by Kage Baker
“That would have been lying,” said Budu, and Rook said:
“Well, but that would have created an artificial dynamic in our relationship. I’m supposed to observe and document the way they live in their natural state. If I’d said I was a magical being, they wouldn’t have behaved in a natural way toward me, would they?”
Sarpa exhaled hard through his little thin nose, and drummed his fingers on his knees. “All right,” he said, “it’s clearly time a specialist was brought in. I’ll make contact with them immediately.” Budu wanted to know what he was going to do, and Sarpa waved his hand. “Textbook procedure for managing primitives. I’ll put them inawe of me with an exhibition of juggling, or something. Once I’ve got their attention, I’ll explain the health risks involved in eating the flesh of their own species.”
“And if they won’t listen?” asked Budu. Sarpa smiled at him in a patronizing kind of way, I guess because he was frightened of the old man. I could smell his fear from clear over where I was standing, playing dumb like a good orderly.
“Why, then we send in the troops, don’t we?” Sarpa said lightly. “But it won’t come to that. I know my job.”
“Good,” said Budu. “What do you need now?”
“I need to download all possible data on them from Rook, here,” Sarpa replied. (What’s that mean?
Just that Rook was going to tell him a lot of things very very fast, mortal.) “We can retire to my field quarters for that; I’d like to get into dry clothes first. Where’s our camp?”
“You’re in it,” said Budu.
Sarpa looked around in dismay. “You haven’t put up the other tents yet?” he asked. Budu told him we don’t need tents, but offered him the one in which they were squatting. “And I’ll assign you Flat Top for an aide,” he said.
(He meant me. I was designated Joshua when I was born, but everybody in my unit went by a nickname. Skullcracker, Crunchmaster, Terminator, that kind of thing. I earned my nickname when we had a contest to see how many beers we could balance on top of our heads. I got five up there.) Sarpa didn’t look too happy about it, but I made myself useful after the old man left: hung some more skins around the tent and brought in some springy bushes for bedding. I unloaded his saddlebags and set up the field unit—uh, the magic box that let us talk to the shamans. Like that one over there, see? Only smaller—while he downloaded from Rook. Rook went back to the farmstead after that, poor little drone, couldn’t leave his mortals for long.
Sarpa got up and spread his hands over the back of his field unit to get them warm. He asked me,
“What time are rations served out?” and I told him we were foraging on this campaign, but that I’d get him part of somebody’s kill if he wanted, or maybe some wild onions. He shuddered and said he’d manage on the Company-issued provisions he’d brought with him. So I set that out for him instead, little tiny portions of funny-smelling stuff.
I don’t think Sarpa understood yet that he was supposed to dismiss me or I couldn’t go. I just stood at ease while he ate, and after a few minutes he offered me a packet of crackers. I could have inhaled the damn things, they were so small. To be polite I nibbled at the edges andmade them last a while, which was hard with teeth like mine, believe me.
When he was finished I tidied up for him, and he settled down at his field unit. He didn’t work, though. He just stared out over the edge of the meadow at the smoke rising from the mortals’ farmstead. I figured I’d better give him a clue, so I said, “Sir, will there be anything else, sir?”
“No… ” he said, in a way that meant there would be. I waited, and after a minute he said, not meeting my eyes: “Tell me something, Enforcer. What does a man have to do to—ah—fraternize with the female mortals?”
By which he meant he wanted to couple with one of your mothers.
I said, “Sir, I don’t know, sir.”
His attention came away from the smoke and he looked up at me sharply. “So it’s true, then, about Enforcers?” he asked me. “That you’re really not, ah, interested?”
“Sir, that’s affirmative, sir,” I told him.
“No sex at all?”
“Sir, no sir.”
“But… ” He looked out at the smoke again. “How on earth do you manage?” 1 felt like asking him the same question: Why would our masters have created his kind with the need to go through the motions of reproduction, when they can’t actually reproduce?
(No, mortal, we can’t. We’re immortal, so we don’t need to.)
I mean, I can see why you mortals are obsessed with it; I’d be too, if that was my only shot at immortality. But we’ve always wondered why the Preserver class were given such a stupid appetite. Budu used to say it was because they needed to be able to understand the mortals’ point of view if they were to function correctly, and I guess that makes sense. Still, if it was me, I’d find it a distraction. So I just told Sarpa, “Sir, nothing to manage. Everybody knows that killing’s a lot easier than making life, and for us it’s a lot more fun, sir.”
He shivered at that, and said, “I suppose it’s really just sports taken to the extreme, isn’t it? Very well; Rook will probably know how to set me up with a girl.”
I didn’t say anything, and he looked at me sidelong, trying to read my expression.
“You probably disapprove,” he said. “With the morality the Company programmed into you.”
“Sir, strictly speaking, you’re exploiting the mortals, sir,” I said.
“And you think that’s wrong.”
“Sir, it would be for me. Not my place to say what’s wrong for you, sir. You’re a Preserver, and one of the new models at that, sir.”
“So I am,” he said, smiling. “You won’t judge me, eh? I like the way your conscience works, Flat Top. And after all, if I can get the creatures’ females on my side, it’ll be easier to persuade them to behave themselves.”
I don’t know why he should have cared what I thought of him, but the Preservers were all like that; the damndest things bothered them. I just told him, “Yes Sir,” and he dismissed me after that. The guys in my mess had saved me a leg of mountain goat. Not much meat, but there was a lot of marrow in the bones. Crack, yum.
Well, so the next day the Facilitator went out and did his stuff.
He dressed in his best clothes, dyed all kinds of bright colors to dazzle the mortals, and he put on makeup. He rode on his horse, which your fathers hadn’t got around to domesticating yet. It was a pretty animal, nothing like the big beasts our cavalry ride: slender legs, little hooves, kind of on the stupid side but elegant as you please.
We went with Sarpa, though of course we were undercover. There were maybe a hundred of us flanking him as he rode down to their patchwork fields, slipping through the trees and the bushes, keeping ourselves out of sight. So close we came I could have popped open any one of their little round heads with a rock, as Sarpa rode back and forth in plain sight and got their attention. They froze with their deer-antler hoes in their hands; they watched him with their mouths open, and slowly drew into a crowd as he approached them. He staged it nicely, I have to say, let his long cloak blow out behind him so its rainbow lining showed, and there were grunts and cries of wonder from the mortals.
Sarpa told them he was a messenger from their ancestors, and to prove it he did a stunt with some special-effects charges that sent red smoke and fireballs shooting from his fingertips. The mortals almost turned and ran at that, but he kept them with his voice, saying he had an important message to deliver. Then he said the ancestors demanded to know why their children had been eating their own kind?
His audience just looked blank at that, and I spotted Rook running up from behind and pushing his way through the crowd. He yelled out that he’d warned them this would happen. Falling flat before Sarpa, he begged the ancestors for mercy and promised that the farmers would never do such a terrible thing again.
At this point, though, the farmstead’s lady raised her voice and said there must be
some mistake, because her people weren’t eating their own kind.
Sarpa asked, were they not lying in wait for the strangers who had recently come into the valley, the harmless people who hunted and gathered? Were they not stabbing them with spears, cutting them open, roasting them over coals?
The lady smiled and shrugged and said yes, the invaders were being treated so; but they were not her own kind, and certainly not children of the ancestors!
Sarpa didn’t win them over nearly as easy as he’d thought he could. They argued back and forth for about an hour, as I remember. He told them why it was wrong to eat other human beings, told them all about the diseases they could catch, even told them a lot of malarkey about what would happen to them in the next world if they didn’t cut it out right now.
The mortals were clearly impressed by him, but refused to consider the newcomers as people and in fact argued quite confidently against such a silly idea. Not only did they point out a whole lot of physical differences that were obvious to them (though it was lost on me; I’ve never been able to tell one of your races from another), they explained how vitally necessary it was to protect their sacred home turf from the alien interlopers, and to protect their limited resources.
Sarpa was kind of taken aback that these little mortal things had the gall to argue with him. I saw he was beginning to lose his temper, and in the shadows beside me Budu noticed it, too; the old man snorted, but he just narrowed his eyes and watched. At last the Facilitator fell back on threatening the mortals, letting fly with a couple of thunderbolts that set fire to a bush and working a few other alarming-looking tricks.
That got instant capitulation. The mortals abased themselves, and the lady apologized profusely for them all being so stupid as not to understand the mighty Son of Heaven sooner. She asked him what they could possibly do to please the Son of Heaven. Maybe he’d like a beautiful virgin?
And a mortal girl was pushed forth, looking scared, and Budu grunted, because Sarpa’s eyes fixed on her with an expression like a hungry dog’s. Then he was all smiles and gracious acceptance, and congratulated the mortals for being so wise as to see things his way. The girl squealed a bit, but he assured her she’d live through his embrace and even have pretty things afterward. I don’t think she believed him, but her mother fixed her with an iron glare, and she gulped back her terror and went with Sarpa.
He took her back up to camp—she squealed a lot more when she saw us at last, but Sarpa sweet-talked her some more—and to celebrate his success he took her to his tent, stripped her bare as a skinned rabbit, and had his fun.
There was a lot of muttering from us about that, and not just because we thought what he was doing was wrong. We were disgusted because he hadn’t realized the mortals were lying to him. See, mortal, we can tell when you’re lying. You smell different then. You smell afraid. But Sarpa had been distracted by his lusts and his vanity, sniffing after something else. We knew damned well the mortals were only giving him the girl to make him go away.
And oh, mortal, it was hard not to go down there and punish them. It was our duty, it was our programmed and ancient desire. By every law we understood, those mortals were ours now. Budu wouldn’t give the order yet, all the same. He just bided his time, though he must have known what was going to happen.
Well—three days later, as Sarpa was in his tent with his little friend while I was busting my ass to find a way to boil water in a rock basin because the great Facilitator wanted a hot bath, thank you very much-Rook came slinking up from the farmstead to tell us that the mortals had done it again. They’d caught a party of strangers, and even now they were whacking them up into bits to be skewered over the cookfire.
I can’t say I was surprised, and I know the old man wasn’t. He just stalked to Sarpa’s tent, threw back one of the skins and said:
“Son of Heaven, it seems that your in-laws have backslid.”
Sarpa was furious. He yelled at the mortal girl, demanded to know what was wrong with her people, even took a swing at her. Budu growled and fetched him out by his arm, and told him to stop being an ass. He added that if this was the way the hotshot Facilitators operated, the Company—the shamans^ I mean—should have saved themselves the trouble of designing a new model, or at least not sent one into the field until they’d got the programming right.
Sarpa just drew himself up and yelled for me to bring his horse. He jumped into the saddle and rode off hell-for-leather, with Rook racing after him. Budu watched them go, and I think he actually considered for a minute whether or not it was worth it to send an armed escort after the fool. In the end he did, which turned out to be a wise precaution.
I wasn’t there to see what happened. I was babysitting Sarpa’s little girlfriend, watching as she cowered in the bedding and cried. I felt sorry for her. We do feel sorry for you sometimes, you know. It’s just that you can be so stupid, you mortals.
Anyway I missed quite a scene. Apparently it didn’t go at all well: Sarpa went galloping down and caught the farm-tribe with their mouths full of hunter-tribe. He shouted terrible threats at them, and put on another show of smoke and noises. Maybe he should have waited until there was an eclipse or a comet scheduled, though, because the farmers weren’t as impressed with his stunts this time. The upshot was, theykilled his horse from under him and he had to run for it, and Rook too. If the armed escort hadn’t stepped out and scared the mortals off, there’d have been a couple of badly damaged Preservers doing time in regeneration vats, and maybe some confused farmers puking up bits of bio-mechanical implants. But Sarpa and Rook got back up to camp safely enough, though they were fuming at each other, Rook especially because now he’d lost his cover and wouldn’t be able to collect any more anthropological data. He said a lot of cutting things about Facilitators in general. Sarpa was just gibbering with rage. I got between him and the girl until he calmed down a little and I respectfully suggested, sir, that he might want to keep her safe as a hostage, sir, and whatever he might have retorted, he shut up when Budu came into the tent and looked at him.
“Well, Facilitator,” said Budu, “what are you going to do now?” But Sarpa had an answer for that. He was through dealing with the lying, grubbing little farmers. He’d go straight to the hunter-gatherers and present himself as their good angel, and show them how to defend themselves against the other tribe.
Budu told him he couldn’t do that, because it directly contravened orders. The monkeys were supposed to interbreed, not fight.
Sarpa said something sarcastic about Budu’s grasp of subtleties and explained that he’d manage that: if the hunter-gatherers captured the farmers’ females, they could keep them as slaves and impregnate them. It wouldn’t exactly be the peace and harmony our masters had wanted imposed, but it would at least guarantee the requisite interbreeding took place.
Budu shrugged, and told him to go ahead and try.
Next day, he did. Rook stayed in camp this time, but I went along because Sarpa, having lost his mount, insisted on me carrying him around on my shoulders. I guess he felt safe up there. He had a good view, anyway, because he was the first in our party to spot the hunter-gatherers’ camp on the far side of the valley.
Our reconnaissance team had reported the hunter-gatherers were digging in and fortifying a position for themselves, finally. Nice palisade of sharpened sticks, and inside they were chipping flint points just as fast as they could. Budu studied them from all angles before he just sent me walking up to the stockade so that Sarpa could look over the fence at them.
He—that is, I—had to dodge quite a few spears and thrown flints before he got them to listen to his speech. They did listen, I have to hand them that much.
But they weren’t buying it. They had every intention of descendingon the farmer-tribe and getting revenge for the murder of their brethren. Sarpa tried to persuade them that the best way to do this was to make more children, but that wouldn’t wash either.
It turned out they weren’t just a migratory tribe. Th
ey apparently had a long-standing cultural imperative to expand, to take new land for themselves whenever they needed it, and if other tribes got in the way they’d push them out or kill them off—though they never ate them, they hastened to add, because they were a morally superior people, which was why they deserved to have the land in the first place.
Sarpa argued against this until they began to throw things at him again, and we beat an inglorious retreat. What was worse, when we got back we discovered that Rook had let the mortal girl go. He’d known her since her childhood, evidently, and didn’t want to see her hurt. He and Sarpa almost came to blows and it’s not pretty to see Preservers do that, mortal, they’re not designed for it. Budu had to step in again and threaten to knock their heads together if they didn’t back off. Anyway, the damage was done, because the girl ran right back to her tribe and told them what was going on. How she’d figured out that Sarpa was going to woo the enemy, I don’t know, unless Rook was dumb enough to tell her. Then, too, you people aren’t always as stupid as you look. She might have figured out on her own that matters were coming to a head.
Which they did, in the gray cold hour before the next dawn.
Our patrols spotted them long before they got within a kilometer of each other: two little armies carrying as much weaponry as they could hold, men and boys and strong women, with their faces painted for war. Guilty, guilty, guilty, mortal! We watched” from our high place and danced where we stood, we were so hungry to go after them. Sarpa didn’t desire his naked girl as much as we desired the sound of our axes on their guilty skulls, pop-chop! They were sinning, the worst of sins, and their blood was ours. But the old man held us back. Orders were, the mortals were to be given every chance. That’s why he was our commander, mortal! He loved the law. His faith was stronger than anyone’s, but he had the strength to hold back from the purest pleasure in the world, which is being the law’s instrument, you see?
So he sent me down with Sarpa riding on my shoulder, and I walked out before the mortal armies, who had just seen each other in the growing light and were working themselves up to charge, the way the monkeys do. They fell silent when Sarpa and I appeared, and clear in the morning they heard the voices of our men, because we couldn’t help singing now, the ancient song, and it welled up so beautiful behindSarpa’s voice as he shouted for them to lay down their arms and go home!