The Sons of Heaven (39 page)

By the time the sun sank to his late and prolonged death, the order had been filled. By evening of the following day, the lot was secured in a refrigerated warehouse beneath Dr. Zeus Incorporated headquarters in London.

“Now it can be told,” said Freestone in a smug voice. All heads turned to him.

“I hope you’re about to say what I think you’re about to say,” said Hapsburg.

“I don’t think I’ll disappoint you,” Freestone replied. He looked up and down the table, smiling at the assembled stockholders and scientists, enjoying being the center of attention. Well, of the stockholders anyway; his scientific colleagues already knew.

“We can now tell you what will happen on the final day of recorded history,” he said. “Which is to say, 9 July 2355. One week and one day—”

“Cut to the chase, for crying out loud,” yelled Telepop.

“Tell us!” Hapsburg ordered.

Freestone looked mildly offended but raised his hands for silence. “I can understand your annoyance. All right; what happens is, on the final day of recorded history,
we just stop recording it.”

“What?” demanded Roche.

“Then that’s not what’ll happen,” said Telepop, “that’s just what you
plan
to happen.”

“And we’ll do a few other things,” Freestone went on hastily, sensing he’d put his foot wrong. “We close down all temporal operations permanently. And we retire all our cyborg personnel.”

There was a moment of silence wherein his last sentence registered, and then everyone turned to stare at the place in which Lopez usually stood during meetings. He was not there today, of course. This meeting had been called without his knowledge, and now it was becoming clear why.

“You’ve finally figured out a way to, er … shut down the cyborgs?” said Morrison.

“Yes, we have,” Freestone asserted. “The long nightmare is over! I’m sure you’ll understand if we don’t want to talk about it much, but it’s something we’ve been planning for years.”

“You’re certain it’ll work?” Roche wanted to know.

“Of course.” Freestone waved his hand. “We’ve had our very best people on it and I think we can assure you there’s nothing to worry about. One week from today, you might say the Company will be
downsized.”
He looked around to see if the old-fashioned word had confused anyone, but they seemed to have grasped his meaning. “After all, with temporal operations shut down we won’t need the operatives anymore.”

“But… won’t we lose a lot of revenue from the Day Six places?” asked Telepop.

“The cut in overhead costs when we retire the operatives will more than compensate us,” Freestone explained. “Just think: no maintenance expenses, no redundancy pay, no pensions! No bother with human resources at all. No more Temporal Concordance to keep track of, either. The whole cyborg operation was ruinously expensive to run, you know, though of course it paid for itself, and now the long-term advantages can be reaped.”

“So you’re saying that on July ninth we can just… take it easy at home with our families?” said Telepop slowly.

“Yes!”

“You’re sure there aren’t any meteors coming to hit us or anything?” Morrison persisted.

“Absolutely,” Freestone said. “We’ll all be perfectly fine. Once the cyborgs are turned off, all we have to do is make sure nobody ever travels into the past again, or sends any messages there either. That way we won’t contradict the Temporal Concordance. We won’t know what’s going to happen in advance after this, but we’ve made enough profit and salvaged enough out of the past to fulfill our original mission statement.”

“That’s true!” said Hapsburg. “We have done what we set out to do, haven’t we? Kept all those animals from going extinct and saved all those, er, things? Paintings and stuff?”

“Exactly,” Freestone replied. “Dr. Zeus has fulfilled his purpose. When the cyborg program is terminated, life goes back to normal. Except that we’re all a lot richer than we were when the program started.”

“And we made the bad things not happen,” said Bugleg.

“What?”Telepop stared across the conference table at him.

“The, er, wars and things,” Rossum explained for him.

“Well—but they did happen,” said Roche. “Didn’t they?”

“Yes, but not as expensively!” Freestone stated. “And that was the whole point of the business, you see?”

Victor was preoccupied.

He had been preoccupied for days. His rooms were crowded now with stacked crates, and if a Public Health Monitor were to burst in for an inspection at that particular moment, Victor would have a great deal of explaining to do.

What was in all those stacked crates? Dangerous and immoral contraband, though once it would have been described as Christmas cheer or gourmet delicacies, garnered patiently from Third World sovereignties over a period of two years. There were bottles of old port, dark as blood, in those crates, there were bottles of the most costly champagnes. Liqueurs. Pate full of truffles, tiny containers of caviar. Obscure herbs and spices, wonderfully potent. Pickled oysters and the pickled eggs of wild birds, honey garnered from opium poppies, jars of clotted cream. If it was rich, if it was delicious, if it was bad for a mortal to consume, it was probably in those crates.

The immorality didn’t stop there. No, it went far beyond: for in a distant refrigeration locker, far above the sunny streets of Avalon, hung slaughtered and butchered animals, rotting on the hook to suitable tenderness for consumption. No Public Health Monitor could deal with this. He or she would be on his or her knees puking in the abattoir at the merest glance at all the bones and veins and muscles and slow-dripping nastiness … but to set aside the twenty-fourth century point of view for a moment, Victor had really bagged a lot of prime meat. Pheasants and grouse, a peacock, a wild boar, a sea turtle, a suckling pig and a calf, venison, and finally that ultimate martyr to humanity’s wickedness:
a buffalo
. Could anything be more deliciously perverse than to serve forth roasted buffalo to immortals who had spent the ages rescuing creatures from extinction?

Even innocence was being summoned to this feast, even now summer fruit was sweetening in the quiet orchards of the interior, and vegetables flourishing on its irrigated terraces. Would all those artichokes and baby carrots blanch at the thought of the company they were shortly to keep?

Victor was too preoccupied to be amused by such a question. He was watching, with his flat green stare, as printed averies spooled out of his credenza.
Each label bore the same address, directing delivery to the Santa Catalina Island Preservancy Conference Center, Avalon, Republic of Santa Catalina.

He was watching the labels print out because he was undecided about something.

Before him on his desk was a card and matching envelope. He had purchased them centuries ago, kept them all this time sealed against age and dust. The envelope was plain ivory parchment. The card was decorated in its lower right-hand corner with a small painting of daffodils.

Victor was turning a calligraphy pen in his fingers, in a gesture of almost mortal nervousness. Click, click, click, the labels continued to print.

He set the pen down at last and his hand rose, involuntarily, to stroke his mustaches. Coming to himself with a start, he looked down at his hand; rose and hurried into the bathroom to wash. By the time he returned and sat down he seemed to have come to some kind of decision, for he picked up the pen and activated it. Peering down at the card, he wrote slowly and carefully.

Having read over what he had just written, Victor nodded and slipped the card into the envelope. He took out a modern Text Parcel envelope, addressed it, slipped the smaller envelope inside. He took a separate sheet of paper and wrote:

Ave et vale, Suleyman. These may well be my last words to you. I wonder if I might ask a favor, sir? Would you have the kindness to see that the enclosed card reaches Madame D’Arraignee? Assuming, of course, that you both survive the Silence.

The slave was much better now, rational and calm; but he slept a great deal, waking only to swallow more of the vitamins and wash them down with water. Tiara grew lonely.

She curled up next to him and dreamed that they were in London, at Claridge’s. It was all a great garden under the stars, like the one behind the shop in Knockdoul, but ever so much more grand. There were roses in the sky. There were stars in the grass. There was a vast holoscreen that towered up to the moon. Her slave was bending forward, smiling, offering her champagne in his cupped hands. There was a couple at the table next to theirs. Yes, the woman with her black eyes, the man so very tall—

“Sweetheart,” a voice was saying. “Princess?”

She sat up in the darkness. She thought the slave was crying again, his voice was so strange. “What is it?” she demanded, a little crossly.

“Look,” he told her. “Look at me.”

He had drawn up both his legs! She shrieked and pounced on him, and they rocked back and forth together, hugging tight. “Now,” he whispered, “we’re so close to London I can smell the tarmac.”

“Can we go now?” she begged. “After so many and so long years of dreaming, my honey love?”

“Soon,” he gasped. “Must exercise! Get my muscles in tone. Learn to walk again. And we’ll need clothes—what a pair of picturesque vagabonds we’d look just now, eh, a little girl in rags leading a blind beggar? Dear, dear, once we’d not have drawn a second glance from anybody, but not nowadays! Oh, they’d have us off the public highway and into a Hospital somewhere as soon as they noticed us. Not a good thing, for me or you.”

“I’ll steal clothes,” she told him, kissing his cheek. “You shall be robed in whitest samite. I shall don the raiment of a great lady. We’ll blaze along the great highways of the world like Antony and Cleopatra, and lesser creatures will die for jealousy that they’re not us.”

At first the slave could barely stand, tottered and fell over at the least wrong move; but practicing at last he got the trick of balance again. As the days went by he never fell at all, and how tall he was now! Tiara cleared a path through the bones for him so he could walk to and fro, finding his way by reciting verse and listening as the echo of his voice bounced back to him from the walls. They found that this worked better if there weren’t so many dead men stacked there to muffle the sound.

Tiara dragged the bones out of the room entirely and farther down the old passageway, piling them up in a very old part of the hill, venturing deeper in the darkness than she’d ever gone before. In this way she found the ship.

It seemed to be a part of the wall first, silvery and cold, bulging out smooth. But as Tiara touched it, wondering, the Memory explained what it truly was. A few meters farther on she came upon the hatchway, irised panes of a pinky-purple steel. And here was a cunning little inset panel, and if she placed her hand just
here—

Without a sound, the door unsqueezed itself. A gush of warm dry air wrapped around Tiara, prompting her to step across the threshold. She went inside, staring around. The Memory chattered loud suddenly, telling her all about the Getaways. This was what kin held in reserve, this was the safe last place where the big people couldn’t come! This was the very ship in which famous Uncle Zingo had hunted, and at so long last caught, her own dear slave. Its name was
The Flee
.

Tiara wandered through it openmouthed, and the Memory put it right up there on a par with the
Argo
and Garuda and the ship of the Three Queens that bore Arthur to Avalon. What a beautiful shining place it was, and so clean, because the kin never lived in it for long; that wasn’t safe. A few nights in flight, no harm, but stay in here a month or a year and the stupids would begin to bleed and die, the Uncles grow strange swollen things in their tender places.
The Flee
was both life and death. It was the greatest thing the kin had ever made.

Tiara backed away in awe, and retreated through the door. Her hand on the panel closed it up again.

She decided not to tell her slave, however. Whether this was because she was afraid it might set off another fit of crying and forgetting just when he was
doing so well, or because some inborn command of secrecy silenced her, it was difficult to say.

Tiara was looking for trout in the little culvert under the bridge one fine moony night when she caught his smell, old Uncle Ratlin, and he caught hers, and she heard his pattering footfall along the bridge, and heard his chuckling up above her.

“Hello again, my juicy babe,” he growled, and splash! He’d vaulted the side and shattered her starry pool, so that the moon and the trout fled. She bared her teeth at him.

“Varlet vile,” she muttered. Oh dear oh dear; the culvert was at her back, and nowhere to run but down its darkness, or out before her into Uncle Ratlin’s wide arms.

“Now, a kiss for your own old dear,” he cackled. “My sweetlips, guess what’s done! Eh? Go on, guess.”

“You have finished and furnished my green hill?” she demanded, putting her nose in the air.

“O, no, my loveydovey. Better than that.” Uncle Ratlin preened and strutted, ankle deep in the water. “It is accomplished! The Ruin, don’t you know? Ratlin’s Finest Death Assortment’s been sent winging its way to the slaves, the cyborgs, the dreadful drones of the big people. Not three days—nay, not two!—and they’ll all lie drowned in dreadful death, convulsed and blue. Let’s celebrate!” He dropped his trousers.

Ice prickled all along Tiara’s neck. She backed into the culvert.

“Y-you can take that to Bloody Barbie,” she told him haughtily. “I’ll none of you. Remember our bargain? I want my green hill! What care I for your goose-feather bed or your manly parts either, until that’s done?”

But he waded closer, grinning. “Any day now,” he promised her. “Come on, my little bed of roses-no-thorns. Uncle Ratlin’s so weary of saggy silly old Quean Barbie and her tantrums. Any day now you might have your fine hill with its lace curtains, but you’ll never get a sniff of it if you won’t come cheer your dear uncle. The world’s changing, my silvery sex kitten. The Ruin has come, and everything’s possible now!”