by Kage Baker
I was thrown back in the arms of Holy Mother Church once I got out of makeup, but somehow my descent into darkness eased up for a while. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I was sent in as a jolly Franciscan instead of a villainous Jesuit. Maybe it was because the murderous power of the Inquisition—and the Church, too—had begun to wane at last. Less and less of my job had to do with the scourge and the branding iron, more and more with protecting lovely old religious art treasures from an increasingly rapacious secular world. Nice work, if you can get it, and I got it for a while.
But I go where the power is, and there was a new religion coming, a new force to hold people spellbound and visit them with dreams and terrors, to unite them with a common point of view and common assumptions about what life is and ought to be. It packed them into its pews every single night of the week without even one commandment, and Hollywood was its holy city. That was where the Company sent me, practically on the day Cecil B. DeMille rolled into town. I’ve been in the entertainment industry ever since, in one capacity or another. It’s better than the Inquisition. Usually.
Lewis wound up in Hollywood too, for a while, as film scripts took on historic value of their own. He really did get work stunt-doubling for Fredric March and Leslie Howard, as it turned out. We occasionally had lunch at Musso & Frank’s Grill and talked about old times over gin gimlets made with Rose’s Lime Juice. We never discussed Mendoza, though.
I don’t know where Mendoza is.
This is not to say I don’t know what happened to her, or at least that I haven’t made a few good guesses; but I don’t think about her much.
She was okay for a while. She did vanish into the coastal range of Central California, and really did all that good work she’d been so confident she could do; in fact, she won a few commendations. I saw her now and again, when she had occasion to stop by some mission where I happened to be portraying a kindly friar. But she was nervous and irritable in human places; she couldn’t wait to finish whatever business had brought her there and disappear again into the wilderness. Just about the only times I ever saw her smile were when she’d turn for a goodbye salute before fading up some canyon, into some drift of coastal fog.
I played that game again: I told myself Mendoza was doing just fine and put her out of my mind, and if I thought about her at all, it was only in the context of how happy she was in some redwood forest somewhere, so I didn’t have to worry about her.
Something happened, though.
I never saw her again after the middle of the nineteenth century. She just wasn’t there anymore, and some other Company botanist had been assigned to that region. He had his work cut out for him, too, because suddenly there were Yankee homesteaders and miners all over the place, clear-cutting, burning, and grazing their cattle even in those precipitous ranges. Mendoza would have been so furious.
Maybe what happened to her had something to do with that. I’d know for certain, if I were to access the official notification the Company sent me. I never have.
I only read enough to glimpse her name and some mention of a disciplinary hearing before I filed it away, unwilling to integrate the rest of the information it contained. That was in 1863, and to this day there it sits on some buried level of my consciousness, right next to the access code that Budu forced on me. I’ve never found out what that says, either.
I did think I saw her, once, in the early years of this century. That was a hallucination, though; had to have been. She couldn’t possibly have been sitting at that table in the Hotel St. Catherine in 1923, and even if she had, she couldn’t possibly have been sitting with the other person I thought I saw there. Anyway, by the time I managed to push my way from the crowded bar to the place where I’d seen them, the table was vacant, two wineglasses empty, the terrace door open. Had they run away? No. They’d never been there at all. Mendoza was somewhere else, I knew that, stashed away in some secret Company place because of something that would probably turn out to be my fault.
But they can’t have done anything too terrible to Mendoza, because she was a good operative, she did good work. It’s not like they could kill her, anyway, right? She’s an immortal, after all, as indestructible as I am. She must be out there someplace.
Budu must be out there someplace too.
The year 2355 approaches, though, and not one of us can hide from it or outrun it. I guess I’m going to have to access Budu’s message eventually, decrypt whatever it was he wanted me to know. I’ll probably read that memo on Mendoza then, too. I have a feeling that I’ll find a new role to play after that, which is okay. Between you and me, being a minor studio executive with a leased sports coupe is beginning to pall a little.