The Life of the World to Come (Company)

by Kage Baker

  An electronic drone rose and fell and, now and then, you could make out voices. Every so often there was an appalling sound, a repeated BOOM always followed by the same shrill piping.

  He was hearing it because every holoreceiver in London was switched on, tuned to the same footage that was being shown over and over.

  This had gone on so long, and he had sat so long silent, that he nearly screamed when there came a furtive knock at his door. He got up and scuttled across the room, peering through the curtain first to see who might be standing on his front step.

  When he saw who it was, he ran to open the door.

  “Hurry,” he said. Chatterji slunk in, followed by Ellsworth-Howard, who was moving in a distinctly unsteady manner. Rutherford closed the door and the three of them stood there in the hall, staring at each other.

  Chatterji hadn’t shaved in two days. He had dark circles under his eyes and his hands were shaking as he fumbled with his cloak. Ellsworth-Howard wasn’t shaking at all; he was so relaxed his pupils were like pinpoints.

  After a moment of mutual silence, Rutherford blurted:

  “Are we going to be arrested?”

  “N-n-no,” Chatterji said. “That’s just what we’ve c-come round to t-tell you. It seems—it s-seems we’re not to buh-buh-blame.”

  “But we are!” Rutherford began to cry again. “We created him. It’s him in that surveillance footage. We know, and soon everybody else will. He’ll be hunted down and caught They’ll put him in hospital to find out what could have made him do such a thing, and they’ll do tests on him—and then they’ll look at him more closely—and they’ll know what he is, and—”

  “C-C-Company won’t let it happen,” Chatterji said. “They’ll keep it q-quiet. I was t-told. You see, they knew. ’S the old rule, R-Rutherford, about not being able to ch-chchange history. They knew our m-man was the one who delivered the buh-bomb. Nothing could be done about it. S-so Dr. Zeus did what it always d-does. Pulled its people out b-beforehand, w-well before the event.”

  “P‘lice never kesh ’im,” Ellsworth-Howard said very slowly, shaking his head from side to side. “Never kesh ’im. Comp‘ny hunt ’im dowwwn. Top secret. Hushushush shhh. Hide ‘im in a lab somewhere far far awayyy. Nobody never know Comp’ny’s to blame, see.”

  “But it’s our fault.” Rutherford wrung his hands.

  Chatterji shook his head numbly.

  “Nope. Because, s-see, if it’s our f-fault, it’s Dr. Z-Zeus’s fault too. That won’t do at all. So we’re all innocents instead. They had to let us work on A-Adonai because history r-records we did. They just didn’t tell us what was guh-guhgoing to happen …”

  “You mean nobody’s going to punish us?” quavered Rutherford.

  “Nobody.” Chatterji turned and walked into the parlor, where he collapsed into his favorite chair. “Oh, they’ll never let us work on anything like him again. They still want Enforcer r-r-replacements, but no new designs now. We’re to create a subclass of Preservers instead. Simple policemen. Security techs. G-g-guards. No more heroes, thank you. No more fuh-fuh-freedom fighters.”

  Ellsworth-Howard was still standing in the hallway, drooling on the mat. In a high plaintive voice he began to sing:

  “Frankenstein, Frankenstein, won’t you be my valentine …”

  Rutherford went and got him and led him to a chair. It took some work to actually get him seated; he kept sliding down toward the floor. Finally Rutherford gave it up and collapsed into his own chair.

  “I still can’t believe it,” he said hoarsely. “We made him a good man! And he was so clever. How could we have gone so wrong?”

  Chatterji gave a bitter laugh. “If we’d programmed him to hide in his r-room like everybody else does nowadays, he’d never have become a guh-guh-gun runner, would he? If he hadn’t had those d-damned high ideals we g-gave him, he’d have let Areco evict the MAC.”

  “We been used, ya know,” Ellsworth-Howard addressed the ceiling. Rutherford and Chatterji turned to look at him.

  “Comp‘ny wanted us to make ’im,” he said. “Look what ’e did in California. Kept the Yanks from getting the big hushush discovery on Cat‘lina Island. If ’e hadn’t, there‘d’ve been no Dr. Zeuuuus, would there of been? But it’s worse’n ya think it is. Y’know how he got the bloody bomb to Mars? He stole a Company ship. With time drive. He was smart enough to shrack with Dr. Zeus security codes. S‘how he got past the blockade. I know, I traced his signal. Comp’ny don’t know, but they’re sure to find out. ’Spect some heads’ll roll over that.”

  Chatterji and Rutherford regarded each other in dawning horror. “No, he c-couldn’t have!” cried Chatterji. “Those things have an autodestruct b-built in to prevent theft.”

  “Yeh … funny about that. Talk about your shracking Mandelbrots. Our bright boy stole the ship, all right. First thing he done was detour into the past. Went Back Way Back. Guess who ’e met there, eh?”

  There was a moment of bewildered silence. Then Rutherford jumped as though he’d been shot. “Not that woman!”

  “The botanist,” said Chatterji.

  “Yeah—” Ellsworth-Howard gagged on his drool and fell over, coughing. Rutherford ran to him and pulled him into a sitting position, shaking him in his agitation.

  “You can’t mean that Preserver of yours again.”

  “I do, though,” said Ellsworth-Howard. “Same Mendoza. An’ y’know what? She musta shown him how to disconnect the autodestruct. If she hadn’t, he’d never got the bomb to Mars. Just blown up in space. Funny, ain’t it?”

  “Then it’s her doing,” shrieked Rutherford. “He’d have died like a hero again, if not for her!”

  “It’s w-worse than that,” Chatterji said, putting his hands to his face in horror. “She knows about him. And if the Company d-doesn’t know yet who stole one of their ships, you can bet they’ll find out, and when they do, the first thing they’ll do will be to fetch her—and then the committee’ll be investigated, and it’ll all come out before the stockholders—”

  “Oh, no, it won’t.” Grimly Rutherford wrestled Ellsworth-Howard’s buke out of his daypack. He snapped it open and dragged Ellsworth-Howard’s nerveless fingers to the buttonball. “We’ll get rid of her first. Who are those discreet fellows in charge of Black Security? Send the order out, Foxy.”

  Ellsworth-Howard gurgled in protest, but even had he been willing it was obvious he was utterly incapable of coordinating his long fingers. Rutherford seized the buke and thrust it at Chatterji. “Here! You’ve got the clearance, too. Have them bring her in.”

  “But—where are we going to put her?” Chatterji protested, as his hand moved uncertainly on the buttonball. “She’s already been sent B-Back Way Back. Unless you want to hide her with the Enforcers?”

  “Yes. No, wait!” Rutherford paced across the room and then turned to glare at Chatterji. “This is her fault. This whole thing is her fault. What might our man have been, if he hadn’t kept running into her? Send her to Options Research.”

  “No,” howled Ellsworth-Howard.

  “We have no choice.” Rutherford turned on him. “If we hid the damned creature in the deepest bunker we could contrive, she’d turn up again somehow. I won’t stand for this any longer. GET RID OF HER.”

  Chatterji squeezed in the request.

  “Bloody bastard,” Ellsworth-Howard groaned. “Wasting my Preservers.”

  “Hardly, given the harm she’s done.” Rutherford continued his pacing. “I’d call it justice, actually. We can’t undo what our man did, but at least we’ve maintained project security, and if she can’t tell what she knows we can’t get into any worse trouble.

  “And the story’s not over yet, is it? If our man’s done great harm, well, he may yet do even greater good. I should think he must be feeling simply terrible about all this. Perhaps it’ll spur him on to some magnificent act of atonement that’ll benefit all mankind! And if that woman’s not around to ensnare him, maybe it’ll work this time.”
He threw himself into his chair decisively.

  “Ya shracking idiot, our man’s already done what Dr. Zeus wanted ‘im to do,” Ellsworth-Howard said, as his feeble burst of adrenaline petered out and the drugs pulled him back down. “Comp’ny don’t care he killed all those people.” He lay back down and went on from his new position:

  “Nursie gave us big meds today. See, now Comp’ny’s gonna own Mars.”

  Rutherford shook his head. “Dr. Zeus has no holdings on Mars,” he said. “They sold them all to Areco, two months ago.”

  “And they got a p-pretty price for them.” Chatterji nodded grimly. “But I’d bet anything they’ll be able to b-buy them back a lot more cheaply. Areco will have to s-sell everything it owns, with the kind of lawsuits it’s facing.”

  “The newsman said that—” Rutherford paled. “That the horrible irony of all this is that the eruption will speed up the terraforming. It will actually become easier for people to live up there now. Once they rebuild.”

  “Used,” Ellsworth-Howard confirmed from the floor. “See? Comp‘ny didn’t want a hero really ever. Just a killer they could control better than my Enforcers. Use ’im to make history turn out the way Dr. Zeus wants it, never mind who dies.”

  “They lied to us,” said Rutherford. His eyes were perfectly round with shock.

  “Bin-GO,” giggled Ellsworth-Howard. “You an’ yer peaceful warrior.”

  Chatterji rested his chin in the palm of his hand and stared into the cold hearth.

  “Whatever happens in 2355,” he said, “we’re going to d-deserve it.”

  None of them noticed the quiet beep that announced that their order had been obeyed, consigning a perfect stranger to an unimaginable fate.

  Rutherford turned on his heel and marched to the sideboard. He drew out an antique key and unlocked a drawer. A moment later he returned with a smooth and featureless black bottle.

  “Here,” he said. “I’ve been saving this for a suitable occasion.”

  Ellsworth-Howard just pointed to it and laughed. Chatterji sat up and stared.

  “That’s not B-Black Elysium, is it?” he whispered.

  “It is.” Rutherford unlocked the neck of the bottle.

  “But that’s illegal.”

  “It is.” Rutherford got the stopper off and inhaled the dark fragrance that rose from the bottle. “But what are laws to us, chaps? Drink was always supposed to help, at times like these.”

  He put his mouth to the neck of the bottle and took a dramatic gulp. Promptly he choked and leaned back, gasping and coughing. Chatterji watched him in horrified fascination.

  “Wh-what’s it like?” he said. Gagging, Rutherford handed him the bottle at arm’s length. After a moment’s hesitation he took it, and drank deep.

  “Oh, God, it’s awful,” he said, shaking his head. But he had another gulp.

  “Here here here,” Ellsworth-Howard reached up from the floor. Chatterji leaned down and pulled him into a sitting position so he could drink without spilling.

  “The Company makes this stuff, too, you know,” said Rutherford. “Exclusive patent is held by Dr. Zeus Incorporated.”

  “G-gosh, we’re not nearly the saviors of humanity we thought we were, are we?” said Chatterji, wondering when he would feel his liver begin to shut down. “Now we know how p-poor old Prashanti and Hauptmann felt, when their project went so disastrously wr-wrong.” Rutherford winced at the names and took the bottle again.

  “Was that messing with my design did it,” said Ellsworth-Howard. He wiped away tears. “I know it. He got access to all kindsa stuff’e shouldn‘ta seen. We shouldn’ta tried to run the sequence in real time. He got away from us.”

  “You’d think we’d have known,” sighed Rutherford. “How many times have we all seen Frankenstein? Why is it we sub-creators can’t seem to create life without things going disastrously wrong?” He passed the bottle to Chatterji.

  “You don’t s-suppose, do you, that the entire course of human history has been shaped by cl-clever chaps like us, sitting around in p-parlors and playing with ideas?” Chatterji said. He had another gulp of the liqueur. It seemed to go down easier this time. “All working for D-Dr. Zeus?”

  “Why not?” Rutherford said. “We’re the only gods there are.”

  “Shracking incompetent gods, then,” said Ellsworth-Howard. He drew a deep breath and sang again, shrill and tremulous, the little he remembered of the music his mum and dad had played when they used to kick him awake in the middle of the night …

  “Freude, schoner gotterfunken, tochter aus Elysium … feuer-trunken …

  Seid umschlungen, millionen! Diesen kuss der ganzen welt …”

  Then Ellsworth-Howard raised a long trembling finger, pointing at the front door.

  “Oh, look,” he said faintly. Rutherford and Chatterji turned their heads to watch as the first of the hallucinations came into the parlor: the limping specters of horribly charred humanity, implacably advancing on the men who made them. Burnt bones who had died at their posts or running before the molten tide, bones of women clutching the fragments of their children, all come to demand an accounting in that cozy Victorian parlor at No. 10 Albany Crescent.

  CONSEQUENCES

  On the second day of the year 2352, a man identifying himself as Sebastian Melmac marched into the headquarters of the Tri-Worlds Council for Integrity and confessed to being the infamous Hangar Twelve Man from the Mars Two disaster surveillance footage. Under interrogation it was discovered that he was, in fact, a British national named Giles Lancelot Balkister, and bore no physical resemblance whatever to the man in the surveillance footage.

  Nevertheless, he was remanded to the custody of His Majesty’s representatives, bundled into an air transport, and hustled home to London. After further interrogation, he was diagnosed, and sent to hospital forever and ever and ever.

  On the third day of 2352, there was a solid gray sky over a northern ocean, locking a close horizon down, no height, no distance in any direction except the west where a faint glint of light shone.

  They looked away toward it, the people who came swarming up out of the green island. Some of them waded out through rough water, bearing on their backs the infants or the ancients, to the coracles bobbing at their moorings. Some of them paused on the cold shore to pull on black skins, glistening and smooth, and these leaped into the waves and swam out to draw the coracles behind them, towing in teams. Long craft were brought from the caves laden with every kind of oddment, iron kettles, anvils, transmitters, birdcages, treasure, and dark figures hauled them out through the surf. Vaulting in, they bent to the oars and followed the others west.

  More of them came and more, pulling on the skins and plunging through the breakers, following the long line away from the island. The man was the last to come forth. The wind trailed his wild hair like storm wrack, before he bound it back and pulled on the mask. He turned once to look at the island and then struck out, and seafoam spangled his beard as he cut through the gray salt wave to the front of the company of travelers.

  He led them away.

  Hours later an aircraft with no marks to identify her came roaring out of the east, coming in fast and low. She raked the island with flame, passed repeatedly to shower down that which did not officially exist in the arsenals of civilized nations, until the little house blazed up and vanished, the golden caves melted, crumbled and smoked, until the seawater came hissing and bubbling in to drown the broken rock and the island was no longer visible above the water.

  By that time, though, the man and his people were long gone, settling in on some new rock, some new refuge, one more stopover in the endless emigration.

  A few hours later on the third day of 2352, the Temple of Artemis closed its vast doors to worshippers. Within, the priestesses assembled, silent in wide circles about each Mother. Some of the priestesses had red and swollen eyes from weeping; all were pale and solemn. They waited.

  Presently the Great Mother emerged from an al
cove to the right of the splendid Goddess in ivory and gold. The Great Mother herself was less splendid. She was ill, and the events of the past week had aged her visibly. She had robed herself in black today. It was the ritual color for the Crone, but the Great Mother had lost family in Mars Two also. She stepped up now to the pulpit and reached for the audiophone with a shaking hand.

  “Daughters,” she said, and her voice echoed back from the immense depths of the temple.” A word before we begin our task today. We gather here to condemn, but not in hatred. We will remember who we are, and the sick male passion for vengeance will not pollute our hearts.

  “A Curse ceremony is not held for the personal satisfaction of the victims. Its purpose is to bring the evil one to justice by his own actions, that he may ensnare himself. We pray for his fall not to punish him, but that his fall may serve as an example to warn other men.” So far her voice was hoarse but controlled, a modern pastor counseling sensibly.

  Incense was being lit as she spoke, stuff with a dark bitter fragrance, and the lights in the temple were being dimmed and shaded to a baleful red. One white spot lit her gaunt face from below, the classic Halloween-party trick to give her face a terrifying and skull-like appearance. She lifted her arms now, and the flowing black sleeves of her robe were like raven’s wings.

  “THIS IS THE MAN!” she said, and her voice lost all its control and rose in a terrifying howl. An unseen technician threw a switch and a huge holo image appeared in midair: the best and clearest frame showing the Hangar Twelve Man, as he’d turned to stare up at the monitor.

  Cecelia, gazing from the circle where she stood, caught her breath. In that moment it flew apart for her, the whole rational system by which she understood the world and her place in it. The balance of crime by retribution, the assurance that there was meaning behind everything and that She controlled destiny with a benign if terrible hand: all this scattered, like pieces on a chessboard overturned by a boisterous child.