by Kage Baker
No, I just—had a hallucination or something. I can’t be alone up there!
Joseph bared his teeth in exasperation and stalked on ahead. I warned you.
I know. Gasping, unsteady, Lewis followed him.
A few meters farther on, though, he staggered and fell. Joseph swung about to find him huddled against the wall, pale and sweating.
What the hell is wrong now?
Lewis turned a sick face up to him. I seem to be having some sort of suppressed memory retrieval.
Of what?
I, uh, appear to be remembering my death.
Joseph crouched beside him. We’re immortal. We don’t die.
I’m perfectly aware of that, thank you.
You know we’re not supposed to be here, right? So you’re probably feeling whatever trauma you went through before the Company recruited you as a kid. Dr. Zeus uses them to keep us in line, like the conditioning nightmares. Break the rules, and you start reliving whatever jam you were in before some nice Company operative appeared out of nowhere and rescued you. Me, I remember the guys who exterminated my tribe.
But I never went through any trauma like that, Lewis said. I was taken by the Company as a newborn. I have no memories of mortal life, you see? He drew his knees up and stared at the blue light with haunted eyes. That’s not it. But something happened to me in Ireland once, and I think it gave me amnesia . . .
We don’t get that either, Lewis. Joseph rose to his feet impatiently. But you stay put and remember whatever you’re remembering. I have something to check out.
He walked away down the tunnel and vanished into the blue light.
Lewis hugged his knees. There had been a child chained in a cell. Not a child. Something all malevolence, hideously wise. There had been a mortal man, a Christian monk. The images were crowding on Lewis thick and fast, incoherent, inexplicable, impossible, and he realized that he could not sit there alone with them. The blue unknown was less horrible. He clawed his way upright again and went tottering off down the passage after Joseph, fighting panic every step of the way.
When he finally emerged from the tunnel’s mouth, though, he stopped in blank surprise. It wasn’t what he had expected at all.
He stood in a great vaulted bunker opening out before him into gentle gloom. The blue light was coming from regeneration vats, which were arranged in neat rows under the vaults. There were hundreds of them, and every one he could see was occupied by a pale floating figure. Joseph was sitting on the floor with his back against the nearest one. He lifted a tear-streaked face as Lewis came forward into the bunker.
“Oh, man,” he said hoarsely. “I wish you hadn’t come in here.”
“But—it’s just some kind of infirmary. These are only regeneration vats,” said Lewis wonderingly. He came closer, peering up at the floating body. After a moment his mouth fell open in astonishment.
“Good God,” he cried. “What are they?”
The vault’s occupant was an immortal male, but there any resemblance to Lewis or Joseph ended. He was enormously tall, even allowing for the magnifying qualities of the transparent tank, probably eight feet if he were standing; enormously broad and deep in the chest and shoulders, with a peculiar articulation of the powerful neck and arms.
His head was even more peculiar, not human at all, with a wide-domed helmet shape. The face was comparably strange: great protruding brows made caves of the blind eyes. An enormous nose, flat cheekbones, the suggestion of unusual dentition in the heavy jaws. The skin was fair. The hair and beard, long and drifting in the tank’s slight current, were the dun color of an autumn field after rain.
He wore nothing but a circlet of copper-colored metal on his brow.
The vault next to him contained another such, not identical but clearly of the same strange race. So did the one beyond that vault, and the one beyond that, and so on as far as Lewis could see. They were all males.
“They’re . . . Neanderthals?” Lewis guessed. “No, they can’t be, they’re so big. That’s not quite the skull shape, either. All the same . . . what kind of monsters are these?”
“They’re not monsters,” Joseph said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “They’re heroes.”
Lewis stared at him in incomprehension.
Joseph got to his feet, slowly, moving like an old mortal. “There’s more than one kind of operative,” he said.
“I know,” Lewis said. “Facilitators, Conservationists, Techs.”
Joseph shook his head. “Those are all Preservers. You, me, Mendoza. All you’ve ever seen is Preservers. The Company doesn’t make these big guys anymore. We used to call them Enforcers.”
“What did they enforce?” Lewis looked up at the sleeping giant nervously.
“Peace,” replied Joseph. “You’ve heard of the Great Goat Cult?”
“Certainly. They were a fanatic religious movement back in prehistory. Insisted on tattoos. Wiped out any tribe that rose above a certain technological level. They delayed the birth of civilization by ten thousand years, and the Company was powerless to stop them.”
“It wasn’t.” Joseph shook his head sadly. “Dr. Zeus got tired of waiting. Wouldn’t you have got tired of waiting? Watching Homosapiens work its way up from the monkeys, and just as it starts to produce art and culture worth preserving, somebody starts a religion that demands mass slaughter of sinners. The Goats were pretty good at it, too, they killed half the population of Europe and Asia before the Company made the decision to interfere.
“But the Company couldn’t send in Preservers to stop the cult. We were designed to run, not to fight. We’re sneak thieves, smooth talkers, nice guys. We don’t get involved in mortal quarrels. We let mortals go their own way to hell while we rescue what we can, and we never, ever risk our own skins. Pain scares us. We don’t do danger.”
“Rather unflatteringly put, but essentially true.” Lewis couldn’t take his eyes off the man in the vault.
“Yeah, well, the Company needed somebody who could do danger. They played around with the available gene pool and came up with these guys.”
“You mean they made recombinants?” Lewis asked, horrified.
“No, just some controlled breeding experiments, which is nastier, if you ask me. Where they got the results they wanted, they made the kids into immortals, but not Preservers: killers. Warriors, though, not assassins. Braver than you or I could ever possibly be, guys who’d think nothing of charging into oncoming spears, guys who could be shot so full of arrows they would look like porcupines and still keep fighting.” Joseph glanced up at the vault, remembering.
“I can’t imagine that,” Lewis murmured. He jumped as the big man moved galvanically, flexed, and then relaxed.
“You’re programmed not to,” Joseph told him. “So am I. Not these guys. Anyway, the Company turned them loose on the Great Goat Cult. Kill all killers. Simple instruction. And they weren’t stupid, either; these guys were as smart as you or I, just motivated differently. They went after any mortals who practiced violence. You know why mortal civilization was finally able to get started? Because these guys did their job.”
“Perhaps they shouldn’t have stopped, given the way civilization progressed.”
“They thought so, too,” said Joseph quietly.
“Oh,” Lewis said. After a poignant silence, he went on: “And so the Company locked them up here? No wonder you didn’t want me to find out about this.”
“I didn’t know about it,” said Joseph in a wretched voice. “I just guessed. The problems were supposed to have been worked out. The Enforcers were supposed to have been retrained, reprogrammed, reassigned. Mostly to Company bases, because as time went on, the mortal races started looking different, and these guys couldn’t pass anymore. I used to see a few of them now and then, back in the early days. Less and less as time went on. I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t want to.”
“What changed your mind?” Lewis drew back as the giant clenched his enormous and well-made hands, th
en relaxed them.
“Looking for Mendoza,” said Joseph. “I hadn’t wanted to think about her, either. I just shoved my official notification of her arrest into a file in my tertiary consciousness and never accessed it until that day in Sam Pan’s when you told me you saw her.”
“I remember. But—”
“I had other data in that file,” Joseph went on steadily. “And when I accessed the notification about Mendoza, it popped up. It was information somebody passed me a long time ago, something I didn’t want to know anything about because it was really dangerous.”
“Those coordinates?”
Joseph nodded.
“And they led you here?”
“The first set did.”
“You mean there are other places like this? Full of these . . . ?”
“Probably. This is the first one I’ve checked.” Joseph sighed. “I didn’t want you to know about them at all. You’re now one of probably ten people in the world who have seen this place, and we are in sooo much trouble if the Company finds out, Lewis. Remember back in San Francisco, when I said the stakes had got way too high for you? You should see them now.”
“I heard a rumor, once.” Lewis began to pace along the rows of vaults, looking at their occupants. “Supposedly passed back from some operative in the future. It’s that, when we finally do reach the twenty-fourth century, our mortal masters will make us all wear an emblem. A clock with its hands missing. They’ll tell us it’s a badge of honor for all our work in time, but really it’ll be a way to mark us out for the day when they . . . dispose of us somehow.”
“I heard that rumor too.”
“But I never believed it. And I’ve seen . . .” Lewis was walking faster now. “What were you hoping to find?”
“Somebody I owe.” Joseph followed him. “Somebody who might be able to help me free Mendoza, if she can be freed. If he’s here. If I can get him out of here.”
They moved along the aisles between the vaults, looking up fearfully at the occupants.
“At least it seems humane enough,” Lewis whispered. “They’re safe. They’re alive. They’re not in any pain. I spent ten years in one of these tanks, once.”
“Jesus, what happened to you?”
“I’m not sure. It was after Ireland.”
“Maybe you did nearly die, then. Ten years! They must have had to replace most of your organic parts.” Joseph shuddered. “You never mentioned this before.”
“Would you want to talk about it?”
“But what kind of danger could a Literature Preservation Specialist get himself into—” Joseph stopped at one vault, and Lewis came instantly to his side.
“No,” said Joseph, both relieved and disappointed. This vault’s occupant was a Preserver, a woman, but not one he knew. She looked tiny, elfin compared with the Enforcers; her black hair waved around her like long silk. After a moment Joseph and Lewis moved on.
There were five hundred vaults in the bunker, four hundred and eighty of which contained sleeping Enforcers. Of the remaining twenty, nine contained Preservers, six males and three females, none of whom was Mendoza. Eleven vaults were empty.
There were rooms opening off one side. One room contained drums of regenerant concentrate and cleaning supplies. Another seemed to be a repair area, with an operating table and cabinets that might have contained tools. The third room had a bank of terminals, blinking quietly, and a cot. On the wall was a chalkboard, on which someone had printed, in straggling Latin:
ABDIEL HAS DONE HIS APPOINTED WORK HERE
9 NOVEMBER 2025–30 NOVEMBER 2025
There was nothing else.
“How many other bunkers like this are there?” said Lewis, aghast.
“You don’t want to know,” Joseph said.
“And your friend might be in any one of them. We’ll have to search them all, won’t we?”
“No way.” Joseph stopped and glared at him. “Not you. Lewis, what have I been telling you over and over again? I’m a Facilitator, there’s less danger for me. Is this how you wound up in a tank for ten years, taking stupid risks?”
Lewis scowled back. “I took a vow to help Mendoza, and I’d keep it even if the Company locked me away for a thousand years.” He considered the nearest one. “How long do you suppose these poor devils have been here?”
“About two thousand years,” said Joseph in a lifeless voice. “That one, anyway. He was brought here in 120 A.D. So were those five over there. We were in the Ninth Legion together.”
Lotus and Jeffrey were terribly disappointed next morning to discover their guests had departed early, though they were somewhat comforted by the considerable tip the gentlemen had left.
Shortly afterward, the clerk in the York Rowntree Factory shop was startled by the abrupt appearance of two men at her counter. Their eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion, their expensive suits needed pressing, and they had in their combined shopping baskets at least a hundred pounds’ worth of assorted chocolate bars. They seemed a bit on edge.
Lewis dropped Joseph off at London City Airport and watched him board his suborbital flight. Weaving a little as he climbed the boarding ramp, Joseph turned at the door and threw Lewis a shaky Roman salute.
“Ave,” murmured Lewis, waving back. “Magna est veritas, et pravalebit.”
A full century was to pass before they saw each other again.
Joseph in the Darkness
SO NOW I HAD OPENED the great big Pandora’s box from hell in my hunt for you, father. I was finding out a lot more about the Company’s secrets than I’d ever wanted to know, and Lewis—what kind of box had he opened for himself? All kinds of things were swarming out of the darkness of his memory to say hello to him. Poor bastard.
At least he was too busy to think about them much. We were all overworked in the second half of the twenty-first century, gearing up for when things were going to get crazy. Way too much to do for a lot of follow-up on the other bunker locations. I did find a couple, one in New Mexico and one in Siberia, but I wasn’t able to do more than locate the concealed doorways. The Company kept me running.
Here’s what would have interested you about that century, father: Information was king, and technological advances went at breakneck speed, if unevenly. Electric cars everywhere except the United States. Bullet trains, boom and bust, new religions, new leases on life for old religions. Fossil fuels began to run out. Islam sheathed its sword and went sort of Amish, concentrating on farming, at least in the former OPEC nations. They hadn’t much choice.
The neopagan religious movement, with all its Wiccan and quasi-Wiccan subsets, finally realized that what it lacked was a certain coherence of doctrine. In 2082 they all got together in Malta to hold the First Maternal Synod. They debated questions like divine polarity (Was the Great God equal with the Great Goddess? They decided he wasn’t) and whether males had souls. They agreed on common goals: the ancient city of Ephesus and its temple to the Goddess, for example, had to be reclaimed and restored for the faithful.
There were a couple of schisms—both the Diannic Feminist extremists and the Sons of Cernunnos walked out of the synod, and terrorists from both factions bombed each other’s shrines. At the end of a year, though, they’d managed to put together a book of holy scripture and forge a new maternalistic religion every bit as violent and repressive as the old paternalistic ones had been. With the shoe now firmly on the other foot, the nonsecular world limped on.
I don’t think it was a judgment of Jehovah—or Diana either, for that matter—but about this time the Sattes virus swept through the prisons of the world, killing off most of the inmates as well as the guards and their families. In every nation on Earth. How much did you know about that one, father? Was it planned? Would you have forbidden it, if you’d been able? Well, the mortals lived up to your expectations, I’m afraid. The stupefying improbability of it all was mostly ignored, the official investigations perfunctory at best, because everyone was so secretly grateful.
Then the virus broke out in the world’s armies, and they weren’t so happy anymore.
When it ended, abruptly and mysteriously as it had begun, there were a lot fewer people; but the infrastructure for the new world was intact, so a boom period of prosperity followed. Wages were up, labor was satisfied. No wars for a while, except in places where it never stopped, with or without armies.
Like Northern Ireland. Somebody nuked Belfast, with a dirty little stolen bomb, probably one of the old ones misplaced by the former superpowers. Nobody’s quite sure who was responsible. But, surprise: when the mushroom cloud dissipated, the place was neither green nor orange. It was dead. Did that teach them anything? You’d bet it wouldn’t, father, and you’d be so right.
America had its troubles too, race wars and a growing antifederalist movement, until the epidemic hit. Things went steadily on to hell in California, with two big earthquakes and an urban war in the south before the epidemic. Most of the population fled to the northern end of the state. Fusion power finally made the scene, and New York sued New Jersey to get its garbage back, now that the stuff could be used to power generators. Taxes went up. The pieces began to fall into place for the Second Civil War. I saw it, working in Texas, which was a big economic giant flexing its muscles. None of the mortals saw it coming, though.
Things went on in China and Africa about like they always had, insane repressions and bloodbaths in some places that made the news, peace and relative prosperity in other places that didn’t. Same with India. Quebec split from Canada and tried, without success, to join the European Union. The Inuits got a full-fledged nation to themselves up in the Arctic Circle. Parts of Japan sank following three major earthquakes in a row, and Mexico suddenly found its lap full of yen. Europe manufactured things and grew a lot of genetically improved vegetables.
The first Luna colonies were founded, and boomed, because the colonists got rich in short order. Even the janitors became millionaires up there. High wages, nothing to spend them on, good benefits. People fought to go.