Babylon Sisters. Paul Di Filippo
a golden ovoid set on a pillar.
I stepped into the room—
—and was living the Chronicle of Mankind.
Oh, those Conservators are clever! Disdaining TAPS as organic mods, they’ve developed an electronic projective telepathy, a brutal generator of waves that swamp the consciousness. Rather than accept an enhancement that amounts to the slightest possible violation of self, they’ve substituted mental rape.
I was myself no longer. Instead, I was some anonymous viewpoint character, living out the tale of humanity, as interpreted by the Conservancy. The device must just have cycled, for I was back four million years.
A hominid, I stood on a dusty African plain, puzzling out what to do with a sharp piece of flint. The sun was hot on my back as I finally bent to saw at the zebra carcass at my feet. I gave a grunt of exultation, and swallowed some bloody meat.
After a time in this milieu, things changed. I won’t attempt to recount the whole vast tale. Everyone knows it. Through Paleolithic and Neolithic I voyaged. Through Sumer, Ur, Thebes, Babylon (Senior), Egypt, Greece and Rome my consciousness hurtled, shuttled from one representative inhabitant to another. All along, pounding into my brain was the inevitability of it: mankind’s long predestined rise from savagery and nescience, his manifest destiny looming huge before him.
Mastery of the universe.
On and on through history I raced, reliving the experiences of hundreds of humans as they subjugated Truehome’s flora and fauna and very topography. The Age of Discovery, the Age of Empire, the Age of the Atom, the Age of Solar Exploration, mankind moving from strength to strength, from one glorious conquest to another, culminating in the invention of the Heisenberg drive, when he exploded onto the universe and found—
Other sentients. Beings that aspired to our stature.
Creepy, crawly things, embodiments of a hundred ancestral fears, all of them daring to claim equality, whereas they deserved nothing but enslavement, or second-rate status at best.
At which point mankind split. Into a camp of loyalists and one of traitors. Conservancy versus Commensality. The old true stock against the deliberate mutants and exteelovers. But there was still time for the traitors to recant, to rejoin the crusade to dominate the galaxy. I could feel sympathy growing in my heart for the twisted cause—
The Chronicle snapped off as abruptly as Babylonian night.
The room went dark, save for feeble bioluminescents.
The Gardens dipped five degrees from horizontal—as the emergency capacitors attempted to handle the huge mass—and started to descend to a preprogrammed emergency landing site.
Babylon had come through for me.
People began to shriek and scream. They stampeded toward the door and flew out the windows.
I activated my own harness and floated up into the shadows to wait.
Pretty soon the hall was empty. I spent the time trying to cleanse my brain of the filth.
Everything was silent, except for the muted sounds of distress from the city outside. I watched a door that led further into the suite.
Through that door came a fog.
I dropped down like an avenging angel, to stand upon the canted floor.
The fog and I faced off. Sweat slicked the circuit-laced leather straps across my chest.
“Drop your mask,” I said. “I want to see what kind of human believes such shit and works for it.”
The fog regarded me blankly for a full minute. (That’s a long time. You try conducting such a standoff for sixty seconds, and see how your nerves bear up.)
At last came a voice from out the prisming mist.
“No.”
That was it. I didn’t even rate an insult.
The chill from the methane atmosphere seemed to have seeped in past the dome’s disabled heaters and infiltrated my heart. From within the mist I thought to detect motion. So I raised my finger and—
Why did I do it?
He was everything I was not. He juxtaposed text to my texture, sense to my sensuality, being to my becoming, mastery over melding. (And yes, my godhorse lover said he would master me. But that was love, and love is a figurative thing.) The envoy and I represented outerness versus innerness; planets versus moons; restless roving versus complacent sessility; secrets versus openness; law versus anarchy. There was no choice. I had to. So—
—raised my finger and lanced him with light.
The fog collapsed. I went over to it and groped inside, my arm cut off above the wrist. I found the distorter and switched it off.
I never mentioned that my brother and I were twins, did I? So it looked like myself cooling there. Of course he had no spinal plaques, or laser beneath his fingernail. In fact, he had no weapons at all. I am forced to believe that he was reaching up to shut off the distorter himself when I killed him, although I know for a fact he was too damned stubborn.
“Buddy—” I murmured.
And half an hour later was half a universe away, under the light of another sun. An hour more (the reception port was busy), I walked on another world.
Thus began more than two years of flight.
I can’t recount all the places I visited. But no matter where I ran, I couldn’t outpace the memory of what I had done. Saved a city and destroyed a life, a life connected to mine by inextinguishable bonds. Twisted bonds, to be sure, but bonds none the less.
One day I woke up and really paid attention to where I was.
In a one-man ship, two parsecs—the minimal distance for survival—away from a quasar, one of those enigmas that blazed with the radiance of a dozen galaxies.
I was sixteen billion lightyears away from Babylon, on the literal edge of the plenum.
It was as far as I could go.
There was nowhere else left to haunt.
So I headed for my birthplace.
I was lying on my back in a field of grain, studying the clouds, when Ace found me.
“We’ve been monitoring arrivals here since you disappeared,” he said. “Babylon had a hunch you’d return sooner or later.”
I didn’t sit up. “So?”
“Babylon wants you to come back. He says you’ve earned it.”
I considered. “How are you functioning anyway? You’re not in direct contact with that master manupulator, are you?”
“No. I received a limited imprint and autonomy for this mission. Are you coming back? Babylon has further use for you.”
“I’m sure. Well, you can transmit this message.”
I recited that ancient children’s rhyme.
“And what does that mean?” asked Ace’s baffled limited imprint.
“Just deliver it. From one poet to another. Babylon will understand.”
Ace seemed to ponder. Then he left.
I adjusted my hands beneath my head into a more comfortable cradle. The earth smelled good. The grain stood tall. The sky was deep. Unless a combine came by, I didn’t plan on moving for a while.
Turning my eyes inward, I sought a candle to travel by.
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