Collected Short Fiction, page 768
Unknown to Krug, androids worldwide worship him as god. A secret temple at the towersite is nearly discovered—Thor Watchman manages to divert attention by inventing an alarm about Krug’s life being in danger. The situation backfires sharply when Krug simultaneously is accosted by two members of the Android Equality Party, a militant organization that has lost faith in Krug as a deity.
Krug’s secretary, misunderstanding the scene, shoots and kills the female android. Watchman cools the ensuing imflammable situation. The secret chapel is moved to a new location—but suddenly around the Earth the Androids are uneasy.
IX
I AM Nick Ssu-ma Lloyd Tennyson Cadge Foster Will Mishima Jed Guilbert and maybe Manuel Krug, maybe. Maybe. A week in the shunt room. You come out, you don’t even know who you are. Manuel Mishima? Cadge Krug? Anyway you can’t be sure. Walk like Lloyd, laugh like Nick, shrug like Will. So on and so on. Everything a blur, a lovely golden haze, sunrise on the desert, like that. Their heads inside your head. Yours inside theirs. Only a week. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. To stop being only me for a while. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Open the box. Jump out. Into them.
Full of funny ideas, now.
Bouncing in the stasis net for 168 hours. Twong and they split you open and you jump out and look for a place to land and you land blong and you’re Nick Ssu-ma, eating roast dog on Taiwan. At dawn in the fog with your aunt. Both naked. She says, touch me here, you do, she laughs, you shiver. Touch me again. Now you laugh, she shivers. Tiny breasts, like Clissa’s. This is our wedding night. With this ring I you do wed, Mrs. Ermine Tennyson, silken thighs, mole in small of back. He sleeps with an android, did you know that? Imagine Manuel doing that. He loves her, so he says. Look. Look here, he loves her, it’s right here. You find your love where you can find it. An android? Well, at least he’s not ashamed or he wouldn’t be in here shunting with us. An android. I almost had one once but I couldn’t. At the last moment. What does it feel going into one? Just like anyone else. They aren’t plastic, you know. Even though there isn’t any hair on it. Sort of incest, though. How? Well, Manuel’s father makes the androids, doesn’t he, so in a way she’s his sister. Very clever. Very, very clever. Cruel bastard. But you like doing it? Of course I do. I’ll show you. Here. Here. Shunt and see.
And he jumps across the net and slides into the slot. Who is he? Jed Ssu-ma? Will Tennyson? We are all one. Prowling my memories of Lilith. I don’t mind. How can I want to keep secrets? My friends. My true friends.
When I was nine years old I Cadge Foster took a toad and cooked it and ate it.
When I was thirteen years old I Will Mishima pissed on the transmat floor because I was scared I wouldn’t get there.
I Lloyd Tennyson put my finger in my sister’s thing she eleven I eight Jed Guilbert fourteen years old pushed a gamma off a loading rack fell eighty meters died squashed I told my father he slipped.
I was ten Nick Ssu-ma a male beta at the back window said to mother he watched you and father in bed my father just smiled my mother had them kill him I Manuel Krug almost thirty years old deceive my wife Clissa with Alpha Lilith Meson whom I love whom I love whom I love of Stockholm she lives on Birger Jarlsgaten Alpha Lilith Meson with breasts and thighs and teeth and elbows with rosy skin whom I love whom I love whom I love no hair on it at all Lilith.
And we shunt and shunt and shunt we hang dangling in the stasis net looping easily from mind to mind, floating, changing skulls as often as we please even though it runs up the charges, and I taste Cadge’s toad and I wet Will’s transmat and I smell Lloyd’s sister on my finger and I kill Jed’s gamma and I lie about Nick’s beta and all of them go to bed with Lilith and they tell me afterward, yes, yes, we really ought to investigate these alpha women, you’re a lucky bastard, Manuel, a lucky lucky lucky bastard.
And I love her
Whom I love
And I see all the little hates and dirtinesses in their souls, my friends, but I see the strengths too, the good things, for it would be awful if we shunted and saw only the cooked toads and the puddles on the transmat floor. I see secret favors and modesties and loyalties and charities. I see how good my friends really are and I worry and I wonder—what do they see in me? Maybe they’ll hate me when we come out of this. We shunt some more. We see what they see in us what we see in us in them.
A week is used up so fast!
Poor Manuel, they say, I never knew it was so bad for him. With all that money and he still feels guilty because he’s got nothing to do with his life. Find a cause, Manuel. Find a cause. Find a cause. I tell them I’m trying. I’m looking.
They say what about the androids?
Should I? What would my father say? If he doesn’t approve.
Don’t worry about him. Do what you think is right. Clissa is in favor of equal rights for androids. If he blows up—let Clissa talk to him before you do. Why should he blow up? He’s made his pile out of androids, now he can afford to let them vote. I bet they’d vote for him. You know all the androids are in love with your father? Yes. Sometimes I think it must be almost like a religion with them. The religion of Krug. Well it makes a sort of sense to worship your creator. Don’t laugh. But I have to laugh. It’s crazy androids bowing down to my father. To idols of him, I bet?
You’re getting off the track, Manuel. If it worries you that you aren’t doing anything important, become a crusader. Equal rights for androids. Up the androids! You bet, up the androids! That’s unworthy of you. You’re probably right.
We hear the gongs and we know our time is up.
We drop out of the net. We slide into our own heads. I’m told they do this part very, very, very, carefully, getting everybody into his own head.
As far as I know I am Manuel Krug.
They ease us out. There is a re-adaptation chamber on the far side of the net. We sit around for three, four hours, getting used to being individuals again. We look at each other strangely. Mostly we don’t look at each other at all. Someone has been laughing too much with my mouth.
In the re-adaptation chamber they have more of those new toys, the blunt-edged cubes. Mine sends me a series of messages.
THE TIME IS NOW 0900 HOURS IN KARACHI
IS THIS THE FIRST TIME YOU’VE MET YOURSELF?
YOUR FATHER PROBABLY WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU
ONLY THE TRUE ANSWERS ARE FALSE
THEY HAVE SETTLED THE CASE OUT OF COURT
ONCE WE WERE ALL A GREAT DEAL WISER
The machine bores and frightens me. I hurl it aside. I am almost certain that I am neither Cadge Foster nor Lloyd Tennyson but I worry about the toad. I will go to Lilith as soon as I leave here. Perhaps I should speak to Clissa first. My father must be at his tower. How is that great erection coming along? Will he soon have messages from the stars to read on the winter nights?
“Gentlemen, we hope you’ll shortly return,” the smiling alpha tells us.
We go out. I am they. They are I. We are we.
We clasp hands solemnly. We head for the transmats. Virtuously, dutifully, I go to Clissa.
THE lawyers met three times in the week following the destruction of Alpha Cassandra Nucleus.
The first meeting was held in the offices of Krug Enterprises, the second in the headquarters of Labrador Transmat General, the third in the board room of the Chase/Krug Building, Fairbanks. The Labrador Transmal people had suggested that Krug simply supply a new alpha, paying the costs of training her. Lou Fearon, acting as counsel for Krug, objected that this might expose his client to expenses of an amount that could not be determined in advance. Labrador Transmat recognized the justice of this position and a compromise was reached under the terms of which Krug Enterprises transferred to Labrador Transmat the title to one Duluth alpha female, untrained, and agreed to pay the costs of her training to a maximum of $10,000 fissionable. The total time consumed in these three meetings was two hours and twenty-one minutes. A contract was drawn and the civil suit was voided. Leon Spaulding initialed the agreement on behalf of Krug, who had gone to Luna to inspect a newly completed gravity pond for hemiplegics at Krug Medical Center in the Sea of Moscow.
November 17, 2218.
A delicate tracery of windblown snow lightly covers the area around Krug’s tower—beyond the construction zone, the snow lies deeply mounded, iron-hard. A dry wind buffets the tower. Well ahead of schedule, it has topped five hundred meters and now is overwhelming in its crystalline splendor.
The eight-sided base yields imperceptibly to the planes of the four-sided trunk. The tower is haloed in light: sunglow rebounds from its flanks, strikes the surrounding fields of snow, leaps up again to kiss the glassy walls, is hurled groundward once more. Albedo reigns here—brightness is all.
The lower two-thirds of the existing structure has now been divided into floors and, as the androids assembling the skin of the tower pile the glass blocks ever higher, those responsible for the interior work follow them up.
Installation of the tachyon-beam system has begun. Five giant rods of brilliant red copper, sixty centimeters thick and hundreds of meters long will form a quintuple spine, rising inside vertical service cores that span close to half the tower’s height. The lower sections of these great busbars are going into place now. A circular jacket of translucent glastic a meter in diameter forms the housing for each bar. The workmen slide forty-meter lengths of copper into these jackets, then cunningly fuse them end to end with quick, dazzling bursts of power from the eye of a welding laser. Elsewhere in the building hundreds of electricians supervise the spraying of conductive filaments into the tower’s gleaming inner walls. Squadrons of mechanics install conduits, waveguides, frequency converters, fluxmeters, optical guidance accessories, focal plane locators, neutron activation foils, Mossbauer absorbers, multichannel pulse height analyzers, nuclear amplifiers, voltage converters, cryostats, transponders, resistance bridges, prisms, torsion testers, sensor clusters, degaussers, collimators, magnetic resonance cells, thermocouple amplifiers, accelerator reflectors, proton accumulators, and much more, everything carefully computer-tagged in advance with its floor level and flow-chart designation. Sending messages to the stars by tachyon-beam is not a simple project.
The tower is already a thing of unparalleled splendor, starkly supple, spectacularly spearing the sky. Visitors drive many kilometers out into the tundra to get the best view of it, for at close range it cannot properly be appreciated. Krug enjoys reminding his guests, though, that what they see today is merely the bottom third of the ultimate structure. To visualize the final building one must imagine a second tower of the same size piled atop this November spire and then a third one set atop that. The mind rebels. The image will not come. Instead, one can bring into view only the picture of a slender, impossibly attenuated, terribly frail needle of glass that hangs in the sky, seeking to put down roots, and, failing, topples and topples and topples, falling like Lucifer through all one long day, and shatters with a faint tinkle in the icy air.
X
“A NEW signal,” Vargas said. A “Slightly different. We began getting it last night.”
“Wait right there,” said Krug. “I’m coming.”
He was in New York. Almost immediately he was in Vargas’ Antarctic observatory, high on the polar plateau, at a point equidistant between the Pole itself and the resorts of the Knox Coast. There were those who said that the transmat era had cheapened life in one way while enriching it in another: the theta force allowed one to flick blithely from Africa to Australia to Mexico to Siberia in a moment’s merry dance, but it robbed one of any true sense of place and transition, of any feel for planetary geography. It transformed Earth into a single infinitely extended transmat cubicle. Krug had often resolved to take a leisurely tour of the world from the air and see desert shading into prairie, forest into bare tundra, mountains into plains. But he had not managed to find the time.
The observatory was a series of pleasant glossy domes sitting atop an ice sheet two and a half kilometers thick. Tunnels in the ice linked dome to dome and gave access also to the outlying apparatus: the vast dish of a radio telescope’s parabolic antenna, the metal grid of an X-ray receiver, the burnished mirror that picked up relayed transmissions from the orbiting observatory high above the South Pole, the short, stocky multiple-diffraction optical telescope, the three golden spikes of the hydrogen antenna, the fluttering airborne webwork of a polyradar system and the rest of the devices with which the astronomers here kept watch on the universe. Instead of using refrigeration tapes to insure that the ice would not melt beneath the buildings, they had employed individual heat-exchange plaques for every structure, so that each building was a little island on the great glacier.
In the main building things hummed and clicked and flashed. Krug did not understand much about this equipment but it seemed properly scientific to him. Technicians ran eagerly about; an alpha high on a dizzying catwalk called numbers to three betas far below; periodically there was a crimson surge of energy within a glass helix twenty meters long and numbers leaped on a green and red counting mechanism at every discharge.
Vargas said, “Watch the radon coil. It’s registering the impulses that we’re getting right now. Here—a new cycle is starting—you see?”
Krug contemplated the pattern of surges.
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“That’s it,” Vargas said. “Now a six-second pause, and then it starts again.”
“2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1,” Krug said. “And it used to be 2-4-1, 2-5-1, 3-1. So they’ve dropped the 4-group altogether, they’ve moved the 5-group to the front of the cycle, they’ve completed the 3-group, they’ve added a pulse in the final group—damn, Vargas, where’s the sense? What’s the significance?”
“We don’t detect any more content in this message than in the last. They’ve both got the same basic structure. Just a minor rearrangement—”
“It’s got to mean something!”
“Perhaps it does.”
“How can we find out?”
“We’ll ask them,” Vargas said. “Soon. Through your tower.” Krug’s shoulders slumped. He leaned forward, gripping the smooth cool green handles of some incomprehensible device jutting from the wall. “These messages are three hundred years old,” he said blackly. “If this planet of theirs is like you tell me it is, that’s like three hundred centuries here. More. They won’t even know about the messages their ancestors sent out. They’ll be mutated out of all recognition.”
“No. There has to be continuity. They couldn’t have reached a technological level that would allow them to send transgalactic messages at all unless they were able to retain the achievements of earlier generations.”
Krug swung around. “You know something? This planetary nebula, this blue sun—I still don’t believe it could have intelligent beings living there. Any kind of life—no! Listen, blue suns don’t last long, Vargas. It takes millions of years for the surface of a planet to cool enough just to get solid. There isn’t that much time, a blue sun. Any planets it’s got, they’re still molten. You want me to believe signals coming from people who live on a fireball?”
Vargas said quietly, “Those signals come from NGC seven-two-nine-three, the planetary nebula in Aquarius.”
“For sure?”
“I can show you all the data.”
“Never mind. But how, a fireball?”
“It’s not necessarily a fireball. Maybe some planets cool faster than others. We can’t be sure how long it takes them to cool. We don’t know how far the home world of the message-senders is from that sun. We’ve got models showing the theoretical possibility that a planet can cool fast enough, even with a blue sun, to allow—”
“It’s a fireball, that planet,” said Krug sullenly.
DEFENSIVE now, Vargas said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Even if it is: must all life-forms live on a solid-surface planet? Can’t you conceive a civilization of high-temperature entities evolving on a world that hasn’t cooled yet? If—” Krug snorted in disgust. “Sending signals with machines made out of molten steel?”
“The signals don’t have to be mechanical in origin. Suppose they can manipulate the molecular structure of—”
“You talk fairy tales to me, doctor. I go to a scientist, I get fairy tales!”
“At the moment fairy tales are the only way of accounting for the data,” Vargas said.
“You know there’s got to be a better way.”
“All I know is that we’re getting signals and they undoubtedly come from this planetary nebula. I know it isn’t plausible. The universe doesn’t have to seem plausible to us all the time. Its phenomena don’t have to be readily explicable. Transmat wouldn’t be plausible to an eighteenth-century scientist. We see the data as best we can and we try to account for it—and sometimes we do some wild guessing because the data we’re getting doesn’t seem to make sense. But—”
“The universe doesn’t cheat,” Krug said. “The universe plays fair.”
Vargas smiled. “No doubt it does. But we need more data before we can explain NGC seven-two-nine-three. Meanwhile we make do with fairy tales.”
Krug nodded. He closed his eyes and fondled dials and meters, while within him a monstrous raging impatience sizzled and blazed and bubbled. Hey, you star people! Hey, you, sending those pulses! Who are you? What are you? Where are you? By damn, I want to know! Me. Krug. Krug.
What are you trying to tell us, you?
Who are you looking for?
What’s it all mean? Suppose I die before I find out!
“You know what I want?” Krug said suddenly. “To go outside, to that radio telescope of yours. And climb up into the big dish. And cup my hands and shout at those bastards with the numbers. What’s the signal now? 2-5-1, 2-3-1, 2-1? It drives me crazy. We ought to answer them right now. Send some numbers: 4-10-2, 4-6-2, 4-2. Just to show them we’re here.”
