Watson Ian - Novel 16 Read online

  IAN WATSON

  Whores of Babylon

  Ian Watson was born in Tyneside in 1943. He studied English at Balliol College, Oxford. His first speculative fiction stories were stimulated by his three-year stay as a lecturer in Japan. In 1969 Roof Garden Under Saturn, a short story, was published in New Worlds magazine, and since then his stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. They have also been published in book form in four previous collections, The Very Slow Time Machine, Sunstroke, Slow Birds and Evil Water.

  Ian Watson’s first novel, The Embedding, was published in 1973 and received enormous critical acclaim. His second novel, The Jonah Kit, became a British Science Fiction Award winner as well as confirming his position in the front rank of contemporary writers. He has been features editor of the journal Foundation since 1975 and a full-time writer since 1976. His most recent novels are Chekhov's Journey (1983), Converts (1984), The Book of the River (1984) and Queenmagic, Kingmagic (1986).

  By the same author

  The Embedding

  The Jonah Kit

  The Martian Inca

  Alien Embassy

  Miracle Visitors

  The Very Slow Time Machine

  God’s World

  Under Heaven’s Bridge (with Michael Bishop)

  Deathhunter

  Sunstroke

  Chekhov’s Journey

  Converts

  The Book of the River

  The Book of the Stars

  The Book of Being

  Queenmagic, Kingmagic

  Slow Birds Evil Water

  IAN WATSON

  Whores of Babylon

  PALADIN

  GRAFTON BOOKS

  A Division of the Collins Publishing Group

  LONDON GLASGOW

  TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

  Paladin Grafton Books

  A Division of the Collins Publishing Group 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA

  A Paladin Paperback Original 1988

  Copyright © Ian Watson 1988

  ISBN 0-586-08773-7

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow

  Set in Century Schoolbook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  By the waters of Babylon we sit down and weep, when we think of thee,

  O America!

  Horace Walpole, 1775

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  1

  In which Alex arrives, and picks up some

  donkey droppings

  When Alex was thirteen, he and the other kids in his age group used to fight with knives. Every Saturday morning for months on end they practised single combat, and pairs, and two-against-one. Alex hated it. The blades were made of stiff rubber but the bruises were real.

  The blades had to be of rubber or else he might have got accustomed to not plunging his weapon right home in his opponent’s neck or belly. In a genuine fight that sort of delicacy could have been fatal.

  At first Alex hadn’t seen the point. Their armoury was well stocked with M-16 rifles, pistols, grenades, light and heavy machine guns, mortars, and even rocket launchers. But Mitch, the coach, took the long view. One day the ammunition would run out; whereas they would always have sharp knives.

  Alex also learned to throw knives. Steel knives now. Thuck. They quivered in the man-shaped target. Mitch had rigged a track to jerk this target along, but to Alex there was something unreal about this kind of target practice. An intruder wasn’t going to trundle along in a straight line. And supposing he missed the intruder, Alex would be disarming himself and giving his enemy a present.

  He had hated knife practice.

  * * *

  On Friday afternoons Mitch had tutored the kids in geography. Mitch’s favourite map was of military target areas inside America. Primary nuclear targets were marked by solid black spots. Secondary targets were open circles. Some parts of this map were great black splotches as if someone had spilled a bottle of ink.

  Oregon, where Alex lived, was almost clean. Portland and another coastal target were secondaries, but otherwise - come nuclear doomsday - the state would be okay, more so than northern California, where other survivalist communities had holed up.

  And if doomsday didn’t come with a bang, but the world’s economic and political systems simply fell apart, plenty of people in Oregon would get by while whole populations elsewhere starved, rioted, looted, and froze.

  Alex was brought up to believe in Survival; and in its twin, Collapse.

  A few years later Alex had given up on the version of survival as practised at ... At ... At somewhere in the Cascade Range. Alex wouldn’t say where exactly. That was his early training coming out. Never lead strangers back to your base.

  So here was Alex, in these late days of civilization as we know it, trying to distance himself from Oregon.

  What late days?

  No doubt when the year 2000 came round it would be a year like any other. Christ wouldn’t appear in the sky to rapture all true believers up into the air. No angels would fly down; nor missiles either. Just because a year ended in three zeroes, was that any reason to imagine the Millennium, the end of the world?

  Yet though Alex didn’t believe this, he still imagined it. Millions of other people must have felt likewise in their various ways. Those who believed in the Rapture. Those who believed in surviving somewhere in the Cascade Range. The planners and the politicians. Ordinary people, grown sick with civilization. Yes, many. Otherwise, would the city of Babylon have been rebuilt?

  Alex Winter was a gritty-looking fellow, with unruly wavy hair. His skin seemed to have been sandblasted like some ancient stone statue which sloughed off particles. But it didn’t seem as though his skin was diseased, just as though he had recently tramped through a dust storm. For a couple of years while he was in college he had applied an oily skin cream; then he’d given up. He’d decided that his skin simply shed old cells and grew new ones faster than normal.

  His face was bold, with a Roman nose and a strong - even jutting - jaw. His eyes were a dull, washed-out blue. His hair was a brindled hue, brown flecked with red, as though every now and then the roots injected a few cells of richer pigment. When he sat, he sat very still and looked determined. When he moved, his motions were often brisk and sudden; though not necessarily effective. With maturity he hoped to reach a compromise between these two states.

  He was a sociology drop-out from the University of Oregon at Eugene; concerning which, he reflected how odd was this whole psychological business of reacting against one’s home and folks. He had honestly believed that by working his way through school in Eugene he was rebelling - against knife practice and such. He would study the phenomenon of his own upbringing objectively in terms of attitude formation, group dynamics, ideology. He would discover what really made that mountain commune tick. By so doing he would inherit the outside world as a full human being, freed of fear, shrived of doom.

  Yet now here he was about to enter a community weirder than any survivalist village, a community d
esigned to find out whether survival as such was possible: the survival of any civilization whatever.

  Here was Alex escaping from the impending Millennium by altering the date, by rolling back the calendar to the year 323 b.c.

  Here he was, approaching the gates of Babylon.

  Which of course was much closer to ground zero than he had ever been while in Oregon. On Mitch’s target map south-eastern Arizona had been one big black blot.

  But Alex didn’t care. In his mind a magic bubble enclosed the area which lay ahead. Perhaps at last he had overcome his upbringing.

  Unless on a far more fundamental level he had finally submitted to it.

  We’ll see, he thought.

  And it is Alex who is writing this account. In Greek, on hinged boards coated with beeswax.

  They crossed the Arizona desert awakening from a daze, their minds buzzing with the common tongue, the universal language: Greek.

  Forty passengers rode the hovercraft; and their brains still frothed and simmered from all the speedteaching. For a week they had been drugged and hypnotized and interfaced with computers. Even sleep had been invaded. Recorded voices had squeaked at high speed like whistling dolphins.

  By the time the passengers arrived at Babylon, they’d been told, their heads would have cleared. A deep sediment of Greek would have settled to the bottoms of their minds. Their ordinary consciousness would be lucid, clear, and Attic.

  A couple of Sahuaro cacti flashed by, towering amidst the scrub. The dead-looking ocotillo and brittle- bushes resembled corals on a sea floor so long drained that most things had turned to dust. Or so it seemed, after the lushness of Oregon. Ahead, not even scrub. A whole swathe of desert was as barren and pockmarked as the moon, as though the landscape had been deliberately scoured to produce a no-man’s-land between the native vegetation of America and that of Babylon. But Alex remembered that this was the old Luke- Williams Air Force Gunnery Range. Rockets and cannon shells and tracer rounds had pruned the plant life in years gone by.

  Next door to the range was another empty segment of the state, the Papago Indian Reservation. In the north of this the grazing had failed. The nearer sod- roofed adobe villages of Hickiwan and Vaya Chin were abandoned years since. This Alex recalled from the briefing before the language lessons began in earnest. He recalled, but it meant little to him.

  In the far distance he noticed jagged mountains which looked un-Babylonian. If the copper smelters had still been burning away full blast at Ajo down there in the south-west, he mightn’t have been able to see those peaks at all on account of sulphuric smoke hazing the sky.

  The Ajo open-cast mines, once run by the Phelps Dodge Corporation; the US Air Force; the Papago Indians - these things meant nothing much. They were part of America, not Babylonia; and America lay behind the travellers.

  Their hovercraft followed the concrete ribbon of the road which once gave access to the construction site. No cars or buses might use this now. It was closed; no longer a modern highway. They flew a few inches above it. The gale of air supporting the hovercraft beneath, and the wind from the tail fans, swept the concrete clear of grit. Yet they did not touch it. They were disconnected, just as they were disconnected from America. The voices babbling in their brains disoriented them. But already, as promised, these voices were becoming quieter, dropping beneath the horizon of awareness.

  ‘Alex-’

  Deborah was saying something to him in Greek, in ancient Greek with an enriched vocabulary which linguists had cannibalized from modern Greek.

  He nodded, but paid little attention. Nothing that they could say at the moment meant anything. They were still in transition.

  He did wish a relationship to flower between himself and Deborah. When they first met a spark had flown, a connection had formed, a tenuous bridge had been built. He was certain of the spark, the bridge; before drugs and hypnosis drowned him and her. No doubting it. He wished they might be friends and lovers. He felt sure she wished this, too. Here they were, sitting side by side, almost touching. But he sat very still. Whatever they felt for each other was dwarfed by what was going to happen. They couldn’t relate as the people they had been; only as the people they would become.

  Was that the last Sahuaro before Babylon? The cactus stood brokenly, wooden ribs exposed, savaged by lightning or by a cannon shell.

  A solitary jackrabbit took off, terrified by the roar of the hovercraft. The animal’s sides flashed from tan to white as it dodged left and right to confuse its enemy. Not that the enemy was interested. Abruptly the rabbit halted and faced north, to drain the heat of flight out of its enormous ears.

  * * *

  Deborah Tate: of medium height, and definitely graceful, though unusually so. Her shoulders sloped remarkably. This was the first physical characteristic of Deborah’s which had struck Alex: that strange, almost alien swoop of the shoulders sloping down from a long, vase-like neck. She was like some African tribal woman whose neck had been stretched, and her shoulders pressed down by brass neck-bands. Such African beauties could not, of course, support their skulls unaided upon the stretched vertebrae, not without a column of strong metal to brace the neck. Yet Deborah’s white skin soared unaided. So in a way she looked almost unhuman, as though she was a woman from another star; her neck and shoulders a perfect touch-sculpture. Since no one else had stared at her wonderingly Alex had concluded that her neck and shoulders somehow conformed to some ideal pattern within himself: the geometry of some personal emotional equation.

  Her eyes were glossy dark; her hair raven dark and strong, cut close in a thick helmet-cut with a protective black tongue teasing her nape. She wore a loose white poncho blouse of linen over a long white linen robe from which the tips of leather sandals and her toes peeped out. Her arms were bare, with copper bangles at the wrists.

  In her Greek costume she looked chaste. But she had already hinted that once in Babylon she would soon go to sit in the Temple of Love to wait for any stranger to come along and toss a coin in her lap. Old man, youngster, ugly or handsome, skinny or fat, clean or filthy, she must go with him and lie with him. Every woman of Babylon was obliged to do so sometime before she reached the age of thirty; a custom which could prove inconvenient if the woman was ugly - she might spend weeks waiting. Presumably one of the priests might then bribe a beggar to cast the coin.

  The prospect seemed to fascinate Deborah.

  Maybe she only spoke of it to Alex, back at the university, in the hope that the stranger might be him? So that she could experience the frisson of excitement and trepidation, then avoid the reality?

  Alex already knew that it would not be he who threw that coin in her lap, with the head of King Alexander stamped on it. Not he; not yet. To do so would be untrue to Babylon. He hoped she understood this.

  Later on, though - presuming that they both became Babylonian citizens - maybe he would bid for Deborah before the auction block in the marriage market of Babylon. (For that was also a custom, if a woman had no dowry.) Maybe.

  Alex was already sure that he would become a citizen at the end of the first trial month. He would enter Babel Tower to be taught Babylonian, lying drugged and hypnotized in some deep stone chamber. He would emerge, to grow his hair long, and wear a turban and perfume, and flourish a jaunty walking stick.

  He wouldn’t simply be some Greek-speaking tourist who departed again, delighted or disgusted, to be debriefed by the university psychologists. Babylon still needed tens of thousands more citizens. The city had been completed only five years ago. Alex would be one of those citizens; he would belong.

  ‘There’s a drumming in my ears,’ Deborah said softly in Greek.

  Alex touched her hand lightly; only lightly, and quickly. ‘It’ll fade. It’ll pass.’

  Maybe that was the wrong response? Maybe she spoke of her excitement so as to share it with him?

  But how could there be right things or wrong things to say on this journey? Silence was best. The other passengers were mostly absor
bed in themselves, as if gathering strength to hoist a great rock, to shoulder a whole new world. There was very little tourist chatter; only the dying hum in all their skulls.

  She said, in Greek:

  ‘My tongue freezes into silence,

  And a gentle fire courses through my flesh;

  My eyes see nothing,

  And there’s a drumming in my ears . . .’

  Alex imagined for a moment that she was echoing his own thoughts in rapport. But no; surely she was quoting poetry. Yes, that was it. She was reciting one of Sappho’s love songs. Seventh-century Sappho; no anachronism there.

  The skull hum had all but disappeared; so why the drumming in her ears? Was it for him? - or for Babylon? - or for the temple of Ishtar, the sacred brothel?

  Deborah came from New York, opposite point of the compass to Alex. Perhaps New York gave her something of a prior lien on Babylon? Her mundane background was computer operator. Also, hopeful actress; but already that particular dream had died, to be replaced by the desire to live a role at last.

  That was about all Alex knew of her earlier life; and he had told her just as little of his own. Arriving ten days earlier at the hypermodern township of Heuristics south of Casa Grande on Interstate 8, all the new arrivals put their pasts behind them. Their purpose: to confront the future which was written in the past, but not in their own personal past.

  He and she had flown into Sky Harbor Airport, Phoenix, to be bussed out together with thirty or so other people to the University of the Future in the desert at Heuristics. It wasn’t entirely by chance that they had sat together on the bus, but it was only on the bus that they had mentioned their previous lives.