The Life of the World to Come (7 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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“Eh?” Ellsworth-Howard scowled at him.
“That means it goes against what we know happened,” Rutherford said. “So they can’t do it.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“And the next part’s going to be really exciting, as we start connecting with actual recorded historical events!” Chatterji cracked his knuckles in enthusiasm. “History as we know it is going to begin happening at last.”
“Brilliant.” Ellsworth-Howard had a bracing draught of ginger beer.
“Though there is one problem …” Chatterji gnawed his lower lip. He hesitated a moment before going on. “I’m afraid we’re having a little trouble with your Enforcers, Foxy. Actually quite a lot of trouble.”
“What d’you mean?” Ellsworth sat upright. “They took out the Great Goat Cult, didn’t they?”
“Oh, yeah. Quite. But … they seem to have some trouble
being retrained, now that they’ve done what we made them for. What was the old word?”
“Demobilized?” said Rutherford.
“That’s it. The Enforcers can’t seem to adjust to peacetime. And they argue! They appear to feel that a lot more, er, preparation is necessary before we begin civilization. There have been some quite nasty incidents, in fact.”
“You mean they won’t stop killing people?” Ellsworth-Howard looked appalled.
“Well, they’re only going for ordinary antisocials now, not cultists, but … in a word, yes,” said Chatterji.
“Oh, dear, that won’t do at all.” Rutherford knitted his brows.
“And they defend themselves by pointing to the historical record and claiming that it proves the job oughtn’t to be stopped.”
“The bloody fools!” Rutherford snorted. “Don’t they understand that we can’t change history?”
“They believe we haven’t tried hard enough,” said Chatterji delicately, not looking at Ellsworth-Howard, who had buried his face in his hands.
“Bloody hell,” he said wearily. “All right; what do we do?”
“Well, the committee would like to know if it’s possible to modify them, since termination isn’t an option.”
“You mean make ’em over into Preservers?” Ellsworth-Howard thought about it. “Reprogram them? I don’t think so. I designed them too shracking well for what they were supposed to do, you know. Why don’t they just reassign them to be security techs or something?”
“Well, but—there’s another problem, I’m afraid.” Chatterji shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Our observers have advised us that the genetic shift is taking place rather sooner than we thought, now that the two main hominid branches are free to interbreed. More and more humans are being born with the distinctive
Homo sapiens sapiens
appearance. Within a few more thousand years, the Enforcers will be … undesirably noticeable.” He looked apologetic.
“You mean they’re gonna stand out like boulders in gravel.” Ellsworth-Howard drummed his fingers on his
knees. “Shrack, shrack, shrack. I knew I should have done something about their faces. It was the optimum skull shape for a fighter, though.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Foxy.”
“Well, no help for it.” Ellsworth-Howard had another gulp from his tankard. “Poor old soldiers! I made ’em too well, that’s the problem. I always fancied I was born in the wrong age, myself—well, obviously we all do—but I wish I’d been a knight in armor. Gone around kicking the shrack out of Nazguls and Orcs and Calormenes. Swords and all that.”
Rutherford and Chatterji exchanged nervous glances, though of course no public health monitor was anywhere within earshot. Ellsworth-Howard reached into the daypack he’d slung down beside his chair and pulled out a buke, which he opened and activated. He squeezed in some figures and sighed.
“All right. Got around three thousand Enforcers in the field. Current status shows two hundred thirty-seven in regeneration vats, consciousness offline. I suppose they could just be left off. Seems like a poor thank-you after they beat the Great Goat nasties for us.”
“But can we ever trust them again?” said Chatterji. “Now that they’ve had the idea of rebellion?”
Ellsworth-Howard’s eyes widened as the full import of the problem sank in on him. “Got a little situation here, haven’t we?”
“Exactly,” Chatterji said soberly. “Immortal, indestructible, and disobedient. Talk about your Frankenstein monsters!”
“What’re we gonna do?”
“Well, it’s not as though they were howling and pounding on our door, after all,” Chatterji said. “We know we solve the problem, somehow, because history doesn’t record a roving band of giant soldiers terrorizing criminals through the ages. The question is, how do we solve it?”
“I know!” Rutherford leaped to his feet in excitement. “Ye gods, chaps, I’ve had the most brilliant idea. This will work—at least if it’s done right—and it’ll make all those legends come true.”
“What legends?” Chatterji asked.
“The Sleeping Knights,” said Rutherford. “All through Europe there are legends of bunches of knights asleep forever in caves! Under various enchantments, you know. Here in England they’re supposed to be knights of the Round Table, sleeping until King Arthur comes again.”
“What’s that got to do with the shracking price of tea in China?” inquired Ellsworth-Howard irritably.
“Don’t you see?
We
could be what causes the legends. Suppose you call in your Enforcers and tell them we do still need them, but they must have upgrades for the new work they’re to do. They’ll submit to being put under for the process. We’ll just take their brains offline and keep them unconscious! We can’t kill them, but we can induce alpha waves indefinitely.”
“Where would we keep them all?” Chatterji looked intrigued.
“Underground bunkers.” Rutherford’s eyes shone. “In keeping with the legends. Carefully monitored, on life support—nothing inhumane, you know. Until the Judgment Day!”
An uncomfortable silence fell then, because nobody ever liked to mention that Judgment Day was thought to be going to arrive in the year 2355. Having breached the unmentionable, however, Rutherford blundered on in a lower voice:
“And—who knows? If something terrible’s going to happen in the future, perhaps it’s just as well we’ll have a secret army hidden away, that we can revive if we need to.”
“Shrack,” said Ellsworth-Howard solemnly. “Think you’ve got the right idea, Rutherford. It’ll take some planning, though. Have to be gradual and crafty, so the poor buggers don’t know what’s going on. Let’s see how much it’ll cost, eh?” His fist worked on the buttonball.
“I’m glad you’re taking this well,” said Chatterji, watching him. “The committee didn’t want you to think the Enforcers were a failure. It is felt, though, that the next project should be more thoroughly tested before it’s put into action.”
“And how do we do that?” grunted Ellsworth-Howard absently. He was absorbed in his calculations. Rutherford looked inquiringly at Chatterji.
“Well, now that historical time is being entered, the Company would like an improved model Enforcer,” Chatterji explained.
“Someone more modern-looking. More suited to a life of service in a civilized world. So, obviously, we’d want somebody who was superbly strong but maybe less violent, more obedient, perhaps a bit more intelligent than the old Enforcers? Someone with the ability to adapt to peacetime life, yet with the same sense of, er, moral commitment.”
“Not so much a warrior as a knight,” said Rutherford. “A hero! I say, Chatty, this sounds interesting.”
“But
not
a charismatic leader who can make thousands hang on his every word,” Chatterji added. “That’s been tried, and we all know what happened.”
“Well, that wasn’t our project,” Rutherford reminded him smugly.
“Thank heaven. We want somebody with the intelligence to judge men and administer laws, but not out of a sense of his own importance. All zeal, no ego.”
“Okay.” Ellsworth-Howard printed out a sheet of figures and handed them to Chatterji. “There’s Operation Pension Plan for the old Enforcers. I feel crappy about it, but I don’t see what else we can do with ’em. Now, what’s this about a knight?”
“We need a New Man, Foxy, an enlightened warrior,” Rutherford cried.
“You mean no more big ugly buggers we can’t control?” Ellsworth-Howard grinned mirthlessly.
“Exactly,” Chatterji said. “And to make certain there are no further problems, the committee wants a completely original prototype. No breeding programs. They don’t want you picking through human children until you find one that fits the optimum morphology and then performing the immortality process on it, either. The results are too unpredictable.”
“It works fine on my shracking Preservers,” growled Ellsworth-Howard.
“Yes, of course, but they’re only Preservers,” Chatterji said hastily. “How much trouble can drones cause? But nothing is to be left to chance on this new design.” He lowered his voice. “The committee wants to see something engineered. Do you understand?”
What he was proposing Ellsworth-Howard do was horribly,
flagrantly illegal and had been for two centuries. As long as nobody actually said in so many words
We want you to make a recombinant
, however, it could be glossed over as something else, should anyone ever call Dr. Zeus or its employees to account, which of course would never happen.
“A tailored gene job?” Ellsworth-Howard asked uneasily, pulling at his lower lip. “Take a lot of work.”
“Absolutely. Field testing, too. And for that reason, the first prototypes will be given ordinary human life spans. No immortality process for them. That way if there’s a flaw in the design, we can dispose of the mistake. Nothing that might come back to haunt us later.”
“I’d better go back to the old
Homo crewkernensis
stuff, then, if you want it engineered. Lots more material to work with.” Ellsworth-Howard kneaded the buttonball and the image of a four-stranded DNA helix appeared on the screen. He began moving its segments about, doodling as it were with the material of life.
“Remember that now you’ll need something with a human face,” Chatterji told him. “No Neanderthal, obviously. And, er, see if you can eliminate that berserker tendency the Enforcers had. We want a man who can kill, but not somebody who enjoys it quite as much. Program in a bit of compassion. Of course,” Chatterji glanced at Rutherford, “that’ll be your job.”
“The Once and Future King, born of a vanished race,” chanted Rutherford. “The Messiah. The Superman. The Peaceful Warrior. The Hero with a Thousand Faces!”
“Don’t talk such rubbish.” Ellsworth-Howard squeezed in a formula and tilted his head, considering the results.
“It’s not rubbish. This is what I’m paid to do, remember? You develop his body, I’ll develop a psychological formula he can be programmed with, and we’ll produce something wonderful.” Rutherford seized up the jug and poured out a second round. They were raising their tankards for a toast when there came a horrifyingly loud commotion at the door. Chatterji and Rutherford turned, half expecting to see a mob of furious Enforcers brandishing stone axes. They beheld instead a trio of municipal firemen in yellow slickers.
“
Get it out
,” said the tallest, striding toward them with an air of command. The other firemen were carrying silver canisters, with which they proceeded to extinguish the fire.
“Right,” snarled the tall fireman. “You’re all under arrest for violation of municipal fire code three-seventeen subset five, paragraph one. And I’ve a special treat for the idiot who set the blaze in the first place. Got a jolly straitjacket warmed up just for you! Right, then, which of you did it?”
“This—this is bloody outrageous,” said Rutherford. “I have a permit for this fire, sir!”
“Oh, have we now?” The fireman thrust his face down close to Rutherford’s own.
“I do so!” Rutherford backed away slightly but did not quail. “This is a historical building and we are licensed re-creators.”
“Are you indeed? Where’s your tourists, then?” the fireman sneered. Chatterji put a hand on the fireman’s shoulder and pushed him back. The fireman grinned like a shark, preparing to roar the command that would have clapped Chatterji in restraints; but something about Chatterji’s expression stopped him cold.
“I don’t think you know who we are,” said Chatterji. “This is a professional matter.” He pulled out a little silver case and extracted an identification disc, which he held out for the fireman to see. The fireman blinked twice and stared at it. His face went rather pale.
“You should have said something!” he said. “Sorry—sorry, sir! Never happen again, sir. I’m a stockholder of yours, actually, sir, we’d have never in a million years thought of interrupting your work. Now we know you’re doing this sort of thing on the premises … just get their fire going again, lads, and least said soonest mended, eh?”
“Fair enough,” said Chatterji. Rutherford collapsed into his chair, blinking away angry tears. Ellsworth-Howard continued to frown at his screen, kneading the buttonball distractedly, ignoring the firemen as they hurriedly cleaned out the grate and relit the fire. Once the flame had leaped up again they vanished as quickly as they’d arrived.

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