There’s a moment of brief, period-accurate bigotry from an unnamed character, including a single period-accurate slur against the Vietnamese.
Before the invention of the light bulb, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach had kept an oil lamp on the nightstand by his bed. Winter mornings had stretched across the tilted Earth, casting a long, deep shadow of night over the French countryside. He’d risen a little after 4AM, being a natural morning person, and he’d always ignited the lamp to read by. There’d been little else to do hours before dawn, but he’d always been full of energy and intelligence, as if vitality had accumulated in him while he slept. Books had been stacked on the lower shelf of the nightstand, along with a restocked fountain pen. In the style of the times, he’d annotated whatever he read, taking notes for future essays and books. He’d been a writer, a true philosopher whose only task was to think and communicate the truths he’d apprehended.
Now when he awoke, he pulled the cord on a shaded lamp and filled the hotel bedroom with pale yellow light. There weren’t any philosophical tracts to read or notes to take. He wasn’t a writer anymore. Technically he was preparing a manuscript in his downtime, but The Nature of the System would never see publication. It wouldn’t even be read by anyone except the Zombie. d’Holbach was a philosopher in mind alone, retired in a sense because the world had demanded action for nearly one hundred and fifty years, and philosophy was best crafted with idle hands. Whenever he did read, he preferred fiction’s newest child, the well-adapted mutation born of fanciful faerie tales and adventure serials: science-fiction, though little of it was scientific. What mattered was the message. Science was ascendant, and everything could be understood by reason and observation. It was an attitude the cults should’ve adopted during the Enlightenment, but even today they remained stubbornly anachronistic, clinging to a theological metaphysics that would’ve embarrassed St. Thomas Aquinas with its simplicity.
It was 4AM on Sunday morning, and thank Edison for electrical power—the world would come awake quickly, and the Baron’s day could begin soon. He took his shaving kit into the bathroom, lathered up his scalp and face, and shaved with a straight edge. He preferred to visit a barber, but he was in a hurry and didn’t want his skin to look dirty. The trick for intimidation was to look the part. He appeared like landed nobility torn out of the 18th century, someone who expected orders to be followed and got his way. It often worked.
He washed the blade, stripped naked and showered quickly. Lathering up a cascade of soap, he felt a little pride about the quality of his physique. Exercise and time had improved his health to a peak never achieved in his first one hundred years of life, and he’d endured yesterday’s injuries well. The bruise on his arm was black, and there was a triangle of yellow on his stomach where Enzu’s boot had struck—with every breath, there was a soreness deep in his punished intestines—but still, he was already recovering, and nothing was too tender to move. Back when the Zombie had led him out of Europe, similar blows had put him down for a day.
He dried with the complimentary towel, dumped it into the hamper for room service, and dressed fully for the morning. Everything was finished neatly with a routine honed over decades. It was only a few minutes after 4:30 when he knocked on the bedroom door.
“Zombie?” he asked.
“It’s safe,” the Zombie called.
The Baron opened the door. The living room was dark, lights out, curtains and window open to the chill air. The Zombie was standing in front of a chair facing the open sky.
“See anything interesting?” the Baron asked.
“The clouds cleared around three,” the Zombie said, “so I’ve been watching the stars and imagining, at least as much as this body still imagines.”
The Baron hesitated to turn on a light, and he shut the bedroom door behind him. The darkness was almost complete. The moon was down, and the city was dim at this hour. The stars weren’t completely hidden, just dim. Their scant lights were scattered across the horizon like specks of quartz in black sand. “What’re you thinking about?”
“Spaceships,” the Zombie said. “I wish they were real.” He turned to look at the Baron, but his expression was hard to discern. Only the slight paleness of his eyes even indicated the direction of his face. “It’d be nice to know that the Earth isn’t the center of the universe.”
“Did you spend all night reading sci-fi?” the Baron asked.
The Zombie turned on the lamp in the corner of the room, flooding it with more warm soft yellow. “If space was somewhere they could go, the gods would have to be obsessed to stay here.”
That wasn’t an answer to the Baron’s question. He shielded his eyes, even though they weren’t that far adjusted yet. He guessed the Zombie was being slightly evasive for a reason. “You cook that thought out of Foundation?” he asked, again trying to verify if the Zombie spent all night reading.
“No. I haven’t been thinking about fiction.”
That was a half-answer, the kind that the Zombie used whenever he’d done something to make the Baron upset. “Did you go out last night then?”
The Zombie nodded towards the open window. “I took a walk.”
Ah, so that’s what his friend had been dancing around. A walk could be good or bad, depending on what the Zombie had done. “How was it?”
“Very enthusiastic.” The Zombie grinned, but only to himself. “I met some people.”
The Baron recognized that cheer. He forced his voice to remain neutral. “Did you kill anybody? Or hurt anyone?”
“I dragged a man by his collar and gave him a few bruises and lumps.”
The Baron waited for elaboration, but none was immediately delivered. If there was a murder, the Zombie would’ve been more serious. Despite appearances, he cared about the consequences, at least when it came to the Baron’s well-being. “Okay. We’ll talk about it over breakfast.” Some of the restaurants in the terminal would be open to feed Saturday’s drunks and Sunday’s workers. He’d debrief the Zombie over coffee.
The Zombie picked up his briefcase from the table. “I need another bowler.”
“We’ll buy one before we ride to Brooklyn.”
He chose a trio of double claro cigars from a humidor he’d brought with him from Boston, packed them into a fine cigar case with a guillotine cutter, and pocketed the lot. He’d smoke them sparingly, less for the tobacco and more for the habit.
On the elevator ride down to the lobby, he asked, “Did you make any enemies?”
“They already were our enemies. I made sure before I kicked in any doors.”
The Baron understood. The Zombie had taken a risk and collected secure information, which would’ve been difficult to retrieve by any other method. Still, only the Zombie could think that breaking-and-entering, trespassing, and assault were reasonable actions, and the Baron knew the Zombie’s history all too well. At least one if not all of those crimes had been committed in his name. No use crying over spilled milk, as the saying goes. The Baron felt confident that he had the diplomacy to deal with it, or at least to turn it to his advantage.
Once they were in the lobby, they went to the front desk and the Baron asked the night clerk for a room change. After a few minutes of checking schedules, the exhausted man at the front desk agreed that they could move after 6PM to the next room down the hall. The Baron said that he’d turn in his keys after dinner that evening, barring any important events or meetings keeping him in Brooklyn overnight.
“You expect we’ll be caught over there?” the Zombie asked.
“Just being prepared,” the Baron said.
They stepped out onto the sidewalk a little before 5AM. They were passing into nautical twilight, when a distant sun painted the horizon in faint glowing shades of deep-sea blue and royal purple, but they were still at least half an hour from sunrise. The streetlights were on, and the cars were shining their headlights; despite the sky’s rich colors, it was useless to see by.
“This time of day reminds me of the poles in winter,” the Zombie said.
The Baron laughed. “When was the last time you went to a pole?”
“Before I met you.”
“Come off it, you don’t remember that long ago.”
The Zombie had his hands behind his back. “That’s not true. I fell into an ice chasm and swam out through the ocean under the ice cap. You don’t forget an experience like that.”
“Oh? Why haven’t you told me about it before?”
“It didn’t occur to me until now.”
The Baron grinned. “Ha! Liar.” The started towards an entrance to Grand Central Terminal on the far corner of the intersection.
“I’ve been to both poles,” the Zombie said, “I’m serious.”
“I believe it, I just don’t believe you went there in the 17th century. You were busy torturing rich people in Central Europe.”
“It’s not a long way,” the Zombie said, “it only takes three years to circle the world.”
Now that was a number that the Baron believed. The Zombie was recognized clearly in Mesoamerican, Inuit, North American, and South American cultic lore. He’d crossed the oceans so many times that it was impossible to count. What surprised the Baron is that it’d never occurred to the Zombie that the New World was a strange place, since every place in the world but one was covered in people, and they’d all seemed equally ignorant of one another.
When the whole world was yours to explore, it was hard to remember the barriers that kept everyone else apart were nearly insurmountable, and that whole cosmologies were defined by these natural divisions. An ocean to an unprepared man might as well be an eternity of time and an infinity of space, and the people on the far side weren’t any more real than the gods in the sky or the dead under the earth. They were myths until you saw them—or in the case of the current gods of prestige, they were comfortable explanations for the unknown.
They spiraled down to the lower concourse where restaurants were opening their doors to travelers. Every Sunday, hundreds of businessmen prepared for 36-hour outbound rides to the old South, where their mining companies, plantations, and textile factories leeched off the hot, poverty-stricken countryside for cheap resources and cheaper labor. Virginian and Georgian accents were dominant, and the laughs of powerful men were rich and cruel. The jokes they told were either bawdy or awfully racist, and they seemed to make a point of telling them louder and laughing harder when the black and Italian waiters were trying to bus nearby tables. If a woman took their order, the facade of humor was pulled away to reveal naked harassment.
The Baron and the Zombie took a table outside the diner, away from the indoor crowd. A young couple—stoned, still awake, and downing raw coffee to reach the dawn—argued about how many people would die in a nuclear strike. She said millions and he said tens of millions, as if that were the difference between mere war and the end of civilization.
“It doesn’t matter how many people die,” the Baron interrupted them. “This civilization ends if the bombs fall. Even if you survive, your lives as they are now? They’re over, and the world that comes afterwards won’t be yours. You won’t be ready for it.”
“Yeah, man, of course,” said the girl, and then they started vehemently agreeing with one another, almost fighting to see whose cynicism came first, who was the leader and the follower in the prophesying of apocalypse.
“You shouldn’t be cynical,” the Baron interrupted again, “It’s dangerous. You’ll start to think that bad things are inevitable. You won’t stop them from happening.”
“Sure, sure, we get it,” said the man. He looked harassed, spent. The Baron could tell that they weren’t really listening. The waiter came by with the couple’s check.
The Baron flagged the waiter down and ordered coffee with cream, a soft boiled egg with soldiers, and hot grits. The Zombie only wanted coffee, his own portion, freshly brewed and almost boiling. The young couple left before the waiter delivered the Baron’s food. The Zombie had his book out on the table, but he wasn’t reading yet.
“Why’d you say that to those kids?” the Zombie asked.
“Their argument was ridiculous. You can prevent a man-made disaster.”
“I disagree. You often can’t.” The Zombie drained his tiny cup of scalding coffee like it was ice cold water. Then he put his mouth on the spigot of his coffee pot and took a long draught.
“That’s awful.”
“My opinion or the coffee?”
“Your choice.” The Baron took his bite. The grits were wonderful while hot, but he had to finish them quickly. Like all warm cereals, they became foul when chilled. His favorite word for the texture was clotted. Grits clotted after a few minutes, leaving a corn-and-butter scab.
“You can’t expect people to act like us. We have an unfair advantage.”
“This isn’t Kantian morality. I’m not universalizing our behavior.”
“I’m invincible. You’re infamous. We don’t rule the world, but we have influence.”
“I’m saying that we shouldn’t put on blinders. We have opportunities to do good.”
The Zombie downed more coffee, wiped his lips and gasped like he’d been refreshed. It was a deliberately annoying little sound, entirely artificial since he usually forgot to breathe unless he was talking. The Baron’s theory for this breathlessness was rather dark. At one time or another, the Zombie must’ve drowned long enough to unlearn the involuntary reflex of breathing. It was fortunate that the Zombie couldn’t remember any such events.
“I take opportunities whenever I can,” the Zombie said.
The Baron ate more grits, then sipped his own cooling coffee and sliced off the top of his pre-cracked egg. The runny yolk was steaming. He took a strip of dry toast—a “soldier”—and dipped it, British-style. “I’m not talking about you,” he said, before taking a bite.
The Zombie watched the yolk drip from the bread and grimaced. “And you call my behavior awful?” Of all the things in the world, he somehow hated raw eggs. It was doubly confusing since the Baron had once seen the Zombie eating elemental sulphur with a spoon.
“You’re really not messing with me?” the Baron asked for what must be the hundredth time. It was almost an impulse at this point—it always made no sense.
“Messing with you how?” the Zombie asked seriously.
“Eggs?”
“They’re foul.”
“I saw you drink bleach last week.”
“What does that have to do with eggs?”
The Baron dipped and ate another strip. They’d never resolve this strange little conflict, and there were more important matters than repeating a personal comedy about yolks. “Nevermind. You went on an enthusiastic walk?”
“Very enthusiastic.”
“Who did you visit?” The Baron hurried to eat as much of his breakfast as possible while the Zombie talked.
“I went down to Tammany Hall.”
The Baron nearly choked on a spoonful of grits. “Really?” he said around a mouthful.
“A door guard admitted that Schuler was cutting us off—without coercion.”
The Baron swallowed and frowned. “Did we make enemies?”
“No more than we had before. We also gained a little respect. Pailthorpe was there.”
“Who?” The name was only vaguely familiar.
“The archivist from our last visit. He’s very old now, but he shouted down six guards without any of them calling my bluff.” The Zombie wasn’t planning on killing anyone at Tammany, that went without question, though it was similarly unquestionable that he would have slaughtered the full complement if it’d been absolutely necessary.
“We can’t press them too far,” the Baron noted. “They’ll push back.”
The Zombie drained his coffee pot and set it on the table with a thud. “One moment.” He popped the briefcase on the table, opened it up and pulled out two file folders. “These are New York’s records on the survivors Jacono identified.” He threw them on the table. “For you.”
The Baron left them where they were. He was eating. “Does Schuler have a copy?”
“They were on a copy desk, but I didn’t see any papers.”
“We’ll need to be careful that we don’t meet Schuler in the street.”
“He wouldn’t try anything in the open. Not when we’re helping them.”
“Never say never. He’s the current Diviner. By definition, he’s insane.”
“You called him lucid.”
“It’s directed insanity.”
The Zombie closed the briefcase. “You aren’t angry with me?”
The Baron laughed under his breath. “Were you trying to piss me off?”
“You’ve yelled at me about this kind of thing before.”
The Baron scooped up more grits and shoveled them down. He felt that sense of weight, the density of the grain settling in his stomach. They’d feel a little leaden for the next hour, but they’d stick with him until lunch. He pointed the spoon at the Zombie. “That’s the key word—before. Could I have stopped you last night?”
“Honestly? No, I wasn’t going to wait for New York to screw us.”
“I don’t like it, I wouldn’t have done it myself, but there you go—two folders that we need.”
The Zombie grinned. “That sounds like approval to me.”
“It’s neutral. Let’s hope Boss Tweed and Oracle Gagliano are in a forgiving mood.”
“What about General Osman?”
“He’ll hate us regardless, though I’m hoping his son gives us a good word.” The Baron glanced through the concourse window into the diner. “We must be coming up on the hour. The racists are paying their checks. If they say anything, I’ll handle them.”
The Zombie opened Foundation and Empire again. “Fine.”
“You didn’t finish reading that last night?” the Baron asked.
“It was a long walk.”
The Baron polished off his breakfast while the Zombie kept his eyes on the page. A couple of businessmen lingered outside the door. One of them finally gestured towards the Baron. He was a lanky fellow in a white suit and a ridiculous cowboy hat. “Look at Ivy League.” His accent was thick. “How much did he pay for that slope?”
His friend laughed. “Too much.”
The Baron looked up, turned in his chair, and smiled at the man. Aggression was common in these places, at these hours, but he was used to it. “Excuse me, sir? Do you have a chaw of tobacco jammed in your mouth?”
Lanky Suit was a little lost, but he was a well-practiced bully. “Aww, look at that. Ivy League tried hurting my feelings.”
The Baron grimaced. “Either it’s a chaw, or that’s your accent.”
The Zombie looked up from his book before the man could retort. “That’s an accent?”
“I know!” the Baron said. “I guess he wanted to sound ridiculous.”
Lanky nudged his hat down towards his eyes. “Rich man’s got a mouth.”
The Baron smirked. “You think you’re a threat?”
Lanky’s hefty friend spoke up: “We could kick you around the block.”
“No, I get it now. You think I’m not a threat. You think, he’s sitting around, he’ll back off like the others, but I can see the police report now, can’t you?” He held out his hands, as if he were reading an invisible sheet of paper. “‘After starting a fight with other customers, Dixie and Clyde were boxed into submission by an athlete and a Korean-American soldier acting in self-defense. They declined to press charges, stating that the beating was punishment enough.’”
“Jeeeesus—” Lanky began.
The Baron slammed the side of his fist on the top of the table. All the silverware and plates rattled violently. He hadn’t even bothered to stand yet. “Are we fighting, or is this stupid?”
“You’re crazy,” Lanky said. “We were only joking.”
“You’re a goddamn menace,” his friend agreed.
The Baron watched them in silence. Saying anything would only prompt them to respond. Letting them have the last word would give them the confidence to leave with their dignity intact, which is all they wanted to salvage at this point. They were businessmen, ultimately, and with the macho games coming to a sudden end, they shook their heads as if they were the sane ones, as if they were the voice of reason in a violent world, and they walked away.
After they vanished into the concourse tunnels, the Baron laughed under his breath. “That was fun.”
“You haven’t cut loose in a while,” the Zombie noted.
“I can only justify it against people who deserve it.”
Verbal jousting was an old skillset for the Baron, one that’d been a necessary evil in the first few decades of his life. In 18th century Paris, two talents had been valued among the nobility above all others. The first and lesser was cunning, especially in financial matters, though it’d been widely believed that any articulate and educated gentleman was worthy of his title. The second and greater skill was wit, used almost exclusively to mock, belittle, and ultimately conquer others. Someone with a stutter might’ve been the most intelligent administrator in Europe, but there’d been little hope that the king would grant him an audience. If the throne had recognized a social pariah, he would’ve tainted his reputation through association.
The Baron was born German but naturalized in France. As a “foreigner” and a philosopher, he’d been allowed certain eccentricities by the Parisian nobility, and he’d never done anything to disguise his disapproval of such a ridiculous system. He’d relied primarily on his authority as a man of letters and a contributing author to the Encyclopédie to garner respect. Only when someone pressed him had he resorted to a harsh word, and while he hadn’t compared with the sharks that swam in the royal court, he’d bit hard enough to avoid being ostracized for its own sake—a fate that had sometimes befallen other natural philosophers.
Of course, money and reputation had kept their places at the table despite the lamentable focus on sharp-tongued dueling, and the Baron had been rich with both. The d’Holbach estate had paid for opening and maintaining the largest salon in Paris with one of the most extensive libraries on the continent. The philosophers Diderot and d’Alembert had conceived, prepared, and compiled the first encyclopedia of the Enlightenment there. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had traveled from Geneva often, and in his writings he’d coined the phrase d’Holbach’s Coterie, referring to the group of radical Enlightenment thinkers that’d regularly stayed in the Baron’s home.
It’d been a decadent place, practically a palace. They’d dined on luxurious and rare foods literally fit for kings and drank vintages of wine so expensive that one bottle could’ve been sold to pay a servant’s wages for a year. Women had been barred entry, even d’Holbach’s first and second wives—a fact that the Baron now regretted—and participation had been on an invite-only basis. Powerful radicals had frequented the salon and opined political, religious, and philosophical views that could’ve put them in a noose. They’d collected power, ambition, and intelligence, and all of them had drunk deep from the twin wells of revolution and change. The Enlightenment had been their time. They’d have made an incredibly powerful cult if any of them had known about the gods.
Such times were long past, though, and after two centuries a man changed. The Baron’s French was poor and vastly antiquated. He didn’t understand modern German. All he really had was English and a smattering of Italian—not enough to speak, just enough to listen. It was only through enduring practice that he’d kept his sharp wit and critical mind.
Thoughts of the past would occasionally crest over him, like gentle waves of nostalgia, but it was always brief. Those years were remote, consigned to the ocean of time, and despite contemporary theories that old minds were ossified, he found that to be absolutely false. Being this old merely meant well-practiced, but it didn’t stop the world from changing to the point where one adapted or died.
Author’s Note:
A wise man once said, fix your hearts or die.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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