by Kage Baker
“Oh yeah?” Mendoza glared back at him. “Well, you can go jump in the nearest fountain, pal.”
Houbert continued: Now, you will ask, my children: What are we to do? How are we to live, knowing that ALL beauty is ephemeral? And I shall tell you to dance! DANCE, and express the sorrow in your perfect and unfailing hearts! RENEW in your beautiful dance the pattern of the cosmos itself! Dance, my children, even as you hear the bell tolling and know it shall NEVER toll for thee!! And the spotlight went out, causing him to vanish.
“Certainly,” said the waiter, drawing himself up in injured dignity just as the tolling of a very large, very loud bell reverberated through the place. “I’ll obey the Daughter of Heaven immediately. I’ll go right out to the nearest fountain, even in these clothes which require pressing and starching, and I’ll just leap in.” He turned to push his way through the crowd on the mezzanine, which had become pretty dense by this time, so I was able to grab his arm.
“What are you, nuts?” I demanded, and Lewis joined in: “Now, now, let’s not lose our tempers.”
“Look, you stupid bloody Indian—” Mendoza yelled in exasperation as a frenzied waltz began to play.
“Mendoza—”
“Why, of course this slave is stupid. But not so stupid that he has forgotten he’s under oath to obey any order whatsoever given him by a Child of Heaven, no matter how unpleasant or irrational. But stupid most assuredly. The Daughter of Heaven has said so.” The waiter jutted his ferocious nose in the air.
“Aw, come on, you don’t have to go jump in any fountains,” I told him.
“No, with all respect, Son of Heaven, I must obey.”
“Not if both he and I countermand her order,” Lewis proposed. “That would satisfy your oath, wouldn’t it? Two Children of Heaven surely overrule one. We both order you not to go jump in the nearest fountain. Don’t we, Joseph?”
“Yeah, we do, and not only that”—I looked sternly at Mendoza—”the Daughter of Heaven is going to reverse her order too. Aren’t you, Mendoza?”
She got an evil gleam in her eyes.
“And she’s not going to order you to do something painful and difficult with the champagne bottle, either!” I yelled.
“The Daughter of Heaven reverses her previous order,” Mendoza enunciated clearly. I released the waiter’s arm. He shook out his bar towel with a crisp snap, refolded it, and draped it over his wrist.
“Thank You. If You have no further orders, this slave is going to continue serving wine to other Children of Heaven, who have also disregarded the Father of Heaven’s request to dance.” And he moved away, back as stiff as a ramrod.
“Goodness, that was awkward,” observed Lewis. “But cheer up; soon enough we won’t have passive-aggressive members of a vanished empire to order about anymore.”
“Three cheers.” Mendoza leaned back wearily. “And I’m not getting up to dance, even if a whole priesthood of Mayans disapproves of me.”
“Good evening, all,” said a voice, seemingly from under the table. A moment later our fourth chair was pushed back, and a little figure clambered up into it.
Lewis nodded. “Good evening, Latif. I assume you have permission to stay up this late?”
“Naturally.” Latif settled back into his chair. The candy-box costume was gone; he wore now the school uniform for the neophyte class, with pleats pressed razor-sharp. “Any of you opening that champagne, by the way?”
“Oh, why not?” Lewis peered into his empty martini glass. He pulled out the drippy bottle and prized up the foil and wire with fastidious care. When the cork finally blew, he poured fresh drinks all around, and we sat for a while watching our fellow immortals dance.
Something I’ve noticed over the years: we don’t dance well, on the whole. None of us are clumsy on the floor, or anything like that; just the opposite. We’re too … smooth. Too perfect. Well, you can’t avoid saying it, we look mechanical. Like big sharks gliding around and around. Never a missed step or beat. Mortals move with a difference, with an awkward something that makes their motion beautiful. Maybe it’s passion. I don’t know. I only knew one immortal who danced well, and she won’t anymore. But maybe it’s just the heels she wears nowadays.
As the level in the champagne bottle grew lower, Lewis began to look green.
“Oh, dear,” he said faintly. “I don’t think I ought to have eaten that last helping of Theobromos mousse.”
“You were drinking martinis before the champagne, weren’t you?” Latif pointed out in his bright little voice. “Theobromine and gin don’t combine well, you know. Try metabolizing sucrose.”
“I haven’t taken in enough starches. Oh dear.”
“Here.” Mendoza pushed back her chair, and Lewis sort of toppled over into her lap, where she fed him sugar cubes from the little dish on the table. He lay there pale and wan. I ordered more champagne, which I shared with Latif. Mendoza just watched the whirling dancers as she stroked Lewis’s limp hair, her face sad and cold.
Hmmm. I looked at them out of the corner of my eye. Had they had a relationship or something, at one time? Lewis was hardly her type. On the other hand, he seemed funny and kind. I found myself hoping she’d made at least one friend during all these years and realized I was in for a lot of trouble on this next job if I let myself worry about the state of Mendoza’s heart. I looked away.
“You’re a lot more presentable in the uniform,” I told Latif. “How’d you get Houbert to let you out of the Hindu prince suit?”
“Nothing he can do.” How could a baby grin wolfishly? “A communication came through this morning. It seems my time-table’s been moved up. I’m to be posted to Labienus ahead of schedule. I leave day after tomorrow. Tell me, sir, have you ever been to Canada? Should one pack a heavyweight wardrobe?”
“Thermal underwear and flannel everything,” I advised. “And plenty of blankets and waterproof shoes. They won’t want you freezing if they’re in such a hurry to get you up there,” I told him. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have intercepted and altered a couple of transmissions to facilitate things, and I wouldn’t have blamed him either. What a cool little customer Latif was. Just like I’d been, once. What would he be like in twenty years?
“Well, we’ll just see, won’t we?” he remarked cheerily, and stood in his chair to pour us both more champagne.
Lewis felt better after a while and lurched upright, just in time to hear La Valse by Ravel pulse into its opening chords.
“I wondered when they’d play that,” he groaned. “That’s Houbert’s favorite piece of music, you know. After The Phantom of the Opera.” The lights in the ballroom deepened to an ominous and weird purple.
“Well, it’s appropriate for tonight, anyhow,” said Mendoza. “The way it evokes glittering empires about to crumble. Music full of death. God, that’s spooky. Look at everybody!”
I peered out on the dance floor, and I swear I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand. Houbert had worked some trick of lighting, some perversely brilliant special effect, that gave the illusion of death masks on each perfect clockwork dancer who skimmed the ballroom floor in time to that terrible, beautiful music. Swooping and circling, they moved, so many skeletons in satin clothes.
No, wait. They weren’t human skeletons. Something was picking up the alloy frame in each of them, the machine that had replaced their mortal, breakable bones, the indestructible casing that held their brains and eyes. Was it some quality in the purple light that caused them to glow through the flesh?
No, not the light—or at least not the light alone. The champagne we’d all been given! He’d had it adulterated with something, some chemical harmless in itself, or we’d have detected it in the first taste. That was what was making our hardware glow.
Slowly I looked down at my own hands. Fine jointed mechanisms riveted to a pivoting frame that disappeared into my lace cuffs. I tried to look at Lewis and Mendoza without turning my head much. They were staring out at the dancers with haunted eyes;
they hadn’t noticed that they too were part of the show, a dapper gentleman skeleton machine and a lissome skull-faced lady machine. And Latif? Well, he wasn’t glowing much, because less of him had been replaced, you see. Just a little machine, yet.
And as the music soared to its crashing close, a deafening chime was heard—two, three, four. The chimes kept coming, and the clock was striking midnight. Happy Hellish New Year, 1700! Things like snakes began to fall from the ceiling, and of course they were only black streamers. Our Mayan waiters began to blow paper horns and crank noisemakers. The waltz ended, and the lights came up. “Auld Lang Syne” was playing, the classic soupy Guy Lombardo arrangement.
Lewis looked gray and tired. Mendoza was pale, shaking. I thought she must have noticed the ugly illusion at our own table—well, not illusion, after all—but she drew a deep breath and said very quietly:
“Oh, how I hate parties. Here we sit tonight, and do you realize how unlikely it is any of us four will ever be together in the same room again?”
Was it loneliness she was afraid of? I reached out my hand to clasp hers.
“Hey, kiddo, you’ll see me again. We’re going on the same assignment together, remember?”
She bared her teeth at me.
CHAPTER TEN
BUT WE FOUND OURSELVES ON the same transport the next morning, strapped into our seats and watching New World One drop away beneath us.
“It was time for you to move on anyway,” I told Mendoza consolingly. “It was stuffy. Decadent. Dull. Nothing should be decadent and dull.”
“Your father was a Moorish groom and your mother performed circumcisions on sailors,” she informed me.
“Hey, that’s okay. I know you’re not really sore. You’re going to love it in California.”
“I won’t be able to get a cocktail there for at least a hundred years,” she brooded. “And longer, for a Ghirardelli’s hot fudge sundae.”
“Well, you hated parties anyway.”
She just snarled and opened her magazine, shutting me out. I didn’t mind; do I ever mind? I’m only the guy who gave her eternal life, after all. I settled back in my seat and closed my eyes. Forty winks after last night’s party seemed like a good idea.
I thought about Latif, the self-assured little administrator-in-training, all his buttons polished, intent on asking the right questions and making the right moves. Funny that he so worshiped my buddy Suleyman, who was anything but a bureaucrat. Still, when you’re tiny and mortal and frightened, and this big god comes looming out of the darkness to offer you a hand—well, it makes an impression. I thought about what it must have been like, in the stinking hold of a slave ship, with all the comfort and safety you’d ever known lying beside you bewilderingly dead … and just as the loss got through to you, and the scream began to rise in your throat because you knew you were alone, just then the big man appeared and called your name.
I don’t know how he knew my name. I don’t even remember what my name was. But he was there, looming against the darkness, a god in a bearskin, and his axe and his hands were red. Lying around his feet were the bad guys, all smashed, the tattooed devils who’d caught my family away from the rock shelter. He didn’t smell or look anything like anybody else I’d ever seen. He looked like a mountain and his brow was a cliff, with his pale eyes staring out from its shadow. He saw me where I was hiding. He put out his red hand and called my name, in his flat high voice. I went to him. He took me out of the painted cave and past the fires where his army was burning the bodies of the tattooed men. He explained that the tattooed men had to die because they were bad and made war. I was glad they were dead and burning, because it meant that I wasn’t going to die.
He told me I would never die. He took me to the other place, where there were clean quiet people who didn’t smell. They fed me, washed me, and put me to bed where it was safe. Later they made me immortal.
But I could never seem to get completely out of that darkness that was scary and smelled so bad. Then I was in the prison and staring through the doorway at the little girl who sat huddled in the straw, such a thin, sick little girl, her arms and legs like white sticks. All the life she had left was burning in her eyes, furious black eyes. I loomed against the light and put out my hand to her. She told me to go to hell. I knew then she had to be immortal; you need a tough will to work for Dr. Zeus.
“Hey.” Mendoza shoved me. Light all around us, clouds drifting past the window. “Wake up. We’re over Alta California.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CALIFORNIA.
Named after a queen, supposedly, and you could see why. She’s the schizoid goddess Fortune herself: sometimes a smiling benefactress who gives mortals all they could hope for in life, sometimes a snarling bitch driving her children from her with a whip and a flail. The trick is, see, you have to know what you really want from her when you go there.
First we saw a pretty coastline: mountains that rolled back from the coastal bluffs, scored with deep valleys. Everything was green, but it was winter, you have to remember.
We saw a place where the land stuck out like a snail’s head just emerging from its shell. That was Point Conception, our destination. No trees here: bare scrubby headland, and even from the transport you could see the bushes tilting sideways in the sea breeze. We felt the wind buffeting us as we sank toward the landing platform.
When we stepped out, wow. An ice-cold gale that made my eyes water. I noticed that all the field personnel lined up to greet us wore sunglasses, the wraparound kind like goggles. I hoped I’d be issued a pair. The winter sunlight was sharp as diamonds.
“Where are the palm trees?” said Mendoza through gritted teeth. “Where are the swimming pools?” There was the sea and a lot of bare rolling hills, and that was about it. We slogged across the platform, the wind whipping at the train of Mendoza’s gown, and presented ourselves to the foremost of the goggled welcomers.
“Hi.” I thrust out a hand. “Facilitator Grade One Joseph reporting to AltaCal Base.”
“Good.” The welcomer smiled, took and dropped my hand. “And Botanist Grade Six Mendoza?”
“Reporting.”
“Good. This way.” We followed him to our shuttle, which was a rickety car set to run on a wooden track held above the earth on cement piers. It looked like a roller coaster. It drove like one, too.
The wind would have torn our voices away if we’d tried to speak out loud, but the man made no subvocal communication attempts either. Nothing like So this is your first time in California? or Wait’ll you folks taste the abalone chowder we fix around here. He might as well have been a mortal. Mendoza just stared off inland; God knows what she was thinking. I watched the blue Pacific glitter in the sun. It certainly was blue, I gave it that.
We rattled away north to a beach at the mouth of a canyon. The main base was here, a plain modular station backed up on its piers into the cliff at the south side of the cove; the kind of place that could be removed later, and a judiciously engineered rock slide or two would hide any evidence it had ever been there. It was painted for camouflage, but otherwise featureless. Like the personnel. Everyone I saw was wearing Company base issue, which is blank utility clothing with a lot of pockets and no style. Houbert would have been appalled. Men and women alike wore the same one-piece garment. No lace, no padding, no embroidery. I’d worn it myself once or twice, back in prehistory, but I could see Mendoza staring at it aghast.
Or maybe she was looking aghast at the mortals, of which there were a surprising number among the base personnel. Not natives that had been fixed for maintenance labor like the Mayans, either, but actual officers. Kids from the future. It must have cost the Company a fortune to ship them all here.
Aren’t those—she subbed at me, and I replied, That’s right.
Our little thrill ride took us right up under the base, where at last the roar of the wind was shut out. Our driver popped the door open for us, and I ventured, “Lotta youngsters here, aren’t there?”
&
nbsp; “Yep.”
“Real windy place, too.”
“Sure is.”
“I was expecting something a little more temperate.”
“Yeah?”
“Say, you don’t talk much, do you?”
“I’m busy.” The guy half-turned. “Mr. Bugleg asked that you report to his office immediately upon arrival. Go up those stairs, and the admitting desk will direct you.”
I figured it out at last. He was an immortal like we were, all right, but a recent recruit: probably born in the twenty-third century. So that’s what they looked like in the future? Was he ever caught between two worlds.
We clambered up the steps with our luggage, and Mendoza growled, “Always the same damn story. I’ve never in my life seen an escalator in one of these places.” She grabbed up her train with one hand and hoisted her suitcase in the other. I pushed my tricorne to the back of my head and followed.
At the top of the stairs we were met by a smiling mortal woman with a clipboard. She might have been good-looking in a silk mantle, with maybe a little lace apron. She wore the sexless coveralls, though, like everybody else we’d met so far.
“Um, welcome to AltaCal Base Eight. You must be Facilitator Joseph, and you must be Botanist Mendoza, am I right? Hello and welcome—”
“Yeah. Hi,” replied Mendoza. “Look, that driver told us we’ve got to report directly to a meeting. Was he kidding? Don’t we get to see our quarters first, wash up a little? That’s pretty inconsiderate, don’t you think?”
“Oh, Mr. Bugleg wants to see you right away. It’s very important.” Rapidly the girl clipped little ID tags to us and our luggage. Her own tag read STACEY. I guessed she’d seen a few of us in her brief lifetime, but not enough to be cool about it. She was radiating discomfort. A little fear, a little more repugnance. I could smell it, and so, unfortunately, could Mendoza. “You can leave your bags here, and we’ll deliver them to your rooms. Mr. Bugleg wants to discuss your mission over dinner.”