“Anti-em,” I spat.
“Tagging your opponent with an expletive does not reduce his threat. And you should feel some loyalty toward your commensals. If that is not enough, then consider this. You are about to trip my rogue-trigger. Soon, if you continue your current lifestyle—and I do not predict you will change—you will become a legitimate target for my enmity. If you help me in this, I will wipe the ledger clean, and you will have at least as many years free from my dedicated pursuit as you have yet enjoyed.”
I thought about it for a minute. It seemed the type of argument that was kinda impossible to refute.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Babylon didn’t smile, but I sensed an AOI analog to that emotion.
“I thought you would see things my way,” he said. Then:
[And I’ll be keeping track of you.]
* * * *
Day was born like a nova.
(Actually: lightstrips, Babylon, literalism, et cetera. )
I stood blinking for a second or two. When I was done, the body that had once been my pal Ace was gone. As to the nature of his future errands, I did not care to speculate. Especially since someday his fix might be mine. But I wouldn’t be able to worry about it if cored—or would I? What tiny portions of personality and memories were left intact, down there in the coree’s brainstem, and what must they feel?
I wasn’t anxious to find out.
Sudden fatigue washed over me like a tide of despair. I had gone a day now without sleep—not counting the godhorse-induced trance, which stimulated rather than soothed—and almost that long without food. I had been shot at by a mek, carried aloft on a floating island like Gulliver on Laputa (I remember TAPPING for that particular image), and scared half out of my wits by the civic entity who was supposed to be protecting me.
And the worst of it was that I couldn’t stop now. I had to think. Matters were far from settled. Just because I had told Babylon I was going to cooperate didn’t mean I would.
There was always the option of flight.
That might have been someone else’s first choice. After all, I claimed earlier that this is an age of running away. With interstellar travel so cheap and easy, what else could one expect? Intelligence has always deluded itself into believing that circumstances were the limiting factor, when usually it was intelligence itself that was the source of trouble. And you can’t flee yourself so easily.
Now, I’m not knocking escape. After all, I once fled to Babylon, and found a kind of happiness. But there was a good reason why I couldn’t just up and run now, except as a last resort, and I don’t expect you to see it.
The reason was the TAP.
Conservators are simultaneously to be pitied and envied. More pitied, of course, because they deny themselves all the manifold virtues of a TAP, claiming such devices are intrusions on the human brain. And envied, just a little, because they aren’t tied down like us.
Sometimes a TAP goes down deep as a taproot.
Suppose you spent all your life (in the case of someone born into the Commensality) or a good portion of your adult years (my case) relying on this massive auxiliary memory-cum-switchboard-cum-advisor-cum-stimulator. After a while, the AOI, with its individual idiosyncracies (they do have them) becomes as integral to your sense of self as your bodily feedback. Further suppose you one day decide on a change of scenery. Of course you won’t voluntarily pick someplace without TAP facilities. Your destination’s bound to be another locus of the Commensality. So you TAP into Babylon and send:
[Please grow a mass of nonsentient paraneurons containing all my personal data, which I may take with me.]
Surprisingly soon a mek or, god forbid, someone like Ace arrives with a little homeostatic container that holds some pretty important stuff. You handle it as nervously as if it were an embryo, which it sorta is.
You arrive at your new home. (Of course, all this applies only for a permanent move. And please notice how neatly the instant transition from the previous orally bounded paragraph to this one mimics the Heisenberg transition itself.) You hand over your container to an agent of the new AOI, who promptly integrates the cells into himself. Now, however, like new lovers, you and the AOI have to accomodate to each other. A rather touchy proposition, and not without its share of urgent uneasiness. And sometimes, like a bad mating, the match never stabilizes.
The net effect of all this is that we in the Commensality tend to be rather sedentary.
And that’s why I wasn’t going to leave unless forced to.
My stomach rumbled, as I stood there in the rapidly filling streets. The methane rain had stopped, and the sky within the dome was filling with individual fliers and aircars.
I couldn’t see too far ahead, but I knew at that moment that I wanted a couple of things.
A meal, and a walk around the Bay.
I set off for a refectory. The movement felt good.
At the refectory portal—just an arched opening without a door; lacking weather there was no reason for doors except privacy, and a refectory was the opposite of private—I passed in. The first room contained the showers. I stripped and washed up with the others there, then passed into the refectory proper.
Did you ever look up the derivation of “Commensality?” Good, then you’ll understand the importance of what went on in the refectory.
Eating binds. Every old human culture locked to the soil of Truehome understood that, on one level or another. Share salt, and an enemy becomes your friend. If you want to forge links with a sophont, try eating with/on/around/against him.
Inside the big, open, high-ceilinged room that was the refectory, there were members of species that employed all those prepositions.
There were humans who ranged from the Conservancy-unmodified norm to those who were altered into the nearly alien. There were godhorses (so beautiful) and axolotls (so comical) and slidewhistles (so noisy). Not to mention a dozen other races I haven’t the heart to detail, because I miss them so. All were unclothed and busy eating, from trough and plate and bowl and hopper. The pungent aromas were making my belly sit up and beg.
So I plunged in.
When my hunger was assuaged and my spirits restored, I hit the showers in the room ante to the exit. (Some races seem to enjoy wearing their food more than actually eating it.) I picked out a new jox and sandals and liftharness (my standard outfit) from the clothing alcove, and exited onto the streets. (Such necessities are freely disbursed in the Commensality. But there’re still plenty of private possessions for me to lift.)
I headed then for the Bayside locks. A quiet place to think was next.
At the locks, I took a quilt from its rack and donned it. The living flesh (no brains, just ganglions) molded itself to my body, sealing my precious hide away from the deadly atmosphere I was about to step into. For a second I was blind and deaf. Then I TAPPED into the feed from a camera mounted in the locker room. I saw myself as I looked now to others: something like an inflated rubber biped balloon.
I switched the TAP to receive the sensory inputs of the quilt. Since it “saw” exclusively by infrared, had no hearing, and “tasted” over its entire surface, you can imagine that the world altered rather radically.
I cycled through the locks and stood on the shore. It tasted like acid and salt beneath my squishy soles.
The surface temperature of our satellite hovers around the triple point of methane: minus 168 degrees Centigrade, the critical temperature at which that compound can exist as solid, liquid or gas.
The shore was solid.
The turbulent sea that stretched away was liquid.
The air was gas (gases, actually, nitrogen supplying the major component.)
Breathing the oxygen suspired by the quilt, I started walking around the curving marge that lay between the city-shell and the lapping sea. It looked like the tide was coming in (courtesy of the primary’s gravity), and so I had to be careful not to get isolated on some inaccessible spit. The quilt could s
tand immersion in the liquid methane, but the damn stuff tasted just like gasoline, and you risked getting swept out into the 400 meter-deep sea. I kept myself oriented by the hottest pointsources of heat within the dome, and the more feeble beacon that was the distant shrouded sun.
Now I could think about my future.
But wouldn’t you know, my stubborn brain could only focus on the past.
I remembered my youth.
Did you ever realize that the Heisenberg drive promotes specialization? When transport is cheap, it makes sense to import what you can’t produce efficiently. And if there’s a big market for whatever you do best, then you tend to do it more and more, until pretty soon almost your whole world’s doing it. (This applies, of course, to Conservancy and neutral worlds, the worker ants, and not us lazy Commensality grasshoppers, who traffic more in intangibles.)
I was born and grew up in a grain field. The whole damn world was hairy with wheat and oats and other assorted hybrids. There was no such thing as a city. The one other family on the world occupied the antipodes. On clear days you couldn’t see forever, but only about as far as the next stalk. It was boring as a stint in a sense-dep tank.
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 fragil
e, 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 picked up this stegasoid in the refectory outshowers, and we spent a fun three hours together. But of course, with the way my luck was running, there had to be repercussions. It turned out she was just in from offplanet, somewhere less fastidious than Babylon, and had a bad case of scale mites. You’ve never known irritation until you’ve had those active little critters under your overlapping spinal plaques. Took an hour in the infirmary to make ’em surrender.
When I got out of the ward, I went to a bar to waste a few idle hours in muzzy rumination.
In the dimness of the bar (haven’t really changed in centuries, I understand), I got a TAP from Babylon.
[I called to see how matters were progressing,] he sent.
I jolted up in my seat when his words filled my brain. [Oh, fine, fine, Babylon. I’m planning my strategy right this minute.]
[Good. I suggest you pay more attention to the mental condition of your commensals while you procrastinate. Perhaps their malaise may help motivate you.]
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but pretended I did.
[Sure. I’ll check it out.]
There was silence then, and I thought Babylon had broken the connection. But he came back with a request.
[Meat, I have a thing I wish you to read. Will you?]
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