Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  The clank of tools and rattle of voices came to her from outside the truck. No one entered the cab. She told herself that she should have taken some of the food in the fridge. She had had time. Perhaps she should even have stayed out of the duct. As long as she stayed away from the cab’s entrance no one would see her. She would have been safe. Would she have had time to hide if anyone had begun to enter the cab? No. She would have made noise too. She would have shaken the machine, as huge as it was. Someone would surely have noticed and found her, and then…

  She shuddered. She did not want to go back in her cage. Nor did she want to be killed.

  She wanted to stay free. She wanted to go home. She wanted to see her father, Frederick, one more time before he died. She wanted to see Aunt Lois and Uncle Renny and the Racs.

  She could feel the impact of tools on metal wherever her skin touched the interior of the duct. Scrapes and clangs, some soft, some loud, assaulted her ears.

  A voice was suddenly clear through the open airlock: “Motherless bastards! Gotta take the whole friggin’ thing apart to get at the one piece that ever fails, and then we don’t have it in stock.” After a pause while—she thought she could hear the sound—someone answered the speaker more quietly, he said, “Of course that’s why it’s out of stock! But at least it came in before they froze the landings.”

  Her heart leaped in her throat. They had the drive controller she and Anatol had thought was still on order. The truck would be repaired today. Then it would be put back in service. Or it would be parked outside, perhaps even under the same slab of roof she had seen from one of the base’s ports.

  Either way, she would be trapped in her hiding place, unable to leave the truck and cross the vacuum all around it because she had no suit, forced to surrender to the first Engineer who entered the cab.

  Could she overpower a driver and handle the truck herself? There would be only one man, his back to her as she crawled from her hiding place, and she had driven similar vehicles on First-Stop. But there were no guarantees. If a driver needed to know secret passwords or numbers to start the motor, like the number Hrecker had used to open the door to the Teller’s construction bay, she would be helpless.

  But if she wasn’t…She remembered the patched headset hanging from the console beneath the viewport. She grinned as she thought that once she was far enough away from the Engineers’ base, she might be able to use the radio to call the Orbitals. This was therefore the best of all possible hiding places.

  Yet if she escaped, she would never see Anatol again.

  Her grin vanished. She sighed. She lay her head on her arms and listened for hours to the muttering and swearing, the clanking and scraping. Eventually silence fell. She crawled from her hiding place, moving as cautiously as she could, and peered from the truck’s broad port. The workers were near the door to the shop’s small office, bent over a game of cribbage while eating their lunch.

  She continued to move cautiously, afraid that one of the men might look up just in time to see the truck quiver on its springs, while she found something to eat and used the toilet. She wasted a few minutes taking off her shirt and wig and letting the truck’s interior lights bathe her leaves. She sighed as a trickle of photosynthesized sugar reached her blood and brain. She wished it were more, the rush that proper light could give her when she was down. Finally, reluctantly, she covered herself once more and crawled back into the darkness of the heating duct.

  It was not long after lunch that she heard a satisfied grunt and a slam that might have been the lid of the truck’s motor compartment. The vehicle rocked as one man clambered into the cab, and then again as a second joined him.

  “Think it’ll start?”

  “It had mechin’ better.” This voice sounded older than the other, but there was no way Pearl Angelica could tell whether it belonged to the first man or the second to climb aboard.

  “And then what?”

  “We leave it right here.” The driver’s seat creaked, and the truck’s electric motor began to hum. The vehicle lurched and rolled. It turned in a tight circle. It backed up. “Works fine now.” It stopped. “Right here. They ain’t lettin’ ‘em out and they ain’t lettin’ ‘em in. So we’re a parkin’ lot for the duration. Goddam lockdown.”

  “They’ll find something for us to do.”

  “Probably give us a gun and put us on a search party. I hear they haven’t found that bot yet.” The voice wobbled as if the speaker were shaking his head. “Or that murderer. You think there is one?”

  Hot air began to move past Pearl Angelica’s feet and over her body toward the grille. She grimaced. It was too hot. Her leaves, already stifled inside her disguise, were wilting. But she told herself she wasn’t dying. She wasn’t in danger. She was only uncomfortable, and that she could stand as long as she had to. No one would discover her. She would not be trapped outside the base, caught by a driver she could not overpower, stuck in a vehicle she could not drive.

  She would see Anatol again.

  “She couldn’t have done it herself, could she? She’s just a plant.”

  After the workers left for the day and the shop was quiet once more, Pearl Angelica ate again. She wished she dared step out of the truck to stretch and walk and test the personnel door to see whether it were unlocked as it had been the night before. But she did not. She wanted Anatol to come through that door, but she knew that someone else—searching Security guards, or a stranger who would cry alarm—might precede him.

  She stayed in the truck, sitting in the driver’s comfortable seat, fingering the buttons and slides that controlled the vehicle. Her eyes moved between the view of the shop’s cavernous interior through the thick-paned port and the ever changing display of the truck’s heads-up clock. She was waiting as patiently as she could, though she cursed and shifted her weight more often as the hour grew later.

  Her breath froze in her throat. Was it opening at last? Was that a crack of light around the jamb? Yes, someone was coming in, but…Her heart hammered in her chest. Sweat sprang to her palms. Air rushed from her lungs and back again. She thought of being outside the truck, in full view, and she was glad she wasn’t standing up. Her legs would not have supported her.

  That wasn’t Anatol. A woman. Small. Grey-haired. Was she familiar? Had Pearl Angelica seen that round face in the concourse? Or…?

  A hand appeared and pushed. A man came in behind the woman, turned, closed the door, and searched for a lock. Was that…?

  The sigh that emptied her lungs marked her recognition of Anatol. But before she could get out of the truck driver’s seat, the door to the shop began to open once more.

  Her heart leaped. Her stomach rolled. Her mouth went dry. Her hands spasmed on the arms of the seat, and her leg muscles cramped. This time the man who appeared wore a Security uniform. But the woman moved close to Anatol, put her arms around his torso, and buried her face in his chest. Anatol shrugged at the guard. The guard scanned the interior of the shop, as devoid of hiding places as ever, winked, saluted, and turned away.

  The “fight or flight” reaction has two components, one coordinated by the nervous system and quick both to flood the body with a galvanizing energy and to drain away, leaving the muscles limp and the breath gasping. The other, managed by the adrenal glands and the hormone adrenaline, is slower to take effect and slower to leave, so that even in the post-crisis letdown, the heart may still pound and the mouth stay dry.

  “Angie!” called Anatol Rivkin. “Are you still here? Are you okay?”

  Pearl Angelica was still laughing when she was finally able to stand and walk toward the truck’s open airlock. By then, Anatol and his companion were already at the entrance. She looked down at them, focusing on the woman. She still seemed small, but now it was her brown skin that dominated the image she cast. The bot’s mind linked a flash of green to her face. “Now I remember you,” she said. “You were at that party.”

  “Cherilee Wright.” She looked far more worried than Pea
rl Angelica felt at the moment.

  “She can help,” said Anatol.

  “If we can get you to my greenhouse,” said the woman. When the bot looked puzzled, she added, “You have leaves, don’t you? They’re green? So if we surround you with greenery, you should blend right in. With a little luck, they’ll never notice you.”

  “If we can get you there,” Anatol repeated. “The room-to-room search is half done, and Security still hasn’t found you. They’re frustrated. They aren’t being nice to people anymore.”

  “But…” The bot descended to the floor and gestured past the two humans toward the door to the maintenance shop. “That one was.”

  “You should have heard what Doctor Wright said.”

  The woman blushed. “I told you before. I’m Cherilee.”

  Pearl Angelica made a sympathetic face. “It sounds like you’d better be. A ‘Doctor Wright’ would never say anything that embarrassed her.”

  “And if I would, he shouldn’t insist on being so formal.”

  Anatol indicated his embarrassment by turning away and clearing his throat. “As I was trying to say, they aren’t letting people pass them in the halls anymore. ID checks. They’re also making people take off their shirts to show they don’t have leaves.”

  “Then we’re stuck here?”

  “They’ll get around to searching it sooner or later. Probably as soon as that guard decides to be suspicious.”

  “I don’t think they’ll find me.”

  “They won’t be able to miss you,” said Anatol.

  “In a heating duct?” She explained where she had spent most of the day.

  “They’ll probably take the truck apart,” said Cherilee.

  “Even after they’ve just put it back together?”

  “You mean they fixed it?” asked Anatol.

  She nodded. “It works fine now.”

  The truck’s flatbed had a low curb or sill around its edge. As soon as Pearl Angelica had opened the maintenance shop’s large vehicle door, she clambered up the ladder on the back of the cab and threw herself flat behind the curb and beside Cherilee Wright.

  “Did you see anybody?”

  The bot shook her head and gripped two tiedown rings as the truck began to roll into the corridor outside the shop. Its electric motor was as quiet as when the workers had tested it. Most of the noise came from the limp tires, thudding as they flexed, grinding fragments of regolith into the pavement, hissing as they rubbed on the side of the door. “I hope he remembers where the brakes are.”

  “Brakes we don’t need. I want to see where we’re going.” The greenhouse manager raised her head as the truck straightened out. When Pearl Angelica rose on one elbow to pull her down again, she saw the shop’s door gaping behind them. Metal screeched against rock as the truck met the corridor’s far wall. “Shit!” said Cherilee as the sound brought a Security guard into view by the airlock.

  The guard had his gun in his hand. More guards were erupting beside him. “Get your head down!” cried the bot. She wished the curb that sheltered them were higher. As it was, she was all too aware that part of her was visible, a target.

  Shouts and flat reports punctuated her words. Bullets whined overhead and spanged off the truck. There was no sign of damage, for the truck, even its tires, had been designed to withstand occasional blows from small meteorites.

  Light and movement drew her gaze upward. A red laser beam was pointing at a tiny spot on the arched ceiling, and a Spider much like those she had seen on Earth was racing toward it. Projectile weapons, she thought, would be insane aboard a ship like the Quebec. The only thing that made them usable here, where despite even careful aim ricochets could puncture the barriers between air and vacuum, was instant repair.

  The women grunted as the truck lurched over the pots and planters that lined the corridor. The truck’s motor whined louder. They rocked around a curve. Pearl Angelica winced when Anatol scraped the side of the vehicle against the wall again. The tracks that had led them from the nearby airlock to the maintenance shop were what had given her the idea: The lunar base’s corridors were wide enough for the truck. Now she wished they were even wider.

  But neither rocky obstacles nor tight scrapes could stop them. The truck would protect them on their way to Cherilee’s greenhouse. It would distract the guards, draw them away from any post that might let them see its destination or interfere. It could even run them down if necessary. Then, when it passed the entrance, it would slow and the two women would jump off the flatbed.

  Now the shots came from ahead, stopping as the truck lurched to one side. There were shouts of alarm, a crunch, a thud, and Pearl Angelica risked raising her head just in time to see a guard stagger to his feet behind the truck. A short-barreled gun with a large grip and magazine lay two meters from his outflung hand. The ruins of a planter and the shrubbery it had held were scattered near the wall.

  “Soft tires,” said Cherilee. “He’s only bruised.”

  “Then how…?”

  “There shouldn’t be any guards. They’ll never see us get off.”

  The accelerating truck so nearly filled the corridor that it compressed the air ahead of it. What passed around the cab and under the flatbed whistled and screamed now, but not loudly enough to drown out the klaxons that announced emergency. Booming noises announced the slamming of pressure doors as Security tried to cut off their paths and trap them in some sealed compartment. They leaned into another curve, rising as the wheels rose over the planters, thumping down, and scraping, yes, again, a shriek of metal on rock. There were more guards, more shots, more shattered urns and spilled dirt, more flickering laser beams spotlighting punctures in the roof, and Cherilee said, “One more turn. If only they don’t…”

  The brakes almost made them lose their grips on the tiedowns. “Now!” she screamed, and she was rolling over the flatbed’s curb before the truck was nearly stopped. Pearl Angelica followed her, and the truck immediately accelerated again. It was barely two lengths away when a pressure door slammed shut behind it.

  Cherilee opened a door, snatched at the bot’s arm, and yanked her out of the corridor. “Will he get away?”

  “There aren’t as many pressure doors downstairs. If he can reach the elevator, he should be okay. If he can’t, well…You showed him that air duct. He has a chance. But now we need a hole for you.”

  Cherilee slammed the door. The bot saw that it was set in an oversized truck door just like the one in the maintenance shop. The room they were in, however, was smaller. Dominated by ranks of stacked crates and parked forklifts, it looked more like a warehouse than a greenhouse. Yet it did smell of fruits and vegetables.

  “Will they know he slowed down?”

  Cherilee shook her head. “But as soon as they find the empty truck, they’ll start backtracking. They’ll search every room it passed.” She led the bot down an aisle between tiers of crates. A moment later, they were passing through a door of ordinary size. “No trucks in here,” she said. “We get the crops out on a conveyor.”

  Ahead of them stretched a tunnel that had not lost two-thirds of its width to rooms walled off along its sides. Bright lights flooded the ceiling, even though elsewhere in the base it was officially night. The broad expanse of floor was marked by a grid of paths surrounding raised beds of soil. Some of the beds were bare, some barely fuzzed with seedlings, some choked with the greens and reds and yellows of mature growth. Set near the ends of several beds were white cylinders about a meter tall.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “Home. Asleep. Follow me.” Pearl Angelica recognized tomatoes, beans, peas, beets, lettuce, potatoes, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, corn, eggplant, cucumbers, squash of several kinds, and more. It was no wonder that this tunnel, and the others like it, could feed the lunar Engineers with relatively little help from Earth.

  Yet the tunnel was not given over entirely to food crops. Ahead of them was a stand of bamboo, palms, ferns, and other tropical plants. Cherilee le
d the bot to a bed that was largely covered with a tangle of vine. “Some of my pets,” she said, pointing to three short, stout trunks that rose from the mat of vegetation. “Cycads. Now strip. They could be here any minute.”

  Pearl Angelica understood just what the other wanted. She quickly removed her disguise. Then, with no more than a glance at Cherilee for confirmation, she stepped among the vines, chose a spot touched by the circle of shade cast by a cycad’s feathery fronds, and lay down. Seconds later, her wadded-up clothes and wig were under her head, a sheet of loosely woven green cloth covered her face and scalp blossoms, the vine leaves had been arranged to blend with her own, and her roots were telling her that the black soil beneath her back was rich with years of loving care.

  There was no change in the light to mark the time, but the coming of day was still obvious. There were voices, rattling containers, the sounds of tools touching the stone floors and the sides of the soil beds. Most of the noise was distant. Some was near and growing closer.

  “Don’t worry. I don’t let anyone else work on my pets.”

  “You didn’t get much sleep,” murmured Pearl Angelica. She could see nothing but the dim green light that filtered through the vine leaves and cloth that covered her face. Her only connection with what surrounded her was sound, the scents of soil and growing vegetation, a hint of sweat.

  “Shh. Don’t talk. I’m going to weed a bit, just to look busy. They’ll be coming over here, the foremen.”

  A moment later she was speaking more loudly. “Chop the residues in section A32 and till them under. The onions in C12 should be ready. Check the melons in C18. B27 is ready for planting. Lentils this time.”

  Sound was enough to tell Pearl Angelica when the others withdrew. She waited long enough to be sure no one else was approaching, and then she whispered, “Weeds?”

  “Shh. Yes.” The vines rustled, and there was the scrape of some small hand tool in the soil, the scritch of roots being pulled out of their nutrient matrix, a strange buzzing in the air above her head. “People used to think gardening in habitats or on the Moon would be weed-free. After all, the soil is sterile, and the only seeds are the ones you plant. They forgot that many weeds have evolved to imitate crop plants. There’s one—the wild variety bears its seeds close to the ground. But the variety that grows in wheat fields lifts its seeds to the same height as the wheat. Then, when farmers harvest the grain, they get the weed seeds as well. And when they plant the crop, they plant the weeds.”