Leo Frankowski - Copernick's Rebellion

“Liebchen,” Patty said, “how do I, uh?…”

“The telephone, my lady? I’ll show you. Telephone, tell my sisters, Colleen and Ohura, that I think I have the day off, so I’ll be over to their house in an hour. And, telephone, be sure and warn me when Lord Guibedo starts home, so I can be here when he arrives.”

“Sure thing, Liebchen,” the local ganglia said.

“Just like that, Liebchen? How do you know its listening?” Patty asked.

“Oh, he’s always listening, my lady. He just isn’t allowed to speak unless spoken to. It’s rather a pity, he’s really very nice.”

“I’m sure. Telephone, please tell my mother that I’m in Death, I mean Life Valley, and that I’m having a wonderful time and I’ve met the nicest boy that she’s just got to meet. Uh, her address is…”

“Four ninety-one Seminole Drive, Boca Raton, my lady,” the telephone said.

“How did you know that?”

“When you moved in, my lady, I had your personal file loaded into my local ganglia from my Central Coordination Unit.”

“But how did it know?”

“The phone directory, obviously, my lady.”

“Oh. And could you tell my boss at NBC that everything is fine and I need another week’s vacation?”

“Happy to, my lady. Have a nice day,” the telephone said.

“Mother! This is Patty,” the CCU said. “Why, Patty! It’s so nice to hear from you.”

“Mother, it’s beautiful here in Acapulco. I wish you could come.”

“Well, not this time, dear. You aren’t lonely, are you?”

“Oh, no. Some of the girls from NBC are with me. The water is just wonderful.”

“That’s good, dear. Have a nice time.”

“Boss. Cambridge here,” the CCU said.

“Patty! Where the hell you been? I’ve been trying to find you for days.”

“Sorry, boss. Finding a telephone in Death Valley is like trying to find a telephone in Death Valley. Hey, this place is a dead end. Nothing but skid-row bums and blacks who can’t get on welfare. But I’ve got a definite lead on Guibedo. He’s in Minnesota. Okay if I track it down? I’ll need a couple more weeks.”

“Well, Patty, if you think it’s solid, go ahead. Take what time and money you need. But be careful. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

“Thanks, boss. I’ll keep in touch.”

Guibedo was riding cross-legged on Dirk’s back, as Dirk trotted at thirty miles an hour down the tunnel that connected Guibedo’s Oakwood to Copernick’s Pinecroft.

“No offense, my lord,” Dirk said, “but I’ll be glad when Lord Copernick’s Transportation, Recreation, and Construction units grow up. I really wasn’t made for this sort of thing.”

“Me, too. I wasn’t either. Them TRACs will help. Can’t even keep a pipe lit. How do you read in this wind, anyhow?”

“With some difficulty, my lord. It’s just that if we LDUs had had a proper philosophical base earlier, certain… errors wouldn’t have taken place.”

“Yah. I know it troubles you, Dirk. Those eighty-five families and that boy hiker and all the rest. Those things were bad, and it’s good you should study so they don’t happen again. But don’t let it get you on the insides. The universe is a big place and all of us are just little people. We do the best we can, but it is impossible for us to know what all of the results of our actions will be, and some of our actions will be wrong. So sometimes we cause needless damage, suffering, and death.

“But if we waited until we were sure of the results before we took action, we would never take action at all. And when something must be done, it is better to do something wrong than to do nothing at all. Anyway, we’ve been able to fix up some of our mistakes.”

“I wish I could do something for the families we killed, my lord.”

“Look. We are out to change the world, Dirk. We have the power to do it. But whenever there is great power, there is also the possibility of great error. When we are done, the world will be a better place. In the meantime, we can only try to cause as little suffering as possible.”

Dirk trotted into Pinecroft’s subbasement. Heinrich Copernick was waiting for them.

“So what was so important, Heiny?” Guibedo asked as he got a leg down.

“War, Uncle Martin. War against us within six months.”

“The Russians is getting uppity? I thought everything was going smooth there.”

“No problem in Russia. After the first year, when we were a capitalistic trick, Ivan noticed that he never had solved his housing problem. Now we’re the natural culmination of Marxism Leninism. Aliev is also claiming that you studied under Lysenko.”

“Hooh! That’s a good one! So, China?”

“No. China and all the eastern nations, except United India, are raising tree houses as fast as they can. We’re banned in India, of course.”

“I always figured they’d be on our side, for religious reasons. With a tree house, you don’t have to kill anything to live.”

“They would have been, if the Neo-Krishnas hadn’t found the birth control chemicals you were putting in the food. They figure they’ll need the excess population for their next holy war.”

“Heiny, it takes a half an acre of land for a tree house to support a family. India was so close to the edge, I had to do something.”

“Oh, I agree with you. But we’re still banned in India.”

“So who we gotta fight?” Guibedo asked, exasperated.

“The United States, and most of Western Europe.”

“Ach! So by ‘us’ you mean you and me! So why does our own country want to fight us?”

“We are upsetting too many apple carts, Uncle Martin. While only four percent of the U.S. population is living in tree houses, housing starts have been virtually zero for the past year. Property values have dropped over fifty percent in some areas. The average home owner owes sixty thousand dollars on his home. Right now he can only sell it for forty thousand. You can’t blame him for being upset.”

“So let him move into a tree house,” Guibedo said. “He won’t owe anybody anything on it.”

“People have been doing just that, Uncle Martin. But to get out from under their old debts, they have to declare bankruptcy. There were over two million bankruptcies in the last year, and there will be ten times that number in the next. The banking industry will collapse under the strain.”

“So what you need with money in the bank for, anyway, when you got a tree house?” Guibedo said. “It takes care of you.”

“What we are doing is great for the individual, Uncle Martin, but it’s death to the system. And the system is about to start fighting back.”

“System! You mean the big shots!”

“Call it anything you want,” Heinrich said. “But they’ll fight us until the last conscript soldier fires the last taxpayer’s bullet.”

“There’s got to be some way out of it, Heiny. It takes two sides to have a war.”

“But only one to have a massacre. There is a way out of fighting, but the cure is worse than the disease.”

“So what is it, Heiny?”

“Kill the trees. I’m sure we could come up with some kind of a blight.”

“Kill my trees! What about the people living in them?” Guibedo said.

“They’d mostly die. And that’s not the worst of it. The CCU has done a fifty-year analysis on present and potential world trends; he’s been on it for nearly a year. CCU! Give Uncle Martin the analysis you gave me.”

“Yes, my lord. The following analysis is based on the premise that bioengineering was never developed. It is also valid in the event that we take no aggressive action in the near future—as, if we don’t, no engineered life forms will exist three years from now.