The Sons of Heaven (8 page)

“Okay,” said Joseph. “What do you want to know?”

“Quite a few things,” said Hearst, looking at him steadily. “First: were you involved in that Bureau of Punitive Medicine place? Were you partners with Marco, that immortal who went crazy?”

“No,” said Joseph. “Absolutely not. I was searching for somebody myself when I found the Bureau. I couldn’t tell anyone directly, but I tipped off Suleyman, the North African Section Head. I figured he’d rescue those poor bastards if anybody would. But no, I am not now, nor have I ever been partners with Marco. What else did you want to ask me, Mr. Hearst?”

Hearst watched the little dog for a moment. “What’s going to happen in the year 2355, Mr. Denham?” he said at last.

At that moment the elevator clanked and began to descend behind its brass grille. Hearst held up his hand in a gesture indicating they should wait, and Joseph nodded. The elevator rose again and a mortal woman emerged, bearing the tray of drinks Hearst had ordered. Hearst thanked her and she departed. Joseph cleared his throat as the elevator descended once more.

“So you’ve figured out about 2355, huh?” he said.

Hearst nodded. “Dr. Zeus Incorporated gives us all manner of tidbits of information about the future world, but I’ve noticed that I’m never told about anything occurring later than the year 2355. No investment information beyond that year at all. Why? And that absurd magazine they send me,
Immortal Lifestyles Monthly
—well, if you read it carefully you notice that there are no references to anything written or created after that date. No books after the year 2355, no pictures, no inventions, nothing!”

“Yeah,” said Joseph, reaching for his glass and taking a sip of ginger ale. “We call it the Silence. Have you asked the Company about it, straight out?”

“I’ve made certain inquiries,” said Hearst. “I have yet to receive a plain answer from anyone.”

“No surprise there. The official answer is that 2355 is when Dr. Zeus finally
goes public, when immortals will finally be able to live openly.” Joseph swirled ice in his glass and looked sidelong at Hearst. “They say they don’t give us any movies or whatever from after that time because we’ll be able to discover them for ourselves. I don’t think anybody has ever believed that.”

“So you’re saying that you don’t know, either.” Hearst looked down at his little dog. Joseph shook his head.

“There’re theories. Global cataclysm in that year, for example. Or that there’s an intracorporate war, and the winners maintain transmission silence after 2355 so nobody in the past knows who wins or how. You want to know what I think?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I think that’s the year when the Company doublecrosses its immortals. We’ve worked for them from the beginning of time—immortals like me, anyway; you’re a special case—with the promise that one day we’d finally get to the wonderful Future and share the great stuff we’ve spent all our lives obtaining for Dr. Zeus. I think it’s a crock. I think they’ll come up with some way to finally kill us, or disable us, and cancel out their debt. You want to know why I think that, Mr. Hearst?”

“Please tell me,” said Hearst.

Joseph stood up and looked Hearst in the eye. “Because they’re doing it already. That’s why I’m on the run, pal, that’s why you got that request to let the Company know immediately if you ever saw me again. You want to know the truth about the Bureau of Punitive Medicine? The Company ran it themselves! Marco was just the guy they had standing guard there. It was a research facility they had, to find a way to reverse the immortality process.”

Hearst nodded. “I was afraid it was something like that.”

“And it was just the tip of the iceberg,” Joseph said, beginning to pace. “The Bureau was only one of the places the Company locks away operatives it doesn’t want anymore. There are at least seven others, not as bad as the Bureau but holding more people. I’ve seen ‘em, Mr. Hearst. And there’s worse.

“You remember Lewis? The guy who worked with me in 1933?”

“The fellow Garbo was so taken with, yes.” Hearst smiled at the memory, but Joseph’s eyes were like flint.

“You should have seen what the Company did to
him,”
he said. “They handed him over to—to an outside agency, let’s say. So he could be experimented on, like a lab rat. Nice, huh? I know, because I was there. I nearly got caught, too. If you followed their orders right now and called the Company, they’d do something worse to me.”

“I’m not given orders,” said Hearst, with a momentary flash of human emotion in his eyes.

“You don’t think so?” said Joseph. “You’ve done everything the Company wanted you to do for them. They’ve given you stuff in return—hell, they made you immortal, you own Company stock—but you aren’t calling the shots, friend.”

Hearst sat silent a moment. At last he reached down and snapped his fingers for Helen. She came at once. He stroked her, scratched between her ears. “I assume,” he said, “that you’re not taking this lying down? You immortals, I mean.” He smiled for a second.
“We
immortals.”

“You got it,” Joseph said. “We’re immortal, we’re indestructible, and we can outthink them. The only advantage they’ve got is, they know everything that’s going to happen up to 2355 and we don’t. Kind of levels the playing field, huh? But it also gives us hope, Mr. Hearst. See—what if
we’re
what happens after 2355?”

“A war in Heaven?” said Hearst. “The Titans rising in rebellion against Zeus? It seems a chancy business, don’t you think?”

Joseph shrugged. “We’ve already had the eternal punishment thing, at the Bureau. So what have we got to lose?”

“I don’t know that I haven’t got a great deal to lose,” said Hearst. “You haven’t shown me any proof yet.”

“Hey, you want proof, and I don’t blame you one bit, friend. My group has managed to get hold of some of the Temporal Concordance. You know what that is, right?”

“It’s the logbook of the Future,” said Hearst, “the Company’s record of everything that’s going to happen.”

“Yeah. The one we’re never allowed to see, except a little at a time, so we can be where they want, when they want us to do their work for them. We found a section.” Joseph reached out with his index finger. “May I?”

Helen snarled. Hearst closed his hands around her and blinked as Joseph set his fingertip between Hearst’s eyes. “Downloading—” said Joseph, and Hearst felt a shock wave, a sudden expansion of his memory. It was a sensation not unlike being hit in the head with a bundle of newspapers hot off the presses. Dates, events, names filled the place behind his eyes.

“Oh—”

“There you go,” said Joseph. “You feel a little dizzy, right? Don’t worry, that’ll pass. I only gave you a tiny bit but boy, have you got a scoop! You can beat all the other news services to the draw for the next three years. But you’ll
also find private communications in there, between officers in the Company, stuff we weren’t meant to see. You can draw your own conclusions about it. I’ll be back in touch in a few years to see how you feel then, and whether or not you want to do business, okay?”

He rose to his feet. Hearst put up a hand. “If you please,” he said. “I’d like to know how you got past my surveillance.”

Joseph grinned. “Hell, Mr. Hearst, I’m over twenty thousand years old. Remember? I can get past a few cameras and motion sensors. Though I’d appreciate it if you’d take me off the record.” He gestured at the holocams that had been steadily observing him. “I’ll bet you can do that, huh, a clever film editor like you?”

“Unnecessary. You have my word I won’t tell the Company you were here.”

“I believe you, Mr. Hearst, honest, but you know what? They go through all your surveillance records routinely anyway,” said Joseph.

“No, they don’t!” said Hearst.

“Yeah, they do. You know Quintilius, your Company liaison? That’s part of his job. The Company doesn’t trust anybody, least of all its own people. The only reason some Company security officer isn’t hearing everything we say right now is because my datalink implant was disabled a long time ago.” Joseph tapped the bridge of his nose. “And they never installed one in you, I guess because you’re a special case. Or maybe they figured you have so much surveillance on yourself already, there was no point in spending more to duplicate it.”

He stepped back and looked Hearst up and down in an admiring kind of way. “I have to tell you, I’m impressed with the job they did. You’re really unique, you know?”

“You keep saying that I’m a
special case,”
said Hearst, rising to loom over Joseph. “What are you implying, exactly?”

Joseph retreated another couple of paces, but smiled disarmingly. “Hey! You’ve been a stockholder for four centuries now, you know the Company product. You know they never, ever make adults immortal. They always start with little children. Except for you! You were the only exception there’s ever been to the rule. You’re smart enough to figure out there’s something fishy about the year 2355; you must have wondered about yourself, too, huh?”

“I did ask about it,” said Hearst. “I was told I have an unusual genetic makeup.”

Joseph’s smile got wider still. “Oh, yes, you could say that. They didn’t lie to you, Mr. Hearst, not about that.”

“Why don’t you explain, then?” Hearst scowled down at him.

“Next time,” said Joseph. “I promise. Really.”

He winked out.

Hearst was only momentarily surprised. Turning his head and scanning for the trajectory of Joseph’s departure, he exhaled in annoyance. “Stay,” he told Helen, setting her down in his chair, and then he winked out, too.

Down through La Casa Grande he sped, faster than mortal eyes could have followed, over his high fences, pursuing the fading blip that was Joseph in hyperfunction; but the head start was too great. On a knoll of rock he halted and stood peering out across the miles of his domain (for everything within mortal sight, and immortal sight too, for that matter, was his). He could just make out Joseph’s signature, fading into the coastal mountains to the north.

“Darn,” he said. After a moment he put his hands in his pockets and walked slowly back up his hill, thinking very hard as he went.

Just as he came to the wide staircase below the Neptune Pool, a tour vehicle pulled up and he heard the docent say excitedly: “Ah-yah! This is very special, everybody. See that man? That’s Mr. William Randolph Hearst the Tenth! His ancestor was the one who originally built this wonderful place. He came here from Europe and saved it all when there wasn’t any more money to keep it open to the public! Wasn’t that nice of him? We don’t get a chance to see him much, because he’s very busy—”

Hearst ducked his head in embarrassment and considered hurrying away, but reflected that it wouldn’t really be polite to do so; there were a dozen mortal faces pressed to the windows of the tour vehicle, staring at him eagerly. He gave them a shy smile and stood there on display while the tour group disembarked and came rushing over. It was largely a party of reenactors, wearing passable early-twentieth-century costumes. One carried a SoundBox blaring out early jazz music. Hearst winced. He preferred modern music, on the whole.

He shook hands, answered a few questions, and hoped they’d all enjoy their visit to his house before he departed with the excuse that he had work to do.

As he stepped across the threshold of La Casa Grande, he wondered plaintively why contact with mortals made him so uncomfortable. It was easy to love them in the abstract, delightful to plan for their welfare; even now his heart warmed at the thought of their enjoyment of the splendors of his great house. He loved listening to the tourists’ reactions, as the docents pointed out this particularly fine Flemish Madonna, or that marvel of Persian figured tile.
He was a little lonely when there weren’t guests downstairs, trooping through his echoing halls. He liked watching their progress on the surveillance cameras.

But he never liked looking into their mortal faces, clasping their mortal hands, talking to them. He never had, honestly, even when he’d been a mortal man himself. Only the endless building plans, only the work made him truly happy.

Nothing really mattered, except the work.

Still no way to measure the hours or the years, in the darkness, but they went by. There were times when icy sweat beaded the walls and ran down to pool on the floor, and the slave’s teeth chattered in his head as he told Tiara the love story. In those nights Tiara struggled through frozen weeds to the farmhouse, and had to use every ounce of her will to make the big man rise from his bed and open the back door, gazing asleep into the darkness while she slid past him and rifled his shelves.

There were times when the air was heavy and stale, hard to draw into the lungs. A living reek came floating down into the places of the dead, nasty smells from Quean Barbie’s domain. But then the wind would shift, and a faint sweet breath from outside would find its way down, telling them about stars and grasses and blossoming thorn. Those were brief nights, but Tiara found she could range farther, run more swiftly then. She brought back wild plums for her slave, and hazelnuts, and with her hands she caught trout in a starry pool.

She carried them back in great haste, always, because the sooner she and the slave could eat, the sooner it would be time to cuddle close again and listen to the story. Tiara liked the heroine, Mendoza, well enough, identified with her in fact, the little girl who had been lost and alone in the dark and yet survived to become a fine lady; but Tiara’s favorite was the Englishman who died and came back again, just like her slave, who described him with such vividness Tiara felt sure she would recognize him in a second, should she ever meet him.

And how brave he was, and how clever in all his incarnations! But especially as Commander Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, who was in the story the
longest. Tiara could well appreciate a ruthless hero, and listened spellbound as the slave described the sea battles Edward fought, the adventures in mangrove swamps, and the duels with villainous slavemasters, the secret missions for his government, the beautiful ladies so grateful to be rescued or so eager to betray state secrets to him. Actually Tiara wasn’t sure she exactly approved of the other ladies, but the slave explained that Edward only romanced them because he hadn’t found Mendoza in that lifetime yet, and as soon as he had he would be faithful unto death.