The Children of the Company Part 24

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 gla.s.s, 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 t.i.tle 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. s.h.i.+pwrecked. 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+pmates. 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."

"We certainly don't want that to happen, do we?" I said.

"No," she said, and then her face changed. I tensed and clutched my bags, ready to bolt; but she lifted her head with a regal expression and regarded me coolly. And I tell you, worm, she was somebody else entirely then.

"I don't believe we've been introduced," she said.

"M-marine Operations Specialist Vasilii Vasilievich Kalugin, at your service," I said, trying to get the words out without my teeth chattering.

"What an awful lot of names you have," she said. "I'm Nicoletta."

Just Nicoletta.

"Pretty name," I said, like an idiot. "You weren't Russian, then?"

"No," she said. "There weren't countries when I was made. I'm very old, you know. I've traveled a long, long way. Traveling all the time. Oh, look; here comes a tram."

Yes, thank G.o.d and all His angels, it was the tram at last, and we boarded, and I ran to the back in childish terror that she'd follow me. She didn't. She rode only a short way and got out at the next stop, another little resort town. As the tram rolled away, though, she looked up and caught my eye. She smiled for me again, that serene and knowing smile.

I congratulated myself all the way home that I'd escaped another nightmarish confrontation with a Defective. I went up to my flat, put away my things, took out a frozen kulebyaka and heated it through, and relaxed in front of the Wire screen to catch up on the news.

It wasn't good news by any means, worm.

The plague had jumped clear across Siberia in the time I'd been gone, and had already broken out in Okhotsk. No sign of it in Vladivostok or j.a.pan yet, but that was antic.i.p.ated. Depressing. I mailed the personnel coordinator at Gorbachev to let her know I was home again, I fixed a drink, and put on a disc to watch Pitoev's remake of The Loves of Surya.

I woke late, roused by the commotion at my door. n.o.body was knocking on it or anything like that; it was being sealed. I could hear the hiss of the extrusion foam being jetted into place.

"Er-excuse me!" I came staggering out in my pajamas and gaped at the blank door lined in pink foam. A note had been pushed through at the bottom. I picked it up off the mat and read a hastily printed note informing me that I was under quarantine by order of the City Council.

"Miron Demyanovich," I shouted, hoping the superintendent was still within earshot. "Why am I being quarantined?"

There was silence for a moment and then he shouted: "You just came back from Paratunka!"

"Yes, well?"

"The news just came through! It's started there!"

"Oh," I said. Well, I had known it would happen, hadn't I? History records that the Sattes virus wiped out the armed forces of the world.

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant Kalugin! G.o.d have mercy on you!"

"That's all right," I said numbly, and went in to fix myself breakfast. I think I must have sat there staring into my coffee for an hour, worm, before I got the courage to get up and check my mail.

Three messages, and they had all come in in the last half hour. One was an electronic version of the note that had been slipped under my door, simply the official notification that I was under quarantine until one week from the present date. If I were still alive and well at the end of that time, I was to notify the proper department and they would process my pet.i.tion for release.

The second note was from Gorbachev Science Center acknowledging my return and telling me that the Alyosha's test launch was being postponed four days due to the outbreak, and requesting that I please inform them immediately in the event of any problems I might have with this schedule. Ha ha! I composed a brief reply informing them of my present scheduling conflict and a.s.suring them that if I were still alive in a week's time I would report for duty at the appointed hour.

The third note was from Litvinov. It was very simple, worm, it told me what was happening. Serebryannikov and Verochka were gone already. Many of the others had begun to manifest symptoms and were expected to go soon. Litvinov was sorry and hoped I had better luck. If anyone survived he, or they, would write again in a couple of days.

But I never heard from any of them after that, worm, though I sent messages every day all that week.

Oh, worm, I'm afraid their Frivolity Symposium must have backfired; Death must have come to inspect them, and decided he'd be unlikely to find a more gallant crew anywhere, and conscripted them immediately to join the hosts of Heaven. Don't you think?

But so much for Litvinov's dream of homesteading that tumbledown resort, so much for dear Larisa with her bright smile, so much for crazy Antyuhin.

I cried, like the miserable weak creature I am, cried for hours. Only with terrible effort did I refrain from mailing Nan. Why sadden her with my helpless misery? The less she knew about this posting of mine, the better. I watched through swollen eyelids as the Wire broadcasts got more grim. Paratunka was devastated. The rest of Kamchatka got off fairly easily, but then as expected the plague traveled down to Vladivostok and so through j.a.pan. There was some desperate hope that Korea and China might escape, that it might move on south, but no; after it had finished with j.a.pan it turned, as though purposefully, and started in on Korea.

As though purposefully.

I'm not sure now exactly when I began to form my theory, worm, but there was a point where I set aside my drink and made a conscious effort to sober myself up by the dull blue light of the Wire. When I had converted enough of the mess in my bloodstream into sugars and water, I looked at my idea again. Nicoletta?

What had she said? That she was looking after the mortals, giving them their vitamins so ... so there wouldn't be too many of them? What could she have meant?

She had been hiking up toward the reservoir when I'd first seen her. She'd been working her way through the Paratunka Valley, giving the mortals their-vitamins.

What was she doing, worm?

She was a Defective! And it occurred to me then that Nicoletta might have got some horrible idea in her head that the Sattes virus was a good thing-after all, a lot of mortals had thought just the same, when it was only attacking prisons-and decided to help it on its way, lest the world overpopulation problem continue. How easily one person with immortal abilities might slip over borders and do such a thing, I knew all too well. Traveling all the time ... and the pattern of deliberate infection would be detected even by the mortals. There would be countless theories afterward that the Sattes virus had been part of a plot to reduce the world population, by taking draconian measures.

Most historians would decide that the prime suspect was the extremist Church of G.o.d-A, who preached drastic population reduction, though nothing would ever be proven. But what if it was one Defective with a big idea in her faulty little head? Dear G.o.d, I thought, I've got to warn somebody! She's got to be stopped!

Ah, but, you see, worm, there was a slight problem here. Officially, there are no Defectives. The Company won't admit to them. When that business with Courier had to be cleaned up, the Company sent in a covert operations squad; and I was informed, as clearly as they could tell me in oblique phrases, that nothing had really happened, and I was never to tell anyone that anything had. The Company has never made any Defective operatives. So whom might I contact with my warning?

Obviously the only safe thing to do would be to contact Labienus, the Northwest American Section Head at Mackenzie Base. He, after all, was the very one who'd been sent to deal with Courier's little accident, he was the one who'd delivered that so delicately veiled threat to me as he'd departed. Surely if discretion were called for, I ought to contact Labienus and none other. Don't you think, worm?

So I sat down at my keyboard and, after agonizing deliberation, composed the following communication: "Dear Executive Facilitator General Labienus, you may recall me from the year 1831 at the Fort Ross Colony, when we had occasion to speak. I understand you are doubtless a very busy man, but I should like very much to discuss a matter of mutual interest at your convenience. Respectfully yours, Marine Operations Specialist Kalugin."

Beautifully circ.u.mspect and tactful, yes, worm? I thought so. And it must have worked, because within the hour my terminal beeped on a shrill frequency inaudible to mortals, had any been there with me, announcing that a message was coming in on a secured channel.

I interfaced hurriedly with the terminal. Kalugin receiving, I transmitted. And there came his signal, quite clear and even slightly cordial in tone: Marine Operations Specialist Kalugin? Labienus here. What is this matter you wish to discuss?

So I explained, worm, as quickly as I could. I told him all about Nicoletta and my suspicions. He heard me out patiently and his signal, when he replied, was grave and thoughtful.

Yes, Kalugin, there's no question you did the right thing by contacting me privately. I appreciate your discretion. Very well; we'll have her picked up immediately for interrogation. You understand, of course, that you'll need to distance yourself from this unfortunate situation?

I answered that I understood perfectly. My only concern was whether or not it would impact on my mission. Labienus a.s.sured me there was no need to be concerned on that account and- HEY! HEY, I'M HERE! THANK G.o.d, THANK G.o.d, THANK G.o.d! You see, worm? I told you! Well, you've been wonderful company and I truly appreciate all your efforts on my behalf, but I'm afraid I won't be able to finish my fascinating story. I'll be on the Soter in an hour or two, or possibly three, I've rather lost track of the time, and I think I'll take a hot shower first-silly, isn't it? With all the hot water I've been in lately, you'd think I'd have had enough to last me for a while, but actually sitting here under this black smoker has given me the most awful creeps, watching the sooty stuff rain down endlessly, I feel as though it's all over me somehow and not just the hull of the Alyosha.

I'll request a weekend leave after this, I've got one due me, I'm quite certain, and I'll go to Nan. Perhaps we'll go somewhere together. Ma.r.s.eilles, perhaps, or Casablanca! Somewhere full of sunlight. I want sunlight, I want it by the bucketful, I want to walk in the warmth and the clean dry air and lie down in the yellow sand with her. She'll make the nightmares go away. She can always make them go away. I'm never frightened when I'm with her, worm, I- What are they doing back there?

What-?

They're removing the fusion drive. They're cutting it out with welding torches. They're not answering my transmissions, worm.

Well, don't be silly, of course they've got to be Company operatives! Mortal divers couldn't work at this depth. It's a pair of security techs in pressure suits, I'm certain. And they're taciturn fellows, everyone knows that, so perhaps they're just too busy to respond.

Oh ...

And now they've gone.

They've left me here.

Why would they do that, worm?

Well, it seems I'm to impose on your hospitality a bit longer, worm. I'm really terribly sorry; I can't think what's happened. Unless the Alyosha with its fusion drive was too heavy for the winch on the Soter, and it was decided to bring it up in two dives? Yes, undoubtedly. And I'm sure the reason they weren't hearing my transmissions was the mess that's all over the hull from the black smoker, it must be full of metals in solution and that's somehow blocking my signal. So. I suppose while I'm waiting for them to come back I'll finish my story, shall I?

Labienus told me to go ahead with my mission, you'll remember. And that's exactly what I did: waited in my sealed room a whole week, while the Sattes virus spread into China and Indochina. I stopped tracking its progress after the first few days. Too depressing. History records that the plague hit China and India particularly hard. I didn't need to see the Wire footage to know what was happening. No, I lived off my cupboard shelf and out of my freezer, I watched film after film after film, I drank like a fish and occasionally sobered myself up long enough to send hopeful little communications to my colleagues at Gorbachev, letting them know I was still alive.

They let me know they were still alive, too. The decision had been made to go ahead with the launch, as I had known perfectly well it would be. The director intervened on my behalf with the City Council and the result was, I was spared a lot of bureaucratic delay. At the end of that week Miron Demyanovich was duly authorized to break the seal on my room. I was sitting there, shaved and combed and in uniform, when I heard the seal being cracked away and then the timid knock; and I opened the door to behold Miron Demyanovich with a biohazard mask over his pinched face, and two frightened-looking council members behind him.

I was manifestly alive and well, so they let me go. I reported to Gorbachev Science Center and underwent a series of tests, from which it was deduced that, yes, I was still alive and well, or at least alive and hung over. Then they stuffed me into the Alyosha rather hurriedly, and I kept my appointment with history.

And this is where you came in, worm.

Well, that was tidy, I must say. The oxygen is almost gone. How nice that you got to hear the whole story.

If it is the whole story.

I can't help feeling a certain nagging discomfort, worm, about one thing.

If I was right about Nicoletta-and Labienus seemed to think I was-where did she get the Sattes virus culture to put in unsuspecting people's water supplies? How did a poor simpleminded Defective manage the steamroller logistics of that sweeping outbreak?

So many people died, worm, were killed discriminately. It's going to drastically affect the course of history. There won't be any full-scale wars for decades (except in Northern Ireland, of course) and it will be a century before the crime rate even approaches its previous figures.

It'll be a much more peaceful, law-abiding, uncrowded world after this, worm. That's going to be good, yes? The poor stupid mortals will think so at first. But, you see, their gene pool will have shrunk so drastically. All those young men, young women gone. Most of a generation. Never so many of them after this. Less and less every year. And then, the next time a plague hits ...

Won't affect us, of course. We're immortal. We'll go right on working for the Company. Company will still be around. Plenty of us immortals still around.

Company wouldn't do a thing like this, worm. I'm positive. We're ethical creatures, for heaven's sake! Programmed to look after them. Take care of the poor mortals.

Though some of us have a rather low opinion of them. It's a job hazard, worm. Despair.