Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  When heesh had finished, Anna spoke softly to herm. She doubted that Marl was paying any attention to them, yet she did not wish him to intrude in any case. Her talks with Clete were a brief respite from Marl’s tirades and scratchy silences.

  “What did you see this time, Clete? What was it like?”

  Clete tipped heesh’s head back as if to gaze out through the organic-inorganic duostrate of the ship at the mysterious universe beyond. “The turbulence the monopole has left behind in its passage through space and time is a golden kinked cord surrounded by a purple halo of the byproducts of destroyed protons. This trail lies on the universal background whose color has no name, woven through stars that stream energy and planets that hum with gravitic contentment. It is the same trail I have followed out of the Monobloc at billion-year intervals. And now I have seen its end.”

  “It sounds beautiful. More beautiful than the world I see every day. How I wish I could share it.”

  Clete shrugged. “Do not belittle your own senses. They offer marvels enough, when one speaks of the present. And our lives are constricted in ways yours is not.”

  “But the past,” Anna said. “To see the past and trace all the mysterious effects of the present back to their essential causes—what do we have to compare with that? That’s what I want.”

  “I will not lie to you. That is indeed something fine you cannot know. Especially to see the Primeval Egg.”

  “You’ve mentioned that before. What’s it like? Why is it so important to a scryer?”

  “It is indescribable, yet the vital thing we live for. To hold the totality of the universe in the eye of the mind, darting in and out of that infinitely dense point, where all is unified, where there is only one Force acting in a broth of elementary particles. To see such perfection ameliorates living in this age of broken symmetry.”

  Clete paused, as if weighing heesh’s words so as not to offer an insult.

  “Have you never wondered why we scryers are dual-sexed?” heesh finally asked.

  Anna looked away, unaccountably embarrassed. “I always thought it was an unavoidable side-effect of your gift.”

  “That is the notion the Sodality promotes. Once, when biofabrication was more primitive, it was even true. The first embryos engineered to have the scrying talent were inadvertantly created androgynes and blind. Now, both ‘defects’ could be repaired. But we believe these traits were not accidental, but predestined. Our androgyny reflects our worship of the wholeness of the Monobloc. Our blindness is a refusal to see the current fallen state of the universe. We are as we wish to be. You single-sexed homo sapiens are defective, each severed from his other half, perfect representatives of an imperfect age.”

  Anna sifted through Clete’s tone and found no reproaches, but only a calm certainty of the true state of things. Suddenly she felt wholly inadequate, a lonely fragile coalition of particles wandering incomplete through a vast void.

  She turned practical to dispel her gloom. “This monopole, solition, whatever. Who are the prospective buyers for it? What are they going to use it for? I know it’s rare, but so are a dozen other things in this universe that are worth much less.”

  “Like humans,” Clete said, “the monopole is incomplete in one sense, a superheavy particle possessing only a single magnetic charge, north or south. This is merely a means of identification, however, not its quintessential property. Every monopole is, in effect, a hot coal that bears the fire of the early universe, the unified Force. Feed a stream of nucleons—protons or neutrons—into it, and they decay instantly into their primal constituents. Each discrete decay releases approximately a billion electron volts of energy. A single monopole could power worlds.”

  Pursing her lips, Anna whistled silently. “That explains why your guild agreed to send you out with Marl for a share of the profits, despite his lack of credit up front. The take will be enormous.”

  “You are wrong,” Clete countered. “One of us would have come for nothing.”

  “What?”

  “The monopole is a fragment of the Unity we worship, existing in the present. For most scryers, contemplation of the Monobloc is devout enough. But for some, such as myself, only a pilgrimage to a monopole will complete my life. And we must rely on such as Marl to take us there.”

  Anna got to her feet. It was.too much information in too short a time. She didn’t know what to think. The realities of the voyage suddenly seemed reversed, all their anxiety and effort expended for Clete, not themselves.

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” she said, and left the tiresias to heesh’s blind-eyed scrutiny.

  Five days—120 standard hours—snailed by like an infinity of water droplets falling on a bruised and hypersensitive forehead. Anna ate just enough to maintain a low level of energy and promote an excess of sleep. She conducted a few desultory conversations with Marl about their hazy future. Clete she avoided, wishing to hear no more disillusioning truths. One can only stand to have the universe inverted so many times.

  Marl remained his insane composite of implacable fury and robotic indifference. Occasionally his synthetic upper half suffused with a mottled flush of rage at some remembered or imagined indignity.

  At last the ship reached the phase of maximum uncertainty. The onboard computer performed the flipflop maneuver of dispersing the uncertainty and imposing the new coordinates automatically, the delicate process requiring nonhuman speed.

  The universe accepted them at their new location.

  Their viewscreens showed a bold white sun blazing less than a tenth of an AU away. They were three times as close to the stellar furnace as Mercury to Old Sol.

  “Diagnostic check,” Marl commanded Anna Then, to Clete, “Goddamn it, Scryer, why so close? You almost have us inside it.”

  “You asked for precision,” Clete replied without evident unease. “I knew we were safe at this range, yet as close as possible. I have done as you requested. Now leave me to my vision.”

  “What do you mean, ‘as close as possible’? We have to get within grapple-range.”

  Clete, trance-bound, failed to answer. But Anna had found out what heesh meant.

  “Marl,” she said, her voice shaky, “the diagnostic check indicates normal functioning, and the detector registers the monopole.”

  “All right, then, where is it?”

  “In the sun.”

  Marl rushed to her side and shoved her cruelly away from her instruments. “It can’t be. I won’t let it.”

  Anna recalled something Clete had told her:

  “I know our grapples can fasten on the monopole when we find it,” she had said. “But what normally stops a monopole in nature?”

  “Concentrations of dense mass,” heesh had answered.

  Marl turned from the screen. “It is in there,” he said in a dead voice. “Radiation analysis indicates excess energy production for a star of this type. Our monopole is wedged in its fucking heart, eating it from the inside out.”

  Marl hit the control panel with tremendous violence. He turned and punched the yielding wall. Then his eyes fell on Clete, rapt in heesh’s contemplation of the monopole at the inaccessible core of the star.

  “Heesh knew, damn it. Heesh knew before the last jump. The little bitch had to have seen it was trapped in a star. And heesh never told us.”

  Anna felt sick. What could they do now?

  She watched Marl advance on the tiresias, fearing his intentions, her feelings a mix of hatred for the traitorous scryer and empathy for heesh’s quest.

  Marl slapped the unlined child-sage’s face, got no reaction, and slapped again, three times, rocking Clete’s head from side to side on heesh’s skinny neck.

  “Goddamn you, wake up. Tell us what to do now.”

  Clete’s unresponsiveness enraged Marl further. He reached for the neck of heesh’s robe, grasped the fabric and split it like paper. Anna couldn’t look away.

  The scryer’s body lay revealed. Immature-looking breasts graced heesh’
s chest. Below a tiny paunch stood shriveled male genitals; below that, a vaginal slit. There was no pubic hair.

  A huge erection bulged in Marl’s shorts. Anna’s sickness deepened, yet she couldn’t rise. Marl would kill her if she interfered. And the scryer—didn’t heesh deserve punishment for heesh’s deception?

  I’11 have my value out of you one way or another,” Marl growled. He unseamed his shorts and his penis was unrestrained.

  Anna turned her eyes then.

  The sounds were awful enough.

  After thirty seconds, Clete’s voice broke weakly through Marl’s

  grunts.

  “No, no defilement. I am whole, you are not. No, don’t contaminate—”

  Marl must have capped the scryer’s mouth with a huge hand, for heesh spoke no more.

  When Marl was done, he stumbled to a corner of the cabin and huddled like an autistic child.

  Anna crept slowly out of her seat and to the side of the tiresias, hoping Marl would not object. He seemed in no condition to even notice, though.

  Blood leaked from the scryer’s mouth and vagina. The couch was efficiently taking it up, to convert it to fruit and water, so they could live their useless lives a bit longer.

  “Clete,” Anna whispered. “Are you okay?”

  The tiresias stirred feebly. “My body is not badly damaged, but my spirit is. I must retreat to the monopole to restore myself.” Clete’s hand sought hers. “Do not let him touch me again.”

  “All right, Clete, all right, I won’t,” she said, crying, not knowing how she would keep the promise.

  As Clete slipped into scrying mode, the ship’s communicator pinged.

  Marl remained catatonic. Anna went to the board.

  The screen revealed a fat-faced man with a drooping mustache, a ship’s cabin-walls out of focus behind him. Fuzzy human figures lurked in the background.

  “Sanger here,” the man said with laconic indifference. “I want my ship back, and Marl with it. You I don’t care about, whoever you are. Anna, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “Listen, I just can’t—”

  Sanger cut in. “My ship has armaments. Yours does not. I will open fire shortly unless I detect three suited figures with empty hands exiting the lock.”

  “How do I know—” Anna began. Then a hand closed around the back of her neck.

  Marl stood behind her, self-aware now.

  “Sanger, my enemy,” he said without inflection. “If you want your ship, follow me. I’m going to collect my monopole.”

  Marl released Anna’s neck and moved to the controls for the ion­drive.

  Anna got hurriedly to her feet, shaking. She walked in a confused zigzag to the suit-locker, reeling mentally from the events of the past few minutes.

  She pulled a suit awkwardly from the rack, clambered into it and sealed its front. She took a helmet in her right hand.

  “Marl,” she said softly, seeing at once both the man he had been and the travesty he now was. “Come with me. Give up. It’s not the worst thing that could happen.”

  Ignoring her, saying nothing, Marl boosted the ion-flow. Anna watched red digits flash their acceleration.

  Clete remained quiescent on heesh’s couch, at one with the monopole. Anna felt she had no right to drag herm away. Heesh had made heesh’s choice.

  Anna put her helmet on, went to the wrinkled sphincter that was the lock’s inner door. There, she looked one last time at Marl.

  His broad hairless back was hunched over the controls, and he muttered to himself. She caught only, “Piece of...”

  Or “Peace of...”

  She tickled the sphincter in the proper pattern, went through, confronted the outer lock of metal and rubber. The sphincter flexed closed behind her. She opened the lock without first exhausting the trapped air. The escaping gases blew her out into space, away from the ship.

  Slowing her tumble with her suit-jets, she found the Lonely Lady silhouetted against the incredible glare of the sun, toward which her own trajectory was inevitably carrying her, if no one interfered. Her helmet-polarization could barely filter it, and her eyes pained her.

  Still, she followed the ship till it was no more than a flyspeck against the medusa-fringed disk of the monopole-snaring sun.

  Her communicator crackled with unheard words from Sanger’s ship, which approached.

  Solitary soliton for the moment, Anna wondered how many atoms of Clete’s vaporized body would eventually find their way to the monopole’s consuming core.

  GRAVITONS

  June 10

  Karla again today attempted to dissuade me from conducting the trial upon myself. I believe her exact words were: “You can’t possibly go through with this insane plan, Alex.”

  “I have to,” I said, in what I hoped was an assured and confident tone. If truth be told—and where else might I tell the whole truth, if not in my private journal?—I was feeling a little trepidation myself. But I was determined not to let Karla see it.

  ‘There’s no other way to prove my theory,” I continued rationally.

  “What about animals? You’ve completely skipped that stage.”

  ‘The phenomenon I expect to observe would be impossible to measure from outside. It’s a perceptual alternation, and an animal cannot report on what it’s experiencing. No, animals are useless for my purposes.”

  Karla grew frustrated at my insistently logical manner, as she so often did. It’s always been a sticking point between us, she claiming I exhibit an unwholesome lack of emotions—“an unnatural gravity,” she once called it—and I countering by accusing her of flightiness, of being unconnected to the solid earth of reality. So different are our basic personalities that I’m surprised we’ve remained lovers for as long as we have.

  “Do you realize exactly what you’re risking?” she demanded.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And you believe it’s worth it? You really think that if you succeed Zavgorodny will just fold up his tents and slink away?”

  “No, he won’t do that,’, I said. “However, if my speculations prove correct, then I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve contributed something unique to man’s understanding of the universe.”

  Karla regarded me with silent contempt for five seconds or so, before saying, “That’s utter bullshit.”

  I was taken aback. “What?”

  “You heard me. I said you’re full of crap. The real reason you’re doing this is because you want the thing named after you. Admit it. You can’t stand the thought of your precious new element being forever known as ‘zavgorodium.’ That’s the only thing motivating you. You’re going to risk your health—maybe even die—just so your name will be attached to a—a lifeless chemical!”

  Karla began to cry. I said nothing. I noticed with an irrelevant precision that her first few tears were held in a little pool by surface tension at the corners of her eyes. I always had been observant. It’s simply part of my job.

  When she was done, she dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve and said, “Well, tell me. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not wrong.”

  * * * *

  June 11

  Thirteen months ago, at the Joint Nuclear Research Institute at Dubna, U.S.S.R.—and simultaneously at the facility which I head, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California—element number 131 was synthesized.

  (In these private notes, I refuse to call it “zavgorodnium,” despite the slight precedence those at Dubna had, and I dare not dub it “chiltonium”—yet. So a simple “element 131” it must remain, for now.)

  Element 131, this substance never before seen on earth, proved to be the first member of the predicted “island of stability” in the periodic table: that group of superheavy elements higher than number 103 which proved to have a half-life longer than thirty-five seconds. As of this writing, it is still the only stable SHE to be created.

  Element 131 has a half-life of approximately twenty-five days.
Given this stability, element 131 lends itself to detailed and extended observation. We have been able to perform more tests and assays and analyses on this new material than on any other synthesized element.

  The most curious property of element 131 is an effect akin to piezoelectricity.

  In common cases of piezoelectricity, mechanical stress on a crystal produces an electrical charge.

  Element 131 exhibits a continual—albeit fluctuating—electrical charge in a rest state. Shielded from obvious forces, without apparent mechanical deformation, element 131 produces a trickle of electricity.

  Various theories have been adduced to explain this anomaly.

  I am certain that none but mine is correct.

  There is only one force which could produce the fluctuating electrical charge. One force which it is impossible to shield against.

  That force is gravity.

  It is my view that element 131 is extremely sensitive to gravity. Its inherent atomic structure makes it responsive to every passing gravity wave, every mass over a certain theoretical threshold.

  I know this to be a fact, as surely as I know anything.

  However, there is no way of proving it in the laboratory.

  According to the mathematics of my theory, the masses needed to influence the production of electrical current in element 131 are of stellar or planetary proportions.

  Obviously, not something one could manipulate in the lab. Current science has no way of producing gravity waves, nor can a sample of the new element be isolated in some imaginary “gravity-free” container and examined for cessation of the effect.

  Until a recent inspiration of mine, there appeared to be no way of proving my contention. For all anyone knew, Zavgorodny’s idiot theory of “quark oscillation” was as plausible as mine, and the various international committees debating over a name for element 131 had no reason to favor either him or me.

  But now I have hit upon a method of fully proving that element 131 does indeed register the presence of gravity.

  An associate of mine at a certain biological lab (which, for fear of adverse publicity, must remain nameless until the eventual success of my project, at which time his firm shall share in the glory), has developed a tailored molecular vector-agent which is intended to carry element 131 through my bloodstream and into my eyes, where the vector will bind its cargo to the photopigment rhodopsin in my retinas, hopefully converting them to gravity receptors.