Leo Frankowski

beer all over the kitchen, so Heiny
ain’t got to get into a bathing suit and chop it off with a boy scout axe, like
he did last time. Ach. And it was such good beer, too!” Gnarled fingers
danced on the controls.
    He had been born in
Leipzig in 1910, with an Italian-Catholic father and a Polish-Jewish mother.
His father’s civil engineering work had caused the family to move often around
Europe. Martin’s parentage and experiences had left him with an improbable
accent, a profound disrespect for institutions, and an open contempt for
governments.
    “So beautiful
you’re going to be, everybody’s going to love you. But why does Heiny want you
so big?”
    In a few hours he had
sealed down the lid of a seed, planted it in a Dixie cup, and watered it.
    “And this time,
the absorption toilet is going to work!”
    His only friend,
relative, and contact with the world was his nephew, Heinrich Copernick. There
was no blood tie between them—Guibedo’s wife had been Heinrich’s mother’s
sister—but a deep and permanent bond had been forged between a thirty-year-old
man and a five-year-old boy in the winter of 1940 in Germany. Guibedo was
frostbitten and young Copernick was stunted and crippled by rickets by the time
they got out of Europe, but they were the only members of two large families to
survive.
    Yet differences in
temperament and life style resulted in the two seeing each other only four or
five times a year. For twenty-five years, Guibedo had been completely immersed
in his work, to the extent that he was almost a hermit. And while he was
conscious of no loneliness or lack in his life, he found himself talking constantly
to the plants and trees around him.
    He walked through the
hollow branch that connected the workshop to his bedroom, ducking under the
coffee-table that had grown—inexplicably—upside down from the ceiling. Guibedo
had hung candles from it and declared it a chandelier to anyone who would
listen.
    “Ach! Laurel, you
grow so much today!” he said to a seedling in a pot by the window. He
spent some time searching for his suit, gave up and settled for a bush jacket.
    “Laurel, we gonna
plant you outside pretty soon, girl.” Guibedo was putting on a nearly
perfectly clean shirt.
    “You gonna be
proud of me today! Me! Heiny got me an interview on television! I’m going to
talk with a bunch of people about you lovelies! Lots of people is gonna hear
how pretty you are.”
    He checked a few trees
growing in the yard and got to the studio almost early.
     
    To Patricia Cambridge,
the world showed no signs of ending. There were famines in Asia, South America,
and Africa, but such things rarely registered on her consciousness. The
problems of energy, pollution, and the scarcity of raw materials had been
partially solved in North America, occasionally at the expense of the rest of
the world. But Patricia, a typical American, was unconcerned. There were wars
and plagues and dozens of tiny countries that were building nuclear bombs, but
that had nothing to do with her, for hers was a golden world of bright promise.
    She had just been
promoted because she was an absolutely ordinary person. She was pretty without
being inordinately beautiful, intelligent without being intellectual, and hard
working without being too aggressive.
    And the men hi charge
at NBC had wanted someone for a daytime talk show, someone who could relate to
the “average woman,” the sort who bought soap and deodorants because
of their television commercials. Patricia, of course, didn’t know this. For
her, this promotion was a just reward for the five years she had spent at
NBC—her entire working career.
    Primly dressed in last
month’s fashions, a gray velvet tights suit printed to imitate used potato
sacks, she rode the ancient subway from her dingy apartment to the studio. She
didn’t notice the grime and shabbiness around her, for Patricia lived in her
own world of blue skies and infinite possibilities.
    She was out to get the
best ratings in her time slot, and she was going to do it by getting at the
issues that really counted. Things like political corruption and homosexuality
and tree houses.
     
    “This is Patricia
Cambridge with The World at Large ! Today on The World at Large we
will be covering an issue vital to the entire housing industry, the genetically
modified tree. On my right we have Burt Scratchon. Mr. Scratchon is president
of Shadow Lawn Estates, Inc., and a leader in the mass housing