The Sons of Heaven (11 page)

“Bedtime, dearie,” he reminds her.

“What?”

“Bedtime. Look! There’s yer bed and nightie. And, see? Coxinga’s bringing cocoa. You get undressed now like a good lass.”

“Okay,” she says, and takes off her clothes. The Captain watches her intently, not because he is a lecherous old Artificial Intelligence, but because in this, as in all things nowadays, she tends to focus on one action so closely she forgets anything else.

But she manages to put on her nightgown and climb into the white infirmary bed without further prompting tonight; accepts the proffered cup of cocoa from another of the skeletal creatures and drinks it down. The creature reaches out to take back the empty cup and busies itself picking up her clothes from the places she dropped them. She has focused on the man in the tank again, staring at him with wide black eyes.

The Captain sighs.

“Go to sleep now, darlin’,” he tells her. Her eyes close and she relaxes completely, sinking back into the pillows. Coxinga pulls up her blankets for him.

The Captain stands regarding Mendoza thoughtfully. After a moment he extends a yearning hand and places it on her brow, as flames leap up through his illusory fingers.

His gesture of affection is not meant for her, though he’s quite fond of Mendoza, in his way; Artificial Intelligences are just as capable of devotion as
human beings are. She’s a well-behaved and obedient cyborg, but what really matters is that she loves
his boy
. Somewhere behind her brow, in a locked file, his boy’s consciousness is trapped. So is that of a similarly disembodied gentleman named Nicholas Harpole. Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax shut them both in there, and only Edward knows the code to release them.

The Captain has taken care of Alec since Alec was five years old. He’s not quite sure what the other two entities are. They were once living men, earlier versions of Alec produced by the same Company responsible for creating him from recombinant DNA. When they had served the Company’s purpose and been killed, an electromagnetic recording of their personalities—memories, emotions, skills—had gone into storage in their files and remained there, inactive, until Alec accidentally downloaded them into his own brain while fleeing from the Company into the deep past.

The result was a remarkable case of multiple-personality disorder for Alec and a continuing logistical nightmare for the Captain. The only thing on which the three gentlemen wholeheartedly agreed was the fact that they loved Mendoza, who had known each of them in their successive incarnations.

Nicholas Harpole, who lived in the sixteenth century and was a scholar and heretic, managed to adjust somehow to massive culture shock and loss of the foundation on which his religious beliefs stood; but then he was an extraordinary man.

So was Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

Edward lived in the nineteenth century and was a political agent for the British Empire. He absorbed all the virtues and most of the vices of that massive institution, along with the cold-blooded practicality that enabled him to do his very unpleasant job. He died heroically in the service of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, an earlier version of Dr. Zeus Incorporated. His subsequent discovery that they lied to him most of his brief life has not been received well and, unfortunately for his creators, Edward has read
Frankenstein
.

He doesn’t think much of his other selves, either.

He dismisses Nicholas as a medieval zealot, limited by ignorance and religious superstition. Cybergenius Alec is in his opinion a dunce, the inevitable product of a soft and degenerate age, and worse: for Alec had been naïve enough to smuggle weapons to a particularly foolhardy group of rebels, and the result had been the destruction of an entire colony on Mars. Hence Alec’s flight, with technology he’d stolen from Dr. Zeus, into the past.

Edward’s perception of these other selves has decided him that
he
alone is fit to inhabit Alec’s body. His effort to achieve this state of independence has
been partly responsible for the accident that brought him, maimed and broken, to the regeneration tank, and Mendoza to her present state of impairment, and Alec and Nicholas to … well, to the place they now inhabit.

But even if the accident had not occurred, Edward’s efforts to kill Alec should have been in vain. Edward is, after all, only a recording, nothing more than a program Alec himself is running, in disassociation response to the psychic trauma of having two additional lifetimes thrust into his memory. Or is he? Why can’t Edward be shut off?

And what exactly has happened to Alec and Nicholas?

The room has no windows and no doors.

No amount of cozy décor can make up for that fact, not the paneled walls, not the leather-upholstered chairs, not the antique lamp with its pool of yellow light, not the rows and rows of beautifully bound books. Not even the endlessly resupplied decanter of fine old brandy.

The two men in the room are identical in every respect to the man floating in the regeneration tank, except that they wear clothing: black subsuits, the last garments they donned before being trapped in this place. There is no clue to tell them how long they’ve been here. Neither hair nor nails have grown, and neither of them needs a shave. Despite the fact that they have emptied the decanter more times than they have bothered to count, no bodily functions have demanded their attention.

One of the men is sprawled on the floor, holding a glass of brandy on his chest. The other man sits in one of the chairs, holding a book from which he reads aloud. He has a beautiful voice, a smooth tenor like a well-tuned violin.

“… ‘The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”‘“

He falls silent. Without a word Alec passes him the glass of brandy. He takes it and drinks; refills it from the decanter, and watches gloomily as the level in the decanter rises back as if by magic.

After a moment, Alec sits up and looks at him. “Is that it? That’s the end of the book?”

“Ay,” says Nicholas, taking a sip of brandy.

“But… but Jim doesn’t sound happy,” says Alec. “What’s he mean, he wouldn’t go back to Treasure Island? It’s the defining event of his whole life. He’d rather go back and serve drinks at the Admiral Benbow?”

“Belike he was wise enough to know when he was well off,” Nicholas replies. “Thou went’st adventuring, and see to what dismal end thou art brought.”

Alec shivers.

“It’s not the end,” he says quickly. “Edward’ll let us out. The Captain will make him let us out. We won’t be in here forever! It hasn’t even been nine months yet. Has it?”

In fact it has been longer than nine months, and both of them know that perfectly well. Nicholas sighs.

“No, surely not,” he lies. He is more resigned than Alec to the idea of being trapped here. He has been dead longer, after all.

“And when we get out, man … “Alec smacks his fist into the upholstery of the chair. “Edward’ll be sorry.”

Nicholas just nods, though he wonders uneasily whether Edward is not already sorry. For the—hundredth?—time, he looks over at the shelf where the broken brandy glass sits. Edward had provided them with a matched set when he trapped them here, but there had been something like an earthquake within a few minutes of their arrival. One of the glasses had been shattered, the very fabric of the room had flexed and seemed on the verge of tearing apart before sudden quiet had returned. It had taken them hours to pick up all the books from the floor.

They haven’t discussed the earthquake much since, because there is a real possibility that its occurrence meant something went terribly wrong with Edward’s plan and they are locked in here for eternity. Nicholas watches now as Alec leaps to his feet and punches the chair again.

“I wish that was him,” says Alec hoarsely. “I’d like to knock that superior smile off his face, like
this—”
He punches the chair once more, harder, and harder again, until it slams backward into the wall. He seizes it, ready to break the thing into kindling.

“Peace, thou!” Nicholas rises to his feet. Alec turns as if to fight, but Nicholas catches his fists.

“I want to kill him,” gasps Alec, shaking. “I never wanted to kill anybody in my life, but I’d like to kill
him
. One stupid mistake on Mars and I snuffed out three thousand people, but nothing,
nothing
ever gets rid of Edward Alton
Bell-Fairfax. Hey, do you suppose we’re in Hell?” He pulls free, grinning bitterly at Nicholas. “Mr. Puritan Christian?”

“We might be,” says Nicholas, in a low voice.

“At least I’d finally be where I belonged, yeah?” says Alec. “Not quite what I’d expected, though. I should have got here in a fiery crash or, or a special state execution, and there ought to be demons queued up to eat my liver for all eternity or something, under flaming brass letters ten feet high spelling out ‘The Hangar Twelve Man Gets What He Deserves!’Instead, I got this shracking library. And you. I don’t know how you fit into the picture at all.”

“No more do I,” says Nicholas. He stares over Alec’s shoulder at the dark wall, and attempts to summon faith. He can’t. His time in this room has not reconciled him with his God.

“I used to think if I died, it’d make up for everything I’d done wrong,” says Alec, slumping into his chair. “But things just got worse, didn’t they? Because I failed Mendoza. Edward’s got her all to himself now, and he’ll do whatever he wants with her.”

“I have failed her twice,” says Nicholas. Alec looks up at his bleak face and regrets his words.

“Though he’d never actually hurt her,” he says. “Really. He’s a bastard, but Edward wouldn’t do that. He’d take care of her. Look, this isn’t helping either of us. Why don’t you read again?”

He hands Nicholas the brandy glass. Nicholas sighs, goes to the shelves and peers at the ranged titles a moment before selecting one. He returns to his chair and opens the book. Clearing his throat, he begins:

“The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, by Charles Darwin …”

The Captain lifts his hand from Mendoza’s brow and sighs. Where, in that wrecked storehouse of memories, is his boy? He extinguishes the lamps in the room. Its sole illumination now is the glowing blue tank and Mendoza’s blue fire, like the most outré of nursery lights, and he scans his systems to determine that all is well on board the
Captain Morgan
. Yes, everything’s shipshape; but satellite data is coming in to warn him of a storm approaching this part of what will one day be the Atlantic Ocean. He lets his visual image dissolve, and turns his attention to setting a course for safe anchorage.

The great ship claps on sail, tacks and glides away through the night.

Night again. No storm now, in fact the
Captain Morgan’s
becalmed on a mirror of burning stars that move only slightly more than the stars overhead.

Encouraged by this extreme stability, the Captain has chosen this night for the ultimate step in Edward’s immortality process.

He has prepared the modified 4/15 support package to insert in the brain. It will be a complicated surgery, requiring removal of preexisting hardware through the nasal fossa and installation of the support package the same way.

Once it’s in place, two things will happen: the process of augmentation of Edward’s mental powers will begin, and a small pulsing time transcendence field will be generated within the cavity of his skull. Blood will flow in and out; nothing else ever can, from that moment, and if the blood supply should be contaminated or cut off, the support package will substitute its own analogous fluid, which will, endlessly recycled, keep the brain alive in a fugue state until repair becomes possible.

As soon as tonight’s work is completed, the biomechanicals within Edward’s body will finish the process of transforming his mortal skull to ferroceramic and he will be, to all intents and purposes, as immortal as Mendoza. Indeed, he’ll be superior; she was made from an ordinary human child. Edward, like Alec and Nicholas, is not human. His brain has greater capacity, better connections, and a host of other engineered improvements. His body, likewise, surpasses the human model in a dozen subtle ways.

Mendoza is fast asleep in her bed in the infirmary, mildly sedated with a theobromine derivative. The Captain would prefer she sleep through the operation, for a variety of reasons.

This is the night on which the Captain would have fulfilled his program to the greatest extent possible, and perhaps only a machine could appreciate the sense of frustration he is experiencing. But for Edward’s treachery his boy would have been, finally and forever,
safe
.

He still has one shot left in his locker, one hope to restore Alec’s consciousness to its own body. He materializes, now, before the blue-glowing tank in the infirmary, but his form is shifting and indistinct, a screen of woven fire with a vague man-shape. What will intimidate Edward? After a moment’s thought he solidifies into his usual appearance, but wearing the uniform of the mid-nineteenth-century Royal Navy, an admiral’s rig, with the added touch that his beard and hair are wilder, blacker, coiling like poisonous snakes.

Wake up, you bastard
.

Edward’s eyes open, so pale a blue that through the cerulean bioregenerant they look colorless as glass. They attempt to focus; squeeze shut as disorientation overwhelms, open again. He bares his formidable teeth.

Mendoza!
Edward sees through the glass the sleeping figure in the white bed, and flails an arm in an attempt to reach her.

I salvaged Mendoza. She’s a strong little girl; she’ll mend even after what you done to her. You’d best save yer worries for yer own damned hide
.