The Machine's Child (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “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.

  OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES

  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 “Papa!” 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.

  Veni
ce, 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.

  Egypt in 2213 is just beginning to recover from a nasty war and horrifying air pollution. It needs tourist income as badly as it ever has, and the bright animated brochures put out by the Tourism Bureau contrast the eternal pyramids, lit as though from within by their own ancient red light, towering above the modern metropolis of West Bank Cairo, where little electric cars in every color of the rainbow zip through the wide clean streets. In fact the pyramids are shown from every possible angle except any likely to feature the Sphinx, which for the last sixty years has had no head, due to an embarrassing incident involving a miscommunication between the presidential palace and the Egyptian Air Force.

  But the resourceful itinerants who make their living from the romance of Egypt have worked around this problem: they have simply programmed their cameras to provide the missing features in any shot taken of the unfortunate monument, which fact they scream helpfully at all persons arriving at the river taxi dock in front of the Cairo Sheraton.

  They’re not sure what to make of the young couple in tailored white linen who arrive from Alexandria via some sort of hovercraft, but they do their best to sell them portraits taken with the Sphinx in the background, portraits taken with the pyramids in the background, portraits taken with donkeys, portraits taken with camels, portraits taken with cutout figures of world leaders. The tall man strides through them, towing the fascinated young lady after him, and he waves them away with a firm and practiced hand. He glances up occasionally at the hawk that circles above him, far against the blazing sun. He will not buy beads, he will not buy carpets, he will not buy brass or copper; he will not even buy tequila, which is going at bargain rates since the Greenest-of-the-Green Party cut the subsidies to Upper Nile farmers of blue agave in their continuing efforts to impose Prohibition.

  All the young couple wish to buy, it seems, is a Pyramid Pizza. They make for the nearest branch of the nationwide chain, spotting from afar its giant winged pizza-disc logo, and after ordering at the window they take seats on the outdoor terrace overlooking the Nile. It’s a pleasant place to sit. The terrace is shaded at present by a photoreactive transparent canopy, and will one day be shaded in a rather more natural way, for it is in the process of being landscaped. Palm trees are being planted along the edge of the terrace even as the young couple are brought their iced tea. While they wait for their pizza, the young lady strikes up a conversation with the elderly gardener, who is setting a baby tree in the deep hole that has been dug for it.

  He’s astonished to discover how well she speaks the dialect of his village, and how much she knows on the subject of date palms. They engage in a lengthy conversation that ends only when the project foreman stalks up, demanding impatiently that the gardener finish planting the damned palm.

  The young couple excuse themselves and finish their pizza. The old gardener goes back to shoveling earth around the roots of the little palm. He does not note the flash of gold in the bottom of the hole, visible there for a split-second before his next shovelful buries it. He finishes planting the palm and says a quiet prayer, hoping the new tree will thrive, as the young couple tidy up their table and leave.

  His prayer will in fact be answered. The palm he has just planted will thrive, will grow to gigantic size and venerable age, to such an extent that tourists in the year 2355 AD will still be pointing it out as a city landmark . . .

  Portland, Oregon, its gray heart beating forever along two great river arteries running to the North Pacific. Its Old Town is gritty and civilized in the midst of improbable forest. Autumn is already as cold as death when the river fog rolls in, and drifts of oak leaves bury the sidewalks, bright as fire, red as blood.

  Along the waterfront, not far from the Maritime Museum, there is a fine restored business block with a view of the Willamette, and there a certain legal firm has its offices. In this year of 2023, the name is Dowling, Dowling and Spratt. Over the decades its name will change, but not its location or its purpose. It is and will always be an unadventurous, reliable establishment.

  So the elder Mr. Dowling doesn’t think much of the business laid out before him by the cold-eyed young Briton in the impeccably cut three-piece suit. It’s the sort of silly idea that inevitably leads to problems for estate claimants years down the line. The young man, however, seems grimly serious about it. He is willing to pay the hefty fee Mr. Dowling quotes him for the service he has requested. After all, no funds are involved: merely the delivery of a certain item to a certain address on a certain date in the future.

  Mr. Dowling would feel better about it, all the same, if he knew what the item was, without necessarily knowing all the particulars. His client decides this request is reasonable. Has Mr. Dowling two envelopes of differing sizes?

  Mr. Dowling has. He reaches into a desk drawer and produces a plain white letter envelope and a larger manila one. He watches as his client withdraws an antique silver card case from an inner breast pocket, and extracts what appears to be an ordinary ivory-colored business card. Has Mr. Dowling a pen?

  Mr. Dowling offers his own Montblanc. The young man takes it and writes on the card: “I will be with you on your wedding night. With the compliments of Edward Acton Bell-Fairfax.” As he writes, Mr. Dowling notes the antique brass cufflinks he wears: very nice fouled anchor design, with a matching pin worn in his fine silk tie. The Englishman places the card in the white envelope and seals it. He writes a name on the white envelope, places it inside the manila one, and seals that. Finally he writes a date o
n the manila envelope. He offers it to Mr. Dowling, who takes it and looks at the date. 9 July, 2355. Beautiful copperplate hand, at least. He shakes his head, but when the young man returns the card case to his pocket and pulls out a debit card, Mr. Dowling is all respectful attention.

  A considerable amount of money is transferred into the account of Dowling, Dowling and Spratt. As soon as the transaction has cleared, the young man stands, towering over him, and leans forward to shake Mr. Dowling’s hand. With mutual cordialities they go to the door, beyond which the young man’s lady friend is patiently waiting, sipping a café latte. She rises with a smile. They depart.

  Mr. Dowling returns to his desk and, staring down at the envelope, shakes his head again. What an absurdly easy way to earn a month’s income! But a client is a client, and Mr. Dowling has every intention of seeing to it that this particular client’s wishes are honored, so far as it is in his power. He and both his associates, as well as every person in his employ, will be long dead by the delivery date specified on the manila envelope. Nevertheless, he pulls out his keyboard and sets up a file with detailed and specific instructions. He scans the exterior of the envelope, and enters its image in the file. He saves and closes.

  Having done that, he takes the envelope itself and locks it in his firm’s safe.

  On his way back to his desk, he pauses at his window. The young couple are still out on the waterfront promenade, walking arm in arm. They are smiling, laughing at some private joke. Watching them, Mr. Dowling cannot say why he feels a shiver of apprehension, cold as death; but he does, and as they walk away together a gust of wind sends oak leaves dancing eerily about them, bright as fire, red as blood.

  ________

  As a rule, if one walked along the beach at Monterey in autumn, one would have splendid views. Emerald green sea breaking white on dark rocks and shading to a deep and powerful blue farther out; to the south the serpentine forest of cypress and pine rising on a peak, aromatic and haunted in the noonday sun. To the north, dazzling bright sand hills, stretching away to a windy sunlit glimpse of Santa Cruz.