Gods and Pawns (Company) Read online

  “Holy smoke,” said Mendoza, reining up. “I’m not going in there, Joseph.”

  “It’s just mortals having a good time,” I said. Painted up on false fronts, garish as any Old West fantasy, were names like The Mazourka, Parker House, The Varsouvienne, La Souciedad, Dennison’s Exchange, The Arcade. All of them were torchlit and proudly decked in red, white, and blue, so the general effect was of Hell on the Fourth of July.

  “It’s brothels and gambling dens,” said Mendoza.

  “It’s theaters, too,” I said defensively, pointing at the upstairs windows of the Jenny Lind.

  “And saloons. What do you want here?”

  “A guy named Isaiah Stuckey,” I said, leaning forward. His scent was harder to pick out now, but…over there… “He’s the miner who found our quartz. I need to talk to him. Come on, we’re blocking traffic! Let’s try that one. The El Dorado.”

  Mendoza gritted her teeth but rode forward, and as we neared the El Dorado the scent trail grew stronger.

  “He’s in here,” I said, sliding down from the saddle. “Come on!”

  “I’ll wait outside, thank you.”

  “You want to wait here by yourself, or you want to enter a nice civilized casino in the company of a priest?” I asked her. She looked around wildly at the happy throng of mortals.

  “Damn you anyway,” she said, and dismounted. We went into the El Dorado.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have used the words nice civilized casino. It was a big square place with bare board walls, and the floor sloped downhill from the entrance, because it was just propped up on pilings over the ash heaps and was already sagging. Wind whistled between the planks, and there is no night air so cold as in San Francisco. It gusted into the stark booths along one wall, curtained off with thumbtacked muslin, where the whores were working. It was shantytown squalor no Hollywood set designer would dream of depicting.

  But the El Dorado had all the other trappings of an Old West saloon, with as much rococo finery as could be nailed up or propped against the plank walls. There were gilt-framed paintings of balloony nude women. There was a grand mirrored bar at one end, cut glass glittering under the oil lamps. Upon the dais a full orchestra played, good and loud, and here again the Stars and Stripes were draped, swagged and rosetted in full glory.

  At the gambling tables were croupiers and dealers in black suits, every one of them a gaunt Doc Holliday clone presiding over monte, or faro, or diana, or chuck-a-luck, or plain poker. A sideboard featured free food for the high rollers, and a lot of ragged men—momentary millionaires in blue jeans, back from the gold fields for the winter—were helping themselves to pie and cold beef. At the tables, their sacks of gold dust or piles of nuggets sat unattended, as safe as anything else in this town.

  I wished I wasn’t dressed as a friar. This was the kind of spot in which a cyborg with the ability to count cards could earn himself some money to offset operating expenses. I might have given it a try anyway, but beside me Mendoza was hyperventilating, so I just shook my head and focused on my quarry.

  Isaiah Stuckey was in here somewhere. At the buffet table? No…

  At the bar? No…Christ, there must have been thirty guys wearing blue jeans and faded red calico shirts in here, and they all stank like bachelors. Was that him? The beefy guy looking around furtively?

  “Okay, Mendoza,” I said, “if you were a miner who’d just recovered consciousness after a drinking binge, stone broke—where would you go?”

  “I’d go bathe myself,” said Mendoza, wrinkling her nose. “But a mortal would probably try to get more money. So he’d come in here, I guess. Of course, you can only win money in a game of chance if you already have money to bet—”

  “STOP, THIEF!” roared somebody, and I saw the furtive guy sprinting through the crowd with a sack of gold dust in his fist. The croupiers had risen as one, and from the recesses of their immaculate clothing produced an awesome amount of weaponry. Isaiah Stuckey—boy, could I smell him now!—crashed through a back window, pursued closely by bullets and bowie knives.

  I said something you don’t often hear a priest say and grabbed Mendoza’s arm. “Come on! We have to find him before they do!”

  We ran outside, where a crowd had gathered around Mendoza’s horse.

  “Get away from that!” Mendoza yelled. I pushed around her and gaped at what met my eyes. The sorry-looking bush bound behind Mendoza’s saddle was…glowing in the dark, like a faded neon rose. It was also shaking back and forth, but that was because a couple of mortals were trying to pull it loose.

  They were a miner, so drunk he was swaying, and a hooker only slightly less drunk, who was holding the miner up by his belt with one hand and doing her best to yank the mutant Lupinus free with the other.

  “I said leave it alone!” Mendoza shoved me aside to get at the hooker.

  “But I’m gettin’ married,” explained the hooker, in as much of a voice as whiskey and tobacco had left her. “An’ I oughter have me a buncha roses to get married holding on to. ’Cause I ain’t never been married before and I oughter have me a buncha roses.”

  “That is not a bunch of roses, you stupid cow, that’s a rare photoreactive porphyrin-producing variant Lupinus specimen,” Mendoza said, and I backed off at the look in her eyes and so did every sober man there, but the hooker blinked.

  “Don’t you use that kinda language to me,” she screamed, and attempted to claw Mendoza’s eyes out. Mendoza ducked and rose with a roundhouse left to the chin that knocked poor Sally Faye, or whoever she was, back on her ass, and her semiconscious fiancé went down with her.

  All the menfolk present, with the exception of me, circled eagerly to give the ladies room. I jumped forward and got Mendoza’s arm again.

  “My very beloved daughters in Christ, is this any way to behave?” I cried, because Mendoza, with murder in her eye, was pulling a gardening trowel out of her saddlebag. Subvocally I transmitted, Are you nuts? We’ve got to go after Isaiah Stuckey! Snarling, Mendoza swung herself back into the saddle. I had to scramble to get up there, too, hitching my robe in a fairly undignified way, which got boffo laughs from the grinning onlookers before we galloped off into the night.

  “Go down to Montgomery Street!” I said. “He probably came out there!”

  “If one of the bullets didn’t get him,” said Mendoza, but she urged the horse down Clay and made a fast left onto Montgomery. Halfway along the block we slowed to a canter and I leaned out, trying to pick up the scent trail again.

  “Yes!” I punched the air and nearly fell off the horse. Mendoza grabbed my hood, hauling me back up straight behind her.

  “Why the hell is it so important you talk to this mortal?” she demanded.

  “Head north! His trail goes back toward Washington Street,” I said. “Like I said, babe, he sold that quartz to Gainsborg.”

  “But we already know it tested positive for your lichen,” said Mendoza. At the next intersection we paused as I sniffed the air, and then pointed forward.

  “He went thataway! Let’s go. We want to know where he got the stuff, don’t we?”

  “Do we?” Mendoza kicked the horse again—I was only grateful the Company hadn’t issued her spurs—and we rode on toward Jackson. “Why should we particularly need to know where the quartz was mined, Joseph? I’ve cultured the lichen successfully. There’ll be plenty for the Company labs.”

  “Of course,” I said, concentrating on Isaiah Stuckey’s scent. “Keep going, will you? I think he’s heading back toward Pacific Street.”

  “Unless the Company has some other reason for wanting to know where the quartz deposit is,” said Mendoza, as we came up on Pacific.

  I sat up in the saddle, closing my eyes to concentrate on the scent. There was his earlier track, but…yes…he was heading uphill again. “Make another left, babe. What were you just saying?”

  “What I was about to say was, I wonder if the Company wants to be sure nobody else finds this very valuable deposit of quartz?�
�� said Mendoza, as the horse snorted and laid its ears back; it wasn’t about to gallop up Pacific. It proceeded at a grudging walk.

  “Gee, Mendoza, why would Dr. Zeus worry about something like exclusive patent rights on the most valuable bioremediant substance imaginable?” I said.

  She was silent a moment, but I could feel the slow burn building.

  “You mean,” she said, “that the Company plans to destroy the original source of the lichen?”

  “Did I say that, honey?”

  “Just so nobody else will discover it before Dr. Zeus puts it on the market, in the twenty-fourth century?”

  “Do you see Mr. Stuckey up there anyplace?” I rose in the saddle to study the sheer incline of Pacific Street.

  Mendoza said something amazingly profane in sixteenth-century Galician, but at least she didn’t push me off the horse. When she had run out of breath, she gulped air and said: “Just once in my eternal life I’d like to know I was actually helping to save the world, like we were all promised, instead of making a lot of technocrats up in the future obscenely rich.”

  “I’d like it too, honest,” I said.

  “Don’t you honest me! You’re a damned Facilitator, aren’t you? You’ve got no more moral sense than a jackal!”

  “I resent that!” I edged back from her sharp shoulder blades, and the glow-in-the-dark mutant Lupinus squelched unpleasantly under my behind. “And anyway, what’s so great about being a Preserver? You could have been a Facilitator like me, you know that, kid? You had what it took. Instead, you’ve spent your whole immortal life running around after freaking bushes!”

  “A Facilitator like you? Better I should have died in that dungeon in Santiago!”

  “I saved your life, and this is the thanks I get?”

  “And as for freaking bushes, Mr. Big Shot Facilitator, it might interest you to know that certain rare porphyrins have serious commercial value in the data storage industry—”

  “So, who’s making the technocrats rich now, huh?” I demanded. “And have you ever stopped to consider that maybe the damn plants wouldn’t be so rare if Botanist drones like you weren’t digging them up all the time?”

  “For your information, that specimen was growing on land that’ll be paved over in ten years,” Mendoza said coldly. “And if you call me a drone again, you’re going to go bouncing all the way down this hill with the print of my boot on your backside.”

  The horse kept walking, and San Francisco Bay fell ever farther below us. Finally, stupidly, I said:

  “Okay, we’ve covered all the other bases on mutual recrimination. Aren’t you going to accuse me of killing the only man you ever loved?”

  She jerked as though I’d shot her, and turned around to regard me with blazing eyes.

  “You didn’t kill him,” she said, in a very quiet voice. “You just let him die.”

  She turned away, and of course then I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her I was sorry. If I did that, though, I’d probably spend the next few months in a regeneration tank, growing back my arms.

  So I just looked up at the neighborhood we had entered without noticing, and that was when I really felt my blood run cold.

  “Uh—we’re in Sydney-Town,” I said.

  Mendoza looked up. “Oh-oh.”

  There weren’t any flags or bunting here. There weren’t any torches. And you would never, ever see a place like this in any Hollywood western. Neither John Wayne nor Gabby Hayes ever went anywhere near the likes of Sydney-Town.

  It perched on its ledge at the top of Pacific Street and rotted. On the left side was one long row of leaning shacks; on the right side was another. I could glimpse dim lights through windows and doorways, and heard fiddle music scraping away, a half dozen folk tunes from the British Isles, played in an eerie discord. The smell of the place was unbelievable, breathing out foul through dark doorways where darker figures leaned. Above the various dives, names were chalked that would have been quaint and reassuring anywhere else: The Noggin of Ale. The Tam O’Shanter. The Jolly Waterman. The Bird in Hand.

  Some of the dark figures leaned out and bid us “G’deevnin’,” and without raising their voices too much let us know about the house specialties. At the Boar’s Head, a woman was making love to a pig in the back room; did we want to see? At the Goat and Compass, there was a man who’d eat or drink anything, absolutely anything, mate, for a few cents, and he hadn’t had a bath in ten years. Did we want to give him a go? At the Magpie, a girl was lying in the back on a mattress, so drunk she’d never wake before morning, no matter what anyone did to her. Were we interested? And other dark figures were moving along in the shadows, watching us.

  Portsmouth Square satisfied simple appetites like hunger and thirst, greed, the need to get laid or to shoot at total strangers. Sydney-Town, on the other hand, catered to specialized tastes.

  It was nothing I hadn’t seen before, but I’d worked in Old Rome at her worst, and Byzantium too. Mendoza, though, shrank back against me as we rode.

  She had a white, stunned look I’d seen only a couple of times before. The first was when she was four years old, and the Inquisitors had held her up to the barred window to see what could happen if she didn’t confess she was a Jew. More than fear or horror, it was astonishment that life was like this.

  The other time she’d looked like that was when I let her mortal lover die.

  I leaned close and spoke close to her ear. “Baby, I’m going to get down and follow the trail on foot. You ride on, okay? I’ll meet you at the hotel.”

  I slid down from the saddle fast, smacked the horse hard on its rump, and watched as the luminous mutant whatever-it-was bobbed away through the dark, shining feebly. Then I marched forward, looking as dangerous as I could in the damn friar’s habit, following Isaiah Stuckey’s scent line.

  He was sweating heavily, now, easy to track even here. Sooner or later, the mortal was going to have to stop, to set down that sack of gold dust and wipe his face and breathe. He surely wasn’t dumb enough to venture into one of these places…

  His trail took an abrupt turn, straight across the threshold of the very next dive. I sighed, looking up at the sign. This establishment was The Fierce Grizzly. Behind me, the five guys who were lurking paused, too. I shrugged and went in.

  Inside the place was small, dark, and smelled like a zoo. I scanned the room. Bingo! There was Isaiah Stuckey, a gin punch in his hand and a smile on his flushed face, just settling down to a friendly crap game with a couple of serial rapists and an axe murderer. I could reach him in five steps. I had taken two when a hand descended on my shoulder.

  “Naow, mate, you ain’t saving no souls in ’ere,” said a big thug. “You clear off, or sit down and watch the exhibition, eh?”

  I wondered how hard I’d have to swing to knock him cold, but then a couple of torches flared alight at one end of the room. The stage curtain, nothing more than a dirty blanket swaying and jerking in the torchlight, was flung aside.

  I saw a grizzly bear, muzzled and chained. Behind her, a guy I assumed to be her trainer grinned at the audience. The act started.

  In twenty thousand years I thought I’d seen everything, but I guess I hadn’t.

  My jaw dropped, as did the jaws of most of the other patrons who weren’t regulars there. They couldn’t take their eyes off what was happening on the stage, which made things pretty easy for the pickpockets working the room.

  But only for a moment.

  Maybe that night the bear decided she’d finally had enough, and summoned some self-esteem. Maybe the chains had reached the last stages of metal fatigue. Anyway, there was a sudden ping, like a bell cracking, and the bear got her front paws free.

  About twenty guys, including me, tried to get out through the front door at the same moment. When I picked myself out of the gutter, I looked up to see Isaiah Stuckey running like mad again, farther up Pacific Street.

  “Hey! Wait!” I shouted; but no Californian slows down when a grizzly is
loose. Cursing, I rose and scrambled after him, yanking up my robe to clear my legs. I could hear him gasping like a steam engine as I began to close the gap between us. Suddenly, he went down.

  I skidded to a halt beside him and fell to my knees. Stuckey was flat on his face, not moving. I turned him over and he flopped like a side of meat, staring sightless up at the clear cold stars.

  Massive aortic aneurysm. Dead as a doornail.

  “No!” I howled, ripping his shirt open and pounding on his chest, though I knew nothing was going to bring him back. “Don’t you go and die on me, you mortal son of a bitch! Stupid jackass—”

  Black shadows had begun to slip from the nearest doorways, eager to begin corpse-robbing; but they halted, taken aback, I guess, by the sight of a priest screaming abuse at the deceased. I glared at them, remembered who I was supposed to be, and made a grudging sign of the Cross over the late Isaiah Stuckey.

  There was a clatter of hoofbeats. Mendoza’s horse came galloping back downhill.

  “Are you okay?” Mendoza leaned from the saddle. “Oh, hell, is that him?”

  “The late Isaiah Stuckey,” I said bitterly. “He had a heart attack.”

  “I’m not surprised, with all that running uphill,” said Mendoza. “This place really needs those cable cars, doesn’t it?”

  “You said it, kiddo.” I got to my feet. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Mendoza frowned, gazing at the dead man. “Wait a minute. That’s Catskill Ike!”

  “Cute name,” I said, clambering up into the saddle behind her. “You knew the guy?”

  “No, I just monitored him in case he started any fires. He’s been prospecting on Villa Creek for the last six months.”

  “Well, so what?”

  “So I know where he found your quartz deposit,” said Mendoza. “It wasn’t mined up the Sacramento at all, Joseph.”

  “It’s in Big Sur?” I demanded. She just nodded.

  At that moment, the grizzly shoved her way out into the street, and it seemed like a good idea to leave fast.