Tower of Glass (8 page)

“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, that 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 reshaping 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.

The car glided through room after room of nursery chambers, silent, darkened, empty but for a few android monitors. Each fledgling android spent the first two years of its life sealed in such a chamber, Bompensiero pointed out, and the rooms through which they were passing contained successive batches ranging in age from a few weeks to more than twenty months. In some rooms the chambers were open; squads of beta technicians were preparing them to receive new infusions of takeoff-level zygotes.

“In this room,” said Bompensiero many rooms later, “we have a group of matured androids ready to be ‘born.’ Do you wish to descend to the floor area and observe the decanting at close range?”

Manuel nodded.

Bompensiero touched a switch. Their car rolled serenely off its track and down a ramp. At the bottom they dismounted. Manuel saw an army of gammas clustered around one of the nursery chambers. “The chamber has been drained of nutrient fluids. For some twenty minutes now the androids within have been breathing air for the first time in their lives. The hatches of the chamber now are being opened. Here: come close, Mr. Krug, come close.”

The chamber was uncovered. Manuel peered in.

He saw a dozen full-grown androids, six male, six female, sprawled limply on the metal floor. Their jaws were slack, their eyes were blank, their arms and legs moved feebly. They seemed helpless, vacant, vulnerable.
Lilith,
he thought. Lilith!

Bompensiero, at his elbow, whispered, “In the two years between takeoff and decanting, the android reaches full physical maturity—a process that takes humans thirteen to fifteen years. This is another of the genetic modifications introduced by your father in the interests of economy. We produce no infant androids here.”

Manuel said, “Didn’t I hear somewhere that we turn out a line of android babies to be raised as surrogates by human women who can’t—”

“
Please
,” Bompensiero said sharply. “We don’t discuss——” He cut himself short, as if remembering who it was he had just reprimanded, and said in a more moderate way, “I know very little about what you mention. We have no such operations in this plant.”

Gammas were lifting the dozen newborn androids from the nursery chamber and carrying them to gaping machines that seemed part wheelchair, part suit of armor. The males were lean and muscular, the females high-breasted and slim. But there was something hideous about their mindlessness. Totally passive, utterly soul-empty, the moist, naked androids offered no response as they were sealed one by one into these metallic receptacles. Only their faces remained visible, looking out without expression through transparent visors.

Bompensiero explained, “They don’t have the use of their muscles yet. They don’t know how to stand, to walk, to do anything. These training devices will stimulate muscular development. A month inside one and an android can handle itself physically. Now, if we return to our car—”

“These androids I’ve just seen,” Manuel said. “They’re gammas, of course?”

“Alphas.”

Manuel was stunned. “But they seemed so... so...” He faltered. “Moronic.”

“They are newly born,” said Bompensiero. “Should they come out of the nurseries ready to run computers?”

They returned to the car.

Lilith!

Manuel saw young androids taking their first shambling steps, and tumbling, and laughing, and getting to their feet and doing it better the second time. He visited a classroom where the subject being taught was bowel control. He watched slumbering betas undergoing personality imprints: a soul was being etched into each unformed mind. He donned a helmet and listened to a language tape. The education of an android, he was told, lasted one year for a gamma, two for a beta, four for an alpha. The maximum, then, was six years from conception to full adulthood. He had never fully appreciated the swiftness of it all before. Somehow the new knowledge made androids seem infinitely less human to him. Suave, authoritative, commanding Thor Watchman was something like nine or ten years old, Manuel realized. And the lovely Lilith Meson was—what? Seven? Eight?

Manuel felt a sudden powerful urge to escape from this place.

“We have a group of betas just about to leave the factory,” said Bompensiero. “They are undergoing their final checkout today, with tests in linguistic precision, coordination, motor response, metabolic adjustment, and several other aspects. Perhaps you would care to inspect them yourself and personally “

“No,” Manuel said. “It’s been fascinating. But I’ve taken up too much of your time already, and I have an appointment elsewhere, so I really must—”

Bompensiero did not look grieved to be rid of him. “As you wish,” he said obligingly. “But of course, we remain at your service whenever you choose to visit us again, and—”

“Where is the transmat cubicle, please?”

* * *

2241, Stockholm.
Jumping westward to Europe, Manuel lost the rest of the day. Dark, icy evening had descended here; the stars were sharp, and a sleety wind ruffled the “waters of Malaren. To foil any possibility of being traced he had jumped to the public transmat cubicle in the lobby of the wondrous old Grand Hotel. Now, shivering, he walked briskly through the autumnal gloom to another cubicle outside the gray bulk of the Royal Opera, put his thumb to the charge- plate, and bought a jump to Stockholm’s Baltic side, emerging in the mellow, venerable residential district of Östermalm. This was the android quarter now. He hurried down Birger Jarlsgaten to the once-splendid nineteenth-century apartment building where Lilith lived. Pausing outside, he looked about carefully, saw that the streets were empty, and darted into the building. A robot in the lobby scanned him and asked his purpose in a flat, froglike voice. “Visiting Lilith Meson, alpha,” Manuel said. The robot raised no objection. Manuel had his choice of getting to her flat by liftshaft or by stairs. He took the stain. Musty smells pursued him and shadows danced alongside him all the way to the fifth floor.

Lilith greeted him in a sumptuous, clinging, floor-length high-spectrum gown. Since it was nothing more than a mono- molecular film, it left no contour of her body concealed. She drifted forward, arms outstretched, lips parted, breasts heaving, whispering his name. He reached for her.

He saw her as a speck drifting in a vat.

He saw her as a mass of replicating nucleotides.

He saw her naked and wet and vacant-eyed, shambling out of her nursery chamber.