Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  “Hi, Dad.” He was not truly her father but her mother’s husband. But he had raised her, loved her, supported her, as only a father could do. And he was the closest link she still had to her mother. Her voice shook. She did not feel like a bot three times as old as any other, like an ancient who had outlived all her generation. Nor did she feel like a grown human woman, old enough to have had children of her own. Her father’s mottled skin, lumpy with myriad tiny tumors, his grey hair, shaggy with bristly tufts, his weakness, his inevitable death, all affected her as if she were a child—a frightened child—all over again.

  His eyes blinked. His flattened nose, the only remnant of the pig he once had been, twitched. His lips parted. “Angie.” His whisper was hoarse and strained.

  He recognized her! Her heart leaped, and she grinned. Then she covered his hand with her own as she struggled for more words. “I’m…I’m going back to Earth, Dad. Just for a visit. With Aunt Lois.”

  He blinked again. “Porculata?” he managed. “Where…? The shoats! Tommy! Muffy.”

  Names from his past, names that reminded her of stories he had told. His first wife, a pig like him but gengineered to be a living, talking bagpipe. Their children. Friends. All gone, long gone, long dead, victims of the Earth she wanted so badly to see. Her eyes filled with tears and she squeezed his hand, hoping he could feel it.

  “We used to sing,” he whispered. “‘With his bloody big dingle…’” His voice cracked and broke and faded. “‘Shakin’ my anther for you.’”

  His eyes blinked closed. There was a soft beep from one of the monitors, though she could see no change in the tracing of his heartbeat. The brain waves, then.

  Someone touched her shoulder. She glanced aside, saw that the nurse was not the one who had met her at the door—his coverall was predominantly yellow, not grey—and said nothing. She looked back at her father. His eyes were open once more, but now he did not seem to see her.

  The nurse said gently, “He’s not…”

  “I know.” She stood up and stared down at her father. After a long moment, she asked the nurse, “How long does he have?”

  The man shrugged. “His heart could still be beating a year from now. His mind…”

  She closed her eyes. “Then he won’t die in the next few weeks.”

  “We don’t expect him to.”

  “Then I can go.” She sighed. “On the Earth run. I should be back in…”

  “Plenty of time,” the nurse said gently.

  “If you get a chance, tell him…”

  She stood on the step outside the pumpkin’s door, staring toward the Tower where its peeled sides gleamed in the afternoon sun. Her eyes felt grainy. Dried tears drew the skin above her cheekbones tight. Her throat hurt.

  Tell him I love him, she thought. I’ve said it before, but never enough. Never enough.

  When she had landed earlier, all her attention had been for this pumpkin. Now, looking back the way she had come, she could see the slope past the Tower, rising gently, almost imperceptibly, toward the bases of the valley’s encircling bluffs. There was something new there, stones set in lines, Racs carrying more stones from the bluffs, setting them beside the others. To one side stood the trio of visitors who thought the Tower held up the sky, their tails twitching back and forth.

  She walked away from the pumpkin, away from her dying father, toward the Tower and beyond it. When she was close enough, she could see that the Racs were arranging their stones in a broad arc open toward the Tower. The bottom of the arc was ornamented with a triangular stem, and in a moment she realized that the arc itself would be nearly parabolic when it was done. The Racs were laying out a rude sketch of a dish antenna.

  One Rac, distinctive in his dark ears and back, seemed to be in charge, telling the others where to place their stones. “Blacktop,” she called. When he turned toward her, she touched the side of her nose and gestured inquiringly. “What is this?”

  “A watching place,” he said. “I said that we will not let the Makers’ Enemies harm our Tower. Here we will stand sentinel. We will guard the treasures that you leave us until we can make them ours.”

  “But…” She hesitated, nonplussed. The shape before her made her think not only of communications and radar antennae, but also of the Earthly churches she had seen illustrated in the Gypsies’ books. Blacktop must have seen the same pictures, and if his people could not yet build walls and buttresses and steeple spires, they could at least mark out a foundation and a floor plan. “I told you, we are not gods.”

  The Rac waved one hand dismissively. “You still have Enemies.”

  This time she heard the capital on the word. As he turned back toward his fellows, she made a resigned face. No, they were not gods. But the Racs did not see them as ordinary mortals. Let the Gypsies leave, and there would soon be a pantheon to shame the Greeks and Romans, complete with enemies that echoed the dreams of Christians and Zoroastrians.

  What position, she wondered, would her father occupy in that pantheon? What position would be her own?

  And would it be for good or ill? When Frederick had told her why the Gypsies had not taught religion to their creations, he had also said that when primitive humans on Earth had met representatives of more advanced cultures, or even people of other skin colors, they had sometimes called them gods. They had offered sacrifices, abased themselves, surrendered control over their own lives, and then stagnated. They had never fulfilled the potential that was within them.

  She hoped the Racs would never let themselves be so handicapped.

  She had said good-bye to her father and her Uncle Renny. She had found her friends and told them where she was going. When Caledonia Emerald, that bot with the variegated blossoms, met her at the Gypsy’s dock with a wish of luck, they had embraced.

  “I’ll watch the Racs as usual,” said her friend. “You find what you want.”

  “Bees,” Pearl Angelica had said.

  “And root-home.” They had embraced again and blinked away the tears that came to their eyes. And now…

  The Quebec’s cargo bay was a long cylinder. The passenger nets were furled. The rear half of the bay, closed off by an insulated partition, held those few tons of goods—crates of frozen mossberries and fish from the oceans of First-Stop—that Lois McAlois was delivering to the Orbitals of Earth’s solar system. The front half was empty except for a large pen covered with netting. Its walls and floor were thickly padded, and in it eight young Armadons, two litters of quadruplets, one of males, one of females, bounced endlessly, restlessly back and forth. If there were anything resembling gravity to hold them to the floor, they would be rolling just as restlessly; their tessellated shells swelled out in wheels atop which ran their legs, reversed at the hips.

  At the moment, the Armadons were the size of cocker spaniels. When they matured, they would be much larger. They would also have sizable cavities in their backs; with the installation of windshields, doors, seats, and control computers, they would become vehicles. Their feed was stored in metal drums strapped to the wall to one side of their pen.

  Forward of the cargo bay were two small sleeping cabins. The nose of the Q-ship held the bank of screens, indicators, and controls that let the pilot guide the ship from place to place. Lois reclined in a padded couch, working the ship out of the Gypsy’s bay. Beside her, Pearl Angelica occupied a similar acceleration couch and stared through the viewport above the controls as metal walls gave way to fields of stars and First-Stop rolled into view, as blue and white and brown as ever any photo of old Earth.

  The planet disappeared from sight. The Gypsy appeared to the left. The pilot’s hands moved decisively. Thrust pressed them both into their couches, and their mothership slid back, fell out of the port and the view, fell behind. They were on their way.

  “The Q-drive,” said Lois McAlois. Their acceleration was barely enough to make them feel half again as heavy as on the surface of First-Stop, but the gee-forces still dragged at her voice. “It depend
s on quantum fluctuations, the spontaneous appearance of matter-antimatter particle pairs. We warp the probabilities, make the pairs appear in floods, and when they annihilate each other, we use the energy they release to turn our reaction mass into plasma. That’s what propels us.”

  Pearl Angelica barely registered her aunt’s patter, a speech memorized long ago and meant to comfort whatever passengers she might carry. It was not ignorance or uncertainty about the Q-drive that made her fingers twitch and the scalelike leaves of her torso quiver. It was the thought of her father, Frederick, Freddy, Dad, so ill, so far beyond the reach of cure. Would he still be there when she returned? Would he be alive? Or…?

  With an effort, she stilled her fingers. She took a deep breath, and another, but her leaves still trembled. She could have waited, couldn’t she? But the next trip to Earth would not be for another year, and Frederick might still be living then. So she would put it off once more, and then the Gypsy would leave First-Stop for its next destination. She would never see Earth if she did not go now. Nor would she get its bees, though that might not be a problem once the Gypsy reached its next stop.

  She tried to set her worries aside by finding the words that would prompt her aunt to continue. “And then we begin to skip…”

  The pilot nodded. “Yes. We’ve long known that electrons and other particles could jump from place to place, even across an energy barrier. They don’t seem to be entirely material, and they have a finite probability of being almost anywhere, though they are more likely to jump shorter distances. The same thing, of course, is true for anything made of these particles.”

  “Such as the Quebec,” said Pearl Angelica.

  The gees could not go too high, or the Armadons would die, but they were still enough to slow her aunt’s nod. “Even that. Even us.”

  “But for larger objects, the probabilities are…”

  “Infinitesimal. Nothing ever moves. But before we left Earth, we learned that the probability warp device could make macroscopic tunneling happen. Ordinary velocity sets the vector. Only tiny fractions of a meter at first. Then larger fractions, a meter, two. We learned to cycle the device in nanoseconds. By the time we left the System, we were traveling well over the speed of light. Einstein be damned.”

  “But it took us years to get here.”

  “The Gypsy’s big. The Quebec’s smaller. It moves faster, a lot faster. Three weeks to Earth. Not five years.”

  “How long will we be there?”

  “A week. Maybe two. We won’t be gone two whole months. Now watch. We’re far enough from the ship.” Her hands moved, the thrust of the drive died to just enough to give them a sense of weight, and something in the bowels of the ship began to hum. The hum quickly rose in pitch until it disappeared in the ultrasonic range. An Armadon squealed in response. The nearer stars began to flow backward in the viewport.

  Pearl Angelica did not hear her aunt say that they could see the stars so clearly, their hues unshifted by their speed, because when the light reached them they were not going faster than light. They gained their vast speed only as the net effect of many timeless leaps from point to point. In the vanishingly short intervals between the leaps, they were virtually motionless, the speed their acceleration gave them negligible by cosmic standards.

  The bot was thinking: two months. And her father should still be alive when she returned. Though the odds were not good. And then she realized…“Aunt Lois, could the probability warp help Dad?”

  “Improve his chances? Throw the dice and make his cells return to normal?”

  Pearl Angelica nodded abruptly, urgently.

  Lois McAlois shook her head. “I don’t believe it.” Her voice was sad, resigned. Frederick Suida had been her friend for many years. “There are just too many cells to fix. Trillions of them, right? And every one of them needing fixing in a different way. You’d have to roll the dice afresh for every one of them, and there are so many that would take forever.”

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  “Are those beasts secured?”

  “I’d like to secure them, all right. In a box, with a heavy weight, at sea.” Pearl Angelica yawned at her aunt, who blinked owlishly to prevent her own gaping reply. Both women were exhausted, for they had spent much of the trip cleaning up after and chasing the eight Armadons in the cargo hold.

  The initial period of zero-gee, even though it was followed by constant acceleration, had not agreed with the beasts. Shortly after the Quebec left the Tau Ceti system, all eight got sick. Pearl Angelica strove valiantly, but the genimals added to the mess—from both ends—much faster than she could remove it. Lois McAlois had to help.

  Of course, they had to remove the netting that covered the pen’s top. In addition, in the struggle to mop the floor, clean goo out of the Armadons’ wheel hubs, and calm the creatures’ whines and moans, one of them—they never decided who—left the pen open. Shortly after that, all eight Armadons were loose in the Quebec, racing back and forth and round and round the available floor space, their legs pumping and their wheels spinning madly. Nor did they slow their catastrophic eruptions until sometime after aunt and niece loaded an injector gun with sedatives.

  Unfortunately, they didn’t dare keep the Armadons unconscious for the entire trip. They got all eight back in their pen, with the netting top back in place and the pen’s gate shut tight. When the genimals woke up again, they were safely confined.

  They also got sick once more, and that started the whole procedure over again. The women had to open the pen to get in, and as soon as the gate began to move, the beasts charged it. Fortunately, they never got into the ship’s control room or the small cabins in which the women slept.

  The journey was four days old before Pearl Angelica asked, “Why don’t we tranquilize them first?”

  That worked, but every time the Armadons awakened from their drugged sleep, they got sick again. As a result, both Pearl Angelica and Lois McAlois could barely stand the sight, smell, sound, or even thought of Armadons.

  “But they’re tranked,” Pearl Angelica added now. “The pen is shut, and the net is on, tight.” She yawned again and tried futilely not to let the ship’s animal stink enter her nose.

  “We’re coming into the system now. I should have told you more about what to expect, but…Mechin’ beasts.” The pilot fell silent as she cut the drives. Pearl Angelica felt her weight leave her seat. Her semicircular canals protested as the Quebec swung about, and she swallowed hard until the thrust returned. “We’re decelerating now,” said her aunt.

  The stars were always there, and the light that reached them between the flickers of the tunnel drive was enough to maintain an illusion of constancy. The ship existed so briefly at any one spot, however, that messages were chopped into unintelligibility. When the ship’s com burped a phrase of staticky noise, Lois therefore switched off the tunnel-drive. Pearl Angelica immediately heard: “Hallo, Gypsies! What’s the news?”

  “Quebec here.” Muting her microphone, the pilot summoned a diagram onto a screen and told her niece, “That’s Saturn Base. A habitat outside the rings. Our course brings us near them first, but we don’t stop. Actually, we’re already past them.”

  “How near did we get?” asked the bot.

  “It’s a relative term. If we’d been much closer, they’d never have spotted us in time to hail us. You might be able to see the rings, but not much more.” Not waiting out the time delay demanded by the millions of kilometers between the ship and Saturn Base, she began to talk. “The Tower’s nearly done. An Engineer terrorist dropped a branch on a pumpkin and almost killed Frederick Suida. We still haven’t found a good target for our second leg. And I’ve got eight littering, puke-brained Armadons for the folks on Mars. They can have a barbecue. You’ll hear everything later on.”

  The com speaker interrupted her. ”Quebec? Is that you, Lois? Of course it is. Sam Hendricks here. This is the first time I’ve been on the com when you came by. We met when you were regro
wing your legs. You hauled me out to the Belt as part of the Gypsy’s construction crew…” He paused as her earlier message reached his ears. “Armadons, you say?” His laughter was unconscious and genuine. “On a spaceship? In zero-gee? I haven’t seen one of those since…You know. Glad Freddy’s okay. I heard him sing once, on an old veedo tape. But don’t hang around out here. They’re waiting for you!”

  “Hi, Sam. He’s not okay. Real sick, though it’s not the litterhead’s fault. Hasn’t got long. I’ll talk to you again on the way home.” She activated the drive once more, but it was less than an hour before they heard again: “Hallo, Gypsies! What’s the news?”

  “That’s one of the Belt stations,” she explained before she repeated her brief summary of the news she brought.

  And again: “Hallo, Gypsies! What’s the news?”

  “That’s Mars.”

  When she finished her spiel once more, Pearl Angelica said, “There’s a lot of us here.”

  “Everybody didn’t sign on the Gypsy. About a third of them stayed here. Orbitals, gengineers, even bots who didn’t want to go a-wandering. They’ve bred since then, especially the bots, and now there’s more here than with the Gypsy. Almost all the Mars colonists are bots.”

  “Do you think any Engineers are…?”

  “Hiding among them? Of course there are. A lot of the refugees came from prison camps, and some of the prisoners had to be Engineers who had gotten someone mad at them. They weren’t about to stick their heads up, and we didn’t have any way to identify them, so…”

  “Haven’t they done anything?”