Sky Coyote (9 page)

He told me I would never die. He took me to the other place, where there were clean quiet people who didn’t smell. They fed me, washed me, and put me to bed where it was safe. Later they made me immortal.

But I could never seem to get completely out of that darkness that was scary and smelled so bad. Then I was in the prison and staring through the doorway at the little girl who sat huddled in
the straw, such a thin, sick little girl, her arms and legs like white sticks. All the life she had left was burning in her eyes, furious black eyes. I loomed against the light and put out my hand to her. She told me to go to hell. I knew then she had to be immortal; you need a tough will to work for Dr. Zeus.

“Hey.” Mendoza shoved me. Light all around us, clouds drifting past the window. “Wake up. We’re over Alta California.”

C
ALIFORNIA
.

Named after a queen, supposedly, and you could see why. She’s the schizoid goddess Fortune herself: sometimes a smiling benefactress who gives mortals all they could hope for in life, sometimes a snarling bitch driving her children from her with a whip and a flail. The trick is, see, you have to know what you really want from her when you go there.

First we saw a pretty coastline: mountains that rolled back from the coastal bluffs, scored with deep valleys. Everything was green, but it was winter, you have to remember.

We saw a place where the land stuck out like a snail’s head just emerging from its shell. That was Point Conception, our destination. No trees here: bare scrubby headland, and even from the transport you could see the bushes tilting sideways in the sea breeze. We felt the wind buffeting us as we sank toward the landing platform.

When we stepped out, wow. An ice-cold gale that made my eyes water. I noticed that all the field personnel lined up to greet us wore sunglasses, the wraparound kind like goggles. I hoped
I’d be issued a pair. The winter sunlight was sharp as diamonds.

“Where are the palm trees?” said Mendoza through gritted teeth. “Where are the swimming pools?” There was the sea and a lot of bare rolling hills, and that was about it. We slogged across the platform, the wind whipping at the train of Mendoza’s gown, and presented ourselves to the foremost of the goggled welcomers.

“Hi.” I thrust out a hand. “Facilitator Grade One Joseph reporting to AltaCal Base.”

“Good.” The welcomer smiled, took and dropped my hand. “And Botanist Grade Six Mendoza?”

“Reporting.”

“Good. This way.” We followed him to our shuttle, which was a rickety car set to run on a wooden track held above the earth on cement piers. It looked like a roller coaster. It drove like one, too.

The wind would have torn our voices away if we’d tried to speak out loud, but the man made no subvocal communication attempts either. Nothing like
So this is your first time in California?
or
Wait’ll you folks taste the abalone chowder we fix around here
. He might as well have been a mortal. Mendoza just stared off inland; God knows what she was thinking. I watched the blue Pacific glitter in the sun. It certainly was blue, I gave it that.

We rattled away north to a beach at the mouth of a canyon. The main base was here, a plain modular station backed up on its piers into the cliff at the south side of the cove; the kind of place that could be removed later, and a judiciously engineered rock slide or two would hide any evidence it had ever been there. It was painted for camouflage, but otherwise featureless. Like the personnel. Everyone I saw was wearing Company base issue, which is blank utility clothing with a lot of pockets and no style. Houbert would have been appalled. Men and women alike wore
the same one-piece garment. No lace, no padding, no embroidery. I’d worn it myself once or twice, back in prehistory, but I could see Mendoza staring at it aghast.

Or maybe she was looking aghast at the mortals, of which there were a surprising number among the base personnel. Not natives that had been fixed for maintenance labor like the Mayans, either, but actual officers. Kids from the future. It must have cost the Company a fortune to ship them all here.

Aren’t those
—she subbed at me, and I replied,
That’s right
.

Our little thrill ride took us right up under the base, where at last the roar of the wind was shut out. Our driver popped the door open for us, and I ventured, “Lotta youngsters here, aren’t there?”

“Yep.”

“Real windy place, too.”

“Sure is.”

“I was expecting something a little more temperate.”

“Yeah?”

“Say, you don’t talk much, do you?”

“I’m busy.” The guy half-turned. “Mr. Bugleg asked that you report to his office immediately upon arrival. Go up those stairs, and the admitting desk will direct you.”

I figured it out at last. He was an immortal like we were, all right, but a recent recruit: probably born in the twenty-third century. So that’s what they looked like in the future? Was
he
ever caught between two worlds.

We clambered up the steps with our luggage, and Mendoza growled, “Always the same damn story. I’ve never in my life seen an escalator in one of these places.” She grabbed up her train with one hand and hoisted her suitcase in the other. I pushed my tricorne to the back of my head and followed.

At the top of the stairs we were met by a smiling mortal
woman with a clipboard. She might have been good-looking in a silk mantle, with maybe a little lace apron. She wore the sexless coveralls, though, like everybody else we’d met so far.

“Um, welcome to AltaCal Base Eight. You must be Facilitator Joseph, and you must be Botanist Mendoza, am I right? Hello and welcome—”

“Yeah. Hi,” replied Mendoza. “Look, that driver told us we’ve got to report directly to a meeting. Was he kidding? Don’t we get to see our quarters first, wash up a little? That’s pretty inconsiderate, don’t you think?”

“Oh, Mr. Bugleg wants to see you right away. It’s very important.” Rapidly the girl clipped little ID tags to us and our luggage. Her own tag read
STACEY
. I guessed she’d seen a few of us in her brief lifetime, but not enough to be cool about it. She was radiating discomfort. A little fear, a little more repugnance. I could smell it, and so, unfortunately, could Mendoza. “You can leave your bags here, and we’ll deliver them to your rooms. Mr. Bugleg wants to discuss your mission over dinner.”

“Great. Thank you very much. Where is the man?” I inquired, hurriedly because I could feel a confrontation building.

“Go through that door at the end of the hall,” said the mortal girl, just before Mendoza said, “Did you know you’ve got an impacted wisdom tooth, Stacey? I’d have it checked out if I were you.”

Stacey’s hand flew to the corner of her jaw, and my hand flew to Mendoza’s arm and I pulled her away with me down the hall.

“Mendoza, that was not nice. Scanning them without permission is impolite.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass! Did you smell the way she felt about us? If she’s got a problem dealing with immortals, why’s she with the Company? Nobody told me there’d be mortals crawling all over this place.”

“Are you going to do this to me again? Don’t do this to me again, Mendoza.”

“What’d she think we were, for crying out loud?
Androids?”

“You’ve never worked with any Company mortals, have you?” I paused, scanning the long featureless hall in confusion. What was that pinging noise?

“Sure I have.” Mendoza turned her head irritably, picking up the sound too.

“I don’t mean native busboys. I mean officers and shareholders of Dr. Zeus, from the future. We make them uncomfortable.” I paused outside a door and scanned the room beyond. There was a mortal inside, interfacing with an entertainment console. That was it. Somebody was playing a holo game.

“But why? They made us, didn’t they? We do exactly what they built us to do, don’t we?”

“I know. I’m not sure what the reason is. Maybe some of them feel we’re not much more than superpowered slaves and they feel guilty about that?”

She took that in for a minute, as we walked on down the hall.

“Well, that’s just ducky,” she hissed, and I knocked on Mr. Bugleg’s door before she could tell me just how ducky it was.

We were let in by a mortal kid, I guess he was a junior clerk or something, and there was Mr. Bugleg standing at the other end of a table set for four. He’d put the table between us and himself, but otherwise you couldn’t have told he was a bigot at all. Nice plastic smile like the girl Stacey. He was mortal too, of course. The food looked lousy.
Ob, boy, this is going to be some tour of duty
, broadcast Mendoza.
Shut up
, I broadcast back. She looked around the room, which was otherwise bare of ornament or furniture save for a plain day bed and a wall console with an enormous private entertainment center. Quite a change from New World One. Bugleg cleared his throat.

“Mendoza. Joseph. How are you? I’m Bugleg. Have a seat.” His smile faltered off. He looked like a scared toddler at a birthday party. He was a thirtyish mortal, not quite beginning to sag yet, fairly pasty-faced, and his head was a funny shape. (But, then, all their heads look funny to me.) He wore the same drab clothing as his staff: no medals, epaulets, or gold braid.

“I’ll ring for my aide now,” he told us, and he did, and after an uncomfortable moment of silence a door opened and another man walked in. This one was an immortal and decently dressed, too, with a good wig and a spiffy brocaded coat. He had a black silk steinkirk knotted casually about his throat. To judge from the heels on his shoes, he wasn’t any taller than me, but he strode up to us with authority. The man had style.

His eyes were gray and cold, and his grip was a little too firm as he shook our hands.

“This is Mr. Lopez, my aide,” ventured Bugleg.

“Joseph. Mendoza. It’s a pleasure meeting you. I’ll be briefing you on the mission as we”—he paused significantly—”dine.”

He pulled out Mendoza’s chair for her. Bugleg sat down and watched in horrified fascination as Mendoza seated herself, settling her acreage of rustling silks less inconveniently.

“Why did you wear all those clothes here?” he asked. “You should put on clothes like we wear. You’d be more comfortable.”

Mendoza was too surprised to say anything, for which I was grateful.

“You must remember, sir, that we field operatives spend our whole lives in the past,” Lopez explained smoothly. “I’ve told you about this before. For us, the past
is
real time. We wear these clothes because they’re what’s being made this year, which happens to be 1700
A.D.
, by the way. Mortals would notice us if we dressed differently. Besides, if we wanted to wear clothes like yours, they’d have to be specially imported from the future, which
would be expensive. It’s much cheaper simply to wear what everybody else is wearing in this time period. In fact, we’re quite used to these fashions. It may be hard for you to believe, but she’s just as comfortable in her clothing as you are in yours.”

“Oh,” said Bugleg.

The food was just as lousy on closer inspection as it had seemed at first glance. At each place was a shaped tray with compartments containing various pureed or textured substances, brightly colored. We all made courteously exclamatory noises over it, though I noticed Lopez’s elbow twitch as he stopped himself from reaching for a claret decanter that wasn’t there. I lifted my plastic sipper bottle to see what our beverage was. Distilled water. Bugleg lifted his and slurped as happily as though it were champagne. He put it down and said:

“It’s so great you’re here at last. Now we can really get some work done. We couldn’t start without you, uh, Joseph. What do you need to know about your mission?”

Mendoza raised her eyebrows, but I said, “Well, as I understand it, we’re kind of lifting an entire biosystem off the face of the Earth in situ, right?”

Bugleg’s jaw hung slack.
He doesn’t know what the big words mean
, transmitted Lopez, and out loud he said, “Right. To be specific, we’re collecting the Chumash village of Humashup. The people, the animals they hunt, the plants they gather, the fish they catch, their culture in its entirety, even samples of the local geology and seawater.”

“Yes,” affirmed Bugleg.

“No wonder you’ve brought so many specialists in on this,” remarked Mendoza.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Lopez almost reached for claret again. “You’ll find access codes for all relevant anthropological information in your assigned quarters, and I believe you’ll find the
texts by John P. Harrington and Alfred L. Kroeber the most useful. To give you an overview, however: the Chumash are the aboriginal inhabitants of this region of the California coast. Our preliminary studies show a Neolithic level of technological development but an extremely complex social and mercantile structure. They’re hunter-gatherers but also industrialists, if you can imagine that. They produce a wide variety of objects manufactured specifically for trade with other local tribes. They’ve developed a monetary system that other tribes have had to adopt in order to do business with them, but they’ve retained sole rights to the manufacture of the shell money they use. The word
Chumash
is a corruption of the name given to them by their neighbors, which can be roughly translated as ‘the people who make money.’ Which they certainly do, literally and figuratively. By local standards they’re millionaires.”