Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  * * *

  Chapter Nine

  Even as the roar of the belly rockets that had cushioned the landing on the Moon died away, another engine in the spaceplane’s tail began to whisper, pressing the passengers back into their seats but only gently, as when an automobile accelerated down an Earthly road. The ship rolled forward, turned, and finally halted. There were noises—clanks, hums, and rumbles—and the ship’s hatch opened to reveal the glass-walled end of a tunnel much like those that on Earth linked airport terminals to airplanes. Rubbery accordion folds mated the tunnel to the side of the spaceplane.

  “Let’s go.”

  Prudence was already unfastening the prisoner’s seat straps when ‘Livrance spoke. “Just a minute,” she said. She pulled the chain from the front of her shirt and produced a key, which she then used to unlock the cuff that chained Pearl Angelica to her seat. She promptly clamped the cuff around the bot’s other wrist. “Now,” she said. “Come on.”

  As soon as she stood up, Pearl Angelica noticed the Moon’s light gravity. Her feet rose higher when she stepped, and her spirits lifted at being this much closer to her kin. But though she was free of Earth, she was not free of the oppression she had found there. Her spirits fell again even as her gait took on the slide and shuffle she had first learned long ago, when she was just a toddler.

  The bot stopped walking when they reached the tunnel mouth, stiffened her legs, twisted against the hands that held her elbows, turned to stare through the glass. For a moment, ‘Livrance and Prudence stood beside her, just as fascinated by the broad plain marked by spider-webbing vehicle tracks, intersecting ridges with clamshell doors set in their flanks, and dish antennae. Low hills marked the horizon, weathered into crumbly regolith by eons of meteorite bombardment, solar winds, and changing temperatures. Unwinking stars above those hills, painfully familiar, brought tears to Pearl Angelica’s eyes. She wondered if Tau Ceti was visible from where she stood.

  No Engineers were visible on the lunar landscape, but she had no doubt that they were waiting for her just beyond the end of the boarding tunnel.

  “Come on,” said ‘Livrance at last.

  She strained to see as much of the base as she could. “Is this the same…?”

  “God knows.” They jerked her into motion once more, but not before she glimpsed between two ridges the lines of what could only be a mass-driver, a railgun, perhaps even the very one that had provided the rocky makings of the projectiles with which the Orbitals once had hammered the Engineers on Earth. Beside it scurried several small robots much like those she had seen on Earth.

  She remembered what she knew of that time when the Gypsies had not yet become the Gypsies, when the Gypsy had not yet been built, when they had not yet fled the Solar System. First they had had to flee Earth’s pogroms, seeking safety in space. Her father, her mother, Donna Rose, Uncle Renny, they had been among the first. Later Uncle Renny and Aunt Lois had flown the first Q-ships on rescue missions, plucking bots and gengineers and other refugees from beneath the Engineers’ boots.

  When the habitats and stations in orbit had proved too small for the horde of refugees, tunnellike shelters had been prepared on the Moon, metal-ribbed, plastic-sheathed, insulated by layers of regolith.

  She remembered those crowded shelters. She had seen them, lived in them, and they had been much smaller and cruder, even to a child’s eye, than what she had just seen. They had still to have been in place when the Engineers reached the Moon themselves. Over the decades since, they had been enlarged and interconnected. Now that portion of the lunar surface must be honeycombed with tunnels. Briefly she wondered if the material that sheathed their frames was still plastic or the webbing she had seen the robot Spiders weaving in Detroit.

  One man was waiting in the drably painted room at the end of the boarding tunnel. He wore blue shirt and trousers unadorned with metal trinkets and, one hand on his holstered sidearm, he was bouncing gently, impatiently, on his toes, untiring in the Moon’s light gravity. He was of middle height, stocky, brown-haired without a sign of grey. His age showed in his face, where lines of skepticism seemed permanently engraved.

  “Hrecker. Chief of Security.” He neither smiled nor offered a hand as he spoke to ‘Livrance, ignoring both the woman and the bot. “Come with me.”

  He led them into a tunnel so much larger than the original refugee shelters that Pearl Angelica was immediately reminded of the distant Gypsy even though the passageway was straight and level, not winding up and down and to the sides. Small electric carts and robots replaced the genimal vehicles she was used to. In the bare metal walls were doors, some of which bore signs that marked them as shops or laboratories. Others, she thought, were offices or homes. The curvature of the roof suggested that the central corridor could be no more than a third of the tunnel’s width. Stone urns beside many doors held small trees and shrubs and flowering plants.

  The pedestrians seemed stranger, for not one wore the coveralls of the Orbitals and Gypsies and though some smiled at her as if she were not a prisoner, most scowled. One even spat. No one spoke to her.

  “They compost everything they can,” said Prudence. “From dead leaves and bodies to sewage. Then they mix it with regolith to make their soil. They grow almost all their food right here.”

  “Just like the Orbitals,” said Pearl Angelica.

  ‘Livrance had one hand on her upper arm, as if he feared the cuffs alone were not enough to keep her from escaping. “They get a lot from Earth.”

  Pearl Angelica guessed that the Orbitals would say much the same about the lunar Engineers. The difference between “growing almost all right here” and “getting a lot from Earth” must be a matter of perception.

  Where their corridor met another, the ceiling rose and the urns were replaced by larger troughs. A faint buzzing drew Pearl Angelica’s attention to yellow-banded insects that hovered and darted near the flowers. “Bees!” she cried.

  Hrecker snorted as ‘Livrance jerked her onward. “That’s what you came for, right? We go left.”

  Other pedestrians were more numerous now, and many stared at Pearl Angelica as she was hustled along the passageway. “Haven’t they ever seen a bot before?” she asked, but before any of her guards could speak, she answered her own question: “Of course they haven’t.”

  More women were visible here than in Detroit. Most wore the same blue shirts and pants as the men. Many of them had children in tow or carried shopping bags; the children and the bags provided the only trace of brilliant color not found on plants. A few of the women carried toolkits, briefcases, and portable computers, suggesting that the Engineers on the Moon were at least slightly more egalitarian than their kin on Earth.

  Hrecker stopped them at the next intersection, where an elevator dropped them to a lower level of the base and deposited them before a wall with only one door. Above the door a sign said, “Construction Bay 1.”

  The Security chief punched a code number into the keypad mounted in the wall beside the entrance. A moment later, the door slid open to reveal a vast, brightly lit cavern and fifty meters of spaceship, held erect by massive staging. Through the tangle of catwalks and cables, Pearl Angelica could see a needle prow, gleaming white paint, blue lettering, gold bands of trim. Just above the ship arched steel girders and glistening sheeting. Above that, she guessed, must be the thin layer of regolith that covered all the base’s tunnels.

  “It’s ready to go.” Hrecker pointed at the two fat cylinders that bracketed the ship’s lower half. “Fuel tanks,” he said. “They’re already loaded with powdered regolith. As soon as the other four are installed and filled, the Teller will fly. And it will fly just as well as anything you have.”

  Beside the ship stood a rack that seemed designed to lift the missing tanks into place, but Pearl Angelica gave it only a glance. She was staring at the pristine ship. It was not quite the same shape as the Q-ships she was familiar with, but it was close enough. The largest difference lay in its sleekly aerod
ynamic nose; the Quebec and its sister ships were blunt, knobby, far less oriented to Earth. She was sure that if she knew how to appraise the engines, she would see that they would work. The Teller would indeed fly.

  “It’s the same technology.” She had not seen the other Engineer approaching; Hrecker did not introduce him. “Did you know that a vacuum can produce particles spontaneously, out of nothing?” Not waiting for their answer, he turned and pointed toward the base of the ship. “It can. They come in matter-antimatter pairs, so there’s no net production of matter, and they usually annihilate each other immediately. This can yield energy, though the only way to get very much energy is to increase the probability of the necessary quantum fluctuations. Your people found out how to—”

  “They stole it,” growled Hrecker.

  “Of course.” The other gave the Security chief a wary look. “And then we stole it back. We even improved it, and now we have a probability warp drive even better than their Q-flux drive. Space is ours!” He delivered his last three words with the fervor of a slogan.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” said Hrecker. He faced Pearl Angelica. “We’ll have more ships, more men, better men. We’ll get the star-drive. And then we’ll push you to the wall and replace you all. Mechanical technology is superior.”

  Pearl Angelica gently shook her head. “You seem to think we don’t use it too.” When it’s appropriate, she did not add. There were things it could do best, and things it could not. And the biological technology was self-reproducing and needed only relatively simple fuels.

  He did not seem to hear, although she noticed the unnamed spokesman for the shipbuilders suppressing a smile as Hrecker growled, “Let’s go.”

  “This is yours. Give it a try.”

  When Pearl Angelica had asked if there were more construction bays, no one had answered. Hrecker had only led them down the corridors until they reached an intersection of four tunnels where the ceiling rose until it was lost in darkness. Perhaps it rose as high above their heads as it had above the Q-ship in Bay 1. In the center of the concourse, surrounded by stone pots of intensely fragrant roses—red and yellow, pink and white—and mock oranges, stood an oblong dais about a meter high. One end of the dais supported a larger version of the stone plant pots on the floor; the other end held an inert veedo set.

  Hrecker jumped to the edge of the dais, turned, grabbed the bot by one upper arm, and pulled her up beside him. He held out one hand and said, “The key.” When Prudence pulled the chain over her head and handed it to him, he undid the cuffs. Then, while Pearl Angelica rubbed her wrists, smoothed rumpled leaves, and grimaced at the pain, he said, “Undo those wraps.”

  ‘Livrance promptly began to remove the bandages that confined her roots. While he worked, his fingers far less gentle than her own would have been but still a blessed relief, the bot looked at the oversized plant pot. It was as high as the dais and a meter and a half in diameter. Its flat rim was decorated with inset disks of polished metal, and it was almost full of dark, rich soil.

  “Go on,” said Hrecker. “Climb in.”

  She turned and scanned the concourse while her roots writhed as if delighted to be free at last. Some of the pedestrians, mostly women with children, had stopped to watch what was happening on the dais. The rest were moving from corridor mouth to corridor mouth, glancing toward her and then away, scowling at the sight of gengineered anathema, pretending they saw nothing out of the ordinary in what was being offered her. Only the robots in the flow of traffic ignored her completely.

  “I’ll need light,” she said.

  Hrecker gestured, and a brilliant beam speared out of the shadows overhead.

  She looked at the beam, the dirt, the concourse around them, and the reflections awakened on the metal walls. She realized just how much on display she would be, like a specimen in a zoo. Or worse, a specimen of some endangered species, or of one the zoo’s managers intended to endanger as soon as they possibly could.

  She shook her head. “I’d rather have a room. Even a cell.”

  “This is it. Climb in.” The Security chief’s voice was less inviting, more commanding. It was clear that she had no choice.

  She drew herself over the edge of the massive pot and stood erect in its center. Her roots twisted around her ankles and reached for the dirt. She could hear someone in the distance hissing: “Snakes!”

  Her roots touched and burrowed, stretched and branched. She found and twined about a narrow pipe that trickled water, just enough to meet her needs. She tasted the moist richness of the soil and closed her eyes as she identified human wastes, decayed remnants of hair and meat and bone, flowers and peelings and stems, all composted into humus. She felt as well the gritty lunar soil, rich with mineral nutrients that had never been tapped by roots before, reeking of dry vacuum, solar wind, and black, star-spangled sky. And there, she thought, was a banner for the Orbitals or Gypsies if they ever decided they needed one, stars on a black field not a blue. Blue was the sky seen from Earth, the color of the Engineers. She would tell them if she ever saw them again.

  The hum of gears and the rub of metal against rock snapped her eyes open once more. Hrecker was holding a black oblong studded with buttons, a remote control unit. The metal disks in the rim of her planter had risen to reveal themselves as the ends of steel rods. They surrounded her as a circular enclosure, now just knee-high like a picket fence but still rising, still sliding upward, emerging from their concealment in the wall of the planter and in the dais below.

  They were waist-high, and she thought that in the light lunar gravity she could easily climb or jump over them. But the Engineers knew that as well as she. They still rose, and so rapidly that the moment when escape seemed conceivable passed more quickly than she could possibly have withdrawn her roots from the soil.

  The bars were shoulder-high now, head-high, higher, and she was trapped in a cell. She had soil rich with nutrients. She had light for photosynthesis. But she was trapped, on display in a steel-barred cage.

  Yet she no longer felt quite like an ordinary zoo specimen, not even of a soon-to-be-endangered species. She felt like a sample of vermin, carefully isolated to prevent its escape and infestation of the surrounding community.

  Worst of all—if there were anywhere for her to flee—there was no lock for her prehensile roots to pick.

  She blinked to prevent the tears from overcoming her self-control.

  She supposed the point must be to prove the superiority of the Engineers. She was the one in the cage. Therefore she and all her kin, bots and gengineers, Gypsies and Orbitals, must be inferior to those who stood outside the bars.

  Hrecker adjusted the veedo set on its stand, turning it so both she and her audience could see the screen. He turned it on, and then he said to ‘Livrance and Prudence, “Your ship should be refueled by now. You can go back to Earth.” He sounded envious.

  The villains were mad gengineers who plotted to release plastic-eating microbes, poison reservoirs with transplant vectors, give Council chieftains the heads of pigs. Game shows offered antique automobiles and air conditioners, reconditioned household appliances and brand-new vacation tickets to the Moon. Heroic astronauts rescued Orbitals whose jury-rigged space drives failed, killed their air plants and Slugabeds and even bots, and converted them to Engineering holiness. Comedians told gene jokes.

  Propaganda for the glory of machinery, thought Pearl Angelica. And the news was no better.

  She grew quickly tired of seeing herself on the veedo screen and hearing herself called spy and traitor and an example of the horrors of genetic engineering. “Spy” she had heard already. But “traitor”? What could she be a traitor to? What had she betrayed? She was a Gypsy. She had never touched the Earth until just a few days before. Certainly she was no member of the Engineer polity. She was loyal to her own group, and no traitor to it.

  But the Engineers saw it differently. She was of Earth, and she had betrayed her heritage simply by being born what she was
, a gengineered bot, illicit mingling of plant and human. If she wished to prove her loyalty, she would as willingly as any vegetable lay her head upon the block.

  That was nonsense. Sheer pig-headed, demagogic nonsense. Even the Engineers who wrote and read the news could not possibly believe it. She was a trophy, nothing more, and a tool with which to try to extort a starship from the Orbitals and Gypsies.

  And “horror”? Humans lived longer than ordinary bots, but bots had roots and leaves and, like any plant, needed only soil, water, and sunlight, not farms and markets and kitchens. She herself was a hybrid, able to survive in either mode, by eating or by photosynthesizing.

  Did that make her such a horror, such a monster? She thought it an advantage herself, and in the biological, evolutionary sense of course it was. But even though she was no blood-sucking vampire, no gore-splattered murderer, she was not normal, not usual, in this world of animal humanity. She was different, and that was enough for some people to brand her enemy and monster.

  Or prey.

  For her first few days in the cage, she was rarely alone. Every morning, nozzles in the ceiling above her cage showered her and her surrounding roses and mock oranges with water, welcome despite the pipe buried beneath her. Soon after that, the first groups of lunar Engineers appeared in the concourse. Most of them had obviously never seen a bot; they stared and parroted the names the veedo called her. Only a few ignored her. Even fewer eyed her sympathetically or pityingly. Children dashed close and yelled, “Look at the plant lady! Why don’t you wear any clothes?” Their mothers yanked them back and cried, “Stay away! Or she’ll turn you into things like her!”

  From time to time a robot with a camera for its head would wheel out of a corridor mouth. It would pan the crowd, squeeze among the men and women and children, and focus its lens on her and the bars of her cage. If she watched not it but the veedo set, she saw that it was feeding live coverage of her plight to the broadcast system. She could also hear what those near the periphery of the crowd were saying.