Scurrying creatures resembling fleas the size of small sow bugs moved about on his arm, making their way through his body hair as men travel through bushes. The holes they had burrowed in his flesh to get to the joints of his hands were in the process of healing into permanent scar tissue.
“Now, of course, I simply leave appropriate amounts of calcium powder around the area, so that they no longer irritate the flesh and joints.”
Dr. Beckwith concluded his lecture and saw to it that Mom had things well in control and was programmed to release her wards after lift-off. He left the coolness of the survival tent and headed for the ship. All around him the green flames of Jade’s countless leafy plants burned brightly with life. He almost envied the men he was abandoning and the freedom they would have here. He knew that they would not agree with his feelings, but he had to leave them. He would be incinerated as a mutineer if he returned to Earth with them. He preferred to be the sole heroic explorer bringing the wonderful news concerning Jade.
He replaced the damaged microwave navigational sensor with an auxiliary unit, then began powering up the ship for lift-off. While he searched a manual for the proper control sequence to operate the ship’s stabilizing computer, an exploring insect on a scouting mission rustled its way out of his hair. It came out beneath his ear and made its way up his cheek. He felt its numerous churning feet grip his face and its feelers making feather-light contact with his skin. He held still while it investigated his eyelashes. After a few moments, the insect crawled down across his mouth and along his neck to disappear under his collar line.
He wondered if his fellow Earth-born men would put up with that sort of thing. A twist of cold fear touched his stomach; what if men refused to come to such a place? But then he relaxed and smiled. He was confident that once Earth’s colonization companies had an organically compatible planet to send people to, that careful advertising would omit such nasty details. The promise of a jungle paradise with an open sky overhead instead of a filtered environment beneath a dead gray dome would sound appealing.
They would come. Others would adjust to Jade just as he had. Adaptability was one of mankind’s greatest survival traits.
And of course, there was nowhere else to go.
He finished with the manual and set the ship into motion. Bass-voiced jets rumbled as the ship rose through the atmosphere. Dr. Beckwith watched the aft view of Jade as it telescoped rapidly. The freshly scorched clearing shrank to a black dot swimming in a green sea. Finally, it vanished as if swallowed by a wave.
Something tickled among the hairs of his armpit. He found it difficult to ignore. He made a mental note to develop some sort of skin desensitizer for the comfort of the new immigrants.
Blind Eyes
Tamara knew the giant would kill her if he caught up. He chased her on the dark beach, each heavy step leaving a crater in the wet sand. He was wired on a handful of blur, synthetic blue crystals that looked a little like drain-cleaner. The side effect that gave the drug its name made his eyes water profusely, which was the only reason Tamara still lived.
Overhead the clouds hid the moon and most of the stars. Far away across the ocean lights gleamed along the coast marking the outskirts of New Havana, Cuba’s largest city. The waves coming up over the reefs and splashing the sand had a phosphorescent glow to them, the ghostly nimbus from plankton blooms that touches the waters of the Caribbean during certain times of the year.
As her feet slapped against the dark sand and popped the bulbs of marooned clumps of seaweed, small crabs scuttled about hoping for food. Tamara was blind, even more blind than the wired-up nine-foot tall giant that murderously hunted her. Her closed eyelids looked normal, there was even the semblance of long dark lashes, but beneath these lids she had no eyes at all. The genes for her optical organs and the brain sections that processed the input from the optical nerves had been deleted, as that left more room in her skull for other things.
She sensed the crabs at her feet, moving objects of a particular shape and size, at a certain location and depth. They had no color or shading, and except for their heat signature, they looked the same to her at midnight or high noon. Tamara perceived the crabs, rather than saw them, just as she perceived the giant.
He was behind her, over a hundred yards away in the dark. She sensed the foaming seawater that rushed over his heavy boots. She watched his huge heart pound with deliberate liquid motions in his vast chest.
Doctor Sato had been right, of course. He had bought her as an embryo from Tyro Labs, and he was the closest thing to a father that she had. He had told her to leave matters at the schools alone. She had not listened, she had used her job as an instructor to find the kids who needed help, to reach into their minds and tug here, to pluck there. She had removed the need they had for blur and other drugs, or at least neutralized it.
Things might not have gone so badly if she had stopped there. If sales had just gone down, the pushers would have been baffled, but not enraged. At least, they would not have had a direction for their anger, and would have been likely to turn it on themselves.
Yes, if she had stopped there, things might have worked out. But she hadn’t.
She was getting tired. She knew that just running was not going to work. The giant was half-blind and in the dark, but he carefully used what little myopic vision he had left, tracking her footsteps in the sand. He lost her now and again, as he had back in the village and the jungle, but always regained her trail. His stamina was boundless, he had the muscle density of a gorilla and had sunken deeply into the berserk rage that engulfed all the giants so easily, especially when they indulged in blur crystals.
It was this last genetic flaw, that when discovered, had finally moved the Office of Social Blending to enact strict regulations. They had essentially outlawed private gene-programming. Gene-shops had long profited from anxious couples. They promised prospective parents the tailor-made child of their dreams. Many sports fans had desired a big beefy son for football or boxing. Once the competition for the best growth programming got started, the free-market and the one-upsmanship tendencies of people everywhere took care of the rest. The modern giants were the result, a highly-publicized and frightening racial subgroup all their own. Every sports team had to have them, every celebrity had to have a bodyguard big enough to match his ego. They did airline and beer commercials, had a high rate of suicide and tended to extremes of violence when intoxicated.
To this day, despite the laws, in the dark corners of the globe more zygotes were poked and prodded, more poverty-stricken women moaned through emergency C-sections, and more giants were born. Tamara reached the place where the hammock and the lantern hung together on a nail sunk into the bark of a tall palm and turned into the forest.
As she had tried to tell Doctor Sato, she had done it for the children. It was not enough to stop the pushers in just her little town, in just the school where she taught. She wanted to strike directly at the people who had harmed the children. She wanted to do more than interrupt their cash-flow and sour their profits.
What had been wonderful was that she had succeeded, for a time. Suddenly the pushers hadn’t wanted to push anymore. Some of them had even turned in their colleagues, all that they knew of, to the DEA. But it had been the others, the secret ones, the ones that hid and watched, who had discovered her. Tamara hadn’t known about them, hadn’t been suspicious enough to spy every mind behind every pair of eyes that watched her.