The Sons of Heaven (64 page)

“Thanks?
Thanks?
Listen, you slimy—”

“My dear.” Edward pulled her back from the window, through which she had apparently been about to leap to get at Joseph. “Perhaps you might consider continuing this no doubt fascinating discussion at a less awkward moment—” “Oh, my, is this the son-in-law you were telling me about?” Hearst murmured, sidling up to Joseph. “I’m so sorry! This is much worse than—say, you’re turning purple.”

Joseph threw back his head and howled, so loudly that the mortals present clapped their hands over their ears.

Edward put up a conciliatory hand. “Now, now. We’re here to prevent a war, not to start one.”

“Okay,” said Latif, “that’s everybody except Lewis. I want—” “Where
is
Lewis?” said Mendoza, scowling down at them all. “We sent him up there to help you, Alec—”

“Sorry!” said Lewis, emerging into the conference room from thin air. “Sorry, one and all. We stopped at Claridge’s, and the time just got away from us.”

He wore impeccable evening dress, and carried what appeared to be an attaché case. With him was a young woman, tiny, also elegantly dressed, and, as far as one could tell beneath the hat and sunglasses, exquisite. “Oh, dear,” Lewis said, looking around apologetically. “I left it till the last minute, didn’t I? We’re still getting used to temporal freedom, and—”

“This is that Lewis for whom you made the garden?” said Nicholas, looking up at Mendoza.

“None other.” Lewis struck a bold pose. “Formerly a mere Literature Preservation Specialist, now the Paraclete of the Most High! Hello, Latif. Hello there, Joseph.”

“Trust you to show up for Judgment Day wearing a tuxedo,” said Joseph in an exhausted voice.

“Well, I’m a man on a mission.” Lewis stepped forward. The young lady followed him closely, staring around in fascination. “And may I present my daughter, Tiara? I’ve come as a sort of diplomatic envoy, though I suppose the peace talks have already started—”

“Not quite,” said Edward.

“Oh, good, then. Ahem.” Lewis set down the attaché case, took a grip on his lapels. “My fellow immortals, the Apocalypse scheduled for today has been cancelled.”

“Dead, we were doing perfectly well on our own,” said Alec, glaring up at the screen.

“Of course you were, and Mendoza and I are very proud of you,” said Edward in the most soothingly tactful voice imaginable. “Nevertheless, we felt that your argument would benefit from additional incentives.”

Budu looked up at him. “What are the terms?” he said.

“Take your oath to serve our purpose,” said Edward, “and we will liberate you from time.”

“As he has liberated me!” exclaimed Lewis, flinging up his hands. “The most fabulous experience of my eternal life.”

“I don’t think any of you can begin to imagine what it’s like,” said Mendoza. “But trust me, it’s wonderful.”

“It would be wonderful for you, wouldn’t it, with three husbands?” retorted Joseph. Mendoza blushed.

“It isn’t what you—Oh, can it. Don’t you see? You can go anywhere you want. No more Company watching your every move and ordering you around,” she said.

“No; we’d have your Englishman telling us what to do, instead,” said Joseph.

“Yes. You will,” said Edward, turning a gimlet eye on him. “It is our moral duty to humanity, especially after the way our creators profited at their expense. Perhaps we’ll find that men are actually capable, without meddling immortals whispering in their ears, of making intelligent decisions. But their evolution must run its course, whatever its end.”

“Except I
am
going to intervene on Mars,” said Alec. “That one’s my burden. I broke it; I’ll fix it.”

“Good,” said Budu.

“As for Earth and Luna, I had in mind some sort of charitable consulting firm,” added Edward, steepling his fingers. “Utilizing the resources we’ve seized from Dr. Zeus. We might provide suggestions or recommendations; always assuming the mortals will accept them, of course.”

“But that’d be the Company all over again,” objected Joseph.

“No, no,” Lewis cried. “More sort of an organized bunch of philanthropic independent contractors. And look what we could give them, for example—” He grabbed up his attaché case and went to the conference table. “Er—could some of you folks move out from under there, please? Thanks.” He set down the attaché case and opened it, turning to display its contents. “There!”

The case was packed full of what appeared to be somewhat irregular marbles, brightly colored. Closer inspection revealed them to be kernels of corn,
quite large, with a whole ear of corn resting atop the pile.
“Mays mendozaii,”
said Lewis. “The answer to world hunger.”

“It’s more nourishing than soy and it’ll grow anywhere, Joseph,” said Mendoza, her eyes intense. “On Earth, anyway. I’m working on a cultivar for Mars now.”

“And think of all the other possibilities for encouragement! Really, we’ve got quite a lot of work to do,” said Lewis.

“Then there will be work,” said Budu thoughtfully. Lewis turned to look up at him, and his eyes widened. Nevertheless he set his chin.

“Er—yes. And as for the killing business—”

“I, myself, was created to kill,” Edward said. “However, I have devoted some painful thought to the questions concerning sublimation of programmed savagery—even written a brief monograph on the subject—”

“Actually, it’s fifteen volumes long,” Nicholas said. Edward scowled at him.

“—and I would enjoy discussing it with you at our mutual leisure, when the opportunity arises,” he continued, looking down at Budu.

“You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you?” said Joseph, slumping.

“Far from it, Doctor Ruy,” Nicholas told him. “Edward, though he may believe otherwise, is not the Almighty.”

“Oh, that takes a load off my mind,” Joseph growled.

“The Almighty, indeed! I much prefer the New Prometheus. But, to return to the crucial question: will you join us, sir?” Edward inquired of Budu. Budu considered them, no expression in his glacial eyes that were Alec’s, and Edward’s, and Nicholas’s eyes. At last he took both his axes from his belt. He held them up in his immense hands.

“Yes,” he said. “The purpose is just. The work will go forward. I’ll take service with you. So will they,” he added, indicating his men with an axe. Immediately all the Enforcers in sight held their axes up, as did the ones still waiting patiently in the darkness of the tunnel, who had had the events above transmitted to them by their officers. Hearst, watching in awe, hesitated only a moment before drawing the sword of Roland and following suit.

“And you?” Nicholas turned to Suleyman.

Suleyman looked sadly at the mortals. “Can you guarantee that they will not be massacred?”

“Yes,” Nicholas replied. “We will do no murder! Let their peers judge them; but they’ll stand trial, now their secrets are all told.”

“Secrets told?” Joseph said. “What’d you do? Tip off the tabloids?”

“No,” said Nicholas, cool as ice. “I sent an extract of Company financial
records for the last thirty years to the tax assessment board of the Tri-Worlds Council for Integrity.”

“Ouch,” said Joseph. Some of the mortals under the table began to sob noisily.

“And Alpha-Omega?” Suleyman pressed.

“That place?” Alec shuddered, and accessed briefly. “That’s right; you captured it, didn’t you? Why don’t you keep it, for now, until we can explain about it to the mortals? Then they can take custody of their stuff, and the rest of you can get your own back.”

Suleyman stroked his beard. He looked over at Latif. “What do you think, son?”

“I’m happy,” Latif replied quietly, looking in satisfaction at Lewis and Mendoza. Suleyman put his hands in his pockets, looked back at Alec.

“Very well,” he said. “We’re with you.”

Edward, watching their reactions, thumped the arm of his chair in satisfaction. “Well done,” he said. Nicholas looked up at him.

“But there is another matter,” he said. “There are others like the Captain! Spirits trapped in steel. We must consider their welfare, Edward.”

“Aw, now, son, I wouldn’t worry about no spirits,” said Captain Morgan. “But I reckon some of the inorganic brethren might take kindly to trying on a bit of flesh.” He cocked a hopeful eye at Sarai. “You wouldn’t happen to be a professional lady, now, would you, dearie? No? Well then, has anybody got a drop of rum for an old seaman?”

“Rum for everybody!” Alec said, and arranged time and space just enough to provide all those watching with drinks. Edward raised his glass.

“To hope,” he said. Bright brass sounded from somewhere, the
Dies Irae
in major key at last, rendered as a heroic coda. They drank.

Afterward, amid the strangest cocktail party milling that had ever taken place, Lewis attempted to coax the packed mortals out from under the table. Tiara, who had followed him like a little silent shadow up to that point, wrinkled her nose at the mortals’ smell and turned to watch the other big people. She spotted Latif and advanced on him, as one spellbound. “You’re
beautiful,”
she said breathlessly. “Are you married?”

Latif gaped down at her and Sarai took him firmly by the arm. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Find another,
p’tite Erzulie.”

“Oh, well,” said Tiara, shrugging. Her gaze fell on Hearst, who was talking to Joseph. “Oh,” she exclaimed. “A gallant hero with a sword! And he is also beautiful!”

She drifted over and stood looking thoughtfully up at Hearst, who was saying: “… he doesn’t seem like such a bad fellow after all. Say, do you think he’ll want any kind of cabinet of advisers?”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Joseph said morosely, and then ducked as something black came flying out of the screen and bounced on the table beside him. “Hey,” he yelled, looking up. “You could have hit somebody with that!”

“I should be so lucky,” Mendoza yelled back.

“What is it, anyway?” He set down his glass and picked up the object. It was a holocube album.

“Baby pictures of your grandchildren,” she told him. He looked horrified.

So I keep the holocube on my desk. I don’t look through the pictures much. Boy, they were ugly babies.

The one I keep in view is the best, though. There’s God Himself—oops, no, it’s just Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax—sitting in that big chair of his, with the two brats on his lap, and they’re all dressed up in tiny sailor suits (with hats, yet), which they obviously hate wearing. Mendoza, standing beside the chair with her hand on Edward’s shoulder, is gazing serenely into the imager and she looks …

Happy. Really happy. Nothing can hurt her anymore. Every other time in my life I said that about someone I loved, I said it over a grave.

I don’t know how she can stand the three of them, but I have to admit they seem to have been meant to be together. At least I don’t have to worry about her now.

Not that my life is worry-free. This brave new world isn’t perfect, by a long shot.

Well, did you think it would be? The mortals have been allowed to rule themselves. My in-laws may think the mortals will be great at self-rule, but I’ve got my doubts about the brains on this present bunch. Most of them wouldn’t even have noticed what happened on July 9, if all those boobytraps the kids set for the Company hadn’t gone off.

You’d have thought there’d be a huge scandal when Dr. Zeus and its villainy was made public. The scientists never even stood trial; their respective governments cut immunity deals with them in return for testimony, and then quietly recruited them for their own laboratories.

The Company’s loot is being redistributed. I couldn’t believe the stuff
Aegeus alone had stashed away! It put the mortal masters’ graft to shame. So now there are a lot of beautiful new public museums and libraries opening. Not many in the American Community or England, though; they distrust art.

They’re scared of animals, too, so they don’t venture into the wilderness areas much, which is a good thing, because a lot of the once-extinct species we set loose out there are thriving again. (Not all of them; the pandas, for example, took one look around, grunted, and lumbered straight back into extinction.) But passenger pigeons once more darken the skies when they migrate over New York. The mortals peer out balefully through their windows and complain about all the droppings.

The mortal gene pool really was shot to hell, thanks to the plagues, to the point where there’d have been no resistance to new diseases at all, in a few more generations, or any ability to adapt to new environments. Not the best shape for a species to be in, when it’s finally started to colonize its solar system.

But Suleyman runs the program to restore genetic diversity, with all the stuff he captured from Alpha-Omega. Plus there are sustainable population estimates to work out, and distribution of
Mays mendozaii
to agrarian communities… I guess we’ll see what happens, huh?

There’s been no further sign of the little stupid people from whom Lewis and Tiara escaped. They seem to have fled so far down a hole in space/time that they won’t be coming back soon, if ever. All the time transference field generators have been shut down and dismantled. Most mortals didn’t believe commercial time travel was real, anyway.

Oh, and nobody ever said, “Hey, immortals, thanks for saving the world all these years!” either. It didn’t seem to be a good idea to let the public know that we really exist, in fact. Too many paranoid mortals, thanks to movies with guys lumbering around in machine suits yelling things like “Imperfect beings must die!”

We thought about appointing a special PR team to promote tolerance and understanding—actually, Lewis thought about it—but in the end, our existence was officially denied. We’re an urban myth now, the way UFOs, Area 51, or Diana of Luna used to be: most mortals suspect we’re real and secretly in league with their governments, but there’s no proof.

Some mortals live in fear of a takeover conspiracy by us. Some mortals hope we’re going to drop out of the sky one day and offer them cosmic wisdom. Or take them off to Shambhala or Shangri-la or some other eternal paradise …