Leo Frankowski - Copernick's Rebellion

“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.”