Complete Short Fiction, page 107
So I would have to cut it open. I had a vibratory cutter that I would run along the pig’s side. Then, being extremely careful, I would roll up the hide. As I mentioned, there was additional collagen that added some tension, so that the skin curled up to expose the meat.
Most of each pig was smooth flesh, suitable for processed food. Without connective tissue or grain, this was easy to work with. I’d run the cutter along the pig’s length, and then cut off slabs. There was always a little blood seepage, but not much. The cutter was smart, and the blood supply was spaced rationally. Large vessels would be avoided, and tucked in, to dangle like electrical conduit. I’d hit them with vascularization hormones later, stimulate arborization, and link them up with the new flesh that bubbled up around them.
Then I would supervise the movement of the chops to the cooler, in the blank north side of the building. They’d rumble down one of the conveyors and disappear to the next step in the process of making food. The area was forgotten, with hexagonal ice crystals growing on the housings of seldom-used support pumps, and fluid spills that eventually turned into sheets of brown-red ice. My least favorite part of the job was defrosting and cleaning that.
Things did go wrong. Cancers could spread through the flesh when cell reproduction was disrupted. This could happen surprisingly fast. Sometimes an entire tube would have to be terminated and discarded. I had no idea where that flesh went.
Once I heard a rattle as the cutter went by. When I looked at the resulting slab, I found a pig’s lower jaw, complete with teeth, all perfectly formed. They looked tiny against that huge bulk, even though they would have been able to support the feeding of a creature that weighed several hundred pounds. I cleaned them off and kept them. There is nothing more diagnostic of a mammal than the elaborate pattern on the surface of the teeth. Someone with more experience than I could have identified what breed of Sus domestica had led to this gargantuan meat factory.
I got into my routine. I don’t think I was even fully conscious, following out my rounds in the semidarkness, with only the backs of pigs for company.
But that jaw should have made me more attentive. Something had gone wrong with the gene expression in that tube. All the developmental genes were still there, after all, just suppressed. It was only after the cutters hesitated a bit on that same pig that I finally hauled it up out of the fluid to investigate more thoroughly.
It had grown a leg, complete with trotter. It looked ridiculous, down there all by itself, supporting nothing, contacting nothing, but it had the full complement of bones and muscles.
I poked it and it jerked away.
So it had some basic innervation as well. I was going to have to do something about this.
Sometimes a consumer gets a hankering for a real differentiated piece of meat, something with connective tissue, muscle strands, bone: a ham, a rib, a chop. These tubes had not been designed to produce those. Even in those that had been, what looked like ancestral cuts of meat were sculpted creations, not actual muscles attached to limbs.
The hoof looked tiny and precise. Something about it appealed to me. I decided to keep it for a while. I had the idea that I was liberating some essential nature hidden in the huge tube of meat. I reprogrammed the slab cutters to avoid it. That dropped my overall productivity a bit, but still well within the quotas I had for this sty.
Sentimentality has no place in farming. I really should have known that.
Next harvest, that leg threw the slab cutter off so much it pulled back, forcing me to slice meat manually. I wasn’t used to the auxiliary blade, and the flesh shuddered so much when I lowered myself to it that I almost sliced through a finger.
Maintaining a sentimental piece of real pig quickly proved to be tiresome. And a health and safety inspection would show poor practice. My real career was elsewhere, but losing points here could really set me back.
At the next skin maintenance time, I rotated that tube so that the leg stuck out toward me. I pulled myself up to it. The leg’s joint was right at the skin surface. That was good. There would be no telltale stump left afterward, and the cutters would be able to do their job. I got right up to the thing, pushing my head against its side, and slid the auxiliary blade into the leg.
It kicked me. I lost my grip and almost fell into the tank myself. I did drop the saw, and lost it somewhere in those translucent depths. The leg flailed several more times, then was still. But it was pulled back against the tube’s bulk, as if ready to attack again.
A shudder went through the entire thing, sending waves splashing back and forth against the tank sides. Blood seeped from the cut and dripped down.
Muscle and bone were one thing, but the thing had nerves, and had recruited a blood supply.
What had given the command to kick me? The nerves led somewhere.
Maybe I was mad at it, but I had given up on careful surgery. I had to get this thing fixed and back on the production line. I recovered my blade from the tank bottom and slashed deeply, checking for any variations in the meat’s otherwise smooth structure.
I found and removed a couple of ribs and a big fold of tissue that I later figured out was a bladder, one that had never managed to grow in on itself to hold fluid. A bit of ureter led off from it, but it had never regrown a kidney, so the tube just ended.
Beneath that, along the spine, I found a lump. This was the creature’s real secret.
It had never grown a dura mater, much less cranial bones, and most of the brain had never grown either, but here was a bit of the pig’s brain, barely protected by a flexible arachnoid and pia mater, material like stiff rubber.
The original pig had a fair amount of cortex. It was an intelligent animal.
This tube of meat was not an intelligent animal. But even then I knew enough of the structure of the mammalian nervous system to have some idea of what had regrown. It was a bit of the motor cortex: what had allowed the thing to kick me. And much of the sensory cortex: what had allowed it to feel me probing it.
There was no comfort I could give. Nothing I could do to help. It couldn’t see, it couldn’t hear, it couldn’t taste. But it could feel pain.
It was just a mistake. Just a malfunction in gene expression, the generation of nerve cells with no consumption value. I thought about how long it had been shuddering under the slices of the cutter. The innervation had gone much farther than I would have thought possible. It sensed everything that was going on, everything that happened to it.
It was silent in that huge room. I sat there, kind of stroking the part of the skin that was left. I had no idea if it could feel that too.
A damage report was called for, so that others could be on the lookout for a similar malfunction.
But I didn’t tell anyone. I excised the brain, the nerves, the other organs.
Then I sauteed those no-longer-functional pain centers in butter. The ultimate discourtesy to a food animal is to kill it but not to eat it.
I think I overcooked them. They were a bit crumbly. But I choked them down.
Okay, this isn’t why I became a Trainer. But it’s why I’ve never quit. We’ve picked something up, and now there’s no way for us to ever put it down again. Now that you bear some of the weight, Berenika, maybe you understand.
Non-encounter
Mark and Berenika’s Desert Residence
I go through every room of the house, as if someone will be hiding in one of them.
But there’s nowhere to hide. The furniture is gone, and the rooms, floored with native stone, seem to have been vacuumed by forensics teams and retain not a trace of their previous occupants.
The high living room windows show the distant dry ridge, tilting like a sinking ship.
I hear a thunk from the underground garage, then voices. A man and a woman.
I was sure Berenika would leave him again. It just didn’t make sense that she would stay. But instead she was taking advantage of his power. I thought they were far away, restoring some part of the dead ocean, not here to find me scuttling across their floor like a hermit crab that had misplaced its shell, pale and shrivel-assed.
“Who are you?”
It’s Paolo. He stands tall and skinny in the doorway’s exact center, as if demonstrating how unnecessarily wide it is.
“I—”
“Oh, you know him.” The short, blond Mria pushes past him, carrying a bag that seems symbolic of “groceries”: leafy celery and a baguette stick out of the top. “The Trainer. Mark’s guy.”
“Mark’s guy.” Paolo’s eyes are pale blue. I had not noticed how clear and perceptive they were. I hadn’t really been watching him, and he certainly had never looked at me before. “What is he doing here, then?”
“I don’t know.” Mria is already in the kitchen. “Maybe he’s training gophers. Why don’t you ask him?”
“I’m here to put some things away,” I say. This is even almost true. At least it is now.
“Hey, us too,” Paolo says. “We can start a club. ‘People who clean up after Mark and Berenika.’ ”
“Don’t be bitter, Paolo.” Mria is opening and closing cabinets. “Didn’t they say they’d leave a saucepan in . . . oh, there it is. She just asked us for a favor, since we were going to be in the neighborhood.”
There was no neighborhood. Mark had, impressively, put his house where there really was nothing, an expanse of dry ridges and valleys in the Great Basin. The most visible life in the region was a herd of pronghorns that tended to keep well south, where there was more water. The only plant visible is an occasional sullen creosote bush. Those black sticks suck all the moisture from the dirt around them, leaving a circle so dry that no seed would ever germinate there. Their kingdoms are tiny and parched, but they are supreme within them.
“You hid your car,” Paolo says.
“Habit.”
“So what were you going to do here?”
“Maybe he’s moving here.” Mria pokes her head in from the kitchen. Behind her, I hear something frying. “You want some lunch, Mr. Animal Trainer? We’re going to have to pack out what we don’t eat.”
I’d never pegged Mria as a cook. But then I hadn’t paid that much attention to her, either. I’d been watching Berenika.
“Sure,” I say. “I didn’t bring anything to contribute.”
“Didn’t figure that you would.” She vanishes back into the kitchen.
“Berenika’s going to be a Trainer too,” Paolo says. “She’s going to find out what really makes things tick.”
“It’s a long, hard road,” I say. “Much less fun than it looks.”
“She knows all about that,” Paolo says. “You probably explained some of it to her.”
“I tried.”
“You’re not going to ask, are you.” Mria hands me linen-wrapped silverware and has me set the table. “Berenika’s gone back to Mark, and both of them are off on some atoll trying to restore fish stocks, train tuna to protect themselves, whatever, and you’re going to pretend you don’t even care.”
“I don’t have the right to care,” I finally manage.
“The forks go on the other side,” Mria says briskly. “You don’t need some kind of standing to care.”
“Oh, come on.” Paolo slouches above us, unsure of what to do. “He just failed. He wanted to set things up a certain way, train Berenika to move to him, and he didn’t do it.”
I try to do it slowly, but I think they hear me let my breath out.
“Don’t you guys need to protect those fish?” Mria says. “Go ahead. I’ll lay everything else out.”
“The fish,” Paolo says on the way down the stairs to the lower levels. “Did you put them here?”
“My first project for Mark,” I say. “They’re an almost-vanished subspecies—agriculture had dropped the water table and their caves were going dry. They seem to be breeding pretty well here. I hope the new owner takes care of them.”
“It’s in the deed. You have to. If you don’t want to, buy somewhere else.”
Many people think that the way we fool nature now shows our power. But it equally enslaves us to perpetual care.
Or some of us, anyway.
In the cool darkness we could hear the water swirling beneath our feet and in the walls. A still pool filled the floor’s center. We stand on its edge, looking down and seeing the passages receding in all directions into the earth.
The pool has a blue glow now that we’re here. The fish can’t see it, but it lets us see them.
“Did you . . . make this?” Paolo’s eyes are large in the dimness.
“I worked it out. There were objections. There’s no geology anywhere near here that could remotely have water-filled caverns like this, but Mark offered to finance it, and it really was the best option. You can’t have everything perfect.”
Blind fish have eyes. Or, rather, they develop eyes normally, up to a point. The genes that guide the development of the eyes is still there, still active. An eyecup develops, a lens. Then, another gene, busily beefing up the front of the head, increasing the sense of smell, the barbels, the whole chemical/physical sense structure that the fish needs to survive in the absolute darkness of limestone caverns a thousand feet underground, finally gets its bulldozers and concrete mixers into the area—and builds right over the eye. It sinks under that new flesh, and vanishes.
I wave my hand over the water. This was once Berenika’s great pleasure, Mark had told me. The one thing about the house that had entranced her. I want to see what she saw.
And they come. The fish swim out of their underground grottos and out into the dim blue glow of that room. Their skin is pure white, patterned with blue, like tattoos. Their drooping barbels let them sense what is around them. They swirl up, never touching each other, sensing the pressure of the others, searching for their microscopic food.
I hold my finger over the water, but don’t touch it. It’s best for them if they never know anyone else is here. It’s too late, anyway. Even if they knew I was here, that I had determined their destinies, they wouldn’t care.
“Come on,” I say to Paolo.
The controls make everything automatic, but it still seems that we need to be there to supervise. I carefully check the sandy floor for any obstructions and find . . .
Paolo stands next to me and looks down.
“Was that your cat?” he says.
“Not at all,” I say. “Just a companion. We worked together for a while. And then—”
“And now it works for Mark too?”
The footprint is clear. I’m tempted to say too clear, as if it was rolled there for police identification. But over here, it looks like the cougar slept. A cave might seem a good place of concealment for it.
No way of telling how long ago it had been here.
“Will they . . . will they be okay under there?” Paolo says.
“The system is sealed and recirculating,” I tell him. “Left for long enough, sure. This cave won’t survive the fall of civilization or anything. But long before they have any trouble, someone will be here to clean it up, keep them fed and alive.”
The cover looks like heavy stone, though I know it’s just a foamed metal alloy with a thin cover of fused rock dust. It slides across the pool, across the cougar footprint, across the vague traces we ourselves have left down there, and the blue glow vanishes. The house’s life is concealed until someone returns to reveal it again.
The cougar never knew I was there, so it can’t miss me, but it must be able to detect a difference in its life now that I have left it.
“Come on up.” Mria calls from upstairs. “Lunch is ready.”
“What are you going to do now?” Paolo says.
“I have another project.”
“Mark must have paid you a bundle. It must be something pretty wild.”
“Not so wild,” I say. “Just something that needs to get done.”
Potential encounter
Urban Study Area #7
Sometimes a chunk of decorative plaster crashes down from the coffered ceiling high overhead. This usually happens a couple of days after a heavy rain. The water percolates through the various remaining layers of the railway station roof. You’d think there wouldn’t be an acanthus swag or gilded rosette left up there, but the builders had not stinted on unseen decoration.
Sometimes it happens for no reason at all, like this morning. I jerk awake, hearing just the echoes of a distant crash.
Usually I get up and search, trying to figure out which piece it was that had just been added to the rubble on the waiting room floor. I don’t know what the point of that is, but I do feel good when I see fresh edges, as if I’m finally getting a grip on how things work around here.
I don’t feel like doing that today. I just wiggle myself deeper into my bag and watch the pale light of morning grow in the high windows. The pigeons that have left a crust over the glass shift and complain on their perches high above.
I’ve been here a few months now, and still find it ridiculous. Had absolutely everyone left this city and headed for better places? It had once been huge. I can walk the old streets for days, clamber carefully across rusting bridges, jump across the pits of collapsed sewers. None of it was set up to interact with nature. It comes from a purely human world, now obsolete.
Most of it collapsed and was swept into sinuous ridges, twenty or thirty feet high. Forests slowly spread across them. There’s a small modern city up the river a bit, but it has its own environment and I never take any animals there.
So now I live among weeds: spiky leaved plants, muck-loving carp, fast-growing trees, pigeons. I hunt among the herds of stunted deer that browse the grass between fallen branches of locusts and silver maples. Sometimes a pack of canids makes its quarrelsome way through the area. A cross between domestic dogs and coyotes, they are unromantic, unphotogenic, and unclean. No Trainer has ever worked to get them to set their carrion-smelling paws on a city street. No passerby has ever been struck at dawn by their wild beauty. When I hear them yelping at night I stuff my head into my pillow.
