Читать книгу Babylon Sisters - Paul Di Filippo - Страница 6
ОглавлениеA THIEF IN BABYLON
How many lightyears to Babylon?
That’s a question members of the Conservancy never fail to ask—and which seldom fails to catch me by surprise. It’s so typical of their way of thinking—a way so alien to mine—that no matter how long I tarry wearily among them (on neutral worlds only, of course), I’m always unprepared to answer, much as they seem unready for and shocked by such a simple feature as my spinal plaques, which I take so much for granted.
The fact is, only someone who subscribes to the old notions of Truehome would ask for the distance to Babylon in lights, rather than simply inquire after its relativistic coordinates. Not to mention being repelled by my bodily modifications, while seeing nothing wrong in using a bodyfogger to appear as a disembodied head himself—
But just because I exhibit certain mannerisms and bodymods consistent with the Commensality does not automatically imply that I am rigidly opposed to the Conservancy. That old either-or, bivalent mindset is property of their system solely. It would be wrong to apply it to anyone such as myself.
Truly, although both they and I denote our systems with cees, we are seas apart.
So, I say—facing my hypothetical and stereotypical Conservator interlocutor, whether on moon or planet, ship or station, under suns green, blue, red or white, him usually polite enough to reveal his face by keeping his roiling, gadget-driven optical distortion focused below his neck—your question does not annoy me. I recognize that you have unbent enough to show me your stern face. (I wish—how I wish—that another man in another time and place had unbent as much.) I am pleased to talk with you about Babylon.
Perhaps my composite conversationalist knows the ancient children’s rhyme. Conservancy types cherish such things, and it gives me a point of introduction. (I TAPPED the verse once and it stayed with me, so I can relate it now.)
How many miles to Babylon?
Threescore miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.
If your heels are nimble and light,
You may get there by candlelight.
Babylon. Like anyplace else in this infinitely accessible universe, it’s just a Heisenberg transition away, so I suppose in a sense you can reach it before a candle’s brief flame flickers out. And when you arrive, it helps if your heels—and mind—are nimble and light, as mine once were.
But as for getting back again—
Well—once you invest as much of yourself in Babylon as I and others have, you can never really leave.
Although of course you can always do what our age specializes in.
You can always run away.
* * * *
Night came down like a hammer.
Certainly, if you know the least little bit about Babylon—and who doesn’t?—you must realize I’ve just lied.
All that really happened was that Babylon shut off the lightstrips that were an integral part of the enormous transparent shell enclosing our city, in accordance with the programmed diurnal cycle.
But what the hell kind of opening line is that? Literalness is such a downer.
No, the story starts much better if I say night came calling. And since some Babylonians—such as myself—who had been born elsewhere still instinctively regarded the phenomenon that way, I think I’ll keep it.
Night came down like a hammer.
Outside our shell dirty clouds of methane and nitrogen swirled, banded a dozen shades of smoggy pink, orange and grey, rendered faintly luminous by the radiance of the gas-giant around which our satellite revolved. (Contributing also, of course, was the feeble light from the far-off primary around which the gas-giant in turn revolved, a star somewhere in that part of infinity that the Conservancy insists on calling Gemini, the twins.)
Light bloomed in a thousand tall towers throughout the city, and fell from myriad free-floating globes. The assorted citizens striding the syalon streets seemed to speed up their pace, as if responding to age-old imperatives their rational selves would have denied.
The night quickens. Everyone, everywhere, grows at least a little more alert after dark, wary of the eyes beyond the fire.
I felt hyped up myself. But then again, I had more reason than most to feel so.
Half an hour after mottled darkness fell, I was ready to step from the departure platform on the fiftieth floor of a residential tower, carrying something that didn’t belong to me. I was confident that no one had seen me take the item, which was small enough to fit neatly beneath the waistband of my jox. And valuable enough to carry me through half a year of lazy pleasures. Well worth the risk involved, thought I.
With my hand on a brass boss studding my black leather chest-yoke, ready to activate the lift circuitry built into the harness, I was congratulating myself on another job well done. That was when the watchmek’s laser nearly clipped my ear off.
I fell flat on the dropledge, having whirled to face the direction of fire. Back in the building, the mek got off another shot that ran a lash of pain along my back.
Biting down on a yell, I pointed my index finger at the officious but stupid thing.
From the small seed that was a solid-state laser embedded under my fingernail sprouted a beam that pierced the mek. It fell over with a dull clunk.
I stood, legs shaky, back scorched. (The only good thing about laser wounds is how they self-cauterize.) My harness fell off, neatly severed, leaving me bare except for sandals and thong (and if you count ornaments, however multi-purposed, my carcanet). My first choice for escape was now gone. I wasn’t about to step off the platform into mid-air sans lift harness, no matter how desperate.
I had two options left. The first was to take the building’s slow gravshaft down—at the bottom of which would surely be waiting a nasty crowd of concerned citizens, summoned by Babylon.
The second looked like an even worse choice. I could go up five floors to the roof, send a TAP for a taxi (the platform here was big enough for individuals only) and wait to be immured within the vehicle, which Babylon would surely override and freeze when he realized what was going on.
I raced inside and headed for the roof.
Sometimes a choice looks bad only because you don’t know all the angles.
On the roof—fifty-five floors full of chambered sophonts closer to the luminescent killer heavens than where I wanted to be—I issued a TAP for the taxi, just to confuse things, then requested the time.
[20:10:01,] came the response.
The Hanging Gardens were due by in three minutes. I had carefully noted their schedule before I attempted this job.
Searching the gloom, I spotted the floating mass: a twinkling faerie palace overgrown with greenery, set on a wide thick disk bearing aloft several landscaped hectares.
The minutes it took to drift toward me seemed eons. Running one thick finger between torc and neck (a foolish mannerism, I know, but one I couldn’t break), I watched the egress to the liftshaft, expecting it to vomit forth meks and men any second.
But no one came. And then the Gardens were overhead.
There were no buildings in Babylon taller than the one I stood on. The Gardens were why.
The polychrome sky was suddenly occulted, and I was in plant-fragrant Shadow; voices drifted down to me. At the same time a creeper brushed my cheek like the antenna of a godhorse. Kicking off my sandals, I tossed my arms up, searching for thicker vines.
Found them.
Swarmed up.
Kids did this on a dare all the time, little caring about the community-service sentence they risked if caught. Once in a while, if they were foolish enough to attempt the climb without a lift harness and lost their hold, they died. Not having grown up here, I had never enjoyed such a thrill before.
Now I was making up for my placid off-world youth.
The Gardens, continuing their slow and stately pavane, left the tower behind. I was halfway up a rubbery liana, hanging a quarter of a kilometer up above the ceramic pavement. I made the mistake of looking down on the carpet of lights, and dizziness blurred my senses. I stopped climbing for a moment until I regained my equilibrium. Then I went as fast as I dared straight to the top.
A leg over the railing, then the other, and I was standing on solid “ground” again. The commingled scents of flowers greeted me.
My arms ached and my legs felt like gelatin. My chest and back were slicked with sweat and possibly blood from my reopened wound. The tension had nurtured a headache that kicked with every pulse.
But beneath my waistband was a fortune waiting to be redeemed.
I looked up in relief. At such a time it would have been good to look upon the stars. (You see, I retained some Conservancy attitudes even after living in Babylon for so long.)
But only a gaudy greasy fog greeted my gaze.
So I moved off.
Avoiding the couples, triplets and quartets (“More than four’s a bore,” they said in the city that month; next month it would be something altogether different, if not antithetical) gathered in the hidden dim purlieus and bowers, past the dancers adorning a plaza, and to the airbus stand.
If I had known then how soon I’d be back in the Gardens, I might not have hurried so.
Minutes later I was down, and lost in the busy streets.
I still had a lot to do. Meet the fence who’d buy my prize, recharge by induction field the subepidermal capacitor that powered my one-shot laser, then, finally, relax.
Task one took an hour, two a minute of that same hour, and three—
I was in a bar that catered to my kind of pleasure, relaxing with a drink, when I spotted him. He was the most beautiful godhorse I had ever seen.
Conservators, of course, call them mantises, or sometimes even bugs. Funny, then, how they resent being called apes themselves. (Once I TAPPED an ancient novel about humanity warring with a race called Bugs, and wished I never had. Pure Conservancy thinking at its most raw.) But any human in the Commensality will call them by some variation of the old folk etymology, godhorse.
This one was a male, with proud uplifted pyramidal head and finely formed mandibles, shining thorax and strong hind legs. His four folded wings were strong gemmed membranes that stirred slightly as I watched; his forelegs were delicacy and precision incarnate. His color at the moment was a relaxed olive.
I’m a big man, but he was taller, although not half my mass.
I initiated a TAP between us. The godhorses understood human language, but our ears were just not set up to interpret their stridulations. Without Babylon as intermediary, we would have been unable to communicate.
And a TAP was so much more intimate anyway.
[Commensal,] I sent in the familiar way, [your sustenance is mine.]
[And yours mine,] he replied. [Do you wish an encounter?]
[Very much,] I said. [And you?]
[You are a handsome human. I have never seen your color skin before. It is like space itself.]
I knew he was newly arrived then, since I’m hardly the only one in Babylon of this shade. [I take that as a yes,] I sent. [Shall we go to a place I know of?]
[Indeed.]
We left the bar together, and—
I pause here, recalling the reactions I’ve gotten from Conservators when I’ve described relations among Commensals before. They always adjust their bodyfoggers to hide their faces in disgust. That’s one thing I can’t stand. I expect them to listen as fellow sophonts, not as chaoses of optical distortion. Conservators might call all who embrace the Commensality perverts, but they always damn well learn before I’m done that we’re perverts with principles.
As I was saying:
—went to a Commensality-supported sensorium.
In our private cube I stripped off my lone pouch of a garment. (I was still barefoot and harnessless). The godhorse wore not so much as a button. He had turned a bright red with excitement.
I laid down on my stomach on the soft warm organiform couch in the twilit room, and he climbed atop me. His chitin was cool, and he weighed nothing in Babylon’s light gravity. His mandibles clacked alongside my collared neck, and his forearm spurs bit into my back. (And now you know the reason for my spinal plaques and carcanet: protection from a caress too violent.)
[Now I master you!] he sent.
I felt his intoxicant saliva snail my jaw. (On Truehome they used to believe the brown drool of the little native godhorses would provoke madness.)
The godhorse stridulated wildly, sawing his hindlegs against his wings. Knowing what was next, I got more excited.
Pinning me in a hold I could easily have broken, but chose not to (isn’t that the essence of love?), he bit my shoulder, opening up old scars.
His saliva mingled with my blood.
In seconds the world exploded in hallucinatory pleasure, the hot bright fragments shooting off into the void, leaving only pure blackness behind, which swallowed me down and down.
When I came out of it, the godhorse was gone. I flipped over onto my back and let the couch grow a patch for my shoulder. Then I got up, dressed, and left.
What do they get out of it? Good question. The answer lies, I think, in the fact that only the male godhorses indulge, and don’t care if their partner is a male or female.
Imagine how you would feel if you could mount someone who absolutely, positively wouldn’t bite your head off, as a female or even fellow male godhorse might, in the throes of passion.
The fact that their saliva is synergistic with our biochemistry is just lagniappe for us.
Because they’re so beautiful, and humans are so exogamous, we’d lie with them anyway, I’m sure, even if they didn’t provide a dose of pure ecstasy.
I was tired and sated and anxious to get home and rest. Night was ending, a full twelve hours of hard work and near-death and the little death of pleasure, and my mind was foggy from it all.
So when the small man with the dead face stepped from an alley outside the sensorium and said, “Hello, Meat,” (more about my name later) I didn’t react as fast as usual.
Squinting (the light-globe here was dead and lying on the syalon, and the next nearest was three meters off), I said, “Ace? How are you? I heard a bad rumor about you. They said you were brain-cored.”
His voice was without affect. “He was.”
So then I knew.
I was talking with Babylon.
* * * *
Let’s digress a minute.
The topic?
Governments.
The Conservancy, the Commensality, and the rough, two-backed beast they make up, sprawling across all creation, locked together in a perpetual ritual encounter akin to both sex and cannibalism. (You’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, I hope, but food and mating are Commensality preoccupations.)
The trouble is that the two systems (although I might make the point here that the Commensality is really a myriad systems that happen to acknowledge a rather limited set of common principles) are just so damned incompatible.
The Conservancy believes in government by an elite corps of trained professionals, enforcing laws meant to secure the maximum good for the greatest numbers. They desire physical and temporal continuity across the stars, which, you’ll pardon my bluntness, is just plain crazy, given the facts of travel by Heisenberg transition. (What can borders possibly demarcate when every point on the space-time continuum is contiguous with every other point?) And they have that completely illogical fetish about an imaginary purity that mankind must adhere to.
That’s the Conservancy. I know its principles intimately, from arguments with one of its sharpest proponents, my brother.
His name?
That doesn’t matter.
He’s dead now.
Anyway. Now what about us? The Commensality.
Our precepts are harder to codify. We don’t have an official canon like theirs. But there’re a few saints in our hagiography, and one was a pantheistic holy fool from Truehome who claimed, “That government governs best which governs least.” We subscribe to that. Also the essential equality of all sophonts, unlike those species chauvinists.
How, you might wonder, does one go about implementing such ideals? Some central coordination is required in any society above a certain level, and once one grants power to any subset of people, it seems they always manage to want more and more. And equality—that’s an even more fantastic notion.
The answer to both is Babylon.
Not the city. The AOI beneath it.
Running every large-sized social unit that calls itself part of the Commensality you will find an Artificial Organic Intelligence. Basically a huge biofabbed mass of paraneurons, with an information-carrying capacity that no one has yet effectively delimited, these beings communicate among themselves across space—and with us via TAP. They hold all knowledge in common, dispensing it upon request. (Fair access to information is equality.) They coordinate interpersonal communications by the Tele-Adjunct and Psychoprosthetic which is as much a part of every member of the Commensality as any sensory organ he was born with. And through their agents—mek and human—they do all the managerial scutwork that is so damn boring but necessary.
How can we stand to entrust our welfare to such a “thing?”
How can Conservators stand to entrust their welfare to fallible humans?
That “thing” is literally no more capable of self-aggrandizement than a person is of keeping his pupils dilated if I flash a bright light in his eyes. And for the same reason: built-in biological limits. AOI’s are the first truly beneficent “rulers” in history. (Of course you know that word in spoken quotes is all wrong.)
Beneficent, that is, until someone or something threatens them or the Commensality.
Then watch out.
Which brings us to the end of digression—
—and the beginning of panic.
* * * *
I was talking with Babylon.
The ceramic pavement grew cold beneath my bare feet, although objectively nothing changed. The shadows (not Shadow) around us seemed deep enough to swallow galaxies. I dipped a blunt finger under my torc and rimmed its reassuring solidity. My heart was beating like the core of a sun, and I willed it down to normal.
I knew Ace was going to be a little slower, now that he had been cored—
(Cored? Babylon catches a person who, despite the elastic parameters of life in the Commensality, has qualified as a disruptive rogue, destructive to the freedom of others. ((It’s all very scientific, each person building up a life-index sorta like karma in the AOI’s banks, and you have to be pretty nasty to qualify for coring. My daily complacency hinged on the belief that I wasn’t.)) In a simple operation, the rogue’s higher brain components are scooped out, leaving enough of the reptilian brain to handle the autonomic functions. A mass of paraneurons is dumped in, giving the AOI direct control of the body, and voila, an agent. Best use of a bad apple. Moral: don’t screw with Babylon and your fellows.)
—but I couldn’t gamble on taking him out, or outrunning whatever weaponry he had modded in.
Thinking fast, I realized that maybe there was no reason to do either. Perhaps this was strictly a social call, having nothing to do with any of my nefarious deeds.
Although I doubted it, I decided to play it that way.
“Ace—uh, Babylon. Hello. Nice to see you. A simple TAP would have gotten my attention just as well.”
The dead man didn’t smile. I had heard that Babylon had trouble portraying emotions, and Ace’s immobile features tended to confirm this.
“That is exactly the opposite of the truth,” said the AOI with the living corpse’s unmodulated voice. “You could have denied the TAP. But not this revenant. I find such encounters quite effective.”
Babylon stared at me until shivers laddered my dorsal plaques. Then he spoke again.
“Let us walk. We have things to speak of.”
What could I say?
We started walking down the nearly empty pre-dawn streets.
Above, it began to rain liquid methane. It sounded like a horde of little clawed animals scrambling atop the dome.
“The Conservancy has made a new move in their war on us,” were Babylon’s first words after we began to stroll, him in a slightly stiff-legged way.
“War is dead,” I parroted.
“Insofar as you mean attack by gross physical means, you merely repeat common knowledge. Neither we nor the Conservancy dare risk antagonizing the other to the point where our opponent would be provoked to, say, translate a few tons of rock directly into the same coordinates as a population center. Being equally vulnerable, we are all equally restrained. But the universe we know is in a constant state of war nonetheless. Our weapon is sheer example. By running an open society, we seduce individuals and worlds constantly away from the Conservancy. Their weapon is propaganda of a most insidious sort.”
I stopped short. “They’ve brought the Chronicle to Babylon.”
“Yes. The Conservancy has sent a representative carrying their Chronicle of Mankind. He’s just moved into the Gardens, and is already playing it for the curious. I am helpless to stop him. My whole reason for being is the free dissemination of information. But the information he has brought is a virus that will kill this world, or at least transform it into an outpost of the Conservancy. Which is the same as death for you and me. Unless we kill him first.”
I started walking again, silent. Babylon followed. We passed a lone axolotl, her neotenic clown’s face smiling. I think she wanted to cruise us, but Babylon must have sent some warning TAP. In a second her elastic features grew worried, and she hurried off.
At last I said, “Why are you telling me this? Can’t you just handle it yourself? Isn’t that your job, to protect our way of life?”
“There can be no official connection between me and the diplomat’s death. We dare not risk violent repercussions. So, I need a tool. And you are that tool.”
I risked some shuck and jive. I should have known it was useless.
“Me? I don’t know anything about such things. I’m a simple hedonist. Why, the very thought—”
Babylon laid a hand on my arm and I shut up.
Then he recited every last crime I’d committed since coming to Babylon.
It was a long list.
“So you see,” he finished, “I know you. You are the one I want. Find this Conservator and kill him. If we accomplish nothing else, we’ll buy a little time while the Conservancy decides what to do. At best, they might grow discouraged, and pick another target.”
I quit pretending. “What’s in it for me? Why should I risk myself to help you?”
“You’re a member of the Commensality,” Babylon reminded me. “As such, you’re a de facto enemy to the Conservancy. If they win here, and they catch you before you can get out in the mass exodus, they’ll scrub your brain. Me, they hate simply because I’m artificial. Mocklife, they call me. But you have two strikes against you. You’ve dared to modify the sacred human physiological ‘norm.’ And you practice miscegenation.”
“Anti-em,” I spat.
“Tagging your opponent with an expletive does not reduce his threat. And you should feel some loyalty toward your commensals. If that is not enough, then consider this. You are about to trip my rogue-trigger. Soon, if you continue your current lifestyle—and I do not predict you will change—you will become a legitimate target for my enmity. If you help me in this, I will wipe the ledger clean, and you will have at least as many years free from my dedicated pursuit as you have yet enjoyed.”
I thought about it for a minute. It seemed the type of argument that was kinda impossible to refute.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Babylon didn’t smile, but I sensed an AOI analog to that emotion.
“I thought you would see things my way,” he said. Then:
[And I’ll be keeping track of you.]
* * * *
Day was born like a nova.
(Actually: lightstrips, Babylon, literalism, et cetera. )
I stood blinking for a second or two. When I was done, the body that had once been my pal Ace was gone. As to the nature of his future errands, I did not care to speculate. Especially since someday his fix might be mine. But I wouldn’t be able to worry about it if cored—or would I? What tiny portions of personality and memories were left intact, down there in the coree’s brainstem, and what must they feel?
I wasn’t anxious to find out.
Sudden fatigue washed over me like a tide of despair. I had gone a day now without sleep—not counting the godhorse-induced trance, which stimulated rather than soothed—and almost that long without food. I had been shot at by a mek, carried aloft on a floating island like Gulliver on Laputa (I remember TAPPING for that particular image), and scared half out of my wits by the civic entity who was supposed to be protecting me.
And the worst of it was that I couldn’t stop now. I had to think. Matters were far from settled. Just because I had told Babylon I was going to cooperate didn’t mean I would.
There was always the option of flight.
That might have been someone else’s first choice. After all, I claimed earlier that this is an age of running away. With interstellar travel so cheap and easy, what else could one expect? Intelligence has always deluded itself into believing that circumstances were the limiting factor, when usually it was intelligence itself that was the source of trouble. And you can’t flee yourself so easily.
Now, I’m not knocking escape. After all, I once fled to Babylon, and found a kind of happiness. But there was a good reason why I couldn’t just up and run now, except as a last resort, and I don’t expect you to see it.
The reason was the TAP.
Conservators are simultaneously to be pitied and envied. More pitied, of course, because they deny themselves all the manifold virtues of a TAP, claiming such devices are intrusions on the human brain. And envied, just a little, because they aren’t tied down like us.
Sometimes a TAP goes down deep as a taproot.
Suppose you spent all your life (in the case of someone born into the Commensality) or a good portion of your adult years (my case) relying on this massive auxiliary memory-cum-switchboard-cum-advisor-cum-stimulator. After a while, the AOI, with its individual idiosyncracies (they do have them) becomes as integral to your sense of self as your bodily feedback. Further suppose you one day decide on a change of scenery. Of course you won’t voluntarily pick someplace without TAP facilities. Your destination’s bound to be another locus of the Commensality. So you TAP into Babylon and send:
[Please grow a mass of nonsentient paraneurons containing all my personal data, which I may take with me.]
Surprisingly soon a mek or, god forbid, someone like Ace arrives with a little homeostatic container that holds some pretty important stuff. You handle it as nervously as if it were an embryo, which it sorta is.
You arrive at your new home. (Of course, all this applies only for a permanent move. And please notice how neatly the instant transition from the previous orally bounded paragraph to this one mimics the Heisenberg transition itself.) You hand over your container to an agent of the new AOI, who promptly integrates the cells into himself. Now, however, like new lovers, you and the AOI have to accomodate to each other. A rather touchy proposition, and not without its share of urgent uneasiness. And sometimes, like a bad mating, the match never stabilizes.
The net effect of all this is that we in the Commensality tend to be rather sedentary.
And that’s why I wasn’t going to leave unless forced to.
My stomach rumbled, as I stood there in the rapidly filling streets. The methane rain had stopped, and the sky within the dome was filling with individual fliers and aircars.
I couldn’t see too far ahead, but I knew at that moment that I wanted a couple of things.
A meal, and a walk around the Bay.
I set off for a refectory. The movement felt good.
At the refectory portal—just an arched opening without a door; lacking weather there was no reason for doors except privacy, and a refectory was the opposite of private—I passed in. The first room contained the showers. I stripped and washed up with the others there, then passed into the refectory proper.
Did you ever look up the derivation of “Commensality?” Good, then you’ll understand the importance of what went on in the refectory.
Eating binds. Every old human culture locked to the soil of Truehome understood that, on one level or another. Share salt, and an enemy becomes your friend. If you want to forge links with a sophont, try eating with/on/around/against him.
Inside the big, open, high-ceilinged room that was the refectory, there were members of species that employed all those prepositions.
There were humans who ranged from the Conservancy-unmodified norm to those who were altered into the nearly alien. There were godhorses (so beautiful) and axolotls (so comical) and slidewhistles (so noisy). Not to mention a dozen other races I haven’t the heart to detail, because I miss them so. All were unclothed and busy eating, from trough and plate and bowl and hopper. The pungent aromas were making my belly sit up and beg.
So I plunged in.
When my hunger was assuaged and my spirits restored, I hit the showers in the room ante to the exit. (Some races seem to enjoy wearing their food more than actually eating it.) I picked out a new jox and sandals and liftharness (my standard outfit) from the clothing alcove, and exited onto the streets. (Such necessities are freely disbursed in the Commensality. But there’re still plenty of private possessions for me to lift.)
I headed then for the Bayside locks. A quiet place to think was next.
At the locks, I took a quilt from its rack and donned it. The living flesh (no brains, just ganglions) molded itself to my body, sealing my precious hide away from the deadly atmosphere I was about to step into. For a second I was blind and deaf. Then I TAPPED into the feed from a camera mounted in the locker room. I saw myself as I looked now to others: something like an inflated rubber biped balloon.
I switched the TAP to receive the sensory inputs of the quilt. Since it “saw” exclusively by infrared, had no hearing, and “tasted” over its entire surface, you can imagine that the world altered rather radically.
I cycled through the locks and stood on the shore. It tasted like acid and salt beneath my squishy soles.
The surface temperature of our satellite hovers around the triple point of methane: minus 168 degrees Centigrade, the critical temperature at which that compound can exist as solid, liquid or gas.
The shore was solid.
The turbulent sea that stretched away was liquid.
The air was gas (gases, actually, nitrogen supplying the major component.)
Breathing the oxygen suspired by the quilt, I started walking around the curving marge that lay between the city-shell and the lapping sea. It looked like the tide was coming in (courtesy of the primary’s gravity), and so I had to be careful not to get isolated on some inaccessible spit. The quilt could stand immersion in the liquid methane, but the damn stuff tasted just like gasoline, and you risked getting swept out into the 400 meter-deep sea. I kept myself oriented by the hottest pointsources of heat within the dome, and the more feeble beacon that was the distant shrouded sun.
Now I could think about my future.
But wouldn’t you know, my stubborn brain could only focus on the past.
I remembered my youth.
Did you ever realize that the Heisenberg drive promotes specialization? When transport is cheap, it makes sense to import what you can’t produce efficiently. And if there’s a big market for whatever you do best, then you tend to do it more and more, until pretty soon almost your whole world’s doing it. (This applies, of course, to Conservancy and neutral worlds, the worker ants, and not us lazy Commensality grasshoppers, who traffic more in intangibles.)
I was born and grew up in a grain field. The whole damn world was hairy with wheat and oats and other assorted hybrids. There was no such thing as a city. The one other family on the world occupied the antipodes. On clear days you couldn’t see forever, but only about as far as the next stalk. It was boring as a stint in a sense-dep tank.
So I said to my brother one day (over the master combine’s radio, for he was a thousand miles away), “Buddy, I’m leaving this world when I hit sixteen.”
“Yeah, sure,” he staticked back. “And where’re you going and what’re you gonna do?”
Even then, I was developing “peculiar” (by the lights of Buddy) tastes. For instance, I used to study the native locusts for hours, and was sorry when we had to kill them, lest they eat our crop.
“The Commensality,” I said, yanking on the steering bars to avoid an eroded spot. I squinted against the newly angled sunlight, as the big machine responded sluggishly and I wished for illegal mind/machine interface.
“Yuk,” Buddy said. “Those exteelovers. What a creepy idea. You wouldn’t really go there, would you?”
“Yes. I’m serious. What’s the sense of living on a neutral world if you can’t choose one side or the other? And I choose the Commensality.”
“You’re crazy. The Conservancy is the only way to go.”
I said nothing in reply; I was too stunned. It had never occured to me that Buddy would object. We had never really argued before. Oh, sure, some sibling spats that sprang up and blew over like our world’s circumpolar storms; hell, there weren’t even any girls on the whole planet to fight over! But I could sense that this topic, this tone, was deadly serious, the source of potential great dissension. So, with untypical wisdom, I hid my adolescent certitude with a bland comment.
But Buddy wouldn’t let it go. I guess I had really shocked him. After work that day, as we sported in our favorite shady swimming-hole, half a world away from home, he kept pressing me on it, until I finally asserted myself, saying that I wasn’t joking about my desire to join, or at least investigate, the Commensality when I was old enough.
That was when, amid harsh words that stopped just short of blows, he quit talking to me, and I, perforce, to him.
There was one last time before I left, when I knew Buddy still cared for me.
I was overseeing a force of meks who were sowing half a continent with winter wheat, up in the northernmost latitudes amenable to cultivation. I was about a klick from my ship when a sudden unseasonable blizzard blew in, white-ing out the kilometers of flatness into featureless oblivion. At first I didn’t worry. I was dressed for a certain level of exposure, and my ship had a homing beacon.
Which I soon learned I had neglected to flip on.
I started trudging through the howling snow-inferno, heading toward where I thought my ship lay. After covering about five klicks I knew I had guessed wrong. I started tromping in a circle. When I couldn’t do that any more, I lay down to die.
I woke up to find Buddy bending over me. (I later learned he had made the instant transition from home to low orbit over my assigned territory, zoomed in on my near-corpse with infrared sensors, then split the atmosphere with a quick descent.)
Through frost-crusted lips I murmured, “Thanks.”
And do you know—that lifesaving bastard wouldn’t unbend enough even to say, “You’re welcome”?
So attaining my majority (age, not size; I still had plenty of growth beyond the two-meter mark I stood at then) I took off, with no goodbyes.
At the spaceport, I pondered travel as our age knew it.
First: why spaceships?
The Heisenberg drive works by transferring all an object’s inherent dispersed quantum uncertainty into its spatial dimension, at which time it becomes possible to impose new relativistic coordinates on it. Great. So now we can flit directly from the surface of one world to that of another.
Not quite. Unless you want to risk occupying the same coordinates as something/someone else, and make the biggest possible bang for your mass. Better pick some vacuum close to your destination.
Which means space. Which means a way to get down from space. Which means spaceships.
But no extravagant takeoffs. Landings, yes. But takeoff consists merely of disappearance and the clap of inrushing air.
Maybe it’s pretty extravagant at that.
So at the field I bought my ticket and took my chances.
And found myself entering the portside lock of Babylon, dazed, confused, and utterly bewildered. (The ancients thought jetlag was something!)
When I trod accidently on the paw of a human-sized feline (I was still wearing my loamy shitkickers), she turned hissing, teeth bare, and said, “Watch it, meat.”
I backed off, muttering apologies. The first thing I did was unvelcro my boots and ditch them.
But I kept the semi-derogatory, semi-joshing name. I was sick of my old one anyway, and felt I was embarking on a new life. And it proved a fortuitous choice. No one expects much subtlety from a giant named Meat—which pays off when you are trying to separate them from their valuables.
(And now I’ve kept my promise to you about explaining my name!)
I called us lazy grasshoppers earlier, and I suppose, compared to others, we are. You can exist in the Commensality without working, thanks to the bounty from the labor of mek units directed by your AOI. But sophonts being sophonts, there is still plenty of enterprise in the Commensality, people providing services and products that others want, so as to raise themselves above the lowest common denominator (all in a Commensally aware manner, of course; no rapacious merchant princes need apply).
But such an existence wasn’t for me. I had worked harder than these people for all my life. Now I wanted to take it easy. But I wanted to do it in style. So I became a thief. Which turned out to be work too, but also fun. I surprised myself with my talents in this area. For years now, I had been content and happy.
But then Babylon had made me think.
I came walking upon the shore to a delicate spray of frozen methane that looked like the bridge to Asgard. I kicked it to flinders, without deriving even the satisfaction of feeling it through the quilt.
What did I owe the Commensality? I had fitted into this peculair polis like a hand into a glove. They had saved me from a life of boring drudgery, providing a matrix in which I could become me. And what had I contributed in turn? Oh, sure, I had made individuals happy (and some no doubt sad). Anyone can do that. But what had I given to the Commensality as a whole? What were my community responsibilities? Did they involve killing another sophont?
Damn that Babylon! I wanted to cleave the thick roof of his hidden cavern beneath the city and let this frigid sea flow in on him.
I stopped walking, and turned. I was far away from the city now, out on a promontory slapped by the hydrocarbon waves. The thick atmosphere hid the dome from me. The next moment, though, an eddy in the gases developed. (We called these windows mooneyes.) Through the mooneye shone the lights of Babylon, various heat-tones of red, orange, yellow, white and blue, like Captain Nemo’s undersea city.
So exotic, so fragile, so mine.
I decided to do what Babylon wanted.
* * * *
So three days later, why was I still hesitating?
(My nerves were strung so tight that every time I happened to step into Shadow—or Shadow swept over me—I flinched.)
I had passed the time in various pursuits, none of which served to truly allay the nervousness I was feeling.
I conducted a scam or two—nothing too extravagant, just something to keep my hand in, and pass the time while I decided how to take out the Conservancy’s envoy. One deal had some interesting facets. It involved the infamous Babylon Sisters—
But that’s another story altogether.
In any case, my growing credit balance did nothing to soothe my apprehensions. So I turned to sex.
I picked up this stegasoid in the refectory outshowers, and we spent a fun three hours together. But of course, with the way my luck was running, there had to be repercussions. It turned out she was just in from offplanet, somewhere less fastidious than Babylon, and had a bad case of scale mites. You’ve never known irritation until you’ve had those active little critters under your overlapping spinal plaques. Took an hour in the infirmary to make ’em surrender.
When I got out of the ward, I went to a bar to waste a few idle hours in muzzy rumination.
In the dimness of the bar (haven’t really changed in centuries, I understand), I got a TAP from Babylon.
[I called to see how matters were progressing,] he sent.
I jolted up in my seat when his words filled my brain. [Oh, fine, fine, Babylon. I’m planning my strategy right this minute.]
[Good. I suggest you pay more attention to the mental condition of your commensals while you procrastinate. Perhaps their malaise may help motivate you.]
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but pretended I did.
[Sure. I’ll check it out.]
There was silence then, and I thought Babylon had broken the connection. But he came back with a request.
[Meat, I have a thing I wish you to read. Will you?]
I sent back acceptance, and Babylon squirted me a book.
It took a couple of seconds to absorb and store it, but since it was only a few megabytes of information, I soon had it integrated.
The nature of the information took me by surprise. I had expected something that would help me with my goal. Instead, I got a book of poetry.
It was titled Crimes Embedded in a Matrix of Semi-serious Poems.
And it was all about me.
[Babylon, I— What’s this all about? Who wrote this?]
[I did. But I am not releasing it for general consumption. It would be too likely to incite similar behavior.]
[But why? And why me?]
Babylon sent something wordless akin to a shrug. [I write a lot of poetry in my spare time, and your life seemed dramatically interesting. Not many people talk directly to me, you know, and I have to do something. Also, believe it or not, I actually like you, and would be sorry to have to scoop out your cortex. So I thought I’d share my work with you. I will not hide the fact that I also calculated the action would provoke a slightly higher allegiance from you.]
[Well, thanks, Babylon. I’m touched.] And I was.
[Please think nothing of it. Goodbye, and remember what I said about your compatriots.]
[Goodbye.]
I told you our “rulers” were idiosyncratic, didn’t I?
I got up and left the bar. Serendipity dictated that I would step out into Shadow.
Wincing, I looked up, onto the underside of the Gardens: a flat grey disk marked with colorful graffiti and bordered by dangling plants. I hooked a finger beneath my carcanet and glared at the Gardens, trying to will the whole thing away. I wished I were Prospero, and could vanish this particular gorgeous palace into the baseless, uncertain fabric that was the spacetime continuum.
Up there, in a rented palace suite, the Conservancy envoy was dispensing his poison, in the form of the Chronicle of Mankind, and Babylon claimed it was generating some sort of psychic illness among the populace.
I set off to find out what he meant.
And this was what I learned.
There was a split growing between the human and the non-human citizens of Babylon. Whereas members of all species had always existed in complete harmony, now everyone seemed to be acquiring jagged edges that grated and rasped on each other. I saw it on the streets and in the refectories, in the concert halls and null-gee natatoriums.
The humans were exhibiting traits such as arrogance and impatience and coerciveness. The non-humans were responding with disdain and stubbornness and frigidity. Godhorses drooped (so dispirited), axolotls frowned (so sad), and slidewhistles scurried by (so silent). I actually saw a fight or three that seemed to have nothing at their bases other than prejudice. (You must understand that there were fights now and then in Babylon during normal times. We’re not talking about Utopia, after all, and any sentients might come to blows about certain disagreements. But over negligible physical details—no, never that.)
I knew what the Conservancy planned. Babylon possessed a slight majority of humans. (An accident of statistical distribution. When travel across the universe resembles Brownian motion, you get such occasional clumping.) Pretty soon, when enough of them were infected with the Chronicle, someone would issue a request to the Conservancy to step in and take over the city, on some pretext such as “protecting fellow humans from bodily harm.” What could Babylon do then? The Commensality’s strength lay in solidarity. An AOI could only act in the interests of his community. And if that community was fragmented, where did correct action lie?
Then would begin the riots and bloodshed and retribution for slights real or imagined, the purges and re-education, until Babylon was molded into the Conservancy’s image.
Civilization is so tenuous.
My inaction had helped to bring this fateful Kristallnacht a step closer. I couldn’t let it happen. Not if doing what Babylon wanted was all it would take to stop it.
So I devised a plan.
* * * *
The Gardens hung in the darkling sky like a Fata Morgana conjured by a demon wizard. I floated up, air streaming over my bare limbs like liquid methane over a quilt. (But the cold was in me, rather than in the air.)
I noticed then that only humans were heading for the Gardens. There wasn’t a single other kind of sophont in sight.
It was truly scary, this segregation, even though, by specious (and specificate) biological assumptions, I was willy-nilly on the side of those who had initiated it. I wondered if this was how my distant ancestors had felt on Truehome, when the calls of a lynchmob echoed through some small North American town.
One perfect ten-point landing later (bare feet comprising an unmodified ten toes), I stood on a wide terrace paved with living substance (the better to roll upon). A hundred meters off stood the palace, central pleasure dome of this aerial trysting place.
I moved off toward it, past glimmering elven lights strung on potted trees.
On the broad steps leading up to the main doors, I TAPPED Babylon.
[You know when to shut off the power?] I asked.
[Of course. 24:00:00 exactly. The witching hour.]
[Ha, ha,] I enunciated with mental precision, just to show I was in no mood for AOI humor. [It’s easy for you to joke. You’re not about to take someone’s life.]
[I stand to lose as much if you fail as you do,] retorted that sententious mass of jelly. Then: [Are you sure you need the whole city shut off?]
[I want utter chaos. That’s the only thing that’s going to bring the Conservator out of his lair. Can you think of a better way to accomplish it?]
[No. We will follow your plan. Good luck.]
Babylon left my brain.
The city was powered by a monopole furnace. Shutting it off consisted of stopping the flow of protons into that destructive soliton. (Each proton-disintegration yielded several gev, and the furnace provided more power than a dozen Babylons could fully use. Fair access to energy is equality.)
I had arrived half an hour before midnight. There was one thing I planned to do before confronting the Conservator.
I was going to experience the Chronicle, so I could know exactly what we were up against.
In the palace, I TAPPED for a floorplan and followed it up a gravshaft to the Conservancy suite.
Before I entered, I stopped to look. I saw a large room crowded with immobile humans, surrounding a golden ovoid set on a pillar.
I stepped into the room—
—and was living the Chronicle of Mankind.
Oh, those Conservators are clever! Disdaining TAPS as organic mods, they’ve developed an electronic projective telepathy, a brutal generator of waves that swamp the consciousness. Rather than accept an enhancement that amounts to the slightest possible violation of self, they’ve substituted mental rape.
I was myself no longer. Instead, I was some anonymous viewpoint character, living out the tale of humanity, as interpreted by the Conservancy. The device must just have cycled, for I was back four million years.
A hominid, I stood on a dusty African plain, puzzling out what to do with a sharp piece of flint. The sun was hot on my back as I finally bent to saw at the zebra carcass at my feet. I gave a grunt of exultation, and swallowed some bloody meat.
After a time in this milieu, things changed. I won’t attempt to recount the whole vast tale. Everyone knows it. Through Paleolithic and Neolithic I voyaged. Through Sumer, Ur, Thebes, Babylon (Senior), Egypt, Greece and Rome my consciousness hurtled, shuttled from one representative inhabitant to another. All along, pounding into my brain was the inevitability of it: mankind’s long predestined rise from savagery and nescience, his manifest destiny looming huge before him.
Mastery of the universe.
On and on through history I raced, reliving the experiences of hundreds of humans as they subjugated Truehome’s flora and fauna and very topography. The Age of Discovery, the Age of Empire, the Age of the Atom, the Age of Solar Exploration, mankind moving from strength to strength, from one glorious conquest to another, culminating in the invention of the Heisenberg drive, when he exploded onto the universe and found—
Other sentients. Beings that aspired to our stature.
Creepy, crawly things, embodiments of a hundred ancestral fears, all of them daring to claim equality, whereas they deserved nothing but enslavement, or second-rate status at best.
At which point mankind split. Into a camp of loyalists and one of traitors. Conservancy versus Commensality. The old true stock against the deliberate mutants and exteelovers. But there was still time for the traitors to recant, to rejoin the crusade to dominate the galaxy. I could feel sympathy growing in my heart for the twisted cause—
The Chronicle snapped off as abruptly as Babylonian night.
The room went dark, save for feeble bioluminescents.
The Gardens dipped five degrees from horizontal—as the emergency capacitors attempted to handle the huge mass—and started to descend to a preprogrammed emergency landing site.
Babylon had come through for me.
People began to shriek and scream. They stampeded toward the door and flew out the windows.
I activated my own harness and floated up into the shadows to wait.
Pretty soon the hall was empty. I spent the time trying to cleanse my brain of the filth.
Everything was silent, except for the muted sounds of distress from the city outside. I watched a door that led further into the suite.
Through that door came a fog.
I dropped down like an avenging angel, to stand upon the canted floor.
The fog and I faced off. Sweat slicked the circuit-laced leather straps across my chest.
“Drop your mask,” I said. “I want to see what kind of human believes such shit and works for it.”
The fog regarded me blankly for a full minute. (That’s a long time. You try conducting such a standoff for sixty seconds, and see how your nerves bear up.)
At last came a voice from out the prisming mist.
“No.”
That was it. I didn’t even rate an insult.
The chill from the methane atmosphere seemed to have seeped in past the dome’s disabled heaters and infiltrated my heart. From within the mist I thought to detect motion. So I raised my finger and—
Why did I do it?
He was everything I was not. He juxtaposed text to my texture, sense to my sensuality, being to my becoming, mastery over melding. (And yes, my godhorse lover said he would master me. But that was love, and love is a figurative thing.) The envoy and I represented outerness versus innerness; planets versus moons; restless roving versus complacent sessility; secrets versus openness; law versus anarchy. There was no choice. I had to. So—
—raised my finger and lanced him with light.
The fog collapsed. I went over to it and groped inside, my arm cut off above the wrist. I found the distorter and switched it off.
I never mentioned that my brother and I were twins, did I? So it looked like myself cooling there. Of course he had no spinal plaques, or laser beneath his fingernail. In fact, he had no weapons at all. I am forced to believe that he was reaching up to shut off the distorter himself when I killed him, although I know for a fact he was too damned stubborn.
“Buddy—” I murmured.
And half an hour later was half a universe away, under the light of another sun. An hour more (the reception port was busy), I walked on another world.
Thus began more than two years of flight.
I can’t recount all the places I visited. But no matter where I ran, I couldn’t outpace the memory of what I had done. Saved a city and destroyed a life, a life connected to mine by inextinguishable bonds. Twisted bonds, to be sure, but bonds none the less.
One day I woke up and really paid attention to where I was.
In a one-man ship, two parsecs—the minimal distance for survival—away from a quasar, one of those enigmas that blazed with the radiance of a dozen galaxies.
I was sixteen billion lightyears away from Babylon, on the literal edge of the plenum.
It was as far as I could go.
There was nowhere else left to haunt.
So I headed for my birthplace.
I was lying on my back in a field of grain, studying the clouds, when Ace found me.
“We’ve been monitoring arrivals here since you disappeared,” he said. “Babylon had a hunch you’d return sooner or later.”
I didn’t sit up. “So?”
“Babylon wants you to come back. He says you’ve earned it.”
I considered. “How are you functioning anyway? You’re not in direct contact with that master manupulator, are you?”
“No. I received a limited imprint and autonomy for this mission. Are you coming back? Babylon has further use for you.”
“I’m sure. Well, you can transmit this message.”
I recited that ancient children’s rhyme.
“And what does that mean?” asked Ace’s baffled limited imprint.
“Just deliver it. From one poet to another. Babylon will understand.”
Ace seemed to ponder. Then he left.
I adjusted my hands beneath my head into a more comfortable cradle. The earth smelled good. The grain stood tall. The sky was deep. Unless a combine came by, I didn’t plan on moving for a while.
Turning my eyes inward, I sought a candle to travel by.
