“—a few more sightings—”
“—we’d probably be able to pinpoint—”
“—that damn string.”
“I feel like the necessary information is so close.”
“Me too. It’s our trustworthy—”
“—but imperfect—”
“—info-witches’ intuition.”
I rubbed my eyes sleepily. “What can we do?”
“Only one thing left,” said Judy.
“A visit to the priestess—”
“—of Babylon—”
“—even though it’ll wipe our credit balance—”
“—flatter than a worm on a neutron star.”
“Oh, good,” I mumbled, and fell asleep before I could even think to say:
Priestess?
12.
Temple of Bel
Eight tapering towers piled high atop each other, wrapped with a ramp around and around, the whole situated in the exact center of the city: that was the priestess’s home. Striding up the corkscrew approach, I made the Sisters fill me in, solo style.
“The priestess,” said Judy, “is a willing extension of Babylon. Not cored, she has agreed to maintain a constant, high-density transmission and realtime contact with our AOI, functioning as a unique input device. All her senses have been modified to a high degree, and she’s gotten a host of new ones. For instance, she’ll be naked to allow her lateral-lines—piscine—and infra-pits—viperine—full play. We’ll tell her our situation, and she’ll correlate it with all Babylon knows, while simultaneously picking up subliminal stuff we can’t even register, right down to the quantum level. Then she’ll give us her advice or prophecy.”
“It’s a very demanding job,” said Jezzie, “and no one can do it too long. They say you’re changed for life afterwards, even when Babylon gives up his contact. But it’s a sinecure for the rest of your days. We’ve thought of volunteering when we get too old for this racket. In a hundred years or so.”
I nodded as if I understood.
At last we reached the top level of the layer-cake temple. There was a single square doorless arch. We went inside.
I had expected a dark, incense-filled chamber. Instead, the room was lit up like a surgery. Seated on an organiform couch was the priestess. Her head was shaved, her eyes without pupils, a milky white. My own gaze seemed drawn down them, deep down to where Babylon dwelled, beneath the moon’s surface.
She was the most awesome thing I had yet seen in Babylon. I couldn’t even think of her as human.
The Sisters began their account, even their usual bravado noticeably shaken.
When they were finished, we waited.
After what seemed like eternity cubed, the priestess spoke.
Two words.
“Red dragon.”
I was still trying to puzzle out the significance of the phrase when the Sisters knocked me to the floor with twin shrieks.
They grabbed at my neck, and pulled the ambassador’s chop right off, breaking the chain and gouging the back of my neck.
“Of course!”
“What idiots!”
“It was right under our noses!”
I got to my feet, rubbing my sore neck. “You don’t mean—”
“But we do! The Conservancy is looking for this string too.”
“And your diplomat must have been bringing sightings to your father.”
“But now they’re ours—”
“—thanks to wonderful, wonderful Sandy.”
“And if they’re complementary to what we’ve got—”
“—which they almost have to be—”
“—then we’ll know the coordinates for the string—”
“—and can sell it to Babylon—”
“—for the price of a planet!”
The priestess had sat silent through our display, unaffected by our merely human emotions. We left the temple then, and headed home.
I stopped on the way at an infirmary to get my sore neck attended to.
“We’ll meet you home, Sandy—”
“—for more celebrating.”
“Even extra special—”
“—this time.”
At that moment, I didn’t get what they meant.
Home again, I heard noises filtering down a corridor from the pleasureparlor.
I ambled down the dimly biolit hall. In the doorway, I stopped dead.
I couldn’t untangle the scene at first. I flashbacked on my lone view of the refectory, so long ago. This was the same, but different.
Scaled limbs bisected expanses of pink flesh. Hooves dimpled tailed saurian haunches. Thighs occulted faces tongues unlike anything human lapped webbed feet braced for a thrust backs arched in pleasure wet engulfings hard lengths grunts cries growls teeth flashing aliens lying where once I no no no no—
“No!” I screamed.
And ran.
My destiny.
I came to myself at the lock leading to the spacefield. Still half crazy, I looked around for a nonliving suit, intending to get out to a ship and flee across as many galaxies as I could.
But nothing was available except quilts.
And I couldn’t use them.
So I slumped down to the pavement, back against the dome wall, dropping my head in my hands. Jezebel and Judith, those witches, those whores of Babylon, seemed to have driven a spike right into my skull.
I strove to think around it.
Where was I going to go? Back to the Conservancy? I was totally unfitted for life there. To another Commensality world? I’d still have to face the same set of dilemmas as here. A neutral world, then. I’d go to a neutral world, a backwater where I could avoid choosing between these disparate star-sweeping ideologies that contended for an individual’s soul nowadays.
But I knew this was impossible too. Because—damn it!—no matter where you fled today, anywhere else was just a blink away.
So I gave up thinking and began to cry.
After a while I realized someone was standing watching me.
I opened my swollen eyes.
I didn’t see hooves.
So I looked up.
A nondescript human male stood beside me. His face was empty of any expression, like a world devoid of weather.
Deadface—
Moreover, he was the same man who had stopped me in my father’s hall ages ago, and ordered me to fetch the ambassador’s chop.
“Babylon,” I whispered.
“Yes,” said the cored one. “It’s me. Look, just what do you think you’re doing?”
I had expected any question but this. “What—I don’t know what you mean.”
“Running away, that’s what I mean. When are you going to face up to reality? If you don’t like what the Sisters did, confront them with it. They are what they are, the same as you. Running away won’t change that. But it will lose you whatever you had.”
I grunted with all the cynicism I could muster. “And what was that? The delusions of a pet.”
“You know that’s not true. Look at what just happened. Besides holding the final key to everything—not entirely accidentally, either —you played your part with Stoat. And very slick it was. I personally think you have a future in this business. Why don’t you go back and work things out?”
“What’s your stake in all this?” I demanded.
“Information is my lifeblood. And people like the Sisters help it breed. I try to keep them happy. You seem to be good for them. And they for you.”
I thought. “I—I don’t know.”
Babylon shrugged stiffly. “You’ll never find out by running away.”
I got to my feet. Babylon stared at me wordlessly for a while, then said, “Don’t decide now. Just come with me on one last excursion. You more or less have to anyway.”
I had a hint of what he meant.
13.
The First ChapterL
Babylon had to clone the diplomat to use his chop. He dug out a few of the de
ad man’s epidermal cells from a crevice in the dragon. When the mindless clone was fully force-grown (how creepy it felt to stare into the face of the man I had killed), the chop, keyed to the individual’s unique bioaura, gave up its secrets.
Almost before I knew it, Ace—that was the old human name of Babylon’s extension—the Sisters and I were in a special little ship. (They had had to carry me, quilt-wrapped, out the dome.) An instant later, we had made a transition halfway across the galaxy, to where the loop of string was located.
“Now,” Ace explained without inflection, “in Riemannian space, the fourth dimension is obviously time, and we may travel along it in only one direction. In the vicinity of this string, with its extra six dimensions accessible, our latest theories inform us that we should be able to move backward along the temporal dimension.
“We are here to prove it.”
The Sisters were huddled together in a cabin corner, feeling lost without their TAPS. I was in the opposite corner. We had had a big fight once reunited, and they weren’t talking to me, nor I to them.
“This is crazy,” I said. But all the time I really knew deep down it wasn’t.
“What would you know, you archaic Conservator?” spat Judy.
“Yeah, you sexual fossil!” contributed Jezzie.
That got me mad. “For your information, you two bitches, I know where—I mean when—we’re travelling to.”
That seemed to floor them.
It was the first time I had ever done so.
Maybe I was learning something after all.
Ace moved to the boards and did something.
We moved along the six dimensions normally hidden inside your average electron. For a timeless eternity, the uncanny passage assaulted our senses horribly. Then the universe looked the same in the viewers. Next, Ace made a standard Heisenberg transition. After that—
Well, why should I belabor the obvious? We landed on my home planet. Concealed in capes and irksome boots, the Sisters passed for non-moddies as we passed through the city. My bare feet met with few stares in the summertime warmth. I provided ingress through the security perimeter around my home.
As soon as we were inside my father’s mansion, Jezzie said, “These boots hurt, I’m taking them off.” Judy followed suit.
Pretty soon the Sisters and I were standing behind the arrass, peeking out through a slit.
I saw my younger self nearly run into Ace. The Sisters stifled their laughter. I must admit I did look cloddish, stupid and scared. It was hard to imagine that was really me. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t as dumb then—I mean now—as I looked.
Or had I been?
After Ace sent the early me back for the diplomat’s chop, we came out from hiding, the Sisters resumed their disguises, and we returned to our ship.
At least I assumed we did, as we must have. I don’t really remember much from the next few hours. I was too bewildered, deep in thought about my past and future.
Once more in the stellar neighborhood of our gateway back home, I finally returned to myself.
If someone without emotions could gloat, Ace was gloating. “This moves the struggle with the Conservancy onto a completely new level. We must make use of this temporal ability before they match us.” He went off into deep thought.
The Sisters meanwhile eyed me speculatively from across the cabin. Finally, one spoke.
“Interesting times ahead, Sandy.”
“Another mind and pair of hands is always welcome in our game.”
“Seems a shame to break up a good team, just because of a little indiscretion.”
“What do you say?”
I paused.
“TAP me for an answer when we get back home.”
PHYLOGENESIS
Life is tenacious, life is ingenious, life is mutable, life is fecund.
Wildflowers spring from vast fields of pillowy black lava barely cool. Bacteria dwell in pockets of oil squeezed between seams and strata, and they proliferate in anaerobic and glacial niches. Nodding fronds and waving worms cluster around hot mineral springs gushing from the floor of the sea, lightless and under immense pressure. Dead staffs, cut years gone by, planted in good soil, take root and sprout leaves. A subarctic pine thick as a pencil, when examined, reveals seventy annual growth rings. Fish and frogs are immured in mud during years of drought, to reawaken with the first rains. Herman Melville once heard a gnawing sound from within a favorite table and watched an insect bore its way out of the unblemished surface, having gone dormant in the original tree from which the table was made decades ago.
Most hardy, most tenacious of life—if living they can indeed be called—are perhaps the viruses. Classified as obligatory parasites—doomed always to an existence dependent on other organisms—barely more than some nucleic acid in a protein coat, they can lie in wait in animate—smallpox in a blanket—for a passing host. Given merely an instant’s contact, they will plant themselves and flourish.
But al1 these examples, however diverse, presuppose at least a minimal planetary environment, a nurturing biosphere. Without that—when a planet dies—can life endure?
This was the vital problem the human race found itself facing.
The invaders came to Earth from space without warning, their skins hardened for atmospheric reentry. In blind fulfillment of their life cycle, they sought biomass for conversion to more of their kind. Earth offered al1 they needed.
Only in the final days of the plague, when the remnants of mankind huddled in a few last redoubts, did anyone admit that extermination of the invaders and reclamation of the planet was impossible. The ecosphere had been fundamentally disrupted, damaged beyond repair.
Then did the chromosartors begin to work feverishly to adapt a new man to the alien conditions. With a snippet from the marsupials, a string from the Pinnipedia, incorporating dozens of other genetic components, they refashioned woman and man for the new conditions.
And their overal1 model, the organism they felt offered the best tactic for survival, was, out of al1 creatures, the most simple.
Virus.
* * * *
The host was sick. Here in its adult environment, without predators its own size, capable of a long, long existence, it had succumbed to infection. In the forbidding vastness of circumsolar space it wallowed, out of control, plainly dying.
Stars hung in the limitless vacuum, pinpoints sharp as loss: orange, blue, white, ruby. One blazed only a few Astronomical Units away, correspondingly more dominant. These luminaries were the only watchers. There was no active mind present to care about what was to occur.
Scale was hard to determine in this wilderness, but the stricken creature seemed to occlude a goodly number of stars with its bulk, in its spasmodic progression through the vacuum.
Ripples pulsed across the organism’s elastic surface, convulsions engendered by unseen internal disquiet. It was plainly a system out of control.
These wavelike motions picked up speed, acquired a crazy tempo, like that of a fibrillating heart. The host looked like an amniotic sac disrupted by the frantic movements of its strangulating inhabitant.
Suddenly, noiselessly, without warning, the host ruptured. Amorphous fragments and thick sheets of biological substances—along with liquids and gases—blew off and scattered in every direction, the solids pinwheeling and tumbling end over end.
Among these useless fragments were several large flocks of objects that seemed still viable. Small ovoids, complete and self-contained, these were the vesicles. Unlike the object that had expelled them, they were born helpless, without control over their course. They radiated off into the depths of space, limning the surface of a ghostly, expanding sphere.
There happened to be no other hosts in the immediate vicinity. The vesicles were thus doomed to wander indefinitely.
The hosts—the prey of the vesicles—although much larger and more capable than the aimlessly floating parasites, were still insignificant targets, compared to the distance
s that separated the two.
But time was long, and any likely event must come to pass. Eventually, the vesicles would chance to meet a new host.
* * * *
There was movement amid the great lifeless night.
A segment of stars was occluded by a tremendous glaucous bulk moving slowly. Its exterior possessed a quasi-organic texture, like a bluish grey compound of fat and plastic. It had a relatively high albedo, so it was rather bright. Its shape was a featureless ovoid. It resembled nothing so much as a titanic mottled pill-capsule.
In its creeping passage, the host was moving toward something that seemed, at first, a single smaller object with many components. This object was also moving, on a path tangential to the host. As the distance between the two objects narrowed, the latter resolved itself into a flock of discrete entities.
The vesicles’ long unconscious seeking was almost at an end. The gravitic memory of their ejection from a common source with identical force and trajectory had kept them together on their uncontrolled flight through the long night, a cluster of small pods that were identical in substance to the host.
Now the foremost portion of the host intersected the flock of vesicles. Some stuck, held not by magnetism or gravity, but by adhesive forces biological in nature. Others—too far away or not tenacious enough—drifted by, losers in the cosmic lottery.
The ones that had clung to the host had a chance to live and reproduce. The ones that had failed to catch on would, in all likelihood, die. Perhaps they would plunge into this system’s sun. Perhaps they would simply wither away, their natural capacities exhausted, their dormancy become final death.
The host emerged from the diminished cloud of vesicles. The two units continued on their separate paths. The sleek uniformity of the host’s thick skin was now broken by the scattered forms of the clinging vesicles, like limpets on a rock. But there was no reaction from the host to this change in its condition. It seemed unaware of its doom. No host, in fact, had ever been known to exhibit sentience.
The vesicles, however, sensed the difference in their state, and they emerged from dormancy. Interior cellular mechanisms began to switch on.
Soon, the portion of the vesicles in contact with the host began to secrete a lysis-promoting enzyme. The integument of the host beneath the vesicles began to dissolve. After a short time, the vesicles and the host were immutably fused together. The vesicles continued to eat inward, single-mindedly following a program laid down long ago.
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