Copernick's Rebellion

Chapter Four JUNE 12, 2000

ALL OF our realities are painted thinly on the void of our own preconceptions.

The problem of training intelligent engineered life forms is a case in point. I designed them with almost no internal motivational structure, except for a certain dog-like desire to please.

I made the major error of assuming that tabula rasa meant the same as carte blanche. It never occurred to me to explain to them things that I assumed were “intuitively obvious.” Things like kindness and decency and respect for life.

—Heinrich Copernick

From his log tape, on finding the tombstones of eighty-five families

Major General George Hastings, Commander, Air Force Intelligence, sat in his office in the Pentagon. He hadn’t slept in thirty hours. His face was haggard.

His wife and children had been missing for two days. They had gone off to spend a week in their new tree house at Lake George and had vanished.

Hastings had TDYed one of his best security teams to Lake George and now the report was back.

Nothing.

The car was parked, no unusual fingerprints on it. The soft path to the house showed only the footprints of Margaret and Jimmy and Beth. There was no ransom note. Nothing. They had vanished from the world just as Scratchon had.

Scratchon? Scratchon and Margaret both had tree houses!

Hastings hit the button on his intercom. “Pendelton!”

“Yes, sir,” a sleepy, obedient voice replied.

“Get Research out of bed.”

“The whole staff, sir?”

“Hell, yes! They are to determine the correlation between currently missing persons and Laurel series tree houses.”

Tree houses at four o’clock on a Sunday morning! “Yes, sir. Full Research staff, tree houses and missing persons.”

Nine hours and half a bottle of amphetamines later the answer came in. Correlation—32 percent.

Thirty-two percent of the people in the sample who owned Laurels were either officially missing or could not be contacted.

Hastings was making up a list of military and governmental officials to be informed of the correlation when Pendelton knocked and entered.

“Thought you should see this, sir.”

It was a day-old National Enquirer. On the front page was a color photograph of a desiccated female corpse half absorbed by a tree-house bed. From a delicate web of roots, a wedding band gleamed.

It was out of his hands now; Hastings went to his empty apartment to sleep and to cry.

A week later Hastings was back at his desk. He felt neither grief nor anger. Only a deadly emptiness that would never leave him.

A knock at the door was immediately followed by Sergeant Pendelton. “They got him, sir.”

“Got who?”

“Martin Guibedo, sir. The Michigan State Police picked him up north of Kalamazoo.”

“It took them long enough.”

“These people with tree houses rarely need to use credit cards, sir. It makes them hard to find. Here’s the report on tree-house occupation, sir.”

“Give it to me verbally.”

“Yes, sir. Basically, people have abandoned the Laurel series houses. But three other species are in common use, and the people in them generally intend to continue using them.”

“Idiots.”

“Yes, sir. The consensus is that it was a technical malfunction in a single product line, and that it does not cast discredit on the entire concept of bioengineering. It’s rather like the public reaction to the Hindenburg disaster seventy years ago, when people ceased using airships but continued to use airplanes.”

“Huh. Anything else?”

“Yes sir. Section Six requests that you visit them.”

“What is it, Ben?” Hastings said.

“We’re out of business, George. Nobody but Mike can pick up anything but a loud roar. It gives you a headache.”

“Somebody is jamming you?”

“We don’t know, George. But if so, they’re jamming everybody. We just got a phone call—a phone call, mind you—from Dolokov’s group at Minsk. Looks like the whole fraternity of telepaths is out of work.”

“Anything like this ever happen before?”

“We’ve picked up tiny spurts of interference before, George. The sort of unintelligible stuff you sometimes pick up near an unborn child, only much louder and more abrupt. There has always been a lot of static on the line, but nothing like this.”

“What about Mike?”

“He’s gone insane, George. He keeps yelling about lords and alpha numbers and digging in the ground and similar drivel. Nothing that makes sense.”

“Have you sedated him yet?”

“No point to it, George. With this racket going on, he can’t possibly affect the rest of us, and the transcribers might find something of interest in his babble.”

“Well, do as you feel best. But I suggest that you keep someone posted by Mike in case the jamming stops.”

“Okay, George. We don’t have anything else to do, anyway.”

“Oh, yer that Professor Guibedo,” Jimmy Saunton said, trying to control his shakes. “The guy with the tree houses. Somebody was telling me about ‘em. What do I have to do to get one, Professor?”

“Can you eat and make shit?” Guibedo asked, looking past his cellmate to the iron bars that formed the far wall. “That’s all you got to do.”

“Huh? Sure. But what do I got to do to get one?” The little drunk was used to being ignored.

“I just told you!” Guibedo barked. “Ach. I ain’t really mad at you. But since they arrested me, it’s been nothing but people, people, people, talking, talking, talking. I ain’t had no rest in three weeks.”

The little drunk was silent for a while. Then he said, “Sorry, Professor. Didn’t mean to rile you.”

“Well, I’m sorry, too. This ain’t your fault. What were you asking about?”

“About your tree houses,” Jimmy said.

“Oh, yeah. Well, the important thing you got to remember is that a tree house is in a symbiotic relationship with the people living inside it. It gives you a nice, comfortable place to live and all the food and beer you want. You give it the fertilizer it needs to stay alive and grow. That’s what caused all the trouble. Them big shots I gave the Laurel trees to, they mostly used the tree just to show off with and give parties in. Then they went and used the toilets in their regular houses!”

“Yeah, somebody was saying that your trees ate a lot of people.”