Stories of Your Life and Others

partners in a way that members of her generation will never be able to.
Imagines him loving and being loved, arguing and compromising. Imagines
him making sacrifices, some hard and some made easy because they're for a
person he truly cares about.
A few minutes pass, and Ana tells herself to stop daydreaming. There's
no guarantee that Jax is capable of any of those things. But if he's ever
going to get the chance to try them, she has to get on with the job in front of
her now: teaching him, as best she can, the business of living.
She initiates the game's shutdown procedure and calls Jax on the
intercom. "Playtime's over, Jax," she says. "Time to do your homework."

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Story Notes

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Tower of Babylon
This story was inspired by a conversation with a friend, when he
mentioned the version of the Tower of Babel myth he'd been taught in
Hebrew school. At that point I knew only the Old Testament account, and it
hadn't made a big impression on me. But in the more elaborate version, the
tower is so tall that it takes a year to climb, and when a man falls to his
death, no one mourns, but when a brick is dropped, the bricklayers weep
because it will take a year to replace.
The original legend is about the consequences of defying God. For me,
however, the tale conjured up images of a fantastic city in the sky,
reminiscent of Magritte's Castle in the Pyrenees. I was captivated by the
audacity of such a vision and started wondering what life in such a city
would be like.
Tom Disch called this story "Babylonian science fiction." I hadn't
thought about it that way when I was writing it— the Babylonians certainly
knew enough physics and astronomy to recognize this story as fanciful—
but I understood what he meant. The characters may be religious, but they
rely on engineering rather than prayer. No deity makes an appearance in the
story; everything that happens can be understood in purely mechanistic
terms. It's in that sense that— despite the obvious difference in cosmology
— the universe in the story resembles our own.

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