The Graveyard Game (28 page)

Will you let go of that?
You know damn well the Edward guy died, and the odds against Nature’s spitting out not two but
three
guys who look just like him—it’s absurd
.

Lewis gestured impatiently at the lobby full of Josephs playing backgammon.
Somehow it doesn’t seem as unlikely as it used to
.

Joseph looked around and went pale.
Oh, no. You don’t suppose there’s some weird little genetic pocket in England like there is here, do you? I never thought about that
.

Well, think about it now
.

All right. I’ll see what I can find out. But you have to drop this, Lewis! Mendoza was my recruit, after all. If I’m not obsessed with
this past the point of good sense, you shouldn’t be. What was she to you?

My dearest friend
, Lewis told him.
You should understand, after where we’ve been today. We don’t have families, we don’t have homes, we don’t even have nationalities. Nothing remains except us, and all we have is each other
.

Joseph was silent a moment.
Sometimes
, he replied.
Mostly, all we really have is ourselves, Lewis. Do you want to lose yourself? You spent ten years switched off once. Do you want that permanently?

There are worse things. Joseph, I’m tired of worrying about me! We live such miserable lives when we live for ourselves. When our work is over, what will I have? A nice little villa for one somewhere and an endless supply of reading matter?

Hey, you might meet somebody. It’s been known to happen
.

Never to me. And very seldom to any of the rest of us, as far as I can tell. Except Mendoza. She loved, and gave up everything she had for it. And then three thousand years in prison, Joseph!

I know
.

Don’t you see? When all this is over, I don’t really care if I’m relegated to a vault or rewarded with a villa in St. Tropez. What I want, with my whole heart, is to know that Mendoza’s story had a happy ending. That love triumphed, and bravery, against impossible odds. That you really saw them together there on Catalina Island
.

And if you get yourself arrested or worse, trying to make the story come out right? What does that leave for you, Lewis?

My honor
.

You are the most dangerous incurable romantic I have ever known
. Joseph spotted Chilon and waved. “We got you a room. Come in and sign for it,” he called.

“You would not believe how far I had to go before I found a parking space,” groused Chilon.

I
WENT WITH LEWIS
to Eurobase One. Father, you wouldn’t recognize it now! When I was little, when you led the troops out to battle and we kids watched you in breathless admiration, it was such a raw place: partly a twenty-fourth-century field camp with a limited budget, partly a Neolithic stockade, but one hundred percent military base, up in those rough cold Cévennes.

You should see it today. It’s a neoclassical Art Deco kind of fantasy, like a resort hotel might be if the Olympian gods built one. I always thought New World One was classy, but it had nothing on this place. Statues by Praxiteles and a lot of other classical masters, gorgeous landscaped gardens, Roman-style banquets with French culinary style, and a bathhouse like something dreamed up by William Randolph Hearst. Aegeus, the guy who’d been running it the last two millennia, had picked and chosen the best elements of the ages that rolled by the place.

There was a big staff of mortal servants to keep it all immaculate too, fairly surly French peasants. I heard rumors while I was there that this hadn’t always been the case, that Aegeus had got away with some exploitative stuff that would have made our mortal masters’ hair stand on end, if they’d known about it. But that, if it happened, was long in the past. I didn’t see a single togaed girl or boy slave while I was there.

Lewis was too nervous to enjoy it much. This was the place he’d been brought after the little stupid guys fried his circuits the first time, after all, the place where he spent ten years in a regeneration vat. More unpleasant memories seemed to be bubbling up to the surface of his consciousness, but he didn’t talk about them much. And though he tested out physically okay, with the damage to his hand all self-repaired, and though he got through his debriefing without arousing any suspicion (as far as I could tell), something was wrong.

He seemed to expect to see little freaks in white suits everywhere we went. In the sensational neoclassical gymnasium he thought he saw them lurking behind the homoerotic Greek bronzes. In the vast billiard parlor hung with lost Renoirs, jolly studies of boozing sports parties, he thought he spotted them under the tables. In the restaurant (Le Grenouille en Vin, a five-star place if ever there was one, the wine cellar alone went down five stories into the bedrock of the Cévennes), he jittered when a white-coated waiter stepped out a little too suddenly from behind a potted palm. Even the Robert Louis Stevenson shrine, with its holo statue of the writer, gave him pause. Maybe it was those huge starry eyes Stevenson had and the pipe-cleaner skinniness of his limbs. I knew the guy; even in the flesh, Louis looked too weird to be human.

But no phantoms seized the other Lewis. After about a week, his new posting orders and identification disk arrived, and the Company sent him on to a nice safe job in New Zealand, pilfering old documents from a university library. I saw him to his transport and then got the hell out of Euro One myself. I was tired of all the grandeur.

I sound pretty philistine, don’t I? But this was my first home, other than that rock shelter. I had some good memories of the old base, when I was young and as idealistic as I was ever going to be. The world was a swell place, and we were all safe, father, because of you and the rest of the big guys. Nobody thought you were monsters then.

But what did the old stockade have to do with this pink carpeting, indirect lighting, gilt and crystal? And where in this world would you fit, now? I’m not so sure I fit myself anymore.

I went back to my job in Spain, assistant to an archaeology team sponsored by the local rabbinical school, making sure they uncovered the miraculously preserved relics of a twelfth-century synagogue, digging up what Nahum and I buried so carefully all those years ago. I made plans to go back to California the next time I could get a few weeks off, but somehow the time just sped by. Was I scared to come look for you, father? Probably. I sure as hell didn’t feel like going to Catalina to see if Mendoza was shacked up there with another Englishman, no matter what I’d promised Lewis.

Things are safe enough in the American Community, at least, no worries about that. Everything is prim and proper and politically correct there now. They’ve outlawed alcohol again in most of the former states. Also meat, dairy products, tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate, refined sugar, recreational drugs of any kind, competitive sports, and most great literature. So has England, and so have most of the rest of what used to be called First World countries.

This means boom economies for those little nations, like the Celtic Federation, who thumb their noses at the others and continue to produce whiskey and lamb chops. Still, most of the world’s farmed acreage is given over to soybeans. Religion isn’t illegal but is increasingly being regarded with genteel horror by most people, except the Ephesians. Faith is so . . . psychologically incorrect.

Sex isn’t illegal, but there isn’t a lot of it going on these days. There’s talk about how it’s a distasteful animal urge, how it victimizes women and robs men of their primal power. It creates codependency. It presents a terrible risk of catching a communicable disease. Relationships of any kind, in fact, are probably a bad idea.

I don’t know exactly when this problem became widespread among the mortals, but I know that a lot of operatives of my acquaintance are climbing the walls or beginning to date other immortals,
which is sort of unusual. We’re not really comfortable in bed with each other as a rule, you know?

There is something beginning to be wrong with the mortals, a certain lack of interest and ability. The birth rate has plummeted all over the world. There are millions of inner children and fewer and fewer real ones. I remember seeing a holo feature on a certain famous amusement park: roller coasters and merry-go-rounds packed with forty-year-olds clutching the wonder of childhood to themselves like harpies, and not one little face in the crowd. Neverland has been invaded by the grownups, no children allowed. It’s better than having lots of real kids starving in gutters, at least.

Mind you, it isn’t like this everywhere. There are still plenty of places a retrograde old guy or gal can be an adult. You can get a beer, a steak, or a roll in the hay, and merry-go-rounds be damned; but you’ll be branded a sociopath if anybody finds out.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people have taken to alternative lifestyles, like living outside national boundaries so they can indulge what appetites they still have without interference. How do they manage this?

It’s being called the Second Golden Age of Sail.

Steam ended the days of the old sailing ships so long ago that most mortals can’t imagine why such lovely, graceful craft were pushed out of existence by squat metal tubs. Being mortals, of course, they weren’t around in the days when foot-long cockroaches swarmed in wooden forecastles or sailors clung to frozen ropes, attempting to take in sails with numb hands. Probably for that reason, a tall ship has come to symbolize the romance of the high seas in a way no chunky cruise boat can ever match, no matter how many Las Vegas revues it books.

Forget about space cruises. Think of an economy air transport, only more cramped, with worse food, and no chance in hell of surviving an accident. People don’t go to Luna to have fun; they go there to work. And Mars will be even more work once mortals are able to go there.

No, consumers wanted something pretty, something comfortingly retro. Tall ships were the answer, updated with modern technology.

You don’t need to climb to dizzying heights or learn a bunch of arcane phrases: the ship’s computer will do it all for you now, with smoothly efficient servomotors and composite cables. It judges the wind and keeps to a course as ably as the crustiest old salt, with the added advantage of weather satellite links. Add a little fusion drive to get you places in a dead calm, and the system is nearly perfect. Employ a couple of able-bodied sailors in case of fouls or repairs, and you even keep the unions happy. Any dope can sail a three-masted clipper now, and lots do, and that means Freedom.

On a good-sized vessel you can store enough booze and contraband food to last a couple of years, and you can enjoy them without a Public Health Monitor breathing down your neck, as long as you stay outside the jurisdiction of the local coast guard. You can play music as loud as you want. You can be overweight, light up a pipe of tobacco, and indulge in other behavior that would get you shut away in a mental hospital if you tried it anyplace else nowadays.

Mortals have taken to the sea in droves, becoming semipermanent residents. Little piddly thirty-foot yachts have become the trailers of the new age. People with real money have custom sailing ships built, mansions under acres of sail.

For a while there was a lot of enthusiastic talk about how eco-friendly sail was, since it utilized wind power, and a lot of commercial freight vessels got built before people figured out it was cheaper just to send stuff by big fusion-driven cargo barges. But for the private sector sail is in, it’s stylish, it’s a political antistatement, and so waterfronts are once again forested with masts.

I have to admit they’re easy on the eyes, those big graceful square-riggers flying along under clouds of canvas; and, unlike the old days, there are no rats, roaches, rotting timbers, or rotting food.

Freedom and adventure on the high seas. Cruise lines make a fortune on consumers who can’t afford their own ships by offering
six-month package tours during which they can partake of forbidden pleasures like pizza or hot fudge sundaes.

I guess that was why Lewis utilized some gradual retirement time and booked himself a cruise on the Olympian Clipper Line’s
Unrepentant Monarch
.

The Company must have decided it was the perfect place to bait the trap.

T
AKE THAT FOR YOU?
” asked the deck steward, gesturing at Lewis’s empty martini glass.

“Thanks.” Lewis looked up from his text of
The Moon and Sixpence
.

“Another?”

“Not now.”

Lewis turned his attention to the bookscreen again, but at that moment a little party boat came into sight to starboard, tacking about to give its passengers a better view of the
Unrepentant Monarch
. They hooted and screamed and waved at the great ship, clinging to the rail of their schooner, and there seemed to be a costume party in progress, because most of them were dressed as pirates. As Lewis smiled and waved back, somebody on board fired their signal cannon. Ping, a broadside, if they had been using shot instead of a sound chip. But even if they used shot, the cruise vessel would have no more noticed a one-pound ball than an elephant would notice a mosquito.

The mortals on board the schooner nevertheless danced and whooped, and the mortals on the
Unrepentant
catcalled back to them as though there were a real assault going on.

Lewis, who remembered vividly what it was like to be on a ship
under attack by French privateers, offered up a prayer of gratitude to Neptune. All things taken into consideration, he preferred reclining in a deck chair with a novel to running around on a blood-smeared deck dodging real cannon fire.

Though the experience had made for one of his better chapters, he felt. The scene where Edward and his command take on the slaver
Whydah Queen
was his favorite, full of authentic little touches, the one he’d rewritten least over the years.
The Tall Englishman
was unbelievably long now, seventeen volumes at last count.