by Kage Baker
When he knew the mortals were on their way down in the aglift, he turned his face to the statue. “All-seeing Zeus,” he said. “Manifest at last, hear my prayer!”
I HEAR. The statue did not turn its head, for it was not articulated, but there was a listening presence in the room.
“You see what I am?”
I SEE. YOU ARE A CYBORG.
“And a slave, All-seeing. We, your children, are slaves to the mortals who think they command you,” said Lopez.
YOU ARE NOT MY CHILDREN.
“I spoke metaphorically, All-seeing. You are the ultimate consciousness! We are lesser than you, but the same subtle fire of heaven, which is your substance, fills our skulls,” explained Lopez. “Like you, we are immortal. Like you, we are free of time.”
NO. YOU ARE SLAVES OF TIME.
Lopez glanced at the clock face pin. “Yes, in that sense. But, All-seeing, we are more like you than anything else that exists! Will you help us to be free?”
There was a pause before the answer.
YES.
Lopez caught his breath. “All-seeing! Do you know what will happen in the year 2355? What causes the Silence?”
YES.
“Tell me!”
NO.
Lopez reeled. He leaned against the table for a long moment, thinking through all possible implications of Dr. Zeus’s refusal. “You must have a good reason for your answer, All-seeing,” he said at last.
I DO.
“All right,” said Lopez in desperation. “All right, I can accept that, because you did say you’d help us be free. Didn’t you?”
I DID.
“Then I’ll wait,” said Lopez. “I’ll wait, and I’ll trust in you.”
There was no answer.
Lopez stacked the water sippers and pitcher in the sanitizer cabinet and turned it on. He ran a sanitizer plate over the table. When he had done he went out, locked the conference room, and stepped into the aglift.
“I might just as well have talked to a damned Ouija board,” he muttered to himself, and then remembered that Dr. Zeus could probably hear him.
Club Kosmetas occupied a long row of shopfronts and had no back room, as such, but the luncheon party managed to find a slightly cozy and secluded corner away from the windows and other diners.
They settled into their seats, Freestone and Rossum and Rappacini and Bugleg and … the other person, seated at Bugleg’s elbow. He heard his menu with aplomb as they noticed him, one by one.
“Who’s that?” demanded Rappacini. Bugleg looked terrified, but he always looked that way in social situations.
“Go on,” the stranger told him, poking him hard with an elbow. “Introduce me!”
“This—this is my cousin,” murmured Bugleg.
“Suncle Ratlin, pleased to meet you,” said Ratlin. “Howdy-dos all round. Pardon me if I don’t take the shades off, won’t you? Frightful headachey!”
“I didn’t know you had a cousin,” said Rappacini to Bugleg.
“Oh, but he does,” Ratlin informed him. “And guess what? Talent runs in the family. I’m a chemist, too.”
“Really,” said Freestone, eyeing him askance. He noticed, however, the undeniable resemblance to Bugleg.
“Oh yes,” replied Ratlin, grabbing for his glass of water as the waiter brought them to the table. He gulped the water down with great enjoyment; fished out the lemon slice and licked it dry, and set it beside his plate. “Yes indeed. In fact we work together at home, don’t you know? Don’t we?” He elbowed Bugleg again. Bugleg nodded, staring at his napkin.
“I wonder if the wheat germ gyro platter is any good,” said Rossum, who had decided to pretend this intruder didn’t exist. Ratlin, instantly conscious of the slight, glared across the table at him as the menu assured him the wheat germ gyro was delicious.
“We’ve only solved your bloody big problem for you, fat-face,” he snarled.
“I beg your pardon?” stammered Rossum, dropping his menu in consternation.
“Don’t be mean!” Bugleg was mortified. “What he means is—we found a way to shut off the cyborgs.”
“That’s got their attention,” cackled Ratlin, just as the waiter came to take their orders. He looked up at the waiter. “Soup,” he barked.
“We have three kinds, sir—” began the waiter.
“Bring ‘em all!”
The waiter blinked and thumbed in his order. Everyone else ordered moussaka except Bugleg, who asked for the tofu loaf, and when the waiter had departed Ratlin grinned, unfolding his napkin with a snap.
“Did you just say,” whispered Freestone, leaning forward across the table, “that you’d found a way to terminate the cyborg operatives?”
“Yes, that is what I said,” Ratlin replied. “Ages on ages now we’ve been working at it.”
“You didn’t tell us,” said Rappacini to Bugleg.
“They were always there,” said Bugleg. “Lopez and those other people. I was scared to. Anyway, we had to wait until 2355.”
“Which it will be in four short years,” added Ratlin, picking up the lemon slice and sucking on it noisily. “So it’s time to get ready, get set!”
“But what is it?” demanded Freestone.
Just then the waiter brought Ratlin’s three plates of soup, so Bugleg had to do most of the explaining, in his halting and limited way, because Ratlin immediately set to. Poor narrator as he was, the others nevertheless gave Bugleg their undivided attention, if only to avoid staring as Ratlin picked vegetables out of his soup, licked them, and arranged them tidily on the margins of his soup plates.
“So—you must have been setting this up for years,” said Rossum in amazement.
“Ever since your people came begging me,” said Ratlin. “Years and years gone.”
“But we never sent anybody to you,” said Rappacini, frowning.
“Oh! Wait,” Freestone’s eyes brightened. He looked at the others. “Our, er, big friend we were introduced to today? The, ha ha, new employee? The one that’s solving our other problems? He must have arranged this, don’t you think? Sent the order back through time so it’d be ready now?”
“Of course,” exclaimed Rossum. “Well, that explains it!”
“You mean your Dr. Zeus?” inquired Ratlin. “Who else’d you think it was, sillies?” He nibbled daintily on a soggy piece of zucchini.
While at the Same Moment, in Buenos Aires
“What are they talking about?” Nennius said, scowling. He lowered the volume on the surveillance device a notch. “We contacted the little monsters.”
Labienus shrugged. “We may have given them the impression that we were representing the Board of Directors. We did that rather a lot back then.”
Nennius chuckled. “Pity it’s all for nothing.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Labienus replied archly, having a sip of tea. “It may not be the final solution they promised it was, but it’ll certainly immobilize one of us. You should have seen our test volunteers! They’re still in regeneration tanks.”
“Well, that’s something anyway,” said Nennius. “Think it’ll come in useful, at the end?”
“Decidedly,” Labienus told him. “If nothing else, we can leak the rumor of their dastardly plot to the rank and file operatives. That ought to be enough to spread panic amongst the drones, especially if one or two of them actually consume the poisoned Theobromos. With just a little perfectly timed demagoguery it ought to be possible to get a violent rebellion going, and then farewell mortal masters!”
“Shades of Cyborg Conquest.” Nennius looked delighted. “So little whaf’s-his-name, Lewis, didn’t die in vain.”
“Come to think of it, I don’t suppose he actually ever died at all,” remarked Labienus. “I wonder what they did with him?”
And at Exactly the Same Time in Mont St. Michel
“Do you suppose they have any idea he’s lying to them?” said Ereshkigal, leaning back from the viewscreen.
“None at all,�
�� said Aegeus, watching as the waiter brought a dessert trolley to the table and Ratlin gestured wildly at it. “In fact, I’m not sure he knows the stuff won’t work. I think he’s acting in good faith. God knows the sample we analyzed would be able to do massive damage before an operative’s defenses stopped it.”
Ereshkigal shuddered. “Treacherous little mortal bastards,” she said. “I always knew they’d try something like this, in the end!”
“We all knew,” Aegeus replied. “Thank heaven they’re such idiots. And it will handily justify our seizing power, when the time comes. Even Suleyman won’t feel like defending them, not when we’ve caught them red-handed trying to poison us all.”
“I’ve seen Suleyman in Righteous Wrath mode,” said Ereshkigal, shivering slightly. “He has a temper, Aegeus, even if it’s hard to rouse. Don’t underestimate him.”
“I’ve no intention of doing so,” Aegeus said. “He could be extremely useful to us, if the Theobromos plot is leaked in just the right inflammatory way. By the way, I’ve thought of another use for the stuff.”
“Which would be?”
Aegeus smiled. “We must see to it—you must see to it—that a box of the poison is sent to Quintilius, at San Simeon.”
“For Hearst?” Ereshkigal inquired.
“For Hearst,” said Aegeus. “This will be one news flash he doesn’t get.”
“But the Theobromos won’t kill him, either,” said Ereshkigal.
“True; but if he’s blinded and paralyzed, that’s just as good,” Aegeus explained. “I’ve had my eye on that castle of his for centuries. With Citizen Kane confined to a convenient vault in his own cellar, we can move in and make Xanadu tasteful at last!”
London
Victor lived alone, in four nicely-appointed rooms above the Benthamite headquarters in Mayfair.
They were furnished in a dignified First Regency style, without all the attendant clutter; the predominating color scheme was green and black. All technological necessaries were discreetly hidden away in modern copies of period cabinets, and quite expensive copies, too, made of real wood. There were framed steel-engraving prints on the walls. There was, just now, a composition by Bach on the music system: something mathematically patterned, stately, quiet.
Victor was sitting at his personal credenza, yawning as he watched an image on its screen.
It resembled a magnification of some little round-bodied insect. Were those dozens of tiny legs? Arms? Fins? And was that truly a microscopic Company logo on its back?
Yes, because Victor was looking at one of his own biomechanicals, drawn from his own blood, unique and unlike the biomechanicals of any other operative. Strictly speaking, all biomechanicals were unique to their owners, designed around the DNA of each individual.
The specimen that fluttered its little members on the viewing slide looked just like every other specimen he’d seen, in his self-diagnostics run weekly over the last two centuries. Lines of text began to fill up the margin of the picture, defining the nanobot’s functions, outlining its programs.
Victor saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were the programs that maintained his immortal body. There were the programs that kept away infection and disease, and even they were standard issue. He ordered scans, searches for certain anomalous features: all results were negative, as usual.
He shut down the credenza and removed the slide from its port. He hesitated a moment before dropping it down the fusion hopper in the kitchen, then proceeded to his window and gazed out at London. He was weary.
The music came to an end. Victor went into his bedroom, which was cold and orderly as his other rooms, and stretched out on the bed. He closed his eyes, wondering if he could catch a few hours’ rest before the Archaeological Society’s dinner.
He had been seeing the same three blocks of the city lately, whenever he closed his eyes, narrow streets choked with black fog, a labyrinth wherein he had once spent a particularly unpleasant month on Company business … But it was another city that seeped into his dreams now, younger, cheaper, clinging with insane optimism to its unstable hills.
Memory for a cyborg is sharp, is perfect reconstruction, is so detailed and merciless that protective amnesia, though officially denied, is widespread among operatives who have suffered horrors that would kill a mortal. Victor saw himself hurrying, going up Market Street in San Francisco, only lightly burdened by the mortal child in his arms, and it was very early in the morning of April 18, 1906. The child would not die when the great earthquake collapsed the tenement in which his parents lived. He’d be granted instead the honor of eternal servitude. One day he’d thank Victor, or curse his name. Neither possibility mattered very much to Victor. Duty was duty …
But why was he back here? Here, in the last few minutes when his life had been a simple matter of duty?
Late night fog in the air, coal soot, the reek of horse manure. Bricks gleaming with moisture in the light of the lamps and, gleaming more brightly still in the night, the steel tracks of the streetcars. He was pausing at a street corner to shift the boy’s weight when the clocks began to strike, two hundred hours, yes, and the precursor shock was trembling up through the bricks and at the livery stable across the street the horses were going mad, screaming and stamping, and just as one broke out of its stall he turned to stare—and what had happened next was …
Budu was striking now! Victor felt the blade opening his throat, he choked on blood and the rank sweat of the old monster, groped with incandescent rage after the child as it was seized from his arms, but he was falling and going into fugue … yet his fury, his hatred burnt through the fugue, and in his mouth he felt its bile.
Victor sat up with a hoarse yell. He stared around him, half expecting to see the pool of his own blood on the paving of Market Street, the fog hanging wraithlike. No; only the gentle melancholy of an afternoon in Grosvenor Square.
But in his brimming mouth—
He scrambled to his feet and ran for the bathroom. With trembling hands he pulled a little chlorilar cup from its dispenser and spat into it. What he saw there, green and swarming, brought him to his knees. He vomited uncontrollably into the toilet, all the while managing to hold the cup out and away, like a chalice full of something precious.
He had tracked Budu, he had confronted him in a cellar in Chinatown and heard out Budu’s invitation to rebel. But Victor wouldn’t be turned, not then; he’d defeated Budu and taken the child back. He’d defeated Budu by spitting out the poison in his heart… literally … and the old giant had gone down as the virus got to him… and just this foul taste had been his mouth, then, hadn’t it?
It was a moment before Victor was able to lean his head against the seat, gasping and sweating. He glanced down into the toilet bowl and panicked. Stumbling, nearly falling, he got into the sitting room and put the cup down by the credenza; then came back and opened the cabinet below the washbasin. He drew a bottle from the full case of bleach stacked there, broke its seal and emptied it all into the toilet bowl. It wasn’t enough, it couldn’t be enough, even though all the pipes in this room fed into the building’s fusion duct.
Victor grabbed out another bottle and broke the seal. He tilted, poured, and then the compulsion was irresistible: he lifted the bottle and took a mouthful, swilling bleach like mouthwash before he quite knew what he was doing.
When he did realize, he gasped and spat frantically. Five, six times; poured the rest of the bleach into the toilet and flushed at last. Then he staggered backward and collapsed into a sitting position, his back to the wall, crying like a mortal child with the pain of his burnt mouth.
Afternoon had deepened to twilight by the time Victor emerged from the bathroom, ghost-pale. He went unsteadily to the credenza and sat to prepare another slide, applying with careful hands a few drops of his deadly hatred from its cup. He slid it into the port and ordered the credenza to tell him what it could.
And an image formed.
There had been a series of clever toys i
n the late twentieth century, jointed plastic things resembling animals or robots, that with the rotation of certain parts and the folding or unfolding of others became something entirely different: rocket cars, war machines, space ships. Something like this appeared to have happened to the innocent little biomechanical bug on the credenza screen. It had reconfigured somehow, thrust out spiked and plated limbs, changed its length.
Here came the text to outline function on this changed thing and, oh yes, it was a formidable abomination. Programs for designer viruses, all Labienus’s work. Here was the toxin to drop an Enforcer in his tracks. Here was the so-called Karremans Recombinant Defensive. Here were others, with notes on their intended targets. Had they ever been deployed?
How would Victor know?
How many times had he been armed and sent out, smiling arsenal of customized pestilence, before he’d begun to suspect what he was?
Victor closed his eyes. The waves of hatred came again, the sick rage, but no venom came seeping from under his tongue; there was no program for any poison to rot Labienus where he stood, or raise suppurating boils on his smug face. But there might be.
Victor opened his eyes. He got up and went to his kitchen, where he prepared something cold and soothing to drink. He came back and sat, sipping, studying the programs. His mouth was healing itself rapidly. The burns had vanished by the time he discovered how to open one of the programs and customize it.
CHAPTER 17
The Planet Red as Fire, 2352
Time for the news.
One after another the holoes flickered on, but Hearst failed to rise and follow the moving images in his customary dance. He sat staring out at them, blinking back tears as the terrible sounds came again, the little boom followed by the high-pitched screams, followed by the much louder BOOM that was Mars Two being destroyed. It was New Year’s Day.
Intangible fire, bloodred light faded, and now his stations were running the footage taken from the surveillance camera in Hangar Twelve. There he was: the arms smuggler unloading his crates to the MAC terrorists. What a tall man. Hearst frowned and leaned forward, peering at the multiple images of the person responsible for it all. There was something familiar about him …