The Life of the World to Come (15 page)

Read The Life of the World to Come Online

Authors: Kage Baker

Tags: #Adult, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #C429, #Extratorrents, #Kat, #Travel

BOOK: The Life of the World to Come
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“A question, Foxy.” Chatterji got up and walked around the image, studying it from all angles. “We’re not making the prototype immortal, of course, but can we install recording hardware? So as to have a complete transcript of his experience.”
“Give ’im a black box? No problem.” Ellsworth-Howard gave an order and another section of brain lit up. “Right there, instead of your support package, eh? Shove it up through the nasal fossa right after birth. Mind you, it’d fit better if we left his nose big. Shield the box right and even we wouldn’t know it was there, unless we knew what to look for. Cut it out after he dies.”
“I don’t want to think about him dying,” said Rutherford.
“He hasn’t even lived yet. That is—I suppose he has, hasn’t he, and died too? Speaking temporally? We’re going to create him and send him back into the past, where he’ll live out a human lifetime. Somewhere, somewhen, that black box is already on its way to be analyzed. All those figures may have appeared on the dice because they were predestined to, chaps, think of that! Talk about once and future kings.”
“I hate shracking temporal paradoxes,” growled Ellsworth-Howard. “D’you want this brain or not, then?”
“Oh, it’s a jolly good brain,” Rutherford hastened to assure him. “We’ll go with this design, by all means.”
“Do you suppose one life sequence is enough?” Chatterji frowned thoughtfully at the brain. “It’s not, really, is it, for this kind of experiment?”
“Not if you want valid results,” Ellsworth-Howard said. “I was planning on cloning, once I’ve got a blastocyst. Get three embryos to start with, run three separate sequences.”
“He’ll be reincarnated,” Rutherford yelled in delight.
“Another
myth made real.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Chatterji icily. Rutherford turned bright red.
“Sorry, old man. No offense. It’s not as though you believed in those legends, after all.”
“Of course I don’t, but that’s not the point,” Chatterji said. “It’s my cultural heritage and I won’t have it mocked. Look here, suppose you give us your report on this now? I’ll be interested in hearing what you’ve come up with.”
“Very well.” Rutherford cleared his throat. “We’ll need to issue a standing order for the Preservers to be on the lookout for a particular scenario, throughout all time.”
“Which will be—?” Chatterji went to the sideboard and poured out a little of the apple-prune juice combination. He tasted it experimentally.
“A woman,” Rutherford said, “fair, of above average height, unmarried, who is sleeping with one or more men who also answer that general physical description. At least one of the men must be highly placed in whatever local tribe or government exists in their era. Any period will do, but
Adonai
simply must be an Englishman, don’t you think?”
“Yes, of course.” Chatterji nodded. Ellsworth-Howard
grunted his assent and made a subvocal request through the throat mike, and sent it for general temporal distribution.
“Once we have the situation, the woman will be abducted, implanted with one of our embryos and returned to her environment,” Rutherford said briskly.
“But these will be
human
women,” said Chatterji, knitting his brows. “Can they manage?”
“Of course. Cattle embryos used to be shipped implanted in rabbits, for heaven’s sake! Nothing inhumane. We’ll have a Preserver contact the woman, give her proper prenatal care and deliver the infant, installing the hardware at birth. And we’ll pressure the supposed father or fathers for child support, on threat of exposure. I thought this bit was particularly neat, myself; ought to partly pay for the program.” Rutherford leaned back and folded his arms in a self-congratulatory manner.
“That is neat, yes.” Chatterji agreed. “It never hurts to think of one’s budget.”
They heard a faint beeping signal.
“Got your situation for you,” Ellsworth-Howard said. “Facilitator in 1525 AD says he’s got his eye on a girl at Greenwich. Matches the physical type and so do her sex partners. One of ’em’s the king’s falconer. That okay?”
“Splendid! Send an affirmative response to the Facilitator.” Rutherford punched the air with his fist. “You see, chaps? It’s all falling into place.”
“What happens next?” Chatterji inquired.
“Next, we’ll arrange for the subject to be raised by one of our paid households with security clearance. They’ll know he’s one of our experiments, but he’ll never be told, of course. He’ll think he’s a human being. What he
will
be told is that he’s illegitimate, that his birth was a scandal and a disgrace.”
“Won’t that tend to create a neurosis?” Chatterji objected, sipping his drink.
“Ah, but, that’s the clever part! He’ll be splendidly nourished and educated.” Rutherford held out his hands, grinning hugely. “He’ll be programmed with the
very
highest ideals by someone he loves and trusts, and told he must work harder than other boys to make up for the stigma of his birth. The
psychology here will produce someone well adjusted, but with a secret shame.”
“Ingenious, Rutherford! Go on.”
“Every influence must be used to indoctrinate him toward a life of service to humanity, you see.” Rutherford stood and began to pace about, rattling the dice in his pocket “Then, we’ll throw him out alone in the world! Start him on the hero’s journey. He’ll have no family, so all his emotional ties and loyalties will come to settle on those values he’s been taught to hold dear. We’ll see what he does.”
“Here now,” said Ellsworth-Howard, who had only just sorted through the whole speech. “Isn’t that a little hard on him? You’re not only making him feel bad about something he didn’t do, you’re making him feel bad about something that didn’t even shracking happen.”
“I believe churches used to call it original sin,” Rutherford agreed, looking crafty. “But what does it matter, if it serves to make him a better man? If he could understand, I’m sure he’d thank us. I can’t wait to see how he’ll turn out, can you?”
Chatterji raised his glass in salute. “I think you’re right, Rutherford. This must be what the gods feel like! I report to the committee on Thursday. You’ll get your authorization for raw materials then, Foxy.”
By the age of seventeen, Alec Checkerfield was no longer unhappy in London. Not at all. He was a well-to-do young man about town and he was having a lot of fun. At least, as much fun as one could have in the twenty-fourth century.
“Alec.”
Alec opened one eye. His other eye was obstructed by the breast of the young lady who happened to be in bed with him that morning. He breathed in the reassuring fragrance of her skin. With his usable eye he looked around uncertainly and met the glare of the bearded face that had lowered down beside him.
“What?”
“Alec, it’s eight bells! Don’t you think you’d better get the wench out of here afore Mrs. L. comes in with yer bloody breakfast on a tray?”
“Uh-huh,” Alec replied. He did not move, staring blankly at the shambles of last night’s social encounter. In the twenty-fourth century, young men hardly ever woke up to find empty liquor bottles and suspicious-looking smoking apparatus lying amid shed clothing; stimulants had been illegal for decades and sex was very nearly so. Alec, however, was a rather old-fashioned boy.
As Alec lay there getting his bearings, the Captain paced back and forth, growling. He no longer resembled a pirate, or
at least not the eighteenth-century variety. Nowadays he appeared as a dignified-looking gentleman in a three-piece suit, though there was still a suggestion of the corsair in his black beard and fierce grin. He looked like a particularly villainous commodities trader.
“Get up, son,” he said patiently. “It’s the first of April, 2337, which is sort of appropriate under the circumstances. Wake up yer friend. Take a shower and wash the smoke out of yer hair. Mix yerself a glass of Fizz-O-Dyne and drink it. Make one for the girl, too. Get her clothes back on her. Take her down the back stairs. Sensors indicate nobody’s in that part of the house right now. Alec, are you listening to me?”
“Oh, piss off,” Alec said, and sat up unsteadily. The girl sighed and stretched. The Captain winked out before she opened her eyes, but several hundred red lights glowered at her from the banks of electronic equipment that lined the walls of Alec’s room, and a small surveillance camera swiveled to follow her motion as she reached out a hand to stroke Alec’s back.
“Hey, babe,” she cooed.
“Hey, babe,” he said, turning to her with all the charm he could summon through the miasma of hangover. “D’j’you sleep okay?”
“Like a brass lime,” she said. It’s not necessary here to explain all the youth argot of the year 2337, but
like a brass lime
was a reference to the title of a current hit song and meant that she’d slept quite well, thank you.
“Bishareedo,” he said, and in the same idiom that meant that he was very happy to hear she’d slept well. He reached out to pull her upright beside him, with one swift motion of his arm. She gave a little squeal of mingled terror and delight. He kissed her gently.
“Squash,” he said, by which he meant
Let’s go wash
. That one wasn’t an idiom; he was simply so hung over he wasn’t speaking clearly.
They staggered into Alec’s bathroom together, giggling, and the girl leaned against a rack of fluffy towels as she watched Alec program the temperature controls of the shower.
Her name, just for the record, was the Honourable Cynthia
Bryce-Peckinghill, and she was young and pretty, and beyond that there was absolutely nothing distinctive about her.
“I have to wee, Alec,” she announced in a playful kind of way.
“Okay,” he said absently, as the water came on and hit him with a blast of needle-steam. He yelped and ducked back, putting up both his hands to wipe his face.
She considered him fondly as she sat on the toilet. She’d never met anybody quite like Alec, nor had any of the other young ladies in their Circle of Thirty. He wasn’t handsome compared to Alistair Stede-Windsor or Hugh Rothschild. He didn’t have their chiseled patrician features. In fact, towering beside them he looked like a good-natured horse, especially if he was grinning. One assumed that he was clumsy because he was so lanky and big; but then he’d move, and one was struck by his grace and the deliberate control he had over his body. When he wasn’t stoned, that is.
Naked like this, Alec’s strangeness was more pronounced, but it was difficult to put into precise words—impossible for Cynthia to put into words, because she was quite brainless, but even the sharper of the girls in the Circle of Thirty hadn’t quite managed to say what it was. There was a suggestion of unnatural strength, of
power
, that a well-bred idiot like Cynthia found scarily pleasurable.
He was sensitive about his long teeth, though. He’d worked at developing several different sidelong or closed-lipped smiles to avoid drawing attention to them. It gave him a crafty sort of look sometimes.
Of course, Alec’s looks were beside the point. What Cynthia had discovered, as all the other young ladies in the Circle of Thirty had discovered, was that Alec had a remarkable talent. Unlike Alistair Stede-Windsor or Hugh Rothschild or any of the other young gentlemen of the Circle, Alec was not only interested in sex any hour of the day or night but
capable of doing something about it
.
And so polite! He had only to look into one’s eyes and suggest certain affectionate pleasures, in that curiously compelling voice of his, and ladies fought to jump into bed with him. Though it must be said that few girls repeated the experience more than once or twice. There was something about
Alec just a bit more … animal, perhaps, than most of them felt comfortable with.
He was sensitive about that trick of looking into a girl’s eyes and making her want what he wanted, too; so sensitive that he pretended to himself that he couldn’t do it.
But as he stood shivering now, pushing his lank wet hair back from his face, he seemed pathetically ordinary. Cynthia thought he looked just super. She hopped up and jumped into the shower with him, and they spent a long time in there and used up a great deal of hot water.
“This way,” Alec said in a stage whisper, leading her down the back stairs. She clutched her shoes as she skipped after him, giggling wildly. This was more adventurous than anything she’d ever done.
They paused on the service porch as Alec spotted a mass of florist’s roses among the morning’s deliveries. He grabbed a red one and stuck it down the back of her jeans when she bent over to pull on her shoes. She shrieked with laughter, which he stifled with a kiss, leaning down. Then he heard the sound of a car pulling up in the street beyond.
Alec stood on tiptoe and peered through the fanlight. When he saw the long car with the Bryce-Peckinghill crest and Cynthia’s older sister at the wheel he smiled and waved, then opened the door just wide enough to let Cynthia out. She bounced down the steps and got into the car, remembering fortunately to take the rose out of her pants first.
Bye-bye,
Alec mouthed silently, and she waved bye-bye and blew him a kiss. Her sister switched on the agmotor and the car rose and zoomed away, bearing the Honourable Mss. Cynthia and Phyllis Bryce-Peckinghill out of this story for the moment.
Alec went to the trouble of returning up the back stairs and going down the front ones to disguise what he’d been doing, but when he strolled into the breakfast room Lewin looked up from his accounts plaquette with a disapproving stare.
“Alec, did you have a girl in your room last night?”
“Er … yes, actually.” Alec avoided eye contact with him, going to the sideboard to pour himself a glass of fruit juice.
Lewin snorted. The Playfriend was somewhere in the attic
with Alec’s other outgrown toys. Alec had long since stopped prattling about the Captain and their adventures together. And, apart from getting genius scores in maths and cyberscience, Alec had manifested no sinister superhuman traits, nothing to suggest why there’d been so much secrecy and heartbreak aboard the
Foxy Lady
all those years ago.
“I see. Well, it would have been polite to have offered her some breakfast, don’t you think?”
“I guess so.” Alec sipped the juice and made a face. He set it aside and filled another glass with mineral water. “She had to get home, though.” He no longer spoke with the jewellike precision of small English children either, had now adopted the slangy Transatlantic accents common to well-educated young men of his social class.
“Hm.” Lewin set the plaquette aside. “Was it the Preeves girl again?”
“Nope.”
“Here’s our Alec!” Mrs. Lewin came bustling into the room, bearing a fresh pot of herbal tea. “I was beginning to think you’d never get up. What can I get for you this morning, dear?”
“Get him some dry toast,” said Lewin, as Alec bent down to kiss her. She accepted his kiss and looked up at him archly.
“Oh, dear. Something for a headache, too, I suppose.”
“Yes, please.” Alec slumped into his chair and watched her depart for the kitchen. He turned to Lewin and said, “How’s her breathing this morning?”
“She didn’t sleep very well.”
“You ought to take her down to the place at Bournemouth,” he said, having a cautious sip of his mineral water.
“And leave you here to do who knows what in our absence?” Lewin said. “Fill the house up with your friends and have a party, that’s what you’d do, and when we came home your father’s bar would be cleaned out. It’s very nearly empty now.”
“It’s not as though he’ll ever come home to notice,” Alec muttered, avoiding Lewin’s gaze. Alec focused his attention on the bubbles rising in his glass until Mrs. Lewin returned with his tray of toast, vitamins, and headache pills. She sat down opposite him and watched with a prim frown until he gulped down the pills and vitamins.
“You’ve been drinking again, haven’t you?”
“Yes, a bit,” he said, wishing she’d leave him alone and wondering if he were going to be sick.
“Dear, you know what that does to your system. Just look at yourself! Green as a duck egg. There’s a reason why that stuff was made illegal, you know. You may think you know it all at your age, I certainly did when I was a girl, but believe me, liquor is a wrecker and a betrayer! With all the advantages you’ve been given in your life I can’t think why you want to go ruining your health and wasting your time with such a stupid habit, I really can’t …”
Alec ground his teeth. Lewin was smiling to himself as he made entries on his plaquette. Alec felt the pressure in his head building and groped for a piece of toast. He poured half a bottle of hot pepper sauce over the toast and crunched it down, praying it wouldn’t come right back up. He began to nod agreement to Mrs. Lewin’s stream of reproaches, and the next time she paused for breath he interjected:
“You’re right. You’re right, and I’m really sorry. I won’t do this again, I promise. Okay?”
She had been about to continue, but his abrupt capitulation took her by surprise.
“You
must
feel ill,” she said. He nodded wretchedly. “Well, poor dear, I suppose it’s because you’re seventeen. Boys seem to feel they have to do stupid things like that You’ll grow out of it, I’m certain, you’re such a clever lad—”
“I was just saying we ought to go down to Bournemouth when the term ends,” he said. “Don’t you think? Have some nice fresh sea air for a change?”
“Oh, that’d be lovely.” She looked at him encouragingly. “Malcolm, why don’t you mail the estate agent about getting the house ready? And perhaps you ought to let his Lordship know. He might want to come across and join us on holiday, wouldn’t that be nice?”
Both Alec and Lewin made noncommittal noises. She’d said that every time they’d gone on holiday, and to date Roger had never managed to show up.
“And did I show you the holocard we got from Derek and Lulu? They’re running a hotel in Turkey now. Ever so happy
there. They remember you so fondly, Alec, they said they both hoped you’re doing well—”
Alec silently intoned
shrack, shrack, shrack
, repeating it like a mantra to drown her out until the headache pills began to work and the toast seemed as though it were going to stay with him. The next time Mrs. Lewin paused Alec got unsteadily to his feet. “I guess I’ll go,” he said. “I’ve got Circle this morning.”
“Shall I ring for the car?” Lewin looked up at him.
“No, thanks.” Alec waited to see if his head would explode. “I’ll take mine.”
Lewin made a dubious sound and watched as Alec departed.
On the grand front steps, Alec reached into his pocket and thumbed the remote that brought his car floating up from the subterranean garage. It had been a gift from his father on his last birthday and it was bright red, very fast and very small. He didn’t really enjoy driving it, as a matter of fact; his knees stuck up on either side of the steering column as though it were a toy car on a fairground ride. The young ladies in the Circle of Thirty seemed enchanted by it, however, and invariably went to bed with him after a fast spin.
“For Christ’s sake, you’d better let me drive,” said the Captain, speaking out of the instrument panel.
“Okay,” said Alec, in no mood for arguing.

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