by Kage Baker
No lights on the console. There would be no lights. Everything would go smoothly. It was a simple job.
A light flashed on the console. On the bed behind him, Sarai tensed and sat up, but said nothing. Latif struck the button that allowed him to intercept the call. Where had it been directed? The switchboard.
This is Brandi, can you take any incoming please? We’re closing down for the party now.
Latif exhaled and forwarded the message to the switchboard. There had been no more than a second’s delay.
At precisely that moment, Kouandete was stepping into the elevator of the building in Gray’s Inn Road, accompanied by Brother Ibou and Brother Mahjoub. They were loaded down with catering containers; he himself carried an immense cooler of punch. The others crowded in after him as he studied the buttons. There, beside the button for the third floor, was a small sign: PERPETUAL ASSURANCE LTD. He pressed the button.
They rode smoothly upward and the doors opened to reveal an ordinary-looking office: rows of consoles, supply cabinets, cheap framed prints on the walls and a dismal view of metropolitan London out the windows. There was nobody in sight but Brandi, who was waiting for them in obvious impatience. However, she smiled as she saw the abundance they carried. “Oh, yeah, that’s a lot for the money. Good.”
“Are we setting up in here?” Kouandete inquired offhandedly. Brandi made a slight face.
“Er—no. It’s sort of special. We’re having it upstairs. Come on, I’ll take you.” She led them to a small door, unmarked, lined up unobtrusively next to the lavatory doors and well out of sight of the windows. Anyone might have taken it for a broom closet, but Brandi swung the door open to reveal a half-sized lift booth. “You’ll have to go up one at a time,” she apologized, and Kouandete shrugged affably and stepped in.
“No aggro,” he said. “Wait here, chaps.” Brandi crowded in beside him and pressed an unmarked button.
“We sort of ran out of room on this floor, so we had to—er—expand,” she explained in a breathless voice, as the lift rose.
“And office space in Holborn is so expensive,” said Kouandete in sympathy.
“Just awful!” she agreed. “My sister works in West Ham, and she says—”
The door opened on a scene of hushed and hurried gaiety: young persons, mostly female, blowing up blue balloons or standing on chairs to fasten blue streamers to the walls. There was a lot of space to decorate, for this was the cavernous emptiness of the hidden floor, the place from the photographs. Kouandete’s heart raced as he recognized the yellow track snaking across the carpet, but he merely smiled and hoisted his cooler, stepping out into the room.
“The caterer’s here,” sang out Brandi. “Over there where they’re putting up the folding table, yeah? I’ll be right back with your friends.” She descended again and Kouandete made his way to the table she had indicated.
“Oh, nice,” cried a girl wearing a pair of optics. “Is that blue punch?”
“Blueberry,” he replied, setting it down.
“Lovely,” cried half a dozen young ladies, hurrying to pull a baby blue tablecloth into place and smoothe it down. “We’re almost ready for you.”
“Certainly,” said Kouandete. He looked about him, hoping he appeared casually disinterested. Yes! There was a console by the window with no chair, no personal items, even a thin layer of dust on its surface; but the yellow track led straight up to it. Did someone work there at that station, in the other half of the office? Did the girl wear the optics to enable her to see whoever was there in cyberspace, simultaneously now and eons in the past?
She must. He watched her surreptitiously as he waited, and saw that she glanced continually over at the console in a nervous sort of way. Watching somebody none of the rest of them could see.
“Okay,” one girl told him, just as the lift opened again and Brandi shooed out Brother Ibou. For the next few minutes Kouandete was busy laying out refreshments, amid the din of excited giggling and the occasional pop as somebody overinflated a balloon. Brother Mahjoub arrived, set down his burden, and looked at the office clock. With great care he enunciated his one line: “Oh. Sir, it’s half past eleven. You need to take your medication.”
“Thank you,” replied Kouandete, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing what looked like a little pillbox. He lifted his head sharply and turned, as though something had just occurred to him. “Oh, dear, I hope our van is all right in the loading zone.” He walked rapidly across the room in the direction of the window, detouring around a pile of presents all wrapped and ribboned in baby blue.
“No!” cried the girl with the optics, racing after him. “Er—please stop—”
“I’m sorry?” Kouandete halted beside the empty console and turned back. “I was just going to look down into the street at our delivery van. I’m not sure the loading zone permits us to park so long.” He opened the pillbox, taking care that the crystal on the inner lid was pointed at the console. Instantly the crystal recorded the signal being received in the office. Withdrawing a mint and popping it in his mouth, Kouandete snapped the lid shut again and returned the box to his pocket. The girl wrung her hands.
“I mean—it’s just that we had a window break recently and—and—”
“It’ll probably be all right,” Kouandete told her, and smiled. “We’re nearly done.” He walked back to the table and resumed folding baby blue serviettes on the diagonal, as Brother Ibou arranged them in a festive pattern around the cake decorated with storks and baby booties.
They had finished, and he was writing up a receipt for Brandi, when he observed the girl with the optics edge over to the empty console and address it. She spoke in an undertone, but Kouandete was adept at reading lips. “Can you log off soon?” she told someone unseen. “Bill just got the signal from Mr. Chandra. He’s bringing her up in the lift!”
Kouandete smiled his widest and ushered Brother Ibou and Brother Mahjoub to the lift door, where they waited as the lift rose. The door opened and revealed a man and a very pregnant lady. She also wore a pair of optics. “Oh!” she exclaimed, as everyone in the room screamed: “SURPRISE!”
Nobody noticed when the caterers made their exit.
But Latif and Sarai heard the agvan arriving all the way back in the cell, heard the doors slamming and the clatter of running feet, and they were already out in the long dim corridor when Kouandete entered it at top speed and slid the last ten feet toward them, pulling up only at the last minute. Grinning, he thrust out the pillbox.
“Would you care for a mint, o exalted immortal ones?” he chortled. Sarai let out a shriek of triumph.
A door opened and a brother looked out at them in disapproval before retreating once more to the silence of his contemplation.
Fez, 15 May 2352
“Half a million years?” said Nef in a stunned voice.
“Give or take a millennium,” Suleyman confirmed. “Five hundred thousand BCE. That’s the farthest back I’ve ever heard of anything being concealed.”
“Way farther than Options Research,” Latif remarked, pouring fresh tea for both of them. He offered more to Nan, but she put her hand over the cup to decline. Sarai, who was drinking rum and cola, leaned back and said: “That was about the dirtiest little secret I can imagine. What do you want to bet they’ve got our DNA templates there, too, all those tubes they’ve supposedly got safe if one of us should need biomechanicals replaced? Keeping it out of our reach in case they need a bargaining chip, you see?”
“Probably,” Latif agreed.
“Half a million years,” repeated Nef. She turned her cup in her hands and looked over at Suleyman. “So … are you going to stage a raid on it, like you did on Options Research? Go in with holocams blazing?”
Suleyman shook his head. “Nothing so public,” he said. “Though we will have to storm it, I’m sure. I dispatched a probe to that location and there’s some defense. Mostly automated; only one life sign there, as far as the probe could tell.”
“P
iece of cake,” Latif declared with a ferocious sneer. He turned to look at Sarai. “Want to come along for the party?”
“Love to,” she replied, meeting his stare. The others exchanged glances.
“And you, ladies?” Suleyman inquired of Nan and Nefer. Nan shook her head.
“My place is with Kalugin,” she said quietly. “Especially if it’s the last night of the world. I don’t know if he’s even aware of my presence, but I’d rather be beside him than in any other place when the Silence falls.”
Suleyman nodded. Nefer cleared her throat. “I’ll beg off, too,” she said. “I’ve been promising myself for years I’d be out on the Serengeti when the hour rolls around. It’s all I’ve got left.”
“I understand,” Suleyman told her. “I’d be with you, if I could. Still … somebody’s got to look out for these reckless young people.” He jerked a thumb at Latif and Sarai. “It may be harder to jump the barricades than they think.”
Latif snorted. “So we’re not moving on this until right at the end?” he inquired. “Say 9th July?”
“No sense in giving them time to grab it back from us,” Suleyman said. “Strike the first blow at Alpha-Omega and follow up with the landing on Catalina before they have time to react.”
“And hope no one else had the same idea,” cautioned Nan.
“I still think we ought to liberate the bunkers where the Enforcers are,” said Latif. “Think of the edge that’d give us, with them on our side!”
“You haven’t seen them, son.” Suleyman rubbed his eyes. “It’s a little unlikely they’d be willing to follow my orders. If they decided to take revenge on the Company, we’d see the bloodbath of our worst nightmares.”
“Okay, but there are some of us stashed away in the bunkers with them, right?” countered Latif. “What if we just woke the Preservers?”
“I don’t want to go near the bunkers,” said Suleyman, raising his voice only slightly but to tremendous effect. “If we poke around in there the Company will take notice. They noticed when Joseph did it, and you know what happened to him. They’re far more paranoid now. Let’s leave well enough alone for the time being.”
“Okay,” said Latif quickly. “After all, we’ll have plenty of opportunity to let them out afterward, right?”
“We should,” Suleyman agreed. “Unless something unforeseen happens, we’ll be running things by Bastille Day.”
“There won’t be any unforeseen happenings,” stated Latif. Suleyman just raised an eyebrow at him and sipped his tea.
CHAPTER 19
Child Care in the Cyborg Family, Volume One:
The Duty of the Cyborg Parent
What a miracle is the cyborg infant! Truly it may be said that his tiny perfect body is something new under the sun! Biomechanicals race through him powered by the fires of heaven, carrying fantastic amounts of information. Pineal Tribrantine Three circulates to take his sun to noon and keep it there, changeless, in a perpetual bright day. Fortunate inheritor of Science, he is freed from the mortal debt of mere humanity but benefits from its genius. Life, in its constant upward progression, has at last, in this newest incarnation, attained what may be justly termed the Angelic. What glorious adventures might now be anticipated? What previously unattainable heights will he scale, this new Adam?
The morning sun streams in through the portholes of the Captain Morgan. It is no day of any week in any known year, but it has the feeling of a Sunday morning, and the ship bounds briskly over a choppy sea.
Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, supercyborg, late of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, is sitting at the booth table in the saloon, working on Child Care in the Cyborg Family, Volume Two: Intellectual Development. He has the slightly rumpled look of a colonial who has begun to go native and let things slip. He’s barefooted, unshaven, wears only trousers, shirt, and waistcoat. He has moreover the slightly guilty look of a colonial who knows he has begun to go native and hopes it won’t get back to the Colony Club.
Constantly as he writes he looks over at the two children.
The boys appear to be twenty-two months old, and the sun glints in their wispy fair hair. They are dressed in white cotton sunsuits, identical save for the initials embroidered in blue on the chest of each one: A for Alec, N for Nicholas.
They are building a tower with little interlocking blocks, which click together tightly to withstand the sea swell. The structure is no random pile but an edifice of complex, not to say Neoclassical, grandeur. As they walk about it, adding a flying buttress here or a column there, they neither waddle nor stagger, except when the ship rolls. It rolls rather violently at the moment.
Edward accesses the weather reports coming in, though every instinct he developed while in the Royal Navy is already telling him that the glass has fallen precipitately. He has a sudden terrifying mental image of the ship pitching sharply, the two little boys thrown with a crash into a bulkhead, cracking their unprotected skulls …
“That’s enough for now,” Edward says. “Into your safety harnesses, please.”
Both babies give him a rebellious look. “We didn’t finish, Deadward,” says Alec.
“We’re sailing into a storm! Kindly do as you’re told, or it’ll be the helmet again,” Edward says, nodding at the battered-looking steel helmet that swings from its strap on a hook. It appears to date from the First World War and was formerly part of Alec’s antique collection. Now, however, it has been lined and padded, and across it in red paint are the words I AM A RECKLESS BOY.
Alec, in a cheery voice, tells Edward what he can do with the helmet.
“Right,” says Edward grimly. He gets up and approaches them with intent to demolish the tower, and Nicholas narrows his eyes. He flings a handful of the sharp-cornered toy bricks into Edward’s path. Edward dodges smartly, looking outraged.
“Stop that at once! And can’t you calculate a trajectory any better than that?”
Nicholas laughs, a bright peal of notes like a golden bell chiming. Alec goes to the helmet, waits until the lurch of the ship swings it within his reach, strains on tiptoe to get it down, and fastens it on his head with the speed of long practice.
“Thank you for letting me sleep in, darling,” says Mendoza, yawning as she enters the saloon at an angle. She is wearing white silk pajamas. “Oh, no,” she adds, seeing Alec in the helmet. Her serenity vanishes and she glares at Edward, steadying herself against the bulkhead. “What happened?”
“He was—”
“I was a bad child,” Alec announces, marching back and forth until Mendoza grabs him up and looks at him in despair.
“I too,” says Nicholas, but at the expression on her face he puts out his arms and leans toward her. Edward lifts him and he clambers onto Mendoza’s other arm, wriggling close and kissing her. “We’re sorry. Don’t cry, please.”
She draws a deep breath and asks, “Did we at least do our hyperfunction exercises this morning? Or speech therapy?”
“Only under threat of duress,” says Edward, opening the toybox as Bully Hayes creeps forward and begins putting the blocks away.
“You teach it. He bullies us,” Alec says.
“Ay,” says Nicholas. Edward snorts.
“You puppies, you have no idea what real bullying’s like! A few years in a public school would sort you out.”
“Stop fighting,” says Mendoza wearily. “Sir Henry? Breakfast, please.”
Aye aye, ma’am. Coxinga’s on his way from the galley.
Edward takes the babies from her and she settles into the booth. “I do have the pleasure of reporting that Nicholas has at last moved beyond elementary calculus,” says Edward, giving her Nicholas. “Mind his little foot, my love.”
“Certainly.” Mendoza looks happier as she takes Nicholas and fastens him into his booster seat. “Bravo, Nicholas! I knew you could do it.”
“And I would like to report favorably of Alec as regards world history, but I’m afraid he spent most of his access hour amusing himself by reprogramming m
y text plaquette to send me extremely rude messages.”
Aw, now, sir, boys will be boys.
“That’s enough,” says Mendoza, taking Alec from Edward. Edward sits down and puts away his composition plaquette with a sigh. Coxinga crawls into the room, bearing a tray full of silver-domed dishes.
Here we go. Kippers, toast, and tea for the commander, breakfast torta and coffee for the missus. Soft-boiled eggs, burgoo, and orange juice for my little mateys!
“I want coffee,” Alec announces.
“You’re far too young and you know that perfectly well,” Edward says severely, fastening the napkin under Alec’s chin. Mendoza is busy napkining Nicholas.
“I like coffee, Deaddy. Makes me go zoom!” Alec pulls his oatmeal bowl close, grabs his spoon before it skates away down the tilting tabletop and begins feeding himself quite competently.
After a moment he leans forward to the condiment rack and helps himself to the honey jar. Edward snatches it from him in a panic. “Are you mad?” he shouts. “You could contract botulism!”
Alec, startled, bursts into tears.
“Oh, Alec, don’t cry.” Mendoza leans over and hugs him, ducking awkwardly around the brim of the helmet. “Edward, darling, he can’t get sick.”
“Do we know that beyond a doubt? Perhaps I overreacted, but one can’t take too many precautions,” Edward replies, pulling out a handkerchief to dry Alec’s tears.
“Piss off,” Alec sobs. “I hate this! Why can’t I reach things?”
“Two demerits for rude language in front of a lady. Blow your nose. There! Don’t be such a baby!”
“But he is a baby, meu amor,” Mendoza points out. “He can’t help it if his body hasn’t caught up with his brain. Give him the Golden Syrup instead.”
