The Children of the Company (36 page)

Authors: Kage Baker

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

BOOK: The Children of the Company

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Is that rare for a cyborg? Very rare, I assure you. You understand of course we’re not emotionless creatures at all, not machines, heavens no! But the danger in loving mortals is that one faces inevitable tragedy: they must age and die, however much one cares for them. Yet somehow we immortals never
seem to form more than the warmest of platonic friendships amongst ourselves … I thought, until I learned otherwise.

I met and fell in love with an Art Preservation Specialist. Met her quite by accident, too, it wasn’t the work brought us together at all. And oh, worm, she’s beautiful, she’s kind, she’s strong, much stronger character than mine. Fearless. And, do you know, we actually got married, my little darling and I? Sleek black lioness and clumsy polar bear, what a match.

We weren’t supposed to wed, of course. The Company doesn’t generally approve of marriages amongst its operatives. And of course it can’t be marriage as mortals have it; we’re parted for long periods of time. That’s never mattered, though. We always meet again. And what exquisite bliss, that reunion, always …

I wonder how long it will be this time? …

But you want to hear an action story, don’t you, big red worm? Yes, here you come, pushing your sucker-mouth across my tiny window, wiping clear an inch-wide view of hell itself, the dark-glowing fumarole. Thanks so awfully much. I’m afraid I don’t see much in the way of heroic action because I’m not much of a hero, am I? But I tried to be. Failed miserably, too. Here’s what happened:

They call it the Sattes virus, after the prison where it first broke out. Some form of hemorrhagic fever, symptoms vomiting and voiding of blood, attacking the intestines and spleen, killing the host within hours. It killed every single inmate and guard at Sattes Men’s Colony in Montana, United States of America. Then it spread to the families of the guards. Then it stopped.

Before anyone could draw breath in relief, it had broken out in two other prisons, one in Utah and one in California. It followed the same pattern there, exactly. Within twenty-four hours it had broken out in prisons in Arizona, New Mexico, British Columbia. Within a week it was in prisons all over the world. How is it transmitted? Plenty of theories, but no real evidence. This was just a month ago, worm.

And do you know what the mortals did? They smirked. Just imagine, the criminal element wiped out in a week! Why, it was like a judgment of God. Never mind that men and women serving a week’s time for traffic violations died, too, and there were a great many more of those than serial killers sitting in cells. It
must
be a judgment of God.

But even as it ran its course in the prisons, it started in the armed forces of the world. Broke out at military bases, on battleships, in civil defense training camps. That wiped the smiles off their faces. Millions of young men and women dying the world over. Perhaps it isn’t a judgment of God after all? The death toll is amazing, surpassed the Black Death in its first week. It kills so quickly, you see! And nobody knows what to do.

Though certain things are obvious. Groups of people living crowded together catch it, men catch it more easily than women. Age is no barrier, neither is race or location. There are theories: testosterone somehow linked? Schools have been closed, public assemblies forbidden, all the usual stuff governments do during a plague, depressingly familiar to us immortals but quite shocking to the poor little mortals who had somehow assumed that living in the twenty-first century exempted them from disasters of this kind. There has even been a resurgence of millennial paranoia: perhaps the count was off by eighty-three years, somehow?

And of course everyone working for the Company knows that’s not the case at all. We all know Sattes won’t bring on the end of the world, that it will disappear as quickly as it began, that no cure nor any cause will ever be found. Business as usual will continue for the human race. Well, not quite as usual … the human gene pool will be gravely diminished.

Now, when all this started, where was I? In the navy, of course. Posted to the Gorbachev Science Base on Avacha Bay. Heroic Lieutenant Kalugin waiting like an actor to play his part, with a worse than usual case of performance nerves.

You see, worm, here’s what history says happened: that even with its armies and navies devastated, even as the whole world waited terrified and scarcely able to hope the dread epidemic had run its course, Russia bravely went ahead with its test voyage of a revolutionary new miniature submersible, the prototype
Alyosha
, powered by an experimental fusion drive. Future histories—when they mention it at all, tiny footnote to history as it is—will characterize this as a supremely gallant gesture of hope for the future in a very uncertain time.

A doomed gesture, too; for the
Alyosha
has been lost and will never be recovered, taking that experimental fusion drive with her (we could only afford to build one, you see; in fact we could only afford to build a little one, which is why it went in a submersible) and by the way her one-man-crew was lost
as well, fearless Lieutenant Kalugin. Perhaps I’ll get a statue, worm, every bit as grand as Peter the Great’s, me in bronze towering among the kiosks that sell vodka and shoe polish in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Ah, but I won’t be lost, really. I won’t, worm, and you know why? Listen closely.

Almost the first thing the Company discovered, when it went into this time travel business so many ages ago, was that
history cannot be changed
. Recorded history anyway. But if you work within the parameters of recorded history, you actually have quite a bit of leeway, because recorded history is frequently wrong, and there are always event shadows—places and times for which there is no recorded history. See how it works?

So the Company decided that what would appear to be a tragedy could in fact be subtly erased. We could conform to the historical facts: I would volunteer for the mission, take out the
Alyosha
on its test run into the Aleutian Basin, transmit a distress signal and maintain silence thereafter, presumably lost in the abyssal darkness beyond recovery, for the navy will never find even a trace of the
Alyosha
… because I’ll have taken the
Alyosha
straight to a Company recovery ship waiting off Karaginskiy Island.

No death after all for valiant Lieutenant Kalugin, and the fusion technology won’t be lost, but co-opted by Dr. Zeus Incorporated, which will be regrettably unable to give it back to its inventors because history cannot be changed. Still, humanity will benefit in the long run. We—

Mother of God and all the holy angels, what was that?

It can’t have been a probe camera from the
Soter
. They can’t have noticed yet I’m in trouble, and even if they had they couldn’t get here so quickly! Could they? I don’t think so, but then I’m in an event shadow, aren’t I, worm?

It can’t be pressure on the hull. It can’t. This hull is made out of a new super-composite. We tested it. It ought to withstand much worse than this. I’m only a thousand meters down. Or, or, well, maybe it will give just a little and then no more? Flexing, not breaking? It won’t collapse. Not with me in it. That won’t happen, worm. Really.

I know what it was! The black smoker must have thrown out a chunk of rock or something. Yes, of course, just a bit of larger-than-ordinary debris raining down on the hull. The rest of it is falling so softly, so silently, it might have been only a little pebble, and perhaps only sounded loud by contrast. Yes. We’re all right, worm. No cause for concern.

Let’s get back to our story, shall we?

The reason I’m sitting here, talking so desperately to you, worm, is, as you must have guessed, that
something went wrong
. All began according to plan, I bubbled away through the deep, reached the
Alyosha’
s last known position, transmitted my last tragic message and then took off for Karaginskiy Island.

But three hours out, I lost forward propulsion. I began to drop. Tried to jettison ballast: no use. And down I went, down through water that grew ever darker but not colder, into this previously undiscovered field of volcanic chimneys smoking out mineral-rich filth. Bump, down I came.

I’ve tried everything. It’s not the fusion drive. That’s still working beautifully, if pointlessly, not actually driving me anywhere. No, it seems to be a series of little malfunctions that have all compounded to make one very big malfunction, and as near as I can tell it’s because a two-ruble bolt cracked and gave a valve more play than it should have had, so that it stuck in an open position … so much loving care was lavished on the wonderful new fusion drive that the rest of the
Alyosha’s
construction was just a bit shoddy, or so it seems.

Ironic, isn’t it? Especially as I might have detected the problem if I’d done a routine scan before climbing in. I didn’t, though. I was tired this morning. Sleepy. Hung over. See why mortals really needn’t fear being conquered by a super-race of cyborgs? We can be just as stupid as they are.

Though you’d have been hung over, too, red worm, if you’d been drinking what I’d been drinking for three days. A cocktail of my own devising: I call it a Moscow Bobsled. Chocolate milk and vodka. Goes down fast and then you crash! Yes, I know, it sounds horrible, but the Theobromine in the chocolate interacts wonderfully with the vodka. What was my excuse for getting into such a state? Well, you’d have been drinking, too.

You see, my friends had died. You wouldn’t know about that, of course. Red worms don’t have friends, I suppose. Cyborgs really shouldn’t, either.

When the plague spread to Russia, it came from the west. Hit St. Petersburg first. All those training ships, all those mortal boys and girls … Well, panicking, and drawing the obvious conclusion that it wasn’t safe to crowd its armed forces together, the government hit on a desperate plan to salvage its remaining navy.

The orders went out to Okhotsk, to Magadan, to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, to the island bases: empty the ships! Empty the barracks! Disperse and quarter the enlisted forces amongst the civilian population, or in remote areas
spread out, and perhaps by the time the Sattes virus had worked its way across Siberia it wouldn’t be able to find new victims.

You can imagine the alacrity with which this order was obeyed, worm. The old ships emptied and sat silent at anchor, and truckloads of sailors were taken up into the mountains. Some of them went to old mining camps, old logging camps, hunting lodges; all kinds of places were pressed into service as emergency quarters. Some just took off into the woods with camping gear, happy to get a vacation and save their lives into the bargain, promising to stay in contact electronically. The officers were quartered at hot spring resorts all through Paratunka. Holidays for everybody! If only the Grim Reaper hadn’t been expected to show up as well. Moving into his little dacha amongst the stone birches, checking his black robe and scythe at the changing-room door and slipping into the hot pool …

The mortals didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t either, really; here we were two weeks from the date of my historic mission and everything was falling to pieces. I knew that most of the people at Gorbachev would survive the plague, because history recorded their names, and of course there was no danger to me. But what do you do socially when the Dies Irae is playing everywhere? How do you pass the time? Watch news on the Wire? Far too depressing. Go out for a drink at a cozy club? Not in a naval uniform, which in this dark hour marks you for one of the damned. Sit in your flat and play solitaire?

I did that, actually, until I got a call from the mortal Litvinov. He and I’d served together on the
Timoshenko,
before I’d been transferred; and guess where he was now! Ten kilometers out of Paratunka, sprawling at his ease in the private tub that came with his dacha. True, the dacha was a little ruinous, because the resort had been closed for years; but the hot water just kept bubbling, that was the great thing about these places, and Larisa was there, and Antyuhin was there, and there was plenty to drink, and wouldn’t I like to come up for a visit?

I probably shouldn’t have gone, worm. But my coworkers at Gorbachev were glad enough to see the back of me for a few days—they were all civilians, after all, and seemed to think that would protect them—so I spruced up and caught the tram out to Paratunka, and walked from there. I’d had some idea of renting a bicycle, but the road was impossible, steep switchbacks rutted and boulder-strewn, straight back into the mountains.

But at last, as the first cold stars were peeping through the trees, I heard the whine of a generator and saw yellow lights; and a minute or so later I was walking in under a leaning arch that had once proclaimed the name of this little resort. I couldn’t tell what it had been, because a new sign had been made from a piece of cardboard and tacked up across the arch. It read:

SATTES SPA—YOUR HOST, BOCCACCIO

I walked in and stood in the central clearing, looking around uncertainly. There were perhaps a dozen little tumbledown dachas visible, all at the edges of the forest. Half a dozen had lights behind the windows, and in some cases light streamed up into the trees through holes in the sagging roofs. There was a strong smell of dry rot and mildew, and all the damage that a mountain winter can inflict on a place like that, to say nothing of a vague sulphurous aroma. Still, the wind from the stars was cold and fresh. I could hear mortal voices in conversation, and music, and laughter. A fire had been lit in half an oil drum before one of the dachas: someone was grilling slabs of some sort of meat product.

As I watched, the door opened and a mortal man appeared, silhouetted black against the yellow light. Warm air steamed out around him. He wore only fatigue trousers, slippers, and a bathrobe, and he carried a drink. As he stepped out he was directing a remark over his shoulder to someone within the dacha: “But that’s exactly my point. How do we know museums aren’t full of evidence that’s been mislabeled—”

He noticed me and started.

“Hell! Christ Almighty, Kalugin, I thought you were a bear after our Spam.”

“Is that what it is?” I came close to the fire and peered in at the coals. Grilled Spam, all right. “Hello, Rostya Anfimovich.”

“Good to see you!” Litvinov jumped down the steps and embraced me. “Did you walk all the way from the tram stop? Everyone, Vasilii Vasilievich got here!”

There was a chorus of happy shouts from the interior of the dacha, and in a matter of minutes I was soaking in the bath, mug of vodka in one hand and sandwich—grilled Spam between two Finnish crackers—in the other.

“Pretty nice, huh?” said Antyuhin gleefully. “And it’s all ours! All we had to do was clean the dead leaves out. And, well, a couple of other things. We won’t tell you about them.”

“Thank you,” I said, looking around. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn they’d had to clean a mastodon skeleton out of there. The little house was a wreck, and can’t have been made of more than plywood and screens anyway. You could see stars through the roof, and birds had nested in the corners. The floor was spongy and gave alarmingly under Litvinov as he stripped down prior to rejoining us in the tub.

“And it’s the junior officer’s mess of the
Timoshenko
together again!” said Larisa Katerinovna, raising her tin cup. “For however long we have.”

“No,” Antyuhin pointed a finger at her admonishingly. “No references to you-know. Back to our symposium. We’ve got a Frivolity Symposium going, Kalugin, see? We’re diverting ourselves with discussion on matters of no social or philosophical significance whatsoever.”

“Current topic under discussion is whether or not Almas really exist,” said Litvinov, splashing in beside me.

“The Mongolian bigfoot?” I stared.

“I don’t see how you can deny it, with the Podgorni footage,” challenged Verochka Sofianovna.

“The point, you see, Kalugin, is: if any supernatural creature who shall remain nameless comes to judge whether or not we’re ready to be taken to the next world, he’ll think we’re a pack of hopeless twits and leave in disgust,” said Antyuhin.

“And for that matter I don’t think the possible existence of an unclassified hominid is a frivolous subject,” Verochka said.

“What if they’ve been sighted in UFOs?” said Larisa.

“Good …” Antyuhin nodded, frowning thoughtfully.

“Pilots or abductees, though?” said Litvinov. “That would make a difference, don’t you think?”

“Only in degrees of absurdity,” said Verochka.

I had another bite of my sandwich and listened, so happy. I love mortals. I love their bravery and their craziness, their ability to tell jokes under fire. I suppose it’s something they have to develop, since they know their deaths are inevitable; but it’s magnificent all the same, don’t you think, worm?

We sat there talking for hours, every now and then getting up to run out, all steaming and pink, to the cold pool, where we’d plunge into black water to keep ourselves from heart failure, or at least that was the idea. It was full of floating leaves but Litvinov assured me it was clean water, in fact he promised to show me just how pure it was later. When we were sufficiently revived we’d race back to the dacha for more vodka and more tales of the paranormal. We covered ghosts, UFOs, persons with the ability to teleport, talking animals, visions of the Mother of God, and anything else we could think of in our attempt to repel the angel of death.

Now and again other crew members in varying states of hilarious undress would stop in for a visit, making the rounds from their dachas across the clearing, usually bringing another bottle. Only once was there sadness, when the engineer Serebryannikov insisted on singing “The Last Night of the World”; other than that the stars shown down undimmed. It was long after midnight when we began to climb out and towel our wrinkled selves, and then to crawl into sleeping bags.

There was a slight social awkwardness then, because everyone was pairing off. Another gesture of defiance at death, I suppose, or perhaps just mutual comforting. I, by myself, was looking for a clean place to unroll my sleeping bag when Larisa approached me shyly.

“Vasilii Vasilievich, you came alone … if you’d like—?” She made an including gesture at herself and Antyuhin. He looked across at me, waiting to see what I’d say as he unrolled their bedding.

“You’re very kind,” I said, bending to kiss her between the eyes. “But I’m a married man, remember?”

“Oh! That’s right. Well, anyway—” She kissed me back, quickly, and hurried off to help Antyuhin. “Dream about your wife, then.”

And I did, worm. I did.

Next day we went climbing, Litvinov and I, and he directed my attention to the considerable beauty of the place with proprietary pleasure. Such trees! Such mountains! Such a beautiful land of fire and ice in high summer, worm. Such a wide sky. I wonder when I’ll see the sky again? No point dwelling on that. No, I’ll tell you how Litvinov and I climbed the trail above the ruined resort and came out above the most perfect little lake, green as malachite. It was
artificial, quite round within its stone coping, and fed by a wide pipe that emerged from the hillside above. Clear as glass, that water cascaded out.

“Here,” said Litvinov, “this is what I was telling you about last night. This is the reservoir they built to supply the dachas and the cold pool. See the snow on those mountains? This is snow-melt, can you imagine? Absolutely pure. It tastes wonderful.”

“This is the stuff that feeds into the taps?” I bent and scooped a little into my palm, doing a content analysis. He was right: quite pure melted snow and nothing else.

“Yes. Dozhdalev and I traced the pipes.” Litvinov crouched down and cupped his hands to drink. “Aah! Good stuff. You know what I’d like to do, after all this is over? I’d like to come back here. Maybe trace title and see if the owners would like to sell. Of course, I haven’t got any money … but, I’ll tell you what I could do! I could offer to be caretaker for them, free of charge. And I’d quietly fix up the best of the dachas to withstand the winter. Scrounge lumber from somewhere or even learn carpentry and plane logs I cut myself, eh? And live by foraging and hunting, and selling pelts for ammo and propane. Wouldn’t that be a great life?”

“You’d have everything you needed,” I said in admiration.

“I would, wouldn’t I? If Verochka wanted to live here too I’d really have it all.” Litvinov looked out over his prospective homestead dreamily. “I’m a city boy, but I could live like this in a minute. If only the world wasn’t being turned upside down …”

“Well, you never know,” I said. Even I didn’t know, then. We immortals are told in a general way what the future holds, but the Company very rarely gives us specifics, you see, worm? For all I knew at that moment Litvinov might well survive to be living on salmon and bear meat in five years’ time, a real pioneer of the post-atomic age.

For all I know … oh, worm, it’s all very well to be hopeful, but we immortals fall so easily into the habit of lying to ourselves. It’s hard to resist.You tell yourself that the years aren’t bearable otherwise and then the lies become a habit, more and more necessary, and eventually there comes a point where you run on the truth like a rock at low tide and it splits you wide open. Shipwrecked. Good-bye.

We walked back down the trail and, to our surprise, encountered a hiker coming up, a pleasant-looking little woman in bright outdoor gear. She
smiled and nodded at us as we passed her, and I started involuntarily: she was an immortal, too! She winked at me and kept going, striding along uphill on tireless legs. I couldn’t very well turn to stare after her, with Litvinov there; and after all it’s not so unusual to meet another operative now and then.

I thought she might have even been on a vacation. The Company has promised they’ll begin granting us such perquisites, you see, as we get further into the future and more and more of our work for them is accomplished. It’s been intimated that one day we’ll even have lives of our own. Wouldn’t that be charming, worm? Nan and I never parted any more, far from this sea that divides us …

I left next day, after hugs and kisses all around from my shipmates. I would have preferred to stay, but I had that crawling sensation we operatives get when we’re off the job for too long; all those programmed urges to get back to work, I suppose.

So I walked back down to Paratunka and waited for the tram, and as I waited, who should come to wait too but the little immortal woman in her bright orange jacket. She smiled and nodded at me again. I looked around to be certain there were no mortals in earshot and said to her, in Cinema Standard: “I, er, noticed you up at the old resort.”

Well, so I’m not a brilliant conversationalist, worm. But neither was she. She just smiled her unfading smile and said: “Yes. I was doing my work. It’s very important, you know.”

“You’re a Botanist?” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Nothing like that. I have to be sure all the mortals are all right, you know.”

Well, now I really had a crawling sensation, worm, because that was rather a strange answer to have given.

“Ah,” I said carefully, “you mean you’re an Anthropologist?”

Her smile never dimmed. “Uh uh,” she said. “I just take care of the mortals.”

I suppose at a moment like this mortals feel their hearts pounding, find their breath constricted, feel icy chills. Heaven knows I did! All I could think was,
Not again.

But, oh, yes, again. What had happened, you see, was that I had stumbled on another Defective.

What’s a Defective, worm? Well, officially they don’t exist, of course; but
the truth is, when the Company was learning how to transform human beings into immortal creatures with prodigious strength and intelligence, it didn’t learn how to do it all at once. No indeed. It took a few tries to get the immortality process right. Unfortunately, the immortality part was the first thing that worked, so the first few deeply flawed individuals produced were permanent problems. What do you do with an idiot who’s been given eternal life? Or a psychopath?

Dirty little secret, eh? I’d only learned about their existence because I’d had an unlucky encounter with one back in 1831, a pleasant-seeming fellow the Company was using as a courier. He was just intelligent enough to deliver packages, and, as long as he was kept continually on the move doing that, his other personality problems weren’t apparent. But, surprise! On a routine mission to bring me some botanical access codes I’d requested, his clerk had neglected to program his next posting. I was treated to a harrowing two days with a very unpleasant fellow indeed.

So I knew all too well what a Defective looked like, sounded like, worm; and here was one seated next to me, on the tram bench in Paratunka.

Oh! Oh, holy saints. That was another rock, wasn’t it? You can see out there, worm, tell me it was another rock, just a little harmless one plunking down on the
Alyosha
’s hull. Yes, thank you, you’ve taken a lot off my mind. You’re doing a splendid job clearing the porthole, too, by the way. I can see so much farther now.

Where was I? This Defective I had met. She looked like some sweet little babushka with a preternaturally young face, gave an impression of being slightly hunchbacked, though I think this was because of the way she carried herself, bent slightly at the waist and rocking to and fro. Her smile was complacent, all-wise, all-knowing, tolerant. You might think, looking at her, that she had achieved great wisdom. I need hardly add, worm, that we correctly functioning immortals never smile in that way. We’re too exhausted.

At least I am. Frightened, too. My instinct was to grab my luggage and run all the way back to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and the tram could follow any time it liked. But I smiled back, to avoid offending the creature, and I said: “You take care of them? That’s very kind of you.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding again. “You know what happens if they don’t get their vitamins, after all.”

“That’s bad, is it?”

“Oh, terrible!” Her face wrinkled up comically. “There’ll be too many of them and they’ll starve! Poor little things.”

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