Babylon Sisters Read online

  “Sheldrake Mountain is such a place.

  “Each level of the Mountain, from what I like to call the Downtown of the tidal flats to Uptown, where we are now, hosts only a certain number and type of lifeform-shaping morphic fields. Other fields, such as those for water and minerals, appear to be constant.

  “But only the Uptown level features the human morphic field.

  “A human thrust into any other level is forced to resonate with the dominant field of that level.

  “They will lose their shape and memories, and assume those of the dominant lifeform of that gradient.

  “The members of the expedition to this world knew nothing of this. They landed atop Sheldrake Mountain, where their morphic stability was a lucky fluke. Then they set out to explore.

  “No one ever returned. The fields overpowered them all within minutes of their landing within each gradient. We now know that a quarter of an hour is all it takes. There are no barriers to hide behind, neither material nor contraforce.

  “I was the only one left behind. I watched everything in realtime on the screens, all my comrades slithering, bursting and crawling out of their clothes. I was stunned beyond words. For days I wandered through Uptown in a stupor. Then I decided what to do.

  “It was impossible for me to catch any of the speedier dominant lifeforms in the short time allotted to me on their levels. I had no traps, nothing to stun a creature. But I thought I might be able to snatch some of the little mud puppies during their exposure at low tide.

  “It took me many more days to nerve myself up to the task. I worried that I might change even in my flight through the zones, but then realized that none of the others had, nor had we altered during our descent from orbit. Apparently, swift passage through the gradients allowed morphic memory to keep the human form stable.

  “I made my quick descent and my catch, returning intact with a mud skipper. Before my eyes he underwent morphic resonance to human shape.

  “Was he one of my original comrades, or a native skipper? I could have compared his karma print with the crew records, but refrained. It was too painful. In any case, there was no possibility of his regaining his personality or memories. Although such things are contained within the morphic fields, they are diffused and unrecoverable.

  “I put the new person through the pedagogue, our device for teaching children.

  “Together, I led him in bringing six more skippers Uptown.

  “Then, disheartened, I stopped.

  “What was the use of turning more mud puppies into humans, filling Uptown with them? They would never be my original comrades. Equally impossible was leaving this miserable planet and returning home. It requires special skills to pilot the ship across interstellar space, skills which I did not possess, and which were not in the pedagogue’s repertoire. No one had ever conceived of a disaster of this magnitude. And even if were to return somehow—well, those who had authorized this expedition do not look kindly on failure.

  “Now the eight of us amuse ourselves here as best we can. We take tribute from the next level down to supplement the diet of the food-machines. And whenever one of my little mud puppie ... When there occurs a gap in our ranks, I recruit a replacement.

  “But not at random any more. The replacement must prove himself or herself, by making his way up Sheldrake Mountain without help.

  “As you did, my darling Quintero.”

  9.

  Primus, Deuce, Tersh, Vair, Sext, Set. With Octavia and Mud Puppy, they formed the full complement of Uptown: three women and five men. (Gender seemed a karma-linked trait, preserved from one incarnation to another. And since it was impossible to tell the gender of a mud puppy in the short time Octavia had to select one, random chance had resulted in this distribution.)

  “I’m so glad you turned out male, Quintero,” said Octavia. Poised naked above him, knees in his ribs, she stopped just short of inserting his cock up her. “The others are starting to grow stale. They bore me.” She slid down on him. “Don’t bore me.”

  Mud Puppy tried not to.

  The dynamics among the Uptowners were intricate and fluid. Mud Puppy at first found them almost impossible to interpret. But as the days and weeks passed, he grew more adept at understanding the relationships, the dominant theme of which was subservience to Octavia.

  Vair was a green-eyed, flame-haired woman. Mud Puppy found her nearly as attractive as Octavia, although admittedly without that special thrill that Octavia held for him. He abstained at first from becoming too intimate with her, fearing Octavia’s displeasure. But when Octavia gave him permission to go with her and do whatever he wished, he eagerly sought Vair out in private.

  “Octavia wants a change, I see,” were Vair’s first words to him. “That didn’t take long. Still, you might have set a record. “

  Mud Puppy was hurt, but Vair’s caresses soon overcame his bruised feelings.

  Between bouts of sex, Vair, at his request, took him on a tour of Uptown.

  There were miles of corridors and dozens of levels sprawled out on the slope of Sheldrake Mountain. Roofed gardens and multistorey atriums, chambers full of inexplicable devices and empty rooms that changed shape from visit to visit, a hanger with skycraft in rows...

  “The expedition must have been here a while before their accident in order to build all this, even with the help of machines. But where’s their ship?”

  Vair laughed. “I had forgotten how naive you skippers could be. Uptown is the ship!”

  * * * *

  On what he took to be the top level (there were no more stairs to be seen), Mud Puppy laid his hand on a hatch. Vair yanked it off.

  “You can’t leave Uptown this way! It’s too dangerous! We only go out when Octavia orders us, and then we use the skycrafts.”

  There seemed no good reason to contravene this injunction—though Mud Puppy felt an unnameable lure emanating from beyond the door—so he turned away.

  Mud Puppy seldom saw Primus, and then only from a distance. The first to join Octavia, he kept mostly to his rooms. According to the others, he had not always been so reclusive. Something had recently soured him on life.

  One night when he found he couldn’t sleep, Mud Puppy left Octavia in bed—he was currently her favorite again—and went to a nearby food-machine. He encountered Primus there, hastily gathering supplies.

  Primus seemed bowed under a perpetual stoop. “So, you’re the newest one, are you? Well, enjoy it while you can.”

  And with that enigmatic comment, the hermit of Uptown scurried off, clutching his armful of meal-paks.

  Back in the rooms he shared with Octavia, Mud Puppy set up the flatscreen and watched his short history over and over till morning.

  10.

  Mud Puppy returned to his quarters from taking his exercise in one of Uptown’s largest rooms, where he ran around and around the circumference like an animal trapped in a well. He was the only one who followed this regimen.

  Muffled cries of ecstatic pain emanated from his suite.

  Octavia’s head rose up and down in Tersh’s lap, while Deuce employed a lash on her back and buttocks.

  Mud Puppy fled to Vair.

  He found her with Sext and Set.

  One leg dangling over the edge of a parapet, he hesitated.

  To die by falling downward now, after struggling upward through so much—

  No. Any way out but that. Not down.

  11.

  The skycraft landed outside the hominid village.

  Octavia yawned. “Another appearance by the gods. This place is so tedious! I had stopped coming till just before your arrival, Quint. But I suppose it’s our duty. Well, let’s hurry—the counters are flickering fast.”

  It must have been contamination from the hominid morphic field. Mud Puppy could recall clear as sunlight the image of Octavia standing in the door of the skycraft, while he grovelled in the dirt. The memory from another existence sliced like a knife. How heavenly she had appeared then. How tainted no
w...

  There was another captive to be disposed of this time.

  Tumbled insensate into a corner of the hold, the trussed hominid was placed under Mud Puppy’s surveillance.

  Shortly, they were above the ocean. Octavia appeared in the hold. She activated a control, and bay doors slid open while they hovered.

  “Push him out, Quint,” she ordered. “And make it fast—we can’t linger.”

  Mud Puppy hesitated.

  “Oh, don’t worry, you’re not killing him. He’ll be a skipper almost before he hits the water.”

  Deuce appeared in the doorway.

  “It’s him or you, Quint,” said Octavia.

  Mud Puppy rolled the hominid out. He found the wailing cry of the victim impossible to extinguish from his brain.

  12.

  Primus’s rooms were dark and musty, by choice rather than any malfunction of Uptown equipment. He had blocked vents and broken most of the illuminants. Now, only after hours of cajoling, was he speaking freely to Mud Puppy.

  “I’m the last of the original seven left. Poor Primus. She keeps me around for sentimental reasons, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Just as you’re a replacement for the old Quintero, so have all the others been replaced. And not just once, but several times. This current Deuce, though, he’s the worst—”

  “What—what did they all die of?”

  Primus cackled. “A bad case of Octavia. They made the trip down to the flats, but never returned. Instead, a new mud puppy was started on its way as their replacement.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would she do it?”

  “She’s insane. When she tires of someone, or they offend her, she simply disposes of them.”

  “I suppose seeing all her fellow expedition members transformed made her crazy—”

  “Is she claiming again that she’s the only surviving human? She hasn’t used that story in a long time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why, Octavia’s no more an original human from the stars than you or I. She was born a hominid. Driven out of the village for some transgression, she crossed a gradient. It’s all on disc. After her transformation, still rather blank­ brained, she stumbled on Uptown. It was empty. Somehow she got herself into the pedagogue. It was on automatic. When she came out, she knew a few things. She changed the settings on the pedagogue. None of us emerge knowing as much as her. She also activated the perimeter defenses to kill any hominids that try to cross. Except for those former mud puppies whose kamma prints are locked in. And she only keeps seven of us around at a time for fear of a mutiny. Not that any of us seem able to really resist her.”

  “Where—where did the original humans go then?”

  “No one knows but me and Octavia. She let it slip in the excitement of having someone to talk to, before she grew quite so self-possessed. You see, there’s more Mountain above us. A gradient above the human. When Uptown landed, the crew was drawn up, not down. They abandoned the ship to become something else. But in doing so, they placed this awful roadblock on the natural path of the Mountain. “

  Mud Puppy clutched Primus’s wrist. “I’m going now, escaping. Come with me.”

  “No, I can’t. I’ve been here too long. Good luck to you though. If you make it, try to remember us.”

  “I will.”

  Cutting through a garden, Mud Puppy encountered Octavia and Deuce.

  He tried to avoid them, but they forced a confrontation.

  “Where have you been?” demanded Deuce.

  “More to the point, where are you going?” said Octavia.

  Mud Puppy didn’t answer. He made to move on.

  “You need to be taught to respect authority,” said Octavia. “Deuce—”

  The blow to his jaw caught Mud Puppy by surprise. A second to his gut doubled him over and sent him face forward into the dirt of the garden.

  His world was nothing but mud—

  No!

  He propelled himself forward, tackling the overconfident Deuce and toppling him. He clambered atop him, grabbed his hair and pounded his head into the earth.

  When the body below him went slack, Mud Puppy rose shakily.

  Octavia’s face was lustful. “You can be the new Deuce now. You’ve earned it. We’ll bring up a new Quintero—”

  Mud Puppy wiped the blood from his mouth and smeared it on Octavia’s face. Her sweet tongue crept out to lick it.

  He left her moaning.

  The hatch on the top level opened easily to his touch.

  Emerald lawns sloped up. The pinnacle of Sheldrake Mountain was visible through a mantle of clouds.

  The change in gradients was like a woman’s hair across his face.

  OTTO AND TOTO IN THE OORT

  Ninety percent of all the slackers who ever lived and didn’t work. are alive and not working in our century.

  —John “Woodie” Campbell XXIV.

  * * * *

  Barbituates and Dexedrine are dangerous drugs, but used with care they can smooth. over the inevitable disturbances of travel most wonderfully. I carry them....

  —Robert A. Heinlein, Tramp Royale.

  * * * *

  Let’s get this mother out of here.

  —Concluding words of the Apollo program, spoken on the Moon by Eugene Cernan.

  * * * *

  Out around the asteroid belt, on what was turning out to be a megasuppressor of a trip, the drugs began to wear off, and we knew it was time for another taste of the frog.

  “Get Buffo out of his cage,” Otto said.

  “You get him,” Toto replied peevishly. “I had to handle him first the last time, and he peed in my hands.”

  “Listen, who’s the virtual human here, you or me’?”

  “You are.”

  Shaggy, immense, buck-naked perfect. twin to Toto, ursine Otto now rose up off his warm furred couch. “That’s absurd! You know perfectly well that. I created you out. of cornucopions in my image. I didn’t want. to but I had to. All because of that stupid Pansystem legislation. ‘Use it up, wear it out, waste some more....’ I couldn’t keep up with my assigned goals, and so I created you to help. You’re registered with the authorities on Venus. Why, just look on the sole of your left foot and you’ll see your tattoon.”

  Toto, still sitting on the edge of his own pilosofa, lifted his unshod and hairy left foot onto his right knee. The registration tattoon blinked beneath the bare skin of his sole.

  Toto wiggled his long toes leisurely and somewhat disdainfully before replying.

  “lt’s true. But what about your own?”

  Otto narrowed his eyes suspiciously “What do you mean?”

  “Go ahead and look. Unless you’re afraid....”

  Otto, standing, cautiously bent his knee, exposing the bottom of his left foot He peered at it over his shoulder. Slowly he lowered it.

  “I’ll be damned. It’s true. I’ve got a tattoon too. When the hell did that happen?”.

  “It’s always been there, since I created vou. I only got a tattoon so you wouldn’t feel lone]y. You’re losing your mind from too much frog. You think you’re the real me.”

  Otto snorted like a pig. “Bull! You put it there while I was sleeping. Admit it.”

  “Maybe I did. And maybe I didn’t.”

  “Well, this is pointless. I know that I’m the baseline and you’re the copy. You’re nothing more than an artificiallv constrained standing wave. And when I’m done with you, I’ll dissolve you back into cornucopions.”

  “We’ll see about that., virt-boy.”

  “The hell with this stupid argument! I’m getting me some frog!”

  “Make it good and scary. And save some for me.”

  “Maybe.”

  Otto moved across the cruiser’s cabin to where a bulpy box venitilated with a few slits sat on a shelf. He opened the latched door of the biopoly container and reached both hands inside. Withdrawing them, he brought forth
an orange toad half as big as a breadbox. (The breadbox was right next to the cage and served handily as a comparative norm.) Otto clutched the toad around its squodgy midsection and held it at arms-length. Predictably, the toad released a copious stream of vivid purple urine into the air. The piss hit the duffish floor and was absorbed. Otto laughed.

  “Damn,” said the toad. “Didn’t even get your foot.”

  “That’s right, Buffo. Because I’m Otto the Original, faster and smarter than Toto the Copy.”

  Toto refused to rise to the bait. “Just get on with it please. This trip has been boring enough so far without having to listen to your tired witticisms.”

  Otto locked gazes with the flaccid and hapless amphibian. “Buffo, are you scared?”

  “No. Why should I be? I have plenty to eat, the ship is infallible and smarter than the two of you put together, and I know you’ll never hurt me. So why should I be scared?”

  Otto was a little taken aback. “Well, that’s all true. But there’s plenty of other things to be scared about.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, big things. Cosmic things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Plague and pestilence.”

  “Every microbe has a serial number, and every virus is patented.”

  “Hunger and suffering.”

  “Everyone photosynthesizes or bites the constant. And if you’re not distributed and renormalized, then you must want it that way, and you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.”

  “The sun going nova.”

  “We’ll move all the planets to greener pastures.”

  “Alien invaders from light-years away.”

  “The cosmic waterhole is dry, it seems.”

  “The heat death of the universe, then!”

  “That old chestnut. Besides, you already know how that will turn out.”

  Toto interrupted. “He’s got you there, Otto. Have you forgotten the ghosts atready?”

  “I thought they were just frog hallucinations....”

  “No, the ship recorded them. We really were visited by our far-future descendants voyaging through a temporal wormhole. Do you want me to replay it?”