by Kage Baker
“I suppose so,” said Lewis. “All the same, this isn’t so bad. We’ve made a few discoveries, haven’t we? You’ve lots of samples of your, er, maize thing.”
“Though not the cultivars I expected,” said Mendoza, squelching on. “Odd, that. You can almost see what this place was like a thousand years ago—some vanished tribe of indigenes working out how to grow things here. No rice, or they’d have figured out rice paddies—no way to drain the marsh, the rainforest soil good for nothing, so they built these islands instead, out of terra preta. Each island a little orchard, and maybe some of them were used for amaranth or manioc crops…”
“I wonder what happened to them all? And where the terra preta came from?” said Lewis. “Surely the Company knows.”
“If all-seeing Zeus knows, he isn’t telling the likes of us,” said Mendoza. “Bloody paranoid corporate conspira—oh, my God.”
Before them rose an island. They could tell it was their island, beaten and lashed by the storm though it was, because the little clearing in which they had pitched their tents was clearly visible. It was visible because it was now halfway down the side of the hill. As they watched, it slid farther. The crates were still up on top, on the edge of what was now a precipice, but everything else had spilled down the slope and Lewis’s folding chair was already bobbing away on the flood.
“NO!”
Another cascade of mud came down, and the clearing flopped over, burying most of what they’d brought with them.
Three hours and a lot of cursing later, they sat on the hilltop once more, amid what they had been able to find of their base camp.
“It could be worse,” said Lewis. “We saved the cocktail shaker.”
“Pity about our sleeping bags, though,” said Mendoza bleakly, taking a sip of gin. “And Pan Li’s flamecube. And my tent.”
“You can have mine, of course,” said Lewis.
“But what’ll you sleep in?”
“I’m an old field campaigner,” said Lewis, with a wave of his hand. “I used to lie up in the heather with nothing but my cloak, when I even had a cloak. This is nothing to Northern Europe! Why, I’ll bet I can even get a fire going.”
Mendoza gave him an incredulous look.
“With what? All the wood is wet.”
“Only on the outside,” said Lewis and, rising, he took a hatchet and strode off in search of a dead tree. It took him a while; most of the local dead wood had already rotted down to punky, bug-infested bits. Finally he was able to scramble up and hack a few dead branches down, and further hack them into shorter lengths, and at last he staggered back with his arms full.
“Et voilà!” he said, looking around for a place to start a fire. There were no rocks, there were no patches of bare dry earth. Finally he improvised a sort of basket of strips of packing steel.
“And now,” Lewis said triumphantly, “the old field operative makes fire. What’s that, you say? We have no flint? We have no matches? We have no magnesium shavings? But we do have hyperspeed!” He held up a pair of dry sticks and then his hands became a blur, and a moment later both sticks had burst into flame.
“Nice trick,” Mendoza admitted. She watched as he coaxed the wood in the basket to catch. It smoked a great deal, but there was no denying it was on fire. She drew the rubber field poncho about her shoulders more tightly.
“So…when was your first mission?” she asked him.
“Anno Domini 142,” said Lewis proudly, rummaging through the box of field rations they’d salvaged. He drew out two pouches of Proteus Hearty Treats, wiped off mud, activated their autoheat units, and passed one to Mendoza. “Ireland. Well, I had to spend a year in Britain first, to acclimatize myself to mortals.”
“They did that to me, too,” said Mendoza. “Spent a whole year in Spain. I hated it. Damned mortals! I’d done all my prep work programming myself for the New World, and I was desperate to get out here. Then, what does the Company go and do? It sends me to England.”
“I’d have been perfectly happy staying in Britain,” said Lewis, taking a mouthful of Proteus Hearty Treats. He chewed, paused, and then said: “Is it me, or does this taste like a brownie steeped in beef gravy?”
Mendoza opened her pouch and ate some. “You’re right.” She looked into the pouch. “Not bad, though. So anyway—”
“So anyway it was Roman Britain by that time, and I was stationed at the Dr. Zeus HQ in Londinium. Oh, it was wonderful there! Heated rooms. Neighbors from all corners of the empire. Quite cosmopolitan, you know, you’d hardly think you were in a barbarian country at all. But then, of course, just as I’d got to taking clean clothes and indoor plumbing for granted—”
“Isn’t that the way it always is?”
“—I was sent to Ireland. Which was quite a contrast.”
“I’ll bet it was. What the hell would a Literature Specialist have to do in Ireland, in that era?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” said Lewis. “Learning tribal lays, and all that. So I just made the best of things. Learned to forage, make fire, get myself out of difficult situations. I did so well I was rewarded with a job in Greece for a few decades, but then—back to rainy old Eire. I got work as a druid.”
“At least I was never sent anywhere that primitive,” said Mendoza with a shudder. “How long were you in Ireland?”
“Until—” Lewis halted, frowned. “Until I…ow.” He put his hands up to his head and squinted his eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Old programming error. Something…I’m so sorry, my memory’s never been right since. I had an accident. Spent ten years in a regeneration vat, would you believe it? And ages in reprogramming therapists’ offices after that,” he babbled. He had begun to sweat profusely.
“Did it happen in Ireland?” Mendoza was watching him closely, concern in her eyes.
“I don’t know! I was in France afterward. Old World One, in the Cevennes. Lovely place. Have you ever been there?”
“No. Lewis, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, I’m just—there’s just that little glitch. Something fairly traumatic happened, apparently.” Lewis shook himself, trying to regain some composure. Mendoza reached over and took his hand in hers, which sent his composure flying again, but he smiled at her and hoped she wouldn’t notice the way his heart was pounding.
“Happens to all of us,” said Mendoza gently. “Damned tertiary-consciousness programming. The Company hides all sorts of little traumas down there, and they spring out and nail you at the worst times—usually just as you’re about to do something Dr. Zeus doesn’t want you to do. Like me with Nicholas.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Lewis, sitting very still so she wouldn’t take her hand away.
“You should have seen the panic attack I had the first time some mortal suggested I might be a Jew,” said Mendoza. “Complete hysterical collapse. Utterly humiliating. All pulled out of suppressed memories of being in the dungeons of the Inquisition. And the nightmares…”
“I have nightmares, too,” said Lewis sadly.
“Like last night?”
“Yes. Usually…I’m lost somewhere, and there are these tremendous domed hills or, or mounds or something…and then I’m being pulled down a hole. Or a tunnel. It’s hot and suffocating and I’m trapped…and I wake up yelling, which doesn’t much impress—well, anyone who happens to hear me.”
Mendoza gave him a thoughtful look.
“Well,” she said finally, “maybe romance just doesn’t work for immortals, eh, Lewis? It certainly didn’t work for me. And maybe it’s just as well. No passion, no pain. Good friendship’s just as important, after all. Maybe even more so.”
She withdrew her hand.
“To get back to the subject of roughing it—I’ve heard stories of some of these older field operatives who are really good at it. Don’t take any gear with them at all. They’ve trained themselves to sleep upright, only it isn’t sleep, it’s a sort of altered consciousness—like their perception of tim
e and the exterior world changes. They just sort of become one with the landscape and blend in. Have you ever done that?”
Lewis shook his head. “Though I’ve known a few who did. People who have stayed out in the field too long. They’re certainly the best at what they do, and some of them can do some remarkable things…one fellow I knew called it stripping down to the machine. Cutting away the inessentials. They’re not bothered by rain or snow or heat.”
“See, I think that would be marvelous. You’d be sort of this super Zen master ninja cyborg,” said Mendoza. “You wouldn’t need anything. What stories they must have to tell!”
“Except that they don’t tell them,” said Lewis.
“What?”
“They’re not great talkers. I suppose that becomes inessential, too. They don’t work well with other operatives, much, and they can’t work around mortals at all.”
“Oh.” She lowered her gaze to the little fire. “Well, it’s still an interesting idea.”
They retired early, Mendoza crawling into the sole remaining bivvy and Lewis wrapping himself up in his poncho in one of the crates. He lay there a while, cold and uncomfortable, listening to distant thunder. Gradually the thunder moved closer, and the lightning became more frequent. He opened his eyes and looked up just as a blue-white flash revealed dozens of insects, including a tarantula, making their determined way over the edge of the crate, all of them looking for a warm place to spend the night.
“Yikes!” Lewis nearly levitated up and out of the crate, landing with a squelch in the long grass.
“What?” Mendoza leaned up on her elbows.
“Just, er, a few bugs,” said Lewis, leaping to his feet and smacking at something crawling up his arm. “It’s all right—”
“Look—” Mendoza unzipped the flap. “This is dumb. Crawl in here with me. There’s room enough and we can lie back to back, okay? Chaste as anything.”
“Okay,” said Lewis, and scrambled into the bivvy. Mendoza zipped it shut again.
They slept, chaste as anything. The rain began to fall again. The night filled with the scent of green leaves.
Lewis opened his eyes. Sunlight, above his face, sparkling on water drops. Early early sunlight, just after a gentle misty dawn. He could glimpse blue sky through the canopy, and a flash of color as a macaw streaked by overhead. The storm had rolled through.
None of which made any impression on him, however, because he was lying on his back and Mendoza was resting her head on his chest, and had thrown one arm over him, and was holding him close.
He lay there, scarcely daring to breathe.
Lord God Apollo, this is Lewis. Remember me? I don’t suppose you’d remember, actually, I’m not the sort of fellow people remember much, but anyway here I am, and I still pray to you occasionally even though I’m a cyborg now, and I was just wondering: I don’t suppose you’d be willing to stop time, right this minute? Right here, in this moment, for the rest of Eternity?
She was warm. Her hair was fragrant with something. Roses? Her arm was bare. She was breathing quietly as a child.
He could almost—
“Mh…Nicholas?”
He felt her come awake, utterly relaxed one moment and utterly alert the next. He squeezed his eyes shut.
She started violently, and he heard her draw a sharp breath. A frozen moment of immobility; then, with great care, she drew away from Lewis and turned on her side, with her back to him.
She made no sound, but he felt the slight trembling as she wept.
Lewis waited an hour before stretching and yawning loudly.
“My gosh, the sun is shining!” he announced.
“And we made it through the night without being washed down the hill,” said Mendoza in a bright voice. She turned to face him, red-eyed but calm and collected.
“What shall we do today?” said Lewis. “Other than pay a heck of a lot of attention to barometrical readings?”
“Hang things out to dry,” she said, leaning up on one elbow to peer out through the mesh. “And I guess we really should see if we can dig out any more of the gear that got buried. Just so some Victorian explorer doesn’t stumble on it and claim it’s evidence for colonists from Atlantis.”
A few strands of her hair were stuck to the side of her face. Lewis, unable to stop himself, reached out and smoothed them back. She pretended not to notice.
“Do you want to go any farther afield to look for your maize?”
“Teosinte. No…I think I’ve found pretty much everything there is to find, there,” she said. “I’m starting to be more interested in the place itself.”
Lewis nodded. “It must have been quite an engineering feat on somebody’s part.”
“There had to have been a huge resident population to build it all, and then to keep the land in production. I want to do some tests on the fruit trees here, to see if there’s much genetic difference from the cultivars grown in other parts of Amazonia.”
“Okay,” said Lewis, unzipping the mesh and crawling out before the conversation could get more botanocentric. He dressed himself, performed such ablutions as were possible, and wandered off to see if he could find any more guavas for breakfast.
There was a bearing tree just at the edge of the slide precipice. He approached with caution, so busy scanning for unstable earth that he didn’t notice the view until it was right before his eyes. When he did notice it, though, he stopped in his tracks, openmouthed.
The land had become a shallow sea, sky-reflecting as a mirror, brilliant blue. The high mounds rose from the water, an archipelago of green gardens, and on their lower slopes grew purple flowers. Macaws sailed out on brilliant wings, blue and gold, scarlet and green, between the islands. All of it in dreamlike silence, but for the rustling of their wings; not a bird or a monkey cried anywhere.
Mendoza came up behind him and gazed out.
“Beautiful,” she said.
“Another Eden,” said Lewis, but she shook her head.
“Mortals built this place,” she said, and went to the guava tree and picked the fruit.
They put their waders and ponchos back on and made their slow way down the hill after breakfast, paralleling the smooth chocolate-colored track of the slide, digging into the mud at the bottom with camp shovels. They found Lewis’s sleeping bag, very much the worse for wear, and a case of bottled water.
“And there was great rejoicing,” said Mendoza, hoisting it on her shoulder. “Let me get this up the hill into the shade.”
“I think I see the flamecube,” said Lewis, poking with the handle of his shovel.
“Oh, good. That’d really give the Von Danikenists something to talk about, wouldn’t it, if that got left behind?” She set the water down and came back to peer into the slush. Lewis raked with the upper edge of the shovel and levered up a corner of the cube. Before it sank into the muck once more, Mendoza was able to reach down and grab hold.
“Oh, no, you should have let me—”
“It’s all right, just back up a little so I can—”
“Really, let me—”
So busy were they that neither one of them noticed the mortal’s approach.
He was within arrowshot when they looked up and saw him at last, and then they stared in disbelief.
He was an ancient mortal, poling along toward them in a flat-bottomed skiff. His boat was elaborately carved to represent some kind of water bird. It moved without a sound across the glassy water, leaving no more wake than a dream. His own garments were elaborate, too, woven cotton in several colors and a headdress of bright macaw feathers, and little pendant ornaments of shell and hammered gold.
He brought his skiff up to the edge of the mound and stopped, leaning on the pole.
“Good morning,” he said.
They did a fast linguistic access and realized that he was speaking in a Taino dialect, though his accent was strange and archaic.
“Good morning, sir,” Lewis replied, in Taino.
“You wou
ldn’t happen to be gods, would you?” inquired the old man.
“No, sir,” said Lewis. “Only servants of a god.”
“Ah,” said the old man. “Well, that would explain the mud all over you. Tell me, children, is the lord Maketaurie Guyuaba anywhere about?”
“Er—no,” said Lewis, doing a fast access on Taino mythology. Maketaurie Guyuaba: lord of Coaybay (land of the dead) beyond the sunset. Hastily he transmitted the reference to Mendoza.
“What a pity,” said the old man, cocking an eye at the hilltop. “I had so hoped to speak to someone important. That would be his camp, up there, where his effulgence shone out the other evening?”
“No, sir, that’s our camp,” said Lewis. “The, er, effulgence was a sort of lamp, this one in fact,” and Mendoza held it up, “but I’m afraid it washed down the hill in the storm, and we’ve just been digging it out.”
“Your lamp?” The old man looked askance at them, mildly amused. “Yes, very likely indeed. You’d best get the mud cleaned off it, children, or your master will beat you. I know what servants will get up to, when the lord of the house is away. When may I find him at home?”
“I’m afraid he lives—er—that way,” said Lewis, waving an arm, “Many moons—ah—quite a long distance off. He sent us here on a great bird to, er…”
Gather plants for him, transmitted Mendoza.
“Gather plants for him, and he’s sending the bird back to collect us in a few days,” Lewis finished.
“A great bird. I see,” said the old man, in a tone of polite disdain. He coughed delicately and said: “The fact is, I had hoped to consult with him on a matter of some importance.”
“We would be happy to deliver a message to him,” said Lewis.