The Life of the World to Come (41 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
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“What were you doing?” he gasped, heart hammering.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “I had to see to something.”
“You’re cold as death,” he said, and pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her, as though that might keep her away from the dark field.
He didn’t recall where he was when he woke next morning, at first, and Mendoza seemed equally surprised to find him
there. They made love. It was, again, a smashing success, but he found himself, again, wondering how a virgin could have learned so many interesting variations on a theme.
Afterward, in another scene of surreal domesticity, she fixed them breakfast as he pulled on his thermals, and they chatted over coffee as though they sat in a kitchen in London.
Finally Alec cleared his throat and said:
“Er … when we were in bed, I couldn’t help noticing that you … ah. That trick with your—er …”
“You mean the …”
“When we … you know, when the bed leg fell off?”
“Ah! Yes.”
“I was surprised you knew that one,” he said, looking her in the eye. “It takes a little practice, yeah?”
Mendoza went pale, with a look of such dismay on her face he was immediately sorry he’d said anything. Then she blushed, setting down her coffee cup.
“Well, I have a lot of time to read and I have quite a collection of pornographic books the last supply shuttle happened to leave here, you see, and—”
“Books?” Alec knitted his brows. “Those are hard to find—”
“Holoes, I mean!” She smacked her forehead in chagrin. “Of course I meant holoes, how silly of me, what was I thinking? Like, ah,
Mr
.
Fireman and His Big Hose. Bad Bondage Boys. Emmanuelle and the Cream Pie Factory
. You see? And I’ve studied them. Obsessively.”
But she was trembling. He was certain she’d been abused, then, and it wrung his heart. He got up and put his arms around her.
“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I thought it was wonderful.”
“I love you,” she said, in a tiny voice. He realized, with an increasing sense of satisfying doom, that marriage was now inevitable.
By the time they walked back to the shuttle, the storm had blown out and the sun was bright. Alec found himself sweating inside his subsuit.
The rain had washed the shuttle clean of all the leaves and stalks that had splattered on its hull, and it glinted silver in the morning light. The hatch had been closed. Alec couldn’t
remember having done that, but he’d been pretty hazy in those first few minutes. He stood there in the waving corn, looking uncertainly at the ship, trying to access the command that would activate it again.
The data was all there; there was just too much of it. No Captain to instantly hand him the right file out of a hundred million files. Mendoza looked at him, her pale face expressionless. She leaned close and reached up to put her arms about his neck.
“I have the impression that the cyborgs who normally pilot these ships access them through a file with a designation of TTMIX333,” she said. “Does that sound right?”
Abruptly everything came into focus and he had the correct file, though he couldn’t recall having learned how to access it in the first place. “I think—” he began, just as the lights blinked on and the hatch popped open for him. “Hey!”
“There you are,” Mendoza said. “You see? You had it in your memory all the time. Wow, this fancy rug’s gotten soggy.” She scrambled inside and he climbed in after her. She stood there a moment staring around at the shuttle’s interior, and picked up one of the pink rosebuds that had been jolted from its crystal vase by the impact of the landing. She examined it bleakly. “No expense spared, eh?”
“Yeah, the bastards,” Alec said, opening the minibar. “Check this out. Six different fruit juices and three kinds of real booze. Illegal as hell, and I should know. Bombay Sapphire, Stolichnaya and—hey, here’s the magic potion.” He waved a little bottle labeled CAMPARI. She nodded, not looking up.
“How could something that began with such idealism—” Mendoza said. Her mouth twisted and she looked away. He realized she was nearly in tears.
“They’ll pay,” he said.
“They ought to,” she said, in a voice trembling with rage or grief or both. “Those damned liars. So many people sweating blood over so many ages, and was it all for this? So rich idiots could have an exotic holiday? Pink rosebuds and vodka in 150,000 BCE, just imagine! And how many like me marooned in places like this, along the way?”
“If there’s others, we’ll find ’em,” Alec said.
Mendoza lifted her head and kissed him, and her kiss was angry but he still liked the taste of it. She raked his lower lip with her teeth as she pulled away.
“You drink that down,” she said, nodding at the bottle he was holding. “I’ll show you the algorithm to return to the future.”
The red fluid was deadly bitter, even mixed with gin. He got it down somehow and was still able to concentrate as she showed him what he had to do. Then the shuttle began to hum, warning lights flashed because the hatch was still open. They looked at each other and realized their moment had passed, slipped away like sand.
From the other side of the glass Mendoza told him
I love you
, ignoring the blast of air from the engines that was bending the green corn down, blowing her hair back like flames in the wind, all in deafening silence. The ship began to rise, the yellow gas began to curl through the stale air of the cabin. Until his vision was taken away Alec peered down at her, wondering if she’d be all right there alone, trying to keep the image of the nightmare field out of his mind.
The pressure wasn’t nearly so bad this time. The shuttle now magically obeyed his every order as soon as he gave it. The yellow smoke was vanishing, it was roiling away, and there in front of him was a black night sky and stars. Below him he saw the distant lights of the
Captain Morgan
at anchor. Alec was shocked to realize that he was arriving back on the same night he’d left, no more than a few seconds after his departure.
He sent the shuttle arrowing down to his ship, mentally groping to order her cargo hatches open. Would she obey? Was the Captain there waiting for him?
No answer when he called, but the hatch doors were opening, the lights in the hold were guiding him down. This was so easy! The shuttle dropped into place like a bird alighting in a nest. The hatches swung shut, closing out the stars, and Alec was back on his ship. The whole episode at the station might have been a hallucination. For a moment the idea paralyzed him with terror.
Then he turned to get out of his seat and saw the bits of green stuff on the damp carpet. Wreckage from Mendoza’s cornfield, tracked in on his boots. He’d really been there.
That was enough to brace Alec as he climbed out of the shuttle and ran through his ship, up through her decks to the bridge. It was deserted, except for Billy Bones and Flint, who stood motionless.
Captain!
There was no answer. Utter silence.
Gulping for breath, he went to the ship’s wheel and grasped it to steady himself.
How do I sail her?
He heard the beeping signal that told him the anchor was being weighed. His hands moved on the wheel as though he were actually steering her, and by God she began to tack about. Yes! A glance upward through the glass told him she was opening out her sails, slowly but certainly now, and there was the whoosh that told him she was moving under power, too. Her bowsprit dipped, punched through the trough of a wave and forged on, throwing aside spray.
Where was the readout to show her course? There it was, and somehow the course was already set, they were going back to Mexico and she was picking up speed. Alec did know how to sail her, he’d always known, but somehow he’d never paid attention when the Captain had sailed her for him.
He began to sing in his profound relief, baying out “Blood Red Roses” as loud as he could. It echoed in the cabin and was carried on the ship’s intercom to every empty stateroom, to Coxinga where he stood immobile in the galley, to Bully Hayes where he had frozen in the act of laying out Alec’s black smuggling clothes. It echoed in the saloon where the Resistance liked to hold their meetings, bouncing off the fine carved chairs, rattling the glasses ranged along the back of the bar.
It echoed in the empty shuttle, where the INTERCEPT program was busily evaluating data as it counted down, unaware that there was no longer any bomb to detonate when the right moment had arrived.
“GO DOWN, YOU BLOOD RED ROSES!”
It might have been minutes or hours later when Alec realized that he had been hearing a signal for some while, an intermittent tapping that cut through the vibration of the ship’s drive and the wash of the night sea. It was a deliberate kind of tapping, an old pattern of beats he nearly remembered. A code, wasn’t it? What had it been called? Something about
save our souls
?
He turned from the wheel and looked about him on the bridge. There. Billy Bones was moving, at least his foremost leg was: up and falling, tap tap tap, so slowly.
Captain!
Silence, but a listening kind of silence.
Captain, are you there?
After a long moment a faint response: Aλεχ I
μ ηερε.
Trusting the ship to follow her course, Alec dove blindly into cyberspace.
It had altered, it wasn’t full of light but green gloom, an underwater murk that went down into blackness and out in a hazy vista of broken spars and rigging. Wrecks. A Sargasso of code strangling, blinding, but not completely concealing the ruined giant that was stretched out in the dim netherworld.
Boχ
A horror, a mutilation, a joke. One leg gone, one hand gone, the faintest of equations sketched in to show where they ought to be. One eye gone and trying to replace itself; but every time it flickered back into existence, it was being torn away by … what
was
that thing?
On the Captain’s shoulder perched a nightmare creature of green bronze, a caricature of a parrot with a hooked beak, tearing steadily and mercilessly at the right side of the Captain’s face, revealing a steel skull and sputtering wires.
Before Alec was even aware he’d thought of it, the bird screamed and shattered into fragments. Alec vaulted through space to the Captain’s side with an astonishing strength and solidity, more than he’d ever had in cyberspace before. Finally left alone, the Captain’s face pieced itself back together and turned up to him.
Boψ. Mψ Boψ.
Alec leaned down and grasped the Captain’s remaining hand. Again, he scarcely knew what he meant to do, but it
was already happening: fire was racing down his arm and tracing in the missing parts of the Captain, repairing, replacing, reviving.
*************
Alεχ
Hold on!
****
Alec
—
Hold on, I’ve got you.
Bloody Hell! Boy, you’ve grown.
They stared at each other as the lights came up, and the terrifying green realm was sucked away into nothing. They stood on the pitching deck of the ship as it appeared in cyberspace, much the same as it appeared in reality. The Captain had been restored to his normal appearance. Alec was so relieved he felt slightly drunk. It was a moment before he noticed the Captain’s incredulous stare. Looking down at himself he realized that he
had
grown, at least in cyberspace, where he had always been a head shorter than the Captain. Now they were the same size.
How did that happen?
You tell me, son! But however you did it, I ain’t complaining.
Are you all right now? You looked awful.
Haaaar! You should see the other bastard. He may have shot away my mainmast, but I lifted his cargo all the same. We got the data, Alec! It don’t matter whether you steal that shuttle or not—
But I did steal it. It’s in the hold.
So much the better. We can go anywhere in time now, Alec, I got the secret of his precious time transcendence field! What’s more, I got most of the temporospatial charts he uses. And there’s other things too, Alec, there’s a whole bag of tricks we got now. You and me has to have a bit of a chat, lad.

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