The Sons of Heaven (The Company)

by Kage Baker

  “And might I escort you?” inquired Uncle Ratlin craftily, bowing and sweeping off his hat to wave it in the direction of the road.

  “I thank you, no,” she told him, and set off herself, following the stream-bank down to where the water trickled through three big culvert pipes. She crawled in and waited there, under the road, willing Uncle Ratlin to leave with all her heart. After a while she could hear him sighing and padding away through the darkness, away to the front entrance to the hill.

  When she was certain he had gone she crawled out and there, as in a dream, a little trout was gliding silently along in the sandy pool. Fast as thought she had it out and flapping on the bank; hooking a finger in its gill she carried it back, in through the old back door and down into the darkness.

  Her mind was whirling full of bright images, she could barely think for the claim the Memory had on her just then. What if a new hill was made for her, what would it be like to live in such a place? To have her own bright room … and lovers, and the likes of Uncle Ratlin waiting on her …

  But she came through the door of the bone room and there was her slave, huddled up against the cold, turning his blind face to the sound of her. Her heart contracted painfully. The other memory mustered itself, all the places he’d taken her with his voice, all the promise of adventure in the outside world, and love that had nothing to do with sampling men like bonbons, and everything to do with passion and sacrifice and glory…

  “What is it, child?” The slave stretched out his hand to her. Weeping, she came and laid the trout in it, and threw herself down beside him. “Ah! Fish. Why, Princess, what’s the matter? What’s happened, my dearest?”

  “I met Uncle Ratlin outside,” she said, gasping. She felt him draw breath sharply, she heard his heart begin to pound.

  “I-Is he coming here? Has he found us out?”

  Oh, he was all coming to pieces, her poor darling, he was beginning to tremble. She sat up and put her arms around him. “He has not, nor ever shall,” she vowed. “He will never hurt you again, my treasure.”

  “He’ll try to kill me again, and I can’t die,” the slave gasped. “I wanted to, I tried, I’d have done anything to make him stop, but I couldn’t die! No matter how I screamed—and screamed—”

  “Hush! Hush, lover mine,” Tiara said. “Talk like Commander Edward. Courage, man! We’re not beaten yet.”

  The slave bit his lips to try to control himself. “Yes,” he mumbled, “Edward, what would Edward do? Edward would do something clever. Edward would analyze the situation, yes, with perfect sangfroid. Tell me, beloved, what happened out there? Why were you crying when you came in? What did Uncle Ratlin say?”

  So Tiara told him how she’d set Uncle Ratlin a task to delay him, just like Odysseus’s wife postponing the suitors with her weaving.

  “Oh, that was clever, my lovely girl,” the slave told her. “You see the benefits of a classical education? I wonder how long it would take him to dig such a hill?” His voice began to go rattly and too fast, like a broken machine. “I expect if he concentrated on it he’d go very quickly indeed, he never gives up, never gives up when he’s after something, I prayed he’d get tired and sleep but he never seemed—no, no good there, Edward, calm down, courage, man! Uncle Ratlin’s doing something else, isn’t he? His grand plot?”

  “He’s almost got the delivery system perfected, that was what he said,” affirmed Tiara.

  “Delivery system,” repeated the slave. “Delivery? As in, weapons? God Apollo, he must mean—”

  “He thought he killed you,” realized Tiara, “and so he thinks he can kill all the slaves, that’s what the grand plot is. So the big people can’t send them to plunder us anymore.” She stared into the darkness, marveling at the bigness of the plan, about which she had never thought except in a general taking-for-granted sort of way. It was the history of her race, after all. It was the struggle that had always been going on, to hide from the wicked big people forever. But…

  “It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t really killed me,” said the slave, clinging to Tiara. “I’m disabled enough as it is … listen to me, Tiara, this is very important. You understand that I’m a cyborg? Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes,” said Tiara slowly, though the Memory was conflicting with the reality she knew. The Memory was insisting on big stalking figures, wielding guns that sprayed death, and poor little kin falling and gasping in the tunnels. Those were the cyborgs, surely, and not her own dear slave with his fair hair, with his beautiful blind eyes? Nor Mendoza, who had fallen so passionately in love? And yet—

  “You know that I’m more than a machine,” said her slave. “And I would never hurt you, dearest Princess. But I and my kind are slaves to the big people, to Dr. Zeus Incorporated. It was Dr. Zeus who sent us in to raid your tunnels and steal your inventions, do you see? And the Company did worse, my darling. They carried off little children of your race and bred them, to see if they could make them invent things in captivity. I know; I saw the proof.

  “And because I knew about it, I was betrayed. Dr. Zeus let your people know where to find me, and let me be taken and brought here, where your Uncles did such things—” The slave’s voice choked off.

  “But why?” Tiara said.

  “Because Dr. Zeus is afraid of its slaves, Princess,” replied the slave, shuddering. “We are stronger and more clever than the big people, and we never die. If we decided to disobey—if the others knew what has been done to fools like me, or to Mendoza—we might make an end of Dr. Zeus. They don’t know how to get rid of us, do you see?

  “Dr. Zeus struck a bargain with your kin, my darling. Ratlin told me so himself. Come up with a way to kill us, and in return Dr. Zeus would leave them alone. That’s the great plot. Kill two birds with one stone, you see? Steal your people’s technology to make themselves powerful, and then let your people do the work of disposing of the thieves.”

  “Oh, betrayers, oh varlets vile,” cried Tiara.

  “Yes. And you know, dearest Princess—Dr. Zeus cannot be trusted.” The slave turned his face to her. “My people were promised freedom and reward when we had completed our work for the Company. Look what they’ve planned for us instead! And I very much fear they’ll doublecross your uncle Ratlin as well. For, once he’s presented them with the weapon they ordered, what need will they have to treat your people fairly? What will prevent them from killing you all, or taking you as slaves? Do you want that?”

  “Never, never!”Tiara was horrified. This was a great deal too much immediate reality for her liking.

  “We immortals might prevent it,” said the slave, lowering his head. “But not if we were all crippled as I’ve been crippled, stacked like so much cord-wood in some Company bunker. What will we do, my Princess? How can we save your people and mine?”

  “We must be brave,” Tiara decided. “We must be heroes.” Her eyes grew wide, as all the heroines of all the stories beckoned to her from the shadows, inviting her to become one of their number.

  “If only I knew how much time had passed,” fretted the slave, “if only I knew where to find the others! I might crawl out of here, even blind, and if I could somehow get word to one of them—Victor or Suleyman—”

  “No,” said Tiara, rising slowly to her feet. “I will be the beautiful spy. I will pry secrets from Uncle Ratlin.”

  CHAPTER 6

  500,000 BCE: Mr. and Mrs. Checkerfield Are Not Receiving

  The Botanist Mendoza can’t keep track of time very well nowadays.

  She sits at her credenza in the ship’s botany cabin, utterly absorbed in an analysis of lysine content for her latest attempt at Mays mendozaii. The sun has dropped blazing into the sea, and she hasn’t noticed. She wouldn’t notice if her hair were on fire. As a matter of fact it is on fire, with a cold blue flame that plays over her features, but she neither sees nor cares.

  Certainly she has no idea that she figures as the heroine in a tragically bad adventure novel written by an o
ld friend. She doesn’t remember Lewis. Just now, she doesn’t remember much of anything.

  It’s entirely likely that she’d still be staring at the credenza screen by the time the sun climbed up out of the sea again, were it not for the fact that she has someone to look after her.

  The door to the botany cabin opens and an extraordinary thing enters, a skeletal creature of gleaming steel, moving scorpionlike on a number of legs. Its skull face and glowing eyes could frighten an unprepared observer into coronary arrest, but Mendoza is oblivious to its approach.

  The steel thing stops beside her and proffers the dinner tray it carries. She glances up briefly.

  “Thank you, Flint,” she says. She becomes fascinated by something on the screen and her hands, which had begun to rise to accept the tray, halt. She remains frozen like that as the minutes pass by. The thing she has addressed as Flint waits patiently.

  But the cameras mounted in the upper corners of the room swivel and focus on her, and a moment later the image of a man materializes beside Flint.

  Mendoza doesn’t notice him either, though he too is extraordinary. Large, powerfully built, attired in a three-piece suit. His wild hair and wild beard are black. He wears a gold earring and looks capable of frightening the Devil himself, though his voice is only mildly reproachful as he says, in a gravelly baritone: “Now then, Mrs. Checkerfield, you stop that and eat yer dinner afore it gets cold.”

  “Oh.” Mendoza looks up from the screen, startled, and notices the tray again. “I beg your pardon, Sir Henry.” The fire in her hair dims, dies down a little.

  As she takes the tray and lifts the cover from the dish, he saves her work and shuts down the credenza. She notices that no more than she’d noticed the sunset. She turns her whole attention to her meal. Only once or twice does she stall, blank-eyed suddenly, fork halfway to her mouth; and both times the Captain reminds her, and she starts and obediently resumes her meal.

  She is not, in fact, a person of diminished capacity. Her problem is exactly the opposite: she is a cyborg, a botanist Preserver drone, formerly the property of Dr. Zeus Incorporated. Mendoza was the inadvertent recipient of a massive transfer of data that overloaded even her fantastically augmented brain.

  The Captain has been able to restore function, but only very slowly has he been able to guide her toward any data integration. In the meanwhile her only defense, emotionally and mentally, is a concentration on particular details so intense it resembles autism.

  The blue fire is a different matter. It’s called Crome’s radiation. It’s generally only produced by mortals who have been diagnosed as psychic, and it’s generally invisible. Cyborgs aren’t supposed to be able to generate Crome’s radiation, visible or otherwise. That Mendoza does, however, is the least of her problems right now.

  When she finishes at last, Flint collects the tray and scuttles away to the galley. She turns back to the credenza, but the Captain (Captain Sir Henry Morgan, to use his full name, only indirectly any relation to the legendary pirate) steps close and holds her attention with his sea-colored gaze.

  “No, dearie. Exercises come next, remember? And then it’ll be time to go see our Alec.”

  He pauses slightly before he pronounces the name, though she misses it.

  “Alec!” Mendoza’s face brightens wonderfully. And literally; the cold fire leaps up, dancing. “Okay.”

  He leads her away, up through the decks of the vast ship to its infirmary.

  It should perhaps be further explained here that Captain Morgan is neither a ghost nor a man. He is an Artificial Intelligence, housed for the most part within the ship that bears his name. He is arguably the most powerful AI in existence, which is remarkable, considering that he started out life as a Pembroke Playfriend designed to monitor and amuse children aged four to eleven. He has long since ditched the cocked hat and scarlet coat his little master originally conferred on him, but he is still a pirate, to the deepest core of his consciousness.

  In the infirmary, he guides Mendoza to a diagnostic table, where she reclines. A device swings up from the edge of the table and a metal plate touches her left temple. She closes her eyes, sighing.

  “Running program seventeen-fifty-two ten,” the Captain announces. “Tell me when the little lights turn green, now.”

  After a moment she says faintly, “Green.”

  “Good. Five equations this time. Ready? Begin.”

  A moment passes and she gives no signal, but he nods.

  “That’s it. That’s my girl. Only a little more now: temporospatial calculation from this here grid, aye. You see it? Give me the answer.”

  “Five hours in thirty-five point two kilometers,” says Mendoza without hesitation.

  “Beautiful, ma’am,” he assures her. “Red light now. Watch for it! Let me know when.”

  Seconds pass. Mendoza begins to frown. “Let me know when,” the Captain repeats. More time goes by and Mendoza clenches her fists, saying nothing. The blue flame flickers high and wild.

  “Well, that still weren’t bad,” the Captain tells her soothingly. “Time. Coda and Exit Three.”The device swings back under the table and she sits up, blinking, looking dazed.

  “Yer doing grand, dearie. I’ll wager none of them Company cyborgs could survive a upgrade like you got and still have anything left to think with! But my girl’s smart as paint, ain’t she? Now, bedtime. Alec’s waiting for you.”

  Mendoza smiles and lets him lead her into the adjoining room.

  This formerly housed the ship’s decompression chamber. That area has been transformed into a regeneration tank by filling it with the blue oxygenated medium used for intensive life support. Through its windows can be glimpsed a man, floating motionless in the azure light.

  His body is long and lanky but powerfully made, with a slightly odd articulation in the arms and shoulders, and his head and face look a little odd, too: very high wide cheekbones, wide mouth, long nose with a certain irregularity in its bridge suggesting it has been broken.

  He is, at least as far as birth certificates and fingerprints go, Alec William St. James Thorne Checkerfield, seventh earl of Finsbury. Appearances can be deceiving, however. The mind occupying Alec’s corporeal premises, so to speak, belongs to another gentleman, long disembodied but arguably still alive, who answers to the name of Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

  Or would do so, were he not deeply unconscious. This is because he is recovering from a near-fatal accident and being rendered immortal in the process. His severed leg has been reattached, his shattered bones mended and converted, atom by atom, to indestructible ferroceramic. Tiny biomechanicals are working through his body, modifying or replacing organs, transforming, transmuting, perfecting, and the sea change has been under way for some weeks now.

  Mendoza walks to the window of the tank and presses her hands against it, peering in. The flame about her burns steady, a clear jet. Minutes pass. She appears to have forgotten anything but the man in the tank, and the Captain knows if he doesn’t do something she’ll stand there all night.

  “Bedtime, dearie,” he reminds her.

  “What?”

  “Bedtime. Look! There’s yer bed and nightie. And, see? Coxinga’s bringing cocoa. You get undressed now like a good lass.”

  “Okay,” she says, and takes off her clothes. The Captain watches her intently, not because he is a lecherous old Artificial Intelligence, but because in this, as in all things nowadays, she tends to focus on one action so closely she forgets anything else.

  But she manages to put on her nightgown and climb into the white infirmary bed without further prompting tonight; accepts the proffered cup of cocoa from another of the skeletal creatures and drinks it down. The creature reaches out to take back the empty cup and busies itself picking up her clothes from the places she dropped them. She has focused on the man in the tank again, staring at him with wide black eyes.

  The Captain sighs.

  “Go to sleep now, darlin’,” he tells her. Her eyes close
and she relaxes completely, sinking back into the pillows. Coxinga pulls up her blankets for him.

  The Captain stands regarding Mendoza thoughtfully. After a moment he extends a yearning hand and places it on her brow, as flames leap up through his illusory fingers.

  His gesture of affection is not meant for her, though he’s quite fond of Mendoza, in his way; Artificial Intelligences are just as capable of devotion as human beings are. She’s a well-behaved and obedient cyborg, but what really matters is that she loves his boy. Somewhere behind her brow, in a locked file, his boy’s consciousness is trapped. So is that of a similarly disembodied gentleman named Nicholas Harpole. Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax shut them both in there, and only Edward knows the code to release them.

  The Captain has taken care of Alec since Alec was five years old. He’s not quite sure what the other two entities are. They were once living men, earlier versions of Alec produced by the same Company responsible for creating him from recombinant DNA. When they had served the Company’s purpose and been killed, an electromagnetic recording of their personalities—memories, emotions, skills—had gone into storage in their files and remained there, inactive, until Alec accidentally downloaded them into his own brain while fleeing from the Company into the deep past.

  The result was a remarkable case of multiple-personality disorder for Alec and a continuing logistical nightmare for the Captain. The only thing on which the three gentlemen wholeheartedly agreed was the fact that they loved Mendoza, who had known each of them in their successive incarnations.

  Nicholas Harpole, who lived in the sixteenth century and was a scholar and heretic, managed to adjust somehow to massive culture shock and loss of the foundation on which his religious beliefs stood; but then he was an extraordinary man.

  So was Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

  Edward lived in the nineteenth century and was a political agent for the British Empire. He absorbed all the virtues and most of the vices of that massive institution, along with the cold-blooded practicality that enabled him to do his very unpleasant job. He died heroically in the service of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, an earlier version of Dr. Zeus Incorporated. His subsequent discovery that they lied to him most of his brief life has not been received well and, unfortunately for his creators, Edward has read Frankenstein.