What is the etiquette when you are going to go away forever, but also stay behind untouched? Who do you say good-bye to? How seriously?
Forget the etiquette, Jen Babylon told himself. Who do you want to see again, if you are never to see her again?
The only reasonable answer was Sheryl, but Sheryl did not answer either her home line or her forwarding page. Babylon kept trying until the last minute before he had to leave his apartment, and as a consequence was late for his appointment at the Base. His jitney started off toward the great plaza along the banks of the Charles briskly enough; but at each intersection it hesitated, seeming confused. Its limited vocabulary did not allow it to explain its problem to its passenger, but as they approached the Base itself Babylon could see the answer. Six gray hovervans with bars on the windows bobbed gently at the approach to the Base, while furious militiamen struggled to clear a way. All the other approaches were blocked off hopelessly, and this one nearly so, by the largest mob Babylon had ever seen assembled in one place—and every one of them a Kook.
Babylon paid off the jitney and made his way on foot, marveling at the carpet of humanity that spread across the great lawn, the walkways, and even the roadstead. How strange they looked! Some were strange because they could not help it, being aliens from planets that circled stars thousands of light-years away: Babylon spotted several creatures that were in no way human, a doughy flying thing like a saffron amoeba, a T'Worlie like the one who had addressed him so strangely, a couple he did not recognize at all. Of the humans, all looked strange because they cared so little for the way they dressed—or cared so much about demonstrating their difference that they wore the shabbiest and filthiest of garments. Others, the women in particular, looked strange because they had made themselves so. Odd fashions had spread from the other galactic races to Earth. Customs from all over the skies had become a part of Earth's culture, and some of these women wore psychedelic scents, diamond-spangled body paint; and all— all—were starved lean in mimicry of that one known "human" race of Cuckoo. Babylon stepped across prone bodies, lying on the grass and yearning toward the great white block of the Base. A militiaman hailed him: "You! Get out of there. We've got to get these vans through."
"But I've got an appointment for transmission—"
The militiaman shook his head. "The plaza's blocked off till we get this mess cleared up. The Kooks aren't so bad, we can fly the vans right over them as they stay on the ground, but you'd get creamed. Unless, of course, you want to lie down, too?"
Babylon grinned and turned away. There had to be twenty thousand people on the lawn. He marveled that this mad movement had grown so huge so quickly; there had been only a few isolated individuals as recently as a month or two ago. Off toward the river bank a militia platoon had kept a lane cleared, and he managed to get through. At the entrance to the Base he was stopped again, this time by an animated debate between a couple of civilians and a militia officer. "Are they Kooks, too?" Babylon asked a militia- woman with stripes on her arm.
She pushed her helmet back and frowned thoughtfully. "Wouldn't say so exactly," she said. "Least, they're not the same as the dreary bunch on the ground. What they are is lawyers."
"Lawyers? For what?"
"Something about the convicts in the vans," she explained. "Go on inside. You'll see the whole thing in there, then you can come back and tell me."
In the stately, echoing foyer to the transmission facilities there were fewer people but a greater stir. Stereostage cameras were set up at one end of the lobby, and a very pretty woman was talking animatedly to a group of young, angry men and women. They weren't Kooks. What Babylon could hear of their conversation made it clear that they, too, were lawyers—apparently from the ACLU—trying to prevent something about the prison vans outside. "What they want to do," one of the lawyers was declaiming, "amounts to an unconstitutional prolongation of their sentences."
The young woman frowned thoughtfully. "But I don't see how. These are all lifers, aren't they?"
"That's the exact point! They're sentenced to serve their natural lives in prison! But what the Tachyon Base people propose is to send them off to this place, Cuckoo, as recorded patterns, capable of being animated at any time at all—even a hundred years from now. So they may well be dead, and their sentences therefore completed, and yet they will still be subject to involuntary servitude thousands of light-years away!"
Babylon started to move closer, but his way was blocked by another militia person, this one a young woman with the crossed batons of a first lieutenant. "Whom do you want to see?" she demanded.
Babylon identified himself. "I'm due for transmission to Cuckoo right now."
"They're behind schedule—of course," she said, and pointed. "Wait over there. There's priority stuff to go before you do." And she was gone before Babylon could question her. He reluctantly sat down on the bench indicated, where a small boy, perhaps ten years old, perhaps less—perhaps anything at all, Babylon conceded to himself, because he was no judge of such things—sat kicking the toes of his shoes together. He was hunched up in the attitude of patient obedience to the whims of grown-ups, but he looked up at Jen Babylon. "Hello," he said.
Babylon nodded, and sat down at the other end of the bench. There was increasing noise from outside the Base, the shouts of militiamen, the whine of hovervans, and a rumble from the crowd of Kooks. He wondered if the militia had carried out their plan to drive the hovervans right over the worshiping Kooks. If so, it hadn't gone well— there was a sudden crescendo of shouts, and then the drone of the fans muted to idle. Babylon wondered what the Kooks would think if he joined them. Or if they knew that he, or at least a copy of himself, would be on Cuckoo within the hour.
"My name is David Gentry," the boy said.
Babylon nodded.
"That's my mother over there," the boy persisted. "Her name is Zara Gentry. She's famous." He kicked a foot toward the stereostage cameras to show the woman he meant, his hands thrust down in his pockets.
"That's nice," Babylon said, only half listening. At the desk before the transmission chamber itself a worried- looking man in a red suede jumpsuit was fumbling irritably through some papers. Babylon leaned toward him and caught his eye. "I'm supposed to be transmitted now," he called.
The man scowled and read a name off one of the papers. "John Babylon?"
"Actually it's Jen. Jen Babylon."
"Whatever it is." The man shuffled that paper to the bottom of the stack. "You'll have to wait."
"But I'm scheduled for Cuckoo—"
"Of course you are! You and fifty-seven others. We'll call you when we're ready, don't worry." And he was off, moving faster than Babylon would have believed likely.
"They're all mixed up here, Mr. Babylon," the boy said. He was a nice-looking kid, with startling green eyes undef the long lashes of childhood. "Are you scared?"
"What?" Babylon's full attention was caught at last. He frowned at the boy, then shrugged. "You know," he said, "I think I am, a little. You see, I'm going to be transmitted by tachyon beam to another planet—"
"I know," the boy said scornfully. "Who doesn't know all that? I wouldn't be scared."
"You wouldn't?"
"You bet I wouldn't! Boy! Going off to another planet, way outside the Galaxy, meeting all those great alien races and all—boy!"
"You make it sound pretty nice," Babylon said wryly. And, the way the boy described it, it really did. The part that was far from nice was that, for at least one of him, it would be a one-way trip.
"I hope David isn't bothering you too much?"
Babylon looked up, startled. The voice had been attractively, huskily feminine. The face matched it, and it had the same arresting green eyes and long lashes as the boy. "This is my mom," the boy introduced them importantly. "Not only is she a newscaster, she's been tachyon- transported herself. Twice!"
Babylon fished the name from his memory. "Zara Gentry. Of course! I've seen you many times on the stereo. Your son isn't bothering me at all, honestly."
"I only talk to him when he isn't doing anything else," the boy explained to his mother. "Can I go get a drink of water?"
Zara Gentry looked around the great hall, now relatively quiet. "All right, but don't get in anybody's way." She watched him trot away and then turned to Jen Babylon. "Aren't you the one who's going to Cuckoo to investigate something mysterious?"
"I guess so. I don't know how mysterious it is—except that it's mysterious to me, anyway. My specialty is linguistics. They seem to think I can help them."
"Mmm." She looked at him speculatively, and Jen Baby- Ion realized she was trying to assess whether interviewing him would be a waste of tape. Evidently she decided it would, because she relaxed and said, "Isn't this awful? I've covered Base events a hundred times before, and they usually just go like clockwork."
"Do you know what's holding things up?"
"The Civil Liberties lawyers have asked for an injunction—they want to keep the Purchased Persons from being transmitted—and they're waiting to hear. Of course, that mob of Kooks out there means that the messenger from the judge's office probably can't get through anyway, so we may be here for some time."
Babylon laughed. "Hurry up and wait. They dragged me back from Polynesia at top priority for this—and now I just sit here."
"Polynesia?" The woman looked at him as if she were reassessing. "Were you there when those crustaceans came ashore?"
He shook his head. "After I left, I guess. I just heard some rumors, nothing more."
"Pity," she said, losing interest again. "It's quite a story. They're not the same sort of crabs that are local there. Something special. Quite large, and— Oh! Excuse me! Time to get back to work."
And she was up and away, toward the great central doors of the foyer. Metal heeltips clicking against the terrazzo floor, the militia squad paraded into the Base and formed a double file across the foyer. Between them, the ragged line of convicts shambled haltingly toward the transmission chamber. The noise outside showed that the Kooks were still there, but evidently the militiamen had managed to get through. And, judging from the fact that the ACLU lawyers were standing silently to watch the procession, the request for an injunction had been denied. Babylon saw Zara Gentry excitedly directing her cameramen to cover the scene, and himself moved closer for a better look.
They did not seem as if they needed a squad of militiamen to keep them in order. They had the blank faces and preoccupied stare of all Purchased People, the convicts whose bodies were sold to whatever bidder chose to make use of them. They came in all shapes and sizes, as various as the gaping onlookers or any other random ordinary clutch of human beings. There was a young girl with flowing blond hair between two immense, squat, dark-skinned men, a stout grandmotherly woman of at least sixty following a scar-faced boy surely still in his teens. The militia squad did not seem to be earning their pay. Society did not appear to need much protection from the stumbling, slack- jawed convicts. Not a spark of volition was visible in any of them.
They came quite close to Jen Babylon as they lined up for their transmission. How many of them were there? Fifty-seven, someone had said, with fifty-seven individual life sentences at least among them, for no fewer than fifty- seven separate terrible crimes. Babylon wondered what the crimes might have been. Only doers of victim crimes or unforgivable crimes against the state—murder, rape, kidnaping, terrorism, and the like—were sentenced to be sold as some other creature's puppets. And then only if the convicted criminal refused psychiatric help or was a multiple recidivist.
It struck Babylon that he was looking at people who would be his neighbors in a very short time, for they were destined for Cuckoo.
But that was wrong. Whatever made these fifty-seven creatures individual would be blanked out by the power of the creatures who purchased them. They would be no more than containers for alien personalities. Babylon wondered uneasily what their new owners might be like. They could be almost anything. With all the races of the Galaxy exchanging representatives, there were a great many who could not survive in such appalling stews as the damp, oxygen-rich air of human birthright. The opposite was equally true, to be sure, but humans were not made welcome on some of the more advanced planets, whereas nearly every race had sent at least a few observers to see quaint, primitive Earth. Some came in edited forms, rebuilt to adapt to terrestrial conditions. Others bought convicts like these from the penal authorities, and impressed their own wills on the human bodies.
So whatever these fifty-seven might have been in their own persons, when he met them again on Cuckoo they would be Other. They would become alien in their drives and motivations, whatever their physical forms might have preferred, and every act and thought and sensory impression would be relayed to their distant owners, on whatever chlorine-aired or stormy liquid world they inhabited. There was a superstition that long-term Purchased People came to resemble their owners—whether primate or lizardlike, energy beings or dissociated swarms. This was nonsense, Babylon thought. Probably it was nonsense . . .
But he was glad, all the same, that he was not one of the fifty-seven.
"Hey, you—hold it!" It was a militiaman's voice, but there was more laughter in it than threat. The knot of Purchased People clotted to a stop, and a small figure darted through them and past the laughing militiamen. It catapulted into Jen Babylon and stopped.
"Excuse me, Mr. Babylon," it said. "Mr. Babylon? Have you seen my mom?"
It was the kid, David Gentry. Babylon turned him around by the shoulders and steered him toward his mother, vivaciously speaking into her microphone while her cameramen were shooting the Purchased People, and as he watched the boy scurry toward her a hand fell on his shoulder. It was the man in the red jumpsuit.
"Mr. Barnaby?"
"That's 'Babylon.'"
"Yes. Come with me for briefing, and don't get mixed up with that lot. You transmit right after them."
"And about time," said Jen Babylon.
The official stiffened. "Do you think I don't know that? Shocking how these people interfere! The traffic that's piling up—the schedules that have to be rerouted—shameful! I've always said it's a mistake to coddle these jailbirds," he said, glaring at the Purchased People as he led Jen past them. "Scan 'em and file 'em, use 'em when you need 'em—what's the use of letting them walk around when they're not being used for anything? I tell you, Mr. Barab- bas, criminals ought to be treated like criminals and not like regular full-fare paying passengers like yourself! No wonder the country's going to the aliens!"
It all happened so quickly there was hardly time to wonder if it would hurt. It didn't. There wasn't any pain at all. They inventoried his clothing and the contents of his pockets, gave him a claim check for the baggage that had been transmitted on ahead, and pointed to a door. He went through it, expecting a waiting room. It wasn't a waiting room. It was a tiny chamber, close as a coffin, and the door slid terminally shut behind him. A sweet electronic voice urged him simply to stand still. He closed his eyes on the studded walls and then, even through closed lids, saw a brilliant flash of searing blue light. His skin tingled. He heard one sharp crack, like a jumping spark. A bittersweet sensation washed through his mouth, and he caught a stinging whiff of something acrid and strange—ammonia? Something worse?
And then it was over.
Something shifted all his senses. The sensory illusions were gone. The electronic voice announced that the transmission cycle was complete. A door opened, not the same one, and Jen Babylon pushed through into the foyer of the Base.
He caught the stout man's scarlet sleeve. "Is that— I mean, is it all—"
The man looked at him pityingly. "Your first time? Yes. It's over. Go about your business."
Babylon let go, taking a deep breath of the air of the world he had been about to leave—the world that one of him had already and irretrievably left. It tasted very sweet.
He gazed around the foyer with pleasure. The last of the prisoners was just being conducted out through the double doors, and Zara Gentry and her son were gone. The voice of the man in the scarlet suede suddenly erupted from behind, lashing at an assistant: "Can't you keep count? There were fifty-seven of them, it says so right here!"
"Fifty-eight," the assistant said doggedly, waving at a luminous-number counter on the wall.
"Fifty-eight including him," snarled the stout man, jerking his head toward Babylon.
"No. Fifty-nine including him. See for yourself, chief."
"Ah, what's the use?" demanded the man. "How can they expect us to do a good job when the traffic piles up like this? That whole party for Sun One is due for transmission right now, and we're not realigned! If we could just get this crowd cleared out . . ."
He was staring nastily at Babylon, who took the hint and strode briskly across the foyer and out the double doors.
There it was! Earth! He was still there! The grass- fringed bank of the Charles had never looked more beautiful, and even the last of the convicts, now being herded back into the hovervans, looked merely pathetic. Or most of them did. Strangely, one of them was looking directly at Jen Babylon. It was one of the big, dark-skinned men, easily two meters tall and muscled in proportion. Babylon could not make out the expression on the man's face. But there was an expression, and there should have been none.