The Machine's Child (Company) (35 page)

“Okay, okay. Sorry. Wow, I don’t know how I missed this thyrohyoid when I put your head back on but I sure missed it, didn’t I?” Joseph bent and paid close attention to his task for a moment before going on. “What was I saying? The kid.

“Alec Checkerfield. He grows up. When he comes of age—shortly after poor Jolly Roger takes the deep six, under distinctly fishy circumstances—he gets himself cyborged!”

Budu growled thoughtfully.

“Yeah, not a complete cyborg like one of us but something like a port junkie? Which procedure no ethical doctor would perform if they knew His Satanic Lordship’s little secret. He’s got some kind of inhuman powers. He’s a mutation the Company’s experimenting with, I’m positive. There’ve always been rumors about genetic engineering . . .”

Budu wondered wearily whether he ought to tell Joseph the truth. It wouldn’t comfort his son, but it would certainly bring matters to a head. And then, alive or dead, Alec Checkerfield would no longer take up valuable time.

“So here’s our boy, mean as Nicholas Harpole and dangerous as that other guy, Edward Whosis-Hyphen,” Joseph continued. “Does his thing on Mars and in his usual fashion makes things worse for mortals everywhere. Gets away with it, too, first stopping at Options Research in his time shuttle to abduct Mendoza, for whatever reason.”

Budu gave him an impatient look.

“But we’ll get him.” Joseph’s voice hardened. “We’ll get the son of a bitch. If he’s even anything that natural!

“I think I’ve got a chance. You said I should get to know my enemy, Father, and you were so right! Because I’ve discovered his weakness,” Joseph said, beginning to giggle again and waving the hemostim around wildly. Budu put up one hand and clenched it on Joseph’s wrist, glaring at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Ow! Sorry. It’s funny, that’s all. Alec Checkerfield, unlike his previous selves, is a kid of the twenty-fourth century, and guess what? Like all his generation, he’s a self-indulgent moron. Get this: the big goofball
is obsessed with pirates. He buys himself a yacht the size of the
Titanic,
all fixed up like a pirate ship. You wouldn’t believe what he’ll spend on it!”

Budu blinked, struck by the similarities between the life of Alec Check-erfield and another Company foundling, of sorts, whose life he’d been investigating shortly before the 1906 earthquake had buried him under several tons of Chinatown.

“He likes his pleasures,” said Joseph. “It’s easy to set a trap for somebody like that. All I have to do is find him. Maybe there’s a way of tracking the shuttle’s energy signature. It works in the movies. Maybe I can lie in wait for him somewhere, and when he least expects it—wham! Strike three and you’re out, Nicholas, for keeps this time.”

Joseph fell silent, sealing up the edges of the wound. Budu swallowed experimentally, finding it suddenly much easier to inhale.

“The only problem,” continued Joseph, “is finding him. Even with him being such a big ugly needle, the haystack of time is so freaking huge. And he’s—hey!” he said, for Budu had braced his good arm on the table and levered himself up into a sitting position. A moment’s concentration, and he had shakily raised his head to stare down at Joseph. He worked his mouth experimentally, drew a deep shuddering breath and spoke.

“You’re missing the obvious again, son,” he said, in a pleasant tenor that was nonetheless oddly flat and without intonation.

“Yaay!” Joseph threw up both arms in a gesture of triumph. He scrambled up on the table and knelt there, hugging Budu. “Oh, Father, you wouldn’t believe how I’ve missed the sound of your voice.”

“There is something you need to know.”

“Oh, this is so swell, this is what I’ve needed you to do all along, plan a war for me, because there’s nobody as good at it as you, you were always the best, and I mean that sincerely, Father—” Joseph said, tears in his eyes. Budu went on staring at him implacably. “And—something I need to know?”

“The boy
is
some kind of Enforcer,” said Budu. “Marco guessed correctly. You should have seen this long ago. His face. His size.”

Joseph screwed up his features, looked away. “I never noticed any resemblance.”

“You’re lying,” said Budu. “And he has our skills. He has the Persuasion.”

“You mean he’s persuasive? Yeah, but—”

“No. He bends the will of others,” Budu said. “As we did. When he commands, he is obeyed.”

“Now,
that’s
nuts,” said Joseph desperately.

“Nicholas Harpole was executed the first of April 1555, before four hundred and nineteen witnesses,” said Budu. “He preached a sermon. You remember what he said; you were there.”

“He . . . tried to make the audience rise up in rebellion against Bloody Mary,” said Joseph. “Or die at the stake with him.”

“Twenty-two of his audience followed him to the stake within three months,” said Budu. “Most of the others either rose in rebellion or committed suicide within the next five years. Of the two immortals who watched him burn, one destroyed herself. The other became a rebel, after years of servile and unquestioning service to the Company.”

Joseph gaped at him a moment, and then shouted: “No! That’s not true, damn it, that’s—that’s total coincidence! You can’t tell me that son of a bitch got inside
my
head!”

“He did,” said Budu.

“And you never lie, do you?” Pounding his temples with both fists, Joseph began to pace in a circle. “Of course you don’t. Of course he’s got hellish powers. That’s what I’ve been saying all along, haven’t I? Help me find him, Father, help me stop him!”

“If he can travel through time, where will the boy go? Think,” ordered Budu.

“Okay, right, think. Where will Alec Checkerfield go?”

“You’ve told me,” said Budu, “that this boy is obsessed with pirates. There are no pirates in his time. He is given a time shuttle.”

“He goes back in time to see some
real
pirates,” Joseph yelled. “Of course! Gee, I really have to apologize, Father, I just don’t seem to be thinking clearly today—so obviously he goes back in time to the golden age of piracy, which he must know was at the end of the seventeenth century, and he probably goes to Madagascar—or wait, no, what am I thinking? He’s born in the Caribbean. He names his ship the
Captain Morgan.
He goes to old Jamaica! In fact, he goes, he’s bound to go, sooner or later he
has
to go to the wickedest pirate city on Earth—”

“Port Royal,” said Budu.

At a cemetery on the outskirts of London, on a bright chilly October afternoon in 1888, a funeral cortege pulls up. The casket is taken from the splendid hearse, and carried with pomp to the graveside by pallbearers in black-ribboned top hats. Mourners file in respectfully through the iron gates, making their way across the grass between the obelisks and statuary, like so many black chess pieces moving between white ones.

The deceased was well known, his mourners are many, and the young couple in elegantly cut black go quite unnoticed where they stand to the rear of the crowd, though in his high silk hat the young man is quite the tallest person there.

The Reverend Mr. Gideon, glancing up in the midst of reading the office for the burial of the dead, does wonder for a second at the expression of icy triumph in the face of the young man, who is contemplating a group of wheezing elderly gentlemen; but the Reverend Mr. Gideon has been at his business long enough to know that a lot of bizarre emotions break loose at funerals, and he goes right on reading without missing a beat.

The deceased is laid to rest, and one by one the mourners file by the grave, some of them stooping to toss in a handful of earth as they pass. The young couple are the last to observe this ritual, and the waiting sexton and his assistant fail to notice that, while the young lady tosses in her handful of earth, the young gentleman tosses in what appears to be a small bottle of gold paint, which falls between the casket and the grave wall, out of sight. It isn’t gold paint. It is about a teaspoon’s worth of
nanobots designed to unleash extreme vengeance on Dr. Zeus Incorporated, on that distant day in 2355 when the world ends. Just now, however, it is completely harmless.

On their way to the gate, the young couple draw abreast of one of the elderly gentlemen, who is making his laborious way along with a cane. He trips on a marble urn, stumbles, is about to fall when the young man catches his elbow and sets him upright. The old gentleman peers up into his face, scowling in an attempt to make it out. His jaw drops.

“Good God,” he says hoarsely. “Bell-Fairfax!”

“I regret to inform you that you are mistaken, sir,” says the young gentleman, smiling with formidable teeth. Eyes brightening as an afterthought occurs to him, he adds: “Merely his bastard. Good afternoon!” He tips his silk hat, turns on his heel, and walks away swiftly to rejoin his young lady.

The old man gasps, his eyes roll back in his head, he pitches forward into somebody else’s memorial wreath; and the daughters and elderly wife who come running back to his assistance, crying out “Pa
pa
!” and “Ambrose!” wonder, in their consternation, why the tall man is laughing as he strides on.

In a dance club in a cellar in swinging London of the 1960s, one young couple seems to be having less fun than their peer group. Perhaps they find their polyester and vinyl clothes ugly and uncomfortable. Perhaps the very tall youth objects to having to duck continually to avoid hitting his head on the beams of the low ceiling. Perhaps the girl is mortified by her appearance in the makeup of the era. Perhaps they find the atmosphere of packed mortal bodies, also wearing polyester clothing in the stifling heat, oppressive; and perhaps they find the popular dances clumsy and graceless. The music is sublime, however, and so presently they retire from the dance floor and find a quiet uncrowded corner, where they sit and listen appreciatively.

The reason their particular corner is uncrowded is because the wall behind it is broken out for some sort of electrical work in progress, and plasterboard, earth, and trailing wires are only carelessly fenced off with a sawhorse. And as the music throbs, as the dancers bounce and twist and
shake their heads, as the colored lights whirl in blobby patterns, the youth leans back casually and pokes something small into a dark recess between two bricks. Even in the pandemonium, he can hear something rattling down inside the wall, and smiles at the girl.

As he leans back, however, something trailing a thin curl of smoke is thrust under his nose. He looks up, startled, at a person of uncertain gender in beaded and fringed clothes, who murmurs something inaudible, but whose expression of all-embracing affection makes it clear an invitation is being offered. He signs confusion. The person tucks the little twisted cigarette between his lips. Not wishing to be impolite, he takes it between his thumb and forefinger and inhales deeply.

The girl is distracted from her wistful contemplation of the bar by his snorting coughs, and though she turns instantly the purveyor of peace and love has drifted off to offer it to others, and the youth’s pupils have expanded to alarming size. In response to her frantically signed question he mouths the word
ganja,
and she rolls her eyes. Getting one arm around him, she helps him to his feet and they leave. He hits his head on the beams four times before they manage to reach the exit.

Venice, bride of the sea! And though the Bridge of Sighs, the golden Rialto, and St. Mark’s glimmer in the ripple-reflections as enticingly as they ever have in this year of 1797, and though the pigeons flutter in clouds and cast their shadows as beautifully as ever on the paving stones of the square, the tourist trade is down, thanks to that annoying little man from Corsica zooming about being the wonder of the martial world, and the fact that he has bestowed on the Venetians a brand-new constitution of their very own doesn’t quite make up for it.

There are practically no British tourists there at all. This suits the hoteliers and cooks just fine,
grazie,
because the British complain ceaselessly about Venetian cuisine and notions of plumbing; but the
gondolieri
are feeling the pinch, because Britons love gondola rides. So Vittorio murmurs a prayer of thanks as the tall Englishman and the young lady engage his services, and poles out enthusiastically along the rank canals between the houses, and into the wider places where it isn’t quite so obvious that people have been emptying their chamberpots into the canal, or indeed simply thrusting their
bottoms out the windows for convenience. In his energetic haste he scarcely notices the Englishman dropping a small object over the side of the gondola. People drop so many things into the waters of Venice.

And the fresh wind off the lagoon does the trick, because the Englishman and his lady are clearly not put off by the sights, sounds, or smells. Indeed, they grow quite actively romantic as the gondola rocks along, and Vittorio watches with one appreciative eye as he bawls out a love ballad in the time-honored
gondolier
tradition. So amorous do they become, in fact, that Vittorio begins calling attention to their activity in a particularly amusing way he has devised: improvising new ballad lyrics in idiomatic Venetian for the benefit of his fellow
gondolieri
and shouting them loud enough to be heard across the water. He doesn’t look back at his passengers as he describes the lady’s attributes and the gentleman’s amazing flexibility. Poling along, he begins to notice that his fellow
gondolieri
are giggling and making cautionary signs to him.

He turns on a downstroke and goes cold all over to observe the expression with which the Englishman and his lady, now sitting up, are regarding him.

Meekly he poles back to the landing and ties up his gondola. Glaring at him, the Englishman steps out and extends his hand to the lady, who leaps up gracefully despite her billowing skirts; and as she passes Vittorio she advises him, in flawless idiomatic Venetian and no uncertain terms, just exactly what he can do with his pole.

They don’t tip.