by Kage Baker
“What happened then?” said Joseph.
“Nothing. I never saw her again. I was all alone the next two days. The Yankees never came back, either. But the night after that, security techs came and took all Mendoza’s stuff, and started searching the place. And in the middle of it Porfirio—he was my case officer—came galloping up, and they started yelling at each other.” Juan Bautista closed his eyes at the memory.
“They left with her stuff. Porfirio reamed me out, he really did. Like it was my fault! But then they came back and got both of us. They took us to some place in Los Angeles, and I didn’t see Porfirio again after that. They questioned me over and over, but I didn’t know anything. Then they transferred me. And that was all that happened.”
“What did he look like?” Joseph asked.
“Porfirio?”
“No, the Englishman. Did he look like James Bond?”
“No,” Juan Bautista said. “He just looked . . . like an Englishman. But he was really tall.”
Joseph began to pace the room. He took a pencil and paper from Juan Bautista’s desk and thrust them at him. “Draw the guy for me,” he said. “Give me a photographic likeness.”
It was a simple request to make of a Company operative, with total recall and photographic memory at his disposal. Juan Bautista shrugged. He worked for about five minutes, as Joseph and Lewis watched him. Long before he had finished and handed the portrait to Lewis, Joseph was across the room beating his head against the wall.
Lewis studied the portrait: a very tall figure looking down from horseback. He was dressed in the clothing a gentleman wore for travel in 1862, elegantly tailored, which somewhat obscured the fact that he was rather lankily built. He had a long broken nose and high broad cheekbones. Lewis found the picture disturbing, though he couldn’t have said why, other than the obvious fact that something about it was making Joseph bang his head against the wall. Juan Bautista watched, horrified.
“You know,” said Lewis carefully, pretending not to notice what Joseph was doing, “this fellow reminds me of . . . the way Mendoza used to describe the mortal she knew in England. The, ah, attitude.”
“And how,” groaned Joseph. He staggered to a chair and sat down. “Give me the picture.”
Lewis handed it to him. Joseph stared at it for a long moment before crumpling it up and squeezing the wad of paper between both hands.
“Did I offend you somehow?” Juan Bautista asked cautiously.
“No. No, you didn’t, pal, and I owe you one. We’re going to go, now, and with any luck our paths won’t ever cross again.” Joseph got up. “Come on, Lewis.”
“Thank you, Juan,” said Lewis. “And rest assured we won’t tell anyone about the raven.”
Juan Bautista watched as Joseph scooped up the helmet and its case and stalked out, with Lewis following.
“Did he know you from somewhere?” Lewis asked quietly, as they paused at the car to put away the helmet.
“He was one of my recruits,” Joseph said, slamming the trunk lid down. “Haven’t seen him since he was four. Great father, ain’t I?”
Juan Bautista went to the window to be certain they left.
“I’m glad they’re going,” said Raven, fussing with her master’s hair. “I didn’t like them at all. I wanted to peck out his eyes, that mean man. Just like in the scary movie.”
“Hush,” Juan Bautista said, watching the two immortals drive away. His hand rose in the habitual gesture to stroke her neck feathers, and this time she let him.
“You’re driving rather fast,” remarked Lewis. It was the first word either of them had spoken. They were halfway back to San Francisco, following the highway along the cliffs above the sea.
“Sorry,” Joseph said. He pulled the car over on the narrow stony verge, stopped the engine, and got out. For a moment Lewis had the strangest conviction that Joseph was going to jump; instead he pulled back his arm and threw something, hurling it with a grunt of fury toward the steel-colored ocean. It seemed to hang in the air a moment before it dropped, a little white ball of wadded paper.
“Would you mind explaining?” asked Lewis, when Joseph got back in and slammed the door.
“We made a decision yesterday when we were both bombed out of our skulls. But the ante, Lewis, just got upped. If you knew just how high it is now,” Joseph said, “I don’t think you’d want to keep playing.”
Lewis turned to stare at him. “I beg your pardon,” he said coldly. “That’s my decision to make, I believe. Mendoza was my friend. If there’s anything I can do to help her, wherever she is now, I’m going to do it.”
Joseph sighed. “We may not be able to do anything for her. Even finding out where she is will be dangerous. I may have some chance, on my own. What I do, what we do, depends on what I turn up. But I may not turn up anything for years. You see what I’m saying?”
“Yes, I do.” Lewis set his chin. “But you have to understand my position. There she was, about to walk into tragedy, and I knew it but there was nothing on earth I could do.”
“Oh, I think I know how you felt,” said Joseph bleakly.
“You recognized the man in the picture. Who was he?”
Joseph disengaged the emergency brake and started the Lexus again. Watching carefully for oncoming traffic, he pulled back onto the highway. “Somebody who died and should have stayed dead,” he said at last.
They were nearly back in Sausalito before Lewis spoke again. “You’ll let me know when you discover where she is?”
“I promise. Now, I think we shouldn’t contact each other again for a few years. You may not hear from me until after the war. You probably won’t be stationed in L.A. much longer.”
Lewis shrugged. “Not the way things are going, no.” He looked at his chronometer. “Gosh, how time flies,” he said lightly.
Joseph nodded. They were talking about the Oakland Raiders when data transmission resumed a few minutes later.
Lewis reclaimed his car and drove back to Hollywood that afternoon, arriving long after dark. He didn’t see Joseph again for thirty years.
Joseph in the Darkness
SO, FATHER, YOU’RE the expert on death. Why can’t we die?
Right now you’d be giving me that flat patient stare that meant I’d asked a really dumb question. But, seriously, think about this for a minute: what step in the immortality process makes us permanent problems for our masters, instead of just terribly long-lived ones?
The conditioning to avoid danger at all costs can be worked around, if you psych yourself up to it. Takes a lot of practice, but it can be done.
The pineal tribrantine 3 gives us eternal youth, but it doesn’t make us indestructible.
The ferroceramic skeletal structure can’t be damaged, but the soft tissues around it are as vulnerable as a mortal’s to injury—or would be, if we didn’t have the speed and agility to avoid bullets, knives, shrapnel, et cetera.
The millions of biomechanicals circulating through us, each one custom-designed to the individual operative’s DNA, are tougher to beat. If my heart was cut out of my body (assuming I held still long enough to let somebody do that, which I wouldn’t, because I’m afraid of pain), I’d just go into fugue and my biomechanicals would grow a new heart. They repair, replace, revive, detoxify, and probably they could keep us immortal all on their own, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re susceptible to damage too.
Each system backs up the other systems, functions overlap, and the whole design works so well that Preservers almost never incur damage bad enough to land them in a repair facility. Smash us to bits—sooner or later we’ll rise up in one piece again, like the bucket-carrying brooms in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and go on about our work. Not only that, we make more of ourselves, out of the unwanted orphans of history. And we’re smarter than the masters who created us. God knows I’d be scared of me, if I was a mortal.
So I can just imagine our masters sitting around a table in an ivory tower up there in the twenty-fourth
century, thumbing frantically through some big book of spells trying to find the one that will turn us off.
But better minds than theirs have tackled the problem, and nobody’s ever managed. I’m talking about suicide attempts, of course. All of us immortals have felt like dying, at some time. Some of us have wanted it bad enough to try. There are a lot of stories, hilarious in a black kind of way, about what happened. The best of them is the one about the guy who overcame his hazard avoidance programming enough to position himself at ground zero in Hiroshima. Next thing he knew, he was wandering around in the mountains with big chunks of his memory gone, and the locals were reporting sightings of Charcoal Faceless Ghost-Man.
Why wasn’t he vaporized, ferroceramic skeleton and all? I don’t know. My guess is, no matter how badly he consciously wanted to die, something in his unconscious got him out of there at hyperspeed at the last possible second.
If we can survive something like that, what can’t we survive?
And how would our masters even begin to find out? How could they experiment without tipping us off? What would we do to them if we caught them at it?
But if they did find some silver bullet, how would they manage to hunt down every single one of thousands of ancient, cunning, superintelligent, and extremely survival-oriented cyborgs so they could use it?
To say nothing of the fact that it would have to be one hell of a silver bullet, capable of destroying every single biomechanical in a cyborg’s body. If it missed even one, the little thing would reproduce frantically, and soon there would be enough to begin repair. Months or years later, some body would claw its way out of an unmarked grave, and if it wasn’t pissed off about the way it had been treated, I’d be real surprised. The masters would be surprised, too. Maybe in their beds, maybe in lonely places.
No wonder they monitor every word we say.
Austin, 2025
THE CEMETERY WAS a modern one, parklike and smooth, with neat flat headstones set flush in the manicured lawn; so it had taken a lot of work and enthusiasm to give it an appropriate holiday look. Garden edging had been used here and there to enclose graves in little pavilions festooned with black and orange crepe paper, or strung with electronic pumpkin and skeleton lights. Every grave had its jack-o’-lantern or bouquet of marigolds and chrysanthemums. The infants’ section was particularly bright, with little plastic trick-or-treat buckets, tiny pumpkins, black and orange pinwheels, tissue-paper ghosts.
The living children in their costumes wandered between the graves reading names and dates, or thronged at the edge of the cemetery, where a produce stand had a pumpkin patch and hayride. A row of dilapidated tractors was ranged along the edge of the property line; today there were dummies mounted in the rusting seats, old clothes stuffed with newspaper and surmounted with rubber masks. There was a vampire, a werewolf, Frankenstein’s monster.
Señor and Señora Death were busy packing up the leftovers of a tailgate picnic, nesting empty Tupperware containers and wadding up plastic bags. Señor Death turned to look at the horizon, where slate-blue clouds advanced. He frowned. He shouted, “Kids! Are you going trick-or-treating or what? Come on.”
They came running from the hayride, the ballerina and Snow White and the baby tiger. Teenage Death strolled after them, being irritating, too cool to hurry.
Señor Death exhaled sharply and shook his head. The ballerina outpaced her little brother and sister and said breathlessly, “Uncle Frio! The man at the pumpkin patch says it’s going to rain. Will that short out Daddy’s lights?”
“No.” Señor Death crouched down by the grave and lifted the wire that connected the four little jack-o’-lanterns carved with the four names: GILBERT, TINA, BRANDY, AGUSTIN. “It’s outdoor grade wire, the microchip’s insulated. They’ll shine all night, no matter what the weather does.”
“Mommy, can I have an orange soda?” asked the baby tiger.
“Not in the car, mijo,” Señora Death said firmly. “When you get home.”; The baby tiger started to pout.
“Tricker-treat, tricker-treat, tricker-treat,” chanted Snow White, which distracted the baby tiger, and he took up the chant too. They bounced up and down in great excitement.
“You’re practically jumping on Daddy’s grave!” the ballerina fretted.
“I think he’d kind of like it,” Señor Death told her. “They’re little, Brandy. It’s okay.”
Teenage Death made his leisurely arrival and bent to lift the cooler over the tailgate for his mother. He fished inside and drew out a bottle of orange soda. Instantly the baby tiger stopped bouncing and pointed an accusatory finger. “How come he gets to have one?”he yelled.
“Because I won’t barf all over the inside of the truck, baby,” said his brother.
“Agustin, it won’t kill you to wait ten minutes until we get home. Put the soda back,” Señor Death ordered. Agustin gave him an insolent stare, so Señor Death added, “If you want to go to that party tonight—”
“Nazi,” muttered the boy, but he put the soda back.
“Come on, kids.” Señora Death was kneeling by the grave, making the sign of the cross. The younger children knelt beside her and crossed themselves too. Señor Death and Agustin stood to pray, reciting the Hail Mary and Our Father with them. When they finished, the children scrambled to their feet and climbed into the truck, crouching under the camper shell. Agustin closed the tailgate on them and stood beside Señor Death, waiting somberly as his mother bent to the gravestone and kissed it. Her white makeup left the print of her lips on the stone that read:
PHILIP BERNARD AGUILAR
LOVING HUSBAND AND FATHER
1990-2021
They got into the truck and drove away, following a road east through low rolling hills and scrub oaks, into a pleasant lakeside housing development shaded by sycamore trees. The storm clouds had advanced with breathtaking speed, bringing early darkness. Already people were putting out lighted pumpkins or turning on strings of Halloween lights. As they pulled into their driveway, a tiny devil and superheroine emerged from the house next door, clutching loot bags.
“Mommy, Robin and Maria are starting!” shrieked Snow White. “Uncle Frio, can’t we go now?”
Señor Death shut off the motor and scowled up at the sky. “Yes, go early, that’s a good idea. Agustin! Watch them like a hawk. If it starts to rain, go to the Circle K and call me. I’ll come drive you home.”
“Okay.” Agustin slid from the cab seat. “Drive me to Sasha’s later?”
Señor Death nodded. Brandy ran into the house and returned with their loot bags and a flashlight for each child. Waving them like light sabers, the children hastened down the street. Señor Death watched them go. He could smell autumn leaves, candle-charring pumpkins, dinners cooking in a dozen kitchens; over all that, the heavy smell of the storm, very strong, worrisome.
He hefted the cooler out of the back and tilted it in the driveway, letting the melted ice drain out. As he bent there, something came through the twilight to him, some signal through the ether he couldn’t define. He stood up sharply and stared, turning his bone-white face this way and that, but he couldn’t locate it.
Shrugging, he carried the cooler into the house.
Señora Death was just sliding a covered dish into the oven. “You can go first,” she told him. “The cotton balls and the Noxema are all laid out.” There was a certain courteous reserve in her tone, a formality, respect and affection without intimacy.
“Thanks,” he said. He made his way through the darkening house, turning on lights as he went, not out of any need—he could see by infrared—but out of a mounting edginess. Near the door of the bathroom he nearly stepped on a UFO Abductee Barbie. Muttering to himself, he picked it up and went to the door of the girls’ room, where he turned on the light before tossing it on Tina’s bed. Nothing out of place, everything normal: Brandy’s side fussily neat, Tina’s a wreckage of toys and crayons. He heard a faint scrape and hiss, smelled something burning. Annette was lighting the
jack-o’-lantern and setting it in the front window.
He went back to the bathroom and slipped off his black robe. Leaning forward over the sink, he began carefully removing the white from his face. It was an involved process, because he had to avoid removing the more subtle makeup that disguised him as a forty-five-year-old mortal man.
He was sponging the last of it out of his mustache when Annette was beside him suddenly, her alarm magnified by the black greasepaint around her eyes.
“Porfirio, I thought I saw a man in the backyard.”
I knew it, he told himself. “Well, let’s see,” he said grimly. He stepped into his bedroom and emerged with a shotgun. Cocking it, he stepped out on the back porch and looked into the deepening shadow.
“Luisa said the marshal shot two Freemen in Spicewood,” Annette hissed.
“Maybe,” he replied. It had been three years since the war, but now and then somebody came lurching out of the back country, desperate for supplies.
But there was no crazed survivalist in this suburban backyard, and nothing out of place either: Gilbert’s wading pool full of waterlogged oak leaves, bicycles, the tree house made of pallets, the rope swing over the edge of the lake. For a split second he thought he saw something wrong. An outline, a ghost, in the tree house? As he stared, it melted into nothing. Or nearly nothing. He snarled silently.
Miles away, there was a flicker on the horizon. A long moment later the faint thunder came.
“It’s okay,” he called to Annette. “Nobody out here stupid enough to trespass.”
He went back indoors.
They ate supper in the kitchen, interrupted occasionally by trickor-treaters. The storm held off. The children came home, and Annette fed the younger ones while Agustin got a change of clothes and his sleeping bag. Porfirio drove him to his party. On the way back the lightning flashes were nearer, the thunder following more closely. As he let himself in, the first drops began to fall, and as he crossed the threshold, a blue-white blaze lit the whole street.