“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.”
Liebchen and Dirk were in the communications room with the CCU.
“Well, I still don’t understand it,” Liebchen said. “I make a couple of teensy little changes to one human, just to make her happy, and everybody gets all upset. So I put her back the way she was, and the next thing you know, Lord Guibedo makes over his entire body and Lady Patricia wants me to put her back to the way she was after I changed her the first time. Then he kicks her IQ up to one hundred sixty-five and makes her breasts as big as grapefruits. And now they’re talking about modifying everybody in the world! I don’t think I’ll ever understand humans.”
“They are confusing and quite irrational,” Dirk said. “But as best as I can make it out, the problem turns on the concept of free will.”
“What’s that?”
“I know it’s hard to understand,” Dirk said, “but the programming of humans is so random and haphazard that they are unable to comprehend it themselves. They are actually unable to explain why they do what they do, even to each other. So they have invented a concept called an ego, or a will, and claim it has complete freedom of action, as though it had no previous programming or external stimulus.”
“Come on, Dirk,” Liebchen said. “You talk like that when you’re cheating at pinochle. I mean, humans are a little strange, but they’re not crazy. No programming or stimulus, indeed.”
“I’m dead serious, Liebchen. Tell her, CCU.”
“He’s right, Liebchen,” the CCU said. “Actually, had you asked Lady Patricia’s permission before you gave her your modification, the whole problem would probably have never occurred.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me I was supposed to ask permission?” Liebchen shouted at the CCU.
“Well, for one thing, I’m not supposed to speak unless spoken to. If I were to give my opinion whenever I felt it would be useful, humans would find me intolerable. You’d be amazed at what I hear every day. For another, had you asked permission to modify her, she most likely would have refused. But my main reason was that I agreed with your basic motivation. You made Lord Guibedo happy. Here was a sentient being who was ultimately responsible for saving his entire species from extinction. At the rate they were going, humans would have wiped themselves out in a century or so, but for Guibedo’s biological techniques. Here was a being who was ultimately responsible for my own existence, and both of yours. Lord Copernick, after all, built on his technology. Yet he was lonely and lacked a mate. There are five billion human females on this planet, and not one stepped up to comfort him.