Babylon said, "You leave a lot to be desired as a guest, Ben, but—" He shrugged. Obviously his old school friend had been under more pressure than he could handle. "We can go out and eat, you know."
"Not tonight. There are a couple of people I need to see. One's a girl I've been thinking of for a long time. The other's . . . myself."
"Yourself? But Ben—" Babylon clamped his lips shut on what he had been about to say; it was far better for Pertin to look for that other self and not find it than to be told, just now, why it could not be found. "I understand," he finished. "Good luck."
"I do want to see you, Jen," said Pertin, already halfway out the door. "Tell you what. I'll come back tomorrow and take you out for a drink, all right?"
"All right," said Jen Babylon. But as the door closed he was wondering which Jen Babylon would keep the date.
THREE
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.