Copernick's Rebellion

Chapter Four JUNE 12, 2000

Major General George Hastings, Commander, Air Force Intelligence, sat in his office in the Pentagon. He hadn’t slept in thirty hours. His face was haggard.

His wife and children had been missing for two days. They had gone off to spend a week in their new tree house at Lake George and had vanished.

Hastings had TDYed one of his best security teams to Lake George and now the report was back.

Nothing.

The car was parked, no unusual fingerprints on it. The soft path to the house showed only the footprints of Margaret and Jimmy and Beth. There was no ransom note. Nothing. They had vanished from the world just as Scratchon had.

Scratchon? Scratchon and Margaret both had tree houses!

Hastings hit the button on his intercom. “Pendelton!”

“Yes, sir,” a sleepy, obedient voice replied.

“Get Research out of bed.”

“The whole staff, sir?”

“Hell, yes! They are to determine the correlation between currently missing persons and Laurel series tree houses.”

Tree houses at four o’clock on a Sunday morning! “Yes, sir. Full Research staff, tree houses and missing persons.”

Nine hours and half a bottle of amphetamines later the answer came in. Correlation—32 percent.

Thirty-two percent of the people in the sample who owned Laurels were either officially missing or could not be contacted.

Hastings was making up a list of military and governmental officials to be informed of the correlation when Pendelton knocked and entered.

“Thought you should see this, sir.”

It was a day-old National Enquirer. On the front page was a color photograph of a desiccated female corpse half absorbed by a tree-house bed. From a delicate web of roots, a wedding band gleamed.

It was out of his hands now; Hastings went to his empty apartment to sleep and to cry.

A week later Hastings was back at his desk. He felt neither grief nor anger. Only a deadly emptiness that would never leave him.

A knock at the door was immediately followed by Sergeant Pendelton. “They got him, sir.”

“Got who?”

“Martin Guibedo, sir. The Michigan State Police picked him up north of Kalamazoo.”

“It took them long enough.”

“These people with tree houses rarely need to use credit cards, sir. It makes them hard to find. Here’s the report on tree-house occupation, sir.”

“Give it to me verbally.”

“Yes, sir. Basically, people have abandoned the Laurel series houses. But three other species are in common use, and the people in them generally intend to continue using them.”

“Idiots.”

“Yes, sir. The consensus is that it was a technical malfunction in a single product line, and that it does not cast discredit on the entire concept of bioengineering. It’s rather like the public reaction to the Hindenburg disaster seventy years ago, when people ceased using airships but continued to use airplanes.”

“Huh. Anything else?”

“Yes sir. Section Six requests that you visit them.”

“What is it, Ben?” Hastings said.

“We’re out of business, George. Nobody but Mike can pick up anything but a loud roar. It gives you a headache.”

“Somebody is jamming you?”

“We don’t know, George. But if so, they’re jamming everybody. We just got a phone call—a phone call, mind you—from Dolokov’s group at Minsk. Looks like the whole fraternity of telepaths is out of work.”

“Anything like this ever happen before?”

“We’ve picked up tiny spurts of interference before, George. The sort of unintelligible stuff you sometimes pick up near an unborn child, only much louder and more abrupt. There has always been a lot of static on the line, but nothing like this.”

“What about Mike?”

“He’s gone insane, George. He keeps yelling about lords and alpha numbers and digging in the ground and similar drivel. Nothing that makes sense.”

“Have you sedated him yet?”

“No point to it, George. With this racket going on, he can’t possibly affect the rest of us, and the transcribers might find something of interest in his babble.”

“Well, do as you feel best. But I suggest that you keep someone posted by Mike in case the jamming stops.”

“Okay, George. We don’t have anything else to do, anyway.”

“Oh, yer that Professor Guibedo,” Jimmy Saunton said, trying to control his shakes. “The guy with the tree houses. Somebody was telling me about ‘em. What do I have to do to get one, Professor?”

“Can you eat and make shit?” Guibedo asked, looking past his cellmate to the iron bars that formed the far wall. “That’s all you got to do.”

“Huh? Sure. But what do I got to do to get one?” The little drunk was used to being ignored.

“I just told you!” Guibedo barked. “Ach. I ain’t really mad at you. But since they arrested me, it’s been nothing but people, people, people, talking, talking, talking. I ain’t had no rest in three weeks.”

The little drunk was silent for a while. Then he said, “Sorry, Professor. Didn’t mean to rile you.”

“Well, I’m sorry, too. This ain’t your fault. What were you asking about?”

“About your tree houses,” Jimmy said.

“Oh, yeah. Well, the important thing you got to remember is that a tree house is in a symbiotic relationship with the people living inside it. It gives you a nice, comfortable place to live and all the food and beer you want. You give it the fertilizer it needs to stay alive and grow. That’s what caused all the trouble. Them big shots I gave the Laurel trees to, they mostly used the tree just to show off with and give parties in. Then they went and used the toilets in their regular houses!”

“Yeah, somebody was saying that your trees ate a lot of people.”

“I only made it so that the tree would grow a new absorption toilet when the old one got plugged up. The trouble was that a lot of them new toilets grew in the beds,” Guibedo said.

“Yeah, somebody was saying that your trees ate a lot of people,” Jimmy repeated, for lack of anything better to say.

“Maybe fifty thousand. Ach! My poor Laurels! Them big shots is chopping you down faster than you can grow!”

“You really love those trees, huh, Professor?”

“It wasn’t really their fault. They shouldn’t have done it, but when you’re lonely and hungry and nobody cares…”

“I know what you mean, Professor. Man, do I know what you mean! But how do I get one?”

“Well, first you got to get out of this jail.”

“That’s easy. They always throw me out in the morning.”

“Ach! I should be so lucky. What’s that scratching sound?”

“Rats. We’re in the basement here. The place is crawling with them. How long you in for anyway, Professor?”

“Who knows? This lawyer my nephew Heiny sent, he says they got maybe twenty thousand warrants out on me. Everything from transporting vegetable matter across state lines without a permit, to premeditated rape. He did some plea bargaining and got most of them reduced to murder in the first degree.”

“Murder one? You know, with a good lawyer, you can beat that one.”

“Sure. The trouble is I got to keep on beating it twenty thousand times! The lawyer figures, if everything goes right, we can do it in maybe three hundred and twenty-five years.”

“Three hundred and… You should live so long!”

“I know. I’m ninety already. It just isn’t fair! Did they throw the Wright brothers in jail every time an airplane crashed? Did Henry Ford get locked up every time somebody got killed in a car wreck? Ach. But that’s my problem, and you can’t do nothing to help me with it. But I can do a lot to help you with yours.”

“My problem, Professor? I told ya, they throw me out in the morning.”

“Sure. And you gonna be panhandling for drinks and sleeping in alleys and back in here tomorrow night.”

“So you think I’m just a bum, huh? Well, let me tell you, Professor, I wasn’t always a bum! I have a college degree, and I had my own business before… well, just before!”

“Ach, Jimmy, I ain’t calling you names, and I ain’t telling you how to run your life. Hah! Sitting here in jail, it looks like I ain’t run my own life so good.

“But you, Jimmy, you got better things coming. Like maybe a ten-room house, with gardens and fountains and plenty of good food and beer all the time in the cupboards.”

“Hey, don’t forget the twenty nude women around my swimming pool.”

“Well, the Ashley series has got forty-foot pools. You gotta get the women on your own.”

“And where am I supposed to get that kind of money?”

“What money? I told you. Eat and make shit!”

“You mean your tree houses are like that! I was thinking of maybe a cubbyhole where I could stay warm.”

“Once you got a DNA string in a microscalpel, Jimmy,you might as well do it up right. You’re thinking in term-fashioned economics, when to build a house twice as big, you had to pay twice as much money. And to make two houses, it costs twice as much again. But with engineered life forms, they build themselves as big as you want, once you’ve designed them. The same thing goes with numbers, since they reproduce themselves. You can make a thousand things, or a million things, just as easy as you can make one. Why, I could have made my tree houses grow millions of seeds and covered the world with them in a year, only I didn’t want to wreck the forests and drive away the animals. Life is best when there is enough, but not too much.

“So anyway, what you got to do is find a nice place to put your tree house. Your best bet is in a state park, maybe. Get way back, maybe a coupla miles from a road, so the big shots won’t bother you. Find a pretty place, with a nice view, near a creek or maybe a waterfall.”

The scratching sound got louder. Guibedo said, “Them must be some damn big rats, Jimmy.”

“The size of dogs, some of them,” Jimmy said. “Go on with what you were saying.”

“So all you got to do is dig a hole, maybe a foot down, and use it for a toilet. Put the seed in it with the point on the seed toward where you want the front door to be. Cover it up and water it every day for three months. You can move into it then, but it won’t be full growed for at least six months.”

“Six months! They grow that fast?” Jimmy said.

“Sure. Engineered life forms are a lot more efficient than natural ones. Or maybe I should say they’re a lot less inefficient. Let me give you some ‘for instances.’

“To get a pound of wood, a natural tree has got to soak up fifteen hundred pounds of water with its roots, run it through its trunk, and evaporate it in its leaves. The only good that all that water did was to haul up a few ounces of trace elements that were dissolved in it. The tree has to do this because transpiration is the only mechanism it has to get those trace elements to the leaves. A simple pump, like your heart, is a million times more efficient.”

“Heh. So all your trees got hearts?”

“Sure. In more ways than one. Another ‘for instance.’ At high noon in the desert, you get about a hundred watts of solar power on each square foot of land. Now just sitting there, Jimmy, your body is burning up a hundred watts to keep you alive. If you were a hundred percent efficient, you could survive without eating just by lying in the sun. But the way nature does it, it takes more than one hundred thousand square feet of land to support a human being.

“Now, I’ve managed to make my tree houses ten percent efficient, about as good as a car engine.”

“You sold me, Professor. Where do I buy a seed?”

“Well, you used to be able to buy one from me for five dollars, but that’s all over now.”

“A house for five dollars?”

“I had to pay for the postage and the advertising. And I had to get some people to help me with the mail. And the boxes cost me twenty-eight cents each! But now I guess you got to get somebody to give you one.”

“I got to panhandle a house? Professor, if you had any idea how hard it is to come up with a fifth of Gallo port…”

“No, no. They promised to give you one. That was the deal when I sold the seed. Once their house was grown up, they had to give a seed to anybody who asked for one. And they had to make that person promise to do the same thing when their house was growed up. Just be sure you pick a model you really like. It ain’t nice to abandon a tree house.”

The scratching got progressively louder until an oval hairline crack, perhaps seven feet by four, suddenly formed on the concrete floor. One end of the slab rose five inches and a snakelike tentacle a yard long slid out. There was an eyeball at the end of it.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, Professor, I never should have touched that sterno! You can’t imagine what I think I see!”

A second eyeballed tentacle joined the first. In unison, they made a 360-degree scan.

“Take it easy, Jimmy, I ain’t had a drink in three weeks, and I’m seeing it, too!”

“My Lord Guibedo,” a voice said from below the concrete. “I am a friend. Please speak softly. May I come up?”

“Nobody up here but us scaredy-cats,” Guibedo whispered. “Come on up and make yourself at home.”

The concrete slab slid to one side. A black creature ascended. It had a rigid oval body six feet long by three wide, but only six inches thick. The eyeballed tentacles extended from the front of its body. It walked on four skinny, muscular legs and held two long humanoid arms close to its body. As it rose from the pit, it changed color like a chameleon, from black to the gray of the prison walls.

“Oh, sweet Mother of Mercy!” Jimmy was cowering in a corner. “I’ve seen orange crocodiles even, but nothing like this!”

“Son of a gun, shit!” Guibedo muttered. “Who are you?”

“My lord, I am Labor and Defense Unit Alpha 001723.”

“Yah, sure. Nice low number you got there. I guess I should have said ‘What are you?’”

“My lord, I am a labor and defense unit. Would you please accompany me. We have very little time.”

“You’re maybe something my nephew, Heiny, came up with?” Guibedo noticed that the thing had at least eight additional fixed eyes, scattered around its circumference.

“Yes, my lord. Lord Copernick created me. He sent me here to facilitate your escape. Please accompany me.” The LDU was backing down into the pit.

“Well, if Heiny says so, let’s go,” Guibedo said, following.

“Hey!” Jimmy said. “What about me?”

“Sir, your presence would constitute a security risk. I must insist that you stay here,” the LDU said.

“He’s right, Jimmy,” Guibedo said. “This could get rough. They’re gonna throw you out in the morning, anyhow.”

“Yeah, Professor, but what am I going to tell them?”

“If you tell them the truth, Jimmy, they’ll throw you in the funny house. Just tell them you went to sleep and when you woke up, I was gone.”

“Yeah, okay. Take it easy, Professor! I’ll get me that tree house like you said.” Jimmy shook Guibedo’s hand.

Guibedo was already waist deep in the pit. “And when you get your tree house, talk to it. They like that. Bye, Jimmy.”

“Bye, Professor.”

“My lord, has the leave-taking ceremony been completed?” the LDU asked.

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

The LDU slid the concrete slab back into position over the pit. When the floor was sealed, lights in the tunnel went on. A long line of LDUs stood patiently waiting. Each was carrying a load of wet cement on its broad back.

“My lord. Once we have you out of here, our plan is to seal up the first one hundred feet of the tunnel with cement to slow down pursuit, then to fill the balance with dirt.”

“That’s a lot of work!”

“We were made for work, my lord. My Lord Copernick ordered it.”

“Well, let’s get walking.”

“That’s quite impossible for you, my lord. This tunnel is fifteen miles long.”

“Fifteen miles! You dug this for me?”

“Yes, my lord, that’s why we were three weeks in getting here.” The LDU crouched to the height of a chair. “Would you please get on my back.”

Eyeing the LDU’s spindly legs, Guibedo cautiously put his portly bottom on its back. The LDU stood up easily to its normal tabletop height and took off at a smooth trot with the man riding sidesaddle. Guibedo soon found it was more comfortable to ride facing forward with his legs crossed.

“Curves ahead, my lord.” Tentacles that Guibedo hadn’t noticed slid from the LDU’s sides and fastened themselves around the man’s waist and legs. Several others provided an acceptable back rest. The LDU’s speed increased to thirty mph and they were still passing concrete-laden LDUs.

“A lot of you guys here.”

“We are ten thousand in the zero-zero division, my lord. Ten brigades of a thousand each with ten platoons of a hundred, each with ten squads of ten LDUs.”

“Just like the army,” Guibedo said, his white hair flapping in the breeze. “Who’s the general?”

“No one, exactly, my lord. Or whichever one of us you talk to. You see, we’re all in telepathic contact with each other. When one of us knows your desires, we all do, and therefore comply.”

“Telepathy! I didn’t know that Heiny was that far along.”

“I don’t believe he designed for it, my lord,” the LDU said above the wind. “But you see, we’re all identical and we have quite extensive and widely distributed redundant neural systems. I have twelve major ganglia, and I can function properly on six.”

“Like the thing with human identical twins…” Guibedo said. “So Heiny just got lucky! Well, that’s nice. Things went bad for him for too long there. I guess it made you guys pretty easy to educate.”

“Yes, my lord. Once he discovered our abilities, he only had to teach one of us to read and write. The rest of us picked it up from Alpha 1. Now, each of us has his own field of expertise, based on our individual reading, with the information available to all.”

“So what’s your specialty?” Guibedo asked.

“Unarmed combat, with a minor in sociology, my lord.” The LDU crowded closer to the left-hand wall of the tunnel. They were no longer passing the concrete carriers, and LDUs with empty baskets were passing them at an astounding speed.

“Pretty quick, your buddies are.”

“Cruising speed for an LDU is forty mph, my lord, although we can go sixty for short durations.”

“Unarmed combat?” Guibedo said. “If you were expecting trouble, why go unarmed?”

“My lord, I mean no external armament.” From a slot above each wrist, a bayonetlike claw extended out to a foot past the knuckles. “They are a trifle dull from cutting through the concrete floor, but they are still quite serviceable.”

“Cutting through concrete! How you do that?”

“Diamond is just another carbon compound, my lord.”

“And carbon is one of the things that we are all made of.” Guibedo laughed. “So you were expecting trouble.”

“We couldn’t know if there would be resistance or not, my lord. Nor could we be sure that we would come up in the right cell of the prison. We Alpha series are only telepathic with one another, not with humans.”

“Betcha Heiny’s working on that, though.”

“Yes, my lord. As I understand it, the Gamma series LDU is to have a malleable nerve net. It is hoped that they will be able to at least receive telepathically from other species, such as man.”

“Well, I’m not so sure I like that, uh—what was your name again?” Guibedo asked.

“Alpha 001723, my lord.”

“Not your number. Your name.”

“I have no other designation, my lord.”

“A nice guy like you oughta have a name, not a number.”

“Do you really think I could, my lord? I mean, it would be permitted?”

“Sure thing. Why not? Pick any name you want.”

“Well, my lord, I think I would like to be called Dirk.”

“Dirk, huh? I was thinking maybe Rover, but if it’s Dirk you want, it’s Dirk you’ll get.”

“Thank you, my lord!”

“Anytime. How old are you, Dirk?”

“I hatched three months ago, my lord, although I was sentient before then.”

“Three months old. Well, I guess that explains it,” Guibedo mused. “So you were sentient inside your egg. That must have been strange.”

“It was, my lord. Each of us thought he was Alpha 1, the first one hatched. And Alpha 1 thought he heard echoes, but he didn’t know that that was unusual.”

“Hah! Hatching must have been a shock. But I don’t see why you were so well developed at such an early stage.”

“It has to do with our cell replication process, my lord. You see, we have four-stranded DNA, which reproduces very slowly. This results in a long gestation period, twelve months. But when we do hatch, we have as many cells as a full-grown adult. With enough food, we can grow from a two-pound eggling to a three—hundred-pound adult in a week, simply by increasing cell size.”

“And here I been using single strand DNA on all my trees,” Guibedo said.

“My lord, that certainly gives rapid growth and repair, but a combat troop needs resistance to heat and radiation, and our glandular redundancy makes up for our slow repairability,” Dirk said.

“You know, Dirk, for a specialist in unarmed combat, you sure know your biochemistry.”

“Oh, no, my lord, I’m picking this up from Alpha 001256. He wants to be called Blade. May he do so, my lord?”

“Sure. Anything to keep our boys at the front happy. Heiny sure did some nice thinking with you guys.” LDUs were now returning to the end of the tunnel with loads of dirt. The tunnel was wide enough for only two to pass, and Guibedo marveled at their coordination as empty LDUs from behind alternated with loaded LDUs from in front to pass the slower-moving Dirk.

“It looks like we’re a moving roadblock, Dirk.”

“We’re not seriously slowing progress, my lord,” Dirk said. “If I traveled much faster, conversation would be difficult above the wind noise. My brothers and I are enjoying this talk.”

“Yah. I guess I am talking to all of you,” Guibedo said. “What are they saying?”

“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.