Copernick's Rebellion

by Leo A. Frankowski

  “Telephone, tell him I’m going to take a couple days off this morning. I see him maybe Tuesday.”

  “He said it was important, my lord. My Central Coordination Unit has compiled some critical information.”

  “So what’s the information? You’re the same animal, aren’t you?”

  “I am, my lord, but I didn’t tell me what it was.”

  “Some coordination you got there. Tuesday!” Guibedo turned away from the telephone. “Hey, Dirk! Bring some cards. With you here, Patty, we can play two teams, you and Liebchen against me and Dirk, so they gotta play fair. With playing three-hand cutthroat, they let me all the time win.”

  “Never, my lord,” Dirk said, a pinochle deck in his hand. His lateral tentacles were holding a book in front of his starboard eyes.

  “Ach! You know, Patty, Dirk never used to lie until he started into philosophy. Dirk, what are you reading now?”

  “The Shih Ching, my lord,” Dirk said, shuffling and dealing, “a poetry anthology commonly said to have been edited by Confucious.”

  “Twenty-one!” Patty said. “Martin, how can Dirk read and play cards at the same time?” She still didn’t feel comfortable around the LDU.

  “He’s got six pairs of brains, Patty. Heiny made him so he could figure strategy, tactics, and where he was putting his foot all at the same time. So right now, one chunk of him is reading, another chunk is playing cards, some other chunk better be keeping score, and part of him is probably gabbing with his brothers. Twenty-two.”

  “Gabbing?” Patty said. “How?”

  “They’re telepathic with each other,” Guibedo said, “not with you and me. Your bid, Liebchen.”

  “Oh, pass! Dirk, pull in your eyes. You’re cheating again.”

  Dirk retracted his yard long eye tentacles, turned a page of the book, and said, “Twenty-four.”

  “Twenty-five. Martin, if you have practical telepathy, what do you need with the telephone?”

  “Thirty. Telepathy has only got one channel, Patty. We humans only use it for emergencies, and this isn’t one of them.”

  “I’m afraid it is, Uncle Martin,” Dirk said in Heinrich Copernick’s voice. “Please get over here as soon as you can.”

  “But I wanted to show Patty around town this morning, Heiny. And I got a run and five aces and Dirk just gave me meld bid!”

  “So play the hand later. Say, how about if I ask Mona to show Patty around, Uncle Martin? It’ll give the girls a chance to get acquainted.”

  “Ach! Heiny, it better be good,” Guibedo said. “You gonna like Mona. Patty, we get together later on. I’ll call you.”

  “How? I mean, if I’m going to be out all day—”

  “The telephone knows where you’re at.”

  “My mother doesn’t know where I am. Can I make a few calls?”

  “It’s your house, too, Patty. If you call outside the valley, they get a telegram. Come on, Dirk, we go the low way,” Guibedo said, leaving.

  Liebchen started cleaning up the kitchen, putting the cards away in four neat stacks and only peeking a little bit.

  “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.

  “In the absence of any active role on our part, the probability of total nuclear war in the next fifty years is point seven two, due primarily to proliferation of atomic weapons among the smaller nations. Due to increased mobility between population centers, increased population in the underdeveloped nations, and a general lowering of living standards, the probability of devastating plague by 2050 is point eight eight. Extrapolating present demographic trends, by 2050 the population of the underdeveloped nations will outnumber that of the developed nations twenty-seven to one. The probability of the increased population’s resulting in famine and causing a conventional war which will mutate to an unsurvivable thermonuclear war is point nine three. Famine could be delayed by increased industrialization, but the resultant pollutants would render the world uninhabitable by 2090. The net probability of civilization surviving on Earth is point zero two at 2050, approaching point zero zero by 2100.”

  There were no formal laws or rules in Life Valley, so there was no formal prohibition of mechanical transportation. However, the general layout of houses, parks, fields, and shops was such that anything larger than a bicycle would have a hard time getting through, and, in fact, most people walked.

  Very few people considered it a hardship. Since the necessities were produced in each home, the only commerce was in luxury items, and such things are easily carried.

  “It’s incredibly beautiful here,” Patricia said. What was once a horrid jungle to her now seemed a fairyland, yet she did not notice her own change in attitude. “It’s as though every path was asking me to walk down it.”

  “Heinrich and Uncle Martin spent a lot of time on the design,” Mona said. “Notice that no matter what time of day it is, the trees and shrubs are arranged so that on any path you can walk in either the sun or the shade.”

  “And the way everything curves, Mona. With every step, the view changes, something else shows up.”

  “That was part of the plan, too.”

  Clothing styles in the valley were varied and occasionally bizarre. A fair number of people followed Guibedo’s lead, wearing ethnic costumes, while others ranged from blue jeans to complete nudity. Mona wore a sarong around her hips and a smile.

  Patty, still in businesslike microshorts and transparent top, felt a little out of place, and said so.

  “No problem for now, Patty. Just take off your top if you’re hot. But you should have something formal for tonight. Perhaps a chiton, since they’re doing Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex at the bandshell tonight and Heinrich promised to take me. You can work on Uncle Martin at dinner.

  “Anyway, next stop’s at Nancy Spencer’s. She’s the best seamstress in the valley.”

  “Ach!” Guibedo’s face was white. “We knew it was going to be bad. That’s why we started the biological revolution. But I never thought it would be this bad. Heiny, have you double-checked all this? Is it really true?”

  “I funded a research group with the Rand people six months ago. I got their report this morning. Their figures are substantially the same as the CCU’s.”

  “Then we got no choice. We got to fight. You have a strategy worked out for it yet?”

  “The CCU and I have been working on it for weeks. While the LDUs can hold their own against conventional troops, they are only marginally effective against armor. They are totally ineffective against air power. When I designed them, I was thinking in terms of a police force and a medical corps. I didn’t realize then that we would be facing a real war. No bird I could possibly come up with could stand a chance against aircraft, let alone orbital beam weapons.

  “Our only possible strategy is dispersion, using basic guerrilla tactics over a wide area. Logistics must be handled locally, since we must presume that all of our strong points, including Life Valley, will be obliterated.

  “What we need, Uncle Martin, is a tree that doesn’t require someone living in it. That merely provides food for people and the LDUs. Something that is more vigorous than natural plants, so it will supplant them. Something that reproduces with spores rather than seeds, so our opponents can’t stop their proliferation.”

  “Sure, Heiny, I could do that. But maybe I better give the species a finite lifespan, so we get rid of them after the war.”

  “Good idea, Uncle Martin. But this war could last fifteen years.”

  “So long?”

  “Guerrilla wars are like that.”

  “But why does it have to be a guerrilla war, Heiny? They’ve got to be the worst kind. How about the socialist and communist countries? They’re growing my trees. Why can’t we just move there? If we go to China and they attack us, they’re attacking China, so we have an ally!”

  “The Eastern Bloc is growing trees because it solves some of their short-term problems. They haven’t yet realized that when the means of production and distribution are in each man’s own home, he doesn’t need a central government any more. Eventually the commissars are going to realize that they are being put out of work. People who run governments like running governments. We don’t have any allies, Uncle Martin.”

  “Yah. Th
e big-shot problem. But still, there’s got to be a better way. So what are our chances of winning this war, anyhow?”

  “Quite good, my lord,” the CCU said. “I estimate a point two two probability of success.”

  “That’s good?”

  “It is, my lord, compared to the probability that civilization will cease to exist within the next century if we do not fight this war.”

  “You figured out how many people are going to die in this thing?”

  The CCU said, “Best estimates are around two hundred million—two percent of the world’s population, my lord—assuming that we make preserving human life a major strategic objective.”

  “So many! You say that so easy, sitting here,” Guibedo said.

  “My lord, I am sentient. I do not want to die. But I am immobile, in the center of our opponent’s major target area. In none of the scenarios that we have examined do I have any chance of survival. The probability that I will be dead within two years is one.”

  “Sorry, fella,” Guibedo said. “Don’t tell me what my own chances are.”

  “My lord, throughout history, every major social, political, or religious upheaval has caused the death of from three to five percent of the population involved. The industrial revolution cost four point two percent of England’s population through starvation and disease. The Russian Revolution cost three point seven percent; the French Revolution, three point six percent; the American Revolution, one point one percent plus an equivalent two point three percent foreign troops. Even the ‘peace—fill’ division of India and Pakistan starved out or killed three point five percent of the population.

  “The two percent estimate I gave you for the upcoming revolution was based on the assumption of the loss of one billion LDUs and similar beings. This time, perhaps we can do some of the dying for you.”

  Heinrich Copernick and Martin Guibedo were silent for a long while.

  Patricia and Mona walked through a series of meadows that dotted the sides of a clear brook, passing over a dozen small bridges. As they did so, the path wound and twisted past and over trout ponds, grottoes, and fountains; it was the antithesis of a superhighway, designed not to be efficient but to make each step of a journey pleasant and interesting.