Babylon Sisters. Paul Di Filippo

pill case offered in outstretched hand, Elena, having returned, said without preamble, “Here, Robert; take one.”

      I took the pill and studied its perfection for a time before I asked, “What is it?”

      “Matisse,” she said. “We’re in his native land now, the source of his vision. It’s only right.”

      “Elena, I don’t know. Haven’t we been happy with Vermeer? Why change now? We could spoil everything....”

      Elena swallowed Matisse dry. “I’ve taken mine, Robert. I need something new. Unless you want to be left behind, you’ll do the same.”

      I couldn’t stand the thought of living in a different perceptiverse than Elena. Although the worm of discontent told me not to, I did as Elena asked.

      Matisse went down easy.

      In no time at all, the sharp, uncompromising realism of Vermeer gave way to the gaudy, exhilarating, heady impressionism of Matisse. The transition was almost too powerful to take.

      “Oh my God....” I said.

      “There,” said Elena, “wasn’t I right? Take your clothes off now. I have to see you naked.”

      We inaugurated this new perceptiverse as we had the first.

      Our itinerary in this new perceptiverse duplicated what had gone before. Once we had exhausted the features of our hotel room and stabilized our new sensory input, we set out to ingest the world, wallowing in this latest transformation. If we chanced to revisit a place we had been to while in the Vermeer perceptiverse, we were astonished at the change. What a gift, we said, to be able to see the old world with continually fresh eyes.

      Listening to the Boston Symphony outdoors along the Charles one night, their instruments looking like paper cutouts from Matisse’s old age, Elena said to me, “Let’s drop a Beethoven, Robert.”

      I refused. She didn’t press me, realizing, perhaps, that she had better save her powers of persuasion for what really mattered.

      The jungles of Brazil called for Rousseau, of course. I capitulated with hardly a protest, and that marked the beginning of the long, slippery slope.

      Vermeer had captivated us for nearly a year.

      Matisse kept us enthralled for six months.

      Rousseau—that naive genius—could hold our attention for only six weeks.

      We were art junkies now, consumers of novel perceptiverses.

      Too much was not enough.

      The neurotropin industry graciously obliged.

      Up till that time, the industry had marketed only soft stuff, perceptiverses not too alien to “reality.” But now, as more and more people found themselves in the same fix as Elena and I, the psychoengineers gradually unleashed the hard stuff.

      In the next two years, Elena and I, as far as I can reconstruct things, went through the following perceptiverses:

      Picasso (blue and cubist), Braque, Klee, Kandinsky, Balthus, Dali, Picabia, Leger, Chagall, Gris, de Kooning, Bacon, Klimt, Delaunay, O’Keefe, Escher, Hockney, Louis, Miro, Ernst, Pollock, Powers, Kline, Bonnard, Redon, van Dongen, Rouault, Munch, Tanguy, de Chirico, Magritte, Lichtenstein, and Johns.

      We hit a brief period of realism consisting of Wood, Hopper, Frazetta, and Wyeth, and I tried to collect my senses and decide whether I wanted to get out of this trip or not, and how I could convince Elena to drop out with me.

      But before I could make up my mind, we were off into Warhol, and everything hit me with such neon-tinted luminescent significance that I couldn’t give it up. This happened aboard a station in high orbit, and the last thing I remember was the full Earth turning pink and airbrushed.

      Time passed. I think.

      The next time I became aware of myself as an individual, distinct from my beautiful yet imprisoning background, Elena and I were in a neo­expressionist perceptiverse, the one belonging to that Italian, I forget his name.

      We were outdoors. I looked around.

      The sky was gray-green, with a huge black crack running down the middle of it. Sourceless light diffused down like pus. The landscape looked as if it had been through an atomic war. I searched for Elena, found her reclining on grass that looked like mutant mauve octopus tendrils. Her flesh was ashen and bloody; a puke-yellow aura outlined her form.

      I dropped down beside her.

      I could feel that the grass was composed of tendrils, thick and slimed, like queer succulents. Suddenly I smelled alien odors, and I knew the light above spilled out of a novel sun.

      The quantum level had overtaken the macroscopic.

      Plastic reality, governed by our senses, had mutated.

      We were truly in the place we perceived ourselves to be.

      “Elena,” I begged, “we’ve got to get out of this perceptiverse. It’s just dreadful. Let’s go back, back to where it all started, back to Vermeer. Please, if you love me, leave this behind.”

      A mouth like a sphincter opened in the Elena-thing. “We can’t go back, Robert. You can never go back, especially after what we’ve been through. We can only go forward, and hope for the best....”

      “I can’t take it anymore, Elena. I’ll leave you; I swear it....”

      “Leave, then,” she said tonelessly.

      So I did.

      Finding a dose of Vermeer wasn’t easy. He was out of favor now; the world had moved beyond him. Even novices started out on the hard stuff nowadays. But eventually, in a dusty pharmaceutical outlet in a small town, I found a dose of that ancient Dutchman. The expiration date printed on the packet was long past, but I swallowed the pill anyway.

      The lovely honeyed light and the perfect clarity returned.

      I went looking for Elena.

      When I found her, she was as beautiful as on that long-ago day when we first abandoned our native perceptiverses for the shock of the new.

      When she saw me, she just screamed.

      I left her then, knowing it was over. Besides, there was something else I had to find.

      The pill with my original name.

      A THIEF IN BABYLON

      How many lightyears to Babylon?

      That’s a question members of the Conservancy never fail to ask—and which seldom fails to catch me by surprise. It’s so typical of their way of thinking—a way so alien to mine—that no matter how long I tarry wearily among them (on neutral worlds only, of course), I’m always unprepared to answer, much as they seem unready for and shocked by such a simple feature as my spinal plaques, which I take so much for granted.

      The fact is, only someone who subscribes to the old notions of Truehome would ask for the distance to Babylon in lights, rather than simply inquire after its relativistic coordinates. Not to mention being repelled by my bodily modifications, while seeing nothing wrong in using a bodyfogger to appear as a disembodied head himself—

      But just because I exhibit certain mannerisms and bodymods consistent with the Commensality does not automatically imply that I am rigidly opposed to the Conservancy. That old either-or, bivalent mindset is property of their system solely. It would be wrong to apply it to anyone such as myself.

      Truly, although both they and I denote our systems with cees, we are seas apart.

      So, I say—facing my hypothetical and stereotypical Conservator interlocutor, whether on moon or planet, ship or station, under suns green, blue, red or white, him usually polite enough to reveal his face by keeping his roiling, gadget-driven optical distortion focused below his neck—your question does not annoy me. I recognize that you have unbent enough to show me your stern face.