“Remember, no judgment, Nanook,” Jian said. “Any of us in Harland’s position would’ve done something similar. We all need to eat, but no one was handing out bags of blood to Harland. Still – we should catch up to him before he starts hunting things in those woods other than deer and rabbits.”
TWENTY ONE
September 2112
Thule Airbase, Greenland
Bursts of goldenrod, the wandering green of a meadow, the bluesy notes of an iris carving out her own place, the gracefully lazy arms of the willow tree, dripping down to the lake and lit from behind by the setting sun – all so real that they could be touched, but there would be no dew clinging to the grass, no scent to the flowers, no wind to move the willow tree, nothing but paint on canvas, a remembered rendition of the way nature once was, painted by a man who loved nature as much as he hated and wanted to control her.
Ignis Mortterra lifted his brush from the canvas that he had been working on. Two soldiers of the AmEur Alliance had entered the room; each soldier held onto one arm of their prisoner, George Murphy.
Already skinny, George had shed twenty pounds since his incarceration, five months ago in April, the night that Isi and the Immortals had escaped. Escaped to where though? George had no idea, and no matter how Mortterra’s thugs tortured him, no matter how many bones they broke, no matter how many times he was water boarded, no matter how many teeth they pulled from him (the most gruesome torture, and one that George could never remain conscious through), George could not tell Mortterra where or, more accurately, when Isi and the Immortals were, because George didn’t know. He hadn’t wanted to know. The less he knew, the less he could reveal; the less he could reveal, the more chance Isi and the Immortals had of succeeding.
George had known that he was probably sacrificing his life on the night that he had switched the machines, but he found himself wishing now that the sacrifice would just hurry up and happen. Dragging this on, month after month, was not only physically painful, not only mentally torturous, but demoralizing all on its own, in its unending way, because of its repetition. Even torture could be boring, and plodding through this day to day abuse, knowing that it would one day kill him, and knowing that on that day, he would be one fraction of the man he had been at the beginning, broken and robbed of all dignity, denied the heroes death that he should have had … the idea of that sad waste was what had kept George’s will to live alive. He would either die a hero, or live – broken, but undefeated. He refused to be broken, and then to die. He refused to be a waste.
Mortterra turned his attention away from his painting, and faced George Murphy.
“Has there been any new activity on the DNA scanner, Mr. Murphy?”
George didn’t respond, and stared straight ahead, expressionless, and almost catatonic.
“Leave him here,” Ignis Mortterra instructed the two AmEur Alliance soldiers. “Leave the cuffs on him, but leave him here. I will send for you to retrieve him when we are done.”
The two soldiers turned on their heels, and walked from the room.
“Come now, Mr. Murphy, come have a seat,” Ignis Mortterra said. “Cushioned, or plain wood?”
George did not respond.
“Oh dear, sorry about that, cushioned, of course. You’ve been through a lot lately, Mr. Murphy, and a soft surface would probably do you some good,” Mortterra said, and turned to the desk size computer behind him, parallel to his easel. He typed in a few strings of numbers, and a recliner materialized in the air between Mortterra and George … who continued to stare into space with no response.
“What’s the matter? Fabric not good enough?” Mortterra said. “Are you more of a leather man, George?”
Ignis Mortterra typed in a new series of numbers on the computer, and the chair in front of George transformed into a supple leather recliner.
George Murphy’s eyes moved, just slightly, in the direction of the recliner. It was enough of a response to let Mortterra know that he had won.
“Go ahead, George,” Mortterra said. “You don’t have to like me in order to use the chair I’m offering you.”
George Murphy shuffled forward unsteadily, and collapsed in the recliner. He sighed as his wounded skin made contact with the cool, soft leather.
“Good boy, George,” Mortterra said. “Takes a bit of the edge off, doesn’t it?”
George nodded, and inhaled sharply in response to the pain caused by that one small movement.
“Poor boy,” Mortterra said. “Now, I’d love to let you rest for awhile, but we must get down to business. Perhaps, when we’re done for the day, I could arrange to have this chair brought back to your cell? Hmmm? Would you like that George?”
George nodded again, but kept his jaw clenched tight, so as not to let out another sound of pain and defeat.
“Okay then, I’ll see to it,” Mortterra said. “Now, just tell me, have you seen any new activity on the DNA scanner?”
George cleared his throat. “Yes, President Mortterra. A few days ago, Afon and Nanook went to London, and then they returned to Detroit yesterday, accompanied by a new set of unidentified DNA.”
“Did they travel through time, or just from place to place, George?”
“They remained in the year 1888,” George said, “and Dr. Nizienko and Mr. Hu did not leave Detroit at all.”
“Hmmm, very interesting,” Ignis Mortterra said. “Now, why do you think that they’d do that? Their reason for being in Detroit has been obvious to me from the beginning. Well, not quite from the beginning, I admit. The night that the Immortals had been scheduled for execution, I, at first, thought that they had all engineered a jailbreak, of sorts. But, if that had been the case, it made no sense for Isi to free anyone, except for her lover Afon. I knew that she was up to something when she took Jian and Nanook along with her. Once the DNA scanner found her in Detroit, in 1888, I must admit that I had myself a good, long, laugh. Couldn’t be more obvious than if she’d sent out a formal announcement of her intentions, right George?”
“I’m sorry President Mortterra,” George Murphy said, “I don’t understand.”
“Oh bullshit, George. She might be a few years early, but what the hell else is there in Detroit, except for Henry Ford?”
George gripped the arms of his chair, as a spasm of pain washed over him. Ignis Mortterra had slapped George’s leg enthusiastically, and broken it. Part of George’s femur was sticking up through his right thigh.
“Oh, so sorry about that George, sincerely, I am,” Ignis Mortterra said, and pressed a button that had a medical team there in seconds.
“Go ahead and give him something strong for the pain,” Mortterra said to one of the doctors that had responded to his summons.
“Thank you, President Mortterra,” George said, and sighed as the morphine took hold in his system.
“No problem George, I really am sorry about that, you know,” Mortterra said, pointing to George’s bandaged leg. “I just don’t seem to know my own strength these days … in any event, once I realized that Isi was in Detroit, her plan, as foolish as it is, became clear to me. Obviously, she hopes to save the world by stopping Henry Ford from developing the gas engine, just like she thought she could save the world with her little Immortality Project. Both are pipe dreams, Murphy; you know it, and I know it. Even if she stops Ford, another man will just come along and invent what she tried to prevent. Even Project Immortality has at least one fatal flaw. If you successfully inject every single human with those wonderful nanobots, what do we do, all feed on each other? If everyone lives, if everyone lives forever, we’d have to stop reproducing, or we’d quickly run out of room. And how, exactly, do you mandate worldwide sterility? Seems to me, no matter what happens, if we try to live forever, we make a dictatorship of the past, over the future,” Mortterra said.
“Your friend, Dr. Isidora Nizienko, believes that we can stop the end of the world. Me? I’m a rational and selfish human being, George,” Mortterra said. “I don’t believe t
hat I can singlehandedly stop the end of the world, but I know for a fact that I can stop the end of my own personal world. I can save myself, and why shouldn’t I, since saving everyone else is impossible. Right, George?”
Receiving no response, Ignis Mortterra reached over to the somnolent George Murphy, and pinched his intravenous line shut, stopping the flow of his pain medication. Mortterra then tapped on George Murphy’s broken leg with his paintbrush. George gasped awake in pain, and Mortterra let go of the I.V. line.
“I said, better to save yourself if saving everyone isn’t possible, right George?”
“Yes, President Mortterra,” George said, through painfully clenched teeth.
“Anyway, so the reason they’re in Detroit is as obvious as it is stupid, but why did they go to England? And who is the extra set of DNA?” Mortterra said.
“I’ve really no idea, Mr. President,” George said, and flinched, expecting some form of brutality in response.
“Relax, George,” Ignis Mortterra said. “What good are that beautiful chair, and those perfect drugs, if you don’t let them do their job? Relax, I was just thinking out loud. It’s easy enough for me to find out on my own.”
Mortterra turned back to his computer.
“See George, here is a file containing all of the major historical events, going all the way back to the beginning of written history. I saved this as soon as the Infinmachine was ready for it’s first test run, so that I could constantly update it, and see if any changes to the historical record had occurred. I know what gets changed, and I can go back and correct it, if I want to,” Mortterra said.
“You can go back and correct it, unless the change in the past means that you no longer exist,” George Murphy said, with the hint of a smile on his face.
“Hah! Touché, Mr. Murphy, but don’t trouble yourself too much on my behalf. All of my ancestors, going as far back as I could trace, have been put under guard. It’s difficult, of course, for my soldiers to be discreet the further they go into the past, but they’ve remained unnoticed, so far … Oh my! Would you look at that? A change in the record, how exciting!”
Mortterra swung the computer monitor so that it was facing George Murphy. The screen was filled with stories about a serial murderer in London, a murderer who had not existed in the past, until Isi and the Immortals had traveled there.
“Did one of them do this?” George said.
“I can’t be sure that it was one of them, but they certainly had something to do with it … and, look at this,” Mortterra clicked onto the second of the two alerts that had flashed onto the screen, to inform him of changes to the historical record. “Dracula? A blood sucking Immortal from Transylvania – that is obviously a novel by someone who met Afon. Transylvania … Russia … same difference, right Murphy?”
Before George could respond, Mortterra continued, still scrolling down the screen. “You know George, this Dracula thing really kept going for a long time. It spawned a whole mythology, lots of books and movies, especially about a hundred years ago. It’s so funny. We all knew that the apocalypse was coming, we all knew that we’d caused it, but there was nothing that we could do to stop it, so we clung onto a vampire image to make ourselves believe that we could live forever too.
“Isi really tapped into a pretty deep seated human desire with that Immortality Project of hers, long before she herself was even born. Even that fucking boyfriend of hers was turned into a damn fictional superhero, a hundred years ago – a superhero and some kind of god of sex too, from what I can see here. Just look at this crap, George,” Mortterra said, and enlarged the image of a poster from a vampire movie.
“Can you believe it? All of this,” Mortterra said, and gestured at the computer monitor that displayed hundreds of years of vampire lore, “all of this from one little encounter with that writer, what was his name?”
“Dracula, I think, President Mortterra,” George said.
“No, no, George, that’s the character the writer based on Afon. No, the writers name, damn it, what was it? It sounded like broom … Bram. Bram Stoker, that’s it. This old brain hasn’t failed me yet,” Ignis Mortterra said, and pretended that he had remembered the name, though he had just reopened the file containing that information. “I really need a writer like that working for me; even Caesar wasn’t Caesar until Shakespeare came along, George. You know?”
“President Mortterra, with all due respect, I’m not sure why having a written record of your accomplishments would matter. When the Earth dies, your greatness will die as well,” George said.
Mortterra’s eyes widened with surprise.
“Oh, the Earth will die my boy,” Ignis Mortterra said, and smiled with open lips at George, “but my greatness will live for as long as I live … and I, rest assured, am going nowhere.”
TWENTY TWO
September 1888
Detroit, Michigan
“You have the whole day free for me, Isidora?” Henry Ford said.
“All of it, and maybe even the night too, if you’re lucky,” Isi said, winking and taking Henry’s hand in hers, as they entered Ford’s workshop.
“Where is Count Solovyov off to today?” Henry asked, and pulled his hand away from hers.
“Oh Henry, you mustn’t be jealous. I am married to him, and you are married to Clara, but right now, we are with each other. Let’s just be present in this moment, okay?” Isi said.
“I’m right here, truly I am” Henry said, “I’d just like to know how long this particular moment will last.”
“We can never really know the answer to that question Henry, that’s the whole point. You’ve got to let go,” Isi said.
“Let go of what, Isidora?”
“All of it, all of your expectations, all of your fears, all of it. Forget what you think I should be, what you think Clara should be, what you think Afon should be, what you think your horseless car should be, and most of all, forget what you think you should be. Look at your horseless car and see it for what it is, not what you want it to be,” Isi said. “That’s always the answer, Henry.”
“What it is, is something that will never work. Look at it,” Henry said, and gestured at the larger test model of the car that he’d been working on. “There it sits, a monument to my vanity, as immobile as a rock – a rock that a fool such as myself once thought could be a winged chariot, freeing the human race from the constraints imposed upon us by physical distance.”
“So,” Isi said, “you are giving up then?”
“What else is there for me to do? I’m clearly delusional. The car won’t work, and this,” Henry said, “this thing between us, this won’t work either Isidora. We’ve, both of us, been fooling ourselves.”
“Henry …” Isi said.
“Oh sure, it’ll work for awhile, it works for right now, just like Edison’s battery, but you and I have no way to recharge every half-an-hour. We really only do have this moment, and it’s finite,” Henry said. “Even now, I am wondering how long we have together, before I have to return you to the arms of your husband.”
“And I have to return you to the arms of your wife,” Isi said. “Do not forget that I am in the same position as you, Henry, and this is just as difficult for me. Perhaps even more so.”
“What do you mean?”
“Count Solovyov and I have been married for ten years. I was only a girl of twenty then, and I’ve been faithful to him all along. You are my only weakness, Henry, and my emotion for you is all the more real because of its rarity. But you? You and Clara are newlyweds, married but only six months, and here you are, with me,” Isi said. “How am I to believe that I am anything more than a dalliance to you, a first year of marriage rebellion against domesticity, a trifle who will be cast aside just as quickly as I was picked up?”
Henry looked at her in silence, and sadly shook his head.
“Silly, isn’t it?” Isi said. “So silly to waste these few moments that we might have together, wondering whether we both really want to
be here. We are here; we both do want to be here, with each other, right now. We should enjoy it, not question it.”
Henry moved toward Isi and embraced her, running his lips down the side of her neck.
“No, no, later Henry,” Isi said. “We have all day and night together for that. Let’s focus on your horseless carriage. If we put our minds together, that could be the lasting thing that we build out of this.”
“Isidora,” Henry murmured, and breathed in the scent of the bare skin on her neck.
“Later,” Isi said, with finality.
“Okay, okay then,” Henry said, and stood up to his full height. He patted the lapels on his jacket back into place, and smoothed one hand over his hair, taking some measure of control over his external appearance, in concert with the self-control that he was attempting to maintain internally.
“So, here’s the problem,” Henry said. “The battery just won’t do as a power source, until it can hold a longer charge. The steam engine requires a constant source of water, and the gasoline engine that I’ve been working on produces great clouds of smoke, and, on one occasion, a fire, but I could handle all of that if I could guarantee a steady supply of gasoline to potential consumers, but that’s the most impractical thing of all, so … it looks like I am going to be giving up, Isidora. No one has invented this before, because it’s not possible,” Henry cleared his throat, and coughed disdainfully. “God gave us the horse for a reason, and who am I to question Him?”
“I did not think that you were a religious man, Henry,” Isi said.
“I’m not. Quite frankly Isidora, I am a man of science, but after I roll a Sisyphean rock up a hill enough times, without success, I can admit when nature has me beaten.”
Isi sat quietly for a few minutes before she responded.
Maybe I should let him give up? Maybe this conversation is what makes him stop and not build the gasoline engine, makes him not build any kind of engine at all … but if Henry Ford doesn’t start mass production of the automobile, someone else will.
Immortal Earth (Vampires For Earth Book 1) Page 11