Dorcas’s clone stirred in her womb as she completely died. The nanomachines stopped while Emily and Paul removed their new daughter, then disassembled the rest of the biomatrix.
Emily said to Paul, “Are you sure the machines redid her retinas?”
Dorcas’s father nodded. “We wouldn’t want the Feds to embarrass the family.”
They wrapped the newborn baby in a blanket. A man appeared to be watching them, but he was a Chicano cripple, no one of consequence.
Loba heard that Dorcas entered a room with two other adults. Two adults and a baby left. The toilet and septic system were full of undifferentiated proteins.
She said to Willie, “In another thirty years, perhaps she’ll work for us again.”
SEVENTEEN
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
OF THE INSECT ERA
After Dorcas, we flew out of New Orleans and over the burnt husks of oil tanks and refineries. The land, though, was mostly green again behind the island beaches with their radioactive sands. Degradation and partial recovery, at least for the natural world. Life evolved in a high-radiation environment, but not in a high-sulfur-dioxide one.
We crossed Mexico and the Pacific with the eggs, pupae, and instars of Dorcas’s insects.
I said, “Willie and I learned a lot working with her. More than enough to duplicate her prior designs.”
I loved the group, tiny and cohesive. Dorcas would have fractured us. We were a human Klein bottle, interpenetrating. We finally made it out of the prisons of our various pasts.
We flew into Peking with a hundred thousand insect eggs mailed ahead of us in plastic airhose segments concealed in thick but ordinary letters, a old trick fish collectors used to send eggs into embargoed countries.
Dust ground from rock by ancient glaciers flew over head, filled with lunged wasps that hated the scent of blood.
Someday, we’d conquer ourselves.
TOR BOOKS BY REBECCA ORE
Alien Bootlegger and Other Stories
Becoming Alien
Being Alien
Gaia’s Toys
Human to Human
The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid
Slow Funeral
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
GAIA’S TOYS
Copyright © 1995 by Rebecca Ore
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Tor book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10010
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. Design by Junie Lee
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ore, Rebecca.
Gaia’s toys / Rebecca Ore. p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-85781-0
I. Title.
95-14724
CIP
PS3565.R385G3 1995 813’.54—dc20
First edition: August 1995
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321
Jacket art & design by Shelley Eshkar
a TOR ® hardcover
distributed by St. Martin’s Press
in the United States
175 fifth avenue
New York, NY 10010
Distributed by H. B. Fenn and Company, Ltd., in Canada
PRAISE
“Rebecca ore is one of those rare talents who can combine brilliantly innovative scientific thinking with evocative, soul-searching fiction. She belongs among those top dozen practitioners of today’s science fiction.”
—Ben Bova
A finalist for the John W. Campbell award, Rebecca Ore consistently earns high praise for her novels:
“Becoming Alien is an intelligent, realistic, gritty, adult novel.”
—Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
“The Illegal Rebirth of Billy The Kid is a stunning fable for tough times.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Alien Bootlegger has jealousy, conniving, intrigue. And death, and the aliens as foils to illuminate very human foibles… Ore’s portrayals ring true.”
—Analog
Now, with Gaia’s Toys, Ore takes us on a riveting journey to a dark and brooding American future. It’s a wicked, dystopic disneyland:
Where gene restructuring is the norm and everyone’s plugged into their computers (which is where the authorities want them)
Where if you don’t have a job, your only option is to become a welfare drone, your head in the military cyberspace… and your memory a thing of the past
Where saving endangered species in micro-eco bubbles has become a fad with intellectuals and the wealthy, but children go hungry in the streets.
And where a group of eco-terrorists have banded together to stop the creation of an insidious new genetic mutation—a weapon that the government will use to rob Americans of their last scrap of freedom Gaia’s Toys is a knife-edged trip twenty minutes into the future, a fast-paced science fiction thriller as possible as tomorrow s headlines.
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