The Shield of Time (16 page)

“Well, but I’ll be dealing with critters,” she demurred. The Americanism dropped into her Temporal before she noticed. “People are what’s complicated, and they’ll be your problem.”

Born on Mars in the Solar Commonwealth, after graduation he would be among those who studied and monitored the earliest stages of spacefaring. To work one’s way into such places as Peenemünde, White Sands, and Tyuratam meant not only personal risk. It meant any sacrifice necessary to preserve the course of events heavy with consequences for history.

Sequeira’s lips crinkled upward. “Speaking of people and complications, we don’t have to report for class till 0800 tomorrow.”

She felt the blood rise and beat in her face. What cadets did on their own scant time was their own business, provided it didn’t make them unfit.
Temptation, oh, my. A fling before the next long grind
—
But do I want any such involvement?
“At the moment the mess hall calls,” she said fast. They ate well there, often gloriously. The staff had the cuisines of the ages at their command.

He laughed again. “Far be it from me to stand in your way. I could get a Wanda-sized hole through me, couldn’t I? Afterward—Let’s go!” The trail was barely wide enough for them to sit side by side, knees touching. He put heels to his horse and set off at a brisk canter. Following, she thought that his litheness should not be clad in a plain issue coverall; a scarlet cloak ought to ripple from those shoulders.
Hey, gal, ease off.

They left the woods and descended steeply out of the hills. An eastward view opened to her. For a moment she lost everything but the awe and the wonder of being here, now, she herself, thirty million years before she was born.

Light streamed golden across a prairie reaching beyond sight. Wildflower-starred, grass rippled and, she knew, rustled under the wind. In places, a grove or a thicket interrupted immensity, and in the distance trees lined a great brown river. She knew also how its water
and its mud surged with life, larvae, insects, fish, frogs, snakes, waterfowl, herds of rooting merycoidodon like giant hogs or small slender hippopotami. Wings filled heaven.

The Academy stood closer, on an elevation which the builders had reinforced to keep it safe above the occasional floods. Through millennium after millennium, gardens, lawns, bowers, low-lying structures of subtle curves and shifty colors, remained inviolate. When the last graduate departed, the builders took it down, eliminating every trace of its existence. But that would not happen for another fifty thousand years.

Riding, Tamberly drank air that was mild, rich with odors of growth, soil, sulfury-sweet herbs. And yet the sun had barely passed through the vernal equinox. What was to be South Dakota lay about her like a dream of what was to be California. Not for geological epochs would the Ice come down from the north.

The trail broadened to a beaten path. A fork in it led around campus to stables at the rear. Sequeira and Tamberly stalled and cared for their horses themselves. Not all Patrol work, probably not most, required that kind of skills, but the Academy did—in case of need and, she suspected, to instill workmanship and responsibility. Banter flew back and forth across the chores.
He
is
a fetching rascal,
she thought.

They emerged hand in hand. Sunset rays fell hazily over the man who waited outside and cast his shadow gigantic behind him. “Good evening,” he greeted. The voice was unemphatic, his garb resembled theirs, but somehow she got a sense of utter control. “Cadet Tamberly?” It was not actually a question. “My name is Guion. I would like a word with you.”

Sequeira stiffened at her side. Her pulse jumped. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing to cause you worry.” Guion smiled. She couldn’t tell how deep it went. Nor could she identify his race. The finely formed countenance hinted at—aristocracy?—but from what century beyond hers? “In fact,
may I have the honor of your company at dinner? If you will pardon us, Cadet Sequeira.”

How did he know I’d be here? Plenty of possible ways, of course, if you’re high-ranking. Why, though?
“Oh, gosh,” she blurted, “I’m all dusty and sweaty and, and everything.”

“You will have cleaned and changed in any case,” Guion said dryly. “Would an hour hence suit you? Number 207, Faculty Lodge. Quite informal. Thank you. I look forward.” He gave her a courtesy salute. Dazed, she returned it. He walked off toward officer country. His gait flowed.

“What’s happening?” Sequeira whispered.

“I, I haven’t the faintest idea. But I’d better go. Sorry, Tu. Another time.” Maybe. She hastened from him. Soon she forgot about him.

Preparing herself helped clear away bewilderment. A cadet had a private room, plus a bath cubicle as exotically, efficiently equipped as Manse Everard had promised. Like most of her classmates, she’d brought along a few clothes from home. The mingling of costumes added color to social occasions. Not that those weren’t amply romantic, give the diversity of origins. (At that, it was limited. She had had explained to her that people from really unlike civilizations would find one another too distracting—incomprehensible or downright repulsive. Most of her fellow recruits came from the years approximately between 1850 and 2000. Some, like Sequeira, originated farther uptime; their cultures were compatible with hers and exposure to her sort was a valuable part of their particular training.) After a while she chose a plain black dress, silver-and-turquoise Navaho pendant, low shoes, the least touch of makeup.

Neutral, she hoped, neither brash nor standoffish. Whatever Guion’s agenda, she didn’t imagine seduction was on it.
Nor on mine. God, no!
She must somehow be of some interest to him. At the same time, she was the merest rookie and he was … a big wheel. Unattached, almost certainly. Or more than that? She had been
taught very little—hardly anything, she realized now that she examined it—about the upper hierarchy of the Patrol.

Maybe none existed. Maybe by Guion’s era humankind had outgrown the necessity. Maybe tonight she’d learn a snippet about that. Eagerness tingled anxiety out of her.

Crossing the campus, where luminous paths shone softly beneath dusk, she hailed those of her fellows whom she met less warmly than they did her. Close friendships were developing, but her mind had gone elsewhere. Seeing how she was clad and where she was bound, they didn’t try to detain her. Naturally, speculation would be thick in the dorms, and tomorrow she must be prepared with responses, if only “I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Confidential. Excuse me, I’ve got a class.”

Briefly, she wondered whether every lot of new recruits spent its year in the same collegiate format as hers. Probably not. Societies, ways of living and thinking and feeling, must vary too much through a million years of history. Indeed, a large part of what she did would look crazy to her professors at Stanford, utterly boggle them. She couldn’t repress a giggle.

She had never been inside Faculty Lodge or seen any pictures from it, and a side entrance brought her into a small, bare chamber from which a gravity shaft bore her straight upward. The democratic atmosphere of the Academy was merely that, an atmosphere, useful for purposes of getting on with the job. She stepped into a corridor where the floor, uncarpeted, lay soft and warm underfoot, like live flesh, and light poured iridescent from all around. Door 207 vanished at her approach and reappeared when she had passed through. The rooms beyond were graciously furnished, in a style more nearly familiar—to put visitors such as she at their ease, she guessed. There was no window, but ceilings revealed the sky, the light of the stars enhanced so that she could see them blink forth, unblurred by the clean air, until the night was full of their majesty.

Guion welcomed her with a gentlemanly handshake and in the same wise conducted her to a seat. Frames on the walls enclosed moving, three-dimensional scenes, cliffs above surf and a mountain silhouetted against dawn. She didn’t know whether they were recorded or live. She didn’t recognize the background music either, but it could be Japanese, and again she suspected it had been carefully chosen for her.

“May I offer you an apéritif?” Guion invited. He used fluent, barely accented English.

“Well, a small dry sherry, if you please, sir,” she ventured in the same language.

He chuckled and sat down across from her. “Yes, you shall keep a clear head for tomorrow morning. The dinner I have planned won’t upset your Spartan routine too badly. How do you like our organization thus far?”

She spent several seconds arranging her words. “Very much, sir. Tough but fascinating. You knew I would.”

He nodded. “The preliminary tests are reliable.”

“And then you have reports on how I did—how I will do—No, let me try saying it in Temporal.”

His gaze was steady upon her. “Don’t. You should know better than that, Cadet Tamberly.”

A machine glided in bearing her drink and something in a snifter glass for him. It gave her the chance to recover. “I’m sorry if I misspoke myself. The time travel paradoxes—” Mustering courage: “But honestly, sir, I can’t believe you haven’t looked.”

He nodded. “Yes. That can be done with reasonable assurance and safety, in this protected environment. To no one’s surprise, you will perform creditably.”

“Which doesn’t let me off the hook earlier, does it?”

“Of course not. You must do the work, gain the abilities. Some individuals, hearing that they will succeed, would be tempted to slack off on the grueling effort; but you have more sense.”

“I know. Success isn’t really guaranteed. I could change that bit of history by goofing; and I sure don’t want to.” Despite his low-key manner, tension was again
gathering in her. She sipped fragrant pungency and tried to make muscles loosen, the way she was learning in phy ed. “Sir, why am I here? I didn’t think I was anybody special.”

“Every agent of the Time Patrol is,” he answered.

“Well, uh, but me—I’m just going to be a field scientist. In the prehistoric, and not even anthropology. About as far from any causal nexus as you can get, I should think. What have I got that, uh, that interests you?”

“The circumstances that brought you to us are unusual.”

“Isn’t everything unusual?” she exclaimed. “How likely was it ever that I, this exact I with this exact combination of genes, would get born? My sister isn’t a lot like me.”

“Sensibly put.” Guion leaned back and partook of his own drink. “Probability is relative. Granted, the events that caught you up were melodramatic; but in a way melodrama is the norm of reality. What could be more sensational than the fiery creation of the universe, of the galaxies and stars? What could have appeared amidst them more strange than life? Dire need, mortal conflict, desperation made it evolve. We survive by waging incessant warfare against invading microscopic hosts and betrayals within. Set beside this, clashes between humans seem ridiculously incidental. Yet they determine our fate.”

His quiet tone and donnish diction calmed her more than did a little alcohol or relaxation technique. “Well, sir, what can I tell you?” she asked. “I’ll do my best.”

He sighed. “If I had definite questions, this session would doubtless not be necessary.” Another smile. “Which would be my loss, true. I am not so alien to you that I don’t expect to find pleasure in your company during these next few hours.” On a level below words, she understood that his courtliness had no ulterior motive—except to soothe her till she could reveal the nuances he desired—and might be sincere.

“I search for clues to a certain matter,” he went on. “You are analogous to a witness, an innocent bystander, who may or may not have noticed something at an accident or a crime, something helpful to the officer investigating the case. That is why I use your mother tongue. In any other, including Temporal, your expressiveness would be too limited. Your very body language would be poorly coordinated with what you are saying.”

A crime? She shivered a bit. “Whatever I can do, sir.”

“That will mainly be to talk freely, for the most part about yourself. People seldom object to doing that, eh?” He turned grave. “I repeat, you have done nothing wrong, and quite possibly have nothing to do with the business. But you understand I must find out.”

“How?” she breathed. “What is this … business?”

“I cannot say.” She wondered if that meant he was forbidden to. “But think of the countless world lines intermeshed throughout the continuum as a spiderweb. A touch on one strand trembles through many. A disruption somewhere changes the configuration of the whole. You have learned that causality does not work exclusively from past to future; it can double back on itself, can even annul itself. There are occasions when we know only that the web is troubled, not where or when the source of the disturbance lies; for that source perhaps does not exist in our yet, our reality. We can only try to trace it back up the threads—” He broke off. “Enough. I do not mean to frighten you.”

“I don’t scare easy, sir.”
This could do it, though.

“Consider my mission precautionary,” he urged. “You, like Agent Everard, have been intimately”—sketched a grin—“if unwillingly associated with the Exaltationists, a major disruptive force.”

“But they’ve all been, will be caught or killed,” she protested. “Won’t they?”

“Yes. However, they could be related to something larger.” He raised a palm. “Not a larger organization or conspiracy, no. We have no reason to suspect that. But
chaos itself has a certain basic coherence. Things have a way of recurring. People do.

“Therefore it is wise to study those who have been part of great events. They may again, whether or not our extant records know anything of it.”

“But I was just, just borne along,” she stammered. “Manse—Agent Everard, he was the one who counted.”

“I want to make sure of that,” Guion said.

He let her sit a span in silence, while the stars strengthened overhead and shaped constellations unknown to Galileo. When he spoke anew, she had come to terms with the situation.

She wasn’t important, she decided. Impossible. This wasn’t humility—she expected to do a topflight job in her coming line of work—but common sense. Enigmatic though he might be, this man was simply behaving like any conscientious detective, checking out every conceivable lead, aware that most led nowhere.