Gods and Pawns (21 page)

“The other thing they’ll do is to figure out how to make people live forever. That won’t go so well, either, because the only way to do it is to take a baby and start modifying it early, with biomechanical implants and conditioning. After twenty years or so the kid is a cyborg who’ll live forever, all right, but…there are some drawbacks. So, no big commercial success from that discovery, either.

“You know how big corporations work, huh? Seventeen years you worked for that rathole insurance company. All that mattered to them in the end was the bottom line.” Uncle Porfirio poured more coffee.

“You’ve been watching us, all this time,” said Maria, not sure what she felt. He just nodded and went on: “Anyway, how were these people going to turn a profit?

“They figured out that if they sent teams back into the past, they could collect little children—abandoned babies, orphans, whatever—and they could work the immortality process on them. That way they’d have immortal agents seeded throughout history. The agents would do various jobs for them, like collecting stuff that would become valuable and hiding it away for ‘discovery’ later.

“This company calls itself Dr. Zeus Incorporated.”

“Dr. Seuss?” Maria had a jarring mental image of Ambrose Muller/Anthony Miller and his Cat in the Hat smile.

“Zeus,” said Uncle Porfirio. “Greek mythology? The nuns taught you about it at Immaculate Heart, right? Zeus, who ruled over the other gods and goddesses because he was the only one who could rescue them from his father, the ogre Time. We heard that story a lot, when we were growing up, all of us little cyborgs-in-training. It was supposed to make us grateful and proud to serve the Company.

“Tonantzin was a cyborg. She was there, positioned in Montezuma’s court, to salvage things for future investors before Tenochtitlan was destroyed. Afterward, she had the chance to recruit an orphan for the company, so she did.”

“But why didn’t she want your brother?” Maria asked.

“You have to fit a certain physical profile,” said Uncle Porfirio. “I had what they called Optimum Morphology. Agustin didn’t. So, when the doctors at the Company hospital were able to pry him out of my arms, they sent Agustin off to be adopted. He was placed in a good home, with a nice mortal couple. That was supposed to be the end of the story.

“It wasn’t. One of the first things I did, when I was a grown-up cyborg, was track down Agustin. He thought he was a wealthy planter’s only son. I sure as hell couldn’t tell him who I was, but we became friends. Close as brothers. I looked after him, just as my mother had told me to do. He got married, he raised a family, he got old and died. His kids raised families of their own, and they died, too, but the family line went on. I kept an eye on them all.”

“And nobody ever noticed
you
never got old or died?” said Maria, and immediately regretted her sarcasm.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Uncle Porfirio, scowling. “I wore makeup, to look like I was aging. I’d go away, send word I’d died, or I’d stage my own accidental death or murder. I’d lie low for thirty years, fifty years. By the time I’d come back, nobody would remember me, and I could start again. I could pose as a long-lost cousin or a friend of the family. It didn’t matter. I watched over them. I helped them.

“Four hundred years, I’ve kept the family together. I carried your great grandmother Maria from the flood that washed away the old mansion. I gave Lupe’s great grandfather Diego the money to buy the ranch in Durango. I pulled Hector from the truck accident when his mother was killed, and carried him to an orphanage. I dragged him to the field hospital, when he was shot by the Japanese.”

“You know all the family history,” said Maria, stunned as it began to sink in on her that she was hearing the truth.

“Every birth, death, and marriage, every name,” said Uncle Porfirio. “And it’s been enough to make an immortal pray for strength, you know that? I can never rest. Always, one of you had some crisis to be solved. Even then I couldn’t always save you. Hector and Lupe were the last two, distant cousins, the last two branches of the family. I thought it would be smart to introduce them. Bring the family together again under one roof. It was a stupid move; it just put all the eggs in one basket.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t have been so damned helpless if you hadn’t always been there to manage every detail of our lives,” Maria retorted. “Did you ever think of that?”

“Believe me, I have,” said Uncle Porfirio. He looked gloomily into his empty cup. “But it’s not easy to let go. Look what happens when I leave for a few years! How about you,
mi hija
? Were you able to call Child Welfare on Tina, for getting drunk when she had a little baby depending on her?”

Maria blinked at him a moment, and then sputtered: “What, you people can read minds, too? Is that some cyborg superpower?”

“No,” said Uncle Porfirio. “But after four hundred years, you get pretty good at knowing what people are thinking.”

He shrugged restlessly, looked around; got up and opened the refrigerator. “I need something sweet. Where’re the piloncillos?”

“I think there’s some in the cheese compartment,” said Maria. “But—”

He had already found the brown sugar cones, and crunched down on one with a sound like granite cracking. “Jesus, this tastes like a fossil! How long has this been in here?”

Maria, realizing it had been in there since 1985, flushed and said: “Nobody did much cooking after Mama died, okay? I’ve been holding down nine-to-five jobs since I got out of high school. Papi would go to the store, and buy piloncillos and chorizo and God knows what else, and then expect it to cook itself. I can’t cook like Mama did!” Her voice began to rise, even as she became aware she was reacting out of all proportion. “You just went away and dumped it all on me, you know that? I never had a life of my own. I did have my own apartment, for one year, eleven months, and three days exactly. I spent all my time being Mama’s nurse and Papi’s other wife and Tina’s other mom. Why
me
?”

“Because you were the only one strong enough to carry the weight,” said Uncle Porfirio. “The only one I could trust to hold the family together.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” said Maria bitterly. “You could have helped, somehow. You could have at least gone to see Papi.”

“I did,” said Uncle Porfirio, grimacing. “I broke all the rules, and I did visit your father. And it got him killed.”

“What?” Maria stared at him. She narrowed her eyes. “Are you talking about the guy in the white coat? Dr. Ambrose Muller? He’s an immortal, too.”

“You figured that out on your own, didn’t you?” Uncle Porfirio shook his head. “You were always sharp. Like me. Ay,
mi hija
, what an agent you would have made.

“Okay: the people who gave us everlasting life weren’t the smartest bunch of venture capitalists who ever implanted a biochip. If they’d known just a little less about cybertechnology and more about human nature, it would have dawned on them that living forever isn’t for everybody.

“Hell, I don’t know that it’s for anybody. After a few centuries, most immortals are tired of living. But they can’t die. That makes some of them pretty sore.

“And some of them come to the conclusion, especially after living through a few wars, that it’s not worth it to save the world. Some of them have decided that the world would be better off if the human race died out.

“This goes against all our programming, of course, but…we were people to start with, before they made us something else. So there are good immortals and there are bad ones. And, about four hundred years ago, a kind of underground movement started.

“The guy who killed Hector is one of them.

“He went crazy back in 1937, or maybe that was when he just decided to hell with it and decided to start killing mortals. A crazy cyborg is bad news for the Company. The mortal masters, up there in the future, won’t even admit we can go mad. So they have ways of covering up incidents like that, and so somebody slipped him a Mickey Finn that made him look dead. He was supposed to have been collected at the funeral home and taken off to a Company holding facility.

“Apparently, he was revived and recruited by the underground instead. He may have been working for them ever since. Recently, though, he seems to have gotten careless again. He’s let himself be seen.

“I was already on his trail. He began playing cat-and-mouse with me. He found out I had a family, started stalking all of you. I came to see Hector and caught him there, giving Hector a shot. He took off and I chased him up to the roof, but he went over the side and got away. I went back…and there wasn’t any way I could help your father. This group engineers plague viruses…among the other things they do. So I put on his favorite music for him, and I told him good-bye.”

“But why?” Maria said hoarsely, feeling her throat constrict. “Why kill Papi?”

“To show me he knew about him. To show me he could,” said Uncle Porfirio.

“And…all that crazy business with Papi’s teeth? The letters to me? What was that all about?”

Uncle Porfirio sighed. “That was a game of chicken. He was systematically blowing my cover, and the Company’s cover, too. You’d already put it all together. The longer I waited, the bigger the mess I’d have to clean up.”

“Waited to do what?” asked Maria.

But he had turned his head, was staring through the house at the front door. His lean dark profile was like a wolf’s, and his lips drew back from his teeth in a wolf’s snarl. Maria set her hand on her gun.

“Put it away,
mi hija
,” said Uncle Porfirio, very quietly. “It can’t help you, and it might make things worse. Let’s go into the living room.”

They sat on the couch, side by side in the light from the pink candles, and the Virgin of Guadalupe smiled on. Uncle Porfirio leaned forward, tense, silent. Maria strained to listen: the sounds of traffic had faded to the occasional
whoosh
of a car along Fountain, and insects creaking in the night. She heard the light footsteps long before they came near, proceeding along the sidewalk, pausing before the house, turning up the walk. No heavy shuffling tread. The walker had nothing to disguise.

He skipped lightly up the front steps, and a second later Maria heard another key in the lock. She felt a moment of vague outrage—how many people had keys to her house?—before the door swung open.

He wore no white coat now, though he was still smiling.

“Hi, Maria,” he said. His smile widened when he saw Uncle Porfirio. “Well, finally! I was beginning to think you’d never come out of the woodwork. Bet you wish you’d done things my way, after all.”

“I’m here now,” said Uncle Porfirio. “What do you want, Emrys?”

But Emrys, or Ambrose Muller, or Dr. Miller, turned to Maria. “Say,
chiquita
, why don’t you go fix us a couple of cups of coffee? Cream and sugar for me.”

His voice, his intonation was a little offbeat. Maria struggled to place his accent; what did it remind her of? She realized he sounded like someone in an old movie. People hadn’t prefaced a remark with the word
say
since the 1930s. Ambrose Muller had supposedly died in 1937. Suppressing a shudder, she said: “Go to hell.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m there already, sister. Your uncle and I need some privacy to talk.”

“She knows already,” said Porfirio. “You told her enough.”

“Suit yourself. I don’t envy you explaining this to your superiors.” Emrys sat down, raised his head, and sniffed the air. “Took a shot at you, did she? You’re lucky she missed. She’s one big old knot of barely suppressed rage, that Maria.”

“Boy, you must have learned a lot from Tina,” said Maria.

He grinned. “
So
much,” he agreed. He shifted his gaze to Uncle Porfirio. “Quite a trick you’ve pulled off, Security Technical Porfirio. All the rest of us orphans trudge through pointless eternity alone, except for you. You’ve got a family of your very own! Must make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

“Except when they’re in danger, of course.

“The good news is, from this day forward, you won’t be the only one looking out for your family. They’ll have a whole new set of guardian angels watching them. The bad news is, there’s a price for our protection.”

“What do you want me to do?” said Uncle Porfirio in a dead voice.

“Oh, nothing very much,” said Emrys. He leaned forward, smiling in a confidential kind of way. “We want you to keep on doing your job, just as well as you ever have. We respect your work, you know. Maybe once or twice in a century, you’ll get a discreetly worded request. We might need a certain access code. We might need you to bungle a job—though we’ll take pains to provide you with excellent reasons for failure, the kind that wouldn’t arouse suspicion in the most paranoid case officer.”

“Just what is it you do?” Maria asked Uncle Porfirio. He did not reply, staring at Emrys with a face like stone. Emrys chuckled.

“You didn’t tell her that much, did you? I didn’t think you would.” He turned to Maria. “I wonder how your ‘uncle,’” and he hooked his index fingers to signify quotes, “explained us to you? In religious terms, am I right? The forces of Good and Evil battling it out across time? And you think your ‘uncle’ is one of the good angels. Not at all, sweetheart.”

Uncle Porfirio shifted in his seat. “How far are you going to take this?” he said, with warning in his tone.

“Don’t you think she deserves the truth? Maria’s the smart one in the family, after all. I think we owe it to her to strip away the mythological crap and tell it like it is.” Emrys made a slicing gesture with his hands.

“The opposing forces here are really Reckless Profit and Conscience. Your ‘uncle’ works for seriously stupid masters, Maria. Money is their greatest good. They created everlasting slaves to get it for them, mining the past like a strata of coal. They didn’t order them to save the animals and the works of art and the children because they were good; they did it because it would make them richer!

“They aren’t remotely concerned with preventing all the horrors and catastrophes they
know
will befall humanity. Far from it; if it were possible to change history, they might not be the little tin gods they are, up there in the future. They just make damned sure their operatives can grab the loot and run with it when all hell breaks loose. Isn’t that so?” Emrys turned to Uncle Porfirio.