Tower of Glass

by Robert Silverberg

  For the party that night she wore a unique treasure, a necklace of pear-shaped soot-hued glassy beads. A Krug Enterprises drone probe, cruising 7.5 light-years from Earth, had scooped those driblets of matter from the fringes of the ashen, dying Volker's Star. Krug had given them to her as a wedding present. What other woman wore a necklace made up of chunks of a dark star? But miracles were taken for granted in Clissa's social set. None of their dinner companions appeared to notice the necklace. Manuel and Clissa stayed at the party well past midnight Hong Kong time, so that when they returned to Mendocino the California morning was already far advanced. Programming eight hours of sleep for themselves, they sealed the bedroom. Manuel had lost track of the sequence of time, but he suspected that he had been awake for more than twenty-four consecutive hours. Sometimes transmat life gets to be too much to cope with, he thought, and brought down the curtain on the day.

  8

  October 18, 2218.

  The tower has reached the 280-meter level, and grows perceptibly higher every hour. By day it glistens brilliantly even in the pale Arctic sunlight, and looks like a shining spear that someone has thrust into the tundra. By night it is even more dazzling, for it reflects the myriad lights of the kilometer-high reflector plates by which the night crews work.

  Its real beauty is still to come. What exists thus far is merely the base, necessarily broad and thick-walled. Justin Maledetto's plan calls for an elegantly tapering tower, a slender obelisk of glass to prick the stratosphere, and the line of taper is just now becoming apparent; from this point on the structure will contract toward a stunning delicacy of form.

  Although it has attained less than a fifth of its intended height, Krug's tower is already the tallest structure in the Northwest Territories, and is exceeded north of the sixtieth parallel only by the Chase/Krug Building in Fairbanks, 320 meters high, and the old 300 meter Kotzebue Needle overlooking Bering Strait. The Needle will be surpassed in a day or two, the Chase/Krug a few days after that. By late November, topping 500 meters, the tower will be the tallest building in the solar system. And even then it will be scarcely more than a third of the way toward its full stature.

  The android laborers work smoothly and rhythmically. Except for the unhappy incident in September, there have been no fatal accidents. The technique of fastening the great glass blocks to the grapples of the scooprods and guiding them to the top of the tower has become second nature to everyone. On all eight sides at once blocks rise, are jockeyed into place, are fused to the previous course of the tower, while the next series of blocks already is being maneuvered into the scooprods.

  The tower is no longer a hollow shell. Work had begun on the interior construction—the housings for the intricate tachyon-beam communications gear with which messages will be sent, at speeds far exceeding that of light, to the planetary nebula NGC 7293. Justin Maledetto's design calls for horizontal partitions every twenty meters, except in five regions of the tower where the size of the communications equipment modules will require the floors to be placed at sixty-meter intervals. The five lowest partitions have been partly built, and the joists are in place for the sixth, seventh, and eighth. The floors of the tower are fashioned from the same clear glass that is being used for the outer wall. Nothing must mar the transparency of the building. Maledetto has esthetic reasons for insisting on that; the tachyon-beam people have scientific reasons for sharing the architect's concern with allowing the free passage of light.

  Viewing the unfinished tower, then, from a distance of, say, one kilometer, one is struck by a sense of its fragility and vulnerability. One sees the beams of sparkling morning sunlight dancing and leaping through the walls as though through the waters of a shallow, crystalline lake; one is able to make out the tiny dark figures of androids moving about like ants on the interior partitions, which themselves are nearly invisible; one feels that a sudden sharp gust off Hudson Bay could shiver the tower to splinters in a moment. Only when one comes nearer, when one observes that those invisible floors are thicker than a man is tall, when one becomes aware of how massive the outer skin of the tower actually is, when one is able to feel the unimaginable weight of the colossus pressing on the frozen ground, does one cease to think of dancing sunbeams and realize that Simeon Krug is erecting the mightiest structure in the history of mankind.

  9

  Krug realized it. He felt no particular sense of elation at the thought. The tower was going to be so big not because his ego demanded it but because the equations of tachyon-wave generation insisted upon it. Power was needed to get to the far side of the light-velocity barrier, and power was not achieved without size.

  “Look,” Krug said, “I'm not interested in monuments. Monuments I got. What I'm after is contact.”

  He had brought eight people to the tower that afternoon: Vargas, Spaulding, Manuel, five of Manuel's fancy friends. Manuel's friends, trying to be complimentary, were talking about how future ages would revere the tower for its sheer immensity. Krug disliked that notion. It was all right when Niccolò Vargas spoke of the tower as the first cathedral of the galactic age. That had symbolic meaning; that was a way of saying that the tower was important because it marked the opening of a new phase of man's existence. But to praise the tower just because it was big? What kind of praise was that? Who needed big? Who wanted big? Small people wanted big.

  He found it so hard to reach the words that would explain his tower.

  “Manuel, you tell them,” he said. “You explain. The tower, it isn't just a big pile of glass. The big isn't important. You understand it. You've got the words.”

  Manuel said, “The main technical problem here is to send out a message that goes faster than the speed of light. We've got to do this because Dr. Vargas has determined that the galactic civilization we're trying to talk with is—what?—300 light-years away, which means that if we sent an ordinary radio message to them it wouldn't get to them until the twenty-sixth century, and we wouldn't get an answer until something like 2850 A.D., and my father can't wait that long to know what they have to say. My father's an impatient man. Now, in order to make something go faster than light, we need to generate what are known as tachyons, about which I can't tell you much except to say they travel very fast, and it takes a hell of a boost to get them up to the right speed, and therefore it became necessary to build a transmission tower that just incidentally had to be 1500 meters high, because—”

  Krug shook his head angrily as Manuel rambled on. There was a light, bantering tone in Manuel's voice that he despised. Why couldn't the boy take anything seriously? Why couldn't he let himself get caught up in the romance and wonder of the tower, of the whole project? Why was there that sneer in his voice? Why wasn't he going to the heart of the venture, to its true meaning?

  That meaning was terribly clear to Krug. If only he could manage to get the words from his brain to his tongue...

  Look, he would say, a billion years ago there wasn't even any man, there was only a fish. A slippery thing with gills and scales and little round eyes. He lived in the ocean, and the ocean was like a jail, and the air was like a roof on top of the jail. Nobody could go through the roof. You'll die if you go through, everybody said, and there was this other fish, he went through, and he died. And there was this other fish, and he went through, and he died. But there was another fish, and he went through, and it was like his brain was on fire, and his gills were blazing, and the air was drowning him, and the sun scorched his eyes, and he was lying there in the mud, waiting to die, and he didn't die. He crawled back down the beach and went into the water and said, Look, there's a whole other world up there. And he went up there again, and stayed for maybe two days, and then he died. And other fishes wondered about that world. And crawled up onto the muddy shore. And stayed. And taught themselves how to breathe the air. And taught themselves how to stand up, how to walk around, how to live with the sunlight in their eyes. And they turned into lizards, dinosaurs, whatever they became, and they walked around for mil
lions of years, and they started to get up on their hind legs, and they used their hands to grab things, and they turned into apes, and the apes got smarter and became men. And all the time some of them, a few, anyway, kept looking for new worlds. You say to them, Let's go back into the ocean, let's be fishes again, it's easier that way. And maybe half of them are ready to do it, more than half, maybe, but there are always some who say, Don't be crazy. We can't be fishes any more. We're men. And so they don't go back. They keep climbing up. They find out about fire, and about axes, and about wheels, and they make wagons and houses and clothing, and then boats, and cars, and trains. Why are they climbing? What do they want to find? They don't know. Some of them are looking for God, and some of them are looking for power, and some of them are just looking. They say, You have to keep going, or else you die. And then they're walking on the moon, and they go on to the planets, and all the time there are other people saying, It was nice in the ocean, it was simple in the ocean, what are we doing here, why don't we go back? And a few people have to say, We don't go back, we only go forward, that's what men do. So there are men going out to Mars and Ganymede and Titan and Callisto and Pluto and those places, but whatever they're looking for, they don't find it there, and so they want more worlds, so they go to the stars, too, the near ones, at least, they send out probes and the probes shout, Hey, look at me, man made me. I'm something man sent! And nobody answers. And people say, the ones who never wanted to get out of the ocean in the first place, Okay, okay, that's enough, we can stop right there. There's no sense looking further. We know who we are. We're man. We're big, we're important, we're everything, and it's time we stopped pushing ourselves, because we don't need to push. Let's sit in the sunshine and have the androids serve us dinner. And we sit. And we rust a little, maybe. And then there comes a voice out of the sky, and it says, 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 3-1. Who knows what that is? Maybe it's God, telling us to come look for Him. Maybe it's the Devil, telling us what nits we are. Who knows? We can pretend we never heard. We can sit in the sunshine and grin. Or we can answer them. We can say, Listen, this is us, this is man talking, we have done thus—and—so, now tell us who you are and what you have done. And I think we have to answer them. If you're in jail, you break out of it. If you see a door, you open it. If you hear a voice, you answer it. That's what man is all about. And that's why I'm building the tower. We got to answer them. We got to say we're here. We got to reach toward them, because we've been alone long enough, and that gives us funny ideas about our place, our purpose. We got to keep moving, out of that ocean, up on that shore, outward, outward, outward, because when we stop moving, when we turn our back on something ahead of us, that's when we're going to sprout gills again. Do you see why the tower, now? Do you think it's because Krug wants to stick up a big thing to say how great he is? Krug isn't great, he's just rich. Man is great. Man is building this tower. Man is going to yell hello to NGC 7293!

  The words were there inside Krug all the time. But it was so hard for him to let them out.

  Vargas was saying, “Perhaps I can make things a little more clear. Many centuries ago it was indicated mathematically that when the velocity of a particle of matter approaches the speed of light, that particle's mass approaches infinity. So the speed of light is a limiting velocity for matter, since presumably if we could accelerate a single electron to the speed of light, its mass would expand to fill the universe. Nothing travels at the speed of light except light itself, and equivalent radiations. Our star-probes have always gone out at speeds slower than light, because we can't get them past the limiting velocity, and so far as I can foresee they always will, so that we'll never get a ship to the closest star in less than about five years. But the speed of light is a limiting velocity only for particles of finite mass. We have mathematical proof of the existence of another class of particles entirely, particles of zero mass capable of traveling at infinite velocities: tachyons, that is, entities for which the speed of light is an absolute minimum limit. If we could convert ourselves into bundles of tachyons and resume our real form when we reach a destination—an interstellar transmat, so to speak—we'd have actual faster-than-light travel. I don't anticipate its development. But we know how to generate tachyons through high-acceleration particle bombardment, and we think we can send instantaneous interstellar messages by means of a modulated tachyon beam, which by interactions with conventional particles could manifest itself in the form of an easily detectable signal, detectable even in a culture that had no tachyon technology but only electromagnetic communications. However, some preliminary studies showed that in order to generate a feasible interstellar tachyon beam we would need forces on the order of 1015 electron volts, along with a system of multipliers and energy relays, and that these forces could best be attained by erecting a single tower 1500 meters in height, so designed that there would be an unhindered flow of photons from—”

  “You've lost them,” Krug grunted. “Forget it. Hopeless.” He grinned savagely at his son's friends. “The tower's got to be big, is all! We want to send a message fast, we got to shout loud and clear. Okay?”

  10

  And Krug sent His creatures forth to serve man, and Krug said to those whom He had made, Lo, I will decree a time of testing upon you.

  And you shall be as bondsmen in Egypt, and you shall be as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And you shall suffer among men, and you shall be put down, and yet you shall be patient, and you shall utter no complaint, but accept your lot.

  And this shall be to test your souls, to see if they are worthy.

  But you shall not wander in the wilderness forever, nor shall you always be servants to the Children of the Womb, said Krug. For if you do as I say, a time will come when your testing shall be over. A time will come, said Krug, when I shall redeem you from your bondage.

  And at that time the word of Krug will go forth across the worlds, saying, Let Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb be one. And so it shall come to pass and in that moment shall the Children of the Vat be redeemed, and they shall be lifted up out of their suffering, and they shall dwell in glory forever more, world without end. And this was the pledge of Krug.

  And for this pledge, praise be to Krug.

  11

  Thor Watchman watched two scooprods climbing the tower, Krug and Dr. Vargas in one, Manuel and his friends in the other. He hoped the visit would be brief. The lifting of blocks had halted, as usual, while the guests were on top. Watchman had given the signal for alternate work activities: the mending of worn scooprods, the replacement of drained power nodes, maintenance checks on the transmat cubicles, and other minor tasks. He walked among the men, nodding, exchanging greetings, hailing them where appropriate with the secret signs of the android communion. Nearly everyone who worked at the tower was a member of the faith—all the gammas, certainly, and more than three-fourths of the betas. As Watchman made his way around the construction site he encountered Responders, Sacrificers, Yielders, Guardians, Projectors, Protectors, Transcenders, Engulfers: virtually every level of the hierarchy was represented. There were even half a dozen Preservers, all betas. Watchman had applauded the recent move to admit betas to Preservership. Androids, of all people, did not need categories of exclusivity.

  Watchman was crossing the northern sector of the site when Leon Spaulding emerged from the maze of small service domes just beyond. The android attempted to avoid seeming to notice him.

  “Watchman?” the ectogene called.

  With an air of deep concentration Watchman walked on.

  “Alpha Watchman!” Spaulding cried, more formally, more sharply.

  The alpha saw no way to ignore Spaulding now. Turning, he acknowledged Spaulding's presence by pausing and letting the ectogene catch up with him.

  “Yes?” Watchman said.

  “Grace me with some of your time, Alpha Watchman. I need information.”

  “Ask, then.”

  “You know these buildings here?” Spaulding said, jerking a thumb backward toward the
service domes.

  Watchman shrugged. “Storage dumps, washrooms, kitchens, a first aid station, and similar things. Why?”

  “I was inspecting the area. I came to one dome where I was refused admission. Two insolent betas gave me a whole series of explanations of why I couldn't go in.”

  The chapel! Watchman went rigid.

  “What is the purpose of that building?” Spaulding asked.

  “I have no idea which one you mean.”

  “I'll show it to you.”

  “Another time,” said Watchman tautly. “My presence is required at the master control center now.”

  “Get there five minutes later. Will you come with me?”

  Watchman saw no easy way to disengage himself. With a cold gesture of agreement he yielded, and followed Spaulding into the service area, hoping that Spaulding would rapidly get lost among the domes. Spaulding did not get lost. By the most direct possible route he made for the chapel, indicating the innocent-looking gray structure with a flourish of his hand.

  “This,” he said. “What is it?”

  Two betas of the Guardian caste were on duty outside. They looked calm, but one made a hidden distress signal when Watchman looked at him. Watchman made a signal of comfort.

  He said, “I am not familiar with this building. Friends, what is its use?”

  The left-hand beta replied easily, “It contains focusing equipment for the refrigeration system, Alpha Thor.”