Arc Riders (7 page)

“I don’t understand how what I know could be that important,” she said after a moment. “I was an army nurse for four years.
I didn’t see or do anything important. When I got out, I worked in Oakland and then Memphis, until they recalled all veterans.”

“Your knowledge, the knowledge in your mind,” Weigand said, “is a fractal of the history of your time. To build your knowledge
into a totality is simply a matter of the right algorithms and sufficient computing power.”

“More computing power than anybody in my day dreamed of,” Grainger said. “Much less dreamed of packing into a space the size
of this transport capsule. The power’s necessary for temporal navigation, of course.”

Carnes nodded understanding. Bitterly she continued, “I wasn’t that sorry to leave Memphis, to tell the truth, though running
nursing at the 96th Evac in Son Tay wouldn’t have been my first choice. And then they told me I had to take over an Argentine
firebase. There had to be an AmCit officer in command of each foreign battalion. It wasn’t just me—they were taking clerical
supervisors, navigators, anybody with the right rank. It was crazy!”

Grainger shrugged. “Getting involved in a land war in Asia was crazy,” he said in a quiet voice. “I can’t imagine how the
people making US policy could be so stupid. And it happened on our timeline, too, it just stopped sooner.”

Chun looked up from her keyboard. “I can’t imagine anything so stupid as war,” she said.

On the main screen hung the image of a child wrapped in blazing napalm, running toward the viewer.

“Oh, war,” said the man from 2025. “That I understand very well.”

Circa 50,000
BC

“W
e’ve found the nexus,” Barthuli said, “but my instinct tells me it’s a double nexus.” He smiled as he added what was for him
a joke, “And the computer agrees to point nine certainty.”

The ARC Riders shifted slightly so that no one blocked another’s view of the forward display. On it, tanks advanced across
a dry, hilly landscape. Dust rose in yellow clouds. Carnes found that the image she saw wasn’t distorted, despite the angle
at which she sat to the concave display area.

“In this timeline,” Barthuli explained, “a force from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam invaded the North on March 31, 1968.
That’s a revision from our database. Our background for this period isn’t of the maximum detail, but I believe it’s sufficient
for the purpose.”

“So we stop the invasion and we’re back where we want to be?” Weigand said.

“I don’t believe so,” said Barthuli. “The incursion was trivial. In the normal course the People’s Army of Vietnam would have
snuffed it out—did snuff it out, as a matter of fact. The event was only important as a spark. Political decisions being what
they are, the spark could have been as easily invented from the whole cloth, the way the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was.”

Attempts to hurry Barthuli wouldn’t make him angry, but neither would they speed his delivery. The analyst had decided in
his own mind the most efficient way of imparting the information he thought necessary. The opinions of others on the question
were of only casual interest to him.

The display shifted. A balding man in a brown suit delivered an address to journalists assembled in a briefing room. Even
without sound, the speaker’s passion was as obvious as the shock on the faces of his audience.

“The response which the US President made to this incursion,” Barthuli continued, “was excessive.” He smiled dryly. “Even
given the gentleman’s demonstrated tendency to see world events as a large-scale Gunfight at the O-K Corral, with himself
as Wyatt Earp. It’s my belief that the same organization which effected the ARVN incursion was responsible for the President’s
reaction to it.”

“There could be separate elements, two or more,” Chun said. “Or just one. The events arc in close succession, but obviously
the party responsible has very sophisticated time-displacement apparatus.”

“I don’t see how Central could have missed them,” Weigand said. “Unless…”

His tongue touched his lips as if in response to their sudden dryness. “Gerd said early on that this might not have affected
those up the line. Do you suppose Central only responds to changes that affect them?”

“Jap revisionists,” Grainger said, as much to himself as to the others. He cleared his throat and looked up in embarrassment.
“Japanese revisionists, probably from the 23d century. When the world started to come together after the bad years, the crazies
got squeezed together in the cracks. Folks who dreamed of a world on which Japan imposed peace and unity, not just a world
of peace and unity for all.”

Weigand nodded slowly. Chun’s moue was another form of agreement.

“We don’t know who they were,” Roebeck said sharply, asserting her leadership for the first time in the discussion. “We don’t
have causes, only effects. We’re not going to guess, we’re going to learn.”

Barthuli beamed approval.

“Sorry,” Grainger muttered. “Sure, I know that.”

“We’re going to get that information by observing the events leading up to the incursion,” Roebeck continued. “We’ll learn
who the players are, then we’ll move to Washington and stop them from affecting the President.”

“Letting the invasion go ahead?” Weigand asked.

“Otherwise we spook the hostiles at the main target,” Grainger said. “This isn’t the sort of operation we can execute without
some risk.”

Roebeck nodded. “Gerd says the incursion would normally have been absorbed into the detritus of time. I accept his analysis.”

She looked from Weigand to Barthuli and smiled coldly. “I would accept Gerd’s analysis that the sun here will rise in the
west tomorrow.”

Barthuli looked down and toyed with the collar of his one-piece garment.

Roebeck eyed the company. “Let’s go do it, shall we?”

Timeline B: March 1968

I
t was deep, velvety nighttime outside the transport capsule. Weigand swore under his breath.

“I’m taking manual control,” Roebeck announced calmly. The keyboard split at her touch. She moved the halves left and right
on the console so that her arms splayed at what was for her a more comfortable angle. “We’ll go up twelve.”

“I’ve got the star sight,” Chun said.

The capsule trembled as it displaced a second time; the screen blanked.

“We were supposed to arrive by daylight,” Grainger explained to Carnes in a low voice. “Our inertial navigation system is
off—and probably drifting rather than just out a fixed amount.”

He shrugged. “Normally it’s reset during after-mission maintenance at Central. This time… that didn’t happen.”

“Ready,” said Roebeck from the controls.

A daylit landscape of hills and scrub vegetation bloomed on the display. “Sun sight,” Weigand said.

“Four hours, thirty-six minutes high,” announced Chun Quo. “Spatial displacement was accurate to the limits of testing.”

“Right,” said Roebeck, taking a deep breath. “Now if everybody will keep quiet for a few minutes, the computer and I will
get us where we want to be.”

Her fingers moved. The display blurred, shifting both in space and—judging from the quick successions of dark sky with light—in
time as well. When Carnes raised her head slightly from where she sat, she saw apparent cross-wires of golden light superimposed
on the rippling images. Occasionally the gold darkened to bronze or even coppery red.

“I could—” Barthuli said.

Roebeck turned her head and stared at the analyst without speaking. The display continued to scroll.

Barthuli stiffened. “Forgive me,” he said. “I was in error.”

He turned his back to the display so that he wouldn’t be tempted to interfere again.

“Now…” Roebeck said. The display went frosty gray. “I think we’re getting there….”

With the brilliance of a lost-wax casting appearing from a shattered mold, a permanent regimental camp sprang in full detail
from the grayness. The flag limp in still air before the headquarters building was the red-striped yellow of South Vietnam.
A berm and concertina wire, both overgrown by brush and creepers, surrounded the encampment. Flatly conical metal roofs shielded
sandbag bunkers from the brutal sun, like so many farmers in straw hats.

Regimental headquarters was a rambling building with stucco walls and a red-tiled roof, a relic of the French presence in
Indo-China. Four M41 tanks squatted in revetments at the building’s corners.

Roebeck took her left hand deliberately away from the split keyboard. Her right index finger moved a spherical control with
the caution of a bomb disposal expert. The display’s viewpoint approached the headquarters building as the sun slid toward
and beneath the horizon.

Following the banquet held in the central courtyard of the headquarters building, drinking had gone on to a late hour. Not
all the dishes had been cleared. Rice and sauces lay spilled among overturned bottles.

Half a dozen Vietnamese officers sat on the ground in a circle, singing and raising glasses to drink at intervals in the song.
One of them faced outward. Several other Vietnamese sprawled on or beneath the tables.

Three Caucasians with Military Assistance Command-Vietnam patches on their left shoulders walked carefully from the table.
The man in the center was drunk and apparently singing quietly. He was dressed in ordinary jungle fatigues with the oakleaf
collar tabs of a major or lieutenant colonel. The name tape over his left breast read
JACKSON
.

The men supporting Jackson were not drunk. They wore tiger-stripe fatigues of the type issued to rangers and special forces.
One of the men was in his forties; the other was short, intense, and no more than twenty-five years old.

Carnes leaned forward when she saw the younger man’s face. She opened her mouth to speak, then swallowed the words.

The men entered a room in the building’s left wing. The oldest closed the louvered door behind them. Roebeck eased a control
forward, her eyes on the display.

The viewpoint slid through the walls of stuccoed masonry, into a ten-by-twelve-foot room that served both as office and sleeping
quarters. The apparent illumination level didn’t change, though neither the gooseneck desk lamp nor the bare bulb under a
reflector in the ceiling were on.

The young man lowered Jackson into a deck chair. It was constructed of polyethylene fabric and aluminum tubes stressed for
the weight of Orientals rather than Caucasians.

The older man set a pocket lamp on the floor. When he turned it on, it bounced an amazing volume of light from the back wall.
The man opened one of a pair of matching cases and began setting up the apparatus within. He connected the two cases with
a flat wire thin enough to be spider silk.

“Twenty-third century mind control technology,” Weigand said with satisfaction. “As expected.”

“And if either of them is Oriental,” Grainger said in a form of apology, “I’ll walk back to 50K.”

The younger man bound Jackson to the chair with swaths of something sprayed from a dispenser. The material was so clear that
it existed only as a reflection in the light.

“They could be hirelings,” Chun said, accepting the apology. “Perhaps even locally recruited agents. Certainly the likelihood
is that those who benefitted from the revision also caused it.”

On the display, Jackson’s head lolled to the side. His eyes were closed.

“I disagree,” said Barthuli calmly.

The younger man stepped away from Jackson and looked toward his companion. The older man donned a helmet with an opaque faceshield,
probably a display.

Chun glanced at Barthuli. The analyst said, “Analyzing the potential effects of a revision requires computing power an order
of magnitude greater than that necessary merely for time displacement. One can expect to affect a given area of events… but
causing middle-and long-term results of a predetermined type is quite another thing.”

The older man manipulated a control box. A small parabolic antenna mounted on a post from the open case pointed toward the
sleeping advisor. The dish waggled minutely, then locked into position.

“Same thing we were dealing with on the last mission,” Grainger said to Carnes. “Different flavor, is all. Hostiles in 1991—our
1991—were using a cruder version on the US National Security Advisor to keep him from making up his mind while the Soviet
Union came apart.”

“Of course it was really hard to tell with Scowcroft whether the mind control device was having any effect,” Weigand added,
grinning slightly.

“We know this one works,” Roebeck said softly as she continued to watch the process.

“We’re not quite in phase with this timeline,” Grainger explained. Nothing visible was changing on the display, but if the
team leader wanted to see it out, no one would gainsay her. “We’re close enough that we can induce images from lightwaves
passing through the region we almost occupy.”

Carnes nodded slowly. She stared at the display as intently as Roebeck did.

“I can’t read the nametag,” she said. “The fellow against the wall. Can you—”

Roebeck’s index finger didn’t seem to move, but the image closed to a head and torso view of the younger man. The tape on
the tiger fatigues read
WATNEY
.

“It may not be a real name,” Roebeck cautioned. “He certainly isn’t a real MACV advisor.”

“It’s the name I knew him by in Son Tay when I was at the 96th,” Carnes said tightly. “He’s a recon specialist. He’s so much
younger here that I wasn’t sure…. And he’s…”

She turned to Grainger and said, “Could I have some more of that water, please? I’m—”

Grainger fished a bottle from a rack concealed in the wall behind him.

Carnes took the water, but she’d managed to swallow the catch of memory from her throat without it. “He’s been wounded at
least a dozen times. When they brought him in in 1990, he was… I don’t know how he survived. Three abdominal wounds. It had
been eighteen hours before the medevac bird reached him, let alone before they got him to us. But he always survives.”