by Kage Baker
He lay there bleeding, running a self-diagnostic. Contusions, minor cuts, no more.
Growling at no one in particular, he dragged himself upright and stumbled along the verge, until he was able to find an offramp. He seemed to have sustained a scalp wound, and now the blood was running down into his good eye. Blinking, he made his way into Watts and shambled down Avalon Boulevard, looking through the ruins for an address.
Nobody bothered him.
The mission was easy to spot. It was the only intact building for blocks, had once been a big rambling private house, and there was a line of people stretching out the door onto the front porch. They looked at him, appalled, except the young man in some kind of monastic habit who was addressing them, handing each one a form to fill out. Joseph wiped the blood from his eye and read the sign mounted above the porch: THE COMPASSIONATES OF ALLAH. He lurched forward and began to crawl up the stairs.
Somebody finally thought to nudge the brother and tell him there was a white guy getting into line. The young man snapped, “No whites treated here—” Then he saw Joseph and stopped, gulping. Joseph fixed him with his good eye, which the blood was obscuring again, and tried to form words. He couldn’t, quite.
An elderly lady groped in her pocket for a handful of gray paper napkins and held them out to Joseph timidly. He accepted them and wiped his bleeding face. She told the young brother she thought Joseph might be Mexican. He leaned forward and told Joseph, in Spanish, that this was a blacks-only immunization center. Joseph just stared at him, breathing harshly.
“Maybe Filipino?” somebody else suggested.
Joseph raised his hand and made a writing gesture in midair.
The people in the line conferred briefly among themselves and decided that maybe the brother had better take the stranger inside before he died on the porch. Thoroughly unnerved, the young man went to the door and opened it, pointing inside. Why was Joseph moving so slowly? Blood loss. Internal hemorrhaging. Estimate fugue state in four minutes fourteen seconds, if self-repair not initiated prior to that time.
Inside was a waiting room. The young man held open a door marked EMERGENCY CARE for Joseph, waving at him to go in, but Joseph spotted the one marked ADMINISTRATOR and pushed that instead, and went through.
A thin-featured black man in old-fashioned reading glasses was going over forms at a desk. He glanced up in irritation at being interrupted, and his eyes widened at the sight of Joseph. Limping just ahead of the young man, who had run after him, Joseph grabbed a grease pencil from a jar on the desk and got its cap off. On the back of a form he wrote, with infinite care, the word Suleyman.
The Administrator looked at him sharply.
That was the last clear impression Joseph had for a while.
He was on a cot in a locked room. Mortals had carried him there. There were compresses on his wounds. It was day. He moved convulsively, twisted the bezel of the ring. Still safe.
It was night. He had a blanket now. Bandages too. The ring, again. Still safe.
Still night, but there were mortals moving around him, cutting away his torn and filthy clothing, washing him, bandaging him again, exclaiming over his bruises. Black men, all in the same monastic robes. They were talking to him, trying to get him upright, into white cotton pajamas. They put shoes on his feet. They pushed his arms through the sleeves of a long coat. Then, thank God, they let him lie down again.
Somebody was feeding him broth. Did he think he could manage with a straw? He tried. He managed, mostly, and somebody wiped away what had run from the slack corner of his mouth. He thought they would let him sleep then, but here were more of them, back with a stretcher. They moved him onto the stretcher and took him out into the night air. It was foul and cold. Old petroleum sump nearby. He was riding in an ambulance—when did that happen? An ambulance but no siren. He remembered the ring again.
They told him to be quiet, that they had to wait for the gate patrolman who knew them.
A shipyard? He had the sudden awful feeling that he was still crouched under the dock, eating crabs, and had only dreamed he made it this far. No, they were explaining that he had no papers, but Suleyman had arranged passage anyway. It was just getting light as he was carried on board the ship, big square freight barge, unlovely thing. Down to a tiny dark closet of a room. The fusion drive boomed steadily somewhere close. They all went away and left him, except the man in the reading glasses. Darkness. The ship was moving out. He could sleep now.
He slept for a long time in the darkness. Brother Ibrahim never left him. Joseph explained about the ring, how it had to be twisted every ten hours. Brother Ibrahim knew. Suleyman had made the ring? Sort of. It was all right.
Day was nearly as dark as night, except for long slanting fingers of sunlight that somehow found their way down into the hold and through his ventilation grate.
He woke weeping, weeping for Lewis, and Brother Ibrahim comforted him. You have no souls, he explained in Arabic, and so need fear no fires of hell. But if your friend was serving Allah’s purpose, he died in glory and light, and feels no pain, which is the best that can possibly be hoped for such creatures. Moreover, he is remembered eternally, for God forgets nothing, and surely that is a kind of eternal life.
Joseph agreed hazily. But how had they come to be speaking in seventh-century Arabic?
You spoke first, Brother Ibrahim told him in mild surprise.
Oh, you’re a scholar?
Yes, Brother Ibrahim was a scholar.
Sunlight stripes followed by darkness, followed by sunlight. He could see a little out of his left eye now, he could manage the straw better. He could work the thumb on his left hand. Brother Ibrahim told him the wounds were healing.
The smells changed. He could smell land. Then, a flood of air and light, and mortals came in through the doorway. More brothers. Moonlight? Brief muttered conversations in French. Brother Ibrahim was coming with him, must deliver Joseph into Suleyman’s hands himself, he had promised to. They reached an agreement, and the stretcher was taken up again. Joseph was carried out into the night, tilting this way, tilting that way, and into the back of a van with Brother Ibrahim crowded in beside him. A long, long drive.
Fez
JOSEPH.”
Suleyman was looking into his eyes.
“Joseph, you’re not self-repairing fast enough. We’re going to help you.”
“Will it hurt?”
“We’ll have to shut you down to do it.”
“That figures,” Joseph grumbled, and lost consciousness again.
Silence, incredible silence. He was alone, and damaged.
Well, of course he was damaged. Shot twice by a death ray, fell off a cliff, was half drowned, and jumped from the back of a convoy speeding through Watts.
No, he was really damaged.
His eyes were swollen nearly shut, his sinus cavities plugged solid and throbbing. Someone had done maxillofacial surgery on him, broken his nose . . .
His datalink was gone. Not offline, not even temporarily disconnected. Gone. Surgically removed.
Joseph peered around cautiously, and found he had no difficulty turning his head. He lay in a bed, in a pleasant room with windows shaded against the sun.
“Joseph?”
He met Suleyman’s somber gaze.
“Tell me what happened to you, Joseph. I need you to tell me as quickly as you can.”
Joseph gave him the briefest version of the story, about the stupid little men who’d been after Lewis for years and finally caught up with him. About the weapons they had, that could ruin the biomechanicals on an operative.
Suleyman looked grim. “There’s more to the story than that, though, isn’t there?”
“Yeah,” Joseph replied. “What have you done to me, Suleyman?”
“Modified you. We had no choice. You won’t need the signal disrupter anymore, at least. You’re officially dead now, Joseph, as far as the Company’s concerned. You don’t exist. But they may have a problem solver hunting fo
r you anyway, and we can’t risk their finding you here.”
Joseph lay there blinking, unable to take it in.
Suleyman went to the window, looking down into the street below. “We’ll get you back on your feet again, of course, and I can give you a list of contacts. You’d heal faster if we had a regeneration tank, but the closest ones are in that bunker you showed me, and I don’t think you want to go there. Once you’ve recovered, though, you’ll need to run. You’re a hazard to my people.”
Joseph nodded.
“I am truly sorry about this, Joseph, sorrier than you can know. A lot has happened in the last few weeks. When you’re well enough, you’re going to have to tell me the whole story, from the beginning, no lies, nothing left out. Do you understand? And the others are going to want to talk to you.”
“Okay,” said Joseph, but was distracted by the echoes that were beginning in his head.
Suleyman scowled at him and crossed swiftly to his bedside. He leaned down and looked hard at Joseph, then straightened up. “Latif!” he shouted.
Joseph didn’t know what happened after that.
He wasn’t well for a long time, even after they repaired him. The Company wasn’t with him anymore. Nobody was watching him, but nobody was watching over him either. For some reason his body seemed to believe it was mortal again. Systems faltered or gave out for no apparent reason, and Latif would be suddenly there beside him with a stabilizer cabinet, cursing, pounding on his chest, telling him it was all in his head.
His head wasn’t at its best, certainly. He had long periods of clarity, but there were still intervals when the echoes would come, when he had to wait, to listen, trying to unravel them, and he couldn’t focus on anything else then. When Joseph was able to think once more, Suleyman would come sit beside him and resume the debriefing. It went on for days. They pried out every detail from his story, going back over the events. Sometimes Suleyman brought in other people, operatives Joseph didn’t know, and had them listen.
The more Joseph told the story, the more terrible it seemed to him, until he could scarcely believe what he’d done. There were times when he lay there weeping helplessly, desperate to redeem himself with Dr. Zeus, ready to go crawling to confess everything, excuse anything, if the Company would only take him back. He wanted his old life again. He’d never wanted trouble. He didn’t want to be alone, cut off, adrift.
One afternoon he opened his eyes, and Nan was sitting beside him, holding his hand. He smiled.
“Joseph, dear,” she said. “We’ve found out something.”
“What?”
“The details of your story are confirmed. You did take a room at the Hotel Saint Catherine on 5 August, and so did Lewis. On 6 August you were both seen in town. On 7 August the maid went to your rooms and found the beds unmade and all your luggage still there, but no sign of either one of you. Three days later, just as the manager was about to call the police, two men representing themselves as your attorneys came to the hotel and removed your personal effects. They paid what you owed and left. The manager was disinclined to pursue the matter further.”
“Ah,” said Joseph.
“I broke into your personnel file. I examined Lewis’s, too. The last entry shows that you were transferred from long-term active duty in Madrid to a location known only as Site 489. Lewis’s last entry shows a short-term mission to Arkham, Vermont, following which he, too, was transferred to Site 489.”
“Same place.”
“Joseph,” she said, squeezing his hand. “Both entries are dated 5 August 2276. The day before the accident happened.”
He stared at her as that sank in. “Then the Company did plan it,” he whispered.
“Someone planned it,” Nan said. “Someone let those creatures know where Lewis was. And you were meant to be taken with him.”
“I was right,” he said dully. It didn’t make him happy.
“Now we know,” Nan said, her voice precise and quiet, “that a site number is a designation not of place but of fate. It signifies permanent disposal of some kind, or at least what the Company imagines to be permanent. Lewis has been disposed of. So has Mendoza. So has Kalugin. So have you, as far as they are aware. Why, Joseph?”
“We were poking around. Getting into secrets.”
“And my dear Kalugin, who never did anything but follow kind impulses at the wrong moment? Or poor unhappy Mendoza, who loved a mortal man?” Nan’s voice hardened. “What happened to them, Joseph? Are they really lost, has the Company found some way to reverse immortality? Or are they hidden away in bunkers, like your friends the old Enforcers?”
“I know what they did to Lewis,” said Joseph. “I know what they did to me. If the Company doesn’t know how to kill us, the little stupid men do. Maybe. Though I’m not dead. Maybe Lewis isn’t dead, either.” But it was a mistake to say that, for it brought terrible images to his mind: Lewis alive and unable to die no matter how desperately he wanted to, helpless somewhere. Joseph began to tremble.
Nan held him, but her voice was like steel now. “We really must find out. Don’t you agree? Before more of us join the ranks of the disappeared? Because the rate of disappearance has accelerated. In the last week, fifty operatives were transferred to sites designated by numbers. The week before that, it was twenty-seven. How many of them were people we knew, Joseph? Will we be obliged to rebel?”
He closed his eyes. “This is it, isn’t it? The pieces are beginning to fall into place for 2355. Infighting and treachery. Is this where the Silence starts?”
“I wish I knew,” she replied.
The following day he woke to see Victor standing beside his bed, white-faced with anger but composed. “So it’s true?” he said. “They gave Lewis to—those things?”
“Yes,” Joseph said. “The little stupid people.”
“Worse perversions of humanity than our own damned father Budu, I can tell you. Homo Umbratilis, the Company called them.”
Man of the shadows? thought Joseph foggily. He said, “You know something about them?”
“Oh, yes,” Victor said, pulling up a chair and sitting down. His fists were clenched on the arms of the chair; Joseph noticed this because Victor was wearing white gloves indoors, which was strange. “Filthy little dwellers under rocks. Idiot craftsmen. Responsible, I daresay, for all the legends of dwarves and kobolds and malevolent fairies. Marginally human, but debased and retarded for all their genius. I don’t know what the Company did to earn their hatred; but it seems they set themselves the task of disabling our operatives.”
“They got Lewis once before,” Joseph said. “But the Company saved him that time.”
“I know,” said Victor, tight-lipped. “I was there when we revived him. I was his, how would you describe it—? His handler. It was my job to see how fully he recovered, how much he remembered about the incident. And when he did remember, it was my job to see that he forgot again.”
Joseph regarded him a long moment. “You’ve done some dirty work in your day, haven’t you?” he said at last.
“Vile things,” Victor said. “I marvel I don’t leave stains where I walk. Listen to me, Joseph. There was a black project. It was by sheerest accident that Lewis blundered into one of their warrens the first time. When the Company rescued Lewis and saw what the little monsters could do—no operative had ever been so badly disabled—they captured and bred some of the damned things, to see if such genius could be turned to Dr. Zeus’s advantage. But they could never get enough of them, the creatures didn’t breed well, the males tended to die young. So Dr. Zeus crossbred its subjects with Homo sapiens, and had slightly better success.
“And then the Company discovered that the free ones were still after Lewis. They can focus on only one idea at a time, but they focus with dreadful intensity, and they never give up. They got it into their heads that they could perfect their weapon against us if they could recapture Lewis and study him.
“Dr. Zeus shipped him off to New World One, out of their re
ach. I was sent there a while to observe him. His memories hadn’t returned, so I reported that he might go back to active duty when the Company had further use for him.
“I thought it was all over. I thought the creatures had all been captured.” Victor tugged absently at his gloves. “There were no more reports of fairies in the world. All the old stories were being dismissed as superstition. I didn’t know they’d simply got better at hiding themselves. But the Company knew. The Company watched Lewis, waiting to see if the creatures had forgot about him.”
“And they hadn’t,” said Joseph.
“No. They were lurking after one of the Company’s half-breeds when he led them to Lewis, quite by chance. And then the hunt was up again. You know what happened after that. Lewis fled to you, after all.”
“The Company creamed them again.”
“No, as it happened. It would appear that some sort of contact was attempted at that time. The Company wanted to reach an agreement with them.”
“Just to get Lewis out of the way?” Joseph was aghast. “What had he done? All we ever did was talk about trying to find Mendoza.”
“Oh, you did other things.” Victor gave him a shrewd look. “You know that perfectly well. You might have been able to get away with it—you’re a Facilitator—but not Lewis. He’d developed a fondness for certain Company secrets, for one thing. And it began to be obvious that his lost memories were returning. But I’m afraid that wasn’t the whole reason he was marked for disappearance.”
“What?”
“The creatures wanted Lewis for experiments,” said Victor, spreading his gloved hands. “Well, the Company decided to let them have him. And if you can’t imagine why our masters might want someone, anyone, to devise a weapon against us—but you’re not that naive.”
Joseph just stared at him.
“Things are rather sticky, just now. Rumors are flying, distrust and paranoia abound, rebellion is in the air. Personally, I can’t imagine how the Silence is going to wait until 2355 to fall,” he said.