Gods and Pawns (3 page)

“…The odd thing is, it’s immense but it doesn’t seem to have been cultivated, ever,” she was saying in a puzzled voice. “Just some gigantiform variant, but no disproportionate increase in the size or number of seed capsules.”

“How curious,” Lewis said, jerked from his reverie by something registering on his hazard sensors.

He turned his head. Far out upon the cracked and blazing plain, a mirage of silver water shimmered, rippled, advanced. Advanced? A sudden gust of hot wind buffeted his face.

“Er—” he said, just as Mendoza lifted her head and turned swiftly.

“What’s that?” she demanded. “Oh, God my Savior!”

“I think it’s—”

They winked out more or less simultaneously and wound up halfway up the side of the nearest island, perched on a tree branch. Watching in horrified fascination, they saw the shining flood roll onward, unhurried, unstoppable, surrounding their refuge and flowing on to the horizon.

“Damn,” said Mendoza, staring. “Where’d all that water come from?” Lewis pointed to the sky, where the slate cloud front of morning was just blotting out the sun and taking on a nasty coppery tint.

“It must be from the storm in the mountains. Grover told us this turned into a lake,” said Lewis.

“So he did. Well, it doesn’t look all that deep,” said Mendoza. “We can wade back to camp. We wore our waders, after all.”

An anaconda, quite a large one, floated past their perch. They regarded it in thoughtful silence.

“Then again,” said Mendoza, just as the sky opened with the force of a fire hose.

They clung to their branch as torrents of water beat down on them, gasping for air with their heads down. The rain shattered the silver mirror of the plain, turned it into a seething, leaping mass of brown water.

“I think we ought to wait it out,” shouted Lewis. Mendoza nodded and pointed to a drier section of branch, one overhung with a canopy of broad leaves. They worked their way along until they reached its comparative shelter and huddled there, dripping. Below them, various Amazonian fauna displaced by the flood was hurrying up the hillside on four, six, or eight legs respectively, likewise seeking refuge.

“But…It never does this at New World One,” said Mendoza, pushing back her wet hair.

“New World One has a force field projected over it,” said Lewis. “Houbert only lets in enough to keep the lawns green.”

“Ah,” said Mendoza. “That would also explain why we aren’t besieged by insects every night.”

“Or snakes,” said Lewis.

“That’s right; snakes can climb, can’t they?” said Mendoza.

They edged a little closer together on the branch.

“Well, we did hope we’d have an adventure,” said Lewis. “And I suppose this beats sitting in on another departmental budget meeting.”

Mendoza nodded doubtfully, watching the rain lash the surface of the water to muddy foam.

“I have to admit, this is as rainy as England,” she said. “At least there weren’t anacondas in Kent.”

“Scarcely any snakes at all there, really,” said Lewis.

“Except for Joseph,” Mendoza added, narrowing her eyes. Lewis, well aware of her feelings for the immortal who had recruited her, made a noncommittal noise. Seeking to turn the conversation elsewhere, he said brightly, “Think how wretched I’d be right now if I’d asked Lucretia along! She wasn’t what you’d call a good sport.”

“Mineralogist, isn’t she?”

“Mm. Emphasis on jewels. Curates the Company’s new world loot. All that plundered gold, jade, and whatnot.”

“You never know; maybe she’d have found a few emeralds out here.” Mendoza turned to look at him. “Wait a minute—there’s a rumor that somebody over in Mineralogy is kinky for gemstones. Supposedly has a private trove she likes to scatter in the bedsheets when she’s entertaining friends. Among other things. That wouldn’t be Lucretia, would it?”

“It certainly wouldn’t,” said Lewis firmly, and untruthfully. Mendoza grinned.

“And you wouldn’t tell me if it was, would you?”

“Of course I wouldn’t.”

“You really are the perfect gentleman, Lewis,” said Mendoza fondly. “What a bunch of idiots your ex-lovers have all been. One of these days, the right one will come along. You’ll see.”

Lewis gave her a forlorn look, which she utterly missed.

The rain continued without cease or indeed any sign that it was ever going to grow less. More things were swept by: a jaguar, crouched on a floating tree trunk, its ears flattened down in disgust. Caymans, swimming in flotillas. A sloth, apparently drowned but possibly not.

And then, abruptly, the rain stopped.

“Oh, look, somebody turned off the taps,” said Mendoza.

They sat there a few minutes, waiting expectantly for the water level to drop.

“I don’t think it’s going down anytime soon, somehow,” said Lewis.

A few more minutes went by.

“Well, it’s only—” Mendoza scanned. “Just over a meter deep. We could wade.”

“We could,” Lewis agreed. A raft of broken branches drifted past, crowded with unhappy-looking monkeys.

“Or we could wait a little longer,” said Mendoza.

They did.

“Dry clothing,” said Lewis at last. “Dry martinis. Comfortable chairs.”

“Yeah,” said Mendoza. The tree tilted outward, ever so slightly, but unmistakably.

“Oh, crumbs,” said Lewis, as the tree tilted farther.

They jumped and landed some distance behind the tree, which keeled over gracefully and slid down the hillside in a runnel of flowing mud. It took a lot of the hilltop with it.

“I have this sudden compelling urge to return to our camp,” said Mendoza. Lewis just nodded, speechless.

They picked their way down the sodden hillside and ventured out into the water, which was just precisely high enough to trickle in over the tops of their waders.

“Lewis, I am so sorry,” Mendoza said as she slogged along. “You might have been sunning yourself in some Venetian palazzo or other right now.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Lewis. “I don’t mind.”

Mendoza looked at him askance. “I’ll bet you say that to all the other girls, too. Sweetheart, there’s such a thing as being too much of a—” She broke off and turned, coming face-to-face with the cayman that had been advancing on them stealthily. It opened its jaws, but closed them on empty air as Mendoza dodged and brought her fists down on its flat head, with a
crack
that echoed across the water. It spasmed, rolled over and drifted away belly-up. “—nice guy,” Mendoza finished.

“I suppose so,” said Lewis. “All the same, this isn’t so bad. We’ve made a few discoveries, haven’t we? You’ve lots of samples of your, er, maize thing.”

“Though not the cultivars I expected,” said Mendoza, squelching on. “Odd, that. You can almost see what this place was like a thousand years ago—some vanished tribe of indigenes working out how to grow things here. No rice, or they’d have figured out rice paddies—no way to drain the marsh, the rainforest soil good for nothing, so they built these islands instead, out of
terra preta
. Each island a little orchard, and maybe some of them were used for amaranth or manioc crops…”

“I wonder what happened to them all? And where the
terra preta
came from?” said Lewis. “Surely the Company knows.”

“If all-seeing Zeus knows, he isn’t telling the likes of
us,
” said Mendoza. “Bloody paranoid corporate conspira—oh, my God.”

Before them rose an island. They could tell it was their island, beaten and lashed by the storm though it was, because the little clearing in which they had pitched their tents was clearly visible. It was visible because it was now halfway down the side of the hill. As they watched, it slid farther. The crates were still up on top, on the edge of what was now a precipice, but everything else had spilled down the slope and Lewis’s folding chair was already bobbing away on the flood.

“NO!”

Another cascade of mud came down, and the clearing flopped over, burying most of what they’d brought with them.

Three hours and a lot of cursing later, they sat on the hilltop once more, amid what they had been able to find of their base camp.

“It could be worse,” said Lewis. “We saved the cocktail shaker.”

“Pity about our sleeping bags, though,” said Mendoza bleakly, taking a sip of gin. “And Pan Li’s flamecube. And my tent.”

“You can have mine, of course,” said Lewis.

“But what’ll you sleep in?”

“I’m an old field campaigner,” said Lewis, with a wave of his hand. “I used to lie up in the heather with nothing but my cloak, when I even had a cloak. This is nothing to Northern Europe! Why, I’ll bet I can even get a fire going.”

Mendoza gave him an incredulous look.

“With what? All the wood is wet.”

“Only on the outside,” said Lewis and, rising, he took a hatchet and strode off in search of a dead tree. It took him a while; most of the local dead wood had already rotted down to punky, bug-infested bits. Finally he was able to scramble up and hack a few dead branches down, and further hack them into shorter lengths, and at last he staggered back with his arms full.

“Et voilà!”
he said, looking around for a place to start a fire. There were no rocks, there were no patches of bare dry earth. Finally he improvised a sort of basket of strips of packing steel.

“And now,” Lewis said triumphantly, “the old field operative makes fire. What’s that, you say? We have no flint? We have no matches? We have no magnesium shavings? But we do have
hyperspeed!
” He held up a pair of dry sticks and then his hands became a blur, and a moment later both sticks had burst into flame.

“Nice trick,” Mendoza admitted. She watched as he coaxed the wood in the basket to catch. It smoked a great deal, but there was no denying it was on fire. She drew the rubber field poncho about her shoulders more tightly.

“So…when was your first mission?” she asked him.

“Anno Domini 142,” said Lewis proudly, rummaging through the box of field rations they’d salvaged. He drew out two pouches of Proteus Hearty Treats, wiped off mud, activated their autoheat units, and passed one to Mendoza. “Ireland. Well, I had to spend a year in Britain first, to acclimatize myself to mortals.”

“They did that to me, too,” said Mendoza. “Spent a whole year in Spain. I hated it. Damned mortals! I’d done all my prep work programming myself for the New World, and I was desperate to get out here. Then, what does the Company go and do? It sends me to
England.
”

“I’d have been perfectly happy staying in Britain,” said Lewis, taking a mouthful of Proteus Hearty Treats. He chewed, paused, and then said: “Is it me, or does this taste like a brownie steeped in beef gravy?”

Mendoza opened her pouch and ate some. “You’re right.” She looked into the pouch. “Not bad, though. So anyway—”

“So anyway it was Roman Britain by that time, and I was stationed at the Dr. Zeus HQ in Londinium. Oh, it was wonderful there! Heated rooms. Neighbors from all corners of the empire. Quite cosmopolitan, you know, you’d hardly think you were in a barbarian country at all. But then, of course, just as I’d got to taking clean clothes and indoor plumbing for granted—”

“Isn’t that the way it always is?”

“—I was sent to Ireland. Which was quite a contrast.”

“I’ll bet it was. What the hell would a Literature Specialist have to do in Ireland, in that era?”

“Quite a bit, actually,” said Lewis. “Learning tribal lays, and all that. So I just made the best of things. Learned to forage, make fire, get myself out of difficult situations. I did so well I was rewarded with a job in Greece for a few decades, but then—back to rainy old Eire. I got work as a druid.”

“At least I was never sent anywhere that primitive,” said Mendoza with a shudder. “How long were you in Ireland?”

“Until—” Lewis halted, frowned. “Until I…ow.” He put his hands up to his head and squinted his eyes.

“What’s wrong?”

“Old programming error. Something…I’m so sorry, my memory’s never been right since. I had an accident. Spent ten years in a regeneration vat, would you believe it? And ages in reprogramming therapists’ offices after that,” he babbled. He had begun to sweat profusely.

“Did it happen in Ireland?” Mendoza was watching him closely, concern in her eyes.

“I don’t know! I was in France afterward. Old World One, in the Cevennes. Lovely place. Have you ever been there?”

“No. Lewis, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m just—there’s just that little glitch. Something fairly traumatic happened, apparently.” Lewis shook himself, trying to regain some composure. Mendoza reached over and took his hand in hers, which sent his composure flying again, but he smiled at her and hoped she wouldn’t notice the way his heart was pounding.

“Happens to all of us,” said Mendoza gently. “Damned tertiary-consciousness programming. The Company hides all sorts of little traumas down there, and they spring out and nail you at the worst times—usually just as you’re about to do something Dr. Zeus doesn’t want you to do. Like me with Nicholas.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Lewis, sitting very still so she wouldn’t take her hand away.

“You should have seen the panic attack I had the first time some mortal suggested I might be a Jew,” said Mendoza. “Complete hysterical collapse. Utterly humiliating. All pulled out of suppressed memories of being in the dungeons of the Inquisition. And the nightmares…”

“I have nightmares, too,” said Lewis sadly.

“Like last night?”

“Yes. Usually…I’m lost somewhere, and there are these tremendous domed hills or, or mounds or something…and then I’m being pulled down a hole. Or a tunnel. It’s hot and suffocating and I’m trapped…and I wake up yelling, which doesn’t much impress—well, anyone who happens to hear me.”

Mendoza gave him a thoughtful look.

“Well,” she said finally, “maybe romance just doesn’t work for immortals, eh, Lewis? It certainly didn’t work for me. And maybe it’s just as well. No passion, no pain. Good friendship’s just as important, after all. Maybe even more so.”

She withdrew her hand.

“To get back to the subject of roughing it—I’ve heard stories of some of these older field operatives who are really good at it. Don’t take any gear with them at all. They’ve trained themselves to sleep upright, only it isn’t sleep, it’s a sort of altered consciousness—like their perception of time and the exterior world changes. They just sort of become one with the landscape and blend in. Have you ever done that?”