The Sons of Heaven (The Company)

by Kage Baker

  Alec stuck out his tongue at him and Nicholas drew back his fist, at which point I grabbed his arm. “No fighting!”

  “I wasn’t going to hit him in the head,” said Nicholas sullenly.

  “But it’s a big storm,” said Alec. “With lots of rain. I was only exaggerating a little. It’s coming this way fast, too. Isn’t it?”

  “You’re right,” I said, scanning the clouds myself and feeling, then, just a little unease. “Well, we won’t stay out too long today. I think we’ll just survey this one bit of forest.”

  It was a fairly dense cover of Norfolk Island pine and ironwood, or things that might be hitherto-unknown variant subspecies of same, just the sort of thing to seduce me into lingering there for days while I ran all possible tests. The old romance was gone, though, somehow. I grew more and more nervous as I worked, as the little boys flitted back and forth between the tree trunks, playing at hyperfunction hide and seek. At last I glanced up and saw not blue sky between the branches but bruised purple air full of heat and wrath. I muttered something profane.

  “What?” said Alec, beside me like a shot.

  “Never mind. Where’s Nicholas?”

  “Here,” he said, materializing in front of me. “It’s starting to rain.”

  “Well, crumbs,” I said effortfully. “I suppose we ought to start back, then.”

  “Why?”Alec said. “We’re cyborgs. A little rain isn’t going to hurt us, is it?”

  “No,” I agreed, peering up at the clouds. I used to work all through the storm season in the Ventana, never once worrying what might happen. I loved storms. I reveled in the downpour, in the blast and the flash and the ozone following a lightning strike. Strangely thrilling, to dodge between the falling bolts. A risk no properly programmed cyborg would ever take, but oh well.

  Still, the idea of Alec or Nicholas doing something like that made my stomach knot up in terror. “Let’s go dance in it!” said Alec brightly.

  “No! We’re just going to sit here under cover and wait for it to blow through,” I said. I led them to a thicket, screened over by branches but well away from any tree trunks, and we stretched out in the prickly gloom.

  “We’re like deer in the forest,” said Nicholas, snuggling against me.

  “Like in that holo?” said Alec. “Bambi, right, with the talking animals, and then he’s an orphan, but then the big king stag comes and turns out to be his father?”

  “When did we let you download that?” I said. “That’s much too scary for you!”

  “It was just there when I accessed,” said Alec, a little too casually. “It was all right. I wasn’t frightened. You’d have to be a pretty big baby to be frightened.”

  “You were frightened,” said Nicholas.

  “No, I wasn’t!”

  “Alec, it’s got forest fires and savage dogs and … and a traumatic orphaning,” I said. The rain, meanwhile, increased; a few drops made it through the canopy and plinked on the broad brim of my hat.

  “But we’re immortals,” said Nicholas. “And nothing like that can ever happen to us.” He said it with a certainty that meant he wanted to be reassured, so I put my arm around him.

  “No, of course not,” I said, and made a mental note to ask Sir Henry if there’s any way to limit the files to which they have access. Alec has enough nightmares as it is. Just then, though, there was a blinding violet-white flash and thunder like the sky cracking open right on top of us.

  When it faded, I found that I was on my feet and tensed to run, with two little limpet-babies clinging to me, trembling, though Alec shouted “Wheehoo!”

  Where are you? Edward transmitted, through a burst of static.

  Four kilometers west-northwest, on the ridge!

  Where’s my boy? Unusual, to hear a machine panicking.

  “I’m okay, Captain!” cried Alec, though his voice was drowned by another flash/crack.

  Come back immediately! You ought—Edward’s transmission broke up in more static, but the implied reproach was there, and I felt miserably guilty. I thought he was overreacting, of course, but I was also remembering Joseph’s face the time he caught me out in that cornfield in Spain when the storm was breaking, and really, this is just too much complicated psychological baggage to contemplate right now.

  “Hold on, darlings,” I said, and set off down the hill as fast as I dared go without the boys’ little heads snapping off, landing on the graded road with a skid and a lurch. It was already a sea of mud, pocked with the boiling rain. Cursing to myself, I went squelching along it ankle-deep, and picked up a fragmentary transmission from Edward:—at once! I’m starting out with—

  I ought to have started down the hill the minute I noticed the clouds had advanced. What is this, my fascination with storms? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Did I always have a careless streak? I suppose I must have, mustn’t I?

  The lightning appeared to move away to the north, at least, but the rain became a nearly solid curtain of water through which we struggled. No use to try to avoid the puddles now; the road was bleeding creamy mud, brimming over its edges, spilling down the flattened grass on its lower side. “Is it going to be all right?” Nicholas shouted.

  “Of course it is!” I said, as cheerily as I could. “It’s only a little rain!”

  “Because I can hear something—” We came around the curve of the hill then, and what we saw stopped me in my tracks.

  There had been quite a picturesque little stream there, trickling down over black boulders, with inviting-looking lush moss. Billy Bones had thoughtfully graded only up to within a meter on either side of its course, and bridged it with some logs roped together. We’d crossed it five or six times without incident; but we weren’t going to be doing that again. The footbridge had vanished. So had a lot of the road. In its place was a roaring cataract of water, jetting from above the boulders. It had blown the bridge down the mountainside as though it were a chip of wood, and descended on the raw new-graded road, eating it away. Now the water tumbled down a vast muddy eroded slide, ten meters across, fanning out in ever-widening rivulets as it descended the mountain.

  I said—something really profane.

  If I’d been alone I might have backed up and flung myself across in hyperfunction. Couldn’t do that with the little boys holding on to me, though. I stared at it stupidly for a moment before peering up through the rain at the cataract.

  “We’re not going across this,” I said unnecessarily. “I think we can cross further up, though. Here’s what we’re going to do.” I backed up to the mountainside and set both boys down. “The two of you are going to stand right here while I climb up and see if there’s a safe place to cross.”

  “You’re going to reconnoiter,” said Nicholas.

  “Bravo, yes, exactly. What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to stand right here,” they chorused.

  So I pulled myself up the mountainside hand over hand, clutching at bushes and other undergrowth. Yes; the stream was a raging torrent up there, too, but still confined more or less to its rocky bed, and there were a couple of boulders that might facilitate leaping across in a couple of child-friendly bounds. I was scanning them to gauge how stable they were when I heard Nicholas saying: “She said we were to stay right here!” and Alec’s bloodcurdling reply: “I am right here, I just want to see—” followed by a tiny little scream.

  I have no idea what happened next. Once or twice in my eternal life I have drawn blanks—when I killed the mortals who shot Edward, for example—and this too is just a blur. Reviewing my visual transcript produces only an image of water and sky and mountain, a brief glimpse of Nicholas looking terrified as an arm—mine, presumably—sweeps out to him, and then Alec rocketing down the mountain slope on his back. He is crying “Wheeee—ow! Ow! Eeeeeee—”

  The sound is dopplering because I am catching up to him, pointing my body for greater speed, knifing past him at last through the avalanche of liquid mud, and I can hear Nicholas’s unbroken sc
ream in my other ear. Lightning again, thunder all around us. Then my foot has braked with a slam on a boulder, and Alec plummets toward me wide-eyed and I grab him, and then we are all three falling sideways and hurtling through green and fragrant branches, until there is a splash and I am fighting my way upward through dark water. Kicking to rise, because I have a child clutched in either arm. We break the surface. We are breathing hard. It echoes.

  The next thing I knew consciously, I was sitting with my knees drawn up on a shelf of rock, gasping, streaming with water. Alec and Nicholas were crouching, one on either side of me, in a kind of twilit gloom. Before us was the black pool, shattered water bobbing with something white. Flower petals? Yes. And around us the black stone walls, dripping, and above us the branches of whatever flowering bush concealed the place. Gardenia taitensis. Tiare, yes.

  Our grotto must be the former terminus of the stream, from its starting point up the mountain. How far had we fallen? I could hear breakers not far below us, and the place smelled of salt mist and blossoms. Another flash, another peal of thunder; then the darkness flowed back, and the sounds of surf and trickling water.

  “That was brilliant,” said Alec gamely.

  “WHAT DID I TELL YOU?” I roared, grabbing him and smacking his bottom. Just once; it echoed in that place like a pistol shot. Then I was holding him in my arms and sobbing like an idiot, and Nicholas was clinging to us and crying, too.

  I shouldn’t have done it. My anger, smoldering for centuries, all that old despair and frustration—it just blindsided me. I wonder I didn’t knock him flying. Thank God I didn’t. Edward has never once struck them …

  “There’s blood,” said Nicholas, tugging at my torn sleeve. I lifted my head to look—gosh, I was scratched and bleeding in a dozen places, that I could see at least. In consternation I scanned the boys; not a mark on Nicholas, thank God, but Alec had a scrape and an egg-sized bump on the back of his head.

  “Does this hurt?” I demanded, pouring a cupped handful of water on it to wash away the blood. The scrape looked minimal. He shivered and made a face, as the icy water ran down inside his collar.

  “Only a little. It’s starting to, actually. I think I hit my head on a rock,” he said.

  “You what?” Now I felt icy water, metaphorical as well as real. I grabbed Alec’s face and stared into his eyes, scanning him. There was no indication of skull fracture or cerebral bleeding; hematoma, slight abrasion, nothing more. He was fine. I told him so, with a shaky laugh, and then stretched out my left hand, which looked like I’d been fending off a wildcat with it.

  “All right, this is as good a time as any for a lesson. See all these cuts? I’m going to heal myself. Watch.” I made my biomechanicals swarm to all the injured places on that hand. The boys watched in fascination as the bleeding stopped, as the cuts closed over and faded. At least, they watched until Alec went green and threw up. Did he have a concussion after all? Frantic, I scanned him again.

  “I’m okay, really,” he insisted. “It’s just excitement.” He might be right; I still couldn’t find anything wrong with him. I gathered him against me and sat still, rocking back and forth. What was I going to do? I tried transmitting to Edward or Sir Henry, but the storm turned it to so much crackle and buzz.

  “We’ll just sit here until the storm passes away,” I said. “Then we can climb down and walk back along the beach, I think.”

  “Show us how you can heal the other hurts,” said Nicholas. So I held out my bleeding right hand and was explaining how they could do this too, once they learned the reflexive commands, and Nicholas bent his head to watch closely, though Alec squeezed his eyes shut and shivered. That was when something big came pushing through the branches and vaulted into our bower, backlit for a second by lightning. I never was so glad to see anyone in my life as Edward, muddy and disheveled, peering at us through the darkness.

  “And, you see? Everything’s going to be all right now, here’s Commander Bell-Fairfax to the rescue!” I babbled. He came swiftly around the margin of the pool and crouched beside us.

  “Nicholas, how’s Mummy?” he asked gently.

  “Rose has a lot of cuts,” Nicholas told him.

  “I’m fine. It’s just Alec—” I fought back hysteria. “He’s hit his head—” Edward went pale and lifted him from my arms, scanning him at once. “I couldn’t find anything—but he was sick—”

  “Alec, how do you feel? How is our little boy?”

  Alec gazed wonderingly up at our worried faces. “Well, my head hurts,” he said at last. “And, er, things sort of have this funny aura around them? And, er, I’m having confusion. How did we get here?”

  “You wouldn’t stay where she told you to, and you fell down the mountain!” cried Nicholas

  “Did I? I’m sorry,” said Alec.

  “You don’t appear to be concussed,” said Edward, looking at him keenly. “But the Captain will do any number of tests, I’m sure. And then we shall discuss demerits.”

  “Okay,” said Alec, snuggling into his arm. I put my arms around Nicholas. Edward put out his other arm and drew us close.

  “Now then,” he said. “You needn’t worry, my dear. The good Captain is at this moment making his way around the island; he’ll send the boat for us presently, and we’ll be warm and dry in short order.”

  “The road washed out—” I said.

  “Yes, I saw. You were quite right; we oughtn’t have cut that road, certainly this close to what is apparently the monsoon season. My apologies,” he said. Not a word about why I hadn’t started back earlier.

  So much can go wrong, in linear time.

  We sat there huddled together, watching the rain and the flashes of lightning. The warmth of Edward’s body was comforting. “We could be a cave family, hiding in our cave,” said Alec contentedly. I wondered whether he was hallucinating.

  What an incompetent fool I am.

  Who is she, this violent, reckless woman? How can I have lived all these ages without knowing myself?

  CHAPTER 20

  The Tombs of the Heroes, 2354

  Nobody noticed Joseph when he got off the air transport at Rufforth, in Yorkshire; nobody noticed him when he got on the train at York; nobody noticed when he got off the train at Northallerton, or when he went into the men’s lavatory to change his clothes.

  The mortal renting agcycles did notice him, when he ran the customary check on Joseph’s identification disc. There wasn’t much to notice, though: Joseph Steppenwolf, Californian tourist on holiday, age thirty, employed by Hearst News Services, enough in his credit account to pay for the agcycle if he crashed it. That last was the only detail of any interest to the mortal.

  So the mortal handed Joseph his activator and obligatory safety helmet, but didn’t bother with the obligatory safety lecture. He was anxious to get back to the Totter Dan game that waited on the rental office’s console, and anyway, nobody ever broke safety laws anymore. He was so deeply involved in his game that he didn’t notice when Joseph sped off through the rain toward the grassy track that had been the A684.

  West on the A684, north at Hardraw. The land was empty, overgrown: walls tumbled, houses fallen in long ago, and an unbroken sea of heather drowning old fields. Joseph saw no mortal soul until he pulled off the road, shortly after turning north. Even then, it was only ghosts he met.

  He lowered the support stand and switched off the agcycle’s motor. Climbing down, he removed his helmet and stared around.

  You could tell there’d been a good-sized building here. The gravel drive was still visible, and beyond was a big mound of mossy stones and bramble. No clue left to show that it had once been a bed-and-breakfast with a gift shop, styling itself The Innocents. Joseph walked across to the ruin and poked cautiously with his foot. A lot of crumbled plaster. Broken brick. A hinge.

  “No Bournville bars today, huh?” he said out loud. He lifted his eyes from the ruin and nearly jumped out of his skin; for a moment he thought he saw Lewis there beside hi
m, looking on sadly as the wind whipped his long coat.

  Nope. Trick of the light, that was all. Joseph looked away at the one thing that hadn’t changed in three centuries: the high steep hill that rose beyond the old foundations. Settling his pack on his shoulders, he waded around the ruin and began to climb.

  Fifteen minutes’ steady work along a rabbit track brought him up under the place he recognized, the crumbled and treacherous-looking rock face that concealed a door. Five minutes later he was hurrying down the black sloping tunnel under the hill, watching a dim blue glow ahead as it brightened and scanning cautiously as he went.

  He emerged into the vast cavern and this, too, was unchanged. Row upon row of vaults stretched away into the twilight, each one with its blue regeneration tank, and in nearly every tank a body floated. Most of them were male. Most of them were enormous, and shared Budu’s peculiar physical characteristics. All wore circlets about their brows, plain bands of dark metal.

  Joseph didn’t waste time gaping, for this was exactly what he had expected to see. He looked across at a chalkboard on one wall and read the words:

  ABDIEL HAS COMPLETED HIS APPOINTED TASK HERE

  12 MAY 2353 TO 1 JUNE 2353

  “Atta boy, Abdiel,” whispered Joseph. He shrugged out of his pack and opened it, drawing out two circlets of dark metal nearly identical to the ones the sleeping giants wore. Pushing them up his left arm like outsize bracelets, he ran quickly to the nearest tank and scaled the maintenance ladder up its side. At the top he paused just long enough to roll up his right sleeve and plunge his hand into the blue regenerant fluid, grabbing the tank’s occupant by his waving dun-colored hair and hauling him up to the surface.

  It took Joseph no more than a split second to pull off the circlet, toss it aside, and replace it with one of the two he had brought. There was an audible zap as the new circlet touched. Even as Joseph was fitting it in place, the big man was opening pale startled eyes and grabbing for him; but Joseph set his index finger against the sloping forehead and downloaded a jolt of encoded information.