Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  Truly, she knew it, Nick was the man she wanted. Gentle, supportive, reliable, the father of her child, the cradle of her heart. But, for all that, she had told Bernie to keep his distance…

  He had been efficient, smooth, and capable. She had told him he was cruel, and he had agreed. If she had thought to wonder, she would have expected him to show a grand ferocity when he confronted Chowdhury, and then Gelarean. But there had been none of that. He had only been strong and direct and to the point. He was a defender, not an attacker, not a despoiler. He was less gentle than Nick, but he too was supportive, in his way, and reliable.

  Halfway through Saturday afternoon, she found herself wondering how much damage her marriage had sustained. Nick was forgiving, yes, but she had briefly forsworn her loyalty to him, if not her love, and he knew it. It had to make a difference, and a difference that she would have to struggle to overcome. Not that Nick would keep reminding her, or that his feelings would be lessened by the memory. He was too forgiving for that. But she, she carried the guilt, and she would have to exorcise that burden.

  She was pacing back and forth in the living room, her voice echoing within her skull, when Andy tugged at her jeans and cried, “Mommy!”

  She bent to him, suddenly aware that she had been ignoring persistent demands for attention, and said, “Yes, dear?”

  “My Warbird went under the couch. Get it for me?”

  She obeyed, but when Andy followed up that demand with a request for a story, she said, “I think it’s about time I baked us some bread. Want to watch?”

  “I wanta help!”

  “Just watch, until you’re bigger.” Nick was assembling the ingredients for a cake, but she chased her husband from the counter of “his” kitchen to the table and dove into her occasional specialty. It was also her therapy, for she had long since learned that pounding bread dough into submission could quiet her mind even when her thoughts churned so vigorously that she could concentrate on nothing else.

  But her thoughts refused this time to quiet. Instead, they jumped their track. How much had she contributed to the final roundup? She had identified Chowdhury’s “boss,” but surely only seconds before Bernie would have seen it himself. She had made a phone call. She had…What else? She had given Bernie someone to talk to, and that was all. She hoped she gave Nick something more.

  On Sunday, she and Nick took Andy to the zoo to see the unmodified ancestral stock of the genimals he knew so well from the veedo and the airport and the highway. In the reptile house, a python was basking in the sun; on the wall beside its cage, a board displayed the skin it had recently shed. “Look at that,” said Emily. “See the scales that covered the eyes?”

  “They’re like windows!” cried Andy.

  “They make me wonder if we could make a house, or a car, or a train, from a snake. The windows would be built in, grown in, and…”

  “Your next project?” asked Nick.

  She shrugged and grinned. “Maybe, come to think of it. It would be easy enough to enlarge those scales and make them repeat along the body. It would be trickier to transplant the genes into a pumpkin, or Roachster.” Or an Armadon, she thought, and she wondered what would come of that project now that Chowdhury was out of circulation.

  She did not get an answer to her question right away. Neoform had lost not only one of its chief researchers and product developers, but also its research director, and on Monday, no one knew what would happen next. She and Alan Bryant were in their domed fabric “barn” that afternoon, checking on the growth of the Bioblimps, when Alan said, “Do you think they’ll make you the new chief?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not political enough. And I wouldn’t want the job if I were.” She gestured past the net that closed off most of the dome’s interior space, forming a huge cage in which young moving vans rose and fell above a long food trough. Their bells swelled and contracted, propelling them about their space, in and out of the zones of blue and gold illumination defined by the dome’s panels, in a way that would not be allowed once they reached full size, when strapped-on control pods would cover their mouths, all except a narrow opening for their breathing. Their tentacles writhed as they plucked chunks of unidentifiable meat from the trough and inserted them into the stomachs within the bells. The sphincters that controlled the openings to their cargo holds alternately gaped and puckered. Each van bore a stylized sailing ship on the side of its gasbag. “They’ll be too big for this place soon. We’ll have to take them outside and tether them.”

  “You would if you were political,” said her aide. Then he shook his head. “We won’t need to tether them. Their nervous systems are so rudimentary that we’ve had some problems designing the control circuitry, but it’s almost ready now.”

  “Tether them anyway. If the controls have been that tricky, something’s bound to go wrong. And we don’t want them wandering off and eating pedestrians.”

  Alan began to laugh, looked sidelong at her, and let it die. The image had been a funny one, straight out of ancient monster movies, but it did, he quickly realized, come a little close to home for his boss. “Have you heard anything about Chowdhury’s lab?”

  “Not a thing. I think they’re pretending he’s taking a little sabbatical. Business as usual for now.”

  The pretense lasted until Wednesday. That morning, when Emily reached her lab, Alan was holding a piece of paper. As she entered the room, he handed it to her. She stopped, leaned against a bench, and read:

  TO: All Employees

  FROM: T. Gruene, Personnel

  RE: Supervisory changes

  We have recently lost one of this company’s three founders, Director of Research Dr. Sean Gelarean, and a valued employee, Dr. Ralph Chowdhury, Senior Researcher in Product Development.

  We will shortly advertise for a new Director of Research. Until the results of our search for a replacement are in, Dr. Gelarean’s post will remain vacant. All reports and requests for travel funds, supplies, and project approvals should be routed to Dr. Atkinson.

  Dr. Chowdhury’s position will be filled by Dr. Adam Chand. Until now, Dr. Chand has been a research assistant in Dr. Chowdhury’s lab.

  “It doesn’t say a word about why we lost those ‘two valued employees,’” said Emily. “But that’s good. In fact, Wilma might make a good replacement for Sean. And Adam…”

  “He’ll do fine,” said Alan.

  Something in his tone made Emily think that he too would like to be a lab chief, but she did not respond. Instead, she handed the memo back to him and said, “Better change that routing in the computer.”

  A little later, crashing sounds, as of furniture breaking, drew her down the hall toward Chowdhury’s—now Chand’s—lab. There she joined a number of her colleagues as they watched, bemused, while Sam Dong and Micaela Potonegra expelled Chowdhury’s chosen furniture, so obviously high, ungainly, and uncomfortable, from the lab, and Chand told a pair of maintenance men, “Out! Get us some decent furniture. But get this stuff out of here!” He sounded exasperated, but there was a strange smile on his face. Emily thought it must signify a sense of triumph and relief, uncertainty and determination.

  “But, Dr. Chand,” one of the maintenance crew protested. “It takes weeks for an order to come through.”

  “Then bring in the furniture from the other lab, in the barn. We’ll do all our work in here, until the new things come and you install them in the barn.”

  “Uh, we could shorten the legs on some of these…”

  “Then do it. In the barn. Get it out of here!”

  “Yessir!”

  Chand’s face did not lose its strained mixture of expressions as he turned his attention on the spectators. “The show’s over,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.” Then, as he seemed to notice Emily for the first time, he added, “Emily! Come on in!” and jerked his head toward the lab behind him.

  She followed him in, to find Sam and Micaela pausing in their labors to stare at her, smiling almost as if
she belonged with them. Perhaps, she thought, she did, for though they had borne the daily brunt of Chowdhury’s temper, she had been the one he had been trying to kill. “Adam,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  “And now what?” he said. Suddenly the uncertainty was uppermost in his expression.

  Emily looked around the room. The equipment—workstations, DNA splicers, and more—was now concentrated on a single workbench and the tops of the lab’s freezers and incubators. “You’ll do your own thing,” she said. She pointed at the puffer fish hanging from the ceiling. “What’s that?”

  Chand’s face lit up. “Well, sure,” he said. “I was planning to…” Then her question penetrated, and he followed her finger with his gaze. “I’ve been trying to design a submarine,” he added more slowly. He explained the fish and the direction of his thought, while Emily nodded encouragingly.

  Micaela Potonegra interrupted: “We will be carrying on, though. The Armadon…” She hesitated, as if aware that the Armadons might be a sore point. They were, after all, potential competition for the company funds and energy Emily’s Bioblimps would also need. They also stood, in the mind of any Neoform employee, for Chowdhury. They were Chowdhury, in a much more solid and positive sense than the cocaine nettle and hedonic genimals. “The Armadon prototypes will be ready for testing soon, and we do want to see them into production. We’ve already put a lot of work into them, you know.”

  Emily did know. They had done most of Chowdhury’s design work, and all of the donkey work of feeding and cleaning and testing, just as Alan Bryant did for her. In a very real sense, the Armadons were as much their babies as they were Chowdhury’s. But they had been Chowdhury’s idea, and he would get the credit, even if he must enjoy it in a prison cell.

  Micaela pointed toward the back of the room. “We still have those four in here.” Emily looked and saw the cage on the floor, crowded with the baby Armadons she had first seen just the week before. “And they can’t stay in that cage any longer. They can hardly move.”

  Nodding that Micaela was speaking for them all, Adam Chand said, “Would you like one? It’ll grow, you know, and when it’s big enough, we can have the prototype shop fit it out. That won’t cost you anything.”

  Emily looked back at three expectant faces. Did they feel that they owed this to her, as recompense for what Chowdhury had done, or tried to do? Then how could she say no? And besides—the thought came to her mind for the first time in weeks—her family did need a second vehicle. Let this one grow up, and it would be perfect for Nick, though they would have to enlarge the garage. And he would be delighted by its rarity on the road, though surely that would not last. Andy would be delighted by it now, as a novel pet and as a replacement for the Chickadee in his affections.

  How could she say no?

  She didn’t.

  She said, “Thank you.”