LOVE
IN BABYLON
by
Bruce Boston
Mercurial and multifarious were the passions of Lord Aragant, archly jaded his palate in all the sensual realms. As a youth he had rampaged with libidinous abandon through the Zones of Babylon and beyond. He had bedded both the harlot- priestesses of the Sacred Temple, teasing sainthood in the sublime range of their tantric repertoire, and the meanest common doxies ---- ill-mannered, foul of mouth, awkward to a fault ---- of the bas-world streets. He had returned home from the horror and the debacle of the Zirconium Campaign unscathed but for a host of diverse sexual parasites that infested his body within and without, infestations expunged with great expense and diligence by the high-court physicians, expunged in toto but for a recurrent and cacophonous fever that cruised the channels of the Lord’s inner ear on damp and starless nights.
By personal invitation ---- some would say dare! ---- Lord Aragant had even sampled and survived the justly infamous Count(ess) Prashk’s equally infamous seraglio, a degenerate menagerie of genetically and surgically engineered grotesqueries so bizarre in conception and execution they had been known to leave lesser men limp for life.
Publicized and peripatetic were the passions of Lord Aragant, and within the Zones the hallmark of all that was stylish, the common lock-step denominator of fleeting erotic fashion, ceaseless in their oscillations to such manic extent that only the most avid and tireless sexual au courants could ever hope to pace such unpredictable pendulum swings.
Yet with respect to a singular fetish-fixation, spawned in the forgotten security of his jewel-encrusted cradle by an overly attentive nursemaid, the passion of Lord ragant remained constant. Sober or intoxicated, as voyeur or participant, whether his chosen partners were single or multiple, male, female or hermaphroditic, whether he savored the taut muscle of a bare thigh as it writhed beneath the lash or sobbed with the joyous terror of abject surrender as the lash fiercely tickled his own sovereign flesh, whether consumed, consumer or mutually at feast, Aragant harbored an abiding and unabated passion for freckles.
Freckles brown as dead leaves...dark as scabs...as outrageously red as freshly-brimming blood. Freckles that marched in paramilitary arrays or swirled like spiral nebulae. Freckles as rare and scattered as the spiny indigenous gorse that ever-so-lightly peppered Babylon’s near-airless moon...and most of all...with the utter abandon only a monarch of his stature could indulge...freckles as dense and brilliant as the tumid dying suns that crowded the galactic core, suns that Aragant often claimed as Babylon’s own in his more intense flights of drug-heightened megalomania.
Thus it was inevitable that in the far-flung reaches of the Zones, where the powers of Babylon did hold sway, its tentacles stretching out like some great stellar cephalopod from system to system, that the unctuous and ever-solicitous minions of the Lord should discover her...or at least one of her ilk, if such another could exist. If they had not found her, they would have perforce had to invent her.
Born on a backspace planet often known as Krief, sometimes merely as KL37@12-BW, on a remote mountain plateau, to peasant herders of a tribe so primitive that Aragant’s name was never spoken aloud except to be whispered in awe and apprehension as that of some wrathful god who ruled beyond the peaked sky, she was freckled like no other woman. Countless swarms of those ‘‘blemishes’’ Aragant found so irresistible spilled from her hairline, cascaded across her forehead, cheeks and shoulders, adorned her breasts like a lavish helping of valspice, flowed down the length of her body to thoroughly dust her legs and ankles and toes...freckles in patterns simple and complex, in sets and subsets distinct and overlapping, in numbers staggering enough to brain-stun a cosmic statistician.
This ‘‘spotted’’ girl, shunned by her fellow primitives, viewed as a freak, a further curse upon their already tenuous and accursed existence, sold into slavery by her father to passing nomads, roughly tamed into submission, never tamed at heart, used at random, sold again and again, was at last delivered, still little more than a child, to the public auction block of a starport city. Here, the greatness of her soon-to-be celebrated beauty, relative as it was to Aragant’s obsession, was inevitably discovered. And having been discovered, it was just as inevitable that except for her freckles, she be pygmalioned completely.
The royal physicians and high-court cosmeticians restructured her features to resemble those of a long-dead nursemaid. They invisibly augmented bones, joints, tendons and muscles until she was supple as a bowl of eels. They took away her name, even from her own mind, and rechristened her ‘‘The Speckled Lotus.’’ Most of her other memories were obliterated, too. They recreated her innocence ---- underpinned at an unconscious level with the skills of a temple harlot ---- and restored her virginity ---- not once, but on a per diem basis! Her body was depilated completely but for the red-blond thatch of the mons veneris, and this they transformed to the finest and softest fur. Her natural pheromones were accented with a host of subtle yet potent aphrodisiacs.
Beneath the machicolated tower now engraved on her right hip, that royal sigil that marked all of Aragant’s possessions, they installed a screen that could be activated with the slap of a palm and opaqued back to freckled flesh likewise. Upon it, holographic dramatizations of the great amorous and erotic classics, from the extant fragments of Boccaccio’s prestellar epic to a more than ample share of Aragant’s own ghosted memoirs, were depicted in an unending round.
And the Lord was pleased. And pleased again. And again.
Of the lengthening list of sins and vices of which Lord Aragant could justly boast ---- and so often did! ---- a compilation too outré for even this outlandish tale, selfishness did not number among them. Those who basked in the regal glow of the Lord’s favor ---- a list itself ever changing, sometimes long as Denebian dusk, often short as Aragant’s flagrant temper ---- all shared freely in the Lord’s wealth and possessions. Thus the line of royal toadies who queued to sample the charms of the Speckled Lotus, and deflower her in turn, was also pleased. And pleased again.
Yet more than her freckles, more than her talent abed, the serpentine contortions of her limbs, the perverse scenes that played upon her flesh or that feline thatch between her thighs, what these sated suitors most remembered and most often rued was the precise moment of their conquest. For as her virginity was taken again and again, and the blood broke afresh upon her thighs, the Speckled Lotus did not cry out in pain or passion. Instead she laughed...loudly, uncontrollably...a husky and knowingly sexual laughter from deep in her freckled throat, a laughter that seemed completely at odds with her wide green ingenue eyes and delicate girlish grace. For you see, by then the lady was quite mad.
Acclaimed and celebrated were the deeds of the Apiarian Conquest, and none more celebrated ---- in song, in verse, in pompous and highly stylized holodramas ---- than those of the common Guardsman known as Thranx. Of all the heroes of that bloody and extended war, Thranx alone captured the popular imagination and emerged as the public favorite. Thranx...who had infiltrated enemy lines to land his diminutive scout at the heart of the Apiarian Hegemony. Thranx...who had survived the battle of Lubricon and singlehandedly launched and detonated the sub- space explosives that had novaed a sun and laid waste an entire system. Thranx alone...who had destroyed the nested hive mind of the Apiarian Queen and sent her subsequently mindless subjects careening at random to mass oblivion.
No more than a wisp of consciousness and a charred sliver of meat, his battered scout drifting aimlessly between the stars, serendipitously discovered by the cruisers that had been sent to confirm the extent of the glorious destruction he had wrought, what remained of the intrepid Guardsman was called back from Death’s banquet before the final toasts could be raised, what little remained of Thranx was restored and restructured by the royal physicians and high-court cosmeticians to a semblance of his former self. With tritanium and silicon and syntheflesh, with spit and polish and the sweat of their collective brows, with all the surgical and prosthetic skills they had mastered, Thranx, or at least something that could be called Thranx, lived and breathed again.
So it was that in a celebratory fête champêtre held in the spacious palace gardens, excessive in its rampant gluttony and vinous debauchery even by Babylonian standards, Thranx found himself quaffing the fiery cup of universal acclaim rather than a chill drought from the chalice of Thanatos. In a distended and ostentatious public ceremony, beamed throughout the Zones, blanketing all frequencies visual and auditory for an entire day and night, officiated personally by Lord Aragant and thoroughly peppered with apocryphal anecdotes from the Lord’s own military career, the Guardsman Thranx found himself standing at attention before his Supreme Commander as the list of his honors was recited, as row upon row of medals was planted across his restructured chest and brightly beribboned medallions were slung about the rigid tritanium column of his neck.
Yet even in the midst of this acclamation, finding himself alive as he never expected to be, Thranx discovered to his surprise and consternation that he was gravely troubled by the destructions he had wrought. The millions upon billions of deaths for which he alone had been responsible, even though they were those of the enemy, merely an omnisentient insect breed ---- in terms of consciousness only a single death, the royal philosophers would later opine ---- weighed heavily upon his shoulders and tread the depths of his heart. Had he really destroyed an entire species so that the hypocrisy and waste that now surrounded him could continue to flourish? So that a egomaniacal despot could maintain his maniacal reign?
Lord Aragant, insensitive as he was to all but himself, alien as the notion of guilt could be to his royal persona, still sensed the troubled soul of the man who stood before him with such a distracted gaze and feasted with strained enthusiasm by his side. Thus on top of the glut of bejeweled medals and decorations ---- a fortune in their own right! ---- in addition to Thranx’s instantaneous promotion from Guardsman to Admiral and his equally rapid severance from the Corp ---- an instantaneous Admiral could never be trusted with a fleet! ---- accompanied by the lifetime sinecure of a landed estate in the very shadow of Babylon’s machicolated towers...Lord Aragant concluded that a night with the Speckled Lotus was in order, the perfect benison to raise the spirits of the young hero and provide him a taste of what his renewed life had to offer.
What Aragant didn’t realize was that there were limits to the skills of the royal physicians, that although what they had restructured from a sliver of charred meat and a flickering wisp of consciousness closely resembled the Guardsman before his heralded deeds, Thranx remained a man in appearance only. His consciousness and most of his memories had survived intact, but the manhood of Thranx ---- at least what many, Aragant among them, considered ‘‘manhood’’ ---- had perished forever.
To refuse a gift from Lord Aragant was unheard of, even by a hero of the day, even by one who was utterly incapable of enjoying it. Though less than a man by Babylonian standards, Thranx was no fool. On the night of his unrequested and unwanted assignation, he arrived at the palace grounds on the appointed hour.
A tongueless servant, a hulking eunuch clothed entirely in royal purple, eyed him with unconcealed venom, gestured once, and then plodded forward without a backward glance. Thranx plodded in his wake, one eunuch trailing after another. They wended their way on a circuitous path through a maze of palace corridors that led to the chamber where the Speckled Lotus was sequestered.
This labyrinthian course was designed both to confound those who might attempt to visit the Lord’s paramour uninvited, and the Lotus herself, should she make any attempt to leave the palace. Past richly embroidered damask hangings and immense murals that elevated venery and all its deviant manifestations to a kind of art, beneath rows of golden sconces and slowly turning diamond chandeliers ---- conspicuous wealth that could have fed and housed the indigent hordes of the Outer Zones! ---- up and down plushly carpeted staircases, where spacer’s boots, at home on the sure steel rungs of a star ship, padded noiselessly and uncertainly. Accustomed to the Spartan existence of the Corps, Thranx found the opulent decadence that surrounded him both unnerving and disgusting. His own estate, where he had spent the previous night tossing sleeplessly on a bed far too soft for his tastes, was appointed in a similar though more modest fashion. Thranx understood, not for the first time, that he had entered a world where he could never belong.
Thranx’s plan was the most obvious. He would spend the night with the Speckled Lotus as Aragant had bid. He would explain to the famous paramour that he was incapable of accepting the gift that had been bestowed upon him. Surely the woman would understand. Surely she would welcome an evening of rest from her endless line of suitors. Later he would praise her beauty and charm to the Lord and offer his profuse gratitude for such a singular experience. Yet once Thranx was ushered into the lady’s chamber and its padded velvet door whispered shut behind him, once the Lotus drew back the gossamer curtains of the four-poster where she lived and slept and worked ---- for work it was, and of the foulest sort ---- and her famous form and visage were revealed, he suddenly found himself as mute as the creature who had led him there.
It was not the Lotus’ abundance of freckles that caused the speech Thranx had rehearsed to die upon his lips. He was no sexual au courant. Even when he was a man possessed of normal desires and the means to fulfill them, he had been indifferent to this popular fetish set by Aragant’s tastes. It was not the litheness of her limbs or the spare trappings of leather and silk that adorned her ample though girlish figure in such a way as to leave it more provocative, more naked, than mere nudity could ever have. It was not the false innocence of her wide green eyes or the madness that dwelt behind them, but what Thranx alone of all who had visited this room was the first to perceive, the sorely wounded softness that dwelt deep within the liquid depths of that madness. And as he watched, still with no words taking shape in his mind or rising to his lips, and the eyes of the Lotus met and held his gaze, that softness began to flicker and bloom, to emerge from the veils of madness and the even thicker veils of the false creature they had made of her and the charade she had been forced to endure.
In their resurrection of a man that by all accounts should have died, perhaps the royal physicians had created more than they suspected. In their transformation of a simple peasant girl to a skilled and glamorous courtesan, the case must have been likewise. For just as Thranx was both more and less than what he seemed ---- his frame more durable, his strength far greater than that of an ordinary man ---- so was the Lotus both more and less than an ordinary woman. They were both artificial creatures of surgical and cosmetic creation, creatures that nature had never meant to be, and before they had spoken a single word, they recognized their kinship. An instantaneous bond, instantaneous as a recently conferred Admiralty though more than nominal, was forged between them.
In the talk that followed, halting at first, then growing in a downhill rush throughout the night, Thranx plumbed the depths of the Lotus’ insanity to the girl who remained within. He unleashed the childhood memories of an identity that had presumably been erased. The Lotus, in turn, by her sudden reversion from obedient whore to a woman never tamed at heart, managed to soothe Thranx’s troubled soul and renew his desire for existence. Both misfits in the world that had created them, they agreed that they would have to find another, a world where they could both belong and belong to one another. The chamber they inhabited had birthed solo infatuation on countless occasions. For the first time it had now borne a mutual trust and understanding.
Aragant was never to learn, less likely to comprehend, what transpired that night. The crystals with which he secretly recorded all the trysts of the Lotus, crystals he would later view at his leisure in voyeuristic masturbatory reveries, were removed from their spy eyes and crushed to splinters underfoot. The venomous purple eunuch, who had remained to guide Thranx back the way they had come, was a toppled hulk beside the chamber’s open door. The chamber itself was deserted. Thranx was a trained warrior, no royal toady to be confused by a simple maze of palace corridors. Later it was reported that another scoutship was missing from the already decimated inventory of the war-torn Seventh Fleet.
Clear to most that the pair had fled together, it was clear to Aragant that Thranx had abducted the Lotus by force. For what woman could be so mad as to choose the favors of a simple Guardsman over the Lord of all Babylon?
Aragant’s subsequent rage knew no bounds. He had not only lost the prime sexual passion of his life, but she had been stolen from him by a commoner. The challenge to his pride, to the pride of Babylon itself, was unbearable. The hero of the day had become a villain in the night. Thranx was denounced as a traitor throughout the Zones, stripped of his Admiralty and his decorations in absentia.
Conspicuous wealth was converted to ready coin and a king’s ransom thrice over was placed upon his head. All of the worlds over which Babylon held sway were scoured by skilled trackers and assassins. The entire resources of the Corp were employed to ferret out the renegade and his supposed captive. Further agents, traveling in disguise through the hostile empires that surrounded Babylon, were dispatched in every direction beyond the Zones. Yet the search proved a futile one. As many a political refugee or common criminal had long since discovered, in a galaxy so abundantly freckled with matter, there were light years aplenty in which to hide.
The high-court physicians and royal cosmeticians sought out substitutes to assuage their Lord’s sense of loss. Other densely freckled woman were produced by the score, by the hundred, and one by one they underwent the same mental and physical transformations that had been suffered upon the Lotus.
Artificial women were fashioned entirely from scratch, clockwork automatons that did not know real life, but could convincingly mimic life and consciousness even to the most perspicacious observers. Lotus2 , Lotus3 ...Lotus28 ...Lotus¥. .. None of them, real or mechanical, would ever please Aragant. For although they might simulate the Speckled Lotus down to the finest details, downto the last stray freckle and the exact timbre of her crazed contralto laugh, Lord Aragant would always find fault, for none of them was the Lotus.
The Lord retired to his chambers and began to brood. The loss and humiliation he had suffered preyed upon his mind. To have been cuckolded by a common Guardsman. To have been deserted by the only woman he had ever loved...for in retrospect, Aragant convinced himself that the lust and lechery he had practiced with such diligence were nothing less than love, the very emotion he had forever denied.
From that day on the fortunes of Babylon began to change. Just as a shadow had fallen across Aragant’s mind, a shadow fell across the Zones over which he ruled. Strange disruptive religions that condemned the immorality of the high court sprang up from nowhere. Civil insurrections and riots became the order of the day. The Outer Zones, systems annexed decades past, went so far as to declare their independence.
And so it was that the shining glory that was Babylon began to fade. For what was Babylon after all ---- a question the royal philosophers had often debated ---- but a fantastical extension of Lord Aragant’s own fantastic desires and dreams?
In a high tower in a deserted wing of the palace, in a room cast in perpetual darkness, Lord Aragant sat by day and night with only his royal hand for company. His collection of crystals replayed the past in a cycling round that always stopped short of the Apiarian Conquest. Beyond the walls he no longer deigned to leave, his world darkened in kind.
On a backspace planet often known as Krief, sometimes merely as KL37@12-B, on a remote mountain plateau, living beside the peasant herders of a tribe so primitive that Aragant’s name was never spoken aloud except to be whispered in awe and apprehension as that of a wrathful god who had once ruled beyond the peaked sky, a strange couple dwelt for many years. A spotted woman with a fading sigil on her right hip. A man whose flesh gradually wrinkled but whose bones did not shrink with age, so that more and more a tautness came to inhabit his countenance, a tautness belied by the wounded softness that could be found in the liquid depths of his eyes.
Shunned by the rest of the tribe, viewed as freaks, as a further curse upon their already tenuous and accursed existence, this strange and nameless pair choose a hut apart, beyond the boundaries of the plateau and the village, farther up the slopes of the jagged mountains that reached toward heaven. Joined in a lifelong mating that was never consummated except in their shared commiseration and caring, except by the words and deeds of their mutual tenderness, they lived in solitude and harmony, tending their own small herd of goats, harvesting the edible tubers that sprouted only in the rocky crevices of these isolated hillsides, tubers that were considered the rarest of delicacies in a world they had left behind...a world that had since left itself behind.
Legend has it that when the couple died, they died together, within seconds of one another. And some would have us believe that for just a moment their departing souls could be seen side by side against the horizon, climbing steadily, cloudy wisps of rarefied consciousness pluming in concert as they rose far beyond the peaked sky.
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