Babylon Sisters. Paul Di Filippo
I had known then how soon I’d be back in the Gardens, I might not have hurried so.
Minutes later I was down, and lost in the busy streets.
I still had a lot to do. Meet the fence who’d buy my prize, recharge by induction field the subepidermal capacitor that powered my one-shot laser, then, finally, relax.
Task one took an hour, two a minute of that same hour, and three—
I was in a bar that catered to my kind of pleasure, relaxing with a drink, when I spotted him. He was the most beautiful godhorse I had ever seen.
Conservators, of course, call them mantises, or sometimes even bugs. Funny, then, how they resent being called apes themselves. (Once I TAPPED an ancient novel about humanity warring with a race called Bugs, and wished I never had. Pure Conservancy thinking at its most raw.) But any human in the Commensality will call them by some variation of the old folk etymology, godhorse.
This one was a male, with proud uplifted pyramidal head and finely formed mandibles, shining thorax and strong hind legs. His four folded wings were strong gemmed membranes that stirred slightly as I watched; his forelegs were delicacy and precision incarnate. His color at the moment was a relaxed olive.
I’m a big man, but he was taller, although not half my mass.
I initiated a TAP between us. The godhorses understood human language, but our ears were just not set up to interpret their stridulations. Without Babylon as intermediary, we would have been unable to communicate.
And a TAP was so much more intimate anyway.
[Commensal,] I sent in the familiar way, [your sustenance is mine.]
[And yours mine,] he replied. [Do you wish an encounter?]
[Very much,] I said. [And you?]
[You are a handsome human. I have never seen your color skin before. It is like space itself.]
I knew he was newly arrived then, since I’m hardly the only one in Babylon of this shade. [I take that as a yes,] I sent. [Shall we go to a place I know of?]
[Indeed.]
We left the bar together, and—
I pause here, recalling the reactions I’ve gotten from Conservators when I’ve described relations among Commensals before. They always adjust their bodyfoggers to hide their faces in disgust. That’s one thing I can’t stand. I expect them to listen as fellow sophonts, not as chaoses of optical distortion. Conservators might call all who embrace the Commensality perverts, but they always damn well learn before I’m done that we’re perverts with principles.
As I was saying:
—went to a Commensality-supported sensorium.
In our private cube I stripped off my lone pouch of a garment. (I was still barefoot and harnessless). The godhorse wore not so much as a button. He had turned a bright red with excitement.
I laid down on my stomach on the soft warm organiform couch in the twilit room, and he climbed atop me. His chitin was cool, and he weighed nothing in Babylon’s light gravity. His mandibles clacked alongside my collared neck, and his forearm spurs bit into my back. (And now you know the reason for my spinal plaques and carcanet: protection from a caress too violent.)
[Now I master you!] he sent.
I felt his intoxicant saliva snail my jaw. (On Truehome they used to believe the brown drool of the little native godhorses would provoke madness.)
The godhorse stridulated wildly, sawing his hindlegs against his wings. Knowing what was next, I got more excited.
Pinning me in a hold I could easily have broken, but chose not to (isn’t that the essence of love?), he bit my shoulder, opening up old scars.
His saliva mingled with my blood.
In seconds the world exploded in hallucinatory pleasure, the hot bright fragments shooting off into the void, leaving only pure blackness behind, which swallowed me down and down.
When I came out of it, the godhorse was gone. I flipped over onto my back and let the couch grow a patch for my shoulder. Then I got up, dressed, and left.
What do they get out of it? Good question. The answer lies, I think, in the fact that only the male godhorses indulge, and don’t care if their partner is a male or female.
Imagine how you would feel if you could mount someone who absolutely, positively wouldn’t bite your head off, as a female or even fellow male godhorse might, in the throes of passion.
The fact that their saliva is synergistic with our biochemistry is just lagniappe for us.
Because they’re so beautiful, and humans are so exogamous, we’d lie with them anyway, I’m sure, even if they didn’t provide a dose of pure ecstasy.
I was tired and sated and anxious to get home and rest. Night was ending, a full twelve hours of hard work and near-death and the little death of pleasure, and my mind was foggy from it all.
So when the small man with the dead face stepped from an alley outside the sensorium and said, “Hello, Meat,” (more about my name later) I didn’t react as fast as usual.
Squinting (the light-globe here was dead and lying on the syalon, and the next nearest was three meters off), I said, “Ace? How are you? I heard a bad rumor about you. They said you were brain-cored.”
His voice was without affect. “He was.”
So then I knew.
I was talking with Babylon.
* * * *
Let’s digress a minute.
The topic?
Governments.
The Conservancy, the Commensality, and the rough, two-backed beast they make up, sprawling across all creation, locked together in a perpetual ritual encounter akin to both sex and cannibalism. (You’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, I hope, but food and mating are Commensality preoccupations.)
The trouble is that the two systems (although I might make the point here that the Commensality is really a myriad systems that happen to acknowledge a rather limited set of common principles) are just so damned incompatible.
The Conservancy believes in government by an elite corps of trained professionals, enforcing laws meant to secure the maximum good for the greatest numbers. They desire physical and temporal continuity across the stars, which, you’ll pardon my bluntness, is just plain crazy, given the facts of travel by Heisenberg transition. (What can borders possibly demarcate when every point on the space-time continuum is contiguous with every other point?) And they have that completely illogical fetish about an imaginary purity that mankind must adhere to.
That’s the Conservancy. I know its principles intimately, from arguments with one of its sharpest proponents, my brother.
His name?
That doesn’t matter.
He’s dead now.
Anyway. Now what about us? The Commensality.
Our precepts are harder to codify. We don’t have an official canon like theirs. But there’re a few saints in our hagiography, and one was a pantheistic holy fool from Truehome who claimed, “That government governs best which governs least.” We subscribe to that. Also the essential equality of all sophonts, unlike those species chauvinists.
How, you might wonder, does one go about implementing such ideals? Some central coordination is required in any society above a certain level, and once one grants power to any subset of people, it seems they always manage to want more and more. And equality—that’s an even more fantastic notion.
The answer to both is Babylon.
Not the city. The AOI beneath it.
Running every large-sized social unit that calls itself part of the Commensality you will find an