The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  The boy is musing to himself, thinking of the methods fabled heroes had always used to defeat ogres, and wondering what sort of magical devices the Time Shamans might have employed, when he becomes aware that the old monster has turned his pale eyes on him again. Flat Top’s expression has lost its warmth. He looks remote, stern, sad.

  The boy feels a chill go down his spine, wondering if his thoughts have been read somehow. The giant extends one of his eloquent hands and picks up a stone axe. He runs his thumb along its scalloped edge. Holding the boy’s gaze with his own, he lays the axe across his knees and resumes their conversation:

  …But enough about me.

  I want to hear your story now, mortal man. I want to know if you’re one of the righteous. You’ll tell me everything you’ve ever done, your whole life story, and then I’ll judge you. Take as long as you like. My patience is limitless.

  The boy gulps, wondering how convincingly he can lie.

  Hanuman

  So there I was playing billiards with an Australopithecus afarensis, and he was winning.

  I don’t usually play with lower hominids, but I was stuck in a rehab facility during the winter of 1860, and there was nothing else to do but watch holoes or listen to the radio programs broadcast by my owner/employer, Dr. Zeus Incorporated. And the programs were uniformly boring; you’d think an all-powerful cabal of scientists and investors, having after all both the secrets of immortality and time travel, could at least come up with some original station formats. But anyway…

  Repair and Rehabilitation Center Five was neatly hidden away in a steep cliff overlooking a stretch of Baja coastline. Out front, lots of fortunate convalescing operatives sprawled on golden sand beside a bright blue sea. Not me, though. When you’re growing back skin, the medical techs don’t like you sunbathing much.

  Even when I looked human again, I couldn’t get an exit pass. They kept delaying my release pending further testing and evaluation. It drove me crazy, but cyborgs are badly damaged so seldom that when the medical techs do get their hands on a genuine basket case, they like to keep it as long as possible for study.

  Vain for me to argue that it was an event shadow and not a mysterious glitch in my programming that was to blame. I might as well have been talking to the wall. Between tests I sat interminably in the Garden Room among the bromeliads and ferns, thumbing through old copies of Immortal Lifestyles Monthly and trying to adjust my bathrobe so my legs didn’t show.

  “Oh, my! Nice gams,” said somebody one morning. I lowered my magazine, preparing to fix him with the most scathing glare of contempt I could muster. What I saw astonished me.

  He was about four and a half feet tall and looked something like a pint-sized Alley Oop, or maybe like a really racist caricature of an Irishman, the way they were being drawn back then. Tiny head, face prognathous in the extreme, shrewd little eyes set in wrinkles under heavy orbital ridges. The sclerae of his eyes were white, like a Homo sapiens. White whiskers all around his face. Barrel chest, arms down to his knees like a chimpanzee. However, he stood straight; his feet were small, narrow and neatly shod. He was impeccably dressed in the fashion of the day, too, what any elderly gentleman might be wearing at this very moment in London or San Francisco.

  I knew the Company had a few cyborgs made from Neanderthals in its ranks—I’d even worked with a couple—but they looked human compared to this guy. Besides, as I scanned him I realized that he wasn’t a cyborg. He was mortal, which explained the white whiskers.

  “What the hell are you?” I inquired, fairly politely under the circumstances.

  “I’m the answer to your prayers,” he replied. “You want to come upstairs and see my etchings?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s because I’m a monkey, isn’t it?” he snapped, thrusting his face forward in a challenging kind of way.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, at least you’re honest about being a bigot,” he said, subsiding.

  “Excuse me!” I slammed my magazine down in my lap. “Anyway, you aren’t a monkey. Are you? You’re a member of the extinct hominid species Australopithecus afarensis.”

  “I love it when you people talk like computers,” he mused. “Sexy, in a perverse kind of way. Yes, Afarensis, all right, one of Lucy’s kindred. Possibly explaining my powerful attraction to ditzy redheads.”

  “That’s an awful lot of big words to keep in such a teeny little skull,” I said, rolling up my magazine menacingly. “So you think cyborgs are sexy, huh? Did you ever see Alien?”

  “And you’re a hot-blooded cyborg,” he said, smiling. “Barely suppressed rage is sexy, too, at least I find it so. Yes, I know a lot of big words. I’ve been augmented. I’d have thought a superintelligent machine-human hybrid like yourself would have figured that out by now.”

  I was almost startled out of my anger. “A mortal being augmented? I’ve never heard of that being done!”

  “I was an experiment,” he explained. “A prototype for an operative that could be used in deep Prehistory. No budget for the project, unfortunately, so I’m unique. Michael Robert Hanuman, by the way.” He extended his hand. It had long curved fingers and a short thumb, like an ape’s hand. I took it gingerly.

  “Botanist Grade Six Mendoza,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “A cyborg name,” he observed. “What was your human name, when you had one?”

  “I don’t remember,” I told him. “Look, I haven’t been calling you a monkey during this conversation. How about you stop throwing around the word cyborg, okay?”

  “No c-word, got it,” he agreed. “You’re sensitive about what you are, then?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No, oddly enough,” said Hanuman. He sat down in the chair next to mine. “I’ve long since come to terms with my situation.”

  “Well, three cheers for you,” I said. “What are you doing in rehab, anyway?”

  “I live here, at Cabo Rehabo,” he said. “I’m retired now and the Company gave me my choice of residences. It’s warm and I like the sea air. Also—” He fished an asthma inhaler from an inner pocket and waved it at me. “No fluorocarbons in the air during this time period. One of the great advantages to living in the past. What are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “There was an accident,” I said.

  “Really! You malfunctioned?”

  “No, there was an error in the Temporal Concordance,” I explained. “Some idiot input a date wrong and I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been when a hotel blew up. Just one of those things that happen in the field.”

  “So you’re—say! Would you be the one they brought in from Big Sur? I heard about you.” He regarded my legs with renewed interest.

  “That was me,” I said, wishing he’d go away.

  “Well, well.” His gaze traveled over the rest of me. “I’d always heard you people never had accidents. You’re programmed to dodge bullets and anything else that comes flying your way.”

  “You try dodging a building,” I muttered.

  “Is that why you’re so angry?” he inquired, just as a repair tech stuck his head around the doorway.

  “Botanist Mendoza? Please report to Room D for a lower left quadrant diagnostic.”

  “It’s been fun,” I told Michael Robert Hanuman, and made my exit gratefully. He watched me go, his small head tilted on one side.

  ***

  But I saw him the next day, waiting outside the lounge. He wrinkled his nose at my flannel pajama ensemble, then looked up and said, “We meet again! Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Thanks, but I don’t feel like going down to the bar dressed like this,” I told him.

  “There’s a snack bar in the Rec Room,” he said. “They serve cocktails.”

  I had just been informed I faced a minimum of two more months of tests, and the idea of dating a superannuated hominid seemed slightly less degrading than the rest of what I had to look forward to. “Why not?” I sighed.
/>   The Rec Room had two pool tables and a hologame, as well as an entire wall of bound back issues of Immortal Lifestyles Monthly. There were tasteful Mexican-themed murals on the walls. There was a big picture window through which you could look out at the happy, well-rested operatives sunning themselves on the beach instead of having intrusive repair diagnostics done. Cocktails were available, at least, and Hanuman brought a pair of mai tais to our card table and set them down with a flourish.

  “Yours has no alcohol in it,” I said suspiciously, scanning.

  “Can’t handle the stuff,” he informed me, and rapped his skull with his knuckles. “This tiny little monkey brain, you know. You don’t want me hooting and swinging from the light fixtures, do you? Or something even less polite?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, shuddering.

  “Not that I swing from anything much, at my age,” he added, and had a sip of his drink. He set it down, pushed back in his chair and considered me. “So,” he said, “What’s it like being immortal?”

  “I don’t care for it,” I replied.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Is it the Makropolous syndrome? You know, an overpowering sense of meaninglessness with the passage of enough time? Or does it have to do with being a cyb—sorry, with feeling a certain distance from humanity due to your unique abilities?”

  “Mostly it’s having to be around monkeys,” I said, glaring at him. “Mortal Homo sapiens, I mean.”

  “Touché,” he said, raising his drink to me. “I can’t say I’m crazy about them, either.”

  “I’m happy when I’m alone,” I continued, and tasted my drink. “I like my work. I don’t like being distracted from my work.”

  “Human relationships are irrelevant, eh?” Hanuman said. “How lucky you’ve met me, then.”

  “You’re human,” I said, studying him.

  “Barely,” he said. “Oh, I know my place. If the Leakeys had had their way I wouldn’t even get to play in the family tree! I’m just a little animal with a lot of wit and some surgical modification.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and shrugged.

  “So it isn’t being immortal that bothers you, it’s the company you have to keep?” he inquired. “Immortality itself is good?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I certainly wouldn’t want to have a body that decayed while I was wearing it. And I’ve got way too much work for one human lifespan.”

  “What do you do? Wait, you’re a botanist. You were doing something botanical in Big Sur?”

  “I was doing a genetic survey on Abies bracteata,” I told him. “The Santa Lucia fir. It’s endangered. The Company wants it.”

  “Ah. It has some terribly valuable commercial use?” He scratched his chin-whiskers.

  “Why does the Company ever want anything?” I replied. “But if it was all that valuable, you’d think they’d let me out of here to get back to the job.”

  “They probably sent another botanist up there in your place,” Hanuman pointed out. “And, after all, you haven’t recovered yet. Have you? How are your new hands working? And the feet?”

  “They’re not new hands,” I said irritably, wondering how he knew so much. “Just the skin. And some other stuff underneath. What do you care, anyway?”

  “I’m wondering how well you’d be able to hold a billiards cue,” he said. “Feel like a game?”

  “Are you kidding?” I felt like laughing for the first time since I’d been there. “I’m a cyborg, remember? You’re only a mortal, even if you have been augmented. I’d cream you.”

  “That’s true,” he said imperturbably, draining his glass. “In that case, what would you say to playing with a handicap? So a poor little monkey like me has a chance?”

  Like an idiot, I agreed, and that was how I found out that augmented lower hominids have all the reflexes that go with the full immortality process.

  “Boy, I’m glad we’re not playing for money,” I said, watching gloomily as he completed a ten-point bank shot and neatly sank three balls, clunk clunk clunk.

  “How could we?” Hanuman inquired, hopping down from the footstool. “I’ve always heard the Company doesn’t pay you people anything. That’s one of the reasons they made you, so they’d have an inexpensive work force.”

  “For your information, we cost a lot,” I snapped. “And I suppose you get paid a salary?”

  “I did, before I retired,” he told me smugly, chalking his cue. “Now I’ve got a nice pension.”

  “What’d you get paid for?” I asked. “You told me you were a prototype that never got used.”

  “I said the program budget got cut,” he corrected me, climbing up for his next shot. “You ought to know the Company finds a use for everything they create. I gave them thirty years of service.”

  “Doing what?”

  He took his time answering, frowning at the table, clambering down, kicking the stool around to a better spot and climbing up to survey the angles again. “Mostly impersonating a monkey, if you must know,” he said at last.

  I grinned. “Dancing while an organ grinder played? Collecting change in a tin cup to augment somebody’s departmental budget?”

  He grimaced, but it didn’t throw his shot off, click, clunk, and another ball dropped into a corner pocket.

  “No, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I worked on some delicate missions. Collected sensitive information. Secrets. You wouldn’t believe the things people will say in front of you when they think you’re not human.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t I?” I paced around the table, trying to distract him while he took aim again. It didn’t work; another flawless bank shot, and it was clear I was never going to get a turn. He straightened up on the stool, now at eye level with me.

  “My memoirs would make interesting reading, I can tell you. What about yours?”

  I shivered. “Boring. “Unless you’d be spellbound by my attempts to produce a maize cultivar with high lysine content.”

  “I’d be interested in hearing how you happened to be in a hotel when it blew up,” he said, surveying the table for his next shot. “Especially in the wilds of Big Sur.”

  “I was looking for a glass of iced tea,” I said.

  “Really.” Smack, clunk, another ball down.

  “With lemon,” I said, taken by the stupidity of it in retrospect. “I was miles from the nearest humans, working my way along a ridge four thousand feet above a sheer drop into the Pacific…and suddenly I had this vision of a glass of iced tea, with lemon.” For a moment I saw it again, with all the intensity of hallucination. “The glass all beaded in frost, and the ice cubes floating, and the lemon slice, with its white cold rind and stinging aromatic zest, and the tart pulp in the glass lending a certain juicy piquancy to the astringent tea…God, I was thirsty.

  “I went back to my base camp, but I guess I’d been away a while. Lichen was growing on my processing credenza. My bivvy tent was collapsed and full of leaves. Raccoons had been into my field rations and strewn little packets of stuff everywhere.”

  “No tea, eh?” Hanuman jumped down, circled the table and leaned up on tiptoe for a shot.

  “Nope,” I said, watching him sink another ball. “And then I got to thinking about other things I hadn’t done in a while. Like…sitting at a table and eating with a fork and knife. Sleeping in a room. Having clean fingernails. All the things you take for granted when you don’t live out of a base camp.”

  “And this was enough to make you go into a hazard zone, and endure the company of the mortal monkeys you so despise—” Hanuman set up for another shot, “—the refinements of civilization?” Whack! Clunk.

  “It sounds so dumb,” I said wonderingly, “but that’s how it was. So I broke camp, cached my stuff, picked the moss out of my hair and took a transverse ridge down to Garrapatta Landing.”

  “The town that exploded?” Hanuman cleared the table and jumped down. “I win, by the way.”

  “The town didn�
�t explode; it burned to the ground after the hotel exploded,” I explained. “Garrapatta Landing was only about three shacks anyway. Nasty little boom town.”

  “And how,” chuckled Hanuman. “Care for another game?”

  “No, thank you.” I glared at the expanse of green felt, empty but for the cue ball.

  “We could play for articles of clothing.”

  “Not a chance in hell.” I set my cue back in its rack.

  “Okay.” Hanuman set his cue beside mine and waved for another round of cocktails. “I’m still curious. How did the hotel explode? I thought you Preserver drones were programmed to avoid hazardous structures.”

  “It wasn’t hazardous when I got there,” I said. “And I don’t like the word drone either, all right? I knew the place was doomed, but because the Concordance had the date wrong on when it was set to blow, I thought I’d be safe going there when I did. What happened was, some miners going into the south range came into town late with a wagonload of blasting powder. Damned mortal morons parked it right under my window. I don’t know how the explosion happened. I was asleep at the time. But it happened, and the whole hotel sort of leaned over sideways and became a mass of flaming wreckage.”

  “With you in it? Ouch,” commented Hanuman.

  “Yes. Ouch,” I said, sitting down again. “Look, I’m tired of explaining this. Why don’t we talk about you, instead? What did the Company do with an operative disguised as a monkey?”

  “Lots of things,” he said, sitting down too. “But I’ve never been debriefed, so I can’t tell you about them.”

  “Okay; but can you tell me why the Company decided it needed to resurrect an Afarensis, rather than just taking a chimpanzee for augmentation?” I persisted. “If they needed a talking monkey? And how’d they do it, anyway?”

  Hanuman looked thoughtful. It was amazing how quickly I’d adjusted to seeing human expressions in his wizened face, human intelligence in his eyes. They fixed on me now, as he nodded.