The Life of the World to Come (Company) Page 3

  “Ah. Well, that’s a fable, because history can’t be changed.” I worked the hand pump to rinse off the tomatoes and peppers. “But the resorts do exist, just as Dr. Zeus exists. In fact, Dr. Zeus owns them. Nice little string of hotels, rather unexceptional except that they’re all located in 150,000 BCE. Or thereabouts. All of them in virgin wildernesses where long-extinct mammals can be observed gamboling, from behind the safety of an electronic perimeter field.

  “You’re from the future, Alec, you must have lived in steel canyons all your life. How much would you pay to be able to swim in waters that had never been polluted, or watch a herd of mammoths grazing?”

  “In all the stories, time travelers wind up as lunch for velociraptors,” he said.

  “All the dinosaurs are extinct in this time. Anyway: Dr. Zeus has quietly built up a select secret clientele in the twenty-fourth century. They pay fortunes, annual incomes of small countries, I’m told, to be rocketed backward through time to carefully landscaped virgin paradises where they can relax by the pool and breathe clean, clean air.” I selected a knife and began slicing up the tomatoes.

  “The only problem is—time travel is hard on the human body. Even the drugs that protect people make them ill. So when they arrive from the dismal future, these millionaires and heiresses can do no more than nibble at a lettuce leaf or two. Therefore Dr. Zeus makes damned sure the resort keeps all manner of trendy greens for salad on hand, and therefore I labor in the sun on this agricultural station.” I whacked a beefsteak tomato in half, imagining it was some Company CEO’s head.

  “But that’s awful.” Alec tried to sit up, looking outraged. “That means you’re not only their prisoner, you’re their slave!”

  He was an idealist, then. Disapproved of slavery, did he? And him a titled gentleman. Just the sort of wealthy young man who comes to loathe his birthright and goes off to die for somebody else’s freedom.

  “I suppose I am,” I said carefully. “But I may as well be of some use to somebody, don’t you think? And it’s not so bad. They don’t call for produce very often. I have a lot of time to work on my own private research.”

  “What’s your research?” Alec said.

  I told him all about my quest to perfect maize plants. I don’t think he understood one word in three of botany talk, and when he wrinkled his forehead and attempted to follow my lecture he looked like a puzzled dog. But he was awfully polite about it, unlike the other Future Children I’ve known, and said gallant things about how worthwhile my project was.

  We talked for a little while on the subject of making one’s life count for something, and I expected a manifesto from him on the need to actively oppose the evils of Dr. Zeus. I was surprised; he just talked about his life. Despite his grand title, it appears there were some unfortunate circumstances attending his birth again. Some poor girl seduced by the sixth earl and then abandoned? I’d hardly have thought the wretched Future Children had enough blood in them to carry on like that, but apparently mortal nature hasn’t changed so much.

  As near as I could make out, the girl went mad and was locked up. Alec seems to have grown to manhood with a devastating sense of his own worthlessness, not surprisingly. I wonder if Nicholas and Edward carried similar burdens of unearned guilt on their backs? Was that what fueled Nicholas’s drive to martyrdom, Edward’s selfless work for an empire that abandoned him? I was too young and foolish to see this in Nicholas, too rushed to see it in Edward; but I see it now. And Alec’s failed at two marriages, apparently, and has steered through his life in increasing emotional isolation. Is that why he’s always alone when I meet the man?

  When he saw he’d affected me, blurting out his wretched story, he made amends by changing the subject entirely and told me about the adventures he’s had, as I kneaded the masa for our commonplace supper of tamales.

  And what adventures he’s had! I begin to see that I have been somewhat mistaken about Future World. It seems he hasn’t grown up in steel canyons at all. It seems that there are still wild places in the twenty-fourth century, still gardens and forests that don’t stink of machine exhaust. Best of all, it seems that the mortal race has not entirely followed the crabbed and fearful lead of its Company scientists, people like Mr. Bugleg of loathsome memory.

  Though they are, all of them, undeniably childish. Future Children indeed. My own dearest love has bought himself a pirate ship, if you please, and spends most of his time sailing around in the Caribbean and other ports of call on what we used to call the Spanish Main! And there he indulges his urge to be virile and bad, like pirates in every film he’s ever seen, and he’s become a smuggler! Mostly of things like wine and cheese, though they’re illegal enough in the twenty-fourth century.

  And yet I think in this he must come nearer to living a real life than the other mortals of his time, who (as far as I was ever able to tell) spend their lives hiding in their rooms, playing electronic games.

  Still, he has found a far less harmless and silly way to rebel, hasn’t he, by going on a crusade against Dr. Zeus? Dangerous to think about.

  Anyway. Such lovely stories he told me, about Jamaica under the tropical stars, parrots and gold doubloons. How happy I was to think of him playing Errol Flynn among the shrouds and ratlines. This ship of his must really be something to see, a full-rigged sailing vessel utilizing twenty-fourth-century technology, sort of an enormous retro yacht. He has some kind of complex computer system running all the rigging apparatus, for there’s no crew at all apparently.

  It’s as though he were able to lose himself in Treasure Island , escaping from his unhappiness by making the wild sea and the pirates come to life for him—except that instead of his imagination, he’s used enormous sums of money and technology. What am I to make of such a brave new world?

  Who cares? It was enough for me to watch the way his face lit up when he described his adventures, watch his expressive face and gestures conveying his stories perfectly even in that thug’s idiom of his. The man should have gone on the stage, I always thought, and what a preacher he’d made!

  And he sang for me. He had been describing how his ex-wives had hated his singing, the repulsive harpies. I was overwhelmed with a sudden memory of Nicholas singing, making some Tudor bawdiness sublime with his dark tenor. So I begged him to sing something, and he obliged with old sea songs, blood-and-thunder ballads that somehow reduced me to a weepy mess.

  At last he reached up his hand and pulled me down beside him, and there I lay hearing his voice vibrate in his chest and throat. We were shortly embracing again, me scanning frantically to see if his brain was likely to explode this time. It was of course impossible that after three hours of rest and a glass of iced tea the man should be completely recovered from transcendence shock, but he was.

  He was twiddling experimentally with the fastenings of my coveralls, and I was wondering how his mail-suit unzipped, when something seemed to occur to him. He lifted his mouth from mine and looked down at me. “Er—”

  “What is it?” I said, desperate lest he should stop.

  “You’re a virgin, I guess, yeah?”

  Have I mentioned that the man is prone to scruples at the most inconvenient times?

  Of course I’m not a virgin, but I do have this sort of immortal self-repairing body, see, and in the three hundred and then three thousand years that had elapsed between our respective couplings, there had been more than ample time for a tiny unimportant membrane to grow back. Christ, I could have grown a leg back in that amount of time.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s all right, though. Please.”

  But now he was self-conscious, and the gorgeous python that had materialized down one leg of his suit shrank a little. “Can I use your shower?”

  Mother of God! Had I mentioned he’s very clean in his personal habits as well? And me without a shower.

  I was stammering to explain about my pathetic tin washtub when we both realized it had been raining outside for some time, warm summer rain. I directed
him out into my back garden and hurried to fetch him a clean towel.

  He always has enjoyed bathing. Something Freudian relating to guilt, perhaps? Edward seemed to have some sort of personal dirt-repellent force field, of course, but I remember the way Nicholas used to revel in clean water and soap.

  When I opened the door and stepped out under the overhang, Alec had already snaked out of the mail-suit and was sitting in the tub, wearing only that torque. He was leaning back into the rain with an ecstatic expression on his face, letting it soak into his lank hair, which was becoming even lanker. The tub was rather low and didn’t obscure much of his nakedness, and I made a small involuntary pleading sound.

  He opened his eyes and looked at me. For a moment he seemed wary, defensive; then grinned his sidelong grin.

  “Would you, er, like to bathe, too?” he asked, all suavity, gesturing invitation as though the tub were ever so capacious. I don’t remember how I got out of my clothes and across the garden, it happened so fast.

  It was insane. The storm was beating down on us, the tub was impossibly tiny, and I was worried about that long back of his—but oh, how that man could kiss. We writhed ineffectively for a few minutes before he simply stood up in the tub and hoisted me into the air as though I weighed no more than a feather. He is phenomenally strong. I slid down, pressed against his body, and he thrust his face into my breasts with a whoop of inarticulate glee. The rain bathed us, and the fragrance of the garden was sweet.

  God, God, God.

  I believe I was in the act of offering Him my soul, or whatever a thing like me has, if He’d only let this moment stretch out into eternity, when my groping hands found the pattern of electronic wire just under the skin of Alec’s shoulders.

  God?

  I leaned forward over the top of Alec’s head and looked down. It was like the most beautiful tattoo you can imagine, an intricate pattern of spirals and knotwork in dull silver, winging out over both his shoulder blades and twining up the back of his neck. But it was wire, installed subcutaneously and tapping somehow into his nervous system and brain. So that’s what the torque was for? I touched it gingerly and had a momentary disorientation, a view of my own breasts seen from—well, not the angle I was used to, anyway.

  “Alec, darling,” I said cautiously, “this is a rather unusual tattoo you have.”

  He said something in reply, but under the circumstances it came out somewhat muffled. I bit my lower lip and said: “I beg your pardon?”

  He lifted his face to look up at me. “You know how I told you I’ve got this big custom cybersystem, to work the rigging on my ship? This is how I run it. I’m a cyborg, have been since I was eighteen.”

  Gosh, what a coincidence!

  Though of course what he means by cyborg and what I would mean by the same word are entirely different things.

  He looked alarmed until he realized I was laughing, and then he chuckled companionably and went back to what he’d been doing as I gasped out, overwhelmed by the cosmic joke:

  “Oh, perfect—!” And then I thought I’d been struck by lightning, because the flash of revelation was very nearly that blindingly bright. I seized his face in both my hands and tilted it up to stare into his eyes. “What year did you say it was where you come from?”

  “Er … 2351,” he said, polite but confused.

  “But that’s only four years from—” I said, and then the whole mystery of my beloved came together. An extraordinary man, with extraordinary abilities, who bears a grudge against Dr. Zeus. A cyborg, and not a poor biomechanical slave like me but a free agent, with both the ability and the determination to slip through the Company’s defenses and do the impossible. And what was that blue fire playing around our bodies? Oh, dear, it was Crome’s radiation. Was I seeing the future?

  And I didn’t know the half of it yet.

  I laughed and laughed. Then I writhed down and we embraced. Somehow or other we wound up on the lawn with the bath overturned beside us, and he was on top of me, peering down through the lightning flashes. He was looking into my eyes as though he’d only just recognized me.

  And how good was it, what we did there on my tidy little lawn? I’ll tell you. If I suffer in darkness for a thousand years because of what I did afterward—I won’t care.

  By great good fortune the water under the tamales had not quite boiled away by the time we went back inside, and the house was filled with the earthy smell of corn. I lit lamps and pulled on an old shirt to set out our supper. He wrapped a towel around his middle and sat down at my rough-hewn table, watching me lay places for us. Two places, after all this time.

  Once, long ago, I’d laid out an intimate supper for two, just like this. We had sat together in a tiny circle of light at an old wooden table, in our own little world, as beyond in the darkness the wind howled and a hostile fate prepared to tear us to pieces the minute we stepped outside the circle.

  It isn’t really a happy memory. Nicholas had been sullenly desperate and I had been fearfully desperate, a good little cyborg feeling real qualms about running away with a mortal man. Before that night ended my heart had been broken irreparably, and Nicholas, furious and terrified, was running to meet his death. Thank you, Dr. Zeus.

  But I’m an old wicked cyborg now, aren’t I? Long past desperation. And how sweetly the rain beat on the roof of my house, and how snug and dry we were in my lamplit kitchen as the blue evening fell, and how sleepy and calm we were there together.

  And calmly, over our supper, I did the first of the things that will damn me if I’m ever caught. I told Alec, in great detail, all about the Silence in 2355, together with some rather necessary bits of temporal physics to enable him to use that shuttle effectively. So very classified, and I divulged it! He knows, now, Dr. Zeus’s fear of the unforeseen apocalypse; he knows his window of opportunity, and what to plan for over the next four years. Whatever his plans may be.

  I gather he has some kind of ally he calls the Captain, who is apparently the captain of his ship, though I’m a little confused on this point because I also had the impression he sails alone. But this Captain may be dead, which is one of the things he’s gone off to resolve/revenge.

  The talk depressed him. He reached across the table and took my hand as we spoke. What kind of emotional life has he had? I could cheerfully kill his ex-wives, I think.

  Oh, yes, I’ve changed. But I would burn in Hell for his dear sake.

  I may yet.

  He helped me wash the dinner dishes, and we hung his thermal underclothes up to dry before the fire, and at last we climbed into my narrow, creaking bed. Last time I’d lain in a real bed with him, he’d been Edward, and we’d been on the run all day and were too exhausted to do more than drift off to sleep together. Not this time! The bed has a permanent list to starboard now, and we were lucky it didn’t collapse in extremis . I really ought to fix it, but I can’t bear to. Just looking at it makes me smile.

  He warmed me right through, my mortal lover, and afterward drifted off to sleep in my arms. I lay watching him by the light of the fire. I might have lain there studying him all night, newly fascinated by all the details I’d never forgotten: the cleft in his chin, the funny swirled patterns in the hair on his arms.

  But the night wasn’t mine to idle away so pleasantly.

  I rose and pulled the blanket up around his shoulders. He sighed, reaching for me. I slipped out into the rainy night, to do the second thing for which I will surely suffer one day.

  The shuttle lay dark and abandoned, its sprung hatch gaping open in the rain. I looked in and saw the tiny green lights on the control panel, dimly illuminating the access port. I made my assault, forced it to give up the secret I wanted.

  The bomb was wired under the pilot’s seat, of all obvious places. It was a tiny white Bakelite box that might have been anything, a fuse relay, a power seat servomotor, a container of breath mints that had fallen down under there and been forgotten. I knew better. I found the tool kit and snipped its vicious lit
tle wires, swung the shuttle’s hatch shut, carried the bomb back with me through the gray rainy night and flung it into my compost heap. It’s there now, as I write. It may yet be live and deadly, it may have been ruined by the rain and the muck; but it will never kill Alec, which is all that matters.

  I came back and reentered paradise, slipping into the firelit room where my love slept safe. Third time lucky, mortal man, I thought.

  He woke when I climbed back in beside him, grumbled a little, reached out his arms to pull me in close and tucked me under his chin, just as Nicholas used to do. I lay awake awhile longer, fighting conditioning nightmares; but I know them for the false programmed things they are now, and they can’t scare me. I fell asleep at last, soothed by the rhythm of his heartbeat.

  We didn’t get out of bed for two full hours next morning. We did everything I’d ever done with Nicholas, who’d been amazingly adventurous for a late medieval fellow, and everything I’d ever done with Edward, who was a Victorian gentleman, which says all I need to say about his personal tastes. The bed sagged ever further toward a happy death.

  Then we got up and I made him breakfast.

  “I hope you like tacos,” I said, spooning the hot filling into corn tortillas. “This seems so inadequate! I seldom dine in the morning, myself, just a roll or something to keep the coffee from killing me. No tea, no kippers, no sardines even. Nothing for an Englishman, but then I never expected to meet one here.”

  “That’s okay,” said Alec. He accepted a taco and bit into it cautiously. “It’s not bad. What is it?”

  “Proteus Breakfast Bounty,” I told him with a sneer. “It approximates sausage. Not inspiring, but sustaining. The tortillas, at least, are real.”