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

  “Chaps,” suggested Rutherford.

  “Yeah, chaps, I meant.”

  In no time they were cozily ensconced in chairs about the fire, and Rutherford had handed around mugs of ginger beer. There was a long moment of silence that was more than contented; it was reverent, sacred almost. The transforming magic of anachronism hung in the air like incense.

  “Shakespeare must have sat like this,” said Rutherford and sighed.

  “Shracking C. S. Lewis too.” Ellsworth-Howard shut his eyes. “Only of course it’d have been real beer.”

  “Or ale,” Chatterji said wistfully. “Or port, or sherry. Or tea! You know what we need? We need one of those cabinet things with fancy bottles and stuff in them. I could get some grape juice. We could pretend it was port.”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Capital.” Rutherford wriggled with excitement. “And something brown for tea or sherry. What could we get that was brown?”

  “Prune juice is dark brown,” said Ellsworth-Howard. “Maybe if we mixed it with some apple juice?”

  “Well, that’s definitely on the list for our next meeting,” said Rutherford, and reaching into his pocket he drew out a tiny electronic memorandum and jotted a picture of an apple and a wrinkly prune with the stylus. “I’ll see what I can get at Harrods.”

  “First rate,” said Chatterji. They all sat there, immensely pleased with themselves. The fire in the grate burned cheerily, brightening their pale faces, warming the washed-out light of a gray summer day in London.

  “We’d better do some work,” said Ellsworth-Howard at last, groaning. “Or I might just sit here being happy all shracking afternoon.”

  “Right. Shall I give my report?” Chatterji set down his tankard and struck an attitude, steepling his fingers.

  “Please,” said Rutherford, and Ellsworth-Howard pulled his attention away from the dancing flames reluctantly.

  “Well, it seems the project has been a success overall. The Enforcers succeeded in wiping out the last remnants of the Great Goat Cult, and it looks like civilization has finally begun to dawn.”

  “Told you they’d do the trick,” said Ellsworth-Howard.

  Chatterji smiled and went on: “Our operatives in the past report that the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons are starting to interbreed and share ideas, which is what we thought would happen. There’s been pressure from some board members who want to see the hunter-gatherer tribes forcibly settled in farming communes, but we had to explain how this contravenes history as known from the Temporal Concordance.”

  “Eh?” Ellsworth-Howard scowled at him.

  “That means it goes against what we know happened,” Rutherford said. “So they can’t do it.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “And the next part’s going to be really exciting, as we start connecting with actual recorded historical events!” Chatterji cracked his knuckles in enthusiasm. “History as we know it is going to begin happening at last.”

  “Brilliant.” Ellsworth-Howard had a bracing draught of ginger beer.

  “Though there is one problem …” Chatterji gnawed his lower lip. He hesitated a moment before going on. “I’m afraid we’re having a little trouble with your Enforcers, Foxy. Actually quite a lot of trouble.”

  “What d’you mean?” Ellsworth sat upright. “They took out the Great Goat Cult, didn’t they?”

  “Oh, yeah. Quite. But … they seem to have some trouble being retrained, now that they’ve done what we made them for. What was the old word?”

  “Demobilized?” said Rutherford.

  “That’s it. The Enforcers can’t seem to adjust to peacetime. And they argue! They appear to feel that a lot more, er, preparation is necessary before we begin civilization. There have been some quite nasty incidents, in fact.”

  “You mean they won’t stop killing people?” Ellsworth-Howard looked appalled.

  “Well, they’re only going for ordinary antisocials now, not cultists, but … in a word, yes,” said Chatterji.

  “Oh, dear, that won’t do at all.” Rutherford knitted his brows.

  “And they defend themselves by pointing to the historical record and claiming that it proves the job oughtn’t to be stopped.”

  “The bloody fools!” Rutherford snorted. “Don’t they understand that we can’t change history?”

  “They believe we haven’t tried hard enough,” said Chatterji delicately, not looking at Ellsworth-Howard, who had buried his face in his hands.

  “Bloody hell,” he said wearily. “All right; what do we do?”

  “Well, the committee would like to know if it’s possible to modify them, since termination isn’t an option.”

  “You mean make ’em over into Preservers?” Ellsworth-Howard thought about it. “Reprogram them? I don’t think so. I designed them too shracking well for what they were supposed to do, you know. Why don’t they just reassign them to be security techs or something?”

  “Well, but—there’s another problem, I’m afraid.” Chatterji shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Our observers have advised us that the genetic shift is taking place rather sooner than we thought, now that the two main hominid branches are free to interbreed. More and more humans are being born with the distinctive Homo sapiens sapiens appearance. Within a few more thousand years, the Enforcers will be … undesirably noticeable.” He looked apologetic.

  “You mean they’re gonna stand out like boulders in gravel.” Ellsworth-Howard drummed his fingers on his knees. “Shrack, shrack, shrack. I knew I should have done something about their faces. It was the optimum skull shape for a fighter, though.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Foxy.”

  “Well, no help for it.” Ellsworth-Howard had another gulp from his tankard. “Poor old soldiers! I made ’em too well, that’s the problem. I always fancied I was born in the wrong age, myself—well, obviously we all do—but I wish I’d been a knight in armor. Gone around kicking the shrack out of Nazguls and Orcs and Calormenes. Swords and all that.”

  Rutherford and Chatterji exchanged nervous glances, though of course no public health monitor was anywhere within earshot. Ellsworth-Howard reached into the daypack he’d slung down beside his chair and pulled out a buke, which he opened and activated. He squeezed in some figures and sighed.

  “All right. Got around three thousand Enforcers in the field. Current status shows two hundred thirty-seven in regeneration vats, consciousness offline. I suppose they could just be left off. Seems like a poor thank-you after they beat the Great Goat nasties for us.”

  “But can we ever trust them again?” said Chatterji. “Now that they’ve had the idea of rebellion?”

  Ellsworth-Howard’s eyes widened as the full import of the problem sank in on him. “Got a little situation here, haven’t we?”

  “Exactly,” Chatterji said soberly. “Immortal, indestructible, and disobedient. Talk about your Frankenstein monsters!”

  “What’re we gonna do?”

  “Well, it’s not as though they were howling and pounding on our door, after all,” Chatterji said. “We know we solve the problem, somehow, because history doesn’t record a roving band of giant soldiers terrorizing criminals through the ages. The question is, how do we solve it?”

  “I know!” Rutherford leaped to his feet in excitement. “Ye gods, chaps, I’ve had the most brilliant idea. This will work—at least if it’s done right—and it’ll make all those legends come true.”

  “What legends?” Chatterji asked.

  “The Sleeping Knights,” said Rutherford. “All through Europe there are legends of bunches of knights asleep forever in caves! Under various enchantments, you know. Here in England they’re supposed to be knights of the Round Table, sleeping until King Arthur comes again.”

  “What’s that got to do with the shracking price of tea in China?” inquired Ellsworth-Howard irritably.

  “Don’t you see? We could be what causes the legends. Suppose you call in your Enforcers and tell them we do still need them, but they must ha
ve upgrades for the new work they’re to do. They’ll submit to being put under for the process. We’ll just take their brains offline and keep them unconscious! We can’t kill them, but we can induce alpha waves indefinitely.”

  “Where would we keep them all?” Chatterji looked intrigued.

  “Underground bunkers.” Rutherford’s eyes shone. “In keeping with the legends. Carefully monitored, on life support—nothing inhumane, you know. Until the Judgment Day!”

  An uncomfortable silence fell then, because nobody ever liked to mention that Judgment Day was thought to be going to arrive in the year 2355. Having breached the unmentionable, however, Rutherford blundered on in a lower voice:

  “And—who knows? If something terrible’s going to happen in the future, perhaps it’s just as well we’ll have a secret army hidden away, that we can revive if we need to.”

  “Shrack,” said Ellsworth-Howard solemnly. “Think you’ve got the right idea, Rutherford. It’ll take some planning, though. Have to be gradual and crafty, so the poor buggers don’t know what’s going on. Let’s see how much it’ll cost, eh?” His fist worked on the buttonball.

  “I’m glad you’re taking this well,” said Chatterji, watching him. “The committee didn’t want you to think the Enforcers were a failure. It is felt, though, that the next project should be more thoroughly tested before it’s put into action.”

  “And how do we do that?” grunted Ellsworth-Howard absently. He was absorbed in his calculations. Rutherford looked inquiringly at Chatterji.

  “Well, now that historical time is being entered, the Company would like an improved model Enforcer,” Chatterji explained. “Someone more modern-looking. More suited to a life of service in a civilized world. So, obviously, we’d want somebody who was superbly strong but maybe less violent, more obedient, perhaps a bit more intelligent than the old Enforcers? Someone with the ability to adapt to peacetime life, yet with the same sense of, er, moral commitment.”

  “Not so much a warrior as a knight,” said Rutherford. “A hero! I say, Chatty, this sounds interesting.”

  “But not a charismatic leader who can make thousands hang on his every word,” Chatterji added. “That’s been tried, and we all know what happened.”

  “Well, that wasn’t our project,” Rutherford reminded him smugly.

  “Thank heaven. We want somebody with the intelligence to judge men and administer laws, but not out of a sense of his own importance. All zeal, no ego.”

  “Okay.” Ellsworth-Howard printed out a sheet of figures and handed them to Chatterji. “There’s Operation Pension Plan for the old Enforcers. I feel crappy about it, but I don’t see what else we can do with ’em. Now, what’s this about a knight?”

  “We need a New Man, Foxy, an enlightened warrior,” Rutherford cried.

  “You mean no more big ugly buggers we can’t control?” Ellsworth-Howard grinned mirthlessly.

  “Exactly,” Chatterji said. “And to make certain there are no further problems, the committee wants a completely original prototype. No breeding programs. They don’t want you picking through human children until you find one that fits the optimum morphology and then performing the immortality process on it, either. The results are too unpredictable.”

  “It works fine on my shracking Preservers,” growled Ellsworth-Howard.

  “Yes, of course, but they’re only Preservers,” Chatterji said hastily. “How much trouble can drones cause? But nothing is to be left to chance on this new design.” He lowered his voice. “The committee wants to see something engineered. Do you understand?”

  What he was proposing Ellsworth-Howard do was horribly, flagrantly illegal and had been for two centuries. As long as nobody actually said in so many words We want you to make a recombinant, however, it could be glossed over as something else, should anyone ever call Dr. Zeus or its employees to account, which of course would never happen.

  “A tailored gene job?” Ellsworth-Howard asked uneasily, pulling at his lower lip. “Take a lot of work.”

  “Absolutely. Field testing, too. And for that reason, the first prototypes will be given ordinary human life spans. No immortality process for them. That way if there’s a flaw in the design, we can dispose of the mistake. Nothing that might come back to haunt us later.”

  “I’d better go back to the old Homo crewkernensis stuff, then, if you want it engineered. Lots more material to work with.” Ellsworth-Howard kneaded the buttonball and the image of a four-stranded DNA helix appeared on the screen. He began moving its segments about, doodling as it were with the material of life.

  “Remember that now you’ll need something with a human face,” Chatterji told him. “No Neanderthal, obviously. And, er, see if you can eliminate that berserker tendency the Enforcers had. We want a man who can kill, but not somebody who enjoys it quite as much. Program in a bit of compassion. Of course,” Chatterji glanced at Rutherford, “that’ll be your job.”

  “The Once and Future King, born of a vanished race,” chanted Rutherford. “The Messiah. The Superman. The Peaceful Warrior. The Hero with a Thousand Faces!”

  “Don’t talk such rubbish.” Ellsworth-Howard squeezed in a formula and tilted his head, considering the results.

  “It’s not rubbish. This is what I’m paid to do, remember? You develop his body, I’ll develop a psychological formula he can be programmed with, and we’ll produce something wonderful.” Rutherford seized up the jug and poured out a second round. They were raising their tankards for a toast when there came a horrifyingly loud commotion at the door. Chatterji and Rutherford turned, half expecting to see a mob of furious Enforcers brandishing stone axes. They beheld instead a trio of municipal firemen in yellow slickers.

  “Get it out,” said the tallest, striding toward them with an air of command. The other firemen were carrying silver canisters, with which they proceeded to extinguish the fire.

  “Right,” snarled the tall fireman. “You’re all under arrest for violation of municipal fire code three-seventeen subset five, paragraph one. And I’ve a special treat for the idiot who set the blaze in the first place. Got a jolly straitjacket warmed up just for you! Right, then, which of you did it?”

  “This—this is bloody outrageous,” said Rutherford. “I have a permit for this fire, sir!”

  “Oh, have we now?” The fireman thrust his face down close to Rutherford’s own.

  “I do so!” Rutherford backed away slightly but did not quail. “This is a historical building and we are licensed re-creators.”

  “Are you indeed? Where’s your tourists, then?” the fireman sneered. Chatterji put a hand on the fireman’s shoulder and pushed him back. The fireman grinned like a shark, preparing to roar the command that would have clapped Chatterji in restraints; but something about Chatterji’s expression stopped him cold.

  “I don’t think you know who we are,” said Chatterji. “This is a professional matter.” He pulled out a little silver case and extracted an identification disc, which he held out for the fireman to see. The fireman blinked twice and stared at it. His face went rather pale.

  “You should have said something!” he said. “Sorry—sorry, sir! Never happen again, sir. I’m a stockholder of yours, actually, sir, we’d have never in a million years thought of interrupting your work. Now we know you’re doing this sort of thing on the premises … just get their fire going again, lads, and least said soonest mended, eh?”

  “Fair enough,” said Chatterji. Rutherford collapsed into his chair, blinking away angry tears. Ellsworth-Howard continued to frown at his screen, kneading the buttonball distractedly, ignoring the firemen as they hurriedly cleaned out the grate and relit the fire. Once the flame had leaped up again they vanished as quickly as they’d arrived.

  “I hate this bloody century,” quavered Rutherford.

  “Oh, you don’t really,” Chatterji told him brightly. “Did you see the way that fellow slunk out of here? Now, that’s what I call power. Face it: in what other era would the lik
es of us have the authority to shape history? Or tell a municipal official to go to the devil, for that matter. This is our time, chaps, and we’re making it count!”

  He picked up Rutherford’s tankard and handed it back to him, and lifted his own so the firelight shone on it. “Let’s drink that toast, shall we? To the New Man.”

  “‘A father for the Superman,’” quoted Rutherford, smiling through his tears.

  Ellsworth-Howard noticed belatedly what they were doing and grabbed up his tankard. Racking his brains for an impressive-sounding thing to say, he misremembered something from one of the few films he’d seen.

  “To a new world of monsters and gods,” he said, and drank deep.

  THE YEAR 2324:

  Smart Alec

  For the first four years of his life, Alec Checkerfield wore a life vest.

  This was so that if he accidentally went over the side of his parents’ yacht, he would be guaranteed a rescue. It was state of the art, as life vests went in the twenty-fourth century: not only would it have enabled him to bob along like a little cork in the wake of the Foxy Lady, it would have reassured him in a soothing voice, broadcast a frequency that repelled sharks, and sounded an immediate alarm on the paging devices worn by every one of the servants on board.

  His parents themselves wore no pagers, which was just as well because if Mummy had noticed Alec was in the water she’d probably have simply waved her handkerchief after him until he was well over the horizon. Daddy would probably have made an effort to rescue Alec, if he weren’t too stoned to notice the emergency; but most of the time he was, which was why the servants had been appointed to save Alec, should the child ever fall overboard. They were all madly fond of Alec, anyway, because he was really a very good little boy, so they were sure to have done a great job, if the need for rescue at sea should ever have arisen.

  It never did arise, however, because Alec was a rather well coordinated child too and generally did what he was told, such as obeying safety rules.

  And he was a happy child, despite the fact that his mother never set her ice-blue eyes on him if she could help it and his father was as likely to trip over him as speak to him. It didn’t matter that they were terrible at being parents; they were also very rich, which meant they could pay other people to love Alec.