Sheila stopped his words with a touch upon his arm. “No,” she said. “Not painless. Look.”
They both looked, watching, staring, and they saw the children’s faces contort, some only lightly, as if they suffered a headache, some in agony, as if some brute were pummeling their naked brains with clubs.
“Oh, stop!” cried Sheila. Her eyes were full of tears. But there was no response. The teacher did not seem to hear.
Fortunately, the lesson did not last long. Mary Gold withdrew her roots from the soil, gasped, sighed, and said, “You see?”
They saw. The children too were gasping. Some were sobbing, quietly or not. All were pale and sweating.
They also saw that Mary Gold hated what she had to do to her young charges. That it was necessary was no consolation.
“The brain,” said the teacher. “It does not store information in any organized way. I can send what I know to the honeysuckle, but it goes as a jumble, and it reaches them”—a nod indicated her students—”in the same way. The pain is worst for those who cannot tolerate knowledge without understanding.”
Sam shook his head in sympathy. “And those who are comfortable with rote learning feel the least pain?”
She nodded sadly. “Many of them,” she said. “They learn quite well, but…” The tips of the leaves that embraced her torso unfurled to reveal the upper curves of her quite human bosom. “We need understanding, the ability to use knowledge creatively, to build. Those who cannot think that well become the menials.” She hesitated, facing her suffering class, and added, “And yes, sometimes they catch on late.”
Then she left them, moving among her students, speaking soft words of empathy—once, when she was young, she had gone through the same ordeal herself—touching, hugging, wiping at tears, comforting. She paid the most attention to those who seemed to be in the greatest pain.
Eventually, she returned to the head of the classroom. “That was,” she said to the Nickers. “What I just gave them was everything I know about our bioform computers. Would you like to ask some questions? To see how much got through?”
Sam accepted the gauntlet and asked how the bioforms could possibly process information. Hands waved. He picked one. And the answer was that in their stems and roots, bioform computers had nerve cells based in part on those of animals. How did they make pictures on their four-leaf screens? Single cells, glowing with bioluminescence or, in some models, darkening with pigment, formed single pixels. The disk drives? That was simple; the sensors were single cells containing grains of magnetite, genetics courtesy of certain bacteria which could orient on the Earth’s magnetic field. Could a bioform computer’s roots interface with those of the honeysuckle vines the way their own did?
No hands rose into the air for that one. The young faces, perplexed, turned toward the teacher who had not given them that bit of information, of understanding, who had not known the answer. In reply, she shrugged in quite a human way and said, “We can find out. Let’s go down the hall.”
They soon found an apartment with a computer rooted not in a pot but in the soil that covered the floor. A waterproof box stood beside the card drive, both beneath a small canopy that shielded the floppies from the showers that periodically must descend from the pipes overhead. Mary Gold sank her roots into the dirt, closed her eyes, and laid a contemplative expression across her face. On the other side of the computer, one of the students did the same.
Mary Gold’s eyes snapped open. “Jackie Thyme! Not yet!” There was a pause, and then, though the child had said nothing aloud, she said, “Why not? A memory dump might burn out your mind… But you’re doing it, aren’t you? You really are.”
Sam sat down in front of the bioform’s keyboard and quickly found the commands that could let him route information to and from the computer’s roots. He then used the bioform to ask Mary Gold, root to root, for a small sample lesson.
Her eyes snapped open when she realized how he had spoken to her, but she said nothing. Wordlessly, she obliged, and the computer had surprisingly little trouble accepting her memories of growing up in a dormitory nursery into its memory. Its designers had long ago solved the problem of translating the language of neurons into that of human language for presentation on a screen or transfer to an electronic machine. And if the resulting computer file was precisely as jumbled a mess as Mary Gold had indicated earlier, the necessary links were indicated within the morass, and Sam was able to use a standard utility to rearrange and simplify, to impose some order. When he was done, he sent the file to Jackie Thyme.
The child winced at the onset of the transmission, but as soon as it was done, she smiled and said, “That was fast. And a little smoother.”
“It’s just as you told us,” Sam said to Mary Gold. “You can progress much faster in your own way than you ever could in the public schools. And of course, you have to, with your lives as short as they are. But you could progress even faster. You’ve been ignoring pedagogy.”
When the bot looked puzzled, Sheila Nickers said, “I think I know what he means. Any textbook, whatever its form—paper book, computer file, or bot brain—should move from the simple basics to the complexities.”
“That’s all I did,” said Sam. “I organized the material. Put it in sequence. And I can do it better. Some of it Sheila can do better yet. And we can record the lessons.”
* * * *
The Engineers had crossed the street. Now they paced back and forth on the sidewalk before the building’s entrance. They carried signs emblazoned with their standard invective. They harangued the passersby who crossed the street to avoid them. They spat on bots who dared to leave or enter their home.
Inside, Sam and Sheila Nickers struggled with the bioform computer that had been assigned to their efforts. They adapted indexing and sorting and organizing routines devised over more than a century of computer experience. They learned that the mind embedded its own organizational links within its memory structure and that though those links could not necessarily be passed directly to another mind, they could be exploited to organize the material of any lesson. They learned what speed worked best for transmission to a student’s mind.
For half of each day, Mary Gold stood by, her roots embedded in the soil, her class assigned to entertain itself. On the other side of the computer stood Jackie Thyme. Their jobs were to test whatever the Nickers could persuade the machine to do.
And finally…
Sam and Sheila were walking barefoot down the hall. “Jackie,” said Sheila. “She said that last was the smoothest ever. The merest twinge of headache. Very short recovery time. Mary Gold said that she could give twice, three times, as many lessons in a day.”
“We’re ready,” Sam agreed. “Our new job didn’t last very long, did it?” The door to their apartment stood open before them. On a small table just inside, the bot who handled that chore had dropped their mail. Sam began to sort it through.
Sheila laughed. “We’re not done. Mary Gold will record her lessons on the floppies, and we will collect lessons from all those bots who lack the talent to shape their memories even as much as she used to do.” When Sam looked puzzled, she added, “Most bots, she told me, have such jumbled memories that all they can give students is agony. Good teachers are rare.”
“Look at this.” He held out a sheet of paper much like those they had seen before. It was hate and ugliness. It named them horrors, damned them to eternal flame, promised doom.
“We will!” said Sheila. “We will do good! We will make it easier and faster for them to educate their children. We will make that education better, deeper, broader. We are not what the Engineers call us with their twisted minds!”
They abandoned the mail, moved deeper into their apartment, and saw the blinking light by which their phone announced a waiting message. When Sheila triggered the playback, she blanched.
Alice Belle had entered the apartment behind them. When Sam heard her soft step and turned, she waved that hateful piece of paper, or one just like it, and gestured toward the phone. “We,” she said. “We’re getting them too. It’s not just you.”
* * * *
The bullhorns woke them.
“FRANKENSTEINS!” someone was screaming. “MONSTERS! Unholy prideful gengineers have tampered with life. BOTS are their blasphemous offspring, horned and forktailed fruit of their rotted loins! THIS IS THEIR DEN!”
“Oh, no,” moaned Sam. “Oh, Jesus, no.” He shuddered with rage, with outrage, with sudden fear.
“THIS IS THEIR DEN!” the strident scream repeated. “Where human Judases have joined them. Greenskins, yes. But they were human once. Now they have betrayed their kind. They have betrayed US. They have betrayed all humans. And they have done it twice. Once by letting the unholy gengineers pollute their very genes! And once by going over to the BOTS!”
Sheila gripped his hand so tightly that he knew that if he were not one of those greenskins about which the Engineers were raving his skin surely would have blanched. “They didn’t do enough already?” she asked the air. She too was shuddering. “The mail wasn’t enough? The phone calls? The signs on our door? Getting kicked out of…”
“GOD ONLY KNOWS WHAT THEY DO IN THERE! They won’t let us in. But God DOES know! And He knows it IS abomination!”
The sound of sirens growing nearer filled the silence left when the ranting Engineer paused for breath.
“Someone called,” said Sam with a sigh of relief. “One of the bots, or a neighbor.” It didn’t matter who. It mattered only that blessed silence, peace, would return, for a while. That the mob would not storm the building to stamp out abomination. That the pogrom would not—not yet—begin.
He wished there were something he could do.
Chapter Eleven
Like most people on Probe Station, Lois McAlois had a tiny box of an apartment just large enough for her bed to fold down and leave a narrow aisle. Unlike most of the Station’s residents, she lived in the low-gee zone. She also had more than enough room in her bed. The missing two-thirds of her legs left a broad expanse of blanket as flat as if the bed were empty.
Yet that legless portion of her bed was not going unused. Curled atop the blanket lay Renny, his over-large head pointed toward her own, his eyes open as hers were not, watching.
A soft click sounded from the wall near the head of the bed. Music began to play. The woman’s eyes opened. She grinned. “Hey, Renny,” she said. “It’s nice to have company in the morning.” One hand snaked from beneath the covers and reached to scratch the German shepherd’s ears.
Renny followed as she slid out of bed and stood on the stubs of her thighs. “I couldn’t do this in full gee,” she said. With one hand, she flipped the switch that folded the bed back into the wall.
She stretched, eyeing the dog speculatively, and stripped off the shift in which she had slept. Renny cocked his head, stared deliberately at her breasts and belly, whined, wagged his tail, and laughed. “You wouldn’t do that if I was a man,” he said.
“Maybe I would.” She stepped into the bathroom, leaving its narrow door open. “I like you.” Only after she had brushed her teeth did she dress. The coverall she chose was dark brown with a pattern of light green and yellow maple leaves.
Renny’s repeated whine suggested that the feeling was mutual, and that he was not concerned that he was missing anything by no longer accompanying Frederick and Donna Rose where they went. He had found in the pilot another focus for his attention.
After breakfast, she took Renny with her to the Q-ship simulator. This was a room about twice the size of her apartment and even nearer the Station’s axis. Jointed arms mounted on its walls supported a rectangular metal box on whose side a metal hatch hung open. Inside, it looked identical to the cramped interior of the Q-ship prototype. The odors of stale sweat and fatigue surrounded it like a cloud.
Arlan Michaels was standing beside the hatch, scratching in his blond hair with one hand. “Ready for another run?” he asked.
“In that sweatbox? You sure we need it?”
“Can’t afford any mistakes.”
With a grunt and a roll of her eyes, the pilot agreed. Michaels’ grin told Renny that her protest and concession were a ritual they played through at least once for every training session. Once, perhaps, the words had been empty. Now, with the first flight almost upon them and the training having lasted for months, they bore more weight.
“The dog going with you?” Michaels asked.
“He’ll fit.” With a wave of one hand, she gestured Renny through the hatch. He lay down where her feet should have gone. “See?”
Michaels nodded. “You plan to take him with you?”
“Why not?” She pulled herself into the simulator’s small cabin. “Company’s nice to have.”
The clang of the hatch cut off whatever reply Michaels might have made.
* * * *
“NORSAT 816. We have the feed.”
“EUROSAT 153…”
“AUSSAT 32…”
“NIPPOSAT…”
“SINOSAT…”
“MOSSAT…”
“PYRASAT…”
“MECCASAT…”
“CANSAT…”
“LAPSAT…”
Hands embedded in mouse-gloves twitched, pointed, gestured. Switches mounted in palms and along the sides of fingers clicked subliminally. Curses muttered. Keyboards rattled. Images appeared on veedo screens. The cloud-veiled outlines of continents and islands and peninsulas took shape, enlarged, and disappeared as views zoomed in on evidence of climate change: coastlines studded with drowned buildings. The world had warmed under the influence of carbon dioxide released by the Machine Age’s fossil exhalations and forest clearings. Yet the warming had had good effects as well; without it, it would never have been possible to have, even in areas once famous for frozen winters, genimals based on insects, reptiles, and tropical mammals.
Further inland lay farmlands thick with gengineered crops; forests; broad tracts once fertile, now turned to dust or marsh, the outlines of abandoned fields and homesteads still visible. Cities sprawled, surrounded by suburbs, their thick ranks of homes a random mix of traditional wood and stone and brick and modern bioforms, pumpkins and eggplants and squash and bean plants and even plants in the guise of massive human heads, squatting on the landscape like the leavings of some mad executioner; in most, the bioforms dominated. In time, they might restore the climate to what it once had been, for the houses drew carbon from the air, while elsewhere forests grew less raped of lumber than they had been in centuries.
City streets streamed with bioform traffic, Roachsters, Macks, Bernies, Beetles, Hoppers, and more. Pedestrians—bot and human—were not quite distinguishable on the sidewalks. Here and there, larger groups surrounded smaller ones, contracting and expanding like the irises of eyes or cameras.
Several operators were scanning newscasts and other signals, the sound turned low but audible. Frederick could hear snippets of politicians’ speeches, weather forecasts, crime reports. There was footage of fires and floods, an earthquake, an announcement that the government had decided to retain its subsidies for traditional agriculture a little longer, a report that someone had poisoned a squadron of Air Force warbirds, another that a warbird had bombed a tank farm, killing fifty of the rhino-based genimals. Occasionally he heard brief mentions of “local disturbances.” There were no explicit admissions of any widespread trouble, no suggestion that Engineers throughout the world were giving up their signs and slogans and becoming more demanding, more aggressive, more violent.
With delicate gestures, someone tried to tweak the enlargement on a satellite image just a little greater. When the image
did not improve, another technician said, “I’ve found a minicam signal. No broadcast, but…” The image changed, and several of those in the room gasped at the evidence of what governments were keeping from the news. Alvar Hannoken pointed his prow of a nose toward the veedo screen and said, “It’s that bad.”
Frederick Suida uttered an involuntary tsking noise. He was not surprised to see Engineers in the outer ring of an iris, nor bots and gengineered humans in the inner, nor knives and clubs and unzippered blue coveralls. He sighed. Murder and rape. Rape and murder. The traditional sports of reactionaries, revolutionaries, and other idiots. One of them the sport that had once cost him nearly every friend he had ever had. A smile was further from his face than ever.
A bearded Engineer noticed the cameraman and waved a crude sword threateningly. The picture centered on the sword and remained steady as its wielder advanced. The weapon rose and fell, and the picture went dark.
Frederick stood, his feet held to the deck by Velcro slippers. He was in Probe Station’s broad, low-ceilinged, low-gee communications center near the spin axis. The room was filled with perhaps two dozen electronic consoles and veedo screens. At each one sat an operator. At the nearest, beside his hip, the operator was Donna Rose. Her screen was one of those that did not display some view of the planet from which they had escaped.
He shifted his attention to Donna Rose and spoke codes and passwords. Smoothly, rapidly, her fingers moved upon the keyboard before her. Three seconds later, time eaten by the passage of light from Station to Earth and back, the screen bloomed with acknowledgements. She had logged onto the computers of the Bioform Regulatory Administration. Now she should be able to access any of the various government networks that anyone on the Station could think of.
“State?” asked Hannoken.
Frederick gave Donna Rose the access code for the State Department’s intelligence net. Within minutes they were downloading reports of Engineer riots, lists of dead and injured, and analyses that identified the Engineers’ targets as anyone in any way connected to gengineering—bots, of course, and greenskins, and other gengineered humans, but also gengineers and their employees and the owners of bioform houses, vehicles, computers, and appliances. A research laboratory had been burned, a university gengineering department trashed. There were complaints that even embassy personnel were being attacked. There were requests for official protests to those foreign governments that turned blind eyes on Engineer activities. They found no sign that any such protests were filed. Nor did they see any sign that Washington was prepared to restrain the Engineers within their own nation’s borders.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 79
