by Kage Baker
Happy. Really happy. Nothing can hurt her anymore. Every other time in my life I said that about someone I loved, I said it over a grave.
I don’t know how she can stand the three of them, but I have to admit they seem to have been meant to be together. At least I don’t have to worry about her now.
Not that my life is worry-free. This brave new world isn’t perfect, by a long shot.
Well, did you think it would be? The mortals have been allowed to rule themselves. My in-laws may think the mortals will be great at self-rule, but I’ve got my doubts about the brains on this present bunch. Most of them wouldn’t even have noticed what happened on July 9, if all those boobytraps the kids set for the Company hadn’t gone off.
You’d have thought there’d be a huge scandal when Dr. Zeus and its villainy was made public. The scientists never even stood trial; their respective governments cut immunity deals with them in return for testimony, and then quietly recruited them for their own laboratories.
The Company’s loot is being redistributed. I couldn’t believe the stuff Aegeus alone had stashed away! It put the mortal masters’ graft to shame. So now there are a lot of beautiful new public museums and libraries opening. Not many in the American Community or England, though; they distrust art.
They’re scared of animals, too, so they don’t venture into the wilderness areas much, which is a good thing, because a lot of the once-extinct species we set loose out there are thriving again. (Not all of them; the pandas, for example, took one look around, grunted, and lumbered straight back into extinction.) But passenger pigeons once more darken the skies when they migrate over New York. The mortals peer out balefully through their windows and complain about all the droppings.
The mortal gene pool really was shot to hell, thanks to the plagues, to the point where there’d have been no resistance to new diseases at all, in a few more generations, or any ability to adapt to new environments. Not the best shape for a species to be in, when it’s finally started to colonize its solar system.
But Suleyman runs the program to restore genetic diversity, with all the stuff he captured from Alpha-Omega. Plus there are sustainable population estimates to work out, and distribution of Mays mendozaii to agrarian communities… I guess we’ll see what happens, huh?
There’s been no further sign of the little stupid people from whom Lewis and Tiara escaped. They seem to have fled so far down a hole in space/time that they won’t be coming back soon, if ever. All the time transference field generators have been shut down and dismantled. Most mortals didn’t believe commercial time travel was real, anyway.
Oh, and nobody ever said, “Hey, immortals, thanks for saving the world all these years!” either. It didn’t seem to be a good idea to let the public know that we really exist, in fact. Too many paranoid mortals, thanks to movies with guys lumbering around in machine suits yelling things like “Imperfect beings must die!”
We thought about appointing a special PR team to promote tolerance and understanding—actually, Lewis thought about it—but in the end, our existence was officially denied. We’re an urban myth now, the way UFOs, Area 51, or Diana of Luna used to be: most mortals suspect we’re real and secretly in league with their governments, but there’s no proof.
Some mortals live in fear of a takeover conspiracy by us. Some mortals hope we’re going to drop out of the sky one day and offer them cosmic wisdom. Or take them off to Shambhala or Shangri-la or some other eternal paradise …
But Hell still exists, too. The kids work there, often as not.
Nicholas harrows Hell. Not only has he become the Apostle to the Als, he’s taken it on himself to find every last pit and oubliette where the Company imprisoned immortals. None have been quite as bad as Options Research, but there have been some pretty grisly surprises in the vaults. Nicholas finds them, sets them free, and heals them. He plays the damn lute for them. He talks to them, with that damn golden voice of his, and looks earnestly into their eyes, and … and somehow or other he makes them want to live again. He’s only had one notable failure.
When we finally got inside the dining room at the conference center and scraped up what was left of Labienus and Aegeus and their respective cabals, the mess was put into a bunch of regeneration tanks. The bones and parts bob around in there, but they don’t seem to want to reunite. Whatever it was Victor unleashed on them is about a million times stronger than the stuff in Bugleg’s poisoned chocolates. They can’t die, of course, but they’ll spend the rest of time trapped inside their ferroceramic skulls. Nobody’s sorry about this except Budu, who would have liked to lay some judgment on them.
Victor went into a tank, too, after his head had been reattached, and he’s completely repaired. Somehow, though, his consciousness won’t come back online, and nobody knows why. There’s nothing wrong with him. Nicholas even did the laying-on-of-hands trick. It worked for Kalugin, who sat bolt upright and asked how long he’d been asleep; but Victor just frowned and turned his face away, withdrew deeper into oblivion.
Budu goes sometimes to stand outside the tank and watch him. I don’t know what he’s thinking.
Each to his own Hell. What does Alec do with his eternal days? Get a load of this: the kid went back to England and actually took his seat in the House of Lords! And attends Parliament! He poses as a human being and he actually wades through stultifying hours of bureaucratic tedium. At least he only has to do it for one mortal lifetime. I was sure the kid would try to engineer some kind of takeover, but no: all he concerns himself with is campaigning for changes in the laws concerning the fairly harmless mortals who have been consigned to Hospital for years.
Naturally enough, given his damned smooth-talking talents, the big ice floe of bureaucracy is beginning to show some cracks. He could of course make things change, whether the mortals wanted it or not; but no, Alec is a good boy. He won’t play God. I’m wondering how long he’ll resist the temptation.
Lewis is only too happy to run around nowadays being the Angel of the Lord, or should I say Alec’s office assistant, handling milord’s paperwork, arranging for the release of mortals from Hospital, making certain the Martian Relief Fund money goes where it ought to. A lot of Alec’s charitable foundations employ mortals he’s had sprung from Hospital, I might add.
Not the few actual criminals, though. Mortals don’t really know how to cope with them anymore. So in a lot of little communities out on the edge of civilization, local law enforcement is only too happy to employ the services of the Flint Axe Security Agency. If the mortals have a problem, if they want some help, they can make a deal with me.
I’m their liaison with the really big guys who do the work of hunting down murderers, abusers, person-eating animals, whatever. In the less educated communities, I tell the mortals my guys are Cimmerians. Other places I tell them Budu and his teams are Scandinavians with acromegaly, and not only does that get accepted, it gets the Enforcers handicapped parking plates. Sweet, huh?
Do they kill mortals? Occasionally. Budu and his guys may have redirected their energies or sublimated their urges or whatever it was Edward taught them to do, but they’re still deadly. And effective: when that stupid terrorist war broke out between the Ephesians and the heretic Druids over what was really in the Malinmhor Codex, all Budu had to do was go in and glare, and that was the end of the shrine-smashing. It’s amazing how eager mortals become to sit down at the peace table with those cold pale eyes on them. Though even that fails, once in a while.
Once in a while Budu brings me some terrified mortal kid who’s been caught setting fire to things, or luring some other kid into a lonely place to hit him real hard with a rock or a stick. These children are mine. I have to sit down with them and get inside their little sick heads. I have to make them understand why it’s wrong to inflict pain on others. I have to fight for their souls. Talk about tough love; it takes all the strength an immortal can summon. I guess you could call it juvenile counseling. I have to get away from it, sometimes,
and walk up and down in the earth.
A whole bunch of operatives can’t cope as well as I can and they just melted into eternity and aren’t coming out again, thank you, but others decided to stick around. Nef is the keeper for the Greater Serengeti Plains Nature Preserve. Hearst is back in his castle, disappointed that he didn’t get to be president of America, but he and his new mistress are crazy about each other. (I don’t know exactly what Tiara is, or why she never ages or dies. I think Alec had something to do with it. The kid’s clever with nanotechnology.) And Suleyman and his people have either made or rediscovered some place they call Blessed Gineh, partly in time and partly out. There’s more than one Paradise, it seems.
And, say, what could be more of a paradise than my in-laws’ tropical island hideaway, full of sounds and sweet airs that give delight? To say nothing of that godawful huge palace, and the bar in the treehouse, and the pirate ship in the lagoon. I’d bet anything Tinkerbell’s lurking there somewhere.
But that’s where Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax (late Commander, R.N., also semi-retired Prometheus) putters around, pruning fruit trees and roses for his wife, pretending not to rule the universe. He and Mendoza take tea on the terrace every epoch/evening, and wait for their—sons? Other selves? Other halves? Whatever the hell the relationship is—to come home from work. Just like any other family. Almost.
And speaking of families: it was agreed that no more immortals would be made, ever. No more stealing mortal children and putting them through years of surgery and programming. But when it was discovered that Edward and Mendoza had figured out a way to have babies … what a surprise! It turned out there were a lot of immortal women, and no few men for that matter, who had secretly longed for the chance to have kids of their own all these years.
I thought it was a really dumb idea, but despite my—choke—family relationship with the holy trinity, my opinion doesn’t carry a lot of weight. Edward feels that proper parenting skills are important, in fact indispensable to immortals, that if we’d had a chance to develop them there wouldn’t have been creeps like Labienus and Aegeus.
So anyone applying to Captain Morgan (how’d you like to have him for your OB-GYN?) gets advice, assistance with producing embryos from DNA and implantation, and—oh yeah—a great big autographed copy of Child Care in the Cyborg Family, all nine million volumes of it. Kids that come with a manual, no less. Latif and Sarai have had a child. Kalugin and Nan are having one, too. Soon there’ll be a whole new generation of happy, well-adjusted little immortals with no memory of human pain and all of time and space to play in.
Sound like a recipe for disaster? See, this means we’re a species now. We’re on a different path from humanity, at least mortal humanity, and we’ll diverge. This could lead to anything. With children of our own to think about, will we care about the mortals anymore? Edward says that if we learn how to be good fathers and mothers, the rest will follow naturally and we’ll all treat the mortals with compassion, respect, et cetera … Sure we will.
Then again, maybe he’s right. Anyway the guy is more powerful than the rest of us put together, so nobody can argue with him. Except Alec and Nicholas, heh heh.
Lewis decided I needed to get out more. He began dragging me off on weekends to visit the kids.
It’s not so bad, I guess. When Alec and Nicholas start fighting with Edward at the dinner table, it’s even fun. And Lewis keeps Mendoza and me from going for each other’s throats. Sometimes we even talk. I like that.
So she’s got a really unusual marriage? I’m learning to keep my mouth shut, except for the occasional slip, like when I asked Nicholas how he liked being the last Christian in the world except for the Pope.
Lewis winced at that, and Mendoza looked like she was about to grab the nearest sharp object and fling it at my head; but Nicholas took her hands and kissed her. Then he told me he forgave me.
There are few things in life as annoying as being forgiven by Nicholas Harpole.
EPILOGUE
Dancing at the Avalon Ballroom
It’s an immense place, like a big bright lantern on its rock above a moonlit sea. The ballroom floor is wide, circular, inlaid with Roman numerals at its edges like the face of a clock; but there are no hands to limit time. The mirrored ball high up turns slowly, and stars float across the dancers and fire shimmers along the walls of the mezzanine, where people sit at tables and talk, or watch the dance.
You can glimpse a face here and there, on the mezzanine. Joseph at a table with Lewis, and with them Hearst and Tiara. Suleyman and Nefer, deep in cozy conversation. All the expected faces, and some unexpected ones, too: at a near table sit Captain Morgan and Mr. Shakespeare, long since liberated from his museum exhibit, in the company of a very agreeable couple of cybernetic whores named Phyllida and Chloe.
The terrace doors are open, and the pale curtains move in the wind from the sea.
The man and the woman are dancing. She wears something long and elegant; he’s in tailored evening dress, white tie and tails. They move together, the dancers, as though a single heart beat time for them.
But there is something strange about the man. How many arms embrace the woman? Is it one man, or three somehow occupying the space of one, out there on the dance floor? They move together, the men, only slightly out of phase, as the drums beat, as the fire burns, as the universe dissolves and re-forms. Do not be afraid.
It is a new dance. They are inventing the steps as they go. The music is the Song of Songs.
