Babylon Sisters Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2002 by Paul Di Filippo

  * * * *

  “Stone Lives” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1985.

  “A Short Course in Art Appreciation” first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1988.

  “Phylogenesis first appeared in Synergy, in 1988.

  “A Thief in Babylon” first appeared in Amazing in 1989.

  “Babylon Sisters” first appeared in Interzone in 2001.

  “Solitons” first appeared in Semiotext(e) SF in 1990.

  “Gravitons” first appeared in Hardware in 1990.

  “Any Major Dude” first appeared in New Worlds in 1991.

  “Mud Puppy Goes Uptown” first appeared in Back Brain Recluse in 1994.

  “Otto and Toto in the Oort” first appeared in Science Fiction Age in 1995.

  “Life Sentence” first appeared in Interzone in 1996.

  “Angelmakers” first appeared in Interzone in 1999.

  “The Reluctant Book” first appeared in Science Fiction Age in 2000.

  “The Scab’s Progress” first appeared online in Sci Fiction in 2001.

  DEDICATION

  This one goes out to the editors, their honored names reflected in the ordering of stories above: Ed Ferman, George Zebrowski, Patrick Price, David Pringle, Rudy Rucker and Peter Lamborn Wilson, Jimm Gall, David Garnett, Chris Reed, Scott Edelman, Ellen Datlow, and of course, for his work on this volume, Nick Gevers. Thanks, Chums!

  * * * *

  And, as always, to Deborah, my favorite human, post-, pre-, or baseline.

  STONE LIVES

  Odors boil around the Immigration Offices, a stenchy soup. The sweat of desperate men and women, ripe garbage strewn in the packed street, the spicy scent worn by one of the guards at the outer door. The mix is heady, almost overpowering to anyone born outside the Bungle, but Stone is used to it. The constant smells constitute the only atmosphere he has ever known, his native element, too familiar to be despised.

  Noise swells to rival the stench. Harsh voices raised in dispute, whining voices lowered to entreat. “Don’t sluff me, you rotty bastard!” “l’d treat you real nice, honey, for a share of that.” From the vicinity of the door into Immigration, an artificial voice is reciting the day’s job offerings, cycling tirelessly through the rotty choices.

  “—to test new aerosol antipersonnel toxins. 4M will contract to provide survivors with a full Citrine rejuve. High-orbit vakheads needed by McDonnell Douglas. Must be willing to be imprinted—”

  No one seems eager to rush forward and claim these jobs. No voices beg the guards for entrance. Only those who have incurred impossible debts or enmity inside the Bungle ever take a chance on the Rating-10 assignments, which are Immigation’s disdainful handouts. Stone knows for sure that he wants no part of these rigged propositions. Like all the rest, he is here at Immigration simply because it provides a focal point, a gathering place as vital as a Serengeti water hole, where the sneaky sluffs and raw deals that pass for business in the South Bronx FEZ—a.k.a. the Bronx Jungle, a.k.a. the Bungle—can he transacted.

  Heat smites the noisy crowd, making them more irritable than usual—a dangerous situation. Hyperalertness parches Stone’s throat. He reaches for the scratched-to-his-touch plastic flask at his hip and swigs some stale water. Stale but safe, he thinks, relishing his secret knowledge. It was pure luck that he ever stumbled upon the slow leak in the inter-FEZ pipe down by the river fence that encircles the Bungle. He smelled the clean water like a dog from a distance, and by running his hands along several meters of chilly pipe, he found the drip. Now he has all the manifold cues to its exact location deeply memorized.

  Shuffling through the crowd on bare calloused feet (amazing what information can he picked up through the soles to keep body and soul intact!), Stone quests for scraps of information that will help him survive another day in the Bungle. Survival is his main—his only—concern. If Stone has any pride left, after enduring what he has endured, it is pride in surviving.

  A brassy voice claims, “I booted some tempo, man, and that was the end of that fight. Thirty seconds later, all three’re dead.” A listener whistles admiringly. Stone imagines he latches on somehow to a boot of tempo and sells it for an enormous profit, which he them spends on a dry, safe place to sleep and enough to fill his ever-empty gut. Not damn likely, but a nice dream nonetheless.

  Thought of food causes his stomach to churn. Across the rough, encrusted cloth covering his midriff, he rests his right hand with its sharp lance of pain that marks the infected cut. Stone assumes the infection. He has no way of telling for sure until it begins to stink.

  Stone’s progress through the babble of voices and crush of flesh has brought him fairly close to the entrance to Immigration. He feels a volume of empty air between the crowds and the guards, a quarter­sphere of respect and fear, its vertical face the wall of the building. The respect is generated by the employed status of the guards; the fear by their weapons.

  Someone—a transported felon with a little education—once described the guns to Stone. Long, bulky tubes with a bulge halfway along their length where the wiggler magnets are. Plastic stocks and grips. They emit charged beams of energetic electrons at relativistic speeds. If the scythe of the beam touches you, the kinetic energy imparted blows you apart like a squashed sausage. If the particle beam chances to miss, the accompanying cone of gamma rays produces radiation sickness that is fatal within hours.

  Of the explanation—which Stone remembers verbatim—he understands only the description of a horrible death. It is enough.

  Stone pauses a moment. A familiar voice—that of Mary, the rat-seller—is speaking conspiratorially of the next shipment of charity clothes. Stone deduces her position as being on the very inner edge of the crowd. She lowers her voice. Stone can’t make out her words, which are worth hearing. He edges forward, leery though he is of being trapped inside the clot of people—

  A dead silence. No one is speaking or moving. Stone senses displaced air puff from between the guards: someone occupies the door.

  “You.” A refined woman’s voice. “Young man with no shoes, in the—” Her voice hesitates for the adjective hiding beneath the grime. “—red jumpsuit. Come here, please. I want to talk to you.”

  Stone doesn’t know if it is he (red?), until he feels the pressure of all eyes upon him. At once he pivots, swerves, fakes—but it is too late. Dozens of eager claws grab him. He wrenches. Moldy fabric splits, but the hands refasten on his skin. He bites, kicks, pummels. No use. During the struggle he makes no sound. Finally he is dragged forward, still fighting, past that invisible line that marks another world as surely as does the unbreachable fence between the Bungle and the other twenty-two FEZ.

  Cinnamon scent envelops him, a guard holds something cold and metallic to the back of his neck. All the cells in his skull seem to flare at once, then darkness comes.

  * * * *

  Three people betray their forms and locations to the awakened Stone by the air they displace, their scents, their voices—and by a fourth, subtle component he has always labeled sense-of-life.

  Behind him: a bulky man who breathes awkwardly, no doubt because of Stone’s ripe odor. This has to be a guard. To his left: a smaller person—the woman?—smelling like flowers. (Once Stone smelled a flower.)

  Before him, deskbound: a seated man.

  Stone feels no aftereffects from the device used on him—unless the total disorientation that has overtaken him is it. He has no idea why he has been shanghaied, and wishes only to return to the known dangers of the Bungle.

  But he knows they are not about to let him.

  The woman speaks, her voice
the sweetest Stone has ever heard.

  “This man will ask you some questions. Once you answer them, I’11 have one for you. Is that all right?”

  Stone nods, his only choice as he sees it.

  “Name?” says the Immigration official.

  “Stone. “

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all anyone calls me.” (Unbearable white-hot pain when they dug out the eyes of the little urchin they caught watching them carve up the corpse. But he never cried, oh, no; and so: Stone.)

  “Place of birth?”

  “This shitheap, right here. Where else?”

  “Parents?”

  “What’re they?”

  “Age?”

  A shrug.

  “That can be fixed later with a cellscan. I suppose we have enough to issue your card. Hold still now.”

  Stone feels multiple pencils of warmth scroll over his face; seconds later, a chuntering sound from the desk.

  “This is your proof of citizenship and access to the system. Don’t lose it.”

  Stone extends a hand in the direction of the voice, receives a plastic rectangle. He goes to shove it into a pocket, finds them both ripped away in the scuffle, and continues to hold the plastic awkwardly, as if it is a brick of gold about to be snatched away.

  “Now my question.” The woman’s voice is like a distant memory Stone has of love. “Do you want a job?”

  Stone’s trip wire has been brushed. A job they can’t even announce in public? It must so fracking bad that it’s off the common corporate scale.

  “No thanks, miz. My life ain’t much, but it’s all I got.” He turns to leave.

  “Although I can’t give you details until you accept, we’ll register a contract right now that stipulates it’s a Rating-1 job.”

  Stone stops dead. It has to be a sick joke. But what if it’s true?

  “A contract?”

  “Officer,” the woman commands.

  A key is tapped, and the desk recites a contract. To Stone’s untutored ears, it sounds straightforward and without traps. A Rating-1 job for an unspecified period, either party able to terminate the contract, job description to be appended later.

  Stone hesitates only seconds. Memories of all the frightful nights and painful days in the Bungle swarm in his head, along with the hot central pleasure of having survived. Irrationally, he feels a moment’s regret at leaving behind the secret city spring he so cleverly found. But it passes.

  “I guess you need this to O.K. it,” Stone says, offering up his newly won card.

  “I guess we do,” the woman says with a laugh.

  * * * *

  The quiet, sealed car moves through busy streets. Despite the lack of outside noise, the chauffeur’s comments on the traffic and their frequent halts are enough to convey a sense of the bustling city around them.

  “Where are we now?” Stone asks for the tenth time. Besides wanting the information, he loves to hear this woman speak. Her voice, he thinks—its’s like a spring rain when you’re safe inside.

  “Madison-Park FEZ, traveling crosstown.”

  Stone nods appreciatively. She may as well have said, “In orbit, blasting for the moon,” for all the fuzzy mental image he gets.

  Before they would let Stone leave, Immigration did several things to him. Shaved all his body hair off; deloused him; made him shower for ten minutes with a mildly abrasive soap; disinfected him; ran several instant tests; pumped six shots into him; and issued him underwear, clean coveralls, and shoes (shoes!)

  The alien smell of himself only makes the woman’s perfume more at­ tractive. In the close confines of the backseat, Stone swims in it. Finally he can contain himself no longer.

  “Uh, that perfume—what kind is it?”

  “Lily of the valley.”

  The mellifluous phrase makes Stone feel as if he is in another, kinder century. He swears he will always remember it. And he will.

  “Hey!” Consternation. “I don’t even know your name.”

  “June. June Tannhauser.”

  June. Stone. June and Stone and lilies of the valley. June in June with Stone in the valley with the lilies. It’s like a song that won’t cease in his head.

  “Where are we going?” he asks over the silent song in his head.

  “To a doctor,” says June.

  “I thought that was all taken care of.”

  “This man’s a specialist. An eye­specialist.”

  This is the final jolt, atop so many, knocking even the happy song out of Stone’s head. He sits tense for the rest of the ride, unthinking.

  * * * *

  “This is a lifesized model of what we’re going to implant in you,” the doctor says, putting a cool ball in Stone’s hand.

  Stone squeezes it in disbelief

  “The heart of this eye system is CCD’s—charge-coupled devices. Every bit of light—each photon—that hits them triggers one or more electrons. These electrons are collected as a continuous signal, which is fed through an interpreter chip to your optic nerves. The result: perfect sight.”

  Stone grips the model so hard his palm bruises.

  “Cosmetically, they’re a bit shocking. In a young man like yourself, I’d recommend organic implants. However, I have orders from the person footing the bill that these are what you get. And of course, there are several advantages to them.”

  When Stone does not ask what they are, the doctor continues anyway.

  “By thinking mnemonic keywords that the chip is programmed for, you can perform several functions.

  “One: You can store digitalized copies of a particular sight in the chip’s RAM, for later display. When you reinvoke it with the keyword, it will seem as if you are seeing the sight again directly, no matter what you are actually looking at. Resumption of realtime vision is another keyword.

  “Two: By stepping down the ratio of photons to electrons, you can do such things as stare directly at the sun or at a welder’s flame without damage.

  “Three: By upping the ratio, you can achieve a fair degree of normal sight in conditions such as a starry, moonless night.

  “Four: For enhancement purposes, you can generate false-color images. Black becomes white to your brain, the old rose-colored glasses, whatever.

  “And I think that about covers it.”

  “What’s the time frame on this, Doctor?” June asks.

  The doctor assumes an academic tone, obviously eager to show professional acumen. “A day for the actual operation, two days, accelerated recovery, a week of training and further healing—say, two weeks, max.”

  ‘Very good,” June says.

  Stone feels her rise from the couch beside him, but remains seated.

  “Stone,” she says, a hand on his shoulder, “time to go.”

  But Stone can’t get up, because the tears won’t stop.

  * * * *

  The steel and glass canyons of New York—that proud and flourishing union of Free Enterprise Zones—are a dozen shades of cool blue, stretching away to the north. The streets that run with geometric precision like distant rivers on the canyon floors are an arterial red. To the west and east, snatches of the Hudson River and the East River are visible as lime-green flows. Central Park is a wall of sunflower-yellow halfway up the island. To the northeast of the park, the Bungle is a black wasteland.

  Stone savors the view. Vision of any kind, even the foggiest blurs, was an unthinkable treasure only days ago. And what he has actually been gifted with—this marvelous ability to turn the everyday world into a jeweled wonderland—is almost too much to believe. Momentarily sated, Stone wills his gaze back to normal. The city instantly reverts to its traditional color of steel-gray, sky-blue, tree-green. The view is still magnificent.

  Stone stands at a bank of windows on the 150th floor of the Citrine Tower, in the Wall Street FEZ. For the past two weeks, this has been his home, from which he has not stirred. His only visitors have been a nurse, a cybertherapist, and June. The isolatio
n and relative lack of human contact do not bother him. After the Bungle, such quiet is bliss. And then, of course, he has been enmeshed in the sensuous web of sight.

  The first thing he saw upon waking after the operation set the glorious tone of his visual explorations. The smiling face of a woman hovered above him. Her skin was a pcllucid olive, her eyes a radiant brown, her hair a raven cascade framing her face.

  “How are you feeling?” June asked.

  “Good,” Stone said. Then he uttered a phrase he never had a use for before. “Thank you.”

  June waved a slim hand negligently. “Don’t thank me. I didn’t pay for it.”

  And that was when Stone learned that June was not his employer, that she worked for someone else. And although she wouldn’t tell him then to whom he was indebted, he soon learned when they moved him from the hospital to the building that bore her name.

  Alice Citrine. Even Stone knew of her.

  Turning from the windows, Stone stalks across the thick cream-colored rug of his quarters. (How strange to move so confidently, without halting and probing!) He has spent the past fifteen days or so zealously practicing with his new eyes. Everything the doctor promised him is true. The miracle of sight pushed into new dimensions. It’s all been thrilling. And the luxury of his situation is undeniable. Any kind of food he wants. (Although he would have been satisfied with frack—processed krill. ) Music, holovision, and most prized, the company of June. But all of a sudden today, he is feeling a little irritable. Where and what is this job they hired him for? Why has he not met his employer face to face yet? He begins to wonder if this is all some sort of ultra-elaborate sluff.

  Stone stops before a full-length mirror mounted on a closet door. Mirrors still have the power to fascinate him utterly. That totally obedient duplicate imitating one’s every move, will-less except for his will. And the secondary world in the background, unattainable and silent. During the years in the Bungle when he still retained his eyes, Stone never saw his reflection in anything but puddles or shards of windows. Now he confronts the immaculate stranger in the mirror, seeking clues in his features to the essential personality beneath.