Tower of Glass

His own politics, such that they were, were definitely Witherer: in a transmat society, where national boundaries are obsolete, why have a formal government at all? Let the legislators abolish themselves; let natural law prevail. But he knew that the withering-away of the state that the Witherers preached would never come to pass. The proof of it was Senator Henry Fearon. The ultimate paradox: a member of the antigovernmental party serving in the government himself, and fighting to hold his seat at every election. What price Withering, Senator?

Fearon praised android industriousness at length. Watchman fretted. No work was getting done while they were up here; he didn’t dare let blocks be hoisted with visitors in the construction zone. And he had schedules to keep. To his relief, Krug soon signaled for a descent; the rising wind, it seemed, was bothering Quenelle. When they came down, Watchman led the way over to the master control center, inviting them to watch him take command of operations. He slipped into the linkup seat. As he pushed the computer’s snub-tipped terminal node into the input jack on his left forearm, the android saw Leon Spaulding’s lips tighten in a scowl of — what? Contempt, envy, patronizing scorn? For all his skill with humans, Watchman could not read such dark looks with true precision. But then, at the click of contact, the computer impulses came flooding across the interface into his brain and he forgot about Spaulding.

It was like having a thousand eyes. He saw everything going on at the site, and for many kilometers around the site. He was in total communion with the computer, making use of all of its sensors, sca

The data torrent brought a surge of ecstasy.

Maintenance charts. Work-flow syntheses. Labor coordination systems. Refrigeration levels. Power-shunt decisions. The tower was a tapestry of infinite details, and he was the master weaver. Everything rushed through him; he approved, rejected, altered, canceled. Was the effect of sex something like this? That tingle of aliveness in every nerve, that sense of being extended to one’s limits, of absorbing an avalanche of stimuli? Watchman wished he knew. He raised and lowered scooprods, requisitioned next week’s blocks, ordered filaments for the tachyon-beam men, looked after tomorrow’s meals, ran a constant stability check on the structure as completed, fed cost data to Krug’s financial people, monitored soil temperature in fifty-centimeter gradations to a depth of two kilometers, relayed scores of telephone messages per second, and congratulated himself on the dexterity with which he accomplished everything. No human could handle this, he knew, even if there were some way for humans to jack themselves directly into a computer. He had a machine’s skills and a human’s versatility, and therefore, except for the fairly serious matter of being unable to reproduce himself, he was in many ways superior to both other classes, and therefore—

The red arrow of an alarm cut across his consciousness.

Construction accident. Android blood spilling on the frozen ground.

A twitch of his mind gave him close focus. A scooprod had failed on the northern face. A glass block had fallen from the 90-meter level. It lay slightly skewed, one end buried about a meter deep in the earth, the other slightly above the ground level. A fissure ran like a line of frost through its clear depths. Legs stuck out from the side closest to the tower. A few meters away lay an injured android, writhing desperately. Three lift-beetles were scurrying toward the scene of the accident; a fourth had already arrived and had its steel prongs under the massive block.

Watchman unjacked himself, shivering in the first moment of the pain of separation from the data-flow. A wallscreen over his head showed the accident vividly. Clissa Krug had turned away, head against her husband’s breast; Manuel looked sickened, his father irritated. The other visitors seemed more puzzled than disturbed. Watchman found himself peering into Leon Spaulding’s icy face. Spaulding was a small, pared-down man, all but fleshless. In the curious clarity of his shock Watchman was aware of the widely separated hairs of the ectogene’s stiff black mustache.

“Coordination failure,” Watchman said crisply. “The computer seems to have misread a stress function and let a block drop.”

“You were overriding the computer at that moment, weren’t you?” Spaulding asked. “Let’s put blame where blame belongs.”

The android would not play that game. “Excuse me,” he said. “There have been injuries and probably fatalities. I must go.”

He hurried toward the door.

“—inexcusable carelessness—” Spaulding muttered.

Watchman went out. As he sprinted toward the accident site, he began to pray.

5

“New York,” Krug said. “The upper office.”

He and Spaulding entered the transmat cubicle. The lambent green transmat field pulsed up from the floor aperture, forming a curtain dividing the cubicle in two. The ectogene set the coordinates. The hidden power generators of the transmat were linked directly to the main generator, spi

There was no sensation. Krug was destroyed; a stream of tagged wavicles was hurled several thousand kilometers to a tuned receiver; and Krug was reconstituted. The transmat field ripped a man’s body into subatomic units so swiftly that no neural system could possibly register the pain; and the restoration to life came with equal speed. Whole and undamaged, Krug emerged, with Spaulding beside him, in the transmat cubicle of his office.

“Look after Quenelle,” Krug said. “She’ll be arriving downstairs. Amuse her. I don’t want to be disturbed for at least an hour.”

Spaulding exited. Krug closed his eyes.

The falling of the block had upset him greatly. It was not the first accident during the building of the tower; it probably would not be the last. Lives had been lost today: only android lives, true, but lives all the same. The waste of life, the waste of energy, the waste of time, infuriated him. How would the tower rise if blocks fell? How would he send word across the heavens that man existed, that he mattered, if there were no tower? How would he ask the questions that had to be asked?

Krug ached. Krug felt close to despair at the immensity of his self-imposed task.

In times of fatigue or tension he became morbidly conscious of the presence of his body as a prison engulfing his soul. The folds of belly-flesh, the island of perpetual rigidity at the base of the neck, the tiny tremor of the upper left eyelid, the slight constant pressure on the bladder, the rawness in the throat, the bubbling in the kneecap, every intimation of mortality rang in him like a chime. His body often seemed absurd to him, a mere bag of meat and bone and blood and feces and miscellaneous ropes and cords and rags, sagging under time’s assault, deteriorating from year to year and from hour to hour. What was noble about such a mound of protoplasm? The preposterousness of fingernails! The idiocy of nostrils! The foolishness of elbows! Yet under the armored skull ticked the watchful gray brain, like a bomb buried in mud. Krug scorned his flesh, but he felt only awe for his brain, and for the human brain in the abstract. The true Krugness of him was in that soft folded mass of tissue, nowhere else, not in the guts, not in the groin, not in the chest, but in the mind. The body rotted while its owner still wore it; the mind within soared to the farthest galaxies.