Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Hey, egghead,” one said. “Yeah, you—the guy with the egg thing in his head. How’s it feel to steal someone’s life?”

  Swan felt a line of heat high up around his brow like a hot wire tightening into his skin, a sharp crown. He stood up, but there was no room to move. The barstool pressed against the back of his legs.

  Swan’s mouth had dried up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about....”

  “We’re talking about how the wrong guy died. It should have been—”

  The man spoke a name Swan vaguely recognized. The mention of the name left him genuinely confused. They were talking about someone he no longer knew, someone who didn’t exist anymore. “I don’t understand. My name is Glen Swan....”

  The men laughed cruelly. “He really believes it!”

  “He’s a fried egghead!”

  Swan tried to push his tormentors aside. “Let me go. I don’t need this!”

  “No, you need this!” one said, and swung a heavy fist into his stomach.

  Swan doubled over. Then he was submerged in a flood of punches and kicks.

  He called for help, but no one came, none of his new “friends.”

  He felt consciousness slipping away.

  But he was pretty sure he managed to black out naturally and on his own, without the help of the EGA.

  11.

  The Doubts

  After he got out of the hospital, Swan found a new job waiting for him. With Tony’s help he got the position in customer relations that Tony had predicted for him.

  But nothing felt the same.

  Who was he?

  Was he a stranger falsely trying to fill another man’s shoes?

  Or was he who he had willed himself—at first halfheartedly, then earnestly, with the help of others—to become?

  These questions occupied his every waking moment. Mostly he tended to come down on the blackest side of the dilemma.

  How could he ever have imagined he could slip so easily into someone else’s old life? He was a fraud, an imposter. Everyone was just pretending with him, pretending to like him, pretending to tolerate him, pretending to accept him as what he was not and could never be.

  Even Emma?

  Even her.

  Emma in her cold bed.

  One day when his doubts reached an unbearable intensity, Swan began making discreet inquiries.

  Inquiries that brought him one day after a week’s searching to arrange an appointment for his next lunch hour.

  12.

  The Decision

  As he made ready to go to work that morning, Emma said, “Glen—I realize how hard things have been for you lately. But I want you to know that I believe in you. Nothing’s your fault, Glen. And someday those guys who beat you up will get caught. Even if they don’t, they’ll pay somehow, in the end. I really believe that, and you should too.”

  Swan winced inwardly at the memory of his beating, but did not comment on Emma’s notion of justice. Justice—or revenge—was something that would soon be within his own grasp.

  If he truly wanted it, knew what to do with it, how to best have it.

  Emma seemed desperate to reach him, as if she sensed the enormity of this day. “You’ve been good to me and Will, Glen. And if I haven’t been quite as good to you, well—it’s because I needed time. I can be better. We can be better together.”

  Swan did not reply. Emma looked down at her hands folded in her lap. When she raised her face, her cheeks were wet.

  “I—I really couldn’t stand to lose you twice.”

  Swan left.

  There was no sign that the door Swan faced at noon in a shabby part of the city belonged to a doctor’s office. And inside were no reassuring accoutrements of medicine, no diplomas or cheerful receptionist or old dying magazines or fellow patients.

  Just a man. A man who sat behind his desk in a highbacked chair in the gloom, swivelled so that Swan never got a good look at his appearance. He was a voice only, and even that voice, Swan suspected, was electronically disguised.

  “—not responsible for any side-effects,” the man was saying. “The whole thing is highly experimental still.” The man chuckled. “No FDA seal of approval. But the beauty of it is that it’s just one spinal injection. Bam! Straight to the brain and your little parasitical friend dissolves and gets scavenged. If everything goes okay, that is. Then you’re free.”

  Free. But for what? If he just wanted to run away from everything, he could run away now. He didn’t have to kill the thing inside his head just to run. It wasn’t a leash or a fence.

  But the EGA was a symbol. That, he realized, was the calculated subtlety of it, of the State’s reformatory schemes. It didn’t even have to function to fulfill its purpose. It could be a placebo for all he knew, a ruse. But even so it was strong, a monument, a permanent symbol of the agreement he had entered into. A token of the exchange he had made, the life that had been extinguished in his place, the new bonds he had willingly assumed. To kill the thing in his head meant to deny the entire past year, to abrogate his contract with his new life.

  To focus instead on spite and revenge, on hurting and pain.

  Swan began to feel sick to his stomach. Was it the EGA kicking in? Or just the natural reaction of whoever he was?

  The doctor was talking. Swan tried to focus on what he was saying.

  “—not your fucking fault—”

  Emma’s face swam up into his vision.

  “Nothing’s your fault, Glen.”

  Swan stood up. “I’ve decided.”

  The doctor’s voice was gloating. “Great. Now we can get down to the important things.”

  “Right,” said Swan, and turned to leave.

  “Hey,” said the doctor. “Where you going?”

  “Back to my job, back to my home, back to my wife.”

  Back to my life.

  ANGELMAKERS

  Snow sugared thickly the steeply sloping winter-dead lawn behind the great organically sprawling autonohouse, a white canvas scribbled over with small oblate bootprints and the sharp parallel tracks of sled blades, as well as the shallow worm furrows of lofter saucers. At regular intervals, black-leaved trees with precisely choreographed branches sucked every impinging photon from a December sun pale as a circle of overwashed bleached cotton pegged at the zenith.

  Around the house, no activity save routine maintenance and materials-acquisition manifested itself. The house’s adults remained busy inside at their ludic labors. Human presence in the landscape consisted of a still line of a dozen children by the edge of the broad frozen river that demarcated the extensive lawn’s lower edge. The children on the shore flanked a set of runner tracks that extended onto the ice and terminated at a jagged hole filled with water as coarse and grey as steel wool.

  The children wore colorful jellied unisuits thin as pressed-fruit strips, revealing the unisex lines of their pre-adolescent bodies. Their warmly rosy hands appeared bare, save for outlines of shivering air. Perched on their heads, upright or askew, squishy caps exhibited the silly geometries of mirror worlds. Holding their sleds and saucers, or standing beside them, the children silently contemplated the ice-surfaced river and its anomalous disfiguration.

  A gentle-looking boy spoke. “She’s been under some time now. A minute almost. There are snags down there, I know.”

  His statement elicited some nervous shuffling and visible expressions of empathy from his peers, except for one rough lad who taunted, “If you don’t trust the angels, Rand, dive in yourself.”

  An exceedingly thin and nervous-looking girl said, “Maybe we should. Or maybe we should call Fabiola’s parents.” She fingered the rim of the ceramic communion wafer bonded to her wrist without touching its responsive surfaces. “What if the angels are too busy elsewhere?”

  “Have you ever known the leucotheans to fail, Shelly?” demanded the second boy.

  “No, but I feel so helpless just standing here. I want to do something.”

  “Fabio
la won’t thank you if you spoil the story of her drowning by horning in on things.”

  The boy named Rand said defensively, “Are you saying Fabiola planned this, Brewster?”

  Brewster made a dismissive wave. “Of course not. Who’d be that daft? But now that it’s happened—”

  At that moment another child shouted, “Look!” The crowd followed the sentry’s outstretched finger with their massed gaze.

  As if from directly out of the consumptive sun, a silhouetted figure had detached itself. Swelling from antlike dot to doll-like cutout to human-scaled apparition as it dropped lower, the angel was swiftly upon them. Without hesitation, the angel plunged through the hole in the ice, sending a geyser of cold water upward, droplets bespattering the children. Too thrilled to care, they gave an instinctive collective shout of excitement and relief.

  Within seconds the angel emerged from the jagged-edge opening, bearing an unconscious child. Skimming low, the angel landed amidst the children, set the body of Fabiola down in the snow, and kneeled beside the bare-headed blonde girl with the gelid blue face.

  Unhesitatingly, the children formed a tight clot around the tableau of kneeling angel and child. Closest by an inch or two, the girl named Shelly peered intensely, her concentration fixed more on the angel than on her unbreathing friend.

  The wingless angel was whiter than the ambient snow: platinum hair, ivory limbs. The angelic body displayed no sex, although the angel was completely unclothed. The face of the angel was composed in neutral lines from which perhaps only a depthless sadness, if any emotion whatsoever, could be teased. The angel’s eyes were featureless marbles, spheres seemingly composed of polished bone set in the ocular orbits.

  The angel kneeled beside Fabiola, but applied no conventional mode of resuscitation. Instead, one arm and hand attentuated ectoplasmically, then snaked through Fabiola’s mouth and, apparently, down the girl’s throat. The angel’s other rarefied hand plunged into the child’s chest over her heart like fog through cheesecloth.

  Fabiola’s body instantly arced like the tensioned arm of a loaded catapult, head and heels digging into the snow. The stolid angel remained seemingly unmoved, but withdrew those intrusive extensions, which resumed humaniform solidity . Fabiola spewed river water, gagged, then sucked in a shuddering breath, while the angel ran soothing hands up the girl’s frame, ending with hands clasping the girl’s head on either side.

  Fabiola’s eyes snapped open. Her gaze locked with the angel’s blank fixity. At the same time Shelly strained forward, as if she were a bob on an invisible elastic line connecting victim and rescuer. The tableau held for a few eternal seconds, then shattered as the angel let the snowy depression again receive Fabiola’s head. Somehow the angel leaped directly from a kneeling posture into the sky.

  Fabiola sat up weakly; both Rand and Brewster moved to support her, and the other children clustered closer to hear the first words from their revivified peer, a weak “I’ve come back.”

  All except Shelly. Shading her eyes, the wan girl watched the angel until that never-speaking being had long disappeared.

  * * * *

  In coupling class, Rand and Fabiola lay sated on mussed white sheets draping a low carnalounge. Fabiola’s newly mature body had developed along her chosen lines of feminine curvature. Rand’s form likewise had fructified into a desirably ripe, slim-hipped maleness. Together, langorous limbs entangled, they resembled one of the three-hundred-year-old Bouguereaus they had studied last quintmester in art-history class. In ranks across the copulatorium, other couched couples replicated their easy indolence.

  Adjacent to Fabiola and Rand on their own divan, Shelly and Brewster were lone exceptions to the class’s ruling somatopsychic fulfillment. Brewster, his innate truculence now compounded by an overdeveloped physique, rested on his back, a frown dragging his face down, arms folded across his inordinately hairy chest. Her slim lily of a body the least mature among her classmates, Shelly reclined on her side, spine convexed toward her partner, arms bowed over her head. Now Brewster spoke more loudly than was deemed polite within the copulatorium. Rand and Fabiola could not help overhearing.

  “Damn it, girl. A little enthusiasm wouldn’t be out of place.”

  A soft “I’m sorry” wisped out from the cage of Shelly’s arms like an escaping ghost.

  Rand was not placated. “Sorry won’t cut it anymore. Why, if you were my only partner, I’d have a knot the size of houseroot in my libido.” The burly youth swung his feet to the floor and stepped over to the neighboring lounge. “On your way, Rand. I’m cutting in.”

  Both Fabiola and Rand graciously consented. Her spill of golden hair whispering on the sheets, the lush Fabiola accepted the impetuous Brewster into her embrace, while Rand slipped onto the couch where Shelly still cringed. As Fabiola and Brewster began to engage, Rand slid a comforting arm around Shelly’s shoulder. She spun about and relaxed into the offered cradle of his shoulder and chest, pressing her face against him.

  “Want to talk about anything?” asked Rand quietly. “Something special bothering you?”

  “I just worry all the time, Rand. I can’t explain it, but it interferes with everything, not just sex.”

  “What concerns you? Your future? It’s perfectly natural for young people our age to be a little worried about exactly what playwork we’ll eventually choose.”

  “No, it’s not my personal future. I’m fairly clear about that. I want to be a theresan.”

  Rand forebore to comment on this rather unconventional choice. “What then?”

  Shelly gripped Rand’s waist tightly. “I—I worry about the people I care for. Their health, their safety—their lives. It’s all I can think about, ever since—ever since Fabiola drowned.”

  For several seconds, Rand said nothing. Then: “But that was five years ago, Shelly.”

  “You needn’t remind me! I’ve lived every hellish preoccupied minute of it!”

  “Well, it’s just—don’t you think you should seek a detangling?”

  “If I remain knotted much longer, I will. But I just want to puzzle it out by myself for a while yet.”

  “It’s so odd, though.” Rand sounded genuinely perplexed. “To have such an archaic fear in this age of angels.”

  At the mention of angels, Shelly stiffened. “They’re the problem. They make our mortality more real at the same time they guard us from accidents. We’ve all come to rely on them so much, that we’ve lost a lot of old instincts of self-preservation. What if their perfection is flawed? Considering where they come from—’such base and hybrid clay.’”

  Rand balked at entering that seldom-trodden territory, the origin of the angels, and swerved instead into literary criticism. “You’re quoting Athanor. He’s not to my taste.”

  Beside them, Fabiola and Brewster were noisily climaxing. The communion wafer on Fabiola’s dangling wrist clacked rhythmically against the tiled floor. Rand found himself aroused. Upon Shelly’s shy acknowledgement of his condition, he began to caress her. Quickly, they started to move together.

  Their formal evaluation at the end of class cited as a demerit only Shelly’s postcoital tears.

  * * * *

  Alternately steamy and chill, cleansing mists billowed from the wallpores of the dimly lit freeform sauna. Subtle restorative natural fragrances and amygdaloids rode the droplets: balsam, vanilla, altozest. Self-segregating instinctively by sex, boys and girls clustered mostly in separate grottoes, as if after the intimacies of coupling class certain male and female intrabonding required reinforcing. Giggles and laughter interspersed boisterous talk.

  Seated on the absorptive floor, Shelly braced her back against a pliable wall, drew her knees up to her chin and crossed her ankles in front of her sex. She made no move to join in any of the conversations around her. She passed most of the sauna session in contemplative silence, until Fabiola approached her. The smiling blonde girl dropped down gracefully beside the somber dark-haired one. Shelly’s tentative expression mix
ed a faint welcome with a nearly palpable disinclination to talk. Fabiola ignored the look.

  “I hear you’ve decided on a career,” said Fabiola.

  Visibly surprised, Shelly answered, “Why, yes, I have.”

  Fabiola paused, then said, “Being a theresan seems an awfully—well, a harsh and stringent path.”

  Shelly’s face now expressed an indignation matched by her tone. “How can you say that? Devoting yourself entirely to the spiritual welfare of others? It’s the most fulfilling career I can imagine.”

  “But the libido-dampers, the vow of minimal consumption—it all seems so purposelessly self-denying in the face of our abundance.”

  “Maybe so. Maybe people nowadays have all the sex and food and toys they need. But there’s still suffering. Death and mortal dissatisfaction resist all unknotting. The vows are real, but also symbolic. They focus our attention, help us concentrate on our mission of relieving pain. The theresans are only one step below the angels themselves.”

  Fabiola evinced nervousness at such a comparison. “Well, I won’t pretend you aren’t suited for such a life, Shel. Ever since we were little, you’ve inclined that way.”

  Shelly neither affirmed nor denied this characterization. Suffused in soothing veils of moisture, the friends rested wordlessly side by side for a minute. Then Fabiola spoke.

  “Don’t you want to know what I’ve chosen for my playwork?”

  Shelly brightened. “Of course. I hadn’t realized you’d decided yet.”

  “I’m majoring in exobiological research, specializing in Leucothean lifeforms with a concentration on hybridology.”

  “Will you have to go discontinuous to visit Leucothea?”

  “Of course, if I choose to travel at all, which I probably will. How else would I cross all those lightyears?”

  Shelly shuddered. “I could never put myself through such an experience, even if it is temporary. Losing your body that way—”

  Fabiola laughed off her friend’s apprehensions. “It’s perfectly safe. Just a matter of not being where you were for a while until the universe is tickled into agreeing you’re ready to be elsewhere.” Changing the subject, Fabiola asked, “Who do you like better, Rand or Brewster?”