The Machine's Child (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “Did I ever meet Shakespeare?” Mendoza said.

  “Er . . . no, I don’t think you did. Nice guy, though.”

  I knew no Shakespeares, Nicholas informed Alec.

  Of course you didn’t. You died nine years before he was born, Edward said. And Alec never really met him, either.

  Then wherefore am I to—

  Oh, shut up and enjoy this, you lot! the Captain transmitted. And see if we can’t make this a nice romantic evening for the lady, eh?

  Aha, said Edward. So that’s the scheme. Aye aye, sir!

  Mendoza jumped a little when the panel in the ceiling irised open to reveal the holoprojector, which resembled a quartz crystal chandelier turned inside out. It descended into position.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Alec said, sliding an arm around her. “You’ll enjoy this.”

  “I’m sure I shall,” she said uncertainly. The Captain dimmed the lights in the room. A big sphere of glowing smoke materialized in the air, just above the bed. The word OVERTURE appeared there, and some vague fairylike images; a symphonic arrangement of Mendelssohn’s music came warbling from the room’s speakers, and the show started at last.

  Scholars are reasonably unanimous in their verdict that this particular film was not the most authentic Shakespearean production ever mounted, but certainly it had the most cobwebs and moonbeams, and it had remained popular with audiences right up to the time that Shakespeare’s plays had been condemned as irredeemably politically offensive. As a result of its popularity, great pains had been taken in remastering it for holo, extrapolating the flat images out into three-dimensional ones. It had translated rather well, even in the black-and-white tones of the original film.

  Mendoza snuggled against Alec, crunched popcorn, and watched the spectacle with evident enjoyment.

  Nicholas sat watching with arms folded, determined to be polite for Alec’s sake. As the play advanced, he found he had little trouble following the story, though it had been written forty years after his death and the actors’ accents seemed strange and uncouth. But as the familiar cadences of language rolled on, he began to be drawn into the illusion, and found himself looking around involuntarily for a pie-seller or a bottled-ale vendor, of the sort that used to follow players’ carts like flies.

  Edward watched silent, absorbed, spellbound by the best that the Brothers Warner could lay before him, tinsel and glitter and all. His experience of staged Shakespeare, for whom he had a well-concealed passion, had been limited to one dusty performance of Julius Caesar. The rest his imagination had been obliged to provide from tiny print double-columned in a cheap edition read by blazing tropical sunlight, or by dim lamplight belowdecks, or in gaslit hotel rooms in dubious places.

  Only Alec was lost, desperately reading the faces and body language of the shadows in his attempt to get some idea of what the play was supposed to be about. He turned to the others, hoping somebody would tell him; but they were following the action with such avidity he was embarrassed to ask.

  So he stared, as fairies soared and flitted through his room. It had become the Wood Near Athens, a forest of dark silvertone. Ashen petals blew across his face as Puck bounded from a drift of leaves, and glittering cobwebs winked in phantom moonlight on the bedposts. As soon as he stopped trying to understand the words, the story began to tell itself to him: the two sets of ridiculous lovers, the troupe of clowns rehearsing in the darkness, the looming father and ice-pale mother locked in hostilities over the bewildered little mortal child. And such terrors! The wild boy with his crazy laugh, and the braying black-lipped donkey man in the night forest!

  Having no significance, the words took on all possible significance. The story was a riddle, a message in a sealed bottle. What could it all mean?

  So Alec watched in fascinated incomprehension, unable to look away as plaintive lovers struggled across his moonlit bedclothes and stumbled over his legs.

  The Captain monitored the real lovers, their heartbeats and respiration rates. He saw a chance and acted on it.

  Quietly he amped up the power to the holoprojector, and deployed his own projectors inset here and there in the stateroom’s decorative molding. He fed subtle signals into Alec’s nervous system through the subcutaneous port, and into Mendoza’s as well through certain circuitry he had installed when he’d repaired her.

  They were so absorbed in the action of the play that they scarcely noticed when the Wood Near Athens began to expand beyond the confines of their bed, indeed became more than illusory play of light over solid surfaces. That was a real moon blazing down from the star-spangles, wasn’t it? And how had velvet moss and luscious woodbine replaced plain cotton percale? But it had, and first Edward and then the others noticed they were reclining on a virtual bank where wild thyme grew, and sweet musk-roses canopied overhead, stars winking through. Only Alec was startled. The others, having no way of knowing that this was a little beyond even twenty-fourth-century remastering capabilities, accepted it as part of the show.

  Just to their left, Titania slumbered beside Bottom, as Oberon looked down with a sardonic smile. Over there the lovers had fallen together, muddy and bedraggled but properly paired off at last. The perfume of nodding violet and eglantine was strangely intoxicating, as well it might be since it was laced with pheromones, jetting from the stateroom’s air vents.

  So the king of shadows summoned his host to follow into the haunted virtual night, and the slow passionate strains of Mendelssohn’s Nocturne came yearning from the speakers. Over at the other end of the clearing a moth-fairy was engaged in a sensual ballet with a muscular black shade, fluttering ineffectually her powdery wings while he possessed her inexorably. This was about the point where Mendoza noticed that she too had been endowed with spangles and a certain silvery light, and that not one but three black-winged shadows had turned and were regarding her with identical hot-eyed stares.

  “Oh!” she said, applauding. “How very—”

  Clever? Inventive? Whatever praise she had been about to bestow on advances in entertainment technology, Nicholas had fastened his mouth over hers before she could make another coherent sound. She squeaked happily, struggled insincerely as Alec and Edward seized her. What followed on that mossy couch, under the astonished moon, was so extreme, so erotically complicated, and so pleasurable that poor old Mr. Shakespeare’s phantom holographic self, away in 2352 London apologizing to a group of Ephesian tourists for writing Taming of the Shrew, found himself smiling without knowing why.

  On the Captain Morgan, the Captain observed carefully as the act progressed, and noted when Mendoza began to sparkle with the blue fire of the Crome effect. At precisely the moment when it was at its most intense, he generated a subsonic tone that set the quartz crystal structure of the holoprojector vibrating.

  Nothing happened. Or . . . not quite nothing. He modulated the frequency. This direction? No . . . That way?

  The very air trembled, the silver illusions flickered for a moment, though the lovers didn’t notice. A spontaneous temporal transcendence field had begun to build inside the stateroom. The Captain watched as its whirling lightnings sent a tentacle toward the bed, where a blue thread of fire extended from Mendoza’s ecstatic body and arched to meet it—

  The Captain silenced the tone immediately. It didn’t stop; the crystals in the holoprojector were still resonating. In panic he retracted the holoprojector up into its recess, and that did the trick, though the room was plunged into darkness relieved only by the spectral flame of Crome’s radiation, playing over Alec and Mendoza where they embraced.

  Hastily the Captain dropped the projector again and resumed the program. On the level of his thought that was not piling up and evaluating data—for the Captain had many levels of thought—he observed Mendoza’s naked body, and congratulated himself once again on the job he had done rebuilding her. Who’d have thought that lissom little thing making his boy happy had ever been the pitable fragment he’d salvaged? Why, he must have regenerated at least eighty
percent of her organic mass—

  And he’d done it right here, within himself—

  Within the largest temporal field ever created.

  The Captain did the electronic equivalent of gasping and smacking his forehead.

  In the virtual Wood Near Athens, three powerful incubi shared between them a spirit of no common rate: so thoroughly that nobody was able to pay any attention to the action of the play, though the Lord woke his Lady, the fiendish kid removed the donkey-head from bully Bottom. Not until Peter Quince came timidly forward to speak his prologue did they lie there, all four, giggling in exhaustion at Pyramus and Thisbe.

  “I liked that,” Mendoza said, as the stateroom returned to normal and the lights came up. “I don’t remember movies being that much fun at all!”

  “Yeah,” was all Alec was able to say, collapsing onto his back.

  “That thing we were doing, was that—” She groped through the ruin of her memory. “Was that going into cyberspace?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Caramba.” Her eyes were wide. She leaned up on her elbow and looked at him inquiringly. “There were three of you. I didn’t know that could happen in cyberspace.”

  “That was just—er—the special effects,” Alec temporized.

  “Really?” Mendoza lay down again. “Impressive!”

  Nicholas gave a wicked chuckle and nudged her. She jumped and looked over her shoulder, startling everybody.

  “I could have sworn you just—” she said, staring through Nicholas. Alec reached up and pulled her down.

  Nicholas and Edward looked at each other in wild surmise.

  Unnoticed on the floor beside the bed, the popcorn bowl had filled with green sprouted shoots of maize.

  THE MORNING OF 26 MARCH 1863

  Seven bells in the morning watch, Mr. and Mrs. Checkerfield, and a grand good morning to ye! Fair skies, wind’s out of the south-southwest, temperature twenty-three degrees Celsius, swells at one meter! The Captain’s voice rang with strange triumph.

  Alec opened his eyes to a breakfast tray heaped with oyster savory, fresh strawberries in zabaglione, and vitamin-fortified orange juice. Beside him, Mendoza yawned and stretched.

  “Coffee,” she implored.

  To be sure, dearie, Jamaica Blue Mountain with cream. Coxinga extended one of its arms with a mug freshly poured. And there’s yers, Alec lad. Now then! We been here in 1863 long enough. I reckon it’s time to move on.

  “Okay,” said Alec sleepily, rolling over. Edward, in the act of shaking out his virtual napkin, looked up sharply.

  We’re to make a time jump? Ha. Then all that moonshine last night was intended to accomplish something! What have you found out, Captain?

  What I needed to know, the Captain told him silently. Are you up to another ride this morning, boyo? Yer old Captain’s solved the wench’s riddle at last. With her at the figurehead, we can cut through to the future easy as climbin’ through the lubber-hole!

  “Huh?” Alec and Nicholas sat bolt upright, obliging Mendoza to clutch at her coffee.

  “What is it?” she asked, looking worriedly at Alec.

  “Nothing!” Alec said, reaching for the oyster savory. “Just feeling bouncy this morning. So, er, Captain sir—what do you reckon, shall we lay in a course for the twentieth century? Say, 1996?” You’re absolutely sure about this? No way you could be mistaken at all? He sipped his coffee and almost gagged. It was liberally laced with time travel cocktail.

  Aye, lad, the Captain said aloud. And you may rest easy on the calculations, by thunder. I been running a program all night to check my figures.

  “Is it particularly hard to get to 1996?” Mendoza said, reaching for the toast.

  No, ma’am. But the further you go past the year 1950, the more crowded things is, so it’s as well to be certain sure where you make landfall, lest you capsize some swab what ain’t watching out. As you’ll remember, I’m sure?

  “Oh,” said Mendoza, who didn’t remember anything of the kind but didn’t want to say so.

  “Yeah,” said Alec, as confidently as he could. “Because that’s the era we need to start turning over some of those bank accounts to electronic transfer, isn’t it, Captain?” He popped an oyster patty in his mouth and chewed, looking sincere.

  I reckon our lawyers will have done that already, lad, but there ain’t no harm making sure, now, is there? the Captain said. What’s more, we could do with a spot of provisioning. They had them supermarket things back then, see.

  What on earth is a supermarket? Edward spooned down virtual zabaglione.

  What it sounds like, what d’y’think? the Captain replied silently. All the beef chops and brandy yer little heart desires, me bucko. But no cigars! Understand? You can do what you like in cyberspace, but Alec’s got to use them lungs.

  Fair enough, said Edward. He set aside his empty dessert glass and looked hungrily at Mendoza. Try not to dawdle, Alec.

  Alec glared at him and Nicholas just shook his head.

  All the same, by the time the breakfast dishes had been cleared away they found themselves desperately ready as well, in spite of nervousness about what they were about to undertake. Mendoza, lingering over a second cup of coffee and a new-printed sheaf of data on the tryptophan content of her maize cultivars, found herself scooped up and carried from the bed.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “I was just thinking,” said Alec. “What could possibly top last night? Let’s find out, what do you say?”

  “Okay,” Mendoza said, dazed but happy. She gulped down the last of her coffee while Alec fastened himself into the storm harness, and then went obligingly into his arms. Without, the four dolphin servos rose on the crest of a wave and leaped on deck. Flint and Bully Hayes loaded them into their torpedo-berths and scuttled into the wheelhouse, as the sails furled, the spars retracted. The great storm-bottle closed down.

  As the air filled with golden gas, with blue fire, a discreet and unfamiliar humming filled the air. Its source was the battery of quartz crystal resonators the Captain had installed that morning, while Alec and Mendoza slept. And now, as the lovers rode to bliss, the charge built and the humming grew louder. The time drive powered up.

  Distracted by the noise, Mendoza opened her eyes and saw Alec’s face, white and tense. She opened her mouth to ask him what the matter was—

  There was a quiet, though dreadfully audible CLICK—

  There was a blue flash—

  SOME OTHER MORNING

  And then there was a roaring darkness as they plunged into deep water and rose upward again, turning as they came, bobbing out into sunlight.

  The yellow gas vented, the storm canopy opened, the dolphin servos shot out into a new sea. Alec clutched Mendoza close and kissed her, hard, as tears of relief streamed down his face. The eerie silence was broken by the Captain’s thundering laughter, and by Mendoza saying worriedly:

  “Alec, darling?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, rocking her in his arms. “And you’re fine, and—and everything’s all right.”

  Aye, son, to be sure! gloated the Captain. Thirty leagues due west of San Francisco and it’s 30 June 1996. All artifacts from 1855 present and accounted for. Zeus’s brass arse be damned! How’s that for a neat bit of navigation?

  They sailed for the City that night, through seas liberally strewn with floating trash and oil slicks. As they came slowly in through the Golden Gate under power, sails reefed, Alec and Mendoza went up on deck and leaned on the rail, staring in fascination at the lights. So did Nicholas and Edward, who were rendered nearly speechless by the size of the Golden Gate Bridge alone. Not so Mendoza, however.

  “Oh, this is so changed from 1855,” she said. “Look, look, Ghirardelli Square!” She fairly jumped up and down, pointing at the luminous sign.

  “Can we go there? I’ve never been here in this time, I can’t have been, I’d remember this! I always had the impression that the earthquake destroyed everything but it can’t have, ca
n it? Oh, isn’t it beautiful?” She paused for breath and coughed, making a face. “Phew! What a smell, though. Is that internal combustion engines?”

  “Old-style automobiles,” said Alec, pointing at the hundreds of tiny lights moving on the bridge and along the steep streets. “Serious pollution.”

  “And look at the twentieth-century ships.” She leaned forward, peering through the night. “And that must be Fisherman’s Wharf . . . look, there are people sitting in the restaurants having cocktails. Oh, how civilized!”

  Where? Edward stared vainly. Alec and Nicholas looked, too, but could see no more than minuscule rows of lit windows along the pierside.

  “. . . Though I can’t say I care for the clothes,” Mendoza added with a judicious frown.

  “We’ll find something you like,” Alec promised, putting his arms around her. “Go shopping, yeah?”

  She leaned back and looked up at him, a little sadly.

  “We haven’t . . . had this kind of thing a lot, have we? The things that mortals take for granted. Shopping, and sightseeing, and picnics and . . . just being man and wife?”

  “No,” Alec said, burying his face in her hair. She looked out at the lights.

  “I can almost remember,” she said quietly, “talking with you about the things we’d do, if we could ever have lives of our own. That must have been before the accident, yes?”

  Edward took control, shoving Alec aside.

  “Yes, my dear,” he said. “We had that conversation a long, long while ago.”

  She sighed.

  “Do you think they’ll ever leave us alone?”

  Edward smiled. His eyes had a disconcertingly icy sparkle; though it might simply have been the reflection of the lights on Telegraph Hill.

  “Why, my dear, that’s a dead issue,” he said. “We’ve taken the offensive, now. And we’ll see if that god they’ve made has any power to help them, when we run them down at last.”

  And Mendoza smiled, too, and settled back in his arms, and they regarded the glowing City spread out before them.