Gods and Pawns (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “The fever broke, anyway. Did you think you were painting again?” she asked, and gave him another spoonful of soup before he could reply.

  “Has she been here?” he demanded, wheezing.

  “Who?”

  “Mevrouw Van Drouten!”

  “No, she hasn’t. Don’t worry, Jan. We can get by the next month or two, if we don’t see her.”

  He lay still a moment, thinking that over, as she fed him soup. “You sold some of the stock,” he guessed, noting the bare places on the walls. “You found another buyer!”

  She smiled at him, and rubbed her eyes with her free hand. With the light full on her face, as it was, he was struck by how much silver was in her hair, and felt a pang at what she’d endured with him. And still another baby on the way, Jesus God…If only they hadn’t loved each other.

  “A gentleman came to see your stuff,” Catharina told him, determinedly cheerful. “I explained we didn’t have anything of yours for sale right now, you know, I played up how fast your stuff sells, and I think I’ve almost got him talked into commissioning something. And he did buy a couple of the old canvases. So, you see? You don’t have to depend on the little witch paintings. You’re good enough to paint your own work, too.”

  “As long as it sells.”

  “It’ll sell, my heart.”

  He pushed himself up on the pillows, took the soup from her in his shaky hands, and tilted the bowl to drink. Handing it back to her, he gasped: “If I can talk him into an allegory—say a nice big canvas, maybe three or four figures on it, eh, that we can get a good price for? Maybe a heroic theme!—Lord God, if only I can stretch my muscles for a little with some reds and violets, won’t that be something?”

  “I had an idea about going to the priests, too,” Catharina told him seriously. “They’ve got the money for paintings, and they know what’s good.”

  “That’s right, they do.” He turned and considered his studio. “Can we afford a good sized canvas? Or even paper and charcoal. I’ll get ideas, Catsi, I want to be able to block out a study.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, and bent to kiss him. “You sleep some more, now. Think about your allegory. We’ll manage this somehow.”

  Jan lay still listening to her descend the stairs, and tried to close his eyes and sleep again; but the light in the room was too strong. He looked at the beautifully empty spots where the old paintings had been, and his eye filled them with new canvases. Should he rework Diana and Her Nymphs? With each figure in a different-colored gown, pink, green, purple! Or something else classical, one of the Muses maybe? Pull out all the stops, lots of little emblematic detail, a painting the viewer could mull over for hours! Or a religious one the priests would be sure to like, yes, say a risen Christ with a robe scarlet as the blood of martyrs…

  He glanced over at the cabinet resentfully, the black void that had swallowed up so much of his strength, so much of his time. What a devil’s bargain! And what a paradox, to spend his days in darkness to preserve the light.

  When the idea hit him, it seemed to shake him physically, it was so powerful. He gaped at the blank wall, seeing the allegory there in all its detail. It wasn’t Diana and Her Nymphs he’d rework, no. Another allegory entirely. It would be his revenge.

  Sliding his skinny legs from under the blanket, he staggered upright and found a stick of charcoal. He lurched across the room and braced himself at the wall, blocking in the cartoon in a few quick swipes on the plaster, just far enough to see that his initial instinct for the composition had been correct. The charcoal dust was making him choke; but everything made him choke these days. Dropping the charcoal, he wiped his hands on his nightshirt and looked around for his breeches. This couldn’t wait. He needed pen and ink.

  Van Drouten walked through the echoing rooms of the old house in the Herengracht, which had been her home for nearly a thousand years. She had run the Company operation out of it, in one mortal disguise or other, since 1434, and every room was furnished with memories.

  Here was the parlor where Spinoza had embraced her, before leaving for Rijnsburg; in this chamber, she still had the chair in which Rembrandt had sat when he’d come to supper. Upstairs was the bed in which Casanova, nasty fellow, had romped with her mortal maid. The kitchen had long since been modernized, but still around the baseboard ran the painted tiles at which Van Gogh had stared unseeing, gaunt young man with such good intentions, while he’d wolfed down the hot meal she’d offered him along with advice: that he might serve God best by painting His light.

  And here was the broom closet hiding the so-narrow passage leading up to the attic rooms where she’d sheltered so many Jewish children from the Nazis, too many to count as they’d been smuggled through, but she could still summon each little frightened face before her mind’s eye.

  It was a quiet house, now, in this last age of the world, and her work was nearly over. There were only a handful of Company operatives left on duty in Amsterdam, where once they had come and gone like bees in a hive. Van Drouten sighed as she climbed the stair to her room. She had always liked a noisy house. She liked life. Some immortals grew weary and sick of humanity after a few millennia, but she never had.

  Her private quarters, at least, were still comfortable and cluttered. She edged past centuries’ worth of souvenirs on her way to the clothes closet, where she slipped out of her gray gown. This time she remembered to take off the little cloisonné pin before she hung it up, the emblem of a clock face without hands, and when she had slipped into denim coveralls she refastened it on the front pocket.

  The pin was not a favorite piece of jewelry. Its supposed intent was to honor those who had the job of traveling through time, effectively defeating time’s ravages; that was why the clock had no hands. Company policy, however, had recently tightened to require all operatives of her class to wear the badge at all times, to enable them to be readily identified by Company security techs on Company property.

  Van Drouten avoided her own gaze in the mirror, steadfastly refusing to think as she made certain the pin was securely fastened and visible. There were just things you couldn’t think about. Hadn’t that always been so? The brevity of mortal life, for example. You had to keep yourself distracted from the sad things. You had to have an escape.

  She glimpsed over her shoulder the painting in its alcove, and turned to regard it with a certain pleasurable nostalgia. It had cost her a lot, good hard cash out of her own household budget, because the Company had abandoned Vermeer once they’d got what they wanted; but she had never been sorry she’d spent the money. The picture gave her an escape, always. For a little while.

  The Empty Room, 1675

  Catharina, red-eyed with weeping and a little drunk, had looked up at her as she’d stepped into the chilly parlor.

  “You’re out of luck, my dear,” she’d told Van Drouten. “No more paintings for your damned cheap doctor. Jan’s dead.”

  “I heard,” she said, as gently as she could. “I am so sorry. How are the children?”

  “Scared. They’re at Maria’s.”

  “They’ll be all right, I’m certain,” said Van Drouten, wishing she could say more. Clearing her throat, she continued: “That was Leeuwenhoek I passed outside, wasn’t it? The microscopist? Was he able to help you at all?”

  “Oh, no.” Catharina gave a sour laugh. “Respectable Mynheer Leeuwenhoek is going to be appointed executor of the estate, if you must know. He’s only interested in seeing that all the debts get paid. So if you’re looking for a bargain, you’d better hurry. They’re coming in to do the inventory this afternoon. And you’d better pay cash!”

  “I have cash,” said Van Drouten, hefting the small chest she’d brought. Catharina looked at her sidelong.

  “How much?”

  “Seven hundred guilders.”

  Catharina put her hands to her face. “Jesus God,” she said. “All right; come on upstairs with me now, quick! I’ll show you something.

  “Maybe
you’ll think it’s funny,” she continued, as they hurried together up the echoing stair. “It was his little joke, you see? Maybe you’ll want it. Maybe you’ll be angry. I don’t give a damn either way anymore, to tell you the truth, but it’ll be yours for seven hundred guilders. Here.”

  She pushed open a door and Van Drouten followed her into the studio. It had the reek of a sickroom and was bone-chilling cold, and canvases were stacked against the walls. The easel was bare; the paints were nowhere to be seen, and the sheets and blanket had already been stripped from the narrow cot. There was no sign of the camera obscura.

  “Looking for the magic cabinet?” Catharina grunted, rummaging through the stacks. “You’re too late for that; we sold it a year ago. Even a dying man has to eat, eh? Here. Look at this.” She pulled out a painting, held it up with a defiant smile. “It’s called The Visit of the Holy Women to the Tomb of Christ.”

  Van Drouten caught her breath.

  “Oh, it’s wonderful! How clever!”

  “But your pissy doctor won’t want it, will he?” Catharina said fiercely. “Not enough blue and yellow!”

  “This isn’t for him,” said Van Drouten. “This is for me. I liked Jan, Catharina. I liked you both.”

  “Then much good may this do you,” Catharina replied, and tossed it at her. Van Drouten dropped the chest, putting up both hands to seize the painting. The chest burst open when it hit the floor, and guilders flooded out in a torrent of bright coin, ran and rolled into the four corners of the room.

  Catharina, looking down at it, just laughed and shook her head.

  In the street outside, late-night traffic roared and hissed along, and far up the pinpoint satellites orbited against the stars; but within the alcove Van Drouten regarded a spring morning in ancient Jerusalem, in a place of silver olive trees and white lilies, and green grass beaded with dew. Mortals, and God, could make such places; a cyborg couldn’t. A cyborg could only preserve them. Van Drouten blinked back tears as she sank into the picture, escaped her immortal life and its immortal terrors for a moment…

  There were the three women. Little Maria was at the left, peeping from the angle of the olive tree, her face bright with anticipation; Catharina was in the center of the canvas, her hands lifted in elaborate astonishment, her face haggard with bitter experience. There was the tomb of Christ, but it was not a stone rolled back that disclosed the interior. It was a cabinet door standing wide, hinges and all, with a lens-tube in its center.

  And the third woman, Van Drouten herself, was highlighted against the sooty blackness of the tomb’s walls. She smiled out at the viewer and offered forth in her hands the linen cloth on which the miracle was printed, in tones of gray and black: the trick, the joke, the alchemical cheat, the negative image of the man. It wasn’t art; but there on the treated cloth his light had been captured for all time, a bargain at thirty pieces of good hard silver.

  A Night on the Barbary Coast

  I’d been walking for five days, looking for Mendoza. The year was 1850.

  Actually, walking doesn’t really describe traveling through that damned vertical wilderness in which she lived. I’d crawled uphill on hands and knees, which is no fun when you’re dressed as a Franciscan friar, with sandals and beads and the whole nine yards of brown burlap robe. I’d slid downhill, which is no fun either, especially when the robe rides up in back. I’d waded across freezing cold creeks and followed thready little trails through ferns, across forest floors in permanent darkness under towering redwoods. I’m talking gloom. One day the poets will fall in love with Big Sur, and after them the beats and hippies, but if vampires ever discover the place they’ll go nuts over it.

  Mendoza isn’t a vampire, though she is an immortal being with a lot of problems, most of which she blames on me.

  I’m an immortal being with a lot of problems, too. Like father, like daughter.

  After most of a week, I finally came out on a patch of level ground about three thousand feet up. I was standing there looking down on clouds floating above the Pacific Ocean, and feeling kind of funny in the pit of my stomach as a result—and suddenly saw the Company-issue processing credenza on my left, nicely camouflaged. I’d found Mendoza’s camp at last.

  There was her bivvy tent, all right, and a table with a camp stove, and five pots with baby trees growing in them. Everything but the trees had a dusty, abandoned look.

  Cripes, I thought to myself, how long since she’s been here? I looked around uneasily, wondering if I ought to yoo-hoo or something, and that was when I noticed her signal coming from…up? I craned back my head.

  An oak tree rose from the mountain face behind me, huge and branching wide, and high up there among the boughs Mendoza leaned. She gazed out at the sea; but with such a look of ecstatic vacancy in her eyes, I guessed she was seeing something a lot farther away than that earthly horizon.

  I cleared my throat.

  The vacant look went away fast, and there was something inhuman in the sharp way her head swung around.

  “Hi, honey,” I said. She looked down and her eyes focused on me. She has black eyes, like mine, only mine are jolly and twinkly and bright. Hers are like flint. Always been that way, even when she was a little girl.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Joseph?” she said at last.

  “I missed you, too, baby,” I said. “Want to come down? We need to talk.”

  Muttering, she descended through the branches.

  “Nice trees,” I remarked. “Got any coffee?”

  “I can make some,” she said. I kept my mouth shut as she poked around in her half-empty rations locker, and I still kept it shut when she hauled out her bone-dry water jug and stared at it in a bewildered kind of way before remembering where the nearest stream was, and I didn’t even remark on the fact that she had goddam moss in her hair, though what I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs was: How can you live like this?

  No, I played it smart. Pretty soon we were sitting at either end of a fallen log, sipping our respective mugs of coffee, just like family.

  “Mm, good java,” I lied.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Okay, kid, I’ll tell you,” I said. “The Company is sending me up to San Francisco on a job. I need a field botanist, and I had my pick of anybody in the area, so I decided on you.”

  I braced myself for an explosion, because sometimes Mendoza’s a little touchy about surprises. But she was silent for a moment, with that bewildered expression again, and I just knew she was accessing her chronometer because she’d forgotten what year this was.

  “San Francisco, huh?” she said. “But I went through Yerba Buena a century ago, Joseph. I did a complete survey of all the endemics. Specimens, DNA codes, the works. Believe me, there wasn’t anything to interest Dr. Zeus.”

  “Well, there might be now,” I said. “And that’s all you need to know until we get there.”

  She sighed. “So it’s like that?”

  “It’s like that. But, hey, we’ll have a great time! There’s a lot more up there now than fog and sand dunes.”

  “I’ll say there is,” she said grimly. “I just accessed the historical record for October 1850. There’s a cholera epidemic going on. There’s chronic arson. The streets are half quicksand. You really take me to some swell places, don’t you?”

  “How long has it been since you ate dinner in a restaurant?” I coaxed. She started to say something sarcastic in reply, looked down at whatever was floating in the bottom of her coffee, and shuddered.

  “See? It’ll be a nice change of scenery,” I told her, as she tossed the dregs over her shoulder. I tossed out my coffee, too, in a simpatico gesture. “The Road to Frisco! A fun-filled musical romp! Two wacky cyborgs plus one secret mission equals laughs galore!”

  “Oh, shut up,” she told me, but rose to strike camp.

  It took us longer to get down out of the mountains than I would have liked, because Mendoza insisted on bringing her five potted trees, wh
ich were some kind of endangered species, so we had to carry them all the way to the closest Company receiving terminal in Monterey, by which time I was ready to drop the damn things down any convenient cliff. But away they went to some Company botanical garden, and, after requisitioning equipment and a couple of horses, we finally set off for San Francisco.

  I guess if we had been any other two people, we’d have chatted about bygone times as we rode along. It’s never safe to drag up old memories with Mendoza, though. We didn’t talk much, all the way up El Camino Real, through the forests and across the scrubby hills. It wasn’t until we’d left San Jose and were picking our way along the shore of the back bay, all black ooze and oyster shells, that Mendoza looked across at me and said: “We’re carrying a lot of lab equipment with us. I wonder why?”

  I just shrugged.

  “Whatever the Company’s sending us after, they want it analyzed on the spot,” she said thoughtfully. “So possibly they’re not sure that it’s really what they want. But they need to find out.”

  “Could be.”

  “And your only field expert is being kept on a need-to-know basis, which means it’s something important,” she continued. “And they’re sending you, even though you’re still working undercover in the Church, being Father Rubio or whoever. Aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “You look even more like Mephistopheles than usual in that robe, did I ever tell you that? Anyway—why would the Company send a friar into a town full of gold miners, gamblers, and prostitutes?” Mendoza speculated. “You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. And where does botany fit in?”

  “I guess we’ll see, huh?”

  She glared at me sidelong and grumbled to herself a while, but that was okay. I had her interested in the job, at least. She was losing that thousand-year-stare that worried me so much.

  I wasn’t worrying about the job at all.