Tower of Glass

23





And Krug said, There shall be this one difference forever upon you.

That the Children of the Womb shall come always from the Womb, and the Children of the Vat come always from the Vat. And it shall not be given to you to bring forth your young from your bodies, as is done among the Children of the Womb.

And this shall be so in order that your lives may flow only from Krug, that to him alone the glory of your creation be reserved, world without end.





24





December 20, 2218.



At 800 meters the tower dominates arid overpowers. There is no resisting its immensity: one steps from the transmat by day or by night, and one is struck dumb by that vaulting shaft of gleaming glass. The solitude of its surroundings lends awesomeness to its height.

It has passed the halfway mark now.

Lately there have been many accidents, born of haste. A pair of workers fell from the summit; an electrician, spraying connectors improperly along a partition, sent a lethal shock through five gammas hoisting cable; two ascending scooprods collided, at a cost of six lives; Alpha Euclid Planner narrowly avoided serious injury when a powerpool backup sent a monstrous surge of maximum-entropy data through the main computer while he was jacked in; three betas were dumped 400 meters down an interior service-access core when a scaffold collapsed. The construction work thus far has caused the destruction of nearly thirty androids. But there are thousands employed at the tower and the work is hazardous and unusual; no one considers the accident rate extraordinarily high.

The first thirty meters of the tachyon-beam broadcast apparatus is virtually finished. Technicians daily test its structural integrity. It will not be possible, of course, to generate tachyons until the entire enormous accelerator track has been completed, but putting together the individual components of the mighty system has an interest of its own, and Krug spends most of his time at the tower watching the tests. Colored lights flash; indicator panels hum and whistle; dials glow; needles quiver. Krug applauds each positive result enthusiastically. He brings hordes of guests. In the last three weeks he has come to the tower with Niccolò Vargas, with his daughter-in-law Clissa, with twenty-nine different members of Congress, with eleven leaders of industry, with sixteen world-famed representatives of the arts. There is unanimous praise for the tower. Even those who perhaps inwardly may think of it as a titanic folly cannot withhold their admiration for its elegance, its beauty, its magnitude. A folly, too, can be wonderful, and no one who has seen Krug’s tower denies its wonder. Nor are there so many who think it is folly to notify the stars that man exists.

Manuel Krug has not been seen at the tower since early in November. Krug explains that his son is busy supervising the complexities of the Krug corporate domain. He is assuming greater responsibilities every month. He is, after all, the heir apparent.





25





Last time I went to Lilith she said, Next time you come let’s do something a little different, all right?

Both of us naked after loving. My cheek on her breasts.

Different how?

To get out of the flat a little. To go around as a tourist and see Stockholm. The android quarter. To see how the people live, the androids. The gammas. Wouldn’t you want to do that?

And I said, a little wary, Why should I? Wouldn’t you rather spend the time with me?

She played with the hair on my chest. Such a beast, I am, so primitive.

She said, We live so cloistered here. You come, we have sex, you leave. We never go anywhere together. I’d like you to come outside with me. Part of your education. I have this drive to educate people, did you know that, Manuel? To open their minds to things. Have you ever been in a Gamma Town?

No.

Do you know what it is?

A place where gammas live, I suppose.

That’s right. But you don’t really know. Not till you’ve been inside one.

Dangerous?

Not really. Nobody will bother alphas in Gamma Town. They bother each other a little, sometimes, but that’s different. We’re high-caste and they keep away from us.

I said, They won’t bother an alpha, maybe, but what about me? They probably don’t want human tourists.

Lilith said she would disguise me. As an alpha. That had a certain kind of spice in it. Temptation. Mystery. It might keep the romance glowing for Lilith and me, playing a game like that. I asked, Won’t they recognize that I’m a fake? And she said, They don’t look too closely at alphas. We have a concept called the social distances. Gammas keep the social distances, Manuel.

All right, then, we’ll go to Gamma Town.

We planned it for a week from that day. I cleared everything with Clissa: going to Luna, I said, won’t be back for a couple of days, yes? No problem. Clissa would spend the time with her friends in New Zealand. I wonder sometimes how much Clissa suspects. Or what she’d say if she knew. I have this temptation to tell her, Clissa, I’ve got an android mistress in Stockholm, she’s way high spectrum in bed and a fantastic body, how do you like that? Clissa isn’t bourgeois, but she’s sensitive. She might feel unwanted. Or maybe Clissa with her great love of the downtrodden androids might say, How kind of you, Manuel, to be making one of them so happy. I don’t mind sharing your love with an android. Bring her to tea some day, won’t you? I wonder.


The day comes. I go to Lilith’s. I go in and she’s naked. Get your clothes off, she says, I grin. Unsubtle. Sure. Sure. I strip and reach for her. She does a little dance step and leaves me holding air.

Not now, silly. When we come back. We’ve got to disguise you now!

She has a spraytube. First she turns it to neutral and covers up the mirror-plate in my forehead. Androids don’t wear such things. The earlobe plugs, she says: out. I take them out and she fills the opening with gel. Then she starts spraying me red. Do I have to shave my body? I ask. No, she says, just don’t take your clothes off in front of anybody. She turns me red all over, with a shiny texture to it. Instant android. Next she gives me a thermal spray from chest to thighs. Going to be cold out there, she says. Androids don’t wear heavy clothes. Here. Here, get dressed.

She hands me a costume. Highneck shirt, skintight pants. Obviously android clothes, and obviously alpha style, too. Fits me like a skin graft. Don’t get an erection, she tells me. You’ll split the trousers. She laughs and rubs me in front.

Where’d you get the clothes?

I borrowed them from Thor Watchman.

You tell him what for?

No, she says, of course not. I just said I needed some. Let’s see how you look, now. Lovely. Lovely! A perfect alpha. Walk across the room. Back. Good. Swagger a little more. Remember, you’re the end-product of human evolution, the finest version of Homo sapiens that ever came out of a vat, with all of a human’s strong points and none of his flaws. You’re Alpha—hmm. We need a name, in case anyone asks. Lilith thinks a moment Alpha Leviticus Leaper, she says. What’s your name?

Alpha Leviticus Leaper, I say.

No. If anyone asks you, you say Leviticus Leaper. They can tell you’re an alpha. Other people call you Alpha Leaper. Clear?

Clear.

She gets dressed. A thermal spray, first, then a kind of gold mesh over her breasts and down to mid-thigh. Nothing else. Nipples showing through the openings in the mesh. Not much hidden below, either. Not my idea of winter clothing. Androids must enjoy winters more than we do.

Want to see yourself before we got out, Alpha Leaper?

Yes.

She dumps mirror-dust in the air. When the molecules are lined up I get a head-to-toe view. Impressive. A really cocky alpha buck, a red devil out on the town. Lilith is right: no gamma would dare to fool with me. Or even look me in the eye.

Let’s go, Alpha Leaper. Slumming in Gamma Town.

Out. Across. To the edge of the city, looking down on windwhipped gray water. Whitecaps in the harbor. Early afternoon, but night already closing in; a greasy gray time of day, fog hanging low, the glow of streetlamps coming through it blurred and dirty. Other lights flashing off buildings or floating overhead: red, green, blue, orange, flickering on and off, yelling for attention, an arrow here, the sign of a trumpet there. Vibrations. Fumes. Sounds. The closeness of many people. A screech in the grayness. Distant laughter, blurred also. Odd scraps of voices drifting in the fog:

“Let go or I’ll clot you!”

“Back to the vat. Back to the vat.”

“Slobies, who’ll take slobies?”

“Stackers can’t tell you.”

“Slobies!”

“Owl! Owl! Owl!”

Stockholm is more than half populated by androids. Why do they gather here? And in maybe nine other cities. Ghettoes. They don’t have to. Transmat world: live wherever you like, get to work anyway. But we like to be with our own kind, she says. And even so they stratify themselves in their ghettoes. The alphas back there, in the fine old houses, and the betas in the ragbag middle. And then the gammas. The gammas. Welcome to Gamma Town.

Wet slippery mud-streaked cobble-paved streets. Medieval? Peeling gray houses face to face, hardly a lane between them. A trickle of cold dirty water running down the gutter from the higher part. Windows of glass. And yet it isn’t completely archaic here: a mixture of styles, all sorts of architecture, olla podrida, bouillabaisse, with twenty-second, twentieth, nineteenth, sixteenth, fourteenth centuries jumbled together. The airy webs of weather-proofed skyways dangling. Rusted slidewalks on a few of the tangled streets. The buzz of climate conditioners that have gone out of phase, pumping greenish fog into the winter air. Thick-walled baroque cellars. Lilith and I walk down zigzag crazy pathways. A demon must have planned this town. The imp of the perverse.

Faces hover.

Gammas. Everywhere. They peer, flit, peer again. Little dim eyes, birdlike, twitch-twitch-twitch, frightened. Afraid of us, they are. The social distances, eh? They keep the social distances. They lurk, they stare, but as we get close they try to be invisible. Head down. Eyes averted. Alphas alphas alphas; all gammas beware!

We tower above them. I never realized how squat gammas are. How short, how broad. And how strong. Those shoulders. Those muscles rippling. Any of them could rip me apart. The Women look strong too, though they’re built more gracefully. To go to bed with a gamma girl? More fire than Lilith, maybe—is that possible? Thrashing and jumping around, low-class groaning, no inhibitions? And the smell of garlic, no doubt. Forget the idea. Coarse, they are. Coarse. Like Quenelle with my father, I’d say. Let them be; there’s passion enough in Lilith, and she’s clean. Probably not worth the effort even to think about it. The gammas keep back from us. Two jaunty alphas out on the town. We have long legs. We have style. We have grace. They fear us.

I am Alpha Leviticus Leaper.

The wind is raw here. Right off the water it comes, knife-sharp. It stirs up dust and bits of things in the streets. Dust! Scraps! When have I seen such filthy streets? Don’t the robocleaners ever come here? Well, then, don’t the gammas have enough pride to clean their own?

They don’t care about such things, says Lilith. It’s a cultural matter. They take pride in their unpride. It reflects their lack of status. Bottom of the android world, bottom of the bottom of the human world, and they know it, and they don’t like it, and the squalor is like a badge of nonstatus for them. Saying, you want us to be filth, we’ll live in filth too. Reveling in it. Wallowing in it. If we’re not people, we don’t have to be tidy at home. You know, robocleaners used to come here and the gammas would dismantle them. There’s one now, you see? Been there ten years, at least.

Robot fragments lie in a drab scattered heap. Shards of a metal man. The glint of good blue metal through the rust. Are those things solenoids? Relays? Accumulators? The coiled wire guts of the machine. Bottom of the bottom of the bottom, a mere mechanical object, destroyed while attacking fee holy squalor of our vat-born pariahs. A gray and white cat pisses on the robot’s guts. The gammas leaning against the wall laugh. Then they see us and creep back, showing awe. They make quick nervous gestures with their left hands—touch crotch, touch breasts, touch forehead, one two three very fast. As automatic, as much a reflex, as the sign of the Cross. What is it? A kind of honorific tugging at the forelock? A show of homage to the wandering alphas?

Something like that, says Lilith. But not quite. Actually it’s just a superstitious sign they make.

To ward off the evil eye?

Yes. In a manner of speaking. Touch the cardinal points, invoke the spirit of genitals and souls and intelligence, crotch chest skull. You’ve never seen androids do it before?

I think maybe I have.

Even alphas, Lilith says. A habit. A comfort when tension. Sometimes even I.

Why the genitals, though? When androids don’t genitate?


Symbolic power, she says. We’re sterile but that’s still a holy zone. In memory of the origin of us all. The human gene pool issued from the loins, and we were designed after those genes. There’s a theology of it.

I make the sign. One two three. Lilith laughs, but she looks edgy, as if I really shouldn’t be doing it. To hell with. Fm masquerading as an android tonight, right? Then I can do android things. One two three.

The gammas lounging against the wall return the sign. One two three. Crotch chest skull.

One of them says something that sounds like, Krug be praised!

What was that? I ask Lilith.

I didn’t hear it.

Did he say Krug be praised?

Gammas will say anything sometimes.

I shake my head. Maybe he recognizes me, Lilith!

Not a chance. Absolutely none. If he said anything about Krug, he means your father.

Yes. Yes. True. He’s Krug. I’m Manuel, only Manuel.

Shh! You’re Alpha Leviticus Leaper!

Right. Sorry. Alpha Leviticus Leaper. Lev for short. Krug be praised? Maybe I didn’t hear it right

Maybe, Lilith says.

We turn a sharp corner and in so doing we trigger an advert trap. By entering the trap’s scanner field we cause powders of many colors to erupt from vents in a wall and form, by electrostatic attraction, a pattern of gaudy words in the air, blindingly bright even in the murk and fog. Against a silvery backdrop we see:



! MEDIC !

ALPHA POSEIDON MUSKETEER

! MEDIC !

SPECIALIST IN GAMMA COMPLAINTS

HE CURES

SOLIDIFIERS

SLOBIE ADDICTS

STACKERS

HE CONQUERS

METABOLIC ROT AND DECAY

AND OTHER PROBLEMS

! REPUTABLE!

FIRST DOOR TO RIGHT AND RING



I ask, Is he really an alpha?

Of course.

What’s he doing living in Gamma Town?

Somebody’s got to be their doctor. You think a gamma can get a medical degree?

He sounds like a quack, though. Putting out a trap like this! What kind of doctor would huckster for patients?

A Gamma Town doctor. That’s how things are done here. Anyway, he is a quack. A good doctor, but a quack. Mixed up in some organ-regeneration scandal years ago, when he had an alpha practice. Lost his license.

You don’t need a license here?

You don’t need anything here. They say he’s dedicated, though. Eccentric but devoted to his people. Would you like to meet him?

No. No. What are slobie addicts?

Slobie’s a drug the gammas take, Lilith says. You’ll see some addicts before long.

And stackers?

They have something wrong in the brain. Scaly matter in the cerebellum.

Solidifiers?

A trouble in the muscles. Stiffening of tissue, or something. I’m not sure. Only gammas get it.

I frown. Does my father know? He stands behind the integrity of his products. If gammas are prone to mysterious diseases

That’s a slobie addict, Lilith says.

An android comes up the street toward us. Drifting, floating, sliding, waltzing, moving with a weird molasses slowness. Eyes slitwide; face dreamy; arms outstretched; fingers drooping. Gropes his way as though going through the atmosphere of Jupiter. All he wears is a scrap of fabric around his hips, yet he sweats in the frosty evening air. Crooning to himself in a clanking way. After what seems like four hours he reaches us. Plants his feet, leans his head back, puts hands on hips. Silence. A minute. At last in low bristly voice he says with terrible unhurriedness, Al... phas... hel... lo... al... phas... love... ly... al... phas.

Lilith tells him to move along.

No response at first. Then his face crumbles. Unutterable sadness. Brings left hand up in awkward clownlike gesture, touches forehead, lets hand drift down to chest, to crotch. Making the sign in reverse—what’s the significance of that? He says tragically, I... love... the... love... ly... al... phas.

I say to Lilith, What kind of drug is it?

Slows the time-sense. A minute becomes an hour to them. It stretches their free time. Of course, we move like whirlwinds around them. Usually the addicts stick together, all on the same time-scheme. Illusion of having days between each work-shift.

A dangerous drug?

She says, Cuts about an hour off the life expectancy for every two hours you’re under the influence. The gammas figure it’s a fair deal, though. Give up an hour objective, gain two or three days subjective—why not?

But it reduces the work force!

Gammas have the right to do what they please with their lives, don’t they, Alpha Leaper? You wouldn’t accept the argument that they’re merely property, would you, and that any kind of self-abuse practiced by the gamma is a crime against its owner?

No. No. Of course not, Alpha Meson.

I didn’t think you felt that way, Lilith says.

The slobie addict is moving in foolish vague circles around us, chanting something so slowly that I am unable to connect one syllable to another, and can make no sense of it. He halts. A glacial smile spreads infinitely slowly across his lips; I think it is a snarl until it is half formed. He sinks into a, hulking crouch. His hand rises, fingers flexed. The hand is obviously heading toward Lilith’s left breast. Neither of us moves.

I catch the gamma’s chant now:

A... A... A... A... A... G... A... A... C... A... A... U...

What’s he trying to say?

Lilith shakes her head. It isn’t important.

She steps away while the groping hand is still ten centimeters from her bosom. A frown begins to replace the smile on the gamma’s face. He looks wounded. His chant takes on a questioning tone:

A... U... A... A... U... G... A... U... C... A... U... U...

A sound of slow, dragging footsteps comes from behind me. A second slobie addict is approaching: a girl, wearing a cloak that hangs down from her shoulders and trails raggedly for many meters behind her, but leaves her thighs and loins bare. She has dyed her hair green, and has it bound up in a kind of tiara. Her face seems wasted and pallid; her eyes are scarcely open; her skin is glossy with sweat. She floats toward our first friend and says something to him in a startling baritone boom. He replies dreamily. I can understand none of what they say. Is it because of the decelerating drug, or do they speak a gamma patois? Something ugly seems to be about to happen. I nod to Lilith, suggesting we leave, but she shakes her head. Stay. Watch them.

The addicts are doing a grotesque dance. Fingertips touching, knees rising and falling. A gavotte for marble statues. A minuet for stuffed elephants.

They croon to one another. They circle one another. The man’s feet become tangled in the girl’s trailing cloak. She moves; he stays firm; the cloak rips, leaving the girl naked in the street. Between her breasts she has a knife, dangling from a green cord. Her back is crisscrossed with scars. Has she been flogged? Her nakedness excites her. I see her nipples stiffening in slow motion. The man is next to her now. He reaches up with painful unhaste and takes the knife from its sheath. Just as slowly he brings it down and touches the cold metal to the girl’s loins, her belly, her forehead. The holy sign. Lilith and I are against the wall, near the entrance to the doctor’s office. The knife makes me uneasy.

Let me take it away from him, I say.

No. No. You’re just a visitor here. This isn’t your affair.

Then let’s go, Lilith.

Wait Watch.

Our friend is singing again. Letters, as before. U... C... A... U... C... G... U... C... C...

His arm comes back, then starts forward. The point of the knife is aimed at the girl’s abdomen. From the tension in his muscles I can see that the blow will have full force; this is no dance step. The blade is only a few centimeters from her skin when I rush forward and slap it from his hand.

He begin to moan.


The girl does not yet realize that she has been saved. She utters a deep droning bellow, perhaps intended to be a shriek. She drops to the ground, clutching her breasts with one hand, thrusting the other between her thighs. She writhes in slow motion.

You shouldn’t have interfered, Lilith says angrily. Come on, now. We’d better go.

But he would have killed her!

Not your affair. Not your affair.

She tugs at my wrist. I turn. We begin to move away. I am aware peripherally that the girl is getting up; the garish lights of the sign of Poseidon Musketeer the Medic glisten on her bare thin flanks. Lilith and I take two steps; then we hear a grunt. We look back, the girl, rising, has risen with the knife in her hand, and she has driven it into the man’s belly. Methodically she draws it upward from waist to chest. He is disemboweled, and is only slowly becoming aware of it. He makes a gurgling sound.

Now we’ve got to go, Lilith says.

We speed toward the corner. As we reach it I turn. The door of Alpha Musketeer has opened. A gaunt haggard figure, alpha-tall, with a mane of wild gray hair and bulging eyes, stands in it. Is this the famous medic? He rushes toward the slobie addicts. The girl kneels before her victim, who has not yet fallen. His blood purples her shining skin. She chants: G! A! A! G! A! G! G! A! C!

In here, Lilith says, and we duck into a dark doorway.

Steps. A dry smell of withered things. Cobwebs. We plunge into unknown depths. In the distance, far below, yellow lights gleam. We go down and down and down.

What is this place? I ask.

Security tunnel. Built during the Sanity War two hundred years ago. Part of a system that runs everywhere under Stockholm. The gammas have taken it over.

Like a sewer.

I hear quick stabs of laughter, jagged blurts of incoherent conversation. There are shops down here, with slitted gates behind which little lamps sputter and flicker. Gammas move to and fro. Some of them make the one-two-three sign as they pass us. Driven by a fear I do not understand, Lilith leads us frantically onward. We change tunnels, entering a passage at right angles to the first one.

Three slobie addicts wander by.

A male gamma with face streaked by red and blue paint pauses to sing, perhaps to us:



Who shall I marry?

Who will marry me?

Fire in the stinking vat

Fire flying free.

My head my head my head my head

My head.



He kneels and gags. Thin blue fluid pours from his lips, almost to our feet.

We move on. We hear an echoing cry:

Al-pha! Al-pha! Al-pha! Al-pha!

Two gammas couple in an alcove. Their bodies are sweat-shiny and lean. Despite myself I watch the plunging hips and listen to the slap of flesh against flesh. The girl pounds the flats of her hands steadily against her partner’s back. Is she protesting a rape, or displaying her ecstasy? I never find out, because a slobie stumbles out of the shadows and falls on them, tumbling in a turmoil of intertwined limbs. Lilith draws me away. I am suddenly heavy with desire for her. I think of the firm breasts beneath her wrap; I think of the bare moist slit. Shall we find an alcove of our own, and couple among the gammas? I put my hand on her buttocks, which are taut as she walks. Lilith wriggles her hips. Not here, she says. Not here. We have social distances to keep too.

A dazzle of light cascades from the tunnel’s roof. Pink bubbles appear and burst, releasing sour smells. A dozen gammas gallop out of a side-passage, halt in shock as they realize they have nearly collided with two visiting alphas, make signs of respect, and rush onward, shouting, laughing, singing.



Oh I melt you and you melt me

And we melt they and happy we be.

Clot! Clot! Clot! Clot!

Grig!



They seem happy, I say.

Lilith nods. They’re soaped to the whiskers, she says. On their way to a radiation orgy, I bet.

A what?

A puddle of yellow fluid slides out from under a closed door. Acrid fumes rise. Gamma urine? The door bursts open. Wild-eyed female gamma, luminescent breasts, livid scar on belly, giggles at us. She executes a respectable curtsey. Mir lady. Milord. Will you clot with me? Giggles. Squats. Lurches around, heels against rump, in a dizzy dance. Arches her back, slaps her breasts, spreads her legs. Green and gold lights blaze in the room from which she has emerged. A figure appears.

What is it, Lilith?

Normal height, but twice the width of a gamma, and covered with thick coarse fur. An ape? The face is human. It lifts its hands. Short blunt fingers; webs between them! Drags the girl back inside. Door closes.

A reject, Lilith says. There are lots of them here.

Reject from what?

Substandard android. Genetic flaws; impurities in the vat, perhaps. Sometimes they have no arms, sometimes no legs, no heads, no digestive tracts, no this, no that.

Aren’t they automatically destroyed at the factory?

Lilith smiles. They aren’t destroyed. Those that aren’t viable die anyway, fast enough. The others are smuggled out when the supervisors aren’t looking and sent to one of the undercities. Many here. We can’t put our idiot brethren to death, Manuel!

Leviticus, I say. Alpha Leviticus Leaper.

Yes. Look, there’s another.

A nightmare figure rollicks through the corridor. Like something that has been placed in an oven until its flesh began to flow and run: the basic outlines are human, but the contours are not. The nose is a trunk, the lips are saucers, the arms are of unequal length, the fingers are tentacles. The genitals are monstrous: horse-penis, bull-balls.

Better off dead, I say to Lilith.

No. No. Our brother. Our pitiful brother whom we cherish.

The monstrosity halts a dozen meters from us. Its ropy arms go through the movements of the one-two-three.

Speaking perfectly clearly it says to us, The peace of Krug upon you, alphas. Go with Krug. Go with Krug. Go with Krug.

Krug be with you, Lilith replies.

The monstrosity shambles onward, murmuring happily.

The peace of Krug? Go with Krug? Krug be with you? Lilith, what does all this mean?

Common courtesy, she says. A friendly greeting.

Krug?

Krug made us all, did he not? she says.

I remember things that were said when I was in the shunt room with my friends. You know all the androids are in love with your father? Yes. Sometimes I think it must be almost like a religion with them. The religion of Krug. Well it makes a sort of sense to worship your creator. Don’t laugh.

The peace of Krug. Go with Krug. Krug be with you.

Lilith, do androids think my father is God?

Lilith evades the question. We can talk about that some other time, she says. People have ears here. There are some things we can’t discuss.

But.

Some other time!

I drop it. The tunnel now widens into a considerable room, well-lit, crowded. A marketplace? Shops, booths, gammas everywhere. We are stared at. There are numerous rejects in the room, each a little more horrid than the last. It is hard to see how creatures so maimed and mismade can survive.

Do they ever go to the surface?

Never. They might be seen by humans.

In Gamma Town?

They take no chances. They’d all be obliterated if.

In the crush of the crowded room, the androids jostle and shove, bicker, snap. Somehow they maintain an area of open space around the intrusive alphas, but not a very great one.

Two knife-duels are going on; no one pays attention. There is much public lasciviousness. The smell of the place is rank and foul. A wild-eyed girl rushes up to me and whispers, Krug bless! Krug bless! She pushes something into my hand and runs off.

A gift.

A small cool cube with beveled edges, like the toy at the New Orleans shunt room. Does it send messages? Yes. I see words forming and flowing and vanishing in its milky core:



A CLOT IN TIME SAVES THINE


*

HIS HIS HIS HIS HERS HIS HIS HIS

*

O SHALLOW IS THY BOWL, FILTHY GRIG

*

SLOBIE REIGNS, STACKERS PAINS

*

PLIT! PLIT! PLIT! PLIT! PLACK!

*

AND UNTO KRUG RENDER KRUG’S



All nonsense. Lilith, can you figure this stuff?

Some of it. The gammas have their own slang, you know. But look here, where it says —

A male gamma with cratered purple skin slaps the cube from our hands. It skitters along the floor; he dives for it in a knot of feet. There is a general uproar. People tangle and twine. The thief breaks from the mass and speeds away into a corridor. The gammas still wrestle confusedly. A girl rises to the top of the heap; she has lost her few scraps of clothing in the melee, and there are bloody gouges on her breasts and thighs. In her hand she holds the cube. I recognize her as the girl who gave it to me in the first place. Now she makes a demonic face at me, baring her teeth. She brandishes the cube and clamps it between her legs. A burly reject pounces on her and hauls her away; he has only one arm, but it is as thick as a tree. Grig! she screams. Prot! Gliss! They vanish.

The crowd is muttering in an ugly way.

I picture them turning on us, ripping at our clothing, revealing the hairy human body beneath my false alpha costume. The social distances may not protect us then.

Come, I say to Lilith. I think I’ve had enough.

Wait.

She turns to the gammas. She holds up her hands, palms facing, about half a meter apart, as though indicating the length of a fish she has caught. Then she wriggles in a peculiar sinuous maneuver, twisting her body so she describes a kind of spiraling curve. The gesture quiets the crowd instantly. The gammas step aside, heads bowed humbly, as we go past. All is well.

Enough, I tell Lilith. It’s getting late. How long have we been here, anyway?

We can go now.

We flee through a maze of interlocking passages. Gammas of a thousand hideous shapes pass us. We see slobies floating in their slow raptures. Rejects. Stackers and solidifiers, for all I can tell. Sounds, smells, colors, textures—I am dazzled and dazed. Voices in the darkness. Songs.



The freedom day is coming

The freedom day is coming

Smip the slobies, grab the gliss—

And ride up to freedom!



Steps. Upward. Gold winds descending. Breathless, we race to the top and find ourselves in the winding cobbled streets of Gamma Town again, probably only a few meters from the place where we went down. It seems to me that the office of Alpha Poseidon Musketeer must be just around the corner.

Night has come. The lights of Gamma Town crackle and flutter. Lilith wants to take me to a tavern. I refuse. Home. Home. Enough. My mind is stained by the sights of the android world. She yields; we hurry out. How far must we walk before we reach a transmat?

We leap. Her flat seems so warm and bright to me now. We rid ourselves of our clothes. Under the doppler I cleanse myself of my red color and my thermal spray.

Was it interesting?

Overpowering, I say. And there’s so much you have to explain, Lilith.

Images swim in my brain. I burn. I sizzle.

Of course you won’t tell anyone I took you, she says. I could get into awful trouble.

Of course. Strictly confidential.

Come close, Alpha Leaper.

Manuel.

Manuel. Come close.

First tell me what it means when they say Krug be—

Later. I’m cold. Warm me, Manuel.

I fold her in my arms. The heavy mounds of her breasts inflame me. I cover her mouth with mine. I thrust my tongue between her lips. We sink down together to the floor.

Without hesitation I spear her. She trembles. She clasps me.

When I close my eyes I see slobies and rejects and stackers.

Lilith.

Lilith.

Lilith.

Lilith I love you I love you I love you Lilith Lilith Lilith

The great vat bubbles. The moist crimson creatures crawl forth. Laughter. Lightning. O shallow is thy bowl, filthy grig! My flesh crashes against hers. Plit! Plit! Plit! Plit! Placid With humiliating swiftness the overwrought Leviticus Leaper pours a billion little boys and girls into his beloved’s sterile womb.