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Authors: Kage Baker

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BOOK: The Life of the World to Come
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“Which one of you is Clive Rutherford?” the tall man inquired.
“But—buh-but you’re dead,” cried Chatterji.
The man looked impatient and put his thumb on the pistol’s safety; then his eyes widened with horror. “Yikes, Edward, hold on. There aren’t lead bullets in this thing, it shoots microwaves! It’d fry his brain bad enough if he were ordinary, but with those rivets, his head’ll explode.”
He drew back the gun an inch or so, as if considering, and his facial expression became aloof. “Trust the Irish to devise something like this. On the other hand, one thing I did learn in my long years as a political is that there really is no such thing as a clean kill. Well then, gentlemen! A particularly nasty death for your friend, unless you speak up. Is Clive Rutherford in this room, please?”
“I’m Clive Rutherford!” he said.
“Good. Mr. Rutherford, where is the woman Mendoza?”
“Who?” Rutherford gaped.
“One of your slaves,” Edward said, curling his lip. “The Botanist Mendoza. You had her arrested and transferred to an unrecorded location, just after that unfortunate incident on Mars. Tell me where she is.”
“I don’t know,” squealed Rutherford, and Ellsworth-Howard shuddered as the man exhaled impatiently and took a firmer grip on his pistol. But then the face changed, and the voice was different too as Nicholas said: “But he’s unarmed, Edward.”
“Who’s Edward?” said Chatterji in spite of his terror.
“Just hit him or something, okay?” Alec said. “I don’t want to kill anybody.”
“Of course you don’t want to kill anybody.” Rutherford mastered himself enough to attempt a soothing tone. “You’re a
good
man, Alec. You’re a hero, not a villain. Oh, when I think of the times I’ve dreamed of meeting you—and to have it happen like this!” Tears welled in his eyes.
“I asked you a question,” said the hard cultured voice that had done most of the talking. “Where is the woman Mendoza?”
“Edward was the name of the s-second one,” Chatterji said suddenly. “In the second s-sequence! Edward Something Something, uh, Fairfax.”
“Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax,” Edward corrected him. “At
your service, formerly; now very much his own man. I really am going to shoot your friend, here, if you don’t answer my question. Where is the woman Mendoza?”
“Oh, my God, he’s g-gone mad,” moaned Chatterji.
“Hardly. It seems to be something akin to demonic possession, even if Nicholas partakes more of the angelic in our particular case.” Edward sounded wickedly amused. “No, Mr. Rutherford—and I assume you must be Francis Chatterji? —no, we’re all three here to confront you, our sinful creators, just as in Mrs. Shelley’s book, though without all the tedium of a chase to the North Pole. Alec, you’ve got this weapon set at minimum wave! That’ll take far too much time.” Edward adjusted the dial on the top of the pistol. “There now. Maximum. Dreadfully sorry, Mr. Ellsworth-Howard—I believe? I’m afraid they’ll have to conduct your funeral with the casket closed, unless the undertaker can contrive a wax replica of your head—”
“Options Research!” said Ellsworth-Howard. He would have said it sooner, but he was finding it difficult to think at the best of times these days.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I sent her to Options Research,” Rutherford said. “But it’s a department, not a place! I don’t know where it is.”
“We can find out from his buke, Edward,” said Alec. “Come on, let’s leave these creeps and go rescue her.”
“Alec, please.” Rutherford held up his hand. “Please listen. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. We created you in good faith! We thought you were going to do great things for humanity. But we were used, Alec! The Company had its own agenda all along. Do you see?”
“I saw Elly Swain, you little bastard,” said Alec. “How many other people suffered to bring your wonderful creation to life? And Edward and Nicholas had mothers too, didn’t they? You treated ’em like animals. What kind of good faith was that?”
“It was necessary.” Rutherford stood up in his agitation and tried to pace, but Chatterji pulled him back down. “Nothing great is got without cost. And if three women suffered some shame and discomfort, it would have been worth it. Oh, Alec, what you might have been! What you
are.
” Rutherford’s
voice broke. “Good God, you’re the hero I always wanted to be. If not for Mars—look at you. Orphaned and free, sailing in your ship with its pirate flag, having adventures, dying heroically and popping up alive again. You sway others with just the sound of your voice, you’re clever and strong and fearless. You’re Peter! You’re Arthur and Robin Hood. You’re, uh, Frodo and Mowgli and Kim and Sinbad and—and the boys in the Narnia books and the boys in
Castle of Adventure
and—”
“What about Pinocchio?” said Alec quietly. “Somebody you could put through hell and it wouldn’t matter, because he wasn’t a real boy?”
“All right, I deserve that,” Rutherford said, weeping. “But you have to understand about the woman. She was your downfall, you see, every time! Your evil angel, if you will. We had to put her away. She held you back, she tangled you—you’d never have accomplished anything—”
“She loved me.”
“But we loved you, too! And we understood your destiny.”
“What destiny? To keep getting myself killed in stupid ways?” growled Alec.
“No, no. To give your life in a noble sacrifice for the good of others,” Rutherford admonished him. “Because you could accomplish things ordinary men couldn’t do. You were to have been the ultimate hero, born of a virgin even, eternally resurrected for mankind’s eternal benef—”
“Thou blaspheming fool!” Nicholas drew himself up until Alec looked seven feet tall. “Was it for
thy
greater glory I suffered in the fire? Hast thou created me, and sat in judgment on my life? Oh, little man, to make a thing like me!”
“We’re sorry! We’re so awfully, awfully s-sorry,” whimpered Chatterji, for Nicholas’s voice had become a thing of terror and power. “We’d never have done it if we’d known how it was going to t-turn out. Please don’t kill us!”
“I can’t deny I’d enjoy it,” sneered Edward. “An appetite you set in my heart. You made me a slaughterer, and gave me the conscience to tell me it was wrong. Should I indulge myself now, I wonder? Get up, all of you. Lie flat on your faces on the floor and put your hands behind your heads.”
Rutherford and Chatterji obeyed at once. Ellsworth-Howard
required a shove to remind him to comply before he flopped down beside them. Alec bound their wrists with cut cords from the drapes, and then knotted the bindings so the struggling of one would only serve to tighten the bonds of the other two. He went through their pockets and removed their identity discs, tucking them into his coat.
Edward then secured the pistol beside the discs, buttoned his coat carefully, and went out into the entry hall, with its marble floor and mosaic roundel an exact counterpart of the one at No. 1 Albany Crescent. He looked around him, grinning.
“Well, good-bye and farewell to you, number ten,” he said. “For the last time, I devoutly hope.”
He opened the door, stepped through, and closed it behind him. They could hear him whistling through his teeth as he strode away down the pavement.
“He never understood.” Rutherford gulped back a sob. “He never understood his greatness.”
“At least he didn’t kill us,” said Chatterji faintly.
After a full minute had gone by, Ellsworth-Howard said:
“Shrack! He took my buke.”
They still hadn’t managed to free themselves by Wednesday, when fortunately the first tour group of the day found them.
All the commuters had now arrived at their offices and set about their wearisome duties, so they missed seeing Alec sprinting back through the streets of London. There were a few tourists on Waterloo Bridge, and they turned at the thunder of footsteps as a wild-eyed man of extraordinary height came racing toward them. If they had not turned, they’d have seen what was making the hissing noise in the Thames directly under the bridge.
“Go,” howled Alec. “Run for your lives! Shoo! Out of my way!”
He skidded to a stop in the middle of the bridge and groped in his coat pocket, bringing out a tiny bottle labeled CAMPARI, of the sort once given out by air transport hostesses. As he was hurriedly unscrewing the cap, one of the tourists inquired timidly:
“Are you a performance artist?”
“Er—yeah.” Alec leaped up on the railing of the bridge. “What’s that Jason Barrymore holo?
War and Peace,
yeah? Okay, this is my impression of the drunk guy.” He threw away the cap and tilted the Campari bottle up, gulping its contents as he teetered back and forth on the rail. He gagged. The tourists applauded uncertainly.
Then he dove forward, right off the bridge, and several of them ran to the rail to see what had happened to him. To their
utter astonishment, he had landed on the deck of some kind of enormous vessel just below, and was running for a cabin as its transparent dome closed over him.
What happened next was uncertain. Some of the witnesses thought the vessel must have been a submarine, because they clearly remembered seeing it submerge. Others insisted the vessel wasn’t a submarine and didn’t submerge, but couldn’t say exactly what it had done; only that it was gone before anyone thought to take a holo of it. In any case, the story wasn’t coherent enough to make the evening news.
“Let’s go,” Alec said, strapping himself into his storm harness. When he had finished, Edward and Nicholas linked arms with him tightly.
What course, laddie?
“Fifty years back and thirty miles off the Galapagos. That ought to be far enough.”
Aye aye!
“And we’ve got loot, Captain, sir! Three identity discs and a buke belonging to Foxen Ellsworth-Howard. I want you to access everything and tell me where Dr. Zeus has a place called Options Research.”
To be sure. Hold yer teeth, gentlemen, she’s tacking about. Where do we come from?
“From the sea!” said Alec, and Edward, and Nicholas, as the yellow gas boiled up and obscured everything but the memory of the black-eyed woman, the Botanist Mendoza.
The Anvil of the World
In the Garden of Iden
1
The Graveyard Game
The Life of the World to Come
Children of the Company
“Baker’s trademark mix of serious speculation and black humor informs this solid addition to her time-travel series.”
—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“One of the most consistently entertaining series to appear in the late nineties. The novels read like literary pastiches—echoes of Heinlein and Robert Louis Stevenson fill this one—and the narrative pace matches that of most thrillers.”
—
Amazing Stories
“I really enjoyed Kage Baker’s
The Life of the World to Come
, which reads like a novel from the future. Consistently surprising, Kage Baker mixes past, present, and imagination into a compelling novel. What 21st century writing should be like.”
—R. Garcia y Robertson
In sixteenth century England, Mendoza fell for a native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality. He died a martyr’s death, burned at the stake. In nineteenth century America, Mendoza fell for an eerily identical native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality. When he died, she killed six men to avenge him. The Company didn’t like that—bad for business. But she’s immortal and indestructible, so they couldn’t hurt her. Instead, they dumped her in the Back Way Back.
Meanwhile, back in the future, three eccentric geniuses sit a parlor at Oxford University and play at being the new Inklings, the heirs of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Working for Dr. Zeus, they create heroic stories and give them flesh, myths in blood and DNA to protect the future from the World to Come, the fearsome Silence that will fall on the world in 2355. They create a hero, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiates determination and sexuality.
The First Company novel returns!
Turn the page for a preview of
by KAGE BAKER
Available January 2006 from Tom Doherty Associates
CHAPTER 1
I am a botanist. I will write down the story of my life as an exercise, to provide the illusion of conversation in this place where I am now alone. It will be a long story, because it was a long road that brought me here, and it led through blazing Spain and green, green England and ever so many centuries of Time. But you’ll understand it best if I begin by telling you what I learned in school.
Once, there was a cabal of merchants and scientists whose purpose was to make money and improve the lot of humankind. They invented Time Travel and Immortality. Now, I was taught that they invented Time Travel first and developed Immortals so they could send people safely back through the years.
In reality it was the other way around. The process for Immortality was developed first. In order to test it, they had to invent Time Travel.
It worked like this: they would send a team of doctors into the past, into 1486 for example, and select some lucky native of that time and confer immortality on him. Then they’d go back to their won time and see if their best case was still around. Had he survived the intervening nine hundred years? He had? How wonderful. Were there any unpleasant side effects? There were? Oops. They’d go back to the drawing board and then back to 1486 to try the new, improved process
on another native. Then they’d go home again, to see how this one turned out. Still not perfect? They’d try again. After all, they were only expending a few days of their own time. The flawed immortals couldn’t sue them, and there was a certain satisfaction in finally discovering what made all those Dutchmen fly and Jews wander.
But the experiments didn’t precisely pan out. Immortality is not for the general public. Oh, it works, God, how it works. But it
can
have several undesirable side effects, mental instability being one of them, and there are certain restrictions that make it impractical for general sale. For example, it only really works on little children with flexible minds and bodies. It does not work on middle-aged millionaires, which is a pity, because they are the only consumers who can afford the process.
So this cabal (they called themselves Dr. Zeus, Incorporated) came up with a limited version of the procedure and marketed it as truly superior geriatric medicine. As such it was fabulously profitable, and everyone commended Dr. Zeus.
Everyone, of course, except all those flawed immortals.
But about the Time Travel part.
Somehow, Dr. Zeus invented a time transcendence field. It, too, had its limitations. Time travel is only possible backward, for one thing. You can return to your own present once you’ve finished your business in the past, but you can’t jump forward into your future. So much for finding out who’s going to win in the fifth race at Santa Anita on April 1, 2375.
Still, Dr. Zeus played around with the field and discovered what could at first be taken as a comforting fact: History cannot be changed. You can’t go back and save Lincoln, but neither can you erase your own present by accidentally killing one of your ancestors. To repeat, history cannot be changed.
However—and listen closely, this is the important part—
this law can only be observed to apply to recorded history.
See the implications?
You can’t loot the future, but you can loot the past.
I’ll spell it out for you. If history states that John Jones won a million dollars in the lottery on a certain day in the past, you can’t go back there and win the lottery instead. But you
can make sure that John Jones is an agent of yours, who will purchase the winning ticket on that day and dutifully invest the proceeds for you. From your vantage point in the future, you tell him which investments are sound and which financial institutions are stable. Result: the longest of long-term dividends for future you.
And suppose you have John Jones purchase property with his lottery winnings, and transfer title to a mysterious holding firm? Suppose you have an army of John Joneses all doing the same thing? If you started early enough, and kept at it long enough, you could pretty much own the world.
Dr. Zeus did.
Overnight they discovered assets they never knew they had, administered by long-lived law firms with ancient instructions to deliver interest accrued, on a certain day in 2335, to a “descendant” of the original investor. And the money was nothing compared to the real estate. As long as they stayed within the frame of recorded history, they had the ability to prearrange things so that every event that ever happened fell out to the Company’s advantage.
At about this point, the scientist members of the cabal protested that Dr. Zeus’s focus seemed to have shifted to ruling the world, and hadn’t the Mission Statement mentioned something about improving the lot of humanity too? The merchant members of the cabal smiled pleasantly and pointed out that history, after all, cannot be changed, so there was a limit to how much humanity’s lot could be improved without running up against that immutable law.
But remember, Gentle Reader, that that law can only be seen to apply to
recorded
history. The test case was the famous Library of Alexandria, burned with all its books by a truculent invader. Technically, the library couldn’t be saved, because history emphatically states that it was destroyed. However, Dr. Zeus sent a couple of clerks bank to the library with a battery-powered copier disguised as a lap desk. Working nights over many years, they transferred every book in the place to film before the arsonist got to it, and took it all back to 2335.
Even though the books turned out to be mostly liberal arts stuff like poetry and philosophy that nobody could understand
anymore, the point was made, the paradox solved: What had been dead could be made to live again. What had been lost could be found.
Over the next few months in 2335, previously unknown works of art by the great masters began turning up in strange places. Buried in lead caskets in cellars in Switzerland, hidden in vaults in the Vatican Library, concealed under hunting scenes by successful third-rate Victorian commercial painters: Da Vincis and Rodins and Van Goghs all over the place, undocumented, uncatalogued, but genuine articles nonetheless.
Take the case of
The Kale Eaters
, the unknown first version of Van Gogh’s early
Potato Eaters
. It wasn’t possible for the Company to go drug Van Gogh in his studio, take the newly finished painting, and leap home with it: nothing can be transported forward out of its own time. What they did was drug poor Vincent, take
The Kale Eaters
and seal it in a protective coat of great chemical complexity, paint it over in black, and present it to a furniture maker in Wyoming (old USA), who used it to back a chair that later found its way into a folk arts-and-crafts museum, and later still into other museums, until some zealous restorer X-rayed the chair and got the shock of his life. Needless to say, the chair was at that time in a collection owned by Dr. Zeus.
As it happens, there are all sorts of chests and cupboards in lonely houses that don’t get explored for years on end. There are buildings that survive bombings, fire, and flood, so that no one ever sees what’s hidden in their walls or under their floorboards. The unlikely things that get buried in graves alone would astonish you. Get yourself a database to keep track of all such safe hiding places, and you too can go into the Miraculous Recovery business.
And why stop there? Art is all very well and can fetch a good price, but what the paying public really wants is dinosaurs.
Not dinosaurs literally, of course. Everyone knew what happened when you tried to revive dinosaurs. But the Romance of Extinction was big business in the twenty-fourth century. To sell merchandise, you had merely to slap a picture of something extinct on it. A tiger, for example. Or a gorilla.
Or a whale. Crying over spilt milk was de rigueur by that time. What better way to cash in on ecological nostalgia than to revive supposedly extinct species?
In May of 2336, people turned on their newspapers and learned that a small colony of passenger pigeons had been discovered in Iceland, of all places. In Christmas of that same year, four blue whales were sighted off the coast of Chile. In March of 2337, a stand of Santa Lucia fir trees, a primitive conifer thought extinct for two centuries, was found growing in a corner of the Republic of California. Everyone applauded politely (people never get as excited over plants as they do over animals), but what didn’t make the news was that this species of fir was the only known host of a species of lichen that had certain invaluable medical properties …
Miracles? Not at all. Dr. Zeus had collected breeding pairs of the pigeons in upstate New York in the year 1500. They were protected and bred in a Dr. Zeus station in Canada for over half a millennium and then released to the outside world again. Similar arrangements were made for the whales and the fir trees.
Anyway, when the public imagination was all aglow with these marvelous discoveries, Dr. Zeus let the truth be known. Not
all
the truth, naturally, and not
widely
known; business didn’t work that way in the twenty-fourth century. But rumor and wild surmise worked as well as the plushiest advertising campaign, and the Company didn’t have to pay a cent for it. It got to be known that if you knew the right people and could meet the price, you could have any treasure from the past; you could raise the lamented dead.
The orders began to come in.
Obsessive collectors of art and literature. Philanthropists sentimental about lost species. Pharmaceutical companies desperate for new biological sources. Stranger people, with stranger needs and plenty of ready cash. There were only two or three questions.
Who was running Dr. Zeus now? Even its founders weren’t sure. Its most secretive inner circle couldn’t have said positively. Suddenly they were surrounded by the pre-arranged fruits of somebody’s labor on their behalf—but whose labor? Just how many people worked for the Company?
Also, were they now faced with the responsibility of making sure history happened at all? Quite a few species had been declared extinct, only to turn up alive and well in unexpected places. Were these Dr. Zeus projects they hadn’t been aware of? Someone went digging in the Company archives and discovered that the coelacauth was a Dr. Zeus special. So was the tule elk. So was the dodo, the cheetah, Père David’s deer. And the Company archives had an unsettling way of expanding when no one was looking.
Finally, where do you get the support personnel for an operation the size that this one had to be? Besides the cost of sending modern agents to and from the past, the agents themselves hated it. They said it was dangerous back there. It was dirty. People talked funny and the clothes were uncomfortable and the food was disgusting. Couldn’t somebody be found who was better suited to deal with the past?
Well. Remember all those test-case immortals?
A team from the future was sent back to history’s predawn, to build training centers in unpopulated places. They went out and got children from the local Neanderthals and Cro-Magoons, and shaved their diverse little skulls and worked the Immortality Process on their little brains and bodies. They brought them up with careful indoctrination and superior education. Then they went back to their own time, leaving the new agents there to expand the operation.
And what did Dr. Zeus have then? A permanent workforce that didn’t have to be shipped back and forth through time, that didn’t suffer culture shock, and that never, never needed medical benefits. Or, to put it in the corporate prose of the Official Company History: slowly these agents would labor through the centuries for Dr. Zeus, unshakable in their loyalty. They had been gifted with Immortality, after all. They knew they had a share in the glorious world of the future. They were provided with all the great literature and cinema of ages unborn. Their life work (their unending life work) was the noblest imaginable: the rescue of living things from extinction, the preservation of irreplaceable works of art.
Who could ask for anything more, you say?
Ah, but remember that Immortality has certain undesirable
side effects. Consider, also, the mental discomfort of being part of a plan so vast that no single person knows the whole truth about it. Consider, finally, the problem in logistics: there are thousands of us already, and as the operation expands, more of us are made. None of us can die. So where are they going to put us all, when we finally make it to that glorious future world our creators inhabit?
Will they allow us in their houses? Will they finally pay us salaries? Will they really welcome us, will they really share with us the rewards we’ve worked millennia to provide them with?
If you’re any student of history, you know the answer to
that
question.
So why don’t we rise in rebellion, as in a nice testosterone-loaded science fiction novel, laser pistols blazing away in both fists? Because in the long run (and we have no other way of looking at anything)
we don’t matter
. Nothing matters except our work.
Look. Look with eyes that can never close at what men do to themselves, and to their world, age after age. The monasteries burned. The forests cut down. Animals hunted to extinction; families of men, too. Live through even a few centuries of human greed and stupidity and you will learn that mortals never change, any more than we do.

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