They drifted closer to the habitat. Pearl Angelica sighed her disappointment as a lamprey-like docking tube blocked the view of Earth and fastened itself over the hatch. She shifted her gaze to one side, where the dock’s clamps held the nose of another ship, a large, barrel-bodied craft with a single wide, triangular wing and, painted on its fuselage, a red cross surrounded by a golden cogwheel. “Is that an Engineer ship?” she asked.
Lois McAlois ignored her. The com was saying, “How’s your reaction mass? Supplies? Crack your hatch now. We’ll have unloaders in there right away. Quarters are ready. Folks are waiting. And that’s a medship.”
“They have a hospital here,” said Lois finally. “The top Engineers come up when they need a cancer cured or a piece regrown.”
“Nothing like a gene-fix,” said the com. “Sounds like you’ve brought us a tourist. We’ll show her around while you’re busy.”
“What will you be busy with?” asked the bot.
“I have to talk to their techs,” said her aunt. “They’ll have some new stuff we may be able to use, and I’ll have to show them what we brought.”
When they emerged from the docking tube, they found a broad, brightly painted chamber in which a number of humans and bots clung to taut lines that ran from wall to wall and from dock openings to the mouths of corridors leading deeper into the habitat. A bot with orange scalp blossoms and an elastic belt that kept her fronds from spreading propelled herself toward them with a smile, her hands shifting smoothly from line to line. “I’m Mary Thyme. Move over here.” She made a face. “Your ship stinks.”
“Those Armadons,” said Pearl Angelica. She yawned. The habitat’s air tasted of machine oil and human sweat and—less prominent, suggesting distance and transport on ventilator breezes—flowers, gardens, growing things. A hint of musk seemed to come from a cluster of brown animals that clung to several parallel rods mounted on the wall well away from any of the room’s entrances or exits.
Lois grabbed a line and pulled herself toward the habitat’s representative. Her niece tried to do the same but fumbled her grip and began to tumble in the air; Mary Thyme grabbed her ankle as she went past and drew her in. When Pearl Angelica had grabbed the line, the local bot patted at the scalelike leaves that covered her torso and said, “You’re different.”
“New model,” said Lois. “One of a kind.”
“Ah.” A gesture sent several coveralled workers toward the ship. The bots among them were barefoot; the humans wore snug socks with thin, rubbery soles. A moment later, the first of the Armadons came sailing into the air of the chamber, its legs flailing, complaints issuing from its elongated snout, animal stench accompanying it. When a clot of dung flew from one wheel-rim, Pearl Angelica ducked. One of the creatures on the wall rack unfurled membranous wings, opened a wide mouth, swooped, and returned to its perch. “They’re new,” said Mary Thyme, pointing. “Flying litterbugs. Flitterbugs.”
“I hope you can spare a few for me to take home,” said Lois.
“Of course.”
Near the far wall, four men with unforgiving faces scowled at the scene, and Pearl Angelica felt a twinge of apprehension. They were flanked by a man and a woman in white Orbital coveralls. They themselves wore loose, dark blue pants tight at waist and ankle, light blue shirts printed in black and gold with large cogwheels and springs and other mechanical imagery, and short lapelless jackets whose collars were curls of padded fabric. The jackets were green, lemon yellow, pink, grey, any color but blue. Two wore ankle boots; two wore sandals.
Mary Thyme noticed the direction of the bot’s stare. “Engineers,” she said. “We sell them Macks and bioform seawater filters, but they still don’t like gengineering or genimals. It’s not mechanical enough, even when they need it.”
All the Armadons were now floundering in the air of the chamber and bouncing off the lines. One was drifting toward the Engineers, one of whom reached toward a pocket of his jacket. A scrawny dock worker promptly headed off the errant genimal and shoved it toward a corridor. Others pushed it further on.
“They’ll have weight soon enough,” said Mary Thyme. She was laughing silently. “And then… Maybe you’d take them out to Mars?”
Lois McAlois and Pearl Angelica simultaneously and violently shook their heads, and the habitat bot chuckled. “We can handle it. And here’s the rest of your cargo.” The smallest box of all came first. “The floppies. I hope Vosima has done something new.” As the rest quickly followed, she peered at frosty labels. “Mossberries. First-Stop fish. What a treat! They’ll go straight to the galleys.”
“I’m sorry we can’t bring more,” said Lois. “But…”
“’S all right,” said Mary Thyme. “You folks always say that, but we grow most of what we really need and get the rest from Earth.” She looked at Pearl Angelica as if she knew that she were the one who needed information. Lois, after all, had been there before. “Though they won’t give us anything with genes we don’t already have, at least in a gene bank. They say they won’t surrender their ‘birthright,’ as if it wasn’t ours as well.” Her eyes darted now toward the Engineers by the wall. “We pay with powersat energy, circuit chips, raw materials, medicine. They ask a lot.”
“But you could grow everything you needed,” said Pearl Angelica. Even the Gypsy could be self-sufficient, she knew. It had been so for the full five years of the voyage to Tau Ceti.
Mary Thyme looked toward the Engineers once more as she nodded. Her orange blossoms quivered to her motion. “We don’t want to break the ties. Earth’s a mudball and they can have it, but it’s still the homeworld.”
“Do they let you visit yet?” asked Lois McAlois.
“Uh-uh. We’re banned. Humans too. They’ll take the Macks, but we’re worse than garbage in their eyes.”
“But they need you more than you need them,” said Pearl Angelica. “Can’t you insist on landing rights?”
Mary Thyme shook her head. “What do we have for an ‘Or else’? Turn off the powersats? Lock them out of the hospital? We couldn’t do that—or we wouldn’t—and they know it.”
Lois barked a laugh. “So the treaty favors them all the way.”
“Some of us think there must have been a sympathizer or two on the negotiation team, but…” The other shrugged, and when Pearl Angelica yawned once more, said, “You’re tired. Shall we go?”
* * * *
“We get enough tourists from Earth,” Mary Thyme was saying the next day. “While the Chief Engineers are in our treatment tanks, their aides and gofers want to see everything, and we oblige. Their traders are the same way between deals. And we get patients and traders from the rest of the system too. Though we don’t have to hold their hands.”
“Have to?” asked Lois McAlois. Munin’s corridors were narrower and their lines were straighter than on the Gypsy. They held little nonsentient greenery, which was concentrated in the habitat’s agricultural levels. But they too held doorways, in this area opening into apartments set aside for visitors and the small restaurants and other businesses that catered to the needs of transients. Lois, Pearl Angelica, and their guide were sitting at a small table in one of the restaurants now, drinking coffee that had come from the habitat’s own gengineered plants, just as on the Gypsy. Models of the first spacecraft to explore the solar system—Sputnik, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Magellan—hung from the restaurant’s ceiling, while the walls were covered with the photos their cameras had sent back to Earth. “You just don’t trust the ones from Earth. I’ll bet you work for Security.”
Mary Thyme just grinned. “Would I admit such a thing? Especially since here I am, sticking close to a couple of our Gypsy friends from the interstellar depths. Why shouldn’t we trust you?”
“Is this the first time one of us has brought a passenger? Maybe you’re afraid we’ve been taken over by hidden Engineers
, and…”
“They wouldn’t send a bot,” said Mary Thyme. “But I’m sure she isn’t along just for the ride.” She looked at Pearl Angelica, her eyebrows lifted inquiringly.
“I did need help with those Armadons.”
“If I had known…,” said Pearl Angelica.
“You’d have managed.” Their guide’s eyes were still on the Gypsy bot, patiently waiting for her to explain her presence.
“Bees,” said Pearl Angelica. When the other’s face turned puzzled, she added, “We don’t have any, so we have to pollinate all our plants by hand.” She mimed daubing with a brush. “And there aren’t any suitable animals on First-Stop. I wanted to get some from Earth.”
Mary Thyme looked doubtful. “We reproduce our plants by cloning.”
“We do that too, but we need to pollinate the flowers if we want the fruits.”
“Aren’t you afraid of being stung?”
Pearl Angelica shrugged. “If that becomes a problem, I expect the gengineers will find time to make them stingless.”
“Why not seedless fruits?”
“We have some.”
“She wants to visit Earth too,” said Lois, and her niece nodded.
Mary Thyme shook her head. “That’s not possible. They never give permission for us to go down there. They come here.”
“Can’t we land anyway?”
“Their weapons are much better than when the Gypsy left,” said Lois. “I wouldn’t even want to try to land.”
“Then we should ask.” Pearl Angelica’s voice held a slightly plaintive note. She had been warned of the ban, but still she hoped.
“It won’t do any good. But…” Mary Thyme inspected the bottom of her empty cup. “If you’re done, we can call them now.”
* * * *
The answer did not come for two more days. By then Mary Thyme and Pearl Angelica had confirmed that neither Munin nor Hugin nor any of the Earth-orbiting stations had bees. There were none on Mars, in the Belt, or at Saturn Base. Nor did there happen to be a copy of the honeybee genome in any of the available gene banks, though there were hints that the bee’s genes had been on file before the Engineers had seized Earth and destroyed so much biological technology.
They had seen the hospital and the tanks in which tailored viruses corrected the defects that turned cells cancerous and induced damaged hearts to heal and lost limbs to grow again. They had seen Munin’s farms, its labs, its shops and theaters. And Lois McAlois had had several of her necessary meetings.
“It’s like being inside an eyeball,” said Pearl Angelica quietly. All three were standing on the inner surface of Munin’s observation bubble, the largest of the plastic spheroids that bulged from the habitat’s stepped hull, held there by the centrifugal force that substituted for gravity. Behind them a metal stairway rose toward the open door of an airlock that would automatically close if anything broke the bubble’s thick skin. Around them was foggy translucency, a bowl quite large enough to hold a hundred people. Ahead of them the bubble’s skin was clear, dimmed by the external silvering they had noticed from the Quebec but still offering a broad view of blackness and stars and, when Munin’s rotation brought the gigantic pupil into position, the Earth itself, three-quarters full. Sharing the view with them were perhaps a dozen Orbitals, both coveralled humans and bots, as silent and as awestruck as they. A young boy, perhaps eight years old, stepped daringly onto apparent nothingness, spreading his arms as if he would fly to Earth or heaven. Half a dozen men stood near the stairs. They varied in the colors of their skins and in their heights, but all were slim, muscular, and hard-faced. They wore the pants and jackets of Engineers, and they watched not the view but the Gypsies. White-coveralled Security agents were not far away from them.
The sound of footsteps on the stairs drew Pearl Angelica’s attention from the sight of an Earth that seemed to roll across the star-dusted sky. She saw a young woman in a pink coverall marked with black diagonals. She was carrying a small envelope, offering it to Mary Thyme, saying softly, “From their Division of Trade,” and turning to go.
The ripping of the envelope was loud in the bubble’s hush. Mary Thyme withdrew a single sheet of paper, read it quickly, and held it toward Pearl Angelica. Its few lines of print were stark against the white paper, and no less stark in their import:
“We regret that we cannot fill your request for a colony of honeybees. Policy insists that this portion of the human birthright belongs to Earth alone.
“We also regret that we cannot permit synthetic biological intelligences to visit Earth. Policy insists that Earth remain uncontaminated by unnatural beings.”
“Litter!” said Pearl Angelica.
“But how did they know you were a bot?” asked Lois McAlois.
“They may have assumed it,” said Mary Thyme. “Or maybe they think we’re all unnatural. Certainly they never have given permission for one of us to go down there.”
“Or someone told them,” said Pearl Angelica. “There are enough Engineers up here.” She scowled meaningfully toward the stairs.
“That’s possible,” said their guide. After a moment, she added, “I’d like to see it too. We have the spysat photos, but it’s not the same.”
“It’s changed a lot since we left,” said Lois. “There used to be twelve billion people on that planet. Now there’s… What?”
“Maybe two.”
“What happened?” asked Pearl Angelica.
“They destroyed the only technology that could feed so many.”
“Now the forests are coming back,” said Mary Thyme. “The fallout’s gone from the air and water.”
“It must have done some damage while it was there,” said Lois.
Their guide pursed her lips and turned toward the observation bubble’s pupil. As she spoke, several of the bubble’s other visitors drifted closer. “DNA damage. We see it in the hospital. More cancer. Birth defects. And we know it’s affected plants and animals too, especially those that breed rapidly and have had many generations to sort out the lethals. We actually see a few new features in the food they ship us, though nothing major. There must be so much more down there…” She shook her head ruefully. “The gengineers would love to be able to study them.”
“It wouldn’t take long to get the bees,” said Pearl Angelica. “Or to taste…”
“No,” said Lois with an abrupt shake of her head. “I can’t risk the ship, or you.”
“My ‘potential,’ you mean.”
“That’s what would bother the bots. Losing you would bother me and Renny.” Lois didn’t mention Frederick, Pearl Angelica’s father, but she did sigh deeply before she added, “I’ll be done in a few more days. We can go home then.”
“But we have to try…!”
“Excuse me.” Pearl Angelica turned and saw that the speaker was one of the Engineers who had been standing near the stairs. His companions were pushing forward beside him, edging the Orbital listeners aside. Their complexions, it suddenly struck her, were not merely rough but pocked and scarred by past infections. The marks spoke eloquently of an environment far less sheltered than the Orbitals’ habitats or the Gypsy.
“I couldn’t help but hear,” the Engineer went on. “You want to visit Earth?”
Pearl Angelica nodded eagerly. “Yes! But…” She held up the message that had barred her from the world below.
The Engineer did not even try to read what was written on the paper before he snorted contemptuously. “We might be able to help.”
“Really?” The Gypsy bot took a step toward him.
“No!” said Lois McAlois and Mary Thyme together. “You can’t—
“Of course she can,” said the Engineer. He grasped her wrist and tugged. “Just come with us.”
“Remember!” cried Mary Thyme.
“They hate bots!”
“But I want—”
Lois seized Pearl Angelica’s other arm, and for a moment the bot was stretched between the two opposing forces. But then one of the other Engineers drew a cylindrical object from a pocket and pressed a button. A parsley-scented mist engulfed both women.
Pearl Angelica gasped as she saw Mary Thyme recoil and her aunt collapse upon the floor. In the edges of her vision she glimpsed white coveralls falling too. Then her own muscles weakened and her world grew dim, faded out, went black. She knew nothing of Orbitals being hurled aside, of a child’s arm snapping, of screams and shouts, of herself being seized, thrown over a shoulder, and carried at a run from the bubble.
Chapter Five
The forest’s edges, like those of forests everywhere, on Earth as it was on First-Stop, were crowded so thickly with small bushes and saplings that anyone who approached from open ground might be pardoned for believing the forest choked with underbrush, pathless and impenetrable. But if one pushed through the vines and stems and brambles just a little past the border zone, one found a surface deep with half-decayed organic matter, darkened by the dense canopy held high overhead by massive trunks, bare of all undergrowth except for the most shade-tolerant of small plants. Here there were paths indeed, the widest of them trodden by the local sentients, the Racs.
Many of these footpaths converged where the ground sloped gently toward the steep dropoff at the edge of the bluff. Here the underbrush had been cleared away to provide a vantage point, a vista of moss-covered valley floor, of that tree the visitors to their world, the Gypsies, had grown to dwarf the largest in any forest any Rac now living would ever see and now were carving, petrifying, and polishing into a Tower that would last for ages, of the orange dwellings they had grown for themselves, of the paths the feet of their giant animals had worn through the valley’s carpet of moss, of the blackened ground upon which landed the vessels in which they journeyed to and from the sky.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 102
