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Authors: Kage Baker

Tags: #Adult, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Fantasy, #C429, #Extratorrents, #Kat, #Travel

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BOOK: The Life of the World to Come

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It’s as though he were able to lose himself in
Treasure Island
, escaping from his unhappiness by making the wild sea and the pirates come to life for him—except that instead of his imagination, he’s used enormous sums of money and technology. What am I to make of such a brave new world?

Who cares? It was enough for me to watch the way his face lit up when he described his adventures, watch his expressive face and gestures conveying his stories perfectly even in that thug’s idiom of his. The man should have gone on the stage, I always thought, and what a preacher he’d made!

And he sang for me. He had been describing how his ex-wives had hated his singing, the repulsive harpies. I was overwhelmed with a sudden memory of Nicholas singing, making some Tudor bawdiness sublime with his dark tenor. So I begged him to sing something, and he obliged with old sea songs, blood-and-thunder ballads that somehow reduced me to a weepy mess.

At last he reached up his hand and pulled me down beside him, and there I lay hearing his voice vibrate in his chest and throat. We were shortly embracing again, me scanning frantically to see if his brain was likely to explode this time. It was of course impossible that after three hours of rest and a glass of iced tea the man should be completely recovered from transcendence shock, but he was.

He was twiddling experimentally with the fastenings of my coveralls, and I was wondering how his mail-suit unzipped, when something seemed to occur to him. He lifted his mouth from mine and looked down at me. “Er—”

“What is it?” I said, desperate lest he should stop.

“You’re a virgin, I guess, yeah?”

Have I mentioned that the man is prone to scruples at the most inconvenient times?

Of course I’m not a virgin, but I do have this sort of immortal self-repairing body, see, and in the three hundred and then three thousand years that had elapsed between our respective couplings, there had been more than ample time for a tiny unimportant membrane to grow back. Christ, I could have grown a leg back in that amount of time.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s all right, though. Please.”

But now he was self-conscious, and the gorgeous python that had materialized down one leg of his suit shrank a little. “Can I use your shower?”

Mother of God! Had I mentioned he’s very clean in his personal habits as well? And me without a shower.

I was stammering to explain about my pathetic tin washtub when we both realized it had been raining outside for some time, warm summer rain. I directed him out into my back garden and hurried to fetch him a clean towel.

He always has enjoyed bathing. Something Freudian relating to guilt, perhaps? Edward seemed to have some sort of personal dirt-repellent force field, of course, but I remember the way Nicholas used to revel in clean water and soap.

When I opened the door and stepped out under the overhang, Alec had already snaked out of the mail-suit and was sitting in the tub, wearing only that torque. He was leaning back into the rain with an ecstatic expression on his face, letting it soak into his lank hair, which was becoming even lanker. The tub was rather low and didn’t obscure much of his nakedness, and I made a small involuntary pleading sound.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. For a moment he seemed wary, defensive; then grinned his sidelong grin.

“Would you, er, like to bathe, too?” he asked, all suavity, gesturing invitation as though the tub were ever so capacious. I don’t remember how I got out of my clothes and across the garden, it happened so fast.

It was insane. The storm was beating down on us, the tub was impossibly tiny, and I was worried about that long back of his—but oh, how that man could kiss. We writhed ineffectively for a few minutes before he simply stood up in the tub
and hoisted me into the air as though I weighed no more than a feather. He is phenomenally strong. I slid down, pressed against his body, and he thrust his face into my breasts with a whoop of inarticulate glee. The rain bathed us, and the fragrance of the garden was sweet.

God, God, God.

I believe I was in the act of offering Him my soul, or whatever a thing like me has, if He’d only let this moment stretch out into eternity, when my groping hands found the pattern of electronic wire just under the skin of Alec’s shoulders.

God?

I leaned forward over the top of Alec’s head and looked down. It was like the most beautiful tattoo you can imagine, an intricate pattern of spirals and knotwork in dull silver, winging out over both his shoulder blades and twining up the back of his neck. But it was wire, installed subcutaneously and tapping somehow into his nervous system and brain. So that’s what the torque was for? I touched it gingerly and had a momentary disorientation, a view of my own breasts seen from—well, not the angle I was used to, anyway.

“Alec, darling,” I said cautiously, “this is a rather unusual tattoo you have.”

He said something in reply, but under the circumstances it came out somewhat muffled. I bit my lower lip and said: “I beg your pardon?”

He lifted his face to look up at me. “You know how I told you I’ve got this big custom cybersystem, to work the rigging on my ship? This is how I run it. I’m a cyborg, have been since I was eighteen.”

Gosh, what a coincidence!

Though of course what he means by
cyborg
and what I would mean by the same word are entirely different things.

He looked alarmed until he realized I was laughing, and then he chuckled companionably and went back to what he’d been doing as I gasped out, overwhelmed by the cosmic joke:

“Oh, perfect—!” And then I thought I’d been struck by lightning, because the flash of revelation was very nearly that
blindingly bright. I seized his face in both my hands and tilted it up to stare into his eyes. “
What
year did you say it was where you come from?”

“Er … 2351,” he said, polite but confused.

“But that’s only four years from—” I said, and then the whole mystery of my beloved came together. An extraordinary man, with extraordinary abilities, who bears a grudge against Dr. Zeus. A cyborg, and not a poor biomechanical slave like me but a free agent, with both the ability and the determination to slip through the Company’s defenses and do the impossible. And what was that blue fire playing around our bodies? Oh, dear, it was Crome’s radiation. Was I seeing the future?

And I didn’t know the half of it yet.

I laughed and laughed. Then I writhed down and we embraced. Somehow or other we wound up on the lawn with the bath overturned beside us, and he was on top of me, peering down through the lightning flashes. He was looking into my eyes as though he’d only just recognized me.

And how good was it, what we did there on my tidy little lawn? I’ll tell you. If I suffer in darkness for a thousand years because of what I did afterward—I won’t care.

By great good fortune the water under the tamales had not quite boiled away by the time we went back inside, and the house was filled with the earthy smell of corn. I lit lamps and pulled on an old shirt to set out our supper. He wrapped a towel around his middle and sat down at my rough-hewn table, watching me lay places for us. Two places, after all this time.

Once, long ago, I’d laid out an intimate supper for two, just like this. We had sat together in a tiny circle of light at an old wooden table, in our own little world, as beyond in the darkness the wind howled and a hostile fate prepared to tear us to pieces the minute we stepped outside the circle.

It isn’t really a happy memory. Nicholas had been sullenly desperate and I had been fearfully desperate, a good little cyborg feeling real qualms about running away with a mortal
man. Before that night ended my heart had been broken irreparably, and Nicholas, furious and terrified, was running to meet his death. Thank you, Dr. Zeus.

But I’m an old wicked cyborg now, aren’t I? Long past desperation. And how sweetly the rain beat on the roof of my house, and how snug and dry we were in my lamplit kitchen as the blue evening fell, and how sleepy and calm we were there together.

And calmly, over our supper, I did the first of the things that will damn me if I’m ever caught. I told Alec, in great detail, all about the Silence in 2355, together with some rather necessary bits of temporal physics to enable him to use that shuttle effectively. So very classified, and I divulged it! He knows, now, Dr. Zeus’s fear of the unforeseen apocalypse; he knows his window of opportunity, and what to plan for over the next four years. Whatever his plans may be.

I gather he has some kind of ally he calls the Captain, who is apparently the captain of his ship, though I’m a little confused on this point because I also had the impression he sails alone. But this Captain may be dead, which is one of the things he’s gone off to resolve/revenge.

The talk depressed him. He reached across the table and took my hand as we spoke. What kind of emotional life has he had? I could cheerfully kill his ex-wives, I think.

Oh, yes, I’ve changed. But I would burn in Hell for his dear sake.

I may yet.

He helped me wash the dinner dishes, and we hung his thermal underclothes up to dry before the fire, and at last we climbed into my narrow, creaking bed. Last time I’d lain in a real bed with him, he’d been Edward, and we’d been on the run all day and were too exhausted to do more than drift off to sleep together. Not this time! The bed has a permanent list to starboard now, and we were lucky it didn’t collapse
in extremis
. I really ought to fix it, but I can’t bear to. Just looking at it makes me smile.

He warmed me right through, my mortal lover, and afterward drifted off to sleep in my arms. I lay watching him by the light of the fire. I might have lain there studying him all night,
newly fascinated by all the details I’d never forgotten: the cleft in his chin, the funny swirled patterns in the hair on his arms.

But the night wasn’t mine to idle away so pleasantly.

I rose and pulled the blanket up around his shoulders. He sighed, reaching for me. I slipped out into the rainy night, to do the second thing for which I will surely suffer one day.

The shuttle lay dark and abandoned, its sprung hatch gaping open in the rain. I looked in and saw the tiny green lights on the control panel, dimly illuminating the access port. I made my assault, forced it to give up the secret I wanted.

The bomb was wired under the pilot’s seat, of all obvious places. It was a tiny white Bakelite box that might have been anything, a fuse relay, a power seat servomotor, a container of breath mints that had fallen down under there and been forgotten. I knew better. I found the tool kit and snipped its vicious little wires, swung the shuttle’s hatch shut, carried the bomb back with me through the gray rainy night and flung it into my compost heap. It’s there now, as I write. It may yet be live and deadly, it may have been ruined by the rain and the muck; but it will never kill Alec, which is all that matters.

I came back and reentered paradise, slipping into the firelit room where my love slept safe.
Third time lucky, mortal man,
I thought.

He woke when I climbed back in beside him, grumbled a little, reached out his arms to pull me in close and tucked me under his chin, just as Nicholas used to do. I lay awake awhile longer, fighting conditioning nightmares; but I know them for the false programmed things they are now, and they can’t scare me. I fell asleep at last, soothed by the rhythm of his heartbeat.

We didn’t get out of bed for two full hours next morning. We did everything I’d ever done with Nicholas, who’d been amazingly adventurous for a late medieval fellow, and everything I’d ever done with Edward, who was a Victorian gentleman, which says all I need to say about
his
personal tastes. The bed sagged ever further toward a happy death.

Then we got up and I made him breakfast.

“I hope you like tacos,” I said, spooning the hot filling into corn tortillas. “This seems so inadequate! I seldom dine in the morning, myself, just a roll or something to keep the coffee from killing me. No tea, no kippers, no sardines even. Nothing for an Englishman, but then I never expected to meet one here.”

“That’s okay,” said Alec. He accepted a taco and bit into it cautiously. “It’s not bad. What is it?”

“Proteus Breakfast Bounty,” I told him with a sneer. “It approximates sausage. Not inspiring, but sustaining. The tortillas, at least, are real.”

“I like ’em,” he said.

“You
are
a gentleman,” I said, pouring him out a mug of coffee. I poured a cup for myself and sat down across the table from him. “Well, then. Here we are.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Checkerfield’s Brunch Club,” he said. God, it sounded strange in my ears. Mrs. Checkerfield? Or Lady Finsbury! Pretty good for somebody who began life in a one-room hut, eh? Child of Spanish peasants who owned maybe two goats and three fig trees? Too surreal to contemplate. I took a careful sip of coffee and said quietly:

“If you knew how often I’ve wished you were sitting right there—”

“I can’t be what you wanted,” he said. “You must have wished for somebody a lot better looking, in shining armor.”

BOOK: The Life of the World to Come

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