All that was wanting was
capital
. He stood ready to accept the donations that must flow in from the noble Britons in his audience, who surely understood that every rational man must labor in the cause of the perfection and advancement of humanity.
Ramsay wasn’t quite hooted off the stage, but the papers very nearly murdered him. His inventions were denounced as nothing more than brilliant stage effects. Worse, the powerful individuals he named all stated flatly that they never heard of him, or of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society to which they supposedly belonged. He was a common charlatan, they said, a humbug, an utter sham.
Ramsay hotly denied these charges and promised to provide proof. He didn’t; he simply disappeared, along with his inventions.
This was the sort of thing that professed skeptics liked to giggle over. Even Lewis, himself an immortal being created by the efforts of a cabal of scientists and investors, smiled as he read the account. His smile faded as he considered the fact that he’d just found evidence—in classified documents, no less—that there
had
been a Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, at least as early as 1849, and that the august
persons who denied knowing David Addison Ramsay
had
been members. And so had Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.
And so had William Fitzwalter Nennys, who, like Lewis, was an immortal being created by the efforts of a cabal of scientists and investors . . .
What on earth had Nennius been doing? What had
Edward
been doing?
Lewis followed up his next hunch: searching for other references to the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society in the classified records. He was mildly astonished at what he found.
It was the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society since 1755; prior to that its members called themselves the Fellowship of the Green Lion, during which time Sir Isaac Newton was one of their number.
The Fellowship of the Green Lion was reliably recorded as having existed as far back as 1660. It seemed to have sprung from a group calling itself the House of Solomon, almost certainly led by Sir Francis Bacon.
That particular fraternity of scholars previously met under the name of the Servants of the Temple of Albion, an organization that could be traced back through the era of Elizabeth I—persons as disparate as Dr. Dee and Sir Francis Drake were members—to the year 1250, when Roger Bacon was apparently its guiding light. There were intimations that Bacon inherited a tradition that began at an even earlier date.
All of this in a file the British government had chosen to keep secret, had chosen to keep
so
secret, it went to the trouble of encrypting it and burying it far from the light of day in New Syon House.
It was at about this time that Lewis began to feel a creeping sensation of knowing too much for comfort.
So he turned his attention to the biographical data on William Fitzwalter Nennys.
Born 1803—ha ha. Lewis knew for a fact that Nennius had come over in a galley at the order of the emperor Claudius; this he learned in the course of a pleasant evening in a coffeehouse back in
1836, during a chat with Nennius about old times. Lewis’s current identification disc gave his own date of birth as the year 2116, when 103
A.D
. was nearer the mark. Well, and what had Nennius done with that lifetime?
Here were the names of parents he never had, followed by a list of schools he never attended; and here the statement that in 1832 he became headmaster of Overton School . . .
Edward’s school. He’d been Edward’s headmaster.
Lewis’s gasp in his chilly room puffed out like smoke. Distractedly he got up and turned on the climate-control unit, standing in front of its heating vent while he collected his memories and spread them out to try to make sense of them.
Nennius
had
been a headmaster, yes, that was what the meeting at the coffeehouse was all about—Nennius brought a sheaf of inky student papers to deliver to Lewis for the Company archives. Lewis didn’t ask why, Lewis didn’t even read them, just passed them on to the Company courier who came for them the following week. Dr. Zeus was always making off with ephemera like that. Lewis was more interested in the prospect of pumping Nennius for details about the old empire. They sat up late, getting mildly buzzed on drinking chocolate and laughing about how it was impossible to find a decently heated room in Britain since the legions pulled out . . .
Closing his eyes, Lewis dived back through his visual record. There! There were the papers, he was laughing with Nennius as he opened the leather case, and Nennius was saying:
“—lad may be somebody someday, but you know how it is with the archivists, they ask for the damnedest trivia—”
Freeze frame. Part of the top page was visible. What did it say? Enlarge and enhance. There were the slightly uneven letters of a boy not yet perfect in his copperplate hand:
Dulce et decorus pro patria mori, which is very true I think if you have got no other way of helping anybody or, for example, stopping the Hindoos from doing things such as burning up their widows. I would like to
—
Reeling slightly, Lewis put a hand to the wall. Compare frame
with
EASILY AND BEST FORGOTTEN
file documents A, B, and C. Points of similarity? Singularity? Statistical likelihood of the same hand?
Ninety-five percent.
And though the feeling of impending danger was very, very strong just then, Lewis leaped out into the middle of his room and executed a few shuffling tap steps, finishing on one knee with both arms flung out in triumph.
Nennius was young Edward’s headmaster. Nennius belonged to the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society and Redking’s Club at the same time his former pupil was a member of them. Coincidence? Or had he sponsored Edward’s admission into those august bodies? Given Edward’s obscure birth and blighted naval career, it seemed likely he had. Why? Unless of course Edward was admitted at the urging of the unknown benefactor who prevented his court-martial and paid for his upbringing. But, then, what did Nennius have to do—?
Lewis was barely able to sleep that night, but he had no nightmares. Not that night, not any night since the plot began to thicken. And this was why he whistled, today, tapping away at the keyboard in his room.
He couldn’t remember when he’d been happier, even as his awareness of risk grew. He very nearly got in touch with Nennius (a scan of Company records showed him that Nennius was currently stationed in the Breton Republic), but common sense prevailed. He was contenting himself now with following up Nennius’s subsequent career.
It appeared that his fellow immortal had worked a very long shift indeed as William Fitzwalter Nennys, finally pretending to die in 1886. All the appliance aging makeup must have been hideously uncomfortable.
Ah, but not so uncomfortable he hadn’t been able to—what was this? To attend a last meeting of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society. Yes, and vote with the other members, old and new—and, my, what interesting new members had joined since 1849, George Bernard Shaw and young Herbert George Wells, for example—to
change the
name of the Gentlemen due to the recent scandal
. What did they decide to call themselves this time?
Lewis read on eagerly and then stopped.
He got up, made himself a cup of tea, went to the window, and stared down into the street for a while. When he finished the tea, he went to his tiny sink and rinsed out the cup, setting it carefully in the drainer. At last he walked back to his workstation, pulled out his chair, sat down, and looked again at the screen.
Yes, it really did say that the new name they chose was the Kronos Diversified Stock Company.
The reason Lewis was having trouble believing what he saw, of course, was that Kronos Diversified was one of the names under which Dr. Zeus, Incorporated, did business throughout the centuries.
He got up once more and went to his cupboard. Taking out a bottle of gin, he poured himself a small silver cocktail and went to the window again. He half-expected to see Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax looking up at him from the pavement, as the late traffic went by.
You won’t be silenced. You meant it, didn’t
you? thought Lewis.
Have you refused to let go, are you haunting me somehow? What does all this mean about the Company, and why have you shown me? Are you trying to tell Mendoza? Can’t you find her, either?
I
F THERE’S AN ETERNITY
, boy, I wouldn’t mind spending it like this,” said Joseph, drifting gently into the coping at the edge of the pool.
“Contemplating the eternal stars?” Suleyman leaned back to look up at them where they glittered in the wide square of night sky, framed by the high white walls of the old garden.
“Floating in your pool with a piña colada, actually.”
“Ass’s milk, you infidel moron,” jeered Latif. “Do you want to scandalize the servants?”
“All right, so it’s coconut pineapple asses’ milk with extract of Jamaican sugar cane,” Joseph said. “God forbid I should upset the help, you lousy little squirt.”
Latif, who had known Joseph since childhood, just sneered at him. He had long since attained his considerable adult height and had the lean and dangerous profile of a North African corsair. Suleyman laughed quietly and thumbed the control that lowered his deck chair into a reclining position so he could view the stars in greater comfort. Suleyman was very dark, with the classical features of Mali, so he didn’t look like a corsair—though he had been one in his time.
“Isn’t that something, about poor old Polaris?” he mused. “All these tens of centuries it’s been the one thing you could depend on, in
this hemisphere, anyway. Byword for constancy, and what does it go and do but slip out of place at last? What will mortals use to navigate, with the North Star gone astray?”
“Things change,” said Joseph.
“So they do, little man. So they do.”
A silence fell, with a shade of meaning in it that the two younger immortals missed. Donal sighed in contentment and switched off his headset, flipping up the televisor.
“That was that,” he informed the others. “The Pirates took the match, six to nothing. Not one goal for the Assassins.”
“The office pool is mine,” said Latif.
“Yaah,” Joseph said.
“Yaah yourself, you loser,” Latif told him, grinning white in the darkness. He sprawled backward like a man at his ease, but there was an alertness in the lines of his body. He went on: “So, this vacation thing you’re doing. You actually want to go see a
necropolis
tomorrow?”
“That’s what I said, kid.”
“Well, that’s certainly my idea of a good time. Ride out into the foothills, where it gets hot enough to boil rice on the rocks at noon, and crawl around a bunch of mortal graves all stuccoed over to look like the biggest seagull splash in the world. What’s that phrase,
whited sepulchers?
What a party guy you turned out to be.”
“It’s psychological,” Joseph said, pushing away from the coping and rotating slowly in his pool float. “People are designed by nature to need a last resting place. The idea of one, anyway. We immortal guys never get graves. The programming we’re given in school keeps the urge off for the first few millennia, but after a while you find yourself wondering what it would be like to just—lie down in a tomb and stop moving forever. So it helps, see, to go and look at the reality. Bones and dust. Makes you glad to be alive.”
“Really?” Donal sounded appalled.
“No, he’s giving us a lot of bullshit as usual,” Latif said.
“Sounds creepy to me,” Donal went on, shuddering. “I was recruited out of some kind of tunnel or catacomb place. I’d never want to visit one.”
“I’ll show him the necropolis,” Suleyman said. “I know what he’s talking about, after all. You kids go hang out at the bazaar. Milo Rousseau’s added a third show at Palais Aziz, did I tell you? If you hang around the window and whine, I’ll bet you can get tickets.”
“What’s his backup band?” Latif sat bolt upright.
“The Dead Weights.”
“We’re there,” Latif said. He regarded Donal with curiosity. “Now, what was that about catacombs? I thought you were recruited out of San Francisco.”
“Plenty of catacombs in San Francisco,” Joseph said, draining his glass and setting it on the coping. “Place has everything. Of course, the catacombs are mostly in Chinatown,” he added, tilting to peer at Donal. “You were an Irish immigrant kid, right?”
“As far as I know,” said Donal. “I was only about three when the Company rescued me.”
“So what were you doing in a catacomb?” Latif persisted.
“He may not feel like talking about it, you know,” Suleyman said.
“No, it’s okay. It’s just—it seems so
silly
.” Donal shook his head. “I was supposed to have been rescued from the 1906 earthquake, but I don’t remember that at all. I remember something else entirely . . .”
“Which was?” Latif prompted.
“This sounds so stupid. As God is my witness, what I remember is that the Bad Toymaker carried me off, down to this place with all these dead Chinese guys. And then Uncle Jimmy—I mean Victor, that’s the operative who recruited me—came and rescued me.”
“Dead Chinese guys,” said Joseph thoughtfully. “That would fit with your being in a catacomb. It wouldn’t explain who took you there, though, or why.”
“Bad
Toymaker?
” Latif looked incredulous.
“See, it’s all mixed up in my mind.” Donal closed his eyes in an attempt to think. “There was this show my mortal parents took me to, on that last night. I found out since it was
Babes in Toyland
, by Victor Herbert. So what I remember is mixed up with the Bad Toymaker and some bears. I thought it was a big bear at first, but it was a man. I thought he was going to break my neck. He’d hurt Uncle Jimmy already, there was blood on Uncle Jimmy’s shirt.” Donal’s voice slowed unconsciously, took on traces of an early accent. “I was scared, but then Uncle Jimmy spit on him, and it, like, broke the spell or something. The Toymaker had to let me go. We climbed a ladder. Then I got to ride in a motor car, the little Chinese doll gave me chocolate, and we went on the ship.”