Mendoza in Hollywood (2 page)

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
.

Y
OU 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?

A
NY 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 other 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.

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.

Receiving
, someone responded.

Botanist Mendoza reporting in
.

Okay. You see the smoke? Follow it in
.

And in another minute I’d come around the edge of a rockslide, and there it was, back under some oak trees, a long low adobe building and stable thatched with tules. A couple of cowhides had been stitched end to end and strung up in the trees like a tarpaulin, and under this nominal shelter an immortal crouched, attempting to build up a small fire with what looked like fairly damp wood. Arranged on the ground beside him were a blue graniteware coffeepot and a couple of skillets. The idea of grilled beef and frijoles drew me like a magnet.