redeem itself for its defective model. Knowing the other rabbit was bound by his conditioning, Peter held no enmity toward him. And in truth, his attention was fixed more on the seductive figure beside him.
He had almost forgotten what a beautiful doe Flopsy was. Her bib was thick and creamy, her haunches strong, her nose sexily moist.
Peter's years of self-sacrifice had included little time for romance. Now, the nights he and Flopsy had spent rutting together, enjoying the only solace available in captivity, returned to him with almost punishing force.
Realizing that he could not let the other rabbit spook the indecisive slaves, acting out of both expediency and jealousy, Peter hopped at the cowardly rabbit. The substitute Peter raised his forepaws awkwardly in defense. But he was no match for the martially trained outsider. In a trice, muzzle bloodied, the other rabbit lay on the floor.
The splices were stunned into silence. The hum of the ventilation system sounded like a hurricane. Peter tensed himself for further violence.
Flopsy spoke, her eyes shining at the return of her first mate. "The meek die on their knees! We walk on two legs! All power to the CLF!"
A chorus of acclamation gradually swelled. Peter was too proud to caution them. They would be gone soon anyway.
He put his arm around Flopsy, feeling the desire to cover her stir in his loins.
Out in the world, her fecundity restored, they would breed free kits that would make mankind tremble!
McGregor, cradled in his organiform bed on the second level of Hill Top Farmhouse, was dreaming. In his dream, he was sitting in a comfy squirmonomic chair, wearing a Digireal set, laniering virtuality. A dream within a dream.
The virtual-ware was a standard Microdelrey scenario, all reassuring arcadian simplicity. McGregor's virtual self was five years old. He walked hand-in-hand with Nurse and Mum down shaded paths, butterflies flittering, the scent of hay in his nostrils.
Suddenly, from behind a shrub leaped a giant animal, a slavering rabbit with a mouthful of fangs! In an instant he was joined by another, and another!
The rabbits grabbed his guardian and his mother, and began to bite their necks and rend their flesh.
McGregor screamed/twisted in his chair/writhed in his bed.
The rabbits, finished with the lifeless corpses of the adults, their snouts incarnadined, turned on the little boy.
He bit his tongue/bit his tongue/bit his tongue, till blood flowed/flowed/flowed.
The monitors in the bed finally kicked in, and the system administered a dose of RU-9000.
McGregor felt the killers' claws and smelled their meaty breath/pulled off the Digireal set/awoke with a jolt.
The taste of his own blood was like sucking on an antique drycell. Sitting up, he spat red and the bed absorbed it. Then, he listened.
The fading echoes of noise from the barn drifted through an open window with the breeze…
What the breeding fuck was going on with those vars? Was it some argument among themselves, a fight over rut or sweet? He had warned them about excess activity after lights-out. By arnie, he'd iraq and pakistan their worthless hides!
A thought came to him. He spoke to the Farm.
"Hill Top."
"Yes?"
"Any intruders?"
"The perimeter sensors report the passage of no creature massing more than ten ounces."
Ten ounces? That was impossible. The countryside was swarming with creatures bigger than that, their nightly runs cutting across the Garden, their bioparms programmed to register, yet not sound an alarm. The sensors had to be jiggered.
"Hill Top."
"Yes."
"Notify the Sawrey dirty-harrys. We have a trespasser. Get me a kill clearance."
A high– baud squirt down the optics and a squirt back.
"Secured."
Not bothering to dress, McGregor reached down from its wallrack a bell-mouthed gun with a magazine shaped like an old-fashioned film canister, its alloy stock featuring oval cutouts as a weightsaving measure.
Downstairs, McGregor roused a gently snoring Mr. Tod. (Many splices, their vocal apparatus modified in the sim-womb for speech, suffered from attendant respiratory problems.)
"Get your slagging withers out of bed. We've got a fox in the henhouse."
"A fox?"
"Don't take me so fucking literally, you stupid trans. Now move it or lose it."
Leaving Mr. Tod to catch up, McGregor raced swiftly and silently toward the barn.
The door was slightly ajar, its rim edged with light.
McGregor kicked it off its hinges.
His extra wetware instantly processed the scene revealed to him, as if it were a freeze-frame.
Several splices crushed beneath the falling door. All the rest clumped in a loose knot around two rabbits. A third rabbit lying on the floor.
The renegade Peter!
Lone blot on McGregor's record…
The scene went realtime.
The bad rabbit darted a paw under its coat. McGregor recognized a Jumpstart shoulder harness. The pistol leaped out into the rabbit's paw.
But McGregor had already fired.
A small packet burst against Peter's chest.
Faster than even McGregor's eye could follow, Peter was wrapped from head to toe in Ivax netting, his pistol trapped against his body. He teetered for a moment, then toppled.
McGregor walked confidently up to the trameled rabbit, the stunned splices shakily parting for him.
"Fucking Crusader Rabbit… What'll you do now?"
Not waiting for Peter's answer, heedless of the soreness of his own door bruised limb, McGregor buried his foot in the var's stomach.
Mr. Tod, grunting on his foxy-smelling doss-pad on the first level of Hill Top Farm, was dreaming.
He was free, free to course the hills and valleys of the immemorial land in his ancestral unmodified form. 'Cross brook and meadow he ranged, following the scents of friend and foe, mate and prey. The sun, the wind, the deep den in winter, these were all he required to be happy. His life was a fulfilling completeness in itself.
In this dream, Mr. Tod had a nightmare.
Humans caught him and tied him to a rack. They bent and twisted his limbs until he yelped with searing pain. When he finally resembled his tormentors, they released him and gave him duties. To watch similarly tortured creatures, guard and chivy them. In return, he was "rewarded": a suit of useless clothes, cloying food, the occasional hurried mating with an imported vixen delivered by the Hedonics Plus van, synthetic chases of bloodless quarry through the thickets of his own brain…
In this nightmare, the days passed like an eternal winter. He struggled to return to his real life. With a vast effort he awoke-
Then awoke once more, back into the nightmare.
Carrying a gun, McGregor was shaking him roughly. Was it morning already? He could hear the tourists laughing at his antics. "Who's been eating from my pie dish? Who's been using my best tablecloth? It must be that odious Tommy Brock. And look, he's sleeping in my bed! I'll teach him-"
But no, it was not even dawn yet. McGregor was saying something about a fox. He was the only fox here, wasn't he? Why couldn't the man let him sleep? He was supposed to be allowed to sleep at night. At the training kennel the teachers had promised him an easy life. They had claimed he would have a kind master. But McGregor was not kind, far from it. He hurt splices, seemed to enjoy it. And he forced Mr. Tod to aid him. Mr. Tod worried about this. He did not want to hurt anyone unnecessarily. You killed only to eat, in order to survive. Hurting was not sport. Sport was frisking and mating-Yet what could he do? McGregor had to be obeyed…
Now the man was suddenly gone. Mr. Tod forced himself to get up. He took his coat down from a peg and donned it. "You must not appear out of costume in public… " Then he went outside.