by Kage Baker
Yes! As much like the others as—as you’re like all these Basques. That was why I thought it was a Company double cross at first. What is the Company doing employing one of them?
Maybe he was a spy, Joseph speculated. Posing in an adult care facility as an autistic genius so he could hack into Company files.
You think so?
Maybe. I don’t know. But it makes a good story, and if I were you, I’d tell the Company that’s what you think he was. And I’ll bet they give you a pat on the back for being so smart, and that’s the last you’ll hear of the business, except for maybe an update later on, telling you they’ve caught the guy and everything’s been taken care of. They turned in at the garden entrance and crossed the courtyard to the indoor dining room. Joseph stopped in the lighted doorway to look seriously at Lewis.
Sounds peachy, Lewis replied bitterly. A waiter appeared—not quite so much of a clone this time, more like an elderly uncle of Joseph’s—and led them to a cozy dark booth. I don’t suppose you’ve had any leads on your friend since last we met?
Only negative ones. One of the bunkers is up here. I got inside it two days ago. Lots of missing people, lots of Enforcers, but not him. So we can rule this one out.
I’m glad you’ve been doing something, at least—
“Hi, guys, sorry I’m late,” said an immortal, sliding into the booth beside Lewis. “Security Tech Chilon. Literature Specialist Lewis? You okay? What the hell’s been going on?”
“About time one of you people showed up,” said Joseph. “My friend here’s had quite a run. Waiter?” He flagged down the elderly mortal, and they had a brief but infinitely convoluted conversation in Euskaran.
“A lot has happened,” Lewis said.
“Your transmission’s been broken or intermittent since you got on the boat at Newhaven,” Chilon informed him.
“That’s nothing.” Lewis stuck out his right hand. “Look at this.”
“What?” Chilon peered at it in the dim light.
“There’s a bruise.”
“Oh.” Chilon looked more closely. “So there is. How—”
“It’s a really bloodcurdling story,” Joseph said, settling back. “I’ve just ordered us wine and a couple of roast ducks. My friend here needs to make a full report. Get your ears on; this’ll take a while.”
It lasted, in fact, through dinner, dessert, and after-dinner drinks. Chilon, who was rather pleasanter and a bit more intelligent than most security techs Joseph had met, listened with an increasingly grim expression, though he was unfailingly polite and sympathetic in his reactions to Lewis’s story.
“It sounds as though we have a lot of work to do here,” he said when Lewis finished. He was pushing his glass of Pernod around on the table without drinking.
“Indeed.” Lewis leaned forward and tried to look confidential. “Now, I realize I’ve inadvertently turned up some information the Company didn’t want generally known, and I can’t tell you how embarrassed I am. I’m only a Literature Specialist, after all. I’d really rather not get involved with any of this. But, you know, it seems to me that the mortal Fancod must be some kind of spy for these creatures. How else could he have known about me? And he’s been getting into Company files! I realize my opinion doesn’t count for much, but something ought to be done about him, don’t you think?”
Joseph applauded silently.
Chilon said, “You’re absolutely right about that. We’ve already handled Fancod, so don’t worry. As for the other stuff—well, you aren’t likely to go blurting the information out to anybody, are you? Other than to Joseph here.”
Joseph held his breath, but Lewis nodded and caught the ball. “I reported to the first Facilitator I could find. Technically it should have been Xenophon, I know, but I wasn’t sure I could reach him, and for all I know that charnnel’s not secured.”
Right answer. Both Chilon and Joseph relaxed.
Chilon had a sip of Pernod. “Good point,” he said.
“So, what happens now?” Lewis looked from one to the other.
“We’re going to monitor you pretty closely for a while, to be sure these people leave you alone,” Chilon said. “We’ll see if we can grab the ones being held by the French authorities. I imagine the guys you trapped in the toilet had some explaining to do.” He grinned. “But we must do some event effacement too, so the mortals don’t get a lot of messy information they don’t need. Don’t worry about any of that. In fact, we can do a memory wipe, if you want.”
Lewis’s knuckles whitened on his glass, but he just shook his head with a slight frown. “I’d rather not go that far, thank you. If I meet up with them again, I want to be able to defend myself.”
“You’re right there.” Joseph nodded.
“Okay.” Chilon finished his drink. “Then here’s what I propose: you could use a vacation anyway, after all this, and I know you were going to Paris, but why don’t you hang out down here for a couple of weeks? Joseph and I can keep an eye on you while the Company clears up the fallout. Paris is a little crowded right now.”
“Sounds like a plan,” said Lewis cautiously.
“They’ll probably want you to report to Eurobase One for a debriefing and a diagnostic,” Chilon went on smoothly. “To see why that bruise is still there.”
“Absolutely, yes.”
Joseph’s eyes flickered from Chilon to Lewis and back. “So what do you want to do now, Lewis?” he said. “You want to get a room here? We can take in one of those Minoan-style bullfights they’re reintroducing. Or, I was planning on going to the Painted Cave Museum tomorrow. You want to tag along?”
“Oh, my gosh, I forgot.” Lewis’s face lit up. “They’re your mortal father’s paintings, aren’t they? What an experience for you. I’d love to come. I left my suitcase at the hotel in Biarritz, though.”
“No problem,” said Chilon. “I have a car. I’ll take you there tonight and bring you back up tomorrow. I ought to stick close anyway, until the operation’s in place. There may be more of the little morons running around.”
Lewis shivered.
It was growing late, so Chilon and Lewis left to walk back to Chilon’s car. Joseph stood in the doorway of the hotel, watching them go down the street in the lamplight as they chatted about the fabled luxury of Eurobase One. The larger man put his hand on Lewis’s shoulder, in a friendly way.
Joseph sighed, wondering if he’d ever see Lewis again.
But next morning there came no call officially informing him that Lewis had been transferred to a distant location, and as Joseph was sitting over his breakfast, he heard the two coming through the hotel lobby, discussing the relative merits of Toblerone over Perugina.
“In here.” He leaned out and waved from the restaurant. They saw him and smiled. He thought that Lewis looked more tired than the day before, if that was possible, with new lines of strain in his face. Lewis seemed cheerful enough as he sat down and ordered coffee, however.
“No weird visitors lying in wait at your hotel, I guess?” Joseph inquired.
“Nope.” Lewis shook out his napkin. “Though I can’t say I had the most pleasant dreams.”
“How’s the investigation going?” Joseph asked Chilon.
“Up and running,” Chilon said, reaching into the roll basket and selecting a brioche. He broke it open and daubed it with fruit paste.
Joseph knew better than to ask for details. He turned to Lewis and said casually, “So, are you all ready to give me emotional support? This should be some experience. I haven’t seen those paintings since I was twenty, when I sealed them up.”
“Wow,” said Chilon through a mouthful.
“Will we have to do any spelunking or anything like that to get to them?” Lewis asked, worried. “Because I’m not really dressed—”
“No, no, we won’t be going into the real cave. That’s been resealed. This is the exhibit they built outside. It’s all holosimulation. They say you can’t tell the difference, except that you can walk thro
ugh without getting mud on your shoes, and there’s a gift shop.”
“So you won’t really get to see your father’s paintings, then,” said Lewis.
Joseph shrugged. “What’s real? I’m a simulation too, when you come down to it. Besides, a lot of people died in that cave. I’ve put off coming back here my whole life, to be honest. Now that there’s this nice sanitary replica, I thought I’d see if I could take it.”
“This was where your mortal parents were killed?” Chilon asked.
“That’s right,” said Joseph.
The site was in a pleasant wooded valley, only a kilometer inland from the sea. Along one side were cliffs bordering a river, with a rock overhang that had long been known as a Neolithic shelter. The cave itself opened out of an escarpment some thirty meters east, and the modern exhibit and carpark were located in a meadow just below.
They drove up in Chilon’s car and paid their admission. They walked through the museum with its display of flint tools and skulls, through the hall of dioramas with its creepy models of fur-clad ancients poised around cook fires, and at last to the painted cave itself. Chilon paused at the gift shop to rent an audio unit before they went in.
“You want one?” He gestured at the display rack as he put on his earshells.
“Nah. What can they tell me I don’t already know?” said Joseph.
They walked into darkness and memory.
The first area, skillfully lit as if by rush lamp for maximum dramatic effect, was the Gallery of the Dancers. It reminded Lewis of the opening night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, with the bear-robed shuffling figures that dominated the last act. Not that the pictures showed anything that easily identifiable: hundreds of wavy black lines only gradually resolved themselves for the eye and became capering thighs, a pair of arms outflung, a profile bowing over a flute. No single form was complete and coherent.
Lewis and Chilon looked up respectfully. After a moment Chilon’s audio docent directed him into the next chamber, and he moved along obediently.
Lewis sidled over to Joseph, who was stone-faced. “Why are the lines all drawn on top of each other?” he whispered.
“Because nobody’d invented erasers yet,” Joseph replied. “And the man was a doodler. He couldn’t finish anything.”
“Oh.”
“It drove my mother crazy.” Joseph surveyed the illusion and found a particular fall of rock, reproduced in perfect holographic detail. “She died right over there,” he added, pointing. “Great Goat cultist with an axe.”
“I’m sorry,” said Lewis, appalled.
“I don’t feel anything. Funny, isn’t it?”
There followed a silence, in which they listened to Chilon’s footsteps getting fainter as he moved farther in.
I’m going to transmit a code to you. Lewis reached out and touched Joseph’s forehead. Before Joseph could reply, the code came, a jumble of something that might have been binary but wasn’t quite. Joseph blinked, received it, and shunted it into his tertiary consciousness.
What the hell was that?
It’s what Fancod used to pull up a Company menu. I tried it last night, when I couldn’t sleep. I got into the personnel files, not the general biographies but the classified material. I thought I’d see if I could find out what Mendoza was doing on Catalina with Edward in 1923. Joseph, the Company sent her Back Way Back, but they didn’t keep her there. She was sent to Agricultural Station One on March 24, 1863, linear time. But later that day she was transferred from there to a place called Site 317. That’s the last entry in her file.
Jesus, Lewis!
Listen to me. It’s more involved than it sounds. Agricultural Station One existed from 200,000 B.C. to 5o,000 B.C., and it was on Catalina Island too. They kept her there from 153,000 to 150,000. She was in Back Way Back three thousand years, Joseph, before they let her out! I couldn’t find any information on the other place, Site 317. But if you saw her on Catalina in 1923, and Site 317 is her last known location, maybe they’re one and the same.
Lewis, are you crazy? Didn’t I warn you about this? “Come on,” Joseph said, striding after Chilon. “I’m getting depressed here.”
They walked unseeing through the Grotto of the Lions, the Red Room, and the Room of Noah, and caught up with Chilon in front of a whole wall of silhouettes of human hands of every possible size.
When they emerged blinking into the morning light, Chilon said, not unkindly, “Did you make peace with your ghosts?”
“There weren’t any,” Joseph said. “Can you beat that?”
“Perhaps because it’s only a replica,” suggested Lewis.
“Could be. But none of the rest of the landscape does anything for me either. I thought I’d feel a connection or something, you know? A sense of belonging, coming up here? I don’t. No kinship at all, even when every guy in the street looks like my twin brother.”
They contemplated that while getting into the car. Chilon switched on the agdrive, and the car rose to its accustomed two feet above the surface of the ground. The propellant motor bore them away.
“I had the same experience,” Chilon remarked. “When I went back to Sparta thinking it would feel like home. I don’t know if it was that so much time had passed and everything about my memories was totally irrelevant, or what. But I wasn’t one of those people. They weren’t part of me.”
“We’re Company men,” said Joseph gloomily.
“I guess so.”
Lewis settled back and gave thanks yet again that he had been acquired by the Company before he could form any memory whatever of mortal life. He had enough problems as it was. “Have you ever thought,” he said carefully, “of where you’ll live after 2355? Assuming, you know—”
“Yeah,” said Chilon.
“Beyond gradual retirement, we can live anywhere we like, right? Settle down?”
“I’d always kind of thought I’d come back here,” said Joseph. “I don’t guess I will, though.”
“I’m not sure where I’d go,” said Lewis. “Just what it would have to have. Fine libraries and shops. A certain degree of gracious civilization. Good restaurants. Decent weather.”
“Santa Barbara,” Joseph suggested.
“No wine or gin there anymore,” Lewis reminded him. “Paris, maybe. Or Monte Carlo. And yet, you know, I’ve never felt culturally identified with the French? What a pity we can’t go backward. I’d love to live in Old Rome at the height of her glory.”
Joseph had, and very nearly said something pungent and to the point about Old Rome. He looked at Lewis’s weary face and confined himself to remarking, “No gin.”
“I suppose not.” Lewis sighed.
“And no Theobromos either,” Chilon said. “The future’s all there is, guys. Pie in the sky as time goes by.”
“Good one,” Joseph chuckled, and Lewis smiled politely.
Chilon left them off in front of Joseph’s hotel while he looked for a place to park, because the technological advances of the twenty-third century had not yet solved that problem. They went back to the lobby to see about getting two more rooms.
Will you check into that code? Lewis asked.
When it’s safe. When I’m alone. Lewis, do you have a death wish or something?
Absolutely not. Lewis looked grim. I found that out on the train from Dieppe, believe me. But this information was dropped in our laps, and we’d be insane not to make use of it. A mere Literature Specialist can’t find out where Site 317 is, but a Facilitator might. Don’t you want to solve the mystery once and for all?
Joseph did not reply immediately. They stepped up to the front desk, and he had a long conversation with the clerk in Euskaran that amounted to, “My friends are staying on. Do you have two more rooms?” and “Yes. Please sign here.” As Lewis was signing in, Joseph transmitted, Something to think about, Lewis. Suppose we find Mendoza, switched off in one of those vaults. What will we be able to do for her? Get her out? Revive her? Hide her? Where the hell can we hide from the
Company? What would she do with herself? The next chapter in that story is that all three of us wind up in vaults in the same bunker, per omnia secula seculorum.
Lewis blanched, but answered doggedly, I don’t believe she’s in one of those vaults, Joseph. What if they let her go after she served her time Back Way Back? We have no idea what Site 317 is. If it’s the Hotel St. Catherine on Catalina Island, if for example that’s her gradual retirement, and she’s still there with Edward—
Will you let go of that? You know damn well the Edward guy died, and the odds against Nature’s spitting out not two but three guys who look just like him—it’s absurd.
Lewis gestured impatiently at the lobby full of Josephs playing backgammon. Somehow it doesn’t seem as unlikely as it used to.
Joseph looked around and went pale. Oh, no. You don’t suppose there’s some weird little genetic pocket in England like there is here, do you? I never thought about that.
Well, think about it now.
All right. I’ll see what I can find out. But you have to drop this, Lewis! Mendoza was my recruit, after all. If I’m not obsessed with this past the point of good sense, you shouldn’t be. What was she to you?
My dearest friend, Lewis told him. You should understand, after where we’ve been today. We don’t have families, we don’t have homes, we don’t even have nationalities. Nothing remains except us, and all we have is each other.
Joseph was silent a moment. Sometimes, he replied. Mostly, all we really have is ourselves, Lewis. Do you want to lose yourself? You spent ten years switched off once. Do you want that permanently?
There are worse things. Joseph, I’m tired of worrying about me! We live such miserable lives when we live for ourselves. When our work is over, what will I have? A nice little villa for one somewhere and an endless supply of reading matter?
Hey, you might meet somebody. It’s been known to happen.
Never to me. And very seldom to any of the rest of us, as far as I can tell. Except Mendoza. She loved, and gave up everything she had for it. And then three thousand years in prison, Joseph!
I know.
Don’t you see? When all this is over, I don’t really care if I’m relegated to a vault or rewarded with a villa in St. Tropez. What I want, with my whole heart, is to know that Mendoza’s story had a happy ending. That love triumphed, and bravery, against impossible odds. That you really saw them together there on Catalina Island.