Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  “We’re just beginning to be prosperous enough to afford a little freedom,” said the greenhouse manager. “We’re beginning to learn just how much freedom is possible, and how much we don’t have. And we will learn, eventually. Freedom for us, and for our children, means freedom for others.”

  Pearl Angelica felt puzzled. “We,” Cherilee had said when it was only the others who had hedged their commitment. The woman before her hadn’t even Anatol’s excuse of friendship—or something more—yet she had risked everything. If she were caught sheltering the bot, her life would surely be the price. “You already know that.”

  “It’s something I read once,” said Cherilee. “I can’t remember it precisely, but I will never forget the point. ‘They came for the communists,’ a man said. ‘And I said nothing. It didn’t affect me, after all. Then they came for the homosexuals and the blacks and the Jews. Still I said nothing. And then they came for me.’”

  “I made one for you. See?” Esteban was sitting on the edge of the kudzu bed, in the shade cast by the fronds of one of Cherilee Wright’s cycads. The trunk was too far from the edge to lean against.

  He was holding up a cuff not quite like the one he wore on his wrist. It was mottled brown and gold and black, gleaming tortoise shell, not grey. “Can you stick an arm out?”

  Pearl Angelica lay among the vines, only her face exposed. Cherilee had said Security was prowling the corridors in force tonight, a predator balked of its prey for far too long. She thought they might well be planning surprise searches, bursting into apartments, labs, storerooms, even greenhouses, hoping to catch the bot out of whatever hiding place had kept her from their hands so far.

  She produced the arm Esteban had requested. The cuff opened like a clamshell in his hands. He accepted her fingers, held them gently, and closed the cuff around her wrist. As he withdrew, his thumbs stroked over the back of her hand, and she wondered. His touch was the touch of a wish. In it she could feel attraction, yearning, something much more than a sense of the difference between their kinds.

  Very deliberately, she kept her eyes on his gift. It was thinner than his own cuff, narrower, prettier. It did not look like the technological marvel it was, but rather like a simple decorative wristlet, a wide bracelet, such as any woman might wear.

  But it was a marvel, a gift, even a gift like no other woman had ever received. It too therefore spoke of attraction and yearning, of Esteban’s wish for what she had already given Anatol.

  Could he know? She hoped Anatol had said nothing, but she knew that it could be very easy to see that sort of truth. Was he trying to match that gift of freedom—temporary though it might be—that Anatol had given her?

  And how could she reply? Bots were not by nature monogamous, no more than were the plants that shared their ancestry. Flowers crowned their heads, and they exchanged pollen deliberately, one to one, bowing to each other to let their blossoms touch or using fingertips and tongues. Yet the wind could pollinate them just as well, and once, when they had lived on Earth, such things as bees could also make them set their seed.

  Her blossoms were not fertile. They were petals only, lacking styles and anthers. Her reproductive apparatus was of the human sort. Should she then mate with only one? That had been her parents’ way, and Donna Rose had been a bot. Yet not all humans so restricted themselves, and most, if they did not have several mates at once, did have them one by one.

  She glanced toward Cherilee. She was sitting on the edge of the garden bed across the aisle. She had said that if Security barged in, she would tuck the bot into her viny shelter, throw her arms around Esteban, and claim he was there so late at night for a rendezvous with her. Now she nodded her approval of the cuff. “Very nice. It goes with your leaves.”

  “I was able to make it smaller.” His tone was eager. “I had to, you know. If they catch you, Angie…Well, I didn’t want them to take it away from you, and I thought if it looked like just a pretty piece of plastic…”

  She did not correct his “Angie” as she had at the party where they had first met. “Can it talk?”

  “Of course! But first…It only recognizes my voice so far.” His touch seemed tentative as he led her through the process of shifting its allegiance. When they were done, it spoke for the first time. “Name me, please,” it said.

  “It sounds like a machine.”

  “That’ll change. Just give it a name.”

  “Donna.” She did not say that Donna Rose had been her mother’s name.

  “Thank you.” Now the cuff’s voice was a pleasant, feminine contralto.

  “Tell it ‘Quiet mode.’” When she obeyed and immediately looked puzzled, he added, “Bone conduction. It doesn’t work too well through your arm and shoulder, but make a fist. Now lean your chin on your knuckles. Better? For when you don’t want to be noticed.” His gesture indicated the vines that surrounded her.

  “Does it open like yours?”

  He shook his head. “It’s too small for a keyboard. You just talk to it. Now say ‘Calendar.’”

  Pearl Angelica caught her breath when a portion of the cuff’s surface became a small grey screen displaying the date and time. “Have I been here that long?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Cherilee.

  “My aunt. She’s had time to go home. To tell everyone what happened. By now she’s on her way back.”

  The other woman nodded. So did Esteban. “We know.”

  “When she gets here, she’ll say there won’t be any ransom. She has to. And then, when they catch me again…”

  They were still nodding. “We’ll keep you safe as long as we can. Maybe they’ll be able to rescue you. A raid…”

  Pearl Angelica shook her head. She was only one person. It would not make sense to risk more for her sake, or to start a war.

  The visitors stopped coming after that. Part of the reason was simply risk, for Security continued its hunt for the bot. Guards invaded the greenhouse three times, twice in one night, and Cherilee reported that checkpoints now blocked airlocks, intersections, and elevator entrances even on the base’s lower levels. Even well-known Engineers had to have their documents with them at all times; others had to tolerate repeated searches.

  Yet Pearl Angelica did not lack for company. Before she returned to her kudzu bed, the cuff Esteban had given her said, “See my tap wire?”

  She could see the hair-fine wire extending from the cuff behind her thumb, but its function puzzled her. “Is that anything like a taproot?”

  The cuff, already sounding slightly more human and much less mechanical, chuckled. “You do think plant, don’t you? But no. Just find an electrical cable.”

  Cherilee showed her the cable tucked out of sight near the edge of the bed. One end held an outlet box. “We use electrical tools,” she said. “For tilling and trimming.”

  “Wind the tap wire six times around the cable,” said the cuff, and they obeyed. Then, when the cuff said nothing more, Pearl Angelica lay down among the kudzu vines, her wrist positioned to put the cuff beside her head. Later, growing bored, she asked it, “Tell me, Donna. How many Engineers are there?

  “About three billion.” The feminine voice of the artificial intelligence concealed within the cuff was so quiet that the bot had to strain to hear it.

  She thought that once the Earth had held five times as many. “Where do they live?”

  “Mostly in Earth’s northern hemisphere.”

  “What happened to all the rest? There were billions in Africa and South America and southern Asia.”

  “They died.”

  “But why?” Africa had been subject to drought and plague for centuries, but elsewhere the land had been lush and green. If civilization vanished, she thought, they would still be able to feed the immense populations that had once replaced every scrap of forest and jungle with farms and cities and rice paddies.

  “Erosion and contamination with industrial toxins destroyed the fertility of their nations’ soils long before,” sa
id the small machine. “Most never accepted the need to control their population size or growth. Only bioforms had made it possible to support their populations. Then the Engineers’ rebellion destroyed the bioforms.”

  “Aren’t there any people left?”

  “Scattered tribes and isolated villages.”

  The machine did not sound quite like Esteban’s own, whose voice and mannerisms were as human as anyone could ask. Nor did it volunteer much information, though Pearl Angelica was sure it could tell her anything she wished to know, if only she could ask the right questions. At the same time, she thought, she could imagine what some of those expanded answers might be. The people of what once had been Earth’s poorest, most overcrowded lands must now struggle to raise food in exhausted soil. Perhaps, like the illicit farmers who had once made the drug marijuana one of North America’s largest cash crops, they protected rare hamberry bushes, udder trees, snackbushes, and other surviving food-bearing bioforms from the Engineers’ search-and-destroy missions. Only the lesser gengineered crops—lobster-potato hybrids, perennial corn, pestproof vegetables that needed no fertilizer—were still accepted.

  She was curious, but Earth’s history held limited appeal for someone in her position, no matter how much she had wished to see the place a few short weeks before. When the machine said, “You have a call,” she let the questioning drop.

  The first voice she heard was Esteban’s. “It’s a radio connection,” he said. “But it’s coded and piggybacked on the base’s wiring.” Now she recognized the wire she had wrapped around the electrical cable as an induction tap; it would detect—and impose—variations in the current flowing past.

  “No one should notice it,” said Esteban. “And it means my cuff’s the only way to make contact with yours. If anyone wants to talk to you…”

  They did. Anatol and others used the cuff to visit from time to time, usually only briefly, sometimes for as much as an hour, and when the visits ended, that end was often abrupt. Esteban and his friends could talk only when they were alone, and Security was opening apartment doors more frequently than ever.

  Yet no one seemed to have any trouble keeping their grip on the discussion from visit to visit. The conversation wandered and eddied and repeated, but over the days its several threads built up. In time, one of those threads became something very like:

  “Why are you so against machine technology?” an unidentified woman asked Pearl Angelica one afternoon.

  “We’re not,” she murmured to her wrist. “We use machines. We have to! How else could we travel from Earth to Tau Ceti and back?”

  “But you rejected machines. That’s why you left.”

  “No.” She shook her head even though she knew those she spoke to could not see her and that if some Security agent were wandering through the greenhouse, the leaves she forced to quiver might only attract his attention to her hiding place.

  “But you did. You insisted on replacing all the machines with monsters. Roachsters.” The speaker’s voice quavered as she shuddered.

  “They were destroying the Earth. Their demand for materials and fuels and lubricants and paved roads and parking lots. The pollution they produced.”

  “That was the population problem, not…”

  The cuff fell silent in the way that was to become so familiar to the bot. When it spoke again, the speaker was different, but Pearl Angelica quickly brought the topic back to where it had been. “An appetite problem,” she whispered. “And we—or our predecessors—were not willing to solve it by killing off enough people to bring the species’ collective appetite within the bounds of reason. Or sterilizing them. Or preventing births.”

  “What did you do?” That was Anatol.

  “Oh!” she said. “I want to see you!”

  “Not yet,” he answered. “Later, when they quit searching. If they ever do. We’re too dangerous to forget. We’re killers, remember.”

  “What did the gengineers do?” asked a woman’s voice.

  “Someone once suggested making a virus that would make everyone’s children small. But no. We used bioforms. We redesigned plants and animals to do many of the things machines could do. They could build themselves, extracting the materials they needed from soil and water and food, gaining energy from sunlight and grass and garbage.”

  “But they couldn’t do everything, could they?” asked Esteban.

  “Of course not. So we used machines. We used them where they were appropriate, where biology could not substitute.”

  “Until…”

  Later she said, “At first the Engineers were just isolated cranks and city gangs. But their numbers grew. Eventually they gained enough power to attack the gengineers and all they had done.”

  “That’s not quite the way we heard it,” said a young man through the cuff.

  “Of course not,” said Anatol. “Our masters wrote the textbooks, and they would not write anything that might make them look stupid or mistaken or evil.”

  “In the end, they banned all work in gengineering,” said Pearl Angelica. “They destroyed the labs and the farms and the genimals. And millions died.”

  “We kept some things.”

  “Oil trees, for fuel. Some food crops.”

  “And now you’re buying Macks and Sponges.”

  “We’re learning how to compromise. Or they are. The Council.”

  “But they hate it,” said Pearl Angelica. “The compromise shames them.” Then, remembering the eyes that had probed her every crevice while she was bound to the jerking, spinning stool they kept for their own personal interrogations, she wondered how real that shame could be. Perhaps it was only official. They had chosen a position: They would rather have nothing to do with genetic engineering and its products, no matter how useful they were. If they said anything else, she supposed they must fear, the mob they ruled would support them in power no longer.

  “And you don’t do that,” said Esteban on another evening.

  “No,” said Pearl Angelica. “We use whatever works. Whatever does the least damage to the world. And we embrace technology in all its varieties and powers. We think it is life-enhancing.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Not as dangerous as not embracing technology. That can cripple civilization.” The bot paused then, considering. Eventually, she admitted, “I suppose it can be dangerous too. You have to be careful not to move too fast, not to rush headlong into fads and abandon older ways that work quite well enough.”

  “A stable, adaptable society needs both old and new,” said Anatol.

  Pearl Angelica moved her wrist, and the murmur of agreement moved along her jawbone to her middle ear.

  But then someone said, “You don’t believe in controlling science. You think if a bigdome has a bright idea, he should just go ahead and let it loose on the world. No matter what harm it might do or how many jobs it destroys or people it offends.”

  “No,” she answered as someone else said, “Offending people isn’t the same sort of thing as killing them.”

  “No,” she repeated. “We think some caution is appropriate, but not the sort of paranoia that was so common toward the end of the twentieth century. Or that the Engineers showed toward gengineering.”

  “But it was destroying the environment! Wild Roachsters in the oceans. Bioblimps in the mountains. Cannibal grass in the woods. Oil trees adding to forest fires. It had to be stopped! Wiped out!”

  The ensuing silence stretched until Pearl Angelica wondered whether another Security interruption had forced Esteban to turn off his cuff once more. But then someone cleared a throat. “No,” she said. “Mistakes happen. But they’re a reason to be careful, not to ban the science that made them possible. Closing off any area of research, rejecting knowledge and technology and change, is the worst thing we could do. The highest good is the pursuit of knowledge. You can’t interfere with that.”

  “Your Tower,” said another voice. “That’s its whole point, isn’t it?”
>
  Not long after that a dozen Security guards entered the greenhouse, marched directly to the bed in which she lay hidden, and stripped the vines aside. There was no searching, no fumbling. Someone had told them just where to look. Within minutes, a pair of guards were half carrying her down the corridor outside the greenhouse. At the first intersection, they took her to the right. Another pair hauled Cherilee Wright to the left.

  They did not remove the strip of pretty plastic that encircled Pearl Angelica’s wrist. Perhaps the informer had not mentioned that or did not know that it existed.

  Her cage was no longer as simple a structure as it had been. Heavy wire mesh had been fastened to the upright bars with loops of welded chain. A sheet of the same mesh covered the top of the cage. Two of the bars were missing, their stubs showing the runneled traces of a laser cutter. In their place was a narrow mesh door equipped with a sturdy lock.

  Roses and mock orange shrubs no longer surrounded the dais. Showers of artificial rain no longer fell each morning from the ceiling. Nothing relieved the starkness of her imprisonment or discouraged the gawkers from coming within inches of the wire that surrounded her. And they were there, women and men, children and youths, laughing when her expression was most desperate, staring when she gripped the mesh with her fingers, recoiling when her roots writhed in the air, and then laughing once more.

  They stopped only when the veedo came to life and Hrecker said, “She will not escape again.” He seemed very satisfied as he bobbed gently on his toes. “And her fellow conspirators are in custody.” He shook his head ruefully. “It’s hard to believe they’re all Engineers, but…” His image was replaced by one of Anatol, Cherilee, the three women who had visited the greenhouse, and several others. They wore identical manacles and nondescript coveralls that might have been chosen in mockery of the Orbitals and the Gypsies. Scabs and bruises marked their faces. Dark shadows ringed their eyes. Blood stained bandages on their hands and fingers.