Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  Malvern shook his head in superior pity. “That’s what you get for trusting in swabs, man. Any major dude could’ve told those corporate criminals that top-down hierarchies never work out. Now, the approach you Third Worlders need is a viral-marketing, appropriate-technology pitch...”

  Zoster actually seemed impressed by Malvern’s foolish bravado, and engaged the foreign scab in earnest jargon-laced discussion, leaving Fearon to trudge along in an unspeaking fug of sweat-dripping, alien jungle heat. Though Zoster was the only one armed, the trio of scabs boldly led their little expedition through a tangle of feral trails, much-aided by their satellite surveillance maps and GPS locators.

  Five native bearers trailed the parade, fully laden-down with scab-baggage and provisions. The bare-chested, bare-legged, dhoti-clad locals exhibited various useful bodily mods, such as dorsal water storage humps, toughened and splayed feet, and dirty grub-excavating claws that could shred a stump in seconds. They also sported less rational cosmetic changes, including slowly moving cicatrices (really migratory subepidermal symbiotic worms) and enlarged ears augmented with elephant musculature. The rhythmic flapping of the porters’ ears produced a gentle creaking that colorfully punctuated their impenetrable sibilant language.

  The tormented landscape of Sierra Leone had been thoroughly reclaimed by a clapped-out mutant jungle. War, poverty, disease, starvation—the Four Landrovers of the African Apocalypse—had long since been and gone, bringing a drastic human population crash that beggared the Black Death, and ceding the continent to resurgent flora and fauna.

  These local flora and fauna were, however, radically human-altered ,recovering from an across-the-board apocalypse even more severe and scourging than the grisly one suffered by humans. Having come through the grinding hopper of a bioterror, they were no longer “creatures” but “evolutures.” Trees writhed, leaves crawled, insects croaked, lizards bunny-hopped, mammals flew, flowers pinched, vines slithered, and mushrooms burrowed. The fish, clumsily reengineered for the surging Greenhouse realities of rising seas, lay in the jungle trails burping like lungfish. When stepped upon, they almost seemed to speak.

  The explorers found themselves navigating a former highway to some long-buried city, presumably “Bayau” or “Moyamba,” to judge by the outdated websites. Post-natural oddities lay atop an armature of ruins, revealing the Ozymandias lessons of industrial hubris. A mound of translucent jello assumed the outlines of a car, including a dimly perceived skeletal driver and passengers. Oil-slick-colored orchids vomited from windows and doors. With the descending dusk invigorating flocks of winged post-urban rats, the travelers made camp. Zoster popped up a pair of tents for the expedition’s leaders and their animals, while the locals assembled a humble jungle igloo of fronds and thorns.

  After sharing a few freezedried packets of slumgullion, the expedition sank in weary sleep. Fearon was so bone-tired that he somehow tolerated Malvern’s nasal whistling and Zoster’s stifled dream shouts.

  He awoke before the others. He unseamed the tent flap and poked his head out into the early sunshine.

  Their encampment was surrounded by marauders. Spindly scouts, blank-eyed and scarcely human, were watching the pop-tents and leaning on pig-iron spears.

  Fearon ducked his head back and roused his compatriots, who silently scrambled into their clothes. Heads clustered like coconuts, the three of them peered through a fingernail’s width of tent-flap.

  Warrior-reinforcements now arrived in ancient jeeps, carrying anti-aircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

  “It’s Kissy Mental’s Bush Army,” whispered Zoster. He pawed hurriedly through a pack, coming up with a pair of mechanical boots.

  “Okay, girls, listen up,” Zoster whispered, shoving and clamping his feet in the piston-heavy footgear. “I have a plan. When I yank this overhead pull-tab, this tent unpops. That should startle the scouts out there, maybe enough to cover our getaway. We all race off at top speed just the way we came. If either of you survive, feel free to rendezvous back at my place.”

  Zoster hefted his gun, their only weapon. He dug the toe of each boot into a switch on the heel of its mate, and his boots began to chuff and emit small puffs of exhaust.

  “Gasoline-powered seven-league boots,” Zoster explained, seeing their stricken expressions. “South African Army surplus. There’s no need for roads with these things, but with skill and practice, youcan pronk along like a gazelle at thirty, forty miles an hour.”

  “You really believe we can outrun these jungle marauders?” Malvern asked.

  “I don’t have to outrun them; I only have to outrun you.”

  Zoster triggered the tent and dashed off at once, firing his pistol at random. The pistons of his boots gave off great blasting backfires, which catapulted him away with vast stainless-steel lunges.

  Stunned and in terror, Malvern and Fearon stumbled out of the crumpling tent, coughing on Zoster’s exhaust. By the time they straightened up and regained their vision, they were firmly in the grip of Prince Kissy Mental’s troops.

  The savage warriors attacked the second pop-tent with their machetes. They quickly grappled and snaffled the struggling Spike andWeeble.

  “Chill, Spike!”

  “Weeble, hang loose!”

  The animals obeyed, though the cruel grip of their captors promised the worst.

  The minions of the Prince were far too distanced from humanity to have any merely-ethnic identity. Instead, they shared a certain fungal sheen, a somatype evident in their thallophytic pallor and exopthalmic gaze. Several of the marauders, wounded by Zoster’s wild shots, were calmly stuffing various grasses and leaves into the gaping suety holes in their arms, legs and chests.

  A working squad now dismantled the igloo of the expedition’s bearers, pausing to munch meditatively on the greenery of the cut fronds. The panic-stricken bearers gabbled in obvious terror, but offered no resistance. A group of Kissy Mental’s warriors, with enormous heads and great toothy jaws, decamped from a rusty jeep. They unshouldered indestructible Russian automatic rifles and decisively emptied their clips into the hut. Pathetic screams came from the ruined igloo. The warriors then demolished the walls and hauled out the dead and wounded victims, to dispassionately tear them limb from limb.

  The Army then assembled their new booty of meat, to bear it back up the trail to their camp. Their fearsome captors, reeking of sweat and formic acid, bound the hands of Fearon and Malvern with tough lengths of grass. They strung Weeble and Spike to a shoulder-pole, where the terrified beasts dangled like piñatas.

  Then they forced the quartet of prisoners forward on the quick march. As they passed through the fetid jungle, the Army paused periodically, to empty their automatic weapons at anything that moved. Whatever victim fell to earth would be swiftly chopped to chunks and added to the head-borne packages of the rampaging mass.

  Within the hour, Fearon and Malvern were delivered whole to Prince Kissy Mental.

  Deliberately, Fearon focused his attention on the Prince’s throne, so as to spare himself the sight of the monster within it. The Army’s portable throne was a row of three first-class airplane seats, with the armrests removed to accomodate the Prince’s vast posthuman bulk. The throne perched atop a mobile palanquin, juryrigged from rebar, chipboard, and astroturf. A system of crutches and tethers supported and eased the Prince’s vast, teratological skull.

  The trophy captives were shoved forward at spearpoint through a knee-deep heap of cargo-cult gadgets.

  “Holy smallpox!” whispered Malvern. “This bossman’s half-chimp and half-ant!”

  “That doesn’t leave any percentage for human, Mal.”

  The thrust of a spear-butt knocked Fearon to his knees. Kissy Mental’s coarse-haired carcass, barrel-chested to support the swollen needs of the head, was sketched like a Roquefort cheese with massive blue veins. The Prince’s vast pulpy neck marked the transition zone to a formerly human skull whose sutures had long since burst under pressure, to be patched with b
ig, red shiny plates of antlike chitin. Kissy Mental’s head was bigger than the prize-winning pumpkin at a 4-H Fair—even when “4-H” meant “Homeostasis, Haplotypes, Histogenesis and Hypertrophy.”

  Fearon slitted his eyes, rising to his feet. He was terrified, but the thought of never seeing Tupper again somehow put iron in his soul. To imagine that he might someday be home again, safe with his beloved—that prospect was worth any sacrifice. There had to be some method to bargainwith their captor.

  “Malvern, how bright do you think this guy is? You suppose he’s got any English, speaking-wise?”

  “He’s got to be at least as intelligent as British royalty.”

  With an effort that set his bloated heart booming like a tribal drum, the Prince lifted both his hairy arms, and beckoned. Their captors pushed Mal and Fear right up against the throne. The Prince unleashed a flock of personal fleas. Biting, lancing, and sucking, the tasters lavishly sampled the flesh of Fearon and Malvern, and returned to their master. After quietly munching a few of the blood-gorged familiars, the Prince silently brooded, the tiny bloodshot eyes in his enormous skull blinking like LEDs. He then gestured for a courtier to ascend into the presence. The bangled, headdressed ant-man hopped up and, well-trained, sucked a thin clear excretion from the Prince’s rugose left nipple.

  Smacking his lips, the lieutenant decrypted his proteinaceous commands, in a sudden frenzy of dancing, shouting, and ritual gesticulation.

  Swiftly the Army rushed into swarming action, trampling one another in an ardent need to lift the Prince’s throne upon their shoulders. Once they had their entomological kingpin up and in lolling motion, the Army milled forward in a violent rolling surge, employing their machetes on anything in their path.

  A quintet of burly footmen pushed Malvern and Fearon behind the bluish exhaust of an ancient military jeep. The flesh of the butchered bearers had been crudely wrapped in broad green leaves and dumped in the back of the vehicle.

  Malvern muttered sullenly below the grumbles of the engine. “That scumbag Zoster.... All clones are inherently degraded copies. Man, if we ever get out of this pinch, it’s no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

  “Uh, sure, that’s the old scab spirit, Mal.”

  “Hey, look!”

  Fearon followed Malvern’s jerking head-nod. A split-off subdivision of the trampling Army had dragged another commensal organism from the spooked depths of the mutant forest. It was a large, rust-eaten, canary-yellow New Beetle, scribbled over with arcane pheremonal runes. Its engine long-gone, the wreck rolled solely through the Juggernaut heaving of the Army.

  “Isn’t that the 2015 New Beetle?” said Fearon. “The Sport Utility version, the one they ramped up big as a stretch Humvee?”

  “Yeah, the Screw-the-Greenhouse Special! Looks like they removed the sunroof and moonroof, and taped all the windows shut! But what the hell can they have inside-wise? Whatever it is, it’s all mashed up and squirmy against the glass—”

  A skinny Ant Army courtier vaulted and scrambled onto the top of the sealed vehicle. With gingerly care, he stuffed a bloody wad of meat in through the missing moonroof.

  From out of the adjacent gaping sunroof emerged a hydralike bouquet of heterogenous animal parts: tails, paws, snouts, beaks, ears. Snarls, farts, bellows and chitterings ensued.

  At length, a sudden flow of syrupy exudate drooled out the tailpipe, caught by an eager cluster of Ant Army workers cupping their empty helmets.

  “They’ve got thePanspecific Mycoblastulain there!”

  The soldiers drained every spatter of milky juice, jittering crazily and licking one another’s lips and fingers.

  “I do wish I had a camera,” said Fearon wistfully. “It’s very hard to watch a sight like this without one.”

  “Look, they’re feeding our bearers into that thing!” marvelled Malvern. “What do you suppose it’s doing with all that human DNA? Must be kind of a partially-human genetic mole-rat thing going on in there.”

  Another expectant crowd hovered at the Beetle’s tailpipe, their mold-spotted helmets at the ready. They had not long to wait, for a fleshy diet of protein from the butchered bearers seemed to suit thePanspecific Mycoblastulato a T.

  Sweating and pale-faced, Malvern could only say, “If they were breakfast, when’s lunch?”

  * * * *

  Fearon had never envisioned such brutal slogging, so much sheer physical work in the simple effort of eating and staying alive. The Prince’s Army marched well-nigh constantly, bulldozing the landscape in a whirl of guns and knives. Anything they themselves could not devour was fed to the Mycoblastula. Nature knew no waste, so the writhing abomination trapped in the Volkswagen was a panspecific glutton, an always-boiling somatic stewpot. It especially doted on high-end mammalian life, but detritus of all kinds was shoved through the sunroof to sate its needs: bark, leaves, twigs, grubs, and beetles. Especially beetles. In sheer number of species, most of everything living was always beetles.

  Then came the turn of their familiars.

  It seemed at first that those unique beasts had somehow earned the favor of Prince Kissy Mental. Placed onboard his rollicking throne, the trussed Spike and Weeble had been subjected to much rough cossetting and petting, their peculiar high-tech flesh seeming to particularly strike the Prince’s fancy.

  But such good fortune could not last. After noon of their first day of captivity, the bored Prince, without warning, snapped Spike’s neck and flung the dead weasel in the path of the painted Volkswagen. Attendants snatched the weasel up and stuffed Spike in. The poor beast promptly lined an alimentary canal.

  Witnessing this atrocity, Malvern roared and attempted to rush forward. A thorough walloping with boots and spear-butts persuaded him otherwise.

  Then Weeble was booted meanly off the dais. Two hungry warriors scrambled to load the porker upside down onto a shoulder-carried spear. Weeble’s piteous grunts lanced through Fearon, but at least he could console himself that, unlike Spike, his pig still lived.

  But finally, footsore, hungry and beset by migraines, his immune system drained by constant microbial assault, Fearon admitted despair. It was dead obvious that he and Malvern were simply doomed. There was just no real question that they were going to be killed and hideously devoured, all through their naive desire for mere fame, money, and professional technical advancement.

  When they were finally allowed to collapse for the night on the edge ofa marshy savannah, Fearon sought to clear his conscience.

  “Mal, I know it’s over, but think of all the good times we’ve had together. At least I never sold Florida real estate, like my Dad. A short life and a merry one, right? Die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Hope I die before I get—”

  “Fearon, I’m fed up with your sunnysided optimism! You rich-kid idiot, you always had it easy and got all the breaks! You think that rebellion is some kind of game! Well, let me tell you, if I had just one chance to live through this, I’d never waste another minute on nutty dilettante crap. I’d go right for the top of the food chain. Let me be the guy on top of life, let me be the winner, just for once!” Malvern’s battered face was livid. “From this day forth, if I have to lie, or cheat, or steal, or kill... Aw, what’s the use? We’re ant meat! I’ll never even get the chancewise!”

  Fearon was stunned into silence. There seemed nothing left to say. He lapsed into a sweaty doze amidst a singing mosquito swarm, consoling himself with a few last visions of his beloved Tupper. Maybe she’d remarry after learning of his death. Instead of following her sweet romantic heart, this time she’d wisely marry some straight guy, someone normal and dependable. Someone who would cherish her, and look after her, and take her rather large inheritance with the seriousness it deserved. How bitterly he regretted his every past unkindness, his every act of self-indulgence and neglect. The spouses of romantic rebels really had it rough.

  In the morning, the hungry natives advanced on Weeble, and now it was Fearon’s turn to shout, jump up and be clouted down.

 
With practiced moves the natives slashed off Weeble’s front limbs near the shoulder joints. The unfortunate Weeble protested in a frenzy of squealing, but his assailants knew all too well what they were doing. Once done, they carefully cauterized the porker’s foreparts and placed him in a padded stretcher, which was still marked with an ancient logo from the Red Cross.

  They then gleefully roasted the pig’s severed limbs, producing an enticing aroma Fearon and Malvern fought to abhor. The crisped breakfast ham was delivered with all due ceremony to Prince Kissy Mental, whose delight in this repast was truly devilish to watch. Clearly the Ant Army didn’t get pig very often, least of all a pig with large transgenic patches of human flesh. A pig that good, you just couldn’t eat all at once.

  By evening, Fearon and Malvern were next on the menu. The two scabs were hustled front and center as the locals fed a roaring bonfire. A crooked pair of nasty wooden spits were prepared. Then Fearon and Malvern had their bonds cut through, and their clothes stripped off by a forest of groping hands.

  The two captives were gripped and hustled and frogmarched as the happy Army commenced a manic dance around their sacred Volkswagen, ululating and keening in a thudding of drums. The evil vehicle oscillated from motion within, in time with the posthuman singing. Lit by the setting sun and the licking flames of the cannibal bonfire, big chimeric chunks of roilingPanspecific Mycoblastulatissue throbbed and slobbered against the glass.

  Suddenly a brilliant klieg light framed the scene, with an 80-decibel airborne rendition of “Ride of the Valkyries.”

  “Hit the dirt!” yelped Malvern, yanking free from his captor’s grip and casting himself on his face.

  Ribo Zombie’s entomopter swept low in a strafing run. The cursed Volkswagen exploded in a titanic gout of lymph, blood, bone fragments and venom, splattering Fearon—but not Malvern—from head to toe with quintessence of Mycoblastula.