sent some warning TAP. In a second her elastic features grew worried, and she hurried off.
At last I said, “Why are you telling me this? Can’t you just handle it yourself? Isn’t that your job, to protect our way of life?”
“There can be no official connection between me and the diplomat’s death. We dare not risk violent repercussions. So, I need a tool. And you are that tool.”
I risked some shuck and jive. I should have known it was useless.
“Me? I don’t know anything about such things. I’m a simple hedonist. Why, the very thought—”
Babylon laid a hand on my arm and I shut up.
Then he recited every last crime I’d committed since coming to Babylon.
It was a long list.
“So you see,” he finished, “I know you. You are the one I want. Find this Conservator and kill him. If we accomplish nothing else, we’ll buy a little time while the Conservancy decides what to do. At best, they might grow discouraged, and pick another target.”
I quit pretending. “What’s in it for me? Why should I risk myself to help you?”
“You’re a member of the Commensality,” Babylon reminded me. “As such, you’re a de facto enemy to the Conservancy. If they win here, and they catch you before you can get out in the mass exodus, they’ll scrub your brain. Me, they hate simply because I’m artificial. Mocklife, they call me. But you have two strikes against you. You’ve dared to modify the sacred human physiological ‘norm.’ And you practice miscegenation.”
“Anti-em,” I spat.
“Tagging your opponent with an expletive does not reduce his threat. And you should feel some loyalty toward your commensals. If that is not enough, then consider this. You are about to trip my rogue-trigger. Soon, if you continue your current lifestyle—and I do not predict you will change—you will become a legitimate target for my enmity. If you help me in this, I will wipe the ledger clean, and you will have at least as many years free from my dedicated pursuit as you have yet enjoyed.”
I thought about it for a minute. It seemed the type of argument that was kinda impossible to refute.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
Babylon didn’t smile, but I sensed an AOI analog to that emotion.
“I thought you would see things my way,” he said. Then:
[And I’ll be keeping track of you.]
* * * *
Day was born like a nova.
(Actually: lightstrips, Babylon, literalism, et cetera. )
I stood blinking for a second or two. When I was done, the body that had once been my pal Ace was gone. As to the nature of his future errands, I did not care to speculate. Especially since someday his fix might be mine. But I wouldn’t be able to worry about it if cored—or would I? What tiny portions of personality and memories were left intact, down there in the coree’s brainstem, and what must they feel?
I wasn’t anxious to find out.
Sudden fatigue washed over me like a tide of despair. I had gone a day now without sleep—not counting the godhorse-induced trance, which stimulated rather than soothed—and almost that long without food. I had been shot at by a mek, carried aloft on a floating island like Gulliver on Laputa (I remember TAPPING for that particular image), and scared half out of my wits by the civic entity who was supposed to be protecting me.
And the worst of it was that I couldn’t stop now. I had to think. Matters were far from settled. Just because I had told Babylon I was going to cooperate didn’t mean I would.
There was always the option of flight.
That might have been someone else’s first choice. After all, I claimed earlier that this is an age of running away. With interstellar travel so cheap and easy, what else could one expect? Intelligence has always deluded itself into believing that circumstances were the limiting factor, when usually it was intelligence itself that was the source of trouble. And you can’t flee yourself so easily.
Now, I’m not knocking escape. After all, I once fled to Babylon, and found a kind of happiness. But there was a good reason why I couldn’t just up and run now, except as a last resort, and I don’t expect you to see it.
The reason was the TAP.
Conservators are simultaneously to be pitied and envied. More pitied, of course, because they deny themselves all the manifold virtues of a TAP, claiming such devices are intrusions on the human brain. And envied, just a little, because they aren’t tied down like us.
Sometimes a TAP goes down deep as a taproot.
Suppose you spent all your life (in the case of someone born into the Commensality) or a good portion of your adult years (my case) relying on this massive auxiliary memory-cum-switchboard-cum-advisor-cum-stimulator. After a while, the AOI, with its individual idiosyncracies (they do have them) becomes as integral to your sense of self as your bodily feedback. Further suppose you one day decide on a change of scenery. Of course you won’t voluntarily pick someplace without TAP facilities. Your destination’s bound to be another locus of the Commensality. So you TAP into Babylon and send:
[Please grow a mass of nonsentient paraneurons containing all my personal data, which I may take with me.]
Surprisingly soon a mek or, god forbid, someone like Ace arrives with a little homeostatic container that holds some pretty important stuff. You handle it as nervously as if it were an embryo, which it sorta is.
You arrive at your new home. (Of course, all this applies only for a permanent move. And please notice how neatly the instant transition from the previous orally bounded paragraph to this one mimics the Heisenberg transition itself.) You hand over your container to an agent of the new AOI, who promptly integrates the cells into himself. Now, however, like new lovers, you and the AOI have to accomodate to each other. A rather touchy proposition, and not without its share of urgent uneasiness. And sometimes, like a bad mating, the match never stabilizes.
The net effect of all this is that we in the Commensality tend to be rather sedentary.
And that’s why I wasn’t going to leave unless forced to.
My stomach rumbled, as I stood there in the rapidly filling streets. The methane rain had stopped, and the sky within the dome was filling with individual fliers and aircars.
I couldn’t see too far ahead, but I knew at that moment that I wanted a couple of things.
A meal, and a walk around the Bay.
I set off for a refectory. The movement felt good.
At the refectory portal—just an arched opening without a door; lacking weather there was no reason for doors except privacy, and a refectory was the opposite of private—I passed in. The first room contained the showers. I stripped and washed up with the others there, then passed into the refectory proper.
Did you ever look up the derivation of “Commensality?” Good, then you’ll understand the
