The Sons of Heaven (53 page)

“Wouldn’t that be a shame.” Amaunet swirled her wine and sipped.

The waiters stepped in at this point and removed the empty dishes, and conversation languished for a moment as the assembled diners watched their
movements like hawks. Still, there was no ominous massing to one side or the other. The sweet course was set out without incident, and liqueur was poured.

“Isn’t this another dish from the
Titanic?”
exclaimed Aethelstan.

“Peaches in Chartreuse jelly, yes,” Victor told him.

“And Black Elysium!”Aegeus lifted his liqueur glass. “Oh, Victor. Whatever regime takes form in our brave new world, you really must be appointed Entertainment Director.” His tone was decidedly patronizing.

“I hope I can hold you to that promise,” said Victor, and there was something in his smile that made them scan their latest course with extra care. They found nothing, however, and both sides of the table drew the conclusion that the coup was scheduled for the seventh course. Indeed, even now a splendid cornucopia of fruit was being arranged on the sideboard, as were several cheeses.

So they all relaxed, for the moment. “Sublime stuff, this,” sighed Nennius, after tasting the Chartreuse jelly. He took another mouthful. At that moment tremendous chords sounded in the room, D minor and its dominant, and there were cries of delight.

“Speaking of sublime!” Aegeus said. “The Statue’s music from
Don Giovanni!
Victor, this is too perfect.” He looked meaningfully at Labienus and intoned with the Commendatore:
“E cenar teco m’invitasti, e son venuto!”

“Ah.” Labienus closed his eyes in bliss, ignoring the dig. “You know, I think it might be worth it, being damned, if one went down to this music.”

“And who wrote the music?” countered Aegeus. “The mortal Mozart, the most unprepossessing, dirty-minded little monkey it would be possible to meet.”

“What’s the point of reminding us of that?” inquired Xi Wang-Mu in distaste.

“To reiterate, madam, that the fairest rose blooms on the foulest dungheap,” Aegeus said. “Everything we find graceful or useful or poignant, comes from these creatures.”

“I decline to keep a dungheap in my bedroom, all the same,” she replied, showing her teeth a little.

“Dung,” said Nennius, “ought to be shoveled into a hole in the ground where it belongs.”

Victor looked gently pained. “Sir, madam—perhaps a change of metaphor, at the table?” he suggested.

“Thank you, Victor. Beauty is a trap, you know.” Labienus smiled and shook his head. “And the love of luxury is a dangerous weakness.” He took a sip of Black Elysium.

“One you share with the rest of us,” retorted Ereshkigal.

“I appreciate luxury,” Labienus admitted. “Which is not the same thing as needing it. Growing dependent on it. I wonder how you can bear the idea of needing the monkeys for anything?” He grinned at Aegeus. “Knowing them as intimately as you do.”

“Labienus, my brother—a touch of humility would become you,” said Aegeus in a steely voice. “Not even we immortals are perfect, after all.”

“How true,” jeered Ashoreth, spooning up the last bit of peach.

“Now, now.”Victor turned his white hands palm up, indicating the speakers from which the music flowed. “There are degrees of perfection. Are any of us the equal of this music, for example?”

“This music,” said Labienus, “magnificent as it is, pales beside any virgin wilderness. Any sunrise, any fall of snow, the immensity of unvisited stars. That’s perfection for you! Untouched and unspoiled by dirty little hands.”

“Oh, so Nature is your great ideal of beauty?”Aegeus leaned forward. “Nature is perfection? Tell me, have you ever seen a two-headed calf? Or a stoat creeping into a duck’s nest and settling down to eat the nestlings alive? Meaningless horror.”

“Not
pretty
, I’ll grant you,” replied Labienus, “not sweet and pleasing to mortal sentimentality! But real, Aegeus. Stern and horrific by your standards but part of one immense harmony. Balanced. Magnificent. Beyond mortal comprehension. Beyond yours too, I fear.”

There were cries and catcalls from the opposite side of the table, until Aegeus held up his hand. “I think I see your difficulty,” he said, in most sympathetic tones. “Poor fellow, don’t you see that your very idea of harmony is a mortal concept? You’re neither a stone nor a star. You are, like it or not, a creature with human senses and perceptions. And this so disgusts you that you try to pretend it isn’t true—”

“You’ve missed my point, as usual—”

“And envision a glorious macrocosm where only man is vile!”

“I was about to correct your sexist remark, but on reflection I’ll let it stand,” said Xi Wang-Mu, and there were nervous giggles. Labienus calmed himself, ate the last delectable morsel of peach on his plate, and set down his spoon before speaking again.

“Yes,” he said. “Man is vile. Man himself said so. Vileness is a concept man invented. It doesn’t exist in Nature.”

“You fool,
nothing
exists in Nature,” Aegeus nearly screamed. “The tree falls in the forest and it knows nothing, the forest knows nothing, the sky and the sunlight know nothing! We’re the only ones to give it meaning at all. You’re
like that imbecile mortal praising the wonder of billions and billions of stars. We alone make them wonderful by our perception that they are! And yet you envision an ideal cosmos with no humanity—”

“I don’t envision it. It exists! Universally, except for three little stains on this one solar system,” said Labienus. “And we alone, we immortals, and few enough of us at that, are capable of appreciating the flawless Absolute!”

“You’re a closet deist,” said Amaunet wearily.

“And you’re stunted, every one of you,” shouted Labienus. “You have eyes to glimpse the eternal, and you’re still fascinated by the filthy monkeys!”

“Why this obsession with a greater power, I wonder?” said Aegeus. “Could it have anything to do with a sense of guilt over, oh, perhaps, the father you betrayed? Old Budu?”

Labienus looked at him with murder in his eyes.

“Can’t you both shut up?” inquired Amaunet, and with the Commendatore she sang:
“E l’ultimo momento!”

“Yes, please, this is the best part,” implored Aethelstan.

“I’d never have come if I’d thought Truth was on the menu,” joked Tvashtar. “So dry, and one is never satisfied afterward.”

“Pentiti, scellerato!”
sang Aethelstan determinedly.

“No, vecchio infatuato!”
Tvashtar sang back, and with the exception of the men at its head the whole table took up the exchange between the Commendatore and the unrepentant Don Giovanni:
“Pentiti!”

“No!”

“Pentiti!”
sang the ladies, in harmonies so sweet and terrifying the Don would have fallen to his knees and repented straightaway, if he’d heard them.

“No!”
cried Tvashtar and Gamaliel, who happened to be tenors.

“Si!”
insisted baritones Nennius and Aethelstan.

“No!”
responded basses Aegeus and Labienus, unable to resist the pull of the music.

“Si!”
Aegeus groped and found his knife.

“No!”
Labienus’s hand closed on the neck of a wine bottle.

“Si, si
—
“
None of them could refuse it now, and their massed ancient voices chorded in a moment of beauty so powerful, so unearthly, that any mortal present might be excused for thinking he was in the presence of the angels.

But on the next note, the final defiant
No
, something was wrong. No one seemed to have the breath for it. In the moment of frozen shock that followed, Victor rose to his feet. His sick white face was shining as he extended his hands and sang:
“Ah! Tempo piu non v’e!”

“What do you mean we’ve no more time, Victor?” snarled Labienus, and his voice was hoarse, and blood ran from his mouth and stained the front of his white shirt.

Aegeus tried to say something but coughed instead, and blood exploded outward in a fine mist. The other guests regarded their plates in dismay, where the green smears of Chartreuse jelly crawled with tiny engines of destruction that had been harmless inert matter five minutes earlier.

“You failed to detect the virus, because it didn’t exist at the moment you scanned,” explained Victor. “The molecules only put themselves together in that particular pattern when I activated the program. Ingenious, isn’t it? But I can’t claim credit for the idea. It’s all Labienus’s modus operandi.”

“You—” croaked Nennius in outrage, desperately blotting with his napkin at his eyes, from which blood now ran like tears. It was a mistake: the skin began to come off on the rough linen napkin, and the ball of his left eye ruptured from the pressure.

At the same moment the waiters, who were looking on in terrified astonishment, reacted. Three of them ran for the door and found it locked, which should present no difficulty for any determined immortal, but somehow their strength had evaporated. They beat on the door and saw their fists burst open on impact, fans of ferroceramic bone and swiftly liquefying matter. Of the three who remained at the sideboard, two of them fell to their knees and attempted to vomit, with dreadful success. Only Sargon mustered enough of a sense of duty to grab a carving knife and lurch toward the table.

“Treacherous little—” Ashoreth attempted to get to her feet and the mere pressure of her hands on the table was enough to split her skin. She sank back, and her scream ended in a drowning noise. Several of the others had remained immobile in surprise, and now found themselves unable to move in any manner other than to seep through their own clothing.

“Tutto e tue colpe e poco!”
Victor sang, with the chorus of demons surging up from Hell.
“Vieni: c’e un mal peggior!”

Only Aegeus’s clothing was holding his flesh together, but the eyes in his rapidly dissolving face were standing out with rage, and his skeleton was determined. He thrust his table knife up through Victor’s white waistcoat, under his ribs in a blow that would have been fatal to a mortal. Victor gasped for breath and looked down at his blood welling out over what was left of Aegeus’s hand.

“I wouldn’t do that, old man,” he said, smiling. “I’m contagious, you know.”

Labienus’s vocal chords had melted and run down his throat, but he was
still able to transmit:
So you modified some of your own poisons, did you? You think you’ll survive to laugh at us?
He seized the carving knife from Sargon, who collapsed gurgling at his feet, and stabbed Victor. Victor gasped again, but did not stop smiling, and raised his hands in a beckoning gesture.

“Vieni!”
he sang, understandably without much breath now but the demons echoed for him,
“Vieni!”

Labienus pulled the carving knife free and, with all his remaining immortal strength, swung it at Victor’s neck.
Whack
, it passed cleanly through the cervical gimbal and Victor’s head flew off and rolled on the table, coming to rest on a silver platter. The eyes turned up to Aegeus and Labienus in an expression of amusement as Don Giovanni’s final wail of agony sounded, and then the light went out of them.

The headless body, fountaining blood, flopped forward, with its arms catching Aegeus and Labienus across the shoulders in a bizarre parody of a chummy gesture. They fell, struggling, coming to pieces as they struggled. Labienus’s last clear glimpse was of Amaunet’s face.

It was so melted it was impossible to tell whether her expression was one of fear or ecstasy. She transmitted:
Has He come for us at last? Oh, let it be Him
…

Death, however, sent His regrets. Amaunet and the rest of them might suffer liquefaction to the point where their hearts wept out of their bodies and their blind brains cowered in the darkness of their impermeable skulls; but they could not die. They were immortal, after all.

The last chords sounded, the celestial music ended. The room was silent.

Night, on an ancient and nameless sea.

A moon drifted between clouds, throwing down watery light on the island with its two hills. It sparkled, reflected in the estuaries and lagoons. It gleamed faintly on the dome atop the northern hill, making it look like a big egg nested in the alder trees.

It shone down on the white scoured bones of the ichthyosaur that lay half-buried, a willow tree growing through the blind skull, well above the summer tideline.

There was quite a lot of noise. The surf boomed far out, the sea wind hissed in the reeds, frogs and insects peeped and groaned. Then, abruptly, there was a lot more noise as the air opened with a red flash and there were five transports roaring down from the sky.

They came in low and fast. One veered away from the others and circled the northern hill, where after turning it landed on a flat open area beside the dome. The other four lined up gracefully and set themselves down on the beach below, and as the moon emerged from a trail of cloud the ichthyosaur skull glimmered out, grinning a welcome at them all.

Immediately, cargo doors opened in the four shuttles and figures leaped forth, pulling from each one a series of great squared objects. They were refrigerated transport pods. A moment later the pods rose, bobbing a meter above the sand as their agunits were activated. The figures set off up the beach in a long purposeful line, towing the pods after them, making for the hill where the first transport was.

“And we’re in,” said Latif as the loading door rolled up. He advanced into the loading bay warily, eyeing the servounit that clattered away like a cockroach
between stacked crates. Suleyman and Sarai followed him, scanning the walls for a door. “And we’re not in,” Latif corrected himself. “I’m not reading any entrance but that crawlway, are you?”

Suleyman shook his head. “The dust is disturbed. Somebody’s been here, not all that long ago,” remarked Sarai.

“Somebody certainly has.” Suleyman strolled over to the crawlway. He dropped into a crouch to study it and there was a faint whine, no louder than a mosquito, but the grated cover to the crawlway lit up cherry-red. He winked out and reappeared to the left of the grate.