The Machine's Child (Company) (24 page)

And look what they did to her,
Alec muttered.
And to us. What have we been but clay they’ve sculpted into men?

Dr. Zeus is going to discover I’m a good deal more than a golem,
said Edward darkly.

To be sure they will, my lad. And I’d be pleased and proud to go over some of my little schemes with you, as you’ve the inclination?

No time like the present,
Edward said.

What’ve you got, Captain sir?

Well now! It be a pleasant thing, to be sure, when a massively
powerful Company can engage the picked geniuses of a whole world to invent things for it; but I reckon ye lads’ve heard that a camel’s a horse designed by committee? And so it is with Dr. Zeus. Too many committees and supervisory panels and executive boards, all second-guessing and hindering them geniuses. And there’s a power of skulking bastards who’s running things behind the scenes, and all fighting amongst themselves naturally, so there’s more confusion. Big corporations is stupid.

The better for our purposes,
said Edward.

Right you are, son. Well, that’s one to us. Now, take them nanobots. Dr. Zeus has come up with the best anywhere, what does more things than anybody else’s design. But they only been used for biological augmentation, see? They got a lot of other potential uses.

Such as?
Alec looked keenly interested.

Oh, such as making robot drones what look just like dolphins. There ain’t no Company accountants telling
us
we can’t.

I confess I can’t understand one word in three of this talk,
said Edward.

I reckon you savvy more than you let on. Well, so: yer little dolphins is a right clever idea, Alec, and sure to be useful. But think about a mine, now, or any other infernal device, that looked like nothing more than a teaspoonful of gold paint! Nanobots in suspension, with a timed-release program alerting ’em to stir themselves, on a certain day in 2355, and become a weapon. Or a transmitter to send out a jamming signal, or get into targeted sites and rape and pillage until a certain bloody Doctor was begging for mercy. No quarter given, of course.

We builds our power base slow, laying down bank accounts and power caches all through time, just like Dr. Zeus has, so we can go anywhere to do what we need to do, until we’re powerful enough. Then it’ll be mayhem and black treachery, served up hot.

Are you saying these weapons couldn’t be detected if sought for, because they wouldn’t actually exist until the moment they deployed?
said Edward.

Aye, sir. Until then they’d be no more than potential.

Good God, that is brilliant,
said Edward, with a chilly smile.
My compliments, Captain. You really are quite the pirate.

Just doing what I was programmed to do, lad, but thank’ee kindly anyhow.

Wait a minute! Mines?
Alec had gone pale.
Weapons? Infernal devices? You’re talking about bombs!

Of course he is,
said Edward.
Weren’t you listening to—

No, no, laddie, to be sure! I meant—

We can’t go leaving bombs around!
Alec shouted.
Haven’t I got enough innocent blood on my hands?

Son, that weren’t what I meant at all. Figure of speech, see—

Of course that wasn’t what he meant, you dolt,
said Edward quickly.
There needn’t be any civilian casualties at all.

No
human
casualities, no indeed, son. Just an all-out attack on that bugger Zeus, what’d leave him so badly hurt he’ll wish he’d never been activated. You’d not shed a tear for him, I’d wager, eh?

No—but—

And I imagine you’d like to see justice done,
said Edward.
Wouldn’t you?

Alec looked at him bleakly.
If justice was done, I’d be dead and rotting.

Aw, no, son—

As you like,
said Edward.
But you were only a dupe, Alec, remember that, a tool for wicked men. They’d like nothing better than to see you perish of remorse. In your place, I should think it my moral duty to bring the true guilty parties to an accounting for their deeds.

Truer words was never spoke, Commander Bell-Fairfax, sir!

And, after all, it may be that one or two of them deserve to die,
said Edward.
For example . . . what other sentence than death could possibly suffice, for the authority who consigned our lady to Options Research?

Both Alec and Nicholas grimaced. Mendoza opened her eyes, and suddenly all her languor was gone; she was braced, wary.

“Darling, are you all right?” she said sharply.

“Perfectly well, my love,” Nicholas told her, and kissed her to stop any other questions. Alec, staring at the floor, clenched his fists until the knuckles were white. Without warning he threw a punch at the bulkhead. His fist went through it harmlessly.

I thought so,
Edward said, leaning back.
Call it execution, if you like; or even public service. One of the few tags I did learn was, let me see, “Qui parcit nocentibus innocentes punit”; which would be translated as, “Who spares the guilty punishes the innocent.” There are cases where one is positively benefitting humanity by slaying judiciously.

Thou playst the boy like a lute,
said Nicholas, sadly.

Well.
Edward sipped his virtual champagne.
Something to think about, in any case. And we really ought to begin planning an enlightened rule for Mankind, once we’ve toppled Zeus. Otherwise, some tyrant will undoubtedly club his way into power.

Alec shivered.
I’m the last man on Earth to rule over other people.

That may well be the case,
said Edward.

The obscuring fog of causality rolls back, the lid of Schrödinger’s box opens, and lo and behold! In nearly every century, on some coastline or other, a great ship has moored far out to sea and sent a little craft in to do business with the natives. Dolphins have coursed beside it, like an escort of sea-greyhounds.

The man and woman stepping ashore seldom draw attention to themselves, except insofar as people occasionally remark on the man’s extreme height. Otherwise the couple are unremarkable in their appearance, their clothing perfectly appropriate for the season and year. Sometimes the man does all the talking; sometimes the woman alone speaks.

Now and then, as they make their way through exotic places, the man is distracted by a church or temple, and lingers a while to watch priests or rabbis or saffron-robed monks going about their businesses. Sometimes he will summon the courage to ask a question of one of them, in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew or, slowly and haltingly, in their own languages. Their answers are brief and to the point, or lengthy, with many digressions, but the result is always the same. He sighs and thanks them, looking rather like a dog that has lost its master. The woman takes his hand and they walk away together.

Now then, Nick, wilt thou not sleep?

Nicholas glanced up from the plaquette on which he had been studying the Pali canon of Buddha’s teachings. He sighed and set it aside.
Mendoza slept peacefully; beside her, Alec and Edward sprawled at awkward angles, in unconscious competition for proximity to her. Outside, stars drifted down into a black ocean.

You don’t look like revelation has struck you, somehow.

No, Spirit.

This ain’t any better than the Tao?

No.

Nor the Bhagavad Gita? Nor the Avesta, neither?

No.

I thought certain you’d like them Gnostic Gospels.

Nicholas shrugged.

And I reckon you ain’t even looked at that nice book on Vodou.

Spirit, this is futility. What do the best of them but recapitulate the Ten Commandments, in one form or another? And I find no proof that men have obeyed strange gods any better than the God of the Israelites, or learned any more of the true nature of the Almighty. Shall I worship a cow? Shall I spin paper prayers on a wheel? I’d as lief go back to eating fish in Lent lest God smite me down, or pray to wooden Mary to take away the toothache.

Well, son, allowing for the foolishness, which I reckon depends on what port you hail from—ain’t there any one seems better than the rest?

None, Spirit. That I must be kind and do no harm, I needed no prophets to tell me; but not one will open his dead mouth to say what kind and harmless Lord would create this dreadful world,
said Nicholas.
Nor permit abominations like Edward and me to walk in it.
He looked down at Mendoza broodingly.
Nor deliver a little frightened child into the Devil’s hands. Nor let her lie forgotten a thousand years on the floor of the house of the dead.

Mm. Can’t answer that one, lad.

I sought to build the New Jerusalem in my own heart, and my heart failed me. Shall I live like Edward, in my reason alone? But that is all ice and pride. Science will not grant me my soul again.

What do I tell my boy, then, if he gets the shakes about eternal life?

Set up no gods for thine Alec, Spirit.
Nicholas lay back and put his arms about Mendoza, pulling her close.
There is love, or there is nothing. The rest is vanity.

When they purchase goods, they pay in hard cash. When they post letters, in those times and places with postal service, the correspondence is always addressed correctly, the postage exact, the paper and ink of the most ordinary for the time. Their occasional transactions with banking firms or attorneys are brief and discreet. Then the man and the woman put back out to sea, and are generally promptly forgotten, and never seen again.

They figure in few ledger entries and no history books at all.

But by the year 1863, in nearly every great coastal city on Earth—Venice, London, Amsterdam, Boston, New York—some old banking house or legal firm administers a long-maintained trust, now and then receiving directions from the present heirs or their legal representatives. Were all the dots connected, all the figures added up, Dr. Zeus Incorporated would be rather surprised to discover it has a rival in the very long-term investment game. The Company, however, is too busy taking care of its own considerable business to do such a thing, and anyway, why should it worry? Nobody else has the ability to travel through time.

So the names on the enduring fortunes ring no warning bells at Dr. Zeus: William St. James Harpole, Thorne Fairfax, Nicholas Mendoza, Alec Bell, Edward Checkerfield, Alton Finsbury . . .

And of course the Company doesn’t think to check its own signals, bounced back through time to its operatives working in the past, to see if anyone has encrypted an interstitial signal in its own constant flow of messages. Thus the Captain continues to draw on his enormous twenty-fourth-century reservoir of memory caches, with scarcely a millisecond of time lag.

This is good, because the Captain now has a lot to coordinate: temporal itineraries, hidden funds, fiendishly clever nanobot weapons designs, the ongoing rejuvenation treatments for Alec, and the careful search of records to determine just where Alec’s DNA vial might be stored . . . and research on the subject of Crome’s radiation generators.

This last business goes ahead more easily for the Captain than for anyone else who has ever attempted to study the subject, for the reason that he is a tremendously powerful artificial intelligence and also because he has a Crome generator to observe, close at hand, around the clock, over a long period of time.

MIDMORNING ON 17 MARCH 1863
AD

On an empty stretch of the Pacific, lightning blazed down out of a clear blue sky. There was a wild roiling in the water, as though some great leviathan had been hit by the blast. Gradually the turmoil ceased. The
Captain Morgan
’s storm bottle retracted, her masts and spars extended, and she clapped on sail. Tacking about, she steered for the South Seas, and white spray struck and ran from her bows like cream.

“Caramba,”
sighed Mendoza, stretching sensually on Edward’s lap. “We must try doing this while copulating again sometime.”

“It has its points,” said Edward, a little shakily. She looked up into his face at once, frowning.

“You’re pale. Are you all right, Alec?”

He looked down at her and she saw his face change abruptly, eyes going wide and guileless. “I’m fine, baby,” he protested, in what she was beginning to think of as his Beach Boy voice. He grinned and patted her behind. She uncoiled nimbly and stood up, and he unfastened the storm harness and stood to join her.

Alec, well along in his treatments with Pineal Tribrantine Three, appeared distinctly younger now. As a rule he tended to avoid looking in mirrors except to shave, so the fact that the planes of his face had tightened and smoothed discernibly went unnoticed. Some of the weathering of years’ exposure to sea gales was disappearing also. What Alec did notice was that his back felt great these days, and his appetite was enormous. His nightmares, however, had not diminished.

But he went gladly enough with Mendoza to their stateroom, for they were suffering slightly from temporal lag. It had been close to midnight on the day they had embarked, though a bright midday sun was shining down now.

They clambered into bed and Mendoza fell asleep almost at once. Alec and Nicholas were also tremendously sleepy, but Edward couldn’t close his eyes.

What’s wrong?
Alec said at last.
Oh. It’s the date, isn’t it? This is the day you . . . er . . . died.