The Machine's Child (37 page)

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind—er, ma’am—” Louis says, and she throws out her hands in a gesture of slightly theatrical chagrin.

“And how remiss of us! We haven’t introduced ourselves. This is my husband, Alec—Harpole, and I am—Mrs. Harpole.”

It is too obviously an alias, and Louis’s eyes gleam with understanding.

“Very pleased to meet you, Mrs. Harpole,” he says in a conspiratorial sort of way. She looks at him consideringly, for a long moment.

“Mr. Stevenson,” she says, “may we rely on your discretion? We are here under something of a cloud. We had hoped to run ashore swiftly and accomplish, ah—what we had hoped to accomplish, and get away again to our ship before—” Her eyes glaze over slightly in rapid thought. “—Before my father’s enemies could come to know of our presence here. I trust I need say nothing further, other to assure you that our intentions are completely honorable?”

“Nothing at all,” Louis cries, thrilled to the marrow of his bones. “Look here, I’ll be delighted to stay with the boat.”

“Oh, sir, how gallant,” she replies, with a charming smile. She puts her hand on her husband’s arm. “We are very much obliged to you. Let us haste, then, Alec dear. We won’t be more than an hour or so, Mr. Stevenson, I promise you.”

And the tall man lets go Louis’s hand only reluctantly, with more protestations of high regard, and Louis watches as the two of them run away in the general direction of the Customs House. When they are gone, he clambers a little self-consciously over the gunwale of their boat and sits at the oars, gazing out at the gray sea-phantom in wildest speculation. Some sort of Flying Dutchman, perhaps? The dolphins have remained, circling in the near water, almost as though they were waiting.

Louis tries the oars once, utterly failing to move them, and marvels at the strength of the oarsman. He can’t define to himself just what is so striking about the man, other than a peculiar quality of being not quite human.

Which is a little ironic, in light of the fact that Alec has been thinking exactly the same thing about him.

In just over an hour the couple return, flushed and gleeful, and they have brought him a present: a bottle of the best brandy Sanchez’s Tavern
has to offer. The tall man presents it to Louis shyly, as a hawk comes swooping low out of the fog above them and vanishes again. Louis makes a valiant pretense of helping the man push the boat off into the surf. He stands waving from the shore as they cut away through the gray water, dolphins leaping after, until at last the fog obscures them.

Louis returns to his bare corner room in the French Hotel, clutching the brandy bottle to his skinny chest, and curls up on the floor in his blanket in the gathering dusk. He does not notice, now or ever, the tiny dab of new plaster on the adobe wall above his head, and even if he did it’s unlikely he would examine it closely enough to learn that it conceals a vitrified tube containing a tiny bottle of something resembling gold paint.

He warms himself with the brandy and with working out, in a dozen different ways, the imaginary adventures of the couple from the phantom ship. His last thought, before he drifts off to sleep, is a question: Will their story have a happy ending?

THAT SAME EVENING OFF THE BAY OF MONTEREY, 1879
AD

“This is
so
cool,” Alec said, as he admired the holoshot. “There we are, and there he is, and he looks just like his pictures!”

“What a stroke of luck, eh?” Mendoza said, kissing his ear as she leaned past him to set down a dish of green corn tamales. “And how neatly it solved the problem! No chance of his walking in on intruders in his room, when he’s guarding their boat.”

It could only have been more unfair if you’d gotten his autograph,
groused Edward.

I already have his autograph,
Alec said smugly.
Bought it at auction, years ago.

Puppy!

Creep!

Belay that, both of you,
the Captain ordered.

“And Mr. Stevenson will go off and write
Treasure Island,
which will inspire you to build this ship and go cruising around the Spanish Main,” said Mendoza, slipping into the booth beside him and shaking out her napkin. “I think? That’s why all the pirate things in here?”

“You could say that,” said Alec. “He was always one of my heroes. When I was six, I’d have given anything to have had a chance to talk to him about pirates.” He scowled at his place setting. “My father wasn’t around, so . . . stories meant a lot to me.
Treasure Island
especially.”

Mendoza, just reaching out to help herself to grilled fish, halted.

“Your father?” She blinked. “When you were—we must have been children, once. Mustn’t we?”

Thou fool!
Nicholas groaned.

“Yes,” said Alec, mentally kicking himself. “But . . .”

“I can’t remember anything about being a child,” said Mendoza. Her eyes were wide and distant. “Why can’t I remember? We must have had—mothers, and fathers—”

“Er—we were orphans,” said Alec, taking her hand.

“Was it . . . unpleasant, when we were children?” she asked cautiously.

“At first,” Alec improvised. “But, er, the Captain came along to look after us. It was great, because he told us stories, and taught us about stars and navigation and everything. And then later he, he helped us escape from the Company!”

“It must have been a nice childhood, then,” said Mendoza, relaxing a little.

“Oh, that part of it was brilliant!” said Alec with enthusiasm. He looked at her sidelong. “We’d, er, sail around to different islands, and have adventures. Build sand castles. Pretend we were digging for buried treasure. We learned all about the real pirates, too. Like, the way the Brotherhood of the Coast’s ships would pass each other, and when they weren’t sure if they were pirates, too, one of the ship’s crews would call out, ‘Where do you hail from?’ and the other ship’s crew would call back—”

“ ‘From the sea!’ ” said Mendoza with him, as she held out her wineglass for Coxinga to fill. “Yes. Oh, it sounds lovely. I wish I could remember.”

As he clinked glasses with her, Alec thought sadly:
No you don’t, baby.
He looked over into Nicholas’s somber gaze, and thought of the dungeons of the Inquisition. He found himself with an irrational desire to buy her dolls, sweets, games, anything to give her the idyllic childhood he’d just been inventing for them.

The idea came out of nowhere, bright as lightning, and seemed the best he’d ever had in his life.

“I can’t believe I’ve never thought of this before,” he said. “Why couldn’t we go see some
real
pirates?”

“Because they were filthy, sadistic, and murderous mortals and it would be terribly hazardous,” said Mendoza, sipping her wine.

Aye, dearie, I’m afraid that’s just so.

“Well, but we wouldn’t invite them on board,” said Alec. “We could just go back to the Spanish Main and watch them!”

Seek out thieves and murderers for sport?
Nicholas frowned in bewilderment.

You young idiot, do you have any idea of the risk you’d be running?
said Edward wearily, pushing away his untasted virtual dinner.
You’ve never associated with any real criminals, have you?

I have so,
said Alec, incensed.

Alec, smugglers of Cadbury’s cocoa and double-cream brie hardly qualify as authentic felons—

Well
—
began the Captain, in a considering kind of voice. Edward and Mendoza looked up at the camera with identical expressions of amazement and disapproval.

Happen there’s this plan I been revolving, see,
said the Captain.
It seems that Dr. Zeus has a satellite in geosynchronous orbit stationed smack above Jamaica. It’s one in a series he’s got linking his bloody communications network. I was afeared he was using it to spy on you, Alec, so I had a good look at it.

Now, this here Jamaica satellite is the master, see? Everything in the system comes and goes through it. The bloody thing’s only protected by a distortion field to hide it, and a little ring of orbiting laser cannon to take out any space debris that might blunder towards it.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Edward, seizing control. “If it’s that vital, it’s sure to be better protected than that.”

Haar! Aye, says you; but yer not taking into account the way the big fat fool’s mind works. He don’t need to protect it any better, thinks he, and why? Because his Temporal Concordance says it’ll never be attacked, at any time in recorded history. Mind you, the Temporal Concordance don’t go past 2355; and besides, a lot of history’s recorded wrong, ain’t it? So . . .

“So if we planted something to activate then, that would take out this
satellite—” Mendoza squinted thoughtfully as she unwrapped a tamale. “Or better still, override its signal and replace it with a false signal of our own—”

Bless yer little heart, dearie, that was just what I were about to say. A nice deadly bolus for the Jamaicasat. Antigravity to take it up there, RAT transmitter to lie to the lasers so they’ll think it’s a maintenance servo and let it past them, where it’ll eat through the hull; and then our own little satellite, what clamps on the Jamaicasat and unfolds like a steel daisy, see, and picks up broadcasting without a second’s interruption once the Jamaicasat’s killed! Dr. Zeus will never know anything’s happened, but from that moment on I’ll be controlling every signal that’s sent.

“Captain, I must apologize,” said Edward, lifting his wineglass to the camera. “You have once again demonstrated your brilliance at treachery, and I stand in awe.” Mendoza looked across at him, one eyebrow raised. “But I fail to see how this has anything to do with pirates, other than being itself an act of piracy.”

We got to lay the trap, don’t we? And it’s best laid right under her keel, which is to say somewhere on Jamaica itself. Ah, says you, but where? Mighty unstable place, Jamaica; deforestation and reforestation and the ground all dug up for plantations, so’s you’d be hard put to find an acre of land that ain’t going to be disturbed one way or the other afore 2355. Worse still, there’ll be earthquakes.

“So there shall,” said Edward, who didn’t get the point. Alec shoved him aside and took control again.

A powerful lot of earthquakes.

“Well, an earthquake wouldn’t damage our mine, but it might uncover it from wherever we’d concealed it—” said Mendoza.

One bloody BIG earthquake.

“Port Royal,” yelled Alec, jumping up at his place. Bang, his head collided with the lamp and he sat down abruptly.

“Darling!” Mendoza reached out to him in concern but he caught her hand and kissed it, grinning.

Her name wasn’t Mavis Breen, but it might just as well have been.

She kept an inn in Spanish Town, the Goat and Compasses, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the Pelican in Muir Harbor, and she was a compact muscular lady of opulent attributes running just slightly to plumpness as she gravitated toward middle age. She kept a husband, too, which was why she was Mrs. Dolly Ansolabehere instead of Miss Dolly Venables.

She hadn’t particularly wanted a husband—Dolly was a strong-willed lady and preferred to call the shots in her life and her business—but like a stray dog he had somehow made himself useful, and the less formal relationship she would have preferred to establish with him was impossible, thanks to the nosiness of the Reverend Mr. Carrowes. All the clergy in Jamaica tended to zealotry in their moral crusades, overcompensation no doubt for their complete inability to do anything about that teeming cesspit of immorality across the bay: Port Royal.

Jamaica, like Dolly Venables, had had to compromise.

The British had captured Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, eager to please Oliver Cromwell, but realized they had little chance of holding on to it should the Spanish make any determined attempt to get it back. Indeed, there was only one armed force of ruthless and effective fighters ready to hand, capable of driving off any Spanish, French, or Dutch incursion, and it wasn’t the British Navy.

No, it was the Brotherhood of the Coast, that loosely organized multinational gang of privateers and pirates. The privateers had licenses and investors backing what they did, the pirates hadn’t, and that was about all there was to distinguish between them. Moreover, a treaty or a fit of pique on the part of an ambassador could shift a man’s professional status in an hour. It was the veneer of respectability on privateering, however, that legally enabled the British holding Jamaica to, as it were, invite the big chicken-killing dog into the yard to protect its sheep.

A fortress was built on a wide sandy hook of land that projected into the bay opposite the future site of Kingston. A crude and violent little city grew up around it, full of all things necessary to attract vicious clientele and make them happy repeat customers. Taverns and brothels without number, gaming houses, lodging houses, merchants eager to convert plundered goods into cash, purveyors and providers of every item the discriminating cutthroat might need when going on the account, warehouses in which to store it all, and churches for the salvation of any souls that might crawl in between drinking binges. It was Port Royal, and it was deemed the wickedest and most impudent place since Sodom or Gomorrah.

It was also a fantastic commercial success. So the deal with the Devil stood, and though the rest of Jamaica—which had been settled by God-fearing Puritans, mind!—wrung its hands in shame, it was also able to farm its sugar cane without fear of foreign invasion, and pocket the profits.

Mrs. Ansolabehere’s situation was far less morally painful. Dr. Ansolabehere was of a most agreeable, not to say docile nature, as husbands went. He had appeared in the common room of the Goat and Compasses one night in 1660 with no belongings other than a small sea chest and the clothes on his back. After a meal, a warming glass of rum, and an hour’s charming conversation, he had somehow taken up the position in Miss Venables’s life that he had occupied, with few interruptions, ever since.