The Life of the World to Come (2 page)

Read The Life of the World to Come Online

Authors: Kage Baker

Tags: #Adult, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #C429, #Extratorrents, #Kat, #Travel

BOOK: The Life of the World to Come
9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Either Dr. Zeus doesn’t know how to go forward in time, or knows how and has kept the information from its immortal slaves, lest we learn the truth about the wonderful world of the twenty-fourth century. Even if I were to tell the others what I know, though, I doubt there’d be any grand rebellion. What point is there to our immortal lives but the work?
Undeniably the best work in the world to be doing, too, rescuing things from destruction. Lost works by lost masters, paintings and films and statues that no longer exist (except that they secretly do, secured away in some Company warehouse). Hours before the fires start, the bombs fall, doomed libraries swarm with immortal operatives, emptying them like ants looting a sugar bowl. Living things saved from extinction by Dr. Zeus’s immortals, on hand to collect them for
its ark. I myself have saved rare plants, the only known source of cures for mortal diseases.
More impressive still: somewhere there are massive freezer banks, row upon row of silver tubes containing DNA from races of men that no longer walk the earth, sperm and ova and frozen embryos, posterity on ice to save a dwindling gene pool.
Beside such work, does it really matter if there is mounting evidence, as we plod on toward the twenty-fourth century, that our masters have some plan to deny us our share of what we’ve gathered for them up there?
I wear, above the Company logo on all my clothing, an emblem: a clock face without hands. I’ve heard about this symbol, in dark whispers, all my life. When I was sent to this station I was informed it’s the badge of my penal servitude, but the rumor among immortals has always been that it’s the sign we’ll all be forced to wear when we do finally reach the future, so our mortal masters can tell us from actual persons. Or worse …
I was exiled to this hole in the past for a crime, but there are others of us who have disappeared without a trace, innocent of anything worse than complaining too loudly. Have they been shuffled out of the deck of time as I have been, like a card thrown under the table? It seems likely. Sentenced to eternal hard labor, denied any future to release them.
What little contact we’ve had with the mortals who actually live in the future doesn’t inspire confidence, either: unappreciative of the treasures we bring them, afraid to venture from their rooms, unable to comprehend the art or literature of their ancestors. Rapaciously collecting Shakespeare’s first folios but never opening them, because his plays are full of objectionable material and nobody can read anymore anyway. Locking Mozart sonatas in cabinets and never playing them, because Mozart had disgusting habits: he ate meat and drank alcohol. These same puritans are able, mind you, to order the massacre of those little pale people to loot their inventions.
But what’s condemnation from the likes of me, killer cyborg drudging along here in the Company’s fields, growing occasional lettuce for rich fools who want to stay at a fine resort
when they time-travel? The Silence is coming for us all, one day, the unknown nemesis, and perhaps that will be justice enough. If only he comes for me before it does.
He’ll come again! He will. He’ll break my chains. Once he stood bound to a stake and shouted for me to join him there, that the gate to paradise was standing open for us, that he wouldn’t rest until I followed him. I didn’t go; and he didn’t rest, but found his way back to me against all reason three centuries later.
He very nearly succeeded that time, for by then I’d have followed him into any fire God ever lit. History intervened, though, and swatted us like a couple of insects. He went somewhere and I descended into this gentle hell, this other Eden that will one day bear the name of Avalon. He won’t let me rest here, though. His will is too strong.
Speak of the fall of Rome and it occurs!
Or the fall of Dr. Zeus, for that matter.
He has come again.
And gone again, but alive this time! No more than a day and a night were given us, but he
did not die
!
I still can’t quite believe this.
He’s shown me a future that isn’t nearly as dark as the one I glimpsed. There is a point to all this, there is a reason to keep going, there is even—unbelievably—the remote possibility that … no, I’m not even going to think about that. I won’t look at that tiny bright window, so far up and far off, especially from the grave I’ve dug myself.
But what if we have broken the pattern at last?
Must put this into some kind of perspective. Oh, I could live with seeing him once every three thousand years, if all our trysts went as sweetly as this one did. And it started so violently, too.
Not that there was any forewarning that it would, mind you. Dull morning spent in peaceful labor in the greenhouse, tending my latest attempt at
Mays mendozaii.
Sweaty two hours oiling the rollers on the shipping platform. Had set out for the high lake to dig some clay for firing when there came the roar of a time shuttle emerging from its transcendence field.
It’s something I hear fairly frequently, but only as a distant boom, a sound wave weak with traveling miles across the channel from Santa Cruz Island, where the Company’s Day Six resort is located. However, this time the blast erupted practically over my head.
I threw myself flat and rolled, looking up. There was a point of silver screaming away from me, coming down fast, leveling out above the channel, heading off toward the mainland. I got to my feet and stared, frowning, at its spiraled flight. This thing was out of control, surely! There was a faint golden puff as its gas vented and abruptly the shuttle had turned on its path, was coming back toward the station.
I tensed, watching its trajectory, ready to run. Oh, dear, I thought, there were perhaps going to be dead twenty-fourth-century millionaires cluttering up my fields soon. I’d have a lot of nasty work to do with body bags before the Company sent in a disaster team. Did I even have any body bags? Why would I have body bags? But there, the pilot seemed to have regained a certain amount of control. His shuttle wasn’t spinning anymore and its speed was decreasing measurably, though he was still coming in on a course that would take him straight up Avalon Canyon. Oh, no; he was trying to land, swooping in low and cutting a swath through my fields. I cursed and ran down into the canyon, watching helplessly the ruination of my summer corn.
There, at last the damned thing was skidding to a halt. Nobody was going to die, but there were doubtless several very frightened Future Kids puking their guts up inside that shuttle just now. I paused, grinning to myself. Did I really have to deal with this problem? Should I, in fact? Wasn’t my very existence here a Company secret? Oughtn’t I simply to stroll off in a discreet kind of way and let the luckless cyborg pilot deal with his terrified mortal passengers?
But I began to run again anyway, sprinting toward the shuttle that was still sizzling with the charge of its journey.
I circled it cautiously, scanning, and was astounded to note that there were no passengers on board. Stranger still, the lone pilot seemed to be a mortal man; and that, of course, was impossible. Only cyborgs can fly these things.
But then, he hadn’t been doing all that expert a job, had he?
So I came slowly around the nose of the shuttle, and it was exactly like that moment in
The Wizard of Oz
when Dorothy, in black and white, moves so warily toward the door and looks across the threshold: then grainy reality shifts into Technicolor and she steps through, into that hushed and shocked moment full of cellophane flowers and the absolute unexpected.
I looked through the window of the shuttle and saw a mortal man slumped forward in his seat restraints, staring vacantly out at me.
Him, of course. Who else would it be?
Tall as few mortals are, and such an interesting face: high, wide cheekbones flushed with good color, long broken nose, deep-set eyes with colorless lashes. Fair hair lank, pushed back from his forehead. Big rangy body clad in some sort of one-piece suit of black stuff, armored or sewn all over with overlapping scales of a gunmetal color. Around his neck he wore a collar of twisted golden metal, like a Celtic torque. The heroic effect was spoiled somewhat by the nosebleed he was presently having. He didn’t seem to be noticing it, though. His color was draining away.
Oh, dear. He was suffering from transcendence shock. Must do something about that immediately.
The strangest calm had seized me, sure sign, I fear, that I really have gone a bit mad in this isolation. No cries from me of “My love! You have returned to me at last!” or anything like that. I scanned him in a businesslike manner, realized that he was unconscious, and leaned forward to tap on the window to wake him up. Useless my trying to break out the window to pull him through. Shuttle windows don’t break, ever.
After a moment or two of this he turned his head to look blankly at me. No sign of recognition, of course. Goodness, I had no idea whence or from when he’d come, had I? He might not even be English in this incarnation. I pulled a crate marker from my pocket and wrote on my hand DO YOU SPEAK CINEMA STANDARD? and held it up in his line of sight.
His eyes flickered over the words. His brow wrinkled in confusion. I leaned close to the glass and shouted:
“You appear to require medical assistance! Do you need help getting out of there?”
That seemed to get through to him. He moved his head in an uncertain nod and fumbled with his seat restraints. The shuttle hatch popped open. He stood up, struck his head on the cabin ceiling and fell forward through the hatchway.
I was there to catch him. He collapsed on me, I took the full weight of his body, felt the heat of his blood on my face. His sweat had a scent like fields in summer.
He found his legs and pulled himself upright, looking down at me groggily. His eyes widened as he realized he’d bled all over me.
“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry—” he mumbled, aghast. English! Yes, of course. Here he was again and I didn’t mind the blood at all, since at least this time he wasn’t dying. Though of course I’d better do something about that nosebleed pretty fast.
So I led him back to my house. He leaned on me the whole way, only semiconscious most of the time. Unbelievable as it seemed, he’d apparently come through time without first taking any of the protective drugs that a mortal must have to make the journey safely. It was a miracle his brain wasn’t leaking out his ears.
Three times I had to apply the coagulator wand to stop his bleeding. He drifted in and out of consciousness, and my floaty calm began to evaporate fast. I talked to him, trying to keep his attention. He was able to tell me that his name was Alec Checkerfield, but he wasn’t sure about time or place. Possibly 2351? He did recognize the Company logo on my coveralls, and it seemed to alarm him. That was when I knew he’d stolen the shuttle, though I didn’t acknowledge this to myself because such a thing was impossible. Just as it was impossible that a mortal being should be able to operate a time shuttle at all, or survive a temporal journey without drugs buffering him.
So I told him, to calm him down, that I was a prisoner here. That seemed to be the right thing to say, because he became confidential with me at once. It seems he knows all about the Company, has in fact some sort of grudge against them, something very mysterious he can’t tell me about; but Dr. Zeus has, to use his phrase,
wrecked his life
, and he’s out to bring them to their knees.
This was so demonstrably nuts that I concluded the crash had addled his brain a bit, but I said soothing and humoring things as I helped him inside and got him to stretch out on my bed, pushing a bench to the end so his feet wouldn’t hang over. Just like old times, eh? And there he lay.
My crazed urge was to fall down weeping beside him and cover him with kisses, blood or no; but of course what I did was bring water and a towel to clean him up, calm and sensible. Mendoza the cyborg, in charge of her emotions, if not her mind.
It was still delight to stroke his face with the cool cloth, watch his pupils dilate or his eyes close in involuntary pleasure at the touch of the water. When I had set aside the basin I stayed with him, tracing the angle of his jaw with my hand, feeling the blood pulsing under his skin.
“You’ll be all right now,” I told him. “Your blood pressure and heart rate are normalizing. You’re an extraordinary man, Alec Checkerfield.”
“I’m an earl, too,” he said proudly. “Seventh earl of Finsbury.”
Oh, my, he’d come up in the world. Nicholas had been no more than secretary to a knight, and Edward—firmly shut out of the Victorian ruling classes by the scandal of his birth—had despised inherited privilege. “No, really, a British peer?” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a real aristocrat before.”
“How long have you been stuck here?” he said. What was that accent of his? Not the well-bred Victorian inflection of last time; this was slangy, transatlantic, and decidedly limited in vocabulary. Did earls speak like this in the twenty-fourth century? Oh, how strange.
“I’ve been at this station for years,” I answered him unguardedly. Oops. “More years than I remember.” He looked understandably confused, since my immortal body stopped changing when I was twenty.
“You mean they marooned you here when you were just a kid? Bloody hell, what’d you do? It must have been something your parents did.”

Other books

The Age of Miracles by Marianne Williamson
The Pages We Forget by Anthony Lamarr
Love Under Two Gunslingers by Cara Covington
Last Kiss by Sinn, Alexa, Rosen, Nadia
Netlink by William H. Keith
Ransom by Sutherhome, Erica
Kiss of Surrender by Sandra Hill
Cicada by J. Eric Laing