Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  She shook her head, unable to answer such audacious charges.

  “Tell me,” he said. “What did you find out before you hid so cleverly in our riverside thickets? What did you tell your masters? Where is your radio? Tell me…” He raised a hand as if he wanted to strike her. “Or…We have drugs, and other methods.”

  “I wasn’t spying,” she managed at last. She had no trouble imagining what “other methods” he meant. “Or hiding. I only wanted soil. Root-ease.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “A taste of the world of my forebears, root-home.”

  His mouth looked as if her words tasted bad. “There is no such link. We expunged all your monstrous kind. Earth has rejected you, disowned you, and we have cleansed our world of all your traces.”

  Not all, she thought. There is still the honeysuckle. But all she said was, “You can’t deny the history.”

  “It does not exist. And even your memory will vanish once we have the star-drive.”

  There, she thought. He had said it.

  “What will you do?” she asked. “Use your robots? Send them out to hunt us down? You’ll need an awful lot of them.”

  “They will make more of themselves. We have almost perfected that.”

  Von Neumann machines. Just as Hamid had told her. If the Engineers could make such things, the Gypsies might indeed be doomed. Dejectedly, she let herself slump onto the edge of her sleeping platform.

  “Stand up!”

  She stayed where she was.

  The major only glared, as if he did not want to contaminate his hand by touching her.

  “You foul the very air by breathing!”

  “Will you have to destroy this warren when I am gone?”

  “We will use a flame thrower on this room. We have already sterilized the plane that fetched you.”

  “Then why am I even here, if I am such a monstrosity? Such an intolerable nastiness?”

  “You will not be on Earth for long. Only until the Council can question you. Then, if they decide to let you live, we’ll move you to the Moon. Orbitals are sometimes permitted there.”

  “And how long will I be there?”

  “Until your friends deliver the star-drive plans.”

  “If,” she said. “They won’t do it.”

  “Then we will finally kill you.”

  A moment later, he was gone. Pearl Angelica was left with the shock of his words.

  They were going to kill her.

  She would die.

  Be gone.

  Nevermore see her father, her friends, the Gypsies, First-Stop.

  She had known that already. How could she not? She had been doomed from the moment the Engineers had decided to ask for a ransom that could not possibly be paid.

  And there was nothing she could do to avoid that doom. There was no hope. No recourse or appeal.

  Earth was ruled by fanatics. Perhaps it always had been. Or its nations, every one of which had at times been as much a closed society as was now the entire planet. Insular, sealed off from foreign contact, foreign ideas, fearing difference and seeing in it deliberate, malicious threats to the sole right way to think and believe and live. Fearing change. Fearing also spies and the implications of criticism, threat, and plot those secret agents must inevitably carry with them.

  The Orbitals were far more open and less defensive. Perhaps they were more confident of the rightness of their beliefs. Certainly they tolerated difference better, and Engineers were welcome to move freely among them. If not many seemed to take the opportunity, that must be because of that very fear of difference that sealed off Engineer society on Earth. Perhaps as well the Engineer authorities blocked travel into space to keep the Orbitals from asking questions, spying, or even taking hostages. Perhaps they feared that those who did not share the official paranoia would defect if they had the chance.

  Were there parallels to this situation in Earthly history? Pearl Angelica had read enough to know that twentieth-century North Americans and western Europeans had prided themselves on their freedom and openness and tolerance of diversity. Yet they had been nearly as defensive about the virtues of their institutions as their neighboring tyrannies. They had maintained immense armies. They had spied and hunted spies. They had controlled who could enter their nations and where their own citizens could go. The tyrannies had exerted even stricter controls.

  As a Gypsy, she could understand some of that attitude. She fully agreed that the tunnel-drive should not be shared with the Orbitals, for fear that it would fall into the hands of the Engineers. Certainly it should not be given to the Engineers directly, not even in exchange for her life.

  Yet she also saw that that defensive caution contributed to the very conflict it guarded against. She wished she could see some other answer.

  “You’re the first genny ever to enter this room. Did you know that?”

  Except for his balding head and heavy abdomen, the speaker might have been Major Reiber’s twin. His face was just as humorless, his posture as stiff, and he wore the same black trousers and white shirt, with very similar medallions on his chest. He was one of the twelve members of the Council of Engineers.

  The Council Chamber was many levels deeper in the Earth than the cell that Pearl Angelica had occupied until the major had returned to escort her through locked doors, down elevators, and past guardposts to this encounter. The Councilors sat at a horseshoe-shaped table surrounded by tiers of plush seats. The tiers were empty now; Pearl Angelica supposed they were intended for spectators and those who had business with the Council. Inside the arc of the horseshoe stood a gleaming metal post topped with a backless seat. Her ankles were chained to rings that protruded from the sides of the post. A belt tight across her lap held her to the seat. Her hands were cuffed behind her back.

  Inset in the gleaming wood before each Councilor was a silver button. There was also a small plaque bearing the Councilor’s name. The speaker was Dubarry.

  “Did you?” Only when she answered with a shake of her head did Dubarry laugh and go on. “In fact, I do believe you’re the first one to be on Earth since it was built. Certainly, there aren’t any wild ones left.”

  “We’re not here for small talk.” Her heart leaped as the stool spun on its stem. Pain erupted in her back, awakened by the abrupt, jerking motion. She gasped, and when she opened her eyes she saw that she was facing an older, dark-skinned Councilor.

  The speaker was dressed much like Dubarry, though his shirt was pink. His name-plaque said “Kentaba.” His voice was softer, more kindly, but his eyes were as stoney as a statue’s, and his lips twitched when she gasped. By the way the others glanced his way as he spoke, she guessed that he was the Council’s leader. “We need to know things. If it will tell us.”

  So to him Pearl Angelica was an “it,” a thing, inhuman, as easy to destroy as a mosquito.

  The stool jerked her painfully around to face Dubarry again as that Councilor said, “We should have let Reiber grill her. I’m sure the major’s report would take less of our time. And…” He lifted one hand from the silver button that seemed to control the stool and fanned his face as if her presence fouled the air he had to breathe.

  She tightened her hands on the edge of her seat. This time, when the stool spun the pain was less. She blinked, and she was facing a white-shirted Dostakovich, his jaw squared by the bulges of incipient jowls. He was not looking at her face, and his lips were wet. To him too, she thought, she was a thing, but not one to be destroyed immediately. It was clear that he had other lusts than the one for blood.

  “We’ve heard rumors that you have a faster-than-light drive,” he said. “Is that true?”

  She did not think that anything she could say would make the Engineers less implacable as foes. Their intentions were already as deadly as they could possibly be. She nodded.

  “How does it work?”

  “I’m a biologist.” That was true enough as far as it went, though she knew just enough ab
out the tunnel-drive’s relationship to the ordinary Q-drive to reveal far too much. “That’s not my field. I have no idea.”

  Her seat spun her to face a dark-haired, round oriental face and a “Kasumi” plaque. “What are you doing out there?”

  Another spin caught her by surprise, and she gasped in pain. Dostakovich was saying, “Still corrupting life? Playing with yourselves? Making more monsters?”

  Again, and Kasumi: “Or have you regained your sense?”

  “They brought Armadons,” said Major Reiber from the side. “And look at her.”

  “Ah.” Kasumi shook his head as if regretting the obstinacy of those who refused to see the folly of their ways and return to the conventions of inanimate technologies. “Such a pretty girl.”

  “What are you doing out there?” asked Kentaba.

  “We’re still working on the Gypsy,” said Pearl Angelica. But the expressions she faced told her that that was not the sort of thing they wanted to know. “And we found a species about as intelligent as chimpanzees.”

  “What are they?” asked Dubarry.

  “Extinct.” Kentaba raised one fist, pointed a finger at the other man, and showed stained teeth in an eloquent grin. “Boom.”

  “And?” Kasumi prompted her.

  She closed her eyes and wished she could grip her head in her palms, bury her fingers in the cool wariness of her petals. She could brace herself against the jerky spinning of her stool, but not enough. The spins and jerks that forced her to face each Councilor as he spoke were giving her a headache. “We call them Racs,” she finally said. She told what the Gypsy gengineers had done.

  “What?” cried Dubarry. “You made aliens!”

  “It was only a matter of time before evolution did the same job.”

  Kentaba repeated “evolution” as if it were a dirty word.

  “How much are you teaching them?” Dostakovich licked his lips and eyed her breasts once more.

  “Language and basic skills.” She hesitated then, thinking that these Engineers would only be alarmed if she told them of the cache of history and science and other knowledge the Gypsies were planning to leave behind when they moved on. Yet she wanted to alarm them, to shatter their arrogant complacency.

  No one interrupted the silence, perhaps because her mouth was still open. At last she did indeed tell them about the Tower.

  The silence continued for a long moment until someone groaned. The stool did not spin her to see who had made the noise, but she thought it had sounded desperate.

  “You are insane,” said Kasumi. “All of you. Far more full of hubris than you ever were on Earth. Playing god. Out of control.” He shook his head. “It is our duty…”

  “Yes.” She was facing Dubarry once more. He was nodding. “We must destroy them all. Orbitals and Gypsies.”

  “And the aliens.” Dostakovich’s lips were dry now. Fear seemed to have destroyed his lust.

  “Or they will destroy us,” said Dubarry. “They are making allies, future enemies for all humanity.”

  “Friends,” insisted Pearl Angelica. “Companions, once they have advanced enough to climb the Tower and join us in space.”

  Kentaba snorted noisily. “We really do need that star-drive.”

  “They’ll never give it to you.”

  “Then you will never see the Gypsy again.”

  Three days later, ‘Livrance and Prudence appeared at her cell. They held cuffs and elastic bandages in their hands.

  “Where’s Hamid?”

  ‘Livrance wore the same shirt of padlocks Pearl Angelica had last seen him in. At her words, he made as if to look over one shoulder, aborted the motion, and shrugged. Prudence, dressed in a light blue fabric printed with simple circuit diagrams, widened her eyes, said, “Gone,” and clamped her lips between her teeth.

  Pearl Angelica grunted in satisfaction. She would rather that he were being punished for raping her, not for contaminating his human sanctity with her disgusting slime, but at least he was being punished. It hardly seemed to matter that the two who had helped him kidnap her were once again cuffing her wrists behind her back, wrapping her roots, and pushing her into the hallway outside her cell.

  A few minutes later, she was once more on the plaza under the open air, staring toward the overgrown riverbank and the river and cloudy sky, twisting her hands in their cuffs, wishing desperately for freedom.

  But, she knew, the price of her freedom was far too high for her friends and kin to pay. She sighed and let her guards lead her where they wished her to go.

  She had known her visit to Earth was almost over when Major Reiber came to her cell with a veedo recorder and a script. “Read this,” he said. “Face the camera and speak into the mike. We’ll send it out, and then it will be up to your friends in space. If they give us what we want, you can go home. If they don’t…” He drew the side of his hand across his throat to show her what the Engineers would do to her then.

  The script was quite simple. “I am a prisoner of the Engineers,” it said. “As you can see, I am in good condition so far. They have not tortured me, and I have plenty of food.”

  When she added, “I have been raped,” Major Reiber clicked off the recorder and said, “No. Try it again.” He did not add, “As many times as it takes to get it right,” but the implication was more than clear enough. She cooperated.

  “But they will not let me leave,” the script went on. “Until you deliver the plans for a working star-drive.”

  When her voice broke on the last word, the major smiled thinly and said, “Say good-bye now.”

  Reading the script had not shamed her. That catch in her voice and the tears she had almost shed did, for they made it seem that she was begging.

  She hoped that that seeming would make no difference, that her friends and kin would know better than to buy her freedom with their own—and her—future extermination.

  She could see by the plaza’s edge the same long automobile that had brought her from the airport.

  The Councilors had questioned her, though she didn’t think they had learned anything useful. On the other hand, she had certainly alarmed them with word of the Racs and the Tower. Now, if the major had not lied, she was on her way back to space. But not back to her friends and kin. She would soon be delivered to other Engineers on the sterile Moon, captive, prisoner, caged safely far from holy Earth and any possibility of genetic contamination.

  “We’ve got one small station,” said ‘Livrance. “But we won’t use it. We’re the only passengers. There’s no cargo. So we can go all the way in this.”

  He meant the spaceplane. But though he and Prudence were just as snugly strapped into their padded couches, they were not prisoners. Their right hands were not cuffed to their couches’ frames. Their legs were not wrapped in tight elastic bandages to conceal unnatural roots and cramping worse with every moment that passed.

  Pearl Angelica wished the spaceplane had a porthole. She knew she would not be able to see Munin or Hugin. They were simply too small against the empty vastness of space. And the Engineer crew would surely have chosen a course that carried the craft’s three passengers as far as possible from those Orbital bases, or even the Engineers’ own station, and any rescue attempt the Orbitals might dare.

  She did not want to look once more upon the Earth whose call had summoned her across the light-years. Yes, the Gypsies needed bees, but really, if she were as honest as she should be with herself and others, the brushes and ladders worked just fine and provided useful employment for youths who might otherwise invent rebellion and offense as they had always done when history left them idle. And if the Gypsy gengineers could not adapt First-Stop dumbos, then surely there would be something at the next world they visited, or the gengineers could modify some Earthly creature.

  Earth had rejected her. It had been the lure of root-home that had drawn her, and root-home was not there.

  But the stars. They would be there, all around. Perhaps she would even be able t
o see Tau Ceti, around which orbited First-Stop and the Gypsy, Frederick and the Racs, all her friends, all her kin.

  There was her true root-home. She should have known it.

  Thrusters banged and rumbled beneath her seat. Acceleration pressed her briefly into her cushions and let up. She floated against her straps while ‘Livrance and Prudence released themselves and moved about the spaceplane’s cabin, pulling themselves from empty seat to empty seat. Both of them were grinning as if they loved space more than Earth, though whether that love was based in the freedom of zero-gee or distance from their bosses Pearl Angelica could not tell.

  No one spoke until finally, growing bored, Pearl Angelica said, “Prudence?”

  Her guard spun in mid-air, her face shifting instantly from unguarded joy to sour watchfulness. “What?”

  “Where were all the women?”

  “What do you mean?” A gesture said that Prudence was a woman, she was there, there was no mystery.

  “Yes, there’s you, of course. And I saw a few on the street, walking. But that was all. There were none in the airport. No woman Councilors. No…”

  “They’re all at home,” said ‘Livrance. “Where they belong.”

  The woman’s sourness increased, though it did not now seem aimed at Pearl Angelica. “Making babies,” she said. “Keeping house and wiping noses.”

  “Anyway,” said ‘Livrance, “you couldn’t have a woman Councilor. They haven’t got the brains…”

  “Shut up,” said Prudence.

  “Such a waste,” said the bot.

  “It’s important work.” The woman’s tone seemed defensive now. “We lost so many people. We have so much to rebuild. And the Council insists, unless…” She held a cupped hand near her lower abdomen, a surprisingly eloquent hint that for some reason she could not do that important work.

  ‘Livrance smirked at them both. “And we have the robots for the scutwork.”