by Kage Baker
Charred mortal bones, fragments of wood, bits of brass. An opium pipe. A bronze hatchet head. Joseph peered at it and made out the characters that told him it was the property of the Black Dragon Retribution Tong. More bones, more hatchet heads, and something that didn’t grate or clank under his shovel. Soft and dull, like leather.
Joseph dropped the shovel at once. He knelt and began to dig with his hands, crying silently, tears running down his face and silvering in his beard.
He found an arm first, fragments of its rotted coat dropping away as he lifted it out: withered sinew, tarry flesh, the leather of the skin strangely supple even so. Bright glint of metal, ferroceramic at the bone end. He lifted it, and it flexed like a snake. Clawlike fingers curled into a fist as he watched. It was a very big arm, wasted and shrunken though it was.
He set it on the edge of the hole and kept searching. Here was a gigantic thigh, still wearing riveted rags: Levi Strauss jeans, for God’s sake. The rest of the leg followed, but the foot had been hacked off. Eventually he found a boot, with a bit of ankle and gimbal joint protruding from its top.
The rest of the body was battered and hewn but in one piece, except for the head. He found it, after a long moment of panicked scrabbling in the hole. You really don’t want to know what it looked like.
Joseph crawled out and attempted to fit the body into the trash receptacle. With some effort he got it to flex, and pushed it down. He placed the head in too, more or less in its own lap, and the arm and leg and foot, and closed the lid. He rolled the receptacle awkwardly to the back of the agvan. Having secured it, he got in and drove to Van Ness, took Van Ness to Lombard, and took Lombard to the Golden Gate Bridge, just as mortals had done for the last four centuries.
The bridge had changed. Its scarlet towers were supported now by antigravity banks, and it had twisted and broken and been repaired more times than could be counted. It was still something to make you catch your breath, whether you were mortal or immortal.
The agvan roared across it under the unsleeping lights and disappeared into the wall of fog that was tumbling down the Marin headlands.
Mount Tamalpais
JOSEPH PULLED TO the side of a particular mountain road and got out, sniffing the air. Morning on the wind, even if there was no appreciable light in the sky yet. He scanned and spotted the entrance to the bunker, which, predictably enough, was where he had found it a century earlier. He unloaded the agvan, lugging things up a steep hill, following a deer trail through madrone and manzanita. Last was the trash receptacle, and he blessed its little wheels that allowed him to drag it along the trail.
When he’d secured everything at the bunker’s door, he staggered back down and leaned into the cab of the agvan to program its autopilot. He backed away and watched as it rose smoothly and rotated. It sped off, back to the distant transport yard in the city. He climbed back up the hill.
Having worked the seal on the door, he went down the long echoing passage, dragging behind him the trash bin full of discarded god.
Abdiel was very old, but he didn’t know he was very old. His memory wasn’t all that good. Looking in a mirror wouldn’t have reminded him: he appeared perpetually twenty, and a young twenty at that, wide dark eyes with a sort of startled Bambi expression, lots of soft curling black hair and a soft dark beard.
He didn’t know he’d looked like that for the last thirty thousand years. He wasn’t very bright.
But bright enough to do his job, and follow the few simple commandments with which he had been programmed. There are seven holy shrines, he had been told. Thou shalt go from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, and so to the seventh, when thou shalt go back to the first again. At each shrine shalt thou labor, as thou hast been instructed; and when thy labor is done there, thou must bear witness and travel to the next place appointed. Thou shalt not fail in this, neither shalt thou speak of thy task to any mortal thou mayest meet without the shrines.
Nowadays it generally took him about twenty years to make a full circle. When he came back to the first shrine, he was always surprised to see his own handwriting on the chalkboard, because he never realized until that moment that he wasn’t arriving there for the first time. The moment he erased the board, it was always as though he’d erased the realization too, for with proof of the past gone, the past ceased to exist for him.
Abdiel was a failed immortal, but if his brain was like a sieve, his body at least was perfectly untiring, ageless, beautiful. Accordingly, the Company had found a use for him, making the most of his plight.
He walked up the side of Mount Tamalpais, keeping to the recreational paths because they were easy, and he liked to follow the line of least resistance. He smiled and stepped aside for every jogger he encountered, keeping his eyes modestly downcast. His clothes were nondescript and a little shabby, though not too shabby, because he didn’t like being arrested as a vagrant. It kept him from his duties, and nothing mattered except his duties.
The fog was rolling up the mountain now, drifting like a reverse avalanche from the sea, a torrent of boiling silver in the afternoon light. It floated over the laurel groves and the yellow meadows of autumn, soothing all that dustiness with cool moist air. Abdiel drew it into his lungs gratefully, thanking it for obscuring his way from the mortals. He was invisible in the fog when he sprinted off the path and down through the moss-hung trees to the dark fold in the rock that he’d seen in his dreams.
Yes, there was the doorway to the seventh shrine. He’d completed his pilgrimage at last. He addressed the seal, and it opened for him. He crept in reverently, hurrying down the long tunnel toward the celestial light.
He didn’t remember having been here before, so he wasn’t as surprised as he might have been to see that there was another person in the shrine, moving about in one of the side chapels. This shrine looked very much like the sixth shrine, which he vaguely remembered, because he’d been there most recently: the soft light, the sweet fragrance, and the blessed ones floating in their dreams.
He set down his pack. The motion drew the attention of the other person, who stepped out of the side chapel and looked at him. “I’ll bet you’re Abdiel,” the person said, scanning.
Abdiel nodded. “Are you one of the Masters?” he asked, for the other man wasn’t a mortal. The man narrowed his little black eyes and smiled.
“Why, yes,” he said. “I am.”
As soon as he told Abdiel this, Abdiel knew that it must be so; and though the man looked nothing like the Masters that Abdiel had seen, being grubby and rather small, instantly Abdiel’s mental picture of Master had reconfigured to resemble the one who stood before him.
“Pleased to meet you,” Abdiel said, smiling back.
The Master considered him. “I notice you have no datalink, Abdiel. That must be because your appointed tasks are so top secret and important, right?”
“Yes.” Abdiel looked earnest. He wasn’t sure why his duties should be top secret, but he certainly knew they were important. “I’ve found the seventh shrine at last.”
“No kidding? Well, good for you. What are you going to do now?”
The Master was testing him! “See that all is clean and in order,” Abdiel said fervently. “Check pumps number A3 and C5 in each unit for corrosion. Monitor alkaline balance of regenerative fluids. Check thermocontrols. Check lighting regulators. Check integrity of all seals. Monitor vault integrity and report any cracks, leaks, or evidence of stresses. Bear witness to my labors. Sir!” He saluted snappily.
“Excellent,” the Master said, and his smile twisted up into his beard at one side. “Now, you know, of course, that you can’t tell anybody you’ve seen me here? That it’s top secret?”
“Oh, yes, sir.” Abdiel saluted again.
“Okay, then.” The Master rolled up his ragged sleeves. “You run along and do your job, and let me do mine.”
“Are you preparing one of the blessed ones for eternal rest?” Abdiel said, looking past him into the
side chapel. Something was stretched out on the steel table in there.
“That’s right.”
“Gee, do you need me to help?” Abdiel looked eager. “I’ve never done that. I just look after the ones who are resting already.”
“You do, eh?” the Master said thoughtfully. “Maybe you can help me. Are you strong?”
“Really strong!” Abdiel held up both arms and made fists to show his muscles.
When the Master led him into the side chamber, Abdiel drew back in horror at what he saw lying on the table there. “Oh. That’s one of the evil ones!” he said, averting his eyes.
“Why do you think so?” the Master asked, watching him.
“Well, he’s all dirty and horrible and dead-looking, and the blessed ones are never like that,” Abdiel said, trying not to see. “The blessed ones are clean and whole and sleep in the heavenly light. The evil ones sleep where it’s dark and dirty, and they get all withered and ugly.”
The Master took up the bucket of regenerative solution with which he’d been washing the thing on the table. “Do you know why that is, Abdiel?”
“Because—” Abdiel faltered, then remembered that the Master had tested him before. “Because the blessed ones have worked hard for the Masters, and deserve a nice rest in a shrine. But the evil ones disobeyed, so they have to sleep in the other place.”
“And where’s the other place, Abdiel?” The Master was bathing the blind eye sockets, the great brown snarling teeth.
Abdiel shuddered and looked away again. “Where you got him from.”
“Smart boy, Abdiel,” the Master said. “Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret. We Masters are all-wise and all-merciful. Sometimes we forgive the evil ones their sins and take them out of the other place and put them here instead. That’s what I’m doing now. This guy wasn’t all bad, you know. Only he’s got to be repaired before he can heal in the heavenly light. See?”
“I guess so.” Abdiel made himself raise his head and look at the ruined giant on the table. Oh, he needed repairs terribly. Dermal integrity breached in thirty-eight places on ventral surface. Left pedal support structure disarticulated, left foot avulsed. Left leg avulsed at pelvic articulation, femur analogue frame dented at supports 5, 8, and 13. Right arm—Abdiel ran to the sink and threw up.
“That’s okay,” the Master said cheerfully. “Good thing you got rid of your lunch before we really got to work. Now, blow your nose and come help me. I’m going to need you to hold him still so I can reattach his leg.”
It wasn’t a very nice experience. Once the leg was reattached, the great body jerked and twisted, and the bright gimbal of the pedal support structure moved unnervingly until they got its horrible black foot on and sutured in place. The arm was even more frightening, but the head was the worst of all. As soon as the Sinclair chain gimbal was reconnected, even before the muscles could be tugged back and sutured into place, the head began to turn, the fearsome jaws to clash. What remained of the structure of its eyes clicked and fluttered as though trying to see. Abdiel had to run for the sink again.
It didn’t bother the Master, though. He just kept working away.
“Now, you see why it’s so important to obey us Masters and do your job?” he lectured Abdiel. “Wouldn’t it be awful to suffer the way this old guy has? You don’t ever want this to happen to you.”
“Gosh, never ever!” gasped Abdiel, pulling himself upright and wiping his mouth.
“So you will keep the commandment about silence, right? Because it would be just too awful to break it and turn out like him.” The Master gritted his teeth and reached up into the neck to pull down one end of a severed tendon. He reconnected it and went on. “Now, I’ve pretty much got the hard parts over with, so you can go on and do your regular work. Run along.”
Abdiel was only too glad to go, out into the heavenly light where the blessed ones slept, fresh and clean every one of them. He busied himself with his assigned tasks and soon forgot all about the nastiness in the side chapel, in fact he was quite startled a week later when the Master came walking down an aisle between the vaults, lugging the ugly old man who was all put together now.
“Hi there,” the Master said. “Where’s an empty vault, Abdiel?”
Abdiel showed him. The Master climbed up nimbly and dropped the body into the regenerant, where it bobbed for a moment before being drawn in. Then it sank, settled, and, seen through the pure blue glow, seemed no longer quite so dead. Was it moving? Were the shriveled limbs stretching out?
“That’s a nice sight,” said the Master. “Wasn’t as hard as I thought, either. I feel like celebrating! You want a granola bar, Abdiel? My treat.” He held out a nubbly confection, and Abdiel accepted it thankfully. He hadn’t remembered to eat in days, and his own stash of Power Crunchies was back at the entrance in his pack. The Master drew out another bar and unwrapped it, and they stood there chewing companionably, looking up at the floating figure.
“Will he get better now?” Abdiel asked.
“Oh, yeah,” the Master said with his mouth full. “Now that he’s all put together, his self-repair will take over and the nanobots will bring him up to specs, rebuild anything he’s missing, get the organs functioning again. His brain’s offline, but that’s the protective fugue. It might take years, but one of these days he’ll look just like the rest of the people in here. Like the big guys, anyway.”
“What about his heavenly crown?” Abdiel asked, indicating the circlet all the other floating figures wore.
“Oh. Well, he was pretty bad, even if he got forgiven, so I don’t know if he’ll get one of those,” the Master said. “We’ll see.”
Abdiel nodded, feeling compassionate and hoping the old man would merit a crown. The crowns were terribly important, and must never, ever be taken off a sleeper, because they gave the blessed ones good dreams. Evil ones, of course, had nightmares.
The rest of that time the Master walked with Abdiel, observing him at his duties. He was interested in everything Abdiel did, and asked him a lot of questions. He particularly tested Abdiel on the access codes to the terminals that connected the bunker with the Masters in their distant abode of delight. Abdiel passed every test. The Master congratulated him and told him he was a good operative. When at last Abdiel chalked his witness on the board, shouldered his pack, and walked away down the tunnel to the mortal world, he turned and waved at his new friend, buoyed by a pleasant sense of self-worth.
By the time he was walking along Highway I, however, he’d forgotten the Master ever existed. All his attention was fixed on finding the mysterious first shrine, which he’d heard was off somewhere in a land far away . . .
Joseph in the Darkness
SO THERE IT IS. So here we are.
You’re getting better, father, I can tell. You still look like a murder victim six times over, but at least you don’t seem to have been dead quite so long. Some day soon you’ll start growing back the soft tissues of your eyes, your liver, your heart, all those things the rats . . .
What if she . . .
I wonder how you got on the wrong side of the Black Dragon Retribution Tong, father, in an opium cellar on Sacramento Street, just minutes before the 1906 earthquake? Must be quite a story. You’ll tell me someday. Or maybe Victor will. I have a feeling he knows. He could never have inflicted those hatchet wounds, he’s half your size. And yet something happened when he spit on you. I wonder if it has any connection with those gloves he never takes off.
Were the hatchetmen sent later? Were you unconscious then? Did Labienus set you up? Was he power hungry? Were you a little inconvenient to have around with your rigid moral code? If it wasn’t your own people, was it the Company? It’s just like something the Company would do. I can testify to that.
This is what the Company does to all its operatives, sooner or later, isn’t it? None of us actually dead, but we’d be luckier if we were. Those of us who behaved ourselves get to dream away time in a nice warm bath. Those of us who hav
en’t behaved? They find an excuse to lower the boom on us, one day when we least expect it. Then we’re abandoned to rot in a grave like you were, or handed over to the enemy like Lewis was, or used and thrown away like Mendoza so nobody would ever discover the truth about her . . .
The Company must have watched us all, weighed every incident, heard every word we said, and waited, keeping score. They could afford to wait years, hundreds of years, thousands of years, and while we worked so faithfully for them, the list of marks against us grew longer.
Maybe I deserved what happened to me, and maybe you did, too, father, but Lewis? What harm did he ever do anybody? And yet I can’t imagine what he’s suffering now, if he’s not so damaged he’s past suffering. Poor romantic idiot.
Was he in love with Mendoza? Was he in love with the Englishman? With both of them? Did he even know? He never gave up trying to find them. He wasn’t a coward, like me.
She’s still lost, my little girl, and maybe in some dungeon blacker than the one in Santiago, with hotter coals. What would they do to a Crome generator? Try to disconnect her extra talents? Experiment on her? She’s not in here now, I know. I’ve looked. If there’s the least chance she alone can go forward in time, she alone can discover the truth about 2355, the Company will have locked her away some place a lot more secure than this; and they’ll never let her out.
I should have gone after her sooner. I should have gone after you sooner, too.
He was right, the goddam Englishman. I screwed up just like Hamlet. You handed me the truth about your betrayal right at the beginning of the play, and I delayed, procrastinated, because I was scared, wasn’t sure, didn’t want trouble. Now look. I’ve lost everything I had, and the curtain’s coming down on a stage littered with bodies.
But we’ll write a new last act, won’t we, father? When I get you out of there, we’ll make a plan. You were always a lot better at battle strategies than I was. It’ll be easy. I still have the Company access codes Lewis downloaded to me, we know where all the bodies are buried, and we have seventy-four years to get ready.