The Life of the World to Come (Company) Read online

  Oh, yeah!

  And maybe cargo room for a few other little items, in case you’ve a mind to do a bit of trading, said the Captain, ever so casually. And a grand master cabin for you, and staterooms so you can have yer little twit friends on board to visit. But the quarterdeck, Alec, that’ll be my place. I’ll have satellite linkups and connections to every financial center in the world. I’ll monitor law enfoncement channels and weather analyses and stock markets. There won’t be anything catches me by surprise! Not whiles I’ve got you, my boy.

  Alec reached out his hand to touch the smooth keel of his ship. It felt solid. He heard gulls crying, he drank in salt air. He thought of the Lewins settled down at their ease in Bournemouth, no vast cold house to manage, no hapless boy to worry about. He thought—briefly—of Jill, who had got engaged to Colin Debenham.

  Who’ll miss me, really? he said. I can just sail away and be free. There’s no reason I can’t go, is there?

  None, by thunder.

  Alec looked around. I need to talk to a shipwright about this. I need a console.

  Not anymore, the Captain said. I’ve just made the call for you, to the best in the business. A communications screen and speaker appeared in midair. They’re waiting on line one. Will you take the call, sir? He parodied an obsequious bow.

  “Hello?” said a tinny voice, filtered through cyberspace. “Hello? Beretania Marine Design, how may we help you? Is there anyone on this line?”

  “Yes.” Alec cleared his throat, looking gleefully at the Captain. “Alec Checkerfield here. Earl of Finsbury. I’d like to place an order.”

  THE YEAR 2350: ANOTHER MEETING, A FEW WEEKS LATER

  Rutherford was curled up in his favorite chair beside the fire, staring at little bright figures that moved in midair before him. He was watching The Wind in the Willows again. He was eating as he watched, hurriedly, so as not to be observed by his associates in case they arrived early.

  All he was eating was a dish of strawberries; but he’d poured real cream over them, which was a misdemeanor. Even possession of real cream violated several city ordinances. As a highly paid idea man in the employ of Dr. Zeus, though, he was entitled to certain immunities, including being waved through customs without a baggage search at the Celtic border.

  The danger thrilled him. He’d have been hospitalized if he’d been caught with a suitcase full of cartons of dairy products. He needn’t have done it, either; on his salary he could afford to travel out of the country and enjoy the same treat in Edinburgh three times a week if he’d wanted it. It wasn’t as delicious there, however. The consciousness of being a smuggler sharpened his pleasure.

  He tried not to think about the victimized and exploited cows suffering in those pariah nations that hadn’t yet banned animal products. He wasn’t a cruel man; he’d never dream of eating meat. But he told himself that it was necessary for a chap in his field to experience as much of the past as was humanly possible, since it was the stuff he worked with for a living. He reasoned that, as the cream and cheese and butter were going to be sold whether he purchased them or not, it was just as well their consumption was turned to a higher purpose.

  Anyhow he needed cheering today.

  He scraped up the last rich drops and paused his holo player. Badger halted in the act of lecturing Toad on his self-destructive impulsive behavior. Rutherford rose and hurried down to the old kitchen, where he rinsed out his bowl and spoon. He was just setting them in the drainer when he heard the pounding on the door that meant his colleagues had arrived.

  Dabbing self-consciously at his mustache, he puffed his way back upstairs and opened the front door. Chatterji and Ellsworth-Howard were standing there together, looking gleeful. Clearly they hadn’t seen the report yet.

  “Hullo, chaps,” he said.

  “Good news, old boy,” said Chatterji. “The report from the first sequence on Adonai’s come in.”

  “Have you seen it yet?” inquired Rutherford cautiously.

  “Nah. Was only in my shracking mail this morning,” Ellsworth-Howard said, shouldering his way in and making for the warmth of the fire. “We thought we’d come round first so we could go over it together.”

  He sank into his now-customary chair and pulled out his buke, setting it up for wide image. Chatterji and Rutherford settled into their chairs, as Rutherford said:

  “Let’s not forget it’s only the first sequence, after all.”

  The first part of the preliminary report was a montage of images, with a smooth electronic voice explaining that the images dated from 1525 AD, and giving a biographical profile of the female to be implanted. There was a very blurred photograph, taken in stealth by the field operative handling the case, of a serving girl carrying a basin down a corridor. It was a grand corridor, by the standards of its time.

  “Hampton Court,” Rutherford couldn’t resist pointing out proudly. “Placed right in the heart of political power.”

  The beautifully modulated voice gave the names of the men with whom the girl had engaged in sexual relations over the previous month. Two images came up: one was another field photograph of a rather tall man in a surcoat, the other a Holbein painting of a man with a hawk on his fist. Their biographical notes followed. The voice explained that the host mother had been implanted soon enough after her encounters to make it plausible that the subject was the genetic offspring of either man.

  “So far, it’s exactly what we wanted,” said Rutherford and sighed. Chatterji looked at him curiously before glancing back at the images. The voice reported that the pregnancy had proceeded normally, though the host mother had been sent from court as a result of her shame.

  “Having a kid without a license?” Ellsworth-Howard peered at the next image, which was primitive-looking footage of the girl wandering disconsolately in a garden, heavily pregnant.

  “No, no, that was long before permits were required,” Chatterji explained.

  “Some absurd religious objection instead,” Rutherford clarified. He winced as the voice went on to inform them that, due to the unusually large size of the subject, there had been complications to the delivery and the host mother had died. There was a brief clip of a frightened-looking older woman holding out a blood-smeared, wailing little thing to the camera. Chatterji recoiled.

  “Died?” he said. “She wasn’t supposed to die! Was that—was it our fault?”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” Rutherford assured him hurriedly. “This was the Dark Ages, remember? Dreadfully high mortality rate they had back then. She’d undoubtedly have died anyway.”

  And the next images were reassuring, too: various scenes around a small cottage in Hampstead, so the voice informed them, staffed by a couple in the pay of the field operative in charge of the project. Here was the subject, aged six months, sprawling asleep on the bosom of the older woman previously seen, where she sat near beehives in what seemed to be an orchard. Here was the subject, aged two years, staring down with wide eyes from the back of a ploughhorse, held up there by a grinning countryman who pointed at the camera, and now a sound byte with the footage:

  “Ee now! See’un thur? That be thuyne uncle Labienus, be’nt ’un now? Coom a long wey t’see thee. Wev to ’un, Nicket. Coom on then. Wev!”

  As Nicket wevved at the camera uncertainly, Rutherford shifted in his chair. “And I’m certain the Company’s fellow in charge turned it all to the Company’s advantage in psychological programming. Not only must our man make up for his bastardy, he must atone for his mother’s death!”

  The voice described the subject’s subsequent dame-school education, and the private tutor who had been hired when the subject was seven to prepare him for higher learning at Oxford. There followed an image of the subject, now apparently in his teens, pacing down a muddy street with a satchel, photographed unawares. It was the first clear shot of his adult face they had seen and it was, indeed, the face of the man they’d summoned into their parlor. But:

  “Good God, what’s happened to his no
se?” Rutherford said, frowning. “He’s broken it!”

  “It was us did it, actually,” Ellsworth-Howard said. “When he was a couple minutes old, putting the black box in. The recording device’s too big to go up through that fancy nose you wanted without damaging the cartilage. Then it grew bent.”

  “Oh, what a shame,” said Rutherford. “Still, it can’t be helped. And I don’t think babies feel discomfort anyway, do they?”

  The voice was explaining that the subject had proved a brilliant student, and entered Balliol College at Oxford with the intention of studying for the priesthood in the nascent Church of England.

  “Shracking what?” said Ellsworth-Howard, outraged. “Religion? I thought he was supposed to be above all that, with the brain we gave him.”

  “Now, now, you’re forgetting that he was designed to operate in the past.” Chatterji sighed. “Of course he was going to share the beliefs of the era we put him in. Even Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were, er, religious, don’t forget.”

  However, the voice went on to say, the subject’s promising career in the Church had been derailed by an unfortunate episode in his seventeenth year. The next image showed the subject, muddy, pale, and furious-looking, struggling between two constables. A third constable lay at their feet, bleeding from the nose.

  “What’s this?” Chatterji frowned at the screen. “That’s old Enforcer behavior.”

  “Oh, not really. The Facilitator handling the case made a poor choice of a tutor for the boy, that’s all,” Rutherford said hurriedly.

  “You watched this before we got here?”

  “I couldn’t wait,” Rutherford admitted, as the voice went on to explain that the subject’s tutor had been selected for his charisma and advanced ideas on religious freedom. Unfortunately, his ideas had been Anabaptist in nature and he had led his circle of disciples, including the subject, in what amounted to heretical orgies.

  “Sex, does he mean?” Ellsworth-Howard frowned. “I thought religious people didn’t do that.”

  “Precisely.” Rutherford nodded.

  “Oh.”

  The voice informed them that, upon discovery and the subsequent scandal, the subject had self-intoxicated on alcohol and publicly preached heresy, which had got him arrested. The Facilitator in charge had managed the subject’s release, after intensive reprogramming, and hustled him out of England to continue his education in various cities in Europe.

  By 1547, the voice continued, the subject had returned to England, having become private secretary to one of the people with whom Dr. Zeus had established contact for business purposes. Here followed a shot of the subject, a towering figure in his black scholar’s attire, looking sullen as he followed a small and somewhat overdressed specimen of the gentry along a walk beside a half-timbered manor house.

  “Impressive fellow,” said Chatterji in a pleased voice. Rutherford squirmed.

  “It was going so well,” he said. Even the electronic voice sounded uncomfortable as it described the logistical error that had precipitated the end of the subject’s life, when in 1554 the Company had sent a team of field agents to the estate where the subject was employed. Their mission had been to collect botanical rarities in the estate’s garden. Three images flashed up, standard Company ID shots of its cyborg personnel: a dark male with an urbane smile, a darker female with a calm smile, and an unsmiling female with a pale, scared face. The voice gave their Company designations.

  “Oi! My Preservers,” remarked Ellsworth-Howard. “What’d they got to do with it?”

  Rutherford sighed. “It was the girl,” he said in distaste.

  The voice went on to explain that the Facilitator in charge of the mission had encouraged his subordinate, the mission’s Botanist, to enter into a sexual relationship with the subject, in the hope that the mission would go more smoothly. Chatterji groaned.

  “Apparently he had no idea our man was a Company experiment,” cried Rutherford, throwing his hands up in the air. “I can’t imagine who left that particular bit of vital information out of his briefing.”

  “Actually,” Chatterji said, raising a placatory hand, “actually there was a good reason why he wasn’t told.”

  Rutherford and Ellsworth-Howard turned to him. Ellsworth-Howard paused the report. “What the shrack?”

  Chatterji gave a slightly embarrassed cough. “It seems there has been a certain amount of … negative feeling, on the part of our older Preservers, about the Enforcers being retired.”

  “What?” Rutherford stared.

  “ … And as a result, an ongoing program of fact effacement has been initiated,” Chatterji admitted. “The new operatives aren’t aware the Enforcer class ever existed. The older ones have been given the impression that the Enforcers were all happily reprogrammed for work on remote Company bases. Very few people outside this room know about Adonai, you see: if the cyborgs were told the Company was experimenting with a new Enforcer design, it might be noticed that most of the old ones had gone missing.”

  “Well, I like that!” Rutherford’s eyes were round with indignation. “And what if they did notice? They think we treated the Enforcers badly, do they? Didn’t we give them eternal life? What do they think they are?”

  “I fully share your feelings,” Chatterji said. “However, the plain fact is that we depend on the Preservers a good deal. Under the circumstances, it was thought best not to antagonize the Facilitator, so he wasn’t informed about our project.”

  “You can see where that led!” said Rutherford.

  “I still don’t see where the girl comes in,” said Ellsworth-Howard, looking from Rutherford to Chatterji.

  “Apparently there was a security breach,” Rutherford said in disgust. “What can you expect, letting a cyborg—er—become intimate with our man?”

  Ellsworth-Howard started the report again, and the voice explained the circumstances that had led to the security breach, and its aftermath, when the subject had been arrested again for preaching heresy.

  “Shrack,” cried Ellsworth-Howard. “What’d he go do a stupid thing like that for?”

  “This was in the sixteenth century, after all,” Rutherford pointed out. “We gave him a splendid mind, but it had no context for dealing with the discovery that cyborgs existed. No wonder the poor fellow behaved irrationally.”

  Here was an image of the subject being chained to a stake before a crowd. Chatterji, watching, turned a nasty putty color, but all he said was: “So he died a martyr’s death. Heroic, Rutherford, but not exactly what we had in mind. And rather an awful job for the salvage operative who had to retrieve his black box.”

  “No; this is the only part that cheered me up at all,” Rutherford told him. “Look now. Watch.”

  A film clip ran and they saw the light of flames dancing on the faces of the spectators, and it danced too on the faces of the three friends: Chatterji horrified, Rutherford’s gaze avid and focused, Ellsworth-Howard looking on in disgust.

  “What’s he doing?” demanded Ellsworth-Howard. “What’s he talking about?”

  “He’s preaching,” Rutherford said. “In that wonderful voice we gave him. And look at the crowd, look at their faces. They’re hanging on his every word, all of them. They’re going to remember this the rest of their lives. Look at that one little lad, look at the hero-worship in his eyes. You see? Our man is inspiring them!”

  “They’re shracking burning him alive, Rutherford,” said Ellsworth-Howard.

  “But just listen to him! Fulfilling his destiny, shouting encouragement to his countrymen to throw off the yoke of religious oppression.” Rutherford was almost in happy tears.

  “Is that what it’s all about? Something political?” Ellsworth-Howard turned to Chatterji, who was now staring at the floor, unable to watch.

  “Protestants versus Catholics, Foxy,” he said in a faint voice. “Remember the plot of Bloody Mary?”

  Ellsworth-Howard shook his head. “Bunch of bigots slugging it out over some bloody stupid reli
gious ritual, that’s all I know.”

  At that moment there was the sound of a detonation and the camera moved abruptly away from the subject. There was one still picture taken five hours later, over which the electronic voice described recovery procedures.

  “Anyway, there was much more than religion involved,” said Rutherford, stretching happily. “The political freedom of the English people was endangered. Didn’t we want someone who’d be willing to die in just such a cause?”

  Ellsworth-Howard brightened. He switched off the report.

  “Yeah, I guess if you look at it that way it’s all right,” he said. “Kind of a short life, though, wasn’t it?”

  “All things considered, chaps, I think we can be proud of ourselves,” Rutherford said. “For all that nonsense with the Preservers, our man still died a hero’s death, didn’t he? What more could we have asked of him?”

  “But there was a security breach,” said Chatterji, groping for his nasal inhalator and taking a fortifying drag. “That mustn’t happen again.”

  “Then, let’s turn the lesson to good use for the next life sequence. Is there a way to make our man less susceptible to women, Foxy?”

  “Not now,” Ellsworth-Howard said. “Can’t mess about with the design once I’ve made an embryo.”

  “I agree, though, that we need him to be a little more … detached.” Chatterji watched the fire, wondering what it would be like to burn to death. It had been a morbid terror of his, ever since he could remember.

  “Precisely.” Rutherford smacked the arm of his chair. “For one thing, his Facilitator must impress on him that common romantic love is a waste of his time. I told you a sex drive would lead to difficulties. We created him to serve a higher purpose. Look at what romance did to King Arthur! How’s a hero to be expected to do his job with all that needless distraction? There’s no sex in The Lord of the Rings.”