Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  The snake hissed, tongue darting.

  I started back, recalling the intimate times when I had sought to run my fingers through the Sisters’ fuzzy polls and they had subtly pulled away.

  “Just—”

  “—call-”

  “—us—”

  “—Medusae.”

  Pulse pounding, I eyed them queerly. “Whatever you say, ladies. Whatever you say.”

  9.

  Instant Experts

  “We’re so glad—”

  “—to see you unbending—”

  “—at least a little.”

  The Sisters and I sat in the Commensal room in our new living quarters. (Thanks to the profits from the Doradus information, they had been able to satisfy a long-standing dream of renting a suite in the single, high-status building that graced the Hanging Gardens with its faerie presence.)

  The three of us were eating a meal together.

  That simple statement astonished me almost more than anything else I had done or seen in Babylon.

  Simply put, I had never done such a thing in the company of others before.

  I guessed I was really changing, fitting into the Commensality. (Although thoughts of plunging into the refectory, which the Sisters still advocated, continued to fill me with horror. Mingling/feeding with clawed and furred and tailed nonhumans— It didn’t even bear contemplation.)

  Each day, it seemed, brought a new revelation about myself.

  “Well, I’m glad too,” I replied after swallowing. “I never would have done anything like this back home. Oh, sure, some people did. But they were the lower classes. Because of my father’s status, I never could.”

  “Now all you need—”

  “—to feel at home here—”

  “—is a TAP.”

  I gave a negative shake of my head. “No, I’ll get along all right without one. After all, they’re just a gimmick. Basically, I can do all the really important things you two do.”

  One of the Sisters sipped at a drink, and the other said, “Oh, really?” Apropos of nothing, she added, “What was that designation of your homeworld?”

  I reeled off the immutable Conservancy figures. “Why do you ask?”

  The women had switched roles, she who had sipped now speaking. “No reason. Say, why don’t you tell us a little more about your home. You never really have.”

  “Uh, okay, I guess.” I settled back on my warm couch. “It’s not a very special world, I suppose, except insofar as every world is. Just three continents—”

  “Are you counting—”

  “—Thone Island—”

  “—which after all—”

  “—is pretty damn big?”

  I pretended not to notice their interruption, realizing now how they intended to goad me. “The population is small, but we were only recently discovered—”

  “Three million, four hundred thousand, six hundred and seventy-nine—”

  “—as of yesterday at noon—”

  “—not counting bonded criminals—”

  “—and it was discovered fifty years ago—”

  “—by someone named—”

  “—Jared Moten.”

  “I lived in Truehome City,” I persevered, “and my father was—”

  “—Conservator Sandyx—”

  “—whose duties included—”

  “—the management of worlds—”

  “—four-seven-one-nine-zero-zero-three-eight—”

  “—through sixty-four.”

  “And your brothers were named—”

  “—Rolf and Heinrich—”

  “Stop it! Okay, so you can think rings around me with a TAP, and I’m just a stupid puritan for not getting one. But the fact remains that my skull contains stuff you can never know unless I tell you, and if you’re interested, you’ll shut up and listen.”

  “Sorry—”

  “—Sandy.”

  Mollified, I tried to relax. “Okay, no hard feelings.” I brought my cup to my lips, drank, and said, “Commensals, right?”

  “Commensals—”

  “—indeed.”

  “Well, to continue. My life, because of my father’s stature in the Conservancy, was regulated to the last detail. There was hardly anything I could do or even think for myself. I didn’t mind it so much when I was a kid, but these last few years, it really got to me. I guess I was just ready to explode when—”

  “Yes?”

  “You can tell us, Sandy.”

  It all flooded back over me then, the emotions strong as when new, but I somehow managed to get it out.

  “I was attended by a dozen bond-servants all the time. You completely core your worst criminals, but we just fit ours with mechanical overrides. It’s the only kind of brain-modification the Conservancy permits. And wipe that argumentative look off your faces, ’cause I’m not about to be enticed into debating which treatment is more humane. Anyway, one or two were always by my side, more to keep an eye on me, I knew, than to really obey. Well, one day I managed to get alone for a few minutes. I went into our hypertext chamber and inserted an info-cache. That cache had been smuggled from offworld and cost me a month’s allowance. It was all about Babylon.

  “I never got to view it. This stranger arrived—a diplomat, I assume.” I hefted the dragon-chop. “This is his. He walked in on me and saw what I was viewing. It burst on me that if he reported it to my father I was in deep trouble. Before I knew it, my hand fell on a brass statue of Founder Moten. I picked it up and, and—”

  I flashed then on a detail that had escaped me till now: blood had covered the head of the statue in cruel mimickry of the blood on the diplomat’s skull.

  But the statue’s skull, unlike the stranger’s, was still intact.

  For some reason that crummy little detail set me off.

  I tried to hold back sobs I could have sworn I’d used up as I ran from my father’s mansion and to the spaceport.

  “Don’t worry,” said a Sister softly.

  “You’re here now.”

  But I still wasn’t quite sure that being here was reason enough to feel good.

  10.

  Interruption Number Four

  The Sisters, growing tired of sitting still for the length of my narrative, were up and stretching in a series of exercises I recognized as kind of modified Truehome tai-chi while I rested my cramped fingers. Their movements failed to stem a flow of sarcastic comments.

  “How touching.”

  “Cradled to our matronly bosoms.”

  “Maybe we should formally adopt you.”

  “Listen—”

  “—finish this up.”

  “Don’t string us along—”

  “—much longer.”

  “There’s a whole city out there—”

  “—just waiting to be plucked.”

  “Who’s the author here?” I asked. “Me or you?”

  The Sisters froze.

  “This city—”

  “—has only one—””

  “—real author—”

  “—and that’s—”

  “—Babylon.”

  11.

  Meeting with a Stoat

  Soon came a time—both welcome and dreaded, happy and sad—when Babylon no longer looked so exotic to me, but instead merely seemed like the place where I lived. True, occasional actions and words—from the Sisters and others—still had the capacity to shock me, making me wonder if I really understood anything about Babylon and the Commensality at all. But on the whole, I felt integrated into the city hidden in the depths of the frigid sherbet-banded atmosphere.

  So despite my continued adamant refusal to participate in the rituals enacted in refectory or sensorium, I prided himself on fitting in.

  Staying clothed and fed in Babylon was no trouble, of course. Food the Sisters brought back with them from their trips to the refectories, sometimes sharing a meal with me, other times declining, having already eaten. When I needed new shorts, I
just took them from the clothing distributories. My feet remained bare.

  I was even coming closer and closer every day to getting a TAP.

  Or so I told myself.

  As for enjoying the luxuries Babylon offered, I relied on the generosity of Judy and Jezzie. They were always flush, and seemed quite willing to support me. I had given up trying to figure out why, and only at rare intervals did I suffer from paranoid fantasies about some devious, long-term scheme into which I meshed like a gear fashioned by the Sisters’ cunning hands.

  I chose to believe I contributed something to the Sisters’ pleasure too, and that made me feel good.

  I accompanied them on all their information-gathering exploits, and was always highly appreciative of their prowess.

  When the Sisters picked up a bad case of hoof-rot (from the showers in the refectory, they claimed), I went with them to the infirmary and offered emotional support while the iatro-mek poked and daubed and epidermally perfused a variety of antibiotics.

  And of course I tried to keep Jezzie and Judy sexually happy too. Because they sure met my needs. The things they knew—well, it just boggled the mind. My previous experiences had been confined to the rather uninspired performances of female bond-servants, whose lack of initiative was highly discouraging.

  No such problem existed with the Sisters.

  If anything, they were a tad too imaginative at times.

  “Just move—”

  “—like so—”

  “—and let us—”

  “—do this—”

  “—while you—”

  “—touch here—”

  “—and here.”

  “Oh!”

  “Oh!”

  “Oh! I echoed.

  And when you threw in early morning gambols in the natatoriums, why, everything seemed to be going just swimmingly.

  Until the Sisters suddenly announced that a rival held something they wanted.

  The three of us were walking through the streets of the city one day, when they brought it up.

  “You know, of course—”

  “—we’re not the only ones—”

  “—who do what we do.”

  I thought about it until I had convinced myself that I had really previously considered such a possibility.

  “Sure,” I said. “That only makes sense.”

  “Well, we’ve recently learned—”

  “—that one of our peers—”

  “—a little guy named Stoat—”

  “—who looks like his namesake—”

  “—and is just as mean—”

  “—has uncovered some juicy information—”

  “—that fits with a piece we’ve got—”

  “—and we want it.”

  “Now, even with his piece and ours—”

  “—the fabulous puzzle will still be incomplete—”

  “—but at least we’ll be one step closer.”

  “But here’s the catch.”

  “We need your help—”

  “—right now.”

  I said, “Me? Help you? Now? How could I? And with something so valuable. Is it worth more than, say, that Doradus information?”

  “So much more—”

  “—you wouldn’t believe it.”

  I whistled. “What is it?”

  “Partial relativistic coordinates—”

  “—for a piece of string.”

  I waited for the punchline. When it didn’t come, I said, “String?”

  “What century—”

  “—are you living in?”

  “Look, you know—”

  “—about monopoles?”

  “Yeah, they’re what Babylon gets its power from. Little pieces of the primordial universe, left over from the Big Bang.”

  “Very good. Then you’ll understand—”

  “—if we tell you—”

  “—that cosmic string—”

  “—is a larger, continuous portion—”

  “—of the same Ur-stuff.”

  “A massive tube of spacetime—”

  “—the six Planckian dimensions that are normally hidden in every particle—”

  “—unrolled and revealed—”

  “—in the form of a closed loop—”

  “—a topological defect in our universe—”

  “—where the basic symmetry—”

  “—of the Monobloc prevails.”

  “And people will kill to discover—”

  “—the location of such a remnant—”

  “—although Jehovah only knows—”

  “—what they’ll do with it—”

  “—since unlike a monopole—”

  “—it’s too massive to move—”

  “—but want it they do—”

  “—and we intend to be the ones—”

  “—to sell it to the highest bidder.”

  “Why,” I asked, “can’t you just deduce the information the same way this guy Stoat did?”

  One Sister alone chose to speak now, as if the two were growing tired of giving such a prolonged explanation, and wished I would just take what they said on faith.

  “The components of his synthesis have dispersed, are no longer in Babylon. And there’s no time to track them down, since Stoat, we’ve learned, is planning to depart Babylon today. What he did, if you’re really interested, is to capitalize on a salient feature of string: its gravity. Your average piece of cosmic string holds approximately ten to the fifteenth solar masses. This concentration has the effect of acting as a gravitational lens, doubling the image of stars and galaxies behind it, all along its length. What Stoat did was to correlate many such sightings, thereby fixing the approximate location of the string.”

  “Why’s he leaving?” I persisted.

  “He’s found a buyer offplanet, and is bringing the information directly to him.”

  “And why don’t you just grab him and drug him and get the coordinates from him, like you usually do?”

  “Jesus—”

  “—can you believe—”

  “—a game of twenty questions—”

  “—when time is slipping away!”

  “Listen, it’s like this. Stoat doesn’t consciously know the coordinates. What he did as a safeguard against just such an attack was to store them in Babylon—who is prevented from accessing them without the owner’s permission, by the way—and then had them blanked from his own brain. So assaulting him prior to today would have gotten us nowhere. But now he’s chosen to leave, and you know what that means.”

  “I do?”

  “Whenever a Commensality citizen departs, presumably for another spot in our federation, he gets to withdraw all his private information out of his old AOI and take it with him, in the form of a mass of paraneurons in a little homeostatic container, which, at his destination, will be merged with the resident AOI, to become accessible once more. Stoat is carrying his container right now, and heading for the port.”

  I felt overwhelmed by this sudden flood of facts. “And my part would be—what?”

  “Stoat’s tough, and it’s going to require both of us to take him. While we keep him busy, you grab his container and run.”

  I considered. How could I refuse?

  “Okay,” I finally agreed.

  “Good—”

  “—because there—”

  “—he is.”

  I looked, saw a little thin man with a ruff of bristly fur running like a mohawk from the crest of his skull down his back to his buttocks. He moved hurriedly, cradling something in his arms, casting ferret-like glances from side to side.

  “We’re going to flank him. You stay off to one side till you see an opening.”

  I peeled away from the Sisters, who trotted up noisly behind Stoat. A few meters away, the women began to argue.

  “You Appaloosa bitch!”

  “You Palomino slut!”

  “If you didn’t look—”

  “—just
like me—”

  “—I’d tell you—”

  “—how grotesque you are!”

  Stoat stopped. He opened his mouth to reveal a set of needle-teeth.

  “Watch it, Sisters. Get out of my way.”

  “You keep out—”

  “—of our argument.”

  “This is personal.”

  “Yeah!”

  The Sisters were blocking Stoat’s progress. He seemed uncertain of how to react. They began to feint at each other, long arms waving in a faux boxing match. Bystanders scattered.

  Stoat moved to detour.

  One of the women launched a high kick, seemingly for her Sister’s jaw.

  In mid-motion she pivoted and her hoof headed for Stoat’s gut.

  The little man, still holding the silver egg that bore his memories, sprung like a weasel for the throat of the attacking Sister. She got her arm up barely in time for Stoat’s teeth to fasten on it instead of her jugular.

  The other Sister closed in. Still fastened to one yowling Sister’s forearm, Stoat brought up a hand tipped with wicked claws and raked at the other woman.

  The whole escapade had taken seconds, and left me dazed. When I saw Stoat’s arm come up, I realized that left only one arm to hold the egg.

  Bending low to avoid flailing limbs, I rushed in, wrested the egg from Stoat—

  —and ran.

  Half an hour later, I was in a part of the city I didn’t know.

  No one seemed to be after me.

  When I had caught my breath, I oriented himself by certain predictable patterns in the sky, and headed home.

  Jezzie and Judy were already there. They fell excitedly on me.

  “What a tussle—”

  “—with that little mink.”

  “But when he wakes up—”

  “—he’s not going to even remember—”

  “—how he got snookered.”

  “My arm’s still sore—”

  “—and so’s my face—”

  “—but we don’t think—”

  “—the new skin will tear—”

  “—if we celebrate!”

  With that, they toppled me backward onto a couch, the precious egg dropping safely to the soft floor, and proceeded to have their way with me.

  Which turned out to be just the treatment I needed for the jitters I hadn’t even been aware I had.

  Falling asleep in our warm pile, the Sisters began to muse lazily.

  “If only we had—”