The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  The mortals were clearly impressed by him, but refused to consider the newcomers as people and in fact argued quite confidently against such a silly idea. Not only did they point out a whole lot of physical differences that were obvious to them (though it was lost on me; I’ve never been able to tell one of your races from another), they explained how vitally necessary it was to protect their sacred home turf from the alien interlopers, and protect their limited resources.

  Sarpa was kind of taken aback that these little mortal things had the gall to argue with him. I saw he was beginning to lose his temper, and in the shadows beside me Budu noticed it, too; the old man snorted, but he just narrowed his eyes and watched. At last the Facilitator fell back on threatening the mortals, letting fly with a couple of thunderbolts that set fire to a bush and working a few other alarming-looking tricks.

  That got instant capitulation. The mortals abased themselves, and the lady apologized profusely for them all being so stupid as not to understand the mighty Son of Heaven sooner. She asked him what they could possibly do to please the Son of Heaven. Maybe he’d like a beautiful virgin?

  And a mortal girl was pushed forth, looking scared, and Budu grunted, because Sarpa’s eyes fixed on her with an expression like a hungry dog’s. Then he was all smiles and gracious acceptance, and congratulated the mortals for being so wise as to see things his way. The girl squealed a bit, but he assured her she’d live through his embrace and even have pretty things afterward. I don’t think she believed him, but her mother fixed her with an iron glare, and she gulped back her terror and went with Sarpa.

  He took her back up to camp—she squealed a lot more when she saw us at last, but Sarpa sweet-talked her some more—and to celebrate his success he took her to his tent, stripped her bare as a skinned rabbit, and had his fun.

  There was a lot of muttering from us about that, and not just because we thought what he was doing was wrong. We were disgusted because he hadn’t realized the mortals were lying to him.

  See, mortal, we can tell when you’re lying. You smell different then. You smell afraid. But Sarpa had been distracted by his lusts and his vanity, sniffing after something else. We knew damned well the mortals were only giving him the girl to make him go away.

  And oh, mortal, it was hard not to go down there and punish them. It was our duty, it was our programmed and ancient desire. By every law we understood, those mortals were ours now. Budu wouldn’t give the order yet, all the same. He just bided his time, though he must have known what was going to happen.

  Well—three days later, as Sarpa was in his tent with his little friend while I was busting my ass to find a way to boil water in a rock basin because the great Facilitator wanted a hot bath, thank you very much—Rook came slinking up from the farmstead to tell us that the mortals had done it again. They’d caught a party of strangers, and even now they were whacking them up into bits to be skewered over the cookfire.

  I can’t say I was surprised, and I know the old man wasn’t. He just stalked to Sarpa’s tent, threw back one of the skins and said:

  “Son of Heaven, it seems that your in-laws have backslid.”

  Sarpa was furious. He yelled at the mortal girl, demanded to know what was wrong with her people, even took a swing at her. Budu growled and fetched him out by his arm, and told him to stop being an ass. He added that if this was the way the hotshot Facilitators operated, the Company—the shamans, I mean—should have saved themselves the trouble of designing a new model, or at least not sent one into the field until they’d got the programming right.

  Sarpa just drew himself up and yelled for me to bring his horse. He jumped into the saddle and rode off hell-for-leather, with Rook racing after him. Budu watched them go, and I think he actually considered for a minute whether or not it was worth it to send an armed escort after the fool. In the end he did, which turned out to be a wise precaution.

  I wasn’t there to see what happened. I was babysitting Sarpa’s little girlfriend, watching as she cowered in the bedding and cried. I felt sorry for her. We do feel sorry for you sometimes, you know. It’s just that you can be so stupid, you mortals.

  Anyway I missed quite a scene. Apparently it didn’t go at all well: Sarpa went galloping down and caught the farm-tribe with their mouths full of hunter-tribe. He shouted terrible threats at them, and put on another show of smoke and noises. Maybe he should have waited until there was an eclipse or a comet scheduled, though, because the farmers weren’t as impressed with his stunts this time. The upshot was, they killed his horse from under him and he had to run for it, and Rook too. If the armed escort hadn’t stepped out and scared the mortals off, there’d have been a couple of badly damaged Preservers doing time in regeneration vats, and maybe some confused farmers puking up bits of biomechanical implants.

  But Sarpa and Rook got back up to camp safely enough, though they were fuming at each other, Rook especially because now he’d lost his cover and wouldn’t be able to collect any more anthropological data. He said a lot of cutting things about Facilitators in general. Sarpa was just gibbering with rage. I got between him and the girl until he calmed down a little and I respectfully suggested, sir, that he might want to keep her safe as a hostage, sir, and whatever he might have retorted, he shut up when Budu came into the tent and looked at him.

  “Well, Facilitator,” said Budu, “what are you going to do now?”

  But Sarpa had an answer for that. He was through dealing with the lying, grubbing little farmers. He’d go straight to the hunter-gatherers and present himself as their good angel, and show them how to defend themselves against the other tribe.

  Budu told him he couldn’t do that, because it directly contravened orders. The monkeys were supposed to interbreed, not fight.

  Sarpa said something sarcastic about Budu’s grasp of subtleties and explained that he’d manage that; if the hunter-gatherers captured the farmers’ females, they could keep them as slaves and impregnate them. It wouldn’t exactly be the peace and harmony our masters had wanted imposed, but it would at least guarantee the requisite interbreeding took place.

  Budu shrugged, and told him to go ahead and try.

  Next day, he did. Rook stayed in camp this time, but I went along because Sarpa, having lost his mount, insisted on me carrying him around on my shoulders. I guess he felt safe up there. He had a good view, anyway, because he was the first in our party to spot the hunter-gatherers’ camp on the far side of the valley.

  Our reconnaissance team had reported the hunter-gatherers were digging in and fortifying a position for themselves, finally. Nice palisade of sharpened sticks, and inside they were chipping flint points just as fast as they could. Budu studied them from all angles before he just sent me walking up to the stockade so that Sarpa could look over the fence at them.

  He—that is, I—had to dodge quite a few spears and thrown flints before he got them to listen to his speech. They did listen, I have to hand them that much.

  But they weren’t buying it. They had every intention of descending on the farmer-tribe and getting revenge for the murder of their brethren. Sarpa tried to persuade them that the best way to do this was to make more children, but that wouldn’t wash either.

  It turned out they weren’t just a migratory tribe. They apparently had a long-standing cultural imperative to expand, to take new land for themselves whenever they needed it, and if other tribes got in the way they’d push them out or kill them off—though they never ate them, they hastened to add, because they were a morally superior people, which was why they deserved to have the land in the first place.

  Sarpa argued against this until they began to throw things at him again, and we beat an inglorious retreat. What was worse, when we got back we discovered that Rook had let the mortal girl go. He’d known her since her childhood, evidently, and didn’t want to see her hurt. He and Sarpa almost came to blows and it’s not pretty to see Preservers do that, mortal, they’re not designed for it. Budu had to step in again and threat
en to knock their heads together if they didn’t back off.

  Anyway, the damage was done, because the girl ran right back to her tribe and told them what was going on. How she’d figured out that Sarpa was going to woo the enemy, I don’t know, unless Rook was dumb enough to tell her. Then, too, you people aren’t always as stupid as you look. She might have figured out on her own that matters were coming to a head.

  Which they did, in the gray cold hour before the next dawn.

  Our patrols spotted them long before they got within a kilometer of each other: two little armies carrying as much weaponry as they could hold, men and boys and strong women, with their faces painted for war. Guilty, guilty, guilty, mortal! We watched from our high place and danced where we stood, we were so hungry to go after them. Sarpa didn’t desire his naked girl as much as we desired the sound of our axes on their guilty skulls, pop-chop! They were sinning, the worst of sins, and their blood was ours.

  But the old man held us back. Orders were, the mortals were to be given every chance. That’s why he was our commander, mortal! He loved the law. His faith was stronger than anyone’s, but he had the strength to hold back from the purest pleasure in the world, which is being the law’s instrument, you see?

  So he sent me down with Sarpa riding on my shoulder, and I walked out before the mortal armies, who had just seen each other in the growing light and were working themselves up to charge, the way the monkeys do. They fell silent when Sarpa and I appeared, and clear in the morning they heard the voices of our men, because we couldn’t help singing now, the ancient song, and it welled up so beautiful behind Sarpa’s voice as he shouted for them to lay down their arms and go home!

  Oh, mortal man, you’d have thought they’d listen to him, in that cold morning when the sun was just rising and making the high snow red as blood, lighting the meadows up green, reaching bright fingers down through deeps of blue air to touch their thatched roofs and palisade points with gold. So brief their lives are in this glorious world, you’d think they’d have grabbed at any excuse not to make them briefer.

  But the one side jeered and the other side screamed, and the next thing I knew I had a spear sticking out of my leg.

  I swear, it felt good. The suspense was over.

  They charged, and were at each other’s throats in less time than it takes to say it. So Budu gave the order.

  I just shoved Sarpa up into a tree, drew my axes, and waded in.

  You can’t imagine the pleasure, mortal. It would be wrong, anyway; that joy is reserved to us, forbidden to the likes of you. War is the Evil, and we make war on war, we strike that wickedness into bloody pulp! The little bone bubbles burst under our axes and the gray matter of their arrogance and presumption flies, food for crows.

  Oh, it was over too soon. There’ll always be those who get the lesson at the last minute, but once we’ve shown them what true evil is they do get it, and throw down their weapons and scream their repentance on their knees. Those we spared; those we accorded mercy. Budu himself herded the terrified survivors into a huddle, and stood guard while we mopped up.

  I was stringing together a necklace of ears I’d taken when I spotted Rook at the edge of the battlefield, weeping. I was feeling so friendly I almost went over and patted him on the back, with the idea of saying something to cheer him up; but they don’t see things the way we do, the Preservers. And seeing him put me in mind of Sarpa, and when I looked around for the Facilitator, damned if he wasn’t still up in the tree where I’d left him.

  So I went over and offered him a helpful hand down, but he drew back at the sight of all the blood on it. I can’t blame him. I was red to the elbows, actually. Sarpa was so pale he looked green, staring at the field as though he’d never be able to close his eyes again.

  I told him it was all right, that the slaughter was over. He just looked down at me and asked me how I could do such things.

  Well, I had to laugh at that. It’s my duty! Who couldn’t love doing his duty? It’s the best work in the world, mortal, in the best cause: seeing that Evil is punished and Good protected. I told him so, and he said it was obscene; I replied that when the mortals took it into their heads to usurp our jobs, that would be obscene. Sarpa didn’t say anything to that, just scrambled awkwardly down and staggered out on the field.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. The boys were still having a little fun, taking heads that weren’t too smashed and cutting off other things that took their fancies, and Sarpa took one look and doubled over, vomiting. The poor guy was a Preserver at heart, after all. The problem was, this was the big dramatic moment when he was supposed to address the surviving mortals of each tribe and point out how disobeying him had brought them to this sorry state.

  I told him to pull himself together. Budu, kind of impatient, sent over a runner to ask if the Facilitator was ready to give his speech, and I tried to drag Sarpa along but he’d take a few steps and start retching again, especially when he saw the women lying dead. I hoisted him up on my shoulders to give him a ride, but he got sick again, right in my hair, which the other guys in my unit thought was hilarious; they stopped stacking corpses to point and laugh.

  I growled at them and set Sarpa down. He put his hands over his face, crying like a baby. It was hopeless. I looked over at Budu and shrugged, holding out my hands in a helpless kind of way. The old man shook his head, sighing.

  In the end, Budu was the one who made the speech, rounding up what was left of the two tribes and penning them together to listen to him.

  It wasn’t a long speech, no flowers of rhetoric such as Sarpa might have come up with. Budu just laid it out for them, simple and straight. From now on, they were all to live together in peace. They would intermarry and have children. There would be no more cannibalism. There would be no more fighting. The penalty for disobedience would be death.

  Then Budu told them that we were going, and they were to bury what we’d left them of their dead. He warned them, though, that we were only going up the mountain, above the tree line into the mist, and we’d be watching them always from the high places.

  And we did. We were up here thirty years. It turned out to be a good thing for us, too, because while we were overseeing the integration of the two tribes, Budu worked out a proposal for our masters.

  I told you he’d studied their future history. He knew what kind of an opening they needed, and he gave them one. He pointed out the nearly universal existence of places we could fit in the mortals’ mythology. Not just of your village, mortal; every village there is, anywhere.

  Legends of gods, or giants or trolls or demons, who live up somewhere high and bring judgment on mankind. Sometimes terrible, sometimes benign, but not to be screwed with, ever! Sometimes they’re supposed to live on one specific mountain, like this one; sometimes the story gets garbled and they’re thought to live in the clouds, or the sky. Someplace up. Hell, there’s even a story about a big man with a beard who lives at the North Pole, who rewards and punishes children. I think he’s called Satan…or was it Nobodaddy? It doesn’t matter.

  Anyway, Budu showed our masters that his proposal fit right in with recorded history, was in fact vital to the development of mortal religion. And, while I understand they don’t approve of religion much up there in the future, they do like to be absolutely sure that history rolls along smoothly. Messing with causality scares them.

  What was his proposal, mortal? Come on, can’t you think? What if I give you three guesses? No?

  Well, Budu said that since civilization was still a little shaky on its legs, our masters needed to keep us around a while as a peacekeeping force. We’d go to each little community and lay down the law, or give them law if they didn’t have it: no eating each other, no murder, don’t inbreed, don’t steal. Basic stuff. Then we’d run patrols and administer justice when and as needed, and contain any new mortal aggression that might threaten to wipe out humanity before it could become established. The final clever touch was that he signed Sarpa’s na
me to it.

  The masters accepted that proposal, mortal. It’s bought us generations of time, even with Marco’s idiot rebellion. The masters may not have trusted us anymore, but they still needed us.

  And it worked for their good, too; it certainly got your village established. You wouldn’t be here now if not for what we did that day, on that bloody field. And neither would our masters, and they know it.

  We watched your fathers, from up here in the rocks and the snow, until we could be certain they wouldn’t backslide again. Then Budu pulled the Fifth Infantry out, all but a garrison of three of us, me and Bouncer and Longtooth, and we watched over your little valley down the long centuries while he went off to give law to other mortals.

  But time marched on, and eventually Bouncer got reassigned somewhere else, and later on Longtooth was transferred out too. Now there’s only me.

  And the word’s just come down from the top, mortal: they’re sending me back to my old unit, after all this time. I’ll see battle again, I’ll serve under the old man! My hands will steam with the blood of sinners. It’ll be wonderful! I’ve gotten so tired of sitting up here, freezing my ass off. If you’d climbed this mountain a day later than you did, you’d have missed out on your chance to get the Truth. Life’s funny, isn’t it? Death is even funnier.

  ***

  The words and gestures cease, as the old monster settles back on his haunches, momentarily lost in a happy dream. The boy watches him. Terrified as he is, he cannot help wondering whether his host isn’t something of a fool. It has of course occurred to him, as he listened unwilling to this story, that people as clever as the Time Shamans must have long since found some way of outwitting their servants. How can the creature trust his masters? How can he not know that times change?

  For even in his village below, where there are still those who can remember glimpsing God, skepticism is blooming. Nowadays children are frightened into good behavior by the old stories, but not men. Once nobody would have dared climb this mountain, seek out this cave; it would have been sacrilegious. Yet the boy’s friends had laughed at him when he’d set out for the mountain, and the village elders had just shrugged, smiling, and watched him go.