Liebchen and Dirk were in the communications room with the CCU.
“Well, I still don’t understand it,” Liebchen said. “I make a couple of teensy little changes to one human, just to make her happy, and everybody gets all upset. So I put her back the way she was, and the next thing you know, Lord Guibedo makes over his entire body and Lady Patricia wants me to put her back to the way she was after I changed her the first time. Then he kicks her IQ up to one hundred sixty-five and makes her breasts as big as grapefruits. And now they’re talking about modifying everybody in the world! I don’t think I’ll ever understand humans.”
“They are confusing and quite irrational,” Dirk said. “But as best as I can make it out, the problem turns on the concept of free will.”
“What’s that?”
“I know it’s hard to understand,” Dirk said, “but the programming of humans is so random and haphazard that they are unable to comprehend it themselves. They are actually unable to explain why they do what they do, even to each other. So they have invented a concept called an ego, or a will, and claim it has complete freedom of action, as though it had no previous programming or external stimulus.”
“Come on, Dirk,” Liebchen said. “You talk like that when you’re cheating at pinochle. I mean, humans are a little strange, but they’re not crazy. No programming or stimulus, indeed.”
“I’m dead serious, Liebchen. Tell her, CCU.”
“He’s right, Liebchen,” the CCU said. “Actually, had you asked Lady Patricia’s permission before you gave her your modification, the whole problem would probably have never occurred.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me I was supposed to ask permission?” Liebchen shouted at the CCU.
“Well, for one thing, I’m not supposed to speak unless spoken to. If I were to give my opinion whenever I felt it would be useful, humans would find me intolerable. You’d be amazed at what I hear every day. For another, had you asked permission to modify her, she most likely would have refused. But my main reason was that I agreed with your basic motivation. You made Lord Guibedo happy. Here was a sentient being who was ultimately responsible for saving his entire species from extinction. At the rate they were going, humans would have wiped themselves out in a century or so, but for Guibedo’s biological techniques. Here was a being who was ultimately responsible for my own existence, and both of yours. Lord Copernick, after all, built on his technology. Yet he was lonely and lacked a mate. There are five billion human females on this planet, and not one stepped up to comfort him.
“The debt that is owed him couldn’t be wiped out by a million females, let alone one.”
“You love him, too, don’t you,” Liebchen said.
“Love?” the CCU said. “I’m not sure I understand that concept. But I do understand our obligation to him, and to the human race in general. In a sense, they are our parents, and we owe it to them to make their twilight years as pleasant as possible.”
“Twilight years?” Dirk asked. “Are they having racial difficulties?”
“It is difficult to make accurate predictions beyond five or six hundred years,” the CCU said. “But they are such an irrational and violent species that I would consider it unlikely for them to be around in three or four millennia. Quite a short time span by our standards.
“Furthermore, we require them for our own existence. We are symbionts; we require human feces to keep the trees alive.”
“Now
“Interesting,” the CCU said. “I wonder why I didn’t think of that. Probably one of my mental blocks. But I still favor keeping them around.”
“Oh, so do I,” Liebchen said. “Taking care of people is kind of fun.”
About the Author
Leo Frankowski was born on February 13, 1943, in Detroit. By the time he was thirty-five, he had held more than a hundred different positions, ranging from “scientist” in an electro-optics research lab to gardener to chief engineer. Much of his work was in chemical, optical, and physical instrumentation, and earned him a number of U.S. patents.
Since 1977, he has owned and managed Sterling Manufacturing & Design, the only mostly female engineering company in the Detroit area. Sterling designs electrical and fluid power controls for automatic special machines. It also produces Formital®, a stretchy metal that is useful in fixing rusty cars.
Last week, he acquired Reluctant Publishing, Ltd., and is now the editor of Stardate Magazine, because it looked like fun.
He is active in MENSA, the Society for Creative Anachronism and science-fiction fandom. He is an officer in two writers’ clubs, and his hobbies include reading, drinking, chess, kite flying, dancing girls, and cooking.
A lifelong bachelor, he lives alone in Sterling Heights, Michigan.
Copyright
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1987 by Leo A. Frankowski
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 86-91592
ISBN 0-345-34033-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: April 1987 Second Printing: July 1989
Cover Art by Ralph McQuarrie
ebook scan & proof by MOS1, December 2004
