Gods and Pawns (28 page)

“How much?”

“Seven hundred guilders.”

Catharina put her hands to her face. “Jesus God,” she said. “All right; come on upstairs with me now, quick! I’ll show you something.

“Maybe you’ll think it’s funny,” she continued, as they hurried together up the echoing stair. “It was his little joke, you see? Maybe you’ll want it. Maybe you’ll be angry. I don’t give a damn either way anymore, to tell you the truth, but it’ll be yours for seven hundred guilders. Here.”

She pushed open a door and Van Drouten followed her into the studio. It had the reek of a sickroom and was bone-chilling cold, and canvases were stacked against the walls. The easel was bare; the paints were nowhere to be seen, and the sheets and blanket had already been stripped from the narrow cot. There was no sign of the
camera obscura
.

“Looking for the magic cabinet?” Catharina grunted, rummaging through the stacks. “You’re too late for that; we sold it a year ago. Even a dying man has to eat, eh? Here. Look at this.” She pulled out a painting, held it up with a defiant smile. “It’s called
The Visit of the Holy Women to the Tomb of Christ.
”

Van Drouten caught her breath.

“Oh, it’s wonderful! How clever!”

“But your pissy doctor won’t want it, will he?” Catharina said fiercely. “Not enough blue and yellow!”

“This isn’t for him,” said Van Drouten. “This is for me. I liked Jan, Catharina. I liked you both.”

“Then much good may this do you,” Catharina replied, and tossed it at her. Van Drouten dropped the chest, putting up both hands to seize the painting. The chest burst open when it hit the floor, and guilders flooded out in a torrent of bright coin, ran and rolled into the four corners of the room.

Catharina, looking down at it, just laughed and shook her head.

In the street outside, late-night traffic roared and hissed along, and far up the pinpoint satellites orbited against the stars; but within the alcove Van Drouten regarded a spring morning in ancient Jerusalem, in a place of silver olive trees and white lilies, and green grass beaded with dew. Mortals, and God, could make such places; a cyborg couldn’t. A cyborg could only preserve them. Van Drouten blinked back tears as she sank into the picture, escaped her immortal life and its immortal terrors for a moment…

There were the three women. Little Maria was at the left, peeping from the angle of the olive tree, her face bright with anticipation; Catharina was in the center of the canvas, her hands lifted in elaborate astonishment, her face haggard with bitter experience. There was the tomb of Christ, but it was not a stone rolled back that disclosed the interior. It was a cabinet door standing wide, hinges and all, with a lens-tube in its center.

And the third woman, Van Drouten herself, was highlighted against the sooty blackness of the tomb’s walls. She smiled out at the viewer and offered forth in her hands the linen cloth on which the miracle was printed, in tones of gray and black: the trick, the joke, the alchemical cheat, the negative image of the man. It wasn’t art; but there on the treated cloth his light had been captured for all time, a bargain at thirty pieces of good hard silver.

I’d been walking for five days, looking for Mendoza. The year was 1850.

Actually,
walking
doesn’t really describe traveling through that damned vertical wilderness in which she lived. I’d crawled uphill on hands and knees, which is no fun when you’re dressed as a Franciscan friar, with sandals and beads and the whole nine yards of brown burlap robe. I’d slid downhill, which is no fun either, especially when the robe rides up in back. I’d waded across freezing cold creeks and followed thready little trails through ferns, across forest floors in permanent darkness under towering redwoods. I’m talking
gloom.
One day the poets will fall in love with Big Sur, and after them the beats and hippies, but if vampires ever discover the place they’ll go nuts over it.

Mendoza isn’t a vampire, though she is an immortal being with a lot of problems, most of which she blames on me.

I’m an immortal being with a lot of problems, too. Like father, like daughter.

After most of a week, I finally came out on a patch of level ground about three thousand feet up. I was standing there looking
down
on clouds floating above the Pacific Ocean, and feeling kind of funny in the pit of my stomach as a result—and suddenly saw the Company-issue processing credenza on my left, nicely camouflaged. I’d found Mendoza’s camp at last.

There was her bivvy tent, all right, and a table with a camp stove, and five pots with baby trees growing in them. Everything but the trees had a dusty, abandoned look.

Cripes, I thought to myself, how long since she’s been here? I looked around uneasily, wondering if I ought to yoo-hoo or something, and that was when I noticed her signal coming from…
up?
I craned back my head.

An oak tree rose from the mountain face behind me, huge and branching wide, and high up there among the boughs Mendoza leaned. She gazed out at the sea; but with such a look of ecstatic vacancy in her eyes, I guessed she was seeing something a lot farther away than that earthly horizon.

I cleared my throat.

The vacant look went away fast, and there was something inhuman in the sharp way her head swung around.

“Hi, honey,” I said. She looked down and her eyes focused on me. She has black eyes, like mine, only mine are jolly and twinkly and bright. Hers are like flint. Always been that way, even when she was a little girl.

“What the hell are you doing here, Joseph?” she said at last.

“I missed you, too, baby,” I said. “Want to come down? We need to talk.”

Muttering, she descended through the branches.

“Nice trees,” I remarked. “Got any coffee?”

“I can make some,” she said. I kept my mouth shut as she poked around in her half-empty rations locker, and I still kept it shut when she hauled out her bone-dry water jug and stared at it in a bewildered kind of way before remembering where the nearest stream was, and I didn’t even remark on the fact that she had goddam
moss
in her hair, though what I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs was:
How can you live like this?

No, I played it smart. Pretty soon we were sitting at either end of a fallen log, sipping our respective mugs of coffee, just like family.

“Mm, good java,” I lied.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Okay, kid, I’ll tell you,” I said. “The Company is sending me up to San Francisco on a job. I need a field botanist, and I had my pick of anybody in the area, so I decided on you.”

I braced myself for an explosion, because sometimes Mendoza’s a little touchy about surprises. But she was silent for a moment, with that bewildered expression again, and I just knew she was accessing her chronometer because she’d forgotten what year this was.

“San Francisco, huh?” she said. “But I went through Yerba Buena a century ago, Joseph. I did a complete survey of all the endemics. Specimens, DNA codes, the works. Believe me, there wasn’t anything to interest Dr. Zeus.”

“Well, there might be now,” I said. “And that’s all you need to know until we get there.”

She sighed. “So it’s like that?”

“It’s like that. But, hey, we’ll have a great time! There’s a lot more up there now than fog and sand dunes.”

“I’ll say there is,” she said grimly. “I just accessed the historical record for October 1850. There’s a cholera epidemic going on. There’s chronic arson. The streets are half quicksand. You really take me to some swell places, don’t you?”

“How long has it been since you ate dinner in a restaurant?” I coaxed. She started to say something sarcastic in reply, looked down at whatever was floating in the bottom of her coffee, and shuddered.

“See? It’ll be a nice change of scenery,” I told her, as she tossed the dregs over her shoulder. I tossed out my coffee, too, in a simpatico gesture. “The Road to Frisco! A fun-filled musical romp! Two wacky cyborgs plus one secret mission equals laughs galore!”

“Oh, shut up,” she told me, but rose to strike camp.

It took us longer to get down out of the mountains than I would have liked, because Mendoza insisted on bringing her five potted trees, which were some kind of endangered species, so we had to carry them all the way to the closest Company receiving terminal in Monterey, by which time I was ready to drop the damn things down any convenient cliff. But away they went to some Company botanical garden, and, after requisitioning equipment and a couple of horses, we finally set off for San Francisco.

I guess if we had been any other two people, we’d have chatted about bygone times as we rode along. It’s never safe to drag up old memories with Mendoza, though. We didn’t talk much, all the way up El Camino Real, through the forests and across the scrubby hills. It wasn’t until we’d left San Jose and were picking our way along the shore of the back bay, all black ooze and oyster shells, that Mendoza looked across at me and said: “We’re carrying a lot of lab equipment with us. I wonder why?”

I just shrugged.

“Whatever the Company’s sending us after, they want it analyzed on the spot,” she said thoughtfully. “So possibly they’re not sure that it’s really what they want. But they need to find out.”

“Could be.”

“And your only field expert is being kept on a need-to-know basis, which means it’s something important,” she continued. “And they’re sending
you,
even though you’re still working undercover in the Church, being Father Rubio or whoever. Aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“You look even more like Mephistopheles than usual in that robe, did I ever tell you that? Anyway—why would the Company send a friar into a town full of gold miners, gamblers, and prostitutes?” Mendoza speculated. “You’ll stick out like a sore thumb. And where does botany fit in?”

“I guess we’ll see, huh?”

She glared at me sidelong and grumbled to herself a while, but that was okay. I had her interested in the job, at least. She was losing that thousand-year-stare that worried me so much.

I wasn’t worrying about the job at all.

You could smell San Francisco miles before you got there. It wasn’t the ordinary mortal aroma of a boom town without adequate sanitation, even one in the grip of cholera. San Francisco smelled like smoke, with a reek that went right up your nose and drilled into your sinuses.

It smelled this way because it had been destroyed by fire four times already, most recently only a month ago, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place. Obscenely expensive real estate where tents and shanties had stood was already filling up with brand-new frame buildings. Hammers pounded day and night along Clay, along Montgomery and Kearney and Washington. All the raw new wood was festooned with red-white-and-blue bunting, and hastily improvised Stars and Stripes flew everywhere. California had only just found out it had been admitted to the Union, and was still celebrating.

The bay was black with ships, but those closest to the shore were never going to sea again—their crews had deserted and they were already enclosed by wharves, filling in on all sides. Windows and doors had been cut in their hulls as they were converted to shops and taverns.

Way back in the sand hills, poor old Mission Dolores—built of adobe blocks by a people whose world hadn’t changed in millennia, on a settlement plan first designed by officials of the Roman Empire—looked down on the crazy new world in wonderment. Mendoza and I stared, too, from where we’d reined in our horses near Rincon Hill.

“So this is an American city,” said Mendoza.

“Manifest Destiny in action,” I agreed, watching her. Mendoza had never liked being around mortals much. How was she going to handle a modern city, after a century and a half of wilderness? But she just set her mouth and urged her horse forward, and I was proud of her.

For all the stink of disaster, the place was
alive
. People were out and running around, doing business. There were hotels and taverns; there were groceries and bakeries and candy stores. Lightermen worked the water between those ships that hadn’t yet been absorbed into the city, bringing in prospectors bound for the gold fields or crates of goods for the merchants. I heard six languages spoken before we’d crossed Clay Street. Anything could be bought or sold here, including a meal prepared by a Parisian chef. The air hummed with hunger, and enthusiasm, and a kind of rapacious innocence.

I grinned. America looked like fun.

We found a hotel on the big central wharf, and loaded our baggage into two narrow rooms whose windows looked into the rigging of a landlocked ship. Mendoza stared around at the bare plank walls.

“This is Oregon spruce,” she announced. “You can still smell the forest! I’ll bet this was alive and growing a month ago.”

“Probably,” I agreed, rummaging in my trunk. I found what I was looking for and unrolled it to see how it had survived the trip.

“What’s that?”

“A subterfuge.” I held the drawing up. “A beautiful gift for his Holiness the Pope! The artist’s conception, anyway.”

“A huge ugly crucifix?” Mendoza looked pained.

“
And
a matching rosary, baby. All to be specially crafted out of gold and—this is the important part—gold-bearing quartz from sunny California, U.S.A., so the Holy Father will know he’s got faithful fans out here!”

“That’s disgusting. Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m not serious, but we don’t want the mortals to know that,” I said, rolling up the drawing and sticking it in a carpetbag full of money. “You stay here and set up the lab, okay? I’ve got to go find some jewelers.”

There were a lot of jewelers in San Francisco. Successful guys coming back from the Sacramento sometimes liked to commemorate their luck by having gold nuggets set in watch fobs, or stickpins, or brooches for sweethearts back east. Gold-bearing quartz, cut and polished, was also popular, and much classier looking.

Hiram Gainsborg, on the corner of Ohio and Broadway, had some of what I needed; so did Joseph Schwartz at Harrison and Broadway, although J. C. Russ on the corner of Harrison and Sixth had more. But I also paid a visit to Baldwin & Co. on Clay at the Plaza, and to J. H. Bradford on Kearney, and just to play it safe I went to over to Dupont and Clay to see the firm of Moffat & Co., Assayers and Bankers.

So I was one pooped little friar, carrying one big heavy carpetbag, by the time I trudged back to our hotel as evening shadows descended. I’d been followed for three blocks by a Sydney ex-convict whose intent was robbery and possible murder; but I managed to ditch him by ducking into a saloon, exiting out the back and across the deck of the landlocked
Niantic,
and cutting through another saloon where I paused just long enough to order an oyster loaf and a pail of steam beer.

I’d lost him for good by the time I thumped on Mendoza’s door with the carpetbag.

“Hey, honeybunch, I got dinner!”

She opened the door right away, jittery as hell. “Don’t shout, for God’s sake!”

“Sorry.” I went in and set down the carpetbag gratefully. “I don’t think the mortals are sleeping yet. It’s early.”

“There are three of them on this floor, and seventeen downstairs,” she said, wringing her hands. “It’s been a while since I’ve been around so many of them. I’d forgotten how loud their hearts are, Joseph. I can hear them beating.”

“Aw, you’ll get used to it in no time,” I said. I held up the takeout. “Look! Oyster loaf and beer!”

She looked impatient, and then her eyes widened as she caught the scent of the fresh-baked sourdough loaf and the butter and the garlic and the little fried oysters…

“Oh, gosh,” she said weakly.

So we had another nice companionable moment, sitting at the table where she’d set up the testing equipment, drinking from opposite sides of the beer pail. I lit a lamp and pulled the different paper-wrapped parcels from my carpetbag, one by one.

“What’re those?” Mendoza inquired with her mouth full.

“Samples of gold-bearing quartz,” I explained. “From six different places. I wrote the name of each place on the package in pencil, see? And your job is to test each sample. You’re going to look for a blue-green lichen growing in the crevices with the gold.”

She swallowed and shook her head, blank-faced.

“You need a microbiologist for this kind of job, Joseph, surely. Plants that primitive aren’t my strong suit.”

“The closest microbiologist was in Seattle,” I explained. “And Agrippanilla’s a pain to work with. Besides, you can handle this! Remember the Black Elysium grape? The mutant saccharomyces or whatever it was? You won yourself a field commendation on that one. This’ll be easy!”

Mendoza looked pleased, but did her best to conceal it. “I’ll bet your mission budget just wouldn’t stretch to shipping qualified personnel down here, eh? That’s the Company. Okay; I’ll get started right after dinner.”

“You can wait until morning,” I said.

“Naah.” She had a gulp of the beer. “Sleep is for sissies.”

So after we ate I retired, and far into the hours of the night I could still see lamplight shining from her room, bright stripes through the plank wall every time I turned over. I knew why she was working so late.