Gods and Pawns (Company)

by Kage Baker

  He carried Isabel into the living room, and she gave a scream and turned her face over his shoulder so she wouldn’t see the television screen. Six-year-old Maria, on the other hand, stared at it as though hypnotized. Before her on the coffee table, two little bowls of Cheerios sat untasted, rapidly going soggy in their milk.

  Porfirio frowned down at his great-great-great-great-(and several more greats) grand-niece. “Don’t call your sister a dope. What’s going on? It sounded like a rat fight in here.”

  “She’s scared of the Amazing No Man, so she wanted me to turn him off, but he’s not scary,” said Maria. “And I want to see him.”

  “You were supposed to be watching Cartoon Circus,” said Porfirio, glancing at the screen.

  “Uh-huh, but Mr. Ringmaster has people on sometimes, too,” Maria replied. “See?”

  Porfirio looked again. Then he sat down beside Maria on the couch and stared very hard at the screen. On his arm, Isabel kicked and made tiny complaining noises over his shoulder until he absently fished a stick of gum from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.

  “Who is this guy?” he asked Maria.

  “The Amazing No Man,” she explained. “Isn’t he strange?”

  “Yeah,” he said, watching. “Eat your cereal, honey.”

  And he sat there beside her as she ate, though when she dripped milk from her spoon all over her nightgown because she wasn’t paying attention as she ate, he didn’t notice, because he wasn’t paying attention either. It was hard to look away from the TV.

  A wizened little person wandered to and fro before the camera, singing nonsense in an eerily high-pitched voice. Every so often he would stop, as though he had just remembered something, and grope inside his baggy clothing. He would then produce something improbable from an inner pocket: a string of sausages. A bunch of bananas. A bottle of milk. An immense cello and bow. A kite, complete with string and tail.

  He greeted each item with widely pantomimed surprise, and a cry of “Woooowwwwww!” He pretended he was offering the sausages to an invisible dog, and made them disappear from his hand as though it were really eating them. He played a few notes on the cello. He made the kite hover in midair beside him, and did a little soft-shoe dance, and the kite bobbed along with him as though it were alive. His wordless music never stopped, never developed into a melody; just modulated to the occasional Wowww as he pretended to make another discovery.

  More and more stuff came out of the depths of his coat, to join a growing heap on the floor: sixteen bunches of bananas. A dressmaker’s dummy. A live sheep on a leash. An old-fashioned Victrola, complete with horn. A stuffed penguin. A bouquet of flowers. A suit of armor. At last, the pile was taller than the man himself. He turned, looked full into the camera with a weird smile, and winked.

  Behind Porfirio’s eyes, a red light flashed. A readout overlaid his vision momentarily, giving measurements, points of similarity and statistical percentages of matchup. Then it receded, but Porfirio had already figured out the truth.

  The man proceeded to stuff each item back into his coat, one after another.

  “See? Where does he make them all go?” asked Maria, in a shaky voice. “They can’t all fit in there!”

  “It’s just stage magicians’ tricks, mi hija,” said Porfirio. He observed that her knuckles were white, her eyes wide. “I think this is maybe too scary for you. Let’s turn it off, okay?”

  “I’m not scared! He’s just…funny,” she said.

  “Well, your little sister is scared,” Porfirio told her, and rose and changed the channel, just as Hector wandered from the bedroom in his pajamas, blinking like an owl.

  “Papi, Uncle Frio won’t let me watch Amazing No Man!” Maria complained.

  “What, the scary clown?” Hector rolled his eyes. “Honey, you know that guy gives you nightmares.”

  “I have to go out,” said Porfirio, handing Isabel over to her father.

  “You were living with mortals? Who were these people?” asks Clete.

  “I had a brother, when I was mortal,” says Porfirio. “I check up on his descendants now and then. Which has nothing to do with this case, okay? But that’s where I was when I spotted Robert Ross. All the time we’d been looking for a baseball player, he’d been working as the Amazing Gnomon.”

  “And a gnomon is the piece on a sundial that throws the shadow,” says Clete promptly. He grins. “Sundials. Time. Temporal physics. They just can’t resist leaving clues, can they?”

  Porfirio shakes his head. Clete finishes the potato chips, tilting the can to get the last bits.

  “So when the guy was programmed with a Happy Place, it wasn’t baseball he fixated on,” he speculates. “It was 1951. ‘The Golden Year.’ He had a compulsion to be there in 1951, maybe?”

  Porfirio says nothing.

  “So, how did it go down?” says Clete, looking expectant.

  It hadn’t gone down, at least not then.

  Porfirio had called for backup, because it would have been fatally stupid to have done otherwise, and by the time he presented his LAPD badge at the studio door, the Amazing Gnomon had long since finished his part of the broadcast and gone home.

  The station manager at KTLA couldn’t tell him much. The Amazing Gnomon had his checks sent to a post office box. He didn’t have an agent. Nobody knew where he lived. He just showed up on time every third Saturday and hit his mark, and he worked on a closed set, but that wasn’t unusual with stage magicians.

  “Besides,” said the mortal with a shudder, “he never launders that costume. He gets under those lights and believe me, brother, we’re glad to clear the set. The cameraman has to put VapoRub up his nose before he can stand to be near the guy. Hell of an act, though, isn’t it?”

  The scent trail had been encouraging, even if it had only led to a locker in a downtown bus station. The locker, when opened, proved to contain the Amazing Gnomon’s stage costume: a threadbare old overcoat, a pair of checked trousers, and clown shoes. They were painfully foul, but contained no hidden pockets or double linings where anything might be concealed, nor any clue to their owner’s whereabouts.

  By this time, however, the Company had marshaled all available security techs on the West Coast, so it wasn’t long before they tracked down Robert Ross.

  Then all they had to do was figure out what the hell to do next.

  Clete’s worried look has returned.

  “Holy shit, I never thought about that. How do you arrest one of us?” he asks.

  Porfirio snarls in disgust. His anger is not with Clete, but with the executive who saddled him with Clete.

  “Are you ready to catch another grenade, kid?” he inquires, and without waiting for Clete’s answer he extends his arm forward, stiffly, with the palm up. He has to lean back in his seat to avoid hitting the Volkswagen’s windshield. He drops his hand sharply backward, like Spider-man shooting web fluid, and Clete just glimpses the bright point of a weapon emerging from Porfirio’s sleeve. Pop, like a cobra’s fang, it hits the windshield and retracts again, out of sight. It leaves a bead of something pale pink on the glass.

  “Too cool,” says Clete, though he is uneasily aware that he has no weapon like that. He clears his throat, wondering how he can ask what the pink stuff is without sounding frightened. He has always been told operatives are immune to any poison.

  “It’s not poison,” says Porfirio, reading his mind. “It’s derived from Theobromos. If I stick you in the leg with this, you’ll sleep like a baby for twelve hours. That’s all.”

  “Oh. Okay,” says Clete, and it very much isn’t okay, because a part of the foundation of his world has just crumbled.

  “You can put it in another operative’s drink, or you can inject it with an arm-mounted rig like this one,” Porfirio explains patiently. “You can’t shoot it in a dart, because any one of us could grab the dart out of the air, right? You have to close with whoever it is you’re supposed to take down, go hand to hand.

  “But first, you
have to get the other guy in a trap.”

  Robert Ross had been in a trap. He seemed to have chosen it.

  He turned out to be living in Hollywood, in an old residency hotel below Franklin. The building was squarely massive, stone, and sat like a megalith under the hill. Robert had a basement apartment with one tiny window on street level, at the back. He might have seen daylight for an hour at high summer down in there, but he’d have to stand on a stool to do it. And wash the window first.

  The sub-executive in charge of the operation had looked at the reconnaissance reports and shaken his head. If an operative wanted a safe place to hide, he’d choose a flimsy frame building, preferably surrounding himself with mortals. There were a hundred cheap boardinghouses in Los Angeles that would have protected Robert Ross. The last place any sane immortal would try to conceal himself would be a basement dug into granite with exactly one door, where he might be penned in by other immortals and unable to break out through a wall.

  The sub-executive decided that Robert wanted to be brought in.

  It seemed to make a certain sense. Living in a place like that, advertising his presence on television; Robert must be secretly longing for some kindly mentor to find him and tell him it was time to come home. Alternatively, he might be daring the Company problem solvers to catch him. Either way, he wasn’t playing with a full deck.

  So the sub-executive made the decision to send in a psychologist. A mortal psychologist. Not a security tech with experience in apprehending immortal fugitives, though several ringed the building and one—Porfirio, in fact—was stationed outside the single tiny window that opened below the sidewalk on Franklin Avenue.

  Porfirio had leaned against the wall, pretending to smoke and watch the traffic zooming by. He could hear Robert Ross breathing in the room below. He could hear his heartbeat. He heard the polite double knock on the door, and the slight intake of breath; he heard the gentle voice saying, “Bobby, may I come in?”

  “It’s not locked” was the reply, and Porfirio started. The voice belonged to a ten-year-old boy.

  He heard the click and creak as the door opened, and the sound of two heartbeats within the room, and the psychologist saying: “We had quite a time finding you, Bobby. May I sit down?”

  “Sure,” said the child’s voice.

  “Thank you, Bobby,” said the other, and Porfirio heard the scrape of a chair. “Oh, dear, are you all right? You’re bleeding through your bandage.”

  “I’m all right. That’s just where I had the tumor removed. It grows back a lot. I go up to the twenty-first century for laser surgery. Little clinics in out-of-the-way places, you know? I go there all the time, but you never notice.”

  “You’ve been very clever at hiding from us, Bobby. We’d never have found you if you hadn’t been on television. We’ve been searching for you for years.”

  “In your spaceships?” said the child’s voice, with adult contempt.

  “In our time machines,” said the psychologist. “Professor Riverdale was sure you’d run away to become a baseball player.”

  “I can’t ever be a baseball player,” replied Robert Ross coldly. “I can’t run fast enough. One of my legs grew shorter than the other. Professor Bill never noticed that, though, did he?”

  “I’m so sorry, Bobby.”

  “Good old Professor Bill, huh? I tried being a cowboy, and a soldier, and a fireman, and a bunch of other stuff. Now I’m a clown. But I can’t ever be a baseball player. No home runs for Bobby.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Porfirio saw someone laboring up the hill toward him from Highland Avenue. He turned his head and saw the cop.

  The too-patient adult voice continued: “Bobby, there are a lot of other things you can be in the future.”

  “I hate the future.”

  Porfirio watched the cop’s progress as the psychologist hesitated, then pushed on: “Do you like being a clown, Bobby?”

  “I guess so,” said Robert. “At least people see me when they look at me now. The man outside the window saw me, too.”

  There was a pause. The cop was red-faced from the heat and his climb, but he was grinning at Porfirio.

  “Well, Bobby, that’s one of our security men, out there to keep you safe.”

  “I know perfectly well why he’s there,” Robert said. “He doesn’t scare me. I want him to hear what I have to say, so he can tell Professor Bill and the rest of them.”

  “What do you want to tell us, Bobby?” said the psychologist, a little shakily.

  There was a creak, as though someone had leaned forward in a chair.

  “You know why you haven’t caught me? Because I figured out how to go to 1951 all by myself. And I’ve been living in it, over and over and over. The Company doesn’t think that’s possible, because of the variable permeability of temporal fabric, but it is. The trick is to go to a different place every time. There’s just one catch.”

  The cop paused to wipe sweat off his brow, but he kept his eyes on Porfirio.

  “What’s the catch, Bobby?”

  “Do you know what happens when you send something back to the same year often enough?” Robert sounded amused. “Like, about a hundred million times?”

  “No, Bobby, I don’t know.”

  “I know. I experimented. I tried it the first time with a wheel off a toy car. I sent it to 1912, over and over, until—do you know where Tunguska is?”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Bobby?” The psychologist was losing his professional voice.

  “Then,” said Robert, “I increased the mass of the object. I sent a baseball back. Way back. Do you know what really killed off the dinosaurs?”

  “Hey there, zoot suit,” said the cop, when he was close enough. “You wouldn’t be loitering, would you?”

  “…You can wear a hole in the fabric of space and time,” Robert was saying. “And it just might destroy everything in the whole world. You included. And if you were pretty sick of being alive, but you couldn’t die, that might seem like a great idea. Don’t you think?”

  There was the sound of a chair being pushed back.

  Porfirio grimaced and reached into his jacket for his badge, but the cop pinned Porfirio’s hand to his chest with the tip of his nightstick.

  “Bobby, we can help you!” cried the psychologist.

  “I’m not little Bobby anymore, you asshole,” said the child’s voice, rising. “I’m a million, million years old.”

  Porfirio looked the cop in the eye.

  “Vice squad,” he said. The cop sagged. Porfirio produced his badge.

  “But I got a tip from one of the residents here—” said the cop.

  “Woooowwwww,” said the weird little singsong voice, and there was a brief scream.

  “What happened?” demands Clete. He has gone very pale.

  “We never found out,” says Porfirio. “By the time I got the patrolman to leave and ran around to the front of the building, the other techs had already gone in and secured the room. The only problem was, there was nothing to secure. The room was empty. No sign of Ross, or the mortal either. No furniture, even, except a couple of wooden chairs. He hadn’t been living there. He’d just used the place to lure us in.”

  “Did anybody ever find the mortal?”

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Porfirio replies. “Fifty years later. In London.”

  “He’d gone forward in time?” Clete exclaims. “But that’s supposed to be impossible. Isn’t it?”

  Porfirio sighs.

  “So they say, kid. Anyway, he hadn’t gone forward in time. Remember, about ten years ago, when archaeologists were excavating that medieval hospital over there? They found hundreds of skeletons in its cemetery. Layers and layers of the dead. And—though this didn’t make it into the news, not even into the Fortean Times—one of the skeletons was wearing a Timex.”

  Clete giggles shrilly.

  “Was it still ticking?” he asks. “What the hell are you telling me? There’s this crazy
immortal guy on the loose, and he’s able to time-travel just using his brain, and he wants to destroy the whole world and he’s figured out how, and we’re just sitting here?”

  “You have a better idea?” says Porfirio. “Please tell me if you do, okay?”

  Clete controls himself with effort.

  “All right, what did the Company do?” he asks. “There’s a plan, isn’t there, for taking him out? There must be, or we wouldn’t be here now.”

  Porfirio nods.

  “But what are we doing here now?” says Clete. “Shouldn’t we be in 1951, where he’s hiding? Wait, no, we probably shouldn’t, because that’d place even more strain on the fabric of time and space. Or whatever.”

  “It would,” Porfirio agrees.

  “So…here we are at the place where Bobby Ross was recruited. The Company must expect he’s going to come back here. Because this is where he caused the accident. Because the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, right?” Clete babbles.

  “Maybe,” says Porfirio. “The Company already knows he leaves 1951 sometimes, for medical treatment.”

  “And sooner or later he’ll be driven to come here,” says Clete, and now he too is staring fixedly at the barn. “And—and today is June 30, 2008. The car crash happened fifty years ago today. That’s why we’re here.”

  “He might come,” says Porfirio. “So we just wait—” He stiffens, stares hard, and Clete stares hard, too, and sees the little limping figure walking up the old road, just visible through the high weeds.

  “Goddamn,” says Clete, and is out of the car in a blur, ejecting candy bar wrappers and potato chip cans as he goes, and Porfirio curses and tells him to wait, but it’s too late; Clete has crossed the highway in a bound and is running across the valley, as fast as only an immortal can go. Porfirio races after him, up that bare yellow hill with its red rocks that still bear faint carbon traces of horror, and he clears the edge of the road in time to hear Clete bellow: “Security! Freeze!”

  “Don’t—” says Porfirio, just as Clete launches himself forward to tackle Robert Ross.