Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

by Kage Baker

  I grinned. “Dancing while an organ grinder played? Collecting change in a tin cup to augment somebody’s departmental budget?”

  He grimaced, but it didn’t throw his shot off. Click, clunk, and another ball dropped into a corner pocket.

  “No, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I worked on some delicate missions. Collected sensitive information. Secrets. You wouldn’t believe the things people will say in front of you when they think you’re nothuman.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t I?” I paced around the table, trying to distract him while he took aim again. It didn’t work; another flawless bank shot, and it was clear I was never going to get a turn. He straightened up on the stool, now at eye level with me.

  “My memoirs would make interesting reading, I can tell you. What about yours?” I shivered. “Boring. Unless you’d be spellbound by my attempts to produce a maize cultivar with high lysine content.”

  “I’d be interested in hearing how you happened to be in a hotel when it blew up,” he said, surveying the table for his next shot. “Especially in the wilds of Big Sur.”

  “I was looking for a glass of iced tea,” I said.

  “Really.” Smack, clunk, another ball down.

  “With lemon,” I said, taken by the stupidity of it in retrospect. “I was miles from the nearest humans, working my way along a ridge four thousand feet above a sheer drop into the Pacific… and suddenly I had this vision of a glass of iced tea, with lemon.” For a moment I saw itagain, with all the intensity of hallucination. “The glass all beaded in frost, and the ice cubes floating, and the lemon slice, with its white cold rind and stinging aromatic zest, and the tart pulp in the glass lending a certain juicy piquancy to the astringent tea… God, I was thirsty.

  “I went back to my base camp, but I guess I’d been away a while. Lichen was growing on my processing credenza. My bivvy tent was collapsed and full of leaves. Raccoons had been into my field rations and strewn little packets of stuff everywhere.”

  “No tea, eh?” Hanuman jumped down, circled the table and leaned up on tiptoe for a shot. .

  “Nope,” I said, watching him sink another ball. “And then I got to thinking about other things I hadn’t done in a while. Like… sitting at a table and eating with a fork and knife. Sleeping in a room. Having clean fingernails. All the things you take for granted when you don’t live out of a base camp.”

  “And this was enough to make you go into a hazard zone, and endure the company of the mortal monkeys you so despise—” Hanuman set up for another shot,”—the refinements of civilization?” Whack!

  Clunk. “

  “It sounds so dumb,” I said wonderingly, “but that’s how it wasxSo I broke camp, cached my stuff, picked the moss out of my hair and took a transverse ridge down to Garrapatta Landing.”

  “The town that exploded?” Hanuman cleared the table and jumped down. “I win, by the way.”

  “The town didn’t explode; it burned to the ground after the hotel exploded,” I explained. “Garrapatta Landing was only about three shacks anyway. Nasty little boom town.”

  “And how,” chuckled Hanuman. “Care for another game?”

  “No, thank you.” I glared at the expanse of green felt, empty but for the cue ball.

  “We could play for articles of clothing.”

  “Not a chance in hell.” I set my cue back in its rack.

  “Okay.” Hanuman set his cue beside mine and waved for another round of cocktails. “I’m still curious. How did the hotel explode? I thought you Preserver drones were programmed to avoid hazardous structures.”

  “It wasn’t hazardous when I got there,” I said. “And I don’t like the word drone either, all right? I knew the place was doomed, but because the Concordance had the date wrong on when it was set to blow, I thought I’d be safe going there when I did. What happened was, some miners going into the south range came into town late with a wagon-load of blasting powder. Damned mortal morons parked it right undermy window. I don’t know how the explosion happened. I was asleep at the time. But it happened, and the whole hotel sort of leaned over sideways and became a mass of flaming wreckage.”

  “With you in it? Ouch,” commented Hanuman.

  “Yes. Ouch,” I said, sitting down again. “Look, I’m tired of explaining this. Why don’t we talk about you, instead? What did the Company do with an operative disguised as a monkey?”

  “Lots of things,” he said, sitting down too. “But I’ve never been debriefed, so I can’t tell you about them.”

  “Okay; but can you tell me why the Company decided it needed to resurrect an Afarensis, rather than just taking a chimpanzee for augmentation?” I persisted. “If they needed a talking monkey? And how’d they do it, anyway?”

  Hanuman looked thoughtful. It was amazing how quickly I’d adjusted to seeing human expressions in his wizened face, human intelligence in his eyes. They fixed on me now, as he nodded.

  “I can tell you that,” he said. The waiter brought our drinks, and Hanuman leaned back in his chair and said:

  “You know the Company has a lot of wealthy clients in the twenty-fourth century. Dr. Zeus takes certain special orders from them, fetching certain special items out of the dead past. Makes a nice profit off the trade, too. You Preservers think all the stuff you collect goes for science, or to museums; not by a long shot, honey. Most of it goes into private collections.”

  “I’d heard that,” I said. Not often, but it was one of the rumors continually circulating among operatives. “So what?”

  “So somebody placed an order once for Primeval Man,” Hanuman went on. “And the Company needed to know what, exactly, was meant by primeval. Was he talking cavemen? Little skinny monkey-faced fellows scavenging hyena kills? Bigfoot? What? But the plutocrat placing the order had trouble being specific. He wanted something that walked upright, but he wanted… an animal. An animal perhaps a little smarter than a performing dog.”

  “This is so illegal,” I said.

  “Isn’t it? But the client could afford to make it profitable for Dr. Zeus. The only trouble was nailing down the definition of the merchandise. Finally the Company sent him an image of a reconstructed Afarensis. Was that primeval enough? Yes! That was what he’d had in mind. Fifteen breeding pairs, if you please.”

  “This is SO illegal,” I said. He smiled at me, not the gum-baring grin of a chimpanzee but tight-lipped, pained. “Big money,” was all he said.

  “I guess so! What was he going to do with them once he had them?”

  “Play God, one assumes.” Hanuman shrugged. “Or perhaps Tarzan. In any case, I suppose you’ve heard that the Company has a genetic bank on ice somewhere, with reproductive tissue and DNA from every race the planet’s ever produced? Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, Crewkerne, the whole works?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard. They have Afarensis in there too?” Hanuman nodded. He did it differently from a Homo sapiens sapiens, I guess because of the way his skull was positioned on his vertebrae. It’s difficult to describe, an odd abrupt bobbing motion of his head.

  “The Company took what they had and filled the order. Produced fifteen female embryos, sixteen males. I was number sixteen.”

  “Why’d they make one extra?” I inquired.

  “Because they could,” said Hanuman, a little wearily. “The client was throwing ridiculous amounts of money at them, after all; why not skim a bit for R&D on a new project? The idea persons involved thought it would be great to find out whether sentience could be enhanced inu lower hominid.

  “So the client got his thirty assorted Afarensis babies and I went off to a private lab for augmentation and years of training.”

  “But not the immortality process,” I said.

  “Prototypes aren’t made immortal,” said Hanuman. “I can see the reasoning: why risk setting a mistake in stone? If the project proposal had been approved they’d have cranked out any number of immortal monkeys, I don’t doubt, but as it was… the Company decided it didn’t need a spe
cialized operative for Prehistory. Apparently they were already having problems integrating their Neanderthal operatives and such into human society, and the last thing they wanted was another set of funny-looking immortals. So…

  “

  “So there was just you,” I said.

  “Just me,” he agreed. “Can you wonder I’m sex-starved?”

  “I’d rather not wonder, okay?” I said. “But that’s pretty awful, I have to admit. Were you raised in a cage?”

  “Good lord, no!” Hanuman looked indignant. “Were you?”

  “No, I was raised at a Company base school,” I said.

  “Then I had a more human upbringing than you had,” he told me. “I had adoptive parents. Dr. Fabry, the head of the project, took me home to his wife. She was a primate liaison and delighted to get me. They were a very loving couple. I had quite a pleasant childhood.”

  “You’re kidding. How’d they get away with it? Isn’t it illegal to keep pets up at that end of time?”

  “I wasn’t a pet,” he said stiffly. “I was raised as their child. They told everyone I was microcephalic.”

  “And the mortals believed that?”

  “Oh, yes. By the twenty-fourth century, there hadn’t been a micro-cephalic born in generations, and people were a little hazy about what the word meant. Everyone I met was kind and sympathetic as a consequence.”

  “The mortals were?” I couldn’t believe this.

  “The twenty-fourth century has its faults,” Hanuman told me, “but people from that time can’t bear to be perceived as intolerant.”

  “But they are,” 1 protested. “I’ve met some, and they are.”

  “Ah, but you’re a—excuse me—a cyborg, you see?” Hanuman reached over and patted my hand.

  “Better than mortals, so of course they’re not going to waste their sympathy on you! But I had every advantage. Why, I myself thought I was a challenged human being until I hit puberty, when I was five.”

  “You didn’t know you were an Afarensis?”

  “I thought all the cranial operations were to compensate for my condition,” he said. “And my parents were too kind-hearted to tell the truth until I became interested in sex, at which time they sat me down and explained that it wasn’t really an option for me.”

  “That’s kind-hearted, all right,” I said.

  “Mm. I was crushed, of course. Went through denial. Mumums and Daddums were so dreadfully sorry because they really did love me, you see, and so they hastened to provide me with all sorts of self-image-improving material. I was told I could be anything I set out to be! Except, of course, a human being, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy a full life. Et cetera.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Raged. Rebelled. Gave poor kind Dr. and Mrs. Fabry no end of grief. Decided at last to embrace my hominid heritage and turn my back on Homo sapiens.” Hanuman picked the fruit spear out of his mai tai and considered it critically. “Demanded to meet my biological parents.” He bit off a chunk of pineapple.

  “But you came out of a DNA bank,” I said. “Yes, they pointed that out too. The best that could be managed was an interview with the host mother who had given birth to me.” Hanuman leaned forward, still munching pineapple, and waggled his eyebrows. “And, talk about illegal! It turned out that the lady in question lived at Goodall Free Township.”

  I did a fast access and was shocked. “You mean the chimpanzee commune? That place set aside for the Signers after the split happens inthe Beast Liberation Party? But I thought that’ll be off-limits to humans.”

  Hanuman lifted his cocktail and drained it, gracefully extending one long pinky as he drank. “Of course it is,” he said, setting the glass down. “Tell me, how long have you worked for the Company now? And you still think laws matter to Dr. Zeus?”

  I was speechless.

  “The Company had sent in a fast-talking—or should I say fast-signing?—person to negotiate with the females at Goodall,” Hanuman said. “One of you people, 1 believe. A Facilitator, isn’t that what the political ones are called? He offered a contract for surrogate maternity to thirty-one chimpanzees. They were implanted with the embryos, they carried them to term and delivered as per contract. Handsomely paid off, too, though presumably not in bananas alone.”

  Something beeped and Hanuman started slightly. “Oops! Excuse me a moment.” He fished a pillbox out of his vest pocket and shook a few capsules into his palm. When he looked around for something to take them with, I pushed my glass forward.

  “No, thank you,” he said delicately, getting up and filling a dispos-… … able cup at the water cooler. I narrowed my eyes. Certain mortals from the twenty-fourth century are reluctant to touch utensils or other personal items a cyborg has used. Probably he just didn’t want to take a sip of something with rum in it, but I was hair-trigger sensitive to anti-cyborg bigotry.

  “You know what? I’ve just remembered I have an appointment,” I said, getting to my feet and stalking out of the room. “Great story, but we’ll have to do this some other time, okay? Bye now.”

  “Aw,” he said sadly, looking after me as I stormed away.

  I didn’t get the rest of the story until a week later.

  The people responsible for my new lungs cautiously admitted that sea air might be good for them, so I was permitted to go outside if I wore a long coat, wide-brimmed hat and a face mask that made me look like Trona the Robot Woman. I reclined in a deck chair on the beach and gazed out at the sea for hours on end, telling myself I didn’t give a damn that other immortals were staring at me. The dark lenses of the mask made the sea a deep violet blue, gave everything an eerie cast like an old day-for-night shot, and I could watch the waves rolling in and pretend I was anywhere but here, anyone but me. One morning I heard a clatter as another deck chair was set up beside mine.

  “There you are,” said someone cheerfully, and turning my head Isaw Hanuman settling into the chair. He was nicely dressed as usual, in a white linen suit today, with a Panama hat that must have been specially made for his little coconut head. He drew a pair of sunglasses from an inner pocket and slipped them on. “Bright, isn’t it?”

  I just turned my robot face back to regard the sea, hoping its expressionlessness would intimidate him into silence.

  “Strange mask,” he observed. “Not the most attractive design they could have chosen. Much more angular than, say, the police in THX 1138. Nowhere near as human as Robot Maria in Metropolis. Even the Tin Man in—”

  “I think they were going for Art Deco,” I said. “Buck Rogers Revival”

  “Yes!” He leaned forward to study the mask again. “Or Flesh Gordon. “

  “Flash Gordon.”

  He chuckled wickedly. “I meant what 1 said. Did you ever see it? Surprisingly good for a porn film. Great special effects.”

  I was silent again, wishing I really was a robot, one perhaps with the ability to extend an arm and fire missiles at unwelcome companions.

  “I was telling you the story of my life,” he said.

  “So you were.”

  “Still interested?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  He folded his hands on his stomach and began again.

  “Goodall Free Township is a grand name, but the reality’s sort of squalid. After the Signer scandal, the Beast Liberation Party gave the signing chimpanzees a thousand acres of tropical woodland for their very own, hoping they’d just disappear into the forest and return to whatever the Beast equivalent of Eden is. I had decided to go there to live, and celebrate my true Afarensis nature.

  “All the way there in the car, Mrs. Fabry told me about the wonderful paradise I was going to be privileged to see, where beasts lived in dignity and self-sufficiency, and how this was only one of the modern examples of mankind atoning for its crimes against the natural world.

  “So I was expecting rainbows and unicorns and waterfalls, you see, quite illogically, but I was, and when we pulled up to the big electrifi
ed fence with barbed wire at the top it was jarring, to say the least. Beyond the fence was a thicket of cane solid as a wall, nothing visible behind it, growing to left and right along the fence as far as the eye could see.

  “Even Mrs. Fabry looked stunned. A ranger emerged from a little shack by the locked gate and saluted snappily, but she demanded toknow why the barbed wire was there. He told her it was to keep poachers out, which she accepted at once. Personally I think—well, you decide, once you’ve heard.

  “The ranger stared at me, but didn’t question. He just stepped inside and got a jotpad, which he handed to Mrs. Fabry with the explanation that she needed to state for the record that she was going in of her own free will, and released the Goodall Free Township Committee from any responsibility in the event of unpleasantness. As she was listening to the plaquette and recording her statement, I began to remove my clothes.

  “At this, the ranger looked concerned and signed to me, What are you doing?

  ” ‘What’s it look like I’m doing?’ I said indignantly. ‘Besides talking, which I can do, thank you very much.’ And I explained that I was going to meet my brothers and sisters in nature and wanted no effete Homo sapiens garments to set me apart. He just shook his head and told me I might want to reconsider.

  “Mrs. Fabry, who knew more about chimpanzees than I did, kept her clothing on. Even so, the ranger advised her she’d dp well to take a gift for the inhabitants. She asked him if he had any fruit and he went inside his shack, to emerge a moment later with a bottle of Biodyne.

  ‘“Take this,’ he said. ‘They got all the fruit they need.’

  “Mrs. Fabry took it reluctantly. Giving renaturalized primates any kind of medical assistance was strictly forbidden, as I was later to find out, but then so were visitors to this particular paradise. Anyway, the ranger dropped the perimeter security and let us in, pointing out a tiny gap between the cane stalks where we might squeeze through; then he locked up after us and I heard the faint hummzap of the fences going back on.

  “As we picked our way through the jungle (where I very much regretted I hadn’t worn my shoes), Mrs. Fabry said, ‘Now, Michael dear, when we meet the chimpanzees, it might be a good idea if you got down in a crouch. They’ll be more comfortable.’