by Kage Baker
“Wow,” said Juan Bautista. “What would happen if the English took over California?”
I rolled up frijoles in a tortilla and bit into it. “They won’t, we know that, so what’s the point of wondering? They gave up Oregon without a fight, didn’t they? Why should they try to take the West Coast now, even if they want it?”
“Ah, but you see,” Imarte said, holding up a forefinger, “the political situation has changed. The Americans, who might once have prevented them, are locked in a devastating civil war whose outcome is still unknown. Europe is making a play to regain lost empires in South America. If the continental royalty manages to conquer Mexico, if the American nation falls apart—and these mortals haven’t our advantage of knowing how it all turns out in the end—why, then, Manifest Destiny comes undone and the whole of the New World is up for grabs again. There have even been rumors that the Russians are beginning to regret pulling out of California. Can anyone wonder if Queen Victoria’s ministers”—she searched for a metaphor—“want to be first in line, shopping bags in hand, when the doors are flung open on the Great American Fire Sale?”
“What does it matter, anyway?” I said crossly.
“Don’t you think it’s fascinating? This is secret history. It lends so much more understanding, so much fire and color to the dramatic pageant unfolding before our eyes. Imagine all those British diplomats playing the Union and Confederate governments off against each other, deploring slavery while covertly aiding the rebels, yet planning still another layer of double cross by preparing to step in and seize territories from the survivors should the Confederacy win!” Her eyes were gleaming. “Given the size of the empire they control already, why should the British think it unreasonable to go on playing the Great Game here?”
“You’re sure about this?” Porfirio asked, taking another swig from the coffeepot. “God knows they were eager enough to stick their fingers in the pie of Texas.”
“I’ve been collecting information. Even now there’s a plot brewing in San Francisco. The nephew of a British statesman has persuaded a stupid young American to join him in a privateering expedition—supposedly to aid the Confederacy by raiding the Pacific Mail and diverting the gold shipments from the San Francisco Mint to the Confederate cause. I don’t yet know how they plan to do it, but I’m fairly sure the Albion Mining Syndicate is involved, from their base on Catalina Island. Are you aware that any maritime power positioned there with even minimal ordnance could effectively control the entire coastline of California at this point in time?”
“Pirates!” Porfirio slapped his knee. “Goddamn Francis Drake is at it again!”
“But that’s awful!” said Juan Bautista. His eyes were big and worried.
“It’s not going to happen, dummy,” I said. “Access your files. If there actually ever is such a plot, somebody screws it up, because it never makes the history books.”
“It might not be so bad if the British took over,” said Porfirio with a grin. “Have we fared all that well under the Yankees? I’ll bet General Vallejo kicks himself every day for not shooting John C. Fremont when he had the chance. And think about a colonial governor and the Union Jack flying over the Plaza. All those damn cowboys and their guns expelled. Think how the future of California would change. No Prohibition, so no bootleggers, so no Mob. No cops with guns. No movie people either. Just lots of plantations run by old aristocratic families. It’d be Lower Canada, man! Nothing would ever happen here.”
No freeways, no smog, low population density. That horrifying city on the plain I’d glimpsed would never exist. Would that be such a bad thing? But of course it was never going to happen. Catalina Island had a strange enough future ahead of it, but being the Californian Hong Kong wasn’t part of the package.
I shrugged. “So what are you planning to do with all this fascinating secret knowledge?” I asked Imarte.
“Take notes. And so should all of you,” she admonished us. “This is the life, the hidden motivation of mortal history. It concerns every one of us.”
“It concerns you, “I said. “I have more important things to occupy my time.”
“Oh, yes, finding seventeen different mutations of mugwort would take precedence over the destinies of nations any day.” She tossed her head.
“Can it, ladies,” Porfirio said.
We heard the rattle and creak of Oscar’s wagon approaching. He was leaning backward in the seat, peering down the canyon behind him. He was concerned. “Er, there appears to be a mortal fellow lying dead drunk in a ditch back there by the grade,” he said. “His horse is unharmed, however.”
Porfirio sighed.
I was afraid all this talk of the damned Brits would set the dreams off again, and I was right. It was a surprisingly quiet dream, though; at least it wasn’t more endless replay of the past.
I was on a ship, not a miserable little dark galleon like the one I’d left La Coruna in so long ago, but a modern ship, one of those beautiful three-masted clippers the English were making nowadays, with iron-framed hulls, so much safer than the Yankee variety. Every detail exact. Salt spray, brisk chilly breeze, white clouds of canvas taking up miles of sky, nimble sailors mounting through the shrouds and ratlines. This ship was taking somebody somewhere fast. I seemed to be having a nice dream for a change. I’d never been on a modern ship before. I wandered around, looking at things with great interest, observing Jack-Tars holystoning the deck and doing other terribly nautical things.
“Here now, girlie,” croaked a voice in my ear, and I turned in astonishment to behold a black-bearded sailor grinning evilly at me. “Ain’t you been in to see him yet?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“He’s aft there,” said the seaman, “in the deckhouse. He’s comin’ through, ye know.”
“Oh,” I said.
Then the dream faded away into something else, something less vivid, and I thought that he wasn’t coming after all, because I’d turned out to be a Crome generator. I woke crying, pitying myself.
OUR IMMORTAL LIVES went on. The hills went from brown to a more weathered shade of brown. The leaves of the black walnut trees turned bright yellow, and so did the few cottonwoods; they were the only ones to make any ostentatious display of color. There were also bright scarlet berries on the toyon holly bushes, and they were pretty hanging in clumps among the dark serrate leaves; but the rest of southern California was unrelievedly drab.
The days dawned gray, which burned off to a glaring white sky around noon, hazy and painful to the eyes. Smoke from the cookfire hung in the cold, still air and did not dissipate. Small wonder smog would become a local institution. There was no rain to wash it away, either, though the dewfall was heavy and our adobe rooms became chill and dank unless lit braziers were kept in them half the day, which increased the smokiness. Oscar made a few wistful remarks about how good New England food would be now that the weather was getting nippy, but there were still no takers for his Criterion Patented Brassbound Pie Safe.
If I were home in the Santa Lucia Range, what a dark green the mountains would be, what a dark blue the sky, with cold winds that drove out the summer fog. And the redwoods and the cypresses would stand like dark gods, offering up their own aromatic blood. The broadleaf maples would blaze like flame, the stars glitter like broken glass. I could travel my secret ridge routes all day with no company but the sea hundreds of meters below me, and the occasional white sail on the far horizon to prove I wasn’t the only living soul in the world.
And if I wanted company, or at least civilized food, I could always hike north to Monterey, or stop in at the Post’s little rancho at Soberanes Creek; though I didn’t do that often, because I unnerved the settlers, and in any case I seldom wanted company. The trees and the sea were enough. Not even he could find me there, my wraith, unable to summon me from my restless bed when I didn’t have one, unable to break my human heart when I’d transmuted it into green leaves and stars.
But here I was in this glaring purgato
ry of a cow town. Winter was decidedly not its best season. The weather wasn’t our only problem; Imarte had given Cyrus Jackson the brush-off somehow, more or less tactfully, but he hadn’t accepted it. Several times we spotted him by infrared, sitting off on the hills at night, watching our little canyon. As long as he did nothing but lurk, he was welcome to his miserable vigil; but you never know when mortals are going to decide to go out in a blaze of glory and try to take you with them, so we monitored him closely.
Imarte didn’t care. She had her fascinating theories, her invaluable first-person narratives, and her wealth of irreplaceable historical detail. When she wrang a source dry, she dropped the source. I am afraid that, although an anthropologist, she lacked a certain love for her subject, or perhaps its immediate and particular personification: the human heart.
I should talk, eh, señors?
Anyway, we were all a little nervous, as the cold weather set in, scanning the dull hills for desperate mortals with guns. They were everywhere down here anyway, but now we had our own special desperate mortal with a gun.
One day, when the northbound stage stopped by, I went down to watch Porfirio change a shoe on the lead horse. I had seen him shoe horses before; but Einar was the only other person around, and he and I had taken to avoiding conversation with each other since our visit to 1996.
It wasn’t a long stop; no passengers had to get on or off; they wouldn’t have stopped except for the loose shoe. During the whole time, though, one of the passengers had his attention riveted on Porfirio. He was a young kid, maybe Juan Bautista’s age, Mexican from the look of him and very well dressed, with a high shirt collar and the old-fashioned silk tie that stuck out like paddles from either side of the central knot. Leading the horse back to its place, Porfirio noticed the boy’s intense regard and glanced up at him once, curious. The boy looked away immediately.
“What was with the kid who kept staring at you?” I asked as the stage went bounding and creaking away and we closed up the smithy shed.
“Beats me,” Porfirio said. “I think I’ll make some tamales dukes tomorrow, what do you say? It’s early for Christmas, but I’ve really got a craving for something sweet.”
He made hot chocolate that night instead of coffee, and we got into quite an elevated mood, sipping it around the fire and laughing. We all sobered up, though, the instant we picked up the mortal coming over the ridge to our immediate north.
“Chief?” Einar was on his feet at once, shotgun unslung and cocked.
“I read him.” Porfirio was in the shadow of an oak tree faster than mortal eye could have followed, his Navy revolver out. Einar faded into the gloom behind the house.
“’Scuse me,” murmured Juan Bautista, grabbing up Marie Dressier, who clacked her beak at him in protest. He sprinted for his room clutching her in his arms, while Erich rode his head, balancing expertly.
I remained where I was, warming my hands on my mug and peering doubtfully up at the ridge. Yes, there he was on infrared, making his stealthy way down the hill in our direction. Carrying a gun, too. But it wasn’t our lovelorn filibuster . . . Who the hell was this, creeping along like a thief, his heart thudding painfully? He raised the gun to sight on our circle of firelight, and I winked out on him, to continue my scan from the shadows under a spurge laurel. He lowered the gun, staring in disbelief at the deserted fire. This was a young male mortal, no intoxicants in his bloodstream but with a number of the toxins produced by fear and exhaustion. No disease signatures . . . some healed fractures, very old. Unhappiness. He didn’t want to be here, he didn’t want to be doing this. He was tired and cold. Where had the person gone, who’d been there a minute ago? he was thinking in Mexican Spanish.
I saw Porfirio and Einar working their way uphill toward him. Porfirio stopped about twenty feet below, and Einar circled around until he was just above him, only about ten feet away in the sagebrush, moving without a sound until he suddenly stood up black against the stars and said loudly:
“¿Qué pasa, amigo?”
The kid whirled, swinging his gun around, but Porfirio nailed him from behind before he could get off a single shot. That was that. He pitched forward, and I saw Porfirio and Einar closing in on him cautiously. I remembered my hot chocolate and took a sip. No reason to come out until they’d brought the body down. He wasn’t dead yet, anyway, just unconscious and bleeding a lot.
Then what a howl of agony. Not out loud, I don’t think it would have shaken the Earth that way if he’d been using only his voice: it was Porfirio’s heart that was screaming, cutting through the subvocal ether like the sound of all possible things malfunctioning at once. My hair stood on end. I came blundering out through the bushes to see him crashing down the hillside, bearing the young mortal in his arms, and you couldn’t have told who looked more deathlike, gray-faced Porfirio or the mortal. Einar was bounding along after him.
“Chief! Chief, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“Code blue!” snarled Porfirio. “Equipment! Three pints He-mosynth!”
Nobody can say we don’t move fast in an emergency. The boy was restarted and stable in no time, bleeding stopped and wounds bound, all kinds of stuff pumping through him that wouldn’t be discovered by mortals for decades. His nice clothes were ruined, of course, including the silk tie, which had come undone and was covered with blood. He was one lucky kid for all that. Porfirio’s shot had missed his heart. We stretchered him into Porfirio’s room, and Porfirio sat down beside him and told us all to get the hell out of there, which we did.
What to do after that but go to bed? Nobody was going to answer our questions; nobody was going to explain why the little creep had come sneaking back to gun for us, or why Porfirio had been so suddenly horrified, after plugging him with as neat a piece of cold-blooded shooting as I’ve ever seen, or why such pains had been taken to save his young life.
I was awakened at dawn by Porfirio coming into my room. He still hadn’t washed the blood from his hands. “He’s starting to come around,” he said hoarsely. “He can’t see me. Go to him, please.”
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the cot and groping for my boots.
Porfirio leaned against the doorway. “He’s one of my family. I didn’t recognize him. Haven’t seen him since he was seven years old.”
“So why was he shooting at you?” I stood up and pulled my shawl around my shoulders.
“I shot his father.”
“You shot his father,” I said, looking at him.
He was looking down at the dirt floor. “Yeah. You know how I recognized him? His father broke all the fingers on his hand that day. Just held his little hand down on the table and pounded it with a bottle. The fingers healed crooked. That was how I recognized him.”
“Oh,” I said.
The boy didn’t wake much. I gave him water and spoke to him soothingly in Spanish, telling him he was all right. Most of the time he was passed out, sedated while the miracle cures Porfirio had filled him with did their work. I examined his hand and found the evidence of old multiple injuries. It must have been a very little hand when it was hurt so badly. Whether or not Paradise exists, señors, there must be a hell. People who do such things to their children belong there, and for all eternity too.
Einar came in to take my place at noon, and I went out into the ghastly white day. Porfirio was nowhere in evidence, but Imarte was standing by the cookfire with an apron tied on over her whore’s finery. Of all things, she appeared to be making lunch; she was tossing handfuls of barley into what smelled like goat stew.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked, squinting at it through the glare.
“It’s the only thing I know how to make,” she said defensively. “It’s a very old recipe.”
“Where’s Porfirio?”
“Asleep in my room, poor dear. Goddess, what a tragedy.” She sighed. The subtext here was that she knew more about it than I did, so I just sat down and refrained from as
king anything else until she couldn’t stand not telling me a second longer.
“You know what happened, of course.”
I shook my head. “Only that the kid is one of that family of his. There seems to be revenge mixed up in it somehow. And child abuse.”
“If that were all! Remember when we asked Porfirio where his family is now? Remember he told us that a great-niece had married a ranchero, and her brothers had come to work on the rancho for him? Well, it seems this young man is her son, hers and the ranchero. The boy’s father appears to have been one of those unfortunates with two personalities, a fairly decent one when he was sober and entirely another kind when he drank. A lot of unresolved rage there, apparently.” She tossed in the last of the barley and looked around. She found the raisins she wanted and sprinkled them in too.
“In any case, after the child was born, the father’s dark side came more into control. He was sober less of the time. Fortunately Porfirio (who was there) and the girl’s brothers looked after the man’s business affairs, but, as so often happens with this type of personality disorder, he was anything but grateful. More and more, his rage manifested itself in violence against his wife and, in time, no doubt as he perceived himself being displaced in her affections, against the child.”
“So he showed them all by crippling the baby’s hand.” I rubbed my eyes wearily. I hated mortals.
“Ah, but that’s not the whole story. The wife, for her part, had a classically codependent personality. She manifested her own feelings of low self-esteem by remaining with her husband in spite of their abusive relationship and, from what I understand, transferring her anger to her brothers and to her ‘Uncle’ Porfirio.”
