The Shield of Time (15 page)

The three hoppers lifted high enough to be no more than glints to any eyes that might chance to catch them, and glided toward Bactra. Below them the land rolled vast from the mountains in the south, fields green and brown, spotted with trees and tiny buildings, the river mercury-bright, the city and the invader camp toylike. No hint of hatred and misery reached these clean cold winds, save what the riders bore with them.

“Now hear this,” Everard intoned. “There are two bandits left, and if we go about it right, I think we may well take them. The operative phrase is ‘go about it right.’ We only get one shot. No fancy dodging around in time, trying to fix things, if this fails. It’s all very well to show the locals a miracle, but we will
not
play games with causality and risk setting off a temporal vortex, even if the risk does seem small. Is that clear? You’ve had the doctrine drilled into you, I know, but Ruszek and I are going down, and if we come to grief, somebody could be tempted to rashness. Don’t be.”

He described Raor’s house and its layout. Alarms were set to yell the moment a vehicle made a space-time jump, departing or arriving, anywhere in a radius of many miles. She and Sauvo would promptly dash for their own machine, or machines, and be off for parts unknown. To hell with the other two. Loyalty was a matter of expediency among those ultimate egoists.

That was the case
if
yonder alarms had been alert when Everard called and help for him appeared. The hoppers’ computers knew to the microsecond when that was. He designated an instant sixty seconds earlier, when he was assaulting Draganizu and Buleni; they’d not been in a position to benefit from any warnings that were flashed them a minute later. “Call it Time Zero.”

At hover, he used magnifying opticals and electronic range finders to determine within a few feet the spot at which he wanted to come into the house. He set the controls for that and Time Zero. The rest of the vehicles
would return to then also, but remain aloft till it became clear what had happened on the ground.

“Go!” His finger stabbed the main control point.

He, his partner, his timecycle were in a corridor. A window on their right stood open to the light and fragrance of the garden court. The door on their left was massive, shut, and locked. They had cut off access to the enemy’s transport.

Sauvo sped around the corner of the hall, deer-swift. His hand gripped an energy pistol. Ruszek shot first. A thin blue flame streaked past Everard. It pierced Sauvo’s chest. The tunic around it scorched. For that eyeblink of time, the fury on his face became the pathetic surprise of a child suddenly struck. He fell. Scant blood ran from him, most was cooked, but otherwise he died in the usual human uncleanliness.

“A stunner might have been too slow,” Ruszek said.

Everard nodded. “Okay,” he answered. “Sit tight. I’ll hunt for the last of ’em.” Into his communicator: “Third down, one to go.” The squad should catch his meaning. “We hold the depot. Watch the doors. If a woman comes out, nab her.” As if from far away he heard terrified sobbing, a female slave, and wished that none of those innocents would suffer.

“That will not be necessary,” sang coldly through the noise. “I will be no game for your curs to chase.”

Raor walked toward them. A thin gown clung to every flowing stride. The ebon hair fell loose around beauty and scorn. Everard thought of Artemis the Huntress. His heart stumbled.

She halted a short way off. He dismounted and approached her.
My God,
he thought, filthy and stinking, I
feel like a naughty schoolboy called up by the teacher.
He straightened and stopped. His pulse throbbed, but he could meet the sea-green eyes.

She continued in Greek: “This is remarkable. I do believe you are that same agent my clone mate spoke of, who almost captured him in Colombia.”

“And almost in Perú, and did it in Phoenicia,” he re
plied, not as a boast but because it seemed she had the imperial right to know.

“You are no ordinary animal, then.” Venom slid into the softness. “Nevertheless, an animal. The apes have triumphed. The universe has lost any meaning it ever held.”

“What … would you … have done with it?”

The glorious head lifted. Pride rang. “We would have made it what we chose, and unmade and remade it, and stormed the stars as we warred for possession, with an entire reality the funeral pyre of each who fell and entire histories the funeral games, until the last god reigned alone.”

Desire blew out of him on a winter wind. Suddenly he wanted to be home, among homely things and old friends. “Secure her, Ruszek,” he ordered. Through the transceiver: “Come join us and let’s get this business finished.”

Shalten’s flat in Paris was large and luxurious, but on the Left Bank overlooking the Boulevard St. Germain. Had he chosen that street purposely? He did have a devious sense of humor. To Everard he remarked that he enjoyed the Bohemian life around him and his neighbors were used to eccentrics, paying him no special notice.

It was a warm fall afternoon. Windows admitted air that smelled slightly of smoke, richly of horse droppings. An occasional automobile stuttered among the wagons and carriages. Between soot-gray walls, under trees where green had begun turning yellow and brown, people thronged the sidewalks. Cafés, boutiques, boulangeries, patisseries did lively trade. The noise that rolled in was full of cheer. Everard tried not to remember that in a dozen years this world would crash to ruin.

The clutter around him, furniture, hangings, pictures, books, busts, bric-à-brac, declared a solidity that had endured and accumulated since the Congress of Vienna. But he recognized a few of the objects from California,
1987. That was quite another world, remote as a dream—a nightmare?

He leaned back in his armchair. Leather creaked, horsehair rustled. He puffed on his pipe. “We had a little trouble finding Chandrakumar,” he finished, “not knowing where in the jail he was. Prisoners in several cells got an astonishing vision. But we did locate him and take him out. He hadn’t been harmed. I admit that added to the mess we’d already made, apparitions and vanishings and everything else. It might’ve caused a real sensation in peacetime. People then had too much else on their minds, though, and in crises, you always get a lot of hysterical stories flying about. They’re soon forgotten. The field report I’ve seen says history is intact. But you’ve surely seen it too.”

History. The stream of events, great and small, running from cavemen to the Danellians. But what about the eddies, the bubbles, the insignificant little individuals and happenings that are also soon forgotten, whose being or nonbeing makes no difference to the course of the stream? I’d like to go back and find out what became of my trekmates, Hipponicus, those two women and the baby.
…
No. I’ve only so much lifespan left me, whatever the length of it turns out to be, and it’ll hold heartbreak enough. Maybe they survived okay.

Seated opposite, Shalten nodded above his churchwarden. “Naturally,” he said. “Not that I ever feared. You might or might not have laid the Exaltationists by the heels—congratulations on your success—but you were certain to act in an informed and responsible manner. Besides, that is a particularly stable section of space-time.”

“Huh?”

“Hellenistic Syria was important, but Bactria lay on the fringe of that civilization. Its influence was always marginal, at most. After Antiochus and Euthydemus made peace—”

Yeah, a nice reconciliation, the prince marrying the princess, everything lovey-dovey again, and who cares
about a lot of killing, maiming, raping, looting, burning, famine, pestilence, impoverishment, enslavement, hopes crushed and lives broken? All in the day’s work, if you’re a government

“—Antiochus, as you know, proceeded to India, but achieved nothing. His real interests lay in the West. When Demetrius succeeded to the Bactrian throne, he in his turn invaded India, but a fresh usurper rose behind his back and took Bactria itself from him. Civil strife followed.” The big bald head shook. “I must admit that the genius of the Greeks never extended to statecraft.”

“True,” murmured Everard. “In, uh, 1981, I think it is, they’ll take for their prime minister a professor from Berkeley.”

Shalten blinked, shrugged the interruption off, and proceeded: “By 135 B.C., Bactria had fallen to the nomads. They were not inhumane, but under them civilization withered. The Hellenic dynasty in western India had meanwhile been absorbed culturally by its subjects, and it did not long outlive its northern cousin. It had had no lasting effect worth mention, and the memory of it faded fast.”

“I know,” said Everard, annoyed.

“I did not mean to patronize you,” Shalten replied blandly, “only to make clear my point. Greek Bactria was as safe a piece of history as we could find to lure the Exaltationists to. It had never much mattered to the rest of the world, and an extraordinary concatenation of fantastically implausible occurrences, not just there but around the entire Hellenistic sphere, would have been required to change this. Therefore, by the law of action and reaction, its own mesh of world lines is especially stable, especially hard to distort. Of course, we were at pains to give the Exaltationists the opposite impression.”

Everard sank back in his chair. “I’ll … be … damned.”
Probably,
gibed his mind.

Shalten’s parched little smile twitched. “And now,” he said, “we must terminate the deception. As I recall, the expression in your natal period is ‘tie up the loose ends.’
In your position among us, you need to know the whole truth. For you to learn it later in this century could pose a hazard. Causational loops can be very subtle. Your experiences and accomplishments in Bactria must continue to have happened. Therefore you must be informed well pastward of our preparations for them. I thought you would enjoy a visit to my
Belle Époque.”

“Uh, you mean, uh, that letter the Russian soldier found in Afghanistan, that became the bait in our trap—it was a fake?”

“Exactly. Did the thought never occur to you?”

“But—you had a million years or more to find some suitable incident—”

“Better to create one to specifications. Eh? Well, it has served its purpose. Prudence dictates that it be removed, annulled. There shall never have been a letter to find.”

Everard sat straight. The stem of his pipe broke in his fist. He ignored the coals that fell onto the lush carpet. “Wait a minute!” he cried. “You’ve been tinkering with reality yourself?”

“Under authorization,” he heard; and his jaws locked on silence.

Here, where the Bear stars wheeled too low, night struck cold into blood and bone. By day, mountains closed off every horizon with stone, snow, glaciers, clouds. A man’s mouth dried as he gasped his way over the ridges, rocks rattling from beneath his boots, for he could never draw one honest breath of air. And then there was fear of the rifle bullet or the knife after, dark that would spill his bit of life out on this empty land. Yuri Alexeievitch Garshin stumbled lost and alone.

“Oh!” Wanda Tamberly cried. “Oh, look!”

Her horse snorted and shied. Hands and knees worked for her, quieting it, while she herself leaned forward, sight grabbing what it could as the marvel passed by. Alarmed at the approach of the great beasts, a dozen animals had bolted from the underbrush on her left. Brightness flashed over mottled coats, bodies of wolfhound size, trifurcate hoofs, heads eerily equine. Then they were across the trail and lost again in wilderness. Tu Sequeira laughed. “Ancestors?” He touched his mount and hers, as though to demonstrate he knew that man’s forebears were snuffling and scuttling about in African jungles. On their way back, his fingers stroked across her thigh.

She hardly noticed. Happiness bubbled and danced. Earth of the Oligocene epoch was a paleontologist’s paradise. “Mesohippus?” she wondered aloud. “I think not, not quite. Nor miohippus; too early for that, isn’t it? But they know so little, really. Even with time machines,
they’ve learned so little. An intermediate species? If only I’d brought a camera!”

“A what?” he asked. Unthinkingly, she had thrown the English word into the Temporal that was, thus far, their sole common language.

“An optical recording device.” The act of explaining drew off most of her excitement. After all, today she had spied any number of creatures. Patrol folk could not avoid an impact on the surroundings of their Academy, a thinning out of nature. If nothing else, lionlike nimravus and saber-toothed eusmilus had long since been shot by holiday makers whom they attacked; and that affected the entire local ecology. However, when cadets had more than a single day free, they generally flitted to some distant region, a mountain to climb, a scenic path to hike, an idyllic island. On the whole, humankind touched very lightly the ages before humankind evolved. To Tamberly this region seemed still almost virginal, set against the Sierra or the Yellowstone of her birthtime.

“You’ll have to learn about cameras,” she said, “and a lot of other crude gadgets. Whew! Suddenly I get a notion of just how much you have got to learn.”

“We all do,” he replied. “I’d be hard put to master everything you must.”

Modesty wasn’t his usual style. The thought crossed her mind that maybe he was realizing that, although she enjoyed his flamboyancy, it wasn’t the sort of thing that could hold her for long. Or—an inward shrug—maybe he’d decided to start practicing a more subdued manner. He’d need that capability in the career ahead of him.

Whichever, he spoke truth. The Patrol took education techniques from the far future of both their eras. In a couple of hours you could gain fluency in any language, directly imprinted in your memory; and that was a minor example. Nevertheless the intensity of training and education pushed the edge of human endurance. Any respite came, and went, like sunshine striking into a hurricane’s eye. She had joined Sequeira on this excursion because she’d slightly rather do that than sleep.