by Kage Baker
Lewis held up the ikon. The face was nearly clear, and it set up that damned left-brain buzzing just like before. The things still worked.
“How can we hand these things over to the Nazis?” he demanded.
“Lewis, it’s orders. The Doctor doesn’t do things like this for, for—shallow reasons! And what can the Nazis do with them, anyway? They’re just going to brain-burn anyone who looks at them!”
“Are you honestly saying you’re just following orders?” Lewis was incredulous. Horrified. Well, so was I. “What if the Nazis learn to duplicate them? What if they use them on prisoners? What if they carry them before them into battle?”
I was groping desperately for an idea. Something Hermann had said—no, he’d asked...“He asked if I understood the assignment. That was all he said. He didn’t say, Do this thing, he asked if I understood it! And I think we both do, Lewis. Don’t we?”
Well, we had to tell ourselves something.
We stared at one another over the ikon. It stared into nothing and buzzed.
“Well, we have to give them the ikons. But I could change them,” he said, half to himself. “Maybe we have to do that.”
“Huh?” My, I was sharp today. I tried for more focus. “What?”
“I can paint new ones, duplicates, fakes. With errors. They won’t do a damned thing. But Hitler and Himmler and all those asses in the Thule Society won’t be able to tell that. They wouldn’t know Vril if it bit them on the nose.”
Something you need to know: we don’t make art, we operatives. We know it, we appreciate it, but something in the process that makes us brilliant and immortal burns out most of our creativity. I’ve never known a Preserver who could paint better than a By-The-Numbers Kincaid. But we can copy like crazed Irish monks using quills made from angels’ wings. We see every detail, we don’t forget a thing, and our hand-eye coordination is, well, inhuman.
Lewis had been duplicating St. Exupéry’s illustration from The Little Prince for weeks now. His forgeries would never be detected, the records showed that; and the originals would go on to some museum in the future.
Lewis read all this on my face, I suspect. It felt like it was a teletype running across my forehead, that’s for sure.
“The Nazis will fall, eventually. We know that,” he said. “Maybe we’re meant to give them the fakes. Joseph, maybe we’re meant to help them fall!”
Well, hell. Maybe we were. And even if we weren’t, it was what we should have been doing. It was what we were, what we were made to do. I’d always prided myself on doing my best for the good of mankind and for the Company, whether mankind and the Company cared or not. Whether they knew it or not....
“I’m not an automaton, you know. I have morals. I’m flexible,” I muttered. Lewis looked at me and raised one eyebrow.
“Do it,” I said.
It took all the rest of that night, the next day, and into the night after that. Some of it I could do—even a Facilitator can wipe off white wash, like I said. And I could handle the scroll we found tucked into one of the frames, too. I’d dictated the original, and I spoke classical Greek better than Lewis. By the time I was done with it, it was useless. Dr. Zeus could store it anywhere, give it to anyone: all it would produce now would be a headache and writer’s cramp.
Watching Lewis paint the fake ikons was a magic show. He had nearly everything he needed in his manuscript restoration kit; he made up a couple of washes from eggs and vinegar right in my kitchen. Maybe it was the heroism of the act—Lewis had an inclination towards heroics that I don’t. Maybe it was that perfectionist thrill he’d been talking about. I don’t know, maybe he just had an unfulfilled urge to be a forger. But even as he swore at the difficulties of tempera washes and trimmed his brushes to insane thinness, he was obviously having a great time. I was glad someone was.
If Dr. Z ever reviewed any of this, they’d just see Lewis restoring the ikons. Whether we were right or wrong to slip the Nazis fakes, we had to do this to finish the job either way. So everyone would live happily ever after—well, not the Nazis, but they weren’t going to anyway. And you can’t change history....
It was hard work. Not the reproduction of the shapes and colors—that was mere mechanics. But it took all Lewis’s iron control as a Preserver to keep from duplicating the damned effects of the ikonic formula. He had to start one of them over twice, when the face kept evoking that left-brain buzz.
When he was approaching the end of the project, Lewis sent me back to his place for a few esoteric chemicals—he said he could make a varnish that would accelerate the paint drying and make it look appropriately aged. And he needed new clothes. Since he was down to the picky details, I took the chance and got rid of the original ikons, too; I took them to Lewis’s apartment, and left them leaning on the wall in his bedroom.
When I got back, he mixed up more Love Potion No. 9 right there in my sink, and gave the final polish to the ikons. I couldn’t tell any difference, except these didn’t make my brain buzz. But whatever the Nazis hoped these would have done, they sure as hell weren’t gonna do it now.
I called the number, out in Beverly Hills, and exchanged mild insults with the butler. He finally conveyed my message to his master, and then his master’s message to me, which was: “Tomorrow at 4 PM. Come to the back door.”
I didn’t offer to wear a carnation so they’d know me.
When it was done, I collected poor exhausted Lewis and took him home. There were no rats in evidence as we made our way up to his front door, and a strong smell of chlorine rose from the stones of the porch. Mr. Hobson, pottering among the camellias, gave us a “thumbs up” as we passed him.
The apartment smelled clean when we stepped in, and the carpet had that look of newly shampooed rugs. However, there was a surprise in the bedroom. The three ikons, leaning against the wall, were surrounded by a circle of dead rats.
I stopped Lewis from going right back out and murdering old Hobson, and sent him to make coffee. I got a broom and the can from the kitchen, and swept up the rodent Army of Darkness lying there grinning at the painted saints. And I looked at them closely as I dumped them.
When I took the trash can out to the back porch, I told Lewis, “The ikons killed your rats.”
“What?” He stared.
“Yep. They all died of strokes and heart failure, like the guys I saw in Byzantium. Rats can recognize faces, like dogs do. That must have been enough for the effect to take hold in their brains. You’ve got a rat-proof apartment now, Lewis.”
That cheered him up something grand. Me, too—it’s nice when you can contrive some sort of benefit out of all the conspiracies and shadow plays that are an operative’s working life. Even if it’s just dead rats. Sometimes because it is.
Eventually, we hid the ikons again. But the Company doesn’t know where, because they think the originals went to Germany. Where they were expected to end up, and where they specifically did no good for the Third Reich. And where they were eventually looted by the Russians. For whom they also worked no magic whatsoever....
We did that, Lewis and me. Our two bits toward making the world a better place: which is, after all, the whole point of Dr. Zeus. Right? Oh, I know that history can’t be changed. But it can be lied to, and it’s no better at identifying a fake than anyone else.
Those damned ikons were good for one thing, though. Maybe Lewis had managed to catch some of that lethal magic in the ikons after all, something only the mortals could see. I’d like to think he did. They still seemed to kill rats like a charm.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Now, that’s facilitating.
KAGE BAKER is the author of the twelve volumes of the the Company series (In The Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote), following the historical adventures of time-traveling immortals. She also wrote a series of fantasy novels (The Anvil of the World, The House of the Stag, The Bird of the River), as well as one children’s book, The Hotel Under the Sand, from Tachyon Publications. Baker was passion
ately involved in the theatre for most of her life, particularly in the area of historical recreation. Born in Hollywood, California, she spent the last seventeen years of her life in the legendary beach town of Pismo Beach. She died in 2011, at the age of fifty-eight, after a year-long battle with cancer. Her sister, Kathleen Bartholomew, is continuing to work on Baker’s stories and novels from notes and instructions left in her estate; the most recent of these, “Hollywood Ikons,” was written exclusively for this collection.
Table of Contents
Cover
Contents
The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park
The Unfortunate Gytt
The Women of Nell Gwynne's
Mother Aegypt
Rude Mechanicals
Hollywood Icons
About the Author