The bots raked their own shares from the ashes, burned their fingers, tasted, sighed with pleasure. No one said a word for several minutes, until Sam nodded. “Do you think?” he asked. “That they’ll be back for the crops?”
“That’s a chance we have to take, isn’t it?”
“We’ve already planted the computer,” said Mary Gold. The kitchen garden near the house had clearly been stripped of everything edible. Only weeds had still flourished. But honeysuckle roots had pervaded the soil, deep and dark, enriched by manure and compost. It had been a natural site for the classroom.
“We’ll stay outdoors,” said Alice Belle. “There’ll always be someone plugged into the honeysuckle.”
“We’ll know if they come anywhere near these hills. And we’ll keep watch for kilometers ourselves,” said Garnet Okra. “You’ll have plenty of time to hide.”
Sam picked up another stick, stroked its dry surface and found it faintly waxy, peered at the large pores in the wood, sniffed its faint hydrocarbon fragrance. He tossed it into the fire and nodded in satisfaction when it burst instantly into flame.
“With luck,” he said. “They’ll leave us alone. Their numbers are shrinking, and they need fewer resources. Maybe they’ll find food enough closer to the cities. Or maybe they’ll have to abandon the cities. They’ll fan out over the countryside looking for food. And they won’t leave us alone.”
“We are safe.” A wave of odor and the soft voice of Eldest’s Speaker identified the source of the words. “We will not be here long. We will be gone before the barbarians come again. Remember: One of us went into space to seek a place for us. She will find it. She will find a way to bring us there.”
“So all we have to do is wait,” said Sheila. Her tone was skeptical, but still a wordless fragrance suggested agreement. “To avoid the Engineers. To hide if they come close. To survive. And if we succeed, we will reach safe haven.”
The sigh that followed seemed to express the hopes of every being who had heard her words. Safe haven. A place where they need not hide, nor flee, nor prepare against attack. A place where they could live as they wished, free, unhated, unfeared, unpersecuted.
Chapter Seventeen
The blast of the labor camp’s horn penetrated even the roar of the ancient front-end loader. A guard gestured, waving his hand over his head. The tractor’s operator backed away from the wall of compacted garbage he was attacking, lowered his machine’s bucket, and shut off the engine.
Jeremy Duncan did not know why the guards had interrupted the day’s routine, but he had no objection. He looked at his fellow prisoners, fellow slaves. There were none of the surreptitious grins that once marked the faces of schoolchildren saved from a quiz by a fire drill, but there was a general relaxation of posture, a glancing toward the hovels they had so recently left behind. The early morning air was cool, and most of the prisoners would be quite happy to escape it. Certainly, they were not eager to start another day of scrabbling through the leavings of earlier generations, looking for metals and glass and plastic that could now be used as raw materials.
The door of the barracks slammed in the distance. Duncan looked, and a movement drew his eye to Looby’s head emerging from his hovel, the largest of them all. Beside Looby appeared Amy. Both were peering toward the gate in the fence as it opened to admit a party of guards surrounding three new arrivals, their blue coveralls ashine with recent laundering, their fronts covered with bits of technological debris, every scrap polished to a metallic gleam. They carried swagger sticks, as long as their forearms, with brass knobs on their ends.
As the group came nearer, the three visitors moved forward, forcing the camp guards to the sides and rear. When they finally stopped before the slaves who had been waiting on the tractor’s preliminary labor, they were at the front of the group.
The camp’s inmates stared at the newcomers. They might have been envious of their freedom to go where they wished, of their clean clothes, of the simple fact that though they bore little spare flesh, they were clearly well fed. But no such feelings showed. The stares were stolid, patient, confident that such visits meant no good for them, waiting for the news to fall upon them.
The visitors stared back for a long moment. Eventually, the one with the most brass on his chest said, “We’re looking for gengineers. Any here?”
Duncan did not volunteer. Indeed, thinking that this summons surely meant new torments, even death, he began to tremble and took one small step backward.
One of the guards noticed his movement. “You! Answer the man!”
He shook his head and tried to back up some more. His sandal came down on a bare toe. He lurched, leaned toward the body behind him, received an abrupt push, staggered upright.
One of the newcomers stepped forward and pointed his swagger stick at Duncan’s side. “Those gills look like nice work. Who did them?”
He said nothing, but whatever shreds of pride he still retained betrayed him. He raised his head and stiffened his neck just enough.
The newcomer thumped him in the ribs with the knob on the end of his stick and said, “Take him.”
* * * *
The campus had once belonged to the Ginkgo County Community College. Now it was nameless, surrounded by chain-link fence whose barbed-wire top tilted inward. Once, like city streets and parks, the campus had been patrolled by litterbugs; now wind-blown rubbish was piled against the base of the fence. Every hundred feet, an open-sided kiosk held a pair of blue-coveralled guards who scanned the ground both inside and outside the enclosure. The lawns and playing fields had been neglected; wherever they had not degenerated to bare dirt under the pressure of feet and wheels they were chest high with ragweed and honeysuckle and other weeds. The honeysuckle crawled as well up the sides of the red-brick buildings and wreathed the windows.
The broad-armed chairs that once had filled the classrooms were now stacked in the gym, replaced by broad tables covered with jumbles of electronic equipment, test-tube racks and test-tubes, microscopes, and more. Jeremy Duncan swore. “Sort it out,” they had told him. “Make it work. We’ll tell you what we want later.”
He knew what they wanted. The equipment itself told him that, for it was precisely the sort of equipment he had had in his own lab. Or not quite that, but it was all equipment that had occupied labs much like his once upon a time. It was obsolete now, and it had been mistreated—cracked and dirty casings, unwashed test-tubes and petri dishes and tissue culture flasks, scorched and tattered instruction manuals. He had put one of the petri dishes in the pocket of his white labcoat; from time to time, he grasped it tightly in his hand as if it were a talisman. Just as he had done before, in the days when life had seemed secure and settled, when the Engineers had seemed no more than a nuisance, he wore no shirt beneath the labcoat.
Across the room, Andy Gilman sorted through glassware. Long hair, dull with dirt and lack of care, hung from the rim of the man’s skull. The bare top was crusted with old scabs. One side of his face was hollowed where a cheekbone had been broken and not repaired. His skin was wrinkled with both age and abuse. He had been, he had told Duncan when they were assigned to share a dorm room, a research director. Now he too was a slave, and folds of skin spoke of a plumpness his imprisonment had worn away. Unlike Duncan, he had no self-modifications that showed, even when he removed both his labcoat and the shirt he wore beneath it.
Duncan leaned over an antique DNA splicer. Its empty reagent magazine was supposed to hold two dozen small vials of nucleotides and enzymes and other biochemicals. He opened its dingy case and immediately noticed that the clock chip was missing from the mother board. He swore. Students, using the machine to learn how to produce small lengths of DNA, could have stepped it through its paces manually. For real gengineering, that would be insufferably slow. With its automatic timer, this primitive model from HPA, Hewlett-Packard-A
pple, would be able to generate whole genes in a day or two. Later models would need only hours.
He straightened his back. There, on another table, was a twin that might have the chip this one was missing. A glance was enough to tell him that its reagent magazine was not merely empty but missing. Another glance, and he spotted a plastic bottle of hand lotion. With a relieved sigh, he picked it up, popped its cap, squirted some of its contents into his palm, and reached beneath his labcoat to massage the edges of his gills.
“We’ll have to cannibalize,” he said a moment later, just loudly enough for Gilman to hear him. “Maybe then we’ll get something that works.”
“Maybe,” said the other. He was reaching for the door of a laboratory refrigerator that stood against one wall. Duncan stepped toward him, as eager as he to see what its white-enameled shell might hide. When Gilman opened the door, both men grinned for just a moment. The refrigerator’s shelves were crowded with a jumble of vials, many of them intact, their labels claiming that they contained the reagents the splicer would need to function.
“Litter,” said Duncan. Far too many of the vials were toppled and broken, as if whoever had moved the refrigerator to this room had not cared what it held. But…
“No one plugged it in,” said Gilman. No wave of cold had met them when he opened it. The refrigerator was at room temperature, and the reagents were surely spoiled. They did not keep well.
Duncan swore again. He pictured the Engineers storming the schools that produced the genetic engineers they hated. They would have smashed and burned, utterly destroying the laboratories, the libraries, the modern equipment. And then someone had realized that the Engineers might have to compromise their ideals, their principles, if they wished to survive. They had gone to the lesser schools that had trained only technicians, using outmoded equipment that had been abused by generations of students, schools that had so far escaped the Engineers relatively unscathed. Some would surely have turned in for destruction everything that smacked of forbidden technologies. Others would have stashed their battered DNA splicers in storerooms, hiding them against a better day. When the Engineers had recognized their need, the equipment had therefore been there, waiting to be ferreted out and seized. But it was useless without the vials of nucleotides, polymerases, and other biochemical reagents.
He surveyed the room once more. Before the rise of the Engineers, he might have felt wistful. The labels were familiar. HPA. Beckman. Eppendorf. Genesys. Zeiss-Nikon. Genentech. He had used some of these same devices when he was in school himself. He had used their faster, more efficient, more versatile successors in his work for the ESRP and Frederick.
But nostalgia was far from his mind now. He felt relief that he was no longer in the labor camp, pleasure at the white labcoat that draped his scrawny frame, more pleasure at the touch of the petri dish in his fingers, and anxiety whenever he wondered what they would ask him to make. Could he do it? Of course he could. Should he do it? Would he do it, when he hated them and all they stood for? If he refused, they would surely remind him of the punishments that could be his.
He and Gilman were not alone. Others, as emaciated as they from months of short rations, some of them nonetheless with the wiry muscles of forced labor, some weak from confinement and inactivity, all equally clad in the white of their profession, also roamed the campus’s rooms and halls. Their faces too spoke of anxiety, and they too muttered and swore.
Duncan wondered if the Engineers knew how lucky they were. Gengineers were often like artists. They felt driven to their work, and the best thing the Engineers could do to make them cooperate was to give them back their labs. If they could make this ancient equipment work, if they could find or make the necessary reagents, they would.
Was that enough for him? He had chosen a job, running Freddy’s clandestine lab for converting intelligent genimals to humans, that left him idle much of the time. He had used that time for some work of his own, but much of it he had been content to waste, reading and thinking. He was not as driven as many of his colleagues. Yet the work undeniably attracted him.
Gilman was standing by a dirty window fringed with honeysuckle leaves and blossoms, peering outward. Duncan joined him as the gate in the fence opened for a rust-splotched bus, salvage from some ancient junkyard. The bus creaked to a halt beside a dorm across the road, and a dozen ragged figures emerged.
The Engineers had collected gengineers wherever they could find them. They had brought them here, to this one-time campus and intended research center. Duncan had no idea whether there were other such places. Their captors were not saying, though they were still collecting. Each day saw new arrivals, much like these.
Another vehicle appeared in the distance. It was a horse-drawn wagon, its body packed with figures. More gengineers? But the guards were suddenly urgent, hurrying the new arrivals into the dorm, closing the gate, unslinging their weapons, taking up watchful positions. Duncan watched as the wagon drew nearer, stopped, disgorged a dozen Engineers in stained coveralls. One used a bullhorn to bellow, “NO GENES!” Others pulled weapons of their own from the bed of the wagon.
They never had a chance to attack the fence. As soon as the weapons were visible, the guards opened fire.
Duncan turned away as the first bodies fell. He had seen enough. The situation was plain. He was in the hands of progressives, Engineers who realized that some compromise was necessary. Out there were the conservatives, for whom all gengineering, whether it was essential to their survival or not, was anathema.
* * * *
“In there. Siddown. No talking.” The guards directed the gengineers into the lecture hall. Jeremy Duncan and Andy Gilman found seats together and tried to ignore the empty feelings in their stomachs. The food on the commandeered campus was not much more plentiful than it had been in the labor camp. The sweetish smell of severe malnutrition thickened the air of the lecture hall, at total odds with the image of civilization and prosperity presented by the sea of white coats that surrounded Duncan and Gilman and lapped against the walls of the lecture hall. Behind the lectern were several Engineers in clean, blue coveralls, their salvaged ornaments reflecting light from the ceiling fixtures.
Duncan thought of the Engineers who had pulled him from the landfill mine. These were not the same, but they had the same air of elite polish and carried very similar swagger sticks. He wondered if he and his fellow gengineers were about to be told why they had been brought to this place, what they were supposed to do for their masters.
Once all the gengineers were seated, one of the Engineers stepped forward and rapped the lectern with his swagger stick. “You know why you are here,” he said. He did not introduce himself. “We need you.” He made a face as if to say he wished they didn’t. “Our aim is to restore the Machine Age. But we must first rebuild the necessary infrastructure. And to do that, we must use genimals.”
“Genimals.” He said the word as if it were a curse. For him and his kind, it was. “Unfortunately, we do not have them anymore. Some of our more enthusiastic supporters hunted them down. They destroyed almost all of them.”
His glare dared anyone to laugh or even smile at the irony that the Engineers should now need what they had destroyed. “We still have potsters and snack bushes. There are still oil trees, though we need more. We don’t need goldfish bushes and Slugabeds and garbage disposals. We do need Mack trucks, Bioblimps, and box-turtle bulldozers. We need to restore the supercrops.”
Someone in the audience muttered, just loud enough for all to hear, “What about cocaine nettles?”
The Engineer scowled at his audience. When he said, “We do not need them. They are quite properly extinct,” Duncan snorted. He knew that not all Engineers shared that attitude. The guards at the labor camp had seemed quite happy to cultivate their drug-secreting plants.
The scowl intensified in the ensuing silence. Finally, the Eng
ineer continued. “Humans were meant to build their tools, not grow them. That is why God gave us hands, to glorify Him with the work of those hands. Machines are the culmination of our nature and our destiny.”
He paused to scan the room. Then he sighed theatrically. “And yes. It was our dependence on machines that exhausted the supplies of the ores and fuels that they required. But the answer was not to replace our mechanical technology with a biological technology! What we needed then, and what we need now, is a biological technology harnessed in support of our machines. We need plants that produce fuel. We need plants or animals that can filter minerals from sea water. We need trucks and bulldozers and cranes, biological if need be, to build the factories with which we will then build the machines to replace them.
“And we need you to make it all possible.” He bowed his head for a second as if in apology. “Yes. In our first enthusiasm, we destroyed much that we should have preserved. Now we need to rebuild it. And we are not gengineers. You are. We need you.”
The room was silent, still. The pause lengthened, and then he said, “If you help us, you will once more be part of society. Honored parts. As valued and essential and honored as ever you were before.”
* * * *
“Do you believe them?” Duncan and Gilman were in their dorm room, squatting on the bare mattresses that were all they had for beds. The frames and springs had long ago been removed; eventually they would be melted down and turned into something the Engineers needed more than comforts for slave laborers, even if those laborers were now being promised honors and rewards. The layers of dust and dead insects in the corners and on the windowsill said that no one had bothered to clean the place before the gengineers had moved in, or after. Tendrils of honeysuckle vine pushed aside the sheet of cardboard with which someone had tried to patch a broken window pane.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 87
