The Sons of Heaven (50 page)

In Prague a well-dressed man sat quietly at a café table in the old square. He ordered tea, and watched the mortal carnival for hours, and when the great Clock struck and its mechanical Death nodded, he nodded back.

In Iraq a woman knelt in the ruins of Babylon the Great and wept awhile, and at last settled herself to wait at the base of a broken statue of Ishtar.

What were you expecting they’d do?

Rise in rebellion, as in a nice testosterone-loaded science fiction novel, laser pistols blazing away in both fists?

He wore a loincloth of jaguar skin, a shivering sunburst of feathers that radiated a full meter out from his head, and golden bells that rang as he stamped out the Dance of the Cycle of Days. Jade beads clicked out the rhythm against his chest, in the long passage of the dance where the drums fell silent. The audience watched, rapt, waiting for a misstep that never happened, though sweat fell from his body like rain; every step perfect, balanced, effortless. While he danced, it was possible to believe he held the universe together, and would dance forever.

He was Agustin Aguilar, twenty-two years old, Flatley Scholarship winner, principal dancer with Ballet Folklorico de Veracruz. It was the eve of his wedding.

For that reason he left the party after the show early, programmed his car for Acapulco, and cranked back his seat so he could get some sleep on the long drive. The city lights fell behind. For a while there were stars; they slipped gradually under a wall of black cloud, but by then Agustin was sleeping and didn’t see the red flash of lightning, miles ahead in the mountains to the west.

It was hours before the strike came. It jolted him awake when it hit, a flare of light brighter than the sun, and the afterimage as all the instruments on the console burned out. Then, a drop and an impact that rattled his teeth, a prolonged scream of metal, a fan of sparks thrown up to either side; the car’s ag drive had cut out and it had fallen to the road, was hurtling forward across asphalt, slewing to one side as it came. Off the edge of the road it went, into a ditch, with a sickening jar.

Agustin could see nothing but pitch blackness for a moment. A light approached, diffused through the dust cloud he’d raised. He threw off his shock enough to shout, to pound on the transparent canopy, to grope for the
emergency release lever. The canopy was jammed, but someone was outside now, yanking on it, a black silhouette backlit by headlights through the roiling dust. The canopy was wrenched away with a shriek and someone was hauling him out bodily. Agustin was set on his feet, shivering in the night air. “Are you all right, man?” shouted his rescuer.

“I think so,” said Agustin through chattering teeth, staring at the stranger. An ordinary-looking guy, despite his astonishing strength. He seemed a little older than Agustin, had a lean somber face and Indian cheekbones, a black gaze like a flint knife.

“My God,” said the stranger. “Struck by lightning! Your car’s fried, my friend.” He pointed down at the hood where paint had bubbled away to bare steel at the edges of the black hole, out of which white smoke and floating ash streamed upward.

“My tuxedo—” Agustin started forward, but the man stopped him like a stone wall.

“I’ll get it,” he said brusquely, and a second later was handing Agustin his suitcase and garment bag. “Come on, my son, let’s get you to Acapulco.”

Agustin was grateful for the warmth of the stranger’s truck, for the hot soup from the stranger’s thermjar, for the use of the stranger’s Shisha to notify the car rental agency, for every kilometer that took him away from the wreck and closer to Marisol.

“So, what’s the tuxedo for?” said the stranger. His face was spookily lit by the green console lights.

“I’m getting married tomorrow,” said Agustin. “Today, I guess. The ninth. I have a lot to thank you for, Mr …?”

“Aguilar,” said the other. “Porfirio Aguilar.”

“I’m Agustin Aguilar! Do you think we might be related?”

“Maybe,” said Porfirio. He accelerated, racing the night to get the boy to his wedding day, one gesture of hope at the end of time.

The pitch was not going well. Nevertheless, Mary deWit squared her shoulders and smiled her brightest for the holocams.

“Actually, Mr. Plowman, the media made it look at lot worse than it was. The loss of life was mainly due to the superheated gas. The city itself—”

“No! What kind of money-grubbing idiot rebuilds a city on an erupting volcano?”

“But Mons Olympus didn’t erupt, Mr. Plowman. The bomb set off the reaction in the power plant, and that blew out the magma chamber. There were survivors, you know, in the underground residential blocks, and the buildings
above
the power plant were untouched. If you’ll just look at the figures I sent you, you’ll see that the cost of rebuilding would be offset—”

Mr. Plowman interrupted her with more uncomplimentary remarks about the stupidity of living on Mars in the first place, followed by his opinion of corporate greed in general and the Griffith Family Arean Trust in particular. Mary was grateful when he ended the transmission. Carefully she shut the holocams down, crossed Mr. Plowman off her list of potential donors, went into the bathroom and had a screaming cry into the hotel’s towels.

When she felt a little better, she washed and dried her face, retouched her makeup, and went out to face her next ordeal. Someone was standing by the window in her room, looking out at the night. Mary, feeling a welcome flood of righteous wrath, pulled out her Gwyddon and poised her thumb over the alarm button.

“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing in my room?” she said. The man turned to face her. She gasped, dropped the Gwyddon, clutched at her heart. He was beside her in a second, supporting her. “Child—I’m so sorry—”

“Papa!” she cried, when she could get her breath. Then—”You’re not real. You died in that wreck. You’ve been gone twenty years. I’ve been working too hard and this is my unconscious summoning you up. Oh, Goddess—”

“Actually, my death was faked,” he said in a sheepish voice. It took a minute for that to sink in, so caught up was she in the pleasure of burying her face against his shoulder, feeling his arms around her, being for a moment seven years old and safe from all harm. But when it sank in:

“Faked?”
She pulled back and stared at him. Eliphal deWit, just as he’d looked … in the days of her childhood, his beard cinnamon-brown, and not the stooped graying man whose eyeglasses were the only thing to have been recovered from the wreck.

“How’s your mother?” he inquired, as though he’d left only the week before. “In a retirement home in Newport, hating everyone, as usual,” said Mary, choking on tears. “And you’d better do some explaining. You’d better do it pretty damned fast—”

“Shhh,” he said, putting his long forefinger to her lips, just as he had done when she’d been little. There were tears in his eyes, too. “Sit down, baby. I just wanted to see you. I’ll tell you everything. It doesn’t matter. Not now.”

There was a gracious old house on a street of chestnut trees. It was beautifully furnished in late-nineteenth-century style, with paintings and carpets and antique furniture, except in one upper chamber.

The floor was tiled in that room, and along one wall a maintenance console blinked with tiny lights, and against the opposite wall was a transparent tank filled with blue fluid, glowing softly. In its depths the body floated.

It was recognizably Kalugin now, much more presentable than it had been on the day when Nan had received Suleyman’s call from Fez. He had tried to prepare her for what she’d see, when she arrived after a whirlwind flight. Both he and Latif had stared when she’d knelt and taken the ruined thing in her arms.

Though Kalugin’s immortal body was now nearly healed, the condition of his immortal mind was still in question. There was brain activity, but whether or not damage had been done by long-term immersion in heavy metals was uncertain. No operative had ever spent two and a half centuries in a sunken wreck in a state of fugue.

Nan believed he was still in there. Given enough time to heal, he would certainly wake one morning, open his eyes, turn his wondering face to her.

Unfortunately, they had run out of time.

Though that wasn’t why she was weeping now, as she sat by the tank.

In her hand was an opened envelope and the card it had contained. Within the card was written, in a graceful and old-fashioned hand, the following:

“Hurry up,” cried Bugleg. “Start the motor!”

“Don’t you dare,” Freestone snapped at the pilot. “There’s three more of my people on the way up. I just spotted them down in the street!”

The pilot sighed and nodded, but set the motor warming up anyway. There were cries of relief from her passengers, who were all in a pitiable state of terror by this time. Freestone glared at her, and pointedly wedged the door open with his body. At last the roof elevator opened and three figures straggled out, clutching their travel packs.

“Oh,
them,”
Rossum said, and sniffed, because the latecomers were none other than the team responsible for, among other things, the ill-fated Recombinant project: Clive Rutherford, Francis Chatterji, and Foxen Ellsworth-Howard.

“Please don’t leave us,”
beseeched Rutherford, throwing his pudgy body forward. He tripped and fell, and his friends were instantly beside him, pulling him up.

“Hold the shracking door!” Ellsworth-Howard snarled.

“It’s not our fault,” Chatterji said. “The tube ran late! There was a f-fire at the St. Pancras station.”

“Was it the cyborgs rioting?” Freestone’s eyes widened.

“We don’t know,” Rutherford panted, shouldering his way in and finding a seat, with Chatterji close behind him.

“It wasn’t my Preservers,” Ellsworth-Howard said, as the door slammed shut and sealed itself behind him. “They got more shracking sense than that!”

“Take off!” Bugleg told the pilot, in the loudest voice he’d ever used.

“Your
Preservers?” said Rappacini coldly, surveying Ellsworth-Howard. “That’s right; you were the head of the Physical Design group, weren’t you?”

“He was the one who worked out the original augmentation method on the cyborgs,” shouted someone from the back of the transport.

“So we have
you
to thank for all this,” shouted someone else, as the transport lifted off with a lurch and a roar.

“Oh yeh?” Ellsworth-Howard said, flinging down his pack and starting for the back of the transport in a menacing fashion, rolling up one sleeve as he went. Chatterji leaped up and caught him, and pulled him down into an empty seat.

“Please,” he cried. “What good will it do to b-blame each other now? We were all part of it!”

At that there was silence, as the mortals considered his words and could find no way to deny them. London fell away below the transport, and they made the suborbital leap to heaven. “Wasting my shracking Preservers,” muttered Ellsworth-Howard. “Serves ‘em right.”

Lopez would have heartily agreed with him on that point, had he been there, but he was making his way to the conference room at that moment.

He was very much out of temper. All his authorizations had been canceled, which meant that the lift doors wouldn’t open for him, and even when he ripped a hole in them and clambered through, the lift still stubbornly refused to rise. He had had to tear the fire door off the emergency stair and climb up twelve flights, where he then had to smash another door to get into the hallway. By the time he picked up the water cooler and used it to batter down the doors to the conference room he was every inch the rampaging cyborg rebel his masters so feared.

Lopez stared around a moment at the empty room. It was littered with discarded chlorilar cups and snack food wrappers, obviously deserted in haste. “Those cowardly little cretins,” he growled. He faced the bronze of Artemisium Zeus in an accusatory sort of way. “Almighty Zeus! I demand an answer. Hear me!”

I HEAR.

“You hear, do you? Well, explain yourself! How could you let this happen? You told me you’d save us, and instead you stood by and did
nothing
, while the masters plotted to disable us.”

YOU HAVE NOT BEEN DISABLED.

“Some of us have! Or didn’t you see Aegeus’s warning broadcast, All-Seeing One?”

AEGEUS IS LYING. NONE OF YOUR PEOPLE HAVE BEEN DECEIVED BY THE MORTALS’ GIFT.

Lopez looked astonished, and then began to pace in intense speculation. “Of course. Aegeus is lying, because he hopes to trigger violent revolution. He thinks
he’ll
be in charge when the dust settles! Yes, that’s it, I see it now. The clever bastard. Well—” He peered up at the ceiling again. “All the same, the masters treacherously conspired in our downfall, and you let them get away with it.”

I DID NOT LET THEM GET AWAY.

“What?”

I SENT THEM TO THE COMMAND POST ON SANTA CATALINA ISLAND.

“What kind of punishment is that? That’s the safest place they could be,” Lopez said indignantly.

AEGEUS IS ALREADY THERE. SO IS LABIENUS. SULEYMAN AND AN ARMED FORCE OF HIS ADHERENTS ARE ON THEIR WAY
THERE TO SEIZE POWER. THERE IS ALSO AN ARMY APPROACHING BY SEA.

“Oh,” said Lopez. A smile of incredulous and nasty delight spread across his face. “They’ll be sitting in the middle of a wasp’s nest, won’t they? Good Lord, whoever wins the power struggle, the masters will be exterminated like rats.” His smile faded as he glanced at the bronze again. “Er… forgive me, All-Seeing, that I ever doubted you. You have truly avenged your people. Accept my heartfelt thanks and my worship.” Something occurred to him, and he added: “You said there’s an army coming by sea? Whose army?”