“Oh, no, my lord, I’m picking this up from Alpha 001256. He wants to be called Blade. May he do so, my lord?”
“Sure. Anything to keep our boys at the front happy. Heiny sure did some nice thinking with you guys.” LDUs were now returning to the end of the tunnel with loads of dirt. The tunnel was wide enough for only two to pass, and Guibedo marveled at their coordination as empty LDUs from behind alternated with loaded LDUs from in front to pass the slower-moving Dirk.
“It looks like we’re a moving roadblock, Dirk.”
“We’re not seriously slowing progress, my lord,” Dirk said. “If I traveled much faster, conversation would be difficult above the wind noise. My brothers and I are enjoying this talk.”
“Yah. I guess I am talking to all of you,” Guibedo said. “What are they saying?”
“My brothers are mostly picking names for themselves, my lord.”
“Anybody got Black Bart yet?”
“No, my lord. Thus far, each of my brothers has wanted to be named after a weapon.”
“No, my lord. We don’t have sex.”
“Such a pity. So how do you reproduce?”
“In the strictest sense of the word, we don’t, my lord.”
“Then how do you get little LDUs?” Guibedo asked.
“Lord Copernick worried that an opponent might breed us for his own needs, my lord, so he caused our eggs to grow from a nonsentient mother being which lives on the ceiling of a vault below his tree house.”
“I wondered why Heiny wanted so much room,” said Guibedo. “How many eggs you got growing down there?”
“Approximately three hundred thousand, my lord, a third of which are now available for hatching.”
“Why so many?” Talking in a windstorm was making Guibedo hoarse.
“My Lord Copernick calls it his insurance policy,” Dirk said. “And, of course, the large numbers don’t cost him anything in time or money.”
“You know, Dirk, I can see how it could be kinda rough, being an LDU. No girls, no father, no mother, no sisters—”
“But a lot of brothers, my lord. We feel rather sorry for you humans. You take so long to grow, then die so soon.”
“You guys don’t die?”
“We can die if sufficiently injured, but we aren’t troubled with diseases. We don’t age or have a finite lifespan.
“But you humans die without ever being able to communicate, except with your clumsy language. How do you fight the loneliness?”
“It ain’t so bad like you make it out. We humans have bonds with each other, but maybe you wouldn’t understand. Friendship, love, kinship with other individuals. And a man who is wise knows that there is a bond between all men. All men are brothers, Dirk, even if we don’t act like it. Everybody counts, nobody should be forgotten.” Actually, Guibedo treasured bis solitude as much as any other hermit did, but he was not sufficiently introspective to notice his own hyprocisy.
“And we got other ways of communication besides words. Actions talk, and we have our ceremonies.”
“Ceremonies, my lord? Could you describe them?”
“Sure. I can see you’re a sociology minor. Whenever something happens to a human that’s important to him, he’s got to have a ceremony. There’s simple ones like shaking hands. Two people meet and want to be friendly, they shake hands. And there’s more complicated ones—”
For the next quarter hour, at Dirk’s prodding, Guibedo talked on about the human ceremonies connected with Birth, Friendship, Love, Hate, Marriage, and Death. Dirk seemed especially interested in burial ceremonies, a fascination that Guibedo ascribed to Dirk’s own deathlessness.
They left the tunnel and entered a starlit abandoned gravel pit. Dirk stopped in front of a seven-foot-tall man. He was magnificently muscled, and his head was large for his body. “Uncle Martin!” Heinrich Copernick stepped away from his battered van. “I see you got out in one piece.”
“Yah, that you, Heiny? That was one hell of a tunnel your boys dug.”
“We figured you were worth it.”
“But why such a long tunnel, Heiny?”
“Logistics, Uncle Martin. For one thing, I needed someplace to put five million cubic feet of dirt. For another thing, there was the problem of feeding ten thousand LDUs. They only eat a fluid that your tree houses produce. There’s a community of eighty-five full-sized tree houses a mile from here, and I was able to grow food synthesizers in their roots, even though plant engineering is hardly my forte.”
“Only eighty-five trees?” asked Guibedo, doing some quick mental calculations. “They could produce enough food?”
“Well, I’m afraid I had to shut down the rest of their services, Uncle Martin. I was up there a couple days ago, and everybody was gone. But the trees will revert to their original state once the tunnel is filled in. The people will return.”
“Well, I hope so,” Guibedo said. “I guess you got to do things like that in an emergency. Why didn’t you tell me you made guys like Dirk, here, Heiny?”
“You’ve just answered your own question, you damned old iconoclast.” Copernick laughed. “You spend a half hour with my LDUs and they’ve got proper names! In a day you’d have them demanding private rooms, time and a half for overtime, and a grievance committee!”
“Maybe not such a bad idea, Heiny. You’d make a fortune hiring these guys out as a construction team. You didn’t have any trouble digging that tunnel, did you?”
“Oh, there was some sort of a security problem once when I was gone, but the LDUs took care of it,” Heinrich called over his shoulder as he walked toward the van.
“See!” Guibedo said. “They’d make a
“I thought about it, but there are the building people and the labor unions to contend with. And look at all the trouble your publicity got you into. Still, lack of money is slowing us down,” Heinrich said, getting into the driver’s seat.
“You know, Heiny, when I was in jail, I got to thinking about catalytic extraction and refining. We could make a tree that could extract heavy metals from the soil…”
The two were lost in technicalities as they drove away.
Three platoons of LDUs left the tunnel-filling and went about special tasks.
One platoon began cutting rectangular slabs of stone, polishing them smooth, and carving names and dates.
Another dug rectangular holes, pleasantly arranged, on a hilltop.
The third platoon exhumed the bodies of eighty-five families who had presented such a security problem, who had been so unamenable to reason.
When the work had been completed and ritual prayers had been said, Dirk thought to his brothers,
Chapter Five
JUNE 5, 2001
