Leo Frankowski

That’s why I made you.”

Chapter Three
    SEPTEMBER 30, 1999
     
    C USTOMARY 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.
    —Heinrich Copernick
    From his lab notebook
     
    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.”
    “But what about
watering it and fertilizer, Dr. Guibedo?”
    “Well, Patty, once it’s this big, the
roots go down pretty far, so you don’t have
to worry about watering it. The toliet gives it all the fertilizer it
needs,” Guibedo said.
    “Then there’s
nothing to do but live in it?”
    “That’s right,
Patty, but you got to use it. A tree house will die if there is nobody living there. I made them that way so that we won’t have a bunch of
empty slums some day. And talk to
your tree, Burty. They like that.”
    “Thank you, Dr.
Guibedo,” Patricia said.
    “So thank you, Patty. If you don’t need me any more, I got to run. I have three more tree houses
here in Forest Hills