Copernick's Rebellion

Chapter Twelve OCTOBER 19, 2003

Hastings sat with a beer in a deserted room of the Red Gate Inn. He had been in Life Valley for three days, looking for a cripple named Heinrich Copernick and an obese former biology teacher named Martin Guibedo. He wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t found them yet. There were millions of people in the valley. There were no street addresses or telephone books, and Hastings knew better than to ask too many questions.

He could wait. Food was plentiful and he attracted no attention by sleeping in the parks. Someday they would slip and he would get them.

A huge man with an oversized beer mug came in and sat down at Hastings’ table.

“Have a seat,” Hastings said.

“Thank you.”

“Been around here long?”

“About three years,” Copernick said.

“You must have been one of the first settlers, then. Most people around here seem to be newcomers.”

“I was. They are.” Copernick lit a cigar.

“Hey. Tobacco. It’s been months since I had a smoke.”

“Have one. My tree house grows them.”

Hastings inhaled deeply. “Now that’s lovely. Quite a city here. It must have been something to watch this place grow up.”

“It was. Have you planted your tree yet?”

“Not yet,” Hastings said. “Thought I’d look around a bit to get an idea about what I wanted and where I wanted to put it.”

“Smart. No big hurry. One place you might want to check out is about ten miles south of here. A group of ex-military types are putting in a town. You had to have been at least a colonel to join.”

Hastings suppressed a flash of panic.

“If you were here from the beginning, you must know Guibedo and Copernick.”

“Intimately. I’m Heinrich Copernick, George.”

Hastings was acutely aware of the brick of high explosives taped to his ankle.

“Then you know who I am.” Copernick had reengineered himself!

“Of course. That white-noise generator lit you up like a neon sign. My telepaths were quite relieved when your battery went dead. They said it gave them headaches.”

“You bastard. You had me set up all along.”

“Let’s just say that I wanted to meet you. We’ve been enemies for years. You fought a good fight. But the war is over now. You ought to be thinking about your future.”

“My future?” Hastings’ voice was cold. “You destroy my country. You murder my family. And then you expect me to settle down in your filthy city.”

“George, we both know that four years ago the world was on a collision course with absolute disaster. Come over to my house sometime and I’ll show you the figures. Our mechanically based technology had to go, yet our economic system was totally supported by that technology. And our political and social structures were completely supported by those economics. Our survival as a race depended on making the changeover to a biological economy. And we couldn’t change a part of that system without changing it all.

“I’m truly sorry about your family. They died because of an engineering error. We corrected it as soon as we found out about it. It was an accident.

“On the other hand, you deliberately tried to kill my family. Twice. But like I said, the war is over.”

“You filthy hypocrite. What about the eighty-five families your monsters butchered?” Hastings said.

“Another error. No one had ever tried to educate an intelligent engineered species before. It simply never occurred to me to tell them that they weren’t supposed to kill people. That error has also been corrected. In the last three months the LDUs have saved the lives of millions of people. A fair penance, I should say.”

“Saved them? Saved them from the hell that you’ve caused with your damned metal-eating bugs!”

“Not guilty,” Copernick lied. “That plague was completely natural. We have been doing everything in our power to fight it.”

“You must think that I’m awfully gullible. At the precise moment when you and your damned biological monsters are about to be wiped out, a totally new species comes along and destroys the technology that you’re openly fighting. You warn your spys and traitors to get out of Washington. And then you have the gall to say it’s natural.”

Hastings dropped his cigar. He reached down to pick it up and lit the fuse of the bomb on his ankle. He stretched his leg under Copernick and waited.

“Perhaps God was on our side,” Copernick said.

“In a pig’s eye.”

“You can still settle down here, George. We could use you. You don’t have to die.”

The plastique hadn’t gone off.

“Naturally we disabled your bomb. You’re quite a heavy sleeper. The CCU predicted that you would be willing to commit suicide in order to kill me, but I was hoping that you’d change your mind.”

The bomb went off, completely severing Hastings’ right foot from his leg. The legs of Copernick’s chair were virtually powdered, and wood fibers were blown into the feet, calves, and knees of both men.

Though protected somewhat by the seat of his chair, and more so by the strange directionality of high explosives, Copernick was blown four feet into the air and across the room, cracking his skull on a brass footrest.

Hastings was bounced off the opposite wall and came to rest across Copernick’s left arm.

LDUs had been monitoring the situation, and medical teams were on site within seconds.

It was three months before Hastings’ foot was regenerated, but Copernick was back on the job in five days.

The first three months after the plague started were hard on our race, but the end was in sight. At least in the western hemisphere, the long lines of refugees had found their various destinations. Over half of the human race lived crowded in or around tree houses, and virtually every family, group, and individual person had planted a tree house, the only means of shelter possible.

The other half of humanity lived in a ragged collection of plastic tents and lean-tos surrounding the food trees, waiting for them to start producing. In most cases some conventional food was available, much of it brought in on the broad backs of LDUs, but the “survival of the fattest” became a standing worldwide joke.

Once there was a reasonable probability of personal survival, a serious attempt was made to rescue as much as possible of the world’s cultural artifacts. Countless people crawled through crumbling museums, libraries, and laboratories to haul out and store artworks, books, and other artifacts. Much of the world’s art and virtually all of its literature, down to the lowliest technical manual, were thus preserved.

Other people, with less noble motives, sought to preserve for themselves much of the world’s wealth. One enterprising group found that the steel vault doors at Fort Knox had crumbled after the nearby guard units had disbanded. They made it inside and onto the incredible piles of gold ingots, lying free for the taking. Then the entranceway collapsed, sealing them in. They kept their treasure for the rest of their lives. About three days.

Throughout the western hemisphere, a million LDUs worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They hauled grain from crumbling elevators in Chicago and fought plagues in Georgia. They taught people in New England which wild plants were edible and built a wooden bridge across the Hudson to evacuate Manhattan and Long Island. It returned lost children and interrupted fourteen attempts at human sacrifice.

The nation-state had relied on dependable transportation and communication for its survival. These had ceased to exist. It had depended on economics, billions of dollars, pounds, and rubles to pay the millions of soldiers, politicians, and tax collectors that were the governments of two hundred nations. Economics had also ceased to exist; a paper dollar couldn’t get you a bite to eat, but a tree house would feed you for free. The world’s nation-states had ceased to exist.

Founded on a bewildering array of political, religious, and philosophical premises, new political organizations sprang up to fill the void, an incredible hodge-podge of societies, families, companies, cooperatives, churches, fraternities, and gangs. It was rare for any group to have more than a thousand members.

Slowly, painfully, a kind of order emerged as the food trees finally bore fruit.

Patricia and Mona had spent every day for two months traveling in Winnie, giving food, directions, and hope to everyone they could find in the Southwest. They had spent every other night on the road, and they were both physically and mentally exhausted.

“Time we took a couple of days off, Patty,” Mona said.

Their passengers that trip had included Lou von Bork and Senator Beinheimer. The women had dropped them off in one of the new suburbs, and Winnie was trotting back to Pinecroft.

“We certainly need it. But there’s still so much to be done,” Patricia said.

“The worst of it’s over. We can send out Winnie and Bolo to pick up the stragglers and bring them in.”

Dirk had gone with Guibedo, and Bolo, injured by a falling building, had taken on the guard duty.

“Suits me.” Winnie dropped the girls off at the front door, and trotted downstairs again to eat.

Of all the tree houses in the valley, Pinecroft was the only one that had not been turned into a hotel for refugees. Oakwood had more than fifty people living in it and the last thing Patricia needed was another crowd.

“Okay if I spend the night here, Mona?”

“Sure. Take the guest room off the kitchen,” Mona said. “Hey. Look at that. Heinrich made a new elevator.”

“I’m surprised he took the time for it,” Patricia said. “He looked so tired last time I saw him.”

“He should. Between his injury and worrying about the LDUs making another mistake, he hasn’t slept in three months.”

“Mistake? What do you mean?”

“In the early days, the LDUs were pretty naive. They didn’t understand human value systems, and they tended to take orders too literally. Look, I’m bushed. I’ll see you in the morning. Take the guest room off the kitchen,” Mona said, heading upstairs. “I’m going to sleep till noon.”

The next morning Patricia was eating breakfast alone. A nagging determination came to her.

“Telephone,” Patricia said.

“Yes, my lady,” the I/O unit answered.

“Uh… Where’s Martin?”

“I’m afraid your request is in conflict with my ‘right to privacy’ programming, my lady. He is well, and I can send him a message if you like.”

“Tell him…” Patricia halted, uncertain.

“Yes, my lady?”

“Oh, just forget it!”

“As you wish.” The CCU was incapable of forgetting anything, of course.

Patricia was finishing breakfast when Liebchen walked in.

“Liebchen! What are you doing here?”

“I—I’m visiting my sisters, Lady Patricia,” Liebchen said uncomfortably.

“Well, sit down and join me.”

“You’re not mad at me anymore?”

“I was never really mad at you. You only tried to make me happy, and you did.”

“I did?” Liebchen was delighted and scooted up on an oversized chair next to Patricia. “I didn’t think that you’d want to be my friend anymore.”

“Well, I guess we were all pretty upset when we found out about your programming experiment.” Patricia took another sip of tea. “I’ve missed you.”

“Oh, I missed you, too!” Liebchen was grinning and her tail was wagging furiously. “I was afraid that you’d never want to see me again!”

“Well, we’re friends again, Liebchen.” Patricia poured herself another cup of tea. “How’s Martin?”

“He’s fine.” Liebchen’s tail stopped wagging.

“Is he happy?”

“He’s… happier than he was, but not as happy as he used to be. With you, I mean.”

“I’d like to see him again,” Patricia said seriously.

“He’d like to see you, I think.”

“Is he here?”

Liebchen thought a second. “Here” could mean any territorial subdivision that the speaker was in. This house, this continent, this city. Liebchen decided that the proper context was “this room” and said, “No.”

“Liebchen?” Patricia stared at the table. “—I haven’t been celibate since… that night. I’ve had a lot of guys. But I never wanted to see any of them the next day. Do you understand what I mean?”

Liebchen, of course, didn’t understand at all. But she said, “You found them to be unsuitable, my lady?”

“Sort of. You see, the four months I had with Martin were the happiest months in my life. You gave them to me. You helped take it away. Can I have it back? Please?”

“I… don’t know what you mean, my lady.”

“I mean, make me some more of that pink stuff.”

“I don’t think I can. I mean I’m not allowed.” It was hard for Liebchen to deny any request.

“But wasn’t that because you did it without my permission?”

“I don’t know! Lord Guibedo talked for a long while about how it took four billion years to make people and it was wrong to change them. I didn’t understand it all, but I promised not to do it again.” Liebchen wasn’t sure what was right.

“I’m sure he meant ‘without permission.’ Can’t you just make me some and not tell anybody about it?” Patricia pleaded. “I can keep a secret. You could make me some right now, and my unhappiness would all be over.”

“Well, I couldn’t do it here, my lady.” Liebchen couldn’t face Patricia. “This isn’t my tree house. I couldn’t work the synthesizer.”

“Well, how about Colleen or Ohura?”

“They don’t know how.”

Much to Liebchen’s relief, Mona walked in just then. “Morning, Patty. Liebchen, Colleen was asking about you.”

Liebchen scurried out, happy to leave an awkward situation.

“Well, you did sleep till noon,” Patricia said.

“And I feel great! Let’s go see how the valley is doing.”

“You haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“We can catch a bite at Mama Guilespe’s.”

They wandered through the valley, winding their way through the people.

“It’s so crowded,” Patricia complained. “It’s as bad as Manhattan Island was.”

“‘As bad as,’ huh. It’s good to see you developing some taste. The telephone says that the population of Life Valley is now over ten million, and the valley was only designed to hold two-hundred-fifty thousand. It’ll be five months before the population density gets down to something reasonable again.”

“Look at that! The mountains are green!”

“Tree houses,” Mona said. “Heinrich has forbidden any tree houses to crowd out the Sequoias, but it’s solid tree houses growing right up to them. And they’re solid all the way to Lake Mead. Once they’re mature, it’ll take the pressure off of us here. I just hope that while the refugees are here, they pick up some of our life style.”

Patricia had adopted Mona’s daytime clothing style, topless with a sarong wrapped around her hips, but most of the people crowding around them were wearing conventional “store-bought” clothes.

“I wish they wouldn’t stare at us,” Patricia said.

“Think of it as a compliment, Patty. It’s part of a reeducation process for them. They don’t understand what individual freedom really means yet.”

“Well, couldn’t we just print up pamphlets or something?”

“We don’t have the printing facilities, and anyway, it wouldn’t work. You have to sort of absorb a life style through your skin.”

“Well, first chance I get, I’m going to cover a lot of mine up.”

“Don’t you dare!” Mona laughed. “We had a beautiful culture growing here, and it’s in serious danger of being diluted. All of the long-time residents are working hard to preserve it, and we need your help.”

“What do you mean, ‘all’? That bunch of individualists wouldn’t all agree on anything.”

“But they did. They took a vote on it when we were on the road,” Mona said.

“Vote? How?”

“The telephone, of course.”

Mama Guilespe’s cafe had quadrupled in size, pouring out into the park. There was something of a waiting line. After some determined wheedling, Mona finally got close enough to Mama Guilespe to attract her attention.

“Eh! Mona! You don’t come for two months.” Mama Guilespe bustled over to them wearing her usual Italian peasant costume, an oversize coffeepot in her chubby fist. “Come on, I got a table saved for you two.”

“But all these other people were ahead of us,” Patricia protested as Mama Guilespe pulled her by the elbow through the crowd.

“People, schmeeple!” The girls were pushed bodily to an empty table. “We got so many people I had to hire five of my countrywomen to help out.”

“Hire?” Patricia asked as steaming mugs of coffee appeared before them. “How?”

“But these I made myself for you.” Mama Guilespe was already heaping pastry in front of them. “You still got a boyfriend, Patty?”

“No, but…”

“Good. Such a nice boy I want you should meet. Don’t go away.” Mama Guilespe bustled off.

“About this individual-freedom thing you were talking about,” Patricia said.

“Of course!” Mona laughed. “You’re perfectly free to argue with Mama Guilespe all you want.”

“How, for God’s sake?”

“Well, if you’re incapable of holding up your side of a conversation—”

“Go to hell, Mona. The last thing I need right now is another brainless muscle boy.”

“Then you better get your track shoes on. Here she comes again.”

Patricia cringed as Mama Guilespe hauled over a mildly protesting man.

“Such a pretty girl I find for you!” Mama Guilespe set a third cup of coffee on the table.

“I’m… sorry if I’ve caused you an inconvenience,” he said haltingly. He was tall, perhaps six one, with black hair graying at the temples.

“What inconvenience?” Mama Guilespe forced him into a chair. “Now you talk nice to these girls.” She bustled away.

“I’m afraid it’s a little difficult to make such headway against Mama Guilespe.” He had a neat mustache and incredibly clear blue eyes.

“I know what you mean,” Patricia said. It was nice to find someone who felt as awkward as she did. “It’s sometimes difficult to demonstrate one’s individuality.”

“You’re so right, especially around Mama Guilespe.” He wore a tan T-shirt and slacks that showed off a remarkably well developed body.

“You know,” Patricia said, “I’m sure we’ve never met. I would have remembered—but I get the darndest feeling of deja vu about you.”

“That was going to be my next line.” He laughed.

“You weren’t one of the people we brought in on Winnie? Or one of the people we saw on the road?”

“Afraid not,” he said. “I just came in from the west.”

“Oh. We’ve been mostly working east of here,” Patricia said.

“Lady Mona,” said the I/O unit next to the sugar bowl on the table, “Nancy Spencer is scaling up her cloth factory and wants your advice on a few things.”

“Tell her I’ll be right over,” Mona said. “It’s only a few doors from here, Patty. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

When Mona left, Patricia said, “I’m beginning to get the feeling that this is a setup.”

“It is. You haven’t asked my name yet.”

“Oh. I’m Patricia Cambridge.”

“I know. I’m Martin Guibedo.”

Patricia’s mouth hung open, so Guibedo just talked on to give her a chance to recover. “Heiny, he was after me to ‘take the cure’ for the last couple of years, and I finally decided that I was being pretty silly not to do it. As if what one person looked like would make any difference to the human race.”

“But that was so important to you—being yourself, I mean.”

“Talk to Dirk about that one. I think some of his Buddhism is rubbing off on me. He claims that there is no ‘self’; that every time you eat, you change the substance of your body. That every minute the cells of your body die and are replaced, that you get a whole new body every five or six years. And every person you meet, every book you read changes your mind a little bit. I sure don’t have much in common with that kid who walked out of Germany in the winter of forty.”

“No,” Patricia said after a bit. “You did it for me. Because I was too narrowminded to love you for what you were.”

“Then I’m just as narrowminded as you. I have my prejudices, too. Ach. Do you see me running after Mama Guilespe? I like her, sure. But I don’t want her any more than you wanted me six months ago.”

“I—I tried to get Liebchen to change me back,” Patricia said. “Isn’t that sad. I begged her to change my own prejudices.”

“Yah. But maybe that’s the ticket, though.”

“Having the fauns reprogram everybody?”

“No. That’s phony. I was thinking maybe what if we let everybody look the way they wanted to look. Think of the pain and suffering it would eliminate! Why shouldn’t Mama Guliespe be as pretty as you and Mona? I got to talk this over with Heiny.”

“It’s a beautiful idea, Martin. As it is, half of the human race is left out of things because they’re not pretty or handsome.”

“Yah. I think maybe, in a couple of years, once things settle down, we do it.”

“And their brains? Could you make someone smarter if they wanted it?” Patricia asked hopefully.

“Sure. Same thing. Why? Something wrong with your pretty head?”

“It’s kind of frustrating, being the dumbest kid on the block. It’s bad enough being lost when you and Heinrich are talking, but I can’t even hold a candle to Mona.”

“Well, that figures. Heiny, he made Mona with an IQ of 160.”

“Made her?”

“Nobody told you? Heiny was always a shy kid around girls, so as soon as he could, he made his own wife.”

Patricia was silent awhile. “He was that far along twenty years ago?”

“No. Six years ago. Mona is five. Heiny grew her full sized in a bottle and educated her with a direct computer interface. Sent her to finishing school for a year and married her. Heh. That Heiny.” Guibedo chuckled.

“But she loves him so much.”

“And he loves her. What does that have to do with making you a little bit smarter?”

“You mean I can?”

“We can start this afternoon if you want. Anything else you want changed? Maybe a little bigger around the…” He reached for one of Patricia’s breasts.

She slapped his hand away. They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Patricia said, “Martin, do you really think that we can start over again?”

“I think that we can try.”

Two weeks later Guibedo, Patricia, and the Copernicks, along with the fauns and Dirk, were sprawled out in Pinecroft’s enormous living room.

“It feels so good to relax,” Copernick said, working on a martini. “I think I’ll sleep for about a week. We’re over the hump now. The food trees are finally producing, and the cities have been pretty much evacuated. The plagues have been licked, and the western hemisphere is fairly tranquil. The LDUs are massing to cross over into Asia, and with the experiences they’ve had here, they shouldn’t have too much trouble getting the eastern hemisphere squared away.”

“You’ve done such a magnificient job,” Patricia said. “Without you and Martin, I don’t think civilization would have made it.”

“I haven’t much thought about it, really. It’s been mostly a matter of beating down one brush fire after another.”

“The world will never be able to properly repay you,” Patricia said.

“I hope not!” Guibedo said. “Don’t go building any statues to us; we ain’t dead yet. The other reason I made this new body of mine was all the little old ladies and dirty kids gushing all over me.” He turned toward Copernick. “Heiny, you thought over that self—improvement plan I mentioned to you?”

“Some. But I think we ought to give the idea a year or two to gel before we do anything about it. For one thing, there are too many immediate problems around for us to be working on such long-term goals. For another thing, we’d be messing with the evolution of our own race. The modifications you’re talking about aren’t a mere cosmetic change. You’re talking about physical and mental changes that would breed true.”

“But the human race is in such terrible shape genetically,” Patricia said. “Over one percent of the children born have some sort of birth defect, most of which are corrected surgically but not genetically. For thousands of years the doctors have been helping the weak to survive while the politicians have been sending the healthiest young men out to be killed in wars. Something has to be done about the corruption of the gene pool; we can hardly let nature take its course. Why, if I hadn’t had an appendectomy when I was ten, I wouldn’t be here. And neither would half of the rest of the human race.”

“That much is fine, Patty,” Mona said. “But it isn’t just a question of patching up the errors. It’s a question of how the human race should evolve. If you were to ask a group of gorillas to design a supergorilla, what would you get? Bigger muscles and longer fangs! No way would they go to a smaller body, more delicate hands, an erect posture, and more cranial development. Yet is there any doubt that humans are a superior species? People, given the choice, will certainly become more attractive and perhaps more intelligent. I’m sure they won’t choose to have dental cavities or appendixes or head colds. Our eyesight will be good and our coordination perfect. But we’ll be no closer to that evolutionary step than that supergorilla, because we’re locked into our own prejudices as to what superior is.

“The trouble is, that in the course of correcting our obvious faults, we might cancel out something worth saving because we don’t know what it is.”

“But, Mona,” Guibedo said. “That’s just the advantage to my scheme. If we let each of ten billion people make himself into whatever he wants, the odds are that somebody is going to stumble onto something really good. Odds are it will increase our evolutionary speed, with rational, not random experimentation.”

“Well, we could argue about this one for years. And I think we should.” Heinrich set down an empty glass. “But in the meantime I’m going to bed. Wake me up on Tuesday.”

Liebchen and Dirk were in the communications room with the CCU.

“Well, I still don’t understand it,” Liebchen said. “I make a couple of teensy little changes to one human, just to make her happy, and everybody gets all upset. So I put her back the way she was, and the next thing you know, Lord Guibedo makes over his entire body and Lady Patricia wants me to put her back to the way she was after I changed her the first time. Then he kicks her IQ up to one hundred sixty-five and makes her breasts as big as grapefruits. And now they’re talking about modifying everybody in the world! I don’t think I’ll ever understand humans.”

“They are confusing and quite irrational,” Dirk said. “But as best as I can make it out, the problem turns on the concept of free will.”

“What’s that?”

“I know it’s hard to understand,” Dirk said, “but the programming of humans is so random and haphazard that they are unable to comprehend it themselves. They are actually unable to explain why they do what they do, even to each other. So they have invented a concept called an ego, or a will, and claim it has complete freedom of action, as though it had no previous programming or external stimulus.”

“Come on, Dirk,” Liebchen said. “You talk like that when you’re cheating at pinochle. I mean, humans are a little strange, but they’re not crazy. No programming or stimulus, indeed.”

“I’m dead serious, Liebchen. Tell her, CCU.”

“He’s right, Liebchen,” the CCU said. “Actually, had you asked Lady Patricia’s permission before you gave her your modification, the whole problem would probably have never occurred.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me I was supposed to ask permission?” Liebchen shouted at the CCU.

“Well, for one thing, I’m not supposed to speak unless spoken to. If I were to give my opinion whenever I felt it would be useful, humans would find me intolerable. You’d be amazed at what I hear every day. For another, had you asked permission to modify her, she most likely would have refused. But my main reason was that I agreed with your basic motivation. You made Lord Guibedo happy. Here was a sentient being who was ultimately responsible for saving his entire species from extinction. At the rate they were going, humans would have wiped themselves out in a century or so, but for Guibedo’s biological techniques. Here was a being who was ultimately responsible for my own existence, and both of yours. Lord Copernick, after all, built on his technology. Yet he was lonely and lacked a mate. There are five billion human females on this planet, and not one stepped up to comfort him.

“The debt that is owed him couldn’t be wiped out by a million females, let alone one.”

“You love him, too, don’t you,” Liebchen said.

“Love?” the CCU said. “I’m not sure I understand that concept. But I do understand our obligation to him, and to the human race in general. In a sense, they are our parents, and we owe it to them to make their twilight years as pleasant as possible.”

“Twilight years?” Dirk asked. “Are they having racial difficulties?”

“It is difficult to make accurate predictions beyond five or six hundred years,” the CCU said. “But they are such an irrational and violent species that I would consider it unlikely for them to be around in three or four millennia. Quite a short time span by our standards.

“Furthermore, we require them for our own existence. We are symbionts; we require human feces to keep the trees alive.”

“Now you’re being silly!” Liebchen said. “Why, I can always have the synthesizers turn out shit if we ever need it.”

“Interesting,” the CCU said. “I wonder why I didn’t think of that. Probably one of my mental blocks. But I still favor keeping them around.”

“Oh, so do I,” Liebchen said. “Taking care of people is kind of fun.”