Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  The men tugged at her chains and led her to one side of the empty building, that monument to another age, to the edge of the plaza, where a raised walkway and a stone wall, waist-high, waited for them. Here and there, honeysuckle leaves and blossoms peeked above the wall’s edge, signs that the vines climbed the wall from whatever lay beyond.

  From any distance, nothing seemed to lie past the plaza’s border. The air was empty, no buildings, no trees, nothing. But by the time the men stopped her beside the wall, Pearl Angelica could see a drop of five meters or so, a broad river, its waters stained with oily sheens and floating rubbish, and a bank which, though it was choked with honeysuckle, still showed signs of streets and fallen buildings. One wider avenue, kept bare of the vines, stretched toward a single wharf from that part of the city south of the plaza. The green-draped, blossom-speckled ruins and the river they bordered stretched out of sight to right and left. Occasionally, the vines trembled as if something moved beneath them. Animals? she wondered. Or honey bums?

  She blinked away the wetness that the honeysuckle, unexpected reminder of the Gypsy, brought to her eyes. The soil of Earth was there too, just beyond her reach as long as her captors kept her on the rocky surfaces of plaza pavements and tunnel floors. So was the honeysuckle, the honeysuckle net that no one here on Earth could possibly use. She imagined tapping into it with her roots and finding it empty, echoing, a nervous system without tenant except for herself, without thoughts except her own, inquiring, yearning.

  She shuddered wordlessly.

  “That used to be slums,” said Prudence. “Warehouses, docks, factories. The Greenhouse Effect meant more rain, greater flow in the river, more frequent floods. With fewer people, we could afford to abandon the land and let nature take its course.”

  “Can we go down there?” the bot asked. “I need…Dirt. Earth. My roots…”

  Prudence shook her head. ‘Livrance jerked the chain to her left wrist. When she cried out at the sudden pain, he said, “No. It took us too long to scrub your kind from our world. We kept finding small groups of bots for years.”

  Hamid laughed. “Unnatural monsters,” he said, though the look he gave her did not say he thought her monstrous. “We had to destroy them. And they were saboteurs and spies too. They poisoned farms, attacked labor camps.”

  She had known that only a few had managed to escape the planet. She had thought that all the rest had died before and during the final upheaval. Yet, she told herself, she should not be surprised that a few had survived for a while. A planet was a large place.

  She felt a sudden rush of pride: Her kin, fighting back despite all loss of hope. Doing what damage they could even as they died. Never surrendering, knowing that if they did they would only be slaughtered. One with all the resistance fighters of human history. Indeed, human themselves, as human in spirit if not in body as any Engineer.

  “We’re being nice to you,” said Prudence. “But we can’t take any chance that you might drop some seeds. You’ll stay on pavement.”

  “Then why did you kidnap me?” she finally asked. She did not try to tell him that she was too human to reproduce by seeds like other bots. “If you don’t want bots on Earth, why did you bring me here?”

  “You came to us,” answered ‘Livrance. “You asked for bees.” He laughed briefly, his tone condescending. “That’s not much, but it’s the first thing your kind has wanted of us.”

  She was puzzled, and she let it show. “You trade with the Orbitals.”

  “Only those in the habitats,” said Prudence. “Your group went to the stars.”

  “And if you’re asking us for anything at all,” said Hamid, “even if it’s only bees, that’s a sign that you’ve made a mistake.”

  “We’ll exhibit you,” said Prudence. “We’ll show you to our people as a sign…”

  “A sign that we made no mistake when we got rid of you,” said ‘Livrance. “That the future is ours, not yours.”

  “Then you won’t ask for any ransom?”

  “Of course we will,” said Prudence. “We’ve got your Q-drive already. But you’ve got a star-drive, a way to travel faster than light. We want that too.”

  That had been the end of the buoyancy that had come to Pearl Angelica when she had left her cell and seen the sky once more. It had also been the end of her freedom, for ‘Livrance and Hamid had almost immediately tightened their grip on her chains and pulled her from the plaza’s edge, from the view of river and trees and honeysuckle, back to the stairwell, back to the depths of the Engineers’ underground fortress, back to her cell.

  Now she sat on her sleeping shelf, staring at the elastic bandages that had compressed her roots against her skin. They twisted in her hands, just as her roots writhed in the air, stretching as if they sought the soil that was nowhere near.

  She had just barely managed to hold onto the moment of pride she had felt when she learned that bots once, while there were still a few left on Earth, had fought back against their oppressors. But it was a struggle to keep her spirits from dropping as low as they had been when she had first seen her cell.

  Her ransom was the very secret that made the Gypsies safe. Even if the Engineers moved off Earth and into the Solar System, even if they destroyed the Orbitals in the habitats, on Mars, and elsewhere, the Gypsies were out of reach.

  Surely they would not pay the price her captors were demanding for her.

  And when the Engineers realized that their demand was futile, she would die.

  It was no consolation that she would die on the Earth which she had yearned so much to see.

  * * *

  Chapter Seven

  Pearl Angelica looked up from the edge of her sleeping platform as footsteps echoed in the corridor outside her cell. A familiar voice said, “I’ll take it in,” and a key scraped in the lock. The rusty steel door creaked open.

  The guard was a middle-aged man who wore a blue coverall almost identical—except in color—to those she had long been familiar with on the Orbitals and human Gypsies, although it was decorated with strips of metallic cloth that suggested girders. A heavy belt, kept from sagging much below his paunch by a single diagonal shoulder strap, supported his keys and a billy club. A single brass medallion, stamped with the profile of an automobile, was pinned to the strap.

  The guard’s cheeks were dark with end-of-shift stubble, a white-capped swelling marked the side of his nose, and his eyes and posture were weary, but he showed all the watchfulness of a professional prison warder as he stopped the door with his foot and peered through the crack to be sure the prisoner was safely out of reach.

  The door swung wider. The guard stepped aside to reveal Hamid in the dimness of the corridor behind him. The kidnapper was holding a metal dinner tray.

  The guard gestured. “Half an hour.”

  “I won’t need that long.” Hamid was grinning as if in anticipation.

  “I don’t have anything to say to you,” said Pearl Angelica. Of her three captors, he was the one who had eyed her, pinched her, felt her. Suddenly, she could guess what he wanted. She also guessed that it was no rare event; the guard seemed quite unperturbed.

  “That’s all right.” The door swung shut and clicked behind him. He set the tray on the wall shelf. “You don’t need to say a word.”

  She stood up. “Then…”

  He swung toward her, put one hand against her breast, squeezed, and pushed. As she fell backward on her thin mattress, he said, “I’ve heard stories.”

  She sprawled where he had hurled her. She glared, thinking of her father and Donna Rose, human and bot. Had he heard of them? Or did he mean other couples? “You haven’t heard anything about me.”

  “So you’ve still got nice tits.” He took off his jacket and tossed it aside.

  She tensed, knowing that she had not guessed wrong. She tried to push herself away from him, into a sitting position near the head of the narrow shelf that was her bed, but he grabbed her ankle and pulled her flat. Her voice tr
embled when she said, “How much did it take to bribe the guard?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t you bring him in to hold me down?”

  “Don’t give me that. All you wear is leaves. No clothes. You flaunt it all, and you know you want it. I won’t need him.”

  “You can’t get a girl of your own sort?”

  “I’ve got three.” He was unfastening his pants. “But I’ve never had a bot.”

  She knew it would do her no good at all to struggle. He was stronger than she, and she thought that the guard outside her cell might be all too willing to hold her down if Hamid only asked. He might even want a piece of her himself.

  She also knew it would not help to scream.

  But though she lay still as her assailant wrenched aside her leaves, exposed her most private flesh, and assaulted her, she could not remain quiet. She cried in outrage, and again, again, again.

  When he answered her rhythmic cries with a grunting “Shut up!” and an open-handed slap, she shrieked and glared and tried to claw his face.

  He pinned both wrists in one large fist and used the other to pound her jaw and cheek and temple, grinning fiercely when he split her lip and her red blood splattered across both their chests.

  She screamed with every blow and every unfaltering thrust.

  She screamed even though she knew it could not help, not here, not on Earth, not in this cell that echoed with her voice.

  Her screams should have echoed beyond her cell, into the corridor where the guard waited for Hamid to be done, beyond the buried building and through the city of Detroit, through all the continent and the Earth, to space itself and all her friends and kin. They should have aroused the planet and prompted the descent of legions of rescuers.

  Certainly her screams echoed in the corridor beyond the door of her cell. But no one came until the guard finally opened the door, eyed her with the detachment of one who has seen it all a thousand times, smirked tiredly, and said, “Time to go.”

  The physical pain faded quickly, though bruises and scabs remained. The pain of mind and spirit—humiliation and outrage, insult and fury—did not. She huddled on the thin pad that covered her sleeping platform, picking at the leaves her rapist had torn, smoothing others back into place, hoping desperately that his sperm would not take root within her. Other bots mated by exchanging pollen, fertilizing the blossoms on their scalps, setting seed that, when ripe, would be planted in soil. She had been given more human features; presumably she could get just as pregnant as any fully human woman.

  Not that he knew that, her kidnapper, her rapist. If she had a gun, a knife, anything sharp and long, oh, she would love to penetrate him!

  And there was nothing in her cell that she could use to remove…the physical stain, the seed, the semen that was now within her. She shuddered at the thought that she might bear her rapist’s child. Nor could she remove the stain upon her mind, her spirit, her soul. She would bear that to her grave.

  She looked at the tray that still sat on the shelf across her cell. It held a small piece of meat, grey, cold, surrounded by congealed grease. There were vegetables, also cold, limp and soft from overcooking. There was a glass of thin milk.

  She gagged at the thought of eating. That, she thought, would solve her problem, her problems. If she could only starve herself, she would then escape the memory of rape and save her kin the need to pay any ransom at all.

  She might even save her kin from rape and slaughter. She did not believe the Engineers would use the tunnel-drive just for trade and exploration. Earth might have recovered from the chaos and destruction of the revolution. The Engineers might indeed be building the mechanical civilization for which they once had yearned. But their minds remained the same. They would not leave the Orbitals and Gypsies in peace. They would be happy only once they stood alone on Earth, in the Solar System, and among the stars, and perhaps not even then.

  She gagged again at the thought of food. What she needed was soil and sunlight, sunlight and soil. The touch of Earth. And they had barred her from it. They had told her that if she left the pavement of the plaza above, if she but touched the soil of Earth, if she sank her roots into the planet’s dirt, she would contaminate their world.

  As if she were the rapist!

  She wished she could be sure that her death would protect her kin, would confine the Engineers to Earth as she was confined to this cell. But she knew what von Neumann machines were. They had been conceived in the twentieth century, when computers were new, before the gengineers had found their ways to sidestep the shortages of minerals and energy that threatened the machine-based civilization of the time. They would be, if only they could be built, machines that could reproduce themselves. They would be able to mine the metals they needed, refine them, shape them into chips and motors and gears and structural elements, and assemble duplicates of themselves. Turned loose upon the Moon or Mars and later harvested for their valuable components, they promised an end to every conceivable shortage of materials. Programmed to build whatever their designers wished, they promised an end to labor shortages and an infinite ballooning of personal wealth.

  They did, of course, require some compact power source. But given that, the payoff was endless.

  So, she realized, was the threat to her people. Von Neumann machines could as easily be told to seek out and destroy enemies, or bots. And they did not really need a faster-than-light drive to reach the Gypsies. As machines, they could not die. An ordinary Q-drive would take them to the stars over the centuries and millennia, there to spread and seek and destroy. Tunnel-drives would only speed the process, shrinking the time to the extinction of the Gypsies and the Orbitals to mere years, or even months.

  She still craved the touch of Earth’s soil, but less than before. Earth was root-home, yes. It was also the home of the enemies of all her kind. It was the place where fate insisted on a dichotomy, an eternal conflict, between machines and life, and promised to extend that conflict wherever her own people might go.

  She stared at her legs, her feet, her ankles, her roots and rootlets. Those branching tendrils varied in thickness, hair-slender near their tips, wormlike where they emerged from her skin. Prehensile tentacles, flexing, writhing. Could she have grabbed her rapist with them, stabbed through his skin, found his nerves, forced him to scream as he did her? Her stomach turned. It had never before occurred to her that she might use her roosting such a way. She was not sure she could.

  What would the machines think of their mission? They would be intelligent. They would have to be, to handle the complexity of reproduction, the variability of the universe, the unpredictability of their target. They would eat, process energy, respond to their environment, reproduce. They would, in fact, share all the features of organic life. They would be alive, a form of life, different only in form and inorganic chemistry.

  And their existence, by itself and aside from any mission of extermination the Engineers might lay upon them, would not disturb the Gypsies or the Orbitals, who coexisted comfortably with both machines and genimals. Yet what would the differences mean to the machines themselves?

  Eventually, she realized what she was doing by thinking of such things. She was avoiding every thought of what had just happened to her. The von Neumann machines were really a threat. They would indeed be a kind of life, by any definition that really mattered. They would have their own opinions. They…

  “I’m just distracting myself,” she said aloud. “Trying not to think of how much it hurts.” And it did, didn’t it? She took a deep breath and admitted just how much pain she truly felt.

  “I’ve been raped.” No, it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t flaunt her body. She didn’t ask for such treatment, and it had never happened, never even almost happened, among the Gypsies. Not that the Gypsies were so perfect. She had heard…But here, a prisoner, in a cell, at the mercy of the Engineers her kind had fled so many years before…She was helpless.

  She knew she might be rap
ed again. She would be raped again, if she stayed where it could happen.

  “But how can I escape?” she asked the wall of her cell.

  She focused again on her roots. Prehensile, yes, they were. They might be able to make Hamid pay in coin of pain for what he had done. They could squirm their way into soil, draw small stones to the surface and even hurl them aside. They could manipulate, and they were small, able to insinuate themselves into the thinnest of cracks.

  She rose from the bed, stretched and heard her joints pop in protest. She examined the door to her cell. She looked at the meal Hamid had brought her. She thought of soil and—was it still day outside?—sunlight.

  Finally, she lay down again, but this time on the floor beside the door. She raised her legs and propped one on the door and the other against the wall, beside the latch. Then she worked her roots as if she stood on bare ground, free and unmolested.

  She closed her eyes to concentrate on those few signals of touch the nerves in her roots could send to her awareness. She felt the thinnest of her prehensile tendrils enter the crack between door and jamb. She made them twist and writhe, seeking further cracks and crevices, squeezing through the tiny space around the bolt, discovering the cramped interior of the lock. She flexed their very tips, probing for the mechanism, grasping, tugging.

  Something moved, just a little. She focussed her attention and strained. She poked and pulled. She gasped at the bright flower of pain when something shifted to crush a tendril. But she did not stop. She continued to strain until at last she heard a scrape and click and grind.

  The door moved in its frame.

  She withdrew her roots. She stood up. She pressed on the door with a trembling hand, letting it open just enough to show her the dim-lit corridor, empty and quiet, with not even the sound of distant steps.

  With barely a glance at the cell behind her, she slipped out, free, and closed the door again.

  Her memory served her well. She found the guard station, a small office with an all-glass wall that exposed to view the corridor and all who passed. But the guard was nodding, and she needed to wait only a little while before his eyes closed completely. She passed his station without incident. The corridors beyond remained empty, though once she stopped and stood stock-still against a wall, heart pounding, while a small robot scurried past. Soon after that, she reached the elevator that would lift her toward the surface.