Tower of Glass

19





November 17, 2218.



A delicate tracery of windblown snow lightly covers the area around Krug’s tower; beyond the construction zone, the snow lies deeply mounded, iron-hard. A dry wind buffets the tower. Well ahead of schedule, it has topped 500 meters, and now is overwhelming in its crystalline splendor.

The eight-sided base yields imperceptibly to the planes of the four-sided trunk. The tower is haloed in light: sunglow rebounds from its flanks, strikes the surrounding fields of snow, leaps up again to kiss the glassy walls, is hurled groundward once more. Albedo reigns here; brightness is all.

The lower two-thirds of the existing structure has now been divided into floors, and, as the androids assembling the skin of the tower pile the glass blocks ever higher, those responsible for the interior work follow them up.

Installation of the tachyon-beam system has begun. Five giant rods of brilliant red copper, sixty centimeters thick and hundreds of meters long, will form a quintuple spine, rising inside vertical service cores that span close to half the tower’s height, and the lower sections of these great busbars are going into place now. A circular jacket of translucent glastic a meter in diameter forms the housing for each bar. The workmen slide forty-meter lengths of copper into these jackets, then cunningly fuse them end to end with quick dazzling bursts of power from the eye of a welding laser. Elsewhere in the building, hundreds of electricians supervise the spraying of conductive filaments into the tower’s gleaming inner walls, and squadrons of mechanics install conduits, waveguides, frequency converters, fluxmeters, optical guidance accessories, focal plane locators, neutron activation foils, Mossbauer absorbers, multi-channel pulse height analyzers, nuclear amplifiers, voltage converters, cryostats, transponders, resistance bridges, prisms, torsion testers, sensor clusters, degaussers, collimators, magnetic resonance cells, thermocouple amplifiers, accelerator reflectors, proton accumulators, and much more, everything carefully computer-tagged in advance with its floor level and flow-chart designation. Sending messages to the stars; by tachyon beam is not a simple project.

The tower is already a thing of unparalleled splendor, starkly supple, spectacularly spearing the sky. Visitors drive many kilometers out into the tundra to get the best view of it, for at close range it cannot properly be appreciated. Krug enjoys reminding his guests, though, that what they see today is merely the bottom third of the ultimate structure. To visualize the final building, one must imagine a second tower of the same size piled atop this November spire, and then a third one set atop that. The mind rebels. The image will not come. Instead, one can bring into view only the picture of a slender, impossibly attenuated, terribly frail needle of glass that hangs in the sky, seeking to put down roots, and, failing, topples and topples and topples, falling like Lucifer through all one long day, and shatters with a faint tinkle in the icy air.





20





“A new signal,” Vargas said. “Slightly different. We began getting it last night.”

“Wait right there,” said Krug. “I’m coming.”

He was in New York. Almost immediately he was in Vargas’ Antarctic observatory, high on the polar plateau at a point equidistant between the Pole itself and the resorts of the Knox Coast. There were those who said that the transmat era had cheapened life in one way while enriching it in another: the theta force allowed one to flick blithely from Africa to Australia to Mexico to Siberia in a moment’s merry dance, but it robbed one of any true sense of place and transition, of any feel for planetary geography. It transformed Earth into a single infinitely extended transmat cubicle. Krug had often resolved to take a leisurely tour of the world from the air, and see desert shading into prairie, forest into bare tundra, mountains into plains. But he had not managed to find the time.

The observatory was a series of pleasant glossy domes sitting atop an ice-sheet two and a half kilometers thick. Tunnels in the ice linked dome to dome, and gave access also to the outlying apparatus: the vast dish of a radio telescope’s parabolic antenna, the metal grid of an X-ray receiver, the burnished mirror that picked up relayed transmissions from the orbiting observatory high above the South Pole, the short, stocky multiple-diffraction optical telescope, the three golden spikes of the hydrogen antenna, the fluttering airborne webwork of a polyradar system, and the rest of the devices with which the astronomers here kept watch on the universe. Instead of using refrigeration tapes to insure that the ice would not melt beneath the buildings, they had employed individual heat-exchange plaques for every structure, so that each building was a little island on the great glacier.

In the main building things hummed and clicked and flashed. Krug did not understand much about this equipment, but it seemed properly scientific to him. Technicians ran eagerly about; an alpha high on a dizzying catwalk called numbers to three betas far below; periodically there was a crimson surge of energy within a glass helix twenty meters long, and numbers leaped on a green and red counting mechanism at every discharge.

Vargas said, “Watch the radon coil. It’s registering the impulses that we’re getting right now. Here—a new cycle is starting—you see?”

Krug contemplated the pattern of surges.





“That’s it,” Vargas said. “Now a six-second pause, and then it starts again.”

“2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1,” Krug said. “And it used to be 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 3-1. So they’ve dropped the 4-group altogether, they’ve moved the 5-group to the front of the cycle, they’ve completed the 3-group, they’ve added a pulse in the final group—damn, Vargas, where’s the sense? What’s the significance?”

“We don’t detect any more content in this message than in the last. They’ve both got the same basic structure. Just a minor rearrangement—”

“It’s got to mean something!”

“Perhaps it does.”

“How can we find out?”

“We’ll ask them,” Vargas said. “Soon. Through your tower.”

Krug’s shoulders slumped. He leaned forward, gripping the smooth cool green handles of some incomprehensible device jutting from the wall. “These messages are 300 years old,” he said blackly. “If this planet of theirs is like you tell me it is, that’s like 300 centuries here. More. They won’t even know about the messages their ancestors sent out. They’ll be mutated out of all recognition.”

“No. There has to be continuity. They couldn’t have reached a technological level that would allow them to send transgalactic messages at all unless they were able to retain the achievements of earlier generations.”

Krug swung round. “You know something? “This planetary nebula, this blue sun—I still don’t believe it could have intelligent beings living there. Any kind of life—no! Listen, blue suns don’t last long, Vargas. It takes millions of years for the surface of a planet just to cool enough to get solid. There isn’t that much time, a blue sun. Any planets it’s got, they’re still molten. You want me to believe signals coming from people who live on a fireball?”

Vargas said quietly, “Those signals come from NGC 7293, the planetary nebula in Aquarius.”

“For sure?”

“For sure. I can show you all the data.”

“Never mind. But how, a fireball?”


“It’s not necessarily a fireball. Maybe some planets cool faster than others. We can’t be sure how long it takes them to cool. We don’t know how far the home world of the message-senders is from that sun. We’ve got models showing the theoretical possibility that a planet can cool fast enough, even with a blue sun, to allow—”

“It’s a fireball, that planet,” said Krug sullenly.

Defensive now, Vargas said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even if it is: must all life-forms live on a solid-surface planet? Can’t you conceive a civilization of high-temperature entities evolving on a world that hasn’t cooled yet? If—”

Krug snorted in disgust. “Sending signals with machines made out of molten steel?”

“The signals don’t have to be mechanical in origin. Suppose they can manipulate the molecular structure of —”

“You talk fairy tales to me, doctor. I go to a scientist, I get fairy tales!”

“At the moment fairy tales are the only way of accounting for the data,” Vargas said.

“You know there’s got to be a better way!”

“All I know is that we’re getting signals, and they undoubtedly come from this planetary nebula. I know it isn’t plausible. The universe doesn’t have to seem plausible to us all the time. Its phenomena don’t have to be readily explicable. Transmat wouldn’t be plausible to an eighteenth-century scientist. We see the data as best we can, and we try to account for it, and sometimes we do some wild guessing because the data we’re getting doesn’t seem to make sense, but—”

“The universe doesn’t cheat,” Krug said. “The universe plays fair!”

Vargas smiled. “No doubt it does. But we need more data before we can explain NGC 7293. Meanwhile we make do with fairy tales.”

Krug nodded. He closed his eyes and fondled dials and meters, while within him a monstrous raging impatience sizzled and blazed and bubbled. Hey, you star people! Hey, you, sending those pulses! Who are you? What are you? Where are you? By damn, I want to know!

What are you trying to tell us, you?

Who are you looking for?

What’s it all mean? Suppose I die before I find out!

“You know what I want?” Krug said suddenly. “To go outside, to that radio telescope of yours. And climb up into the big dish. And cup my hands and shout at those bastards with the numbers. What’s the signal now? 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1? It drives me crazy. We ought to answer them right now. Send some numbers: 4-10-2, 4-6-2, 4-2. Just to show them we’re here. Just to let them know.”

“By radio transmission?” Vargas said. “It’ll take 300 years. The tower will be finished soon.”

“Soon, sure. Soon. You ought to see it. Come see, next week. They’re putting the gadgets in it now. We’ll be talking to the bastards soon.”

“Would you like to hear the audio signal coming in, the new one?”

“Sure.”

Vargas touched a switch. From speakers in the laboratory wall came a dry cold hiss, the sound of space, the voice of the dark abyss. It was a sound like a cast-off snakeskin. Overriding that withered sound, seconds later, came sweet upper-frequency tones. Pleep pleep. Pause. Pleep pleep pleep pleep pleep. Pause. Pleep. Pause. Pause. Pleep pleep. Pause. Pleep pleep pleep. Pause. Pleep. Pause. Pause. Pleep pleep. Pause. Pleep. Silence. And then again, pleep pleep, the new cycle beginning.

“Beautiful,” Krug whispered. “The music of the spheres. Oh, you mysterious bastards! Look, doctor, you come see the tower next week, next—oh, Tuesday. I’ll have Spaulding call you. You’ll be amazed. And listen, anything else new comes up, another change in the signal, I want to hear right away.”

Pleep pleep pleep.

He headed for the transmat.

Pleep.

Krug leaped northward along the meridian, following the line of 90° E., looped the North Pole, and emerged beside his tower. He had sped from icy plateau to icy plateau, from the world’s bottom to its top, from late spring to early winter, from day to night. Androids were busy everywhere. The tower seemed to have grown fifty meters since yesterday’s visit. The sky was ablaze with the light of reflector plates. The song of NGC 7293 sang seductively in Krug’s mind. Pleep pleep. Pleep.

He found Thor Watchman in the control center, jacked in. The alpha, unaware of Krug’s presence, seemed lost in a drugged dream, climbing the precipices of some distant interface. An awed beta offered to cut into the circuit and tell Watchman, via the computer, that Krug had arrived. “No,” Krug said. “He’s busy. Don’t bother him.” Pleep pleep pleep pleep pleep. He stood for a few moments, watching the play of expressions on Watchman’s tranquil face. What was passing through the alpha’s mind now? Freight invoices, transmat manifests, welding cues, weather reports, cost estimates, stress factors, personnel data? Krug felt pride geysering in his soul. Why not? He had plenty to be proud of. He had built the androids, and the androids were building the tower, and soon man’s voice would go forth to the stars—

Pleep pleep pleep. Pleep.

Affectionately, a little surprised at himself, he put his hands to Thor Watchman’s broad shoulders in a quick embrace. Then he went out. He stood in the frigid blackness a short while, surveying the frenzied activity at every level of the tower. On top they were putting new blocks in place with flawless rhythm. Inside, the tiny figures were hauling neutrino-sheathing around, joining lengths of copper cable, installing floors, carrying the heat-cool-power-light system higher and higher. Through the night came a steady pulsation of sound, all the noises of construction, blending into a single cosmic rhythm, a deep booming hum with regular soaring climaxes. The two sounds, the inner and the outer one, met in Krug’s mind, boom and pleep, boom and pleep, boom and pleep.

He walked toward the transmats, ignoring the knives of the Arctic wind.

Not bad for a poor man without much education, he told himself. This tower. These androids. Everything. He thought of the Krug of forty-five years ago, the Krug growing up miserable in a town in Illinois with grass in the middle of the streets. He hadn’t dreamed much about sending messages to the stars then. He just wanted to make something out of himself. He wasn’t anything, yet. Some Krug! Ignorant. Skinny. Pimpled. Sometimes on holocasts he heard people saying that mankind had entered a new golden age, with population down, social and racial tensions forgotten, a horde of servomechanisms to do all the dirty work. Yes. Yes. Fine. But even in a golden age somebody has to be on the bottom. Krug was. Father dead when he was five. Mother hooked on floaters, sensory scramblers, any kind of dream-pills. They got a little money, not much, from a welfare foundation. Robots? Robots were for other people. Half the time the data terminal, even, was shut off for unpaid bills. He never went through a transmat until he was nineteen. Never even left Illinois. He remembered himself: sullen, withdrawn, squint-eyed, sometimes going a week or two without speaking to anyone. He didn’t read. He didn’t play games. He dreamed a lot, though. He slid through school in a haze of rage, learning nothing. Slowly coming out of it when he was fifteen, propelled by that same rage, turning it suddenly outward instead of letting it fester within: I show you what I can do, 1 get even with you all! Self-programming his education. Servotechnology. Chemistry. He didn’t learn basic science; he learned ways of putting things together. Sleep? Who needed sleep? Study. Study. Sweat. Build. A remarkable intuitive grasp of the structure of things, they said was what he had. He found a backer in Chicago. The age of private capitalism was supposed to be dead; so was the age of free-lance invention. He built a better robot, anyway. Krug smiled, remembering: the transmat hop to New York, the conferences, the lawyers. And money in the bank. The new Thomas Edison. He was nineteen. He stocked his laboratory with equipment and looked for grander projects. At twenty-two, he started to create the androids. Took awhile. Somewhere in those years, the probes began coming back from the near stars, empty. No advanced life-forms out there. He was secure enough now to divert some attention from business, to allow himself the luxury of wondering about man’s place in the cosmos. He pondered. He quarreled with the popular theories of the uniqueness of man. Went on toiling, though, diddling with the nucleic acid, blending, hovering over centrifuges, straining his eyes, dipping his hands deep into tubs of slime, hooking together the protein chains, getting measurably closer to success. How can man be alone in the universe if one man himself can make life? Look how easy it is! I’m doing it: am I God? The vats seethed. Purple, green, gold, red, blue. And eventually life came forth. Androids shakily rising from the foaming chemicals. Fame. Money. Power. A wife; a son; a corporate empire. Properties on three worlds, five moons. Women, all he wanted. He had grown up to live his own adolescent fantasies. Krug smiled. The young skinny pimpled Krug was still here within this stocky man, angry, defiant, burning. You showed them, eh? You showed them! And now you’ll reach the people in the stars. Pleep pleep pleep. Boom. The voice of Krug spanning the light-years. “Hello? Hello? Hello, you! This is Simeon Krug!” In retrospect he saw his whole life as a single shaped process, trending without detour or interruption toward this one goal. If he had not churned with intense, unfocused ambitions, there would have been no androids. Without his androids, there would not have been sufficient skilled labor to, build the tower. Without his tower—


He entered the nearest transmat cubicle and set coordinates in a casual way, letting his fingers idly choose his destination. He stepped through the field and found himself in the California home of his son Manuel.

He hadn’t planned to go there. He stood blinking in afternoon sunlight, shivering as a sudden wave of warmth struck his Arctic-tuned skin. Beneath his feet was a shining floor of dark red stone; the walls that rose on either side of him were coruscating swirls of light bursting from polyphase projectors mounted in the foundation; above him was no roof, only a repellor field set for the blue end of the spectrum, through which there dangled the fruit-laden branches of some tree with feathery gray-green leaves. He could hear the roar of the surf. Half a dozen household androids, going about their domestic chores, gaped at him. He caught their awed whispers: “Krug... Krug...”

Clissa appeared. She wore a misty green wrap that revealed her small high breasts, her sharp-boned hips, her narrow shoulders. “You didn’t tell me you were—”

“I didn’t know I was.”

“I would have had something ready!”

“Don’t feel I need anything special. I’m just dropping in. Is Manuel—”

“He isn’t here.”

“No. Where?”

Clissa shrugged. “Out. Business, I guess. Not due back until dinnertime. Can I get you—”

“No. No. What a fine house you have, Clissa. Warm. Real. You and Manuel must be very happy here.” He eyed her slender form. “It’s such a good place for having children, too. The beach—the sun—the trees—”

An android brought two mirror-bright chairs, expanding and socketing them with a swift deft twinkle of his hands. Another turned on the waterfall on the inland side of the house. A third lit an aroma spike, and the odor of cloves and cinnamon unfolded in the courtyard. A fourth offered Krug a tray of milky-looking sweets. He shook his head. He remained standing. So did Clissa. She looked uncomfortable.

She said, “We’re still newlyweds, you know. We can wait awhile for children.”

“Two years, isn’t it, you’ve been married? A long honeymoon!”

“Well—”

“At least get your certificate. You could start thinking about children. I mean, it’s time you—time I—a grandchild—”

She held forth the tray of sweets. Her face was pale; her eyes were like opals in a frosty mask. He shook his head again.

He said, “The androids do all the work of raising the kid, anyhow. And if you don’t want to get yourself stretched, you could have it ectogenetically, so—”

“Please?” she said softly. “We’ve talked about this before. I’m so tired today.”

“I’m sorry.” He cursed himself for pushing her too hard. His old mistake; subtlety was not his chief skill. “You’re feeling all right?”

“Just fatigue,” she said, not convincing him. She seemed to make an effort to show more energy. She gestured, and one of her betas began to assemble a stack of glittering metal hoops that rotated mysteriously about some hidden axis; a new sculpture, Krug thought. A second android adjusted the walls, and he and Clissa were bathed in a cone of warm amber light. Music trembled in the air, coming from a cloud of tiny glittering speakers that floated, fine as dust, into the courtyard. Clissa said, too loudly, “How is your tower going?”

“Beautiful. Beautiful. You should see it.”

“Perhaps I’ll come, next week. If it isn’t too cold there. Are you up to 500 meters yet?”

“Past it. Rising all the time. Only not fast enough. I ache to see it finished, Clissa. To be able to use it. I’m so full of impatiences I’m sick with them.”

“You do look a little strained today,” she said. “Flushed, excited. You ought to slow down, sometimes.”

“Me? Slow? Why? Am I so old?” He realized he was barking at her. He said more temperately, “Look, maybe you’re right. I don’t know. I better leave now. I don’t mean to be a bother for you. I just felt like a little visit.” Pleep pleep. Boom. “You tell Manuel it was nothing special, yes? To say hello. When did I see him, anyway? Two weeks, three? Not since right after he came out of that shunt-room business. A man can visit his son sometimes.” He reached out impulsively, drew her to him, hugged her lightly. He felt like a bear hugging a forest sprite. Her skin was cold through that misty wrap. She was all bones. He could snap her in half with a quick yank. What did she weigh, fifty kilos? Less? A child’s body. Maybe she couldn’t even have children. Krug found himself trying to imagine Manuel in bed with her, and pushed the thought away, appalled. He kissed her chilly cheek. “You take care,” he said. “So will I. We both take care, get lots of rest. You say hello to Manuel for me.”

He rushed to the transmat Where to next? Krug felt feverish. His cheeks were flaming. He was adrift, floating on the broad bosom of the sea. Coordinates tumbled across his mind; frantic, he seized one set, fed it to the machine. Pleep. Pleep. Pleep. The scaly hiss of amplified star-noise nibbled at his brain. 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1. Hello? Hello? The theta force devoured him.

It brought him forth inside an immense musty cavern.

There was a roof, dozens of dim kilometers overhead. There were walls, metallic, reflective, yellow-brown, curving toward some distant place of union  . Harsh lights glared and flickered. Sharp-edged shadows stained the air. Construction noises sounded: crash, thunk, ping, bavoom. The place’ was full of busy androids. They clustered close to him, glistening with awe, nudging, whispering: “Krug... Krug... Krug...” Why do androids always look at me that way? He scowled at them. He knew that perspiration was bursting from every pore. His legs were unsteady. Ask Spaulding for a coolpill: but Spaulding was elsewhere. Krug was jumping solo today.

An alpha loomed before him. “We were not led to anticipate the pleasure of this visit, Mr. Krug.”

“A whim. Simply passing through, looking in. Pardon me—your name—?”

“Romulus Fusion, sir.”

“How big a work-force here, Alpha Fusion?”

“Seven hundred betas, sir, and nine thousand gammas. The alpha staff is quite small; we rely on sensors for most supervisory functions. Shall I show you around? Would you like to see the lunar runabouts? The Jupiter modules? The starship, perhaps?”

The starship. The starship. Krug comprehended. He was in Denver, at Krug Enterprises’ main North American vehicle-assembly center. In this spacious catacomb many types of transportation devices were manufactured, covering all needs that the transmat could not meet: ocean-crawlers, sliders for surface travel, stratospheric gliders, heavy-duty power-haulers, immersion modules for use on high-pressure worlds, ion-drive systemships for short-hop spacing, interstellar probes, gravity boxes, skydivers, minirailers, sunscoops. Here, too, for the past seven years, a picked technical staff had been building the prototype of the first manned stargoing vessel. Lately, since the commencement of the tower, the starship had become a stepchild among Krug’s projects.

“The starship,” Krug said. “Yes. Please. Let’s see it.”

Aisles of betas opened for him as Romulus Fusion ushered him toward a small teardrop-shaped slider. With the alpha at the controls they slipped noiselessly along the floor of the plant, past racks of half-finished vehicles of every description, and came at length to a ramp leading to yet a lower level of this subterranean workshop. Down they went. The slider halted. They got out.


“This,” said Romulus Fusion.

Krug beheld a curious vehicle a hundred meters long, with flaring vanes running from its needle-sharp nose to its squat, aggressive-looking tail. The dark red hull seemed to have been fashioned from conglomerated rubble; its texture was rough and knobby. No vision accesses were in evidence. The mass-ejectors were conventional in form, rectangular slots opening along the rear.

Romulus Fusion said, “It will be ready for flight-testing in three months. We estimate an acceleration capability of a constant 2.4 g, which of course will bring the vessel rapidly to a velocity not far short of that of light. Will you go inside?”

Krug nodded. Within, the ship seemed comfortable and not very unusual; he saw a control center, a recreation area, a power compartment, and other features that would have been standard on any contemporary systemgoing ship. “It can accommodate a crew of eight,” the alpha told him. “In flight, an automatic deflector field surrounds the ship to ward off all oncoming free-floating particles, which of course could be enormously destructive at such velocities. The ship is totally self-programming; it needs no supervision. These are the personnel containers.” Romulus Fusion indicated four double rows of black glass-faced freezer units, each two and a half meters long and a meter wide, mounted against a wall. “They employ conventional life-suspension technology,” he said, “The ship’s control system, at a signal from the crew or from a ground station, will automatically begin pumping the high-density coolant fluid into the containers, lowering the body temperature of personnel to the desired degree. They will then make the journey submerged in cold fluid, serving the double purpose of slowing life-processes and insulating the crew against the effects of steady acceleration. Reversal of the life-suspension is just as simple. A maximum deepsleep period of forty years is planned; in the event of longer voyages, the crew will be awakened at forty-year intervals, put through an exercise program similar to that used in the training of new androids, and restored to the containers after a brief waking interval. In this way a voyage of virtually infinite length can be managed by the same crew.”

“How long,” Krug asked, “would it take this ship to reach a star 300 light-years away?”

“Including the time needed for building up to maximum velocity, and the time required for deceleration,” replied Romulus Fusion, “I’d estimate roughly 620 years. Allowing for the expected relativistic time-dilation effects, apparent elapsed time aboard ship should be no more than 20 or 25 years, which means the entire voyage could be accomplished within the span of a single deepsleep period for the crew.”

Krug grunted. That was fine for the crew; but if he sent the starship off to NGC 7293 next spring, it would return to Earth in the thirty-fifth century. He would not be here to greet it. Yet he saw no alternative.

He said, “It’ll fly by February?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Start picking a crew: two alphas, two betas, four gammas. They’ll blast off for a system of my choosing early in ‘19.”

“As you instruct, sir.”

They left the ship. Krug ran his hands over its pebbled hull. His infatuation with the tachyon-beam tower had kept him from following the progress of the work here; he regretted that now. They had done a magnificent job. And, he saw, his assault on the stars would have to be a two-pronged effort. When the tower was complete, he could attempt to open realtime communication with the beings whom Vargas insisted lived in NGC 7293; meanwhile, his android-staffed starship would be embarked on its slow journey outward. What would he send aboard it? The full record of man’s accomplishments—yes, cubes galore, whole libraries, the entire musical repertoire, a hundred high-redundancy information systems. Make that crew four alphas, four betas; they’d need to be masters of communications techniques. While they slept, he would beam tachyon-borne messages to them from Earth, detailing the knowledge that he expected to gain from the tower’s contacts with the star-folk; perhaps, by the time the starship reached its destination in the year 2850 or so, it would have become possible to give its crew access to dictionaries of the language of the race it was to visit. Whole encyclopedias, even. Annals of six centuries of tachyon-beam contact between Earthmen and the inhabitants of NGC 7293!

Krug clapped Romulus Fusion’s shoulder. “Good work. You’ll hear from me. Where’s the transmat?”

“This way, sir.”

Pleep. Pleep. Pleep.

Krug jumped back to the tower site.

Thor Watchman was no longer jacked into the master control center’s computer. Krug found him inside the tower, on the fourth level up, overseeing the installation of a row of devices that looked like globes of butter mounted on a beaded glass string.

“What are these?” Krug demanded.

Watchman looked surprised to see his master appear so abruptly. “Circuitbreakers,” he said, making a quick recovery. “In case of excessive positron flow—”

“All right. You know where I’ve been, Thor? Denver. Denver. I’ve seen the starship. I didn’t realize it: they’ve got it practically finished. Effective right now we’re going to tie it into our project sequence.”

“Sir?”

“Alpha Romulus Fusion is in charge out there. He’s going to pick a crew, four alphas, four betas. We’ll send them off next spring under life-suspension, coldsleep. Right after we send our first signals to NGC 7293. Get in touch with him, coordinate the timing, yes? Oh—and another thing. Even though we’re ahead of schedule here, it still isn’t going fast enough to please me.” Boom. Boom. The planetary nebula NGC 7293 sizzled and flared behind Krug’s forehead. The heat of his skin evaporated his sweat as fast as it could burst from his pores. Getting too excited, he told himself. “When you finish work tonight, Thor, draw up a personnel requisition increasing the work crews by 50%. Send it to Spaulding. You need more alphas, don’t hesitate. Ask. Hire. Spend. Whatever.” Boom. “I want the entire construction scheme reprogrammed. Completion date three months tighter than the one we have now. Got it?”

Watchman seemed a little dazed. “Yes, Mr. Krug,” he said faintly.

“Good. Yes. Good. Keep up the good work, Thor. Can’t tell you how proud. How happy.” Boom. Boom. Boom. Pleep. Boom. “Well get you every skilled beta in the Western Hemisphere, if necessary. Eastern. Everywhere. Tower’s got to be finished!” Boom. “Time! Time! Never enough time!”

Krug rushed away. Outside, in the cold night air, some of the frenzy left him. He stood quietly for a moment, savoring the sleek glimmering beauty of the tower, aglow against the black backdrop of the unlit tundra. He looked up. He saw the stars. He clenched his fist and shook it.

Krug! Krug! Krug! Krug!

Boom.

Into the transmat. Coordinates: Uganda. By the lake.

Quenelle, waiting. Soft body, big breasts, thighs parted, belly heaving. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1. Krug leaped across the world.





21





In the glare of crisp white winter sunlight a dozen alphas paraded solemnly across the broad plaza that fell, like a giant terraced apron, from the lap of the World Congress building in Geneva. Each of the alphas carried a demonstration-spool; each wore the emblem of the Android Equality Party. Security robots were stationed in the corners of the plaza; the snubheaded black machines would roll instantly forward, spewing immobilizing stasis-tape, if the demonstrators deviated in any way from the agitation program they had filed with the Congressional doorkeeper. But the AEP people were not likely to do anything unexpected. They simply crossed the plaza again and again, marching neither too rigidly nor too slackly, keeping their eyes on the holovision hovercameras above them. Periodically, at a signal from their leader, Siegfried Fileclerk, one of the demonstrators would activate the circuitry of his demonstration-spool. From the nozzle of the spool a cloud of dense blue vapor would spurt upward to a height of perhaps twenty meters and remain there, tightly coalesced by kinesis-linkage into a spherical cloud, while a message imprinted in large and vivid golden letters emerged and moved slowly along its circumference. When the words had traveled the full 360°, the cloud would dissipate, and only after the last strands of it had vanished from the air would Fileclerk signal for the next demonstrator to send up a statement.


Though Congress had been in session for some weeks now, it was improbable that any of the delegates inside the handsome building were paying attention to the demonstration. They had seen such demonstrations before. The purpose of the AEP group was merely to have the holovision people pick up and relay to viewers all over the world, in the name of news coverage, such slogans as these:



ANDROID EQUALITY NOW!

FORTY YEARS OF-SLAVERY IS ENOUGH!

DID CASSANDRA NUCLEUS DIE IN VAIN?

WE APPEAL TO THE CONSCIENCES OF HUMANITY

ACTION! FREEDOM! ACTION!

ADMIT ANDROIDS TO CONGRESS—NOW!

THE TIME HAS COME!

IF YOU PRICK US, DO WE NOT BLEED?





22





Thor Watchman knelt beside Lilith Meson in the Valhallavagen chapel. It was the day of the Ceremony of the Opening of the Vat; nine alphas were present, with Mazda Constructor, who belonged to the Transcender caste, officiating. A couple of betas had been persuaded to attend, since Yielders were needed. This was not a ceremony that required the participation of a Preserver, and so Watchman played no part in it; he merely repeated to himself the invocations of the celebrants.

The hologram of Krug above the altar glistened and throbbed. The triplets of the genetic code around the walls seemed to melt and swirl as the ritual neared its climax. The scent of hydrogen was in the air. Mazda Constructor’s gestures, always noble and impressive, grew more broad, more all-encompassing.

“AUU GAU GGU GCU,” he called.

“Harmony!” sang the first Yielder.

“Unity!” sang the second.

“Perception,” Lilith said.

“CAC CGC CCC CUC,” chanted Mazda Constructor.

“Harmony!”

“Unity!”

“Passion,” said Lilith.

“UAA UGA UCA UUA,” the Transcender cried.

“Harmony!”

“Unity!”

“Purpose,” Lilith said, and the ceremony was over. Mazda Constructor stepped down, flushed and weary. Lilith lightly touched his hand. The betas, looking grateful to be excused, slipped out the rear way. Watchman rose. He saw Andromeda Quark in the far corner, the dimmest corner, whispering some private devotion of the Projector caste. She seemed to see no one else.

“Shall we go?” Watchman said to Lilith. “I’ll see you home.”

“Kind of you,” she said. Her part in the ceremony appeared to have left her aglow; her eyes were unnaturally bright, her breasts were heaving beneath her thin wrap, her nostrils were flared. He escorted her to the street.

As they walked toward the nearby transmat he said, “Did the personnel requisition reach your office?”

“Yesterday. With a memo from Spaulding telling me to send out a hiring call at once. Where am I going to find that many skilled betas, Thor? What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that Krug is pushing us hard. He’s obsessed with finishing the tower.”

“That’s nothing new,” Lilith said.

“It’s getting worse. Day by day the impatience grows, deepens, becomes more intense, like a sickness inside him. Maybe if I were human I’d understand a drive like that. He comes to the tower two, three times a day, now. Counts the levels. Counts the newly raised blocks. Hounds the tachyon people, telling them to get their machines hooked up faster. He’s starting to look like something wild: sweating, excited, stumbling over his own words. Now he’s padding the work crews—tossing millions of dollars more into the job. For what? For what? And then this starship thing. I talked to Denver yesterday. Do you know, Lilith, he ignored that plant all last year, and now he’s there once a day? The starship has to be ready for an interstellar voyage within three months. Android crew. He’s sending androids.”

“Where?”

“Three hundred light-years away.”

“He won’t ask you to go, will he? Me?”

“Four alphas, four betas,” Watchman said. “I haven’t been told who’s being considered. If he lets Spaulding decide, I’m finished. Krug preserve us from having to go.” The irony of his prayer struck him belatedly, and he laughed, a thin, dark chuckle. “Yes. Krug preserve us!”

They reached the transmat. Watchman began to set coordinates.

“Will you come up for awhile?” Lilith asked.

“Glad to.”

They stepped into the green glow together.

Her flat was smaller than his, just a bedroom, a combination sitting-room/dining-room/kitchen, and a sort of large foyer-cum-closet It was possible to see where a much larger apartment had been divided to form several smaller ones, suitable for androids. The building was similar to the one where he lived: old, well-worn, somehow warm of soul. Nineteenth-century, he guessed, although Lilith’s furnishings, reflecting the force of her personality, were distinctly contemporary, leaning heavily to floor-mounted projections and tiny, delicate, free-floating art objects. Watchman had never been at her place before, though they were close neighbors in Stockholm. Androids, even alphas, did not socialize much in one another’s homes; the chapels served as meeting-places for most occasions. Those who were outside tile communion   gathered in AEP offices, or clung to their solitude.

He dropped into a springy, comfortable chair. “Care to corrode your mind?” Lilith asked. “I can offer all kinds of friendly substances. Weeds? Floaters? Scramblers? Even alcohol—liqueurs, brandies, whiskeys.”

“You’re well stocked with pollutions.”

“Manuel comes here often. I must play hostess for him. What will you have?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m not really fond of corrosion.”

She laughed and moved toward the doppler. Quickly it consumed her wrap. Under it she wore nothing but a thermal spray, light green and lovely against her pale scarlet skin; it covered her from breasts to thighs, protecting her against Stockholm’s December winds. A different setting of the doppler and that was gone too. She kept her sandals on.

Sinking down easily to the floor, she sat crosslegged before him and toyed with the dials of her wall-projections; textures ebbed and flowed as she made random adjustments. There was an oddly tense moment of silence. Watchman felt awkward; he had known Lilith five years, nearly her whole life, and she was as close a friend to him as one android customarily was to another. Yet he had never been alone with her before in quite this way. It was not her nudity that disturbed him; nudity meant nothing at all to him. It was, he decided, simply the privacy of it. As though we were lovers. As though there was something... sexual... between us. He smiled and decided to tell her about these incongruous feelings. But before he could speak, she did:

“I’ve just had a thought. About Krug. About his impatience to finish the tower. Thor, what if he’s dying?”

“Dying?” Blankly; an unfamiliar idea.

“Some terrible disease, something they can’t fix tectogenetically. I don’t know what: some new kind of cancer, maybe.

Anyway, suppose he’s just found out that he has maybe a year or two to live, you see, and he’s desperate to get his space signals sent out before then.”

“He looks healthy,” Watchman said.

“Rotting from the inside out. The first symptoms are erratic behavior—jumping obsessively from place to place, accelerating work schedules, bothering people to respond faster—”

“Krug preserve us, no!”

“Preserve Krug.”

“I don’t believe this, Lilith. Where did you get this notion? Has Manuel said anything?”


“Strictly intuition. I’m trying to help you account for Krug’s odd behavior, that’s all. If he really is dying, that’s one possible explanation for—”

“Krug can’t die.”

“Can’t?”

“You know what I mean. Mustn’t. He’s still young. He’s got a century ahead of him, at least. And there’s so much that he still must do in that time.”

“For us, you mean?”

“Of course,” Watchman said.

“The tower’s burning him up, though. Consuming him. Thor, suppose he does die? Without having said the words—without having spoken out for us—”

“We’ll have wasted a lot of energy in prayer, then. And the AEP will laugh in our faces.”

“Shouldn’t we do something?”

He pressed his thumbs lightly against his eyelids. “We can’t build our plans atop a fantasy, Lilith. So far as we know, Krug isn’t dying, and isn’t likely to die for a long time.”

“And if he does?”

“What are you getting at?”

She said, “We could start to make our move now.”

“What?”

“The thing we discussed when you first pushed me into sleeping with Manuel. Using Manuel to enlist Krug’s support for the cause.”

“It was just a passing thought,” Watchman said. “I doubt that it’s philosophically proper to try to manipulate Krug like that. If we’re sincere in our faith, we should await His grace and mercy, without scheming to—”

“Stop it Thor. I go to chapel, and you go to chapel, and we all go to chapel, but we also live in the real world, and in the real world you have to take real factors into account Such as the possibility of Krug’s premature death.”

“Well...” He shivered with tension. She was speaking pragmatically; she sounded almost like an AEP organizer. He saw the logic of her position. All of his faith was pinned to the hope of the manifestation of a miracle; but what if there were no miracle? If they had an opportunity to encourage the miracle, should they not take it? And yet—and yet—

She said, “Manuel’s primed. He’s ready to take up our cause openly. You know how pliable he is; I could turn him into a crusader in two or three weeks. I’d take him to Gamma Town, first—”

“In disguise, I hope.”

“Of course. We’d spend a night there. I’d rub his face in it. And then—you remember, Thor, we talked about letting him see a chapel—”

“Yes. Yes.” Watchman trembled.

“I’d do that. I’d explain the whole communion  . And finally I’d come right out and ask him to go to his father for us. He would, Thor, he would! And Krug would listen. Krug would yield and say the words. As a favor to Manuel.”

Watchman rose. He paced the room. “It seems almost blasphemous, though. We’re supposed to wait for Krug’s grace to descend on us, in Krug’s own time. To make use of Manuel this way, to attempt to shape and force the will of Krug—”

“What if Krug’s dying?” Lilith asked. “What if he’s got only months left? What if a time comes when there is no Krug? And we’re still slaves.” Her words rebounded from the walls, shattering him:

when there is no Krug

when there is no Krug

when there is no Krug

when there is no Krug

“We have to distinguish,” he said shakily, “between the physical man who is Krug, for whom we work, and the eternal presence of Krug the Maker and Krug the Liberator, who—”

“Not now, Thor. Just tell me what should I do. Take Manuel to Gamma Town?”

“Yes. Yes. But move one step at a time. Don’t reveal things too quickly. Check with me if you have any doubts. Can you really control Manuel?”

“He worships me,” Lilith said quietly.

“Because of your body?”

“It’s a good body, Thor. But it’s more than that. He wants to be dominated by an android. He’s full of second-generation guilts. I captured him with sex, but I hold him by the power of the Vat.”

“Sex,” Watchman said. “Captured him with sex. How? He has a wife. An attractive wife, I’ve heard, though of course I’m in no position to judge. If he has an attractive wife, why does he need—”

Lilith laughed.

“Did I say a joke?”

“You don’t understand a thing about humans, do you, Thor? The famous Alpha Watchman, totally baffled!” Her eyes sparkled. She jumped to her feet. “Thor, do you know anything about sex? At first hand, I mean.”

“Have I done sex? Is that what you’re asking?”

“That’s what I’m asking,” Lilith told him.

The change in the conversation’s direction puzzled him. What did his private life have to do with the planning of revolutionary tactics?

“No,” he said. “Never. Why should I? What could I get from it beside trouble?”

“Pleasure,” she suggested. “Krug created us with functional nervous systems. Sex is amusement. Sex excites me; it ought to excite you. Why haven’t you ever tried it?”

“I don’t know an alpha male who has. Or who even thinks much about it.”

“Alpha women do.”

“That’s different. You have more opportunities. You’ve got all those human males running after you. Human females don’t run after androids much, except for some disturbed women, I guess. And you can do sex with a human without any risks. But I’m not going to chance entangling myself with some human female, not when any man who thinks I’m infringing on his rights can destroy me on the spot.”

“How about sex between android and android?”

“What for? So we can make babies?”

“Sex and reproduction are separate things, Thor. People have sex without babies and babies without sex all the time. Sex is a social force. A sport, a game. A kind of magnetism, body to body. It’s what gives me power over Manuel Krug.” Abruptly the tone of her voice shifted, losing its didactic quality, becoming softer. “Do you want me to show you what it is? Take your clothes off.”

He laughed edgily. “Are you serious? You want to do sex with me?”

“Why not? Are you afraid?”

“Don’t be absurd. I just didn’t expect—I mean—it seems so incongruous, two androids going to bed together, Lilith—”

“Because we’re things made out of plastic?” she said coldly.

“That isn’t what I meant. Obviously we’re flesh and blood!”

“But there are certain things that we don’t have to do, because we come from the Vat. Certain bodily functions that are reserved for the Children of the Womb. Eh?”

“You’re distorting my position.”

“I know I am. I want to educate you, Thor. Here you are trying to manipulate the destinies of an entire society, and you’re ignorant of one of the most basic human motivations. Come: strip. Haven’t you ever felt desire for a woman?”

“I don’t know what desire is, Lilith.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She shook her head. “And you think we should have equality with humans? You want to vote, you want to put alphas in Congress, to have civil rights? But you’re living like a robot. Like a machine. You’re a walking argument for keeping androids in their place. You’ve closed off one of the most vital sectors of human life and tell yourself that that sort of stuff is only for humans; androids don’t have to bother with it. Dangerous thinking, Thor! We are human. We have bodies. Why did Krug give us genitals if He didn’t mean us to use them?”


“I agree with every word you’ve said. But—”

“But what?”

“But sex seems irrelevant to me. And I know that’s a damning argument against our cause. I’m not the only alpha who feels this way, Lilith. We don’t talk about it much, but—” He looked away from her. “Maybe the humans are right. Maybe we are a lesser kind, artificial through and through, just a clever kind of robot made out of flesh and—”

“Wrong. Stand up, Thor. Come here.”

He walked toward her. She took his hands and put them on her bare breasts.

“Squeeze them,” she said. “Gently. Play with the nipples. You see how they get hard, how they stand up? That’s a sign that I’m responding to your touch. It’s a way that a woman shows desire. What do you feel when you touch my breasts, Thor?”

“The smoothness. The cool skin.”

“What do you feel inside?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pulse rate changing? Tensions? A knot in your belly? Here. Touch my hip. My buttock. Slide your hand up and down. Anything, Thor?”

“I’m not sure. I’m so new at this, Lilith.”

“Strip,” she said.

“It seems so mechanical this way. Cold. Isn’t sex supposed to be preceded by courtship, soft lights, whispering, music, poetry?”

“Then you do know a little about it.”

“A little. I’ve read their books. I know the rituals. The peripherals.”

“We can try the peripherals. Here: I’ve turned down the lights. Take a floater, Thor. No, not a scrambler—not the first time. A floater. Fine. Here’s a little music, now. Undress.”

“You won’t tell anybody about this?”

“How silly you are! Who would I tell? Manuel? Darling, I’ll tell him, darling, I’ve been unfaithful to you with Thor Watchman!” She laughed giddily. “It’ll be our secret. Call it a humanizing lesson. Humans have sex, and you want to be more human, don’t you? I’ll discover sex to you.” She smiled archly. She tugged at his clothes.

Curiosity seized him. He felt the floater going to work in his brain, lifting him toward euphoria. Lilith was right: the sexlessness of alphas was a paradox among people who claimed so intensely to be fully human. Or was sexlessness as general among alphas as he thought? Perhaps, busy with the tasks set for him by Krug, he had simply neglected to let his emotions develop? He thought of Siegfried Fileclerk, weeping in the snow beside Cassandra Nucleus, and wondered.

His clothes dropped away. Lilith drew him into her arms.

She rubbed her body slowly against his. He felt her thighs on his thighs, the cool taut dram of her belly touching his, the hard nodes of her nipples brushing his chest. He searched himself for some trace of response. He was uncertain about what he found, although he could not deny that he enjoyed the tactile sensations of their contact. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. They sought his. Her tongue slid a short distance between his teeth. He ran the palms of his hands down her back, and on a sudden impulse dug the tips of his fingers into the globes of her buttocks. Lilith stiffened and pushed herself more intensely against him, grinding now instead of rubbing. They remained that way for some minutes. Then she relaxed and eased away from him.

“Well?” she asked. “Anything?”

“I liked it,” he said tentatively.

“Did it excite you, though?”

“I think so.”

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“How can you tell?”

“It would show,” she said, grinning at him.

He felt impossibly absurd and awkward; he felt cut off from his own identity, unable to return to or even to see the Thor Watchman he knew and understood. From the first, almost from the time of leaving the Vat, he had regarded himself as older, wiser, more competent, more confident, than his fellow alphas: a man who comprehended the world and his place in it. But now? Lilith had reduced him in half an hour to something clumsy, naive, foolish... and impotent.

She put her hand to his loins. “Since your organ hasn’t become rigid,” she said, “obviously it wasn’t very exciting for you when I—” She paused. “Oh. Yes. Now do you see?”

“It happened when you touched me.”

“That isn’t awfully surprising. So you like it, then? Yes. Yes.” Her fingers moved cunningly. Watchman had to admit that he found the sensation interesting, and that sudden startling awakening of his maleness in her hands was a remarkable effect. But yet he remained outside himself, a detached and remote observer, no more involved than if he were attending a lecture on the mating habits of Centaurine proteoids.

She was close against him, again. Her body moved, sliding from side to side, writhing a little, quivering with a barely suppressed tension. He clasped her in his arms. He ran his hands over her skin once more.

She drew him to the floor.

He lay atop her, bracing himself with knees and elbows so that his full weight would not descend on her. Her legs surrounded him; her thighs clamped tight against his hips; her hand slipped between their bodies, seized him, guided him into her. She began to thrust her pelvis up and down. He caught the rhythm of it shortly, and matched her thrusts with thrusts of his own.

So this is sex, he thought.

He wondered how a woman felt about having something long and hard pushed into her body like that. Evidently they enjoyed it; Lilith was gasping and trembling in what seemed like delight. But it struck him as an odd thing to covet. And was pushing yourself into a woman all that thrilling? Was this what the poetry was about, was this what men had fought duels over and renounced kingdoms for?

After awhile he said, “How will we know when it’s over?”

Her eyes opened. He was unable to tell whether there was fury or laughter in them. “You’ll know,” she said. “Just keep moving!”

He kept moving.

The motions of her hips grew more violent. Her face became twisted, distorted, almost ugly; some sort of interior storm had broken and was raging within her. Muscles throbbed randomly throughout her body. At the place where he was joined to her, he could feel her grasping him with playful inner spasms.

Abruptly he felt a spasm of his own, and ceased to catalog the effects their union   had produced in her. He closed his eyes. He fought for breath. His heart raced frantically; his skin blazed. He tightened his grip on her and pressed his face into the hollow between her cheek and her shoulder. A series of jolting impacts rocked him.

She was right: it was easy to tell when it was over.

How fast the ecstasy drained away! He could barely remember now the powerful sensations of sixty seconds ago. He felt cheated, as though he had been promised a feast and had been given only dream-food to eat. Was that all? Like the surf trickling away after a brief surge of tide? And ashes on the beach. And ashes on the beach. It is nothing at all, Thor Watchman thought. It is a fraud.

He rolled free of her.

She lay with her head lolling back, her eyes closed, her mouth slack; she was sweat-dappled and wan-looking. It seemed to him that he had never seen this woman before. A moment after he had left her, her eyes opened. She propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him, almost shyly, perhaps.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.” He looked away.

“How do you feel?”

Watchman shrugged. He searched for the right words and could not find them. Defeated, he said, “Tired, mostly. Hollow. Is that right? I feel—hollow.”


“Normal. After coitus every animal is sad. Old Latin proverb. You’re an animal, Thor. Don’t forget it.”

“A weary animal.” Ashes on the cold beach. The tide very low. “Did you enjoy it, Lilith?”

“Couldn’t you see? No, I suppose you didn’t. I enjoyed. Very much.”

He put his hand lightly on her thigh. “I’m glad. But I’m still baffled.”

“By what?”

“The whole thing. The pattern, the constellation of events. Pushing. Pulling. Sweating. Groaning. The tickle in the groin, and then it’s over. I—”

“No,” she said. “Don’t intellectualize. Don’t analyze. You must have been expecting more than is really there. It’s only fun, Thor. It’s what people do to be happy together. That’s all. That’s all. It’s not a cosmic experience.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just a dumb android who doesn’t—”

“Don’t. You’re a person, Thor.”

He realized he was hurting her by his refusal to have been overwhelmed by their coupling. He was hurting himself. Slowly he got to his feet. His mood was wintry; he felt like an empty vessel lying in the snow. He had known a flash of joy, he thought, right at the moment of discharge; but was that instant of lightning worth anything if this dreary gloom always came afterward?

She had meant well. She had wanted to make him more human.

He lifted her, pulled her against him for a moment, kissed her glancingly on the cheek, cupped one of her breasts in his band. He said, “We’ll do this again some time, all right?”

“Whenever you say.”

“It was very strange for me, the first time. It’ll get better. I know it will.”

“It will, Thor. The first time is always strange.”

“I think I’d better go now.”

“If you have to.”

“I’d better. But I’ll see you again soon.”

“Yes.” She touched his arm. “And in the meantime—I’ll start moving along the lines we discussed. I’ll take Manuel to Gamma Town.”

“Good.”

“Krug be with you, Thor.”

“Krug be with you.”

He began to dress.