by Kage Baker
Don’t be scared. I’m just reminiscing.
When we slaughtered the last of the Goats, your fathers were set free, don’t you understand? Instead of running and hiding in holes like animals, they could settle down to become people. They had time at last, to learn to count on their fingers and toes, to look at the stars and wonder what they were. Time to drill holes in deer bone and make music. Time to paint bison on cave walls. And the other immortals (we called them Preservers), had time at last to go among your fathers and collect cultural artifacts the shamans wanted saved, now that there was culture.
But what were we Enforcers supposed to do, with our great purpose in life gone? We loved to kill. It was all we knew, all we were made for. So our officers met together, to talk over the question of where the masters expected us to fit, in this new peacetime we’d made possible for mortals.
There was a lot of debate. Most of us in the rank and file were pretty optimistic; we just figured they’d reprogram us to do some other job. But one colonel, an asshole named Marco, thought we could never be sure the mortals wouldn’t relapse into being cultists, and that maybe we ought to make some preemptive strikes: you know, kill all the mortals who looked as though they might make war, so they’d never get a chance to.
Everyone roared him down, except the men under his command. See, that would have been absolutely wrong! That would have been killing innocents, and we don’t do that. Noncombatants are to be protected at all times. But our masters, who as I mentioned are nervous people, shit themselves in terror when they found out what Marco’d said.
Marco’s faith was imperfect. We should have done something about him right then…but that’s another story.
Anyway, Budu told him he was a fool, and that shut him up.
Budu was our general, our supreme commanding officer. He was one of the oldest of us and he was the best, the strongest, the biggest. And he was righteous, I tell you, our Truth was strong in his heart! I’d have died for him, if I wasn’t immortal, and as it was I had my head lopped off twice fighting under him. I didn’t care; the masters stuck it on again and I was proud to go right from the regeneration tank back to the front lines, as long as Budu was out there too.
(Regeneration tank. It’s…think of it as a big pot, no, a big pot, do you know what a cauldron is? All right, imagine a big one full of, uh, magic juice, and whenever one of us immortals would be damaged too badly to repair ourselves, we’d be carted off the field and put in one of these magic cauldrons to heal. We’d come out good as new.)
Anyway. Budu was also the smartest of us. Budu studied future history, between this age and the time in which our masters live. He figured out what scared them the most. He said the mortal masters might think they didn’t need us anymore, but they’d find they were mistaken soon enough. He ordered us to wait. Something would happen.
And, Father of Justice, the old man was right!
Now you’re going to find the story more interesting, mortal, because this part of it deals with your own people.
Let’s see, how do I explain the concept of mitochondrial DNA to you?
I’ve already told you how the shamans at the other end of Time want to be sure nothing happens to endanger their own existence, right? Causality really worries them. So they’re obsessive about tracing their ancestors, finding out for certain where they came from. And they’ve been careful to chart something called genetic drift. It’s like a map, you know what a map is, that shows where their fathers have been.
Well, they found that a lot of their fathers—actually, mothers—started
out right below this mountain, mortal, right down in that nice green valley of yours. It’s sort of a crossroads—uh, game trail—for humanity. It’s where a lot of important human traits came together to make something special.
But back then this hadn’t happened yet. There was a tribe living down there, all right, nicely settled into a farming community, but they only had some of the genetic markers, the special blood, that our masters expected to find.
So the masters sent in a Preserver to watch them. He was what we call an anthropologist, which meant he didn’t mind working with the monkeys. His name was Rook. He became a member of their tribe, lived in their huts with them. I couldn’t do it, but I guess there’s no accounting for tastes.
Rook was expecting another tribe to appear from somewhere and intermarry with the farmers, and that other tribe would provide the missing pieces, so to speak, and their descendants would become our masters’ fathers. He was all set to record it, when it happened; but it didn’t quite happen the way he’d expected.
The other tribe came along, all right, hunter-gatherers on a long leisurely migration to greener pastures, and that valley below was nice and green. The newcomers had the right genes, too, just as Rook had predicted.
What he hadn’t predicted, though, was that the peaceful farming folk would treat the newcomers just like they treated any other migratory species. Like elk, or caribou. You see, agrarian societies sometimes have a problem getting enough protein…
That means meat. I mean they were catching the hunter-gatherers and eating them.
You’re embarrassed to learn that your fathers were cannibals? Think how the shamans at the other end of Time felt!
So the old Enforcers weren’t demobilized quite yet, ha ha. But this was a slightly more complicated situation than we were used to, understand? We couldn’t just wade in there and wipe out the peaceful farming folk. Negotiation was called for. And we never negotiate.
So our masters assigned us a liaison with the mortals, a new kind of Preserver they’d invented, called a Facilitator.
Facilitators are different. We Enforcers were designed to love killing, and the regular Preservers were designed to love the things they preserved. The Facilitators, though, were designed to be more objective, to operate in the big civilizations that were about to be born. They would be politicians, intriguers, councilors to mortal kings. What do those words mean?…I guess the best translation would be liars.
I remember the staff meeting as though it were yesterday, mortal man.
It was raining. We’d made camp on that high meadow you passed on your way up here, and most of us had fanned out into the landscape. Budu had only brought the Fifth Infantry Division, which I was in. I was one of his aides, so all I had to do was set up the tent where the meeting was to be held. The old man stood there quietly in the open, staring down the trail; he didn’t care if he got wet.
We’d had a report from a patrol that they were on their way. Pretty soon I caught a whiff of Preserver in the wind though Budu had picked it up before I did; he had already turned to watch them come down from the pass. Rook was on foot, a little miserable-looking guy in a wet cloak, but the Facilitator was riding a horse, and Rook was having to tilt his head back to look up at him as he talked earnestly, waving his arms.
The Facilitator was tall, for one of them anyway, and wore nice tailored clothes. His name was Sarpa. He wasn’t paying attention to Rook much, just sort of nodding his head as he rode and scanning the landscape, and when he spotted us I saw his eyes widen. I don’t know what he’d been told about Enforcers at his briefing, but he hadn’t expected what he found.
They were escorted in, and I took Sarpa’s horse away and tethered it. The old man wanted to start the meeting right then. The Preservers asked for something hot to drink first, which seemed stupid to me—had they come there to talk, or to have a party?—but Budu just told me to get them something. All we had was water, but I brought it in a couple of polished Great Goat skulls, the nicest ones in camp. The Preservers stared with big round eyes when I set their drinks before them, and didn’t touch a drop. There’s no pleasing some people.
At least they got down to business. Rook made his report first, about how the farming tribe had been fairly peaceable until the newcomers had arrived, when they had suddenly shown a previously-unknown talent for hunting hunters. They watched the hunters’ trails, lay in wait with s
harp sticks, and almost never failed to carry off one of the younger or weaker of the new tribe, whom they butchered and parceled out among themselves. Rook had seen all this firsthand.
The Facilitator Sarpa asked him why he hadn’t tried to stop them.
“I did try,” he said wretchedly. “I told them they shouldn’t eat other people. They told me (with their mouths full) that the strangers weren’t people. There were quite calm about it, and nothing I said could convince them otherwise. Anyway, I can’t say much without blowing my cover; they thought it was funny enough I wouldn’t touch the ribs they offered me.”
Sarpa wanted to know what his cover was, and Rook told him he was an adopted member of the tribe, and had himself avoided any “unpleasantness” by volunteering to work in the fields even in bad weather. Sarpa stared harder at that than he’d stared at the skull cups.
“You’re maintaining your cover by good attitude?” he said, as though he couldn’t believe it.
“That’s what a participant observer does,” Rook explained.
“But when you’re one of us? It never occurred to you to exploit your superior abilities, or your knowledge? Why didn’t you pose as a spirit? A magician, at least, and impress them with a few tricks?”
“That would have been lying,” said Budu, and Rook said:
“Well, but that would have created an artificial dynamic in our relationship. I’m supposed to observe and document the way they live in their natural state. If I’d said I was a magical being, they wouldn’t have behaved in a natural way toward me, would they?”
Sarpa exhaled hard through his little thin nose, and drummed his fingers on his knees. “All right,” he said, “it’s clearly time a specialist was brought in. I’ll make contact with them immediately.”
Budu wanted to know what he was going to do, and Sarpa waved his hand. “Textbook procedure for managing primitives. I’ll put them in awe of me with an exhibition of juggling, or something. Once I’ve got their attention, I’ll explain the health risks involved in eating the flesh of their own species.”
“And if they won’t listen?” asked Budu. Sarpa smiled at him in a patronizing kind of way, I guess because he was frightened of the old man. I could smell his fear from clear over where I was standing, playing dumb like a good orderly.
“Why, then we send in the troops, don’t we?” Sarpa said lightly. “But it won’t come to that. I know my job.”
“Good,” said Budu. “What do you need now?”
“I need to download all possible data on them from Rook, here,” Sarpa replied. (What’s that mean? Just that Rook was going to tell him a lot of things very very fast, mortal.) “We can retire to my field quarters for that; I’d like to get into dry clothes first. Where’s our camp?”
“You’re in it,” said Budu.
Sarpa looked around in dismay. “You haven’t put up the other tents yet?” he asked.
Budu told him we don’t need tents, but offered him the one in which they were squatting. “And I’ll assign you Flat Top for an aide,” he said.
(He meant me. I was designated Joshua when I was born, but everybody in my unit went by a nickname. Skullcracker, Crunchmaster, Terminator, that kind of thing. I earned my nickname when we had a contest to see how many beers we could balance on top of our heads. I got five up there.)
Sarpa didn’t look too happy about it, but I made myself useful after the old man left: hung some more skins around the tent and brought in some springy bushes for bedding. I unloaded his saddlebags and set up the field unit—uh, the magic box that let us talk to the shamans. Like that one over there, see? Only smaller—while he downloaded from Rook. Rook went back to the farmstead after that, poor little drone, couldn’t leave his mortals for long.
Sarpa got up and spread his hands over the back of his field unit to get them warm. He asked me, “What time are rations served out?” and I told him we were foraging on this campaign, but that I’d get him part of somebody’s kill if he wanted, or maybe some wild onions. He shuddered and said he’d manage on the Company-issued provisions he’d brought with him. So I set that out for him instead, little tiny portions of funny-smelling stuff.
I don’t think Sarpa understood yet that he was supposed to dismiss me or I couldn’t go. I just stood at ease while he ate, and after a few minutes he offered me a packet of crackers. I could have inhaled the damn things, they were so small. To be polite I nibbled at the edges and made them last a while, which was hard with teeth like mine, believe me.
When he was finished I tidied up for him, and he settled down at his field unit. He didn’t work, though. He just stared out over the edge of the meadow at the smoke rising from the mortals’ farmstead. I figured I’d better give him a clue, so I said, “Sir, will there be anything else, sir?”
“No…” he said, in a way that meant there would be. I waited, and after a minute he said, not meeting my eyes: “Tell me something, Enforcer. What does a man have to do to—ah—fraternize with the female mortals?”
By which he meant he wanted to couple with one of your mothers.
I said, “Sir, I don’t know, sir.”
His attention came away from the smoke and he looked up at me sharply. “So it’s true, then, about Enforcers?” he asked me. “That you’re really not, ah, interested?”
“Sir, that’s affirmative, sir,” I told him.
“No sex at all?”
“Sir, no sir.”
“But…” He looked out at the smoke again. “How on earth do you manage?”
I felt like asking him the same question: Why would our masters have created his kind with the need to go through the motions of reproduction, when they can’t actually reproduce?
(No, mortal, we can’t. We’re immortal, so we don’t need to.)
I mean, I can see why you mortals are obsessed with it; I’d be too, if that was my only shot at immortality. But we’ve always wondered why the Preserver class were given such a stupid appetite. Budu used to say it was because they needed to be able to understand the mortals’ point of view if they were to function correctly, and I guess that makes sense. Still, if it was me, I’d find it a distraction.
So I just told Sarpa, “Sir, nothing to manage. Everybody knows that killing’s a lot easier than making life, and for us it’s a lot more fun, sir.”
He shivered at that, and said, “I suppose it’s really just sports taken to the extreme, isn’t it? Very well; Rook will probably know how to set me up with a girl.”
I didn’t say anything, and he looked at me sidelong, trying to read my expression.
“You probably disapprove,” he said. “With the morality the Company programmed into you.”
“Sir, strictly speaking, you’re exploiting the mortals, sir,” I said.
“And you think that’s wrong.”
“Sir, it would be for me. Not my place to say what’s wrong for you, sir. You’re a Preserver, and one of the new models at that, sir.”
“So I am,” he said, smiling. “You won’t judge me, eh? I like the way your conscience works, Flat Top. And after all, if I can get the creatures’ females on my side, it’ll be easier to persuade them to behave themselves.”
I don’t know why he should have cared what I thought of him, but the Preservers were all like that; the damndest things bothered them. I just told him, “Yes Sir.” and he dismissed me after that. The guys in my mess had saved me a leg of mountain goat. Not much meat, but there was a lot of marrow in the bones. Crack, yum.
Well, so the next day the Facilitator went out and did his stuff.
He dressed in his best clothes, dyed all kinds of bright colors to dazzle the mortals, and he put on makeup. He rode on his horse, which your fathers hadn’t got around to domesticating yet. It was a pretty animal, nothing like the big beasts our cavalry ride: slender legs, little hooves, kind of on the stupid side but elegant as you please.
We went with Sarpa, though of course we were undercover. There were maybe a hundred of us flanking him as
he rode down to their patchwork fields, slipping through the trees and the bushes, keeping ourselves out of sight. So close we came I could have popped open any one of their little round heads with a rock, as Sarpa rode back and forth in plain sight and got their attention.
They froze with their deer-antler hoes in their hands, they watched him with their mouths open, and slowly drew into a crowd as he approached them. He staged it nicely, I have to say, let his long cloak blow out behind him so its rainbow lining showed, and there were grunts and cries of wonder from the mortals.
Sarpa told them he was a messenger from their ancestors, and to prove it he did a stunt with some special-effects charges that sent red smoke and fireballs shooting from his fingertips. The mortals almost turned and ran at that, but he kept them with his voice, saying he had an important message to deliver. Then he said the ancestors demanded to know why their children had been eating their own kind?
His audience just looked blank at that, and I spotted Rook running up from behind and pushing his way through the crowd. He yelled out that he’d warned them this would happen. Falling flat before Sarpa, he begged the ancestors for mercy and promised that the farmers would never do such a terrible thing again.
At this point, though, the farmstead’s lady raised her voice and said there must be some mistake, because her people weren’t eating their own kind.
Sarpa asked, were they not lying in wait for the strangers who had recently come into the valley, the harmless people who hunted and gathered? Were they not stabbing them with spears, cutting them open, roasting them over coals?
The lady smiled and shrugged and said yes, the invaders were being treated so; but they were not her own kind, and certainly not children of the ancestors!
Sarpa didn’t win them over nearly as easy as he’d thought he could. They argued back and forth for about an hour, as I remember. He told them why it was wrong to eat other human beings, told them all about the diseases they could catch, even told them a lot of malarkey about what would happen to them in the next world if they didn’t cut it out right now.
