The Best of Kage Baker

by Kage Baker

  ***

  I didn’t like the twentieth century, but it finally went away. Everything went into my eyes: the Pan Pacific Exhibition, Dashiell Hammett lurching out of John’s Grill, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge. Soldiers and sailors. Sutro’s Baths destroyed. Mortals in bright rags, their bare feet dirty, carrying guitars. Workmen digging a pit to lay the foundations of the Transamerica Building and finding the old buried waterfront, the abandoned ships of my mortal childhood still down there in the mud. The Embarcadero Freeway rising, and falling; the Marina District burning, and coming back with fresh white paint.

  My costume changed to fit the times. Now and again I caught a glimpse of myself, impartial observer, in a shop window reflection. I was hard to recognize, though I saw the same blank and eternally smooth face every time under the sideburns, or the mustache, or the glasses.

  The new world was loud and hard. It didn’t matter. I had all the literature and music of past ages to give me human contact, if secondhand through Dickens or Austen. And I had kept copies of the times I’d liked, out of what I sent into the Company storage banks. I could close my eyes at night and replay the old city as I’d known it, in holo.

  Everything time had taken away was still there, in my city. Sutro was still there, in his silk hat. I could walk the paths of his park beside him, as I’d never done in his time, and imagine a conversation, though of course I’d never spoken to him or anyone. I didn’t want to tell him about his house being torn down, or his park being “reduced” as the San Francisco Park Department put it, for easier maintenance, the Conservatory gone, the statues almost all gone, the carpet beds mown over.

  ***

  Kristy Ann in her twenties became grim and intense, a thin girl who dressed carelessly. Sometimes she brought books of photographs to the park with her and stalked along the paths, holding up the old images to compare them with the bare modern reality. One day she came with a crowd of young mortals from her college class, and talked knowledgeably about the park. The term urban archaeology was used a number of times.

  Now, when she painted the park, she worked with the old photographs beside her, imposing the light and colors of the present day on representations of the past. I knew what she was doing. I’d done it myself, hadn’t I?

  Kristy Ann in her thirties grew thinner, seldom smiled. She took to patrolling the park for trash, muttering savagely to herself as she picked up empty pop cans or discarded snack wrappers.

  She came once to the park with two other women and a news crew from KQED. They were filmed in front of the statue of Diana, talking about a Park Preservation Society they’d founded. There was talk of budget cuts. A petition. One of the cameramen made a joke about the statue and I could see the rage flaring in Kristy Ann’s eyes. She began to rant about the importance of restoring Sutro Park, replacing the statues, replanting the parterres.

  Her two companions exchanged glances and tactfully cut her off, changing the focus of the interview to the increasing deterioration of Golden Gate Park and the need for native, drought-resistant plantings.

  A year later a big smiling man with a microphone did a segment of his California history series there in the park, and Kristy Ann was on hand to be interviewed as “a local historian”. She took his arm and pulled him to the bare slopes where the carpet beds had bloomed. She showed him her photocopies of the old photographs, which were growing tattered nowadays.

  She talked and talked and talked about how the beds must be restored. The big man was too polite to interrupt her, but I could see the cameraman and assistant director rolling their eyes. Finally the assistant director led her away by the arm and gave her a handful of twenty dollar bills.

  A couple of months after that she stopped coming to the park. Kristy Ann was gone, for most of a year. I wondered if she’d gone mad or gone to jail or one of those other places mortals go.

  ***

  The Company had less and less for me to film, as the years rolled on. Evidently archivists weren’t as interested in twenty-first century San Francisco. I was sent out for newsworthy events, but more and more of my time was my own. Gleason structured it for me, or I couldn’t have managed.

  I had a list: Shower, Breakfast, Walk, Park Time, Lunch at Park, Park Time, Walk, Dinner, Shower, Bed. I needed patterns. Gleason said I was like a train, where other people were like automobiles: they went anywhere, I had iron wheels and had to stay on my iron track. But a train carries more than an automobile. I carried the freight of Time. I carried the fiery colors of Sutro’s design, the patterns of his flower beds.

  I had a route worked out, from HQ to Sutro Park, and I carried my lunch in a paper bag, the same meal every day: wheat bread and butter sandwich, apple, bottle of water. I didn’t want anything else. I was safe on my track. I was happy.

  I sat in the park and watched the fog drifting through the cypress trees. I knew, after so many years, how to be invisible: never bothered anyone, never did anything to make a mortal notice I was there. There weren’t many mortals, anyway. People only cut through Sutro Park on their way from 48th Avenue to Point Lobos Road. They didn’t promenade there anymore.

  ***

  When Kristy Ann wandered back into the park, she was rail-thin and all her hair was gone. She wore shapeless, stained sweat clothes and a stocking cap pulled down over her bare skull. She found a bench, quite near mine, that got the sunlight most of the day except when the fog rolled in, and she stayed there. All day, every day. Most days she had a cup of coffee with her, and always a laptop.

  I found I could tune into her broadband connection, as she worked. She spent most of her day posting on various forums for San Francisco historical societies. I followed the forum discussions with interest.

  At first she’d be welcomed into the groups, and complimented on her erudition. Gradually her humorlessness, her obsession came to the fore. Flame wars erupted when forum members wanted to discuss something other than the restoration of Sutro Park. She was always asked to leave, in the end, when she didn’t storm out of her own accord. Once or twice she re-registered under a different name, but almost immediately was recognized. The forum exchanges degenerated into mutual name-calling.

  After that Kristy Ann spent her days blogging, on a site decorated with gifs of her old photographs and scans of her lovingly colored recreations of the park. Her entries were mostly bitter reflections on her failed efforts to restore the carpet beds. They became less and less coherent. A couple of months later, she disappeared again. I assumed her cancer had metastasized.

  ***

  Ezra? Gleason was uncomfortable about something. Ezra, we need to talk. The Company has been going over its profit and loss statements. They’re spending more on your upkeep than they’re making from your recordings. It’s been suggested that we re-train you. Or relocate you. This may be difficult, Ezra…

  ***

  I don’t think anyone but me would have recognized Kristy Ann, when she came creeping back. She moved like an old woman. She seemed to have shrunken away. There was no sign of the laptop; I don’t think she was strong enough to carry it, now. She had a purse with her meds in it. She had a water bottle.

  She found her bench in the sunlight and sat there, looking around her with bewildered eyes, all their anger gone.

  Her electromagnetic field, the drifting halo of electricity that all mortals generate around their bodies, had begun to fluctuate around Kristy Ann. It happens, when mortals begin to die.

  I wondered if I could do it.

  I did; I got to my feet and walked toward her, cautious, keeping my eyes on the ground. I came to her bench and sat down beside her. My heart was pounding. I risked a glance sideways. She was looking at me with utter apathy. She wouldn’t have cared if I’d grabbed her purse, slapped her, or pulled off her clothes. Her eyes tracked off to my left.

  I turned and followed her stare. She was looking at an old stone basin on its pedestal, the last of Sutro’s fountains, its sculpted waterworks long since gone.
<
br />   I edged closer. I reached into her electromagnetic field. I touched her hand—she was cold as ice—and tuned into the electrical patterns of her brain, as I had tuned into her broadband signal. I downloaded her.

  I didn’t hurt her. She saw the fountain restored, wirework shooting up to outline its second tier, its dolphins, its cherubs. Then it was solid and real. Clear water jetted upward into a lost sky. The green lawn spread out, flawless.

  White statues rose from the earth: the Dancing Girls. The Dreaming Satyr. Venus de Milo. Antinous. The Boy with Bird. Hebe. The Griffin. All the Gilded Age’s conception of what was artistic, copied and brought out to the western edge of the world to refine and educate its uncultured masses.

  Sutro’s house lifted into its place again; the man himself rose up through the path and stood, in his black silk hat. Brass glinted on the bandstand. Music began to play. Before us the Conservatory took shape, for a moment a skeletal frame and then a paned bubble of glass flashing in the sun. Orchids and aspidistras steamed its windows from inside. And below it—

  The colors exploded into being like fireworks, red and blue and gold, variegated tropical greens, purples, the carpet beds in all their precise glory. Managed Nature, in the nineteenth century’s confident belief that unruly Nature should be managed to pleasing aesthetic effect. The intricate floral designs glowed, surreal grace notes, defying entropy and chaos.

  She was struggling to stand, gasping, staring at it. The tether broke and she was pulled into the image. I gave her back her hair, with a straw hat for the sun. I gave her a long flounced skirt that swept the gravel, a suitable blouse and jacket. I gave her buttoned boots and a parasol. I gave her the body of young Kristy Ann, who had wandered alone with her sketchbook. Now she was part of the picture, not the dead thing cooling on the bench beside me.

  She walked forward, her eyes fixed on the carpet beds, her lips parted. Color came into her face.

  ***

  The fog came in, grayed the twenty-first century world. I heard crunching footsteps. A pair of women were coming up the path from the Point Lobos Road entrance. I got to my feet. I approached them, head turned aside, and managed to point at what was sitting on the park bench. One of the women said something horrified in Russian, the other put her hands to her white face and screamed.

  They drew back from me. I pulled out my card and thrust it at them. Finally, suspicious, one of them took it and spelled out its message. I stared at my shoes while she put two and two together, and then I heard her pulling out her cell phone and calling the police.

  I wasn’t arrested. Once the police were able to look at the body and see its emaciation, the hospital band on its wrist, once they read the labels on the pill bottles in the purse, they knew. They called the morgue and then they called Gleason. He came and talked to them a while. Then he took me back to HQ.

  ***

  They don’t send me out much, anymore. I sleep a lot, in the place where the Company keeps me. I don’t mind; at least I don’t have to deal with strangers, and after all I have my memory.

  I ride there on Edwin and the weather is always fine, the fog far out on the edge of the blue sea. The green park is always full of people, the poor of San Francisco out for a day of fresh air, sunlight and as much beauty as a rich man’s money can provide for them. Pipefitters and laundresses sit together on the benches. Children run and scream happily. Courting couples sit on little iron folding chairs and listen to the band play favorites by Sir Arthur Sullivan. The intricate patterns blaze.

  She will always be there, sometimes chatting with Mr. Sutro. Sometimes bustling from one carpet bed to the next with a watering can or gardening tools. I tip my hat and say the only words I can say, have ever said: “Good morning, Christiane.”

  She smiles and nods. Perhaps she recognizes me, in a vague kind of way. But I never dismount to attempt conversation, and in any case she is too busy, weeding, watering, clipping to maintain the place she loves.