The hologram of Krug above the altar glistened and throbbed. The triplets of the genetic code around the walls seemed to melt and swirl as the ritual neared its climax. The scent of hydrogen was in the air. Mazda Construction’s gestures, always noble and impressive, grew more broad, more all-encompassing.
“AUU GAU GGU GCU,” he called.
“Harmony!” sang the first Yielder.
“Unity” sang the second.
“Perception,” Lilith said.
“CAC CGU CCC CUC,” chanted Mazda Constructor.
“Harmony!”
“Unity!”
“Passion,” said Lilith.
“UAA UGA UCA UUA,” the Transcender cried.
“Harmony!”
“Unity!”
“Purpose,” Lilith said, and the ceremony was over. Mazda Constructor stepped down, flushed and weary. Lilith lightly touched his hand. The betas, looking grateful to be excused, slipped out the rear way. Watchman rose. He saw Andromeda Quark in the far corner, the dimmest corner, whispering some private devotion of the Projector caste. She seemed to see no one else.
“Shall we go?” Watchman said to Lilith. “I’ll see you home.”
“Kind of you,” she said. Her part in the ceremony appeared to have left her aglow; her eyes were unnaturally bright, her breasts were heaving beneath her thin wrap, her nostrils flared. He escorted her to the street.
As they walked toward the nearby transmat he said, “Did the personnel requisition reach your office?”
“Yesterday. With a memo from Spaulding telling me to send out a hiring call at once. Where am I going to find that many skilled betas, Thor? What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that Krug is pushing us hard. He’s obsessed with finishing the tower.”
“That’s nothing new,” Lilith said.
“It’s getting worse. Day by day the impatience grows, deepens, becomes more intense, like a sickness inside him. Maybe if I were human I’d understand a drive like that. He comes to the tower two, three times a day, now. Counts the levels. Counts the newly raised blocks. Hounds the tachyon people, telling them to get their machines hooked up faster. He’s starting to look like something wild: sweating, excited, stumbling over his own words. Now he’s padding the work crews — tossing millions of dollars more into the job. For what? For what? And then this starship thing. I talked to Denver yesterday. Do you know, Lilith, he ignored that plant all last year, and now he’s there once a day? The starship has to be ready for an interstellar voyage within three months. Android crew. He’s sending androids.”
“Where?”
“Three hundred light-years away.”
“He won’t ask you to go, will he? Me?”
“Four alphas, four betas,” Watchman said. “I haven’t been told who’s being considered. If he lets Spaulding decide, I’m finished. Krug preserve us from having to go.” The irony of his prayer struck him belatedly, and he laughed, a thin, dark chuckle. “Yes. Krug preserve us!”
They reached the transmat. Watchman began to set coordinates.
“Will you come up for awhile?” Lilith asked.
“Glad to.”
They stepped into the green glow together.
Her flat was smaller than his, just a bedroom, a combination sitting-room/dining-room/kitchen, and a sort of large foyer-cum-closet. It was possible to see where a much larger apartment had been divided to form several smaller ones, suitable for androids. The building was similar to the one where he lived: old, well-worn, somehow warm of soul. Nineteenth-century, he guessed, although Lilith’s furnishings, reflecting the force of her personality, were distinctly contemporary, leaning heavily to floor-mounted projections and tiny, delicate, free-floating art objects. Watchman had never been at her place before, though they were close neighbors in Stockholm. Androids, even alphas, did not socialize much in one another’s homes; the chapels served as meeting-places for most occasions. Those who were outside the communion gathered in AEP offices, or clung to their solitude.
He dropped into a springy, comfortable chair. “Care to corrode your mind?” Lilith asked. “I can offer all kinds of friendly substances. Weeds? Floaters? Scramblers? Even alcohol-liqueurs, brandies, whiskeys.”
“You’re well stocked with pollutions.”
“Manuel comes here often. I must play hostess for him. What will you have?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m not really fond of corrosion.”
She laughed and moved toward the doppler. Quickly it consumed her wrap. Under it she wore nothing but a thermal spray, light green and lovely against her pale scarlet skin; it covered her from breasts to thighs, protecting her against Stockholm’s December winds. A different setting of the doppler and that was gone too. She kept her sandals on.
Sinking down easily to the floor, she sat cross-legged before him and toyed with the dials of her wall-projections; textures ebbed and flowed as she made random adjustments. There was an oddly tense moment of silence. Watchman felt awkward; he had known Lilith five years, nearly her whole life, and she was as close a friend to him as one android customarily was to another. Yet he had never been alone with her before in quite this way. It was not her nudity that disturbed him; nudity meant nothing at all to him. It was, he decided, simply the privacy of it. As though we were lovers. As though there was something … sexual … between us. He smiled and decided to tell her about these incongruous feelings. But before he could speak, she did:
“I’ve just had a thought. About Krug. About his impatience to finish the tower. Thor, what if he’s dying?”
“Dying?” Blankly; an unfamiliar idea.
“Some terrible disease, something they can’t fix tectogenetically. I don’t know what: some new kind of cancer, maybe. Anyway, suppose he’s just found out that he has maybe a year or two to live, you see, and he’s desperate to get his space signals sent out before then.”
“He looks healthy,” Watchman said.
“Rotting from the inside out. The first symptoms are erratic behavior — jumping obsessively from place to place, accelerating work schedules, bothering people to respond faster—”
“Krug preserve us, no!”
“PreserveKrug .”
“I don’t believe this, Lilith. Where did you get this notion? Has Manuel said anything?”
“Strictly intuition. I’m trying to help you account for Krug’s odd behavior, that’s all. If he really is dying, that’s one possible explanation for—”
“Krug can’t die.”
“Can’t?”
“You know what I mean. Mustn’t. He’s still young. He’s got a century ahead of him, at least. And there’s so much that he still must do in that time.”
“For us, you mean?”
“Of course,” Watchman said.
“The tower’s burning him up, though. Consuming him. Thor, suppose hedoes die? Without having said the words — without having spoken out for us—”
“We’ll have wasted a lot of energy in prayer, then. And the AEP will laugh in our faces.”
“Shouldn’t we do something?”
He pressed his thumbs lightly against his eyelids. “We can’t build our plans atop a fantasy, Lilith. So far as we know, Krug isn’t dying, and isn’t likely to die for a long time.”
“And if he does?”
“What are you getting at?”
She said, “We could start to make our move now.”
“What?”
“The thing we discussed when you first pushed me into sleeping with Manuel. Using Manuel to enlist Krug’s support for the cause.”
“It was just a passing thought,” Watchman said. “I doubt that it’s philosophically proper to try to manipulate Krug like that. If we’re sincere in our faith, we should await His grace and mercy, without scheming to—”