Mendoza in Hollywood (Company) Read online

  Praise for Kage Baker and The Company series

  “Kage Baker has earned praise for her tales of the Company, a future-based outfit that ‘recruits’ throughout time, turns its new troops into immortal cyborgs, and sends them out to fill in the blank spots of history. . . . Look for it! Baker does not disappoint!”

  —Analog

  “One of the most consistently entertaining series to appear in the late nineties. The novels read like literary pastiches—echoes of Heinlein and Robert Louis Stevenson fill this one—and the narrative pace matches that of most thrillers.”

  —Amazing Stories

  Mendoza in Hollywood

  “[C]ombines historical detail and fast-paced action with a good dose of ironic wit and a dollop of bittersweet romance.”

  —Library Journal

  The Graveyard Game

  “If John le Carré wrote science fiction, it might read like The Graveyard Game.”

  —The New York Times

  The Life of the World to Come

  A Kirkus Selection for Best Sci-Fi of 2004

  “Another entry in Baker’s superlative series about Dr. Zeus . . . An astonishing and thoroughly satisfying installment. What’s more, Baker’s overall concept and rationale, flawlessly sustained through five books, grows ever more spellbinding and impressive.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Baker’s trademark mix of serious speculation and black humor informs this solid addition to her time-travel series.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Baker’s strong world-building and clever plotting make this an addictive read.”

  —Romantic Times BookClub Magazine

  TOR BOOKS BY KAGE BAKER

  In the Garden of Iden

  Mendoza in Hollywood

  The Graveyard Game

  The Life of the World to Come

  The Children of the Company

  The Anvil of the World

  The Machine’s Child

  KAGE BAKER

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  MENDOZA IN HOLLYWOOD

  First published in the United States by Harcourt, Inc.

  Copyright © 2000 by Kage Baker

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Book design by Linda Lockowitz

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, Kage.

  Mendoza in Hollywood: a novel of the company/Kage Baker.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-765-31530-0

  EAN 978-0-765-31530-4

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A4313M46 2000

  813'.54—dc21

  99-14949

  First Tor Trade Paperback Edition: May 2006

  Printed in the United States of America

  D 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  This book is dedicated to Phyllis Patterson,

  Instigator, with respect and affection;

  And to the village she founded under the oak trees

  And to its people. Et in Arcadia ego.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  Establishing Shot

  PART TWO

  Babylon Is Fallen

  PART THREE

  The Island Out There

  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.

  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.

  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,. . .

  Mendoza in

  Hollywood

  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.

  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, señors.

  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, señors, are those tapes rolling?

  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 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 chamberpot 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 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, señors, 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 o
ther 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, señors, 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

  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 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, Señor Drought and Señorita Smallpox and a few shrewd Yankee moneylenders would pretty well end the days of the gentes de razón. 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 mostly 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.