The Machine's Child (Company)

by Kage Baker

  Cigar, please, Captain, Edward ordered. He sprawled back into the pillows, taking a virtual Hoyo Du Monterrey from midair already lit. Thank you. He drew and exhaled sensuously, smiling at the ceiling.

  Right then, laddie, it’s time we talked.

  Talk away, Edward said, blowing a smoke ring.

  What in thunder did you think you was bloody playing at?

  I don’t believe I care for your tone, sir, said Edward blandly. You’re speaking to a commander in Her Majesty’s Navy, remember?

  You damned idiot, didn’t you notice the Crome’s radiation she was generating whilst ye was having yer fun?

  Yes, thank you, I did notice. Edward writhed in happy recollection. Who’d have thought there were new pleasures to be discovered, at my advanced age?

  Would it interest you to know that we nearly wound up off course on our beam-ends, thanks to yer little game?

  What the hell do you mean? Edward rose on his elbows, scowling.

  I mean that there was a second, there, when something pulled us a few points into the wind. Not that you’d have noticed, blazing away like a twelve-pound gun as you was, but we was yanked astern so’s we was moving forward in time for a beat or two, d’ye see? It were all I could do to get us on course again so we didn’t fetch up God only knows when.

  Good Christ. Edward sat up and took the cigar out of his mouth. You think it was the Crome’s radiation?

  I reckon so, lad, since it happened when she was throwing it brightest.

  Edward narrowed his eyes, thinking.

  Now I wonder, he said at last, if this wasn’t the same phenomenon that afflicted her in that canyon in Los Angeles? At the place with the quaint name.

  Hollywood?

  Hollywood, to be sure. She was taken forward then, as we were just now. Can it be possible the stuff exerts some kind of retrograde force? An energy of opposition, as it were? If that’s the case, we really can travel to the future after all—since it seems we were being pulled with her. The trick is to get her to generate the radiation whilst we’re in transit.

  I don’t like the odds. All the test records I’ve accessed show Crome’s radiation ain’t dependable for anything but blue lights. It ain’t quantifiable, it ain’t qualifiable. It never produces the same effect twice. Not under test conditions. I’ll grant you it may manifest differently in yer lady than in mere mortals, but I’d want to run tests afore we tried anything.

  But, look here. If she can go forward through time—what’s to stop us sending her ahead to see what will happen after 2355? Edward puffed out clouds of virtual cigar smoke in his excitement. Good God, what a tactical advantage that’d give us!

  Aye, maybe. But what if the Silence is caused by a cataclysm like a meteor hitting the planet? You might send her straight into an inferno. How’d we know, eh? We’d never get her back.

  Edward shuddered. No. I won’t imperil her like that, not for any advantage.

  Besides, just because she done it once don’t mean the lass can do it whenever we want her to, like a card trick. We don’t know enough about Crome’s.

  One thing seems plain. Edward looked down at Mendoza fondly. It’s passion strikes the spark. He ran a hand along the curve of her thigh.

  It ain’t plain at all! Could be a dozen different factors. I’d have said stress, more likely, maybe coupled with some sexual arousal. Don’t you go planning on scudding along bare-poled through time with her again, until we know it ain’t dangerous. I’ll allow I can’t think of a pleasanter way for a man to die, but them’s my orders, laddie. See you follow ’em.

  I beg your pardon? said Edward, with a very unpleasant light in his eyes.

  By the powers, what’s got you bridling so at a sensible command? My little Alec’s always been one to do as he’s told.

  And so was I, once, muttered Edward, having another drag on his cigar. Until it got me eight bullets in my back.

  Then all the more reason not to be a fool. If you’d had yer old Captain with you back then, you’d have lived to waltz away with yer lady here, and saved everybody a deal of sorrow and care.

  And I maintain, Captain, that I did live. Look at me! My life force continues as strong as ever. We really ought to make plans to search for my own proper body, once Mendoza’s herself again. I’m quite sure the Company’s storing it somewhere, pending my revival.

  There ain’t nothing about it in the Project Adonai file, son.

  Undoubtedly because it’s been kept a secret. I know how these people think, you see, I was one of them! The right hand never tells the left what it’s about.

  And them autopsy pictures in the file?

  Edward grimaced. Those might have been of surgery, not an autopsy.

  Maybe. Whether or not you shuffled off yer own coil, I ain’t letting Alec die. I’m for going after the silver tube you all come out of in the first place.

  Edward tipped virtual ash into a dish that materialized on the bedside table. He looked mulish a long moment before shrugging.

  As you like. He patted Mendoza’s derriere. I dare say she’ll be twice as happy with two husbands.

  LATER THAT SAME DAY

  “Trees,” Mendoza said like a prayer, clinging to the rail and pointing. They were making their way, without much sail on, along the primeval California coastline.

  “Yeah,” Alec said sleepily, “they’re trees, all right.” He put his arms around her and leaned, looking out at the forbidding country. It was all plunging gorges and soaring peaks of rock like black emerald, the land dropping steeply away into the sea. Here and there the cliff faces gleamed wet where falls descended, vaporing out to mist and rainbows before ever reaching the surf below. Trees marched in serrated ranks upward, making a dense green gloom in the canyons and striding like gods along the ridges, except where lightning or slides had cleared a few acres of mountain meadow, tiny patches of sunlight quiet and distant on the heights. His eyes widened as he took it all in. “Awesome.”

  “But the trees are bigger,” Mendoza said. “And it’s all greener.” She turned to look up at him. “When were we here before?”

  Alec raced mentally through her journals. “Seventeen hundreds,” he said. “The red Indians were here but the Europeans weren’t much.”

  “Ah,” she said, nodding. “Climate change. Look at all the streams! No walking miles and miles to find water now.”

  “Nope,” Alec said. Nicholas, leaning on the rail beside them, wondered when she’d had to do that. He looked up at the somber wilderness and thought of her alone there in the long years, when he’d been . . . what? A sediment of ash in the bank of the Medway River? He reached out a hand to touch her face, but Alec was pulling her backward for a kiss.

  “When can we make landfall, Captain?” he said.

  You see a likely spot, boy? Nothing here but avalanches and flumes. My charts say the coastline ain’t so grim a few leagues southerly, so we’ll try our luck there. I reckon you’ll find plenty of room for a picnic then.

  “Okay.” Alec kissed the top of Mendoza’s head. A picnic, he reflected. I’ve got my ship, I’ve got her, I’ve got an undiscovered place, and we’re going to go explore and have adventures together. Exactly what I always wanted. And I don’t deserve any of it.

  But Mendoza turned to smile at him, and he smiled back. He caught her hands and whirled her in a little impromptu swing dance along the deck. She followed awkwardly at first; but within a moment or two her body acquired the rhythms somehow, and she was matching him, step for step, effortless, anticipating his moves as no partner he’d ever been with had done. Nicholas and Edward paced them, looking on hungrily.

  “Oh, this is marvelous,” she said. “This is, this is—dancing! Isn’t it?”

  “That’s my baby,” Alec said. “I’ll take you dancing—ballrooms, and clubs and—” He remembered a passage from her journal. “I know where we can go! The Avalon Ballroom on Catalina Island, you always wanted to go there.”

  “Did I? Okay,” she said, twirl
ing under his arm.

  Santa Catalina Island? Edward frowned. Are you mad? Dr. Zeus will infest that place, and I should know. I helped put them there.

  Alec ignored him, as the sheer elation of the physical movement caught him up in a way it hadn’t in years. Mendoza swung back toward him, her face flushed with delight.

  “Captain! Give us some music,” he said, launching her with his hands, and as the music roared over the ship’s speakers she came down light as a bird and sprang back, floating through the complicated steps as though she’d been dancing them all her life.

  He gave a raw whoop of triumph and seized her, and they went together along the deck faster now, executing the figures in perfect time, moving as one body. Edward and Nicholas were pulled with them, running along helpless, too caught up in their arousal to notice when the deck began to crackle with blue fire.

  The Captain noticed, and very nearly shut off the music; but after a moment’s consideration he instead activated a whole battery of instruments to record, to measure and analyze the phenomenon occurring there on the deck.

  And when the music drew to its close and the dancers stopped, panting, the blue light flickered out as though it had never been there. Nothing had happened, after all.

  “My, this saves time,” said Mendoza, watching as the cliff face as it dropped past them. “Did we do this before? All I remember is having to climb.”

  “Oh, we did that, too,” lied Alec breezily, piloting the agboat over the lip of the cliff. Here a headland of broad meadows sloped back to the mountains. Immense redwoods spired up from the high places. Closer down to the meadowline there were oak trees, too, laurels and Monterey cypress.

  Alec had brought them up on a long ragged point that projected out above the sea, open and sunny, perhaps a kilometer long and half as wide. On the north side of the meadow a dark cataract came roaring over green boulders before it plunged away, down the cliff to the sea a thousand feet below. Alec steered for it.

  Not back there, Edward said. Too close to the mountains! Best to put some open ground between ourselves and anything that might come out of those trees.

  But it’s shady and there’s water, Alec said. Besides, if the Company tries any sneak attacks, we’re armed. He patted the disrupter in its holster meaningfully. And it’s too long ago for there to be any red Indians. I checked. Nothing here but us and Nature, okay?

  “Beautiful trees,” said Mendoza dreamily, stretching out the new boots Bully Hayes had fabricated for her. Alec wore hiking boots, cargo pants, and an old shirt. Edward had ordered a suit of severely correct virtual Victorian field garb for the occasion; Nicholas, who felt hopelessly lost, simply wore his ordinary black clothing.

  Alec took a deep breath as he pulled them up on the streambank.

  “What a green place! Smell that air.” He set the agboat down and jumped out, turning to her. Mendoza took his hand and stepped out on the alien shore, and for a moment looked startled.

  “What a big place,” she said. “I have so much to do.”

  “But we’re on holiday now, remember?” Alec told her, shivering, for the shadow of the redwoods was ice-cold. He led her out into the sunlight. “No worries. Look at all the wildflowers!”

  “Look at the Datura meteloides,” Mendoza said, then ran forward. “No, it isn’t! Calystegia macrostegia. Look at the size!”

  All Alec could see was a big white flower, but he came and made suitably astonished noises as she knelt over it, examining the leaves and following the vine back to its root as though it were a power lead. Edward was surveying the meadow, studying the treeline. Nicholas was watching Mendoza sadly.

  “Variant of convolvulus, but the leaves are atypical—” she muttered, crawling along on hands and knees. “Sagitate, as all macrostegia—gigantiform, and—” She looked up, looked around. “Where’s the—” Her gaze riveted with purpose on the picnic basket that Alec was just hauling from the agboat. “I need the—”

  Her face became confused, and then went utterly blank. Alec, glancing over at her, felt the hair stand on the back of his neck.

  Why’s she looking like that? he cried silently.

  Blocked memory retrieval, I reckon, the Captain told him. The lassie was programmed as a botanist, remember? It’s hell going against yer programming, believe me.

  Alec shuddered. Nicholas could bear it no longer and seized control. He knelt down beside Mendoza, taking her hand.

  “Quid rei est, mi amores?” he said gently. Her eyes focused and fixed on him.

  “Nescio—” she replied. “Quid faciam? Ubi sunt instrumenta mea?” She halted, surprised, and then she laughed. “We’re not speaking Cinema Standard, are we? How strange.”

  “We have spoken in many tongues,” he said, feeling his heart soar. “And just so we used to speak long ago, when you worked in the Garden. It was our way of speaking in secret. Do you remember when you were a slave?”

  “Yes, I remember that.”

  What’s he saying to her? Alec asked. What’s that language?

  Latin, said Edward in disgust. It seems Brother Nicholas has found means to exploit his pointless skills. Well, never mind; it’s proving useful in an awkward circumstance.

  “You worked in a garden and collected plants,” Nicholas explained. “You had a basket with tools. I think you must be remembering that. But, my love, you are free now! There is nothing you must do any more, no work other than to please yourself. Do you understand?”

  “Oh!” Her cheeks were scarlet. “How embarrassing, to forget.”

  “No, no, my love,” he said, unable to stop himself from leaning forward and taking her by the shoulders. “It’s sweet to speak with you in the old way. It makes me remember when we were young, and lay together in that garden.”

  “I remember this. We were supposed to be working; but we’d make love all the time instead. And—they punished us?”

  “Yes, beloved,” Nicholas said, thinking that it was close enough to the truth.

  She was staring around at the solemn trees. “And this was a garden, too. But . . .” She turned back to him, and her eyes were a little frightened. “This is not a human place.”

  “No, beloved.”

  “Was I lost here?”

  “Long years, my heart. Yet I have found you again,” Nicholas told her, kissing her brow. “And I will bring your soul out of this darkness.”

  “But—” She looked up at him. “Who will do the work?”

  See what I mean? Programming.

  “You don’t—” Nicholas struggled for words in frustration, and Alec stepped in.

  “The Company’s made some other slaves now, to do all that. You know what your work is? You’ve got this project going on, er, Indian maize! That was it. You remember that?”

  Smart lad.

  She blinked at his sudden return to English, but her face brightened with comprehension. “Yes! Must produce a variety with the vigor of ancient cultivars yet retaining the high yield of modern hybrids while increasing levels of tryptophan, lysine, and accessible niacin.”

  “Er—yeah,” Alec said. “Except, er, of course, we lost everything you were working on, when the accident happened.”

  “Damn!”

  “But it’s okay! The Captain will help you start your work over and anyway, we’ve got all the time in the world now,” Alec said. “Remember? So let’s have our picnic, and then what do you say we go exploring?”

  “Okay.” She took his outstretched hand. He helped her up from her knees.

  It was a nice picnic: smoked oysters on little crackers, soy protein sandwiches, and a big thermos bottle of iced fruit tea. They ate seated companionably on the gunwale of the agboat, and though Edward grumbled silently about the soy protein by and large they enjoyed their treat very much.

  “It’ll be even nicer when we can grow fresh stuff,” remarked Mendoza.

  “Yup,” agreed Alec, not knowing what else to say.

  Afterward they walked up the stream bank a few
hundred meters, and Edward took the lead in their exploration. Nicholas peered up now and then at the mountainside, unable to shake the feeling that something immense and silent watched them as they clambered over the green boulders.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect this was jade,” Edward said, stooping to examine a rock the size of his fist.

  “It is,” Mendoza said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Spectrographic analysis?” She looked at him in surprise.

  “Er—of course it is. By Jove, what a fortune this would be worth in Macao.” He chuckled and tossed it away.

  Really? Alec looked back at the rock. He stared around at the green pebbles scattered everywhere.

  “Have we ever been there?” Mendoza said.

  “Macao? No, my dear, I don’t believe you have. I was there once, on some nasty business,” Edward said. His face darkened a little. “Company business, as I know now.”

  “Oh,” said Mendoza.

  Should we maybe take some of this stuff back to the ship? Alec tried, without success in his virtual state, to pick up a glossy stone. Might be worth something.

  Hast thou not gold enough, boy? Nicholas looked at him askance.

  They reached the end of the box canyon and peered up at another waterfall; speculated on swimming in the freezing water and decided against it. They found gooseberries growing along the stream bank, but only Nicholas liked them. Mendoza cut a sprig and tucked it in her pocket. As they came back, Alec took control, bent and grabbed up a piece of jade at last.

  “Let’s collect some of this,” he said.

  “Oh. To trade with?” Mendoza looked around and picked up a piece obligingly.

  “Yes indeed. I know places that’d pay serious cash for jade. Even if we don’t trade it—big raw lumps of gemstone, what a cool kind of loot to have! Sheer barbaric splendor.”

  Mendoza nodded. “Okay. Let’s have splendor.”

  “Great,” Alec said, pacing ahead of her. “Come on, we can collect an emperor’s ransom!”

  There was a great deal of jade along the stream. Working together, in a few minutes they had filled all the bellows pockets in Alec’s explorer pants and prized loose a boulder of considerable size, which Alec insisted on lugging up to the agboat, wet and slightly muddy.