Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  The neohumans were not troubled, for they had expected as much.

  They began to prepare for departure.

  * * * *

  6-Licorice and 3-Peach stood at a thick transparent portion in the host’s outer skin, once intended to admit sunlight on a bank of dimpled blue swellings, for reasons obscure to them, but obviously plain enough to the host. Now the swellings were dead. But the sunlight entered still.

  The host had lost its ability to maneuver against solar gravity, by jetting waste gases and liquids, and had been falling for some time down the invisible gravity well into the Sun. It was also rotating slowly without control. However, its own internal gravity remained constant, keeping the feet of the neohuman couple secured firmly to the wet floor, even when that surface had spun one hundred and eighty degrees.

  The rotation brought a new sight into the window: a planet and its satellite. The satellite was immemorially grey and dead, with markings that moved the humans strangely, awaking ancestral emotions. The planet, once green and blue, now resembled a white featureless ball, exactly the texture and composition of the host.

  3-Peach and 6-Licorice were silent while the planet remained in view. When it had vanished, 3-Peach said, “Do you think they’ll ever leave, 6-Lick?”

  “Who can tell? Who knows why they even came? We can’t even say if they’re natural or artificial. Why do we have weight inside them, for instance? And if they did go, what would they leave behind? Bare rock, no life? No,we can’t count on it, we can’t even dream about it.”

  A troop of youngsters surged by, laughing and playing tag. 3-Peach said nothing for a time, until they were gone. Then: “I guess you’re right, 6-Lick. We just have to make the most of the life we have.”

  They left the window, holding hands.

  * * * *

  In the last month of life aboard the host, no females became pregnant, although the couples continued to engage in sex, for reasons of comfort and pleasure. Metabolisms were changing in anticipation of departure.

  At last the day arrived. All signs pointed to the imminent collapse of the weakened host.

  Each human sought out a macrophage. There were plenty left for everyone, and their viciousness had decreased in these end-days, almost as if they had internalized chemical messages of defeat. These former enemies were now to become the means of escape for the humans.

  Approaching the scavengers one on one, the human sallowed themselves to be ingested.

  The encounters were far from fatal. A new secretion produced by the humans overrode the macrophages’ instructions. In the ultimate subversion, the defensive eaters became protective vesicles, settling down by the thousands to the floor. The humans inside inhaled the altered cytoplasm of the vesicles and gradually lost awareness.

  Watching their fellows become encysted by the scores al1 around them, 3-Peach and 6-Lick paused for a moment before allowing the same necessary fate to overtake themselves.

  “It was a sweet couple of years, 6-Lick.”

  “I can’t remember better.”

  “The kids grew up fine.”

  “The songs were glorious.”

  “The math was exciting.”

  “The sex was marvelous.”

  “As always.”

  Silence, save for other soft and private goodbyes. Then 6-Licorice spoke.

  “You’re the only one for me, 3-Peach.”

  “And you for me, dear. I can’t wait til1 we’re to­gether again.”

  6-Licorice, not so sanguine as his mate, made no reply but just squeezed 3-Peach’s hand.

  They went under then, enlarvaed, cocooned.

  Only an hour or two passed, so nicely had the humans timed events.

  The host exploded silently, its internal pressure rupturing its damaged skin: the end point of the process begun so many human births ago, with the initial pinholes of entry. It looked like a gigantic seed pod distributing its seeds.

  Vesicles were scattered in every direction.

  Some embarked on a course straight for the Sun; others seemed destined to impact the Moon or burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Chance dictated the course of each, since they lacked maneuvering capabilities.

  3-Peach and 6-Licorice were lost amid the thousands. They had been side by side prior to the explosion. Perhaps they would stay together in their long drift. Perhaps not.

  But many would live to breed again.

  And again.

  And again . . .

  SOLITONS

  Marl said roughly, “We’re here—get your arses in motion.”

  Anna tried to shake off the vast weight of nausea engendered by Heisenberg transition. Bastard, she thought. So tough on yourself and the rest of us. I’ll take it though, now that I’m in, for the stakes at risk. And not crawl back to your black-and-blue bed.

  Petting her organiform couch to an upright position, Anna faced the screen and keyboard that allowed her to control the Lonely Lady’s force-grapples and confinement bottle. She initiated a diagnostic check, before Marl could order her to do so, thereby achieving a precious bit of satisfaction.

  She had run six of these checks over the past month, upon completion of each epidrive jump. Yet the equipment had not been used once.

  The monopole was proving more elusive than they had feared at the outset of their search. No wonder only desperate gamblers dared hunt the elusive particle.

  From the corner of one eye, Anna watched Marl rise from his couch. A big man, he defied the world with an ugly seamed rind of a face, split by narrow eyes, thin lips, and bisected by a hatchet-blade nose. From skull to midriff, Marl was covered with synthetic skin, possessing no follicles or sweat glands. His chest lacked nipples, his fingers nails. Below this artificial terminator, his muscled body was hirsute to the human extreme. He wore only a pair of tight white shorts to midthigh, a deliberate affront and taunt to Ann’s physical aloofness. (She, in response, wore a shapeless black coverall under all circumstances.)

  Anna pondered his bizarre appearance for the hundredth time, a body at war with itself, living testament to the blood-debt he owed Sanger, his rival. He could have easily had the former good looks that had first attracted Anna to him, before Sanger wrecked Marl’s ship and nearly killed him. But anger and desire for revenge had bred in Marl like Shintak viruses, distorting his mind in subtle and obvious ways, least of which was this senseless flaunting of his scars.

  Marl catfooted across the living resilient floor—part of the ship’s closed recycling system—to the couch where Clete, their hired tiresias, lay.

  The third organiform couch in the small cabin held Clete’s thin child-sized body in its warm depression. Prior to the last jump, Clete had complained of tiredness, reclined heesh’s couch and gone instantly to sleep. Now, though, heesh was awake, milky white eyes stering blindly at the pinkly luminescent ceiling.

  As Marl approached, Clete’s body tensed beneath heesh’s grey robe, as if expecting a blow.

  Marl stood by the couch, clenching his massive knobby fists. “There you go, Scryer. Just as you ordered, we’ve jumped a hundred lights closer to Mizar. I must admit, your ranging shots are getting smaller. What was the first—two thousand parsecs? Do you think you might be a little more precise in your next estimate? I was led to believe by your guild that you had seen solitons being formed and could lead us right to them.”

  Clete’s voice was a calm soprano, ageless and sexless. “I have indeed seen solitons being born in the Monobloc, bright red knots in the polychrome domains of the nucleating primal universe. But that happened, to be precise, ten to the minus thirty-fifth seconds after the Big Bang. Over twelve billion years ago.”

  A small smile creased Clete’s unwrinkled features. “A lot has happened since then, Marl, if you stop to think. I can envision the whole Monobloc any time, from any place in the universe, since each bit of matter once resided in that infinitely dense point, and I can follow any thread back to the labyrinth’s center. But as the universe expands over time, I can
hold less and less of it in my mind simultaneously. Eventually, to scry the recent past, I must be physically present in that very volume of space I wish to examine. Hence our ‘ranging shots,’ as you archaicly call them. Now, unless you wish to pay the Scryers’ Sodality more than you already owe them, let me get to my work, which you cannot possibly understand in any real sense.”

  Marl’s right fist came up from his side as if to strike Clete, then stopped in mid-gesture. The tiresias lay unperturbed. It was not that heesh’s blind eyes had not registered the threat—by scrying the immediate past nanoseconds behind reality, Clete could “see” as well as anyone, with only an insignificant lag—but that heesh knew Marl would not dare contravene the rules by which he had contracted for Clete’s services.

  Clete was right this time. Marl pivoted, quivering with rage, and stalked away, spitting out over his shoulder, “Do it then, damn it!”

  A small shiver passed down Clete’s body, and heesh’s breathing slowed. Nothing could disturb herm now, until heesh roused hermself.

  Marl threw himself heavily down onto his couch, which surged with semifluid movement, like a waterbed filled with mercury. Anna turned from her board. She felt for Marl—not pity or love, but some novel mixture of respect and awe and fear. He drove her and Clete no harder than he pushed himself. But to know that made it no easier to take. They were not infected with his same will or desires.

  “Let up on Clete, Marl,” she ventured mildly. “I’m sure heesh’s doing heesh’s best. Remember: without herm, we’d have no chance at all.”

  Marl sat up and fixed her with a baleful stare. “That filthy androgyne and heesh’s stinking guild are nothing but leeches. They bleat about how hard it is to interpret their visions of the past to get a fix on the present, yet stand there all the while with outstretched hands for more and more credits. Then when you’re bled dry, they disgorge what they knew all along.”

  Anna was taken aback. “You can’t believe that, Marl. Imagine what Clete’s doing right now. I’ve talked with herm a little about it. It’s not easy. Heesh is travelling through an abstract landscape of colors and shapes, trying to correlate it with the world we know through our conventional senses. Even then, once heesh masters that, clients like us toss in the dimension of time, asking herm to track a miniscule object through the billions of years of its existence to its present location. It’s amazing heesh gets any results at all.”

  Marl snorted. “What results? We’ve only got heesh’s word for it that we’re getting closer to the monopole.” He leaned forward with sudden eagerness. “Speaking of which, has the detector registered anything yet?”

  “Of course not. I would have spoken up. I want this hunt to succeed too, you know.”

  Marl looked at Anna with blank suspicion, as if he had never seen her before. His hands spasmed in his lap like fish out of water. “We don’t have forever. How long do you imagine it will take Sanger to catch up with us?”

  Anna winced. She had almost managed to forget that aspect of their pleasant little prospecting trip.

  Soon after Marl, a changed man, had come home from the hospital that Sanger’s sabotage had sent him to, he had begun to savage Anna verbally, then physically. She had left him with much regret but no hesitation, ending an asteroid-mining partnership-cum-affair of some years’ standing. Much time passed with no word from him. Then one day he had shown up at Anna’s door, with this mad plan to make their fortunes by netting a monopole. Had Anna not been down on her own luck, she would never have agreed to go in with him. He took her to the port to see his ship, and she was surprised at its quality, having thought him broke.

  Only when they were underway did he tell her that the ship was Sanger’s, stolen from his yards in an abortive attempt to snatch the man himself from under the nose of his elaborate security force.

  When Anna demanded that he return her home, Marl had spun a glib lunatic’s tapestry of how they could have immediate success, selling the monopole for gigacredits, then, armored in wealth, secure from Sanger, extract their revenge.

  She had made the mistake of staying with him until they picked up Clete from the Sodality world. There, her name was registered on the contract with Marl’s, and she realized that Sanger would now be able to connect her with Marl, and any safety back home was illusory. There was no way out for her except forward, linked to this apparition out of her past in victory or defeat.

  “All right,” Anna said. “You made your point and blew away any dreams of peace I was cultivating. Go away now, and let me read. At least it allows me to forget.”

  Marl lowered his voice to a seductive whisper. The effect combined with his disfigured features was grotesque. “We could forget together, Anna. Take up what we once had. That thing will be out of it for long enough. We’ll have some privacy.”

  Anna spat on the floor, which slowly absorbed it. “Shove it. I’m not your lover anymore. At worst, I’m your hostage. At best: your friend. And before you try anything, remember who I studied with.”

  Marl shivered, as he recalled the reputation of the Cybele, the Bloody Nuns. He turned on his side away from Anna.

  She breathed a sigh of relief. Especially since she had never even seen a Cybele.

  Her screen flooded with text on the epidrive. All her working life she had used the spacedrive, with little thought paid to how it functioned. Now, on this crazy trip, where boredom alternated with screaming tension, she had begun to grow interested in this device that made their travel possible.

  The words read:

  “FILE: Epistemological spacedrive, overview.

  CROSSREFERENCED: Heisenberg transition, epidrive, Shozo Turnbow...

  “The epistemological spacedrive was perfected in the year 2, Ante Scattering, by one Shozo Turnbow. Its basic mode of operation relies on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is most simply formulated in the statement: All qualities of a particle may not be known simultaneously.

  “The advent of superior subatomic scanning methods, coupled with digitalization of the results, lies at the heart of the drive. Basically, all particles possess a host of qualities—spin, angular momentum, and mass, for instance—one of which is location in space. An object subject to the epidrive is first scanned quark by quark, and all its qualities—save location—recorded in a suitable memory matrix. The duration of this process naturally varies directly with the mass of the object being scanned, placing a premium on size. As data accumulates, over hours and days, the object under scan enters a state of uncertainity as to its location. The very precision with which all its nonspatial qualities are recorded forces all its inherent uncertainity to be concentrated in its spatial dimension. At this point, the object may be literally anywhere in the universe. At the height of uncertainty, two things are done simultaneously. All information previously recorded is wiped, dispersing the uncertainty, and a new relativistic location is imposed on the object. Transition is instantaneous.”

  Anna’s head swam with the words, simple enough on the surface, yet concealing hidden depths of paradox. She ran a slim hand over her cropped brown hair, wondering if she would ever truly fathom the epidrive. What bothered her most was the fact that the scanning equipment had of necessity to scan itself as part of the ship to be transported. It seemed too muoh like pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. And the whole drive required such minimal power... Where were the huge warp mechanisms of antique fiction, comforting in their similarity to internal­combustion engines?

  An abrupt shuddering intake of breath sounded across the cramped cabin, and Anna knew that Clete had come out of heesh’s scrying trance. She turned from her screen as Marl abandoned his sullen meditations. Together, the two crossed the room to Clete.

  The tiresias had stroked heesh’s couch into its roughly L-shaped position, and now sat with stringy, fatigue-trembling muscles apparent beneath heesh’s robe. A seemingly insignificant twist of heesh’s lips, which Marl and Anna had learned to interpret as a smile of satisfaction, seemed to
bode well.

  Marl’s eagerness could not be contained. It caused him to actually lay his hands upon Clete’s robe, against all guild prohibitions. “Well,” he demanded, “do you have a fix on it? Can you take us there? Speak up!”

  Clete said nothing, and Marl quickly realized what he had done and removed his grip from the grey fabric. Crazy he might be, Anna knew, but that did not preclude cunning and guile and a sense of whom not to offend. Anna he could only push so far, since he needed her to capture the monopole while he maneuvered the ship under its ion-drive. And Clete he needed even more, for heesh’s clairvoyance.

  But after the success of the mission, Anna wondered, what then?

  Upon heesh’s release, Clete spoke in heesh’s pellucid voice. “I have seen the monopole in its unmistakable glory. It is not far. Here are its coordinates.” Heesh reeled off a set of relativistic figures describing the transition to be made, which heesh had read from the tangled skeins of force heesh saw in heesh’s visionary state.

  Marl almost leapt for the epidrive controls. As if a few seconds saved now could matter over the five days it would take the epidrive to reach the transition peak. At his board, he placed a contact mike against his throat and subvocalized the code to activate the drive. Anna prayed for him to move his lips, but he made no such mistake. If only she knew the code, she could—what? Return home to await Sanger’s arrival? Flee to some far reach of space? No, her only hope of future safety lay in accomplishing what they had set out to do.

  Marl remained by the board, as if willing the drive to speed up. Anna turned back to Clete.

  “You look drained,” she said to the scryer. “Let me get you something to eat.”

  “That would be appreciated,” Clete said. Anna went to a cluster of pebbly-skinned fruits growing from the wall and picked one. She drew a glass of cloudy liquid from a wall-nipple and picked up a protein bar from the supply-cabinet. These she brought back to Clete.

  The tiresias ate with catlike economy. Anna sat on the end of heesh’s couch. Clete’s small form left half the surface free.