Copernick's Rebellion Page 6

  “My brothers are mostly picking names for themselves, my lord.”

  “Anybody got Black Bart yet?”

  “No, my lord. Thus far, each of my brothers has wanted to be named after a weapon.”

  Kids! Guibedo thought. “You keep calling them ‘brothers.’ Ain’t you got no girls?”

  “No, my lord. We don’t have sex.”

  “Such a pity. So how do you reproduce?”

  “In the strictest sense of the word, we don’t, my lord.”

  “Then how do you get little LDUs?” Guibedo asked.

  “Lord Copernick worried that an opponent might breed us for his own needs, my lord, so he caused our eggs to grow from a nonsentient mother being which lives on the ceiling of a vault below his tree house.”

  “I wondered why Heiny wanted so much room,” said Guibedo. “How many eggs you got growing down there?”

  “Approximately three hundred thousand, my lord, a third of which are now available for hatching.”

  “Why so many?” Talking in a windstorm was making Guibedo hoarse.

  “My Lord Copernick calls it his insurance policy,” Dirk said. “And, of course, the large numbers don’t cost him anything in time or money.”

  So Heiny figures things are gonna get real rough! Ach! The kid oughta know that it’s safer to hide than to fight. Still, maybe it’s safer yet to be able to fight while you’re hiding.

  “You know, Dirk, I can see how it could be kinda rough, being an LDU. No girls, no father, no mother, no sisters—”

  “But a lot of brothers, my lord. We feel rather sorry for you humans. You take so long to grow, then die so soon.”

  “You guys don’t die?”

  “We can die if sufficiently injured, but we aren’t troubled with diseases. We don’t age or have a finite lifespan.

  “But you humans die without ever being able to communicate, except with your clumsy language. How do you fight the loneliness?”

  “It ain’t so bad like you make it out. We humans have bonds with each other, but maybe you wouldn’t understand. Friendship, love, kinship with other individuals. And a man who is wise knows that there is a bond between all men. All men are brothers, Dirk, even if we don’t act like it. Everybody counts, nobody should be forgotten.” Actually, Guibedo treasured bis solitude as much as any other hermit did, but he was not sufficiently introspective to notice his own hyprocisy.

  “And we got other ways of communication besides words. Actions talk, and we have our ceremonies.”

  “Ceremonies, my lord? Could you describe them?”

  “Sure. I can see you’re a sociology minor. Whenever something happens to a human that’s important to him, he’s got to have a ceremony. There’s simple ones like shaking hands. Two people meet and want to be friendly, they shake hands. And there’s more complicated ones—”

  For the next quarter hour, at Dirk’s prodding, Guibedo talked on about the human ceremonies connected with Birth, Friendship, Love, Hate, Marriage, and Death. Dirk seemed especially interested in burial ceremonies, a fascination that Guibedo ascribed to Dirk’s own deathlessness.

  They left the tunnel and entered a starlit abandoned gravel pit. Dirk stopped in front of a seven-foot-tall man. He was magnificently muscled, and his head was large for his body. “Uncle Martin!” Heinrich Copernick stepped away from his battered van. “I see you got out in one piece.”

  “Yah, that you, Heiny? That was one hell of a tunnel your boys dug.”

  “We figured you were worth it.”

  “But why such a long tunnel, Heiny?”

  “Logistics, Uncle Martin. For one thing, I needed someplace to put five million cubic feet of dirt. For another thing, there was the problem of feeding ten thousand LDUs. They only eat a fluid that your tree houses produce. There’s a community of eighty-five full-sized tree houses a mile from here, and I was able to grow food synthesizers in their roots, even though plant engineering is hardly my forte.”

  “Only eighty-five trees?” asked Guibedo, doing some quick mental calculations. “They could produce enough food?”

  “Well, I’m afraid I had to shut down the rest of their services, Uncle Martin. I was up there a couple days ago, and everybody was gone. But the trees will revert to their original state once the tunnel is filled in. The people will return.”

  “Well, I hope so,” Guibedo said. “I guess you got to do things like that in an emergency. Why didn’t you tell me you made guys like Dirk, here, Heiny?”

  “You’ve just answered your own question, you damned old iconoclast.” Copernick laughed. “You spend a half hour with my LDUs and they’ve got proper names! In a day you’d have them demanding private rooms, time and a half for overtime, and a grievance committee!”

  “Maybe not such a bad idea, Heiny. You’d make a fortune hiring these guys out as a construction team. You didn’t have any trouble digging that tunnel, did you?”

  “Oh, there was some sort of a security problem once when I was gone, but the LDUs took care of it,” Heinrich called over his shoulder as he walked toward the van.

  “See!” Guibedo said. “They’d make a good work gang.”

  “I thought about it, but there are the building people and the labor unions to contend with. And look at all the trouble your publicity got you into. Still, lack of money is slowing us down,” Heinrich said, getting into the driver’s seat.

  “You know, Heiny, when I was in jail, I got to thinking about catalytic extraction and refining. We could make a tree that could extract heavy metals from the soil…”

  The two were lost in technicalities as they drove away.

  Three platoons of LDUs left the tunnel-filling and went about special tasks.

  One platoon began cutting rectangular slabs of stone, polishing them smooth, and carving names and dates.

  Another dug rectangular holes, pleasantly arranged, on a hilltop.

  The third platoon exhumed the bodies of eighty-five families who had presented such a security problem, who had been so unamenable to reason.

  When the work had been completed and ritual prayers had been said, Dirk thought to his brothers, It’s comforting to know that the proper ceremonies have been completed.

  Yes, replied Blade. It’s important that we learn to do everything properly.

  Chapter Five

  JUNE 5, 2001

  ONE OF the surprising things about commanding large forces is that eager, dedicated subordinates are often more trouble than slovenly ones. You must be ever on your guard. The slightest hint can be taken literally and blown all out of proportion.

  The problem is as old as the chain of command. A general drops a hint; a colonel makes a suggestion; a major writes a memo; a captain gives an order; a lieutenant barks a command; and… a corporal pulls a trigger. It happened at Corregidor—the Japanese command never intended for the death march to occur. It happened at Mai Lai—when a town was wiped out. And it happened all too often in the course of the Symbiotic Revolution.

  —Heinrich Copemick

  From his log tape

  “So what’s the verdict, Doc?” General Hastings asked.

  “You’ve got to stop smoking, George,” Dr. Cranford said.

  “Is that all?”

  “Of course not. You really must start keeping regular hours. And cut your work week down to sixty hours. And get out a little more. Learn to relax.”

  “Look, Cranford, work is about all I have left.”

  “George, the tragedy that took your family happened a year ago. You can’t—”

  “Cut it.”

  “But a man can’t mourn forever—”

  “I take it that I’m healthy,” Hastings said.

  “Yes, but you don’t deserve to be. There’s nothing wrong with you now that a little rest and exercise won’t cure.”

  “You’ve been telling me that every checkup for the last ten years.”

  “Well, why do you bother coming to me if you don’t take my advice? I tell you, working your
self into the ground all the time is going to catch up with you. It’ll shorten your life, George,” Dr. Cranford said.

  “It hasn’t yet. Now are you going to sign my flying status papers or not?”

  “I don’t have much choice. Air Force regulations are so damned specific about it. I don’t know why you bother—your flight pay is less as a general than it was as a lieutenant-colonel. But your reflexes are perfect. Your eyesight is twenty-twenty. Your blood pressure and electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram and every other damned thing are annoyingly perfect. But George, your life style is going to catch up with you.”

  “Just sign the paper. Doc, you’re even more crotchety than usual. Something bugging you?” Hastings asked.

  “Nothing except that I’m about to give up my practice and take up faith healing. That seems to be where my gifts lie.”

  “Somebody didn’t have the courtesy to die when you told him to?”

  “A whole bunch of somebodies. Half of the damned Senate has walked into this office with every organ in their flabby bodies rotting away!

  “You know that this is the best-equipped facility in the country. And you know that I wouldn’t tell a man he was going to die unless I ran him through every test known to man, plus a few I thought up myself. And then not until he had six days to live and no hope. It’s just not something that a doctor likes to do. Besides the fact that many of them are my friends, it’s embarrassing to have to admit that my profession is of no damn use to them!”

  “People have been getting well?” Hastings said.

  “Scads of the bastards! It’s driving me to drink and damned nearly to profanity!”

  “So this has been happening to everybody?”

  “No. You’ve got to be in Congress to get a special dispensation from whatever God or devil is doing this to me. And seniority seems to help.”

  “You’re serious about this?”

  “Hell yes, I’m serious! One week I tell a senator to put his affairs in order, and the next week he comes in with his heart beating and his liver working and he’s alive in front of God and everybody!”

  “Do you have any theories about it?”

  “I thought at first that it was something that we were doing here by accident. Turned the place upside down for months. Checked out every batch of every drug that I’d given any one of them. Nothing. Then I found out that two other doctors at different clinics were doing the same damned thing. The only thing that it correlates with is you’ve got to be a congressman.”

  “Well, have you checked out that angle?”

  “Of course! The three of us have checked out every item in the Capitol cafeteria. The kind of floor wax they use. The postage stamps. The pencils. Anything that they would all have in common. Hell, I even sent a roll of their toliet paper to the lab. Nothing!

  “I figure that God doesn’t want congressmen and hell’s full up!” Cranford said.

  “Maybe I can give you a hand finding out what’s behind this.”

  “You? Now, I appreciate the offer, but what use is a spook going to be on a medical research program?”

  “You’d be surprised. Can you give me some specifics? Like who got cured of what and when?” Hastings said.

  “No. I can’t. That’s privileged information, George.”

  “Well, you’ve gotten my curiosity up, Doc. Don’t be surprised if somebody with a warrant comes over to pick up your medical records.”

  “And don’t be surprised if I tell your process server to go to hell,” Cranford said.

  “Here is the analysis of those medical records, sir,” Pendelton said.

  “Give it to me verbally, Sergeant.” Hastings leaned back in his padded chair.

  “Yes, sir. In the past two years, eighteen U.S. senators and fifty-seven members of the House have had spontaneous remissions of major diseases. The spectrum of the diseases is typical for American males in their age group. In all cases, their internal organs now test out as being equal to those of twenty-year-olds.”

  “It almost makes me want to get into politics,” Hastings said. “What else do these particular congressmen have in common?”

  “Nothing that’s indicated, sir. The sample seems to be random.”

  “Pendelton, I want a very discreet analysis run on these men. Their voting records. The places they visit. The people they know.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get a few men on it.”

  “But discreetly. I don’t have to remind you that the Congress has to approve all promotions of general officers.”

  Martin Guibedo drove a battered two-ton truck across Death Valley toward five acres of lush greenery growing out of the surrounding desolation. Death Valley had been one of the public parks that had been sold to private interests in the early ‘90s to “distribute the nation’s wealth to the poor” and make a lot of politicians rich.

  He parked next to the fountain and waddled, smiling, to the five-story tree house in the center of the garden. “Ach! Pinecroft!” he said to the tree. “So beautiful you’ve grown! You have got to be the prettiest tree my microscalpel ever made!”

  The door opened for him, and he went through the huge living room, noting pleasantly that the waterfalls both worked and the cleaning apparatus was doing its job. In the kitchen, an incredibly beautiful woman rose to greet him, smiling.

  “Uncle Martin!” she gushed. “It’s so good to see you!”

  “Hi, Mona,” Guibedo said uncomfortably. Is this an animal or a people? “Where’s Heiny?”

  “Heinrich is in the communications lab, fourth level down on your right.”

  “Thanks.” Guibedo stepped into the elevator and thought, Uncle, yet! I guess Heiny married her legal. None of my business, I suppose. But sometimes Heiny goes too far.

  Heinrich Copernick sat back, talking to two hemispherical mounds on his workbench. One was a meter across, the other a third of that.

  “You both realize that, though parts of a multinodal communications net, you are really a single multiperson—ality organism. Refusing to talk to each other is extremely adolescent behavior. Now go on with what happened.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the larger mound said. “So I said to myself, ‘What is your conception of spaciotemporal reality?’ And I answered me, ‘What?’ Now, how can I communicate with myself when my mental facilities are so different from my own?”

  “Just keep working on it,” Heinrich said. “Oh, Uncle Martin! So good to see you. What do you think of my latest?”

  “Well, he is schmarter than the other one what you made, Heiny.”

  “Which other one?”

  “You know. That big dummy what all the time dragged his knuckles in his shit.”

  “You must mean the simian-variation labor and defense unit,” Heinrich said. “I’ve pretty much given up on that whole series. Redesigning existing bioforms turned out to be considerably more difficult than I had originally estimated.”

  “Yah. Told you so. Putzing around with natural—growed life forms is like trying to build a wristwatch in a junkyard. You is better off in a machine shop. It takes maybe a little bit longer, but you know what you got.”

  “It was just that my initial experiments with existing bioforms were so successful, Uncle Martin.”

  “Well, if you want to call making yourself look like a gladiator in an Italian movie a successful experiment, you go ahead.”

  “I can see nothing wrong with increasing my own strength and stamina.”

  “Sure. That’s fine. But the green eyes and the wavy black hair and the baby-smooth complexion, Heiny? Kid stuff! You’re seventy years old and you oughta be above that kind of thing.”

  “I’m entitled to a little fun.”

  “And what do you need with being seven feet tall for, anyway?”

  “For one thing, it hides the size of my head,” Copernick said. “How is your end of it going, Uncle Martin?”

  “Just fine and ahead of schedule. My tree houses are getting real popular. Eleven separate spe
cies are in public use, with nine more in the advanced experimental stage. My best estimates are one point five million inhabited tree houses and eight million more growing up. Seven million people are living in them right now!” Guibedo glowed with pride.

  “Excellent! That’s almost one tenth of one percent of the world’s population.”

  “The progression is a geometrical one,” Guibedo said. “We’re almost there, in a coupla years.”

  “I wasn’t being facetious, Uncle Martin. I’m genuinely proud of you. How about the heavy-metal extraction project?”

  “That’s what I came over here to tell you about. Those kidney trees we planted over the old mines are all growed up.”

  “Kidney trees?”

  “Yah. I call them that because the extraction glands work just like a human kidney, getting rid of poisonous substances.”

  “Like gold, silver, and platinum.” Heinrich laughed. “But are they working?”

  “So-so. I think maybe I should have made the mercury come inside of cherries instead of grapefruits. When they fall off the tree, they go schpritzing all over the place. And the mercury gets absorbed by the roots and goes up to the top of the tree, and comes schpritzing down again. Son of a gun, shit. If that mercury was orange paint, I’d look like a pumpkin.”

  “You know, Uncle Martin, I could take care of your weight problem pretty easily.”

  “What problem? I like being me. And the ground is covered with grapefruit rinds.”

  “Nothing serious, we can rig nets or something. But what about the other metals?”

  “Oh, that’s pretty good, even if the trees are overworked with the mercury. I got a lot of golden apples and platinum pears out in the truck. I didn’t have room for the silver pinecones or the osmium cherries.”

  “Blade! Attention! Central Coordination Unit here.”

  A multicolor LDU laid aside the history text that he was reading and trotted over to the CCU’s Input/Output unit in his barracks. “Sir!”

  “Blade, take your platoon and unload Lord Guibedo’s truck. Assay the contents and report. Build a smelter and convert the gold into standard twenty-pound bars. Store the platinum for the time being.”