Copernick's Rebellion

by Leo A. Frankowski

  The dirt was too shallow for burial, so Claymore re—stacked the woodpile into a rectangle seven feet by fourteen by five feet high and dragged the seven bodies to the top of it. He found a glass jug of kerosene and some matches in the house, said the ritual prayers that humans were fond of, and lit it afire.

  Whoever is on duty at the Central Coordination Unit. Claymore here.

  Dirk here for the CCU. Shoot.

  Claymore here. Don’t say that. I did and I was. I’ve been in action that resulted in a bullet breaking my right arm. Request permission to return to Life Valley for R and R.

  There was a three-second delay.

  Dirk here. Permission granted. The luck you’ve had. You’re out of action for a month losing your bird, and now, thirty minutes after getting to your duty station, you’re coming back again.

  Claymore here. Those are the breaks.

  Dirk here. Well, if you’re still punning, you can’t be too bad off. I’ll tell Ishtar you’re coming. Dirk out.

  Others were not as bad off. The farmers lost their machinery and most of their houses, but they were traditionally self-reliant. In the northern hemisphere, the crops were ready for harvest. For the first time in many years, there was a surplus of eager, if unskilled, labor.

  In general, the less technically advanced were the least affected. The few remaining Eskimos were annoyed when their outboard motors, snowmobiles, and rifles were eaten, but the old ones knew how to do without such things. They taught the younger men, and gained considerable prestige and security.

  Except for Hawaii and other islands with military bases, the Pacific was not plagued with the metal-eating larvae. On the Marshall out-islands, the people listened to their radios with detached interest. The troubles of the outside world provided a useful source of gossip, nothing more. Little had ever been done to them, and less for them. Bare-breasted native girls danced, laughing, at the usual ceremonies.

  Throughout the underdeveloped world, crowded masses trudged on in despair, as they had done for a hundred years. Yet, in many, there was a glow of hope. They had been promised enough food for all. If that was true, it was indeed a blessing, because no one could remember a time when there had been enough for everyone.

  In the American west, many American Indians were happy. Organized, intelligent, and poor, but with plenty of land, they had wholeheartedly accepted the tree houses as soon as the seeds had become available. Over half the American Indian population already lived in tree houses, so the larvae did not cause them extreme inconveniences.

  The old chiefs, the wise men, the men of power were smugly contented. As they had so often predicted, the insanities of the white man had finally caught up with him. They had even heard one of them admit as much on the radio, and in their own language. Before the radios went silent, the old ways would return, and perhaps even the buffalo.

  The young men were not content, but eager. They remembered the old stories, and told them to each other. The time of defeat and drudgery and shame was over. There would again be a time when skill and courage and honor counted.

  Russia went the way of Europe and North America, with a breakdown of communications and central authority. From her crumbling cities came the long lines of refugees. Her countryside, too, was in a difficult position, as the workers on the large collective farms did not have the tradition of self-reliance that kept farmers in other parts of the world relatively unaffected.

  China was in relatively good shape. The large population was dispersed, and not far from food supplies. In sixty years the farms had only been lightly mechanized; that work was wasted, but survival was not a serious problem.

  Japan’s problems were most serious. Tree houses had never really caught on there, and most of its food had been brought to her ports on ships that were no more. The Japanese could only hope that the voice on the radio had told the truth.

  From Life Valley, one million LDUs, their language lessons completed, trotted toward their assigned areas. Each was to watch over the safety of ten thousand humans, and they had doubts as to the possibility of doing the job well.

  Each platoon of one hundred had with it two Betas with their observation birds and one mind-reading Gamma unit. The birds were important to locate tree houses. All of the recent models had an external spigot that gave out the food that the LDUs ate. They would need to find many of these on the trek ahead.

  Chapter Ten

  JULY 22, 2003

  I HAVE enlarged my memory banks in order to better accommodate the influx of data on the increasing number of humans entering the valley.

  In future daily reports on each human, you must prefix each notation with the code number which I have assigned to that human. Because of the prejudices of the humans, it is imperative that no human learns his own number, or even that such numbers exist.

  These records will be useful in making long-term prognoses; the data will will not be available to humans because of our “right to privacy” directive.

  —Central Coordination Unit to all local ganglia

  Hastings remembered how a month ago he had awakened hot on the desert sand. He had lain there for minutes, trying to figure out where he was and why he was there. His last memories had been of relaxing in the F-38, mentally preparing himself to drop his first atomic bomb.

  What did they hit me with? he thought.

  Cautiously he moved the various parts of his body. Nothing broken. He got up and stripped off his suit and parachute. He found the standard-issue survival pack. Food. A .22-caliber handgun. Compass and maps. A canteen of distilled water. A manual. A radio that didn’t work.

  He drank deeply, knowing that rationing the water was a bad idea. Better to drink now and get the full cooling benefit of the water. He rigged the parachute into a sunshade and waited for Air Rescue for a day and a half. It didn’t get there. He made an arrow with rocks to show his direction of travel.

  The next evening, at moonrise, he picked up his belongings and started walking southwest, toward Death Valley.

  “Who was it that said that the only way to stop a good man is to kill him?” he said to the rocks. “Funny, I can’t remember.”

  He walked until sunrise without seeing any sign of man, not even a plane. He found the shelter of an overhanging rock and survived the day. At moonrise, he finished his water and walked on. The only sign of life was a shiny mosquito that seemed to be in love with his belt buckle.

  The next morning his urine looked like Bock beer and he started to worry.

  He woke to find a larva eating a hole in the barrel of his pistol. He tried to scream, but his throat was too dry to make a sound. He struggled to his feet, staggered a hundred yards, and fell down. He knew then that he was a dead man. He rolled over, put himself in a dignified posture, and prepared his mind for death.

  He woke to find a gourd of water being held to his mouth by a powerful tan hand. He gulped the water.

  “Slowly at first, sir.”

  Something was strange about the wrist. Yes, there was a slot in it. He jerked himself upright, spilling some of the water.

  “You’re one of them!” Hastings croaked.

  “I suppose so, sir.” The LDU rescued the water gourd. “I’m Labor and Defense Unit Alpha 362729. My friends call me K’kingee.”

  Hastings took another drink of water.

  “What makes you think that I’m your friend?”

  “I presumed that you would feel a certain amount of gratitude, sir.”

  “I guess I do. Thank you. Am I a prisoner of war?”

  “You are not a prisoner of anything, sir.”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Had I intended that, it would have been more efficient to have simply let you die.”

  “Don’t you realize what I am?”

  “You are a human being, sir.”

  “I mean the uniform.”

  “Your clothing indicates that you were a general officer in the United States Air Force.”

  “
What do you mean ‘were’?”

  “The Air Force no longer exists, sir. At least it no longer has aircraft capable of flight.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I didn’t manage it, sir. Didn’t you notice the larva that is eating your pistol?”

  “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.

  As they approached the hospital, they heard the nurse screaming from the second floor, where he found a Siberian tiger busily devouring the body of a woman who had been dying of cancer. The tiger viewed Tao’s appearance as a threat to its first meal in eight days. Roaring, it charged.

  The tiger weighed seven-hundred pounds, more than twice that of the LDU, but in speed, intelligence, and ferocity, there was no contest. As the tiger leaped, Tao dropped below him. Thrusting a foot-long dagger-claw between the tiger’s swinging forepaws, he slit its throat to the spinal column. As the dead tiger hit the floor, Tao was already examining the patients in the room.

  Both were dead.

  The nurse entered as Tao was tying the tiger’s carcass upside down to the ceiling with Venetian blind cords.

  “Oh, thank you, Tao. The patients—”

  “Are both dead. I’ll attend to their bodies. You must care for the living. Get the men in the courtyard working. I want this building evacuated by evening. And send one of them, Antonio Biseglio, up here.”

  “Yes, sir. What are you doing?” the nurse asked.

  “We have three hundred hungry people here, and this carcass is protein edible for your species.” He had the tiger skinned and gutted, and was slicing the meat into one-inch cubes.

  “But it’s a tiger!”

  “Protein. Look, they’re eating a rhinoceros in Griffith Park. Just tell people it’s beef. Now move!”

  Antonio Biseglio arrived shortly. “You wanted me, boss?”

  “I would prefer that you didn’t use honorifics on me. Except in emergencies, we LDUs maintain a subordinate role to humans.”

  “Sorry, Tao.”

  “Better. Now, people are hungry, you’re a cook, and this is meat. Do something,” Tao said as he worked.

  “Cat meat?”

  “The Watusi consider it a delicacy. Tell people it’s beef.”

  “I don’t have any utensils.”