Thomas Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman

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 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..."

"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.

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.

"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 doing without their Roachster

for weeks while it goes through its molt, or cleaning up leaves the size of

bedsheets dropped by their bioform houses. They've heard stories of how neat

and clean the streets were in the Age of Machines, of plug-in parts and

care-free homes. They forget, if they ever knew, how foul the air was growing,

how close we were to exhausting the fossil fuels and ores that made the

machines possible, when the gengineers offered us an alternative. They gave us

a way to raise everyone's standard of living to what the Machine Age made

possible only in a few nations, and then to keep it there.

"It's not really very surprising," he went on. "Not surprising at all,

that we should have the Engineers. Dissatisfaction is a basic human trait.

It's not something we can legislate out of existence. I doubt we could even

gengineer it out of existence." He paused to allow a murmur of laughter. "But

they went too far when they attacked the concert.

"Freddy was a pig. A pig with a human intelligence and human talents. He

was, in fact, a human being stuck in a body designed for immobility. He might

as well have been a quadriplegic. Certainly, he was just as handicapped. And

he dared to wish for a body, a human body, a freedom that the gengineers had

denied him. He dared to say that the technology exists, that a government

program even encourages the use of gene replacement to turn human volunteers

into members of endangered species.

"Calla Laffiter." He gestured toward the woman, and she nodded, giving the

reporters and veedo cameras a toothy smile. "The local ESRP head. She asked

the BRA for permission to give Freddy and his wife human bodies. But religious

groups, the Engineers and their sympathizers, they said Freddy was just an

animal, and a pig at that, a garbage disposal. His mind was irrelevant. So

were his talents. Turning an animal--much less a pig!--into a human being

would be blasphemy." Franklin Peirce shook his head as if human folly could

still amaze him.

"Tell us," said the reporter from the Times. "Animal rights was a big

issue a century ago. People said that we have no right to exploit animals in

research. Some even said that we have no right to eat them. Certainly, we have

no right to manipulate them for our own convenience. Doesn't any vestige of

that feeling remain?"

Franklin Peirce sighed. "Of course it does," he said. "It even has a good

deal to do with the Endangered Species Replacement Program. Our exploitations,

our neglect, our disregard of the rights of other animals to have their own

place in the world, all that led to the deaths of many species. When we

realized what we had done, and when the technology became available, our guilt

drove us to set up the ESRP. That program is, in a very real sense, an

expiation of our sins.

"It might even have something to do with the idea that we shouldn't use

gene replacement to turn animals into humans. But more to the point here is

the feeling that there is something sacred about the human form. Animals are

animals, and changing them in that way degrades us and defies God."

"Doesn't changing them corrupt their own integrity?" This was the woman

from the OnLine Herald.

Franklin Peirce sighed again. "If we made most animals human, we probably

would be doing that," he said. "Animals are not little, cute, furry people, no

matter how many children's stories and veedo shows and Sunday supplement

articles treat them that way." His questioner tightened her mouth as if she

had been responsible for more than one such article. "They don't have our sort

of minds, and they wouldn't fit in our bodies. They wouldn't have the faintest

idea of how to live as humans. They would be the equivalent of the profoundly

retarded.

"But those few animals like Freddy," the museum curator continued. "They

do have our kinds of minds. They are human in all but body. They can talk, and

we can ask them what they want."

"What do they say?" asked the Times man.

"Thank you," said Franklin Peirce. He had needed that question. "They say

that they are human in the most important way. They say that their integrity

is corrupted by unreasonably enforcing their handicap." The man who sat on the

sofa, between Kimmer Peirce and Calla Laffiter, nodded at these words.

"It isn't really," said Franklin Peirce, "a question of 'animal rights' at

all. In his own mind--and in mine--a genimal like Freddy is as human as one

can be. The question is therefore one of human rights."

"But he isn't human!" said the woman from the Herald.

"He is now," said Calla Laffiter. The man from the Times spoke above the

suddenly growing murmur. "You mean it worked," he said. "The technology is

quite well established," said Franklin Peirce. "It's only the direction of the

change that was new. Of course it worked."

"What does he look like now?"

"He's right in front of you," said Franklin. He turned to face the sofa on

the left of the stage. "Freddy? Would you stand up, please?" The man who had

been sitting all this time between Kimmer Peirce and Calla Laffiter stood up.

He offered the reporters a slight bow.

Total silence greeted him. Freddy straightened and aimed his blunt-nosed

face at the audience. His nostrils pointed forward just a little more than was

usual for a human face, as if the ESRP had been unable to erase all vestiges

of his origins. He stepped forward, and Franklin relinquished the microphone.

"Call me," he said when he had positioned the microphone to his liking.

"Call me Frederick, now."

"Do you have a last name?" asked the woman from the Enquirer.

"Suida. The scientific name of the pig family." A titter of laughter ran

among the reporters. "It recognizes my origins, but it is now only my legal

name." He stressed the "legal."

"Frederick Suida. But you're still Freddy."

He nodded. "To my friends."

"Can you still sing?"

"Yes! Give us a song! A song for your public!" For a long moment, Freddy

stared at the reporters, his face blank. Franklin Peirce was just beginning to

step toward the podium, ready to intervene, when the ex-pig's mouth shaped a

curve of pain, he shrugged, and he said, "I haven't sung since..."

"Then it's time you did. C'mon." Franklin looked at the woman from the

Enquirer, his face grim. "Enough," he said. "He's been through too much to

play with him."

"Our readers and viewers will want to know."

Freddy laid one hand on the curator's sleeve. "No," he said. "There's no

point in refusing to remember. I can stand it. I'll sing."

Franklin stepped aside. He looked at his wife and Calla Laffiter, who had

slid closer together to fill the gap Freddy had left on the couch. He smiled

uneasily at them, and then he gave Freddy a "go ahead" gesture with one open

palm.

Freddy took a deep breath, said, "There's no accompaniment," and began to

sing, "I was born about ten thousand years ago..."

Franklin winced. Kimmer began to weep. The woman from the Enquirer smirked

as if she were satisfied that her prejudices were so vindicated. Several of

the other reporters sighed in sympathy, and the ready lights on most of the

veedo cameras quietly winked out.

Freddy's voice was not the mellow bass it once had been. It croaked. It

squeaked. It wobbled and skittered and scratched upon the eardrum.

Calla Laffiter left the sofa and touched his shoulder. He fell quiet,

tears glistening in his own eyes. Into the silence, she said, "He has been

profoundly changed. You understand that. It's no wonder that his voice is

different, or that he is not yet used enough to it to control it well. Give

him time."

The Times reporter raised his hand. "Mr. Suida. I'm sorry."

The woman from the Enquirer smirked again. "And what will you do now,

Freddy?"

He could only shrug. He did not know.

CHAPTER 2

Beside the long, low building's front door was a small brass plaque that

said, "Agricultural Testing Service, Inc." Frederick Suida snorted. The man he

had come to see knew as much about farming as he did about mining the moon.

Beside Frederick, a German shepherd with an over-large head growled as if

in agreement with the snort. The man cut him off with a gentle thump and a

scratch behind one ear. "Enough, Renny." Then he shifted the dog's collar,

repositioning the small lump of the court-ordered radio tracker beneath his

throat. The dog had supposedly been named for a star of ancient veedo tales of

an even more ancient time when the cavalry had always been ready to ride to

the rescue. The cavalry no longer existed. Nor was this an age of heroes.

When the man opened the building's door, the dog pushed past him, tail

high and oscillating easily from side to side, sniffing, into a room that held

a dust-filmed reception counter, a small couch, three molded chairs, and an

arching tangle of bioluminescent vines rooted in a large pot. There was no

receptionist, nor any sign of human occupancy. A single door, ajar, confirmed

that there was more to the establishment.

Frederick stared at the wall behind the reception counter and called,

"Jeremy Duncan?" He winced at the sound of his voice. Ever since his

conversion, his voice had been prone to squealing when he shouted.

A sudden thudding bang suggested that someone had heard and dropped his

feet from a desktop or windowsill to a carpeted floor. A moment later, a man

stood in the room's doorway, one hand holding a bottle of moisturizing lotion.

He was short, chubby, and balding, and his chest was bare beneath an open

white labcoat. The slits that marked his gills were red lines on the sides of

his chest. The skin around them looked inflamed. It also glistened with

lotion.

"Dr. Duncan," said Frederick, holding out his hand. "I never seem to find

you with a shirt on." He did not smile. It had been many years since he had

felt he had anything to smile about.

The other shrugged and set his lotion bottle on the reception counter.

"Too tight," he said, just as he did whenever Frederick made his ritual

comment. "They hurt." Once before, at an earlier meeting, he had explained

that he had given himself the gills after he had taken up scuba-diving. He had

wanted the freedom of the fish; only later had he learned that the reshaped

tissue was excruciatingly sensitive to mechanical pressure. When Frederick had

asked him why he had never changed his body back, or tried to remove the

sensitivity, he had said, "They work just fine in the water."

Now Jeremy Duncan gestured his visitors into the depths of the building

and said, "Haven't seen you for awhile."

"Not since I brought the last check." They were passing a door that opened

on a dimly lit room equipped with two nutrient-bath tanks and a large freezer.

Frederick paused, as he always did when he visited Jeremy Duncan's place of

work. The room resembled an operating room, as antiseptic in its gleaming tile

and medicinal odors as if it were meant for physical surgery. It was even

equipped with cardiac monitors and heart-lung machines. But there were no

trays of laser scalpels and hemostats. Instead, there were racks for

intravenous bottles. The bottles stood in a cabinet by the wall, together with

packets of sterile tubing and needles. The bottles held the nutrients to

supplement the bath in its sustaining of the patient while cells gained a

pseudoembryonic malleability, tissues and organs reshaped, and the body

restructured itself to obey new blueprints. In the freezer, Frederick knew,

were more bottles filled with suspensions of tailored viruses.

Similar viruses had changed Freddy's porcine form to the one he wore now.

He remembered only too well being laid in a tank filled with a thick, warm

fluid they said would nourish him through the weeks of change. But these

tanks, here and now, were empty. "You haven't been very busy," he finally

said.

Jeremy Duncan was standing in the more brightly lit doorway of his office

a few steps down the hall. "You haven't sent me many clients."

"We could send you back to the regular ESRP labs." As he spoke, Frederick

reached into the breast pocket of his green coverall. He held out an envelope.

Duncan took the envelope and shuddered. The viruses the Endangered Species

Replacement Program used had been designed to replace, bit by bit, the genes

that made a human being human with those that specified an anteater, a

rhinoceros, a giant tortoise, a..."Turning people into aardvarks and okapi? No

thanks." The ESRP had arisen when the technology of gengineering had made it

possible for humanity to do something about the guilt it felt for allowing so

many wild species to go extinct. It replaced the genes of volunteers with

those of vanished animals, enough to turn them into physical duplicates and

supply the zoos with exhibits. In time, said the gengineers, perhaps they

would make the replacements so complete that they could let the vanished

species return to the wild. Whether there would be a wild for them to return

to was another question; the world was more crowded with human beings than it

had ever been.

"The Engineers trashed my lab twice while I was working for the ESRP," he

added. "They haven't found this place yet. There are advantages to being out

here in the boonies." He shook his head. "One of these days, they're going to

stop playing nice guy..." When Frederick looked pained, he said, "I know. I

know. Relatively speaking. And I don't want to be there when it happens. I'd

rather spend my time twiddling my thumbs." He brought his hands together in

front of his paunch to demonstrate. Then he opened the envelope, extracted the

check, and waved it in the air. "And letting you pay the bills." He backed up

at last, letting his visitors into his office. The room was dominated by a

metal desk supporting an ancient PS/4 computer. A stained anti-static pad

showed around the edges of the keyboard. The room's walls were covered with

shelves that sagged under the weight of books, technical journals, and disks.

A stiff-looking armchair sat by the window.

"There aren't that many intelligent genimals." It was illegal to give an

animal the genes for human intelligence, but that only limited the number of

gengineers who did it. The results were usually turned loose to fend for

themselves. Occasionally, they later came to public attention, as Frederick

once had himself.

"So I have time to play consultant." Duncan sat down in the softly padded

swivel chair by the desk, tucked the check under the edge of the blotter, and

swung toward the window. He gestured Frederick toward the armchair and said,

"Is that one?" He pointed at the German shepherd, his expression hopeful. He

did not make the mistakes of trying to pet the dog or speaking baby talk to

it; experience had taught him that if Renny were indeed an intelligent

genimal, he would not appreciate the condescension.

Frederick shook his head as he took the seat, while Renny flopped onto the

floor between the two men and barked a laugh. He slapped the carpet twice with

his tail. "Bet your ass I am!" Duncan did not seem surprised by the rough but

clear voice. He had obviously met many creatures that looked like animals but

spoke like humans.

"He seems to be happy the way he is."

The dog nodded, his tongue showing between his teeth. "I know better," he

said.

"I'd think you'd want to be like us," said Duncan.

"Huh! Ordinary dogs, maybe," said Renny. "We're pack animals, sure, and

they'll take you apes for their pack. But not me. I'm too smart to fall for

that con. I'd rather be what I am." He lay down on the carpeted floor and

rested his chin on his paws.

"Though he'd like a mate," said Frederick. "I introduced him to a female a

few weeks ago. A lab. But..."

"Dumb bitch," growled Renny. "Smelled okay, but couldn't say a word."

"I wish he'd change his mind," said Frederick. "That's why I set you up

here. Why we fund you. To give genimals like him a chance to escape the limits

of their bodies, the persecution of..."

"PETA?"

Frederick nodded, his expression grim. "He was working as a guide dog, and

someone heard him talking." That was when People for the Ethical Treatment of

Animals had reported an illegal genimal and sued to have him destroyed. "They

say he's dangerous too. A vicious carnivore. No moral sense. We're fighting

it, but..."

"A guide dog?" asked Duncan. "For what? Replacing eyes and limbs is easy."

"Christian Scientist," said Frederick. "They still haven't accepted even

antibiotics and vaccines."

"So they'll put me down." Renny sighed heavily. "I'm ready, though the

boss swore I was the best dog he'd ever had." He paused. "They promise it

won't hurt."

Duncan emitted a short, sharp bark that might have been a laugh. "Huh!

They're afraid of the competition."

"Maybe so," said Frederick. "They don't like bots either, though they're

not..."

"Then they shouldn't be complaining," interrupted Renny. "I was doing a

job nobody else wanted. None of them, for sure."

"Maybe they're afraid you'll get ambitious," said Duncan.

"Or aggressive," said Frederick.

"They just think I've got too many teeth." Renny grinned to show them just

how many he had.

Frederick looked at Jeremy Duncan. "I've talked to a technician who worked

in the lab that made him. The word was that they'd designed out all Renny's

Thomas Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman

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