The Children of the Company (20 page)

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Authors: Kage Baker

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BOOK: The Children of the Company
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He conferred briefly and subvocally with Smythe, and then she named a sum. It wasn’t quite enough to bring my budget into the black.
What do you think, Latif? I
wondered.
Perhaps we could work out a marketing strategy. ‘If You’re Tired of Waiting for Godiva, Wait No More! Primo Black Magic Is Here!’ And we can always claim it’s fresher and purer than the competition’s because it comes in on the Dutch East Indies ships—
Smythe winced and named another sum. It was a lot higher than the other sum she’d named. Latif cautiously lifted his perfectly dry face from my apron and mouthed Take it! in silence, then buried his face again and gave another wail of misery.
“Done,” I said aloud. “Who’s your banker?”
Eliphal oversaw the transfer of funds. We had the stuff loaded out of the house by that evening.
“So, you see?” I said, dipping my scrub brush in the soapy water and going after the greasy patch in front of the kitchen hearth. “You weren’t ready to be fast-tracked after all.”
“You’re right, of course,” Latif replied gloomily, dipping his scrub brush, too. He put it down a moment to roll up his sleeves again and then attacked a blob of spilled jam. “But it almost worked.”
If Joost hadn’t mixed those labels and if I’d had a better idea what the black market rate ought to be
…
You know I was only trying to defray operating expenses and make your job easier, I hope?
“Oh, yeah,” I agreed. “And it might have worked at that, sweetie. But the logic’s really simple here: you’re a child.You don’t know everything about this job yet. That’s why you’re not in Africa. And aren’t you glad that if you were going to make a big boomeranging blunder, you did it in front of me and not your hero Suleyman?”
“I guess so,” he replied, edging forward to get some tracked-in mud.
“Or Labienus! Though I can’t imagine you’d be having a conversation like this one with him,” I added, snickering at the idea of Mr. Super-Cyborg Executive
Facilitator General on his hands and knees scrubbing a floor. “I guess I must have fallen pretty short of your expectations after you’d studied under Labienus.”
“Everybody under his command hates Labienus,” Latif told me quietly.
“I’d heard that,” I said. “I’ve heard he treats his mortals like animals.”
Latif nodded. He dipped his brush again and went on scrubbing. After a moment he said: “He hates them. He thought I’d hate them, too, because of the slave ship. He told me I could go far with him. But … Labienus never breaks the rules where anybody can see. And he always makes sure there’s somebody else to take the blame. But I saw. And I thought … well, so much for role models.” He scowled down at the rust stain he was attacking. “But Suleyman doesn’t do stuff like that. I hope?”
I slopped suds on a crusted bit of something I didn’t want to think about—how long since the last time Margarite had scrubbed this floor?!—and said:
“No, Suleyman’s a nice guy. You’ll see, when you finally get yourself assigned to his HQ. And, you know what? Even with a little setback like this, I’ll bet you get your wish. I’ll bet you’ll be assigned to his command in no time at all, a smooth operator like you.”
He actually giggled at that.
“Though actually I should probably continue on here a while longer,” he said, with elaborate casualness.
“So you can learn the finer points of getting dirt up off of a floor, huh?” I panted, sitting up and dropping my brush in the bucket.
“Or something,” he replied, dropping his brush in there, too. He stood up.
“Good, because you wouldn’t believe how much of an Executive Facilitator’s job is cleaning up messes,” I told him, getting to my feet and surveying what we’d done so far. “Okay! Now we mop and then, what do you say? Want to go shopping on the Dam? I could use some marzipan cakes.”
“Me too,” Latif replied, slipping his little hand into mine.
Labienus shudders, wills the memory away. He puts back the offending file. Settling down with the red project file he opens it, paging through the material with his reports, his annotations.
When he opens it, the first image to greet his eyes is a slightly out-of-focus field photograph of a street in sixteenth-century London. Labienus remembers
an overwhelming sense of nausea. Standing in old Egypt, finicky over a little smoke and dung, he’d had no idea of the filth he’d have to endure over the next four thousand years! London had certainly been one of the low points in his long life. He had endured, however. And profited …
Turning the page, he sees the face as through a shroud. He removes the protective covering of tissue paper from the drawing. His gesture is almost tender, as though he were lifting a blanket to gaze upon a sleeping child.
It is no more than a study for a portrait never painted, a sketch on paper in red chalk and black ink, by some long-dead Italian master. The subject is a young male mortal. He had posed stiffly, regarding the artist with disapproval, for the artist had been a papist and the subject of the sketch was a heretic.
The artist had therefore not made much effort to flatter his subject. He had presented with blunt realism the boy’s long homely face, his broken nose, his small cold eyes, his wide mouth. Even if he had been well disposed toward the boy, however, the artist would have been unable to make him look quite human.
But no mortal living could have known why. The boy himself hadn’t known why. Precious few immortals would have known, either, by the year 1543! Labienus looks down at the portrait and mentally calls up Budu’s features, superimposes them over the boy’s.
There is a resemblance, would be even more of a resemblance if the portrait had been done in color. A certain expression in the eyes. A certain set of the mouth. The same cheekbones. If a god had taken that ancient flatheaded creature in the photograph and sculpted it like clay until it looked human, the result would be the boy in the portrait. One of them is a monster and the other is a man.
The delicious irony, of course, is that it is the boy who is the monster.
Though not in a moral sense, Labienus admits to himself. Regardless of the predilection for violence and the prodigious carnal appetites with which he had been created, Nicholas Harpole had been quite a virtuous boy.
Labienus was never officially posted to London, but there he happened to be, in the dismal year 1527. He chanced to be riding back from Hampstead to his lodgings in the City, one night.
No moon and few stars, under the thin fog. Almost a warm night, if wretched England could be said to have such a thing, for it was high summer. Ahead and to his left were the flickering lights of London, but out here in the fields was unfathomable darkness, unless of course one was a cyborg and could see by infrared. Labienus wasn’t bothering to do that, however. He knew the way well and so did his horse.
It paused to crop the long grass at the edge of the ditch and he waited patiently, deciding to cut across the fields toward Gray’s Inn Road. As he sat there, however, he heard a faint cryptic signal in the ether.
It was coming from the opposite side of the road, off in the direction of St. Marylebone. Frowning, he turned his head and scanned.
Nothing there in the darkness. He was about to ride on when the signal came again, like a faintly glowing puff of mist in the night. He switched to infrared; no result. Turning his horse’s head to the right, he urged it across the ditch and into the fields beyond. The animal trotted forward, then slowed to a walk; then stopped, whickering uneasily.
Labienus saw nothing. In the instant before he realized there was a voice in his head
telling him
he saw nothing, he felt a paralyzing shock, and something black rose up from the ground at tremendous speed.
He found himself caught in darkness, cradled like a child across a lap except for the fact that a massive hand had closed on his windpipe. Another massive hand, on an arm like a tree trunk, had firm hold of his mount’s bridle, and though the horse was trembling it stood obediently still. He looked up. A black silhouette rose against the night, a giant crouching in the new-cut hay.
Labienus calmed himself.
Father
, he transmitted.
“Why are you wearing a black armband?” said a voice in the night. It was not the deep, growling voice one would expect to hear coming out of something that looked so much like a bear. It was rather flat and high-pitched.
I’m in deep mourning. Hadn’t you heard? Niccolò Machiavelli just died.
The giant shook with silent laughter. Labienus felt his throat released, and he gulped air gratefully.
So the rumors are true. You went rogue!
“Some time ago,” said Budu. “The Crusades were the last straw. You can speak out loud. The Company won’t hear us.”
Remembering the shock, Labienus ran a diagnostic on himself and realized his datafeed to the Company had been shorted out. He felt incredulous delight.
“How long will it last?”
“Long enough.” Budu released him and he sat up, brushing hay from his doublet.
“I’ve been hoping you were out there,” Labienus said.
“Have you?”
“They should never have retired you. I had no idea how vile a place the world would become, with the mortals free to spread like pestilence. Our masters are imbeciles, father!”
“You think so?”
“Yes,” said Labienus, realizing he’d said too much. He sat back, evening his breath, studying the Enforcer.
“Good,” said Budu. He wore layered rags and a leather hood that must have required two cowhides. It was all stained, faded, dull stone colors, superb camouflage. He sheathed an immense hunting knife, making it vanish somewhere in his clothing.
Labienus realized that if he’d said the wrong thing, he might have had his throat cut and Budu would simply have made off with his horse. He had no particular desire to wake, chilled and painful and covered with his own blood, in gray dawn in the middle of nowhere with a long walk ahead of him.
He licked his lips and said: “When the Black Death broke out—I half hoped it was your doing, somehow.”
“No,” said Budu, “but you were thinking in the right lines. It was impressive.”
“It was marvelous! It crippled Justinian’s work in Byzantium, and what it did to Europe! Whole towns vanished and went back to clean earth. It swept through their filthy little cities the way you used to, father, and nothing stopped it.”
“But it was stupid, son,” Budu told him. “Don’t waste your admiration on it. It killed indiscriminately. Innocents died with the guilty.”
“How many of them are innocent any more?” said Labienus bitterly. “How many of them were ever innocent?”
“You were, once,” Budu replied.
Labienus reminded himself never to speak from the heart.
“What have you been doing with yourself, father? Assuming you can tell me.”
Budu shrugged. “I’ve walked in shadows. Continued the work, when I had the chance. One old man with a knife can’t do much.”
“But the other Enforcers?” asked Labienus. “Haven’t any of them followed you into exile?”
“They were betrayed,” said Budu. “They’ve been taken offline, one after another as the years passed, and the Company has hidden them well. I’m the only one left walking free.” Idly he took up a long stem of hay and turned it in his fingers, rotating it like the tiniest of quarterstaffs. He pointed it at Labienus. “You see how we were repaid, after we labored for our masters? How do you think they will repay you, when you’ve served your purpose?”
“Undoubtedly the same,” said Labienus. “If they get the chance.”
Budu chuckled. “But you won’t let them have the chance, eh?”
“No indeed.”
“What do you propose to do?”
Labienus looked at him. “What would you do? Wait until they’re vulnerable and strike. Their precious Temporal Concordance runs out in 2355; after that they’ll have no more foreknowledge of events than we do. Once that playing field’s leveled, we’ll see who wins the game.”
“And who is we, son?”
“You and I, presumably. And any of the rest of the Executives who are as disgusted as we are, and I’ll bet there are a lot of us.”
“There are,” said Budu. “Will you join us, son?”
“Oh, yes.” Labienus felt a shiver of genuine delight. “Only tell me what you need me to do, father!”
“Work with me,” said Budu, staring into his eyes. “We have a lot of preparation to make for 2355. You think this Earth is crowded now, you think it’s dirty? You’ve no idea how much worse it’s going to be, in a few more centuries. The mortals will go mad. Cities like termite mounds. Murderers in packs like wolves, roaming unpunished. Not simply one or two tyrants or dictators in a century, not one or two neat world wars, the way you were told. Wars every year,
fuehrers
at the end of every street. No justice. No order. No refuge for the innocent.”
“You must have seen the Temporal Concordance.” Labienus was awed.

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