T. Bass - Half Past Human

“Under the seats. Climb in.”

Val fed the charts through Doberman’s map digester. They rolled through, coming out flat and indexed.

“If the variance is denied—” began Tinker, “I think I’d like to keep the child as long as possible. The grace period runs until it starts to walk or talk.”

Val shook his head vehemently.

“I wouldn’t try that!” he exclaimed. “The chucker teams would be nosing around your cubicle—stalking the little infant. Too much anxiety. Oh, I know that Psych Clinic sometimes orders fem citizens to go gravid to develop their own female identity. Those fems don’t seem to mind having their kids chucked down the chute. But you and Mu Ren are different—sensitive. Better if you chucked it right after it was born. Easier.”

Tinker looked weak—helpless.

“If you can’t do it, I’ll come over and do it for you. That’s what friends are for,” said Val absently. He didn’t notice his troubled friend flare up.

Sphincter opened. Garage said, “Goodbye.” In a moment they were traveling at tree-top level. The sun looked like a lunar disc through the step-down windows. Tinker noticed the charts for the first time. He picked up one.

“What are these coordinates?”

“Transmissions—unauthorized tightbeams from the Outside. Our questing beams picked them up. There is nothing unusual on our buckeye detectors—thought we’d check them out visually.”

Tinker studied the chart. One of the coordinates lay over the same line he had been receiving on the night before.

“Security has been picking them up too.”

“This is a matter for Hunter Control,” frowned Val. “It is coming from the Outside—maybe even the gardens.”

They passed over orchards and low fields of triple-crop—the mixture of stalk plants with vines and herbs. Tinker glanced from the chart to the window. The mountain range lay ahead—dozens of peaks—the taller ones with white ice caps.

Awakening to the bright cheerful summer, Flower raised his head and smiled his pollen face at his green neighbors. Lifting his eyes to the sun he saw the Glory—the orange world of the red octopus—shimmering gold and watery red. Arms tingled. Toes groped for soil damp. Sun shared Great Truths with his flower mind. His soul expanded. Rapture. Ecstasy faltered with autumn. Where were his bees? Pollen wasted. Actinics browned his green. Toes lost their arthritic grip. Where were his bees? Withered and drying, he fell into the soil without reproducing—returning to the nitrogen cycle unfulfilled. A flower soul moved on.

Doberman III circled lower for a closer look. Tinker felt the nausea of burning gastric juice in his throat. A decomposing body lay in the garden. It was supine and naked. Roots and stolons invaded the flaking, red-brown skin. Empty sockets gazed upward.

“Another flower reaction,” said Val caustically. “It looks like a neut—an unpolarized male. Probably just an overdose of Molecular Reward. Neuts don’t have much Inappropriate Activity. Suicide is unlikely. The poor Nebish thought he was a flower and came Outside to commune with the sun—a phototropic catatonic schizo due to MR. Too late for sampling.”

“Flower reaction?” said Tinker.

“Dying in the open like that. Under the sun. The hard rays just peel the skin right off—in a few hours. We see two kinds of flowers in the Gardens. Suicides, and drug reactions. Old Molecular Reward. The Big ES rations it out to Good Citizens, and we use it to bolster hunters’ nerve; but it is dangerous. The boys from Neuro can differentiate between MR and IA. But they need fresh brain tissue. We’ll just leave this one. It will be part of the crop pretty soon anyway.”

Tinker mumbled something about a very hostile garden.

“Air is pretty thin here in the upper slopes. Hang on. We’ll go down and use the wheel drive,” said Val, kicking the craft into manual. His eyes gleamed as he maneuvered up the narrow trails, squealing wheels and grinding gravel. The craft lurched along, fish-tailing on tight turns and accelerating smoothly on flat areas. When they stopped, Tinker saw several miles of broken and tilted rock.

“Mount Tabulum.”

“It looked a lot more like a table from far away.”

“It’s pretty flat,” said Val, edging the craft forward. “There’s sign of buckeye. See the charcoal surrounded by stones? Used to be many Eyepeople around here before we hunted them down. Too bad they’re so depleted. They were good sport. But they were a danger to the crops—so they had to go.”

Wheels jounced them across the table past an acre of ice-rimmed melt-water. The opposite edge looked out over other snowy mountain peaks. A mile below, the slopes were covered with glaciers of cube apartments. They drove back to the lake in the cup-like center of the table. Tinker studied the dash readings.

“Fourteen thousand feet! I was going to step out and taste that water, but I’d need my oxygen bottle at this altitude.”

Val adjusted the scanners, saying, “The buckeye seems to get along fine up here. Plenty of water—unless the pink snow poisons it—and safe from the hunters. Citizens can’t come up here without a machine or a heavy mountain Cl-En suit. Used to be a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain until something nipped off the peak. Note the serrated edge around the cup. Rocks look melted too.”

“What could cut off the top like that?” asked Tinker.

Val shrugged. “Don’t know. The shock waves scrambled meck brains for miles around. A large Hunt was in progress up here. No recordings survived. Clean. No induced radiation.”

Tinker frowned. Earth-moving projects in the Sewer Service gave him enough experience to appreciate the energy involved. He couldn’t even guess at the cause. The results were clear—several acres of flat space useless to the hive but ideal for buckeyes.

The scanners swept over the campsites. Ashes and firestones—recent. Many of the bones had not yet bleached.

“The stones are cold,” said Val. “Not surprising. Even if there are buckeyes up here, it would be impossible to sneak up on them in this noisy craft.”

“No sign of a communicator, though,” said Tinker. “The distance from here to my receiver—through all the soil and walls—would tax a small tightbeam. Something big enough to transmit that far would be impossible to hide up here.”

Val nodded, satisfied. He steered for the edge. Wheels lurched down the slope displacing small rock slides. Several times he recklessly activated his air stream—lifted off into the thin atmosphere—and crunched back into the shifting gravel. Impatient. Finally, on the lower slopes, he lifted successfully and flew west. An hour later they were over an empty blue ocean.

Tinker hit the magnifiers. Scanners showed only sterile, clear water. A broken tubeway lay on the bottom like a snake carcass—skin peeling and strut ribs exposed. Cold bubble buildings covered shelves at six and ten fathoms—skummy and dark. At five hundred feet, they flew back and forth along the coordinates of the tightbeam. Sand, surf and horizon island specks. None of the islands fit the coordinates.

“What were all those blue-domed cysts on the bottom?” asked Tinker. “They’ve been dead a long time.”

“Rec Domes,” said Val. “Underwater Recreation Centers. When the tubeway died—they died. No demand for them these days. Few citizens swim. No megafauna in the ocean, anyway. The Sewer Service sent out subs to record structure deterioration when I was a boy. Saw the playbacks. I doubt if the Big ES will go back into the sea again—too much work to do.”

For hours they searched the open waters. They saw one small rocky island with a few stubborn plants.