The Life of the World to Come (17 page)

Read The Life of the World to Come Online

Authors: Kage Baker

Tags: #Adult, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #C429, #Extratorrents, #Kat, #Travel

BOOK: The Life of the World to Come
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“Well, in Mars One,” Jill said. “Mars Two’s another story.”
“Mars Two is irrelevant,” said Balkister. “The agriculturals control the terraforming process and therefore control Mars.
They can’t be outvoted or shouldered aside by the drones in the urban hives! No listless decadent intellectuals running the show at the expense of the real producers.”
“Giles, you are so full of horseshit,” Jill said. “You wouldn’t last five minutes up there.”
“Is it my fault I’m not physically fit for Mars?” said Balkister. “Blame my bloody genetic inheritance. So much for the divine right of the elite to pass on their DNA! My parents oughtn’t have been allowed to have me. They’d never have passed muster if they’d had to apply for the permit.”
“There’d certainly have been a lot less hot air in the world.” Alec smiled.
“Maybe I do serve a purpose, then,” Balkister replied. “Maybe civilization needs an ugly little creep like me to serve as a conscience, to prick the bubble of hypocrisy wherever it swells up, to jar people from their smug self-satisfaction and complacency!”
“Bollocks, Balkister. Balkister, bollocks,” sang Jill.
“You’d do well on Mars, though, Checkerfield,” said Blaise.
“And so he ought,” said Balkister. “God knows you’re strong enough. You can be the ugly big creep I send in my place to be the social conscience of our class in the dark warrens of Mars Two. Let’s consider this seriously, Checkerfield.”
“Alec is beautiful,” said Jill, bending down to kiss him.
“Like a mushroom cloud!” scoffed Balkister. “Isn’t
impressive
the word we’re looking for, dear? God, Checkerfield, if only I had your voice, or you had my brain. People listen to you. They don’t always agree, but you get them to listen.”
“It’s something to think about, Checkerfield,” said Blaise. “Mars.”
Alec looked up through the branches of the plane tree (
seventeen thousand three fifty-five leaves
, he counted automatically) at the sky beyond.
“Maybe I’ll go out there,” he said. “Someday.”
“Alec, isn’t that your family’s Rolls?” Jill glanced over in the direction of the car park.
“What?” Alec brought his gaze down. “It is.” He sat up abruptly as he saw Lewin get out of the car and come striding across the grass toward the circle. “Oh, shit.”
Lewin’s face was gray, his expression set. He spotted Alec and made straight for him. Alec took a few steps forward.
“What’s happened?” Alec shouted. “What is it?
Is she okay?
” The other members of the circle left off their separate conversational cliques to turn and stare.
“The missus is fine,” Lewin said, and then in a completely altered voice he said:
“My lord, I regret to inform you that your father, the sixth earl, died this morning. You are now the seventh earl of Finsbury.”
“Oh!” Jill put her hands to her mouth. Alec just stood there staring.
“Are you sure?” Balkister said. “Had he been ill?”
“No, sir. There was an accident.” Lewin looked up at Alec. “He was on a dive near the Great Barrier Reef and evidently he was intoxi—” Lewin broke off. “Alec!”
Alec was trembling. The pupils of his eyes had become so wide the black nearly obscured the transparent crystal. He drew his lips back from his formidable teeth in a snarl.
“Shrack,” he said. “That tears it, doesn’t it?” He looked around and saw a bench. With all his strength he punched it: first a left, then a right, and on the next left the flimsy laminate planks cracked and began to split. “You shracking bastard,” he panted, “you’ll never be back now, will you?”
The Circle of Thirty had fixed its attention on him, stunned.
“Alec, for Christ’s sake,” hissed Lewin, trying to get between him and the crowd to block the view.
“Whoops! Ape Man’s lost it,” called Alistair Stede-Windsor gaily, though his voice was shrill. Alec ignored him in his rage and grief, pounding on the splintering bench as in a terrifically reasonable voice Blaise said:
“You know, old man, that’s Crown property you’re demolishing—”
“Who shracking cares?” Alec said. “I can pay for it. I’m the shracking seventh earl now, yeah? I can pay for anything.” The bench fell apart at last, its stone supports toppled, and Alec seized one up and hurled it with a grunt of fury at his little red car. It landed on the hood with a crash and several members of the Circle of Thirty screamed.
“I’ll pay for everything!” Alec roared, grabbing up the other stone support and starting off toward the car park. “I got the money, I got the toys, I got the title and he’s never coming home now, the shracking son of a bitch, I’ll never see him again!”
“Alec!” Lewin raced after him, closely followed by Balkister and Blaise. “Stop this!”
Alec threw the other support at his car and the windscreen cracked with a sound like a shot being fired. “I didn’t want the shracking car. I didn’t want the money,” he said hoarsely, staring at the ruin he’d made. “I just wanted him to come back. Now—”
“Alec, I’m sorry,” Balkister grabbed his arm. “But you can’t—” He looked at Alec’s fists and went pale, turned to Jill. “His hands are bleeding!”
Jill had been staring, frozen in horror, but now she snapped out of it and ran to them, delving tissues from her purse. Alec started at her touch, looked down at her.
“He never came home, he was never happy, because of me! He’s gone to Fiddler’s Green,” he gasped. “He’s gone to Fiddler’s Green, and I’ll never be able to tell him I was sorry.”
“Darling, it’s not your fault,” said Jill, stanching his split knuckles. And then it was as though she heard a quiet little voice in her ear saying, cold as steel:
Much too much emotional baggage for you, my dear
.
“Oh, I’m sorry—” wept Alec, as embarrassment added weight to his grief. All he could think of was Roger sinking down and down through dark water, toward a green island he’d never been to yet, perhaps happy at last.
“We’ve got to get him out of here,” said Blaise. “Before the—”
Lewin said something unprintable. They looked up, following his gaze, and saw the public health monitor arriving.
“This is the meditation room,” said the doctor in a too-gentle voice, and put a too-gentle hand on his shoulder and suggested, rather than pushed, Alec over the threshold. “You can be private in here for as long as you like.”
“Thanks a bunch,” said Alec sullenly, rubbing his wrists where the restraints had been taken off. His hands were hurting badly now, but he hadn’t been allowed drugs, he assumed because of the urine and blood tests.
“You’ll find relaxation patterns on the console,” the doctor told him, pointing to the only piece of furniture in the room. The room was what would have been referred to in a previous age as a padded cell. Even the console was thickly upholstered in pillowy foam. Every effort had been made to give the visitor the impression that he or she was floating inside a fluffy cloud.
“Relaxation patterns?” said Alec, looking around to see if he could spot the surveillance camera.
“Oh, yes. Whale songs, forest rain, Dineh chanting, white noise. Lots of visual and olfactory aids as well. Please enjoy them,” said the doctor.
“Can you give me something for these?” Alec held his bandaged hands up, knuckles out. “I’m in a lot of pain.”
“I know.” The doctor looked sad. “But we don’t do drugs here, Alec. Use this as your opportunity to begin learning to deal with your pain. If you become one with your pain, understanding will begin. Feel your pain. Make friends with your pain.”
Alec thought of telling the doctor to go shrack himself. Instead he nodded. “Thank you, sir, I will. I’ll just meditate now, shall I?”
The doctor smiled, reached across the threshold to pat him on the shoulder gingerly and then left, sealing the door. When it had closed, the wall appeared to be a solid spongy mass.
Alec leaned against the wall and slid down, sighing. He assessed his resources. They had relieved him of his shoes and tie but, because of his rank, refrained from going through his pockets. As a result he still had a packet of breath mints, his identity disc, three Happihealthy shields, a ToolCard and, most important, his jotbuke.
Not safe to get it out yet, though. Where was the surveillance camera?
Alec let his gaze wander over the walls in a casual sort of way and picked it out at last, looking like an extra-fluffy blob of cloud: in the door, directly opposite the console. He got
awkwardly to his feet, levering himself up with his elbows, and went to inspect the console.
Blocking the camera’s view with his back, he took up the buttonball. It was like handling a live coal with his hands the way they were, but he gritted his teeth and summoned up a menu. Whale songs, good and loud. He lingered on the aromatherapy column a moment, wondering whether eucalyptus essence might get him high, or at least kill the smells of this place, which were of terror, disorientation, and urine. Shrugging, he ordered it at maximum concentration. As it misted into the room he sneezed, shuddered, and focused his attention on the menu screen.
A few experimental orders got him into a defended site, easily as kicking open a flimsy door. His eyes narrowed as he decrypted, forcing through one barrier after another until he found what he wanted. He altered codes, working quickly.
The surveillance camera thought it saw him turn from the console and slide down the wall once more, to sit slack-faced and motionless, apparently listening to whale songs and getting mildly goofy on eucalyptus essence. This was what it dutifully reported to the monitor at the orderly’s post for the next hour.
Fortunately for Alec, it was only seeing what he’d told it to see. In reality he had turned to lean against the wall and pulled his jotbuke from his inner jacket pocket, wincing. He flipped it open, thumbed a command and set it down on the console. As he nursed his right hand and watched, a small antenna projected and a ball of light shot forth.
Even before the Captain materialized within the poorresolution globe, there was a concerted torrent of profanity that nearly drowned out the whale songs.
“I didn’t call you to have you talk to me like that,” growled Alec. “I’d like some counseling, okay? I’ve just had a shock, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“You think
you’ve
had a shock?” The Captain’s face was dark with agitation, his beard curling threateningly. “Bloody hell, Alec, what did you think you was doing, smashing up that car? Christ, son, look at those hands! D’you know what kind of trouble we’re in now?”
“It’s no big thing, okay?” said Alec wearily, sliding down
the wall again. “Lewin is out there talking with the doctors. He told me he’d cut a deal. They won’t throw me in hospital, because I’m Jolly Roger’s kid. I’ll get therapy and a slap on the wrist and I’ll have to pay a fine. That’s for Roger’s solicitors to worry about.
My
solicitors now—”
“Shut up! Did they take a blood sample? Have they done a brain scan?”
“Er—yeah.” Alec regarded him with wide eyes. He jumped as the Captain repeated a word several times, and it wasn’t
shrack
. “Hey—”
“Get on the buttonball, Alec, smart now,” the Captain ordered. “We got to diddle the test results, boy, or you ain’t getting out of hospital anytime this century, not if you was Prince Hank himself.”
Frightened, Alec scrambled to his feet and took the ball. He ordered up the menu again. “See, it’s okay if they find the drugs and booze in my blood. That way they’ll think I was just stoned and not crazy when I smashed the bench—”
“And yer car,” the Captain told him, watching tensely as Alec plunged into places he wasn’t supposed to be. “Come on, come on, where’s yer chart? Not there. Further down that way. Aye. Stop! There it is.” More profanity ensued as he regarded the results of Alec’s brain scan. “Change it, boy. Delete the code. Now, on my mark, input—” and he gave Alec the code that would alter the test results and efface any evidence of Alec’s cerebral anomaly. When they had finished they altered the results of the blood and urine tests as well, though not to conceal the presence of intoxicants.
Alec was sweating and sick with terror by the time he finished inputting, and his right hand throbbed.
“What did we have to do all that for?” he demanded, sagging back against the wall. The Captain sagged beside him and spoke carefully.
“Son, you remember when they bought me for you, back when you was just a little matey, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“And you set me free, and we went on the account. Well, now, you ain’t just gone through life assuming everybody else can decrypt data and steal it, eh, only nobody does it but you? How d’you reckon you do it?”
“I—I’m smart as paint,” said Alec, beginning to sweat again. He avoided the Captain’s eyes. “You always told me I was.”
“Why, so you are, matey, when it comes to encryptions anyhow; you got no bloody sense about anything else. All right, I won’t start! Listen to me, son. All yer life, I’ve had to fake medical records and genetic test results and brain scans, so nobody’d find out how different you was from other kids.” The Captain put his hands in his pockets and looked at Alec.

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