted to some more sheltered garden. The small stumps still jutted from the ground.

  She shuddered. “It looks like a prison camp.” The guards were armed. The honeysuckle had been cleared from the ghetto border, leaving a strip of bare earth beside the fence. In that strip, mounds of dirt marked where dead honey-bums, rioters, and bots had been buried. The fence itself was higher, though admittedly the barbed-wire top angled outward, not inward. Most ominous of all, the bots within the fence seemed wilted. They milled about and chatted as they always had, but their movements seemed subdued, their voices were quieter, and there was no sound of song. Their leaves spread as before to the sun but seemed to remain closer to their trunks, as if in apprehension.