Frederick had known he could never keep Renny. He had known that if PETA won its lawsuit, the court decision would take him away, put him away; if PETA lost, he would go off on his own. Either way, the genimal would be gone. He wasn’t a pet. But Frederick had grown used to having Renny around. He missed him already.
Somewhat to his surprise, he was realizing that he missed Donna Rose as well. He hadn’t known her as long, but she was attractive and sympathetic. And she aroused his own sympathy, just as did Renny. He supposed his history must have something to do with that. He too had been persecuted, had lost friends and loved ones, had…
“Mr. Suida?” He had not heard his office door open, but the fact that there had been no knock was enough to tell him who his visitor was. He did not need her voice.
“Dr. Breger.” He turned toward the BRA Assistant Director. Her coverall was as metallic in its finish as it had been the other day, though it was now bronze, not silver. With her dark skin, she looked almost robotically efficient. Her expression was a narrow, tight-lipped smile, almost like that of a mother amused by her child’s mischief.
“What have you done now, Frederick?” she asked. As the door clicked behind her, she pointed at Frederick’s computer screen. “Didn’t you know the system would flag that sort of expenditure? It was the first thing on my screen when I got back after this morning’s policy meeting.”
He had forgotten, but what could he say other than what he had rehearsed to himself a dozen times already? Deliberately, he shrugged. “I didn’t think there would be any problem.”
“But there is.” Breger leaned over his desk, supporting her weight on her hands. She was precisely as intimidating as she intended to be, although the touch of red in Frederick’s cheeks came not from that, but from the narrow gape of her coverall and what it showed. “Tell me about it.”
“They called yesterday to say they had a new spacedrive that might do funny things to living matter…”
“What sort of funny things?”
“I don’t know. They didn’t say. But apparently they don’t want to take a chance on a human test pilot.” He was careful to look her in the eye as he lied. “They wanted an animal.”
“And you had one.”
He nodded jerkily. “I suggested they go through NSF, but they said the biological effects…”
Now it was the Assistant Director’s turn to nod. “Made us seem more appropriate.” At the same time, she relaxed, straightened from her dominating stoop, and walked around his desk to stand beside him. “I suppose you’re right.”
“And then this morning…” He gestured at his screen. “There it was. So I went ahead and approved it. And bought the tickets.”
She stared at him. “And the bot ‘handler’?”
This, he thought, was the weakest point. “It’s a long trip, and I thought the crews wouldn’t have much experience with animals.” He shrugged again. “I decided to send someone to look after him.”
Her stare did not relax. “Is she coming back, Frederick?”
He shifted awkwardly in his seat and added, “She’s a cleaner. Part of the night crew.” He looked away, toward the window, and knew she was noticing the empty tub of dirt. “I took her in after the Engineers trashed her dorm.”
The Assistant Director grunted and nodded as if she understood what had moved him. “So you’ve moved two out of harm’s way,” she said thoughtfully. “I wish I could think it would make much difference.” But then she scowled, her smile vanishing as if it had never been, even in the rudimentary form he recalled. “Do you realize what a mechin’ mess you’ve made?”
The question was not one that needed an answer. Frederick sat rigidly still and said nothing.
Breger groaned theatrically. “There are channels, you know. It’s not your place to approve such things.” She spun away from him, clutched her hands behind her back, and strode to the window. “Honeysuckle!” She bent, yanked the vine from the dirt it had claimed and hurled it out the window. “You’ve made us all look like mentally defective twits who care nothing at all for public opinion. PETA will get its judgment quite automatically, just as soon as the judge finds out. We—or you, just you, I hope—will be up for contempt of court and favoritism and conflict of interest. The Engineers will be on the sidewalk down there, screaming for your blood.”
She spun. “Why?” She glared. After a moment, she said, “I know why. Judgment or no judgment, the dog is safe. But you, sir, are not. You’re…”
“Fired?” Frederick’s voice shook. He hadn’t expected this severe a reaction, though he was already telling himself he should have.
“No.” Breger let out a gusty sigh. “No, dammit. You’re suspended, with pay, until we find out… If I’m right, we’ll have to be able to show we’ve taken steps. Then we’ll schedule the disciplinary hearing.” She moved toward the door. When her hand was on the knob, she turned toward him once more. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe we can convince the judge to say experimentation is a more useful form of disposal than execution, that by shipping Renny off in this way, we have capitulated in a way that he can simply rubber-stamp. But I doubt it. PETA would certainly object.” She shook her head. “We all have our natural sympathies. I should have known yours would make trouble.”
* * * *
He was alone again. Staring at the tub of dirt, empty now of honeysuckle though the window was still open and surely the vine would invade again. Staring at the carpet, the veedo, the requisition still on the computer screen. Feeling sorry for himself. He had blown it. Disgraced himself. Meched himself out of his job. Yet he did not feel that he had done the wrong thing.
What now? he asked himself. And then he realized. Breger had said nothing about canceling the tickets. She could have. Renny and Donna Rose would still be in the airport, waiting to board their spaceplane. So she must be going to let him get away with it. She too had her natural sympathies, and if she couldn’t bring herself to act on them, she could let him. PETA’s lawsuit would be moot, for Renny would be safely out of reach. So, for that matter, would be Donna Rose, though Breger had hardly reacted when he had explained who the bot was. And all the blame was his. He guessed that she would simply throw him to the wolves. A scapegoat. Scapepig. He shouldn’t feel surprised, though he did.
But if she hadn’t canceled the tickets… He turned to his bioform computer, tapped the sensitive spots on the specialized leaf that served as the keyboard, and… The tickets were still good. Donna Rose was still on the passenger roster, Renny still listed among the cargo. And there were empty seats on the spaceplane.
* * * *
The cab was a Yellow Hopper, a gengineered version of a grasshopper. It had never succeeded as a civilian vehicle because, even though the city’s streets were maintained far better than they had been in the Machine Age, it jounced constantly, as if the wheels it didn’t have were slamming in and out of potholes. Frederick gritted his teeth against the rattling gait, clung to the strap that hung from the wall of the passenger compartment, and watched the streets. Honey-bums peeked from their sheltering vines. Blue-clad Engineers stared insolently at bioform vehicles and modified humans and bots. A mother stood by, smiling, a small dog straining at a leash, while her child used a small metal shovel to pick up a lump of dog excrement and hurl it at a Mack.
Frederick shuddered. He had done the right thing. This city, this country, this world was no place for a sensitive, intelligent being, genimal or bot or, indeed, even human. He had done it again when, before leaving his office for what might well be the last time, he had used his computer to spend most of his savings on a third, round-trip ticket on the afternoon spaceplane to orbit.
The Hopper stopped at the door to his apartment building. “Wait,” he told the driver. Then he let himself in and packed a small bag. After a moment’s hesitation, he removed from the wall three holos
, one of his late mate, Porculata, the living bagpipe, one of their children, and one of his old friend, Tom Cross, and his wife, Muffy. He tucked them into the center of the bag. Then he carefully watered his two house plants, a traditional coleus and a goldfish bush. He thought it might well be a futile gesture—he expected to return, but he had no idea whether it would be in hours, days, or weeks, by which time the plants would be withered sticks and dust. But he could not simply abandon a living thing.
“The airport.”
The cabby, though he wore the colorful headwrap of some Southeast Asian tribesman, was clearly Caucasian. For a moment, Frederick wondered whether he had been adopted by the descendants of immigrants, his ancestors included Asians, or emigrants to Asia, or he just thought the head-dress handsome. But he did not say anything after giving his simple instruction, and the cabby said nothing in return. The Hopper lurched through the city streets toward the greenways that led toward the suburbs and the airport, and Frederick stared glumly out the vehicle’s window.
Frederick scowled as a trio of Roadrunners sped past the cab, honking, their red-clad riders bent low over their necks. When he had been a garbage disposal, when Tom had been a child, long before he had learned what pain meant, there had still been a few internal combustion automobiles and trucks on the roads, antiques, status symbols. Now they remained in storage, in museums, in the garages of collectors, emerging only for parades and similar special occasions. Motorcycles had remained in use the longest, for they had appealed to the Engineers despite the high cost of their fuel and the difficulty of finding parts except by cannibalizing other machines. They had succumbed within just the last few years. Now the Engineers used bicycles or took the Bernies.
He peered at the sky. To one side, a column of smoke marked a fire. He wondered if the Engineers had torched a house. Ahead, a web of contrails radiated from the airport. Jetliners—Alitalia Cardinals, American Eagles, China Air Juncos, each identifiable by coloring or wing configuration—circled, waiting for their turns to land. Outlying hangars began to show beside the road, and he could see jets on the ground, with workers cleaning and restocking the passenger or cargo pods strapped to their backs and mechanics working over the engines strapped to the roots of their tails. The engines were essential because the great birds could never fly under muscle power alone. The advantage of gengineering was that it made the jets largely self-manufacturing, though they needed skeletal reinforcements, and if their engines failed, the muscles could provide at least some emergency control.
A distant roar and an arrow-straight contrail, growing louder, closer, faster than any gengineered jetliner could possibly manage, even with strap-on assistance, marked the arrival of a spaceplane from orbit. “There,” said Frederick. “The Yonder terminal.”
It was commonplace to find Engineers picketing the airline terminals with their “MACHINES NOT GENES” signs. Frederick had not expected to find them also protesting at the gateway to space, holding signs that said “UNFAIR” and “BRING THE MACHINES HOME.” Here if anywhere the Machine Age still lived in all its most glorious aspects. Rockets, spaceplanes, satellites, habitats, Moonbases. All were as mechanical as could be, as dependent on machines, as rejecting of bioforms as any Engineer could wish.
Nor had he expected to see an Engineer bent over a sheet of cardboard flattened on the sidewalk. He was carefully painting a new sign. A finished version leaned against a pillar nearby. It read, “KEEP SPACE CLEAN. NO BOTS.” Frederick told himself that Donna Rose must have been noticed.
The Engineers, he thought, did not appreciate how much of the world around them was still based on mechanism. There were still electronic computers, engines for Bioblimps and jets, strap-on passenger and cargo pods, and a thousand other things. The bioforms had been developed to fill all the roles they could, to replace mechanical devices wherever that was possible and thus to ease the strain on energy and mineral resources. One result had been that in many respects, mechanical technology had stagnated. Innovation had followed the bioforms and left spaceplanes and their kin much as they had been a century before.
Yet bioforms could not do everything; space technology was simply the most blatant testimonial to that fact. Certainly bioforms were not suited to the harsh environment of space, airless, subject to extremes of heat and cold and solar radiation. Frederick did not think the pattern would ever change, nor would it need to, for the space environment, though harsh, held all the resources a mechanical technology needed or could use. It also held plenty of room for mechanical innovations.
Yet that only taunted the Engineers, as if they were children above whose heads someone dangled candy. The Machine Age wasn’t dead, but it was definitely eclipsed by the dominant technology of gengineering. The machines remained gloriously strong only where they were far out of the Engineers’ reach, in space. And they would remain out of reach as long as the Engineers continued to echo the religious fundamentalists of another age who had refused to accept the discoveries of science. Their attitudes were such that no space-related operation would hire them. Their lack of tolerance for the new disqualified them for the very world they craved.
The woman at the ticket counter wore a jet black coverall with silver piping and a golden sunburst above her left breast. When he handed her his National Identification Card, she slipped it into the slot of an electronic card drive much like that of the bioform floppy reader in his office computer. The NIDC or niddic carried embedded in its magnetic surface all the data it needed to serve as both a passport and a checkbook; bills remained in use only for smaller purchases and bribes such as he had had to offer Donna Rose’s foreman.
When the ticket clerk eyed him carefully, he knew that she was comparing his face with the picture the niddic had thrown onto the screen of her terminal. When she placed a form on the pressure-sensitive surface of the counter and said, “Sign here,” he knew her computer was comparing his signature with that recorded in the niddic.
He accepted his ticket and checked his bag. “Gate Seventeen,” the clerk said. “It takes off in twenty minutes.”
The Yonder terminal jutted farther from the main building than any other, and Gate Seventeen was at its far end. He walked, following the corridor through weapon scanners and bomb sniffers and past plate glass windows that offered views of feathered jetliners being fueled from truck trailers filled with meat gengineered to grow on sewage, of litterbugs cleaning up the jets’ waste deposits, of luggage carts drawn by small Macks to and from the jets’ cargo compartments. Only when he was passing Gate Twelve did he glimpse the spaceplane that was his destination, its needle-like prow stabbing the sky above the runway. As he drew closer, he could see more of its snow-white ceramic-coated metal hull, gleaming in the sun, long enough and high enough to dwarf any of the flying genimals he had passed already.
A single black-clad attendant stood by the door to the spaceplane’s boarding ramp, glancing at his watch. Beyond him, Frederick could see a single pair of legs climbing toward the plane’s entrance hatch. “You’re the last,” said the attendant. “Just in time.”
As soon as Frederick entered the surprisingly small passenger cabin—most of the spaceplane’s bulk was devoted to fuel tanks—he spotted Donna Rose’s distinctive yellow blossoms. The sight of an empty seat beside her tempted him to smile, but when he realized that the seats in front of and behind her were also empty, he scowled instead. The plane was by no means full, but still, there were no other clusters of empty seats as large. He hoped that most of the passengers were grounders on business trips; he expected more tolerance of habitat and station residents. Under his breath, he muttered, “Bigots!”
He slipped into the seat beside the bot just as, behind him, the hatch chunked closed and, ahead of him, the “Fasten Seat Belts” signs above all the seats came on.
“Mr. Suida!” she said. The tips of the long leaves that sheathed her chest drew away from her skin for
just a moment.
“Frederick,” he answered. “Call me that, please. Or even Freddy.”
“But…”
“They caught me,” he explained. “The boss got pissed when she found out what I’d done. And then she kicked me out, at least temporarily. So here I am.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “I mean…” She laughed awkwardly and looked away. “Not that you’re fired, Frederick. That you’re…”
“Here?” Frederick allowed himself a small smile, the first in longer than he wished to remember that had not been a purely mechanical social gesture, not that there had been many even of those. “So I am. That’s what I said. I’ve always wanted to visit a station.”
The spaceplane’s engines rumbled, and the great vehicle began to move away from the terminal. In the reflections on the terminal’s vast windows, Frederick got his first glimpse of the plane’s narrow, swept-back wings.
She was looking at him once more. “I was confused,” she said. “It took forever to find the terminal. I’ve never been here before.”
“But you made it,” he said. “That’s what counts.” He hesitated, hoping that she would not take his next words as insulting her competence. “Where’s Renny?”
“He’s okay,” she said. “They said they’d put his carrier in the warm hold.” Now it was her turn to hesitate. “I’m glad you’re here,” she finally added. “I was lonely.”
“And so am I.” The spaceplane swung into position at the end of its assigned runway, the engine roar grew so loud that speech was impossible, and thrust pressed them into the backs of their seats as they began to move. Donna Rose clutched the arm of the seatrest between them with one hand. He laid his own hand over hers, yawned, and closed his eyes.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 74
