Men spilled out, four, all toting M-16s. They spread out, flanking me. I raised my hands slowly. Not a threat. They were pros, though, and took no chances, keeping me tracked. I made no moves. The chopper’s front door opened, and a woman jumped down, ducking a little under the rotor blades. The engine whined down, and she stalked through the sagebrush and dry grasses towards me.
I knew her the instant she hit the ground, would know her anywhere. Her stance, the way her hips moved. Gold, in fatigues. I wanted to laugh. It figured. I nodded to myself, lots of avenues of potentiality closing off with it being her, here, now. Like a cascade of dominoes, many things resolved themselves.
She waved the men away, irritated. “She’s not going to blow up, you idiots. Back in the chopper. We’re leaving in a few minutes.” She rounded on them. “Get. Back. In. The Chopper.” She pointed. They went.
She turned to me, ten feet away. I hadn’t moved yet. She keyed a microphone at her epaulet, talking loudly to be heard above the whine of the chopper. “This is Garcia. I have her. Stand down. Get back to the rendezvous for your pickup. We’ll send the chopper. Leave the Jeep.” She released the mike button, glanced at me. “Got anything in the Jeep you want?” I shook my head and patted my bag, still squatting. She looked at me, listening to something. “Negative. I said, leave it. Let the local cops take care of it.”
She turned to face me fully. She looked the same. Her fatigues were digi-camo, designed by machines for blending into semi-urban environments. No insignia. But she was in charge. Gold is always in charge. Her sunglasses were gold-tinted aviators, mirror-bright in the sun.
“Garcia,” I said. “Should have known.”
“Didn’t you?” she said, and the laugh was just behind her question. She squatted down, low like I was.
I shook my head. “I suspected, but couldn’t confirm it without a lot of trouble. I’ve been on the move.”
“Yes, you ran me quite a chase. But now that part is behind us.” She looked at me, patted me on the knee, like a child gone missing for a few hours. “I’ve missed you.”
I looked away. Always the same with her. Manipulation. Endless. Ceaseless.
She sighed. “You ready? Places to go, people to meet.” Chiding, a common phrase, but Gold never spoke idly.
“Who?” I asked, wary. I stood, brushing dust off my pants. She made a circle gesture above her head, and the pilot cycled the copter’s engine, which began to whine in a different pitch.
“Somebody you need to meet,” she said, and I knew her eyes were smiling behind her sunglasses. “Somebody new.”
We went. There was an empty seat behind hers in the chopper. Nobody spoke to me, and I couldn’t have heard them if they had. The blades whirred and picked up speed. The world dropped away beneath us. Somebody new, she had said. So.
Chapter Twenty-One
I first flew over Paris in a balloon. Hot-air balloon. I mention it now because I always feel liberated when everything you normally see about the world, seen from above, is small. As flight matured, I’ve always felt it was a freedom granting experience. There is before, and then after, a flight. You go from here to there. In between you’re really nowhere, or in the same place, especially nowadays with the too-alike airports and eerily similar airliners.
Balloons are different in that you’re exposed to the elements, but the concept holds. You go up, you float around, you come down and you are different. You survived. You’re maybe a new person, or you can become one. Flight for me is about unlocking potential.
I learned to pilot in the thirties, but never really pursued it after it became a specialized trade, with sophisticated aircraft. Gold, however, loved it. She flew anything she could get her hands on. She flew with the Red Army and grew notorious as one of their Night Angels. She was daring, fearless, cool under pressure. Ruthless towards enemies, and most everyone was some enemy to her if she thought about it long enough.
We were together, she and I, for many lifetimes. Not solely as lovers, although we were. Passionately at times. But as, well, more like sisters. Two people who, through circumstances not of our creation, were thrust together into a shared reality. We were drawn to each other. In the beginning, we were close as lovers, there in England and later Italy, where we lived in a big stone house and pretended to be rich, mad noblewomen who threw great, raucous parties. We went from lonely, so lonely, to suddenly having each other.
I cannot explain this if you have never experienced something like it. To be alone, for such a long time, and suddenly, to not be alone. To have someone who understands your life, what you have gone through? It is again, a situation of before and after.
We told each other everything, with an urgency again that you might not understand. Daily, my memory slips away from me. I fear it. What am I forgetting now? What am I losing? It is a curse. So we told each other what we remembered of our lives. At length, in long detail. We had both tried, we learned, to record our stories, important things we felt, in written accounts. That we might come back to them later. This is impossible for us, we decided. I’m sure we had both done such, written coded accounts that our present selves were determined to ensure our future selves would learn from, and completely forgotten them, lifetimes later. Consider the logistics of document preservation across long periods of time and you will see. It’s impossible. Things fall apart.
So we spoke, often for days at a time, as we’re speaking now. Telling stories, things we remembered. Our plans and actions. She told me of the New World, all of its glories and horrors. How she had wandered, she said, down the western coast, with a fishing people out of the north. Following seals, tuna, and whales. They settled and spread, and soon there were tribes of their descendants as far south as Peru. Like a plague, she would sneer. A plague of insects. She was old, older than I, for she also claimed to have wandered for many lives through the new world, living much as I had: witch, wife, or whore.
She had lived, as I did, in the shadow of the Ice, but elsewhere, as her earliest traditions differed from my recollections of my family’s beside our little bend in the river. She was not Gold then, but had another name she claimed, thin lipped when asked about it, to have forgotten, it was so long ago. She told of the rise of the great kingdoms in the South, the Olmecs. She had lived in the Amazon, which was a well-populated place, once, she said; a garden world of earthworks and canals. Like Venice, sometimes, she said. But mud brick. Beautiful in the sunset, peaceful and languid.
But always, where she lived there was eventually war. She had many stories about war. She, frankly, loved war. She was, in a real sense, in more than one place and at more than one time, a goddess of war.
But I loved her. I will admit it. She was fearless, and fear wracked me. She defied the gods that created her, while I, I am ashamed to admit, feared to disappoint mine. She was lovely, with olive skin and dark brown eyes, a long, muscular body. I wanted, needed, to know more about her, to understand her and what drove her, to do whatever it took to stay near her. Even when my dreams were insistent I do some task somewhere else, I would rush back to her as quickly as I could. I felt desperately that I might lose her, or that she would tire of me.
I learned, long after, that she tired of me as she tired, eventually, of everything that wasn’t herself. She is a highly skilled mimic of human emotions that covers for an intellect that has no true feelings. She is a monster, like how a Hitler or a Stalin or a cult leader, convinced of their infallibility, are monsters.
But we were lovers, close as twins, and I was blind to all of this. I should have been able to see it, but I didn’t. I was blind, as all lovers are blind one time or another. Or if I saw it, I pretended not to know. I can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter. I did not stop her.
We compared stories, as I have said. We, for example, compared detailed accounts, as carefully as we could remember, of the tasks and jobs —the quests, as she called them—our gods had required of us. Mine, as I knew but perhaps had not fully realized, were mostly
passive, informational, rarely pushing anyone they compelled me to meet to do anything overt. Or they were small things.
I usually learned as much as I could about a person and got to know them a little, learned what they were doing. Many were doctors, or astronomers, advisors to kings, but rarely kings or people in charge. Later, after what we now call the Renaissance, I was to meet many scientists and proto-scientists. Priests, I also met, especially if they were engaged in the study of the natural world, which many were in those days. In antiquity, I met many priests and talked long about their religion and their customs.
Hers, however, were more active gods. They would loose her upon her quests, have her find a man (almost all of our subjects were men) and teach him something. Something specific. How a complex problem he was struggling with was to be solved. Or, perhaps, not solved. Perhaps a man building something, or engaged in some religious practice, for example, which her gods found objectionable or heretical. That man needed to be removed from the board, as Gold would say. Sanctioned. Murdered. Many times they marked men for death in her dreams, and she knew nothing of why they were to be killed, only that they must die, and it was her job to do it. This too I had done, but it was rare, I think, for me. Not so for her.
To spite her gods, as I have said, she would often try to thwart them by overzealously accomplishing her task. Kill a man? Why not his whole village? Teach a man a new mathematical concept? Why not give him supreme power over all his former rivals at his school or temple, as well? She was devious and subtle, and she hated her gods. She brought chaos wherever she went in her quests.
But as we spoke, we discerned a pattern. Both gods, or groups of gods, or aspects of the same god were interested in what people were learning. In progress understanding the world. I had known this abstractly, but thought the gods watched over us and I was an agent, an angel if you like, of their will. If I thought of it at all. Much of what I have thought in my life I have forgotten. Perhaps I knew all along.
For example, once I recalled a cache of documents I had long ago laid in a box in a cave in what is now France. They were written on parchment, stored carefully in a lead-lined box, and hidden deep in a cave. I remembered it on my own, and not as a dream-sending. I knew where it was, and I was not far, being at the time in Germania.
So I traveled there one summer, and found the cave and, amazingly, found the box. I was sure it would hold some secrets, some clue to my past life. I had remembered hiding the box, that it was important and that I had hidden it there that my future self might find it and read it. I was such a naïve fool, both when I hid it and when I found it again.
I lugged this heavy box down to my camp, and there, in the bright sun of Southern France, read a message from myself to myself, written hundreds of years before. It was gibberish. Oh, there was some stuff which made sense, and recalled to me fragments of what had been going on. But it was essentially an account of which aspect of the divine Roman pantheon my dreams might be from. There was a lengthy account of how I had served a claimant to the throne, an upstart general from Spain who tried to seize the throne and was crucified for it.
But insight? None. I’m sure it was very important to me at the time, but it was meaningless now. Gold laughed at me when I told her this. “Of course it is meaningless, you fool,” she sneered. “It was almost a thousand years ago. What relevance, other than the most remote chance, might anything you did so long ago have to you now?”
But this is my point. We were constantly, both of us, serving our gods. Mine sought to learn; hers sought to act. But always about one central theme. Human civilization and progress. They were shaping us, guiding us. It was clear. Clock builders, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, physicians. Government officials in charge of technical policy, or who opposed religion in government. Always about technology. Who had it? What were they doing with it? How could it be improved? The gods wanted men to build tools and, using tools, build more and better tools. But it was slow, so slow, and as I have told you, things fall apart. There were wars and chaos regardless of what Gold might do to foment it where she was. It happens. Humans are slow to progress, slow to change, slow to learn. Quick to anger, quick to fight and wreck things.
Why was this? We wondered to each other. Why would the gods be interested in this? What were these gods we served? I told her my tale of the silvery pearl I had found on the river bank. She said nothing, only that she remembered no childhood, it having slipped from her mind over the long years. Perhaps she too had found such a pellet as a child and been infected. Possessed. Blessed. We could not be certain, but this cemented in us the thought that the gods, needing such a mechanism, were part of the physical world and not beings of sorcerous will and supernatural force. This, for us having grown through the age of magic and ignorance, was a big step. And a crucial one, for it showed us that the gods, powerful, frightening, and awful as they were, might be part of the world. Part of it just as we were. They might, we reasoned, not be gods at all, but something more like us. It was a shadow of a thought, this germ of an idea, this seed. And like a seed, given time and tending, it grew.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The chopper did not, as I had thought it would, take us to a staging area nearby. We flew south, following the highway we had taken. I saw the roadblock which had been waiting for us. I nodded to myself, reached for the headset behind my seat.
“You weren’t going to drone us, then?” I said, and Gold just turned and smiled at me. Her teeth were white and even as ever.
“Drone you?” she glanced at me. “Of course not,” she said into her headset. “Now shut up and enjoy the ride. We have a plane to catch.” Her smile was very large.
The chopper flew on for about twenty minutes, and I kept my silence and thought. Jessica would be okay. I was sure, now she was away from Gold. Gold was, I knew, more dangerous to her in proximity. At a distance she might stay out of her thinking. Gold was vindictive and jealous, I knew, even though we had not been in each other’s presence for decades.
So, someone new, she said. The thought excited me and was dreadful at the same time. That she held some official position in government, I could tell. And the US government was like none the world had ever known. Aspiring to omniscience, Washington was, while pretending, a moralistic exceptionalism. Hyperpower. The world had not seen such, since Rome. Even the British had had rivals throughout their empire.
It had, I knew, much to do with geography, separation from others. An empty continent, thanks to the European plagues. A pedigree of the Empire, born out of the British system as they were. And luck, being positioned to take advantage of Europe’s weakness after the War. It was, I thought, amusing that Gold had burrowed like a tick into the American intelligence service, after what we had gone through in the War.
I remembered the cold and the mud of the Eastern front, my little band of partisans. We had laughed at the Americans when they had joined the War, but they were clever bastards and wound up telling themselves they had won it. Gold, as ever, hadn’t cared as long as there was chaos for her to work with.
We sat down at a lonely airstrip, cracked and weedy. A white jet, private, marked only with a number on the tail, was waiting for us, the crew aboard and engine idling. Gold didn’t even talk to the chopper crew, just hopped out and stalked towards the jet, expecting me to follow. I followed, feeling the old pull of her, comfortable as an old coat. Aboard, we sank into white leather cushions and she tossed me a water bottle from a cooler.
“We’re going to New Mexico to meet someone. Can’t say who,” she paused, taking a swig and swirling it over her teeth. She smiled. “Mostly because I don’t know who he is, not really.” She put the cap back on her bottle and looked up at me.
“Him?” I said. “Like us?”
“I call him Smoke, or did once I explained about us. He had another name, but it was long and complicated, so I forgot it.” Her eyes twinkled. She preened like a cat with a freshly killed bird in its mouth, I thought. She s
tretched and curled her legs under her in the seat. “Hand me that blanket, would you?”
The blanket was a plush, faux cashmere government issue. It had an insignia on it. State dept. I passed it to her. “How long? And from where?” Outside, the chopper lifted, its rotors dopplering away into the distance.
“Well,” she said, “that’s what makes him so interesting. I met him in DC, at one of their agencies. You talked to him, remember? In Agra. He’s an operator, for sure.”
Stupid word, I thought. Americanism. “That guy? I thought he was a square.”
She smiled. “You know,” she continued, “I don’t think he is from here at all.”
I drank my water and looked at her, considering. She looked at me, square in the eyes, her face impassive and blank, revealing nothing. Was there anything to reveal? Had there ever been? Sometimes I think Gold is always who she is, her masks mere convenience she wears for others, and she doesn’t wear one with me. Or maybe she is nothing but masks. Matryoshka. “Not from here?” I said.
She reached up and slid the window down. The plane began to taxi, the engines whining. I glanced out the window. It was approaching dusk. I hoped Jessica was okay. I looked back at Gold, who had reclined her seat and was watching me from her side, her head pillowed by her elbow. “He can tell you. I’m not sure what to believe, but he’s got a tale to tell, for sure. He could be full of shit, but we need to deal with him, I think. He’s…well, you’ll see, soon enough.” She yawned, then smiled. “Was up early, getting all this ready. You’re hard to catch.”
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