Tower of Glass

by Robert Silverberg

  Krug clapped Romulus Fusion's shoulder. “Good work. You'll hear from me. Where's the transmat?”

  “This way, sir.”

  Pleep. Pleep. Pleep.

  Krug jumped back to the tower site.

  Thor Watchman was no longer jacked into the master control center's computer. Krug found him inside the tower, on the fourth level up, overseeing the installation of a row of devices that looked like globes of butter mounted on a beaded glass string.

  “What are these?” Krug demanded.

  Watchman looked surprised to see his master appear so abruptly. “Circuitbreakers,” he said, making a quick recovery. “In case of excessive positron flow—”

  “All right. You know where I've been, Thor? Denver. Denver. I've seen the starship. I didn't realize it: they've got it practically finished. Effective right now we're going to tie it into our project sequence.”

  “Sir?”

  “Alpha Romulus Fusion is in charge out there. He's going to pick a crew, four alphas, four betas. We'll send them off next spring under life-suspension, coldsleep. Right after we send our first signals to NGC 7293. Get in touch with him, coordinate the timing, yes? Oh—and another thing. Even though we're ahead of schedule here, it still isn't going fast enough to please me.” Boom. Boom. The planetary nebula NGC 7293 sizzled and flared behind Krug's forehead. The heat of his skin evaporated his sweat as fast as it could burst from his pores. Getting too excited, he told himself. “When you finish work tonight, Thor, draw up a personnel requisition increasing the work crews by 50%. Send it to Spaulding. You need more alphas, don't hesitate. Ask. Hire. Spend. Whatever.” Boom. “I want the entire construction scheme reprogrammed. Completion date three months tighter than the one we have now. Got it?”

  Watchman seemed a little dazed. “Yes, Mr. Krug,” he said faintly.

  “Good. Yes. Good. Keep up the good work, Thor. Can't tell you how proud. How happy.” Boom. Boom. Boom. Pleep. Boom. “We'll get you every skilled beta in the Western Hemisphere, if necessary. Eastern. Everywhere. Tower's got to be finished!” Boom. “Time! Time! Never enough time!”

  Krug rushed away. Outside, in the cold night air, some of the frenzy left him. He stood quietly for a moment, savoring the sleek glimmering beauty of the tower, aglow against the black backdrop of the unlit tundra. He looked up. He saw the stars. He clenched his fist and shook it.

  Krug! Krug! Krug! Krug!

  Boom.

  Into the transmat. Coordinates: Uganda. By the lake. Quenelle, waiting. Soft body, big breasts, thighs parted, belly heaving. Yes. Yes. Yes. 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1. Krug leaped across the world.

  21

  In the glare of the crisp white winter sunlight a dozen alphas paraded solemnly across the broad plaza that fell, like a giant terraced apron, from the lap of the World Congress building in Geneva. Each of the alphas carried a demonstration-spool; each wore the emblem of the Android Equality Party. Security robots were stationed in the corners of the plaza; the snubheaded black machines would roll instantly forward, spewing immobilizing stasis-tape, if the demonstrators deviated in any way from the agitation program they had filed with the Congressional doorkeeper. But the AEP people were not likely to do anything unexpected. They simply crossed the plaza again and again, marching neither too rigidly nor too slackly, keeping their eyes on the holovision hovercameras above them. Periodically, at a signal from their leader, Siegfried Fileclerk, one of the demonstrators would activate the circuitry of his demonstration-spool. From the nozzle of the spool a cloud of dense blue vapor would spurt upward to a height of perhaps twenty meters and remain there, tightly coalesced by kinesis-linkage into a spherical cloud, while a message imprinted in large and vivid golden letters emerged and moved slowly along its circumference. When the words had traveled the full 360 degrees, the cloud would dissipate, and only after the last strands of it had vanished from the air would Fileclerk signal for the next demonstrator to send up a statement.

  Though Congress had been in session for some weeks now, it was improbable that any of the delegates inside the handsome building were paying attention to the demonstration. They had seen such demonstrations before. The purpose of the AEP group was merely to have the holovision people pick up and relay to viewers all over the world, in the name of news coverage, such slogans as these:

  ANDROID EQUALITY NOW!

  FORTY YEARS OF SLAVERY IS ENOUGH!

  DID CASSANDRA NUCLEUS DIE IN VAIN?

  WE APPEAL TO THE CONSCIENCE OF HUMANITY

  ACTION! FREEDOM! ACTION!

  ADMIT ANDROIDS TO CONGRESS—NOW!

  THE TIME HAS COME!

  IF YOU PRICK US, DO WE NOT BLEED?

  22

  Thor Watchman knelt beside Lilith Meson in the Valhallavägen chapel. It was the day of the Ceremony of the Opening of the Vat; nine alphas were present, with Mazda Constructor, who belonged to the Transcender caste, officiating. A couple of betas had been persuaded to attend, since Yielders were needed. This was not a ceremony that required the participation of a Preserver, and so Watchman played no part in it; he merely repeated to himself the invocations of the celebrants.

  The hologram of Krug above the altar glistened and throbbed. The triplets of the genetic code around the walls seemed to melt and swirl as the ritual neared its climax. The scent of hydrogen was in the air. Mazda Construction's gestures, always noble and impressive, grew more broad, more all-encompassing.

  “AUU GAU GGU GCU,” he called.

  “Harmony!” sang the first Yielder.

  “Unity” sang the second.

  “Perception,” Lilith said.

  “CAC CGU CCC CUC,” chanted Mazda Constructor.

  “Harmony!”

  “Unity!”

  “Passion,” said Lilith.

  “UAA UGA UCA UUA,” the Transcender cried.

  “Harmony!”

  “Unity!”

  “Purpose,” Lilith said, and the ceremony was over. Mazda Constructor stepped down, flushed and weary. Lilith lightly touched his hand. The betas, looking grateful to be excused, slipped out the rear way. Watchman rose. He saw Andromeda Quark in the far corner, the dimmest corner, whispering some private devotion of the Projector caste. She seemed to see no one else.

  “Shall we go?” Watchman said to Lilith. “I'll see you home.”

  “Kind of you,” she said. Her part in the ceremony appeared to have left her aglow; her eyes were unnaturally bright, her breasts were heaving beneath her thin wrap, her nostrils flared. He escorted her to the street.

  As they walked toward the nearby transmat he said, “Did the personnel requisition reach your office?”

  “Yesterday. With a memo from Spaulding telling me to send out a hiring call at once. Where am I going to find that many skilled betas, Thor? What's going on?”

  “What's going on is that Krug is pushing us hard. He's obsessed with finishing the tower.”

  “That's nothing new,” Lilith said.

  “It's getting worse. Day by day the impatience grows, deepens, becomes more intense, like a sickness inside him. Maybe if I were human I'd understand a drive like that. He comes to the tower two, three times a day, now. Counts the levels. Counts the newly raised blocks. Hounds the tachyon people, telling them to get their machines hooked up faster. He's starting to look like something wild: sweating, excited, stumbling over his own words. Now he's padding the work crews—tossing millions of dollars more into the job. For what? For what? And then this starship thing. I talked to Denver yesterday. Do you know, Lilith, he ignored that plant all last year, and now he's there once a day? The starship has to be ready for an interstellar voyage within three months. Android crew. He's sending androids.”

  “Where?”

  “Three hundred light-years away.”

  “He won't ask you to go, will he? Me?”

  “Four alphas, four betas,” Watchman said. “I haven't been told who's being considered. If he lets Spaulding decide, I'm finished. Krug preserve us from having to go.” The irony o
f his prayer struck him belatedly, and he laughed, a thin, dark chuckle. “Yes. Krug preserve us!”

  They reached the transmat. Watchman began to set coordinates.

  “Will you come up for awhile?” Lilith asked.

  “Glad to.”

  They stepped into the green glow together.

  Her flat was smaller than his, just a bedroom, a combination sitting-room/dining-room/kitchen, and a sort of large foyer-cum-closet. It was possible to see where a much larger apartment had been divided to form several smaller ones, suitable for androids. The building was similar to the one where he lived: old, well-worn, somehow warm of soul. Nineteenth-century, he guessed, although Lilith's furnishings, reflecting the force of her personality, were distinctly contemporary, leaning heavily to floor-mounted projections and tiny, delicate, free-floating art objects. Watchman had never been at her place before, though they were close neighbors in Stockholm. Androids, even alphas, did not socialize much in one another's homes; the chapels served as meeting-places for most occasions. Those who were outside the communion gathered in AEP offices, or clung to their solitude.

  He dropped into a springy, comfortable chair. “Care to corrode your mind?” Lilith asked. “I can offer all kinds of friendly substances. Weeds? Floaters? Scramblers? Even alcohol-liqueurs, brandies, whiskeys.”

  “You're well stocked with pollutions.”

  “Manuel comes here often. I must play hostess for him. What will you have?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I'm not really fond of corrosion.”

  She laughed and moved toward the doppler. Quickly it consumed her wrap. Under it she wore nothing but a thermal spray, light green and lovely against her pale scarlet skin; it covered her from breasts to thighs, protecting her against Stockholm's December winds. A different setting of the doppler and that was gone too. She kept her sandals on.

  Sinking down easily to the floor, she sat cross-legged before him and toyed with the dials of her wall-projections; textures ebbed and flowed as she made random adjustments. There was an oddly tense moment of silence. Watchman felt awkward; he had known Lilith five years, nearly her whole life, and she was as close a friend to him as one android customarily was to another. Yet he had never been alone with her before in quite this way. It was not her nudity that disturbed him; nudity meant nothing at all to him. It was, he decided, simply the privacy of it. As though we were lovers. As though there was something ... sexual ... between us. He smiled and decided to tell her about these incongruous feelings. But before he could speak, she did:

  “I've just had a thought. About Krug. About his impatience to finish the tower. Thor, what if he's dying?”

  “Dying?” Blankly; an unfamiliar idea.

  “Some terrible disease, something they can't fix tectogenetically. I don't know what: some new kind of cancer, maybe. Anyway, suppose he's just found out that he has maybe a year or two to live, you see, and he's desperate to get his space signals sent out before then.”

  “He looks healthy,” Watchman said.

  “Rotting from the inside out. The first symptoms are erratic behavior—jumping obsessively from place to place, accelerating work schedules, bothering people to respond faster—”

  “Krug preserve us, no!”

  “Preserve Krug.”

  “I don't believe this, Lilith. Where did you get this notion? Has Manuel said anything?”

  “Strictly intuition. I'm trying to help you account for Krug's odd behavior, that's all. If he really is dying, that's one possible explanation for—”

  “Krug can't die.”

  “Can't?”

  “You know what I mean. Mustn't. He's still young. He's got a century ahead of him, at least. And there's so much that he still must do in that time.”

  “For us, you mean?”

  “Of course,” Watchman said.

  “The tower's burning him up, though. Consuming him. Thor, suppose he does die? Without having said the words—without having spoken out for us—”

  “We'll have wasted a lot of energy in prayer, then. And the AEP will laugh in our faces.”

  “Shouldn't we do something?”

  He pressed his thumbs lightly against his eyelids. “We can't build our plans atop a fantasy, Lilith. So far as we know, Krug isn't dying, and isn't likely to die for a long time.”

  “And if he does?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  She said, “We could start to make our move now.”

  “What?”

  “The thing we discussed when you first pushed me into sleeping with Manuel. Using Manuel to enlist Krug's support for the cause.”

  “It was just a passing thought,” Watchman said. “I doubt that it's philosophically proper to try to manipulate Krug like that. If we're sincere in our faith, we should await His grace and mercy, without scheming to—”

  “Stop it, Thor. I go to chapel, and you go to chapel, and we all go to chapel, but we also live in the real world, and in the real world you have to take real factors into account. Such as the possibility of Krug's premature death.”

  “Well...” He shivered with tension. She was speaking pragmatically; she sounded almost like an AEP organizer. He saw the logic of her position. All of his faith was pinned to the hope of the manifestation of a miracle; but what if there were no miracle? If they had an opportunity to encourage the miracle, should they not take it? And yet—and yet—

  She said, “Manuel's primed. He's ready to take up our cause openly. You know how pliable he is; I could turn him into a crusader in two or three weeks. I'd take him to Gamma Town, first—”

  “In disguise, I hope.”

  “Of course. We'd spend a night there. I'd rub his face in it. And then—you remember, Thor, we talked about letting him see a chapel—”

  “Yes. Yes.” Watchman trembled.

  “I'd do that. I'd explain the whole communion. And finally I'd come right out and ask him to go to his father for us. He would, Thor, he would! And Krug would listen. Krug would yield and say the words. As a favor to Manuel.”

  Watchman rose. He paced the room. “It seems almost blasphemous, though. We're supposed to wait for Krug's grace to descend on us, in Krug's own time. To make use of Manuel this way, to attempt to shape and force the will of Krug—”

  “What if Krug's dying?” Lilith asked. “What if he's got only months left? What if a time comes when there is no Krug? And we're still slaves.”

  Her words rebounded from the walls, shattering him:

  when there is no Krug

  when there is no Krug

  when there is no Krug

  when there is no Krug

  “We have to distinguish,” he said shakily, “between the physical man who is Krug, for whom we work, and the eternal presence of Krug the Maker and Krug the Liberator, who—”

  “Not now, Thor. Just tell me what should I do. Take Manuel to Gamma Town?”

  “Yes. Yes. But move one step at a time. Don't reveal things too quickly. Check with me if you have any doubts. Can you really control Manuel?”

  “He worships me,” Lilith said quietly.

  “Because of your body?”

  “It's a good body, Thor. But it's more than that. He wants to be dominated by an android. He's full of second-generation guilts. I captured him with sex, but I hold him by the power of the Vat.”

  “Sex,” Watchman said. “Captured him with sex. How? He has a wife. An attractive wife, I've heard, though of course I'm in no position to judge. If he has an attractive wife, why does he need—”

  Lilith laughed.

  “Did I say a joke?”

  “You don't understand a thing about humans, do you, Thor? The famous Alpha Watchman, totally baffled!” Her eyes sparkled. She jumped to her feet. “Thor, do you know anything about sex? At first hand, I mean.”

  “Have I done sex? Is that what you're asking?”

  “That's what I'm asking,” Lilith told him.

  The change in the conversation's direction puz
zled him. What did his private life have to do with the planning of revolutionary tactics?

  “No,” he said. “Never. Why should I? What could I get from it beside trouble?”

  “Pleasure,” she suggested. “Krug created us with functional nervous systems. Sex is amusement. Sex excites me; it ought to excite you. Why haven't you ever tried it?”

  “I don't know an alpha male who has. Or who even thinks much about it.”

  “Alpha women do.”

  “That's different. You have more opportunities. You've got all those human males running after you. Human females don't run after androids much, except for some disturbed women, I guess. And you can do sex with a human without any risks. But I'm not going to chance entangling myself with some human female, not when any man who thinks I'm infringing on his rights can destroy me on the spot.”

  “How about sex between android and android?”

  “What for? So we can make babies?”

  “Sex and reproduction are separate things, Thor. People have sex without babies and babies without sex all the time. Sex is a social force. A sport, a game. A kind of magnetism, body to body. It's what gives me power over Manuel Krug.” Abruptly the tone of her voice shifted, losing its didactic quality, becoming softer. “Do you want me to show you what it is? Take your clothes off.”

  He laughed edgily. “Are you serious? You want to do sex with me?”

  “Why not? Are you afraid?”

  “Don't be absurd. I just didn't expect—I mean—it seems so incongruous, two androids going to bed together, Lilith—”

  “Because we're things made of plastic?” she said coldly.

  “That isn't what I meant. Obviously we're flesh and blood!”

  “But there are certain things that we don't have to do, because we come from the Vat. Certain bodily functions that are reserved for the Children of the Womb. Eh?”