The Children of the Company (35 page)

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Authors: Kage Baker

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #C429, #Extratorrents, #Kat

BOOK: The Children of the Company
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“Sex,” Kiu said thoughtfully. “And Fear. Get that big old devil behind them with a stick, and my radiant beauty in front of them, and they’ll run right off a cliff, if I ask.”
“I’m a firm believer in Guilt, personally,” said Labienus.
“Works well on individuals,” Kiu conceded.
“Nothing like it for subtle motivation. Plant it deeply enough into a mortal’s psyche and it twists them endlessly.” Labienus sighed. “Get it in there young enough and it’ll do all your work for you. You’ll have only to prod the mortal along with a suggestion now and then.”
“You realize, of course, that we learned this from the Company?” said Kiu. “Deep programming to keep us running? I was supposed to feel guilty about surviving when everyone else in my village was slaughtered. ‘Kiu-Ba, you bad girl, why didn’t you die with us?’ Conditioning nightmares for centuries, every time I had a disobedient thought, until I learned to work around them.”
“Well, of course,” said Labienus. “I did, too. What a lot you can do with a child, if you handle them properly!”
A metallic voice spoke from the communications console, echoing through the trailer.
“Beloved of the Avatar, this is your one-hour call.
”
Kiu reached out to a bedside unit and thumbed its button. “I copy, Sergei. How’s the preshow going?”
‘As you divinely ordained it, Beloved.”
“You will be blessed. Out.” Kiu slid from the bed and hurried to her dressing table. Giggling, Labienus rose and began to dress himself.
“Do you have many Russians working for you?”
“Just Sergei.” Kiu spread a coat of primer onto her face, working quickly. She had, after all, had millennia of practice.
“There was a Russian Preserver drone in my sector, and talk about conditioning! You’ll never guess how the Company put his survivor’s guilt to good use.”
“They sent him down in shipwrecks to salvage valuables?” Kiu fanned the first coat dry and considered her pots of rouge.
“You’ve heard about Kalugin, then?”
“Ashoreth’s worked with him. What an emotional mess!” Kiu loaded a canister of flesh tone into her airbrush and, closing her eyes, applied the base coat of foundation.
“But the most obliging fool it was ever my privilege to manipulate,” said Labienus, slipping on his MEDIA tag again. “I could make that fellow believe anything.”
Kiu set the airbrush aside and turned her masklike face to Labienus. Just at this stage of her toilette she looked queenly, cold, wise as a serpent.
“Give me a broken man every time. Putty can be every bit as useful as tempered steel, you know,” she said. “Whatever happened to Kalugin, anyway?”
Labienus smiles, remembering.
The transmission had been picked up on the
Soter’
s receiver in 2083, as Kalugin had rambled, had shouted, had mumbled and at last fallen into the nearest thing to eternal silence an immortal could preserve …
I suppose I can just keep talking until the oxygen runs out.
Yes, that would probably be a good idea, wouldn’t it? Because then it’ll be an anaerobic environment in here and no bacteria will grow. I’ll be in better shape when they find me, and I’ll have left an audio record. Less effort for the one who has to piece together what happened … and less upsetting for Nan, I mustn’t forget that.
For of course I’ll be rescued. They’ll find me. Even though the
Alyosha’s
disappearance is masked by an event shadow, even though the portholes are beginning to be obscured by a film of what I am terribly afraid is mineral deposit that will set like concrete and entomb me in here, to say nothing of making the little sub impossible to spot way down here in the Aleutian Basin …
I do wish those appalling ticking noises would stop. Anyone less cheerfully determined than I am would suspect they were hairline cracks forming in the hull. I could survive the hull collapsing, of course, but then I’d be …
But the Company will find me. I’ll be repaired, someday. I believe in that,
yes, I do, with my whole heart and soul, don’t I? Certainly I do. Keep talking, Vasilii Vasilievich. That way you won’t start screaming, and after all why should you scream? Everything’s going to be perfectly all right. The Company will find you. You’ve been broadcasting your distress signal loud enough to reach every cyborg operative in the eastern hemisphere and possibly one or two Kabalist rabbis in Poland.
Hm, hm, hm, life flashing before one’s eyes. Very large red worm dragging itself across the glass and leaving a clear trail, oh, dear, there really is quite a lot of dark debris drifting down from the volcanic vent, isn’t there? But that’s why they call them
black smokers
, isn’t it?
Is it? Would you like me to tell you my life story, large red worm? If I do, will you stay? Perhaps if you keep clearing the debris from that one porthole there’ll be some clue for the rescue team, one tiny circle of light in the darkness with my frightened face pressed to it, mouth moving endlessly in pointless conversation. Yes, perhaps.
All right. What’s my earliest memory? Being a mortal child. I was the big boy of the family. I was four. I think. Two sisters, Dunya and Sima. I remember them very well. Dunya was eight and Sima was three. Dunya had long braids and Sima had little short ones. We lived in a big house. I was frightened of Papa. He beat the servants, even the girls. But we had a lot of servants. We had fine clothes and toys, too, and our house had a wooden floor. So you can see we were somebody, my family.
Maybe the money and estates belonged to Mama? She never seemed bothered that Papa beat the servants and shouted at her, she just pretended he didn’t exist. I don’t know how trustworthy my memory is, of course, since I’d run and hide whenever Papa would rage. Dunya called me a coward. Hardly fair. She’d run and hide, too. But she never cried. I cried all the time. How squalid it all is, this memory, and how brief.
It ends, you see, the day it was warm enough to go outside and take bread to old Auntie Irinka. She can’t have been my aunt really. I have the impression she lived in a little dark house in the fir woods, like Baba Yaga, and we were taking bread to her for charity. An old retainer put out to honorable pasture, perhaps? Sadly, she never got her bread.
Was it Dunya’s fault? She was old enough to know better. I was the big boy of the family, though, I ought to have done something.
You see, the footpath ran along the bank of the river. Quickest route. Our
nurse should have taken us some other way, I suppose, but Masha (that was our nurse, Masha) was impatient. We weren’t going quickly enough for her, either, at least Dunya was but it took Sima ages to get anywhere on her little fat legs and I was slow, too, carrying the big bread loaf because I was the big boy, and so bundled up in my stiff coat I must have looked like a penguin walking. I should have fallen in, too …
Well, Masha decided she couldn’t wait, and told us to stop there on the path and not to move until she came back, and then she ducked away into the trees to attend to a private matter. We stood and waited. There was such sunlight! Such a raw powerful smell of new life beginning! The wild smell of the trackless forest. Dark wet earth where the snow was melting, buds swelling on the branches, little green shoots sprouting everywhere. And the yellow-white surface of the river, still frozen solid. And Dunya said, “Let’s go skating,” and I said, “We haven’t got skates with us.”
Dunya tossed her braids at this and told me we could make skates out of sticks, and I said we couldn’t, and she said she’d show me, and she scrambled down the embankment and broke a couple of forked sticks from a dead branch and stepped into them, and she actually did manage to sort of limp around on the ice. Sima wanted to skate, too, and staggered down the embankment. There weren’t any other good sticks, but Dunya hobbled over and took her hands and towed her out after her, slipping and complaining, and they went way out across the river, and had just started back. None of us paid attention to the noises like thunder, far off, or noticed that they were coming nearer. We didn’t even know what they meant.
But Masha knew, and her anger was almost greater than her fear, I think, when she came running back through the forest. She called us all sorts of names as she jumped down to the edge of the ice and demanded that the girls return immediately. Both the little faces turned up to her in surprise, and then,
boom …
I think I closed my eyes. I’m sure I did. I always used to close my eyes when I was frightened. There was some shouting, I think, but I can’t recall much about that; and when I finally opened my eyes, I recall how astonished I was. Everything had changed! The glaring bright surface of the river had broken up, all that stillness was now a surging living current of brown water, and great islands and bobbing floes of ice, and the
boom-boom-boom
like thunder was still going on all around.
But of Masha or my sisters there was no sign. They had vanished. I stood there staring, hugging the big loaf of bread. I had no idea what had happened. Minutes passed and nothing changed. I was still alone there on the footpath with the bread.
No, no, big worm, come back! The sad part is over. Now the story takes a most unexpected turn. You’ll like this.
I heard a big deep voice saying, “What are you going to do, Vasilii Vasilievich?” I thought it might be the devil or Saint Mikhail, and I almost closed my eyes again, but something made me turn and look. And there, standing on the edge of the forest, was a man I recognized: one of our serfs, Grigori. He was leaning on his axe, just looking at me with his big pale eyes.
I said, if I recall correctly, “What?” and he said: “You’ve lost your sisters! What are you going to do now? Your father will beat you, no mistake about it. Didn’t he tell you to be the big boy of the family?”
I started to cry. “Oh,” I sobbed. “What am I going to do? I’m scared to go home!”
He came at once and crouched in front of me, looking me in the eye. He said, “Hey, Master, don’t worry! I’ll tell you what. You and I have always been friends, right?”
Now, I don’t think that was quite true, I think he’d been brought from another village not long before, but he’d done a lot of work around the house lately and gone out of his way to be friendly to me, even binding up my knee once when I’d fallen and scraped it. I just sniffled now and said “Yes.”
And he said: “Well! I’d hate to see your mother and father kill you, Master, so I’ll take you to a safe place I know of. The people are nice there. It’s warm. There’s plenty of food. They’ll let you live with them, and nobody will ever know what you’ve done. How about that, eh?”
I think I might have argued, but in the end I went with him. He took my hand and we walked away into the fairy-tale forest, and I never saw the mortal world, as a mortal child, again. I have never been able to remember what happened to the bread.
Where did you go, worm? The porthole’s silting up again. No matter. I’ll just go on talking as though you were still there. Wouldn’t you like to know what happened to me? It’s really an extraordinary story. After all, I started out in
medieval Russia and here I am in a submarine in the year 2083, still alive. How did I become immortal? Did Grigori bite me in the neck? Certainly not. He wasn’t that kind of a monster.
No, it seems my serf was in reality a cyborg posing as human, just as I am now, and once he had been a mortal child, just as I was then. What were all these cyborgs doing, running around Mother Russia? You might well ask!
Stealing icons out of lovely old cathedrals that are going to be blown up by Bolsheviks, amongst other things, or making off with a czar’s ransom in amber wall panels before the Nazis can take them. Snatching orphans out of snowbanks, or from under the very hooves of Tatars’ horses, and whisking them away to hidden Company bases to be converted to cyborgs. It’s a little painful, the immortality process, but I can’t deny there are advantages. Super intelligence, phenomenal abilities, and of course immortality.
Personally I’ve always thought Grigori was a bit sloppy. I don’t think I was quite fit to become an immortal; but I was made into one anyway, so there you are.
Nan loves me as I am, at least. I’ve never understood why …
I was programmed to be a Marine Operations Specialist, and, as soon as I was out of school, began my long and illustrious career of going down with ships. Yes! That’s what I do, worm, I sink for a living. Ha ha. When history records that a ship will go down with a particularly valuable item on board, it’s my job to be aboard somehow, as captain or able-bodied seaman, and arrange to get the desired loot well sealed in a protective casing before the fatal storm or reef or whatever Fate has in store.
And then down we go, the poor mortals and I, to the bottom. I never like that part. I’m so sorry, you know, so sorry for them and there’s nothing I can do at all, I can’t save them … And then, to blunder around in the dark like a bloated corpse in the hold, waiting with the loot until the recovery ships are dispatched from the Company, that’s not the pleasantest job in the world either, but somehow that’s what my career aptitude tests recommended.
But I can’t complain, and do you know why? Why I’m a lucky man, worm? I’ll tell you: I found love.

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