Leo Frankowski - Copernick's Rebellion

“Ridiculous, my ladies,” Dirk said. “According to my brother Tomahawk, who’s up on Indian lore, this group is the most incredible hodge-podge imaginable. The one on the end, for example. His moccasins are maybe Crow, the leggings are Shawnee, his bow Cree, and the arrows are Seminole. The war bonnet is Sioux, his scalp lock is Iroquois, and the war paint looks more Zulu than anything else. Yet judging from their facial features, this bunch are Zuni.”

“They’ve just been watching too many movies, Dirk,” Mona said. The boys were starting to come around.

“Perhaps, my lady. A more important question is what to do with them. We can’t have them running around shooting people, but I would prefer not to kill them,” Dirk said.

“Neither would I.” Mona turned to the boy on the end. “Why did you shoot at us?”

The boy was silent. Liebchen slipped back into Winnie.

Dirk prodded the boy. “Come, come, now. The lady is speaking to you.”

“I’ll never talk, paleface,” the boy said in perfect English.

“Lacking, among other things, a face, I hardly qualify as a paleface. Winnie, bring out the first one from inside, the one who wouldn’t talk.”

The boys’ eyes widened as the huge hand placed the bandaged boy in front of them.

“Gee, Dirk, can I spank another one?”

“Perhaps. Now then, son. Why did you shot at us?”

“Well, for one thing, we didn’t know your house—trailer was alive.”

“That’s hardly an excuse for shooting at people,” Mona said.

“You’re on our land!” the boy in the middle said.

“Gee, the map said this was a state park.” Winnie hoped he hadn’t made a mistake.

“No! I mean this whole country is our land. You stole it from us and now we’re taking it back.”

“You’re welcome to all the land you can use,” Mona said, “but you’re not entitled to kill people.”

“We have a right to take what’s ours.”

“It’s not yours. The land belongs to everyone. There’s plenty enough to share. The time of stealing and killing is over. Soon, for the first time in history, there will be enough of everything for everyone. Why be stuck on the past when you can be part of the future?”

“Paleface.”

Liebchen came out of Winnie with a glassful of something that looked like a mixture of milk and pink grapefruit juice. “This will fix everything, my lady.”

“What’s that?” Mona asked.

“Something I had Winnie’s synthesizer make. It’ll make these guys go home and be happy,” the faun said proudly.

“You haven’t quite answered my question, Liebchen.”

“It is a behavorial modification compound that will change their perceptions and programming, my lady. It’ll make it so everybody’s happy.”

“What does it do?”

“It makes people see things the way they want to see them, and act the way they’re supposed to act, and be happy about it.”

“Give me that.” Mona spilled the stuff on the sand, trying to control her emotions. The source of Patricia’s problem was now obvious. “Liebchen, I don’t want you to make anything like this again.”

“Never, my lady? But it makes everybody happy.”

“Never! Well, not unless Uncle Martin tells you to.

Now go inside and go to sleep and stay asleep until we get home.”

“You’re not mad at me, are you, Lady Mona?” Liebchen was quivering, frightened.

“No, but you did make a mistake. Now do as you’re told.”

Patricia didn’t make the connection between her own problems and Liebchen’s, and followed the faun inside.

“Dirk, give this bunch a warning and let them go,” Mona said.

“Well, you heard the lady.” Dirk extended his dagger-claw in front of the boys’ noses. “If I had my way, I’d rough you up a bit more, or maybe chop off your hands to mark you as troublemakers.” Dirk’s claws sliced through the ropes as though they were spaghetti. “This time the Lady Mona was here to save you, but next time you won’t be so lucky. If I don’t get you, I have a million brothers who will. Now get out of here and take your buddy in the plaster with you.”

The boys required no further encouragement.

Well, that’s that problem, Mona thought. But there’s going to be hell to pay tomorrow.

From the point where Hastings was ejected from his plane to the outskirts of Life Valley was four hundred miles as the jet flies. It was more than twice that for a man who has to walk and live off the land.

Hastings was forced to consider fifteen miles a day to be good speed, and often he didn’t achieve it. But Hastings’ character and temperament were as solid as concrete. And like concrete, the more he was stressed, the more rigid he became. His small lean frame became thinner and harder from the continuous walking. His mind became narrower and harder as well.

Guibedo and Copernick had become for him the personification of all that was evil. They had murdered his family. They had destroyed his country. They had taken from him all that could possibly be good in the world.

Hastings had become something less than a human being. He had become a machine. A machine with only one function.

Vengeance.

Yet his intelligence never failed him.

He burned his uniform and dressed himself in rugged camping clothes that he found in Paradise, Nevada. He let his hair and beard grow long to blend into the crowds of refugees.

In an abandoned electronics repair store, he cobbled together a white-noise generator from a pocket radio. He took apart a choke coil and wove the fine copper wire into a tight-fitting skull cap. He spent hours fitting the cap so that his long hair went through it and the cap wasn’t noticeable at a distance. He put the radio in his shirt pocket and ran a wire under his arm to the skull cap at the back of his neck. Such a contrivance would have stopped a human telepath; it might work on the gene-engineered monsters, as well.

He found a strip of titanium in an abandoned workshop at Nellis Air Force Base, and painstakingly ground it into a gutting knife. He ripped the element from an electrical heater and fashioned the nichrome wire into a garrotte. In the explosives shed behind an abandoned air police office he found three bricks of C-4 explosive. Plastique. But the electrical detonators with them had had iron magnetos, and were useless.

Three weeks later at a construction site in Good Springs, he found some blasting caps with chemical fuses.

His confidence was starting to match his determination. The only way to stop a good man is to kill him.

And good men are damned hard to kill!

Dirk trotted into Guibedo’s workshop at Oakwood. Intent on his work, Guibedo was hunched over his incredibly ornate microscalpel.

“My lord.”

“Hi, Dirk.” Guibedo didn’t turn from his work. “I’ll be with you in five minutes. Such a beauty this one’s going to be, Dirk. It’s an eighty-foot Viking long boat with a square sail, oars, shields, and everything. Heiny’s gonna make an animal to work the oars and be the dragon’s head. It’s only got a ten-inch draft, so we can take it up the rivers and canals, but we can still take it on the ocean. Some fun, huh?”

“I’m sure it will provide considerable amusement, my lord,” Dirk said dryly. The frivolity of these humans!