by Kage Baker
The Benthamites followed the tenets of Jeremy Bentham, nineteenth-century social philosopher and reformer. Most of his ideas were fairly radical, for their era: utilitarianism, coercive law, applying calculus as a means of evaluating human happiness. His thinking on mortuary arrangements, however, was truly original.
Why, he asked, were the deceased such slackers? Instead of crumbling away in boxes and reserving to themselves two yards of land that might be put to better use for food production, they ought to be of some service to humanity! He drew the line at cannibalism, but did feel that the human corpse had a host of uses both practical and decorative, which only mere religious superstition prevented from development.
To name but one possible way in which Mortality might serve Utility: attractive persons might have their bodies preserved postmortem and presented to friends as an alternative to statuary. Mr. Bentham himself willed his body to his college in the eager expectation of becoming his own memorial shrine.
Alas, the science of taxidermy wasn’t quite equal to Mr. Bentham’s hopes, and the best efforts only produced a sort of macabre doll that was kept in its own handsome cabinet except when it was annually wheeled out and propped up at memorial dinners. Mr. Bentham faded from the memory of all but his unfortunate beneficiaries and readers of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, until the late twenty-second century when the body of his writings was rediscovered and Benthamism became the latest craze.
Altered, of course, to suit twenty-second century sensibilities. The focus then was on reclaiming the vast acres of real estate lost to public use because they were full of dead bodies. This had become a critical issue on a crowded planet, as over time funerary institutions went bankrupt and abandoned hundreds of square miles of headstone-studded earth.
Enter the Benthamites. Their benevolent organization raised funds to purchase disused memorial parks, which were then carefully excavated. After due archaeological and medical analysis, the bodies were cremated (less dental gold and any personal items with which they might have been buried), the graves were filled in, and the headstones used in the construction of public works buildings. The former cemeteries were rededicated to public use by the living. Low-cost housing, car parks, air transport stations, shopping malls …
And when the new plagues came and devastated that pragmatic world, and the dead outnumbered the living, still the Benthamites continued their good work to the benefit of all. Death had so terrified the moderns that they couldn’t bear contemplation of his white face, mention of his name; the newly dead were whisked away to cremation and never spoken of again. In such an environment, naturally enough the last thing anyone wanted to see on a daily commute or casual drive was a graveyard! So the Benthamites grew in popularity, and therefore in power.
And therefore their ranks were densely infiltrated by the immortal operatives of Dr. Zeus Incorporated.
He usually went by the name of Victor deVere. His immortal body was neatly made and looked well in tailored clothes, so he was something of a dandy. His sharply pointed beard and mustaches were red. His eyes were green and capable of brightness, but generally focused in the flat blank stare of a hunting cat. His skin was white as paper, an unnatural pallor very unusual for an immortal, with shadows like bruises under the bored eyes.
At the crest of Lankershim his car’s propellant motor stalled, and Victor keyed in an order to restart. He drummed his gloved fingers on the dash console while the car growled and thought about it.
As Victor waited, he considered the view spreading out below him: a waste of blowing sand and broken sidewalk that had been the San Fernando Valley, crossed by the unreliable trickle of the Los Angeles River and bounded at the east by the ruin of the old city itself. It was fairly attractive, as ruins went. Morning glory vines had spread rampant over dozens of square miles, hiding and softening the scars of urban war with blue flowers.
The motor started up again, but the car informed Victor that it had lost its programming and asked politely for a destination. Annoyed—for the damned thing had only to go down the hill and around the corner—Victor entered trip coordinates again. The car hummed and sped off with him, down Lankershim and along Forest Lawn Drive, in the shadow of Mount Hollywood.
At the gatehouse the security tech on duty nodded and let him through. He left the car, which was having another directional crisis, and walked on up to the modular shelter—surmounted by its holographic image of Jeremy Bentham’s staring effigy—that was Labienus’s office.
Labienus was sitting out on the deck, enjoying the afternoon sunlight. He was an immortal, a smooth-faced man with the gravitas of a Roman senator, though he had only been a legionary commander. He had clasped his hands about one knee and was smiling out at the old cemetery, which was certainly busier than it had been in its heyday. At the distant edges earth movers filled in looted sites, and along the fence neat rows of potted saplings awaited planting. Nearer in, a flatbed moved slowly between the opened graves, as security techs loaded up coffins to be taken away to the long work shed for evaluation.
“Look at it all, Victor,” said Labienus. “The opened graves, the tombstones strewn about. What’s it remind you of?”
Victor turned to regard the scene. “An old engraving of Judgment Day,” he replied.
“Just what I was thinking!” said Labienus. “Too, too funny, don’t you agree? Another myth brought to life by the Company. Here we are at the end of time and the earth is indeed giving up her dead. And, unless I’m mistaken, this particular spot once had an angelic visitation. Wasn’t it here? It was a movie location before it became a graveyard, I remember.”
Victor accessed briefly. “You’re referring to D. W. Griffith’s films? Angels hovering over a battlefield or some such nonsense?”
“Yes.” Labienus waved a hand. “It was filmed on this very spot. Just picture them here now, blowing their trumpets, dangling above the crypt lids.”
“Hilarious,” Victor told him, and sat down. “You seem happy about something.”
“It’s been a successful day,” said Labienus. “Two celebrity corpses.”
“Really!” remarked Victor. “Who were they?”
“Bette Davis and Stan Laurel,” Labienus informed him.
“Have we got buyers?”
“There are enough parties interested in Davis to put her up for auction. There’s only been one response on Laurel, but it’s the collector who owns Oliver Hardy and is trying for a complete set, so I think the Company can name its own price,” said Labienus, grinning. The sale of human remains was of course strictly illegal, but there were wealthy cinephiles who were willing to pay handsomely for the ultimate in private shrines to the celebrated dead.
“A neat bit of business,” agreed Victor.
“And we’ve located three more Company caches,” Labienus continued, referring to the hermetically sealed coffins that had been filled with loot and buried to preserve them. “Mostly full of mid-to-late-twentieth-century goods. One’s full of first editions of books. The others seem to be paintings and canisters of film.”
“Films, eh? How appropriate.” Victor looked idly at his chronometer. “Care to join me in a gin and tonic before I assail that mountain of correspondence?”
“Yes, thanks,” said Labienus, and stretched luxuriously. He transmitted: Something else, too. Quite a little St. Valentine’s box turned up today.
Victor felt a wave of nausea, but his face showed nothing as he stepped inside the office and opened the refrigeration unit. Found something special, did you?
Oh, yes. AIDS victim named Jason Smith, went to his eternal reward in 2007. He was in our loving hands his last six months and sealed in a biogen box immediately postmortem. The virus had mutated in him, you see, become something really wonderful. It’s been percolating away all this time and ought to make quite a splash.
Victor fished out the gin and tonic and after a moment’s further search found a fresh lime. Methodically he pulled on transparent sanitary gloves over his
white ones. Quite calmly he mixed the drinks and replied: I suppose you’ll need me to escort him somewhere.
China, of course. Again. Population density’s jumped up unacceptably in the last three years. Can’t have that, after all.
Even this close to our conquest? Stolidly Victor cut slices from the lime.
Especially this close.
I suppose I’ll be working with a local operative in the area?
One of our best men: fellow named Hong Tsieh. He’ll do most of the work, actually. You’ll have but to deliver the merchandise.
Easy enough, Victor transmitted, and stepping back out on the deck, handed a drink to Labienus. “Here you are. Cheers, old man.”
“Here’s to health,” said Labienus, snickering at his own joke as he lifted his drink in response. Victor smiled and drank, holding in his mind the image of Labienus’s severed head rolling off the deck and down the hill, perhaps not stopping until it bounced into the river and tumbled away over stones to the sea …
But Labienus’s head did not go down the hill until the rest of him went with it, strolling away to his car, which took him off to his comfortable quarters in the walled enclave of Old Hollywood. Victor retired to his desk in the office and set about answering Labienus’s correspondence, covertly recording everything he found.
There was little of interest to the Company in his communications, nothing to directly implicate Labienus in the Plague Club conspiracy. Labienus was far too careful, and anyway there was no need for proof; the Company knew perfectly well that Labienus had been releasing viruses into the mortal population for centuries. Victor had been told to turn up the contacts, the associates, to draw in gradually the edges of the net. Hong Tsieh, whoever he might be, was the real prize this evening.
Victor forced access to Labienus’s private files and began scrolling through the correspondence file headings, largely out of habit. The texts of the communications were no longer there, of course, cannily long deleted; but one never knew what might turn up. It was, at least, something to do on this miserable posting. Victor had been a mole in Labienus’s organization for just over two centuries now and would gladly have exchanged places with any of the unfortunate residents of Forest Lawn, no matter how transitory their state.
“Sir?” There was a sharp double knock on the door. “Sendeb reports we’ve located another celebrity.”
Victor sighed and pulled his attention away from the scrolling dates. “Which one?”
“Buster Keaton, sir.”
Victor raised his eyebrows. Early cinema pioneers generally commanded high prices, if they were well known. “You’re sure it’s not Diane or Michael?”
“It says Buster on the headstone, sir. He’s in great shape, too.”
“Bring him up here,” Victor ordered. “I’ll notify Sotheby’s tomorrow.”
He settled back and focused on the dates again. To his annoyance, he noted that they had sped by more quickly than he had anticipated: all the way back to June 2083. He scrolled up again and then halted.
There. 15 July 2083. Message from: V. Kalugin. Subject: Concern.
Nothing else. Victor scrolled ahead with infinite care, into 2084 and beyond, but there were no other message headings from V. Kalugin. He withdrew his consciousness from the files and leaned back, folding his gloved hands in his lap, staring at the wall.
Vasilii Kalugin had disappeared long ago. He hadn’t been anybody important within the Company, a Marine Salvage Specialist of low rank, but Victor had been searching for him for decades. Kalugin’s wife had asked him to search, and Victor loved Kalugin’s wife, and so Victor had sought Kalugin faithfully. Honorably, too.
Even so, he had never been able to find a trace of the man beyond a last communication dating from February 2083. Here now was the heading of a message dated four months later, and to Labienus, of all people.
What had been happening in July 2083? Labienus had been busy, to be sure. That was the summer the Sattes virus had swept through the prisons, and then the armed forces, of the world. Labienus had boasted, since, that that had been his finest hour: he’d managed to eliminate the criminals and the warmongers of all nations in one stroke. The virus had begun in late May in North America. By mid-July it had circumnavigated the globe, crossing Siberia to Kamchatka and then working its way down into Japan …
Kamchatka? That had been Kalugin’s last known location. He’d been doing something classified in Kamchatka. But here was proof that at the very moment the Sattes virus had hit there, he’d communicated with Labienus—who was responsible for the virus. Had Kalugin found something out?
Could he have been such a fool as to accuse Labienus directly? Unfortunately, Kalugin had been a fool.
The double knock sounded again. “Sir! We’ve brought him.”
Victor pushed back his chair. He got up and went out to inventory the corpse of Buster Keaton for the Company’s sales catalogue.
Mont St. Michel, 10 August 2330
Following the devastating tsunami of 2198, Mont St. Michel had been rebuilt, almost entirely at Company expense.
Appearances had been preserved—this was France, after all—so the visitor approaching on the air ferry from Jersey might still watch as its fairy-tale spire loomed from the sea mist, as its thirteenth-century battlements and quaint village became visible. Within, however, the granite rock now housed a secure labyrinth of rooms and corridors constructed to withstand wave, wind, earthquake, or bomb blast. The causeway to the mainland had never been rebuilt, for ecological reasons (or so it had been explained at the time) and so the Mont once again enjoyed the protection of violent tides and shifting fields of quicksand.
This cut back on the tourist trade a bit, but the Company (which now owned Mont St. Michel, due to France defaulting on a debt) didn’t mind. Nor did the French, really. The place was exquisitely kept up, and moreover now housed the world-class Grand Musée de Rennes, a glorious shrine to French culture, which anyone might visit if he or she had the proper academic credentials.
Victor didn’t need credentials. He stepped down to the landing pier with the mortal tourists and made his way past the ticket kiosks to a private entrance. The guard posted there nodded and let him in; locked the gate behind him. Three minutes later Victor stepped from an elevator and emerged in the corridor outside the Chief Curator’s private suite. The guards posted there nodded, too, but they paused to transmit news of his arrival to Aegeus before they let him in.
“Victor!” Aegeus half rose behind his desk, smiling. “Have a seat, please.”
He was an immortal, solid and blond, with the look of a respectable public official. His office looked like an antique dealer’s showroom. Victor, seating himself, didn’t bother to stare at the massed wealth there: the paintings by Gericault and Renoir, the Cocteau lithographs, the holosculptures of Marcel Gigue, the gold and crystal and calfskin and teak that had been whisked out of the paths of armies and secured away here, for Aegeus’s private appreciation.
“How was your journey?” Aegeus inquired, settling back in his late-eighteenth-century chair. On the lapel of his suit coat he wore the enamel pin representing a clock face without hands. Among the higher-ranking immortals, the pins had become cynically chic, a perverse statement of identity.
He did not offer Victor a drink from the decanter on the table at his side, though the glasses were Waterford and the ice in the silver bucket was fresh.
“Uneventful,” Victor replied. He proceeded to relate the substance of his conversation with Labienus. Aegeus listened, frowning thoughtfully.
“Hong Tsieh, eh?” he said at last. “Another Facilitator. I’d never have suspected, but we’ll set a trap accordingly. Good work, Victor! Our masters will be pleased with you.”
“What about the other matter?” asked Victor. “The body of Jason Smith. Do you want me to divert it and deliver something harmless?”
Aegeus made a face. “Regrettably … you’ll have to follow through on that one, Victor. Deliver as int
ended.”
Victor blinked. His pale face went a shade paler. “Innocent mortals will die,” he stated in a calm voice.
“Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.” Aegeus smiled sadly and shook his head. “History records the outbreak of a virulent and previously unknown autoimmune disorder in Nangjing in two months’ time. It’ll kill thousands and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. Pity, but there you are. Labienus will pay for it, rest assured.”
Privately Victor doubted this. Aegeus had been assuring him that retribution was just around the corner for Labienus for decades now. There was always some reason to delay his arrest a moment longer, some previously unguessed-at lead that must be followed up.
“So I’m to deliver the, the body as ordered? The disease culture? Work with this Hong Tsieh?” Victor asked.
“I can’t think of anybody else I’d trust with the job,” Aegeus told him, nodding. “It’ll be hard, I know, but you’ve the spine for it. Save any mortals you can, of course. And observe Hong Tsieh closely. This opens up a whole new field of investigation. We’ll need to root his people out, see what they’re up to. I’ll expect a full report in, say, six months’time?”
“Very well,” said Victor, rising to his feet.
“Good man. You’re going straight back to Hollywood, I suppose?”
“I thought I’d overnight in Paris,” Victor answered. “I never miss a chance to stay at Les Andelys if I can manage it.”
“That place where Cazaubin was sous-chef?” Aegeus looked sincerely interested for a moment. “Excellent choice! Do enjoy yourself, please. You’ve certainly earned it.”
He turned with an expression of dismissal and began to study something at the terminal that rose from the surface of his desk. Victor found his own way out.
But he did not go to Paris.
Fez, 11 August 2330
There was a certain quarter of the old city no longer very fashionable, close as it was to the vast power station. Here rose the white wall of a private home, high and nearly featureless, revealing nothing of what might lie beyond it. There was an old door painted blue; far up there were narrow windows, and their carved screens were also painted blue. Anyone who took the trouble to follow the wall around would discover that it enclosed five acres, and would conclude that this was the private compound of some very successful businessman or minor prince.
