Babylon Sisters. Paul Di Filippo
wasteland.
Stone savors the view. Vision of any kind, even the foggiest blurs, was an unthinkable treasure only days ago. And what he has actually been gifted with—this marvelous ability to turn the everyday world into a jeweled wonderland—is almost too much to believe. Momentarily sated, Stone wills his gaze back to normal. The city instantly reverts to its traditional color of steel-gray, sky-blue, tree-green. The view is still magnificent.
Stone stands at a bank of windows on the 150th floor of the Citrine Tower, in the Wall Street FEZ. For the past two weeks, this has been his home, from which he has not stirred. His only visitors have been a nurse, a cybertherapist, and June. The isolation and relative lack of human contact do not bother him. After the Bungle, such quiet is bliss. And then, of course, he has been enmeshed in the sensuous web of sight.
The first thing he saw upon waking after the operation set the glorious tone of his visual explorations. The smiling face of a woman hovered above him. Her skin was a pcllucid olive, her eyes a radiant brown, her hair a raven cascade framing her face.
“How are you feeling?” June asked.
“Good,” Stone said. Then he uttered a phrase he never had a use for before. “Thank you.”
June waved a slim hand negligently. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t pay for it.”
And that was when Stone learned that June was not his employer, that she worked for someone else. And although she wouldn’t tell him then to whom he was indebted, he soon learned when they moved him from the hospital to the building that bore her name.
Alice Citrine. Even Stone knew of her.
Turning from the windows, Stone stalks across the thick cream-colored rug of his quarters. (How strange to move so confidently, without halting and probing!) He has spent the past fifteen days or so zealously practicing with his new eyes. Everything the doctor promised him is true. The miracle of sight pushed into new dimensions. It’s all been thrilling. And the luxury of his situation is undeniable. Any kind of food he wants. (Although he would have been satisfied with frack—processed krill. ) Music, holovision, and most prized, the company of June. But all of a sudden today, he is feeling a little irritable. Where and what is this job they hired him for? Why has he not met his employer face to face yet? He begins to wonder if this is all some sort of ultra-elaborate sluff.
Stone stops before a full-length mirror mounted on a closet door. Mirrors still have the power to fascinate him utterly. That totally obedient duplicate imitating one’s every move, will-less except for his will. And the secondary world in the background, unattainable and silent. During the years in the Bungle when he still retained his eyes, Stone never saw his reflection in anything but puddles or shards of windows. Now he confronts the immaculate stranger in the mirror, seeking clues in his features to the essential personality beneath.
Stone is short and skinny, traces of malnourishment plain in his stature. But his limbs are straight, his lean muscles hard. His skin where it shows from beneath the sleeveless black one-piece is weather-roughened and scarred. Plyoskin slippers—tough, yet almost as good as barefoot—cover his feet.
His face. All intersecting planes, like that strange picture in his bedroom. (Did June say “Picasso”?) Sharp jaw, thin nose, blond stubble on his skull. And his eyes: faceted dull-black hemispheres: inhuman. But don’t take them back, please; I’ll do whatever you want.
Behind him the exit door to his suite opens. It’s June. Without conscious thought, Stone’s impatience spills out in words, which pile one for one atop June’s simultaneous sentence, merging completely at the end.
“I want to see—”
“We’re going to visit—”
“—Alice Citrine.”
Fifty floors above Stone’s suite, the view of the city is even more spectacular. Stone has learned from June that the Citrine Tower stands on land that did not even exist a century ago. Pressure to expand motivated a vast landfill in the East River, south of the Brooklyn Bridge. On part of this artificial real estate, the Citrine Tower was built in the Oughts, during the boom period following the Second Constitutional Convention.
Stone boosts the photon-electron ratio of his eyes, and the East River becomes a sheet of white fire. A momentary diversion to ease his nerves.
“Stand here with me,” June says, indicating a disk just beyond thc elevator door, a few meters from another entrance.
Stone complies. He imagines he can feel the scanning rays on him, although it is probably just the nearness of June, whose elbow touches his. Her scent fills his nostrils, and he fcrvently hopes that having eyes won’t dull his other senses.
Silently the door opens for them.
June guides him through.
Alice Citrine waits inside.
The woman sits in a powered chair behind a horseshoe-shaped bank of screens. Her short hair is corn-yellow, her skin unlined, yet Stone intuits a vast age clinging to her, the same way he used to be able to sense emotions when blind. He studies her aquiline profile, familiar somehow as a face once dreamed is familiar.
She swivels, presenting her full features. June has led them to within a meter of the burnished console.
“Good to see you, Mr Stone,” says Citrine. “I take it you are comfortable, no complaints.”
“Yes,” Stone says. He tries to summon up the thanks he meant to give, but can’t find them anywhere, so disconcerted is he. Instead, he says tentatively, “My job—”
“Naturally you’re curious,” Citrine says. “It must be something underhanded or loathsome or deadly. Why else would I need to recruit someone from the Bungle? Well, let me at last satisfy you. Your job, Mr. Stone, is to study.”
Stone is dumbfounded. “Study?”
“Yes, study. You know the meaning of the word, don’t you? Or have I made a mistake? Study, learn, investigate, and whenever you feel you understand something, draft me a report.”
Stone’s bafflement had passed through amazement to incredulity. “I can’t even read or write,” he says. “And what the frack am I supposed to study?”
“Your field of study, Mr. Stone, is this contemporary world of ours. I have had a large part, as you may know, in making this world what it is today. And as I reach the limits of my life, I grow more interested in whether what I have built is bad or good. I have plenty of reports from experts, both positive and negative. But what I want now is a fresh view from one of the underdwellers. All I ask is honesty and accuracy.
“As for reading and writing—those outmoded skills of my youth—June will assist you in learning those if you wish. But you have machines to read to you and transcribe your speech. You may start at once.”
Stone tries to assimilate this mad request. It seems capricious, a cover for deeper, darker deeds. But what can he do except say yes?
He agrees.
A tiny smile plucks at the woman’s lips. “Fine. Then our talk is over. Ch. one last thing. If you need to conduct on-site research, June must accompany you. And you will mention my sponsorship of you to no one. I don’t want sycophants.”
The conditions are easy—especially having June always close—and Stone nods his acceptance.
Citrine turns her back to them then. Stone is startled by what he sees, almost believing his eyes defective.
Perched on the broad back of her chair is a small animal resembling a lemur or tarsier. Its big, luminous eyes gaze soulfully at them, its long tail arcs in a spiral above its back.
“Her pet,” whispers June, and hurries Stone away.
* * * *
The task is too huge, too complex. Stone considers himself a fool for ever having accepted.
But what else could he have done, if he wanted to