Tower of Glass

by Robert Silverberg

  At all times two or three off-duty androids lounged in front of that dome, seemingly idle, actually functioning as casual sentries who would prevent any womb-born one from entering. Sometimes journalists or guests of Krug came wandering this way, and the sentries had various deft techniques for leading them away from the chapel without actually provoking the forbidden clash of wills between android and human. The chapel was not open to anyone born of man and woman. Its very existence was unknown to any but androids.

  Thor Watchman reached it just as the stretcher-bearers were setting Caliban Driller down before the altar. Going in, he made the proper genuflection, dropping quickly to one knee and extending his arms, palms upward. The altar, resting in a purple bath of nutrient fluids, was a pink rectangular block of flesh that had been synthesized precisely as androids themselves were synthesized. Though alive, it was scarcely sentient, nor was it capable of sustaining its life unaided; it was fed from beneath by constant injections of metabolase that permitted it to survive. To the rear of the altar was a full-sized hologram of Simeon Krug, facing forward. The walls of the chapel were decorated with the triplets of the RNA genetic code, inscribed in infinite reproduction from floor to summit:

  * * * *

  AAAAAGAACAAU

  AGAAGGAGCAGU

  ACAACGACCACU

  AUAAUGAUCAUU

  GAAGAGGACGAU

  GGAGGGGGCGGU

  GCAGCGGCCGCU

  GUAGUGGUCGUU

  CAACAGCACCAU

  CGACGGCGCCGU

  CCACCGCCCCCU

  CUACUGCUCCUU

  UAAUAGUACUAU

  UGAUGGUGCUGU

  UCAUCGUCCUCU

  UUAUUGUUCUUU

  * * * *

  “Put him on the altar,” Watchman said. “Then go out.”

  The stretcher-bearers obeyed. When he was alone with the dying beta, Watchman said, “I am a Preserver and I am qualified to be your guide on your journey to Krug. Repeat after me as clearly as you can: Krug brings us into the world and to Krug we return.”

  “Krug brings us into the world and to Krug we return.”

  “Krug is our Creator and our Protector and our Deliverer.”

  “Krug is our Creator and our Protector and our Deliverer.”

  “Krug, we beseech Thee to lead us toward the light.”

  “Krug, we beseech Thee to lead us toward the light.”

  “And to lift the Children of the Vat to the level of the Children of the Womb.”

  “And to lift the Children of the Vat to the level of the Children of the Womb.”

  “And to lead us to our rightful place—”

  “And to lead us to our rightful place—”

  “—beside our brothers and sisters of the flesh.”

  “—beside our brothers and sisters of the flesh.”

  “Krug our Maker, Krug our Preserver, Krug our Master, receive me back into the Vat.”

  “Krug our Maker, Krug our Preserver, Krug our Master, receive me back into the Vat.”

  “And grant redemption to those who come after me—”

  “And grant redemption to those who come after me—”

  “In that day when Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb are one.”

  “In that day when Womb and Vat and Vat and Womb are one.”

  “Praise be to Krug.”

  “Praise be to Krug.”

  “Glory be to Krug.”

  “Glory be to Krug.”

  “AAAAAGAACAAU be to Krug.”

  “AAAAAGAACAAU be to Krug.”

  “AGAAGGAGCAGU be to Krug.”

  “AGAAGGAGC—” Caliban Driller faltered. “The chill is in my breast,” he murmured. “I can't—I can't—”

  “Finish the sequence. Krug awaits you.”

  “—AGU be to Krug.”

  “ACAACGACCACU be to Krug.”

  The beta's fingertips dug into the yielding flesh of the altar. The tone of his skin had deepened in the past few minutes from crimson to something close to violet. His eyeballs rolled. His lips curled back.

  “Krug awaits you,” Watchman said fiercely. “Do the sequence!”

  “Can't—speak—can't—breathe—”

  “Listen to me, then. Just listen. Make the codons in your mind as I say them. AUAAUGAUCAUU be to Krug. GAAGAGGACGAU be to Krug. GGAGGG—”

  Desperately Watchman went down the rows of the genetic ritual as he knelt next to the altar. With each group of codons he rotated his body in the prescribed double helix, the proper motion for the last rites. Caliban Driller's life ebbed swiftly. Toward the end, Watchman pulled a tie-line from his tunic, jacked one end into the input in his forearm and the other into Driller's, and pumped energy into the shattered beta to keep him going until all the RNA triplets had been named. Then, only then, when he was certain that he had sent Caliban Driller's soul to Krug, did Watchman unjack, arise, murmur a brief prayer on his own behalf, and summon a team of gammas to haul the body away for disposal.

  Tense, drained, yet jubilant over the redemption of Caliban Driller, he left the chapel and headed back toward the control center. Halfway there his way was blocked by a figure of his own height—another alpha. That seemed strange. Watchman's shift would not be over for some hours yet; when it was, the alpha Euclid planner was scheduled to arrive and relieve him. But this alpha was not Planner. He was altogether unfamiliar to Watchman.

  The stranger said, “Watchman, may I have some time? I am Siegfried Fileclerk of the Android Equality Party. Of course you know of the constitutional amendment that we propose to have our friends introduce in the next Congress. It has been suggested that in view of your close association with Simeon Krug, you might be helpful to us in our desire to gain access to Krug for the purpose of obtaining his endorsement for—”

  Watchman cut in, “Surely you must be familiar with my position concerning involvements in political matters.”

  “Yes, but at this time the cause of android equality—”

  “Can be served in many ways. I have no wish to exploit my connection with Krug for political purposes.”

  “The constitutional amendment—”

  “Pointless. Pointless. Friend Fileclerk, do you see that building yonder? It is our chapel. I recommend you visit it and cleanse your soul of false virtues.”

  “I am not in communion with your church,” said Siegfried Fileclerk.

  “And I am not a member of your political party,” Thor Watchman said. “Excuse me. I have responsibilities in the control center.”

  “Perhaps I could speak with you when your shift has ended.”

  “You would then be intruding upon my time of resting,” Watchman said.

  He walked briskly away. It was necessary for him to employ one of the neural rituals of tranquillity to ease the anger and irritation surging within him.

  Android Equality Party, he thought disdainfully. Fools! Bunglers! Idiots!

  7

  Manuel Krug had had a busy day. 0800, California. Awakening, at his home on the Mendocino coast. The turbulent Pacific almost at his front door; a thousand-hectare redwood forest as his garden; Clissa beside him in bed, cat-soft, cat-shy. His mind fogged from last night's Spectrum Group party in Taiwan, where he had let himself drink too much of Nick Ssu-ma's millet-and-ginger liqueur. His beta houseman's image on the floating screen, urgently whispering, “Sir, sir, please get up. Your father expects you at the tower.” Clissa cuddling closer against him. Manuel blinking, struggling to cut through the web of fleece swaddling his brain. “Sir? Pardon, but you left irrevocable instructions that you were to be awakened!” A forty-cycle note rumbling out of the floor; a fifteen-megacycle cone of sound slicing down out of the ceiling; himself impaled between the two, unable to escape back into sleep. Crescendo. Wakefulness, reluctant, grudging. Then a surprise: Clissa stirring, trembling, taking his hand, putting it over one of her little cool breasts. His fingertips converging on the nipple and finding it still soft. As expected. A bold overture from the child-woman, but flesh weak if spirit willing. T
hey had been married two years; despite all his earnest and skillful efforts, he had not succeeded yet in fully arousing her senses. “Manuel—” she whispered. “Manuel—touch me all over—!”

  He felt cruel about turning her off. “Later,” he said, as the terrible spikes of sound met in his brain. “We have to get up now. The patriarch is waiting for us. We're going to the tower today.”

  Clissa pouted. They tumbled from bed; instantly the damnable sonics ceased. They showered, breakfasted, dressed. “Are you sure you really want me to come?” she asked.

  He said, “My father made a point of inviting you. He thinks it's high time you saw the tower. Don't you want to go?”

  “I'm afraid I'll do something foolish, say something naive. I feel so awfully young when I'm around him.”

  “You are awfully young. Anyway, he's fond of you. Just pretend you're terribly terribly fascinated by his tower and he'll forgive you for anything silly you might say.”

  “And the other people—Senator Fearon, and the scientist, and whoever else—Manuel, I feel embarrassed already!”

  “Clissa—”

  “All right. All right.”

  “And remember: the tower is going to strike you as the most marvelous enterprise of humanity since the Taj Mahal. Tell him that after you've seen it. Not in so many words, but getting the idea across your own way.”

  “He's really serious about the tower, isn't he?” she asked. “He actually expects to talk to people in the stars.”

  “He does.”

  “How much will it cost?”

  “Billions,” Manuel said.

  “He's draining our heritage to build that thing. He's spending everything.”

  “Not quite everything. We'll never hurt for cash. Anyway, he made the money; let him spend it.”

  “But on an obsession—a fancy—”

  “Stop it, Clissa. It isn't our business.”

  “Tell me this, at least. Suppose your father died tomorrow, and you took charge of everything. What would happen to the tower?”

  Manuel set up the coordinates for their transmat jump to New York. “I'd halt work on it the day after tomorrow,” he said. “But I'll gut you if you ever let him know that. Get in, now. Let's go.”

  * * * *

  1140, New York. Midmorning already, and he had been awake only forty hurried minutes, after arising at eight. That was one of the little troubles of the transmat society: you kept dropping whole segments of time into hidden pockets if you jumped from west to east.

  Naturally there were compensating benefits when you went the other way. In the summer of ’16, on the day before his wedding, Manuel and some of his friends of the Spectrum Group had raced the dawn westward around the world. They began at 0600 on a Saturday in the Amboseli Game Preserve, with the sun coming up back of Kilimanjaro, and off they went to Kinshasa, Accra, Rio, Caracas, Veracruz, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Auckland, Brisbane, Singapore, Pnompenh, Calcutta, Mecca. No visas were needed in the transmat world, no passports; such things were too obviously absurd with instantaneous travel available. The sun plodded along, as always, at a feeble thousand miles an hour; the leaping travelers had no such handicap. Although they paused fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there, enjoying a cocktail or nipping a floater, buying small souvenirs, touring famous monuments of antiquity, yet they constantly gained time, pressing farther and farther backward into the previous night, outstripping the sun as they sped about the globe, striding into Friday evening. Of course, they lost all they had gained when they crossed the dateline and were dumped into Saturday afternoon. But they nibbled away the loss by continuing westward, and when they came round to Kilimanjaro again it was not yet eleven on the same Saturday morning from which they had departed, but they had circled the world and had lived a Friday and a half.

  You could do such things with a transmat. You could also, by timing your jumps with care, see two dozen sunsets in a single day, or spend all your life under the blaze of eternal noon. Nevertheless, arriving in New York at 1140 from California, Manuel resented having had to surrender this segment of morning to the transmat.

  His father greeted him formally in his office with a pressure of palms, and hugged Clissa with somewhat more warmth. Leon Spaulding hovered uneasily to one side. Quenelle stood by the window, back to everyone, studying the city. Manuel did not get along with her. He generally disliked his father's mistresses. The old man picked the same type every time: full lips, full breasts, jutting buttocks, fiery eyes, heavy hips. Peasant stock.

  Krug said, “We're waiting for Senator Fearon, Tom Buckleman, and Dr. Vargas. Thor will take us on the grand tour of the tower. What are you doing afterward, Manuel?”

  “I hadn't thought—”

  “Go to Duluth. I want you to get to know something about the plant operations there. Leon, notify Duluth: my son arrives for an inspection trip early this afternoon.”

  Spaulding went off. Manuel shrugged. “As you wish, father.”

  “Time to extend your responsibilities, boy. To develop your management capacities. Someday you be boss of all this, eh? Someday, when they say Krug, they mean you.”

  “I'll try to live up to the trust you've placed in me,” Manuel said.

  He knew he wasn't fooling the old man with his glibness. And the old man's show of paternal pride wasn't fooling him. Manuel was aware of his father's intense contempt for him. He could see himself through his father's eyes: a wastrel, a perpetual playboy. Against that he held his own image of himself: sensitive, compassionate, too refined to brawl in the commercial arena. Then he tumbled through that image to another view of Manuel Krug, perhaps more genuine: hollow, earnest, idealistic, futile, incompetent. Which was the real Manuel? He didn't know. He didn't know. He understood less and less about himself as he grew older.

  Senator Fearon stepped from the transmat.

  Krug said, “Henry, you know my son Manuel—the future Krug of Krug, he is, the heir apparent—?”

  “It's been many years,” Fearon said. “Manuel, how are you!”

  Manuel touched the politician's cool palm. He managed an amiable smile. “We met five years ago in Macao,” he said gracefully. “You were passing through, en route to Ulan Bator.”

  “Of course. Of course. What a splendid memory! Krug, this is a fine boy here!” Fearon cried.

  “You wait,” Krug said. “When I step down, he'll show you how a real empire-builder operates!”

  Manuel coughed and looked away, embarrassed. Some compulsive sense of dynastic need forced old Krug to pretend that his only child was a fit heir to the constellation of enterprises he had founded or absorbed. Thus the constant show of concern for Manuel's “training,” and thus the abrasive, repetitive public insistence that Manuel would some day succeed to control.

  Manuel had no wish to take command of his father's empire. Nor did he see that he was capable of it. He was only now outgrowing his playboy phase, groping his way out of frivolity the way others might grope their way out of atheism. He was looking for a vehicle of purpose, for a vessel to contain his formless ambitions and abilities. Someday, perhaps, he might find one. But he doubted that Krug Enterprises would be that vehicle.

  The old man knew that as well as Manuel did. Inwardly he scorned his son's hollowness, and sometimes the scorn showed through. Yet he never ceased pretending that he prized his son's judgment, shrewdness, and potential administrative skills. In front of Thor Watchman, in front of Leon Spaulding, in front of anyone who would listen, Krug went on and on about the virtues of the heir apparent. Self-deluding hypocrisy, Manuel thought. He's trying to hoax himself into believing what he knows damned well won't ever be true. And it won't work. It can't work. He'll always have more real faith in his android friend Thor than he will in his own son. For good reason, too. Why not prefer a gifted android to a worthless child? He made us both, didn't he?

  Let him give the companies to Thor Watchman, Manuel thought.

  The other members of the party were arriv
ing. Krug shepherded everyone toward the transmat banks.

  “To the tower,” he cried. “To the tower!”

  * * * *

  1110, the tower. He had regained the better part of an hour out of his lost morning, anyway, through this jump of one time-zone westward from New York. But he could have done without the trip. Bad enough to caper in the chill Arctic autumn, forcing himself to admire his father's absurd tower—the Pyramid of Krug, Manuel liked to call it privately—but then there had been the business of the falling block, the crushing of the androids. A nasty incident.

  Clissa had gone to the edge of hysteria. “Don't look,” Manuel told her, folding his arms about her as the wallscreen in the control center showed the scene of the lifting of the block from the corpses. To Spaulding he said, “Sedative. Fast.”

  The ectogene found him a tube of something. Manuel jammed the snout against Clissa's arm and activated it. The drug leaped through her skin in a soft ultrasonic spurt.

  “Were they killed?” she asked, head still averted.

  “It looks that way. Possibly one survived. The others never knew what hit them.”

  “The poor people.”

  “Not people,” Leon Spaulding said. “Androids. Only androids.”

  Clissa lifted her head. “Androids are people!” she blazed. “I don't ever want to hear something like that again! Don't they have names, dreams, personalities—”

  “Clissa,” Manuel said gently.

  “—ambitions,” she said. “Of course they're people. A bunch of people just died under that block. How could you, you in particular, make such a remark about—”

  “Clissa!” Manuel said, anguished.

  Spaulding was rigid, eyes glassy with rage. The ectogene seemed to tremble on the verge of an angry retort, but his fierce discipline saw him past the moment.

  “I'm sorry,” Clissa murmured, looking at the floor. “I didn't mean to get personal, Leon. I—I—oh, God, Manuel, why did any of this have to happen?” She began to sob again. Manuel signaled for another sedative tube, but his father shook his head and came forward, taking her from him.