by Bee Ridgway
It was a beautiful late afternoon. Nick had just spent an hour with a coach, practicing modern American manners, slang, facial expressions, hand gestures. He was exhausted. Then he caught sight of Leo walking under one of the huge screens that were everywhere in the education quad, projecting a constant, silent stream of visual information about the present. Nick struck out across the grass, hoping to divert his friend into the bar for a beer. It wasn’t until he was several yards from Leo that he realized that the man walking near his friend—in front of him and a few feet to the left—was actually conversing with him. It was strange. They were not together, and yet they were.
Nick slowed down, and Leo turned as if he had eyes in the back of his head. His face was still and serious. He shook his head once, with intent: Don’t come near.
Nick nodded. It had been a soldierly communication, and all Nick’s battle senses were awakened. He put his hand in his pocket and fished out his phone, flipped it open, and tucked it against his ear. Then he changed the angle of his walk to move parallel with the pair. He strolled along pretending to be talking on the phone, his eyes on Leo’s companion.
At first he could only see the man’s back. His hair was thick and brown, blow-dried. He wore a wide-shouldered business suit as blue as the summer sky, which he filled with meaty precision. The tailoring was immaculate and expensive, but the suit was absurd.
Nick, who tended to dress for the future in jeans and soft cotton shirts, smiled to himself. Maybe that terrible suit was why Leo was keeping his distance.
Then the man turned, as Leo had—as if he knew Nick was watching him. He had a square chin and a thin mouth, and that blow-dried hair was styled up and off his forehead. He looked like the handsome, anodyne white men who predicted the weather on American TV.
But there was something wrong with the way the man looked at Nick.
Even from several yards away, Nick could feel the flat, frozen emptiness of that gaze. He lowered his phone and stared back unblinkingly, no longer pretending disinterest. Time seemed to stop . . . thought fell away. . . .
Then Leo turned, too, and his expression recalled Nick to himself. Leo was communicating something. A more urgent warning. Nick blinked, pivoted on his heel, and walked in the other direction.
When Nick asked Leo about it the next day, Leo said the man had asked the way to the amusement park, and Leo had led him there. Leo wasn’t telling the truth—or at least not the whole truth—but Nick didn’t push it. He’d learned in Spain. A soldier will tell you what you need to know when you need to know it.
* * *
Two weeks later, Nick, Leo, and Meg were floating in the pool outside Nick’s house, watching a custard-colored full moon rise over the mountains. Something akin to joy filled Nick’s heart. He was bobbing like a cork in a heated infinity pool in the Andes, his formerly stiff rump tucked into a plastic flotation device made to look like a spotted frog. His two friends were bobbing too, one in a dragon and one in a panda bear. He was happy—like the Frankish butcher had said he would be. He found himself employing a phrase he’d gleaned from TV: “You guys are the best.”
They laughed at him, and Meg used her own new slang: “Sucker,” she said.
“I’m not a sucker,” Nick said.
“You are so.” She sipped at her cocktail—Sex on the Beach—through a straw and paddled her feet in the water. “You love the Guild.”
“In that case we’re all suckers,” Nick said. “All we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules.”
Leo, rotating gently in his panda bear, snorted. “That’s a pretty tall order,” he said. His slang was better than both of theirs, and he loved to show off.
“What does that mean?”
“A tall order?” Leo put his head back and let his three braids dangle in the water. His head was plucked bald except for a square patch of hair at the back, which was long and braided into three thin plaits. He had been told this hairstyle would not be acceptable in Bangalore, but he still had a few months in Chile, and Leo wasn’t going to reach for the razor until the plane was waiting for him. “A tall order is something that is nearly impossible. So you say that all we have to do is be happy and uphold the rules. I say, ‘That’s a tall order.’ It means that I’m not sure I can do it.”
“Why not?”
Leo rolled his head to the side and looked at Nick. “I’m disenchanted with the Guild.”
“Why?”
“Remember that guy, a couple of weeks ago? I was walking with him across the quad.”
“Yes,” Nick said. “The man in the baby-blue suit.”
“The Man in the Baby-Blue Suit,” Meg said. “It sounds like a song.”
“He wasn’t anything like a song,” Leo said. “Unless it was a song about ominous government types.”
“What was his name?”
“He never told me.”
“All right, so.” Meg thought about it. “We’ll call him Mibbs.”
“They call me Mister Mibbs!” Nick was pleased with his joke.
Leo didn’t laugh. “You saw him, Nick. He wasn’t funny.”
“No,” Nick agreed. “Even in that suit he wasn’t funny.”
“He walked at a distance from me,” Leo said. “As if he were afraid to come too close. He asked me about my experiences on what he kept calling the ‘warpath.’”
“That’s nothing new. Everyone’s always asking you crazy questions about being an Indian,” Nick said. “Like that thirteenth-century Japanese guy who keeps challenging you to an archery contest.”
“And that German woman,” Meg piped up. “Astride von What-have-you.”
Leo put his hands over his ears. “Oh, God, Astride! I was so glad when she finally left.”
Nick laughed, but Leo dropped his hands from his ears and his eyes were serious. “He asked me all sorts of intense questions. Very specific. About certain practices of, shall we say, revenge? Revenge isn’t quite the right word. It’s about compensation, completion . . . but to an outsider, it can look . . .”
“Vicious?” Nick supplied the word, thinking of Badajoz.
“Perhaps. In any case, Mr. Mibbs had very broad questions about what ‘Indians’ do with white captives.”
“Like, torture?”
Leo shrugged. “He had all this crazy mixed-up information about the Mohawks and the Mixtecs, most of it complete bullshit. He seemed to think that Mohawks sacrifice babies on top of pyramids and eat their livers, which is absurd because . . . well, never mind. The point is, he was obsessed with how to find out if a stolen baby had been killed or adopted. I told him that I’m Pocumtuk, not Mixhawk . . . ” Leo laughed, then frowned when Nick and Meg just stared at him. “Well, anyway, he told me to shut up and answer his questions. So I said I could only speak for my nation, but that it was important to understand that when it is deemed appropriate for our captives to die, they die in a manner that we feel mirrors the agonies of our own hearts. If it is deemed appropriate that they be adopted, they are ceremonially incorporated into the nation—”
“It would be great if you would use shorter sentences,” Meg said.
Leo rolled his eyes and carried on. “At which point he interrupted me too, and said he didn’t care about the particulars; was there some sort of computer database recording what happened to white babies stolen by—and I am using his words here—bloodthirsty savages like myself? I just started laughing because what else was I supposed to do?”
“Scalp him and eat his liver on a pyramid, I guess,” Nick said, swishing his hands through the warm water.
“Well, yes. I should have thought of that of course. And he does have a great head of hair, but who would want to touch it?”
Nick smiled, and so did Leo, but Nick knew they were both pretending to make light of Mr. Mibbs. Just the thought of touching that man gave Nick the creeps, like hearing a door close in an empty house.
“So I laughed,” Leo said, “and I asked him which part of the past he was from. He said it was an
official question: Was there such a database? I said he could take his official question and stuff it up his ass. He said that if I didn’t answer his question I would be sorry.”
“You think he was Guild brass or something?” Meg’s voice was high with excitement.
“Yes,” Leo said. “I think he was.”
“What happened then? He said he’d make you sorry, and then what?”
“Then he . . . well, he looked at me,” Leo said. “He’d avoided looking at me up until that point, and then suddenly he just lifted his head and stared. You must have felt it, Nick. That thing he did with his eyes. When he looked at you. That feeling, that desolation.”
“Felt what?” Meg asked.
Nick recalled the emotion that had flooded him when that gaze had been turned on him. “Despair,” he said.
“Yes. It was like he was pushing into my head. Pushing out my emotions and replacing them with his.”
“Mind control,” Meg said. “The Guild uses mind control.”
“Surely not,” Nick said. “It’s easy enough to read people’s emotions when they look at you. He was just a weird, unhappy man with a disturbing imagination. He wasn’t a Guild official. Think about all the Guild officials we know here at the compound. Think about the Alderwoman, Alice Gacoki. She’s nice and normal. This guy wasn’t representing Guild policy. They would have called you in to the parliament buildings if they wanted to know something about . . .” He tried to remember the tribes Leo had mentioned, and couldn’t. “Your culture.”
Leo sucked in his cheeks.
“But that’s not the point,” Nick said. “The point is that that guy was just weird. Weird people must jump, too.”
“You are a happy camper, aren’t you, Nick?” Meg held the tiny paper umbrella from her drink over her head, and imitated Nick’s accent. “Is it raining fire and brimstone? Goodness gracious, I hadn’t noticed!”
“If I’m a happy camper, you’re a conspiracy theorist,” Nick muttered.
Meg shrugged. “Mind control doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Everything about the Guild is too comfortable, too nice. Like the fact that there actually aren’t any weirdos here, and as you say, weirdos must jump. So where are they?” Meg sucked the last of the Sex on the Beach from her glass with an obnoxious slurp. “Something’s wrong. There has to be a catch.”
“She’s right.” Leo twirled his panda so he was facing Nick. “The Guild is too perfect, and that guy was way too creepy for your average asocial modern guy. I could feel it. There was something very wrong about him, and about what he was asking.”
“Feelings!” Nick scowled. “Can we stop talking about feelings? God!”
“Have it your way.” Leo sounded tired. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“I think you—both of you—are jumping to conclusions. The Guild has been perfectly open, and more than generous with us.”
“The Guild is rich and powerful,” Leo said, “and it tells us what it wants us to believe.”
Nick, in his frog, felt chilly. He wasn’t used to arguing. In his world, one either gave opinions or received them. For a long time now, as Marquess of Blackdown and then as the leader of a company of soldiers, he had been at or near the top of every hierarchy. He took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s assume you are right. What are your options? Abandon the Guild?”
“Why not?”
“Oh, please. Do you really think you could make it out there alone?”
Leo closed his eyes and swished his fingers in the water. “The Guild can’t possibly catch every single person who jumps. There must be people out there who don’t belong.”
Nick laughed scornfully, but neither Meg nor Leo responded. So he put his head back and stared up and out, into the night sky.
* * *
They had one more good day, the three of them. Two weeks after the unpleasantness in the infinity pool—unpleasantness to which they never again referred but that hung around them like a cold fog—Meg, Leo, and Nick drove down to Santiago for a couple of days’ vacation from the compound. They roared around the city in one of the Guild’s fleet of BMWs, a yellow convertible. They shopped and ate in restaurants and wore their modern clothes without a hitch. In the evening they celebrated by going dancing.
Nick and Leo were both propositioned by the same girl in the club, though neither accepted her offer. Leo had left a woman behind him and wasn’t, as he’d told Astride and several other interested Guild women, “ready.” But Nick? Looking into the girl’s slightly smudged, pretty face, he found that he simply didn’t want to. It was as if the rakish young marquess who had rutted his way across the early eighteen hundreds was still back at the terrible white hospital, asleep. Or dead in the dirt of Salamanca.
Only Meg actually took someone back to her hotel room that night, a fact that kept Nick and Leo up, laughing over a bottle of wine in the hotel bar, until the dawn.
The next day the adventurers stumbled out into the afternoon sun, looking for something to eat before getting back on the road. They ended up at the Mercado Central, eating shellfish and admiring the 1872 cast-iron market building.
“Each one of us is older than this place,” Meg said, quaffing her champagne. She was on her third glass.
Nick shrugged. “We aren’t older than those mountains.”
“How do you know?” Leo cracked a crab claw, scowling as he tried to dig out the tender flesh with a yellow plastic devil’s fork. “Maybe they were put up last year as a tourist attraction.”
“Look,” Nick said. He pointed through the crowd that pressed its noisy way past their table. “It’s Alice Gacoki.”
Meg and Leo swiveled in their seats. The Alderwoman was standing alone, absorbed by the spectacle of a mountainous pile of fish cakes. Then she glanced at her watch and moved along to the next stall.
Leo pushed back his chair. “Let’s follow her.”
Meg was on her feet in a second. “Quickly, Nick. She’s short. We’ll lose her in the crowd.”
“Just why are we doing this?” Nick shoved a last bite of lobster into his mouth, threw a careless wad of pesos onto the table, and caught up with his friends.
They followed the Alderwoman through the crowd, ducking behind slender cast-iron pillars that couldn’t actually hide them and laughing out loud when it seemed certain that she would notice them. But she didn’t, and they successfully trailed her all the way to the women’s restroom. She disappeared inside.
“I’m going in,” Meg said.
“Don’t. It’s ridiculous. Let’s get back.” Leo jangled the car keys in his pocket. “I want to get some of the driving done in daylight.”
But Meg was already pushing the door open, turning as she did so and putting a finger over her lips.
The two men waited outside for ten minutes. Women entered and left again, but there was no sign of either Meg or the Alderwoman.
“Do you think one of us should go in after her?”
Nick frowned. “They must be talking in there.”
A minute later Alice Gacoki emerged. She saw them immediately. “Hello,” she said, coming forward. Her business suit was perfectly tailored to her slight form. She was Kikuyu, with close-cut white hair. She wore a ring with a pale yellow stone on one of her long, elegant hands, which moved balletically as she talked. She had jumped forward three centuries in her thirteenth year and had been the Alderwoman for decades now. “It’s Nick, isn’t it? Nick Davenant.”
“It’s good to see you again,” Nick said, and bowed.
“Be careful with that bow,” she said, and held out her hand. Nick flushed and shook it. Her skin was cool, but her ring on her finger was warm.
She turned to Leo. “And you’re . . .” She paused, looking up into his face. He waited for her to remember him. And she did. “Leo Quonquont.”
Nick was impressed. How many thousands of names and faces did she have logged in her mind? The Alderwoman stood back now and crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you fellows doing here?
”
Leo pointed with his chin at the bathroom door. “We’re waiting for our friend Meg.”
“Ah. The hungry one. I’m in a rush to get up to the compound, so please say hello to her for me. See you back at the ranch.” She nodded to them both and walked away into the crowd.
Meg popped out a moment later. Her mouth was a tiny, tight line, her eyes wide and frightened.
“What happened?” Leo touched her shoulder.
She looked from one to the other of them. “Did you see her?”
“Yes.” Nick had never seen his friend so perturbed. “She said to say hi. She was in a rush. What the hell happened in there?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
But when they reached the convertible Meg had second thoughts about getting in. “I shouldn’t tell you in there. It’s probably rigged with some sort of recording device.”
“Bugged,” Leo said. “That’s the word for it.”
“I doubt very much whether—” Nick reached for the door handle.
“Whatever.” Meg was looking up and down the street. “Just come on.”
With her arms tucked into theirs, the two men had to bend over Meg to hear her whisper as she trotted them along at a furious pace. “I slipped into the stall next to her,” she said. “I popped right up on the toilet and looked over the divider.”
“You didn’t!” Nick laughed, horrified.
“Sure I did. Why not? Well. There she stood, holding her cell phone. I thought for certain she’d look up and see me. Then the phone vibrated, and she answered it.” Meg looked up at her companions, first Leo, then Nick. “I could barely hear her. But she said, ‘She has disappeared. Ignatz has fled. The Brazilian resistance is fractured for the moment. Whenever they regroup, we have to be ready.’”
The two men stopped and stared down at her.
“I’m not telling you a lie. God strike me dead if I tell a lie.”
Whether the car was bugged or not, they argued about it all the way home. Meg fought loudly, Leo calmly, Nick with a disbelieving contempt for his friends’ opinions. Meg and Leo said this proved what they had suspected. The Guild was corrupt. They were killing people. Somewhere out there—in Brazil—there was a resistance movement.