The Graveyard Game (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “I have to call home,” said Mr. Fancod.

  “Oh, but we’re going home, Mr. Fancod,” the man assured him.

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  “Well, I’m afraid we really must ask you to come along anyhow . . .”

  “Ask the cyborg if he has any raisins.”

  Cyborg? Lewis sat perfectly still, heart pounding. He heard the male attendant stifling a chuckle. “Now then, Mr. Fancod, I think it’s time you stopped having fun with us. If you’ll come along now, we’ll stop at Prashant’s, and you can buy more raisins.”

  “Okay,” said Mr. Fancod, and Lewis heard them coming out of the reading room. He glanced up cautiously. The two mortals were making apologetic faces at him. Mr. Fancod, following them obediently, had taken out his orange and was peeling it as they went along, staring at it in utter absorption. He dropped pieces of peel on the floor as he walked.

  Gnawing on his lower lip, Lewis watched them go. He looked down at his Buke and typed in:

  applied it carefully to one of the loathsome, blood-engorged??????

  He saved the document and closed the Buke. Rising, he got a tissue and carefully collected all the discarded orange peel. He tossed it in the dustbin. Wiping his hands, he ventured into the reading room to see if all was well.

  It wasn’t.

  All the consoles, except the nearest one, bore a cheery greeting above the logo and menu for the London Metropolitan Library. That was normal. What wasn’t normal was the black screen on the nearest console, crossed from top to bottom in something that resembled binary code but wasn’t quite. Lewis approached it reluctantly and stood looking down at the screen. He reached out at arm’s length and gave the command key a tentative tap.

  The inexplicable code went away and was replaced by a menu. It said:

  DR. ZEUS COMMUNICATION REQUEST

  INITIALIZE

  INITIAL REPLY

  MEMO

  DEPARTMENT METHODICAL

  LEFT MODE

  ENTER PERSONAL NOW:

  Lewis looked over his shoulder and looked back at the screen. He leaned forward and examined the console. It was a moment before he found the small panel that had been broken out at one side, and the little alteration sticking out of it, made of paper clips and magnedots.

  He looked around the room once more before crawling quickly underneath the seat recess to unplug the console. He found an OUT OF ORDER sign and spread it across the screen before scurrying back to his desk.

  Opening his Buke again, he linked up with the Greater London Communication Listings and entered a search request for the name FANCOD.

  There was only one. Thurwood Fancod, care of Neasden Adult Residential Facility. Registered challenged adult. Employed: Self-Reliance In-Home Data Entry Program. Sponsor: Jovian Integrated Systems.

  Jovian Integrated Systems was one of the holding companies for Dr. Zeus Incorporated.

  Lewis leaned back. “Oh dear,” he murmured. He exited the listings and swiveled in his chair, this way and that like a compass needle seeking true north. He closed his eyes to concentrate more deeply and at last found the frequency he sought.

  Xenophon? Literature Specialist Lewis requesting reception.

  Xenophon receiving, came the reply.

  There seems to have been a security breach of some kind. My cover’s been compromised.

  Specify.

  A mortal named Thurwood Fancod has access to material quite a bit beyond my need to know.

  Xenophon swore electronically. Details?

  He identified me as a cyborg in front of two other mortals. They didn’t take him seriously, but he knew. And . . . he modified one of the library terminals to hack into a Dr. Zeus database. Seems to have been going after something classified.

  Damn!

  Should I run?

  Yes, you’d better. We’ll send a team over right away to confiscate the modified unit and replace it. I suppose somebody had better deal with Fancod, too. Where can we reach you?

  Lewis gave him a set of coordinates.

  Very good. Your new assignment and paperwork will be forwarded to you at that address on 7 March. Vale, Lewis.

  Vale.

  Sighing, Lewis got up and slipped his Buke into its case. He made a quick search through his desk drawers for any personal items he might want. There were none. He pulled on his coat, stowed the Buke case in an inner pocket, and took one last wistful look at his name in its gold lettering before walking out.

  In the morning someone with unquestionable credentials as his next of kin would tearfully notify the library of an accident, or sudden death, or some terrible emergency. Shortly thereafter a person with splendid references would be perfectly positioned for promotion to the position of chief curator, and the space Lewis March had left in the world would vanish like a footprint in sand. It was standard operating procedure for a security breach, and he’d been warned that this sort of thing might begin to occur more frequently as he got closer to the Company’s end of time.

  He caught an antigravity transport at the corner and rode the short distance to his house, where he packed a suitcase with his shaving bag and a change of clothes. Just before closing it, he went to a cabinet and took out a little bubblewrap package containing the old daguerreotype of Edward, nesting it between two shirts.

  Lewis carried his suitcase down to the front hall and paused again, looking around at the comfortable rooms, the entertainment center, the furniture, the paintings. Within the next six hours there would be Company techs in here loading everything into a van. This time tomorrow the place would be spotless, silent, and empty, awaiting a rental agent’s powers of description. It had been nice while it lasted.

  He put that out of his mind as he stepped outside, locked the door behind him, and walked away. Immortals say a lot of good-byes.

  It wasn’t until Lewis was on the LPA transport bucketing along to Newhaven that he groaned and smacked his forehead. “The cheroot!” he said out loud. “How would he light the damned thing?” A mortal woman looked across at him in affronted silence. She wasn’t affronted enough to go inform a Public Safety Monitor that there was a man talking to himself on the transport, however, so Lewis made it to the Dieppe ferry without incident.

  Once on board, he went quickly up to the deserted upper deck and found himself a cozy seat near the tea station, a corner booth with a table. There he wedged his suitcase in securely, took out his Buke, and within minutes was lost in the problem of how to light a cigar in a longboat in a swamp on the Guinea Coast in 1845.

  He had concluded that it really wouldn’t be all that improbable for Edward to be carrying sulfur friction matches (might even have had one of the new boxes with a safety striking surface), when two men clambered unsteadily onto the upper deck and sat down opposite the tea station.

  Lewis frowned down at his last paragraph. Leeches. Loathsome and blood-engorged were a little overripe. So was slimy. What about . . . vile gray creatures?

  But leeches were black, not gray, weren’t they? Lewis sat back to think. Slugs were gray, and so were—he raised his eyes to scan the mortals who sat across from him. His mouth fell open in surprise.

  They got up abruptly and came and sat on either side of him.

  “Don’t shout,” said one of them.

  “No,” said the other one.

  Lewis stared from one to the other. “I beg your pardon?” he said at last.

  “No use to beg,” the first speaker told him.

  They were very odd looking mortals. White suits in England? In March? And very large black sunglasses, and fairly stupid hats: one wore a knitted ski hat, the other a shapeless canvas porkpie. They were small and spindly enough to make Lewis seem like a gorilla by comparison. Both had drippy little voices, just like Mr. Fancod’s.

  They were quite the most feeble and ridiculous things Lewis had seen in a long while, even including Mr. Fancod. Nevertheless, he felt a sudden urge to leap over the side and swim back to Newhaven.

>   Getting a grip on his nerves, Lewis affected a certain composure as he saved and closed his novel once again.

  “Would you mind telling me who you fellows are?” he said.

  “Yes,” said the man in the ski hat.

  Lewis returned his Buke to its case, scanning them more closely.

  “You’re carrying weapons, aren’t you?” he said. They started.

  “Yes,” agreed the one in the ski hat.

  “No,” said the one in the porkpie.

  “No,” the one in the ski hat corrected himself.

  Lewis pursed his lips. “I see. But you were threatening me, weren’t you? And if you’re not carrying weapons, how do you propose to make your threats good?”

  The two men looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then they nodded and each drew from within his coat a pistol and pointed it at Lewis.

  “We have weapons,” admitted the one in the porkpie.

  Lewis looked at the pistols. They appeared to be modern disrupters but were not of any design he’d ever seen. All he could determine, on scanning them, was that they contained circuitry whose purpose seemed to be generating a wave field of some kind.

  He folded his hands on the table and thought very carefully about the situation in which he found himself.

  No danger at all, on the face of it. He might simply wink out from between the two little men, run down into the main lounge, and alert the Public Safety Monitor that there were lunatics with weapons on board. Of course, then there would be a scene, which was not something a running operative particularly wanted. No way to avoid being asked to make a statement to the authorities, and perhaps to the press, either of which would be in direct violation of Company policy as regarded quiet exits.

  He could wrest the weapons away and throw them overboard, which seemed like a good idea actually, though Lewis disliked hurting mortals. These particular mortals looked as though they might snap like toothpicks if he tried anything the least bit forceful, and that would cause a scene as well.

  If he were Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, he’d have casually killed the two with a backhand chop five minutes ago and tossed them, guns and all, discreetly over the side into the Channel. He wasn’t Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

  “Well, then,” Lewis said, as politely as he could. “What do you want?”

  “To take you home,” said the one in the porkpie.

  Lewis suppressed a smile. “Um—and what happens if I don’t want to go home with you?”

  “We shoot you,” the other one informed him. “Then we take you anyhow.”

  “Yes,” the one in the porkpie agreed.

  “I’d rather you didn’t shoot me,” Lewis said, drumming his fingertips on the table.

  “Yes. We know,” said the one in the ski hat.

  Realizing in panic that he was looking at three and a half more hours of conversation like this, Lewis attempted to transmit to Xenophon. There was no response. He felt the proverbial sensation of ice water along his spine.

  “Are you jamming my signal?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So you know what I am?”

  “Yes.” Both of them nodded their heads. “You’re a cyborg.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We have been looking for you,” said the one in the porkpie.

  Lewis closed his eyes. Ireland. In that moment, years of denial ended abruptly. The nightmares had him. Grinning, they pulled off their masks, and he remembered the cave under Dun Govaun, the creatures who hadn’t been children after all but small men, weak and stupid, yet masters of a weapon that could disable the cleverest cyborg, if he walked into their hiding place. And Lewis had. The erasure field had crippled him, but it hadn’t quite killed him. His captors didn’t mind, because they had him now, so they could take him apart and see how he was made and make the weapon stronger, better, more deadly . . .

  “Well then,” he said in a light voice, opening his eyes again. “If you’ve been hunting me this long, you must know I don’t want to be caught.”

  “Yes,” said the one in the ski hat, nodding again.

  “I think it’s only fair to warn you, I’ll probably run as soon as we get off this boat,” Lewis said.

  “That would be dumb,” said the one in the porkpie, disapproval in his voice. “Because we’d shoot you, and then you’d be broken.”

  “Well, probably; but that’s all the more reason for me to do something desperate, you see?” Lewis spread out his hands as though presenting them with an irrefutable argument. “So, there it is. If you’re smart, you’ll keep those guns trained on me.”

  “Oh, we’re smart,” the one in the ski hat said.

  “We’re the smartest ones,” said the one in the porkpie.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Lewis agreed. “Well. I can’t run anywhere until we land at Dieppe, so I think I’ll just go on with my writing.”

  “It won’t help,” said the one in the ski hat.

  “Then there’s no reason for you to stop me, is there?” said Lewis smoothly, drawing his Buke from its case again. His captors appeared to be thinking that over.

  “No,” they said at last.

  Lewis called up a Company line, and found to his frustration that although he was able to access the channel, he was unable to send any messages. Apparently whatever was jamming his personal transmission was able to block the Buke’s as well. After several efforts he entered in the last communication code he had on file for Joseph.

  Joseph wasn’t home. His automatic response picked up the call, and Lewis beheld a brilliant yellow screen with bouncy red letters, giving the following cheery message in Castilian Spanish:

  Hola! If you’re calling about the sofa and loveseat, they’re still for sale. I’m on vacation this week, but please leave your comm code and I’ll return your call as soon as I get back. If this is really important, you can reach me care of the Hotel Elissamburu, Irun, Eskual Herriraino, at HtEli546/C/882. I’ll be there until the 30th. Bye.

  Lewis exhaled in annoyance. He attempted to leave a message, but was blocked once again. After staring at the screen in frustration, he logged off and reopened his story file again and typed:

  applied it carefully to one of the filthy little creatures, and had the satisfaction of watching it shrivel and drop away.

  Over the next three hours Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax and company got rid of the leeches, found their way through the mangrove swamp by a secret shortcut that was actually faster than sailing across the lagoon, descended on one of Delarosa’s notorious barracoons, and burned it to the ground after setting free all the slaves, one of whom was the captive daughter of King Bahou, and very grateful she was too. But just as she was about to express her thanks, who should emerge from the steaming, fever-ridden jungle but the treacherous Diego Luna, determined to make good his threat to kill the English commander . . .

  Lewis, on the other hand, sat in an increasingly chilly upper deck lounge praying that somebody would come open the tea station and perhaps notice his unwelcome companions. Nobody did.

  Dieppe, en Route to Paris

  IT WAS DARK BY THE TIME the ferry landed at Dieppe. Lewis put away his Buke and groped for his suitcase. “Well, gentlemen, it’s time to disembark,” he told his captors.

  “Not yet,” they said together, threatening with their pistols. “We’re supposed to wait until everybody goes.”

  So they waited, as the passengers from the lower decks trailed up the gangway, departing in ones and twos for the customs building. When the last one had trundled his baggage ashore, the little men rose to their feet.

  “We’re supposed to go now,” said the one in the porkpie. “You’re supposed to walk in front of us.”

  “Okay,” Lewis said, hauling out his suitcase. “But I’m warning you, I’ll almost certainly try to run away.”

  “Stupid cyborg,” said the one in the ski hat. Lewis shrugged and walked ahead of them, down to the main deck and up the gangway to the quay. They foll
owed closely, keeping their pistols trained on him the whole time. As he approached the customs building, Lewis glanced over his shoulder at them.

  “I’ll probably make my attempt in here,” he said, and walked quickly up the ramp into the lighted hall with the turnstile and customs officers at its far end. They followed him, keeping their guns well up and pointed at his head. It was a long, long walk across the floor.

  “Bonsoir, Monsieur,” yawned the guard at the nearest turnstile.

  “Regardez-vous les disrupters, s’il vous plait,” Lewis said through his teeth, smiling. The guard’s gaze skimmed past Lewis at the two little men and their guns.

  “Merde!” he cried. The two little men stopped in their tracks, startled.

  “Merci. Bonsoir,” Lewis said pleasantly, largely unheard in the commotion of five large customs officers tackling his would-be captors. He walked over to Luggage Analysis, set his suitcase on the conveyor belt, and followed it through on the designated footpath without incident.

  Before boarding the express to Paris he stopped at the snack bar and bought three Toblerones, and had finished one by the time he was seated in the deserted passenger car. The train left the station and picked up speed. Lewis was unwrapping the second Toblerone with trembling hands when two more strangers in white suits emerged from the car behind him and sat down, one to his left and one immediately in front of him.

  They were quite similar to the first pair, though not so perfectly matched in size; one wore a beret, and the other a baseball cap. The one with the beret also had a tiny chin-tuft of beard.

  “Don’t try that again,” he told Lewis menacingly. “We have weapons too.”

  “How many of you people are there?” Lewis asked.

  “All of us,” the one with the cap said.

  “I’d really rather not go with you,” said Lewis. “Why do you think you can frighten me with your guns? I’m a cyborg, you know.”

  “Because these can hurt you,” the one in the beret said, gesturing with the hand he was careful to keep firmly in his pocket. “We hurt you once before. We have these now. We can do it again.”