remarkably well developed body.
“You know,” Patricia said, “I’m sure we’ve never met. I would have remembered—but I get the darndest feeling of deja vu about you.”
“That was going to be my next line.” He laughed.
“You weren’t one of the people we brought in on Winnie? Or one of the people we saw on the road?”
“Afraid not,” he said. “I just came in from the west.”
“Oh. We’ve been mostly working east of here,” Patricia said.
“Lady Mona,” said the I/O unit next to the sugar bowl on the table, “Nancy Spencer is scaling up her cloth factory and wants your advice on a few things.”
“Tell her I’ll be right over,” Mona said. “It’s only a few doors from here, Patty. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
When Mona left, Patricia said, “I’m beginning to get the feeling that this is a setup.”
“It is. You haven’t asked my name yet.”
“Oh. I’m Patricia Cambridge.”
“I know. I’m Martin Guibedo.”
Patricia’s mouth hung open, so Guibedo just talked on to give her a chance to recover. “Heiny, he was after me to ‘take the cure’ for the last couple of years, and I finally decided that I was being pretty silly not to do it. As if what one person looked like would make any difference to the human race.”
“But that was so important to you—being yourself, I mean.”
“Talk to Dirk about that one. I think some of his Buddhism is rubbing off on me. He claims that there is no ‘self’; that every time you eat, you change the substance of your body. That every minute the cells of your body die and are replaced, that you get a whole new body every five or six years. And every person you meet, every book you read changes your mind a little bit. I sure don’t have much in common with that kid who walked out of Germany in the winter of forty.”
“No,” Patricia said after a bit. “You did it for me. Because I was too narrowminded to love you for what you were.”
“Then I’m just as narrowminded as you. I have my prejudices, too. Ach. Do you see me running after Mama Guilespe? I like her, sure. But I don’t want her any more than you wanted me six months ago.”
“I—I tried to get Liebchen to change me back,” Patricia said. “Isn’t that sad. I begged her to change my own prejudices.”
“Yah. But maybe that’s the ticket, though.”
“Having the fauns reprogram everybody?”
“No. That’s phony. I was thinking maybe what if we let everybody look the way they wanted to look. Think of the pain and suffering it would eliminate! Why shouldn’t Mama Guliespe be as pretty as you and Mona? I got to talk this over with Heiny.”
“It’s a beautiful idea, Martin. As it is, half of the human race is left out of things because they’re not pretty or handsome.”
“Yah. I think maybe, in a couple of years, once things settle down, we do it.”
“And their brains? Could you make someone smarter if they wanted it?” Patricia asked hopefully.
“Sure. Same thing. Why? Something wrong with your pretty head?”
“It’s kind of frustrating, being the dumbest kid on the block. It’s bad enough being lost when you and Heinrich are talking, but I can’t even hold a candle to Mona.”
“Well, that figures. Heiny, he made Mona with an IQ of 160.”
“Made her?”
“Nobody told you? Heiny was always a shy kid around girls, so as soon as he could, he made his own wife.”
Patricia was silent awhile. “He was that far along twenty years ago?”
“No. Six years ago. Mona is five. Heiny grew her full sized in a bottle and educated her with a direct computer interface. Sent her to finishing school for a year and married her. Heh. That Heiny.” Guibedo chuckled.
“But she loves him so much.”
“And he loves her. What does that have to do with making you a little bit smarter?”
“You mean I can?”
“We can start this afternoon if you want. Anything else you want changed? Maybe a little bigger around the…” He reached for one of Patricia’s breasts.
She slapped his hand away. They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Patricia said, “Martin, do you really think that we can start over again?”
“I think that we can try.”
Two weeks later Guibedo, Patricia, and the Copernicks, along with the fauns and Dirk, were sprawled out in Pinecroft’s enormous living room.
“It feels so good to relax,” Copernick said, working on a martini. “I think I’ll sleep for about a week. We’re over the hump now. The food trees are finally producing, and the cities have been pretty much evacuated. The plagues have been licked, and the western hemisphere is fairly tranquil. The LDUs are massing to cross over into Asia, and with the experiences they’ve had here, they shouldn’t have too much trouble getting the eastern hemisphere squared away.”
“You’ve done such a magnificient job,” Patricia said. “Without you and Martin, I don’t think civilization would have made it.”
“I haven’t much thought about it, really. It’s been mostly a matter of beating down one brush fire after another.”
“The world will never be able to properly repay you,” Patricia said.
“I hope not!” Guibedo said. “Don’t go building any statues to us; we ain’t dead yet. The other reason I made this new body of mine was all the little old ladies and dirty kids gushing all over me.” He turned toward Copernick. “Heiny, you thought over that self—improvement plan I mentioned to you?”
“Some. But I think we ought to give the idea a year or two to gel before we do anything about it. For one thing, there are too many immediate problems around for us to be working on such long-term goals. For another thing, we’d be messing with the evolution of our own race. The modifications you’re talking about aren’t a mere cosmetic change. You’re talking about physical and mental changes that would breed true.”
“But the human race is in such terrible shape genetically,” Patricia said. “Over one percent of the children born have some sort of birth defect, most of which are corrected surgically but not genetically. For thousands of years the doctors have been helping the weak to survive while the politicians have been sending the healthiest young men out to be killed in wars. Something has to be done about the corruption of the gene pool; we can hardly let nature take its course. Why, if I hadn’t had an appendectomy when I was ten, I wouldn’t be here. And neither would half of the rest of the human race.”
“That much is fine, Patty,” Mona said. “But it isn’t just a question of patching up the errors. It’s a question of how the human race should evolve. If you were to ask a group of gorillas to design a supergorilla, what would you get? Bigger muscles and longer fangs! No way would they go to a smaller body, more delicate hands, an erect posture, and more cranial development. Yet is there any doubt that humans are a superior species? People, given the choice, will certainly become more attractive and perhaps more intelligent. I’m sure they won’t choose to have dental cavities or appendixes or head colds. Our eyesight will be good and our coordination perfect. But we’ll be no closer to that evolutionary step than that supergorilla, because we’re locked into our own prejudices as to what superior is.
“The trouble is, that in the course of correcting our obvious faults, we might cancel out something worth saving because we don’t know what it is.”
“But, Mona,” Guibedo said. “That’s just the advantage to my scheme. If we let each of ten billion people make himself into whatever he wants, the odds are that somebody is going to stumble onto something really good. Odds are it will increase our evolutionary speed, with rational, not random experimentation.”
“Well, we could argue about this one for years. And I think we should.” Heinrich set down an empty glass. “But in the meantime I’m going to bed. Wake me up on Tuesday.”
