by Kage Baker
“All right, I’m sorry. But don’t prune it back like that, you impossible—ai!” She grips the arm of her chair until the wood cracks.
“My love?” Edward is with her instantly.
“What the hell are they doing in there, playing hockey?” Mendoza gasps.
#χλ∊σ∗κγ∗ Scared!
Edward stiffens as though electrified.
“Did you hear—?”
“What?” she looks at him, alarmed.
≌%8ωιλια∗∗Where??
“That’s Alec!” Edward whispers. “Can’t you hear?”
“No!”
∗∗∗νιχηOλ∗∗OW!
“That was Nicholas!”
“You mean they’re transmitting?” Mendoza looks incredulous.
∗∗∗ασμηαρ∗∗Stop kick!
Damnation, the boys are online, yells the Captain. Mendoza jumps at his sudden voice and Edward distinctly hears twin screams of alarm from within her body, has a sense of wildly flailing limbs.
“Ay! God and bloody Saint James,” says Mendoza through gritted teeth.
Might I suggest you transmit back, Commander Bell-Fairfax, sir?
Edward reaches over and places his hand on Mendoza’s belly. Hush, he transmits, and perceives a sudden silence, an alert attention. Hush, gentlemen. You’re perfectly safe. You’ll—er—arrive shortly.
“Well, that seems to be working,” Mendoza says hopefully. “They’ve stopped dancing on my bladder.”
Bad man, transmits an accusatory little voice, sharp and clear now.
That’s my boy! That’s Alec!
SINFUL man, transmits an even more accusatory little voice.
Edward! transmits the first voice, and a dizzying wave of anger surges toward Edward out of the ether.
Bastard! transmits the second voice, no less vehement.
Yes, yes, all right! I admit you’ve been inconvenienced, Edward transmits back.
INCONVENIENCED?
I’ll make amends, in loco parentis, on my word of honor. You’ll have the best of everything. The years will speed by like so many days! The happiest of second childhoods and then, I promise you—
Piss off, bad man!/Smite thee!
Edward exhales in annoyance. I see. Well, perhaps if your brains weren’t the size of marbles just now, you’d be capable of listening to reason. Can you understand this much? If you thrash about, you’ll hurt Mendoza.
Mendoza!/Rose! And then, heartbreaking, a mournful crying, such a little lost sound.
Lost her again!/Again!
No! No, listen for her heartbeat, do you hear it? Just as I promised you. She’s with you. You’ll be all right. Be good little fellows and go back to sleep now.
Want her… /Want her…
But the transmissions fade out into silence. Mendoza, who has been watching Edward closely, demands: “What did they say?”
“Rather what you’d expect, under the circumstances,” says Edward shakenly, collapsing into the chair next to hers.
“So the biomechanicals are working,” she muses, “because they’re already able to transmit. What a thought, eh? No years of surgery to endure, like I had.”
Begging yer pardon, ma’am, but I’ve still got the support packages to install. That’ll happen in their teens.
“Poor little bastards,” says Edward.
Ah, now, sir, the bitsy darlings’ll never feel a thing, the Captain assures him with black good humor. They’ll be completely anesthetized.
“How nice for them,” retorts Edward.
“They must be pretty crowded in there by now, eh?” Mendoza speculates, in a bright voice with only the barest edge of suppressed panic. “And it’ll get worse. How much longer?”
“Ninety-two days, seven hours, and three minutes precisely,” says Edward. Mendoza winces.
“I had this dream,” she says. “They were born and they were a couple of little robot children. Little brushed steel baby heads, you know?”
Aw, now, dearie, never you fear; there ain’t no way they’ll take after me.
“And I put them on the bed, but they fell off and broke. I was appalled,” says Mendoza. A tear rolls down her cheek.
“Think nothing of it. A fairly common nightmare for the mother-to-be, according to Molesworth,” Edward says, reaching over to hold her hand. “Something every mortal woman learns to bear with.”
“How do mortal women manage this?” says Mendoza, despairing. “The discomfort isn’t so bad, but… This is just too inevitable. What if the dream was the Crome’s, coming back? I mean, if their little skulls will be vulnerable … if they aren’t made fully immortal until they’re in their teens … something really could happen to them.”
Edward feels his mouth go dry at the thought. He squeezes her hand, but says firmly: “Nothing of the kind will occur. I have every confidence.”
“Confidence in whom?” Mendoza says. “Fate? Destiny? God? We never had any of them on our side before.”
“That was before,” says Edward. He lifts Mendoza’s hand to his lips. Her scent comforts him. She leans back with a sigh. Kissing her hand but not relinquishing it, he leans back, too. The Lark Ascending continues its melodic flight on the ship’s intercom. Flint bustles clanking across the threshold, bearing a laden tray.
“Ah! Teatime,” remarks Edward.
Nine Months:
Edward Paenitens
“No,” says Mendoza, “I’m only eight centimeters dilated. Calm down, babies, calm down. Poor little things, they’re scared.”
She herself is tranquil and self-possessed, concentrating thoroughly on her task. Edward, by contrast, is sweating where he sits beside her, holding her hand. He focuses in on the children and can only get a sense of wild turmoil, panic, terror.
“I’m quite proud of your composure, my love,” stammers Edward.
“I am finally,” says Mendoza, “in control of something. Sometimes it’s good to be a cyborg. Nine centimeters. He’s crowning.” She levers herself up on her elbows. “Get ready, Edward.”
Edward scrambles around to the front of the bed and his jaw drops in dismay.
What he has always fondly euphemized as an orchid, an iris, splits wide, and a gush of bright blood precedes the domed crown emerging.
The sight and scent of the blood disturb him deeply. Edward remembers:
Raiding an Ivory Coast barracoon, and a warrior with glistening black skin charges him. Edward cuts him down, in a fountain of blood, but another comes at him, and another, until the last has dropped and Edward stands weeping, splashed with blood in the stinking sunlight, among dead men he had wanted to liberate. When he finds the Portuguese slave trader at last, cowering in a hut, Edward hacks him to pieces.
He remembers—
Watching as Able-Bodied Seaman Price takes the twelfth lash, and then another dozen. Captain Southbey orders another dozen then, and the midshipmen are pale as paper, the other officers looking on nervously but saying nothing. The surgeon’s assistant wrings his hands but says nothing, as the count goes on: four dozen. Six. Eight. The blood is a mist in the air. “Sir, this exceeds your authority,” says Edward, putting his hand on Southbey’s shoulder. Southbey turns on him in white rage. Then Southbey is down on the deck, his broken teeth scattering, blood spurting from his nose and lips and eyes as Edward methodically beats him with both fists, unable to stop, knowing it will mean court-martial and a death sentence—
“Ten centimeters.” Edward remembers—
He has stalked the little thief half the night. His quarry is a wretched nonentity who broke into a Society stronghold, and there stole something of unimaginable value, saw something he ought not to have seen. The sentence is death, of course. Patiently Edward closes the distance, until the thief in his panic enters a blind alley. He realizes his error and turns, but Edward is there. The thief staggers backward, gabbling out a frantic plea in a language Edward does not know. “Hush,” says Edward sternly, and cuts his throat, and the blood jets forth—
—And Edward now, with his augmented mind, hears the translation at last: “Please! Take the thing! They made me do it, they’re holding my wife and the baby—”
“Oh—” He raises shaking hands as the head is thrust forth, its purple features flattened and apelike, a tiny subhuman monster! He very nearly shouts with horror but controls himself and catches the head, wondering heartsick what he can possibly tell Mendoza. The body emerges and the head sags back, such a little vulnerable chin and throat, little hands waving in terrified blind protest. Abruptly the whole thing is writhing there in his hands, trailing its blue pulsing cord, turning its head from side to side, opening its mouth to draw in breath and scream—
And Edward watches unbelieving as its body turns pink, as its head decompresses and assumes a fairly human shape, as its squashed features resolve into something familiar. Trembling, shivering, squalling, Nicholas has returned to the world and the flesh. He is still inexpressibly hideous, in Edward’s eyes.
But Mendoza is holding out her hands, and so Edward gingerly places the baby in them. Her composure is gone, she seems uncertain, at a loss, peering into the tiny face; but her hands move as though without her knowledge, drawing the struggling little thing close, cradling him on her breast, stroking him.
How shall I ever console her?
“Oh,” she says, beginning to smile. “Oh, it’s Nicholas.”
“I’m so sorry,” says Edward brokenly.
“Look at his beautiful hands … what?”
Never mind that! Where’s my boy?
For still, on the ether, one faint voice shrieks in terror and disorientation. Alone! Scared! Where? Steadied by the necessity of calming someone else’s panic, Edward seats himself again and observes the crown of the other twin’s head just appearing.
Don’t be afraid. Come through. We’re here.
“Second birth initiated,” says Mendoza, transcendently serene once again. Alec slips back into the world with ease, trailing the afterbirth behind him, shrieking his dismay.
There’s my boy! That’s my Alec!
“Little Alec. Oh, what a sweet face!” Mendoza stretches out her free hand.
HAAR! Bless him, what a sight for sore eyes!
Edward thinks he looks like a greasy yelling goblin, but is thankful the child is alive and undeformed.
He has rolled up his shirtsleeves and is bathing Nicholas, clutching the bloody sponge in one hand, when he looks down at the baby’s birth-compressed head. The sight brings before his eyes the grim vision of the old Enforcers: helm-skulled giants on a battlefield, warriors righteous and unstoppable, gleefully smashing sinners into red pulp with flint axes. Death and death and death, whatever the argument, the answer always death. Joyous death. And did their son, in a newer and more elegant edition, succeed to his fathers?
Didn’t he just. A hundred dark doorways, quick kills, sprawled bodies. So sorry, nothing personal: for the Good of the Realm. For the Greater Good of Mankind. Pieces on a game board, pawns removed, cast aside. Every one of them beginning like this tiny new thing before him in its bloody bathwater. So much effort to create such perfection, such limitless potential to be—pushed from a hurtling railway carriage, garroted, poisoned, shot, stabbed, sabered, or blown to pieces by cannon fire, Rule Britannia!
And this new thing, and it is a new thing for all the freight of ancient passions it bears in its memory, its design of twisted spirals that gives it its fathers’ hands and voice and brain with all their demonic sense of purpose, called out of the void by alchemical science. What else has it inherited? What will it do?
What have we done?
Nicholas begins to shiver and cry again. Edward hurriedly swathes him in a towel and picks him up to comfort him, and the little thing is so helpless and weighs nothing, nothing at all.
We have done so much worse than sin, little brother, Edward tells him, shuddering. One hardly knows what to call it. We had damned well better save the world. How on earth else can we ever atone?
Unsteadily, Edward swaddles Nicholas in the blankets that have been prepared. He fits on Nicholas’s head the striped stocking cap: there. Little pirate on a big ship. He trades off with Mendoza and bathes Alec, and soon there are two little pirates mewling in her arms. “Aren’t they wonderful?” says Mendoza, smiling down at them.
“They look like a brace of skinned grouse,” says Edward morosely. Gazing down, he looks for slacker Alec, benighted Nicholas, his two despised rivals, failed images of himself. The old contempt will not come, somehow. He remembers, he remembers for all three of them:
Little Alec looking hopefully into the faces of strangers, hoping one of them would be Roger Checkerfield, come home from sea at last, but he never came. Nicket made to kneel and pray beside the green grave mound, that they told him was his mother’s, when he wondered for the first time: where is my father, then?… And, buried deep, a little Edward who followed the butler like a hopeful puppy. “Will you tell me about the war, Richardson?”…
What were their faults but his own? And now they must start the pitiless journey all over again. They are so small, and their feeble wails tear his heart.
“Are you crying?” Mendoza looks up into Edward’s face, startled. “Oh, darling!”
“Well, who wouldn’t be, says I?” remarks the Captain, assuming a visual image. “I call that a right nice morning’s work, now. Look at ‘em there, like a couple of little angels! Of course I’ll have thirty years of work to do all over again with my Alec, but does old Captain Morgan mind? Hell no, he’s just a machine—”
“Oh, shut up,” says Edward, wiping away tears. “I should think this calls for a photograph to commemorate the occasion.”
“You mean a holo, don’t you, Commander sir?” offers the Captain helpfully.
“Whatever,” says Mendoza.
So, an image in the family album: the woman all respectably gowned, tucked up in the vast gold-and-crimson pirate bed, looking tired but pleased with herself. In her arms, the swaddled babies, comical in their little caps. Standing to either side, the two male figures: what might be a slightly crazed but very proud grandfather, with his black beard and evil grin, and here the other man, cold and dignified as he stares down the maker of the image.
He has the weight of a thousand generations on his shoulders. There is new purpose in his pale and haunted eyes. He will be a father.
CHAPTER 13
Extract from the Journal of the Botanist Mendoza (transcript):
In the Bedroom
I can’t get over what beautiful hands they have.
And the pattern in the hair on the back of their little heads, the perfect clockwise spiral. Not so much as a birthmark on either of their perfectly identical bodies. Mostly identical. Alec gets much redder in the face, in fact all over, when he screams. And he screams a lot more loudly. Neither one of them seem to need much sleep, so this is quite an occasion, both of them down at once, gives me a moment to update this … I’ll have to dictate these entries from here on in, because I can’t hold a baby and manage a pen or plaquette. Flint, I want the striped blanket. Yes. Thank you.
How neatly he fits in the angle of my arm. As though it had been designed for his rest. I suppose in the larger scheme of things it was, wasn’t it? Ohh, look: rapid eye movements. When he’s awake they focus sharply, as a mortal child’s could not at this age; and they were from the moment he opened them that same pale blue, the color of Spanish glass… shh, shhh, Nicholas … little Nicket.
Do mortal women maunder on in this inane way, about the children they bring into daylight? How do they bear it, holding this tiny little thing in their arms, knowing all the perils it has to go through once it stands alone? This is terrifying.
In fact—I can’t imagine why I’m not crouching in a corner with my hands over my head, whimpering in fright. You know, you go along for three thousand years of immortal life and one day is pretty much like another, even with catastrophic tragedies now and again, and you just assume no
thing will ever change. Then, one fine day, everything changes forever. I am the first of my kind to do this reproduction thing, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to proceed.
Mortal women have mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers to consult and advise and Greek-chorus for them generally, and I have … a pirate.
No offense, Sir Henry. The modifications on Flint are impressive, the bottle holder and the padded waldoes or whatever those are, and the concertina-playing apparatus and the, ah, dangly mobile thing. I’m sure Alec likes it. He gurgles and stops crying whenever you make the pirate doll dance for him.
And the cradle is lovely. How clever of you to build it to match the rest of the bedroom décor. I’m sure any little boy would love a cradle built to look like a pirate ship. All that gilded carving, and the blanket and hangings in red velvet, with those gold-embroidered skull and crossbone motifs … It’s just so huge … Yes, I know Edward had that Whiteley’s one with the bunnies picked out, and I was thinking maybe something in powder blue and pink, but—no, no, I don’t mind at all. Edward doesn’t, either. Really.
And I understand about the health benefits and all that, and I know you’d love to feed Alec by yourself, and I was quite impressed with the way you gave him the vitamins. But I’m not certain I can hook myself up to that thing. In fact, I’m certain I can’t. I’m sorry… yes, of course, later he can have juice and I don’t know what. You’ll do a wonderful job then, to be sure. Mm-hm. It’s an adorable dimple, you’re right…
… And there goes Flint, wet nurse of the Spanish Main …
No, darling, I was just talking to Sir Henry. Everything’s all—what? No, I think it’s just drool. Go back to sleep. There … Poor thing, sprawled flat on his back and so he’s snoring most amazingly; but it doesn’t seem to disturb Alec. It’s sweet of him to cuddle Alec like that, considering Alec pees on him whenever he gets the chance. There have been several unfortunate incidents on the changing table already.