Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

by Kage Baker

  And now the Captain had puberty to worry about, and how, oh, how, was Alec ever going to find a girl who’d come with him? A lover would get close to his boy, would notice all sorts of little odd things about Alec. Where was there a girl who’d love Alec enough to stay, if she knew the truth about him?

  One worry at a time, the Captain decided, and accessed the stock exchange to see what promising investments might present themselves for the payoff from this job. He had to make his boy independently wealthy, after all, and then there were the taxes to be evaded…

  The girl was out there somewhere. She’d wait.

  Stephen Hawking, an extraordinary mortal if ever there was one, has argued that the best evidence that time travel is impossible is that we haven’t met any visitors from the future. Good point. Though I think that anyone visiting the past would scarcely announce their presence, would in fact be much more likely to have access to a range of disguises we couldn’t hope to penetrate. And there are all those Fortean accounts of out-of place artifacts such as chains embedded in anthracite coal seams, certain proof of temporal visitors to the early Cretaceous— or it would be proof, if the artifacts themselves hadn ‘t mysteriously disappeared since, like the famous spark plug that was embedded in a geode. (Although it turned out to be embedded in a lump of mud, not a geode, which sort of deflates the geological anomaly a bit… )

  Who knows? But my money’s on time travel, all the same.

  The Queen in Yellow

  * * *

  The lady waited in her motorcar. It was a grand car, the very best and latest of its kind in 1914, a Vauxhall touring convertible with a four-litre engine, very fast. It was painted gold. Until recently the lady would have been waiting on a horse, by choice a palomino Arabian stallion. She preferred her current transportation system, because she did not particularly care for living things. She did admire machines, however. She liked gold, too.

  Her name was Executive Facilitator for the Near Bast Region Kiu, and the sleek golden motorcar in which she waited was parked on a deserted road in the middle of a particularly ancient and historically significant bit of Nowhere. Not so far behind her, the Nile flowed on through eternity; above her, the white moon swam like a curved reed-boat across the stars, and it and they shed faint soft light on the rippled dunes of the desert and the green garden country. Lady Kiu cared no more about the romance of her surroundings than the Sphinx, who was her junior by several millennia. She did not show her eleven thousand years, almond-eyed beauty that she was. She looked no older than a fairly pampered and carefree twenty-two. Her soul, however, had quite worn away to nothing. Lady Kiu was impatient as she waited. Her perfect nails tapped out a sinister little rhythm on the Vauxhall’s steering wheel. You would think such an ageless, deathless creature would have long since learned to bide her time, and normally Lady Kiu could watch the pointless hours stagger past with perfect sangfroid; but there was something about the man for whom she waited that irritated her unaccountably. The man was standing on a ridge and staring, slack jawed, at the beauty of the night. Moon, sand, stars, gardens, the distant gleam of moonlight on the river: he had seen a lot of moons, stars, sand, gardens and rivers in his time, but this was Egypt, after all! And though he too was a deathless, ageless creature, he had never in all his centuries been to Egypt before, and the Romance of the Nile had him breathlessly enchanted.

  His name was Literature Preservationist Lewis. He was a slight, fair-haired man with the boyish good looks and determined chin of a silent film hero. He was moreover brave, resourceful and terribly earnest about his job, which was one of the things about him that so irritated Lady Kiu. He also tended to get caught up in the moment to such an extent that he failed to check his internal chronometer as often as he ought to, with the result that when he did check it now he started guiltily, and set off at a run through the night. He was able to move far more quickly than a mortal man, but he was still five minutes late for his rendezvous.

  “Sorry!” he cried aloud, spotting Lady Kiu at last, sullen by moonlight. He slid to a halt and tottered the last few steps to her motorcar, hitching up his jodhpurs.

  “Sand in your pants?” inquired Lady Kiu, yawning.

  “Er—actually we’ve all got sand everywhere. We’re roughing it, rather. The professor doesn’t go in for luxuries in the field. I don’t mind, though! He’s really the most astonishing mortal, and I’m used to a bit of hardship—” said Lewis.

  “How nice. Your report, please.”

  Lewis cleared his throat and stood straight. “Everything is on schedule and under budget. I guided the fellaheen straight to the shaft entrance without seeming to, you see, quite subtly, and even though it’s been. blocked with debris, the excavation has .been going along famously. At the current speed, I expect we’ll reach the burial chamber exactly at twilight tomorrow.”

  “Good.” Lady Kiu studied her nails. “And you’re absolutely certain you’ll get the timing right?”

  “You may rely on me,” Lewis assured her.

  “You managed to obtain a handcar?”

  “All I had to do was bribe a railway official! The princess and I will roll into Bani Suwayf in style.”

  “The mortal trusts you?”

  “Professor Petrie? I think I’ve managed to impress him.” Lewis hooked his thumbs through his suspenders proudly. “I heard him tellingMr. Brunton what a remarkable fellow I am. ‘Have you noticed that fellow Kensington?’ he said. Petrie impresses me, too. He’s got the most amazing mental abilities—”

  “Darling, the day any mortal can impress me, I’ll be ready for retirement,” said Lady Kiu, noting in amusement that Lewis started and quivered ever so slightly at her use of the word darling.

  “I can expect you at Bani Suwayf at midnight tomorrow, then,” she added. “With the merchandise.”

  “Without fail!”

  “That’s a good boy. We’ve set you up a nice workroom on the boat, with everything you’ll need for the restoration job. And in your cabin—” she reached out a lazy hand and chucked him under the chin

  “—there’ll be a bottle of well-iced champagne to celebrate. Won’t that be fun?” Lewis’s eyes widened. Struck mute, he grinned at her foolishly, and she smiled back at him. She expected men to fall in love with her—they always did, after all—but Lewis fell in love with anything beautiful or interesting, and so he wasn’t worth her time. Still, it never hurt to give an underling some incentive.

  “Until tomorrow,” she said, blowing him a kiss, and with a roar her golden chariot came to life and bore her away toward the Nile.

  You will find the pyramid of Senuseret II west of the Nile, near Al Fayyum. It is an unassuming little twelfth-dynasty affair of limestone and unburned mud brick. It is quite obvious how it was built, so no one ever speculates on how on earth it got there or who built it, or argues morbidly that apocalyptic knowledge is somehow encoded in its modest dimensions.

  To the south of Senuseret’s pyramid is a cemetery, and on this brilliant day in 1914 it had a certain holiday air. The prevailing breeze brought the fragrance of fields, green leaf and lotus surging up in the brief Egyptian spring. Makeshift huts had been put up all along its outer wall, and Englishmen and Englishwomen sat in the huts and typed reports, or made careful drawings with the finest of crow quills, or fanned flies away from their food and wondered plaintively what that furry stuff was on the tinned pilchards, or fought off another wave of malaria.

  Within the cemetery walls, several shaft tomb entrances admitted sunlight. In such shade as there was, the Egyptian fellaheen sat sorting through fairly small basketfuls of dig debris, brought to them by brown children from the mouth of another shaft. Lewis, his archaeologist ensemble augmented by a pith helmet today, stood watching themexpectantly. His riding boots shone with polish. His jodhpurs were formidable.

  Beside him stood a mortal man, burned dark by the sun, who wore mismatched native slippers without socks, patched knickerbocker trousers, a dirty shirt that had lost its b
uttons, and a flat cap that had also seen better days. He was white-haired and gray-bearded but had a blunt powerful form; he also had an unnervingly intense stare, fixed not on the fellaheen but on Lewis.

  William Matthew Flinders Petrie was sixty years old. He had laid down the first rules of true archaeology, and that made him very nearly a patron saint for people who invested in history as much as Lewis’s masters did.

  Though invested is not, perhaps, the correct word for the way the Company got its money. Lewis never thought about that part of it much, to avoid being depressed. He had always been taught that depression was a very bad thing for an immortal, and the secret to happiness was to keep busy, preferably by following orders. And life could be so interesting! For example, one got to rub elbows with famous mortals like Flinders Petrie.

  “So you think this grave hasn’t been robbed? You have an intuition about this, have you?” Petrie said.

  “Oh, yes, Professor,” said Lewis. “I get them now and then. And after all, theft is a haphazard business, isn’t it? How systematic or careful can a looter be? I’d be awfully surprised if they hadn’t missed something.”

  “Interesting,” said Flinders Petrie.

  “What is, sir?”

  “Your opinion on thieves. Have you known many?”

  Actually Lewis had worked with thieves his entire life, in a manner of speaking. But remembering that he was supposed to be a youthful volunteer on his first visit to Egypt (which was half true, after all), he blushed and said “Well—no, sir, I haven’t, in fact.”

  “They have infinite patience, as a rule,” Petrie told him. “.You’d be astonished at how methodical they are. The successful ones, at least. They take all manner of precautions. Get up to all sorts of tricks. Sometimes an archaeologist can learn from them.”

  “Ah! Such as wearing a costume to gain access to a forbidden shrine?” Lewis inquired eagerly. “I have heard, sir, that you yourself convinced certain tribesmen you were mad by wearing, er, some rather outlandish things—”

  “The pink underwear story, yes.” Petrie gave a slight smile. “Yes, itsometimes pays very well if people think you’re a harmless fool. They’ll let you in anywhere.”

  As Lewis prepared to say something suitably naive in response, children came streaming from the mouth of the shaft like chattering swallows. A moment later an Egyptian followed them and walked swiftly to Petrie, before whom he bowed and said:

  “Sir, you will want to come see now.”

  Petrie nodded once, giving Lewis a sidelong glance.

  “What did I tell you?” said Lewis, beaming.

  “What indeed?” said Petrie. “Come along then, boy, and let’s see if your instincts are as good as you think they are.”

  The mouth of the shaft had been blocked, as all the others there had been blocked, with centuries of mud and debris from flood runoff, and it was hard as red cement and had taken days of labor to clear in tiny increments. But the way was now clear to the entrance of the tomb chamber itself, where a mere window had been chiseled through into stifling darkness. A Qufti waiting with a lantern held it up and through the hole, flattening himself against the wall as Petrie rushed forward to peer inside.

  “Good God!” cried Petrie, and his voice cracked in excitement. “Is the lid intact? Look at the thing, it hasn’t been touched! But how can that be?” He thrust himself through, head and shoulders, in his effort to see better, and the Qufti holding the lamp attempted to make himself even flatter, without success, as Petrie’s body wedged his arm firmly into the remaining four inches of window space and caused him to utter a faint involuntary cry of pain.

  “Sorry. Oh, bugger all—” Petrie pulled backward and stripped off his shirt. Then he kicked off his slippers, tossed his cap down on top of them, and yanked open his trousers. The sole remaining fly button hit the wall with the force of a bullet, but was ignored as he dropped his pants and jumped free, naked as Adam.

  “Your trowel, sir,” said the Qufti, offering it with his good arm as he drew back.

  “Thank you, Ali.” Petrie took the trowel, draped his shirt over the windowledge, and vaulted up and through with amazing energy for a man of his years, so that Lewis and Ali endured no more than a few seconds of averting their eyes as his bottom and then legs and feet vanished into stygian blackness.

  “Er—what a remarkable man,” observed Lewis.

  The Qufti just nodded, rubbing his arm.

  “GIVE ME THE LAMP!” ordered Petrie, appearing in the hole for a moment. “And keep the others out of here for the present, do youunderstand? I want.a clear field.” He turned on Lewis a glare keen enough to cut through limestone. “Well? Don’t you want to see your astonishing discovery, Mr. Kensington? I’d have thought you’d have been beside yourself to be the first in!”

  “Well—ah—I’m certain I couldn’t hope to learn as much from it as you would, Professor,” said Lewis. Petrie laughed grimly. “I wonder. Never mind, boy, grab a trowel and crawl through. And don’t be an old maid! It’s a sweatbath in here.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Lewis, racing for the mouth of the shaft, and for all his embarrassment and reluctance there was still a little gleeful voice at the back of his mind singing: I’m on a real Egyptian archaeological dig with Flinders Petrie! The Father of Archaeology! Gosh!

  In the end he compromised by stripping down to his drawers, and though Petrie set him to the inglorious task of whittling away at the window to enlarge the chamber’s access while he himself worked at clearing the granite sarcophagus, Lewis spent a wonderful afternoon. His sense of rapport with the Master in his Element kept him diverted from the fact that he was an undersized cyborg wearing nothing but a pair of striped drawers, chipping fecklessly at fossilized mud while sweat dripped.from the end of his nose, one drop precisely every 43.3 seconds, or that he was trapped in a small hot enclosed space with an elderly mortal who had certain intestinal problems.

  The great man’s vocal utterances were limited to grunts of effort and growls of surprise, with the occasional “Hold the damned light over here a moment, can’t you?” But Lewis, in all the luxury of close proximity and uninterrupted except for having to pass the debris-basket out the hole on a regular basis, was learning a great deal by scanning Petrie as he worked.

  He was not learning the sort of things he had expected to learn, however. For example, his visual recordings of Petrie were not going to be as edifying as he’d hoped: the Master in his Element appeared nothing like a stately cross between Moses and Indiana Jones, as depicted in the twenty-fourth century. He resembled a naked lunatic trying to tunnel out of an asylum. That didn’t matter, though, in light of the fascinating data Lewis was picking up as he scanned Petrie’s brain activity. It looked like a lightning storm, especially through the frontal lobes. There were connections being made that were not ordinarily made in a mortal mind. Patterns in data were instantly grasped and analyzed, fundamental organizational relationships perceived that mortals did not, as a rule, perceive, and jumps of logic of dazzling clarity followed. Lewis was enchanted. He watched the cerebral fireworks display, noted theslight depression in one temple and pondered the possibility of early brain trauma rerouting Petrie’s neural connections in some marvelous inexplicable way…

  “I must say, sir, this is a great honor for me,” said Lewis hesitantly. “Meeting and actually working with a man of your extraordinary ability.”

  “Nothing to do with ability, boy,” replied Petrie, giving him a stare over the edge of the sarcophagus.

  “It’s simply a matter of paying attention to details. That’s all it is. Most of the people out here in the old days were nothing more than damned looters. Go at it with a pick and blasting powder! Find the gold!

  Didn’t care tuppence for the fact that they were crumbling history under their bloody boots.”

  “Like the library of Mendes,” said Lewis, with bitter feeling.

  “You remember that, do you?” Petrie cocked a shaggy eyebrow at him. “Remarkable; th
at was back in ‘92. You can’t have been more than an infant at the time.”

  “Well, er, yes, but my father read about it in the Times, you see,” temporized Lewis. “And he talked about it for years, and he shared your indignation, if I may say so. That would have been Naville, wouldn’t it, who found all those rooms filled with ancient papyri, and was so ham-fisted he destroyed most of them in the excavation!” His vengeful trowel stabbed clay and sent a chip whizzing into the darkness.

  “So he did,” said Petrie, picking up the chip and squinting at it briefly before setting it in the debris basket. “I called him a vandal and he very nearly called me out. Said it was ridiculous to expect an archaeologist to note the placement of items uncovered in a dig, as though one were to note where the raisins were in a plum pudding! Mark that metaphor, you see, that’s all an excavation meant to him: Dig your spoon in and gobble away! Never a thought for learning anything about what he was digging up.”

  “And meanwhile who knew what was being lost?” Lewis mourned. “Plays. Poetry. Textbooks. Histories.”

  Petrie considered him a long moment before speaking again, and Lewis was once more aware of the bright storm in the old man’s head.

  “We can never know,” Petrie said. “Damn him and everyone like him. How can we ever know the truth about the past? Historians lie; time wrecks everything. But if you’re careful, boy, if you’re methodical, if you measure and record and look for the bloody boring little details, like potsherds, and learn what they mean—you can get the dead to speak again, out of their ashes. That’s worth more than all the gold and amulets in the world, that’s the work of my life. That’s what I was born for. Nothing matters except my work.”

  “I know exactly what you mean!” said Lewis.

  “Do you?” said Petrie quietly.

  They worked on in silence for a while after that.

  At some point in the long afternoon the auroral splendor of Petrie’s mind grew particularly bright, and he cried out, “What the deuce?”