"Kage Baker - Son Observe the Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

Kage Baker - Son Observe the Time

Kage Baker: Son Observe the Time
On the eve of destruction we had oysters and champagne.
Don’t suppose for a moment that we had any desire to lord it over the poor mortals of San Francisco, in that month of April in that year of 1906; but things weren’t going to be so gracious there again for a long while, and we felt an urge to fortify ourselves against the work we were to do.
And who were we, you may ask? The present-time operatives of Dr. Zeus Incorporated, a twenty-fourth century cabal of investors who have presided over the development of immortality and time travel, amongst other things. Neither of those inventions are terribly practical, I regret to say; nevertheless they can be utilized to provide a satisfactory profit for Company shareholders. Assuming, of course, that we immortals–their servants–are able to perform our tasks in a satisfactory manner.
London before the Great Fire, Delhi before the Mutiny, even Chicago–I was there and I can tell you, it requires a great deal of mental and emotional self-discipline to live side by side with mortals in a Salvage Zone. You must look, daily, into the smiling faces of those who are to lose all, and walk beside them in the knowledge that nothing you can do will affect their fates. Even the most prosaic of places has a sort of haunted glory at such times; judge then how it looked to us, that gilded fantastical butterfly of a city, quite unprepared for its approaching holocaust.
The place was made even queerer by the fact that there were so many Company operatives there at the time. The very ether hummed with our transmissions. In any street you might have seen us dismounting from carriages or the occasional automobile, we immortal gentlemen tipping our derbies to the ladies, our immortal ladies responding with a graceful inclination of their picture hats, smiling as we met each other’s terrified eyes. We dined at the Palace and as guests at Nob Hill mansions; promenaded in Golden Gate Park, drove out to Woodward Gardens, attended the theater and everywhere saw the pale set faces of our own kind, busy with their own particular preparations against what was to come.
Some of us had less pleasant places to go. I was grateful that I was not required to brave the Chinese labyrinth by Waverly Place, but my associate Pan had certain business there amongst the Celestials. I myself was obliged to venture, too many times, into the boarding-houses south of Market Street. Beneath the Fly Trap was a Company safe house and HQ; we’d meet there sometimes, Pan and I, at the end of a long day in our respective ghettoes, and we’d sit shaking together over a brace of stiff whiskies. Thus heartened, it was time for a costume change: dock laborer into gentleman for me, coolie into cook for him, and so home by cable car.
I lodged in two rooms on Bush Street. I will not say I slept there; one does not rest well on the edge of the maelstrom. But it was a place to keep one’s trunk, and to operate the Company credenza necessary for facilitating the missions of those operatives whose case officer I was. Salvaging is a terribly complicated affair, requiring as it does that one hide in History’s shadow until the last possible moment before snatching one’s quarry from its preordained doom. One must be organized and thoroughly coordinated; and timing is everything.
On the morning of the tenth of April I was working there, sending a progress report, when there came a brisk knock at my door. Such was my concentration that I was momentarily unmindful of the fact that I had no mortal servants to answer it. When I heard the impatient tapping of a small foot on the step, I hastened to the door.
I admitted Nan D’Araignee, one of our Art Preservation specialists. She is an operative of West African origin with exquisite features, slender and slight as a doll carved of ebony. I had worked with her briefly near the end of the previous century. She is quite the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and happily married to another immortal, a century before I ever laid eyes on her. Timing, alas, is everything.
"Victor." She nodded. "Charming to see you again."
"Do come in." I bowed her into my parlor, acutely conscious of its disarray. Her bright gaze took in the wrinkled laundry cast aside on the divan, the clutter of unwashed teacups, the half-eaten oyster loaf on the credenza console, six empty sauterne bottles and one smudgily thumbprinted wineglass. She was far too courteous to say anything, naturally, and occupied herself with the task of removing her gloves.
"I must apologize for the condition of the place," I stammered. "My duties have kept me out a good deal." I swept a copy of the Examiner from a chair. "Won’t you sit down?"
"Thank you." She took the seat and perched there, hands folded neatly over her gloves and handbag. I pulled over another chair, intensely irritated at my clumsiness.
"I trust your work goes well?" I inquired, for there is of course no point in asking one of us if we are well. "And, er, Kalugin’s? Or has he been assigned elsewhere?"
"He’s been assigned to Marine Transport, as a matter of fact," she told me, smiling involuntarily. "We are to meet on the Thunderer afterward. I am so pleased! He’s been in the Bering Sea for two years, and I’ve missed him dreadfully."
"Ah," I said. "How pleasant, then, to have something to look forward to in the midst of all this. . . ."
She nodded quickly, understanding. I cleared my throat and continued:
"What may I do for you, Nan?"
She averted her gaze from dismayed contemplation of the stale oyster loaf and smiled. "I was told you might be able to assist me in requisitioning additional transport for my mission."
"I shall certainly attempt it." I stroked my beard. "Your present arrangements are unsuitable?"
"Inadequate, rather. You may recall that I’m in charge of Presalvage at the Hopkins Gallery. It seems our original estimates of what we can rescue there were too modest. At present I have five vans arranged for to evacuate the Gallery contents, but really we need more. Would it be possible to requisition a sixth? My own case officer was unable to assist me, but felt you might have greater success."
This was a challenge. Company resources were strained to the utmost on this operation, which was one of the largest on record. Every operative in the United States had been pressed into service, and many of the European and Asian personnel. A handsome allotment had been made for transport units, but needs were swiftly exceeding expectations.
"Of course I should like to help you," I replied cautiously, "if at all possible. You are aware, however, that horsedrawn transport utilization is impossible, due to the subsonic disturbances preceding the earthquake–and motor transports are, unfortunately, in great demand–"
A brewer’s wagon rumbled down the street outside, rattling my windows. We both leaped to our feet, casting involuntary glances at the ceiling; then sat down in silent embarrassment. Mme. D’Araignee gave a little cough. "I’m so sorry–My nerves are simply–"
"Not at all, not at all, I assure you–one can’t help flinching–"
"Quite. In any case, Victor, I understand the logistical difficulties involved; but even a handcart would greatly ease our difficulties. So many lovely and unexpected things have been discovered in this collection, that it really would be too awful to lose them to the fire."
"Oh, certainly." I got up and strode to the windows, giving in to the urge to look out and assure myself that the buildings hadn’t begun to sway yet. Solid and seemingly as eternal as the pyramids they stood there, for the moment. I turned back to Mme. D’Araignee as a thought occurred to me. "Tell me, do you know how to operate an automobile?"
"But of course!" Her face lit up.
"It may be possible to obtain something in that line. Depend upon it, Madame, you will have your sixth transport. I shall see to it personally."
"I knew I could rely on you." She rose, all smiles. We took our leave of one another with a courtesy that belied our disquiet. I saw her out and returned to my credenza keyboard.
QUERY, I input, RE: REQUISITION ADDTNL TRANSPORT MOTOR VAN OR AUTO? PRIORITY RE: HOPKINS INST.
HOPKINS PROJECT NOT YOUR CASE, came the green and flashing reply.
NECESSARY, I input. NEW DISCV OVRRIDE SECTION AUTH. PLEASE FORWARD REQUEST PRIORITY.
WILL FORWARD.
That was all. So much for my chivalrous impulse, I thought, and watched as the transmission screen winked out and returned me to my status report on the Nob Hill Presalvage work. I resumed my entry of the Gilded Age loot tagged for preservation.
When I had transmitted it, I stood and paced the room uneasily. How long had I been hiding in here? What I wanted was a meal and a good stretch of the legs, I told myself sternly. Fresh air, in so far as that was available in any city at the beginning of this twentieth century. I scanned the oyster loaf and found it already pulsing with bacteria. Pity. After disposing of it in the dustbin I put on my coat and hat, took my stick and went out to tread the length of Bush Street with as bold a step as I could muster.
It was nonsense, really, to be frightened. I’d be out of the city well before the first shock. I’d be safe on air transport bound for London before the first flames rose. London, the other City. I could settle into a chair at my club and read a copy of Punch that wasn’t a month old, secure in the knowledge that the oak beams above my head were fixed and immovable as they had been since the days when I’d worn a powdered wig, as they would be until German shells came raining down decades from now. . . .
Shivering, I dismissed thoughts of the Blitz. Plenty of life to think about, surely! Here were bills posted to catch my eye: I might go out to the Pavilion at Woodward’s to watch the boxing exhibition–Jack Joyce and Bob Ward featured. There was delectable vaudeville at the Orpheum, I was assured, and gaiety girls out at the Chutes, to say nothing of a spectacular sideshow recreation of the Johnstown Flood . . . perhaps not in the best of taste, under the present circumstances.
I might imbibe Gold Seal Champagne to lighten my spirits, though I didn’t think I would; Veuve Cliquot was good enough for me. Ah, but what about a bottle of Chianti, I thought, arrested by the bill of fare posted in the window of a corner restaurant. Splendid culinary fragrances wafted from within. Would I have grilled veal chops here? Would I go along Bush to the Poodle Dog for Chicken Chaud-Froid Blanc? Would I venture to Grant in search of yellow silk banners for duck roasted in some tiny Celestial kitchen? Then again, I knew of a Swiss place where the cook was a Hungarian, and prepared a light and crisply fried Wienerschnitzel to compare with any I’d had . . . or I might just step into a saloon and order another oyster loaf to take home. . . .
No, I decided, veal chops would suit me nicely. I cast a worried eye up at the building–pity this structure wasn’t steel-framed–and proceeded inside.
It was one of those dark, robust places within, floor thickly strewn with fresh sawdust not yet kicked into little heaps. I took my table as any good operative does, back to the wall and a clear path to the nearest exit. Service was poor, as apparently their principal waiter was late today, but the wine was excellent. I found it bright on the palate, just what I’d wanted, and the chops when they came were redolent of herbs and fresh olive oil. What a consolation Appetite can be.
Yes, Life, that was the thing to distract one from unwise thoughts. Savor the wine, I told myself, observe the parade of colorful humanity, breathe in the fragrance of the joss sticks and the seafood and the gardens of the wealthy, listen to the smart modern city with its whirring steel parts at the service of its diverse inhabitants. The moment is all, surely.
I dined in some isolation, for the luncheon crowd had not yet emerged from the nearby offices and my host remained in the kitchen, arguing with the cook over the missing waiter’s character and probable ancestry. Even as I amused myself by listening, however, I felt a disturbance approaching the door. No temblor yet, thank Heaven, but a tempest of emotions. I caught the horrifying mental images before ever I heard the stifled weeping. In another moment he had burst through the door, a young male mortal with a prodigious black mustache, quite nattily dressed but with his thick hair in wild disarray. As soon as he was past the threshold his sobs burst out unrestrained, at a volume that would have done credit to Caruso.
This brought his employer out of the back at once, blurting out the first phrases of furious denunciation. The missing waiter (for so he was) staggered forward and thrust out that day’s Chronicle. The headlines, fully an inch tall, checked the torrent of abuse: MANY LOSE THEIR LIVES IN GREAT ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS.
The proprietor of the restaurant, struck dumb, went an ugly ashen color. He put the fingertips of one hand in his mouth and bit down hard. In a broken voice, the waiter described the horrors: Roof collapsed in church in his own village. His own family might even now lie dead, buried in ash. The proprietor snatched the paper and cast a frantic eye over the columns of print. He sank to his knees in the sawdust, sobbing. Evidently he had family in Naples, too.
I stared at my plate. I saw grey and rubbery meat, congealing grease, seared bone with the marrow turned black. In the midst of life we are in death, but it doesn’t do to reflect upon it while dining.
"You must, please, excuse us, sir," the proprietor said to me, struggling to his feet. "There has been a terrible tragedy." He set the Chronicle beside my plate so I could see the blurred rotogravure picture of King Victor Emmanuel. Report That Total Number Of Dead May Reach Seven Hundred, I read. Towns Buried Under Ashes and Many Caught in Ruined Buildings. MANY BUILDINGS CRUSHED BY ASHES. Of course, I had known about the coming tragedy; but it was on the other side of the world, the business of other Company operatives, and I envied them that their work was completed now.
"I am so very sorry, sir," I managed to say, looking up at my host. He thought my pallor was occasioned by sympathy: he could not know I was seeing his mortal face like an apparition of the days to come, and it was grey and charring, for he lay dead in the burning ruins of a boarding house in the Mission District. Horror, yes, impossible not to feel horror, but one cannot empathize with them. One must not.
They went into the kitchen to tell the cook and I heard weeping break out afresh. Carefully I took up the newspaper and perused it. Perhaps there was something here that might divert me from the unpleasantness of the moment? Embezzlement. A crazed admirer stalking an actress. Charlatan evangelists. Grisly murder committed by two boys. Deadly explosion. Crazed derelict stalking a bank president. Los Angeles school principals demanding academic standards lowered.
I dropped the paper, and, leaving five dollars on the table, I fled that place.
I walked briskly, not looking into the faces of the mortals I passed. I rode the cable car, edging away from the mortal passengers. I nearly ran through the green expanse of Golden Gate Park, dodging around the mortal idlers, the lovers, the nurses wheeling infants in perambulators, until at last I stood on the shore of the sea. Tempting to turn to look at the fairy castles perched on its cliffs; tempting to turn to look at the carnival of fun along its grey sand margin, but the human comedy was the last thing I wanted just then. I needed, rather, the chill and level grace of the steel-colored horizon, sun-glistering, wide-expanding. The cold salt wind buffeted me, filled my grateful lungs. Ah, the immortal ocean.
Consider the instructive metaphor: Every conceivable terror dwells in her depths; she receives all wreckage, refuse, corruption of every kind, she pulls down into her depths human calamity indescribable: but none of this is any consideration to the sea. Let the screaming mortal passengers fight for room in the lifeboats, as the wreck belches flame and settles below the extinguishing wave; next morning she’ll still be beautiful and serene, her combers no less white, her distances as blue, her seabirds no less graceful as they wheel in the pure air. What perfection, to be so heartless. An inspiration to any lesser immortal.
As I stood so communing with the elements, a mortal man came wading out of the surf. I judged him two hundred pounds of athletic stockbroker, muscles bulging under sagging wet wool, braving the icy water as an act of self-disciplinary sport. He stood for a moment on one leg, examining the sole of his other foot. There was something gladiatorial in his pose. He looked up and saw me.
"A bracing day, sir," he shouted.
"Quite bracing." I nodded and smiled. I could feel the frost patterns of my returning composure.
And so I boarded another streetcar and rode back into the mortal warren, and found my way by certain streets to the Barbary Coast. Not a place a gentleman cares to admit to visiting, especially when he’s known the gilded beauties of old Byzantium or Regency-era wenches; the raddled pleasures available on Pacific Street suffered by comparison. But Appetite is Appetite, after all, and there is nothing like it to take one’s mind off unpleasant thoughts.
* * *
"Your costume," the attendant pushed a pasteboard carton across the counter to me. "Personal effects and field equipment. Linen, trousers, suspenders, boots, shirt, vest, coat and hat." He frowned. "Phew! These should have been laundered. Would you care to be fitted with an alternate set?"
"That’s all right." I took the offending rags. "The sweat goes with the role, I’m afraid. Irish laborer."
"Ah." He took a step backward. "Well, break a leg."
"Thank you."
Fifteen minutes later I emerged from a dressing room the very picture of an immigrant yahoo, uncomfortably conscious of my clammy and odiferous clothing. I sidled into the canteen, hoping there wouldn’t be a crowd in the line for coffee. There wasn’t, at that: most of the diners were clustered around one operative over in a corner, so I stood alone watching the Food Service technician fill my thick china mug from a dented steel coffee urn. The fragrant steam was a welcome distraction from my own fragrancy. I found a solitary table and warmed my hands on my dark brew there in peace, until an operative broke loose from the group and approached me.
"Say, Victor!"
I knew him slightly, an American operative so young one could scan him and still discern the scar tissue from his Augmentations. He was one of my Presalvagers.
"Good morning, Averill."
"Say, you really ought to listen to that fellow over there. He’s got some swell stories." He paused only long enough to have his cup refilled, then came and pulled out a chair across from me. "Know who he is? He’s the Guy Who Follows Caruso Around!"
"Is he?"
"Sure is. Music Specialist Grade One! That boy’s wired for sound. He’s caught every performance Caruso’s ever given, even the church stuff when he was a kid. Going to get him in Carmen the night before You-Know-What, going to record the whole performance. He’s just come back from planting receivers in the footlights! Say, have you gotten tickets yet?"
"No, I haven’t. I’m not interested, actually."
"Not interested?" he exclaimed. "Why aren’t you–how can’t you be interested? It’s Caruso, for God’s sake!"
"I’m perfectly aware of that, Averill, but I’ve got a prior engagement. And, personally, I’ve always thought de Reszke was much the better tenor."
"De Reszke?" He scanned his records to place the name and, while doing so, absently took a great gulp of coffee. A second later he clutched his ear and gasped. "Christ Almighty!"
"Steady, man." I suppressed a smile. "You don’t want to gulp beverages over 60 degrees Celsius, you know. There’s some very complex circuitry placed near the Eustachian tube that gets unpleasantly hot if you do."
"Ow, ow, ow!" He sucked in air, staring at me with the astonishment of the very new operative. It always takes them a while to discover that immortality and intense pain are not strangers, indeed can reside in the same eternal house for quite lengthy periods of time. "Should I drink some ice water?"
"By no means, unless you want some real discomfort. You’ll be all right in a minute or so. As I was about to say, I have some recordings of Jean de Reszke I’ll transmit to you, if you’re interested in comparing artists."
"Thanks, I’d like that." Averill ran a hasty self-diagnostic.
"And how is your team faring over at the New Brunswick, by the way? No cases of nerves, no blue devils?"
"Hell no." Averill started to lift his coffee again and then set it down respectfully.
"Doesn’t bother you that the whole place will be ashes in a few days’ time, and most of your neighbors dead?"
"No. We’re all okay over there. We figure it’s just a metaphor for the whole business, isn’t it? I mean, sooner or later this whole world–" he made a sweeping gesture, palm outward– "as we know it, is going the same way, right? So what’s it matter if it’s the earthquake finishes it now or a wrecking ball someplace further on in time, right? Same thing with the people. It’ll all come to the same thing in the end, so there’s no reason to get personally upset about it, is there? No, sir. Specially since we’ll all still be alive."
"A commendable attitude." I had a sip of my coffee. "And your work goes well?"
"Yes sir." He grinned. "You will be so proud of us burglary squad fellows when you get our next list. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we’re finding! All kinds of objets d’art, looks like. One-of-a-kind items, by God. Wait’ll you see."
"I look forward to it." I glanced at my Chronometer and drank down the rest of my coffee, having waited for it to descend to a comfortable 59 degrees Celsius. "But, you know, Averill, it really won’t do to think of yourselves as burglars."
"Well–that is–it’s only a figure of speech, anyhow!" Averill protested, flushing. "A joke!"
"I’m aware of that, but I cannot emphasize enough that we are not stealing anything." I set my coffee cup down, aware that I sounded priggish, and looked sternly at him. "We’re preserving priceless examples of late Victorian craftsmanship for the edification of future generations."
"I know." Averill looked at me sheepishly, "But–aw, hell, do you mean to say not one of those crystal chandeliers will wind up in some Facilitator General’s private HQ somewhere?"
"That’s an absurd idea," I told him, though I knew only too well it wasn’t. Still, it doesn’t do to disillusion one’s subordinates too young. "And now, will you excuse me? I mustn’t be late for work."
"All right. Be seeing you!"
As I left he rejoined the admiring throng about the fellow who was telling Caruso stories. My way lay along the bright tiled hall, steamy and echoing with the clatter of food preparation and busy operatives; then through the dark security vestibule, with its luminous screens displaying the world without; then through the concealed door that shut behind me and left no trace of itself to any eyes but my own. I drew a deep breath. Chill and silent morning air; no glimmer of light, yet, at least not down here in the alley. Half-past-five. This time three days hence–
I shivered and found my way out in the direction of the waterfront.
Not long afterward I arrived at the loading area where I had been desultorily employed for the last month. I made my entrance staggering slightly, doing my best to murder "You Can’t Guess Who Flirted With Me" in a gravelly baritone.
The mortal laborers assembled there turned to stare at me. My best friend, an acquaintance I’d cultivated painstakingly these last three weeks, came forward and took me by the arm.
"Jesus, Kelly, you’d better stow that. Where’ve you been?"
I stopped singing and gave him a belligerent stare. "Marching in the Easter Parade, O’Neil."
"O, like enough." He ran his eyes over me in dismay. Francis O’Neil was thirty years old. He looked enough like me to have been taken for my somewhat bulkier, clean-shaven brother. "What’re you doing this for, man? You know Herlihy doesn’t like you as it is. You look like you’ve not been home to sleep nor bathe since Friday night!"
"So I have not." I dropped my gaze in hungover remorse.
"Come on, you poor stupid bastard, I’ve got some coffee in my dinner pail. Sober up. Was it a letter you got from your girl again?"
"It was." I let him steer me to a secluded area behind a mountain of crates and accepted the tin cup he filled for me with lukewarm coffee. "She doesn’t love me, O’Neil. She never did. I can tell."
"Now, then, you’re taking it all the wrong way, I’m sure. I can’t believe she’s stopped caring, not after all the things you’ve told me about her. Just drink that down, now. Mary made it fresh not an hour ago."
"You’re a lucky man, Francis." I leaned on him and began to weep, slopping the coffee. He forbore with the patience of a saint and replied:
"Sure I am, Jimmy, And shall I tell you why? Because I know when to take my drink, don’t I? I don’t swill it down every payday and forget to go home, do I? No indeed. I’d lose Mary and the kids and all the rest of it, wouldn’t I? It’s self-control you need, Jimmy, and the sorrows in your heart be damned. Come on now. With any luck Herlihy won’t notice the state you’re in."
But he did, and a litany of scorn was pronounced on my penitent head. I took it with eyes downcast, turning my battered hat in my hands, and a dirtier nor more maudlin drunk could scarce have been seen in that city. I would be summarily fired, I was assured, but they needed men today so bad they’d employ even the likes of me, though by God next time–
When the boss had done excoriating me I was dismissed to help unload a cargo of copra from the Nevadan, in from the islands yesterday. I sniveled and tottered and managed not to drop anything much; O’Neil stayed close to me the whole day, watchful lest I pass out or wander off. He was a good friend to the abject caricature I presented; God knows why he cared. Well, I should repay his kindness, at least, though in a manner he would never have the opportunity to appreciate.
We sweated until four in the afternoon, when there was nothing left to take off the Nevadan; let go then with directions to the next day’s job, and threats against slackers.
"Now, Kelly." O’Neil took my arm and steered me with him back toward Market Street. "I’ll tell you what I think you ought to do. Go home and have a bit of a wash in the basin, right? Have you clean clothes? So, put on a clean shirt and trousers and see can you scrape some of that off your boots. Then come over to supper at our place, see. Mary’s bought some sausages, we thought we’d treat ourselves to a dish of Coddle now that Lent’s over. We’ve plenty."
"I will, then." I grasped his hand. "O’Neil, you’re a lord for courtesy."
"I am not. Only go home and wash, man!"
We parted in front of the Terminal Hotel and I hurried back to the HQ to follow his instructions. This was just the sort of chance I’d been angling for since I’d sought out the man on the basis of the Genetic Survey team report.
An hour later, as cleanly as the character I played was likely to be able to make himself, I ventured along Market Street, heading down in the direction of the tenement where O’Neil and his family lived, the boarding houses in the shadow of the Palace Hotel. I knew their exact location, though O’Neil was of course unaware of that; accordingly he had sent a pair of his children down to the corner to watch for me.
They failed to observe my approach, however, and I really couldn’t blame them; for proceeding down Market Street before me, moving slowly between the gloom of twilight and the electric illumination of the shop signs, was an apparition in a scarlet tunic and black shako.
It walked with the stiff and measured tread of the automaton it was pretending to be. The little ragged girl and her littler brother stared openmouthed, watching its progress along the sidewalk. It performed a brief business of marching mindlessly into a lamppost and walking inexorably in place there a moment before righting itself and going on, but now on an oblique course toward the children.
I too continued on my course, smiling a little. This was delightful: a mortal pretending to be a mechanical toy being followed by a cyborg pretending to be a mortal.
There was a wild reverberation of mirth in the ether around me. One other of our kind was observing the scene, apparently; but there was a gigantic quality to the amusement that made me falter in my step. Who was that? That was someone I knew, surely. Quo Vadis? I transmitted. The laughter shut off like an electric light being switched out, but not before I got a sense of direction from it. I looked across the street and just caught a glimpse of a massive figure disappearing down an alley. My visual impression was of an old miner, one of the mythic founders of this city. Old gods walking? What a ridiculous idea, and yet . . . what a moment of panic it evoked, of mortal dread, quite irrational.
But the figure in the scarlet tunic had reached the children. Little Ella clutched her brother’s hand, stock-still on the pavement: little Donal shrank behind his sister, but watched with one eye as the thing loomed over them.
It bent forward, slowly, in increments, as though a gear ratcheted in its spine to lower it down to them. Its face was painted white, with red circles on the cheeks and a red cupid’s bow mouth under the stiff black mustaches. Blank glassy eyes did not fix on them, did not seem to see anything, but one white-gloved hand came up jerkily to offer the little girl a printed handbill.
After a frozen motionless moment she took it from him. "Thank you, Mister Soldier," she said in a high clear voice. The figure gave no sign that it had heard, but unbent slowly, until it stood ramrod-straight again; pivoted sharply on its heel and resumed its slow march down Market Street.
"Soldier go." Donal pointed. Ella peered thoughtfully at the handbill.
" ‘CH-IL-DREN,’ " she read aloud. What an impossibly sweet voice she had. "And that’s an Exclamation Point, there. ‘Babe–Babies, In, To–Toy–’ "
" ‘Toyland,’ " I finished for her. She looked up with a glad cry.
"There you are, Mister Kelly. Donal, this is Mister Kelly. He is Daddy’s good friend. Supper will be on the table presently. Won’t you please come with us, Mister Kelly?"
"I should be delighted to." I touched the brim of my hat. They pattered away down an alley, making for the dark warren of their tenement, and I followed closely.
They were different physical types, the brother and sister. Pretty children, certainly, particularly Ella with her glossy black braids, with her eyes the color of the twilight framed by black lashes. But it is not beauty we look for in a child.
It was the boy I watched closely as we walked, a sturdy three-year-old trudging along holding tight to the girl’s hand. I couldn’t have told you the quality nor shade of his skin, nor his hair nor his eyes; I cared only that his head appeared to be a certain shape, that his little body appeared to fit a certain profile, that his limbs appeared to be a certain length in relation to one another. I couldn’t be certain yet, of course: that was why I had maneuvered his father into the generous impulse of inviting me into his home.
They lived down a long dark corridor toward the back of the building, its walls damp with sweat, its air heavy with the odors of cooking, of washing, of mortal life. The door opened a crack as we neared it and then, slowly, opened wide to reveal O’Neil standing there in a blaze of light. The blaze was purely by contrast to our darkness, however; once we’d crossed the threshold, I saw that two kerosene lamps were all the illumination they had.
"There now, didn’t I tell you she’d spot him?" O’Neil cried triumphantly. "Welcome to this house, Jimmy Kelly."
"God save all here." I removed my hat. "Good evening, Mrs. O’Neil."
"Good evening to you, Mr. Kelly." Mary O’Neil turned from the stove, bouncing a fretful infant against one shoulder. "Would you care for a cup of tea, now?" She was like Ella, if years could be granted Ella to grow tall and slender and wear her hair up like a soft thundercloud. But there was no welcoming smile for me in the grey eyes, for on the previous occasion we’d met I’d been disgracefully intoxicated–at least, doing my best to appear so. I looked down as if abashed.
"I’d bless you for a cup of tea, my dear, I would," I replied. "And won’t you allow me to apologize for the condition I was in last Tuesday week? I’d no excuse at all."
"Least said, soonest mended." She softened somewhat at my obvious sobriety. Setting the baby down to whimper in its apple-box cradle, she poured and served my tea. "Pray seat yourself."
"Here." Ella pulled out a chair for me. I thanked her and sat down to scan the room they lived in. Only one room, with one window that probably looked out on an alley wall but was presently frosted opaque from the steam of the saucepan wherein their supper cooked. Indeed, there was a fine layer of condensation on everything: it trickled down the walls, it lay in a damp film on the oilcloth cover of the table and the blankets on the bed against the far wall. The unhappy infant’s hair was moist and curling with it.
Had there been any ventilation it would have been a pleasant enough room. The table was set with good china, someone’s treasured inheritance no doubt. The tiny potbellied stove must have been awkward to cook upon, but O’Neil had built a cabinet of slatwood and sheet tin next to it to serve as the rest of a kitchen. The children’s trundle was stored tidily under the parents’ bed. Next to the painted washbasin on the trunk, a decorous screen gave privacy to one corner. Slatwood shelves displayed the family’s few valuables: a sewing-basket, a music box with a painted scene on its lid, a cheap mirror whose frame was decorated with glued-on seashells, a china dog. On the wall was a painted crucifix with a palm frond stuck behind it.
O’Neil came and sat down across from me.
"You look grand, Jimmy." He thumped his fist on the table approvingly. "Combed your hair, too, didn’t you? That’s the boy. You’ll make a gentleman yet."
"Daddy?" Ella climbed into his lap. "There was a soldier came and gave us this in the street. Will you ever read me what it says? There’s more words than I know, see." She thrust the handbill at him. He took it and held it out before him, blinking at it through the steamy air.
Here I present the printed text he read aloud, without his many pauses as he attempted to decipher it (for he was an intelligent man, but of little education):
CHILDREN!
Come see the Grand Fairy Extravaganza BABES IN TOYLAND
Music by Victor Herbert
Book by Glen MacDonough
Staged by Julian Mitchell
Ignacio Martinetti and 100 Others! Coming by Special Train of Eight Cars!
Biggest Musical Production San Francisco Has Seen In Years!
An Invitation from Mother Goose Herself:
MY dear little Boys and Girls,
I DO hope you will behave nicely so that your Mammas and Papas will treat you to a performance of Mr. Herbert’s lovely play Babes in Toyland at the Columbia Theater, opening Monday, the 16th of April. Why, my dears, it’s one of the biggest successes of the season and has already played for ever so many nights in such far-away cities as New York, Chicago, and Boston. Yes, you really must be good little children, and then your dear parents will see that you deserve an outing to visit me. For, make no mistake, I myself, the only true and original MOTHER GOOSE, shall be there upon the stage of the Columbia Theater. And so shall so many of your other friends from my delightful rhymes such as Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, Bo Peep, Contrary Mary, and Red Riding Hood. The curtain will rise upon Mr. Mitchell’s splendid production, with its many novel effects, at eight o’clock sharp.
OF course, if you are very little folks you are apt to be sleepyheads if kept up so late, but that need not concern your careful parents, for there will be a matinee on Saturday at two o’clock in the afternoon.
WON’T you please come to see me? Your affectionate friend, Mother Goose.
"Oh, dear," sighed Mary.
"Daddy, can we go?" Ella’s eyes were alight with anticipation. Donal chimed in:
"See Mother Goose, Daddy!"
"We can’t afford it, children." Mary’s mouth was a set line. She took the saucepan off the stove and began to ladle a savory dish of sausage, onions, potatoes and bacon onto the plates. "We’ve got a roof over our heads and food for the table. Let’s be thankful for that."
Ella closed her little mouth tight like her mother’s, but Donal burst into tears. "I wanna go see Mother Goose!" he howled.
O’Neil groaned. "Your mother is right, Donal. Daddy and Mummy don’t have the money for the tickets, can you understand that?"
"You oughtn’t to have read out that bill," said Mary in a quiet voice.
"I want go see the Soldier!"
"Donal, hush now!"
"Donal’s the boy for me," I said, leaning forward and reaching out to him. "Look, Donal Og, what’s this you’ve got in your ear?"
I pretended to pull forth a bar of Ghirardelli’s. Ella clapped her hands to her mouth. Donal stopped crying and stared at me with perfectly round eyes.
"Look at that! Would you ever have thought such a little fellow’d have such big things in his ears? Come sit with your Uncle Jimmy, Donal." I drew him onto my lap. "And if you hush your noise, perhaps Mummy and Daddy’ll let you have sweeties, eh?" I set the candy in the midst of the oilcloth, well out of his reach.
"Bless you, Jimmy," said O’Neil.
"Well, and isn’t it the least I can do? Didn’t know I could work magic, did you, Ella?"
"Settle down, now." Mary set out the dishes. "Frank, it’s time to say Grace."
O’Neil made the sign of the Cross and intoned, with the little ones mumbling along, "Bless-us-O-Lord-and-these-Thy-gifts-which-we-are-about-to-receive-from-Thy-bounty-through-Christ-Our-Lord-Amen."
Mary sat down with us, unfolding her threadbare napkin. "Donal, come sit with Mummy."
"Be easy, Mrs. O’Neil, I don’t mind him." I smiled at her. "I’ve a little brother at home he’s the very image of. Where’s his spoon? Here, Donal Og, you eat with me."
"I don’t doubt they look alike." O’Neil held out his tumbler as Mary poured from a pitcher of milk. "Look at you and me. Do you know, Mary, that was the first acquaintance we had–? Got our hats mixed up when the wind blew ’em both off. We wear just the same size."
"Fancy that."
So we dined, and an affable mortal man helped little Donal make a mess of his potatoes whilst chatting with Mr. and Mrs. O’Neil about such subjects as the dreadful expense of living in San Francisco and their plans to remove to a cheaper, less crowded place as soon as they’d saved enough money. The immortal machine that sat at their table was making a thorough examination of Donal, most subtly: an idle caress of his close-cropped little head measured his skull size, concealed devices gauged bone length and density and measured his weight to the pound; data was analyzed and preliminary judgment made: Optimal Morphology. Augmentation Process Possible. Classification pending Blood Analysis and Spektral Diagnosis.
"That’s the best meal I’ve had in this country, Mrs. O’Neil," I told her as we rose from the table.
"How kind of you to say so, Mr. Kelly," she replied, collecting the dishes.
"Chocolate, Daddy?" Donal stretched out his arm for it. O’Neil tore open the waxed paper and broke off a square. He divided it into two and gave one to Donal and one to Ella.
"Now, you must thank your Uncle Jimmy, for this is good chocolate and cost him dear."
"Thank you Uncle Jimmy," they chorused, and Ella added, "But he got it by magic. It came out of Donal’s ear. I saw it."
O’Neil rubbed his face wearily. "No, Ella, it was only a conjuring trick. Remember the talk we had about such things? It was just a trick. Wasn’t it, Jimmy?"
"That’s all it was, sure," I agreed. She looked from her father to me and back.
"Frank, dear, will you help me with these?" Mary had stacked the dishes in a washpan and sprinkled soap flakes in.
"Right. Jimmy, will you mind the kids? We’re just taking these down to the tap."
"I will indeed," I said, and thought: Thank you very much, mortal man, for this opportunity. The moment the door closed behind them I had the device out of my pocket. It looked rather like a big old-fashioned watch. I held it out to the boy.
"Here you go, Donal, here’s a grand timepiece for you to play with."
He took it gladly. "There’s a train on it!" he cried. I turned to Ella.
"And what can I do for you, darling?"
She looked at me with considering eyes. "You can read me the funny papers." She pointed to a neatly stacked bundle by the stove.
"With pleasure." I seized them up and we settled back in my chair, pulling a lamp close. The baby slept fitfully, I read to Ella about Sambo and Tommy Pip and Herr Spiegleburger, and all the while Donal pressed buttons and thumbed levers on the diagnostic toy. It flashed pretty lights for him, it played little tunes his sister was incapable of hearing; and then, as I had known it would, it bit him.
"Ow!" He dropped it and began to cry, holding out his tiny bleeding finger.
"O, dear, now, what’s that? Did it stick you?" I put his sister down and got up to take the device back. "Tsk! Look at that, the stem’s broken." It vanished into my pocket. "What a shame. O, I’m sorry, Donal Og, here’s the old hankie. Let’s bandage it up, shall we? There, there. Doesn’t hurt now, does it?"
"No," he sniffled. "I want another chocolate."
"And so you’ll have one, for being a brave boy." I snapped off another square and gave it to him. "Ella, let’s give you another as well, shall we? What have you found there?"
"It’s a picture about Mother Goose." She had spread out the Children’s Page on the oilcloth. "Isn’t it? That says Mother Goose right there."
I looked over her shoulder. "Pictures from Mother Goose," I read out, "Hot Cross Buns. Paint the Seller of Hot Cross Buns. Looks like it’s a contest, darling. They’re asking the kiddies to paint in the picture and send it off to the paper to judge who’s done the best one."
"Is there prize money?" She had an idea.
"Two dollars for the best one," I read, pulling at my lower lip uneasily. "And paintboxes for everyone else who enters."
She thought that over. Dismay came into her face. "But I haven’t got a paintbox to color it with at all! O, that’s stupid! Giving paintboxes out to kids that’s got them already. O, that’s not fair!" She shook with stifled anger.
"What’s not fair?" Her mother backed through the door, holding it open for O’Neil with the washpan.
"Only this Mother Goose thing here," I said.
"You’re never on about going to that show again, are you?" said Mary sharply, coming and taking her daughter by the shoulders. "Are you? Have you been wheedling at Mr. Kelly?"
"I have not!" the little girl cried in a trembling voice.
"She hasn’t, Mrs. O’Neil, only it’s this contest in the kids’ paper," I hastened to explain. "You have to have a set of paints to enter it, see."
Mary looked down at the paper. Ella began to cry quietly. Her mother gathered her up and sat with her on the edge of the bed, rocking her back and forth.
"O, I’m so sorry, Ella dear, Mummy’s so sorry. But you see, now, don’t you, the harm in wanting such things? You see how unhappy it’s made you? Look how hard Mummy and Daddy work to feed you and clothe you. Do you know how unhappy it makes us when you want shows and paintboxes and who knows what, and we can’t give them to you? It makes us despair. That’s a Mortal Sin, despair is."
"I want to see the fairies," wept the little girl.
"Dearest dear, there aren’t any fairies! But surely it was the Devil himself you met out in the street, that gave you that wicked piece of paper and made you long after vain things. Do you understand me? Do you see why it’s wicked, wanting things? It kills the soul, Ella."
After a long gasping moment the child responded, "I see, Mummy." She kept her face hidden in her mother’s shoulder. Donal watched them uncertainly, twisting the big knot of handkerchief on his finger. O’Neil sat at the table and put his head in his hands. After a moment he swept up the newspaper and put it in the stove. He reached into the slatwood cabinet and pulled a bottle of Wilson’s Whiskey up on the table, and got a couple of clean tumblers out of the washpan.
"Will you have a dram, Kelly?" he offered.
"Just the one." I sat down beside him.
"Just the one," he agreed.
You must not empathize with them.
* * *
When I let myself into my rooms on Bush Street, I checked my messages. A long blue column of them pulsed on the credenza screen. Most of it was the promised list from Averill and his fellows; I’d have to pass that on to our masters as soon as I’d reviewed it. I didn’t feel much like reviewing it just now, however.
There was also a response to my request for another transport for Mme. D’Araignee: DENIED. NO ADDITIONAL VEHICLES AVAILABLE. FIND ALTERNATIVE.
I sighed and sank into my chair. My honor was at stake. From a drawer at the side of the credenza I took another Ghirardelli bar and, scarcely taking the time to tear off the paper, consumed it in a few greedy bites. Waiting for its soothing properties to act, I paged through a copy of the Examiner. There were automobile agencies along Golden Gate Avenue. Perhaps I could afford to purchase one out of my personal operation’s expense account?
But they were shockingly expensive in this city. I couldn’t find one for sale, new or used, for less than a thousand dollars. Why couldn’t her case officer delve into his own pocket to deliver the goods? I verified the balance of my account. No, there certainly wasn’t enough for an automobile in there. However, there was enough to purchase four tickets to "Babes in Toyland."
I accessed the proper party and typed in my transaction request.
TIX UNAVAILABLE FOR 041606 EVENT, came the reply. 041706 AVAILABLE OK?
OK, I typed. PLS DEBIT & DELIVER.
DEBITED. TIX IN YR BOX AT S MKT ST HQ 600 HRS 041606.
TIBI GRATIAS! I replied, with all sincerity.
DIE DULCE FRUERE. OUT.
Having solved one problem, an easy solution to the other suggested itself to me. It involved a slight inconvenience, it was true: but any gentleman would readily endure worse for a lady’s sake.
* * *
My two rooms on Bush Street did not include the luxury of a bath, but the late Mr. Adolph Sutro had provided an alternative pleasure for his fellow citizens: the Baths, which surely could have existed only in that city, in that time.
Just north of Cliff House Mr. Sutro had purchased a rocky little purgatory of a cove, cleaned the shipwrecks out of it and proceeded to shore it up against the more treacherous waves with several thousand barrels of cement. Having constructed not one but six saltwater pools of a magnificence to rival old Rome, he had proceeded to enclose it in a crystal palace affair of no less than four acres of glass.
Ah, but this wasn’t enough for San Francisco! The entrance, on the hill above, was as near a Greek temple as modern artisans could produce; through the shrine one wandered along the museum gallery lined with exhibits both educational and macabre and descended a vast staircase lined with palm trees to the main level, where one might bathe, exercise in the gymnasium or attend a theater performance. Having done all this, one might then dine in the restaurant.
However, my schedule today called for nothing more strenuous than bathing. Ten minutes after descending the grand staircase I was emerging from my changing room (one of five hundred), having soaped, showered and togged myself out in my rented bathing suit, making my way toward the nearest warm-water pool under the bemused eyes of several hundred mortal idlers sitting in the bleachers above.
I was not surprised to see another of my own kind backstroking manfully across the green water; nothing draws the attention of an immortal like sanitary conveniences. I was rather startled when I recognized the man, however, not having seen him since some time in the sixteenth century. Lewis is nothing more than a Literary Preservation Specialist, rather a sad-looking little fellow with a noble profile; not in my class, of course, but a gentleman for all that.
He felt my regard and glanced up, seeing me at once. He smiled and waved.
Victor! he broadcast. How nice to see you again.
It’s Lewis, isn’t it? I responded, though I knew his name perfectly well, and far more of his history than he knew himself. I had been assigned to monitor his activities once, to my everlasting shame. Still, it had been centuries, and he had never shown any sign of recovering certain memories. I hoped, for his sake, that such was the case. Memory effacement is not a pleasant experience.
He pulled himself up on the coping of the pool and swept his wet hair out of his eyes. I stepped to the edge, took the correct diver’s stance and leapt in, transmitting through bubbles: So you’re here as well? Presalvaging books, I suppose?
The Mercantile Library, he affirmed, and there was nothing in his pleasant tone to indicate he’d remembered what I’d done to him at Eurobase One.
God! That must be a Herculean effort, I responded, surfacing.
He transmitted rueful amusement. You’ve heard of it, I suppose?
Rather, I replied, practicing my breast stroke. All those Comstock Lode silver barons went looting the old family libraries of Europe, didn’t they? Snatched up medieval manuscripts at a tenth their value from impoverished Venetian princes, I believe? Fabulously rare first editions from London antiquarians?
Something like that, he replied. And brought them back home to the States for safekeeping.
Ha!
Well, how were they to know? Lewis made an expressive gesture taking in the vast edifice around us. Mr. Sutro himself had a Shakespeare first folio. What a panic it’s been tracking that down! And you?
I’m negotiating for a promising-looking young recruit. Moreover, I drew Nob Hill detail, I replied casually. I’ve coordinated quite a team of talented youngsters set to liberate the premises of Mssrs. Towne, Crocker, Huntington et al. as soon as the lights are out. All manner of costly bric-a-brac has been tagged for rescue–Chippendales, Louis Quatorzes–to say nothing of jewels and cash.
My, that sounds satisfying. You’ll never guess what I found, only last night! Lewis transmitted, looking immensely pleased with himself.
Something unexpected? I responded.
He edged forward on the coping gleefully. Yes, you might say so. Just some old papers that had been mislaid by an idiot named Pompeo Leoni and bound into the wrong book. Just something jotted down by an elderly left-handed Italian gentleman!
Not Da Vinci? I turned in the water to stare at him, genuinely impressed.
Who else? Lewis nearly hugged himself in triumph. And! Not just any doodlings or speculation from the pen of Leonardo, either. Something of decided interest to the Company! It seems he devoted some serious thought to the construction of articulated human limbs–a clockwork arm, for example, that could be made to perform various tasks!
I’ve heard something of the sort, I replied, swimming back toward him.
Yes, well, he seems to have taken the idea further. Lewis leaned down in a conspiratorial manner. From a human arm he leapt to the idea of an entire articulated human skeleton of bronze, and wondered whether the human frame might not be merely imitated but improved in function!
By Jove! Was the man anticipating androids? I reached the coping and leaned on it, slicking back my hair.
No! No! He was chasing another idea entirely, Lewis insisted. Shall I quote? I rather think I ought to let him express his thoughts. He leaned back and, with a dreamy expression, transmitted in flawless fifteenth-century Tuscan: It has been observed that the presence of metal is not in all cases inimical to the body of man, as we may see in earrings, or in crossbow bolts, spearpoints, pistol balls, and other detritus of war that have been known to enter the flesh and remain for some years without doing the bearer any appreciable harm, or indeed in that practice of physicians wherein a small pellet of gold is inserted into an incision made near an aching joint, and the sufferer gains relief and ease of movement thereby.
Take this idea further and think that a shattered bone might be replaced with a model of the same bone cast in bronze, identical with or even superior to its original.
Go further and say that where one bone might be replaced, so might the skeleton entire, and if the articulation is improved upon the man might attain a greater degree of physical perfection than he was born with.
The flaw in this would be the man’s pain and the high likelihood he would die before surgery of such magnitude could be carried out.
Unless we are to regard the theory of alchemists who hold that the Philosopher’s Stone, once attained, would transmute the imperfect flesh to perfection, a kind of supple gold that lives and breathes, and by this means the end might be obtained without cutting, the end being immortality. Lewis opened his eyes and looked at me expectantly. I smacked my hand on the coping in amusement.
By Jove! I repeated. How typical of the Maestro. So he was all set to invent us, was he?
To say nothing of hip replacements!
But what a find for the Company, Lewis!
Of course, to give you a real idea of the text I ought to have presented it like this: Lewis began to rattle it out backward. I shook my head, laughing and holding up my hands in sign that he should stop. After a moment or two he trailed off, adding: I don’t think it loses much in translation, though.
I shook my head. You know, old man, I believe we’re treading rather too closely to a temporal paradox here. Just as well the Company will take possession of that volume, and not some inquisitive mortal! What if it had inspired someone to experiment with biomechanicals a century or so too early?
Ah! No, you see, since History can’t be changed. We’re safe enough, Lewis pointed out. As far as History records those Da Vinci pages, it records them as being lost in the Mercantile Library fire. The circle is closed. All the same, I imagine it was a temptation for any operatives stationed near Amboise in Da Vinci’s time. Wouldn’t you have wanted to seek the old man out as he lay dying, and tell him that something would be done with this particular idea, at least? Immortality and human perfection!
Of course I’d have been tempted; but I shook my head. Not unless I cared to face a court-martial for a security breach.
Lewis shivered in his wet wool and slid back into the water. I turned on my back and floated, considering him.
The temperature doesn’t suit you? I inquired.
Oh . . . they’ve got the frigidarium all right, but the calidaria here aren’t really hot enough, Lewis explained. And of course there’s no sudatorium at all.
Nor any slaves for a good massage, either, I added, glancing up at the mortal onlookers. Sic transit luxuria, alas. Lewis smiled faintly; he had never been comfortable with mortal servants, I remembered. Odd, for someone who began mortal life as a Roman, or at least a Romano-Briton.
Weren’t you recruited at Bath. . . ? I inquired, leaning on the coping.
Aquae Sulis, it was then, Lewis informed me. The public baths there.
Of course. I remember now! You were rescued from the temple. Intercepted child sacrifice, I imagine?
Oh, good heavens, no! The Romans never did that sort of thing. No, I was just somebody’s little unwanted holiday souvenir left in a blanket by the statue of Apollo. Lewis shrugged, and then began to grin. I hadn’t thought about it before, but this puts a distinctly Freudian slant on my visits here! Returning to the womb in time of stress? I was only a few hours old when the Company took me, or so I’ve always been told.
I laughed and set off on a lap across the pool. At least you were spared any memories of mortal life.
That’s true, he responded, and then his smile faded. And yet, you know, I think I’m the poorer for that. The rest of you may have some harrowing memories, but at least you know what it was to be mortal.
I assure you it’s nothing to be envied, I informed him. He nodded in concession of my point and set out across the pool himself, resuming his backstroke.
I think I would have preferred the experience, all the same, he insisted. I’d have liked a father–or mother–figure in my life. At the very least, those of you rescued at an age to remember it have a sort of filial relationship with the immortal who saved you. Haven’t you?
I regret to disillusion you, sir, but that is absolutely not true, I replied firmly.
Really? He dove and came up for air, gasping. What a shame. Bang goes another romantic illusion. I suppose we’re all just orphans of one storm or another!
At that moment a pair of mortals chose to roughhouse, snorting and chuckling as they pummeled each other in their seats in the wooden bleachers; one of them broke free and ran, scrambling apelike over the seats, until he lost his footing and fell with a horrendous crash that rolled and thundered in the air, echoing under the glassed dome, off the water and wet coping.
I saw Lewis go pale; I imagine my own countenance showed reflexive panic. After a frozen moment Lewis drew a deep breath.
"One storm or another," he murmured aloud. "Nothing to be afraid of here, after all. Is there? This structure will survive the quake. History says it will. Nothing but minor damage, really."
I nodded. Then, struck in one moment by the same thought, we lifted our horrified eyes to the ceiling, with its one hundred thousand panes of glass.
"I believe I’ve got a rail car to catch," I apologized, vaulting to the coping with what I hoped was not undignified haste.
"I’ve a luncheon engagement myself," Lewis said, gasping as he sprinted ahead of me to the grand staircase.
* * *
On the 16th of April I entertained friends, or at least my landlady received that impression; and what quiet and well-behaved fellows the gentlemen were, and how plain and respectable the ladies! No cigars, no raucous laughter, no drunkenness at all. Indeed, Mrs. McCarty assured me she would welcome them as lodgers at any time in the future, should they require desirable Bush Street rooms. I assured her they would be gratified at the news. Perhaps they might have been, if her boarding house were still standing in a week’s time. History would decree otherwise, regrettably.
My sitting room resembled a council of war, with its central table on which was spread a copy of the Sanborn map of the Nob Hill area, up-to-date from the previous year. My subordinates stood or leaned over the table, listening intently as I bent with red chalk to delineate the placement of Hush Field generators.
"The generators will arrive in a baker’s van at the corner of Clay and Taylor Streets at midnight precisely," I informed them. "Delacort, your team will approach from your station at the end of Pleasant Street and take possession of them. There will be five generators. I want them placed at the following intersections: Bush and Jones, Clay and Jones, Clay and Powell, Bush and Powell and on California midway between Taylor and Mason." I put a firm letter X at each site. "The generators should be in place and switched on by no later than five minutes after midnight. Your people will remain in place to remove the generators at half-past three exactly, returning them to the baker’s van, which will depart promptly. At that moment a private car will pull up to the same location to transport your team to the central collection point on Ocean Beach. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly, sir," Delacort saluted. Averill looked at her slightly askance and turned a worried face to me.
"What’re they going to do if some cop comes along and wants to know what they’re doing there at that time of night?"
"Any cop coming in range of the Hush Field will pass out, dummy," Philemon informed him. I frowned and cleared my throat. Cinema Standard (the language of the schoolroom) is not my preferred mode of expression.
"If you please, Philemon!"
"Yeah, sorry–"
"Your team will depart from their station at Joice Street at five minutes after midnight and proceed to the intersection of Mason and Sacramento, where a motorized drayer’s wagon will be arriving. You will be responsible for the contents of the Flood mansion." I outlined it in red. "Your driver will provide you with a sterile containment receptacle for Item Number Thirty-Nine on your acquisitions list. Kindly see to it that this particular item is salvaged first and delivered to the driver separately."
"What’s Item Thirty-Nine?" Averill inquired. There followed an awkward silence. Philemon raised his eyebrows at me. Company policy discourages field operatives from being told more than they strictly need to know regarding any given posting. Upon consideration, however, it seemed wisest to answer Averill’s question; there was enough stress associated with this detail as it was without adding mysteries. I cleared my throat.
"The Flood mansion contains a ‘Moorish’ smoking room," I informed him. "Among its features is a lump of black stone carefully displayed in a glass case. Mr. Flood purchased it under the impression that it is an actual piece of the Qaaba from Mecca, chipped loose by an enterprising Yankee adventurer. He was, of course, defrauded; the stone is in fact a meteorite, and preliminary spectrographic analysis indicates it originated on Mars."
"Oh," said Averill, nodding sagely. I did not choose to add that plainly visible on the rock’s surface is a fossilized crustacean of an unknown kind, or that the rock’s rediscovery (in a museum owned by Dr. Zeus, incidentally) in the year 2210 will galvanize the Mars Colonization Effort into making real progress at last.
I bent over the map again and continued:
"All the items on your list are to be loaded into the wagon by twenty minutes after three. At that time, the wagon will depart for Ocean Beach and your team will follow in the private car provided. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Rodrigo, your team will depart from their Taylor Street station at five minutes after midnight as well. Your wagon will arrive at the corner of California and Taylor; you will proceed to salvage the Huntington mansion," I marked it on the map. "Due to the nature of your quarry you will be allotted ten additional minutes, but all listed items must be loaded and ready for removal by half-past-Three, at which time your private transport will arrive. Upon arrival at Ocean Beach you will be assisted by Philemon’s team, who will already (I should hope) have loaded most of their salvage into the waiting boats."
"Yes, sir." Rodrigo made a slight bow.
"Freytag, your team will be stationed on Jones Street. You depart at five after midnight, like the rest, and your objective is the Crocker mansion, here." Freytag bent close to see as I shaded in her area. "Your wagon will pull up to Jones and California; you ought to be able to fill it in the allotted time of two hours and fifteen minutes precisely, and be ready to depart for Ocean Beach without incident. Loong? Averill?"
"Sir!" Both immortals stood to attention.
"Your teams will disperse from their stations along Clay and Pine Streets and salvage the lesser targets shown here, here, here, and here–" I chalked circles around them. "I leave to your best judgment individual personnel assignments. Two wagons will arrive on Clay Street at one o’clock precisely and two more will arrive on Pine five minutes later. You ought to find them more than adequate for your purposes. You will need to do a certain amount of running to and fro to coordinate the efforts of your ladies and gentlemen, but it can’t be helped."
"I don’t anticipate difficulties, sir." Loong assured me.
"No indeed; but remember the immensity of this event shadow." I set down the chalk and wiped my hands on a handkerchief. "Your private transports will be waiting at the corner of Bush and Jones by half-past three. Please arrive promptly."
"Yes, sir." Averill looked earnest.
"In the entirely likely event that any particular team completes its task ahead of schedule, and has free space in its wagon after all the listed salvage has been accounted for, I will expect that team to lend its assistance to Mme. D’Arraignee and her teams at the Mark Hopkins Institute." I swept them with a meaningful stare. "Gentlemen doing so can expect my personal thanks and commendation in their personnel files."
That impressed them, I could see. The favorable notice of one’s superiors is invariably one’s ticket to the better sort of assignment. Clearing my throat, I continued:
"I anticipate arriving at no later than half-past-two to oversee the final stages of removal. Kindly remain at your transports until I transmit your signal to depart for the central collection point. Have you any further questions, ladies and gentlemen?"
"None, sir," Averill said, and the others nodded agreement.
"Then it’s settled," I told them, and carefully folded shut the mapbook. "A word of warning to you all: you may become aware of precursors to the shock in the course of the evening. History will record a particularly nasty seismic disturbance at two a.m. in particular, and another at five. Control your natural panic, please. Upsetting as you may find these incidents, they will present no danger whatsoever, will in fact go unnoticed by such mortals as happen to be awake at that hour."
Averill put up his hand. "I read the horses will be able to feel it," he said, a little nervously. "I read they’ll go mad."
I shrugged. "Undoubtedly why we have been obliged to confine ourselves to motor transport. Of course, we are no brute beasts. I have every confidence that we will all resist any irrational impulses toward flight before the job is finished.
"Now then! You may attend to the removal of your personal effects and prepare for the evening’s festivities. I shouldn’t lunch tomorrow; you’ll want to save your appetites for the banquet at Cliff House. I understand it’s going to be rather a Roman experience!"
The tension broken, they laughed; and if Averill laughed a bit too loudly, it must be remembered that he was still young. As immortals go, that is.
* * *
Astute mortals might have detected something slightly out of the ordinary on that Tuesday, the 17th of April; certainly the hired-van drivers must have noticed an increase in business, as they were dispatched to house after house in every district of the city to pick up nearly identical loads, these being two or three ordinary-looking trunks and one crate precisely fifty centimeters long, twenty centimeters wide and twenty centimeters high, in which a credenza might fit snugly. And it would be extraordinary if none of them remarked upon the fact that all these same consignments were directed to the same location on the waterfront, the berth of the steamer Mayfair.
Certainly in some cases mortal landladies noticed trunks being taken down flights of stairs, and put anxious questions to certain of their tenants regarding hasty removal; but their fears were laid to rest by smiling lies and ready cash.
And did anyone notice, as twilight fell, when persons in immaculate evening dress were suddenly to be seen in nearly every street? Doubtful; for it was, after all, the second night of the opera season, and with the Metropolitan company in town all of Society had turned out to do them honor. If a certain number of them converged on a certain warehouse in an obscure district, and departed therefrom shortly afterward in gleaming automobiles, that was unlikely to excite much interest in observers either.
I myself guided a brisk little four-cylinder Franklin through the streets, bracing myself as it bumped over the cable car tracks, and steered down Gough with the intention of turning at Fulton and following it out to the beach. At the corner of Geary I glimpsed for a moment a tall figure in a red coat, and wondered what it was doing so far from the theater district; but a glance over my shoulder made it plain that I was mistaken. The red-clad figure shambling along was no more than a bum, albeit one of considerable stature. I dismissed him easily from my thoughts as I contemplated the O’Neil family’s outing to the theater.
Had I a warm, sentimental sensation thinking of them, remembering Ella’s face aglow when she saw me present her father with the tickets? Certainly not. One magical evening out was scarcely going to make up for their ghastly deaths, in whatever cosmic scale might be supposed to balance such things. Best not to dwell on that aspect of it at all. No, it was the convenience of their absence from home that occupied my musings, and the best way to take advantage of it with regard to my mission.
At the end of Fulton I turned right, in the purple glow of evening over the vast Pacific. Far out to sea–well beyond the sight of mortal eyes–the Company transport ships lay at anchor, waiting only for the cover of full darkness to approach the shore. In a few hours I’d be on board one of them, steaming off in the direction of the Farallones to catch my air transport, with no thought for the smoking ruin of the place I’d lived in so many harrowing weeks.
Cliff House loomed above me, its turreted mass a blaze of light. I saw with some irritation that the long uphill approach was crowded with carriages and automobiles, drawn in on a diagonal; I was obliged to go up as far as the rail depot before I could find a place to leave my motor, and walk back downhill past the Baths.
I dare say the waiters at Cliff House could not recall an evening when so large a party, of such unusual persons, had dined with such hysterical gaiety as on this 17th of April, 1906.
If I recall correctly, the reservation had been made in the name of an international convention of seismologists. San Francisco was ever the most cosmopolitan of cities, so the restaurant staff expressed no surprise when elegantly attired persons of every known color began arriving in carriages and automobiles. If anyone remarked upon a certain indefinable similarity in appearance amongst the conventioneers that transcended race, why, that might be explained by their common avocation–whatever seismology might be; no one on the staff had any clear idea. Only the queer nervousness of the guests was impossible to account for, the tendency toward uneasy giggling, the sudden frozen silences and dilated pupils.
I think I can speak for my fellow operatives when I say that we were determined to enjoy ourselves, terror notwithstanding. We deserved the treat, every one of us; we faced a long night of hard work, the culmination of months of labor, under circumstances of mental strain that would test the resolution of the most hardened mercenaries. The least we were owed was an evening of silk hats and tiaras.
* * *
There was a positive chatter of communication on the ether as I approached. We were all here, or in the act of arriving; not since leaving school had I been in such a crowd of my own kind. I thought how we were to feast here, a company of immortals in an airy castle perched on the edge of the Uttermost West, and flit away well before sunrise. It is occasionally pleasant to embody a myth.
I saw Mme. D’Araignee stepping down from a carriage, evidently arriving with other members of the Hopkins operation team. No bulky Russian sea captain in sight, of course, yet; I hastened to her side and tipped my hat.
"Madame, will you do me the honor of allowing me to escort you within?"
"M’sieur Victor." She gave me a dazzling smile. She wore a gown of pale bluegreen silk, a shade much in fashion that season, which brought out beautifully certain copper hues in her intensely black skin. Diamonds winked from the breathing shadow of her bosom. She took my arm and we proceeded inside, where we had the remarkable experience of having to shout our transmissions to one another, so crowded was the ether:
I am very pleased to inform you I have arranged for an automobile for your use this evening, I told her, as we paused at the cloakroom for checks.
Oh, I am so glad! I do hope you weren’t put to unnecessary trouble.
Through the door to the dining room we caught glimpses of napery like snow, folded in a wilderness of sharp little peaks, with here and there a gilt epergne rising above them.
Not what I’d call unnecessary trouble, no, though it proved impossible to requisition anything at this late date. However, I did have a vehicle allocated for my own personal use and that fine runabout is entirely at your disposal.
Merci, merci mille temps! But will this not impede your own mission?
Not at all, dear lady. I shall be obliged to you for transportation as far as the Palace, I think, after we’ve dined; but since my mission involves nothing more strenuous than carrying off a child, I anticipate strolling back across the city with ease.
You are too kind, my friend.
A gentleman could do no less. I pulled out a chair for her.
We chatted pleasantly of trifling matters as the rest of the guests arrived. We studied the porcelain menu in some astonishment–the Company had spent a fortune here tonight, certainly enough to have allotted me one extra automobile. I was rather nettled, but my irritation was mollified somewhat by the anticipation of our carte du jour:
Green Turtle Soup Consommé Divinesse
Salmon in Sauce Veloute Trout Almondine Crab Cocktail
Braised Sweetbreads Roast Quail Andaluz
Le Faux Mousse Faison Lucullus
Early Green Peas White Asparagus Risotto Milanese
Roast Saddle of Venison with Port Wine Jelly
Curried Tomatoes Watercress Salad
Chicken Marengo Plovers’ Eggs Virginia Ham Croquettes
Lobster Salad Oysters in Variety
Gateau d’Or et Argent Assorted Fruits in Season
Rose Snow Tulip Jellies Water Ices
Surprise Yerba Buena
All accompanied. of course, by the appropriate vintages, and service à la russe. We were being rewarded.
A shift in the black rock, miles down, needle-thin fissures screaming through stone, perdurable clay bulging like the head of a monstrous child engaging for birth, straining, straining, STRAINING!
The smiling chatter stopped dead. The waiters looked around, confused, at that elegant assembly frozen like mannequins. Not a scrape of chair moving, not a chime of crystal against china. Only the sound that we alone listened to: the cello-string far below us, tuning for the dance of the wrath of God. I found myself staring across the room directly into Lewis’s eyes, where he had halted at the doorway in mid-step. The immortal lady on his arm was as still as a painted image, a perfect profile by Da Vinci.
The orchestra conductor mistook our silence for a cue of some kind. He turned hurriedly to his musicians and they struck up a little waltz tune, light gracious accompaniment to our festivities. With a boom and a rush of vacuum the service doors parted, as the first of the waiters burst through with tureens and silver buckets of ice. Champagne corks popped like artillery. As the noises roared into our silence, an immortal in white lace and spangles shrieked; she turned it into a high trilling laugh, placing her slender hand upon her throat.
So conversation resumed, and a server appeared at my elbow with a napkined bottle. I held up my glass for champagne. Mme. D’Araignee and I clinked an unspoken toast and drank fervently.
Twice more while we dined on those good things, the awful warning came. As the venison roast was served forth, its dish of port jelly began to shimmer and vibrate–too subtly for the mortal waiters to notice more than a pretty play of light, but we saw. On the second occasion the oysters had just come to table, and what subaudible pandemonium of clattering there was: half-shell against half-shell with the sound of basalt cliffs grinding together, and the staccato rattle of all the little sauceboats with their scarlet and yellow and pink and green contents; though of course the mortal waiters couldn’t hear it. Not even the patient horses waiting in their carriage-traces heard it yet. But the sparkling bubbles ascended more swiftly through the glasses of champagne.
The waiters began to move along the tables bearing trays: little cut-crystal goblets of pink ices, or red and amber jellies, or fresh strawberries drenched in liqueur, or cakes. We heard the ringing note of a dessert spoon against a wineglass, signaling us all to attention.
The Chief Project Facilitator rose to address us. Labienus stood poised and smiling in faultless white tie and tuxedo. As he waited for the babble of voices to fade he took out his gold Chronometer on its chain, studied its tiny screen, then snapped its case shut and returned it to the pocket of his white silk waistcoat.
"My fellow Seismologists." His voice was quiet, yet without raising it he reached all corners of the room. Commanding legions confers a certain ease in public speaking. "Ladies." He bowed. "I trust you’ve enjoyed the bill of fare. I know that, as I dined, I was reminded of the fact that perhaps in no other city in the world could such a feast be so gathered, so prepared, so served to such a remarkable gathering. Where but here by the Golden Gate can one banquet in a splendor that beggars the Old World, on delicacies presented by masters of culinary sophistication hired from all civilized nations–all the while in sight of forested hills where savages roamed within living memory, across a bay that within living memory was innocent of any sail?
"So swiftly has she risen, this great city, as though magically conjured by djinni out of thin air. Justifiably her citizens might expect to wake tomorrow in a wilderness, and find that this gorgeous citadel had been as insubstantial as their dreams."
Archly exchanged glances between some of our operatives as his irony was appreciated.
"But if that were to come to pass–if they were to wake alone, unhoused and shivering upon a stony promontory, facing into a cold northern ocean and a hostile gale–why, you know as well as I do that within a few short years the citizens of San Francisco would create their city anew, with spires soaring ever closer to Heaven, and mansions yet more gracious."
Of course we knew it, but the poor mortal waiters didn’t. I am afraid some of our younger operatives were base enough to smirk.
"Let us marvel, ladies and gentlemen, at this phoenix of a city, at once ephemeral and abiding. Let us drink to the imperishable spirit of her citizens. I give you the City of San Francisco."
"The City of San Francisco," we chorused, raising our glasses high.
"And I give you," smiling he extended his hand, "The City of San Francisco!"
Beaming the waiters wheeled it in, on a vast silver cart: an ornate confection of pastry, of spun-sugar and marzipan and candies, a perfect model of the City. It was possible to discern a tiny Ferry Building rising above chocolate wharves, and a tiny Palace, and Nob Hill reproduced in sugared peel and nonpareils. Across the familiar grid of streets Golden Gate Park was done in green fondant, and beyond it was the hill where Sutro Park rose in nougat and candied violets, and beyond that Cliff House itself, in astonishing detail.
We applauded.
Then she was destroyed, that beautiful city, with a silver cake knife and serving wedge, and parceled out to us in neat slices. One had to commend Labienus’ sense of humor, to say nothing of his sense of ritual.
* * *
It was expected that we would wish to dance, after dining; the ballroom had been reserved for our use, and at some point during dessert the orchestra had discreetly risen and carried their instruments away to the dais.
I thought the idea of dancing in rather poor taste, under the circumstances, and apparently many of my fellow operatives agreed with me; but Averill and some of the other young ones got out on the floor eagerly enough, and soon the stately polonaise gave way to ragtime tunes and two-stepping.
Under the pretense of going for a smoke I stepped out on the terrace, to breathe the clean night air and metabolize my portion of magnificent excess in peace. By ones and twos several of the older immortals followed me; soon there was quite an assemblage of us out there between two worlds, between the dark water surging around Seal Rock and the brilliant magic lantern of the ballroom.
"Victor?" Mme. D’Araignee was making her way to me through the crowd. Her slippers, together with her diamonds, had gone into the leather case she was carrying, and she had donned sensible walking shoes; she had buttoned a long motorist’s duster over her evening gown. The radiant Queen of the Night stood now before me as the Efficient Modern Woman.
"You didn’t care to dance either, I see," she remarked.
"Not I, no," I replied. We stood for a moment looking in at the giddy whirl. I saw Averill prance by in the arms of an immortal sylph in pink satin; their faces were flushed and merry. Don’t think them heartless, Reader. They did not understand yet. Horror, for Averill, was still a lonely prairie and a burning wagon; for the girl, still a soldier with a bayonet in a deserted orchard. Those nightmares weren’t here in this bright room with its bouncing music, and so all must be right with the world.
But we were old ones, Mme. D’Araignee and I, and we stood outside in the dark and watched them dance.
Down, miles down, the slick water on the clay face and the widening fissure in darkness, dead shale trembling like an exhausted limb, granite crumbling, rock cracking with the strain and crying out in a voice that rose up, and up at last through the red brick, through the tile and parquet, into the warm air and the music!
The mortal musicians played on, but the dancers faltered. Some of them stopped, looking around in confusion; some of them only missed a step or two and then plunged back into the dance with greater abandon, determined to celebrate something.
Mme. D’Araignee shivered. I threw my unlit cigar over the parapet into the sea.
"Shall we go, Nan?" I offered her my arm. She took it readily and we left Cliff House.
Outside on the carriage drive, and all the way up the steep hill to where my motor was parked, the waiting horses were tossing their heads and whickering uneasily.
Mme. D’Araignee took the wheel, easily guiding us back down into the City through the spangled night.
Even now, at the Grand Opera House, Enrico Caruso was striking a pose before a vast Spanish mountain range rendered on canvas and raising his carbine to threaten poor Bessie Abott. Even now, at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the Grand Prize Masked Carnival was in full swing, with throngs of costumed roller-skaters whirling around the rink that would be a triage hospital in twelve hours and a pile of smoking ashes in twenty-four. Even now, the clock on the face of Old St. Mary’s Church–bearing its warning legend SON OBSERVE THE TIME AND FLY FROM EVIL–was counting out the minutes left for heedless passers-by. Even now, the O’Neil children were sitting forward in their seats, scarcely able to breathe as the cruel Toymaker recited the incantation that would bring his creations to life.
And we rounded the corner at Divisadero and sped down Market, with Prospero’s aprés-pageant speech ringing in our ears. At the corner of Third I pointed and Mme. D’Araignee worked the clutch, steered over to the curb and trod on the brake pedal.
"You’re quite sure you won’t need a ride back?" she inquired over the chatter of the cylinders. I put my legs out and leapt down to the pavement.
"Perfectly sure, Nan." I shot my cuffs and adjusted the drape of my coat. Reaching into the seat I took my stick and silk hat. "Give my seat to the Muse of Painting. I’m off to lurk in shadows like a gentleman."
"Bonne chance, then, Victor." She eased up on the brake, clutched, and cranked the wheel over so the Franklin swung around in a wide arc to retrace its course up Market Street. I tipped my hat and bowed; with a cheery wave and a double honk on the Franklin’s horn, she steered away into the night.
So far, so good. The night was yet young and there were plenty of debonair socialites in evening dress on the street, arriving and departing from the restaurants, the hotels, the theaters. For a block I was one of their number; then Iaccomplished my disappearance down a black alleyway into another world, to thread my way through the boarding-house warren.
Rats were out and scuttling everywhere, sensing the coming disaster infallibly. In some buildings they were cascading down the stairs like trickling water. Cats ignored them and drunkards stood watching in stupefied amazement, but there was nobody else to remark upon it; these streets did not invite promenaders.
I found the O’Neils’ building and made my way up through the unlit stairwell, here and there kicking vermin out of my way. I left the landing and proceeded down their corridor, past doors tight shut showing only feeble lines of light at floor level to mark where the occupants were at home. I heard snores; I heard weeping; I heard a drunken quarrel; I heard a voice raised in wistful melody.
No light at the O’Neils’ door, naturally; none at the door immediately opposite theirs. I scanned the room beyond but could discern no occupant. Drawing out a skeleton key from my waistcoat pocket, I gained entrance and shut the door after me.
No tenant at all; good. It was death-cold in there and black as pitch, for a roller shade had been drawn down on the one window. A slight tug sent it wobbling upward but failed to let much more light into the room. Not that I needed light to see my Chronometer as I checked it; half-past eleven, and even now my teams were assembling at their stations on Nob Hill. I leaned against a wall, folded my arms and composed myself to wait.
Time passed slowly for me, but in Toyland it sped by. Songs and dances, glittering processions came to their inevitable close; fairies took wing. Innocence was rewarded and wickedness resoundingly punished. The last of the ingenious special effects guttered out, the curtain descended, the orchestra fell silent, the house lights came up. A little while the magic lingered, as the O’Neil family made their way out through the lobby, a little while it hung around them like a perfume in the atmosphere of red velvet and gilt and fashionably attired strangers, until they were borne out through the doors by the receding tide of the crowd. Then the magic left them, evaporating upward into the night and the fog, and they got their bearings and made their way home along the dark streets.
I heard them, coming heavily up the stairs, O’Neil and Mary each carrying a child. Down the corridor their footsteps came, and stopped outside.
"Slide down now, Ella, Daddy’s got to open the door."
I heard the sound of a key fumbling in darkness for its lock, and a drowsy little voice singing about Toyland, the paradise of childhood to which you can never return.
"Hush, Ella, you’ll wake the neighbors."
"Donal’s asleep. He missed the ending." Ella’s voice was sad. "And it was such a beautiful, beautiful ending. Don’t you think it was a beautiful ending, Daddy?"
"Sure it was, darling." Their voices receded a bit as they crossed the threshold. I heard a clink and the sputtering hiss of a match; there was the faintest glimmer of illumination down by the floor.
"Sssh, sh, sh. Home again. Help Mummy get his boots off, Ella, there’s a dear."
"I’ll just step across to Mrs. Varian’s and collect the baby."
"Mind you remember his blanket."
"I will that."
Footsteps in the corridor again, discreet rapping on a panel, a whispered conversation in darkness and a sleepy wail; then returning footsteps and a pair of doors closing. Then, more muffled but still distinct to me, the sound of the O’Neils going to bed.
Their lamps were blown out. Their whispers ceased. Still I waited, listening as the minutes ticked away for their mortal souls to rest.
Half-past one on the morning of Wednesday, the 18th of April in the year 1906, in the City of San Francisco. Francis O’Neil and his wife and their children asleep finally and forever, and the world had finished with them. In the grey morning, at precisely fourteen minutes after the hour of five, this boarding-house would lurch forward into the street, bricks tumbling as mortar blew out like talcum powder, rotten timbers snapping, and that would be the end of Frank’s strength and Mary’s care and Ella’s dreams, the end of the brief unhappy baby, and no-one would remember them but me.
And, perhaps, Donal. I stepped across the hall and let myself into their room, perfectly silent.
The children lay in their trundle on the floor, next to their parents’ bed. Donal slept on the outer edge, curled on his side, both hands tucked under his chin. I stood for a moment observing, analyzing their alpha patterns. When I was satisfied that no casual noise would awaken them, I bent and lifted Donal from his bed. He sighed but slept on. After a moment’s hesitation I drew the blanket up around Ella’s shoulders.
I stood back. The boy wore a nightshirt and long black stockings, but the night was cold. Frank’s coat hung over the back of a chair: I appropriated it to wrap his son. Shifting Donal to one arm, I backed out of the room and shut the door.
Finished.
No sleeper in that building woke to hear our rapid descent of the stairs. On the first landing a drunk sat upright, leaning his head on the railings, sound asleep with his lower jaw dropped open like a corpse’s. We fled lightly past him, Donal and I, and he never moved.
Away through the maze, then, away forever from the dirt and stench and poverty of that place. In twelve hours it would have ceased to exist, and the wind would scatter white ashes so the dead could never be named nor numbered.
Even Market Street was dark now, its theaters shut down. Over at the Grand Opera House on Mission, Enrico Caruso’s costumes hung neatly in his dark dressing-room, ready for a performance of La Boheme that would never take place. Up at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the weary janitor surveyed the confetti and other festive debris littering the skating rink and decided to sweep it up in the morning. Toyland, at the Columbia, was shut away in its properties-room; fairy tinsel, butterfly wings, bear heads peering down from dusty shelves into the darkness.
Even now my resolute gentlemen and ladies were despoiling Nob Hill, flitting through its darkened drawing rooms at hyperspeed like so many whirring ghosts, bearing with them winking gilt and crystal, calfskin and morocco, canvas and brass, all the very best that money could buy but couldn’t hope to preserve against the hour to come. Without the Franklin I’d have a tedious walk uphill to join them, but at a brisk pace I might arrive with time to spare.
Donal stretched and muttered in his sleep. I shifted him to my other shoulder, changed hands on my walking-stick, and was about to hurry on when I caught a whiff of some familiar scent on the air. I halted.
It was not a pleasant scent. It was harsh, musky, like blood or sweat but neither; like an animal smell, but other; it summoned in me a sudden terror and confusion. When I tried to identify it, however, I had only a mental image of a bear costume hanging on a hook, the head looking down from a shelf. When had I seen that? I hadn’t seen that! Whose memories were these?
I controlled myself with an effort. Some psychic disturbance was responsible for this, my own nerves were contributing to this, there was no real danger. Why, of course: it must be nearly Two o’clock, when the first of the major subsonic disruptions would occur.
Yes, here it came now. I could hear nearby horses begin to scream and stamp frantically, I could feel the paving-bricks grind against one another under the soles of my boots, and the air groaned as though buried giants were praying to God for release.
Yes, I thought, this must be it. I balanced my stick against my knee and drew out my chronometer, trying to verify the time. As I peered at it the door of a stable directly across the street burst open, and a white mare came charging out, hooves thundering. Donal jerked and cried.
Timing is everything. My assailant chose that perfect moment of distraction to strike. I was enveloped in a choking wave of that smell as a hand closed on my face and pulled my head back. Instantly I clawed at it, twisted my head to bite; but a vast arm was wrapping around me from the other side and cold steel entered my throat, opened the artery, wrenched as it was pulled out again.
So swiftly had this occurred that my stick was still falling through midair, had not yet struck the pavement. Donal was pulled upward and backward, torn from me, and I heard his terrified cry mingle with the clatter of the stick as it landed, the rumbling earth, the running horse, a howling laughter I knew but could not place. I was sinking to my knees, clutching at my cut throat as my blood fountained out over the starched front of my dress shirt and stained the diamond stud so it winked like Mars. Ares, God of War. Thor. I was conscious of a terrible anger as I descended to the shadows and curled into Fugue.
* * *
"Will you get on to this, now? Throat cut and he’s not been robbed! Here’s his watch, for Christ’s sake!"
"Stroke of luck for us, anyhow."
I sat up and glared at them. The two mortal thieves backed away from me, horrified; then one mustered enough nerve to dart in again, aiming a kick at me while he made a grab for my chronometer. I caught his wrist and broke it. He jumped back, stifling an agonized yell; his companion took to his heels and after only a second’s hesitation he followed.
I remained where I was, huddled on the pavement, running a self-diagnostic. The edges of my windpipe and jugular artery had closed and were healing nicely at hyperspeed; if the thieves hadn’t roused me from Fugue I’d be whole now. Blood production had sped up to replace that now dyeing the front of my previously immaculate shirt. The exterior skin of my throat was even now self-suturing, but I was still too weak to rise.
My hat and stick remained where they had fallen, but of Donal or my assailant there was no sign. I licked my dry lips. There was a vile taste in my mouth. My chronometer told me it was a quarter past two. I dragged myself to the base of a wall and leaned there, half-swooning, drowning in unwelcome remembrance.
That Smell. Sweat, blood, the Animal, and smoke. Yes, they’d called it the Summer of Smoke, that year the world ended. What world had that been? The world where I was a little prince, or nearly so; better if my mother hadn’t been a Danish slave, but my father had no sons by his lady wife, and so I had fine clothes and a gold pin for my cloak.
When I went to climb on the beached longship and play with the gear, a warrior threatened me with his fist; then another man told him he’d better not, for I was Baldulf’s brat. That made him back down in a hurry. And once, my father set me on the table and put his gold cup in my hand, but I nearly dropped it, it was so heavy. He held it for me and I tasted the mead and his companions laughed, beating on the table. The ash-white lady, though, looked down at the floor and wrung her hands.
She told me sometimes that if I wasn’t good the Bear would come for me. She was the only one who would ever dare to talk to me that way. And then he had come, the Bear and his slaughtering knights. All in one day I saw our tent burned and my father’s head staring from a pike. Screaming, smoke and fire, and a banner bearing a red dragon that snaked like a living flame, I remember.
My mother had caught me up and was running for the forest, but she was a plump girl and could not get up the speed. Two knights chased after us on horseback, whooping like madmen. Just under the shadow of the oaks, they caught us. My mother fell and rolled, loosing her hold on me, and screamed for me to run; then one of the knights was off his horse and on her. The other knight got down too and stood watching them, laughing merrily. One of her slippers had come off and her bare toes kicked at the air until she died.
I had been sobbing threats, I had been hurling stones and handfuls of oak-mast at the knights, and now I ran at the one on my mother and attacked him with my teeth and nails. He reared up on his elbows to shake me off; but the other knight reached down and plucked me up as easily as if I’d been a kitten. He held me at his eye level while I shrieked and spat at him. His shrill laughter dropped to a chuckle, but never stopped.
A big shaven face, no beard, no mustache, colorless fair hair cropped. Head of a strange helm-shape, tremendous projecting nose and brows, and his wide gleeful eyes so pale a blue as to be colorless, like one of my father’s hounds. He had enormous broad cheekbones and strange teeth. That smell, that almost-animal smell, was coming from him. That had been where I’d first encountered it, hanging there in the grip of that knight.
The other knight had got up and came forward with his knife drawn and ready for me, but my captor held out his huge gauntleted hand.
"Siste! " he told him pleasantly. "Siste, comes."
The other knight growled something and brandished his knife. My captor’s eyes sparkled; he batted playfully at my assailant, who flew backward into a tree and lay there twitching, blood running from his ears. Left in peace, my knight held me up and sniffed at me. He sat down and ran his hands all over me, taking his gauntlets off to squeeze my skull until I feared it would break like an egg. I had stopped fighting, but I whimpered and tried to wriggle away.
"Do you want to live, little boy?" he asked me in perfectly accented Saxon. He had a high-pitched voice, nasally resonant.
"Yes," I replied, shocked motionless.
"Then be good and do not try to run away from me. I will preserve you from death. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good." He forced my mouth open and examined my teeth. Apparently satisfied, he got up, thrusting me under one arm. Taking the two horses’ bridles, he walked back to the war-camp of the Bear with long rolling strides.
It was growing dark, and new fires had been lit. We passed pickets who challenged my captor, and he answered them with smiles and bantering remarks. At last he stopped before a tent and gave a barking order, whereupon a groom hurried out to take the horses and led them away for him. Two other knights sat nearby, leaning back wearily as their squires took off their armor for them. One pointed at me and asked a question.
My captor grinned and said something in fluting reply, hugging me to his chest. One knight smiled a little, but the other scowled and spat into the fire. As my captor bore me into his tent I heard someone mutter "Romani! " in a disgusted tone.
It was dark in the tent, and there was no-one there to see as he stripped off my clothes and continued his examinations. I attempted to fight again but he held me still and asked, very quietly, "Are you a stupid child? Have you forgot what I said?"
"No." I was so frightened and furious I was trembling, and I hated the smell of him, so close in there.
"Then listen to me again, Saxon child. I will not hurt you, neither will I outrage you. But if you want to die, keep struggling."
I held still then and stood silent, hating him. He seemed quite unconcerned about that; he gave me a cup of wine and a hard cake, and ignored me while I ate and drank. All his attention was on the two knights outside. When he heard them depart into their respective tents, he wrapped me in a cloak and bore me out into the night again.
At the other end of the camp there was a very fine tent, pitched a little distance from the others. Two men stood before it, deep in conversation. After a moment one went away. The other remained outside the tent a moment, breathing the night air, looking up at the stars. When he lifted the flap and made to go inside, my captor stepped forward.
"Salve, Emres."
"Salve, Budu," replied the other. He was a tall man and elderly–I thought: his hair and eyebrows were white. His face, however, was smooth and unlined, and there was an easy suppleness to his movements. He was very well-dressed, as Britons went. They had a brief conversation and then the one called Emres raised the flap of the tent again, gesturing us inside.
It was so brilliantly lit in there it dazzled my eyes. I was again unrobed, in that white glare, but I dared do no more than clench my fists as the old one examined me. His hands were remarkably soft and clean, and he did not smell bad. He stuck me with a pin and dabbed the blood onto the tongue of a little god he had, sitting on a chest; it clicked for a moment and then chattered to him in a tinny voice. My captor and he had a conversation in a swift tongue quite unlike the Latin they’d been using until that time. At its conclusion, Emres pointed at me and asked a question. My captor shrugged. He turned his big head to look at me.
"What is your name, little boy?" he asked in Saxon.
"Bricta, son of Baldulf," I told him. He looked back at Emres.
"Ecce Victor," he said.
* * *
The taste in my mouth was unbearable. I hadn’t wanted this recollection, this squalid history! I much preferred Time to begin with that first memory of the silver ship that rose skyward from the circle of stones, taking me away to the gleaming hospital and the sweet-faced nurses.
I got unsteadily to my feet, groping after my hat and stick. As I did so I heard the unmistakable sound of an automobile approaching. In another second a light runabout rattled around the corner and pulled up before me. Labienus sat behind the wheel, no longer the jovial Master of Ceremonies. He was all hard-eyed centurion now.
"We received your distress signal. Report, please, Victor."
"I was attacked," I said dully.
"Tsk! Rather obviously."
"I . . . I know it sounds improbable, sir, but I believe my assailant was another operative," I explained. To my surprise he merely nodded.
"We know his identity. You’ll notice he’s sending quite a distinct signal."
"Yes." I looked down the street in wonderment. The signal lay on the air like a trail of green smoke. Why would he signal? "He’s . . . he’s somewhere in Chinatown."
"Exactly," agreed Labienus. "Well, Victor, what do you intend to do about this?"
"Sir?" I looked back at him, confused. Something was wrong here, some business I hadn’t been briefed about, perhaps? But why–?
"Come, come, man, you’ve a mission to complete! He took the mortal boy! Surely you’ve formed a plan to rescue him?" he prompted.
The hideous taste welled in my mouth. I suppressed an urge to expectorate.
"My team on Nob Hill is more than competent to complete the salvage there without my supervision," I said, attempting to sound coolly rational. "That being the case, I believe, sir, that I shall seek out the scoundrel who did this to me and jolly well kill him. Figuratively speaking, of course."
"Very good. And?"
"And, of course, recapture my mortal recruit and deliver him to the Collection Point as planned and according to schedule," I said. "Sir."
"See that you do." Labienus worked both clutch and brake expertly and edged his motor forward, cylinders idling. "Report to my cabin on the Thunderer at seven hundred hours for a private debriefing. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly clear, sir." So there was some mystery to be explained. Very well.
"You are dismissed."
"Sir." I doffed my hat and watched as he drove smoothly away up Market Street.
I replaced my hat and turned in the direction of the signal, probing. My dizziness was fading, burned away by my growing sense of outrage. The filthy old devil, how dare he do this to me? What was he playing at? I began to walk briskly again, my speed increasing with my strength.
Of course, the vow to kill him hadn’t been meant literally. We do not die. But I’d find some way of paying him out in full measure, I hadn’t the slightest doubt about that. He had the edge on me in strength, but I was swifter and in full possession of my faculties, whereas he was probably drooling mad, the old troll.
Yes, mad, that was the only explanation. There had always been rumors that some of the oldest operatives were flawed somehow, those created earliest, before the Augmentation Process had been perfected. Budu had been one of the oldest I’d ever met. He had been created more than forty thousand years ago, before the human races had produced their present assortment of representatives.
Now that I thought of it, I hadn’t seen an operative of his racial type in the field in years. They held desk jobs at Company bases, or were Air Transport pilots. I’d assumed this was simply because the modern mortal race was now too different for Budu’s type to pass unnoticed. What if the true reason was that the Company had decided not to take chances with the earlier models? What if there was some risk that all of that particular class were inherently unstable?
Good God! No wonder I was expected to handle this matter without assistance. Undoubtedly our masters wanted the whole affair resolved as quietly as possible. They could count on my discretion; I only hoped my ability met their expectations.
Following the signal, I turned left at the corner of Market and Grant. The green trail led straight up Grant as far as Sacramento. What was his game? He was drawing me straight into the depths of the Celestial quarter, a place where I’d be conspicuous were it daylight, but at no particular disadvantage otherwise.
He must intend some kind of dialogue with me. The fact that he had taken a hostage indicated that he wanted our meeting on his terms, under his control. That he felt he needed a hostage could be taken as a sign of weakness on his part. Had his strength begun to fail somehow? Not if his attack on me had been any indication. Though it had been largely a matter of speed and leverage. . . .
I came to the corner of Grant and Sacramento. The signal turned to the left again. It traveled up a block, where it could be observed emanating from a darkened doorway. I stood considering it for a moment, tapping my stick impatiently against my boot. I spat into the gutter, but it did not take the taste from my mouth.
I walked slowly uphill past the shops that sold black and scarlet lacquerware and green jade. Here was the Baptist mission, smelling of starch and good intentions. From this lodging-house doorway a heavy perfume of joss sticks; from this doorway a reek of preserved fish. And from this doorway . . .
It stood ajar. A narrow corridor went straight back into darkness, with a narrower stair ascending to the left. The bottommost stair tread had been thrown open like the lid of a piano bench, revealing a black void below.
I scanned. He was down there, and making no attempt to hide himself. Donal was there with him, still alive. There were no other signs of mortal life, however.
I paced forward into the darkness and stood looking down. Chill air was coming up from below. It stank like a crypt. Rungs leading down into a passageway were just visible, by a wavering pool of green light. So was a staring dead face, contorted into a grimace of rage.
After a moment’s consideration, I removed my hat and set it on the second step. My stick I resolved to take with me, although its sword would be useless against my opponent. No point in any further delay; it was time to descend into yet another hell.
At the bottom of the ladder the light was a little stronger. It revealed more bodies lying in a subterranean passage of brick plastered over and painted a dull green. The dead had been young men, and seemed to have died fighting, within the last few hours. They were smashed like so many insects. The light that made this plain was emanating from a wide doorway that opened off the passage, some ten feet further on. The smell of death was strongest in there.
"Come in, Victor," said a voice.
I went as far as the doorway and looked.
In that low-ceilinged chamber of bare plaster, in the fitful glow of one oil lamp, more dead men were scattered. These were all elderly Chinese, skeletally emaciated, and they had been dead some hours and they had not died quietly. One leaned in a chair beside the little table with the flickering lamp; one was hung up on a hook that protruded from a wall; one lay half-in, half-out of a cupboard passage, his arm flung out as though beckoning. Three were sprawled on the floor beside slatwood bunks, in postures suggesting they had been slain whilst in the lethargy of their drug and tossed from the couches like rags. The apparatus of the opium-den lay here and there; a gold-wrapped brick of the poisonous substance, broken pipes, burnt dishes, long matches, bits of wire.
And there, beyond them, sat the monster of my long nightmares.
"You don’t like my horrible parlor," chuckled Budu. "Your little white nose has squeezed nearly shut, your nostrils look like a fish’s gills."
"It’s just the sort of nest you’d make for yourself, you murdering old fool," I told him. He frowned at me.
"I have never murdered," he told me seriously. "But these were murderers, and thieves. Who else would keep such a fine secret cellar, eh? A good place for a private meeting!" He leaned back against the wall, lounging at his ease across the top tier of a bunk, waving enormous mud-caked boots. His dress consisted of stained bluejean trousers, a vast shapeless red coat made from a blanket, and a battered black felt hat. He had let his hair and beard grow long; they trailed down like pale moss over his bare hairy chest. He looked rather like St. Nicholas turned monster.
Donal sat stiffly beside him. Budu had placed his great hand about the boy’s neck, as easily as I might take hold of an axe handle.
"Uncle Jimmy," moaned Donal.
"Explain yourself, sir," I addressed Budu, keeping my voice level and cold. He responded with gales of delighted laughter.
"I was the Briton, and you were the little barbarian!" he sad. "Look at us now!"
I stepped into the room, having scanned for traps. "I followed your signal," I told him. "You certainly made it plain enough. May I ask why you thought it was necessary to cut my throat?"
He shrugged, regarding me with hooded eyes. "How else to get your attention but to take your quarry from you? And how to do that but by disabling you temporarily? What harm did it do? Spoiled your nice white shirt, yes, and made you angry!" He chuckled again.
I tapped my stick in impatience. "What was your purpose in calling me here, old man?"
"To tell you a few truths, and see what you do when you’ve heard them. You were wondering about us, we oldest Old Ones, wondering what became of us all. You were thinking we’re like badly made clockwork toys, and our Great Toymakers decided to pull us off the shelves of the toyshop." He stretched luxuriously. Donal tried to turn his head to stare at him, but was held fast as the old creature continued:
"No, no, no. We’re not badly made. I was better made than you, little man. It’s a question of purpose." He thrust his prognathous face forward at me through the gloom. "I was made a war-axe. They made you a shovel. Is the metaphor plain enough for you?"
"I take your meaning." I moved a step closer.
"You’ve been told all your life that our Masters wish only to save things, books and pretty pictures and children, and for this purpose we were made, to creep into houses like mice and steal away loot before Time can eat it."
"That’s an oversimplification, but essentially true."
"Is it?" He stroked his beard in amusement. I could see the red lines across the back of his hand where I’d clawed him. He hadn’t bothered to heal them yet. "You pompous creature, in your nice clothes. You were made to save things, Victor. Iwasn’t. Now, hear the truth: I, and all my kind, were made because our perfect and benign Masters wanted killers once. Can you guess why?"
"Well, let me see." I swallowed back bile. "You say you’re not flawed. Yet it’s fairly common knowledge that flawed immortals were produced, during the first experimentations with the Process. What did the Company do about them? Perhaps you were created as a means of eliminating them."
"Good guess." He nodded his head. "But wrong. They were never killed, those poor failed things. I’ve seen them, screaming in little steel boxes. No. Guess again."
"Then . . . perhaps at one time it was necessary to have agents whose specialty was Defense." I tried. "Prior to the dawn of civilization."
"Whee! An easy guess. You fool, of course it was! You think our Masters waited, so gentle and pure, for sweet reason to persuade men to evolve? Oh, no. Too many wolves were preying on the sheep. They needed operatives who could kill, who could happily kill fierce primitives so the peaceful ones could weave baskets and paint bison on walls." He grinned at me with those enormous teeth, and went on:
"We made Civilization dawn, I and my kind! We pushed that bright ball over the horizon at last, and we did it by killing! If a man raised his hand against his neighbor, we cut it off. If a tribe painted themselves for war, we washed their faces with their own blood. Shall I tell you of the races of men you’ll never see? They wouldn’t learn peace, and so we were sent in to slay them, man, woman, and child!"
"You mean," I exhaled, "the Company decided to accelerate Mankind’s progress by selectively weeding out its sociopathic members. And if it did? We’ve all heard rumors of something like that. It may be necessary from time to time even now. Not a pretty thought, but one can see the reasons. If you hadn’t done it, mankind might have remained in a state of savagery forever." I took another step forward.
"We did good work," he said plaintively. "And we weren’t hypocrites. It was fun." His pale gaze wandered past me to the doorway. There was a momentary flicker of something like uneasiness in his eyes, some ripple across the surface of his vast calm.
"What is the point of telling me this, may I ask?" I pressed.
"To show you that you serve lying and ungrateful Masters, child," he replied, his attention returning to me. "Stupid Masters. They’ve no understanding of this world they rule. Once we cleared the field so they could plant, how did they reward us? We had been heroes. We became looters. And you should see how they punished us, the ones who argued! No more pruning the vine, they told us, let it grow how it will. You’re only to gather the fruit now, they told us. Was that fair? Was it, when we’d been created to gather heads?"
"No, I dare say it wasn’t. But you adapted, didn’t you?" To my dismay I was shaking with emotion. "You found ways to satisfy your urges in the Company’s service. You’d taken your share of heads the day you caught me!"
"Rescued you," he corrected me. "You were only a little animal, and if I hadn’t taken you away you’d have grown into a big animal like your father. There were lice crawling in his hair when I stuck his head on the pike. There was food in his beard!"
I spat in his face. I couldn’t stop myself. The next second I was sick with mortification, to be provoked into such operatic behavior, and dabbed hurriedly at my chin with a handkerchief; Budu merely wiped his face with the back of his hand and smiled, content to have reduced my stature.
"Your anger changes nothing. Your father was a dirty beast. He was an oathbreaker and an invader too, as were all his people. You’ve been taught your history, you know all this! So don’t judge me for enjoying what I did to exterminate his race. And, see, see what happened when I was ordered to stop killing Saxons! When Arthur died, Roman order died with him. All that we’d won at Badon Hill was lost and the Saxon hordes returned, never to leave. What sense did it make, to have given our aid for a while to one civilized tribe and then leave it to be destroyed?" His gaze traveled past me to the doorway again. Who was he expecting? They weren’t coming to his aid, that much was clear.
"We do not involve ourselves in the petty territorial squabbles of mortals," I recited. "We do not embrace their causes. We move amongst them, saving what we can, but we are never such fools as to be drawn into their disputes."
"Yes, you’re quoting Company Policy to me. But don’t you see that your fine impartiality has no purpose? It accomplishes nothing! It’s wasteful! You know the house will burn, so you creep in like thieves and steal the furniture beforehand, and then watch the flames. Wouldn’t it be more efficient use of your time to prevent the fire in the first place?" He paused a moment and looked at the back of his hand with a slight frown. I saw the red lines there fade to pink as he set them to healing over.
"It would be more efficient, yes," I said, "but for one slight difficulty. You couldn’t prevent the fire happening. It isn’t possible to change history."
"Recorded history." He bared his big teeth in amusement once more. "It isn’t possible to change recorded history. And do you think even that sacred rule’s as unbreakable as you’ve been told? I have made the history that was written and read. It disappoints me. I will make something new now."
"Shall you really?" I folded my arms. Doubtless he was going to start bragging about being a god. It went with the profile of this sort of lunatic.
"Yes, and you’ll help me if you’re wise. Listen to me. In the time before History was written down, in those days, our Masters were bold. All mortals have inherited the legend that there was once a golden age when men lived simply in meadows, and the Earth was uncrowded and clean, and there was no war, but only arts of peace.
"But when Recorded History began–when we were forbidden to exterminate the undesirables–that paradise was lost. And our Masters let it be lost, and that is the condemnation I fling in their teeth." He drew a deep breath.
"Your point, sir?"
"I’ll make an end of Recorded History. I can so decimate the races of men that their golden age will come again, and never again will there be enough of them to ravage one another or the garden they inhabit. And we immortals will be their keepers. Victor, little Victor, how long have you lived? Aren’t you tired of watching them fight and starve? You creep among them like a scavenger, but you could walk among them like–"
"Like a god?" I sneered.
"I had been about to say, an angel," Budu sneered back. "I remember the service I was created for. Do you, little man? Or have you ever even known? Such luxuries you’ve had, among the poor mortals! Have you never felt the urge to really help them? But the time’s soon approaching when you can."
"Ridiculous." I stated. "You know as well as I do that History won’t stop. There’ll be just as much warfare and mortal misery in this new century as in the centuries before, and nothing anyone can do will alter one event." I gauged the pressure of his fingers on Donal’s neck. How quickly could I move to get them loose?
"Not one event? You think so? Maybe." He looked sly. "But our Masters will turn what can’t be changed to their own advantage, and why can’t I? Think of the great slaughters to come, Victor. How do you know I won’t be working there? How do you know I haven’t been at work already? How do you know I haven’t got disciples among our people, weary as I am of our Masters’ blundering, ready as I am to mutiny?"
"Because History states otherwise," I told him flatly. "There will be no mutiny, no War in Heaven if you like. Civilization will prevail. It is recorded that it will."
"Is it?" He grinned. "And can you tell me who recorded it? Maybe I did. Maybe I will, after I win. Victor, such a simple trick, but it’s never occurred to you. History is only writing, and one can write lies!"
I stared at him. No, in fact, it never had occurred to me. He rocked to and fro in his merriment, dragging Donal with him. Silent tears streamed down the child’s face.
Budu lurched forward, fixing me with his gaze. "Listen now. I have my followers, but we need more. You’ll join me because you’re clever, and you’re weary of this horror too, and you owe me the duty of a son, for I saved you from death. You’re a Facilitator and know the codes to order Company equipment. You’ll work in secret, you’ll obtain certain things for me, and we’ll take mortal children and work the Augmentation Process on them, and raise them as our own operatives, for our own purposes, loyal to us. Then we’ll pull the weeds from the Garden. Then we’ll geld the bull and make him pull the plough. Then we’ll slaughter the wolf that preys on the herd. Just as we used to do! There will be Order.
"For this reason I came as a beggar to this city and followed you, watching you. Now I’ve made you listen to me." He looked at the doorway again. "Tell me I’m not a fool, little Victor, tell me I haven’t walked into this trap with you to no purpose."
"What will you do if I refuse?" I demanded. "Break the child’s neck?"
This was too much for the boy, who whimpered like a rabbit and started forward convulsively. Budu looked down, scowling as though he had forgotten about him. "Are you a stupid child?" he asked Donal. "Do you want to die?"
I cannot excuse my next act, though he drove me to it; he, and the horror of the place, and the time that was slipping away and bringing this doomed city down about our ears if we tarried. I charged him, howling like the animal he was.
He reared back; but instead of closing about Donal’s throat, his fingers twitched harmlessly. As his weight shifted, his right arm dropped to his side, heavy as lead. My charge threw him backward so that his head struck the wall with a resounding thud.
All the laughter died in his eyes, and they focused inward as he ran his self-diagnostic. I caught up Donal in my arms and backed away with him, panting.
Budu looked out at me.
"A virus," he informed me. "It was in your saliva. It’s producing inert matter even now, at remarkable speed, that’s blocking my neuroreceptors. I don’t think it will kill me, but I doubt if even your Masters could tell. I’m sure they hope so. You’re surprised. You had no knowledge of this weapon inside yourself?"
"None," I said.
Budu was nodding thoughtfully, or perhaps he was beginning to be unable to hold his head up. "They didn’t tell you about this talent of yours, because if you’d known about it, I would have seen it in your thoughts, and then I’d never have let you spit on me. At the very least I wouldn’t have wiped it away with my wounded hand."
"A civilized man would have used a handkerchief," I could not resist observing.
He giggled, but his voice was weaker when he spoke.
"Well. I guess we’ll see now if our Masters have at long last found a way to unmake their creations. Or I will see; you can’t stay in this dangerous place to watch the outcome, I know. But you’ll wish you had, in the years to come, you’ll wish you knew whether or not I was still watching you, following you. For I know your defense against me now, think of that! And I know who betrayed me, with his clever virus." Budu’s pale eyes widened. "I was wrong! The rest of them may be shovels, but you, little Victor–you were made a poisoned knife. Victor Veneficus!" he added, and laughed thickly at his joke. "Oh, tell him–never sleep. If I live–"
"We’re going now, Donal Og, Uncle Jimmy’ll get you safe out of here," I said to the child, turning from Budu to thread my way between the stinking corpses on the floor.
I heard Budu cough once as his vocal centers went, and then the ether was filled with a cascade of images: A naked child squatting on a clay floor, staring through darkness at a looming figure in a bearskin. Flames devouring brush huts, goatskin tents, cottages, halls, palaces, shops, restaurants, hotels. Soldiers in every conceivable kind of uniform, with every known weapon, in every posture of attack or defense the human form could assume.
If these were his memories, if this was the end of his life, there was no emotion of sorrow accompanying the images; no fear, no weariness, no relief either. Instead, a loud yammering laughter grew ever louder, and deafened the inner ear at the last image: a hulking brute in a bearskin, squatting beside a fire, turning and turning in his thick fingers a gleaming golden axe; and on the blade of the axe was written the word VIRUS.
Halfway up the ladder, the trap opening was occluded by a face that looked down at me and then drew back. I came up with all speed; I faced a small mob of Chinese, grim men with bronze hatchets. They had not expected to see a man in evening dress carrying a child.
I addressed them in Cantonese, for I could see they were natives of that province.
"The devil who killed your grandfathers is still down there. He is asleep and will not wake up. You can safely cut him to pieces now."
I took up my hat and left the mortals standing there, looking uncertainly from my departing form to the dark hole in the stair.
The air was beginning to freshen with the scent of dawn. I had little more than an hour to get across the city. In something close to panic I began to run up Sacramento, broadcasting a General Assistance Signal. Had my salvage teams waited for me? Donal clung to me and did not make a sound.
Before I had gone three blocks I heard the noise of an automobile echoing loud between the buildings. It was climbing up Sacramento toward me. I turned to meet it. Over the glare of its brass headlamps I saw Pan Wen-Shi. His tuxedo and shirtfront, unlike mine, were still as spotless as when he’d left the Company banquet. On the seat beside him was a tiny almond-eyed girl. He braked and shifted, putting out a hand to prevent her from tumbling off and rolling away downhill.
"Climb in," he shouted. I vaulted the running board and toppled into the back seat with Donal. Pan stepped on the gas and we cranked forward again.
"Much obliged to you for the ride," I said, settling myself securely and attempting to pry Donal’s arms loose from my neck. "Had a bit of difficulty."
"So had I. We must tell one another our stories some day," Pan acknowledged, rounding the corner at Powell and taking us down toward Geary. The little girl had turned in her seat and was staring at us. Donal was quivering and hiding his eyes.
"Now then, Donal Og, now then," I crooned to him. "You’ve been a brave boy and you’re all safe again. And isn’t this grand fun? We’re going for a ride in a real motor-car!" Under my words was a soothing frequency to blur his memory of the last two hours.
"Bad Toymaker gone?" asked the little muffled voice.
"Sure he is, Donal, and we’ve escaped entirely."
He consented to lower his hands, but shrank back at the sight of the others. "Who’s that?"
"Why, that’s a little China doll that’s escaped the old Toymaker, same as you, and that’s the kind Chinaman who helped her. They’re taking us to the sea, where we’ll escape on a big ship."
He stared at them doubtfully. "I want Mummy," he said, tears forming in his eyes.
The little girl, who till this moment had been solemn in fascination, suddenly dimpled into a lovely smile and laughed like a silver bell. She pointed a finger at him and made a long babbling pronouncement, neither in Cantonese nor Mandarin. For emphasis, she reached down beside her and flung something at him over the back of the seat, with a triumphant cry of "Dah!" It was a wrapped bar of Ghirardelli’s, only a little gummy at one corner where she’d been teething on it. I caught it in midair.
"See now, Donal, the nice little girl is giving us chocolates!" I tore off the wrapper hastily and gave him a piece. She reached out a demanding hand and I gave her some as well. "Chocolates and an automobile ride and a big ship! Aren’t you the lucky boy, then?"
He sat quiet, watching the gregarious baby and nibbling at his treat. His memories were fading. As we rattled up Geary he looked at me with wondering eyes.
"Where Ella?" he asked me.
When I had caught my breath, I replied:
"She couldn’t come to Toyland, Donal Og. But you’re a lucky, lucky boy, for you will. You’ll have splendid adventures and never grow old. Won’t that be fun, now?"
He looked into my face, not knowing what he saw there. "Yes," he answered in a tiny voice.
Lucky boy, yes, borne away in a mechanical chariot, away from the perishable mortal world, and all the pretty nurses will smile over you and perhaps sing you to sleep before they take you off to surgery. And when you wake, you’ll have been Improved; you’ll be ever so much cleverer, Donal, than poor mortal monkeys like your father. A biomechanical marvel fit to stride through this new century in company with the internal combustion engine and the flying machine.
And you’ll be so happy, boy, and at peace, knowing about the wonderful work you’ll have to do for the Company; much happier than poor Ella would ever have been, with her wild heart, her restlessness and anger. Surely no kindness to give her eternal life, when life’s stupidities and injustice could never be escaped?
. . . But you’ll enjoy your immortality, Donal Og. You will, if you don’t become a thing like me.
The words came into my mind unbidden, and I shuddered in my seat. Mustn’t think of this just now: too much to do. Perhaps the whole incident had been some sort of hallucination? There was no foul taste in my mouth, no viral poison sizzling under my glib tongue. The experience might have been some fantastic nightmare brought on by stress, but for the blood staining my elegant evening attire.
I was a gentleman, after all. No gentleman did such things.
Pan bore left at Mason, rode the brakes all the way down to Fulton, turned right and accelerated. We sped on, desperate to leave the past.
***
There were still whaleboats drawn up on the sand, still wagons waiting there, and shirtsleeved immortals hurriedly loading boxes from wagon to boat. We’d nearly left it too late: those were my people, that was my Nob Hill salvage arrayed in splendor amid the driftwood and broken shells. There were still a pair of steamers riding at anchor beyond Seal Rock, though most of the fleet had already put out to sea and could be glimpsed as tiny lights on the grey horizon, making for the Farallones. As we came within range of the Hush Field both of the children slumped into abrupt and welcome unconsciousness.
We jittered to a stop just short of the tavern, where an impatient operative from the Company’s motor agency took charge of the automobile. Pan and I jumped out, caught up our respective children, and ran down the beach.
Past the wagons loaded with rich jetsam of the Gilded Age, we ran: lined up in the morning gloom and salt wind were the grand pianos, the crystal chandeliers, the paintings in gilt frames, the antique furniture. Statuary classical and modern; gold plate and tapestries. Cases of rare wines, crates of phonograph cylinders, of books and papers, waited like refugees to escape the coming morning.
I glimpsed Averill, struggling through the sand with his arms full of priceless things. He was sobbing loudly as he worked; tears coursed down his cheeks, his eyes were wide with terror, but his body served him like the clockwork toy, like the fine machine it was, and bore him ceaselessly back and forth between the wagon and the boat until his appointed task should be done.
"Sir! Where did you get to?" he said, gasping. "We waited and waited–and now it’s gonna cut loose any second and we’re still not done!"
"Couldn’t be helped, old man!" I told him as we scuttled past. "Carry on! I have every faith in you!"
I shut my ears to his cry of dismay and ran on. A boat reserved for passengers still waited in the surf. Pan and I made for the boarding officer and gave our identification.
"You’ve cut it damned close, gentlemen," he grumbled.
"Unavoidable," I told him. His gaze fell on my gore-drenched shirt and he blinked, but waved us to our places. Seconds later we were seated securely, and the oarsmen pulled and sent us bounding out on the receding tide to the Thunderer where she lay at anchor.
We’d done it, we were away from that fated city where even now bronze hatchets were completing the final betrayal–
No. A gentleman does not betray others. Nor does he leave his subordinates to deal with the consequences of his misfortune.
Donal shivered in the stiff breeze, waking slowly. Frank’s coat had been lost, somewhere in Chinatown; I shrugged out of my dinner jacket and put it around Donal’s shoulders. He drew closer to me, but his attention was caught by the operatives working on the shore. As he watched, something disturbed the earth and the sand began to flurry and shift. Another warning was sounding up from below.
The rumbling carried to us over the roar of the sea, as did the shouts of the operatives trying to finish the loading. One wagon settled forward a few inches, causing the unfortunate precipitation of a massive antique clock into the arms of the immortals who had been gingerly easing it down. They arrested its flight, but the shock or perhaps merely the striking hour set in motion its parade of tiny golden automata. Out came its revolving platforms, its trumpeting angels, its pirouetting lovers, its minute Death with raised scythe and hourglass. Crazily it chimed FIVE.
Pan and I exchanged glances. He checked his chronometer. Our boatmen increased the vigor of their strokes.
Moment by moment the East was growing brighter, disclosing operatives massed on the deck of the Thunderer. Their faces were turned to regard the sleeping city. Pan and I were helped on deck and our mortal charges handed up after us; a pair of white-coifed nurses stepped forward.
"Agent Pan? Agent Victor?" inquired one, as the other checked a list.
"Here, now, Donal, we’re on our ship at last, and here’s a lovely fairy to look after you." I thrust him into her waiting arms. The other received the baby from Pan, and the little girl went without complaint; but as his nurse turned to carry him below decks, Donal twisted in her arms and reached out a desperate hand for me.
"Uncle Jimmy!" he screamed. I turned away quickly as she bore him off. Really, it was for the best.
I made my way along the rail and emerged on the aft deck, where I nearly ran into Nan D’Arraignee. She did not see me, however; she was fervently kissing a great bearded fellow in a brass-buttoned blue coat, which he had opened to wrap about them both, making a warm protected place for her in his arms. He looked up and saw me. His eyes, timid and kindly, widened, and he nodded in recognition.
"Kalugin," I acknowledged with brittle courtesy, tipping my hat. I edged on past them quickly, but not so quickly as to suggest I was fleeing. What had I to flee from? Not guilt, certainly. No gentleman dishonorably covets another gentleman’s lady.
As I reached the aft saloon we felt it beginning, with the rising surge that lifted the Thunderer at its mooring and threatened to swamp the fleeing whaleboats; we heard the roar coming up from the earth, and in the City some mortals sat up in their beds and frowned at what they could sense but not quite hear yet.
I clung to the rail of the Thunderer. My fellow operatives were hurrying to the stern of the ship to be witness to History, and nearly every face bore an expression compounded of mingled horror and eagerness. There were one or two who turned away, averting their eyes. There were those like me, sick and exhausted, who merely stared.
And really, from where we lay offshore, there was not much to see; no DeMille spectacle; no more at first than a puff of dust rising into the air. But very clear across the water we heard the rumbling, and then the roar of bricks coming down, and steel snapping, and timbers groaning, and the high sweet shattering of glass, and the tolling in all discordance of bronze-throated bells. Loud as the Last Trumpet, but not loud enough to drown out the screams of the dying. No, the roar of the earthquake even paused for a space, as if to let us hear mortal agony more clearly; then the second shock came, and I saw a distant tower topple and fall slowly, and then the little we had been able to see of the City was concealed in a roiling fog the color of a bloodstain.
I turned away, and chanced to look up at the open doorway of a stateroom on the deck above. There stood Labienus, watching the death of three thousand mortals with an avid stare. That was when I knew, and knew beyond question, whose weapon I was.
I hadn’t escaped. My splendid mansion, with all its gilded conceits, had collapsed in a rain of bricks and broken plaster.
A hand settled on my shoulder and I dropped my gaze to behold Lewis, of all people, looking into my face with compassion.
"I know," he murmured, "I know, old fellow. Too much horror to bear. At least it’s finished now, for those poor mortals and for us. At least we’ve done our jobs. Brace up! Can I get you a drink?"
What did he recognize in my sick white face? Not the features of a man who had emptied a phial into an innocent-looking cup of wine, and given it to him under pretense of calming his nerves. Why, I’d always been a poisoner, hadn’t I? But it had happened long ago, and he had no memory of it anyway. I’d seen to that. And Lewis would never suspect me of such behavior in any case. We were both gentlemen, after all.
"No, thank you," I replied, "I believe I’ll just take the air for a little while out here. It’s a fine restorative to the nerves, you know. Sea air."
"So it is," he agreed, stepping back. "That’s the spirit! And it’s not as though you could have done anything more. You know what they say: History cannot be changed." He gave me a final helpful thump on the arm and moved away, clinging to the rail as the deck pitched.
Alone, I fixed my eyes on the wide horizon of the cold and perfect sea. I drew in a deep breath of chill air.
One can write lies. And live them.
Two operatives in uniform were making their way toward me through the press of the crowd. I looked across at them.
"Executive Facilitator Victor?"
I nodded. They shouldered into place, one on either side of me.
"Sir, your presence is urgently requested. Mr. Labienus sends his apologies for unavoidably revising your schedule," one of them recited.
"Certainly." I exhaled. "By all means, gentlemen, let us go."
We made our way across deck to the forward compartments, avoiding the hatches where the crew were busily loading down the Art, the Music, the Literature, the fine flowering of the Humanity that we had, after all, been created to save.


Kage Baker - Son Observe the Time

Kage Baker: Son Observe the Time
On the eve of destruction we had oysters and champagne.
Don’t suppose for a moment that we had any desire to lord it over the poor mortals of San Francisco, in that month of April in that year of 1906; but things weren’t going to be so gracious there again for a long while, and we felt an urge to fortify ourselves against the work we were to do.
And who were we, you may ask? The present-time operatives of Dr. Zeus Incorporated, a twenty-fourth century cabal of investors who have presided over the development of immortality and time travel, amongst other things. Neither of those inventions are terribly practical, I regret to say; nevertheless they can be utilized to provide a satisfactory profit for Company shareholders. Assuming, of course, that we immortals–their servants–are able to perform our tasks in a satisfactory manner.
London before the Great Fire, Delhi before the Mutiny, even Chicago–I was there and I can tell you, it requires a great deal of mental and emotional self-discipline to live side by side with mortals in a Salvage Zone. You must look, daily, into the smiling faces of those who are to lose all, and walk beside them in the knowledge that nothing you can do will affect their fates. Even the most prosaic of places has a sort of haunted glory at such times; judge then how it looked to us, that gilded fantastical butterfly of a city, quite unprepared for its approaching holocaust.
The place was made even queerer by the fact that there were so many Company operatives there at the time. The very ether hummed with our transmissions. In any street you might have seen us dismounting from carriages or the occasional automobile, we immortal gentlemen tipping our derbies to the ladies, our immortal ladies responding with a graceful inclination of their picture hats, smiling as we met each other’s terrified eyes. We dined at the Palace and as guests at Nob Hill mansions; promenaded in Golden Gate Park, drove out to Woodward Gardens, attended the theater and everywhere saw the pale set faces of our own kind, busy with their own particular preparations against what was to come.
Some of us had less pleasant places to go. I was grateful that I was not required to brave the Chinese labyrinth by Waverly Place, but my associate Pan had certain business there amongst the Celestials. I myself was obliged to venture, too many times, into the boarding-houses south of Market Street. Beneath the Fly Trap was a Company safe house and HQ; we’d meet there sometimes, Pan and I, at the end of a long day in our respective ghettoes, and we’d sit shaking together over a brace of stiff whiskies. Thus heartened, it was time for a costume change: dock laborer into gentleman for me, coolie into cook for him, and so home by cable car.
I lodged in two rooms on Bush Street. I will not say I slept there; one does not rest well on the edge of the maelstrom. But it was a place to keep one’s trunk, and to operate the Company credenza necessary for facilitating the missions of those operatives whose case officer I was. Salvaging is a terribly complicated affair, requiring as it does that one hide in History’s shadow until the last possible moment before snatching one’s quarry from its preordained doom. One must be organized and thoroughly coordinated; and timing is everything.
On the morning of the tenth of April I was working there, sending a progress report, when there came a brisk knock at my door. Such was my concentration that I was momentarily unmindful of the fact that I had no mortal servants to answer it. When I heard the impatient tapping of a small foot on the step, I hastened to the door.
I admitted Nan D’Araignee, one of our Art Preservation specialists. She is an operative of West African origin with exquisite features, slender and slight as a doll carved of ebony. I had worked with her briefly near the end of the previous century. She is quite the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and happily married to another immortal, a century before I ever laid eyes on her. Timing, alas, is everything.
"Victor." She nodded. "Charming to see you again."
"Do come in." I bowed her into my parlor, acutely conscious of its disarray. Her bright gaze took in the wrinkled laundry cast aside on the divan, the clutter of unwashed teacups, the half-eaten oyster loaf on the credenza console, six empty sauterne bottles and one smudgily thumbprinted wineglass. She was far too courteous to say anything, naturally, and occupied herself with the task of removing her gloves.
"I must apologize for the condition of the place," I stammered. "My duties have kept me out a good deal." I swept a copy of the Examiner from a chair. "Won’t you sit down?"
"Thank you." She took the seat and perched there, hands folded neatly over her gloves and handbag. I pulled over another chair, intensely irritated at my clumsiness.
"I trust your work goes well?" I inquired, for there is of course no point in asking one of us if we are well. "And, er, Kalugin’s? Or has he been assigned elsewhere?"
"He’s been assigned to Marine Transport, as a matter of fact," she told me, smiling involuntarily. "We are to meet on the Thunderer afterward. I am so pleased! He’s been in the Bering Sea for two years, and I’ve missed him dreadfully."
"Ah," I said. "How pleasant, then, to have something to look forward to in the midst of all this. . . ."
She nodded quickly, understanding. I cleared my throat and continued:
"What may I do for you, Nan?"
She averted her gaze from dismayed contemplation of the stale oyster loaf and smiled. "I was told you might be able to assist me in requisitioning additional transport for my mission."
"I shall certainly attempt it." I stroked my beard. "Your present arrangements are unsuitable?"
"Inadequate, rather. You may recall that I’m in charge of Presalvage at the Hopkins Gallery. It seems our original estimates of what we can rescue there were too modest. At present I have five vans arranged for to evacuate the Gallery contents, but really we need more. Would it be possible to requisition a sixth? My own case officer was unable to assist me, but felt you might have greater success."
This was a challenge. Company resources were strained to the utmost on this operation, which was one of the largest on record. Every operative in the United States had been pressed into service, and many of the European and Asian personnel. A handsome allotment had been made for transport units, but needs were swiftly exceeding expectations.
"Of course I should like to help you," I replied cautiously, "if at all possible. You are aware, however, that horsedrawn transport utilization is impossible, due to the subsonic disturbances preceding the earthquake–and motor transports are, unfortunately, in great demand–"
A brewer’s wagon rumbled down the street outside, rattling my windows. We both leaped to our feet, casting involuntary glances at the ceiling; then sat down in silent embarrassment. Mme. D’Araignee gave a little cough. "I’m so sorry–My nerves are simply–"
"Not at all, not at all, I assure you–one can’t help flinching–"
"Quite. In any case, Victor, I understand the logistical difficulties involved; but even a handcart would greatly ease our difficulties. So many lovely and unexpected things have been discovered in this collection, that it really would be too awful to lose them to the fire."
"Oh, certainly." I got up and strode to the windows, giving in to the urge to look out and assure myself that the buildings hadn’t begun to sway yet. Solid and seemingly as eternal as the pyramids they stood there, for the moment. I turned back to Mme. D’Araignee as a thought occurred to me. "Tell me, do you know how to operate an automobile?"
"But of course!" Her face lit up.
"It may be possible to obtain something in that line. Depend upon it, Madame, you will have your sixth transport. I shall see to it personally."
"I knew I could rely on you." She rose, all smiles. We took our leave of one another with a courtesy that belied our disquiet. I saw her out and returned to my credenza keyboard.
QUERY, I input, RE: REQUISITION ADDTNL TRANSPORT MOTOR VAN OR AUTO? PRIORITY RE: HOPKINS INST.
HOPKINS PROJECT NOT YOUR CASE, came the green and flashing reply.
NECESSARY, I input. NEW DISCV OVRRIDE SECTION AUTH. PLEASE FORWARD REQUEST PRIORITY.
WILL FORWARD.
That was all. So much for my chivalrous impulse, I thought, and watched as the transmission screen winked out and returned me to my status report on the Nob Hill Presalvage work. I resumed my entry of the Gilded Age loot tagged for preservation.
When I had transmitted it, I stood and paced the room uneasily. How long had I been hiding in here? What I wanted was a meal and a good stretch of the legs, I told myself sternly. Fresh air, in so far as that was available in any city at the beginning of this twentieth century. I scanned the oyster loaf and found it already pulsing with bacteria. Pity. After disposing of it in the dustbin I put on my coat and hat, took my stick and went out to tread the length of Bush Street with as bold a step as I could muster.
It was nonsense, really, to be frightened. I’d be out of the city well before the first shock. I’d be safe on air transport bound for London before the first flames rose. London, the other City. I could settle into a chair at my club and read a copy of Punch that wasn’t a month old, secure in the knowledge that the oak beams above my head were fixed and immovable as they had been since the days when I’d worn a powdered wig, as they would be until German shells came raining down decades from now. . . .
Shivering, I dismissed thoughts of the Blitz. Plenty of life to think about, surely! Here were bills posted to catch my eye: I might go out to the Pavilion at Woodward’s to watch the boxing exhibition–Jack Joyce and Bob Ward featured. There was delectable vaudeville at the Orpheum, I was assured, and gaiety girls out at the Chutes, to say nothing of a spectacular sideshow recreation of the Johnstown Flood . . . perhaps not in the best of taste, under the present circumstances.
I might imbibe Gold Seal Champagne to lighten my spirits, though I didn’t think I would; Veuve Cliquot was good enough for me. Ah, but what about a bottle of Chianti, I thought, arrested by the bill of fare posted in the window of a corner restaurant. Splendid culinary fragrances wafted from within. Would I have grilled veal chops here? Would I go along Bush to the Poodle Dog for Chicken Chaud-Froid Blanc? Would I venture to Grant in search of yellow silk banners for duck roasted in some tiny Celestial kitchen? Then again, I knew of a Swiss place where the cook was a Hungarian, and prepared a light and crisply fried Wienerschnitzel to compare with any I’d had . . . or I might just step into a saloon and order another oyster loaf to take home. . . .
No, I decided, veal chops would suit me nicely. I cast a worried eye up at the building–pity this structure wasn’t steel-framed–and proceeded inside.
It was one of those dark, robust places within, floor thickly strewn with fresh sawdust not yet kicked into little heaps. I took my table as any good operative does, back to the wall and a clear path to the nearest exit. Service was poor, as apparently their principal waiter was late today, but the wine was excellent. I found it bright on the palate, just what I’d wanted, and the chops when they came were redolent of herbs and fresh olive oil. What a consolation Appetite can be.
Yes, Life, that was the thing to distract one from unwise thoughts. Savor the wine, I told myself, observe the parade of colorful humanity, breathe in the fragrance of the joss sticks and the seafood and the gardens of the wealthy, listen to the smart modern city with its whirring steel parts at the service of its diverse inhabitants. The moment is all, surely.
I dined in some isolation, for the luncheon crowd had not yet emerged from the nearby offices and my host remained in the kitchen, arguing with the cook over the missing waiter’s character and probable ancestry. Even as I amused myself by listening, however, I felt a disturbance approaching the door. No temblor yet, thank Heaven, but a tempest of emotions. I caught the horrifying mental images before ever I heard the stifled weeping. In another moment he had burst through the door, a young male mortal with a prodigious black mustache, quite nattily dressed but with his thick hair in wild disarray. As soon as he was past the threshold his sobs burst out unrestrained, at a volume that would have done credit to Caruso.
This brought his employer out of the back at once, blurting out the first phrases of furious denunciation. The missing waiter (for so he was) staggered forward and thrust out that day’s Chronicle. The headlines, fully an inch tall, checked the torrent of abuse: MANY LOSE THEIR LIVES IN GREAT ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS.
The proprietor of the restaurant, struck dumb, went an ugly ashen color. He put the fingertips of one hand in his mouth and bit down hard. In a broken voice, the waiter described the horrors: Roof collapsed in church in his own village. His own family might even now lie dead, buried in ash. The proprietor snatched the paper and cast a frantic eye over the columns of print. He sank to his knees in the sawdust, sobbing. Evidently he had family in Naples, too.
I stared at my plate. I saw grey and rubbery meat, congealing grease, seared bone with the marrow turned black. In the midst of life we are in death, but it doesn’t do to reflect upon it while dining.
"You must, please, excuse us, sir," the proprietor said to me, struggling to his feet. "There has been a terrible tragedy." He set the Chronicle beside my plate so I could see the blurred rotogravure picture of King Victor Emmanuel. Report That Total Number Of Dead May Reach Seven Hundred, I read. Towns Buried Under Ashes and Many Caught in Ruined Buildings. MANY BUILDINGS CRUSHED BY ASHES. Of course, I had known about the coming tragedy; but it was on the other side of the world, the business of other Company operatives, and I envied them that their work was completed now.
"I am so very sorry, sir," I managed to say, looking up at my host. He thought my pallor was occasioned by sympathy: he could not know I was seeing his mortal face like an apparition of the days to come, and it was grey and charring, for he lay dead in the burning ruins of a boarding house in the Mission District. Horror, yes, impossible not to feel horror, but one cannot empathize with them. One must not.
They went into the kitchen to tell the cook and I heard weeping break out afresh. Carefully I took up the newspaper and perused it. Perhaps there was something here that might divert me from the unpleasantness of the moment? Embezzlement. A crazed admirer stalking an actress. Charlatan evangelists. Grisly murder committed by two boys. Deadly explosion. Crazed derelict stalking a bank president. Los Angeles school principals demanding academic standards lowered.
I dropped the paper, and, leaving five dollars on the table, I fled that place.
I walked briskly, not looking into the faces of the mortals I passed. I rode the cable car, edging away from the mortal passengers. I nearly ran through the green expanse of Golden Gate Park, dodging around the mortal idlers, the lovers, the nurses wheeling infants in perambulators, until at last I stood on the shore of the sea. Tempting to turn to look at the fairy castles perched on its cliffs; tempting to turn to look at the carnival of fun along its grey sand margin, but the human comedy was the last thing I wanted just then. I needed, rather, the chill and level grace of the steel-colored horizon, sun-glistering, wide-expanding. The cold salt wind buffeted me, filled my grateful lungs. Ah, the immortal ocean.
Consider the instructive metaphor: Every conceivable terror dwells in her depths; she receives all wreckage, refuse, corruption of every kind, she pulls down into her depths human calamity indescribable: but none of this is any consideration to the sea. Let the screaming mortal passengers fight for room in the lifeboats, as the wreck belches flame and settles below the extinguishing wave; next morning she’ll still be beautiful and serene, her combers no less white, her distances as blue, her seabirds no less graceful as they wheel in the pure air. What perfection, to be so heartless. An inspiration to any lesser immortal.
As I stood so communing with the elements, a mortal man came wading out of the surf. I judged him two hundred pounds of athletic stockbroker, muscles bulging under sagging wet wool, braving the icy water as an act of self-disciplinary sport. He stood for a moment on one leg, examining the sole of his other foot. There was something gladiatorial in his pose. He looked up and saw me.
"A bracing day, sir," he shouted.
"Quite bracing." I nodded and smiled. I could feel the frost patterns of my returning composure.
And so I boarded another streetcar and rode back into the mortal warren, and found my way by certain streets to the Barbary Coast. Not a place a gentleman cares to admit to visiting, especially when he’s known the gilded beauties of old Byzantium or Regency-era wenches; the raddled pleasures available on Pacific Street suffered by comparison. But Appetite is Appetite, after all, and there is nothing like it to take one’s mind off unpleasant thoughts.
* * *
"Your costume," the attendant pushed a pasteboard carton across the counter to me. "Personal effects and field equipment. Linen, trousers, suspenders, boots, shirt, vest, coat and hat." He frowned. "Phew! These should have been laundered. Would you care to be fitted with an alternate set?"
"That’s all right." I took the offending rags. "The sweat goes with the role, I’m afraid. Irish laborer."
"Ah." He took a step backward. "Well, break a leg."
"Thank you."
Fifteen minutes later I emerged from a dressing room the very picture of an immigrant yahoo, uncomfortably conscious of my clammy and odiferous clothing. I sidled into the canteen, hoping there wouldn’t be a crowd in the line for coffee. There wasn’t, at that: most of the diners were clustered around one operative over in a corner, so I stood alone watching the Food Service technician fill my thick china mug from a dented steel coffee urn. The fragrant steam was a welcome distraction from my own fragrancy. I found a solitary table and warmed my hands on my dark brew there in peace, until an operative broke loose from the group and approached me.
"Say, Victor!"
I knew him slightly, an American operative so young one could scan him and still discern the scar tissue from his Augmentations. He was one of my Presalvagers.
"Good morning, Averill."
"Say, you really ought to listen to that fellow over there. He’s got some swell stories." He paused only long enough to have his cup refilled, then came and pulled out a chair across from me. "Know who he is? He’s the Guy Who Follows Caruso Around!"
"Is he?"
"Sure is. Music Specialist Grade One! That boy’s wired for sound. He’s caught every performance Caruso’s ever given, even the church stuff when he was a kid. Going to get him in Carmen the night before You-Know-What, going to record the whole performance. He’s just come back from planting receivers in the footlights! Say, have you gotten tickets yet?"
"No, I haven’t. I’m not interested, actually."
"Not interested?" he exclaimed. "Why aren’t you–how can’t you be interested? It’s Caruso, for God’s sake!"
"I’m perfectly aware of that, Averill, but I’ve got a prior engagement. And, personally, I’ve always thought de Reszke was much the better tenor."
"De Reszke?" He scanned his records to place the name and, while doing so, absently took a great gulp of coffee. A second later he clutched his ear and gasped. "Christ Almighty!"
"Steady, man." I suppressed a smile. "You don’t want to gulp beverages over 60 degrees Celsius, you know. There’s some very complex circuitry placed near the Eustachian tube that gets unpleasantly hot if you do."
"Ow, ow, ow!" He sucked in air, staring at me with the astonishment of the very new operative. It always takes them a while to discover that immortality and intense pain are not strangers, indeed can reside in the same eternal house for quite lengthy periods of time. "Should I drink some ice water?"
"By no means, unless you want some real discomfort. You’ll be all right in a minute or so. As I was about to say, I have some recordings of Jean de Reszke I’ll transmit to you, if you’re interested in comparing artists."
"Thanks, I’d like that." Averill ran a hasty self-diagnostic.
"And how is your team faring over at the New Brunswick, by the way? No cases of nerves, no blue devils?"
"Hell no." Averill started to lift his coffee again and then set it down respectfully.
"Doesn’t bother you that the whole place will be ashes in a few days’ time, and most of your neighbors dead?"
"No. We’re all okay over there. We figure it’s just a metaphor for the whole business, isn’t it? I mean, sooner or later this whole world–" he made a sweeping gesture, palm outward– "as we know it, is going the same way, right? So what’s it matter if it’s the earthquake finishes it now or a wrecking ball someplace further on in time, right? Same thing with the people. It’ll all come to the same thing in the end, so there’s no reason to get personally upset about it, is there? No, sir. Specially since we’ll all still be alive."
"A commendable attitude." I had a sip of my coffee. "And your work goes well?"
"Yes sir." He grinned. "You will be so proud of us burglary squad fellows when you get our next list. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we’re finding! All kinds of objets d’art, looks like. One-of-a-kind items, by God. Wait’ll you see."
"I look forward to it." I glanced at my Chronometer and drank down the rest of my coffee, having waited for it to descend to a comfortable 59 degrees Celsius. "But, you know, Averill, it really won’t do to think of yourselves as burglars."
"Well–that is–it’s only a figure of speech, anyhow!" Averill protested, flushing. "A joke!"
"I’m aware of that, but I cannot emphasize enough that we are not stealing anything." I set my coffee cup down, aware that I sounded priggish, and looked sternly at him. "We’re preserving priceless examples of late Victorian craftsmanship for the edification of future generations."
"I know." Averill looked at me sheepishly, "But–aw, hell, do you mean to say not one of those crystal chandeliers will wind up in some Facilitator General’s private HQ somewhere?"
"That’s an absurd idea," I told him, though I knew only too well it wasn’t. Still, it doesn’t do to disillusion one’s subordinates too young. "And now, will you excuse me? I mustn’t be late for work."
"All right. Be seeing you!"
As I left he rejoined the admiring throng about the fellow who was telling Caruso stories. My way lay along the bright tiled hall, steamy and echoing with the clatter of food preparation and busy operatives; then through the dark security vestibule, with its luminous screens displaying the world without; then through the concealed door that shut behind me and left no trace of itself to any eyes but my own. I drew a deep breath. Chill and silent morning air; no glimmer of light, yet, at least not down here in the alley. Half-past-five. This time three days hence–
I shivered and found my way out in the direction of the waterfront.
Not long afterward I arrived at the loading area where I had been desultorily employed for the last month. I made my entrance staggering slightly, doing my best to murder "You Can’t Guess Who Flirted With Me" in a gravelly baritone.
The mortal laborers assembled there turned to stare at me. My best friend, an acquaintance I’d cultivated painstakingly these last three weeks, came forward and took me by the arm.
"Jesus, Kelly, you’d better stow that. Where’ve you been?"
I stopped singing and gave him a belligerent stare. "Marching in the Easter Parade, O’Neil."
"O, like enough." He ran his eyes over me in dismay. Francis O’Neil was thirty years old. He looked enough like me to have been taken for my somewhat bulkier, clean-shaven brother. "What’re you doing this for, man? You know Herlihy doesn’t like you as it is. You look like you’ve not been home to sleep nor bathe since Friday night!"
"So I have not." I dropped my gaze in hungover remorse.
"Come on, you poor stupid bastard, I’ve got some coffee in my dinner pail. Sober up. Was it a letter you got from your girl again?"
"It was." I let him steer me to a secluded area behind a mountain of crates and accepted the tin cup he filled for me with lukewarm coffee. "She doesn’t love me, O’Neil. She never did. I can tell."
"Now, then, you’re taking it all the wrong way, I’m sure. I can’t believe she’s stopped caring, not after all the things you’ve told me about her. Just drink that down, now. Mary made it fresh not an hour ago."
"You’re a lucky man, Francis." I leaned on him and began to weep, slopping the coffee. He forbore with the patience of a saint and replied:
"Sure I am, Jimmy, And shall I tell you why? Because I know when to take my drink, don’t I? I don’t swill it down every payday and forget to go home, do I? No indeed. I’d lose Mary and the kids and all the rest of it, wouldn’t I? It’s self-control you need, Jimmy, and the sorrows in your heart be damned. Come on now. With any luck Herlihy won’t notice the state you’re in."
But he did, and a litany of scorn was pronounced on my penitent head. I took it with eyes downcast, turning my battered hat in my hands, and a dirtier nor more maudlin drunk could scarce have been seen in that city. I would be summarily fired, I was assured, but they needed men today so bad they’d employ even the likes of me, though by God next time–
When the boss had done excoriating me I was dismissed to help unload a cargo of copra from the Nevadan, in from the islands yesterday. I sniveled and tottered and managed not to drop anything much; O’Neil stayed close to me the whole day, watchful lest I pass out or wander off. He was a good friend to the abject caricature I presented; God knows why he cared. Well, I should repay his kindness, at least, though in a manner he would never have the opportunity to appreciate.
We sweated until four in the afternoon, when there was nothing left to take off the Nevadan; let go then with directions to the next day’s job, and threats against slackers.
"Now, Kelly." O’Neil took my arm and steered me with him back toward Market Street. "I’ll tell you what I think you ought to do. Go home and have a bit of a wash in the basin, right? Have you clean clothes? So, put on a clean shirt and trousers and see can you scrape some of that off your boots. Then come over to supper at our place, see. Mary’s bought some sausages, we thought we’d treat ourselves to a dish of Coddle now that Lent’s over. We’ve plenty."
"I will, then." I grasped his hand. "O’Neil, you’re a lord for courtesy."
"I am not. Only go home and wash, man!"
We parted in front of the Terminal Hotel and I hurried back to the HQ to follow his instructions. This was just the sort of chance I’d been angling for since I’d sought out the man on the basis of the Genetic Survey team report.
An hour later, as cleanly as the character I played was likely to be able to make himself, I ventured along Market Street, heading down in the direction of the tenement where O’Neil and his family lived, the boarding houses in the shadow of the Palace Hotel. I knew their exact location, though O’Neil was of course unaware of that; accordingly he had sent a pair of his children down to the corner to watch for me.
They failed to observe my approach, however, and I really couldn’t blame them; for proceeding down Market Street before me, moving slowly between the gloom of twilight and the electric illumination of the shop signs, was an apparition in a scarlet tunic and black shako.
It walked with the stiff and measured tread of the automaton it was pretending to be. The little ragged girl and her littler brother stared openmouthed, watching its progress along the sidewalk. It performed a brief business of marching mindlessly into a lamppost and walking inexorably in place there a moment before righting itself and going on, but now on an oblique course toward the children.
I too continued on my course, smiling a little. This was delightful: a mortal pretending to be a mechanical toy being followed by a cyborg pretending to be a mortal.
There was a wild reverberation of mirth in the ether around me. One other of our kind was observing the scene, apparently; but there was a gigantic quality to the amusement that made me falter in my step. Who was that? That was someone I knew, surely. Quo Vadis? I transmitted. The laughter shut off like an electric light being switched out, but not before I got a sense of direction from it. I looked across the street and just caught a glimpse of a massive figure disappearing down an alley. My visual impression was of an old miner, one of the mythic founders of this city. Old gods walking? What a ridiculous idea, and yet . . . what a moment of panic it evoked, of mortal dread, quite irrational.
But the figure in the scarlet tunic had reached the children. Little Ella clutched her brother’s hand, stock-still on the pavement: little Donal shrank behind his sister, but watched with one eye as the thing loomed over them.
It bent forward, slowly, in increments, as though a gear ratcheted in its spine to lower it down to them. Its face was painted white, with red circles on the cheeks and a red cupid’s bow mouth under the stiff black mustaches. Blank glassy eyes did not fix on them, did not seem to see anything, but one white-gloved hand came up jerkily to offer the little girl a printed handbill.
After a frozen motionless moment she took it from him. "Thank you, Mister Soldier," she said in a high clear voice. The figure gave no sign that it had heard, but unbent slowly, until it stood ramrod-straight again; pivoted sharply on its heel and resumed its slow march down Market Street.
"Soldier go." Donal pointed. Ella peered thoughtfully at the handbill.
" ‘CH-IL-DREN,’ " she read aloud. What an impossibly sweet voice she had. "And that’s an Exclamation Point, there. ‘Babe–Babies, In, To–Toy–’ "
" ‘Toyland,’ " I finished for her. She looked up with a glad cry.
"There you are, Mister Kelly. Donal, this is Mister Kelly. He is Daddy’s good friend. Supper will be on the table presently. Won’t you please come with us, Mister Kelly?"
"I should be delighted to." I touched the brim of my hat. They pattered away down an alley, making for the dark warren of their tenement, and I followed closely.
They were different physical types, the brother and sister. Pretty children, certainly, particularly Ella with her glossy black braids, with her eyes the color of the twilight framed by black lashes. But it is not beauty we look for in a child.
It was the boy I watched closely as we walked, a sturdy three-year-old trudging along holding tight to the girl’s hand. I couldn’t have told you the quality nor shade of his skin, nor his hair nor his eyes; I cared only that his head appeared to be a certain shape, that his little body appeared to fit a certain profile, that his limbs appeared to be a certain length in relation to one another. I couldn’t be certain yet, of course: that was why I had maneuvered his father into the generous impulse of inviting me into his home.
They lived down a long dark corridor toward the back of the building, its walls damp with sweat, its air heavy with the odors of cooking, of washing, of mortal life. The door opened a crack as we neared it and then, slowly, opened wide to reveal O’Neil standing there in a blaze of light. The blaze was purely by contrast to our darkness, however; once we’d crossed the threshold, I saw that two kerosene lamps were all the illumination they had.
"There now, didn’t I tell you she’d spot him?" O’Neil cried triumphantly. "Welcome to this house, Jimmy Kelly."
"God save all here." I removed my hat. "Good evening, Mrs. O’Neil."
"Good evening to you, Mr. Kelly." Mary O’Neil turned from the stove, bouncing a fretful infant against one shoulder. "Would you care for a cup of tea, now?" She was like Ella, if years could be granted Ella to grow tall and slender and wear her hair up like a soft thundercloud. But there was no welcoming smile for me in the grey eyes, for on the previous occasion we’d met I’d been disgracefully intoxicated–at least, doing my best to appear so. I looked down as if abashed.
"I’d bless you for a cup of tea, my dear, I would," I replied. "And won’t you allow me to apologize for the condition I was in last Tuesday week? I’d no excuse at all."
"Least said, soonest mended." She softened somewhat at my obvious sobriety. Setting the baby down to whimper in its apple-box cradle, she poured and served my tea. "Pray seat yourself."
"Here." Ella pulled out a chair for me. I thanked her and sat down to scan the room they lived in. Only one room, with one window that probably looked out on an alley wall but was presently frosted opaque from the steam of the saucepan wherein their supper cooked. Indeed, there was a fine layer of condensation on everything: it trickled down the walls, it lay in a damp film on the oilcloth cover of the table and the blankets on the bed against the far wall. The unhappy infant’s hair was moist and curling with it.
Had there been any ventilation it would have been a pleasant enough room. The table was set with good china, someone’s treasured inheritance no doubt. The tiny potbellied stove must have been awkward to cook upon, but O’Neil had built a cabinet of slatwood and sheet tin next to it to serve as the rest of a kitchen. The children’s trundle was stored tidily under the parents’ bed. Next to the painted washbasin on the trunk, a decorous screen gave privacy to one corner. Slatwood shelves displayed the family’s few valuables: a sewing-basket, a music box with a painted scene on its lid, a cheap mirror whose frame was decorated with glued-on seashells, a china dog. On the wall was a painted crucifix with a palm frond stuck behind it.
O’Neil came and sat down across from me.
"You look grand, Jimmy." He thumped his fist on the table approvingly. "Combed your hair, too, didn’t you? That’s the boy. You’ll make a gentleman yet."
"Daddy?" Ella climbed into his lap. "There was a soldier came and gave us this in the street. Will you ever read me what it says? There’s more words than I know, see." She thrust the handbill at him. He took it and held it out before him, blinking at it through the steamy air.
Here I present the printed text he read aloud, without his many pauses as he attempted to decipher it (for he was an intelligent man, but of little education):
CHILDREN!
Come see the Grand Fairy Extravaganza BABES IN TOYLAND
Music by Victor Herbert
Book by Glen MacDonough
Staged by Julian Mitchell
Ignacio Martinetti and 100 Others! Coming by Special Train of Eight Cars!
Biggest Musical Production San Francisco Has Seen In Years!
An Invitation from Mother Goose Herself:
MY dear little Boys and Girls,
I DO hope you will behave nicely so that your Mammas and Papas will treat you to a performance of Mr. Herbert’s lovely play Babes in Toyland at the Columbia Theater, opening Monday, the 16th of April. Why, my dears, it’s one of the biggest successes of the season and has already played for ever so many nights in such far-away cities as New York, Chicago, and Boston. Yes, you really must be good little children, and then your dear parents will see that you deserve an outing to visit me. For, make no mistake, I myself, the only true and original MOTHER GOOSE, shall be there upon the stage of the Columbia Theater. And so shall so many of your other friends from my delightful rhymes such as Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, Bo Peep, Contrary Mary, and Red Riding Hood. The curtain will rise upon Mr. Mitchell’s splendid production, with its many novel effects, at eight o’clock sharp.
OF course, if you are very little folks you are apt to be sleepyheads if kept up so late, but that need not concern your careful parents, for there will be a matinee on Saturday at two o’clock in the afternoon.
WON’T you please come to see me? Your affectionate friend, Mother Goose.
"Oh, dear," sighed Mary.
"Daddy, can we go?" Ella’s eyes were alight with anticipation. Donal chimed in:
"See Mother Goose, Daddy!"
"We can’t afford it, children." Mary’s mouth was a set line. She took the saucepan off the stove and began to ladle a savory dish of sausage, onions, potatoes and bacon onto the plates. "We’ve got a roof over our heads and food for the table. Let’s be thankful for that."
Ella closed her little mouth tight like her mother’s, but Donal burst into tears. "I wanna go see Mother Goose!" he howled.
O’Neil groaned. "Your mother is right, Donal. Daddy and Mummy don’t have the money for the tickets, can you understand that?"
"You oughtn’t to have read out that bill," said Mary in a quiet voice.
"I want go see the Soldier!"
"Donal, hush now!"
"Donal’s the boy for me," I said, leaning forward and reaching out to him. "Look, Donal Og, what’s this you’ve got in your ear?"
I pretended to pull forth a bar of Ghirardelli’s. Ella clapped her hands to her mouth. Donal stopped crying and stared at me with perfectly round eyes.
"Look at that! Would you ever have thought such a little fellow’d have such big things in his ears? Come sit with your Uncle Jimmy, Donal." I drew him onto my lap. "And if you hush your noise, perhaps Mummy and Daddy’ll let you have sweeties, eh?" I set the candy in the midst of the oilcloth, well out of his reach.
"Bless you, Jimmy," said O’Neil.
"Well, and isn’t it the least I can do? Didn’t know I could work magic, did you, Ella?"
"Settle down, now." Mary set out the dishes. "Frank, it’s time to say Grace."
O’Neil made the sign of the Cross and intoned, with the little ones mumbling along, "Bless-us-O-Lord-and-these-Thy-gifts-which-we-are-about-to-receive-from-Thy-bounty-through-Christ-Our-Lord-Amen."
Mary sat down with us, unfolding her threadbare napkin. "Donal, come sit with Mummy."
"Be easy, Mrs. O’Neil, I don’t mind him." I smiled at her. "I’ve a little brother at home he’s the very image of. Where’s his spoon? Here, Donal Og, you eat with me."
"I don’t doubt they look alike." O’Neil held out his tumbler as Mary poured from a pitcher of milk. "Look at you and me. Do you know, Mary, that was the first acquaintance we had–? Got our hats mixed up when the wind blew ’em both off. We wear just the same size."
"Fancy that."
So we dined, and an affable mortal man helped little Donal make a mess of his potatoes whilst chatting with Mr. and Mrs. O’Neil about such subjects as the dreadful expense of living in San Francisco and their plans to remove to a cheaper, less crowded place as soon as they’d saved enough money. The immortal machine that sat at their table was making a thorough examination of Donal, most subtly: an idle caress of his close-cropped little head measured his skull size, concealed devices gauged bone length and density and measured his weight to the pound; data was analyzed and preliminary judgment made: Optimal Morphology. Augmentation Process Possible. Classification pending Blood Analysis and Spektral Diagnosis.
"That’s the best meal I’ve had in this country, Mrs. O’Neil," I told her as we rose from the table.
"How kind of you to say so, Mr. Kelly," she replied, collecting the dishes.
"Chocolate, Daddy?" Donal stretched out his arm for it. O’Neil tore open the waxed paper and broke off a square. He divided it into two and gave one to Donal and one to Ella.
"Now, you must thank your Uncle Jimmy, for this is good chocolate and cost him dear."
"Thank you Uncle Jimmy," they chorused, and Ella added, "But he got it by magic. It came out of Donal’s ear. I saw it."
O’Neil rubbed his face wearily. "No, Ella, it was only a conjuring trick. Remember the talk we had about such things? It was just a trick. Wasn’t it, Jimmy?"
"That’s all it was, sure," I agreed. She looked from her father to me and back.
"Frank, dear, will you help me with these?" Mary had stacked the dishes in a washpan and sprinkled soap flakes in.
"Right. Jimmy, will you mind the kids? We’re just taking these down to the tap."
"I will indeed," I said, and thought: Thank you very much, mortal man, for this opportunity. The moment the door closed behind them I had the device out of my pocket. It looked rather like a big old-fashioned watch. I held it out to the boy.
"Here you go, Donal, here’s a grand timepiece for you to play with."
He took it gladly. "There’s a train on it!" he cried. I turned to Ella.
"And what can I do for you, darling?"
She looked at me with considering eyes. "You can read me the funny papers." She pointed to a neatly stacked bundle by the stove.
"With pleasure." I seized them up and we settled back in my chair, pulling a lamp close. The baby slept fitfully, I read to Ella about Sambo and Tommy Pip and Herr Spiegleburger, and all the while Donal pressed buttons and thumbed levers on the diagnostic toy. It flashed pretty lights for him, it played little tunes his sister was incapable of hearing; and then, as I had known it would, it bit him.
"Ow!" He dropped it and began to cry, holding out his tiny bleeding finger.
"O, dear, now, what’s that? Did it stick you?" I put his sister down and got up to take the device back. "Tsk! Look at that, the stem’s broken." It vanished into my pocket. "What a shame. O, I’m sorry, Donal Og, here’s the old hankie. Let’s bandage it up, shall we? There, there. Doesn’t hurt now, does it?"
"No," he sniffled. "I want another chocolate."
"And so you’ll have one, for being a brave boy." I snapped off another square and gave it to him. "Ella, let’s give you another as well, shall we? What have you found there?"
"It’s a picture about Mother Goose." She had spread out the Children’s Page on the oilcloth. "Isn’t it? That says Mother Goose right there."
I looked over her shoulder. "Pictures from Mother Goose," I read out, "Hot Cross Buns. Paint the Seller of Hot Cross Buns. Looks like it’s a contest, darling. They’re asking the kiddies to paint in the picture and send it off to the paper to judge who’s done the best one."
"Is there prize money?" She had an idea.
"Two dollars for the best one," I read, pulling at my lower lip uneasily. "And paintboxes for everyone else who enters."
She thought that over. Dismay came into her face. "But I haven’t got a paintbox to color it with at all! O, that’s stupid! Giving paintboxes out to kids that’s got them already. O, that’s not fair!" She shook with stifled anger.
"What’s not fair?" Her mother backed through the door, holding it open for O’Neil with the washpan.
"Only this Mother Goose thing here," I said.
"You’re never on about going to that show again, are you?" said Mary sharply, coming and taking her daughter by the shoulders. "Are you? Have you been wheedling at Mr. Kelly?"
"I have not!" the little girl cried in a trembling voice.
"She hasn’t, Mrs. O’Neil, only it’s this contest in the kids’ paper," I hastened to explain. "You have to have a set of paints to enter it, see."
Mary looked down at the paper. Ella began to cry quietly. Her mother gathered her up and sat with her on the edge of the bed, rocking her back and forth.
"O, I’m so sorry, Ella dear, Mummy’s so sorry. But you see, now, don’t you, the harm in wanting such things? You see how unhappy it’s made you? Look how hard Mummy and Daddy work to feed you and clothe you. Do you know how unhappy it makes us when you want shows and paintboxes and who knows what, and we can’t give them to you? It makes us despair. That’s a Mortal Sin, despair is."
"I want to see the fairies," wept the little girl.
"Dearest dear, there aren’t any fairies! But surely it was the Devil himself you met out in the street, that gave you that wicked piece of paper and made you long after vain things. Do you understand me? Do you see why it’s wicked, wanting things? It kills the soul, Ella."
After a long gasping moment the child responded, "I see, Mummy." She kept her face hidden in her mother’s shoulder. Donal watched them uncertainly, twisting the big knot of handkerchief on his finger. O’Neil sat at the table and put his head in his hands. After a moment he swept up the newspaper and put it in the stove. He reached into the slatwood cabinet and pulled a bottle of Wilson’s Whiskey up on the table, and got a couple of clean tumblers out of the washpan.
"Will you have a dram, Kelly?" he offered.
"Just the one." I sat down beside him.
"Just the one," he agreed.
You must not empathize with them.
* * *
When I let myself into my rooms on Bush Street, I checked my messages. A long blue column of them pulsed on the credenza screen. Most of it was the promised list from Averill and his fellows; I’d have to pass that on to our masters as soon as I’d reviewed it. I didn’t feel much like reviewing it just now, however.
There was also a response to my request for another transport for Mme. D’Araignee: DENIED. NO ADDITIONAL VEHICLES AVAILABLE. FIND ALTERNATIVE.
I sighed and sank into my chair. My honor was at stake. From a drawer at the side of the credenza I took another Ghirardelli bar and, scarcely taking the time to tear off the paper, consumed it in a few greedy bites. Waiting for its soothing properties to act, I paged through a copy of the Examiner. There were automobile agencies along Golden Gate Avenue. Perhaps I could afford to purchase one out of my personal operation’s expense account?
But they were shockingly expensive in this city. I couldn’t find one for sale, new or used, for less than a thousand dollars. Why couldn’t her case officer delve into his own pocket to deliver the goods? I verified the balance of my account. No, there certainly wasn’t enough for an automobile in there. However, there was enough to purchase four tickets to "Babes in Toyland."
I accessed the proper party and typed in my transaction request.
TIX UNAVAILABLE FOR 041606 EVENT, came the reply. 041706 AVAILABLE OK?
OK, I typed. PLS DEBIT & DELIVER.
DEBITED. TIX IN YR BOX AT S MKT ST HQ 600 HRS 041606.
TIBI GRATIAS! I replied, with all sincerity.
DIE DULCE FRUERE. OUT.
Having solved one problem, an easy solution to the other suggested itself to me. It involved a slight inconvenience, it was true: but any gentleman would readily endure worse for a lady’s sake.
* * *
My two rooms on Bush Street did not include the luxury of a bath, but the late Mr. Adolph Sutro had provided an alternative pleasure for his fellow citizens: the Baths, which surely could have existed only in that city, in that time.
Just north of Cliff House Mr. Sutro had purchased a rocky little purgatory of a cove, cleaned the shipwrecks out of it and proceeded to shore it up against the more treacherous waves with several thousand barrels of cement. Having constructed not one but six saltwater pools of a magnificence to rival old Rome, he had proceeded to enclose it in a crystal palace affair of no less than four acres of glass.
Ah, but this wasn’t enough for San Francisco! The entrance, on the hill above, was as near a Greek temple as modern artisans could produce; through the shrine one wandered along the museum gallery lined with exhibits both educational and macabre and descended a vast staircase lined with palm trees to the main level, where one might bathe, exercise in the gymnasium or attend a theater performance. Having done all this, one might then dine in the restaurant.
However, my schedule today called for nothing more strenuous than bathing. Ten minutes after descending the grand staircase I was emerging from my changing room (one of five hundred), having soaped, showered and togged myself out in my rented bathing suit, making my way toward the nearest warm-water pool under the bemused eyes of several hundred mortal idlers sitting in the bleachers above.
I was not surprised to see another of my own kind backstroking manfully across the green water; nothing draws the attention of an immortal like sanitary conveniences. I was rather startled when I recognized the man, however, not having seen him since some time in the sixteenth century. Lewis is nothing more than a Literary Preservation Specialist, rather a sad-looking little fellow with a noble profile; not in my class, of course, but a gentleman for all that.
He felt my regard and glanced up, seeing me at once. He smiled and waved.
Victor! he broadcast. How nice to see you again.
It’s Lewis, isn’t it? I responded, though I knew his name perfectly well, and far more of his history than he knew himself. I had been assigned to monitor his activities once, to my everlasting shame. Still, it had been centuries, and he had never shown any sign of recovering certain memories. I hoped, for his sake, that such was the case. Memory effacement is not a pleasant experience.
He pulled himself up on the coping of the pool and swept his wet hair out of his eyes. I stepped to the edge, took the correct diver’s stance and leapt in, transmitting through bubbles: So you’re here as well? Presalvaging books, I suppose?
The Mercantile Library, he affirmed, and there was nothing in his pleasant tone to indicate he’d remembered what I’d done to him at Eurobase One.
God! That must be a Herculean effort, I responded, surfacing.
He transmitted rueful amusement. You’ve heard of it, I suppose?
Rather, I replied, practicing my breast stroke. All those Comstock Lode silver barons went looting the old family libraries of Europe, didn’t they? Snatched up medieval manuscripts at a tenth their value from impoverished Venetian princes, I believe? Fabulously rare first editions from London antiquarians?
Something like that, he replied. And brought them back home to the States for safekeeping.
Ha!
Well, how were they to know? Lewis made an expressive gesture taking in the vast edifice around us. Mr. Sutro himself had a Shakespeare first folio. What a panic it’s been tracking that down! And you?
I’m negotiating for a promising-looking young recruit. Moreover, I drew Nob Hill detail, I replied casually. I’ve coordinated quite a team of talented youngsters set to liberate the premises of Mssrs. Towne, Crocker, Huntington et al. as soon as the lights are out. All manner of costly bric-a-brac has been tagged for rescue–Chippendales, Louis Quatorzes–to say nothing of jewels and cash.
My, that sounds satisfying. You’ll never guess what I found, only last night! Lewis transmitted, looking immensely pleased with himself.
Something unexpected? I responded.
He edged forward on the coping gleefully. Yes, you might say so. Just some old papers that had been mislaid by an idiot named Pompeo Leoni and bound into the wrong book. Just something jotted down by an elderly left-handed Italian gentleman!
Not Da Vinci? I turned in the water to stare at him, genuinely impressed.
Who else? Lewis nearly hugged himself in triumph. And! Not just any doodlings or speculation from the pen of Leonardo, either. Something of decided interest to the Company! It seems he devoted some serious thought to the construction of articulated human limbs–a clockwork arm, for example, that could be made to perform various tasks!
I’ve heard something of the sort, I replied, swimming back toward him.
Yes, well, he seems to have taken the idea further. Lewis leaned down in a conspiratorial manner. From a human arm he leapt to the idea of an entire articulated human skeleton of bronze, and wondered whether the human frame might not be merely imitated but improved in function!
By Jove! Was the man anticipating androids? I reached the coping and leaned on it, slicking back my hair.
No! No! He was chasing another idea entirely, Lewis insisted. Shall I quote? I rather think I ought to let him express his thoughts. He leaned back and, with a dreamy expression, transmitted in flawless fifteenth-century Tuscan: It has been observed that the presence of metal is not in all cases inimical to the body of man, as we may see in earrings, or in crossbow bolts, spearpoints, pistol balls, and other detritus of war that have been known to enter the flesh and remain for some years without doing the bearer any appreciable harm, or indeed in that practice of physicians wherein a small pellet of gold is inserted into an incision made near an aching joint, and the sufferer gains relief and ease of movement thereby.
Take this idea further and think that a shattered bone might be replaced with a model of the same bone cast in bronze, identical with or even superior to its original.
Go further and say that where one bone might be replaced, so might the skeleton entire, and if the articulation is improved upon the man might attain a greater degree of physical perfection than he was born with.
The flaw in this would be the man’s pain and the high likelihood he would die before surgery of such magnitude could be carried out.
Unless we are to regard the theory of alchemists who hold that the Philosopher’s Stone, once attained, would transmute the imperfect flesh to perfection, a kind of supple gold that lives and breathes, and by this means the end might be obtained without cutting, the end being immortality. Lewis opened his eyes and looked at me expectantly. I smacked my hand on the coping in amusement.
By Jove! I repeated. How typical of the Maestro. So he was all set to invent us, was he?
To say nothing of hip replacements!
But what a find for the Company, Lewis!
Of course, to give you a real idea of the text I ought to have presented it like this: Lewis began to rattle it out backward. I shook my head, laughing and holding up my hands in sign that he should stop. After a moment or two he trailed off, adding: I don’t think it loses much in translation, though.
I shook my head. You know, old man, I believe we’re treading rather too closely to a temporal paradox here. Just as well the Company will take possession of that volume, and not some inquisitive mortal! What if it had inspired someone to experiment with biomechanicals a century or so too early?
Ah! No, you see, since History can’t be changed. We’re safe enough, Lewis pointed out. As far as History records those Da Vinci pages, it records them as being lost in the Mercantile Library fire. The circle is closed. All the same, I imagine it was a temptation for any operatives stationed near Amboise in Da Vinci’s time. Wouldn’t you have wanted to seek the old man out as he lay dying, and tell him that something would be done with this particular idea, at least? Immortality and human perfection!
Of course I’d have been tempted; but I shook my head. Not unless I cared to face a court-martial for a security breach.
Lewis shivered in his wet wool and slid back into the water. I turned on my back and floated, considering him.
The temperature doesn’t suit you? I inquired.
Oh . . . they’ve got the frigidarium all right, but the calidaria here aren’t really hot enough, Lewis explained. And of course there’s no sudatorium at all.
Nor any slaves for a good massage, either, I added, glancing up at the mortal onlookers. Sic transit luxuria, alas. Lewis smiled faintly; he had never been comfortable with mortal servants, I remembered. Odd, for someone who began mortal life as a Roman, or at least a Romano-Briton.
Weren’t you recruited at Bath. . . ? I inquired, leaning on the coping.
Aquae Sulis, it was then, Lewis informed me. The public baths there.
Of course. I remember now! You were rescued from the temple. Intercepted child sacrifice, I imagine?
Oh, good heavens, no! The Romans never did that sort of thing. No, I was just somebody’s little unwanted holiday souvenir left in a blanket by the statue of Apollo. Lewis shrugged, and then began to grin. I hadn’t thought about it before, but this puts a distinctly Freudian slant on my visits here! Returning to the womb in time of stress? I was only a few hours old when the Company took me, or so I’ve always been told.
I laughed and set off on a lap across the pool. At least you were spared any memories of mortal life.
That’s true, he responded, and then his smile faded. And yet, you know, I think I’m the poorer for that. The rest of you may have some harrowing memories, but at least you know what it was to be mortal.
I assure you it’s nothing to be envied, I informed him. He nodded in concession of my point and set out across the pool himself, resuming his backstroke.
I think I would have preferred the experience, all the same, he insisted. I’d have liked a father–or mother–figure in my life. At the very least, those of you rescued at an age to remember it have a sort of filial relationship with the immortal who saved you. Haven’t you?
I regret to disillusion you, sir, but that is absolutely not true, I replied firmly.
Really? He dove and came up for air, gasping. What a shame. Bang goes another romantic illusion. I suppose we’re all just orphans of one storm or another!
At that moment a pair of mortals chose to roughhouse, snorting and chuckling as they pummeled each other in their seats in the wooden bleachers; one of them broke free and ran, scrambling apelike over the seats, until he lost his footing and fell with a horrendous crash that rolled and thundered in the air, echoing under the glassed dome, off the water and wet coping.
I saw Lewis go pale; I imagine my own countenance showed reflexive panic. After a frozen moment Lewis drew a deep breath.
"One storm or another," he murmured aloud. "Nothing to be afraid of here, after all. Is there? This structure will survive the quake. History says it will. Nothing but minor damage, really."
I nodded. Then, struck in one moment by the same thought, we lifted our horrified eyes to the ceiling, with its one hundred thousand panes of glass.
"I believe I’ve got a rail car to catch," I apologized, vaulting to the coping with what I hoped was not undignified haste.
"I’ve a luncheon engagement myself," Lewis said, gasping as he sprinted ahead of me to the grand staircase.
* * *
On the 16th of April I entertained friends, or at least my landlady received that impression; and what quiet and well-behaved fellows the gentlemen were, and how plain and respectable the ladies! No cigars, no raucous laughter, no drunkenness at all. Indeed, Mrs. McCarty assured me she would welcome them as lodgers at any time in the future, should they require desirable Bush Street rooms. I assured her they would be gratified at the news. Perhaps they might have been, if her boarding house were still standing in a week’s time. History would decree otherwise, regrettably.
My sitting room resembled a council of war, with its central table on which was spread a copy of the Sanborn map of the Nob Hill area, up-to-date from the previous year. My subordinates stood or leaned over the table, listening intently as I bent with red chalk to delineate the placement of Hush Field generators.
"The generators will arrive in a baker’s van at the corner of Clay and Taylor Streets at midnight precisely," I informed them. "Delacort, your team will approach from your station at the end of Pleasant Street and take possession of them. There will be five generators. I want them placed at the following intersections: Bush and Jones, Clay and Jones, Clay and Powell, Bush and Powell and on California midway between Taylor and Mason." I put a firm letter X at each site. "The generators should be in place and switched on by no later than five minutes after midnight. Your people will remain in place to remove the generators at half-past three exactly, returning them to the baker’s van, which will depart promptly. At that moment a private car will pull up to the same location to transport your team to the central collection point on Ocean Beach. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly, sir," Delacort saluted. Averill looked at her slightly askance and turned a worried face to me.
"What’re they going to do if some cop comes along and wants to know what they’re doing there at that time of night?"
"Any cop coming in range of the Hush Field will pass out, dummy," Philemon informed him. I frowned and cleared my throat. Cinema Standard (the language of the schoolroom) is not my preferred mode of expression.
"If you please, Philemon!"
"Yeah, sorry–"
"Your team will depart from their station at Joice Street at five minutes after midnight and proceed to the intersection of Mason and Sacramento, where a motorized drayer’s wagon will be arriving. You will be responsible for the contents of the Flood mansion." I outlined it in red. "Your driver will provide you with a sterile containment receptacle for Item Number Thirty-Nine on your acquisitions list. Kindly see to it that this particular item is salvaged first and delivered to the driver separately."
"What’s Item Thirty-Nine?" Averill inquired. There followed an awkward silence. Philemon raised his eyebrows at me. Company policy discourages field operatives from being told more than they strictly need to know regarding any given posting. Upon consideration, however, it seemed wisest to answer Averill’s question; there was enough stress associated with this detail as it was without adding mysteries. I cleared my throat.
"The Flood mansion contains a ‘Moorish’ smoking room," I informed him. "Among its features is a lump of black stone carefully displayed in a glass case. Mr. Flood purchased it under the impression that it is an actual piece of the Qaaba from Mecca, chipped loose by an enterprising Yankee adventurer. He was, of course, defrauded; the stone is in fact a meteorite, and preliminary spectrographic analysis indicates it originated on Mars."
"Oh," said Averill, nodding sagely. I did not choose to add that plainly visible on the rock’s surface is a fossilized crustacean of an unknown kind, or that the rock’s rediscovery (in a museum owned by Dr. Zeus, incidentally) in the year 2210 will galvanize the Mars Colonization Effort into making real progress at last.
I bent over the map again and continued:
"All the items on your list are to be loaded into the wagon by twenty minutes after three. At that time, the wagon will depart for Ocean Beach and your team will follow in the private car provided. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Rodrigo, your team will depart from their Taylor Street station at five minutes after midnight as well. Your wagon will arrive at the corner of California and Taylor; you will proceed to salvage the Huntington mansion," I marked it on the map. "Due to the nature of your quarry you will be allotted ten additional minutes, but all listed items must be loaded and ready for removal by half-past-Three, at which time your private transport will arrive. Upon arrival at Ocean Beach you will be assisted by Philemon’s team, who will already (I should hope) have loaded most of their salvage into the waiting boats."
"Yes, sir." Rodrigo made a slight bow.
"Freytag, your team will be stationed on Jones Street. You depart at five after midnight, like the rest, and your objective is the Crocker mansion, here." Freytag bent close to see as I shaded in her area. "Your wagon will pull up to Jones and California; you ought to be able to fill it in the allotted time of two hours and fifteen minutes precisely, and be ready to depart for Ocean Beach without incident. Loong? Averill?"
"Sir!" Both immortals stood to attention.
"Your teams will disperse from their stations along Clay and Pine Streets and salvage the lesser targets shown here, here, here, and here–" I chalked circles around them. "I leave to your best judgment individual personnel assignments. Two wagons will arrive on Clay Street at one o’clock precisely and two more will arrive on Pine five minutes later. You ought to find them more than adequate for your purposes. You will need to do a certain amount of running to and fro to coordinate the efforts of your ladies and gentlemen, but it can’t be helped."
"I don’t anticipate difficulties, sir." Loong assured me.
"No indeed; but remember the immensity of this event shadow." I set down the chalk and wiped my hands on a handkerchief. "Your private transports will be waiting at the corner of Bush and Jones by half-past three. Please arrive promptly."
"Yes, sir." Averill looked earnest.
"In the entirely likely event that any particular team completes its task ahead of schedule, and has free space in its wagon after all the listed salvage has been accounted for, I will expect that team to lend its assistance to Mme. D’Arraignee and her teams at the Mark Hopkins Institute." I swept them with a meaningful stare. "Gentlemen doing so can expect my personal thanks and commendation in their personnel files."
That impressed them, I could see. The favorable notice of one’s superiors is invariably one’s ticket to the better sort of assignment. Clearing my throat, I continued:
"I anticipate arriving at no later than half-past-two to oversee the final stages of removal. Kindly remain at your transports until I transmit your signal to depart for the central collection point. Have you any further questions, ladies and gentlemen?"
"None, sir," Averill said, and the others nodded agreement.
"Then it’s settled," I told them, and carefully folded shut the mapbook. "A word of warning to you all: you may become aware of precursors to the shock in the course of the evening. History will record a particularly nasty seismic disturbance at two a.m. in particular, and another at five. Control your natural panic, please. Upsetting as you may find these incidents, they will present no danger whatsoever, will in fact go unnoticed by such mortals as happen to be awake at that hour."
Averill put up his hand. "I read the horses will be able to feel it," he said, a little nervously. "I read they’ll go mad."
I shrugged. "Undoubtedly why we have been obliged to confine ourselves to motor transport. Of course, we are no brute beasts. I have every confidence that we will all resist any irrational impulses toward flight before the job is finished.
"Now then! You may attend to the removal of your personal effects and prepare for the evening’s festivities. I shouldn’t lunch tomorrow; you’ll want to save your appetites for the banquet at Cliff House. I understand it’s going to be rather a Roman experience!"
The tension broken, they laughed; and if Averill laughed a bit too loudly, it must be remembered that he was still young. As immortals go, that is.
* * *
Astute mortals might have detected something slightly out of the ordinary on that Tuesday, the 17th of April; certainly the hired-van drivers must have noticed an increase in business, as they were dispatched to house after house in every district of the city to pick up nearly identical loads, these being two or three ordinary-looking trunks and one crate precisely fifty centimeters long, twenty centimeters wide and twenty centimeters high, in which a credenza might fit snugly. And it would be extraordinary if none of them remarked upon the fact that all these same consignments were directed to the same location on the waterfront, the berth of the steamer Mayfair.
Certainly in some cases mortal landladies noticed trunks being taken down flights of stairs, and put anxious questions to certain of their tenants regarding hasty removal; but their fears were laid to rest by smiling lies and ready cash.
And did anyone notice, as twilight fell, when persons in immaculate evening dress were suddenly to be seen in nearly every street? Doubtful; for it was, after all, the second night of the opera season, and with the Metropolitan company in town all of Society had turned out to do them honor. If a certain number of them converged on a certain warehouse in an obscure district, and departed therefrom shortly afterward in gleaming automobiles, that was unlikely to excite much interest in observers either.
I myself guided a brisk little four-cylinder Franklin through the streets, bracing myself as it bumped over the cable car tracks, and steered down Gough with the intention of turning at Fulton and following it out to the beach. At the corner of Geary I glimpsed for a moment a tall figure in a red coat, and wondered what it was doing so far from the theater district; but a glance over my shoulder made it plain that I was mistaken. The red-clad figure shambling along was no more than a bum, albeit one of considerable stature. I dismissed him easily from my thoughts as I contemplated the O’Neil family’s outing to the theater.
Had I a warm, sentimental sensation thinking of them, remembering Ella’s face aglow when she saw me present her father with the tickets? Certainly not. One magical evening out was scarcely going to make up for their ghastly deaths, in whatever cosmic scale might be supposed to balance such things. Best not to dwell on that aspect of it at all. No, it was the convenience of their absence from home that occupied my musings, and the best way to take advantage of it with regard to my mission.
At the end of Fulton I turned right, in the purple glow of evening over the vast Pacific. Far out to sea–well beyond the sight of mortal eyes–the Company transport ships lay at anchor, waiting only for the cover of full darkness to approach the shore. In a few hours I’d be on board one of them, steaming off in the direction of the Farallones to catch my air transport, with no thought for the smoking ruin of the place I’d lived in so many harrowing weeks.
Cliff House loomed above me, its turreted mass a blaze of light. I saw with some irritation that the long uphill approach was crowded with carriages and automobiles, drawn in on a diagonal; I was obliged to go up as far as the rail depot before I could find a place to leave my motor, and walk back downhill past the Baths.
I dare say the waiters at Cliff House could not recall an evening when so large a party, of such unusual persons, had dined with such hysterical gaiety as on this 17th of April, 1906.
If I recall correctly, the reservation had been made in the name of an international convention of seismologists. San Francisco was ever the most cosmopolitan of cities, so the restaurant staff expressed no surprise when elegantly attired persons of every known color began arriving in carriages and automobiles. If anyone remarked upon a certain indefinable similarity in appearance amongst the conventioneers that transcended race, why, that might be explained by their common avocation–whatever seismology might be; no one on the staff had any clear idea. Only the queer nervousness of the guests was impossible to account for, the tendency toward uneasy giggling, the sudden frozen silences and dilated pupils.
I think I can speak for my fellow operatives when I say that we were determined to enjoy ourselves, terror notwithstanding. We deserved the treat, every one of us; we faced a long night of hard work, the culmination of months of labor, under circumstances of mental strain that would test the resolution of the most hardened mercenaries. The least we were owed was an evening of silk hats and tiaras.
* * *
There was a positive chatter of communication on the ether as I approached. We were all here, or in the act of arriving; not since leaving school had I been in such a crowd of my own kind. I thought how we were to feast here, a company of immortals in an airy castle perched on the edge of the Uttermost West, and flit away well before sunrise. It is occasionally pleasant to embody a myth.
I saw Mme. D’Araignee stepping down from a carriage, evidently arriving with other members of the Hopkins operation team. No bulky Russian sea captain in sight, of course, yet; I hastened to her side and tipped my hat.
"Madame, will you do me the honor of allowing me to escort you within?"
"M’sieur Victor." She gave me a dazzling smile. She wore a gown of pale bluegreen silk, a shade much in fashion that season, which brought out beautifully certain copper hues in her intensely black skin. Diamonds winked from the breathing shadow of her bosom. She took my arm and we proceeded inside, where we had the remarkable experience of having to shout our transmissions to one another, so crowded was the ether:
I am very pleased to inform you I have arranged for an automobile for your use this evening, I told her, as we paused at the cloakroom for checks.
Oh, I am so glad! I do hope you weren’t put to unnecessary trouble.
Through the door to the dining room we caught glimpses of napery like snow, folded in a wilderness of sharp little peaks, with here and there a gilt epergne rising above them.
Not what I’d call unnecessary trouble, no, though it proved impossible to requisition anything at this late date. However, I did have a vehicle allocated for my own personal use and that fine runabout is entirely at your disposal.
Merci, merci mille temps! But will this not impede your own mission?
Not at all, dear lady. I shall be obliged to you for transportation as far as the Palace, I think, after we’ve dined; but since my mission involves nothing more strenuous than carrying off a child, I anticipate strolling back across the city with ease.
You are too kind, my friend.
A gentleman could do no less. I pulled out a chair for her.
We chatted pleasantly of trifling matters as the rest of the guests arrived. We studied the porcelain menu in some astonishment–the Company had spent a fortune here tonight, certainly enough to have allotted me one extra automobile. I was rather nettled, but my irritation was mollified somewhat by the anticipation of our carte du jour:
Green Turtle Soup Consommé Divinesse
Salmon in Sauce Veloute Trout Almondine Crab Cocktail
Braised Sweetbreads Roast Quail Andaluz
Le Faux Mousse Faison Lucullus
Early Green Peas White Asparagus Risotto Milanese
Roast Saddle of Venison with Port Wine Jelly
Curried Tomatoes Watercress Salad
Chicken Marengo Plovers’ Eggs Virginia Ham Croquettes
Lobster Salad Oysters in Variety
Gateau d’Or et Argent Assorted Fruits in Season
Rose Snow Tulip Jellies Water Ices
Surprise Yerba Buena
All accompanied. of course, by the appropriate vintages, and service à la russe. We were being rewarded.
A shift in the black rock, miles down, needle-thin fissures screaming through stone, perdurable clay bulging like the head of a monstrous child engaging for birth, straining, straining, STRAINING!
The smiling chatter stopped dead. The waiters looked around, confused, at that elegant assembly frozen like mannequins. Not a scrape of chair moving, not a chime of crystal against china. Only the sound that we alone listened to: the cello-string far below us, tuning for the dance of the wrath of God. I found myself staring across the room directly into Lewis’s eyes, where he had halted at the doorway in mid-step. The immortal lady on his arm was as still as a painted image, a perfect profile by Da Vinci.
The orchestra conductor mistook our silence for a cue of some kind. He turned hurriedly to his musicians and they struck up a little waltz tune, light gracious accompaniment to our festivities. With a boom and a rush of vacuum the service doors parted, as the first of the waiters burst through with tureens and silver buckets of ice. Champagne corks popped like artillery. As the noises roared into our silence, an immortal in white lace and spangles shrieked; she turned it into a high trilling laugh, placing her slender hand upon her throat.
So conversation resumed, and a server appeared at my elbow with a napkined bottle. I held up my glass for champagne. Mme. D’Araignee and I clinked an unspoken toast and drank fervently.
Twice more while we dined on those good things, the awful warning came. As the venison roast was served forth, its dish of port jelly began to shimmer and vibrate–too subtly for the mortal waiters to notice more than a pretty play of light, but we saw. On the second occasion the oysters had just come to table, and what subaudible pandemonium of clattering there was: half-shell against half-shell with the sound of basalt cliffs grinding together, and the staccato rattle of all the little sauceboats with their scarlet and yellow and pink and green contents; though of course the mortal waiters couldn’t hear it. Not even the patient horses waiting in their carriage-traces heard it yet. But the sparkling bubbles ascended more swiftly through the glasses of champagne.
The waiters began to move along the tables bearing trays: little cut-crystal goblets of pink ices, or red and amber jellies, or fresh strawberries drenched in liqueur, or cakes. We heard the ringing note of a dessert spoon against a wineglass, signaling us all to attention.
The Chief Project Facilitator rose to address us. Labienus stood poised and smiling in faultless white tie and tuxedo. As he waited for the babble of voices to fade he took out his gold Chronometer on its chain, studied its tiny screen, then snapped its case shut and returned it to the pocket of his white silk waistcoat.
"My fellow Seismologists." His voice was quiet, yet without raising it he reached all corners of the room. Commanding legions confers a certain ease in public speaking. "Ladies." He bowed. "I trust you’ve enjoyed the bill of fare. I know that, as I dined, I was reminded of the fact that perhaps in no other city in the world could such a feast be so gathered, so prepared, so served to such a remarkable gathering. Where but here by the Golden Gate can one banquet in a splendor that beggars the Old World, on delicacies presented by masters of culinary sophistication hired from all civilized nations–all the while in sight of forested hills where savages roamed within living memory, across a bay that within living memory was innocent of any sail?
"So swiftly has she risen, this great city, as though magically conjured by djinni out of thin air. Justifiably her citizens might expect to wake tomorrow in a wilderness, and find that this gorgeous citadel had been as insubstantial as their dreams."
Archly exchanged glances between some of our operatives as his irony was appreciated.
"But if that were to come to pass–if they were to wake alone, unhoused and shivering upon a stony promontory, facing into a cold northern ocean and a hostile gale–why, you know as well as I do that within a few short years the citizens of San Francisco would create their city anew, with spires soaring ever closer to Heaven, and mansions yet more gracious."
Of course we knew it, but the poor mortal waiters didn’t. I am afraid some of our younger operatives were base enough to smirk.
"Let us marvel, ladies and gentlemen, at this phoenix of a city, at once ephemeral and abiding. Let us drink to the imperishable spirit of her citizens. I give you the City of San Francisco."
"The City of San Francisco," we chorused, raising our glasses high.
"And I give you," smiling he extended his hand, "The City of San Francisco!"
Beaming the waiters wheeled it in, on a vast silver cart: an ornate confection of pastry, of spun-sugar and marzipan and candies, a perfect model of the City. It was possible to discern a tiny Ferry Building rising above chocolate wharves, and a tiny Palace, and Nob Hill reproduced in sugared peel and nonpareils. Across the familiar grid of streets Golden Gate Park was done in green fondant, and beyond it was the hill where Sutro Park rose in nougat and candied violets, and beyond that Cliff House itself, in astonishing detail.
We applauded.
Then she was destroyed, that beautiful city, with a silver cake knife and serving wedge, and parceled out to us in neat slices. One had to commend Labienus’ sense of humor, to say nothing of his sense of ritual.
* * *
It was expected that we would wish to dance, after dining; the ballroom had been reserved for our use, and at some point during dessert the orchestra had discreetly risen and carried their instruments away to the dais.
I thought the idea of dancing in rather poor taste, under the circumstances, and apparently many of my fellow operatives agreed with me; but Averill and some of the other young ones got out on the floor eagerly enough, and soon the stately polonaise gave way to ragtime tunes and two-stepping.
Under the pretense of going for a smoke I stepped out on the terrace, to breathe the clean night air and metabolize my portion of magnificent excess in peace. By ones and twos several of the older immortals followed me; soon there was quite an assemblage of us out there between two worlds, between the dark water surging around Seal Rock and the brilliant magic lantern of the ballroom.
"Victor?" Mme. D’Araignee was making her way to me through the crowd. Her slippers, together with her diamonds, had gone into the leather case she was carrying, and she had donned sensible walking shoes; she had buttoned a long motorist’s duster over her evening gown. The radiant Queen of the Night stood now before me as the Efficient Modern Woman.
"You didn’t care to dance either, I see," she remarked.
"Not I, no," I replied. We stood for a moment looking in at the giddy whirl. I saw Averill prance by in the arms of an immortal sylph in pink satin; their faces were flushed and merry. Don’t think them heartless, Reader. They did not understand yet. Horror, for Averill, was still a lonely prairie and a burning wagon; for the girl, still a soldier with a bayonet in a deserted orchard. Those nightmares weren’t here in this bright room with its bouncing music, and so all must be right with the world.
But we were old ones, Mme. D’Araignee and I, and we stood outside in the dark and watched them dance.
Down, miles down, the slick water on the clay face and the widening fissure in darkness, dead shale trembling like an exhausted limb, granite crumbling, rock cracking with the strain and crying out in a voice that rose up, and up at last through the red brick, through the tile and parquet, into the warm air and the music!
The mortal musicians played on, but the dancers faltered. Some of them stopped, looking around in confusion; some of them only missed a step or two and then plunged back into the dance with greater abandon, determined to celebrate something.
Mme. D’Araignee shivered. I threw my unlit cigar over the parapet into the sea.
"Shall we go, Nan?" I offered her my arm. She took it readily and we left Cliff House.
Outside on the carriage drive, and all the way up the steep hill to where my motor was parked, the waiting horses were tossing their heads and whickering uneasily.
Mme. D’Araignee took the wheel, easily guiding us back down into the City through the spangled night.
Even now, at the Grand Opera House, Enrico Caruso was striking a pose before a vast Spanish mountain range rendered on canvas and raising his carbine to threaten poor Bessie Abott. Even now, at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the Grand Prize Masked Carnival was in full swing, with throngs of costumed roller-skaters whirling around the rink that would be a triage hospital in twelve hours and a pile of smoking ashes in twenty-four. Even now, the clock on the face of Old St. Mary’s Church–bearing its warning legend SON OBSERVE THE TIME AND FLY FROM EVIL–was counting out the minutes left for heedless passers-by. Even now, the O’Neil children were sitting forward in their seats, scarcely able to breathe as the cruel Toymaker recited the incantation that would bring his creations to life.
And we rounded the corner at Divisadero and sped down Market, with Prospero’s aprés-pageant speech ringing in our ears. At the corner of Third I pointed and Mme. D’Araignee worked the clutch, steered over to the curb and trod on the brake pedal.
"You’re quite sure you won’t need a ride back?" she inquired over the chatter of the cylinders. I put my legs out and leapt down to the pavement.
"Perfectly sure, Nan." I shot my cuffs and adjusted the drape of my coat. Reaching into the seat I took my stick and silk hat. "Give my seat to the Muse of Painting. I’m off to lurk in shadows like a gentleman."
"Bonne chance, then, Victor." She eased up on the brake, clutched, and cranked the wheel over so the Franklin swung around in a wide arc to retrace its course up Market Street. I tipped my hat and bowed; with a cheery wave and a double honk on the Franklin’s horn, she steered away into the night.
So far, so good. The night was yet young and there were plenty of debonair socialites in evening dress on the street, arriving and departing from the restaurants, the hotels, the theaters. For a block I was one of their number; then Iaccomplished my disappearance down a black alleyway into another world, to thread my way through the boarding-house warren.
Rats were out and scuttling everywhere, sensing the coming disaster infallibly. In some buildings they were cascading down the stairs like trickling water. Cats ignored them and drunkards stood watching in stupefied amazement, but there was nobody else to remark upon it; these streets did not invite promenaders.
I found the O’Neils’ building and made my way up through the unlit stairwell, here and there kicking vermin out of my way. I left the landing and proceeded down their corridor, past doors tight shut showing only feeble lines of light at floor level to mark where the occupants were at home. I heard snores; I heard weeping; I heard a drunken quarrel; I heard a voice raised in wistful melody.
No light at the O’Neils’ door, naturally; none at the door immediately opposite theirs. I scanned the room beyond but could discern no occupant. Drawing out a skeleton key from my waistcoat pocket, I gained entrance and shut the door after me.
No tenant at all; good. It was death-cold in there and black as pitch, for a roller shade had been drawn down on the one window. A slight tug sent it wobbling upward but failed to let much more light into the room. Not that I needed light to see my Chronometer as I checked it; half-past eleven, and even now my teams were assembling at their stations on Nob Hill. I leaned against a wall, folded my arms and composed myself to wait.
Time passed slowly for me, but in Toyland it sped by. Songs and dances, glittering processions came to their inevitable close; fairies took wing. Innocence was rewarded and wickedness resoundingly punished. The last of the ingenious special effects guttered out, the curtain descended, the orchestra fell silent, the house lights came up. A little while the magic lingered, as the O’Neil family made their way out through the lobby, a little while it hung around them like a perfume in the atmosphere of red velvet and gilt and fashionably attired strangers, until they were borne out through the doors by the receding tide of the crowd. Then the magic left them, evaporating upward into the night and the fog, and they got their bearings and made their way home along the dark streets.
I heard them, coming heavily up the stairs, O’Neil and Mary each carrying a child. Down the corridor their footsteps came, and stopped outside.
"Slide down now, Ella, Daddy’s got to open the door."
I heard the sound of a key fumbling in darkness for its lock, and a drowsy little voice singing about Toyland, the paradise of childhood to which you can never return.
"Hush, Ella, you’ll wake the neighbors."
"Donal’s asleep. He missed the ending." Ella’s voice was sad. "And it was such a beautiful, beautiful ending. Don’t you think it was a beautiful ending, Daddy?"
"Sure it was, darling." Their voices receded a bit as they crossed the threshold. I heard a clink and the sputtering hiss of a match; there was the faintest glimmer of illumination down by the floor.
"Sssh, sh, sh. Home again. Help Mummy get his boots off, Ella, there’s a dear."
"I’ll just step across to Mrs. Varian’s and collect the baby."
"Mind you remember his blanket."
"I will that."
Footsteps in the corridor again, discreet rapping on a panel, a whispered conversation in darkness and a sleepy wail; then returning footsteps and a pair of doors closing. Then, more muffled but still distinct to me, the sound of the O’Neils going to bed.
Their lamps were blown out. Their whispers ceased. Still I waited, listening as the minutes ticked away for their mortal souls to rest.
Half-past one on the morning of Wednesday, the 18th of April in the year 1906, in the City of San Francisco. Francis O’Neil and his wife and their children asleep finally and forever, and the world had finished with them. In the grey morning, at precisely fourteen minutes after the hour of five, this boarding-house would lurch forward into the street, bricks tumbling as mortar blew out like talcum powder, rotten timbers snapping, and that would be the end of Frank’s strength and Mary’s care and Ella’s dreams, the end of the brief unhappy baby, and no-one would remember them but me.
And, perhaps, Donal. I stepped across the hall and let myself into their room, perfectly silent.
The children lay in their trundle on the floor, next to their parents’ bed. Donal slept on the outer edge, curled on his side, both hands tucked under his chin. I stood for a moment observing, analyzing their alpha patterns. When I was satisfied that no casual noise would awaken them, I bent and lifted Donal from his bed. He sighed but slept on. After a moment’s hesitation I drew the blanket up around Ella’s shoulders.
I stood back. The boy wore a nightshirt and long black stockings, but the night was cold. Frank’s coat hung over the back of a chair: I appropriated it to wrap his son. Shifting Donal to one arm, I backed out of the room and shut the door.
Finished.
No sleeper in that building woke to hear our rapid descent of the stairs. On the first landing a drunk sat upright, leaning his head on the railings, sound asleep with his lower jaw dropped open like a corpse’s. We fled lightly past him, Donal and I, and he never moved.
Away through the maze, then, away forever from the dirt and stench and poverty of that place. In twelve hours it would have ceased to exist, and the wind would scatter white ashes so the dead could never be named nor numbered.
Even Market Street was dark now, its theaters shut down. Over at the Grand Opera House on Mission, Enrico Caruso’s costumes hung neatly in his dark dressing-room, ready for a performance of La Boheme that would never take place. Up at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the weary janitor surveyed the confetti and other festive debris littering the skating rink and decided to sweep it up in the morning. Toyland, at the Columbia, was shut away in its properties-room; fairy tinsel, butterfly wings, bear heads peering down from dusty shelves into the darkness.
Even now my resolute gentlemen and ladies were despoiling Nob Hill, flitting through its darkened drawing rooms at hyperspeed like so many whirring ghosts, bearing with them winking gilt and crystal, calfskin and morocco, canvas and brass, all the very best that money could buy but couldn’t hope to preserve against the hour to come. Without the Franklin I’d have a tedious walk uphill to join them, but at a brisk pace I might arrive with time to spare.
Donal stretched and muttered in his sleep. I shifted him to my other shoulder, changed hands on my walking-stick, and was about to hurry on when I caught a whiff of some familiar scent on the air. I halted.
It was not a pleasant scent. It was harsh, musky, like blood or sweat but neither; like an animal smell, but other; it summoned in me a sudden terror and confusion. When I tried to identify it, however, I had only a mental image of a bear costume hanging on a hook, the head looking down from a shelf. When had I seen that? I hadn’t seen that! Whose memories were these?
I controlled myself with an effort. Some psychic disturbance was responsible for this, my own nerves were contributing to this, there was no real danger. Why, of course: it must be nearly Two o’clock, when the first of the major subsonic disruptions would occur.
Yes, here it came now. I could hear nearby horses begin to scream and stamp frantically, I could feel the paving-bricks grind against one another under the soles of my boots, and the air groaned as though buried giants were praying to God for release.
Yes, I thought, this must be it. I balanced my stick against my knee and drew out my chronometer, trying to verify the time. As I peered at it the door of a stable directly across the street burst open, and a white mare came charging out, hooves thundering. Donal jerked and cried.
Timing is everything. My assailant chose that perfect moment of distraction to strike. I was enveloped in a choking wave of that smell as a hand closed on my face and pulled my head back. Instantly I clawed at it, twisted my head to bite; but a vast arm was wrapping around me from the other side and cold steel entered my throat, opened the artery, wrenched as it was pulled out again.
So swiftly had this occurred that my stick was still falling through midair, had not yet struck the pavement. Donal was pulled upward and backward, torn from me, and I heard his terrified cry mingle with the clatter of the stick as it landed, the rumbling earth, the running horse, a howling laughter I knew but could not place. I was sinking to my knees, clutching at my cut throat as my blood fountained out over the starched front of my dress shirt and stained the diamond stud so it winked like Mars. Ares, God of War. Thor. I was conscious of a terrible anger as I descended to the shadows and curled into Fugue.
* * *
"Will you get on to this, now? Throat cut and he’s not been robbed! Here’s his watch, for Christ’s sake!"
"Stroke of luck for us, anyhow."
I sat up and glared at them. The two mortal thieves backed away from me, horrified; then one mustered enough nerve to dart in again, aiming a kick at me while he made a grab for my chronometer. I caught his wrist and broke it. He jumped back, stifling an agonized yell; his companion took to his heels and after only a second’s hesitation he followed.
I remained where I was, huddled on the pavement, running a self-diagnostic. The edges of my windpipe and jugular artery had closed and were healing nicely at hyperspeed; if the thieves hadn’t roused me from Fugue I’d be whole now. Blood production had sped up to replace that now dyeing the front of my previously immaculate shirt. The exterior skin of my throat was even now self-suturing, but I was still too weak to rise.
My hat and stick remained where they had fallen, but of Donal or my assailant there was no sign. I licked my dry lips. There was a vile taste in my mouth. My chronometer told me it was a quarter past two. I dragged myself to the base of a wall and leaned there, half-swooning, drowning in unwelcome remembrance.
That Smell. Sweat, blood, the Animal, and smoke. Yes, they’d called it the Summer of Smoke, that year the world ended. What world had that been? The world where I was a little prince, or nearly so; better if my mother hadn’t been a Danish slave, but my father had no sons by his lady wife, and so I had fine clothes and a gold pin for my cloak.
When I went to climb on the beached longship and play with the gear, a warrior threatened me with his fist; then another man told him he’d better not, for I was Baldulf’s brat. That made him back down in a hurry. And once, my father set me on the table and put his gold cup in my hand, but I nearly dropped it, it was so heavy. He held it for me and I tasted the mead and his companions laughed, beating on the table. The ash-white lady, though, looked down at the floor and wrung her hands.
She told me sometimes that if I wasn’t good the Bear would come for me. She was the only one who would ever dare to talk to me that way. And then he had come, the Bear and his slaughtering knights. All in one day I saw our tent burned and my father’s head staring from a pike. Screaming, smoke and fire, and a banner bearing a red dragon that snaked like a living flame, I remember.
My mother had caught me up and was running for the forest, but she was a plump girl and could not get up the speed. Two knights chased after us on horseback, whooping like madmen. Just under the shadow of the oaks, they caught us. My mother fell and rolled, loosing her hold on me, and screamed for me to run; then one of the knights was off his horse and on her. The other knight got down too and stood watching them, laughing merrily. One of her slippers had come off and her bare toes kicked at the air until she died.
I had been sobbing threats, I had been hurling stones and handfuls of oak-mast at the knights, and now I ran at the one on my mother and attacked him with my teeth and nails. He reared up on his elbows to shake me off; but the other knight reached down and plucked me up as easily as if I’d been a kitten. He held me at his eye level while I shrieked and spat at him. His shrill laughter dropped to a chuckle, but never stopped.
A big shaven face, no beard, no mustache, colorless fair hair cropped. Head of a strange helm-shape, tremendous projecting nose and brows, and his wide gleeful eyes so pale a blue as to be colorless, like one of my father’s hounds. He had enormous broad cheekbones and strange teeth. That smell, that almost-animal smell, was coming from him. That had been where I’d first encountered it, hanging there in the grip of that knight.
The other knight had got up and came forward with his knife drawn and ready for me, but my captor held out his huge gauntleted hand.
"Siste! " he told him pleasantly. "Siste, comes."
The other knight growled something and brandished his knife. My captor’s eyes sparkled; he batted playfully at my assailant, who flew backward into a tree and lay there twitching, blood running from his ears. Left in peace, my knight held me up and sniffed at me. He sat down and ran his hands all over me, taking his gauntlets off to squeeze my skull until I feared it would break like an egg. I had stopped fighting, but I whimpered and tried to wriggle away.
"Do you want to live, little boy?" he asked me in perfectly accented Saxon. He had a high-pitched voice, nasally resonant.
"Yes," I replied, shocked motionless.
"Then be good and do not try to run away from me. I will preserve you from death. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Good." He forced my mouth open and examined my teeth. Apparently satisfied, he got up, thrusting me under one arm. Taking the two horses’ bridles, he walked back to the war-camp of the Bear with long rolling strides.
It was growing dark, and new fires had been lit. We passed pickets who challenged my captor, and he answered them with smiles and bantering remarks. At last he stopped before a tent and gave a barking order, whereupon a groom hurried out to take the horses and led them away for him. Two other knights sat nearby, leaning back wearily as their squires took off their armor for them. One pointed at me and asked a question.
My captor grinned and said something in fluting reply, hugging me to his chest. One knight smiled a little, but the other scowled and spat into the fire. As my captor bore me into his tent I heard someone mutter "Romani! " in a disgusted tone.
It was dark in the tent, and there was no-one there to see as he stripped off my clothes and continued his examinations. I attempted to fight again but he held me still and asked, very quietly, "Are you a stupid child? Have you forgot what I said?"
"No." I was so frightened and furious I was trembling, and I hated the smell of him, so close in there.
"Then listen to me again, Saxon child. I will not hurt you, neither will I outrage you. But if you want to die, keep struggling."
I held still then and stood silent, hating him. He seemed quite unconcerned about that; he gave me a cup of wine and a hard cake, and ignored me while I ate and drank. All his attention was on the two knights outside. When he heard them depart into their respective tents, he wrapped me in a cloak and bore me out into the night again.
At the other end of the camp there was a very fine tent, pitched a little distance from the others. Two men stood before it, deep in conversation. After a moment one went away. The other remained outside the tent a moment, breathing the night air, looking up at the stars. When he lifted the flap and made to go inside, my captor stepped forward.
"Salve, Emres."
"Salve, Budu," replied the other. He was a tall man and elderly–I thought: his hair and eyebrows were white. His face, however, was smooth and unlined, and there was an easy suppleness to his movements. He was very well-dressed, as Britons went. They had a brief conversation and then the one called Emres raised the flap of the tent again, gesturing us inside.
It was so brilliantly lit in there it dazzled my eyes. I was again unrobed, in that white glare, but I dared do no more than clench my fists as the old one examined me. His hands were remarkably soft and clean, and he did not smell bad. He stuck me with a pin and dabbed the blood onto the tongue of a little god he had, sitting on a chest; it clicked for a moment and then chattered to him in a tinny voice. My captor and he had a conversation in a swift tongue quite unlike the Latin they’d been using until that time. At its conclusion, Emres pointed at me and asked a question. My captor shrugged. He turned his big head to look at me.
"What is your name, little boy?" he asked in Saxon.
"Bricta, son of Baldulf," I told him. He looked back at Emres.
"Ecce Victor," he said.
* * *
The taste in my mouth was unbearable. I hadn’t wanted this recollection, this squalid history! I much preferred Time to begin with that first memory of the silver ship that rose skyward from the circle of stones, taking me away to the gleaming hospital and the sweet-faced nurses.
I got unsteadily to my feet, groping after my hat and stick. As I did so I heard the unmistakable sound of an automobile approaching. In another second a light runabout rattled around the corner and pulled up before me. Labienus sat behind the wheel, no longer the jovial Master of Ceremonies. He was all hard-eyed centurion now.
"We received your distress signal. Report, please, Victor."
"I was attacked," I said dully.
"Tsk! Rather obviously."
"I . . . I know it sounds improbable, sir, but I believe my assailant was another operative," I explained. To my surprise he merely nodded.
"We know his identity. You’ll notice he’s sending quite a distinct signal."
"Yes." I looked down the street in wonderment. The signal lay on the air like a trail of green smoke. Why would he signal? "He’s . . . he’s somewhere in Chinatown."
"Exactly," agreed Labienus. "Well, Victor, what do you intend to do about this?"
"Sir?" I looked back at him, confused. Something was wrong here, some business I hadn’t been briefed about, perhaps? But why–?
"Come, come, man, you’ve a mission to complete! He took the mortal boy! Surely you’ve formed a plan to rescue him?" he prompted.
The hideous taste welled in my mouth. I suppressed an urge to expectorate.
"My team on Nob Hill is more than competent to complete the salvage there without my supervision," I said, attempting to sound coolly rational. "That being the case, I believe, sir, that I shall seek out the scoundrel who did this to me and jolly well kill him. Figuratively speaking, of course."
"Very good. And?"
"And, of course, recapture my mortal recruit and deliver him to the Collection Point as planned and according to schedule," I said. "Sir."
"See that you do." Labienus worked both clutch and brake expertly and edged his motor forward, cylinders idling. "Report to my cabin on the Thunderer at seven hundred hours for a private debriefing. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly clear, sir." So there was some mystery to be explained. Very well.
"You are dismissed."
"Sir." I doffed my hat and watched as he drove smoothly away up Market Street.
I replaced my hat and turned in the direction of the signal, probing. My dizziness was fading, burned away by my growing sense of outrage. The filthy old devil, how dare he do this to me? What was he playing at? I began to walk briskly again, my speed increasing with my strength.
Of course, the vow to kill him hadn’t been meant literally. We do not die. But I’d find some way of paying him out in full measure, I hadn’t the slightest doubt about that. He had the edge on me in strength, but I was swifter and in full possession of my faculties, whereas he was probably drooling mad, the old troll.
Yes, mad, that was the only explanation. There had always been rumors that some of the oldest operatives were flawed somehow, those created earliest, before the Augmentation Process had been perfected. Budu had been one of the oldest I’d ever met. He had been created more than forty thousand years ago, before the human races had produced their present assortment of representatives.
Now that I thought of it, I hadn’t seen an operative of his racial type in the field in years. They held desk jobs at Company bases, or were Air Transport pilots. I’d assumed this was simply because the modern mortal race was now too different for Budu’s type to pass unnoticed. What if the true reason was that the Company had decided not to take chances with the earlier models? What if there was some risk that all of that particular class were inherently unstable?
Good God! No wonder I was expected to handle this matter without assistance. Undoubtedly our masters wanted the whole affair resolved as quietly as possible. They could count on my discretion; I only hoped my ability met their expectations.
Following the signal, I turned left at the corner of Market and Grant. The green trail led straight up Grant as far as Sacramento. What was his game? He was drawing me straight into the depths of the Celestial quarter, a place where I’d be conspicuous were it daylight, but at no particular disadvantage otherwise.
He must intend some kind of dialogue with me. The fact that he had taken a hostage indicated that he wanted our meeting on his terms, under his control. That he felt he needed a hostage could be taken as a sign of weakness on his part. Had his strength begun to fail somehow? Not if his attack on me had been any indication. Though it had been largely a matter of speed and leverage. . . .
I came to the corner of Grant and Sacramento. The signal turned to the left again. It traveled up a block, where it could be observed emanating from a darkened doorway. I stood considering it for a moment, tapping my stick impatiently against my boot. I spat into the gutter, but it did not take the taste from my mouth.
I walked slowly uphill past the shops that sold black and scarlet lacquerware and green jade. Here was the Baptist mission, smelling of starch and good intentions. From this lodging-house doorway a heavy perfume of joss sticks; from this doorway a reek of preserved fish. And from this doorway . . .
It stood ajar. A narrow corridor went straight back into darkness, with a narrower stair ascending to the left. The bottommost stair tread had been thrown open like the lid of a piano bench, revealing a black void below.
I scanned. He was down there, and making no attempt to hide himself. Donal was there with him, still alive. There were no other signs of mortal life, however.
I paced forward into the darkness and stood looking down. Chill air was coming up from below. It stank like a crypt. Rungs leading down into a passageway were just visible, by a wavering pool of green light. So was a staring dead face, contorted into a grimace of rage.
After a moment’s consideration, I removed my hat and set it on the second step. My stick I resolved to take with me, although its sword would be useless against my opponent. No point in any further delay; it was time to descend into yet another hell.
At the bottom of the ladder the light was a little stronger. It revealed more bodies lying in a subterranean passage of brick plastered over and painted a dull green. The dead had been young men, and seemed to have died fighting, within the last few hours. They were smashed like so many insects. The light that made this plain was emanating from a wide doorway that opened off the passage, some ten feet further on. The smell of death was strongest in there.
"Come in, Victor," said a voice.
I went as far as the doorway and looked.
In that low-ceilinged chamber of bare plaster, in the fitful glow of one oil lamp, more dead men were scattered. These were all elderly Chinese, skeletally emaciated, and they had been dead some hours and they had not died quietly. One leaned in a chair beside the little table with the flickering lamp; one was hung up on a hook that protruded from a wall; one lay half-in, half-out of a cupboard passage, his arm flung out as though beckoning. Three were sprawled on the floor beside slatwood bunks, in postures suggesting they had been slain whilst in the lethargy of their drug and tossed from the couches like rags. The apparatus of the opium-den lay here and there; a gold-wrapped brick of the poisonous substance, broken pipes, burnt dishes, long matches, bits of wire.
And there, beyond them, sat the monster of my long nightmares.
"You don’t like my horrible parlor," chuckled Budu. "Your little white nose has squeezed nearly shut, your nostrils look like a fish’s gills."
"It’s just the sort of nest you’d make for yourself, you murdering old fool," I told him. He frowned at me.
"I have never murdered," he told me seriously. "But these were murderers, and thieves. Who else would keep such a fine secret cellar, eh? A good place for a private meeting!" He leaned back against the wall, lounging at his ease across the top tier of a bunk, waving enormous mud-caked boots. His dress consisted of stained bluejean trousers, a vast shapeless red coat made from a blanket, and a battered black felt hat. He had let his hair and beard grow long; they trailed down like pale moss over his bare hairy chest. He looked rather like St. Nicholas turned monster.
Donal sat stiffly beside him. Budu had placed his great hand about the boy’s neck, as easily as I might take hold of an axe handle.
"Uncle Jimmy," moaned Donal.
"Explain yourself, sir," I addressed Budu, keeping my voice level and cold. He responded with gales of delighted laughter.
"I was the Briton, and you were the little barbarian!" he sad. "Look at us now!"
I stepped into the room, having scanned for traps. "I followed your signal," I told him. "You certainly made it plain enough. May I ask why you thought it was necessary to cut my throat?"
He shrugged, regarding me with hooded eyes. "How else to get your attention but to take your quarry from you? And how to do that but by disabling you temporarily? What harm did it do? Spoiled your nice white shirt, yes, and made you angry!" He chuckled again.
I tapped my stick in impatience. "What was your purpose in calling me here, old man?"
"To tell you a few truths, and see what you do when you’ve heard them. You were wondering about us, we oldest Old Ones, wondering what became of us all. You were thinking we’re like badly made clockwork toys, and our Great Toymakers decided to pull us off the shelves of the toyshop." He stretched luxuriously. Donal tried to turn his head to stare at him, but was held fast as the old creature continued:
"No, no, no. We’re not badly made. I was better made than you, little man. It’s a question of purpose." He thrust his prognathous face forward at me through the gloom. "I was made a war-axe. They made you a shovel. Is the metaphor plain enough for you?"
"I take your meaning." I moved a step closer.
"You’ve been told all your life that our Masters wish only to save things, books and pretty pictures and children, and for this purpose we were made, to creep into houses like mice and steal away loot before Time can eat it."
"That’s an oversimplification, but essentially true."
"Is it?" He stroked his beard in amusement. I could see the red lines across the back of his hand where I’d clawed him. He hadn’t bothered to heal them yet. "You pompous creature, in your nice clothes. You were made to save things, Victor. Iwasn’t. Now, hear the truth: I, and all my kind, were made because our perfect and benign Masters wanted killers once. Can you guess why?"
"Well, let me see." I swallowed back bile. "You say you’re not flawed. Yet it’s fairly common knowledge that flawed immortals were produced, during the first experimentations with the Process. What did the Company do about them? Perhaps you were created as a means of eliminating them."
"Good guess." He nodded his head. "But wrong. They were never killed, those poor failed things. I’ve seen them, screaming in little steel boxes. No. Guess again."
"Then . . . perhaps at one time it was necessary to have agents whose specialty was Defense." I tried. "Prior to the dawn of civilization."
"Whee! An easy guess. You fool, of course it was! You think our Masters waited, so gentle and pure, for sweet reason to persuade men to evolve? Oh, no. Too many wolves were preying on the sheep. They needed operatives who could kill, who could happily kill fierce primitives so the peaceful ones could weave baskets and paint bison on walls." He grinned at me with those enormous teeth, and went on:
"We made Civilization dawn, I and my kind! We pushed that bright ball over the horizon at last, and we did it by killing! If a man raised his hand against his neighbor, we cut it off. If a tribe painted themselves for war, we washed their faces with their own blood. Shall I tell you of the races of men you’ll never see? They wouldn’t learn peace, and so we were sent in to slay them, man, woman, and child!"
"You mean," I exhaled, "the Company decided to accelerate Mankind’s progress by selectively weeding out its sociopathic members. And if it did? We’ve all heard rumors of something like that. It may be necessary from time to time even now. Not a pretty thought, but one can see the reasons. If you hadn’t done it, mankind might have remained in a state of savagery forever." I took another step forward.
"We did good work," he said plaintively. "And we weren’t hypocrites. It was fun." His pale gaze wandered past me to the doorway. There was a momentary flicker of something like uneasiness in his eyes, some ripple across the surface of his vast calm.
"What is the point of telling me this, may I ask?" I pressed.
"To show you that you serve lying and ungrateful Masters, child," he replied, his attention returning to me. "Stupid Masters. They’ve no understanding of this world they rule. Once we cleared the field so they could plant, how did they reward us? We had been heroes. We became looters. And you should see how they punished us, the ones who argued! No more pruning the vine, they told us, let it grow how it will. You’re only to gather the fruit now, they told us. Was that fair? Was it, when we’d been created to gather heads?"
"No, I dare say it wasn’t. But you adapted, didn’t you?" To my dismay I was shaking with emotion. "You found ways to satisfy your urges in the Company’s service. You’d taken your share of heads the day you caught me!"
"Rescued you," he corrected me. "You were only a little animal, and if I hadn’t taken you away you’d have grown into a big animal like your father. There were lice crawling in his hair when I stuck his head on the pike. There was food in his beard!"
I spat in his face. I couldn’t stop myself. The next second I was sick with mortification, to be provoked into such operatic behavior, and dabbed hurriedly at my chin with a handkerchief; Budu merely wiped his face with the back of his hand and smiled, content to have reduced my stature.
"Your anger changes nothing. Your father was a dirty beast. He was an oathbreaker and an invader too, as were all his people. You’ve been taught your history, you know all this! So don’t judge me for enjoying what I did to exterminate his race. And, see, see what happened when I was ordered to stop killing Saxons! When Arthur died, Roman order died with him. All that we’d won at Badon Hill was lost and the Saxon hordes returned, never to leave. What sense did it make, to have given our aid for a while to one civilized tribe and then leave it to be destroyed?" His gaze traveled past me to the doorway again. Who was he expecting? They weren’t coming to his aid, that much was clear.
"We do not involve ourselves in the petty territorial squabbles of mortals," I recited. "We do not embrace their causes. We move amongst them, saving what we can, but we are never such fools as to be drawn into their disputes."
"Yes, you’re quoting Company Policy to me. But don’t you see that your fine impartiality has no purpose? It accomplishes nothing! It’s wasteful! You know the house will burn, so you creep in like thieves and steal the furniture beforehand, and then watch the flames. Wouldn’t it be more efficient use of your time to prevent the fire in the first place?" He paused a moment and looked at the back of his hand with a slight frown. I saw the red lines there fade to pink as he set them to healing over.
"It would be more efficient, yes," I said, "but for one slight difficulty. You couldn’t prevent the fire happening. It isn’t possible to change history."
"Recorded history." He bared his big teeth in amusement once more. "It isn’t possible to change recorded history. And do you think even that sacred rule’s as unbreakable as you’ve been told? I have made the history that was written and read. It disappoints me. I will make something new now."
"Shall you really?" I folded my arms. Doubtless he was going to start bragging about being a god. It went with the profile of this sort of lunatic.
"Yes, and you’ll help me if you’re wise. Listen to me. In the time before History was written down, in those days, our Masters were bold. All mortals have inherited the legend that there was once a golden age when men lived simply in meadows, and the Earth was uncrowded and clean, and there was no war, but only arts of peace.
"But when Recorded History began–when we were forbidden to exterminate the undesirables–that paradise was lost. And our Masters let it be lost, and that is the condemnation I fling in their teeth." He drew a deep breath.
"Your point, sir?"
"I’ll make an end of Recorded History. I can so decimate the races of men that their golden age will come again, and never again will there be enough of them to ravage one another or the garden they inhabit. And we immortals will be their keepers. Victor, little Victor, how long have you lived? Aren’t you tired of watching them fight and starve? You creep among them like a scavenger, but you could walk among them like–"
"Like a god?" I sneered.
"I had been about to say, an angel," Budu sneered back. "I remember the service I was created for. Do you, little man? Or have you ever even known? Such luxuries you’ve had, among the poor mortals! Have you never felt the urge to really help them? But the time’s soon approaching when you can."
"Ridiculous." I stated. "You know as well as I do that History won’t stop. There’ll be just as much warfare and mortal misery in this new century as in the centuries before, and nothing anyone can do will alter one event." I gauged the pressure of his fingers on Donal’s neck. How quickly could I move to get them loose?
"Not one event? You think so? Maybe." He looked sly. "But our Masters will turn what can’t be changed to their own advantage, and why can’t I? Think of the great slaughters to come, Victor. How do you know I won’t be working there? How do you know I haven’t been at work already? How do you know I haven’t got disciples among our people, weary as I am of our Masters’ blundering, ready as I am to mutiny?"
"Because History states otherwise," I told him flatly. "There will be no mutiny, no War in Heaven if you like. Civilization will prevail. It is recorded that it will."
"Is it?" He grinned. "And can you tell me who recorded it? Maybe I did. Maybe I will, after I win. Victor, such a simple trick, but it’s never occurred to you. History is only writing, and one can write lies!"
I stared at him. No, in fact, it never had occurred to me. He rocked to and fro in his merriment, dragging Donal with him. Silent tears streamed down the child’s face.
Budu lurched forward, fixing me with his gaze. "Listen now. I have my followers, but we need more. You’ll join me because you’re clever, and you’re weary of this horror too, and you owe me the duty of a son, for I saved you from death. You’re a Facilitator and know the codes to order Company equipment. You’ll work in secret, you’ll obtain certain things for me, and we’ll take mortal children and work the Augmentation Process on them, and raise them as our own operatives, for our own purposes, loyal to us. Then we’ll pull the weeds from the Garden. Then we’ll geld the bull and make him pull the plough. Then we’ll slaughter the wolf that preys on the herd. Just as we used to do! There will be Order.
"For this reason I came as a beggar to this city and followed you, watching you. Now I’ve made you listen to me." He looked at the doorway again. "Tell me I’m not a fool, little Victor, tell me I haven’t walked into this trap with you to no purpose."
"What will you do if I refuse?" I demanded. "Break the child’s neck?"
This was too much for the boy, who whimpered like a rabbit and started forward convulsively. Budu looked down, scowling as though he had forgotten about him. "Are you a stupid child?" he asked Donal. "Do you want to die?"
I cannot excuse my next act, though he drove me to it; he, and the horror of the place, and the time that was slipping away and bringing this doomed city down about our ears if we tarried. I charged him, howling like the animal he was.
He reared back; but instead of closing about Donal’s throat, his fingers twitched harmlessly. As his weight shifted, his right arm dropped to his side, heavy as lead. My charge threw him backward so that his head struck the wall with a resounding thud.
All the laughter died in his eyes, and they focused inward as he ran his self-diagnostic. I caught up Donal in my arms and backed away with him, panting.
Budu looked out at me.
"A virus," he informed me. "It was in your saliva. It’s producing inert matter even now, at remarkable speed, that’s blocking my neuroreceptors. I don’t think it will kill me, but I doubt if even your Masters could tell. I’m sure they hope so. You’re surprised. You had no knowledge of this weapon inside yourself?"
"None," I said.
Budu was nodding thoughtfully, or perhaps he was beginning to be unable to hold his head up. "They didn’t tell you about this talent of yours, because if you’d known about it, I would have seen it in your thoughts, and then I’d never have let you spit on me. At the very least I wouldn’t have wiped it away with my wounded hand."
"A civilized man would have used a handkerchief," I could not resist observing.
He giggled, but his voice was weaker when he spoke.
"Well. I guess we’ll see now if our Masters have at long last found a way to unmake their creations. Or I will see; you can’t stay in this dangerous place to watch the outcome, I know. But you’ll wish you had, in the years to come, you’ll wish you knew whether or not I was still watching you, following you. For I know your defense against me now, think of that! And I know who betrayed me, with his clever virus." Budu’s pale eyes widened. "I was wrong! The rest of them may be shovels, but you, little Victor–you were made a poisoned knife. Victor Veneficus!" he added, and laughed thickly at his joke. "Oh, tell him–never sleep. If I live–"
"We’re going now, Donal Og, Uncle Jimmy’ll get you safe out of here," I said to the child, turning from Budu to thread my way between the stinking corpses on the floor.
I heard Budu cough once as his vocal centers went, and then the ether was filled with a cascade of images: A naked child squatting on a clay floor, staring through darkness at a looming figure in a bearskin. Flames devouring brush huts, goatskin tents, cottages, halls, palaces, shops, restaurants, hotels. Soldiers in every conceivable kind of uniform, with every known weapon, in every posture of attack or defense the human form could assume.
If these were his memories, if this was the end of his life, there was no emotion of sorrow accompanying the images; no fear, no weariness, no relief either. Instead, a loud yammering laughter grew ever louder, and deafened the inner ear at the last image: a hulking brute in a bearskin, squatting beside a fire, turning and turning in his thick fingers a gleaming golden axe; and on the blade of the axe was written the word VIRUS.
Halfway up the ladder, the trap opening was occluded by a face that looked down at me and then drew back. I came up with all speed; I faced a small mob of Chinese, grim men with bronze hatchets. They had not expected to see a man in evening dress carrying a child.
I addressed them in Cantonese, for I could see they were natives of that province.
"The devil who killed your grandfathers is still down there. He is asleep and will not wake up. You can safely cut him to pieces now."
I took up my hat and left the mortals standing there, looking uncertainly from my departing form to the dark hole in the stair.
The air was beginning to freshen with the scent of dawn. I had little more than an hour to get across the city. In something close to panic I began to run up Sacramento, broadcasting a General Assistance Signal. Had my salvage teams waited for me? Donal clung to me and did not make a sound.
Before I had gone three blocks I heard the noise of an automobile echoing loud between the buildings. It was climbing up Sacramento toward me. I turned to meet it. Over the glare of its brass headlamps I saw Pan Wen-Shi. His tuxedo and shirtfront, unlike mine, were still as spotless as when he’d left the Company banquet. On the seat beside him was a tiny almond-eyed girl. He braked and shifted, putting out a hand to prevent her from tumbling off and rolling away downhill.
"Climb in," he shouted. I vaulted the running board and toppled into the back seat with Donal. Pan stepped on the gas and we cranked forward again.
"Much obliged to you for the ride," I said, settling myself securely and attempting to pry Donal’s arms loose from my neck. "Had a bit of difficulty."
"So had I. We must tell one another our stories some day," Pan acknowledged, rounding the corner at Powell and taking us down toward Geary. The little girl had turned in her seat and was staring at us. Donal was quivering and hiding his eyes.
"Now then, Donal Og, now then," I crooned to him. "You’ve been a brave boy and you’re all safe again. And isn’t this grand fun? We’re going for a ride in a real motor-car!" Under my words was a soothing frequency to blur his memory of the last two hours.
"Bad Toymaker gone?" asked the little muffled voice.
"Sure he is, Donal, and we’ve escaped entirely."
He consented to lower his hands, but shrank back at the sight of the others. "Who’s that?"
"Why, that’s a little China doll that’s escaped the old Toymaker, same as you, and that’s the kind Chinaman who helped her. They’re taking us to the sea, where we’ll escape on a big ship."
He stared at them doubtfully. "I want Mummy," he said, tears forming in his eyes.
The little girl, who till this moment had been solemn in fascination, suddenly dimpled into a lovely smile and laughed like a silver bell. She pointed a finger at him and made a long babbling pronouncement, neither in Cantonese nor Mandarin. For emphasis, she reached down beside her and flung something at him over the back of the seat, with a triumphant cry of "Dah!" It was a wrapped bar of Ghirardelli’s, only a little gummy at one corner where she’d been teething on it. I caught it in midair.
"See now, Donal, the nice little girl is giving us chocolates!" I tore off the wrapper hastily and gave him a piece. She reached out a demanding hand and I gave her some as well. "Chocolates and an automobile ride and a big ship! Aren’t you the lucky boy, then?"
He sat quiet, watching the gregarious baby and nibbling at his treat. His memories were fading. As we rattled up Geary he looked at me with wondering eyes.
"Where Ella?" he asked me.
When I had caught my breath, I replied:
"She couldn’t come to Toyland, Donal Og. But you’re a lucky, lucky boy, for you will. You’ll have splendid adventures and never grow old. Won’t that be fun, now?"
He looked into my face, not knowing what he saw there. "Yes," he answered in a tiny voice.
Lucky boy, yes, borne away in a mechanical chariot, away from the perishable mortal world, and all the pretty nurses will smile over you and perhaps sing you to sleep before they take you off to surgery. And when you wake, you’ll have been Improved; you’ll be ever so much cleverer, Donal, than poor mortal monkeys like your father. A biomechanical marvel fit to stride through this new century in company with the internal combustion engine and the flying machine.
And you’ll be so happy, boy, and at peace, knowing about the wonderful work you’ll have to do for the Company; much happier than poor Ella would ever have been, with her wild heart, her restlessness and anger. Surely no kindness to give her eternal life, when life’s stupidities and injustice could never be escaped?
. . . But you’ll enjoy your immortality, Donal Og. You will, if you don’t become a thing like me.
The words came into my mind unbidden, and I shuddered in my seat. Mustn’t think of this just now: too much to do. Perhaps the whole incident had been some sort of hallucination? There was no foul taste in my mouth, no viral poison sizzling under my glib tongue. The experience might have been some fantastic nightmare brought on by stress, but for the blood staining my elegant evening attire.
I was a gentleman, after all. No gentleman did such things.
Pan bore left at Mason, rode the brakes all the way down to Fulton, turned right and accelerated. We sped on, desperate to leave the past.
***
There were still whaleboats drawn up on the sand, still wagons waiting there, and shirtsleeved immortals hurriedly loading boxes from wagon to boat. We’d nearly left it too late: those were my people, that was my Nob Hill salvage arrayed in splendor amid the driftwood and broken shells. There were still a pair of steamers riding at anchor beyond Seal Rock, though most of the fleet had already put out to sea and could be glimpsed as tiny lights on the grey horizon, making for the Farallones. As we came within range of the Hush Field both of the children slumped into abrupt and welcome unconsciousness.
We jittered to a stop just short of the tavern, where an impatient operative from the Company’s motor agency took charge of the automobile. Pan and I jumped out, caught up our respective children, and ran down the beach.
Past the wagons loaded with rich jetsam of the Gilded Age, we ran: lined up in the morning gloom and salt wind were the grand pianos, the crystal chandeliers, the paintings in gilt frames, the antique furniture. Statuary classical and modern; gold plate and tapestries. Cases of rare wines, crates of phonograph cylinders, of books and papers, waited like refugees to escape the coming morning.
I glimpsed Averill, struggling through the sand with his arms full of priceless things. He was sobbing loudly as he worked; tears coursed down his cheeks, his eyes were wide with terror, but his body served him like the clockwork toy, like the fine machine it was, and bore him ceaselessly back and forth between the wagon and the boat until his appointed task should be done.
"Sir! Where did you get to?" he said, gasping. "We waited and waited–and now it’s gonna cut loose any second and we’re still not done!"
"Couldn’t be helped, old man!" I told him as we scuttled past. "Carry on! I have every faith in you!"
I shut my ears to his cry of dismay and ran on. A boat reserved for passengers still waited in the surf. Pan and I made for the boarding officer and gave our identification.
"You’ve cut it damned close, gentlemen," he grumbled.
"Unavoidable," I told him. His gaze fell on my gore-drenched shirt and he blinked, but waved us to our places. Seconds later we were seated securely, and the oarsmen pulled and sent us bounding out on the receding tide to the Thunderer where she lay at anchor.
We’d done it, we were away from that fated city where even now bronze hatchets were completing the final betrayal–
No. A gentleman does not betray others. Nor does he leave his subordinates to deal with the consequences of his misfortune.
Donal shivered in the stiff breeze, waking slowly. Frank’s coat had been lost, somewhere in Chinatown; I shrugged out of my dinner jacket and put it around Donal’s shoulders. He drew closer to me, but his attention was caught by the operatives working on the shore. As he watched, something disturbed the earth and the sand began to flurry and shift. Another warning was sounding up from below.
The rumbling carried to us over the roar of the sea, as did the shouts of the operatives trying to finish the loading. One wagon settled forward a few inches, causing the unfortunate precipitation of a massive antique clock into the arms of the immortals who had been gingerly easing it down. They arrested its flight, but the shock or perhaps merely the striking hour set in motion its parade of tiny golden automata. Out came its revolving platforms, its trumpeting angels, its pirouetting lovers, its minute Death with raised scythe and hourglass. Crazily it chimed FIVE.
Pan and I exchanged glances. He checked his chronometer. Our boatmen increased the vigor of their strokes.
Moment by moment the East was growing brighter, disclosing operatives massed on the deck of the Thunderer. Their faces were turned to regard the sleeping city. Pan and I were helped on deck and our mortal charges handed up after us; a pair of white-coifed nurses stepped forward.
"Agent Pan? Agent Victor?" inquired one, as the other checked a list.
"Here, now, Donal, we’re on our ship at last, and here’s a lovely fairy to look after you." I thrust him into her waiting arms. The other received the baby from Pan, and the little girl went without complaint; but as his nurse turned to carry him below decks, Donal twisted in her arms and reached out a desperate hand for me.
"Uncle Jimmy!" he screamed. I turned away quickly as she bore him off. Really, it was for the best.
I made my way along the rail and emerged on the aft deck, where I nearly ran into Nan D’Arraignee. She did not see me, however; she was fervently kissing a great bearded fellow in a brass-buttoned blue coat, which he had opened to wrap about them both, making a warm protected place for her in his arms. He looked up and saw me. His eyes, timid and kindly, widened, and he nodded in recognition.
"Kalugin," I acknowledged with brittle courtesy, tipping my hat. I edged on past them quickly, but not so quickly as to suggest I was fleeing. What had I to flee from? Not guilt, certainly. No gentleman dishonorably covets another gentleman’s lady.
As I reached the aft saloon we felt it beginning, with the rising surge that lifted the Thunderer at its mooring and threatened to swamp the fleeing whaleboats; we heard the roar coming up from the earth, and in the City some mortals sat up in their beds and frowned at what they could sense but not quite hear yet.
I clung to the rail of the Thunderer. My fellow operatives were hurrying to the stern of the ship to be witness to History, and nearly every face bore an expression compounded of mingled horror and eagerness. There were one or two who turned away, averting their eyes. There were those like me, sick and exhausted, who merely stared.
And really, from where we lay offshore, there was not much to see; no DeMille spectacle; no more at first than a puff of dust rising into the air. But very clear across the water we heard the rumbling, and then the roar of bricks coming down, and steel snapping, and timbers groaning, and the high sweet shattering of glass, and the tolling in all discordance of bronze-throated bells. Loud as the Last Trumpet, but not loud enough to drown out the screams of the dying. No, the roar of the earthquake even paused for a space, as if to let us hear mortal agony more clearly; then the second shock came, and I saw a distant tower topple and fall slowly, and then the little we had been able to see of the City was concealed in a roiling fog the color of a bloodstain.
I turned away, and chanced to look up at the open doorway of a stateroom on the deck above. There stood Labienus, watching the death of three thousand mortals with an avid stare. That was when I knew, and knew beyond question, whose weapon I was.
I hadn’t escaped. My splendid mansion, with all its gilded conceits, had collapsed in a rain of bricks and broken plaster.
A hand settled on my shoulder and I dropped my gaze to behold Lewis, of all people, looking into my face with compassion.
"I know," he murmured, "I know, old fellow. Too much horror to bear. At least it’s finished now, for those poor mortals and for us. At least we’ve done our jobs. Brace up! Can I get you a drink?"
What did he recognize in my sick white face? Not the features of a man who had emptied a phial into an innocent-looking cup of wine, and given it to him under pretense of calming his nerves. Why, I’d always been a poisoner, hadn’t I? But it had happened long ago, and he had no memory of it anyway. I’d seen to that. And Lewis would never suspect me of such behavior in any case. We were both gentlemen, after all.
"No, thank you," I replied, "I believe I’ll just take the air for a little while out here. It’s a fine restorative to the nerves, you know. Sea air."
"So it is," he agreed, stepping back. "That’s the spirit! And it’s not as though you could have done anything more. You know what they say: History cannot be changed." He gave me a final helpful thump on the arm and moved away, clinging to the rail as the deck pitched.
Alone, I fixed my eyes on the wide horizon of the cold and perfect sea. I drew in a deep breath of chill air.
One can write lies. And live them.
Two operatives in uniform were making their way toward me through the press of the crowd. I looked across at them.
"Executive Facilitator Victor?"
I nodded. They shouldered into place, one on either side of me.
"Sir, your presence is urgently requested. Mr. Labienus sends his apologies for unavoidably revising your schedule," one of them recited.
"Certainly." I exhaled. "By all means, gentlemen, let us go."
We made our way across deck to the forward compartments, avoiding the hatches where the crew were busily loading down the Art, the Music, the Literature, the fine flowering of the Humanity that we had, after all, been created to save.