Watson, Ian - Novel 16

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

 
 
          
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 designed 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.

 
          
*
* *