Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  “Natural selection. What’s that sound?”

  “Of course. What sound?”

  “Zzz-zzz.”

  “A bee. Several bees. They must be smelling your petals, even under the vines and cloth.” There was a pause. “You’ll have to tell me how genetic engineering works.” Pearl Angelica imagined a shrug. “It has to be a lot faster than natural selection.”

  “I don’t know enough.”

  “Shh. I wish I dared to experiment. But selective breeding is all I can get away with. The Revolution produced a few sports, mutations from the radiation. I can work with those.” There was a pause. “This vine. Do you know what it is? No, don’t answer. Shh. I see someone coming.”

  There was the slightest of foot sounds, a shuffle, a pad. “Do you want something, Sanjan?”

  “We have orders to fill, Dr. Wright. And the onions have not been picked.”

  “They’re working on that now. You can see.” Her joints creaked faintly as she stood. Pearl Angelica imagined her pointing toward section C12. “Is there anything else?”

  “What are those bees doing there? There aren’t any flowers.”

  “Who knows? Maybe they’re scouts, and one of the hives is about to swarm. I’ll have someone check on it.”

  The man grunted. “Did you know there are guards at the door? They say they’re making it a checkpoint. They also say they will have to search all our crates.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.” Cherilee’s tone changed from stiffly formal to worried disapproval. “I hear that bot escaped from her cage.”

  Silence stretched out then until Pearl Angelica wondered if the other woman had left as silently as Sanjan. But then there was a muttered curse. Her tool stabbed the soil. “He runs the warehouse out front,” she said. “He thinks he’s my supervisor because he’s a man. And I guess we aren’t going to sneak you out of here today. That’s the only exit.”

  “Shh,” said the bot. “Tell me about the vine.”

  There was a sigh and a forced chuckle. “Of course. Do you know what kudzu is? It grows ferociously. Covers everything. This one’s more restrained. As well-behaved as ivy.”

  As if they somehow knew their presence might betray her, the bees disappeared from over Pearl Angelica’s head shortly before Security finally searched the greenhouse that afternoon. Guards marched two abreast down the aisles between the garden beds, searched among the cornstalks and between the rows of potato vines, and rummaged through the lockers in which the tools were kept. One even used a rifle butt to ruffle through the kudzu leaves less than a meter from where the bot lay concealed. Another joked that the search had taken longer the first time they searched the place. Now they knew all the hiding places.

  Not one of them found a thing, but when Cherilee Wright appeared beside the kudzu bed the next morning, she said, “The guards are still there.”

  “I could tell,” Pearl Angelica murmured from beneath the vines. Tools had banged more loudly as work began that day. Voices had been tense. She guessed that people were being stopped, their papers checked, their bodies searched, as they went in and out of the greenhouse. Perhaps even at every intersection and elevator.

  “And your bees are back.”

  “I can hear them. Did you know they’re why I’m here?”

  “It was on the veedo.”

  “I really just wanted to see Earth. But we do need them, and that was my excuse.”

  “You could have all you wanted if it was up to me. A whole hive.”

  “Thanks.” Pearl Angelica appreciated the thought no matter how empty, futile, useless, it had to be. Even if she had a hive of bees under her arm, there was no way she would ever be able to get it to the Gypsy. Or the Orbitals. Or even off the Moon. “How many bees in a hive?”

  “Twenty thousand or so.”

  “I don’t need that many!”

  “Shh. There’s no one close by, but…”

  “I’d only want a few. Just enough to breed.”

  The other chuckled. “They don’t come that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know about queens?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “There’s just one to a hive, and she’s the only bee that reproduces. All the rest are there to take care of her, and they produce new queens by feeding larvae a special food.”

  “Then you can’t just clone them.”

  “I think it would be tricky. You’d need a mated queen. They mate as soon as they emerge from the pupa, and they store all the sperm they will need in their lifetime. And then you’d need some workers too.”

  Pearl Angelica said nothing more. She was a biologist. She knew First-Stop’s biology. She understood plants and pollination. She knew what bees did and how necessary it was. But she had never really studied the bees themselves, not in books, not in the memories of her fellow bots, some of whom must surely have preserved the knowledge, handed down from earlier generations.

  “Are you embarrassed?” When the bot remained as silent as the garden she was pretending to be, Cherilee laughed gently. “It’s only ignorance, you know. A very curable condition.”

  * * *

  Chapter Fifteen

  A thin curtain veiled the room’s only window. It gentled the light of Tau Ceti and provided just enough of a visual barrier to keep passersby from spying on the man whose life was ending within the pumpkin house. The barrier was not enough to keep those inside from seeing the valley and its carpet of moss, white now with frost instead of berries, or the nearly complete Tower.

  A glass bottle hung upside down from the rack beside the bed, a thin plastic tube leading from it to a Y-shaped junction. The other arm of the junction was sealed by a rubbery membrane. From its stem, another tube passed to a bony wrist marked by normal spots of age, small hillocks grown from aberrant cells, and scars where tumors had been cut away.

  Monitor screens displayed the rhythms of the man’s life, slow now, sedate, far less regular and reliable than once they were. His shallow breathing stopped entirely for seconds at a time. When it restarted, there were faint gurgles deep in his throat and his chest would quiver. There was no sign of life at all in his arms and legs.

  A nurse aimed a hypodermic half full of golden fluid toward the ceiling, squirted a miniature geyser, and eyed it judiciously. Then he thrust the needle through the membrane on the free arm of the tubing junction, pressed the plunger, and let the medication mingle with the IV fluid.

  “It’s only a mild stimulant,” he said. “Anything stronger would kill him. So he may not wake up at all. If he does, it won’t be for long. He’s nearly—”

  “We know,” said Lois McAlois. She sniffed. The room smelled of medicines and disinfectant cleansers and a musk, not quite a human body odor, that made her think of the pig Frederick had been before the gengineers gave him the body of a man, long before she had first met him.

  Her husband was holding Frederick Suida’s unencumbered hand. “He’d hate it if we didn’t tell him.”

  “She is his daughter, after all.” The nurse shook his head sympathetically, turned, and left the room.

  “We’ve waited too long,” said Lois. She had known she should tell him as soon as she returned to the Gypsies, but she had dreaded the task. Better, she had told herself, to wait for an official decision on whether to pay Pearl Angelica’s ransom and then to wait for the Quebec’s tanks to be refilled and a new cargo assembled. Better to wait until she could board her ship and flee the knowledge of the distress her news must cause her friend. Or would have caused, when his mind was whole. Might cause, for a few minutes or an hour if she could tell him while his mind was briefly lucid.

  “Will he even know we’re telling him?” asked Renny. “Or what we’re saying? Will he remember it?”

  Lois brushed at a speck of lint on the blanket that covered their old friend. “That doesn’t matter, does it? He would want to know. And we would know if we failed to tell him.”

  A gurgle became a snort
. A muscle moved visibly in Frederick’s neck. A finger twitched.

  “For us, then.” Renny nodded. “For him, if he can grasp it. But for us, at least. We won’t have to feel guilty. We’ll know we did all we could.”

  Eyes opened and revealed whites turned yellow by a failing liver, blotched with red by burst capillaries. There were clouds beneath the pupils, in the lenses, and a hazy film over one cornea. Yet life remained, weary and near its lowest ebb though it be. “Donna?” The voice was weak, the word almost a grunt.

  “Lois.” Donna, she knew, had been his wife. Pearl Angelica’s mother. The thought flickered through her mind that she was glad she and Renny had had no children if this was what could happen, and then that it was good that Donna Rose was dead.

  “Renny?”

  “You got that one right.”

  “Unh. I…feel different.”

  “They gave you some extra vitamins, Freddy. We’ve got news you’ve got to hear.”

  “Bad n…?”

  Lois nodded, though she knew he could barely see her. “It’s Pearl Angelica.” She paused while Frederick’s eyes closed and his face signalled all the alarm it could now manage. Then she told him about the kidnapping and the ransom demand.

  She stopped when the water began to fill Frederick’s eyes and run down his cheeks. Renny reached forward with a tissue to blot the tears. The dying man rolled his head slowly from side to side on the pillow.

  “No!” said Frederick.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Lois.

  “No! Don’t. Can’t…do it.”

  She hesitated. “No,” she said at last. “We can’t give them a tunnel-drive. No starships for the Engineers.” They would have to invent their own. Unfortunately, Lois was sure they would, in time. They already had the basic Q-drive.

  “No.” He smiled weakly, while the tears increased their flow. “Not even if…” For a moment, he seemed to have lapsed once more into unconsciousness. But then his lips parted to show the tip of a thick tongue. “Rescue?”

  Renny nodded. “We’ll try.”

  “I’m starting back tomorrow.”

  “We don’t want her to die.”

  “Or you,” said Lois. She blinked against her own tears. She looked at her husband. His eyes too were wet. “We love both of you, you know.”

  There is a tension to a living body even when it is asleep or in a coma. As long as the nervous system is functioning at all, it sends signals to the muscles to maintain muscle tone and snug the bones against each other in their joints. The result is a readiness for action that persists until the link between the brain and spinal cord and the muscles is lost. If that loss leaves the body living, as it does in a paraplegic or quadriplegic, the unlinked muscles lose their tone. The joints go loose. Yet there then remains a different sort of tension, one born of moving blood, of inflation, of turgor like that which keeps a leaf of lettuce from wilting. When it too is lost, the body wilts indeed.

  Frederick closed his eyes and gasped for breath. “Some th…things,” he managed to say. “Important. More important. No matter. How much it…it hurts.”

  Renny nodded. “I think we’ve learned that lesson.” He spoke very softly. “The Nazis taught it. The Palestinians. Others too. And then the Engineers. When terrorists make demands, the price of giving in is always worse than the price of resisting. In the long run.”

  “It’s not easy,” said Lois. “Not easy to say no. To refuse the ransom. To let someone you love die.”

  “Hurts!”

  Frederick Suida’s fingers twitched at last. Renny squeezed the hand he held. Lois McAlois took the other hand, being careful not to disturb the IV tubing, and squeezed that as well. Both were crying, their cheeks as wet as Frederick’s had been not so long before.

  Yet now Frederick’s cheeks and eyes were dry. He gasped once more, said, “Hea…” and fell silent while his eyes opened for what seemed to both Lois and Renny must be the last time. “I see,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tower. Tower of…the gods. Stair…way. Heaven.”

  Did he mean that Tower that soared into the sky outside the pumpkin? He was staring at them fixedly, ignoring the window and its view, seeming to see something quite other than anything in this world at all, and to see it more clearly than he had seen anything for years.

  A moment later, he said quite flatly and reasonably, in a perfectly normal tone, “Shakin’ my anther for you. It hurts.”

  The tensions of muscle and blood that had marked his life ever since his birth vanished. The lines that had danced across the screens of the monitors beside the bed went flat. A light began to flash.

  “Hurts,” said Lois. “No matter how much it hurts. We can’t give them the tunnel-drive. They’re too strong to raid. We have to let them kill her.”

  The word spread quickly. On First-Stop, it drew the Gypsies from their tasks, from installing ceramic plates in the Tower’s treasure chamber, from polishing a few last spots on the Tower’s flanks, from farming and fishing, from research in laboratories and libraries, to gather outside the pumpkin in which lay the body of the man who had conceived the monument they would leave behind them when they departed this world. In orbit, the labors of pollinators and cooks, technicians and managers, engineers both physical and genetic, came to a halt. Classrooms fell silent. People—both humans and bots—froze where they stood, and then they went home to be alone with their thoughts. Traffic briefly bloomed in the tunnels, and then it disappeared.

  It had been years since Frederick had played much of a role among the Gypsies, but his people revered the memory of what he had done and the mission he had given them for their wanderings among the stars.

  Many Racs knew only that the Gypsies were their makers. They drew no distinctions between the gengineers and all the rest. But a few did realize that some Gypsies deserved worship more than others. Of that few, some knew who Frederick was and what his role had been in the genesis of the Tower. They held him just as high as they did the gengineers responsible for their rise from nonsentience. All the rest could see how the Gypsies responded to the news of his death and sense a reverence much akin to that which Blacktop preached for the Tower and the gods.

  They gathered in and around their watching place until no scrap of dirt was visible. They stood quietly, none sitting upon the pew-stones. Some, as was their custom, faced the Tower or its smaller representation that was their icon. Most watched the crowd of Gypsies near Frederick’s pumpkin as the body was brought out and laid in a coffin. The crowd shifted its attention then toward the graveyard on the Tower’s north side, while the Gypsies produced shovels and dug a hole.

  When the bots and humans dispersed at last, Blacktop climbed slowly to his usual post on the lowest step of the Racs’ pyramidal altar. From that vantage point, he stared out across the sea of faces that was his tribe, his people. And yes, there, to one side as they were for every evening service, were the strangers who had come to see the tree that held up the sky and stayed to carry rocks and build the walls of the watching place. Wanderer, Stonerapper, Shorttail, each as attentive as any one of the tailless Racs surrounding them.

  What would they tell their own people when they finally returned whence they had come?

  And there was Leaf, a little further from the front, glaring at the strangers’ backs, her fur bristling. The priest could not see her children, but he knew they were old enough to leave Leaf’s hut and accompany her. They surely stood beside her knees, awed by the atmosphere surrounding them, puzzled by their mother’s ferocity. Her slightly hunched posture said her hands were curled protectively about their heads.

  Blacktop sighed. Her attitude was as fixed and unchangeable as a mountain. If it spread—and it might—there would be war. That was something else he had discovered in the Gypsies’ library.

  At last he raised his arms until they extended from his sides like wings, and he said, “Even the gods are mortal.”

  The smooth susurrus of response bespoke anxiety.

  His
hands moved as if he were beckoning his congregation. “A god has died,” he said, and then he let his voice grow rough and calming. “Call him the god of knowledge, for other gods have told me he was the one who thought of building the Tower before you, whose secrets will one day be ours.”

  He glanced at the trio of visitors, and then at Leaf. “No matter who climbs the Tower.” Then he stopped. He let his arms fall to his sides. He said, “The gods live even when they die. There is a part of them that flies to a land of milk and mossberries if they have served their gods well. There they live in bliss forever. If we pursue the Tower well, we will someday join them.”

  “Yet pursuing the Tower need not always mean offering it whatever knowledge we can find. Today there is something more important we must do. Frederick faces a long, long journey. If he will reach its end, he must have food and water. We must provide them.” His pause was just long enough to be sure every ear was aimed his way. “Bring Frederick’s journey rations with you to the evening service.”

  Several faces within the compass of the watching place’s low walls looked skeptical. Blacktop chose one and pointed. “You think the dead do not eat or drink. But the books that tell of the gods that our gods worship are very clear. The part of them that lives forever is no more solid than a scent. They call it ‘spirit.’ And it gains strength from the similar ‘spirit’ of what the living offer for its sake.”

  He stared over the sea of faces. At last he nodded as if approving their acceptance of his addition to the doctrine they were still learning how to follow. Then he raised his arms once more and beckoned to them. “We cannot know how long it takes a spirit to reach the land of its gods,” he said. “Not until we undertake that journey ourselves. As each of us surely will. We must therefore feed it for as long as we possibly can. Tonight bring dried meat and berries, nuts, jugs of wine and water.” He turned and held both hands toward the pole at the peak of the altar, and the basket at the peak of that. “Enough to fill the treasure chamber on this image of the Tower.”