Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  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 Exp
loration, 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.

  BABYLON SISTERS

  1.

  The Last Chapter

  We—that was Babylon’s agent, the Sisters and me—uncurled ourselves out of six hidden Planckian dimensions, slid down a lightyear or so of string, and popped out into the familiar four-dimensional Riemannian spacetime.

  “Holy Moten,” I said.

  “That about sums it up,” said Jezzie.

  “My sentiments exactly,” chimed Judy.

  So said the Sisters, then fell silent. They seemed rather lost, away from their TAPS, like two halves of a severed snake.

  Ace, Babylon’s semi-autonomous extension, regarded us coldly. “We trust you three will not advertise this trip. The consequences for you would not be pleasant.”

  With that frigid warning, Ace went to the control-board’s ears and whistled us a course back to Babylon, distant by one transition, then an hour under ion drive.

  Through space, then soupy atmosphere we skittered, the cabin’s inhabitants all in speculative silence.

  Once again standing free under Babylon’s dome, Ace perked up, and likewise the Sisters, as they came back into TAP contact.

  “The Conservancy is in for a few surprises now,” said Ace cryptically, then hastened away on his master’s business.

  The Sisters and I made for home.

  Once back in our communal burrow-cum-nest, Judy and Jezzie disappeared, leaving me alone. I had never felt so confused in my life. I sat for a long time, just trying to piece everything together into a coherent story. Then, without even quite meaning to, I began to write:

  First I killed the diplomat—

  2.

  Interruption Number One

  “Hey, Sandy—what are you doing to the wall?” questioned Jezzie.

  “Yeah,” said Judy. “You’re making graffiti all over our nice clean pleasureparlor walls.”

  Squatting on my haunches, I looked up and back at the two women who had just entered. Still, after all these months together, the only way I could tell them apart was the purpling love-bite on Judy’s neck.

  Into my lap I dropped my hand which held the stick of charcoal I had taken from the artists’ co-op a month ago. I tried to summon up as much dignity as these two had left me.

  “I am not just scrawling tags and icons like the kids do on the underside of the Gardens. I am writing. And because there’s no paper in this stupid city, I’m writing on the walls.”

  “’Writing?’” said Judy, then paused.

  “Oh, I see,” said Jezzie, simultaneously enlightened. “How quaint
. And what are you ‘writing?’”

  “The story of how I ended up here, and what we just went through. I thought that it might help me make sense of everything.”

  “Good luck,” Judy said.

  “You know the walls will just absorb it,” volunteered Jezzie. “Look, your first sentence is gone already.”

  I looked. Sure enough, the wall was now as featureless as the methane ocean outside our dome.

  “Well, I guess I’d better write fast then.” I turned back to the wall, charcoal re-poised.

  “One minute,” said Jezzie. “Doesn’t ‘writing’ traditionally presuppose an audience?”

  “Yeah, I guess—”

  “Give us a minute,” added Judy, “and we’ll learn to read.”

  “Then we can help you understand.”

  I laughed, somewhat bitterly, I feared. “More help like yours I don’t think I need.”

  “Oh, come on now.”

  “We saved you from a life of boredom.”

  Wearily, I shook my head. I knew the Sisters’d do what they wanted no matter what I said. So I waited while they TAPPED.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’re ready now.”

  I brought the tip of my black stick down against the white mocklife wall, and rewrote my first sentence.

  3.

  Flight to Babylon

  First I killed the diplomat.

  Looking, no doubt, for my father, he had come unexpectedly upon me in the library of my father’s home, and had seen what I was viewing. There was no way he could have mistaken the images visible on every curved wall of the hypertext chamber: words and graphix and video in multiple overlapping windows. And once he had seen what I was looking at, I had no choice but to stop him from telling anyone.

  I don’t think I meant to kill him. But as he stood there gaping at me, my mind just went blank with panic. My hand flailed wildly across the tabletop beside my stimucliner, and encountered something hard and thick as a bottle. I grabbed the object, jumped up, and struck.

  The diplomat was lying on the floor, the side of head bloodily deformed to the shape of the statue I held. I looked curiously at the bronze for a full minute before I could recognize it as the likeness of Founder Moten, whose face I had seen daily since my crechetime.