The Life of the World to Come (46 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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There were still a few refinements to make, of course. A holo generator was necessary to give the ship the illusion of a suitably historical appearance, or at least obscure her with shifting fogbanks, in any era she might cross. Also, the Captain was still organizing and correlating the time charts he’d plundered from Dr. Zeus.
He was intrigued by the continual mention of
event shadows,
locations where no historical record existed for certain years. Within those shadows, Dr. Zeus had no foreknowledge
of events. Anything might have happened there, which gave anyone hiding in an event shadow a decided advantage.
Don’t you see, matey? We can sail on blue water forever, if we need to! This’ll make it easier to raid Dr. Zeus. We’ll appear out of nowhere, strike, and be off again through time afore he knows what’s hit him.
But haven’t we got everything we need from the Company now?
Not by a long shot, laddie. I want to know what’s in store for us in the future. We’re going after Dr. Zeus’s bloody Temporal Concordance. Belike yer lady will be able to give us a clue as to its whereabouts, eh? There’s a whole mass of defended sites I want a closer look at. I’ll strip him of everything he’s got, the bronze bastard. I can set traps for him hundreds of years back, that won’t blow up in his face until 2355. Two can play his game, by thunder!
I guess so.
Ah, but yer feeling listless. I know. Revenge’ll seem sweeter when you’ve had a chance to think about this a little.
I don’t think I care about the revenge anymore.
Oh, no? After what he done to you? Well, now, that’s an admirable sentiment, lad, and I’m happy to see you’ve got such a forgiving heart. I call that right charitable, to be sure. All the same … you want to rescue yer girl, don’t you?
Of course I do.
Then you’d best let the old Captain chart yer course, because unless we put a couple of broadsides through Dr. Zeus, it mayn’t be so easy to take the lady.
That energized Alec. He ventured out of bed and staggered about the ship, feeling his strength return. He didn’t care for the beard at all, and removed it as soon as his hands were steady enough to control the shaver. He spent a week bringing himself back, working out in the ship’s gym and learning the new commands that would guide the
Captain Morgan
through time. Worried as he was about what Mendoza might think of his complicity in the Mars disaster, he was even more desperate to see her again. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d needed human companionship so badly.
Though the Captain kept delicately dropping hints about Mendoza, hints that Alec resolutely refused to think about … In fact the Captain was hinting about a lot of things he’d discovered.
Apparently, there had been some kind of project going on for years, to produce uniquely talented and disposable puppets for Dr. Zeus. The other men like Alec had been killed. Alec was the first one to escape his preordained fate, and even so his life was irrevocably changed: he had become the Flying Dutchman after all, doomed to run before the wind as long as he lived.
His anger started to smolder again, and as it returned the sense of weakness and guilt retreated. Revenge began to look good once more. Elly, Roger, Cecelia, Mendoza, the people of Mars Two, and now these unknowns who had come before him! The list of Dr. Zeus’s victims kept growing.
The course is laid in, son. You’ve taken yer medicine?
Aye, sir.
Alec smiled grimly, buckling the safety harness.
Brace yerself. It’ll be worse than the storm off Trinidad in ’47.
It won’t be worse than riding that carpeted toilet through space. Where do we come from, Captain, sir?
From the sea!
The yellow gas boiled, a throbbing ran through the
Captain Morgan,
and Alec became the whirling center of a very expensive carnival ride.
There was no one to see the
Captain Morgan’s
arrival, but if there had been they might have thought they beheld an immense bottle materializing abruptly in Avalon Bay, spinning in the water, gradually slowing. When the spinning had slowed to a halt, the bottle underwent an extraordinary transformation. Half of its glassy surface folded back lengthwise, revealing the deck of the ship it had become. With only the faintest whirring sound the masts rose smoothly from her deck, her spars popped out, her rigging
deployed. Her anchor dropped, plummeting down through the clear water.
We done it, lad. We’ve traveled!
What’s the chronometer say?
It’s a week after you left. She’ll never know you was delayed.
Alec unbuckled his harness and ran out on deck. He was in the bay he remembered, there was the island, and there inland he could see the wide swath he’d cut through Mendoza’s cornfield.
“Yeah!” he howled.
There’s where I landed, that’s what I told you about.
He was on the point of leaping overboard when the Captain sent the agboat alongside.
This’ll get you there faster, boy. But careful, now!
Alec vaulted in and took the agboat up the canyon, following his previous course. The broken corn was still where it had fallen, only now turning yellow. He veered right sharply and made straight for the little house, there in its tidy garden.
“Mendoza!” He cut the motor and jumped from the boat. “Baby! I’m here, I came back for you!”
Alec—
“Mendoza?” Alec sprinted up on the porch (there was the bench where he’d sat, there were even a few drops of his blood) and pounded on the door.
Alec, there’s nobody here.
What?
“Mendoza?” Alec opened the door.
I scanned the whole station. She’s gone. Bloody hell, I was afraid this’d happen.
Alec walked into the empty room and stood, staring.
No signs of violence. Nothing overturned or broken. He knew what must have happened, all the same. Almost calmly he looked down at the table where they had dined together, at the big old-fashioned book that sat there now, open to a page of spidery black script that ended abruptly. He knew what that was: old-time writing. That must be her bottle of ink, there, and that was her pen, made from a gull’s feather. The ink had congealed in the open bottle. She’d been writing when they’d come for her.
They’ve killed her, haven’t they? Because she helped me.
No, she ain’t dead. I swear it, son! But they got to her first.
Do you know where she is?
I’ll find out. See that terminal there? Hook us in.
Alec obeyed. The Captain dove away from him through cyberspace. Alec remained there, alone in the room.
The dark field was before his eyes. The little girl had walked blindly there, hadn’t seen the danger, hadn’t heard his shout of warning. He hadn’t warned her, had he? Instead he’d pushed her straight into the fire.
Numbly, he closed the book and looked at it. Had she made it herself? Some of the paper toward the front was yellowed, as though it were very old. He peered at the writing on the first page, trying to decipher it. The letter I, and that would be the word
am
maybe, and then an A, and what could that next word be? Moving his lips, he read in silence the word
Botanist.
He sounded it out several times before the syllables had meaning for him. She had written this. This was all he had left of her, and he didn’t know how to read.
When the Captain came racing back into his consciousness, he was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands.
Alec, let’s go! The bastard’s right behind me. He knows we’re here.
Is she dead?
No, but they arrested her. Alec, we got to get out of here, we can’t help her now
It’s my fault.
Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t start that again. In about five minutes there’ll be Company shuttles storming round that point out there!
I don’t care.
Bloody Hell!
Do you care about her? If she needed rescuing afore, she really needs it now. Unless you want to wind up in the jar next to hers in some Company facility, you better move yer damn arse!
That got Alec on his feet, but he went to the book and wrapped it in the blanket from her bed.
What in hell are you doing?
the Captain roared.
She left writing. You have to translate it for me.
Alec ran for the door, clutching the bundled book to his chest as though it were a child.
He was back on board, in his safety harness, and the stasis gas had just begun to fill the air when a shadow streaked across the transparent dome. It was a shuttle, coming in low and fast, just as he had done. Before he could see whether it was going to turn and come back over, the
Captain Morgan
leaped away through time.
We’re clear! Thirty miles out from the Farallones and it’s 7 June, 2215. That’s what I’d call a neat escape.
Alec gasped for fresh air, pushing out of the harness.
Never mind that. Where is she?
I don’t know, son. I wasn’t able—
What do you mean, you don’t know?
Alec had begun to shake with anger.
You told me she was still alive. How can you know that, and not know where she is?
Alec, lad, there’s things I ain’t had the right time to explain—
Well, you can damned well explain ’em now. What did you mean, about her being in a jar?
What haven’t you told me?
Son, I wouldn’t lie to you.
Hell yes, you would!
Alec charged into cyberspace, shoving past the Captain to riffle through the Company files. Numbers and names filled his head, dates and places, maps and pictures, yielding up their secrets at his impatient push.
Suddenly there was a defended file before his eyes, something with the Captain’s own seal on it, a text headed
Adonai.
What’s this file? Why’ve you got it locked?
No, boy! Leave it alone.
Alec’s eyes narrowed. He forced the seal and accessed the file.
Into his consciousness came pouring the contents of
Adonai
: the proposal, outline, conceptual designs, every memo that had passed between all persons concerned, minutes of meetings, sequence reports complete with images …
And, finally and terribly, the black box recordings containing
in electromagnetic analogue every thought, emotion and sensation ever experienced during the lives of two men named Nicholas Harpole and Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.
Abruptly Alec had the memory of two complete lifetimes he had not lived, with a blindingly swift montage of images: half-timbered hall, rose garden, black-letter pages, cold corridors, the deck of a warship, a man in a tailcoat unrolling a map, a dying man, a green jungle. Death, his own, in flaming agony and in a hail of bullets, and in both cases the anguished face of the black-eyed girl watching him die, Mendoza.
Mendoza, who had loved him. Them.
The knowledge was incomprehensible, unbearable, could not be assimilated.
An alternative was found.
Alec felt a tearing, an impossible increase, and roared with pain as a second pair of arms burst forth from his sides, flailing and striking, and then yet a third pair, and barely had this registered on his screaming mind than two new legs shot out from his hips and then two more, kicking frantically, and his groin erupted in a hydra of members, beyond grotesque, da Vinci’s Vitruvian man gone one better! And, last, a second face thrust forward from his own, as though it broke the surface of smooth water, an appalling face baring its white teeth in rage, and close after it a second face no less fearsome in its howl of lamentation like the crack of thunder, and the very chambers of his heart were tearing themselves open now and splitting into three, and he knew it would kill him and was glad, and toppled like a ghastly idol to smash into pieces on the floor.
But somewhere in all the horror was one quiet satisfaction: that of having confirmed, at last, beyond all doubt or argument, that he was indeed the monster he had always suspected himself to be.
Not dead yet? He lay gasping on the floor of the saloon, sprawled out, wearing only the body he’d been born with. The pain was beginning to ease away, but things were very far from being all right. What had just happened, to beat him down with such shame and horror?

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