Sky Coyote (25 page)

I was watching Mendoza and Dalton at work. They were on their knees in a meadow, examining some plant with one of the wise women, who was pronouncing:

“Now, this we call
tok
, and it has many uses. The flower buds are good to eat—”

“Asclepias eriocarpa,”
said Mendoza under her breath. “Ask her if this isn’t the same thing they use to make fishing tackle.” She could speak Chumash perfectly well but preferred to let Dalton do the talking. With one memorable exception, Mendoza avoids contact with mortals.

“Don’t you use this for fishing tackle, too?” prodded Dalton obediently.

“Of course! You see, you just cut the stems and peel them open …” Their voices faded into the background. Far but sharp, I heard a man weeping. I smelled mortal misery.

I scanned. He was a mile distant, but his emotional state streamed in the air like a banner, blue and purple. I focused in and could just make out somebody huddled in oak shade on a hill due west of us. Mendoza was too focused on what she was doing to hear, but Dalton sensed him too and glanced across at
me, questioning. I got up and strolled away in a casual manner until I was out of sight, when I broke into a run.

No, no, this would never do. Everyone was supposed to be happy about leaving. Upbeat. Glad to be clearing out before the murderous white men or Chinigchinixians or whoever arrived. If one mortal sat down and actually thought about it and got sad, others might too. Mortals are like that, for all their lack of sympathy for one another. And unhappy individuals ask questions, which is never a good idea when you’re trying to lead a people to a promised land. I had to find this poor wretch, whoever he was, and cheer him up. Or something.

Half a mile down the canyon, I could identify the guy: Kenemekme, the first man to speak to me. I’d got to know him, slightly, since. He seemed to be the loser my groupies had said he was: a decent hunter, but nobody much otherwise. Not wealthy. Once a husband and father, but something had happened to the baby and the wife had run off with somebody else. Nobody listened to him in the councils. I guess you might hide in the bushes and cry, if your life was like that.

By the time I got to where he was, he’d stopped crying and was resting his chin in his hands, staring at the far-off sea horizon. He jumped a little as I hunkered beside him.

“Nice view, isn’t it, nephew?”

He looked down at his feet. “All right, I guess.”

“Yes, lovely view. The sky is blue, the sun is warm, the salvation of your people is proceeding apace. So, why such a long face? You can tell your Uncle Sky Coyote.” I put my head to one side, watching him.

He swallowed hard and at last replied, “I thought it would be different.”

“What would be different, nephew?”

“Well, I thought—it’s just that before You came, I had my own ideas about the way things worked. All that about Father Sun drinking blood and devouring corpses, like the priests told us—I mean, that
couldn’t
be true. He’s no more than a monster if He does things like that. I had Him pictured more like a kind of grandfather, loving but stern. Terrible to the wicked, yes, that I could believe. And… I thought some kind of higher order prevailed in the Upper World. But from what You say, things are just as bad up there as they are down here. Even God cheats.” He gave a shaken little laugh that caught on a sob.

I sighed and shrugged. “Nephew. What did you think, when the priests and shamans told you about us Sky People? When you hear a story, do you believe only the nice parts? Truth isn’t like a baked fish, where you can eat the flesh and leave the bones and skin. You have to eat it all.”

“But if some of those stories are true, then worship is pointless, isn’t it? Why worship beings like that? And all those rituals, all those kantap mysteries, why bother anymore? I mean, now we
know.”

“Well, the kantap’s another affair. But—”

“And as for prayer, forget it. Why pray to a cannibal who cheats at dice, no matter how powerful He is? And why behave at all? You Sky People have Your nerve dictating rules to us, the way You carry on! When I think of some of the stories I’ve heard about You, Coyote—!”

I hated to do it, but it was time to drag out my Spanish Jesuit training.

“All right-Think what you’re saying, nephew. You don’t like us Sky People, so no more moral restraints for you. You can lie, steal, and cheat, yes, rape and murder too, if you feel like it.”

“Well, no, I won’t, because—well, it’s wrong, and if everybody
did it, nobody could live anywhere, and—we have to have some way to protect people. And I won’t be like You Gods!”

“I see. But doesn’t that mean you’re deciding to be good without anybody telling you to? Nobody punishing you if you sin, nobody rewarding you for virtue? Think of that, nephew.”

He struggled with the idea. It scared the daylights out of him, of course. I’ve never met a mortal it didn’t scare. So he said:

“Wait a minute! Why am I even listening to You? Of course! You’re a liar! In every story I’ve ever heard, You tell the most outrageous lies!”

“So it follows that—?”

“Well, it follows that none of what You’ve been telling us is true.” He grasped at a ray of light. “And maybe things
are
like I’d imagined, and maybe Father Sun
is
loving and benign and cares for us …”

I shook my head. “You’re forgetting something, nephew. I didn’t tell you that Father Sun eats people. That’s been said by your own priests, by all the reverend truth-tellers of your own village.”

He stared at me and bit his lip. “Then maybe they don’t know anything either …”

“Then figure it out for yourself! Here I come all the way from the Upper World to save my people from annihilation, and what happens? I get called a liar. Thank you
so
much.” I rose as if to go.

“No! Wait, just this once, couldn’t You tell the truth?” He caught hold of my leg in desperation. “The shamans don’t know anything more than I do. They’ve never been to the Upper World, but You have! You’re the only one I can ask! If You really love Your creations, why can’t You at least tell us the truth about it all? Why do children die? Why doesn’t love last? Why are our
lives so short and miserable? Why do You allow evil? Isn’t there
anywhere
things are the way they ought to be? What’s the truth?”

“Is that what you’re really in search of, nephew? Truth?”

“Yes! Truth!”

Hell, I hate to see people unhappy. “Then look into my eyes, nephew.”

Truth is not all that hard to do, as special effects go. You just put mortals in a trance, scramble their brains a little, and invest some random object with Mystic Significance. It can be anything: a rock, a bush, a flower, a word. The tricky part is making sure your subject has a nice neutral Life-Affirming Experience and not a Call to Action. Otherwise he or she is likely to go out and preach that it’s necessary to the world’s salvation that (for example) everyone must be tattooed or the universe will collapse. Look at whoever this guy was down in Yang-Na.

Me, I’m a professional. I don’t make that kind of mistake. When I blow somebody’s mind, I empty the ammo chamber first. Kenemekme staggered back and shook his head. His eyes filled with tears.

“The beauty,” he sobbed. “Oh—oh, the beauty!”

“Happy now?” I ventured. He threw his arms around me.

“Yes! At last, I understand! It all makes sense now and—what
beauty!”

“Yes. But you can’t put it into words, can you? That would be blasphemy.”

“Oh, yes, You’re right. How could I ever describe … How can I ever thank You?”

“And you won’t try to go out and tell other people about it, will you? No preaching or anything like that? This is our little secret.”

“Yes! Yes! Thank You, thank You, thank You!”

“Don’t mention it. You run along now and be happy, okay?”

“Yes!!” he cried, and went away down the hill singing.

Piece of cake. His brain, I mean.

Mendoza paused, her spoonful of Proteus lifted halfway to her mouth. She frowned slightly.

“Are we having an earthquake?” she wondered. All over the commissary, immortal heads were raised, immortal brows creased in the same frown. There weren’t any mortals in there with us except for the food servers, who weren’t noticing. I shivered and grabbed my ears: all those long inner dog hairs had begun to vibrate unbearably. She threw her spoon down in disgust. “That’s all we need. A goddam temblor.”

But nothing was shaking or rattling, not anywhere in the room. We looked around at the other immortals. I shrugged.

“Something seismic somewhere, I guess, but not near enough to involve us,” I told her. She shrugged too, picked up her spoon and went on eating. You could almost hear the whirring in the room as twenty people accessed their files on earthquakes in recorded history. It occurred to me that we weren’t operating in recorded history, exactly, but I didn’t say anything about that. Panicked immortals are awesome to behold.

“Yeah, I remember now,” I went on. “There’s a lot of regular volcanic activity a little way up the coastline. No big deal. Lava pillows in the cliffs, hot springs in the interior. I bet that’s what we’re noticing.”

“Hot springs, huh?” Mendoza looked mildly interested. “No spas yet, of course. Funny your Chumash don’t seem to know anything about them. You’d think a hot spring would be an ideal place to build a sweat lodge.”

“Actually, they have.” An anthropologist named Catton leaned over the back of his chair. “Not our people here, the tribe living up there. They even have a health resort, so to speak, but
they don’t get many customers from other tribes, because their rates are so high.”

This brought a general chuckle from the listeners around us. There were a few jokes about mints on pillows and complimentary sherry in the rooms. God, I’d have liked a glass of sherry right then.

Mendoza got up and went across the room to the cooler for more water, all straight lines in her new field garb. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to adopt the space age coveralls; her compromise made her look like a sensible Victorian tourist in khaki. I leaned forward to speak to her when she returned.

“Uh… say, I don’t see that guy with the mustache and the attitude. What’s his name? Maclntyre?” I said, very casually.

She gave me the look she usually gives at such moments.

“Him.”
What a lot of contempt could be crammed into one syllable. “The name you’re straining after, not very convincingly, I might add, is MacCool.”

“The two of you have been seeing a lot of each other, huh?” I said.

She stared at me, surprised, but only for a moment.

“What the hell is it to you?” she demanded in a savage undertone. “Are you all set to leap in and sabotage my little romance again?”

“Look, your private life is none of my business—”

“Gosh, thanks so much!”

“But—” I struggled to find a way to tell her the guy was bad news. “I thought … Weren’t you and Lewis …?”

For a moment she looked blank.

“Lewis
. My God, what an imagination you’ve got! For your information, Lewis and I were very good friends and that was all, I can assure you. Do you think I’d ever in my life fall in love with anybody again, after what happened in England?”

“You might think it was safer, with somebody who wasn’t mortal,” I blundered on. “One of us, maybe.”

“I might, but you know something?” Jesus, her eyes were hard. “I’m discovering I don’t like the company of my own kind much better than that of the mortal monkeys. I don’t want the complications, the interference, the distraction. I have work to do! What’s the point of sitting around with a bunch of millennial bores and listening to them complain about things they can’t change? Some of us are just as stupid as mortals, if not more so.”

“Glad to hear you say that,” I ventured, meaning to go on with something complimentary about her work ethic. Before I could, though, she looked me in the eye and said quietly:

“Level with me, Joseph, for once in your life. You’re older than most of the people in this room. I can’t remember ever seeing you have a real emotion. You are one perfect Company machine. You don’t feel a damned thing anymore, do you? No, please, I’m not trying to insult you. I just want you to tell me something.

“Our hearts, they do go dead after a few centuries, don’t they? The human emotions stop bothering us.”

I had to tell her some of the truth. So I said: “The game is learning to avoid pain, babe. No more, no less. They told you that in school, didn’t they? Look around you. The rest of these people aren’t necessarily more successful at it than you are. I don’t even manage it, all the time. It isn’t getting free of your heart that saves you. It’s your work that saves you, because it’s the only thing that will never let you down. Okay?”

Her eyes bored into me a few seconds before she decided to accept that. She looked down at her plate, and I had the sensation of having a sword point lowered from my throat.

“I don’t want a human heart anymore,” she said quietly. “It’s not a question of pain, either. It’s … it’s the scope of the work
here. This country. These mountains. Those trees, Joseph, those magnificent trees. All the years wasted at New World One, when I should have been here! Parties and babbling and new clothes, all keeping me from this place. I don’t want… people tugging my attention away from it now.”

She was in love again, after all; but not with MacCool or anything human, mortal or immortal. I chose my next words very carefully.

“Exactly! You’re focusing on your work, which is what you should be doing. I think this is great, Mendoza. You’re instinctively choosing to turn your attention to the important stuff, and it’s going to make you a lot happier than some people I could mention who spend all their time bitching about management.”

“Like MacCool?” She looked up again, sneering. “Was that what was bothering you, the prospect of my falling for somebody like him? Well, don’t trouble yourself, dog boy. That guy is a disaster waiting to happen, and I’ve had enough disasters, thank you very much. He smells like burning houses and screaming civilians trapped in wreckage. Wrong, wrong,
wrong
for little me.”