Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (5 page)

He had to stop. There were men with guns around him now, ushering him into the loading lock. The take-off sparklers were already lit. Turning to look up the bluff, he could see figures silhouetted against the sun. Figures that were humanoid, but certainly not human. They would have taken other shapes, faster shapes. She was still dawdling twenty metres behind him. Trying to delay him.

She still had time.

The loading lock door whined shut, slowly, interminably, narrowing to a metre-wide sliver. She had still not moved. Eventually, he could not bear it any longer, and turned his face away.

When he turned back, she was holding him up against acceleration, his head in her hands, while men clung on to safety grips on the walls around him. Someone was yelling into a communicator “GET US AIRBORNE! GET US SOME HEIGHT NOW!” Something heavy clanged off the outside hull.

She turned his head to face her. “Was it all bullshit? It sounded like it."

"Complete bullshit,” he gasped weakly. “A good thing I'm having a—heart attack, or you'd have been able to tell I was lying just by listening to my—heartbeat."

She held him close, supporting him, as the acceleration mounted and the shuttle rolled towards orbit.

"Try to relax. Don't exert yourself. We'll get you through this."

"Just promise me this is one ship you'll—never get off. If you never make planetfall, your aggression algorithms may—never kick in. Stay in space—travel hopefully—never arrive—"

She held him close and made a very reasonable facsimile of tears until the acceleration lessened and they came to take him off her.

"Give us room! Give us room! Let us get him some oxygen!"

She shook her head. “His heart has stopped."

The certainty of the statement gave them pause. They separated from her, treating her with the respect prudent men give to things they cannot explain. She sank down against the wall, trying to let gravity drag her miserably to the floor. Gravity refused to do so. She had to suffer in mid-air.

Copyright © 2009 Dominic Green

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The road to the Ugly Farm was a gauntlet of fierce bad temper.

People from the neighbouring shanty towns—
estância
workers who had lost their livelihoods in the dust bowl, displaced rain forest tribesmen only a generation out of the jungle—crowded the way in on both sides, hurling insults in Portuguese, Nheengatu, Yanomamo, Talian and German.
Comissão para a Recriminação
troopers stood between the limousine and the mob, armed like New Age gladiators with plexiglass shields and shock batons. Far more effective in holding the crowd back, however, was the public knowledge that the
Comissão
troopers were there to keep in as well as to keep out. The Ugly Farm was under investigation, and investigation in today's Brazil could lead to a spell in the sort of prison mediaeval manuscripts barely touched on. There were no rich men's jails in Rio any longer. The
Comissão
had declared both that all criminals must be treated equally, and that criminals who had destroyed the Green Gold Of The State were more despicable than any mere murderer.

The Ugly Farm seemed to have always had a high wire fence—also, Mullen noted with interest, a rabbit-proof one, dug into the ground. The
Comissão
was erecting a second one, and in between the first fence and the second were a few ominous yards of distressed dust dotted with occasional signs saying
perigo! minas!

"BAAAD PEOPLE,” said Polymath from her shoulder.

"Not bad people,” reproved Mullen. “
Hungry
people. You get angry too when you get hungry."

"HUNGRY,” said Polymath hopefully.

"You were fed not an hour ago and you know it. You are a bad, fat parrot."

The car had to pass through two separate checkpoints before being allowed into the compound.

"Are they scared that what's in here will escape?” she said.

Ferreira shrugged. “They're not really sure what they
do
have in here. That's the problem."

The car whispered to a halt on sand that had once been soil, in the middle of a cluster of rotting tree stumps. The main house, an old
estância,
was surrounded by a wired-off compound, access being possible only via the narrow ginnel they had just driven down. Huge unhappy shapes moved beyond the wire. The polythene-sheathed strands were so thickly clustered together that the fence looked like a perforated sheet of plastic.

Ferreira helped her out of the car with a courtesy few Western men showed nowadays. “Those ones over there are the failures, for the most part. The Farm's work has mostly been failures, of course. Genetic engineering is very hit and miss. And the thinking behind the farm has been mostly miss. Nobody should ever have let these idiots near a gene sequencer. This whole scheme was based on theories that have been out of date since the Human Genome Project. But they found friends in the
Comissão,
saying they could rejuvenate the agro sector, get Amazonas back on its feet again, so they got all the funding they needed, even though they were also being funded by an American burger consortium, the destroyers of the
selvas.
That's why the big public stink, and the angry mob out front. And why everyone in this compound is under house arrest.” He held up a warning finger. “Be very careful what you say and do. The Recrimination Commission is looking for people to blame, and your Australian citizenship will not protect you. Three of those under house arrest here right now are American and European nationals. A full section of the
Regimento do Mártir Chico Mendes
has been detailed here to guard them."

Beyond the wire, something huge was painfully dragging itself along, groaning pitifully. “What was it they were trying to produce?"

"A hyperefficient food animal that tolerates life in a semi-desert, which is what Amazonas has become. Effectively a better, cheaper burger machine. The American burger companies are running scared now Third World countries are starting to demand money for their meat. They're twisting this way and that, trying out all sorts of new ideas."

"All the same,” said Mullen, “prehistoric DNA."

"Idiotic,” agreed Ferreira. “Modern genetic thinking is, I believe, that nurture is as important to an egg as nature. The environment a cell starts to divide in has as great an effect on the end product creature as the cell's DNA does. So, even though you can extract fossil DNA from a preserved insect that bit a dinosaur a hundred million years ago, you still have no mama dinosaur for that DNA to develop in."

Mullen nodded. “So they cheated.” She moved up to the wire, squinting to better see what lay beyond it.

"Yes. They used existing life forms they believed would be as close as possible to the prehistoric original. They were looking to recreate creatures from the end Permian, early Triassic. At that time in prehistory, I believe, the world gradually became very hot and arid. The complex mammal-like life forms of the Permian died out, leaving the world to be inherited by creatures that could take the heat."

Mullen nodded. “Dinosaurs."

"I think they were trying for archosaurs, the dinosaurs’ ancestors, but yes. The dinosaurs weren't around at the time of the Permian extinction, you see."

Mullen kicked at a long black glistening turd lying in the dust at her feet. “I take it they've been using geese as mama dinosaurs."

"They
wanted
to use hoatzins. A sort of bird whose chicks have claws, you know? They're native to Brazil. They believed hoatzins were the most primitive living birds.” He laughed harshly. “They probably saw it on the National Geographic channel. But hoatzins are rare nowadays, they're
selvas
fauna, and everything that once lived in the
selvas
is sacred. So the Commission wouldn't let them. Shall we go inside?"

The office had an air conditioner. Under the new austerity laws, it had been disconnected, the wires left ostentatiously poking out of the wall to show how much in tune with the ideals of the
Comissão
the building's owners were. If someone had intended for the office to be too hot for Mullen to think straight, someone had been unaware Mullen had just flown from Darwin.

The Ugly Farm's head of research, Doctor Diogenes Brum De Santana, was under house arrest. Mullen had been warned in writing not to exchange documents, weapons, or ‘biological materials’ with him. He was a shock-headed latino who appeared to have consciously modelled his look on Einstein, without accompanying it with the genius. Also in the room was Captain Doctor Prates Alencar, an aloof black woman in a paramilitary uniform somehow cut to look like a business suit. Danilo Ferreira sat beside Mullen.

"Experiment 2308 is the pinnacle of the programme,” said Doctor De Santana excitedly. “It is the factor that could turn this facility round economically, returning tax dollars to the people."

"It's a food animal, then,” said Mullen.

"FOOD,” echoed Polymath from her shoulder mournfully.

"Not entirely,” said De Santana, lowering his eyes guiltily. “Its economic benefit has arisen as something of an unexpected byproduct.” He looked up at Alencar, clearly seeking permission. “Perhaps it would be better if I demonstrated?"

Alencar gave the briefest of nods. De Santana rose from his seat, crossed the room to an antique cabinet made of dead rainforest, carefully located a key, unlocked it. Inside, the cabinet contained a jerry-built steel frame fed by electrical wires, on which was stretched a reptilian skin resembling crocodile hide. Mullen decided that the skin had to be artificial. It was, to begin with, bright green.

"This is,” he muttered nervously, “from Experiment 2307. The other one in the clutch.” He crossed back to the workstation and dabbed at its screen. A colour palette appeared there.

"The green is so vibrant because the skin cells actually contain chloroplasts,” he said. “The 2300 series seem to supplement a heterotrophic diet with photosynthesis happening inside their own dermis. But photosynthetic pigments aren't limited to chlorophyll alone. There are others, as we know.” He adjusted the colour palette on the screen; the hide turned as golden as a leaf in autumn. “Xanthophyll.” He dialled the colour wheel still further—the hide became a rich New England autumn red. “Phycoerythrin. With the correct electrical stimulus, it is possible to maintain this behaviour, as you see,
even after the dermis is removed from the animal
. It is even possible to produce dynamic effects—” he touched another control, and the hide pulsed red-yellow-green like a traffic light. “Rich stupid women will pay billions for this. And the beauty is that we are not upsetting an existing ecosystem. This is a life form we have created from whole cloth."