by Kage Baker
“That’s true!” said Hapsburg. “We have done what we set out to do, haven’t we? Kept all those animals from going extinct and saved all those, er, things? Paintings and stuff?”
“Exactly,” Freestone replied. “Dr. Zeus has fulfilled his purpose. When the cyborg program is terminated, life goes back to normal. Except that we’re all a lot richer than we were when the program started.”
“And we made the bad things not happen,” said Bugleg.
“What?”Telepop stared across the conference table at him.
“The, er, wars and things,” Rossum explained for him.
“Well—but they did happen,” said Roche. “Didn’t they?”
“Yes, but not as expensively!” Freestone stated. “And that was the whole point of the business, you see?”
London, 2 July 2355
Victor was preoccupied.
He had been preoccupied for days. His rooms were crowded now with stacked crates, and if a Public Health Monitor were to burst in for an inspection at that particular moment, Victor would have a great deal of explaining to do.
What was in all those stacked crates? Dangerous and immoral contraband, though once it would have been described as Christmas cheer or gourmet delicacies, garnered patiently from Third World sovereignties over a period of two years. There were bottles of old port, dark as blood, in those crates, there were bottles of the most costly champagnes. Liqueurs. Pate full of truffles, tiny containers of caviar. Obscure herbs and spices, wonderfully potent. Pickled oysters and the pickled eggs of wild birds, honey garnered from opium poppies, jars of clotted cream. If it was rich, if it was delicious, if it was bad for a mortal to consume, it was probably in those crates.
The immorality didn’t stop there. No, it went far beyond: for in a distant refrigeration locker, far above the sunny streets of Avalon, hung slaughtered and butchered animals, rotting on the hook to suitable tenderness for consumption. No Public Health Monitor could deal with this. He or she would be on his or her knees puking in the abattoir at the merest glance at all the bones and veins and muscles and slow-dripping nastiness … but to set aside the twenty-fourth century point of view for a moment, Victor had really bagged a lot of prime meat. Pheasants and grouse, a peacock, a wild boar, a sea turtle, a suckling pig and a calf, venison, and finally that ultimate martyr to humanity’s wickedness: a buffalo. Could anything be more deliciously perverse than to serve forth roasted buffalo to immortals who had spent the ages rescuing creatures from extinction?
Even innocence was being summoned to this feast, even now summer fruit was sweetening in the quiet orchards of the interior, and vegetables flourishing on its irrigated terraces. Would all those artichokes and baby carrots blanch at the thought of the company they were shortly to keep?
Victor was too preoccupied to be amused by such a question. He was watching, with his flat green stare, as printed averies spooled out of his credenza. Each label bore the same address, directing delivery to the Santa Catalina Island Preservancy Conference Center, Avalon, Republic of Santa Catalina.
He was watching the labels print out because he was undecided about something.
Before him on his desk was a card and matching envelope. He had purchased them centuries ago, kept them all this time sealed against age and dust. The envelope was plain ivory parchment. The card was decorated in its lower right-hand corner with a small painting of daffodils.
Victor was turning a calligraphy pen in his fingers, in a gesture of almost mortal nervousness. Click, click, click, the labels continued to print.
He set the pen down at last and his hand rose, involuntarily, to stroke his mustaches. Coming to himself with a start, he looked down at his hand; rose and hurried into the bathroom to wash. By the time he returned and sat down he seemed to have come to some kind of decision, for he picked up the pen and activated it. Peering down at the card, he wrote slowly and carefully.
Having read over what he had just written, Victor nodded and slipped the card into the envelope. He took out a modern Text Parcel envelope, addressed it, slipped the smaller envelope inside. He took a separate sheet of paper and wrote:
Ave et vale, Suleyman. These may well be my last words to you. I wonder if I might ask a favor, sir? Would you have the kindness to see that the enclosed card reaches Madame D’Arraignee? Assuming, of course, that you both survive the Silence.
PART V
CHAPTER 21
Out of the Hill
The slave was much better now, rational and calm; but he slept a great deal, waking only to swallow more of the vitamins and wash them down with water. Tiara grew lonely.
She curled up next to him and dreamed that they were in London, at Claridge’s. It was all a great garden under the stars, like the one behind the shop in Knockdoul, but ever so much more grand. There were roses in the sky. There were stars in the grass. There was a vast holoscreen that towered up to the moon. Her slave was bending forward, smiling, offering her champagne in his cupped hands. There was a couple at the table next to theirs. Yes, the woman with her black eyes, the man so very tall—
“Sweetheart,” a voice was saying. “Princess?”
She sat up in the darkness. She thought the slave was crying again, his voice was so strange. “What is it?” she demanded, a little crossly.
“Look,” he told her. “Look at me.”
He had drawn up both his legs! She shrieked and pounced on him, and they rocked back and forth together, hugging tight. “Now,” he whispered, “we’re so close to London I can smell the tarmac.”
“Can we go now?” she begged. “After so many and so long years of dreaming, my honey love?”
“Soon,” he gasped. “Must exercise! Get my muscles in tone. Learn to walk again. And we’ll need clothes—what a pair of picturesque vagabonds we’d look just now, eh, a little girl in rags leading a blind beggar? Dear, dear, once we’d not have drawn a second glance from anybody, but not nowadays! Oh, they’d have us off the public highway and into a Hospital somewhere as soon as they noticed us. Not a good thing, for me or you.”
“I’ll steal clothes,” she told him, kissing his cheek. “You shall be robed in whitest samite. I shall don the raiment of a great lady. We’ll blaze along the great highways of the world like Antony and Cleopatra, and lesser creatures will die for jealousy that they’re not us.”
At first the slave could barely stand, tottered and fell over at the least wrong move; but practicing at last he got the trick of balance again. As the days went by he never fell at all, and how tall he was now! Tiara cleared a path through the bones for him so he could walk to and fro, finding his way by reciting verse and listening as the echo of his voice bounced back to him from the walls. They found that this worked better if there weren’t so many dead men stacked there to muffle the sound.
Tiara dragged the bones out of the room entirely and farther down the old passageway, piling them up in a very old part of the hill, venturing deeper in the darkness than she’d ever gone before. In this way she found the ship.
It seemed to be a part of the wall first, silvery and cold, bulging out smooth. But as Tiara touched it, wondering, the Memory explained what it truly was. A few meters farther on she came upon the hatchway, irised panes of a pinky-purple steel. And here was a cunning little inset panel, and if she placed her hand just here—
Without a sound, the door unsqueezed itself. A gush of warm dry air wrapped around Tiara, prompting her to step across the threshold. She went inside, staring around. The Memory chattered loud suddenly, telling her all about the Getaways. This was what kin held in reserve, this was the safe last place where the big people couldn’t come! This was the very ship in which famous Uncle Zingo had hunted, and at so long last caught, her own dear slave. Its name was The Flee.
Tiara wandered through it openmouthed, and the Memory put it right up there on a par with the Argo and Garuda and the ship of the Three Queens that bore Arthur to Avalon. What a beautiful shining place it was, and so clean, because the k
in never lived in it for long; that wasn’t safe. A few nights in flight, no harm, but stay in here a month or a year and the stupids would begin to bleed and die, the Uncles grow strange swollen things in their tender places. The Flee was both life and death. It was the greatest thing the kin had ever made.
Tiara backed away in awe, and retreated through the door. Her hand on the panel closed it up again.
She decided not to tell her slave, however. Whether this was because she was afraid it might set off another fit of crying and forgetting just when he was doing so well, or because some inborn command of secrecy silenced her, it was difficult to say.
Tiara was looking for trout in the little culvert under the bridge one fine moony night when she caught his smell, old Uncle Ratlin, and he caught hers, and she heard his pattering footfall along the bridge, and heard his chuckling up above her.
“Hello again, my juicy babe,” he growled, and splash! He’d vaulted the side and shattered her starry pool, so that the moon and the trout fled. She bared her teeth at him.
“Varlet vile,” she muttered. Oh dear oh dear; the culvert was at her back, and nowhere to run but down its darkness, or out before her into Uncle Ratlin’s wide arms.
“Now, a kiss for your own old dear,” he cackled. “My sweetlips, guess what’s done! Eh? Go on, guess.”
“You have finished and furnished my green hill?” she demanded, putting her nose in the air.
“O, no, my loveydovey. Better than that.” Uncle Ratlin preened and strutted, ankle deep in the water. “It is accomplished! The Ruin, don’t you know? Ratlin’s Finest Death Assortment’s been sent winging its way to the slaves, the cyborgs, the dreadful drones of the big people. Not three days—nay, not two!—and they’ll all lie drowned in dreadful death, convulsed and blue. Let’s celebrate!” He dropped his trousers.
Ice prickled all along Tiara’s neck. She backed into the culvert.
“Y-you can take that to Bloody Barbie,” she told him haughtily. “I’ll none of you. Remember our bargain? I want my green hill! What care I for your goose-feather bed or your manly parts either, until that’s done?”
But he waded closer, grinning. “Any day now,” he promised her. “Come on, my little bed of roses-no-thorns. Uncle Ratlin’s so weary of saggy silly old Quean Barbie and her tantrums. Any day now you might have your fine hill with its lace curtains, but you’ll never get a sniff of it if you won’t come cheer your dear uncle. The world’s changing, my silvery sex kitten. The Ruin has come, and everything’s possible now!”
“Is it indeed?”Tiara sniffed, retreating farther. “Well, let me tell you this—” And then she turned and slithered down the culvert, fast and frantic as a little eel, but the big eel came rippling after her.
Then it was all roots, and black slime and fumbling over ridged pipe, and the gasping harsh echoes filling the narrow space, and far ahead the tiny white window to make for, and her little heart pounded and the heroines cheered her on. WOULD SHE MAKE IT??? But his old fingers were around her ankle like a loop of wire as she burst at last into clean air and moonlight.
Uncle Ratlin pulled. She fell face-forward into black water and was writhing around, turning to bite him—
When the whole world exploded!
The huge thing squealed loud enough to wake the dead, it started back on sharp hooves and sank in the place where it had been quietly drinking; then advanced menacingly, murder in its little red eyes, and its black-bristled back was like a ridge of mountains against the moon.
Tiara and Uncle Ratlin froze, staring at it. “Oh shite,” breathed Uncle Ratlin, which wasn’t a very elegant thing to say at such a dramatic moment, but Tiara silently agreed with him.
Now with the presence of mind that made her a heroine of true distinction, Tiara moved her leg back, as though to retreat into Uncle Ratlin’s clutches, and he slacked his tight hold on her heel, which she then booted hard in his old face, bash, so his lip split and he saw stars. In a dazzling second move she used the impetus of her kick to shoot forward like an apple seed spurted between finger and thumb, pop, under the onrushing monster and flying up the high bank on the far side.
And she heard, from the hazel branch where she’d lighted, she heard the deafening bang as the pig hit the mouth of the culvert and stuck there, working its shoulders as it tried to squeeze down into the darkness after Uncle Ratlin.
Tiara stayed up there the rest of the night, until the moon had set and the gray dawn was coming out of the east, and dewfall pearled on her bare skin. At first she sang little wild songs of triumph to congratulate herself, as the pig grunted and screamed after what it couldn’t get. After a while it pulled out and trotted away, disgusted, and then Tiara fell silent. She thought of Uncle Ratlin perhaps waiting on the other side of the bridge; she thought of her slave waiting for her, wondering where she was. Worst of all was when she remembered what Uncle Ratlin had told her about the Ruin! Had it fallen yet? Had Suleyman gotten her slave’s warning in time? She must tell her slave what she’d learned.
But she didn’t dare come down until she was sure Uncle Ratlin had gone back to the hill, and that wasn’t until the last stars had faded away and the terrible light was coming. No cool clouds to protect her from the fire of day this morning, no polarized goggles either. At last she slipped down from the hazel and ran home, making a green trail across the gray dew fields of high summer.
And it was already too late.
For even as she paused in the heather and looked around before slipping into the dark, the first of the agtrucks was roaring along the road from Knockdoul, and she saw the others behind it, two and three and four and five as the slave had taught her to count. What a lot of traffic for this country lane, wasn’t it?
But blowing and blasting they came to a halt and settled just at the base of the hill, and Tiara had a panoramic view of what happened next.
It was just what the Memory had always said would happen, the towering figures in their armor piling out, running with weapons, out of sight round the flank of the hill. Tiara knew where they were going: to the main entrance, where perhaps Uncle Ratlin had just crawled home to bed.
With a quavering scream she scrambled inside and ran down the corridor, faster than ever she’d fled Uncle Ratlin or the pig, and leaped into the bone room and slammed the door after herself. “Princess?” Her slave raised his head where he’d been sitting in the dark, rocking himself back and forth in his worry. “What is it, child?”
She ran to him and flung her arms around his neck, trying to hide from the terror. He held her close and heard her blood thundering in her veins.
“What’s happened?” he said. “You’re frightened! We’ll be all right—”
That was when the first of the explosions came, the dull BOOM that started the bone room door on its hinges. The slave was on his feet instantly, lifting Tiara with him. “What’s that?” he demanded, in the clearest and sharpest voice with which she could ever remember him speaking. It nerved her enough to gulp back her sobs and cry: “The big men have come! They’re breaking into the hill, they’re killing us!”
There were shouts now, and thin high screaming, and the keening of weapons. Another explosion puffed air into the bone room, air with a faint acrid smoke that made Tiara choke and cough.
The slave’s grip on her tightened. “You won’t die,” he promised her. “Oh, for two good arms—or my sight, for that matter. We’ve got to get out of here.” He set her down. “Lead me, beloved. Point me the way we’re to go. If you fall, I’ll carry you. Now!”
She took his hand and they stumbled out into the corridor. There was a horror of red light in the tunnel, filling up the way toward the exit. There was a thunder of boots and shouting. Tiara whimpered and turned, dragging the slave with her deeper into the warren, back into the darkness and the ancient trash, back where the Memory told her to go, where Getaway was.
But they were pursuing, the dreadfuls, the cyborgs who somehow hadn’t succumbed to the Ruin after all, who we
ren’t dropping in the disruptor fields as they ought to, who were impossibly defeating her people again.
There it was, the smooth silver side of The Flee. Trembling she found the portal and smacked her little palm on the access panel, twice and three times, would it never open?
“Princess?”The slave was gasping. “Where are we? What is this?”
“It’s The Flee,” she cried in relief as the door unscrewed itself. “We’ll be safe in here! Come, my own.” She pulled the slave through after her even as the smoke came belching in strangling gusts, as big boots crashed, kicking aside bones and garbage to get through, and a dark shape was looming against the red light, so tall—
But here came more tumult and concussion from the other side of them as well, from within the ship. She heard screams and whinnyings from the stupids who were crowding in at a far door and a cawing voice that could only be Uncle Ratlin, and another voice nearly forgotten and dearly hated, countermanding Uncle Ratlin—
“Oh God Apollo, that’s him—” babbled the slave. “Oh no, no, not again—”
The door was irising shut so slowly—
And the shouting from the tunnel resolved itself into one word, being shouted over and over by the big man who rushed forward through the redness, close enough now to be heard clearly:
“LEWIS!”
The slave’s head came up and snapped around.
“What—”
The door was irising shut—
And Tiara saw what the slave could not, the lean black face raging, glimpsed only a second before the door sealed itself, as the voice yelled: