Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  She feared the noise the elevator made might attract attention, but when it stopped in the underground lobby there was no sound of pursuit, no sight of others, no sign that her absence had yet been noticed. There were only the stairs that stepped up to the plaza, dimly lit by scattered fixtures, with none of the warm glow of distantly reflected sunlight. She wished she knew how late at night it was, that she had a watch, that the Engineers had thought to mount a clock upon the wall. But she didn’t. They hadn’t. The only clue she had was the lack of traffic on the steps, and that hinted that the hour was late indeed.

  Then perhaps she would not be free for long. Dawn would come, and soon someone would look into her cell, and they would learn she was gone. The search would begin.

  The stone plaza, as empty as the stairway, was dark, shadowed by the monolithic building that stood to one side, the only light that shed by a quarter moon and distant stars through a tattered veil of cloud. She crossed it quickly to the wall at which she had stood earlier that day. Lights were visible beyond the river, their reflections shining broken white and yellow, red and green, on the water. More lights were visible on her own shore to left and right, marking where Detroit’s Engineers lived and worked upon the surface.

  She followed the scent of honeysuckle to where a sprig of vine and leaf and blossom poked above the line of the bordering wall. She swung herself over the edge, grasped the vine, strong and friendly and welcoming, and clambered down.

  At last she stood upon Earth’s soil.

  Her heart leaped at the feel of dirt beneath her feet. She was tempted to stop right there and root herself, touch her mother world as deeply as she could, drink deep of all that heritage the Engineers had forced her kind to flee.

  But she knew she did not dare. Turning her back upon the plaza, she groped through shadow-deepened darkness, pushing aside vines and branches, stumbling over blocks of ancient stonework, listening warily to the small sounds of nocturnal animals, wondering if she would meet a wandering Engineer, a honey bum, perhaps even another bot, overlooked in the pogroms of the past. She had not gone far before her hand touched a tree trunk, dew showered down upon her, and she realized that leaves obscured the sky. She was as hidden as she could hope to be from the search that would soon, too soon, begin.

  She smiled and stroked the tree whose bulk had stopped her. She shifted her feet, luxuriating in the softness of dirt, the tickle of small growing things against her calves. She took a step, two, exploring the limits of the space she had found. She jumped when one hand met a curving surface as smooth as skin. As she explored it with her fingers, she realized that it was wood, wood carved into…what? Here was a cleft that could only be an armpit, here an arm, here fingers, nose, mouth. A statue, then, a wooden statue, hidden in the undergrowth.

  She settled herself beside the unseen figure and finally let her roots unfurl to touch Earth’s fertile surface and penetrate the soil, a dark loam rich with humus. She sighed at the touch of root-ease, wished for day and sun, and recognized the taste of honeysuckle vines. Her roots enmeshed themselves with those of the vines, and as her nerves found the plant’s synapses, she felt herself merging with the world around her.

  The honeysuckle had been designed long ago by bot gengineers to serve as a communications network. The nerve-bearing roots of all the separate vines merged together to form a single nervous system that permeated Earth’s soil wherever honeysuckle grew. Once bots had used this network to send messages to each other. But the vines had simple senses too, and the bots had used them to watch for danger, to monitor events where no bots lived to formulate reports.

  Her contact with the vines took form within her mind as a head-sized hole that pierced a solid wall. The wall was grey. The space beyond the hole was as black as starless space. Pearl Angelica knew there were no other bots on Earth, but she could not help herself. She leaned toward the hole, toward the image within her mind, and called: “Is anyone there?”

  There was only silence, echoing in her nerves and brain as it must have echoed for years in the vast interconnected network that covered the continent and even stretched beyond, under the shallower seas to offshore islands.

  She sighed resignedly. She opened herself to the slower, simpler flow of information generated by the honeysuckle itself. She began to see that threads of light and sound crossed the blackness of the hole, representations of the honeysuckle roots, data threads woven into webs and cables, stretching forth across the landscape. She chose one thread, brighter and louder than the rest because its source was the immediate area, Detroit and its environs, and she let the senses of the vines report to her: The quiet streets of a city that once had roared with factories, automobiles, and hordes of people. Scattered lights marking the sway of neighborhoods and sketching the borders of fields and woody patches. Few people walked or drove abroad. Occasional robots trimmed lawns even in the predawn darkness, tilled fields and gardens, cleaned streets.

  She chose other threads, dimmer, quieter, more distant, and she saw the world that she had sought, as peacefully idyllic as she had dreamed. Still other threads, still more distant, attenuated by the flux of information from an ever-growing host of vines, and she sensed forests, growing everywhere, replacing lawns and fields, surrounding and engulfing abandoned buildings. There were farms as well, seeming fertile, bountiful, adequate to the task of feeding the Engineer populace as they had not been in the years immediately after the Revolution.

  Still she sorted threads, and now she found one that seemed brighter, louder, faster. As she focused her awareness, she thought the data seemed familiar. The signal seemed, in fact, not to come from the vines at all. She let it roll through her nervous system, and then it was clear: A lesson for young bots, a recital of how to flee, stay hidden, avoid detection, flowing from some forgotten bioform computer. Fugitives, refugees, had carried it with them, planted it in soil when they thought they had found shelter, and used it to educate their young. But then they had been discovered, or they had been rescued by the Orbitals. The computer did not say; it only repeated endlessly the task it had last been set.

  Pearl Angelica closed her eyes against the darkness that surrounded her. Earth, she thought. Root-home. An empty house, abandoned by those who had loved it best, left to the rats in the walls. And haunted by…Tears spilled onto her cheeks at the contradiction between what this world once had been, a lifetime ago, and what it was now.

  There were other threads as well. Some of them played still more somber notes to her mind. They spoke of ruins everywhere, signs of war, signs of death, signs that once many more people had lived on this world of roots. And the honeysuckle knew where they had gone. It answered her unspoken, almost unthought query by showing her the bones around which its roots entwined. Deep in the soil, in what had once been pits and trenches, the bodies had been piled. Here were the scorched and broken remains of humans, bots, Macks, Roachsters, Armadons, litterbugs, Cardinals, and many, many more. All the fruit of the gengineering technology Earth had birthed and its inheritors had rejected so violently.

  Her tears became outright sobs, careless of whoever might hear.

  And here were pits that held none but humans. Engineers, she guessed. Victims of starvation, of disease, of the war the Orbitals had waged in order to defend their escape from persecution, of the purges that had followed disagreements.

  She sobbed again, shuddering, as the honeysuckle net brought to her mind what seemed the scent of death, even though she knew the flesh had long since left these bones.

  Eventually, feeling as raped by knowledge as she had been by Hamid’s flesh, she disengaged from the honeysuckle. Ironically, her withdrawal was as gentle as if she were sliding her fingers from a lover’s hand. She sighed shakily and opened her eyes once more. Grey was just barely visible in the interstices of the leaves above her head. The sky was already lightening. She nestled her roots into the loam beneath her, wishing that she need not hide from the dawn, that she dared to venture into the open where t
he rising sun might touch her leaves.

  The light brightened. Soon she realized that she could see the statue beside which she had stood for hours: It represented a naked man, kneeling, head bowed as if intent on the ground before him. Yet it hardly seemed to have been carved, for it duplicated every detail, every wrinkle and fold, even every pore and hair of its animal model. It was also covered with a skinlike bark as glossy smooth and dark as polished wood. A sturdy branch raised willowlike leaves above its head. Smaller branches sprouted from its back and sides and front.

  She recognized it now. It was a fruit of sorts of the honeysuckle vine, whose creators had put in the nectar that pooled in the blossom cups a viruslike gene transfer vector. Those who succumbed to the wine and its freight of alcohol and euphoric drug would bit by bit see their genes modified until at last they took root wherever they happened to be. Soon thereafter all their flesh and bone, even their brains, turned to wood.

  The only way a honey bum could ward off the fate of whoever had become this mindless statue was to stay on pavement, where roots could not find purchase.

  There were honey bums on the Gypsy, she recalled. There might even be a statue or two like this, though she had never either seen or heard of one. She smiled and patted the stranger on what once had been a warm and fleshy shoulder. “Did you find your roots?” she asked softly. “Are you happier now?”

  The sky was rose and gold and deepest blue. Light touched the trees around her and brought their greens and browns and blacks to life. Not far away, she saw that the trees gave way to a patch of brush, ferns and grasses and small bushes no higher than her waist. She sighed, surrendered to her craving, and pulled her roots from the soil. A few steps later, she sank her roots into the loam once more, spread her arms, and let Earth’s sun bathe her leaves.

  What had she sought in coming here? To the Solar System, wishing for Earth, dreaming of a Mother, a world that would welcome her, a world perhaps where her kind lingered past all rumor of extinction. A sense of belonging, of family, of long-enduring context. Roots, and root-home.

  Insects hovered over the blossoms of a nearby shrub. Black and yellow, buzzing. Bees. One approached and lingered briefly near her scalp.

  What had she found? Nothing was left of her kind on Earth but bones and echoes and the stink of death. The soil was dirt much like any dirt she had ever found on the Gypsy or First-Stop or would someday find on other worlds. The sun, that ancient god of Earthly life, was a star like any other star.

  There was the past, yes, but not a friendly past. Not belonging, but rejection. What she most truly sought waited for her in orbit, on the Gypsy, on First-Stop, at home.

  A roaring whine overhead announced the long swing across her vision of a small airplane, the waggle of its wings, the bending of its course into a circle above her position.

  She did not try to flee. She stood still, alone, face, front, and leaves offered to the morning sun, until the brush crackled behind her and people stepped into her brushy clearing. She made no move until Hamid held a knife before her eyes and said, “Pull ‘em up, now. Or I’ll cut ‘em off.”

  She returned to her cell quietly, with neither struggle nor argument. She barely reacted when she saw that there was now a guard upon her door in addition to the guard at the station down the hall, except to think that they were taking no chances that she would escape again.

  They did not know that the taste of root-home she had craved had been less than her dreams.

  They did not know she craved it no more.

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  The guard who opened her door in the morning was the same man who had let Hamid in to rape her. But now he seemed more alert. His back was straighter, his gut pulled in, his eyes wide and searching.

  “In here, Major Reiber.” Before he stepped aside, his gaze lingered over her body in a way that made her wish for clothes. The man who stepped past him was lean to the point of emaciation, so lean that the sharp creases in his black trousers and white shirt seemed to ride the edges of his flesh as a tent rode its poles. Pinned to the shirt just below his left collarbone were three silver medallions Pearl Angelica recognized as depicting an ancient steam locomotive, an airplane, and the skeletal construction that had first landed men on the Moon. Glancing at the guard’s single emblem of brass, she thought that the medallions must somehow signify rank in the Engineer hierarchy.

  “I won’t need you,” Major Reiber said to the guard. His back was stiff, and his movements were as precise and abrupt as those of soldiers the bot had seen in old films. “Go.”

  As the cell door clicked shut, he said to the bot, “Stand up when I’m talking to you.”

  She sat up on her sleeping platform, watching this major. But he did nothing further, said nothing, made no threat. His confident stance said that he was no Hamid or ‘Livrance or Prudence to be sent on distant missions, no agent to be sent hither and yon on others’ errands. He represented this world’s rulers far more directly, and he was absolutely sure she would obey his order.

  His eyes moved the length of her body, though in a far colder, more impersonal way than had the guard’s. She had no sense of the sort of threat Hamid had posed. She might have been a specimen in a laboratory.

  She shuddered and thought that if she did not obey, he would surely remain there all day, standing stiff, staring, making her skin crawl and her throat ache to scream.

  When she finally stood, she said, “Are you going to rape me too?”

  His face twisted as if the very idea of sex with a bot turned his stomach. “Rape? A plant? No one has touched you. They wouldn’t dare.”

  “One did.”

  “Don’t lie to me. It won’t help you.”

  “I’m half-human.”

  “Then it’s only half rape. At most. If anything really happened, we should punish you for contaminating…Who do you accuse?”

  “Hamid,” she said as she thought, she had contaminated him? Hamid hadn’t treated her like a human being, but then he hadn’t seemed to find her all that repulsive. Perhaps he had simply spent too much time among the Orbitals. “Ask him. Ask the guard.”

  “I will.” The major nodded, and his expression promised that Hamid would not enjoy his immediate future. Then he looked her over once more and changed the subject, “You don’t really want bees, do you?”

  She blinked and nodded. He smelled of sweat despite the earliness of the hour and the crispness of his clothing. She wondered how often he bathed. “Of course we do. We’ve been using brushes, artist’s paintbrushes, to pollinate our flowers, and…” She shrugged and used her hands to show him what she meant. “We left in a hurry, you know. Or they did. I wasn’t even born until…”

  “You’re a spy. Admit it.” The man sniffed, and she knew that he had barely heard her.

  “What on Earth would I be spying for?”

  He glared at her with an air of disgust. “Don’t pretend to be so ignorant,” he said. “I know you saw the robots on the way here.” When she only looked puzzled, he added, “You don’t have anything like that, do you?”

  “Not quite. Not so small, but—”

  “Ah. And you never will.” He shook one fist before her face. “We have learned to build artificial intelligences far, far better than anything the Orbitals can make.”

  Pearl Angelica nodded appeasingly. “I’m sure,” she said. “They seem quite marvelous. But I don’t think we need them when we have—”

  “Abominations! But you will never have our robots. They will give us the universe! We will not trade them. We will not even trade their plans, nor their general principles. Not even for the star-drive you stole from our predecessors.”

  She said nothing, but her flinch at his words made her thoughts transparent.

  “They were thieves! The Orbitals and your damned Gypsies. And now they send you to steal our latest discoveries.”

  His eyes now were so wide that the whites showed all around his irises, and there was
sweat upon his forehead. But though Pearl Angelica had heard of such signs of rabid fanaticism, she had never seen them, never learned how dangerous it could be to argue. If she had, perhaps she would have kept her mouth shut. Or perhaps not, for his accusations were so blindly unjustified that her own eyes were widening, her heart was pounding, her palms were sweating.

  “No!” she cried angrily. “I didn’t sneak down here to Earth. You kidnapped me. It’s your doing, not mine, that I am here at all. If you had left me alone, I wouldn’t even know about your damned artificial intelligences.”

  He sighed with ostentatious patience. “But you wanted to be here. You asked to visit. And when we turned you down, you forced us to kidnap you.”

  “What…!”

  “You are clever.” He looked aside as if he could not quite believe his own words. “A very clever spy. You knew that your mere appearance in the Solar System would be a taunt we could not resist. But it will not work.”

  “How can you say that?” But she knew the answer. She had read enough history to recognize the Big Lie in operation. The real question was who he was lying to. Not her. But himself? Or posterity? If he could extract a confession from her, he could then justify doing whatever he wished to her. And a mere unfounded accusation could serve nearly as well.

  Or perhaps he merely hoped to rattle her until in confusion or self-defense she revealed her people’s secrets.

  “You proved you are a spy when you escaped. The only questions are how long you were free and how much you saw before you reported to your Orbital masters.” Before she could protest that there was no way she could possibly have reported as he charged, he added, “We are searching for the radio you must have discarded before we caught you again.”