Gods and Pawns (10 page)

“Baccharis Trimera,”
she said, spitting out the botanical name like a curse.
“Pemus Boldus. Boerhavia Caribaea.
All of them specifics for liver trouble, all of them vermifuges. But what are they giving him? This stuff!” She seized up a frond of watercress and held it out to Lewis.

Dazed, Lewis took the cress. Yes; the leaves were full of cysts that would develop into liver fluke, if ingested. More significant just now, however, was the fact that Orocobix was coming down the steps, followed by Atabey and Cajaya.

“What did you do, you little fool?” Cajaya shouted.

Tanama threw herself down before Orocobix, hiding her face.

“I didn’t,” she wept. “The dead lady—she saw—”

Orocobix lifted her gently to her feet, and she clung to him. He looked at Lewis.

“Oh, dear,” he said.

“I’m afraid you have not told us everything,” said Lewis, with all possible diplomacy.

“And why should we?” cried Atabey. “You’re nothing but a servant—” Orocobix lifted his hand and she fell silent.

“It’s the
terra preta
, isn’t it?” Mendoza demanded, speaking in Cinema Standard. “The microbe’s only produced by infecting someone with liver fluke! They’re
sacrificing
him, and by inches—for goddamned
compost
—”

“Mendoza, wait,” said Lewis. Orocobix was watching their faces closely.

“I trust you’ll pardon us our omission,” he said. “It’s a state secret, you see. But I suppose you must be told…”

“We have become aware of another member of your family. The dead notice these things,” Lewis improvised. “Why is the young man so ill?”

“He was Kolibri, but became Caonaki,” said Orocobix. “The King, whose honor it is to suffer for the good of all mankind. The very sweat of his agony makes the earth bear in abundance. Without him, I could never have made these islands. We should have starved on a barren and watery plain long since.”

Savages—mortal savages—barbaric devils
—Mendoza was not trusting herself to speak aloud anymore, for which Lewis was grateful. He cleared his throat.

“He seems very young,” he observed.

“He never lives very long,” said Orocobix regretfully. “But he always comes to us again, for he loves us. He understands his duty. And now, you understand the advantage we are offering your master, do you not? For it is likely Cajaya will bear his next body. The land of the dead will become a garden of all loveliness.”

It’s a favorable recessive!
Mendoza shouted silently, thinking even through the red fog of her anger.
He’s not
less
able to resist the parasites—he’d have died by now. He fights them off! That’s why the damn mortals keep reinfecting him! And his body fights them off by producing the bacteria
—

Which also produce the
terra preta. Lewis almost heard the
click
as the puzzle pieces snapped into place. He stared at Orocobix. He must have been tested in childhood—so must Agueybana—and found wanting. Their bodies did not generate the magic microbes. They’d been cured and allowed to live normal lives. The women were never tested, but carried the recessive.

For a moment Lewis saw so clearly the immensity of what had been here, once: the great agricultural empire expanding, the black islands rising from the plain of thin poor soil, the unfruitful rain forest conquered and made to bear. The royal family, presiding over the people they had subjugated with promise of eternal plenty. Their thousands of subjects lived in peace in hilltop gardens, never knowing hunger, with death merely the promise of a more carefree life.

But, at the heart of this earthly paradise…always somewhere a young man suffering in darkness, voiding gold from his bowels and bladder.

The royal family had understood exactly the genetic reasons for their wealth, and the mechanism of infestation.

Here on this island they had issued commands, received tribute, and calculated their bloodlines to a nicety. Here they had huddled together, immune, when the unknown epidemic came, and their subjects died to the last man, woman and child. The stench of the far gardens must have risen up to heaven. Here they had dwindled over the decades, as the extended family died back. Here they had married cousins and finally brothers and sisters, and in a few more years would have come to nothing anyway.

And no poet to sing their story!
Lewis cried from his heart.

The bastards,
Mendoza transmitted bitterly.
The mortal bastards. Send them a miracle and they’ll never fail to nail it to a cross.

All this in a split second, and Orocobix was still looking at Lewis, hoping his proposition had found favor. Lewis drew breath and bowed, knowing what he must say.

“I think my master will be pleased, Great Orocobix,” he said, blandly.

They left the next morning, before the mists had cleared.

Orocobix accompanied them, though he sat as a passenger while Lewis poled the boat across the green water on the journey out. He looked up at their island as it loomed out of the fog, and shook his head at the raw scar of the slide, which had grown bigger.

“They’re all going like that now,” he said. “No one to tend them, you know. I suppose, given enough time, they’ll all melt down onto the plain. It’s just as well we won’t be here to see.”

Mendoza stepped from the boat without a word to him, shouldering the case that held her credenza. Lewis turned and helped him to his feet, passing the pole over before he stepped ashore.

“Many thanks for your splendid hospitality, Great Orocobix,” he said. “I can assure you, my master will respond promptly to your offer.”

“She was a prettier girl, when she was younger,” said Orocobix. “I think it likely she’ll improve with a little plumpness, as she matures; they tend to be a good deal less flighty after the children start coming.”

“No doubt,” said Lewis. The old man fumbled for something inside his robe.

“By the way,” he said, “I meant to send you with something…ah! Here it is. Present this to Lord Maketaurie, with my compliments. We honor him with the most ancient heirloom of our house, as an earnest of our sincerity.”

He handed Lewis a small bundle. Lewis accepted it with a bow, sticking it in an inner pocket.

“Good day to you, then, children,” said Orocobix. “Pray excuse me; so much to do, you know…”

“Farewell, great god,” said Lewis. He watched as the old man dipped the pole and sent the boat around, light as a leaf on the water; it went gliding away, and vanished into the mist.

Lewis started up the hill after Mendoza, who had paused halfway up to retrieve a few buried items washed out by the storms. He was rehearsing a speech, and it began:
Look here, I was wondering…we get on pretty well, don’t you think? I have nightmares, and a little glitch or two, and you have nightmares, too, and bad memories, but—we could sort of form a mutual support alliance. I know I’ll never replace your Englishman, but
—

“Oh, look,” Mendoza said glumly, and held up a martini glass. “Ancient visitors from space left us a ritual object. Do you suppose they preferred shaken, or stirred?”

Lewis took the glass and tilted it so the mud trickled out. “Looks like they drank espresso.”

“Ugh,” said Mendoza. “Do you realize, this whole time we’ve been living on a mountain of—”

“Don’t think about it,” said Lewis. “Just don’t. Think about anything else. Fairies dancing in the moonlight. The meaning of
Rosebud.
The far-off tinkle of little golden temple bells.”

“Or, for example, my disciplinary hearing,” said Mendoza.

“What disciplinary hearing?”

“The one I’ll get when the anthropologists discover what I did. I sneaked into the damn Room of Sacrifice again last night. Gave that boy a dose of medication to kill liver flukes,” said Mendoza, starting up the hill again. Lewis stared after her a moment, then ran to catch up.

“Bravo,” he said. “Bravo! But it won’t make any difference, I’m afraid. He’ll only be reinfected.”

“No, he won’t.” Mendoza reached the top and swung around to face Lewis. “Because after I dosed the kid, I went out to the fish ponds. Yanked out every last little bit of watercress.
And
smashed every damn snail I could find.”

Her eyes were sullen, her mouth was hard, and Lewis thought he had never loved her more than in that moment.

“I had to, Lewis. That temple room was the most obscene thing I’d seen since…since England.” England, where a young man had gone willingly to the stake because he believed it was his duty.

“I know,” said Lewis gently, seeing the tall specter loom beside her, and knowing it would never go away. Nicholas Harpole’s shadow rose with her in the morning, walked with her in all her ways, and lay down beside her at night.

“It still won’t make any difference,” she went on. “You can bet Dr. Zeus will infect him again, once the Company gets its hands on him. They’ll want to experiment on him, won’t they?”

“It won’t be that bad,” Lewis said. “The Company isn’t inhumane. They’ll cure him again once they get their answer, and then—well, the Guanikina will learn they’re not gods, and will that really be such a bad thing? Better than living in ever-increasing squalor and—and—”

“And incest,” said Mendoza. “You’re right, of course.”

“And who cares what the anthropologists think anyway? We’ve still made an amazing discovery. How often do lowly field operatives discover something about which All-Seeing Zeus didn’t already know?” said Lewis, more cheerfully.

“That’s true.” Mendoza brightened up a little.

They waded into the remains of their camp, which was already disappearing under creepers, and began to throw what they’d salvaged into the packing crates.

“By the way,” said Mendoza, “what was that, that the old man gave you?”

“A relic of ancient Atlantis, ha ha,” said Lewis. He reached under his poncho and pulled out the bundle. Carefully, he unwrapped rags of colored cotton.

“Oh,” he said. Mendoza came and peered at the little lidded basket, woven of pink and yellow straw.

“Talk about cheesy souvenirs,” she said. She lifted off the lid. “Something in there? Those look like somebody’s keys.”

Lewis reached in and pulled out a bunch of metal tags, all fastened together on a loop of braided cord. They were rectangular, apparently made of polished steel, and engraved on one side. He separated one out from the rest and held it up to examine it. His eyes widened.

“What?” Mendoza craned her neck to look.

“
Numerus XXXV. Pertinens ad Stationem XVII Experimentalem Hesperidum,
” Lewis read aloud. He tilted the tag so she could see the stylized thunderbolt logo underneath the inscription.

“Hesperides Experimental Station?” Mendoza stared at the tag. “Wasn’t that the old Company base out in mid-Atlantic they had to close when…” She trailed off and was silent for about thirty seconds before turning away and doubling up with laughter. Lewis joined her, laughing so hard he had to lean against a tree. At last he stood, threw his hat in the air and whooped in despair:

“So much for discovering something unknown to Dr. Zeus! Ladies and gentlemen, please take your places for the Causality Quadrille!”

The barn stands high in the middle of backcountry nowhere, shimmering in summer heat. It’s an old barn, empty a long time, and its broad planks are silvered. Nothing much around it but yellow hills and red rock.

Long ago, somebody painted it with a mural. Still visible along its broad wall are the blobs representing massed crowds, the green diamond of a baseball park, and the figure in a slide, seeming to swim along the green field, glove extended. His cartoon eyes are wide and happy. The ball, radiating black lines of force, is sailing into his glove. Above him is painted the legend:

WHAT A CATCH
! And, in smaller letters below it:

1951, The Golden Year!

The old highway snakes just below the barn, where once the mural must have edified a long cavalcade of DeSotos, Packards, and Oldsmobiles. But the old road is white and empty now, with thistles pushing through its cracks. The new highway runs straight across the plain below.

Down on the new highway, eighteen-wheeler rigs hurtle through, roaring like locomotives, and they are the only things to disturb the vast silence. The circling hawk makes no sound. The cottonwood trees by the edge of the dry stream are silent too, not a rustle or a creak along the whole row; but they do cast a thin gray shade, and the men waiting in the Volkswagen Bug are grateful for that.

They might be two cops on stakeout. They aren’t. Not exactly.

“Are you going to tell me why we’re sitting here, now?” asks the younger man, finishing his candy bar.

His name is Clete. The older man’s name is Porfirio.

The older man shifts in his seat and looks askance at his partner. He doesn’t approve of getting stoned on the job. But he shrugs, checks his weapon, settles into the most comfortable position he can find.

He points through the dusty windshield at the barn. “See up there? June 30, 1958, family of five killed. ’46 Plymouth Club Coupe. Driver lost control of the car and went off the edge of the road. Car rolled seventy meters down that hill and hit the rocks, right there. Gas tank blew. Mr. and Mrs. William T. Ross of Visalia, California, identified from dental records. Kids didn’t have any dental records. No relatives to identify bodies.

“Articles in the local and Visalia papers, grave with the whole family’s names and dates on one marker in a cemetery in Visalia. Some blackening on the rocks up there. That’s all there is to show it ever happened.”

“Okay,” say the younger man, nodding thoughtfully. “No witnesses, right?”

“That’s right.”

“The accident happened on a lonely road, and state troopers or whoever found the wreck after the fact?”

“Yeah.”

“And the bodies were so badly burned they all went in one grave?” Clete looks pleased with himself. “So…forensic medicine being what it was in 1958, maybe there weren’t five bodies in the car after all? Maybe one of the kids was thrown clear on the way down the hill? And if there was
somebody
in the future going through historical records, looking for incidents where children vanished without a trace, this might draw their attention, right?”

“It might,” agrees Porfirio.

“So the Company sent an operative to see if any survivors could be salvaged,” says Clete. “Okay, that’s standard Company procedure. The Company took one of the kids alive, and he became an operative. So why are we here?”

Porfirio sighs, watching the barn.

“Because the kid didn’t become an operative,” he says. “He became a problem.”

1958. Bobby Ross, all-American boy, was ten years old, and he loved baseball and cowboy movies and riding his bicycle. All-American boys get bored on long trips. Bobby got bored. He was leaning out the window of his parents’ car when he saw the baseball mural on the side of the barn.

“Hey, look!” he yelled, and leaned
way
out the window to see better. He slipped.

“Jesus Christ!” screamed his mom, and lunging into the back she tried to grab the seat of his pants. She collided with his dad’s arm. His dad cursed; the car swerved. Bobby felt himself gripped, briefly, and then all his mom had was one of his sneakers, and then the sneaker came off his foot. Bobby flew from the car just as it went over the edge of the road.

He remembered afterward standing there, clutching his broken arm, staring down the hill at the fire, and the pavement was hot as fire, too, on his sneakerless foot. His mind seemed to be stuck in a little circular track. He was really hurt bad, so what he had to do now was run to his mom and dad, who would yell at him and drive him to Dr. Werts, and he’d have to sit in the cool green waiting room that smelled scarily of rubbing alcohol and look at dumb
Humpty Dumpty Magazine
until the doctor made everything all right again.

But that wasn’t going to happen now, because…

But he was really hurt bad, so he needed to run to his mom and dad—

But he couldn’t do that ever again, because—

But he was really hurt bad—

His mind just went round and round like that, until the spacemen came for him.

They wore silver suits, and they said, “Greetings, Earth boy; we have come to rescue you and take you to Mars,” but they looked just like ordinary people and in fact gave Bobby the impression they were embarrassed. Their spaceship was real enough, though. They carried Bobby into it on a stretcher and took off, and a space doctor fixed his broken arm, and he was given space soda pop to drink, and he never even noticed that the silver ship had risen clear of the hillside, one step ahead of the state troopers, until he looked out and saw the curve of the Earth. He’d been lifted from history, as neatly as a fly ball smacking into an outfielder’s mitt.

The spacemen didn’t take Bobby Ross to Mars, though. It turned out to be some place in Australia. But it might just as well have been Mars.

Because, instead of starting fifth grade, and then going on to high school, and getting interested in girls, and winning a baseball scholarship, and being drafted, and blown to pieces in Viet Nam—Bobby Ross became an immortal.

“Well, that happened to all of us,” says Clete, shifting restively. “One way or another. Except I’ve never heard of the Company recruiting a kid as old as ten.”

“That’s right.” Keeping his eyes on the barn, Porfirio reaches into the backseat and gropes in a cooler half full of rapidly melting ice. He finds and draws out a bottle of soda. “So what does that tell you?”

Clete considers the problem. “Well, everybody knows you can’t work the immortality process on somebody that old. You hear rumors, you know, like when the Company was starting out, that there were problems with some of the first test cases—” He stops himself and turns to stare at Porfirio. Porfirio meets his gaze but says nothing, twisting the top off his soda bottle.

“
This
guy was one of the test cases!” Clete exclaims. “And the Company didn’t have the immortality process completely figured out yet, so they made a mistake?”

Several mistakes had been made with Bobby Ross.

The first, of course, was that he was indeed too old to be made immortal. If two-year-old Patty or even five-year-old Jimmy had survived the crash, the process might have been worked successfully on them. Seat belts not having been invented in 1946, however, the Company had only Bobby with whom to work.

The second mistake had been in sending “spacemen” to collect Bobby. Bobby, as it happened, didn’t like science fiction. He liked cowboys and baseball, but rocket ships left him cold. Movie posters and magazine covers featuring bug-eyed monsters scared him. If the operatives who had rescued him had come galloping over the hill on horseback, and had called him “Pardner” instead of “Earth boy,” he’d undoubtedly have been as enchanted as they meant him to be and he would have bought into the rest of the experience with a receptive mind. As it was, by the time he was offloaded into a laboratory in a hot red rocky landscape, he was far enough out of shock to have begun to be angry, and his anger focused on the bogusness of the spacemen.

The third mistake had been in the Company’s choice of a mentor for Bobby.

Because the Company hadn’t been in business very long—at least, as far as its stockholders knew—a lot of important things about the education of young immortals had yet to be discovered, such as: no mortal can train an immortal. Only another immortal understands the discipline needed, the pitfalls to be avoided when getting a child accustomed to the idea of eternal life.

But when Bobby was being made immortal, there weren’t any other immortals yet—not successful ones, anyway—so the Company might be excused that error, at least. And if Professor Bill Riverdale was the last person who should have been in charge of Bobby, worse errors are made all the time. Especially by persons responsible for the welfare of young children.

After all, Professor Riverdale was a good, kind man. It was true that he was romantically obsessed with the idyll of all-American freckle-faced boyhood to an unhealthy degree, but he was so far in denial about it that he would never have done anything in the least improper.

All he wanted to do, when he sat down at Bobby’s bedside, was help Bobby get over the tragedy. So he started with pleasant conversation. He told Bobby all about the wonderful scientists in the far future who had discovered the secret of time travel, and how they were now working to find a way to make people live forever.

And Bobby, lucky boy, had been selected to help them. Instead of going to an orphanage, Bobby would be transformed into, well, nearly into a superhero! It was almost as though Bobby would never have to grow up. It was every boy’s dream! He’d have super-strength and super-intelligence and never have to wash behind his ears, if he didn’t feel like it! And, because he’d live forever, one day he really would get to go to the planet Mars.

If
the immortality experiment worked. But Professor Riverdale—or Professor Bill, as he encouraged Bobby to call him—was sure the experiment would work this time, because such a lot had been learned from the last time it had been attempted.

Professor Bill moved quickly on to speak with enthusiasm of how wonderful the future was, and how happy Bobby would be when he got there. Why, it was a wonderful place, according to what he’d heard! People lived on the moon and on Mars, too, and the problems of poverty and disease and war had been licked, by gosh, and there were
no Communists!
And boys could ride their bicycles down the tree-lined streets of that perfect world, and float down summer rivers on rafts, and camp out in the woods, and dream of going to the stars…

Observing, however, that Bobby lay there silent and withdrawn, Professor Bill cut his rhapsody short. He concluded that Bobby needed psychiatric therapy to get over the guilt he felt at having caused the deaths of his parents and siblings.

And this was a profound mistake, because Bobby Ross—being a normal ten-year-old all-American boy—had no more conscience than Pinocchio before the Cricket showed up, and it had never occurred to him that he had been responsible for the accident. Once Professor Bill pointed it out, however, he burst into furious tears.

So poor old Professor Bill had a lot to do to help Bobby through his pain, both the grief of his loss and the physical pain of his transformation into an immortal, of which there turned out to be a lot more than anybody had thought there would be, regardless of how much had been learned from the last attempt.

He studied Bobby’s case, paying particular attention to the details of his recruitment. He looked carefully at the footage taken by the operatives who had collected Bobby, and the mural on the barn caught his attention. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the sight of the ballplayer must have been Bobby’s last happy memory, the final golden moment of his innocence.

“What’d he do?” asks Clete, taking his turn at rummaging in the ice chest. “Wait, I’ll bet I know. He used the image of the mural in the kid’s therapy, right? Something to focus on when the pain got too bad? Pretending he was going to a happy place in his head, as an escape valve.”

“Yeah. That was what he did.”

“There’s only root beer left. You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Well, so why was this such a bad idea? I remember having to do mental exercises like that, myself, at the Base school. You probably did, too.”

“It was a bad idea because the professor didn’t know what the hell he was doing,” says Porfirio. The distant barn is wavering in the heat, but he never takes his eyes off it.

Bobby’s other doctors didn’t know what the hell they were doing, either. They’d figured out how to augment Bobby’s intelligence pretty well, and they already knew how to give him unbreakable bones. They did a great job of convincing his body it would never die, and taught it how to ward off viruses and bacteria.

But they didn’t know yet that even a healthy ten-year-old’s DNA has already begun to deteriorate, that it’s already too subject to replication errors for the immortality process to be successful. And Bobby Ross, being an all-American kid, had gotten all those freckles from playing unshielded in ultraviolet light. He’d gulped down soda pop full of chemicals and inhaled smoke from his dad’s Lucky Strikes and hunted for tadpoles in the creek that flowed past the paper mill.