Sky Coyote (Company)

by Kage Baker

  Praise for Kage Baker

  “Kage Baker is the greatest natural storyteller to enter the field since Poul Anderson.”

  —Gardner Dozois

  “One of the most consistently entertaining series to appear in the late nineties. The novels read like literary pastiches—echoes of Heinlein and Robert Louis Stevenson fill this one—and the narrative pace matches that of most thrillers.”

  —Amazing Stories

  “Kage Baker has earned praise for her tales of the Company, a future-based outfit that ‘recruits’ throughout time, turns its new troops into immortal cyborgs, and sends them out to fill in the blank spots of history, collect treasure before they are lost, and defend the Company’s interests… . Look for it! Baker does not disappoint!”

  —Analog

  Praise for Sky Coyote

  “Humorous and inventive … an entertaining tale of time travel and mythic adventure.”

  —Library Journal

  “Baker’s second installment in her Company series proves a witty match to In the Garden of Iden … [and a] deliciously wicked platform for satirizing past, present, and all-too-likely future human frailties… . Baker nails her twentieth-century targets: societal, religious, and oh-so-personal hypocrisy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  non“An agreeably subversive, sometimes hilarious entry… .”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sly dialogue and dark secrets … a winner.”

  —Booklist

  Tor Books by Kage Baker

  The Anvil of the World

  The Children of the Company

  Gods and Pawns

  The Graveyard Game

  In the Garden of Iden

  The Life of the World to Come

  The Machine’s Child

  Mendoza in Hollywood

  Sky Coyote

  The Sons of Heaven

  KAGE BAKER

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SKY COYOTE

  Copyright © 1999 by Kage Baker

  Originally published in 1999 by Harcourt Brace & Company

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book,

  or portions thereof, in any form.

  Book design by Trina Stahl

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, Kage.

  Sky coyote / Kage Baker.—1st trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1748-3

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-1748-6

  1. Dr. Zeus Incorporated (Imaginary organization)—Fiction. 2. Immortalism—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. 4. Chumash Indians—California—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A4313S58 2007

  813’.54—dc22

  2007019020

  First Trade Paperback Edition: December 2007

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  To George H. Baker,

  who once spent a very long afternoon

  trying to read Hiawatha to an impatient four-year-old

  so she’d have some sense of his ethnic heritage,

  this book is respectfully dedicated.

  CHAPTER ONE

  YOU’LL UNDERSTAND THIS STORY BETTER if I tell you a lie.

  Well, a myth, anyway. There was this god once, the Greek god of Time. He was a cruel old bastard and he ate all his children as soon as they were born. Zeus, the youngest son, managed to escape; when he grew up, he came back and ended the rule of Time by killing his father. Then he cut him open and set the older children free. King Time is dead; long live King Zeus.

  In the twenty-fourth century, a research and development firm proudly appropriated Zeus as its corporate logo when it developed a method of time travel.

  The method didn’t quite pan out, though. Traveling through time is prohibitively expensive, and there are certain crucial limitations. For example, you can’t go into the future, only backward into the past, and forward again to your point of departure in the present. Another problem is that history cannot be changed. Period. It’s the law.

  However, this law can only be observed to apply to recorded history…

  So the discovery wasn’t a total loss. The company altered its logo slightly and became Dr. Zeus. They were able to make a nice profit looting the past by collecting “lost” works of art and arranging long-term investments. They loaded a database with every event in recorded history and found they still had plenty of uncharted past to move around in. They realized that if the past couldn’t be changed, it could at least be manipulated to Company advantage.

  But who were they going to get to do the actual manipulating? Traveling back in time is rough, if you do it the cost-effective way without extra buffers. Twenty-fourth-century agents bitch about it constantly, and demand extra pay. Fabulously rich corporations never seem to have enough cash, paradoxically enough; though you may really need to send that man back to deposit a certain sum in a certain bank on a certain day in 1806, you’re reluctant to do it unless you’ve got a guarantee it will pay off in six figures. And how many times do you want to lay out money to send people through? Isn’t there a way to cut costs on this?

  Dr. Zeus got its answer reviewing another failed project: immortality.

  Technically it’s possible to make an immortal person. It is not commercially practical. It only works on infants or little children, not middle-aged millionaires; and since middle-aged millionaires are the only ones who could afford to pay for the process, it’s sort of a loss as a market item. In addition, the chosen babies must meet certain stringent physical requirements, and endure years of surgical alteration and training. Not even the most determined millionaire parents, once they knew what it entailed, would put their little Gloria or Donald Jr. through such an ordeal.

  So, you can’t sell immortality. On the other hand, if you’re looking for Company agents who will work loyally without health insurance and never, ever retire …

  They sent a team back to Lower Paleolithic times. A permanent base was established; equipment was shipped back, too. The original team went about collecting little Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. These kids were then implanted, augmented, amplified, fortified, hopped up, switched on, tuned in, and thoroughly indoctrinated. They were given the whole harvest of human knowledge and culture from the other end of time; the books, the music, the cinema. They grew up, these superüberkinder, and when the last nasty mortal tissues had been well and truly excised, the base technicians handed them the keys to the lab and said: You take over. We’re going home.

  So, see what was accomplished with just one round trip? You don’t send your agents back and forth through time; you recrui
t them at the beginning and let them walk forward through time in the ordinary way. Outlay for the project was kept to a minimum, and now Dr. Zeus had immortal operatives working for it, strategically placed at every important event in history. Of course, they were promised a golden future when they finally got to the future. Though that hasn’t happened yet …

  And the immortals made more immortals, though not in the usual way, because they had all been very carefully sterilized; suitable infants were selected from the mortal population and processed at remote bases inaccessible to marauding primitives. More bases were built, more secret Company projects were inaugurated, and the fix, as they say, was in.

  Dr. Zeus ruled the world. Covertly, of course.

  By now you’ve probably got a mental image of these immortals. You’re only mortal yourself, and the idea of a deathless, perfect race makes you uncomfortable—and maybe just a little hostile—so you imagine them intellectual and emotionless. Stuck up, too. You’re probably thinking they all look like vampires or superheroes, tall and steely-eyed, the men with bulging biceps and the women gorgeous in a chilly sort of way.

  Well, you’re wrong. The truth is, they look just like you, and why shouldn’t they? They used to be human beings.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE YEAR IS 1699 A.D., the place is South America: deepest jungle, green shadows, slanting bars of sunlight, a dark rich overripe smell. Jaguars on the prowl. Orchids in bloom. Little birds and monkeys making continuous little bird and monkey noises in the background.

  And here’s the Lost City in the middle of the jungle: sudden acres of sunlight and silence in the middle of all that malarial gloom. Red and white stucco pyramids. Steps and courtyards and avenues, straight as a die. Straighter. Really impressive architecture out in the middle of nowhere. Gods and kings carved all over the place.

  And here’s the intrepid Spanish Jesuit, our hero. You couldn’t mistake him for anything else. He’s got those little black raisin eyes Spanish priests are supposed to have, but with a sort of twinkly expression the masters of the Inquisition usually lack. He’s got the black robe, the boots, the crucifix; he’s short—well, let’s say “compact of build”—and is of olive complexion. Needs a shave.

  He approaches cautiously through the jungle, and his cute little eyes widen as he beholds the Lost City. From somewhere within his robe he produces a square of folded sheepskin, and opens it to study a complicated design penned in red and blue inks. He seems to orient himself, and proceeds quickly to a wall embellished with scowling plaster monsters whose terrifying rage seems to keep even the lianas and orchids from encroaching on them. He makes his way along the perimeter, then: ten meters, twenty meters, thirty, and comes at last to the Jaguar Gate.

  This is a magnificent towering megalith kind of a thing of red plaster, surmounted by a green stone lintel on which two jaguars are carved in bas-relief, upright and rampant in fighting poses, with eyes and claws inlaid in gold. Nay, but there’s more: no actual gate occupies this gateway, no rusting bars of iron, oh no. Instead a solid wave of faint blue light shimmers there, obscuring slightly the view of the fabulous city beyond. If you have really good hearing (and the Spanish Jesuit has), you can just perceive that the blue light is humming slightly, crackling, buzzing.

  And what’s this in nasty little heaps around the base of the gateway? Lots of fried bugs and a fried bird or two, and—gosh, the Spanish Jesuit doesn’t even want to think about what that blackened and twisted thing is over there, the one reaching out with a skeletal claw to the blue light. Probably just a dead monkey, though.

  Peering at the detail of the pictographic inscription that runs up one side of the gateway, the Jesuit finds what he has been searching for: a tiny black slot in the face of a parrot-deity who’s either beheading a prisoner or fertilizing a banana plant, depending on how good your knowledge of pictographs is. After observing it closely, the Jesuit reaches into a small leather pouch at his belt. He brings out an artifact, a golden key of strange and unkeylike design. How did this Spanish Jesuit come by such a key? Did he read about its fabled existence in some long-forgotten volume moldering in the libraries of the Escorial? Did he track its whereabouts across the New World, following a long-obscured trail through unspeakable dangers? Your guess is as good as mine. Holding his breath, he inserts it into the slot in the parrot-god’s beak.

  At once there is a high-pitched shrilling noise, and the Spanish Jesuit knows, without being told, that someone has been alerted to his presence there. Maybe several someones. The blue light falters and blinks out for a second. Seizing his opportunity, the Spanish Jesuit leaps through the gateway, moving remarkably quickly for a man in a long cassock. No sooner has he landed on the pavement beyond than the blue light snaps back on, and a mosquito who was attempting to follow the Spanish Jesuit meets a terrible, though not untimely, death in a burst of sparks. The Spanish Jesuit breathes a sigh of relief. He has gained entrance to the Lost City.

  Making his way through this awesome pile of arcane geometry, he finds a shaded courtyard where a fountain splashes. Here are tables and seats carved from stone. He sits down. There’s a stiff sheet of calligraphied parchment lying on the table. He leans forward to peer at it with interest. A shadow appears across an archway, and he looks up to see the Ancient Mayan.

  Again, this is a guy you identify immediately. Feathered headdress, jaguarskin kilt, silky black pageboy bob. Hooked nose and high cheekbones. A sad and sneering countenance, appropriate on a member of a long-vanished empire. Is this the end for the Spanish Jesuit?

  No, because the Ancient Mayan bows so his green plumes curl and bounce forward, and he inquires:

  “How may I serve the Son of Heaven?”

  The Jesuit looks down at the parchment.

  “Well, the Margarita Grande looks pretty good. On the rocks, with salt, okay? And make that two. I’m expecting a friend.”

  “Okay,” replies the Ancient Mayan, and glides away silently.

  Boy, I love moments like this. I really enjoy watching the illusion coming into sharp contrast with the reality. I imagine the shock of the imaginary viewer, who must think he’s walked into a British comedy sketch. You know why I’ve survived in this job, year after year, lousy assignment after lousy assignment, with no counseling whatsoever? Because I have a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. Also because I have no choice.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SO I’M SITTING HERE WAITING for the Mayan guy to come back with our cocktails, and I’m understandably a little jumpy, because I’m meeting someone I haven’t seen in, oh, a while, and we didn’t part on the best of terms. When mortals are nervous, their senses are heightened, they notice all kinds of little details they’re ordinarily unaware of. Imagine how it is with us.

  Like I notice: the sound of tennis balls, far off, rebounding. Leisure. The sound of toilets flushing, wow, think of all that expensive plumbing. The smell of the jungle isn’t any worse than, say, a terrarium in bad need of a cleaning, and it’s pretty much blocked out anyway by the dominating aromas of this place: colognes. Antiperspirants. Cultivated flowers. Refrigerated food all nice and fresh. I can even smell fabric: starched napkins and tablecloths and bed linens, and not one spot of mildew on anything, and this is in the tropics, yet.

  As I sit marveling at the luxury of New World One, she comes into range. I pick her up about twenty-five meters to the right and two meters down, steadily ascending, must be stairs beyond that arch. She’s moving at four point six kilometers an hour. I hear the footsteps on the staircase now, and through the arch I see her rising: head, then shoulders, then the white brocade of her gown.

  She paused on the top step and looked at me.

  She’d been one of those Galicians with white skin and red hair; could have passed for an Irishwoman, or English, even, until you saw her eyes. They were black. They had a hard stare, an expression of… disdain is too mild a word. Disgust, that’s it, whether at me or the world or God, I could never tell.

  But it had
been a long time, and maybe she’d even forgotten about what’s-his-name. I took a deep breath and smiled.

  “Well, well. Little Mendoza.” And I stood and summoned every ounce of belief in the scene we presented. Father confessor extends welcome to young noblewoman.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “No, sorry,” I replied. “The robe’s got you fooled.”

  “What a little pudding face you have with your beard and mustache shaved off.”

  “I missed you too,” I said gallantly, gesturing to a seat. After a moment’s hesitation she approached and sat down, and I sat too, and the Mayan very providentially brought our cocktails.

  “You got my transmission, then.” It’s safe to begin with the obvious.

  “I did.” She arranged the train of her gown, not looking at me.

  “So.” I leaned back after the first sip. “Been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “One hundred and forty-four years.” No, she hadn’t forgotten about what’s-his-name. “Since Portsmouth. I’m taller than you are, too. I wonder why I never noticed that before.”

  “You’re wearing high heels.”

  “Could be.” She raised her glass and considered it. She was being too much of a lady to bite the lime, but she did lick the salt.

  “I like your ensemble. Bonnet à la Fontagnes, isn’t it? Boy, they really keep up with fashion here, don’t they? That’s the exact style they were wearing in Madrid when I left.”

  “I should hope so.” She sneered. “You think courtiers fuss about their clothes? Hang around here a few years.”

  “If I remember right, you used to like new fashions.”

  “Less important now. I don’t know why. I’m very comfortable here, actually. Sanitation, good food, peace and quiet. Nothing to disturb my work but the social occasions, and I manage to get out of most of those.”