Her patient was a boy with a badly broken wrist. Reuben knelt down beside him, smiling reassuringly. “Looks like you’ve done yourself some damage there.”
“I told him not to climb that tree,” the fraught-looking woman behind him said, “but it was there in the living room, and somebody just can’t resist a challenge.”
“Well, I can understand that,” Reuben said, winking at the kid, and concentrated on the nanites. “Heal him.”
Nothing happened. There was no flicker of silver over the child’s skin and no answering hum in his blood. Puzzled, Reuben tried again, focussing all his willpower on it. Yesterday, he had been able to close wounds with a thought and mend a damaged spine with a touch.
Still nothing, and he nodded at Meili before splinting the wrist. “No more trees until that’s healed.”
“You too?” Meili asked.
“Yes.” Reuben looked up as Vairya stepped inside, looking worried.
“I’ve got people calling me from all over the city, saying the nanites have stopped responding. More than that, things seem to have stopped growing.”
“Going backwards?” Reuben asked with a sudden sick clench of his gut. If everything they had fixed with nanites over the last few days failed, it would be catastrophic.
“No, just not changing any further.”
“Call your brother. Find out if the ships are doing this.” It could be some new weapon, designed to disable nanites before it blew up the city.
Vairya nodded, but his eyes went blank for a second. “Doing an internal scan first to see if I can detect what’s happening to the ones in my system. Oh.”
“What?” Meili said, clenching her fists.
“They’re all inert,” he said. “I can detect them in my bloodstream, but they seem to be dead. They’re completely unresponsive.” He looked up and said into his com, “Jibrail, are you there? Something strange is happening down here.”
“What time is it?” Meili said slowly. “I think… it’s been ten days, ten days exactly.”
“Since what?” Reuben asked.
“Ten days since we injected the first nanites into Vairya.”
There was a pale flash and suddenly Jibrail was standing in the garden. He looked shorter in person, and he was actually smiling.
“Ten days,” Meili repeated.
“Quite right, Dr Peake,” Jibrail said, bestowing an approving look on her. “Vairya, it is good to see you healthy.”
“What’s going on?” Vairya demanded. “Meili?”
“The original nanites,” she said, “the ones we put in you and Cooper, were medical nanites. All medical nanites have a time limit coded in. They die after ten days.”
“Precisely,” Jibrail said. “Of course, given the extraordinary use to which they had been put, and their assimilation of the older Terran bots, we couldn’t be certain that trait had been passed on. I did manage to persuade my colleagues to indulge my curiosity and hold off firing until the deadline had passed, and I can tell you with complete confidence that our scans have not identified any surviving nanite activity in Caelestia.” He turned an almost kind smile at their shocked faces. “Don’t look so taken aback. Not everybody can remember everything.”
“We’re going to live?” Meili said blankly.
Jibrail’s smile softened slightly, and he said gently, “Yes, Doctor. You are all going to live.”
“And just as I was starting to enjoy having godlike powers,” Vairya said, but he was still looking stunned despite his jaunty tone.
Jibrail looked pained. “I believe that is precisely why they built in those very limits. Now, we have some emergency supplies to beam down, and I need to coordinate drop sites with the mayor.”
“Of course,” Vairya said, a little weakly, and squeezed Reuben’s hand.
Jibrail looked at them, and his mouth tilted up in an all too familiar smirk. “I understand it is good etiquette to invite your best man to speak at your wedding. I would appreciate it if you asked someone else to take on the role. I abhor public speaking.”
And, before either of them could do more than splutter, he strolled away into the hospital, already talking on his com.
“I, on the other hand,” Meili said, “love embarrassing people in public. I think I’d be outstanding at the job.”
“We’re not getting married,” Reuben said, before this got completely out of hand.
“Yet,” Vairya added dreamily and then blushed when Reuben stared at him.
Meili cackled and then darted forwards to hug them both, which was the strangest thing yet. “I might just miss working with you when we leave, Cooper. You weren’t so bad in the end.”
“We are actually dead, aren’t we?” Reuben said to Vairya. “This cannot be real.”
“‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come’?” Vairya murmured, his eyes still wide. “If we are dead, it must have been two weeks ago, because nothing in my world makes much sense anymore.”
Reuben couldn’t resist. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Vairya, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Vairya narrowed his eyes at him. “Oh, you did not just do that.”
“Yet you still love me,” Reuben said, lifting his face to the sun.
“Of course,” Vairya said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to forgive you for mangling Shakespeare.”
Reuben smiled and brought Vairya’s hand to his mouth to kiss his knuckles. “But you won’t kick me out of your garden?”
“Never,” Vairya said and turned to kiss him, and somewhere in even this tiny garden there must be flowers, because Reuben could smell roses. Or perhaps the scent simply came drifting to him from this great garden city, Caelestia in the stars, which had flowered again and would now be forever his home, the place where the roses grew, tended by the garden knight he loved.
The End
Bibliography
Below you will find a list of all the quotations Vairya and Reuben use in their banter. Where the quotation comes from a shorter poem, I have included the whole piece; for longer poems I have included the relevant stanza. I have not included passing allusions or references which are not direct quotations—you can hunt those down yourself.
Chapter One
‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’, Percy Bysshe Shelley. ‘Ozymandias’, 1818
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Chapter Two
‘If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come— the readiness is all’, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 1603
Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?
‘Conscience does make cowards of us all’ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, 1603
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enter
prises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Chapter Four
‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshare, and their spears into pruning hooks’, King James Bible, Isaiah 2:4
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
Chapter Six
‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out’, King James Bible, Matthew 18:9, 1611
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and castitfrom thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.
Chapter Seven/Eight
‘This is how the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper’, T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, 1925. Reuben and Vairya both quote from this poem at length during this chapter.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
‘The game’s afoot’
‘like greyhounds in the slips’
‘Once more into the breach’ William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1. All these quotations come from the same speech:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'
‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land’, T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’. 1922
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
‘Hollow men’
‘Shape without form, shade without colour’, both from T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, 1925
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
‘So all day long the noise of battle roll’d among the mountains by the winter sea’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson ‘Morte D’Arthur’, The Idylls of the King, 1869
‘Sing, O muse, of the wrath of Achilles’, Homer, Odyssey
‘This day is called the feast of Crispian’, William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3, 1599
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd
‘Until King Arthur’s table, man by man, had fall’n in Lyonnesse about their Lord’ Alfred, Lord Tennyson ‘Morte D’Arthur’, The Idylls of the King, 1869
So all day long the noise of battle roll'd
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
Until King Arthur's table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their Lord,
King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
‘Such a sleep they sleep— the men I loved. I think that we shall never more, at any future time, delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds, walking about the gardens and the halls’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson ‘Morte D’Arthur’, The Idylls of the King, 1869
The sequel of to-day unsolders all
The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record. Such a sleep
They sleep—the men I loved. I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time,
Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds,
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.
I perish by this people which I made,—
Tho' Merlin sware that I should come again
To rule once more—but let what will be, be.
‘Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree’, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, 1669
OFMans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss
of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,[ 5 ]
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai,didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos
Chapter Nine
‘Sing no sad songs for me’, Christina Rossetti, ‘Song’, 1848
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
‘darkling plain’, Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, 1867
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
In Heaven and Earth Page 13
