In the Garden of Iden (6 page)

M
R. SILANUS PACED
across the front of the classroom. On the chalkboard at his back, a few names:
MASADA
.
WARSAW
.
JONESTOWN
.
MARS TWO
.

“So as we’ve seen, not one faith has ever lived up to its promises. The world has never become a paradise, quite the opposite, in fact: think of the millions upon millions slaughtered, tortured, imprisoned for this great idea, this good news, this revolution. The visionary who works against human nature to impose his—or her—sweeping vision on the world is inevitably its worst enemy.

“Now, who isn’t? Consider the work of certain individual mortals who set themselves simple tasks. They saw no need to raise armies; they saw no need for revolution or bloodshed; they worked instead for realistic goals with the tools they had. And they succeeded, and
their
works have been of lasting benefit to humanity.” He erased the board with relish and chalked a new set of names:
DICKENS
,
PASTEUR
,
LISTER
,
FLEMING
,
TERESA
,
MUIR
,
KOBIAR
,
LUONG
.

“People like these have done more to relieve human misery than any prophet with a manifesto ever will. They number in the millions, these mortals, but they don’t make it into the history books much. They don’t do anything sweeping or controversial. They live their lives, contribute their bits of good work, and die quietly in their beds without recognition or reward. Usually. But they make a difference for the good that no true believer ever can.

“Before we meet again on Friday, access the biographies of these mortals and review their lives. Read the complete works of Charles Dickens and be able to explain them in their historical context. Accessing on your own, see if you can add more names to this list and be ready to explain your choices. All clear? Class dismissed.”

We drifted out of the classroom, we wonder children.

“Isn’t he the most handsome man?” breathed Nancy, twisting at a lock of her wig. She’d never stopped trying to get her hair to grow. We’d both vowed to let it grow down to our ankles once the lab techs stopped tinkering with our brains.

“Double-plus wowie,” I agreed.

“I’ve heard he went to the Crusades to rescue Moslem babies. I’ll bet he looked divine in armor.” She pressed the elevator button. The door opened, and we stepped in, our hoop skirts crowding the other passengers.

“You couldn’t get me to work in the Holy Land for absolutely anything,” I stated.

She clicked her tongue derisively. “As if you had a choice!”

“I do,” I said, smug. “I’m fixing it. I’m making my specialty New World flora, so they’ll have to send me there. Hardly any mortals out there at all. No bloodthirsty zealot fanatic murderers.”

“What about the Aztecs?”

“They’re just in one part of the New World, aren’t they? It’s two big continents and there’s miles and miles where mortals have never even set foot. You can keep your Europe.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re fooling yourself. There are mortals everywhere. You’ll have to work with them sometime, you know.”

“Not me. Not Mendoza. The only fieldwork I’m doing is in empty fields. No totally disgusting killer apes for me, thank you very much.”

“My, I can see why they didn’t make you an anthropologist. You’re headed for trouble with an attitude like that, you know.” She shook her finger at me. She was right, too. And far wiser than I: she became an art preservation specialist and didn’t even have to set foot in the field until the seventeenth century. And then she got to pose as a wealthy art patron’s Algerian mistress. In Italy. Some people have all the luck. I wouldn’t mind lying around in a gondola in some nice civilized country but oh, no, I had it all figured out, hadn’t I?

The elevator slowed to my floor.

“Oh, um, can I borrow your holo with the footage of Quin Shi? Something happened to mine in the machine and I’ve got an assignment on him.”

“I’ll leave it in your cube.” The doors clanked open. “Bye, Mendy.”

“Bye, Nancy.”

Ah, the life of a teenage cyborg.

I have an old holostat online somewhere, more crackly and pointy with every passing year, of my graduation class at their Commencement Picnic and Swim Party.

There we are, a double row lined up on a beach in what will one day be Queensland, squinting happily into the imager. Our bathing costumes look particularly ugly and old-fashioned. We don’t care, apparently: every one of us is smiling, even Akira who has just had his box lunch dive-bombed by a seagull. Why shouldn’t we be happy? Twenty seventeen-year-olds and not one of us has acne.

And there I am, between Nancy and Roxtli. I have won the hair contest: mine waves down my back as far as my hips, while Nancy’s only stands out around her head like a dark cloud. But she has grown into a petite beauty and I am plain, plain, plain. And freckled. And unbecomingly tall. Smile on, Mendoza, in the sun and sky and seaweed of that faraway day. If only you had a clue.

As soon as they brought us back and showered the sand off us and handed us our degrees, they gave us our individual appointments with the career guidance counselor.

Bright and early on the appointed day, I rode the elevator down to his office level and put my card in his wall. Moments later, I was bade enter.

The counselor was one of the older ones. He looked no more than twenty-five, like everybody else, but you could tell how long someone had been in the service by a certain facial expression. Moreover, his brow ridges were on the pronounced side. Other than that, his appearance was all up-to-date. His doublet and trunk hose were well cut, and he had on the newer, fuller ruff that was just coming into fashion then. He waved me to a chair and looked at my card.

“Mendoza, Botanist Level One. Well. How are you doing, Mendoza?” We shook hands.

“Great, thanks.”

“So.” He creaked into his chair. “I’ve got your specs here, but why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?”

“Well, I’m really, really interested in going to the New World,” I said at once. “I’ve made a particular study of the native grain species and I think I could do a lot of good work there. And I wouldn’t mind working in the remote areas at all, in fact I’d prefer it. I’d love to get in on the El Dorado operations or maybe even New World One. I’ve heard some interesting things about Florida, too …” He was punching buttons on his keyboard as I talked, which annoyed me. I shut up and pointedly waited for him to finish.

He stared at something on the screen for a moment. He reached for a pen, dipped it in ink, and began to write on a card.

“I wouldn’t count on going to the New World just yet,” he said. “Your profile has a recommendation here for Assigned Acclimatization Europe.”

“Oh, God.” Two years mandatory cover identity working among mortals?

“That’s what it says. Nothing to be upset about, you know.” He kept writing.

“Why would they stick me with a job like that? I’m a botanist. I’ve prepared for the New World, not for growing turnips for maniac religious bigots.”

“They’re not all like that, you know,” he said mildly. “The mortal race has its points.”

“Tell me about it. I happen to have been recruited from the dungeons of the Inquisition,” I said nastily. My trump card. Top My Trauma time.

“Is that so?” he remarked. “Ever hear of the Great Goat Cult?”

Of course I had. They were a Paleolithic religious movement whose principal activities were tattooing themselves and exterminating their neighbors who didn’t. They were so good at genocide that they nearly wiped out what there was then of the human race, delaying the birth of civilization by ten thousand years. I looked at his gently prognathous face and felt hot blood rush into my own.

“Attitude problem. Don’t mind me,” I muttered.

“It’s possible to learn to live with mortals.” He took up the pen again. “Trust me.”

I sat there mortified while he jotted a few sentences on the card.

“Besides, if Dr. Z says you have to, you have to,” he continued. “Don’t make trouble for yourself. Just be reasonable about it, go nicely where you’re told to go, and in three years the AAE drops off your file. All you have to do is prove you can handle what’s expected of any operative. Once they know that, they’ll be more receptive to your requests for specific postings.”

He tapped up some more stuff on the computer. I watched his face as he stared at the screen. I could not see the data, of course. No operative ever sees detailed information on his or her particular future: even such information as the Company has is sometimes incomplete. Even kiddies as processed as we are aren’t completely documented. Nevertheless I said resentfully:

“You’ve probably got it all there in front of you, where they send me and whether I get to go to Florida and what I’ll be doing in ninety years.”

“That’s right.” He nodded. “Maybe.”

“Why do they bother to call you a counselor?”

“Because I can tell you things you need to know about where they’re sending you,” he said, keeping his eyes on the screen.

“Well, where are they sending me?”

“England.”

“England!” I practically screamed.

England, home of grotesque old King Henry the Six-Wived. As children we’d followed his antics in Current Events with considerable amusement, but when he finally ate himself to death, he left a country as wrecked as his pantry. For years, assorted court cabals had circled each other warily, waiting for frail Prince Edward to reach manhood. We knew, of course, that he’d die in his teens and another era of civil unrest would result.

“What are they sending me to England for?” I cried. “Isn’t it, like, very unsafe there? Aren’t there going to be all kinds of blood-baths soon?”

“Not where you’re being posted,” he assured me. “They want a botanist over there for a very specific project. You’re the very one they need. Pretty soon we’ll have the opportunity to send European personnel in. You’ll be part of a Spanish team. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Spanish?” I narrowed my eyes, doing a fast access. “Now, wait a minute. Edward’s sister Mary is going to get the throne when he dies. There’s a Spanish connection there. Is that what we’re talking about?”

“Yes. The place will be crawling with Spaniards. We can slip you in with no trouble at all.”

“It reads like a hazard to me.”

“Would we send you somewhere that wasn’t safe?” He shuffled papers on his desk. “Anyway. You’ll go to Spain first to establish your cover identity, spend a year there, go over to England in”—he leaned over to peer at the screen—“’54. You won’t even be alone. You’ll be part of a team, and you’ll have a facilitator with you.”

I relaxed. “That’s better. As long as I don’t have to interface personally with the killer monkeys.”

“Ah, come on.” He leaned back. “This is England, after all. The land of, uh, Dickens.”

“He’s Victorian Era.”

“It’s green there. Beautiful countryside, I’ve seen it myself. Best beer in the world. Great cities, like York.”

“And London?” I perked up. “Will I get to go to London?”

“Maybe.” He smiled. “You might even get to meet Shakespeare.”

Dates whirred behind my eyes. “He won’t be born for a dozen years.”

“Well, you never know; you might get to like England. I’ve known plenty of operatives who opted to stay on somewhere after their assignment was served, even if they hated it there at first. And England’s heading into a Golden Age, uh”—his eyes flicked to my file—“Mendoza. You could be in on it from the beginning.”

I thought about it. London was supposed to be the flower of cities all, as Chaucer said, an incredible cosmopolis in an otherwise primitive country. Really fashionable clothing, maybe, for a change. New dances. New music. “It might not be so bad,” I conceded.

“You’ll see.” He smiled. He handed me a stack of printouts. “Now, here’s a recommended holo list and an events graph. You can study them privately. The starred entries are mandatory, the highlighted entries are strongly recommended. You’ll be issued a field kit sometime in the next two weeks. Your departure is scheduled for July twentieth. Nice to meet you, Mendoza.”

I went wandering back to my room. In this present moment I’d fling myself down on my bed to think; in that era of corsets and bumrolls one did no such thing. I perched on a wooden settle instead and looked at the recommended (actually mandatory) holo list.

Might as well start with the history review, I thought. It was starred. I scanned its access pattern, and suddenly I remembered, I had known all along, and I let the information fill up around me like a nice hot bath. Here was the score card, here were the players:

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. Its king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists. Oh yes: and for booting the Roman Catholic Church out of England, though he’d started out as a Catholic, married to our old friend Katherine, Infanta of Aragon. But years of marriage to her produced no son and heir for Henry: only a daughter, Princess Mary. Henry was tired of Katherine anyway, so he divorced her (against the express wishes of the Holy Father) and married Wife Number Two, a court tart with pretensions to trendy radical religious opinions, named Anne Boleyn. Jumping on her Lutheran bandwagon as well as on the rest of her, Henry imported the Protestant Reformation into England.

Next round: Anne Boleyn couldn’t produce a male heir either, only a baby girl, Princess Elizabeth, so Henry had Anne beheaded and took Wife Number Three: the devout little Jane Seymour, who, like many of his subjects, was still sympathetic to the Catholics. Before her death there even were rumors that England might go Catholic again. She did die, however, right after giving birth to the long-awaited Prince Edward, and any chance of an early Counter-Reformation died with her.

Endgame: Henry married, in quick succession, three more wives, which sure as hell made rapprochement with the Pope unlikely. By the time Henry died, the Protestant faction was in firm control of the country, especially with the council of regents who ruled for the frail little King Edward.