by Kage Baker
“I passed the Grand Ballroom on the way over here,” I continued. “Brother! What an engineering stunt that is.”
“Isn’t it?” She sat on the edge of the bed and fished around for her shoes. “Whole thing goes up like a hallucination in twenty-four hours. You haven’t even seen the inside yet. That’s his big specialty; Houbert earned his first credits designing portable field shelters like palaces. He’s a genius, under all the aesthete crap.”
“I guess so!”
“Not that I’ll miss him.” She pushed her feet into her shoes and stood up, looming over me. “Let’s get out of here. Revelry and merriment await us.”
CHAPTER NINE
WHETHER THEY DID OR NOT, I was sure impressed by the Grand Ballroom. It looked real, and permanent, until you got close enough through the traffic jam of sedan chairs and saw that the whole massive thing was just a white tent—though on a scale that made Barnum and Bailey’s biggest effort look like a field bivvy. Carved cantilevers ten stories high circled around the outside, gleaming with gold leaf, and scarlet pennants fluttered from the dome, and the whole business glowed with interior lighting like a fairy castle.
“Wow” was all I could say. Mendoza clambered out of the chair ahead of me, unimpressed.
“Come on. I want a drink.”
We joined the milling throng and flowed inside with everybody else, where I had the shock of discovering that this was a two-level tent. On the ground floor were a bar, hatcheck booth, retiring area, and kitchens, all gorgeously appointed in a central chamber. Around the perimeter ran a couple of long sloping ramps leading up to the second floor, curtained in swags of sea-green satin. Gaping, I followed Mendoza as she beelined for the bar, and soon we were on our way up the ramp with a margarita each and so many other immortals, you couldn’t hear yourself think for all the subvocal chatter.
I thought that what I’d seen so far had been pretty neat, until I got upstairs. The ballroom itself was floored with a vast and gleaming expanse of polished teak—over cork, to judge from the pleasant bounciness of our steps. The ceiling was held up with gilded palm trees and winked here and there with tiny electric stars. From the center a mirrored ball hung, revolving above rose-pink lights, throwing spots of light that swam slowly like fish around the walls. There was a bandstand full of white-jacketed musicians tuning up; a placard of gold script on a blood-red background announced that they were KING PAKAL & HIS PARTY BOYS D’ POPUL VUH.
A few immortals drifted on the dance floor; others were sitting at a bank of tables on a kind of mezzanine, near the buffet table. I made for the food first, like the old field operative I am. Mendoza teetered along after me, sipping from her margarita.
And was that a spread! Great hors d’oeuvres and other little crunchy things. Nothing as substantial as cold cuts or dinner rolls, but what it lacked in solid food, it made up for in imaginative presentation. I remember a big pyramid of chicken salad paprikaed all over to look like our red stucco central residential complex. I remember Mayan hieroglyphs sculpted in liverwurst. I remember a scowling Mayan warrior profile bas-relieved in tomato aspic, with a bulging hard-boiled egg for its glaring eye. Green vegetable pate had been piped in for the head’s trailing quetzal plumes.
But the desserts! Let’s skip the obvious stuff like the pineapple gondolas and the gateaux pyramides. Let’s skip the little dishes of salted nuts and chalky mints. There was Theobromos in abundance like I’ve never seen in my long life: layered into cakes,whipped into creamy mousses, waxily coating fresh strawberries and candied fruits. There was Theobromos cream pie three inches deep, Theobromos cheesecake decorated with Theobromos bonbons, Theobromos roses on sugar stems, bombe Theobromos filled with frozen Theobromos ganache, Theobromos tartufos rolled in chopped Brazil nuts, and a whole lot of lively and obscene little figures made of plain, solid, highest-grade Theobromos. And champagne. Boy oh boy, what would our mortal masters say if they could see all this?
Over the buffet was strung a bannered message in gold script: WE ARE THE BRIGHT ASCENDING BUBBLES IN THE BLACK WINE OF MORTALITY. What the hell that was supposed to mean I couldn’t guess, but it looked poetic. Mendoza and I loaded our plates with a little of everything and elbowed along the terrace to a vacant table.
“This looks like a good place.” Mendoza dumped her plate down and collapsed into a folding chair. “Nice view, breeze from the windows, close to a door for quick exit after the New Year strikes. I’ve gone as far as I’m going in these heels tonight, thank you.”
“You said it, kiddo.” I dove into my Theobromos zabaglione fantasia, and conversation sort of languished for a few minutes. With each passing moment, though, the ballroom grew more beautiful and the wan crowd of immortals livelier. King Pakal and his buddies struck up a medley of Cab Calloway hits, and a few Old Ones actually got out on the floor and boogie-woogied in their silk pants and hoop skirts.
“Say, Joseph, is that you?” Lewis wandered up with a massively loaded dessert plate and a dry martini. “And Mendoza! Good to see you again. Would you two mind terribly if I took this chair? My lady friend threw tact to the winds and locked herself in her room with a good book, so I’m going to spend my evening carping from the mezzanine and overdosing on neurostimulants.”
“Sure.” Mendoza speared a bonbon on her dessert fork and waved assent. “How the hell are you, anyway?”
“Just peachy-keen, thanks.” He set his plate down and took a seat. Wriggling forward to the edge of it, he placed his fingertips on his knees. “And I’ve had the most splendid news. You’ll never guess.”
“What?”
“I’m being transferred!”
“No kidding? Where to?”
“England. The jolly old UK.” He lifted a forkful of Theobromos torte and bit into it decisively. “Well, with a brief layover in Jamaica to build a cover identity. Oh, my, this has orange liqueur drizzled through it! Try some. In any case, I’m off next month. Hurrah!”
“England, huh?” Mendoza laid her fork down and frowned. “Well, you watch out, dear. It’s a crazy place. Cold and wet, and dirty, too. I was miserable there.”
She hadn’t been miserable all of the time, as I remembered, but even under the cheery influence of the Theobromos I knew better than to say this. I just scraped my parfait glass clean and dug into the Theobromos pudding.
“Well, you were there in, what, the fifteens? This is a whole new era. London may be nasty, but there’ll be coffeehouses and exciting literary parties. And, you know, I’m actually rather looking forward to getting my hands dirty in the field again.” He raised his martini in a gesture of salute. I thought he looked as though he’d break in half if the dirt fought back with any determination, but then he was stronger than he appeared. We all are. Mendoza just shook her head.
“You take care, all the same. They’re not a civilized people, no matter what they think of themselves.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve some wild and woolly times to get through before Victoria toddles onstage. I’ll be working out of the London safe house, though, so I shouldn’t think there’ll be too much cause for concern. Do you know London at all?”
“No.” Mendoza sipped from her drink. “I was stuck down in Kent the whole time.” I wondered why she was able to discuss England with everybody except me.
“Pity. Well, that’s what access codes are for, though I always find personal recommendations helpful too. And! Even though my primary assignment will be coordinating arrivals and departures, somebody up there’s finally remembered my literary training. I’m to collect rare volumes as they come off the presses and ship them off to ‘specified locales.’ What fun! Perhaps I’ll run some cozy little antiquarian bookshop in the West End. Assuming there is a West End yet. I suppose there must be.” He carefully removed the nuts from a slice of Theobromos log before attacking it with his fork.
“You’ll have a swell time,” I assured him. King Pakal led a particularly raucous sign-off to the “St. James Infirmary Blues” and started in on some twent
y-third-century neobaroque fusion stuff. I turned to stare at the ballroom, which glittered with movement as more and more people braved the dance floor. “Boy, look at the turnout. Is it like this every year?”
“Not so elaborate,” Mendoza admitted.
“No indeed.” Lewis waved his fork. “Look at all the slogans.” I followed his gesture and realized that there were banners everywhere like the one above the buffet, with drooping gold script announcing such heartening sentiments as TEMPUS FUGIT, CARPE DIEM, WE ARE THE TICKING CLOCK MEASURING THE SOUL’S DARK MIDNIGHT, WE ARE DIANA’S FORESTERS, ALL GOOD THINGS MUST END, and TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW.
“Nothing like wallowing in it.” Mendoza shuddered.
“Well, it is the beginning of the end for this place,” Lewis pointed out. “The Age of Exploration marches on, nipping at Houbert’s heels. How he must dread the thought of all those earnest fellows in pith helmets searching for Lost Atlantis here. I must say I’ve been bored silly at old New World One, but I’ll be sorry to think of the monkeys finally getting in.”
“The human ones or the ones with tails?” Mendoza showed too many teeth in her smile. We all shared a brittle laugh and clinked our glasses, toasting nothing much.
The orchestra abruptly left off the fusion and struck up Mozart’s “Chorus of the Janissaries” from The Abduction from the Seraglio.
“Whoops.” Lewis and Mendoza got to their feet, as did everybody else who had been sitting down, so I stood too. All the Mayan waiters prostrated themselves. Base Administrator Houbert was borne in through the main entrance in a gilded sedan chair. He had on a getup of gold tissue and purple plumes, and wore a crown of violets. Big golden tears had been painted down his cheeks. I guess this was to signify that he was in mourning for the end of an era.
Lewis pressed his lips together, but Mendoza didn’t even bother to conceal her giggles, until it became obvious that the chair bearers were taking Houbert on a grand circuit of the dance floor, past all the diners on the terrace. As he processed along, he dipped into a bag from time to time and tossed little round black pellets to the crowd. Black olives? Goat droppings? No, they were hitting with a sharp crack that made diners flinch and avoid them. The sound suggested a hard coating.
“Oh, God, they’re black jelly beans this year,” Mendoza muttered.
“Of course. The siècle is fin, after all,” replied Lewis out of the side of his mouth. As the palanquin neared us, we gentlemen doffed our hats and bowed, which Houbert acknowledged with a graceful wave and a shotgun scatter of candy. I jumped up to catch one before it broke my margarita glass and popped it in my mouth. I was expecting licorice, but that would have been too pedestrian for Houbert; these jelly beans were flavored with Black Elysium liqueur. It figured.
I had drawn attention to myself with my leap, though, and Houbert’s little eyes settled on me. There was a split second of recognition, then an icy stare, before he turned his face deliberately away. The sedan chair bounced on past our table.
“Well, that was as pointed a snub as I’ve seen in the last three hundred years,” observed Lewis. Suddenly his face lit up. “Great Caesar’s ghost, that story is true! You did electrocute his pet piranhas!”
“What!” Mendoza stared at me.
“They say he stepped into the damned breakfast-room pool and fried those fish with some direct current when they attacked him. Oh, well done!” Lewis applauded me.
“It was an accident,” I muttered in embarrassment. “It was part of this dumb game he had me playing to find my access codes. I was coming down off a Theobromine high at the time, and I slipped.”
“Ah. Plied you with Hell’s Own Swiss Miss compound, did he? Serves the beggar right.” Lewis resumed his seat and dug into a Theobromos napoleon with gusto. Mendoza collapsed into her chair, weeping with laughter.
“You of all people losing your stirrups. And I missed it? I’m desolated! I’d cut my own throat, if that would kill me! How, oh how did this happen?”
“Did you ever have the special stuff he serves his guests?” I said defensively.
“Oh, no.” Lewis dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. “We’ve never been considered artistic or creative enough to appreciate it. We’re mere bureaucratic cogs in the big chronometer of life, unlike you, apparently. No, old chap, you sampled a pleasure reserved for the elite few.” He began to chuckle afresh. “That’ll teach him!”
By this time Houbert had made a full circuit of the ballroom, and his bearers took him across to where a golden throne was just descending from the ceiling, its arrival on a raised dias timed to coincide with the end of the music. He dismounted from the palanquin and turned to face us all (except for me). A single pink spotlight hit him.
MY DEAREST CHILDREN! he boomed. We all winced, and he hastily adjusted his decibels. Weep with me! Weep, oh weep! All weep!
Nobody was weeping, and the Mayan waiters gave us some dirty looks. Finally there were some howls and boohoos of lament from the tables closest the dias. Houbert raised his big hands in seeming ecstasy, as though he were conducting an orchestra playing something slow and sublime. That’s it! Allow it to well up in your hearts! FEEL the sorrow of eternal life, the endless tragedy of the endless mortality in which we can never share! Let the tide of tears for all that you have known, and all that you can never know, wash into your hearts!
“Have you heard about the latest nanotechnology they’re allowing us in the field?” Lewis inquired of Mendoza. “There was a nice article in Immortal Lifestyles Monthly.”
“No, I haven’t seen this month’s issue,” replied Mendoza, draining her margarita.
For another day of reckoning dawns on the all-too-near horizon, my children! Once again the evil genius Time draws near with his hourglass and scythe, bringing destruction once again to a garden of paradise! Once again we poor deathless ones willwander homeless upon the face of the earth, as ruin devours what we once held dear! Houbert held out one palm and shimmied it slowly downward. He may have meant the gesture to be expressive, but it made him look as though he were shaking a tambourine.
“Well, it seems that someone’s come up with a surveillance device of perfectly astonishing tininess, and here’s the best part: it’s packaged in miniature robots that look exactly like head lice.” Lewis widened his eyes for emphasis.
“No kidding?”
Will no merciful God look down to stop the pitiless and eternally unfolding pageant of the years? Who among you but has fled weeping as barbarians despoiled Troy, or as fire and brimstone rained down upon Nineveh and Tyre? Who among you but has learned the bitter lesson that All Good Things Must Come to an End?
“As God is my witness. Even under a microscope, you can’t tell, unless you know where to look for the manufacturer’s mark. Plant one on a mortal subject, and you can hear every word that’s uttered in a thirty-foot radius around him.”
“The anthropologists ought to love that.”
LAMENTATION is my theme this evening. Houbert threw up his beefy arms. For this sweet Utopia that will lie in ruins one century hence, and for us, poor creatures that we are, denied the blessed solace of eternal sleep, of kindly dust and gentle oblivion, of sharing the fate of those who have gone forever into that good night!
“But! There’s more. The article says that these are only the prototypes, and we can expect a whole new line of multipurpose lice. Tiny traveling cameras, for example. Lice that function as miniature hypodermics—” Lewis jabbed eloquently with his dessert fork. “One ‘bite,’ and your mortal subject is knocked out for hours, or inoculated with a vaccine.”
“And the timing’s so right, too. Just as the powdered wig is becoming the fashion statement,” said Mendoza in admiration.
CHERISH the divine emotions that make you what you are, my children: the unnatural survivors of fragile humanity, from them but never again of them, watching eternally as human creativity is destroyed and yet eternally renewed, so that even as we unnaturals MOURN, we must unnaturally CELEBRATE!
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“That’s just what I thought, myself. Dare we take it further? Why not receivers as well as transmitters? Lice that pick up Company broadcasts of popular entertainment. Lice that store and deliver coded information. Think of the possibilities!”
“You know, I think I did see this article. Wasn’t this in the issue with Alec Guinness on the cover?”
DO NOT shrug, as some will, and declare that weeds and death SHOULD conquer because the gilded and graceful SHARE the streets with poverty and disease. A glare in my direction left no doubt about Houbert’s opinion of me.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, with an article on his postwar comedies.”
“That’s the one. I haven’t read it yet. It’s packed in my carry-on so I’ll have something to read on the transport.”
Consider us here on this last night of a century, the deathless, the eternally beautiful, in all our comfort and felicity. Yet even WE shall scatter like leaves before the wind, and who can know when we shall meet again? This gorgeous pavilion will vanish with the dews of morning; yet our more PERMANENT halls shall prove no less insubstantial! Houbert buried his face in his hands, smearing his golden paint.
“Well, don’t miss the ‘Coming Attractions’ section. Personally, I’m thrilled by the potential uses. I can just see myself sitting in some London salon with my lice-ridden peruke, eavesdropping on Doctor Johnson!” Lewis rubbed his hands together.
“How colorful.” Mendoza moved her elbow as a Mayan waiter put down a silver ice bucket containing a champagne bottle. “What’s this? We didn’t order champagne.”
“The Father of Heaven (who is, by the way, giving a beautiful speech to which everyone ought to be paying attention) gave orders that this beverage be served to all His immortal children,” replied the Mayan primly. “Whether They deserve it or not.”