Babylon Sisters. Paul Di Filippo
mainly agricultural enclaves, where older values were strictly enforced—Citrine Biotics refined and perfected the work of their reseachers and others in the field of carbon chips: microbiological assemblies, blood-borne programmed repair units. The final product, marketed by Citrine to those who could afford it, was near-total rejuvenation, the cell-slough—or, simply, the sluff.
Citrine Biotics headed the Fortune 500 within six years.
By then it was Citrine Technologies.
And Alice Citrince sat atop it all.
But not forever.
Entropy will not be cheated. The information-degradation that DNA undergoes with age is not totally reversible. Errors accumulate despite the hardworking carbon chips. The body dutiful gives out the end.
Alice Citrine is nearing the theoretical close of her extended life. Despite her youthful looks, one day a vital organ will fail, the result of a million bad transcriptions.
She needs Stone, of all people, to justify her existence.
Stone squeezes June’s knee and relishes the sense of importance. For the first time in his sad and dingy life, he can make a difference. His words, his perceptions matter. He is determined to do a good job, to tell the truth as he perceives it.
“June,” Stone says emphatically, “I have to see everything.”
She smiles. “You will, Stone. You will indeed.”
* * * *
And the phaeton comes down—
—in Mexico City, which crashed last year at population 35 million. Citrine Technologies is funding a relief effort there, operating out of their Houston and Dallas locations. Stone is suspicious of the motives behind the campaign. Why didn’t they step in before the point of collapse? Can it be that they are worried now only about refugees flooding across the border? Whatever the reasons, though, Stone cannot deny that the CT workers are a force for good, ministering to the sick and hungry, reestablishing electrical power and communications, propping up (acting as?) the city government. He boards the phaeton with his head spinning, and soon fmds himself—
—in the Antarctic, where he and June are choppered out from the CT domes to a krill-processing ship, source of so much of the world’s protein. June finds the frack stench offensive, but Stone breathes deeply, exhilarated at being afloat in these strange and icy latitudes, watching the capable men and woman work. June is happy to be soon aloft, and then—
—in Peking, where CT heuristic specialists are working on the first Artificial Organic Intelligence. Stone listens with amusement to a debate over whether the AOI should be named K’ung Fu-tzu or Mao.
The week is a kaleidoscopic whirl of impressions. Stone feels like a sponge, soaking up the sights and sounds so long denied him. At one point he finds himself leaving a restaurant with June, in a city whose name he has forgotten. In his hand is his ID card, with which he had just paid for their meal. A holoportrait stares up from his palm. The face is cadaverous, filthy, with two empty, crusted sockets for eyes. Stone remembers the warm laser fingers taking his holo in the Immigration Office. Was that really he? The day seems like an event from someone else’s life. He pockets his card, unsure whether to have the holo updated or to keep it as a token of where he has come from.
And where he might end up?
(What will she do with him after he reports?)
When Stone asks one day to see orbital installations, June calls a halt. “I think we’ve done enough for one trip, Stone. Let’s get back, so you can start to put it all together.”
With her words, a deep boneweariness suddenly overtakes Stone, and his manic high evaporates. He silently assents.
* * * *
Stone’s bedroom is dark, except for the diffuse lights of the city seeping in through a window. Stone has multiplied his vision, the better to admire the naked glowing form of June beside him. He has found that colors grow muddy in the absence of enough photons, but that a very vivid black-and white image can be had. He feels like a dweller in the past century, watching a primitive film. Except that June is very much alive beneath his hands.
June’s body is a tracery of lambent lines, like some arcane capillary circuitry in the core of Mao/K’ung Futzu. Following the current craze, she has had a subdermal pattern of microchannels implanted. The channels are filled with synthetic luciferase, the biochemical responsible for the glow of fireflies, which she can now trigger at will. In the afterglow of their lovemaking, she has set herself alight. Her breasts are whorls of cold fire, her shaven pubic mound a spiral galaxy dragging Stone’s gaze into illimitable depths.
June is speaking in a abstracted way of her life before Stone, pondering the ceiling while he idly strokes her.
“My mother was the only surviving child of two refugees. Vietnamese. Came to America shortly after the Asian War. Did the only thing they knew how to do, which was fish. They lived in Texas, on the Gulf. My mother went to college on a scholarship. There she met my father, who was another refugee of sorts. He left Germany with his parents after its Reunification. They said the compromise government was neither one thing nor the other, and they couldn’t deal with it. I guess my background is some sort of microcosm of a lot of the upheavals of our times.”
She catches Stone’s hand between her knees and holds it tightly. “But I feel a calmness with you right now, Stone.”
As she continues to speak of things she has seen, people she has known, her career as Citrine’s personal assistant, the oddest feeling creeps over Stone. As her words integrate themselves into his growing picture of the world, he feels the same abyssmal tidal suck that he first felt upon learning of history
Before he can decide consciously if he even wants to know or not, he finds himself saying, “June. How old are you?”
She falls silent. Stone watches her staring blindly at him, unequipped with his damned perceptive eyes.
“Over sixty,” she finally says. “Does it matter?”
Stone finds he cannot answer, does not know if her age does matter or not.
Slowly June wills her glowing body dark.
* * * *
Stone bitterly amuses himself with what he likes to think of as his art.
Perusing the literature on the silicon chip that dwells in his skull, he found that it has one property not mentioned by the doctor. The contents of its RAM can be squirted in a signal to a stand-alone computer. There the images he has collected may be displayed for all to see. What is more, the digitized images may be manipulated, recombined with themselves or with stock graphics, to form entirely lifelike pictures of things that never existed. These, of course, may be printed off.
In effect, Stone is a living camera and his computer a complete studio.
Stone has been working on a series of images of June. The color printouts litter his quarters, hung on wall and underfoot.
June’s head on the Sphinx’s body. June as La Belle Dame Sans Merci. June’s face imposed upon the full moon, Stone asleep in a field as Endymion
The portraits are more disturbing than soothing, and, Stone senses, quite unfair. But Stone feels that he is gaining some therapeutic effect from them, that each day he is inching closer to his true feelings for June.
He still has not spoken to Alice Citrine. That nags him greatly. When will he deliver his report? What will he say?
The problem of when is solved for him that afternoon. Returning from one of the tower’s private gyms, he finds his terminal flashing a message.
Citrine will see him in the morning.
* * * *
Alone this second time, Stone stands on the plate before Alice Citrine’s room, allowing his identity to be verified. He hopes the results will be shared with him when the machine finishes, for he has no idea