Sky Coyote (26 page)

“MacCool? He was transferred,” said a geologist at a near table, leaning toward us.

“He what?” I started. Mendoza became perfectly still, staring at me.

“This morning. He was pulled for a special project elsewhere, or so I heard. His orders came through last night. I don’t know where they sent him.”

“Ah,” I said.

Mendoza, still looking at me, was even whiter than she usually is.
Joseph
, she transmitted,
you’re scared
.

You can tell that through the dog face? You’re imagining it. I’m surprised, that’s all
.

You’re scared. MacCool was shooting his big mouth off, and now he’s been taken away, and you’re scared
.

I am not! But if he had to go to a disciplinary hearing somewhere, I’m damn glad you’re not with him. He was stupid. We’re not stupid. We keep our heads down and do our jobs, right? Because we know that whatever happens, in the long run the Company is on the side of the angels, or whatever there is up there.
Years of habit kicked in, and I made the sign of the cross with my coyote paw. She did, too, shakily. Once a Spaniard, always a Spaniard.

And maybe that was why it was easier for her to accept the idea of people just disappearing, no trial, no trace. It should have been easy for me. It’s not like I haven’t seen it happen before.

Part of the trick of avoiding pain is to make sure that all the people whose personal misery can hurt you too are off safe somewhere, doing something that can’t possibly screw up their lives again. If you can get them settled securely in some comfortable rut, you can go your own way without thinking all those creepy little thoughts that come to you in the sleepless night.

I had thought Budu was safe. Everybody knew that most of the Enforcer rank and file had been retrained as Preservers, but the Company had found what seemed like an ingenious solution for the best ones, the officers. Who has the most opportunity to plunge into the wreckage of war and take what would otherwise be burned or smashed? A soldier, right? And when you’re an ex-Enforcer, you can do the job even better than an original Preserver could, because you’re a really big, ugly soldier who can get away with taking loot or prisoners for himself. Your fellow warriors aren’t going to argue the point. You can be a barbarian, mercenary, pirate, or legionary and be in at the kill as empires totter, as libraries and monasteries are sacked, and help yourself to what the Company wants.

And Budu and his officers did pretty well, for what seemed like a long time. They weren’t kept together, of course. After
Homo sapiens sapiens
became the only game in town, a bunch of guys that big and that strange-looking would have drawn attention. Separated, they were less noticeable, especially in armies whose men came from diverse ethnic and racial groups, like Rome’s. So they passed themselves off as Hyperboreans, later as Norsemen, and if the men they soldiered with hadn’t ever actually been to Scandinavia, it helped.

Or so I heard. As the ages went by, I kept in touch less and less, because I was pretty busy. I knew that Budu had become a Roman legionary and loved his work: he found the ethics of the republic admirable and enjoyed fighting alongside all those hardworking enlisted men. That was the image of him I kept in my mind for the next few centuries, Budu happy and occupied, smashing barbarian skulls so that neat little garrison towns could be carved out of the European wilderness. Though I served as a centurion myself for a while, our legions were never quartered near each other, so I never had the chance to drop in on him.

Of course, if I’d let myself think about it, I’d have come to the uneasy conclusion that once the Caesar family got into power, Budu wouldn’t find Rome quite so admirable. I didn’t let myself think about it, though, because of my habit of avoiding pain. And after Rome fell, I just assumed he’d switched sides and was helping to tear down what he’d helped build.

But I never asked, never looked him up, because … why because? Probably because deep down I knew what was happening.

I
’D BEEN A SPY FOR
Alexis Comnene, one of his army of invisible men doing their quiet bit to keep the status quo in old Byzantium. Right now the best way to prevent the Basileus’s boat from rocking seemed to be encouraging those reliable and dependable enemies, the Turks, to slaughter those worst of loose-cannon friends, the Norman knights. It was a political scene a million miles removed from armies on the Tiber and memories of Budu.

I saw him last in Antioch. That was where everybody saw him last. I was surprised as all hell to meet him there, too. He was sitting in a transport lounge placidly reading a magazine. The transport lounge was seven stories below ground level, the year happened to be 1099, and Budu was wearing the mail habit of a Crusader. The strange thing was that he sat between two nervous-looking security techs. I knew what had happened, but I wouldn’t admit it to myself. I just smiled and advanced on him with my most innocent look of delighted astonishment.

“Wow, father, what are you, under arrest or something?” I exclaimed.

He lowered the magazine and looked at me. “Yes,” he replied.

He might just as well have thrown a punch into my solar plexus. I stopped dead and gave a weak little giggle. “You’re kidding, right?”

But one of the techs stood up and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Sir, can we ask you to move on? This operative has nothing to say to you.”

“I’m a Facilitator,” I told him, remaining reasonable and calm. “It’s okay. I have clearance for stuff like this.”

The tech looked into my eyes. He was checking my retinal pattern, not my sincere expression, and after a second he nodded. “We’re just his escort, sir. He’s on his way to a hearing.”

“Of course,” I said with a nod, feeling queasy. “Look, can I have a few minutes alone with the old guy? Maybe I can learn something useful.”

The tech didn’t like that much, but my record was clean and my rank was high—higher than his, at least, which was what counted. “Go on, take your friend with you and have a couple of Turkish coffees. I’ll bet I can get something out of him in the time it takes you to get down to the mud. Okay?”

“Okay,” the tech replied, and nodded at his friend, who rose readily enough to go with him. I had a feeling they weren’t enjoying this duty. Budu watched them go, shaking his head.

“Look at them, just walking away after a few smooth words from a stranger. If they were under my command, I’d order them both to step off a cliff.”

“If they were under your command, they’d do it, too,” I said, sitting down beside him. “What the hell’s happened, father? What are you doing here?”

“I refused a direct order,” he replied.

I don’t get caught flat-footed often, but that time I sat there
gaping like an idiot. After a moment of my stunned silence, he decided to take charge of the conversation.

“I have something to ask you. Listen to me, son. How long has it been since you’ve seen one of my kind? Almost a thousand years, hasn’t it? And yet there were hundreds of us. Where have they all gone? Do you know? Tell me if you know.”

“They’re—they’re working on Company bases, or in military operations,” I said. “Aren’t they?”

“No, they’re not,” he told me. “I’ve been searching. I’ve seen classified information. Most of them were never retrained at all. Marco was never retrained. Where is he? And the rest of the commanders, the ones like me who were sent out to save with one hand and slay with the other, do you know where they are? I’ll tell you as much as I know. One by one, as the centuries have gone by, the others have fallen in battle. Just as in the old times, Company medical teams have collected them and taken them back to the nearest base for repair and regeneration.
But they have never been released
. No record of reassignment for any of them, anywhere. I am the last.”

“They must be on some base somewhere,” I said faintly, but I knew he was telling the truth, as hideous as it sounded.

“No personnel list on any base on Earth carries their names,” Budu told me.

Then he did something without warning, without asking my permission, taking advantage of the state of shock I was in. He reached out and set his index finger between my eyes and forcibly downloaded information to me, an encrypted signal bearing something I
really
didn’t want to know about. I gasped and shunted it to my tertiary consciousness.

“No!” I clenched my fists. “You can’t stick me with this!”

He just laughed. “You’ll have to decode it, one day. You won’t
be able to resist. I wonder what you’ll do then? I hope you can hide the fact that you’re carrying a secret message, son.”

“Why?” I looked at him, almost tearfully. “Why did you do this?”

He half shrugged. “Insurance. The Company won’t retire you, son, you look too much like all the rest of them, and you’re too good a liar to be caught. You may succeed in doing something where I fail.”

“Thanks a lot,” I muttered. He swept the transport lounge in a leisurely glance. The two security techs were still at the coffee bar.

“I should tell you what I’m going to tell the disciplinary board,” he said. “When I was assigned to Jerusalem, it was the last indignity I could endure. I have obeyed orders and have asked no questions all this long while, as the Company’s purpose has been repeatedly betrayed and degraded. The excuse given was always that history cannot be changed. Why did I labor for them to make Rome mighty, if all that power and order was to be handed to a family of monsters? Why did I lend my strength to drive the Saxons out of Britain, if Camelot was to fall in one generation? Once it was not so, but since history began, the Company’s way is always to bring something great into being and then to let it die. They set me to kill, because I like to kill, and they think that my pleasure will distract me from the dishonor of these days.” He held me silent with that pale-blue stare of his, so pale a blue, cold and self-assured, it was almost no color at all.

“Look now! Islam has brought order here, knowledge, tolerance. And I must wear this cross and wade in innocent blood, that I may get for my masters a box hidden under Solomon’s temple. Do you know what some of these Christians have been doing? Eating human flesh. Moslem children. You remember what
we would have done to mortals for such an offense, in the days of our power?”

I nodded, shivering.

“That’s what I’ll tell the disciplinary board,” Budu continued composedly. “It may make some of them sorry for me. It won’t change what they mean to do with me, but it may put them off their guard. Here come my little dogs.”

The security techs were returning now. We watched them approach. Budu said to me:

“I could strike you, if you like. I could pretend anger with you. It might help you disassociate yourself from me, if you’re afraid of coming under suspicion.”

“I don’t want to disassociate myself from you,” I whispered.

“Then you’re a fool,” Budu replied, and picked up his magazine again. “Goodbye, son. Access the code, if you dare. I wonder if you will.”

I stood up and walked away from him shakily, nodding at the techs.

“That one’s been in the field too long,” I told them in an undertone. “I’ll transmit my report this afternoon. Watch yourselves, guys.”

But they didn’t, apparently; or, to be more precise, they didn’t watch Budu. He never got to that disciplinary hearing. I don’t know why, I don’t know what happened, I only know there was an extremely discreet all-points bulletin broadcast later, using a lot of euphemisms and addressed only to the attention of operatives with a certain level of security clearance. He got away somehow.

I’ve never seen him since. I haven’t looked for him. He hasn’t attempted to contact me, and I’m grateful for that. Maybe he was caught a long time ago; how do you hide, after all, from a Company with advance knowledge of every event in history? Though
a lot of history is unrecorded, and who knows the event-shadow areas better than we immortals, who have to work in them so much of the time?

I’ve never accessed his message, all the same.

I’ve gone through seven centuries with this permanent Pandora’s box in my head, and I have nightmares now and then, where I give in to temptation and decode the damn thing, and something awful always happens. Moaning and shuddering, I wake up with a start.