by Kage Baker
And if you get yourself arrested or worse, trying to make the story come out right? What does that leave for you, Lewis?
My honor.
You are the most dangerous incurable romantic I have ever known. Joseph spotted Chilon and waved. “We got you a room. Come in and sign for it,” he called.
“You would not believe how far I had to go before I found a parking space,” groused Chilon.
Joseph in the Darkness
IWENT WITH LEWIS to Eurobase One. Father, you wouldn’t recognize it now! When I was little, when you led the troops out to battle and we kids watched you in breathless admiration, it was such a raw place: partly a twenty-fourth-century field camp with a limited budget, partly a Neolithic stockade, but one hundred percent military base, up in those rough cold Cévennes.
You should see it today. It’s a neoclassical Art Deco kind of fantasy, like a resort hotel might be if the Olympian gods built one. I always thought New World One was classy, but it had nothing on this place. Statues by Praxiteles and a lot of other classical masters, gorgeous landscaped gardens, Roman-style banquets with French culinary style, and a bathhouse like something dreamed up by William Randolph Hearst. Aegeus, the guy who’d been running it the last two millennia, had picked and chosen the best elements of the ages that rolled by the place.
There was a big staff of mortal servants to keep it all immaculate too, fairly surly French peasants. I heard rumors while I was there that this hadn’t always been the case, that Aegeus had got away with some exploitative stuff that would have made our mortal masters’ hair stand on end, if they’d known about it. But that, if it happened, was long in the past. I didn’t see a single togaed girl or boy slave while I was there.
Lewis was too nervous to enjoy it much. This was the place he’d been brought after the little stupid guys fried his circuits the first time, after all, the place where he spent ten years in a regeneration vat. More unpleasant memories seemed to be bubbling up to the surface of his consciousness, but he didn’t talk about them much. And though he tested out physically okay, with the damage to his hand all self-repaired, and though he got through his debriefing without arousing any suspicion (as far as I could tell), something was wrong.
He seemed to expect to see little freaks in white suits everywhere we went. In the sensational neoclassical gymnasium he thought he saw them lurking behind the homoerotic Greek bronzes. In the vast billiard parlor hung with lost Renoirs, jolly studies of boozing sports parties, he thought he spotted them under the tables. In the restaurant (Le Grenouille en Vin, a five-star place if ever there was one, the wine cellar alone went down five stories into the bedrock of the Cévennes), he jittered when a white-coated waiter stepped out a little too suddenly from behind a potted palm. Even the Robert Louis Stevenson shrine, with its holo statue of the writer, gave him pause. Maybe it was those huge starry eyes Stevenson had and the pipe-cleaner skinniness of his limbs. I knew the guy; even in the flesh, Louis looked too weird to be human.
But no phantoms seized the other Lewis. After about a week, his new posting orders and identification disk arrived, and the Company sent him on to a nice safe job in New Zealand, pilfering old documents from a university library. I saw him to his transport and then got the hell out of Euro One myself. I was tired of all the grandeur.
I sound pretty philistine, don’t I? But this was my first home, other than that rock shelter. I had some good memories of the old base, when I was young and as idealistic as I was ever going to be. The world was a swell place, and we were all safe, father, because of you and the rest of the big guys. Nobody thought you were monsters then.
But what did the old stockade have to do with this pink carpeting, indirect lighting, gilt and crystal? And where in this world would you fit, now? I’m not so sure I fit myself anymore.
I went back to my job in Spain, assistant to an archaeology team sponsored by the local rabbinical school, making sure they uncovered the miraculously preserved relics of a twelfth-century synagogue, digging up what Nahum and I buried so carefully all those years ago. I made plans to go back to California the next time I could get a few weeks off, but somehow the time just sped by. Was I scared to come look for you, father? Probably. I sure as hell didn’t feel like going to Catalina to see if Mendoza was shacked up there with another Englishman, no matter what I’d promised Lewis.
Things are safe enough in the American Community, at least, no worries about that. Everything is prim and proper and politically correct there now. They’ve outlawed alcohol again in most of the former states. Also meat, dairy products, tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate, refined sugar, recreational drugs of any kind, competitive sports, and most great literature. So has England, and so have most of the rest of what used to be called First World countries.
This means boom economies for those little nations, like the Celtic Federation, who thumb their noses at the others and continue to produce whiskey and lamb chops. Still, most of the world’s farmed acreage is given over to soybeans. Religion isn’t illegal but is increasingly being regarded with genteel horror by most people, except the Ephesians. Faith is so . . . psychologically incorrect.
Sex isn’t illegal, but there isn’t a lot of it going on these days. There’s talk about how it’s a distasteful animal urge, how it victimizes women and robs men of their primal power. It creates codependency. It presents a terrible risk of catching a communicable disease. Relationships of any kind, in fact, are probably a bad idea.
I don’t know exactly when this problem became widespread among the mortals, but I know that a lot of operatives of my acquaintance are climbing the walls or beginning to date other immortals, which is sort of unusual. We’re not really comfortable in bed with each other as a rule, you know?
There is something beginning to be wrong with the mortals, a certain lack of interest and ability. The birth rate has plummeted all over the world. There are millions of inner children and fewer and fewer real ones. I remember seeing a holo feature on a certain famous amusement park: roller coasters and merry-go-rounds packed with forty-year-olds clutching the wonder of childhood to themselves like harpies, and not one little face in the crowd. Neverland has been invaded by the grownups, no children allowed. It’s better than having lots of real kids starving in gutters, at least.
Mind you, it isn’t like this everywhere. There are still plenty of places a retrograde old guy or gal can be an adult. You can get a beer, a steak, or a roll in the hay, and merry-go-rounds be damned; but you’ll be branded a sociopath if anybody finds out.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people have taken to alternative lifestyles, like living outside national boundaries so they can indulge what appetites they still have without interference. How do they manage this?
It’s being called the Second Golden Age of Sail.
Steam ended the days of the old sailing ships so long ago that most mortals can’t imagine why such lovely, graceful craft were pushed out of existence by squat metal tubs. Being mortals, of course, they weren’t around in the days when foot-long cockroaches swarmed in wooden forecastles or sailors clung to frozen ropes, attempting to take in sails with numb hands. Probably for that reason, a tall ship has come to symbolize the romance of the high seas in a way no chunky cruise boat can ever match, no matter how many Las Vegas revues it books.
Forget about space cruises. Think of an economy air transport, only more cramped, with worse food, and no chance in hell of surviving an accident. People don’t go to Luna to have fun; they go there to work. And Mars will be even more work once mortals are able to go there.
No, consumers wanted something pretty, something comfortingly retro. Tall ships were the answer, updated with modern technology.
You don’t need to climb to dizzying heights or learn a bunch of arcane phrases: the ship’s computer will do it all for you now, with smoothly efficient servomotors and composite cables. It judges the wind and keeps to a course as ably as the crustiest old salt, with the added advantage of weather satellite lin
ks. Add a little fusion drive to get you places in a dead calm, and the system is nearly perfect. Employ a couple of able-bodied sailors in case of fouls or repairs, and you even keep the unions happy. Any dope can sail a three-masted clipper now, and lots do, and that means Freedom.
On a good-sized vessel you can store enough booze and contraband food to last a couple of years, and you can enjoy them without a Public Health Monitor breathing down your neck, as long as you stay outside the jurisdiction of the local coast guard. You can play music as loud as you want. You can be overweight, light up a pipe of tobacco, and indulge in other behavior that would get you shut away in a mental hospital if you tried it anyplace else nowadays.
Mortals have taken to the sea in droves, becoming semipermanent residents. Little piddly thirty-foot yachts have become the trailers of the new age. People with real money have custom sailing ships built, mansions under acres of sail.
For a while there was a lot of enthusiastic talk about how eco-friendly sail was, since it utilized wind power, and a lot of commercial freight vessels got built before people figured out it was cheaper just to send stuff by big fusion-driven cargo barges. But for the private sector sail is in, it’s stylish, it’s a political antistatement, and so waterfronts are once again forested with masts.
I have to admit they’re easy on the eyes, those big graceful square-riggers flying along under clouds of canvas; and, unlike the old days, there are no rats, roaches, rotting timbers, or rotting food.
Freedom and adventure on the high seas. Cruise lines make a fortune on consumers who can’t afford their own ships by offering six-month package tours during which they can partake of forbidden pleasures like pizza or hot fudge sundaes.
I guess that was why Lewis utilized some gradual retirement time and booked himself a cruise on the Olympian Clipper Line’s Unrepentant Monarch.
The Company must have decided it was the perfect place to bait the trap.
Three Days out of Auckland, 2275
TAKE THAT FOR YOU?” asked the deck steward, gesturing at Lewis’s empty martini glass.
“Thanks.” Lewis looked up from his text of The Moon and Sixpence.
“Another?”
“Not now.”
Lewis turned his attention to the bookscreen again, but at that moment a little party boat came into sight to starboard, tacking about to give its passengers a better view of the Unrepentant Monarch. They hooted and screamed and waved at the great ship, clinging to the rail of their schooner, and there seemed to be a costume party in progress, because most of them were dressed as pirates. As Lewis smiled and waved back, somebody on board fired their signal cannon. Ping, a broadside, if they had been using shot instead of a sound chip. But even if they used shot, the cruise vessel would have no more noticed a one-pound ball than an elephant would notice a mosquito.
The mortals on board the schooner nevertheless danced and whooped, and the mortals on the Unrepentant catcalled back to them as though there were a real assault going on.
Lewis, who remembered vividly what it was like to be on a ship under attack by French privateers, offered up a prayer of gratitude to Neptune. All things taken into consideration, he preferred reclining in a deck chair with a novel to running around on a blood-smeared deck dodging real cannon fire.
Though the experience had made for one of his better chapters, he felt. The scene where Edward and his command take on the slaver Whydah Queen was his favorite, full of authentic little touches, the one he’d rewritten least over the years. The Tall Englishman was unbelievably long now, seventeen volumes at last count.
Lewis had hit a dry spell lately, as he drew inevitably closer to the point where Edward (now a political, supposedly in the pay of Her Majesty’s Foreign Office but in reality an agent of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society) was to be given his assignment to go to California. Quite apart from the fact that he wasn’t looking forward to killing off his hero, Lewis had certain qualms about depicting Edward’s relationship with Mendoza. It seemed an invasion of privacy, unforgivably frivolous to dramatize something that had resulted in heartbreak for her, not to mention ruin.
He had made some attempts to block out a different scenario, one with a happy ending, but it had given off no more warmth than a painted fire. Nothing to do but set the whole project aside for a few decades and see if something suggested itself . . .
Lewis sighed and leaned back, looking up at the sky with its Mercator lines of cable crossing. Vast canvas walls straining in the brisk breeze, the Unrepentant Monarch skimmed along like a seabird. Perhaps Edward had come to America on a clipper. Ought Lewis take notes for a future scene?
He couldn’t let the story alone, could he? He closed his eyes, sorted through his mental list of gods, and invoked Apollo and the Muses to grant him inspiration.
“I say, aren’t you Literature Specialist Lewis?”
Lewis opened his eyes. There before him, leaning on the rail, was Facilitator Nennius, nattily dressed in white cruise attire. In some other dimension, Apollo smirked and threw Lewis a salute.
“Nennius, isn’t it?” he said, after a moment’s stupefaction. “Heavens, how long has it been? 1836, wasn’t it?”
“To be sure. That evening at Johnson’s.” Nennius stepped forward, surefooted though the Unrepentant was rising on a particularly mountainous swell just then, and settled himself into the deck chair next to Lewis. He was a tall immortal, dark and aristocratic-looking. “Well, well, what are the odds of this? Are you taking the whole cruise?”
“As far as Panama. I’m on my way to my next posting,” Lewis replied, fighting down panic. Was it so remarkable they should run into one another again, after four hundred years? He looked on as Nennius ordered a bottle of Chateau Rothschild from the deck steward and wondered how on earth he could refrain from leading the conversation around to Edward, whom this man had actually known, spoken with, perhaps even set on his course in life.
“I’m on holiday, personally,” Nennius said, lounging back. “And a damned well-earned one, I might add. I’ve just come off forty years as a politician in Australia. I envy you Conservationist chaps, I really do. When you’re done with a job, you’ve at least got something to show for it. How I’d love to have an old book or a painting or anything I could point to and say, ‘There, that was my work, I rescued that for the ages.’ But nothing we Facilitators do shows, you know, in the long run.”
“Well, but surely that’s the point,” Lewis said. “If your work’s done well, it doesn’t show. It’s a much more difficult job being a Facilitator. You’re the men behind the scenes, the stage managers for history, the men in black.”
“A very flattering assessment.”
“True, all the same.”
“Well, thank you.”
They fell silent as the steward brought the wine—service was superb on these cruises—and Nennius accepted his glass, inhaled, sipped, and approved. The steward, waiting until Nennius’s nod, vanished unobtrusively. Nennius watched him go and shook his head.
“What that chap could teach his fellow mortals. Does it seem to you they’ve gotten ruder as the ages roll by? To think the day would come when you’d have to go on a cruise like this to experience courtesy!”
“It’s one of the things promised in the brochure,” Lewis said. “Every one of the staff has to take social interaction classes.”
“Not like the old days, eh?” Nennius drank with relish. “The little monkeys might have been ignorant and bloodthirsty, but by God they knew how to be polite when they had to. Remember that night we sat up talking till all hours at Johnson’s? That waiter waited, there in the corner, and not a word of complaint or a cough or an impatient look from him.”
“Johnson’s,” Lewis said, remembering.
“Abominable coffee, but a lovely place for privacy. Gone long since, I suppose.”
“Utterly. That whole block went during the Blitz.”
“That’s right, you were stationed over there then, weren’t you? You
’ve had some lively postings over the years. I was there until the twentieth century. Then I was off to Greece, thank God.” Nennius waved indulgently at the mortal pirate party, which was making another pass along the starboard bow. “Look at the silly little beggars. They do everything they can to make their world as dull and inhibited as it can possibly be, and run off at weekend to pretend they’re having adventures. They do love their adventures.”
“So few of them ever get to have real ones,” Lewis said.
“True. Good thing too, on the whole. Though I remember one who did, by God!” Nennius reached for his glass. “Do you recall those papers I gave you for the archives, that night in 1836? Nasty inky schoolboy mess the Company wanted, for some unimaginable reason?”
Lewis felt the shiver of warning, sensed the pit thinly screened with branches. He stared out at the wide horizon, pretending to think. “Vaguely. I was more interested in your anecdotes about Londinium.”
“So you were. The leather-knickers-down-the-well story.” Nennius sniggered. “And to think they ended up in a museum exhibit! Anyway. I was a headmaster at a public school at the time, and the papers were nothing more than exercises I’d set one of my pupils. Remarkable boy, really, though I thought he’d no future at all. Illegitimate, you see, even if he was the bastard of somebody awfully important. They’d paid to send him to Overton, at least. But you know how it was back then: you simply had no place in the world with that kind of mark against you, unless you cut one out for yourself.
“I never thought the boy would manage it. Too fond of using his fists to answer an argument, though he was certainly a clever little fellow. He was shaping up into a scholar of some promise, actually, but then he was nearly sent down for fighting, so his people—whoever they were—took him out of school and sent him off to the Navy for a midshipman, and I thought, well, that’s the last I’ll hear of him. Our padre was desolated. He had some idea the little brute could have gone out for divinity!”
