The Sons of Heaven (31 page)

“Greek letters? That’s all I know about them, man.”

“You were inside the building in Gray’s Inn Road. Did you, in the lobby or anywhere else, notice the words or characters Alpha-Omega?”

“No, Suleyman. What is this? I thought we were going to talk about Nennius.”

“Eventually,” he said. “I know a lot about his operation. The black project he was in charge of, for example, the Checkerfield baby? I expect I know as much as you do about that one.”

“Really?” she snapped. “You know why it was all necessary? Then you know more than I. What was Nennius doing?”

“He was following orders,” Suleyman answered. “Just as you were. The Company wanted something, and took the necessary steps to produce it.”

“They wanted Mars Two blown all to hell and gone?” Sarai demanded. “What kind of Preservers are we, let me ask you that? I never signed up to kill mortals. Who gave Nennius orders to make a monster, eh?”

“Was he a monster, Sarai?”

“I never knew what he was,” she said quietly, looking away. “They just told me, you go to the maternity hospital at this address and take a certain baby out of his cot. Quick and quiet, so the cameras can’t see, and then report to London HQ with him.”

“Didn’t they tell you anything else at HQ?” inquired Suleyman.

“That he was something special, and I was to take him to the Checkerfields, who were going to pretend he was theirs. I was supposed to stay on as his nanny and protect him. Watch everything he did. Make full reports to Nennius.”

“Was he different?” Suleyman asked. “In unusual ways?”

“Real good at maths,” Sarai said. “Bloody little genius at anything to do with numbers. How many boats in the harbor, baby? How many leaves on the mango tree? And he’d just look once and tell you.”

“But he wasn’t autistic?”

“Hell no. Sociable as you please. Loved people.” She turned away. After a long moment she went on, her face unseen to him as she said: “I can guess how he turned out to be the Hangar Twelve Man. My orders changed. I was supposed to start telling the baby mean things. Tell him it was his fault the Checkerfields got their divorce. Tell him he wasn’t as good as other little boys, so he’d best mind his manners! I couldn’t do it. Nennius told me, ‘Fine then, you’re off the job,’ and sent me back to Haiti. That was that. Never saw Alec’s funny face again, until the Hangar Twelve footage.

“So was it all Nennius’s idea? You tell me, old husband.”

Suleyman held up his hands. “Who runs the Company, Sarai? The mortals themselves. They directed Nennius. They profited when Mars Two was bombed. Only mortals would be foolish enough to do something like that without understanding the consequences.”

“This is new talk from you,” she said uneasily. “You used to love the little mortals.”

“You can love a child, and still weep for what he does,” said Suleyman. “Can’t you, Sarai?”

She bowed her head over her glass in silence. He sighed and went on: “Nennius, however, knew exactly what he was doing. He had his own agenda, Sarai.”

He had all her attention now. “What was it?”

“Do you have any idea what condition the human gene pool is in?” he asked. “Have you been observing the mortals, these last few centuries? All so alike, and each generation smaller in numbers than the previous one?”

“Because of all the plagues sweeping through,” Sarai said.

“And the eugenics programs. They did their share of wrecking the gene pool, too,” Suleyman explained. “So did the drop in the birth rate.”

“And?”

“There were still plenty of mortals with the drive to reproduce at the beginning of this decade. Unfortunately, a lot of them went to live on Mars, where there were no permits required for having children.” Suleyman regarded her somberly. She just shook her head.

“Nennius,” Suleyman went on, “is one of a certain group of immortals. They’re headed by the American Northwestern Sector Executive, Labienus. They’ve been at work a long time. They’re the reason I require an intelligence network. The great plagues were their doing.”

“But what for?”

“They’re fed up with the mortals.” Suleyman shrugged. “Maybe they’ve watched too many movies. Remember
Cyborg Conquest?
‘We are the ultimate goal of evolution! Imperfect beings must die!’”

“Oh, that’s crap. We’ve all felt like squashing the damn mortals now and then—”

“And some of us have given in to the urge,” Suleyman told her. “Nennius didn’t go along with the plan to destroy Mars Two because it would make the Company money—though it did. He did it because of the percentage of the mortals’ breeding population living up there.

“And now, boom. They’re gone. There are lots of places here and there on
Earth where mortals still have children, but they’re being methodically targeted for plague outbreaks.

“So within the space of a few more generations—depleted as the mortal gene pool is—humanity could be facing extinction.”

“Man! And you sit here so calm and tell me so?” Sarai shook her head emphatically. “No. It can’t be this bad. The mortals can’t have missed this! Not the masters at Dr. Zeus, anyway. They’re ungrateful little twits, making us wear those bloody clock badges, but they’re not this stupid about their own survival.”

“Of course they’re not,” Suleyman agreed. “They’ve had us preserving genetic material for millennia. Somewhere, they keep stored vials of genetic material from every race that’s ever walked the earth.”

“Ah! Okay, there you are; they’ve left themselves an escape. Gene pool shrinks too far, the masters will just fill it up again from their emergency cache. One generation in vitro and they’ll be out of danger.”

“They would be,” Suleyman said, “if nothing happened to that emergency cache beforehand.”

“Labienus isn’t going for that, too?” Sarai looked horrified. Suleyman shrugged.

“Not yet, as far as I can tell. The masters have taken great trouble to hide it away. They don’t know about Labienus’s group, but they’re terrified of us all anyway. Have been, ever since we liberated Options Research.” Suleyman rested his chin in his palm.

“The Frankenstein story,” Sarai muttered bitterly.

“That’s right. And there are plenty of angry monsters like Labienus among us, so I can’t say I blame them for being scared. The problem is—can they keep their secret safely?”

“They’ll never manage,” said Sarai, eyes wide. “It’s this Alpha-Omega, isn’t it, Suleyman? Where they’ve cached the DNA? That’s what’s on the hidden floor of that damn place in London. That’s why you had Latif doing surveillance there!”

He just nodded.

“And if you’ve found it, others might find it too, and if it’s destroyed—”

“Extinction for humanity.”

“I’m frightened now,” said Sarai.

“So am I, my heart,” he replied. She reached out and took his hand.

“What are you going to do?” she said at last.

“I don’t have a lot of choice,” he said wearily. “The masters can’t possibly keep Alpha-Omega safe. I’ll have to seize it from them, which will be an act of
open rebellion, but what can I do? If I don’t secure it, Labienus’s group will, and there go the mortals; and many of us, too, I might add. His people have no compunction about disabling fellow immortals. You heard what happened to Kalugin?”

Sarai shuddered. “And that other one, the one nobody’s ever found. Lewis.”

“Lewis,” Suleyman echoed.

In the very beginning, before he had understood what a cyborg was, Glele Kouandete had thought they must be orishas. He’d been very small then, sick and frightened, and it was easy to get that impression. The big man had worn a white coat as he’d paced between the beds of the children’s ward, administering the injections with a deft hand, calm and patient though the children and nurses were all screaming. The younger man, in his red shirt, had been fierce as he’d overseen the evacuation into the agcraft, yelling
Move, move, move!
in a voice like a hammer on an anvil. Were they Obatala and Ogun?

When he was well again, when he was getting used to the foster parents they’d settled him with and understood about the viral outbreak, Kouandete concluded that they had only been a doctor and a soldier after all. He thought this until the big man in white came to visit him, in the summer he graduated from college (by which time he no longer believed in the orishas), and offered him a job.

When he became a member of Suleyman’s staff, he learned the truth. Kouandete was exhilarated at first, thrilled by the concept of a benign Company that rescued people and things from destruction. It was reassuring to discover that immortals of a sort really did guide and watch over the human race, and wonderful, too, to be one of the few mortals in on the secret.

Since then, Kouandete’s life had become infinitely more complex. Because he was good at his job, which involved secrets, he was privy to the sordid politics within Dr. Zeus Incorporated. He knew about the renegade immortals who spread the plague that wiped out his own village; he knew about the fearful stockholders and scientists who were attempting to get rid of the immortals, all of them, even loyal ones like Suleyman.

So, by his fortieth year, Kouandete found himself in a world every bit as terrifying and chaotic as the hospital ward of his earliest memory. To be sure, he was well to do, had a nice car and flat, took his holidays in the south of France; he also had ulcers and maintained a silent desperate hope that the orishas
might turn out to exist after all. Perhaps they might reach down from wherever they lived, to avert the coming apocalypse.

Though he had to admit that Suleyman and Latif were doing their best, as he leaned back now and accepted a glass of tea from one of the servants. He drank gratefully and set the glass aside, watching as Latif spread out the old-fashioned flat photographs he had brought from London.

“Unbelievably awkward piece of equipment,” Kouandete said in apology. “But it was the only thing I could think of that their surveillance wouldn’t have detected. Too low-tech.”

“No, no, you’re thinking like one of us,” Suleyman assured him. He walked slowly around the table, hands in his pockets, staring down at the images of a place called Alpha-Omega. Getting them had involved considerable effort. Kouandete had had to position his subordinates in the local glaziers’firm, and secure a flat on the opposite side of Gray’s Inn Road. Latif designed the missile dummy for him, but Kouandete himself had fired it at the fifth floor window, with the result that the persons within were startled to see what looked like a raven fly straight into the glass, making an oddly-shaped hole before glancing away and vanishing.

When the glazier had been summoned to replace the broken pane, he succeeded in getting multiple exposures of the hidden floor, on a tiny concealed camera so ancient it had once been the property of the KGB. The film was then couriered to the local chapter house of the Compassionates of Allah, where Kouandete had it developed. Two hours later, with the chill of London drizzle still in his bones, he had handed the packet of photographs to Latif.

“So this is the amazing invisible fifth floor,” mused Sarai. “Not much here for them to be so secretive, eh? Half of it’s empty.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Latif said, scowling down at the pictures. “Two consoles over here, crowded into this one area. Empty console out here, no chair. And what’s this yellow thing on the carpet?”

“It looks like a path,” observed Suleyman. “All around the area where the workstations are, notice. Remember when the first office robots came out, the ones that moved on magnetic trails? The trails used to weave around office floors like that, in and out of cubicles and around filing cabinets.”

“Nobody’s used technology that primitive in centuries,” insisted Latif. Suleyman just picked up one of the photographs and waved it at him ironically.

“Do you think it might outline some kind of perimeter defense?” suggested Kouandete. “Like a force field around the two desks?”

“Possibly,” Suleyman said, replacing the photograph. He stroked his beard,
considering the layout. “There don’t seem to be any refrigeration units in evidence, even though we know they have to be there somewhere, so I’m at something of a loss …”

Abruptly, Latif shouted something profane, and then: “Primitive technology,” he exclaimed. “Remember the first virtual reality mazes? Remember how those arcades looked when you took off your helmet inside one?”

“I never played the game, son,” Suleyman reminded him.

“They looked like this!” Latif said. “Big empty rooms with trackways laid out on the floor. That was all that was really there. Everything else—the walls, the alleys, the bad guys—only existed inside the helmets.”

“You think the two people in this office are in the middle of some kind of virtual maze?” Sarai looked skeptical.

“But what’s the point of a virtual
office?”
said Kouandete, knitting his brows. “Why take such trouble to conceal something on a hidden floor that’s only an illusion?”

“Unless it isn’t an illusion,” cried Latif. “Virtual, but a projection of something real somewhere else!”

“They’re seeing something being broadcast real time?” guessed Suleyman. “Coordinating their office with one that exists in some other place?”

“So what we’re after might not be actually, physically, there,” said Kouandete in disappointment.

“Not in that place, no … “Suleyman began to pace slowly, putting his hands back in his pockets. “In some other place … or—”

“Some other time!” said Sarai. Suleyman turned on his heel to stare at her. There was a moment of silence before they both said: “Alpha-Omega.”

“What?” said Kouandete, watching as Latif did a somewhat alarming dance of triumph. Suleyman pointed at the photographs.

“Those,” he said, “are images of Omega. Omega is the place that exists at the end of time. Here, or rather in London on Gray’s Inn Road. In reality. But in cyberspace it exists alongside of Alpha, which occupies what appears in these pictures as empty air.

“In reality, Alpha is the place that exists at the beginning of time. It’s the other half of the office in those pictures, but it’s hidden away in the past.”