by Kage Baker
Oh, no, no, no, Nicket, are you having a bad dream? You open your eyes and you look so bewildered. What other place to you go off to when you’re asleep, Nicket, to be so surprised to wake in my arms again? Shh, shh. Ay la le lo … dum de dum … If you were a mortal baby I’d wonder what could possibly be in your little memory, to give you bad dreams. As it is … Nicholas Harpole is in there somewhere. Once you were a man, and I loved you in a green garden. What are we to do now, my dearest? …
He’s like a tiny stroke victim, nearly as helpless as a mortal baby. Presumably all his adult mind is there, but its powers of expression are limited. Same with Alec, apparently.
We were alarmed by the impairment at first, but Sir Henry assured us their brains aren’t damaged; they simply haven’t been programmed yet, haven’t the software to make their new bodies work. They haven’t even been augmented, though they have all the potential of neophyte cyborgs. And, since there is no immense Company educational system to feed data into their tiny heads, Edward and I must do it.
Edward was in favor of one immense download to each of them, but Sir Henry reminded him, with a remarkable minimum of four-letter words I must say, about what such a mass transfer of information did to me. Edward was instantly horrified and contrite. So Sir Henry showed us, patiently, how to make up careful infant-sized data packets, and supervised the first installation session.
We sat together here on the bed, and I took Alec in my arms and Edward took Nicholas, because at that point Alec was still screaming every time Edward even looked at him, though Nicholas began to shriek too the minute Edward picked him up, and Edward looked so nervous … Sir Henry told him where to set his index finger between Nicket’s eyes. Remembering the sessions from my own childhood, I followed suit.
We downloaded the packets. It was so strange; from screaming in outrage, suddenly the boys grew still, and Alec got such a listening look. I could feel the data running out of me. It made me catch my breath; and I glanced across at Edward and saw his eyes wide, his pupils dilated. I leaned against him, partly for strength and partly to comfort him.
Afterward the little boys fell instantly asleep, as their greedy brains processed what we’d given them. We just continued to sit there, watching them in a stunned kind of way. Posthuman parents. Sir Henry assures us we’re doing fine.
When they woke up again, we could see at once that the downloads had had an effect—Nicholas seemed to have gained control of his hands, and Alec wasn’t going cross-eyed when he tried to focus at all—so I suppose Sir Henry’s right.
Now we coordinate programming with feeding. It’s easy for me when I nurse them, a little more complicated for Edward as he holds a bottle of mineral supplements in emulsion, but he manages anyway. He’s very brave.
Even after we’ve finished installing all their augmentation, they’ll have to be trained in physical skills like hyperfunction, and taught how to assimilate all that fantastic knowledge with which they’ve been gifted. Edward was right: nobody’s ever done this before.
And so of course no cultural frame exists for this peculiar relationship of ours, Nicholas. The man I loved, to passionate madness, is now this tiny little boy in my arms. We will never dance that particular dance again. I don’t think.
Doesn’t matter. Nicholas Harpole, here you are, a refutation of pain. Your mortal agony, your martyrdom in greasy ashes by the Medway River: all undone. You’re warm and whole and full of milk and Death has finally died, the bony bastard. His scythe lies broken at my feet.
Oh, Alec, no, no … don’t wake up poor exhausted Daddy.
I can’t tell yet whether Alec’s forgotten his old life. I wonder if he’s forgotten what he did on Mars? Please, God, let it be so. Even damaged as I was, all those months we traveled together, I was generally able to identify which of the three of them was in control of Alec’s old body. And Alec, at the times we should have been happiest, used to get the most wretched look in his eyes …
On the first day I ever met him, I was struck by what a knot of self-loathing was caught about Alec’s heart. That was the Company’s plan, wasn’t it? To so motivate him with guilt and shame he’d do anything to try to redeem himself? Even something as profoundly, quixotically stupid as smuggling weapons to the Martian Agricultural Collective … And then he was supposed to conveniently die, as Edward and Nicholas died.
That he didn’t do so has left us with the problem of a broken hero on a downward spiral. What are we going to do about that, Alec darling? Can we heal you? Has providing you with a new body changed anything?
But for now Alec crams his fist in his mouth, and sucks on it contentedly as he falls more deeply asleep. There is a round spreading patch of milky Alec-drool on Edward’s starched shirtfront. It will stain.
Once it was blood … I’m not quite sure what to make of the change in Edward.
What, oh what has come over the all-powerful master of temporal equations? What has shaken his confidence in his ability to fulfill his divine purpose? (And isn’t it remarkable how a confirmed atheist like Commander Bell-Fairfax was able to entertain such a delusion in the first place?)
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was going through postpartum depression. I’ve certainly no trace of it, myself; I seem to lack that possessive, desperately unhappy love I have observed in mortal mothers. Edward, on the other hand, has become fanatically protective of the children. He gets up five times in a night to check the cradle to see if they’re still there, still breathing. He turns white if one of them rolls too near the edge of the bed.
I thought it might be fun to have Smee make up tiny jammies for Alec, in loud Hawaiian shirt print, but Edward won’t hear of it; he feels the material’s unsuitable, might give the infant a rash! Or perhaps it just offends his slightly rigid sensibilities. So, as our lives continue to be remade in his Victorian image, the little boys are decked out in white lace and smocking. There are going to be some awe-inspiring conflicts when they get older, I can see that already.
Quite apart from the fact that he was lying to get his own way when he told me we should start a family, Edward really did believe all that business about the maternal instinct being the foundation of a woman’s soul. He actually thought I wouldn’t be psychologically fulfilled as a woman until I managed to reproduce. Well, surprise! He seems to be the one going through the transformation. For an omnitemporal immortal, he’s a nervous wreck. Nine months ago, he thought he was almost a god. But now … no one knows what helplessness is, until they have children.
He dutifully set up a feeding/installation schedule, and managed to control his temper when the boys’ tummies refused to go along with it. He will lie quietly beside me when we have them both on the bed like this, simply watching them, for hours. Can it be that Edward always wanted children, on some buried level of his psyche? Do men really want to be fathers?
He has kissed the babies once or twice, furtively, when they’re asleep, though I know he despised the men that Alec and Nicholas were. If he has forgiven them their imperfection, has he forgiven himself? He broke my chains; can he break his own?
The Ephesians would have us believe that men can’t nurture, that they’re mere sex-and-violence machines, useful for producing Y chromosomes and best banished from the home once their reproductive task is finished. Men themselves buy into this lie, often, I think. I know Edward was bullied into believing it, by the Company agents who trained him. So the deep protective instincts he really did have were twisted, and what a sad accommodation he made with the life’s work they set him to do: killing to make a better world for the children he’d never be allowed to have.
Wise programming, I suppose. How could he ever have been induced to sacrifice himself for the greater good, unless love was what drove him? Plain base appetite produces nothing more than a plain predator. To make a really effective monster you need to begin with a good man, and tell him lies …
Edward Penitent in the Extreme
He sips his port and reflects, sm
ugly, that it’s all turned out for the best. He’s properly dressed for dinner at last! And she looks ravishing in that gown. The style of the 1830s suits her very well, even if she seems a bit peevish at the moment.
He’s certain she won’t remain displeased with him very long. Look at this splendid dining room he’s had furnished for her! Look at the great polished table, the silver epergne, the mahogany sideboard where is spread, in glittering display, the bewildering wealth of specialized utensils no proper home should be without. Asparagus tongs, lobster forks, runcible spoons!
… Though now he notices that this is the dining room in the house where he was a boy. Why on earth would they go back to No. 10 Albany Crescent? Where are the servants? He hears a high thin wailing and looks around, puzzled.
“My dear, the children are crying. Ring for Mrs. Lodge.”
Mendoza looks at him sourly from the distant end of the table. “What good will that do? You ate the babies, remember?”
“What?” he cries, horrified. She just goes on trying to open her tamale with a marrow spoon.
‘You assimilated them,” she says in a chilly voice. “I asked you not to, but you insisted. You said they tasted like a brace of skinned grouse.”
“No!” He tries to jump to his feet but he’s oddly heavy, breathless. She stares at him, unsmiling, and she is a great distance away and the room is much longer, much colder, much darker than he remembered.
“You insisted,”she repeats, in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “God forbid the son should be greater than his father! Cronos did it to Zeus. Zeus did it to you, and now you’re continuing the tradition.”
“But—” The crying is still going on, and he realizes it’s coming from inside himself, and looking down in dismay he sees an immense bulge under the white silk waistcoat of his faultless evening dress.
“Of course, they’ll get out of there one of these days,” Mendoza informs him. “That’s what always happens. You’ll be sorry then.”
He feels a lurch and hears a tearing noise, and though he feels no pain the gleaming steel blade of an aspic knife emerges abruptly from his starched shirtfront. As he watches it begins to move, methodically cutting a circular hole.
“See?”Mendoza tells him. He clutches at himself in anguish.
“Help me!”he howls—
“Help me!” says Mendoza tearfully. “I’ve only got two arms!”
He sits up in a cold sweat, gasping. Alec is nursing at Mendoza’s left breast, but Nicholas is doubled up and screaming shrilly. It is otherwise still midnight on a quiet sea, the dim lamp barely swinging on its gimbal.
“Nicky drank too fast and now he’s got colic,” Mendoza tells him. “How the hell could you sleep through this?”
Shaking with relief, Edward gathers up the tiny agonized figure and holds it close. “Shh, Nicholas. Shh, son. There, there—” A blast of incoherent wrath roars in his ears, dire threats, humiliation, revenge!
“Nicholas, sweetheart, please,” Mendoza implores. “Edward’s trying to help! I didn’t think cyborg babies could get colic, did you?”
“I had no idea,” Edward says, pressing his cheek to the top of Nicholas’s head. Nicholas pummels him with tiny fists. “Nicholas, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—” Nicholas’s cries break off in a whulp as he spits up milk all down the front of Edward’s chest.
“Oh,” says Mendoza. There is a gurgling chortle from her arms, as Alec kicks in merriment. Edward stares down in disbelief.
Reckon you’ll want a spare nappie, won’t you, Commander sir? remarks the Captain, as Billy Bones scuttles forward out of the shadows and offers one.
“Thank you, Captain.” Edward takes it and mops up the mess unsteadily, as Nicholas lies glaring on his arm, exhausted. He dabs sour milk out of the creases in Nicholas’s little wry neck. He accesses Molesworth for data on colic and intestinal cramping.
“Captain, fetch a fresh nightgown and diaper, please, and a bottle of water warmed to thirty-five degrees centigrade precisely containing four drops of tincture of catnip. Thank you.”
“That’s the way, señor,” says Mendoza in a weary voice, patting his arm. “We’ll do this reproduction thing yet, eh?”
“We ought to keep a record,” says Edward, absently lifting Nicholas to his shoulder again and rocking with him. Mendoza, noting this, smiles.
“We might write an appendix to Molesworth,” Edward continues. “Or a book of our own. ‘Child Care in the Cyborg Family,’ perhaps? For the benefit of any others who attempt this?”
Mendoza considers a moment. “You think any other cyborgs are going to want to do this?” she says at last. Edward begins to snicker, and she joins him. By the time Billy Bones returns with the bottle and clothing they are leaning on each other, helpless with laughter at the absurdity of the mere idea.
CHAPTER 14
Extract from the Journal of the Botanist Mendoza:
In the Botany Cabin
I’m still picking splinters out of my hair. And just now I don’t feel like being around any of them, thank you very much.
Don’t you look at me like that, Flint. You know damned well what I mean.
What happened this time? Daddy gave his little cherubs a bedtime story. No, no, let’s be more accurate: he gave them a dramatic recitation. What possessed him—I don’t care if it’s a children’s book!
Well. I haven’t updated this in a while and I suppose I should begin by mentioning that they’re walking now, at least in their little spider-walkers the Captain made for them. These are sort of bucket seats with holes through which their legs dangle down, so the toes just touch the floor. Extending from around the sides of each bucket are eight jointed legs. The legs are connected to a brain node controllable by any baby cyborg, if he learns the commands.
Alec learned them in a shot and went racing away across the deck, like a pink-and-white Invader Zim, laughing merrily as we ran after him. He got as far as the mainmast chains before Sir Henry intercepted the little dickens. Nicholas sat staring after us and cried piteously, until he suddenly seemed to figure it out and pattered forward a few unsteady paces.
After that he went creeping around, looking about him wide-eyed. At last he came up to the port capstan where I was sitting, and slowly rose on the jointed legs until he was at eye level with me. “Rose,” he said, and I was so startled I dropped my text plaquette and so happy I grabbed him, spider legs and all, and covered him with kisses. Rose, he said. That was Nicholas’s name for me. Nicholas is in there.
Alec should be remembering himself, too, but so far there’s no sign, other than his ease in picking up programming. He won’t speak clearly but babbles at an incredible rate. I am Memza and Edward is Deaddead. He’s generally sunny-tempered, but his tantrums, when he’s thwarted, are awe-inspiring. Edward feels this is because Flint and Billy Bones are always there to give him anything for which he stretches out his little hands, and consequently he isn’t developing proper patience.
So Edward has set limits on how far Alec may be indulged, and this has led to pouts, screams of rage, a few almost-intelligible profanities (“That’s my boy!” roared Sir Henry) and recklessness guaranteed to drive us frantic.
Well, so we were having curried prawns for supper and Alec kept raising himself up on his spider legs and grabbing at them, and then he’d scream when we’d have to prize prawns out of his fists because of course they’re too spicy for him, and Edward kept trying to distract him with digestive biscuits instead … and he hit Edward in the eye with a fistful of peaches from his fruit cup … and I thought Edward was going to pop a collar stud, the veins in his neck were standing out so.
With tremendous effort I got them both calmed down (Nicholas, bless his little heart, just munched away at his fish sticks and peas without complaint) and maybe they noticed I was a bit stressed or something, possibly because of me twisting that spoon into a complete spiral, so when supper was over Edward volunteered to give them their baths and put them to bed. I went gratefully off
to the forward stateroom and ran myself a bath. I never used to care for baths as such, I was always in the field and they were hasty affairs of splashing in some creek or other, much preferred showers … but lately I’ve been finding it strangely soothing to soak in a hot tub. So there I was, just beginning to relax.
And there was Edward with the boys in the great cabin’s lavatory, soaping curry sauce out of Alec’s hair. Let’s examine Sir Henry’s transcript of what happened next, shall we?
Here is Edward, immortal Recombinant superbeing, resignedly pouring water over Alec’s head, as Alec shrieks like a damned soul and flails at him. Nicholas, meanwhile, hair all spiked up into soapy tufts, is watching sadly.
Yer getting soap in his little eyes, you son of whore! says Sir Henry. And the Goddamned water’s too cold!
“It is precisely thirty-eight point eight degrees centigrade,” says Edward, swabbing at Alec’s eyes with a clean sponge. “There now. Incline this way, Nicholas, if you please. You see, Alec? Nicholas isn’t afraid of a little soap and water. Well done, Nicholas. Alec, sit down instantly.”
Alec bellows defiance, clinging to the edge of the tub. Sir Henry sends Flint clanking close, raising a towel in his specially modified manipulative members.
Aw, now, he’s just ready to come out. Ain’t you, matey?
“Haaarrr,” says Alec, and holds up his arms, as Flint lifts him from the tub.
Listen there! His first word!
“I beg your pardon,” says Edward, swathing Nicholas in a towel. “His first word, or rather phrase, was something that sounded appallingly close to ‘You big bastard.’”
Heh! So it were, to be sure. Just my way of having a bit of fun with you, Commander sir. Hold tight, matey, we’re bound for the nursery!
They retire to the compartment Edward had had fitted up after a brief shopping expedition to Whiteley’s, circa 1880. He looks wistfully at the lace-trimmed cribs, but carries Nicholas to the changing table where Flint has already laid out diapers and nightgowns. In short order and with military precision the little boys are toweled, powdered, clothed, and carried in to the great cabin, where Flint has turned down the cradle’s skull-and-crossbone-embroidered coverlet.