Copernick's Rebellion

by Leo A. Frankowski

  “You think? I thought that Loran gizmo of yours was supposed to tell you where you were within a hundred yards.”

  “It does, usually, only it started to act up just after takeoff. It’s trying to tell me that we’re over Kentucky.”

  “You gotta believe your instruments, boy. First rule of instrument flight.”

  “Moe, we left Fort Scott, Kansas, fifty-five minutes ago. I have been flying into the sunset since then. This plane cruises at three hundred forty knots. Those are wheat fields down there. I’m not going to believe that I’ve flown five hundred forty miles due east.”

  “Well, hadn’t you better radio for help?”

  “The radio’s quit working, too. Both of them.”

  After hearing the news about the attempted bombing of Life Valley, von Bork had spent a day collecting up his two secretaries, Senator Beinheimer, and the staff of the Crystal City installation. He had piled them, along with absolutely no baggage, into his Cessna and topped off his fuel tanks. The senator’s name was sufficient to get them immediate clearance for takeoff at 1545.

  Dusk was coming down even more rapidily than the twin engine turbo prop. Very few lights showed in the farming country, and none of those lit up a suitable stretch of highway.

  Von Bork continued due west, heading for Life Valley, hoping that a lighted highway or—please God!—an airport would appear.

  At a thousand feet, he settled for the planted field up ahead. Lowering his landing gear and flaps (they worked!), he came in to what he thought was a wheat field.

  “Dear God… dear God… dear God,” Beinheimer muttered, clutching the armrest with fear-whitened fingers.

  “That the only prayer you know, Moe?”

  “The only one, by God, but it’s sincere! After this, I’ll learn some more. I swear I will!”

  “Hang on, gang!” von Bork shouted into the intercom. “The old barnstormers could do it, and we’re only eighty ahead of them in technology!”

  Von Bork was no farm boy, and what with the speed, altitude, and darkness, he was wrong about it being a wheat field; it was corn, tall Kansas corn.

  The Cessna’s landing gear had been designed for use on a surface infinitely harder than rich, tilled soil. All three wheels sheared off within twenty yards of touchdown. This was good, because von Bork’s air-speed indicator had been rendered grossly inaccurate by two metal-munching larva. He had come in more than eighty knots too fast.

  The Cessna sliced through the mile-wide cornfield, narrowly missing the center pivot irrigation machine. The wings took an amazing beating, each cornstalk sending its own thump through the airframe.

  The plane had slowed to sixty before the wing strut gave way almost exactly in the center and both wings tore off together. This too was lucky, for had one gone before the other, the plane would have rolled.

  The battered fuselage skidded to a stop, and all was suddenly quiet.

  Von Bork took his hands from the wheel, hardly able to believe it was over and he was alive. He said into the intercom: “How’s it going back there?”

  “We’re all okay, Mr. von Bork.”

  “Well,” von Bork said to Beinheimer, “I guess that was a good landing.”

  Public consternation was, of course, extreme. Every political body in the world sat in emergency session. Crash programs and task forces were funded, but none had time to accomplish anything. Research takes years. The larvae took only days. Accusations and counter—accusations flashed across national borders.

  India abruptly ceased all communication with the rest of the world on the same day that the swans flew. Israel, the fifth most powerful nation after Russia, the U.S., China, and India, took her silence as an admission of guilt for the metal-eating plague. The Israelis’ aircraft and missiles were already useless, but their tanks were made of thicker metal. Even perforated with holes, char—bram armor could stop most projectiles, and turbine engines contain little iron or aluminum. Damaged fuel tanks were fitted with plastic liners, gun barrels were given a cursory inspection, and the attack was launched.

  The last tank stopped twenty kilometers from its depot. A tread weakened by hundreds of holes had broken.

  So ended the last mechanized war the world would ever see.

  Radio and television stations suspended their regular programming, devoting their time to emergency broadcasts, but the messages from the world’s governments were monotonously similar: “Don’t panic. Stay in your homes. We’ll take care of you.”

  But there was nothing that anyone could do.

  Air time was also allotted to religious programs. A thousand priests, ministers, and shamans called on as many gods to help them, but the gods remained silent.

  Many of the religious leaders proclaimed that the end of the world was at hand. And in a sense, they were right.

  Trains, being made of thicker metal, lasted a week longer than cars or trucks. Their last freights were mostly food and water for the cities; very few places on Earth had more than a week’s supply of food on hand. Canned food became useless as the cans were slashed and destroyed. And the larvae soon riddled the refrigerator units that kept frozen food fresh. The trucks and trains that once brought fresh supplies no longer existed.

  The food trees sprouted quickly, and each grew six vines that spread out evenly for fifteen feet and then generated new roots at these spots. The space between was quickly covered with heart-shaped leaves, close to the ground. Each leaf had a red cross at its center. Though Guibedo had no love for the Red Cross (or any other organization, for that matter), the red cross was the only symbol of help that he could think of that was universally known.

  In six weeks each food plant would cover forty acres of land. Trees and other plants that were in the way were absorbed with remarkable rapidity. Animals found their leaves to be bitter and spat them out; those that persisted, died. Farmers who tried to uproot the new weed found that it recovered in hours. Herbicides were ineffective.

  In two months the dense ground cover would start to rise as tree trunks grew in a triangular pattern every fifteen feet. The trunks would grow to be eight feet tall. Only then, three months from planting, once there was enough photosynthetic area, would they start to produce food gourds on their trunks. But each tree could feed a thousand people.

  “The bridge is out,” Senator Beinheimer said.

  A farmer had driven the ten of them into town, at which point the truck’s engine failed due to a larva hole in the oil gallery.

  Three days in Bristol, Colorado, convinced von Bork that transportation was not available, and would probably never be available.

  Striking out on foot, they headed west.

  The two men and six women who were subordinate to von Bork were all Rejuves. They all had more than sixty years of experience. They all had healthy twenty-year-old bodies. Among them, they had a vast array of useful knowledge. How to pick mushrooms, how to dig roots, how to trap rabbits, and how to build shelter. Traveling upstream along the Arkansas River, they survived well. The senator was able to keep up, though his bones ached.

  It took them a month to cross the Colorado Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Now, on the downhill side, the road came quite literally to an end.

  “I said the bridge is out.”

  “Obviously,” von Bork said. “But that is the Gunnison River, and the Gunnison empties into the Colorado, and the Colorado pours into Lake Mead, spitting distance from Life Valley.”

  “You crazy, boy? You’re talking about maybe a thousand miles of white water.”

  “True. I’m also talking about riding instead of walking. Personally, I’m sick of walking. Who’s with me?”

  “We’re always with you, Mr. von Bork.”

  Senator Beinheimer was the last one down.

  Within a mile, they found an abandoned twelve-man rubber raft.

  Antenna towers are held stable by long steel cables, and when these were eaten through, the towers fell. Radio and TV stations went off the air.

&n
bsp; The orbiting communications satellites still operated but their crews could give no useful information to the people below because they themselves had no way of finding out what was happening.

  These stations, and those on the moon, were largely self-sufficient, and could survive several years without help from Earth. But they could provide no help in return.

  The world’s electrical power was cut off, as power towers crumpled and high-voltage wires crashed to the Earth. There was no way for most people to listen to the satellite broadcasts.

  No insects had been spread over the oceans, so ships at sea were generally not affected until they came to land. There they were promptly plagued by egg-laying mosquitoes. Most of them sank at the docks, their hulls riddled with holes. Some left and tried to make it to their home ports, and, of these, some made it back. But those that didn’t went down with all hands, as the lifeboats were in worse shape than the ships themselves.

  Small sailing craft, with plastic hulls and brass fittings, were largely unaffected. Most of these left port with jury-rigged wooden masts and manilla stays, their owners, or those who had stolen them, planning to eke out some sort of survival by fishing.

  The old, the infirm, the hospitalized were the worst affected. In some cases, the doctors resorted to euthanasia. In most, the ill were simply abandoned when nothing more could be done for them. In a few cases, dedicated medical staffs stayed with their patients.

  Several thousand self-proclaimed messiahs, quoting the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran, or one of a hundred similar texts, or claiming special divine, scientific, or political knowledge, gathered flocks eager to follow anyone who seemed to know what he was doing. Their net effect was beneficial, for many of these leaders led their people out of the cities.

  Without electrical power or water, cities became uninhabitable. Sanitation became nonexistent, and plagues broke out on a scale unknown since the Middle Ages.

  Mindless looting, murder, and rape became commonplace. Those authorities that still existed had neither communications nor weapons nor transportation. They were largely powerless, and few could do anything but protect themselves.

  Most people formed into small, local groups and were able to maintain some form of order within their tiny territories as the lawbreakers were no better armed and generally less well coordinated.

  * * *

  A great, silvered parabolic dish was constructed in Life Valley, targeted on a functioning communications satellite, and a message transmitted. With nothing else to transmit, the operators relayed it all over the globe on the commercial VHF and UHF frequencies.

  Consumer electronics contain little or no ion or aluminum. And those with battery-operated radios and televisions heard it.

  The voice was Heinrich Copernick’s, although, for linguistic reasons, the speaker was the CCU.

  “I am Heinrich Copernick. I have a message that is vital to your welfare. Be patient, and it will be repeated in your own language. An English-language broadcast will begin in ten minutes.” These lines, with appropriate broadcast times, were then repeated in Russian, Chinese, French, German, Hindustani, and fifty-three other languages and dialects.

  “We are in the midst of a devastating and historically unprecedented plague,” it continued in English. “As you are doubtless well aware, it is caused by an insect that is capable of metabolizing iron and aluminum. It has spread with incredible rapidity across the entire globe.

  “The biological metabolism of metals is not unprecedented. Iron bacteria have plagued corrosion engineers for many years. It is possible that these insects carry such bacteria, or have somehow incorporated DNA from these bacteria into their chromosomes.

  “It seems a law of nature that everything that can be eaten eventually will be eaten. Every possible ecological niche is eventually filled. Nature has finally caught up with us, at least insofar as our two most common metals are concerned.

  “Mankind is indeed fortunate that my uncle, Dr. Martin Guibedo, has developed a means of supplying food and shelter that does not depend on the metals we once used. I am speaking, of course, of the tree houses.

  “You are doubtless familiar with them. Just previous to the plague, an estimated three percent of the world’s population was living in them. These tree houses are capable of supporting, for a few months and at a bare sustenance level, ten times the number of people currently living with them. There is room for one third of humanity in the adult trees that already exist, and for all of humanity in the young trees that are now maturing.

  “Those of you now living in tree houses are urged to be generous. You must do this because all men are brothers; we cannot allow our brothers to starve needlessly.

  “And you must do this for your own self-protection, for a hungry man with a hungry family is a dangerous man. The people you invite into your homes can help protect you from the marauding gangs that now infest our world.

  “As mayor of a tree-house city growing in what was once Death Valley, I invite anyone who can come to join us. Our citizens are planting tree houses to accommodate you. We will do what we can to make your walk here as comfortable as possible.

  “In addition to this, we have planted ten million food trees across the Earth. Each of these trees will, in two months’ time, be able to feed one thousand people. Alone they will be able to feed all of humanity. Eat only the food pods that grow from the trunks. The leaves and branches are poisonous. These trees were designed by Dr. Martin Guibedo to combat the present crisis. One of them should now be growing for every five square miles of our Earth’s land. As each covers forty acres of land, they will be easy enough to spot. Each leaf has a small red cross in the center.

  “Because of the emergency, these trees were planted hurriedly and without regard to property rights. While we normally respect property rights, racial survival comes first.

  “Those of you who are living in cities and heavily populated areas must leave them at once. Staying where you are, you are in serious danger of dying from disease, fire, or starvation. Take what food and clothing you can, join others for self-protection, and head for the most isolated area you can find. Odds are a food tree will be there. If you go far enough, you will find food.

  “Besides developing new forms of plants, we have also developed several new forms of animals. One of these is called a Labor and Defense Unit. They resemble a walking kitchen table and I am afraid that they are rather ugly to look at, but they are honest policemen and good doctors. They are intelligent, fast, and deadly.

  “There are now one million LDUs. This is a very small force compared with the world’s population, but it seems to be the only one capable of acting on a worldwide basis. Because of this we are declaring martial law.

  “Murder, slavery, and the wanton destruction of food supplies, including tree houses and food trees, are hereby declared capital offenses. LDUs have been ordered to kill immediately anyone found committing these offenses.

  “It is not our intention to infringe the rights of any organized group. We will support any group capable of maintaining order within its local area, and we urge everyone to form such groups for mutual aid and self-protection, provided that obvious standards of conduct are maintained.

  “To summarize, there is more than enough food for everyone, but you must leave the cities to find it.

  “And a force of intelligent, strange-looking animals will be helping to maintain law and order. Please give them your complete cooperation.

  “I am Heinrich Copernick. I have a message that is vital to your welfare. Be patient, and it will be repeated in your own language. The next English-language broadcast will begin in twelve hours.”

  Guibedo, Copernick, Mona, Patricia, Liebchen, and Dirk listened to the broadcast in the living room at Oakwood, Guibedo’s home.

  “Heiny, you make me out for such a hero, I get embarrassed,” Guibedo said, switching off the radio.

  “You deserve it, Uncle Martin. It’s about time you got some recognition for your ac
complishments. But when times are rough—and they’ve never been worse—people need to know that there is someone, someplace, who can and will help them. They need a hero to keep their spirits up, and you’re handy.”

  “Well, I still get embarrassed.”

  “At least now there will be fewer people trying to kill you,” Copernick said.

  “Kill Martin!” Patricia was horrified, and Mona was startled. Liebchen was immediately in tears.

  “Nobody did it,” Guibedo said with his arms around Patricia and Liebchen. “Thanks mostly to Dirk and his buddies. We didn’t tell you about it because there wasn’t any point to making you worry.”

  “Thank you, Dirk,” Patricia said, gently stroking the LDU’s feathery back. Gently, because he had been badly burned in the fire a month before. LDUs with their four-stranded DNA healed almost as slowly as humans did. By comparison, the fauns, Ohura and Colleen, far more seriously injured, were almost completely well, although Ohura’s hair was still short and Colleen’s new leg was still three inches shorter than her old one.

  Liebchen was considerably more demonstrative than Patricia, jumping up and hugging Dirk as best she could. She kissed both of his eye stalks and then began working her way around his oval body, kissing all eight of his fixed eyes. Dirk caressed her back, and if her actions caused him any pain, he didn’t show it.

  “You know,” Guibedo said, “I think they’re in love.”

  “As you know, my lord, we’re both incapable of the romantic love of bisexual beings,” Dirk said. “Though I must confess that I rather enjoy having her around. Still, I wish I could join my brothers who are leaving tomorrow. There is so much work to do and so few to do it.”

  “Somebody has got to mind the store,” Guibedo said. “Only twenty of you will be left in the valley, and all of you are injured. You’ll have your share of work.”