The Graveyard Game (2 page)

No, because you couldn’t violate the laws of temporal physics. You couldn’t change history. He knew that perfectly well and yet found himself running to the chamber as the gas boiled up around her, beating on the window with his fists.

“Mendoza!” he shouted. “Mendoza, for God’s sake! Don’t go with him!”

She stared, taken aback, and then turned her wondering face to her companion. Lewis realized she thought he meant the other immortal, and cried, “No!”

She looked back at him and shook her head, shrugging.

“No, no!” Lewis shouted, and he could feel tears welling in his eyes as he pressed his hands against the glass, to push across time by main force. Futile. She was vanishing from his sight even now, as the yellow gas obscured everything.

Out of the clouds, her hand emerged for a moment. She set it against the window, palm to palm with his flattened hand, a gesture he would have died for once, rendered less personal by the thickness of the glass.

Then she was gone, he had lost her again, and he staggered back from the chamber and became aware that Maire was standing beside him. He turned and looked into her amazed eyes, struggled to compose himself.

“Er—what’s going on?” he inquired, in the coolest voice he could summon.

“You tell me!” was Maire’s reply.

In the end, though, she had to explain first. What he had seen was a temporal anomaly—nothing the Company couldn’t handle. In fact Maire had received advance warning this morning from Future HQ. It was all listed in the Temporal Concordance. Everyone knew that weird things happened at the Mount Olympus HQ anyway, overlooking as it did Laurel Canyon’s notorious Lookout Mountain Drive. It had been built to monitor that very location, actually.

This didn’t do a lot to clear up Lewis’s confusion. Temporal Concordance or not, it was still supposed to be impossible for anybody in the past to jump
forward
through time. When he mentioned this, Maire glanced at the techs and drew him aside.

“She was your friend, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Lewis. “A—a coworker. We were close.”

Maire said in a low voice:

“Then you knew she was a Crome generator.”

Lewis hadn’t known. He was unable to hide his shock. Watching his face go pale, Maire lowered her voice even more.

“Lewis, I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s true. Something latent that wasn’t caught when she was recruited, apparently. You know what those people are; she might have warped the field any one of a dozen ways. What can I tell you? The impossible happens, sometimes.”

He nodded, silent. Maire looked him up and down and pursed her lips.

“Under the circumstances, you see why there wasn’t anything you could have done to help her,” she said, in a tone that was gentle but suggested he’d better get a grip on himself now.

Lewis gulped and nodded.

Nothing more was said that night, and he thought the matter would slip by without further discussion. But next morning at breakfast, Maire said, “You’re still upset. I can tell.”

“I guess I made a fool of myself,” Lewis replied, sipping his coffee. “She was a good friend.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Lewis,” she told him, stirring sugar into her cup. The tech who was on his hands and knees scrubbing a large stain off the carpet looked up to glare at her. She glared back and slowly lifted her coffee, drinking it in elaborate enjoyment. “I might have done the same thing in your shoes. Besides, you’re a valued Company operative.”

“That’s nice to know,” said Lewis mildly, but he felt the hair stand on the back of his neck. He modified the slight tremor into a sad shake of his head. “Poor Mendoza. But, after all, a Crome generator! At least the rumors make sense now.”

“Yes,” Maire agreed. “Cream?”

“Thank you.” Lewis held out his cup. The tech made a disgusted noise. He was a relatively young immortal, having traveled to 1996 from the year 2332 and not liking the past at all. He didn’t care for decadent old immortals who indulged in disgusting controlled-substance abuse either. Coffee, cream, and chocolate were all illegal in his era. More: they were immoral.

“Unfortunate, but the sooner we put it behind us the better,” Maire continued. She rose and wandered over to the picture window, which looked out across Laurel Canyon. It was a hazy morning in midsummer, with the sky a delicate yellow shading to blue at the zenith. The yellow was from internal combustion engines. The air burned, acrid on one’s palate, and was full of the wailing of sirens and the thudding beat of helicopter blades. Maire was fifteen thousand years old, but the late twentieth century didn’t bother her much; she’d seen worse. Besides, this was Hollywood.

Behind her, Lewis drained his coffee and set down his saucer and cup. “Sound advice,” he said. “Well, I’d better hit the road. I’m going up to San Francisco today. That fellow with the Marion Davies correspondence has settled on a price at last.”

“No, really?” Maire grinned. “I suppose you’ll pay a little visit to . . .” She dropped her eyes to the tech, who was still scrubbing away, and looked back up at Lewis.
Ghirardelli’s?
she transmitted on a private channel.

Lewis stood and took her hand.
Shall I bring you back a box of little Theobromos cable cars?
he transmitted back.

Her smile widened, showing a lot of beautiful and very white teeth. She squeezed his hand. She was a strong woman.
You’re a dear
.

“To Fisherman’s Wharf? Certainly. Shall I bring you back a loaf of sourdough bread?” Lewis asked.

“You’re a dear! Boudin’s, please.” She glanced down at the tech mischievously. “I wonder if they’ll still pack up those boiled crabs in ice chests for you.”

The tech looked horrified.

“I’ll find out.” Lewis slipped his hand free and took his briefcase and keys. “Ciao, then. If I have to stay over, I’ll give you a call.”

“Oh, stay over,” Maire ordered, waving him to the door. “Too long a drive to make twice in one day. Besides, you could use a little vacation. Get this unfortunate incident out of your mind.”

“Oh, that,” said Lewis, as though he’d forgotten already. “Yes, well, I imagine a ride on a cable car will lighten my spirits.”

He wasn’t referring to the popular tourist transit.
Theobroma cacao
has a unique effect on the nervous systems of immortals. Make chuckled at his joke. The tech looked over his shoulder in a surly kind of way as Lewis stepped out into the heat and light of a Southern California morning.

He walked once around his car to inspect it for vandalism. When this Company HQ had been built, thirty years earlier, the gated community in which it was situated was regularly patrolled, to say nothing of being perched so far up on such a steep hill as to deter most criminals. Times had changed.

Sooner or later, they always did.

Satisfied that his leased transport was safe for operation, Lewis got in. Carefully he fastened his seatbelt and put on his sunglasses; carefully he backed out onto Zeus Drive and headed over the top of the hill to the less crowded exit from Mount Olympus. As he descended, he had a brief view of the city that stretched to the sea. Beyond, it had once been possible to see Catalina Island. The island was still there, but the smog hid it. Only once in a great while, when atmospheric conditions were just right, could it be glimpsed.

He proceeded down to Hollywood Boulevard and headed north through Cahuenga Pass, where he got on the Hollywood Freeway. He bore east to Interstate 5. After Mission San Fernando he followed the old stagecoach road, now a multilane highway into the mountains. It took him north, under arches restored since the last earthquake.

Long high miles brought him to Tejon Ranch, where the road dropped like a narrow sawmill flume between towering mountains preposterously out of scale. At the top, the San Joaquin Valley hung before his eyes like a curtain, and far down and away the tiny road raced across it, straight as an arrow.

He shivered, remembering how bad the grim old Ridge Route had been, especially in the season of flash floods, or forest fires, or blizzards, or summer heat so extreme, it made automobile tires explode. The modern road had only the drawback of the San Andreas Fault, which lay directly beneath it.

But there was no earthquake scheduled today, so as he shot down onto the plain through a miasma of burning brakes he muttered a little prayer of thanks to Apollo, in whom he did not particularly believe, but one really ought to thank
somebody
for getting safely down that pass.

For the next four hours the view was the same: the lion-yellow Diablo Range on his left, flat fields on his right, stretching across the floor of the valley to the Sierra Nevadas, the eastern wall of the world. Straight ahead lay the highway, shimmering in the heat. Memory rose like a ghost from the bright, silent monotony.

He did not want to remember himself striding along the front walk of Botany Residential with a bouquet of red roses, and he was even whistling, for God’s sake, he was that happy. Could anything have been more of a cliché? Right in through the lobby, past all the mortal servants and the Botany staff leaving for early dinners, and he didn’t care who saw him. He waited at the elevator, still whistling. He might as well have had a neon sign on his forehead:
I AM A HAPPY MAN
.

The elevator doors opened, and there stood Botanist Mendoza, ice bucket in hand. She smiled at him, briefly. She didn’t smile at many people, but once at a party he’d been casually kind to her. It hadn’t amounted to much; he’d seen her alone at a table, miserably unhappy, and brought her a handful of cocktail napkins to dry her eyes. Could he help? No, she explained with brittle dignity: it was only that she’d once loved a mortal man, and he’d been dead now for forty years, and she hadn’t realized it had been that long until something at the party reminded her. She didn’t really want company, but Lewis stayed long enough to be sure she was all right.

He smiled and nodded at her now, and she nodded back. They stepped past each other, she to the ice machine and he to ascend into realms of delight. He thought.

As it turned out, he got ice too.

Ten minutes later he was standing outside the elevator on the fifth floor of Botany Residential, in the act of tossing the roses into
the trash chute, when the door opened and Mendoza was standing there again, witness to his bitter gesture. Her eyes widened. He drew himself up, summoning what shreds of self-respect he had left, and adjusted his cuffs.

“Hello, Mendoza,” he said.

“Oh, Lewis. I’m sorry,” she said.

She took him down the hall to her apartment, and he didn’t mean to pour out his woes, but he did, and she listened.

They stayed there for hours, until he talked it all out, and then it seemed like a good idea for them to sneak down to the bar in the lobby and go on talking over drinks. For some reason she decided to let him past the wall of sarcasm with which she kept the rest of the world at bay. It couldn’t have been his little moment of chivalry with the cocktail napkins. Lewis had been kind to a lot of women. But, laughing with her in that cramped little bar, he spent the best evening he’d had in a long time. And they were seen.

“You went out with the Ice Witch?” hooted Eliakim from Archives.
“Mendoza?
Botanist Mendoza? You took a flamethrower instead of a bottle or something?”

“None of your business,” Lewis said. “But it might interest you to know that she’s a perfectly delightful woman.”

“This is the redhead we’re talking about, right?” Junius from Catering leaned over the back of his chair, eyes wide with disbelief. “The workaholic? The one who isn’t interested in
anybody?
I tried to kiss her once at a Solstice party, and I thought I’d have to get a skin graft for the frostbite!” He looked at Lewis with a certain awe that Lewis found flattering.

He merely shrugged. “It doesn’t bear discussion.”

Of course they promptly went out and told most of New World One, and for about two weeks rumors flew. He went to Mendoza to apologize.

“To hell with them,” she said philosophically. “Us a couple? Are they nuts? What a bunch of nasty little academic gossips, and what overblown imaginations.”

“I just wanted you to understand that none of it came from me,” he said, not that pleased.

“I know,” she replied, looking at him with a fondness that made his heart skip a beat. “You’re a good man, Lewis. You’re the nicest immortal I’ve ever known.”

She kissed him, then, on the cheek, and tousled his hair.

They never became lovers, but she was affectionate with him in a way she never was with anyone else. He accepted that. They became great friends. When he was transferred to England, he found he missed her terribly. When he learned what had happened to her, years later in Los Angeles, he was sick at heart.

H
E GAVE A SIGH OF RELIEF
when at last he turned west through the Altamont Pass, fighting the wind until he got through to the East Bay cities, leaving the golden desolation well behind him.

Chrome and glass, sea air, the Oakland Bay Bridge with its section that had fallen out during the last big earthquake—all nicely replaced now, millions of busy commuters never gave it so much as a thought anymore, but Lewis’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel until he had crossed into the city.

He made his way along the diagonal of Columbus, where he turned up a steep and narrow street and called upon a man in a dark rear apartment. A price was named and met; several bundles of cash were removed from Lewis’s leather briefcase, to be replaced by a certain packet of letters. Lewis got back into his car and checked his internal chronometer.

Three hours ahead of schedule.

He started the car and took it up the long spiral to Coit Tower, apologizing to the transmission. There he parked and walked to the edge of the terrace, to all appearances a young executive taking an afternoon off to admire the spectacular view.

He removed his sunglasses and folded them away in his breast pocket. He looked out across the bay at Marin County. Somewhere over there . . . ? He transmitted a tentative inquiry. It was returned immediately, from the depths of the city at his feet: