Babylon Sisters. Paul Di Filippo
So I said to my brother one day (over the master combine’s radio, for he was a thousand miles away), “Buddy, I’m leaving this world when I hit sixteen.”
“Yeah, sure,” he staticked back. “And where’re you going and what’re you gonna do?”
Even then, I was developing “peculiar” (by the lights of Buddy) tastes. For instance, I used to study the native locusts for hours, and was sorry when we had to kill them, lest they eat our crop.
“The Commensality,” I said, yanking on the steering bars to avoid an eroded spot. I squinted against the newly angled sunlight, as the big machine responded sluggishly and I wished for illegal mind/machine interface.
“Yuk,” Buddy said. “Those exteelovers. What a creepy idea. You wouldn’t really go there, would you?”
“Yes. I’m serious. What’s the sense of living on a neutral world if you can’t choose one side or the other? And I choose the Commensality.”
“You’re crazy. The Conservancy is the only way to go.”
I said nothing in reply; I was too stunned. It had never occured to me that Buddy would object. We had never really argued before. Oh, sure, some sibling spats that sprang up and blew over like our world’s circumpolar storms; hell, there weren’t even any girls on the whole planet to fight over! But I could sense that this topic, this tone, was deadly serious, the source of potential great dissension. So, with untypical wisdom, I hid my adolescent certitude with a bland comment.
But Buddy wouldn’t let it go. I guess I had really shocked him. After work that day, as we sported in our favorite shady swimming-hole, half a world away from home, he kept pressing me on it, until I finally asserted myself, saying that I wasn’t joking about my desire to join, or at least investigate, the Commensality when I was old enough.
That was when, amid harsh words that stopped just short of blows, he quit talking to me, and I, perforce, to him.
There was one last time before I left, when I knew Buddy still cared for me.
I was overseeing a force of meks who were sowing half a continent with winter wheat, up in the northernmost latitudes amenable to cultivation. I was about a klick from my ship when a sudden unseasonable blizzard blew in, white-ing out the kilometers of flatness into featureless oblivion. At first I didn’t worry. I was dressed for a certain level of exposure, and my ship had a homing beacon.
Which I soon learned I had neglected to flip on.
I started trudging through the howling snow-inferno, heading toward where I thought my ship lay. After covering about five klicks I knew I had guessed wrong. I started tromping in a circle. When I couldn’t do that any more, I lay down to die.
I woke up to find Buddy bending over me. (I later learned he had made the instant transition from home to low orbit over my assigned territory, zoomed in on my near-corpse with infrared sensors, then split the atmosphere with a quick descent.)
Through frost-crusted lips I murmured, “Thanks.”
And do you know—that lifesaving bastard wouldn’t unbend enough even to say, “You’re welcome”?
So attaining my majority (age, not size; I still had plenty of growth beyond the two-meter mark I stood at then) I took off, with no goodbyes.
At the spaceport, I pondered travel as our age knew it.
First: why spaceships?
The Heisenberg drive works by transferring all an object’s inherent dispersed quantum uncertainty into its spatial dimension, at which time it becomes possible to impose new relativistic coordinates on it. Great. So now we can flit directly from the surface of one world to that of another.
Not quite. Unless you want to risk occupying the same coordinates as something/someone else, and make the biggest possible bang for your mass. Better pick some vacuum close to your destination.
Which means space. Which means a way to get down from space. Which means spaceships.
But no extravagant takeoffs. Landings, yes. But takeoff consists merely of disappearance and the clap of inrushing air.
Maybe it’s pretty extravagant at that.
So at the field I bought my ticket and took my chances.
And found myself entering the portside lock of Babylon, dazed, confused, and utterly bewildered. (The ancients thought jetlag was something!)
When I trod accidently on the paw of a human-sized feline (I was still wearing my loamy shitkickers), she turned hissing, teeth bare, and said, “Watch it, meat.”
I backed off, muttering apologies. The first thing I did was unvelcro my boots and ditch them.
But I kept the semi-derogatory, semi-joshing name. I was sick of my old one anyway, and felt I was embarking on a new life. And it proved a fortuitous choice. No one expects much subtlety from a giant named Meat—which pays off when you are trying to separate them from their valuables.
(And now I’ve kept my promise to you about explaining my name!)
I called us lazy grasshoppers earlier, and I suppose, compared to others, we are. You can exist in the Commensality without working, thanks to the bounty from the labor of mek units directed by your AOI. But sophonts being sophonts, there is still plenty of enterprise in the Commensality, people providing services and products that others want, so as to raise themselves above the lowest common denominator (all in a Commensally aware manner, of course; no rapacious merchant princes need apply).
But such an existence wasn’t for me. I had worked harder than these people for all my life. Now I wanted to take it easy. But I wanted to do it in style. So I became a thief. Which turned out to be work too, but also fun. I surprised myself with my talents in this area. For years now, I had been content and happy.
But then Babylon had made me think.
I came walking upon the shore to a delicate spray of frozen methane that looked like the bridge to Asgard. I kicked it to flinders, without deriving even the satisfaction of feeling it through the quilt.
What did I owe the Commensality? I had fitted into this peculair polis like a hand into a glove. They had saved me from a life of boring drudgery, providing a matrix in which I could become me. And what had I contributed in turn? Oh, sure, I had made individuals happy (and some no doubt sad). Anyone can do that. But what had I given to the Commensality as a whole? What were my community responsibilities? Did they involve killing another sophont?
Damn that Babylon! I wanted to cleave the thick roof of his hidden cavern beneath the city and let this frigid sea flow in on him.
I stopped walking, and turned. I was far away from the city now, out on a promontory slapped by the hydrocarbon waves. The thick atmosphere hid the dome from me. The next moment, though, an eddy in the gases developed. (We called these windows mooneyes.) Through the mooneye shone the lights of Babylon, various heat-tones of red, orange, yellow, white and blue, like Captain Nemo’s undersea city.
So exotic, so fragile, so mine.
I decided to do what Babylon wanted.
* * * *
So three days later, why was I still hesitating?
(My nerves were strung so tight that every time I happened to step into Shadow—or Shadow swept over me—I flinched.)
I had passed the time in various pursuits, none of which served to truly allay the nervousness I was feeling.
I conducted a scam or two—nothing too extravagant, just something to keep my hand in, and pass the time while I decided how to take out the Conservancy’s envoy. One deal had some interesting facets. It involved the infamous Babylon Sisters—
But that’s another story altogether.
In any case, my growing credit balance did nothing to soothe my apprehensions. So I turned to sex.
I