When Tom Cross first woke up, he knew something was wrong, for he felt empty, dead inside, his cheeks were stiff with dried tears, and he had the sort of headache that comes with having had too many self-pitying drinks. But what was that something? Memory served him not at all, and he felt a surge of panic as he peered within his skull for the answer he craved so badly.
The light that came through the bedroom window was grey, and the honeysuckle leaves beyond the glass glistened with wet. He rolled over with a grunt, slapping at the alarm with a clumsy hand to silence its insistent, strident, “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” Then, realizing, he groped at the other side of the bed. But no curve of haunch or hip or breast met his hand. The bed was empty, cold, unwarmed all night by any other body, and the scent of honeysuckle wine that clung to the pillow was only a weak echo of what he was used to smelling in the morning.
He remembered. She was gone, missing, kidnapped. The police had come, and they had been sympathetic, but they had had little help to offer. “Wait,” they had said. “Maybe someone will call. Or maybe not. Sometimes the victims just disappear.” The woman who had said that had not been able to meet his eye.
He had cleaned up the apartment, picking up coins, wiping up honey, righting the only child they had known, their Alice. The landlord had arrived, with a loop of chain and a padlock for the apartment door, a promise that a locksmith would soon arrive to repair the door properly, and the news that insurance would cover all the damage. Though it could not, admittedly, get Muffy back.
When clouds had blotted out the stars and the night had grown cool at last, Tom had closed the apartment’s windows. Then he had had a drink. He had been tempted to try, in memory of Muffy and her own preference, the honeysuckle wine, but he had settled for the scotch in the cupboard. Then he had had another, sitting as near the phone as he could. He had not wanted to miss the call. But no call had come. He had cried, had another drink, cried some more, and finally gone to bed.
He sat up and put his legs over the side of the bed. The motion made his headache worse. He stared at the floor and considered the state of his body. His mouth was dry and foul. His belly felt full of acid, and it lurched quite involuntarily when Randy, responding to the signs that he was awake, leaped onto the mattress and presented her bristly back to be scratched. The scratch was an essential part of Randy’s morning ritual, and if Muffy wasn’t there, he would have to do. He sighed, met the spider’s demand as perfunctorily as possible, and brushed her aside.
He needed aspirin, a toothbrush, breakfast. Most of all he needed Muffy. Lacking that…Mech, but he missed Freddy. And with that thought, he knew what he wanted to do that day.
As soon as he could, he called the Garden: “Bert? I can’t make it today.”
“What you mean you can’t make it today?” His boss was loud in his surprise. Tom winced and wished the aspirin he had taken worked more rapidly. “We have a shipment to unload. Customers to take care of! And I cannot do it all, at all. Today is when the bills I must send out!”
Tom explained what he had found when he reached home the day before and said, “I want to see a friend. I need someone to talk to.”
Bert’s voice instantly turned sympathetic: “Of course, you must! Friends are a great help! Count on me! You can, if there is anything I can do. I know how it is. It never happened to me. It never happened to my parents. But my grandfather, it happened to him. Bad times those were, and it was the government that did it, the secret police. Not kidnappers. But I know. The stories! I heard them many times.” Tom could almost see him nodding sagaciously, insistently.
The art museum’s main entrance, softened by the morning’s mist and rain, was framed by marble pillars in the classic mode, though more than a little etched and stained by many decades of exposure. Parked in the paved circle before the entrance was an antique mechanical limousine, its flanks bearing the BRA insignia of the Bioform Regulatory Administration. To either side of the original, central building were more modern wings of glass and concrete and beyond those, clusters of hollowed bioforms, pumpkins and squashes rearing their tumorous hulks against the green backdrop of parkland beyond. In the foreground of the southern cluster, a single dried and windowed eggplant swung from a concrete stem. Broad lawns clumped with shrubbery and trees and twined across with gravel walkways separated the complex from the road.
Usually, the museum’s pumpkins gave Tom a pang of mingled guilt and homesickness. He had grown up in one, and he had left his mother—but not his father, never his father, not the real one—behind in one. Today, he registered the details only peripherally as he climbed the steps to the entrance. Randy was clinging to his shoulder, her fur scratching against his neck. The attendant at the ticket booth waved them through, saying, “Visitin’ again? Where ya girlfriend?”
Tom nodded and shrugged and thought the darkness on his face must be what provoked the attendant’s next comment: “Left ya, hah? They do it ever’time.” He didn’t try to set the other straight but stepped past him and into the cavern of the entrance rotunda, its floor tessellated with geometric patterns, its high walls hung with bronze sculptures. A giftshop occupied a filigreed enclosure to one side. A sound-plaque mounted on a pedestal before him announced that the shop’s enclosure was an adaptation of the fibrous skeleton of the seed pod of the wild cucumber, and that the bronzes had been done during the Great Depression of the previous century, as government make-work projects. The bronzes had adorned public buildings such as post offices and courthouses for over a hundred years.
The music section was in the basement. Tom headed toward the stairs in the back of the building, passing paintings, woodwork, pottery, and more. Near the stairway was an exhibit of early biosculptures. Some still writhed or hummed or reflected iridescence from overhead spotlights. Some were aged, silent, dull. A few, like the very early Atkinsons, had long ago died of old age and been stuffed. Their value was now less that of art than that of history.
It was too early in the day for the museum to be crowded. There was only a single couple ahead of him, studying the biosculptures. The man looked familiar and, briefly, he wondered why. But he dismissed the question. His mind was on other things.
When Jim Brane woke, he too had a headache, but not because of what he had drunk. The back of his head was tender, swollen, and throbbing. Happily, however, his bed was not empty, for beside him, short auburn hair rumpled on her cheek, body warm against his own, face still puffy with sleep, was Julia Templeton. Nor did he himself feel so empty. He remembered immediately what had happened the day before, and though he felt as deprived by fate as Tom, his response was far more angry than depressed.
He and Julia had their breakfast in the Farm’s journeyman dining hall, abroad and sunny room with a serving counter down one side. It looked much like the apprentice refectory, but where the apprentices sat at long trestle tables, the journeymen had tables sized for four and sat, mostly, in twos. Jim Brane and Julia Templeton could thus be joined by no more than one or two of their fellows at a time, eager for news of what had happened, full of commiseration and perhaps—more privately, of course—“There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Losing one’s truck was every trucker’s greatest dread. If happened late enough in life, it meant having to start one’s career over again with a new pup, doing years of local delivery work while the pup grew and learned and became able to handle the long hauls.
The Farm’s dispatching office was next door to the dining hall. On their way out, Julia checked the assignment board hanging on the wall. Then she grinned. “They’ve left me free,” she said. “Must want me to hold your hand. Or this place has a heart after all.”
Jim couldn’t help but grin back as he took her hand in his. “If this were the Wild West, and if we were cowboys, and if we had six-guns and saddles, we could round up a posse and go hunting the rustlers.”
“But it isn’t,” she said. “We aren’t, we don’t, and we can’t. That’s the cops’ job.”
“So what can we do?”
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“We haven’t been to the art museum?”
The last thing he wanted to do was pretend that he wasn’t driving his truck on their joint labors because he was on holiday. Tige had been stolen. He was bereft, and he grieved. Yet he knew that nothing would be gained, he would subtract nothing from whatever time must pass before he and the Mack could be reunited by the police, if he moped around the Farm all day.
He made a sour face. “So let’s.” They had been, at one time or another, to most of the city’s cultural institutions, but once they had discovered the museum of natural history, with its displays of ancient skeletons that seemed so promising of the Age of Bioforms, they had been satisfied to return again and again. Concerts, plays, and human history had lost their charm. Yet today, pteranodons and gomphotheres and glyptodonts did not appeal. They both needed something fresh.
“Maybe it’ll take your mind off Tige.”
“Mmph.” He grunted skeptically, as if to say he would be upset for days and weeks, and so would she if her Blackie were stolen.
Blackie’s ancestral stock had included a strong strain of Boston bull. She was slimmer and longer-legged than Tige, who had owed more to the English variety of bulldog. But the stertorous breathing, at rest or in motion, was similar, and so was the size. Both dwarfed their drivers and could carry many tons upon their backs.
The Farm’s Macks were kept in large barns, each in its own bay, each bay with its own door to the outside. The bays were lined with maintenance equipment. Ceiling hoists held cabs and cargo pods suspended in the air through the night, relieving the genimals of their weight. Most bays held at least two pods of different sizes, giving the truckers a chance to tailor their equipment to the jobs of the day. A hallway ran along the barn’s central axis, with human-sized doors letting the truckers reach their Macks.
When they passed the door to Tige’s bay, Jim had to stop for just a moment. He opened the door, looked in at all the empty space, seeing it as no more vast and no emptier than the void in his heart. “Come on,” said Julia, her hand on his arm, and he closed the door. Blackie’s bay was next door, and there he helped her lower Blackie’s smallest pod, its cargo compartment no larger than the back of an old-time bread-van, from the ceiling and strap it into place. Then Julia tossed her Mack a biscuit. Once they were aboard, she found the computer cable on the floor and plugged it into the socket in Blackie’s spine. The socket was exposed in the center of an opening in the pod’s floor behind the control console, and it linked the pod’s computer directly into the Mack’s central nervous system.
Within an hour they were admiring bronze sculptures, ancient paintings, and a display that tracked the development of biosculpture. “Down that way,” said Julia. She stopped thumbing through her guidebook long enough to point. “There’s modern art, paintings, ceramics, even fashion.”
In reply, Jim pointed at the silent Atkinsons before them. “These are interesting,” he said. One was a furry double helix; its sound plaque said that it had been gengineered in part from a cat’s genes and that it had purred when stroked. He wished he could touch it, but it was enclosed in a glass case. “I wonder what it felt like when it was alive.”
“Like a cat, of course. A skinny one. I like this one better.” She was staring at three bulb-tipped stalks whose bases bore scores of insectile legs. The stalks moved slowly about their enclosure, its top slotted to admit air, swaying and trembling, forming and reforming a triangular cluster.
“What’s it do?” She shrugged, but he did not register the answer. Approaching them down the museum’s hallway was a young man who looked somehow familiar, as if, despite the giant spider riding upon his shoulder, he were someone Jim had once known well but had not seen for years, someone who had changed since last Jim had seen him, someone who had grown as much as had Jim himself, someone who…
“Tommy. Tommy Cross.”
The eyes that met his were rimmed with dark, and the mouth, like Jim’s own, held no smile at all. “Hi, Jimmy.”
Jim turned to Julia to say, “We were friends in high school. Best friends. But then he…” He looked back at his old friend. “I haven’t seen you since you ran away from home with Freddy.”
“We made it to the city.” Tom held one hand as if to add that that was past and now of no importance. “What have you been doing?” The hand moved to point at the other man’s shoulder and the patch it bore. “That…?”
“Ah.” Jim’s tone faltered as if he were embarrassed by a memory. “Dad got me interested in the Truck Farm. I’m a trucker now.” Jim turned just enough to wrap an arm about Julia’s shoulder and pull her close. “So’s Julia. Templeton. And…”
“I see.” Tom’s expression fell even further.
“What’s the matter?” asked Julia. “It sounds like you two should be happy to see each other, but you both look as if you’ve just lost your best friend. Not found him again.” She paused for a moment and added, “I know why Jimmy’s down. Someone knocked him on the head yesterday and stole his Mack. But you?”
Tom Cross patted the spider on his shoulder and said, apparently irrelevantly, “This is Randy.” But his voice was suddenly choked with tears. In a moment, he went on. “Belongs to my girlfriend. Muffy Bowen.” Then he explained what had happened.
“Oh, mech,” said Jim.
“Yeah. I came here to talk to Freddy.”
“You mean he’s here, too?”
Julia looked puzzled.
“In the music department, downstairs. He’s an exhibit, of all things.” Tom pointed toward the stairwell at the end of the hall. “That’s where I was going. Want to come?”
The basement music room was actually a small auditorium. There were several arcs of seats for an audience, soft lighting, ceiling panels designed to improve the room’s acoustics, wall-mounted speakers, and a small stage. On the stage, a single man, slender, clean-shaven, grey-haired, clad in an anonymous grey coverall and vest, sat in a straight-backed chair, his back to the missing audience. A briefcase leaned against the chair leg. Before him was a small table covered with papers. On the far side of the table were four padded frameworks that roughly resembled highchairs. Each of the frameworks held a genimal. One of the genimals, sitting upright with its snout in the air, looked precisely like the garbage disposals in Mr. Greengenes’ Appliance Garden. Another lay on its back with its legs jutting uselessly into the air. Its blunt snout projected upward much like that of the first genimal, though it was considerably more elongated and it was perforated by a number of holes, like the fingering holes of a flute. Its hide was checkered black and tan. The third and fourth genimals were smaller, and each had, poking toward the ceiling, more than the usual four legs.
“That’s Freddy!” said Jim, pointing at the garbage disposal.
“Call him Frederick,” said Tom. “He insists, ever since he became a serious musician. He sings,” he added, looking at Julia. “And Porculata. She’s a bagpipe.” He pointed at Porculata’s snout. “Sphincter muscles close off the holes. Her legs are just hollow tubes, and they used duck genes to give her air sacs. The little guys are their kids, the calliope shoats.” He shook his head, as if at the vagaries of uncontrolled hybridization. “Their apartment’s behind the stage.”
“Do they have names?” asked Julia.
“The kids? Barnum and Baraboo.”
Randy shifted on Tom’s shoulder, lifting her body and waving her palps as if sifting the air for an odor that seemed familiar. Then she uttered a single “Meep,” scuttled down his front as easily as if she still had her full complement of legs, and charged down the auditorium’s central aisle. In a moment, she was racing across the stage toward Freddy—Frederick—the garbage disposal, the grey man was pulling his glossily shod feet beneath his chair with an air of distaste, and Frederick was yelling, “Randy!” and twitching as best he could his stubby limbs. Porculata and the shoats were squealing their own greetings. The commotion was anything but musical.
The three young humans ap
proached the stage more slowly, while Randy climbed over Frederick’s immobile form, palping and meeping. When they stepped onto the stage and Frederick could see them, the genimal said in a nasal bass, “Where’s Muffy? How’d Randy lose a leg? And hi, Jimmy, longtime no see. Who’s the broad? She’s got nice…”
Tom glanced at the grey man while Randy moved happily on to Porculata and the shoats. He wondered what he was doing there—the papers on the table looked intimidatingly official—but he ignored the man’s obvious irritation while he glumly explained what had happened the day before. When he was done, the grey man cleared his throat emphatically and spoke to Frederick: “You can chat with your friends later. Right now, we have important business to finish.”
Surprised, Tom said, “What’s with this bird, Frederick?”
His old friend made a rude noise, and his voice rose in pitch. “The man from BRA. He’s still wet behind the ears. He hasn’t been weaned yet. He…”
“But…”
“He says we’re guilty of unlicensed gengineering. Someone spotted Ringling and Bailey at the Met and asked questions.” He repeated the rude noise. Ringling and Bailey were Barnum’s and Baraboo’s sisters. “Now he wants to confiscate the kids.”
The BRA agent glared impartially at everyone. “It is a serious offense,” he said. “The regulations are quite clear, and no plan was ever submitted. There was never any application for permission. There was no environmental impact statement. And the law requires all these things of all gengineers before production can possibly be allowed to begin. If they are not done, we must be sure there is no hazard. We must examine them. That’s what our laboratories are for.” As he spoke, his hands moved over his papers, pointing to the forms that had to be filed.
“Litter,” said Tom Cross. “I suppose all those pieces of paper were submitted, in triplicate, before your production was begun?”
“Quintuplicate,” said the BRA agent. “And I was born, not made. I had parents, and they reproduced quite naturally. There were no gengineers involved.” His expression was smug with self-righteous satisfaction.
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