Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “Will they know he slowed down?”

  Cherilee shook her head. “But as soon as they find the empty truck, they’ll start backtracking. They’ll search every room it passed.” She led the bot down an aisle between tiers of crates. A moment later, they were passing through a door of ordinary size. “No trucks in here,” she said. “We get the crops out on a conveyor.”

  Ahead of them stretched a tunnel that had not lost two-thirds of its width to rooms walled off along its sides. Bright lights flooded the ceiling, even though elsewhere in the base it was officially night. The broad expanse of floor was marked by a grid of paths surrounding raised beds of soil. Some of the beds were bare, some barely fuzzed with seedlings, some choked with the greens and reds and yellows of mature growth. Set near the ends of several beds were white cylinders about a meter tall.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Home. Asleep. Follow me.” Pearl Angelica recognized tomatoes, beans, peas, beets, lettuce, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, corn, eggplant, cucumbers, squash of several kinds, and more. It was no wonder that this tunnel, and the others like it, could feed the lunar Engineers with relatively little help from Earth.

  Yet the tunnel was not given over entirely to food crops. Ahead of them was a stand of bamboo, palms, ferns, and other tropical plants. Cherilee led the bot to a bed that was largely covered with a tangle of vine. “Some of my pets,” she said, pointing to three short, stout trunks that rose from the mat of vegetation. “Cycads. Now strip. They could be here any minute.”

  Pearl Angelica understood just what the other wanted. She quickly removed her disguise. Then, with no more than a glance at Cherilee for confirmation, she stepped among the vines, chose a spot touched by the circle of shade cast by a cycad’s feathery fronds, and lay down. Seconds later, her wadded-up clothes and wig were under her head, a sheet of loosely woven green cloth covered her face and scalp blossoms, the vine leaves had been arranged to blend with her own, and her roots were telling her that the black soil beneath her back was rich with years of loving care.

  * * * *

  There was no change in the light to mark the time, but the coming of day was still obvious. There were voices, rattling containers, the sounds of tools touching the stone floors and the sides of the soil beds. Most of the noise was distant. Some was near and growing closer.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t let anyone else work on my pets.”

  “You didn’t get much sleep,” murmured Pearl Angelica. She could see nothing but the dim green light that filtered through the vine leaves and cloth that covered her face. Her only connection with what surrounded her was sound, the scents of soil and growing vegetation, a hint of sweat.

  “Shh. Don’t talk. I’m going to weed a bit, just to look busy. They’ll be coming over here, the foremen.”

  A moment later she was speaking more loudly. “Chop the residues in section A32 and till them under. The onions in C12 should be ready. Check the melons in C18. B27 is ready for planting. Lentils this time.”

  Sound was enough to tell Pearl Angelica when the others withdrew. She waited long enough to be sure no one else was approaching, and then she whispered, “Weeds?”

  “Shh. Yes.” The vines rustled, and there was the scrape of some small hand tool in the soil, the scritch of roots being pulled out of their nutrient matrix, a strange buzzing in the air above her head. “People used to think gardening in habitats or on the Moon would be weed-free. After all, the soil is sterile, and the only seeds are the ones you plant. They forgot that many weeds have evolved to imitate crop plants. There’s one—the wild variety bears its seeds close to the ground. But the variety that grows in wheat fields lifts its seeds to the same height as the wheat. Then, when farmers harvest the grain, they get the weed seeds as well. And when they plant the crop, they plant the weeds.”

  “Natural selection. What’s that sound?”

  “Of course. What sound?”

  “Zzz-zzz.”

  “A bee. Several bees. They must be smelling your petals, even under the vines and cloth.” There was a pause. “You’ll have to tell me how genetic engineering works.” Pearl Angelica imagined a shrug. “It has to be a lot faster than natural selection.”

  “I don’t know enough.”

  “Shh. I wish I dared to experiment. But selective breeding is all I can get away with. The Revolution produced a few sports, mutations from the radiation. I can work with those.” There was a pause. “This vine. Do you know what it is? No, don’t answer. Shh. I see someone coming.”

  There was the slightest of foot sounds, a shuffle, a pad. “Do you want something, Sanjan?”

  “We have orders to fill, Dr. Wright. And the onions have not been picked.”

  “They’re working on that now. You can see.” Her joints creaked faintly as she stood. Pearl Angelica imagined her pointing toward section C12. “Is there anything else?”

  “What are those bees doing there? There aren’t any flowers.”

  “Who knows? Maybe they’re scouts, and one of the hives is about to swarm. I’ll have someone check on it.”

  The man grunted. “Did you know there are guards at the door? They say they’re making it a checkpoint. They also say they will have to search all our crates.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.” Cherilee’s tone changed from stiffly formal to worried disapproval. “I hear that bot escaped from her cage.”

  Silence stretched out then until Pearl Angelica wondered if the other woman had left as silently as Sanjan. But then there was a muttered curse. Her tool stabbed the soil. “He runs the warehouse out front,” she said. “He thinks he’s my supervisor because he’s a man. And I guess we aren’t going to sneak you out of here today. That’s the only exit.”

  “Shh,” said the bot. “Tell me about the vine.”

  There was a sigh and a forced chuckle. “Of course. Do you know what kudzu is? It grows ferociously. Covers everything. This one’s more restrained. As well-behaved as ivy.”

  * * * *

  As if they somehow knew their presence might betray her, the bees disappeared from over Pearl Angelica’s head shortly before Security finally searched the greenhouse that afternoon. Guards marched two abreast down the aisles between the garden beds, searched among the cornstalks and between the rows of potato vines, and rummaged through the lockers in which the tools were kept. One even used a rifle butt to ruffle through the kudzu leaves less than a meter from where the bot lay concealed. Another joked that the search had taken longer the first time they searched the place. Now they knew all the hiding places.

  Not one of them found a thing, but when Cherilee Wright appeared beside the kudzu bed the next morning, she said, “The guards are still there.”

  “I could tell,” Pearl Angelica murmured from beneath the vines. Tools had banged more loudly as work began that day. Voices had been tense. She guessed that people were being stopped, their papers checked, their bodies searched, as they went in and out of the greenhouse. Perhaps even at every intersection and elevator.

  “And your bees are back.”

  “I can hear them. Did you know they’re why I’m here?”

  “It was on the veedo.”

  “I really just wanted to see Earth. But we do need them, and that was my excuse.”

  “You could have all you wanted if it was up to me. A whole hive.”

  “Thanks.” Pearl Angelica appreciated the thought no matter how empty, futile, useless, it had to be. Even if she had a hive of bees under her arm, there was no way she would ever be able to get it to the Gypsy. Or the Orbitals. Or even off the Moon. “How many bees in a hive?”

  “Twenty thousand or so.”

  “I don’t need that many!”

  “Shh. There’s no one close by, but …”

  “I’d only want a few. Just
enough to breed.”

  The other chuckled. “They don’t come that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know about queens?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “There’s just one to a hive, and she’s the only bee that reproduces. All the rest are there to take care of her, and they produce new queens by feeding larvae a special food.”

  “Then you can’t just clone them.”

  “I think it would be tricky. You’d need a mated queen. They mate as soon as they emerge from the pupa, and they store all the sperm they will need in their lifetime. And then you’d need some workers too.”

  Pearl Angelica said nothing more. She was a biologist. She knew First-Stop’s biology. She understood plants and pollination. She knew what bees did and how necessary it was. But she had never really studied the bees themselves, not in books, not in the memories of her fellow bots, some of whom must surely have preserved the knowledge, handed down from earlier generations.

  “Are you embarrassed?” When the bot remained as silent as the garden she was pretending to be, Cherilee laughed gently. “It’s only ignorance, you know. A very curable condition.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A thin curtain veiled the room’s only window. It gentled the light of Tau Ceti and provided just enough of a visual barrier to keep passersby from spying on the man whose life was ending within the pumpkin house. The barrier was not enough to keep those inside from seeing the valley and its carpet of moss, white now with frost instead of berries, or the nearly complete Tower.

  A glass bottle hung upside down from the rack beside the bed, a thin plastic tube leading from it to a Y-shaped junction. The other arm of the junction was sealed by a rubbery membrane. From its stem, another tube passed to a bony wrist marked by normal spots of age, small hillocks grown from aberrant cells, and scars where tumors had been cut away.

  Monitor screens displayed the rhythms of the man’s life, slow now, sedate, far less regular and reliable than once they were. His shallow breathing stopped entirely for seconds at a time. When it restarted, there were faint gurgles deep in his throat and his chest would quiver. There was no sign of life at all in his arms and legs.

  A nurse aimed a hypodermic half full of golden fluid toward the ceiling, squirted a miniature geyser, and eyed it judiciously. Then he thrust the needle through the membrane on the free arm of the tubing junction, pressed the plunger, and let the medication mingle with the IV fluid.

  “It’s only a mild stimulant,” he said. “Anything stronger would kill him. So he may not wake up at all. If he does, it won’t be for long. He’s nearly—”

  “We know,” said Lois McAlois. She sniffed. The room smelled of medicines and disinfectant cleansers and a musk, not quite a human body odor, that made her think of the pig Frederick had been before the gengineers gave him the body of a man, long before she had first met him.

  Her husband was holding Frederick Suida’s unencumbered hand. “He’d hate it if we didn’t tell him.”

  “She is his daughter, after all.” The nurse shook his head sympathetically, turned, and left the room.

  “We’ve waited too long,” said Lois. She had known she should tell him as soon as she returned to the Gypsies, but she had dreaded the task. Better, she had told herself, to wait for an official decision on whether to pay Pearl Angelica’s ransom and then to wait for the Quebec’s tanks to be refilled and a new cargo assembled. Better to wait until she could board her ship and flee the knowledge of the distress her news must cause her friend. Or would have caused, when his mind was whole. Might cause, for a few minutes or an hour if she could tell him while his mind was briefly lucid.

  “Will he even know we’re telling him?” asked Renny. “Or what we’re saying? Will he remember it?”

  Lois brushed at a speck of lint on the blanket that covered their old friend. “That doesn’t matter, does it? He would want to know. And we would know if we failed to tell him.”

  A gurgle became a snort. A muscle moved visibly in Frederick’s neck. A finger twitched.

  “For us, then.” Renny nodded. “For him, if he can grasp it. But for us, at least. We won’t have to feel guilty. We’ll know we did all we could.”

  Eyes opened and revealed whites turned yellow by a failing liver, blotched with red by burst capillaries. There were clouds beneath the pupils, in the lenses, and a hazy film over one cornea. Yet life remained, weary and near its lowest ebb though it be. “Donna?” The voice was weak, the word almost a grunt.

  “Lois.” Donna, she knew, had been his wife. Pearl Angelica’s mother. The thought flickered through her mind that she was glad she and Renny had had no children if this was what could happen, and then that it was good that Donna Rose was dead.

  “Renny?”

  “You got that one right.”

  “Unh. I … feel different.”

  “They gave you some extra vitamins, Freddy. We’ve got news you’ve got to hear.”

  “Bad n …?”

  Lois nodded, though she knew he could barely see her. “It’s Pearl Angelica.” She paused while Frederick’s eyes closed and his face signalled all the alarm it could now manage. Then she told him about the kidnapping and the ransom demand.

  She stopped when the water began to fill Frederick’s eyes and run down his cheeks. Renny reached forward with a tissue to blot the tears. The dying man rolled his head slowly from side to side on the pillow.

  “No!” said Frederick.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Lois.

  “No! Don’t. Can’t … do it.”

  She hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “We can’t give them a tunnel-drive. No starships for the Engineers.” They would have to invent their own. Unfortunately, Lois was sure they would, in time. They already had the basic Q-drive.

  “No.” He smiled weakly, while the tears increased their flow. “Not even if …” For a moment, he seemed to have lapsed once more into unconsciousness. But then his lips parted to show the tip of a thick tongue. “Rescue?”

  Renny nodded. “We’ll try.”

  “I’m starting back tomorrow.”

  “We don’t want her to die.”

  “Or you,” said Lois. She blinked against her own tears. She looked at her husband. His eyes too were wet. “We love both of you, you know.”

  There is a tension to a living body even when it is asleep or in a coma. As long as the nervous system is functioning at all, it sends signals to the muscles to maintain muscle tone and snug the bones against each other in their joints. The result is a readiness for action that persists until the link between the brain and spinal cord and the muscles is lost. If that loss leaves the body living, as it does in a paraplegic or quadriplegic, the unlinked muscles lose their tone. The joints go loose. Yet there then remains a different sort of tension, one born of moving blood, of inflation, of turgor like that which keeps a leaf of lettuce from wilting. When it too is lost, the body wilts indeed.

  Frederick closed his eyes and gasped for breath. “Some th … things,” he managed to say. “Important. More important. No matter. How much it … it hurts.”

  Renny nodded. “I think we’ve learned that lesson.” He spoke very softly. “The Nazis taught it. The Palestinians. Others too. And then the Engineers. When terrorists make demands, the price of giving in is always worse than the price of resisting. In the long run.”

  “It’s not easy,” said Lois. “Not easy to say no. To refuse the ransom. To let someone you love die.”

  “Hurts!”

  Frederick Suida’s fingers twitched at last. Renny squeezed the hand he held. Lois McAlois took the other hand, being careful not to disturb the IV tubing, and squeezed that as well. Both were crying, their cheeks as wet as Frederick’s had been not so long before.

  Yet
now Frederick’s cheeks and eyes were dry. He gasped once more, said, “Hea …” and fell silent while his eyes opened for what seemed to both Lois and Renny must be the last time. “I see,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tower. Tower of … the gods. Stair … way. Heaven.”

  Did he mean that Tower that soared into the sky outside the pumpkin? He was staring at them fixedly, ignoring the window and its view, seeming to see something quite other than anything in this world at all, and to see it more clearly than he had seen anything for years.

  A moment later, he said quite flatly and reasonably, in a perfectly normal tone, “Shakin’ my anther for you. It hurts.”

  The tensions of muscle and blood that had marked his life ever since his birth vanished. The lines that had danced across the screens of the monitors beside the bed went flat. A light began to flash.

  “Hurts,” said Lois. “No matter how much it hurts. We can’t give them the tunnel-drive. They’re too strong to raid. We have to let them kill her.”

  * * * *

  The word spread quickly. On First-Stop, it drew the Gypsies from their tasks, from installing ceramic plates in the Tower’s treasure chamber, from polishing a few last spots on the Tower’s flanks, from farming and fishing, from research in laboratories and libraries, to gather outside the pumpkin in which lay the body of the man who had conceived the monument they would leave behind them when they departed this world. In orbit, the labors of pollinators and cooks, technicians and managers, engineers both physical and genetic, came to a halt. Classrooms fell silent. People—both humans and bots—froze where they stood, and then they went home to be alone with their thoughts. Traffic briefly bloomed in the tunnels, and then it disappeared.

  It had been years since Frederick had played much of a role among the Gypsies, but his people revered the memory of what he had done and the mission he had given them for their wanderings among the stars.

  Many Racs knew only that the Gypsies were their makers. They drew no distinctions between the gengineers and all the rest. But a few did realize that some Gypsies deserved worship more than others. Of that few, some knew who Frederick was and what his role had been in the genesis of the Tower. They held him just as high as they did the gengineers responsible for their rise from nonsentience. All the rest could see how the Gypsies responded to the news of his death and sense a reverence much akin to that which Blacktop preached for the Tower and the gods.