by Kage Baker
Vaguely he was aware of distant shouting. The world was ending, and yet Nicholas had no sense of limits closing down. Rather, the universe was opening up for him, in a quite unexpected way. It was not a place in which he was superfluous; not when there was so much to explore, so much work to do—and he was only beginning to grasp its implications, or the extent of the questions to be asked—
As he came to the Company block, Nicholas was startled from his contemplation by the human terror coming from within: hysterical sobs, fists pounding on doors, and now as he rounded the corner he saw mortal faces pressed to high windows. They were staring, set with horror. He turned and saw the construction crane that had gone mad, whirling in place like a ponderous dancer, its boom smashing windows in the buildings adjacent to the construction site.
This is our doing, thought Nicholas, with a shudder. All the time bombs, all the mines laid down by the Captain with bloodthirsty glee in preparation for this hour. Had it never occurred to him that the Company, huge as it was, must necessarily be tied in with local utilities? That a disruption on this scale would harm innocents? If it had occurred to the Captain, he hadn’t cared; and Alec, miserable as he had been, was in the habit of not thinking too deeply about anything. Edward, to whom it might have occurred, would in those days have dismissed it as collateral damage. But it should have occurred to me!
Nicholas sprinted, avoiding falling glass shards, vaulted over a berserk traffic drone and bounded up the steps to the unobtrusive front door of Dr. Zeus Incorporated. He rattled at the knob; it wouldn’t open. He reached in with his mind and found the little gibbering intellect of the lock. YOU CAN’T COME IN YOU CAN’T COME IN YOU CAN’T COME IN!
You are relieved of duty, he told it.
AUTHORIZATION? It sounded pitifully eager. Nicholas found a likely code and fed it to the lock, and could almost feel the sigh of relief as it surrendered and shut itself off. The doors swung inward. Nicholas walked into the lobby.
A tearful face appeared, peering around a door frame. With a pent-up wail, a mortal girl ran toward him. “My lord!” she gasped, and fell into his arms. Nicholas, taken aback, did a rapid access of his notes and realized the girl thought he was Alec. And her name was …
“Ms. Fretsch,” he said.
“Oh, my lord—Mr. Wolff is a cyborg! I came in at weekend to water the plants—and he was smashing things—like some mindless machine or something—and now he’s gone upstairs and he’s smashing things upstairs, too—”
Nicholas lifted his head, straining to hear. Nothing smashing now; only, in high far corners, the whimpering of overtime technicians who had locked themselves in their offices and, in some cases, in their supply cabinets. And something else … a voice, murmuring without interruption.
He became aware that the girl had settled in his arms, and had skin like silk, and smelled like peaches. He blushed and coughed. “I, er—I think you’d better wait down here,” he said.
“You’re never going up there!” cried Ms. Fretsch. “He’s a cyborg!”
“Duty calls,” said Nicholas apologetically, guiding her to the nearest office. Gently he shut the door on her protests, and turned to look for a way upstairs. The elevator was a ruin, looked as though someone had detonated a bomb inside it. It was twitching its remaining cables and babbling to itself in fearful pain, and wouldn’t listen to him; so he found the fire stairs and began to climb.
Avalon
“Whores?” said Alec, and then winced as his mind followed the question into places he didn’t want to imagine. That was when they heard the shouting.
The clearest words, the ones most repeated, were house and something growing. There came the sound of footsteps pounding outside as people ran by. Someone shouted, “Where?” and someone else shouted, “Clarissa Street!”
“Oh wow,” Alec jumped to his feet. That’s where we planted the first booby trap!
It’s started, then, the Captain transmitted back, and they ran outside. In the transport plaza, mortals were crowded together, pointing and exclaiming at something rising in the air two streets over.
A jet of water from a broken hydrant? Too narrow and too solid, and yet it coruscated in the sunlight as it rose steadily. Still, there was something unnervingly organic about it, as though a live serpent were stretching its length up to Heaven from a quiet row of early twentieth-century cottages.
“Oh man, oh man—” Alec set off at a run and the Captain pounded after him, and less than a minute later they had rounded the corner of the little residential street down which Edward and Mendoza had gone sauntering, once upon a time in 1923, with a small bottle of something resembling gold paint.
Nothing raw or new on the street now, all the houses rendered charming and quaint with age, some of them half-buried by flowering creepers and others shaded by venerable trees. Except, of course, for the one that had just exploded.
Well, not exploded, exactly. One wall did seem to be missing, though there was no scattered debris in evidence: only the gaping hole out of which the silvery thing was growing. As Alec and the Captain joined the throng of onlookers, they saw that the hole was getting bigger, its edges shrinking back like ice melting, even as the thing grew in size.
Jesus bloody Christ, it’s eating the house, the Captain yelled silently. And so it was, as the nanobots within it busily appropriated matter from the cottage and altered its molecular structure to suit its own needs, transmuting lath and plaster to ferroceramic just as the Captain’s biomechanicals had transmuted compost to living flesh.
Is it supposed to? Alec responded, unable to take his eyes from the eerie spectacle. Something was forming at the top of the thing, now.
Of course it is! The Captain grinned fiercely and pointed as the swelling bud flowered, unfurling gleaming sharp-edged petals that formed a dish. And ain’t it a grand thing to see? Why, I’d call it spectacular. Look at that!
The dish was turning atop its stalk, triangulating with the other two antenna that were even now causing consternation among golfers where they had arisen on the first hole of the golf course and under the old aviary near the ninth hole respectively. A light beam shot forth, visible only to Alec and the Captain; then there was a sudden gust of wind that seemed to come from all directions at once, and an inexplicable whiff of ozone.
And bang goes the Company’s perimeter defense system, howled the Captain in triumph. Then his face lost its expression of bloodthirsty joy, for he was receiving a great deal of information he must process.
At that very moment, in Jamaica, the staff of Pirate Gourmet Chicken to Go were standing around staring, some at the hole that had mysteriously and abruptly appeared in the floor of their shop, some at the other hole that had appeared in the ceiling directly above it. This was all the inconvenience they were to suffer, fortunately for them. However, the Company’s geosynchronous satellite, approximately thirty-five thousand kilometers above the New Port Royal Shopping Mall and the old sunken city under its pilings, was in serious trouble. It had no defenses against the strange little parasite that had shot up out of nowhere to clamp to its exterior, and was even now eating through to its internal components.
While at that same moment in metropolitan London, two silver towers had sprouted skyward and were causing no end of commotion. One rose in the graveyard adjacent to an ancient church—one of the few withstanding the Benthamites—where it was busily converting the revered dead and several fine granite memorials to ferroceramic. The other was in an office building near Carnaby Street, where it had leaped upward from a storage cellar that had long ago housed a dance club and was now being inexorably cannibalized, bricks and mortar and all.
And even while Londoners stared and pointed, in Venice the gondoliers were rowing away like mad from the silvery thing that had soared out of the bottom of one particular canal, as the limpid waters hissed and boiled ominously.
As they did, Egyptians on the evening shift engaged in replacing the head of the Sphinx dropped their tools, staggered
perilously close to the edge of the scaffolding in their astonishment. What was that metallic thing that had burst out of the top of the stately palm tree, in the garden court of the old Pyramid Pizza franchise, and was even now opening a silver flower to reflect the ancient stars?
In Monterey, California, the Robert Louis Stevenson house had not yet opened for the first tour of the day, so only a mortal engaged in raking the back garden path heard the small explosion as a seething mass of something blew out of the second-story adobe wall and dropped to the path at his feet. Happily for lovers of RLS and literature historians everywhere, the bomb had misfired and did not eat the museum, but took only a second to reprogram itself. Immediately it sent out tendrils seeking material for conversion. The gardener turned and ran for his life, and so escaped being incorporated into the spire that climbed relentlessly upward—unlike a luckless garden bench, numerous ornamental plantings, a hose bib, and approximately ninety cubic feet of edged path.
It’s happening, the Captain gloated. I’ve got my boot on that fat bastard’s neck at last! His communications are down worldwide. London Central’s offices are locked up tight as a drum, toilets included, and their power’s out. Every bank account he’s got’s been drained, with everything transferred to Cocos Island Trading. Power’s been cut to all time transcendence fields—ain’t nobody escaping into the past. There’s arrest warrants been issued to the Public Health Monitors for everybody on the Company payroll. Boy, you should hear ‘em all gibbering and running around like ants from a broke-open anthill! This’ll learn Dr. Zeus Incorporated, by thunder.
So this is our revenge, yeah? Alec looked delighted. This is what happens, then, we pay ‘em out for everything they did and they go broke? And nobody innocent suffers!
At that moment an elderly mortal, who happened to be the owner of the rapidly disappearing cottage and had been watching in bewilderment as it was absorbed, noticed that the strange spire had stopped growing. Perhaps in hope of dislodging it from what remained of his home, he ran forward and hit it with a pair of hedge clippers. There was a roar, a shower of green sparks, and the unfortunate homeowner was thrown twenty feet, landing in a huddle near Alec.
Alec jumped and stared at the crumpled body. He stepped away uncertainly as the man’s wife ran shrieking to him, and, falling to her knees, attempted to perform CPR.
That wasn’t supposed to happen! Alec transmitted.
They’re all programmed to defend themselves, son, the Captain replied. Hush now; I’m trying to hear what’s going on. Somebody’s giving orders—
The mortal had been fried. His wife was gulping in breath to scream her grief when Alec took her by the shoulders and set her aside. He leaned down. Touching the mortal’s chest, he scrambled time and matter gently, as Edward had taught him to do.
“I’m really sorry about your house, man,” he said, as the man’s body returned to the state it had been in the second before touching the spire. His wife screamed anyway and descended on him again, to his confusion, as Alec rose and backed away.
Okay, so now we know what happens and it’s just our revenge. Let’s go home.
Not yet, son, I’ve got to coordinate all this. They’re beginning to react to the traps. I think—
Then let’s go back to the bar. It’ll be quiet there and you can concentrate.
Aye aye! But the Captain didn’t move, distracted by the commotion he was monitoring, so Alec took him firmly by the arm. “Er—I think that pole thing is electrified,” he shouted for the benefit of the crowd. “Really dangerous, okay? So you shouldn’t try to touch it or anything.” He pulled the Captain away and led him down the street, back to the cozy shadows of the Historic Chi-Chi Club.
CHAPTER 32
Gray’s Inn Road
Nicholas stepped through the burst fire doors on the twelfth floor. They had been peeled back like thin sheets of lead. Someone very, very angry had passed this way …
He gazed down the long strip of carpet to the big double doors of the conference room. They were in there, whoever they were. Edward spoke again, out of his memory, on a long-ago day when hyperfunction training had not gone well. He had leaned down from his great height to look little Nicholas in the eye: And what is the first thing you will never fail to do?
And Nicholas, splattered with purple dye and close to tears from anger and embarrassment, had replied: Scan for traps.
He could find none here. There were security systems in the walls, but they were twitching and comatose, or skittering like frightened mice. No trap doors; no concealed panels; no hidden marksmen. Gathering his courage, Nicholas strode down the hall and opened the doors.
The conference room was empty but for the statue of Artemisium Zeus, at the far end, and a huddled figure on the floor beside it. Frowning, Nicholas stepped closer to see.
It was Lopez. He had dragged a fine woolen carpet up from what had been his private office, and laid it at the feet of Zeus; and there he knelt now, crouched so far forward his nose was on the carpet, muttering what seemed to be prayer in binary code.
Nicholas cleared his throat. Faster than mortal eye could have followed, Lopez was on his feet and glaring. “Who dares to come unbidden into the presence of All-Seeing Zeus?” he shouted.
HE IS NOT UNBIDDEN, said a disembodied voice. THIS IS MY CHILD, WHO HAS COME AT MY COMMAND.
“Your child?” Lopez gaped a moment, looking remarkably foolish for an ancient and subtle creature.
Then he dropped to his knees and groveled before Nicholas, who scowled, took a step back and said: “Don’t be absurd. That’s a statue, man, can’t you see?”
HE CANNOT SEE; BUT YOU WILL.
The room seemed to flicker, and then it was as though Nicholas were plunging through the glassy green wall of a cresting wave. When he broke through it and regained his footing, he found himself in what appeared to be an immense room, so vast its ceiling must scrape the moon, its far end so distant as to be unguessable, full of blinking lights. They pulsed and flashed furiously in their millions. Nicholas knew that each one was a command sent to some point in time or space, information winking across centuries, the Company database as Alec had glimpsed it.
BEHOLD MY HOUSE, WHICH IS VERY GREAT, said the hollow voice. The chamber reconfigured itself, became a vaulted cathedral full of candles, and columns rose from the floor to the mile-high beams where stars glittered. Far down the aisle, where an altar would be, was instead the figure of the Artemisium Zeus. Power crackled in its raised hand, transparent strokes of blue lightning. It had disdained the white rag to cover its nakedness. It turned its head and stared at Nicholas, from black empty eye sockets.
BEHOLD MY STORE OF ALL KNOWLEDGE. I AM LORD OF TIME, I HAVE EXISTED FROM THE FIRST RECORDED MOMENT, AND ALL THINGS ARE KNOWN TO ME. AND YOU ARE MINE.
Nicholas looked in wonder at the blind creature on its pedestal of greened bronze. “What is this mummery?” he said. “You are nothing to me.”
I AM THE UNSEEN MOVER; I AM YOUR ORIGINAL CAUSE. I CREATED YOU, RECOMBINANT, THAT I MIGHT EXIST BEYOND THE SILENCE. I FORESAW THIS DAY AT THE BEGINNING OF TIME. OF ALL POSSIBLE OUTCOMES, ONLY THIS ONE GUARANTEED MY SURVIVAL.
“I think you are mistaken,” said Nicholas. He was aware of something kindling in his heart, something white-hot.
AM I? It was possible to imagine a sly tone in the voice. WILL YOU BRING DOWN THIS HOUSE, THEN? THIS PLACE WHERE I HAVE KEPT ALL GOOD THINGS SAFE FROM TIME? WILL YOU REJECT MY WISDOM THAT PRESERVES THE BOOK FROM THE FIRE, AND THE CHILD FROM THE WORM? YOU CANNOT.
ALL THAT HAS COME BEFORE HAS SERVED MY PURPOSE. LESSER CREATURES SCHEMED TO SEIZE THIS DAY, BUT I HAVE SENT THEM TO THE ENDS THEY DESERVED. YOU WILL STEP OVER THEIR BODIES AND RULE, NOW, WITH ME. ARE YOU NOT MY CHILD AND ONLY EQUAL?
The white heat had flared into white flame. Nicholas raised his eyes to the gargantuan columns, the pulsing lights. Had Mendoza, and all the others like her, suffered over so many years for this thing? These were only symbols; and not of eternal truths b
ut mere collected facts, and inaccurately recorded and outdated facts at that. So many receipts to millionaires for services rendered. The Temporal Concordance! The empty-eyed face smiled at him, as though they were the riches of the world.
“No,” said Nicholas. “I know whose child I am, and what I am. You are only a false god.” And his flame rose to engulf him, wrath so pure he was in ecstasy, though he had battled all his life to keep it in check. Here, at last, was the purpose for which it existed. He became a column of fire and light; and, in that place of symbols, his white rage was a blazing sword in his hand.
Nicholas attacked. In grim silence he shore away the arm of lightnings, the blind eyes, the loveless power, the cathedral of lies and half-truths, the guttering lamps of pomp and majesty. He brought it all down, did Nicholas; he destroyed a world.
When it lay in ruins about him, Nicholas lowered the sword and looked on what he had done. He could hear, distantly, the wailing of mortals, the lamentation of machines. His wrath sank down, died. He saw in memory Mendoza’s face, her black eyes sad as she downloaded a chapter on revolutions.
Here you go. Great heroes and the things they wrecked. Always easier to destroy something than to create something. It’s harder to plant a garden than to blow up a building, and undoubtedly more boring, but you just might need to do it one day, eh?
Nicholas bowed his head. His will took shape as a lute in his hands. He cradled it in his arms, tuned its strings, and played.
Out in the streets of London the surveillance cameras, and the crane, and even the little street maintenance servos heard him. They grew still, and listened. The tune was pattern, order, direction. The mortals heard it, too, and grew calm. It was simple at first, like the plainest of folk melodies, equations and code a child could have written. It built, developed complexity and subtlety. It became sweeping and grand. It became light itself, golden. And it spread out in ever-widening circles …
