Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  “Think they’ll buy it?” said a rough male voice.

  “They’d better,” said a second. “Or we’ll…”

  The first voice laughed. “Just give her to me.”

  “She’s coming to,” said a woman.

  Am I? Pearl Angelica asked herself painfully. Her awareness was returning. She could hear. Whatever pressed against her cheek, she now could tell, was smooth, cool, soft. There were odors, soap and sweat, floral perfume, stale food, hydrocarbon fuel.

  She supposed she was coming to, or she wouldn’t hurt so much. The headache was the worst. She grunted as she recalled being seized and tugged and finally the spray of aerosol that had ended all resistance. She was awake. Lois would be too, and any others the gas had overcome. She winced at the thought that Lois must be sharing her pain. She hoped her aunt had suffered nothing worse.

  A hand rocked her shoulder and tipped her face into a flood of light. She grimaced. “Pull the shade there, ‘Livrance,” said the woman. There was the rasp of plastic against plastic, the light dimmed, and then she said to their prisoner: “You can open your eyes now.”

  Pearl Angelica obeyed. She was sprawled on a leather-covered sofa in a cylinder less than half the size of the Quebec’s cargo hold. To each side the walls were pierced by oval windows in a pattern that she recognized from old veedos: She was in an airplane. The nearest window was covered by a sliding shutter; beside it half-crouched a nondescript man of middle height and roundish face. His skin was dark, his hair was a pelt of tight curls, and he might have been in his thirties. The pattern on his shirt was one of keys and open padlocks. ‘Livrance. Deliverance? She wished it were true.

  The other two stood beside the sofa, their heads bent beneath the low ceiling. The woman’s skin was lighter, sallow, tight across her cheekbones and around her mouth. Her hair was straight and black, and her eyelids folded orientally. The other man had light brown skin, heavy bars for eyebrows and mustache, a prominent nose. He was looking at her as if she were already his to do with as he wished. She did not think she would enjoy his wishes. She closed her eyes again.

  A hand smashed her cheek and rocked her head. “Look at us!”

  “Take it easy, Hamid,” said the woman. “She’s still groggy.”

  The bot moaned and blinked and stared. Hamid and the woman were younger than she, in their late twenties. They had not yet been born when the Engineers had seized Earth. All three of her captors wore the pants and shirts and jackets she had seen on the Munin habitat. Their eyes were dark, brown or black, fixed on her as if she were less even than vermin, an object to be exploited, a mess to be wiped away as soon as they could find a rag.

  She struggled to sit up. Brusque hands swept her legs off the sofa’s cushions. Metal rattled almost musically and drew her eyes to her feet. A chain linked the cuffs on her ankles to each other and…Cloth tightly wrapped her lower legs, hiding her roots. She would not be able to run, even if she got the chance. Nor would she be able to taste whatever soil they let her near. Earth’s? Was that the sky through which they flew? She glanced at her wrists, where thin cords were buried in her flesh. She worked her mouth, which was dry and tasted foul. “Engineers,” she said.

  “That’s right,” said the woman. A metal chain ran around her neck and inside the front of her shirt. “I’m Prudence.”

  “What…?”

  ‘Livrance snorted contemptuously. “That depends on your friends.”

  Pearl Angelica did not ask why they had kidnapped her. As groggy as she still was, as much in pain, she thought it clear that they wanted something. They were holding her for ransom, and if the Orbitals and Gypsies refused to pay, she would never return to First-Stop, her friends, her father, the Racs. She moaned.

  “We’ve changed, you know,” said Prudence. “It’s been more than thirty years since we got rid of your sort.”

  “And we don’t want you now, genny,” said ‘Livrance.

  “We use Macks now,” said Hamid. He was staring at her breasts, and her leaves suddenly seemed much less than an adequate covering. She wished she had the long fronds of her kin, a coverall, even a blanket.

  “Only because we don’t have enough fuel for trucks,” said the other man.

  “And we have Sponges to get metals from seawater,” Hamid glared at his fellow. He seemed to be trying to convince her that the Engineers had changed so much that they were no longer any threat at all.

  “We use what we must of the old technology,” said Prudence. She made a face. “As long as we must.”

  “But not for long,” said ‘Livrance.

  “I could use her,” said Hamid.

  Pearl Angelica wished she dared to shake her head, but her headache was still throbbing. The airplane tipped, banking onto a new course, and through the windows on one side she could see roads and buildings, fields and forests and small lakes, far below them. A vaster body of water—but still a lake and not a sea; a far side was visible, and on it the distinctive outlines of many buildings—was visible to one side. When she tried to move her feet much more than the distance between the sofa cushion and the floor, she found that her hobble was chained to a leg of the sofa. The attachment seemed so solid that she was sure the sofa was bolted to the floor.

  She bent to touch the wrappings that concealed her roots. Even though her fingers were numb from loss of circulation, the fabric felt rubbery, as if it were that of ordinary elastic bandages. “Why…?”

  “They’re obscene,” said Hamid. “So we cover them.”

  “Too tight,” she said, and her fingers moved awkwardly, sought an edge, began to pluck.

  “Leave them alone,” said ‘Livrance.

  She grunted and leaned back. They had changed, had they? Perhaps they didn’t slaughter bots anymore, but then they didn’t have them to slaughter, except for her. And when their demand for ransom was refused….They used genimals because they had to, not because they were really anymore tolerant than they had been. And they looked forward to needing the genimals not at all. Through the haze of pain, she wondered how they would manage that.

  The plane leveled out of its bank and began to tilt its nose down. The floor tipped away from her, and she felt as if she were perched precariously at the edge of a cliff, or perhaps of one of the bluffs that ringed the valley on First-Stop. A voice issued from a grille in the ceiling overhead: “Take your seats, please. We will be landing shortly.”

  Grinning, Hamid leaned over Pearl Angelica to pull the ends of a seatbelt from among the sofa’s cushions. He buckled it around her waist and drew it tight, but then his hands did not leave her. They pinched and poked and bent her scalelike leaves aside to expose her skin. She tried to block his hands with her arms, but he only seized her biceps with one hand, squeezing cruelly while the other kept on with its insults. He stopped only when Prudence said, “That’s enough, Hamid. Sit down and fasten your own seatbelt.”

  She rubbed at the lines still embedded in the skin of her wrists, at the bruise on her upper arm. She paced restlessly, enjoying as much as she could the freedom of being able to use feet that were not chained and hobbled. She scowled at the grey and greasy soup that filled the bowl on the narrow shelf built into the concrete wall at chest height. It had come to her over an hour before, and it had been tepid then. Now it was cold, the grease congealed into floating plaques.

  She stared at the door of her cell. It was a massive sheet of rusty steel. Beneath a grilled window was the narrow hatch that had admitted the soup and a slice of stale, dark bread. Around its edges was a gap barely wide enough for a fingernail. A heavy metal plate covered what she thought must be the lock.

  She sat on the thin mattress of her bed, spread upon a broader, lower concrete shelf, wondering if she would be here long enough for cold, greasy soup to seem appetizing. There was no window to the outside, not this far underground. The only light came from a small fluorescent fixture in the ceiling, covered by a heavy screen. What came through the grille in the door was too dim to cou
nt.

  She stared at the filthy porcelain of the lidless toilet and the tiny sink with its single dripping tap, at the walls, marked with water stains, graffiti both faded and fresh, and splotches of…what? Soup that other prisoners had rejected? Or…? She bit her lip and looked at the floor, where the long elastic bandages that had wrapped her lower limbs lay tangled. Elastic, she thought. No wonder they had hurt. But now her roots, at least, were free.

  As if in response to her thought, they writhed in the air, as prehensile as fingers or tentacles. Would they ever touch Earth’s soil? Would they even taste the dirt of Munin again, or the Gypsy, or First-Stop?

  She wished she knew how far below the surface the Engineers had hidden her. There was a hint of salt in the air, as if her tiny cell were hidden in the bowels of some abandoned salt-mine cavern. Perhaps, she thought, that accounted for the rustiness of her door.

  She wished there were some soil within her reach, just a little, just enough to fill her soupbowl, if only it were soil of Earth. She would eat the soup then, even that foul stuff, just as she had eaten the dry bread, and fill the bowl with the dirt. Then she would set the dish on the floor, and…

  The plane had bounced twice when it touched the ground, and then its wheels had settled into a chattering report on the runway’s ruts and potholes and general lack of both pavement and maintenance. A glass and concrete terminal had come into view as they slowed, but the plane had turned away from it and toward a hangar some distance to one side. Beside the hangar had waited a squad of men of a sort the bot recognized from old veedos she had seen. They carried short-snouted automatic weapons. With them were a long-bedded truck with a rack of ground-to-air missiles elevated to launching position and an armored personnel carrier with a heavy machine gun mounted in a turret on its roof. The men wore blue coveralls decorated with golden cogwheel patches. The trucks were painted olive drab. Nearby stood a boxy black automobile whose windows were tinted so dark that the interior was invisible.

  “Detroit,” Prudence had said. “It’s the capital now.”

  Of course, thought Pearl Angelica. Just as it had been the capital of the twentieth century’s Machine Age, though government had then been centered elsewhere.

  She sat still when Hamid, one hand on her thigh, unfastened the chain and seatbelt that held her to the sofa. Her headache was beginning to fade at last, and she felt as if she might be able to struggle. But there was no point, she knew. She could not escape, and if she did, she had no way to leave the planet, to return to Munin or to First-Stop. She could not even be rescued; that was what the soldiers and their weapons were there to prevent. Her aunt would have to leave without her, and her father…Tears filled her eyes as she thought that he might finally die before she could see him again.

  “Let’s go.” ‘Livrance’s hand on her shoulder pulled her to her feet and pushed her toward the plane’s exit.

  Moments later, she was in the back seat of the car, pressed between the two men, cringing at the insistent probes of Hamid’s fingers, sighing with relief when ‘Livrance said, “Hamid!” Prudence was in front, beside a uniformed driver who spoke no word to any of them as he started the nearly silent engine, pushed buttons that locked the doors with audible clicks, and rolled his vehicle past the soldiers, through a gate, and onto a patchily paved roadway.

  At first the road was flanked by broad strips of empty ground. Trees and brush had been removed for a hundred meters to either side as if the Engineers feared that enemies might hide within it and leap out in ambush. But Earth’s soil was there, visible wherever grass and weeds did not grow, and she yearned. If only…But she was a prisoner, her roots as bound as her hands, and not even the odors of Earth’s soil could reach her within the sealed car.

  As they neared the city, the cleared strip filled in, first with the honeysuckle-cloaked rubble of one-time homes and shops and offices, charred beams jutting into the air as reminders of…She wondered how much had been ruined by the Engineers themselves when they seized power so many years before, how much was the result of the pounding the Engineers had taken from space as the bots and gengineers had fled the planet. The Orbitals had used chunks of lunar rock to smash missiles and launchpads, airports and factories.

  Then the rubble was cleared away in patches to reveal bare ground planted with crops. She recognized the brilliant green and tall stems of corn, the bluish green of cabbage. A field of what looked at first like tomato plants puzzled her, however. These plants bore clusters of yellow oblongs she had never seen before. Were they some leftover from the time of the gengineers? Or were they some strange mutation?

  Newer buildings came into view, two and three stories tall, built of masonry, much of it bearing the smoke stains and fragments of ancient mortar that said it had been reclaimed from the rubble piles. And then there was a tall framework of what looked like steel tubes over which crawled what must have been several hundred small machines. Each one trailed a flexible strand; some of the openings in the framework were already filled with translucent webbing.

  The car pulled to the side of the road, and Hamid said, “See those Spiders? We’re not so backward, you know. We’ve made a lot of progress with artificial intelligence. Before long, we’ll even be able to make von Neumann machines.”

  “An old idea,” said ‘Livrance. “Machines that make copies of themselves. Tell them what to do, turn them loose, and wait. They’ll build anything you like.”

  “We don’t have the people,” said Prudence. “But those things are already rebuilding the cities for us.”

  Pearl Angelica let her gaze descend to street level, where a dozen sweaty, dirty humans shoveled rubble into the maw of a machine that apparently generated the substance of the web. Other workers emptied plastic drums from the open cargo pod of a Mack truck. In the street itself, she could see several massive wads of Mack waste, and she realized that she had not yet seen a litterbug.

  “We’ve got all the energy we need,” said Hamid. “Hydro, wind, even nuclear.”

  “And powersats,” said ‘Livrance.

  Hamid grunted as if he hated to admit how much the Engineers depended on the Orbitals. “They’re lucky we buy their power,” he said. “They’d starve if—”

  “We just need better batteries,” interrupted the woman. “Or fuel cells. Something compact and portable.” She gestured, and the car resumed its journey.

  “That’s where we’re going,” said ‘Livrance. He was pointing to the right, toward a multistoried edifice whose sides reflected the sky wherever the glass its long-gone builders had used to sheathe it was intact. Large areas, long vertical triangles the shape of shards, were filled in with the flat sheen of the Spiders’ weavings.

  When they reached the building, however, Pearl Angelica learned that the building itself was not their goal. It was surrounded by a broad plaza dotted with shrubs and small trees in concrete planters, benches, and fountains. Flowers surrounded a sign that said “Government Center” in large, ornate letters. But the building’s broad doors were blocked by stone curbs and metal railings.

  The plaza’s traffic was a mix of human and machine, of men—women were hardly to be seen at all—and knee-high robots that scurried among the swinging legs. Everyone and everything flowed purposefully toward and away from a single cavernous stairwell that led deep beneath the surface. It seemed clear to the prisoner that the Engineers feared another war with space and had gone underground in search of safety.

  The people in the plaza showed their pained awareness of the small procession—a bot in chains, her three captors leading her toward the lip of the stairwell, the men’s hands on her elbows propelling her onward whenever her hobbled legs could not match the pace they set—in the way they elaborately ignored it. They fell quiet. They turned their eyes toward the empty building that dominated the plaza. They bent their paths away as if afraid to get too close.

  By the time Pearl Angelica and her captors reached the staircase, they had it almost entirely to themselve
s except for the machines which, caring nothing for who or what they were, concentrated on the tricky task of clambering from step to step. Half carrying the bot, Hamid and ‘Livrance rushed her down the stairs, Prudence following close upon their heels. Three flights of steps below the surface, the bot noted heavy doors poised to swing closed upon command, hydraulic cylinders as thick as her torso visible in the shadows behind them. One more flight, and a low-ceilinged foyer, its concrete bare of signs or graffiti, held the doors of several elevators.

  When the elevator had finally stopped, Pearl Angelica had been only seconds from the cell she now occupied.

  “You’ve heard that we were doomed,” said Prudence. “That the resources we needed for a new Machine Age simply were no longer there. No metals. No fuels.”

  Pearl Angelica nodded. The cuffs that had bound her ankles were now on her wrists, with lengths of chain, leashes, linking her to ‘Livrance and Hamid. But they were outdoors now, standing on the plaza beneath racing clouds, and even this much freedom from her prison was enough to lift her spirits.

  Yet her roots were bound once more, and her legs ached. When her captors had finally come for her, they had scowled to see the wrappings on the floor. ‘Livrance had held her while Hamid had wound them back in place. Only when the man’s hands had begun to wander further up her legs than necessary had the darker man released her. She had tried to kick Hamid then, but he had only stepped aside and laughed.

  “But the metals were still there,” said Prudence. “We just had to dig them out of the dumps. And the fuels…” She shrugged fatalistically. “There were a lot of deaths…”

  “Eighty-five percent,” said the bot. Before the Engineers’ revolution the world population had been over twelve billion people. Afterward, the total had been less than two billion.

  “It cut the need,” said ‘Livrance. “It made success possible.”