The Machine's Child (Company) (16 page)

Alec ignored him, as the sheer elation of the physical movement caught him up in a way it hadn’t in years. Mendoza swung back toward him, her face flushed with delight.

“Captain! Give us some music,” he said, launching her with his hands, and as the music roared over the ship’s speakers she came down light as a bird and sprang back, floating through the complicated steps as though she’d been dancing them all her life.

He gave a raw whoop of triumph and seized her, and they went together along the deck faster now, executing the figures in perfect time, moving as one body. Edward and Nicholas were pulled with them, running along helpless, too caught up in their arousal to notice when the deck began to crackle with blue fire.

The Captain noticed, and very nearly shut off the music; but after a moment’s consideration he instead activated a whole battery of instruments to record, to measure and analyze the phenomenon occurring there on the deck.

And when the music drew to its close and the dancers stopped, panting, the blue light flickered out as though it had never been there. Nothing had happened, after all.

“My, this saves time,” said Mendoza, watching as the cliff face as it dropped past them. “Did we do this before? All I remember is having to climb.”

“Oh, we did that, too,” lied Alec breezily, piloting the agboat over the lip of the cliff. Here a headland of broad meadows sloped back to the mountains. Immense redwoods spired up from the high places. Closer down to the meadowline there were oak trees, too, laurels and Monterey cypress.

Alec had brought them up on a long ragged point that projected out above the sea, open and sunny, perhaps a kilometer long and half as wide. On the north side of the meadow a dark cataract came roaring over green boulders before it plunged away, down the cliff to the sea a thousand feet below. Alec steered for it.

Not back there,
Edward said.
Too close to the mountains! Best to put some open ground between ourselves and anything that might come out of those trees.

But it’s shady and there’s water,
Alec said.
Besides, if the Company tries any sneak attacks, we’re armed.
He patted the disrupter in its holster meaningfully.
And it’s too long ago for there to be any red Indians. I checked. Nothing here but us and Nature, okay?

“Beautiful trees,” said Mendoza dreamily, stretching out the new boots Bully Hayes had fabricated for her. Alec wore hiking boots, cargo pants, and an old shirt. Edward had ordered a suit of severely correct virtual Victorian field garb for the occasion; Nicholas, who felt hopelessly lost, simply wore his ordinary black clothing.

Alec took a deep breath as he pulled them up on the streambank.

“What a green place! Smell that air.” He set the agboat down and jumped out, turning to her. Mendoza took his hand and stepped out on the alien shore, and for a moment looked startled.

“What a
big
place,” she said. “I have so much to do.”

“But we’re on holiday now, remember?” Alec told her, shivering, for the shadow of the redwoods was ice-cold. He led her out into the sunlight. “No worries. Look at all the wildflowers!”

“Look at the
Datura meteloides,
” Mendoza said, then ran forward. “No, it isn’t!
Calystegia macrostegia.
Look at the size!”

All Alec could see was a big white flower, but he came and made suitably astonished noises as she knelt over it, examining the leaves and following the vine back to its root as though it were a power lead. Edward was surveying the meadow, studying the treeline. Nicholas was watching Mendoza sadly.

“Variant of convolvulus, but the leaves are atypical—” she muttered, crawling along on hands and knees. “Sagitate, as all
macrostegia
—gigantiform, and—” She looked up, looked around. “Where’s the—” Her gaze riveted with purpose on the picnic basket that Alec was just hauling from the agboat. “I need the—”

Her face became confused, and then went utterly blank. Alec, glancing over at her, felt the hair stand on the back of his neck.

Why’s she looking like that?
he cried silently.

Blocked memory retrieval, I reckon,
the Captain told him.
The lassie
was programmed as a botanist, remember? It’s hell going against yer programming, believe me.

Alec shuddered. Nicholas could bear it no longer and seized control. He knelt down beside Mendoza, taking her hand.

“Quid rei est, mi amores?” he said gently. Her eyes focused and fixed on him.

“Nescio—” she replied. “Quid faciam? Ubi sunt instrumenta mea?” She halted, surprised, and then she laughed. “We’re not speaking Cinema Standard, are we? How strange.”

“We have spoken in many tongues,” he said, feeling his heart soar. “And just so we used to speak long ago, when you worked in the Garden. It was our way of speaking in secret. Do you remember when you were a slave?”

“Yes, I remember that.”

What’s he saying to her?
Alec asked.
What’s that language?

Latin,
said Edward in disgust.
It seems Brother Nicholas has found means to exploit his pointless skills. Well, never mind; it’s proving useful in an awkward circumstance.

“You worked in a garden and collected plants,” Nicholas explained. “You had a basket with tools. I think you must be remembering that. But, my love, you are free now! There is nothing you must do any more, no work other than to please yourself. Do you understand?”

“Oh!” Her cheeks were scarlet. “How embarrassing, to forget.”

“No, no, my love,” he said, unable to stop himself from leaning forward and taking her by the shoulders. “It’s sweet to speak with you in the old way. It makes me remember when we were young, and lay together in that garden.”

“I remember this. We were supposed to be working; but we’d make love all the time instead. And—they punished us?”

“Yes, beloved,” Nicholas said, thinking that it was close enough to the truth.

She was staring around at the solemn trees. “And this was a garden, too. But . . .” She turned back to him, and her eyes were a little frightened. “This is not a human place.”

“No, beloved.”

“Was I lost here?”

“Long years, my heart. Yet I have found you again,” Nicholas told her, kissing her brow. “And I will bring your soul out of this darkness.”

“But—” She looked up at him. “Who will do the work?”

See what I mean? Programming.

“You don’t—” Nicholas struggled for words in frustration, and Alec stepped in.

“The Company’s made some other slaves now, to do all that. You know what your work is? You’ve got this project going on, er, Indian maize! That was it. You remember that?”

Smart lad.

She blinked at his sudden return to English, but her face brightened with comprehension. “Yes! Must produce a variety with the vigor of ancient cultivars yet retaining the high yield of modern hybrids while increasing levels of tryptophan, lysine, and accessible niacin.”

“Er—yeah,” Alec said. “Except, er, of course, we lost everything you were working on, when the accident happened.”

“Damn!”

“But it’s okay! The Captain will help you start your work over and anyway, we’ve got all the time in the world now,” Alec said. “Remember? So let’s have our picnic, and then what do you say we go exploring?”

“Okay.” She took his outstretched hand. He helped her up from her knees.

It was a nice picnic: smoked oysters on little crackers, soy protein sandwiches, and a big thermos bottle of iced fruit tea. They ate seated companionably on the gunwale of the agboat, and though Edward grumbled silently about the soy protein by and large they enjoyed their treat very much.

“It’ll be even nicer when we can grow fresh stuff,” remarked Mendoza.

“Yup,” agreed Alec, not knowing what else to say.

Afterward they walked up the stream bank a few hundred meters, and Edward took the lead in their exploration. Nicholas peered up now and then at the mountainside, unable to shake the feeling that something immense and silent watched them as they clambered over the green boulders.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect this was jade,” Edward said, stooping to examine a rock the size of his fist.

“It is,” Mendoza said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Spectrographic analysis?” She looked at him in surprise.

“Er—of course it is. By Jove, what a fortune this would be worth in Macao.” He chuckled and tossed it away.

Really?
Alec looked back at the rock. He stared around at the green pebbles scattered everywhere.

“Have we ever been there?” Mendoza said.

“Macao? No, my dear, I don’t believe you have. I was there once, on some nasty business,” Edward said. His face darkened a little. “Company business, as I know now.”

“Oh,” said Mendoza.

Should we maybe take some of this stuff back to the ship?
Alec tried, without success in his virtual state, to pick up a glossy stone.
Might be worth something.

Hast thou not gold enough, boy?
Nicholas looked at him askance.

They reached the end of the box canyon and peered up at another waterfall; speculated on swimming in the freezing water and decided against it. They found gooseberries growing along the stream bank, but only Nicholas liked them. Mendoza cut a sprig and tucked it in her pocket. As they came back, Alec took control, bent and grabbed up a piece of jade at last.

“Let’s collect some of this,” he said.

“Oh. To trade with?” Mendoza looked around and picked up a piece obligingly.

“Yes indeed. I know places that’d pay serious cash for jade. Even if we don’t trade it—big raw lumps of gemstone, what a cool kind of loot to have! Sheer barbaric splendor.”

Mendoza nodded. “Okay. Let’s have splendor.”

“Great,” Alec said, pacing ahead of her. “Come on, we can collect an emperor’s ransom!”

There was a great deal of jade along the stream. Working together, in a few minutes they had filled all the bellows pockets in Alec’s explorer pants and prized loose a boulder of considerable size, which Alec insisted on lugging up to the agboat, wet and slightly muddy.

“Whew!” he grunted, setting it inside and leaning away, bracing his hands into the small of his back.

Alec, have you strained yerself?

No.

“What will we do with it?” Mendoza said. “It’s certainly a big one.”

“Get Bully Hayes on it with some rock drills and have him carve something, maybe.” Alec panted for breath. “Would you like that, huh? A statue? Or, hey, what about a jade throne? A jade bench anyway. And some jade drinking cups”—he began to giggle—” with
Souvenir of Prehistoric California
carved on ’em.”

Idiot boy,
said Edward loftily. Nicholas looked over his shoulder at the shadow under the trees. Somewhere far in, a coyote howled.

They wandered out across the meadow after that, holding hands as they ventured through the wildflowers to the cliff’s edge, idyllic as could be, though Alec crunched rather as he walked from all the jade in his pockets, and found it difficult to bend his knees.

“It’s pulling your pants down, too,” Mendoza said affectionately, glancing around behind him. “Cheeky.”

“Whoops.” Alec hauled up on his waistband and unbuckled his belt to refasten it. Mendoza looked out over the wide sea and the
Captain Morgan
quiet at anchor below them.

“This is a beautiful place,” she said.

“But . . .”

“But what?”

“I think you become like a tree or a stone, if you get lost here,” she said quietly. “Not human. That would be a good thing, if you were very sad.”

“But you won’t be sad anymore, ever,” Alec assured her.

“I hope not.” Her voice was older, quieter, thoughtful; not that of a young girl at the moment but very much the survivor Alec remembered from the agricultural station, the preternaturally calm woman who had ministered to him.

Now Mendoza frowned and turned her head to stare inland, just as the Captain transmitted:

Alec! Heads up! Bloody big life form coming down that hill east northeast!

“Oh, how tedious,” Mendoza said, in tones of mild irritation. “That grizzly bear has noticed us.”

“What?” Alec swung around to follow her gaze and beheld the biggest animal he’d ever seen in his life, an immense mass of yellow-silver fur shambling down toward the meadow, appallingly fast for all its clumsiness.

“Ursus horribilis.”
Mendoza shook her head. “Well, we’d better leave now.”

“But—but—wild animals never bother you if you let them alone,” Alec said.

“Yes, but that’s a grizzly bear,” Mendoza said, as though that would explain everything. “Shall we go?”

And then she wasn’t there, she had just vanished from beside Alec, and the bear had come down off the hillside and was lolloping out across the meadow straight for him. It had cut off Alec from the agboat, where Mendoza was standing. Her expression of amazement was rapidly becoming one of consternation.

ALEC!
the Captain roared. Alec stood rooted where he was in terror, aware of thirty pounds of jade where he’d never needed it less and a sheer drop at his back. Edward and Nicholas attempted to bolt and were pulled up sprawling by his immobility.

Run, boy,
shouted Nicholas, desperately trying and failing to summon a virtual boar-spear.
What, art thou lame?

You bloody ass
—Edward said, and seizing control he drew the disrupter pistol.

Stop! You can’t shoot a wild animal!
Alec said, as the bear thundered ever closer and Mendoza reappeared near them screaming:

“What are you doing? Let’s go!”

But Edward, his face cold and stern, was concentrating on the onrushing bear. He turned edge-on, stiffly upright in the stance of the nineteenth-century marksman, left arm down at his side, right arm extended at full length, taking careful aim.

“A moment, please, my dear,” he said, and fired.