Thomas A. Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman.pdf - Thomas A. Easton - widez2

Woodsman - Organic Future

Thomas A. Easton

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

Once Martha’s home had been as massively solid as her own body. Then she had been banished to the

yard outside and forced to watch, morosely pacing while that pile of stone and mortar was torn down

and replaced by an oblong concrete rim. Her immense grey sadness lifted only when the construction

crew positioned a Bioblimp, a genetically engineered jellyfish, over the rim, glued it down, added braces,

killed and cleaned and dried it, and coated it with pungent sprays. The new building was a translucent

dome whose thin leather walls trembled when the wind blew.

Inside once more, Martha eyed the buffet with as much interest as the Bioblimp had ever provoked. The

pressure of three hundred well-dressed bodies reaching for canapes and plastic cups of punch and coffee

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and wine was, bit by bit, nudging the long table closer to the bars of her enclosure. In just another

moment...

“I had my eye on that one!” Freddy the pig sounded outraged as he struggled to point with a stubby

forelimb. “You can’t have it!”

Martha seemed to understand. She showed the modified pig a sheepish, embarrassed eye and extended

her trunk toward him. Tom Cross shifted Freddy’s weight to one arm to free a hand and accept the small

triangle of bread and shrimp salad. Then, as he tucked it into Freddy’s upright maw, the elephant dipped

her trunk into the punchbowl.

Some of the onlookers gasped in dismay, but Freddy laughed and Tom, his oldest friend, joined in. They

were in the zoo’s new elephant hall. It held eight roomy cells, three of them occupied; the other elephants

were outdoors. Toward the western end of the building was a temporary stage; behind the stage, the

setting sun tinted the translucent wall a glowing orange-red. The occasion was a benefit concert intended

to raise money to pay the last of the building’s costs. The stars of the concert would be Freddy and his

wife, Porculata.

Freddy sneezed and muttered, “The place stinks. Somebody should housebreak those monsters.

Goddam perfumes, too. I’d stand it better if I had hands. Or even a trunk.” The pig wiggled a trotter.

Once he had been a garbage disposal; the gengineers had shaped him so, to fit in the dark, cramped

space beneath a kitchen sink, with no need for more than vestigial limbs. They had also played on him the

cruel trick of intelligence, which Tom had discovered when he was a child of six. Later, the boy had given

the genimal a freedom his body did not fit.

Freddy’s wife was as crippled, and as intelligent, as he. “You and your wishes,” she said now. “They’re

about as useless as, as these.” She waved her several legs in the air. There were more than four of them,

all hollow tubes through which she could channel her breath. She was a living bagpipe.

Tom’s wife, Muffy, reached out a hand to stroke Porculata’s tartan hide. “We’re working on it,” she

said. In the crook of her other arm nestled Randy, the giant spider that at one time, when she had been

an exotic dancer, had been her trademark prop. Behind her was a broad easel with a display of clippings

about Freddy and Porculata and the musical performances that had made them both famous.

A dignified sniff drew Tom’s and Muffy’s eyes toward a gentleman whose silvery grey coverall matched

his swept-back hair. When he saw that he had their attention, he said, “A pig’s a pig, and they’ll stay that

way. If God had intended...”

“God!” Freddy snorted.

“But BRA...” said Kimmer Peirce. Young and blonde, she stood beside her

husband, Franklin, the balding curator of the art museum where the musical genimals lived. He was

holding Porculata in his arms.

At the interruptions, the sniffer muttered, “Animals!” and turned away. An older woman, her hair not

quite as grey as his, made a face at his back. “The Bioform Regulatory Administration is dominated by

the conservatives,” she said. Her dress coverall bore the emblem of the Endangered Species

Replacement Program. “They don’t mind using gene replacement to turn people into animals. And we

could go the other way, easy. The technology’s just the same. But no, that’s...”

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“We’ll persuade them, Calla,” said Muffy. Calla Laffiter was the director of the local office of the ESRP.

“And then you can...”

A gentle chime rang through the hall. “That’s our cue,” said Freddy. “Come on, let’s go!” As the crowd

drifted toward the folding seats arrayed across the building’s floor, leaving the remaining canapes and

punch to Martha, Franklin Peirce and Tom Cross carried their burdens toward the stage. To one side, a

brass quintet was arranging sheet music on stands. In the center of the stage, illuminated by a single

spotlight, gleamed a pair of chrome-plated support racks for the genimals. Behind them, the building’s

wall glowed pink from the fading sunset.

The sound of motorcycle engines penetrated the building’s walls a moment before the quintet began to

play, but no one seemed to notice or to wonder what such antique vehicles should be doing in the

pedestrian precincts of the zoo. They were too intent on the stirring brassiness of trumpets and

trombones, the throaty wailing of Porculata’s bagpiping, and the sheer virtuosity of Freddy’s scat-singing,

which brought it all together. The audience was rapt.

So too were the three pachyderms still in the building. Martha and her companions faced the stage

head-on, swaying on their feet, their trunks curling, flexing. From time to time, one would raise its trunk

forehead high and trumpet. Yet no member of the audience flinched or looked around. The voices of the

elephants blended into the performance precisely as they should in that setting, precisely as if the score

had called for them. The total effect was both weird and marvelous.

Motorcycle engines roared again, closer now. The last glow of sunset cast shadows flickering on the

wall behind the stage. The shadows loomed, larger, and yells interrupted the music. Shadow arms rose

and fell, and the wall shook and boomed as it was struck.

The music stopped. Someone shrieked, “Engineers!” A crudely shaped, heavy blade stabbed through

the wall with the harsh hiss of parting leather. More blades expanded the single tear to a gaping rent.

Yelling figures tumbled through, waving crude swords or machetes that in that frozen instant announced

by curve and width and length their origins as ground-down automobile leaf springs. The

invaders—unwashed, unshaven, red-eyed—wore blue coveralls with golden cogwheel patches. From

their ears dangled brass springs and other bits of technological debris.

The audience screamed as the Engineer terrorists charged. Wild swings of their swords knocked music

stands off the stage and battered instruments into uselessness while the musicians scurried out of the way.

Not all of them made it. One sword clove Porculata in two and sprayed blood across the stage. The

pigs’ support racks toppled with metallic clangs. Freddy rolled under a chair and began to wail in terror

and instant grief.

The invaders stormed off the stage and into the audience, still swinging their swords. Muffy shrieked as

one knocked Randy from her shoulder and stomped the spider into pulp. When she tried to grab the

killer by one blood-spattered arm, reaching for his bearded face with clawlike fingers, another impaled

her chest on a heavy staff. On the other end of the staff, a painted flag, its colors as black as Muffy’s hair,

as red as her blood, said, “Machines, Not Genes!” When Tom shrieked as loudly as she and began to

raise a chair above his head, a third terrorist buried a sword in his back.

Bowels and bladders emptied in the reflexes of terror. Pungent odors competed with the coppery scent

of blood but failed to win. Rivulets and floods spread across the floor, and the terrorists’ only casualty

came when one slipped and fell. A concert-goer seized the man’s sword and thrust it through his throat.

A moment later, he too was dead.

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The elephants trumpeted in alarm to match the humans’ screams. But when Martha tried to do

something more by reaching through her bars to seize a grimy neck, a sword chopped through her trunk.

Blood sprayed across the hall as she shrieked with pain and panic. Her companions echoed her, and the

bars of their enclosures creaked and bent as they strove to come to her aid.

Swords rose and fell. One terrorist cried, “Where’s that other pig?” Two or three thrust their blades

between the bars and laughed as the elephants recoiled. Most ignored the animals. All seemed to relish

the screams of the injured and dying humans. At last the siren calls of police Sparrowhawks resounded in

the sky overhead. One of the Engineers seized a fistful of canapes from the still untoppled buffet table,

and all turned to run. Seconds later, their motorcycles roared in flight.

A single banner waved near the center of the elephant hall, its staff still embedded in Muffy’s chest.

Around it sprawled a scene of carnage, of blood and moans and sobs and screams, both human and

animal. On the stage, Freddy keened in anguished fear and loss, his gaze fixed on the body of his wife.

“Porkchop!” he wailed. “Toommmyy!”

The police arrived. With them came the medics, one of whom immediately slapped a sedative-secreting

leech on Freddy’s neck.

“Forty dead,” said Kimmer Peirce. Her eyes were hollow, her blonde hair disarrayed. It was the day

after the Engineers’ attack on the concert, but she had neither slept nor used a comb. “Fifty more in the

hospital.” Freddy stared at the familiar walls of his museum apartment, the mats and pillows, the tub, the

fridge, the door to the attendant’s booth. The attendant was gone; Kimmer had banished her, insisting on

taking over herself.

They had brought him home while he was out. He knew that. He was nestled in familiar cushions,

surrounded by familiar smells. But...”Porkchop?” he asked, hoping it had all been a nightmare.

It had, but not in sleep. Kimmer nodded, squeezing his forelimbs just above the trotters. “She’s gone,”

she said.

“And Tommy?”

Another nod, another squeeze. “And Muffy.” Kimmer’s eyes filled with tears;

Muffy had been among her favorite people. “Randy, too.”

Freddy emitted a shuddering sigh. “Litter. Shit.”

She nodded again.

“I’m glad the kids weren’t there.” Barnum and Baraboo, Ringling and Bailey.

They could play in their ways as marvelously as their parents, but they had their own gigs elsewhere.

“They’re on their way home.”

“But they can’t talk.” All they could offer was their presence, and that was

something. But they couldn’t talk. They just weren’t equipped for anything but music.

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“I can,” said Kimmer. “I’m here. You can talk to me.” She patted his side and tugged a pillow closer.

“Franklin, too.”

“He’s okay?”

“Thank God.” She wiped at her tears. “I don’t know what I’d do if...” The

door opened, and Franklin Peirce appeared as if they had summoned him. Beside him was Calla

Laffiter, the local ESRP chief. She wore a coverall very like the one she had worn at the abortive

concert, though it was distinctly plainer in cut.

Franklin’s coverall was the light tan of his own position, but that was not all he wore. A heavy bandage

decorated one forearm, and when Freddy began to open his mouth, he said, “Yeah, one of them nicked

me before I could get out of the way. Reactionary bastards.” The Engineers had deified the machine.

They wished, they said, to destroy the technology of gengineering and all that had sprung from

it—Bioblimps and Roachsters and other vehicles, housing, new food crops, Freddies.

“I wish,” said Kimmer. “I wish they’d stuck to litterbugs.” That was how the Engineers had begun, by

turning their demonstrations into barbecues for the gengineered pigs that served society as

street-cleaners. Then they had begun to attack gengineered vehicles. Now...

“Still,” Franklin added. “There’s one good thing coming out of it.”

His wife snorted, plainly saying that she doubted that was possible. “It

can’t be good enough.”

“There’s a lot of sympathy for you, Freddy. You’ve lost so much, and it’s in all the news. The zoo folks

say they think even BRA will soften up a bit.”

The pig closed his eyes. He sobbed aloud, and tears ran down his cheeks and neck; the gengineers had

made him human in more than mere intelligence. “I wouldn’t trade,” he finally said. “No way. No way.”

Kimmer squeezed his wrist again. Franklin sighed. “No, Freddy.

But...compensation.”

“It’s not worth it. It isn’t!”

The press conference was being held in the museum’s basement auditorium. This was the same room in

which Freddy and Porculata once, as musicians, had entertained their public. Their wooden support

racks—not chromed, these—still stood on the right side of the stage. On the left, Kimmer Peirce

occupied one end of a deeply cushioned sofa. Calla Laffiter was at the sofa’s other end. Between them

sat a tall, slender man, round-faced and blunt-nosed. He had not yet been introduced.

The front of the stage bore a podium festooned with microphones. The first few rows of seats held two

dozen reporters. From the ceiling hung several veedo cameras, crimson ready lights glowing, all aimed at

the man behind the podium.

Franklin Peirce was that man. “You know the background,” he was saying. “The Engineers have a lot of

sympathizers. Many people yearn for the Good Old Days. They don’t like manure in the streets, or

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Thomas A. Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman.pdf

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