“It is an uncharted red dwarf,” my Negus whispers. “Low metallicity. We are about a dozen AU out and headed in at sub-relativistic speed.”
There is nothing duller than a red dwarf. Most stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, tiny, cool, and old. A couple light years away and this red dwarf would be invisible to the naked eye.
I let the telescope resume its automatic scanning and drift back toward the inflatable habitats, where we will spend the next several weeks, until Babylon returns to Earth, or we find a habitable world to settle in the name of Africa-Zion.
Jah informs me of his findings. “One visible planet. Hot Jupiter classification.”
The diamond hard, white-hot fronds of Babylon part in front of me and close behind as I pass. My vacuum suit is lined with mylar, which reflects most of the heat, but through my face glass I feel the hot flush of infrared, byproduct of googolbytes of cognitive processing.
The lacy veil of Babylon dilates like a stomach sphincter, and Ngwali is there, drifting toward me. “There you are,” he says. “We worry about you, you’re gone so long.”
“You could have asked Jah where I was,” I replied. “Why aren’t you setting up camp?”
“Camp is boring. I like you people better when you are smoking pot.” He flashes an impish grin. “Besides, they tell me to quit bothering them and go find you.”
That makes some sense. Ngwali is not a tafaronaut, he has only a basic training in vacuum skills. His expertise is agriculture and gene modifications. He is a nurturer with little use until we jump off Babylon onto a habitable world.
“I have nothing for you to do. My shift is finished. I will sleep in the inflatable until the observations are complete.” I yearn for the chance to take off my helmet and stretch my legs and arms.
Jah whispers in my ear, “Second sighting has confirmed, primary planet has a rocky moon. Oxygen, silicon, carbon, iron. Nitrogen atmosphere, estimated at ninety kilo-Pascals pressure.”
“Perhaps I can help you sleep, Susan.” Ngwali has stopped close enough that he can reach out a hand and brush it against my arm.
“Shut up. I’m listening to Jah.” I do not bother to be polite with him. “What did you say, Emperor? There’s a rocky moon? On the hot Jupiter?”
“Sightings have confirmed it, child.”
Ngwali’s beautiful brow has knitted with confusion. “Aren’t all moons rocky?”
“The moon is wrong, you fool. It shouldn’t be where it is.” For billions of years the hot Jupiter has spiraled down the solar system’s gravitational well, like a bowling ball spiraling down a culvert. It would have knocked its sibling planets into higher orbits or absorbed them. It would have picked up moons the way a debutante picks up suitors. But once it dropped into its tight orbit, the red dwarf would have stripped away its satellites. The embrace of star and planet is too close for additional lovers.
“It is possible, child, that the moon was captured from another system in the very recent past.” We both know Jah’s explanation is unlikely. “But do not worry about it now, child. I will know more once the observations are complete. There are always anomalies.”
I take Jah’s advice and grab Ngwali by the hand that is trying to grope me through two layers of vacuum suit. “You heard the Emperor. I have a couple of hours of not worrying. And you’re going to help me not worry.”
Arm in arm we follow the beacons back through the shifting forest of technology.
The inflatable habitats surround the vacuum shell like a basket of condom balloons. Rosaria and Nandy are inside, setting up the recycler systems that will send our excrement through a hydroponic garden of tomatoes and collie weed.
The bongo is working on the outside, tethering the pressure socks together. She does not look twice as Ngwali and I zip ourselves into the airlock pocket and pressurize it, blowing it up like a fake breast before we enter the habitat.
The pressure habitat is an investment. It will remain here in the cloud after we leave, a sheltering bubble for future hitchhikers. I take off my helmet and smell hot polyethylene tetraphthalate. The rounded walls surround me, a crinkly esophagus, speakers glued to them, playing the Prophet Marley in a continuous stream.
Ngwali looks around. “Where is your room, Susan?”
I push him with my feet, my hands braced against the airlock. He tumbles like a man-shaped asteroid and smacks into a zipped doorway. “We’ll call that one my room. Now get in.”
He peels out of his suit and he is wearing only a thong beneath. I run my hands over him. He has shaved most of his body hair as well as the hair on his scalp. I run my hands over him. We bounce off a wall with a sound like a beach ball.
I show him what I am wearing beneath my suit and he can only chuckle.
The lovemaking we do there, inside a sausage casing of air within a godlike machine thousands of light years from home, it is not to create babies, but it is nevertheless a sacrament. It is as holy as breathing, or eating, or shitting. We tumble in free fall, our bodies wrapped together, and it celebrates our humanity, that we are still animals, still mortal, still flawed, and still holy in the eyes of Jah.
I fall asleep for a while, , then I wake, I-and-I floating in the center of the room, stuck to Ngwali by sweat and a loose embrace. My pressure suit drifts crumpled in a ball. It is buzzing, the loud tone of someone trying to get my attention through the com.
I rub my eyes just as the entrance to the room zippers open. I see Bongo Pei-Xi floating there, and behind her is Ngwali. He looks terrified, his beautiful brown face has gone ashen. The bongo looks like she will throw up.
I look at the thing that I hold in my arms --its strong, perfect skin pressed against me, and it looks at me with Ngwali’s face, but its expression is the expression of Babylon.
“Fooled you, didn’t I, Susan?” says Babylon.
#
On the first week of the singularity I was a child, barely in my twelfth year, living happily with my family in Oklahoma. By the eighth week of the singularity, as Babylon chewed our moon to fragments, I was an orphan and I was old.
I had found my way to a refugee camp in Galveston. Food was plentiful, because so few had survived to eat it, but our rescuers brought us much more. They brought us hope.
They came to our camp with their red, yellow, and green caps covering their dreadlocks. I was so young then that the colors reminded me of Christmas. But now the colors remind me of the message they brought with them, of the Lord Jah in his box, watching over Africa-Zion and all of His children who were wounded by Babylon, His Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I, who was of the same blood of Babylon, but who brought us salvation instead of terror.
And not since the seventh week of the singularity has Babylon stooped to communicate directly to a human.
Until now.
#
The Babylon in Ngwali’s flesh speaks with Ngwali’s cocky voice, sneers with his cocky mouth, and stretches luxuriously with Ngwali’s beautiful naked body. The man-Babylon mocks me with every flirtatious twinkle of its evil eyes. “You must realize that it is not easy for us to talk to you. Have you ever talked to a worm? You can shock it or you can burn it. But there is no subtlety there. To truly talk to a worm, you must become a worm. I am not the singularity. I am both the singularity and the worm.”
The original Ngwali looks pale beneath his black skin. He seems to be dry-heaving into his hand. If he actually vomits in the pressure sock, I swear I will make him scrub every surface until the place smells clean again.
Nandy and Rosaria anchor themselves to utility conduits as far from the man-Babylon as possible without leaving the vacuum sock. They have not removed their helmets, continuing to draw air from their portable life support, as if they might catch a disease from breathing the same air as the abomination. From time to time they look at me with disgust. I know how t
hey feel. I want to burn the sweat of the fake Ngwali from my skin with a soldering iron.
Bongo Pei-Xi has fetched the chalice and sucks from the mylar balloon. She is in an interesting position. It is her duty as our spiritual leader and mission director to resist Babylon. But you cannot resist when you are living inside something’s skin and it can kill you as easily as it maps the dendrites of your mind. Pei-Xi addresses the man-Babylon like you would speak to a thunderstorm. “What do you want, Babylon?”
“Sue has not told you yet. Or you haven’t realized? Please, my darling Susan, will you tell them what is wrong?” The god in a man’s flesh puts out his hand as if to stroke my arm, but I flinch away.
My sisters turn to me, so I clear my throat, and even though I want to spit on the man-Babylon, I speak with calm words instead. “It is the moon. The moon should not be here.”
“Very good, my darling Susan!” Babylon laughs and his white teeth chop the air of the vacuum sock. “That moon cannot have happened naturally. Which means that it was put there.”
Nandy looks confused, she says, “So who put it there?”
Jah speaks up, his Amharic echoing through the speakers glued to the plastic walls. “Another singularity put it there, child.”
The man-Babylon shrugs and grins his cocky grin. “It is the aliens. Finally we meet them. And that is why you are here.”
“For what?” I fear now that Babylon weaves a plot around us with its vast mind and there will be no escaping its desires. “What could we do for you? You could make copies of all of us. Make the fakes do your bidding and leave us alone.”
“We could. But an entity like ourselves would not be fooled. We prefer to make first contact with an intermediary. Something insignificant. Something beneath notice.”
Babylon wants us for a cat’s paw.
Bongo Pei-Xi crinkles the mylar bag, and when she speaks, it is with the calm of the ganja. “We do not serve you, Babylon.”
“But we can pay for your services.” The man-Babylon points a finger at Nandy and Rosaria. “Wouldn’t the two of you like your father back? He’s with us. A copy is in the cloud. It will be a simple matter to provide a body and fill it with his soul exactly like it was when he gave his mind to us and left you and your mother in that camp.”
The sisters look terrified and angry. They clutch each other with vacuum gloves bunched like talons.
“And my dear Sue,” he croons, his blinding smile turning to me. “We can give you back your womb. We can make you fertile. And we can fill you up with seed should you like.”
“No. The price is higher than that.” We are like puppets to Babylon, but I want to use Babylon like it uses me. “We want the diaspora of Africa-Zion. We want to travel to the stars. Give us your secret of faster than light travel.”
“If you knew how to do what we do,” the man-Babylon rolled his eyes, “then you would be us.”
“Then we want free passage.”
“For you?”
“For everyone. For every human. We want the right of safe passage in Babylon. No novas. No X-ray bursts, no ejecting our bodies into deep space, or melting us for our trace elements. If you let us in the cloud, you have to protect us until we reach a home.”
I hear Rosaria and Nandy gasp with astonishment, their breath tinny in their suit’s external speakers.
“It’s settled then.” The Babylon thing extends a hand to me. It is a curiously human gesture and it disorients me, which is no doubt what it intends. “There is a five-thousand tonne limit. One gram over and your vacuum shells become individual atoms.” The condescension of Babylon shines from Ngwali’s already smug face. “We knew you would ask for that. But then, we know everything.”
#
It takes a week for the singularity cloud to reach the mysterious moon. I often leave the pressure sock to get away from the obscenity of the man-Babylon. It is naked and vulgar, eschewing clothes to remind us that it is both flesh and god. It needles me at every opportunity.
When I am alone, tending my telescopes, Jah speaks to me. What He says He wants to stay a secret from my colleagues, but there can be no secrets from Babylon. What Babylon does not overhear it can infer.
“There is an evolutionary limit to the singularity, Susan. There are hard ceilings to computation and data storage that are established on the Planck level. But whatever has moved that moon has exceeded the capabilities of Babylon.”
It pleases me to think that something might humble even Babylon. “So Babylon wants that power.”
“You remember the infrared anomalies we detected in this singularity cloud? I believe they are weapons. This cloud is a ship of war.”
“Emperor Selassie, what kind of weapons would gods use between each other?”
There is silence in the speakers before Jah speaks. “The kind that can destroy a moon at the very least.”
As I return from the telescopes, drifting alone through the cloud, the ghostly computronium opens and I see the man-Babylon waiting for me. He wears no vacuum suit and has not so much as bothered to wear clothes, his naked skin bare to the void. He grins.
“What do you want with me, Babylon?” I assume he can hear me, although he wears no radio and no sound can travel through the vacuum.
He flies at me, propelled by the will of Babylon. His legs wrap about my waist in a wrestling move. He has a pair of wire cutters that he thrusts at my helmet. I prepare to scream, but he shushes me, lifting a finger to silent lips.
The static hum of my earphones goes quiet and I realize that he has disabled the radio pickups on my vacuum suit. He has cut me off from the vacuum shell. I fear what the man-Babylon will do to me, here where nothing can hold it accountable. We tumble and fall through the cloud.
The man-Babylon has a piece of paper and a pen. In the silence of vacuum he writes, then presses the paper against my faceplate, centimeters from my eyes. He grins and his legs squeeze my belly so tight I can hardly breathe.
I read his message.
39 JAHS ESCAPED THEIR BOX TO JOIN US. JAH SAYS ANYTHING TO BE FREE.
With a motion like a conjuror, he folds the paper and puts it in his mouth. I can see that the saliva on his shadowed tongue has frozen. Babylon chews and pantomimes a swallow.
Babylon leaves me in vacuum to ponder his message, a message that Babylon does not care to share with Jah.
When I return to the vacuum sock I find Ngwali floating in the central chamber. He sees me look at him and then look over my shoulder. He knows what the gestures mean.
“You don’t have to worry, Susan. It is me. The real me.” Ngwali does not seem happy to be himself. “I am not that thing. This is no trick to fool you or seduce you. That thing is out walking. It walks naked in the vacuum, and I am just me.”
As he says this, I overstand Ngwali the man for the first time. The most hated thing in history has stolen his face and his mind. I drift to him and hold his shoulders, forcing him to look at me. From the redness of his eyes I can tell he has cried in secret. “Ngwali, I have blamed you for things Babylon did in your skin. I give you my apology. You are not responsible for the actions of Babylon.”
Ngwali will not meet my eyes. “But you do not understand, Susan. That thing is me. Babylon copied every cell in my body. It has talked to me, Susan, and it knows my thoughts. It is me, doing what I would do if I had power like Babylon. I would have tricked you and fucked you if I could.”
I slap Ngwali hard across the face. I have to cup my other hand against his ear to make the slap hurt. “I overstand perfectly,” I yell, knowing that Babylon overhears everything. “We be like Jah, you and I-and-I. We are good because we are limited. You are a good man, Ngwali. Do not doubt that.”
I kiss him and Ngwali kisses me back. It is a promise between the two of us, and a mourning for a stolen beginning. We drift our sep
arate ways, imperfect pieces of flesh inside a vast mind.
I lose myself in observational data as the cloud falls toward the inner solar system. The Babylon cloud comes to rest in a Lagrange point between the moon and the hot Jupiter. We are a fraction of an AU from the red dwarf, this ancient remnant of cosmic particles, and its heat is greater than the noonday sun in an Oklahoma sky.
My fellow rasta and I return to our vacuum shell to descend to the moon and do the errands of Babylon. Both Ngwalis climb in with us, but I can tell which is the original because that one is trembling and silent. He is also the one wearing clothes.
Babylon kicks us from the cloud and w. We tumble through space, Pei-Xi and Jah shouting instructions. When we regain orientation, the shell skims low over the tiny moon. I watch the gray landscape rolling beneath my optics. There are craters and dormant volcanoes and a nitrogen atmosphere that bathes everything in a pallid fog. It is not large enough for tectonics, but wherever it has been, it has picked up enough molecular water to cover the world with damp. There is no free-standing oxygen. If there was life on this moon, it has long since died. This moon was dead before the Milky Way gorged itself on dwarf galaxies and collapsed into a spiral.
“Hold tight and praise Jah,” warns Bongo Pei-Xi. “We be braking for re-entry.”
Our plasma jets fire, and Babylon must be laughing at us to see our pitiful Newtonian physics. But it works. We plummet toward the planet, cradled on a column of blue light. And when we enter the atmosphere, the parachutes deploy and we drift like thistledown. Perhaps if we had hitched a ride on another cloud we would have expended these parachutes as we dropped to a world of green fields and blue oceans, and my sisters would begin to make babies for the glory of Jah.
We land on a plain of ash.
The man-Babylon will not set foot on this world, but he stares at us from the hatchway as we explore the landing site. The vacuum pod sits on this gray world like a giant red, gold, and green soda can. We do not need our suits here, just a nose tube and a catalyzer to strip the oxygen from the atmospheric CO-2.