Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  Some of the Security guards had found shelter from the rocket blast. Bullets pounded the ship’s hull. One, and then another, penetrated and ricocheted before embedding in interior walls.

  “The roof,” Pearl Angelica screamed above the din. “They must have planned to remove it.”

  “But we can’t do that,” yelled Anatol.

  “It can’t be that thick,” said the woman with the broken ribs, her voice as loud as anyone’s. “Go through it. Now. Before one of those bullets hits something essential.”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” said Esteban. “Or one of us. But you’d better find some place to lie down.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You too, Angie.”

  “The Apollo crews took off standing up,” said Anatol.

  “So you’re a historian. But we’re in a hurry.”

  As soon as they were all flat on the floor around his seat, he increased thrust. The ship lifted off the floor of the construction bay and hesitated. Pearl Angelica closed her eyes, not wanting to see the ceiling grow quickly closer and crumble into shards. Instead she listened to the impact and felt the ship stagger, heard the screeling of metal scraped on metal, the hiss of air where a seam gave way, the scream and pop of ruptured structure. She imagined the rush of air from the bay and the corridors beyond, the screams of the dying diminishing as the air that carried their sound sucked from their lungs, the slam of airtight barriers across the corridors.

  And there was silence except for the uneven sound of their thrust and the agonized sobbing of the woman with the broken ribs. Thrust was not kind to her.

  Pearl Angelica opened her eyes. The viewport was gouged but intact. Beyond it was rich black and stars. They were free.

  Even though the engines now were choking, gasping, stuttering, straining to lift them all to safety but threatening at every second to fail. She wished she knew whether the problem was some failure of the Engineers—if only they had done their own test piloting!—or some effect of their collision with the roof.

  It hardly seemed to matter that Esteban’s hands were flying desperately over the controls, that the ship was wobbling on its course, its thrust dangerously out of line with its center of mass, or that he was swearing and saying, “We lost three tanks. One’s left. Just one. We can’t go far.”

  An alarm was buzzing, a red light was flashing, and a synthesized voice was saying with artificial calm, “Air alert. There is a crack in the airlock rim twelve point five centimeters above the floor. Air alert. There is a puncture thirty-two centimeters clockwise from the hatch and forty centimeters above the floor. Air alert. There is a puncture…Patches are in the cabinet marked ‘Emergency.’ Follow the instructions on their backs.”

  Cherilee was already on her feet, opening the locker and extracting the cylindrical canister of patches. She did not stop to read the label, for she had been a resident of the Moon for years. She had learned what to do in such cases long ago: Locate the hole, choose a patch of the right size, peel off its backing, and slap it into place. Repeat as long as air is being lost. Hesitate, and die.

  She did what had to be done. Pearl Angelica prayed that it would be enough.

  The buzzer stopped. The red light stopped blinking.

  The ship jerked sideways, throwing Cherilee to the floor and making the others roll and slide.

  “They’re still shooting at us,” said Esteban.

  “What with?”

  “They’re dead!”

  Esteban’s hands flew across the controls, and the Teller jinked again. “Lasers,” he said. “And they’re throwing rocks at us with the railguns.”

  Another lurch brought Pearl Angelica up against the base of Esteban’s seat. The beehive slipped from her grip, and the paper plug in its entrance hole fell free. One of the women grabbed the paper and shoved it back in place. “That’s all we need, eh? Bees!”

  But Pearl Angelica barely appreciated the catastrophe the other had so nearly averted. She was staring at fresh blood on Esteban’s calf and crying, “Where’s Aunt Lois?”

  “Can’t see,” he said.

  She told herself his voice was strong. He was not bleeding to death. In fact, the blood was really only a trickle. Wasn’t it?

  “We lost a radar antenna,” he added. “Only got one now, and that’s looking down, spotting rocks. There. The computer can handle collision avoidance. But…”

  A loud clang interrupted his words. “That’s not perfect either. And it won’t do a bit of good against the lasers. As soon as they penetrate…”

  “Call her.”

  “Can’t.” He flipped a switch, and the hiss of static filled the cabin. “We lost that too.”

  The Teller jerked to one side. Something crunched and grated in the ship’s stern.

  “One tank left,” said Esteban. “And it’s loose. One solid hit, a couple more dodges like that, and it’s gone. And we’re sitting ducks.”

  “We don’t have long, do we?” That was one of the women, her voice high and shaky.

  “We couldn’t get far anyway, not on just one tank.” Anatol was on his knees beside the bot, reaching for her.

  “There!” Karel shouted. Something glinted in the viewport, vanished, reappeared a finger’s width away, and vanished once more.

  “Is that her?”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “She’s using the tunnel-drive,” said Pearl Angelica. “Macroscopic tunneling.”

  Esteban grunted, “Got it.” He shook his head admiringly, though his face showed the pain he was feeling from his wound. “She’s not hovering now. Dodging, so they can’t target her. But she can’t…”

  “Yes, she can!” cried Pearl Angelica. The Quebec was bigger than the Teller, much bigger. It had sleeping cabins and a cargohold, and if it wasn’t big enough to engulf the smaller ship, perhaps it could still…“Yes!”

  Laser beams are invisible in the vacuum of space. Rocks propelled by railguns move far too fast to spot except with radar. But the signs of both were plain to see in Lois McAlois’ evasive random skittering about the sky.

  Their presence was also proven by the Teller’s sideways lurches and sudden changes in acceleration, by the bangs of glancing blows and the hiss of escaping air, by cries of “Air alert” and Cherilee’s scrambles through the ship with her hands full of patches.

  Each of the Quebec’s leaps brought it closer to the Teller. Its image increased in size. The dancing glint was now a splinter of light. It was a spaceship, a knob-headed arrow, its fletching a cluster of reaction mass tanks. Its viewport became visible, and behind it the shadowy forms of a control console, a pilot’s seat, a pilot.

  “There she is,” said Pearl Angelica. “That’s her.”

  “Thank god,” said Cherilee. “There’s one patch left.”

  A louder crash than any since they had breached the roof of the construction bay shook the ship. Metal screeched and snapped. “That’s it,” said Esteban. “Last tank.” The engines quit. The sound and weight of thrust abruptly stopped. The ship stopped shaking as if it were about to fall apart and began to yaw. The stars swung across the viewport. Pearl Angelica floated into the air. So did Cherilee, Karel, the other women.

  “Escaping air,” said Esteban. “Like an attitude jet. But we can’t control it.”

  “Air alert,” said the computer. Was Pearl Angelica coloring its voice with her own fears? Or did it indeed sound resigned now that the ship could no longer dodge and flee?

  Esteban touched the controls and the computer fell silent. He indicated a digital readout. “We’re dead,” he said. “That’s the temperature of the hull over the engine room. If we could spin…” He shook his head. “In another minute, they’ll burn through the hull. Then we lose all our air.”

  “We don’t have suits, do we?” That was Karel.

  Where was the Quebec? It was no longer visible in the viewport.

  When something clanged against their hull, they all flinched. But the sound was not that of a crashing rock. It was diff
erent, more solid, steadier, and then the stars danced in the viewport. The Moon appeared, smaller than when seen from Earth.

  “She grabbed us,” said Pearl Angelica. “I didn’t know it was possible. But she came beside us and skipped us with her. We’re out of range. We’re safe.”

  The refugees had not filled the Quebec for long after Lois McAlois had matched airlocks and invited them aboard, for it had been only a short skip to Munin and the Orbitals. There the Teller had been turned over to the Engineers. The refugees had not, despite demands.

  Now the Quebec was on its way back to First-Stop. With it went Anatol Rivkin and Cherilee Wright and Esteban, his true name at last revealed as Julio Lee. “But I like Esteban better,” he said.

  “Not Julie?” asked Lois, and he shuddered.

  The ship was crowded, and it stank, partly of the Armadons it had brought with Pearl Angelica to Earth’s solar system, partly of the cheese it was hauling back to the Gypsies, partly of the people who now overburdened its air filters. The beehive, enclosed in a cage of wire screening, was strapped to one wall of the cargo bay.

  The two Gypsies and Cherilee shared Lois’s sleeping cabin. The men took the other, though neither Anatol nor Esteban was pleased with the arrangement.

  “Why not?” insisted Anatol. He had stopped Pearl Angelica outside their rooms. No one else was in sight at the moment, and his hands gripped her shoulders gently, careful not to tear her leaves. “We did before. When you were in my room.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But—”

  The radio was audible throughout the ship: “Hallo, Gypsies! I hear she’s safe. And they paid the ransom. Congratulations! And tell her not to get so mechin’ close to the fire next time.”

  “Is it Esteban?” He touched her wrist where she had worn the cuff he had given her. She had left it behind to instruct the Orbitals in its secrets. Esteban had promised her another as soon as the Gypsies set him up with a suitable workshop. “His artificial intelligences? That power source he came up with from the Q-drive? The better robots he’ll give your people? Does he offer a better bride-price than me?”

  She jerked her wrist away from his hand. “Are you selling brides again, then, back on Earth?”

  He made a face. “Or is it just that he got you off the Moon? Are you grateful?”

  “You got me out of my cage. You introduced us. Should I be more grateful to you?” She shook her head. “That’s not much of a basis for an affair. Or marriage. And I like you both.”

  “You want us both, then? But you’re half plant, aren’t you? Not very discriminating. As long as the bees bring the pollen…”

  “And you’re half ass.” Cherilee appeared behind him. “If you say one more word, I’ll kick you. Though that’s probably overkill. Any man who talked to me like that would be out of my life forever.”

  Pearl Angelica looked past him at the woman. “Where’s Esteban?”

  Anatol grunted as if they each had punched him in the stomach.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty

  When she saw the small crowd of familiar, friendly bots and humans waiting at the Gypsy’s dock, Pearl Angelica had to struggle to hold back the flood of tears. There was Uncle Renny Schafer, pressing through the pack to wrap his arms around both the bot and his wife and say, “I thought we’d never see you again.”

  She clutched him in return. “I thought you wouldn’t too.” And there, close on Renny’s heels, was her friend Caledonia Emerald, reaching for her, embracing, crying, “Welcome home!” She stopped trying to control herself. At last, the nightmare was over. She was back, home indeed. She was safe. And she believed it now in a way that she hadn’t when her aunt rescued her and the fugitive Engineers from the wreck of the Teller, or even when the Orbitals had welcomed her just as happily as these, her friends and kin.

  As soon as she could, Caledonia Emerald led her aside from the crowd, saying, “There’s something you have to see. Right away.”

  “What is it?”

  But she only shook her head and tugged on Pearl Angelica’s arm. “I came up here as soon as we heard you were in the system. Just to show you this. Let’s go.”

  “Yes,” said Uncle Renny. “You have to see this.”

  “I’ll take care of the others,” said Aunt Lois.

  “No,” said Esteban. “We stay with her.” The others nodded, and Pearl Angelica was not surprised. Neither Anatol nor Esteban, she thought, would wish to be far from her. And Cherilee Wright had come to be a good friend. As for the rest, she supposed they were unwilling to let go of the few people they knew in a world that had to be strange indeed.

  Now Cherilee stood stock still in the middle of the Gypsy’s broad and curving tunnel. Two streams of traffic parted to flow around them—Armadons and Macks, Roachsters and litterbugs, bots and humans in gengineered vehicles, on bicycles, on foot. The air reeked of biological technology.

  “I never dreamed,” said the botanist, “that I would ever see all this.” Her eyes were as wide as a child’s.

  “It’s the way it used to be,” said Anatol. He too was enraptured by the image of days gone by on Earth that the scene evoked. Karel and the women from the Moon looked more baffled by the strangeness of the environment in which they found themselves.

  “Earth never smelled like this,” said Esteban. “It had open air.” He alone, though he was gawking as eagerly as the others, seemed to retain some sense of the similarity between the Gypsy and the lunar base they had fled three weeks before.

  “It smells better in the greenhouses,” said Caledonia Emerald as Lois McAlois gave Cherilee a gentle push and the group began to move once more.

  “It’s mostly bots that run them, but there should be a place for you,” said Lois.

  Cherilee stopped again and looked at Pearl Angelica. “I know,” she said. “I know that’s where I used to work. But I told you…”

  The bot nodded. She held the beehive in her arms just as she had when they were fleeing the Moon. “She’d like to study gengineering, Aunt Lois.”

  “There’s no reason why not. I’m sure someone needs an apprentice. But…” She looked at Caledonia Emerald. “We’re going to a greenhouse now, aren’t we?”

  When the bot nodded, Pearl Angelica asked, “Why? I want to see Uncle Renny. And visit Dad’s grave. And then I should get back to my lab.”

  “You’ll see.” Caledonia Emerald would say nothing more until they had passed through several of the Gypsy’s twisting tunnels, a zone of nearly zero weight, and two parks, and finally entered a tunnel much like the one Cherilee Wright had ruled on the Moon. It was as long and broad and as filled with green, though the soil in which the plants grew was not held in raised beds, but flush with the floor, rimmed by nothing more than low curbs, and several of the crops were very different. There were stands of grain and vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. There were also beds of bioform computers, snackbushes, and udder trees, and several whose occupants were clearly small versions of the bots that walked and stood in the greenhouse’s aisles, weeding and watering.

  One of those bots rushed up to them before they could get much past the door. Both arms were outstretched, her hands grasping for arms and wrists, her now-fading crimson blossoms quivering as she bobbed her head in eagerness. “You got her! We heard, but that’s not the same as seeing. And these—” She stared at Pearl Angelica. “The ones who helped you?”

  “Crimson Orchis,” Lois McAlois managed to squeeze into the rush of words. She looked at her niece.

  “Eldest,” said Pearl Angelica.

  “Oh, no!” Crimson Orchis’s fronds uncurled briefly from her torso, revealing how brown and ragged their edges were. ”You are the Eldest now. You’re older than any of us.”

  Anatol and Esteban and the others looked perplexed.

  “Not old enough,” said Pearl Angelica.

  “Oh, yes. We never gave you the title. We hoped you would come to seem older…”

  “Slow and wrinkled,” said Lois M
cAlois.

  “Wise,” said the bot. “Experienced.”

  “I’ve gained some of that,” said Pearl Angelica. She sighed and wished she had had the wisdom to stay on First-Stop. She thought she could have done without the experiences the Engineers had forced on her. “Not many bots get kidnapped, raped, and caged at any age.”

  “Not since we left Earth.” Crimson Orchis gestured, and a younger bot appeared to take the beehive, set it on a nearby workbench, and remove the crumpled paper that plugged its doorway. A single bee appeared in the opening almost immediately. “And we almost lost you, didn’t we? All that potential.” She shook her head.

  Pearl Angelica grimaced. “You could have…”

  “We did. Over here.” Crimson Orchis led them all to a bed that held two dozen thick stalks topped by knobs whose dents and bumps suggested human faces. Unlike the infant bots that grew in nearby beds, these had no fronds. Their bases were surrounded by rosettes of small oval leaves.

  Anatol looked from the bed to Pearl Angelica just as she fell to her knees and reached to touch the nearest knob. “Clones?” he said, and then, as if realizing that of course there could be little resemblance between adult and infant bot and that of course Crimson Orchis could mean nothing else, he repeated more definitely, “Clones.”

  Lois McAlois was nodding. “They were starting them before I headed back to Earth.”

  A second elderly bot appeared beside them. “We couldn’t wait any longer.” She paused to produce a liquid cough that said she was nearer the end of her life than Crimson Orchis. Her blossoms were almost colorless. “We’re fading now. Soon we’ll be gone. So we decided to take no more chances. We need your longevity.”

  “That’s why so many,” said Karel. He nodded as if remembering that the short lives of bots were no secret, even among the Engineers.