Tower of Glass (19 page)

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 crosslegged 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!”

“Preserve
Krug
.”

“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 he
does
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—”

“Stop it Thor. I go to chapel, and you go to chapel, and we all go to chapel, but we also live in the real world, and in the real world you have to take real factors into account Such as the possibility of Krug’s premature death.”

“Well...” He shivered with tension. She was speaking pragmatically; she sounded almost like an AEP organizer. He saw the logic of her position. All of his faith was pinned to the hope of the manifestation of a miracle; but what if there were no miracle? If they had an opportunity to encourage the miracle, should they not take it? And yet—and yet—

She said, “Manuel’s primed. He’s ready to take up our cause openly. You know how pliable he is; I could turn him into a crusader in two or three weeks. I’d take him to Gamma Town, first—”

“In disguise, I hope.”

“Of course. We’d spend a night there. I’d rub his face in it. And then—you remember, Thor, we talked about letting him see a chapel—”

“Yes. Yes.” Watchman trembled.

“I’d do that. I’d explain the whole communion. And finally I’d come right out and ask him to go to his father for us. He would, Thor, he would! And Krug would listen. Krug would yield and say the words. As a favor to Manuel.”

Watchman rose. He paced the room. “It seems almost blasphemous, though. We’re supposed to wait for Krug’s grace to descend on us, in Krug’s own time. To make use of Manuel this way, to attempt to shape and force the will of Krug—”

“What if Krug’s dying?” Lilith asked. “What if he’s got only months left? What if a time comes
when there is no Krug?
And we’re still slaves.” Her words rebounded from the walls, shattering him:

when there is no Krug

when there is no Krug

when there is no Krug

when there is no Krug

“We have to distinguish,” he said shakily, “between the physical man who is Krug, for whom we work, and the eternal presence of Krug the Maker and Krug the Liberator, who—”

“Not now, Thor. Just tell me what should I do. Take Manuel to Gamma Town?”

“Yes. Yes. But move one step at a time. Don’t reveal things too quickly. Check with me if you have any doubts. Can you really control Manuel?”

“He worships me,” Lilith said quietly.

“Because of your body?”

“It’s a good body, Thor. But it’s more than that. He
wants
to be dominated by an android. He’s full of second-generation guilts. I captured him with sex, but I hold him by the power of the Vat.”

“Sex,” Watchman said. “Captured him with sex. How? He has a wife. An attractive wife, I’ve heard, though of course I’m in no position to judge. If he has an attractive wife, why does he need—”

Lilith laughed.

“Did I say a joke?”

“You don’t understand a thing about humans, do you, Thor? The famous Alpha Watchman, totally baffled!” Her eyes sparkled. She jumped to her feet. “Thor, do you know anything about sex? At first hand, I mean.”

“Have I done sex? Is that what you’re asking?”

“That’s what I’m asking,” Lilith told him.

The change in the conversation’s direction puzzled him. What did his private life have to do with the planning of revolutionary tactics?

“No,” he said. “Never. Why should I? What could I get from it beside trouble?”

“Pleasure,” she suggested. “Krug created us with functional nervous systems. Sex is amusement. Sex excites me; it ought to excite you. Why haven’t you ever tried it?”

“I don’t know an alpha male who has. Or who even thinks much about it.”

“Alpha women do.”

“That’s different. You have more opportunities. You’ve got all those human males running after you. Human females don’t run after androids much, except for some disturbed women, I guess. And you can do sex with a human without any risks. But I’m not going to chance entangling myself with some human female, not when any man who thinks I’m infringing on his rights can destroy me on the spot.”

“How about sex between android and android?”

“What for? So we can make babies?”

“Sex and reproduction are separate things, Thor. People have sex without babies and babies without sex all the time. Sex is a social force. A sport, a game. A kind of magnetism, body to body. It’s what gives me power over Manuel Krug.” Abruptly the tone of her voice shifted, losing its didactic quality, becoming softer. “Do you want me to show you what it is? Take your clothes off.”

He laughed edgily. “Are you serious? You want to do sex with me?”

“Why not? Are you afraid?”

“Don’t be absurd. I just didn’t expect—I mean—it seems so incongruous, two androids going to bed together, Lilith—”

“Because we’re things made out of plastic?” she said coldly.

“That isn’t what I meant. Obviously we’re flesh and blood!”

“But there are certain things that we don’t have to do, because we come from the Vat. Certain bodily functions that are reserved for the Children of the Womb. Eh?”

“You’re distorting my position.”

“I know I am. I want to educate you, Thor. Here you are trying to manipulate the destinies of an entire society, and you’re ignorant of one of the most basic human motivations. Come: strip. Haven’t you ever felt desire for a woman?”

“I don’t know what desire is, Lilith.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

She shook her head. “And you think we should have equality with humans? You want to vote, you want to put alphas in Congress, to have civil rights? But you’re living like a robot. Like a machine. You’re a walking argument for keeping androids in their place. You’ve closed off one of the most vital sectors of human life and tell yourself that that sort of stuff is only for humans; androids don’t have to bother with it. Dangerous thinking, Thor! We
are
human. We have bodies. Why did Krug give us genitals if He didn’t mean us to use them?”

“I agree with every word you’ve said. But—”

“But what?”

“But sex seems irrelevant to me. And I know that’s a damning argument against our cause. I’m not the only alpha who feels this way, Lilith. We don’t talk about it much, but—” He looked away from her. “Maybe the humans are right. Maybe we
are
a lesser kind, artificial through and through, just a clever kind of robot made out of flesh and—”

“Wrong. Stand up, Thor. Come here.”

He walked toward her. She took his hands and put them on her bare breasts.

“Squeeze them,” she said. “Gently. Play with the nipples. You see how they get hard, how they stand up? That’s a sign that I’m responding to your touch. It’s a way that a woman shows desire. What do you feel when you touch my breasts, Thor?”

“The smoothness. The cool skin.”

“What do you feel
inside
?”

“I don’t know.”

“Pulse rate changing? Tensions? A knot in your belly? Here. Touch my hip. My buttock. Slide your hand up and down. Anything, Thor?”

“I’m not sure. I’m so new at this, Lilith.”

“Strip,” she said.

“It seems so mechanical this way. Cold. Isn’t sex supposed to be preceded by courtship, soft lights, whispering, music, poetry?”

“Then you
do
know a little about it.”

“A little. I’ve read their books. I know the rituals. The peripherals.”

“We can try the peripherals. Here: I’ve turned down the lights. Take a floater, Thor. No, not a scrambler—not the first time. A floater. Fine. Here’s a little music, now. Undress.”

“You won’t tell anybody about this?”

“How silly you are! Who would I tell? Manuel? Darling, I’ll tell him, darling, I’ve been unfaithful to you with Thor Watchman!” She laughed giddily. “It’ll be our secret. Call it a humanizing lesson. Humans have sex, and you want to be more human, don’t you? I’ll discover sex to you.” She smiled archly. She tugged at his clothes.

Curiosity seized him. He felt the floater going to work in his brain, lifting him toward euphoria. Lilith was right: the sexlessness of alphas was a paradox among people who claimed so intensely to be fully human. Or was sexlessness as general among alphas as he thought? Perhaps, busy with the tasks set for him by Krug, he had simply neglected to let his emotions develop? He thought of Siegfried Fileclerk, weeping in the snow beside Cassandra Nucleus, and wondered.

His clothes dropped away. Lilith drew him into her arms.

She rubbed her body slowly against his. He felt her thighs on his thighs, the cool taut dram of her belly touching his, the hard nodes of her nipples brushing his chest. He searched himself for some trace of response. He was uncertain about what he found, although he could not deny that he enjoyed the tactile sensations of their contact. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. They sought his. Her tongue slid a short distance between his teeth. He ran the palms of his hands down her back, and on a sudden impulse dug the tips of his fingers into the globes of her buttocks. Lilith stiffened and pushed herself more intensely against him, grinding now instead of rubbing. They remained that way for some minutes. Then she relaxed and eased away from him.

“Well?” she asked. “Anything?”

“I liked it,” he said tentatively.

“Did it excite you, though?”

“I think so.”

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“How can you tell?”

“It would show,” she said, grinning at him.