Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  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 black
ness 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.”