The Sons of Heaven (21 page)

Easy to find the polarized dark goggles she needed, though they were dusty and flyspecked on their display rack. Who needed such things in that gray rainy country, except holidaymakers hoping to ski? And easy to find the writing things, the thin cylinders. Her eye was drawn to a lovely one, thicker and bigger than the others, its case and cap all decorated with swirly patterns. As she pulled it from the display there was a click, and a ghostly voice told her:
You’ll be glad you’ve selected the Little Book of Kells Calligraphy Master! Price is One Punt Eightpence. For information on entering the all-parish schools penmanship competition for 2355, kindly apply to the keeper of this shop
.

One punt eightpence? Yes, that was the other thing she needed. She found the cashbox and puzzled over it only a moment before she got it to disgorge the greasy leaves of paper marked with pictures of bearded men and harps. They smelled fearfully of big people, but she crammed a good wad of them into her bag.

Nothing left, then, but to sprint up the stairs to the big lady’s bed-sitter and rifle her closet. These weren’t Princess clothes at all! Bulky cable-knit things and floppy frumpy stuff. No gauzy moonbeams or cobwebs. Tiara wrinkled her nose at the sight of them, but selected what she needed without lingering, reflecting that this was a disguise after all.

Her bag was quite heavy, tearing now. Tiara helped herself to one of the pillow slips off the big lady’s bed: much better. She rearranged her goods and, hefting the bag over her shoulder, ran lightly down the stairs and out into the night.

The big lady woke with a start and drew back from the doorway, realizing that she’d been sleepwalking again. Muttering to herself, she shut and locked the door and creaked back up to bed.

Tiara made for the garden wall, but found she was unable to vault it again with her bag. She turned to find another way out, and stopped, staring.

She’d scarcely glanced at the place on her way in; now it took her attention fiercely. A square of green walled by stone, with roses tidy all along the wall, white roses echoing starlight, and how the stars were glittering down! And such perfume, and the bright shimmer of water in a stone basin. And a man.

He did not move. After a moment Tiara understood that he wasn’t a real man but a stone figure, no taller than she was, really; only the distance and the starlight had made him seem big. She ventured close.

The man was smiling so kindly, with such a gentle face, but staring past her with blind stone eyes, just as her slave stared. He was holding out his cupped hands before him. Clear water welled from his palms, and trickled down over his fingertips to drop into the stone basin. He seemed to be offering Tiara a drink.

She came forward, enchanted, leaning close to look into his hands. There were rippling stars reflected in the water. She bent her head and drank thirstily. It was good water. She could taste the stars.

“You have our royal thanks,” she told him grandly, but he said nothing. Suddenly Tiara wanted her slave very much.

There was an arched gate in the wall just beyond, and she slipped out through it and ran away. So light her footfall was that even with the bag, she made no sound as she left Knockdoul behind her.

It was quick, the journey back. Was this all it took to cross the boundaries of her old life? Tiara looked out in astonishment at the wide world she’d explored, beginning to go pale in the creeping dawn, and saw it was only a little place.

And yet her old world was smaller still. She pushed her way down through the crawlhole to the bone room, and her heart pounded against her ribs to see her slave still there, huddled where she’d left him. She swept the old brown bones aside and knelt to kiss his cheek. He jumped and shivered, opening his eyes.

“It’s me, darling one, jewel of my heart,” she told him. “Such presents I’ve brought you!”Tiara upended the pillow slip and spilled out her loot, the bright stuff and the clothes and the brown bottles. The slave heard them rattling out and his eyebrows drew together in confusion, then arched wide with amazement. He levered himself upright.

“Great Caesar’s ghost,” he cried hoarsely. “You did it? You’ve gone and come back? Oh, where’s my time sense? My Princess, my beautiful brave one!” His nostrils flared as he caught the scent of what was in the brown bottles. “And you’ve brought me vitamins—” He groped frantically for them.

“To be sure I have, sweet lord,” she crowed, and pressed a bottle into his hand. He turned it between his fingers, unable to get it open, until she saw what was the matter and took it back. “‘Having said this, Calypso laid her table, setting out in abundance Ambrosia and pouring the red nectar; and so the way-opener, the Swift-Arriving, drank and ate,’” she quoted teasingly. She twisted the neck from the bottle and gave it back to her slave, who gulped the contents down as though they were nectar and ambrosia indeed.

“Oh,” he cried, when he had swallowed them, “oh, well done, Princess. That was a high-mineral supplement. God Apollo, I’ll be walking down Brook Street in no time! Is there any more?”

“Long-vexed royal Odysseus, there is so,”Tiara chanted. “Bottles and jars, jars and bottles, and all for the darling one. Will you have more, my hero?”

The slave laughed wildly. “Ah, I could fill myself so full I’d rattle! No, no, best to be temperate. Drink down some water, yes, metabolize a little at a time. And you’re the hero, the heroine, my little goddess, you’re rosy-fingered Dawn herself.”

“‘And the goddess gave him a skin of dark wine, and another of water,’” Tiara recited, fetching him the beer bottle they kept water in. He drank it down as she watched gleefully. “But wait! There’s more.”

“You found paper to make a parcel?”

“How much would you expect to pay,” she sang, fetching out the present kit, “for this beautiful parcel-post-wrappy thing? Thirty punts? Forty? Fifty? Well, you can have it all today for our low, low price of only free!”

“Oooo,” chortled the slave, and felt about for it until she set it in his hands. His thin fingers turned it and turned it, as his face grew thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “I know what this is. It folds into a box, doesn’t it? Here are the seals and tabs. Well done, well done. We’ll need only to pack the sample with something so it doesn’t rattle about.” He set it by. “Did you find a pen, my love?”

“The very beautiful Little Book of Kells Calligraphy Master,” Tiara replied, putting it into his hand with a flourish.

“Really?” The slave ran his thumb over its shaft until he found the activator button, which he pressed. The pen came on with a little beep, and its red light winked to show it was readying the laserjet. “How exciting! We must have a scriptorium.”

Tiara had no idea what that might mean, but it turned out to be a broken lighting panel laid across the slave’s lap and underpropped by four skulls of roughly matching sizes. The torn paper sack was torn further, into a sheet of serviceable size and flatness, and Tiara arranged it before the slave and held it for him as he lifted pen to paper.

Here he paused a moment, sucking in his lower lip as he thought very hard. At last he began to write, slowly and carefully shaping the letters he could not see. In straggling but beautiful Latin, he wrote:

“If only there was a way to render ‘biomechanicals’ in Latin,” the slave fussed, laying down the pen.

“What is Latin, my treasure?”Tiara looked admiringly at the flowing uncials.

“A secret language,” the slave told her, laying a finger beside his nose. “No one’s spoken it in centuries, but Suleyman will be able to read it. You see? We’re terribly clever, darling. Where’s that box got to, now?”

The parcelmistress turned, frowning, and looked about her tiny office. Where had the voice come from? She started involuntarily as it sounded on the air again. “If you please,” it insisted, “I want to send a parcel to Compassionates of Allah. It’s a present for Uncle Suleyman.”

A bright-wrapped package came over the edge of the counter. The parcelmistress leaned forward and stared down at the little girl who had spoken to her. There was a moment when her brain raced wildly to make sense of what she was seeing.

The child was white as ashes, wore polarized goggles, a lot of bulky clothing
and a stocking cap, though her tiny dirty feet were bare. Was she a Traveler’s child from one of the caravans? Was she an albino? The Compassionates of Allah were all black men, so perhaps—

“A nice birthday present for your uncle?” the parcelmistress inquired, pulling the little box onto the mailer. It was weighed, enclosed in a mold, and the mold was injected with foam that expanded into a protective shell and dried instantly. The mold withdrew, leaving the parcel ready for its label.

“Yes indeed,” the child replied, in such a piercingly sweet voice the parcelmistress very nearly forgot what she was doing. She shook her head in confusion and turned to the microphone.

“And where would he live, your uncle Suleyman?” she asked. The child simply stared at her, expressionless behind the great black optics of her goggles. “Er—nearest charterhouse of the Compassionates of Allah, would it be?”

“Yes indeed,” the child repeated.

“That’ll be in Dublin,” the parcelmistress told her, and asked the printer for a label with the correct address. It came whirring out on an avery, and she tore it off and affixed it to the parcel. “Two and seven, dear.”

A grubby ball of money bounced up on the counter. The parcelmistress decided the child was certainly from the caravans; nobody but tinkers and road trash used cash anymore, even here. She took the old bills gingerly and turned to make change, but when she turned back she was alone in the room. She stood there, blinking a moment, as her memory of the visitor faded, shifted, altered. Without thinking she dropped the change in her pocket and set the package with the others, where the van boy would pick them up that afternoon.

And he did so, and the little parcel began its long journey. The first stop was the tall house full of robed black men, where a Communications Brother peered at the address and frowned in puzzlement. He took it to the office of the most reverend of the gentlemen there, and after a brief discussion they lasered open the foam case and beheld the package. They opened it cautiously and found the letter.

Within three hours the parcel had been sealed up again and locked in a case, which the reverend Brother carried with him as he boarded the transport to take him out of that rainy green purgatory, away to a blessed land of light and warmth …

So I suppose we’re omnipresent now. Omnitemporal? But not truly omnipotent, as Edward hastens to correct me: “Only to the limits of my observational ability, my dear.”

It appears that the truth about Time is rather more complex than we were told in school. Dr. Zeus explained to its little cyborgs that mortals perceive time in a linear way, because they have no other frame of reference; but in reality (they said) it is more of a spiral than a line, and when you learn to step across from one part of the spiral to another, you can travel through time. It would seem, however, that the Company wasn’t telling the truth. As usual.

Whoever first learned how to travel in time, whether it was the Company or those little pale people from whom it stole its technology—it appears they took one look at the awful incoherent vastness of it all, screamed, and hastily projected conduits of artificial linear time with which to travel through the mess in a more or less orderly way. The restriction against being able to travel forward in time was a result of the conduit system. Real time is nonlinear, chaos, all-simultaneous, extending through every direction and dimension at once, and Edward alone knows what this does to causality. Entropy is an artifact of mortal perception.

We, of course, are beyond all that now, ascended beings that we are.

Here outside of time, it doesn’t seem to make that much difference. I must admit it’s pleasant, terrifically liberating. We can stop the sun in the sky if we choose, we can prolong the nights indefinitely, we need never eat nor drink again if we aren’t so inclined; but avoiding linear existence grows unsettling after a while. There is that suspicion that if we simply blissed out and meshed with Eternity and each other permanently, we might… oh, I don’t know, be
transformed into beings of pure energy or some other cliché, and of course that would never do. Not with the plans Edward has for Ruling the World.

I do feel better knowing that the Crome’s radiation is gone, I must say, even if Edward did shut it off without my permission. He does a lot of things without my permission.

Though even if I had ever been able to use the Crome’s for psychic powers, I wouldn’t need it now.

Edward’s still stalking about Byronically exulting in his newfound immortal senses. (Ha-ha!) His mortal senses were pretty hot, so I can only imagine what he’s experiencing.

No, that’s not true … because I can do much more than imagine. I have only to poke around a little and I can summon up every one of Edward’s memories, some of which are pretty ghastly. But I see with equal clarity how he hated the work he was set to do, so I forbear to judge. After all, I have killed mortals in my time.

I am equally an open book, wherein he reads at his pleasure. This makes our sex life exquisite and truly interesting, but we’re learning to be careful about doing it out of bed. Honesty can be painful.

He knows, for example, that I was more than a little peeved at his appalled pronouncement on the tininess of my mental faculties compared to his own. He has repeatedly apologized. In this new world, where he strides like a self-assured god, his only remaining worry is how I feel about him.