by Kage Baker
“Hush—” Nicholas looks up sharply. “What’s that?”
Alec shuts his eyes. “That’s … voices?”
They are silent a moment, listening. Nicholas’s eyes light with a desperate hope. “I would know that voice in my grave,” he says. The chairs vanish.
“That’s her,” yells Alec. “Mendoza!”
And the world rips apart, becomes blinding light and inexplicable noise as they are hurled together, Alec and Nicholas, into the maelstrom, shot madly from their sphere. Only for a second: then they are lying stunned in a new place, but they no longer have the senses to determine anything about it. Adult consciousness tries to nest in a tiny and barely-formed brain, retains its memory and sense of self but loses all other function.
Blind panic terror! … And then the gradual consolation. Warmth. Music coming from somewhere, an unceasing double drumbeat, a voice.
“File opened; download completed,” says Edward. “What a brave girl you were.”
“Oh, that was lovely.” Mendoza stretches, kisses him. “Merrily indeed.”
“I’m working on my technique, my love. And so, Nicholas and Alec are liberated! We’re all friends again now, I trust?” Edward cocks an eye at the camera. Then his grin fades, his eyes grow suddenly wide. Abruptly he leans up on his elbow. “Good God.”
He throws back the covers, rolls on his side, stares.
“You’re sure they’re in there,” Mendoza says, looking uneasily down at her body.
“They are,” Edward tells her, his face pale. “But I—I can feel them!”
“You didn’t do something like download them into you instead of me?”
“No. You’ve got them. Just—there.” He gingerly touches the approximate spot. “But how on earth can I feel that?”
Why, yer the amazing all-powerful Edward, ain’t you? Yer just picking up their little life signs, is all.
“There are no words for this,” Edward says, looking rather as though he’s going to be sick.
“They’re all right, aren’t they?” Mendoza demands. He nods.
“All life begins this way, doesn’t it?” he says, in a tone of dread.
Recombinant DNA clones implanted in a cyborg? Hell no.
“No! Like—that.” Edward sits up, looks down at Mendoza’s body. “The little person. That exquisite detail. The arteries like threads, the budding limbs, the potential.”
“Well, yes,” Mendoza replies. She looks into his anguished face. “Darling, what is it?”
“Mortals have no idea what they do,” he says at last. “I had no idea! And now we’re trapped in linear time with them for the next score of years—ye gods, what have we done?” He leaps out of bed in his horror and begins to pace, tying his robe closed, tangling the knot.
“They’ll be so small,” he says, “And anything could take them while they’re still vulnerable, anything! Good God, a wave over the bows. A tumble through a hatchway. The responsibility—we’ll have to prepare. Safety devices installed on everything. Suitably warm clothing. Properly digestible meals. Do you realize we haven’t even planned a nursery yet? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LAUGHING ABOUT?” Edward turns raging to the nearest speaker, though the Captain’s amusement has been rolling throughout the entire ship.
Haar! Divine retribution be a fine thing, to be sure, that’s all. I’ll just go draft plans for converting one of the guest staterooms into a nursery, shall I?
“Do it,” snaps Edward. “And let me see the blueprints the moment you’ve finished.”
CHAPTER 12
Three Months:
Extract from the Journal of the Botanist Mendoza:
Monsters and Ice Cream
This is driving me mad.
I don’t know what to wear.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that with a closet full of clothing from all the historical eras through which we’ve traveled, I could find garments that weren’t uncomfortably tight or hideous? I can’t. I feel like screaming. All I want to wear are Alec’s Hawaiian shirts, hanging forlorn in the wardrobe. They smell like him and are comforting, recalling happy amnesiac days. But then my horrible swollen legs show.
Edward assures me they are not swollen. Edward is lying. Edward is flawlessly dressed himself, has had Smee the servounit cut him perfectly tailored proper Victorian attire. Edward may be jumpy as a cobra on speed, but there is nothing wrong with Edward’s body. I’m the one who’s distorted, bloated, disgusting …
I am being irrational. I am experiencing a panic reaction because my immortal body has always been the one unchanging, inalterable constant in my life. I have gained five pounds. I had never gained a pound in all the years since 1554. It’s not right, not natural, I’m not programmed for this.
How the hell do mortals do it? And they do it all the time!
I feel like a battleground. Sir Henry must continually monitor and reprogram my biomechanicals to be certain they don’t sense the babies as intruders and abort them. The babies, of course, have their own biomechanicals who would fight back. I have nightmares of the little things building a fortress of steel inside me, firing cannons, assembling siege machinery … Let’s not even go into the absurdity of immortal cyborgs adjusting to midnight feedings, baby clothes, toys, teething; nor the question of what sexual feelings I may or may not eventually have for someone who’s been in my womb, no matter how unrelated we are.
Edward is trying to help. He is trying very hard to be helpful, even with the strain he’s under, which is only that of an omnitemporal being who’s just been jolted out of his smugness by the discovery that there are some things in the universe beyond his control, ha ha, and I can’t even enjoy gloating about it.
“My dear, you are ravishing in my eyes,” he told me.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “Oh, God, don’t touch me.”
“Now, then,” he said coaxingly, parting the clothes to peer in at me where I crouched weeping in the back of the armoire, “if you’ll come out like a good girl, you’ll have a treat. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“Don’t you speak to me in that condescending manner!” I screamed. “How dare you?”
“My dear, this is simply a hormonal tide making you miserable,” he assured me. “You’re not yourself. It’s perfectly natural.”
“No, it isn’t!”
“Yes, dearest, it is. I’ve just been accessing Molesworth’s The Encyclopedia of Maternity, volumes one through twelve, which, in addition to containing numerous helpful suggestions for improving the state of mind of the mother-to-be, all too plainly delineates your present symptoms.” Edward dodged as I threw a shoe at him.
“You enjoy being a cyborg, don’t you?” I muttered.
“I will overlook that remark. My love, you know you can’t stay in the wardrobe.” Edward reached in, groping for me.
“I may as well,” I said, starting to cry again. “I can’t work. I can’t find anything to wear.”
“I’ve had something made up for you. Won’t you come out and see?” He got my wrist and tugged gently. “In addition to which, I’ve found something in the refrigerated pantry that the good Doctor Molesworth specifically lists as appealing to the appetites of prospective mothers. Remember our provisioning expedition to twentieth-century San Francisco?” He held up something above the shirt rack where I could see it, and waved it back and forth enticingly: a half-gallon carton of Double Fudge Death Wish ice cream.
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you,” I cried, overcome with remorse at the way I’d been yelling at him. “But, darling, I can’t possibly have any.”
“Content analysis reveals it to be rich in calcium,” he informed me. “Moreover it contains walnuts, which are an abundant source of fatty acids vital to the development of brain cells—” He lunged while I was distracted and lifted me out into the room. I leaned my head on his shoulder and sobbed.
“I know,” I said, “but it’s full of Theobromos. I can’t have that while I’m pregnant, it wouldn’t be good for the babies.”
“Ah.” He looked chagrined. “Well, perhaps this will console you.” He set me down on the bed, and hopefully held up an amazing negligée: flame pink silk, cut more daringly than anything the heroine of the most pornographic romance novel might wear. I burst into fresh tears and didn’t even try to explain, just let him think I was crying in gratitude as he helped me into it.
“There we are,” he said soothingly. “We needn’t get up today, after all. We’ll put up our little feet, there’s a girl, and here are fresh handkerchiefs to wipe away our tears and—and would we like to watch a holo?”
“Yes,” I said, blotting my face. “I want to watch Dracula.”
Which version, dearie? inquired Sir Henry.
“I don’t know!”
Not to fret, now. Here, darlin’, we’ll just put on Evans Spielberg’s from 2105. Got good reviews at the time, aye.
“Okay…”
Edward propped pillows solicitously and settled himself beside me, as Sir Henry lowered the holoprojector into the room and dimmed the lights. I could see the lines of strain around Edward’s eyes.
“That ice cream’s still sitting there,” I complained. “And we’re in linear time, so it’ll melt.”
“I’ll get it, my dear.”
“Here we are, omnipotent omnipresent immortals with fantastically augmented intelligence, and the minute we’re stuck back in linear time we forget a simple thing like ice cream melting.” I fell over into the pillows in my misery. “How are we going to do this, Edward?”
“Now, now,” said Edward, and looked down at the ice cream with sudden interest. “H’m! What an ambrosial fragrance. I’ll have a little of this, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay,” I said, distracted by the bloodred film credits coming up in midair and the overture to Swan Lake. Edward sat down again and, prizing the lid off the carton, dipped in the spoon he’d brought for me. He tasted cautiously. His pupils dilated.
“H’m!”
“Hush,” I told him crossly, snuggling against his shoulder as I watched the prologue describing the horrific circumstances of Vlad Tepes’s youth as a hostage among the Turks. Edward ate Double Fudge Death Wish and watched, too.
His remarks for the next forty-five minutes were confined to statements like “You’d never get your victim to hold still for that unless you broke his back first,” and “That was an artery, for heaven’s sake! Where’s the blood?” When the action of the film moved to England, he began to giggle at the accents used by the American actors. At Dracula’s courtship of Mina, a tender scene I particularly liked, he all but fell over snorting with suppressed laughter.
“Do you mind?” I said, turning to glare.
“Sorry. Sorry, my love,” he said, scraping tentatively at the bottom of the carton with his spoon. I followed his gaze.
“Oh my God, have you eaten the whole half-gallon?”
“It would appear so,” he said musingly. “Wonderful stuff, this.”
“Fine! Now you’re intoxicated,” I said in indignation. “Didn’t your brilliant genius Recombinant brain tell you about what Theobromine does to us?”
“Yes,” he said. His pupils were enormous, black as Dracula’s cape. “But I rather enjoy new sensations. It’s not quite like being drunk. Far more pleasurable.”
“How nice for you,” I said, and turned my attention to the holo again. Edward set the empty carton and spoon aside and put his arm around me, pulling me close. He began to nuzzle my ear and I shivered and melted against him, even though we’d come to the scene where Dr. Van Helsing was shooting up heroin. “Mmmmwatch the movie …” I said.
“Now, this is intoxicating,” Edward murmured, letting his hands roam. He pressed his face against my skin and inhaled.
“Uh-huh,” I said. He buried his face in my hair.
“How I love your hair on the pillow, all disarrayed as you sleep,” he said indistinctly. “You draw your fists under your chin and scowl so, like a bad-tempered child. When you open your eyes to me, there’s a bloom on them, after deep dreams, as though you were blind. Oh, little girl, I’d buy all your matches. I’d carry you home with me, and warm you, and you wouldn’t die after all …”
“No, of course not,” I said, and then: “What?”When had he ever lain awake staring at me?
“And I love your accent,” he said.
“I don’t speak with an accent.”
“Yes, you do. Cinema Standard and, when you’re sleepy or tired, you do just the faintest violence to your aitches.” He wrapped me in his arms and lifted me abruptly, turning me to him, and leaned down until we were nose to nose. “Two and a half days. The fifteenth to the seventeenth of March, 1863. That was all we had … and yet, after the first hour, I could have drawn your little body in chalk, sculpted it in ivory, so perfectly I knew you. What horror I felt, to discover I loved you …”
I blinked at him. This was not, I need hardly mention, anything like his usual style.
“Because you thought you might have to kill me,” I said.
“Mm.” He nodded. “But also because … one must avoid entanglements of that kind in the service, lest it impair one’s efficiency… damn them. I knew what you were from the moment I saw you. I ought to have caught you up and ridden away to safety, and Whitehall be damned. All those wasted years … running about with a sword trying to end the slave trade by myself, like a boy out of Marryat’s books. And then the Society’s tool, filling graves for them. Why did I never understand …”
“That it was vanity?” I said.
“Mm, but so much worse—” His gaze sharpened, tried to focus, and he pulled himself together and made an extra effort to speak distinctly. “Delusion. Because, the thing is—human progress begins, not with one lone man with a weapon, however heroic. Nor with subtle governments, be they never so altruistic. It begins with a man and his wife in bed … and … how could I ever hope to govern humanity, without having been even that human?
“I will serve life,” he cried, and kissed me forcefully. “I will love my wife and my children, and—and do everything I couldn’t do when I was a mortal man, and—all the sentimental commonplaces will have a glorious new meaning, and—”
Oh, my God, he’s finally got a clue, I thought, so overwhelmed with tenderness for him I forgot about the movie. But the lash of his introspection swung around and caught me a good one. For after all …
How human was I? Haughty cyborg brat. Bad-tempered child, prize to be carried off. Tragic adolescent perpetually mourning her lost love. Reactive victim. That’s all I’ve been, for millennia. Now the long drama is over, do I have the faintest idea what to do with a happy ending? How can I? Incomplete immature thing that I am, am I even capable of changing? And yet I must, now. I found myself trembling in panic.
“I think I’d like to learn how to garden,” said Edward thoughtfully. He looked down, surprised, as I clung to him. Nicholas, in his genuine concern for my soul, had comforted me. Alec, with thoughtless kindness, had offered me rescue from my eternal slavery. But what was this, flowing out of Edward like light, as he lifted my chin and gazed into my eyes? Was it strength?
Horrible violence on the holoscreen, the air was drenched with gore, and we were so oblivious it might have been a pastoral scene with butterflies. Edward flooded his consciousness into mine, and what with all the Theobromos and hormones it was a wonder our brains didn’t melt.
Dracula went about his awful business and was liberated at last. He floated in a golden apotheosis to heaven, redeemed by love, but we didn’t notice a thing until the inhuman comedy fell silent and the end credits rolled.
Six Months:
Edward Hortulanus
The botany cabin has undergone a change in the past few months. It had previously a wild, overgrown sort of look; now it has the lush appearance of a Victorian hothouse. Potted ferns, sago palms, and bromeliads rise in green luxuriance, many-hued begonias droop from hanging baskets, little citrus trees proudly display green and red and golden fru
it. Boxwood obelisks and topiary are arranged in careful patterns. The air is rich with the heavy perfume of gardenias.
Mendoza is reclining in a cushioned deck chair in the midst of it all, draped with shawls, and she, too, has undergone a change. The second trimester is nearly concluded.
“I’m not sure I can relax in here, darling,” remarks Mendoza. Edward, who has been busily clipping a rosemary bush into what he feels is pleasing symmetry, lowers his shears and looks at her in concern.
“But this is the closest we can manage to supplying the calmative effects of Nature,” says Edward, “as recommended by Dr. Molesworth. Short of putting in to some island, which may very well be a primeval Eden but may also be infested with tropical diseases, wild animals, and hominid savages.”
“They couldn’t hurt us,” says Mendoza. “You know that perfectly well.”
“But I should prefer to avoid drawing attention to ourselves,” Edward replies.
“Couldn’t I just get up and water the maize cultivars?” asks Mendoza.
“Dearest, your little projects must wait—” Edward tells her, commanding the misting system to activate. Mendoza looks black daggers at him.
“It’s not a little project,” she says. “It’s an attempt to produce a perfect grain to feed the starving masses of mortals, and I’ve been working on it for centuries. Don’t you refer to it in that dismissive tone of voice, as though it were a—a needlework sampler!”
Edward orders the soothing music flowing from the ship’s speakers to drop down a decibel level or two. “My love, I never meant to imply anything of the sort. Of course it’s a laudable quest! Though I do feel I ought to point out that if a cultivar with adequate lysine levels has eluded your grasp thus far—to say nothing of the fact that there is no appearance in the historical record, prior to the year 2355, of any such marvelous gift to mankind—”
“Oh, shut up!” she snaps, blinking back tears.
“Very well,” says Edward stiffly, and, noticing a Duke of Wellington fuchsia that doesn’t quite meet his standards of harmonious proportion, advances on it with the shears.
