by Kage Baker
Avalon
In the Historic Chi-Chi Club, the holoset was down; nothing but blind air, and the disgruntled golfers had decamped. The barman was tapping at the console, trying to make it work. He looked up at them with a worried expression as they came in. “Say, what’s going on?” he demanded.
“Accident at somebody’s house,” said Alec. “Can we have another round, please?”
Shrugging, the barman set to mixing their drinks as Alec guided the Captain to the booth. As they were sitting down, a mortal man came in and crept up on a stool before the bar. “Johnny, please, okay?” he said in a tiny voice. The bartender glanced at him and then did a double take.
“Ah—I don’t think Johnny’s coming in today,” he said, staring at the man’s gray slack face. “Maybe you should go home, pal.”
“Nooo,” the man moaned. “Please. I really need to see Johnny.”
Alec looked over at the stranger, who was dressed in maintenance coveralls. He could smell the tranquilizers in the man’s bloodstream, even before the barman leaned close and murmured: “Look, Jack, your eyes are like pinpoints. You’re more full of hop than a drugstore, see? You go home, sleep it off, maybe Johnny’ll be in tomorrow.”
The stranger began to cry. “If you seen what I seen,” he sobbed, “Oh! What I seen—”
“What are you talking about?” the barman asked him. Alec looked at the Captain, who was staring into space with a grimace of concentration. He looked back at the stranger.
The stranger was fighting tears, and at last managed to say: “I work—up at Preservancy Center in the interior. Custodian. Big party in the conference suites last night. Dinner party. I’m s’posed to clean up afterward. Four hun’red hours, the party’s over, all those rich people gone home to bed? Just sweep up and collect the linens? But the room’s locked. And there’s this god-awful smell.” He was starting to tremble.
Alec frowned, leaning closer, though he could hear with perfect clarity as the man continued. “So I thought, what the hell? And I made the system unlock. And I opened the door, and I saw—oh, oh—”
“What did you see?” hissed the barman. “Was there some kind of accident? Somebody sick?” The man shook his head, wracked by the memory, tears streaming down his face.
“Something real bad,” he whimpered. “All those people. Oh, the smell! You couldn’t—and I went to get help and they—and it’s all locked up tight and they’re handling it, everything’s under control now—I’m all locked up tight, too. Lots of dope from the doctor there. She says go home and forget but how could you ever forget that? They’ll have to burn everything. That was my job, what’m I gonna do now? …”
Alec looked at the Captain in horror. What’s he talking about? We never planned some kind of massacre, did we?
No, the Captain replied tersely. Nothing to do with us. Hush, boy! I’m busy.
The stranger had given up trying to talk and was rocking himself back and forth on the barstool, sobbing hopelessly. The barman had backed away and was staring at him, twisting a bar towel into knots in his two hands. Alec got out of the booth and approached the stranger hesitantly. “Hey—can I ask you a few—”
“Don’t touch him,” yelled the bartender. “Jeepers, can’t you see? It must be a new plague. Oh, pal, why’d you have to come into my place?”
“Don’t be scared,” said Alec, touching the stranger’s shoulder. He reached into the man’s mind and blurred the horror, floated the memory loose so it drifted away. He turned to the bartender. “It’s okay. He hasn’t got anyth—”
At that moment there was a dull boom from somewhere outside, and the power went out. The column of smoky light from the holo vanished. The shouting in the street, which had begun to quiet down, redoubled. Alec could hear doors slamming, windows opening.
Alec ran out into the street, and then threw himself backward at the curb to avoid being struck by a vehicle barreling down Sumner Avenue. He gaped as it roared by. It was something he’d only seen in holoes of old news footage: an open aghumm filled with armed personnel. Mortals in some kind of black uniform. The vehicle sped left around the corner onto Crescent Street, narrowly avoiding the fountain, and zoomed on. To judge by the shouts of dismay and outrage, the vehicle was narrowly avoiding pedestrians as well.
Picking himself up, Alec turned and was distracted by a new source of commotion, rising from all over Avalon. Up Sumner Avenue as far as he could see, and up the picturesque steep streets with their Victorian houses and old gardens, throughout the town, the next phase had begun: old long-sealed garage doors were suddenly opening, unremarkable little sheds were rising up off their foundations to reveal tunnels underneath, out of which were pouring more vehicles filled with personnel clutching disrupter rifles.
Down they came, like ants swarming as they all converged on Chimes Tower Road, heading out of town and away into the interior.
Panicked vacationers were running for their hotels. Others, just as terrified, were running from their hotels out into the streets, demanding to know what was going on. There was a scramble at the Pleasure Pier as boaters piled into their launches or tried desperately to commandeer water taxis. “Oh, man,” said Alec, stunned. “This is—”
He had been going to say war, but the sound of multiple explosions, thundering from somewhere in the interior, finished the sentence for him.
A black cloud and a fireball rose beyond the hills. Alec ducked and turned to look. The mortals all around him began screaming, and when the massive air transports came hurtling in across the sea, buzzing low above Avalon, Alec screamed, too. Clutching his ears against the tumult, he winked out to the Chi-Chi Club.
“Captain,” he cried. He stared around in the gloom. There was no sign of the barman, or of the stranger he had refused to serve. The Captain had the place all to himself, and had used his privacy to yank the console behind the bar out of the wall. Reaching through the dead power lines he had gripped the communications cable, and tapped into it by ordering his biomechanicals to extend leads from his arm. Wires twined now through his hand, through the fabric of his sleeve and cuff into the cable. As he turned slowly to Alec, his face had the blankness of a machine.
Air transport just landed invasion force of immortals at Preservancy HQ in the interior, he transmitted in a preoccupied tone. Also picking up marine transport landing invasion force on windward shore off Little Harbor. Seems like the slaves has taken advantage of all the confusion to rise in revolt, aye.
“Then it is the immortals fighting,” groaned Alec, and covered his mouth with his hands. After a moment he looked up. “But those were mortals in the cars driving off—they’ve got guns, there’s a battle going on right over the hill!”
No there ain’t, the Captain told him. They’ve hit my lockout field on the road into the interior, is all. They’re trying to blast their way through to get to the Company bunkers. Their orders is to defend the mortals holed up in there against the immortals.
“Well—then we have to let them, you have to disengage the lockout,” yelled Alec. “We don’t want anybody to die!”
But they will die, if I let them through, explained the Captain. And it’s Dr. Zeus Incorporated’s leaders is in that bunker, Alec, the guiltiest bastards in history. This is our revenge, son. They’re about to be cut into pieces by their own slaves. They’ll be paid out for what they done to you. For what they done to Mendoza! And for Mars Two, boy, remember that.
“But this is going to be just as bad as Mars Two.” Alec was in agony. “Nicky was right, we’ve got to make ‘em stop fighting!”
Son, what do you want me to do? Red lights burned in the Captain’s blank stare; only the reflection of taillights from a taxi careering down Sumner Avenue outside. This is what I’m programmed for. They’ll get what they deserve, and you’ll be safe and happy.
“I won’t be happy,” Alec said. “They’ll all destroy each other, and maybe the rest of the world, too.”
More explosions, and a hapless voice i
n the street: a Public Health Monitor vainly shouting orders above the commotion and being ignored. Glass was shattering somewhere, some mortal was sobbing in pain, and there were cries of “Fire!”
Alec breathed deep, remembering the mind games Edward had taught him for controlling panic. “This is stupid. We’ve punished ‘em enough, Captain,” he said.
I can’t stop it now, Alec.
“Well, I will,” Alec replied. “You stay here! Keep the lockout engaged. Maybe if we can—” There was a subterranean explosion and the very floorboards lifted, dust sifted down from the ceiling and bottles rolled and smashed.
Bloody Hell! Get out of here, son!
“All right, that’s enough,” shouted Alec, and stalked out into the street. Glaring around at the riot, he flexed his shoulders, threw out his arms and roared: “STOP IT!”
And it stopped.
Straining, creaking like a kite fighting the wind, time held still as Alec expanded his consciousness in widening circles. He swept through the minds of the mortals, who had begun to turn on one another in their terror and disorientation, from the crowds in the streets to the soldiers in the interior. Disrupter weapons appeared to dematerialize, moving backward through time, and smoke and flame reversed themselves and shrank into nothingness. Alec wondered what to do next.
The man he had once been would have known exactly what to do. He could smash the old corrupt system! Punish the wicked! Make new laws! Begin an eternal benign rule, by superbeings with supreme wisdom and Ultimate Power! But Alec was no longer that man.
He swept out farther and went right through the tiny spinning globe, touched every mortal mind in its serene incomprehension or shrieking terror. He saw the human race for what it was, and they were only little animals after all. The universe was empty, pointless; if free will wasn’t an illusion, it might just as well have been, given heredity and death. How frightened the mortals were, how desperate their brief lives! And how they had been cheated, endlessly… by smirking beings who mocked their mortal limitations and masqueraded as gods.
There under the stopped clock, even as he held the mortal millions in the palm of his hand, Alec Checkerfield bowed his head in shame for all his kind. “Don’t be scared,” he told them, but the little things were so helpless and weighed nothing, nothing at all in the mindless cosmos.
Yet there were the other minds, weren’t there? The hard bright minds of the immortals, fixed like bayonets. He looked up and saw them, in all their iron resolve. Suleyman’s plans, and Budu’s, in excruciating detail. Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla! He shook his head in disgust. “Dona eis requiem,” he muttered, and his pale eyes grew cold and stern. Now he knew what he had to do.
“Just stay there, okay?” he told the moment and, dropping his arms, he looked around. The fountain on Crescent Street was still sending its innocent jet of water skyward, bright and still as crystal, a pattern of frozen light in the air. He walked toward the fountain.
A Public Health Monitor stood like a statue in his path, face frozen in a grimace of comic terror, gas gun in hand. Sighing, Alec took it from him as he passed. He sent it backward through time.
For good measure he disposed of a couple of broken bottles and a long shard of broken glass that various mortals had caught up. He poked further into the chaos with his mind, defusing bombs, disarming viruses, shutting down all he could find of the subtle weaponry that immortals had primed for centuries in anticipation of this hour. Then, looking around, he vaulted the base of the fountain and walked up the play of light on the water, and was—
CHAPTER 33
Out of the Hill Forever
Tiara and Lewis were thrown to the floor in that first moment when time and space distorted into something appalling, impossible. They slid along tilting steel with only a hand for each other, his right in her left, and they fetched up against a bulkhead together and lay there panting. Tiara scrambled to her unsteady feet as she heard the voices coming. “Hide! My heart’s darling, we’ve got to hide you—”
But the ship lurched and she fell. The Flee was traveling somewhere, it was trembling and droning with crazy flight. She crawled on her hands and knees to the slave. He reached out for her, steadied himself and knelt upright. And, wonder of wonders! His long-dead left arm was twitching, the fingers working in an uncoordinated kind of way but certainly moving, rising through the shimmering air to touch her face.
In that moment the uncontrolled quality of the ship’s flight changed, evened out, and Tiara was able to get to her feet again and pull the slave up. Hand in hand they ran, she leading, down the long curving corridor past the windows glaring with light and cloudy air—
But there around the curve came the tide of stupids rushing at them, wringing their hands and yammering, and pulling up short and blinking with their big weak eyes at Tiara and her slave. She skidded to a halt. The slave halted with her, nearly overbalancing. “Turn,” she shouted, and the slave turned obediently and they ran back the way they’d come, but not far—
For here was Uncle Ratlin, limping along on a stick and leading a host of other Uncles and stupids and, yes oh yes, swollen and evil and old under her big bouffant, Quean Barbie. And what was that looming behind her, that slow bloated hairy thing in stained underwear, sweating and clutching at his fat heart? Why, it was a captive big man who had once been as beautiful as an Elvis, totally irrelevant to this story except insofar as he was probably Tiara’s father.
And everybody saw everybody else, except the slave of course, and they halted, and for a moment there was such profound silence of astonishment that all that could be heard was the whining hum of The Flee’s motive power.
But then there was noise, and plenty.
Uncle Ratlin’s shrieked rage was awesome, as he threw down his stick and shook both fists. “You,” he howled at the slave. “You lived again, didn’t you? Nasty nanobots played me such a trick! No wonder the Company came for us. Must have thought I’d cheated them. My good name slandered!” He turned a terrible righteous face to Tiara. “And you, sugar baby, so this was your game all along, dandling me with promises.”
“Who’s that?” demanded Quean Barbie, pointing an accusatory finger. “What little piece have you been seeing on the side? You old tomcat!” She brought up a flowered handbag and stuck Uncle Ratlin with it as hard as she could, knocking off his hat. He turned on her, snarling.
“Mind your own business, silly old bitch! You think you’ll be Quean where we’re going? Do you?”
“There is no Quean but Me,” she hissed back, raising dreadful black nails. “How could you forget, Ratlin?”
He quailed and then drew himself up, showing all his pointy teeth. “Easy to forget an old thing like you,” he jeered, “easy when there’s a fresh new Quean all sweet and ready. You’re dead, old rag, old bag!” He turned to Tiara and made a peremptory summoning gesture. “Take her, Baby! Claw the eyes out of her head and I’ll forgive your sad betrayal.”
“BABY?” squalled Quean Barbie, in a voice so frightful Tiara trembled where she stood, and the slave put his arms around her.
“Leave her alone,” he said gallantly, if pointlessly. “She’s only—” But he never finished the sentence, because Uncle Ratlin pulled out a weapon and shot him, and he fell to the floor.
“That settles him,” Uncle Ratlin stated. “Leave that, sugar, you’ve got business to attend to.” For Tiara had dropped to her knees beside the slave and was wailing her grief. The slave turned his head toward her and then—a miracle!—lifted himself up on his elbows.
“Aha,” he cried. “Aha! It’s just the legs have gone this time. Princess, do you know what this means?” He turned a defiant face in the direction in which he supposed Uncle Ratlin to be standing. “You horrible old fool, I’m reprogramming myself! The biomechanicals have learned to adapt again.”
“My love,” Tiara sobbed.
“That’s a slave,” exclaimed Quean Barbie, her shock even louder than her outrage. “My daughter in
the arms of a slave!”
“Do you hear me?” The slave ignored her, pushing himself up into a sitting position. He made an ancient gesture of sublime rudeness in Uncle Ratlin’s general vicinity. “That for your damned death ray! You’re not going to have Literature Preservation Specialist Lewis to kick around anymore.”
“That’s true, anyway,” Uncle Ratlin told him. “Spondip! Moonifan! Throw him out the lockport.”
An Uncle scurried to palm a via panel, and there was a roaring blast of hot wet air as a port in the wall unscrewed itself. Quean Barbie’s high hair blew backward like a flying cloud, the big fat man slipped and fell with a crash that rocked the ship, and the air was filled with flying black damp bits of nasty things they’d all tracked into the clean ship from the ruin of the old hill.
“Stop, you stupid thing,” Quean Barbie screeched. “Close it up! We’re losing altitude! Do you want us to crash?”
“SHUT UP, MOTHER!” Uncle Ratlin ordered, as two Uncles ventured forward against the wind to seize Tiara’s slave by the arms and drag him toward the port.
“No,” cried Tiara in despair, and would have attacked them, but Ratlin lunged out and got her by the wrist.
“That’s enough of your fun,” he growled at her. “This is your place, this is what you are, you’re going to come away with us and you’ll be Quean, little girl, as you were born to be, and you’ll have the presents and the lovers and the babies and the hill, and why should you ever want anything else? There’s no life but this. There’s no world but this. Don’t you remember what you are? You’re kin!”
“Tiara—” gasped the slave, fighting as the Uncles struggled against the wind and the slick floor. His pants began to come off as they dragged him along, and he grabbed frantically at them to preserve a last shred of dignity. “Child, live a good life—”
The Uncles reached the portal and cringed against the brilliant light, the beating rain, the perfume of strange flowers. A tropical sky whirled beyond, blue streaked with flaming dawn clouds, the sky Tiara had imagined in every great adventure she had ever been told of, in the slave’s gentle voice all those years in the dark—