Babylon Sisters. Paul Di Filippo
it if cored—or would I? What tiny portions of personality and memories were left intact, down there in the coree’s brainstem, and what must they feel?
I wasn’t anxious to find out.
Sudden fatigue washed over me like a tide of despair. I had gone a day now without sleep—not counting the godhorse-induced trance, which stimulated rather than soothed—and almost that long without food. I had been shot at by a mek, carried aloft on a floating island like Gulliver on Laputa (I remember TAPPING for that particular image), and scared half out of my wits by the civic entity who was supposed to be protecting me.
And the worst of it was that I couldn’t stop now. I had to think. Matters were far from settled. Just because I had told Babylon I was going to cooperate didn’t mean I would.
There was always the option of flight.
That might have been someone else’s first choice. After all, I claimed earlier that this is an age of running away. With interstellar travel so cheap and easy, what else could one expect? Intelligence has always deluded itself into believing that circumstances were the limiting factor, when usually it was intelligence itself that was the source of trouble. And you can’t flee yourself so easily.
Now, I’m not knocking escape. After all, I once fled to Babylon, and found a kind of happiness. But there was a good reason why I couldn’t just up and run now, except as a last resort, and I don’t expect you to see it.
The reason was the TAP.
Conservators are simultaneously to be pitied and envied. More pitied, of course, because they deny themselves all the manifold virtues of a TAP, claiming such devices are intrusions on the human brain. And envied, just a little, because they aren’t tied down like us.
Sometimes a TAP goes down deep as a taproot.
Suppose you spent all your life (in the case of someone born into the Commensality) or a good portion of your adult years (my case) relying on this massive auxiliary memory-cum-switchboard-cum-advisor-cum-stimulator. After a while, the AOI, with its individual idiosyncracies (they do have them) becomes as integral to your sense of self as your bodily feedback. Further suppose you one day decide on a change of scenery. Of course you won’t voluntarily pick someplace without TAP facilities. Your destination’s bound to be another locus of the Commensality. So you TAP into Babylon and send:
[Please grow a mass of nonsentient paraneurons containing all my personal data, which I may take with me.]
Surprisingly soon a mek or, god forbid, someone like Ace arrives with a little homeostatic container that holds some pretty important stuff. You handle it as nervously as if it were an embryo, which it sorta is.
You arrive at your new home. (Of course, all this applies only for a permanent move. And please notice how neatly the instant transition from the previous orally bounded paragraph to this one mimics the Heisenberg transition itself.) You hand over your container to an agent of the new AOI, who promptly integrates the cells into himself. Now, however, like new lovers, you and the AOI have to accomodate to each other. A rather touchy proposition, and not without its share of urgent uneasiness. And sometimes, like a bad mating, the match never stabilizes.
The net effect of all this is that we in the Commensality tend to be rather sedentary.
And that’s why I wasn’t going to leave unless forced to.
My stomach rumbled, as I stood there in the rapidly filling streets. The methane rain had stopped, and the sky within the dome was filling with individual fliers and aircars.
I couldn’t see too far ahead, but I knew at that moment that I wanted a couple of things.
A meal, and a walk around the Bay.
I set off for a refectory. The movement felt good.
At the refectory portal—just an arched opening without a door; lacking weather there was no reason for doors except privacy, and a refectory was the opposite of private—I passed in. The first room contained the showers. I stripped and washed up with the others there, then passed into the refectory proper.
Did you ever look up the derivation of “Commensality?” Good, then you’ll understand the importance of what went on in the refectory.
Eating binds. Every old human culture locked to the soil of Truehome understood that, on one level or another. Share salt, and an enemy becomes your friend. If you want to forge links with a sophont, try eating with/on/around/against him.
Inside the big, open, high-ceilinged room that was the refectory, there were members of species that employed all those prepositions.
There were humans who ranged from the Conservancy-unmodified norm to those who were altered into the nearly alien. There were godhorses (so beautiful) and axolotls (so comical) and slidewhistles (so noisy). Not to mention a dozen other races I haven’t the heart to detail, because I miss them so. All were unclothed and busy eating, from trough and plate and bowl and hopper. The pungent aromas were making my belly sit up and beg.
So I plunged in.
When my hunger was assuaged and my spirits restored, I hit the showers in the room ante to the exit. (Some races seem to enjoy wearing their food more than actually eating it.) I picked out a new jox and sandals and liftharness (my standard outfit) from the clothing alcove, and exited onto the streets. (Such necessities are freely disbursed in the Commensality. But there’re still plenty of private possessions for me to lift.)
I headed then for the Bayside locks. A quiet place to think was next.
At the locks, I took a quilt from its rack and donned it. The living flesh (no brains, just ganglions) molded itself to my body, sealing my precious hide away from the deadly atmosphere I was about to step into. For a second I was blind and deaf. Then I TAPPED into the feed from a camera mounted in the locker room. I saw myself as I looked now to others: something like an inflated rubber biped balloon.
I switched the TAP to receive the sensory inputs of the quilt. Since it “saw” exclusively by infrared, had no hearing, and “tasted” over its entire surface, you can imagine that the world altered rather radically.
I cycled through the locks and stood on the shore. It tasted like acid and salt beneath my squishy soles.
The surface temperature of our satellite hovers around the triple point of methane: minus 168 degrees Centigrade, the critical temperature at which that compound can exist as solid, liquid or gas.
The shore was solid.
The turbulent sea that stretched away was liquid.
The air was gas (gases, actually, nitrogen supplying the major component.)
Breathing the oxygen suspired by the quilt, I started walking around the curving marge that lay between the city-shell and the lapping sea. It looked like the tide was coming in (courtesy of the primary’s gravity), and so I had to be careful not to get isolated on some inaccessible spit. The quilt could stand immersion in the liquid methane, but the damn stuff tasted just like gasoline, and you risked getting swept out into the 400 meter-deep sea. I kept myself oriented by the hottest pointsources of heat within the dome, and the more feeble beacon that was the distant shrouded sun.
Now I could think about my future.
But wouldn’t you know, my stubborn brain could only focus on the past.
I remembered my youth.
Did you ever realize that the Heisenberg drive promotes specialization? When transport is cheap, it makes sense to import what you can’t produce efficiently. And if there’s a big market for whatever you do best, then you tend to do it more and more, until pretty soon almost your whole world’s doing it. (This applies, of course, to Conservancy and neutral worlds, the worker ants, and not us lazy Commensality grasshoppers, who traffic more in intangibles.)
I was born and grew up in a grain field. The whole damn world was hairy with wheat and oats and other assorted hybrids. There was no such thing as a city. The one other family on the world occupied the antipodes. On clear days you