Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  Only a handful of refugees had made it into space. As far as Donna Rose knew, there had been no bots among them.

  Frederick spoke more gently. “The Orbitals,” he said. That was what those who lived in space had begun to call themselves. “The Orbitals have begun to build extra living quarters. More were opened up when the Gypsy workers left. But the ships aren’t ready yet. Look at them.” He pointed at the screen, and then at the large, reinforced window on its right. The window overlooked the half that remained of the bay that had once held the Quoi. The office they were in, as well as other offices and workshops and labs where Arlan Michaels could design new drives and ships and physicists could strive for improvements in the technology, had been carved from the rest of the bay. Beyond the window were scattered several Q-drives in various stages of assembly. Beyond them was the broad iris that could open onto space.

  The bot straightened as if she were summoning energy from the air. “There are others down there, Freddy,” she said. “We’ve seen the camps, the graves. And we have the spaceplanes!” Her torso jerked as if she would like to pace, to turn and stomp and emphasize her protests with every motion at her command. But her roots were embedded in her trough of soil.

  She did not withdraw those roots. She only jerked and gestured. Her leaves lashed. She pointed past the half-finished Q-ships toward Earth’s rim to indicate the low-orbit stations where several spaceplanes had been mothballed. They had not dared to return after they had delivered their pitifully few refugees. “The spaceplanes!” she said again.

  “Which would have to be refueled on the ground.”

  “Give them Q-drives!”

  He shook his head. “No. They would need too much refitting to handle the mass tanks. It’s simpler to build the new ones. They should even be able to handle the round trip. But…” He shook his head again. “Even if they were finished, we couldn’t use them. Their pilots are still in training.”

  “We have Renny!” As soon as the Quoi’s test flights had proved successful, the dog had decided that he wanted to be, like Lois McAlois, a Q-ship pilot.

  Before Frederick could answer her again, Arlan Michaels swung through the office door. “We’ve got a problem,” he said as he stopped against a wall.

  “Pilots or drives?” asked Frederick. Michaels was still in charge of pilot training as well as drive design. Frederick’s responsibility was overseeing the construction of the new Q-ships. He handled paperwork, saw to it that the project had what it needed, dealt with the conflicts that inevitably arose among the workers, and did his best to solve whatever other problems arose. He also learned, and if he was no Q-flux engineer or physicist, at least he could now understand some of what those specialists were saying.

  At the moment, what Michaels was saying was not hard to understand. He was drifting toward the window that overlooked the drive assembly shop, pointing, saying, “We’ve got a batch of superconducting ribbons that won’t superconduct. Not at anything over 400 K, anyway. Someone cracked the casing and let air in. That let too much oxygen diffuse into the ceramic, and now it’s shot.”

  “Minerva,” said Frederick. His computer was a near duplicate of Alvar Hannoken’s Athena. “Spec sheets, high-temp erbium superconductor.” To Michaels, he said, “Can you fix it?”

  “If I could heat it just right, in a vacuum. That would drive the oxygen off.”

  “Vacuum we’ve got.” Frederick indicated the spec sheet on the screen. “And the processing temp seems to be within reach.”

  “But how do I know when to stop it?” With hardly a moment of hesitation, he answered his own question. “Run a current through it, of course. As soon as the resistance drops to zero, stop heating and seal the casing.” Such procedures had been impossible when superconduction happened only at the temperature of liquid nitrogen or below.

  “Was it sabotage?” asked Donna Rose.

  “I don’t think so,” said Michaels.

  “Was what sabotage?” The voice from beyond the door was so nearly a yelp that the sudden appearance of Renny’s pointed nose was hardly necessary.

  Frederick explained very briefly what had happened. Then Michaels said, “I’ll see what we can do,” and turned to leave. As soon as he was gone, Renny pulled himself through the doorway, positioned himself near the screen, and folded his hands beneath his chin as if they still were forepaws.

  “I wish she’d get back,” the German shepherd said. His tail pumped twice. For a moment, he seemed to be staring at the half-formed Q-ships outside the construction shack. The first of them to be completed would be his. He had finished his training. He had done as well as Lois on the simulator. And Hannoken himself had done the work that gave him the hands he would need.

  Then his gaze shifted, his focus moving outward, his mind quite visibly pursuing Lois. She was headed toward the Belt, towing a chain of cargo pods loaded with supplies and equipment and crew. She had taken the first such train when Renny was still growing his hands. Workers had been burrowing into the asteroid that would become the Gypsy ever since. The rock they removed in the process was processed to remove its metals. The remaining slag was ground and set aside for later use as reaction mass. Meanwhile, the workers smoothed the forming Gypsy’s rough contours, hollowed out corridors and chambers, installed cables and plumbing. Others gathered and powdered smaller asteroids, for the Gypsy’s own excavated mass would hardly be enough to propel the vast ship everywhere that it might go.

  Toward one end of the immense ovoid, workers were preparing the cavern that would be the new ship’s drive chamber. When it was ready, the largest Q-drive yet imagined would be assembled within the cavern and the Gypsy would move under its own power to lunar orbit. There its conversion would be finished. It would acquire computers and furnishings, desks and kitchen ovens, all the paraphernalia that would be necessary if the Gypsy ever went, as some intended, elsewhere. Eventually, it would acquire its crew and inhabitants.

  “She’ll have legs, you know,” said Renny. She had finally let the gengineers treat her stumps before she left.

  “Three more weeks,” said Frederick.

  “She has to stop at Mars,” said Donna Rose. Several of the pods Lois was hauling were destined for Chryse Base. Several more held cargo for the Saturn outpost, though she would not take them all the way; instead, she would bend her trajectory just so and then release them to fly a tangent course. They carried retrorockets just sufficient to slow them at the end of their journey.

  “But she’ll be at Gypsy in ten days,” said Frederick. “Three more days to refill her mass tanks and hook up the return pods.” Some of the construction workers were rotating home, back to families and friends, but Lois’ return cargo would be much less massive than what she had hauled from Earth orbit. “She’ll make better time on the way home.”

  In many ways, the Q-drive was free of the restrictions inherent in normal rockets. Still, what the Quoi could do did depend on the reaction mass she could carry in her tanks, and she was a small ship. She could handle heavy cargos, but like a tugboat with a line of barges she had to strain. The necessary acceleration came much faster with smaller loads, and her peak velocity was higher.

  Renny stared outwards for long moments. Frederick finally broke the silence by saying, “Do you think you could land one of the new ships on Earth?”

  The answering snort was distinctly doggy. “You’ve got rescue fantasies.”

  “It’s safe enough, isn’t it?” insisted Donna Rose.

  “That’s what Michaels says. The drive didn’t hurt Lois or me, and he’s confident enough to have us building those.” Renny gestured toward the skeletal, half-completed ships outside the shack.

  “Doesn’t it need a vacuum?” asked the bot.

  Renny nodded. “That’s not supposed to be a problem,” he said slowly, as if he were thinking his way through lessons
that had struck him as less than central to learning how to pilot. “For maximum power, it needs a vacuum even purer than that of the space out there.” He gestured toward the screen. “If the vacuum isn’t that good, the Q-flux generates less power, but then the flow of energy drives out any particles in the drive chamber, just as if they were fuel particles. That improves the vacuum, and then the power increases. It should therefore work just as well in an atmosphere. It might even work better, for the air itself could be used as reaction mass. The ship wouldn’t have to carry extra.”

  “Then…?”

  “But you haven’t got the foggiest idea of who to rescue. Or where to find them.”

  “Anybody!” cried Donna Rose.

  Renny shook his head. “The Engineers are in power everywhere,” he said. “The spysats don’t lie. There’s nobody left to rescue.”

  “There are the labor camps,” said Frederick.

  The dog shook his head again. “That’s just fishing,” he said. “Half the slaves are probably Engineers on the outs.”

  * * * *

  Later, when Renny had returned to his training and Frederick and Donna Rose were once more alone, Hannoken called. Minerva chimed, Donna Rose worked her fingers in the mouse-glove above her keyboard, embedded circuitry responded, and the image of uncompleted Q-ships on the wall screen was replaced by the face of Probe Station’s Director. His picture window was visible behind him. Before it sat a pot much like the one that had held his kudzu vine. This one, however, was empty except for a tiny shoot.

  “What’s that?” asked Donna Rose.

  “Your tissue sample,” answered the Station Director. He turned and gestured. “I made some changes, and…”

  “What?” The bot’s voice was outraged. “I didn’t…”

  “What’s up?” Frederick cut off her protests with a placating gesture.

  Hannoken turned back toward his veedo pickup and grimaced. “I thought you’d like to see what the com center just picked up. It seems to be a government situation analysis.” His face faded from the screen to be replaced by text. “See what you think.”

  “Hunh,” grunted Frederick. “He didn’t say much about it.”

  “His face did.” Her tone was sour, as if she had much more to say about becoming a mother without her knowledge or consent.

  “Let’s see…”

  The document was straightforward. It said:

  At the height of the Machine Age, there were over five billion people on the planet. Our ancestors knew that this population was greatly above Earth’s so-called carrying capacity. That is, it was much too large to be sustained indefinitely. The world population would have to be much smaller if it was to require no more resources—food, fuels, solar and hydroelectric energy, wood, ores, etc.—than natural processes made available each year. They were forecasting that when the population exceeded the resources necessary to support it—whether because the fuels and ores were used up and soil fertility lost, or because the population simply grew too big—billions of people would die. The world would, quite inevitably, reduce the human population to or below the carrying capacity defined by the simplest of all the laws of nature. In simple, human terms, that law is: You cannot spend more than you earn; if you try, you will empty your bank account, exhaust your credit, and wind up facing that law again, only without whatever cushion you had the first time around.

  Unfortunately, the gengineers were able to forestall the balancing of nature’s equation. Population grew until, just before our Revolution, it had more than doubled. The last worldwide census put it at 12.3 billion.

  As our ancestors were beginning to realize when gengineering first appeared, the technology of the Machine Age cannot support such numbers. Fortunately, we have already removed over two billion bots, greenskins, and other social contaminants. Yet, if we are to succeed in our aims, we will have to cleanse the human species of many more of its members. Recent estimates indicate that we do not have the resources to support more than two billion.

  Our present difficulties in obtaining sufficient food, fuel, and materials may prove to be a blessing in disguise. By this time next year, the world population will be lean and trim, and we will be the healthier species of which we have long dreamed.

  “They are mad.” Donna Rose’s voice was hushed. “They won’t have time to do anything but bury people.”

  “Or eat them,” said Frederick with a shudder. “They’ll lose too much. Starvation means a generation of brain-damaged children. They may not have the intelligence to rebuild until centuries from now. But there’ll be disease, too, plague, and that will cost them even more. They’ll lose whatever technicians they have, or most of them.”

  “Savages,” said Donna Rose. “The survivors will be hunters and gatherers. Subsistence farmers if they’re lucky.”

  “Is there any more?”

  Donna Rose touched a key on her board, and four more lines scrolled into view:

  Unfortunately, our numbers may be so much reduced that it will prove difficult to maintain a mechanical technology unless we appeal to the Orbitals for raw materials and technical assistance. At the very least, they must keep their power sats in service. They cannot keep diverting the beams for their own purposes.

  * * * *

  “Would they help, Freddy?” asked Donna Rose. They were together on Frederick’s bed, the lights dimmed, the softest of music in the background. “The Orbitals.”

  “I don’t know.” Frederick sighed and tightened his arm around her shoulders. “I don’t think so. They destroyed the ground facilities. They rejected everything the Orbitals stand for.”

  “Not machines.”

  “But the new. New tech. New ideas.”

  They were quiet, then, until Donna Rose said reflectively, “My child. I never set the seed, but… What will she be like?”

  When Frederick had no answer for her, she said, “I need some sun.” She drew away from him, tugged a cover over him, and crossed the room. She uncovered the porthole, drew the curtain that kept the bright light from interfering with Frederick’s sleep, and stepped into her trough of soil.

  Frederick watched quietly until the curtain hid her. Then he sighed deeply and closed his eyes. But he did not sleep.

  He thought he had come to terms with his firing, his barring from Earth. He had told himself months before that it was for the best. He couldn’t go home. The spaceplanes were no longer flying. But even if they were, the chaos and animosity down below were such that if he did return, he would far too promptly die. He would accomplish nothing.

  Now the Engineers themselves were telling him that even if the killing stopped, the dying would continue. It could not be prevented. The gengineers, and most of the biological infrastructure they had created to support civilization, were gone. The Orbitals had raw materials and energy and technical expertise in plenty, and they would surely be asked to help. He did not think they would.

  If he wished to live, he could not go home again. If he wished to achieve anything at all in what remained of his life, he could not go home again. The Orbitals represented for now his—and humanity’s—only path into a positive future.

  He was fortunate, wasn’t he? He had Donna Rose. He had Renny. He had lost everyone else many years ago. But what about Bert? And Jeremy Duncan?

  They were down there, somewhere. He hoped they were still alive. He, himself… Hannoken had offered him a job. As soon as the Q-ship prototype had passed its tests, Hannoken had said, “We need to build more of these things. Bigger ones, for passengers and cargo. The ores will come from the Moon, just as they did for this.” He had thumped the wall of his office to indicate Probe Station and all the other stations and habitats in orbit around the troubled Earth. “You can be the coordinator. Want it?”

  He had agreed. He could not remain an idle, useless
refugee. Nor could Donna Rose, who had already been working in the com center. He had drafted her for his assistant. And then…

  Hannoken was growing her a daughter. The Q-ships would be ready soon. The Gypsy was being prepared, though precisely what it was being prepared for still seemed uncertain.

  He sighed again, and Donna Rose heard him. “Do you think,” she said. “Do you think there’ll be anyone left to rescue by the time we can go get them? Or are we, my daughter and I, the last of the bots?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The flickering light of the flames gave the foot-thick trees that surrounded the clearing an air of cathedral majesty. The scents of smoke and pine resin and honeysuckle made one think of incense. That of hydrocarbons spoke of burning candles and ancient, leaky, oil-burning furnaces.

  The smell of forest duff, the coolness of the night breeze, the sound of branches moving overhead, the awareness of the fact that the flames were not those of a ranked host of votive candles but of a small bonfire, all these weakened the illusion. Yet Sam Nickers still smiled dreamily. He had visited France once, he and Sheila, and they had visited cathedrals and chateaux and museums and more cathedrals. He clung to the illusion, to the memory it evoked of more pleasant times, of times when they had not needed to flee for their lives, scurrying like mice through dark corners and hollow passages.

  He thought of the ancient right of sanctuary and wished that it still held in any form. But churches were weak things now. They still existed. People still believed in God or gods. People still prayed, confessed, rang bells, burned incense. But sanctuary? He looked up at the rough-barked columns that surrounded him. This was all there was.

  He wished that were not so. What had happened to the Daisy Hill Truck Farm where he had grown up? What had happened to his father, retired, still living in a cottage on the farm? He had heard nothing. But the farm was prominent, visible, easy to find, and the mob had been destroying the trucks. Surely they would not have neglected the farm.