Copernick's Rebellion

Chapter Five JUNE 5, 2001

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

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

“Is that all?”

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

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

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

“Cut it.”

“But a man can’t mourn forever—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“People have been getting well?” Hastings said.

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

“So this has been happening to everybody?”

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

“You’re serious about this?”

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

“Do you have any theories about it?”

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

“Well, have you checked out that angle?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir. I’ll get a few men on it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which other one?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m entitled to a little fun.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kidney trees?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Blade! Attention! Central Coordination Unit here.”

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

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

“Sir!”

“A truckload of gold and platinum!” Heinrich said. “Great! Now we can afford to exercise our option to purchase on the land we planted the trees on.”

“And you better do it in a hurry, kid,” Guibedo said. “And get a big fence around it. I saw a troop of boys out hiking, maybe two miles from the main grove.”

“Vintovka! Attention! Central Coordination Unit here.”

“Sir!”

“Vintovka, a troop of boys is on the march two miles north of the heavy-metal extraction grove. I want them under continuous observation. Launch four observation birds, different species, rotation at ten-minute intervals. If the boys come within one mile of the grove, notify me.”

“Sir!”

“I’ll get a lawyer right on it, Uncle Martin. Or better still, this would be a good project for the Central Coordination Unit.”

“Crockett and Felderstein.”

“Mark? Heinrich Copernick here,” the Central Coordination Unit said. “I’ve decided to exercise my option on the old Golden Hoard mines. Can you arrange a closing for next Tuesday morning, say ten a.m. at your office?”

“That’s only six days away, but my clients have a clear title. Sure. You figure there’s some life in those old mines?”

“I think it’s worth a try. I’ll bring a certified check for $950,000 with me. You can handle the title insurance, prorations, and so on.”

“My usual two percent?”

“Bullshit! Fifty dollars per hour. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Kemper, Lodge, and Smith.”

“Barry? Heinrich Copernick here,” the CCU said.

“How are you, Heinrich?”

“Great. Barry, I’m reopening the old Golden Hoard mines. Would you file incorporation papers for a general mining company. Call it Golden Hoard, Inc., if you can.”

“Sure. Who are the incorporators and what’s the stock split?”

“You, Mona, and myself, with one share, ten thousand shares, and twenty thousand shares, respectively.”

“I only get one lousy share?”

“So what do you want for nothing?”

“My usual. Fifty bucks an hour.”

“Done. Crockett and Felderstein are handling the closing.”

“I’ll drop by and keep them honest.”

“I doubt that, but drop by anyway. And have the incorporation papers ready to sign.”

“Central Coordination Unit?” Guibedo said. “You mean this big round thing you were talking to when I came in? He sounded pretty mixed up to me. You think he’s ready for any kind of a job?”

“Certainly. Oh, just now there’s a slight problem with integrating the auxiliary ganglion I told him to grow—”

“You told him to grow!” Guibedo yelled. “You’re letting an intelligent bioengineering creation control its own growth?”

“I wouldn’t ordinarily, of course. But in this case it’s quite necessary. You see, once the world’s economy is converted from a technological to a biological base, communications and a certain amount of central coordination are still going to be necessary. It will be quite impossible to maintain the telephones, computers, et cetera, without a factory system to produce spare parts.

“I plan to have the Central Coordination Unit grow a ganglion into each of your tree houses, with an input/ output unit in each room. These ganglia, being part of a single organism, will be in constant communication with each other, so sending a message will be simply a matter of talking to your local ganglion.”

“Schwartz and Company.”

“Duffy? Heiny Copernick here,” the CCU said.

“Heiny! I ain’t seen you in six months!”

“Don’t you feel glad? What’s gold selling at?”

“Seven hundred and eighteen dollars an ounce. How much you wanna buy?”

“Not buy. Sell. I got sixty-six thousand ounces to unload.”

“Whee! How hot is it?”

“Ice cold. Dug it up myself. Let’s see… That’s just under fifty million.”

“Well, there’s my ten percent commission to figure in. But I ain’t got that kind of money, Heiny!”

“Five percent. Don’t get greedy. I’ll deliver it to you first thing Monday morning. You put a million in my account by noon, then a million a day until you’re paid up.”

“You gonna trust me for that kind of money?”

“I can think of four good reasons why I should. Want me to list them?”

“Not over the phone, for God’s sake!”

“So what you got here is a telephone system. Well, at least it’ll stop the phone wires from being ripped off when the tree house grows,” Guibedo said.

“He’s not quite a telephone, Uncle Martin, in that communication isn’t instantaneous. The maximum speed I’ve been able to get in a nerve pulse is one hundred twenty meters per second. But you will be able to send a message.

“He more than makes up for his lack of speed. My brainchild, if you’ll excuse the pun, has twenty-two times the gray matter of a human brain. He is presently tied in with the wire services, most of the larger computers in the country, and two other phone lines. He’s already loaded a quarter of the Library of Congress into his memory.

“While most of his gray matter is used for input, output, and memory, his IQ is quite unmeasurable. I’d guess perhaps four hundred.”

“Well, if he’s so schmart, what makes you think that you’re going to stay boss, Heiny?”

“That’s hardly a worry, Uncle Martin. In the first place, I’ve instilled a strong psychological dependence into him. He could no more disobey me—or you—than a dog could attack his master.”

“That’s been known to happen.”

“In the second place, he’s a hell of a nice guy.”

“So was Hitler when he wanted to be.”

“And in the third place, he eats a fluid that only your trees can produce. And your trees can survive only if they have a regular supply of human excreta in their absorption toilets. He requires humans for his very existence.”

“Ach! If he’s so schmart, he can figure a way around that one.”

“You and I are the only beings who can operate a microscalpel, Uncle Martin. I’ve instilled an absolute mental block in the CCU covering the fields of chemistry and biology. All of my engineered life forms are in a symbiotic relationship with your trees and, thus, with us humans.”

“All of them, Heiny? What about Mona?”

“My wife is as human as you or I!” Copernick shouted.

“You made her with the microscalpel I gave you!” Guibedo shouted back. “You engineered her DNA just like you did with this—this telephone thing, and don’t you deny it!”

“I cloned Mona after I modified the DNA of one of my own cells, Uncle Martin. That modification doesn’t reduce her humanity. Come on, I’m modified and, to a lesser extent, so are you. Are we so inhuman?”

Guibedo thought, So he trades sodomy for incest, but he didn’t say it.

“Come on, Uncle Martin. Let’s eat. We’ll both be in a better mood after dinner.”

“Knife! CCU here!”

“Sir!”

“Knife, take six brigades and dig a tunnel, suitable for your species, from here to the heavy-metal extraction grove, eighteen miles NNW of here. Complete it by next Tuesday afternoon.”

“Sir! This route has never been surveyed. We have no knowledge of rock and soil conditions.”

“Take more units as you need them. Report any difficulties to me.”

“Sir!”

“Liebchen, this is the CCU. Would you please report?”

A little humanoid with the hindquarters of a goat pranced over to the I/O unit in her nursery.

“I’m Liebchen. May I help you?”

“Liebchen, for the next two weeks, the Labor and Defense Units are going to be extremely active. Except for those things relating to the comfort of the humans, I want all of Pinecroft’s systems turned down to the bare minimum and all of Pinecroft’s energy diverted to food production for the LDUs. Could you do that for me, please?”

“It pleases me to serve you, my lord.”

“Not ‘lord,’ dear. Only Lord Guibedo and Lord Copernick deserve that title. And Liebchen, would you see to it that Lord Guibedo takes a mild euphoric with his lunch? Nothing heavy, just something that will make him listen to reason.”

“Of course, sir. I’d be happy to.”

Heinrich turned to the mounds on his workbench. “You guys keep at it, hear? I want to see the new ganglia integrated sometime in the next week.”

“Yes, my lord.”

As they went up the elevator, Heinrich said, “When you think about it, Uncle Martin, Mona is probably your grandniece. How does it feel to have your family grow?”

“I would have wished that maybe it grew another way.”

“Oh, it’s doing that, too. Twins, according to the tests.”

Guibedo raised a huge white eyebrow.

“Don’t worry, Uncle Martin. Mona and I don’t have a recessive gene between us.”

“CCU! Vintovka here!”

“Yes, Vintovka. Report.”

“Sir! The hiking troop is now one mile from the heavy-metal extraction grove and proceeding directly toward it.”

“Vintovka, launch another observation bird, an eagle this time, with orders to attack the scout most separated from the troop. Injure him sufficiently to require immediate medical attention, but do not kill him.”

“Sir!”

Lunch consisted of roladen and sauerbraten for Guibedo and kielbasa, pirogi, and chanina for Mona and Heinrich, with black beer all around. All of which was synthesized in the kitchen cupboards by the tree house.

Bobby Jackson had grown up in the downtown Los Angeles Boy’s Home. This was his first extended trip into the country, and he was dead tired after roughing it in the desert hills for three days. Despite the friendly jeers of his companions, he had straggled two hundred yards behind the rest of his troop. To keep the others in sight, he scrambled to the top of a large rock alongside the path.

Above and behind him, an eagle calculated a trajectory, folded its seven-foot wings, and power-dived from six thousand feet. As the scoutmaster, a Big Brother donating his time to the home, turned to make sure no one had left the trail, he saw the divebombing bird. “Look out, Bobby! Behind you!”

Bobby turned to see the huge bird coming at him at 150 miles per hour. It was the last thing that his eyes would ever see.

The eagle struck Bobby square in the face. Without stopping, it efficiently plucked out both of his eyes and flew on.

Mission accomplished.

“Heiny,” Guibedo said with brown beer foam on his white mustache, “that was one of the best meals I ever ate. I wonder why Pinecroft, your tree house here, is such a better cook than my Bayon. I used the same gene sequence for their synthesizers.”

“That’s easy,” Mona said. “Heinrich is developing a series of household servants. The darlings are too young to do any work yet, but they have a sort of empathic contact with Pinecroft. They can control its growth to a certain extent, but more important, they can modify the output of the food synthesizer, with the net result that we have a limitless menu of excellent food.”

“Hey! That’s great! That solves the biggest headache I’ve had, getting the food right. Can these servants make a tree house add a room where you want it?”

“Oh, yes, Uncle Martin,” Heinrich said. “But I can’t take all the credit. Mona’s in charge of their training, and doing a wonderful job. I don’t think I could have done it without her help.”

“Yah, Heiny. You sure are a lucky guy.”

The CCU I/O unit in the kitchen, “My Lord Copernick?”

“What do you need?”

“I want to report, sir, that pursuant to your suggestion, I have arranged for you to close on the Golden Hoard mine property next Tuesday morning. Also, I have taken the liberty to cause a corporation to be formed to own the mine.”

“I compliment your efficiency.”

“Thank you, sir. I have had the truck unloaded and the contents assayed. Arrangements have been made to have the gold smelted and sold for forty-five million dollars, through unorthodox channels. The platinum, with an estimated value of seven point four million, has been stored pending the availability of suitable smelting facilities.”

“Hey!” Guibedo said. “Save me maybe twenty of those apples.”

“Certainly, my Lord Guibedo. Arrangements have been made such that you will have a convincingly functioning mine in one week, with suitable machinery, fencing, and so forth.

“Also, the hiking troop has ceased to be a security problem. One of their members was injured, and the others are carrying him out on a stretcher.”

“Not badly, I hope,” Heinrich said. “Mona, why don’t you take Uncle Martin’s truck out there and get that kid to a hospital. I’ll have a bird guide you.”

“Of course,” Mona said, leaving.

“So what do you think of my Central Coordination Unit now, Uncle Martin?”

“Well, Heiny, if them Nazi big shots would have had one of him, we never would have made it out of Germany!”

“My lords,” the CCU said, “I would like to suggest that you use your surplus capital to purchase additional real estate, starting with the balance of Death Valley here.”

“You know, Heiny, that’s not a bad idea,” Guibedo said. “We could build quite a city here. Plenty of sunlight and there’s water in them mountains.”

“I think you’re right, Uncle Martin,” Heinrich said, turning to the CCU. “Do it!”

Later, surrounded by their rough plans for the city, Heinrich suddenly said, “Uncle Martin, what did you want with those twenty golden apples?”

“I thought maybe they would make nice Christmas presents.”

“Ben, you were able to get Mike to talk?” General Hastings said.

“He’s been talking all along, George. It’s just that we’re starting to make some sense out of what he’s saying.”

“So, what does he have to say?”

“It’s not that easy. It’s a matter of word-frequency correlations. You see, George, one of us has to be with him all of the time. If the jamming ever quits, somebody has to be there to sedate him before he drives the rest of us insane. But when you put in a six-hour shift listening to a madman rave, you eventually notice certain words turning up fairly often.

“You see two possibilities as to what the jamming is. One is simply that it is a random noise, transmitted accidentally or deliberately from some natural or artificial source.

“The other theory is that the noise carries information between some people or beings that we don’t know about. If this is the case, the information is being transmitted at a rate several hundred times faster than the human nervous system can function, so most of us telepaths just hear white noise. The possibility exists that Mike’s synapses are fast enough to pick up the data and that the rest of his brain can’t take the information overload.

“Look. The human brain is a series of parallel buffers and gates. Faced with an information overload, such a system will skip a given number of words for each word transmitted.

“On the theory that Mike is repeating every hundredth—or whatever—word in a series of messages, we recorded several months of his ravings and had them transcribed and analyzed by computer. Here is a list of words that appear a statistically significant number of times.”

Hastings looked down at the list of words. Near the top were “Lord,”

“Copernick,”

“Guibedo,”

“Life,” and “Valley.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“I thought you’d like it, George. Then we had the computer synthesize statistically probable messages based on word frequency. These aren’t real messages of course. But they are similar.”

The sheet of paper had a series of sentences like:

“Lord Guibedo is going to Pinecroft.”

“The tunneling in Sector Three is completed.”

“Keep Sector Twenty-two cleared of traffic.”

“Better and better,” Hastings said. “Get all of this over to the Sham Shop analysts.”

“Sure, George. There are reams of the stuff. One other point—there’s a bewildering variety of ancient and modern weapons mentioned, and in just about every language there is. We’re not sure what they stand for, but if these are code words, there are at least several thousand of them.”