by Kage Baker
“Okay,” I said, and started to obey, but the figures drew me in again as soon as I turned my face to the screen. Sir Henry had to order the credenza to save and shut itself down. I sat blinking at it until he waved his hand in front of my face—how humiliating!—and then allowed myself to be led away through the ship.
We went to the infirmary and there was my darling’s body, floating in the blue light. I went at once to the window. Who did I think I saw?
Why, the one constant in my patchwork memory. We’d always been together. I could dimly remember when we walked in the garden of a Tudor manor house, though that had been a long time ago, and there was something sad about the memory. I had vague impressions, too, that we’d worn the clothing of many other eras. That was all I knew for certain. I had an uneasy feeling that bad things had happened to us, and that Alec was only one of his names …
Sir Henry had followed me. He put his mouth close to my ear, as though I were deaf. “Would you like him to come out of there now?”
No lapse in my attention then. “Oh,” I cried. “Yes, please! How do we get him out?”
“I’ll drain the tank, and you get undressed,” he replied. “Then you go in and help him. You’ll know what to do.”
I hurried out of my clothing as the bioregenerant medium gurgled away, and Alec’s body sank down through the tank until it lay in a fetal curve on the tile floor. It looked blue and drowned, but the red scars from the augmentation surgery had already vanished, healed without trace. The spiraling tattoo pattern across his shoulders was pulsing like blue neon. To my joy I saw he was already trembling, one shaky hand was groping across the tiles.
“Alec!” I splashed in, fell to my knees beside him. “Up, up, come on, my love!”
Such joy. I got my arms around his chest and hauled him into a sitting position. He was turning his head blindly, as the thick blue fluid streamed down from his face, and his lank hair was dark with it. Even in such a moment, he was beautiful to me. Deftly I slipped behind him and performed a Heimlich maneuver.
His head reared up and he spat out a tremendous gob of the bioregenerant. Lurching forward onto his hands and knees he began to cough, violently expelling the stuff from his lungs; I pounded helpfully on his back, yelling, “That’s it, darling!”
He pushed himself upright, threw his head back, drew in a first whooping breath as I clung to him, laughing and crying. He began to laugh, too, wild gurgling laughter, gasping as his lungs continued to clear. Raising his fists at the ceiling of the chamber he howled: “LIIIIIIIFE!”
Lowering his arms he wrapped them around me and held me tight, swaying back and forth, gulping for breath a moment; then he bent to kiss me. I was so happy.
“I’ve missed you terribly, Alec, you have no idea, but you’re all right now and we’ll never lose each other again—” I babbled between kisses. He rose with me into a crouch and stood slowly, and all mortal clumsiness had gone forever from the motion of his body. I didn’t know, yet, addled as I was, what was different about him.
But he must have been acutely aware of the change. He stood still a moment, his eyes wide. “Great God,” he said, his voice hoarse and hushed with awe. “So this is—”
“This is how you’re supposed to be, Alec,” I told him in my charmingly vacant way. “Good as new!”
He looked down at me, such speculation in his eyes.
I led him out to the shower, chattering away like a blissful idiot. He started at the first touch of spray on his changed skin; then opened his mouth and drank, seemingly fascinated by the taste of water. I cupped my hands and washed him, sluicing away the last of the bioregenerant from his body. He seemed greedy for sensation, opened each of the bottles of shampoo and soap to inhale their fragrances, gleeful.
When we stepped out, he seized the nearest towel and buried his face in it, became so involved in some mysterious worship of terry cloth that I had to take another towel and rub him dry. Oh, he liked that; liked it even better when I brought his silk robe and wrestled him into it. He noticed the infirmary cabin beyond, and barely let me tie the robe closed before he went bolting out there to run his hands over the blanket on the bed, seize up the glass vials and bottles to admire their sparkle. When I brought him his torque, he actually put out his tongue and tasted it before letting me slip it around his neck; exclaimed over the bright gleam of his wedding ring when I put it back on his finger.
He was beginning to laugh again, and I laughed with him, so giddy I had forgotten to dry myself or put on a stitch. Sir Henry, who had discreetly disappeared, was making polite throat-clearing noises to give me a clue, but I was oblivious.
“Ah,” yelled my darling, noticing the door. Only a split second he fumbled with the lock before he ran out on deck. There he stopped, transfixed with amazement. The twilit sea still gleaming, evening star and new moon bright, a million stars, yes, I’d have stared too if I were seeing them for the first time with an immortal’s senses.
He caught his breath. He was trembling. At last he spoke.
“‘… Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb that thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-ey’d cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst the muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.’”
By the end of the Shakespeare quote he was shouting, his glorious voice without strain echoing from the masts and spars cathedral-high above us.
I could have stood there forever, just smiling at my monster through happy tears; but he turned to me as if for confirmation and then he noticed I was still naked. He advanced on me, caught me up in his arms with a whoop of triumph and bore me inside to the bed. “Now,” he yelled gleefully, “my love, we’ll change the world!”
And there, above me, poised, he halted: frowned. “You’re hurt,” he said, perhaps as it occurred to him that I was on fire with Crome’s radiation.
“No, no, Alec, I’m fine,” I told him, stroking back his wet hair. As though I could have concealed the shame of my impairment! “See? And you’re fine, too.”
But he placed a tentative hand on my forehead. “Just—there—”
I suppose he didn’t know then the words for what was wrong, but he must have been able to see it clearly enough. He got that determined look on his face, the one that means he knows he’s right regardless of reason or reality. He took my face in his hands and pushed into the wrecked place in my mind, which did hurt. I cried out once; then surrendered, as I always have, and he was inside me in an entirely new way.
Was it like roaring through darkness, across a landscape lit here and there by the fires of war? Everything burnt, blocked, misaligned? Rows of lights blinked out of sequence: he changed their pattern. Tumbled and scattered structures sprawled before those all-seeing eyes of his: he righted them, arranged them into order. Meaningless dark unkeyed strings of numbers flamed into reason and purpose for him. What had taken Sir Henry months to even begin by therapy, proceeding painfully and with infinite effort, my lover accomplished in a moment. Only that one secret file he left hidden from me, Alec and Nicholas encrypted, such loving treachery.
What was it like for me, being healed of the ruin of my wits? It was exquisite pleasure, indescribable but certainly better than sex. I had lost all fear and was yielding everything up to his probing mind, even those blocked and obliterated files, although I think he hadn’t quite got to them when …
Well, there were no longer walls between us, in his new state, and he didn’t know how to shield his mind from me. The darkness was lit, and in that illumination we beheld each other with utter clarity, absolute intimacy. Communion at last.
I screamed, did my best to pull away from him. He was holding me far too close for that and I went limp in his arms, staring up at him in horror. “You’re not Alec!�
�� I said.
Distantly we heard Sir Henry’s bitter laughter.
“No, my dear,” the man who held me admitted, and his poor face was white as though I’d just driven a knife into his heart. “My name is Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. I believe you loved me, once.”
I wish I hadn’t taken so long to understand. He looked as though he had begun to grasp what Eternity means while I lay there silent, as though it had at last occurred to him that he is now unable to die, even if he might want to.
But I groped in my newly-restored memory and there it was, 1863, the deck of the J. M. Chapman where my Victorian gentleman lay dying in my arms, gunned down by American Pinkerton agents who were, understandably, attempting to foil a British plot to seize California from the embattled Union.
“… Edward? But they killed you—”
“Not quite,” he told me. I threw my arms around his neck and burst into tears. For a moment, it was 1863 and some wonderful, improbable thing had happened, to be greedily accepted without question. “I came back for you,” he said. “I set you free.”
But since when did my tragedies miraculously reverse themselves? Where was Alec, to whom I’d been married before the accident? The man I’d supposed was some kind of reincarnation of Edward himself, whom I had in turn taken for a reincarnation of my lost love, Nicholas Harpole? …
I reckon you’d better come clean and tell her the whole truth, Commander Bell-Fairfax, sir, suggested Sir Henry from the ship’s speakers. There was a certain grim triumph in his voice.
It was a little late for that, however. The moment I wondered, my repaired cyborg brain instantly filled me in on what I’d been missing the last couple of years, during which Edward and Alec and Nicholas (!) were all crammed together in one body, struggling in an ever-escalating war for dominance. I had all the data gleaned from my perfect communion with Edward’s cyborg brain, too. I knew everything now, including how he’d come to lie here beside me.
It hit me like an anvil dropped out a window. I writhed from his arms, sat up.
“Edward,” I gasped, “what have you done?”
At least now I understood the abrupt changes in his (their) moods all those months we adventured together on this ship, those inexplicable moments when his (their) speech would switch from twenty-fourth-century Transatlantic slang to Tudor English to that smooth, suave, and ever-so-well-bred Victorian voice … stammering a bit now as he told me how he’d reluctantly come to the conclusion that the others weren’t worthy of me, how therefore he’d found a way to take sole possession of Alec’s body, imprisoning Alec and Nicholas somewhere while he planned to perhaps grow them new bodies, using the only available womb … mine. But by the time he paused to catch his immortal breath, I wasn’t listening anymore.
Nicholas Harpole. My beloved, not dead after all though his body was ashes, not even reincarnated, the man himself as I last knew him in a cell in Rochester in 1555. He had not rested. He had found me again, and Edward—
“You betrayed him.” I covered my face with my hands. “Oh, Edward, you betrayed them both.”
“No! All I wanted was to have my own life back,” Edward said. “I had work to do! And if they hadn’t been squeamish, there’d have been no need for any deception.”
“But you tricked them anyway,” I said. I was too furious to look at him. “Oh, Nicholas! He could barely speak to me—” I closed my eyes as the tears started again. “And poor Alec—”
Which was when I remembered the reason I had gone willingly into that unspeakable place of unspeakable things. Alec, playing at being a hero, had stolen a Company shuttle and smuggled a bomb to Mars. With my help.
“Oh, dear God, he was the Hangar Twelve Man!” I said in horror.
“I’m afraid so,” said Edward, reaching out to turn my face to his. “Scarcely the mate you deserved, you see? The boy was a fatal blunderer—”
“He was a fool, but he wasn’t an evil man,” I said. I struck his hand away. “Nothing like the opportunist you are. You were just going to take everything from him, weren’t you? His ship, his life, and … me.”
Edward drew himself up, unflinching. “You, at least, my dear,” he said. “Can you blame me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Damn you! You’ll always find a way to destroy yourself. Split you into three, and you just turn on each other! My God, you’ve done it again, only this time you’re able to sit here and argue the point with me.”
“I am not arguing with you,” said Edward coolly, though he was still very pale. “And I point out that no one has been destroyed.”
“No, just consigned to some—some void in my memory!”
“And what better place for him? What would Alec have done with eternal life, but wasted it? I at least have a purpose in this world!” said Edward, with heat. “And if Alec hadn’t been betrayed, as you put it, if he were sitting here now and all had gone according to the Captain’s plan, Nicholas should have been consigned to a much less congenial void. And so should I. Doubtless that would have displeased you less, however.”
“NO,” I screamed, beating my fists against the mattress. “No, you big—Why am I even trying? I have spent years, innumerable years, unbearable years of my life mourning for you! All the lost chances, all the false starts—” I was still fighting furious tears as I raised my head to glare at him. “You liar. Oh, you smooth liar. All that business about wanting to have a baby of our own was a lie, too, wasn’t it?”
“Not as such,” he hastened to say. “It truly was my intention to provide for Nicholas and Alec, and what better way? Only think, my love, what transcendent intimacy this miracle would confer. You will become our fount of life! Poor Alec will know a mother’s love at last, and Nicholas—”
“What’re they supposed to do when they grow up?” I cried in horror. “Can you imagine the conflicts for them? Did it ever occur to you to wonder how I might feel about this?”
“My love, your happiness has been my greatest concern,” he assured me, sliding an arm around my shoulders. “All your life, you have been deprived of any shred of domestic felicity. No hearth. No home. No children. Your maternal instincts, so long denied, can be expressed at last in our union. Consider, my dearest love, that I now have the power to grant you fulfillment as a woman!”
“Who the hell are you to decide how I ought to be fulfilled as a woman?” I said, throwing off his arm. He caught both my hands in his, and I couldn’t pull them away.
“The missing half of your soul,” he said, looking earnestly into my eyes. “And I stand beside you on the threshold of a destiny of which you have never dreamed.”
Nice words. He had me soothed for a moment, before it occurred to me they were familiar somehow. He was paraphrasing something I’d said. He was quoting from …
“You read my journal?” I demanded. He winced, and I knew he had read it.
Haar, Edward, yer on a reef now, chortled Sir Henry.
And with that I jumped up and went marching out on deck, still shooting sparks, ignoring his conciliatory noises as he chased after me all the way to Alec’s stateroom, and into Alec’s vast bed with its dreadful pirate motifs and crimson counterpane.
I flung myself down in it and pulled the coverlet up, rolling as far from Edward as I could get and still remain in the bed. And I thought that would be that, and lay there shaking with anger and remorse. But he advanced across the bed like a big cat and reached out to put his hand on my shoulder.
“My dear,” he said, “this is no way to begin a marriage.”
Furious, I rolled over and swung at him, intending to knock him across the room. Long ago I’d belted Nicholas once, poor darling must have seen stars, but he forbore to hit me back and dear God I’d wished I could cut off my hand the second after, I was so sorry.
But Edward is no longer a mortal man. No mortal eye could have seen his hand closing on my wrist, so quick he caught me. He held me immobile a long moment and space/time creaked with the strain, I’d swear, irresistible force p
itted against immovable object, until at last I began to tremble and he forced my wrist slowly backward. I tried to spit in his face, but my mouth was too dry.
“No,” he said in a patient voice, staring down into my eyes. “I will not lose you like this.”
I writhed in an attempt to throw him off. I might as well have struggled against the weight of a planet. He held my gaze with those pale eyes, the black pupils dilated wide, and the fight just left my body. I wondered, briefly, if he used to do this to the people the Company sent him to kill, if they dropped their defenses and waited meekly for his knife, his garrote, his big clever hands…
He wouldn’t let me look away from him. Lowering his face to mine, he inhaled the scent of my skin, and kissed my cheek. He kissed my throat slowly, to the pulse under my ear.
I can’t honestly say he raped me. He was so careful, took such infinite pains with me, was as gentle as Nicholas had ever been, and not even the knowledge of what he’d done to Nicholas was enough to keep my body from doublecrossing me. It just surrendered. I grit my teeth to think how little time it took before I was weeping, pleading with him softly, and not to be let go.
Such a persuasive hand, with its gold wedding band gleaming. I wear the ring’s mate. Nicholas married me, with those rings made from one gold doubloon, in the pirate city Alec wanted so much to explore. But Edward will be my husband.
Damn him.
He didn’t even gloat afterward. I wasn’t allowed that much high ground over the man. He was tender, he was courteous, tucked the sheet about me decorously before turning away after I made it clear I was in no mood for postcoital chat. Was confident enough of his victory to go to sleep with me lying there beside him, though I might have done anything.
What do I do about this man, this superior product of a self-righteous age, who has had the monumental arrogance to decide Nicholas and Alec are unnecessary to my happiness?
Though he says they never loved me enough. He points out that Nicholas left me, when he discovered what I really was; and Alec was just as horrified to learn the truth. Only he, Edward, was able to absorb the idea of cyborged immortality without revulsion, and love me anyway.
