Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  All six Racs stirred uncomfortably, but the bot paid them no further attention for a long moment. Finally, she said, “It’s a long way off now. When we leave—and we must—it will be longer still.”

  “When will you leave?” The way Leaf shifted her basket on her arm suggested that she was now less interested in the answer than in getting on with her gathering. Cloudscurry touched her furry arm in silent enforcement of her attentiveness, and she stilled.

  “When the Tower is done. When I have found…” Her tone turned thoughtful. “We need bees. Small animals that visit flowers and carry the yellow dust that makes them set their seeds.”

  Blacktop puffed his cheeks in a grimace of resignation to the inevitability of the Gypsies’ departure. Then he nodded. He knew what she meant by bees.

  But so did the strangers. “We will catch some for you,” said Wanderer.

  “No!” said Cloudscurry. Her shoulder fur was once more bristling. “This is our valley. Our task. We do things for the gods.”

  “You are visitors,” said Blacktop. “Guests.” He did not seem quite comfortable with the concept, as if it were something else he had encountered in the Gypsies’ books. Certainly these strangers were the first visitors or guests the Racs had ever seen. “You will sit and tell stories of your home. We will do the work.”

  “I’ve caught some myself,” Pearl Angelica cautioned them all. “But they cannot live aboard our ship.”

  “Remake them, then,” said Cloudscurry. The miracles of gengineering seemed quite routine to her and all the other Racs, even though they were centuries from a similar capability themselves.

  The bot sighed. “The gengineers say they’re too busy already.”

  Suddenly stiffening, Blacktop lifted his spear and pointed toward the Tower. The other Racs spun with him. Pearl Angelica turned and saw a Bioblimp straining at a tree limb that had just been cut from the Tower’s shaft. The limb, as large as many a forest tree, was a little too heavy for the Bioblimp to lift; the best the genimal and its small propeller could do was slow the fall of its load, guiding it toward the slash pile to the south. But…

  Hard by the base of the Tower were the pumpkin shells that served the project’s supervisors and workers. A little further off, set by itself with a view of both the Tower and the valley’s small lake, was the pumpkin that housed Pearl Angelica’s father and his nurses.

  “Wrong direction,” said Wanderer. He swung his own spear toward the lake. “It will land… there.”

  Pearl Angelica gasped. He was pointing toward the isolated pumpkin in which Frederick Suida’s life guttered like an exhausted candle flame. “My father! Dad!”

  Cries of alarm rose in the distance as others realized what was happening.

  “Your father? But you’re a bot,” said Leaf. She sounded perplexed, for bots, though they had breasts and in form resembled human females, were like the plants that had supplied half their genes. They were dioecious, both male and female, makers of both pollen and eggs. They were also considered “she” by both humans and themselves.

  “My mother was his wife.” And Donna Rose had been as short-lived as every bot except Pearl Angelica. She had died years before. Frederick, half human, half pig, not plant at all, had lived longer. But his time too had come. He had been ill now for months, bedridden, attended by physicians and nurses. The pumpkin had been his choice at the beginning, that he could be near his daughter, that he could watch the Tower grow and be finished. Now he too rarely knew where he was or what he had done. And he was a target.

  A figure, brilliant yellow in the coverall most humans wore, not the leaf-green of the bots, appeared in the doorway of Frederick’s shelter. It faced briefly toward the shouts, looked upward, and turned to rush inside once more, leaving the door wide open behind it.

  People were running toward the pumpkin. Others flagged down a Mack, its descent from a bulldog plain in its squashed face and bowed legs, opened the cargo pod strapped to its back, and crowded aboard. Two insectile Roachsters, long and low and spiky in their profiles, their passenger compartments embedded in the shell of their backs, left their dirt tracks and rolled across the mossflowers.

  “Too late,” moaned Pearl Angelica. “They can’t stop it. Oh, Dad!”

  Air currents lifted the Bioblimp, dropped it, pushed it first to one side, then the other. But the straining engine and propeller defeated the breezes and kept the gengineered jellyfish and its burden slanting through the air toward a spot somewhat beyond the pumpkin.

  “It will drop the limb,” said Blacktop. “Soon.”

  Even as he spoke, the yellow coverall appeared once more in the pumpkin’s doorway. Others, clad in other colors and in the green of bot leaves, followed. They were carrying a stretcher, on it a single body covered with white sheets. They ran, and in that moment the Bioblimp uncurled its tentacles and released its load just as the Rac had foretold.

  The Bioblimp, still fifty meters above the ground, leaped upward as the weight of its burden fell away. The tree limb, propelled by the momentum its carrier had given it, slanted steeply downward. Air resistance swept its leafy branches upward as if they were the vanes of a dart. Its thick butt hung down, swaying, plunging.

  “He’s out!” breathed Pearl Angelica exultantly. “He’s safe!”

  The massive limb struck the domed top of the pumpkin, smashing through, small branches lashing in elastic reaction, breaking, showering leaves and twigs and larger pieces over the ruined structure below. A moment later, the crash of the impact rolled across the valley to the bot’s ears.

  The limb now jutted from a jagged hole in the pumpkin’s dome. The building’s windows were shattered. The walls were cracked. The pumpkin itself was knocked askew on its stone foundation cradle.

  The small cluster of refugees had turned to view the disaster by the time the Mack, the Roachsters, and the running Gypsies reached them. People milled and gestured, and Pearl Angelica could hear that their voices were rising in frenzied chaos.

  Overhead, the rogue Bioblimp hovered above the scene as if to savor the havoc it had wrought.

  “It has to be an accident,” said Pearl Angelica. She was aware of an extra fillip of relief as she thought, accidents don’t happen to gods. We have escaped divinity.

  All six of the Racs shook their heads. “It was too exact,” said Cloudscurry. She spun her spear in one hand and jabbed its point emphatically into the dirt between her feet. “Right to the heart.”

  “But why would anyone want to kill my father?”

  All seven stared at the Bioblimp as if it might speak to them in answer to her question. As they watched, the door in the side of the vehicle’s control cabin opened. For just a moment, someone stood in the opening, and then he—or was it she?—jumped. When the sunlight caught the spinning body, it revealed only that it was wearing blue.

  “A human!” breathed Blacktop in a smooth, tight tone that even to Pearl Angelica’s alien ear suggested awe and dismay.

  “But why?” cried the bot once more.

  “Your ancient enemies remain.”

  “It was an accident,” said Pearl Angelica. “It had to be.”

  “No,” said Blacktop. His voice was smooth with anger, yet it was also patient, definite. “They could not have followed you. You, your people, have told us they do not have the means. But they hide among you.”

  Leaf glared at the stranger Racs. “Or they come upon us. They sneak through the valley and plant seeds of hate.”

  Pearl Angelica stared at Wanderer, Stonerapper, and Shorttail. “They couldn’t have,” she said. “You can’t make evil happen just by wishing it. And I don’t think you stopped to talk to anyone. You were heading for the village up there, weren’t you?” She pointed to the top of the bluff, where the Racs made their home and the smoke of their fires was visible from afar. When t
he strangers nodded, she blinked. Tears filled her eyes. She bowed her head and clenched her fists. “But how could the Engineers have done it?”

  “You are gods,” said Blacktop. He sounded more convinced than ever. Then, to forestall the protest promised by her suddenly raised head and open mouth, he added, “Or makers. And I have read. All gods have enemies who seek to undo their works. The battle is ancient and eternal, and it has come to us.”

  “You brought it,” Leaf virtually sang at Wanderer, her hand tight on the handle of her basket, her voice as smooth as Blacktop’s.

  “It followed them,” said Blacktop chidingly. “They could not escape it. Nor could we.” He paused while Pearl Angelica turned back to the view of disaster across the valley. Other Bioblimps had the rogue in tow. Bots and humans were gathered around the body of the would-be assassin. Frederick Suida’s nurses still clustered around his stretcher. Others were already climbing over the damaged pumpkin, removing whatever furniture and other items had survived the bludgeon that had fallen from the air, estimating the damage, already planning the necessary repairs.

  Finally, thoughtfully, Blacktop said, “Even if the humans had never come, all we lacked was awareness, and they have told us that that was only a matter of time.”

  “A million years or so.” When Pearl Angelica began to shake with shrill hiccups, prelude to the hysterical laughter of relief, Cloudscurry dropped her spear and wrapped a furry arm around her shoulder. She quieted, though the tears flowed more freely than ever.

  Eventually, she was able to speak again. “How could killing Dad undo anything? The Tower was his idea, but… All he can do now is watch.”

  “The Tower is too big to harm,” said Cloudscurry. “But without your father, perhaps your people would lose interest. You would not finish it. You would not fill the chamber at the top.”

  “And you would leave immediately.” Leaf gestured anxiously. “You would abandon us.”

  “Your ancient enemies remain, and they are ours as well,” said Blacktop. “We will hold this in our minds and in our histories. You will leave, and in your absence they may try to destroy…” He shook his spear toward the Tower. “But it is ours. You are giving it to us. And we will keep careful watch until we are able to climb it. Be sure of this, we will keep it safe.”

  Wanderer began to nod as he spoke. When Blacktop fell silent at last, he said, “The Tower is new and strange. But my people know of the humans. They made us too, and we have tales of the days when we lived here as you do now. We will help you protect the Tower.”

  “No!” cried Leaf. “It is ours! You will never touch it or see it again or know… !”

  “Leaf!” Blacktop’s bark was stern, and the female Rac stopped talking and seemed to wilt.

  “They are the enemy!”

  Pearl Angelica was suddenly thankful that the Racs had a leader like Blacktop. Perhaps there would be no war after all. But still… “Knowledge.” She leaned against Cloudscurry’s furry side as she spoke. “It’s the only sort of treasure you can give away to others and never give it up. The hardest thing about it is getting it in the first place.”

  “Climbing the Tower,” said Wanderer. He was staring at the immense spike with a speculative twist to his mouth.

  Blacktop wore the same twist when he eyed the leader of the visitors. Finally, he said, “We need no berries today. Come. We will take you to the village.” He gestured, Cloudscurry removed her arm from the bot, and the six Racs began to climb the bluff.

  Pearl Angelica stared after them for a long moment. The village was set not far from the edge of the bluff, just past the border of the forest. As they walked up the path, Leaf bent to the scattered patches of mossberries within her reach, gathering a taste of what she must have planned to feed her children. Blacktop strode with his head bowed, thoughtful, surely planning how to tell his fellows about other races of Racs with tails and subtly different faces, about gods and ancient enemies and the Racs’ mission as a species, or perhaps only as a tribe, to guard the Tower against all harm. Mission, she thought. That might be all it took to lead to conflict. Not races, not racism. Certainly Earth’s history suggested that a sense of mission could do as much damage as any sense of difference.

  But then she put all thought of the Racs from her mind and looked toward the valley once more. The distant crowd seemed less frantic now. Another Mack had arrived, and people were carrying the body of the terrorist toward its cargo pod. Others stood quietly about her father’s stretcher, their postures suggesting that despite the excitement and the jostling he must have received he had come to no harm. Still more were walking back toward the Tower and their tasks.

  Hoping fervently that Frederick truly had suffered no harm to worsen his condition, she began the hike back to her father.

  Chapter Two

  Pearl Angelica’s lab was a narrow room that smelled of dried leaves, tissue preservatives, and disinfectant. One of its long walls was dominated by a table that held a microscope and a computer, a mouse-glove resting beside the keyboard, auxiliary screens on the wall behind it. To the left of the table was a wall of shelving, storage for specimens, nets, traps, and reports. The end of the room to the right was occupied by a small sink, a coffeemaker, a rack of mugs and other glassware. Above the sink, set in the pumpkin’s curved wall, a window showed the nearby Tower’s base looming against a backdrop of pillowy grey clouds. Veils of distant rain seemed to sweep the tops of the bluffs beyond the lake.

  The computer screens showed the resource inventory maps she had helped prepare for the Tower cache. She was supposed to be looking for errors before they were impressed on the ceramic tablets the Gypsies hoped would outlast metal or glass. Here were the minerals, fossil fuels, fertile soils, and forests that the Racs, if they followed the human pattern, might well have despoiled long before they scaled the Tower, with line drawings to demonstrate the heights and breadths of majesty that would once have existed. Other workers had enumerated birds, with drawings of skies opaque with migrating flocks; fish, with pictures of rivers so thick with spawners one could walk dryshod from bank to bank; grazing animals, with herds to fill every view past all horizons; sea beasts spouting, swarming, mating. A world of bounty, and every time she looked at any of the maps, her own or others’, she wondered how much of that bounty would be left by the time the Racs had learned how to climb the Tower. Earth, she knew, had once been just as rich.

  On the microscope’s stage was a small clear-sided box containing a many-legged creature she had found burrowed into a scrap of bone. Its head was fixed to the interior surface of the box’s lid, and a computer screen showed its oscillating mouthparts grinding away at the box’s plastic.

  But at the moment the bot was paying no attention to the inventory maps or her specimen and its potential as a biological drill or, enlarged, as a tunneler. She was leaning her buttocks against the edge of her worktable, facing the doorway in the room’s fourth wall. “Uncle Renny,” she was saying to the man who had just knocked on the door’s frame.

  “I came down as soon as I heard.” Renny Schafer was of medium height, lean, the bridge of his nose a straight slope from his forehead, his silver hair cut short and stiff. Prominent canines gleamed whenever he opened his mouth. He was one of those who piloted the Gypsy’s Q-ships. “Is Freddy all right?”

  Tears gleamed in her eyes. “He wasn’t hurt, but…” She shrugged. “It did shake him up. He’s not making much sense.”

  A look of pain crossed the man’s face. “Less than usual, you mean.” His old friend’s illness had left him able to do little more than breathe and twitch an occasional muscle. Sometimes he could talk, but his mind was only rarely lucid. “I had hoped to say hello.”

  “He probably won’t recognize you. Though maybe he’ll improve a little when they get his place repaired and he’s back in familiar surroundings.”

 
; “Have they got any better idea of what’s wrong with him?”

  She shook her head. When Frederick Suida had fallen ill, his physicians had said the gengineering technology that had made him a sentient pig in the first place had been too primitive. So had been the gene-replacement techniques that had later made him human. Now his chromosomes were disintegrating, apparently at random, scrambling the operating instructions in each of his many trillion cells, and each cell was going awry in its own way. Some cells turned cancerous and could not be repaired by tailored viruses. The physicians removed the resulting tumors as rapidly as they made themselves apparent, but they could do little when the masses of rogue tissue were deep within the brain. Some cells stopped working; the physicians cloned replacement organs, but again they could do little when the cells were brain cells and other neurons. Some cells began to act like other types, skin cells secreting stomach acid or hormones; these were the easiest to repair, often simply by reprogramming their errant genes.

  “There are just too many things wrong,” she said. And they went wrong far too rapidly for any lasting help.

  Renny was not really her uncle. But he had been a friend of her father’s for so many years, and the two men had had so much in common, that he felt like kin. She had called him “uncle,” and his wife “aunt,” as long as she had known how to speak. She tightened her lips as she hoped that the gene manipulations that had made him a sentient dog, and later given him his human body, had been more polished, less clumsy. Otherwise, he too might…

  She stared at the wall beside the man. It held another rack of shelving and a freezer cabinet whose shallow drawers held several thousand preserved tissue samples. It also bore a poster-sized photo of the display case in which one of her biologist predecessors had mounted the few insects and spiders that had inadvertently accompanied the Gypsies into space. The insects included a dozen flies, several fleas, a few cockroaches and lice, and a number of beetles and moths. There were also three bedraggled bees which had died and been preserved before anyone had thought to try to multiply them. Pearl Angelica did not even know whether they were male or female, but she thought that did not matter. If the gengineers had gotten to them while they were still alive, before their own internal enzymes, and then bacteria and molds, had destroyed their DNA, they could have cloned as many as they wished. They might even have been able to make a queen, and then…