Mendoza in Hollywood is a science fiction novel by American writer by Kage Baker; it is the third novel in her series concerning the activities of The Company. In the UK it was published as At the Edge of the West. American illustrator Michael Koelsch painted the cover art of Baker's first three novels in The Company series, including Mendoza in Hollywood.
Plot introduction
The narrator is the botanist Mendoza. What we are reading is apparently her confession of why she deserted her post and ran away with a mortal, and then violently killed the six others responsible for his death.
Plot summary
As the novel opens, Mendoza is walking through incessant rain in the hills above old Los Angeles. It is winter, 1862, and to the east America is at war with itself. For over 150 years she has lived wild in the Pacific coast forest, collecting and cataloging plant species, and rarely interacting with anybody else, human or cyborg. This suits her fine, and she resents being commanded down to Cahuenga Pass for a special mission. As usual, however, she wants to be a "good little machine". She already knows what the mission is. The rain will be followed by a long drought, and there will be much to be preserved, which would otherwise be lost. What the drought cannot eradicate, starving cattle will. Meanwhile, smallpox will reduce the local population, especially the Native Americans.
Arriving at the Inn at the pass, she quickly meets her fellow cyborgs, the Facilitator Porfirio, Anthropologist Oscar, Zoologist Einar, Ornithologist Juan Bautista, and the Anthropologist Imarte, with whom she renews her ongoing feud. With all the traffic passing by, the Inn is a perfect cover for Company research and other work. However, when Mendoza arrives, the main problem is lighting a fire to cook dinner, given that everything is soaked by the rain.
Mendoza's first night is a rough one, as she dreams incessantly of Nicholas Harpole, her lover in 16th century England, who was burned at the stake. She is woken by Porfirio, who tells her she has been blasting the place with "Crome radiation", the blue radiance of psychic activity. She dismisses his concerns, but worries about this sudden resurgence of her previous troubles.
Later, she is led into the hills by Einar, to collect samples in the "Temperate Belt" which will be severely affected by the drought. This just happens to follow the future path of Sunset Boulevard. Along the way, Einar has to kill one of the locals. The hills are infested with bandits, crazy pioneers and other mortals likely to shoot first and warn later. Mendoza is shocked - cyborgs are programmed to run from danger and not harm mortals. Einar informs her that the rules are different here. She is even given a Navy pistol to use if necessary.
The Inn's inhabitants pass the time with movies supplied by the company. In one chapter, we get a long and reverent description of them watching D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, with Einar as Chorus describing every scene. Since Imarte was actually alive in Babylon, one of the movie's famous settings, we hear much about what life was really like.
Everything is thrown into tumult, however, when Mendoza decides to forage in Laurel Canyon. The place is known to be saturated with Crome radiation from a bizarre underground quartz formation. It is this which will attract so many unusual people to the site in the 20th century, and give rise to many of the underground stories of Hollywood. Despite precautions and a lot of very futuristic equipment, Mendoza and Einar suddenly find themselves thrown forward in time to 1996. Mendoza the botanist is suddenly in urban LA, where the soil is concrete and the major life form is the automobile.
Staggering up to a Company safe house whose future location they know, they are hastily taken inside by the staff, who have been expecting this event. Horses and all, they are placed in a Time Transfer chamber for return to their own time, but at the last minute Mendoza sees the cyborg Lewis enter the building. Lewis had befriended Mendoza at the facility New World One and she suspected he was in love with her. Lewis makes an attempt to talk to Mendoza, and tries to warn her "Don't go with him!". She has no idea what he means, and in any case, the transfer takes place before any more can be said.
Returning to the Inn, short one horse which died from the Transfer, Mendoza confronts Porfirio. He must have known what was going to happen to her. He grudgingly admits he knew something, but was just told to let it happen. He also knew only what he needed to know, and nothing more.