The Life of the World to Come (9 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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“But they gonna board us for aspection,” Alec sobbed.
“Hey, kiddo, don’t you worry. Daddy’s a gentleman, don’t forget, he’s got some pull. I’m the bloody earl ’a Finsbury, okay?
And
a CEO at J.I.S. And I’ll tell you something else. Jovian Integrated Systems gonna have something to say, too. Nobody’s gonna touch li’l Alec, he’s such a special kid.”
That was right; Alec was a special kid, all the servants said so. For one thing, all other little boys were brought into this world by the stork, but not Alec. He had come in an agcopter. Reggie had told him so.
“Yeah, son,” Reggie had chuckled, looking around to be certain Sarah was nowhere within earshot. “The stork call your daddy and say, ‘Come out to Cromwell Cay.’ And your daddy take the launch out where the agcopter waiting on the cay at midnight, with the red light blinking, and when he come back he bring Sarah with our little bundle of joy Alec. And we all get nice fat bonuses, too!”
Alec wiped his nose and was comforted. Daddy set him on the deck and yelled to Cat for another drink and told Alec to
go play now somewhere. Alec would dearly have liked to stay and talk with Daddy; that had been the longest conversation they’d ever had together, and he had all kinds of questions. What was
Jovian Integrated Systems
? What was Fiddler’s Green? Why were some rules important, like wearing the life vest, and other rules were dumb? Why were gentlemen free? But Alec was a considerate and obedient little boy, so he didn’t ask. He went off to play, determined never, ever to be a telltale or a scaredy-cat.
Very shortly after that the happy life came to an end.
It happened quite suddenly, too. One day Mummy abruptly put down her novel, got up out of her deck chair and stalked over to Daddy where he sat watching a Caribbean sunset.
“It’s over, Rog,” she said.
He turned a wondering face to her. “Huh?” he said. After a moment of staring into her eyes, he sighed. “Okay,” he said.
And the
Foxy Lady
set a course that took her into gray waters, under cold skies. Sarah packed up most of Alec’s toys so he only had a few to play with, and got out his heaviest clothes. One day they saw a very big island off the port bow. Sarah held him up and said: “Look! There’s England.”
Alec saw pale cliffs and a meek little country beyond them, rolling fields stretching away into a cloudy distance, and way off the gray blocky mass of cities. The air didn’t smell familiar at all. He stood shivering, watched the strange coastline unroll as Sarah buttoned him into an anorak.
They waited at the mouth of a big river for the tide to change, and Sarah pointed out the city of Rochester to Alec on a holomap and said that was where Charles Dickens had lived. He didn’t know who Charles Dickens was. She reminded him about the holo he’d watched at Christmas, about the ghosts of the past and the future.
The Thames pulled them into London, which was the biggest place Alec had ever seen. As the sun was setting they steered into Tower Marina, and the long journey ended with a gentle bump against the rubber pilings. Alec went to bed that night feeling very strange. The
Foxy Lady
seemed to have become silent and heavy, motionless, stone like the stone city all around them, and for the first time that he could ever remember
the blue sea was gone. There were new smells, too. They frightened him.
His cabin was full of the cold strange air when he woke up, and the sky was gray.
Everyone seemed to be in a hurry, and rather cross. Sarah bundled Alec into very thick heavy clothes indeed, leaving his life vest in the closet, and she herself put on more clothes than he had ever seen her wear. Daddy was wearing strange new clothes, too, stiff and uncomfortable-looking ones, and he had shaved. There was no breakfast cooking in the galley; Lewin had been ashore and come back with a box of Bentham’s Bran Treats (“At least they’re fresh baked!” he cried) and a dozen cups of herbal tea, steeping in chlorilar cups. Breakfast was served, or rather handed around, at the big table in the saloon. Alec was impressed. Normally only Daddy and Mummy dined in here, but today he and Sarah were at the table, too. Mummy, however, was nowhere to be seen, and when Alec inquired about this, Daddy just stared at him bleakly.
“Your mummy’s gone to visit some friends,” Sarah told him.
He didn’t care for his breakfast at all—he thought it smelled like dead grass—but he was too well-mannered a child to say so and hurt Lewin’s feelings. Fortunately there wasn’t much time to eat, because the car arrived and there was a lot of bustle and rush to load luggage into its trunk. Finally he was led down the gangway and across the pier to where the car waited.
It was nothing at all like the rusted hacks in which he’d ridden in the islands. This was a Rolls Royce Exquisite Levitation, black and gleaming, with Daddy’s crest on the door and a white man in a uniform like a policeman at the steering console. Alec had to fight panic as he was handed in and fastened into his seat. Sarah got in, Daddy got in, Lewin and Mrs. Lewin crowded into the front beside the driver, and the Rolls lifted into midair and sped silently away. That was the end of life on board the
Foxy Lady
.
There were servants lined up on the steps outside the house in Bloomsbury, and Alec watched as Daddy formally shook hands with each of them. Alec thought it would be polite to do this, too, so he trailed after Daddy shaking hands and asking
the servants what their names were. For some reason this made them all smile, and one of them muttered to another: “Now
that’s
a little gentleman.” Then they all went into the big house with its echoing rooms, and Alec had come home to England.
The house only dated from 2298, but it had been deliberately built in an old-fashioned style because it was an earl’s townhouse, after all, so it was taller and fancier than the other houses in the street. Alec still hadn’t explored all its rooms by the time he noticed one morning that Daddy wasn’t at the breakfast table, and when he asked about it Sarah informed him: “Your daddy’s away on a business trip.”
It was only later, and by chance, that he found out Daddy hadn’t lasted a week in London before he’d gone straight back to Tower Marina and put out to sea again on the
Foxy Lady
.
Then Alec had cried, but Sarah had had a talk with him about how important it was that he live in London now that he was getting to be a big boy.
“Besides,” she said, taking the new heavy clothes out of their shopping bags and hanging them up in his closet, “your poor daddy was so unhappy here, after your mummy had gone.”
“Where did Mummy go?” said Alec, not because he missed her at all but because he was beginning to be a little apprehensive about the way pieces of his world had begun vanishing. He picked up a shoebox and handed it to Sarah. She took it without looking at him, but he could see her face in the closet mirror. She closed her eyes tight and said:
“She divorced your daddy, baby.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That means she doesn’t want to live with him anymore. She’s going to go away and live with some other people.” Sarah swallowed hard. “After all, she was never happy on the
Foxy Lady
after you came along.”
Alec stared at her, dumbfounded. After a moment he asked: “Why didn’t Mummy like me? Everybody else does.”
Sarah looked as though she wanted to cry.
“Damballah!”
she said, very softly. Then, in a light, normal tone of voice, she told him: “Well, I think she just never wanted to have children, with all the noise and mess a baby makes, and then
a little boy running around and getting into everything. She and your daddy used to be very happy, but after you came it was spoiled for them.”
Alec felt as though the ceiling had fallen in on him. What a terrible thing he’d done!
“I’m sorry,” he said, and burst into tears.
Then Sarah did that trick she could do, moving so fast you couldn’t see her move, and her arms were around him and she was rocking him, crooning to him, hiding him in her breasts.
“I’m sorry, too,” she wept. “Oh, Alec, you mustn’t mind. You’re a
good
little boy, you hear me? You’re my sweet, good little winji boy, and Sarah will always love you no matter what. Don’t you ever forget that. When you grow up maybe you’ll understand, sometimes people have to obey orders and say things they don’t want to say at all? And”—her voice caught—“I’m sure you’ll always be a good little boy, won’t you, to make your poor daddy happy again?”
“Uh huh,” Alec gasped. It was the least he could do, after he’d made Daddy so
un
happy. His tears felt hot on his cheeks, in that cold room, and Sarah’s tears were like the hot rain that used to fall off Jamaica when there’d be lightning in the sky and Daddy would be yelling for him to get below because there was a storm coming.
But a terrible storm did come, and swept away another part of the world.
“What the hell did you go and tell him that for?” Lewin was shouting. Alec cowered on the stairs, covering his mouth with his hands.
“It was the truth,” Sarah said in a funny unnatural voice. “He’d have found out sometime.”
“My God, that’s all the poor baby needs, to think he’s responsible for the way that cold bitch acted,” raged Mrs. Lewin. “Even if it was true, how could you tell him such a thing? Sarah, how could you?”
So then Sarah was gone too, and that was his fault for being a telltale. He woke up early next morning because the front door slammed, booming through the house like a cannon shot. Something made him get out of his bed and run across the icy floor to the window.
He looked down into the street and there was Sarah, swinging
away down the pavement with her lithe stride, bag over her shoulder. He called to her, but she never looked back.
Everybody was very kind to him to make up for it. When he’d be sad and cry, Mrs. Lewin would gather him into her lap. Lewin told him what a brave big guy he was and helped him fix up his room with glowing star-patterns on the ceiling and an electronic painting of a sailing ship on his wall, with waves that moved and little people going to and fro on her deck. The other servants were nice, too, especially the young footman, Derek, and Lulu the parlormaid. They were newlyweds, attractive and very happy.
Sometimes Lewin would hand them Alec’s identification disk and tell them to take him out for the day, so he could learn about London. They took him to the London Zoo to see the animal holoes, and to the British Museum, and Buckingham Palace to see where Mary III lived, or over to the Southwark Museum to meet and talk to the holo of Mr. Shakespeare. They took him shopping, and bought him exercise equipment and a complete holo set for his room, with a full library of holoes to watch. There were thirty different versions of
Treasure Island
to choose from; once Alec knew what it was about, he wanted them all. The older versions were the most exciting, like the bloodcurdling tales Sarah had used to tell him about the Spanish Main. Even so, they all had a prologue edited in that told him how evil and cruel pirates had really been, and how Long John Silver was not really a hero.
Gradually the broken circle began to fill in again, because everybody in the house in Bloomsbury loved Alec and wanted him to be happy. He loved them, too, and was grateful that they were able to love him back, considering what he’d done.
But Alec understood now why Daddy had preferred to live at sea. Everybody was always on at him, in the friendliest possible way, about what a lot there was to do in London compared to on a cramped old boat; but it seemed to him that there was a lot more
not
to do in London.
There was grass, but you mustn’t walk on it. There were flowers, but you mustn’t pick them. There were trees, but you mustn’t climb them. You must wear shoes all the time, because it was dirty and dangerous not to, and you mustn’t
leave the house without a tube of personal sanitizer to rub on your hands after you’d touched anything other people might have touched. You couldn’t eat or drink a lot of the things you used to, like fish or milk, because they were illegal. You mustn’t ever get fat or “out of shape,” because that was immoral. You mustn’t ever tell ladies they had nice bubbies, or you’d go to hospital and never ever come out.
Mustn’t play with other children, because they carried germs; anyway, other children didn’t want to play with you, either, because you carried germs they didn’t want to catch. You were encouraged to visit historical sites, as long as you didn’t play with anybody but the holograms. It had been interesting talking to Mr. Shakespeare, but Alec couldn’t quite grasp why nobody was allowed to perform any of his plays anymore, or why Shakespeare had felt obliged to explain that it had been unfair to build his theatre, since doing so had robbed the people of low-income housing. He had seemed so forlorn as he’d waved good-bye to Alec, a transparent man in funny old clothes.
There was something to apologize for everywhere you turned. The whole world seemed to be as guilty as Alec was, even though nobody he met seemed to have made their own mummies and daddies divorce. No, that was Alec’s own particular awful crime, that and telling on Sarah so she had to go away.
Sometimes when he was out with Derek and Lulu, walking between them and holding their hands, strangers would stop and compliment Derek and Lulu on how well-behaved their son was. After the first time this had happened and the stranger had walked on, Alec had looked up at them and asked:

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