by Kage Baker
“There are rumors you got mixed up in something like that,” Kiu told him slyly, watching as he crossed to his wardrobe and pulled out a garment bag. He turned to her in surprise.
“What? Victor? Not at all. He was born mortal, like the rest of us. I merely experimented with his augmentation, to make him the truly useful tool he is.”
“Not Victor! I heard it was a black project,” Kiu prompted. “Something that went by the code name Adonai? …”
“Ahhh.” Labienus paused with a dinner jacket over his arm. For a moment he looked mild and wistful, as though contemplating some sentimental memory. “That fellow. Nennius and I masterminded that project. My Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. We told them we needed a New Enforcer, and the monkeys obligingly put together the most wonderful monster for us. Great hulking creature with a brilliant mind, and what courage he had! What virtuous zeal! Even when our little idea-men botched the program, he was unfailingly destructive. A thousand pities he couldn’t have been made one of us.
“Oh, well.” He hung the dinner jacket up in the bag. “You’d better pack, you know; we’ve got a transport to catch. Will you be wearing that slinky red number tonight?”
“Of course,” Kiu said, tossing her head and brushing back her hair. She grinned at him. “No matter how much blood spills, I’ll still look divine.”
London, the Afternoon of 8 July 2355:
The Masters of the Universe:
They Confront the Unthinkable
“You said they’d never be able to tell what was in the chocolates,” screamed Rossum, pointing an accusatory finger at Bugleg. He was still gaping in horror at the space where the holo had run only a second before, broadcasting Aegeus’s call for rebellion.
“They weren’t supposed to,” Bugleg stammered.
“You promised!” Rappacini wailed. “You and that cousin of yours. That nasty man. Get him online. Find out what he did wrong!”
“You idiots, there’s no time for that,” Freestone told them, but Bugleg had already summoned his unit from the table and was fumbling out a communication card. He slipped it into the port. After a breathless second the screen lit up with a geometric pattern of purple and green, as a tweedly dance tune played. Over the music a smooth electronic voice said: “Mr. Ratlin regrets to inform the caller that he is presently on holiday. If you’re feeling blue, Ratlin’s Finest is just the thing to lift those weary spirits. Luscious whole-milk chocolates high in butterfat content, manufactured with scrupulous sanitary care. And we’re pleased to announce our new Summer Assortment! When you’re relaxing at the seaside—”
“They’ll kill us.” Rossum clutched his head, rocked himself back and forth. “They’ll all come and kill us. We’ll die. We’re dead.”
“We’ve got to hide,” said Bugleg, looking around frantically as though a suitable hole might present itself.
“Where on earth can we hide from them?” demanded Freestone. “They’re all cyborgs. Oh, I always knew this would happen—”
“Wait! Wait! I know who’ll be loyal,” exclaimed Rappacini. “Dr. Zeus. He’s the Company, after all! Isn’t he?”
There was a pause, punctuated by terrified asthmatic breathing, while they all considered his suggestion. One by one, they looked sidelong at the bronze figure on its pedestal in the corner. “But he was Lopez’s idea,” objected Bugleg.
“But we made him,” said Rappacini.
“But we made Lopez, too,” Freestone pointed out.
“But we don’t have any choice,” said Rossum. “Didn’t he get rid of that Recombinant thing for us? Hasn’t he worked fine ever since?”
“Er … Dr. Zeus?” Freestone turned to the bronze. “Can you hear us?”
I HEAR.
In midair the robed figure appeared beside its original, and with a squeal of metal turned its greened head as though to regard them from the hollow sockets of its eyes. Freestone caught his breath, and in what he hoped was a firm voice said: “Do you know about our problem?”
I KNOW.
“Well, can you help us?”
I CAN.
“Then help us! What must we do to be saved?”
YOU MUST EVACUATE YOUR PERSONNEL TO THE FORTIFIED COMMAND CENTER ON SANTA CATALINA ISLAND, it told them. YOU WILL SURVIVE THE REBELLION THERE.
“Okay, yes, good! That’s the sort of thing we need to hear.” Freestone looked around at the others. “How do we do that, please? Can you get a transport for us?”
YOUR AIR TRANSPORT IS WAITING ON THE ROOF. IT SEATS FIFTY-THREE IN COMFORT.
“Great,” cried Rappacini. “We can take our best people! Can you secure a communications line for us, please?”
THE LINE IS OPEN AND SECURED.
So they summoned their best and brightest, did the masters of the universe, and Dr. Zeus stood passively in midair considering them.
All over England the calls went out, received by terrified geniuses hiding in closets or under beds. Soon from every quarter they came, slipping furtively along the deserted streets of London to the nearest tube station or crossing open fields on foot, expecting every moment that raging cyborgs with disrupter pistols would leap out from behind the copses and spinneys.
Oddly enough, none did.
The reason for this was that the rank and file of cyborgs had no knowledge of the dastardly plot. Aegeus’s message had gone out to the Executive Facilitators only, and they were already quite aware that there was something wrong with the Theobromos. Not one of them, therefore, had distributed the stuff. The painfully detailed logistical chain had broken and the Theobromos sat undelivered in its boxes in offices all over the world, except in Morocco where it was burning merrily in Suleyman’s pool.
Where were the rank and file immortals, if they weren’t marching shoulder to shoulder on their erstwhile masters, as they had in Cyborg Conquest?
There was a high plateau somewhere north of the Matto Grosso, an island in the air, a place no mortal could reach on foot. The Botanist Smythe, however, had scaled it easily, hauling herself up by creepers and reclining at last under the towering canopy of gigantic ancient trees, under the trailing moss and epiphytes, under the flight of bright-winged macaws. She wasn’t a particularly nice person, the Botanist Smythe. Still, she had opted to spend what might be the last hours of her life in the place she had come closest to loving anything.
On Santa Rosa Island, off the coast of California, the tourist transport lowered with a whoosh, and the yellow grasses bent backward in the rush of air. The tourists filed from the vehicle, and somehow none of them noticed the lone visitor who winked out from their midst. On a deserted stretch of beach, he looked skyward and saw the tiny black figure planing toward him, coming over the sea, descending, avoiding the thermals generated by the hot barren hills. A moment later Raven settled on Juan Bautista’s shoulder, ruffling out her feather-cloak. He smiled at her.
At a certain famous museum in Florence, the curator failed to emerge from his office, though it was long past closing time. The mortal guards occasionally peered in at Beckman where he sat alone, and at last one of them coaxed him to come out and join them for a midnight supper. He sat in the company of mortals and the paintings he had spent his immortal life preserving, and Beckman felt a wave of relief sweep over him. Why go back to his empty apartment, ever again? Why face the end, whatever it was, alone, when he could spend it gazing into the tenderly mocking eyes of Botticelli’s Flora?
Everywhere in the world, as the hours passed, the immortals were finding their places. In museums, in gardens, in ancient libraries, they appeared for the last solitary watch.
In London, nobody seemed to notice the woman who had retreated into a high gallery at the Globe Theatre and was staring at the empty stage, watching shadows strut and posture.
In China, there was a whole party of silent folk on the Great Wall, looking out to the north, as though phantom armies massed there.
In Prague a well-dressed man sat quietly at a café table in the old square. He ordered
tea, and watched the mortal carnival for hours, and when the great Clock struck and its mechanical Death nodded, he nodded back.
In Iraq a woman knelt in the ruins of Babylon the Great and wept awhile, and at last settled herself to wait at the base of a broken statue of Ishtar.
What were you expecting they’d do?
Rise in rebellion, as in a nice testosterone-loaded science fiction novel, laser pistols blazing away in both fists?
Veracruz
He wore a loincloth of jaguar skin, a shivering sunburst of feathers that radiated a full meter out from his head, and golden bells that rang as he stamped out the Dance of the Cycle of Days. Jade beads clicked out the rhythm against his chest, in the long passage of the dance where the drums fell silent. The audience watched, rapt, waiting for a misstep that never happened, though sweat fell from his body like rain; every step perfect, balanced, effortless. While he danced, it was possible to believe he held the universe together, and would dance forever.
He was Agustin Aguilar, twenty-two years old, Flatley Scholarship winner, principal dancer with Ballet Folklorico de Veracruz. It was the eve of his wedding.
For that reason he left the party after the show early, programmed his car for Acapulco, and cranked back his seat so he could get some sleep on the long drive. The city lights fell behind. For a while there were stars; they slipped gradually under a wall of black cloud, but by then Agustin was sleeping and didn’t see the red flash of lightning, miles ahead in the mountains to the west.
It was hours before the strike came. It jolted him awake when it hit, a flare of light brighter than the sun, and the afterimage as all the instruments on the console burned out. Then, a drop and an impact that rattled his teeth, a prolonged scream of metal, a fan of sparks thrown up to either side; the car’s ag drive had cut out and it had fallen to the road, was hurtling forward across asphalt, slewing to one side as it came. Off the edge of the road it went, into a ditch, with a sickening jar.
Agustin could see nothing but pitch blackness for a moment. A light approached, diffused through the dust cloud he’d raised. He threw off his shock enough to shout, to pound on the transparent canopy, to grope for the emergency release lever. The canopy was jammed, but someone was outside now, yanking on it, a black silhouette backlit by headlights through the roiling dust. The canopy was wrenched away with a shriek and someone was hauling him out bodily. Agustin was set on his feet, shivering in the night air. “Are you all right, man?” shouted his rescuer.
“I think so,” said Agustin through chattering teeth, staring at the stranger. An ordinary-looking guy, despite his astonishing strength. He seemed a little older than Agustin, had a lean somber face and Indian cheekbones, a black gaze like a flint knife.
“My God,” said the stranger. “Struck by lightning! Your car’s fried, my friend.” He pointed down at the hood where paint had bubbled away to bare steel at the edges of the black hole, out of which white smoke and floating ash streamed upward.
“My tuxedo—” Agustin started forward, but the man stopped him like a stone wall.
“I’ll get it,” he said brusquely, and a second later was handing Agustin his suitcase and garment bag. “Come on, my son, let’s get you to Acapulco.”
Agustin was grateful for the warmth of the stranger’s truck, for the hot soup from the stranger’s thermjar, for the use of the stranger’s Shisha to notify the car rental agency, for every kilometer that took him away from the wreck and closer to Marisol.
“So, what’s the tuxedo for?” said the stranger. His face was spookily lit by the green console lights.
“I’m getting married tomorrow,” said Agustin. “Today, I guess. The ninth. I have a lot to thank you for, Mr …?”
“Aguilar,” said the other. “Porfirio Aguilar.”
“I’m Agustin Aguilar! Do you think we might be related?”
“Maybe,” said Porfirio. He accelerated, racing the night to get the boy to his wedding day, one gesture of hope at the end of time.
Portmeirion
The pitch was not going well. Nevertheless, Mary deWit squared her shoulders and smiled her brightest for the holocams.
“Actually, Mr. Plowman, the media made it look at lot worse than it was. The loss of life was mainly due to the superheated gas. The city itself—”
“No! What kind of money-grubbing idiot rebuilds a city on an erupting volcano?”
“But Mons Olympus didn’t erupt, Mr. Plowman. The bomb set off the reaction in the power plant, and that blew out the magma chamber. There were survivors, you know, in the underground residential blocks, and the buildings above the power plant were untouched. If you’ll just look at the figures I sent you, you’ll see that the cost of rebuilding would be offset—”
Mr. Plowman interrupted her with more uncomplimentary remarks about the stupidity of living on Mars in the first place, followed by his opinion of corporate greed in general and the Griffith Family Arean Trust in particular. Mary was grateful when he ended the transmission. Carefully she shut the holocams down, crossed Mr. Plowman off her list of potential donors, went into the bathroom and had a screaming cry into the hotel’s towels.
When she felt a little better, she washed and dried her face, retouched her makeup, and went out to face her next ordeal. Someone was standing by the window in her room, looking out at the night. Mary, feeling a welcome flood of righteous wrath, pulled out her Gwyddon and poised her thumb over the alarm button.
“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing in my room?” she said. The man turned to face her. She gasped, dropped the Gwyddon, clutched at her heart. He was beside her in a second, supporting her. “Child—I’m so sorry—”
“Papa!” she cried, when she could get her breath. Then—”You’re not real. You died in that wreck. You’ve been gone twenty years. I’ve been working too hard and this is my unconscious summoning you up. Oh, Goddess—”
“Actually, my death was faked,” he said in a sheepish voice. It took a minute for that to sink in, so caught up was she in the pleasure of burying her face against his shoulder, feeling his arms around her, being for a moment seven years old and safe from all harm. But when it sank in:
“Faked?” She pulled back and stared at him. Eliphal deWit, just as he’d looked … in the days of her childhood, his beard cinnamon-brown, and not the stooped graying man whose eyeglasses were the only thing to have been recovered from the wreck.
“How’s your mother?” he inquired, as though he’d left only the week before. “In a retirement home in Newport, hating everyone, as usual,” said Mary, choking on tears. “And you’d better do some explaining. You’d better do it pretty damned fast—”
“Shhh,” he said, putting his long forefinger to her lips, just as he had done when she’d been little. There were tears in his eyes, too. “Sit down, baby. I just wanted to see you. I’ll tell you everything. It doesn’t matter. Not now.”
Paris
There was a gracious old house on a street of chestnut trees. It was beautifully furnished in late-nineteenth-century style, with paintings and carpets and antique furniture, except in one upper chamber.
The floor was tiled in that room, and along one wall a maintenance console blinked with tiny lights, and against the opposite wall was a transparent tank filled with blue fluid, glowing softly. In its depths the body floated.
It was recognizably Kalugin now, much more presentable than it had been on the day when Nan had received Suleyman’s call from Fez. He had tried to prepare her for what she’d see, when she arrived after a whirlwind flight. Both he and Latif had stared when she’d knelt and taken the ruined thing in her arms.
Though Kalugin’s immortal body was now nearly healed, the condition of his immortal mind was still in question. There was brain activity, but whether or not damage had been done by long-term immersion in heavy metals was uncertain. No operative had ever spent two and a half centuries in a sunken wreck in a state of fugue.
Nan believed he was still in there
. Given enough time to heal, he would certainly wake one morning, open his eyes, turn his wondering face to her.
Unfortunately, they had run out of time.
Though that wasn’t why she was weeping now, as she sat by the tank.
In her hand was an opened envelope and the card it had contained. Within the card was written, in a graceful and old-fashioned hand, the following:
Dear Nan,
I doubt whether I shall ever have the opportunity to speak to you again, and so I must take this chance to wish you every happiness.
Whatever may befall, I cannot face the Silence without letting you know that I have always held you in the very highest regard.
Please accept this expression of sincere esteem from
Your true friend,
Victor, Facilitator
London, the Late Evening of 8 July 2355
“Hurry up,” cried Bugleg. “Start the motor!”
“Don’t you dare,” Freestone snapped at the pilot. “There’s three more of my people on the way up. I just spotted them down in the street!”
The pilot sighed and nodded, but set the motor warming up anyway. There were cries of relief from her passengers, who were all in a pitiable state of terror by this time. Freestone glared at her, and pointedly wedged the door open with his body. At last the roof elevator opened and three figures straggled out, clutching their travel packs.
“Oh, them,” Rossum said, and sniffed, because the latecomers were none other than the team responsible for, among other things, the ill-fated Recombinant project: Clive Rutherford, Francis Chatterji, and Foxen Ellsworth-Howard.
“Please don’t leave us,” beseeched Rutherford, throwing his pudgy body forward. He tripped and fell, and his friends were instantly beside him, pulling him up.
“Hold the shracking door!” Ellsworth-Howard snarled.
“It’s not our fault,” Chatterji said. “The tube ran late! There was a f-fire at the St. Pancras station.”