by Kage Baker
Stunned silence from my fellow immortal creature. I went on:
“I was just thinking, you know, about all those decadent technocrats sitting around in the future getting bombed on an elixir produced from…”
“So it gets discovered here, in 1844,” said Mendoza at last. “It isn’t a genetically engineered cultivar at all. And the wild spores somehow came from…?”
“But nobody else will ever know the truth, because we’re removing every trace of this vine from the knowledge of mortal men, see?” I explained. “Root and branch and all.”
“I’d sure better get that bonus,” Mendoza reflected.
“Don’t push your luck. You aren’t supposed to know.” I took my shovel and clambered back into the hole. “Come on, let’s get the rest of him out of here. The show must go on.”
Two hours later there was a tidy heap of brown bones and rusted steel moldering away in a new hiding place, and a tidy sum in gold plate occupying the former burial site. We filled in the hole, set up the rest of the equipment we’d brought, tested it, camouflaged it, turned it on and hurried away back down the canyon to the Mission, taking the hush unit with us. I made it in time for Matins.
***
News travels fast in a small town. By nine there were Indians, and some of the Gentes de Razon too, running in from all directions to tell us that the Blessed Virgin had appeared in the Kasmalis’ garden. Even if I hadn’t known already, I would have been tipped off by the fact that old Maria Concepción did not show up for morning Mass.
By the time we got up there, the bishop and I and all my fellow friars and Mendoza, a cloud of dust hung above the dirt track from all the traffic. The Kasmalis’ tomatoes and corn had been trampled by the milling crowd. People ran everywhere, waving pieces of grapevine; the other plants had been stripped as bare as the special one. The rancheros watched from horseback, or urged their mounts closer across the careful beds of peppers and beans.
Around the one vine, the family had formed a tight circle. Some of them watched Emidio and Salvador, who were digging frantically, already about five feet down in the hole; others stared unblinking at the floating image of the Virgin of Guadalupe who smiled upon them from midair above the vine. She was complete in every detail, nicely three-dimensional and accompanied by heavenly music. Actually it was a long tape loop of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which nobody would recognize because it hadn’t been composed yet.
“Little Father!” One of the wives caught me by my robe. “It’s the Mother of God! She told us to dig up the vine, she said there was treasure buried underneath!”
“Has she told you anything else?” I inquired, making the sign of the cross. My brother friars were falling to their knees in raptures, beginning to sing the Ave Maria; the bishop was sobbing.
“No, not since this morning,” the wife told me. “Only the beautiful music has gone on and on.”
Emidio looked up and noticed me for the first time. He stopped shoveling for a moment, staring at me, and a look of dark speculation crossed his face. Then his shovel was moving again, clearing away the earth, and more earth, and more earth.
At my side, Mendoza turned away her face in disgust. But I was watching the old couple, who stood a little way back from the rest of the family. They clung to each other in mute terror and had no eyes for the smiling Virgin. It was the bottom of the ever-deepening hole they watched, as birds watch a snake.
And I watched them. Old Diego was bent and toothless now, but sixty years ago he’d had teeth, all right; sixty years ago his race hadn’t yet learned never to fight back against its conquerors. Maria Concepción, what had she been sixty years ago when those vines were planted? Not a dried-up shuffling old thing back then. She might have been a beauty, and maybe a careless beauty.
The old bones and the rusting steel could have told you, sixty years ago. Had he been a handsome young captain with smooth ways, or just a soldier who took what he wanted? Whatever he’d been, or done, he’d wound up buried under that vine, and only Diego and Maria knew he was there. All those years, through the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he’d been there. Diego never coming to Mass because of a sin he couldn’t confess. Maria never missing Mass, praying for someone.
Maybe that was the way it had happened. Nobody would ever tell the story, I was fairly sure. But it was clear that Diego and Maria, alone of all those watching, did not expect to see treasure come out of that hole in the ground.
So when the first glint of gold appeared, and then the chalice and altar plate were brought up, their old faces were a study in confusion.
“The treasure!” cried Salvador. “Look!”
And the rancheros spurred their horses through the crowd to get a better look, lashing the Indians out of the way; but I touched the remote hidden in my sleeve and the Blessed Virgin spoke, in a voice as sweet and immortal as a synthesizer:
“This, my beloved children, is the altar plate that was lost from the church at San Carlos Borromeo, long ago in the time of the pirates. My beloved Son has caused it to be found here as a sign to you all that ALL SINS ARE FORGIVEN!”
I touched the remote again and the Holy Apparition winked out like a soap bubble, and the beautiful music fell silent.
Old Diego pushed his way forward to the hole and looked in. There was nothing else there in the hole now, nothing at all. Maria came timidly to his side and she looked in too. They remained there staring a long time, unnoticed by the mass of the crowd, who were watching the dispute that had already erupted over the gold.
The bishop had pounced on it like a duck on a June bug, as they say, asserting the right of Holy Mother Church to her lost property. Emidio and Salvador had let it be snatched from them with hard patient smiles. One of the Gentes de Razon actually got off his horse to tell the bishop that the true provenance of the items had to be decided by the authorities in Mexico City, and until they could be contacted the treasure had better be kept under lock and key at the alcalde’s house. Blessed Virgin? Yes, there had seemed to be an apparition of some kind; but then again, perhaps it had been a trick of the light.
The argument moved away down the hill—the bishop had a good grip on the gold and kept walking with it, so almost everyone had to follow him. I went to stand beside Diego and Maria, in the ruins of their garden.
“She forgave us,” whispered Diego.
“A great weight of sin has been lifted from you today, my children,” I told them. “Rejoice, for Christ loves you both. Come to the church with me now and I will celebrate a special Mass in your honor.”
I led them away with me, one on either arm. Unseen behind us, Mendoza advanced on the uprooted and forgotten vine with a face like a lioness kept from her prey.
***
Well, the old couple made out all right, anyway. I saw to it that they got new grapevines and food from the Mission supplies to tide the family over until their garden recovered. Within a couple of years they passed away, one after the other, and were buried reasonably near one another in the consecrated ground of the Mission cemetery, in which respect they were luckier than the unknown captain from Castile, or wherever he’d come from.
They never got the golden treasure, but being Indians there had never been any question that they would. Their descendants lived on and multiplied in the area, doing particularly well after the coming of the Yankees, who (to the mortification of the Gentes de Razon) couldn’t tell an Indian from a Spanish Mexican and lumped them all together under the common designation of Greaser, treating one no worse than the other.
Actually I never kept track of what happened to the gold. The title dispute dragged on for years, I think, with the friars swearing there had been a miracle and the rancheros swearing there hadn’t been. The gold may have been returned to Carmel, or it may have gone to Mexico City, or it may have gone into a trunk underneath the alcalde’s bed. I didn’t care; it was all faked Company-issue reproductions anyway. The bishop died and the Y
ankees came and were the new conquerors, and maybe nothing ever did get resolved either way.
But Mendoza got her damned vine and her bonus, so she was as happy as she ever is. The Company got its patent on Black Elysium secured. I lived on at the Mission for years and years before (apparently) dying of venerable old age and (apparently) being buried in the same cemetery as Diego and Maria. God forgave us all, I guess, and I moved on to less pleasant work.
Sometimes, when I’m in that part of the world, I stop in as a tourist and check out my grave. It’s the nicest of the many I’ve had, except maybe for that crypt in Hollywood. Well, well; life goes on.
Mine does anyway.
Old Flat Top
The boy has the firm chin and high-domed brow of the Cro-Magnon hominids—might be a member of any racial group—and is dressed in somewhat inadequate Neolithic clothing of woven grass and furs. He didn’t bring any useful Neolithic tools with him on this journey, however. He had come to see if God was really on the mountain as he’d always been told, and he hadn’t thought tools would be any use in finding God. In this he was reasonably correct. No instrument his people could produce, at their present level of technology, would help him now.
Far enough up a mountain to peer above the clouds, the boy is in serious trouble. Above him is ice and thin air; all around him a sliding waste of black blasted rock, immense, pitiless. The green valley of his ancestors lies a long way below him, and he could return there in slightly under a minute if he didn’t mind arriving in a red smashed mass.
That would scarcely win him the admiration of his peers, however, and he clings now desperately to a narrow handhold, and gazes up at the mouth of the cave he has come so far to find. He can neither jump nor climb any higher. He can’t climb back down, either; his hands and feet have gone numb. He realizes he is going to die.
To his left, a few meters away, there is sudden movement.
He turns his head to stare. What he had taken to be an outcropping of particularly weathered rock is looking at him. It is in fact a man, easily twice his size, naked but for a belted bearskin and a great deal of dun-colored hair and beard.
The giant’s body is powerfully built, nearly human as the boy understands human, but with a slightly odd articulation of the arms and shoulders. The head is not human at all. The skull is long and low, helmet-shaped, and with its heavy orbital ridges and forward-projecting face it reminds the boy of those stocky little villagers in the next valley, the ones who scatter flowers over their dead and make such unimaginative flint tools. Like them, too, the giant has an immense protruding nose. Its cheekbones are high and broad, its jaw heavy, its teeth terrifyingly long. The boy knows this because the giant is grinning at him.
“Boo,” says the giant, in a light and rather pleasant voice.
This syllable means nothing to the boy, but he is so thoroughly unnerved that he loses his grip on the mountain and totters backward, screaming.
The next moment is a blur. All his breath is knocked out of him, and before he can grasp what has happened, he finds himself crouching inside the cave that was so unattainable a moment before. The giant is squatting beside him, considering him with pale inhuman eyes.
Seen close to, the giant is even more unnerving. He cocks his head and the angle at which he does this is not human either, nor is the strong strange musk of his body. The boy drags himself swiftly backward, stares around the interior of the cave for a weapon. The giant chuckles at him.
There are plenty of weapons, but it’s doubtful the boy would be able to lift any of these tremendous stone axes, let alone defend himself with one. He looks further, and then his frantic gaze stops dead at the battered cabinet against one wall.
The fact that its central screen glows with tiny cryptic symbols is almost beside the point. It’s a box, and the boy’s world has no such geometry. He has never seen a rectangle, a square. This fully convinces him that he has found the object of his quest. Slowly, he turns back to face the giant.
He makes obeisance, and the giant snorts. Sitting timidly upright, the boy explains that he has come in search of God on the mountain for the purpose of learning the Truth.
The boy’s language is a combination of hand gestures and sounds. The giant’s eyes narrow; he leans close, keenly observing, listening. When the boy has finished, the giant clears his throat and replies in the same manner.
He communicates for some time. His hands are clever, capable of facile and expressive gestures, and his vocal apparatus produces a wider range of syllables, enunciated with greater precision; so it will be understood that he is a far more eloquent speaker than the boy, who listens as though spellbound.
***
Yes, I’ll tell you the Truth. Why not? In all these generations, you’re the first mortal to climb up here, so you’ve earned an answer; but I don’t think you’ll like it much.
I’m not your God. I’m the highest authority you’ll ever encounter, though, mortal man. Really. I was created to judge you and punish you, you and all your fathers. Would you like to know how that happened? Watch.
I’ll draw something in the dust for you, here. This is called a circle, all right? It’s the wheel of Time. Never mind what a wheel is. This part here, almost at the beginning, is where your people began to exist.
Life was a lot harder back then, mortal. Your people almost didn’t make it. You know why? Because, almost from the time your fathers stood up on their little hind legs, they made war on one another. Winters weren’t bitter enough! Leopards and crocodiles weren’t hungry enough! Famine wasn’t terrible enough either. They had to keep whittling away at their numbers themselves, stupid monkeys.
The worst were a bunch who called themselves the Great Goat Cult. They found a weed that filled them with holy visions when they chewed it. They heard voices that told them to go out and kill. Became screaming tattooed maniacs who made a lot of converts, believe me, but they killed more than they converted.
Now, look here at this part of the circle. This is up at the other end of Time. The people up there are, let’s say they’re powerful shamans. And they’re very nervous. Being so close to the end of Time, they want to save as much of the past as they can.
They looked back into Time through a, uh, a magic eye they had. They looked at their oldest fathers and saw that if this Great Goat Cult wasn’t stopped, they themselves might never come to exist. Who had time to learn how to make fire, or sew furs into clothing or make pots out of clay, if crazy people were always chasing and killing everybody?
I’m simplifying this for you, mortal, but here’s what they did.
The shamans found a way to step across from their part of the circle into the beginning part. They took some of your fathers’ children and made them slaves, but magic slaves: immortal and strong and really smart. They sent those slaves to try to reason with the Great Goat Cult.
It didn’t work.
The slaves were great talkers, could present many clever arguments, but the Great Goat Cult wouldn’t listen. In fact, they sent the slaves back to their shaman masters with spears stuck in inconvenient places, and one or two had to carry their own lopped-off body parts. So the shamans had to come up with another idea.
Can you guess yet what it was? No? Well, you’re only a mortal. I’ll tell you.
They took some more slaves, not just from your fathers but from some of the other tribes running around back then—those little guys in the next valley, for example, and some big people from a valley you’ve never seen, and a few others who’re all extinct now.
You know how you can put a long-legged ram with long fleece in the pen with a short-legged ewe with short fleece, and you’ll get a short-legged lamb with long fleece? Eventually? Breeding experiments, right, you’ve got it. Well, that’s what the shamans did with all these people. Bred the big ones and the little ones to get what they wanted.
What did they want? What were they breeding for? You can’t guess? I’m disappointed. They wanted their very own screaming kil
ling maniacs to counter the cultists.
Except we’re not really maniacs. We just have a great sense of humor.
We’re the optimum morphological design for a humanoid fighting machine, oo-rah! We’re not afraid of being hurt, like you. And of course we too were made immortal and smart. Three thousand of us were bred. That was a lot of people, back then. They raised us in cadet academies, trained us in camps, me and all my brother warriors.
This was all done back here at the beginning of time, by the way. The shamans were scared to death to have us up there at their end. There are no warriors in their time, or so we were always told.
And we were all programmed—no, you don’t know what that is. Indoctrinated? Convinced with extreme prejudice?
We were given the absolute Truth.
But it’s our Truth, not yours, mortal. Our Truth is that we have the joyous right and duty to kill, instantly and without question, any dirty little mortals we find making war on each other. You don’t have the right to kill yourselves. You’re supposed to live in peace, herd beasts, plant crops, tell stories, have babies. Do that and we’ll let you alone. But if you decide to make war, not love—whack, there we are with flint axes and bloody retribution, you see? Simplicity itself.
It was the law. Perfect and beautiful justice. You do right, we punish wrong. No questions. No whining.
The shamans from the other end of Time created us as the consummate weapon against the Great Goat Cult. We were bigger and faster, and we killed without pity or hesitation. Our faith was stronger than theirs. So we made mincemeat out of the little bastards.
Oh, those were great times. So much work to do! Because, while the shamans had dithered around about whether or not we should be created, the Cult had spread across the world. It took centuries to stamp them all out. We rode in endless pursuit and it was one long happy party, mortal. Summer campaigns, year after year. Winter raids, damn I loved them: bloodspray’s beautiful on new-fallen snow, and corpses stay fresh so much longer…