Babylon Sisters

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Candybytes! I stored all the African data on candybytes! They were my bonanza for the child educational market. Edible paper, tasty sugar substrate, info-rich secret ingredients! “

  “Hey yeah!” said Malvern nostalgically. “I used to eat candybytes as a little kid in my Time-Warner-Disney Creche. So now one of us has to gobble your moldy old lemon-drops?” Malvern was clearly nothing loath.

  “No need for that, I brought old Heckle here. Heckle is my verbal output device.”

  Fearon examined the raven’s cage. “This featherbag looks as old as a Victrola.”

  Kingseed set a moldy data strip atop a table, then released Heckle. The dark bird hopped unerringly to the start of the tape, and began to peck and eat. As Heckle’s living read-head ingested and interpreted the coded candybytes, the raven jumped around the table like a fairy-chess knight, a corvine Turing Train.

  “How is a raven like a writing desk?” murmured Kemp.

  Heckle, shivered, stretched his glossy wings, and went Delphic. In a croaky, midnight-dreary voice, the neurally-possessed bird delivered a strange tale.

  A desperate group of Noahs and Appleseeds, Goodalls and Cousteaus, Leakeys and Fosseys, had gathered up Africa’s endangered flora and fauna, then packed the executable genetic information away into a most marvelous container: the Panspecific Mycoblastula. ThePanspecific Mycoblastulawas an immortal chimeric fungal ball of awesome storage capacity, a filamentously aggressive bloody tripe-wad, a motile Darwinian lights-and-liver battle-slimeslug.

  Shivering with mute attention, Fearon brandished his handheld, carefully recording every cawed and revelatory word. Naturally the device also displayed the point-of-view of Weeble’s crittercam.

  Suddenly, Fearon glimpsed a shocking scene. Weeble was under attack!

  There was no mistaking the infamous Skratchy Kat, who had been trying, without success, to skulk around Kingseed’s industrial estate. Weeble’s porcine war cry emerged tinnily from the little speakers. The crittercam’s transmission whipsawed in frenzy.

  “Sic him, Weeble! Hoof that feline spy!”

  Gamely obeying his master’s voice, the pig launched his bulk at the top-of-the-line postfeline. A howling combat ensued, Fearon’s pig getting the worse of it. Then Shelob the multi-ton spider joined the fray. Skratchy Kat quickly saw the sense of retreat. When the transmission stabilized, the superstar’s familiar had vanished in retreat. Weeble grunted proudly. The crittercam bobbed rhythmically as the potent porker licked his wounds with antiseptic tongue.

  “You the man, Fearon! Your awesome pig kicked that cat’s ass-wise!”

  Kingseed scratched his head glumly. “You had a crittercam channel open to your pig this whole time, didn’t you?”

  Fearon grimaced, clutching his handheld. “Well, of course I did! I didn’t want my Weeble to feel all lonely.”

  “Ribo Zombie’s cat was watergating your pig. Ribo Zombie must have heard everything we said up here. I hope he didn’t record those GPS coordinates.”

  The possessed raven was still cackling spastically, as the last crackles of embedded data spooled through its postcorvine speech centers. Heckle was recaged and rewarded with a tray of crickets.

  Suddenly, Fearon’s handheld spoke up in a sinister basso. It was the incoming voice of Ribo Zombie himself. “So the Panspecific Mycoblastula is in Sierra Leone. It is a savage territory, ruled by the mighty bushsoldier, Prince Kissy Mental. He is a ferocious cannibal who would chew you small-timers up like aphrodisiac gum! So Malvern and Fearon—take heed of my street-wisdom. I have the top-line hardware, and now, thanks to you, I have the data as well. Save yourselves the trouble, just go home.”

  “Gumshoe on up here, you washed-up ponce!” said startled Malvern, dissed to the bone. “My fearsome weasel will go sloppy seconds on your big fat cat!”

  Kingseed stretched forth his liver-spotted mitt. “Turn off those handhelds, boys.”

  When Fearon and Malvern had bashfully powered down their devices, the old guru removed an antique pager from his lab bench. He played his horny thumb across the rudimentary keypad.

  “A pager?” Malvern goggled. “Why not, like, jungle drums?”

  “Pipe down. You pampered modern lamers can’t even manage elementary anti-surveillance. Whereas, while one obsolescent pager is useless—two are a secure link.”

  Kingseed read the archaic glyphs off the tiny screen. “I can see that my contact in Freetown, Dr. Herbert Zoster, is still operational. With his help, you might yet beat Zombie to this prize.” Kingseed looked up. “After allowing Ribo Zombie to bug my very home, I expect no less from you. You’d better come through this time, or never show your faces again at the Tallahassee scabCon. With your dalkon shields—or on them, boys.”

  “Lofty! We’re outta here pronto! Thanks a lot, gramps.”

  * * * *

  Tupper was very alarmed about Africa. After an initial tearful outburst, hot meals around Fearon’s house became as rare as whales and pandas. Domestic conversation died down to apologetic bursts of dingbat-decorated email. Their sex life, always sensually satisfactory and emotionally deep, became as chilly as the last few lonely glaciers of Greenhouse Greenland. Glum but determined, Fearon made no complaint.

  On the day of his brave departure—his important gear stowed in two carry-on bags, save for that which Weeble wore in khaki-colored saddle-style pouches—Fearon paused at the door of their flat. Tupper sat morosely on the couch, pretending to surf the screen. For thirty seconds the display showed an ad from AT&T (Advanced Transcription and Totipotency) touting their latest telomere upgrades. Fearon was, of course, transfixed. But thenTupper changed channels, and he refocused mournfully for a last homesick look at his frosty spouse.

  “I must leave you now, Tuppence honey, to meet Malvern at the docks.” Even the use of her pet name failed to break her reserve. “Darling, I know this hurts your feelings, but think of it this way: my love for you is true because I’m true to my own true self. Malvern and I will be in and out of that tropical squalor in a mere week or two, with minimal lysis all around. But if I don’t come back right away—or even, well, forever—I want you to know without you, I’m nothing. You’re the feminine mitochondrium in my dissolute masculine plasm, baby.”

  Nothing. Fearon turned to leave, hand on the doorknob. Tupper swept him up in an embrace from behind, causing Weeble to grunt in surprise. Fearon slithered around within the cage of her arms to face her, and she mashed her lips into his.

  Malvern’s insistent pounding woke the lovers up. Hastily, Fearon redonned his outfit, bestowed a final peck on Tupper’s tear-slicked cheek, and made his exit.

  “A little trouble getting away?” Malvern leered.

  “Not really. You?”

  “Well, my landlady made me pay the next month’s rent in advance. Oh, and if I’m dead, she gets to sell all my stuff.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Just the kind of treatment I expect.”

  * * * *

  Still flushed from the fever-shots at U.S. Customs, the two globe-trotting scabs watched the receding coast of America from the deck of their Cuba-bound ferry, the Gloria Estefan.

  “I hate all swabs,” said Malvern, belching as his innards rebooted.

  Fearon clutched his squirming belly. “We could have picked better weather. These ferocious Caribbean hurricane waves —”

  “What ‘waves’? We’re still in the harbor.”

  “Oh, my Lord—”

  After a pitching, greenish sea-trip, Cuba hove into view. The City of Havana, menaced by rising seas, had been relocated up the Cuban coast through through a massive levy on socialist labor. The crazy effort had more or less succeeded, though it looked as if every historic building in the city had been picked up and dropped.

  Debarking in the fragrant faux-joy of the highly colored tropics, the eager duo hastened to the airfield—for only the cowboy Cubans still maintained direct air-flights to the wrecked and smoldering shell of the Dark Continent.

&nb
sp; Mi Amiga Flicka was a hydrogen-lightened cargolifter of Appaloosa-patterned horsehide. The buoyant lift was generated by onboard horse stomachs, modified to spew hydrogen instead of the usual methane. A tanker truck, using a long boom-arm, pumped a potent microbial oatmeal into the tethered dirigible’s feedstock reservoirs.

  “There’s a microbrewery on board,” Malvern said with a travel agent’s phony glee. “Works off grain mash just like a horse does! Cerveza muy potenta, you can bet.”

  A freestanding bamboo elevator ratcheted them up to the zeppelin’s passenger module, which hung like a zippered saddlebag from the bouyant horsehide belly.

  The bio-zep’s passenger cabin featured a zebrahide mess-hall that doubled as a ballroom, with a tiny bandstand and a touchingly antique mirrorball. The Cuban stewards, to spare weight and space, were all jockey-sized.

  Fearon and Malvern discovered that their web-booked “stateroom” was slightly smaller than a standard street toilet. Every feature of the tiny suite folded, collapsed, inverted, everted, or required assembly from scattered parts.

  “I don’t think I can get used to peeing in the same pipe that dispenses that legendary microbrew,” said Fearon. Less finicky, Malvern had already tapped and sampled a glass of the golden boutique cerveza. “Life is a closed loop, Fearon.”

  “But where will the pig sleep?”

  They found their way to the observation lounge for the departure of the giant gasbag. With practiced ease, the crew detached blimp-hook from mooring mast. The bacterial fuel-cells kicked over the myosin motors, the props began to windmill and the craft surged eastward with all the verve and speed of a spavined nag.

  Malvern was already deep into his third cerveza. “Once we get our hands on that wodge of extinct gene-chains, our names are forever golden! It’ll be vino, gyno and techno all the way!”

  “Let’s not count our chimeras till they’re decanted, Mal. We’re barely puttering along, and I keep thinking of Ribo Zombie and his highly publicized private entomopter.”

  “Ribo Zombie’s a fat show-biz phoney, he’s all talk! We’re heavy-duty street-level chicos from Miami! It’s just no contest.”

  “Hmmph. We’d better vortal in to Fusing Nuclei and check out the continuing coverage.”

  Fearon found a spot where the zep’s horsehide was thinnest, and tapped an overhead satellite feed. The gel-screen of his handheld flashed the familiar Fusing Nuclei logo.

  “In his one-man supercavitating sub, Ribo Zombie and Skratchy Kat speed toward the grim nomansland of sub-Saharan Africa! What weird and wonderful adventures await our intrepid lone-wolf scab and his plucky familiar? Does carnal love lurk in some dusky native bosom? Log-on Monday for the realtime landing of RZ and Skratchy upon the sludge-sloshing shores of African doom! And remember, kids—Skratchy Kat cards, toys and collectibles are available only through Nintendo-Benz—”

  “Did they say ‘Monday?’” Malvern screeched. “Monday is tomorrow! We’re already royally boned!”

  “Malvern, please, the straights are staring at us. Ribo Zombie can’t prospect all of Africa through all those old UN emplacements. Kingseed found us an expert native guide, remember? Dr. Herbie Zoster.”

  Malvern stifled his despair. “You really think this native scab has got the stuffwise?”

  Fearon smiled. “Well, he’s not a scab quite like us, but he’s definitely our type! He’s pumped, ripped and buff, plus, he’s wily and streetsmart. I checked out his online resumé! Herbie Zoster has been a mercenary, an explorer, an archaeologist, even the dictator of an offshore datahaven. Once we hook up with him, this ought to be a waltz.”

  In the airborne hours that followed, Malvern sampled a foretaste of the vino, gyno and techno, while Fearon repeatedly wrote and erased apologetical email to his wife. Then came their scheduled arrival over the melancholy ruins of Freetown—and a dismaying formal announcement by the ship’s Captain.

  “What do you mean, you can’t moor?” demanded Malvern.

  Their Captain, a roguish and dapper, yet intensely competent fellow named Luis Sendero, removed his cap, and slicked back the two macaw feathers anchored at his temple. “The local caudillo, Prince Kissy Mental, has incited his people to burn down our trading facilities. One learns to expect these little setbacks in the African trade. Honoring our contracts, we shall parachute to earth the goods we bring, unless they are not paid for—in which case, they are dumped anyway, yet receive no parachute. As for you two Yankees and your two animals—you are the only passengers who want to land in Sierra Leone. If you wish to touch down, you must parachute just as the cargo.”

  After much blustering, whuffling and whining, Fearon, Malvern and Weeble stood at the open hatch of Mi Amiga Flicka, parachutes strapped insecurely on, ripcords wired to a rusty cable, while the exotic scents of the rainy African landscape wafted to their nostrils.

  Wistfully, they watched their luggage recede to the scarred red earth. Then, with Spike clutched to his breast, Malvern closed his eyes and boldly tumbled overboard. Fearon watched closely as his colleague’s fabric chute successfully bloomed. Only then did he make up his mind to go through with it. He booted the reluctant Weeble into airy space, and followed suit.

  * * * *

  “Outsiders never bring us anything but garbage,” mumbled Dr. Zoster.

  “Is it Cuban garbage?” said Malvern, tucking into their host’s goat-and-pepper soup with a crude wooden spoon.

  “No. They’re always Cubans bringing it, but it’s everybody’s garbage that is dumped on Africa. It becomes a cargo-cult phenomenon. For you see: any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.”

  Fearon surreptitiously fed the peppery cabrito to his pig. He was having a hard time successfully relating to Dr. Herbie Zoster. It had never occurred to him that elderly Kemp Kingseed and tough, sunburnt Herbie Zoster were such close kin.

  In point of fact, Herbie Zoster was Kingseed’s younger clone. And it didn’t require Jungian analysis to see that, just like most clones, Zoster bitterly resented the egotistical man who had created him. This was very clearly the greatest appeal of life in Africa for Dr. Herbie Zoster. Africa was the one continent guaranteed to make him as much unlike Kemp Kingseed as possible.

  Skin tinted dark as mahogany, callused and wiry, dotted with many thorn-scratches, parasites and gunshot wounds, Zoster still bore some resemblance to Kingseed—about as much as a battle-scarred hyena to an aging bloodhound.”

  What exactly do people dump around here?” said Malvern with interest.

  Zoster mournfully chewed the last remnant of a baked yam and spat the skin into the darkness outside their thatched hut. Something with great glowing eyes pounced upon it instantly, with a rasp and a snarl. “You’re familiar with the ‘Immunosance?’”

  “Oh yeah, sure!” said Malvern artlessly, “we’re from Miami.”

  “That new Genetic Age completely replaced the Nuclear Age, the Space Age, and the Information Age.”

  “Good riddance,” Malvern offered. “You got any more of that cabrito stew? It’s fine stuff!”

  Zoster rang a crude brass bell. A limping, turbaned manservant dragged himself into their thatched hut, tugging a bubbling bucket of chow.

  “The difficulty with massive technological advance,” said Zoster, spooning the steamy goop, “is that it obsolesces the previous means of production. When the Immunosance arrived, omnipresent industries already covered all the advanced countries.” Zoster paused to pump vigorously at a spring-loaded homemade crank, which caused the light-bulb overhead to brighten to its full thirty watts. “There simply was no room to install the new bio-industrial revolution. But a revolution was very necessary anyway. So all the previous junk had to go. The only major planetary area with massive dumping grounds was—and still is—Africa.”

  Zoster rubbed at his crank-stiffened forearm and sighed. “Sometimes they promote the garbage and sell it to us Africans. Sometimes they drop it anonymously. But nevertheless—no matter how we struggle or re
sist—the very worst always ends up here in Africa, no matter what.”

  “I’m with the sequence,” said Malvern, pausing to belch. “So what’s the 4-1-1 about this fabled Panspecific Mycoblastula?”

  Zoster straightened, an expression of awe toughening his face below his canvas hatbrim. “That is garbage of a very special kind. Because the Panspecific Mycoblastula is an entire, outmoded natural ecosystem. It is the last wild continent, completely wadded up and compressed by foreign technicians!”

  Fearon considered this gnomic remark. He found it profoundly encouraging. “We understand the gravity of this matter, Dr. Zoster. Malvern and I feel that we can make this very worth your while-wise. Time is of the essence. When can we start?”

  Zoster scraped the dirt floor with his worn boot-heel. “I’ll have to hire a train of native bearers. I’ll have to obtain supplies. We will be risking our lives, of course.... What can you offer us in return for that?”

  “A case of soft drinks?” said Malvern.

  Fearon leaned forward intently. “Transistor radios? Antibiotics? How about some plumbing?”

  Zoster smiled for the first time, with a flash of gold teeth. “Call me Herbie.”

  * * * *

  Zoster extended a callused fingertip. It bore a single ant, the size and color of a sesame seed.

  “This is the largest organism in the world.”

  “So I heard,” Malvern interjected glibly. “Just like the fire-ants invading America, right? They went through a Darwinian bottleneck and came out supercharged sisters, genetically identical even under different queens. They spread across the whole USA smoother than marshmallow fluff.”

  Zoster wiped his sweating stubbled jaw with a filthy bandanna. “These ants were produced four decades ago. They carry rhizotropic fungi, to fertilize crops with nitrogen. But their breeders overdesigned them. These ants cause tremendous fertile growth in vegetation, but they’re also immune to insect diseases and parasites. The swabs finally wiped them out in America, but Africa has no swabs. We have no public health services, no telephones, no roads. So from Timbuktu to Capetown, cloned ants have spread in a massive wave, a single super-organism big as Africa.”