Sunset of the Gods (25 page)

Jason smiled. “Well, I remember a place I hid out once before.”

He set a course for the island of Crete.

The shepherds and goatherds around Mount Ida now spoke the Doric dialect of Greek instead of a Hittite-Luwian language, and Jason noticed the occasional iron tool among them. Otherwise, they were exactly as he remembered their ancestors in 1628 b.c.

He had brought the aircar over Crete and across the Tallaion Mountains (as the Kouloukounas range was called in this era) and along the Mylopatomas Valley to the upland plain of Nidha, with the snow-capped mass of Ida looming up eight thousand feet above sea level. At least this time he hadn’t had to struggle, lamed by a broken foot, over all that dramatic terrain. A slow circle of Mount Ida had revealed the well-remembered cave, under a looming shelf of rock, where he and Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez had sheltered.

He had cut off the invisibility field as he had brought the aircar in for a landing on the nearest piece of level ground he could find, allowing any locals who happened to be around a glimpse of it. Rutherford, he knew, would have had heart failure. But among a profoundly illiterate population like this, any tales would die out after a couple of centuries at most, and never be believed by anyone in the greater world outside this totally ignored backwater of an island. And a little supernatural cachet wouldn’t hurt.

And so it had proved. They had taken up residence in the cave, believed by some to have been the nursery of the infant Zeus. It, too, was much as he remembered, although this time it didn’t lie under a sky polluted with the ashes of Santorini in the aftermath of the most cataclysmic volcanic explosion in history. After a while the locals had timidly sought them out. A series of hints, haltingly delivered through the barrier of dialect differences, had persuaded them to supply the uncanny pair of strangers with cheese and wine (by courtesy so called) and certain other items, while keeping their presence a secret lest the displeasure of certain baleful deities be called down on the whole region. Jason and Mondrago had certain skills—first aid, for example—that enabled them to repay the favors and in the process acquire even more prestige. And they were both experts in wilderness survival, who quickly improvised bows with which to hunt the wild goats. They passed late August and early September with no great difficulty.

As September 18 approached, Jason programmed a fairly complex navigational command into the autopilot of the Transhumanists’ aircar. He sent it looping, pilotless, in a circle that brought it around to the opposite side of Mount Ida . . . and then, with all the acceleration it could pile on, directly into the mountainside. After his return, any investigators the Authority might find it worthwhile to send to that mountainside might find a few bits of wreckage that hadn’t been there before.

Through it all, Mondrago remained stoically silent on the subject Jason had ruled off limits.

Finally the time came when they stood (it seemed undignified to arrive on the displacer stage sitting on one’s butt) awaiting retrieval. Jason held the little jar stolen from Themistocles’ house tightly in his hand. The digital countdown projected onto Jason’s optic nerve wound down. It was nearing zero when Mondrago finally blurted, “Sir, I just don’t get it!”

“What don’t you get?”

“You know what I mean. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about you, it’s that you’re a man of your word. And you told me that you meant what you said to Pan. But all the things you said you were going to prevent—the performances on Mount Kotroni and under the Acropolis—happened over a month ago, back in Attica. So you didn’t keep your promise.”

“Didn’t I?” Jason grinned. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What, sir?”

“We’re time travellers!”

Mondrago’s bug-eyed stare of realization was the last thing Jason saw before the indescribable unreality of temporal transition took them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

As always,
the glare of electric lighting in the great dome was blinding after instantaneous transition from a relatively dim setting—and practically all settings in past ages were relatively dim. It made the disorientation of temporal displacement even worse, affecting even an old hand like Jason. Between the blindness and the dizziness, it was a moment before he became aware of the hubbub among the people behind the ranks of control panels. They had been expecting four people to appear on the stage, not two.

Blinking the stroboscopic stars out of his eyes, Jason saw Mondrago shamefacedly getting to his feet. “Don’t worry,” he assured him. “Everybody loses his balance the first time.” Looking around the floor of the stage, he spotted Landry’s TRD, covered with the ashes of the crematory furnace. Then he saw Kyle Rutherford advancing toward the stage, his face a question mark.

“Dr. Landry was killed,” said Jason, pointing at the tiny, ashy sphere on the floor. He offered no further explanation. Rutherford restrained himself from demanding one.

“And Dr. Frey . . . ?”

“She remained in the target milieu. Her TRD is in here.” Jason held out the ceramic vase.

Rutherford stared wide-eyed. Jason had a pretty good idea what he was thinking, after his own last extratemporal expedition. He recalled the words of a probably mythical twentieth century figure with the unlikely name of Yogi Berra: “
Déjà vu
all over again.”

“Yes, it was cut out of her,” he said, answering Rutherford’s unspoken question.

Rutherford went pale. “The Teloi?”

“No . . . or at least not principally. There are a lot of things you need to know—things that can’t be made public. Can we go somewhere for an informal preliminary debriefing?”

“Yes . . . yes, of course.” Rutherford started to lead them away, then paused. “But from your choice of words, do I gather that Dr. Frey was alive when you last saw her?”

“Yes. I left her in the fifth century b.c. still alive. And. . . .” Jason paused, and his face took on a look that caused Rutherford to flinch backwards. “And
this
time I’m going to get her back!”

Reducing Rutherford to a state of inarticulate shock had long been an ambition of Jason’s. Now he had achieved it . . . and the circumstances made it impossible for him to enjoy it.

They sat in Rutherford’s private office. It was more austerely furnished than the one in Athens that he preferred whenever he didn’t need to be in Australia, but like that one it held a display case containing items brought back from the past. And here, also, the prize exhibit was a sword—in this case, a seemingly undistinguished medieval hand-and-a-half sword. A teenaged French peasant girl who believed the saints had told her to liberate her people and crown her Dauphin had found it buried behind the altar of the church of Saint Catherine of Fierbois in 1429 and carried it to the relief of Orleans. More to the point, the office contained the necessary equipment for playing the sights and sounds recorded on the tiny disc Jason had removed from his implant through an equally tiny slot in his skull, concealed by a flap of artificial skin. They had corroborated a story Rutherford clearly didn’t want to believe.

Now Jason and Mondrago—uncharacteristically subdued, unaccustomed as he was to such surroundings—waited while Rutherford shook his head, slowly and repeatedly as though in a semi-daze. Jason wasn’t sure which revelation had hit the old boy hardest: that a surviving Transhumanist underground still existed, or that they were operating an illicit temporal displacer on a higher technological level than the Authority’s, or that they were taking high technology equipment into the past, or the objectives for which they were using their displacer. Now he sat amid the rubble of his well-ordered world.

“One thing in our favor,” Jason concluded, trying to end on a positive note. “The Transhumanists are limited to sending their varieties that look more or less like normal humans—that’s the only sort we saw—back in time. Their more extreme species variations would be pretty conspicuous in past eras, not to mention the cyborg warriors with grossly obvious bionic parts.”

“But,” said Mondrago, spoiling the effect Jason had intended, “there’s no reason they can’t have all of those on Earth in the present day, in the various concealed strongholds Franco bragged about.” They all shuddered inwardly, as members of their culture always did at the thought of the grotesque and unnatural abominations the Transhuman movement had spawned, all of which were believed to have been extirpated a century before.

Rutherford gave his head a final shake, this time a decisive one. “This is terrible! It must be stopped! The potential consequences of what you have discovered are simply incalculable.”

“Agreed,” Jason nodded. “But the Authority can’t handle it alone.”

“I know.” Rutherford’s voice was desolate. The prospect of having to compromise the Authority’s sacrosanct status as an independent agency was one more blow. “We shall have to involve the government’s law enforcement agencies. Earth must be combed from pole to pole. This illegal displacer must be found!”

“Easier said than done,” Jason cautioned. “Remember, they didn’t steal the Authority’s technology; they developed it themselves from Weintraub’s original work, in a superior form. It won’t be like searching for an installation the size of this one.
Their
displacer is compact enough to be hidden, and so energy-efficient that they could send a fairly numerous party equipped with an aircar twenty-nine hundred years back using a concealable power source.”

This time a low moan escaped Rutherford. “And in the meantime,” he said in a dead voice, “we have no idea where to look for their various schemes of temporal subversion. You said the Transhumanists you encountered were from a time slightly earlier than the present—”

“Yes, Franco let that slip.”

“—but we don’t know how long they have been pursuing their nefarious program, nor how much further into our future they will be continuing to send expeditions back, nor where and when those expeditions will go. Our field of investigation is impossibly large. And we don’t know where to begin!”

“Not altogether true. We know exactly what one of their schemes is: the Pan cult. And we know exactly how to scupper it.” Before Rutherford could speak, Jason leaned forward and spoke with grim, tightly controlled urgency. “I propose that you send me and Alexandre and a couple of other combat-trained Service men back to the moment after I left Pan, the point of arrival to be Mount Kotroni, where they were about to take him.”

“But . . . but . . . you and Mondrago were already there,” stammered Rutherford, scandalized. “So you and your own earlier selves will be present simultaneously!” What Jason was proposing violated one of the most basic policies of the Authority.

“Once there,” Jason continued, ignoring the interruption, “we’ll stop them from using high-tech means to induce panic in the Persians while staging an appearance by Pan. Then, as per my agreement with Pan, we’ll take him to Athens where he’ll tell the cultists that they’ve been played for suckers. Of course,” he added as an afterthought, “we’ll need certain rather special equipment and supplies.” He launched into a list. As he proceeded, Rutherford experienced more and more difficulty breathing, and by the time he was done the older man seemed on the verge of a stroke.

Rutherford gradually regained the power of speech. “But the expense! The illegality! The. . . .” He pulled himself together. “You realize, of course, that while I have a great deal of discretion as regards the Temporal Service’s ordinary operations, I could not possibly take it upon myself to authorize anything like this. The entire governing council of the Authority will have to consider your proposal.”

“Bring ’em on.”

If Mondrago had seemed uncomfortable in Rutherford’s private sanctum, he was positively fidgeting in the understatedly ornate conference room that held a quorum—indeed, almost the entirety—of the council, sitting around a long table with him and Jason at one end and Rutherford at the other.

The councilors had been summoned from around the planet to Australia—a summons sent under conditions of maximum security, for it had included the essential elements of Jason’s findings. Since their arrival they had seen and heard the supporting evidence, and no one was inclined to doubt those findings. Not that there had ever been any serious doubt, given Jason’s well-known reputation for competence, despite his equally well-known reputation as a wise-ass.

His proposal, however, was something else.

Helene de Tredville, a small woman of almost ninety standard years with white hair pulled tightly back into a severe bun, stared down the table at him. “So, Commander Thanou, do I understand that you want us to let you take modern weapons back to the fifth century b.c.?”

“Modern weapons and
medical supplies
?” Alistair Kung’s voice—unexpectedly high-pitched, coming from such an overweight body—rose to a squeak on the last two words.

“Yes to both. Actually, I’d also considered asking you to send back an aircar with an invisibility field.” Jason knew it was wicked to relish the signs of incipient cardiac arrest around the table. He relished it anyway. “Fortunately, Pan knows how to pilot the Teloi aircars, so we can use one of those, even though the lack of invisibility technology will be inconvenient. But as for modern weapons . . . the Transhumanists surely have them, and we can hardly be expected to go up against them with in-period swords and spears.”

“But the medical supplies,” Kung began, only to be silenced by Jason’s expression. All the flippancy slid away, revealing what lay beneath it.

“I promised Pan that if he did as I ask I would free him from his dependency on his Transhumanist and Teloi masters. I keep my promises. Since we’ve been back, I’ve had a chance to confer with medical specialists and ascertain precisely what he needs. We can take back a supply that will, quite frankly, last him as long as a twisted organism like him is likely to live. I intend to leave him the Teloi aircar and advise him to go somewhere out-of-the-way—maybe the part of Crete where Alexandre and I hid.” A ghost of Jason’s trademark raffish smile reawoke. “He can start a ‘cult’ of his own there to assure his safety. In a historyless place like fifth-century b.c. Crete, it won’t cause any problems.”