The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  “That’s disgusting. Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m not serious, but we don’t want the mortals to know that,” I said, rolling up the drawing and sticking it in a carpetbag full of money. “You stay here and set up the lab, okay? I’ve got to go find some jewelers.”

  There were a lot of jewelers in San Francisco. Successful guys coming back from the Sacramento sometimes liked to commemorate their luck by having gold nuggets set in watch fobs, or stickpins, or brooches for sweethearts back east. Gold-bearing quartz, cut and polished, was also popular, and much classier looking.

  Hiram Gainsborg, on the corner of Ohio and Broadway, had some of what I needed; so did Joseph Schwartz at Harrison and Broadway, although J. C. Russ on the corner of Harrison and Sixth had more. But I also paid a visit to Baldwin & Co. on Clay at the Plaza, and to J. H. Bradford on Kearney, and just to play it safe I went over to Dupont and Clay to see the firm of Moffat & Co., Assayers and Bankers.

  So I was one pooped little friar, carrying one big heavy carpetbag, by the time I trudged back to our hotel as evening shadows descended. I’d been followed for three blocks by a Sydney ex-convict whose intent was robbery and possible murder; but I managed to ditch him by ducking into a saloon, exiting out the back and across the deck of the landlocked Niantic, and cutting through another saloon where I paused just long enough to order an oyster loaf and a pail of steam beer.

  I’d lost him for good by the time I thumped on Mendoza’s door with the carpetbag.

  “Hey, honeybunch, I got dinner!”

  She opened the door right away, jittery as hell. “Don’t shout, for God’s sake!”

  “Sorry.” I went in and set down the carpetbag gratefully. “I don’t think the mortals are sleeping yet. It’s early.”

  “There are three of them on this floor, and seventeen downstairs,” she said, wringing her hands. “It’s been a while since I’ve been around so many of them. I’d forgotten how loud their hearts are, Joseph. I can hear them beating.”

  “Aw, you’ll get used to it in no time,” I said. I held up the takeout. “Look! Oyster loaf and beer!”

  She looked impatient, and then her eyes widened as she caught the scent of the fresh-baked sourdough loaf and the butter and the garlic and the little fried oysters...

  “Oh, gosh,” she said weakly.

  So we had another nice companionable moment, sitting at the table where she’d set up the testing equipment, drinking from opposite sides of the beer pail. I lit a lamp and pulled the different paper-wrapped parcels from my carpetbag, one by one.

  “What’re those?” Mendoza inquired with her mouth full.

  “Samples of gold-bearing quartz,” I explained. “From six different places. I wrote the name of each place on the package in pencil, see? And your job is to test each sample. You’re going to look for a blue-green lichen growing in the crevices with the gold.”

  She swallowed and shook her head, blank-faced.

  “You need a microbiologist for this kind of job, Joseph, surely. Plants that primitive aren’t my strong suit.”

  “The closest microbiologist was in Seattle,” I explained. “And Agrippanilla’s a pain to work with. Besides, you can handle this! Remember the Black Elysium grape? The mutant saccharomyces or whatever it was? You won yourself a field commendation on that one. This’ll be easy!”

  Mendoza looked pleased, but did her best to conceal it. “I’ll bet your mission budget just wouldn’t stretch to shipping qualified personnel down here, eh? That’s the Company. Okay; I’ll get started right after dinner.”

  “You can wait until morning,” I said.

  “Naah.” She had a gulp of the beer. “Sleep is for sissies.”

  So after we ate I retired, and far into the hours of the night I could still see lamplight shining from her room, bright stripes through the plank wall every time I turned over. I knew why she was working so late.

  It’s not hard to sleep in a house full of mortals, if you tune out the sounds they make. Sometimes, though, just on the edge of sleep, you find yourself listening for one heartbeat that ought to be there, and it isn’t. Then you wake up with a start and remember things you don’t want to remember.

  I opened my eyes and sunlight smacked me in the face, glittering off the bay through my open door. Mendoza was sitting on the edge of my bed, sipping from her canteen. I grunted, grimaced, and sat unsteadily.

  “Coffee,” I croaked. She looked smug and held up her canteen.

  “There’s a saloon on the corner. The nice mortal sold me a whole pot of coffee for five dollars. Want some?”

  “Sure.” I held out my hand. “So... you didn’t mind going down to the saloon by yourself? There are some nasty mortals in this town, kid.”

  “The famous Sydney Ducks? Yes, I’m aware of that.” She was quietly gleeful about something. “I’ve lived in the Ventana for years, Joseph, dodging mountain lions! Individual nasty mortals don’t frighten me anymore. Go ahead, try the coffee.”

  I sipped it cautiously. It was great. We may have been in America (famous for lousy coffee) now, but San Francisco was already San Francisco.

  Mendoza cleared her throat and said, “I found your blue-green lichen. It was growing on the sample from Hiram Gainsborg’s. The stuff looks like Stilton cheese. What is it, Joseph?”

  “Something the Company wants,” I said, gulping down half the coffee.

  “I’ll bet it does,” she said, giving me that sidelong look again. “I’ve been sitting here, watching you drool and snore, amusing myself by accessing scientific journals on bioremediant research. Your lichen’s a toxiphage, Joseph. It’s perfectly happy feeding on arsenic and antimony compounds found in conjunction with gold. It breaks them down. I suspect that it could make a lot of money for anyone in the business of cleaning up industrial pollution.”

  “That’s a really good guess, Mendoza,” I said, handing back the coffee and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I found my sandals and pulled them on.

  “Isn’t it?” She watched me grubbing around in my trunk for my shaving kit. “Yes, for God’s sake, shave. You look like one of Torquemada’s henchmen, with those blue jowls. So Dr. Zeus is doing something altruistic! In its usual corporate-profit way, of course. I don’t understand why this has to be classified, but I’m impressed.”

  “Uh-huh.” I swabbed soap on my face.

  “You seem to be in an awful hurry.”

  “Do I?” I scraped whiskers from my cheek.

  “I wonder what you’re in a hurry to do?” Mendoza said. “Probably hotfoot it back to Hiram Gainsborg’s, to see if he has any more of what he sold you.”

  “Maybe, baby.”

  “Can I go along?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’m not sitting in my room all day, watching lichen grow in petrie dishes,” she said. “Is it okay if I go sightseeing?”

  I looked at her in the mirror, disconcerted. “Sweetheart, this is a rough town. Those guys from Australia are devils, and some of the Yankees—”

  “I pity the mortal who approaches me with criminal intent,” she said, smiling in a chilly kind of way. “I’ll just ride out to the Golden Gate. How can I get into trouble? Ghirardelli’s won’t be there for another two years, right?”

  I walked her down to the stable anyway, and saw her safely off before hot-footing it over to Hiram Gainsborg’s, as she suspected.

  Mr. Gainsborg kept a loaded rifle behind his shop counter. I came in through his door so fast he had it out and trained on me pronto, before he saw it was me.

  “Apologies, Father Rubio,” he said, lowering the barrel. “Back again, are you? You’re in some hurry, sir.” He had a white chin beard, wore a waistcoat of red-and-white striped silk, and overall gave me the disconcerting feeling I was talking to Uncle Sam.

  “I was pursued by importuning persons of low moral fiber,” I said.

  “That a fact?” Mr. Gainsborg pursed his lips. “Well, what about that quartz you bought yesterday?
Your brother friars think it’ll do?”

  “Yes, my son, they found it suitable,” I said. “In fact, the color and quality are so magnificent, so superior to any other we have seen, that we all agreed only you were worthy of this important commission for the Holy Father.” I laid the drawing of the crucifix down on his counter. He smiled.

  “Well, sir, I’m glad to hear that. I reckon I can bring the job in at a thousand dollars pretty well.” He fixed me with a hard clear eye, waiting to see if I’d flinch, but I just hauled my purse out and grinned at him.

  “Price is no object to the Holy Mother Church,” I said. “Shall we say, half the payment in advance?”

  I counted out Chilean gold dollars while he watched, sucking his teeth, and I went on: “In fact, we were thinking of having rosaries made up as a gift for the whole College of Cardinals. Assuming, of course, that you have enough of that particular beautiful vein of quartz. Do you know where it was mined?”

  “Don’t know, sir, and that’s a fact,” he told me. “Miner brought in a sackful a week ago. He reckoned he could get more for it at a jeweler’s because of the funny color. There’s more’n enough of it in my back room to make your beads, I bet.”

  “Splendid,” I said. “But do you recall the miner’s name, in case we do need to obtain more?”

  “Ayeh.” Mr. Gainsborg picked up a dollar and inspected it. “Isaiah Stuckey, that was the fellow’s name. Didn’t say where his claim was, though. They don’t tell, as a general rule.”

  “Understandable. Do you know where I might find the man?”

  “No, sir, don’t know that. He didn’t have a red cent until I paid for the quartz, I can tell you; so I reckon the next place he went was a hotel.” Mr. Gainsborg looked disdainful. “Unless he went straight for the El Dorado or a whorehouse, begging your pardon. Depends on how long he’d been in the mountains, don’t it?”

  I sighed and shook my head. “This is a city of temptation, I am afraid. Can you describe him for me?”

  Mr. Gainsborg considered. “Well, sir, he had a beard.”

  Great. I was looking for a man with a beard in a city full of bearded men. At least I had a name.

  So I spent the rest of that day trudging from hotel to boardinghouse to tent, asking if anybody there had seen Isaiah Stuckey. Half the people I asked snickered and said, “No, why?” and waited for a punchline. The other half also replied in the negative, and then asked my advice on matters spiritual. I heard confessions for seventeen prostitutes, five drunks, and a transvestite before the sun sank behind Knob Hill, but I didn’t find Isaiah Stuckey.

  By twilight, I had worked my way out to the landlocked ships along what would one day be Battery and Sansome Streets, though right now they were just so many rickety piers and catwalks over the harbor mud. I teetered up the gangplank of one place that declared itself the MAGNOLIA HOTEL, by means of a sign painted on a bedsheet hung over the bow. A grumpy-looking guy was swabbing the deck.

  “We don’t rent to no goddam greasers here,” he informed me. “Even if you is a priest.”

  “Well, now, my son, Christ be my witness I’ve not come about taking rooms,” I said in the thickest Dublin accent I could manage. “Allow me to introduce myself! Father Ignatius Costello. I’m after searching for a poor soul whose family’s in sore need of him, and him lost in the gold fields this twelvemonth. Do you rent many rooms to miners, lad?”

  “Sure we do,” muttered the guy, embarrassed. “What’s his name?”

  “Isaiah Stuckey, or so his dear old mother said,” I replied.

  “Him!”The guy looked up, righteously indignant now. He pointed with his mop at a vast expanse of puke on the deck. “That’s your Ike Stuckey’s work, by God!”

  I recoiled. “He’s never got the cholera?”

  “No, sir, just paralytic drunk. You ought to smell his damn room, after he lay in there most of a week! Boss had me fetch him out, plastered or not, on account of he ain’t paid no rent in three days. I got him this far and he heaved up all over my clean floor! Then, I wish I may be struck down dead if he don’t sober up instant and run down them planks like a racehorse! Boss got a shot off at him, but he kept a-running. Last we saw he was halfway to Kearney Street.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he was intending to go, my son?”

  “No, I don’t,” said the guy, plunging his mop in its pail and getting back to work. “But if you run, too, you can maybe catch the son of a—” he wavered, glancing up at my ecclesiastical presence “— gun. He ain’t been gone but ten minutes.”

  I took his advice, and hurried off through the twilight. There actually was a certain funk lingering in the air, a trail of unwashed-Stuckey molecules, that any bloodhound could have picked up without much effort – not that it would have enjoyed the experience – and incidentally any cyborg with augmented senses could follow, too.

  So I was slapping along in my sandals, hot on Stuckey’s trail, when I ran into Mendoza at the corner.

  “Hey, Joseph!” She waved at me cheerily. “You’ll never guess what I found!”

  “Some plant, right?”

  “And how! It’s a form of Lupinus with—”

  “That’s fascinating, doll, and I mean that sincerely, but right now I could really use a lift.” I jumped and swung up into the saddle behind her, only to find myself sitting on something damp. “What the hell—”

  “That’s my Lupinus. I dug up the whole plant and wrapped the root ball in a piece of my petticoat until I can transplant it into a pot. If you’ve squashed it, I’ll wring your neck,” she told me.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. “Look, could we just canter up the street that way? I’m chasing somebody and I don’t want to lose him.”

  She grumbled, but dug her heels into the horse’s sides and we took off, though we didn’t go very far very fast because the street went straight uphill.

  “It wouldn’t have taken us ten minutes to go back and drop my Lupinus at the hotel, you know,” Mendoza said. “It’s a really rare subspecies, possibly a mutant form. It appears to produce photoreactive porphyrins.”

  “Honey, I haven’t got ten minutes,” I said, wrootching my butt away from the damn thing. “Wait! Turn left here!” Stuckey’s trail angled away down Kearney toward Portsmouth Square, so Mendoza yanked the horse’s head around and we leaned into the turn. I peered around Mendoza, trying to spot any bearded guy staggering and wheezing along. Unfortunately, the street was full of staggering bearded guys, all of them converging on Portsmouth Square.

  We found out why when we got there.

  Portsmouth Square was just a sandy vacant lot, but there were wire baskets full of pitch and redwood chips burning atop poles at its four corners, and bright-lit board and batten buildings lined three sides of it. The fourth side was just shops and one adobe house, like a row of respectable spinsters frowning down on their neighbors, but the rest of the place blazed like happy Gomorrah.

  “Holy smoke,” said Mendoza, reining up. “I’m not going in there, Joseph.”

  “It’s just mortals having a good time,” I said. Painted up on false fronts, garish as any Old West fantasy, were names like The Mazourka, Parker House, The Varsouvienne, La Souciedad, Dennison’s Exchange, The Arcade. All of them were torchlit and proudly decked in red, white, and blue, so the general effect was of Hell on the Fourth of July.

  “It’s brothels and gambling dens,” said Mendoza.

  “It’s theaters, too,” I said defensively, pointing at the upstairs windows of the Jenny Lind.

  “And saloons. What do you want here?”

  “A guy named Isaiah Stuckey,” I said, leaning forward. His scent was harder to pick out now, but... over there... “He’s the miner who found our quartz. I need to talk to him. Come on, we’re blocking traffic! Let’s try that one. The El Dorado.”

  Mendoza gritted her teeth but rode forward, and as we neared the El Dorado the scent trail grew stronger.

  “He�
�s in here,” I said, sliding down from the saddle. “Come on!”

  “I’ll wait outside, thank you.”

  “You want to wait here by yourself, or you want to enter a nice civilized casino in the company of a priest?” I asked her. She looked around wildly at the happy throng of mortals.

  “Damn you anyway,” she said, and dismounted. We went into the El Dorado.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have used the words nice civilized casino. It was a big square place with bare board walls, and the floor sloped downhill from the entrance, because it was just propped up on pilings over the ash heaps and was already sagging. Wind whistled between the planks, and there is no night air so cold as in San Francisco. It gusted into the stark booths along one wall, curtained off with thumb tacked muslin, where the whores were working. It was shantytown squalor no Hollywood set designer would dream of depicting.

  But the El Dorado had all the other trappings of an Old West saloon, with as much rococo finery as could be nailed up or propped against the plank walls. There were gilt-framed paintings of balloony nude women. There was a grand mirrored bar at one end, cut glass glittering under the oil lamps. Upon the dais a full orchestra played, good and loud, and here again the Stars and Stripes were draped, swagged and resetted in full glory.

  At the gambling tables were croupiers and dealers in black suits, every one of them a gaunt Doc Holliday clone presiding over monte, or faro, or diana, or chuck-a-luck, or plain poker. A sideboard featured free food for the high rollers, and a lot of ragged men – momentary millionaires in blue jeans, back from the gold fields for the winter – were helping themselves to pie and cold beef. At the tables, their sacks of gold dust or piles of nuggets sat unattended, as safe as anything else in this town.

  I wished I wasn’t dressed as a friar. This was the kind of spot in which a cyborg with the ability to count cards could earn himself some money to offset operating expenses. I might have given it a try anyway, but beside me Mendoza was hyperventilating, so I just shook my head and focused on my quarry.