Leo Frankowski

humans
die without ever being able to communicate, except with your clumsy language.
How do you
fight the loneliness?”
    “It ain’t so bad
like you make it out. We humans have bonds with each other, but maybe you
wouldn’t understand. Friendship, love, kinship with other individuals. And a man who is wise
knows that there is a bond between all men. All men are brothers, Dirk, even if we don’t act like it.
Everybody counts, nobody should be forgotten.” Actually, Guibedo treasured
bis solitude as much as any other hermit did, but he was not sufficiently introspective to
notice his own hyprocisy.
    “And we got
other ways of communication besides words. Actions talk, and we have our
ceremonies.”
    “Ceremonies, my
lord? Could you describe them?”
    “Sure. I can see
you’re a sociology minor. Whenever something happens to a human that’s
important to him, he’s got to have a ceremony. There’s simple ones like shaking hands. Two
people meet and want to be friendly, they shake hands. And there’s more complicated ones—”
    For the next quarter
hour, at Dirk’s prodding, Guibedo talked on about the human ceremonies connected with Birth,
Friendship, Love, Hate, Marriage, and Death. Dirk seemed especially interested in
burial ceremonies, a
fascination that Guibedo ascribed to Dirk’s own
deathlessness.
    They left the tunnel
and entered a starlit abandoned gravel pit. Dirk stopped in front of a
seven-foot-tall man. He was magnificently muscled, and his head was large for his body.
“Uncle Martin!” Heinrich Copernick stepped away from his battered van.
“I see you got out in one piece.”
    “Yah, that you,
Heiny? That was one hell of a tunnel your boys dug.”
    “We figured you
were worth it.”
    “But why such a
long tunnel, Heiny?”
    “Logistics,
Uncle Martin. For one thing, I needed someplace to put five million cubic feet
of dirt. For another thing, there was the problem of feeding ten thou sand LDUs. They only
eat a fluid that your tree houses produce. There’s a community of eighty-five
full-sized tree houses a mile
from here, and I was able to grow food
synthesizers in their roots, even though plant engineering is hardly my
forte.”
    “Only
eighty-five trees?” asked Guibedo, doing some quick mental calculations.
“They could produce enough food?”
    “Well, I’m
afraid I had to shut down the rest of their services, Uncle Martin. I was up there a couple days ago, and everybody was gone. But the trees will
revert to their original state once the tunnel is filled in. The people will return.”
    “Well, I hope
so,” Guibedo said. “I guess you got to do things like that in an emergency.
Why didn’t you tell me you made guys like Dirk, here, Heiny?”
    “You’ve just
answered your own question, you damned old iconoclast.” Copernick
laughed. “You spend a half hour with my LDUs and they’ve got proper names! In a day you’d
have them demanding private rooms, time and a half for overtime, and a grievance committee!”
    “Maybe not such
a bad idea, Heiny. You’d make a fortune hiring these guys out as a
construction team. You didn’t have any trouble digging that tunnel, did
you?”
    “Oh, there was
some sort of a security problem once when I was gone, but the LDUs took care of
it,” Heinrich called over his shoulder as he walked toward the van.
    “See!” Guibedo said.
“They’d make a good work gang.”
    “I thought
about it, but there are the building people and the labor unions to contend with. And
look at all the trouble your publicity got you into. Still, lack of money is slowing us
down,” Heinrich said, getting into the driver’s seat.
    “You know, Heiny,
when I was in jail, I got to thinking about catalytic extraction and refining.
We could make
a tree that could extract heavy metals from the soil…”
    The two were lost in
technicalities as they drove away.
    Three platoons of
LDUs left the tunnel-filling and went about special tasks.
    One platoon began cutting rectangular
slabs of stone, polishing them smooth, and carving names and dates.
    Another dug
rectangular holes, pleasantly arranged, on a hilltop.
    The third platoon exhumed the bodies of
eighty-five families who had presented such a
security problem, who had been so unamenable to reason.
    When the work had
been completed and ritual prayers had been said, Dirk thought to his brothers, It’s comforting to
know that the proper ceremonies have been com pleted.
    Yes, replied Blade. It’s
important that