Free The Graveyard Game by Kage Baker Page A

generation. You make your mistake, and not only do youget screwed forever, the screwing spreads out in circles like ripples from a body dropped into quiet water. A body with a millstone about its neck.
    That’s why slash and burn was your way of dealing with the bad guys, wasn’t it? Make examples of them, terrify the others so they’ll never dare to break the laws. Free will? Forget it. Obedience was what you demanded and got. Very Pentateuch.
    I wonder . . . did you ever work around Ur of the Chaldees? Ever lay some law on a shepherd named Abram? With Company special effects, maybe?
    But theater was never your way. You’d have marched up to the shepherd, grabbed him by the front of his robe, and told him you would be running his life from then on, for his own good. You didn’t beat around the bush.
    Times changed, though. The Company had to stop being that direct. I think you understood this, maybe you alone of all the old Enforcers; though it didn’t help you in the end. You realized what was going on when your kind began disappearing, didn’t you? You knew how the Company was solving the problem of operatives it no longer needed.
    Did you do what I’m doing now, investigating, searching? But it’s a little harder for me, Father, the Company’s more devious these days, as 2355 draws closer. The Preservers are being given a nice package deal. It’s called gradual retirement.
    The argument is that as the future world comes nearer, there’s less work for us, who were created to rescue endangered things from humanity’s folly. Mortals, finally becoming wise and good, don’t need our services as much to preserve their priceless works of art from the ravages of war, to prevent extinctions of rare plants and animals due to overcrowding, overdevelopment. There is very little and soon will be
no
more war, overcrowding, or development.
    Personally I have my doubts about this. Maybe they’ve just run out of stuff for us to save.
    But anyway. We’ve all been told the Company will start rewardingus now for our millennia of faithful service. Giving us little treats, vacations, personal lives. This is the way it’ll be all the time after 2355, they say: we can go anywhere we want, do anything we want. Just as though we weren’t slaves.
    It’s taken me so many years to be able to say that word.
    Slaves? Us? Not when the Company is starting to let us choose our own postings. Not when the Company is permitting us lasting relationships with the mortals with whom we have to work. Not when the Company is relaxing the old rules about personal property, schedules, and Theobromos consumption. We have choices now, at least some of the time. We can live our own lives, except when the Company needs us to do something.
    The reason gradual retirement is so gradual, of course, is that all our programming directly opposes the idea of retirement. We have to be eased into a life of leisure. Our work is all we want, all we need, all that has kept us going through centuries of immortal heartbreak. Time on our hands makes us seriously uncomfortable. Look what it did to a Conservationist like poor Mendoza. Drove her crazy . . .
    I assume she went crazy when she killed those mortals. A Conservationist killing, that’s unheard of. Guys like you made pyramids of trophy heads, I know, and problem solvers like Porfirio work their silent way through the sewers of the world taking out two-legged vermin. Even Facilitators have been known to do a little quiet unofficial termination now and then.
    But Mendoza? I’d never have thought her anger could push her that far. It was a rotten trick the Company played on her, taking her work away, letting her sit there in the middle of desolation with nothing to keep the old memories at bay. No wonder she went with the damned Englishman . . .
    But which Englishman?
    Who the hell was he?
    What was he?

London, 2026
    T REVOR AND ANITA sat waiting in the front parlor of the shop in Euston Road. They were