The car glided through room after room of nursery chambers, silent, darkened, empty but for a few android monitors. Each fledgling android spent the first two years of its life sealed in such a chamber, Bompensiero pointed out, and the life rooms through which they were passing contained successive batches ranging in age from a few weeks to more than twenty months. In some rooms the chambers were open; squads of beta technicians were preparing them to receive new infusions of takeoff-level zygotes.
“In this room,” said Bompensiero many rooms later, “we have a group of matured androids ready to be ‘born.’ Do you wish to descend to the floor area and observe the decanting at close range?”
Manuel nodded.
Bompensiero touched a switch. Their car rolled serenely off its track and down a ramp. At the bottom they dismounted. Manuel saw an army of gammas clustered around one of the nursery chambers. “The chamber has been drained of nutrient fluids. For some twenty minutes now the androids within have been breathing air for the first time in their lives. The hatches of the chamber now are being opened. Here: come close, Mr. Krug, come close.”
The chamber was uncovered. Manuel peered in.
He saw a dozen full-grown androids, six male, six female, sprawled limply on the metal floor. Their jaws were slack, their eyes were blank, their arms and legs moved feebly. They seemed helpless, vacant, vulnerable. Lilith, he thought. Lilith!
Bompensiero, at his elbow, whispered, “In the two years between takeoff and decanting, the android reaches full physical maturity—a process that takes humans thirteen to fifteen years. This is another of the genetic modifications introduced by your father in the interests of economy. We produce no infant androids here.”
Manuel said, “Didn't I hear somewhere that we turn out a line of android babies to be raised as surrogates by human women who can't—”
“Please,” Bompensiero said sharply. “We don't discuss—” He cut himself short, as if remembering who it was he had just reprimanded, and said in a more moderate way, “I know very little about what you mention. We have no such operations in this plant.”
Gammas were lifting the dozen newborn androids from the nursery chamber and carrying them to gaping machines that seemed part wheelchair, part suit of armor. The males were lean and muscular, the females high-breasted and slim. But there was something hideous about their mindlessness. Totally passive, utterly soul-empty, the moist, naked androids offered no response as they were sealed one by one into these metallic receptacles. Only their faces remained visible, looking out without expression through transparent visors.
Bompensiero explained, “They don't have the use of their muscles yet. They don't know how to stand, to walk, to do anything. These training devices will stimulate muscular development. A month inside one and an android can handle itself physically. Now, if we return to our car—”
“These androids I've just seen,” Manuel said. “They're gammas, of course?”
“Alphas.”
Manuel was stunned. “But they seemed so ... so... “ He faltered. “Moronic.”
“They are newly born,” said Bompensiero. “Should they come out of the nurseries ready to run computers?”
They returned to the car.
Lilith!
Manuel saw young androids taking their first shambling steps, and tumbling, and laughing, and getting to their feet and doing it better the second time. He visited a classroom where the subject being taught was bowel control. He watched slumbering betas undergoing personality imprints: a soul was being etched into each unformed mind. He donned a helmet and listened to a language tape. The education of an android, he was told, lasted one year for a gamma, two for a beta, four for an alpha. The maximum, then, was six years from conception to full adulthood. He had never fully appreciated the swiftness of it all before. Somehow the new knowledge made androids seem infinitely less human to him. Suave, authoritative, commanding Thor Watchman was something like nine or ten years old, Manuel realized. And the lovely Lilith Meson was—what? Seven? Eight?
Manuel felt a sudden powerful urge to escape from this place.
“We have a group of betas just about to leave the factory,” said Bompensiero. “They are undergoing their final checkout today, with tests in linguistic precision, coordination, motor response, metabolic adjustment, and several other aspects. Perhaps you would care to inspect them yourself and personally—”
“No,” Manuel said. “It's been fascinating. But I've taken up too much of your time already, and I have an appointment elsewhere, so I really must—”
Bompensiero did not look grieved to be rid of him. “As you wish,” he said obligingly. “But of course, we remain at your service whenever you choose to visit us again, and—”
“Where is the transmat cubicle, please?”
* * * *
2241, Stockholm. Jumping westward to Europe, Manuel lost the rest of the day. Dark, icy evening had descended here; the stars were sharp, and a sleety wind ruffled the waters of Malären. To foil any possibility of being traced he had jumped to the public transmat cubicle in the lobby of the wondrous old Grand Hotel. Now, shivering, he walked briskly through the autumnal gloom to another cubicle outside the gray bulk of the Royal Opera, put his thumb to the chargeplate, and bought a jump to Stockholm's Baltic side, emerging in the mellow, venerable residential district of Östermalm. This was the android quarter now. He hurried down Birger Jarlsgaten to the once-splendid nineteenth-century apartment building where Lilith lived. Pausing outside, he looked about carefully, saw that the streets were empty, and darted into the building. A robot in the lobby scanned him and asked his purpose in a flat, froglike voice. “Visiting Lilith Meson, alpha,” Manuel said. The robot raised no objection. Manuel had his choice of getting to her flat by liftshaft or by stairs. He took the stairs. Musty smells pursued him and shadows danced alongside him all the way to the fifth floor.
Lilith greeted him in a sumptuous, clinging, floor-length high-spectrum gown. Since it was nothing more than a monomolecular film, it left no contour of her body concealed. She drifted forward, arms outstretched, lips parted, breasts heaving, whispering his name. He reached for her.
He saw her as a speck drifting in a vat.
He saw her as a mass of replicating nucleotides.
He saw her naked and wet and vacant-eyed, shambling out of her nursery chamber.
He saw her as thing, manufactured by men.
Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing.
Lilith.
He had known her for five months. They had been lovers for three. Thor Watchman had introduced them. She was on the Krug staff.
Her body pressed close to his. He brought his hand up and cupped one of her breasts. It felt warm and real and firm through the monomolecular gown, as he drew his thumb across the tip of her nipple it hardened and rose in excitement. Real. Real.
Thing.
He kissed her. His tongue slipped between her lips. He tasted the taste of chemicals. Adenine, guanine, cytosine, uracil. He smelled the smell of the vats. Thing. Thing. Beautiful thing. Thing in woman's shape. Well named, Lilith. Thing.
She drew away from him and said, “You went to the factory?”
“Yes.”
“And you learned more about androids than you wanted to know.”
“No, Lilith.”
“You see me with different eyes now. You can't help remembering what I really am.”
“That is absolutely not true,” Manuel said. “I love you, Lilith. What you are is no news to me. And makes no difference at all. I love you. I love you.”
“Would you like a drink?” she asked. “A weed? A floater? You're all worked up.”
“Nothing,” he said. “It's been a long day. I haven't even had lunch yet and I think I've been going for forty hours. Let's just relax, Lilith. No weeds. No floater.” He unsnapped his clothing, and she helped him out of it. Then she pirouetted before a doppler; there was a brief rising burst of sound and her gown disappeared. Her ski
n was light red, except for the dark brown of her nipples. Her breasts were full, her waist was narrow, her hips flared with the impossible promise of fertility. Her beauty was inhumanly flawless. Manuel fought the dryness in his throat.
She said sadly, “I could feel the change in you the moment you touched me. Your touch was different. There was—fear?—in it. Disgust?”
“No.”
“Until tonight I was something exotic to you, but human, like a Bushman would be, an Eskimo. You didn't keep me in a separate category outside the human race. Now you tell yourself that you've fallen in love with a mess of chemicals. You think you may be doing something sick by having an affair with me.”
“Lilith, I beg you to stop it. This is all in your mind!”
“Is it?”
“I came here. I kissed you. I told you I loved you. I'm waiting to go to bed with you. Maybe you're projecting some guilts of your own on me when you say—”
“Manuel, what would you have said a year ago about a man who admitted he'd been to bed with an android?”
“Plenty of men I know have been—”
“What would you say about him? What kind of words would you use? What would you think of him?”
“I've never considered such things. They simply haven't concerned me, ever.”
“You're evading. Remember, we promised that we wouldn't play any of the little lie-games people play. Yes? You can't deny that at most social levels, sex between humans and androids is regarded as a perversion. Maybe the only perversion that's left in the world. Am I right? Will you answer me?”
“All right.” His eyes met hers. He had never known a woman with eyes that color. Slowly he said, “Most men regard it as, well, cheap, foul, to sleep with androids. I've heard it compared to masturbation. To doing it with a rubber doll. When I heard such remarks, I thought they were ugly, stupid expressions of anti-android prejudice, and I obviously didn't have such attitudes myself, or I never could have fallen in love with you.” Something in his mind sang mockingly, Remember the vats! Remember the vats! His gaze wavered and moved off center; he stared intently at her cheek-bone. Grimly he said, “Before the whole universe I swear, Lilith, that I never felt there was anything shameful or dirty about loving an android, and I insist that despite what you've claimed to detect in me since my visit to the factory, I don't have any such feelings even now. And to prove it—”
He gathered her to him. His hand swept down her satiny skin from her breasts to her belly to her loins. Her thighs parted, and he clasped his fingers over the mount of Venus, as fleeceless as an infant's, and suddenly he trembled at the alien texture he felt there, and found himself unmanned by it, though it had never troubled him before. So smooth. So terribly smooth. He looked down at her, at her bareness. Bare, yes, but not because she had been shaven. She was like a child there. Like—like an android. He saw vats again. He saw moist crimson alphas whose faces were without expression. He told himself sternly that to love and android was no sin. He began to caress her, and she responded, as a woman would respond, with lubrication, with little ragged bursts of breath, with a tightening of her thighs against his hand. He kissed her breasts and clutched her to him. It seemed then that the blazing image of his father hovered like a pillar of fire in the air before him. Old devil, old artificer! How clever to design such a product! A product. It walks. It talks. It seduces. It gasps in passion. It grows tumescent in the labia minora, this product. And what am I? A product too, hey? A hodgepodge of chemicals stamped out from much the same sort of blueprint-mutatis mutandis, of course. Adenine. Guanine. Cytosine. Uracil. Born in a vat, hatched in a womb—where's the difference? We are one flesh. We are different races, but we are one flesh.
His desire for her returned in a dizzying surge and he pivoted, topped her, drove himself deep within her. Her heels hammered ecstatically on his calves. The valley of her sex throbbed, clasping him in authentic frenzy. They rocked and climbed and soared.
When it was over, when they had both come down, she said, “That was disgustingly bitchy of me.”
“What was?”
“The scene I made. When I was trying to tell you what I thought was in your mind.”
“Forget it, Lilith.”
“You were right, though. I suppose I was projecting my own misgivings. Maybe I feel guilty about being the mistress of a human. Maybe I want you to think of me as something made of rubber. Somewhere inside me, that's probably how I think of myself.”
“No. No.”
“We can't help it. We breathe it all the time. We're reminded a thousand times a day that we aren't real.”
“You're as real as anyone I've ever known. More real than some.” More real than Clissa, he did not add. “I've never seen you clutched like this before, Lilith. What's happening?”
“Your factory trip, she said. “Until today I was always sure that you were different. That you hadn't ever spent one second worrying about how or where I was born, or whether there might be something wrong about what we have going. But I was afraid that once you saw the factory, saw the whole process in clinical detail, you might change—and then, when you came in tonight, there was something about you, something chilly that I knew hadn't been part of you before—” She shrugged. “Maybe I imagined it. I'm sure I imagined it. You aren't like the others, Manuel. You're a Krug; you're like a king; you don't have to build up your status by putting other people down. You don't divide the world into people and androids. You never did. And a single peek into the vats couldn't change that.”
“Of course it couldn't,” he said in the earnest voice in which he did his lying. “Androids are people, and people are people, and I've never thought otherwise, and I never will think otherwise. And you're beautiful. And I love you very much. And anyone who believes that androids are some kind of lesser breed is a vicious madman.”
“You support full civic equality for androids?”
“Certainly.”
“You mean alpha androids, don't you?” she said mischievously.
“I—well—”
“All androids ought to be equal to humans. But alphas ought to be more equal than the others.”
“You bitch. Are you playing games again?”
“I'm sticking up for alpha prerogatives. Can't a down-trodden ethnic group establish its own internal class distinctions? Oh, I love you, Manuel. Don't take me seriously all the time.”
“I can't help it. I'm not really very clever, and I don't know when you're joking.” He kissed the tips of her breasts. “I have to go now.”
“You just got here!”
“I'm sorry. I really am.”
“You came late, we wasted half our time in that dumb argument—stay another hour, Manuel!”
“I have a wife waiting in California,” he said. “The real world intervenes from time to time.”
“When will I see you again?”
“Soon. Soon. Soon.”
“Day after tomorrow?”
“I don't think so. But soon. I'll call first.” He slipped his clothes on. Her words cracked in his mind. You aren't like the others, Manuel.... You don't divide the world into people and androids. Was it true? Could it be true? He had lied to her; he was festering with prejudices, and his visit to Duluth had opened a box of poisons in his mind. But perhaps he could transcend such things by an act of will. He wondered if he might have found his vocation tonight. What would they say if the son of Simeon Krug were to embrace the explosive cause of android equality? Manuel the wastrel, the idler, the playboy, transformed into Manuel the crusader? He toyed with the notion. Perhaps. Perhaps. It offered an agreeable opportunity to shake off the stigma of shallowness. A cause, a cause, a cause! A cause at last! Perhaps. Lilith followed him to the door, and they kissed again, and his hands stroked her sleekness, and he closed his eyes. To his dismay, the room of the vats glowed against his lids, and Nolan Bompensiero cavorted in his brain, piously explaining how newly decanted androids were taught the art of controlling their anal sphincter
s. He pulled free of Lilith, in pain. “Soon,” he said. “I'll call.” He left.
* * * *
1644, California. He stepped from the transmat cubicle into the slate-floored atrium of his home. The afternoon sun was edging out over the Pacific. Three of his androids came to him, bearing a change of clothes, a freshener tablet, a newspaper. “Where's Mrs. Krug?” he asked. “Still asleep?”
“By the shore,” a beta valet told him.
Manuel changed quickly, took the freshener, and went out on the beach. Clissa was a hundred meters away, wading in the surf; three long-legged beach-birds ran in giddy circles around her, and she was calling to them, laughing, clapping her hands. He was almost upon her before she noticed him. After Lilith's voluptuousness, she seemed almost wickedly immature: narrow hips, flat boyish buttocks, the breasts of a twelve-year-old. The dark hairy triangle at the base of her belly seemed incongruous, improper. I take children for my wives, he thought, and plastic women for my mistresses. “Clissa?” he called.
She swung about. “Oh! You scared me!”
“Having some fun in the ocean? Isn't it too cold for you?”
“It's never too cold for me. You know that, Manuel. Did you have a good time at the android plant?”
“It was interesting,” he said. “What about you? Feeling better now, I see.”
“Better? Was I sick?”
He looked at her strangely. “This morning—when we were at the tower—you were, well, upset—”
“Oh, that! I'd almost forgotten. God, it was terrible, wasn't it? Do you have the time, Manuel?”
“1648, give or take a minute.”
“I'd better get dressed soon, then. We've got that early dinner party in Hong Kong.”
He admired her ability to slough off traumas. He said, “Right now it's still morning in Hong Kong. There's no hurry.”
“Well, then, do you want to take a swim with me? The water's not as cold as you think. Or—” She paused. “You haven't kissed me hello, yet.”
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello. I love you.”
“I love you,” he said. Kissing her was like kissing alabaster. The taste of Lilith was still on his lips. Which is the passionate, vital woman, he wondered, and which the cold, artificial thing? Holding his wife, he felt no sensation at all. He released her. She tugged at his wrist, pulling him with her into the surf, and they swam a while, and he came out chilled and shivering. At twilight they had cocktails together in the atrium. “You seem so distant,” she told him. “It's all this transmat jumping. It takes more out of you than the doctors know.”
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