The Graveyard Game (19 page)

Is that what you’ve been doing?
Suleyman glanced at him, grinning.
Waiting for storms? Aie! How long has it taken you to get even this far? Pay attention, now, little man, and learn something
.

He sent the Moke charging recklessly up the nearest slope, swerving over the most rutted part of the road deliberately, at a decidedly unsafe speed. Joseph yelped and held on; but all that happened was that at the crest of the hill the Moke suddenly froze in its tracks.

“Shit.” Suleyman thumped the steering wheel. “The power cell’s knocked loose again. Give me a hand, here.” He swung open the driver’s side door and hopped out, pulling a tool kit from under the seat. Joseph got out and came around the fender uncertainly, meeting him in front of the car.

“Here,” Suleyman said, thrusting the tool kit at him. “Open that and get me out a C-rod spanner.”

Joseph obeyed and looked on as Suleyman lifted the hood of the car and peered in, making a disgusted sound. “Look at that. I tell that kid and I tell him, bungee cord’s no good. Replace the hold-down clamp, I tell him. Does he listen? Kids!”

The power cell had indeed jumped half out of its little shaped space, and one connection had jostled loose. Suleyman tugged at his gold earring in annoyance. Then he reached out and grasped the connection with one hand, while reaching for the spanner with the other. In the second that his hand touched the spanner that Joseph still held out to him, there was a brief flash and click.

“And no more datafeed for the next six hours,” Suleyman announced.

“Wow,” Joseph said. “That’s brilliant. I never thought a simple car power cell would have enough charge to blow out the link!”

“They don’t.” Suleyman tugged his earring again. “But this does.”

Joseph stared openmouthed. “My God. Where did you get that?”

“Latif designed it. Clever child, wouldn’t you say? We used to have a few virtual reality games, back when they first came out. Some of them had some interesting glitches.”

Joseph said something profane in a long-dead language. “Do you know how many years it’s taken me to make one of those? And it’s twice that size!”

Suleyman just smiled and reconnected the power cell. They got back in the car and drove on.

“Now, you understand,” Suleyman resumed, “that I can’t trust you.”

Joseph sighed.

“We’ve known each other a long time, and I mean it as a compliment when I say you’re the most Company man I’ve ever seen. You’re also a lying little bastard when you need to be. That’s a good thing, given your line of work. Unfortunately, I think you lie to yourself, too.

“If you’re working for the Company and reporting on what I’m doing—well, it isn’t as though I haven’t tried to tell them. I think the Company knows about Budu’s group, and they’re tolerating him because the Company can benefit from his work without getting its own hands dirty.” Suleyman pulled up before the necropolis and switched
off the engine. “However, the devil will call for payment one of these days.”

They got out and trudged toward the gleaming white terraces. The heat was astonishing, making the horizon dance and waver in currents of boiling air.

“The other possibility is that you’re here from Budu himself,” Suleyman went on composedly. “You’ve made it clear you still think of him as a hero. You wouldn’t feel that way if you walked with me through a children’s hospital in Uganda, though, unless you’ve changed a lot from the days when you and I worked together. And we immortals don’t change. It’s one of the things that makes us immortals.”

“My point exactly,” said Joseph. “Budu wouldn’t change either, not to the point where he’d orchestrate something like this.”

“Maybe. Anyway—if you
are
here from your old Enforcer, if you’re leading me into a trap, disabling me won’t help you. Quite apart from the fact that little Latif would be very, very annoyed with you, and he knows where you live, by the way, I’ve taken a lot of pains to see that my work will go on without me.”

“I work alone, myself,” Joseph said. “I wish I had the kind of resources you have.”

“I made some good investments when Dr. Zeus started permitting us private incomes,” Suleyman conceded. “Latif, too. And it helps, of course, to have advance knowledge of the market.”

“How did you manage that?” Joseph asked, as they made their way up a long mud-brick stair between walls so white, their shadows were iridescent blue, under a sky blue as blue tile. “You’d have to get a look at the Temporal Concordance to get information like that, and everybody knows we’re not allowed to see that stuff.”

“Nor do we,” Suleyman said imperturbably. “If we could get a look at the Temporal Concordance past the present calendar date, we’d be all omnipotent as gods. Latif just analyzes the Company investments, and we go with his projections. I said he’s a clever child. Strong, too. I recruited him out of a slave ship, you know. Watched
him, down there in the hold, beside his dying mother. Frightened little baby, but he was angry. His anger made him strong. We’re all of us angry when we come into this immortal life; keeps us motivated to fight for humanity against evil.

“The question is, how long can we fight without coming to see humanity itself as the source of evil?” Suleyman stopped on the stair, turning to Joseph. “Of course, we’ve been given immortal wisdom, with immortal strength, to avoid such a pitfall.”

“Well, there’s that old saw of Nietzsche’s about becoming a dragon yourself if you fight dragons too long,” Joseph said, drinking from the thermos again. “I still don’t think Budu’s guilty. And I haven’t led you into an ambush. In fact, I’m going to show you something really useful, to somebody with the ability to use it.” He climbed again, scanning as he went, until he abruptly stepped off to the left into one of the white terraces.

He paced along a short distance, Suleyman following closely, and stopped at one particular tomb midway along the line.

“Ah.” Suleyman looked close. “This door is in good repair. Very unusual.”

“Isn’t it?” Joseph ran his hand down the frame. He found what he was searching for, what any operative with Facilitator clearance could have found, if he knew it was there. The door clicked and swung inward.

There were several dead persons in the tomb, in varying degrees of becoming dust. The front and side walls of the tomb were of mud brick; the back wall was the hillside itself, an irregular rock outcropping. Joseph pointed at it silently, and Suleyman nodded.

“Clever,” he remarked. Had any one of the mortal occupants of the tomb come to life again for a moment, he would have been astounded to watch as Joseph and Suleyman walked toward the rock wall and through it, vanishing into a gloom deeper than even a corpse would be comfortable with.

But Joseph and Suleyman, able to see by infrared, clearly saw the smooth and sloping walls of the tunnel they traveled.

It was just like the tunnel in Yorkshire had been, to look at; had the same faint pleasant scent, too. Presently they emerged into another vast and vaulted room, blue-lit from the rows of regeneration tanks, each with its floating occupant.

“This is some kind of repair facility,” said Suleyman, frowning.

“You’d think so, but look at these guys.” Joseph went close. “See! Here’s your proof.
These
were the old Enforcers.”

Suleyman followed him reluctantly, staring up at the vaults. His eyes widened.

“Name of the Merciful,” he said quietly.

“What else do you do with an immortal you don’t want anymore? You can’t kill them,” said Joseph. “I guess you could blast them into space, but they might find a way back, and then—”

Suleyman looked up at a chalkboard on the wall. There, in Latin, were the words:

ABDIEL HAS DONE HIS APPOINTED WORK HERE
6 MARCH 2143–23 MARCH 2143

He looked back at Joseph’s anguished face. “All right,” he said. “I bear witness.”

Joseph began to hurry back and forth among the vaults, looking up at the occupant of each one, and Suleyman followed him.

“You’re not looking for your child,” Suleyman realized. “You’re looking for Budu.”

Joseph nodded. “I think they must have caught him at last. I’m betting he’s in one of these vaults. If I can find him, and wake him up—I pity whoever spread all those viruses from that supply tunnel.” He skidded to a stop in front of a vault where a male Preserver floated. “Kalugin might be here, too. Would you recognize him if we found him?”

“I would,” Suleyman replied grimly, standing beside Joseph. “I performed his marriage ceremony.”

“They got
married?
He and Nan? Two immortals?”

“It happens,” said Suleyman.

“Amazing.” Joseph turned a corner and started working his way along a new row of vaults. “So I guess we’re wondering just exactly what Donal saw in 1906? How did the Company catch up with Budu? Why did Budu grab Donal? It was right before the big earthquake. Was Budu maybe doing some recruiting?”

“Unlikely,” Suleyman said. “Unless his people have a way of performing the immortality process themselves, and if they’d managed to infiltrate the Company far enough to get
that
secret, they wouldn’t have needed to send their own leader into a salvage zone to steal one mortal child.”

“I guess so,” Joseph said. “Donal said Budu and Victor were fighting, didn’t he? Victor had blood on his shirt. Can you imagine what it would be like fighting with an Enforcer? Why wasn’t Victor smashed like a bug?”

Suleyman nodded in agreement, stopping in front of one vault to peer at someone he thought he recognized. After a moment he moved on. “Donal said that Victor spat on Budu. That suggests the use of some kind of toxin.”

“Poison? But
no
poison works on us. And if the Company finally found one, why wouldn’t they use it to kill off all these Enforcers instead of keeping them here?”

“I don’t know.” Suleyman looked up at an olive-skinned girl with a sweet-sad face. “Unless it only disabled the old monster.”

“Here’s another scenario. What if Budu did start some group to try to change Company policy? And what if his people double-crossed him, and somebody else has been running the cabal since 1906? Have your people found any trace of Budu in the last two hundred years?”

After a long moment Suleyman said, “As a matter of fact, no. Not since the end of the nineteenth century. Plenty of evidence of his group, though.”

“There,” Joseph said. “There’s your answer.”

“It’s not an answer, little man. It’s many, many more questions.”

“You know who we have to talk to now, of course.”

“Victor.” Suleyman came to the last row of vaults and turned, starting back.

“And Victor’s either on the side of the Company or he’s one of the bad guys.” Joseph strode to keep up. “If he’s still Company, he may be the problem solver who finally caught up with Budu.”

“A dangerous man to talk to, in either case.”

“I liked Victor,” said Joseph plaintively. “The guy did me a favor once, when he was stationed at New World One.”

“He’s always been the most pleasant and courteous of guests, when he stops in to visit Nan,” Suleyman said.

“They’re old friends?”

“So it seems.”

“Would she talk to him? Can she find anything out for us?”

Suleyman looked down at him as they walked. “What are the chances that any of this will help her learn what happened to Kalugin?”

“I can promise to look for him,” said Joseph. “I already have a shopping list of missing operatives.”

“Then she’ll talk to Victor.”

They emerged from the tomb unseen. A plume of dust rose up behind them as they headed back for the city. Joseph sagged in his seat, watching the distant minarets against the sky.

“This is really depressing. At least I’m starting to get an idea of what will happen in 2355. There’s the Company, and then there’s this antihumanity cabal within the Company, and then there are people like you and me who are just trying to do their jobs. I can think of a lot of ways the Silence might fall.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Suleyman said.

“And the Company has it coming. Will we all wind up in those bunkers, or wearing those clock emblems? It’s just the kind of thing I can see the twenty-fourth-century investors ordering. We make them nervous.”

“I don’t blame them for being nervous. It’s sad . . . Now and then,
to obtain something the Company wanted, I’ve had to impersonate supernatural creatures.”

“Me too.”

“I’ve played a djinn, once or twice. There’s some interesting folklore about djinns. The story goes that Allah made men from clay, but the djinns he made from subtle fire. In his wisdom Allah gave them tremendous power, but gave mankind chains to bind that power, lest the djinns prey on them. So djinns were slaves to wise men and served their purposes. King Solomon commanded whole armies of them.”

“I’ve heard that too.”

“The story goes on to say that the djinns must continue as faithful slaves until Judgment Day. Then, when the first blast of the trumpet sounds, they all die, since they have no souls with which to enter Paradise.”

“Talk about raw deals.” Joseph grinned bitterly.

“Who argues with the Almighty?” Suleyman made a gesture with his hand as though flicking away a speck of dust. “No point. Maybe the djinns don’t mind. Maybe they’re glad to rest at last. Don’t forget that Allah is all-merciful and utterly just. Unlike the mortal masters who created us.”

“Now I’m
really
depressed,” muttered Joseph.

The city grew nearer. After a while Joseph asked, “So. If I wanted to get a message to you without going through Company channels, how would I do that?”

Suleyman chuckled. “You do count on trust. I’ll tell you, though. Look up a religious order calling themselves the Compassionates of Allah. If you’re in the right city, and you leave a message, it will filter back to me.”

T
HEY STROLLED TOGETHER
through the city, the immortal gentleman and lady.

He was a dapper white man with small precise features. His eyes were green as a cat’s, his hair and pointed beard red as fire. He wore a white suit of perfectly pressed, tropical-weight linen, rather retro in its cut, and a wide-brimmed hat against the sun. Formal as his appearance was, there was a sense of deliberate parody, a hint of the bizarre. Something too much like an insect’s pincers in the way his oiled mustache swept up; something suggestive of a mime’s exaggeration in his walk. Despite the heat, he wore white gloves.