Sky Coyote (37 page)

Though I once knew a lady of a metaphysical turn of mind who’d have argued that the plain daylight
is
the mystical goal, that God or whatever, being everywhere,
is
the ordinary world all around us, and our quest is not to arrive where He is but to notice Him right in front of our faces. If she was correct, Kenemekme wouldn’t be disappointed. She died a long time ago, though, so I couldn’t debate the point.

But it made me feel good to see him paddling along happily into the unknown. One little bit of Humashup was being left behind, one tiny fragment of the lost world, and maybe something good would come of it. Sort of like Pandora’s box, you know? Shut in there with all the evils and sorrows of the world was Hope. The rest of the people were being taken away to a bright future, and Kenemekme was being left in the dark, but maybe he’d brighten up the darkness a little while with his songs, with his crazy dances.

T
HE REST OF THE STORY’S
pretty funny. Want to hear?

The people of Humashup did just fine at Mackenzie Base. Massive culture shock at first, of course, but they picked up on the delights of technology right away. More cartoon matinees! Food you didn’t have to pound on a rock! Toilet paper! Not to mention lifetime jobs with the Company doing things like cleaning fuel tanks and working in processing plants. Menial work, but they were unskilled, after all, and it paid well. Great medical benefits, too. Most of them lived to see a third century.

They weren’t allowed to breed anymore, of course, but that was okay with them, because most of them felt that parenting was a real pain in the ass. They happily donated sperm and ova to the Company freezebanks and let the anthropologists continue to pick their brains, though of course the longer they were exposed to a foreign culture, the less accurate their memories were about their old ways. They lived out long and comfortable lives eating Company food, buying Company merchandise, and vacationing at Company resorts.

Did I mention that Nutku and his fellow kantap members
went into business? Their shell money was traded for Company scrip as soon as they figured out the exchange rate, and with it they bought the plant that manufactured the BeadBucks used at Company resorts for minor purchases like cocktails, appetizers, and beach-chair rentals. They parleyed that into a number of Authentic Chumash(tm) handicraft stands at Company bases all over the globe. Sepawit’s kid grew up to become one of their CEOs, in fact, an executive with amazing vision. Numbers of ladies like Skilmoy supplemented their paychecks by producing Authentic Chumash(tm) baskets and other stuff in their spare time, which they had more of, now that they didn’t have babies every year, and eventually banked enough to open their own, competing line. There was a real trade war that went on for years. Eventually they all died of old age, rich, and that was the end of them.

A long, long time later, the Chumash nation was reborn. Not the real Chumash, of course; the ones we left behind had long since died of smallpox or interbred with their invaders to the point that they ceased to exist as a culture, except for one determined tribe that ran a gambling casino somewhere.

No, the New Chumash were mostly Caucasian members of a religious group in the Federal Republic of Santa Barbara. Their spiritual leader had this vision that declared that he and all his followers were reincarnated Chumash. They believed the Chumash had spent all their time swimming with dolphins and getting energy out of quartz crystals. Nobody thought to ask the casino owners whether or not this was true, because running a casino didn’t seem a very spiritual thing to be doing.

So the New Chumash bought up all this land north of the republic (pretty close to where Humashup had been, as a matter of fact) and declared it an ecological preserve and spiritual sanctuary. They were able to do this, despite the astronomical price
of real estate in California, because they were stinking rich, being a very successful religious movement. The Reformed Church of Chinigchinix, by this time a toothless and benign old faith, gave its blessing to these fellow Native Americans by adoption.

And they had a lot of healing seminars and ate a lot of whole-grain carbohydrates on the sacred ground, but most of them felt that something was missing. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the sacred ground, like most of California after half a millennium of overdevelopment, was so chemically poisoned it looked like the back of the moon. All the whole-grain carbohydrates and the woven baskets they were served in had to be imported from Nigeria. Anyway, the reincarnated Chumash weren’t quite happy.

It chanced that one of them, being a stockbroker, was at a dinner party with a lot of other rich and powerful people. There she met a friend of a friend who had connections with Dr. Zeus. She did a lot of wistful talking over her nonalcoholic Chardonnay; so did her money. One thing led to another, and within two weeks the New Life Chumash Nation had placed its order with the Company. As the Company had known it would.

Bring the Chumash out of the past for us, they said. Give us back our traditions, our ancient ways. We want to dress up in Chumash robes. We want the total Chumash experience. Spare no expense.

And with those magic words, Dr. Zeus got to work. From their labs they got out all this Chumash genetic material that they, uh, just happened to have. They brought out all the carefully propagated flora and fauna of the Chumash ecosystem from their botanical and zoological gardens. They brought from their records every possible detail of Chumash folkways and culture, and boy, they sure had a lot of material.

The sacred ground was detoxified and bulldozed back into its
original contours; it was replanted; it was restocked with animal life. Cleaning and restocking the adjacent ocean floor was harder, but, you know, they’d said to spare no expense, and who was the Company to argue? There was some outcry from historical preservationists when the picturesque old oil rigs off the coast were dismantled. Cash donations shut them up. When everything had naturalized, Humashup was rebuilt down to the last woven hut, and the New Life Chumash Nation moved in.

The next step was making more Chumash. This posed a slight problem for the New Lifers, because they were all sexually dysfunctional in one way or another. No problem, said Dr. Zeus. We’ve got genuine Chumash sperm and ova here, and they can get it on in a petri dish as well as anywhere else. The ladies of the group coped admirably with the in vitro transplants; they drank raspberry leaf tea for nine months and found childbirth a very spiritually fulfilling experience.

But they were kind of disappointed in the resulting children, who didn’t seem to share their values. And, let’s face it, life on the sacred ground under the ancient oak trees was, well,
bard
and smelly, and there turned out to be absolutely no psychic contacts with dolphins. The tribe running the casino could have told them that, if anyone had bothered to ask them.

Eventually most of the New Chumash got tired of it and went off to be the other people they’d been in their past lives. Dr. Zeus got custody of the Chumash children, and the children inherited the ecological preserve. They had to be taught how to live on it, though, so the Company sent in all these anthropologists made up as Sky People to instruct them in their ancient culture. Including a Sky Coyote, but not me. That was some other Sky Coyote. I was somewhere else by then.

When they grew up, the Chumash took a good look at the world around them and decided they wanted out of the Stone
Age. But these Chumash had been inoculated against diseases, and there were no Spaniards around to beat them up, see, so things turned out a little differently this time.

A couple of generations later, genetic descendants of Nutku were the stockbrokers drinking Chardonnay at dinner parties in Santa Barbara. They still had their language and culture intact, which helped them become the most aggressive import-export entrepreneurs on the Pacific Rim. Many of them moved down to Hollywood, where they revitalized the entertainment industry to such an extent that there were soon dark mutterings in certain quarters about the town’s being run by Indians.

They did have a problem with juvenile delinquency, however. Chumash gangs became the latest scourge of the venerable Republic of Mission Revival. The same intact culture that made them good businessmen also made many of them lousy parents …

But it was
their
culture, and at least they got it back, which is more than some people get. And, all things considered, they’re doing okay. You should see how the Etruscans Nouveaux turned out!

Happy endings aren’t so easy to come by when you’re an immortal, because nothing ever quite seems to end. Well, things do; we don’t, which is part of the problem.

New World One Base was closed down, right on schedule before the century ended. Deliberately ruined and abandoned to the jungle, leaving not a rack behind for Colonel Churchward or any of those guys to find. Houbert had decamped by then, with an entourage that included his few surviving Mayans. His next paradise was a chateau on the Loire, where I understand the Mayans refined the science of haute cuisine to an art before they, too,
eventually died. Houbert was moved on to Monaco—it’s one of those places the Company practically invented—and created another little celestial world on the Riviera. As far as I know, he’s still there at the safe house, dispensing his own special syrupy wisdom to adoring mortal servants and unlucky subordinates.

Latif grew up into a superbly competent executive administrator, all brass and flash and hardball, and got the shock of his young life when he finally pushed through his assignment to North Africa and was reunited with his hero Suleyman. It took him a while to realize that sly, courteous old Suleyman was also a superbly competent executive administrator, and actually knew a few tricks Latif didn’t. Eventually the student settled down at the feet of the master, and the two of them became legends in that part of the world.

I was thrown back in the arms of Holy Mother Church once I got out of makeup, but somehow my descent into darkness eased up for a while. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I was sent in as a jolly Franciscan instead of a villainous Jesuit. Maybe it was because the murderous power of the Inquisition—and the Church, too—had begun to wane at last. Less and less of my job had to do with the scourge and the branding iron, more and more with protecting lovely old religious art treasures from an increasingly rapacious secular world. Nice work, if you can get it, and I got it for a while.

But I go where the power is, and there was a new religion coming, a new force to hold people spellbound and visit them with dreams and terrors, to unite them with a common point of view and common assumptions about what life is and ought to be. It packed them into its pews every single night of the week without even one commandment, and Hollywood was its holy city. That was where the Company sent me, practically on the
day Cecil B. DeMille rolled into town. I’ve been in the entertainment industry ever since, in one capacity or another. It’s better than the Inquisition. Usually.

Lewis wound up in Hollywood too, for a while, as film scripts took on historic value of their own. He really did get work stunt-doubling for Fredric March and Leslie Howard, as it turned out. We occasionally had lunch at Musso & Frank’s Grill and talked about old times over gin gimlets made with Rose’s Lime Juice. We never discussed Mendoza, though.

I don’t know where Mendoza is.

This is not to say I don’t know what happened to her, or at least that I haven’t made a few good guesses; but I don’t think about her much.

She was okay for a while. She did vanish into the coastal range of Central California, and really did all that good work she’d been so confident she could do; in fact, she won a few commendations. I saw her now and again, when she had occasion to stop by some mission where I happened to be portraying a kindly friar. But she was nervous and irritable in human places; she couldn’t wait to finish whatever business had brought her there and disappear again into the wilderness. Just about the only times I ever saw her smile were when she’d turn for a goodbye salute before fading up some canyon, into some drift of coastal fog.

I played that game again: I told myself Mendoza was doing just fine and put her out of my mind, and if I thought about her at all, it was only in the context of how happy she was in some redwood forest somewhere, so I didn’t have to worry about her.

Something happened, though.

I never saw her again after the middle of the nineteenth century. She just wasn’t there anymore, and some other Company botanist had been assigned to that region. He had his work cut
out for him, too, because suddenly there were Yankee homesteaders and miners all over the place, clear-cutting, burning, and grazing their cattle even in those precipitous ranges. Mendoza would have been so furious.

Maybe what happened to her had something to do with that. I’d know for certain, if I were to access the official notification the Company sent me. I never have.