The Children of the Company Part 1

The Children of the Company.

Kage Baker.

This one is dedicated to ...

Garrett, Patrick, Megan, Skye, Anya, Adelia, Jesse, Thomas, Katie.

May you, who are so much brighter and better than we were, learn from history and find a way to save the world.

ONE.

1863.

MAN OF SHADOWS.

The man has an air of authority. Dignity, too. Gravity, integrity, and all you'd want to see in the face of a judge. He is a consummate actor.

His name (at least, the name he has used for the last couple of millennia) is Labienus. He is a Facilitator General for Dr. Zeus Incorporated, and the Executive Section Head for the Northwestern American Continent. This means he has a great deal of power, more than a cyborg is generally granted. If his mortal masters had any inkling of how much power he actually has, they'd be terrified.

But Labienus's mortal masters are in their offices in the twenty-fourth century, safe in some urban hive. Labienus, at this moment, sits in his Company HQ office in 1863, and it is as far from the urban world as he can manage. The view from his window is trackless wilderness.

The local Native Americans have long since learned this is no place to visit for any reason whatsoever, and no prospector will ever manage to straggle this far into the mountains. Were one to do so, however, and were he to climb painfully up the side of a particular towering peak, and were he to look at a particular cliff wall when the light was striking it in a particular way ... he'd be astounded to find himself looking into a paneled and carpeted room, where a smooth-faced man would smile out at him before pressing a b.u.t.ton to trigger an avalanche to sweep him away like a mosquito.

And the man is smiling now, and humming a sprightly little tune to himself as he scans the file of a low-ranking drone he has just d.a.m.ned. As head of Black Security, it is occasionally his duty to consign his fellow immortals to the nearest they can come to eternal fires. He doesn't mind the work. He likes cutting away unnecessary things.

He orders a disk generated of the material he's just scanned, and a moment later it pops obediently out of a slot in his desk. He takes it and crosses the room to a seldom-used cabinet, where he unlocks and opens a file drawer. At the very back, beyond the slots headed BUDGET REPORTS 17001850 and GENETIC SURVEY FOR YUKON REGION, is a small file case he'd labeled in a moment of whimsy. It reads simply DOOMED.

Labienus pulls it out and glances through it. There are a few disks in there, and several paper files. He drops the disk inside, but as he does so the foremost of the paper files spills forward, opens.

An image stares out at him. It is not a human face, as human is counted in 1863, but it might have pa.s.sed for human sixty thousand years earlier. Prognathous, big and wide, with immense broad cheekbones, nose like a boulder fallen from the cliff of the sharply receding brow, ma.s.sive jaw. Hair and beard are neutral, the dun color of winter hills where no snow has fallen, and the hair begins far back and is worn long. The eyes are pale, almost colorless. For all its inhuman quality, the face is intelligent and calm.

Labienus finds his smile freezing, and averts his eyes. With a grimace of self-contempt he makes himself look again, stare down the face. It's only a picture, after all! Still, after a moment he prefers to gaze out the window at the big trees, remembering when he first saw Budu.

One day it might be known as Jericho, but at that time it had no name, no walls, no surrounding desert thick with potsherds. It hadn't much more than a few reed huts and they sat low on the low earth, no raised mound, at the edge of a lake. It was a green place. There was a lot of rain. When there was a cloudless night, the stars were not in patterns you or I would recognize. Uncounted generations yet before it would occur to anyone that marks poked in clay with a cut reed might serve to freeze a moment in time, or make a hero immortal.

Life prospered in this low place. There was so much food, of all kinds, that it was easy to have a baby every year and feed them all. What it was not easy to do was to find room for them all, crowding around the fire.

The father was a fist, the mother was a vast belly with a pair of sloe-eyed babies at gourdlike b.r.e.a.s.t.s. A boy might be edged away from the fire, especially if he was one of many boys and there was no special reason to value him. A boy might be pushed from the breast, for no reason that he could see except that there were too many children, and if he was too small to be of use yet he might wander off at times unnoticed.

So a boy might escape, occasionally, to the high places where there was plenty of room. He might look down on the huts crowding the low place, and his resentment might in time find expression. He might make songs about the ugliness of the cookfire smoke hanging in the clean air, or the stink of crowded bodies, or the unfairness of life. He would do very well on his own, if he was a resourceful and self-reliant little boy, feeding himself from the abundance all around him.

He might tell himself stories, too, as he lay in the tall gra.s.s watching the clouds cross the sky: how the clouds and the stars were people, and he was their child, not the child of the dirty people in their low village. His mother was not that smoke-wrinkled fat creature in the hut; she was a glorious G.o.ddess of towering cloud, with high domed b.r.e.a.s.t.s yielding pure snowmelt. And his father ... perhaps his father was the darkness between the stars, since that was bigger than the stars themselves. Perhaps the boy was a star himself, accidentally fallen to Earth, and didn't belong in that muddy village at all. Perhaps one day the other stars would notice he was lost and come find him.

There might have come a day when he had been beaten by an older brother, and run crying up to the high place, and sat there alone on the height looking down on the village, hating them all. But the wild places loved him, the big rocks and the cedars and the gra.s.ses loved him, and so ... they might have listened to him when he fervently wished that something very bad would happen to the wicked dirty people down there. Perhaps they told him he had the power to bring punishment down from the sky.

And perhaps something very bad had happened after all ...

He might have watched, too astonished to be frightened, as the tattooed strangers crept up on the far escarpment across the valley and peered down at his village, where the tiny people went to and fro like ants. And maybe like ants the strangers had come swarming down, screaming, and speared his people and set fire to their huts.

Then the boy might have felt terror, watching the flames, then he might have trembled where he crouched in the long gra.s.s like a rabbit. But there might have risen also a sense of wonder in his heart, an awe that was nearly joy. He had made this happen!

Being very little, he might not have understood what occurred next. G.o.ds might have come, tremendous beings with animal bodies and the upper torsos of giants, galloping down into the low place, swinging flint axes. And if the G.o.ds made death and death and more death, so that the strangers who had invaded his village were slaughtered in their turn, the boy a.s.sumed they too had come down from the sky at his call.

Eventually there would have been only a few ants crawling feebly here and there, and smoke rising and big birds beginning to circle, and perhaps then the boy would have been bewildered to see the centaurs break apart and become giants walking on two legs, leading great bridling stamping beasts. Perhaps he held his breath as the biggest of the giants turned his flat head slowly and stared up at the hills, and seemed to see the boy in his hiding place.

Perhaps then the giant had walked up the long slope, never taking his pale eyes from the boy, unhurried, swinging his flint axe in one b.l.o.o.d.y hand as he came. But the boy would not have been afraid; and when Budu towered over him at last, and held out his red hand, the boy would have taken it eagerly.

He would have ridden in the crook of the Enforcer's arm after that, far above the smoke and the pitiful ant-bodies and the crying survivors, and how happy he would have been! And if he was loaded into a magical hut later, that shone like the sun and the moon and rose into the air toward the stars, if it took him to join his true brothers and sisters, it would have been no more than the boy expected.

Perhaps all this was nothing more than a story the boy made up, or an imperfectly remembered dream.

But from that day afterward, he was the child of the G.o.ds, and claimed his birthright.

It was good to be the son of a G.o.d, though he was perfectly aware he was exploiting the mortal monkeys' ridiculous superst.i.tions. It was better still to be a new life form with all mortal weakness burned away, a cyborg, brilliant and immortal, heir to the technology of the future! And to be a Facilitator was best of all.

The Company sent mere Preservers scurrying through the mortal world after plants, after animals, after mortals' genetic material, even after their clumsy clay pots. Preservers were like mice gleaning grain from an endless harvest, drones programmed with obsession for their own petty little disciplines.

Enforcers, the pale-eyed giants who rescued him, had no job but to patrol endlessly and descend like avenging demons upon mortals who made war on one another, so that the peaceful tribes would prevail and civilization would dawn at last. The Enforcers were too short-sighted to see that the very civilization they fought for would render them obsolete, too rigidly focused on their conception of righteousness to pay attention to any other work.

But a Facilitator manipulated mortal destinies to the Company's advantage. A Facilitator shaped the raw stuff of history! Facilitators were able to adapt, to improvise, to see all sides of a question and understand every one, and that was power. Labienus set aside the name he had been given in the Company school and took the name Atrahasis. It meant "Great Wise One."

Being the Great Wise One had kept him amused for a while, even as he began to suspect that the mortal masters who had reached back through the past to create him were no better than their pathetic ancestors upon whom he looked down. Impossible to resist dropping the odd technological artifact here and there, knowing how doggedly future archaeologists would label spark plugs or Phillips head screws as "ritual objects of unknown purpose." Atrahasis had even touched up a few cave paintings, daubing flying saucers amid the bison and wooly mammoths.

This was the gloriously fluid time before history began, when there were nearly infinite possibilities. Nothing yet recorded, except in the pattern of stones tossed to a cultivated field's edge, in the layers of ash and sc.r.a.pers left in a cave, in the crumbling brick foundations of unnamed settlements. This was the perfect time-if one was an immortal creature, immeasurably wiser than one's flawed mortal creators-to lay one's own foundations for power among the mortal ma.s.ses.

Not that he ever desired to rule them.

There was water, and mud, and there were reeds.

That was all. No cities, no arts, no industry. In short, no civilization.

The mortals hadn't cared; they'd been happy enough, living in little clutches of reed huts that were too amorphous even for villages. They'd been well nourished, too, hunting for ducks, fis.h.i.+ng, gathering roots and wild grains.

Young Atrahasis hadn't cared, either. It was all one to him if the monkeys never came down out of the trees, let alone built themselves nations. He much preferred the social life at Old World One, in the company of his fellow junior executive immortals.

And, while it was true that there were only so many times one could attend a fancy-dress ball in the costume of a G.o.d before it just wasn't amusing anymore, there was still the s.e.x, and the unending delicious gossip. There was the ongoing challenge of how to falsify his monthly reports to his superiors, so that his utter lack of productivity was disguised.

Best of all were the times he got out on his own in his personal aircraft, soaring above the marshy world. It was fun, swooping over the reed huts and watching the little mortals scream and point at him. And when he flew by moonlight, over the wide land and the glittering water, under the white stars: oh, then he truly felt like the son of heaven.

But the day had come when he had been called into the office of Executive Facilitator Nergal, and kept sweating in the antechamber a full two hours before being called in at last and told, with exquisite understatement, that Dr. Zeus had a special place for slackers and liars, not a very nice place really, and would young Atrahasis care to do a bit of work for a change? Such as, perhaps, organizing the mortals in his a.s.signed region into a useful, civilized society?

He didn't have to be told twice.

Shaking with anger and fear, he had flown out above the land between the two rivers. The first mortals to encounter him did not fare well, especially after they shot arrows into his glider.

But mortals certainly came to fear him, in time, and so they obeyed him. He bid them call him Enlil.

There was water and mud, which must be separated, even as the Lord gathered the waters under heaven together unto one place and let the dry land appear. Atrahasis ordered the mud raised into arable fields, the water drained away into ca.n.a.ls. The weary little mortals leaned on their shovels and looked around at this flat, arid-seeming place, where the old easy life would no longer be possible.

They asked the cruel young G.o.d whether they might not rest now; and in response he gave them oxen and plows, and barley to sow. Atrahasis made them farmers. By day they toiled for him in the fields; by night they filed back in long rows to the long reed houses where he stabled them, and slept guarded by his security technicals. Any who tried to escape were punished spectacularly.

But after a few generations they had come to accept this, for Atrahasis explained their cosmos to the mortals. The G.o.ds, it seemed, had grown tired of drudge work, and so they had created mortal mankind to do it for them. Mortals had no other purpose in life but this labor. Mortals who worked diligently at draining the marshes, or planting the fields, would be rewarded in this life by being granted a little dry land and a house, and perhaps a day of leisure once a week.

The afterlife, unfortunately, was a dark and horrible place of twittering ghosts, so suicide had better not be thought of. But if a mortal worked hard all his life, and begot many children who worked just as hard as he did-why, it was just possible that mortal might be granted a slightly less gloomy corner of the underworld for his own, and might even sup of the crusts and dregs from the G.o.ds' own table.

And they believed him! The darker and more unpleasant Atrahasis made their world, the more desperately the little mortals clung to what he told them, the more obedient they became. It helped, of course, that he could back up his words with all manner of stage effects to awe them.

It helped also that he could kill them with impunity; for he had discovered that as long as he could meet an annual production quota of barley for the Company's mills, and present statistics showing an overall increasing birth rate among his mortal charges, Dr. Zeus was fairly disinterested in the occasional sacrifice.

And when the rivers rose one season and drowned three-fourths of his mortals, Atrahasis waited out the catastrophe on high ground, watching with a peculiar thrill as bloated corpses were swept past his feet.

He told the survivors it had been their own fault, for not loving him enough.

His security techs wearied of playing overseers after a century or so. Atrahasis therefore had them sort through the mortal population for those who were most servile; these he raised up, and gave them t.i.tles, and a little power over their fellow mortals. He noted, with amus.e.m.e.nt, that they were far more zealous in their oppressive duties than his techs had been.

Some two or three showed greater than average intelligence; these he made bureaucrats, and set them to tallying the crops that went into the Company warehouses as offerings to the G.o.ds. When he got around to bestowing on them the divine gift of making counting-marks with reeds on clay tablets, he was more than a little annoyed to learn that they'd already figured it out for themselves.

By now Atrahasis had redeemed himself in the eyes of Executive Facilitator Nergal. No slacker he! His city was a perfect geometry of green and golden squares, yielding abundant barley, yielding melons and pomegranates, chickpeas and dates, grapes and cuc.u.mbers, and fine flocks of sheep and goats. His mortals bred in such numbers that it was hardly worthwhile to pursue those who escaped. Besides, the escapees invariably settled down and started little farms of their own, so indoctrinated they were.

His own personal ziggurat of sun-fired brick arose, like an incongruous mountain, the house of the great G.o.d Enlil. He told the mortals that it must stand high above the smoke and stench of the city. The overseers sang the praises of the G.o.ds, and cracked their whips with gusto as the patient laborers raised terrace upon terrace.

There remained only to design a palace to sit atop it, and have his tech staff install all that was necessary to make life gracious. So Atrahasis moved out of his field shelter at last, into his grand house with its penthouse view, advanced sanitation, and doors of imported cedarwood.

And Atrahasis saw that this was good.

Then he celebrated by throwing a party for himself, and invited all those members of his commencement cla.s.s who were still on speaking terms with him. They came and drank his excellent barley beer, and dined on his roast kid and hot bread, his melons and pomegranates, his chickpeas and dates. They praised him, lounged with him on his fine furniture, looked down with him on the Euphrates and the s.h.i.+ning ca.n.a.ls. By night they sang with him under the eternal stars. And he was pleased that he had impressed them all.

But the stale gossip of Old World One seemed a bit tedious now, and none of his former cla.s.smates were quite as sparklingly witty as he remembered them. After the second day, he found himself wis.h.i.+ng they'd leave.

Atrahasis became bored.

His city was practically running itself nowadays. s.h.i.+ps plied the two rivers and brought trade goods for him. Uncomplaining mortals loaded his granaries with wheat and barley, to be s.h.i.+pped to distant Company warehouses in Eurobase One and Terra Australis. The mortals had craftsmen now, gold workers and scribes, carpenters and potters, weavers, charioteers. Atrahasis received commendations from his superiors. A job well done! Preserver drones were sent in to work among the mortals, collecting their works of art, noting down the stories of their heroes. Atrahasis, who found Preservers the dullest people in the world, did not invite them to stay with him.

Instead, he dined alone behind a curtain in his high temple, and issued memos to his staff, who conveyed his will to the mortals far below. He ordered new gliders from the Company field catalogs, and soared alone over night fields. He kept up a desultory correspondence with some few of his old cla.s.smates.

He toyed with the idea of wiping the whole project out and starting over again, but he couldn't think of a way to make the rivers rise sufficiently. There was always fire and brimstone ...

Though of course the Company would notice something like that.

So Atrahasis continued to go through the motions, ordering the construction of libraries, gardens, and ca.n.a.ls. When word came of some manner of political disturbance far off to the south, he daydreamed wistfully a little while about watching armies advance, looking down from his high place on b.l.o.o.d.y slaughter. Then, regretfully, he gave orders for the building of a defensive wall.

It was a splendid wall. So wide across its top, two chariots could race abreast; so high, no slung stones could reach those chariots. And well made, too; no trash or rubble infilling its center, but only solid fired brick. The inner walls were faced with glazed tile depicting the glory of the Great G.o.d Enlil. The mortals were proud of it.

Atrahasis was pleased, himself; it had earned him a commendation from the new Executive Facilitator Shamash, who had replaced Nergal, who had been transferred to another region. Not one dark and unpleasant enough to suit Atrahasis, but that couldn't be helped.

He was gazing out upon his wall, musing on the possibility of regime change, when he first spotted the far-off cloud of dust.

When his charioteers came racing back with their reports, when his overseers sounded the alarm, when it finally sank in on Atrahasis that an army was actually advancing on his sacred city-his first reaction was incredulous outrage.

"He calls himself who?" he demanded. Below him, in the audience pit, his high priest trembled.

"Enna-aru, o great G.o.d," he said, addressing Atrahasis's shadow on the opposite wall, that being the only part of his lord he was permitted to see. "And he calls himself a ..." He strained to remember the unfamiliar word. "A king. And he says he has come to cast down the oppressor of the people. What are we to do, o great G.o.d?"

"Gather in the people behind the wall, and shut the gates," said Atrahasis, stalking back and forth in front of his fire. "Let the young men gather stones for their slings, and mount my high wall. Come back when you have seen to these things."

"Immediately, o great G.o.d," said his high priest, and ran like a rat down the dark tunnel through the temple.

Atrahasis went at once to his credenza.

He paused before it, struggling to get a grip on his emotions. Why send a message? He was pretty certain the Company wouldn't dispatch any Enforcers to come barreling in and slaughter the invaders for him. Their patrols had been few and far between in the recent centuries ...

Should he ask for advice? More security techs? But that would make him seem weak.

At last he transmitted: LOCAL PETTY TYRANT HAMMERING AT MY GATES. FOOTAGE OUGHT TO MAKE EXCITING VIEWING AT THE NEXT SOLSTICE BALL. SHADES OF D. W. GRIFFITH!

"Sir?" Security Technical Vidya saluted. "Orders, sir?"

Atrahasis composed his features into a suitable mask of superior amus.e.m.e.nt and turned. "Oh, we needn't mobilize your boys for a few hours yet. Let the monkeys slug it out in front of the walls! Just stand ready to defend this place, if any of them break through. If he's a super-duperpower and takes the whole ant heap, we'll evacuate by air."

"And the mortals, sir?"

Atrahasis shrugged elaborately. "The herds need to be thinned now and again. Who am I to stand in the way of progress? Just make certain our air transport is fueled up. I could do with a change of scene after all these centuries, couldn't you?"

He took his evening meal of roast lamb, lentils, and wine in his high garden that night, looking out across the plain. Atrahasis felt rather proud of himself that he did not quail at the sight of all those campfires, stretching away through the black night, under a heavy and thunderous sky. After all, a gleaming sky chariot waited patiently in its hangar, down on the fifth terrace, in case he should need to be airlifted out.

All the same, he did not think he'd give the order to evacuate until the fighting reached the temple complex. He could imagine it breaking around his ziggurat like a red tide. The screams, the smoke, the pitiful crying, the foolish little figures dragging themselves like ants ... the curious chop a flint axe made, breaking a skull ... it was with a pang of disappointment that he realized they were in the Bronze Age now, and he might never hear the music of a flint edge again.

He breakfasted in the garden, too, on goat cheese, figs, and fresh bread, frowning at the hundred columns of smoke that rose against the rising sun. Only cook-fires? When were they going to charge?

The sun was so high he had ordered a parasol erected over his chair by the time something finally happened. Fanning himself irritably, he peered out at his wall. There, the mortals were running to and fro at last, pointing, readying their caches of slingstones. Action!

But ...

Nothing happened.