Greenhouse

by Thomas A Easton

  There were even moving vans, hydrogen-filled Bioblimps gengineered from jellyfish, tethered to the ground, turning to festive music while children and adults rode the seats suspended from their tentacles and enjoyed the shade cast by their fifty-meter gasbags. The sailing-ship logo was prominent on their sides, for they had been donated for the sake of publicity. Mayflower Van Lines held the monopoly on these genimals, but it had found that the vans bred in far greater numbers than the company could use, and it had had to find other uses for them. Most became food for jets and other genimals. Some were pickled when tiny for use in school biology classes. A few had found their way to zoos and amusement parks as biological merry-go-rounds.

  The zoo was crowded and noisy and, Jim Brane had suggested, not at all a place where anyone would expect to find them. They had been there, of course. Hadn’t everyone? But they were not in the habit of strolling from cage to cage and throwing popcorn and peanuts at the animals.

  It would be, they all agreed, a perfect place to go to ground, at least for a day, and while the police were trying to find the villains, or while the villains were growing tired of their nefarious determination to spirit Muffy—and now Tom—away for unnamed but presumably foul purposes, they could enjoy themselves.

  As soon as Detective Fischer had left, they had therefore all crowded into Tige’s cab. Tom had fitted the handcart and its cushions into a corner and set Freddy in it. Randy had clung with her seven legs to the cart’s edge and a cushion, close to the pig but safely out of range of any crushing lurch. Jim had taken the wheel and said to his Mack, “Head for the Reagan, Tige. We’re going to the zoo.” Tige had known the way, and thereafter Jim had had to do no more than hold the wheel and look like a driver. Muffy Bowen had marveled at the Mack truck’s obedience, forgetting that Jim had explained it the day before.

  “More honey bums,” said Tom Cross, pointing at the stone ramp beneath an overpass. Heat shimmered off the concrete that sheltered the bums from the weather.

  “They’re further gone than your mother,” said Julia Templeton.

  “I’ve heard,” said Muffy. “That they stay on the pavement there because if they don’t…”

  “They’ll grow roots?” Tom snorted. “I don’t believe it.”

  “But you never do see them lying down on dirt,” said Jim Brane. “In the city, they’re in the alleys, never in the park.”

  “How would they know?”

  “Something in the wine? A gene vector with a memory tag? Or maybe they’ve just seen a few bad examples.”

  Freddy laughed. “Remember that boob from BRA?” Tom nodded, smiling at the crack.

  “What boob?” asked Muffy, puzzled. She hadn’t been there.

  Tom described the scene he and Jim and Julia had met on the museum’s small stage.

  “He was telling us why our kids are dangerous,” said Freddy. “But that honeysuckle is dangerous. Look at’em!” He rolled his eyes toward the nearest window. “And no one ever asked permission to gengineer it, or to release it. And no one’s analyzed it to see what the gengineer behind it might have hidden in its genes.”

  “But roots?”

  “Your mother seems to think…”

  “But she’s…”

  They passed under a wrought-iron archway, found a parking place, and paid their entry fees. Once they were past the turnstile, they relaxed, feeling safe. Julia said, “You can’t be sure. They might have followed us.”

  Tom shrugged. “Then there’s nowhere safe. We might as well enjoy ourselves.”

  The handcart shook as its wheels rolled over a hump heaved up in the path by a root. “Watch it!” cried Freddy. “I’m still sore from yesterday!”

  “There aren’t any honey bums,” said Muffy. Randy was riding on her shoulder now, shifting her stance to scan the zoo’s woods and enclosures for new and interesting sights. She herself was scanning with something else in mind.

  “Too many fences,” said Jim. “And the gates are locked, except where there’s a ticket booth.”

  “There also isn’t much honey,” said Julia. “It’s like the Farm. They must dig it up.” She pointed at a single small vine with three flowers, and Muffy stepped toward it.

  Tom stopped her with a hand on her arm. “You shouldn’t.”

  The craving was strong in her. In fact, perhaps thanks to the heavy dose her kidnappers had given her, it was stronger than she had ever felt it. Certainly, it was stronger than it could possibly have been the week before, when Tom had said much the same thing, and she had responded, “I’m an adult! I can have some if I want it! I can handle it!”

  She turned, glaring, feeling her brows hunched aggressively above her eyes. But then she froze, facing Tom, and her mind raced.

  Her father had been an alcoholic. Her mother had favored pills. Neither had often been conscious enough to talk with her, to help her with all the concerns of a growing girl. She had tried to flee to her friends, but they had teased her about her parents the zombies. She had retreated, keeping only one girlfriend, Helena. But then her father had made a pass at Hel, her mother had said nothing—if she had even been aware of what was going on—and she had been alone. That was when she had acquired Randy. Soon after, she had begun to dance.

  And when her father had made a pass at her, she had left.

  She had never told Tom what she had fled. Now she wondered how much he guessed, how much her own dependence on the honeysuckle wine had told him, how far she had already gone on the path to being just like her father, or her mother. She shuddered.

  But just a little? It would ease the tension in her skull, the befuddlement she still felt. It would clear her vision and release her normally lively spirit from the mud in which she felt it was trapped. It would…Finally, her face relaxed, she sighed, and she said, “You’re right.” She said nothing more as she turned away from the tempting vine and its blossoms.

  As they walked along the zoo’s many broad paths, Freddy was vocal in his disapproval of the animals: “Look at that,” he said when they had stopped to peer at one of the three remaining rhinoceroses on Earth. The other two were in the Paris zoo. “The horniest animal here. And absolutely useless. Unless you’re another rhino.”

  “Or a gengineer trying to grow a Tank,” said Jim Brane. Long after the last pure rhino died, the species’ genes would live on. Armies had been using Tanks for decades.

  No one else said a word. An unmodified rhino was indeed a forlorn and useless beast. Once, said the printed notice mounted on the low railing that surrounded the rhino’s enclosure, Africans had slaughtered the rhinos so that Arabs could carve their horns into dagger handles and grind the chips from the carving into a dust reputed to be an aphrodisiac. Fortunately for the rhinos, war had sterilized the lands that had supported that trade before all the beasts were gone. Yet that had not saved them. Their original habitats were gone now, eaten up by expanding populations and their need for farmland, or too altered by changing climate.

  Sound plaques seemed rare outdoors, but there was one on the wall around the armadillo yard. As they approached, it began to speak, describing its subjects and outlining how armadilloes leaped straight upward when startled. As a result, when one of the animals is crossing a road, and a vehicle comes along, it either is hit by the bumper or knocks its brains out on the vehicle’s underside. The results were generally fatal in the days when vehicles were built of steel and propelled at high speeds by internal combustion engines. Today, when most vehicles are alive, and hence softer and slower, more armadilloes survive their peculiar reflexive response.

  “Bright,” rasped Freddy. “But I guess they got that bug out of the Armadons.”

  They moved on, and Freddy was saying, “Look at that one! It’s weirder than I am, or Porculata, or the shoats. A hairy-assed banana on legs. A…”

  “I’ve read,” said Muffy as Randy peered at the strange beast, meeped, and began to crawl down her mistress’s front. She caught the cat-sized spider in both hands before she co
uld escape and, perhaps, try to turn the animal into lunch. “They’re working on making vacuum cleaners out of them.”

  “Don’t laugh,” said Jim, pointing at the sign on the fence. Tom leaned forward and read the words aloud: “Born Samuel Hurd, December 19, 2045,this anteater volunteered for the ‘Endangered Species Replacement Program.’ After massive gene substitutions, he assumed the form you see.”

  The sign did not say, but they were aware, that so many species were so nearly extinct—or, indeed, had died out completely—that this was the only possible way to supply specimens of those species for zoos. It was also an expiation of human guilt, an expression of human responsibility, a promise of what amends were possible, for in most cases the species’ endangerment or extinction was due to human actions. People had hunted them for furs and skins and ivory and dagger handles, for gall bladders and musk and oil. People had destroyed the forests and swamps and plains in which they lived to build farms and subdivisions and shopping malls.

  This was the only form of non-medical human gengineering, man-mucking, that was legal. It was only fair, said some, that people turn themselves into the images of their victims. With time and progress, the day might come when people could become more than mere images, but duplicates or avatars, all their genes replaced, and the diminished and vanished species would live again. Others said that the idealism was only noisy propaganda designed to maintain the flow of failures, criminals, escapists, and psychiatric refugees on which the ESRP depended, and to let the remainder of society feel virtuous about permitting the program to exist.

  Freddy muttered, “I’d like to substitute my genes.” The same techniques might give him a body to match his brain, a human body, with legs that could walk and run, with hands that could do more than protrude uselessly from his torso. Tom Cross reached out a hand to pat the pig’s barrel torso reassuringly, and Muffy recalled tales she had heard of the dawn of the Age of Gengineering, when the first steps were being taken toward the genetic repair of birth defects, and handicapped people, led by anti-progress demagogues, were saying they preferred their handicaps to being cured by gene replacement. Given the chance for such a “cure,” Freddy would seize it with all four of his twitching stubs.

  “And look over there,” said the pig. He was pointing as best he could with a forelimb at a young woman wearing a very brief tunic. “How about substituting those genes for Porculata’s? Wow.”

  “You’ll need money,” Tom said.

  “So I’ll go on tour,” said the pig. “Want to come along? We’ll sing dirty songs together again.”

  Tom opened his mouth and let “Shakin’ my anther for yoouu!” emerge.

  “You need some practice,” said Jim Brane.

  “What’s that?” asked Julia Templeton, and they, like all the zoo-goers around them, like the animals themselves, fell silent to listen to a distant growl. Was it thunder?

  Whump! A gout of flame erupted noisily beyond the trees as the hydrogen that filled the gasbag of a Bioblimp merry-go-round exploded. Screams echoed out of sight.

  The thunder grew louder. Some zoo-goers began to move toward the edges of the walkway. A dozen motorcycles, three abreast, rounded the curve of the path beyond the rhino yard and accelerated toward them. Those pedestrians who had lacked the foresight to get out of the way ahead of time now leaped, cursing, for safety. Children screamed. Zoo animals scampered, crawled, and lumbered for the entries to their dens, caves, and stables.

  The riders wore the coveralls and insignia of Engineers. The first three carried pennants adorned with crude portraits of gears, hammers, and wrenches. Most of the rest wore strapped to their backs flat bundles of boards and sticks, clearly picket signs. Two backs bore each a pair of crossed bullhorns.

  Muffy and her friends had been heading toward a broad mall that ran roughly down the zoo’s center. It held flower beds and fountains, the sea lion pool, an open-air cafeteria, and several concessions. To either side were the zoo’s larger buildings, ancient, ivy-covered masonry, housing for primates, cats, elephants, and staff.

  Now the Engineers roared their motorcycles into the open space, dismounted, planted their pennant staves in a flower bed, unfolded their signs, and unslung their loudspeakers. In moments their message became clear—they wanted an end to gengineering and a return to the glories of the Mechanical Age, when humans could not be turned into animals, when life was sacred, immune to tampering, and when God’s divine plan could not be daily blasphemed.

  Most of the pedestrians were now flowing, running, away from the mall. With them went Muffy and her companions, Freddy bouncing in the cart. When they found a quiet spot in which to pause, the pig moaned. “I feel like a mechin’ soccer ball! I’ll be black and blue all over! I’ll…”

  Tom said, “The first time I ever saw them, I had just come into the city. They were screaming the same sort of stuff and barbecuing a litterbug. I had Freddy in the handcart.”

  “And they saw us,” said Freddy.

  “They wanted him.” He paused as if remembering. “I crashed the cart into an Engineer’s knees, and we fled. We wound up hiding in The Spider’s Web.” He looked at Muffy. “And meeting you.”

  Now it was Jim’s turn to remember: “They don’t know what they’re talking about.” He gestured at the zoo around them. “It was the Mechanical Age that wiped out so many species. It also used up the very resources it needed to survive—especially fossil fuels—and if they got their mechanical golden age back, it would immediately come crashing down around their ears. They’d get the real ‘Good Old Days’ then—subsistence farming, high infant mortality, starvation.”

  Julia Templeton laughed. “That’s what they taught us in Bioeconomics.”

  “We’ve heard it too,” said Muffy. She spoke hesitantly, the effects of the wine on her mind still apparent. Tom took her hand, and she let him finish her thought. “On veedo, and in the magazines.” His voice changed to indicate that he was quoting, at least roughly, a line of thought he—and they—had heard many times: “It’s only the gengineers who have kept civilization going since the mechanical resources became scarce. We have just enough left to fool the reactionaries into believing they can retreat into the past successfully.”

  The Engineers’ bullhorns fell silent as the ululating, siren-like cry of a Sparrowhawk echoed overhead. They looked up and saw three police jets stooping toward the demonstrators. “Over there,” said Jim, pointing toward a broad path a hundred meters off, and they saw two police-model Roachsters, their long-armed claws gaping toward the mall, maneuvering through the pedestrians. In a moment, the motorcycles roared again, the pedestrians leaped for safety, and the Engineers were fleeing as they had come.

  “Now can we have a bite?” asked Freddy.

  Tom laughed, and they turned back toward the mall and its cafeteria. When they reached it, they saw a litter of picket signs and pennants, abandoned when the Engineers had fled. Litterbugs were already attacking the debris, while police officers tried to shoo them away. One litterbug was already demonstrating the reason why, lying on its side and panting uselessly for breath. “Sometimes, the ink they use on their signs is poisoned. A neurotoxin,” said Julia. “On purpose.”

  Freddy made a whimpering noise. “That’s barbaric. Poisoning food!”

  “It’s worse than you think,” she added. “If they feed the carcass to other litterbugs, or to anything else, the poison will get them too. They’ll have to burn it.”

  Eventually, the Engineers’ debris was removed and the zoo returned to normal. They explored the exhibits, had lunch, roamed some more, and grew bored. Tom’s arms, he said, were weary and his back sore, and he and Jim began to trade off the chore of pushing the pig in the handcart. Both of them said they envied Muffy, for Randy was a much smaller genimal, and though she kept the spider on her shoulder, her step actually seemed to grow lighter as the last traces of the honeysuckle wine left her system.

  They were in the bird house when they finally decided that th
ey could dare to go home. The sun was still high, but Julia had sat down on a bench, taken off her shoes, and begun to rub her feet. “I’ve hidden long enough,” she said. “I’m hot and sweaty and tired. And…”

  “There’s been no sign that anyone is following us,” said Jim Brane.

  Muffy Bowen said, “You forget, that’s why we’re here. It doesn’t mean no one’s waiting for us at home.”

  “But we can’t stay here all night,” said Jim. “They’ll chase us out.”

  “So where do we go now?”

  “The Farm?”

  As they left the building and headed toward the parking lot, Freddy began to sing just loudly enough to attract the attention of the others on the walkway: “I’ve got the anther!”

  Muffy chuckled when Jim winced at the pig’s rough bass. He was pushing Freddy, and the pig’s mouth was closest to his ear. But Tom joined in on the second line anyway:

  “And showers of pollen!

  I’ve got the anther!

  Shakin’ my anther for you!”

  When they were done, Julia said, “It’s an idiot song.” She and Jim both laughed.

  They were passing a paddock in which grazed a mixed herd of bison, zebra, and wildebeest. A broad, slow stream ran through the paddock and held numerous waterfowl. Where the paddock ended began a grove of broad oaks. Set among the trees was a cluster of acorn squashes, each about half the size of the pumpkin Petra Cross lived in. Wooden hallways linked the squashes into a single structure that blended into the woods and contrasted happily with the stone and concrete of most of the zoo’s buildings.

  A short gravel path led toward what was clearly the main entrance to the structure. Where the path left the main walkway was a sign: