Smith flipped two more switches. “Six weeks,” he said. “And then—”
“We need a planet-buster,” said the Baron.
“What the gyp’s that?” asked Silber.
“Old stories,” said the Baron. “They used to write about blowing up whole worlds, even stars.”
“Hah.” That was Bela.
“Truth. I had a great-great-something uncle, they say. Made donuts for a living, but he dreamed up some of the damnedest gadgets.”
“So what would we want a planet-buster for?” asked Hrecker.
“We wouldn’t need a whole gyppin’ fleet. One ship, one big warhead, and the job’s done. No more First-Stop. No more coons.”
“Pretty drastic,” said Smith. “Overkill.”
“Nah,” said the Baron. “Who cares about a bunch of alien trees and bugs, as long as we get the monsters? It ain’t Earth, after all.”
“And that’s the only place that counts, eh?” asked Bela.
“Right.” The Baron jerked his head in an affirmative that brooked no argument.
Hrecker glanced at Eric Silber. He was grinning. Bela and Smith were not. Their faces looked as stiff as his own felt. They too were struggling to contain their reactions to the Baron’s bloodthirsty chauvinism. They too, perhaps, feared that the Baron might really be an agent of Security, there as much to provoke disloyal attitudes as to watch drive-room displays.
It was hard to imagine that anyone could seriously wish to destroy an entire world.
Chapter Six
“Tell me, Dotson. You look sad.”
He ignored her, staring past her out his bedroom window across the evening-shadowed valley, the high Worldtree, the complex of buildings that huddled around its base. A flock of dumbos, leathery wings flapping, flexible proboscises trailing from their round heads, swooped above nearby roofs. They were already gathering for their fall migrations. Behind him the VC muttered through its repertoire of dramas, sermons, exhortations, and lessons in history, calculation, and the study of the plaques for all those children and adults who did not choose to sit in classrooms. He had not turned it off when he came in.
“Tell me, please.” The voice was reedy, thin, yet sweet and clear, young, still new to speech though its owner was the size of a half-grown Rac. She had not been talking for very many weeks. “Tell me, do. What happened to you?”
He sighed. He said nothing. Then he sighed again. “Senior Hightail. As usual. He says I’m not in the lab enough. I’m ignoring my work. Not making progress.”
“I keep you busy.”
“I suppose you do. He thinks it’s Sunglow. So do the other students. ‘Too many late nights,’ they say. ‘Go to bed alone for a change.’”
“You always go to bed alone.”
“Huh. I can’t say that. They’d wonder what I was doing.”
“Talking to me.”
“Lord Highass even said maybe I should see the career counselor. Maybe I don’t belong at Worldtree Center.”
“Stay here!” The voice sounded suddenly worried. “Talk to me!”
“I wouldn’t be able to take you with me if I left, would I?” He chuckled, his voice rougher now, more relaxed, more affectionate. He reached out one hand to stroke the side of the head and ruffle the pale blue petals on its scalp. He looked at the figure, still rooted in the large pot in which he had first planted the seed. Leaves still fanned across the soil. But its stem was now a body no higher than his chest. Its lower portion was divided into legs, its center swelled into hips, and a little higher its chest wore two—just two, and already larger than a Rac female’s six—mammary bumps. There were shoulders, arms, hands. The skin was pale and covered with small, triangular, bright green leaves.
There was a face quite unlike any Rac’s. Quite flat by comparison, with no projecting muzzle. More triangular than round, broad-browed, narrow-chinned. Small teeth, gray eyes instead of brown, a thin, furless skin—leafless too—that let the cheekbones show. A chin, so squarely shelflike that it might have been designed to compensate for the missing shelves of bone above the eyes. Eyebrows thin and pale, not bristling like some prickly hedge.
If a Rac child had ever looked like that, its parents would have called a physician, who surely would have called it underdeveloped, weak, anemic, sickly, doomed to die an early death.
Yet the plant beside him did not seem strange to him at all. It was a Remaker in all but one little thing: Its—her—feet were still rooted; she could not walk. “You’re a big girl now.”
“Too big to move?”
He nodded. “Too big to hide.” He could just imagine what the neighbors would say if he lugged her out the door in her pot. They would see right away that he had something unusual and illicit. They would call the Center. She would be confiscated and examined, and as soon as someone realized what she truly was, she would be ensconced in the Great Hall and worshipped endlessly.
While he … He didn’t think they would have much patience with him. Certainly they would not worship him. Or honor him in any way. Most likely, they would take him to some small room deep beneath the Great Hall, or even deeper within the caverns in the bluff, and he would never see the sun again. Or Sunglow.
Nor would it help if she could walk. He thought she would. Any day now she would pull her feet from the dirt and step out of the pot. Why else would her stalk have become legs? But even then … Well, she was not the same shape as a Rac. She couldn’t possibly walk with the same gait. She didn’t have the pelt. Or the rotund belly.
If she walked out beside him, he would still lose her. He would still be in trouble.
One hand rose to bring his mind back from wherever it had wandered. Two fingers rubbed the side of her nose. She had learned to do that so well, almost well enough to pass, if only she looked more like a Rac and less like a god. “Read me a story?”
He sighed once more. He scratched the side of his muzzle. “Okay.”
Almost as soon as she had opened her eyes and shown her ability to speak, he had realized that she had to be much like a child. She would need toys and stories and playmates.
He hadn’t been able to do a thing about the playmates. He had to keep her secret, and besides, what school would have her? She was far too strange, too alien, even without her obvious connection to religion.
He had wandered Worldtree City for days before he had dared to go into a toy store. “Gifts for my sister’s children,” he had said, and the bored clerk had not seemed to doubt him. He had chosen a pair of dolls, one Rac, one Remaker, and a wooden Worldtree with a set of brightly painted graduated rings. Unfortunately, his talking plant had ignored them. The toys now rested on the windowsill.
A bookstore had been both easier and more successful. He had brought home brightly illustrated fantasies and nonsense, legends and histories, and those she had loved. Her current favorite was the tale of Kitewing, who had ridden a soaring box kite to observe the movements of a tailless army in one of the many battles for possession of the valley and the Worldtree. He had seen how high he was and how much higher the dumbos flew, and he had cried out for his ground crew to let out more line from the winch. He had soared higher, and yet higher, and when the opposing army had sent its own kites aloft to forestall him, he had cut their cables with his sword. Only one enemy had avoided his attack, remaining below him to saw at his own cable. Kitewing had managed to leap from his kite at the last possible moment and land upon the flange that encircled the top of the Worldtree. His enemy had followed him. They had fought, and when Kitewing had thrust the other off the Worldtree, he had discovered the chamber full of Remaker records.
“And the box full of seeds.”
“And the box full of seeds,” he agreed. “They kept it in the Great Hall, over there.” He pointed through the window. “Until I took one of them and plante
d it.”
“That’s me.”
“That’s you.”
Her indeed. She had grown rapidly, from seed to sprout to sapling, a swollen stalk, a fat terminal bud. The stalk had swelled still more and subdivided and taken the Remaker shape. The bud had enlarged, leaflike scales had fallen away, and a face had appeared, eyes as closed as any newborn animal’s. He had touched her skin, felt animal warmth beneath the tiny leaves that covered it, been surprised at the way she bent toward his hand and an arm reached for him, gently clutching.
He had marveled. He still did. The Remakers had remade the plant species that had been her ancestor far more extensively than they had remade his own precursor species. They had added, he guessed, their own genes. Perhaps they had added genes from other plants and animals as well. He could not tell, but he recognized in her the flowering of the genetic engineer’s art.
That was why …
“Why did you name me Gypsy Blossom?”
“That’s what the Remakers called themselves. Gypsies. And they made you. Remade you. Just as they did us. But you’re a plant. You have leaves, and your head’s a flower, a blossom.” He had explained it all to her before, but she liked to hear the words again and again, just like any child of Racs.
He had marveled anew three days later when she had opened her eyes and blinked and softly said, “That’s the Worldtree.” She had been facing the window. When she turned, pivoting on her stalk, she added, “You’re Dotson.”
She had learned as he had talked to her, thinking her little more than a plant. And at that moment that could only be considered her birth, she had already known enough to identify the first things her eyes saw.
A newborn, she had already been able to speak simple sentences, express simple thoughts. How far would she develop with time? he wondered. Had all Remakers been so precocious? Or had they differed in this as the plaques said they did in other ways. Some, he knew, had been pink, brown, and green. Some had had hair, not petals. Some had been borne in wombs, and some had grown from seed.
That was when he had begun to leave the VC on all day.
* * * *
“Are you going to see the career counselor?”
“No!”
“Maybe there is something that would suit you better.”
“No!”
“But …” Sunglow sat beside him in the shade of a bank of honeysuckle. In front of them two gravel paths met at an angle, and a small patch of moss was studded with white berries. Sunglow leaned forward to accept the bounty their world offered, even here in the shadow of Worldtree Center’s buildings. She picked a few berries, touched two to either side of her muzzle, and set them between his lips. He chewed, blinked at sudden tart sweetness, and swallowed.
He did not respond as he should, even though, somewhere in his mind, he dimly recognized the significance of her gesture: courting and invitation and welcome. Even the ancestral Racs of the forests, unintelligent and wild, living in hollow trees and burrows, courted their mates with food. The Remakers had not chosen—or perhaps they had just not thought—to remove the instinct from those genes that dictated the automatic functions of the brain.
“I can’t leave,” Dotson Barbtail said. “There’s too much to do. I’m not done. I—”
“You’re not doing it. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
He nodded jerkily.
“And it’s not what people say.” Her tone was mournful now. “Not me. I wish it was. But even moments like this … We go to Great Hall worship every week. We’re together often enough to keep people thinking of us as a pair. But we don’t have any of those late nights. You’ve never even let me past your door. Or come past mine.”
He only looked at her and twitched the skin of his shoulder and whined nervously deep in his throat. He knew she wished. He understood. He even shared the same desire. But he dared not let her find what he grew in the privacy of his apartment. If he had ever given in, if he had ever gone to her place, he would have felt obliged to let her into his. And then …
“You spend an awful lot of time in there.”
He whined again.
“You’ve got something, haven’t you? Something you don’t want anyone to know about. Something that takes up all your time.”
He wished he dared to get up and run, but all he could manage was to turn his stare aside.
“Another female?”
“No!”
“What is it then?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t I have a right to know? After all—”
“It’s damaging your reputation? Then stay away from me.”
“It’s damaging yours too. Whatever you’re doing, it’s destroying your career. You’re not doing the work you should be doing.”
He shrugged.
“It won’t be long before they throw you out.”
There was a long silence. Dotson picked a few mossberries himself. He stared at them as they rolled back and forth in the hollow of his hand. He licked his lips, and when that reminded him of other berries, just a little while ago, he recalled the answer he should have given Sunglow then.
Automatically he chose two plump berries, touched them to his own face, and held them up. When she leaned forward, he set them against her lips. Her tongue licked out to touch his fingers, and they were gone.
“I suppose I ought to go to the lab. Put in some time. Read reports. Run some tests. Though I wasn’t making that much progress before I got distracted.”
“By what?”
He didn’t answer.
* * * *
He stayed away from his apartment as long as he could. He worked. He found signs that a polymerase he had sought for months might lie in cells that had come from a hot spring just a little to the west of Worldtree City. He ate a meal he barely tasted in one of the Center’s cafeterias. He wrote a brief report to Senior Hightail about the new enzyme. And not long after dark he could stay away no longer.
Blue-gray light flickered in the crack that rimmed his door, and the mutter of VC talk and music was just loud enough to mask the steps behind him. He noticed nothing until his door was open and he was in and the door’s swing back into its jamb was blocked.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Sunglow!” She filled the doorway when he spun, silhouetted against the dim hall light behind her, her teeth gleaming in the VC flicker, her foot against the door.
“Someone’s in here.”
“No!” he said. “I just left the VC on.”
“Uh-uh. I’ve been listening. The channel changed.” She set one hand against his chest and pushed. He resisted. “Don’t you think I have a right to know?”
The anxious whine was back in his chest, struggling to become audible once more. But he gave way before her hand.
“Where’s the light switch?”
He pointed helplessly.
She flipped it on. “There’s nothing here.”
He was defeated: “In the sleeping room.”
Sunglow stepped past him. He followed her, watching past her shoulder when she stopped in the doorway. The VC was near the foot of his sleeping pad, but it faced the window and a large plant pot occupied by a shapeless pillar.
“There’s no one here. And I was sure I’d find her on your pad.” She pointed toward her left, where the room’s broad window made a corner with the wall and the shelves on which he kept his harnesses and pouches, cloaks and caps, were mostly bare. “Tsk,” she said, “but you’re a slob.” She bent to pick up a harness. “There should be someone here.”
He flipped the sleeping room’s light switch and sighed. The pillar by the window was wrapped in his second-best cloak, a brown cloth with pale green stripes.
“What is that?”
&nb
sp; “You can take it off now,” said Dotson.
“Is that Sunglow?” The muffled voice grew clearer as the cloak unpeeled.
Sunglow gasped and touched her own face as if she faced a mirror that told her she had changed in some dreadful way. When she realized what she was doing, that this was no mirror, that it was real and strange, she jerked her hands down and away from her cheeks.
“I heard her at the door. And I knew you wanted me to be a secret. So I grabbed the cloak.” Gypsy Blossom held it out. “I’m sorry I knocked everything off the shelves.”
Sunglow took the cloak in her hands and automatically began to fold it.
“Yes,” said Dotson Barbtail. He wanted to smooth the leaves the cloak had disarranged. “This is Sunglow.”
“You’re pretty,” said the plant. Slowly and deliberately, she raised a hand to scratch at her cheek beside her nose.
“What … ?” Sunglow’s voice squeaked. “They called them bots, didn’t they?”
“Botanicals.” Dotson nodded.
“And you swiped a seed.”
He nodded again.
“I don’t blame you for keeping me out.”
He bent to start picking up the things the bot had knocked from the shelves when she tried to hide within his cloak. “I suppose I should be packing now.”
“No,” said Sunglow. She set his cloak upon a shelf. “I won’t say anything. This is too marvelous.”
He grunted in surprise and relief.
“But there is a price.” Before he could react, she added, “I want to come back here. I want to talk to her.”
He stood up, his arms full. “Not me?”
“Oh! Of course! But …”
He understood. She still wanted him, as he wanted her. But the bot was foremost in her mind for now.
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 130
