Baker, Kage - Company 3 - Mendoza in Hollywood

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Prologue

IN the twenty-fourth century, about halfway through, it was said there was a fabulously

powerful Company that could obtain virtually anything, if one had enough money.

A Shakespeare first folio for your library? A live dodo for your aviary? An original sketch

by da Vinci for your bedroom wall? Recordings of every performance Mick Jagger ever

gave?

What about a necklace once worn by Cleopatra?

Have you a favorite historical figure? Would you like to have his baby? Or have your wife

have his baby? Guaranteed authentic offspring of Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte,

Elvis Presley.

As it happened, the Company actually existed, and it called itself Dr. Zeus Incorporated.

It began with two goals: to render human beings immortal and to develop time travel.

Success in either goal was incomplete, though with all the money Dr. Zeus was making, it

hardly mattered.

Time travel, for example, seems to be possible only backward, and then forward again to

your point of departure in your present. Nor can you bring anything forward out of its

own time into yours. And, by the way, history cannot be changed.

You can get around this somewhat by establishing indestructible warehouses in the past,

where you stash all the loot you acquire there, to be retrieved in your present time. But

you will need a workforce to maintain these sites, and run your errands through time . ..

Immortality is another matter. It's absolutely possible to confer it on a human being.

Problem is, what you have when you've finished won't be a human being any longer, it'll

be a cyborg, and how many people want to pay millions to become one of those things?

Somebody clever at Dr. Zeus came up with an idea that solved both problems at a stroke:

Make your workforce immortal.

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Since they'll live forever, there's no need to ship them back and forth through time: look at

the costs you'll cut if you just create them at the beginning of time and let them work their

way through it, day by day, like everybody else. Transmit your orders to your cyborgs

using that subatomic particle you've discovered that exists everywhere and in all times at

once. You're in business.

Every epoch has its abandoned children, its orphans of war or famine. Won't they be

grateful to be rescued and gifted with immortality and lifetime jobs? And what jobs:

rescuing precious things from the relentless sweep of oblivion. Of course they'll be

grateful. . .

This is the third volume in the unofficial history of Dr. Zeus Incorporated.

In the Garden of Iden introduced Botanist Mendoza, rescued as a child from the dungeons

of the Inquisition in sixteenth-century Spain by a Company operative, Facilitator Joseph.

In exchange for being gifted with immortality and a fantastically augmented body and

mind, she would work in the past for the future, saving plants from extinction.

On her first mission as an adult, Mendoza was sent with Joseph to England, at that time

under the repressive Catholic rule of Bloody Mary. Disguised as mortals, she and other

operatives were to loot the private gardens of an eccentric collector, Sir Walter Iden. Her

goal: obtain samples of Ilex tormentosum, a species that contained a powerful anticancer

drug and that would be extinct in the future.

Superior and snide as only a teenaged immortal can be, Mendoza looked down on the

mortals among whom she had to labor—until she met Sir Walter's secretary, Nicholas

Harpole, a Protestant heretic.

Mendoza and Nicholas engaged in a contest of wits that led them into bed. Passionately

in love despite Joseph's warnings about the folly of becoming attached to a mortal,

Mendoza attempted to juggle her heart, her mission, and her secret. She failed

spectacularly.

Nicholas ended up being led to the stake. Mendoza was heartbroken, numb. Joseph came

to her rescue again and got her transferred to the Company research base in South

America: New World One.

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Sky Coyote opened 144 years later, as Joseph arrived at New World One for a brief

holiday before going on to his next mission in Alta California. The project—persuading a

village of Chumash to let the Company relocate them to one of its research bases—would

be immense, requiring the services of operatives of all disciplines. Mendoza was also

drafted for the mission.

Unpleasant surprises awaited them in California. The immortal operatives met a number

of their mortal masters from the future. They were appalled to find them ignorant and

bigoted, fearful of their cyborg servants. Joseph learned unsettling facts about the

Company that brought to mind a warning given him centuries earlier by Budu, the

immortal who recruited him.

Why was it that, though the immortals were provided with information and entertainment

from the future, nothing they received was ever dated later than the year 2355? The

Company's official answer was that in 2355 Dr. Zeus would be able to go public with its

great work and reward its operatives for their ages of service. But could the Company be

believed?

Mendoza, back in contact again with the mortal world, found that her heart had not

recovered from Nicholas. Despising the mortals and uncomfortable even with her own

kind, she found comfort only in the vast wilderness of Alta California. In its forests she

was able to leave her painful humanity and focus on the only reliable consolation: her

work as a botanist.

Then, after 160 years, . . .

TRANSCRIPT ACNW032063 PRIVATE HEARING

Subject: Botanist Mendoza. March 20, 1863.

Five kilograms Theobromos administered.

Auditors magisterial: Labienus, Aethelstan, Gamaliel.

You want the truth from me? It's a subjective thing, truth, you know, and you could easily

get all the damning evidence you need from the datafeed transcripts. Oh, but you wouldn't

understand my motive, would you? I see the point.

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Will it help if I freely confess? I killed six—no, seven— mortal men, though I must say it

was under provocation. I acted in direct violation of the laws that govern us, of the

principles instilled in me when I was at school. I betrayed those principles by becoming

involved in a mortal quarrel, supporting a cause I knew must fail in the end. Worst of all, I

stole Company property—myself, when I deserted the post to which I had been assigned.

I don't expect mercy, senors.

But it might help you to know that what I did, I did for love.

I had an unfortunate experience when I was a young operative, you see; I was baptized in

the blood of a martyr. No, really. Did you know those things work, baptisms? I didn't. I

was given the same education we all get, sanity and science and reasonable explanations

for everything that happens in the world. Faith and its attendant rituals sound like a good

deal, the whole eternal salvation thing, but inevitably they lead to fear, oppression, the

rack and flames. I knew that much was true firsthand.

I was blindsided, as I'm sure you would have been, by the discovery that the experience

actually left some kind of psychic mark on me. The mortal man smeared his blood and

shouted his incantation, and there I stood like an animal that's been collared and let go, to

wander bewildered among my own kind wondering what had happened. I was never right

again after that. For a long time I thought I'd shaken off his spell. I was almost happy

there in the mountains all alone. But you wouldn't let well enough alone. You sent me

back into mortal places, and he found me again, tracked me by the mark he'd put on me

for that purpose.

He will never let me rest.

Thank you, I certainly will have some more Theobromos. This is excellent stuff, by the

way. Keep it coming, and no doubt you'll find out everything you want to know, with me

a weepy mess at the end of it.

Okay, senors, are those tapes rolling?

-=O=-***-=O=-

any of you gentlemen ever served in Los Angeles? No? Rough place. Murders and

fighting all the time since the Yankees came. No good reason to put a city there, on that

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clay bluff above the river; but Spain was so certain the Russians were going to invade

Alta California, they had to go stick little pretend towns along its coast, like pins on a

map. That way they could claim white settlement, because the mission Indians didn't

count.

White! That was a laugh. What happened was that Felipe De Neve sent his goons riding

up from Sinaloa with anybody he could bribe, threaten, or deceive into coming along as

prospective settlers. There were maybe one or two Spaniards in that bunch, but the rest

were mestizo and mulatto ex-soldiers, the mingled blood of New Spain and Africa with

their wives and little children. De Neve's men dragged them up through the desert and

over the mountains and set them down by that dry wash of a river, with its big sycamore

trees. And after a mass was duly celebrated, they left them there, rode away and left them

staring out into that night, and what an empty, empty night it must have been. No

neighbors but the local Indians, and nothing to shelter them from the bears but brush huts.

The settlers, huddled together listening to the coyotes howl, must have wondered what on

God's earth they had got themselves into.

But they made the best of things, built a little adobe village, got some Indians to be their

slaves, and in a generation or two they were gentlemen rancheros, with thousands of head

of cattle on estates the size of small kingdoms, estates that would have made the

threadbare gentry of the Old World sick with envy.

Of course, if one wanted a chamber pot or a carving knife or a bolt of cotton cloth, one

had to wait for the supply ship from Mexico, which put in an appearance once every five

years or so. This situation did not improve after the Revolution, either; a free and

democratic bureaucracy moves even more slowly than a viceregal one. So in came the

Yankee traders, smuggling consumer goods in their trading brigs, and the Californio

rancheros were only too glad to do business with them. You know where that led. Richard

Henry Dana wrote home about the fortune waiting to made by anybody with the ambition

to build mills and factories here. Emigrants from the United States came struggling over

the Rockies to see if it was true, some lady found a gold nugget in a sluice, and in no time

at all we were all Americans, thanks to a little strong-arm work by John C. Fremont.

Not a bad thing, entirely, at first. It was the making of San Francisco. Los Angeles,

though, sort of festered. It filled up with drunks and outlaws, white trash from the States

who'd failed at gold prospecting, men on the run from civilization generally. There was

nothing down there, you see, except dry brown hills and cattle, plenty of space to get lost

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in. Soon there were lots of saloons to get lost in too, and drunken shoot-outs in the streets.

There were so many murders, people began calling Los Angeles the City of Devils rather

than the City of Angels. Los Diablos. The old ranchero families huddled in their fine

haciendas, listened to the gunfire, and wondered what in hell had happened to their town.

So you can see, senors, why I wasn't exactly thrilled to be posted down there. Monterey,

green and gracious, that was where I preferred to be when I had to work near mortals;

better still, the wild coastal mountains, the Ventana and Big Sur.

When you're coming down from the north, Los Angeles looks horrible at first: all brown

rolling monotony. Hasn't got the redwoods, hasn't got the green mountains or the air like

wine. It's a sad, trampled place. But let me put it on the record that my distaste at my

assignment played no part in what happened. I went where I was told and did my job. I

always have. We all do.

Weren't you briefed on this part? All right, I was sent to the HQ in Cahuenga Pass, close

by La Nopalera. The cover is that it's a stagecoach stop. It's far enough out from Los

Angeles to give us privacy, but being on the stage line, it's convenient for getting agents

in and out. Agents and other things.

But that's all beside the point. Give me more of that—it's Guatemalan, isn't it?—and I'll

try to stick to the story. You know, it's amazing, senors, but you bear a striking

resemblance to certain inquisitors I knew in Old Spain. All of you. It's your eyes, I think.

They're too patient.

PART ONE

Establishing Shot

CAHUENGA PASS, 1862

I arrived during a miserable winter. It had rained most amazingly; the locals had never

seen such rain. The canyons flooded. The new sewers down at the pueblo were a total

loss. Roads washed out, and the stages were late or never arrived at all. There was, I

understand, a little mining town up in the San Gabriels that was washed away

completely— whole thing wound up down on the plain in scattered soggy bits. Only the

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rancheros were happy, because of the good grazing there was going to be from the rain.

They thought. Little did they know that that was the last rain they were going to see for

years. Before it rained again, Senor Drought and Senorita Smallpox and a few shrewd

Yankee moneylenders would pretty well end the days of the gentes de razon. Ah, Los

Angeles. One disaster after another, always has been.

Those particular disasters were still somewhat in the future on the day I finally walked

into HQ. I'd followed the coast down as far as Buenaventura and then swung inland to

follow El Camino Real through the hills and along the valley floor, traveling most by

night to avoid the mortal population. The rain never let up the whole way, and I was

soaked through. I crossed innumerable creeks swollen with white anger, roaring their way

out to sea and taking willow snags with them. I saw smooth green hillsides so saturated,

their grassy turf slid, like a half-taken scalp or a toupee, and left bare holes that the rain

widened.

So much for Sunny California. All I saw of it that dark morning was water, brown water

and creamy mud, and black twigs bobbing along in the hope of someday washing up on a

white beach. You can imagine how grateful I was to see a plume of smoke going up

between one foothill and the next. I checked my coordinates. Cahuenga Pass HQ? I

broadcast tentatively.

Receiving, someone responded.

Botanist Mendoza reporting in.

Okay. You see the smoke ? Follow it in.

And in another minute I'd come around the edge of a rockslide, and there it was, back

under some oak trees, a long low adobe building and stable thatched with tules. A couple

of cowhides had been stitched end to end and strung up in the trees like a tarpaulin, and

under this nominal shelter an immortal crouched, attempting to build up a small fire with

what looked like fairly damp wood. Arranged on the ground beside him were a blue

graniteware coffeepot and a couple of skillets. The idea of grilled beef and frijoles drew

me like a magnet.

"Hola." I jumped the last brown torrent and made my way up the sandy bank to the inn.

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"'Morning." The immortal looked up from under the brim of his dripping hat. "Welcome

to the Hollywood Canteen. "

"This is where Hollywood's going to be, isn't it?" I asked. I dropped my bag and held my

hands down to the little fire. "Funny thought. "

My informant stretched out an arm to point, trailing the fringe of his scrape through dead

leaves. "Chinese Theater and Hollywood Bowl right down there. Paramount Studios out

in that direction. If you've got eighty years to hang around, we can go for breakfast at the

Warner Brothers' commissary."

"I'll settle for what you've got." I eyed the skillets: last night's leftovers, cold and

congealed. I looked around for something dry to add to the fire.

"So you're Mendoza?" inquired my host. He was lean and dark, with a thin black

mustache and a sad, villainous face villainously scarred. The scars were all appliance

makeup, of course, but they gave him the look that sends liquor store owners diving

behind counters for their shotguns. I nodded in reply.

"Porfirio." He reached across the fire and shook hands with me. "I'm your case officer,

subfacilitator, and security tech. Nice to meet you. "

"Thanks. Is it dangerous here?"

"Oh, yeah," he said. He took up an oak log and tried stripping the wet cork layer off. "We

don't get much trouble over this way, but you want to be careful when you ride out." He

broke the log between his hands and fed it carefully into the coals. "Especially where

you'll be working. Your temperate belt passes through some nasty bandit nests." He was

referring to the climate anomaly that was my present assignment, a long terrace roughly

following the future route of Sunset Boulevard, where an unusual weather pattern had

evolved some plants unique to the area, several of which had potentially remarkable

commercial properties. Unfortunately they were all scheduled to go extinct in the next big

drought, grazed out of existence by starving cattle.

"Bandits?" I was profoundly annoyed. "They told me I was going to be working in

Beverly Hills!"

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He was really amused by that. "Oh, you will be! It just isn't there yet. What, were you

planning on having a cocktail in the Polo Lounge? You've got a while to wait if you want

to see the mansions and the swimming pools." The fire blazed up at last, and he edged the

skillets in toward its heart. "Come on, little fire, come on, we want some breakfast.

Where's your horse, by the way?" He looked up in surprise as it occurred to him that I'd

walked in.

"I don't have one. "

"You're kidding me! Nobody walks down here. We've got a good stable you can choose

from," he said firmly.

"That's okay. I don't care for horses, actually. "

"I don't myself, but I ride them here. Trust me. You may need to get out of certain

situations in a hurry. This is Los Diablos, after all." He put up a hand to stop my

objections. "And don't think you can deal with the situation by just winking out at a speed

mortals can't see. That may have been all right in the old days, but there are a lot of

people out here now. It's too conspicuous. You'll need a horse. Everyone rides them.

You'll need a gun, too. "

"A gun?" I said, sitting back on my heels. "I've never carried a gun! You mean you've

actually had to shoot people?"

He nodded somberly.

"But we were always trained—"

"I know," he said as he pushed the coffeepot over wavering flames. "The rules are

different down here. You'll see. "

"Who are you talking to?" Another operative emerged from the adobe, stooping below the

wooden lintel of the door. He stood, sleepily scratching himself through a suit of long

underwear worn under blue jeans. He gave a yawn that turned into a shiver.

"The botanist's here." Porfirio gestured with the skillet. "Mendoza, this is Einar. Einar,

this is Mendoza. "

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"Zoologist grade 5." He came forward and shook my hand, then crouched down beside us.

"Fire's not doing so good, is it?"

It wasn't. It had sunk away from the coffeepot and was smoking out.

"Wood's wet," he said.

"No kidding," we told him. He was tall for one of us, with white-blond hair and eyes like

ice caves. Spectral coloring aside, he was a nice-enough-looking fellow.

"I was just giving her the safety lecture," Porfirio explained, handing him an oak log to

break.

"Uh-huh." Einar snapped it into fragments. "Hey, chief, did you tell her about where we

are? The movie studios and everything?"

"Yes. I thought you could issue her one of the Navy pistols and give her a short training

session with it." Porfirio took the kindling from him and fed it into the coals, where it

caught.

"No problem." Einar poked up the fire and coaxed a few tongues of flame to rise. "Come

on, I need some coffee. There. Yeah, and I can show you where all the neat stuff will be.

A lot of early cinema is shot in these very canyons. DeMille, D. W. Griffith, Hal Roach.

Tinseltown!"

"But there's nothing there to actually see yet, is there?" I said.

"Well, no. Except the familiar landscapes, you know. I just enjoy the atmosphere of it

all." Einar waved another oak branch in the air. "I mean, here we are in the mundane

West, as far west as you can go, if you think about it, and everywhere around us the West

of the cinema—the true West, if you will—is just sort of immanent. Hovering in these

canyons like a spirit, waiting to be born. Ghosts of the future. All this greatness just about

to happen, but not yet. We are the actors on a stage where the curtain hasn't risen!" His

eyes were alight with enthusiasm.

"We're behind the scenes, you mean." Porfirio watched the fire doubtfully. A little thread

of steam was rising from the mouth of the coffeepot, but the grease on the beefsteaks was

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