Mendoza in Hollywood (20 page)

Mendoza, for God’s sake! Don’t go with him!

I turned my head slowly to Einar. He was looking confused. He met my eyes and shrugged. I looked back at Lewis, shaking my head and holding out my hands. Were those tears in his eyes? He was mouthing
no
over and over, both palms pressed flat against the glass as if trying to push it in. The yellow gas was almost opaque now. I reached out my hand in slow motion and set it on the window, palm to palm with him through the glass, though I could no longer see his face. Then the transcendence came, and it was a lovely thing, pleasurable even with the feeling of infinite violence being done to one, as if you were picked up and thrown into the void forever, or flying . . .

Then there was a strong wind blowing the fog away, and I stumbled and fell to my knees, choking. I was groping in red sand, trying to rise in a thicket of sagebrush and spurge laurel. There were the horses, flailing and struggling, and there was Einar, doubled up on hands and knees, gasping out yellow smoke.

I scanned blearily. No houses, no deadly city on the plain. We were on the ridge above Laurel Canyon, in the same space we’d occupied 134 years earlier. Later? Whatever. I sank down as Einar was doing and panted, clearing my lungs. Neither one of us said anything for a few minutes. Even the horses gave up and lay still while their mortal nervous systems recovered.

Finally Einar turned over and sat up, resting his head in his hands.

“What was up with that guy?” he asked. “Why didn’t he want you to go with me?”

“No idea.” I shook my head. “We used to be good friends, back before I came to California. I haven’t seen him in ages.”

I couldn’t remember ever having seen Lewis that upset, even when his lady friends dumped him, as sometimes happened. He was one of those genuinely nice guys who somehow always wind up alone. I was always alone, myself. It had been what made us friends.

Einar and I both shrugged.

Once the horses were able to get up, we left that place, walking and leading them, because the trail down from the ridge was steep and tricky. Halfway back, my horse began to cough and shudder, then abruptly fell. Blood gushed from its wide nostrils as it gave one last convulsive twitch. The stress of the time journey, I guess. Einar sank down on his knees and cried.

It was hours before we stumbled into our own canyon, to the welcome smell of beef being grilled over a mesquite fire. There was blessed silence: no cars, no phantoms, only the oak trees and chaparral and one or two stars winking in the twilight sky. Porfirio was crouched over the fire, turning the steaks. He looked up as we approached.

“There you are. What happened to the mare?”

“She had an accident,” said Einar sullenly, and led his mount away to the stable.

Porfirio winced, and I thought he was recalculating his operating budget. He looked at me. “And you? Any problems?”

“Not really,” I said. Well, we’d come home in one piece, hadn’t we? I sank down beside the fire.

Porfirio still stood, considering me for a long moment. “Mendoza,” he said, “I’m a security tech. I can tell when people are lying.”

I glared at him, señors, feeling very Spanish. How dare he say I was lying? Even if I was. “All right, something happened,” I admitted, pulling off the stupid high-tech armor that hadn’t worked. He swore. I snapped at him, “I don’t know why you bothered to make us carry all this garbage. I suppose you had some communiqué from the Company about what was going to happen today? Did everybody but
me
know? One of those rules you’re not supposed to break, about telling people what’s in their future?”

“Something like that,” Porfirio said.

“Why did you ask me, then, if you knew?”

“Because they didn’t tell me much,” he said bitterly. “They never do. Never enough to be of any use.”

“That figures.” I sighed and slumped forward. I was so tired. I
was about to tell him about the accident when he took my breath away by asking:

“How long have you been a Crome generator?”

I began to shake. “I’m not! There was just one time, when I was young—only that once. My case officer thought—he said it was probably nothing. Never since then, I swear!”

“Mendoza,” he said, “since you’ve been here, not one week has gone by that there hasn’t been an incident. I’ve looked out and seen the blue light pouring through the cracks in the boards, as if you had lightning in there with you. You didn’t know? You slept through it every time? What’s been happening to you?”

I shook my head. How could I tell him, when I didn’t know myself? Bad dreams? I debated telling him about my dead lover who had risen from his grave to follow me across three centuries, an ocean, and a continent to make my life intolerable in this already intolerable place. What I said instead was, “I appear to be malfunctioning.”

We regarded each other in silence.

“Are you going to ship me out and send for a replacement botanist?” I asked. That was according to regulations. Ironic, isn’t it, seniors? I was holding my breath, petrified at the thought that my field career was over. If only he
had
shipped me out.

Porfirio shook his head grimly. “I don’t do that to my people. You’ve done a lot of good work, Mendoza. If you throw enough Crome to read by, so what? It doesn’t seem to be hurting anybody but you. I know you have some bad memories, but you never let them interfere with your work. Look . . .the rules are different down here. Don’t give me a reason to have you replaced, and I won’t. Okay? But don’t ever lie to me, because I’ll know. So what happened today?”

I told him, as he took the steaks off the fire with greatest care and arranged them on an iron platter. He listened without a word, going about the business of setting out the evening meal as though I were telling him the plot of a film I’d seen. At last I finished, and he handed me a plate of supper and sat down across from me as I ate.

“Mendoza,” he said finally, “watch your back.”

That was all he’d say on the subject.

Obviously he had an idea of what was coming. And on that day in 1996, Lewis
knew
, señors, what would happen, knew that I’d sit before you in this place now, telling you this story. He was trying to warn me. It was kind of him, though it did no good in the end, and I hope it didn’t get him into trouble. This just proves once again the only unbreakable law I know: that history cannot be changed.

T
HE SUMMER WORE ON
; it grew hotter and browner and dustier, and then in the evenings the wind began to change. Big purple rifts of fog would come blowing in from the coast. In the brown canyons the big leaves of sycamores began to drift down, smelling spicy and sweet when one crunched through them. Deer began to descend from the brown hills, looking around hopefully for garden produce, which they didn’t find; but we did get venison for a change. The moon got very big, very silver, and the coyotes rejoiced.

Porfirio began to stock up our supplies for the winter. Not that there was ever any snow, and we knew, as the mortals didn’t, that this year there wouldn’t even be winter rains to flood out the roads. But it was a safe bet that some disaster or other was going to strike, this being southern California, so it was just as well to be prepared.

So Einar was sent out time and again, to Los Angeles with lowing longhorns for Dr. Zeus, and he came back with wagonload after wagonload of crates, barrels, and sacks. Porfirio and Einar would haul them into the storeroom, where Juan Bautista and I (and Erich and Marie) would uncrate stuff and check it against the order list. Dozens of sacks of pink beans, dozens more of masa, enough coffee beans to wake the dead, jars of pickles and preserves, cones of brown sugar, boxes of salt . . . and seven cases of canned sardines.

“Jesus, why’d he order all the sardines?” I said, staring astonished into an opened crate. “They’re not even on his list. Hey, Porfirio?” Juan Bautista got a funny look on his face and put up his hands to shush me, but Porfirio had already backed in, carrying one end of a barrel.

“What?” he grunted, backing in the rest of the way so Einar could ease his end down.

“Never mind, I figured it out,” I said, but he turned frowning and noticed the funny-looking cans in the opened crate.

“What the hell are those?” He picked up one of the cans. “These are sardines! I didn’t order these. None of you guys even like them.”

“I like them,” said Juan Bautista in a doomed voice.

There was a frozen moment, which unfortunately was broken by Marie Dressier limping across the room and looking up at Juan Bautista expectantly.

Porfirio blew his top, and then blew it louder when he found out that that opened case was one of seven, but I really thought the roof was going to come off the adobe when he discovered that Juan Bautista had added them to the station’s order list, which meant that they’d been paid for out of the station’s operating budget.

“Didn’t I order the damn bird a sack of pelican chow?” shouted Porfirio.

Juan Bautista hung his head. “She’s too old for it. It makes her droppings runny.”

I left then and at some speed, not wishing to be there when Porfirio came down off the ceiling. Einar was already gone.

I was up in my favorite retreat by the creek, gloomily contemplating my future, when Juan Bautista came wandering along the creek bed half an hour later. Erich was perching on him and Marie was cradled in his arms. He was sniffling a little.

I cleared my throat, so he wouldn’t think he was alone and go into some soliloquy of teenage despair.

“Oh,” he said. “Hi.” He came over and sat down beside me. I edged away slightly, not caring to be that close to Marie’s beak.
She had a wicked kind of hook on the end of it, like a mandarin’s thumbnail.

“Is Porfirio through screaming?”

“I guess so,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t have ordered seven cases. And it was wrong not to tell him about adding to his order. But what am I supposed to do? She’s old. She’s an endangered species. Fish is what she’s supposed to eat. We can’t take any more out of the creek, or the breeding population will go below sustainable levels.
He
ought to try that lousy pelican chow, see how
he
likes it.”

This implied that Juan Bautista had sampled it himself, which I didn’t want to think about. “Well, don’t worry,” I said. “If Imarte peddles her papayas vigorously enough, she’ll earn back the budget deficit.” But he wasn’t amused, he was sunk in the self-righteous bitterness that only the very young can feel.

“Darned grandfather,” he muttered.

We sat there a moment in silence. “What,” I asked cautiously, “was that supposed to mean?”

“It was my grandfather got me into this.”

“You mean, a real grandfather? Your mortal father’s father?”

He nodded. After a moment, he drew a deep breath and began.

“We lived on one of the islands. I don’t even know which one, San Miguel or Santa Rosa. All our people had left to go live at the mission, but Grandfather took us back—my father and mother, I mean. He wouldn’t leave his holy place. He was the . . . I guess he was the priest. The word for it sounded like
sishwin
. Anyhow, his god told him he wasn’t supposed to leave the island, so he had to go back. That meant my father had to go back, too, because he was supposed to be the sishwin after Grandfather died, and my mother went too, because she was going to have me. They went by canoe. My mother was sick the whole way. I remember she used to talk about it.

“She and my father had a lot of fights. I was born over there, and there weren’t any medicine women to help when I was born, just my father, and she was always talking about that. She wanted to go back to the mission, she didn’t mind being a Christian, and she talked
about that a lot too. And she was always afraid I would fall off a cliff into the sea.

“My father didn’t want to be there either. When they were speaking to each other, he’d tell her how mad he was at my grandfather, how our old god was fake nowadays and Grandfather was just being stubborn about staying on the island. I remember he said he could never be a sishwin, because even if the old god cared, Grandfather would never think my father was good enough.

“But they never said anything when Grandfather came into the house. They were scared of him. He was scary-looking. He looked at Daddy like he was dirt, and at Mommy the same way.

“He liked me. He used to take me out to his holy place. There was a big wooden statue of the god there with the sun and the moon on his head. There were big black ravens, and I guess they were bigger than the ones here on the mainland, because I’ve never seen them that big since I came back. Grandfather used to show me how to feed them. Some were tame and would hop on my hand and let me scratch their necks. Some could talk. I used to think that was magic, because back then I didn’t know how smart the
corvidae
are.

“Grandfather told me a lot of stuff about how I belonged to his god, and how if Mommy and Daddy were bad weak people,
I
wasn’t, and I was going to be a powerful sishwin just like him, and someday our god was going to send the bears to get all the bad weak people who stopped paying attention to him.