Read Online In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker - Free Book Online Page B

Six-Wived. As children we’d followed his antics in Current Events with considerable amusement, but when he finally ate himself to death, he left a country as wrecked as his pantry. For years, assorted court cabals had circled each other warily, waiting for frail Prince Edward to reach manhood. We knew, of course, that he’d die in his teens and another era of civil unrest would result.
    “What are they sending me to England for?” I cried. “Isn’t it, like, very unsafe there? Aren’t there going to be all kinds of blood-baths soon?”
    “Not where you’re being posted,” he assured me. “They want a botanist over there for a very specific project. You’re the very one they need. Pretty soon we’ll have the opportunity to send European personnel in. You’ll be part of a Spanish team. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
    “Spanish?” I narrowed my eyes, doing a fast access. “Now, wait a minute. Edward’s sister Mary is going to get the throne when he dies. There’s a Spanish connection there. Is that what we’re talking about?”
    “Yes. The place will be crawling with Spaniards. We can slip you in with no trouble at all.”
    “It reads like a hazard to me.”
    “Would we send you somewhere that wasn’t safe?” He shuffled papers on his desk. “Anyway. You’ll go to Spain first to establish your cover identity, spend a year there, go over to England in”—he leaned over to peer at the screen—“’54. You won’t even be alone. You’ll be part of a team, and you’ll have a facilitator with you.”
    I relaxed. “That’s better. As long as I don’t have to interface personally with the killer monkeys.”
    “Ah, come on.” He leaned back. “This is England, after all. The land of, uh, Dickens.”
    “He’s Victorian Era.”
    “It’s green there. Beautiful countryside, I’ve seen it myself. Best beer in the world. Great cities, like York.”
    “And London?” I perked up. “Will I get to go to London?”
    “Maybe.” He smiled. “You might even get to meet Shakespeare.”
    Dates whirred behind my eyes. “He won’t be born for a dozen years.”
    “Well, you never know; you might get to like England. I’ve known plenty of operatives who opted to stay on somewhere after their assignment was served, even if they hated it there at first. And England’s heading into a Golden Age, uh”—his eyes flicked to my file—“Mendoza. You could be in on it from the beginning.”
    I thought about it. London was supposed to be the flower of cities all, as Chaucer said, an incredible cosmopolis in an otherwise primitive country. Really fashionable clothing, maybe, for a change. New dances. New music. “It might not be so bad,” I conceded.
    “You’ll see.” He smiled. He handed me a stack of printouts. “Now, here’s a recommended holo list and an events graph. You can study them privately. The starred entries are mandatory, the highlighted entries are strongly recommended. You’ll be issued a field kit sometime in the next two weeks. Your departure is scheduled for July twentieth. Nice to meet you, Mendoza.”
    I went wandering back to my room. In this present moment I’d fling myself down on my bed to think; in that era of corsets and bumrolls one did no such thing. I perched on a wooden settle instead and looked at the recommended (actually mandatory) holo list.
    Might as well start with the history review, I thought. It was starred. I scanned its access pattern, and suddenly I remembered, I had known all along, and I let the information fill up around me like a nice hot bath. Here was the score card, here were the players:
    England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. Its king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists. Oh yes: and for booting the Roman Catholic Church out of England, though he’d started out as a Catholic, married to our old friend Katherine, Infanta of Aragon. But years of marriage to her