“Can we watch?” Mona was worried about training the fauns.
“Not the actual LDU. It’s under sedation in the next room and shouldn’t be disturbed. I can show you the simulation if you like.”
Copernick switched on one of the displays. It showed a strange creature with a flat oval body, six feet by three, standing on four camel’s legs. There were eight fixed eyes around its circumference, and two more at the ends of yard-long tentacles growing from its front. Two long remarkably humanoid arms were held folded at its sides. There was a strange slit above each wrist. In front of it stood Heinrich Copernick, writing on a blackboard. But it was the Heinrich Copernick of a year ago, with crippled legs and a bent back. The man and the LDU were moving at blinding speed, and uttering high-pitched squeaks.
Copernick adjusted a dial on the panel and a digital readout changed from 12.5 MHz to 250 KHz. The screen slowed down to normal speed and conversations became intelligible.
“… so the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides,” the image said. “Oh. Hello, boss.”
“Hi. How is it going?” Copernick said.
“On schedule. Say, you’re looking good. When are you going to reprogram my body to match yours?” the simulation said.
“Mine isn’t finished yet. But if you want to update yours anyway, feel free. My current medical section is on bubble deck eighty-one.”
“Thanks. I will.”
“That classroom,” Mona said. “It looks so familiar.”
“Boss, do you have someone else there with you?” The simulation was startled. This was unprecedented!
“Yes.” Copernick motioned Mona into the camera’s field of view.
“Mona! My God, girl! It’s good to see you in the flesh.”
“Has Heinrich been talking about me?” Mona said.
“Of course not, silly. I mean he has, but I was referring to before,” the simulation said.
Mona looked confused.
“You mean he hasn’t told you… Well, uh, I have work to do. See you both later.”
“Later.” Copernick quickly switched off the display and reset the system clock.
“Told me what?” Mona demanded.
“I’ll explain later.”
“No. Now.”
“Mona, please.”
“It just isn’t fair! You were nice and loving all my life and then one day I have an operation and you get cold and icy, and you ship me off to that finishing school without even a kiss good-bye…” Mona began to sob.
“There were things that a girl should know that I couldn’t teach you.” Copernick was awkward as he put his arms around her.
“And you almost never wrote.” Mona sobbed.
“You know how busy I’ve been.”
“And now I get home and you waste all this time on technical stuff and you haven’t even kissed me.”
Copernick kissed her. “Better?”
“Not much of a kiss. Not like when we were on the lake or all the times we made love or—”
“The lake?” Copernick was confused for a moment. Then daylight dawned in the swamp. The simulation had been making love to its student!
“Heinrich, what’s happened to you? I mean, have you changed your mind the way you changed your body? Don’t you love me any more?” Mona was crying in earnest.
“I love you, Mona.”
“You do?”
“I love you very much. And I want you to marry me.”
“You do?” Mona held him tightly. Her tear-streaked face smiled.
“Yes, I do. And we can get married as soon as you like,” Copernick said. Right after I have a little talk with that damned simulation!
“Oh, Heinrich, I’d given up hoping that you’d want me.”
“Of course I want you. That’s why I made you.”
Chapter Three
SEPTEMBER 30, 1999
CUSTOMARY MORALITY has us ask, “Is what I am doing in accordance with a previously established set of rules?”
A more rational ethic would have us ask, “Is what I am doing in the best interests of all humanity, including myself?”
As civilization becomes increasingly complex, the likelihood of any ancient rule book’s being appropriate becomes increasingly small.
Martin Guibedo found Burt Scratchon and Patricia Cambridge waiting for him at the tree house.
“Well, you finally made it,” Scratchon said. “We were beginning to think that you had lost your nerve.”
“What nerves? The only scary thing was the E train. It broke down twice on the way over here,” Guibedo said.
“The subway at this hour?” Patricia said. “But they’re so dangerous after dark!”
“There is a couple of things good about weighing three hundred pounds, Patty. One is that most people don’t bother you,” Guibedo said. “So what do you think of Laurel, who I give to Burty here?”
“It’s lovely, Dr. Guibedo. And it’s so huge!” Patricia said.
“It might make a decent warehouse, if you could get a forklift through the front door,” Scratchon said.
“Don’t do that, Burty. The carpets couldn’t take the weight. Anyway, we’re going to have plenty of warehouses pretty soon.”
“Do you mean that you are working on a tree-house warehouse, Dr. Guibedo?” Patricia asked.
“No. I just mean that a lot of warehouses are used up for storing things like lumber and food. With my tree houses, we’re not going to do that much any more, so we’re gong to have more warehouses than we need.” Guibedo sat down on one of the oversized chairs in the tree house’s living room.
“My God!” Scratchon said. “You mean that you’re deliberately wrecking the economy?”
“What wrecking? I’m just saying that we’re going to have extra, so we don’t have to build any more for a while.”
Scratchon was about to erupt, so Patricia cut in. “Dr. Guibedo, you were going to explain about the care and feeding of tree houses to us.”
“Sure. There isn’t really that much to tell, Patty. The tree house is six months old now, so it can mostly take care of itself.”
“Dr. Guibedo, I just can’t get over how fast they grow.”
“Nothing to it, Patty. Do the arithmetic. On an acre of land you have falling seventeen million calories of solar power every minute. A pound of my wood takes three thousand calories to make, and my tree houses are about ten percent efficient. So if a tree house isn’t doing anything else but making wood, you have maybe five hundred pounds of wood per acre per minute.”
Patricia was trying to take notes, but she always had problems with large numbers. “But it is doing other things, isn’t it, Dr. Guibedo?”
“Sure. It keeps you cool in the summer and warm in the winter and it makes food and beer for you. And it has to use some of what it makes to keep itself alive. And then, when it was little, it didn’t have an acre of photosynthetic area to work with.”
“Doesn’t it give you the creeps to live in something that’s alive?” Scratchon said.
“You like better maybe living in something’s that dead?”
“Dr. Guibedo, you were going to tell us about how to take care of them,” Patricia said, working hard to keep them from fighting.
“Nothing much to tell. The floors and walls absorb foreign material, so you don’t have to clean them. The wastebaskets and toliets work about the same way, only a lot faster, of course. The closets and cupboards you gotta dust out. You should maybe mark on the kitchen cupboards what food grows where, unless you like surprises.”