Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  —For Paul Bowles

  MUD PUPPY GOES UPTOWN

  1.

  His world was nothing but mud, and he hid in it.

  On his stomach, his back filmed with concealing silt, his mouth filtering nutritious diatoms from the slime, his primitive lungs straining, only his bulbous eyes and snout protruding, he awaited the return of the blessed water, all the while hating the searing heat and light from the sky.

  Every day the shallow water disappeared; every day it returned. This was all he knew of the world. That much, and the moving presence of Shadow.

  The water’s retreat had caught him outside of Shadow today. He sensed the border of the protective twilight not far away, yet dared not move toward it. Better to lie still, so as not to attract predators, and risk dehydration.

  The briny mud vibrated meaningfully beneath him. He rotated his big eyes, fearing what he would see.

  A crab twice his size approached. Its mouthparts worked avidly; it waved its claws in eager agitation, opening and closing the pincers menacingly.

  He bolted in panic. Levering himself out of the sucking mud with his stubby fins, he scuttled away, propelled partly by his lashing tail.

  Leaving the slow crab far behind, he crossed into Shadow. The coolness was like a balm. For a few seconds, he felt safe. Then he realized what he had done.

  He had ventured into the territory of his neighbors. Uninvited, he, a loner without affiliation, had trespassed on their marked dominion.

  Suddenly, there was a scout confronting him. Then another and another. Soon, the whole pack was there. The dominant males began the ritual of intimidation. Rearing their foreparts high with the strength of their tails, they inflated their cheeks, then flopped down heavily, blowing air and splattering the mud. Closer and closer they drew, half-encircling him, until they were almost falling atop him.

  He stood his ground. There was no choice. He must meet their challenge or retreat to the sunlit flats to die, from attack of crab or bird.

  Now he mounted his own challenge. He darted first one way, then another, seeking to nip his attackers. Startled for a moment, they froze. Then, meeting his boast, they redoubled their attack.

  A ponderous weight—as of some gargantuan cousin of the fighters—a little distance off transmitted the impact of its cushioned fall through the saturated medium. The animals battled on, heedless of the many smaller vibrations that followed the large one.

  Without warning, the fighters were suddenly enclosed by a transparent barrier, a cylinder. They continued their savage life-or-death melee regardless.

  Sounds boomed out above them. Lesser shadows fell across them. The lone trespasser, tired and bruised, continued to hurl himself against the pack.

  Something surrounded him. He was gently squeezed and lifted up, high into the air.

  A living face big as the moon that shone across the nighted waters confronted him. The creature’s eyes were the color of the sky. More sounds issued from what must be the creature’s red-painted mouth.

  Much later, Uptown, watching the playback of this scene, recalling it simultaneously from both old and new perspectives, he would feel half ashamed, half proud. With Octavia by his side, he would shiver at the tenderness of her words and the memory of her naked hand enfolding him from snout to tail.

  “How bravely he fights, and against such odds! I think he deserves a chance in the next gradient, don’t you? Come, little skipper, my mud puppy, you’re moving on up. Hurry now, friends, before the fields overwhelm us!”

  And with that he left forever the world of his birth, the only world he had ever known, the harshly primal tidal flats surrounding Sheldrake Mountain.

  2.

  This was how the first change took Mud Puppy.

  Placed in a pond of fresh water bounded by grassy banks, he lay stunned. The creatures who had picked him up out of the battle had departed immediately after dropping him into the water. (Mud Puppy, arm around Octavia, watched Octavia on the flatscreen say, “You’re on your own from here, little skipper.”)

  Gathering the small strength remaining to him, Mud Puppy swam to the margin of the pond and hid himself among the stalks of some weeds. He nibbled tentatively at them. They tasted strange, as did even the water, the air. Everything was strange. This was not his world. His very instincts felt wrong...

  A dull lassitude began to envelop him. Torpor seeped throughout his frame, from tip to tail. Awareness slipped away.

  There was something like a cloud. Mud Puppy knew clouds. They brought rain and shade. But this cloud was different. It was composed of mud puppies. Millions and millions of mud puppies. No, it was just one. One big mud puppy. The Mother and Father of them all. And he, lonely, lost Mud Puppy, was still part of it. He could feel the essence of his being subsumed in the cloud, an integral part of it.

  But even as he sensed this identity with the cloud, he could feel a sundering commence. The cloud was moving away, out from under him. No, he was being torn away from the mud puppy cloud, his self was losing its identification with his fellow skippers. The cleavage hurt, psychically and physically. He felt himself coming apart, drifting without support.

  Another cloud appeared. Desperate, Mud Puppy willed himself toward it—or did it move toward him?

  They merged.

  In the pond, among the weeds, Mud Puppy began to change form.

  His tail lengthened, thickened. His fins disappeared. Four legs sprouted, armed with claws. His sleek skin roughened, became scales and plates. His snout elongated, filled with sharp teeth. A ridge of bone arched over his eyes.

  A small saurian now, Mud Puppy awoke.

  The world was perfect again, all sensations in harmony with his new form and mind. Memories of the mud flats were already fading, becoming buried by the accumulation of each instant’s vivid impressions.

  A small minnow swam by, ignorant of Mud Puppy’s presence in the weeds.

  Quick as thought. Mud Puppy darted out and struck. The minnow was quickly swallowed.

  With this meal, Mud Puppy began to grow.

  3.

  Over eight feet long and commensurately massive, Mud Puppy climbed upward through the lush vegetation on his powerful stubby legs. His ponderous tail smashed plants flat.

  Something nameless impelled him. Stronger than the mating urge, stronger than hunger, it was an impulse not shared with his fellows.

  Perhaps it was the deep memory of being held entire in a soft hand.

  The forested land sloped upward very gently. and Mud Puppy made easy progress. Already he was remote from any familiar territory. His destination was unknown; he was following an invisible gradient only dimly apprehended.

  For days he journeyed, pausing only to feed. With no preconceptions about distance Mud Puppy had no notion of the many miles he covered.

  One dawn Mud Puppy felt himself cross a line. The sensation was less perceptible than the press of spidersilk on his scales.

  Mud Puppy hid himself beneath some bushes.

  What emerged, still resonating from contact with the new morphic cloud, was a huge mammal, a tusked cat fully as big as the reptile he had been.

  Voicing a hunting call, he began to prowl.

  4.

  Days, months, years.

  Meals, matings, miles.

  Upward, ever upward.

  Incarnation succeeded incarnation. Toward the end of each one, Mud Puppy felt the impulse to move ever higher up Sheldrake Mountain.

  Eventually he traded teeth and claws for fleet-footed speed. Speed in turn gave way to grasping ability and increased intelligence.

  (None of these identities recorded; a huge gap here. Octavia had meant it when she said he’d be on his own.)

  Lemur, monkey. anthropoid.

  Until finally—

  Something crudely akin to Octavia.

  5.

  The highest structure in the village was a four-legged tower lashed together from rudely cut saplings. Topped with a platform barely big enough to su
pport one person, the tower rocked and trembled with every breeze and with every movemcnt of its occupant.

  Mud Puppy squatted now high up in the air, performing sentry duty for the tribe.

  Hairy, low-browed. prognathous, he possessed a compact body layered in muscles. A wrap of uncured animal hide was fastened around his waist.

  The sentry’s view stretched down a gentle slope, a greensward cleared by generations of firewood-scavenging and kept trimmed short by the domesticated ovines who browsed it under the clear sky and hot sun. Behind him the huts of his tribe were ranged: an unplanned agglomeration of several dozen wattled structures, including the Longhouse.

  This was the village, the envy of all the nomads and hunters of this gradient of Sheldrake Mountain, who, with their precarious lives, were motivated to make frequent attacks upon the settlement.

  Picking unmindfully at the bark on the logs beneath him, his thick-nailed fingers peeling back a smooth strip, Mud Puppy tried to think about what was troubling him.

  He could find no words in his small stock for the feelings inside him. They were new, yet familiar. They seemed to relate to movement...

  Mud Puppy stood cautiously up. His vision ranged out over the treetops.

  Far, far away and below the sea glinted, marked by the patch of Shadow cast by Sheldrake Mountain itself. By the shape and angle of the Shadow, he could tell the time, early morning—

  Suddenly, Mud Puppy felt his mind split. He seemed to be in two places at once. One of him was tiny and grovelled in the stinking mud, one swayed upon the tower...

  When the moment of dissonance passed, Mud Puppy came to himself only to witness one of the tribe’s ovines being carried away by a maurauder.

  Swelling his chest, Mud Puppy gave vent to the tribe’s alarm call, a wordless ululation.

  Defenders rushed from the village. The thief increased his speed for the refuge of the woods. Casting a popeyed horrified glance over his shoulder, he saw he was being overtaken. He dropped the ovine.

  The sacrifice of his booty was fruitless; he was caught short of safety. The pursuers brought him down, pummelling him savagely with fists and branches. Quickly he was trammelled with liana-like cords and carried back gleefully among the huts.

  When Mud Puppy was relieved of duty, he shambled up to see the chief.

  The chief stood triumphant above the bruised and bleeding intruder who lay senseless in the dust and offal outside the Longhouse. For some reason, Mud Puppy felt sympathy for the captured thief.

  “what will be done with him?”’

  “The Upmountain Ones come today for their tribute. If we please them. they will punish this one for us.”

  The morning moved on into afternoon. Expectation mountcd making itself felt in the village. At last came the sentry’s call, an alert different from that for a raid.

  The entire village assembled on the lawn. next to the pre-arranged pile of tributc.

  A skycraft took distinct shape. The villagers prostrated themselves. On his belly, Mud Puppy could feel the craft touch the earth.

  “Arise,” came the voice of one of the Upmountain Ones.

  The congregation came trembling to their feet.

  As always, the Upmountain Ones were clothed in garments smooth and seamless as living snakeskin. Their faces were all familiar from previous visits, save for one—

  Mud Puppy’s heart rattled his ribs. That face—he knew that woman’s face! He could feel the touch of her hand—

  Hearing nothing but his surging blood for a space, Mud Puppy was swept by waves of emotion. When he took notice again of sounds, the chief was concluding his plea to the visitors.

  “—into the sea!”

  The villagers broke into shouts. “Yes, toss him into the sea!”

  The Upmountain Ones smiled. They appeared amused by the display. The one who had bade the villagers arise said, “Very well. Load the goods and we’ll take the captive too. You must make haste though!”

  The villagers hastened to obey, handing meat, fruit and skins up to the crew standing in the hatch. Mud Puppy tried to press closer to the woman, but was frustrated by the crowd.

  Soon the Upmountain Ones were inside their sealed craft, along with the prisoner. The craft ascended silently, turned its nose downmountain, and dropped away.

  The sentry, still atop his perch, could track it for its entire flight. When it was over the sea, he relayed the news to his expectant listeners. When the small speck fell from the craft, he told them also.

  A shout of savage joy rent the air.

  Mud Puppy heard it from a distance.

  He was on his way upmountain.

  6.

  Cradling his predator-ripped arm, faint with hunger, naked, Mud Puppy pushed himself on.

  He knew he could not go much further. But he had no idea what distance remained, nor indeed where he was going.

  A feeling like a woman’s hair drawn across his face—

  Losing consciousness, losing shape, Mud Puppy fell to the soil.

  His personal record picked up again here, caught by the perimeter scanners, on disc a fade-in directly from Octavia dropping him into the pond. (“You’re on your own...”). He played the scene over and over in slow motion, looking for clues to what had driven him through all the pain, for clues to whatever was eternal in him, something he might call on to propel him through life Uptown.

  But what showed was only surface, and that was most mutable.

  7.

  Mud Puppy studied himself in the mirror.

  He was tall and slim, clothed in a seamless suit. His hair was short and brown, his eyes dark. This was his face now, and felt right. He could not definitely recall another. Yet—behind this countenance, in the depths of the mirror, seemed to hang a dozen more, hairy, furred and scaled...

  He had just emerged from the pedagogue—he realized with a start that he somehow knew the machine’s name and its function (knew the very concept of “machine!”)—and his mind held much more than he could readily comprehend.

  He opened and closed his mouth several times, striving to form some of the new words in his head: the pantomime struck him as fishlike. He felt embarrassed, blood suffusing his face.

  The door to his room opened silently of its own accord.

  A man stood there.

  Mud Puppy found that the stranger’s face stirred something within him. When the man spoke, the aura of command in his voice was familiar.

  “Come with me now, Quintero. Octavia wants to see you.”

  Mud Puppy hesitated. Quintero? Was that his name? He supposed it must be. Yet it didn’t quite fit. What did he call himself inside? There was another name, the first he had ever been addressed by, long ago...

  “Who—who are you?”

  “Deuce.”

  Deuce’s eyes were hard as a flint scraper, his mouth cruel as a thorn. Mud Puppy found himself instinctively disliking him. Deuce appeared to sense this reaction, and to relish it.

  “Enough talk now. Octavia doesn’t care to be kept waiting. Follow me.”

  Deuce turned and strode off. Mud Puppy followed.

  They passed through long, windowless, door-dotted corridors with antiseptic white walls, ascended several flights of stairs, and at last emerged onto a terrace open to the air.

  Stopping in shock, Mud Puppy tried to absorb the vista revealed to him.

  Beyond the terrace’s parapet, in a panaorama stretching a full one hundred and eighty degrees, the land fell dramatically away: to step off would be to walk however briefly on treetops. The geography of the lower slopes was compressed by distance into stripes or bands of different vegetation. At the foot of the mountain the waters of the sea began, continuing to the horizon. The breezes seemed to carry a tinge of the water’s ancient salt tang.

  Looking upward over his shoulder, Mud Puppy could see only overhanging architecture, a pile of balconies, rooms and towers.

  “Welcome to Uptown, Quintero.”

  Mud Puppy saw the woman
then. His heart kicked like a wild animal.

  Octavia was reclining on a cushioned bench. Her eyes were the color of sky. Her mouth was painted red.

  “Come sit by me,” she said, patting the couch. Mud Puppy moved toward her as if in a trance. When he had dropped down beside her, she said, “You may leave now, Deuce.”

  Deuce smiled and reentered the building.

  “There’s something I want you to watch,” said Octavia. She reached down and picked up a roll of some material. She unfurled it and ran a finger across it; the material stiffened with a slight curve, so it could stand. She pressed a button at a corner. The flatscreen filled with images and sound emerged.

  When the screenOctavia said, “My mud puppy,” he knew that was his only and real name.

  The short recording over, Mud Puppy said, “That was me then...?”

  “Yes. “

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Your karma print. It’s unique to you. The perimeter sensors picked it up. And it’s the same one we recorded years ago, from when you were a tiny marine skipper.”

  Mud Puppy’s head ached. “I don’t—I don’t understand any of it.”

  “I’ll explain later,” said Octavia. “But first I want something, Quintero.”

  She skimmed a finger down the front of her garment and it fell apart. Reaching over, her breasts tumbling out, she undid his.

  Her soft warm hand enveloping his cock—

  But it was all of him she held.

  8.

  “When humans landed on this world, they knew nothing of the morphic gradients of Sheldrake Mountain. It appeared to be a world like any other. But it was not.

  “All objects in the universe, inanimate or otherwise, derive their identity, their very shape and qualities, from morphic fields, nonmaterial regions of influence extending in space and continuing in time, not subject to human manipulation. These fields are localized within and around the systems they organize. They hold the cumulative experiences of all members of each class, a separate racial memory for every type of plant, animal and stone, every crystal, protein and star.

  “So much was long known to science. What had never been encountered before was a situation in which morphic fields were strictly stratified in space.