“Just give me the number,” said the other as he pulled a bioform keyboard into view. But as soon as he had typed out the number, the screen went blank except for two stark lines of type:
LAND LINE FAILURE.
PLEASE TRY AGAIN.
* * * *
“We launch the Q-ship in just five days,” Lois had said. “I need to get in a lot of time on the simulator before then.”
“Me too,” Renny had said. “I’m going with her, and I want to learn everything I can, even if I don’t have hands.”
“And I have chores as well,” Hannoken had said.
Frederick had left the Director’s office, almost too dejected to notice that Donna Rose was by his side, one hand on his shoulder, comforting, an ear if he wished to talk, a presence if that was all he wished. He was grateful, though he said nothing.
When they reached their quarters, Frederick lay down on the bed. Donna Rose sat beside him. When he rolled to his belly, she leaned over him and began to knead the tense muscles of his neck and shoulders.
“Do you remember?” she asked. “That first night? I walked into your office, and we watched…” Her hands clenched a little harder than necessary. Frederick grunted. “And then my supervisor—Ladysmith was his name, Mr. Ladysmith—wanted me to get back to work. You let me stay, though you had to let him think…”
She had been offering him nonverbal signals almost from the start. He had carefully ignored them. Frederick grimaced into the pad beneath him as she paused. He could guess what she was about to say, what comfort she was about to offer.
Her hands now lay flat and gentle on his back. “It’s possible, Freddy. That’s not how we reproduce, but we do have…”
He rolled over. “See?” she said, and her leaves peeled away from her torso, revealing her chest and belly all the way down to where her foliage emerged from the flesh of her hips and groin. The cleft she was referring to was visible among the bases of her leaves, revealed by their extreme unfurling; below it was the small bulb that held a portion of her central nervous tissue, a second, smaller brain. She bent her head to follow his gaze with her own. “That doesn’t get in the way,” she said.
He looked away. “No,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Is it because I’m not really human?” Her expression fell, and her leaves curled once more around her.
“No. I’m not either, after all. But…” He paused, sat up, put an arm around her to offer what comfort he could after spurning her own. “Years ago,” he said. “When I was still a pig. I met your ancestors. They couldn’t move like you. They didn’t look like you. And they used their odors, pheromones, to make men mate with them. That’s how you got your human genes.”
“But we don’t do that anymore!” Donna Rose protested. “We can’t even make pheromones. We lost that ability generations ago.”
Frederick nodded sadly. “I know,” he said. “I do. And you’re lovely in a very human way. If I didn’t have the memories I do, I could easily respond. But…” He shrugged and shook his head.
“Is there someone back on Earth?”
“No.” He shook his head again. “There never was.”
Chapter Twelve
He knew it shouldn’t. He knew better. But still it never failed to surprise him, that a bot’s blood could be as red as his own, as wet, as sticky. Only the smell was different, for it was touched with the earthiness of a fresh-sliced beet.
Sam Nickers was kneeling over one of his new neighbors, wrapping a bandage around the hole in her upper arm, tsking when the clean fabric touched the soil of the apartment floor. Whenever he tsked, Jackie Thyme raised a little higher the roll from which Sam drew the bandage he needed. But the young arms were tired, and they sagged. The cycle repeated again and again.
Just a few days before, Jackie had been helping Sam and Sheila develop the bioform computer as an interface between teacher, honeysuckle, and students. Now she was a medical orderly, fidgeting with an impatience that had not shown when the wounds had been new and fascinating. She stared at a nearby bioform computer, its screen and card drive torn and useless. She half turned to face the honeysuckle vines that hung in the window to her right, most of their leaves still green, many blossoms still upright and filled with wine despite the tattering effects of gunfire.
Alice Belle stood to one side, her blossoms a splash of orange and pink against the shadowed wall, watching Sam work. She had come to the small, windowless room he had set up as his aid station, where he had picked splinters of glass from scalps and bandaged simple wounds and dispensed slings. She had said, “We’ve got a bad one, Sam. She’s bleeding and screaming, and she won’t let us move her.”
Sam never knew his patient’s name. He knew nothing about her except that she had been injured and that her skin was pale and her leaf-tips and petals were limp with the shock of her injury. A tranquilizer leech had taken care of the screaming. Antibiotic and clip-stitch and bandage were taking care of the rest.
“There,” he said at last, in as soothing a tone as he could manage. “It didn’t hit an artery. It didn’t hit the bone. You should be able to use the arm. But stay away from the windows.”
“Right, Doc.”
“Doc!” he snorted, rocking back on his heels as she struggled to her feet. The bots had been calling him that ever since he first unwrapped his paramedic training. They had already had the tools of his trade—bandages, drug-secreting leeches, bottles of saline and glucose, stands and rubber tubing and rubber gloves—but none of them knew more than the rudiments of first aid. He did, and he knew that he had saved lives that would otherwise have been lost.
“You’re the closest thing we’ve got,” said Alice Belle. The patient was gone, moving—even trotting—back to whatever task the Engineers’ bullet had interrupted. Now Alice Belle left as well, returning to her own work.
Shots echoed from the building across the street. Dark spots and cracks appeared in the wall before Sam’s eyes as slugs smashed into the plaster. He sighed wearily and wished… Some of the windows in the bots’ apartment building faced alleys, offsets, decorative panels, and the scars of blister-like floater garages. The snipers across the streets therefore could not see straight in and had to fire at angles that left much of the space within the apartments to which those windows belonged quite safe. On two sides, where the building rose above its neighbors, there were even windows snipers could not reach at all, unless they were content to shoot holes in the ceiling.
It had begun with the demonstrators. At first they had simply marched and picketed and waved their signs and screamed their slogans. They had slaughtered and roasted a Roachster on the street in front of the building. They had beaten and chased those bots who had dared to leave the building.
Sam jumped as something touched his shoulder. He tipped his head up and back and recognized Jackie Thyme. For a moment, he had forgotten she was there. “You should be in the shelter,” he said. They had been moving as many bots as possible, but especially the very young and the very old, to the basement.
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “I want to help,” she said. “And if I can’t help you…” She let the tips of her leaves part in a gaping botanical shrug. “Then I’ll just be a gofer.” She paused, and then she added, her voice touched with plaintiveness, “Why did the roaches leave?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the Mayor turned Engineer. Or the Chief of Police.”
At first, the police had tried to help. They had come whenever the bots or Sam or Sheila had called to complain. They had dispersed the demonstrators. Then they had begun to swing by on their rounds, but their patrol had proved regular and predictable. Whenever the official Roachster had been due, the Engineers had vanished into doorways and alleys and basements like the roaches whose name they—and kids of all kinds—used for the police. Only a few remained in view, now
quiet and peaceable and waiting for the police to turn the corner, when they would call back the others, as obstreperous as ever.
And then, the afternoon before, the police had vanished completely.
As if their leaving had been a signal, and perhaps it had, Engineers had swarmed into the neighborhood. They had expelled most of the residents of all those buildings that faced the bots’ apartments. Shots had suggested the fates of those who resisted or who bore genetic modifications such as green skins or cosmetic inserts or even genetic tattoos. The remnants of a few bioforms—garbage disposals, computers, flycatchers, floaters—had been thrown to the street below. The largest pieces had once belonged to the bubble-like garages that had clung to the outer walls of those apartments whose tenants owned floaters. The Engineers had pried them loose and watched them fall, yelling in destructive glee.
Once the neighborhood had been properly cleansed of all modern technology except for the roof-top Bellows, half plant, half animal, that kept the buildings bearable in summer, the Engineers had moved in. Now they sat by darkened windows, rifles and pistols in their hands, sniping at whatever bot dared to make herself visible. The shots had died down the night before, when the bots had turned off the lights that fed them. They had resumed when morning sunlight began to illuminate their rooms.
“We don’t use such things ourselves,” Narcissus Joy had told him. “We have our own devices. But those weapons are no less effective because they’re so traditional. Guns are elegantly simple as machines go. They even consume few resources of material or energy, especially if they reload their cartridges. And they take a long time to wear out.”
Sam had been puzzled. “How can you admire their guns when they…?”
“It’s not the tool that matters,” Narcissus Joy had said. “But the aim of its user.”
It was a cliche of history and philosophy and ethics, Sam knew, that a good end could never justify evil means. She had seemed to deny that, though he had had to agree that a bad end could befoul good means. Yet he had not tried to argue. He had said only, “I’m glad their aim isn’t any better.”
Now he said to Jackie Thyme, “Let’s get into the hallway.” Windowless and shielded by interior walls, that was the safest place on most of the building’s floors. It was not, however, completely safe, as the holes in wooden doors and plaster partitions insistently reminded him. At least, the snipers couldn’t see them there.
* * * *
“This,” gasped Sheila. “This is a helluva way to get to talk to my husband.”
“Hush,” said Sam. “We’ve both been busy.” He positioned a light blue leech on the side of her throat. Then, while he waited for it to secrete its dose of pain-killer, he used a scrap of clean bandage to wipe blood from the snakeskin along her jaw. When the pale green of her skin—it would have been white with her pain if she had been an unmodified normal human—began to darken toward its normal hue, he stroked her cap of orange and brown feathers and began to work on the damage.
“So have those snipers.” Her wound was low on her ribcage, a tear in the skin, a broken rib, blood. By the time the bullet had penetrated the corridor wall to find her, its force had been more than half spent.
The children she had been leading toward the elevators to the basement squatted quietly by the wall, low, below the level of the windowsills in the apartments to either side, so that bullets would be less likely to find them as well. The youngest children, still too young to withdraw their roots from the soil and walk, even too young for their stalks to begin the changes that would give them legs, had been transplanted into earthenware pots that now rested on children’s wagons shaped like miniature Tortoises, Armadons, and Beetles. The older children held the wagons’ handles; until their guide had been shot, they had been pulling them down the hall.
Except for Sam’s mutterings as he worked, the few words he exchanged with his wife, the noises that bullets made as they punched holes in walls and plaster fragments rained upon the floor, the hallway was silent. The younger bots in their pots could not yet speak. The older ones did not.
Sam finally looked up from his wife’s wound. “Jackie,” he said. “Get these kids downstairs. And stay down there yourself.”
“Uh-uh,” said the young bot. “I’ll be back.” But she obeyed his first command, gesturing to the others, starting the parade once more moving down the hall.
When the last of the wagons had passed, Sheila stared yearningly after them. “They’re making shields,” she said as her husband applied a last clip and began to wrap her chest in yards of bandage. “For the windows, you know? They’re using doors. Some are steel. Most are just wood, and there won’t be enough, but that’s my next job. As soon as all the kids are downstairs. Gotta get the adults down there too. All except the marines.”
“The marines?”
“They have a few…” She gasped as he tightened the wrapping that would help her rib heal. “A few who have studied war. No experience, but they’ve read a lot. They’ve got weapons. And plans.”
“Good,” said Sam. “I hope it works, but…”
* * * *
Sam began to notice differences among the bots who passed him in the building’s halls. Some, the majority, kept their heads ducked while they carried dismounted doors toward the windows and equipment such as bioform computers toward the elevators, as if that would keep them safe from the Engineer snipers. Others, the marines, Sam thought, held their heads higher and moved with an air of brisk determination.
Not all the bots he treated could walk away from him. They needed stretchers and stretcher-bearers. Unfortunately, no such luxuries were available, and when he tried to commandeer a door, Shasta Lou stepped from a doorway to shake the pale blue blossoms of her head and say, “No. We have to seal the building.”
“And let her die?” He stared pointedly at the bandages he had tied in place over the injured bot’s abdomen. He hoped she had some notion of how easily his crude patchings could come loose. “I don’t dare carry her myself, or let anyone else. She needs support, and even with that, she could bleed to death internally.”
“The group comes first,” said Shasta Lou.
With a quiet shudder, the patient rendered their argument moot. Sam sighed and bent and carried the body to the wider patch of corridor onto which the elevators opened. He had just laid it on the floor when a door sighed open and Jackie Thyme emerged.
“I thought I told you to stay down there.”
The young bot’s shrug belied her serious, determined expression. “I want to help.”
“Think you can handle this one? Don’t take it to the shelter. The first floor should do.”
Another shrug, and the small bot grasped the body’s ankles and began to pull. The corpse slid obediently into the elevator.
As it did so, Alice Belle stepped out of the next elevator to the left, waved one hand, and hurried off down the corridor. Behind her appeared Narcissus Joy. From a belt around her waist hung a radiophone. She was carrying a heavy pot from whose top grew a leafy bush covered with compact fruit. Curious, as soon as Jackie Thyme had disappeared with her burden, Sam followed Narcissus Joy into the nearest apartment and watched her set the pot on the floor to one side of an unshielded window. She noticed him behind her, nodded, and said nothing as she leaned toward the window and peered outside.
Sam noticed that her scalp blossoms, normally a creamy white, were now limp and bedraggled. Their orange rims seemed dirty. Fatigue, he thought. No time to stand beneath one of the building’s artificial rainstorms, nor to stand, rooted and sunlit, photosynthesizing, resting, recharging.
A shot chipped paint from woodwork near her head. She withdrew and picked one of her plant’s fruit. A long, hair-like tendril continued to link the fruit to the branch that had borne it. She found a grip on the fruit’s skin and peeled it back like that of a b
anana. As soon it was exposed to air, the inner fruit darkened in color and spread birdlike wings. It stepped onto her wrist, fluttered, preened, and looked at Narcissus Joy, who looked in turn at Sam and said, “A botbird.”
She flicked her wrist toward the window, and the botbird flew through the opening. Behind it trailed a continuation of the fiber that had spanned the break in its stem. “Fiber optics,” said Narcissus Joy. “So we can see what’s going on out there. It’s easier than using the honeysuckle.”
She turned toward the plant she had brought into the room and began to poke and pat at its uppermost leaves, until they formed a flat surface like the screen of a bioform computer. On that surface there appeared a view of the streets and buildings outside their walls and below the botbird.
The view blanked out. “The fiber broke,” said the bot, even as she reached for another botbird fruit, peeled it, and released it. The landscape outside once more began to slide across the screen, and in a moment they could see what the buildings hid from their eyes: a street, a block away, dotted with groups of Engineers. “More guns,” said Narcissus Joy. “And… Litter!”
“What?” asked Sam. She pointed at the image, and he stared at the heavy tubes that rested on three blue-clad shoulders. He knew what they were; he had seen them in old veedo movies and in occasional newscasts of foreign wars whose disputants could afford nothing more modern than the small missiles these tubes would launch.
A gasp behind him announced that someone else had recognized the old-fashioned weaponry as well, and probably for the same reason. He turned his head and saw Jackie Thyme leaning forward, wordlessly intent on the view. As silently, he put one arm around her shoulders.
Narcissus Joy had her phone in her hand, punching digits in a blur of motion. “They’re getting ready for the main assault,” she said, staring at the screen that showed the botbird’s view. “No, I don’t think they’ll have much trouble getting in. Yes, get things up here.” On the screen, the Engineers carrying the shoulder-fired missile launchers were beginning to trudge toward the nearest intersection. “And hurry.”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 81
