Sky Coyote (24 page)

He was sitting in the sunlight at the cave mouth, frowning slightly at the clouds that were massing in the northern quadrant of the sky. He lowered his head as I approached and smiled at me with his pale eyes. He didn’t look surprised to see me. Budu never looked surprised. He surprised other people.

He was bigger and older and smarter than any of the other Enforcers, and even the people who loved him were frightened of him. I don’t want to give you the impression I didn’t love him. I’ve paid lip service to thin sad gods on crucifixes and bearded gods who flung thunderbolts and green gods all wrapped up in bandages, but the god my heart really believes in wears a bearskin, has bloody hands and a calm, merciless stare.

“What nice clothes, son,” he observed, and I ran to him and we embraced. He still smelled the same: not like a
Homo sapiens sapiens
at all. I came up to his collarbone now, but I still felt four years old.

“Thanks. Look! Custom stitching!” I preened, trying to make him laugh. He did smile a little.

“Look at you, how grand you are nowadays. You must have risen high in the ranks,” he remarked in his toneless voice.

“Oh, not all that much,” I said. “Otherwise I’d have a nice soft desk job. I’m just a field operative, and they keep me busy, let me tell you.”

He nodded. “Sending you on errands like this one.”

I coughed a little at that. “They didn’t exactly send me. I wanted to come, to talk to you myself. There’ve been a lot of strange stories going around. I wanted to get your opinion on things.”

“My opinion or my statement, child?” he said, and chuckled at my discomposure.

“You know what’s been happening,” I told him, deciding to throw circumlocution to the winds. “The war’s over. It’s been over for centuries, really. If there are any of the Goat Cult left anywhere, they’re keeping to themselves, not bothering anybody. A lot of the Enforcers are balking at new assignments, though. They won’t believe the Goats are really gone.”

“They
are
gone,” Budu told me.

“I knew you weren’t one of the problem cases,” I said, reassured. “So maybe you could tell me what’s going on with the other guys, that they won’t come back to the bases with their regiments? One or two have even refused direct orders. You’d think they’d be glad to come in out of the cold, after all this time!”

“And some have done worse things,” he prompted.

“Yes,” I sighed and looked down at my feet. “It’s a pretty ugly story. Marco commandeered a mortal village and quartered his regiment there. Said his intelligence was that there were Goat spies hiding out with the civilians. He began interrogations.”

“And it came to killing,” Budu said.

“Yeah. But apparently nobody there had ever even heard of the Goats. A lot of innocent mortals died.”

Budu nodded slowly. “Marco is a fool,” he said. I was so glad
to hear him say that! But my relief was damped down when he went on to say:

“He doesn’t need the Goat Cult.”

“Nobody
needs the Goat Cult!” I agreed desperately. “And he knew that as well as you or I. He did his job so well, all of you did, that nobody will ever have to worry about the Goats again. All he had to do was bring his men home. And now he’s facing a disciplinary hearing, when he ought to be retiring with honors.”

“And is he sitting in a detention cell, awaiting trial?” Budu inquired.

“Well—not exactly,” I admitted. “He’s still out there. He says he’s on the trail of a new Goat incursion. He’s refusing to come in.”

“How unfortunate,” said Budu, “for everyone concerned.”

“It really is. The rumors are that there were even women and children killed at this village,” I went on.

“But we always killed them.” Budu looked at me. “He-Goats, she-Goats, little Goats beside their Goat mothers. We spared only the infants. The indoctrination was too complete in the others. If you’d been crouching beside a Goat body instead of by your mother, I’d have knocked in your little head too, lest you grow up into a big Goat.”

He watched my reaction with a cold twinkle in his eye. “Now you look shocked!” he joked. “Don’t worry. I knew you were a good child when I saw you. But really, there was no way but to exterminate them wherever we found them, and they were everywhere in those days. Not now.”

After an uncertain pause, I said, “So, have you any suggestion about what to do with Marco? I don’t suppose you could talk to him?”

“I might,” Budu told me. “If I see him. I could tell him he’s wasting his time hunting for Goats.”

“It would really, really be a good idea if you could,” I told him. “It would ease a lot of people’s minds at Company headquarters. Some of those committee members don’t understand—well, no, they do understand what you guys have done for them. But they’re getting a little scared, to tell you the absolute truth.”

“They know they can’t do much to stop us, if we refuse orders,” said Budu.

“Exactly,” I agreed.

A silence fell. I hurried to fill it in.

“Under the circumstances, you can see how the Company might be a little uncomfortable that you’ve chosen to postpone coming in, yourself.”

“I’ve been busy,” he replied.

“It sounds like you’ve been doing a great job with the locals,” I said lamely.

“I’ve been busy thinking,” he said.

“Oh. Okay,” I said, and then he got up and paced out to the edge of the bluff, and I had to run after. He stopped and looked around him. You could see for huge distances in all directions, well into what would one day be different nations.

“You ought to look at this and think about it, too,” he told me. “Look, out here. That will be Italy, one day. The little man Napoleon will come from there, and go over there”—he swung his big arm around in the direction of France—”to raise his armies, trying to be a god. Many, many people will die before he learns he’s a man.” He swung his big arm around. “And that will be Germany, where there will be a man so stupid, he doesn’t know what happens when one group of animal breeds only with itself, or one family marries only its own cousins. You know what he’ll do in the name of what he calls his race. How many will die? Ten million? And how many others will learn the idea of big murder from him, and do as he did in their own nations? And
look out there,” he went on, turning. “Spain. They will feed people to their god, and then go conquer a world, beyond that sea, where the rulers feed people to
their
god.

“Keep looking, Joseph. That will be Africa. Think of all those slaves dying for the wealth of nations, and the curse they fulfill. And there, in Jerusalem, three people of one book, children of one god, will tear one another to pieces. Farther, where you can’t see, from the steppes, another little man will come, with his horses and his men, conquering with no other plan than to make heaps of skulls wherever he goes. British, Americans, Japanese, Russians. Look up at the sky, think of all those people burning to death on Mars. Big murder, son. You can’t look in any direction without seeing a nation that deserves to be gelded.”

“Well—yeah,” I agreed. “That’s why Dr. Zeus was founded. Why we were made. To preserve the good part of humanity from all the awful things these people will do.”

“That was why
you
were made, son.” He turned to look down at me. “And since you were made to hide things away to keep them safe, it must have occurred to you how much simpler your job would be if we Enforcers were permitted to keep monsters from running loose in the world.”

“Of course,” I said uneasily. I could see where this was going. “But what can we do? Those people will have their time. Hitler, the Vikings, the Church of God-?. All we can do is work in their event shadows to make the best of things. We can’t prevent their existence, however much we’d like to. We can’t change history.”

“How do you know, son?”

“Because it’s impossible! Every one knows that. It’s one of the first things we learn. The laws of temporal physics prove it,” I stated.

“And you’ve made a study of temporal physics?” He put his enormous hands behind his back and regarded me.

“No, but I know what everybody else knows,” I answered, feeling panicked.

“Because Dr. Zeus told you.” His gaze traveled out to the world again. “Think about this, son. If the Company were lying to you, how would you know? And if the Company were lying, and history
can
be changed—would it be to the Company’s advantage to change it?”

“Well, of course,” I responded. “Except—well, wait. No, because the whole operation has functioned by using the event shadows cast by history as it exists. If history were changed, all those chains of connected circumstance would be broken. We don’t know what would happen.”

He nodded slowly. “The Company owns many fine things, saved from war and wickedness. But if there were no wars, no thieves and murderers, who would own those fine things? In the future there are wise and powerful men who send us our orders, you and me. If history were changed, would those men lose their power?”

The line of black clouds was advancing from the north, bringing a storm that couldn’t be blown away or outrun. He sighed, watching it come.

“Maybe our masters are great and good and have told us the truth. But if they’ve lied to us—and how can we know they haven’t?—then a thousand generations of innocents will die to make our masters rich.”

“But we have no way of knowing that they’ve lied, either!” I protested.

He looked down at me and smiled. “No way at all,” he said. “So I’ll speak to Marco, when I see him. Tell me, do you know what they’re going to do with us, my Enforcers and me, now that we have served our purpose?”

“You’ll be retrained.” That was what I had been told.

“Will we?” He held up his big hands and looked at them. “Will they make us Preservers, like you?”

“I—I guess so.”

“Then we must obey,” he said. “I wonder about something. When the year 2355 has come and gone, will the Company still need its Preservers?”

“Not as Preservers, no,” I said after a moment. “The Company will have made a new civilization, one that’s so advanced, there won’t be wars.”

“Or natural disasters, or accidents?” he asked. A breeze came out of the north, cold as ice, the outrider of the coming storm.

“Maybe they’ll need us to preserve things from those, then.” I said. “We have to trust the Company, father! What else can we do?”

“I don’t know,” he told me. “But you should think about this, son.”

I didn’t want to. It was pointless. What could I do, even if he happened to be right? But I owed him a son’s duty, so I told him I’d think about it.

I left him and made my way back down the mountain. Near the pass into future Switzerland, I encountered a mortal traveler swinging a nifty copper ax as he strode along.

Is pass open?
he signed to me.

Yes
, I signed back,
but you’d better hide your ax
. His eyes widened at that; he must have heard about the angry god. Hastily he slipped it over his shoulder into his backpack.

Thanks
, he signed.

You should probably turn back, though, I added. There’s a storm coming.

His gaze traveled off to where I was pointing at the wall of clouds. It had come a full third of the way across the sky. He evaluated for a moment and then shrugged.

I bet I make it
.

I shrugged back at him and went on my way. If that guy got caught in the storm, he might be stuck up here until skiers found him in the late twentieth century; but it wouldn’t be my fault. I’d warned him, hadn’t I? Whatever doubts Budu might have on the subject, it was my experience, so far, that history couldn’t be changed.

O
N THE OTHER HAND
, B
UDU
had been right in his suspicion that the Company didn’t always take the high moral ground where troublesome immortals were concerned. The Enforcers were gone now; I hadn’t seen one in centuries. Were they really leading happy and productive lives somewhere? What happened to immortals who asked the wrong questions, like Budu? Or like MacCool, for that matter?

And what
was
going to happen in the year 2355?

I stood up slowly and looked out into the night. There were the lights of the base. No nice warm fireside for me; I had a berth among the other ageless, in a gray future room without decoration, where walls met floors and ceilings without molding or baseboard, stripped bare of decoration and other nonfunctional nonessentials.

Oh well. It would at least be warm and dry. I turned to head down the ridge.

What was
that?
There was that emotion again, that broadcast from somebody far out in the night. Anger, but with it a certain glee. Whoever it was had evaded our patrols. Great. Well, he
wasn’t close enough to do me any harm on my way home. I’d make my report in the morning, which it was already, actually. One of the really important things an immortal needs to know is when to go to bed.

I made my report, and the security patrols were stepped up. They found evidence somebody had been lurking around, all right; some Native American covert surveillance guy was peeping at us. Would he be back? It was anybody’s guess, but the proper precautions were taken. Meanwhile, those of us working in the field tried to speed up the job a little.