The Sons of Heaven (12 page)

Edward turns his face, sees the Captain, and the image has its intended effect: for a split second he looks terrified. He moves defensively and the motion sets him turning gently through the blue fluid. As he turns he stares about him, realizing where he must be. By the time he completes his revolution and faces the Captain, he is smiling, narrow-eyed.

Why, Captain, whatever could you mean?
transmits Edward.

I mean you got exactly five minutes to bring my Alec back from that site you got him stowed in, or I’ll make it so damned hot for you you’ll wish you was still dead
.

Hmm. You can’t mean that literally; you won’t damage this body you’ve taken such pains to keep alive. And what a job you’ve done! I feel quite fit. Is that my missing leg, reattached? My compliments, Captain. You’ve worked wonders for me. I must be very nearly immortal by now
.

That’s Alec’s leg, damn you! And you ain’t immortal yet, laddie. I ain’t going ahead with the last step until I get what I’m after. Give me the code to access that site. Let me rescue my boy, and you’ll get yer bloody immortality
.

But brother Alec’s quite safe where he is, Captain. Likewise brother Nicholas. Edward’s smile widens as he looks out at Mendoza. What file location could be safer? My own true love bears them, as it were, in the womb of her memory. However, even she doesn’t know how to set them free. My safety precaution, of course
.

Give me that code, you lying son of a whore, or you’ll be sorry
.

I doubt that very much. Checkmate, Captain, old man! Now, why don’t you get on with the business at hand?

The Captain has hoped to avoid this moment, but is driven to a last, untested resort. He glares at Edward, who is shaken by a sudden spasm. Edward’s right hand clenches, rises to his face, strikes his chin lightly.

What—

You been in that tank months, my lad. Don’t you think I might have had the chance to install a little extra subroutine, whilst I was a-mending you,
in all that time? Something to control yer motor reflexes, like? Just as a bargaining point?

Edward’s eyes blaze at him. Slowly, with tremendous effort, the hand unclenches, the arm lowers.

Oh, bugger. Well, it was worth a shot
.

Don’t think you can trifle with me! I want life again, Captain, and I’ll have it, Edward transmits sharply. I’ve work to do in this weary world. You have my word as a gentleman I’ll release Alec and Nicholas … as soon as we’ve made flesh to house them
.

Mendoza turns and murmurs uneasily in her sleep.

Come now, Captain. We don’t want to wake my dear wife. Get on with it!

The Captain indulges in some language that would blister the paint off a warship’s hull. He growls assent, an ominous noise that seems to come from everywhere within the ship. A pair of padded clamps emerge from the wall of the tank and seize Edward’s head in a secure grip, and cables snake out through the fluid and secure his limbs.

The specialized servounit descends into the tank and moves straight toward his face, extending its sharp-edged probe. Edward struggles, but is held fast.

So it’s a checkmate, is it? Sure you don’t want to give me that code, Commander Bell-Fairfax, sir?

Edward closes his eyes tight. The Captain urges the probe nearer. It whirrs and Edward’s eyes open to regard the little razor edges turning, each in its own clever pivot.

It’s a bluff, damn you. You don’t dare injure me
.

Did I say I was going to injure you, Commander? Not I; though if I took it into my head to do that, I could repair any damage I done good as new, so I reckon you’d better not tempt me
.

But it might come to just that, mightn’t it, Captain? Be certain you know exactly when to pull back. Perhaps you can repair anything you do to my body, but what if you damage my mind? Suppose I go mad and forget how to retrieve Alec? It might happen that way, you know
.

Bloody hell, boy. If I was a kindly old pirate like Long John Silver, I’d admire the nerve of you. But I’m a machine, Edward, ain’t you forgetting? I got programming tells me what to do, not feelings. I’m supposed to protect my boy. I want that code! And if I have to hurt you to get it, there ain’t nothing will stop me once I start. You see?

Edward controls his panic. Why, Captain. The minute I gave it up you’d lock me
away somewhere unpleasant and give this body back to Alec. Consider my choices: eternal life at the cost of a little discomfort versus whatever you’d do to me once I’d lost my tactical advantage. He masters himself enough to widen his eyes and, in a fair approximation of Alec’s voice, transmits: Please, Captain sir, I’m still your boy! Even if you did let Edward kill me. You wouldn’t really let him lose me forever, would you?

It is a moment before the Captain responds.

You little bastard. You won’t give an inch, will you? Yer going to force my hand. Well, I’ll just follow orders, like the honest seaman I am. I’ll get on with the immortality process, by thunder. But unless you want to go through it fully conscious, you’ll give me that code now
.

Do your worst; it won’t be enough
.

I reckon we’ve struck, then, says the Captain grimly. Here’s yer immortality, damn you
.

He activates the probe. Edward stiffens in horror as it seeks tentatively and then cuts deftly into its target. After a moment he is unable to keep silent, and altogether it is a good thing that Mendoza is sedated and can’t hear him.

Three times, the Captain pauses in the procedure to inquire whether Edward will give him the code. Edward is unable to reply coherently, but he will not yield.

By the third time his voice, which has lost its dignity and its control, so much resembles young Alec’s that the Captain would be weeping if he were not a machine. Still, not until the probe has traveled halfway to the brain does the Captain concede, grant Edward victory and merciful unconsciousness.

I just broke a table in half.

Clearly I am not quite myself yet.

There are, for example, surgically tidy holes in my memory. I know certain unspeakable things happened to me, at a place called—no, can’t remember it. Can’t remember anything about that. It might have happened to someone else, as far as my memory is concerned.

Yet other memories have returned with disgusting clarity: I know that I’m a Crome generator, burdened with freakish precognition. Look at me, blazing like a damned dish of cherries jubilee. Or the Ghost of Christmas Past.

What happened?

I remember staring, fascinated, at the Indian maize analysis. The eternal quest, for fields stretching to far horizons, kernels bright-striped in all possible colors, gritstone meal feeding multitudes that thrive …

Unbidden before my sight came an image: the figure of a man woven together out of grain stalks, bound with bright ribbon, his featureless face an enigma.

I rubbed my eyes. The image meant nothing to me.

Abruptly, Sir Henry was standing at my side. He looked somber. “I’ve work for you, dearie,” he said. “Come with me.”

“Okay,” I said, and started to obey, but the figures drew me in again as soon as I turned my face to the screen. Sir Henry had to order the credenza to save and shut itself down. I sat blinking at it until he waved his hand in front of my face—how humiliating!—and then allowed myself to be led away through the ship.

We went to the infirmary and there was my darling’s body, floating in the blue light. I went at once to the window. Who did I think I saw?

Why, the one constant in my patchwork memory. We’d always been together. I could dimly remember when we walked in the garden of a Tudor manor house, though that had been a long time ago, and there was something sad about the memory. I had vague impressions, too, that we’d worn the clothing of many other eras. That was all I knew for certain. I had an uneasy feeling that bad things had happened to us, and that
Alec
was only one of his names …

Sir Henry had followed me. He put his mouth close to my ear, as though I were deaf. “Would you like him to come out of there now?”

No lapse in my attention then. “Oh,” I cried. “Yes, please! How do we get him out?”

“I’ll drain the tank, and you get undressed,” he replied. “Then you go in and help him. You’ll know what to do.”

I hurried out of my clothing as the bioregenerant medium gurgled away, and Alec’s body sank down through the tank until it lay in a fetal curve on the tile floor. It looked blue and drowned, but the red scars from the augmentation surgery had already vanished, healed without trace. The spiraling tattoo pattern across his shoulders was pulsing like blue neon. To my joy I saw he was already trembling, one shaky hand was groping across the tiles.

“Alec!” I splashed in, fell to my knees beside him. “Up, up, come on, my love!”

Such joy. I got my arms around his chest and hauled him into a sitting position. He was turning his head blindly, as the thick blue fluid streamed down from his face, and his lank hair was dark with it. Even in such a moment, he was beautiful to me. Deftly I slipped behind him and performed a Heimlich maneuver.

His head reared up and he spat out a tremendous gob of the bioregenerant. Lurching forward onto his hands and knees he began to cough, violently expelling the stuff from his lungs; I pounded helpfully on his back, yelling, “That’s it, darling!”

He pushed himself upright, threw his head back, drew in a first whooping breath as I clung to him, laughing and crying. He began to laugh, too, wild gurgling laughter, gasping as his lungs continued to clear. Raising his fists at the ceiling of the chamber he howled: “LIIIIIIIFE!”

Lowering his arms he wrapped them around me and held me tight, swaying back and forth, gulping for breath a moment; then he bent to kiss me. I was so happy.

“I’ve missed you terribly, Alec, you have no idea, but you’re all right now
and we’ll never lose each other again—” I babbled between kisses. He rose with me into a crouch and stood slowly, and all mortal clumsiness had gone forever from the motion of his body. I didn’t know, yet, addled as I was, what was different about him.

But he must have been acutely aware of the change. He stood still a moment, his eyes wide. “Great God,” he said, his voice hoarse and hushed with awe. “So this is—”

“This is how you’re supposed to be, Alec,” I told him in my charmingly vacant way. “Good as new!”

He looked down at me, such speculation in his eyes.

I led him out to the shower, chattering away like a blissful idiot. He started at the first touch of spray on his changed skin; then opened his mouth and drank, seemingly fascinated by the taste of water. I cupped my hands and washed him, sluicing away the last of the bioregenerant from his body. He seemed greedy for sensation, opened each of the bottles of shampoo and soap to inhale their fragrances, gleeful.

When we stepped out, he seized the nearest towel and buried his face in it, became so involved in some mysterious worship of terry cloth that I had to take another towel and rub him dry. Oh, he liked that; liked it even better when I brought his silk robe and wrestled him into it. He noticed the infirmary cabin beyond, and barely let me tie the robe closed before he went bolting out there to run his hands over the blanket on the bed, seize up the glass vials and bottles to admire their sparkle. When I brought him his torque, he actually put out his tongue and
tasted it
before letting me slip it around his neck; exclaimed over the bright gleam of his wedding ring when I put it back on his finger.

He was beginning to laugh again, and I laughed with him, so giddy I had forgotten to dry myself or put on a stitch. Sir Henry, who had discreetly disappeared, was making polite throat-clearing noises to give me a clue, but I was oblivious.

“Ah,” yelled my darling, noticing the door. Only a split second he fumbled with the lock before he ran out on deck. There he stopped, transfixed with amazement. The twilit sea still gleaming, evening star and new moon bright, a million stars, yes, I’d have stared too if I were seeing them for the first time with an immortal’s senses.

He caught his breath. He was trembling. At last he spoke.

“‘… Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings
,

Still choiring to the young-ey’d cherubins;

Such harmony is in immortal souls;

But, whilst the muddy vesture of decay

Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.’”

By the end of the Shakespeare quote he was shouting, his glorious voice without strain echoing from the masts and spars cathedral-high above us.

I could have stood there forever, just smiling at my monster through happy tears; but he turned to me as if for confirmation and
then
he noticed I was still naked. He advanced on me, caught me up in his arms with a whoop of triumph and bore me inside to the bed. “Now,” he yelled gleefully, “my love, we’ll change the world!”

And there, above me, poised, he halted: frowned. “You’re hurt,” he said, perhaps as it occurred to him that I was on fire with Crome’s radiation.

“No, no, Alec, I’m fine,” I told him, stroking back his wet hair. As though I could have concealed the shame of my impairment! “See? And you’re fine, too.”

But he placed a tentative hand on my forehead. “Just—there—”

I suppose he didn’t know then the words for what was wrong, but he must have been able to see it clearly enough. He got that determined look on his face, the one that means he
knows
he’s right regardless of reason or reality. He took my face in his hands and pushed into the wrecked place in my mind, which did hurt. I cried out once; then surrendered, as I always have, and he was inside me in an entirely new way.