thanks, Babylon. I’m touched.] And I was.
[Please think nothing of it. Goodbye, and remember what I said about your compatriots.]
[Goodbye.]
I told you our “rulers” were idiosyncratic, didn’t I?
I got up and left the bar. Serendipity dictated that I would step out into Shadow.
Wincing, I looked up, onto the underside of the Gardens: a flat grey disk marked with colorful graffiti and bordered by dangling plants. I hooked a finger beneath my carcanet and glared at the Gardens, trying to will the whole thing away. I wished I were Prospero, and could vanish this particular gorgeous palace into the baseless, uncertain fabric that was the spacetime continuum.
Up there, in a rented palace suite, the Conservancy envoy was dispensing his poison, in the form of the Chronicle of Mankind, and Babylon claimed it was generating some sort of psychic illness among the populace.
I set off to find out what he meant.
And this was what I learned.
There was a split growing between the human and the non-human citizens of Babylon. Whereas members of all species had always existed in complete harmony, now everyone seemed to be acquiring jagged edges that grated and rasped on each other. I saw it on the streets and in the refectories, in the concert halls and null-gee natatoriums.
The humans were exhibiting traits such as arrogance and impatience and coerciveness. The non-humans were responding with disdain and stubbornness and frigidity. Godhorses drooped (so dispirited), axolotls frowned (so sad), and slidewhistles scurried by (so silent). I actually saw a fight or three that seemed to have nothing at their bases other than prejudice. (You must understand that there were fights now and then in Babylon during normal times. We’re not talking about Utopia, after all, and any sentients might come to blows about certain disagreements. But over negligible physical details—no, never that.)
I knew what the Conservancy planned. Babylon possessed a slight majority of humans. (An accident of statistical distribution. When travel across the universe resembles Brownian motion, you get such occasional clumping.) Pretty soon, when enough of them were infected with the Chronicle, someone would issue a request to the Conservancy to step in and take over the city, on some pretext such as “protecting fellow humans from bodily harm.” What could Babylon do then? The Commensality’s strength lay in solidarity. An AOI could only act in the interests of his community. And if that community was fragmented, where did correct action lie?
Then would begin the riots and bloodshed and retribution for slights real or imagined, the purges and re-education, until Babylon was molded into the Conservancy’s image.
Civilization is so tenuous.
My inaction had helped to bring this fateful Kristallnacht a step closer. I couldn’t let it happen. Not if doing what Babylon wanted was all it would take to stop it.
So I devised a plan.
* * * *
The Gardens hung in the darkling sky like a Fata Morgana conjured by a demon wizard. I floated up, air streaming over my bare limbs like liquid methane over a quilt. (But the cold was in me, rather than in the air.)
I noticed then that only humans were heading for the Gardens. There wasn’t a single other kind of sophont in sight.
It was truly scary, this segregation, even though, by specious (and specificate) biological assumptions, I was willy-nilly on the side of those who had initiated it. I wondered if this was how my distant ancestors had felt on Truehome, when the calls of a lynchmob echoed through some small North American town.
One perfect ten-point landing later (bare feet comprising an unmodified ten toes), I stood on a wide terrace paved with living substance (the better to roll upon). A hundred meters off stood the palace, central pleasure dome of this aerial trysting place.
I moved off toward it, past glimmering elven lights strung on potted trees.
On the broad steps leading up to the main doors, I TAPPED Babylon.
[You know when to shut off the power?] I asked.
[Of course. 24:00:00 exactly. The witching hour.]
[Ha, ha,] I enunciated with mental precision, just to show I was in no mood for AOI humor. [It’s easy for you to joke. You’re not about to take someone’s life.]
[I stand to lose as much if you fail as you do,] retorted that sententious mass of jelly. Then: [Are you sure you need the whole city shut off?]
[I want utter chaos. That’s the only thing that’s going to bring the Conservator out of his lair. Can you think of a better way to accomplish it?]
[No. We will follow your plan. Good luck.]
Babylon left my brain.
The city was powered by a monopole furnace. Shutting it off consisted of stopping the flow of protons into that destructive soliton. (Each proton-disintegration yielded several gev, and the furnace provided more power than a dozen Babylons could fully use. Fair access to energy is equality.)
I had arrived half an hour before midnight. There was one thing I planned to do before confronting the Conservator.
I was going to experience the Chronicle, so I could know exactly what we were up against.
In the palace, I TAPPED for a floorplan and followed it up a gravshaft to the Conservancy suite.
Before I entered, I stopped to look. I saw a large room crowded with immobile humans, surrounding a golden ovoid set on a pillar.
I stepped into the room—
—and was living the Chronicle of Mankind.
Oh, those Conservators are clever! Disdaining TAPS as organic mods, they’ve developed an electronic projective telepathy, a brutal generator of waves that swamp the consciousness. Rather than accept an enhancement that amounts to the slightest possible violation of self, they’ve substituted mental rape.
I was myself no longer. Instead, I was some anonymous viewpoint character, living out the tale of humanity, as interpreted by the Conservancy. The device must just have cycled, for I was back four million years.
A hominid, I stood on a dusty African plain, puzzling out what to do with a sharp piece of flint. The sun was hot on my back as I finally bent to saw at the zebra carcass at my feet. I gave a grunt of exultation, and swallowed some bloody meat.
After a time in this milieu, things changed. I won’t attempt to recount the whole vast tale. Everyone knows it. Through Paleolithic and Neolithic I voyaged. Through Sumer, Ur, Thebes, Babylon (Senior), Egypt, Greece and Rome my consciousness hurtled, shuttled from one representative inhabitant to another. All along, pounding into my brain was the inevitability of it: mankind’s long predestined rise from savagery and nescience, his manifest destiny looming huge before him.
Mastery of the universe.
On and on through history I raced, reliving the experiences of hundreds of humans as they subjugated Truehome’s flora and fauna and very topography. The Age of Discovery, the Age of Empire, the Age of the Atom, the Age
