Sky Coyote (Company)

by Kage Baker

Fine! Wait for my signal—

  “People, don’t worry about it,” I told the growing crowd. “He’s crazy, that’s all. Listen, guy, who’s going to believe a little runt like you? Can your god come down and talk to these people the way I have? You’re only a man! Why should they believe you instead of me, anyway?”

  If everything had gone as I planned, he’d have fallen down then in a fit, a clear sign to anyone watching that he most definitely did not have God on his side. But Sepawit pushed through the crowd, carrying a stone cooking bowl. I swung to point my muzzle at the stranger.

  “And another thing!” I barked. “You serve such an angry god: why don’t you tell us what fate befell the boy these people sent out to spy on you? What did His avengers do to Sumewo? What awaits those who defy Chinigchinix?”

  “Hideous death!” The fool couldn’t resist scaring them with hellfire and damnation. “See the consequence of being His enemy? The spy could not hide his presence from us, and with coals and scorpions his tongue was loosened, with the flaying knife his soul was liberated! But he was more fortunate than you shall be, for at the end he accepted the Lord, and so his spirit is at rest. You will envy him, when the avengers come for you! And they will come—”

  But the crowd gasped.

  “Sumewo is dead?” Anucwa put her hands to her mouth in horror, and somebody else said incredulously, “Little Sumewo?” and there were moans of dismay, and a couple of people burst into tears. The missionary must have thought he’d hit the mark big time.

  But Sepawit stumbled forward, unable to take his eyes off the stranger’s face. “You did kill the boy, then,” he stated.

  “Not I, but the wrath of the One Lord!” shouted the stranger in his triumph. He made no attempt to dodge the stone bowl as Sepawit smashed it down on his head. Sickening crunch is a cliché for the sound it made, but an apt cliché. He dropped. There were brains in the dirt. Sepawit sank into a crouch and covered his face with his hands.

  I went to him and knelt beside him. “Sepawit. I’m sorry. I told you about these people.”

  “I just bought that bowl,” he said in a stunned voice. “Kaxiwalic won’t want it now.” He began to shake, and finally burst into tears. He threw his arms around me and wept his heart out, as unashamedly as though I were a sympathetic dog.

  “Let’s get this trash out of here and burn it,” said Nutku grimly. He and a couple of other men took the stranger’s body by the heels and dragged it away. People drifted off like ghosts, unwilling to intrude on Sepawit’s grief.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THERE WERE CONSEQUENCES, OF COURSE. There was a whole inquiry and report. Imarte made one hell of a scene, but the final ruling was that if she hadn’t been such a fatuous ass, the situation wouldn’t have deteriorated to the point it did. Interestingly enough, none of the Future Kids was particularly shocked at what Sepawit had done. After all, he was only a savage, wasn’t he, and didn’t they do things like that all the time? And maybe the mortals from the twenty-fourth century were still human enough to wonder what they’d do if they found out that one of their children had been tortured to death.

  But my fellow immortals were mostly on Imarte’s side. I had set in motion the chain of events that led to the death of a mortal; and while the older operatives understood that this had been necessary for the good of the mission, they were a little disgusted by the debating trick with which I’d beaten Imarte. None of them were Facilitators, naturally. The anthropologists, of course, were outraged and horrified at what a slimy little guy I was. The younger operatives agreed with them.

  Except for Mendoza. She’d barely noticed any of it.

  I was sitting in splendid isolation at my table in the commissary, pretending not to notice as people avoided sitting near me. Not that I blamed them; I wouldn’t want to watch me eat, either, with this coyote muzzle. Mendoza came in and got a bowl of soup and some crackers. She carried them straight to my table and sat down across from me, to my surprise and shock. I looked up at her to see if she was maybe expressing a comradely solidarity. I should have known better; she was staring absently into space, crumbling crackers into her soup in a way that suggested she’d forgotten how to eat.

  “It’s tomato bisque today, you know,” I told her.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “With real synthetic cream.”

  “How gross,” she said, but not as though she meant it.

  “So, how’s it going lately?” I inquired. “Haven’t seen you in the village much, now that the operation’s winding down.”

  “I’ve been in the field, doing a survey,” she said, bringing her stare back from a great distance and focusing on me at last. “I went for a walk. I was gone seven days and seven nights, and never stopped walking. I went a long way up this country, Joseph, more than a hundred miles. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.”

  “What did you see?” I leaned forward. She leaned forward too, and there was a warmth in her eyes for the first time in a long time, but it wasn’t for me.

  “I saw a high desert, a bitter, chill place with no water, a desolation of spines. But one night of rain, and there were flowers there stretching for miles, rolling away in every direction: violet, blue, crimson, and every shade of gold, pale gold like the morning or saffron yellow, and green-gold like brass. They just swept on forever, and the color pulsed and flickered like a bed of coals. There were clumps and stands of boulders rising from the desert floor, and they were pink, Joseph, like strawberries bleeding juice into cream, colors of the strangest innocence for that place of death.

  “I turned my face north and went on, and looked down out of the mountains into a valley floor. It ran five hundred miles, with a river winding down it, and was so wide, a mortal wouldn’t have been able to see across, and on the bottom was a lost sea. Only salt marshes left, marooned in the land, and cracked earth white with salt and bleaching bones. There was still a smell of the sea in the air, which was hot as a furnace. I walked across the valley and found mussel shells in the rocks. Condors drifted in the thermals over it, and dragonflies mottled green and orange, big as birds.

  “I walked up that valley, following the edge of the hills, and crossed over west into the green coastal range. North of here, Joseph, are oak forests that run on unbroken for miles, every kind of oak tree, every species that exists! Some are so old, so huge, one tree might shelter a whole valley in its shade. But you should see the redwoods!

  “Where the mountains fall steeply into the sea, that’s where I found the best ones. You’ve never seen trees so tall, not even you, and these are so old, they might have taken root when you were young. They make a darkness like night down in the canyons, cold as night, heavy with shadows and incense. Around their roots, even the little growth is ancient: horsetail rush and fern, living fossils. It might have been a million years ago; I felt I had fallen into the past there, with not a human sight or sound for miles. It’s all alive with its own life, Joseph, nothing to do with us!

  “I went north until I saw a mountain of marble, like a white pyramid, and that was where I turned back and followed the coast down. It was like a garden! Madrone trees all along the ridges, standing like queens, the leaves every pastel shade, the blood-red bark peeling back from the branches that might have been smooth-cast in copper. Silver-barked alders following every little stream down to the sea, and buckeyes just beginning to put out big sprays of pink-and-white blossom, fragrant as almond oil. Tiny meadows a thousand feet above the sea, talk about your hanging gardens!

  “And there’s a place, Joseph, where a vein of green stone works its way through the side of a mountain and down into cliffs that stand above the sea, and the trail to the beach winds over boulders like raw emeralds. The beach is all dark-green sand, and the water’s clear and green like rolling glass. Not one human voice to hear, not a breath, not a heartbeat, not a cry! Only the sound of the sea booming in the green caves.

  “I could have stood there on that headland forever, perfectly happy, un
til the green lichen had grown over me, until the long mosses trailed from my hair. I never wanted to move from that spot again. You must have found places like that, in all your centuries. Haven’t you ever wanted that, Joseph, just to let go of your humanity and let the sunlight flood in on the black place where it once was?”

  She looked so happy, and I was losing her, losing her into that wilderness. But the ice was melting, the stuff that had locked around her heart on the day the Englishman died.

  I smiled my most sincere smile, coyote teeth and all, and said, “It sounds swell, honey.”

  “Oh, there’s so much work for me here,” she went on, her eyes intense. “The Spanish will graze cattle and work unthinkable changes on the environment, but what the Yankees do in their turn will make the Spanish look like conservationists. There will be mass extinctions of the native plants as species are introduced from Europe and go wild. There are endemics growing here that are found nowhere else, Joseph, plants that evolved on their own in some fabulously distant time, maybe when this whole range was an island to itself. Did you know it was an island once?”

  “I’d heard that.”

  “The geology bears no relation to the mainland of America. This whole place just drifted in on the continental plate, appeared on the Pacific horizon like a cloud, and came to rest here. It will move out to sea again one day, tearing loose from America with enough seismic force to level the cities. Paradise on the move once more, and the angel with the flaming sword back in residence.” She looked wistful. “Perhaps the people will all be gone by then. The trees will still be here, though, if I do my work right. Do you think I have a chance of staying here, Joseph, if I put in a request with the Company?”

  “You might,” I replied, knowing I would have to pull in a couple of favors again. “I don’t see why not, if there’s as much botanical work as you say. They need somebody here, and it might as well be you.”

  “Exactly. This was what I did my graduate work in, anyway, you remember? The particular botany of the New World. This was the place I wanted to go, when I started out. Isn’t it funny how I was right about this, all along?” Resentment flashed briefly in her eyes. “Why on earth didn’t the Company send me here first, instead of Europe? Think how different my life would have been!”

  No denying that. “But you’d never have scored that Ilex tormentosum,” I reminded her. Then I wished I hadn’t, because such a bleak look came into her face, I wanted to lift my muzzle and howl that I was sorry, I was sorry, I was sorry.

  “Damn you for the memory,” she said. “Oh, hell, what’s the point in denying it happened? It would have all been ended by now anyway.”

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “I know. And I never believed you, even after he was gone.” Cold sorrow in her white face, all the happiness pale ashes again. She gave me that look like steel, straight into my eyes. “Do you know when I believed you at last? In 1596, when Sir Francis Drake died. There was quite a lot of chatter about it, you know, because he was a sort of anticelebrity down there in New Spain. Houbert held a big mourning party—all in fun, naturally. There was an enormous dessert, a ship, the Golden Hind, sculpted in Theobromos. Everyone was supposed to come dressed up as pirates, I remember. People were swaggering around speaking in terrible English accents, and the sound of those voices again—well. That was when it struck me, you know, that I’d been away from England for forty-one years.”

  She was looking past me now, out the commissary window at the dark Pacific. Her voice had grown cool and distant. “He’d have been an old man, my Nicholas, if he’d lived. I didn’t dare try to imagine what he’d have looked like. How could time wreck that well-made body of his? Stupid question, since fire did the job in half an hour. Anyway I sat there at that table with Houbert’s damned orchestra playing Fifteen Men on the Dead Man’s Chest, dropping miserable tears into my rum cocktail, and that was when I knew you’d been right.”

  “As I sat there, a kind-hearted stranger saw me crying and brought me a handful of cocktail napkins so I could blow my nose. That was how I met Lewis.

  “He was so kind to me, Joseph, that day I knew that you’d been right. It would have come to grief in the end no matter what Nicholas and I had done. You were right after all.”

  “I was hoping you’d forgive me eventually,” I said.

  She brought her gaze back to me with a snap. “I didn’t say I’d forgiven you,” she said. “You could have saved him for me, and you let him die.”

  “Baby, I couldn’t have saved him! You know that. There was no way he was going to let us rescue him.”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “But I know that if there had been, you’d have killed him just the same. He’d seen too much; he knew about us. That made him a security risk for the Company. He had to be silenced, and you were all ready to do it. It was simply your good luck he was so set on his martyrdom; saved you the trouble of injecting him with one of those nasty little drugs you used to carry around with you.”

  What could I say? We both knew it was the truth.

  She put her head to one side, considering me. “No lies, no denials? Well, good for you. Listen, don’t feel too badly about this. I can’t forgive you, but I do understand that you had no choice. You’re a Company man, and you had to do what the Company wanted. You always have; you always will. I don’t hate you for it.” She reached out and patted my paw absently. “There’s not enough of you inside there to hate, is there?”

  Maybe not.

  I said nothing—what could I say?—as she got up and walked away. The soup she hadn’t even touched sat there at her empty place, getting cold.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE LAST DAYS OF HUMASHUP were now drawing to a close. Nutku and his cronies had liquidated their assets and closed out their books. The priests had stripped their holy places of sanctity and shut them down. Streets and houses took on an eerily clean look, because what hadn’t been packed up for travel had been sold to the Company. People had nothing to do but eat and talk to one another. We had come to the dangerous days, the time when second thoughts occur; and while the missionary had failed in his effort to convince them that I was Evil Incarnate, maybe some of them were now a little shaky in their confidence. Not Kenemekme, of course; nothing could upset him; he just danced his little dances and played his little tunes and was happy with me as he could be. But other folks were getting restless. Other folks were thinking about friends or relatives in other villages who would be left behind. Other folks were beginning to realize this was not a game.

  How would I handle it? How would I keep them from contemplating the end of their world?

  Try this some time and see if it doesn’t work for you, when you’re having problems with your Chumash.

  “Sorry I’m late, everybody,” I puffed, sprinting into the clearing where everyone had gathered at my request. It was just getting dark, so the white sheet I was carrying shimmered ghostly in the twilight.

  “We’re all here, Uncle Sky Coyote, like you wanted,” Sepawit told me, looking uncertainly at the techs who’d come with me. They ignored him as they proceeded to set up the primitive battery-powered equipment they’d brought. Some of the people turned and stared at them; others watched me as I got busy tacking up the sheet between two oak trees.

  “I can see you are, and I’m very pleased,” I said. “I worked hard to get this treat for you tonight, I’ll have you know. Had to send off all the way to the World Above for it!” Which was close to the truth; New World One was a tropical paradise, wasn’t it?

  “A treat? That’s nice,” said Sepawit, turning to let everybody know, but most of the village had heard our conversation and were murmuring to one another. When I turned to face them all, they looked up at me with bright anticipatory faces, the young people and the old ones, the shamans and the hunters and my pals from the kantap. I could see that the techs were just about ready, so I threw up my arms in a gesture of welcome. The white spotlight hit me, and there were cries of
astonishment.

  “My children!” I cried. “I hate being bored! Don’t you? Doesn’t everybody? Even spirits get bored, you know. We were sitting around in the Sky talking about what a great show the kantap put on for everybody, and the spirits were saying they wished there was something they could do to repay you all for the wonderful time they had that night. So I said, well, why don’t we work some magic for them?

  “And they agreed that was a great idea, so here we are. Tonight, I’m going to tell you stories the way we tell them in the World Above. Before we do, though, I have to show you my special hunting medicine.”

  There was a flash and a click as the first of the slides was inserted, and on the sheet an image appeared: a red cylinder as long as a man’s hand, with a piece of cord protruding from one end and a little flame licking at the tip of the cord. I pointed to it.

  “There. That’s my Fire Flashes like Lightning. If I want to kill something, all I have to do is throw one of these babies and wait for whatever I’m hunting to run across it. It’s better than a harpoon, and not only does it kill what I’m hunting, it cooks it for me on the spot! Like it?

  “But look at this one!” The slide changed, and there was a bigger red cylinder, and this one had a stick protruding from one end and a cone-shaped head on the other. “This is my Flies like a Goose! When I want to go somewhere in a hurry, I just climb on its back, tie myself on with some cord, and hold a little fire under its tail. You should see me go!”

  There were gasps of wonder. I could see Nutku and the others from the kantap sitting forward, peering hard at the screen to figure out how the hell I was achieving this illusion. I let my tongue hang out and grinned.

  “Here we are. This is Pulls through the Air,” I continued, pointing at the next picture. It was a figure like a red U on its side, and the tips of its ends were dull silver. “Whenever I want something to come to me, I hold this up, and it attracts it! Well—most of the time, anyway.