by Kage Baker
“That looks like fun,” he told them hopefully.
“Would you like to join the game?” responded the junior manager, even more hopefully.
“Oh, I don’t know how to play,” Courier replied, and every head in the room turned toward him. A young man, supposedly a Russian, who didn’t play cards in that day and age?
How much more conspicuous could he make himself? I thought. “Yes, Andrei Andreivich, that does sound serious.” I looked over at Courier, wondering what on earth he was doing. “Er—look here, it sounds to me as though a violent purge is needed. Rid yourself of poisons, you know.”
“You’ve never played cards?” the junior manager was gaping at Courier.
“A purge!” Andrei backed away a pace or two. “Do you think that’s really necessary, Doctor?”
“You never know.” Then to the others I interjected, “Of course he’splayed cards, gentlemen, but he’s from Kiev, after all; he’s never learnedfrontier rules.” I moved swiftly to the table and addressed Courier
“Youplay picquet, I’m sure, and whist, don’t you?” Tell them you play whist, for God’s sake!
Okay. “Yes, I play whist,” he agreed.
“Well, shall we have a game, then?” 1 pulled out a chair and satdown.
“Whist!” Iakov Dmitrivich exhaled a cloud of noxious blue smoke and bit down on his cigar viciously.
“Well, I’m out! That ain’t no game for me.” He folded his cards and threw them on the table, pausing just long enough to chalk his winnings.
The junior manager looked relieved, nevertheless. “Whist, yes, what a grand idea!” he babbled.
“Haven’t played in ages! Be a bit of a change, won’t it? Shall we, ah… shall we wager?” He must have seen the foolish-looking Courier as his chance to repair his losses.
“I’m not certain my friend has much money—” I began, but Courier smiled and reached into his coat.
“I’ve got lots of cash! See?” He emptied his purse on the table. Out jingled a collection of Coins of the World: gold pieces from Chile, American dollars, French francs, British half-crowns, Russian rubles and a mongrel mass of small change.
“Looks fine to me.” The junior manager shuffled the deck with slightly shaky hands. “Stiva, will you partner me?” His assistant clerk pulled up another chair and Courier sat down too, and the junior manager dealt the cards.
I transmitted the rules of whist to Courier, who nodded with a shrewd expression and sorted quickly through his hand. We lost the first hand; thereafter he watched the cards keenly, and within a few more hands we began to win, and then win every time.
I looked up in horror as I realized what he was doing. You’ve never used your cyborg abilities to win at cards, and neither would I, of course, but it didn’t seem to have occurred to Courier that he’d draw attention to himself by memorizing the positions of the cards, and using his knowledge to win. The chalked figures on the table grew higher and higher as we won more sums in scrip from the junior manager, who sat in a veritable pool of sweat. The room grew unpleasantly silent; Iakov Babin, who had been leaning by the fire regaling a small crowd with bloodcurdling tales of an Indian massacre, left off talking and stared across the room at us with an ironical grin. I met his eyes and he nodded as if to say,
“What did I tell you? Dybbuk!”
Courier, for God’s sake, what are you doing? Let the mortals win some of the time!
He looked up at me in puzzlement. But I thought the object of the game was to win.
Now, it will undoubtedly have dawned on you by this time that there was something wrong with Courier. It had even dawned on me. We aren’t made stupid, and yet he was behaving like a perfect ass!
And then I had what I thought was a moment of blinding revelation: he was a Courier because that was the only job he was fit for, running from one place to another with a bag of papers! I looked across at his innocent face and all the old horror stories of early experiments came into my mind, before the Company perfected us, before they had managed to give us immortal minds to compare with our immortal bodies. Was he one such golem? Yes, you shiver. Imagine how I felt, sitting across the table from him!
“Babin, I declare you’ve got the Evil Eye!” I tittered. “You’ve broken our winning streak.” And I put down just the wrong card. There was a gasp of relief from the junior manager. Courier started and stared. “But—” he protested.
Enough! There’ll be trouble here if you win any more!
Oh. Okay.
“I’m done.” I yawned prodigiously. “Gracious, the air’s blue in here! Time I went to bed. You’d better turn in too, young man; you’ll have a long journey ahead of you once we’ve got those papers signed.”
“Here, now, that’s hardly fair,” the assistant clerk complained. “We sat out our run of bad luck; you should do the same!”
“He played damned well for somebody who didn’t know much about cards,” muttered the junior manager. As I sought for the right words to defuse the situation, Courier was scooping up his little bag of coins unconcernedly.
“I’ll just take these,” he said. “You can have the scrip stuff back; I can’t use it anyway.” Everyone looked at him, dumfounded.
“Yes, capital idea, all debts canceled!” I cried in false heartiness. “Let’s end our evening on a friendly note, shall we?”
The junior manager stared as that sank in and then smiled desperately. “All right! All debts canceled, fellows, what do you say?” And as I exited the room, hastily pushing Courier ahead of me, I could hear Babin’s roar of denial over the timid chorus of agreement.
“What on earth possessed you to do that?” I exploded, when we were a safe distance down the corridor. “It’s all very well for you to be careless of your own cover, but you’re endangering mine! I’m obliged to live with those men for the next few years, and what will they think of me?” His face was so stupidly blank I felt guilty at once. If he were indeed some indestructible simpleton, anger was wasted on him; and I wasalready thinking poor fellow, it’s not his fault after all when he opened his mouth to speak.
“Say, have you got my orders yet?”
It was as if he had thrown vodka onto a bonfire. My rage, which had shrunk so rapidly into little blue coals, flared to the ceiling again, and higher than the flames of anger and impatience were those of loathing for the scarecrow, the defective, the badly made machine that he was. Bigotry? Yes, I suppose so. Humbling thought, isn’t it?
“Fool!” I snapped. “Don’t you think if any orders had come in I’d have told you? Here!” I grabbed out my credenza and thrust it at him. “You look from now on! Keep it until your damned orders come in, and leave me alone!”
I set off down the corridor to my room, but he followed me swiftly. “Can’t we go somewhere else? Isn’t there anything else to do around here?” he pleaded.
“No! But here’s an order for you, you imbecile!” I turned on him. “Go to your room and stay there!” His reaction was extraordinary. All the color drained from his face; with a queer frightened look he dodged around me and stumbled down the corridor to his room. I went into my own quarters, feeling guilty again. What could be wrong with the creature? Well, I hadn’t made him the way he was, anyway; and surely I’d played host beyond the call of duty. Perhaps he’d let me get a full night’s sleep now. Dawn next day found me creeping from my room, carrying a real volume of Schiller and the envelope containing the access code strip. I left the stockade and descended the steep path into the cove. The old shipyard was still being used for carpentry, and the forge and tannery were down here too; but it was still so early that there was no one about to see me hurry across the footbridge and disappear into the woods on the other side of the stream. I found a clearing under a stand of red pines with a floor of dry brown needles; and there I settled down happily, took out Mendoza’s letter, and accessed the code at last. Instantly my mind was ringing with Latin names and three-dimensional images of growing things and their uses. To my astonish
ment I realized that acorn meal from Quercus agrifolia, if left to mold, produced a useful antibiotic. And the leaves of Rubus ursinus could be used against dysentery. Really? And, my goodness, what a lot of uses for Asdepias speciosa, which was nothing more than milkweed!
Oh, well. Doubtless I’d find dozens of interesting little weeds next time I went exploring. For now, however, I intended to stay where I was until Courier got his damned orders and took his much-desired leave. Iwas thoroughly weary of him. I yawned, stretched out my boots and immersed myself in Schiller’s poems.
What a pleasant morning I had. Before long the forge started up, and a breeze brought me the hot smell of charcoal and the bell-note of hammer on anvil. At the bottom of my glade the stream rushed and chattered along, brown as tea. It was a holy stream, I remembered with amusement; not long ago a visiting priest had blessed it, and consecrated it, and now we had an unlimited supply of holy water. How thoughtful of the reverend father! Just what was needed on the frontier.
My idyll was shattered by no end of commotion at the forge. I jumped up and ran to the edge of my clearing, where I beheld Ronstan-tin the smith, hip-deep in the stream, splashing and stumbling in a circle. He was trying to shake off a tiny mongrel dog, which had hold of the seat of his trousers with a positive death-grip and swung by its clamped teeth, growling ferociously. Ronstantin sobbed oaths upon the little cur, imploring a whole host of blessed saints to smash it like a cockroach. From the bank of the stream four little naked Indians watched with solemn black eyes.
“What happened?” I ran to them.
“Tsar bit him,” replied the tallest of the children.
“Vasilii Vasilievich!” wept the blacksmith. “Help me, in God’s Holy Name! Get it off me!”
“For heaven’s sake, man, it’s the size of a rat!” I turned again to the boy. “Why did the doggie bite him?”
“He came running out here with his pants on fire,” the child replied. “It was neat. Then he jumped in the water where we were swimming. We jumped out and Tsar jumped in to bite him. He’s a brave dog.” That was when I realized that it wasn’t Ronstantin’s trousers the dog had seized with such energy. No wonder he was crying. I waded hastily into the stream and somehow prised Tsar loose, but he had tasted blood and yapped viciously for more. I held him out at arm’s length, squeaking and struggling, as I bent to examine poor Ronstantin’s backside.
Yes, the seat of the trousers had quite burnt away, and in addition to the dog bite he had a thoroughly ugly second-degree burn on either buttock.
“Tsk! This is a serious burn, my friend,” I told him.
“I know that, you idiot!” he groaned. “I mean—excuse me—can’t you do something about it? I’m suffering the pains of Hell!”
“Well, er, of course. Sit down in the water again while I determine a course of treatment for you.” What a chance to show off my new knowledge of the local healing herbs! I accessed hurriedly. Let’s see, what might be growing here that was useful for burns? Sambucus canadensis, of course! That was the native elderberry tree, wasn’t it? Hadn’t I seen one growing along the bank near here? I turned and waded ashore, holding out Tsar to his master. The dog’s growling subsided like a teakettle taken off the fire.
“Listen to me, children! There’s an elder tree growing up there on the bank. Perhaps your mommies use the leaves to make poultices? Yes? No? Well, will you be good children and fetch me some branches so I can make a soothing poultice for this poor man?” I implored. Up on the bluff a small crowd of colonists had gathered, drawn by all the noise.
“Vasilii Vasilievich, I’m dying!” moaned the blacksmith, writhing in the water. “Oh, Holy Saints, oh, Mother of God, why did I ever leave Irkutsk for this savage place?”
“All right,” chorused the little Indians, and scampered away bright-eyed with excitement. Konstantin howled and prayed until they returned bearing green branches laden down with tiny blue berries. I gathered them up, confused. What did one do with them, exactly? Tsar’s master knew an indecisive adult when he saw one, fortunately.
“You pound them up on a rock!” he yelled helpfully. “Want us to do it?” Without waiting for a reply he grabbed up a water-worn cobble and began mashing the berries into a slimy mess on the top of a boulder. The other children crowded around him while Tsar stalked stiff-legged along the bank, snarling at Konstantin.
In no time at all they’d reduced leaves and berries and all to a nasty-looking goo.
“All right, Konstantin Kirillovich,” 1 told him, “please rise from the water. I’ve got an excellent native salve that’ll take the pain away.” I scooped up a handful of the muck and prepared to clap it on his seared derrière, while the children looked on expectantly.
And, well, my nerve gave way. How could this horrible stuff help a burn like that? I found myself digging into my coat for the little book of skin repair tissue we field agents carry. Yes, I know it’s forbidden! But, you know, the truth is, our medicine works just as well on mortals as it works on us. Stealthily I tore out three or four of the sheets and stuck them on the blacksmith’s behind, but he caught a glimpse of what I was doing over his shoulder.
“Prayers you’re putting on my ass?” he screamed. “Are you crazy?”
“No!” I smeared the elderberry poultice on to disguise what I’d done. “That was merely, um, medical parchment, very useful in forming a base for the compound, you see—”
“Listen, you big St. Petersburg pansy—” he grated; then a remarkable expression crossed his face as the drugs in the skin replacement were released into his system. “The pain’s gone!” he gasped. He reachedbehind and felt himself; then crouched down in the water to wash off the salve. By the time he rose, dripping, the synthetic skin had fused with his own and looked fresh and pink as on the day of his birth.
“Hooray!” yelled the children, jumping up and down in triumph, while Tsar went mad with barking.
“It’s healed,” Konstantin stated in wonderment. Then he stared down at the swirling water. “It must have been this stream! I was here when the little father blessed it! It’s a miracle! The holy water has worked a miracle!”
I squelched wearily back up the bank, as his cries brought spectators from the bluff down for a closer look at the Miracle of the Holy Stream. Courier was not among them, at least. Ought I to go see if he’d finally received his orders and gone? Perhaps I should go call on the Munin family to see how Andrei Efimovich’s leg was mending. Perhaps I should look for specimens of Asdepias speciosa. There were a thousand better things to concern myself with than a difficult fellow operative. I was supposed to be a doctor, wasn’t I?
And so I resolutely put Courier out of my mind and spent the rest of the day trudging from hut to house, with the intention of getting to know my patients better. I was not particularly successful; anyone who had the least ache or pain had run down to the holy stream and was bathing in its icy waters. Not necessarily bad for business: I might have a few cases of pneumonia by the week’s end. But I did lance an abscessed gum for a Kashaya woman, and recommend a salve for a Creole baby’s flea bites; so I was of some use to my mortal community.
There was no sign of Courier when I returned to the stockade that evening, through pumpkin fields, with the late red sun throwing long shadows of corn shocks where they stood in bundles. There was no sign of him when I sat down to dinner in the officers’ mess, and attempted to join in the general conversation in a pleasant and comradely way. Not that I had much to contribute, with my pocket edition of Schiller, and nobody invited me to play cards with them. I was the recipient of a few distinctly dirty looks, in fact, especially from Iakov Babin.
I took a candle and wandered off to my room, my volume of poetry tucked sadly away in my coat. When I got there, I had the most peculiar feeling that something was somehow not quite right. I held up my candle and looked around.
My bunk, with its blanket, was undisturbed; so was my sea chest. My Imperial Navy saber still hung in its place of honor on the wall. My
little stack of books was where it ought to be. Of course, my credenza wasn’t there… perhaps Courier had left it in the guest room? I decided to wait until morning to look for it. Oh, yes, I know, you’d have gonestraight in to see if he really had gone. I simply didn’t want to. I lit my lamp and blew out the candle. A plume of greasy smoke curled, pungent, from the snuffed wick. That was when I heard the growl.
A growl, I say. It wasn’t a dog; it wasn’t a bear. God only knew what it was, but it had emanated from the other side of the plank wall. From Courier’s room. Oh, dear.
I scanned. I couldn’t make sense of my readings. Courier seemed to be in the room, and yet—
I lit the candle again and went out into the corridor, where I knocked at Courier’s door. There was a scuttling sound. No light showing under the door, or between the planks. What was going on here? 1
drew a deep breath and pulled open the door.
Darkness, and as the wavering light of my candle moved through the doorway I beheld a tangled mass on the floor. I prodded it with my boot. Strips of something? A trade blanket, torn to shreds. Interspersed with brittle glinting fragments and scraps of paper that had once been a framed picture of the tsar. Where was Courier?
Cautiously I raised the candle and looked upward.
It was on the ceiling, wedged in an angle of roof and rafters. Courier was up there clinging to the rafters, or had been.