The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (7 page)

Taller than most of the people around him, Ridell had a neatly trimmed brown beard and wore his best green-and-orange paisley suit (with bell-bottom trousers), along with a patterned tie and sandals with dark socks. Other men were similarly attired, so he knew he didn't stand out from them; but then again, he didn't want to be different, at least not in any bad way. Still, he did hope for a good assignment.

While in line he thought about his wife, Hana, who worked for the reservation's parks department on one of the numerous gardening crews. He wished the two of them had better jobs, and that they had a larger apartment, and more privileges. At breakfast that morning their eleven-year-old daughter, Willow, had asked what her older sister, Jade, was doing in her job for Chairman Rahma. No one had given the child details before this, though they were well known to the parents. Jade was a member of the great man's harem now, selected for her beauty and intelligence to join him on the game reserve where he lived.

“Something to do with caring for the animals,” Hana had replied, as she exchanged a knowing glance with her husband.

A human animal
, Doug had thought, and he'd said, “We don't know what her job assignment is yet.”

Ridell hoped his beautiful older daughter did well. It was important to the entire family.…

When his turn came he handed the female clerk a small electronic device called a précis, which contained a summary of his life, including details of his education and family, where he had worked, and (in a code that he could not read) information on his personality—whether he took orders well, learned quickly, and the like. The hand-held device had an illuminated amber screen. She touched one of the control pads on it.

“I was a machine-repair technician before,” he said, “in a factory on the outskirts of the reservation.”

She said something, in a low tone that he could not hear. The woman had short black hair that glistened with a gel that made it stand out in little spikes.

“Excuse me, but what did you say?” he asked.

Her dark eyes flashed. “I can see where you worked.” She pointed at the screen on the hand-held device. “It's all right here.” The précis screen, which previously had been amber, now glowed pale orange.

“Of course, I'm sorry. My previous job was noisy, and I have some hearing loss from it.”

“I see.” She asked him a number of questions, details of his experience. Repeatedly he had to ask her to speak louder, which she did.

The woman made entries in the hand-held device, then connected it to a computer at her desk, which took a moment to process the new data. Finally the screen on the connected précis turned pale green. She removed it and handed it back to him.

“This is your new assignment,” she said. “Report tomorrow at seven a.m.”

The screen showed that he was going to be working for one of the government's robotics servicing units. An address was provided on the south side of the reservation, and the name of a contact person.

Out on the street Ridell passed a greengrocer, a drug-injection booth, and a family guidance center (an abortion clinic), then waited for bicyclists to pass before crossing the wide street. On the other side he stepped onto a sidewalk that had sensors embedded in the surface, to collect the energy of his footsteps. The buildings on this side of the street had terraced vegetable gardens running up their outside walls, and he knew the accumulated energy of the sidewalks was used to pump water up to the gardens.

He turned onto a street that sloped upward gradually, toward the apartment building where he lived with his family. Ahead in the street, he saw a produce truck slowing for bicyclists going uphill ahead of it, who showed no inclination to get out of the way. They were even swarming over the oncoming lane, going in the wrong direction, so that the driver could not pass them. Since bicycles always had the right of way against motorized vehicles, he waited patiently, going slowly behind the pack.

Seeing something out of the corner of his eye, Ridell turned to his left, just as another bicyclist raced past him, went around the car, and approached the rear of the group of bicyclists.

A pedestrian, an elderly woman near Ridell, shouted, “He has a gun!”

He saw her pointing at the bicyclist, but couldn't see any weapon. The rider caught up with the group, and now Ridell heard him shouting, and saw him waving a handgun, causing the other bicyclists to scatter. To Ridell's horror he fired at a woman several times, causing her to crash and fall to the pavement.

The attacker darted down a side alley and disappeared from view. The woman didn't move; blood pooled around her head. Hesitantly, a man and a woman approached her, in an apparent attempt to give aid. To Ridell, however, she looked dead. Maybe it was a lover's crime of passion, a relationship that had gone terribly wrong.

Police sirens were already whining.

To avoid getting involved, Ridell turned and hurried down another street, taking an alternate route home. Surveillance cameras would identify and track the killer as he fled. Undoubtedly the man was already being monitored—and he must have known he would be caught quickly by the efficient, high-tech methods of the police. But his hatred of the victim must have run so deep that he didn't care. There would be no trial. The cops would kill him on the spot, the moment he was apprehended.

Reaching another street, with the siren noise a couple of blocks away, Doug Ridell thought he might like his new job better than the old one. The factory noise had been driving him crazy, and he was happy to get away from it. Still, he was eager for Jade to advance in her own career, so that she and the entire Ridell family could move up to a higher social rung, with a larger apartment and all of the perks that went with it.

He wondered if his daughter was having sex with Chairman Rahma at that very moment.…

*   *   *

ARTIE WENT THROUGH
an open doorway and took an elevator to one of the lower levels, where he boarded a slidewalk that transported him through a long tunnel. After rounding a corner, the hubot sent an electronic signal from his AI core, causing thick double doors to slide open ahead of him, doors that were carved with raised images of extinct animals. Disembarking from the slidewalk, he walked inside, where he felt a slight change in air pressure.

There were separate forest, arid bush, jungle, and other environments here, with vegetation stretching far into the distance. It was a network of complex subterranean habitats, with sunlight passing through the techplex ceiling overhead to warm the irrigated, nutrient-fed interiors. In the sky visible through the ceiling, he saw the sun peeking around puffy clouds.

At the front of the enclosure, he paused to examine an array of settings on a control panel, specifying the humidity for various zones of the underground facility, zones that were separated by electronic barriers that flickered and waved slightly from delicate disturbances in the air.

Two robot technicians worked the controls, part of a larger team of automatons that were linked electronically to Artie and transmitted a constant stream of valuable data to him.

The hubot saw a red gazelle run by, darting through the bush section and vanishing into the distance, then heard the warbling call of a thrush—both among the once-extinct creatures that had been resurrected with a combination of cellular material, historical information from observers, habitat information, and other data, forming what the inventor of the system, Glanno Artindale, called “genetic blueprints.”

Many animal species went extinct in the past five hundred years because they were hunted by humans, or because they were killed by predators such as rats, snakes, monkeys, or owls that were brought in by humans who had no understanding of the consequences of their actions. Often the habitats were destroyed by humans or by other related conditions—and to a very large extent the unfortunate creatures went extinct on islands, where their numbers were limited and where conditions changed enough to wipe them out. On those islands, they were sometimes visited by the crews of sailing ships, careless men who had no concern for what they were doing to endangered species.

In order to resurrect a particular species, the laboratory technicians entered all of the known data into the Artindale Computer System, including descriptions of the creatures made by centuries-past sailors (often Portuguese and Dutch) and other observers, along with the data from scientific papers and even the wildest of conjectural writings. This included genetic, hair, and other cellular information that had been assembled, as well as known facts about the habitats in which these creatures lived, including what they probably ate as well as data on other creatures that competed with them for resources or preyed on them—and which creatures the extinct species might have, in turn, preyed upon themselves. The tiniest, seemingly most innocuous observations were included, and the computer system then filtered out the most improbable data, focusing instead on characteristics that the creature most likely had.

Artindale also came up with a variety of chemical solutions in which to nourish and grow the cells, and developed charts of various ingredients to add or subtract, depending upon cellular reactions. In some cases there were inadequate cellular samples with which to begin the process, so Artindale developed what he called “educated assumptions,” which were used to generate artificial cellular materials, and to build creatures that he said would “closely approximate” extinct life-forms, matching all but an infinitesimal percentage of characteristics and traits. This was something Artie knew, having gleaned it from the technical electronic files left by his mentor, but it was not anything Rahma would be pleased to know—because it suggested a certain lack of genetic authenticity and purity.

All of the thirty-seven resurrected species, some involving adult pairs with offspring, and some individual adults, were comparatively recent extinctions from a historical standpoint, having come to the terminus of their genetic lineage between 1582 and 2036. He had decided to focus on this time period because, as a general rule, there was more data on comparatively recent species that had gone extinct. Glanno Artindale, and in turn Artie, could have gone back further if they wished, but the more recent species they'd brought back were more than enough to keep Artie and his team busy. On occasion, the hubot found evidence of likely candidates for resurrection that were much more ancient (but only if a wealth of intriguing information was available), yet he always set them aside for future research teams to work on.

This time Artie tinkered in the laboratory for around half an hour, supervising the assistants, answering their questions, making his own settings on the controls. He was about to enter the complex of habitats and walk around inside when he heard a familiar voice behind him.

“Oh, there you are,” Rahma said, as he came up beside the hubot. “Are you about finished here? I have important things for you to do.”

“Somehow that doesn't surprise me,” Artie said, with a smile.

Just then, a large gray-and-white bird emerged from the jungle section and strutted slowly around the mango and papaya trees, pausing to eat fruit that had fallen to the ground.

“The dodo bird!” Rahma exclaimed.

“Our one and only,” Artie said. “The legendary flightless pigeon.” It was far and away the most popular of the creatures in his menagerie.

The legendary bird's wings were quite small in relation to the size of its body, preventing it from flying. Rahma knew this was one of the reasons it had gone extinct on the island in the Indian Ocean where it lived, because over generations it became accustomed to a comfortable existence foraging on the ground, where food was plentiful. Until the arrival of humans and other predators (brought by humans) that hunted the dodo birds down with ease, and made them extinct.

The fat male bird stared at them for several long moments, showing no fear or aggression. It made a clucking sound, then waddled back into the thick undergrowth.

“We're growing a girlfriend for him in the laboratory,” Artie said, “and hopefully they'll like each other.”

“You have more than thirty species here, right?” Rahma said, “but only two have successfully bred with their own kind so far? The Labrador ducks and a species of mouse?”

“That's still the case, sir. The two species you mentioned are doing well; others are not, and I'm afraid they can only be grown in the laboratory. For those that have not bred yet, we've been adjusting breeding conditions, and in a few cases we're growing more of them in the lab in the hope that they will eventually breed.”

“And if they won't?”

“Then they're doomed to eventual extinction.” He paused. “They'll go extinct for a second time.”

“How sad,” Rahma said.

“It is that, sir. As you know, this is a potentially huge-scale project, and very time-consuming, so I've backed off on generating new species in order to keep the operation small enough to manage.”

“Wise decision. I was wondering if you were going to blow out of this habitat, and start asking for funds to expand.”

“My department can always use additional funds, Chairman. Oh, remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned a new species?”

“Yes, you said you had a small marsupial, a juvenile.”

“That's right,” Artie said. “It is growing faster than anticipated, and is already half of what we think its adult size will be.” He walked to a window and pointed into an enclosure that was physically walled off from the other habitat sections, with clearplex partition walls.

Rahma moved to his side, looked in. His eyes widened. “What the hell is
that
?”

Artie took several moments before replying. The enclosure was forested with kentia pines, palms, a variety of eucalyptus, and a dense undergrowth of shrubs and ferns. On the lower branch of a eucalyptus tree, the marsupial lay on its nest of twigs and leaves. Around the size of a small dog, it stared at Rahma with pale yellow eyes, its batlike wings folded over its body like a tent. The snout was long and pointed, and the thin lips separated slightly, showing large, razor-sharp incisors and canine teeth. The animal had reddish brown fur and a white streak down the center of its face.