The Machine's Child (Company) (39 page)

There were pretty black women selling food: roasted yams, bullas and fried cakes, cut coconuts ready to be sipped and nibbled from, star-apples and plantains. There were respectable shops with wares displayed in their respectable windows: blue willow china, porcelain dogs, Dutch faience ware to catch the eye of the idling shopper for an impulse purchase. Banal and ordinary, until one reflected that some ship had been assailed in blood and screaming and fire for these consumer goods.

There were houses three and even four stories high, that had clearly grown in segments as the fortunes of their owners had leapt unsteadily upward. At their windows, bawds and strumpets watched the passers below in languid boredom, or leaned down their long curls and the occasional badly-secured tit and called enticements into the street. Mendoza sneered at them, clinging firmly to Edward’s arm.

The churches looked as rawly new, as badly planned, as grubbily busy as the rest of the place. Nicholas regarded them in wonder. He was not so much amazed by the fact that prostitutes and thieves were flocking in to evening prayer (who could be more in need of salvation, after all?), but there was a Roman Catholic church within blocks of a Protestant one and both were doing about equal business, coexisting peacefully.

Alec gasped at the stench, and then at the displayed carcasses, as they came upon the meat market. Edward was amused at his reaction and Nicholas bewildered, for it was no worse than any meat market
he
had ever seen. The reek of raw sewage and unwashed bodies was fairly palpable, too, but the pleasant smells were also formidable: perfumes strong enough to knock you down breathing out of the apothecaries’ shops, suppers cooking in the taverns and bakehouses, tobacco smoke, cloves, sandalwood, spilled rum.

As the night purpled and lamps began to flare, they found themselves looking into a goldsmith’s window, admiring the rings and rough-cut jewels in settings.

“Did we ever have wedding rings?” Mendoza wondered suddenly, looking up at Alec, who happened to have control at that moment.

Alec looked down at her, feeling at tug at his heart. “We never had a chance to get any,” he said at last. “Come on.” He pulled her into the goldsmith’s shop with him, and a while later they emerged, with a small box containing a pair of rings that had been cast from one Spanish doubloon.

A few streets farther on, in an area that history would record as never being fully excavated by marine archaeologists, they found an inn of the nicer sort: half-timbered brick, three stories, leaded glass windows without even a glimpse of prostitutes at them.

There were ladies of questionable profession, it is true, sitting inside the dark paneled common room, with heavily-wigged gentlemen in long waistcoats, and the air was blue with smoke from churchwarden pipes. There were one or two scarred and evil-looking men seated at a game of cards in the lamplight. It was a quiet place all the same, just what the Captain had told them to look for. Edward found the publican and ordered dinner for two, to be served in a private room upstairs.

They waited on a settle while their order was got ready. Alec sat staring around, drinking in every detail: the pewter tankards and leather drinking-jacks, the onion bottles, the herringbone-brick floor. It was just like his dreams, only dirtier.

Mendoza was thinking that it wasn’t so bad, really. Vaguely she could remember a worse place, and thought it might have been called
Los Angeles,
just as dangerous and less fun overall. She did not relax her guard, however, remaining prepared to break mortal necks if there was any danger to Alec.

Edward watched tensely, no less on edge than she, sizing up the ugliest of the card players. Nicholas waited beside him, and of all of them he felt perhaps most lost: for the room was like a room in Tudor London, and yet just enough was unfamiliar to bewilder him. He sighed and perched on an edge of the settle beside Mendoza, reflecting that he might have carried her away with him to some such place as this . . . if it hadn’t been raining, that last day. If the roads hadn’t been muddy. If it hadn’t been a
bitter cold night. If . . . Nicholas sighed and attempted, with his usual lack of success, to provide himself with a virtual pot of ale.

The publican appeared out of the smoke to tell them their room was ready. He showed them up to it, bowing them in with a flourish (Edward had paid in gold) and departed discreetly. There they stood, staring. In addition to the candlelit supper for two they had ordered, there was a canopied bed in the room. Alec nearly pushed Edward over in his haste to grab control back.

“How very romantic, señor,” said Mendoza.

They looked at each other and then, uttering identical whoops of delight, leaped on the bed, with its fine tapestry counterpane and its bolsters. Mendoza had to lay aside two flintlock pistols and a cutlass and Alec had to plow through yards and yards of ruffling silk before they could obtain their objective, but obtain it at last they did. Passersby in the street below stared up at the open window in envy, at the wild laughter and wilder moans issuing from up there.

Therefore it was a little while before any attention was paid to supper: turtle soup and smoked pork loin, peas, rice, and yams, and a bottle each of sherry and rum. Mendoza looked at Alec’s face above the waving candle flames, and suddenly the laughter went out of her eyes.

“Wait. We did this before,” she said nervously, “Once. Didn’t we? Weren’t we in a room like this, and we ate supper at a little table, and you . . . you were angry about something?”

Nicholas seized control and reached out—across how many centuries of lost time?—to take her hand. “I was a fool,” he said. “And would to God we’d run away then, and not waited for morning!”

“But what happened?”

“I had a chance, and I wasted it,” he told her, blinking back tears. Groping in his pocket with his free hand, he found the box from the goldsmith’s shop.

“Here!” Nicholas pulled her to the window, to the vista of blue night with its million stars, over doomed Port Royal that echoed with drunken singing. “Here. Without are dogs and enchanters, whoremongers and murderers; but let them bear witness.” He took out the smaller of the two rings and raised her left hand, slipping it on her finger.

“So. I will cleave to thee and be thy husband, and never forsake thee
again, but share thy fortunes through the world. And wilt thou have me, love?” he pleaded, taking her two hands in his own.

“But I’ve always been your wife,” Mendoza said. Taking up the other ring she put it on his finger, and folded his hand closed. “There.”

He caught her up and kissed her, and they swayed together in the candlelight before the window. Down in the street, weaving between the shadows cast by the flickering torches, a staggering wanderer applauded them.

Nicholas half-thought he might die then, dissolve into a memory in Alec’s blood, finally granted absolution; but nothing happened except that Alec, who had sworn he’d never marry again, kissed Mendoza. Edward, who had sworn he’d never marry at all, kissed her, too.

So they sat down to their wedding supper at last, a hundred and twenty-seven years late, and drank to their future.

Long afterward they descended to the common room. Mendoza waited in a corridor while Edward found his way to the jakes, which were quite the most noisome he’d ever encountered, and under pretext of pissing used the opportunity to drop the mine down a hole in the floor. He emerged gratefully, and they went out again into the fevered night.

The mine stayed where it had been dropped, through earthquake and flood and terrifying numbers of years, until the afternoon in 2355 when it woke to its programmed destiny. But Mendoza and her husbands walked back to Queen Street without incident and rowed out to the
Captain Morgan,
where they came aboard quietly and went to bed in peace.

Joseph had had an eventful, and terribly slow, ride to Port Royal.

Galloping through the dark and the fireflies, he had three times been halted by thieves demanding his purse. He had stopped only long enough to kill them like cockroaches and ride on; but the third one had shot his horse, after which he was compelled to run. Hyperfunction, it should be noted here, is easy enough for an immortal but cannot be sustained indefinitely, particularly when the immortal in question is attempting to carry a heavy sea chest. In any event, it was four o’clock in the morning before Joseph, limping and panting, staggered into Port Royal and made
his way to the waterfront adjacent to Lime Street, carrying the sea chest swathed in his coat to muffle its squealing.

Spotting a likely boat tied at the dock, he jumped down into it and cast off, rowing swiftly out into the harbor. When he was far enough from shore to be unobserved he shipped the oars and sat still a moment, catching his breath. At last he reached forward and depressed an unseen catch. He opened the lid of the sea chest.

The squealing was immediately louder, and the colored lights inside blinked frantically until he reached in and turned a knob. At once the shrill noise stopped, the red lights went out; but the green and yellow ones continued to blink at him.

He considered them, tilting his head as though listening to the night, as his boat rocked on the tide.

It was blessedly quiet, with the alarm shut off at last. Across the black water he could hear the sounds of Port Royal in its fitful sleep: a single dog barking at two drunks reeling home, glass breaking in an alley somewhere. A rooster called attention to the fading stars, for it was by now nearly five o’clock. Joseph listened, still turning his head this way and that, but seemed unsatisfied. At last he turned away from the harbor, out toward the Caribbean.

Almost at once he stiffened and leaned forward. There! His attention focused on an immense and indistinct something moored well off Lime Cay. His eyes narrowed, his lips drew back from his teeth in a grimace of concentration.

Then he began to chuckle, most unpleasantly.

“You son of a bitch,” he told the big ship. And how swiftly and neatly he dipped the oars in the water again, and how quickly he rowed out across the night ocean, making for his prey; and how surprised would have been anyone who knew the obliging little doctor from the Goat and Compasses, if they’d seen the expression of animal ferocity on his face in that dark morning.

The closer he got to the big ship, the blurrier and more confusing its outline became. The only constants were its two running lights and a faint amber glow toward its stern. When he had crossed three-quarters of the
distance he paused, shipping the oars again, and reached into the seachest. He cast an involuntary glance upward in the direction of the satellite.

Thirty meters away, something surfaced and regarded him with unforgiving red eyes. It cut smoothly through the dark water toward him. From three other directions, dorsal fins rose into sight and sped forward, converging on Joseph’s boat.

Joseph was too preoccupied with what he was doing to notice them. He turned two knobs at once, in opposite directions.

All the lights on the big ship went out. Suddenly it stood exposed, outlined black against the pale gleam of morning with no blurring, no confusion whatever: unmistakably one of the vast pleasure yachts of the twenty-fourth century. Joseph had broadcast a signal to jam the Captain’s interface, cutting him off from the satellite and from Alec as effectively as though he didn’t exist. It was only a matter of time, of course, before an AI that powerful and resourceful remodulated its signal around the jamming; but it doesn’t take long to kill a mortal man.

Something hit the hull of Joseph’s boat, throwing him backward where he sat. Heart pounding, he scrambled up again, on the defensive. No further blows came; but there in the water beside him was the smooth finned menace, motionless, its momentum lost. Shark? He grabbed an oar and jabbed at the thing.

The oar hit with an unexpected
clunk
and the object bobbed gently. Joseph eyed it, suspicious. Some kind of torpedo? He pulled the oar back in haste, but whatever it was just continued to float there, harmless. Harmless
now.
Scanning, Joseph noted the circuitry, the electronic confusion and paralysis.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Robot Flipper.”

His unsettling grin returning, Joseph dipped the oars again. He pulled smoothly forward to close the last of the distance to the big ship. Drawing alongside, he tied up to its anchor-hawse and then, hand over hand, moved silently up the wet cable and so came aboard her.

Alec opened his eyes and looked around. Edward and Nicholas, just opening their eyes on either side of him, scowled. Underneath him Mendoza slept on, sprawled in yards of white silk trimmed with lace.

There she was, truly his wife now, and here he was still half dressed in his pirate clothes, and he had just had the most wonderful night of his life, with everything he had ever wanted at last. Whether he deserved it or not.

So why did he have the overpowering sense that something was horribly wrong?

Captain?

There was no answer.

Look at the machine,
cried Edward, sitting bolt upright. Alec turned and saw Flint, immobile, frozen in the act of picking up his brocaded coat from where he’d thrown it the night before.

That was when he heard the faint but unmistakable sound of footsteps on the deck.

He slid out of bed and sat on the edge, hastily pulling on his boots. Mendoza curled on her side, murmuring something nonsensical, still fast asleep. Alec bound on his cutlass and stuck one of the flintlock pistols into his belt.

He closed the stateroom door behind him and cautiously made his way through the saloon to the deck, with Edward and Nicholas stalking alongside. As he stepped out to the pale morning, he reached into the ship’s security system with his mind and ordered an emergency lockdown. All over the ship, then, he heard bolts shooting into place, locks ringing shut.

Someone else heard it, too. Someone who had been standing half hidden by the foremast turned, stared along the length of the deck and met Alec’s stare.