The Sons of Heaven (3 page)

As Tiara got older and more skillful she learned to milk the big beasts into a jar, and would carry it back to her slave with scarcely a drop spilled. Then they’d feast on the cream, and with his throat refreshed the slave could go on with the astonishing stories, about Jason and the Argonauts, about Odysseus, about Rama and Sita.

Tiara loved her slave. With just a little food and care he became much nicer to look at: the wound in his head healed over and he regained use of one of his arms, dragging himself upright to lean against a wall. Nor was he loud, as the big people were, but soft-spoken, and as self-effacing as the stupids that served Quean Barbie. Tiara assumed this was because he was a slave.

The only trouble she would ever have with him was when he would cry. Sometimes he’d begin to cry and be unable to stop, and shouting at him or stamping her feet never helped; so she learned those were the times to play Mummy, and kiss the tears from his cheeks (she liked the salty flavor) and stroke his hair and sing to him. It was a strange feeling for Princess Tiara, rocking him in her arms until he’d wept himself quiet. It made her Memory come, flooding her little mind with images and words she’d never imagined. It made her heart ache.

How long does it take to tell all of the Ramayana? The Iliad? The Kalevala? All the stories of the Arabian Nights? The Cattle Raid of Cooley? Every myth and legend an immortal mind might compile in two thousand years of careful work? And telling them once would never be enough, for the devouring attention of a child. There are always stories to be told over and over, until the listener repeats them with the teller, pause for pause, breath for breath, word for ceaseless word, unappeased, unappeasable.

Quean Barbie, up in her warm chamber with her captive suitors and her silent attendants, watched game shows and soap operas and Elvis holoes. Down in the dark, Princess Tiara drank of a different brew, began to grow into another kind of Quean entirely.

Her tastes did form around romances, as she grew. Every tale of chivalry and passion the slave had ever sung when he’d been a troubadour, she loved: Tristan and Isolde, Arthur and Guinevere, Pelleas and Melisande. Every jongleur ditty about Robin and Marian. All the Shakespeare love plays, acted out in the slave’s beautiful voice and with the gestures of his one good hand.
Heathcliff and Cathy, Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester enchanted Tiara. When he recited Alfred Noyes’s
The Highwayman
for her, she wanted it every night after that for years.

Princess Tiara grew small high breasts, and began to develop a certain interest in the slave’s anatomy. No use; he couldn’t make those parts work, damaged as he was, and he explained that it wasn’t good for a little girl to start that sort of play too early anyway. Carefully, phrasing with exquisite tact, he made a request. She agreed, and the next night she went down to the farmhouse and rummaged around in the big man’s bedroom as he slept. She returned in triumph with a pair of thin cotton dress trousers, and helped the slave pull them on over his nakedness. Once his man parts were covered she forgot all about them. He did look so funny, with the big baggy trousers rolled up on his thin legs!

But the clothes made him happy, and Tiara liked making her slave happy.

Now that she had breasts, now that he had trousers, the long hours of talk changed. There were still stories, but he also told her about History. He had lived a long time and knew a great deal, and he knew how to make it interesting for her. Every king or emperor or president had had a great lady who’d loved him, after all, and a story could easily be related in terms of what Theodosia had bid Justinian to do, or Eleanor bid Franklin. And he made the big world seem such a wonderful place! It was quite a shock of connection, the day Tiara realized that all the stories he’d been telling her hadn’t happened inside the hill but must, of course, have happened in the big world outside.

Yes, that was a jump into another dimension. None of those people in the stories lived in cold rooms full of trash, or waded shivering through dewfall to steal food. There were elegant places where rain didn’t cascade down the walls in winter, where things were fixed when they broke, where nobody had to hide in the darkness.

“I want to go out there,” she informed the slave.

“I wish we could, dearest Princess,” said the slave wistfully. “We could walk in the beautiful city of London, under the blossoming trees in Regent’s Park. We could stay at Claridge’s. We could dress splendidly and go to an elegant restaurant. I would wave my hand for the seller of roses and he’d come, just like that, and lay his wares at your feet. A waiter would bring us champagne. All the men passing by would fall in love with you.”

“And would I be more beautiful than their dreams and hearts’ desires?” Tiara asked.

“Oh, yes, child,” the slave replied, and stretched out his hand and found her
face. He traced its contours, the tiny nose and chin of exquisite delicacy, the high-domed brow and enormous eyes. “Oh, Princess, you’ll break hearts in your time.”

“Why can’t we go right now?” Tiara pleaded.

“Time,” the slave replied. “I’m not at my best, I’m afraid, and you’re still so little, dearest. One fine day, though, you’ll be a grand lady; and if I’m lucky, one day my legs will repair themselves. Then, if you’ll lead me by the hand, we might go away together.”

“What will it take to make your legs work again?”

The slave smiled wryly. “A few months in a regeneration tank would do it, but we haven’t got one of those, have we, my love? I suppose if we could get room service in here we’d have a chance, and wouldn’t that be nice? Regular meals, so dear Tiara could grow tall and poor old Lewis’s biomechanicals had the fuel they needed to repair themselves.”

“You mean we need more food,” she said, focusing sharply.

“Mm-hm. Vitamins, minerals, and iron,” he said airily, draping his arm around her. “We’ll have them someday, I’m sure. Coquille St. Jacques, oysters creole, curried shrimp. Crème brulée, asparagus soufflé, café au lait. You’ll be lovely in watered silk and pearls, and all the splendid gallants will fall on their knees to beg you for the honor of just one dance with the rare and remarkable Princess Tiara Parakeet.”

She snuggled in under his arm, but her mind was still busy. “Will you be very jealous, when I have lots of lovers?” she wanted to know.

“Oh, a bit, I suppose,” he said, leaning his cheek against the top of her head. “But, really, how could I be greedy? I can’t keep you all to myself, a beauty like you.”

He had begun to hum a little tune, a waltz composed in a place and time very far from that dark room stacked with the moldering dead, when Tiara looked up at him and asked: “Have you ever loved anybody besides me?”

The waltz trailed off into silence.

“Once upon a time,” the slave said quietly.

There was a silence again, and Tiara prodded him. “Once upon a time?”

The slave drew a deep breath, and in the clear voice with which he had recited before kings at Tara he began: “This is a story about two lovers. It is the best love story I know, because it’s true.”

“Star-crossed lovers?” Tiara wanted to know.

“Oh, yes, terribly. They suffered torment, and prison, and death. Nations and powers conspired to keep them apart. But they always found each other
again, you see? And at last they went away together and were never parted anymore.

“Once upon a time … a little girl sat in a cell like this one. It was dark and cold in there, and the little girl was frightened and all alone.”

“But
I’m
not alone,” said Tiara.

“No, dearest. You have me. But this little girl didn’t have anybody, yet.

“Her name was Mendoza.”

The man sets the Elephant back in its place, picks up an ivory Pawn. He reflects that there had been a certain political agenda in the mind of the carver; all the white figures are clearly agents of nineteenth-century imperialism. The ivory Pawn could be a controleur, a company store accountant, a missionary: high collar and hat, pointed beard and mustaches. In pose he is stiff as a wooden idol, he has none of the dynamic lines of the other pieces. Only his face is alive. His teeth are bared in a grimace of Viking ferocity, his staring eyes round with malice
.

The Benthamites had finally come for Forest Lawn.

It wasn’t the first time open season had been declared on a cemetery. Centuries earlier, San Francisco had decided her civic space was at a premium and relocated her founding population (who were in no condition to protest the change of address) to a potato field some miles south of her borders. The former San Franciscans in question, however, were granted neat new plots and crypts, in fact a nice necropolis of their very own, in compensation for being evicted.

Not so the residents of Forest Lawn in Hollywood. They might reasonably have expected that politics could no longer touch them, but they’d have been in for a surprise.

The Benthamites followed the tenets of Jeremy Bentham, nineteenth-century social philosopher and reformer. Most of his ideas were fairly radical, for their era: utilitarianism, coercive law, applying calculus as a means of evaluating human happiness. His thinking on mortuary arrangements, however, was truly original.

Why, he asked, were the deceased such slackers? Instead of crumbling away in boxes and reserving to themselves two yards of land that might be put to better use for food production, they ought to be of some service to humanity! He drew the line at cannibalism, but did feel that the human corpse had a host of uses both practical and decorative, which only mere religious superstition prevented from development.

To name but one possible way in which Mortality might serve Utility: attractive persons might have their bodies preserved postmortem and presented to friends as an alternative to statuary. Mr. Bentham himself willed his body to his college in the eager expectation of becoming his own memorial shrine.

Alas, the science of taxidermy wasn’t quite equal to Mr. Bentham’s hopes, and the best efforts only produced a sort of macabre doll that was kept in its own handsome cabinet except when it was annually wheeled out and propped up at memorial dinners. Mr. Bentham faded from the memory of all but his unfortunate beneficiaries and readers of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
, until the late twenty-second century when the body of his writings was rediscovered and Benthamism became the latest craze.

Altered, of course, to suit twenty-second century sensibilities. The focus then was on reclaiming the vast acres of real estate lost to public use because they were full of dead bodies. This had become a critical issue on a crowded planet, as over time funerary institutions went bankrupt and abandoned hundreds of square miles of headstone-studded earth.

Enter the Benthamites. Their benevolent organization raised funds to purchase disused memorial parks, which were then carefully excavated. After due archaeological and medical analysis, the bodies were cremated (less dental gold and any personal items with which they might have been buried), the graves were filled in, and the headstones used in the construction of public works buildings. The former cemeteries were rededicated to public use by the living. Low-cost housing, car parks, air transport stations, shopping malls …

And when the new plagues came and devastated that pragmatic world, and the dead outnumbered the living, still the Benthamites continued their good work to the benefit of all. Death had so terrified the moderns that they couldn’t bear contemplation of his white face, mention of his name; the newly dead were whisked away to cremation and never spoken of again. In such an environment, naturally enough the last thing anyone wanted to see on a daily commute or casual drive was a graveyard! So the Benthamites grew in popularity, and therefore in power.

And therefore their ranks were densely infiltrated by the immortal operatives of Dr. Zeus Incorporated.

He usually went by the name of Victor deVere. His immortal body was neatly made and looked well in tailored clothes, so he was something of a dandy. His sharply pointed beard and mustaches were red. His eyes were green and capable of brightness, but generally focused in the flat blank stare of a hunting cat. His skin was white as paper, an unnatural pallor very unusual for an immortal, with shadows like bruises under the bored eyes.

At the crest of Lankershim his car’s propellant motor stalled, and Victor
keyed in an order to restart. He drummed his gloved fingers on the dash console while the car growled and thought about it.

As Victor waited, he considered the view spreading out below him: a waste of blowing sand and broken sidewalk that had been the San Fernando Valley, crossed by the unreliable trickle of the Los Angeles River and bounded at the east by the ruin of the old city itself. It was fairly attractive, as ruins went. Morning glory vines had spread rampant over dozens of square miles, hiding and softening the scars of urban war with blue flowers.

The motor started up again, but the car informed Victor that it had lost its programming and asked politely for a destination. Annoyed—for the damned thing had only to go down the hill and around the corner—Victor entered trip coordinates again. The car hummed and sped off with him, down Lankershim and along Forest Lawn Drive, in the shadow of Mount Hollywood.

At the gatehouse the security tech on duty nodded and let him through. He left the car, which was having another directional crisis, and walked on up to the modular shelter—surmounted by its holographic image of Jeremy Bentham’s staring effigy—that was Labienus’s office.

Labienus was sitting out on the deck, enjoying the afternoon sunlight. He was an immortal, a smooth-faced man with the gravitas of a Roman senator, though he had only been a legionary commander. He had clasped his hands about one knee and was smiling out at the old cemetery, which was certainly busier than it had been in its heyday. At the distant edges earth movers filled in looted sites, and along the fence neat rows of potted saplings awaited planting. Nearer in, a flatbed moved slowly between the opened graves, as security techs loaded up coffins to be taken away to the long work shed for evaluation.