Gods and Pawns (Company) Page 17

  “That there’s some kind of secret group that knows what’s going to become rare and valuable, and figured out how to hide it all away until it is valuable,” said Maria. “So either they’ve got a time machine or they’ve been around for hundreds of years. In which case they’re probably running governments secretly, the way people used to say the Freemasons did. And they’ve definitely got immortal people to work for them. Are you a vampire or something?”

  Uncle Porfirio scowled. “Don’t be ridiculous. Vampires don’t exist.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’m just a cyborg.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Maria very nearly lost it this time. “Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in that movie?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Only you’re not from the future. You’ve been around a loooong time. I’ll bet you worked on a certain ranch in Durango, didn’t you? The only part I couldn’t figure out was your connection with the other cyborg guy, the bastard who killed Papi.” Maria’s fist clenched on the gun.

  Uncle Porfirio glanced sidelong at the porch. “I’m not working with him, mi hija. Let me close and lock the door, okay? And then maybe I can make some fresh coffee. This is going to take a while to explain, and I don’t know how much time we have.”

  “He’s coming for me tonight, isn’t he?”

  Uncle Porfirio shook his head.

  “He’s coming here, probably, but he’s coming for me. That was the whole point of this stupid game.”

  In the kitchen, it was almost possible to believe that it was still 1956, that everything was still normal and right with the world. Uncle Porfirio hung up his coat on the old bent nail by the door—yes, he still wore his under-arm holster—and made fresh coffee in the same blue graniteware pot that had been sitting on the back of the stove the last time he had walked out of the kitchen, thirty-five years earlier. Maria, accepting a cup from him, felt weirdly peaceful.

  “Why did you go away?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t my choice, honey,” he said, sitting down across the table from her. “I had to go do something somewhere else for a while, for the Company. The people I work for.”

  “You know what happened, once you were gone,” Maria said.

  “I know.” He looked bleak. “Nothing I could do.”

  “And you’re not only not really my uncle, you’re sure as hell not Papi’s cousin. You’re not even remotely related to my family, are you?”

  “Oh, yes, I am,” he said, raising his eyes to hers. Black eyes, fathomless as the shaft of a well. And as cold…or so she had thought, when she had been a little girl. Now she recognized something of the darkness she saw in her own mirror. Not coldness: resignation. And, perhaps, the hardness of anthracite coal.

  “A long time ago, mi hija, there was a city on the waters of a lake. It was a beautiful place, or so I always heard; I never saw it with my own eyes. It had bridges and causeways. It had gleaming white towers that shone like pearls in the evening light, and canoes went back and forth across the water loaded with jade, and gold, and chocolate. It was a good place to live, cleaner than any city in Europe. Prosperous, too. Beyond the lake were green fields of corn and blue fields of maguey, stretching to the horizon, and wide straight roads leading away to all the lands the people of the city had conquered.

  “And that was the worm in the apple, mi hija, or I guess you could say the worm in the maguey.

  “They had two problems. The first was that, a few generations before I was born, some priest had come up with the idea that blood sacrifice was the only way to keep the universe from flying into a million pieces. Human blood had to be splashed on the altars of the gods, every day; human blood had to be smeared on the clothes and in the hair of the priests. The cities were white as pearls, clean and pretty, yes, but the insides of the temple were caked with blood and black with crawling flies. That was the price they had to pay.

  “And where was all that blood going to come from? The only way to get it was to conquer other cities, for captives to sacrifice. And, once you sacrifice captives, why waste all that fresh meat? So all their neighbors hated them.

  “Their other problem was that their Emperor was a frightened man.

  “In the previous cycle of time, a god with skin white as the bones of the dead had ruled the world. One day he had sailed away, into the sunrise; but when he came back, he would begin a new cycle. The clock had been ticking for years, and it was this Emperor’s bad luck that it was due to strike in his lifetime. The end of the world was coming. He knew it; he knew the day and the hour, and knew there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it.

  “So the day came at last, and Hernando Cortés rode into Tenochtitlan with his army. It’s not true that he conquered Mexico with a handful of Spaniards. He had help from nearly every tribe he met along the way. That’s what happens when you eat your neighbors.

  “One of the things the Emperor did, to try and placate Cortés, was to offer a household of high-born ladies to be the wives of his captains. All of them were the daughters of chiefs. Some of them were the Emperor’s sisters, and cousins. One of them was my mother. Your grandmother of a dozen generations, mi hija.

  “My father was a captain of Spain, and he might have been a mercenary lusting after gold, or he might have been a noble soldier for the Cross. Maybe both. All I remember was that he was big and strong, and his helmet shone in the sunlight. He was good to my mother. She loved him enough to stay with him, even after those white towers fell and the magic lake became a cracked dry bed of dust. When he marched away into the jungle, looking for something else to conquer, she followed him.

  “And after a while, she carried a baby in a cotton sling on her back; and after a while, she led a little boy by the hand, while the new baby slept in the cotton sling.

  “I remember the red dust of the trails, the green lizards, the black condors circling high against the blue. I remember the fire at night, when my mother told me about Tenochtitlan, and why I must never forget it, though it didn’t exist anymore.

  “My father told me all about Spain, and Jesus Christ, and how He gave Himself to be sacrificed, because the old God required shed blood.

  “Somehow or other I got them confused in my mind, Spain and Tenochtitlan, both of them with priests in black offering blood that ran down in streams. Even my mother had come to confuse Christ and Montezuma, maybe; both of them thin sad men, knowing they were going to die so a new age could be born.

  “One day, when I was about four, we captured a city. It wasn’t so big and beautiful as Tenochtitlan, but it put up more of a fight. My father must have lost most of his army, taking it. He held it for a week before it was taken back.

  “We hid in a palace, away from all the fire and smoke and noise. My father was carried in, and I don’t know if he was dead or dying; my mother screamed over him and kissed his bleeding face. What happened next, I’m not sure, but it seemed as though his soldiers thought that if his body was propped up, if his sword was put in his dead hand, the enemy would think he was immortal and would turn and run. So my mother helped them drag him outside. I never saw her again.

  “But before she went away, my mother told me to look after my little brother.

  “It’s important you understand that, mi hija.

  “Now, my mother had a servant who had followed her from Tenochtitlan, a clever little lady named Tonantzin, who walked as soundlessly as a jaguar. I was scared and crying, holding on to baby Agustin, when I looked up and noticed her standing there. My mother had left the door barred, but she had gotten in somehow.

  “Tonantzin said she had come to rescue me, and I must go away with her as fast as I could run. I told her I couldn’t run fast, carrying the baby. She said the baby would have to be left behind. Tonantzin caught my wrist, to pull me away, but I wouldn’t let go of Agustin. So in the end she grabbed us both in one armful, and we left the room by a secret way.

  “That old palace had a passage in it that ran down under the rocks
, an echoing tunnel. After a long way it opened on a river, where a canoe had been drawn up as though waiting for us. Tonantzin set us safe inside and rowed us away fast. I remember the jade green river with the dragonflies zipping to and fro as her paddle dipped in the water. It was all calm and quiet, because the river carried us far away from the battle. You wouldn’t think the world had ended at all. Agustin stopped crying and fell asleep, rocked by the water.

  “Then the lady Tonantzin told me a story, mi hija.

  “She said that a god named Time Crow had once ruled the world, and he had been as bloody and terrible as the old priests. But he knew that when the next cycle of years came, his wife would bear a son who would sacrifice his father. And this god Time Crow was not as wise as Montezuma. He thought he could cheat fate. So, every time his wife had a baby, he’d eat it, just as the priests used to do. He did this eleven times.

  “But his wife thought of a way to trick him. When the twelfth baby was born, she dressed a lump of jade like an infant and presented it to Time Crow. He was in such a hurry to eat his son that he just gulped it down, and never realized he had been tricked. The real baby was sent away to a safe place, and grew up into a mighty warrior called Lightning Bolt. This Lightning Bolt came back and overthrew his father Time Crow, and sacrificed him. When he cut the body open, out came all eleven of Lightning Bolt’s brothers and sisters, miraculously brought back to life, though they had been dead.

  “And Lightning Bolt’s brothers and sisters were so grateful to be rescued that they made him their Emperor, even though he was the last-born.

  “Tonantzin told me all this story was true, that Lightning Bolt was her Emperor, too. He had the power to raise the dead, and make people live forever, because he had become the master of the cycles of time. She said I could become his servant and live forever, if I wanted. I thought this was a good idea, so I said yes. It never occurred to me that she wasn’t making the offer to both of us, Agustin and I.

  “I went to sleep, and when I woke up, we were on the riverbank and the biggest dragonfly I had ever seen was sitting there on the mud, with its wings beating loud. It shone like polished jade. Warriors took us from the boat and loaded us into the dragonfly’s head. We flew away across the jungle to the home of the gods.

  “It was a beautiful place of gardens and pyramids, but that was where I lost Agustin. They took him away from me when I was asleep. It was years before I found him again. By that time I was immortal.”

  “But there aren’t really any gods,” said Maria.

  Uncle Porfirio shook his head, looking tired.

  “Here’s where your secret brotherhood comes in.

  “Way up in the future, a big corporation will figure out time travel. They won’t be able to do much with it, because it’s impossible to change history, and it’s impossible to go anywhere but the past. So, no winning Lotto numbers from next week, you see?

  “The other thing they’ll do is to figure out how to make people live forever. That won’t go so well, either, because the only way to do it is to take a baby and start modifying it early, with biomechanical implants and conditioning. After twenty years or so the kid is a cyborg who’ll live forever, all right, but…there are some drawbacks. So, no big commercial success from that discovery, either.

  “You know how big corporations work, huh? Seventeen years you worked for that rathole insurance company. All that mattered to them in the end was the bottom line.” Uncle Porfirio poured more coffee.

  “You’ve been watching us, all this time,” said Maria, not sure what she felt. He just nodded and went on: “Anyway, how were these people going to turn a profit?

  “They figured out that if they sent teams back into the past, they could collect little children—abandoned babies, orphans, whatever—and they could work the immortality process on them. That way they’d have immortal agents seeded throughout history. The agents would do various jobs for them, like collecting stuff that would become valuable and hiding it away for ‘discovery’ later.

  “This company calls itself Dr. Zeus Incorporated.”

  “Dr. Seuss?” Maria had a jarring mental image of Ambrose Muller/Anthony Miller and his Cat in the Hat smile.

  “Zeus,” said Uncle Porfirio. “Greek mythology? The nuns taught you about it at Immaculate Heart, right? Zeus, who ruled over the other gods and goddesses because he was the only one who could rescue them from his father, the ogre Time. We heard that story a lot, when we were growing up, all of us little cyborgs-in-training. It was supposed to make us grateful and proud to serve the Company.

  “Tonantzin was a cyborg. She was there, positioned in Montezuma’s court, to salvage things for future investors before Tenochtitlan was destroyed. Afterward, she had the chance to recruit an orphan for the company, so she did.”

  “But why didn’t she want your brother?” Maria asked.

  “You have to fit a certain physical profile,” said Uncle Porfirio. “I had what they called Optimum Morphology. Agustin didn’t. So, when the doctors at the Company hospital were able to pry him out of my arms, they sent Agustin off to be adopted. He was placed in a good home, with a nice mortal couple. That was supposed to be the end of the story.

  “It wasn’t. One of the first things I did, when I was a grown-up cyborg, was track down Agustin. He thought he was a wealthy planter’s only son. I sure as hell couldn’t tell him who I was, but we became friends. Close as brothers. I looked after him, just as my mother had told me to do. He got married, he raised a family, he got old and died. His kids raised families of their own, and they died, too, but the family line went on. I kept an eye on them all.”

  “And nobody ever noticed you never got old or died?” said Maria, and immediately regretted her sarcasm.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Uncle Porfirio, scowling. “I wore makeup, to look like I was aging. I’d go away, send word I’d died, or I’d stage my own accidental death or murder. I’d lie low for thirty years, fifty years. By the time I’d come back, nobody would remember me, and I could start again. I could pose as a long-lost cousin or a friend of the family. It didn’t matter. I watched over them. I helped them.

  “Four hundred years, I’ve kept the family together. I carried your great grandmother Maria from the flood that washed away the old mansion. I gave Lupe’s great grandfather Diego the money to buy the ranch in Durango. I pulled Hector from the truck accident when his mother was killed, and carried him to an orphanage. I dragged him to the field hospital, when he was shot by the Japanese.”

  “You know all the family history,” said Maria, stunned as it began to sink in on her that she was hearing the truth.

  “Every birth, death, and marriage, every name,” said Uncle Porfirio. “And it’s been enough to make an immortal pray for strength, you know that? I can never rest. Always, one of you had some crisis to be solved. Even then I couldn’t always save you. Hector and Lupe were the last two, distant cousins, the last two branches of the family. I thought it would be smart to introduce them. Bring the family together again under one roof. It was a stupid move; it just put all the eggs in one basket.”

  “Maybe we wouldn’t have been so damned helpless if you hadn’t always been there to manage every detail of our lives,” Maria retorted. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “Believe me, I have,” said Uncle Porfirio. He looked gloomily into his empty cup. “But it’s not easy to let go. Look what happens when I leave for a few years! How about you, mi hija? Were you able to call Child Welfare on Tina, for getting drunk when she had a little baby depending on her?”

  Maria blinked at him a moment, and then sputtered: “What, you people can read minds, too? Is that some cyborg superpower?”

  “No,” said Uncle Porfirio. “But after four hundred years, you get pretty good at knowing what people are thinking.”

  He shrugged restlessly, looked around; got up and opened the refrigerator. “I need something sweet. Where’re the piloncillos?”

  “I think there’s so
me in the cheese compartment,” said Maria. “But—”

  He had already found the brown sugar cones, and crunched down on one with a sound like granite cracking. “Jesus, this tastes like a fossil! How long has this been in here?”

  Maria, realizing it had been in there since 1985, flushed and said: “Nobody did much cooking after Mama died, okay? I’ve been holding down nine-to-five jobs since I got out of high school. Papi would go to the store, and buy piloncillos and chorizo and God knows what else, and then expect it to cook itself. I can’t cook like Mama did!” Her voice began to rise, even as she became aware she was reacting out of all proportion. “You just went away and dumped it all on me, you know that? I never had a life of my own. I did have my own apartment, for one year, eleven months, and three days exactly. I spent all my time being Mama’s nurse and Papi’s other wife and Tina’s other mom. Why me?”

  “Because you were the only one strong enough to carry the weight,” said Uncle Porfirio. “The only one I could trust to hold the family together.”

  “Oh, thank you so much,” said Maria bitterly. “You could have helped, somehow. You could have at least gone to see Papi.”

  “I did,” said Uncle Porfirio, grimacing. “I broke all the rules, and I did visit your father. And it got him killed.”

  “What?” Maria stared at him. She narrowed her eyes. “Are you talking about the guy in the white coat? Dr. Ambrose Muller? He’s an immortal, too.”

  “You figured that out on your own, didn’t you?” Uncle Porfirio shook his head. “You were always sharp. Like me. Ay, mi hija, what an agent you would have made.

  “Okay: the people who gave us everlasting life weren’t the smartest bunch of venture capitalists who ever implanted a biochip. If they’d known just a little less about cybertechnology and more about human nature, it would have dawned on them that living forever isn’t for everybody.

  “Hell, I don’t know that it’s for anybody. After a few centuries, most immortals are tired of living. But they can’t die. That makes some of them pretty sore.