The Sons of Heaven (The Company)

by Kage Baker

  Finally they stopped descending, and the lady pulled him off into an alcove at the side. The soldiers ran on past them, down a corridor leading into a big vaulted room. David mustered his indignation to demand: “I want to talk to your supervisor!”

  “Sorry, honey, he’s busy,” said the lady, as a doorway opened in the alcove. She shoved him through and he found himself in a room not unlike the one he’d left. Bed, commode, sink. He turned around to ask her for his bag, but she had already tossed it in after him and slammed the door.

  David stood gaping a moment before he bent and picked up his bag. At least those nasty people had gone. He sat down on the bed, trembling and wheezing from the run, and rummaged in his bag for his medication. There was no sipper bottle beside his bed, and he had to go to the sink and fill a little chlorilar cup with water before he could take his pills. And the water tasted funny, and he spilled some of it on himself. Really, this was very annoying. He made a mental note to speak sharply about it to whoever brought him his breakfast.

  Feeling the need to work off his anger, he pulled out his Totter Dan unit and looked around for the entertainment console.

  There wasn’t one.

  David Reed cried out, a high-pitched squeal of horror and disbelief. Rising to his feet again he proceeded to search the room. Wall to wall, like a mime flattening his palms against the unyielding surfaces, he sought desperately for a port, a screen, a buttonball, anything with function! Nothing. Nothing under his bed either, or behind the commode, or in the door. Nothing at the sink, though he poked the Totter Dan lead into every hole he found there. “Ancilla,” he screamed. “Where is it? Hook me up!”

  No soothing voice, no comforting illusion rushing to his assistance. Failing to appreciate the irony of this, he collapsed on his bed and sobbed in terror. Lots of time passed.

  After a while he curled into fetal position and emptied his mind of thought. As ever, it didn’t take him long.

  Racing back along the corridor, Sarai spotted Latif running from the opposite direction. They met, crashing into each other. He grabbed her and swept her back in a kiss. They wrestled together a long moment before they broke for air at last.

  “Secured!” Latif announced, and Sarai shouted with laughter. Hand in hand they ran back along the corridor, and a moment later emerged, by veiled and uncertain ways, in Suleyman’s receiving room.

  Suleyman was sitting at a low table, sipping tea and studying a sheaf of printouts. He did not look up as they came in.

  “The jewels are in the jewel box,” said Sarai. “And the piggy’s in the pen. What on earth’s wrong?”

  Suleyman spread the papers out across the table. They were still images, taken at several angles from surveillance camera feed, of a room. It was not an empty room. “These came in while we were at Alpha-Omega,” he said. “From the Preservancy Conference Center on Santa Catalina Island.”

  “Victor sent them, then,” Latif said, coming around the table to peer at the images.

  “I don’t think so,” Suleyman told him. Latif looked more closely. He uttered something profane. Suleyman continued: “Though the possibility exists that he arranged the transmission in advance.”

  “Do we have anybody else out there?” asked Latif in a slightly shaky voice. “Who might have sent these, I mean?”

  Suleyman nodded. “She didn’t send them, though. She’s at a secured location, monitoring the mortals’ transmissions.” He stroked his beard, regarding a particular image. “I’ve been running a forensic reconstruction on the rest of them. That one,” he added, pointing, “is almost certainly Nennius.”

  Sarai leaned forward, her gaze hard and hungry. She stared at the image a long moment before grinning ferociously. “Well,” she said. “Some justice. How nice! What about the others?”

  “Are they all in Labienus’s camp?” inquired Latif, reaching for the tea and taking a gulp.

  “No,” replied Suleyman. He pointed to another image. “There’s a ninety-nine point nine percent probability that one’s Aegeus. And that would be Ereshkigal next to him.”

  “So.” Latif jumped to his feet and began to pace. “If Victor did what it looks like he did—then both the Masters and the Plague Club are out of the race.”

  “Possibly,” said Suleyman. “Their leaders, at least.”

  “Which means we can get to the Command Center without having to fight anybody but the mortal troops.”

  “Possibly,” said Suleyman.

  “Which means we win!”

  “Possibly.”

  “Somebody sometime’s going to have to go into that room and clean things up,” observed Sarai. “To retrieve Victor, at least.”

  “Better sooner than later, too. Son, we’ll need hazmat units,” Suleyman said.

  “On it,” Latif told him, and was gone from the room. Sarai looked after him.

  “He’s a good son,” she said.

  “He is.” Suleyman had another sip of tea. “Victor was a good son, too.”

  “Was he one of yours?” Sarai turned to him, surprised.

  “No,” Suleyman said. “Someone else’s son. I would have been proud to call him mine, though.”

  Sarai nodded, looking at the terrible pictures. “I never had many recruits,” she said. “And I haven’t kept track of them. Maybe just as well. Too painful.”

  He sighed. They could hear, from the courtyard, the bustle as the shuttles were refueled and the troops loaded, and somewhere Yusuf patiently explaining to a trio of Peace Officers that, yes, there had been a fire, but the household had got it out swiftly. The lord of the house would be glad to meet them on Monday to make a full report. Suleyman raised his eyebrows.

  “I ought to make Latif go out to apologize,” he said. He gazed for a moment at the shatrang set displayed in a corner of the room, the old work of art in ivory and ebony. “Tell me something,” he said. “Do you really think Alec Checkerfield is dead?”

  Sarai flinched. “What’s that got to do with anything? But he’s not in this world,” she said quietly. “I tell you I’d know.”

  “You think so?” Suleyman turned down his empty tea glass. “I wonder.” Latif came stalking back, eyes glittering. “Hazmat units loaded and we’re ready to go on your order.”

  “Mm.” Suleyman rose to his feet. He walked across the room to the shatrang game and moved one of the pieces. Then he turned back to Latif and Sarai. “Armageddon calls. Let’s go, children.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Meanwhile, in Paradise

  The Captain steers through Eternity, moors off a convenient headland of Time.

  A vast shimmering coalesces into something solid and visible. The island emerges from the mists. The masts and spars of the Captain Morgan emerge, too, and the green trees of the garden, and the outline of the high house. Night is fading away into morning here, whenever this is.

  The house solidifies; within it a pulsing star of energy settles lightly into time and place, assumes nearly human form. Forms. Four of them. Children?

  They materialize all together in the great bed, in the master bedroom with its windows wide on the sea. The little girl is more or less in the center of the tangle of sprawling limbs and pillowed heads. There is no visible difference between the three little boys, save for the spiraling tattoo on the shoulders of one of them.

  Their contentment is nearly palpable. They are exactly where they longed to be for so many painful centuries, and they sleep very well now. They might have been sleeping a night or a year or a thousand years. The sound of their untroubled breathing is quiet in the room, and so is the roll of breakers on the reef beyond the lagoon, and the sigh of the wind in the palm trees, and the red birds starting up dawn song timidly.

  Below this there is a faint hum and drone, a constant low sound whose source is time itself. It is generally inaudible to those who still move within the temporal framework, as other rooms within a maze are invisible to its explorers. To those outside time who can hear the sound, it is indistinct e
nough to be ignored.

  Until it changes, as it does now.

  A click. A whirr and a new sound, rising a little louder than before. Thunder and something else, at once sublime and terrifying, like howling angels with flaming swords, and a chorus under it of piping like insects in a summer night, or drowning souls screaming for rescue.

  Within the room the atmosphere changes, and a faint prickle of electricity charges the air. Domed thunderclouds, touched with the tender colors of morning, appear on the wide horizon of the sea and race down the sky. Out on the terraced fields the young corn dances and circles as a wind travels across it, under the advancing clouds. The Captain Morgan rocks at anchor in the lagoon.

  Some strange perfume is in the air. Orange blossoms? Green-cut hay? Something is going to happen.

  The girl wakes. She is coming back from dreams so deep there is a bloom on her eyes at first, giving her the appearance of blindness. Gradually her perceptions sharpen and she turns her head, looking perplexed. She sits up. The others wake instantly. “Do you hear that?” she says. They all listen.

  “Ay,” says one of the boys.

  After a moment the boy with the tattoo says, “That’s strange. What is that?” Then, looking down at himself, he cries: “Oh, no! Not again!”

  “It’s all right,” says the third boy, sounding amused. He stretches, sensually, and his limbs lengthen, his chest deepens and broadens. The others follow suit, and in short order appear as adults. But the noise is still going on …

  “I’ve heard that noise before,” says Mendoza. “Somewhere. Haven’t you?”

  They listen again, intently, and at last Edward frowns. “I do believe,” he says, “that some event in the cycle of time is bleeding through the temporal correspondence points.”

  “Oh. Like a temporal resonance?” says Alec.

  “But monstrous big.” Nicholas is frowning now too. “To make such a noise across time’s whole frame. Some—” He stops short of saying the word catastrophe out loud, but Mendoza hears his thought anyway.

  “We must be hearing 2355,” she concludes.

  “No!” says Alec.

  “Surely not,” Nicholas agrees.

  “Highly unlikely,” Edward assures her.

  But as they listen, as they scan the temporal wave for the original source of the disturbance, it becomes undeniable: 2355. Then beyond the windows, lightning flashes blue. Thunder booms, and hot rain comes down in torrents, with all the fury of a tropical squall. They hear the slamming of windows throughout the house as the Captain responds to the storm. When the commotion subsides, the sound has died away, the charge in the room dissipated. “I guess we’d better do something about that one of these days,” says Alec uncomfortably.

  “Especially since we planted all those time bombs,” adds Mendoza, looking at Edward. Something unspoken passes between them.

  “No help for it, I suppose,” Edward says. “One of us had better go see what happens.”

  Now then, there ain’t no need to go running off all affrighted. Plenty of time to think about this! You want breakfast, that’s what you want. Coxinga’s just laying it out on the sideboard and Flint’s lit a nice cheery fire, on account of the rain. Come on downstairs, mateys.

  His voice is a shade too jolly and coaxing. “Captain—” says Edward.

  Hot cocoa all round, eh? Perfect weather for it!

  “Captain, did you possibly detect something in that occurrence that escaped us?” says Edward.

  Well now, what could have escaped the likes of a sharp-witted lad like you, Commander sir? Smart as paint, that’s what you are.

  “You did detect something,” says Mendoza, sighing.

  If I did, I ain’t saying a word about it until my boy gets some breakfast in him, the Captain replies firmly. Alec don’t take worries well on an empty belly, see? And you got all the leisure in the world to deal with one little problem somewhere off on the shank end of time.

  “I see,” says Edward. So they rise and descend to breakfast. It’s a long walk to get there, down wide staircases and through paneled corridors, now decorated in eclectic style with art gathered from many different eras. The effect is occasionally jarring but rather interesting, on the whole.

  The dining room is small and cozy by comparison, with a table set for four and firelight gleaming on the mahogany sideboard, where a repast is laid out under domed silver dishes.

  Look here, Commander! Nice dish of kedgeree just like you like it, and banana omelet for my Alec. There’s pikelets, Nick, and try the Oysters Creole, ma’am, they’re particularly good this morning—

  “I’m sure they are, Captain,” says Mendoza, as Edward pulls out a chair for her, “but I think we’d like to get straight to the point.”

  “Yeah,” says Alec. He lifts the dome from one of the dishes, and takes an entire folded omelet and stuffs it in his mouth. The others avert their eyes as he chews and then swallows it down. “Okay, there! I’ve eaten. Now you can tell us what you know that we don’t know about 2355.”

  “Alec, your manners are disgusting,” remarks Edward, seating himself and pouring tea. “Nevertheless, Captain—”

  Aye, well. I analyzed what come through just now. Most of it’s too confused to sort out at this distance, but there be some detonations. So I went through the Temporal Concordance and had me a look at travel bookings for Dr. Zeus personnel for the week preceding 9 July 2355. When the eleventh hour draws nigh, an awful lot of Company folk are going to be where them explosions is going off, which is Catalina Island. But there’s a deal of commotion coming from London, too.

  Nicholas, who has been buttering a pikelet, looks up sharply. “It’ll be war, then, surely, and no heavenly cataclysm,” he says in relieved tones.

  “I fail to see how war is preferable to a meteor strike, if the world ends in either case,” says Edward calmly. He sips his tea. Lightning crackles down outside, lighting up the room as blue as Crome’s radiation.

  “But it may not end,” Nicholas says, leaning forward in his excitement as thunder rolls. “Now, if the sun should quick-consume its own heart and blast them all in streaming fire, no remedy for that, plead how we may. But men may be dissuaded from a war!”

  “You mean we’re supposed to stop it,” said Alec.

  Oh, hell.

  “Have either of you ever tried to talk mortals out of fighting among themselves?” says Mendoza. “It almost never works.”

  “Not so, love!” Nicholas rises to his feet and takes her by the shoulders. “Men see their folly, and change. And they will! In the third millennium there will be no great wars, only—” He halts.

  “Only me blowing up Mars Two,” Alec says grimly.

  Alec, that weren’t yer fault.

  “Sit down and drink your orange juice like a civilized being,” Edward orders. “You know the Captain’s correct. In any case, it can’t be helped now.”

  Alec obeys and Nicholas remains standing, looking disconcerted from one to the other. Mendoza squeezes his hand. Lightning again, and thunder and the drumming rain loud afterward.

  “It’s a nice idea, to try to save the world,” she tells him gently, “but maybe it can’t be done. I and all my kind had our hands full, rescuing even bits and pieces of it from destruction. The mortals have free will; if they use it to obliterate themselves in one final bloodbath, what can we do?”

  “Go to them beforehand, and persuade them that they must not,” says Nicholas with certainty.

  “And anyway they don’t really have free will, you know,” Alec says, and gulps orange juice. “That’s a religious myth.”

  “Men may make choices—” Nicholas insists.

  Nicholas, dammit, history can’t be changed. You know that! Commander, tell the boy.

  Edward regards his plate of kedgeree. On the tines of his fork he lifts a bit of crisply fried onion, a perfect golden spiral curling as time itself was once believed to curl. “History can’t be changed,” he agrees. “But are we part of its set
pattern, at this point?”

  A flash of lightning, so near they’d be momentarily blinded if they were mortals, and even so Alec covers his ears as the thunder comes. Wind, now, too, green leaves are whirling and flying in the rain, hitting the windows.

  Can’t tell, growls the Captain at last.

  “Why not?” demands Alec. “Because it isn’t recorded? Or is there something else?”

  Maybe.

  “What uncharacteristic brevity, Captain,” says Edward. “There wouldn’t be some sort of causal node at that point in time, would there? Some moment from which many other moments in time radiate, whether backward or forward?”

  Aw, now, sir, even an old machine like me knows no such thing’s been proven to exist. It’s only been theorized by smart lads like you.

  “But if there were causal nodes, that’d be the kind of place one would be,” says Alec. “Maybe the biggest one ever’s there. Maybe that’s the moment all history depends on! If it’s connected—if everything leads there or comes off there—”

  “How if this were our purpose, made plain at last?” demands Nicholas. “Were we meant to be idle in this paradise?” He turns to Edward. “Wherefore did you take such pains to teach us, if not to benefit mortal humanity?”

  Mendoza has put down her coffee cup. “How do we know we wouldn’t make things worse by interfering?” she asks.

  “On the other hand,” counters Edward, “if there were a possibility we might rescue the mortals from their own folly at that moment in time, we should have the moral obligation to do so.”

  “Maybe, señor,” she replies.

  “Particularly,” he continues, “in view of the fact that it is our responsibility to make certain our weapons bring about the downfall of Dr. Zeus Incorporated, as they were intended to do, rather than randomly inflict hardship on the mortal population.”

  But you can leave all that to me! That’s all worked out to the last cipher, lads, there ain’t no need for any of you to go slogging out across time to watch. When the hour strikes I’ll bring you sweet revenge on a tray, and Dr. Zeus’s bloody fat head on a pike.