“So what’s your specialty?” Guibedo asked.
“Unarmed combat, with a minor in sociology, my lord.” The LDU crowded closer to the left-hand wall of the tunnel. They were no longer passing the concrete carriers, and LDUs with empty baskets were passing them at an astounding speed.
“Pretty quick, your buddies are.”
“Cruising speed for an LDU is forty mph, my lord, although we can go sixty for short durations.”
“Unarmed combat?” Guibedo said. “If you were expecting trouble, why go unarmed?”
“My lord, I mean no external armament.” From a slot above each wrist, a bayonetlike claw extended out to a foot past the knuckles. “They are a trifle dull from cutting through the concrete floor, but they are still quite serviceable.”
“Cutting through concrete! How you do that?”
“Diamond is just another carbon compound, my lord.”
“And carbon is one of the things that we are all made of.” Guibedo laughed. “So you were expecting trouble.”
“We couldn’t know if there would be resistance or not, my lord. Nor could we be sure that we would come up in the right cell of the prison. We Alpha series are only telepathic with one another, not with humans.”
“Betcha Heiny’s working on that, though.”
“Yes, my lord. As I understand it, the Gamma series LDU is to have a malleable nerve net. It is hoped that they will be able to at least receive telepathically from other species, such as man.”
“Well, I’m not so sure I like that, uh—what was your name again?” Guibedo asked.
“Alpha 001723, my lord.”
“Not your number. Your name.”
“I have no other designation, my lord.”
“A nice guy like you oughta have a name, not a number.”
“Do you really think I could, my lord? I mean, it would be permitted?”
“Sure thing. Why not? Pick any name you want.”
“Well, my lord, I think I would like to be called Dirk.”
“Dirk, huh? I was thinking maybe Rover, but if it’s Dirk you want, it’s Dirk you’ll get.”
“Thank you, my lord!”
“Anytime. How old are you, Dirk?”
“I hatched three months ago, my lord, although I was sentient before then.”
“Three months old. Well, I guess that explains it,” Guibedo mused. “So you were sentient inside your egg. That must have been strange.”
“It was, my lord. Each of us thought he was Alpha 1, the first one hatched. And Alpha 1 thought he heard echoes, but he didn’t know that that was unusual.”
“Hah! Hatching must have been a shock. But I don’t see why you were so well developed at such an early stage.”
“It has to do with our cell replication process, my lord. You see, we have four-stranded DNA, which reproduces very slowly. This results in a long gestation period, twelve months. But when we do hatch, we have as many cells as a full-grown adult. With enough food, we can grow from a two-pound eggling to a three—hundred-pound adult in a week, simply by increasing cell size.”
“And here I been using single strand DNA on all my trees,” Guibedo said.
“My lord, that certainly gives rapid growth and repair, but a combat troop needs resistance to heat and radiation, and our glandular redundancy makes up for our slow repairability,” Dirk said.
“You know, Dirk, for a specialist in unarmed combat, you sure know your biochemistry.”
“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.”
Kids! Guibedo thought. “You keep calling them ‘brothers.’ Ain’t you got no girls?”
“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.”
So Heiny figures things are gonna get real rough! Ach! The kid oughta know that it’s safer to hide than to fight. Still, maybe it’s safer yet to be able to fight while you’re hiding.
“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.”