Tower of Glass

by Robert Silverberg

  “Wait a minute,” Krug said. “You're telling me that this stellar system has been through something like a nova, that the explosion took place so recently that the shell is only 1.3 light-years across even though it's growing at fifteen kilometers a second, and that the central sun is tossing out so much hard radiation that the shell is fluorescing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you also want me to believe that there's an intelligent race inside that furnace sending us messages?”

  Vargas said, “There can be no doubt that the signals are coming from NGC 7293.”

  “Impossible!” Krug roared. ”Impossible!” He slapped his fists against his hips. “A blue giant—only a couple of million years old to begin with. How do you evolve life at all, let alone an intelligent race? Then some kind of solar blowup—how does anything survive that? And the hard radiation? Tell me. Tell me. You want me to design a system that's a good bet not to have life, I give you this god-damned planetary nebula! But how signals? From what?!”

  “We have considered these factors,” Vargas said softly.

  Quivering, Krug asked, “Then the signals are natural phenomena after all? Impulses radiated by the atoms of your filthy nebula itself?”

  “We still believe the signals have an intelligent origin.”

  The paradox baffled Krug. He retreated, sweating, confused. He was only an amateur astronomer; he had read plenty, he had stuffed himself with technical tapes and knowledge-enhancing drugs, he knew red giants from white dwarfs, he could draw the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, he could look at the sky and point out Alpha Crucis and Spica, but all of it was data of an external kind, decorating the outer walls of his soul. He was not at home in it as Vargas was; he lacked a sense of the inwardness of the facts; he could not easily move beyond the bounds of the given data. Thus his awe of Vargas. Thus his discomfort now.

  “Go on,” Krug muttered. “Tell me what. Tell me how.”

  Vargas said, “There are several possibilities. All speculative, all guesses, you understand? The first and most obvious is that the signal-senders of NGC 7293 arrived there after the blowup, when things were quiet again. Say, within the last 10,000 years. Colonists from a deeper part of the galaxy—explorers—refugees—exiles—whatever, recent exiles.”

  “And the hard radiation,” Krug said. “Even after things were quiet again, there'd still be radiation from that murderous blue sun.”

  “Obviously they would thrive on it. We need sunlight for our life-processes; why not imagine a race that drinks its energy a little higher up the spectrum?”

  Krug shook his head. “Okay, you make up races, I play advocatus diaboli. They eat hard radiation, you say. What about the genetic defects? What kind of stable civilization can they build with a mutation rate that high?”

  “A race adapted to high radiation levels would probably have a genetic structure that isn't as vulnerable to bombardment as ours. It would absorb all kinds of hard particles without mutating.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” After a moment Krug said, “Okay, so they came from someplace else and settled your planetary nebula when it was safe. Why don't we have signals from the someplace else too? Where's the home system? Exiles, colonists—from where?”

  “Maybe the home system is so far away that the signals won't reach us for thousands of years.” Vargas suggested. “Or perhaps the home system doesn't send out signals. Or—”

  “You have too many answers,” Krug muttered. “I don't like the idea.”

  “That brings us to the other possibility,” said Vargas. “That the signal-sending species is native to NGC 7293.”

  “How? The blowup—”

  “Maybe the blowup didn't bother them. This race might thrive on hard radiation. Mutation may be a way of life for them. We're talking about aliens, my friend. If they're truly alien, we can't comprehend any of the parameters. So look: speculate along with me. We have a planet of a blue star, a planet that's far away from its sun but nevertheless is roasted by fantastically strong radiation. The sea is a broth of chemicals constantly boiling. A broth of mutations. A million years after the cooling of the surface, life is spawned. Things happen fast on such a world. Another million years and there's complex multi-celled life. A million more to mammal-equivalents. A million more to a galactic-level civilization. Change, fierce, unending change.”

  “I want to believe you,” Krug said darkly. “I want. But I can't.”

  “Radiation-eaters,” Vargas went on. “Clever, adaptable, accepting the necessity, even the desirability, of constant violent genetic change. Their star explodes: very well, they adapt to the increase in radiation, they find a way to protect themselves. Now they live inside a planetary nebula, with a fluorescent sky around them. Somehow they detect the existence of the rest of the galaxy. They send messages to us. Yes? Yes?”

  Krug, in anguish, pushed his hands through the air at Vargas, palms outward. “I want to believe!”

  “Then believe. I believe.”

  “It's only a theory. A wild theory.”

  “It accounts for the date we have,” said Vargas. “Do you know the Italian proverb: Se non è vero, è ben trovato? ‘Even if it isn't true, it's well invented.’ The hypothesis will do until we have a better one. It answers the facts better than the theory of a natural cause for a complex repetitive signal coming to us in several media.”

  Turning away, Krug stabbed at the activator as though he no longer could bear the image on the dome, as though he felt the furious radiation of that alien sun raising deadly blisters on his own skin. In his long dreams he had seen something entirely different. He had imagined a planet of a yellow sun, somewhere, eighty, ninety light-years away, a gentle sun much like the one under which he had been born. He had dreamed of a world of lakes and rivers and grassy fields, of sweet air tinged perhaps with ozone, of purple-leafed trees and glossy green insects, of elegant slender beings with sloping shoulders and many-fingered hands, quietly talking as they moved through the groves and vales of their paradise, probing the mysteries of the cosmos, speculating on the existence of other civilizations, at last sending their message to the universe. He had seen them opening their arms to the first visitors from Earth, saying, Welcome, brothers, welcome, we knew you had to be there. All of that was destroyed now. In the eye of his mind Krug saw a hellish blue sun spitting demonic fires into the void, saw a blackened and sizzling planet on which scaly armored monstrosities slithered in pools of quicksilver under a sullen sky of white flame, saw a band of horrors gathering around a nightmarish machine to send an incomprehensible message across the gulf of space. And these are our brothers? It is all spoiled, Krug thought bitterly.

  “How can we go to them?” he asked. “How can we embrace them? Vargas, I have a ship almost ready, a ship for the stars, a ship to carry a sleeping man for centuries. How can I send it to such a place?”

  “Your reaction surprises me. Such distress I did not expect.”

  “Such a star I did not expect.”

  “Would you have been happier if I told you that the signals were after all mere natural pulses?”

  “No. No.”

  “Then rejoice in these our strange brothers, and forget the strangeness, and think only of the brotherhood.”

  Vargas’ words sank in. Krug found strength. The astronomer was right. However strange those beings might be, however bizarre their world—always assuming the truth of Vargas’ hypothesis—they were civilized, scientific, outward-looking. Our brothers. If space folded upon itself tomorrow, and Earth and its sun and all its neighbor worlds were engulfed and thrust into oblivion, intelligence would not perish from the universe, for they were there.

  “Yes,” Krug said. “I rejoice in them. When my tower is done I send them my hellos.”

  Two and a half centuries had passed since man first had broken free of his native planet. In one great dynamic sweep the spaceward drive had carried human explorers from Luna to Pluto, to the edge of the solar system and beyond, and nowhere had th
ey found trace of intelligent life. Lichens, bacteria, primitive low-phylum crawlers, yes, but nothing more. Disappointment was the fate of those archeologists who had hatched fantasies of reconstructing the cultural sequences of Mars from artifacts found in the desert. There were no artifacts. And when the star-probes had begun to go forth, making their decades-long reconnaissances of the nearest solar systems, they had returned with—nothing. Within a sphere a dozen light-years in diameter, there evidently had never existed any life-form more complex than the Centaurine proteoids, to which only an amoeba need feel inferior.

  Krug had been a young man when the first star-probes returned. It had displeased him to see his fellow Earthmen constructing philosophies around the failures to find intelligent life in the nearby solar systems. What were they saying, these apostles of the New Geocentricism?

  —We are the chosen ones!

  —We are the only children of God!

  —On this world and no other did the Lord fashion His people!

  —To us falls the universe, as our divine heritage!

  Krug saw the seeds of paranoia in that kind of thinking.

  He had never thought much about God. But it seemed to him that men were asking too much of the universe when they insisted that only on this small planet of one small sun had the miracle of intelligence been permitted to emerge. Billions upon billions of suns existed, world without end. How could intelligence not have evolved again and again and again across the infinite sea of galaxies?

  And it struck him as megalomania to elevate the tentative findings of a sketchy search through a dozen light-years into an absolute statement of dogma. Was man really alone? How could you know? Krug was basically a rational man. He maintained perspective on all things. He felt that mankind's continued sanity depended on an awakening from this dream of uniqueness, for the dream was sure to end, and if the awakening came later rather than sooner the impact might be shattering.

  “When will the tower be ready?” Vargas asked.

  “Year after next. Next year, if we have luck, maybe. You saw this morning: unlimited budget.” Krug frowned. He felt suddenly uneasy. “Give me the truth. Even you, you spend all your life listening to the stars, you think Krug's a little crazy?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Sure you do. They all do. My boy Manuel, he thinks I ought to be locked up, but he's afraid to say it. Spaulding, out there, him too. Everybody, maybe even Thor Watchman, and he's building the damned thing. They want to know what's in it for me. Why do I throw billions of dollars into a tower of glass. You too, Vargas!”

  The twisted face grew even more taut. “I have nothing but sympathy for this project. You injure me with these suspicions. Don't you think making contact with an extrasolar civilization is as important to me as it is to you?”

  “Ought to be important to you. Your field; your study. Me? Businessman. Maker of androids. Owner of land. Capitalist, exploiter, maybe a little bit of chemist, know something about genetics, yes, but no astronomer, no scientist. It's a little crazy, eh, Vargas, for me to care about a thing like this? Squandering of assets. Non-productive investment. What kind of dividends do I get from NGC 7293, huh? You tell me. You tell me.”

  Nervously Vargas said, “Perhaps we ought to go downstairs. The excitement—”

  Krug slapped his chest. “I'm just turned sixty. I got a hundred years to live, more, maybe. Maybe two hundred, who knows? Don't worry about me. But you can admit it. You know it's crazy for an ignoramus like me to get so interested in something like this.” Krug shook his head vehemently. “I know it's crazy myself. I have to explain me to me all the time. I just tell you, this is something has to be done, and I do it, this tower. This hello to the stars. I was growing up, they kept telling us, We're all alone, We're all alone, We're all alone. I didn't believe it. Couldn't. Made the billions, now I'll spend the billions, get everybody straight in the head about the universe. You found the signals. I'll answer them. Numbers back for numbers. And then pictures. I know how to do it. One and zero, one and zero, one and zero, black and white, black and white, keep the bits going and they make a picture. You just fill in the boxes on your chart. This is what we look like. This is water molecule. This is our solar system. This is—” Krug halted, panting, hoarse, taking note for the first time of the shock and fear on the astronomer's face. In a more peaceful tone he said to Vargas, “I'm sorry. I shouldn't shout. Sometimes I run off at the mouth.”

  “It's all right. You have the fire of enthusiasm. Better to get carried away sometimes than never to come alive at all.”

  Krug said, “You know what started it? This planetary nebula you threw at me. Upset me, I tell you why. I had a dream I'd go to the place the signals were coming from. Me, Krug, in my ship, under deepsleep, sailing a hundred, even two hundred light-years, ambassador from Earth, a trip nobody ever took before. Now you tell me what a hell-world the signals come from. Fluorescent sky. O-type sun. A blue-light furnace. My trip's off, eh? Got me worked up, the surprise of it, but don't worry. I adapt. I absorb good stiff jolts. Knocks me to a higher energy state, is all.” Impulsively he gathered Vargas to him in a fierce bear-hug. “Thank you for your signals. Thank you for your planetary nebula. Thank you a million, you hear, Vargas?” Krug stepped back. “Now we go downstairs. You need money for the laboratory? Talk to Spaulding. He knows it's carte blanche for you, any time, any size money.”

  Vargas left, talking to Spaulding. Alone in his office, Krug found himself ablaze with surplus vitality, his mind flooded with a vision of NGC 7293. Indeed, he resonated at a higher energy state; his skin itself was a fiery jacket for him.

  “Going out,” he grunted.

  He set the transmat coordinates for his Uganda retreat and stepped through. A moment later he was seven thousand miles to the east, standing on his onyx verandah, looking down at the reedy lake beside his lodge. To the left, a few hundred meters out, a quartet of hippos floated, nothing showing but pink nostrils and huge gray backs. To the right he saw his mistress Quenelle, lolling bare in the shallows. Krug stripped. Rhino-heavy, impala-eager, he pounded down the sloping shore to join her in the water.

  6

  It took Watchman only a couple of minutes to run to the accident site, but by then the lift-beetles had moved the fallen block and the bodies of the victims were exposed. A crowd had gathered, all betas; the gammas lacked authority and motivation for interrupting their work programs, even for something like this. Seeing an alpha approach, the betas faded back, hovering on the edge of the scene in an uneasy conflict. They did not know whether to return to work or to remain and offer assistance to the alpha, and, thus caught unprogrammed, they stood by wearing the dismal expressions of android bewilderment.

  Watchman quickly surveyed the situation. Three androids—two betas and a gamma—had been crushed by the glass block. The betas were beyond easy recognition; it was going to be a chore just to peel their bodies out of the permafrost. The gamma beside them had almost avoided being killed, but his luck had not quite been good enough; he was intact only below the waist. His had been the legs Watchman had seen sticking out from under the block. Two other androids had been struck by the falling scooprod. One of them, a gamma, had taken a fatal blow on the skull and was lying in a sprawl a dozen meters away. The other, a beta, had apparently received a glancing but devastating swipe in the back from a corner of the rod's grip-tread; he was alive but seriously injured, and plainly in great agony.

  Watchman selected four of the beta onlookers and ordered them to transport the dead ones to the control center for identification and disposal. He sent two other betas off to get a stretcher for the injured one. While they were gone he walked over to the surviving android and looked down, peering into gray eyes yellow-rimmed with pain.

  “Can you talk?” Watchman asked.

  “Yes.” A foggy whisper. “I can't move anything below my middle. I'm turning cold. I'm starting to freeze from the middle down. Am I going to die?”

  “Probably,” Wat
chman said. He ran his hand along the beta's back until he found the lumbar neural center, and with a quick jab he shorted it. A sigh of relief came from the twisted figure on the ground.

  “Better?” the alpha said.

  “Much better, Alpha Watchman.”

  “Give me your name, beta.”

  “Caliban Driller.”

  “What were you doing when the block fell, Caliban?”

  “Getting ready to go off shift. I'm a maintenance foreman. I walked past here. They all started to shout. I felt the air hot as the block came down. I jumped. And then I was on the ground with my back split open. How soon will I die?”

  “Within an hour or less. The coldness will rise until it gets to your brain, and that will be the end. But take comfort: Krug saw you as you fell. Krug will guard you. You will rest in the bosom of Krug.”

  “Krug be praised,” Caliban Driller murmured.

  The stretcher-bearers were approaching. When they still were fifty meters away, a gong sounded, marking the end of the shift. Instantly every android who was not actually hoisting a block rushed toward the transmat banks. Three lines of workers began to vanish into the transmats, heading for their homes in the android compounds of five continents, and in the same moment the next shift began to emerge from the inbound transmats, coming out of leisure periods spent in the recreation zones of South America and India. At the sound of the gong Watchman's two stretcher-bearers made as if to drop the stretcher and rush for the transmats. He barked at them; and sheepishly, they hustled toward him.

  “Pick up Caliban Driller,” he commanded, “and carry him carefully to the chapel. When you're done with that you can go off shift and claim credit for the time.”

  Amid the confusion of the changing shift, the two betas loaded the injured android on the stretcher and made their way with him to one of the dozens of extrusion domes on the northern perimeter of the construction site. The domes served many uses: some were storage depots for materiel, several were kitchens or washrooms, three housed the power cores that fed the transmat banks and the refrigeration tapes, one was a first aid station for androids injured on the job, and one, in the heart of the irregular clutter of gray plastic mounds, was the chapel.