The Machine's Child (Company) (22 page)

There was a clatter nastily suggestive of metal implements of some kind being laid out. A faint hiss, a pleasant smell of cloves . . . and a strangled yell of outrage from Joseph.

After a full thirty seconds of burning silence, he straightened up beside the bed and fixed Roger with a glare of righteous accusation. Roger was snoring gently.

“All right,” said Joseph. “You degenerate spawn of imperialist oppressors. What gives, here, mortal man?”

No reply from Roger. Joseph bent again and this time it was five whole minutes before he rose. With effort he controlled himself enough to speak clearly.

“Okay,” he said. “So you’ve
already
had a vasectomy. Very responsible and decent of you, Roger. I want to sincerely thank you for your sense of public-spiritedness. At least he won’t be
your
fault. So what this means . . . what this means is . . . Cecelia! That two-timing Jezebel!”

He worked swiftly as he thought aloud, closing and sealing, collecting his instruments, throwing a blanket over Roger.

“In fact, if the kid’s born in nine months . . . and you’re up here unconscious right now . . . and Her Ladyship is all alone downstairs—”

Joseph’s eyes went wide with horror.

“What have I done?” he said, and then his words were echoing in the darkness with nobody to hear them.

Mavis, clearing away the dishes, started and nearly dropped them as Joseph came tearing down into the parlor.

“Where’s Her Ladyship?” he demanded. “Who’s she with?”

“She went out for a walk,” Mavis said. “I think she was sort of put out, you know, with His Lordship getting so—”

“But is she alone?” Joseph shouted, grabbing her by both arms.

“Yes!” Mavis glared at him. “If you hadn’t kept buying His Lordship all those drinks—”

But she was speaking to an empty room, and the door was swinging slowly back after having smacked wide open and banged the wall. Pursing her lips, she went and pulled it firmly shut against the perfumed night.

Joseph ran, keenly aware of what a romantic and very, very secluded spot Muir Harbor was at night. The impenetrable gloom and silence of the forest, the thickets of flowers along the bank of the dark stream, the faint crash of the pitiless sea, the white glint of the stars laughing down at him . . .

He emerged from the long aisle of pines and picked up Cecelia on infrared about fifty meters ahead of him, slender and upright, gazing out across the meadows above the lagoon. What was she watching so intently?

A man? No. It glimmered pale in the starlight. It seemed to be a wild horse, grazing in complete unconcern. So Her Ladyship liked wildlife? Great. As long as she confined herself to nature appreciation . . . Joseph decided not to take any chances, and advanced on her purposefully.

“Penny for your thoughts, Your Ladyship,” he said in his friendliest manner.

Cecelia sighed, closed her eyes. After a moment she opened them and turned to look down at him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just a figure of speech, Your Ladyship,” he said. “Say, I’m real sorry about His Lordship’s slight overindulgence in spirits. Strong cider in these parts! Anyway I saw him all safely tucked into bed. He ought to be fine in the morning.”

“How very kind of you,” she said.

“Don’t mention it. So, um . . . are you alone out here?”

“I was,” she said, turning back to watch the white horse.

“Well, it’s just as well I came along,” he told her. “We don’t usually get grizzly bears down here, but you never know, and wouldn’t that be awful? With you and Roger so young and in love and all. Why, we had a couple go just like Pyramus and Thisbe out here, a couple of years ago. Terrible tragedy. Most people have no idea how dangerous bears are, but—”

“Pyramus and Thisbe?” Cecelia raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you the literary man, Mr. Capra!”

“Well—yes, I have a certain appreciation for the giants of literature,” Joseph said. “And may I remark how nice it is to encounter a fellow enthusiast? How are you enjoying
Persuasion,
by the way? Is this your first time reading Austen?”

“No,” Cecelia said, looking out across the meadow. The horse had wandered off. “I’m rereading the canon.”

“Really? All Austen’s stuff? Great,” Joseph said genially, but he scanned the meadow for would-be rendezvous-keepers. There didn’t seem to be any. “And do you find your appreciation of all those witty little observations has increased with time?”

“No,” she said at last. “As a matter of fact, no, I don’t. I loved those books as a girl. I read them now, and I grow impatient with Austen.”

“Really?” Joseph stared at her in surprise.

“Yes.” Cecelia’s voice was remote and sad. “She saw human nature for what it is, with the miserable self-interest that motivates us, and the sordid bargains we make. All pettiness, weakness, inanity. How could she resolve every story with an improbable happy romance?”

“The literary convention of the time, I guess,” Joseph said.

She gave him a look that acknowledged he was slightly more than a fencepost who had happened to overhear her soliloquy.

“Do you suppose she’d have had the courage to tell the truth, if she’d lived longer?” Cecelia wondered.

“What would you say is the truth, Your Ladyship?”

“That we can’t possibly find perfect love in other people. Have you ever had a religious impulse, Mr. Capra?”

“I might have,” Joseph said.

“Do you suppose it begins in a dissatisfaction with the inessential?” Cecelia looked up at the stars. “A desire for something more than human love?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” he said, realizing in terror that if any woman might give birth to his enemy, it would be this one.

“I don’t know either,” she said. “But I wish I’d begun thinking about this earlier in my life.”

After a moment Joseph cleared his throat.

“I, ah, take it you and His Lordship are having problems, then?” he said. “Is there somebody else?”

She looked down at him scornfully. “Gracious, what concern is it of yours? Since you ask, however—I haven’t the slightest interest in infidelity. Roger has his flaws, but he’s never harmed anyone in his life.”

“Really? That’s nice,” Joseph muttered, avoiding her eyes. “So maybe you’ll be starting a family soon?”

“A family?” she said, as though that were the most absurd suggestion anyone could have possibly made. “Roger and I agree very nicely on a number of things, Mr. Capra, and one of them happens to be our utter disinclination to have children. Now or ever. I donated genetic material to the Kronos Biodiversity Project when I was a girl; as far as I’m concerned, that fulfilled my duty to posterity.”

“Oh,” Joseph said, feeling a metaphysical
splat.
He wiped imaginary custard and pie crust from his face, and glared in the direction of the grinning Fates.

He saw her back to the inn and watched the passageway all night, but no tall lover ever came sneaking along to her room. When they came down for breakfast, Roger was rather pale and sat carefully, but seemed to have no memory of anything untoward having happened.

After the Hearty North Coast Breakfast, the Checkerfields’ butler came ashore to advise that they should depart. As compensation for not staying
longer, however, the earl and Lady Finsbury posed smiling for a holoshot under the inn sign, and Roger had his butler write a dignified recommendation below which he made his mark. Mavis displayed it proudly over the bar for the rest of her life.

Joseph loaded up the Checkerfields’ luggage and drove them down to the pier, where he saw them aboard their palatial yacht. Back ashore, he waved as they set sail, cursing himself for not managing to slip a bomb into one of their suitcases somehow.

Then he drove back, settled the charges, and told Mavis he was off to another business conference.

The first thing he did upon returning to the mountain was check the Temporal Concordance, to see if all references to Alec Checkerfield had been miraculously erased.

They hadn’t been.

“So I guess that answers
that
big question in temporal physics, huh?” he told Budu gloomily, loosening his tie as he sagged down against the vault. “All that work for nothing! The little bastard—and he really is one—gets born anyway.”

“You Could Try Again,” Budu said.

“And do what? Swim up to their yacht in a subsuit and flippers to try to sneak aboard? Keep chasing after the miserable so-and-so in the hope I’ll get a chance to do away with him?” Joseph growled. “Oh, yeah, I can just hear the laughs the gods of causality would have at my expense.
‘Shark Attack in Normally Safe Waters!
Infant Unharmed.
Nanny Goes on Murderous Rampage!
Tot Saved by Chance Bystander.
Father Christmas Explodes in Harrods’ Disaster!
Child Miraculously Escapes.
Classroom Taken Hostage by Macedonian Terrorists!
Our Interview with Lone Boy Who Was in the Lavatory at the Time!’ No, thank you.”

Budu bared his teeth in terrifying silent laughter.

“And You Have Forgotten Another Thing.”

“Oh, yeah?” Joseph said, groping in his pocket for a granola bar. He peeled the wrapper off and took a bite, chewing forcefully.

“Dr. Zeus Would Protect The Boy. The Company Needs Him To Deliver The Bomb To Mars Two.”

“Hell,” said Joseph through a mouth of granola. “You’re right. So even though Jolly Roger got a clip job and Lady Cecelia would rather be a nun, nothing is going to stop Dr. Zeus from producing that kid from somewhere. You know who ran the Kronos Biodoversity Project, don’t you?”

“He Will Be Born. He Will Take His Place In History As The Hangar Twelve Man. Until He Has, You Will Be Unable To Touch Him,” Budu said, and watched as Joseph drew the inference he had intended. Joseph stopped chewing.

“But
after
—!” he said. “After Mars Two he’ll disappear. No more history to protect him. The son of a bitch’ll have a time shuttle, he’ll take it on the lam through the event shadows. Anything might happen to him there!” Joseph leaped to his feet and clenched both fists over his head. “Oh, he’s mine, Father. He’s dead meat. I’ll track him down, punch his ticket to the afterlife one-way, rescue Mendoza, and still have time to relax with a cold one before Judgment Day! This is good.”

“And Then I Will Have Real Work For You To Do,” Budu said.

San Francisco had come and gone.

Well, as far as anyone knew at the time. The boom had gone bust, the gold fields played out; devastating fires had repeatedly leveled the place. Nowadays the ready cash to rebuild just wasn’t there, should another blaze sweep through. Once upon a time a merchant might have charged any price he wanted for a dozen eggs, or a loaf of bread, or a shovel. A month’s wages hadn’t been thought too high for a pair of socks, and as for a cigar—!

But nobody would discover the Comstock Lode for years yet, and just now men who had been briefly rich beyond dreams of avarice were creeping back into the City in hopes of getting jobs sweeping floors, emptying spittoons, anything to build up enough of a stake to allow them to drift back sadly eastward, or south to sordid early death in Los Angeles or Mexico.

But for the first time in California’s history, there were abundant consumer goods available at low prices. You could get anything in San Francisco, and the sooner the better, because most of it was spoiling on the shelves. Of course, nobody had any money, so it didn’t matter.

Mr. William Green owned a dry-goods establishment on Clay Street. That morning, in the cathedral-like silence at his counter, he had noticed an inordinate number of little brown moths flitting to and fro through the sunbeams. No customers having come in all morning, he had ample leisure to observe the moths, and discovered that they
seemed to be congregating primarily around the sacks of flour stacked in the corner.

Closer examination proved that the moths were crawling out of and into the flour through the thousand pinprick holes they had chewed in the sacking. Mr. Green pulled a sack free and opened it, grimacing as he peered down into a cobwebby maggoty mess that should have been pie crusts and biscuits long ago.

“Merde!”
Mr. Green had muttered, because his real name was Mr. Rambouillet. He had fled France owing somebody a great deal of money, and settled in San Francisco with the earnest hope of making more. That, however, is a story entirely unrelated to our present one, which continues:

Having resigned himself to the loss, Mr. Green spent the next hour dragging sacks of flour out to the four-foot-deep chasm the last good rain had cut down the center of Clay Street. One after another he pitched in the sacks, and each landed with a little
poof
of white dust, sad as a corpse flopping into quicklime. None of the few passersby remarked on what he was doing, as it was a fairly common sight lately.

Now Mr. Green stood in front of his dry-goods store, dusting his hands and thinking gloomily about getting into his stock of brandied peaches again. He had eaten his way through one case already. His was an addictive personality, which was one of the reasons he owed somebody in France a great deal of money. But:

“ ‘Dry goods and general merchandise.’ Now,
this,
” a voice said, “should suit us very well, my dear, wouldn’t you think?”

“Maybe, señor,” a voice replied, and Mr. Green turned to stare, and kept staring.

They were an odd-looking pair, who had made their way up Clay Street through the blowing sand. The young girl was dressed as a boy for some reason, not very convincingly given her figure. The man was extraordinarily tall and wore a curious twisted metal collar, though otherwise he was dressed in a nondescript enough way: white shirt and boots, timeless in their design, and a pair of blue
serge de Nimes
trousers very similar to the ones Mr. Levi Strauss had recently begun making over on Sacramento Street.

The man loomed over Mr. Green now.

“Is this your establishment, my good man?” he said, and it registered
on Mr. Green that he was an Englishman. “And have you any ladies’ garments ready-made?”