The Machine's Child (11 page)

“Boom boom,” he said. “The machine’s child.”

“S’great!” said Alec. “C’we see the baby?”

No, boys, not yet. We don’t want them bad dreams to start again, do we?

“Nooo,” the three of them chorused, but only on principle, because they couldn’t remember any bad dreams.

Just let yer old Captain steer yer course, mateys, aye, and we’ll sail upon blue water. Listen to that beat! Ain’t it fine? I reckon this tops Zeus growing Athena in his head. Now, here comes jolly Coxinga with yer cocoa and sleepy meds. You can watch the holo until you’ve drunk the posset; then it’s time to turn in.

“Aye aye sir,” said Alec, attempting to salute and missing. Edward and Nicholas laughed at that until they cried, rolling off their virtual cushions and sprawling on the carpet. Alec was far too drugged to stay on
chairs, and the servounits had discreetly removed the room’s breakable furniture.

As timeless time went by, the truth of what had happened at Options Research became like an iceberg seen through a telescope, sharp and clear but safely distant, unreal, unconnected to them. They learned, again, to dress and shave and feed themselves. One day the Captain advised them it was necessary for their safety to jump through time again, and Alec was willing to drink the vile drink Coxinga brought him and buckle himself into the safety harness. He began to shake uncontrollably when the yellow gas flowed, but Edward and Nicholas hugged him tight, and somehow they made it through the time transcendence without panicking. Then they were safe in some other when, and the next day Alec sighted oared galleys off the port bow.

The Captain monitored all this closely. He would allow them, now, to come into the infirmary from time to time. There still wasn’t much to see. Blue liquid filled the decompression chamber, and dimly a figure could be glimpsed floating inside it. No features were visible, scarcely anything at all other than its general shape and size. They knew it was Mendoza, they knew that the Captain was working very hard to repair her for them; other than that she too was like the iceberg, far-off and unreal, too painful to think about.

Wherever they were in this time, the weather was very warm. They floated in a dead calm under a sky of pearly cloud, far from any land, and the heat haze made the sea one wide expanse of opal. There was no breath of wind.

Nicholas was miserable in his virtual linen and black wool, but he was unable to accept the idea of wearing garments from any period other than 1555 without losing himself. He compromised by simply wearing his shirt and breeches, in which he looked like Hamlet. Edward, though, insisted that the Captain provide him with a suit of
proper clothes,
which seemed to be virtual tropical whites, circa 1862. The Captain sighed and indulged him.

________

Months passed. Less drugs, and now they were under orders to go down to the gym daily and work out, to throw off the effects of long half-sleep. As it sweated out of them they came more sharply into focus, each one, and the nightmares began again: steel coffins in a dark place, poison and torture, every possible variation on what had happened. Nicholas and Alec clawed their way out of dreams, sobbing, on more than one night. Edward woke shouting with the horrors himself. They would rise, then, and stagger away to the infirmary, to stare in desperation at the drifting thing in the hyperbaric chamber. The pale floating figure was becoming more substantial, its upper part veiled in a swirling cloud like seaweed. The air seemed perfumed, calming, comforting.

Now, lads, it’s time we had a bit of a chat.

They looked up from their respective activities: Alec from tinkering with a new manipulatory member for Flint (it was Alec’s turn to use his body), Nicholas from watching him, Edward from his virtual cheroot and game of solitaire.

“In regard to?” Edward tipped ash into the small virtual dish provided for that purpose.

Yer lady will wake soon, and we need to make some preparations.

There was a silence at the table.

“What’s she going to remember?” said Alec at last.

No way to tell, is there?

“I should think there’s a certain likelihood she went mad,” said Edward stiffly.

Could be. Of course, there’d be drugs I could give her.

“If she be bedlam-mad, I’ll love her still,” said Nicholas.

“How noble of you,” Edward said. “But have you considered that her feelings toward
us
might have changed, in the ages she lay there in torment? Waiting perhaps for a rescue that never came, thanks to my damned bungling?”

“She’ll hate us now. She knows about Mars Two,” said Alec.

“You self-centered little bastard!” Edward laughed, without mirth.

Nicholas folded his hands. “If she wisheth me to suffer the fire a second time, I’ll burn. I have deserved her hate.”

Lad, her heart was broke afore because thou wert so willing to die. Hast thou forgot the lesson?

“No, Spirit, in God’s name,” Nicholas said. “Though God hath done with me.”

“What’s the point of all your gospel study, then?” said Edward, stubbing out his cigar. “Ah! But you don’t seem to be reading much Scripture nowadays, do you? Have you lost your faith? Or has it simply dawned on you that there’s not a line in the Bible that can possibly have any relevance to the kind of creatures we are?”

“Wilt thou mock my shame, murderer?” said Nicholas sadly. “Thou hast never loved God.”

“I beg your pardon! I was His own little white lamb once,” Edward retorted. “Quite a devout child, I’ll have you know.”

“Wow. What happened?” inquired Alec in a listless voice.

“I was called to the headmaster’s study in my first term and informed my parents were lost at sea,” Edward told him. “When I’d stopped blub-bing, I went straight to chapel to pray. Begged God to let there be some mistake. Promised Him I’d be ever so good if my papa and mamma weren’t really drowned.”

“And there was no miracle for thy sake, and so in peevish spite thou turnedst from the Lord,” said Nicholas contemptuously.

“By no means,” said Edward. “On my next birthday I was informed that the gentleman and lady whose son I’d
thought
I was—who were pleasant enough people, even if they never seemed to care about me much—had merely been foster parents. My real father, apparently a great man, was still alive. A prayer answered!

“Of course, my existence was a disgrace and a scandal for him, and he was very much vexed at having to bother with me again; so shortly thereafter he arranged that I should leave school and go into the navy. Less expense for him, and I’m sure he had the earnest hope I’d be sunk as well. I generally avoided praying for anything after that.” Edward picked up the virtual jack of spades and examined it thoughtfully.

“Even so my father cast me off, but I never blamed the Almighty,” argued Nicholas.

“Aren’t you both forgetting something?” said Alec. “We’re all Dr. Zeus’s bastards. Those men were being blackmailed over kids that weren’t even theirs.”

“By Jove!” Edward grinned. “I hadn’t thought of that. Gives one a poignant sense of revenge, even at this late date.”

“Wilt thou rejoice?” Nicholas shook his head. “Better we had never been born, to bring such misery into this too-weary world.”

“Yeah,” said Alec glumly.

Edward snorted and shook his head. “What good will your sense of guilt do Mendoza? I rather hope she went mad in that place, if it shielded her from the horrors. Perhaps the, what was it? The Crome’s radiation.”

It don’t always drive people mad, sir, begging yer pardon. I been scanning through Dr. Zeus’s records on Crome generators, the tests they did and all. It bears some looking into, if you take my meaning.

“Really?” Edward looked intrigued. “You know, it struck me at the time of reading that this might be terribly advantageous. What peculiar abilities might she have? If we were able to make use of that power somehow—”

“Make
use
?” Nicholas started up in his seat, clenching his fists. “Was she no more to thee than that?”

Edward met his rage without flinching. “She is my pearl without price,” he said. “Our masters were the ones who used her like a slave, and then cast her alive into Hell. And are you really going to tell me you wouldn’t like to pay them out for what they did to her? Ah, but you’re a man of God. Christ forbid you’d ever do more than weep and pray over her, whereas I—”

Nicholas struck out with his fist. Edward leaped up, blocking the blow with one hand while producing a virtual pistol from thin air with the other. He froze a second, astonished at what he’d done, and Nicholas seized his wrist. He strained to force it backward, groping for Edward’s throat with his other hand. Alec stared in disbelief as the Captain roared,
STAND TO! Ye bloody idiot fratricides! Edward, drop that gun!

“Not a chance, Machine,” said Edward, as he struggled to aim. “Aren’t you proud of me, summoning this on my own? If it’s made out of the same stuff as Nicholas and I, I should think it ought to kill him, shouldn’t you? It’s certainly worth a try.”

“Are you crazy?” Alec shouted, scrambling to his feet and adding his grip to Nicholas’s. He focused on the pistol, deleting it. Edward snarled and sank down into his seat. Nicholas drew back with visible effort, hands trembling with the need to throttle something.

Nicholas, sit down! And you, Cleverdick, you think you’ve stolen a march on old Captain Morgan? We’ll see how many pistols you can bring out of cyberspace when yer so full of tranquilizers you can’t stand up.

“You can’t drug me without drugging Alec, too,” Edward gloated. “And if I’ve learned the trick of it, there’s nothing to stop me conjuring up any weapon I please, is there, Machine?”

“Stop it,” Alec said. “What do you think Mendoza would do, if she saw you trying to kill Nicholas? She loved him. She even loved
you
! And how’s she ever going to be happy again, anyway, after what she’s been through? Don’t you think we ought to worry about that first?”

There was a silence as the three men regarded each other sullenly.

“Point taken,” Edward muttered.

Thank you so much, yer lordship! It’s about time somebody thought of the lady’s feelings. We got worse problems, anyway.

“You think she’s gone mad, then?” said Edward.

I wouldn’t like to say, sir; but, technically speaking, you have.

“Damn your insolence!”

No, sir, hear me out. You all three see each other clear enough, but only Alec’s got an actual physical body, which is the only one she’ll be able to see. D’ye get my meaning? If she was to hear the three of you arguing amongst yerselves when it’s Alec’s mouth doing all the talking—

“Good God!” Edward put his head in his hands. “She’ll think he’s a lunatic.”

“But what remedy, Spirit?” Nicholas said.

I reckon you’ll need to let Alec do all the talking. He’s the one she’d be expecting to see, if she expects anything. As far as she knows, you two are dead.

“But I would have begged her pardon on my knees,” said Nicholas in agony. “I would have told her I am with her still! Shall I have no voice?”

If you can tell her through Alec, maybe. Look here, gentlemen: ever
since the two of ye popped into my boy’s life, I’ve been saying ye were all the same fellow. Ye got on well enough when I had ye under sedation, so it’s plain ye can do it. Ye might think about sharing quarters now and again, instead of insisting on yer own bodies and clothes and the like. Just see what it’s like to be Alec.

“But I’m not Alec,” said Edward. “Thank God.”

“I wouldn’t want to be
you,
either,” Alec retorted, turning to scowl at him.

Belay that! All right, ye miserable lubbers, have yer brawls now. Ye damned well won’t be able to once she’s awake. And ye might remember she loved all three of ye the same; and ye might grant the lady her good sense.

“She will not see me. I’ll be no more than a shadow kissing her,” Nicholas groaned. “Oh, Spirit. I had a girl in a garden once, and there was Paradise, and the more fool I for leaving it. Look thou love her, Alec!”

They did not drift, but tacked with purpose here and there across the face of whatever ancient globe they presently inhabited. Obscure headlands emerged from fog, or rose on far horizons wearing high caps of cloud. The
Captain Morgan
lurked offshore, or threaded shallow mazy inlets where her masts loomed over oak trees. She cruised along coasts of white cities, or swampy stick-villages, or wastes of painfully bright sand.

There were supplies to be obtained, when the Captain would send Billy Bones and Flint ashore by night to plunder fields or shuttered market stalls. There were storms to outrun. There were fleets of triremes, corsairs, and savages to avoid. All potential high adventure of the sort Alec had imagined when he first thought of owning a time machine, and now he wasn’t even remotely interested in it.

The sound of the heartbeat had continued, strong now and never slowing, like dance music in another room. Though the Captain no longer broadcast it, they heard it even in their sleep. The perfume of the bioregenerant was heavy in the air, driving them nearly mad with longing.

Since Edward had managed it once already with a gun, at the Captain’s
suggestion Alec offered to teach Edward and Nicholas how create less objectional virtual items on their own. Nicholas tried once or twice, failed and gave it up. Edward seemed unable to repeat his success with the gun but kept at it doggedly, though Alec—who had never analyzed just what he was doing when he pulled things from cyberspace, and so had no way to describe it—was a fairly poor teacher.

“Look, you must know how really,” he said in exasperation, leaning back in the booth. “You made the damn gun come out of nowhere. And anyway, you’ve got the same brain as me, yeah?”