Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Elena, we’ve had this discussion before. I keep telling you that you can’t apply the rules of quantum physics to the macroscopic world....”

  “Oh, screw all that anyway! You’re just trying to change the subject. Aren’t you excited at all?”

  “Maybe I would be, if I knew what it was all about. I still don’t understand. Is this new drug just another hallucinogen?”

  “No, that’s just it; it’s much more. It alters your visual perceptions in a coherent, consistent manner, without affecting anything else. You don’t see anything that’s not there; you just see what does exist in a different way. And since sight’s our most critical sense, the effect’s supposed to be like stepping into another universe.”

  I considered. “And exactly what kind of universe would one be stepping into?”

  Elena fell into my lap with a delighted squeal, as if she had won the battle. “Oh Robert, that’s just it! It’s not what universe, it’s whose!”

  “Whose?”

  “Yes, whose! The psychoengineers claim they’ve distilled the essence of artistic vision.”

  I suppose I should interject here that Elena was a student of art history. In our bountiful world, where the Net cradled one from birth to death, she was free to spend all her time doing what she enjoyed, which happened to be wandering for hours through museums, galleries, and studios, with me in tow.

  “You’re saying,” I slowly went on, “that this magical pill lets you see like, say, Rembrandt?”

  “No,” frowned Elena, “not exactly. After all, Rembrandt, to use your example, probably didn’t literally see much differently than any of us. That’s a fallacy nonartists always fall for. The magic was in how he transmuted his everyday vision, capturing it in the medium of his art. I doubt if any artist, except perhaps those like Van Gogh, who are close to madness, can maintain their unique perspective every minute of their waking hours. No, what the psychoengineers have done is to formalize the stylistic elements of particular artists—more or less the idiosyncratic rules that govern light and shape and texture in an individual perceptiverse—and make them reproducible. By taking this new neurotropin, we’ll be enabled to see not like Rembrandt, but as if inhabiting Rembrandt’s canvases!”

  “I find that hard to believe....”

  “It’s true, Robert; it’s true! The volunteers all report the most marvelous results!”

  “But Elena, would you really want to inhabit a Rembrandt world all day?”

  “Of course! Look around you! All these dull plastics and synthetics! Who wouldn’t want to! And anyway, it’s not Rembrandt they’ve chosen for the first release. It’s Vermeer.”

  “Vermeer or Rembrandt, Elena, I just don’t know if....”

  “Robert, you haven’t even considered the most important aspect of all this. We’d be doing it together! For the first time in history, two people can be sure they’re sharing the same perceptiverse. Our visual perceptions would be absolutely synchronized. I’d never have to wonder if you really understood what I was seeing, nor you me. We’d be totally at one. Just think what it would mean for our love!”

  Her face—that visage I can no longer fully summon up without a patina of painterly interpretation—was glowing. I couldn’t hold outagainst her.

  “All right,” I said. “If it means so much to you....”

  She tossed her arms around my neck and hugged me close. “Oh Robert, I knew you’d come around! This is wonderful!” She released me and stood. “I have the pills right here.

  I confess to having felt a little alarm right then. “You bought them already, not knowing if I’d even agree....”

  “You’re not angry, are you, Robert? It’s just that I thought we knew each other so well....” She fingered her little plastic pill case nervously.

  “No, I’m not angry; it’s just.... Oh well, forget it. Let’s have the damn pill.”

  She fetched a single glass of water from the tap and dispensed the pills. She swallowed first, then, as if sharing some obscure sacrament, passed me the glass. I downed the pill. It seemed to scorch my throat.

  “How long does the effect last?” I asked.

  “Why, I thought I made that clear. Until you take another one.”

  I sat down weakly, Elena resting one haunch on the arm of the chair beside me. We waited for the change, looking curiously around the room.

  Subtly at first, then with astonishing force and speed, my perceptiverse—our perceptiverse—began to alter. Initially it was the light pouring in through the curtained windows that began to seem different. It acquired a pristine translucency, tinged with supernal honeyed overtones. This light fell on the wood, the plastic, the fabric in my mundane apartment, utterly transfiguring everything it touched, in what seemed like a chain reaction that raced through the very molecules of my whole perceptiverse.

  In minutes the change was complete.

  I was inhabiting the Vermeer perceptiverse.

  I turned to face Elena.

  She looked like the woman in Young Woman with a Water Jug at the Met.

  I had never seen anything—anyone—so beautiful.

  My eyes filled with tears.

  I knew Elena was experiencing the same thing as I.

  Crying, she said,”Oh Robert, kiss me now.”

  I did. And then, somehow, we were naked, our oil paint- and brushstroke-mottled bodies shining as if we had stepped tangibly from the canvas, rolling on the carpet, locked in a frantic lovemaking unlike anything I had ever experienced before that moment.

  I felt as though I were fucking Art itself.

  * * * *

  Thus began the happiest months of my life.

  At first, Elena and I were content merely to stay in the apartment all day, simply staring in amazement at the most commonplace objects, now all transformed into perfect elements in some vast, heretofore-undiscovered masterpiece by Vermeer. Once we had exhausted a particular view, we had only to shift our position to create a completely different composition, which we could study for hours more. To set the table for a meal was to fall enraptured into contemplation of a unique still life each time. The rules of perceptual transformation that the psychoengineers had formulated worked perfectly. Substances and scenes that Vermeer could never have imagined acquired the unmistakable touch of his palette and brush.

  Tiring even of such blissful inactivity, we would make love with a frenetic reverence approaching satori. Afterward the wrinkles in the sheets reminded us of thick troughs of paint, impasto against our skin.

  After a time, of course, this stage passed. Desirous of new vistas, we set out to explore the Vermeer-veneered world.

  We were not alone. Thousands shared the same perceptiverse, and we encountered them everywhere, instant signs of mutual recognition being exchanged. To look into their eyes was to peer into a mental landscape utterly familiar to all us art-trippers.

  The sights we saw— I can’t encapsulate them in words for you. Perhaps you’ve shared them, too, and words are unnecessary. The whole world was almost palpably the work of a single hand, a marvel of artistic vision, just as the mystics had always told us.

  It was in Nice, I believe, that Elena approached me with her little pillcase in hand. She had gone out unexpectedly without me, while I was still sleeping. I didn’t complain, being content to sit on the balcony and watch the eternally changing Mediterranean, although, underneath my rapture, I believe I felt a bit of amazement that she had left without a word.

  Now, pill case offered in outstretched hand, Elena, having returned, said without preamble, “Here, Robert; take one.”

  I took the pill and studied its perfection for a time before I asked, “What is it?”

  “Matisse,” she said. “We’re in his native land now, the source of his vision. It’s only right.”

  “Elena, I don’t know. Haven’t we been happy with Vermeer? Why change now? We could spoil everything....”

  Elena swallowed Matisse dry. “I’ve taken mine, Robert. I need some
thing new. Unless you want to be left behind, you’ll do the same.”

  I couldn’t stand the thought of living in a different perceptiverse than Elena. Although the worm of discontent told me not to, I did as Elena asked.

  Matisse went down easy.

  In no time at all, the sharp, uncompromising realism of Vermeer gave way to the gaudy, exhilarating, heady impressionism of Matisse. The transition was almost too powerful to take.

  “Oh my God....” I said.

  “There,” said Elena, “wasn’t I right? Take your clothes off now. I have to see you naked.”

  We inaugurated this new perceptiverse as we had the first.

  Our itinerary in this new perceptiverse duplicated what had gone before. Once we had exhausted the features of our hotel room and stabilized our new sensory input, we set out to ingest the world, wallowing in this latest transformation. If we chanced to revisit a place we had been to while in the Vermeer perceptiverse, we were astonished at the change. What a gift, we said, to be able to see the old world with continually fresh eyes.

  Listening to the Boston Symphony outdoors along the Charles one night, their instruments looking like paper cutouts from Matisse’s old age, Elena said to me, “Let’s drop a Beethoven, Robert.”

  I refused. She didn’t press me, realizing, perhaps, that she had better save her powers of persuasion for what really mattered.

  The jungles of Brazil called for Rousseau, of course. I capitulated with hardly a protest, and that marked the beginning of the long, slippery slope.

  Vermeer had captivated us for nearly a year.

  Matisse kept us enthralled for six months.

  Rousseau—that naive genius—could hold our attention for only six weeks.

  We were art junkies now, consumers of novel perceptiverses.

  Too much was not enough.

  The neurotropin industry graciously obliged.

  Up till that time, the industry had marketed only soft stuff, perceptiverses not too alien to “reality.” But now, as more and more people found themselves in the same fix as Elena and I, the psychoengineers gradually unleashed the hard stuff.

  In the next two years, Elena and I, as far as I can reconstruct things, went through the following perceptiverses:

  Picasso (blue and cubist), Braque, Klee, Kandinsky, Balthus, Dali, Picabia, Leger, Chagall, Gris, de Kooning, Bacon, Klimt, Delaunay, O’Keefe, Escher, Hockney, Louis, Miro, Ernst, Pollock, Powers, Kline, Bonnard, Redon, van Dongen, Rouault, Munch, Tanguy, de Chirico, Magritte, Lichtenstein, and Johns.

  We hit a brief period of realism consisting of Wood, Hopper, Frazetta, and Wyeth, and I tried to collect my senses and decide whether I wanted to get out of this trip or not, and how I could convince Elena to drop out with me.

  But before I could make up my mind, we were off into Warhol, and everything hit me with such neon-tinted luminescent significance that I couldn’t give it up. This happened aboard a station in high orbit, and the last thing I remember was the full Earth turning pink and airbrushed.

  Time passed. I think.

  The next time I became aware of myself as an individual, distinct from my beautiful yet imprisoning background, Elena and I were in a neo­expressionist perceptiverse, the one belonging to that Italian, I forget his name.

  We were outdoors. I looked around.

  The sky was gray-green, with a huge black crack running down the middle of it. Sourceless light diffused down like pus. The landscape looked as if it had been through an atomic war. I searched for Elena, found her reclining on grass that looked like mutant mauve octopus tendrils. Her flesh was ashen and bloody; a puke-yellow aura outlined her form.

  I dropped down beside her.

  I could feel that the grass was composed of tendrils, thick and slimed, like queer succulents. Suddenly I smelled alien odors, and I knew the light above spilled out of a novel sun.

  The quantum level had overtaken the macroscopic.

  Plastic reality, governed by our senses, had mutated.

  We were truly in the place we perceived ourselves to be.

  “Elena,” I begged, “we’ve got to get out of this perceptiverse. It’s just dreadful. Let’s go back, back to where it all started, back to Vermeer. Please, if you love me, leave this behind.”

  A mouth like a sphincter opened in the Elena-thing. “We can’t go back, Robert. You can never go back, especially after what we’ve been through. We can only go forward, and hope for the best....”

  “I can’t take it anymore, Elena. I’ll leave you; I swear it....”

  “Leave, then,” she said tonelessly.

  So I did.

  Finding a dose of Vermeer wasn’t easy. He was out of favor now; the world had moved beyond him. Even novices started out on the hard stuff nowadays. But eventually, in a dusty pharmaceutical outlet in a small town, I found a dose of that ancient Dutchman. The expiration date printed on the packet was long past, but I swallowed the pill anyway.

  The lovely honeyed light and the perfect clarity returned.

  I went looking for Elena.

  When I found her, she was as beautiful as on that long-ago day when we first abandoned our native perceptiverses for the shock of the new.

  When she saw me, she just screamed.

  I left her then, knowing it was over. Besides, there was something else I had to find.

  The pill with my original name.

  A THIEF IN BABYLON

  How many lightyears to Babylon?

  That’s a question members of the Conservancy never fail to ask—and which seldom fails to catch me by surprise. It’s so typical of their way of thinking—a way so alien to mine—that no matter how long I tarry wearily among them (on neutral worlds only, of course), I’m always unprepared to answer, much as they seem unready for and shocked by such a simple feature as my spinal plaques, which I take so much for granted.

  The fact is, only someone who subscribes to the old notions of Truehome would ask for the distance to Babylon in lights, rather than simply inquire after its relativistic coordinates. Not to mention being repelled by my bodily modifications, while seeing nothing wrong in using a bodyfogger to appear as a disembodied head himself—

  But just because I exhibit certain mannerisms and bodymods consistent with the Commensality does not automatically imply that I am rigidly opposed to the Conservancy. That old either-or, bivalent mindset is property of their system solely. It would be wrong to apply it to anyone such as myself.

  Truly, although both they and I denote our systems with cees, we are seas apart.

  So, I say—facing my hypothetical and stereotypical Conservator interlocutor, whether on moon or planet, ship or station, under suns green, blue, red or white, him usually polite enough to reveal his face by keeping his roiling, gadget-driven optical distortion focused below his neck—your question does not annoy me. I recognize that you have unbent enough to show me your stern face. (I wish—how I wish—that another man in another time and place had unbent as much.) I am pleased to talk with you about Babylon.

  Perhaps my composite conversationalist knows the ancient children’s rhyme. Conservancy types cherish such things, and it gives me a point of introduction. (I TAPPED the verse once and it stayed with me, so I can relate it now.)

  How many miles to Babylon?

  Threescore miles and ten.

  Can I get there by candlelight?

  Yes, and back again.

  If your heels are nimble and light,

  You may get there by candlelight.

  Babylon. Like anyplace else in this infinitely accessible universe, it’s just a Heisenberg transition away, so I suppose in a sense you can reach it before a candle’s brief flame flickers out. And when you arrive, it helps if your heels—and mind—are nimble and light, as mine once were.

  But as for getting back again—

  Well—once you invest as much of yourself in Babylon as I and others have, you can never really leave.

  Although of course you can always do what our
age specializes in.

  You can always run away.

  * * * *

  Night came down like a hammer.

  Certainly, if you know the least little bit about Babylon—and who doesn’t?—you must realize I’ve just lied.

  All that really happened was that Babylon shut off the lightstrips that were an integral part of the enormous transparent shell enclosing our city, in accordance with the programmed diurnal cycle.

  But what the hell kind of opening line is that? Literalness is such a downer.

  No, the story starts much better if I say night came calling. And since some Babylonians—such as myself—who had been born elsewhere still instinctively regarded the phenomenon that way, I think I’ll keep it.

  Night came down like a hammer.

  Outside our shell dirty clouds of methane and nitrogen swirled, banded a dozen shades of smoggy pink, orange and grey, rendered faintly luminous by the radiance of the gas-giant around which our satellite revolved. (Contributing also, of course, was the feeble light from the far-off primary around which the gas-giant in turn revolved, a star somewhere in that part of infinity that the Conservancy insists on calling Gemini, the twins.)

  Light bloomed in a thousand tall towers throughout the city, and fell from myriad free-floating globes. The assorted citizens striding the syalon streets seemed to speed up their pace, as if responding to age-old imperatives their rational selves would have denied.

  The night quickens. Everyone, everywhere, grows at least a little more alert after dark, wary of the eyes beyond the fire.

  I felt hyped up myself. But then again, I had more reason than most to feel so.

  Half an hour after mottled darkness fell, I was ready to step from the departure platform on the fiftieth floor of a residential tower, carrying something that didn’t belong to me. I was confident that no one had seen me take the item, which was small enough to fit neatly beneath the waistband of my jox. And valuable enough to carry me through half a year of lazy pleasures. Well worth the risk involved, thought I.

  With my hand on a brass boss studding my black leather chest-yoke, ready to activate the lift circuitry built into the harness, I was congratulating myself on another job well done. That was when the watchmek’s laser nearly clipped my ear off.