by Kage Baker
The elevator slowed to my floor.
"Oh, um, can I borrow your holo with the footage of Quin Shi? Something happened to mine in the machine and I've got an assignment on him."
"I'll leave it in your cube." The doors clanked open. "Bye, Mendy."
"Bye, Nancy."
Ah, the life of a teenage cyborg.
I have an old holostat online somewhere, more crackly and pointy with every passing year, of my graduation class at their Commencement Picnic and Swim Party.
There we are, a double row lined up on a beach in what will one day be Queensland, squinting happily into the imager. Our bathing costumes look particularly ugly and old-fashioned. We don't care, apparently: every one of us is smiling, even Akira who has just had his box lunch dive-bombed by a seagull. Why shouldn't we be happy? Twenty seventeen-year-olds and not one of us has acne.
And there I am, between Nancy and Roxtli. I have won the hair contest: mine waves down my back as far as my hips, while Nancy's only stands out around her head like a dark cloud. But she has grown into a petite beauty and I am plain, plain, plain. And freckled. And unbecomingly tall. Smile on, Mendoza, in the sun and sky and seaweed of that faraway day. If only you had a clue.
As soon as they brought us back and showered the sand off us and handed us our degrees, they gave us our individual appointments with the career guidance counselor.
Bright and early on the appointed day, I rode the elevator down to his office level and put my card in his wall. Moments later, I was bade enter.
The counselor was one of the older ones. He looked no more than twenty-five, like everybody else, but you could tell how long someone had been in the service by a certain facial expression. Moreover, his brow ridges were on the pronounced side. Other than that, his appearance was all up-to-date. His doublet and trunk hose were well cut, and he had on the newer, fuller ruff that was just coming into fashion then. He waved me to a chair and looked at my card.
"Mendoza, Botanist Level One. Well. How are you doing, Mendoza?" We shook hands.
"Great, thanks."
"So." He creaked into his chair. "I've got your specs here, but why don't you tell me a little about yourself?"
"Well, I'm really, really interested in going to the New World," I said at once. "I've made a particular study of the native grain species and I think I could do a lot of good work there. And I wouldn't mind working in the remote areas at all, in fact I'd prefer it. I'd love to get in on the El Dorado operations or maybe even New World One. I've heard some interesting things about Florida, too…" He was punching buttons on his keyboard as I talked, which annoyed me. I shut up and pointedly waited for him to finish.
He stared at something on the screen for a moment. He reached for a pen, dipped it in ink, and began to write on a card.
"I wouldn't count on going to the New World just yet," he said. "Your profile has a recommendation here for Assigned Acclimatization Europe."
"Oh, God." Two years mandatory cover identity working among mortals?
"That's what it says. Nothing to be upset about, you know." He kept writing.
"Why would they stick me with a job like that? I'm a botanist. I've prepared for the New World, not for growing turnips for maniac religious bigots."
"They're not all like that, you know," he said mildly. "The mortal race has its points."
"Tell me about it. I happen to have been recruited from the dungeons of the Inquisition," I said nastily. My trump card. Top My Trauma time.
"Is that so?" he remarked. "Ever hear of the Great Goat Cult?"
Of course I had. They were a Paleolithic religious movement whose principal activities were tattooing themselves and exterminating their neighbors who didn't. They were so good at genocide that they nearly wiped out what there was then of the human race, delaying the birth of civilization by ten thousand years. I looked at his gently prognathous face and felt hot blood rush into my own.
"Attitude problem. Don't mind me," I muttered.
"It's possible to learn to live with mortals." He took up the pen again. "Trust me."
I sat there mortified while he jotted a few sentences on the card.
"Besides, if Dr. Z says you have to, you have to," he continued. "Don't make trouble for yourself. Just be reasonable about it, go nicely where you're told to go, and in three years the AAE drops off your file. All you have to do is prove you can handle what's expected of any operative. Once they know that, they'll be more receptive to your requests for specific postings."
He tapped up some more stuff on the computer. I watched his face as he stared at the screen. I could not see the data, of course. No operative ever sees detailed information on his or her particular future: even such information as the Company has is sometimes incomplete. Even kiddies as processed as we are aren't completely documented. Nevertheless I said resentfully:
"You've probably got it all there in front of you, where they send me and whether I get to go to Florida and what I'll be doing in ninety years."
"That's right." He nodded. "Maybe."
"Why do they bother to call you a counselor?"
"Because I can tell you things you need to know about where they're sending you," he said, keeping his eyes on the screen.
"Well, where are they sending me?"
"England."
"England!" I practically screamed.
England, home of grotesque old King Henry the Six-Wived. As children we'd followed his antics in Current Events with considerable amusement, but when he finally ate himself to death, he left a country as wrecked as his pantry. For years, assorted court cabals had circled each other warily, waiting for frail Prince Edward to reach manhood. We knew, of course, that he'd die in his teens and another era of civil unrest would result.
"What are they sending me to England for?" I cried. "Isn't it, like, very unsafe there? Aren't there going to be all kinds of blood-baths soon?"
"Not where you're being posted," he assured me. "They want a botanist over there for a very specific project. You're the very one they need. Pretty soon we'll have the opportunity to send European personnel in. You'll be part of a Spanish team. You'll be perfectly safe."
"Spanish?" I narrowed my eyes, doing a fast access. "Now, wait a minute. Edward's sister Mary is going to get the throne when he dies. There's a Spanish connection there. Is that what we're talking about?"
"Yes. The place will be crawling with Spaniards. We can slip you in with no trouble at all."
"It reads like a hazard to me."
"Would we send you somewhere that wasn't safe?" He shuffled papers on his desk. "Anyway. You'll go to Spain first to establish your cover identity, spend a year there, go over to England in"—he leaned over to peer at the screen—" '54. You won't even be alone. You'll be part of a team, and you'll have a facilitator with you."
I relaxed. "That's better. As long as I don't have to interface personally with the killer monkeys."
"Ah, come on." He leaned back. "This is England, after all. The land of, uh, Dickens."
"He's Victorian Era."
"It's green there. Beautiful countryside, I've seen it myself. Best beer in the world. Great cities, like York."
"And London?" I perked up. "Will I get to go to London?"
"Maybe." He smiled. "You might even get to meet Shakespeare."
Dates whirred behind my eyes. "He won't be born for a dozen years."
"Well, you never know; you might get to like England. I've known plenty of operatives who opted to stay on somewhere after their assignment was served, even if they hated it there at first. And England's heading into a Golden Age, uh"—his eyes flicked to my file—"Mendoza. You could be in on it from the beginning."
I thought about it. London was supposed to be the flower of cities all, as Chaucer said, an incredible cosmopolis in an otherwise primitive country. Really fashionable clothing, maybe, for a change. New dances. New music. "It might not be so bad," I conceded.
"You'll see." He smiled. He handed me a stack of p
rintouts. "Now, here's a recommended holo list and an events graph. You can study them privately. The starred entries are mandatory, the highlighted entries are strongly recommended. You'll be issued a field kit sometime in the next two weeks. Your departure is scheduled for July twentieth. Nice to meet you, Mendoza."
I went wandering back to my room. In this present moment I'd fling myself down on my bed to think; in that era of corsets and bumrolls one did no such thing. I perched on a wooden settle instead and looked at the recommended (actually mandatory) holo list.
Might as well start with the history review, I thought. It was starred. I scanned its access pattern, and suddenly I remembered, I had known all along, and I let the information fill up around me like a nice hot bath. Here was the score card, here were the players:
England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. Its king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists. Oh yes: and for booting the Roman Catholic Church out of England, though he'd started out as a Catholic, married to our old friend Katherine, Infanta of Aragon. But years of marriage to her produced no son and heir for Henry: only a daughter, Princess Mary. Henry was tired of Katherine anyway, so he divorced her (against the express wishes of the Holy Father) and married Wife Number Two, a court tart with pretensions to trendy radical religious opinions, named Anne Boleyn. Jumping on her Lutheran bandwagon as well as on the rest of her, Henry imported the Protestant Reformation into England.
Next round: Anne Boleyn couldn't produce a male heir either, only a baby girl, Princess Elizabeth, so Henry had Anne beheaded and took Wife Number Three: the devout little Jane Seymour, who, like many of his subjects, was still sympathetic to the Catholics. Before her death there even were rumors that England might go Catholic again. She did die, however, right after giving birth to the long-awaited Prince Edward, and any chance of an early Counter-Reformation died with her.
Endgame: Henry married, in quick succession, three more wives, which sure as hell made rapprochement with the Pope unlikely. By the time Henry died, the Protestant faction was in firm control of the country, especially with the council of regents who ruled for the frail little King Edward.
New game card: the Royal heirs, in order of their respective rights to the throne. Three stiff children with the coldest eyes in Christendom.
Protestant Edward, the boy king, soon to die, his prim face closed and folded shut.
Catholic Mary, sad old maid, with her bulldog face. She'd done a slow burn for years as she watched her father abuse her mother and her Church. She was shortly to get revenge in a big way.
Noncommittal Elizabeth, somber and alert, despised by the Catholics and Protestants alike for her mother's disgrace. Cunning and cautious, she was destined to survive her siblings and inherit the throne. She was famous in our classrooms as one of the Exemplary Mortals, right up there with Charles Dickens. She hated war and wastefulness, and didn't really give a damn what prayers people said as long as the economy thrived and nobody tried to dethrone her.
Yay, Elizabeth. I scanned for the current events I'd be concerned with.
1553, June. Edward is dying, lingering on in the last stages of heavy-metal poisoning administered by Mary's adherents. He finally, horribly, dies, and then—
Oh, dear. After a messy interlude involving an abortive Protestant coup, Mary Tudor (a.k.a. Bloody Mary) would be crowned queen. She would make the mistake of assuming that her loyal subjects were all still true Catholics in their hearts, eager to forget the distasteful heretical interlude That Bitch had seduced her father into ordering. But, surprise: a whole generation had grown up sincerely Protestant, and wanted none of the old faith. Riots and rebellion would break out, and here I caught the names Wyatt and Dudley. In desperation, she'd begin burning her disobedient subjects at the stake, earning her nation's everlasting hatred before she died.
But before she died, she'd marry a Catholic monarch in the hope that he'd (1) love her and (2.) help her bludgeon the True Faith back into people's hearts. Grimly she yearned for love. She was never to have any love out of him: but in the matter of religion he'd assist her ably.
For she was to marry Philip, most Catholic heir apparent to the throne of Spain, and when he came to England, he'd bring all his pet Inquisidors to share with her. A great respecter of the Holy Office, Philip. Very eager to discuss matters of faith with the English Protestants. They must have run out of secret Jews to burn.
I sat blinking, taking all this in. They were going to send me with Philip's entourage. With all those Inquisidors. The Spanish were going to be as popular as smallpox with their English hosts, and I would be one of their number.
CHAPTER SEVEN
« ^ »
It was July 21, 1553. Clutching my wicker suitcase to my bosom, I made my way to the transit lounge.
Behind me, the ship blinked and hummed. People in flight-tech coveralls ran around with service hoses. There was no evidence there that time had passed: nothing had changed but me. Now I, too, was beyond change.
I dropped my luggage on a settle and collapsed beside it, pushing my hat to the back of my head so the long comb wouldn't bore into my skull. I leaned back carefully. I was frightened.
This was sunny Spain, land of my birth. A concrete floor, stretching to the other side of the cavern. Three green couches set around a coffee table. A row of beverage-dispensing machines. I thought longingly of coffee and wondered why there were no cups on the stand. Then blared a voice from the steel box directly over my head.
"Botanist Mendoza, please report to the arrivals desk."
I blundered to my feet and looked around. Not ten feet away, the clerk was putting down her microphone, looking straight at me. I glared at her and dragged my suitcase over.
"Reporting."
"Please sign in. Your transport shuttle has arrived."
I signed in. I put down the stylus and looked at her. She was buffing her nails. After a moment she glanced at me, as if surprised to see me there, and said:
"Up those stairs."
I looked around. The stairs were steep, narrow, concrete, and rose into darkness. There was no hand rail. Cursing, I hitched up my skirts and struggled upward. The first few steps were littered with the debris of any transit area: snack wrappers, crushed paper cups. The treads had been painted green once. Traffic had worn a path through the paint, polished the cement to a greasy luster. Cement is one of the few things that look worse polished.
The light at the top of the stairs was out. I found the via panel by groping and flattened my palm against it for identification, hoping the panel wasn't broken too. It whirred and clicked, but no door appeared. I turned to shout down that chimney of a stairwell but heard a gentle whoosh. The door swung open behind me. I stepped through.
I was standing on a rock terrace on a mountainside. Big tumbled boulders and cliffs of red stone sat there in utter silence. It was seven o'clock on a warm summer evening, and the sun was low in the sky. Air warm and heavy as milk, but clear: I could see range upon range of mountains stretching out before me to the horizon. Where the late sun slanted on them, they were red and gold. Where it did not, they were violet. A few stark trees, pines mostly, were aromatic in that calm air. I was shaking badly. It wasn't supposed to be beautiful.
When I got my nerves together, I picked my way down from there. On a curve of road below me waited a coach. There were two horses standing patiently in harness. There was a small man talking to the horses.
He was the first mortal I'd seen in years. My transport shuttle had a mortal driver. I would have to put my life in mortal hands. He looked up and saw me. His eyes widened.
"Señorita!" He swept down low in a bow. "A thousand apologies! You are Doña Rosa Anzolabejar, whom I have been sent to meet?" That was my cover name. How nice that my one travel outfit was elegantly cut.
"I am even she," I said in my snootiest Castilian, starting down the hill. "Pray fetch my luggage, if you will be so kind."
"Immediately, señorita."
While he bustled after my suitcase, I hastily scanned the coach. Mid-sixteenth-century model, built like a Conestoga wagon without appreciable springs. No structural defects, though, no weaknesses or excessive wear in the wheels. I scanned the horses: all eight shoes on tight, no flaws in the harness, placid healthy animals unlikely to bolt or fall over dead. Carefully the mortal brought my belongings down. He opened the wagon door and bowed again, extending a hand to help me in.
"Allow me, señorita."
I took his hand gingerly. He was young, there were no traces of alcohol or toxic chemicals in his sweat, his vision was normal, heartbeat and pulse rate normal, muscular coordination above average. He did have an incipient abscessed tooth, but he wasn't aware of it yet, so it wasn't going to distract him from his task. He helped me in.
"Have we far to go, or shall we arrive before nightfall?" I inquired.
"It is not far to your father's house, gracious Mistress. I will bring you there before moonrise."
"I thank you, señor."
He sprang up into the driver's seat, and we rattled away. Dust billowed. We snaked along the road down out of the mountains. I tracked the landscape fearfully for bandits or other lower life forms but I found none, which was good. Nor had my mortal flown into any chest-pounding homicidal rages yet, nor was he being reckless and driving too fast. So far, okay.
Down, then, to a plain of wheatfields, spreading away empty. A single windmill stood black against the yellow sunset. Where were the dark and crooked streets? The gibbets? The bonfire smoke full of human ashes? This was mortal land, wasn't it?
The sunset deepened to red, and another house appeared on the horizon. As we drew near, I saw people assembled by the front door. Some of them were mortal servants, peering in excitement at the coach. Four of them were my own kind, a man and two women standing together and one man who waited by the gate. He came forward smiling as the coach shook to a stop and I was handed down.
