The Sons of Heaven (36 page)

“Are you going to quarrel?” Nicholas asked breathlessly.

“No, indeed,” said Edward. He stood and kissed my hand. “By all means, my love, survey the land. It’s not as though we haven’t all the time in the world.”

Alec applauded.

We stopped briefly on the beach on our way back, so that Edward could stalk about picking up likely-looking bits of seashell. He retired into the saloon as soon as we got back, settled down with Sir Henry to produce grandiose virtual renderings of Villa Bell-Fairfax while I gave the boys their bath.

Well, the building hasn’t quite gone as planned.

“You know what it looks like, señor?” I said unhelpfully, as we stood staring down at what should have been a palatial edifice and was instead a mess of melted-looking foundations. “Like those science experiments we used to do at the Base schools. Moon Rocks! Watch them grow! Just take a little salt, some laundry bluing…”

“That’s absurd,” said Edward. “It ought to have worked.”

The little bastards is working, Commander, but they don’t seem to have no clear idea what they’re supposed to do, said Sir Henry, speaking out of Bully Hayes’s chest. I reckon I could have a go at reprogramming ‘em for you, sir
.

“Or we could just slap up a tiki hut,” I suggested.

“No,” said Edward, with a certain asperity.

So back we went to the ship, and Edward took over the saloon and commanded silence while he reviewed his grand plan for flaws. The boys and I went away to the nursery and were very quiet all afternoon, doing hyperfunction exercises until they wore themselves out and went down for their naps. I lay down with them but couldn’t rest, feeling the tidal pull of Edward’s frustration through three bulkheads and two cabins.

At last I got up and wandered out to the saloon. Edward was still sitting where I’d left him, staring into the screen of the composition plaquette and drumming his fingers on the table.

There are no errors, he transmitted. I have been over my calculations repeatedly
.

Well, señor, maybe this is just a little beyond nanotechnology, I replied, sliding into the booth beside him. Nobody’s ever tried—

Of course it’s never been tried. That’s not the point. It
ought
to work!
Edward’s finger-drumming increased in speed. I put my hand over his.

Perhaps you ought to set it aside, just temporarily, and then you can approach it again with a rested mind, I told him soothingly. I can think of one way to relax…

Hmmmph
. He was still staring at the screen.

The children are asleep
, I hinted. That sank in and he looked up sharply.
Oh
.

Have I mentioned that we’re not, as it were, romping in Venus’s grove much lately? Pretty pathetic for omnitemporal superbeings, eh? But, you know, there are the children, whose presence is, ahem, somewhat inhibiting. Yes, I know that once upon a different lifetime I did everything imaginable with Nicholas and with Alec, too, but somehow seeing them at knee level affects me oddly. Presumably they have memories of those all-night romps somewhere in their little heads, too, but… I cannot deal with this now. It seems unthinkable to me, loathsome …

And what with one thing and another we’ve been pretty busy, and anyway we get
tired
in linear time, at the end of a long day. Most nights all we manage is a brief blissful consciousness-mingling, which is actually better than sex, to be perfectly honest, and yet we find ourselves strangely reluctant to give up on the old-fashioned physical union because … oh, I don’t know, maybe we feel that if we let go of this crucial bit of the human experience, we’ll have edged that much closer to losing our old selves in the Beings-of-Pure-Energy cliché?

Anyway, we ever so carefully edged out of the booth and crept away to the aft stateroom, where we spent approximately ten busy minutes before our nerves got the better of us and we went tiptoeing back to the saloon. And there we both halted, in mutual coronary near-arrest, and I was exceedingly
glad I’d muted my customary wails of rapture, because
there was Alec
, who had wandered, all sleepy and rumpled-looking, into the saloon. He had climbed up into the booth and was peering into Edward’s composition plaquette.

“Why, sweetheart!” I said, in quite the highest falsetto I have ever mustered, and wishing I didn’t feel quite so much as though I were a wife in a French farce. “You woke up!”

“Mm-hm,” said Alec, rubbing one eye. He looked up at us. “Is this supposed to be programming, Deaddy?”

“Yes,” said Edward, starting forward. “You mustn’t play with it! It’s very important—”

“Well, but you left out a step,” Alec informed him.

“I beg your pardon?” Edward halted.

“Here and here and this bit here,” said Alec, smudging the plaquette screen as he pointed.
“Three
steps, actually.”

“Don’t touch the screen,” said Edward automatically, as he bent to the table and grabbed up the plaquette. He stared intently a moment; then looked at Alec with the strangest expression. “Oblige me by explaining,” he said.

Alec just beamed, you never saw a child look so smug, and patted the booth next to him. “Sit down, old dead guy.”

So there they were for the next two hours, really the sweetest picture; you’d have thought they were Daddy and Baby reading an alphabet book together. Alec had a gleeful field day pointing out all the flaws in Edward’s design, but Edward listened without his customary irritation. He even let Alec fill in the missing code, and apparently there was quite a lot of missing code. When Alec had had his fill of crowing, Edward thanked him and sent him swaggering back to the nursery with a piece of toast and jam.

Then he turned to me (I had been unobtrusively tending to the potted plants all this while), seized me around the waist, and bent me backward in a profound kiss. “You’re taking this well, I must say,” I gasped, when we came up for air.

“We have created something better than ourselves,” he said, with an expression of—what? Holy joy? For a moment, he looked almost like Nicholas, my Nicholas as he had used to be.

We have now been here six months linear. Villa Bell-Fairfax is not quite finished, in part because the señor keeps coming up with improvements on his original design. It’s going to be awesome when it’s done, I suppose. I was
afraid Edward’s little seashell-building nanobots would produce something like a pink plastic dollhouse, but the effect actually resembles white pottery or glass, gently translucent and only faintly pearly in certain lights. It looks like no Italianate mansion I ever saw—those cupolas, those balustrades, those arches, that gingerbread! Still, I’m sure it’ll all come together in a style of its own. If it’s ever finished.

For one thing, the wainscoting is entirely carved mahogany, which Edward is getting, piece by piece, from some shop up in London circa 1845. I do wonder what the mortal shopkeepers make of the profoundly tall man who turns up in their shop now and then, purchasing great chunks of their best quality polished paneling, paying for it with suspiciously new-minted gold sovereigns and politely declining assistance as he carries it out of their shop, then adjusting their perception so they don’t notice as he steps with it sidelong back through time. In the same way he is accumulating marble, tiles, oak planks for flooring, plumbing… though the
baths on the Roman plan
are proving a little tricky, even for an all-powerful superbeing.

He labors all day at the building site, installing this, adjusting that, assisted by Bully Hayes and Billy Bones. I, by common consent, take the little boys with me as I slog on with my environmental survey. The survey was taking longer than Edward thought it should, because of course there are no roads for easy access in our untouched island paradise, so one night Edward sent the servos out to grade some. I was so furious with him I could have screamed, but of course I couldn’t in front of the children and anyway I saw at once he had thought I’d be
delighted!
He was startled and contrite when he picked up what I was feeling, but what’s done is done.

And I suppose the scars will eventually green over again. Most of them.

I have a feeling I’m going to have nightmares tonight. Yes, thank you, Flint, I will have some of that rum.

We went out this morning, the boys and I. A kiss for Deaddy at the Villa Bell-Fairfax worksite, and then away into the depths of the island, exploring.

It’s difficult being a cyborg botanist drone, when you have two little boys waiting, with greater (Nicholas) and lesser (Alec) degrees of patience, for you to stop studying some damn plant so we can
go
somewhere. Is that a cave over there? Is that a volcano? Can we build a house in this tree? Are there deadly piranhas in the lagoon? Are there coconuts in that palm tree? Can I climb up and pick some? Why can’t I? Look, is that a crocodile?

This is why my environmental survey is taking forever, because after an hour of this I just give up and play Wendy or Tinkerbell or Tiger Lily or whatever they want me to be. Figuratively speaking, of course. They’re much too intellectually advanced for mere make-believe. They’re
Cyborg Children
, after all.

We got all the way over to the windward side of the island, on the graded road that snakes along like a black gash through the screaming green foliage. We came to the crest of the ridge, very like my old prison on Santa Catalina, along its rocky spine: same sea wind pushing up the hillside to fan my face, same ferny trees waving below. Nicholas pointed at the far horizon. “Clouds,” he said. “Is that a storm?”

“Run a scan,” I suggested. “Check the meteorological data.”

“Yup! It’s a typhoon coming our way,” announced Alec.

Nicholas looked frightened, and I shook my head. Nicholas closed his eyes, scowling as he ran the numbers; then opened them and glared at Alec. “It is not,” he said. “It’s just rain. You only said that to be dramatic.”

Alec stuck out his tongue at him and Nicholas drew back his fist, at which point I grabbed his arm. “No fighting!”

“I wasn’t going to hit him in the
head,”
said Nicholas sullenly.

“But it’s a big storm,” said Alec. “With lots of rain. I was only exaggerating a little. It’s coming this way fast, too. Isn’t it?”

“You’re right,” I said, scanning the clouds myself and feeling, then, just a little unease. “Well, we won’t stay out too long today. I think we’ll just survey this one bit of forest.”

It was a fairly dense cover of Norfolk Island pine and ironwood, or things that might be hitherto-unknown variant subspecies of same, just the sort of thing to seduce me into lingering there for days while I ran all possible tests. The old romance was gone, though, somehow. I grew more and more nervous as I worked, as the little boys flitted back and forth between the tree trunks, playing at hyperfunction hide and seek. At last I glanced up and saw not blue sky between the branches but bruised purple air full of heat and wrath. I muttered something profane.

“What?” said Alec, beside me like a shot.

“Never mind. Where’s Nicholas?”

“Here,” he said, materializing in front of me. “It’s starting to rain.”

“Well, crumbs,” I said effortfully. “I suppose we ought to start back, then.”

“Why?”Alec said. “We’re cyborgs. A little rain isn’t going to hurt us, is it?”

“No,” I agreed, peering up at the clouds. I used to work all through the
storm season in the Ventana, never once worrying what might happen. I loved storms. I reveled in the downpour, in the blast and the flash and the ozone following a lightning strike. Strangely thrilling, to dodge between the falling bolts. A risk no properly programmed cyborg would ever take, but oh well.

Still, the idea of Alec or Nicholas doing something like that made my stomach knot up in terror. “Let’s go dance in it!” said Alec brightly.

“No! We’re just going to sit here under cover and wait for it to blow through,” I said. I led them to a thicket, screened over by branches but well away from any tree trunks, and we stretched out in the prickly gloom.

“We’re like deer in the forest,” said Nicholas, snuggling against me.

“Like in that holo?” said Alec.
“Bambi
, right, with the talking animals, and then he’s an orphan, but then the big king stag comes and turns out to be his father?”

“When did we let you download that?” I said. “That’s much too scary for you!”

“It was just there when I accessed,” said Alec, a little too casually. “It was all right. I wasn’t frightened. You’d have to be a pretty big baby to be frightened.”

“You were frightened,” said Nicholas.

“No, I wasn’t!”

“Alec, it’s got forest fires and savage dogs and … and a traumatic orphaning,” I said. The rain, meanwhile, increased; a few drops made it through the canopy and plinked on the broad brim of my hat.

“But we’re immortals,” said Nicholas. “And nothing like that can ever happen to us.” He said it with a certainty that meant he wanted to be reassured, so I put my arm around him.

“No, of course not,” I said, and made a mental note to ask Sir Henry if there’s any way to limit the files to which they have access. Alec has enough nightmares as it is. Just then, though, there was a blinding violet-white flash and thunder like the sky cracking open right on top of us.

When it faded, I found that I was on my feet and tensed to run, with two little limpet-babies clinging to me, trembling, though Alec shouted “Wheehoo!”

Where are you?
Edward transmitted, through a burst of static.

Four kilometers west-northwest, on the ridge!

Where’s my boy?
Unusual, to hear a machine panicking.

“I’m okay, Captain!” cried Alec, though his voice was drowned by another flash/crack.

Come back immediately! You ought
—Edward’s transmission broke up in more static, but the implied reproach was there, and I felt miserably guilty. I thought he was overreacting, of course, but I was also remembering Joseph’s face the time he caught me out in that cornfield in Spain when the storm was breaking, and really, this is just too much complicated psychological baggage to contemplate right now.