Tower of Glass (20 page)

He felt impossibly absurd and awkward; he felt cut off from his own identity, unable to return to or even to see the Thor Watchman he knew and understood. From the first, almost from the time of leaving the Vat, he had regarded himself as older, wiser, more competent, more confident, than his fellow alphas: a man who comprehended the world and his place in it. But now? Lilith had reduced him in half an hour to something clumsy, naive, foolish... and impotent.

She put her hand to his loins. “Since your organ hasn’t become rigid,” she said, “obviously it wasn’t very exciting for you when I—” She paused. “Oh. Yes.
Now
do you see?”

“It happened when you touched me.”

“That isn’t awfully surprising. So you like it, then? Yes. Yes.” Her fingers moved cunningly. Watchman had to admit that he found the sensation interesting, and that sudden startling awakening of his maleness in her hands was a remarkable effect. But yet he remained outside himself, a detached and remote observer, no more involved than if he were attending a lecture on the mating habits of Centaurine proteoids.

She was close against him, again. Her body moved, sliding from side to side, writhing a little, quivering with a barely suppressed tension. He clasped her in his arms. He ran his hands over her skin once more.

She drew him to the floor.

He lay atop her, bracing himself with knees and elbows so that his full weight would not descend on her. Her legs surrounded him; her thighs clamped tight against his hips; her hand slipped between their bodies, seized him, guided him into her. She began to thrust her pelvis up and down. He caught the rhythm of it shortly, and matched her thrusts with thrusts of his own.

So this is sex, he thought.

He wondered how a woman felt about having something long and hard pushed into her body like that. Evidently they enjoyed it; Lilith was gasping and trembling in what seemed like delight. But it struck him as an odd thing to covet. And was pushing yourself into a woman all that thrilling? Was this what the poetry was about, was this what men had fought duels over and renounced kingdoms for?

After awhile he said, “How will we know when it’s over?”

Her eyes opened. He was unable to tell whether there was fury or laughter in them. “You’ll know,” she said. “Just keep moving!”

He kept moving.

The motions of her hips grew more violent. Her face became twisted, distorted, almost ugly; some sort of interior storm had broken and was raging within her. Muscles throbbed randomly throughout her body. At the place where he was joined to her, he could feel her grasping him with playful inner spasms.

Abruptly he felt a spasm of his own, and ceased to catalog the effects their union had produced in her. He closed his eyes. He fought for breath. His heart raced frantically; his skin blazed. He tightened his grip on her and pressed his face into the hollow between her cheek and her shoulder. A series of jolting impacts rocked him.

She was right: it was easy to tell when it was over.

How fast the ecstasy drained away! He could barely remember now the powerful sensations of sixty seconds ago. He felt cheated, as though he had been promised a feast and had been given only dream-food to eat. Was that all? Like the surf trickling away after a brief surge of tide? And ashes on the beach. And ashes on the beach. It is nothing at all, Thor Watchman thought. It is a fraud.

He rolled free of her.

She lay with her head lolling back, her eyes closed, her mouth slack; she was sweat-dappled and wan-looking. It seemed to him that he had never seen this woman before. A moment after he had left her, her eyes opened. She propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him, almost shyly, perhaps.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.” He looked away.

“How do you feel?”

Watchman shrugged. He searched for the right words and could not find them. Defeated, he said, “Tired, mostly. Hollow. Is that right? I feel—hollow.”

“Normal. After coitus every animal is sad. Old Latin proverb. You’re an animal, Thor. Don’t forget it.”

“A weary animal.” Ashes on the cold beach. The tide very low. “Did you enjoy it, Lilith?”

“Couldn’t you see? No, I suppose you didn’t. I enjoyed. Very much.”

He put his hand lightly on her thigh. “I’m glad. But I’m still baffled.”

“By what?”

“The whole thing. The pattern, the constellation of events. Pushing. Pulling. Sweating. Groaning. The tickle in the groin, and then it’s over. I—”

“No,” she said. “Don’t intellectualize. Don’t analyze. You must have been expecting more than is really there. It’s only
fun,
Thor. It’s what people do to be happy together. That’s all. That’s all. It’s not a cosmic experience.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just a dumb android who doesn’t—”

“Don’t. You’re a person, Thor.”

He realized he was hurting her by his refusal to have been overwhelmed by their coupling. He was hurting himself. Slowly he got to his feet. His mood was wintry; he felt like an empty vessel lying in the snow. He had known a flash of joy, he thought, right at the moment of discharge; but was that instant of lightning worth anything if this dreary gloom always came afterward?

She had meant well. She had wanted to make him more human.

He lifted her, pulled her against him for a moment, kissed her glancingly on the cheek, cupped one of her breasts in his band. He said, “We’ll do this again some time, all right?”

“Whenever you say.”

“It was very strange for me, the first time. It’ll get better. I know it will.”

“It will, Thor. The first time is always strange.”

“I think I’d better go now.”

“If you have to.”

“I’d better. But I’ll see you again soon.”

“Yes.” She touched his arm. “And in the meantime—I’ll start moving along the lines we discussed. I’ll take Manuel to Gamma Town.”

“Good.”

“Krug be with you, Thor.”

“Krug be with you.”

He began to dress.

23

 
And Krug said, There shall be this one difference forever upon you.

That the Children of the Womb shall come always from the Womb, and the Children of the Vat come always from the Vat. And it shall not be given to you to bring forth your young from your bodies, as is done among the Children of the Womb.

And this shall be so in order that your lives may flow only from Krug, that to him alone the glory of your creation be reserved, world without end.

24

December 20, 2218.

At 800 meters the tower dominates arid overpowers. There is no resisting its immensity: one steps from the transmat by day or by night, and one is struck dumb by that vaulting shaft of gleaming glass. The solitude of its surroundings lends awesomeness to its height.

It has passed the halfway mark now.

Lately there have been many accidents, born of haste. A pair of workers fell from the summit; an electrician, spraying connectors improperly along a partition, sent a lethal shock through five gammas hoisting cable; two ascending scooprods collided, at a cost of six lives; Alpha Euclid Planner narrowly avoided serious injury when a powerpool backup sent a monstrous surge of maximum-entropy data through the main computer while he was jacked in; three betas were dumped 400 meters down an interior service-access core when a scaffold collapsed. The construction work thus far has caused the destruction of nearly thirty androids. But there are thousands employed at the tower and the work is hazardous and unusual; no one considers the accident rate extraordinarily high.

The first thirty meters of the tachyon-beam broadcast apparatus is virtually finished. Technicians daily test its structural integrity. It will not be possible, of course, to generate tachyons until the entire enormous accelerator track has been completed, but putting together the individual components of the mighty system has an interest of its own, and Krug spends most of his time at the tower watching the tests. Colored lights flash; indicator panels hum and whistle; dials glow; needles quiver. Krug applauds each positive result enthusiastically. He brings hordes of guests. In the last three weeks he has come to the tower with Niccolò Vargas, with his daughter-in-law Clissa, with twenty-nine different members of Congress, with eleven leaders of industry, with sixteen world-famed representatives of the arts. There is unanimous praise for the tower. Even those who perhaps inwardly may think of it as a titanic folly cannot withhold their admiration for its elegance, its beauty, its magnitude. A folly, too, can be wonderful, and no one who has seen Krug’s tower denies its wonder. Nor are there so many who think it is folly to notify the stars that man exists.

Manuel Krug has not been seen at the tower since early in November. Krug explains that his son is busy supervising the complexities of the Krug corporate domain. He is assuming greater responsibilities every month. He is, after all, the heir apparent.

25

 
Last time I went to Lilith she said, Next time you come let’s do something a little different, all right?

Both of us naked after loving. My cheek on her breasts.

Different how?

To get out of the flat a little. To go around as a tourist and see Stockholm. The android quarter. To see how the people live, the androids. The gammas. Wouldn’t you want to do that?

And I said, a little wary, Why should I? Wouldn’t you rather spend the time with me?

She played with the hair on my chest. Such a beast, I am, so primitive.

She said, We live so cloistered here. You come, we have sex, you leave. We never go anywhere together. I’d like you to come outside with me. Part of your education. I have this drive to educate people, did you know that, Manuel? To open their minds to things. Have you ever been in a Gamma Town?

No.

Do you know what it is?

A place where gammas live, I suppose.

That’s right. But you don’t really know. Not till you’ve been inside one.

Dangerous?

Not really. Nobody will bother alphas in Gamma Town. They bother each other a little, sometimes, but that’s different. We’re high-caste and they keep away from us.

I said, They won’t bother an alpha, maybe, but what about me? They probably don’t want human tourists.

Lilith said she would disguise me. As an alpha. That had a certain kind of spice in it. Temptation. Mystery. It might keep the romance glowing for Lilith and me, playing a game like that. I asked, Won’t they recognize that I’m a fake? And she said, They don’t look too closely at alphas. We have a concept called the social distances. Gammas keep the social distances, Manuel.

All right, then, we’ll go to Gamma Town.

We planned it for a week from that day. I cleared everything with Clissa: going to Luna, I said, won’t be back for a couple of days, yes? No problem. Clissa would spend the time with her friends in New Zealand. I wonder sometimes how much Clissa suspects. Or what she’d say if she knew. I have this temptation to tell her, Clissa, I’ve got an android mistress in Stockholm, she’s way high spectrum in bed and a fantastic body, how do you like that? Clissa isn’t bourgeois, but she’s sensitive. She might feel unwanted. Or maybe Clissa with her great love of the downtrodden androids might say, How kind of you, Manuel, to be making one of them so happy. I don’t mind sharing your love with an android. Bring her to tea some day, won’t you? I wonder.

The day comes. I go to Lilith’s. I go in and she’s naked. Get your clothes off, she says, I grin. Unsubtle. Sure. Sure. I strip and reach for her. She does a little dance step and leaves me holding air.

Not now, silly. When we come back. We’ve got to disguise you now!

She has a spraytube. First she turns it to neutral and covers up the mirror-plate in my forehead. Androids don’t wear such things. The earlobe plugs, she says: out. I take them out and she fills the opening with gel. Then she starts spraying me red. Do I have to shave my body? I ask. No, she says, just don’t take your clothes off in front of anybody. She turns me red all over, with a shiny texture to it. Instant android. Next she gives me a thermal spray from chest to thighs. Going to be cold out there, she says. Androids don’t wear heavy clothes. Here. Here, get dressed.

She hands me a costume. Highneck shirt, skintight pants. Obviously android clothes, and obviously alpha style, too. Fits me like a skin graft. Don’t get an erection, she tells me. You’ll split the trousers. She laughs and rubs me in front.

Where’d you get the clothes?

I borrowed them from Thor Watchman.

You tell him what for?

No, she says, of course not. I just said I needed some. Let’s see how you look, now. Lovely. Lovely! A perfect alpha. Walk across the room. Back. Good. Swagger a little more. Remember, you’re the end-product of human evolution, the finest version of
Homo sapiens
that ever came out of a vat, with all of a human’s strong points and none of his flaws. You’re Alpha—hmm. We need a name, in case anyone asks. Lilith thinks a moment Alpha Leviticus Leaper, she says. What’s your name?