Tower of Glass (22 page)

Let me take it away from him, I say.

No. No. You’re just a visitor here. This isn’t your affair.

Then let’s go, Lilith.

Wait Watch.

Our friend is singing again. Letters, as before. U... C... A... U... C... G... U... C... C...

His arm comes back, then starts forward. The point of the knife is aimed at the girl’s abdomen. From the tension in his muscles I can see that the blow will have full force; this is no dance step. The blade is only a few centimeters from her skin when I rush forward and slap it from his hand.

He begin to moan.

The girl does not yet realize that she has been saved. She utters a deep droning bellow, perhaps intended to be a shriek. She drops to the ground, clutching her breasts with one hand, thrusting the other between her thighs. She writhes in slow motion.

You shouldn’t have interfered, Lilith says angrily. Come on, now. We’d better go.

But he would have killed her!

Not your affair. Not your affair.

She tugs at my wrist. I turn. We begin to move away. I am aware peripherally that the girl is getting up; the garish lights of the sign of Poseidon Musketeer the Medic glisten on her bare thin flanks. Lilith and I take two steps; then we hear a grunt. We look back, the girl, rising, has risen with the knife in her hand, and she has driven it into the man’s belly. Methodically she draws it upward from waist to chest. He is disemboweled, and is only slowly becoming aware of it. He makes a gurgling sound.

Now we’ve got to go, Lilith says.

We speed toward the corner. As we reach it I turn. The door of Alpha Musketeer has opened. A gaunt haggard figure, alpha-tall, with a mane of wild gray hair and bulging eyes, stands in it. Is this the famous medic? He rushes toward the slobie addicts. The girl kneels before her victim, who has not yet fallen. His blood purples her shining skin. She chants: G! A! A! G! A! G! G! A! C!

In here, Lilith says, and we duck into a dark doorway.

Steps. A dry smell of withered things. Cobwebs. We plunge into unknown depths. In the distance, far below, yellow lights gleam. We go down and down and down.

What is this place? I ask.

Security tunnel. Built during the Sanity War two hundred years ago. Part of a system that runs everywhere under Stockholm. The gammas have taken it over.

Like a sewer.

I hear quick stabs of laughter, jagged blurts of incoherent conversation. There are shops down here, with slitted gates behind which little lamps sputter and flicker. Gammas move to and fro. Some of them make the one-two-three sign as they pass us. Driven by a fear I do not understand, Lilith leads us frantically onward. We change tunnels, entering a passage at right angles to the first one.

Three slobie addicts wander by.

A male gamma with face streaked by red and blue paint pauses to sing, perhaps to us:

Who shall I marry?

Who will marry me?

Fire in the stinking vat

Fire flying free.

My head my head my head my head

My head.

He kneels and gags. Thin blue fluid pours from his lips, almost to our feet.

We move on. We hear an echoing cry:

Al-pha! Al-pha! Al-pha! Al-pha!

Two gammas couple in an alcove. Their bodies are sweat-shiny and lean. Despite myself I watch the plunging hips and listen to the slap of flesh against flesh. The girl pounds the flats of her hands steadily against her partner’s back. Is she protesting a rape, or displaying her ecstasy? I never find out, because a slobie stumbles out of the shadows and falls on them, tumbling in a turmoil of intertwined limbs. Lilith draws me away. I am suddenly heavy with desire for her. I think of the firm breasts beneath her wrap; I think of the bare moist slit. Shall we find an alcove of our own, and couple among the gammas? I put my hand on her buttocks, which are taut as she walks. Lilith wriggles her hips. Not here, she says. Not here. We have social distances to keep too.

A dazzle of light cascades from the tunnel’s roof. Pink bubbles appear and burst, releasing sour smells. A dozen gammas gallop out of a side-passage, halt in shock as they realize they have nearly collided with two visiting alphas, make signs of respect, and rush onward, shouting, laughing, singing.

Oh I melt you and you melt me

And we melt they and happy we be.

Clot! Clot! Clot! Clot!

Grig!

They seem happy, I say.

Lilith nods. They’re soaped to the whiskers, she says. On their way to a radiation orgy, I bet.

A what?

A puddle of yellow fluid slides out from under a closed door. Acrid fumes rise. Gamma urine? The door bursts open. Wild-eyed female gamma, luminescent breasts, livid scar on belly, giggles at us. She executes a respectable curtsey. Mir lady. Milord. Will you clot with me? Giggles. Squats. Lurches around, heels against rump, in a dizzy dance. Arches her back, slaps her breasts, spreads her legs. Green and gold lights blaze in the room from which she has emerged. A figure appears.

What is it, Lilith?

Normal height, but twice the width of a gamma, and covered with thick coarse fur. An ape? The face is human. It lifts its hands. Short blunt fingers; webs between them! Drags the girl back inside. Door closes.

A reject, Lilith says. There are lots of them here.

Reject from what?

Substandard android. Genetic flaws; impurities in the vat, perhaps. Sometimes they have no arms, sometimes no legs, no heads, no digestive tracts, no this, no that.

Aren’t they automatically destroyed at the factory?

Lilith smiles. They aren’t destroyed. Those that aren’t viable die anyway, fast enough. The others are smuggled out when the supervisors aren’t looking and sent to one of the undercities. Many here. We can’t put our idiot brethren to death, Manuel!

Leviticus, I say. Alpha Leviticus Leaper.

Yes. Look, there’s another.

A nightmare figure rollicks through the corridor. Like something that has been placed in an oven until its flesh began to flow and run: the basic outlines are human, but the contours are not. The nose is a trunk, the lips are saucers, the arms are of unequal length, the fingers are tentacles. The genitals are monstrous: horse-penis, bull-balls.

Better off dead, I say to Lilith.

No. No. Our brother. Our pitiful brother whom we cherish.

The monstrosity halts a dozen meters from us. Its ropy arms go through the movements of the one-two-three.

Speaking perfectly clearly it says to us, The peace of Krug upon you, alphas. Go with Krug. Go with Krug. Go with Krug.

Krug be with you, Lilith replies.

The monstrosity shambles onward, murmuring happily.

The peace of Krug? Go with Krug? Krug be with you? Lilith, what does all this mean?

Common courtesy, she says. A friendly greeting.

Krug?

Krug made us all, did he not? she says.

I remember things that were said when I was in the shunt room with my friends. 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.

The peace of Krug. Go with Krug. Krug be with you.

Lilith, do androids think my father is God?

Lilith evades the question. We can talk about that some other time, she says. People have ears here. There are some things we can’t discuss.

But.

Some other time!

I drop it. The tunnel now widens into a considerable room, well-lit, crowded. A marketplace? Shops, booths, gammas everywhere. We are stared at. There are numerous rejects in the room, each a little more horrid than the last. It is hard to see how creatures so maimed and mismade can survive.

Do they ever go to the surface?

Never. They might be seen by humans.

In Gamma Town?

They take no chances. They’d all be obliterated if.

In the crush of the crowded room, the androids jostle and shove, bicker, snap. Somehow they maintain an area of open space around the intrusive alphas, but not a very great one.

Two knife-duels are going on; no one pays attention. There is much public lasciviousness. The smell of the place is rank and foul. A wild-eyed girl rushes up to me and whispers, Krug bless! Krug bless! She pushes something into my hand and runs off.

A gift.

A small cool cube with beveled edges, like the toy at the New Orleans shunt room. Does it send messages? Yes. I see words forming and flowing and vanishing in its milky core:

A CLOT IN TIME SAVES THINE

*

HIS HIS HIS HIS HERS HIS HIS HIS

*

O SHALLOW IS THY BOWL, FILTHY GRIG

*

SLOBIE REIGNS, STACKERS PAINS

*

PLIT! PLIT! PLIT! PLIT! PLACK!

*

AND UNTO KRUG RENDER KRUG’S

All nonsense. Lilith, can you figure this stuff?

Some of it. The gammas have their own slang, you know. But look here, where it says —

A male gamma with cratered purple skin slaps the cube from our hands. It skitters along the floor; he dives for it in a knot of feet. There is a general uproar. People tangle and twine. The thief breaks from the mass and speeds away into a corridor. The gammas still wrestle confusedly. A girl rises to the top of the heap; she has lost her few scraps of clothing in the melee, and there are bloody gouges on her breasts and thighs. In her hand she holds the cube. I recognize her as the girl who gave it to me in the first place. Now she makes a demonic face at me, baring her teeth. She brandishes the cube and clamps it between her legs. A burly reject pounces on her and hauls her away; he has only one arm, but it is as thick as a tree. Grig! she screams. Prot! Gliss! They vanish.

The crowd is muttering in an ugly way.

I picture them turning on us, ripping at our clothing, revealing the hairy human body beneath my false alpha costume. The social distances may not protect us then.

Come, I say to Lilith. I think I’ve had enough.

Wait.

She turns to the gammas. She holds up her hands, palms facing, about half a meter apart, as though indicating the length of a fish she has caught. Then she wriggles in a peculiar sinuous maneuver, twisting her body so she describes a kind of spiraling curve. The gesture quiets the crowd instantly. The gammas step aside, heads bowed humbly, as we go past. All is well.

Enough, I tell Lilith. It’s getting late. How long have we been here, anyway?

We can go now.

We flee through a maze of interlocking passages. Gammas of a thousand hideous shapes pass us. We see slobies floating in their slow raptures. Rejects. Stackers and solidifiers, for all I can tell. Sounds, smells, colors, textures—I am dazzled and dazed. Voices in the darkness. Songs.

The freedom day is coming

The freedom day is coming

Smip the slobies, grab the gliss—

And ride up to freedom!

Steps. Upward. Gold winds descending. Breathless, we race to the top and find ourselves in the winding cobbled streets of Gamma Town again, probably only a few meters from the place where we went down. It seems to me that the office of Alpha Poseidon Musketeer must be just around the corner.

Night has come. The lights of Gamma Town crackle and flutter. Lilith wants to take me to a tavern. I refuse. Home. Home. Enough. My mind is stained by the sights of the android world. She yields; we hurry out. How far must we walk before we reach a transmat?

We leap. Her flat seems so warm and bright to me now. We rid ourselves of our clothes. Under the doppler I cleanse myself of my red color and my thermal spray.

Was it interesting?

Overpowering, I say. And there’s so much you have to explain, Lilith.

Images swim in my brain. I burn. I sizzle.

Of course you won’t tell anyone I took you, she says. I could get into awful trouble.

Of course. Strictly confidential.

Come close, Alpha Leaper.

Manuel.

Manuel. Come close.

First tell me what it means when they say Krug be—

Later. I’m cold. Warm me, Manuel.

I fold her in my arms. The heavy mounds of her breasts inflame me. I cover her mouth with mine. I thrust my tongue between her lips. We sink down together to the floor.

Without hesitation I spear her. She trembles. She clasps me.

When I close my eyes I see slobies and rejects and stackers.

Lilith.

Lilith.

Lilith.

Lilith I love you I love you I love you Lilith Lilith Lilith