The Children of the Company (41 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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This occurred on New Year’s Eve, so Labienus dropped by the house with Champagne to celebrate; though by this time Anna and Geert were in such emotional states they didn’t particularly feel like celebrating.
Labienus took them upstairs for a firm talk about future strategies, and I was left to amuse Hendrick.
We stood looking at one another uncertainly, and I cleared my throat and said: “Well, Hendrick. Would you like to play Super Soccer-Man?”
He made a slight face.
“No,” he said. “I don’t really like it so much. Daddy does, though. Could we go for a walk?”
“Probably not the best idea,” I said apologetically. We’d only had one or two incidences of vandalism outside the house, but it had been decided to keep Hendrick out of sight until he started school, by which time the more violent protest would have died down somewhat.
“I don’t like living here,” Hendrick told me, sighing. “I wish we could move back to our other house. But we’re not going to now, are we?”
“I’m afraid not,” I told him. He looked resigned. Then a furtive brightness came into his eyes.
“I know what we can do,” he said, glancing guiltily in the direction of the second floor.
“What, Hendrick?” I couldn’t suppress a smile. “You know I can’t permit anything your parents forbid.”
“Oh, it isn’t anything bad,” he said, taking my hand and leading me to the dining nook. “You’ll like this, it’ll be lots of fun! Really. Now, you sit down there—” He pushed me into the nook and I sat awkwardly on the little bench seat. He lifted the lid of the other seat and drew out an ancient imitation leather case. Stamped on it in gold letters were the words TOURNAMENT CHESS SET.
“You know how to play this game?” he inquired, setting up the board and pieces with remarkable speed, and correctly, I might add.
“Yes,” I replied, stroking my mustaches. Poor little fellow, I thought, inviting a cyborg to play chess! “Do your parents object to chess, Hendrick?”
“Not—exactly,” said Hendrick, avoiding my eyes. “It’s just Daddy says I can’t look like a brainiac or something.” He smiled slyly. “And anyway Daddy isn’t so good at it. I think that’s why really.” He turned the board on the diagonal and pushed it toward me. “Would you like to play black or white?”
I took white, and moved king’s knight to F-three. He promptly advanced a queen’s pawn to D-five and sat looking at me expectantly. I moved a king’s pawn to G-three; his queen’s bishop went to G-four. I moved my king’s bishop to G-two. He countered with moving his queen’s knight to D-seven. I sent a king’s pawn to H-three. Hendrick sidled his queen’s bishop over to
capture my king’s knight. I responded in kind, taking his queen’s bishop with my king’s bishop.
Anyone watching us would have thought we were only pretending to play, simply jumping the pieces around without purpose, so quickly were our moves made. I leaned back, setting his queen’s bishop to one side, and considered him. His face was alight as he studied the pieces and quickly advanced a queen’s pawn to C-six.
“You’re actually enjoying this,” I observed. I advanced a queen’s pawn to D-three.
“Uh-huh,” he replied, advancing a king’s pawn to E-six. “This is the time I like the most, though. Before everything locks up.”
I moved a king’s pawn to E-four. “Locks up?”
“You know,” he replied absently, moving his queen’s knight to E-five. “It all locks up. So much has happened you can see how it’s going to end.”
“Can you indeed?” I slid my king’s bishop back to G-two.
“Uh-huh.” He captured my king’s pawn at E-four. I took his capturing pawn with my king’s bishop. “Then it just gets bor-ing.”
“Because you know who’s going to win?” I inquired, watching him move his king’s knight to F-six.
“Uh-huh.” He rubbed his nose thoughtfully as I returned my king’s bishop to G-two once more. “Usually it’s me. You’re kind of good, though.” He reached out and sent his king’s bishop to B-four. “Check.”
I blocked it with my king’s knight. To my astonishment, he responded by moving his king’s pawn to H-five.
“Did you mean to do that?” I asked him. He looked up at me in surprise.
“Can’t you see the way it’s going to go?”
“No, I’m afraid I can’t.” What an admission to make to a mortal child, of all people! He looked disappointed.
“I thought maybe you could. You play almost as good as me,” he added tactfully.
I advanced my queen to E-two. He edged his queen over to C-seven.
“You said I was different, Hendrick,” I said carefully, setting my queen’s pawn on C-three. “Is that why you thought I could see the moves in advance, as you can?”
He nodded, moving his king’s bishop back to E-seven.
“How am I different?”
He looked up at me, knitting his brows again. “Well, you just are. You move different. You smell different. You talk like one of those people on the Wire. You and Michel, too. You know what I mean! Don’t you know?”
I knew; but it was impossible he should know, or rather it would have been impossible were he a human child. I scanned him. Yes; not quite a human brain.
Engineered to better process information.
So the child would be able to catch a ball, as clumsy schoolboy Geert had never been. Able, moreover, to distinguish a cyborg from a mortal human. Able to see the outcome of a chess game after a certain number of moves.
What else might Hendrick Karremans have been able to do?
He took my prolonged silence for embarrassment and said quickly: “Don’t worry! I won’t tell anybody. I don’t like being different, either.”
Not knowing how to reply, I simply nodded and moved my queen’s pawn to D-four. His knight retreated but he stepped up his attack after that, until the thirtieth move, when I took his queen and he took mine. Then he yawned and waved his hands over his head.
“Now
it’s boring,” he told me. “It’s going to be a draw.”
“Really?” I looked at the board. I analyzed the positions. He was quite correct.
“Uh-huh. In eighteen—” Hendrick cocked his head and studied the board. “No! Nineteen moves. You play good, Mr. Victor. It took a long time to know what you’d do.”
We had been playing for all of six minutes.
“Thank you,” I said. “That was a remarkable experience.” I meant it, too.
“Want to play again?” he said hopefully.
“Some other time,” I said, though I knew it was unlikely there would ever be another time.
“Okay. Can I have a Fruit Pop?” he inquired, carefully putting the board and its pieces away. From what I had observed I knew Anna didn’t allow him sweets between meals, but I went to the kitchen and got the child his Fruit Pop.
He took it gleefully and we went out to the parlor, where he sat at the piano kicking his legs. He seemed completely uninterested in the keyboard, however.
“Do you play the piano?” I asked him.
“Uh-uh.” He looked at me as though I were mad. “I’m only a little kid.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. He nibbled away at the Fruit Pop a moment later and then his face grew suddenly apprehensive.
“What’s the matter?”
“If those people said I can go to their school—then I’ll have to get those shots, won’t I?”
“I suppose you will,” I said.
“I don’t want to have shots,” he cried, tears welling in his eyes.
“Well, perhaps you won’t, then.”
“But it’s locked up now! They’re the only school I can go to so Mommy and Daddy will have to send me there, but Michel will tell them I have to get shots to make the law people happy and make things easier,” Hendrick wailed, forgetting his Fruit Pop, which dripped on the shining black finish of the piano. I got up hastily and mopped it with a tissue.
He was right, of course. One of the things Labienus was even now explaining to Anna and Geert was that they would have to make this particular concession, to have Hendrick vaccinated to comply with Civil Ordinance Number 435.
“You’ll simply have to be brave, Hendrick,” I told him. “After all, it’s not as though they stick children with needles any more.”
“But it still hurts,” he wept. “I know it does. It went
hiss
and the medicine jumped into Mommy when she got
her
shots and she said
ow!
I’m scared to be hurt.”
Why on earth had Anna let him watch her being inoculated?
“It’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid of pain,” I told him. “But you mustn’t be a baby about it, after all. All the other children in that school had to have shots, you know.”
“But I don’t need the shots. They did,” he said angrily. “And it’s not fair. They’re not going to die.”
Was he precognitive as well? But he showed no sign of being a Crome generator, one of those mortals who produces a freak bioelectric field that carries over into the temporal wave. They occasionally seem to pick up information from the pattern of the future. “Well, neither are you,” I lied. “You surely don’t suppose a few little shots are going to kill you?”
“No,” he said, irritably wiping his nose on his sleeve. “Not that kind of shots. I mean people are going to kill me. That’s all locked up, too.”
“Why would you think that, Hendrick?” I asked him, crouching to offer him a tissue. He looked at me with an expression of weary patience.
“
Be-cause,”
he told me. “Don’t you know what’s been going on? All those people who are mad at Mommy and Daddy? They’re scared of me. They threw things at our windows. Mommy and Daddy want me to be alive but a lot more people want me to not be alive. It would be real easy to kill me. All somebody has to do is shoot through those windows with a gun. When I go to that school it would be even more easy. They could just shoot me in the street. They could shoot me in the car. Even if I wore a soldier helmet they could get me. So it’s all locked up. See?”
I stared at him, aghast at the matter-of-fact way he spoke.
“You don’t seem frightened,” I said at last. “Why are you afraid of shots, but not afraid to die?”
He had turned his attention to his melting Fruit Pop and was attempting to eat it before it fell off the stick. After a moment he said: “Well, when you die, it hurts but then it’s over. My cat had to die and it didn’t hurt him. He just went to sleep. But when you get a shot, it hurts and you’re still alive, so it keeps hurting.”
At that moment we heard their voices echoing down the stairs as they came, Anna and Geert sounding tired, Labienus sounding placatory.
“I thought we lived in a reasonable world,” Anna was saying. “I really thought the human race had evolved beyond this sort of thing.”
“Ah, but evolution is an ongoing process, isn’t it?” Labienus said. “Think of yourselves as part of the change. You’re fighting prejudice and irrational fear. When you’ve proved that what you did was right, you will have advanced civilization that much farther. But you won’t manage it without a few sacrifices.”
“That’s true, of course,” Geert said dispiritedly. They stepped down into the parlor and looked at Hendrick with identical expressions of shame. Anna cleared her throat.
“Hendrick, I’m afraid we’re going to have to take you to the doctor after all—”
That was as far as she got before he began to howl, and threw himself down on the floor crying hopelessly.
“You promised,
” he shrieked. “I knew! I
knew
you’d do it—” They bent over him, murmuring reproaches. I backed away from them and turned to Labienus.
“I must get away,” I murmured.
“Of course,” he said immediately. “I quite understand. Take the night off. I’ll stay with them.” Once again he reached out and clasped my hand, startling me.
I shrugged into my coat and slipped out, scarcely taking time to wonder at the change in Labienus’s administrative style. Perhaps he wasn’t entirely the smiling manipulator I had known him to be.
I caught a bus into Old Amsterdam. There was a fine old restaurant on the Dam, soothing to the soul, unfashionably fitted out in red leather and crystal, with an excellent wine cellar. The food was of the sort generally described as “hearty fare” but prepared well; what should be fresh was fresh, and what should be high was just delicately so. I dined in comparative solitude and lingered over my meal, watching from my table as the Dam began to fill up with merrymakers for the countdown to midnight.
Dusk fell. I watched the lights begin to glow, sipping my coffee, savoring my dessert. New Year’s Eve, and the year 2092 was about to slip into history. What was the first New Year’s Eve I could remember? The Eurobase One celebration in 503 A.D. Very clearly I remembered lying in the ward recovering from my latest augmentation, furious at the pain I felt, as the nurses hung pink and purple and yellow streamers in the hall. There were cut-out decorations, too: a smiling baby wreathed in a banner, and a terrible old man with a scythe and hourglass. The nurse told us a story about the old man. She explained how we needn’t be afraid of him, ever, for we lucky little children were becoming immortal.

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