by Kage Baker
I’ve never seen him since. I haven’t looked for him. He hasn’t attempted to contact me, and I’m grateful for that. Maybe he was caught a long time ago; how do you hide, after all, from a Company with advance knowledge of every event in history? Though a lot of history is unrecorded, and who knows the event-shadow areas better than we immortals, who have to work in them so much of the time?
I’ve never accessed his message, all the same.
I’ve gone through seven centuries with this permanent Pandora’s box in my head, and I have nightmares now and then, where I give in to temptation and decode the damn thing, and something awful always happens. Moaning and shuddering, I wake up with a start.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I WOKE UP ON MY Foamfill synthetic bed with a start. As my nightmare faded around me, I realized that my ears were doing that awful inner vibration thing again, and after a millisecond’s analysis I knew why. You couldn’t have seen me as I dove for the bag under my bed and fled through the doorway of my cubicle; I was moving too fast.
Out in the corridor, doors were popping open all along its length, and there was a white flurry of immortals in various kinds of eighteenth-century nightdress moving like wraiths—very, very fast wraiths—each clutching an emergency bag, rushing for the door at the end of the hall in an unstoppable torrent. But there was hardly a sound, and under the eerie calm of the blue hall lights it looked like a dream sequence from a film.
Down the stairs we went, with muffled thunder of bare feet and slippers, to crash open the ground-level doors and burst into the ice-cold night full of the noise of roaring black surf. Nobody stopped; nobody said a word; we kept going, plowing through the cold soft sand across the beach, gaining speed as we reached the solid ground and sped uphill for the nearest high place.
We’d found a good refuge around a rocky outcropping in seconds, and that was where we were assembled when the first shaking began. At first, vibrations only we could perceive; then the trembling that the base warning system picked up, causing it to emit the shrill bleeping signal that woke the mortals; then the steady bang-bang-bang of a fairly big one. It wasn’t so bad where we were; a few pebbles went bouncing off the outcropping, and we swayed slightly and clutched one another. We heard the mortals screaming inside the base structure, which rocked and groaned on its pilings like an uneasy elephant. A couple of them came running down the stairs and then stopped in the lobby, staring out in horror at the floodlit sand, which was dancing as though it were alive, each grain leaping up.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” cried one of us, his volume up to the maximum setting. I crouched down and grabbed my poor ears. Where was Mendoza? The shaking got harder; it was coming in waves now. The exterior floodlights flickered and went out, throwing the lobby into black shadow, so we couldn’t tell if the mortals obeyed or not. Somebody—it was the geologist who’d spoken with me at dinner—pushed his way to the front of our group and stared down. He stretched out an arm, pointing and yelling, “Sand boil!”
And these things came spouting up from the beach under the moonlight, like jets of water but not glittering the way water would; no, these were liquefied sand fountains. We stared in fascination, swaying to keep balance, until somebody gasped, “Oh, shit, look!”
A sand boil had erupted right beside one of the base’s support pilings. As we watched, the whole modular dome began to lean, tilt, as if the uneasy elephant had decided to kneel down, or as if a horseshoe crab had decided to bury itself in sand. There was one shocked outcry from us all, blended with profanity in dozens of long-forgotten languages and dialects, then silence. We watched motionless through the longest ten seconds I could remember in a while, as the base settled, and tilted, and settled. We heard things breaking. The mortals trapped inside were making the kind of noises that come to you in nightmares for years after. We didn’t even notice that the shaking had stopped.
With a final groan, the base settled at last and didn’t tilt anymore. The mortal crying—and it was mostly crying now, the hysterical screams had stopped—drifted up on the night air, faint as the sound of summer crickets. The wind and the surf were so loud.
“Six point two,” announced the geologist.
“All right.” Lopez pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He wore a long nightshirt with lace cuffs, and without his wig I saw he had a crewcut bullet head. “Security! Initiate damage assessment and rescue attempts.” They saluted and filed away down the hill. “Idomenus?”
“Sir.” The geologist stepped forward.
“What, in your opinion, is the least likely location to be affected by aftershocks?”
“This hill’s pretty good, sir. Granite bedrock close under the surface.”
“Good. We’ll establish our emergency camp here. Operatives! Kindly open your emergency kits and prepare shelters and triage facilities. I assume we can expect aftershocks?” He turned to Idomenus.
“Oh, yes.”
All around us, immortals were fanning out along the wide saddle-backed hill, and here and there tents were already popping open like mushrooms in the moonlight. Lopez asked me, “Can you estimate what effect this is likely to have on the mission?”
“I don’t guess it’ll bother the Chumash much, not physically—their houses are pretty earthquake-safe. They’ll view it as a mystical event; they have an earth goddess named Khutash, and maybe they’ll assume she’s angry—” My ears began to go crazy again, and I grabbed them.
Lopez’s eyes widened. “Operatives! Aftershock in five seconds!” he shouted. Sure enough, the earth gave a rolling tremor, and we braced ourselves. Fresh screams broke out down at the base. I realized I was getting motion sick. Lopez watched me with interest.
“God, that’s useful. Your ears are functioning as an early-warning system superior to ours,” he said as the rumbling subsided.
“You wouldn’t want it made standard issue, believe me,” I said wretchedly.
“Perhaps not. Continue with your report, please.”
“Uh … so, the earth goddess is mad about something. I’ll have to come up with a reason. I can do that, no problem. As far as the rest of the mission goes, we won’t know how it’s been impacted until we get a report from security. Was our equipment damaged? Was our collected material damaged? That has to be determined.”
“Yes, of course.” He nodded thoughtfully.
“You want me to go help them set up tents now?” I looked around for a bush behind which I could throw up.
“No. Remain with me. You’re too useful in detecting aftershocks, for the time being. Let’s see: it’s now oh five hundred hours precisely. As soon as the sun rises, you’re to go to the Chumash and reassure them about the seismic event. Perhaps the earth goddess is angry with the Sun about the coming invasion?”
“Yeah, or something.”
“Something to pacify them.” He turned briskly and surveyed the eastern horizon, which was already a little paler than the rest of the sky. Low down, there was a spreading, rolling puff of what I would have thought was fog, only it was blood-red and blowing from inland out to sea. It was dust, from who knew how many landslides. I worried briefly about my Chumash, until I remembered that Humashup was laid out sensibly clear of possible slide areas.
“Looks like they’re bringing out some stretchers,” called Ashur, whose tent area had a good view of the base.
“Tsk. Operatives, prepare triage for incoming wounded! What is it, are we about to have another shock?” He whirled about in concern as I staggered for the nearest bush.
“Nope,” I replied feebly, and whooped my guts up. “Well, actually … now we are.”
“Aftershock!” he announced, and it came rolling through, and we rode it out. “All operatives with medical training report to the triage area, please!”
“That includes me.” I held up my paw.
He looked severe. “I rather think your appliances rule out your performing brain surgery at the present time,” he told me. “Now, let’s go see what’s b
ecome of our mortal contingent. In the event Mr. Bugleg has deceased, you are second in command.”
“Okay.” Gosh, I’d made officer again. He strode away to the line of security techs that was just winding its way up the hill, and I wandered after him. We passed Mendoza, who was briskly setting up her tent like all the others. I waved at her. She looked up and grinned.
“Some ride, huh?” she shouted. I nodded and kept going. Nice to know she was all right.
The preliminary reports were: no dead; fifteen slightly injured, with assorted scratches and contusions; three badly wounded,two of whom had been in the lobby, because the glass doors broke when the dome tilted over; and two mortals with, respectively, one broken arm and one broken ankle. Not bad. There were people unaccounted for, but we were still evacuating them from the base, which had remained structurally sound despite its support failure. In the growing light, the base looked like one of those crablike things out of a Hieronymus Bosch landscape, gigantic and marooned on the beach, with tiny people crawling in and out of it. Obviously not a Houbert design. But the lead security tech was confident it could be righted with a day of heavy equipment work.
And I wasn’t an officer again after all. Bugleg was escorted stumbling and weeping up the hill by two techs. Lopez and I both scanned him as he approached.
“Minor contusions on your knees and elbows, slight abrasion of your chin,” Lopez diagnosed. “Very good, sir! You clearly did the sensible thing and stayed in your room during the shaking. The base modules are designed to provide maximum protection—”
“You didn’t!” sobbed Bugleg. “You left us! You left us and ran outside!”
“Well, but that’s what we were designed to do, sir. We left early so as to have nice shelters all prepared for you when the quake was over. See?” Lopez pointed. “Everything’s ready: tents set up, triage hospital in operation, evacuation proceeding on schedule. You’ll even have breakfast on time.”
“But the base fell over and you left us!“ Bugleg’s voice rose to an accusatory scream. “You knew it was going to happen, you old-time people, and you didn’t tell us!”
Lopez hauled off and slapped him in the face. Even I jumped.
“Stop that blubbering at once,” said Lopez in a low, cold voice. “You’ll frighten the others. Now, then. None of us operatives had advance warning from the Company of this, any more than you did. It’s known that California has earthquakes, so precautions were taken, and they’ve paid off, I might add. None of you has been killed. But there is no written history for this particular region in this particular year. This is one of those dark zones we operatives have to contend with all the time in the field: times and places where anything might happen. You’ve just experienced a little of the danger we have to face continually.
“As for staying behind and getting you out of your beds, we could no more have done that than we could have told the earthquake to go away. We were designed with the irresistible compulsion to avoid danger at all costs, even at the cost of your lives. You designed us that way, sir, you and your associates, so you’ve no cause to complain if we perform according to specifications.”
I don’t think poor Bugleg was taking in half of what he was being told. He stood there in his jammies, shivering and blinking back tears. Lopez looked him up and down.
“Now, I suggest you retire to a shelter and calm yourself. We’ll attempt to send a communication to the Company as soon as it can be determined whether or not our system was damaged.”
“Okay,” Bugleg sniffled.
“Come on, guy, there’s a nice one all set up over here,” I said, leading him by the sleeve to a minidome a few paces from Lopez’s impromptu command center. He was so upset, he didn’t seem to notice the physical contact, which would have had him recoiling at any other time. “Looky here! Protection from the wind, nice comfy air mattress, cozy Thermofilm comforter! Why don’t we sit down in here and wait until Mr. Lopez gets everything under control, okay?”
“My clothes are dirty,” he said sadly.
“Well, sure. That was bound to happen. They can be washed as soon as everything’s back up and running.”
“Lopez is mean.” Tears formed in his eyes. “All you old-time people are mean. I wish I’d never made that pineal tribrantine three.”
“Huh?” I gaped at him. Was he telling me he was the genius who’d invented PT3, the stuff that keeps our immortal cellular clocks set at high noon? I was all set to blurt out the question, but at that very second my ears began to go nuts again. I clutched them and yelled, “Hey, Lopez! Heads up!”
“Operatives! Aftershock!” roared Lopez from where he was conferring with the security techs. The tent began to widgy back and forth, and Bugleg cowered, his eyes wide.
“It’s okay! It’s okay! Look! It’s almost over. It is over, see? You’re safe. Nothing can fall on you out here,” I told him.
“I’m not safe!” he wailed. “It’s cold. It’s dark. We’re out where animals and savages can get us! I left my sipper bottle in my room. And the rocks hurt my feet. And there’s disease vectors and microbes, and the sun radiation will give us cancer. And we’re killing the grass on this hill with these tents. And the shaking keeps coming. And … I have to be with old-time people.” He wrung his hands.
“You don’t like us, huh?” I studied him. He shook his head miserably. “How come?”
“You’re weird and scary. You do bad things like kill animals,” he gulped. The effort of answering a question seemed to focus him, calm him a little. “You chop down trees to make your houses and fires. And you smoke bad stuff and eat and drink bad stuff, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Controlled substances.” Like coffee, tea, chocolate … Boy, if our spartan little beach parties upset him, what would he make of a New World One? Did he even have a clue how Houbert was living down there?
“And you and the old-time mortals do all those rituals and superstitions. Lopez said you were a, a priest!” He mouthed the word in utter digust. “And you watch those things where people kill each other. That’s sick!”
“You mean … gladiatorial games?” I was mystified.
He shook his head. “No. The Agtha Christies. The Sherlock Homes. You people like those. I know.”
“But you guys play shooting games at your holo consoles.”
“That’s different.” His voice dropped to an uneasy whisper. “That’s to get out the bad thoughts.”
“Bad thoughts?” I made a guess. “You mean, violent impulses?”
He stared at me, trying to decipher what I’d said. “Violents,” he agreed at last. “People are bad. We’re all bad. But if we play the games every day, just killing pretend things, we don’t hurt anybody.”
“So people are bad, and we have to keep from hurting anything,” I prompted. “And that was why Dr. Zeus was founded?”
He nodded, wiping his nose. “People did war,” he said. “Pollution. Killing things until they were all gone. We could stay inside and not hurt anything, but the bad things had happened already. We had to make them not have happened. That was why they made you old-time people, so you could stop the bad things. But they made you wrong. I don’t like you.”
“Okay. But you helped make us too, right? You helped make pineal tribrantine three?”
“I made it,” he corrected me. “I figured out how. We had to make you fast and strong and not get old.” And he proceeded to tell me how he’d done it, in technical language that made my head spin, though the grammar and syntax were stripped down to six-year-old level. Though I had to access volumes to get even a grasp of the chemistry and technology involved, it was obvious it was the simplest thing in the world to him. Such was his concentration, as he spoke, that he didn’t even notice the next three aftershocks, or the screams of Stacey as she was having a piece of lobby door removed from her leg.
“Only now I’m sorry I did it,” he finished with a hiccup. “I’m thirsty. Get me something to drink.”
“Sure.�
�� I groped around and handed him a sipper bottle of distilled water. He sucked on it contentedly as I stared at him, trying to dope the thing out. Was he an idiot savant? But the other mortals shared a lot of his attitudes, and many of them were nearly as ignorant. Was he just an extreme case of a future type, brilliant in his own field and proudly, defensively moronic about everything else? It was a historical fact that after the Victorian era, scientists would become more and more specialized in their disciplines and less informed about other fields, the opposite of Renaissance men. Would the trend continue long enough to produce this? And would ecological responsibility warp into this bizarre self-hatred? What a substitute for a faith! Puritanism Lite! All the guilt without the God!
And yet … what did I want from the guy? He believed it was morally wrong to hurt anybody or anything. He lived by his principles and tried to make sure everybody under his command followed them too, even if his command was pretty much a joke.
It was sad that he was so terrified of the wild nature he was trying to preserve, and so bigoted against the humanity he was trying to help. So unnerved, too, by the deathless creatures he’d helped create to do his work.
Jeez, he’d helped create me. Here I was, sitting in a tent, face to face with my creator. Or one of my creator’s faces.
So I had a couple more pieces of that very big jigsaw puzzle I’d first sat down to twenty thousand years ago. Pieces of the edge, from the look of it. I was pretty sure that Bugleg and his peer group couldn’t possibly be running things, poor little sanetimonious Victor Frankensteins that they were. They certainly would never have countenanced the creation of Budu and his fellow Enforcers. To say nothing of all the dirty-tricks squads that had operated for the good of the Company since then. Or Houbert’s screamingly decadent parties.
Which meant that Lopez had probably been leveling with me when he implied that he and his cronies were the ones really in charge. It made more sense, and was in some ways a comforting thought. On the other hand, it meant that my kind were responsible for some pretty nasty work, including the betrayal of their own Enforcers.