by Kage Baker
“How come you’re not in school?” I inquired as we drifted along.
“This is school,” he replied disgustedly. “I’m an executive administrative trainee. Houbert’s supposed to be giving me valuable insights into running a base. This morning’s lesson seems to be What to Do If One Runs Out of Marzipan Petits Fours When One Is Expecting an Important Guest for Brunch. I hope you like the damned things.”
“Hey, I’ll eat anything. Sorry he made you run around like this.”
“That’s okay.” He shrugged his little shoulders. “This semester’s almost over. Next semester I’ll be sent to study with Labienus at Mackenzie Base. I’ve heard he’s a real administrator. Then, next year, I’m scheduled to go to the Low Countries and learn field command from Van Drouten. Then I’m going on to Morocco. That’s where I want to work once I graduate. With Suleyman. Do you know him?”
“The North African section head? Yeah. Worked with him under Moulay Idriss. Nice guy.”
“He’s working for Moulay Ismail now, with the Sallee corsairs. He recruited me.” The baby’s eyes were wide for a moment, and for just that moment he looked his age. “We were on a slave ship, and m-my, my mortal mother, died. Suleyman was there in chains too, pretending to be one of us, and he looked after me then. But he had his pirates lying in wait! He had them board the ship and free everybody! He took me away with him and sent me to the Company. I was aptitude-tested and scored extremely high in leadership capabilities. That’s why my augmentation is proceeding at an accelerated rate, you see.”
“I’d wondered. Neophytes aren’t usually sent into the field this early.” We bumped gently into the coping on the other side, and I fished around for the mooring rope. “How old are you, anyway? Four?”
“Three,” he told me proudly, and held up his arms to be lifted out of the boat. “I guess they need good administrators these days. If Houbert is typical of the best they’ve got, they really need me. I won’t work here, though. I’ll be in Africa. With Suleyman.”
“You’ve got it all planned, huh?”
“He’s the best there is in his field,” the kid said proudly. “I’ve been reading his file. Talk about a celebrated record! I want to model my career on his. He gave me my name, you know. Latif, that’s what he called me when he was taking care of me. I don’t remember what I was called before. Anyway, the Company’s really going to need good African operatives soon, with all the history that’s going to happen over there.”
“Well, Latif, I hope you get your chance.” I stepped onto the coping beside him, and we made our way to the door, which turned out to be the entrance to a fairly ordinary elevator. Latif put down his cake box long enough to press the button. I looked at him thoughtfully. Smart, confident kid, despite his size-10 case of hero worship. Probably with a brilliant future ahead of him, too; Suleyman had an eye for good recruits. Why hadn’t any of my recruits ever thought I was a hero? I’d certainly believed the operative who recruited me was God Himself, I’d been so grateful to be saved from those screaming people with stone axes. But Mendoza hadn’t liked me much even before that business with the Englishman, and it wasn’t my fault the guy got himself burned at the stake. You’d think she’d show a little gratitude now and then, considering what I’d saved her from.
On the other hand, how much gratitude had I shown to old Budu, the guy who recruited me? I hadn’t exactly been there like a loyal son when he needed me, had I? So maybe the problem is simply that I’m a slimy little guy, and that’s life.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOORS PARTED, we were greeted by a blast of recorded music—sounded like Mozart—and a wave of heavy incense smoke. And I mean heavy. Blue clouds of it.
“Oh, shit, he’s set fire to the copal again,” muttered Latif. “He’s through there. That’s his morning levee room. I’m just taking this off to the kitchen. See you later.”
I took a moment to adjust my wig, set my hat at the proper angle, and shoot my lace cuffs. As I did, a querulous voice called:
“The stairs. You didn’t come up my stairs. That’s part of the whole experience.”
“Sorry,” I responded, following the voice through the outer room to the door of the audience chamber. I looked in.
It was a very nice room, everything green and white and gold, with snaky Mayan stuff all over the walls. At the far end an enormous philodendron looked ready to eat the two jaguars that lolled half-asleep beside its pot. Slightly nearer, a golden throne encrusted with jade commanded my attention. Or maybe it was a jade throne encrusted with gold. Anyway it was a hell of an impressive piece of furniture. Too bad the guy perched upon it looked like J. Wellington Wimpy.
“Joseph.” He rose slowly to his feet and took a couple of majestic steps down to meet me. “Joseph, at last. This is the one we’ve heard so much about.” He seized my hand in both his own and shook it up and down. “And I am merely Kukulkan the Divine Feathered Serpent, or I may be Director Houbert. I would prefer to be less the god-bureaucrat and more the artist; but one can’t have everything, even here.” Standing up, he had a little more dignity, because he was pretty tall for one of us, and beefy with it too. The white robe and golden sandals put you in mind of classical statuary. I wondered what possessed him to wear that feeble-looking little red mustache and skimpy beard. Oh, of course: he was supposed to be Kukulkan on Earth, the feathered serpent who was believed to appear as a white man with a red beard. Maybe the Mayans found him convincing.
“You really ought to have braved my stairs, you know. There are a whole series of theatrical effects triggered if you tread in the right places. Bursts of flame. Armored automata. Cascades of flowers. I spent decades working out the mechanisms,” he told me.
“Gee, I wish I’d seen. I was helping the kid bring your bakery order up, though.”
“Ah, little Latif.” He smiled fondly. “Isn’t he a charming child? One seldom sees them out in the field so young, but he does have extraordinary potential. Such a shame he can’t stay longer! Off to the harsh new worlds beyond our ancient walls. Everyone’s leaving, it seems.” He sighed and shook his head.
“Are they?”
“Oh, yes. Inevitably. Our revels here are nearly ended, you know; cloud-capped palaces and gorgeous illusions will melt away quite, before the end of the next century. All this splendor abandoned to the spider and the worm.” His eyes grew moist with sorrow.
“Ah, don’t take it too hard. You know the Company isn’t going to leave all this stuff. They’ll have tech crews ripping out the gold and packing up the furniture years before we ditch the place,” I said cheerfully. “You can set up your trick staircase in the next outpost. I hear Canada’s got some great scenery.”
“A frozen wasteland.” He shuddered. “Don’t even speak to me about it. How I envy you your time in California.” His eyes brightened. “Speaking of which, I’ve arranged a little entertainment to make your briefing more interesting. And I’m being remiss! Naughty me. I haven’t even offered you coffee. Shall I make it up to you?”
“Sure,” I said, guardedly, because he had a little secret smile on his face. He looped his big arm through mine and waltzed me across the room, straight toward a bare wall. Just as it seemed we were about to smack into it, the wall swung away as silently and swiftly as if it were a curtain instead of plastered mortar. A neat effect, I had to admit. Too bad I was an immortal with an immortal’s senses, because of course I’d heard the mechanisms and counterweights going off when we crossed a certain section of tiled floor; but it was almost as good without the surprise.
Beyond was his dining room. There was a long banquet table loaded with great-looking food on gold-and-jade service; coffee was steaming, orange juice was freshly squeezed, and peaked napkins were set at three places, one of which was occupied by Latif, who looked bored and impatient. The only problem was, table and chairs appeared to be suspended in midair over a pool, and there were piranhas flitting back and forth in the water.
Director Hoube
rt stepped back to watch my reaction, his little smile spreading below his little mustache. I felt like punching the guy; I really wanted breakfast.
Now, Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, whose adventures have kept me company on many a lonely outpost over the centuries, would have said something really snappy here to deflate the big balloon. I’ve never yielded to the temptation to emulate my literary pals, though; immortals can’t afford to make enemies. Especially of other immortals. So I tilted my tricorne back and grinned, the picture of foolish admiration.
“Boy, what a conundrum! You designed all this yourself, didn’t you?”
“Surely you can solve my puzzle,” he crowed, his little eyes twinkling. “You who’ve served in such fascinating places and epochs. This should be child’s play for you. I’ve read your file, you know. You’re quite a celebrity. Come now, show some of the mental dexterity that saved you from the Pictish headhunters!”
Jeez, he had read my file. If there’s anything more uncomfortable than meeting a fan, I don’t know what it is. Maybe being eaten alive by piranhas. Latif met my eyes and started to open his mouth. “Don’t you dare tell him!” cried Houbert. Latif shrugged and poured himself a cup of coffee. I could just jump across, but I’d land smack in the middle of the cups and saucers and epergnes et cetera, smasho.
“Well, let’s see.” I scanned the room. The fish were real, all right, and so was the water. I groped in my coat to find something to toss in, and brought out a little ball of wadded-up silver paper. It barely touched the surface before it vanished in a boiling mass of nasty little fish. Okay. No glass panel covering the pool. I scanned again and on impulse switched to infrared this time. Bingo!
No solid sheet of glass, but a kind of transparent ferro-ceramic path to the table, no more than a half meter wide and set just a fraction of a centimeter below the surface of the water. Step off a centimeter to either side and breakfast would be on me, if I were a mortal. Thanks to the highly visible temperature differential between the transparency and the water on infrared, though, I ran no risk of feeding the fish. Boldly I stepped out on the unseen path and marched across it to the table, kicking out of my way a couple of overeager piranhas who jumped at my shoes.
“Oh, well done!” Houbert applauded. “Splendid!” He came bouncing after me, and I could see Latif watching him, wondering whether he’d slip, but Houbert got safely to his chair and rang a tiny golden bell. I tensed for more theatrics: he was only summoning a trio of Mayans, who prostrated themselves on the threshold of the room. “You may serve now,” he told them.
The poor bastards couldn’t see the path like I could, but they must have known it was there, because they came in coolly enough and proceeded to wait on us. Great food, if deliberately weird: the eggs were pink and green and the orange juice was from blood oranges, which Houbert drank with a smirk from a golden sacrificial vessel. The Mayans whisked his napkin open for him and dished out his Franco-Mayan cuisine with reverence and patience, as befitted the Father of Heaven.
“Do you like our regional variant of oeufs crocodiles? These fellows can prepare anything if they’re shown how once. Try the pommes de terre Quetzalcoatl!” Houbert leaned across to push a golden platter in my direction. I lifted my hand, but a Mayan had anticipated me and scooped a big starchy mass onto my plate.
“Swell,” I affirmed. “You know, you’ve got quite an unusual setup here. I can’t remember when I’ve been at a base with such, uh, flair.”
“Well, of course we’ve had a long time to develop everything.” Houbert looked pleased. “I daresay we’ve been the premiere research facility for a good three millennia. That’s what makes it such a pity … But we won’t speak of it, no, we absolutely mustn’t. I warn you, I sob like a child when I contemplate the future.”
I looked at Latif, who nodded gravely and rolled his eyes.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“I was hoping—if it isn’t presumptuous—you’ve been to such fabulous places, lived in them, worked in them, passed effortlessly as one of their denizens. How did you bear it? You saw Rome in all her splendor. Byzantium, too. How does one cope with the inevitable death of all that beauty and elegance?” Houbert looked at me beseechingly.
“Well …” I bit the end off a croissant and chewed slowly, giving myself time to come up with an answer. “It wasn’t all like that, you know. There was a lot of garbage and disease and starvation, too. Maybe that’s it, you know, sir? You see the bad with the good long enough, and by the time a change comes, you’re ready to welcome it. No more gilded carriages in the streets, but no more crippled beggars either. Sometimes it’s a good idea for weeds to cover a place.”
“I see your point.” Houbert looked disappointed. “But in that case, there’s really no analogy possible, is there? For of course we have no crippled beggars here. No ugliness, no injustice, no hunger. Only perfection. No reason for the hypothetical gods to take their revenge on us.”
I nodded and stuffed the rest of the croissant in my mouth, but I thought privately that I’d seen some perfect pleasure gardens go up in flames too, and sometimes it seemed like a good idea at the time. Not that I’ve ever been the one with the torch, of course. That’s not my job; I’m what Dr. Zeus used to call a Preserver, not an Enforcer. But, then, nowadays nobody even remembers that there ever were Enforcers, except for really old operatives like me.
“I suppose one learns not to care,” mused Houbert, spreading mango jam on a helping of teosinte polenta. “After all, however many palace revolutions one flees, there’s always another palace somewhere. For us, at least. The charm of the new continually soothing away regret for the old. Do you not find it so?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“And of course we immortals must above all things cultivate our sense of enchantment.” Houbert spooned a massive glob into his mouth, and jam dripped into his beard. One of the Mayans deftly and immediately napkined him. “That’s one of the things, the truly important things I’ve been endeavoring to impart to our little colleague here. Life is ours, eternally; whether a gift or a curse is largely up to our own efforts. Boredom is a dreadful thing to carry through the centuries. One must preserve one’s sense of wonder at life. One must make it a grand continual game, full of rapture, revelry, and surprises.”
He had a point there. You do have to play certain mind games to keep from going nuts. A good sex life helps, too.
“Your problem, sir, if I may speak plainly,” said Latif, “is that you don’t have enough real work to do.”
“Child, child, how can you understand?” My god, tears were actually standing in Houbert’s eyes. “There is endless work to do. But if you don’t find a way to make it delightful, what do you face but ages upon ages of drudgery? We must retain the freshness and capacity for enjoyment of childhood—qualities that, I regret to say, you do not seem to possess in any great quantity.”
Maybe watching his mother die in chains had something to do with it. Latif snorted and tossed a bit of javelina sausage to the piranhas, who made it vanish.
“And you really must learn to appreciate these things, child, or life will be the dullest eternity of bread and water you can imagine. If you can imagine,” Houbert pleaded. “Nobody can face eternity without dreams.”
Actually dreams can be a problem, but I didn’t feel I should butt in at this point, because, except for the raving excess, I agreed with Houbert. It’s just that not everybody has to prance around in a perpetual Disneyland to have a good time, and when you enforce whimsy with an iron hand, nobody enjoys it.
“Well, sir, I’m doing my best to understand you,” Latif told him. “I’m wearing the costume. I play the games. What you don’t seem to get is that I’ve got a purpose here. Purpose can be fun, too. I’ve had plenty of style, but I’d like some substance now, thank you. I want to learn about managing people. I want to learn about command decisions. Okay? I now know how to arrange a diplomatic banquet and brunch for a real live field agent who’s actually been out in
reality and done things with it. I know all about providing my subordinates with magic and mystery and fun. It’s the problems I want to learn about.”
“My child, my child, won’t you find out about the problems soon enough?” Houbert raised his hands to heaven. The Mayans misunderstood his gesture and stepped in with hot towels, one for either hand. “But I know what it is. You’re young. And who is so impatient to be perfect as a youthful operative, still in the process of sloughing off his imperfect mortal flesh? Look at you, your augmentations have barely begun, and yet you can’t wait to leave your flawed humanity behind. So eager to be the perfect machine! If you’d only listen, this old machine could warn you that the day will come when you’ll learn to savor that humanity. Playfulness, irrationality, sheer nonsense for nonsense’s sake lend a dimension to life we immortals need, need desperately. How else can we endure the centuries rolling over our heads and the horrors they bring?”
“Baloney,” muttered Latif.
“Well, he can’t really appreciate your point, sir, because there aren’t any horrors here, are there? There aren’t even any problems.” I took on the voice of reason. “This is a five-star vacation resort compared with some other places I’ve been, kid. You’ll get your chance to wade in trouble up to your neck, believe me. Enjoy the hot showers and the flush toilets while you’ve got ‘em, because for the next two hundred years or so they’ll be few and far between. Take your time. God knows you’ve got time.”
“When we stop playing, we die emotionally,” sniffled Houbert, waving away Mayans.
“Oh, I don’t know if I’d agree with that.” I looked at Latif. “But take your fun while you can get it, that’s what I always say. Your friend Suleyman, for example. Boy, the laughs we had in the souk at Fes! He had complete control of the political situation the whole time, dispatching reports and coordinating intelligence, but did he neglect to hang out by the pool in the evening with a couple of cold ones and a good book? Nope. You learn what you like, and you make sure you always have enough of it, so you can work as hard as the Company needs you to.”