by Kage Baker
“Not pretty, I’ll grant you,” replied Labienus, “not sweet and pleasing to mortal sentimentality! But real, Aegeus. Stern and horrific by your standards but part of one immense harmony. Balanced. Magnificent. Beyond mortal comprehension. Beyond yours too, I fear.”
There were cries and catcalls from the opposite side of the table, until Aegeus held up his hand. “I think I see your difficulty,” he said, in most sympathetic tones. “Poor fellow, don’t you see that your very idea of harmony is a mortal concept? You’re neither a stone nor a star. You are, like it or not, a creature with human senses and perceptions. And this so disgusts you that you try to pretend it isn’t true—”
“You’ve missed my point, as usual—”
“And envision a glorious macrocosm where only man is vile!”
“I was about to correct your sexist remark, but on reflection I’ll let it stand,” said Xi Wang-Mu, and there were nervous giggles. Labienus calmed himself, ate the last delectable morsel of peach on his plate, and set down his spoon before speaking again.
“Yes,” he said. “Man is vile. Man himself said so. Vileness is a concept man invented. It doesn’t exist in Nature.”
“You fool, nothing exists in Nature,” Aegeus nearly screamed. “The tree falls in the forest and it knows nothing, the forest knows nothing, the sky and the sunlight know nothing! We’re the only ones to give it meaning at all. You’re like that imbecile mortal praising the wonder of billions and billions of stars. We alone make them wonderful by our perception that they are! And yet you envision an ideal cosmos with no humanity—”
“I don’t envision it. It exists! Universally, except for three little stains on this one solar system,” said Labienus. “And we alone, we immortals, and few enough of us at that, are capable of appreciating the flawless Absolute!”
“You’re a closet deist,” said Amaunet wearily.
“And you’re stunted, every one of you,” shouted Labienus. “You have eyes to glimpse the eternal, and you’re still fascinated by the filthy monkeys!”
“Why this obsession with a greater power, I wonder?” said Aegeus. “Could it have anything to do with a sense of guilt over, oh, perhaps, the father you betrayed? Old Budu?”
Labienus looked at him with murder in his eyes.
“Can’t you both shut up?” inquired Amaunet, and with the Commendatore she sang: “E l’ultimo momento!”
“Yes, please, this is the best part,” implored Aethelstan.
“I’d never have come if I’d thought Truth was on the menu,” joked Tvashtar. “So dry, and one is never satisfied afterward.”
“Pentiti, scellerato!” sang Aethelstan determinedly.
“No, vecchio infatuato!” Tvashtar sang back, and with the exception of the men at its head the whole table took up the exchange between the Commendatore and the unrepentant Don Giovanni: “Pentiti!”
“No!”
“Pentiti!” sang the ladies, in harmonies so sweet and terrifying the Don would have fallen to his knees and repented straightaway, if he’d heard them.
“No!” cried Tvashtar and Gamaliel, who happened to be tenors.
“Si!” insisted baritones Nennius and Aethelstan.
“No!” responded basses Aegeus and Labienus, unable to resist the pull of the music.
“Si!” Aegeus groped and found his knife.
“No!” Labienus’s hand closed on the neck of a wine bottle.
“Si, si—“ None of them could refuse it now, and their massed ancient voices chorded in a moment of beauty so powerful, so unearthly, that any mortal present might be excused for thinking he was in the presence of the angels.
But on the next note, the final defiant No, something was wrong. No one seemed to have the breath for it. In the moment of frozen shock that followed, Victor rose to his feet. His sick white face was shining as he extended his hands and sang: “Ah! Tempo piu non v’e!”
“What do you mean we’ve no more time, Victor?” snarled Labienus, and his voice was hoarse, and blood ran from his mouth and stained the front of his white shirt.
Aegeus tried to say something but coughed instead, and blood exploded outward in a fine mist. The other guests regarded their plates in dismay, where the green smears of Chartreuse jelly crawled with tiny engines of destruction that had been harmless inert matter five minutes earlier.
“You failed to detect the virus, because it didn’t exist at the moment you scanned,” explained Victor. “The molecules only put themselves together in that particular pattern when I activated the program. Ingenious, isn’t it? But I can’t claim credit for the idea. It’s all Labienus’s modus operandi.”
“You—” croaked Nennius in outrage, desperately blotting with his napkin at his eyes, from which blood now ran like tears. It was a mistake: the skin began to come off on the rough linen napkin, and the ball of his left eye ruptured from the pressure.
At the same moment the waiters, who were looking on in terrified astonishment, reacted. Three of them ran for the door and found it locked, which should present no difficulty for any determined immortal, but somehow their strength had evaporated. They beat on the door and saw their fists burst open on impact, fans of ferroceramic bone and swiftly liquefying matter. Of the three who remained at the sideboard, two of them fell to their knees and attempted to vomit, with dreadful success. Only Sargon mustered enough of a sense of duty to grab a carving knife and lurch toward the table.
“Treacherous little—” Ashoreth attempted to get to her feet and the mere pressure of her hands on the table was enough to split her skin. She sank back, and her scream ended in a drowning noise. Several of the others had remained immobile in surprise, and now found themselves unable to move in any manner other than to seep through their own clothing.
“Tutto e tue colpe e poco!” Victor sang, with the chorus of demons surging up from Hell. “Vieni: c’e un mal peggior!”
Only Aegeus’s clothing was holding his flesh together, but the eyes in his rapidly dissolving face were standing out with rage, and his skeleton was determined. He thrust his table knife up through Victor’s white waistcoat, under his ribs in a blow that would have been fatal to a mortal. Victor gasped for breath and looked down at his blood welling out over what was left of Aegeus’s hand.
“I wouldn’t do that, old man,” he said, smiling. “I’m contagious, you know.”
Labienus’s vocal chords had melted and run down his throat, but he was still able to transmit: So you modified some of your own poisons, did you? You think you’ll survive to laugh at us? He seized the carving knife from Sargon, who collapsed gurgling at his feet, and stabbed Victor. Victor gasped again, but did not stop smiling, and raised his hands in a beckoning gesture.
“Vieni!” he sang, understandably without much breath now but the demons echoed for him, “Vieni!”
Labienus pulled the carving knife free and, with all his remaining immortal strength, swung it at Victor’s neck. Whack, it passed cleanly through the cervical gimbal and Victor’s head flew off and rolled on the table, coming to rest on a silver platter. The eyes turned up to Aegeus and Labienus in an expression of amusement as Don Giovanni’s final wail of agony sounded, and then the light went out of them.
The headless body, fountaining blood, flopped forward, with its arms catching Aegeus and Labienus across the shoulders in a bizarre parody of a chummy gesture. They fell, struggling, coming to pieces as they struggled. Labienus’s last clear glimpse was of Amaunet’s face.
It was so melted it was impossible to tell whether her expression was one of fear or ecstasy. She transmitted: Has He come for us at last? Oh, let it be Him…
Death, however, sent His regrets. Amaunet and the rest of them might suffer liquefaction to the point where their hearts wept out of their bodies and their blind brains cowered in the darkness of their impermeable skulls; but they could not die. They were immortal, after all.
The last chords sounded, the celestial music ended. The room was silent.
CH
APTER 29
Alpha-Omega
Night, on an ancient and nameless sea.
A moon drifted between clouds, throwing down watery light on the island with its two hills. It sparkled, reflected in the estuaries and lagoons. It gleamed faintly on the dome atop the northern hill, making it look like a big egg nested in the alder trees.
It shone down on the white scoured bones of the ichthyosaur that lay half-buried, a willow tree growing through the blind skull, well above the summer tideline.
There was quite a lot of noise. The surf boomed far out, the sea wind hissed in the reeds, frogs and insects peeped and groaned. Then, abruptly, there was a lot more noise as the air opened with a red flash and there were five transports roaring down from the sky.
They came in low and fast. One veered away from the others and circled the northern hill, where after turning it landed on a flat open area beside the dome. The other four lined up gracefully and set themselves down on the beach below, and as the moon emerged from a trail of cloud the ichthyosaur skull glimmered out, grinning a welcome at them all.
Immediately, cargo doors opened in the four shuttles and figures leaped forth, pulling from each one a series of great squared objects. They were refrigerated transport pods. A moment later the pods rose, bobbing a meter above the sand as their agunits were activated. The figures set off up the beach in a long purposeful line, towing the pods after them, making for the hill where the first transport was.
“And we’re in,” said Latif as the loading door rolled up. He advanced into the loading bay warily, eyeing the servounit that clattered away like a cockroach between stacked crates. Suleyman and Sarai followed him, scanning the walls for a door. “And we’re not in,” Latif corrected himself. “I’m not reading any entrance but that crawlway, are you?”
Suleyman shook his head. “The dust is disturbed. Somebody’s been here, not all that long ago,” remarked Sarai.
“Somebody certainly has.” Suleyman strolled over to the crawlway. He dropped into a crouch to study it and there was a faint whine, no louder than a mosquito, but the grated cover to the crawlway lit up cherry-red. He winked out and reappeared to the left of the grate.
“It’s charging up,” he said. “We’ll have to take out this wall. I’m not reading any refrigeration units behind it. Limpets, here and here.”
“You got ‘em.” Latif and Sarai slapped the bombs in place and were gone, and Suleyman was gone, and a second later there was a puff and a flash and a gaping hole in the wall. Before the last bit of debris had fallen they were inside.
What they saw, by infrared, surprised them.
They had broken through into what appeared to be spartan living quarters: a food preparation area, an open lavatory, an entertainment console. It might have been a prison cell. There was a table and a chair and a bed, and in the bed a thin pale mortal was just struggling to sit up and pull off a sleep mask.
Their view of the bed, however, was blocked by the apparition. It hung in midair, scowling at them ferociously and gnashing its sharp teeth: a lavender shark with pale blue fins. “Go away,” it ordered in the voice of a furious woman. “Get out of here, or I’ll bite you!”
“This is original,” observed Sarai. As they stood gaping at it, it melted, transformed. It became a balloony purple octopus, writhing its tentacles.
“Go away now,” it cried. For good measure it changed again. Now it was a bright red lobster two meters tall, clacking its claws at them.
“What are you?” wondered Suleyman.
“They’re, uh, the monsters from Totter Dan’s Undersea Adventure,” Latif said.
“Who’s that?” asked the mortal in the bed, managing to get his sleep mask off at last. He stared at the blown wall open to the night, the three figures silhouetted against the moonlight, and rubbed his eyes.
“Leave him alone,” screamed the lobster, morphing now into a woman in a rather dowdy-looking robe. “Please go!” The mortal was groping frantically in a drawer at the side of his bed. He had pulled something out and was reaching up with it when Latif shot it out of his hand. He yelped and cowered back in his blankets.
“No!” the woman implored. “Don’t hurt him.” From the rubble behind them something came clattering: another servounit, a dog-sized thing waving manipulative members in a menacing fashion. Sarai kicked it away and it lay on its back in a corner, traction treads racing futilely. “Please!” Weeping now, the woman opened her robe and displayed her naked body. “Would you go away if I made you happy? I’ll do anything you want. Just please don’t hurt my David.”
“You’re an AI, aren’t you?” guessed Suleyman. “You’re supposed to monitor life support for the mortal.”
“Ancilla, make them go away!” the mortal told her.
“I’m trying,” she replied, as the first of Suleyman’s team came through the wall. They stopped and stared.
“Through there,” Suleyman told them, pointing into the depths of the dome’s interior. “The storage area’s got a vacuum seal.”
“Is that what you want?” Ancilla peered into Suleyman’s face. “You want something from the alcove, like those other people? Take it! Take whatever you want and go. I can fix it so he won’t even notice anything’s missing. Just let my David alone.”
“We won’t hurt David,” Suleyman told her, “but we can’t leave him here. We’re taking everything that’s stored in that alcove, and closing this station down. David’s going home to Time Forward with us. He’ll be all right.”
“But—I wasn’t notified,” Ancilla said doubtfully.
“What?” The mortal emerged from under the covers. “What’d he say, Ancilla?”
“The Company’s evacuating this base!” Suleyman raised his voice slightly. “Consider this your notification.” He lowered his voice and looked at Ancilla. “Has he got any personal effects he’ll want to bring?” he asked, indicating the mortal with a jerk of his thumb.
“What?” The mortal sat up, swung his feet over the side of the bed. “Don’t bother talking to her. She’s not real. I’m real! What do you mean, the Company’s evacuating me?”
Suleyman looked around Ancilla at the mortal. There was a rush of cold air as the alcove was opened, and a clinking and thumping from the darkness as Suleyman’s team immediately set to loading the contents of Alpha-Omega into the transport units. “An emergency situation has developed, sir,” Suleyman told the mortal. “Your location is no longer secure.”
“Oh!” The mortal cringed. “Then you’ve got to save what’s in the recesses beyond the Portal.” He got up hurriedly and groped around in the darkness. “Ancilla! Where are my clothes?”
Smoothly, without a wasted movement, Alpha-Omega was divested of its treasure in surprisingly little time considering the months of effort that had gone into finding it. When the mortal man had dressed himself and found both shoes, and fussed with a bag of toilet necessaries, and downloaded his Totter Dan games into a transfer unit, the last of the silver tubes was on its way down to the transports.
“What about your AI’s program?” inquired Suleyman, examining the console.
“What?” David peered at him. “Oh. Leave it here. I won’t need that thing if I’m going home.”
“You’re a real little pig, aren’t you?” said Sarai in disgust.
“No!” Ancilla’s eyes widened. She turned to Suleyman. “No, I have to look after David. You understand, don’t you?”
“Latif, escort him to the shuttle,” Suleyman ordered. Latif drew his pistol and David scurried ahead of him, out through the loading dock. “I’m sorry,” Suleyman told Ancilla. “We don’t have time. We’ll take good care of him, I promise you.”
He turned from her and strode out to the waiting transport. Sarai lingered a moment to say: “You hang in there, dearie. Somebody’ll be back.” She turned and ran after Suleyman.
They powered up, the five ships, they rose and turned, and disappeared through a blaze of red light with a boom that echoed across the dark w
ater. For a few minutes there was breathless silence; then the night noises returned, the frogs and insects cautiously resumed their songs.
The white moonlight streamed in through the broken wall of Alpha-Omega, and through the phantom woman who wept in its ruins.
Fez, 9 July 2355
“This isn’t London,” said David Reed, staring around in horror at the city lit by sunset, under the dreadfully wide sky. “It’s foreign! And it’s hot. Why am I here?”
“Change of plan, dearie,” said the black lady, with a white smile that made him very uncomfortable. “Pick up your feet now. Quick. We want to get you stashed away safe.”
“But—” David protested, and she slapped him quite hard on his behind. With a yelp he started forward, and she grabbed his arm and drew him along with her, inexorably propelling him down the narrow street. He didn’t much like the look of it. It was what would be called an alley in any civilized country, with high white windowless walls to either side and a high wall at the end.
He looked about fearfully for piles of donkey flop or dirty merchants with moth-eaten rugs, which he supposed were everywhere in these unpleasant substandard countries, but there weren’t any. Only the clean silent street and the soldiers jogging along behind them, each one bearing on his or her shoulders a refrigeration unit. As they neared the end of the street David looked expectantly for the doorway or turning they’d take next, but to his consternation there didn’t appear to be any turning.
He gasped and tried to stop before they ran smack into the wall, but the black lady bore him on. The wall seemed to pull back, and a stairway opened at their feet, leading down to a doorway that was even now opening on darkness.
Stumbling, unwilling, he descended the stair and the next minute or so was a long nightmare of steps turning and going down, turning and going down, with the soldiers thundering behind him so that there was no stopping, even if the mean lady had been willing to listen to his protests.
