The Life of the World to Come (24 page)

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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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“There now,” said Rutherford. “There’s our noble soul. Wouldn’t permit keelhauling, I daresay.”
Then he caught his breath at the image that appeared, apparently taken by a field operative with a concealed camera and somewhat blurred and badly composed in consequence. Nevertheless it riveted one’s attention. It showed the deck of a warship, crowded with assembled men, and in the background below the quarterdeck a grating set up lengthwise, to which a half-naked man had been pinioned. He had taken so many lashes his back looked as though it had been grilled. Blood spread in a bright stain down the back of his white trousers. To one side stood the man with the cat o’ nine tails. It hung slack in his hand, however, for he had stopped, was staring, as all the men were staring and even the prisoner himself was staring, head turned painfully to gape at the scene frozen in the foreground.
The subject was being restrained by four other officers. Their faces were terrified. His was terrifying. His long teeth were bared. His eyes were very bright and focused on the man who lay before him on the deck, the man in the much more ornate uniform, the man who was bleeding from nose and mouth and eyes.
“Shrack,” grunted Ellsworth-Howard. Rutherford and Chatterji just stared, mute. This was stronger stuff than anyone was accustomed to in the twenty-fourth century.
Court-martial had been initiated, explained the voice, but before action could be taken the primary “father” of the subject had intervened to have the subject honorably retired on half-pay, transferred to a certain department in Her Majesty’s government doing business as Imperial Export. Upon mention of the name of the department, Chatterji gulped and Rutherford said:
“But wasn’t that—?” He mouthed in silence,
the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society?
“Blimey.” Ellsworth-Howard pointed at the screen. “Look who he went to work for!”
The next picture was of a small and inconspicuous-looking man in a black suit He had had his portrait taken with his hand on a globe; that was the only clue to his character. The voice identified the man as the head of the department to which the subject had been transferred, and explained that the subject had become his protégé.
This provoked a fit of nervous giggles among the members of the fellowship.
There followed a series of photographs of the subject in civilian dress, a big amiable-looking man, engaged in various apparently innocent pastimes in various exotic locales: grinning sheepishly from his perch on the back of a camel, fumbling with amateur photography equipment before some Turkish fortifications, doffing his top hat to a lady before the onion domes of the Kremlin. In these pictures his face looked almost clownish, a well-bred twit on a grand tour.
It was impossible to think this was the homicidal young officer from the deck of the warship. Here he was, smiling innocently, having his picture taken with a group of Afghani bandits who were glaring sidelong at him in ill-concealed contempt. Here he was again, holding up a bottle and pointing gleefully at it, mugging for the photographer; easy not to notice the harbor and men o’ war in the background.
The vocal accompaniment to these images was a litany of thefts, seductions, arson, and assassinations, committed with consummate skill for queen, country, and Imperial Export.
“
Espionage,
” said Rutherford in awe.
“And murder,” Chatterji added soberly. “He certainly had no trouble killing when he was ordered to.”
“But in a just cause!” said Rutherford. “He was serving his nation, as any honorable man would do, and serving it well I might add.”
“Fair enough,” said Ellsworth-Howard. “How’d he get killed this time?”
“Oh, any number of heroic ways, I expect, given his line of work,” said Rutherford, just as the next image flashed before them: the subject with two other men, sitting in a singularly dusty photographer’s studio. They were posed formally in three chairs. One was a very dark individual with a black mustache. The other was a sad-faced young man, English apparently,
with a valise on his lap. The subject, who looked slightly older now, had his hand on the shoulder of the young man and was smiling at the camera. There was something unsettling in his smile, something smoothly professional about it, and perhaps a little weary.
The voice explained that this picture had been taken at Veracruz, Mexico, on 30 November 1862, and was the last known photograph of the subject before his disappearance while in the field at Los Angeles, California, in March, 1863. Imperial Export had regretfully closed its files on him after some years and given him posthumous commendation for his final work on Operation Document D.
“My God!” Chatterji jumped as though he’d been shot.
“What?” said Rutherford, and Ellsworth-Howard ordered the report to pause. The voice stopped and the glittering silver save-pattern crawled across the screen.
“Haven’t you ever heard of Document D?” demanded Chatterji. Ellsworth-Howard shook his head. Rutherford attempted to recall.
“Something in the Company archives? Used to be property of the Crown. Highly classified, had to do with that pirate fellow—it was a ship’s logbook, wasn’t it? Data about the coast of California and—and something they saw on an island there—” Rutherford clapped his hand over his mouth.
“Exactly,” said Chatterji, leaning close to speak quietly. “
Very
classified information.”
“It must have been Catalina Island the pirates stopped at, on their way up the coast!” hissed Rutherford. He rocked where he sat in suppressed excitement. “And they saw—you know what—and they wrote about it, and there the account sat in the logbook, never understood by anyone until the founders of ‘Imperial Export’ got hold of it and sent out a team to investigate—”
“Which must have included our man—”
“And they found—well, you know what they found—and the end of it all was that ‘Imperial Export’ eventually became Dr. Zeus Incorporated,” shrieked Rutherford.
“Sssh! For God’s sake, this is all classified,” Chatterji shook him.
“Shrack!” Ellsworth-Howard stared at the frozen screen. “This is like discovering your son’s your grandfather, ain’t it? We made him, and he made—well, our jobs. What’s this about Catalina Island, though? I thought that was just an experimental station.”
“You go right on thinking that, old fellow,” Chatterji said.
“Oh, it’s too perfect,” said Rutherford. “Do you know what they call the town on that island?
Avalon.
That’s where our once and future hero went to die.”
“Yeah, but he still died,” Ellsworth-Howard said. “I want to know how.”
He ordered the report to continue and the photograph from Veracruz vanished, to be replaced with a rather awful series of pictures from the subject’s postmortem examination. The voice explained that the subject had been shot to death by American counterespionage agents in a vain attempt to prevent him from destroying classified documents before they could seize said material.
“And if he hadn’t, chaps, who knows what might have happened?” Rutherford’s eyes were brimming with happy tears. “We might not be sitting here now. Oh, the synchronicity of it all! He nobly kept the secret that enabled us to create him.”
“Who’s that?” Ellsworth-Howard pointed at two new pictures that appeared on the screen. The voice explained that there were certain details of the subject’s last days still unresolved pending review of his brain transcript, and that the full report could be expected within three days. Recovery of the subject’s body had been facilitated by the fact that he had been in the company of two Dr. Zeus operatives at the time of his death.
The first picture enlarged to fill the screen and the voice explained that the terrified-looking man was one Antonio Souza, thirty-four years of age, operator of a safe house and low-level shipping station at San Pedro, California.
Souza’s picture shrank back and the second picture enlarged.
“Oi, that’s another of my Preservers,” said Ellsworth-Howard. A black-eyed woman stared up from what appeared to be a cell. Her face was as blank as a mask. The blackness of the eyes was so complete, so utterly absent of light or even
human consciousness that it made Rutherford want to hide. The voice explained that this was the Botanist Mendoza—
“Who?”
Rutherford choked. The voice continued—cyborg operative under suspicion of malfunction, previously assigned to Cahuenga Pass Transport Station. Duties had related to acquisition of rare plant species in temperate belt scheduled to go extinct in local ecological disaster beginning June 1862—
“Stop,” said Rutherford, and Ellsworth-Howard paused the report once more. The voice fell silent and the glittering pattern scored the woman’s face, giving her the appearance of having an uncontrollable tic.
“Talk about your synchronicity,” said Chatterji, shaking his head.
“What’s she doing there?” said Rutherford. “That’s the same girl he—he—knew. in his first sequence. How did she get to the New World?”
Ellsworth-Howard pulled up a sidebar and squeezed in a request. He peered at the screen. “Transferred,” he said. “Shipped there in 1555.”
“But this is a disaster!” Rutherford clenched his fists. “She’ll have recognized our man, don’t you see? He’s a classified project, and now she knows about him.”
“I say, Rutherford, you’re right.” Chatterji frowned. “Well, nothing for it but to control the damage as best we can. She’s being detained, isn’t she?”
“Fortunately. But the damned creature’s a cyborg.” Rutherford glared at her image on the screen. “Which means, of course, that our problem is a permanent one.”
“Then we need a permanent solution,” Chatterji mused. “There are still a few vat spaces left in the bunkers where we’re keeping the old Enforcers …” He looked at Rutherford over Ellsworth-Howard’s head and made a gesture of unplugging something. Ellsworth-Howard noticed, however.
“No shracking way,” he said indignantly. “She’s one of my Preservers. They cost too much to waste like that. Just have her transferred again.”
“But where, Foxy?” said Chatterji. “We’re dealing with a breach of security, remember.”
“I want her silenced, but even more importantly I want her
away from our man,” said Rutherford with determination. “There must be no possibility whatever of her encountering him in his next sequence. What if there’s an undetected Mandelbrot frame operating here?”
Ellsworth-Howard thought about that for a moment.
“She could be sent Back Way Back,” he said at last.
“Good thought.” Chatterji looked pleased. “How far back?”
“A hundred and fifty thousand years should do it,” said Rutherford decisively. “Yes. That should remove any danger to the project.”
“Right, then.” Ellsworth-Howard slipped on the button of the throat mike and gave an order. While they were waiting for confirmation, a long black private transport came gliding along the nearest walkway. Opposite them it stopped, and a medic got out and walked briskly over the grass toward them. Just as he knelt and began to wash their feet, there was a beeping signal: confirmation. The order had been obeyed.
Alec Grows Up
He had a reputation now.
People who lived in the shadows cast by the light of the First World knew about him; and that included the dead-eyed golden ones who lay on the beaches at Capferrat and St. Tropez. Hungrily they watched the blue horizon for his ship. In certain circles he was called the Candyman; in others he was known as the Liberator.
Whatever they wanted, whatever it took to sweeten their weary days—whether it was bloodred wine or whiskey, or ganja strong enough to set their feet on another plane of reality—the big guy could get it for them. Or it might be cocoa with marshmallows, or it might be caviar. All it had to be was forbidden, and he could get it for them.
He didn’t even demand their souls in payment. Just cash.
There were stories, legends in the Caribbean and on the Côte d’Azur, about the smiling lord who threw such wild parties on his white ship. The list of people he was said to have bedded was improbably long. He gave every appearance of being an easy mark, as hopelessly stoned as any of his guests at his parties, an amiable fool; and yet thieves boarding his ship had a tendency to vanish, never to be seen again. So there was a faintly sinister edge to his mythos, and people wondered about that black flag …
But nobody really cared, because he had the power to ease
the pain of living, heal the sores of ennui, and take away wounding memory of the cold, clean, bright, ordered world for a couple of nights. And if they shuddered, shamefaced with guilt over their excesses, they only did it after he had sailed away. Later still they prayed for his return, and watched the sea for a glimpse of his pirate flag. All they wanted was a little freedom, and they knew he could get it for them.
It was only freedom of the senses, of course. Once, the boy had had dreams about setting them truly free. He had thought it might be nice, to be a legend.
He was older now.
Careful, Alec.
I know. My God, was it always this gloomy? This deserted?
I’m afraid so.
The tall man stood, irresolute, looking around at Trafalgar Square. Other than the surveillance cameras there was only a lurking public health monitor to note his presence, who, after a cursory inspection, decided the tall man was a tourist and therefore had an excuse for looking strange.
And Alec did look strange, by the standards of modern London: unhealthily tanned by the sun and dressed for a much warmer climate, with a brilliantly loud tropical patterned shirt. He was peering a bit as he tried to bring his vision into the narrow and close horizon of walls.
It was difficult. He’d only been away three years this time, but something seemed to have cut the cord at last. There was no specific change he could point to, other than the tragedy; only a general sense of everything in London being steeper, and narrower, and darker.
You know what it is? It’s not home anymore. I never really belonged here at all, did I?
Not you, my lad. You come from the sea.
Alec smiled faintly at that, but the truth was he was finding the old pirate-talk pretty comforting just now.
So where’s this art gallery, then?
Starboard at the next corner and straight on three blocks.
He shivered, wishing he’d brought a coat, and set off at a rapid walk to warm himself. He’d get a coat in some shop, after
the show. The Bloomsbury house was too full of ghosts to stop in, even if it hadn’t been locked up tight as a drum with dustcovers over everything.
He had tried to go back to live there twice.
In his twentieth summer he partied for a whole season off Carriacou with a very agreeable bunch of decadent kids, minor admin bluebloods. The Captain had snarled at him a lot because he began drinking heavily again, and attempted to prod him back to his usual routine of club-hopping, which required that he stay at least sober enough to walk. Alec had been disinclined to visit clubs, however, because there was one quite nice girl who shared his bed more frequently than the other young ladies in the party.
But when the season had ended she came to him, pale and stammering, to announce that she was pregnant.
He took the news badly, yet when he sobered up he bathed, shaved, and went with her to the local marriage registrar. There was a brief ceremony on a terrace with a sweeping view of Hillsborough Bay, and the white ships belonging to millionaires drifted on the horizon like swans. Then they went down the hill, on board his ship and straight off to London and Tower Marina.
By the time they dropped anchor he found, unaccountably, that he was looking forward to starting a family. The Bloomsbury house had been reopened and aired out, new servants had been hired, and Lewin and Mrs. Lewin had come bustling from their retirement. Alec’s old nursery was repainted, and then—
She was ever so sorry, the girl said, but apparently she’d been mistaken. There wasn’t going to be a baby after all. And, while she was certain Alec was a super guy, now that she wasn’t stoned all the time she just didn’t think the relationship would work out. What were the chances they could simply pretend this whole thing had never happened?
Away went the new servants, away went Lewin and Mrs. Lewin back into retirement, and away went the girl out of Alec’s life, bearing a nice fat settlement by which to remember him.
The second time had been much less banal.
He was walking through Portofino when he heard a voice
crying out to him in English. He turned to see a girl in an agchair speeding toward him from the shadows of a dark side street. She was an American, in terrible trouble: her husband was lying in wait for her with a gun at their villa. She begged Alec to help her. The Captain muttered something cautionary but Alec mentally shushed him. The girl collapsed weeping, explaining that she was a sufferer from Vargas’s syndrome. She’d had to flee without any of her medication or her identity disk.
Alec escorted her to the nearest safety station to make a report. The Captain had to do all the translating, with Alec repeating phonetic Italian after him; but once the officers did grasp that there had been a case of domestic violence, they took off with gratifying speed (the Ephesian Party held the balance of power in the Italian government that year). In no time at all they came zooming back to the safety station with a bound, tranquilized man drooling in the back of a detention vehicle.
Somehow Alec and Lorene (that was her name) wound up living together in a hotel. She was witty and charming and practical, and she had been a coloratura soprano before she’d gotten ill. She could still sing, though without much power, in a piercingly sweet voice that reminded him of tinkling frost or chiming bells. Their stay at the hotel stretched out into weeks. One night Lorene had told Alec the full story of her life, all misfortune, and he was so moved to compassion he proposed.
The honeymoon on board the
Captain Morgan
was a perfect idyll. Not an especially sensual one, because Lorene’s illness flared up in the sea air, but they were blissfully happy anyway. Alec sent ahead orders for the Bloomsbury house to be completely remodeled. He set up a holoscreen by her bed and went through interior design catalogs with her.
Lorene was enchanted with London in the way only Americans are. She was enchanted with the Rolls and its Finsbury crest, she was enchanted all the way to the front steps of her new home, where she allowed Alec to lift her out of the Rolls and settle her into her agchair. She smiled enchantingly at the servants lined up to welcome her (Lewin and Mrs. Lewin weren’t among them; Mrs. Lewin was too ill to come up to
London). Then Lorene looked up at the house and a shadow fell across her face.
“Oh, my God, those steps are high,” she said.
“Don’t worry, babe,” Alec said. “I’m supposed to carry you across the doormouth, remember?”
And he caught her up (she weighed practically nothing) and stormed the stairs and jumped over the threshold with her, but unfortunately he knocked her elbow on the jamb as they passed through and she almost fainted with the pain.
Things had not improved. Almost from the first day, Lorene became sullen and silent, and Alec told himself that it was because London made her illness worse. Most days she was too exhausted to do more than lie on a day bed and watch holoes with him. If he went out for any period of time, she greeted his return with tearful complaints that the servants had been rude to her. She didn’t like the house or furnishings, either.
Balkister dropped in one day to discuss his latest crusade, which (that week) was to get the Falkland Islands renamed the Malvinas (again), and he stayed until midnight talking over old times with Alec. As soon as Balkister had wobbled his way out the door, Lorene rose on her elbow and denounced him for the nastiest, most adolescent little creep she’d ever met.
Alec agreed with her readily enough. Plenty of people felt that way about Balkister. Lorene went on to demand whether Alec knew that Balkister was a homosexual, and obviously in love with Alec?
Alec didn’t know. He stood there, slightly befuddled by the hour and what he’d been drinking, trying to sort that one out. Balkister had never approached him for that kind of fun, that he remembered; but then a lot of the time he’d spent in Balkister’s company they’d both been stoned. At last he laughed and told Lorene he thought she was wrong. She wept hysterically. He carried her up to their bed at last, and when he tried to crawl in beside her she screamed that he was gay and struck at him. He staggered away and slept in a guest bedroom.
The next two weeks, Alec was like a wounded horse on a battlefield, helplessly tangling himself in his own guts with
every step he attempted to take out of his trouble. Even on the best days, Lorene was unaccountably irritated with him. He was such an overgrown boy! He had no drive or ambition at all. How could a grown man think he could just run away from his troubles and live on a yacht all the time? At her worst she grew screamingly abusive, shaking in her chair with emotion, and a pair of scarlet spots would appear on either side of her thin white nose.
After her rages she clung to him, weeping and contrite, and called him all the loving names of their courtship period, and begged him to be strong for her.
The Captain, who knew when to keep his mouth shut, did. He authorized the services of a team of private investigators, however, and when their reports came in he kept his peace and bided his time.
The servants quit in a body one morning, as a formal protest after Lorene accused the cook of trying to poison her. This was serious: one didn’t treat servants that way in the twenty-fourth century. Alec controlled his temper and said nothing. When he didn’t respond by blowing up at her, Lorene followed him around in her agchair insisting that there
had
been sleeping pills in the food, and the less he responded the angrier she became, until she accused him of being a gutless coward.
With a roar of frustration he picked up an overstuffed recliner and threw it across the room, and followed it with the matching ottoman. They both landed on the piano and it collapsed. She flew up the stairs, shrieking as though he were after her with an axe, and locked herself in her room.
Had enough yet, boyo?
the Captain inquired.
But Alec was horrified at himself, instantly remorseful. It occurred to him that perhaps what they both needed was a change of air.
So he removed the chair and ottoman from the ruins of the piano, and went upstairs to speak gently to Lorene, through the locked door of their bedroom. Once he got her calmed down enough to listen, she agreed to go away with him. There was a desperate eagerness in her voice as she asked whether they might sail immediately. Alec assured her they could leave that night, and went off to Tower Marina to get the
Captain Morgan
ready for sailing.
When he returned that afternoon, there was a phalanx of long purple vehicles drawn up in front of his house and strangers were going up and down the stairs. He jumped from the car before it quite settled down, terrified that Lorene had had an accident. But no: there she was, emerging in her chair, escorted down the stairs by a muscular young man in an oddly patterned robe.
“Hey,” Alec said. Lorene shrieked and flinched, and the man put a protective arm around her and looked daggers at Alec. Alec started toward them, but his way was blocked by two more of the robed men—were those
bumblebees
embroidered on their clothes?—and an authoritative-looking woman in purple.
“Alec Checkerfield, earl of Finsbury?” the woman asked.
“Yeah,” Alec said, looking past her at Lorene, who was sobbing and hiding her face as she was helped into one of the purple cars.
“Do you know who we are, and why we are here?”
Alec spotted the bee logo on the door of the purple car and finally placed it. “You’re Ephesians, right? What’s going on?”
“Your wife called us and begged for our help. We’re here to provide her with safe conduct from this house to our Newham Hospital shelter, to protect her from any further abuse at your hands,” the woman said.

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