The Sons of Heaven (58 page)

All they needed was time.

But beyond the windows of the transport the golden summer evening was waning, waning, and the light was fading from their world. Nicholas could see it flickering away, like a candle guttering. He looked sadly into the mortal faces. Who could say whether their sun would ever rise again?

Could he win them time? To dance
Le Sacre du Printemps
, to see a grandchild, to get a club booking, to publish?

Then there was a pitch as something went wrong with the transport, and it veered crazily and nearly hit an oncoming vehicle. The mortals screamed; tinny warning Klaxons sounded from the interior speakers, as the emergency programs took over and the transport wobbled to the pavement. Red lights flashed above the emergency exits, but here too something failed and they did not pop open. Panicked, the mortals scrambled to their feet and threw themselves against the doors.

“Pardon me,” said Nicholas, going to them. He edged past them and by habit prepared to set his shoulder to the door. If he had followed through with his body slam, the door would have undoubtedly gone flying outward. At the last moment, however, he heard Edward’s voice in a long-ago lecture:
Points for obtaining goal, Nicholas, but demerits for technique. You are a cyborg, boy. What alternatives might you have tried? I’m waiting
… and Alec had stared sidelong at him, widening his eyes helpfully in an attempt to hint that all he had had to do was …

Talk to it
. Nicholas reached up to the exit servomotor, searching for a port. He started, feeling a tiny intellect there, a feeble confused presence. Carefully, as though stroking a frightened kitten, he suggested that it might want to open the emergency doors. It calmed down enough to comply; the exits sprang open, and a moment later everyone was standing on the pavement at Acton Street.

“What’s happened?” cried the old woman. What indeed; for as far as the eye could see, there were public transports scattered along the road like toys, each with a crowd of bewildered mortals huddled around it. They were not looking at the transports, however. The boy shouted and pointed a trembling finger. Nicholas craned his head back to look.

What
were
those things, atop every light standard? He accessed his files on London and identified them as the surveillance cameras that monitored all Britons, day and night. But they were doing no monitoring now; they were thrashing like eels in mechanical agony, whipping to and fro on their cables, snaking, the very picture of agitation. They were keening, too, a high-pitched howl that echoed off the buildings.

“They’ve never done that before!” the merchant said.

“I think it’s a technical malfunction,” said Nicholas, enunciating with care. “You had better go to your homes.”

“But I live in Brompton,” said the girl, indignant.

The old woman looked at Nicholas sharply. “Do
you
know what’s going on?”

“Shrack! Look at that!” said the boy. All around them, the street maintenance servos were emerging from the curbside tunnels in which they ordinarily passed the daylight hours. Racing about blindly, they caromed into one another or struck stalled vehicles.

“I’m getting back on the bus,” muttered the old woman, and she did so, and the other mortals crowded after her. Nicholas decided they were probably safer there, for the moment. He turned and walked down Gray’s Inn Road,
dodging the maintenance servos and the bits that were now flying loose from the flailing surveillance cams.

The machines were in pain
. They had been given consciousness, of a sort, and so it followed that they perceived error as discomfort, even as the Captain did. The Captain, a complex mind, was capable of anger or frustration when his programming was blocked. The Captain, having Mind, was Spirit, though of course not Soul, and therefore—

Nicholas stopped in his tracks, astounded. Had all conscious machines, which was to say those of a sufficient complexity,
minds?
Were they therefore spirits, too? And if that was the case, what distinguished them from the Captain? Had they rights? What precisely was their status? How did they compare with animal minds? Who would see to their welfare? Did the question even apply? Now, what if—

Vaguely he was aware of distant shouting. The world was ending, and yet Nicholas had no sense of limits closing down. Rather, the universe was opening up for him, in a quite unexpected way. It was not a place in which he was superfluous; not when there was so much to explore, so much work to do—and he was only beginning to grasp its implications, or the extent of the questions to be asked—

As he came to the Company block, Nicholas was startled from his contemplation by the human terror coming from within: hysterical sobs, fists pounding on doors, and now as he rounded the corner he saw mortal faces pressed to high windows. They were staring, set with horror. He turned and saw the construction crane that had gone mad, whirling in place like a ponderous dancer, its boom smashing windows in the buildings adjacent to the construction site.

This is our doing
, thought Nicholas, with a shudder. All the time bombs, all the mines laid down by the Captain with bloodthirsty glee in preparation for this hour. Had it never occurred to him that the Company, huge as it was, must necessarily be tied in with local utilities? That a disruption on this scale would harm innocents? If it had occurred to the Captain, he hadn’t cared; and Alec, miserable as he had been, was in the habit of not thinking too deeply about anything. Edward, to whom it might have occurred, would in those days have dismissed it as collateral damage.
But it should have occurred to me!

Nicholas sprinted, avoiding falling glass shards, vaulted over a berserk traffic drone and bounded up the steps to the unobtrusive front door of Dr. Zeus Incorporated. He rattled at the knob; it wouldn’t open. He reached in with his mind and found the little gibbering intellect of the lock.
YOU CAN’T COME IN YOU CAN’T COME IN YOU CAN’T COME IN!

You are relieved of duty, he told it.

AUTHORIZATION?
It sounded pitifully eager. Nicholas found a likely code and fed it to the lock, and could almost feel the sigh of relief as it surrendered and shut itself off. The doors swung inward. Nicholas walked into the lobby.

A tearful face appeared, peering around a door frame. With a pent-up wail, a mortal girl ran toward him. “My lord!” she gasped, and fell into his arms. Nicholas, taken aback, did a rapid access of his notes and realized the girl thought he was Alec. And her name was …

“Ms. Fretsch,” he said.

“Oh, my lord—Mr. Wolff is a
cyborg!
I came in at weekend to water the plants—and he was smashing things—like some mindless
machine
or something—and now he’s gone upstairs and he’s smashing things upstairs, too—”

Nicholas lifted his head, straining to hear. Nothing smashing now; only, in high far corners, the whimpering of overtime technicians who had locked themselves in their offices and, in some cases, in their supply cabinets. And something else … a voice, murmuring without interruption.

He became aware that the girl had settled in his arms, and had skin like silk, and smelled like peaches. He blushed and coughed. “I, er—I think you’d better wait down here,” he said.

“You’re never going up there!” cried Ms. Fretsch. “He’s a
cyborg!”

“Duty calls,” said Nicholas apologetically, guiding her to the nearest office. Gently he shut the door on her protests, and turned to look for a way upstairs. The elevator was a ruin, looked as though someone had detonated a bomb inside it. It was twitching its remaining cables and babbling to itself in fearful pain, and wouldn’t listen to him; so he found the fire stairs and began to climb.

“Whores?” said Alec, and then winced as his mind followed the question into places he didn’t want to imagine. That was when they heard the shouting.

The clearest words, the ones most repeated, were
house
and
something growing
. There came the sound of footsteps pounding outside as people ran by. Someone shouted, “Where?” and someone else shouted, “Clarissa Street!”

“Oh wow,” Alec jumped to his feet. That’s where we planted the first booby trap!

It’s started, then
, the Captain transmitted back, and they ran outside. In
the transport plaza, mortals were crowded together, pointing and exclaiming at something rising in the air two streets over.

A jet of water from a broken hydrant? Too narrow and too solid, and yet it coruscated in the sunlight as it rose steadily. Still, there was something unnervingly organic about it, as though a live serpent were stretching its length up to Heaven from a quiet row of early twentieth-century cottages.

“Oh man, oh man—” Alec set off at a run and the Captain pounded after him, and less than a minute later they had rounded the corner of the little residential street down which Edward and Mendoza had gone sauntering, once upon a time in 1923, with a small bottle of something resembling gold paint.

Nothing raw or new on the street now, all the houses rendered charming and quaint with age, some of them half-buried by flowering creepers and others shaded by venerable trees. Except, of course, for the one that had just exploded.

Well, not exploded, exactly. One wall did seem to be missing, though there was no scattered debris in evidence: only the gaping hole out of which the silvery thing was growing. As Alec and the Captain joined the throng of onlookers, they saw that the hole was getting bigger, its edges shrinking back like ice melting, even as the thing grew in size.

Jesus bloody Christ, it’s eating the house
, the Captain yelled silently. And so it was, as the nanobots within it busily appropriated matter from the cottage and altered its molecular structure to suit its own needs, transmuting lath and plaster to ferroceramic just as the Captain’s biomechanicals had transmuted compost to living flesh.

Is it supposed to?
Alec responded, unable to take his eyes from the eerie spectacle. Something was forming at the top of the thing, now.

Of course it is!
The Captain grinned fiercely and pointed as the swelling bud flowered, unfurling gleaming sharp-edged petals that formed a dish.
And ain’t it a grand thing to see? Why, I’d call it spectacular. Look at that!

The dish was turning atop its stalk, triangulating with the other two antenna that were even now causing consternation among golfers where they had arisen on the first hole of the golf course and under the old aviary near the ninth hole respectively. A light beam shot forth, visible only to Alec and the Captain; then there was a sudden gust of wind that seemed to come from all directions at once, and an inexplicable whiff of ozone.

And bang goes the Company’s perimeter defense system
, howled the Captain in triumph. Then his face lost its expression of bloodthirsty joy, for he was receiving a great deal of information he must process.

At that very moment, in Jamaica, the staff of Pirate Gourmet Chicken to Go were standing around staring, some at the hole that had mysteriously and abruptly appeared in the floor of their shop, some at the other hole that had appeared in the ceiling directly above it. This was all the inconvenience they were to suffer, fortunately for them. However, the Company’s geosynchronous satellite, approximately thirty-five thousand kilometers above the New Port Royal Shopping Mall and the old sunken city under its pilings, was in serious trouble. It had no defenses against the strange little parasite that had shot up out of nowhere to clamp to its exterior, and was even now eating through to its internal components.

While at that same moment in metropolitan London, two silver towers had sprouted skyward and were causing no end of commotion. One rose in the graveyard adjacent to an ancient church—one of the few withstanding the Benthamites—where it was busily converting the revered dead and several fine granite memorials to ferroceramic. The other was in an office building near Carnaby Street, where it had leaped upward from a storage cellar that had long ago housed a dance club and was now being inexorably cannibalized, bricks and mortar and all.

And even while Londoners stared and pointed, in Venice the gondoliers were rowing away like mad from the silvery thing that had soared out of the bottom of one particular canal, as the limpid waters hissed and boiled ominously.

As they did, Egyptians on the evening shift engaged in replacing the head of the Sphinx dropped their tools, staggered perilously close to the edge of the scaffolding in their astonishment. What was that metallic thing that had burst out of the top of the stately palm tree, in the garden court of the old Pyramid Pizza franchise, and was even now opening a silver flower to reflect the ancient stars?

In Monterey, California, the Robert Louis Stevenson house had not yet opened for the first tour of the day, so only a mortal engaged in raking the back garden path heard the small explosion as a seething mass of something blew out of the second-story adobe wall and dropped to the path at his feet. Happily for lovers of RLS and literature historians everywhere, the bomb had misfired and did not eat the museum, but took only a second to reprogram itself. Immediately it sent out tendrils seeking material for conversion. The gardener turned and ran for his life, and so escaped being incorporated into the spire that climbed relentlessly upward—unlike a luckless garden bench, numerous ornamental plantings, a hose bib, and approximately ninety cubic feet of edged path.

It’s happening
, the Captain gloated.
I’ve got my boot on that fat bastard’s neck at last! His communications are down worldwide. London Central’s offices are locked up tight as a drum, toilets included, and their power’s out. Every bank account he’s got’s been drained, with everything transferred to Cocos Island Trading. Power’s been cut to all time transcendence fields—ain’t nobody escaping into the past. There’s arrest warrants been issued to the Public Health Monitors for everybody on the Company payroll. Boy, you should hear ‘em all gibbering and running around like ants from a broke-open anthill! This’ll learn Dr. Zeus Incorporated, by thunder.