Whores of Babylon

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Alex Winter and Deborah Tate arrive by hovercraft at the city of Babylon, lying on the river Euphrates in the Arizona desert. He is a sociology drop-out from the University of Oregon at Eugene who wants to become a Babylonian. She has a much stranger ambition. Their minds are babbling in the Greek that has been pumped into them via computer interface at the University of Heuristics. To them, English has yet to be invented and the young king Alexander lies dying in his palace. The city is dominated by the tower of Babel, its spiral roadway curling up towards the heavens and wide enough for several donkey carts. And women sit outside the Temple of Ishtar, waiting for some stranger to drop a coin in their laps. The prospect seems to fascinate Deborah. She wants to become one of the Whores of Babylon.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 137

Sample

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 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?

The year 2000 had come around like any other. Christ hadn’t appeared in the sky to rapture all true believers up into the air. No angels had flown down, nor missiles neither. But though Russia and America may have shaken hands at last, many more countries than ever before were armed with ever more nuclear weapons, some of those countries already hated America, or would do so when new régimes took over, and in 2001 the Twin Towers had been destroyed – setting the tone for the new Millennium?

Alex didn’t believe in the end of the world, yet he could imagine it. Millions of other people must have felt likewise in various ways. Those who believed in the Rapture. Those who believed in surviving somewhere in the Cascade Range. The planners and the politicians. The antiglobalizationists. Ordinary people, grown sick with civilization. Yes, many. Otherwise, would the city of Babylon have been rebuilt?

Alex Winter was a gritty-looking fellow, his hair wavy and unruly. His skin seemed to have been sandblasted like some ancient stone statue which sloughed off particles. 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 most other people’s.

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 designed to find out whether survival as such was possible: the survival of any civilization whatever.

Here was Alex escaping from the new 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.

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 speed-teaching. 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 Saguaro 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. 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 and the wind from the tail fans swept the concrete clear of grit. Travellers did not touch the surface. They were disconnected, as surely as they were disconnected from America. The voices babbling in their brains disoriented them. 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. 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 Saguaro 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, 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 system, 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, 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, copper bangles at the wrists.

In her Greek costume she looked chaste. Yet 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 into 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 some time 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 had only spoken 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 of a total stranger?

Alex already knew that it would not be he who threw into her lap that coin 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 – 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 possessed 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 after a month, 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?

How could there be right things or wrong things to say on this journey? Silence was best. The other passengers were mostly absorbed 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, would-be actress; but that dream had died, replaced by the desire to live out a role at last.

Which 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 together with thirty-odd other people to the Institute 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.

Heuristics: as a name this sounded no more nor less capricious than the names of several other townships thereabouts. Such as Aztec. And Mecca. Salome, and Baghdad. Yet of course ‘heuristics’ meant the art of asking questions, a word from the ancient Greek, as Alex now well knew.

Being hypermodern, the township of Heuristics was mainly invisible – just as the future was invisible? Heuristics was mostly underground, windows in its ceilings. This highly energy-conservative design served to hide the true size of the Institute, which might have been smaller or very much larger than the actual oasis of glass, the array of twinkling little lakes which would be visible from the air: a chequerboard of mirages or mirrors. Mirrors, more like. The Institute of the Future was indeed a many-faceted mirror reflecting the past into the future. Though what did it reveal of its graduates’ faces? Alex did not know yet. By the time he did know, would he wear the same countenance as before? Would Deborah?

‘Look,’ she said in Greek.

Everyone in Babylon spoke Greek to begin with. Greek was the world language used by travellers. It was the English of its day. For this was the epoch of Alexander the Great, and these were the last days of his reign. Alex’s namesake lay dying of fever even now in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar.

‘Look, Alex!’

Ahead to east and west fields fuzzed the desert with rich greens. Canal water glinted, webbing irrigated farmland …

Babylonia did not actually trespass upon the Papago Indian Reservation, but it came quite close, the further to remove itself from modern civilization: from the rumbling, farting commercial entrails of Arizona. Were the Papagos – those weavers of bright baskets – not now retrenched deep within their heartland, surviving on welfare, their few starving cattle cropping the last arid pasture, they might well have been incensed to behold the greenery of Babylonia and to guess how much money was spent on piping water underground from the flood-control reservoir on the Gila River outside Gila Bend. But it was a fifty-mile walk from the nearest Papago village to Babylon. The Indians still held their wasteland in perpetuity. The border between Babylonia and Papagueria remained sacrosanct, inviolate; except to buzzards.

Realistically – Alex told himself – Babylon made not one jot of difference to the neighbouring Indians. If there had been no Babylon, the money certainly wouldn’t have been spent on piping a river into Papagueria. So there was no injustice.

Why then did the thought cross his mind? Was he, the trained survivor, suffering a twinge of liberal conscience?

If so, he was a fool. Unprepared for the Babylonian experience.

Anyway, there were only four or five thousand Papago Indians. There were thirty or forty times as many Babylonians. Very likely some of the more go-ahead Indians were already basket-weavers or herdsmen in Babylonia.

At last! Far off, Alex spied the city walls and the Tower of Babel rising behind.

This time he did clasp Deborah’s hand. When he let go she shook her wrist as though a fly had settled on it. Her copper bangles rattled.

The fields running up to the outer wall were patchworks of leeks and onions, turnips and cabbages. Dykes, shaded by date palms, divided the fields. Big, mature palms – of which there were thousands – must have been transplanted here full-grown. Dozens of men and women laboured at a leisurely rate, a few cranking hand pumps, most carrying and emptying water-pots. The women wore loose cotton or flannel smocks, belted at the waist. The men were mainly stripped to their loincloths.

The river Euphrates flowed citywards close by, bearing coracles, some carrying a single donkey tethered aboard, others giant boats with three or four donkeys penned on them in addition to passengers and cargoes of produce, wine-casks, or goats. From atop the great brick citadel a few guards eyed and counted the river traffic.

Coracles weren’t the handiest of boats. Even with oars fore and aft and with a central mast dangling sail to trim the course, these perfectly round craft tended to spin in the current like waltzer cars at a funfair.

Yet this was how goods arrived in town from upstream Babylonia, dizzily water-borne. Then the skin hulls were stripped off the stick frames and loaded on to the donkeys to be carried back north. The donkeys munched up the straw padding of the boats to sustain them on the return journey; while the sticks were sold as kindling.

It all made sense.

The Euphrates made a return journey, too. Once well out of sight of the city and the southern Babylonian estates, the bulk of the water was filtered and cleaned and pumped through underground pipelines back to its source some twenty miles north of Babylon. From there, topped up by extra water from Gila Bend, the river recommenced its course down through verdant Babylonia.

Alex was aware that visitors should never allude to this arrangement, nor to the buried nuclear power source which would run the pumps automatically for at least the next hundred years. Citizens of Babylon ignored the origin of the Euphrates; forgot it. According to the laws of Hammurabi, the penalty for broaching the forbidden topic was enslavement to a temple on grounds of blasphemy. Or worse: the Greek visitors had been told that an offender could legally be executed.

Thus actually the broad Euphrates flowed all the way from distant Armenia, and onward down to the sea.

Am I mad? wondered Alex momentarily. Are we all mad, who come here?

No! The pretence regarding the river was a logical lunacy. It aimed to challenge the greater lunacies: of time, decay, decadence, and the death of civilization. It was only one item in a much greater pretence; a pretence so grand that it readily became reality.

Enough said, regarding the false Euphrates. The true Euphrates.

Was Alex mad? Or would he be mad only once he became a Babylonian?

No. He had been mad previously. The rest of the world was mad. It had been mad for years, waiting for the end.

Now Alex would be sane.

And now the hovercraft had arrived at its destination. The road of concrete had disappeared a while since, giving way to a road of dirt.

In the lee of the outer walls below the looming citadel, the craft settled on its skirts. Its engines died. The dust swirled and settled. The passengers disembarked.

An avenue led onward and inward, tunnelling between wall and citadel. Down this avenue they could see the more massive inner walls pierced by the Ishtar Gate. Before they could proceed, a squad of soldiers spilled out of a guardroom and barred the way with spears. These were local soldiers, robed and bearded; not Macedonians.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Their corporal’s counting us,’ said Deborah. ‘That’s all.’

It wasn’t quite all. Even when the corporal had finished totalling the new arrivals, his men still blocked the way. The corporal glanced impatiently along the avenue. Soon a small group of Greeks, no more than half a dozen, hastened into view, shepherded by a couple of spearmen. The Greeks trotted along the avenue, then headed for the waiting hovercraft. The soldiers all dropped back into shelter, though otherwise none of them acted as though the twentieth-first century machine existed. Quickly the craft roared to life, reinflating its skirts and whipping up clouds of dust which covered all the waiting visitors.

They had arrived neat and clean, but now, as the craft swung round and departed, suddenly they were as travel-stained as though they had walked the whole way to Babylon – across all of Asia Minor, Cilicia, Cappadocia, down through Mesopotamia.

‘Shit,’ one voice said loudly in English – and a soldier’s spear jerked as if to impale the word. English was a dead language; it hadn’t yet been born.

The corporal stepped forward. ‘Now you enter Babylon, Gate of God,’ he called out in Greek.

The newcomers had to stop once again outside the Ishtar Gate, not because of soldiers but simply to admire.

The massive inner wall of baked brick rose impregnably from the steeply sloping scarp of a deep canal-moat lined with burnt brick and bitumen. A bridge of removable planks led across to the gate, its towers gorgeously enamelled and decorated. At top and bottom were friezes of rosettes like spinning chariot wheels. In between, against a bright turquoise background, beasts in glazed, moulded brick stood out one above the other: white and blue bulls with yellow horns and hooves, and dragons.

The dragons’ bodies were covered with scales. Their hind legs were those of a bird of prey; their forelegs were feline. Tails were tipped with scorpion stings; heads sported the double horns of the Arabian viper. Mane and scaly claws and forked tongue were a golden brown; the rest was creamy white. The dragons st. . .