quarter of a kilometer up above the ceramic pavement. I made the mistake of looking down on the carpet of lights, and dizziness blurred my senses. I stopped climbing for a moment until I regained my equilibrium. Then I went as fast as I dared straight to the top.
A leg over the railing, then the other, and I was standing on solid “ground” again. The commingled scents of flowers greeted me.
My arms ached and my legs felt like gelatin. My chest and back were slicked with sweat and possibly blood from my reopened wound. The tension had nurtured a headache that kicked with every pulse.
But beneath my waistband was a fortune waiting to be redeemed.
I looked up in relief. At such a time it would have been good to look upon the stars. (You see, I retained some Conservancy attitudes even after living in Babylon for so long.)
But only a gaudy greasy fog greeted my gaze.
So I moved off.
Avoiding the couples, triplets and quartets (“More than four’s a bore,” they said in the city that month; next month it would be something altogether different, if not antithetical) gathered in the hidden dim purlieus and bowers, past the dancers adorning a plaza, and to the airbus stand.
If I had known then how soon I’d be back in the Gardens, I might not have hurried so.
Minutes later I was down, and lost in the busy streets.
I still had a lot to do. Meet the fence who’d buy my prize, recharge by induction field the subepidermal capacitor that powered my one-shot laser, then, finally, relax.
Task one took an hour, two a minute of that same hour, and three—
I was in a bar that catered to my kind of pleasure, relaxing with a drink, when I spotted him. He was the most beautiful godhorse I had ever seen.
Conservators, of course, call them mantises, or sometimes even bugs. Funny, then, how they resent being called apes themselves. (Once I TAPPED an ancient novel about humanity warring with a race called Bugs, and wished I never had. Pure Conservancy thinking at its most raw.) But any human in the Commensality will call them by some variation of the old folk etymology, godhorse.
This one was a male, with proud uplifted pyramidal head and finely formed mandibles, shining thorax and strong hind legs. His four folded wings were strong gemmed membranes that stirred slightly as I watched; his forelegs were delicacy and precision incarnate. His color at the moment was a relaxed olive.
I’m a big man, but he was taller, although not half my mass.
I initiated a TAP between us. The godhorses understood human language, but our ears were just not set up to interpret their stridulations. Without Babylon as intermediary, we would have been unable to communicate.
And a TAP was so much more intimate anyway.
[Commensal,] I sent in the familiar way, [your sustenance is mine.]
[And yours mine,] he replied. [Do you wish an encounter?]
[Very much,] I said. [And you?]
[You are a handsome human. I have never seen your color skin before. It is like space itself.]
I knew he was newly arrived then, since I’m hardly the only one in Babylon of this shade. [I take that as a yes,] I sent. [Shall we go to a place I know of?]
[Indeed.]
We left the bar together, and—
I pause here, recalling the reactions I’ve gotten from Conservators when I’ve described relations among Commensals before. They always adjust their bodyfoggers to hide their faces in disgust. That’s one thing I can’t stand. I expect them to listen as fellow sophonts, not as chaoses of optical distortion. Conservators might call all who embrace the Commensality perverts, but they always damn well learn before I’m done that we’re perverts with principles.
As I was saying:
—went to a Commensality-supported sensorium.
In our private cube I stripped off my lone pouch of a garment. (I was still barefoot and harnessless). The godhorse wore not so much as a button. He had turned a bright red with excitement.
I laid down on my stomach on the soft warm organiform couch in the twilit room, and he climbed atop me. His chitin was cool, and he weighed nothing in Babylon’s light gravity. His mandibles clacked alongside my collared neck, and his forearm spurs bit into my back. (And now you know the reason for my spinal plaques and carcanet: protection from a caress too violent.)
[Now I master you!] he sent.
I felt his intoxicant saliva snail my jaw. (On Truehome they used to believe the brown drool of the little native godhorses would provoke madness.)
The godhorse stridulated wildly, sawing his hindlegs against his wings. Knowing what was next, I got more excited.
Pinning me in a hold I could easily have broken, but chose not to (isn’t that the essence of love?), he bit my shoulder, opening up old scars.
His saliva mingled with my blood.
In seconds the world exploded in hallucinatory pleasure, the hot bright fragments shooting off into the void, leaving only pure blackness behind, which swallowed me down and down.
When I came out of it, the godhorse was gone. I flipped over onto my back and let the couch grow a patch for my shoulder. Then I got up, dressed, and left.
What do they get out of it? Good question. The answer lies, I think, in the fact that only the male godhorses indulge, and don’t care if their partner is a male or female.
Imagine how you would feel if you could mount someone who absolutely, positively wouldn’t bite your head off, as a female or even fellow male godhorse might, in the throes of passion.
The fact that their saliva is synergistic with our biochemistry is just lagniappe for us.
Because they’re so beautiful, and humans are so exogamous, we’d lie with them anyway, I’m sure, even if they didn’t provide a dose of pure ecstasy.
I was tired and sated and anxious to get home and rest. Night was ending, a full twelve hours of hard work and near-death and the little death of pleasure, and my mind was foggy from it all.
So when the small man with the dead face stepped from an alley outside the sensorium and said, “Hello, Meat,” (more about my name later) I didn’t react as fast as usual.
Squinting (the light-globe here was dead and lying on the syalon, and the next nearest was three meters off), I said, “Ace? How are you? I heard a bad rumor about you. They said you were brain-cored.”
His voice was without affect. “He was.”
So then I knew.
I was talking with Babylon.
* * * *
Let’s digress a minute.
The topic?
Governments.
