Mendoza in Hollywood

Praise for Kage Baker and The Company series

“Kage Baker has earned praise for her tales of the Company, a future-based outfit that ‘recruits’ throughout time, turns its new troops into immortal cyborgs, and sends them out to fill in the blank spots of history. . . . Look for it! Baker does not disappoint!”

—
Analog

“One of the most consistently entertaining series to appear in the late nineties. The novels read like literary pastiches—echoes of Heinlein and Robert Louis Stevenson fill this one—and the narrative pace matches that of most thrillers.”

—
Amazing Stories

Mendoza in Hollywood

“[C]ombines historical detail and fast-paced action with a good dose of ironic wit and a dollop of bittersweet romance.”

—Library Journal

The Graveyard Game

“If John le Carré wrote science fiction, it might read like
The Graveyard Game
.”

—
The New York Times

The Life of the World to Come
A Kirkus Selection for Best Sci-Fi of 2004

“Another entry in Baker’s superlative series about Dr. Zeus . . . An astonishing and thoroughly satisfying installment. What’s more, Baker’s overall concept and rationale, flawlessly sustained through five books, grows ever more spellbinding and impressive.”

—Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“Baker’s trademark mix of serious speculation and black humor informs this solid addition to her time-travel series.”

—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Baker’s strong world-building and clever plotting make this an addictive read.”

—Romantic Times BookClub Magazine

TOR BOOKS BY KAGE BAKER

In the Garden of Iden

Mendoza in Hollywood

The Graveyard Game

The Life of the World to Come

The Children of the Company

The Anvil of the World

The Machine’s Child

KAGE BAKER

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK
NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

MENDOZA IN HOLLYWOOD

First published in the United States by Harcourt, Inc.

Copyright © 2000 by Kage Baker

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Book design by Linda Lockowitz

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor
^®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baker, Kage.

Mendoza in Hollywood: a novel of the company/Kage Baker.

         p. cm.

ISBN 0-765-31530-0

EAN 978-0-765-31530-4

I. Title.

PS3552.A4313M46 2000

First Tor Trade Paperback Edition: May 2006

Printed in the United States of America

D  0  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2

This book is dedicated to Phyllis Patterson,
Instigator, with respect and affection;
And to the village she founded under the oak trees
And to its people.
Et in Arcadia ego
.

PART ONE

Establishing Shot

PART TWO

Babylon Is Fallen

PART THREE

The Island Out There

I
N THE TWENTY-FOURTH CENTURY
, about halfway through, it was said there was a fabulously powerful Company that could obtain virtually anything, if one had enough money
.

A Shakespeare first folio for your library? A live dodo for your aviary? An original sketch by da Vinci for your bedroom wall? Recordings of every performance Mick Jagger ever gave
?

What about a necklace once worn by Cleopatra
?

Have you a favorite historical figure? Would you like to have his baby? Or have your wife have his baby? Guaranteed authentic offspring of Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Elvis Presley
.

As it happened, the Company actually existed, and it called itself Dr. Zeus Incorporated
.

It began with two goals: to render human beings immortal and to develop time travel. Success in either goal was incomplete, though with all the money Dr. Zeus was making, it hardly mattered
.

Time travel, for example, seems to be possible only backward, and then forward again to your point of departure in your present. Nor can you bring anything forward out of its own time into yours. And, by the way, history cannot be changed
.

You can get around this somewhat by establishing indestructible warehouses in the past, where you stash all the loot you acquire there,
to be retrieved in your present time. But you will need a workforce to maintain these sites, and run your errands through time. . 
.

Immortality is another matter. It’s absolutely possible to confer it on a human being. Problem is, what you have when you’ve finished won’t be a human being any longer, it’ll be a cyborg, and how many people want to pay millions to become one of
those
things
?

Somebody clever at Dr. Zeus came up with an idea that solved both problems at a stroke: Make your workforce immortal
.

Since they’ll live forever, there’s no need to ship them back and forth through time: look at the costs you’ll cut if you just create them at the beginning of time and let them work their way through it, day by day, like everybody else. Transmit your orders to your cyborgs using that subatomic particle you’ve discovered that exists everywhere and in all times at once. You’re in business
.

Every epoch has its abandoned children, its orphans of war or famine. Won’t they be grateful to be rescued and gifted with immortality and lifetime jobs? And what jobs: rescuing precious things from the relentless sweep of oblivion. Of course they’ll be grateful. . 
.

This is the third volume in the unofficial history of Dr. Zeus Incorporated
.

In the Garden of Iden
introduced Botanist Mendoza, rescued as a child from the dungeons of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Spain by a Company operative, Facilitator Joseph. In exchange for being gifted with immortality and a fantastically augmented body and mind, she would work in the past for the future, saving plants from extinction
.

On her first mission as an adult, Mendoza was sent with Joseph to England, at that time under the repressive Catholic rule of Bloody Mary. Disguised as mortals, she and other operatives were to loot the private gardens of an eccentric collector, Sir Walter Iden. Her goal: obtain samples of
Ilex tormentosum,
a species that contained a powerful anticancer drug and that would be extinct in the future
.

Superior and snide as only a teenaged immortal can be, Mendoza looked down on the mortals among whom she had to labor
—
until she met Sir Walter’s secretary, Nicholas Harpole, a Protestant heretic
.

Mendoza and Nicholas engaged in a contest of wits that led them into bed. Passionately in love despite Joseph’s warnings about the folly of becoming attached to a mortal, Mendoza attempted to juggle her heart, her mission, and her secret. She failed spectacularly
.

Nicholas ended up being led to the stake. Mendoza was heartbroken, numb. Joseph came to her rescue again and got her transferred to the Company research base in South America: New World One
.

Sky Coyote
opened
144
years later, as Joseph arrived at New World One for a brief holiday before going on to his next mission in Alta California. The project
—
persuading a village of Chumash to let the Company relocate them to one of its research bases
—
would be immense, requiring the services of operatives of all disciplines. Mendoza was also drafted for the mission
.