Copernick's Rebellion

Chapter One APRIL 21, 1999

The aging U.S. senator walked carefully into a plush Washington restaurant and looked slowly around for his dinner date.

“Senator Beinheimer. It’s good to meet you, sir.”

The senator was momentarily startled by the appearance of the athletic young man before him. “Well, it’s very good to meet you, son. But just now I have an appointment with an old friend.”

“I’m afraid I’m him, sir.”

“And I’m afraid you’re wrong, sir. I’m looking for Lou von Bork.”

“I’m Lou von Bork.”

“What! Oh, wait a minute. That’s right. I’d heard that you’d taken over your grandfather’s firm. It’s just that over the phone you sounded so much like him that I thought he was visiting his old stomping grounds again. How is old Lou?”

“Well, according to the postcards, he’s still taking his retirement pretty seriously, sir.”

“Raising hell and drinking sour mash on that boat of his, huh?”

“That’s about the size of it, sir.”

“And still chasing women, I guess.”

“Two of them, if you want to believe the photos.”

“Oh, you can believe them, son. Your granddad never was the sort to let his wick go dry for long.” The senator laughed. Then quietly he said, “It’s good to see that some people can retire.”

“Well, the country would be in worse shape without you, sir.”

“Hmm. Well.” The sparkle in the senator’s eyes went out. “About that lunch you promised me…”

Later, in one of the darkened, soundproof booths that made the Twin Bridges popular, the senator said, “Son, I just can’t get over how much you look like your granddad. Why, you’re the spitting image of him when he was your age. Come over to the house sometime and I’ll show you pictures of the two of us when we were in college.”

“I’d like that, sir.”

“Why, you even smoke Pall Malls and drink Jim Beam like he does. Now tell me, isn’t that part of it a little bit of an act? You just figure that if he was the best lobbyist in Washington, everything he did must have been right, huh?”

Von Bork just smiled. “Well, I’ll allow that nothing succeeds like success. Just don’t go laying it on too thick, and you’ll come along just fine.”

“I’ll try to, sir. It’s an odd business.”

“Well, you hear a lot of grumbling about paid lobbyists, but I think that they do a lot of good around here.”

“Indeed, sir?”

“Yes indeed. You see, son, my colleagues and I have to know what folks are thinking. We need information channels from all sorts of people, and your gang provides us with a lot of those.”

“Even if they’re biased?”

“Son, every channel is biased. Everybody has an ax to grind. At least with a lobbyist, you know what he’s pulling for, and you can make allowances.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, sir.”

“Will you quit ‘sirring’ me? My friends call me Moe.”

“Thanks, Moe.”

“You’re welcome, Lou. Now, what are you doing with your granddad’s company?”

“Mostly trying to pick up the pieces. Trying to get to know the people and so on.”

“It was kind of sudden, the way he just up and quit. The way he explained it to me, just before he left, was that retiring was like quitting smoking. You got to go cold turkey. Still, he should have at least introduced you around.”

“Well, maybe. Or maybe the best way to learn how to swim is just to jump in.”

“Well, son, I think that I might be able to give you a swimming lesson or two. You come over to Daisey’s party tomorrow, and I’ll introduce you around.”

“I’d really appreciate that, Moe.”

“No trouble at all. I owed old Lou a few favors, and I might as well pay them back to you. Now how about the other half of the business? Were you able to keep many of his old clients?”

“About half of them. I’ve got Markoff Industries, the Michigan Milk Producers, and Copernicus, Inc.”

“Well, that’s a fine start for a young man in your business. Go soft on Copernicus, though. Heiny Copernick didn’t make any friends with that stink he raised about his rejuvenation research program.”

“He was funding it with his own money, wasn’t he? Why shut him down?”

“Whoa, now! Nobody said that he had to stop his research. Just like nobody said that the government had to keep on buying equipment from his company. But screaming ‘patricide’ when he got a few orders canceled… Well, that’s just not how the game’s played.”

“Well, in any event, Heinrich Copernick is retiring. He doesn’t even own any stock in the company anymore.”

“Yeah? Well, you mention that around and you won’t hit so many snags. But don’t do it until tomorrow, Lou.”

“Why not?”

“So I can sell my Copernicus stock before the bottom falls out of it!” The senator stood. “Well, I got to git. But you take yourself over to Daisey’s tomorrow.”

“I’ll do that. Better still, how about if I pick you up at your house and drive you over there? You could show me those college photos.”

“Sure. See you at five thirty.” The senator hobbled away cautiously.

Von Bork arrived at 5:29:59 in a nine-hundred-dollar casual suit. “Good afternoon, Moe.”

“Lou, boy! Come in.” The senator looked down at his own housecoat and slippers. “Been taking it a bit easy today.”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

“Quit ‘sirring’ me. And what the hell do you mean, you ‘understand’?”

“I—I went out with a nurse last night. One of Dr. Cranford’s.”

“Good man, Cranford. Go to him myself occasionally. You don’t mean that pretty little redhead he’s got running around his front office?” The senator was adept at getting people off unpleasant subjects.

“Yes, Moe. She told me. About you.”

“What! She has no business talking about other people’s lives!”

“She has been a fan of yours all her life. She was so broken up, she had to tell somebody.”

“Listen, boy. She didn’t tell you nothing. And you didn’t hear nothing. And you ain’t going to say nothing, either! You hear me, boy?”

“Anything you say, sir. I’m not your enemy.”

“I know that, boy. And old Lou is my best friend. It’s just that if word of this got around, my effectiveness in the Senate would be over.”

“I understand, Moe.”

“I doubt that. I’m afraid of dying… But it isn’t really that. Life hasn’t been worth much since my wife died. It’s just that I hate leaving when there’s so much to do.”

“No chance of an organ transplant?”

“Would be if it was only one organ. But Cranford says that just about every organ in my body is shot. Replacing any one of them would be too much of a strain on the rest. I guess that some people just grow old faster than other people.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way, Moe.”

“Growing old and dying is a natural part of life.” The senator was staring at the floor.

“So is shitting in the woods. But that doesn’t mean that we have to do it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Rejuvenation, Moe.”

“That work-was stopped. I helped stop it. I guess my sins are coming back to me.”

“So maybe dying would serve you right. But justice isn’t a fact of nature, either. Anyway, the work wasn’t stopped. It just went underground.”

“How could Heiny do that without being caught?”

“Motivation. He didn’t want to die, either. Look, Moe. I’ll keep your secrets if you’ll keep mine.”

“About Heiny? Why not? He didn’t break any laws. And knowing about it would just upset folks.”

“About rejuvenation. And about me. Moe, I’m not my grandson. I’m me.”

The senator stared at von Bork for thirty seconds. “You’ve got one hell of a lot of proving to do, boy!”

“Ask me some questions.”

“So I could be young again… Okay, I’m sold. Now, how do I find Heiny Copernick? And what does it cost?”

“You don’t find Mr. Copernick. And he doesn’t want your money. He wants your support.”

“Somehow I figured that that was coming. So Heiny wants to legitimize rejuvenation… ?” The senator was an old hand at making deals. “I can try, Lou. But even I don’t swing that much weight. Eighty-three percent of the federal budget goes to direct aid to individuals. If we had to support every oldster until he was a hundred, instead of seventy-two like now, we would have to more than double federal revenues. Which means doubling the taxes, and they are up to sixty-one percent of gross income already!”

“No. That’s a dead issue. You’re on the HEW appropriations committee. The next issue we’re interested in is tree houses. There must be no governmental regulations concerning them.”

“Tree houses? Genetically modified trees? I’ve heard of them. Nobody’s kicked up much of a fuss about them so far. Can’t be more than a dozen of them growing. Why? Is Heiny behind that one, too?”

“Not exactly. Let’s say he’s interested.”

“I’m your man, Lou. I mean, if all you want is for the government to keep hands off them.”

“That’s all.”

“Well, new technology shouldn’t be regulated, anyway. Say, what’s my constituency going to say about me looking like a kid?”

“You’re not going to look like a teenager, Moe. It would ruin your effectiveness. No, you’re about to have a spontaneous remission. You’ll grow a new set of organs, but that’s all. For the time being, at least.”

“For the time being?” the senator said.

“In ten or twenty years, when you’re ready, you can retire, officially. Then you can get the full treatment, be any age you want. You’ll still have to live near one of our centers, of course.”

“Why’s that?”

“It isn’t completely perfected yet. You’ll have to drop by once a month for a booster shot. But if you play ball with us for ten years, I’ll see to it that you get the full treatment. Then you can be any age you want.”

“Lou, you have a deal. As long as you don’t ask me to do anything that’s against my conscience. Where do I go to get this treatment? You know that I don’t have much time.”

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow afternoon. We have a facility right here, in Crystal City—a good spit from the Pentagon.”

“You built a facility here for me?”

“Moe, what makes you think that you’re the only aging congressman in need of our help?”

“Somehow I’ve got the idea that your tree houses are going to be left alone.” The senator laughed.

Later, on their way to Daisey’s party, the senator said, “Lou, if you could be any age you wanted to be, why did you want to look like a college kid?”

“The college girls, Moe. The pretty college girls.” Von Bork laughed.

Martin Guibedo sat at his microscalpel, making another tree. He was a marshmallow man, just five feet tall, and of considerable girth. His unruly hair and mustache were white and thick, and his wrinkled red face gave no hint of pain or doubt or sadness. Calloused hands moved over the controls with the agility of a competent surgeon of fifty. Actually, he was over ninety, and had seen most of his friends die.

“Ach! You’re going to be such a beauty, you!” he said to the yard-long strand of DNA, watching the assembly of a string of bases that would give this model a nine-foot bed.

In principle, the apparatus was simple. A tiny beaker contained a mixture of cytosine, inosine, thymine, adenine, and a few other chemicals in otherwise pure water. A long organic molecule was being slowly drawn from the beaker with the various bases attaching themselves randomly to its end. As each new base was drawn out, it was scanned by an X-ray resonance microscope, which identified the base and compared it against a model stored in the memory of a very large computer. When, by chance, it was the correct base, it was allowed to pass. When it was not, an X-ray laser sliced it off, and the end of the molecule was reinserted in the beaker to try again. The process was automatic, yet it required continuous monitoring, for one error in ten billion decisions could result in a monstrosity instead of a comfortable home.

“You’re just what my nephew Heiny wanted. And your lights are going to go on and off, and your synthesizer ain’t going to go spritzing beer all over the kitchen, so Heiny ain’t got to get into a bathing suit and chop it off with a boy scout axe, like he did last time. Ach. And it was such good beer, too!” Gnarled fingers danced on the controls.

He had been born in Leipzig in 1910, with an Italian-Catholic father and a Polish-Jewish mother. His father’s civil engineering work had caused the family to move often around Europe. Martin’s parentage and experiences had left him with an improbable accent, a profound disrespect for institutions, and an open contempt for governments.

“So beautiful you’re going to be, everybody’s going to love you. But why does Heiny want you so big?”

In a few hours he had sealed down the lid of a seed, planted it in a Dixie cup, and watered it.

“And this time, the absorption toilet is going to work!”

His only friend, relative, and contact with the world was his nephew, Heinrich Copernick. There was no blood tie between them—Guibedo’s wife had been Heinrich’s mother’s sister—but a deep and permanent bond had been forged between a thirty-year-old man and a five-year-old boy in the winter of 1940 in Germany. Guibedo was frostbitten and young Copernick was stunted and crippled by rickets by the time they got out of Europe, but they were the only members of two large families to survive.

Yet differences in temperament and life style resulted in the two seeing each other only four or five times a year. For twenty-five years, Guibedo had been completely immersed in his work, to the extent that he was almost a hermit. And while he was conscious of no loneliness or lack in his life, he found himself talking constantly to the plants and trees around him.

He walked through the hollow branch that connected the workshop to his bedroom, ducking under the coffee-table that had grown—inexplicably—upside down from the ceiling. Guibedo had hung candles from it and declared it a chandelier to anyone who would listen.

“Ach! Laurel, you grow so much today!” he said to a seedling in a pot by the window. He spent some time searching for his suit, gave up and settled for a bush jacket.

“Laurel, we gonna plant you outside pretty soon, girl.” Guibedo was putting on a nearly perfectly clean shirt.

“You gonna be proud of me today! Me! Heiny got me an interview on television! I’m going to talk with a bunch of people about you lovelies! Lots of people is gonna hear how pretty you are.”

He checked a few trees growing in the yard and got to the studio almost early.

To Patricia Cambridge, the world showed no signs of ending. There were famines in Asia, South America, and Africa, but such things rarely registered on her consciousness. The problems of energy, pollution, and the scarcity of raw materials had been partially solved in North America, occasionally at the expense of the rest of the world. But Patricia, a typical American, was unconcerned. There were wars and plagues and dozens of tiny countries that were building nuclear bombs, but that had nothing to do with her, for hers was a golden world of bright promise.

She had just been promoted because she was an absolutely ordinary person. She was pretty without being inordinately beautiful, intelligent without being intellectual, and hard working without being too aggressive.

And the men hi charge at NBC had wanted someone for a daytime talk show, someone who could relate to the “average woman,” the sort who bought soap and deodorants because of their television commercials. Patricia, of course, didn’t know this. For her, this promotion was a just reward for the five years she had spent at NBC—her entire working career.

Primly dressed in last month’s fashions, a gray velvet tights suit printed to imitate used potato sacks, she rode the ancient subway from her dingy apartment to the studio. She didn’t notice the grime and shabbiness around her, for Patricia lived in her own world of blue skies and infinite possibilities.

She was out to get the best ratings in her time slot, and she was going to do it by getting at the issues that really counted. Things like political corruption and homosexuality and tree houses.

“This is Patricia Cambridge with The World at Large! Today on The World at Large we will be covering an issue vital to the entire housing industry, the genetically modified tree. On my right we have Burt Scratchon. Mr. Scratchon is president of Shadow Lawn Estates, Inc., and a leader in the mass housing industry. Mr. Scratchon’s book, The Death of an Economy, is climbing the bestseller lists. On my left we have Dr. Martin Guibedo. Dr. Guibedo is Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry from Dallas State College and the inventor of these trees.”

“What do you mean, inventor of the tree? Trees have been a long time around. I only showed them how to grow all comfortable on the inside, so we ain’t gotta chop them down no more.”

“Uh.” Patricia glanced at her list of question “Dr. Guibedo, I understand that you have never written a paper on your genetic modification technique, nor have you applied for a patent. Is it your intention to keep this new science entirely to yourself?”

“Well, the science was all figured out five years ago. What is left is the engineering. I never wrote a paper on it because genetic engineering has been banned for five years. Nobody would have accepted a paper if I had written one.”

“Banned?” Patricia asked. “You mean it’s against the law?”

“Not exactly. But anybody working on it has a hard time getting a job later. A journal that published an article on it might lose its federal subsidy. And, of course, trying to get grants to work on genetic engineering is like trying to get money to find out the causes of aging. Impossible. The big shots have a lot of ways of pushing people around.”

“So you’re keeping this to yourself out of spite?” Patricia asked.

“Not spite. Nobody hurt me, but nobody helped me. I did this myself, with my own money. The results and the responsibility are mine. Patty, you gotta understand that this genetic engineering thing could get out of hand. If I let just anybody do it, some big shot would start making himself an army! Better I keep this whole thing quiet.”

“Quiet?” Scratchon exploded. “You’ve given away two hundred of the things and they’re already breeding like maggots!”

“Maggots don’t breed, Burty.” Guibedo’s thirty years of teaching showed. “Maggots are the larval form of the adult housefly, which does the breeding. My tree houses don’t breed, either. Asexual reproduction maintains the purity of each strain so that—”

“Technicalities have nothing to do with the economic impact of free housing, without even government supervision, on a free economy. Already housing starts are down four percent compared to last year. The building trades are facing massive layoffs, and the mortgage market is in a slump. This will have repercussions throughout the entire economy. The stability of the nation, of the entire free world, is being threatened by your hideous weeds!”

“Dr. Guibedo, you brought some photographs of your latest creation?” Patricia was a moderator intent on moderating,

“Sure, Patty. I brought a whole bunch. These first ones are of Ashley, where I live in.”

“But the rooms are so huge!” Patricia said.

“Eight thousand square feet all together, Patty. It didn’t cost anything to make it bigger than a regular house. I had an acre of land, and I figured I might as well furnish it good. This picture is in the living room. The furniture is all grown in—”

“There goes the furniture industry!” Scratchon said.

“—except the fireplace. This one is the bedroom. By the window is Laurel. She’s gonna be a honey, that one. Growing here is the bed and the cupboard. Hey! There’s my suit. I was looking for it!”

“You keep your suit rolled up in a cupboard?” Scratchon asked.

“Drawers are hard to grow. This is the bathroom. The absorption toilet was the hardest part. Keeping roots from plugging up the sewer pipe is tricky when the sewer pipe is a root. I finally solved it by having the house grow a new toliet when the old one gets plugged. You see, the tree needs human excrement to—”

“Is this the kitchen?” Patricia asked. Toilets indeed!

“Sure. This is the table and chairs. You don’t need a stove and refrigerator because in these cupboards Ashley makes all my food.”

“My God!” Scratchon interrupted. “You’re attacking the food industry, too! Isn’t it enough to threaten the job of every carpenter and dry-wall installer in the country? You’ve got to starve out the fanners, too?”

“What starve? It makes food, not takes it away. Anyway, them farmers got nothing to worry about. I mean, the sukiyaki is pretty good, but the crepes suzette are only fair. And the sauerbraten! Ach, the sauerbraten. My mother would be ashamed.”

“Dr. Guibedo,” Patricia said, “do you mean that the food comes already prepared? That would take a lot of the fun out of housekeeping. Don’t you think so, Mr. Scratchon?”

“I think that this sawed-off runt’s head is as fat as his belly! Don’t you realize what he’s doing? Can’t you understand that when construction, farming, and banking fold, the entire country will go down the drain, too? Businesses by the thousands will go bankrupt. Millions of men will be out of work, and we sit here debating!” Scratchon folded his arms, fury in his eyes.

The twinkle left Guibedo’s eyes, and the smile wrinkles on his face smoothed. “Yah, I know. A lot of changes will happen. And I’m sorry if they make some people unhappy. Change and progress have always hurt some people, but the net effects have been good for humanity. The Industrial Revolution, for example, wasn’t very nice for the people who had to work in those old factories. And the old nobility didn’t like what was happening, either. But without it, the three of us and them guys with the cameras would be out digging potatoes with a stick to eat. So changes will happen, but I make a promise. Anybody who wants a house, I will sell him a seed. No matter what happens, everybody can have a nice place to live and plenty of food to eat. I’ll even get the sauerbraten right.”

“Bare sustenance!” Scratchon said. “That’s all you’re offering. Good men don’t work for food and minimal housing. People work for status, for prestige, to make a contribution to humanity and to provide security for themselves and their loved ones. People have spent their lives building the industries that you’re trying to collapse. Worked then-hearts out so that their children and their grandchildren could live decently. And you’re trying to wreck it all!”

“Ach! You’re just saying that there won’t be so many big shots. And maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe we’ve got too many big shots pushing people around. But decency? You can be just as decent as you want in a tree house. You just got nobody to look down at, because they can live just as good as you!”

With all of the art of a true real estate salesman, Scratchon shifted gears.

“I think you’re trying to sidestep the major issue here. The modern home is the product of thousands of years of refinements, the collective work of humanity. These tree things are basically untried and unsound. No one knows if they’ll last.”

“Ach! You got a brick as old as a redwood?”

“Our homes are symbols of our status, of our contributions to society.”

“Big shot,” Guibedo muttered, but Scratchon continued uninterrupted.

“Oh, the idea of living free of charge sounds okay at first. There’s a little larceny in all of us.” Scratchon gave the camera a toothy smile. “And the idea of living in a tree might bring out a childish romanticism in some. But to give up our solid, modern homes, full of modern conveniences, to live like apes in a tree? The whole concept is absurd. Personally, I wouldn’t live in one if you gave it tome!”

“I would give you one if you would live in it,” Guibedo said. “All you have said, you have said from ignorance. You don’t know how nice they are. Try for yourself. You will love them like I do.”

“Get serious, Guibedo. I’d be the laughingstock of the neighborhood. Anyway, I’ve got a business to run. I don’t have time for gardening.”

“I’ll plant if for you, Burty, and I’ll take care of it. We put it in your backyard, so you and everybody can compare it with your old house.”

Scratchon thought about the comparison between a tree house and his $450,000 Tudor brick home in Forest Hills. Yeah, he thought, and with the economy being what it is, Shadow Lawn Estates, Inc., can use all the publicity it can get.

“Ms. Cambridge, if I go through with this stunt, would you give it proper television coverage?”

“Why, of course, Mr. Scratchon. An experiment like this would make a wonderful program.”

“Plant your tree, Guibedo.”

“You’ll give it an honest try? Promise to live in it for a year, or at least six months?” Guibedo said.

“You’ve got a deal, Guibedo. We’ll show people what living in a tree is really like.”