The Machine's Child (Company) (26 page)

“It’s okay, baby,” Alec said, sliding an arm around her. “You’ll enjoy this.”

“I’m sure I shall,” she said uncertainly. The Captain dimmed the lights in the room. A big sphere of glowing smoke materialized in the air, just above the bed. The word
OVERTURE
appeared there, and some vague fairylike images; a symphonic arrangement of Mendelssohn’s music came warbling from the room’s speakers, and the show started at last.

Scholars are reasonably unanimous in their verdict that this particular film was not the most authentic Shakespearean production ever mounted, but certainly it had the most cobwebs and moonbeams, and it had remained popular with audiences right up to the time that Shakespeare’s plays had been condemned as irredeemably politically offensive. As a result of its popularity, great pains had been taken in remastering it for holo, extrapolating the flat images out into three-dimensional ones. It had translated rather well, even in the black-and-white tones of the original film.

Mendoza snuggled against Alec, crunched popcorn, and watched the spectacle with evident enjoyment.

Nicholas sat watching with arms folded, determined to be polite for Alec’s sake. As the play advanced, he found he had little trouble following the story, though it had been written forty years after his death and the actors’ accents seemed strange and uncouth. But as the familiar cadences of language rolled on, he began to be drawn into the illusion, and found himself looking around involuntarily for a pie-seller or a bottled-ale vendor, of the sort that used to follow players’ carts like flies.

Edward watched silent, absorbed, spellbound by the best that the Brothers Warner could lay before him, tinsel and glitter and all. His
experience of staged Shakespeare, for whom he had a well-concealed passion, had been limited to one dusty performance of
Julius Caesar.
The rest his imagination had been obliged to provide from tiny print double-columned in a cheap edition read by blazing tropical sunlight, or by dim lamplight belowdecks, or in gaslit hotel rooms in dubious places.

Only Alec was lost, desperately reading the faces and body language of the shadows in his attempt to get some idea of what the play was supposed to be about. He turned to the others, hoping somebody would tell him; but they were following the action with such avidity he was embarrassed to ask.

So he stared, as fairies soared and flitted through his room. It had become the Wood Near Athens, a forest of dark silvertone. Ashen petals blew across his face as Puck bounded from a drift of leaves, and glittering cobwebs winked in phantom moonlight on the bedposts. As soon as he stopped trying to understand the words, the story began to tell itself to him: the two sets of ridiculous lovers, the troupe of clowns rehearsing in the darkness, the looming father and ice-pale mother locked in hostilities over the bewildered little mortal child. And such terrors! The wild boy with his crazy laugh, and the braying black-lipped donkey man in the night forest!

Having no significance, the words took on all possible significance. The story was a riddle, a message in a sealed bottle. What could it all mean?

So Alec watched in fascinated incomprehension, unable to look away as plaintive lovers struggled across his moonlit bedclothes and stumbled over his legs.

The Captain monitored the real lovers, their heartbeats and respiration rates. He saw a chance and acted on it.

Quietly he amped up the power to the holoprojector, and deployed his own projectors inset here and there in the stateroom’s decorative molding. He fed subtle signals into Alec’s nervous system through the subcutaneous port, and into Mendoza’s as well through certain circuitry he had installed when he’d repaired her.

They were so absorbed in the action of the play that they scarcely noticed when the Wood Near Athens began to expand beyond the confines of their bed, indeed became more than illusory play of light over solid surfaces. That was a
real
moon blazing down from the star-spangles,
wasn’t it? And how had velvet moss and luscious woodbine replaced plain cotton percale? But it had, and first Edward and then the others noticed they were reclining on a virtual bank where wild thyme grew, and sweet musk-roses canopied overhead, stars winking through. Only Alec was startled. The others, having no way of knowing that this was a little beyond even twenty-fourth-century remastering capabilities, accepted it as part of the show.

Just to their left, Titania slumbered beside Bottom, as Oberon looked down with a sardonic smile. Over there the lovers had fallen together, muddy and bedraggled but properly paired off at last. The perfume of nodding violet and eglantine was strangely intoxicating, as well it might be since it was laced with pheromones, jetting from the stateroom’s air vents.

So the king of shadows summoned his host to follow into the haunted virtual night, and the slow passionate strains of Mendelssohn’s
Nocturne
came yearning from the speakers. Over at the other end of the clearing a moth-fairy was engaged in a sensual ballet with a muscular black shade, fluttering ineffectually her powdery wings while he possessed her inexorably. This was about the point where Mendoza noticed that she too had been endowed with spangles and a certain silvery light, and that not one but
three
black-winged shadows had turned and were regarding her with identical hot-eyed stares.

“Oh!” she said, applauding. “How very—”

Clever? Inventive? Whatever praise she had been about to bestow on advances in entertainment technology, Nicholas had fastened his mouth over hers before she could make another coherent sound. She squeaked happily, struggled insincerely as Alec and Edward seized her. What followed on that mossy couch, under the astonished moon, was so extreme, so erotically complicated, and so pleasurable that poor old Mr. Shakespeare’s phantom holographic self, away in 2352 London apologizing to a group of Ephesian tourists for writing
Taming of the Shrew,
found himself smiling without knowing why.

On the
Captain Morgan,
the Captain observed carefully as the act progressed, and noted when Mendoza began to sparkle with the blue fire of the Crome effect. At precisely the moment when it was at its most intense, he generated a subsonic tone that set the quartz crystal structure of the holoprojector vibrating.

Nothing happened. Or . . . not quite nothing. He modulated the frequency. This direction? No . . . That way?

The very air trembled, the silver illusions flickered for a moment, though the lovers didn’t notice. A spontaneous temporal transcendence field had begun to build inside the stateroom. The Captain watched as its whirling lightnings sent a tentacle toward the bed, where a blue thread of fire extended from Mendoza’s ecstatic body and arched to meet it—

The Captain silenced the tone immediately. It didn’t stop; the crystals in the holoprojector were still resonating. In panic he retracted the holoprojector up into its recess, and that did the trick, though the room was plunged into darkness relieved only by the spectral flame of Crome’s radiation, playing over Alec and Mendoza where they embraced.

Hastily the Captain dropped the projector again and resumed the program. On the level of his thought that was not piling up and evaluating data—for the Captain had many levels of thought—he observed Mendoza’s naked body, and congratulated himself once again on the job he had done rebuilding her. Who’d have thought that lissom little thing making his boy happy had ever been the pitable fragment he’d salvaged? Why, he must have regenerated at least eighty percent of her organic mass—

And he’d done it right here, within himself—

Within the largest temporal field ever created.

The Captain did the electronic equivalent of gasping and smacking his forehead.

In the virtual Wood Near Athens, three powerful incubi shared between them a spirit of no common rate: so thoroughly that nobody was able to pay any attention to the action of the play, though the Lord woke his Lady, the fiendish kid removed the donkey-head from bully Bottom. Not until Peter Quince came timidly forward to speak his prologue did they lie there, all four, giggling in exhaustion at Pyramus and Thisbe.

“I liked that,” Mendoza said, as the stateroom returned to normal and the lights came up. “I don’t remember movies being that much fun at all!”

“Yeah,” was all Alec was able to say, collapsing onto his back.

“That thing we were doing, was that—” She groped through the ruin of her memory. “Was that
going into cyberspace
?”

“Sort of.”

“Caramba.”
Her eyes were wide. She leaned up on her elbow and looked at him inquiringly. “There were three of you. I didn’t know that could happen in cyberspace.”

“That was just—er—the special effects,” Alec temporized.

“Really?” Mendoza lay down again. “Impressive!”

Nicholas gave a wicked chuckle and nudged her. She jumped and looked over her shoulder, startling everybody.

“I could have sworn you just—” she said, staring through Nicholas. Alec reached up and pulled her down.

Nicholas and Edward looked at each other in wild surmise.

Unnoticed on the floor beside the bed, the popcorn bowl had filled with green sprouted shoots of maize.

THE MORNING OF 26 MARCH 1863

Seven bells in the morning watch, Mr. and Mrs. Checkerfield, and a grand good morning to ye! Fair skies, wind’s out of the south-southwest, temperature twenty-three degrees Celsius, swells at one meter!
The Captain’s voice rang with strange triumph.

Alec opened his eyes to a breakfast tray heaped with oyster savory, fresh strawberries in zabaglione, and vitamin-fortified orange juice. Beside him, Mendoza yawned and stretched.

“Coffee,” she implored.

To be sure, dearie, Jamaica Blue Mountain with cream.
Coxinga extended one of its arms with a mug freshly poured.
And there’s yers, Alec lad. Now then! We been here in 1863 long enough. I reckon it’s time to move on.

“Okay,” said Alec sleepily, rolling over. Edward, in the act of shaking out his virtual napkin, looked up sharply.

We’re to make a time jump? Ha. Then all that moonshine last night was intended to accomplish something! What have you found out, Captain?

What I needed to know,
the Captain told him silently.
Are you up to another ride this morning, boyo? Yer old Captain’s solved the wench’s riddle at last. With her at the figurehead, we can cut through to the future easy as climbin’ through the lubber-hole!

“Huh?” Alec and Nicholas sat bolt upright, obliging Mendoza to clutch at her coffee.

“What is it?” she asked, looking worriedly at Alec.

“Nothing!” Alec said, reaching for the oyster savory. “Just feeling bouncy this morning. So, er, Captain sir—what do you reckon, shall we lay in a course for the twentieth century? Say, 1996?”
You’re absolutely sure about this? No way you could be mistaken at all?
He sipped his coffee and almost gagged. It was liberally laced with time travel cocktail.

Aye, lad,
the Captain said aloud.
And you may rest easy on the calculations, by thunder. I been running a program all night to check my figures.

“Is it particularly hard to get to 1996?” Mendoza said, reaching for the toast.

No, ma’am. But the further you go past the year 1950, the more crowded things is, so it’s as well to be certain sure where you make landfall, lest you capsize some swab what ain’t watching out. As you’ll remember, I’m sure?

“Oh,” said Mendoza, who didn’t remember anything of the kind but didn’t want to say so.

“Yeah,” said Alec, as confidently as he could. “Because that’s the era we need to start turning over some of those bank accounts to electronic transfer, isn’t it, Captain?” He popped an oyster patty in his mouth and chewed, looking sincere.

I reckon our lawyers will have done that already, lad, but there ain’t no harm making sure, now, is there?
the Captain said.
What’s more, we could do with a spot of provisioning. They had them supermarket things back then, see.

What on earth is a supermarket?
Edward spooned down virtual zabaglione.

What it sounds like, what d’y’think?
the Captain replied silently.
All the beef chops and brandy yer little heart desires, me bucko. But no cigars! Understand? You can do what you like in cyberspace, but Alec’s got to use them lungs.

Fair enough,
said Edward. He set aside his empty dessert glass and looked hungrily at Mendoza.
Try not to dawdle, Alec.

Alec glared at him and Nicholas just shook his head.

All the same, by the time the breakfast dishes had been cleared away they found themselves desperately ready as well, in spite of nervousness about what they were about to undertake. Mendoza, lingering over a second cup of coffee and a new-printed sheaf of data on the tryptophan content of her maize cultivars, found herself scooped up and carried from the bed.

“Hello?” she said.

“I was just thinking,” said Alec. “What could possibly top last night? Let’s find out, what do you say?”

“Okay,” Mendoza said, dazed but happy. She gulped down the last of her coffee while Alec fastened himself into the storm harness, and then went obligingly into his arms. Without, the four dolphin servos rose on the crest of a wave and leaped on deck. Flint and Bully Hayes loaded them into their torpedo-berths and scuttled into the wheelhouse, as the sails furled, the spars retracted. The great storm-bottle closed down.

As the air filled with golden gas, with blue fire, a discreet and unfamiliar humming filled the air. Its source was the battery of quartz crystal resonators the Captain had installed that morning, while Alec and Mendoza slept. And now, as the lovers rode to bliss, the charge built and the humming grew louder. The time drive powered up.

Distracted by the noise, Mendoza opened her eyes and saw Alec’s face, white and tense. She opened her mouth to ask him what the matter was—