Babylon Sisters Read online

  Stone is short and skinny, traces of malnourishment plain in his stature. But his limbs are straight, his lean muscles hard. His skin where it shows from beneath the sleeveless black one-piece is weather-roughened and scarred. Plyoskin slippers—tough, yet almost as good as barefoot—cover his feet.

  His face. All intersecting planes, like that strange picture in his bedroom. (Did June say “Picasso”?) Sharp jaw, thin nose, blond stubble on his skull. And his eyes: faceted dull-black hemispheres: inhuman. But don’t take them back, please; I’ll do whatever you want.

  Behind him the exit door to his suite opens. It’s June. Without conscious thought, Stone’s impatience spills out in words, which pile one for one atop June’s simultaneous sentence, merging completely at the end.

  “I want to see—”

  “We’re going to visit—”

  “—Alice Citrine.”

  Fifty floors above Stone’s suite, the view of the city is even more spectacular. Stone has learned from June that the Citrine Tower stands on land that did not even exist a century ago. Pressure to expand motivated a vast landfill in the East River, south of the Brooklyn Bridge. On part of this artificial real estate, the Citrine Tower was built in the Oughts, during the boom period following the Second Constitutional Convention.

  Stone boosts the photon-electron ratio of his eyes, and the East River becomes a sheet of white fire. A momentary diversion to ease his nerves.

  “Stand here with me,” June says, indicating a disk just beyond thc elevator door, a few meters from another entrance.

  Stone complies. He imagines he can feel the scanning rays on him, although it is probably just the nearness of June, whose elbow touches his. Her scent fills his nostrils, and he fcrvently hopes that having eyes won’t dull his other senses.

  Silently the door opens for them.

  June guides him through.

  Alice Citrine waits inside.

  The woman sits in a powered chair behind a horseshoe-shaped bank of screens. Her short hair is corn-yellow, her skin unlined, yet Stone intuits a vast age clinging to her, the same way he used to be able to sense emotions when blind. He studies her aquiline profile, familiar somehow as a face once dreamed is familiar.

  She swivels, presenting her full features. June has led them to within a meter of the burnished console.

  “Good to see you, Mr Stone,” says Citrine. “I take it you are comfortable, no complaints.”

  “Yes,” Stone says. He tries to summon up the thanks he meant to give, but can’t find them anywhere, so disconcerted is he. Instead, he says tentatively, “My job—”

  “Naturally you’re curious,” Citrine says. “It must be something underhanded or loathsome or deadly. Why else would I need to recruit someone from the Bungle? Well, let me at last satisfy you. Your job, Mr. Stone, is to study.”

  Stone is dumbfounded. “Study?”

  “Yes, study. You know the meaning of the word, don’t you? Or have I made a mistake? Study, learn, investigate, and whenever you feel you understand something, draft me a report.”

  Stone’s bafflement had passed through amazement to incredulity. “I can’t even read or write,” he says. “And what the frack am I supposed to study?”

  “Your field of study, Mr. Stone, is this contemporary world of ours. I have had a large part, as you may know, in making this world what it is today. And as I reach the limits of my life, I grow more interested in whether what I have built is bad or good. I have plenty of reports from experts, both positive and negative. But what I want now is a fresh view from one of the underdwellers. All I ask is honesty and accuracy.

  “As for reading and writing—those outmoded skills of my youth—June will assist you in learning those if you wish. But you have machines to read to you and transcribe your speech. You may start at once.”

  Stone tries to assimilate this mad request. It seems capricious, a cover for deeper, darker deeds. But what can he do except say yes?

  He agrees.

  A tiny smile plucks at the woman’s lips. “Fine. Then our talk is over. Ch. one last thing. If you need to conduct on-site research, June must accompany you. And you will mention my sponsorship of you to no one. I don’t want sycophants.”

  The conditions are easy—especially having June always close—and Stone nods his acceptance.

  Citrine turns her back to them then. Stone is startled by what he sees, almost believing his eyes defective.

  Perched on the broad back of her chair is a small animal resembling a lemur or tarsier. Its big, luminous eyes gaze soulfully at them, its long tail arcs in a spiral above its back.

  “Her pet,” whispers June, and hurries Stone away.

  * * * *

  The task is too huge, too complex. Stone considers himself a fool for ever having accepted.

  But what else could he have done, if he wanted to keep his eyes?

  Stone’s cramped and circumscribed life in the Bungle has not prepared him well to fathom the multiplex, extravagant, pulsating world he has been transported to. (At least this is what he initially feels.) Literally and figuratively kept in the dark for so long, he finds the world outside the Citrine Tower a mystifying place.

  There are hundreds, thousands of things he has never heard of before. People, cities, objects, events. There are areas of expertise whose names he can hardly pronounce. Areology, chaoticism, fractal modeling, paraneurology. And don’t forget history, that bottomless well atop which the present moment is but a scrim of bubbles. Stone is, perhaps, most shocked by his discovery of history. He cannot recall ever having considered life as extending backward in time beyond his birth. The revelation of decades, centuries. millennia nearly pushes him into a mental abyss. How can one hope to comprehend the present without knowing all that has gone before?

  Hopeless, insane, suicidal to persist.

  Yet Stone persists.

  He closets himself with his magic window on the world, a terminal that interfaces with the central computer in the Citrine Tower—itself a vast, unintelligible hive of activity—and through that machine to almost every other in the world. For hours on end, images and words flash by him, like knives thrown by a circus performer—knives that he, the loyal but dumb assistant, must catch to survive.

  Stone’s memory is excellent, trained in a cruel school, and he assimilates much. But each path he follows has a branch every few steps, and each branch splits at frequent points, and those tertiary branches also sprout new ones, no less rich than the primaries....

  Once Stone nearly drowned, when a gang left him unconscious in a gutter and it began to rain. He recalls the sensation now.

  June brings him three meals faithfully each day. Her presence still thrills him. Each night, as he lies abed, he replays stored images of her to lull him asleep. June bending, sitting, laughing, her Asian eyes aglow. The subtle curves of her breasts and hips. But the knowledge-fever is stronger, and he tends to ignore her as the days go by.

  One afternoon Stone notices a pill on his lunch tray. He asks June its nature.

  “Its a mnemotropin—promotes the encoding of long-term memories,” she replies. “I thought it might help you.”

  Stone swallows it greedily, and returns to the droning screen.

  Each day he finds a pill at lunch. His brain seems to expand to a larger volume soon after he takes them. The effect is potent, allowing him to imagine he can ingest the world. But still, each night when he finally forces himself to stop, he feels he has not done enough.

  Weeks pass. He has not prepared a single sentence for Alice Citrine. What does he understand? Nothing. How can he pass judgment on the world? It’s hubris, folly. How long will she wait before she kicks his ass out onto the cold street?

  Stone drops his head in his hands. The mocking machine before him torments him with a steady diarrhea of useless facts.

  A hand falls lightly on his quivering shoulder. Stone imbibes June’s sweet scent.

  Stone smashes the terminal’s power stud with the base
of his palm so fiercely it hurts. Blessed silenee. He looks up at June.

  “I’m no damn good at this. Why’d she pick me? I don’t even know where to start.”

  June sits on a cushion beside him. “Stone, I haven’t said anything, because I was ordered not to direct you. But I don’t think sharing a little of my experience will count as interference. You’ve got to limit your topic, Stone. The world’s too big. Alice doesn’t expect you to comprehend it all, distill it into a masterpiece of concision and sense.

  “The world doesn’t lend itself to such summations, anyway. I think you unconsciously know what she wants. She gave you a clue when you talked to her.”

  Stone summons up that day, plays back a view he filed of the stern old woman. Her features occult June’s. The visual cue drags along a phrase.

  “—whether what I have built is bad or good.”

  It is as if Stone’s eyes have overloaded. Insight floods him with relief. Of course, the vain and powerful woman sees her life as the dominant theme of the modern era, a radiant thread passing through time, with critical nodes of action strung on it like beads. How much easier to understand a single human life than that of the whole world. (Or so he believes at the moment.) That much he thinks he can do. Chart Citrine’s personal history, the ramifications of her long career, the ripples spreading from her throne. Who knows? It might indeed prove archetypal.

  Stone wraps his arms around June in exultation, gives a wordless shout. She doesn’t resist his embrace, and they fall back upon the couch.

  Her lips are warm and complaisant under his. Her nipples seem to burn through her shirt and into his chest. His left leg is trapped between her thighs.

  Suddenly he pulls back. He has seen himself too vividly: scrawny castoff from the sewer of the city, with eyes not even human.

  “No,” he says bitterly. “You can’t want me.”

  “Quiet,” she says, “quiet.” Her hands are on his face; she kisses his neck; his spine melts; and he falls atop her again, too hungry to stop.

  “You’re so foolish for someone so smart,” she murmurs to him afterwards. “Just like Alice.”

  He does not consider her meaning.

  * * * *

  The roof of the Citrine Tower is a landing facility for phaetons, the suborbital vehicles of companies and their executives. He feels he has learned all he can of Alice Citrine’s life, while cooped up in the tower. Now he wants the heft and feel of actual places and people to judge her by.

  But before they may leave, June tells Stone, they must speak to Jerrold Scarfe.

  In a small departure lounge, all soft white corrugated walls and molded chairs, the three meet.

  Scarfe is head of security for Citrine Technologies. A compact, wiry man, exhibiting a minimum of facial expressions, he strikes Stone as eminently competent, from the top of his permanently depilated and tattooed skull to his booted feet. On his chest he wears the CT emblem: a red spiral with an arrowhead on its outer terminus, pointing up.

  June greets Scarfe with some familiarity, and asks, “Are we cleared?”

  Scarfe waggles a sheet of flimsy in the air. “Your flight plan is quite extensive. Is it really necessary, for instance, to visit a place like Mexico City, with Mr. Stone aboard?”

  Stone wonders at Scarfe’s solicitude for him, an unimportant stranger. June interprets Stone’s puzzled look and explains. “Jerrold is one of the few people that know you represent Miz Citrine. Naturally, he’s worried that if we run into trouble of some kind, the fallout will descend on Citrine Technologies.”

  “I’m not looking for trouble, Mr. Scarfe. I just want to do my job.”

  Scarfe scans Stone as intentlv as the devices outside Alice Citrine’s sanctum. The favorable result is eventually expressed as a mild grunt, and the announcement, “Your pilot’s waiting. Go ahead.”

  Higher off the grasping earth than he has ever been before, his right hand atop June’s left knee, feeling wild and rich and free, Stone ruminates over his life of Alice Citrine, and the sense he is beginning to make of it.

  Alice Citrine is 159 years old. When she was born, America was still com­ prised of states, rather than FEZ and ARCadias. Man had barely begun to fly. When she was in her sixties, she headed a firm called Citrine Biotics. This was the time of the Trade Wars, wars as deadly and decisive as military ones, yet fought with tarriffs and five-year plans, automated assembly lines and fifth-generation decision­making constructs. This was also the time of the Second Constitutional Convention, that revamping of America for the state of war.

  During the years when the country was being divided into Free Enterprise Zones—urban, hi-tek, autonomous regions, where the only laws were those imposed by corporations and the only goal was profits and dominance—and Areas of Restrictive Control—rural, mainly agricultural enclaves, where older values were strictly enforced—Citrine Biotics refined and perfected the work of their reseachers and others in the field of carbon chips: microbiological assemblies, blood-borne programmed repair units. The final product, marketed by Citrine to those who could afford it, was near-total rejuvenation, the cell-slough—or, simply, the sluff.

  Citrine Biotics headed the Fortune 500 within six years.

  By then it was Citrine Technologies.

  And Alice Citrince sat atop it all.

  But not forever.

  Entropy will not be cheated. The information-degradation that DNA undergoes with age is not totally reversible. Errors accumulate despite the hardworking carbon chips. The body dutiful gives out the end.

  Alice Citrine is nearing the theoretical close of her extended life. Despite her youthful looks, one day a vital organ will fail, the result of a million bad transcriptions.

  She needs Stone, of all people, to justify her existence.

  Stone squeezes June’s knee and relishes the sense of importance. For the first time in his sad and dingy life, he can make a difference. His words, his perceptions matter. He is determined to do a good job, to tell the truth as he perceives it.

  “June,” Stone says emphatically, “I have to see everything.”

  She smiles. “You will, Stone. You will indeed.”

  * * * *

  And the phaeton comes down—

  —in Mexico City, which crashed last year at population 35 million. Citrine Technologies is funding a relief effort there, operating out of their Houston and Dallas locations. Stone is suspicious of the motives behind the campaign. Why didn’t they step in before the point of collapse? Can it be that they are worried now only about refugees flooding across the border? Whatever the reasons, though, Stone cannot deny that the CT workers are a force for good, ministering to the sick and hungry, reestablishing electrical power and communications, propping up (acting as?) the city government. He boards the phaeton with his head spinning, and soon fmds himself—

  —in the Antarctic, where he and June are choppered out from the CT domes to a krill-processing ship, source of so much of the world’s protein. June finds the frack stench offensive, but Stone breathes deeply, exhilarated at being afloat in these strange and icy latitudes, watching the capable men and woman work. June is happy to be soon aloft, and then—

  —in Peking, where CT heuristic specialists are working on the first Artificial Organic Intelligence. Stone listens with amusement to a debate over whether the AOI should be named K’ung Fu-tzu or Mao.

  The week is a kaleidoscopic whirl of impressions. Stone feels like a sponge, soaking up the sights and sounds so long denied him. At one point he finds himself leaving a restaurant with June, in a city whose name he has forgotten. In his hand is his ID card, with which he had just paid for their meal. A holoportrait stares up from his palm. The face is cadaverous, filthy, with two empty, crusted sockets for eyes. Stone remembers the warm laser fingers taking his holo in the Immigration Office. Was that really he? The day seems like an event from someone else’s life. He pockets his card, unsure whether to have the holo updated or to keep it as a token of where he has come f
rom.

  And where he might end up?

  (What will she do with him after he reports?)

  When Stone asks one day to see orbital installations, June calls a halt. “I think we’ve done enough for one trip, Stone. Let’s get back, so you can start to put it all together.”

  With her words, a deep bone­weariness suddenly overtakes Stone, and his manic high evaporates. He silently assents.

  * * * *

  Stone’s bedroom is dark, except for the diffuse lights of the city seeping in through a window. Stone has multiplied his vision, the better to admire the naked glowing form of June beside him. He has found that colors grow muddy in the absence of enough photons, but that a very vivid black-and white image can be had. He feels like a dweller in the past century, watching a primitive film. Except that June is very much alive beneath his hands.

  June’s body is a tracery of lambent lines, like some arcane capillary circuitry in the core of Mao/K’ung Fu­tzu. Following the current craze, she has had a subdermal pattern of microchannels implanted. The channels are filled with synthetic luciferase, the biochemical responsible for the glow of fireflies, which she can now trigger at will. In the afterglow of their lovemaking, she has set herself alight. Her breasts are whorls of cold fire, her shaven pubic mound a spiral galaxy dragging Stone’s gaze into illimitable depths.

  June is speaking in a abstracted way of her life before Stone, pondering the ceiling while he idly strokes her.

  “My mother was the only surviving child of two refugees. Vietnamese. Came to America shortly after the Asian War. Did the only thing they knew how to do, which was fish. They lived in Texas, on the Gulf. My mother went to college on a scholarship. There she met my father, who was another refugee of sorts. He left Germany with his parents after its Reunification. They said the compromise government was neither one thing nor the other, and they couldn’t deal with it. I guess my background is some sort of microcosm of a lot of the upheavals of our times.”

  She catches Stone’s hand between her knees and holds it tightly. “But I feel a calmness with you right now, Stone.”

  As she continues to speak of things she has seen, people she has known, her career as Citrine’s personal assistant, the oddest feeling creeps over Stone. As her words integrate themselves into his growing picture of the world, he feels the same abyssmal tidal suck that he first felt upon learning of history