Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Hell, no! I just want to get this frog antsy enough for us both to go subplanckian!”

  “A real human wouldn’t have made that mistake about the ghosts....”

  “This real human has too much on his mind to think about some greedheads at the end of time who never did anything for us!”

  Otto began to shake Buffo. “C’mon, get frightened!”

  “I—I’m getting sick!”

  Buffo regurgitated a gout of clear bile onto Otto’s uncovered pelted chest. Disgustedly, Otto extended the toad to Toto.

  “Here, see what you can do.”

  Toto took the toad and set it gently on the couch beside him.

  “Buffo, I want you to picture something for me. Would. you do that?”

  “I suppose”

  “Picture a pair of yellow legs rising out of the swamp where you all your family once lived. They stretch up and up for what seem like miles, before they disappear in a cloud of white feathers. Above that cloud stretches a long powerful neck. And that neck terminates in a malicious head with nasty beady bird eyes. And set in that head is a rapierlike ivory beak about a skidillion miles long. And now you’ve got nowhere to hide, and that beak is plunging down toward your stinking carcass!”

  “Oooooh, nooooo!”

  From rugose glands atop Buffo’s head, tiny droplets of sticky exudate began to emerge.

  Otto greedily grabbed up the toad and began to suck its tacky warty skin, using his sandpapery strop of a tongue.

  “Aaaaah!”

  Toto snatched the sartorized animal back and slurped dovn his share. Rising unsteadily he tried to stuff Buffo back into its container, but instead locked it in the nearby breadbox.

  “I can feel the electrons in my amygdala jumping orbits!”

  “My brain is bigger than the heliosphere!”

  Otto suddenly popped up the ship’s control stalk from the floor. It was configured currently in the form of a large mushroom, atop which sat an anthropomorphic caterpillar whose lower body fused with the mushroom cap.

  “You are speaking to the incarnate deva of the Grigori Bearford,” said the caterpillar. “How may I help you?”

  “There’s an escape seed orbiting Tethys. Change our course to intercept.”

  “Allow me to confirm.” The caterpillar paused a moment, then said, “At the extreme limits of my SQUID sensors, I do detect a tiny black body that might be an escape seed. It is not putting out a distress signal, however. May I ask how you knew about it?”

  “It’s the frog,” said Otto. “It fosters stochastic bursts. Now get busy changing course.”

  “This command is acceptable.”

  “All of my commands are acceptable, you stupid ship! I’m the real human!”

  “I’m sorry, but I read a tattoon on your foot through the floor.”

  Furious, Otto turned to Toto. “Now see what you’ve done with your idiot pranks, you moron! The ship won’t even accept me as the original!”

  “That’s because you’re not.”

  “That does it. Ship, dissolve his template.”

  “That command is not acceptable from a copy.”

  “Arrrrgh!”

  Otto lunged for the caterpillar, but it merged swiftly into the mushroom before he could grab it., and he was left draped across the fungal platform. Then the mushroom itself pulled back into the floor.

  Picking himself up from the ship’s soft deck, Otto turned toward Toto, seemingly ready to hurl himself at his nemesis. Then he sagged as the inevitable unpleasant aftereffects of toad-licking kicked in.

  “My brainstem’s being plucked!”

  “A black hole’s ea.ing my cortex!”

  Otto staggered toward the breadbox. I ll get some manna to set us straight.”

  He opened the breadbox, stuck his hand in, and made a retching noise.

  “Buffo’s pissed all over our manna!”

  Toadlike laughter issued from the breadbox. Otto slammed the door shut.

  “Let him sit in his own mess,” Toto advised, “and have the ship make us some more manna.”

  Before Otto could issue the command, however, the mushroom with its seated figure popped up again.

  “We are in orbit a few klicks behind the escape seed,” announced the deva of the Grigori Bearford.

  “What took so long?” demanded Otto.

  “We were on the opposite side of the Sun from Saturn when you issued the orders.”

  “Oh, that’s OK then.”

  “What is our next step?”

  Otto looked at Toto. “My head hurts too much. I’m going to get some manna. You decide.”

  Toto scratched himself thoughtfully. “Well, we spent all this time and effort getting here. Let’s bring the seed onboard.”

  “It is a very primitive type,” advised the caterpillar. “A Macbride-Allen design. What if it dates from the Ree-Rep era and contains something dangerous?”

  Toto gave the caterpillar a disdainful look. “You ve told us often enough that you possess more processing power in your optical-protein circuits and more manufacturing ability in your cornucopion cadcammers than the entire twentieth-century Earth. Our hourly energy budget is greater than that period’s annual global total. I think we’ll be able to deal with a few itty-bitty rogue recursive replicators, don’t you?”

  ‘’Wlthout clear signs of danger, trusting more in my abilities than yours, I shall obey.”

  The stalk withdrew. Returning from another part of the ship, Otto clutched two thick fanlike slices of lacey manna. He gave one to Toto.

  “Thank you. You are a good servant.”

  Otto only vented a porcine snort.

  Soon the caterpillar came back to provide a running commentary on its actions.

  “The seed has been englobed within a newly created neutronium-hardened area of the ship some 50 thousand cubic meters in volume. Surface markings indicate that it once served as an emergency pod on a ship called the Peppermint Stith. Or perhaps that should be Stick. The legend has been mostly obliterated by centuries of space dust and intersatellite ionization, and I have been forced to reconstruct the information based on the few molecules of paint left.”

  “Quit boasting,” said Otto around a mouthful of manna, “and crack that sucker.”

  “I am already doing so.... A very simple utility fog has poured out revealing a single inhabitant of the seed, who appears to have been in some kind of stasis. Now that the fog is dispersing, however, she appears to be awakening.”

  “She!”

  “A woman!”

  “What the hell are you fooling around for? Get her up here pronto!”

  The securely latched breadbox began to rock back and forth as Buffo hurled himself around inside. “Let me out, let me out! I want to meet her too! I promise I won’t pee anymore! Please, please, pretty please! I love when babes lick me! Look, my exocrine glands are already flowing with nice juicy heavy-chain polypeptides!”

  Otto cuffed the box. “Shut up! You’ll stay in there until I say you can come out.”

  The box ceased rocking, and a baleful yellow eye pressed itself to a ventilation slit. “I hate you!’

  But Otto had already turned away, and with Toto now considered a swelling on the floor

  Larger and large the bud grew until it was human-sized, although still too small to hold the massive Toto or Otto. Scorings appeared on the bud, outlining petals, which began to peel back from the pointed tip, lotuslike.

  Revealed inside the intraship transport mechanism stood a woman: short blonde hair, medium height, one eye green, one violet. She was clad only in a single strip of red metallic fiber. Clinging in no clear manner, the band began around her left ankle, spiraled up around that single leg, zipped between her crotch, twixt her buttocks, around her waist, across one breast. and circled her neck as a collar, leaving her half-naked in a helical fashion.

  Her eyes widened at the sight of the twins. “I—my name’s Goldie Liddell. Who—who are you?”

  Ot
to spoke first. “Allow me to introduce us. My name is Otto the Original, and this is Toto the Copy.”

  Toto chose not to protest this slanted introduction, but simply said, “Charmed, I’m sure.”

  The woman stepped tentatively forth from the blossom, which was already collapsing back into the floor. “Are you, like, intelligent bears?”

  “Of course not! We’re completely human, although modified a wee bit. That is, I’m human, whereas Toto is merely a clever cornucopion duplicate of me.”

  Goldie looked curiously around. “Where am I?”

  The caterpillar interjected, “Aboard the Grigori Bearford, out of Sheffield City, Venus. We are currently in the neighborhood of Saturn, where we came upon your escape seed.”

  Goldie shivered. “That awful coffin of a thing! I remember being hustled into it when the Peppermint Stick ran into trouble. They said I’d be picked up soon. After that, it’s all a blank. How long was I in it?”

  “What was the date of your ship’s disaster?” asked the deva.

  “Let me see.... I think it was October. I remember I had just had my period.... October the fifteenth!”

  Toto sighed deeply. “He means the year.”

  “Oh. Twenty-ninety.”

  “You have been in suspension then for nearly a century.”

  “Goodness! I guess my contract’s expired then....”

  Otto asked, “What contract is that?”

  “The Peppermint Stick was a resupply ship for the whorehouse on Tethys. Hundreds of bi-boys and omni-girls. We were hired to service the water-ice miners. I was hoping to save up money to homestead on Mars. They were almost done terraforming it....”

  “Whores!” laughed Otto.

  “Water miners!” guffawed Toto.

  “Holy frog!” said Otto. “We’ve hauled aboard a living fossil!”

  Goldie frowned. “That’s not a very nice thing to call someone. I’m a completely modern and up-to-date person of intelligence.”

  “Not anymore, Little Golden. We exist on the far side of the Singularity now.”

  “That foolish notion came true? People were always talking about it, but it never got any closer. It was always just five years ahead forever! The Vinge-point after which nothing would ever be the same.... Well, what happened?”

  Toto said, “Basically, humanity assumed godlike powers without any idea of how to use them. Our machines run everything perfectly now and, by law, every citizen has to think up creative tasks to keep them busy, whether we need anything done or not. Mostly it’s not. That’s why we happened to be out here. We thought we might get some good new ideas if we looked back at the Solar System from its edge. We were on our way to the Oort Cloud when we detoured to rescue you.”

  Goldie sauntered up close to Otto and Toto. “And I’m so-oh grateful you did! I don’t think we’re too different, despite our coming from, like, different centuries and all, do you?”

  Goldie began to stroke the pelted chests of the giants. Loud borborygmous rumblings if from salmon-stlufled grizzlies issued from deep in their diaphragms. Encouraged, she pressed up against them.

  “Now, tell little Goldie the truth. Do I feel like some old ‘fossil’ to you big, sensitive fellows?”

  Otto loosed a roaring bellow, which Toto echoed. Goldie stepped back in mock fright. “Oh. you bears are scaring me!” She raised her hands to the collar around her throat, whereupon the entire stripe fell away in a slack coil, leaving her completely naked.

  From the breadbox came the plaintive voice of Buffo. “Hey, this isn’t fair. Guys, guys? Get off that couch and let me out! C’mon, you know a nice hit of frog will make it better.” Buffo paused to watch the busy tangle for a while. “Although I don’t really see how.... Oh, shucks!”

  Soon Buffo’s resigned snores competed with the other noises in the cabin.

  Then there was silence.

  Some hours later, the caterpillar laid down the pipe of its hookah and politely coughed.

  “What do you want?” Otto gruffly demanded.

  “I believe that the same agency which destroyed the Peppermint Stick is now bent on attacking us. You recall the existence of those dwellers in the liquid ocean deep below Tethys’s surface...?”

  “Not those stupid Clarke worms!”

  “What’re Clarke worms?” asked Goldie.

  Toto explained. “The natives of Saturn’s satellites. They drove your horny water-ice miners offplanet the same year your ship was destroyed, and before humanity could counterattack, we went through the Singularity and didn’t need their crummy moon anymore, so nobody’s ever been back.”

  “A large fleet of intelligent missiles is fast approaching,” said the ship. “Shall I—?”

  Otto yawned. “Of course. And sterilize the moon too while you’re at it.”

  Goldie swung her legs over the edge of the couch.

  “Done,” said the deva.

  “Wow. You guys don’t mess around. But was it really necessary to kill, like, even a bunch of worms so thoroughly?”

  “Oh, it’ll give someone else the interesting task of reconstructing the species. And you know, Little Golden, that reminds me. Something you said earlier has sparked an idea in my Original Human brain.”

  “Do tell,” said Toto. “This will be a first.”

  Ignoring the taunt, Otto said, “Take us to the Oort Cloud, deva. Allow me to show you around the ship, meanwhile, Little Golden.”

  Pointing out the various features of the Grigori Bearford, including the Fast Forward drives, took nearly an hour, toward the end of which time Toto, Otto, and Goldie stood before a closed door.

  “Now, behind this door is the one part of the ship you must never visit, even though it’s easily accessible.”

  “Gee, what’s in there?”

  Otto and Toto looked at each other with chagrin. “We’ve forgotten. The frog has ruined our short-term memories. But I distinctly recall it’s something really awful and scary and not good to mess with. So stay away.”

  “Mega-Bluebeard,” said Goldie. “But I’ll try.”

  Reentering the room where she had first encountered the twins, Goldie noticed a sobbing coming from the breadbox. Before anyone could stop her, she had removed a weeping Buffo and was cradling the hypertrophied toad between her breasts.

  “There, there, what’s the matter, froggie?”

  “I”—sniff, sniff—“just want to be licked!”

  “Oh, is that all?” said Goldie.

  “No, don’t!” warned Toto.

  But it was too late, for Goldie had already obligingly slurped the patina of slime off the toad’s head.

  The toad fell from her lifeless hands, and she keeled over onto the floor with a look of ecstatic overload on her face.

  Otto scooped up the toad. “You greedy bastard! Look at what you’ve done now! You should have known an unsartorized human couldn’t take your foul mess!”

  “It wasn’t fair,” whined Buffo. “You two had all the fun you wanted.”

  “But we didn’t go and break her!” said Otto as he stuffed the amphibian roughly back into its bulpy box.

  The floor was already closing over Goldie. “I will have her reanimated shortly,” consoled the ship. “Meanwhile, we are now stopped some forty thousand AU’s from the Sun, at. the farthest fringes of the Oort, home to the Solar System’s comet reserves.”

  Otto rubbed his big hands together. “Great! Now, this is what. I’ve thought up. We’re going to terraform the Earth!”

  “But the Earth is already pretty much terraformed, isn’t it?” suggested Toto. “More or less by definition?”

  “I know that! But just think! If we bombard the planet with millions of comets, just like our ancestors did to Mars, it wi11 completely wipe out billions of people and all of civilization there! Then we can spend a lot of time and energy recreating it!”

  Toto shook his head admiringly. “I have to confess, Otto, that with this marvelous idea, you have surpassed your inherent limitation
s as a copy. Let’s do it.”

  At that instant, a choir of glowing angelic beings materialized inside the ship.

  “It’s those ghosts from the end of time again,” Otto observed with annoyance.

  “And they are radiating a controlled flow of cornucopions,” added the deva.

  “Yes,” said the choir with one celestial voice, “we have returned to reason with you once more. We are your potential descendents from the Omega Point of futurity. And we are here to stop you. If you carry forth your mad plan, we will never come to be!”

  “It’s rather a tenuous foundation to argue from, isn’t it?” asked Toto.

  The lead angel raised his/her arms in an imperious gesture. “Enough! Will you desist?”

  “Make us!

  There came a blinding radiance that filled the ship. When it dissipated, both the twins and the angels were nowhere to be seen.

  Seconds later, from the floor Goldie was reborn. Sitting up, she looked curiously around.

  “Otto? Toto? Hello? Anyone?”

  Buffo called out from his box. “It’s just you and me now, babe!”

  “Oh, you nasty thing! Be quiet.”

  Goldie moved to the mushroom and poked the slumped unconscious caterpillar, but he failed to respond.

  “Goodness! I’m really up the creek now!”

  Goldie began to wander through the ship.

  Finally she found herself at the forbidden door.

  “Should I...? Well, why not?”

  But before she could try to open the door, it opened on its own.

  Behind it stood Otto. Or Toto.

  Save that he was only as tall as Goldie’s knee, and proportioned to suit.

  “Who—who are you?”

  “My name’s Toot,” said the teddy bear. “I’m the original. Let me apologize for any inconvenience my duplicates might have caused you. The ship is bootstrapping itself back into existence now, incorporating what it learned from the angels. And if our hypothetical descendents should return, they won’t find us such an easy mark.”

  “I don’t understand....”

  Toot explained what had happened.

  “Does that mean,” Goldie asked, “that you’re going to go ahead with the crazy scheme Otto and Toto came up with?”

  “Of course. It’s brilliant. I knew that if I left them alone long enough, they’d hit upon something.