Sky Coyote (28 page)

He nodded, wiping his nose. “People did war,” he said. “Pollution. Killing things until they were all gone. We could stay inside and not hurt anything, but the bad things had happened already. We had to make them not have happened. That was why they made you old-time people, so you could stop the bad things. But they made you wrong. I don’t like you.”

“Okay. But you helped make us too, right? You helped make pineal tribrantine three?”

“I made it,” he corrected me. “I figured out how. We had to make you fast and strong and not get old.” And he proceeded to tell me how he’d done it, in technical language that made my head spin, though the grammar and syntax were stripped down to six-year-old level. Though I had to access volumes to get even a grasp of the chemistry and technology involved, it was obvious it was the simplest thing in the world to him. Such was his
concentration, as he spoke, that he didn’t even notice the next three aftershocks, or the screams of Stacey as she was having a piece of lobby door removed from her leg.

“Only now I’m sorry I did it,” he finished with a hiccup. “I’m thirsty. Get me something to drink.”

“Sure.” I groped around and handed him a sipper bottle of distilled water. He sucked on it contentedly as I stared at him, trying to dope the thing out. Was he an idiot savant? But the other mortals shared a lot of his attitudes, and many of them were nearly as ignorant. Was he just an extreme case of a future type, brilliant in his own field and proudly, defensively moronic about everything else? It was a historical fact that after the Victorian era, scientists would become more and more specialized in their disciplines and less informed about other fields, the opposite of Renaissance men. Would the trend continue long enough to produce
this?
And would ecological responsibility warp into this bizarre self-hatred? What a substitute for a faith! Puritanism Lite! All the guilt without the God!

And yet … what did I want from the guy? He believed it was morally wrong to hurt anybody or anything. He lived by his principles and tried to make sure everybody under his command followed them too, even if his command was pretty much a joke.

It was sad that he was so terrified of the wild nature he was trying to preserve, and so bigoted against the humanity he was trying to help. So unnerved, too, by the deathless creatures he’d helped create to do his work.

Jeez, he’d helped create
me
. Here I was, sitting in a tent, face to face with my creator. Or one of my creator’s faces.

So I had a couple more pieces of that very big jigsaw puzzle I’d first sat down to twenty thousand years ago. Pieces of the edge, from the look of it. I was pretty sure that Bugleg and his peer group couldn’t possibly be running things, poor little sanetimonious
Victor Frankensteins that they were. They certainly would never have countenanced the creation of Budu and his fellow Enforcers. To say nothing of all the dirty-tricks squads that had operated for the good of the Company since then. Or Houbert’s screamingly decadent parties.

Which meant that Lopez had probably been leveling with me when he implied that he and his cronies were the ones really in charge. It made more sense, and was in some ways a comforting thought. On the other hand, it meant that my kind were responsible for some pretty nasty work, including the betrayal of their own Enforcers.

On the
other
hand … you never have enough hands, you know? Look at it from the Company’s point of view: here they are stuck with these enormously strong guys who don’t even look human anymore, at least not by the modern definition, and as if that isn’t awkward enough, they like to kill, kill, kill. Though only in the most righteous of causes! So to keep them happy, you have to keep finding evildoers for them to tear into little pieces. To make matters worse, the immortals are terribly cunning and now beginning to disapprove of
you
.

I would’ve started sweating, myself. And if there’s this future of perfect peace and harmony coming in 2355, what place would soldiers have in it anyway?

I didn’t see what choice the Company had. But the Enforcers couldn’t have been done away with. They were immortal, after all. Probably they were hidden away somewhere having a nice long rest. Maybe being saved as some kind of special-unit ace in the hole just in case the future of perfect peace and harmony didn’t quite work out. Yeah.

The awful bottom line, of course, is that if you’re going to rule the world, you have to have absolute power, and everybody knows what absolute power does. Dr. Zeus set out to change
things, to give the whole sorry history of the human race a happy ending. The Company discovered that it had to rule the world first; and then it turned out that nothing could be changed. As for that happy ending—we won’t know until after 2355, will we?

So, really, what can one poor little coyote like me do about it?

You could decipher the message
.

Bugleg began to snore. I scanned him and found that he had asthma, which the dust and spring pollen were probably aggravating. He couldn’t even breathe the same air as us, poor bastard.

The east got brighter, and pretty soon my enemy the Sun rose, red and hungry. I got up and went over to Lopez to see how things were going.

He stood in the open air reading a transmission. Our communications system must be okay. He was still wigless, but somebody had fetched his tricorne out of the mess for him, and it threw a pointed shadow on the page in his hands.

“Want me to go check on the Chumash now?” I asked him, and he turned to me a face livid with rage.

“They knew,” he said, “about the quake. In
their
time, their survey equipment is clever enough to read old strata like a book. Isn’t that wonderful? Of course they had no idea it would be this severe, or that we’d be sitting right on top of it. They didn’t tell us, because it would only have upset the mortals; besides, they knew we could handle any problems that might arise. Naturally. It’s what we were designed to do, after all.”

He crumpled up the paper and flung it into the sagebrush. I slunk away, my tail between my legs. Another round of motion sickness was coming on. Was it an aftershock, or all the shifting conspiracy theories?

You could hardly tell there’d been an earthquake, away from the base. Back along the trail everything looked just as normal
and sunny as can be, with little birds singing and dew sparkling on the leaves. In a couple of places there’d been a minor landslide, a few bucketfuls of rocks and dirt fresh and dark on the path; that was all.

Humashup was busy as I walked in. Outside their doors, people were shaking ashes and charcoal out of their sleeping furs, or sweeping cold cinders into the streets. I let myself pretend for a moment I was walking into the old village I dream about, which was now probably buried under somebody’s wine cellar in Spain or France. Sepawit, sluicing off ash with a basket of water, greeted me cheerfully.

“Hey, Sky Coyote, You should have been here this morning! We had quite a shaker!”

“Hell of a quake,” agreed Nutku, beating his best bearskin robe until the dust flew. I was about to reply when a bizarre figure pranced by, decked in flowers and tootling away on a deer-bone flute. It was Kenemekme; he had taken to doing things like that lately. We watched him in silence for a moment. Nutku sighed and went on shaking dust out of his robe, and I tried to remember what I’d been about to say.

“I know. Khutash is very angry. She found out about Sun’s white men last night,” I told them. They looked surprised.

“Khutash is angry? Is that what makes earthquakes?” Sepawit blinked. “Well, I guess You’d know, but we always thought it was a natural phenomenon.”

“What?” Oh, boy, I wasn’t at my quick-witted best today.

“We always thought it was the World Snakes down there under the crust of the earth, the ones who hold everything up? We thought they just get tired every now and then and bump into one another,” Nutku explained. “The astrologer-priest says they push the mountains up a little higher every year.”

“Oh,” I said.

H
UMASHUP WAS BACK TO NORMAL
by midmorning. AltaCal Base took a lot longer to recover. Even after the techs had managed to right and reinforce the supports on the modular dome, we had trouble convincing the mortals to go back inside. They crouched in the pop-tents on the hill, shivering, and even when we explained that we could tell it was absolutely safe (hadn’t they designed us to detect structural infirmity in any building we might enter?), they wouldn’t budge. Finally I said I thought I’d seen bear tracks nearby, and that got them moving. Within an hour the corridors of the base were resounding with electronic beeps and blasts from all the reactivated holo cabinets, and another layer of mutual dislike and mistrust settled into place.

“So, can that thing see me all right?” Nutku inquired, peering into the holocamera lens. It was one of two reflective eyes in the face of a little crouching figure Jomo was carrying on his shoulder. The other two holocameras, similarly disguised, were par-ranged at the two other points of a triangle centered on Nutku.

“Just fine,” Jomo assured him. Jomo was the Spirit Who Wants to Watch As You Build a Canoe. Chang, his team anthropologist, was excitedly talking to Nutku’s apprentices where they were attempting to work. They were trying to be terribly cool and make it all look easier than it was. I sat in the shade nearby, glad I didn’t have to stand in the sun in my coyote fur.

“All right. This is my boatyard we’re standing in,” said Nutku, gesturing around him. “Over there are my apprentices. Their parents are paying me plenty to take them on, believe me, because once you’ve joined the Canoemakers’ Union and learned how to build fine-quality canoes, you’re set for life. For an extra fee they can get their kid into the kantap, but only if I agree to sponsor him, and I only sponsor the really talented ones. Some guys will let any moron into the kantap if he pays enough, but not me.

“Where was I? So anyway, I’ve got them cutting up these logs.” He walked over to the work site. The boys were hacking away self-consciously, trying not to look up at the camera. “Pine isn’t your best material for canoes, but this is a midrange model with just a few luxury features—”

“Where do you get your wood?” Chang wanted to know.

“What?”

“Where do you get the wood you use?”

“Stuku the lumber dealer,” Nutku replied, as though it were terribly obvious. “Except when we get some redwood from dealers I know up north, or sometimes we get lucky and a redwood log washes up on the beach. But we’re talking pine right now, okay? So what I’ve got my boys doing is, they’re splitting these logs up into planks. Show one for the spirit, Sulup.”

One of the kids held up a plank that had been split off, rough and splintery, about an inch thick. He grinned at the camera. “Remember me, spirit! My name is Sulupiauset and my father’s a rich man and I make the best canoes anywhere!”

“And you get tar detail, too, smart mouth,” growled Nutku. “Pay no attention to these brats, spirit. Anyway, once the pine’s all cut into planks, we adze them down until they’re only about so thick.” He measured a three-quarter-inch space between his index finger and thumb.

“What are they using, there?” Jomo asked, moving in for a close-up. The boys gladly stopped working to turn to the lead camera and display their adzes, the various flint and obsidian blades in handles made of deer antler.

“Damned expensive tools, but their parents can afford the best. It’s an investment, anyway,” Nutku explained. “That black rock’s imported all the way from the desert on the other side of Kuyam. Back to work, kids.”

“Don’t you find the flint lasts better?” I asked, surprised. My tribe had always preferred it. The camera wobbled over to focus on me for a moment—the heads of the two other little figures followed suit, turning silently—then swung back to the workers. Nutku stepped out of camera range and told me sotto voce, “Of course it does, but the kids love the way the black stuff looks, right? And it
is
sharp.”

Chang meanwhile had become fascinated with the sight of the wood curling back from the planks—it looked so easy—and had taken up an adze himself to try a few tentative scrapes. The boys put their tools down and stood around to watch his efforts, very respectful. Jomo went for another close-up. After a couple of minutes Jomo set down his camera and reached for an adze himself.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he told Chang. The boys snickered and nudged one another.

“I don’t think so,” Chang replied huffily. Nutku turned and saw what was happening.

“What do you think you’re doing, watching a race?” he shouted at the apprentices. “Get back to work! I want those planks cut and sanded by dinnertime!” He strode back and crouched down in front of the holocamera, which was still recording. “Can you still see me, little spirit? Okay, the next thing we do is cut the planks in the pattern for a canoe and drill the holes so the planks can be sewn and tarred together.”

Jomo and Chang were still splintering away at their respective planks, so I went over and picked up the holocamera. “So, uh, what do you use for sanding? Sharkskin?” I inquired.