About the Author

Kage Baker was an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Centre and taught Elizabethan English as a Second Language. Her books include In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, and Mendoza in Hollywood, among many others. Born in 1952 in Hollywood, she lived in Pismo Beach, California, the Clam Capital of the World. She died on January 31, 2010.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the Garden of Iden

Tor Books

Chapter One

I AM A BOTANIST. I will write down the story of my life asan exercise, to provide the illusion of conversation in this place where Iam now alone. It will be a long story, because it was a long road thatbrought me here, and it led through blazing Spain and green, greenEngland and ever so many centuries of Time. But you'll understand itbest if I begin by telling you what I learned in school.

Once, there was a cabal of merchants and scientists whose purposewas to make money and improve the lot of humankind. They inventedTime Travel and Immortality. Now, I was taught that they inventedTime Travel first and developed Immortals so they could send peoplesafely back through the years.

In reality it was the other way around. The process for Immortalitywas developed first. In order to test it, they had to invent Time Travel.

It worked like this: they would send a team of doctors into the past,into 1486 for example, and select some lucky native of that time andconfer immortality on him. Then they'd go back to their own time andsee if their test case was still around. Had he survived the interveningnine hundred years? He had? How wonderful. Werethere any unpleasant side effects? There were? Oops. They'd go backto the drawing board and then back to 1486 to try the new, improvedprocess on another native. Then they'd go home again, to see how thisone turned out. Still not perfect? They'd try again. After all, they wereonly expending a few days of their own time. The flawed immortalscouldn't sue them, and there was a certain satisfaction in finallydiscovering what made all those Dutchmen fly and Jews wander.

But the experiments didn't precisely pan out. Immortality is not forthe general public. Oh, it works. God, how it works. But it can haveseveral undesirable side effects, mental instability being one of them,and there are certain restrictions that make it impractical for generalsale. For example, it only really works on little children with flexibleminds and bodies. It does not work on middle-aged millionaires, whichis a pity, because they are the only consumers who can afford theprocess.

So this cabal (they called themselves Dr. Zeus, Incorporated) cameup with a limited version of the procedure and marketed it as trulysuperior geriatric medicine. As such it was fabulously profitable, andeveryone commended Dr. Zeus.

Everyone, of course, except all those flawed immortals.

But about the Time Travel part.

Somehow, Dr. Zeus invented a time transcendence field. It, too, hadits limitations. Time travel is only possible backward, for one thing.You can return to your own present once you've finished yourbusiness in the past, but you can't jump forward into your future. Somuch for finding out who's going to win in the fifth race at Santa Anitaon April 1, 2375.

Still, Dr. Zeus played around with the field and discovered whatcould at first be taken as a comforting fact: History cannot be changed.You can't go back and save Lincoln, but neither can youerase your own present by accidentally killing one of your ancestors.To repeat, history cannot be changed.

However--and listen closely, this is the important part--this law canonly be observed to apply to recorded history. See the implications?

You can't loot the future, but you can loot the past.

I'll spell it out for you. If history states that John Jones won a milliondollars in the lottery on a certain day in the past, you can't go backthere and win the lottery instead. But you can make sure that JohnJones is an agent of yours, who will purchase the winning ticket onthat day and dutifully invest the proceeds for you. From your vantagepoint in the future, you tell him which investments are sound andwhich financial institutions are stable. Result: the longest of long-termdividends for future you.

And suppose you have John Jones purchase property with hislottery winnings, and transfer title to a mysterious holding firm?Suppose you have an army of John Joneses all doing the same thing?If you started early enough, and kept at it long enough, you couldpretty much own the world.

Dr. Zeus did.

Overnight they discovered assets they never knew they had,administered by long-lived law firms with ancient instructions todeliver interest accrued, on a certain day in 2335, to a "descendant" ofthe original investor. And the money was nothing compared to the realestate. As long as they stayed within the frame of recorded history,they had the ability to prearrange things so that every event that everhappened fell out to the Company's advantage.

At about this point, the scientist members of the cabal protestedthat Dr. Zeus's focus seemed to have shifted to ruling the world, andhadn't the Mission Statement mentioned something about improvingthe lot of humanity too? The merchant members of thecabal smiled pleasantly and pointed out that history, after all, cannotbe changed, so there was a limit to how much humanity's lot could beimproved without running up against that immutable law.

But remember, Gentle Reader, that that law can only be seen toapply to recorded history. The test case was the famous Library ofAlexandria, burned with all its books by a truculent invader.Technically, the library couldn't be saved, because historyemphatically states that it was destroyed. However, Dr. Zeus sent acouple of clerks back to the library with a battery-powered copierdisguised as a lap desk. Working nights over many years, theytransferred every book in the place to film before the arsonist got to it,and took it all back to 2335.

Even though the books turned out to be mostly liberal arts stufflike poetry and philosophy that nobody could understand anymore,the point was made, the paradox solved: What had been dead could bemade to live again. What had been lost could be found.

Over the next few months in 2335, previously unknown works ofart by the great masters began turning up in strange places. Buried inlead caskets in cellars in Switzerland, hidden in vaults in the VaticanLibrary, concealed under hunting scenes by successful third-rateVictorian commercial painters: Da Vincis and Rodins and Van Goghs allover the place, undocumented, uncatalogued, but genuine articlesnonetheless.

Take the case of The Kale Eaters, the unknown first version of VanGogh's early Potato Eaters. It wasn't possible for the Company to godrug Van Gogh in his studio, take the newly finished painting, and leaphome with it: nothing can be transported forward out of its own time.What they did was drug poor Vincent, take The Kale Eaters and seal itin a protective coat of great chemical complexity, paint it over in black,and present it to a furniture maker in Wyoming (old USA), who used itto back a chair that later found its way into a folk arts-and-craftsmuseum, and later still into othermuseums, until some zealous restorer X-rayed the chair and got theshock of his life. Needless to say, the chair was at that time in acollection owned by Dr. Zeus.

As it happens, there are all sorts of chests and cupboards in lonelyhouses that don't get explored for years on end. There are buildingsthat survive bombings, fire, and flood, so that no one ever sees what'shidden in their walls or under their floorboards. The unlikely things thatget buried in graves alone would astonish you. Get yourself a databaseto keep track of all such safe hiding places, and you too can go into theMiraculous Recovery business.

And why stop there? Art is all very well and can fetch a good price,but what the paying public really wants is dinosaurs.

Not dinosaurs literally, of course. Everyone knew what happenedwhen you tried to revive dinosaurs. But the Romance of Extinction wasbig business in the twenty-fourth century. To sell merchandise, youhad merely to slap a picture of something extinct on it. A tiger, forexample. Or a gorilla. Or a whale. Crying over spilt milk was de rigueurby that time. What better way to cash in on ecological nostalgia than torevive supposedly extinct species?

In May of 2336, people turned on their newspapers and learnedthat a small colony of passenger pigeons had been discovered inIceland, of all places. In Christmas of that same year, four blue whaleswere sighted off the coast of Chile. In March of 2337, a stand of SantaLucia fir trees, a primitive conifer thought extinct for two centuries,was found growing in a corner of the Republic of California. Everyoneapplauded politely (people never get as excited over plants as they doover animals), but what didn't make the news was that this species of firwas the only known host of a species of lichen that had certaininvaluable medical properties ...

Miracles? Not at all. Dr. Zeus had collected breeding pairs of thepigeons in upstate New York in the year 1500. They were protected andbred in a Dr. Zeus station in Canada for over half a millenniumand then released to the outside world again. Similar arrangementswere made for the whales and the fir trees.

Anyway, when the public imagination was all aglow with thesemarvelous discoveries, Dr. Zeus let the truth be known. Not all thetruth, naturally, and not widely known; business didn't work that wayin the twenty-fourth century. But rumor and wild surmise worked aswell as the plushiest advertising campaign, and the Company didn'thave to pay a cent for it. It got to be known that if you knew the rightpeople and could meet the price, you could have any treasure from thepast; you could raise the lamented dead.

The orders began to come in.

Obsessive collectors of art and literature. Philanthropistssentimental about lost species. Pharmaceutical companies desperatefor new biological sources. Stranger people, with stranger needs andplenty of ready cash. There were only two or three questions.

Who was running Dr. Zeus now? Even its founders weren't sure. Itsmost secretive inner circle couldn't have said positively. Suddenly theywere surrounded by the prearranged fruits of somebody's labor on theirbehalf--but whose labor? Just how many people worked for theCompany?

Also, were they now faced with the responsibility of making surehistory happened at all? Quite a few species had been declared extinct,only to turn up alive and well in unexpected places. Were these Dr.Zeus projects they hadn't been aware of? Someone went digging in theCompany archives and discovered that the coelacanth was a Dr. Zeusspecial. So was the rule elk. So was the dodo, the cheetah, Pere David'sdeer. And the Company archives had an unsettling way of expandingwhen no one was looking.

Finally, where do you get the support personnel for an operationthe size that this one had to be? Besides the cost of sending modernagents to and from the past, the agents themselves hated it. They saidit was dangerous back there. It was dirty. People talked funny andthe clothes were uncomfortable and the food was disgusting. Couldn'tsomebody be found who was better suited to deal with the past?

Well. Remember all those test-case immortals?

A team from the future was sent back to history's predawn, to buildtraining centers in unpopulated places. They went out and got childrenfrom the local Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, and shaved theirdiverse little skulls and worked the Immortality Process on their littlebrains and bodies. They brought them up with careful indoctrinationand superior education. Then they went back to their own time, leavingthe new agents there to expand the operation.

And what did Dr. Zeus have then? A permanent workforce thatdidn't have to be shipped back and forth through time, that didn't sufferculture shock, and that never, never needed medical benefits. Or, to putit in the corporate prose of the Official Company History: slowly theseagents would labor through the centuries for Dr. Zeus, unshakable intheir loyalty. They had been gifted with Immortality, after all. They knewthey had a share in the glorious world of the future. They were providedwith all the great literature and cinema of ages unborn. Their life work(their unending life work) was the noblest imaginable: the rescue ofliving things from extinction, the preservation of irreplaceable works ofart.

Who could ask for anything more, you say?

Ah, but remember that Immortality has certain undesirable sideeffects. Consider, also, the mental discomfort of being part of a plan sovast that no single person knows the whole truth about it. Consider,finally, the problem in logistics: there are thousands of us already, andas the operation expands, more of us are made. None of us can die. Sowhere are they going to put us all, when we finally make it to thatglorious future world our creators inhabit?

Will they allow us in their houses? Will they finally pay us salaries?Will they really welcome us, will they really share with us the rewardswe've worked millennia to provide them with?

If you're any student of history, you know the answer to thatquestion.

So why don't we rise in rebellion, as in a nice testosteroneloadedscience fiction novel, laser pistols blazing away in both fists? Becausein the long run (and we have no other way of looking at anything) wedon't matter. Nothing matters except our work.

Look. Look with eyes that can never close at what men do tothemselves, and to their world, age after age. The monasteries burned.The forests cut down. Animals hunted to extinction; families of men,too. Live through even a few centuries of human greed and stupidityand you will learn that mortals never change, any more than we do.

We must go on with our work, because no one else will do it. Thetide of death has to be held back. Nothing matters except our work.

Nothing matters.

Except our work.

Continues...

Excerpted from In the Garden of Idenby Kage Baker Copyright © 2005 by Kage Baker. Excerpted by permission.
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