Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  “I wish,” she said at last. “I wish you didn’t have to hear all this, Aunt Lois. Or watch them kill me.”

  “Me too.” The sound of the Quebec’s thrusters was audible behind its pilot’s voice. Pearl Angelica knew that the ship could not be in a stable orbit. It had to be on a course that carried it above the base, moving slowly past and falling toward the lunar surface until Lois brought it again and again back into position.

  But were those thrusters active enough? Pearl Angelica wished she had a better feel for piloting, a better sense of what was possible. How long could the Quebec’s tanks of reaction mass last? Would her aunt have to leave to refuel, and thereby miss her death? Or was there some other way for her to hold position?

  She was speaking again: “I’d rather have you here with me. Take you home. I wish I’d never brought you with me. But I did. And if you must die, I can stay as near as I can manage. I can watch. I can tell the Gypsies what they did to you.”

  “I wish I could see you.” The tears came to Pearl Angelica’s eyes. Her voice shuddered. She choked. “Touch you.”

  The voice that came from her cuff sounded as stricken as her own. “But we can’t. If I tried to come any closer…They have railguns. Lasers.”

  “I don’t want you dead too. Stay away, please. And good-bye. Tell Uncle Renny that.”

  “I will.”

  “Tell the rest too.”

  “I will.”

  “And don’t forget the Racs.”

  “I won’t.”

  This time it was Esteban who finally interrupted the silence. “There may be a way,” he said.

  “What!” cried Lois McAlois. Her voice was loud even through the cuff on Pearl Angelica’s wrist, and the bot nearly forgot to whisper as she demanded, “How?”

  “I can’t say yet,” he said. “I shouldn’t raise your hopes. In fact, I’ve said too much already. There are just too many ifs. But I want to get the rest free too. And it will have to be tomorrow night.”

  “There won’t be any later chances,” agreed Lois McAlois.

  “Why not now?” asked Pearl Angelica, though she knew that any plan that had any chance at all of succeeding must require preparation.

  “I need to learn things,” said Esteban. “Arrange things. And then, if and if and if—”

  “I understand,” said Lois McAlois. “No promises.”

  “No promises,” said Esteban.

  * * *

  Chapter Eighteen

  She stood within her steel enclosure, roots embedded in the soil, head tipped back to expose her front to the artificial sun above the cage. She did not sleep even though her eyes burned. She had been unable to close her eyes after Esteban had severed his contact through her cuff, and with it her access to her aunt. Now he was doing all he could to make come true all those promises he had refused to speak. She prayed—the only gesture she was free to make—to every god whose name she had ever heard that he would succeed.

  Would he? Could he? Would he get her out of her cage and lead her on a sudden dash for freedom? She drew thirstily, desperately, on water and nutrients and light, stoking reserves she knew she might never need. She thought of solid food and its more compact calories. Saliva flooded her mouth, and her stomach growled. The body had imperatives that survived even the hybridization of plant and animal.

  Hrecker had offered her no last meal, no final courtesies. She did not think he would in the morning, either. If that was when they came for her. Wasn’t that the traditional time? But on the Moon true dawn came only every two weeks. The “days” of human experience were artificial, defined by fiat to correspond to those rhythms eons of evolution had written into the core of every Earthly being.

  “When is dawn here?” All she had had ever since she came to the Moon was glimpses of the surface. She had no idea of the time of “day” outside the base.

  Donna, her cuff, seemed to know what she meant. “Eleven pee-em tomorrow,” it said in a very neutral tone. It was not yet human enough to seem sympathetic. “Twenty-three hundred hours.”

  Whichever one they chose, then. Lunar dawn or clock dawn, arbitrary but still Earth dawn, if they were traditionalists. False or true. Or between the two. Both fit those few words of doom recorded by the Council of Ministers. Tomorrow. And the light that beamed down upon her, the dirt beneath her feet, the air around her, might be the last she would ever taste. Her roots spasmed, curled, set a tangled grip deep in the soil as tight as the grip she wished she could clamp on life. She did not wish to die.

  She told herself that Esteban must have a chance to save her. His mind was so sharp…She looked at the cuff on her wrist. He had devised a way to turn the Q-drive into a miniature and inexhaustible power source. He had then built the cuff around it. A communicator, a computer, an artificial intelligence. She shook her head at the awesome potential of what he had done, and again as she wondered whether his masters even knew that he had done it. If anyone could pry her out of this cage and move her from the Engineers’ lunar base to her Aunt Lois…She wished she knew what he had in mind.

  She also wished she had told her aunt what he had done. She could not possibly tell how the new power source worked, but she could at least have passed the word that it was possible. Given that, Gypsy engineers could try to duplicate Esteban’s work. Their work would of course be easier if she knew more. Or if Esteban himself would reveal his secrets.

  The veedo set did not distract her, for it was not turned on. Nor did gawkers, for only a few dared to approach her on this eve of her death. She was alone with her thoughts and her wishes.

  A dozen guards arrived that afternoon. They scowled until the few bystanders present fled. They said nothing as they took positions around the dais that held her cage. Most faced outward, arms crossed, sidearms on their hips. Four faced inward, watching her.

  Pearl Angelica did not think it hard to guess why they were there. No one would be allowed to speak with her. No enemies would taunt her, but neither would any friend be permitted to comfort her. She would not be able to use the cuff’s induction tap to speak with Esteban or Lois. And there would be no escape.

  She wished…If she could not escape, could she at least avoid the morning? But she had no poison, no knife, not even a fragment of broken glass. The guards that watched her would surely stop her if she tried to strangle herself with that very piece of wire she could not use to talk. She had to live. Until…

  A robot arrived, steering a motorized cart with a small cargo bed. It unplugged the veedo set, put it on the cart, and trundled it toward a corridor mouth.

  Pearl Angelica stared after the departing cart, and then at the empty end of the dais that still held her cage. The veedo was on its way to storage, she thought. Or someone’s apartment. And when they took her away the next day, she would never return to this spot. Not even as an electronic image behind a glass screen.

  The rest of the day passed excruciatingly slowly. Pedestrians scuttled on the borders of the concourse, moving from corridor to corridor as if they feared the notice of the guards. The guards themselves shifted on their feet and grunted and farted and said nothing at all, not even to each other. In due time, they were replaced by a new shift.

  “Five pee-em,” the cuff whispered to the bones of her wrist. “Seventeen hundred hours.” The vibrations of the sound waves passed to her radius and ulna, her humerus, her collar bone, sternum, ribs, vertebrae, and skull, finally reaching the ossicles of her middle ear. “Six pee-em…Nine…”

  The floodlight above her went out. The lights that illumined the concourse and corridors dimmed. The guard was changed again. It was evening, night, a time when the human neural computer, with all its inbuilt programming, expected shadows and darkness and omens of death.

  “Midnight…”

  She did not tell the cuff to stop, for though the countdown oppressed her, shortened her breath, made her heart pound with dread, she also felt a morbid fascination, kin to that which drives a tongue to probe the gap l
eft by a missing tooth or a finger to pick at a scab.

  “One aye-em. One hundred hours. Wee-est of the wee hours.”

  Her last day had begun, was an hour old. She would not see its end, would never see another, would never see her Aunt Lois, another bot, Uncle Renny, her father’s grave, the Gypsy or the Gypsies, Earth from space or First-Stop. Unless…

  A flicker in the shadowed mouth of a corridor caught her eye. Low, near the floor, near the wall, small and darting. A mouse? But it was not that small.

  “Two aye-em. Not quite so wee.”

  Were there mice on the Moon? What could be more natural? It was made of green cheese, wasn’t it? She tried to laugh but stopped at the first taste of hysteria.

  There were research labs, weren’t there? Places for testing toxins and drugs. Rooms full of little cages full of mice. Mice that could, that surely did, escape. To nibble at the cheese.

  She caught her breath. A mouse could not possibly make her guards exclaim, slap at thighs and arms and chests, reach for their guns, swear, fall all around her! Fall as if someone—Esteban!—had pulled the trigger on a machine gun or laser and unleashed a hail of death. But there was no sound of gunfire, no line of laser light sweeping across the concourse below the level of her feet. There was no blood. There was only…Had she heard a hiss, a phut! a phut-t-t-t-t-t! and then…?

  All the guards were down and still.

  “Ah!”

  That soft sound came from the corridor where she had glimpsed whatever she had glimpsed a few moments before. It was followed by a quieter sigh of relief. A figure rose from the floor of the corridor and approached her.

  “Esteban!” she cried. Her roots slid from the soil as if they had minds of their own and knew that the time had come to leave.

  He gestured her silent. “Shh, someone might…” He bent over the guards one by one, touching their throats.

  “There’s a door now.” She pointed at the side of her cage.

  “Yeah.” Now he was slapping their pockets, extracting every lump he found. “I was hoping someone had a key.”

  “Hrecker used a remote.”

  When it was clear that he would find neither key nor remote, he said, “C’mon, Stan.” He held the wire his cuff extruded vertically and swept it along the edge of the dais.

  “There!” said the machine. “Hold still. That’s it. Get me closer…” It guided Esteban until he held the wire at an angle. A moment later, the cuff said, “Got it, Ollie!”

  The bars of the cage shuddered in their sockets and began to slide down into the rim of the planter. Esteban winced when they shrieked, rubbing against the loops of steel that anchored the cage’s meshwork skin. “Now squat,” he said. “And push.”

  Her hand gripped his even before what was left of the cage bounced off the guards and struck the concourse’s floor. “Let’s go,” he said. “We haven’t got much time.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the guards. Two were bleeding. They had not even twitched at the cage’s impact on their backs and heads. “Are they dead?”

  “Asleep.” He showed her the gun he had used. “An airgun. I had to steal it from the hospital. They use it on madmen. Now. Run.” He tugged at her hand, and they ran.

  He led her through a maze of corridors, only some of which seemed familiar from her nighttime explorations of the base with Anatol, or perhaps from that brief tour Hrecker had given her when he brought her to her cage. They heard Security guards in the distance and glimpsed them when they stopped at intersections to peek around corners. They took turns they hoped would keep them free, tested doors and hid in dark offices and laboratories, crouched behind planters thick with foliage. Finally Esteban muttered, “Here,” and tried a door.

  “Where are we?” They were both breathing hard. Whenever he could, Esteban had set a breakneck pace, and he had not let go of her hand. She had had to keep up.

  “Almost there.” The room behind the door was as dark as any other of their temporary refuges, but this time he reached for a light switch. The space he revealed was about three meters by ten. Large, reusable cartons, stacked nearly to the ceiling, covered half its floor. “I checked,” he said. “You can hide behind the boxes. There’s room, and nobody would think of looking there.”

  “You did.”

  “I’m smarter than they are.” He pushed her toward the cartons. “Go on,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  She was already on top of the pile. Ahead of her, between the last row of cartons and the wall, she could see a space, not even as big as the cage she had just escaped. She did not want to descend into it. She swivelled to look at Esteban, but he was now beside the door, his hand on the light switch.

  “But…”

  “Go on,” he said. “Get in. If anyone finds the lights on, they’ll get suspicious. And I will be back.”

  A carton moved beneath her weight, and she slid into the hole. As soon as she could no longer see her friend—and he could not see her—the lights went out. The door opened and quietly closed. She fell the last half-meter into her new cell.

  The darkness was complete. Her brain manufactured sparkles and lines and fragmentary mottled patterns from the random firings of the neurons in her retinas. There were faint sounds too, and though she wondered at first if they too were hallucinations borne of sensory deprivation, she soon accepted them as…The mutter of distant voices? The muted clash of metals? Steps in the corridor outside the door?

  She resisted the trembling that threatened to overwhelm her by flattening one hand against the side of a carton. Plastic. They could be folded flat, stored fifty at a time inside one of their number, and unfolded again whenever they were needed. She wondered how old these cartons were, what they had held, and even where they had been. The Gypsies and the Orbitals both used the same design. It dated, she thought, to a time before the gengineers had fled Earth.

  What was in the cartons now? She could detect no smell of food or machine oil. They were light, light enough that Esteban might easily have lifted and moved and rearranged the stacks to make this space for her to hide in, but they were not empty. She felt for the top of a carton, found overlapping flaps, and slid a hand inside. Soft. Cloth. Clothing, then. Or bedding.

  She was painfully aware that Esteban had told her nothing at all of what he planned. He had said he would return. But he had given no hint of where he was going now, or of where they would go when he came back.

  He had said he wanted to free the others when they were talking with Aunt Lois, hadn’t he? Then perhaps that was what he was doing now. Shooting guards, putting them to sleep just as he had done to hers. Releasing Esteban and Cherilee and the other dissidents who had wished and tried and failed to protect Pearl Angelica, the living blasphemy so far from her home and kin.

  “How long have we been in here?” she asked the artificial intelligence in the cuff Esteban had given her. She was sure it was not the hours she felt within her. “Since he left. Since the lights went out.”

  “Ten minutes,” said the machine quietly. “Time flies when you’re having fun.” And much, much later, maddeningly later: “Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-two.”

  Footsteps in the corridor. A moving door. Light once more, at last. And a voice she recognized, a voice she had feared she would never hear again: “Angie?”

  “Anatol!”

  Esteban was there as well, looking sour as she clambered over the stack of cartons and rushed to embrace her older friend.

  “I thought…,” she said, and she set her fingers gently beside Anatol’s left eye. It was swollen shut by a massive bruise. Then she looked at the others and could not help a dismayed gasp.

  “Yeah,” said Anatol. His arms were tight around the bot. “They were pretty rough.”

  “They won’t get another chance,” said Esteban.

  Besides Anatol and Esteban, there was one other man, his skin swarthy, his bald crown a mass of scabs rimmed by crusted, dirty curls. He looked both lost and determined. Pearl Angel
ica barely recalled seeing him at the party that seemed so long ago. “The worst of it doesn’t show,” he said.

  But it did. Four women accompanied the men, and their eyes were wide and dark and wary. One carried an arm in a sling. Another was bent half double, her arms cradling her sides as if she were in agony from broken ribs. Pearl Angelica recognized them both from their visit to the greenhouse and wished she knew their names.

  “I’ll make them kill me first,” said the woman who clutched her ribs. Her voice was rough with pain and fluid.

  “We’ll carry you if we have to,” said Anatol.

  “You won’t,” she rasped. “It hurt, but I ran this far. I can keep going. As long as…You said you can do it, Esteban. Just get us out of here.”

  “I thought there would be more,” said Pearl Angelica.

  “The rest can’t walk. Or I couldn’t find them.”

  “Some are already dead,” said the man she didn’t know.

  “Did they get us all?” asked someone.

  “All but Esteban.”

  “Then who’s the informer?”

  “Do you think we’d be here now if he was the one?”

  “Where’s Cherilee?” asked Pearl Angelica. “Wasn’t she…?

  “She was with us,” said the woman with the broken arm.

  “I bet it was Notting,” said the man. “He didn’t seem worried enough when they took us in.”

  “It doesn’t matter, as long as he’s not with us now.”

  “Or she.”

  “She said she had to get something,” said Anatol. “At the greenhouse.”

  “I told her where to find us.” Esteban looked uncertain.

  “Here?” asked the bot. She refused to share the suspicion that had obviously crossed more than one of the others’ minds.

  “No. We can’t wait for her. If they catch her…” He eased the door open the merest crack, peered into the corridor, and retreated. He leaned against the door and whispered, “Guards. But they’re not going our way.” Footsteps became audible, and voices.