by Kage Baker
“And a fine good evening to yez as well. I think I’ll just wait around and see if They drop by tonight. Yez’ll be welcome to stay to meet Them, ye know.” He raised his eyebrows alluringly.
“Thank you, Senor, but I am weary and fear I would not be at my social best. Give Them my regards, though, won’t you?” I requested, and made my escape under the grinning stars. When I returned to my camp there was a faint blue light blinking in my field lab. I actually grabbed up my frying pan and started for it, blood in my eye; but it was only the credenza indicator light, telling me that a transmission had come in while I was out.
I leaned down to peer at the tiny glowing screen.
PRIORITY DIRECTIVE GREEN 07011860 2300 RE: CROME GENERATOR. INVESTIGATE FURTHER. OBTAIN DNA SAMPLE AND FORWARD TO RELAY STATION.
There was some ugly language used in the field lab, and a frying pan sailed out under the stars as though propelled by cosmic anti-gravity rays.
So, how do you get a DNA sample from a psychic?
A real two-fisted operative would move in silently, plant some expensive neuroneutralizing device (which field botanists are never given enough budget for, by the way) and get a pint of blood and maybe a finger or two from the unconscious subject.
I opted to sneak into the hermit’s house while he wasn’t there and collect shed hair and skin cells, but even that presented its own problems. When did he leave his wicker beehive? For how long? Did he ever go far enough away for all his blue lights to follow him and leave me the hell alone? If he did, and they did, maybe he’d be unable to perceive my rifling his belongings.
Dawn of the next day found me crouching in a willow thicket one kilometer south of the hermit’s cove, scanning intently. He was home, I could tell, awake already and moving around within a tiny zone of activity; must be still within the beehive. Abruptly his signal dropped in location and its zone widened: he’d climbed out and was moving around on his lawn. Then his signal moved away due west, receding and receding. He must be going down to dig clams. That should take him a while. 1 emerged from my thicket and ran like a rabbit over the dunes. In no time I went tumbling down the sandwall into his cove and sprinted across his lawn. Well, he wouldn’t need any sixth sense to know I’d been here; I could always tell him I’d just stopped by to borrow a cup of sugar or something. No blue radiation at the moment, at least.
I pushed my way into the willows about the base of his beehive and looked around. He’d cleared a space under the bushes around the four supporting poles. It was cool and shady in there, and clearly he used it as additional living room. Over to one side was a shallow well and the banked embers of a cooking fire; over to the other side must be his library, to judge from the baskets and baskets of clamshells. There must have been hundreds of them, each one painted with knotted and interlacing patterns of dizzying Celtic complexity. Some had text, beautiful tiny lettering massed between spirals and vine leaves, but many appeared to be abstract images. There was something vaguely familiar about them, but I couldn’t spare the time to look further. I scrambled up his ladder and crawled into the beehive.
Right at the doorway was his scriptorium: a chunk of redwood log two feet across, adzed flat for a work surface, with clamshells holding various inks and paints. I supposed he made them from berry juice and powdered earths. A grooved tray held little brushes made from reed cane and hair; an old graniteware cup held water. The present tome in progress was balanced on a ring of woven grass. I didn’t look at it particularly closely, or at the fiddle hanging on thewall. I made straight for the rumpled mass of sealskins that formed the old man’s bed.
I swept a few long white hairs into my collector and groped around with a scraper for skin cells. Oh, great, the ancient hide was coming off too. Now the Company would think he had seal DNA. It would have to do. Tucking the samples away, I turned to exit on my hands and knees. My gaze fell on the half-painted clamshell.
The pattern was drawn in a faint silver line, done with a knife point or an old nail maybe, and blocked in carefully in ocher and olive green. Ribbons and dots? No. A twisting ladder? No… a DNA spiral. A DNA spiral.
I stared at it fixedly for a long moment and then jumped down the ladder into the area below, where I grabbed up a clamshell from the nearest basket.
On its inner surface was an accurate depiction of the solar system, including Pluto and all the moons of Jupiter. And here was another one showing the coastline of Antarctica, and I couldn’t identify this one but it certainly looked like circuitry designs. And what were these? Lenticular cumuli? Where had he seen all this?
He hadn’t gotten it from any bloody Lemurians, that much I was sure of. In this time period, surely only one of us could have painted these pictures, unless there was a serious security breach somewhere. I’d have to inform the Company.
I reflected on the possibilities as I sped back to my camp. He’d seen my field lab, of course, but I’d only been here a couple of days! He was a psychic, and a powerful one. Had he somehow been picking up transmissions from the station on the mesa nearby? If they’d been careless with their shielding, he might. Anyway it couldn’t be my fault.
I rushed right into the tent and sent a breathless communication outlining what I’d found. As the last green letter flitted away into the ether, I sat back and frowned. Having been put into words, the story sounded even crazier than it was. The crew at the relay station might think I had a screw missing. Maybe I should go back and take some holoes of the clamshells to back up my story. There was still the DNA sample to send, too.
But even as I was preparing it for transmission, the credenza beeped and another message came in. I leaned over to peer at it.
PRIORITY DIRECTIVE GREEN 070218601100 RE: CROME GENERATOR. OBTAIN LIBRARY.
My jaw dropped. Hesitantly I transmitted: CLARIFY? SPECIFY? HOWMANY?
ENTIRE LIBRARY. OBTAIN. PRIORITY.
A long moment later I transmitted: ACKNOWLEDGED.
Well, this was just great. What was I supposed to do now? Carry basket after basket of clamshells up to the relay station on the mesa?
Yes, that was exactly what I was supposed to do, and that was the easy part. How was I to obtain the old man’s library in the first place? I’d like to see anybody just sort of slip four hundred pounds of clamshells into her pocket without being noticed, and I was dealing with a psychic at that. I crawled out of the tent and stood, gloomily staring at the thickets of Oenothera, It wasn’t as though I didn’t have work of my own to do, after all. Look at all these endangered plants. And such specimens of Lupinus chamissonis, Fragaria chiloensis, Calystegia soldanella! Why couldn’t the Company send a Security operative to deal with this? I reached out and broke off a sprig of primrose, examining closely the pattern of viral striping in a deeper pink than the salmon color of the petals… The petals turned blue. Everything turned blue: my hand, my sleeve, the dune before me. I raised a startled face just in time to see a dark-blue blur cross the sky above me, as the electromagnetic anomaly pulsed and roared like a monster leaping out of the sand at my feet. I tried to yell, but couldn’t remember how, and I fell down a tiny blue tunnel where there was nothing to see but a line of tiny letters and punctuation marks, tangling themselves together in a vain attempt to produce something other than gibberish.
After a long while they did manage to spell out a word, however, and it blinked on and off steadily: RESET. Oh. I knew what that meant. I was supposed to do something now, wasn’t I? I breathed, blinked and tried to look around but found I could only move my eyes.
I lay where I had toppled backward, frozen in my last conscious attitude, arm still out, hand still clutching a sprig of Oenothera. A little sand had drifted into my open mouth. It was quiet and peaceful here now, and no longer blue; but the air stung with ozone and some sort of electromagnetic commotion was going on to the north of me.
To hell with it. I closed my eyes, but to my dismay saw red letters flashing behind my eyelids. PRIORITY! OBTAIN LIBRARY! My body jerked as some fri
ed circuit repaired itself and my legs flexed, attempting to pull me up into a standing position. After several tries, during which the rigid upper half of my body jolted to and fro and got me another faceful of sand, my legs righted themselves and set off northward, staggering through the dunes. The rest of me rode along above them like an unwilling maharani atop a drunken elephant. At least some of the sand spilled out of my mouth. As I lurched nearer I could feel the anomaly throbbing away up ahead, and a fan of blue rays spread themselves like a peacock’s tail above the hermit’s cove. Every instinct I had left was screaming at me to get out of there, but my lower torso blundered along like a goddamn Frankenstein’s monster, stumbling occasionally and pitching me face-forward into the sand again. Frantically I went into my self-repair program and tried to get control, but it was committed to fixing my arms and would not allow override. The best I was able to do was close my mouth.
By the time I came thrashing over the top of the last dune, I had sensation again in my right arm; but what I beheld in the cove below me nearly brought on another fit of electronic apoplexy. Somebody else was stealing the library!
Two small figures were struggling up the face of the opposite dune, each carrying a basket of piled shells. From the prints in the sand ahead of them, I could see that this was not their first trip, and their destination was an indistinct domed something that lay in a shimmer of blue just over the top of the dune. My jaw worked, I spat out sand and shouted, “Hey!” They turned around and I had the impression that they were a pair of English children in white hooded snowsuits, their facial features tiny and perfect, their skin ashy pale. They wore enormous black goggles. When they saw me they squeaked in horror and ran, plowing up the dune face in their efforts to get away from me and not drop the heavy baskets. My legs took me down the sand like a juggernaut. I picked up speed across the lawn and started up after them, gaining back more and more of my coordination as I went. They were nearly to the top of the dune now and I could see there was something not quite human in their proportions. Head circumference too big, tubby little bodies, spindly arms and legs. What the hell? I searched my index for information on related subjects and was rewarded with a host of terribly earnest UFO titles from the late twentieth century, all illustrated with drawings of these same spindly little people. Aliens? From outer space?
Were these the Ascended Masters from whom the hermit had been stealing his sacred fire, his memorized scraps of improbable knowledge? As I gained on them they began crying open-mouthed in their terror, desperately trying to clamber over the top of the dune.
One of them made it but the other stumbled, dropping his basket, and a single clamshell bounced out and went skating down the sandwall toward me. My right hand shot out and closed on it like a trap, in as fine an example of bonehead priority programming as I’ve ever seen, because if I’d been able to ignore it and keep going past I’d have caughtthe little so-and-so. As it was, in my wasted second he managed to grab up his basket again and hands-and-knees drag it over the top, where his friend had hung back long enough to help him to his feet. They scampered away down the other side just seconds before I was able to pull myself up off the slope.
I looked down into a wide valley of sand, featureless but for the great white circle of a shell midden. There was an airship parked on it.
Now this was 1860, mind you, and here was this thing that looked like an Easter egg designed by Jules Verne sitting on a prehistoric shell midden. It was all of some purply-silver metal and it had portholes, and riveted plates, and scrollwork and curlicues that made no kind of aerodynamic sense. It wasn’t one of our ships, certainly. It bore no resemblance to a silver saucer; but then, this was 1860, wasn’t it? Nearly a hundred years before anything crashed in a place called Roswell. The little figures ran for it, sobbing in alarm to the others who stood around the ship. They all turned to stare at me, except for one who was crouched over, trying to pull a snowsuit on up around himself. As all the others screamed at the sight of me, he straightened up and looked. It was the hermit.
“0, not to worry,” he told them. “I know her.” He put his hands up to form a trumpet around his mouth and shouted, “I regret I was not at home when yez come to call! It seems They’ve decided to take me to Mount Shasta to live with Them permanent-like! Ain’t dat a grand thing, now?”
“Your library!” I croaked. The little creatures were frantically tossing basket after basket of shells in through the open door of the airship, and two of them grabbed the hermit’s arms to try to hurry him the rest of the way into his suit. He gave me a slightly shamefaced shrug.
“Well, They found me out about that, and They’re confiscating it; but They’re good fellows, like I told yez, and They say I can open a school in Lemuria when she comes up. They say They’ll have to test me worthiness some more, but dat’s all right.” One of them zipped up the front of his suit and pressed a pair of goggles into his hands, signing several times that he should put them on at once. The others were vanishing inside the ship as fast as they could get through the door.
But I wasn’t about to follow them now, priority or no priority, not after the brain-scrambling I’d got when they’d overflown me. My self-preservation program was finally working again, and I stood rooted in place watching the hermit fit the goggles on over his spectacles while the one remaining creature gibbered and tugged on his arm.
“Half a minute, there, I can’t see through this—there now. Why, it’s all funny-looking. Say,” he called across to me, “yez might see if theSisterhood’s interested in coming out here to the Dunes. I still think it’s a capital place for a great center of learning.” The ship began to tremble and hum, and the creature turned to dart through the door, pulling the hermit after him. I recoiled from the waves of radiation that flooded outward. The hermit paused in the doorway, looking back to me, and went on shouting:
“Because, ye know, the vibrations hereabouts is so powerful yez can almost—” the door slid shut with a dull bang, trapping a lock of his beard as the ship began its ascent into the sky. The ascent paused, the door slid open a half-inch and the beard vanished inside; the door slammed again and the ship zoomed upward a few hundred meters, until without turning it sped off at an angle and vanished from sight. I stood staring for a long moment. Aware that I was still clutching the one clamshell I had managed to grab, I raised my hand painfully and examined it. I nearly screamed.
It was a nice little study of ducks paddling happily on a lake. And look: here were some children on the shore of the lake, feeding the ducks. At least, they might have been children. Oh, who was I kidding?
They weren’t children, they were Visitors from Somewhere who had found a unique life form in these Dunes. Like me, they had tested a sample; like me, they were transplanting it. I let my arm drop to my side. Now that the ship had gone I could see across the midden to the high dune beyond, where clamshell letters ten” feet high shouted silently:
NOT ALONE.
This one’s for Harlan Ellison, just because. Another early story, featuring what one might call the Continental operatives, as opposed to Joseph and his pals.
A meditation on personal style: if you were immortal, and privileged with data on all the airs and graces from the twenty-fourth century backward, how would you define yourself? If you could sample any era but belonged to none of them, what would make you feel most at home? The Facilitator Joseph clearly feels a strong pull toward Jazz Age America. Literature Preservationist Lewis longs vainly after the cosmopolitan world of the Roman Empire. Executive Facilitator Latif seems to have accessed a lot of John le Carre novels as a neophyte. Botanist Mendoza, on the other hand, is stuck in her own personal time warp and doesn’t give a damn. But I think a lot of operatives would be irresistibly drawn to the elegance, the permanence, the arrogance of the Victorian era.
The Wreck of the Gladstone
* * *
On the fourteenth of November 1893, the schooner yacht Gladstone encountered a storm in the Catalina channel o
ff the harbor at Los Angeles, California. A northeastern gale capsized her and she sank within sight of the lights of San Pedro. It is a matter of recorded fact that all hands were lost, including the captain.
Nevertheless, the following August he returned to the scene of his death and peered down through the green water, and it seemed to him he could just discern her outline, green and waving, rippling and fading, the lost Gladstone.
Standing at the rail he wondered, miserably, if any of the mortals he had known were still down there with her, the owner with his long moustache, the sea cook with his canvas apron. I could tell he was so miserably wondering because of the set of his mouth and wide stare. I’ve known Kalugin since the summer of 1699 and have learned, in that time, to read his least thought in his countenance. It is indeed a dear countenance, but terribly at odds with itself; the eyes ought to be steel but are vague and frightened. The nose is arrogant as an eagle’s beak, the mouth shaped cruel for its hereditary work of ordering serfs to the pillory: yet the sharp features are blunted in the wide pink face. He doesn’t really look like one of us at all.
“Come inside, dear.” I touched his arm with my gloved hand. “We can’t do anything until the morning.”
“I shall have bad dreams,” he replied. He turned to go with me, and his gaze fell hopefully upon the island off to the west. “Do you suppose any of the crew managed to swim ashore?”
“Certainly they might have.” I gave his arm a squeeze. “But they’dhave had to have been extraordinary swimmers. And history does record that all hands were lost, after all.”
“Including me, my dear,” he pointed out, and I was obliged to shrug in concession of his point. It is one of the laws of the time-manipulation business that history cannot be changed. It is one of its hazards, and conveniences, that this law can only be observed to apply to recorded history. We arrange matters to our advantage in perfect obedience to the known facts. Kalugin had gone down with his ship, and so conformed to the historical record. The fact that he had risen on the sea foam three days later, like Venus or Christ, was beside the point and out of the history books altogether. The fact that he had failed in his mission on that occasion was of greater consequence, and the reason for our present excursion. I led him into the saloon of the Chronos, where dinner had just been served. Victor was standing at his place waiting for us, eyeing the repast with approval