Leo Frankowski - Copernick's Rebellion

“I thought that it was a hallucination. Is that another one of your creatures?”

“If you mean ‘Is it an engineered life form?’ the answer is no, sir.”

“Then where did it come from?”

“A natural mutation, I suppose, sir.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“You are at liberty to believe anything that you want, sir. Just now I have a job to do. If you go due west for two miles, you will come to a road. Follow it south for three miles and you will find an uninhabited tree house. I suggest that you stay there.”

“What are you doing out here, anyway? I thought that all of you things were in Death Valley,” Hastings said.

“I prefer ‘LDU’ to ‘things.’ We call it Life Valley now. And I’m on a scouting mission. We’ll be coming through here in force in a few weeks.”

“You are a trusting soul. May I have some more of that water?”

“You may keep both gourds, sir. As to being trusting, may I point out that the tree house I mentioned is forty miles from the nearest source of water? Even if you were my enemy, without mechanical transportation you could not go anywhere to harm us.”

“Forty miles in which direction?” Hastings asked.

“South. But please don’t do anything suicidal.”

The LDU headed north at a run.

Hastings eventually made it to the tree house. He refreshed himself and got a night’s sleep.

He woke shivering with a fever and for weeks he wondered if he had survived the desert only to die in the bowels of a plant.

Now, a month after being ejected from his plane, the sickness was gone and his body was again strong. He packed all the food and water he could carry and started south.

They had been distributing food and water to people en route to Life Valley since morning, and Winnie’s load was twelve thousand pounds lighter. But he had been designed to work in tunnels where the temperature was held at fifty-five degrees, and fifty miles from Flagstaff, the heat was starting to tell on him. He had been slowing down since noon and now was down to trotting at only twenty mph.

But Winnie’s juvenile pride was involved. He was on his first big trip, and he wasn’t going to let anybody think he was a softy. He unfolded one huge arm from the top of his forty-foot-long body, wiped the sweat from his eyes with a yard-wide hand, and plodded onward.

His passengers were similarly uncomfortable. While the heat didn’t bother Dirk, his burns still troubled him, and he was worried about Liebchen. The faun had put herself into a trance to better endure the heat, and Dirk was gently swabbing her body with water. “It was stupid of me to have allowed her along, my ladies,” the LDU said.

“I’m afraid that none of us were thinking too clearly,” Mona said. “She’ll be okay. Fauns are tough, and it’ll be dark in a few hours.”

“It’s the people that get me down,” Patricia said. “We must have passed ten thousand of them today, and all we could do was give them a handout and directions to the valley.”

“We’ll give the worst cases a lift on our way back.” Mona took two frosted glasses from the synthesizer and put one on the table in front of Patricia. “Buck up, girl. In a few months it’ll all be over.”

“There are ten billion people out there! We couldn’t feed them all when we had machines. We’ll never be able to do it now.”

“Nonsense!” Mona said, “There never was a good technical reason for famine. Even before Heinrich and Uncle Martin got into the act, the Earth could have supported ten times the people than it does today.”

“Huh? There have been famines for the last ten years.”

“Figure it out. Every day the Earth receives three point five times ten to the eighteenth calories of solar energy, half of which reaches the surface. Now, if only one percent of the Earth’s surface was planted with crops that were only one percent efficient, you have fifty billion people on thirty-five hundred calories a day, enough to get fat on.

“Then figure that ten percent, not one percent, of the Earth’s surface is arable and that some natural plants are three percent efficient. We could feel one point five trillion people.”

“Then for God’s sake, why didn’t we?” Patricia asked.

“Because we never got our shit together. Uncle Martin blames it all on the ‘Big Shot Problem,’ the fact that people in power don’t like to change the status quo, but his views on social problems tend to be overly simplistic. You’d have to add in tradition, inertia, world trade agreements, greed, ignorance, and stupidity to get a complete answer. Mostly stupidity.”

Patricia finished her drink and looked up. Another group of refugees was just ahead.

Winnie was slowing down as Mona got up. “Just remember that you’re looking at the last famine in history.”

“Don’t get scared!” Winnie shouted in his little boy’s voice. “We’ve got food and water for you!”

Unbroken lines of LDUs, loaded with food and tree-house seeds, were still streaming out of the valley, heading north, to go through Alaska, swim the Bering Straits, and enter Asia, Europe, and Africa by way of Kamchatka. As many others were headed south, to try to alleviate the chaos in South America. Thousands more fanned out over the North American continent.

The Los Angeles zoo had been abandoned by its keepers, mostly because they simply couldn’t get from their homes to work.

Metal-eating larvae swarmed over cage bars and door hinges and the valves that kept the moats filled.

Gazelles, zebras, and mountain sheep hungrily, timidly, made their way out to the tall grass of untended lawns and munched contentedly.

Other animals were neither contented nor timid. Lions, tigers, and wolves, unfed for a week, quietly prowled about looking for warm meat.

The years they had spent in captivity had softened their muscles, and some hungry lions couldn’t catch a mountain goat, let alone a gazelle. Still, there was a lot of slow-moving meat around. The two-legged variety.

Antonio Biseglio was a chef, as his father and grandfather had been chefs. His kitchen was his kingdom and his kingdom was under siege.

With fly swatter and mallet, he had put up a noble, if useless, defense. In a week’s time his stove was worthless, his pots were like colanders, and his pans like sieves. In the end he salvaged nothing but a copper omelet pan, and with that he joined the crowds abandoning the city.

Tom Greene County Hospital was left with only one Filipino intern and a single nurse to care for the 230 surviving patients. The nurse, tired to the point of hallucination, dropped the buckets of water she was carrying and screamed as the LDU entered the stairwell.

“Don’t be afraid. I am a friend.”

“Wh—what are you?”

“I am Labor and Defense Unit Alpha 001256. My friends call me Tao.”

“Oh, yes. We heard that you—uh—folks would be out.” The nurse tiredly massaged her temples. “Look. Can you help me? We’ve got water in the basement, but the pipes to the other floors are out. People on the fourth floor are dying of thirst.”

“I’m afraid that there are more important considerations. The steel framework of this building is infested with larvae. It will collapse within three days. We must evacuate it immediately,” Tao said.

“But how? And where to?”

“I will organize a human labor force. The patients tell me that there is a doctor around. Find him, and together place all salvageable medical supplies into the hallways. I will have it hauled out to the courtyard, along with the patients.”

Relieved that someone—or something—was taking responsibility, the nurse said, “Yes, sir.”

Within an hour, using persuasion and offers of food, with threats and demonstrations of force, Tao collected a group of one hundred healthy men to assist him.