Tower of Glass

by Robert Silverberg

  Krug cradled the girl in his immense arms, half crushing her against his huge chest. “Easy,” he said, hugging her. “Easy, easy, easy. It was a terrible thing, yes. But they didn't suffer. They died clean. Thor will look after the hurt ones. He'll shut off their pain centers and make them feel better. Poor Clissa, poor, poor, poor, poor Clissa—you've never seen anyone die before, have you? It's awful when it's so sudden, I know. I know.” He comforted her tenderly, stroking her long silken hair, patting her, kissing her moist cheeks. Manuel watched in astonishment. He had never seen his father so gentle before in his life.

  But of course Clissa was something special to the old man: the instrument of dynastic succession. She was supposed to be the steadying influence that would guide Manuel to an acceptance of his responsibilities, and she also was charged with the task of perpetuating the name of Krug. A paradox, there: Krug treated his daughter-in-law as though she were as fragile as an ancient porcelain doll, but yet he expected a stream of sons shortly to begin to flowing from her loins.

  To his guests Krug now said, “Too bad we end the tour this way. But at least we saw everything before it happened. Senator, gentlemen, I'm grateful that you came to see my tower. I trust you come again when it's a little more finished. Now we go, eh?”

  Clissa seemed calmer. It troubled Manuel that not he but his father had been the one to soothe her.

  Reaching out to take her, he said, “I think Clissa and I will head back to California. A couple of hours together on the beach and she'll be steadier. We—”

  “You are expected this afternoon in Duluth,” said Krug stonily.

  “I—”

  “Send for household androids to fetch her,” he said. “You go to the plant.” Turning away from Manuel, Krug nodded to his departing guests and said to Leon Spaulding, “New York. The upper office.”

  * * * *

  1138, the tower. Nearly everyone was gone, now: Krug, Spaulding, Quenelle, and Vargas back to New York, Fearon and Buckleman to Geneva, Maledetto to Los Angeles, Thor Watchman down to see about the injured androids. Two of Manuel's household betas had arrived to take Clissa back to Mendocino. Just before she stepped into the transmat with them, Manuel embraced her lightly, kissing her cheek.

  “When will you come?” she asked.

  “Early this evening, I guess. We have a date in Hong Kong, I think. I'll get back in time to dress for dinner.”

  “Not sooner?”

  “I have Duluth to do. The android plant.”

  “Get out of it.”

  “I can't. You heard him tell me to go. Anyway, the old man's right: it's about time I saw it.”

  “What a bore. An afternoon in a factory!”

  “I have to. Sleep well, Clissa. Wake up with this ugly thing that happened here left far behind. Shall I program an erasure wire for you?”

  “You know I hate having my memory tampered with, Manuel.”

  “Yes. I'm sorry. You'd better go, now.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you,” he told her. He nodded to the androids. They took her arms and led her into the transmat.

  He was alone, except for a couple of unknown betas who had arrived to take charge of the control center in Watchman's absence. He walked coolly past them into Watchman's private office at the rear of the dome, pushed the door shut, and nudged the input of the telephone. The screen lit up. Manuel tapped out the call numbers of a scrambler code, and the screen responded with the abstract pattern that told him his privacy was guaranteed. Then he punched the number of Lilith Meson, alpha, in the android quarter of Stockholm.

  Lilith's image glowed on the screen: an elegantly constructed woman with lustrous blue-black hair, a high-bridged nose, platinum eyes. Her smile dazzled. “Manuel? Where are you calling from?” she asked.

  “The tower. I'm going to be late.”

  “Very late?”

  “Two or three hours.”

  “I'll shrivel. I'll fade.”

  “I can't help it, Lilith. His majesty commands me to visit the Duluth android plant. I must go.”

  “Even though I've rearranged a week's shifts to be with you tonight?”

  “I can't tell him that,” Manuel said. “Look, it's only a few hours. Will you forgive me?”

  “What else can I do? But how dull to have to go sniffing in vats when you could be—”

  “It's known as noblesse oblige. Anyway, I've become a little curious about the android facts of life since you and I—since we—Do you know, I've never been inside one of the plants?”

  “Never?”

  “Never. Wasn't ever interested. Still not interested, except in one special angle of it: here's my chance to find out what sort of things are under that lovely scarlet skin of yours. Here's my chance to see how Krug Synthetics makes Liliths by the batch.”

  “Are you sure you really want to know?” she asked, dropping her voice into cello range.

  “I want to know all there is to know about you,” Manuel said earnestly. “For better, for worse. So forgive me for coming late, will you? I'll be taking a Lilith lesson in Duluth. And I love you.”

  “I love you,” said Alpha Lilith Meson to the son of Simeon Krug.

  * * * *

  1158, Duluth. The main Earthside plant of Krug Synthetics, Ltd.—there were four others, on as many continents, and several offworld plants—occupied a vast sleek block of a building nearly a kilometer long, flanking the shore of Lake Superior. Within that building, operating virtually as independent provinces, were the laboratories that formed the stations of the way in the creation of synthetic life.

  Manuel now toured those stations of the way like a visiting proconsul, weighing the work of the underlings. He rode in a plush bubblecar as seductively comfortable as a womb, which glided along the fluid track that ran the length of the building, high above the operations floor. Beside him in the car was the factory's human supervisor, a neat, crisp, fortyish man named Nolan Bompensiero, who, although he was one of the key men in the Krug domain, sat tense and rigid, in obvious fear of Manuel's displeasure. He did not suspect how resentful Manuel was of this assignment, how bored he was, how little he cared to brandish power by making trouble for his father's employees. Manuel had only Lilith on his mind. This is the place where Lilith was born, he thought. This is the way that Lilith was born.

  At each section of the factory an alpha—the section supervisor—entered the car, riding with Manuel and Bompensiero to the end of his own zone of responsibility. Most of the work at the plant was under the direction of alphas; the entire giant installation employed only half a dozen humans. Each alpha looked as tense as Bompensiero himself.

  Manuel passed first through the rooms where the high-energy nucleotides constituting DNA, the basic building-block of life, were synthesized. He gave half-hearted attention to Bompensiero's quick, nervous spiel, tuning in only on an occasional phrase.

  “—water, ammonia, methane, hydrogen cyanide, and other chemicals—we use an electrical discharge to stimulate the formation of complex organic compounds—the addition of phosphorus—

  “—a simple process, almost primitive, don't you think? It follows the line of the classic Miller experiment of 1952—medieval science, right down there on the floor—

  “—the DNA determines the structure of the proteins in the cell. The typical living cell requires hundreds of proteins, most of them acting as enzymes, biological catalysts—

  “—a typical protein is a molecular chain containing about two hundred amino acid subunits linked together in a specific sequence—

  “—the code for each protein is carried by a single gene, which in turn is a particular region on the linear DNA molecule—all of this of course you must know, forgive me for restating such elementary material, forgive me, I only wish to—”

  “Of course,” Manuel said.

  —and here, in these vats, we make the nucleotides and join them into dinucleotides, and string them together to form DNA, the nucleic acid th
at determines the composition of—”

  Lilith, from those vats? Lilith, from that stinking brew of chemicals?

  The car drifted smoothly forward. An alpha supervisor departed; another alpha, bowing stiffly, smiling fixedly, entered.

  Bompensiero said, “We design the DNA templates, the blueprints for the life-form we wish to create, but then the task is to make the living matter self-replicating, since surely we cannot build an android cell by cell ourselves. We must reach what we call the takeoff stage. But naturally you know that the DNA is not directly involved in protein synthesis, that another nucleic acid acts as an intermediary, RNA, which can be coded to carry the genetic messages laid down in the DNA—

  “—four bases or chemical subunits, arranged in varying combinations, form the code—adenine, guanine, uracil, cytosine—”

  “—in these vats—you can almost imagine the chains forming—the RNA transmits the DNA instructions—protein synthesis is conducted by cellular particles called ribosomes, which are about half protein and half RNA—adenine, guanine, uracil, cytosine—the code for each protein is carried by a single gene, and the code, inscribed on messenger-RNA, takes the form of a series of triplets of the four RNA bases—you follow?”

  “Yes, certainly,” said Manuel, seeing Lilith swimming in the vats.

  “As here. Adenine, adenine, cytosine. Cytosine, cytosine, guanine. Uracil, uracil, guanine. AAC, CCG, UUG—it's almost liturgical, isn't it, Mr. Krug? We have sixty-four combinations of RNA bases with which we can specify the twenty amino acids—quite an adequate vocabulary for the purpose! I could chant the whole list for you as we travel this hall. AAA, AAG, AAC, AAU. AGA, AGG, AGC, AGU. ACA—”

  The alpha who was traveling with them at the moment coughed loudly and clutched his waist, grimacing.

  “Yes?” Bompensiero said.

  “A sudden spasm,” said the alpha. “A digestive difficulty. Pardon me.”

  Bompensiero returned his attention to Manuel. “Well, no need to run down all the sequences. And so we put together the proteins, you see, building up living molecules in precisely the way it happens in nature, except that in nature the process is triggered by the fusion of the sexual gametes, whereas we synthesize the genetic building-blocks. We follow the human genetic pattern, naturally, since we want a human-looking end product, but if we wished we could synthesize pigs, toads, horses, Centaurine proteoids, any form of life we chose. We pick our code, we arrange our RNA, and presto! The pattern of our final product emerges precisely as desired!”

  “Of course,” said the alpha, “we don't follow the human genetic code in every respect.”

  Bompensiero nodded eagerly. “My friend here brings up a vital point. In the earliest days of android synthesis your father decided that, for obvious sociological reasons, androids must be instantly identifiable as synthetic creations. Thus we introduce certain mandatory genetic modifications. The red skin, the absence of body hair, the distinctive epidermal texture, are all designed mainly for identification purposes. Then there are the modifications programmed for greater bodily efficiency. If we can play the role of gods, why not do it to the best effect?”

  “Why not?” Manuel said.

  “Away with the appendix, then. Rearrange the bony structure of the back and pelvis to eliminate all the troubles that our faulty construction causes. Sharpen the senses. Program for optimum fat-versus-muscle balance, for physical esthetics, for endurance, for speed, for reflexes. Why make ugly androids? Why make sluggish ones? Why make clumsy ones?”

  “Would you say,” Manuel asked casually, “that androids are superior to ordinary human beings?”

  Bompensiero looked uneasy. He hesitated as if trying to weigh his response for all possible political impacts, not knowing where Manuel might stand on the vexed question of android civil rights. At length he said, “I think there's no doubt about their physical superiority. We've programmed them from the moment of conception to be strong, handsome, healthy. To some extent we've been doing that with humans for the past couple of generations, too, but we don't have the same degree of control, or at least we haven't tried to obtain the same degree of control, on account of humanistic objections, the opposition of the Witherers, and so forth. However, when you consider that androids are sterile, that the intelligence of most of them is quite low, then even the alphas have demonstrated—pardon me, my friend—relatively little creative ability—”

  “Yes,” Manuel said. “Certainly.” He pointed toward the distant floor. “What's going on right down there?”

  “Those are the replication vats,” said Bompensiero. “The chains of basic nucleic matter undergo division and extension there. Each vat contains what amounts to a soup of newly conceived zygotes at the takeoff stage, produced by our build-up procedures of protein synthesis instead of by the sexual process of the union of natural gametes. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Quite,” said Manuel, staring in fascination at the quiescent pink fluid in the great circular tanks. He imagined he could see tiny specks of living matter in them; an illusion, he knew.

  Their car rolled silently onward.

  “These are the nursery chambers,” Bompensiero said, when they had entered the next section and were looking down on rows of shining metal vaults linked by an intricate webwork of pipes. “Essentially, they're artificial wombs, each one enclosing a dozen embryos in a solution of nutrients. We produce alphas, betas, and gammas here in Duluth—a full android range. The qualitative differences between the three levels are built into them during the original process of synthesis, but we also supply different nutritional values. These are the alpha chambers, just below to our left. To the right are the betas. And the next room, coming up—entirely gammas.”

  “What's your distribution curve?”

  “One alpha to 100 betas to 1000 gammas. Your father worked out the ratios in the beginning and they've never been altered. The distribution precisely fits human needs.”

  “My father is a man of great foresight,” said Manuel vaguely.

  He wondered what the world would have been like today if the Krug cartel had not given it androids. Perhaps not very different. Instead of a small, culturally homogeneous human elite served by computers, mechanical robots, and hordes of obliging androids, there might be a small, culturally homogeneous human elite served only by computers and mechanical robots. Either way, twenty-third century man would be living a life of ease.

  Certain determining trends had established themselves in the past few hundred years, long before the first clumsy android had staggered from its vat. Primarily, starting late in the twentieth century, there had been the vast reduction in human population. War and general anarchy had accounted for hundreds of millions of civilians in Asia and Africa; famine had swept those continents, and South America and the Near East as well; in the developed nations, social pressures and the advent of foolproof contraception had produced the same effects. A checking of the rate of population growth had been followed, within two generations, by an absolute and cascading decline in actual population.

  The erosion and almost total disappearance of the proletariat was one historically unprecedented outcome of this. Since the population decline had been accompanied by the replacement of men by machines in nearly all forms of menial labor and some not so menial, those who had no skills to contribute to the new society were discouraged from reproducing. Unwanted, dispirited, displaced, the uneducated and the ineducable dwindled in number from generation to generation; and this Darwinian process was aided, subtly and then openly, by well-meaning officials who saw to it that the blessings of contraception were denied to no citizen. By the time the masses were a minority, genetic laws reinforced the trend. Those who had proven themselves unfit might not reproduce at all; those who merely came up to norms might have two children per couple, but no more; only those who exceeded norms could add to the world's human stock. In this way population remained stable. In this way the clever inherited the earth.

  The res
haping of society was worldwide. The advent of transmat travel had turned the globe into a village; and the people of that village spoke the same language—English—and thought the same thoughts. Culturally and genetically they tended toward mongrelization. Quaint pockets of the pure past were maintained here and there as tourist attractions, but by the end of the twenty-first century there were few differences in appearance, attitudes, or culture among the citizens of Karachi, Cairo, Minneapolis, Athens, Addis Ababa, Rangoon, Peking, Canberra, and Novosibirsk. The transmat also made national boundaries absurd, and old concepts of sovereignty melted.

  But this colossal social upheaval, bringing with it universal leisure, grace, and comfort, had also brought an immense and permanent labor shortage. Computer-directed robots had proved themselves inadequate to many tasks: robots made excellent street-sweepers and factory workers, but they were less useful as valets, baby-sitters, chefs, and gardeners. Build better robots, some said; but others dreamed of synthetic humans to look after their needs. The technique did not seem impossible. Ectogenesis—the artificial nurturing of embryos outside the womb, the hatching of babies from stored ova and sperm—had long been a reality, chiefly as a convenience for women who did not wish to have their genes go down to oblivion, but who wanted to avoid the risks and burdens of pregnancy. Ectogenes, born of man and woman at one remove, were too thoroughly human in origin to be suitable as tools; but why not carry the process to the next step, and manufacture androids?

  Krug had done that. He had offered the world synthetic humans, far more versatile than robots, who were long-lived, capable, complex in personality, and totally subservient to human needs. They were purchased, not hired, and by general consent they were regarded by law as property, not persons. They were slaves, in short. Manuel sometimes thought it might have been simpler to make do with robots. Robots were things that could be thought of as things and treated as things. But androids were things that looked uncomfortably like people, and they might not acquiesce in their status of thinghood forever.