by Kage Baker
“No, it doesn’t.” He lowered the glasses and looked at me again, not quite sure what to think. “You never cease to amaze me, Dolores. It should make our continued acquaintance interesting indeed. However—Alfred hasn’t much experience with maritime customs such as leaving a watch on duty. Neither, I suspect, have his fellow privateers. They may all be belowdecks playing whist.” He looked through the glasses again. “Or there may be something wrong. I doubt it, though. Sails reefed, anchor down, everything in order, both boats there.”
“How do you even know that’s Mr. Rubery’s ship?” I was in agony. Nearer we flew and nearer, across the lovely clear water, closer to the ones who were waiting for us.
“That is another good question,” he said coolly. He didn’t know what to make of my terror, but he wasn’t about to panic himself. “Let’s just see, shall we? You!” he addressed Souza in Spanish. “Take us in, under her stern.”
Souza looked inquiringly at me—though he understood Spanish perfectly well—and I nodded weakly. We made straight for her now, then angled around so that we were coming in with a good view of the aft cabin. There was her name, in big blocky letters: J. M. CHAPMAN. Her boarding ladder was down, in open invitation.
Behind my eyes, a line of text jumped out at me, Harpending peevishly complaining that the name of the vessel was the plain Chapman, though for some reason journalists had seen fit to refer to it in all the papers as the J. M. Chapman.
“It’s she,” said Edward briskly. He said to Souza, “Bring her alongside.”
I stared up at the painted name. Freshly painted name. Wait, no. The J. and the M. and the CH were duller; only the APMAN gleamed with new enamel. I subjected it to infrared scanning and saw, underneath, the letters ISHOLM. This ship had been the J. M. Chisholm not long ago. Who had altered her name, and why?
“Señor,” I said, keeping my voice as reasonable as I could. “Call it woman’s intuition. I fear treachery here. What if Mr. Rubery has met with some misfortune?”
Edward gave me a long speculative look. “Then he’ll need my assistance,” he said. “In any case, it’s my duty to find him. Are you frightened, Dolores? You needn’t go on board if you are. This shouldn’t take long.”
He took up his saddlebag and caught hold of the ladder, climbing nimbly despite his awkward grip. I sat there and watched him a dull moment, before rising and scrambling after with a sob of desperation. If I couldn’t prevent him from walking into the trap, perhaps I could get him out of it. Perhaps nothing very bad would happen after all. Mr. Rubery, twit that he was, would come out of this with no more than a slap on the wrist and deportation, so perhaps Edward and I would escape once more, sailing free into the sunset after amazing adventures.
We boarded the J. M. Chapman and stood on her empty deck. All sunlight and silence, but for the creaking of the rigging and the sough of breakers on the shore nearby.
“Edward,” I whispered. “There are mortal men below decks.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Mortal men?” he said, smiling a little. He set off down the deck and then halted, turning to me with the strangest look in his eyes. “What did you—?”
Yes, señors, I’d given myself away. Not that it mattered, however.
With only the slightest sound, the door of the aft cabin opened, and a man emerged. He was a clean-shaven nondescript in a neat gray suit, smiling as he leveled a pistol at Edward. “Commander Bell-Fairfax?” He had a pleasant flat American voice. “You’re under arrest, sir. Could you set down that bag, please?”
Edward went white as a sheet, but he smiled that cold and narrow-eyed smile.
“Ah,” he said. “This bag?” He set it down very carefully. He opened it. The Pinkerton agent made a sharp little noise, stepped toward him, thrusting out his pistol—but Edward held up both hands in a pacifying motion and slowly drew out the valise.
“This is what you want, I expect,” he said, and held it up. The agent smiled and stepped forward, holding out his hand.
Edward shot him.
I had the American’s pistol out of his hand before he fell. “Jump!” I screamed to Edward, for I could hear the men below hatches boiling from beneath us, coming up on deck as the wounded agent rolled and cried for help. I turned to see Edward composedly opening the valise and scattering its contents over the side, papers fluttering and falling, and the lovely violet ink blurring and melting away to nothing as soon as the pages settled on the water. The Americans would never learn the whole truth now. They’d get the island, but they wouldn’t know what its secret was or where, and the British would find a way to creep back and take it from under their noses.
“Jump, for God’s sake!” I ran to him, but the bullets got there first.
It didn’t happen in picturesque slow motion. He neither jerked nor spun about. He coughed once, with the first hit; then he squared his big back and took the shots, doing his best to ignore them as he sent the last of the papers into the sea and dropped the valise after them. He pushed himself around to face me and the crew of Pinker-ton agents who had surrounded us.
He met my gaze with an ironical smile. Oh, he was falling; his legs weren’t working anymore. He toppled forward, and I caught him, and we sank to the deck in a welter of bright blood. His hat came off and rolled away.
I was sobbing, catching my breath in ugly little cries as I rocked him in my arms, trying to get enough air for a scream. Blood was coming up out of his mouth. He gave one grimace of pain and he stiffened; but then something seemed to get easier, and he opened his eyes and peered up at me with an inquiring expression, as though I had just made a remark he didn’t quite hear and was hoping I’d repeat it.
The world had shrunk to that little space on the deck. Our enemies might have been a circle of statues, for all we noticed them. His world was shrinking even faster; he was fighting to keep his eyes focused on mine.
“Wh—what are you?” he asked, quietly, as though we were lying in a green garden somewhere and no blood was running down his chin.
The only gift I could give him now was the truth. My throat was like stone, but I got the words out, whispering to him.
“I’m not a mortal woman, mi amor. But it was science and medicine that made me so, not magic. I exist because your masters discovered something that enabled them to make immortal creatures like me, to do their work for them here in the past. They will create a race that can never age nor die, just as you said. This is what you have bought with your life.”
He was knitting his brows, his breath was rasping and wet as he strained to hear me. Suddenly there was comprehension in his eyes, and they brightened. He gave a gurgling chuckle. He knew.
I fought to suck in a breath. His death was coming for him. I leaned closer and said, “Listen to me, my love. I’m trapped by centuries, I can’t follow you. Come back for me and break my chains. Set me free. Will you set me free?”
He nodded. He looked into my eyes, trying to say something. He had neither the strength nor the time. A wind gusted across the deck toward us. His soul slipped away with it.
I bent over him, hiding his dead face with my hair.
“I hear no sound but your silenced voice,” I murmured. “I feel no heat but the fire that burns you, I draw no breath but you come into me, before me, behind me, you are the sea and the rock!”
“Johnston’s dead,” someone announced. “Who’s this woman?”
“The whore from the Bella Union, ain’t she?” someone else said.
“God damn,” said a voice directly above me. “I guess you could say this didn’t turn out so well. What’ll we do with this one?” A booted foot tapped Edward’s leg.
“Weight the body,” someone said. “We’ll put out to sea and drop him in the channel. No evidence, gentlemen.”
“Come on, girlie, get up.” A hand closed on my wrist. “You’re under arrest.”
I don’t really have a clear memory of what happened next, señors, only a few impressions. I remember seeing Souza in the distanc
e, rowing away for his life. I remember the Americans screaming and trying to hide. If you want the details, you can check my video transmission. I know what I must have done; because when that longboat full of British voices came around the point to see what was going on, I remember throwing human heads at them. And an arm. I didn’t kill the Englishmen, though, I’m fairly certain. I think they retreated in some haste. And then of course your security operatives came and found me, doubtless because poor Souza’s control implant was broadcasting his horror.
And that’s it, señors, that’s the end of the story. I had a second chance to save my love, and I failed. I took unauthorized leave and I committed murder. I did find out a great many interesting things about the genesis of our Company, but I have a feeling that the information was classified, not for my eyes at all.
I was a bad machine.
But I’ve told you the truth, señors, every word. Now, you wouldn’t have one more piece of Theobromos to spare, would you, for a poor old thing like me?
HOW VERY EMBARRASSING to read one’s own testimony. If the hearing panel hadn’t given me so much Theobromos, I’d have told them the story in half the time.
As it was, I lay in the worst case of theobromine poisoning I’d ever had, for three days and three nights, before they came for me and gave me to understand there would be no trial, no further action. I was only to be sent off to my new posting immediately. I was still groggy when they helped me into the silver box, and I heard the hiss, breathed in the yellow gas, and was abruptly here.
And where exactly is here? Ah, that’s the cream of the jest. I crawled out of the box and wandered around in bewilderment for several minutes before I found the crates and dispatch case that had been sent with me. I fumbled open the seal and read my orders.
I am now the managing operative of a Dr. Zeus agricultural station, located—where else?—on Catalina Island, and the present year is 153,020 B.C.E. I am in fact the sole personnel assigned to this station, but after all I’m an immortal with unlimited strength, so I find myself adequate for the job. Plenty of heavy equipment I can drive, plenty of supplies sent as I request them. No company at all.
Is it my job to collect the rare endemic species that grow here and nurture them along? Not exactly. My assignment is to grow produce for the Company’s Day Six resort on Santa Cruz Island, some miles north of here. I supply the salad bars of wealthy twenty-fourth-century vacationers, who pay out a considerable chunk of their income to be herded into cramped shuttles and thrown back through time to an unspoiled and unpolluted paradise where they can sport-fish, have their holos taken with dwarf woolly mammoths, or just relax by the pool. I read that in a brochure somebody dropped on the loading dock where I deliver the crates of radicchio, squash blossoms, and endive that I raise. I never stay to watch the ship arrive. I don’t like talking to people.
My heart aches when I think of the Ventana and Big Sur. I can never go back there again. I’m forbidden to leave this garden I’ve made. And some violence has been done to my electronic memory, I fear. Something’s been deleted. I can’t access all those fascinating historical records of this island now, nor the successive altered maps. They don’t seem to have realized that the information still exists in my human memory. But since I can’t download the information to another operative, maybe they don’t care, especially as I’m unlikely to see anyone I know back here. Even Joseph won’t be born for a hundred thousand years. Longer for Lewis and the others. No way at all to talk about my discoveries, which is undoubtedly why I’ve been put so far in the past.
All things considered, though, the Company has treated me very well. One door closes, another one opens. This is a beautiful island right now, not at all the dry and rocky place it will become. There are immense forests here, ironwoods the equal of any sequoias you might find on the mainland, deep groves of mahogany trees, great spreading oaks and pines. Very little flat land, but what there is I have covered with neat green rows of vegetables, tidy orchards, and a small area for my own botanical experiments. No animals bigger than the little fox. Plenty of birds. No mortals at all . . . yet.
I’m to watch for them, though. This is very, very secret. Really I shouldn’t be writing it down here, but who the hell will ever see? I’m to watch for certain people, odd-looking people with pale skins, who will arrive one day. They will not be Ancient Lemurians. It is expected they will arrive in well-designed oared galleys or perhaps even in gliders of some kind. It is expected they will settle in the Silver Canyon region. It is expected they will dig themselves in under a mountain and hide there, safe from marauding Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon primitives. I’m to report their arrival to the Company at once, and then I’m to monitor them unobtrusively for the next few centuries. When they’ve reached a certain level of technological development, when a certain energy signature begins to appear, I’m to alert Dr. Zeus. I suspect the Company will come in and slaughter them, then, and make off with their peculiar inventions.
Talk about piracy. But the Company won’t take everything. Something will be deliberately left for the British to find in 1862 or whenever, some bit of machinery that will be hidden away in a military laboratory for decades, until some Briton finally discovers how to make it work, and gains thereby insight into certain dimensional principles that enable him to solve the problem of time travel. Dr. Zeus will have guaranteed its own birth, built the foundation of its empire. And Edward will have been the sacrificed hero whose blood mortared its cornerstone.
Pretty sneaky, eh?
It was a few centuries before I could bring myself to climb over to the west end of this island and look down into the anchorage where Edward died. I half-expected to see the ship lying there, and his poor mortal body sprawled on the deck. But none of that’s happened yet. Thousands of years yet before the acorns fall that will grow into the trees that make up the timbers of the J. M. Chapman of fatal memory. Edward’s distant ancestors are at this time knapping flints for hand axes. I would bet, though, that in some tribe on some cold green island there is one very tall savage who has learned how to put a wooden handle on his ax, or perhaps to draw reindeer on his cave wall. It will so unnerve his fellow cavemen that they’ll grab him at the next spring equinox and sacrifice him to their gods. Perhaps some wretched little proto-Celtic girl will weep for him and wring her hands, too.
Who knows? We may have been in this dance since time began, and could never see the pattern until Dr. Zeus made me an immortal, unable to die or to forget. When Nicholas died, I was still too young to see what was going on. This last time with Edward gave them away, however. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but surely even the Hindus don’t imagine it works like this. What’s the point? The same man circling through lives like a blazing comet, always returning on the same course, meeting the same inevitable doom before he vanishes into darkness, serving somebody’s purpose with his death but never his own. The game is fixed. Whoever is running it—and I can guess at the identity, though not the reason—it’s fixed.
But now at least I know.
I don’t expect I’ll see him again for a while. But I will see him again. He will come back and set me free, because he said he would. And it may not be on our next encounter, or the next, but one day the pattern of his sacrifice and death will be broken. We will make something better than this, he and I, and God help our masters if they try to prevent us.
In the meanwhile I tend my rows of corn and tomatoes, or wander on this narrow cobblestone crescent and admire the blue sea, or sit outside my shelter at night and watch the sky. I’m patient; I can wait.
He will come again.
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