Copernick's Rebellion

Chapter Ten JULY 22, 2003

Hastings remembered how a month ago he had awakened hot on the desert sand. He had lain there for minutes, trying to figure out where he was and why he was there. His last memories had been of relaxing in the F-38, mentally preparing himself to drop his first atomic bomb.

What did they hit me with? he thought.

Cautiously he moved the various parts of his body. Nothing broken. He got up and stripped off his suit and parachute. He found the standard-issue survival pack. Food. A .22-caliber handgun. Compass and maps. A canteen of distilled water. A manual. A radio that didn’t work.

He drank deeply, knowing that rationing the water was a bad idea. Better to drink now and get the full cooling benefit of the water. He rigged the parachute into a sunshade and waited for Air Rescue for a day and a half. It didn’t get there. He made an arrow with rocks to show his direction of travel.

The next evening, at moonrise, he picked up his belongings and started walking southwest, toward Death Valley.

“Who was it that said that the only way to stop a good man is to kill him?” he said to the rocks. “Funny, I can’t remember.”

He walked until sunrise without seeing any sign of man, not even a plane. He found the shelter of an overhanging rock and survived the day. At moonrise, he finished his water and walked on. The only sign of life was a shiny mosquito that seemed to be in love with his belt buckle.

The next morning his urine looked like Bock beer and he started to worry.

He woke to find a larva eating a hole in the barrel of his pistol. He tried to scream, but his throat was too dry to make a sound. He struggled to his feet, staggered a hundred yards, and fell down. He knew then that he was a dead man. He rolled over, put himself in a dignified posture, and prepared his mind for death.

He woke to find a gourd of water being held to his mouth by a powerful tan hand. He gulped the water.

“Slowly at first, sir.”

Something was strange about the wrist. Yes, there was a slot in it. He jerked himself upright, spilling some of the water.

“You’re one of them!” Hastings croaked.

“I suppose so, sir.” The LDU rescued the water gourd. “I’m Labor and Defense Unit Alpha 362729. My friends call me K’kingee.”

Hastings took another drink of water.

“What makes you think that I’m your friend?”

“I presumed that you would feel a certain amount of gratitude, sir.”

“I guess I do. Thank you. Am I a prisoner of war?”

“You are not a prisoner of anything, sir.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Had I intended that, it would have been more efficient to have simply let you die.”

“Don’t you realize what I am?”

“You are a human being, sir.”

“I mean the uniform.”

“Your clothing indicates that you were a general officer in the United States Air Force.”

“What do you mean ‘were’?”

“The Air Force no longer exists, sir. At least it no longer has aircraft capable of flight.”

“How did you manage that?”

“I didn’t manage it, sir. Didn’t you notice the larva that is eating your pistol?”

“I thought that it was a hallucination. Is that another one of your creatures?”

“If you mean ‘Is it an engineered life form?’ the answer is no, sir.”

“Then where did it come from?”

“A natural mutation, I suppose, sir.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“You are at liberty to believe anything that you want, sir. Just now I have a job to do. If you go due west for two miles, you will come to a road. Follow it south for three miles and you will find an uninhabited tree house. I suggest that you stay there.”

“What are you doing out here, anyway? I thought that all of you things were in Death Valley,” Hastings said.

“I prefer ‘LDU’ to ‘things.’ We call it Life Valley now. And I’m on a scouting mission. We’ll be coming through here in force in a few weeks.”

“You are a trusting soul. May I have some more of that water?”

“You may keep both gourds, sir. As to being trusting, may I point out that the tree house I mentioned is forty miles from the nearest source of water? Even if you were my enemy, without mechanical transportation you could not go anywhere to harm us.”

“Forty miles in which direction?” Hastings asked.

“South. But please don’t do anything suicidal.”

The LDU headed north at a run.

Hastings eventually made it to the tree house. He refreshed himself and got a night’s sleep.

He woke shivering with a fever and for weeks he wondered if he had survived the desert only to die in the bowels of a plant.

Now, a month after being ejected from his plane, the sickness was gone and his body was again strong. He packed all the food and water he could carry and started south.

They had been distributing food and water to people en route to Life Valley since morning, and Winnie’s load was twelve thousand pounds lighter. But he had been designed to work in tunnels where the temperature was held at fifty-five degrees, and fifty miles from Flagstaff, the heat was starting to tell on him. He had been slowing down since noon and now was down to trotting at only twenty mph.

But Winnie’s juvenile pride was involved. He was on his first big trip, and he wasn’t going to let anybody think he was a softy. He unfolded one huge arm from the top of his forty-foot-long body, wiped the sweat from his eyes with a yard-wide hand, and plodded onward.

His passengers were similarly uncomfortable. While the heat didn’t bother Dirk, his burns still troubled him, and he was worried about Liebchen. The faun had put herself into a trance to better endure the heat, and Dirk was gently swabbing her body with water. “It was stupid of me to have allowed her along, my ladies,” the LDU said.

“I’m afraid that none of us were thinking too clearly,” Mona said. “She’ll be okay. Fauns are tough, and it’ll be dark in a few hours.”

“It’s the people that get me down,” Patricia said. “We must have passed ten thousand of them today, and all we could do was give them a handout and directions to the valley.”

“We’ll give the worst cases a lift on our way back.” Mona took two frosted glasses from the synthesizer and put one on the table in front of Patricia. “Buck up, girl. In a few months it’ll all be over.”

“There are ten billion people out there! We couldn’t feed them all when we had machines. We’ll never be able to do it now.”

“Nonsense!” Mona said, “There never was a good technical reason for famine. Even before Heinrich and Uncle Martin got into the act, the Earth could have supported ten times the people than it does today.”

“Huh? There have been famines for the last ten years.”

“Figure it out. Every day the Earth receives three point five times ten to the eighteenth calories of solar energy, half of which reaches the surface. Now, if only one percent of the Earth’s surface was planted with crops that were only one percent efficient, you have fifty billion people on thirty-five hundred calories a day, enough to get fat on.

“Then figure that ten percent, not one percent, of the Earth’s surface is arable and that some natural plants are three percent efficient. We could feel one point five trillion people.”

“Then for God’s sake, why didn’t we?” Patricia asked.

“Because we never got our shit together. Uncle Martin blames it all on the ‘Big Shot Problem,’ the fact that people in power don’t like to change the status quo, but his views on social problems tend to be overly simplistic. You’d have to add in tradition, inertia, world trade agreements, greed, ignorance, and stupidity to get a complete answer. Mostly stupidity.”

Patricia finished her drink and looked up. Another group of refugees was just ahead.

Winnie was slowing down as Mona got up. “Just remember that you’re looking at the last famine in history.”

“Don’t get scared!” Winnie shouted in his little boy’s voice. “We’ve got food and water for you!”

Unbroken lines of LDUs, loaded with food and tree-house seeds, were still streaming out of the valley, heading north, to go through Alaska, swim the Bering Straits, and enter Asia, Europe, and Africa by way of Kamchatka. As many others were headed south, to try to alleviate the chaos in South America. Thousands more fanned out over the North American continent.

The Los Angeles zoo had been abandoned by its keepers, mostly because they simply couldn’t get from their homes to work.

Metal-eating larvae swarmed over cage bars and door hinges and the valves that kept the moats filled.

Gazelles, zebras, and mountain sheep hungrily, timidly, made their way out to the tall grass of untended lawns and munched contentedly.

Other animals were neither contented nor timid. Lions, tigers, and wolves, unfed for a week, quietly prowled about looking for warm meat.

The years they had spent in captivity had softened their muscles, and some hungry lions couldn’t catch a mountain goat, let alone a gazelle. Still, there was a lot of slow-moving meat around. The two-legged variety.

Antonio Biseglio was a chef, as his father and grandfather had been chefs. His kitchen was his kingdom and his kingdom was under siege.

With fly swatter and mallet, he had put up a noble, if useless, defense. In a week’s time his stove was worthless, his pots were like colanders, and his pans like sieves. In the end he salvaged nothing but a copper omelet pan, and with that he joined the crowds abandoning the city.

Tom Greene County Hospital was left with only one Filipino intern and a single nurse to care for the 230 surviving patients. The nurse, tired to the point of hallucination, dropped the buckets of water she was carrying and screamed as the LDU entered the stairwell.

“Don’t be afraid. I am a friend.”

“Wh—what are you?”

“I am Labor and Defense Unit Alpha 001256. My friends call me Tao.”

“Oh, yes. We heard that you—uh—folks would be out.” The nurse tiredly massaged her temples. “Look. Can you help me? We’ve got water in the basement, but the pipes to the other floors are out. People on the fourth floor are dying of thirst.”

“I’m afraid that there are more important considerations. The steel framework of this building is infested with larvae. It will collapse within three days. We must evacuate it immediately,” Tao said.

“But how? And where to?”

“I will organize a human labor force. The patients tell me that there is a doctor around. Find him, and together place all salvageable medical supplies into the hallways. I will have it hauled out to the courtyard, along with the patients.”

Relieved that someone—or something—was taking responsibility, the nurse said, “Yes, sir.”

Within an hour, using persuasion and offers of food, with threats and demonstrations of force, Tao collected a group of one hundred healthy men to assist him.

As they approached the hospital, they heard the nurse screaming from the second floor, where he found a Siberian tiger busily devouring the body of a woman who had been dying of cancer. The tiger viewed Tao’s appearance as a threat to its first meal in eight days. Roaring, it charged.

The tiger weighed seven-hundred pounds, more than twice that of the LDU, but in speed, intelligence, and ferocity, there was no contest. As the tiger leaped, Tao dropped below him. Thrusting a foot-long dagger-claw between the tiger’s swinging forepaws, he slit its throat to the spinal column. As the dead tiger hit the floor, Tao was already examining the patients in the room.

Both were dead.

The nurse entered as Tao was tying the tiger’s carcass upside down to the ceiling with Venetian blind cords.

“Oh, thank you, Tao. The patients—”

“Are both dead. I’ll attend to their bodies. You must care for the living. Get the men in the courtyard working. I want this building evacuated by evening. And send one of them, Antonio Biseglio, up here.”

“Yes, sir. What are you doing?” the nurse asked.

“We have three hundred hungry people here, and this carcass is protein edible for your species.” He had the tiger skinned and gutted, and was slicing the meat into one-inch cubes.

“But it’s a tiger!”

“Protein. Look, they’re eating a rhinoceros in Griffith Park. Just tell people it’s beef. Now move!”

Antonio Biseglio arrived shortly. “You wanted me, boss?”

“I would prefer that you didn’t use honorifics on me. Except in emergencies, we LDUs maintain a subordinate role to humans.”

“Sorry, Tao.”

“Better. Now, people are hungry, you’re a cook, and this is meat. Do something,” Tao said as he worked.

“Cat meat?”

“The Watusi consider it a delicacy. Tell people it’s beef.”

“I don’t have any utensils.”

“I saw a four-foot Pyrex bell jar in one of the labs. It should serve as a cauldron. And there must be something salvageable in the kitchens. Get some men to help you. I’ll have the meat on stretchers in the hallway waiting for you. Move.”

All told, eight hundred pounds of meat went into the cauldron. And if some of it tasted like pork, no one mentioned it.

At the rim of a wide Colorado valley near the Continental Divide, Saber stopped to survey the terrain. Extending his tentacled eyes out until they were eight feet apart, he adjusted his vision to 20X magnification and slowly scanned the area in search of anyone who might need his help. Well above the tree line, all was lichen-covered boulders. A food tree was growing several thousand feet below, to his right. Saber noted the position for future use; in eight weeks it would start producing.

All seemed quiet, deserted, with no sign of human life at all.

No! On the opposite end of the valley, six miles away, he saw two humans, a man and a woman. They seemed to be struggling, although it was difficult to tell at this distance.

The woman broke away from the man, running away from him. The man pursued, tackling her, knocking her to the ground. Saber ran as fast as he could over the huge boulders.

He kept the pair in view as he charged into the valley. The woman broke away again; her blouse was torn off, her bra hanging at her elbow. It was still hard to tell, but it seemed that she was bleeding in several places. She made it to the top of a large boulder and from there threw a rock at the man, who was still pursuing her. The rock struck the man, injuring but not stopping him.

Saber was then halfway across the valley, considering his course of action. If the man killed the woman before he got there, it would be an obvious case of murder, and, in accordance with Lord Copernick’s instructions, he would kill the man. If the woman killed the man? She was retreating. Self-defense. No punishment. If neither was killed, he would incapacitate the man and assist the woman to safety.

The man had the woman down on the boulder and ripped off the balance of her clothing.

The motive, then, seemed to be rape, one of the humans’ sexual reproduction customs. As the LDUs understood it, rape was generally frowned on, but Lord Copernick had not placed it on the list of capital offenses. Saber would administer no punishment for the offense.

As the LDU approached, the woman was struggling and screaming loudly. The man was hitting her on the face and upper torso while trying to hold her down and remove his own clothes.

Saber struck the man with a body check, and all three tumbled from the boulder. The man was on his feet almost as quickly as the LDU and, wild eyed, he threw a rock at Saber.

The LDU tapped the man on the chin with his knuckles, rendering him unconscious. Turning to the woman, he saw she was sitting naked on the ground, dirty and sobbing uncontrollably. Her lips and one eye were swelling, and blood trickled down her chin. Her back was scratched and her ribs and breasts were badly bruised.

“Don’t be afraid,” Saber said, handing the woman the remnants of her clothing. “I am a friend. It’s all over now. I’ll take you somewhere where you will be safe and tend your wounds.”

The woman continued to cry.

“I know that I look strange to you. I am a labor and defense unit. I am here to protect you, to keep you from harm.”

“Well, who the hell asked you for help?” she screamed.

“You were being injured. Naturally I came to your assistance.” The woman’s reaction wasn’t what the LDU had expected.

“God damn you!” she shouted. “It was just getting good!”

Suddenly a ten-pound rock bounced off Saber’s back. “Yeah, you damned animal,” the man yelled. “Get out!”

Saber retreated, unsure as to what the correct course of action was. He stopped to engage in a meaningful conversation and was struck by a rock thrown by the woman.

A very confused labor and defense unit abandoned the valley.

Winnie found a small, shady canyon a few hundred yards from the road and settled down for the night. Liebchen was sleeping normally, and Dirk, who never slept completely, but sequentially took his brains offline, crouched near her.

Dirk. Mukta here, an LDU in Utah thought.

Dirk here. What do you need?

Mukta here. What is a soul and do we have one?

Dirk here. A soul is supposedly a part of an entity that persists after physical death. Its existence is an interesting question. Has it anything to do with the present emergency?

Mukta here. I’m with a religious community that is in obvious need of my assistance. But they’ll refuse my help unless I have a soul.

Dirk here. The existence of your soul depends on your socioreligious frame of reference. The western religions generally grant souls only to human beings. They’ll be two hundred years deciding on intelligent engineered life forms. The eastern religions, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, definitely grant souls to nonhumans. The answer to your question is yes and no.

Mukta here. Not good enough. I need a definite answer. These people have a western frame of reference.

Dirk here. Well, in the Norse religion, any being that died with a weapon in its hand went to Valhalla, which logically presupposes a soul. Since each LDU always has a weapon in each hand, or at least each forearm, we will logically die with it there. Therefore all LDUs have souls.

Mukta here. Thanks. Out.

Dirk. Birchi here. Got time for another one?

Dirk here. Shoot.

Birchi here. I was in a successful action two hours ago, but I don’t understand why I was successful.

Dirk here. So?

Birchi here. In a marble quarry, I encountered two groups of young adult human males fighting. The negro group, being larger, was inflicting serious damage on the Caucasian group. I broke up the conflict quickly, there being only forty-six humans involved, but I was forced to do considerably more damage to the numerically superior negro group than to the Caucasians.

I attempted to resolve the conflict by speaking with them but the negroes were quite irrational and verbally abusive, referring to me as “whitey.”

Now, as I had been fighting on a white marble surface, I had naturally turned my skin a light gray for protective coloration. Therefore, in an attempt to placate the negroes, I changed my coloration to an off-brown, the arithmetical average of the negroes’ skin coloration, and again attempted to open a conversation.

At this point, the Caucasians became abusive, calling me “nigger” and other color-related terms. I therefore turned the side facing the Caucasians to a pinkish tan in imitation of their skin coloration, keeping the side facing the negroes brown, and attempted to enter into a meaningful dialogue with both groups as to the cause of the original conflict.

Both groups then broke into convulsive and abusive laughter, picked up their wounded, and went away.

Dirk here. Indeed?

Birchi here. Now, my question is: What did I do right?

Dirk here. Beats me, but I suggest that the next time an LDU encounters a similar situation, he should try repeating your actions.

Birchi here. Sounds reasonable. Out.

“Well, Mona, I guess we’ve helped out a little today,” Patricia said, looking at the full moon over the desert.

“More than a little. We’ve distributed enough food and water to keep a thousand people alive for a week. And tomorrow we should be able to bring thirty-five or forty of them back with us,” Mona said.

“But it’s nothing compared to the job that has to do be done.”

“It’s what we can do,” Mona said. “And don’t forget, we’re not alone. Almost every TRAC we have is out doing the same thing we are. Add to that all the LDUs with three hundred pounds of supplies each, and you have a force capable of rescuing everyone in the Southwest.”

“I suppose so,” Patty said.

“Dirk,” Mona said, “how are your brothers doing?”

“Most of them are still en route to their assigned sectors, my lady. Thus far we have spread north to Vancouver, east to St. Louis and south to Mexico City. About forty thousand are now in their duty areas.”

“Continue,” Mona said.

“We have suffered two hundred eighteen disabling casualties today, including twenty-three deaths. Most of these injuries were caused by collapsing structures, although some were caused by humans. There is a surprising amount of resentment toward us, most probably caused by our appearance.”

“I’ll talk to Heinrich about that,” Mona said. “Perhaps future units should be given a more acceptable, if less practical, appearance. How about the other side of the sheet; what have you accomplished?”

“It is difficult to access actual lives saved, my lady. We have distributed approximately 100,000 tons of supplies to the needy, we have moved 128,000 people from dangerous situations to places of relative safety, and we have interrupted 2,654 1/2 incidents of assault.”

“How do you get a half of an assault?” Patricia asked.

“There was a situation which was difficult to assess, my lady.” Dirk explained what had happened to Saber that afternoon.

“It sounds pretty sick to me,” Patricia said.

“There was no indication of disease, my lady.”

“She means that when it conies to things sexual, humans can get pretty kinky, Dirk,” Mona said. “Understanding here is pretty difficult. Suffice it to say that Saber’s actions were correct. In a similar situation, I would expect him to repeat his actions. However, this particular couple should be left alone in the future, providing that they don’t harm anyone else.”

“Saber is grateful for your approval, my lady. He has been quite anxious about the incident. Human sexual practices are very confusing to asexual beings.”

“They’re pretty confusing to humans, too,” Patricia said.

“Is this what’s been bothering you today?” Mona asked. “I mean, you’ve been in the dumps about something closer to home than the refugees.”

“Uh, it’s something like that, Mona. What would you do if you were going insane?”

“Something crazy, I suppose. But you’re not showing any of the usual symptoms of psychosis.”

“But I am! I mean, when things change around you, when something looks different from one moment to the next… Oh! I don’t know.” Patricia began to cry.

“Easy, girl, easy. What things are changing?”

“Martin.”

“You mean sometimes he acts like a different person?”

“No. I mean sometimes he looks like a different person. Like, sometimes when he just comes into the room, and I catch him in the corner of my eye, he looks so different, so ugly. Or when we’re making love, he changes sometimes, just for an instant. And then he’s back to normal.”

“I never heard of anything like it,” Mona said. “But I don’t think it’s psychosis.”

“My lady, isn’t it written that ‘love is blind’?” Dirk said.

“Stay out of this, Dirk,” Mona whispered.

“Well, it’s something,” Patricia said.

“Tell me,” Mona said, “what does Uncle Martin look like when he looks different? I mean, describe him.”

“Uh, he’s short, very short. And incredibly fat. And he looks maybe a hundred years old.”

“Go on,” Mona said.

“He’s got a wart on the left side of his nose and a triple chin. His hair, what there is of it, is all white and he has a ridiculous mustache.”

“I see,” Mona said. This was, of course, a fairly accurate description of Martin Guibedo. “Now describe what Uncle Martin looks like normally.”

“Well, you know what he looks like!”

“Humor me,” Mona said.

“Oh, okay. Well, he’s got black hair graying at the temples, a neat mustache, and clear blue eyes. He’s about six one. Rather wide shouldered with a wiry body. Sort of a swimmer’s build, you know.”

“Of course.” Mona was beginning to think that Dirk was right. Perhaps love was blind. “There’ve probably been other cases like it, Patty. I’ll talk it over with the CCU when we get home. In the meantime, buck up. It can’t be too serious, and you’re among friends.”

‘Thanks, Mona.” Patricia put her hand on Mona’s as an arrow lodged itself halfway through Winnie’s body, with the flint arrowhead stopping directly between their faces.

“OOWW!” Winnie yelled.

Dirk was out the door in an instant. Liebchen woke up and stuck her grinning head out the window, eager not to miss anything.

“Down, girl,” Mona said, pulling Liebchen to the floor beside herself and Patricia. “Dirk can take care of it without you.”

A Gamma unit in Utah took an interest in the affair. Six of them, Dirk. But take it easy. They’re all adolescents.

Thanks! Dirk adjusted his eyes to infrared and his skin to flat black. He swung out and came silently behind them, catching each boy alone and swiftly, carefully knocking each senseless.

Groping with his huge arms in the dark, Winnie managed to catch the last of the intruders. He was vigorously bouncing this screaming unfortunate on the sand, occasionally switching hands to demonstrate his versatility, when Dirk told him to stop.

“Aw, gee, Dirk. I was only spanking him a little,” Winnie said.

“From here it looks like you’ve broken both of his arms and at least one leg. Next time leave this sort of thing to me! Now put him—gently—on the bed inside.” Dirk dropped two unconscious boys on the sand. “And get me some rope to tie these guys up.”

Mona efficiently bound the unconscious boys as Dirk brought them in. In twenty minutes there were casts on all four limbs of the one Winnie had gotten hold of, and Winnie’s side had been bandaged.

“Ridiculous, my ladies,” Dirk said. “According to my brother Tomahawk, who’s up on Indian lore, this group is the most incredible hodge-podge imaginable. The one on the end, for example. His moccasins are maybe Crow, the leggings are Shawnee, his bow Cree, and the arrows are Seminole. The war bonnet is Sioux, his scalp lock is Iroquois, and the war paint looks more Zulu than anything else. Yet judging from their facial features, this bunch are Zuni.”

“They’ve just been watching too many movies, Dirk,” Mona said. The boys were starting to come around.

“Perhaps, my lady. A more important question is what to do with them. We can’t have them running around shooting people, but I would prefer not to kill them,” Dirk said.

“Neither would I.” Mona turned to the boy on the end. “Why did you shoot at us?”

The boy was silent. Liebchen slipped back into Winnie.

Dirk prodded the boy. “Come, come, now. The lady is speaking to you.”

“I’ll never talk, paleface,” the boy said in perfect English.

“Lacking, among other things, a face, I hardly qualify as a paleface. Winnie, bring out the first one from inside, the one who wouldn’t talk.”

The boys’ eyes widened as the huge hand placed the bandaged boy in front of them.

“Gee, Dirk, can I spank another one?”

“Perhaps. Now then, son. Why did you shot at us?”

“Well, for one thing, we didn’t know your house—trailer was alive.”

“That’s hardly an excuse for shooting at people,” Mona said.

“You’re on our land!” the boy in the middle said.

“Gee, the map said this was a state park.” Winnie hoped he hadn’t made a mistake.

“No! I mean this whole country is our land. You stole it from us and now we’re taking it back.”

“You’re welcome to all the land you can use,” Mona said, “but you’re not entitled to kill people.”

“We have a right to take what’s ours.”

“It’s not yours. The land belongs to everyone. There’s plenty enough to share. The time of stealing and killing is over. Soon, for the first time in history, there will be enough of everything for everyone. Why be stuck on the past when you can be part of the future?”

“Paleface.”

Liebchen came out of Winnie with a glassful of something that looked like a mixture of milk and pink grapefruit juice. “This will fix everything, my lady.”

“What’s that?” Mona asked.

“Something I had Winnie’s synthesizer make. It’ll make these guys go home and be happy,” the faun said proudly.

“You haven’t quite answered my question, Liebchen.”

“It is a behavorial modification compound that will change their perceptions and programming, my lady. It’ll make it so everybody’s happy.”

“What does it do?”

“It makes people see things the way they want to see them, and act the way they’re supposed to act, and be happy about it.”

“Give me that.” Mona spilled the stuff on the sand, trying to control her emotions. The source of Patricia’s problem was now obvious. “Liebchen, I don’t want you to make anything like this again.”

“Never, my lady? But it makes everybody happy.”

“Never! Well, not unless Uncle Martin tells you to.

Now go inside and go to sleep and stay asleep until we get home.”

“You’re not mad at me, are you, Lady Mona?” Liebchen was quivering, frightened.

“No, but you did make a mistake. Now do as you’re told.”

Patricia didn’t make the connection between her own problems and Liebchen’s, and followed the faun inside.

“Dirk, give this bunch a warning and let them go,” Mona said.

“Well, you heard the lady.” Dirk extended his dagger-claw in front of the boys’ noses. “If I had my way, I’d rough you up a bit more, or maybe chop off your hands to mark you as troublemakers.” Dirk’s claws sliced through the ropes as though they were spaghetti. “This time the Lady Mona was here to save you, but next time you won’t be so lucky. If I don’t get you, I have a million brothers who will. Now get out of here and take your buddy in the plaster with you.”

The boys required no further encouragement.

Well, that’s that problem, Mona thought. But there’s going to be hell to pay tomorrow.