He looked at her strangely. “This morning — when we were at the tower — you were, well, upset—”
“Oh,that! I’d almost forgotten. God, it was terrible, wasn’t it? Do you have the time, Manuel?”
“1648, give or take a minute.”
“I’d better get dressed soon, then. We’ve got that early dinner party in Hong Kong.”
He admired her ability to slough off traumas. He said, “Right now it’s still morning in Hong Kong. There’s no hurry.”
“Well, then, do you want to take a swim with me? The water’s not as cold as you think. Or—” She paused. “You haven’t kissed me hello, yet.”
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello. I love you.”
“I love you,” he said. Kissing her was like kissing alabaster. The taste of Lilith was still on his lips. Which is the passionate, vital woman, he wondered, and which the cold, artificial thing? Holding his wife, he felt no sensation at all. He released her. She tugged at his wrist, pulling him with her into the surf, and they swam a while, and he came out chilled and shivering. At twilight they had cocktails together in the atrium. “You seem so distant,” she told him. “It’s all this transmat jumping. It takes more out of you than the doctors know.”
For the party that night she wore a unique treasure, a necklace of pear-shaped soot-hued glassy beads. A Krug Enterprises drone probe, cruising 7.5 light-years from Earth, had scooped those driblets of matter from the fringes of the ashen, dying Volker’s Star. Krug had given them to her as a wedding present. What other woman wore a necklace made up of chunks of a dark star? But miracles were taken for granted in Clissa’s social set. None of their dinner companions appeared to notice the necklace. Manuel and Clissa stayed at the party well past midnight Hong Kong time, so that when they returned to Mendocino the California morning was already far advanced. Programming eight hours of sleep for themselves, they sealed the bedroom. Manuel had lost track of the sequence of time, but he suspected that he had been awake for more than twenty-four consecutive hours. Sometimes transmat life gets to be too much to cope with, he thought, and brought down the curtain on the day.
8
October 18, 2218.
The tower has reached the 280-meter level, and grows perceptibly higher every hour. By day it glistens brilliantly even in the pale Arctic sunlight, and looks like a shining spear that someone has thrust into the tundra. By night it is even more dazzling, for it reflects the myriad lights of the kilometer-high reflector plates by which the night crews work.
Its real beauty is still to come. What exists thus far is merely the base, necessarily broad and thick-walled. Justin Maledetto’s plan calls for an elegantly tapering tower, a slender obelisk of glass to prick the stratosphere, and the line of taper is just now becoming apparent; from this point on the structure will contract toward a stunning delicacy of form.
Although it has attained less than a fifth of its intended height, Krug’s tower is already the tallest structure in the Northwest Territories, and is exceeded north of the sixtieth parallel only by the Chase/Krug Building in Fairbanks, 320 meters high, and the old 300 meter Kotzebue Needle overlooking Bering Strait. The Needle will be surpassed in a day or two, the Chase/Krug a few days after that. By late November, topping 500 meters, the tower will be the tallest building in the solar system. And even then it will be scarcely more than a third of the way toward its full stature.
The android laborers work smoothly and rhythmically. Except for the unhappy incident in September, there have been no fatal accidents. The technique of fastening the great glass blocks to the grapples of the scooprods and guiding them to the top of the tower has become second nature to everyone. On all eight sides at once blocks rise, are jockeyed into place, are fused to the previous course of the tower, while the next series of blocks already is being maneuvered into the scooprods.
The tower is no longer a hollow shell. Work had begun on the interior construction — the housings for the intricate tachyon-beam communications gear with which messages will be sent, at speeds far exceeding that of light, to the planetary nebula NGC 7293. Justin Maledetto’s design calls for horizontal partitions every twenty meters, except in five regions of the tower where the size of the communications equipment modules will require the floors to be placed at sixty-meter intervals. The five lowest partitions have been partly built, and the joists are in place for the sixth, seventh, and eighth. The floors of the tower are fashioned from the same clear glass that is being used for the outer wall. Nothing must mar the transparency of the building. Maledetto has esthetic reasons for insisting on that; the tachyon-beam people have scientific reasons for sharing the architect’s concern with allowing the free passage of light.
Viewing the unfinished tower, then, from a distance of, say, one kilometer, one is struck by a sense of its fragility and vulnerability. One sees the beams of sparkling morning sunlight dancing and leaping through the walls as though through the waters of a shallow, crystalline lake; one is able to make out the tiny dark figures of androids moving about like ants on the interior partitions, which themselves are nearly invisible; one feels that a sudden sharp gust off Hudson Bay could shiver the tower to splinters in a moment. Only when one comes nearer, when one observes that those invisible floors are thicker than a man is tall, when one becomes aware of how massive the outer skin of the tower actually is, when one is able to feel the unimaginable weight of the colossus pressing on the frozen ground, does one cease to think of dancing sunbeams and realize that Simeon Krug is erecting the mightiest structure in the history of mankind.
9
Krug realized it. He felt no particular sense of elation at the thought. The tower was going to be so big not because his ego demanded it but because the equations of tachyon-wave generation insisted upon it. Power was needed to get to the far side of the light-velocity barrier, and power was not achieved without size.
“Look,” Krug said, “I’m not interested in monuments. Monuments I got. What I’m after iscontact .”
He had brought eight people to the tower that afternoon: Vargas, Spaulding, Manuel, five of Manuel’s fancy friends. Manuel’s friends, trying to be complimentary, were talking about how future ages would revere the tower for its sheer immensity. Krug disliked that notion. It was all right when Niccolт Vargas spoke of the tower as the first cathedral of the galactic age. That had symbolic meaning; that was a way of saying that the tower was important because it marked the opening of a new phase of man’s existence. But to praise the tower just because it was big? What kind of praise was that? Who needed big? Who wanted big? Small people wanted big.
He found it so hard to reach the words that would explain his tower.
“Manuel, you tell them,” he said. “You explain. The tower, it isn’t just a big pile of glass. The big isn’t important. You understand it. You’ve got the words.”
Manuel said, “The main technical problem here is to send out a message that goes faster than the speed of light. We’ve got to do this because Dr. Vargas has determined that the galactic civilization we’re trying to talk with is — what? — 300 light-years away, which means that if we sent an ordinary radio message to them it wouldn’t get to them until the twenty-sixth century, and we wouldn’t get an answer until something like 2850 A.D., and my father can’t wait that long to know what they have to say. My father’s an impatient man. Now, in order to make something go faster than light, we need to generate what are known as tachyons, about which I can’t tell you much except to say they travel very fast, and it takes a hell of a boost to get them up to the right speed, and therefore it became necessary to build a transmission tower that just incidentally had to be 1500 meters high, because—”