by Kage Baker
Far enough up a mountain to peer above the clouds, the boy is in serious trouble. Above him is ice and thin air; all around him a sliding waste of black blasted rock, immense, pitiless. The green valley of his ancestors lies a long way below him, and he could return there in slightly under a minute if he didn’t mind arriving in a red smashed mass.
That would scarcely win him the admiration of his peers, however, and he clings now desperately to a narrow handhold, and gazes up at the mouth of the cave he has come so far to find. He can neither jump nor climb any higher. He can’t climb back down, either; his hands and feet have gone numb. He realizes he is going to die.
To his left, a few meters away, there is sudden movement.
He turns his head to stare. What he had taken to be an outcropping of particularly weathered rock is looking at him. It is in fact a man, easily twice his size, naked but for a belted bearskin and a great deal of dun-colored hair and beard.
The giant’s body is powerfully built, nearly human as the boyunderstands human, but with a slightly odd articulation of the arms and shoulders. The head is not human at all. The skull is long and low, helmet-shaped, and with its heavy orbital ridges and forward-projecting face it reminds the boy of those stocky little villagers in the next valley, the ones who scatter flowers over their dead and make such unimaginative flint tools. Like them, too, the giant has an immense protruding nose. Its cheekbones are high and broad, its jaw heavy, its teeth terrify-ingly long. The boy knows this because the giant is grinning at him.
“Boo,” says the giant, in a light and rather pleasant voice.
This syllable means nothing to the boy, but he is so thoroughly unnerved that he loses his grip on the mountain and totters backward, screaming.
The next moment is a blur. All his breath is knocked out of him, and before he can grasp what has happened, he finds himself crouching inside the cave that was so unattainable a moment before. The giant is squatting beside him, considering him with pale inhuman eyes.
Seen close to, the giant is even more unnerving. He cocks his head and the angle at which he does this is not human either, nor is the strong strange musk of his body. The boy drags himself swiftly backward, stares around the interior of the cave for a weapon. The giant chuckles at him. There are plenty of weapons, but it’s doubtful the boy would be able to lift any of these tremendous stone axes, let alone defend himself with one. He looks further, and then his frantic gaze stops dead at the battered cabinet against one wall.
The fact that its central screen glows with tiny cryptic symbols is almost beside the point. It’s a box, and the boy’s world has no such geometry. He has never seen a rectangle, a square. This fully convinces him that he has found the object of his quest. Slowly, he turns back to face the giant. He makes obeisance, and the giant snorts. Sitting timidly upright, the boy explains that he has come in search of God on the mountain for the purpose of learning the Truth.
The boy’s language is a combination of hand gestures and sounds. The giant’s eyes narrow; he leans close, keenly observing, listening. When the boy has finished, the giant clears his throat and replies in the same manner.
He communicates for some time. His hands are clever, capable of facile and expressive gestures, and his vocal apparatus produces a wider range of syllables, enunciated with greater precision; so it will be understood that he is a far more eloquent speaker than the boy, who listens as though spellbound. Yes, I’ll tell you the Truth. Why not? In all these generations, you’re the first mortal to climb up here, so you’ve earned an answer; but I don’t think you’ll like it much.
I’m not your God. I’m the highest authority you’ll ever encounter, though, mortal man. Really. I was created to judge you and punish you, you and all your fathers. Would you like to know how that happened? Watch.
I’ll draw something in the dust for you, here. This is called a circle, all right? It’s the wheel of lime. Never mind what a wheel is. This part here, almost at the beginning, is where your people began to exist. Life was a lot harder back then, mortal. Your people almost didn’t make it. You know why? Because, almost from the time your fathers stood up on their little hind legs, they made war on one another. Winters weren’t bitter enough! Leopards and crocodiles weren’t hungry enough! Famine wasn’t terrible enough either. They had to keep whittling away at their numbers themselves, stupid monkeys. The worst were a bunch who called themselves the Great Goat Cult. They found a weed that filled them with holy visions when they chewed it. They heard voices that told them to go out and kill. Became screaming tattooed maniacs who made a lot of converts, believe me, but they killed more than they converted.
Now, look here at this part of the circle. This is up at the other end of Time. The people up there are, let’s say they’re powerful shamans. And they’re very nervous. Being so close to the end of Time, they want to save as much of the past as they can.
They looked back into Time through a, uh, a magic eye they had. They looked at their oldest fathers and saw that if this Great Goat Cult wasn’t stopped, they themselves might never come to exist. Who had time to learn how to make fire, or sew furs into clothing or make pots out of clay, if crazy people were always chasing and killing everybody?
I’m simplifying this for you, mortal, but here’s what they did.
The shamans found a way to step across from their part of the circle into the beginning part. They took some of your fathers’ children and made them slaves, but magic slaves: immortal and strong and really smart. They sent those slaves to try to reason with the Great Goat Cult.
It didn’t work.
The slaves were great talkers, could present many clever arguments, but the Great Goat Cult wouldn’t listen. In fact, they sent the slaves back to their shaman masters with spears stuck in inconvenient places, and one or two had to carry their own lopped-off body parts. So the shamans had to come up with another idea.
Can you guess yet what it was? No? Well, you’re only a mortal. I’ll tell you. They took some more slaves, not just from your fathers but from some of the other tribes running around back then—those little guys in the next valley, for example, and some big people from a valley you’ve never seen, and a few others who’re all extinct now.
You know how you can put a long-legged ram with’ long fleece in the pen with a short-legged ewe with short fleece, and you’ll get a short-legged lamb with long fleece? Eventually? Breeding experiments, right, you’ve got it. Well, that’s what the shamans did with all these people. Bred the big ones and the little ones to get what they wanted.
What did they want? What were they breeding for? You can’t guess? I’m disappointed. They wanted their very own screaming killing maniacs to counter the cultists.
Except we’re not really maniacs. We just have a great sense of humor.
We’re the optimum morphological design for a humanoid fighting machine, oo-rah! We’re not afraid of being hurt, like you. And of course we too were made immortal and smart. Three thousand of us were bred. That was a lot of people, back then. They raised us in cadet academies, trained us in camps, me and all my brother warriors.
This was all done back here at the beginning of time, by the way. The shamans were scared to death to have us up there at their end. There are no warriors in their time, or so we were always told. And we were all programmed—no, you don’t know what that is. Indoctrinated? Convinced with extreme prejudice?
We were given the absolute Truth.
But it’s our Truth, not yours, mortal. Our Truth is that we have the joyous right and duty to kill, instantly and without question, any dirty little mortals we find making war on each other. You don’t have the right to kill yourselves. You’re supposed to live in peace, herd beasts, plant crops, tell stories, have babies, Do that and we’ll let you alone. But if you decide to make war, not love—whack, there we are with flint axes and bloody retribution, you see? Simplicity itself.
It was the law. Perfect and beautiful justice. You do right, we punish wrong. No qu
estions. No whining.
The shamans from the other end of Time created us as the consummate weapon against the Great Goat Cult. We were bigger and faster, and we killed without pity or hesitation. Our faith was stronger than theirs. So we made mincemeat out of the little bastards.
Oh, those were great times. So much work to do! Because, while the shamans had dithered around about whether or not we should becreated, the Cult had spread across the world. It took centuries to stamp them all out. We rode in endless pursuit and it was one long happy party, mortal. Summer campaigns, year after year. Winter raids, damn I loved them: bloodspray’s beautiful on new-fallen snow, and corpses stay fresh so much longer…
Don’t be scared. I’m just reminiscing.
When we slaughtered the last of the Goats, your fathers were set free, don’t you understand? Instead of running and hiding in holes like animals, they could settle down to become people. They had time at last, to learn to count on their fingers and toes, to look at the stars and wonder what they were. Time to drill holes in deer bone and make music. Time to paint bison on cave walls. And the other immortals (we called them Preservers), had time at last to go among your fathers and collect cultural artifacts the shamans wanted saved, now that there was culture.
But what were we Enforcers supposed to do, with our great purpose in life gone? We loved to kill. It was all we knew, all we were made for. So our officers met together, to talk over the question of where the masters expected us to fit, in this new peacetime we’d made possible for mortals. There was a lot of debate. Most of us in the rank and file were pretty optimistic; we just figured they’d reprogram us to do some other job. But one colonel, an asshole named Marco, thought we could never be sure the mortals wouldn’t relapse into being cultists, and that maybe we ought to make some preemptive strikes: you know, kill all the mortals who looked as though they might make war, so they’d never get a chance to.
Everyone roared him down, except the men under his command. See, that would have been absolutely wrong! That would have been killing innocents, and we don’t do that. Noncombatants are to be protected at all times. But our masters, who as I mentioned are nervous people, shit themselves in terror when they found out what Marco’d said.
Marco’s faith was imperfect. We should have done something about him right then… but that’s another story.
Anyway, Budu told him he was a fool, and that shut him up.
Budu was our general, our supreme commanding officer. He was one of the oldest of us and he was the best, the strongest, the biggest. And he was righteous, I tell you, our Truth was strong in his heart! I’d have died for him, if I wasn’t immortal, and as it was I had my head lopped off twice fighting under him. I didn’t care; the masters stuck it on again and I was proud to go right from the regeneration tank back to the front lines, as long as Budu was out there too.
(Regeneration tank. It’s… think of it as a big pot, no, a big pot. Do you know what a cauldron is? All right, imagine a big one full of, uh, magic juice, and whenever one of us immortals would be damaged too badly to repair ourselves, we’d be carted off the field and put in one of these magic cauldrons to heal. We’d come out good as new.)
Anyway, Budu was also the smartest of us. Budu studied future history, between this age and the time in which our masters live. He figured out what scared them the most. He said the mortal masters might think they didn’t need us anymore, but they’d find they were mistaken soon enough. He ordered us to wait. Something would happen.
And, Father of Justice, the old man was right!
Now you’re going to find the story more interesting, mortal, because this part of it deals with your own people.
Let’s see, how do I explain the concept of mitochondrial DNA to you?
I’ve already told you how the shamans at the other end of Time want to be sure nothing happens to endanger their own existence, right? Causality really worries them. So they’re obsessive about tracing their ancestors, finding out for certain where they came from. And they’ve been careful to chart something called genetic drift. It’s like a map, you know what a map is, that shows where their fathers have been. Well, they found that a lot of their fathers—actually, mothers-started out right below this mountain, mortal, right down in that nice green valley of yours. It’s sort of a crossroads—uh, game trail—for humanity. It’s where a lot of important human traits came together to make something special. But back then this hadn’t happened yet. There was a tribe living down there, all right, nicely settled into a farming community, but they only had some of the genetic markers, the special blood, that our. masters expected to find.
So the masters sent in a Preserver to watch them. He was what we call an anthropologist, which meant he didn’t mind working with the monkeys. His name was Rook. He became a member of their tribe, lived in their huts with them. I couldn’t do it, but I guess there’s no accounting for tastes. Rook was expecting another tribe to appear from somewhere and intermarry with the farmers, and that other tribe would provide the missing pieces, so to speak, and their descendants would become our masters’ fathers. He was all set to record it, when it happened; but it didn’t quite happen the way he’d expected.
The other tribe came along, all right, hunter-gatherers on a long leisurely migration to greener pastures, and that valley below was niceand green. The newcomers had the right genes, too, just as Rook had predicted.
What he hadn’t predicted, though, was that the peaceful farming folk would treat the newcomers just like they treated any other migratory species. Like elk, or caribou. You see, agrarian societies sometimes have a problem getting enough protein…
That means meat. I mean they were catching the hunter-gatherers and eating them. You’re embarrassed to learn that your fathers were cannibals? Think how the shamans at the other end of Time felt!
So the old Enforcers weren’t demobilized quite yet, ha ha. But this was a slightly more complicated situation than we were used to, understand? We couldn’t just wade in there and wipe out the peaceful farming folk. Negotiation was called for. And we never negotiate.
So our masters assigned us a liaison with the mortals, a new kind of Preserver they’d invented, called a Facilitator.
Facilitators are different. We Enforcers were designed to love killing, and the regular Preservers were designed to love the things they preserved. The Facilitators, though, were designed to be more objective, to operate in the big civilizations that were about to be born. They would be politicians, intriguers, councilors to mortal kings. What do those words mean?… I guess the best translation would be liars. I remember the staff meeting as though it were yesterday, mortal man.
It was raining. We’d made camp on that high meadow you passed on your way up here, and most of us had fanned out into the landscape. Budu had only brought the Fifth Infantry Division, which I was in. I was one of his aides, so all I had to do was set up the tent where the meeting was to be held. The old man stood there quietly in the open, staring down the trail; he didn’t care if he got wet. We’d had a report from a patrol that they were on their way. Pretty soon I caught a whiff of Preserver in the wind though Budu had picked it up before I did; he had already turned to watch them come down from the pass. Rook was on foot, a little miserable-looking guy in a wet cloak, but the Facilitator was riding a horse, and Rook was having to tilt his head back to look up at him as he talked earnestly, waving his arms.
The Facilitator was tall, for one of them anyway, and wore nice tailored clothes. His name was Sarpa. He wasn’t paying attention to Rook much, just sort of nodding his head as he rode and scanning the landscape, and when he spotted us I saw his eyes widen. I don’t know what he’d been told about Enforcers at his briefing, but he hadn’t expected what he found.
They were escorted in, and I took Sarpa’s horse away and tethered it. The old man wanted to start the meeting right then. The Preservers asked for something hot to drink first, which seemed stupid to me—had they come there to talk, or to have a p
arty?—but Budu just told me to get them something. All we had was water, but I brought it in a couple of polished Great Goat skulls, the nicest ones in camp. The Preservers stared with big round eyes when I set their drinks before them, and didn’t touch a drop. There’s no pleasing some people.
At least they got down to business. Rook made his report first, about how the fanning tribe had been fairly peaceable until the newcomers had arrived, when they had suddenly shown a previously-unknown talent for hunting hunters. They watched the hunters’ trails, lay in wait with sharp sticks, and almost never failed to carry off one of the younger or weaker of the new tribe, whom they butchered and parceled out among themselves. Rook had seen all this firsthand.
The Facilitator Sarpa asked him why he hadn’t tried to stop them.
“I did try,” he said wretchedly. “I told them they shouldn’t eat other people. They told me (with their mouths full) that the strangers weren’t people. They were quite calm about it, and nothing I said could convince them otherwise. Anyway, I can’t say much without blowing my cover; they thought it was funny enough I wouldn’t touch the ribs they offered me.”
Sarpa wanted to know what Rook’s cover was, and Rook told him he was an adopted member of the tribe, and had himself avoided any “unpleasantness” by volunteering to work in the fields even in bad weather. Sarpa stared harder at that than he’d stared at the skull cups.
“You’re maintaining your cover by good attitude?” he said, as though he couldn’t believe it.
“That’s what a participant observer does,” Rook explained.
“But when you’re one of us? It never occurred to you to exploit your superior abilities, or your knowledge? Why didn’t you pose as a spirit? A magician, at least, and impress them with a few tricks?”