the Commensality, and the rough, two-backed beast they make up, sprawling across all creation, locked together in a perpetual ritual encounter akin to both sex and cannibalism. (You’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, I hope, but food and mating are Commensality preoccupations.)
The trouble is that the two systems (although I might make the point here that the Commensality is really a myriad systems that happen to acknowledge a rather limited set of common principles) are just so damned incompatible.
The Conservancy believes in government by an elite corps of trained professionals, enforcing laws meant to secure the maximum good for the greatest numbers. They desire physical and temporal continuity across the stars, which, you’ll pardon my bluntness, is just plain crazy, given the facts of travel by Heisenberg transition. (What can borders possibly demarcate when every point on the space-time continuum is contiguous with every other point?) And they have that completely illogical fetish about an imaginary purity that mankind must adhere to.
That’s the Conservancy. I know its principles intimately, from arguments with one of its sharpest proponents, my brother.
His name?
That doesn’t matter.
He’s dead now.
Anyway. Now what about us? The Commensality.
Our precepts are harder to codify. We don’t have an official canon like theirs. But there’re a few saints in our hagiography, and one was a pantheistic holy fool from Truehome who claimed, “That government governs best which governs least.” We subscribe to that. Also the essential equality of all sophonts, unlike those species chauvinists.
How, you might wonder, does one go about implementing such ideals? Some central coordination is required in any society above a certain level, and once one grants power to any subset of people, it seems they always manage to want more and more. And equality—that’s an even more fantastic notion.
The answer to both is Babylon.
Not the city. The AOI beneath it.
Running every large-sized social unit that calls itself part of the Commensality you will find an Artificial Organic Intelligence. Basically a huge biofabbed mass of paraneurons, with an information-carrying capacity that no one has yet effectively delimited, these beings communicate among themselves across space—and with us via TAP. They hold all knowledge in common, dispensing it upon request. (Fair access to information is equality.) They coordinate interpersonal communications by the Tele-Adjunct and Psychoprosthetic which is as much a part of every member of the Commensality as any sensory organ he was born with. And through their agents—mek and human—they do all the managerial scutwork that is so damn boring but necessary.
How can we stand to entrust our welfare to such a “thing?”
How can Conservators stand to entrust their welfare to fallible humans?
That “thing” is literally no more capable of self-aggrandizement than a person is of keeping his pupils dilated if I flash a bright light in his eyes. And for the same reason: built-in biological limits. AOI’s are the first truly beneficent “rulers” in history. (Of course you know that word in spoken quotes is all wrong.)
Beneficent, that is, until someone or something threatens them or the Commensality.
Then watch out.
Which brings us to the end of digression—
—and the beginning of panic.
* * * *
I was talking with Babylon.
The ceramic pavement grew cold beneath my bare feet, although objectively nothing changed. The shadows (not Shadow) around us seemed deep enough to swallow galaxies. I dipped a blunt finger under my torc and rimmed its reassuring solidity. My heart was beating like the core of a sun, and I willed it down to normal.
I knew Ace was going to be a little slower, now that he had been cored—
(Cored? Babylon catches a person who, despite the elastic parameters of life in the Commensality, has qualified as a disruptive rogue, destructive to the freedom of others. ((It’s all very scientific, each person building up a life-index sorta like karma in the AOI’s banks, and you have to be pretty nasty to qualify for coring. My daily complacency hinged on the belief that I wasn’t.)) In a simple operation, the rogue’s higher brain components are scooped out, leaving enough of the reptilian brain to handle the autonomic functions. A mass of paraneurons is dumped in, giving the AOI direct control of the body, and voila, an agent. Best use of a bad apple. Moral: don’t screw with Babylon and your fellows.)
—but I couldn’t gamble on taking him out, or outrunning whatever weaponry he had modded in.
Thinking fast, I realized that maybe there was no reason to do either. Perhaps this was strictly a social call, having nothing to do with any of my nefarious deeds.
Although I doubted it, I decided to play it that way.
“Ace—uh, Babylon. Hello. Nice to see you. A simple TAP would have gotten my attention just as well.”
The dead man didn’t smile. I had heard that Babylon had trouble portraying emotions, and Ace’s immobile features tended to confirm this.
“That is exactly the opposite of the truth,” said the AOI with the living corpse’s unmodulated voice. “You could have denied the TAP. But not this revenant. I find such encounters quite effective.”
Babylon stared at me until shivers laddered my dorsal plaques. Then he spoke again.
“Let us walk. We have things to speak of.”
What could I say?
We started walking down the nearly empty pre-dawn streets.
Above, it began to rain liquid methane. It sounded like a horde of little clawed animals scrambling atop the dome.
“The Conservancy has made a new move in their war on us,” were Babylon’s first words after we began to stroll, him in a slightly stiff-legged way.
“War is dead,” I parroted.
“Insofar as you mean attack by gross physical means, you merely repeat common knowledge. Neither we nor the Conservancy dare risk antagonizing the other to the point where our opponent would be provoked to, say, translate a few tons of rock directly into the same coordinates as a population center. Being equally vulnerable, we are all equally restrained. But the universe we know is in a constant state of war nonetheless. Our weapon is sheer example. By running an open society, we seduce individuals and worlds constantly away from the Conservancy. Their weapon is propaganda of a most insidious sort.”
I stopped short. “They’ve brought the Chronicle to Babylon.”
“Yes. The Conservancy has sent a representative carrying their Chronicle of Mankind. He’s just moved into the Gardens, and is already playing it for the curious. I am helpless to stop him. My whole reason for being is the free dissemination of information. But the information he has brought is a virus that will kill this world, or at least transform it into an outpost of the Conservancy. Which is the same as death for you and me. Unless we kill him first.”
I started walking again,
