by Kage Baker
Labienus made a face. “The bust’s available. The corpse, unfortunately …”
“Ah. It’s in bad shape?”
“Not exactly. It’s not there, that’s the problem. When we got his coffin open, it was empty.”
“Damn,” said Nennius, mildly outraged.
Fez, 9 July 2355
Suleyman sets back the Viziers and draws out the ivory Rukh, turning it in his hand. It’s a heavy piece, depicted as a crusader-era stone tower in the Norman style. On the battlements stand two scowling warriors in generic European army uniforms. They are disproportionately large. At their feet crouches a dog, his ears and muzzle sharp points, and his head is lifted as though he is baying at the moon.
CHAPTER 4
The Castle in the Clouds, 2333
Time for the news!
The big boy set down his little dog and stood up. He sighted along the row of tiny holoprojectors mounted through the room at eye level (his eye level, anyway) and focused sharply on the first one to send its picture flaring into light and color, about halfway down the wall. He began to snap out a staccato rhythm with his fingers.
As the opening fanfare sounded he was abruptly there in front of the floating image, watching as the first snippets of program teaser played. Just as the commercial interlude was beginning, a projector on the wall opposite put forth its lit image, commencing a news broadcast from another region. He whirled and absorbed its lead-in; whirled back as another image appeared, and darted to another apparition as it came, and so to another and another, as the whole of his long study glowed with a babel of voices and bright forms.
By this time the big boy was moving rather too fast for a mortal eye to follow, and it was just as well. Any mortal would be profoundly unsettled watching his movements, which resembled a bizarre dance, sort of a cross between the rushing assault of a grizzly bear and the effortless glide of a hummingbird between the vivid ghosts. Image to image to image, he was actually managing to watch all thirty news programs simultaneously.
His speed wasn’t the only unsettling thing about him. It was impossible to tell his age: twenty? Twenty-two? There was a blank innocence to his face that recalled childhood. His eyes were blue-gray, set close together above a long straight nose; his features were even and smooth, his mouth a little pursed. And yet there was a certain grimness to the young man impossible to explain, the gravity and isolation of a granite mountain range.
His little dog had prudently found herself a place under a chair, well out of range. The big boy was a kind master, but to be stepped on by William Randolph Hearst—even by accident—was very, very bad.
Anyway, she hadn’t long to wait; within three minutes the phantoms had begun to fall silent, wink out. News programs weren’t very long in the year 2333.
The big boy slowed in his dance, turning before the last of the images went dark, frowning thoughtfully. Then he paced back along the length of his study to the work console at the far end, by the windows. Click, click, click, his snapping fingers punctuated his progress. He seated himself before the console, took up its buttonball and settled down to work.
His buttonball, by the way, was of the old-fashioned variety with alphabet option as well as all modern commands. The big boy could read and write. It was only one of the many things that set him apart from the mortal public he guided, and only one of the reasons he took it upon himself to guide them.
RED PLANET MARS SEQUENCE TOO LONG, HE WROTE. GIVE THE AMERICAN VIEWER A BREAK! DON’T MAKE THEM SIT THROUGH A LECTURE CLASS ON THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM. FIND SOME MORE SUCCINCT WAY TO MAKE IT REAL TO THEM.
CELTIC FEDERATION CLIP GOOD. MAKE THIS A CONTINUING FEATURE. POSITIVE CLIPS, DANCE, WEAVING (BUT AVOID MENTION OF WOOL), CALLIGRAPHY, AND ABOUT THREE EPISODES INTO IT AN OVERVIEW OF HISTORY. SUGGEST: SIR WALTER RALEIGH INVENTED GENOCIDE, RESPONSIBLE FOR LUNG CANCER? BUT NOT SO BLATANT WE GIVE THE BRITISH CONSUL AN EXCUSE TO SQUAWK AGAIN.
WHAT HAPPENED TO TEXAS-MEXICO TREATY SEQUENCE???? PUNCH UP IMAGES! IF YOU CAN’T GET GOOD FOOTAGE THERE USE STOCK SHOTS AND DOCTOR THEM.
He sent this message and began another. His little dog, having ventured out from under her refuge, trotted across the room and curled up at his feet. She settled her head on her forepaws, ready to nap. Then she lifted her head and stared around suspiciously.
The big boy noticed at once. He looked down at her. “What is it, Helen?” he said. His voice was unnerving too, high and soft. During his mortal lifetime, it had been described as the fragrance of violets made audible.
She whuffed and jumped to her feet. He turned his cold gaze out into the room, following the direction of her attention.
Everything as it ought to be: his room much the same as it had looked for the last four centuries, his Gothic pieces neatly ranged above the surveillance equipment, his fabulously ancient books in their sealed cases, the portrait of his mortal self—somewhat older than he appeared now—staring back at him from its accustomed place above the long polished conference table. A mortal man would have been fooled.
And how likely, was it, after all, that anybody could get past his surveillance system up here on La Cuesta Encantada? Even if they made it over the perimeter boundaries and into his high gardens, La Casa Grande itself was well protected from any but invited guests.
But the big boy got to his feet, picking up the little dog and tucking her into the corner of his arm. She snarled at the unseen presence, uttering terrible threats in little-dog language. He touched her muzzle and smiled at her, briefly, before his face resumed its dead implacable expression.
“You may as well take a breath,” he said quietly. There was a gasp from beyond the far doorway as someone followed his advice.
“Damn,” said someone, “I forgot about the dog.”
He dropped into the doorway—apparently from somewhere near the ceiling—a short, dark man in a slightly rumpled business suit. Nervously he shot his cuffs, smoothed his hair, stroked his close black beard and mustaches to neatness. With a final tug at his lapels, he turned and regarded the big boy with a dazzling smile. “Hey, Mr. Hearst, how’s it going? Long time no see, huh?”
Hearst raised an eyebrow. “Joseph Denham,” he said.
“Gosh, it’s been a while since I used that name. But, yeah, it’s me.” Joseph adjusted the knot of his tie. “You’re looking great these days! And I mean that sincerely. So you got your castle back again, after all these years. It must have felt swell to come home.”
“Mr. Denham,” said Hearst, “can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t call my security team and advise the Company of your presence here?”
“Yeah,” said Joseph. “I’ve got some information you need, Mr. Hearst. Trust me—you really should hear me out.”
Hearst looked at him in silence a long moment. “I can do that,” he said at last. He turned and indicated a chair with his gaze. “Come in and sit down, Mr. Denham. And I’d like to ask you a couple of questions first, if I may.”
“Sure! No problem,” said Joseph. He crossed the threshold and went straight to the offered chair, where he made himself comfortable. Hearst picked up the hand unit of a household communications device—rendered in best Retro style to resemble a candlestick telephone—and waited a moment.
“Mary? Send up a tray with a couple of glasses of ginger ale, please. Thank you.”
“Gee, thanks,” said Joseph.
“You’re welcome.” Hearst sat down across from him and leaned forward to put the little dog on the floor. She went straight to Joseph’s shoes and became very interested in sniffing them, now and then reminding him she was on duty with a stern whuff. Joseph did his best to ignore her, saying only: “She looks just like the one you had the last time we met.”
“She’s a descendant, actually,” said Hearst, watching the little dog. “I call them all Helen; makes it easier, in the long run. Of course, everything’s in the long run now.” He raised his eyes to Joseph. “At least, I think it is. Maybe you’ll be able to tell me about t
hat, Mr. Denham.”
“Okay,” said Joseph. “What do you want to know?”
“Quite a few things,” said Hearst, looking at him steadily. “First: were you involved in that Bureau of Punitive Medicine place? Were you partners with Marco, that immortal who went crazy?”
“No,” said Joseph. “Absolutely not. I was searching for somebody myself when I found the Bureau. I couldn’t tell anyone directly, but I tipped off Suleyman, the North African Section Head. I figured he’d rescue those poor bastards if anybody would. But no, I am not now, nor have I ever been partners with Marco. What else did you want to ask me, Mr. Hearst?”
Hearst watched the little dog for a moment. “What’s going to happen in the year 2355, Mr. Denham?” he said at last.
At that moment the elevator clanked and began to descend behind its brass grille. Hearst held up his hand in a gesture indicating they should wait, and Joseph nodded. The elevator rose again and a mortal woman emerged, bearing the tray of drinks Hearst had ordered. Hearst thanked her and she departed. Joseph cleared his throat as the elevator descended once more.
“So you’ve figured out about 2355, huh?” he said.
Hearst nodded. “Dr. Zeus Incorporated gives us all manner of tidbits of information about the future world, but I’ve noticed that I’m never told about anything occurring later than the year 2355. No investment information beyond that year at all. Why? And that absurd magazine they send me, Immortal Lifestyles Monthly—well, if you read it carefully you notice that there are no references to anything written or created after that date. No books after the year 2355, no pictures, no inventions, nothing!”
“Yeah,” said Joseph, reaching for his glass and taking a sip of ginger ale. “We call it the Silence. Have you asked the Company about it, straight out?”
“I’ve made certain inquiries,” said Hearst. “I have yet to receive a plain answer from anyone.”
“No surprise there. The official answer is that 2355 is when Dr. Zeus finally goes public, when immortals will finally be able to live openly.” Joseph swirled ice in his glass and looked sidelong at Hearst. “They say they don’t give us any movies or whatever from after that time because we’ll be able to discover them for ourselves. I don’t think anybody has ever believed that.”
“So you’re saying that you don’t know, either.” Hearst looked down at his little dog. Joseph shook his head.
“There’re theories. Global cataclysm in that year, for example. Or that there’s an intracorporate war, and the winners maintain transmission silence after 2355 so nobody in the past knows who wins or how. You want to know what I think?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I think that’s the year when the Company doublecrosses its immortals. We’ve worked for them from the beginning of time—immortals like me, anyway; you’re a special case—with the promise that one day we’d finally get to the wonderful Future and share the great stuff we’ve spent all our lives obtaining for Dr. Zeus. I think it’s a crock. I think they’ll come up with some way to finally kill us, or disable us, and cancel out their debt. You want to know why I think that, Mr. Hearst?”
“Please tell me,” said Hearst.
Joseph stood up and looked Hearst in the eye. “Because they’re doing it already. That’s why I’m on the run, pal, that’s why you got that request to let the Company know immediately if you ever saw me again. You want to know the truth about the Bureau of Punitive Medicine? The Company ran it themselves! Marco was just the guy they had standing guard there. It was a research facility they had, to find a way to reverse the immortality process.”
Hearst nodded. “I was afraid it was something like that.”
“And it was just the tip of the iceberg,” Joseph said, beginning to pace. “The Bureau was only one of the places the Company locks away operatives it doesn’t want anymore. There are at least seven others, not as bad as the Bureau but holding more people. I’ve seen ‘em, Mr. Hearst. And there’s worse.
“You remember Lewis? The guy who worked with me in 1933?”
“The fellow Garbo was so taken with, yes.” Hearst smiled at the memory, but Joseph’s eyes were like flint.
“You should have seen what the Company did to him,” he said. “They handed him over to—to an outside agency, let’s say. So he could be experimented on, like a lab rat. Nice, huh? I know, because I was there. I nearly got caught, too. If you followed their orders right now and called the Company, they’d do something worse to me.”
“I’m not given orders,” said Hearst, with a momentary flash of human emotion in his eyes.
“You don’t think so?” said Joseph. “You’ve done everything the Company wanted you to do for them. They’ve given you stuff in return—hell, they made you immortal, you own Company stock—but you aren’t calling the shots, friend.”
Hearst sat silent a moment. At last he reached down and snapped his fingers for Helen. She came at once. He stroked her, scratched between her ears. “I assume,” he said, “that you’re not taking this lying down? You immortals, I mean.” He smiled for a second. “We immortals.”
“You got it,” Joseph said. “We’re immortal, we’re indestructible, and we can outthink them. The only advantage they’ve got is, they know everything that’s going to happen up to 2355 and we don’t. Kind of levels the playing field, huh? But it also gives us hope, Mr. Hearst. See—what if we’re what happens after 2355?”
“A war in Heaven?” said Hearst. “The Titans rising in rebellion against Zeus? It seems a chancy business, don’t you think?”
Joseph shrugged. “We’ve already had the eternal punishment thing, at the Bureau. So what have we got to lose?”
“I don’t know that I haven’t got a great deal to lose,” said Hearst. “You haven’t shown me any proof yet.”
“Hey, you want proof, and I don’t blame you one bit, friend. My group has managed to get hold of some of the Temporal Concordance. You know what that is, right?”
“It’s the logbook of the Future,” said Hearst, “the Company’s record of everything that’s going to happen.”
“Yeah. The one we’re never allowed to see, except a little at a time, so we can be where they want, when they want us to do their work for them. We found a section.” Joseph reached out with his index finger. “May I?”
Helen snarled. Hearst closed his hands around her and blinked as Joseph set his fingertip between Hearst’s eyes. “Downloading—” said Joseph, and Hearst felt a shock wave, a sudden expansion of his memory. It was a sensation not unlike being hit in the head with a bundle of newspapers hot off the presses. Dates, events, names filled the place behind his eyes.
“Oh—”
“There you go,” said Joseph. “You feel a little dizzy, right? Don’t worry, that’ll pass. I only gave you a tiny bit but boy, have you got a scoop! You can beat all the other news services to the draw for the next three years. But you’ll also find private communications in there, between officers in the Company, stuff we weren’t meant to see. You can draw your own conclusions about it. I’ll be back in touch in a few years to see how you feel then, and whether or not you want to do business, okay?”
He rose to his feet. Hearst put up a hand. “If you please,” he said. “I’d like to know how you got past my surveillance.”
Joseph grinned. “Hell, Mr. Hearst, I’m over twenty thousand years old. Remember? I can get past a few cameras and motion sensors. Though I’d appreciate it if you’d take me off the record.” He gestured at the holocams that had been steadily observing him. “I’ll bet you can do that, huh, a clever film editor like you?”
“Unnecessary. You have my word I won’t tell the Company you were here.”
“I believe you, Mr. Hearst, honest, but you know what? They go through all your surveillance records routinely anyway,” said Joseph.
“No, they don’t!” said Hearst.
“Yeah, they do. You know Quintilius, your Company liaison? That’s part of his job. The Company doesn’t trust
anybody, least of all its own people. The only reason some Company security officer isn’t hearing everything we say right now is because my datalink implant was disabled a long time ago.” Joseph tapped the bridge of his nose. “And they never installed one in you, I guess because you’re a special case. Or maybe they figured you have so much surveillance on yourself already, there was no point in spending more to duplicate it.”
He stepped back and looked Hearst up and down in an admiring kind of way. “I have to tell you, I’m impressed with the job they did. You’re really unique, you know?”
“You keep saying that I’m a special case,” said Hearst, rising to loom over Joseph. “What are you implying, exactly?”
Joseph retreated another couple of paces, but smiled disarmingly. “Hey! You’ve been a stockholder for four centuries now, you know the Company product. You know they never, ever make adults immortal. They always start with little children. Except for you! You were the only exception there’s ever been to the rule. You’re smart enough to figure out there’s something fishy about the year 2355; you must have wondered about yourself, too, huh?”
“I did ask about it,” said Hearst. “I was told I have an unusual genetic makeup.”
Joseph’s smile got wider still. “Oh, yes, you could say that. They didn’t lie to you, Mr. Hearst, not about that.”
“Why don’t you explain, then?” Hearst scowled down at him.
“Next time,” said Joseph. “I promise. Really.”
He winked out.
Hearst was only momentarily surprised. Turning his head and scanning for the trajectory of Joseph’s departure, he exhaled in annoyance. “Stay,” he told Helen, setting her down in his chair, and then he winked out, too.
Down through La Casa Grande he sped, faster than mortal eyes could have followed, over his high fences, pursuing the fading blip that was Joseph in hyperfunction; but the head start was too great. On a knoll of rock he halted and stood peering out across the miles of his domain (for everything within mortal sight, and immortal sight too, for that matter, was his). He could just make out Joseph’s signature, fading into the coastal mountains to the north.