The Life of the World to Come (Company) Page 7

  In a later time Alec would look back on the years aboard the Foxy Lady as the happiest in his life, and sometimes he’d come across the old group holo and wonder why it had all ended. The picture had been taken in Jamaica, by somebody standing on a mooring catwalk and shooting down on deck.

  There he was, three years old, in his bright red life vest and sailor hat, smiling brightly up at the camera. Assembled around him were all the servants: fabulous Sarah, his Jamaican nurse, arrogantly naked except for blue bathing shorts; Lewin and Mrs. Lewin, the butler and cook; Reggie, Bob, and Cat, the deckhands; and Mr. Trefusis, the first mate. They formed a loving and protective wall between Alec and his mummy and daddy, or Roger and Cecelia, as they preferred to be called.

  Roger and Cecelia were visible up on the quarterdeck: Cecelia ignoring them all from her deck chair, a cold presence in a sun hat and dark glasses, reading a novel. Roger was less visible, leaning slouched against the rail, one nerveless hand about to spill a rum highball all over his yachting shoes. He’d turned his face away to look at something just as the image had been recorded, so all you could see was a glimpse of aristocratic profile, blurred and enigmatic.

  It hadn’t mattered. Alec had a wonderful life, full of adventures. Sarah would tell him stories about Sir Henry Morgan and all the pirates who used to roam the sea, living on their ships just like Alec did, and how they formed the Free Brotherhood of the Coast, whose secret way of recognizing each other at sea was for one pirate crew to call out, “Where d’ye hail from?” and instead of replying that they were from Kingston or Liverpool or Southampton, the crew of the other ship would cry, From the sea! And so they’d know they were pirates too. Alec liked that.

  And there was the fun of landing on a new island—what would it be like? Was there any chance there might still be pirates lurking around? Alec had played on beaches where the sand was white, or yellow, or pink, or black, built castles on all of them and stuck his little pirate flags on their turrets. Jolly Roger, that was what the flag was called.

  Jolly Roger was also what the deckhands called Alec’s daddy when he seemed to be having more than usual difficulty walking or talking. This was generally after he’d been drinking the tall drinks Cat would shake up for him at the bar on the yacht. Sometimes Cat would put a fruit spear in the drinks, cherries and chunks of pineapple skewered on long wooden picks with the paper pirate flag at the top. Sometimes Daddy’s eyes would focus on Alec and he’d present him with the fruit spear and yell for more rum in his drink. Alec would sit under Daddy’s tall chair and eat the pineapple and cherries, making faces at the nasty stuff they’d been soaked in. Then he’d carry the Jolly Roger pick back to his cabin, where he had a whole hoard of them carefully saved for his sand castles.

  It was a shame the rum had such an effect on Daddy, because going to get it was always fun. The Foxy Lady would drop anchor in some sapphire bay and Sarah would put on a halter top and shoes, and put shoes on Alec, and they’d go ashore together in the launch. As they’d come across the water Sarah might sing out, “How many houses, baby?” and Alec would look up at the town and count the houses in his head and he’d tell her how many there were, and she’d tousle his hair and tell him he was right again! And they’d laugh.

  Then there’d be a long walk through some island town, past the gracious houses with window boxes full of pink flowers, where parrots flashed and screamed in the green gardens, back to the wappen-bappen places where the houses looked like they were about to fall down, and there would always be a doormouth with no sign and a dark cool room beyond, full of quiet black men sitting at tables, or brown men sitting at tables, or white men turned red from the sun. In one place there was a green and red parrot that knew Alec’s name. “Smart Alec,” it called him, to his delight and the amusement of the quiet men. In another place there was a big mermaid carved out of wood, with flowing hair and bubbies nearly as nice as Sarah’s. Everything smelled new and exciting.

  Different as the details might be, the visit was always the same: he and Sarah would go in, and the quiet men would greet Sarah with welcome and a certain deference, almost awe, as though she were a visiting queen. Invariably a man in an apron would come out, bringing a lemonade for Alec and a glass of white rum for Sarah, and sit at a table with them while his helpers loaded crates into a battered old vehicle. Alec seldom understood what was being said, because people talked differently on different islands; but whether they were in the Caribbean or Polynesia, Sarah always spoke to the quiet men in their own language, as perfectly as though she’d been born among them.

  When Alec had finished his lemonade, they’d go out into the sunlight again and the man with the apron would give them a ride back into town with the crates. The crates were nearly always stenciled CROSSE & BLACKWELL’S PICKLED GHERKINS.

  And nearly always, they’d spot a stern-looking black or brown or white man in a white uniform, pedaling along on a bicycle, and Sarah would hug Alec tight and cry out in a little silly voice: “Oh, nooo, it’s a policeman! Don’t tell him, Alec, don’t tell him our secret!” This always made Alec giggle, and she’d always go on: “Don’t tell him we’ve got guns! Don’t tell him we’ve got explosives! Don’t tell him we’ve got ganja! Don’t tell him we’ve got coffee!” She’d go on and on like this, as they’d bump along trailing dust clouds and squawking birds, and by the time they reached the harbor Alec would be weak with laughter.

  Once they were at the launch, however, she’d be all quiet efficiency, buckling Alec into his seat and then helping the man move the crates into the cargo bay. Sarah was immensely strong and could lift a crate on one hand, just using the other to balance. When all the crates were on board, the man would hold out a plaquette and Sarah would bring out Daddy’s identification disk and pay for the crates. Then they’d zoom back out to the Foxy Lady. They’d put out to sea, and the next day there would be rows of brown bottles under the bar again, and Cat would be busy shaking up the tall drinks, and Daddy would be sitting on the quarterdeck with a glass in his hand, staring vacantly away at the blue horizon.

  Not everybody thought that the trips to get the rum were such a good idea, however.

  Alec was sitting in the saloon one day after just such a trip, quietly coloring. He had made a picture of a shark fighting with an anchor, because he knew how to draw anchors and he knew how to draw sharks, and that was all the logic the scene needed. The saloon was just aft of the galley. Because it was very warm that day the connecting door was open, and he could hear Lewin and Mrs. Lewin talking in disgusted tones.

  “He only gets away with it because he’s a peer.”

  “Peer or no, you’d think he’d stop it for the kid’s sake! He was such a great teacher, too, and what’s he given that all up for? And what would happen if we were ever boarded for inspection? They’d take the baby away in a minute, you know they would.” Chop, chop, chop, Mrs. Lewin was cutting up peppers as she talked.

  “Don’t think so. J. I. S. would smooth it over, same as always. Between his lineage and Them, he can do whatever he bloody well pleases, even in London.”

  “Yeh, well! Things was different before Alec came, weren’t they? And anyway it’s wrong, Malcolm, you know it is, it’s criminal, it’s dangerous, it’s unhealthy, and really the best thing we could do for him would be to tell a public health monitor about it.”

  “And where’d we be, then? The last thing J. I. S. wants is some hospital looking at—” Lewin started through the doorway and saw Alec in the saloon. He retreated and shut the door.

  Alec sat frowning at his picture. He knew that Daddy’s drinking made people sad, but he’d never thought it was dangerous. On the other hand, he knew that rules must be obeyed, and dangerous things must be reported at once, like water below decks or smoke in any of the cabins.

  He got up and trotted out of the saloon. There was Daddy on the aft deck, smiling dreamily at the sun above the yardarm.

  “Hey, there, Alec,” he greeted the little boy. He had a sip of his drin
k and reached out to tousle Alec’s hair. “Look out there to starboard. Is that a pretty good island? Should we go there, maybe?”

  Alec shivered with joy. Daddy almost never noticed him, and here he was asking Alec’s opinion about something.

  “Yeah,” he cried. “Let’s go!”

  But Daddy’s gaze had drifted away, out to the horizon, and he lifted his glass again. “Some green island we haven’t found yet,” he murmured, “farther on ’n farther on ’n farther on …”

  Alec remembered what he had wanted to ask. He reached out and pushed at Daddy’s glass with his index finger.

  “Is that crinimal?” he said. It was a moment before Daddy played that back and turned to gape at him.

  “What?”

  “Is that dangerous?” Alex said, and mimed perfectly the drinking-from-a-bottle gesture he had seen the servants make in reference to his father. “You have to obey the rules. If I see danger I’m supposed to tell.”

  “Huh,” said Daddy, and he rubbed his scratchy chin. He hadn’t shaved in about a week. His eyes narrowed and he looked at Alec slyly.

  “Tell me, Alec, ’m I hurting anybody?”

  “No.”

  “We ever had an accident on this ship? Anything happen ol’ Roger can’t handle?”

  “No.”

  “Then where’s the harm?” Daddy had another sip. “Tell me that. ’M a nice guy even when I’m stoned. A gentleman you know. Old school tie.”

  Alec had no idea what that meant, but he pushed on:

  “How come it’s crinimal?”

  “Aha.” Daddy tilted his glass until the ice fell down against his lip. He crunched ice and continued, “Okay, Alec. Big fact of life. There’s a whole bunch of busybodies and scaredy-cats who make a whole bunch of rules and regs about things they don’t want anybody doing. See? So nobody gets to have any fun. Like, no booze. They made a law about no booze. And they’re all, ‘You can’t lie about in the sun because you get cancer,’ and they’re all, ‘You can’t swim in the ocean ’cos you might pee,’ and they’re all, ‘You can’t eat sweets because they make you fat,’ okay? Dumb stuff. And they make laws so you go to hospital if you do this little dumb stuff! Okay?

  “That’s why we don’t live in London, kiddo. That’s why we live out here on the Lady, so no scaredy-cat’s gonna tell us what to do. Okay? Now then. If you went running to the scaredy-cats to tell ‘em about the rum, you’d be an even worse thing than them. You’d be a telltale! And you gotta remember you’re a gentleman, and no gentleman is ever a telltale. See? ’Cos if you did tell about the rum, well, they’d come on board and they’d see me with my little harmless drinkies and they’d see your mummy with her books and they’d see Sarah with her lovely bare tits and then you know what they’d do? Daddy’d go to hospital and they’d take you away. Li’l Alec ain’t gonna be a telltale, is he? He’s my li’l gentleman, ain’t he?”

  “I don’t want ’em to take me away!” Alec wailed, tears in his eyes. Daddy dropped his glass, reaching clumsily to pull Alec up on his lap, and the glass broke, but he didn’t notice.

  “’Course you don’t. ’Cos we’re free here on the Foxy Lady, and you’re a gentleman and you got a right to be free, free, free. Okay? You won’t tell on Daddy, not my li’l Alec. Gonna be an earl someday, when Daddy’s gone to Fiddler’s Green. So anyway. You just let old Jolly Roger go his ways and you never be a telltale, okay? And don’t pay them no mind with their dumb rules.”

  “But they gonna board us for aspection,” Alec sobbed.

  “Hey, kiddo, don’t you worry. Daddy’s a gentleman, don’t forget, he’s got some pull. I’m the bloody earl ’a Finsbury, okay? And a CEO at J.I.S. And I’ll tell you something else. Jovian Integrated Systems gonna have something to say, too. Nobody’s gonna touch li’l Alec, he’s such a special kid.”

  That was right; Alec was a special kid, all the servants said so. For one thing, all other little boys were brought into this world by the stork, but not Alec. He had come in an agcopter. Reggie had told him so.

  “Yeah, son,” Reggie had chuckled, looking around to be certain Sarah was nowhere within earshot. “The stork call your daddy and say, ‘Come out to Cromwell Cay.’ And your daddy take the launch out where the agcopter waiting on the cay at midnight, with the red light blinking, and when he come back he bring Sarah with our little bundle of joy Alec. And we all get nice fat bonuses, too!”

  Alec wiped his nose and was comforted. Daddy set him on the deck and yelled to Cat for another drink and told Alec to go play now somewhere. Alec would dearly have liked to stay and talk with Daddy; that had been the longest conversation they’d ever had together, and he had all kinds of questions. What was Jovian Integrated Systems? What was Fiddler’s Green? Why were some rules important, like wearing the life vest, and other rules were dumb? Why were gentlemen free? But Alec was a considerate and obedient little boy, so he didn’t ask. He went off to play, determined never, ever to be a telltale or a scaredy-cat.

  Very shortly after that the happy life came to an end.

  It happened quite suddenly, too. One day Mummy abruptly put down her novel, got up out of her deck chair and stalked over to Daddy where he sat watching a Caribbean sunset.

  “It’s over, Rog,” she said.

  He turned a wondering face to her. “Huh?” he said. After a moment of staring into her eyes, he sighed. “Okay,” he said.

  And the Foxy Lady set a course that took her into gray waters, under cold skies. Sarah packed up most of Alec’s toys so he only had a few to play with, and got out his heaviest clothes. One day they saw a very big island off the port bow. Sarah held him up and said: “Look! There’s England.”

  Alec saw pale cliffs and a meek little country beyond them, rolling fields stretching away into a cloudy distance, and way off the gray blocky mass of cities. The air didn’t smell familiar at all. He stood shivering, watched the strange coastline unroll as Sarah buttoned him into an anorak.

  They waited at the mouth of a big river for the tide to change, and Sarah pointed out the city of Rochester to Alec on a holomap and said that was where Charles Dickens had lived. He didn’t know who Charles Dickens was. She reminded him about the holo he’d watched at Christmas, about the ghosts of the past and the future.

  The Thames pulled them into London, which was the biggest place Alec had ever seen. As the sun was setting they steered into Tower Marina, and the long journey ended with a gentle bump against the rubber pilings. Alec went to bed that night feeling very strange. The Foxy Lady seemed to have become silent and heavy, motionless, stone like the stone city all around them, and for the first time that he could ever remember the blue sea was gone. There were new smells, too. They frightened him.

  His cabin was full of the cold strange air when he woke up, and the sky was gray.

  Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, and rather cross. Sarah bundled Alec into very thick heavy clothes indeed, leaving his life vest in the closet, and she herself put on more clothes than he had ever seen her wear. Daddy was wearing strange new clothes, too, stiff and uncomfortable-looking ones, and he had shaved. There was no breakfast cooking in the galley; Lewin had been ashore and come back with a box of Bentham’s Bran Treats (“At least they’re fresh baked!” he cried) and a dozen cups of herbal tea, steeping in chlorilar cups. Breakfast was served, or rather handed around, at the big table in the saloon. Alec was impressed. Normally only Daddy and Mummy dined in here, but today he and Sarah were at the table, too. Mummy, however, was nowhere to be seen, and when Alec inquired about this, Daddy just stared at him bleakly.

  “Your mummy’s gone to visit some friends,” Sarah told him.

  He didn’t care for his breakfast at all—he thought it smelled like dead grass—but he was too well-mannered a child to say so and hurt Lewin’s feelings. Fortunately there wasn’t much time to eat, because the car arrived and there was a lot of bustle and rush to load luggage into its trunk. Finally he was led down the gangway and across the pier to where the
car waited.

  It was nothing at all like the rusted hacks in which he’d ridden in the islands. This was a Rolls Royce Exquisite Levitation, black and gleaming, with Daddy’s crest on the door and a white man in a uniform like a policeman at the steering console. Alec had to fight panic as he was handed in and fastened into his seat. Sarah got in, Daddy got in, Lewin and Mrs. Lewin crowded into the front beside the driver, and the Rolls lifted into midair and sped silently away. That was the end of life on board the Foxy Lady.

  There were servants lined up on the steps outside the house in Bloomsbury, and Alec watched as Daddy formally shook hands with each of them. Alec thought it would be polite to do this, too, so he trailed after Daddy shaking hands and asking the servants what their names were. For some reason this made them all smile, and one of them muttered to another: “Now that’s a little gentleman.” Then they all went into the big house with its echoing rooms, and Alec had come home to England.

  The house only dated from 2298, but it had been deliberately built in an old-fashioned style because it was an earl’s townhouse, after all, so it was taller and fancier than the other houses in the street. Alec still hadn’t explored all its rooms by the time he noticed one morning that Daddy wasn’t at the breakfast table, and when he asked about it Sarah informed him: “Your daddy’s away on a business trip.”

  It was only later, and by chance, that he found out Daddy hadn’t lasted a week in London before he’d gone straight back to Tower Marina and put out to sea again on the Foxy Lady.

  Then Alec had cried, but Sarah had had a talk with him about how important it was that he live in London now that he was getting to be a big boy.

  “Besides,” she said, taking the new heavy clothes out of their shopping bags and hanging them up in his closet, “your poor daddy was so unhappy here, after your mummy had gone.”