Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

by Kage Baker

  Oh, mortal man, you’d have thought they’d listen to him, in that cold morning when the sun was just rising and making the high snow red as blood, lighting the meadows up green, reaching bright fingers down through deeps of blue air to touch their thatched roofs and palisade points with gold. So brief their lives are in this glorious world, you’d think they’d have grabbed at any excuse not to make them briefer. But the one side jeered and the other side screamed, and the next thing I knew I had a spear sticking out of my leg.

  1 swear, it felt good. The suspense was over.

  They charged, and were at each other’s throats in less time than it takes to say it. So Budu gave the order.

  I just shoved Sarpa up into a tree, drew my axes, and waded in.

  You can’t imagine the pleasure, mortal. It would be wrong, anyway; that joy is reserved to us, forbidden to the likes of you. War is the Evil, and we make war on war, we strike that wickedness into bloody pulp! The little bone bubbles burst under our axes and the gray matter of their arrogance and presumption flies, food for crows.

  Oh, it was over too soon. There’ll always be those who get the lesson at the last minute, but once we’ve shown them what true evil is they do get it, and throw down their weapons and scream their repentance on their knees. Those we spared; those we accorded mercy. Budu himself herded the terrified survivors into a huddle, and stood guard while we mopped up.

  I was stringing together a necklace of ears I’d taken when I spotted Rook at the edge of the battlefield, weeping. I was feeling so friendly I almost went over and patted him on the back, with the idea of saying something to cheer him up; but they don’t see things the way we do, the Preservers. And seeing him put me in mind of Sarpa, and when I looked around for the Facilitator, damned if he wasn’t still up in the tree where I’d left him.

  So I went over and offered him a helpful hand down, but he drew back at the sight of all the blood on it. I can’t blame him. I was red to the elbows, actually. Sarpa was so pale he looked green, staring at the field as though he’d never be able to close his eyes again.

  I told him it was all right, that the slaughter was over. He just looked down at me and asked me how I could do such things.

  Well, I had to laugh at that. It’s my duty! Who couldn’t love doing his duty? It’s the best work in the world, mortal, in the best cause: seeing that Evil is punished and Good protected. I told him so, and hesaid it was obscene; I replied that when the mortals took it into their heads to usurp our jobs, that would be obscene. Sarpa didn’t say anything to that, just scrambled awkwardly down and staggered out on the field.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. The boys were still having a little fun, taking heads that weren’t too smashed and cutting off other things that took their fancies, and Sarpa took one look and doubled over, vomiting. The poor guy was a Preserver at heart, after all. The problem was, this was the big dramatic moment when he was supposed to address the surviving mortals of each tribe and point out how disobeying him had brought them to this sorry state.

  I told him to pull himself together. Budu, kind of impatient, sent over a runner to ask if the Facilitator was ready to give his speech, and I tried to drag Sarpa along but he’d take a few steps and start retching again, especially when he saw the women lying dead. I hoisted him up on my shoulders to give him a ride, but he got sick again, right in my hair, which the other guys in my unit thought was hilarious; they stopped stacking corpses to point and laugh.

  I growled at them and set Sarpa down. He put his hands over his face, crying like a baby. It was hopeless. I looked over at Budu and shrugged, holding out my hands in a helpless kind of way. The old man shook his head, sighing.

  In the end, Budu was the one who made the speech, rounding up what was left of the two tribes and penning them together to listen to him.

  It wasn’t a long speech, no flowers of rhetoric such as Sarpa might have come up with. Budu just laid it out for them, simple and straight. From now on, they were all to live together in peace. They would intermarry and have children. There would be no more cannibalism. There would be no more fighting. The penalty for disobedience would be death.

  Then Budu told them that we were going, and they were to bury what we’d left them of their dead. He warned them, though, that we were only going up the mountain, above the tree line into the mist, and we’d be watching them always from the high places.

  And we did. We were up here thirty years. It turned out to be a good thing for us, too, because while we were overseeing the integration of the two tribes, Budu worked out a proposal for our masters. I told you he’d studied their future history. He knew what kind of an opening they needed, and he gave them one. He pointed out the nearly universal existence of places we could fit in the mortals’ mythology. Not just of your village, mortal; every village there is, anywhere.

  Legends of gods, or giants or trolls or demons, who live up somewhere high and bring judgment on mankind. Sometimes terrible, sometimes benign, but not to be screwed with, ever! Sometimes they’re supposed to live on one specific mountain, like this one; sometimes the story gets garbled and they’re thought to live in the clouds, or the sky. Someplace up. Hell, there’s even a story about a big man with a beard who lives at the North Pole, who rewards and punishes children. I think he’s called Satan… or was it Nobodaddy? It doesn’t matter.

  Anyway, Budu showed our masters that his proposal fit right in with recorded history, was in fact vital to the development of mortal religion. And, while I understand they don’t approve of religion much up there in the future, they do like to be absolutely sure that history rolls along smoothly. Messing with causality scares them.

  What was his proposal, mortal? Come on, can’t you think? What if I give you three guesses? No?

  Well, Budu said that since civilization was still a little shaky on its legs, our masters needed to keep us around a while as a peacekeeping force. We’d go to each little community and lay down the law, or give them law if they didn’t have it: no eating each other, no murder, don’t inbreed, don’t steal. Basic stuff. Then we’d run patrols and administer justice when and as needed, and contain any new mortal aggression that might threaten to wipe out humanity before it could become established. The final clever touch was that he signed Sarpa’s name to it.

  The masters accepted that proposal, mortal. It’s bought us generations of time, even with Marco’s idiot rebellion. The masters may not have trusted us anymore, but they still needed us. And it worked for their good, too; it certainly got your village established. You wouldn’t be here now if not for what we did that day, on that bloody field. And neither would our masters, and they know it. We watched your fathers, from up here in the rocks and the snow, until we could be certain they wouldn’t backslide again. Then Budu pulled the Fifth Infantry out, all but three of us, me and Bouncer and Longtooth, and we watched over your little valley down the long centuries while he went off to give law to other mortals.

  But time marched on, and eventually Bouncer got reassigned somewhere else, and later on Longtooth was transferred out too. Now there’s only me.

  And the word’s just come down from the top, mortal: they’re sending me back to my old unit, after all this time. I’ll see battle again, I’ll serve under the old man! My hands will steam with the blood of sinners. It’ll be wonderful! I’ve gotten so tired of sitting up here, freezing my ass off. If you’d climbed this mountain a day later than you did, you’d havemissed out on your chance to get the Truth. Life’s funny, isn’t it?

  Death is even funnier.

  The words and gestures cease, as the old monster settles back on his haunches, momentarily lost in a happy dream. The boy watches him. Terrified as he is, he cannot help wondering whether his host isn’t something of a fool. It has of course occurred to him, as he listened unwilling to this story, that people as clever as the Time Shamans must have long since found some way of outwitting their servants. How can the creature trust his masters? How can he not know that t
imes change?

  For even in his village below, where there are still those who can remember glimpsing God, skepticism is blooming. Nowadays children are frightened into good behavior by the old stories, but not men. Once nobody would have dared climb this mountain, seek out this cave; it would have been sacrilegious. Yet the boy’s friends had laughed at him when he’d set out for the mountain, and the village elders had just shrugged, smiling, and watched him go.

  The boy is musing to himself, thinking of the methods fabled heroes had always used to defeat ogres, and wondering what sort of magical devices the Time Shamans might have employed, when he becomes aware that the old monster has turned his pale eyes on him again. Flat Top’s expression has lost its warmth. He looks remote, stern, sad.

  The boy feels a chill go down his spine, wondering if his thoughts have been read somehow. The giant extends one of his eloquent hands and picks up a stone axe. He runs his thumb along its scalloped edge. Holding the boy’s gaze with his own, he lays the axe across his knees and resumes their conversation:

  … But enough about me.

  I want to hear your story now, mortal man. I want to know if you’re one of the righteous. You’ll tell me everything you’ve ever done, your whole life story, and then. I’ll judge you. Take as long as you like. My patience is limitless.

  The boy gulps, wondering how convincingly he can lie.

  As I write this, a new portrait of Shakespeare has surfaced. The provenance seems airtight; carbon dating, materials and techniques all check out; and, best of all, he looks like the guy in the Droeshout engraving, only younger, sexier, and with more hair. If this isn’t a fake, then it’s clearly a Company job, and my guess is this is the portrait from which the Droeshout engraving was made. “Here, this is the only picture we have of him, but it’s twenty years old; give him a solemn expression and less hair, okay?”

  And Bard-worshippers everywhere toss their sweaty nightcaps in the air and cry “Huzzah,” not surprisingly. But what does surprise me is the hostile—as opposed to healthily skeptical—attitude of certain academics. That we should still care how Shakespeare the Man looked infuriates them. They see it as decadent, an unhealthy preoccupation with celebrity. Shakespeare’s work is so great that we cheapen it, apparently by any attempt to know its creator; better to treat the plays as great and mysterious works of art that have come to us out of nowhere, author-less, and reinterpret them on our own terms.

  This seems like rank academic Von Danikenism to me. An ordinary mortal man created something wonderful and immortal; and I’d like to see his face. I like the little human details.

  The Dust Enclosed Here

  * * *

  “He never wore a red doublet in his life!”

  Susanna had sounded outraged. Hastening to smooth her anger, the stranger’s voice had followed: “An you wish it painted, good lady, ‘twill look best in red. Consider! “Us not the man you dress, but the monument for posterity. And, Mistress Hall, Preeves and Sons have plied our trade this many a year and we know what looks well in a memorial. Think of the dark church, ay, and the old wood, and this splendid funerary bust gleaming from the shadows in—gray? No, no, Mistress, it must be a goodly scarlet, granting your dear father a splendor like the setting sun!” Will’s sun was setting. His son down below the horizon and he’d follow soon enough himself. He had wadded the sheet between his fingers irritably, wishing they’d go have their hissed argument elsewhere. No, no peace yet; Susanna had drawn back the curtain, letting in the blinding light while a shabby fellow in a puke-colored coat peered at him, respectful as though he were already dead, and sketched in a book the rough cartoon to impose on a marble bust blank.

  “Christ Jesu,” Will had muttered, closing his eyes. When he’d opened his eyes again, preparing to give them his best offended glare, he was surprised to discover they were gone and it was night. Nothing but low coals to light the room, with a blue flame crawling on them. And then the shadow had loomed against the light, and he’d turned his head expecting it was John—

  That was the last memory! The strange doctor who’d come for his soul, or at least it had seemed so. The stranger had bent swiftly, thrusting something cold into his face. He’d felt a sharp pain in his nose andthen a tearing between his eyes, sparks of fire, fathomless darkness… Will put his nervous hand up now to stroke the bridge of his nose, imagining he felt sympathetic pain. There was no real pain, he knew. No real hand or nose, either, but if he thought about that for long he’d panic again. Mastering himself, he paced the little tiring room (or what he pretended was his tiring room) and waited for his cue.

  Here it came now, the sudden green orb in his vision. He felt the pull and was summoned like the ghost he was, through the insubstantial curtain into the light, where swirling dust motes coalesced into his hologrammatic form.

  “… so give a big welcome to Mr. William Shakespeare!” cried Caitlin gamely, indicating him with an outflung hand as she stepped aside for him. She wore an antique costume, the sort of gown his grandmothers might have worn. Three people, the whole of his audience, applauded with something less than enthusiasm. He gritted his teeth and smiled brilliantly, bowed grandly with flourishes, wondering what he’d ever done to be consigned to this particular Hell.

  “God give ye all good day, good ladies, good gentleman!” he cried. The lumpen spectators regarded him.

  “Doth thou really be-eth Shakespeareth?” demanded the man, grinning, in the flat Lancashireish accent Will had come to understand was American.

  “As nearly -he as cybertechnology may revive and represent, good sir!” Will told him, and Caitlin made a face, her usual signal meaning: Keep it simple for the groundlings. He nodded and went on:

  “I am, sir, an insubstantial hologram. Yet my form is drawn in forensic reconstruction from my mortal corpse exact, to show how 1 was when I lived. Yea, and I have been programmed with quotes from my works for your entertainment, and my personality hath been extrapolated from the best conjecture of scholars.”

  Though he suspected that last was a flat lie; it seemed to him that his owners (gentlemen of a company calling itself Jupiter Cyberceuticals) must somehow have captured his memories if not his soul, in that last minute of his life, and held them prisoner now in this wooden 0. However, he said what they had programmed him to say.

  “So do you, um, find it really strange being here in the future?” asked one of the women. She spoke politely enough, but it was a question he’d heard at nearly every performance since his revival. Will kept the smile in place and replied, “Ay, indeed, madam, most strange. When I do hear that humankind hath nowadays built cities on the Moon, nay, even on Mars, truly I think this is an age of wonders indeed.” The programming that he wore like chains prompted him to goon and make certain low jokes about how he wished his era had had a cure for baldness, but he exerted his will and refused. Caitlin wrung her hands.

  “What do you think of your Prince Hank?” inquired the other woman, smirking archly, and Will accessed the data on the latest juicy scandal among the royals. He smirked right back at her and stroked his beard.

  “Well, truly, good lady, to paraphrase mine own First Part of Henry the Fourth: right sadly must our poor queen see riot and dishonour stain the brow of her young Harry!” They giggled in appreciation. Encouraged, he went on:

  “Belike he doth but imitate the sun, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world, that, when he please again to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wondered at by breaking through the foul and ugly mists—”

  No; he’d lost them. His sensors noted their complete incomprehension, though they were smiling and applauding again. He just smiled back and bowed, wishing he had a set of juggler’s clubs or a performing dog.

  “I thank ye! I humbly thank ye. What would ye, now, good ladies? What would you, now, sir?” They blinked, their smiles fading.

  “What about a sonnet?” he suggested in desperation.

  “Okay,” ag
reed the man.

  He was programmed to give them the one catalogued as the Eighteenth, and for once he didn’t feel like substituting another.

  “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” he declaimed. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate…

  ” He gave the rest in a performance so widely gestured and so antic even Will Kempe would have winced at it for being over the top, but it held their attention at least.

  “That was neat,” volunteered the man, when the recitation had ended.

  “Many thanks. That sonnet, with selected others, is available in the Gifte Shoppe off the lobby, in both ring hob and standard format,” he informed them. Caitlin nodded approvingly. The commercials must not be omitted, and that was one of the few things on which he agreed with his owners.

  “Does the Gifte Shoppe sell Fruit Chew bars too?” inquired one of the ladies.

  “Yea, madam, it doth,” he told her, and she turned to her companions.

  “I’m starving. Do you want to… ?”

  “Yeah,” the others chorused, nodding, and they turned away and made for the exit. Courtesy wasn’t entirely dead in this latest age, however; at the door the man turned back and waved.

  “Thanks, and—urn… Goodbyeth thee!”

  Will smiled and waved back. “Now God blight thy knave’s stones with poxy sores, most noble sir,” he murmured sotto voce, noting with relief that it was six o’clock. The Southwark Museum was about to close for the day.

  “Our revels now are ended!” he shouted, as the big clock struck across the river.