Thomas A. Easton - Organic Future 05 - Seeds of Destiny.pdf - Thomas A. Easton - widez2

Seeds of Destiny – Organic

Future 05

Thomas A. Easton

All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com .

Page 1

CHAPTER 1

“Sir?”

A hand reached toward Marcus Aurelius Hrecker from a shadowy alcove in the painted tunnel wall.

Automatically, he raised a warding arm and shifted his step to stay out of reach.Olympia , burrowed into

the bulk of the grandest mountain in the Solar System, was as safe as any place, safer than any city on

Earth or the Moon. But you could never tell. Even in a crowded tunnel.

“Sir? Please!”

The hand belonged to a small woman, stooped and wrinkled and smelling of

years. Her hair was so gray it was practically white. Almost against his will, he stopped and faced her.

Other pedestrians flowed past behind him.

“Did you know I’m being evicted? I had such a nice apartment. And they say they need it for someone

else. They’re putting me in a home. Just one room and a cafeteria and a lounge full of old wrecks. Like

me.”

“I’m sorry.” He shook his head. “But there’s really nothing I can do.” Why was she even telling him? He

didn’t know her, and he could imagine no reason why she would think he might change the housing

office’s mind. Certainly he couldn’t take her home with him. His own apartment was barely large enough

for him.

“Of course you can’t!” She nodded rapidly, her eyes bright, her mouth set in a pursed line. “Not about

that. But...” She reached into the shadows behind her. Light glinted on polished metal wheel-hubs and

basket wire. He recognized a cart of the sort many people used when shopping. “I have to get rid of my

flowers, you know. I can’t take them with me. They just won’t allow it. There’s no point in even asking.

But you look like a nice fellow.”

She swung back toward him, something in her hands. He shied away from her, stepping backward,

thumping into a passerby, lurching forward again, and she thrust that something against his chest. “Here.”

Suddenly he was holding a smooth-sided cylinder and staring at a spray of fuzzy green and white-edged,

yellow-centered violet.

Oh, no, he thought. Fear washed over him even as his fingertips stroked the side of the cylinder and told

him it was made of some smooth ceramic. It was surely a local product, made of Martian soil. No one

shipped raw clay or pottery between the worlds, not even in an era when Q drives tapped the raw

energy of space itself to power rockets.

No one made flowerpots either, and here was the handle and now it made sense.

Page 2

“Here,” she said again, and her nod was insistent, demanding, dogmatic. “You can have an African

violet. All it needs is light and water, and maybe a little fertilizer.”

But he was not listening. “No!” he cried. “You keep it! I can’t!”

He pushed the mug full of greenery toward the old woman, but she seized his

wrists and with surprising strength turned him toward the center of the tunnel. “No,” she said. “I really

can’t, you know. They’re evicting me. But I can’t keep my flowers. And they’re so pretty, aren’t they?

You take good care of it now.”

“But-- !”

“Go on. I have lots more to give away.” There was a push at his back. He

staggered a step, and the flow of traffic swept him up and on.

Fortunately the shirt he wore did not have time-consuming buttons, snaps, zips, or strips. It wrapped

diagonally across his chest, and he thought he got the flower out of sight before anyone could recognize it

for what it was. An African violet, she had called it. A plant, of all things.

At least she had sense enough to stay away from the more brightly lit portions of the tunnel.

Plants were most definitely not approved personal possessions. They were acceptable only in

agricultural domes and tunnels. House plants were prima facie evidence of Orbital/Gypsy sympathies at

best, of disloyalty and treason at worst.

If Security spotted the African violet, it would not matter a bit that his father, his grandfather, and his

great-grandfather had all been Security agents. An uncle had even been chief of Security on the Munin

habitat until a blowout caught him without a suit.

He tried to look innocent.

He tried not to stare at his fellow pedestrians. That just wasn’t done. Only

the very young and the guilty failed to pretend they were alone in the tunnels, on the way to work or

home or running errands.

He tried not to search the tunnel walls and ceiling for Security cameras. But if he couldn’t look at the

African violet and he couldn’t look at people, there was nothing else at which to aim his eyes.

At least he could refrain from scanning, couldn’t he? Then he wouldn’t look like he was searching for

cameras. He wouldn’t look guilty.

Unless they watched for people who were obviously trying not to be noticed.

In which case he had better not keep looking away from shopping carts. It

was quite natural to peek, to see what people had found in their shopping, to learn what foods had come

from the farms. Like that purple globe of eggplant, red-skinned onions, blue-green potsters, green

broccoli, pale white fish.

Page 3

He forgot the fish as his eyes jerked back to the green and away.

He wished he had a reader with him.

There! Watch those! Illuminated signs that advertised beer and pizza and

minerals formed when Mars had water a billion years ago. Crystals, the shop bragged. Mudstone

marked with ripples. Wormtracks. Shells.

There was a diskshop stocked with newsdisks, novels, textbooks, games, and more. Its entrance was

never clear, for people moved steadily in and out.

A tour shop, its entrance flanked by glass-cased, bright-lit posters showing the vast rise of Olympus

Mons, the gorge of Marineris just as vast, Io spuming yellow, red, and black, the desolation of the lunar

highlands, coral reefs on Earth, fishless and stark, Earth itself viewed from orbit. Next door a clothing

store, its display assuring everyone it sold everything from the flimsiest of nightwear to Martian hardsuits.

Marcus Aurelius Hrecker let his attention settle on a tiny robot, legs flickering as it scurried along the

floor, dodged feet, and raced up a ramp attached to the tunnel wall. There was another robot on the shelf

that ran just above all the doorways and display cases and neon signs and usually kept the machines off

the floor and out from underfoot. The first ignored the pull-outs, the ramps up and down, and the access

holes that led inside the walls. It met a third, and there was room to pass. It stopped. Its head rose,

antennae wiggled as it optimized the signal it was receiving, and it began to move again, faster, running

now, practically flying, taking the ramp that led to the next cross-path, arched riblike beneath the tunnel’s

roof.

The little robots removed dust and litter and debris, searched for defects in tunnels and ducts, repaired

what they could, and signalled for human assistance when a problem was beyond their abilities. Marcus

Aurelius Hrecker shared his people’s pride in the versatile machines even though he understood their

major shortcoming. They were a triumph of mechanical and electronic technology, but they were no

nearer the ultimate goal than they had been a century before. Only the sort of information storage one

found in genes could permit a self-reproducing von Neumann machine to exist.

Artificial intelligence? They had that, though hardly at a human level, not even at the level rumor hinted

had been achieved some time before the Engineers’ final victory. He had heard the robots compared to

cats and monkeys, and the reason for their limitation was once more that they were not organic. In some

ways, living things had distinct design advantages.

But not this African violet. Not at this moment. Not now. Not ever.

It could kill him.

He wished he dared to set the plant in its mug on one of those shelves, or

on the floor. The machines would dispose of it. That was their job. They were everywhere. They

cleaned clothes and floors, polished shoes, mended and repaired, stripped paint and replaced it, found

and fetched lost items, and prepared food, tending Olympia and all its people just as they did in the cities

of Mars and Earth, the Moon and the habitats, everywhere the Engineers chose to live.

But no one did such things. If he did, one of his fellow pedestrians would surely notice and report his

Page 4

suspicious behavior. Or the cameras, wherever they were, would pick him up.

Better he should leave the plant under his shirt.

* * *

The short side-tunnel, filled with the pink-tinged light of Mars, opened into a concourse thirty meters

high. Its far wall was a curve of steel-ribbed glass. Beyond that was the red-rock lip of the scarp that

lifted Olympus Mons a kilometer above the lowlands beyond, and then those lowlands, softened and

smoothed into plains by distance. The only signs of human presence were a distant dome and a cloud of

yellow fumes beside the concentric rings of an open-pit mine.

No one paid the spectacular view any attention at all. No one seemed disturbed by the far-off industrial

stain on the landscape. Both were routine, backdrop, as accepted as the posters in the tour shop’s

display cases.

Marcus Aurelius Hrecker was no exception. When he left the tunnel, his mind was on the plant tucked

within his shirt, on his destination, on the tasks that awaited him. He turned sharp left, stepped aboard the

escalator in front of him, rode to the next level up, and entered another tunnel marked by a small brass

plaque that said “Olympus University.” When Hrecker passed it, it repeated its message aloud.

Just within this tunnel was a directory board that displayed a map of the university’s tunnels and a list of

departments, offices, and labs. Hrecker ignored this too. The Q-Drive Research Center where he was a

junior researcher was straight ahead and right and right and left, past the administration’s side-tunnel and

the dining hall and the freshman dorms, just before the turn into the athletic complex, and late on any

afternoon the lab rocked with noise every time someone opened the main door to enter or leave.

Sometimes the din even penetrated the solid rock of Mars itself.

But the tunnels were quiet now. The day’s first classes were in session. He glanced through the entry to

the dining hall and found it empty except for a few stragglers. The creak of exercise machinery was the

only sign that anyone was in the athletics area at all.

And here was the Research Center. He felt the flower mug with his wrist. Would he be able to reach his

lab before someone spotted it? Would he be able to bury it in a wastebasket? Should he flush the plant

and its soil down a toilet, wash its container, and pretend it had never held anything more incriminating

than a wooden pencil?

Of course, as soon as the entrance door swung shut behind him, Eric Silber came out of the com room,

his hands full of paper. “What’s that? A tumor?”

Silber was a mathematician, but his sharply angled, acne-scarred face and cawing voice had prompted

more than one to suspect out loud that he was really a Security plant. Thereafter, no one quite dared to

trust him or to object to his bitter gibes. And of course he had seen the bulge in Hrecker’s shirt.

“Just a...” He made a garbled noise, waved one hand, and turned quickly into the hall that led toward his

lab. When Eric did not follow him or say, “What?” he breathed a sigh of relief.

Page 5

Thomas A. Easton - Organic Future 05 - Seeds of Destiny.pdf

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