Tower of Glass Read online

  The red arrow of an alarm cut across his consciousness.

  Construction accident. Android blood spilling on the frozen ground.

  A twitch of his mind gave him close focus. A scooprod had failed on the northern face. A glass block had fallen from the 90-meter level. It lay slightly skewed, one end buried about a meter deep in the earth, the other slightly above the ground level. A fissure ran like a line of frost through its clear depths. Legs stuck out from the side closest to the tower. A few meters away lay an injured android, writhing desperately. Three lift-beetles were scurrying toward the scene of the accident; a fourth had already arrived and had its steel prongs under the massive block.

  Watchman unjacked himself, shivering in the first moment of the pain of separation from the data-flow. A wallscreen over his head showed the accident vividly. Clissa Krug had turned away, head against her husband's breast; Manuel looked sickened, his father irritated. The other visitors seemed more puzzled than disturbed. Watchman found himself peering into Leon Spaulding's icy face. Spaulding was a small, pared-down man, all but fleshless. In the curious clarity of his shock Watchman was aware of the widely separated hairs of the ectogene's stiff black mustache.

  “Coordination failure,” Watchman said crisply. “The computer seems to have misread a stress function and let a block drop.”

  “You were overriding the computer at that moment, weren't you?” Spaulding asked. “Let's put blame where blame belongs.”

  The android would not play that game. “Excuse me,” he said. “There have been injuries and probably fatalities. I must go.”

  He hurried toward the door.

  “—inexcusable carelessness—” Spaulding muttered.

  Watchman went out. As he sprinted toward the accident site, he began to pray.

  5

  “New York,” Krug said. “The upper office.”

  He and Spaulding entered the transmat cubicle. The lambent green transmat field pulsed up from the floor aperture, forming a curtain dividing the cubicle in two. The ectogene set the coordinates. The hidden power generators of the transmat were linked directly to the main generator, spinning endlessly on its poles somewhere beneath the Atlantic, condensing the theta force that made transmat travel possible. Krug did not bother to check the coordinates Spaulding had set. He trusted his staff. A minor abscissa distortion and the atoms of Simeon Krug would be scattered irrecoverably to the cold winds, but he unhesitatingly stepped into the glow of green.

  There was no sensation. Krug was destroyed; a stream of tagged wavicles was hurled several thousand kilometers to a tuned receiver; and Krug was reconstituted. The transmat field ripped a man's body into subatomic units so swiftly that no neural system could possibly register the pain; and the restoration to life came with equal speed. Whole and undamaged, Krug emerged, with Spaulding beside him, in the transmat cubicle of his office.

  “Look after Quenelle,” Krug said. “She'll be arriving downstairs. Amuse her. I don't want to be disturbed for at least an hour.”

  Spaulding exited. Krug closed his eyes.

  The falling of the block had upset him greatly. It was not the first accident during the building of the tower; it probably would not be the last. Lives had been lost today: only android lives, true, but lives all the same. The waste of life, the waste of energy, the waste of time, infuriated him. How would the tower rise if blocks fell? How would he send word across the heavens that man existed, that he mattered, if there were no tower? How would he ask the questions that had to be asked?

  Krug ached. Krug felt close to despair at the immensity of his self-imposed task.

  In times of fatigue or tension he became morbidly conscious of the presence of his body as a prison engulfing his soul. The folds of belly-flesh, the island of perpetual rigidity at the base of the neck, the tiny tremor of the upper left eyelid, the slight constant pressure on the bladder, the rawness in the throat, the bubbling in the kneecap, every intimation of mortality rang in him like a chime. His body often seemed absurd to him, a mere bag of meat and bone and blood and feces and miscellaneous ropes and cords and rags, sagging under time's assault, deteriorating from year to year and from hour to hour. What was noble about such a mound of protoplasm? The preposterousness of fingernails! The idiocy of nostrils! The foolishness of elbows! Yet under the armored skull ticked the watchful gray brain, like a bomb buried in mud. Krug scorned his flesh, but he felt only awe for his brain, and for the human brain in the abstract. The true Krugness of him was in that soft folded mass of tissue, nowhere else, not in the guts, not in the groin, not in the chest, but in the mind. The body rotted while its owner still wore it; the mind within soared to the farthest galaxies.

  “Massage,” Krug said.

  The timber and tone of his command caused a smoothly vibrating table to extrude itself from the wall. Three female androids, kept constantly on call, entered the room. Their supple bodies were bare; they were standard gamma models, who could have been triplets but for the usual programmed minor somatotype divergences. They had small high-set breasts, flat bellies, narrow waists, flaring hips, full buttocks. They had hair on their heads and they had eyebrows, but otherwise they were without body hair, which gave them a certain sexless look; yet the groove of sex was inscribed between their legs, and Krug, if his tastes inclined that way, could part those legs and find within them a reasonable imitation of passion. His tastes had never inclined that way. But Krug had deliberately designed an element of sensuality into his androids. He had given them functional—if sterile—genitals, just as he had given them proper—though needless—navels. He wanted his creations to look human (aside from the necessary modifications) and to do most human things. His androids were not robots. He had chosen to create synthetic humans, not mere machines.

  The three gammas efficiently stripped him and worked him over with their cunning fingers. Krug lay belly-down; tirelessly they plucked at his flesh and toned his muscles. He stared across the emptiness of his office at the images on the distant wall.

  The room was furnished simply, even starkly: a lengthy rectangle that contained a desk, a data terminal, a small somber sculpture, and a dark drape that would, at the touch of a repolarizing stud, reveal the panorama of New York City far below. The lighting, indirect and subdued, kept the office in eternal twilight. On one wall, though, there blazed a pattern in brilliant yellow luminescence:

  * *

  * * * *

  *

  * *

  * * * * *

  *

  * * *

  *

  It was the message from the stars.

  Vargas’ observatory had picked it up first as a series of faint radio pulses at 900 megacycles; two quick beats, a pause, four beats, a pause, one beat, and so on. The pattern was repeated a thousand times over a span of two days, then halted. A month later it showed up at 1421 megacycles, the 21-centimeter hydrogen frequency, for another thousand turns. A month after that it came in both at half and at double that frequency, a thousand of each. Still later, Vargas was able to detect it optically, riding in on an intense laser beam at a 5000-angstrom wavelength. The pattern was always the same, clusters of brief bursts of information: 2 ... 4 ... 1 ... 2 ... 5 ... 1 ... 3 ... 1. Each subcomponent of the series was separated from the next by an appreciable gap, and there was a much larger gap between each repetition of the entire group of pulse-clusters.

  Surely it was some message. To Krug, the sequence 2-4-1-2-5-1-3-1 had become a sacred number, the opening symbols of a new kabbalah. Not only was the pattern emblazoned on his wall, but the touch of his finger would send the sound of the alien signal whispering through the room in any of several audible frequencies, and the sculpture beside his desk was primed to emit the sequence in brilliant flashes of coherent light.

  The signal obsessed him. His universe now revolved about the quest to make reply. At night he stood beneath the stars, dizzied by the cascade of light, and looked to the galaxies, thinking, I am Krug, I am Krug, here I wait,
speak to me again! He admitted no possibility that the signal from the stars might be other than a consciously directed communication. He had turned all of his considerable assets to the task of answering.

  —But isn't there any chance that the “message” might be some natural phenomenon?

  None. The persistence with which it arrived in such a variety of media indicates a guiding consciousness behind it. Someone is trying to tell us something.

  —What significance do those numbers have? Are they some kind of galactic pi?

  We see no obvious mathematical relevance. They do not form any apparent intelligible arithmetical progression. Cryptographers have supplied us with at least fifty equally ingenious suggestions, which makes all fifty equally suspect. We think that the numbers were chosen entirely at random.

  —What good is a message that doesn't have any comprehensible content?

  The message is its own content: a yodel across the galaxies. It tells us, Look, we are here, we know how to transmit, we are capable of rational thinking, we seek contact with you!

  —Assuming you're right, what kind of reply do you plan to make?

  I plan to say, Hello, hello, we hear you, we detect your message, we send greetings, we are intelligent, we are human beings, we wish no longer to be alone in the cosmos.

  —In what language will you tell them this?

  In the language of random numbers. And then, in not-so-random numbers. Hello, hello, 3.14159, did you hear that, 4.14159, the ratio of diameter to circumference?

  —And how will you say this to them? With lasers? With radio waves?

  Too slow, too slow. I cannot wait for electromagnetic radiations to go forth and come back. We will talk to the stars with tachyon-beams, and I will tell the star-folk about Simeon Krug.

  Krug trembled on the table. The android masseuses clawed his flesh, pounded him, drove knuckles into his massive muscles. Were they trying to tap the mystic numbers into his bones? 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 3-1? Where was the missing 2? Even if it had been sent, what would the sequence mean, 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 2-3-1? Nothing significant. Random. Random. Meaningless clusters of raw information. Nothing more than numbers arrayed in an abstract pattern, and yet they carried the most important message the universe ever had known:

  We are here.

  We are here.

  We are here.

  We call out to you.

  And Krug would answer. He shivered with pleasure at the thought of his tower completed and the tachyon-beams pouring out into the galaxy. Krug would reply, Krug the rapacious, Krug the insensitive moneyman, Krug the dollar-hungry boor, Krug the mere industrialist, Krug the fat peasant, Krug the ignorant, Krug the coarse. I! Me! Krug! Krug! Krug!

  “Out,” he snapped to the androids. “Finished!”

  The girls scurried away. Krug rose, slowly resumed his garments, walked across the room to run his hands over the pattern of yellow lights.

  “Messages?” he said. “Visitors?”

  The head and shoulders of Leon Spaulding appeared in midair, glistening against the invisible webwork backdrop of a sodium-vapor projector. “Dr. Vargas is here,” the ectogene said. “He's waiting in the planetarium. Will you see him?”

  “Naturally. I'll go up. And Quenelle?”

  “She went to the lake house in Uganda. She'll wait for you there.”

  “And my son?”

  “Paying his inspection call on the Duluth plant. Do you have instructions for him?”

  “No,” Krug said. “He knows what he's doing. I'll go to Vargas now.”

  The image of Spaulding winked out. Krug entered his liftshaft and rose swiftly to the domed planetarium on the highest level of the building. Under its coppered roof the slight figure of Niccolò Vargas paced intently. To his left was a display case holding eight kilograms of proteoids from Alpha Centauri V; to his right, a squat cryostat in the frosty depths of which could dimly be seen twenty liters of fluid drawn from Pluto's methane sea.

  Vargas was an intense, fair-skinned little man for whom Krug entertained a respect bordering on awe: a man who had spent every day of his adult life searching for civilization in the stars, and who had mastered all aspects of the problems of interstellar communications. Vargas’ specialty had left its imprint on his features: fifteen years earlier, incautiously exposing himself to the beam of a neutron telescope in a moment of intolerable excitement, Vargas had baked the left side of his face beyond hope of tectogenetic repair. They had regrown his ruined eye, but they had not been able to do much about the decalcification of the underlying bony structure except to shore it up with beryllium-fiber matting, and so part of Vargas’ skull and cheek now had a slumped, shriveled look. Deformities such as that were unusual in an era of easy cosmetic surgery; Vargas, however, had no apparent interest in undergoing further facial reconstruction.

  Vargas smiled his lopsided smile as Krug entered. “The tower is magnificent!” he said.

  “Will be,” Krug corrected.

  “No. No. Already magnificent. A wondrous torso! The sleekness of it, Krug, the bulk, the upward thrust! Do you know what you are building there, my friend? The first cathedral of the galactic age. In thousands of years to come, long after your tower has ceased to function as a communications center, men will go to it, and kneel, and kiss its smooth skin, and bless you for having built it. And not only men.”

  “I like that thought,” said Krug. “A cathedral. I hadn't seen it that way.” Krug caught sight of the data cube in Vargas’ right palm. “What do you have there?”

  “A gift for you.”

  “A gift?”

  “We have tracked the signals to their source,” Vargas said. “I thought you would like to see their home star.”

  Krug lurched forward. “Why did you wait so long to tell me? Why didn't you say something while we were at the tower?”

  “The tower was your show. This is mine. Shall I turn on the cube?”

  Krug gestured impatiently toward the receptor slot. Vargas deftly inserted the cube and activated the scanner. Bluish beams of interrogatory light lanced into the small crystal lattice, mining for the stored bits of information.

  The stars blossomed on the planetarium's ceiling.

  Krug was at home in the galaxy. His eyes picked out familiar landmarks: Sirius, Canopus, Vega, Capella, Arcturus, Betelgeuse, Altair, Fomalhaut, Deneb, the brightest beacons of the heavens, strewn spectacularly across the dome above him. He sought the near stars, those within the dozen-light-year radius that man's stellar probes had reached in his own lifetime: Epsilon Indi, Ross 154, Lalande 21185, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Procyn, 61 Cygni. He looked toward Taurus and found red Aldebaran glowing in the face of the Bull, with the Hyades clustered far behind, and the Pleiades burning in their brilliant shroud. Again and again the pattern on the dome shifted as focuses narrowed, as distances grew. Krug felt thunder in his breast. Vargas had said nothing since the planetarium had come to life.

  “Well?” Krug demanded at last. “What am I supposed to see?”

  “Look toward Aquarius,” said Vargas.

  Krug scanned the northern sky. He followed the familiar track across: Perseus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus, Aquarius. Yes, there was the old Water-Carrier, between the Fishes and the Goat. Krug struggled to recall the name of some major star in Aquarius, but came up with nothing.

  “So?” he asked.

  “Watch. We sharpen the image now.”

  Krug braced himself as the heavens rushed toward him. He could no longer make out the patterns of the constellations; the sky was tumbling, and all order was lost. When the motion ceased, he found himself confronted by a single segment of the galactic sphere, blown up to occupy the whole of the dome. Directly above him was the image of a fiery ring, dark at the core, rimmed by an irregular halo of luminous gas. A point of light glimmered at the nucleus of the ring.

  Vargas said, “This is the planetary nebula NGC 7293 in Aquarius.”

  “And?”

  “It is the source of our signals.�
�

  “How certain is this?”

  “Absolutely,” the astronomer said. “We have parallax observations, a whole series of optical and spectral triangulations, several confirming occultations, and much more. We suspected NGC 7293 as the source from the beginning, but the final data was processed only this morning. Now we are sure.”

  Dry-throated, Krug asked, “How distant?”

  “About 300 light-years.”

  “Not bad. Not bad. Beyond the reach of our probes, beyond the reach of efficient radio contact. But no problem for the tachyon-beam. My tower is justified.”

  “And there still is hope of communication with the senders of the signals,” Vargas said. “What we all feared—that the signals came from some place like Andromeda, that the messages had begun the journey toward us a million years ago or more—”

  “No chance of that now.”

  “No. No chance.”

  “Tell me about this place,” Krug said. “A planetary nebula—what kind of thing is that? How can a nebula be a planet?”

  “Neither a planet nor a nebula,” said Vargas, beginning to pace again. “An unusual body. An extraordinary body.” He tapped the case of Centaurine proteoids. The quasi-living creatures, irritated, began to flow and twine. Vargas said, “This ring that you see is a shell, a bubble of gas, surrounding an O-type star. The stars of this spectral class are blue giants, hot, unstable, remaining on the main sequence only a few million years. Late in their life-cycle some of them undergo a catastrophic upheaval comparable to a nova; they hurl forth the outer layers of their structure, forming a gaseous shell of great size. The diameter of the planetary nebula you see is about 1.3 light years, and it is growing at a rate of perhaps fifteen kilometers a second. The unusual brightness of the shell, let me say, is the result of a fluorescence effect: the central star is producing great quantities of short-wavelength ultraviolet radiation, which is absorbed by the hydrogen of the shell, causing—”