Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  That was when I knew I had to run.

  The spinning images all around me told me where to go.

  I exited the HT chamber and began to run through the empty halls of the mansion. My father was away on Conservancy business, and had taken most of the resident human staff with him. I had given the rest of the bondies the day off, and powered down the usaforms. It was only at such times that I dared to view the highly illicit material the diplomat had caught me with. (And what I had gone through to get those info-caches I don’t even want to say.)

  Damn the intruder’s dead nosey ways! I thought as I jogged down carpeted and marbled corridors. Because of him I was being forced to give up the only life I had ever known.

  But the next second I wondered if his intrusion hadn’t been just the final push I was waiting for. After all, I had been dreaming of fleeing for so long....

  Just as I reached the front hall, another stranger stepped from behind a hanging arras that depicted scenes of Truehome’s history. I stopped dead. What was this, for Moten’s sake—open house?

  The new guy was small and creepy, with a deadpan face.

  “Go get the ambassador’s chop,” he ordered me.

  My jaw hit my collarbone. “What? How did you—?”

  “Forget all your questions, there’s no time. Just do what I say.”

  There was noise and movement from behind the big tapestry. Stifled female laughter? I looked down to where the arras stopped an inch short of the floor, and saw—

  Two sets of hooves? Yes, and a pair of hairy bare feet.

  I looked back to the little guy. Something about him brooked no arguments. I made a frustrated, fearful noise halfway between a growl and a whimper, then turned around and jogged off.

  The blood on the floor had already started to congeal. I reached down the diplomat’s robefront and pulled out his chop. It was shaped like a red dragon couchant, suspended from a thin gold chain. (My own chop was in the form of an old pierced silver coin on a leather thong.) I snapped the chain and dropped the dragon chop in my pocket.

  Back in the hall, I wasn’t surprised to find the arras concealing nothing, all uninvited visitors having disappeared.

  I was out the door and in a fifth-force floater. Then somehow I was at the spaceport.

  When Customs asked to print my chop, I hesitated.

  My chop contained, among a multitude of other data, my given name (Udo), my maternal family name (von Anglen), my solar-planetary-continental-genetic-pedigree designation eedeefoursevenoneninezerozerothreeeightpipemmafivedeltabluesixtwochibethsubell), and my paternal family name (Sandyx). If I handed it over here, my trail would be obvious as piss in snow.

  “Uh, I’d rather not—”

  The Customs man shrugged. “Your choice. But in that case, you know, it’s a one-way trip. They won’t let you back in.”

  I knew. But I couldn’t quite imagine yet what that meant.

  When I passed through the gate, I suddenly felt burdens fall off me that I had never fully realized were there. I was shorn of Udo (given name that held my parents’ expectations). I had discarded von Anglen (the weight of my maternal heritage). I had crawled out from under Ceedee...etcetera (the computer-encoded string that nailed me down into the Conservancy’s rigid matrix). I promptly forgot Sandyx (that massive paternal debt)—

  All I was left with was my nickname, Sandy. And that wasn’t even on my chop.

  The Heisenberg boat to Babylon was easy to find. All I had to look for was the most motley crowd of passengers.

  I tried to pay with my chop, but the pilot refused it.

  “Trip’s free, boy. Courtesy of Babylon. Now hustle onboard, I’ve got a schedule to keep.”

  I ended up sitting next to the person who had been ahead of me. I guessed he was human, but he had been modified to look like a Truehome racoon, right down to mask, whiskers, fur and tail.

  It was the first time I had ever been so close to a moddie in real life. I had thought my secret viewing had gotten me used to the notion that such people existed, but I was wrong. I was scared and excited and tongue-tied, all at once.

  “First time off-planet?” the moddie asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Don’t sweat it. Remember what they say. ‘If you’re here, you’re already everywhere.’”

  I knew what my new acquaintance was getting at. Every point in this universe is the same—but unique. Location is a figment, a default value of matter that can be altered by the epistemological drive’s concentration of quantum uncertainty along an object’s Riemannian spatial dimensions. This is the discovery that underlies the universe we all inhabit.

  But the human mind has some stubborn hard-wiring that resists this notion.

  Instant transition can really scramble your head.

  In less than ninety minutes, I went from hurrying through the familiar city of my birth (on good old Planetary Mass 5, under the Conservancy Designated sun 47190038) to spinning in orbit around a spectacular gas-giant, its gaudy face marbled like the endpapers in a real oldtime book.

  Then, under conventional drive, the ship dropped into the methane-nitrogen atmosphere of one of the jovian’s satellites, a moon half as big as Truehome itself. Down through a witches’ brew of red-orange-yellow hydrocarbon polymers we dropped, coming to land on a plain of frozen methane.

  “Everyone out for Babylon,” said the pilot.

  My seatmate had already deserted me. I looked around the interior of the ship. There were no recognizable suits, and the enbubbled city was at least a hundred meters away.

  “How do we get there?” I asked.

  The pilot twitched his ridged tail and nictated twice. He looked at me as if I were the dumbest innocent ever to spread himself across the spacetime continuum.

  “Just take a quilt,” said the pilot at last, and gestured.

  I turned.

  My fellow passengers were donning organic mats that flowed together around them, sealing them away for their trip across the plain, and leaving them looking awfully like faceless people made of dough.

  My stomach flipflopped, as the reflexes created by a lifetime of Conservancy antipathy to mocklife took over.

  “Don’t you have any, uh, mechanical suits?”

  “No,” said the pilot obstinately. “Now come on and leave. I’ve got a schedule to keep.”

  I tried to control my queasy nervousness. “But how will I even see?”

  “You just TAP the quilt’s sensory feed.”

  My expression must have betrayed my ignorance, because the pilot whistled.

  “No TAP? How the hell do you expect to fit in? You damn anti-ems...” The pilot’s invective trailed off into mutters as he got up and began to rummage in a white biopolymer ovoid that grew from the wall. Eventually he emerged with a mechanical suit.

  “If this still leaks like the last time someone used it, you’d better run.”

  So I ran.

  It seemed like my destiny.

  At the little blister attached to the huge dome, I entered through an ordinary hatch. Inside the pressurized lock I quickly doffed the treacherous suit. Then I turned toward the inner wall.

  The entrance to Babylon was an organic sphincter. There were no controls visible to make it open.

  This juxtaposition of mechanical and organic seemed—on the tenuous basis of my limited experience—to be a Commensality hallmark.

  A telltale light near the outer door indicated that others were waiting to enter. I wondered what the hell to do now.

  Hesitantly I stepped to the valve, laid a hand against its warm surface.

  Seemingly responding to my liveness, the airlock sphinctered open.

  I stepped into Babylon.

  Hypertext hadn’t readied me for the city at all.

  Too much hit at once.

  The first thing I noticed—if I can pretend to disassociate a single impression from the whole mass—was the sky. The curving dome far above was piebald: transparent strips alternated with lumi
nescent ones, the latter providing in toto the equivalent of the daylight I was used to. These lightstrips were not so bright that I couldn’t see the atmosphere beyond the dome, through the adjacent panels. It looked like one of Van Gogh’s nightmares.

  The next assault on my senses came from groundlevel.

  The curving street I found myself in was full of people.

  Only they weren’t.

  People, that is. They were all alien sophonts, mixed with more moddies.

  Although not one gave me more than a cursory glance, moving busily about on their own errands, their massed presence still creeped me out.

  The aliens were giant mantis-like beings, and rubbery wet amphibian looking ones. Some resembled the hypothetical intelligent dinosaurs that might have emerged on an alternate Truehome timeline. Another species boasted a long snout out of which protruded a length of cartilage. This they slid in and out, producing a noise like a child’s slidewhistle.

  And the humans— If they didn’t have tails, they had spinal armor. If they weren’t over two meters tall, they might be under one. If they weren’t painted in a dozens shades and styles, then they were bioluminescent. And if they didn’t have extra appendages of one sort or another, then they were probably missing conventional ones. And they exhibited every fashion of dress from total nudity to layers of garments.

  Someone pushed me from behind as I stood transfixed.

  I whirled, ready to defend myself against Conservancy pursuers.

  A man had tripped coming through the sphincter-lock, which I was inadvertantly blocking. He recovered himself, gazed for a second or two at me, as if striving to communicate wordlessly somehow, then said aloud, “Sorry, commensal,” before moving off.

  I wanted to reply that I wasn’t a commensal (whatever that implied), but the man was quickly gone, blending into the crowd.

  Realizing I occupied a spot where such accidents were likely to keep happening, I decided to move on. Where, I didn’t really know. My plans—formulated so hastily in the room where a dead man lay—didn’t extend much beyond this moment.

  One direction, therefore, being as good as another, I left the circumferential road and set off down a pedestrian-filled street that arrowed between buildings toward the interior of the dome.

  After fifteen minutes of aimless ogling (what was that, and how did that work, and what was he doing with her), something penetrated my awareness.

  I was being followed.

  By a woman.

  Who as soon as I focused on her across the sea of strangers trotted quickly up, to halt right beside me.

  4.

  Interruption Number Two

  “Hey, it’s about time you got to the good part!”

  “Yeah, where we come in.”

  “It’s been real boring up till now.”

  “That big expository lump about how strange everything looked.”

  “Don’t you think you’re laying on the naivete a little thick?”

  “You should have started with your arrival in Babylon.”

  “Yeah, nothing interesting ever happens anywhere else.”

  I tried to look disgusted. “For two people who never read anything until a few minutes ago, you’re a real pair of critical experts.”

  “We know—”

  “—a good story—”

  “—in any medium.”

  “Well, just let me get on with it,” I said. “I’ll try to speed it up.”

  “You’d better.”

  “Or you’ll lose your only audience.”

  5.

  Sisters Beyond the Skin

  Dressed in little besides a thong-style bottom, the woman was taller than me, and I was not short. (I found myself confronting her staring breasts at eyelevel, and forced myself to look up.) Her attractive face was painted in blue whorls. Although her skin was white as mine, she sported a massive kinky black corona of curls.

  The woman shifted slightly as the flow of pedestrians surged by. (One or two took off into the air on fifth-force harnesses to avoid the static tableau we formed.)

  From the slick ceramic surface of the street came a sharp clattering tattoo.

  I looked down.

  The woman was hooved.

  At midcalf her skin smoothly segued into hairy horsy Clydesdale fetlocks, from beneath which peeped anomalously caprine ivory hooves (with decorative gold insets?).

  I couldn’t find my voice.

  The woman had no such problem.

  “You’re dressed funny,” she announced. “What’s your name?”

  I looked at what I was wearing.

  “Sandy,” I said. “And what’s so funny about a grey paper coverall with nuprene boots?”

  “Well, Sandy,” continued the woman, “it’s got no color or style. It’s so drab.”

  I started to get angry. “Hey, now, wait just one minute—”

  Ignoring me, the woman said, “And you’ve got no TAP. I’ve been trying to send to you for ten blocks now, and I couldn’t get through.”

  “TAP, TAP,” I spluttered. “I’m sick of hearing about TAPS! What the hell is a TAP?”

  The woman assumed a knowing look. “I’ll bet you’re from the Conservancy.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, and turned away as if to leave.

  “I’ve read about him,” said the woman.

  I faced her. “Who? Who are we talking about now?”

  “Why, you brought him up.”

  I was getting a headache. Trying to order my thoughts, I realized the woman could be referring only to the object of my instinctive exclamation.

  “Do you mean ‘Jesus’?”

  “Sure. I read the whole book about him. But he wasn’t in the first half at all. I don’t think the author planned too well, do you?”

  I had to smirk. “Oh, I’m sure you read it. From start to finish.”

  The woman frowned. “You don’t believe me. But if you don’t know anything about TAPS, then I guess it’s not your fault. Look, I’ll quote something from it.”

  Wearing a blank look for a second, the woman paused.

  Then she began to recite the entire Book of Revelations.

  I stood dumbstruck. The woman continued to rattle off chapter and verse. At last I raised a hand.

  “Whoa, hold it. Okay, okay, you read the book. I believe you.”

  “Don’t stop me now. I haven’t even gotten to the part yet about my namesake, Jezebel. You know, where John accuses Jezebel of all that immorality and eating food sacrificed to idols.”

  “That’s your name?” I asked. “Jezebel?”

  “Jezzie, mostly. I took it out of that very book. Now isn’t it a coincidence, that you should mention a character from the same book when we first met?”

  All I could do was shake my head.

  “Where are you going?” asked Jezzie.

  Sobering up after the manic conversation, I said, “I—I don’t know.”

  “Are you hungry?” said Jezzie.

  I considered. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

  “Great! We’ll go to a refectory. Come on.”

  Jezzie began to clip-clop down the street.

  I hurried to catch up.

  From behind, I saw that Jezzie’s body paint ran around from her face to the back of her neck and down her spine, ending in a red circle in the dimple above her buttocks.

  When I was abreast of Jezzie (quite literally), I found I had a hundred questions.

  “Why were you following me?” was first.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You looked different, I suppose. I was interested in you. And then there was the fact that you lacked a TAP. I was curious to see how you were going to manage.”

  “That damn word again! Will someone please explain it to me?” There had been no mention of the thing in all my secret reading. I wondered what it was, that it had been censored even from the illicit information. I had a sudden intuition. “Is that what allowed you to quote that text?”

  Jezzie laughed. (It was somehow sim
ultaneously charming and alarming.) “Of course. Did you think I actually had it memorized? What an old-fashioned idea. Is that how you do things in the Conservancy? A TAP—Tele-Adjunct and Psychoprosthetic, if you must—is so much better.”

  I thought a moment. Then: “What are you accessing?”

  “Why, Babylon, of course.”

  “The city itself?”

  Again the laugh. “In a way. But not the city you can see. The AOI beneath.”

  “The ‘ayohwhy?’”

  “No, the ay-oh-eye. Artificial Organic Intelligence. Don’t tell me you don’t have those either.”

  A host of childhood horror tales swarmed upon me then. Stories of how everyone in the Commensality was merely a puppet, their mental strings pulled by vast, domineering mocklife brains, hived away beneath the superstructure. I looked down at the syalon pavement, as if I could pierce its solidity and witness the calculating, nutrient-bathed mass beneath.

  I felt a shiver finger my vertebrae, but tried to ignore it. Surely all these people—Jezzie included—could not be mindless automatons. The propaganda I had swallowed all my life must be wrong. Maybe further information would clarify things.

  “How—how does it work?”

  “Well, that’s a big topic. Simply put, Babylon acts as a routing device for interpersonal communication, and as an auxiliary memory. Not to mention facilitating such things as machine-interfacing, remote-sensing, and so on.”

  “And can this Intelligence read all your thoughts?”

  “Is that what’s bothering you? I thought you were nervous about something. Of course not! What kind of arrangement would that be? Babylon only receives what I will to send, and vice-versa. That’s just the way it was biofabbed.”

  For continued peace of mind, I chose to believe her. But Jezzie’s next proposition tested the depth of this new faith.

  “Are you that hungry? It’d only take a few minutes to fit you with a TAP—it’s just a shot of nanodevices—and you’d get along much better. That is, if you’re planning to spend much time in Babylon at all.”

  Faith was a thing only microns deep.

  “Uh, I’m not sure. I mean, maybe not right now. If it’s okay with you, that is.”

  Jezzie smiled, and we walked on in silence.

  Eventually we came to a large building, into the doorless portal of which all sorts of beings were entering.