Half Past Human (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by T. J. Bass

  ‘It’s his pregnancy,’ said Val. ‘It is unauthorized.’

  ‘But I’m a good worker. My child will be a good worker.’

  Walter assessed Tinker’s anxiety. These family-2 situations were dangerous. Imprinting wasn’t diluted effectively, and the pair tended to grow too fond of each other. Bad for ES efficiency.

  ‘Your permit is a class three – carbon copy?’ said Walter.

  Tinker nodded.

  ‘For a hybrid you’d need at least a class four,’ continued the fat old man. ‘Probably a class five, since Mu Ren is far too young to have earned the right to reproduce herself. That’s it. Class five. Hybrid permit with mate-of-choice. Have you applied for a variance?’

  Tinker hung his head.

  ‘As soon as I found out,’ he said sadly. ‘The committee hasn’t met yet, but the meck who took the application explained that it usually took some act of planet-wide benefit to earn a class five. Probability very low.’

  Walter patted the younger man’s shoulder and said cheerfully: ‘Well, a meck isn’t a committee. We have men to decide such things – human beings. You have been a very good worker, Tinker. I know some of the committee members. I’ll speak with them this morning. Why don’t you try to relax. Go for a shakedown cruise with Val. Doberman needs checking out.’

  Val and Walter exchanged glances. Tinker was too preoccupied to notice the thick stack of wrinkled charts – unusual for a mere shakedown cruise. Doberman III flexed his hinge muscle as they approached. The hatch opened to a dim cabin.

  ‘Morning, sirs,’ greeted the craft.

  Val climbed in, tossing the charts on the dash. He fumbled for harness buckles. Tinker paused.

  ‘Won’t we be needing our closed-environment suits?’

  ‘Under the seats. Climb in.’

  Val fed the charts through Doberman’s map digester. They rolled through, coming out flat and indexed.

  ‘If the variance is denied—’ began Tinker, ‘I think I’d like to keep the child as long as possible. The grace period runs until it starts to walk or talk.’

  Val shook his head vehemently.

  ‘I wouldn’t try that!’ he exclaimed. ‘The chucker teams would be nosing around your cubicle – stalking the little infant. Too much anxiety. Oh, I know that Psych Clinic sometimes orders fem citizens to go gravid to develop their own female identity. Those fems don’t seem to mind having their kids chucked down the chute. But you and Mu Ren are different – sensitive. Better if you chucked it right after it was born. Easier.’

  Tinker looked weak – helpless.

  ‘If you can’t do it, I’ll come over and do it for you. That’s what friends are for,’ said Val absently. He didn’t notice his troubled friend flare up.

  Sphincter opened. Garage said, ‘Goodbye.’ In a moment they were traveling at tree-top level. The sun looked like a lunar disc through the step-down windows. Tinker noticed the charts for the first time. He picked up one.

  ‘What are these coordinates?’

  ‘Transmissions – unauthorized tightbeams from the Outside. Our questing beams picked them up. There is nothing unusual on our buckeye detectors – thought we’d check them out visually.’

  Tinker studied the chart. One of the coordinates lay over the same line he had been receiving on the night before.

  ‘Security has been picking them up too.’

  ‘This is a matter for Hunter Control,’ frowned Val. ‘It is coming from the Outside – maybe even the gardens.’

  They passed over orchards and low fields of triple-crop – the mixture of stalk plants with vines and herbs. Tinker glanced from the chart to the window. The mountain range lay ahead – dozens of peaks – the taller ones with white ice caps.

  2

  Tinker’s Ritgen Rag

  Awakening to the bright cheerful summer, Flower raised his head and smiled his pollen face at his green neighbors. Lifting his eyes to the sun he saw the Glory – the orange world of the red octopus – shimmering gold and watery red. Arms tingled. Toes groped for soil damp. Sun shared Great Truths with his flower mind. His soul expanded. Rapture. Ecstasy faltered with autumn. Where were his bees? Pollen wasted. Actinics browned his green. Toes lost their arthritic grip. Where were his bees? Withered and drying, he fell into the soil without reproducing – returning to the nitrogen cycle unfulfilled. A flower soul moved on.

  Doberman III circled lower for a closer look. Tinker felt the nausea of burning gastric juice in his throat. A decomposing body lay in the garden. It was supine and naked. Roots and stolons invaded the flaking, red-brown skin. Empty sockets gazed upward.

  ‘Another flower reaction,’ said Val caustically. ‘It looks like a neut – an unpolarized male. Probably just an overdose of Molecular Reward. Neuts don’t have much Inappropriate Activity. Suicide is unlikely. The poor Nebish thought he was a flower and came Outside to commune with the sun – a phototropic catatonic schizo due to MR. Too late for sampling.’

  ‘Flower reaction?’ said Tinker.

  ‘Dying in the open like that. Under the sun. The hard rays just peel the skin right off – in a few hours. We see two kinds of flowers in the Gardens. Suicides, and drug reactions. Old Molecular Reward. The Big ES rations it out to Good Citizens, and we use it to bolster hunters’ nerve; but it is dangerous. The boys from Neuro can differentiate between MR and IA. But they need fresh brain tissue. We’ll just leave this one. It will be part of the crop pretty soon anyway.’

  Tinker mumbled something about a very hostile garden.

  ‘Air is pretty thin here in the upper slopes. Hang on. We’ll go down and use the wheel drive,’ said Val, kicking the craft into manual. His eyes gleamed as he maneuvered up the narrow trails, squealing wheels and grinding gravel. The craft lurched along, fish-tailing on tight turns and accelerating smoothly on flat areas. When they stopped, Tinker saw several miles of broken and tilted rock.

  ‘Mount Tabulum.’

  ‘It looked a lot more like a table from far away.’

  ‘It’s pretty flat,’ said Val, edging the craft forward. ‘There’s sign of buckeye. See the charcoal surrounded by stones? Used to be many Eyepeople around here before we hunted them down. Too bad they’re so depleted. They were good sport. But they were a danger to the crops – so they had to go.’

  Wheels jounced them across the table past an acre of ice-rimmed melt-water. The opposite edge looked out over other snowy mountain peaks. A mile below, the slopes were covered with glaciers of cube apartments. They drove back to the lake in the cup-like center of the table. Tinker studied the dash readings.

  ‘Fourteen thousand feet! I was going to step out and taste that water, but I’d need my oxygen bottle at this altitude.’

  Val adjusted the scanners, saying, ‘The buckeye seems to get along fine up here. Plenty of water – unless the pink snow poisons it – and safe from the hunters. Citizens can’t come up here without a machine or a heavy mountain Cl-En suit. Used to be a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain until something nipped off the peak. Note the serrated edge around the cup. Rocks look melted too.’

  ‘What could cut off the top like that?’ asked Tinker.

  Val shrugged. ‘Don’t know. The shock waves scrambled meck brains for miles around. A large Hunt was in progress up here. No recordings survived. Clean. No induced radiation.’

  Tinker frowned. Earth-moving projects in the Sewer Service gave him enough experience to appreciate the energy involved. He couldn’t even guess at the cause. The results were clear – several acres of flat space useless to the hive but ideal for buckeyes.

  The scanners swept over the campsites. Ashes and firestones – recent. Many of the bones had not yet bleached.

  ‘The stones are cold,’ said Val. ‘Not surprising. Even if there are buckeyes up here, it would be impossible to sneak up on them in this noisy craft.’

  ‘No sign of a communicator, though,’ said Tinker. ‘The distance from here to my receiver – through all the soil and walls – would tax a small tightbe
am. Something big enough to transmit that far would be impossible to hide up here.’

  Val nodded, satisfied. He steered for the edge. Wheels lurched down the slope displacing small rock slides. Several times he recklessly activated his air stream – lifted off into the thin atmosphere – and crunched back into the shifting gravel. Impatient. Finally, on the lower slopes, he lifted successfully and flew west. An hour later they were over an empty blue ocean.

  Tinker hit the magnifiers. Scanners showed only sterile, clear water. A broken tubeway lay on the bottom like a snake carcass – skin peeling and strut ribs exposed. Cold bubble buildings covered shelves at six and ten fathoms – skummy and dark. At five hundred feet, they flew back and forth along the coordinates of the tightbeam. Sand, surf and horizon island specks. None of the islands fit the coordinates.

  ‘What were all those blue-domed cysts on the bottom?’ asked Tinker. ‘They’ve been dead a long time.’

  ‘Rec Domes,’ said Val. ‘Underwater Recreation Centers. When the tubeway died – they died. No demand for them these days. Few citizens swim. No megafauna in the ocean, anyway. The Sewer Service sent out subs to record structure deterioration when I was a boy. Saw the playbacks. I doubt if the Big ES will go back into the sea again – too much work to do.’

  For hours they searched the open waters. They saw one small rocky island with a few stubborn plants.

  ‘Not crop plants, probably,’ said Val. ‘If we had more time it might be interesting to see what does survive on a barren island like that – without the Tillers and Agrifoam of the Big ES.’

  Tinker glanced at the chronograph. ‘Speaking of time, shouldn’t we be starting back?’

  Val lifted his hands from the controls.

  ‘Home, Doberman.’

  Walter met them in the garage. He appeared depressed.

  ‘Must be important,’ said Val. ‘For him to walk all the way down here.’

  Wheezing, belly swinging, old Walter waddled up to them. ‘It’s Mu Ren,’ he said. ‘Labor has started. Your dispenser called me.’

  Tinker started to run for the door.

  ‘The variance was denied,’ called Walter.

  Val caught up with Tinker downspiral.

  ‘Won’t the Mediteck be there?’

  ‘No authorization.’

  They were sweating heavily when they arrived. Mu Ren dozed between contractions. Tinker looked at the viewscreen. A sensor was glued to her belly and biolectricals ran across the screen. Fetal and maternal cardiograms looked good to him. He placed a hard board under her buttocks to keep the outlet up out of the fluids. The dispenser’s class thirteen meck brain sorted through its delivery program.

  ‘Mu Ren, pull your knees,’ it said when the next contraction began. She awoke and put her fingers behind the bend of her knees, pulling her thighs up and out. Bag of waters bulged. Tinker sorted through his tray of instruments – two snub-nosed clamps and a pair of blunt scissors. Membranes burst with the next contraction. Fluids gushed. A black hairy head showed. It was still inside.

  ‘Presentation?’ asked the dispenser. Diagrams appeared on the screen. Tinker palpated the top of the baby’s head. The larger diamond-shaped fontanel was posterior – towards her sacrum.

  ‘Baby is facing sacrum.’

  ‘Occiput anterior, very favorable,’ said the screen.

  With her next contraction her perineum stretched and the top of the hairy head bulged into view again.

  ‘Ritgen rag,’ said the meck. Tinker picked up a coarsely woven, dry hand towel and supported her perineum. Between contractions he lifted upwards and delivered the baby’s head.

  ‘Cord check,’ said the meck.

  Tinker flicked mucus from the little puckered pink face and felt deep between the baby’s neck and shoulder. One loop of the umbilical cord circled the neck. It felt tense. He dug his middle finger under the cord and pulled quickly. It didn’t budge. The fetal cardiogram became erratic. The meck accentuated the irregular pulse by putting it on audio. Tinker worked faster.

  ‘One loop,’ he said, reaching for the pair of snub-nosed clamps. Click, click. Picking up the scissors, he cut between the clamps. The head moved out a fraction of an inch and the cardiogram smoothed. Guiding the head down, he released the anterior shoulder from under her symphysis. Lifting, he released the posterior shoulder. The rest of the infant tumbled out in a jumble of cord and a gush of fluid. Wiping the wrinkled face, he handed the still infant to Val.

  ‘I’d better chuck it down the chute before she hears it cry. That’d ruin her day,’ mumbled Val, turning to the door. He held the wet, cheesy infant at arm’s length, like garbage gone sour.

  Tinker was busy with the afterbirth. Mu Ren’s uterus was filling with clots and the placenta bulged into the vagina. She went pale and silent.

  Val crawled down towards the spiral leaving a trail of cloudy white drops in the dust. The infant began to squirm and cry vigorously. Large eyes blinked at him. He tried not to return their gaze.

  Val set the blades between chop and dice. He glanced down the dark chute. The granular brown walls carried nondescript stains that spoke of the varieties of waste it accepted. Standing back he began to swing the infant underhanded. If he tossed it expertly it should fall the two hundred feet to the blades with only minimal trauma against the walls.

  ‘She’s bleeding,’ called Tinker.

  Val glanced back to see Tinker’s worried face in the crawlway. His swinging had quieted the infant.

  ‘Did you try pressing the fundus?’

  ‘Didn’t help.’

  ‘Try calling the white team. A Mediteck with his Medimeck.’

  ‘Won’t come. No paper work for this pregnancy. It is unauthorized.’

  They both glanced down at the cooing infant. Dark eyes watched them. They smiled.

  ‘The nipple-midbrain-uterine reflex,’ said Tinker.

  They carried the infant back to Mu Ren. She was trying to massage her uterine fundus, but the hemorrhage continued.

  ‘Breastfeed,’ said Tinker, handing her the infant.

  She fumbled weakly, but the infant quickly locked onto the nipple – sucking strongly. Immediately she felt her fundus cramp and harden. The bleeding stopped.

  ‘He doesn’t know he is unauthorized,’ she said.

  Several months later Tinker brooded over his bench at Garage. A tool kit with shoulder harness hung from his stool. Val came on duty and was surprised to find him there.

  ‘What brings you in so early?’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ said Tinker. ‘Besides, I’m not here for duty – just packing my things.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Val, fingering the kit.

  ‘Going on strike,’ continued Tinker. ‘I’ve been down to the Department of Population Control every day this month. Always the same thing. No variance on my class three birth permit. They want me to turn in the hybrid.’

  Val adopted a sympathetic facade – more to keep a good worker in the garage than out of any true feeling for the infant.

  ‘The committee’s vote is usually final,’ he said realistically.

  Tinker squared his shoulders.

  ‘Well, we will see how the Big ES gets along without me. I keep half the machines in this city functioning.’

  Val nodded. ‘True, but all you will do is lower our standard of living. We can’t influence the committee. Old Walter tried that. You need a planet-wide contribution – a heroic act to match the class five permit.’

  Tinker’s androgenic shoulders stayed square – his chin up.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said, strapping on his kit.

  Mu Ren watched Tinker unload the staples.

  ‘Calorie-basic?’ she said.

  He nodded and grunted.

  ‘On strike. Pushing for a variance.’

  She had watched the pressures of the past months wear him down – gone was the open-faced innocence of his neutral years. He barked and growled, threatening trauma to the clerks. He walked to his workbench and put on t
he earphones. She stood behind him with her arms around his shoulders and her forehead pressed against the back of his head.

  ‘He’s crawling already,’ she whispered.

  He glanced around the room.

  ‘Better pick up anything small and sharp. He’ll just put it in his . . .’ he began. Realizing that the chute awaited the infant any day now, the theoretical danger of swallowing a sharp object seemed ridiculous.

  ‘Well, anyway . . .’ he cleared his throat. ‘The chucker team won’t know he is crawling. He is way ahead of schedule in his neuromuscular development.’ After a moment’s reflection he added: ‘And don’t let Val in here anymore. He’s such a Good Citizen he’d feel he had to report Junior’s maturity – Val, the GC bastard!’

  Tinker set his jaw and spliced his five-foot, black capacitor into the communicator’s power line. Pouring water into the heat sink, he checked the polarity reversal. A shaped field probed around the room, rustling loose tools. Mu Ren returned to her bedding and curled up with her child. The screen blinked with concentric dancing circles. Musical notes pulsed. He noted the coordinates, narrowed the beam, and called.

  ‘Who is out there?’

  The music grew loud and clear as the other transmitter locked onto his position. The concentric circles collapsed to a pinpoint. A metallic voice interrupted the tune.

  ‘Who asks?’

  Tinker worried about the ripples of green light on the edges of his screen – Security’s questing beams. He doubted if they would be able to lock in well enough to get their conversation. He worked fast – identifying himself quickly.

  ‘My name is Tinker – of HC City.’

  ‘My name is Harvester,’ answered the coarse voice.

  ‘A renegade?’ asked Tinker.

  ‘A free meck,’ corrected the voice. ‘Disciple of Olga. If you wish to be free from the damnable hive you may join us – wild and free – the tribes of Mount Tabulum. A Tinker is always welcome. There is much work to do.’

  ‘Free?’ mumbled Tinker, hopefully.

  ‘We offer you freedom and flavored calories. Join us. Olga will protect you.’

  Tinker studied his wall map. Beam coordinates lay across the Mount Tabulum which he and Val had visited. The area had seemed deserted.