The Life of the World to Come (Company)

by Kage Baker

  He was intrigued by the continual mention of event shadows, locations where no historical record existed for certain years. Within those shadows, Dr. Zeus had no foreknowledge of events. Anything might have happened there, which gave anyone hiding in an event shadow a decided advantage.

  Don’t you see, matey? We can sail on blue water forever, if we need to! This’ll make it easier to raid Dr. Zeus. We’ll appear out of nowhere, strike, and be off again through time afore he knows what’s hit him.

  But haven’t we got everything we need from the Company now?

  Not by a long shot, laddie. I want to know what’s in store for us in the future. We’re going after Dr. Zeus’s bloody Temporal Concordance. Belike yer lady will be able to give us a clue as to its whereabouts, eh? There’s a whole mass of defended sites I want a closer look at. I’ll strip him of everything he’s got, the bronze bastard. I can set traps for him hundreds of years back, that won’t blow up in his face until 2355. Two can play his game, by thunder!

  I guess so.

  Ah, but yer feeling listless. I know. Revenge’ll seem sweeter when you’ve had a chance to think about this a little.

  I don’t think I care about the revenge anymore.

  Oh, no? After what he done to you? Well, now, that’s an admirable sentiment, lad, and I’m happy to see you’ve got such a forgiving heart. I call that right charitable, to be sure. All the same … you want to rescue yer girl, don’t you?

  Of course I do.

  Then you’d best let the old Captain chart yer course, because unless we put a couple of broadsides through Dr. Zeus, it mayn’t be so easy to take the lady.

  That energized Alec. He ventured out of bed and staggered about the ship, feeling his strength return. He didn’t care for the beard at all, and removed it as soon as his hands were steady enough to control the shaver. He spent a week bringing himself back, working out in the ship’s gym and learning the new commands that would guide the Captain Morgan through time. Worried as he was about what Mendoza might think of his complicity in the Mars disaster, he was even more desperate to see her again. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d needed human companionship so badly.

  Though the Captain kept delicately dropping hints about Mendoza, hints that Alec resolutely refused to think about … In fact the Captain was hinting about a lot of things he’d discovered.

  Apparently, there had been some kind of project going on for years, to produce uniquely talented and disposable puppets for Dr. Zeus. The other men like Alec had been killed. Alec was the first one to escape his preordained fate, and even so his life was irrevocably changed: he had become the Flying Dutchman after all, doomed to run before the wind as long as he lived.

  His anger started to smolder again, and as it returned the sense of weakness and guilt retreated. Revenge began to look good once more. Elly, Roger, Cecelia, Mendoza, the people of Mars Two, and now these unknowns who had come before him! The list of Dr. Zeus’s victims kept growing.

  The course is laid in, son. You’ve taken yer medicine?

  Aye, sir. Alec smiled grimly, buckling the safety harness.

  Brace yerself. It’ll be worse than the storm off Trinidad in ’47.

  It won’t be worse than riding that carpeted toilet through space. Where do we come from, Captain, sir?

  From the sea!

  The yellow gas boiled, a throbbing ran through the Captain Morgan, and Alec became the whirling center of a very expensive carnival ride.

  There was no one to see the Captain Morgan’s arrival, but if there had been they might have thought they beheld an immense bottle materializing abruptly in Avalon Bay, spinning in the water, gradually slowing. When the spinning had slowed to a halt, the bottle underwent an extraordinary transformation. Half of its glassy surface folded back lengthwise, revealing the deck of the ship it had become. With only the faintest whirring sound the masts rose smoothly from her deck, her spars popped out, her rigging deployed. Her anchor dropped, plummeting down through the clear water.

  We done it, lad. We’ve traveled!

  What’s the chronometer say?

  It’s a week after you left. She’ll never know you was delayed.

  Alec unbuckled his harness and ran out on deck. He was in the bay he remembered, there was the island, and there inland he could see the wide swath he’d cut through Mendoza’s cornfield.

  “Yeah!” he howled. There’s where I landed, that’s what I told you about. He was on the point of leaping overboard when the Captain sent the agboat alongside.

  This’ll get you there faster, boy. But careful, now!

  Alec vaulted in and took the agboat up the canyon, following his previous course. The broken corn was still where it had fallen, only now turning yellow. He veered right sharply and made straight for the little house, there in its tidy garden.

  “Mendoza!” He cut the motor and jumped from the boat. “Baby! I’m here, I came back for you!”

  Alec—

  “Mendoza?” Alec sprinted up on the porch (there was the bench where he’d sat, there were even a few drops of his blood) and pounded on the door.

  Alec, there’s nobody here.

  What? “Mendoza?” Alec opened the door.

  I scanned the whole station. She’s gone. Bloody hell, I was afraid this’d happen.

  Alec walked into the empty room and stood, staring.

  No signs of violence. Nothing overturned or broken. He knew what must have happened, all the same. Almost calmly he looked down at the table where they had dined together, at the big old-fashioned book that sat there now, open to a page of spidery black script that ended abruptly. He knew what that was: old-time writing. That must be her bottle of ink, there, and that was her pen, made from a gull’s feather. The ink had congealed in the open bottle. She’d been writing when they’d come for her.

  They’ve killed her, haven’t they? Because she helped me.

  No, she ain’t dead. I swear it, son! But they got to her first.

  Do you know where she is?

  I’ll find out. See that terminal there? Hook us in.

  Alec obeyed. The Captain dove away from him through cyberspace. Alec remained there, alone in the room.

  The dark field was before his eyes. The little girl had walked blindly there, hadn’t seen the danger, hadn’t heard his shout of warning. He hadn’t warned her, had he? Instead he’d pushed her straight into the fire.

  Numbly, he closed the book and looked at it. Had she made it herself? Some of the paper toward the front was yellowed, as though it were very old. He peered at the writing on the first page, trying to decipher it. The letter I, and that would be the word am maybe, and then an A, and what could that next word be? Moving his lips, he read in silence the word Botanist.

  He sounded it out several times before the syllables had meaning for him. She had written this. This was all he had left of her, and he didn’t know how to read.

  When the Captain came racing back into his consciousness, he was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands.

  Alec, let’s go! The bastard’s right behind me. He knows we’re here.

  Is she dead?

  No, but they arrested her. Alec, we got to get out of here, we can’t help her now

  It’s my fault.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t start that again. In about five minutes there’ll be Company shuttles storming round that point out there!

  I don’t care.

  Bloody Hell! Do you care about her? If she needed rescuing afore, she really needs it now. Unless you want to wind up in the jar next to hers in some Company facility, you better move yer damn arse!

  That got Alec on his feet, but he went to the book and wrapped it in the blanket from her bed.

  What in hell are you doing? the Captain roared.

  She left writing. You have to translate it for me. Alec ran for the door, clutching the bundled book to his chest as though it were a child.

  He was back on board, in his safety harness, and the
stasis gas had just begun to fill the air when a shadow streaked across the transparent dome. It was a shuttle, coming in low and fast, just as he had done. Before he could see whether it was going to turn and come back over, the Captain Morgan leaped away through time.

  We’re clear! Thirty miles out from the Farallones and it’s 7 June, 2215. That’s what I’d call a neat escape.

  Alec gasped for fresh air, pushing out of the harness. Never mind that. Where is she?

  I don’t know, son. I wasn’t able—

  What do you mean, you don’t know? Alec had begun to shake with anger. You told me she was still alive. How can you know that, and not know where she is?

  Alec, lad, there’s things I ain’t had the right time to explain—

  Well, you can damned well explain ’em now. What did you mean, about her being in a jar? What haven’t you told me?

  Son, I wouldn’t lie to you.

  Hell yes, you would! Alec charged into cyberspace, shoving past the Captain to riffle through the Company files. Numbers and names filled his head, dates and places, maps and pictures, yielding up their secrets at his impatient push.

  Suddenly there was a defended file before his eyes, something with the Captain’s own seal on it, a text headed Adonai.

  What’s this file? Why’ve you got it locked?

  No, boy! Leave it alone.

  Alec’s eyes narrowed. He forced the seal and accessed the file.

  Into his consciousness came pouring the contents of Adonai: the proposal, outline, conceptual designs, every memo that had passed between all persons concerned, minutes of meetings, sequence reports complete with images …

  And, finally and terribly, the black box recordings containing in electromagnetic analogue every thought, emotion and sensation ever experienced during the lives of two men named Nicholas Harpole and Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

  Abruptly Alec had the memory of two complete lifetimes he had not lived, with a blindingly swift montage of images: half-timbered hall, rose garden, black-letter pages, cold corridors, the deck of a warship, a man in a tailcoat unrolling a map, a dying man, a green jungle. Death, his own, in flaming agony and in a hail of bullets, and in both cases the anguished face of the black-eyed girl watching him die, Mendoza.

  Mendoza, who had loved him. Them.

  The knowledge was incomprehensible, unbearable, could not be assimilated.

  An alternative was found.

  Alec felt a tearing, an impossible increase, and roared with pain as a second pair of arms burst forth from his sides, flailing and striking, and then yet a third pair, and barely had this registered on his screaming mind than two new legs shot out from his hips and then two more, kicking frantically, and his groin erupted in a hydra of members, beyond grotesque, da Vinci’s Vitruvian man gone one better! And, last, a second face thrust forward from his own, as though it broke the surface of smooth water, an appalling face baring its white teeth in rage, and close after it a second face no less fearsome in its howl of lamentation like the crack of thunder, and the very chambers of his heart were tearing themselves open now and splitting into three, and he knew it would kill him and was glad, and toppled like a ghastly idol to smash into pieces on the floor.

  But somewhere in all the horror was one quiet satisfaction: that of having confirmed, at last, beyond all doubt or argument, that he was indeed the monster he had always suspected himself to be.

  Not dead yet? He lay gasping on the floor of the saloon, sprawled out, wearing only the body he’d been born with. The pain was beginning to ease away, but things were very far from being all right. What had just happened, to beat him down with such shame and horror?

  Mars, he’d been responsible for all those people dying on Mars.

  No, that had been before …

  Mendoza. She’d been arrested, he’d failed her.

  No, that had been before …

  He wasn’t even a human being. He was a Recombinant, one of those creatures who’d been illegal for centuries, who lived now only in the most lurid of horror fictions. A genetic test pattern, an experiment, an organic thing worked out on a graph before he’d ever drawn breath. Even poor mad Elly not his kin, he’d been no more than a parasite in her womb, no child of anyone’s. Dr. Zeus had meddled with a twist of DNA and produced a nonperson.

  Somebody moaned. Somebody else was lying on the floor of the saloon, breathing harshly.

  Alec lifted his head and looked.

  Two other men lay near him on the floor, their heads close to his, each lying at an angle away from the other, forming a three-branched figure.

  One wore an old-fashioned suit, vaguely familiar to Alec from cinema. One wore nothing but a long white shirt and what looked to be black tights. In every other respect, however, they were identical to Alec. They were lifting their heads now just as he had done, and staring at him and at each other with just such an expression of horror and disbelief as he himself wore.

  With a cry he scrambled backward from them, more terrified than he had ever been in his life. He could get no more than a body’s length from either man, however, no matter how he struggled.

  The one in the shirt had dragged himself into a sitting position, and shut his eyes tight. He was reciting something to himself in an undertone. The third man was looking rapidly from Alec to the other one, his gaze hard. He sat up and gestured oddly, running his hands over his clothing as if he were searching for something. He didn’t seem to be able to find it. He smelled like blood and fireworks.

  Alec knew, not wanting to know, that his name was Edward. The other one, the one who was now opening his eyes and looking at Edward with such loathing, was Nicholas, and he reeked of smoke.

  “Murderer!” Nicholas said.

  Edward smiled coldly. “I suppose so. I don’t seem to be burning in Hell for my crimes, however, have you noticed? And it wouldn’t appear that Jesu Christ has answered your prayers, either. What do you suppose is going on?”

  “I’ve lost my mind,” gasped Alec, and promptly wished he hadn’t, for both the others turned their pale eyes on him.

  “Stop blubbering, boy,” Edward said. “You made a second Pompeii on Mars; if you can bear that, you ought to be able to bear our company.”

  “You’re not really here,” Alec said, squeezing his eyes shut, rocking himself to and fro. “I’ve fried my brain somehow. I’m hallucinating.”

  That’s all it is, matey, to be sure.

  All three of them jumped.

  “Captain,” Alec shouted, “I’ve crashed myself!”

  It ain’t nothing to worry about, son. Never you mind them two duppies! Remember the spooks you saw, that time you tried them mushrooms? But you’ll be all right, now, here’s old Billy Bones with something to put you to sleep—

  The servounit came scuttling into the saloon, extending its arm with the anesthesia mask. For once, Alec was ready to welcome it. He’d have given a lot to lose consciousness just then. Nicholas gave a yell of horror, drawing back from the skull-faced thing, but Edward leaped to his feet.

  Alec felt himself pushed aside somehow, watching as Edward attacked Billy Bones with incredible speed and ferocity. The mask was sent flying, and Billy Bones wound up across the room on its back, scrabbling vainly at the air with its steel legs.

  Ow! Alec, what in thunder did you do that for?

  “My name is Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax,” Edward said. “Don’t attempt to drug me again. You’re the mechanical servant, aren’t you? Perhaps you can answer my questions! Have I been made immortal? Has the Society accomplished its purpose?”

  There was a long, long pause.

  What Society would that be, now, sir? the Captain inquired politely. He was scanning Alec with great care, noting that his brainwave pattern was distinctly different when Edward was speaking.

  “The Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, of course! We were about to found an epoch of science. We were to conquer death and transform the world,” Edward said.

  There was anot
her long silence, broken by a bitter laugh from Nicholas.

  “Fool,” he said. “Hast thou no understanding? We are dead men, thou and I. Yet thou art not in Hell, nor I in Heaven neither; and the reason is, we have no souls to go thence. Some necromancy created us, no more but homunculi.” He pointed at Billy Bones. “Look how the boy hath made a brass head to sail his ship! And lo, the same alchemy hath made the boy and us.”

  Edward’s eyes narrowed. “Medieval theological rubbish. I tell you, I was one of a brotherhood of men working to bring a golden age to mankind! We were on the brink of wonderful things when I—”

  “Thou wert never one of their number,” Nicholas said. “Thou wert no more than their tool, and when they’d brake thee, they cast thee away.”

  “Liar!” Edward took a menacing step toward Nicholas. Alec felt himself pulled closer too, and struggled to draw back. Edward’s progress was arrested. He turned, glaring at Alec. Alec shoved him. He felt real, and when he threw a punch at Alec, Alec seized his wrist and felt the heat of solid flesh, the texture of his sleeve. As they struggled, locked together, Alec saw every tiny detail of the brass cuff links Edward wore, with their device of a fouled anchor. Alec shuddered. Edward for his part was peering in baffled rage at the tiki pattern of Alec’s shirt.

  “Beat it, dead man!” Alec growled.

  Er, excuse me, sirs—said the Captain.

  “Speak when you’re spoken to, machine,” snapped Edward.

  Oh, aye, sir, to be sure. Captain Henry Morgan at yer service, sir, and I was just trying to do me duty like I was programmed. With respect, sir, I believe I can throw some light on the subject of yer Society, Commander Bell-Fairfax, sir. Perhaps you didn’t have time to take in the contents of this here file when everything happened so quick just now, but if you’ll have a closer look—

  The Captain excerpted the dossier on Adonai’s second sequence, the same text and pictures that a certain trio of learned gentleman had studied at their leisure in Regent’s Park. He fed it directly to Alec, modifying the signal to accommodate Edward’s brain patterns.