Leo Frankowski

cylinder.
    “They’re
lovely,” Mona said. “But why the mythological
appearance?”
    “They had to be
quite human in appearance, or the human children that they raise might imprint
improperly, or turn out autistic. Yet I didn’t want adults to confuse them with people.
After all, we don’t want a competing species.
    “Since human
children normally imprint before they can walk, looking up from their cribs, the
kids should see the fauns as human,” Copernick said.
    “What am I
supposed to do with them?”
    “Raise
them.”
    “Raise twenty
children at one time?” Mona said. “I couldn’t. I mean that it would be
impossible!”
    “It’s not that
bad. They are not human. They won’t have to go through the repetitive learning
processes that a human child does. And they can already speak English.”
    “English! But
they’re still in those bottle things.”
    “I’m using a
direct computer interface with them while they are still in their cloning
tanks,” Copernick said.
    “Then why do you
need me to raise them?”
    “It’s not just
busy work, Mona. True, I could educate the fauns completely by computer. If you
don’t want the job, I’ll have to do it. The simulations I’ve run indicate that it will work.
But future generations of fauns will have to be raised more naturally by their own
parents. If there’s a hitch in the educational process, we’d better know about it before
we let fauns raise human children.”
    “Well…”
    “The fauns
won’t be ready for decanting for at least a week. Take your time making up your mind
about working with them. Now let me show you the simulation room.”
    The room contained
two desks covered with lighted buttons. Above each was a television display
screen. Behind
them, taking up most of the room, were four featureless gray cabinets. Each cabinet
was a yard wide, two yards high, and sixty yards long.
    “These are the
main simulation computers,” Copernick said.
    “They’re so
big. I thought that computers were little things.”
    “Little
computers are. These are two of the largest ever built. It requires around six hundred
trillion bits of random access memory to keep track of all the chemical processes in a simple
animal. A human requires twice that.”
    “They must have been awfully
expensive.” Mona said.
    “They were. The
reproduction cost for the equipment here at Pinecroft would be around eighty
million dollars. The engineering cost was three times that. And Uncle Martin’s installation
was almost as expensive.”
    “I didn’t know
that you were that rich.”
    “I’m not. I
never was. Copernicus, Inc., is worth several billion. I founded it. I built it and I
ran it. But in order to get the capital I needed for expansion, I had to sell the bulk of my
company’s stock to outsiders. By the time I was ready to retire, I owned only a
small percent of my own company.”
    “Then how did
you get all of this stuff?” Mona asked.
    “Owning a
company is one thing. Controlling it is another. Stockholders usually leave you alone,
as long as you declare a dividend. As president, I made sure that we had a large R
& D budget. This equipment was all built in my own labs.”
    “You mean you
stole it?”
    “No. I bought
it. Through a third party, of course. And at scrap prices.” Copernick
laughed.
    “It still sounds
as if you stole it from your own stockholders.”
    “Nobody ever
lost money doing business with Heinrich Copernick!”
    Mona looked at her
bare feet and was silent.
    “Anyway, each
of these computers can simulate the entire life-cycle of an organism. With a
fifty-gigahertz clock, I can take a human being from a fertilized cell to an
octagenarian in eleven hours. They are the most important single tool
we use in bioengineering. They let me test out a design or modification in a matter
of hours, when
actually growing the organism could take decades. These displays let me see
what is going on in any part of the simulation, right down to the molecular
level. Or you can slow down the clock and look at it macroscopically; watch it work and
play. Even talk to it.”
    “Talk to
it!” Mona woke up.
    “Assuming that
the being involved can talk. One of the surprises I had with these simulations
was that the nervous systems were so well modeled that the programs attain a degree of
self-awareness.”
    “You mean it’s
alive?”
    “Of course not.
They’re nothing but programs on a machine. But they think they’re alive.
It causes some