The Life of the World to Come (Company)

by Kage Baker

  He opened his eyes and saw Mendoza standing in the doorway, watching him. She didn’t look scared, to see him naked. Always a good sign. He smiled at her.

  “Would you, er, like to bathe, too?” he invited, as casually as he could. Mendoza got a wild look in her eyes and started toward him through the rain, peeling off her clothes as she came.

  “Now, this is the part of the film,” she said, in her clear and carefully enunciated way, “where the orchestra begins to play the love theme with a lot of strings and horns, you know, and the camerawork goes sort of blurry and focuses on the lovers embracing passionately, but only from the waist up of course, and then the camera pulls back and tilts up into the branches of the trees, or perhaps goes to a stock shot of crashing waves or something—”

  “The hair—the hair—”

  “Okay—” Mendoza paused beside the tub, tilting her head to loose the long braid, and he reached out eager hands to help her. She shook her hair out. It was just as he had thought it would be. So was her body, and the perfume of her arousal was driving him mad.

  She stepped into the opposite end of the tub, which was not nearly big enough for two people, and within seconds they were grappling and splashing, kissing feverishly.

  “Wait, this is nuts,” she moaned, “There’s no room—”

  “Yes, there is,” Alec said. He struggled to his feet and lifted her in his arms, high above him, pressed close, and let her slide down until her breasts were on a level with his face. “Oh, yum—”

  Things went along very nicely indeed for the next few minutes. Mendoza’s arms went around him; then he felt her stiffen slightly.

  “Alec, darling,” she said, with just the slightest trace of strain in her voice, “this is a rather unusual tattoo you have.”

  “No‘uh tattoo,” he said. “M’a thyborg!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He lifted his mouth and looked up at her. “You know how I told you I’ve got this big custom cybersystem, to work the rigging on my ship? That’s how I run it. I’m a cyborg, have been since I was eighteen.”

  Mendoza began to quiver in his arms, and he thought for one awful second she was turned off by his revelation. Then he saw she was laughing, so silently and profoundly she could barely draw breath.

  “Oh, perfect,” she gasped. Her eyes widened in sudden shock and she looked down at him. “What year did you say it was where you come from?”

  “Er … 2351,” he said, wondering why they had to talk about this right now.

  “But that’s only four years from—” Mendoza’s face underwent such an extraordinary transformation that he nearly dropped her. “Dear God in Heaven, it’s you!” She flung her fists toward the sky, jubilant, fierce, howling with laughter that echoed from the green canyon walls.

  “YOU’RE THE NEMESIS, YOU’RE THE APOCALYPSE, YOU’RE THE SILENCE!” she cried into the storm. “YOU WILL BREAK DR. ZEUS!”

  There was a triple flash of lightning at that moment, with a roar of thunder so loud Alec thought the world was ending. In the terrifying blue illumination he looked up and saw her poised above him. She might have been something out of another world, bright as a flame, her eyes glowing with inhuman love.

  “Oh,” he said, and then Mendoza had slid down and clamped her mouth on his, and they wrestled there as the lightning flashed, the thunder boomed. Their struggles overturned the tin tub, dumping them unceremoniously onto the lawn in a flood of rainwater, and they rolled on the tidy grass and he seized her.

  Their eyes met. For a hushed moment there was a perfect mutual understanding Alec could never have put into words, the most profound intimacy, and the overwhelming conviction that he was about to remember who she was. Then the madness claimed them both and he couldn’t think, couldn’t think.

  “Mendoza?”

  “Mm?” Lazily she tousled his wet lank hair.

  “We need to talk about a few things.”

  “We certainly do,” she said.

  Alec rose on his elbows and lifted his head to consider the rain, which was still drumming down on them. He wiped his face with one hand. “We should probably go inside before we catch cold. Or drown.”

  “Okay,” she said. He maneuvered himself up, and Mendoza accepted his extended hand to pull her to her feet.

  Within a few minutes, with their soaked clothing drying in front of a pleasantly crackling fire, they were sitting down to supper at her rough-hewn table. He felt insanely calm, aware that something truly frightening had happened to him and that somehow he wasn’t afraid. Who could be afraid of the angel/demoness/little lost girl sitting down across from him, so politely offering a home-cooked supper?

  Not that it wasn’t the most surreal dining experience he’d ever had.

  “So this is—?” He lifted an oblong package on his plate with the times of his fork.

  “That’s a tamale. Please take the wrapper off before you eat it.”

  “Oh. Like banana leaves?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Okay,” he said, and took it apart bemusedly. “About that thing that happened? What was it you called me, the Nemesis? What was that about, exactly?”

  “Well.” Mendoza took a bite of rolled-up tortilla. “I’m going to tell you something very, very classified,” she said, chewing. “I believe I mentioned that Dr. Zeus, possessing the secret of time travel, knows everything that’s ever happened in recorded history, as well as everything that ever will happen. Beer?”

  “Yes, please,” he said, holding out his mug. She poured something hoppy and amber from a stone pitcher and continued:

  “Everything that ever will happen, I say—up to the year 2355. You understand this is a matter of intense speculation for everyone concerned with the Company. But the fact is, beyond July 9, 2355, there’s just—silence.”

  “Silence how?” Alec frowned.

  “Not one word from our future selves on the other side of that moment in time. I have heard that the last message, badly distorted, says simply ‘We still don’t know—’. As you might imagine, a Company so accustomed to being omniscient isn’t at all happy about being in the dark like everybody else on something so important.”

  “What’s omniscient mean? And why don’t they just travel forward through time to see what happens then?” Alec asked.

  “Omniscient means all-knowing,” Mendoza said. “Like God. But Dr. Zeus isn’t all powerful, you see, because time travel into the future isn’t possible. Or so we are told.”

  “Okay,” said Alec, smiling at her erudition and the matter-of-fact way she was telling him all this. He had a brief vision of the little girl at a tea party, lecturing to her dolls.

  “Naturally,” she went on, pouring herself a beer and drinking, “there are those who insist that the future beyond 2355 really is known, that the silence is maintained by whoever seizes control on July 9.”

  “And you know about all this because … ?”

  “I told you I became privy to certain secrets, didn’t I?” she said, looking opaque again. “So. Most of us feel that an intracorporate war at that time is inevitable, with the winner keeping silent to conceal the circumstances of his, her, their or its victory. And it will go very, very badly for the losers, on that day.”

  His amusement evaporated abruptly.

  “But you shouldn’t—” he said. “If there’s some kind of bloody takeover, there could be a purge. Executions. You’re a security risk, and Dr. Zeus doesn’t give a shrack about little people’s lives. I know!”

  “Damned right I’m a security risk,” she said coolly. “That’s why I’m talking to you.”

  Alec stared at her, disconcerted. He cleared his throat.

  “Mendoza,” he said, “you’re young, and you’ve lived in this hole for most of your life. It’s dangerous to be so reckless, baby. How do you know it’s safe to tell me this stuff? Just because we had sex doesn’t make me a good guy, you know.”

  “How do you know it’s safe to tell me anything?
” she countered. “I’m a criminal, remember? You’re pretty trusting yourself.”

  He snorted. “Maybe, with a little girl in a garden. There are a lot worse crimes committed out in the real world than anything you could ever have done.”

  She was silent a moment, and then shrugged. “But on the other hand, what if Alec Checkerfield is what happens in 2355? I think you really will kick Dr. Zeus’s all-knowing ass. I say go for it, darling.” She raised her beer in a toast. “I only hope I’m around to see.”

  “You will be,” he said, wondering what on earth had happened to her, to make her speak so flippantly of her own death. He reached across the table and stroked her cheek. “I promise you. You’ll be right there with me. God knows you shouldn’t be running around loose.”

  “Let us hope so,” she said, kissing the palm of his hand and taking it between both of her own. “But life is so uncertain, señor. In any case, start planning your attack now. Twenty-three fifty-five is your window of opportunity, you see?”

  “You said something, though.” Alec squeezed her hand. “You said time travel into the future doesn’t work, and then you said Or so we are told. Does that mean maybe there’s just a teeny winji chance somebody might do it, if he was lucky?”

  “Unlucky,” she said, and for a moment there was a cold unhappiness in her face, so bleak an expression he wanted to gather her into his arms and rock her, anything to give comfort. She drew a deep breath and spoke with deliberation:

  “There is evidence that the temporal wave can, under certain circumstances, pull one forward as well as backward. I know of a place where it might happen; but you really wouldn’t want to try.”

  “But if I did try,” Alec persisted, “say if I had certain advantages other people didn’t, I might manage it. Or I could just lay low for the next four years, wait and see what happens in 2355—and then go back to now and set up for bringing Dr. Zeus down, because I’ll be the only one who knows the truth.”

  Mendoza smiled. “You might try, darling, but you’d run into problems. There are two more things you need to know about temporal physics. The one immutable law is that history cannot be changed. Okay? So if you waited until 2355, and turned on the news one day and heard that Dr. Zeus survived a coup attempt, you couldn’t go back in time and fix things so that the rebels win.”

  “I see,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “What’s the other thing I need to know about?”

  “A complication technically described as variable permeability of the temporal fabric,” Mendoza told him, and he loved the way her mouth moved as she enunciated the words, in her educated voice. But where could she have been educated?

  Was she lying to him? Was that why bits of her story didn’t add up, or was she just leaving out things it would be difficult to explain, as he had left certain things out of what he’d told her? Innocent people had secrets, too.

  “Temporal fabric?” he inquired, taking a sip of beer. “Now, what in hell does that mean?”

  “What it means is that there seems to be a limit on how often you can go back to the same point in time. Dr. Zeus doesn’t know why. But if, say, you went back in time to buy a winning lottery ticket on a certain day—and of course you’d need to get hold of the Temporal Concordance for the numbers, no mean trick in itself—”

  “Temporal Concordance?”

  “The database containing every single event in recorded history up to July 8, 2355,” Mendoza explained. “It’s the single most valuable thing the Company owns. Anyway, even assuming you got that far, you’d better be damned sure you did it right, because you probably wouldn’t have a second chance.”

  “So if I got the numbers wrong and tried to go back a second time—?”

  “Your shuttle would probably veer off to the day before or the day after (and to some other point in physical space, too, which could cause real trouble for you) but never again to that particular place and time. You see?”

  “I think so.” He frowned down at his dinner, uneasily aware that answering his questions might be putting her life in jeopardy. But if she were really telling the truth …

  He lifted the beer pitcher, topped up her mug and his.

  “Go on,” he said.

  They retired, pleasantly crowded on her narrow bed, with the rain still drumming outside and the smell of the wet garden coming through the windows. He made overtures, and she responded to them with enthusiasm and in fact with a certain expertise that bewildered him. As the act, and then the acts, progressed, it became apparent that she knew as much about what they were doing as any girl in any Happy Club he had ever visited. Then she gave every evidence of knowing more, and his body told his brain to shut up …

  Only in the afterglow was he able to start thinking again, uneasily connecting dots without numbers as she slept in his arms. Had she been lying? Unconscious and relaxed, she looked unnervingly like a child, terrifyingly young for what she’d just been doing with him. Who could have taught her such things? Had she been abused by her jailers?

  And yet she’d seemed so happy …

  As though you’ve ever had any clue what a girl’s thinking, Alec reminded himself. He lay there on the edge of sleep, watching the flames dancing in the fireplace across the room, backlighting her hair, flickering on her pale skin.

  Who on earth was this little girl? Twice the bad bet Lorene had been … He could certainly pick them. Despair and disaster attracted him like a perfume.

  Third time’s the charm, babe, he thought drowsily, and kissed her.

  Darkness lit by the fires of war, eerie silence.

  He saw Mendoza, wide-eyed, advancing across a battlefield, oblivious to the pits of flaming debris and the tracer fire, to the disrupter beams piercing the smoky air and narrowly missing her. There was a bush still standing in the wasteland, a dark thing with sharp spines and berries bright as blood. She seemed to be drawn to it, fascinated, not seeing the dangers at all. She was stretching out her hand …

  He was trying to warn her, bounding forward to pull her down—when he woke with a start, to find that Mendoza had evidently gone out into the rain and was now climbing in beside him. She was wet and chilled.

  “What were you doing?” he gasped, heart hammering.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered. “I had to see to something.”

  “You’re cold as death,” he said, and pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her, as though that might keep her away from the dark field.

  He didn’t recall where he was when he woke next morning, at first, and Mendoza seemed equally surprised to find him there. They made love. It was, again, a smashing success, but he found himself, again, wondering how a virgin could have learned so many interesting variations on a theme.

  Afterward, in another scene of surreal domesticity, she fixed them breakfast as he pulled on his thermals, and they chatted over coffee as though they sat in a kitchen in London.

  Finally Alec cleared his throat and said:

  “Er … when we were in bed, I couldn’t help noticing that you … ah. That trick with your—er …”

  “You mean the …”

  “When we … you know, when the bed leg fell off?”

  “Ah! Yes.”

  “I was surprised you knew that one,” he said, looking her in the eye. “It takes a little practice, yeah?”

  Mendoza went pale, with a look of such dismay on her face he was immediately sorry he’d said anything. Then she blushed, setting down her coffee cup.

  “Well, I have a lot of time to read and I have quite a collection of pornographic books the last supply shuttle happened to leave here, you see, and—”

  “Books?” Alec knitted his brows. “Those are hard to find—”

  “Holoes, I mean!” She smacked her forehead in chagrin. “Of course I meant holoes, how silly of me, what was I thinking? Like, ah, Mr. Fireman and His Big Hose. Bad Bondage Boys. Emmanuelle and the Cream Pie Factory. You see? And I’ve studied them. Obsessively.”

  But s
he was trembling. He was certain she’d been abused, then, and it wrung his heart. He got up and put his arms around her.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said. “I thought it was wonderful.”

  “I love you,” she said, in a tiny voice. He realized, with an increasing sense of satisfying doom, that marriage was now inevitable.

  By the time they walked back to the shuttle, the storm had blown out and the sun was bright. Alec found himself sweating inside his subsuit.

  The rain had washed the shuttle clean of all the leaves and stalks that had splattered on its hull, and it glinted silver in the morning light. The hatch had been closed. Alec couldn’t remember having done that, but he’d been pretty hazy in those first few minutes. He stood there in the waving corn, looking uncertainly at the ship, trying to access the command that would activate it again.

  The data was all there; there was just too much of it. No Captain to instantly hand him the right file out of a hundred million files. Mendoza looked at him, her pale face expressionless. She leaned close and reached up to put her arms about his neck.

  “I have the impression that the cyborgs who normally pilot these ships access them through a file with a designation of TTMIX333,” she said. “Does that sound right?”

  Abruptly everything came into focus and he had the correct file, though he couldn’t recall having learned how to access it in the first place. “I think—” he began, just as the lights blinked on and the hatch popped open for him. “Hey!”

  “There you are,” Mendoza said. “You see? You had it in your memory all the time. Wow, this fancy rug’s gotten soggy.” She scrambled inside and he climbed in after her. She stood there a moment staring around at the shuttle’s interior, and picked up one of the pink rosebuds that had been jolted from its crystal vase by the impact of the landing. She examined it bleakly. “No expense spared, eh?”