The Best of Kage Baker

Old Flat Top





The boy has the firm chin and high-domed brow of the Cro-Magnon hominids—might be a member of any racial group—and is dressed in somewhat inadequate Neolithic clothing of woven grass and furs. He didn’t bring any useful Neolithic tools with him on this journey, however. He had come to see if God was really on the mountain as he’d always been told, and he hadn’t thought tools would be any use in finding God. In this he was reasonably correct. No instrument his people could produce, at their present level of technology, would help him now.

Far enough up a mountain to peer above the clouds, the boy is in serious trouble. Above him is ice and thin air; all around him a sliding waste of black blasted rock, immense, pitiless. The green valley of his ancestors lies a long way below him, and he could return there in slightly under a minute if he didn’t mind arriving in a red smashed mass.

That would scarcely win him the admiration of his peers, however, and he clings now desperately to a narrow handhold, and gazes up at the mouth of the cave he has come so far to find. He can neither jump nor climb any higher. He can’t climb back down, either; his hands and feet have gone numb. He realizes he is going to die.

To his left, a few meters away, there is sudden movement.

He turns his head to stare. What he had taken to be an outcropping of particularly weathered rock is looking at him. It is in fact a man, easily twice his size, naked but for a belted bearskin and a great deal of dun-colored hair and beard.

The giant’s body is powerfully built, nearly human as the boy understands human, but with a slightly odd articulation of the arms and shoulders. The head is not human at all. The skull is long and low, helmet-shaped, and with its heavy orbital ridges and forward-projecting face it reminds the boy of those stocky little villagers in the next valley, the ones who scatter flowers over their dead and make such unimaginative flint tools. Like them, too, the giant has an immense protruding nose. Its cheekbones are high and broad, its jaw heavy, its teeth terrifyingly long. The boy knows this because the giant is grinning at him.

“Boo,” says the giant, in a light and rather pleasant voice.

This syllable means nothing to the boy, but he is so thoroughly unnerved that he loses his grip on the mountain and totters backward, screaming.

The next moment is a blur. All his breath is knocked out of him, and before he can grasp what has happened, he finds himself crouching inside the cave that was so unattainable a moment before. The giant is squatting beside him, considering him with pale inhuman eyes.

Seen close to, the giant is even more unnerving. He cocks his head and the angle at which he does this is not human either, nor is the strong strange musk of his body. The boy drags himself swiftly backward, stares around the interior of the cave for a weapon. The giant chuckles at him.

There are plenty of weapons, but it’s doubtful the boy would be able to lift any of these tremendous stone axes, let alone defend himself with one. He looks further, and then his frantic gaze stops dead at the battered cabinet against one wall.

The fact that its central screen glows with tiny cryptic symbols is almost beside the point. It’s a box, and the boy’s world has no such geometry. He has never seen a rectangle, a square. This fully convinces him that he has found the object of his quest. Slowly, he turns back to face the giant.

He makes obeisance, and the giant snorts. Sitting timidly upright, the boy explains that he has come in search of God on the mountain for the purpose of learning the Truth.

The boy’s language is a combination of hand gestures and sounds. The giant’s eyes narrow; he leans close, keenly observing, listening. When the boy has finished, the giant clears his throat and replies in the same manner.

He communicates for some time. His hands are clever, capable of facile and expressive gestures, and his vocal apparatus produces a wider range of syllables, enunciated with greater precision; so it will be understood that he is a far more eloquent speaker than the boy, who listens as though spellbound.


Yes, I’ll tell you the Truth. Why not? In all these generations, you’re the first mortal to climb up here, so you’ve earned an answer; but I don’t think you’ll like it much.

I’m not your God. I’m the highest authority you’ll ever encounter, though, mortal man. Really. I was created to judge you and punish you, you and all your fathers. Would you like to know how that happened? Watch.

I’ll draw something in the dust for you, here. This is called a circle, all right? It’s the wheel of Time. Never mind what a wheel is. This part here, almost at the beginning, is where your people began to exist.

Life was a lot harder back then, mortal. Your people almost didn’t make it. You know why? Because, almost from the time your fathers stood up on their little hind legs, they made war on one another. Winters weren’t bitter enough! Leopards and crocodiles weren’t hungry enough! Famine wasn’t terrible enough either. They had to keep whittling away at their numbers themselves, stupid monkeys.

The worst were a bunch who called themselves the Great Goat Cult. They found a weed that filled them with holy visions when they chewed it. They heard voices that told them to go out and kill. Became screaming tattooed maniacs who made a lot of converts, believe me, but they killed more than they converted.

Now, look here at this part of the circle. This is up at the other end of Time. The people up there are, let’s say they’re powerful shamans. And they’re very nervous. Being so close to the end of Time, they want to save as much of the past as they can.

They looked back into Time through a, uh, a magic eye they had. They looked at their oldest fathers and saw that if this Great Goat Cult wasn’t stopped, they themselves might never come to exist. Who had time to learn how to make fire, or sew furs into clothing or make pots out of clay, if crazy people were always chasing and killing everybody?

I’m simplifying this for you, mortal, but here’s what they did.

The shamans found a way to step across from their part of the circle into the beginning part. They took some of your fathers’ children and made them slaves, but magic slaves: immortal and strong and really smart. They sent those slaves to try to reason with the Great Goat Cult.

It didn’t work.

The slaves were great talkers, could present many clever arguments, but the Great Goat Cult wouldn’t listen. In fact, they sent the slaves back to their shaman masters with spears stuck in inconvenient places, and one or two had to carry their own lopped-off body parts. So the shamans had to come up with another idea.

Can you guess yet what it was? No? Well, you’re only a mortal. I’ll tell you.

They took some more slaves, not just from your fathers but from some of the other tribes running around back then—those little guys in the next valley, for example, and some big people from a valley you’ve never seen, and a few others who’re all extinct now.

You know how you can put a long-legged ram with long fleece in the pen with a short-legged ewe with short fleece, and you’ll get a short-legged lamb with long fleece? Eventually? Breeding experiments, right, you’ve got it. Well, that’s what the shamans did with all these people. Bred the big ones and the little ones to get what they wanted.

What did they want? What were they breeding for? You can’t guess? I’m disappointed. They wanted their very own screaming killing maniacs to counter the cultists.

Except we’re not really maniacs. We just have a great sense of humor.

We’re the optimum morphological design for a humanoid fighting machine, oo-rah! We’re not afraid of being hurt, like you. And of course we too were made immortal and smart. Three thousand of us were bred. That was a lot of people, back then. They raised us in cadet academies, trained us in camps, me and all my brother warriors.

This was all done back here at the beginning of time, by the way. The shamans were scared to death to have us up there at their end. There are no warriors in their time, or so we were always told.

And we were all programmed—no, you don’t know what that is. Indoctrinated? Convinced with extreme prejudice?

We were given the absolute Truth.

But it’s our Truth, not yours, mortal. Our Truth is that we have the joyous right and duty to kill, instantly and without question, any dirty little mortals we find making war on each other. You don’t have the right to kill yourselves. You’re supposed to live in peace, herd beasts, plant crops, tell stories, have babies. Do that and we’ll let you alone. But if you decide to make war, not love—whack, there we are with flint axes and bloody retribution, you see? Simplicity itself.

It was the law. Perfect and beautiful justice. You do right, we punish wrong. No questions. No whining.

The shamans from the other end of Time created us as the consummate weapon against the Great Goat Cult. We were bigger and faster, and we killed without pity or hesitation. Our faith was stronger than theirs. So we made mincemeat out of the little bastards.

Oh, those were great times. So much work to do! Because, while the shamans had dithered around about whether or not we should be created, the Cult had spread across the world. It took centuries to stamp them all out. We rode in endless pursuit and it was one long happy party, mortal. Summer campaigns, year after year. Winter raids, damn I loved them: bloodspray’s beautiful on new-fallen snow, and corpses stay fresh so much longer…

Don’t be scared. I’m just reminiscing.

When we slaughtered the last of the Goats, your fathers were set free, don’t you understand? Instead of running and hiding in holes like animals, they could settle down to become people. They had time at last, to learn to count on their fingers and toes, to look at the stars and wonder what they were. Time to drill holes in deer bone and make music. Time to paint bison on cave walls. And the other immortals (we called them Preservers), had time at last to go among your fathers and collect cultural artifacts the shamans wanted saved, now that there was culture.

But what were we Enforcers supposed to do, with our great purpose in life gone? We loved to kill. It was all we knew, all we were made for. So our officers met together, to talk over the question of where the masters expected us to fit, in this new peacetime we’d made possible for mortals.

There was a lot of debate. Most of us in the rank and file were pretty optimistic; we just figured they’d reprogram us to do some other job. But one colonel, an a*shole named Marco, thought we could never be sure the mortals wouldn’t relapse into being cultists, and that maybe we ought to make some preemptive strikes: you know, kill all the mortals who looked as though they might make war, so they’d never get a chance to.

Everyone roared him down, except the men under his command. See, that would have been absolutely wrong! That would have been killing innocents, and we don’t do that. Noncombatants are to be protected at all times. But our masters, who as I mentioned are nervous people, shit themselves in terror when they found out what Marco’d said.

Marco’s faith was imperfect. We should have done something about him right then…but that’s another story.

Anyway, Budu told him he was a fool, and that shut him up.

Budu was our general, our supreme commanding officer. He was one of the oldest of us and he was the best, the strongest, the biggest. And he was righteous, I tell you, our Truth was strong in his heart! I’d have died for him, if I wasn’t immortal, and as it was I had my head lopped off twice fighting under him. I didn’t care; the masters stuck it on again and I was proud to go right from the regeneration tank back to the front lines, as long as Budu was out there too.

(Regeneration tank. It’s…think of it as a big pot, no, a big pot, do you know what a cauldron is? All right, imagine a big one full of, uh, magic juice, and whenever one of us immortals would be damaged too badly to repair ourselves, we’d be carted off the field and put in one of these magic cauldrons to heal. We’d come out good as new.)

Anyway. Budu was also the smartest of us. Budu studied future history, between this age and the time in which our masters live. He figured out what scared them the most. He said the mortal masters might think they didn’t need us anymore, but they’d find they were mistaken soon enough. He ordered us to wait. Something would happen.

And, Father of Justice, the old man was right!

Now you’re going to find the story more interesting, mortal, because this part of it deals with your own people.

Let’s see, how do I explain the concept of mitochondrial DNA to you?

I’ve already told you how the shamans at the other end of Time want to be sure nothing happens to endanger their own existence, right? Causality really worries them. So they’re obsessive about tracing their ancestors, finding out for certain where they came from. And they’ve been careful to chart something called genetic drift. It’s like a map, you know what a map is, that shows where their fathers have been.

Well, they found that a lot of their fathers—actually, mothers—started

out right below this mountain, mortal, right down in that nice green valley of yours. It’s sort of a crossroads—uh, game trail—for humanity. It’s where a lot of important human traits came together to make something special.

But back then this hadn’t happened yet. There was a tribe living down there, all right, nicely settled into a farming community, but they only had some of the genetic markers, the special blood, that our masters expected to find.

So the masters sent in a Preserver to watch them. He was what we call an anthropologist, which meant he didn’t mind working with the monkeys. His name was Rook. He became a member of their tribe, lived in their huts with them. I couldn’t do it, but I guess there’s no accounting for tastes.

Rook was expecting another tribe to appear from somewhere and intermarry with the farmers, and that other tribe would provide the missing pieces, so to speak, and their descendants would become our masters’ fathers. He was all set to record it, when it happened; but it didn’t quite happen the way he’d expected.

The other tribe came along, all right, hunter-gatherers on a long leisurely migration to greener pastures, and that valley below was nice and green. The newcomers had the right genes, too, just as Rook had predicted.

What he hadn’t predicted, though, was that the peaceful farming folk would treat the newcomers just like they treated any other migratory species. Like elk, or caribou. You see, agrarian societies sometimes have a problem getting enough protein…

That means meat. I mean they were catching the hunter-gatherers and eating them.

You’re embarrassed to learn that your fathers were cannibals? Think how the shamans at the other end of Time felt!

So the old Enforcers weren’t demobilized quite yet, ha ha. But this was a slightly more complicated situation than we were used to, understand? We couldn’t just wade in there and wipe out the peaceful farming folk. Negotiation was called for. And we never negotiate.

So our masters assigned us a liaison with the mortals, a new kind of Preserver they’d invented, called a Facilitator.

Facilitators are different. We Enforcers were designed to love killing, and the regular Preservers were designed to love the things they preserved. The Facilitators, though, were designed to be more objective, to operate in the big civilizations that were about to be born. They would be politicians, intriguers, councilors to mortal kings. What do those words mean?…I guess the best translation would be liars.

I remember the staff meeting as though it were yesterday, mortal man.

It was raining. We’d made camp on that high meadow you passed on your way up here, and most of us had fanned out into the landscape. Budu had only brought the Fifth Infantry Division, which I was in. I was one of his aides, so all I had to do was set up the tent where the meeting was to be held. The old man stood there quietly in the open, staring down the trail; he didn’t care if he got wet.

We’d had a report from a patrol that they were on their way. Pretty soon I caught a whiff of Preserver in the wind though Budu had picked it up before I did; he had already turned to watch them come down from the pass. Rook was on foot, a little miserable-looking guy in a wet cloak, but the Facilitator was riding a horse, and Rook was having to tilt his head back to look up at him as he talked earnestly, waving his arms.

The Facilitator was tall, for one of them anyway, and wore nice tailored clothes. His name was Sarpa. He wasn’t paying attention to Rook much, just sort of nodding his head as he rode and scanning the landscape, and when he spotted us I saw his eyes widen. I don’t know what he’d been told about Enforcers at his briefing, but he hadn’t expected what he found.

They were escorted in, and I took Sarpa’s horse away and tethered it. The old man wanted to start the meeting right then. The Preservers asked for something hot to drink first, which seemed stupid to me—had they come there to talk, or to have a party?—but Budu just told me to get them something. All we had was water, but I brought it in a couple of polished Great Goat skulls, the nicest ones in camp. The Preservers stared with big round eyes when I set their drinks before them, and didn’t touch a drop. There’s no pleasing some people.

At least they got down to business. Rook made his report first, about how the farming tribe had been fairly peaceable until the newcomers had arrived, when they had suddenly shown a previously-unknown talent for hunting hunters. They watched the hunters’ trails, lay in wait with sharp sticks, and almost never failed to carry off one of the younger or weaker of the new tribe, whom they butchered and parceled out among themselves. Rook had seen all this firsthand.

The Facilitator Sarpa asked him why he hadn’t tried to stop them.

“I did try,” he said wretchedly. “I told them they shouldn’t eat other people. They told me (with their mouths full) that the strangers weren’t people. There were quite calm about it, and nothing I said could convince them otherwise. Anyway, I can’t say much without blowing my cover; they thought it was funny enough I wouldn’t touch the ribs they offered me.”

Sarpa wanted to know what his cover was, and Rook told him he was an adopted member of the tribe, and had himself avoided any “unpleasantness” by volunteering to work in the fields even in bad weather. Sarpa stared harder at that than he’d stared at the skull cups.

“You’re maintaining your cover by good attitude?” he said, as though he couldn’t believe it.

“That’s what a participant observer does,” Rook explained.

“But when you’re one of us? It never occurred to you to exploit your superior abilities, or your knowledge? Why didn’t you pose as a spirit? A magician, at least, and impress them with a few tricks?”

“That would have been lying,” said Budu, and Rook said:

“Well, but that would have created an artificial dynamic in our relationship. I’m supposed to observe and document the way they live in their natural state. If I’d said I was a magical being, they wouldn’t have behaved in a natural way toward me, would they?”

Sarpa exhaled hard through his little thin nose, and drummed his fingers on his knees. “All right,” he said, “it’s clearly time a specialist was brought in. I’ll make contact with them immediately.”

Budu wanted to know what he was going to do, and Sarpa waved his hand. “Textbook procedure for managing primitives. I’ll put them in awe of me with an exhibition of juggling, or something. Once I’ve got their attention, I’ll explain the health risks involved in eating the flesh of their own species.”

“And if they won’t listen?” asked Budu. Sarpa smiled at him in a patronizing kind of way, I guess because he was frightened of the old man. I could smell his fear from clear over where I was standing, playing dumb like a good orderly.

“Why, then we send in the troops, don’t we?” Sarpa said lightly. “But it won’t come to that. I know my job.”

“Good,” said Budu. “What do you need now?”

“I need to download all possible data on them from Rook, here,” Sarpa replied. (What’s that mean? Just that Rook was going to tell him a lot of things very very fast, mortal.) “We can retire to my field quarters for that; I’d like to get into dry clothes first. Where’s our camp?”

“You’re in it,” said Budu.

Sarpa looked around in dismay. “You haven’t put up the other tents yet?” he asked.

Budu told him we don’t need tents, but offered him the one in which they were squatting. “And I’ll assign you Flat Top for an aide,” he said.

(He meant me. I was designated Joshua when I was born, but everybody in my unit went by a nickname. Skullcracker, Crunchmaster, Terminator, that kind of thing. I earned my nickname when we had a contest to see how many beers we could balance on top of our heads. I got five up there.)

Sarpa didn’t look too happy about it, but I made myself useful after the old man left: hung some more skins around the tent and brought in some springy bushes for bedding. I unloaded his saddlebags and set up the field unit—uh, the magic box that let us talk to the shamans. Like that one over there, see? Only smaller—while he downloaded from Rook. Rook went back to the farmstead after that, poor little drone, couldn’t leave his mortals for long.

Sarpa got up and spread his hands over the back of his field unit to get them warm. He asked me, “What time are rations served out?” and I told him we were foraging on this campaign, but that I’d get him part of somebody’s kill if he wanted, or maybe some wild onions. He shuddered and said he’d manage on the Company-issued provisions he’d brought with him. So I set that out for him instead, little tiny portions of funny-smelling stuff.

I don’t think Sarpa understood yet that he was supposed to dismiss me or I couldn’t go. I just stood at ease while he ate, and after a few minutes he offered me a packet of crackers. I could have inhaled the damn things, they were so small. To be polite I nibbled at the edges and made them last a while, which was hard with teeth like mine, believe me.

When he was finished I tidied up for him, and he settled down at his field unit. He didn’t work, though. He just stared out over the edge of the meadow at the smoke rising from the mortals’ farmstead. I figured I’d better give him a clue, so I said, “Sir, will there be anything else, sir?”

“No…” he said, in a way that meant there would be. I waited, and after a minute he said, not meeting my eyes: “Tell me something, Enforcer. What does a man have to do to—ah—fraternize with the female mortals?”

By which he meant he wanted to couple with one of your mothers.

I said, “Sir, I don’t know, sir.”

His attention came away from the smoke and he looked up at me sharply. “So it’s true, then, about Enforcers?” he asked me. “That you’re really not, ah, interested?”

“Sir, that’s affirmative, sir,” I told him.

“No sex at all?”

“Sir, no sir.”

“But…” He looked out at the smoke again. “How on earth do you manage?”

I felt like asking him the same question: Why would our masters have created his kind with the need to go through the motions of reproduction, when they can’t actually reproduce?

(No, mortal, we can’t. We’re immortal, so we don’t need to.)

I mean, I can see why you mortals are obsessed with it; I’d be too, if that was my only shot at immortality. But we’ve always wondered why the Preserver class were given such a stupid appetite. Budu used to say it was because they needed to be able to understand the mortals’ point of view if they were to function correctly, and I guess that makes sense. Still, if it was me, I’d find it a distraction.

So I just told Sarpa, “Sir, nothing to manage. Everybody knows that killing’s a lot easier than making life, and for us it’s a lot more fun, sir.”

He shivered at that, and said, “I suppose it’s really just sports taken to the extreme, isn’t it? Very well; Rook will probably know how to set me up with a girl.”

I didn’t say anything, and he looked at me sidelong, trying to read my expression.

“You probably disapprove,” he said. “With the morality the Company programmed into you.”

“Sir, strictly speaking, you’re exploiting the mortals, sir,” I said.

“And you think that’s wrong.”

“Sir, it would be for me. Not my place to say what’s wrong for you, sir. You’re a Preserver, and one of the new models at that, sir.”

“So I am,” he said, smiling. “You won’t judge me, eh? I like the way your conscience works, Flat Top. And after all, if I can get the creatures’ females on my side, it’ll be easier to persuade them to behave themselves.”

I don’t know why he should have cared what I thought of him, but the Preservers were all like that; the damndest things bothered them. I just told him, “Yes Sir.” and he dismissed me after that. The guys in my mess had saved me a leg of mountain goat. Not much meat, but there was a lot of marrow in the bones. Crack, yum.

Well, so the next day the Facilitator went out and did his stuff.

He dressed in his best clothes, dyed all kinds of bright colors to dazzle the mortals, and he put on makeup. He rode on his horse, which your fathers hadn’t got around to domesticating yet. It was a pretty animal, nothing like the big beasts our cavalry ride: slender legs, little hooves, kind of on the stupid side but elegant as you please.

We went with Sarpa, though of course we were undercover. There were maybe a hundred of us flanking him as he rode down to their patchwork fields, slipping through the trees and the bushes, keeping ourselves out of sight. So close we came I could have popped open any one of their little round heads with a rock, as Sarpa rode back and forth in plain sight and got their attention.

They froze with their deer-antler hoes in their hands, they watched him with their mouths open, and slowly drew into a crowd as he approached them. He staged it nicely, I have to say, let his long cloak blow out behind him so its rainbow lining showed, and there were grunts and cries of wonder from the mortals.

Sarpa told them he was a messenger from their ancestors, and to prove it he did a stunt with some special-effects charges that sent red smoke and fireballs shooting from his fingertips. The mortals almost turned and ran at that, but he kept them with his voice, saying he had an important message to deliver. Then he said the ancestors demanded to know why their children had been eating their own kind?

His audience just looked blank at that, and I spotted Rook running up from behind and pushing his way through the crowd. He yelled out that he’d warned them this would happen. Falling flat before Sarpa, he begged the ancestors for mercy and promised that the farmers would never do such a terrible thing again.

At this point, though, the farmstead’s lady raised her voice and said there must be some mistake, because her people weren’t eating their own kind.

Sarpa asked, were they not lying in wait for the strangers who had recently come into the valley, the harmless people who hunted and gathered? Were they not stabbing them with spears, cutting them open, roasting them over coals?

The lady smiled and shrugged and said yes, the invaders were being treated so; but they were not her own kind, and certainly not children of the ancestors!

Sarpa didn’t win them over nearly as easy as he’d thought he could. They argued back and forth for about an hour, as I remember. He told them why it was wrong to eat other human beings, told them all about the diseases they could catch, even told them a lot of malarkey about what would happen to them in the next world if they didn’t cut it out right now.

The mortals were clearly impressed by him, but refused to consider the newcomers as people and in fact argued quite confidently against such a silly idea. Not only did they point out a whole lot of physical differences that were obvious to them (though it was lost on me; I’ve never been able to tell one of your races from another), they explained how vitally necessary it was to protect their sacred home turf from the alien interlopers, and protect their limited resources.

Sarpa was kind of taken aback that these little mortal things had the gall to argue with him. I saw he was beginning to lose his temper, and in the shadows beside me Budu noticed it, too; the old man snorted, but he just narrowed his eyes and watched. At last the Facilitator fell back on threatening the mortals, letting fly with a couple of thunderbolts that set fire to a bush and working a few other alarming-looking tricks.

That got instant capitulation. The mortals abased themselves, and the lady apologized profusely for them all being so stupid as not to understand the mighty Son of Heaven sooner. She asked him what they could possibly do to please the Son of Heaven. Maybe he’d like a beautiful virgin?

And a mortal girl was pushed forth, looking scared, and Budu grunted, because Sarpa’s eyes fixed on her with an expression like a hungry dog’s. Then he was all smiles and gracious acceptance, and congratulated the mortals for being so wise as to see things his way. The girl squealed a bit, but he assured her she’d live through his embrace and even have pretty things afterward. I don’t think she believed him, but her mother fixed her with an iron glare, and she gulped back her terror and went with Sarpa.

He took her back up to camp—she squealed a lot more when she saw us at last, but Sarpa sweet-talked her some more—and to celebrate his success he took her to his tent, stripped her bare as a skinned rabbit, and had his fun.

There was a lot of muttering from us about that, and not just because we thought what he was doing was wrong. We were disgusted because he hadn’t realized the mortals were lying to him.

See, mortal, we can tell when you’re lying. You smell different then. You smell afraid. But Sarpa had been distracted by his lusts and his vanity, sniffing after something else. We knew damned well the mortals were only giving him the girl to make him go away.

And oh, mortal, it was hard not to go down there and punish them. It was our duty, it was our programmed and ancient desire. By every law we understood, those mortals were ours now. Budu wouldn’t give the order yet, all the same. He just bided his time, though he must have known what was going to happen.

Well—three days later, as Sarpa was in his tent with his little friend while I was busting my ass to find a way to boil water in a rock basin because the great Facilitator wanted a hot bath, thank you very much—Rook came slinking up from the farmstead to tell us that the mortals had done it again. They’d caught a party of strangers, and even now they were whacking them up into bits to be skewered over the cookfire.

I can’t say I was surprised, and I know the old man wasn’t. He just stalked to Sarpa’s tent, threw back one of the skins and said:

“Son of Heaven, it seems that your in-laws have backslid.”

Sarpa was furious. He yelled at the mortal girl, demanded to know what was wrong with her people, even took a swing at her. Budu growled and fetched him out by his arm, and told him to stop being an ass. He added that if this was the way the hotshot Facilitators operated, the Company—the shamans, I mean—should have saved themselves the trouble of designing a new model, or at least not sent one into the field until they’d got the programming right.

Sarpa just drew himself up and yelled for me to bring his horse. He jumped into the saddle and rode off hell-for-leather, with Rook racing after him. Budu watched them go, and I think he actually considered for a minute whether or not it was worth it to send an armed escort after the fool. In the end he did, which turned out to be a wise precaution.

I wasn’t there to see what happened. I was babysitting Sarpa’s little girlfriend, watching as she cowered in the bedding and cried. I felt sorry for her. We do feel sorry for you sometimes, you know. It’s just that you can be so stupid, you mortals.

Anyway I missed quite a scene. Apparently it didn’t go at all well: Sarpa went galloping down and caught the farm-tribe with their mouths full of hunter-tribe. He shouted terrible threats at them, and put on another show of smoke and noises. Maybe he should have waited until there was an eclipse or a comet scheduled, though, because the farmers weren’t as impressed with his stunts this time. The upshot was, they killed his horse from under him and he had to run for it, and Rook too. If the armed escort hadn’t stepped out and scared the mortals off, there’d have been a couple of badly damaged Preservers doing time in regeneration vats, and maybe some confused farmers puking up bits of biomechanical implants.

But Sarpa and Rook got back up to camp safely enough, though they were fuming at each other, Rook especially because now he’d lost his cover and wouldn’t be able to collect any more anthropological data. He said a lot of cutting things about Facilitators in general. Sarpa was just gibbering with rage. I got between him and the girl until he calmed down a little and I respectfully suggested, sir, that he might want to keep her safe as a hostage, sir, and whatever he might have retorted, he shut up when Budu came into the tent and looked at him.

“Well, Facilitator,” said Budu, “what are you going to do now?”

But Sarpa had an answer for that. He was through dealing with the lying, grubbing little farmers. He’d go straight to the hunter-gatherers and present himself as their good angel, and show them how to defend themselves against the other tribe.

Budu told him he couldn’t do that, because it directly contravened orders. The monkeys were supposed to interbreed, not fight.

Sarpa said something sarcastic about Budu’s grasp of subtleties and explained that he’d manage that; if the hunter-gatherers captured the farmers’ females, they could keep them as slaves and impregnate them. It wouldn’t exactly be the peace and harmony our masters had wanted imposed, but it would at least guarantee the requisite interbreeding took place.

Budu shrugged, and told him to go ahead and try.

Next day, he did. Rook stayed in camp this time, but I went along because Sarpa, having lost his mount, insisted on me carrying him around on my shoulders. I guess he felt safe up there. He had a good view, anyway, because he was the first in our party to spot the hunter-gatherers’ camp on the far side of the valley.

Our reconnaissance team had reported the hunter-gatherers were digging in and fortifying a position for themselves, finally. Nice palisade of sharpened sticks, and inside they were chipping flint points just as fast as they could. Budu studied them from all angles before he just sent me walking up to the stockade so that Sarpa could look over the fence at them.

He—that is, I—had to dodge quite a few spears and thrown flints before he got them to listen to his speech. They did listen, I have to hand them that much.

But they weren’t buying it. They had every intention of descending on the farmer-tribe and getting revenge for the murder of their brethren. Sarpa tried to persuade them that the best way to do this was to make more children, but that wouldn’t wash either.

It turned out they weren’t just a migratory tribe. They apparently had a long-standing cultural imperative to expand, to take new land for themselves whenever they needed it, and if other tribes got in the way they’d push them out or kill them off—though they never ate them, they hastened to add, because they were a morally superior people, which was why they deserved to have the land in the first place.

Sarpa argued against this until they began to throw things at him again, and we beat an inglorious retreat. What was worse, when we got back we discovered that Rook had let the mortal girl go. He’d known her since her childhood, evidently, and didn’t want to see her hurt. He and Sarpa almost came to blows and it’s not pretty to see Preservers do that, mortal, they’re not designed for it. Budu had to step in again and threaten to knock their heads together if they didn’t back off.

Anyway, the damage was done, because the girl ran right back to her tribe and told them what was going on. How she’d figured out that Sarpa was going to woo the enemy, I don’t know, unless Rook was dumb enough to tell her. Then, too, you people aren’t always as stupid as you look. She might have figured out on her own that matters were coming to a head.

Which they did, in the gray cold hour before the next dawn.

Our patrols spotted them long before they got within a kilometer of each other: two little armies carrying as much weaponry as they could hold, men and boys and strong women, with their faces painted for war. Guilty, guilty, guilty, mortal! We watched from our high place and danced where we stood, we were so hungry to go after them. Sarpa didn’t desire his naked girl as much as we desired the sound of our axes on their guilty skulls, pop-chop! They were sinning, the worst of sins, and their blood was ours.

But the old man held us back. Orders were, the mortals were to be given every chance. That’s why he was our commander, mortal! He loved the law. His faith was stronger than anyone’s, but he had the strength to hold back from the purest pleasure in the world, which is being the law’s instrument, you see?

So he sent me down with Sarpa riding on my shoulder, and I walked out before the mortal armies, who had just seen each other in the growing light and were working themselves up to charge, the way the monkeys do. They fell silent when Sarpa and I appeared, and clear in the morning they heard the voices of our men, because we couldn’t help singing now, the ancient song, and it welled up so beautiful behind Sarpa’s voice as he shouted for them to lay down their arms and go home!

Oh, mortal man, you’d have thought they’d listen to him, in that cold morning when the sun was just rising and making the high snow red as blood, lighting the meadows up green, reaching bright fingers down through deeps of blue air to touch their thatched roofs and palisade points with gold. So brief their lives are in this glorious world, you’d think they’d have grabbed at any excuse not to make them briefer.

But the one side jeered and the other side screamed, and the next thing I knew I had a spear sticking out of my leg.

I swear, it felt good. The suspense was over.

They charged, and were at each other’s throats in less time than it takes to say it. So Budu gave the order.

I just shoved Sarpa up into a tree, drew my axes, and waded in.

You can’t imagine the pleasure, mortal. It would be wrong, anyway; that joy is reserved to us, forbidden to the likes of you. War is the Evil, and we make war on war, we strike that wickedness into bloody pulp! The little bone bubbles burst under our axes and the gray matter of their arrogance and presumption flies, food for crows.

Oh, it was over too soon. There’ll always be those who get the lesson at the last minute, but once we’ve shown them what true evil is they do get it, and throw down their weapons and scream their repentance on their knees. Those we spared; those we accorded mercy. Budu himself herded the terrified survivors into a huddle, and stood guard while we mopped up.

I was stringing together a necklace of ears I’d taken when I spotted Rook at the edge of the battlefield, weeping. I was feeling so friendly I almost went over and patted him on the back, with the idea of saying something to cheer him up; but they don’t see things the way we do, the Preservers. And seeing him put me in mind of Sarpa, and when I looked around for the Facilitator, damned if he wasn’t still up in the tree where I’d left him.

So I went over and offered him a helpful hand down, but he drew back at the sight of all the blood on it. I can’t blame him. I was red to the elbows, actually. Sarpa was so pale he looked green, staring at the field as though he’d never be able to close his eyes again.

I told him it was all right, that the slaughter was over. He just looked down at me and asked me how I could do such things.

Well, I had to laugh at that. It’s my duty! Who couldn’t love doing his duty? It’s the best work in the world, mortal, in the best cause: seeing that Evil is punished and Good protected. I told him so, and he said it was obscene; I replied that when the mortals took it into their heads to usurp our jobs, that would be obscene. Sarpa didn’t say anything to that, just scrambled awkwardly down and staggered out on the field.

Maybe he shouldn’t have done that. The boys were still having a little fun, taking heads that weren’t too smashed and cutting off other things that took their fancies, and Sarpa took one look and doubled over, vomiting. The poor guy was a Preserver at heart, after all. The problem was, this was the big dramatic moment when he was supposed to address the surviving mortals of each tribe and point out how disobeying him had brought them to this sorry state.

I told him to pull himself together. Budu, kind of impatient, sent over a runner to ask if the Facilitator was ready to give his speech, and I tried to drag Sarpa along but he’d take a few steps and start retching again, especially when he saw the women lying dead. I hoisted him up on my shoulders to give him a ride, but he got sick again, right in my hair, which the other guys in my unit thought was hilarious; they stopped stacking corpses to point and laugh.

I growled at them and set Sarpa down. He put his hands over his face, crying like a baby. It was hopeless. I looked over at Budu and shrugged, holding out my hands in a helpless kind of way. The old man shook his head, sighing.

In the end, Budu was the one who made the speech, rounding up what was left of the two tribes and penning them together to listen to him.

It wasn’t a long speech, no flowers of rhetoric such as Sarpa might have come up with. Budu just laid it out for them, simple and straight. From now on, they were all to live together in peace. They would intermarry and have children. There would be no more cannibalism. There would be no more fighting. The penalty for disobedience would be death.

Then Budu told them that we were going, and they were to bury what we’d left them of their dead. He warned them, though, that we were only going up the mountain, above the tree line into the mist, and we’d be watching them always from the high places.

And we did. We were up here thirty years. It turned out to be a good thing for us, too, because while we were overseeing the integration of the two tribes, Budu worked out a proposal for our masters.

I told you he’d studied their future history. He knew what kind of an opening they needed, and he gave them one. He pointed out the nearly universal existence of places we could fit in the mortals’ mythology. Not just of your village, mortal; every village there is, anywhere.

Legends of gods, or giants or trolls or demons, who live up somewhere high and bring judgment on mankind. Sometimes terrible, sometimes benign, but not to be screwed with, ever! Sometimes they’re supposed to live on one specific mountain, like this one; sometimes the story gets garbled and they’re thought to live in the clouds, or the sky. Someplace up. Hell, there’s even a story about a big man with a beard who lives at the North Pole, who rewards and punishes children. I think he’s called Satan…or was it Nobodaddy? It doesn’t matter.

Anyway, Budu showed our masters that his proposal fit right in with recorded history, was in fact vital to the development of mortal religion. And, while I understand they don’t approve of religion much up there in the future, they do like to be absolutely sure that history rolls along smoothly. Messing with causality scares them.

What was his proposal, mortal? Come on, can’t you think? What if I give you three guesses? No?

Well, Budu said that since civilization was still a little shaky on its legs, our masters needed to keep us around a while as a peacekeeping force. We’d go to each little community and lay down the law, or give them law if they didn’t have it: no eating each other, no murder, don’t inbreed, don’t steal. Basic stuff. Then we’d run patrols and administer justice when and as needed, and contain any new mortal aggression that might threaten to wipe out humanity before it could become established. The final clever touch was that he signed Sarpa’s name to it.

The masters accepted that proposal, mortal. It’s bought us generations of time, even with Marco’s idiot rebellion. The masters may not have trusted us anymore, but they still needed us.

And it worked for their good, too; it certainly got your village established. You wouldn’t be here now if not for what we did that day, on that bloody field. And neither would our masters, and they know it.

We watched your fathers, from up here in the rocks and the snow, until we could be certain they wouldn’t backslide again. Then Budu pulled the Fifth Infantry out, all but a garrison of three of us, me and Bouncer and Longtooth, and we watched over your little valley down the long centuries while he went off to give law to other mortals.

But time marched on, and eventually Bouncer got reassigned somewhere else, and later on Longtooth was transferred out too. Now there’s only me.

And the word’s just come down from the top, mortal: they’re sending me back to my old unit, after all this time. I’ll see battle again, I’ll serve under the old man! My hands will steam with the blood of sinners. It’ll be wonderful! I’ve gotten so tired of sitting up here, freezing my ass off. If you’d climbed this mountain a day later than you did, you’d have missed out on your chance to get the Truth. Life’s funny, isn’t it? Death is even funnier.


The words and gestures cease, as the old monster settles back on his haunches, momentarily lost in a happy dream. The boy watches him. Terrified as he is, he cannot help wondering whether his host isn’t something of a fool. It has of course occurred to him, as he listened unwilling to this story, that people as clever as the Time Shamans must have long since found some way of outwitting their servants. How can the creature trust his masters? How can he not know that times change?

For even in his village below, where there are still those who can remember glimpsing God, skepticism is blooming. Nowadays children are frightened into good behavior by the old stories, but not men. Once nobody would have dared climb this mountain, seek out this cave; it would have been sacrilegious. Yet the boy’s friends had laughed at him when he’d set out for the mountain, and the village elders had just shrugged, smiling, and watched him go.

The boy is musing to himself, thinking of the methods fabled heroes had always used to defeat ogres, and wondering what sort of magical devices the Time Shamans might have employed, when he becomes aware that the old monster has turned his pale eyes on him again. Flat Top’s expression has lost its warmth. He looks remote, stern, sad.

The boy feels a chill go down his spine, wondering if his thoughts have been read somehow. The giant extends one of his eloquent hands and picks up a stone axe. He runs his thumb along its scalloped edge. Holding the boy’s gaze with his own, he lays the axe across his knees and resumes their conversation:

…But enough about me.

I want to hear your story now, mortal man. I want to know if you’re one of the righteous. You’ll tell me everything you’ve ever done, your whole life story, and then I’ll judge you. Take as long as you like. My patience is limitless.

The boy gulps, wondering how convincingly he can lie.