The Sons of Heaven (23 page)

How the hell do mortals do it? And they do it all the time!

I feel like a battleground. Sir Henry must continually monitor and reprogram my biomechanicals to be certain they don’t sense the babies as intruders and abort them. The babies, of course, have their own biomechanicals who would fight back. I have nightmares of the little things building a fortress of steel inside me, firing cannons, assembling siege machinery … Let’s not even go into the absurdity of immortal cyborgs adjusting to midnight feedings,
baby clothes, toys, teething; nor the question of what sexual feelings I may or may not eventually have for someone who’s been in my womb, no matter how unrelated we are.

Edward is trying to help. He is trying very hard to be helpful, even with the strain he’s under, which is only that of an omnitemporal being who’s just been jolted out of his smugness by the discovery that there are some things in the universe beyond his control, ha ha, and I can’t even enjoy gloating about it.

“My dear, you are ravishing in my eyes,” he told me.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “Oh, God, don’t touch me.”

“Now, then,” he said coaxingly, parting the clothes to peer in at me where I crouched weeping in the back of the armoire, “if you’ll come out like a good girl, you’ll have a treat. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“Don’t you speak to me in that condescending manner!” I screamed. “How dare you?”

“My dear, this is simply a hormonal tide making you miserable,” he assured me. “You’re not yourself. It’s perfectly natural.”

“No, it isn’t!”

“Yes, dearest, it is. I’ve just been accessing Molesworth’s
The Encyclopedia of Maternity
, volumes one through twelve, which, in addition to containing numerous helpful suggestions for improving the state of mind of the mother-to-be, all too plainly delineates your present symptoms.” Edward dodged as I threw a shoe at him.

“You
enjoy
being a cyborg, don’t you?” I muttered.

“I will overlook that remark. My love, you know you can’t stay in the wardrobe.” Edward reached in, groping for me.

“I may as well,” I said, starting to cry again. “I can’t work. I can’t find anything to wear.”

“I’ve had something made up for you. Won’t you come out and see?” He got my wrist and tugged gently. “In addition to which, I’ve found something in the refrigerated pantry that the good Doctor Molesworth specifically lists as appealing to the appetites of prospective mothers. Remember our provisioning expedition to twentieth-century San Francisco?” He held up something above the shirt rack where I could see it, and waved it back and forth enticingly: a half-gallon carton of Double Fudge Death Wish ice cream.

“Oh, that’s so sweet of you,” I cried, overcome with remorse at the way I’d been yelling at him. “But, darling, I can’t possibly have any.”

“Content analysis reveals it to be rich in calcium,” he informed me. “Moreover it contains walnuts, which are an abundant source of fatty acids vital to
the development of brain cells—” He lunged while I was distracted and lifted me out into the room. I leaned my head on his shoulder and sobbed.

“I know,” I said, “but it’s full of Theobromos. I can’t have that while I’m pregnant, it wouldn’t be good for the babies.”

“Ah.” He looked chagrined. “Well, perhaps this will console you.” He set me down on the bed, and hopefully held up an amazing negligée: flame pink silk, cut more daringly than anything the heroine of the most pornographic romance novel might wear. I burst into fresh tears and didn’t even try to explain, just let him think I was crying in gratitude as he helped me into it.

“There we are,” he said soothingly. “We needn’t get up today, after all. We’ll put up our little feet, there’s a girl, and here are fresh handkerchiefs to wipe away our tears and—and would we like to watch a holo?”

“Yes,” I said, blotting my face. “I want to watch
Dracula.”

Which version, dearie? inquired Sir Henry
.

“I don’t know!”

Not to fret, now. Here, darlin’, we’ll just put on Evans Spielberg’s from 2105. Got good reviews at the time, aye
.

“Okay…”

Edward propped pillows solicitously and settled himself beside me, as Sir Henry lowered the holoprojector into the room and dimmed the lights. I could see the lines of strain around Edward’s eyes.

“That ice cream’s still sitting there,” I complained. “And we’re in linear time, so it’ll melt.”

“I’ll get it, my dear.”

“Here we are, omnipotent omnipresent immortals with fantastically augmented intelligence, and the minute we’re stuck back in linear time we forget a simple thing like ice cream melting.” I fell over into the pillows in my misery. “How are we going to
do
this, Edward?”

“Now, now,” said Edward, and looked down at the ice cream with sudden interest. “H’m! What an ambrosial fragrance. I’ll have a little of this, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay,” I said, distracted by the bloodred film credits coming up in midair and the overture to
Swan Lake
. Edward sat down again and, prizing the lid off the carton, dipped in the spoon he’d brought for me. He tasted cautiously. His pupils dilated.

“H’m!”

“Hush,” I told him crossly, snuggling against his shoulder as I watched the prologue describing the horrific circumstances of Vlad Tepes’s youth as a
hostage among the Turks. Edward ate Double Fudge Death Wish and watched, too.

His remarks for the next forty-five minutes were confined to statements like “You’d never get your victim to hold still for
that
unless you broke his back first,” and “That was an artery, for heaven’s sake! Where’s the blood?” When the action of the film moved to England, he began to giggle at the accents used by the American actors. At Dracula’s courtship of Mina, a tender scene I particularly liked, he all but fell over snorting with suppressed laughter.

“Do you mind?” I said, turning to glare.

“Sorry. Sorry, my love,” he said, scraping tentatively at the bottom of the carton with his spoon. I followed his gaze.

“Oh my God, have you eaten the whole half-gallon?”

“It would appear so,” he said musingly. “Wonderful stuff, this.”

“Fine! Now you’re intoxicated,” I said in indignation. “Didn’t your brilliant genius Recombinant brain tell you about what Theobromine does to us?”

“Yes,” he said. His pupils were enormous, black as Dracula’s cape. “But I rather enjoy new sensations. It’s not quite like being drunk. Far more pleasurable.”

“How nice for you,” I said, and turned my attention to the holo again. Edward set the empty carton and spoon aside and put his arm around me, pulling me close. He began to nuzzle my ear and I shivered and melted against him, even though we’d come to the scene where Dr. Van Helsing was shooting up heroin. “Mmmmwatch the movie …” I said.

“Now,
this
is intoxicating,” Edward murmured, letting his hands roam. He pressed his face against my skin and inhaled.

“Uh-huh,” I said. He buried his face in my hair.

“How I love your hair on the pillow, all disarrayed as you sleep,” he said indistinctly. “You draw your fists under your chin and scowl so, like a bad-tempered child. When you open your eyes to me, there’s a bloom on them, after deep dreams, as though you were blind. Oh, little girl, I’d buy all your matches. I’d carry you home with me, and warm you, and you wouldn’t die after all …”

“No, of course not,” I said, and then: “What?”When had
he
ever lain awake staring at
me
?

“And I love your accent,” he said.

“I don’t speak with an accent.”

“Yes, you do. Cinema Standard and, when you’re sleepy or tired, you do just the faintest violence to your aitches.” He wrapped me in his arms and lifted
me abruptly, turning me to him, and leaned down until we were nose to nose. “Two and a half days. The fifteenth to the seventeenth of March, 1863. That was all we had … and yet, after the first hour, I could have drawn your little body in chalk, sculpted it in ivory, so perfectly I knew you. What horror I felt, to discover I loved you …”

I blinked at him. This was not, I need hardly mention, anything like his usual style.

“Because you thought you might have to kill me,” I said.

“Mm.” He nodded. “But also because … one must avoid entanglements of that kind in the service, lest it impair one’s efficiency… damn them. I knew what you were from the moment I saw you. I ought to have caught you up and ridden away to safety, and Whitehall be damned. All those wasted years … running about with a sword trying to end the slave trade by myself, like a boy out of Marryat’s books. And then the Society’s tool, filling graves for them. Why did I never understand …”

“That it was vanity?” I said.

“Mm, but so much worse—” His gaze sharpened, tried to focus, and he pulled himself together and made an extra effort to speak distinctly. “Delusion. Because, the thing is—human progress begins, not with one lone man with a weapon, however heroic. Nor with subtle governments, be they never so altruistic. It begins with a man and his wife in bed … and … how could I ever hope to govern humanity, without having been even that human?

“I will serve
life,”
he cried, and kissed me forcefully. “I will love my wife and my children, and—and do everything I couldn’t do when I was a mortal man, and—all the sentimental commonplaces will have a glorious new meaning, and—”

Oh, my God, he’s finally got a clue
, I thought, so overwhelmed with tenderness for him I forgot about the movie. But the lash of his introspection swung around and caught me a good one. For after all …

How human was
I?
Haughty cyborg brat. Bad-tempered child, prize to be carried off. Tragic adolescent perpetually mourning her lost love. Reactive victim. That’s all I’ve been, for millennia. Now the long drama is over, do I have the faintest idea what to do with a happy ending? How can I? Incomplete immature thing that I am, am I even capable of changing? And yet I must, now. I found myself trembling in panic.

“I think I’d like to learn how to garden,” said Edward thoughtfully. He looked down, surprised, as I clung to him. Nicholas, in his genuine concern for
my soul, had comforted me. Alec, with thoughtless kindness, had offered me rescue from my eternal slavery. But what was
this
, flowing out of Edward like light, as he lifted my chin and gazed into my eyes? Was it strength?

Horrible violence on the holoscreen, the air was drenched with gore, and we were so oblivious it might have been a pastoral scene with butterflies. Edward flooded his consciousness into mine, and what with all the Theobromos and hormones it was a wonder our brains didn’t melt.

Dracula went about his awful business and was liberated at last. He floated in a golden apotheosis to heaven, redeemed by love, but we didn’t notice a thing until the inhuman comedy fell silent and the end credits rolled.

The botany cabin has undergone a change in the past few months. It had previously a wild, overgrown sort of look; now it has the lush appearance of a Victorian hothouse. Potted ferns, sago palms, and bromeliads rise in green luxuriance, many-hued begonias droop from hanging baskets, little citrus trees proudly display green and red and golden fruit. Boxwood obelisks and topiary are arranged in careful patterns. The air is rich with the heavy perfume of gardenias.

Mendoza is reclining in a cushioned deck chair in the midst of it all, draped with shawls, and she, too, has undergone a change. The second trimester is nearly concluded.

“I’m not sure I can relax in here, darling,” remarks Mendoza. Edward, who has been busily clipping a rosemary bush into what he feels is pleasing symmetry, lowers his shears and looks at her in concern.

“But this is the closest we can manage to supplying the calmative effects of Nature,” says Edward, “as recommended by Dr. Molesworth. Short of putting in to some island, which may very well be a primeval Eden but may also be infested with tropical diseases, wild animals, and hominid savages.”

“They couldn’t hurt us,” says Mendoza. “You know that perfectly well.”

“But I should prefer to avoid drawing attention to ourselves,” Edward replies.

“Couldn’t I just get up and water the maize cultivars?” asks Mendoza.

“Dearest, your little projects must wait—” Edward tells her, commanding the misting system to activate. Mendoza looks black daggers at him.

“It’s not a
little project,”
she says. “It’s an attempt to produce a perfect grain
to feed the starving masses of mortals, and I’ve been working on it for centuries. Don’t you refer to it in that dismissive tone of voice, as though it were a—a needlework sampler!”

Edward orders the soothing music flowing from the ship’s speakers to drop down a decibel level or two. “My love, I never meant to imply anything of the sort. Of course it’s a laudable quest! Though I do feel I ought to point out that if a cultivar with adequate lysine levels has eluded your grasp thus far—to say nothing of the fact that there is no appearance in the historical record, prior to the year 2355, of any such marvelous gift to mankind—”

“Oh, shut up!” she snaps, blinking back tears.

“Very well,” says Edward stiffly, and, noticing a Duke of Wellington fuchsia that doesn’t quite meet his standards of harmonious proportion, advances on it with the shears.

“All right, I’m sorry. But don’t prune it back like that, you impossible—ai!” She grips the arm of her chair until the wood cracks.

“My love?” Edward is with her instantly.

“What the hell are they doing in there, playing hockey?” Mendoza gasps.

#χλ∊σ∗κγ∗ Scared!

Edward stiffens as though electrified.

“Did you hear—?”

“What?” she looks at him, alarmed.

≌%8ωιλια∗∗Where??

“That’s Alec!” Edward whispers. “Can’t you hear?”

“No!”

∗∗∗νιχηOλ∗∗OW!

“That was Nicholas!”

“You mean they’re transmitting?” Mendoza looks incredulous.

∗∗∗ασμηαρ∗∗Stop kick!

Damnation, the boys are online
, yells the Captain. Mendoza jumps at his sudden voice and Edward distinctly hears twin screams of alarm from within her body, has a sense of wildly flailing limbs.