The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  “And to think, the next man to see that thing won’t even be born for years and years,” Hearst said in awe. He closed the front of the cabinet and locked it. As he dropped the key in his waistcoat pocket, he looked at Lewis speculatively.

  “I suppose you’re an immortal too, Mr. Kensington?” he inquired.

  “Well—yes, sir, I am,” Lewis admitted.

  “Holy Moses. And how old are you?”

  “Not quite eighteen hundred and thirty, sir.”

  “Not quite! Why, you’re no more than a baby, compared to Mr. Denham here, are you?” Hearst chuckled in an avuncular sort of way. “And have you known many famous people?”

  “Er—I knew Saint Patrick,” Lewis offered. “And a lot of obscure English novelists.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” Mr. Hearst smiled down at him and patted him on the shoulder. “And now you can tell people you’ve known Greta Garbo, too.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lewis, and then his mouth fell open, but Hearst had already turned to me, rustling the slip of paper I had given him.

  “And you say my kitchen staff can mix this stuff up, Mr. Denham?”

  “Yeah. If you have any trouble finding all the ingredients, I’ve included the name of a guy in Chinatown who can send you seeds and plants mail-order,” I told him.

  “Very good,” he said, nodding. “Well, I’m sorry you boys can’t stay longer, but I know what those studio schedules are like. I imagine we’ll run into one another again, though, don’t you?”

  He smiled, and Lewis and I sort of backed out of his presence salaaming.

  Neither one of us said much on the way down the mountain, through all those hairpin turns and herds of wild animals. I think Lewis was scared Hearst might still somehow be able to hear us, and actually I wouldn’t have put it past him to have managed to bug the Model A.

  Myself, I was silent because I had begun to wonder about something, and I had no way to get an answer on it.

  I hadn’t taken a DNA sample from Hearst. It wouldn’t have been of any use to anybody. You can’t make an immortal from an old man, because his DNA, no matter how unusual it is, has long since begun the inevitable process of deterioration, the errors in replication that make it unusable for a template.

  This is one of the reasons immortals can only be made from children, see? The younger you are, the more bright and new-minted your DNA pattern is. I was maybe four or five when the Company rescued me, not absolute optimum for DNA but within specs. Lewis was a newborn, which is supposed to work much better. Might fetal DNA work better still?

  That being the case…had Jabesh kept a sample of the furtive work he’d done, in that cramped steamer cabin? Because if he had, if Dr. Zeus had it on file somewhere…it would take a lot of work, but the Company might meet the terms of William Randolph Hearst.

  But they wouldn’t actually ever really do such a thing, would they?

  We parked in front of the general store in San Simeon and I bought five rolls of Pep-O-Mints. By the time we got to Pismo Beach I had to stop for more.

  ***

  End Credits: 2333

  The young man leaned forward at his console, fingers flying as he edited images, superimposed them, and rearranged them into startling visuals. When he had a result that satisfied him, he put on a headset and edited in the sound, brief flares of music and dialogue. He played it all back and nodded in satisfaction. His efforts had produced thirty seconds of story that would hold the viewers spellbound, and leave them with the impression that Japanese Imperial troops had brutally crushed a pro-Republic riot in Mazatlan, and Californians from all five provinces were rallying to lend aid to their oppressed brothers and sisters to the south.

  Nothing of the kind had occurred, of course, but if enough people thought it had, it just might become the truth. Such things were known to happen.

  And it was for everyone’s good, after all, because it would set certain necessary forces in motion. He believed that democracy was the best possible system, but had long since quietly acknowledged to himself that government by the people seldom worked because people were such fools. That was all right, though. If a beautiful old automobile wouldn’t run, you could always hook it up to something more efficient and tow it, and pretend it was moving of its own accord. As long as it got where you wanted it to go in the end, who cared?

  He sent the story for global distribution and began another one, facts inert of themselves but presented in such a way as to paint a damning picture of the Canadian Commonwealth’s treatment of its Native American neighbors on the ice mining issue. When he had completed about ten seconds of the visual impasto, however, an immortal in a gray suit entered the room, carrying a disc case.

  “Chief? These are the messages from Ceylon Central. Do you want to review them before or after your ride?”

  “Gosh, it’s that time already, isn’t it?” the young man said, glancing at the temporal chart in the lower left hand corner of the monitor. “Leave them here, Quint. I’ll go through them this evening.”

  “Yes, sir.” The immortal bowed, set down the case, and left. The young man rose, stretched, and crossed the room to his living suite. A little dog rose from where it had been curled under his chair and followed him sleepily.

  Beyond his windows the view was much the same as it had been for the last four centuries: the unspoiled wilderness of the Santa Lucia mountains as far as the eye could see in every direction, save only the west where the sea lay blue and calm. The developers had been stopped. He had seen to it.

  He changed into riding clothes and paused before a mirror, combing his hair. Such animal exploitation as horseback riding was illegal, as he well knew, having pushed through the legislation that made it so himself. It was good that vicious people weren’t allowed to gallop around on poor sweating beasts anymore, striking and shouting at them. He never treated his horses that way, however. He loved them and was a gentle and careful rider, which was why the public laws didn’t apply to him.

  He turned from the mirror and found himself facing the portrait of Marion, the laughing girl of his dreams, forever young and happy and sober. He made a little courtly bow and blew her a kiss. All his loved ones were safe and past change now.

  Except for his dog; it was getting old. They always did, of course. There were some things even the Company couldn’t prevent, useful though it was.

  Voices came floating up to him from the courtyard.

  “…because when the government collapsed, of course Park Services didn’t have any money anymore,” a tour docent was explaining. “For a while it looked as though the people of California were going to lose La Cuesta Encantada to foreign investors. The art treasures were actually being auctioned off, one by one. How many of you remember that antique movie script that was found in that old furniture? A few years back, during the Old Hollywood Revival?”

  The young man was distracted from his reverie. Grinning, he went to the mullioned window and peered down at the tour group assembled below. His dog followed him and he picked it up, scratching between its ears as he listened. The docent continued: “Well, that old cabinet came from here! We know that Rudolph Valentino was a friend of Marion Davies, and we think he must have left it up here on a visit, and somehow it got locked in the cabinet and forgotten until it was auctioned off, and the new owners opened the secret drawer.”

  One of the tourists put up a hand.

  “But if everything was sold off—”

  “No, you see, at the very last minute a miracle happened.” The docent smiled. “William Randolph Hearst had five sons, as you know, but most of their descendants moved away from California. It turned out one of them was living in Europe. He’s really wealthy, and when he heard about the Castle being sold, he flew to California to offer the Republic a deal. He bought the Castle himself, but said he’d let the people of California go on visiting Hearst Castle and enjoying its beauty.”

  “How wealthy is he?” one of the visitors wanted to know.

&
nbsp; “Nobody knows just how much money he has,” said the docent after a moment, sounding embarrassed. “But we’re all very grateful to the present Mr. Hearst. He’s actually added to the art collection you’re going to see and—though some people don’t like it—he’s making plans to continue building here.”

  “Will we get to meet him?” somebody else asked.

  “Oh, no. He’s a very private man,” said the docent. “And very busy, too. But you will get to enjoy his hospitality, as we go into the Refectory now for a buffet lunch. Do you all have your complimentary vouchers? Then please follow me inside. Remember to stay within the velvet ropes…”

  The visitors filed in, pleased and excited. The young man looked down on them from his high window.

  He set his dog in its little bed, told it to stay, and then left by a private stair that took him down to the garden. He liked having guests. He liked watching from a distance as their faces lit up, as they stared in awe, as they shared in the beauty of his grand house and all its delights. He liked making mortals happy.

  He liked directing their lives, too. He had no doubt at all of his ability to guide them, or the wisdom of his long-term goals for humanity. Besides, it was fun.

  In fact, he reflected, it was one of the pleasures that made eternal life worth living. He paused for a moment in the shade of one of the ancient oak trees and looked around, smiling his terrible smile at the world he was making.

  The Catch

  The barn stands high in the middle of backcountry nowhere, shimmering in summer heat. It’s an old barn, empty a long time, and its broad planks are silvered. Nothing much around it but yellow hills and red rock.

  Long ago, somebody painted it with a mural. Still visible along its broad wall are the blobs representing massed crowds, the green diamond of a baseball park, and the figure in a slide, seeming to swim along the green field, glove extended. His cartoon eyes are wide and happy. The ball, radiating black lines of force, is sailing into his glove. Above him is painted the legend:

  what a catch! And, in smaller letters below it:

  1951, The Golden Year!

  The old highway snakes just below the barn, where once the mural must have edified a long cavalcade of DeSotos, Packards, and Oldsmobiles. But the old road is white and empty now, with thistles pushing through its cracks. The new highway runs straight across the plain below.

  Down on the new highway, eighteen-wheeler rigs hurtle through, roaring like locomotives, and they are the only things to disturb the vast silence. The circling hawk makes no sound. The cottonwood trees by the edge of the dry stream are silent too, not a rustle or a creak along the whole row; but they do cast a thin gray shade, and the men waiting in the Volkswagen Bug are grateful for that.

  They might be two cops on stakeout. They aren’t. Not exactly.

  ***

  “Are you going to tell me why we’re sitting here, now?” asks the younger man, finishing his candy bar.

  His name is Clete. The older man’s name is Porfirio.

  The older man shifts in his seat and looks askance at his partner. He doesn’t approve of getting stoned on the job. But he shrugs, checks his weapon, settles into the most comfortable position he can find.

  He points through the dusty windshield at the barn. “See up there? June 30, 1958, family of five killed. ’46 Plymouth Club Coupe. Driver lost control of the car and went off the edge of the road. Car rolled seventy meters down that hill and hit the rocks, right there. Gas tank blew. Mr. and Mrs. William T. Ross of Visalia, California, identified from dental records. Kids didn’t have any dental records. No relatives to identify bodies.

  “Articles in the local and Visalia papers, grave with the whole family’s names and dates on one marker in a cemetery in Visalia. Some blackening on the rocks up there. That’s all there is to show it ever happened.”

  “Okay,” says the younger man, nodding thoughtfully. “No witnesses, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The accident happened on a lonely road, and state troopers or whoever found the wreck after the fact?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the bodies were so badly burned they all went in one grave?” Clete looks pleased with himself. “So…forensic medicine being what it was in 1958, maybe there weren’t five bodies in the car after all? Maybe one of the kids was thrown clear on the way down the hill? And if there was somebody in the future going through historical records, looking for incidents where children vanished without a trace, this might draw their attention, right?”

  “It might,” agrees Porfirio.

  “So the Company sent an operative to see if any survivors could be salvaged,” says Clete. “Okay, that’s standard Company procedure. The Company took one of the kids alive, and he became an operative. So why are we here?”

  Porfirio sighs, watching the barn.

  “Because the kid didn’t become an operative,” he says. “He became a problem.”

  ***

  1958. Bobby Ross, all-American boy, was ten years old, and he loved baseball and cowboy movies and riding his bicycle. All-American boys get bored on long trips. Bobby got bored. He was leaning out the window of his parents’ car when he saw the baseball mural on the side of the barn.

  “Hey, look!” he yelled, and leaned way out the window to see better. He slipped.

  “Jesus Christ!” screamed his mom, and lunging into the back she tried to grab the seat of his pants. She collided with his dad’s arm. His dad cursed; the car swerved. Bobby felt himself gripped, briefly, and then all his mom had was one of his sneakers, and then the sneaker came off his foot. Bobby flew from the car just as it went over the edge of the road.

  He remembered afterward standing there, clutching his broken arm, staring down the hill at the fire, and the pavement was hot as fire, too, on his sneakerless foot. His mind seemed to be stuck in a little circular track. He was really hurt bad, so what he had to do now was run to his mom and dad, who would yell at him and drive him to Dr. Werts, and he’d have to sit in the cool green waiting room that smelled scarily of rubbing alcohol and look at dumb Humpty Dumpty Magazine until the doctor made everything all right again.

  But that wasn’t going to happen now, because…

  But he was really hurt bad, so he needed to run to his mom and dad—

  But he couldn’t do that ever again, because—

  But he was really hurt bad—

  His mind just went round and round like that, until the spacemen came for him.

  ***

  They wore silver suits, and they said “Greetings, Earth boy; we have come to rescue you and take you to Mars,” but they looked just like ordinary people and in fact gave Bobby the impression they were embarrassed. Their spaceship was real enough, though. They carried Bobby into it on a stretcher and took off, and a space doctor fixed his broken arm, and he was given space soda pop to drink, and he never even noticed that the silver ship had risen clear of the hillside, one step ahead of the state troopers, until he looked out and saw the curve of the Earth. He’d been lifted from history, as neatly as a fly ball smacking into an outfielder’s mitt.

  The spacemen didn’t take Bobby Ross to Mars, though. It turned out to be some place in Australia. But it might just as well have been Mars.

  Because, instead of starting fifth grade, and then going on to high school, and getting interested in girls, and winning a baseball scholarship, and being drafted, and blown to pieces in Viet Nam—Bobby Ross became an immortal.

  ***

  “Well, that happened to all of us,” says Clete, shifting restively. “One way or another. Except I’ve never heard of the Company recruiting a kid as old as ten.”

  “That’s right.” Keeping his eyes on the barn, Porfirio reaches into the backseat and gropes in a cooler half full of rapidly melting ice. He finds and draws out a bottle of soda. “So what does that tell you?”

  Clete considers the problem. “Well, everybody knows you can’t work the immortality process on somebody t
hat old. You hear rumors, you know, like when the Company was starting out, that there were problems with some of the first test cases—” He stops himself and turns to stare at Porfirio. Porfirio meets his gaze but says nothing, twisting the top off his soda bottle.

  “This guy was one of the test cases!” Clete exclaims. “And the Company didn’t have the immortality process completely figured out yet, so they made a mistake?”

  ***

  Several mistakes had been made with Bobby Ross.

  The first, of course, was that he was indeed too old to be made immortal. If two-year-old Patty or even five-year-old Jimmy had survived the crash, the process might have been worked successfully on them. Seat belts not having been invented in 1946, however, the Company had only Bobby with whom to work.

  The second mistake had been in sending “spacemen” to collect Bobby. Bobby, as it happened, didn’t like science fiction. He liked cowboys and baseball, but rocket ships left him cold. Movie posters and magazine covers featuring bug-eyed monsters scared him. If the operatives who had rescued him had come galloping over the hill on horseback, and had called him “Pardner” instead of “Earth boy,” he’d undoubtedly have been as enchanted as they meant him to be and he would have bought into the rest of the experience with a receptive mind. As it was, by the time he was offloaded into a laboratory in a hot red rocky landscape, he was far enough out of shock to have begun to be angry, and his anger focused on the bogusness of the spacemen.

  The third mistake had been in the Company’s choice of a mentor for Bobby.

  Because the Company hadn’t been in business very long—at least, as far as its stockholders knew—a lot of important things about the education of young immortals had yet to be discovered, such as: no mortal can train an immortal. Only another immortal understands the discipline needed, the pitfalls to be avoided when getting a child accustomed to the idea of eternal life.

  But when Bobby was being made immortal, there weren’t any other immortals yet—not successful ones, anyway—so the Company might be excused that error, at least. And if Professor Bill Riverdale was the last person who should have been in charge of Bobby, worse errors are made all the time. Especially by persons responsible for the welfare of young children.