by Kage Baker
In a way, it was both. It was the Company HQ for Suleyman, Executive Facilitator, Regional Sector Head for North Africa. It had also become a place of sanctuary, a harem, and a family home.
Victor walked unhurriedly toward the blue door. He neared it and it opened from within, silently, and he stepped through: a white man in a white suit disappearing into a white wall. The door closed.
A mortal servant made obeisance to him, and led him down a dark cool passageway. Halfway along, another immortal stepped out from a side passage a mortal wouldn’t have noticed and fell into step beside Victor. Victor had expected this. He didn’t react.
“Is it another plague?” inquired Latif. He was Suleyman’s son-in-immortality and he was lean and tall, with the harsh aquiline features of a black corsair.
“Yes,” Victor told him. “But—is Nan here presently?”
Latif raised an eyebrow. “No,” he replied. “She’s back in Paris.”
“Just as well, I suppose,” said Victor.
“You have some news for her?”
“Possibly,” said Victor. Neither of them said anything more until the mortal had led them farther into the depths of the house and up a flight of echoing tiled stairs. They came to a door and the servant bowed, made to slip away. Latif put a hand on his shoulder.
“Tea,” he ordered. He looked aslant at Victor. “Two glasses, one chlorilar cup.”
The mortal was mildly shocked but hastened to obey.
“Come in, Victor, please,” said someone with a deep voice from beyond the door. Latif opened the door and they went in.
Suleyman was seated at a low table, upon which a shatrang board had been set up. Four mortal children knelt opposite. Three looked up to stare as Victor and Latif entered but the fourth kept her gaze fixed on the board. Her little fists were clenched. Seeing that a game was in progress, the immortals waited. As they watched, the child reached out and moved one of the pieces.
“You want to sacrifice your Vizier?” Suleyman inquired. Horrified, the child shook her head. Suleyman glanced up at the immortals. “You were distracted by my guest,” he told the child. “You may withdraw the move.”
“Thank you, lord,” she said, and hastily put the game piece back.
“You need to learn concentration to the point where nothing, not the walls of the house collapsing where you sit, can distract you from the game,” concluded Suleyman, and rising from the table he ordered the game positions to print. He collected the hard copy from the rosewood console housing his credenza and passed out the sheets to the children. “That’s all for today. Take these home and study them this week. And, tell your parents, tuition is due with the next lesson! The poor old tutor has to be able to buy bread, after all.”
There were some giggles at that, there were uncoordinated salaams, and the children ran from the room, waving their homework as they pattered away through the house. The game pieces retracted slowly into the tabletop and an inlaid panel slid into place above them. Suleyman turned his attention to Victor.
“It’s China, this time,” said Victor. “Nangjing.”
“I was afraid of that,” Suleyman replied. “Sit down, won’t you?”
Victor sat. The servant brought the tea. The mortal knelt a respectful distance away as the immortals drank tea and chatted about weather, global politics, the investment market. He watched, fascinated, as the white man sipped from the cheap disposable cup. Had Lord Suleyman intended an insult to his guest? But they seemed on the best of terms.
Victor finished his tea and crushed the cup in an easy gesture. The mortal stared when Victor withdrew a little roll of transparent chlorilar bags from an inner pocket and tore one off. He tucked his used cup inside, sealed it with fastidious care, and set it on the tray. The mortal knit his brows in comprehension. Some biohazard? Perhaps the white man had been ill. That would explain why he was still wearing his gloves. The servant made a mental note to tip the bag down the fusion hopper without touching it.
When they had refreshed themselves, Latif gestured for the tea things to be removed and the servant departed with them. Victor leaned forward and in a low voice related the events of the previous thirty-six hours.
“Damn,” said Latif, when he’d finished. “How long does Aegeus think you’ll put up with this, anyway? He’s got to know you know they’re working together.”
“He knows I have no choice, so my opinion doesn’t matter,” said Victor wearily. “And they aren’t allies at all. Aegeus will let Labienus do his dirty work until the day of the Silence, and then he’ll have him arrested and condemned, with sincerest outrage, no doubt. Labienus is perfectly aware the Company is allowing him to lay waste to the mortals. He despises Aegeus for a hypocrite. And he’ll make damned sure he takes out Aegeus’s faction before they can arrest him.”
“If we’re lucky, they’ll be so focused on getting each other they won’t pay attention to the rest of us,” said Latif.
“Oh, they have their plans for the rest of us,” Suleyman told him.
“Me, at least,” said Victor with a bitter laugh. “I stumbled across the memo. Probably a good idea, in my case, but it really would be a shame about the rest of you.”
“We’ll do what we can, Victor,” Suleyman said, and reached out to thump Victor on the shoulder in sympathy. Victor flinched at his touch.
“Careful, for God’s sake,” he murmured. “You never know.”
There was a brief awkward silence and then Latif said: “So what was that you said about finding somebody?”
Victor sighed. He explained what he’d seen in Labienus’s correspondence files. The other two men listened closely. Before he had finished, Latif was groaning and putting his face in his hands.
“That would be just like poor old Kalugin,” he said, leaning backward. “To be so clueless he’d go to Labienus, of all people, with whatever it was he’d found! It had to have been some big smoking gun about the Sattes virus, wouldn’t you think? Since it was hitting where he was working right about then? And Labienus must have had him taken into custody as soon as he’d finished his job. Maybe even invited him up to MacKenzie Base to make a full report. Kalugin would have gone, too.”
“But Kalugin’s not in any of the storage bunkers,” said Suleyman, stroking his beard. “If we knew where he’d gone after his mission—”
“Where do you go on leave that’s near the Arctic Circle?” Latif wondered. “What the hell is there to do? I know Russians don’t mind it up there, but still. Why’d he take his R and R in such a godforsaken—”
“Unless he didn’t,” Suleyman said in a dull voice. Victor looked up at him.
“But his record says—”
“Nan’s been proceeding on the assumption, all these years, that that was true,” said Suleyman. “He went on leave and then disappeared. But, you know, he generally used his leave time to visit Nan. Why didn’t he do the same on that last occasion?”
“What was his mission?” demanded Victor, as an idea occurred to him. There followed a silence as the realization hit all three of them: Kalugin had been a Marine Salvage Specialist, which meant that his work involved securing things the Company wanted that would otherwise be lost in shipwrecks. Unfortunately for Kalugin, the most economical and effective way to accomplish this usually involved going down with the ships when they sank.
Suleyman closed his eyes. The silence resumed and deepened, as all three immortals accessed swiftly through the historical record for the year 2083. There wasn’t as much as there might have been; the Sattes outbreak had caused an immense event shadow on history in that year. Mortals had been so preoccupied with the horrors of the plague they hadn’t documented much else. But Suleyman found it at last, focusing on entries relating to the Russian navy.
On 21 July 2083, the navy had launched a prototype miniature submersible, the Alyosha, powered by an experimental fusion drive—which would have been the first successful one, if the Alyosha hadn’t been lost that day in the Bering Sea.
<
br /> The record stated that her sole crewman had been awarded honors posthumously, but his name was not recorded.
Suleyman grimaced and transmitted his findings to Latif and Victor. Latif swore and jumped to his feet. “I bet they left him down there,” he yelled. “Oh, man, he’s still in the damn submarine—”
Victor bit his lower lip. He bit it hard enough to draw blood, and a bright drop welled. He sighed and drew out a tissue, dabbing the blood away carefully. Then he busied himself with taking out another chlorilar bag and sealing the tissue inside it. He put the bag in his coat pocket and said, in a preternaturally calm voice, “We mustn’t tell Nan.”
The Aleutian Basin, 25 August 2330
“What the hell are these?” Latif demanded, scowling through the viewport. “Volcanic vents? What do they call them, black smokers? These aren’t on the maps.”
“It may have been in somebody’s interest not to report them,” observed Victor.
“Maybe,” said Latif. “Or maybe whoever had the job of mapping this stretch just blew it off. Not a lot goes on up here anymore.”
Victor nodded.
“Well, this is really peachy,” continued Latif. “All these fumaroles spewing out sediment just full of metallic crap. You could hide anything down here; the sediment would bury it and the metals would keep anybody’s sensors from picking it up afterward. No wonder nobody ever found the Alyosha.”
“Do we have any chance of finding it now?” asked Victor.
“If we go to blue-sound scan for this section of the grid, we might,” Latif replied. He gave the console new orders. Then he leaned back in his seat, stretching. “And we wait. You want a beer?”
“I wouldn’t mind one,”Victor replied. Latif got up and paced back through the cabin to the refrigeration unit. He pulled out two beers and returned to the console, as the Met Agwe continued its underwater search. The immortals sat drinking their Red Stripes, staring out into the gloom.
“You’re not going through all that business with disposable cups and bags right now, I notice,” said Latif.
“There are no mortals here I might infect,” Victor replied.
“You really have no idea when it goes on or off?”
Victor shook his head. “Something in my programming of which I’m unaware, perhaps. Or a signal Labienus generates, when he requires my particular talent. As far as I know I’ve only been used twice—three times, perhaps. I test my blood on a weekly basis, but I’ve never been able to predict an episode.”
“Mm.” Latif shook his head. “Whatever goes down when the Silence falls, I hope Labienus gets it in the neck.”
“He doesn’t see himself as an evil man, you know,” said Victor. “He sees the mortals as the source of all evil. His dream is for a restoration of the Golden Age: no more wars, no more pollution, no more wretched little human race. Only a few of us immortals, flitting about like fairies through the replanted forests and happy beasts.”
“That’d get old real fast,” growled Latif.
“Aegeus, on the other hand,” said Victor, “doesn’t want the mortals exterminated. They’re an exploitable resource. What would we do for waiters and busboys, after all? To say nothing of other uses. We’ll still need them to compose their music and paint their paintings and write their novels for us to enjoy, since we immortals are incapable of creating art.”
“Well, we weren’t made to create things. We were made to save them,” reflected Latif. “Although … I don’t think I’d agree that we don’t create art. You remember Houbert?”
Victor rolled his eyes.
“All right, I know he was a big…” Words failed Latif. “But you have to admit he was a genius at design. Those pavilions he’d put up for his parties. All the special effects. I was at a New Year’s Eve ball once where he … “His voice trailed off. Victor looked at him. “You know who else tried to create?” Latif went on at last. “Lewis. You remember him? The little Literature Preserver we’ve never found?”
Victor shivered. “I remember him.”
“I knew him from the time I was a neophyte, at New World One. He was sort of pathetic, but a nice guy. I ran into him on a job one time in New Zealand, back in the early part of the last century,” said Latif. “At a transport terminal. He was working on an adventure novel he’d spent years writing. He’d found an old picture of a mortal who used to work for the Company, some spy named Edward Bell-Fairfax. Lewis was fascinated with him. Wrote this epic about him being some kind of Victorian James Bond. Showed me some of it.”
“That’s rather unusual, I must admit. One of us, writing? Was it any good?”
Latif shrugged. “I don’t know.” He frowned out at the dim world beyond the viewport, turning the beer bottle in his long hand. “It was crap, actually. But he tried. He had the inspiration, for all the good it did him. At least he wasn’t one of those poor amnesiac bastards we pulled out of the Bureau of Punitive Medicine—” He leaned forward abruptly and peered at the screen where the blue-sound images were playing out. “What’s that?”
Victor ordered the Met Agwe to pause, then proceed forward slowly. “It’s cylindrical.”
“It’s about the right size.”
“It seems to be in one piece.” Victor called up the single surviving photograph of the Alyosha. The two immortals compared it to the image on the screen.
“Mostly in one piece,” amended Latif after a moment. He activated the sensors again. They listened, sifting through the gibberish that was dissolved iron, copper, zinc …
Latif stiffened. “There.” He enhanced the image, the sensor readings. The two immortals sat there gazing at the screen a moment before Latif rose in his seat. He stalked back to the alcove where his pressure suit hung waiting, silent as the man entombed five fathoms below the Met Agwe‘s keel.
Fez, 9 July 2355
Suleyman takes out the Viziers, ivory and ebony, and compares them.
They’re more similar than other pieces in the game, for all that the artist was depicting different cultures. One is robed in a djellaba, one wears a tailcoat, but both look wise and dishonest. Both smile, fingering their beards. About the feet of both, reaching up with gestures of supplication, are carved smaller figures: the envoys of conquered tribes? Toadies? Petitioners? Lesser ministers?
CHAPTER 3
The Masters of the Universe at a Private Meeting, York, 2318:
They Deal with the Breaking Scandal
“It’s not fair,” said Bugleg miserably. “We didn’t make that Options Research place. We didn’t send anybody there.”
“Well—we sort of did,” said Rappacini.
“Some of us did,” said Freestone. “Not me, though.”
“It was one of them made it really awful,” Rossum pointed out. “All we wanted was a place to do tests on the operatives. We never said to torture them.”
“We just wanted a way for them to not be,” agreed Bugleg.
“If only nobody had found out about Options Research,” said Dippel with a sigh.
They were scientists. They were all young men, and though they had been born to different races and nations, there was something disconcertingly similar in their smooth uneasy faces. Their clothing was uniform as garments can be without actually being uniforms, plain functional garb, no complicated fastenings, no particular style. They sat around an oval table with a polished white surface that invited scribbling. In the center was a can of bright-colored doodlepens, which had been placed there to encourage creativity. Nobody was drawing anything on the table, however, creative or otherwise.
“We shouldn’t have put one of the big mean ones in charge, I guess,” said Dippel.
“That was probably a mistake,” admitted Rappacini.
“And he didn’t even find a way to terminate them,” said Freestone, shaking his head. “Even though he was supposed to be superintelligent.”
“They’re all supposed to be superintelligent,” objected Rossum.
“Maybe they can’t be termin
ated after all,” said Rappacini.
“What did we have to go make them not die for?” wondered Bugleg, staring at the table.
“Well, it seemed like a good idea when we came up with it,” said Dippel.
“But now they’re really mad at us,” said Bugleg.
He was referring to the immortal servants created by Dr. Zeus Incorporated, and their somewhat understandable outrage at the discovery of a covert base, hidden in the deep past, where some two hundred missing immortals had been imprisoned for research purposes. Suleyman had liberated them, and gone public with the story. Some very fancy plausible denial indeed had been necessary, with blame shifted to the renegade immortal Marco, who had run the place, and who was now (fortunately) missing.
“Everything’s happened so fast with this Company,” complained Rossum. “One minute it was all just this really good idea and the next minute it was all this awful causality stuff that had already happened without asking us.”
“Like those toy things,” said Rappacini. “What are they called? You’re just winding a crank playing a nice little tune in a box and then all of a sudden a lid flies open and this scary thing jumps out.”
“Schrödinger’s cat,” said Rossum.
“No, something else,” said Rappacini in frustration, and held out his arms and waggled them to suggest the thing he was trying to name. “Anyway I never liked those.”
“We wrought not wisely, but too well,” said Freestone.
“Don’t talk like that!” cried Bugleg. “You sound like one of them!”
“No, they sound like me!” said Freestone with some heat. “We’re the human beings here. We made them, and not the other way around. They might have forgotten that, but I certainly haven’t. How are we going to stop them from taking over, that’s the question we should be asking.”