Baker, Kage - Company 09 - The Sons of Heaven by Baker Kage

Author:Baker, Kage
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

CHAPTER 19

Child Care in the Cyborg Family, Volume One:

The Duty of the Cyborg Parent

What a miracle is the cyborg infant! Truly it may be said that his tiny perfect body is something new under the sun! Biomechanicals race through him powered by the fires of heaven, carrying fantastic amounts of information. Pineal Tribrantine Three circulates to take his sun to noon and keep it there, changeless, in a perpetual bright day. Fortunate inheritor of Science, he is freed from the mortal debt of mere humanity but benefits from its genius. Life, in its constant upward progression, has at last, in this newest incarnation, attained what may be justly termed the Angelic.

What glorious adventures might now be anticipated? What previously unattainable heights will he scale, this new Adam?

The morning sun streams in through the portholes of the Captain Morgan. It is no day of any week in any known year, but it has the feeling of a Sunday morning, and the ship bounds briskly over a choppy sea.

Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, supercyborg, late of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, is sitting at the booth table in the saloon, working on Child Care in the Cyborg Family, Volume Two: Intellectual Development. He has the slightly rumpled look of a colonial who has begun to go native and let things slip. He's barefooted, unshaven, wears only trousers, shirt, and waistcoat. He has moreover the slightly guilty look of a colonial who knows he has begun to go native and hopes it won't get back to the Colony Club.

Constantly as he writes he looks over at the two children.

The boys appear to be twenty-two months old, and the sun glints in their wispy fair hair. They are dressed in white cotton sunsuits, identical save for the initials embroidered in blue on the chest of each one: A for Alec, N for Nicholas.

They are building a tower with little interlocking blocks, which click together tightly to withstand the sea swell. The structure is no random pile but an edifice of complex, not to say Neoclassical, grandeur. As they walk about it, adding a flying buttress here or a column there, they neither waddle nor stagger, except when the ship rolls. It rolls rather violently at the moment.

Edward accesses the weather reports coming in, though every instinct he developed while in the Royal Navy is already telling him that the glass has fallen precipitately. He has a sudden terrifying mental image of the ship pitching sharply, the two little boys thrown with a crash into a bulkhead, cracking their unprotected skulls .. .

"That's enough for now," Edward says. "Into your safety harnesses, please."

Both babies give him a rebellious look. "We didn't finish, Deadward," says Alec.

"We're sailing into a storm! Kindly do as you're told, or it'll be the helmet again," Edward says, nodding at the battered-looking steel helmet that swings from its strap on a hook. It appears to date from the First World War and was formerly part of Alec's antique collection. Now, however, it has been lined and padded, and across it in red paint are the words I am a reckless boy.

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