Gods and Pawns (Company) Read online

  “She’s an idiot, and you were too nice for her anyway,” said Mendoza firmly.

  “Funnily enough, that was what she said, too,” said Lewis, grimacing at the memory. “So I thought, well, perhaps—after all, there we were, talking about that place in Bolivia you’ve always wanted to see, and then, bang, I won, and—perhaps it’s destiny or something!”

  Mendoza blinked. “You’re going to use your week’s liberty on a field expedition?”

  “We could actually get some work done!” said Lewis. “You could, anyway. And it would do me no end of good to get in a little wilderness experience.”

  “Oh, Lewis, you can’t! I mean, I can’t—”

  “Of course you can! It’s my door prize, after all; I can invite whom I please,” said Lewis. “And I’ve decided I really, truly want to explore Bolivia.”

  “You perfect gentle knight,” said Mendoza, and threw her arms around him and kissed him.

  He had imaginary heart palpitations for an hour afterward, and drew stares from the Mayan gardeners as he went skipping back to Administrative Residential Pyramid.

  “You’re lucky the rainy season hasn’t started yet,” Grover informed them, ordering their shuttle to begin its descent. He was a very old operative, distinctly Neanderthal of brow, so much so in fact that he could no longer go out among mortals without drawing undue attention to himself. His duties these days were limited to on-base jobs like piloting shuttles.

  “I suppose all that turns to impassable mud?” said Lewis, peering down at the plain below them. It was dry and brown, distinguished only by the curious forested mounds that rose here and there from the general flatness.

  “No; it turns into a lake,” said Grover. “See all those hills? They’re actually islands. You want my advice, you’ll set up your camp on one.”

  “Are there mortals down there?” Mendoza scowled at the network of raised causeways between the islands. “Certainly looks like it. That land’s been farmed.”

  “Not in recorded history,” said Grover. “Thirty thousand square miles of isolation. You can play your music as loud as you like—nobody’s going to slap your wrist over anachronisms out here!”

  “Good,” said Mendoza.

  They landed and were left with four crates of gear, and the cheery promise that Grover would return for them in a week’s time. Lewis watched the shuttle vanish away to the west. Lowering his head, he regarded the island-hill before them and felt the first slight qualm of concern, with a deeper uneasiness following.

  “My gosh, that’s dense undergrowth,” he said. “I’m not sure we’re really dressed for adventuring. We look like a Dresden shepherd and shepherdess.”

  “What?” said Mendoza. “My whole ensemble’s khaki. We’ll be fine!”

  “I suppose so,” said Lewis, reflecting that seventeenth-century costume in khaki was still seventeenth-century costume.

  “Besides,” said Mendoza, hoisting a crate on one shoulder, “I hate those damned Company-issue coveralls.”

  Halfway up the hill, however, she was using language that rather shocked Lewis, or at least it did after he did a quick idiom access of sixteenth-century Galician Spanish. He ducked as first one and then the other of her high-heeled shoes went flying down the trail.

  An hour later, however, there was a neat camp on the plateau at the top of the hill, on one edge so as to take advantage of the view.

  “All the comforts of home,” said Mendoza happily, setting up a folding chair. “Did you bring the gin?”

  “And a bottle of olives,” Lewis replied, hunting for the cocktail shaker. He found it, activated the self-refrigeration unit, and set it aside to chill. “Shall I build a fire?”

  “We’ve got something better,” said Mendoza, reaching into the depths of a crate. She pulled out a cube of something resembling thick glass, about the size of a hatbox. Further search revealed a wrought-iron base for it; Mendoza set it out, placed the cube on top, and switched it on. “There we go!”

  Lewis watched as the cube lit up and began to radiate heat, with stylized holographic flames dancing across its surface. “Oh, my! How did we mere Preservers rate that kind of field technology?”

  “We didn’t,” said Mendoza smugly. “Pan Li in Accounting owed me a favor. Nice, huh?”

  “Splendid,” said Lewis, setting up his own chair.

  “And, look at this perfect camping spot! Guava trees. Brazil nut trees. Peach-palms. Anyone would think it had been someone’s little private orchard.”

  “Paradisial,” Lewis agreed.

  They relaxed, sipping cocktails as the gigantic tropical evening descended, and listened to the night coming to life. Drowsy parrots nestled together in the high branches; far off, some monkey set up a low monotonous hooting. The stars swarmed like white moths.

  “Now, this is solitude,” said Mendoza in satisfaction. “No fussy department heads. No tedious meetings. No mortals!”

  Except for one, Lewis thought to himself. He gazed across at Mendoza and imagined once again the specter of the mortal man she had loved, looming beside her. He had long since learned that he’d never supplant Nicholas Harpole, though the man had been dead the best part of a century. Lewis cleared his throat and said: “Wonderful, isn’t it? What shall we do tomorrow?”

  “Go exploring!” said Mendoza. “Take the field credenza and go in search of specimens yet unclassified.”

  “Search for lost worlds and dinosaurs? Ancient civilizations? Forgotten colonists from lost Atlantis?” Lewis suggested.

  They laughed companionably and clinked glasses.

  Later, as she sat in the entrance to her tent, combing out her hair without the least self-consciousness, he watched her and thought: This, at least, I have. And it’s more than she’ll grant to anyone else.

  A field bivvy is a compact and useful piece of gear, lightweight and eminently portable. Once zipped inside, however, Lewis found it rather cramped.

  He lay flat on his back, staring up at the mesh screen scant inches from his nose. It was hot, but the profusion of little insects whining on the outside of the screen dissuaded him from unzipping the flap. He turned over, and the tarpaulin underneath crackled disagreeably. He attempted to punch some comfort into his flat camping pillow, and failed.

  God Apollo, he thought irritably, I used to tramp through half of Europe dossing down in ditches, and slept like a baby. Have I really grown so soft?

  Just as sleep began its hesitant approach, something out on the far plain shrieked. Lewis gave up and resigned himself to a night of insomnia.

  For a long while he listened to Mendoza’s distant breathing and heartbeat. The night sounds grew louder: tree frogs peeping by the millions, immense stealthy insects, moon-eyed things that haunted the upper branches…

  He heard, quite distinctly, the crash of a metal door rolling open. A soft white light, only just brighter than moonlight, flooded the camp. Lewis opened his eyes and saw that a door had opened in the hillside. Little people were emerging.

  “Hey,” he said, and tried to sit up. To his horror, he found that he was unable to move. But they had heard him; they came quite purposefully and yanked up the bivvy stakes, and commenced dragging him, doubly shrouded, toward the door in the hill.

  “NO!” he shouted, managing at last to thrash about, and sat up face-first into the mesh. Moonlight, shining into his face, dappled through the jungle canopy; silence. No door, no little people.

  “Lewis, are you okay?” Mendoza’s voice was cautious.

  “Bad dream,” he said.

  “Oh. Sorry,” she replied.

  “Quite all right,” he said, and lay down and stared up at the mesh, knowing he’d never close his eyes again.

  But the next thing he saw was red radiance everywhere, and a concerted morning birdcall backed up by little monkeys screaming at the sun.

  Lewis turned over, focused his eyes, and recoiled at the number and size of the insects perched all over the bivvy mesh. He heard Mendoza give a muffl
ed shriek and begin flailing away, as bugs flew off in all directions from her bivvy.

  “Horrible, aren’t they?” he called.

  “Ugh, ugh, ugh.” Mendoza unzipped her bivvy and scrambled out, and danced up and down. “Goddamned tropics! We should have brought one of those electronic bug killers.”

  “Watch out,” said Lewis, beating upward to dislodge two tarantulas and a dragonfly with a twelve-inch wingspan. Mendoza retreated to one of the equipment crates. Lewis crawled forth into the morning and dutifully looked elsewhere as Mendoza got dressed.

  “Oh! There are pineapple guavas growing over here,” he announced. “Shall I pick some for our breakfast?”

  “Go ahead,” said Mendoza, sounding muffled. Lewis spent the next few minutes busily gathering fruit. Then a tarantula reached out of a clump of leaves and grabbed back a guava he had just picked, at which point Lewis discovered just how far he could jump from a standing start.

  He came skittering back with his arms full of guavas, just in time to see Mendoza step forth from the crate dressed in hip waders, into the top of which she had tucked the hem of her gown. It looked more than odd. She met his stare and said proudly, “I don’t care. I’m insect-proof!”

  “You know, you’ve got a point,” Lewis replied and, setting down the guavas, dove into a crate himself, to root through his gear for his own waders.

  Fully armored against insect peril, they sat down and dined. The freshness of the morning was rapidly boiling away, as steam rose from the broad leaves all around them. Far to the horizon, where mountain peaks were visible, lay a low line of slaty cloud.

  “Is it storming over there?” Mendoza remarked, frowning as she spooned up guava juice.

  “I suppose so,” said Lewis. He peered out at the distant clouds, bringing them into close focus. “Oh, dear, we may not have escaped the rainy season after all.”

  “We’ll just take rain ponchos,” said Mendoza, shrugging. “Never understood the way mortals get upset by a few drops of water. England, now—that was a rainy country. And wretchedly cold.”

  They finished breakfast in a leisurely fashion and loaded on their field credenza packs, after which they made their way down from their hill to the plain. Close to, it was possible to see that irregular bands of dark earth circled each of the islands on the wide land.

  “Ah-ha!” said Mendoza, pointing. “Teosinte!”

  “Where?” Lewis turned his head.

  “There! Growing all over the terra preta. See?”

  “That stuff that looks like giant crabgrass?”

  “Well, yes, it does,” said Mendoza impatiently. “But do you realize how significant its presence is here? Nobody thought teosinte was cultivated this far down the continent! The indigenes farmed manioc and amaranths instead.”

  “You don’t say,” Lewis replied, as his brain went into comfortable shutoff mode, its custom whenever Mendoza started in on the subject of botany.

  For the next few hours he trotted after her through the shimmering heat as they explored farther afield, nodding and making polite exclamations, occasionally holding things when asked or standing beside plants she was imaging so as to provide a reference of scale. As he watched Mendoza working, his primary consciousness was focused in a pleasant fantasy.

  The hip waders impaired his imaginings somewhat, but still there was something of human passion about her when she worked, not like the other immortals at all, with such an intensity she seemed ever so slightly dangerous.

  And how could something lithe as a tigress have such apple-blossom skin? Her hair was coming undone as she worked, floating like flames around her face, and the long coiled braid drooping down…if he were to reach out and take hold of it, what would she…

  “…The odd thing is, it’s immense but it doesn’t seem to have been cultivated, ever,” she was saying in a puzzled voice. “Just some gigantiform variant, but no disproportionate increase in the size or number of seed capsules.”

  “How curious,” Lewis said, jerked from his reverie by something registering on his hazard sensors.

  He turned his head. Far out upon the cracked and blazing plain, a mirage of silver water shimmered, rippled, advanced. Advanced? A sudden gust of hot wind buffeted his face.

  “Er—” he said, just as Mendoza lifted her head and turned swiftly.

  “What’s that?” she demanded. “Oh, God my Savior!”

  “I think it’s—”

  They winked out more or less simultaneously and wound up halfway up the side of the nearest island, perched on a tree branch. Watching in horrified fascination, they saw the shining flood roll onward, unhurried, unstoppable, surrounding their refuge and flowing on to the horizon.

  “Damn,” said Mendoza, staring. “Where’d all that water come from?” Lewis pointed to the sky, where the slate cloud front of morning was just blotting out the sun and taking on a nasty coppery tint.

  “It must be from the storm in the mountains. Grover told us this turned into a lake,” said Lewis.

  “So he did. Well, it doesn’t look all that deep,” said Mendoza. “We can wade back to camp. We wore our waders, after all.”

  An anaconda, quite a large one, floated past their perch. They regarded it in thoughtful silence.

  “Then again,” said Mendoza, just as the sky opened with the force of a fire hose.

  They clung to their branch as torrents of water beat down on them, gasping for air with their heads down. The rain shattered the silver mirror of the plain, turned it into a seething, leaping mass of brown water.

  “I think we ought to wait it out,” shouted Lewis. Mendoza nodded and pointed to a drier section of branch, one overhung with a canopy of broad leaves. They worked their way along until they reached its comparative shelter and huddled there, dripping. Below them, various Amazonian fauna displaced by the flood was hurrying up the hillside on four, six, or eight legs respectively, likewise seeking refuge.

  “But…It never does this at New World One,” said Mendoza, pushing back her wet hair.

  “New World One has a force field projected over it,” said Lewis. “Houbert only lets in enough to keep the lawns green.”

  “Ah,” said Mendoza. “That would also explain why we aren’t besieged by insects every night.”

  “Or snakes,” said Lewis.

  “That’s right; snakes can climb, can’t they?” said Mendoza.

  They edged a little closer together on the branch.

  “Well, we did hope we’d have an adventure,” said Lewis. “And I suppose this beats sitting in on another departmental budget meeting.”

  Mendoza nodded doubtfully, watching the rain lash the surface of the water to muddy foam.

  “I have to admit, this is as rainy as England,” she said. “At least there weren’t anacondas in Kent.”

  “Scarcely any snakes at all there, really,” said Lewis.

  “Except for Joseph,” Mendoza added, narrowing her eyes. Lewis, well aware of her feelings for the immortal who had recruited her, made a noncommittal noise. Seeking to turn the conversation elsewhere, he said brightly, “Think how wretched I’d be right now if I’d asked Lucretia along! She wasn’t what you’d call a good sport.”

  “Mineralogist, isn’t she?”

  “Mm. Emphasis on jewels. Curates the Company’s new world loot. All that plundered gold, jade, and whatnot.”

  “You never know; maybe she’d have found a few emeralds out here.” Mendoza turned to look at him. “Wait a minute—there’s a rumor that somebody over in Mineralogy is kinky for gemstones. Supposedly has a private trove she likes to scatter in the bedsheets when she’s entertaining friends. Among other things. That wouldn’t be Lucretia, would it?”

  “It certainly wouldn’t,” said Lewis firmly, and untruthfully. Mendoza grinned.

  “And you wouldn’t tell me if it was, would you?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t.”

  “You really are the perfect gentleman, Lewis,” said Mendoza fondly. “What a bunch o
f idiots your ex-lovers have all been. One of these days, the right one will come along. You’ll see.”

  Lewis gave her a forlorn look, which she utterly missed.

  The rain continued without cease or indeed any sign that it was ever going to grow less. More things were swept by: a jaguar, crouched on a floating tree trunk, its ears flattened down in disgust. Caymans, swimming in flotillas. A sloth, apparently drowned but possibly not.

  And then, abruptly, the rain stopped.

  “Oh, look, somebody turned off the taps,” said Mendoza.

  They sat there a few minutes, waiting expectantly for the water level to drop.

  “I don’t think it’s going down anytime soon, somehow,” said Lewis.

  A few more minutes went by.

  “Well, it’s only—” Mendoza scanned. “Just over a meter deep. We could wade.”

  “We could,” Lewis agreed. A raft of broken branches drifted past, crowded with unhappy-looking monkeys.

  “Or we could wait a little longer,” said Mendoza.

  They did.

  “Dry clothing,” said Lewis at last. “Dry martinis. Comfortable chairs.”

  “Yeah,” said Mendoza. The tree tilted outward, ever so slightly, but unmistakably.

  “Oh, crumbs,” said Lewis, as the tree tilted farther.

  They jumped and landed some distance behind the tree, which keeled over gracefully and slid down the hillside in a runnel of flowing mud. It took a lot of the hilltop with it.

  “I have this sudden compelling urge to return to our camp,” said Mendoza. Lewis just nodded, speechless.

  They picked their way down the sodden hillside and ventured out into the water, which was just precisely high enough to trickle in over the tops of their waders.

  “Lewis, I am so sorry,” Mendoza said as she slogged along. “You might have been sunning yourself in some Venetian palazzo or other right now.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Lewis. “I don’t mind.”

  Mendoza looked at him askance. “I’ll bet you say that to all the other girls, too. Sweetheart, there’s such a thing as being too much of a—” She broke off and turned, coming face-to-face with the cayman that had been advancing on them stealthily. It opened its jaws, but closed them on empty air as Mendoza dodged and brought her fists down on its flat head, with a crack that echoed across the water. It spasmed, rolled over and drifted away belly-up. “—nice guy,” Mendoza finished.