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 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.
18
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 Transmat 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 an 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.
19
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 500 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, and the lower sections of these great busbars are going into place now. A circular jacket of translucent plastic 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, and squadrons of mechanics install conduits, waveguides, frequency converters, fluxmeters, optical guidance accessories, focal plane locators, neutron activation foils, Mцssbauer absorbers, multi-channel pulse height analyzers, nuclear amplifiers, voltage converters, cryostats, transponders, resistance bridges, prisms, torsion testers, sensor clusters, degaussers, collimaters, 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.