“I—I don’t know if I should. I mean, I’ve been happy with you.”
“I love you, too. But you would have been just as happy on heroin, and that ain’t real, either. Drink!”
“But—”
“You’re going to drink that or I’ll have Dirk pour it down your throat!”
Dirk shifted his weight uneasily, unsure of the correct course of action if he received such an order.
“Uncle Martin! Take it easy, for god’s sake,” Mona said.
“Ach…” Guibedo stomped into the living room, followed by Dirk. Liebchen tried to make herself inconspicuous in a corner.
Things were silent for a minute, then Patricia said,“You know, he really does love me.” And she drained the contents of the glass with one gulp.
A half hour later, Guibedo was trying to look interested in a six-month-old magazine as Patricia walked up to him. Her expression held pity and an involuntary touch of revulsion.
“I… see you drank it, Patty.”
“Yes. It’s… strange. Do you think that we could…”
“No. That’s all done now,” Guibedo said gruffly. “Look. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t real. You’ll find yourself a nice boy. Me, well, Heiny bought me some land near the ocean, and Mole just finished digging a tunnel to it. I’m gonna go there and work on my boats.”
“But we could try—”
“You’re not being honest, Patty. In a week your pity would turn into disgust. Better we break it clean, and we both have pretty memories. Look. I give you Oakwood for a present. I don’t need it anymore. Dirk will get my stuff moved out.” Guibedo went to the door and turned.
“Good-bye, Patty.”
He wanted to kiss her a last time, but he was afraid that she’d go through with it out of pity. He was out the door before the tears filled his eyes.
He was sitting on a park bench when Liebchen and Dirk found him. Dirk hovered protectively a a distance. Liebchen sat at his side.
“My lord. It is so late. Where will you go? How can you find your way in the dark?”
“I don’t know, Liebchen. But I’ve been on the bottom before. And then I didn’t have any friends.”
Chapter Twelve
OCTOBER 19, 2003
FOR THE next few hundred years, one of our primary functions must be the collection of data on the humans.
After all, they are to a certain extent our ancestors, and we should at least have accurate records concerning them once they are no more.
Hastings sat with a beer in a deserted room of the Red Gate Inn. He had been in Life Valley for three days, looking for a cripple named Heinrich Copernick and an obese former biology teacher named Martin Guibedo. He wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t found them yet. There were millions of people in the valley. There were no street addresses or telephone books, and Hastings knew better than to ask too many questions.
He could wait. Food was plentiful and he attracted no attention by sleeping in the parks. Someday they would slip and he would get them.
A huge man with an oversized beer mug came in and sat down at Hastings’ table.
“Have a seat,” Hastings said.
“Thank you.”
“Been around here long?”
“About three years,” Copernick said.
“You must have been one of the first settlers, then. Most people around here seem to be newcomers.”
“I was. They are.” Copernick lit a cigar.
“Hey. Tobacco. It’s been months since I had a smoke.”
“Have one. My tree house grows them.”
Hastings inhaled deeply. “Now that’s lovely. Quite a city here. It must have been something to watch this place grow up.”
“It was. Have you planted your tree yet?”
“Not yet,” Hastings said. “Thought I’d look around a bit to get an idea about what I wanted and where I wanted to put it.”
“Smart. No big hurry. One place you might want to check out is about ten miles south of here. A group of ex-military types are putting in a town. You had to have been at least a colonel to join.”
Hastings suppressed a flash of panic.
“If you were here from the beginning, you must know Guibedo and Copernick.”
“Intimately. I’m Heinrich Copernick, George.”
Hastings was acutely aware of the brick of high explosives taped to his ankle.
“Then you know who I am.” Copernick had reengineered himself!
“Of course. That white-noise generator lit you up like a neon sign. My telepaths were quite relieved when your battery went dead. They said it gave them headaches.”
“You bastard. You had me set up all along.”
“Let’s just say that I wanted to meet you. We’ve been enemies for years. You fought a good fight. But the war is over now. You ought to be thinking about your future.”
“My future?” Hastings’ voice was cold. “You destroy my country. You murder my family. And then you expect me to settle down in your filthy city.”
“George, we both know that four years ago the world was on a collision course with absolute disaster. Come over to my house sometime and I’ll show you the figures. Our mechanically based technology had to go, yet our economic system was totally supported by that technology. And our political and social structures were completely supported by those economics. Our survival as a race depended on making the changeover to a biological economy. And we couldn’t change a part of that system without changing it all.
“I’m truly sorry about your family. They died because of an engineering error. We corrected it as soon as we found out about it. It was an accident.
“On the other hand, you deliberately tried to kill my family. Twice. But like I said, the war is over.”
“You filthy hypocrite. What about the eighty-five families your monsters butchered?” Hastings said.
“Another error. No one had ever tried to educate an intelligent engineered species before. It simply never occurred to me to tell them that they weren’t supposed to kill people. That error has also been corrected. In the last three months the LDUs have saved the lives of millions of people. A fair penance, I should say.”
“Saved them? Saved them from the hell that you’ve caused with your damned metal-eating bugs!”
“Not guilty,” Copernick lied. “That plague was completely natural. We have been doing everything in our power to fight it.”
“You must think that I’m awfully gullible. At the precise moment when you and your damned biological monsters are about to be wiped out, a totally new species comes along and destroys the technology that you’re openly fighting. You warn your spys and traitors to get out of Washington. And then you have the gall to say it’s natural.”
Hastings dropped his cigar. He reached down to pick it up and lit the fuse of the bomb on his ankle. He stretched his leg under Copernick and waited.
“Perhaps God was on our side,” Copernick said.
“In a pig’s eye.”
“You can still settle down here, George. We could use you. You don’t have to die.”
The plastique hadn’t gone off.
“Naturally we disabled your bomb. You’re quite a heavy sleeper. The CCU predicted that you would be willing to commit suicide in order to kill me, but I was hoping that you’d change your mind.”
The bomb went off, completely severing Hastings’ right foot from his leg. The legs of Copernick’s chair were virtually powdered, and wood fibers were blown into the feet, calves, and knees of both men.
Though protected somewhat by the seat of his chair, and more so by the strange directionality of high explosives, Copernick was blown four feet into the air and across the room, cracking his skull on a brass footrest.