Time's Chariot (14 page)

'Do you think that's why you wanted to work for
the College? I notice you started training at sixteen.
That's quite young.'

'You mean, I owe my whole existence to the
College – and believe it or not, I am grateful – so
naturally I want to give something back to them?'
Rico shrugged. 'Maybe. Or maybe I just like the
adventure and the challenge.'

'But you don't like everything the College does.
Your file mentions a certain antipathy towards
correspondents.' Orendal sat back and studied him
with one eyebrow raised.

Rico paused a moment to gauge the level of
frankness he should use in his reply.
What the heck
,
he thought,
set it all to max
. 'I loathe the whole
correspondents programme,' he said bluntly. 'I
think it's a big stain on what otherwise could be a
quite fair and just society.'

'They're contributing to that society,' Orendal
pointed out.

'And how many volunteers do you get?' Rico
demanded. He didn't give her the opportunity to
answer. 'The correspondents are our way of
sweeping our failures under the carpet. Heaven forbid
we should try and do anything as useful as help
them.'

'The percentage of correspondents . . .' Orendal
said.

'Oh, of course, percentages.' Rico sat back and
flung his hands in the air. 'That makes it OK.

There's, what, twenty billion here on Earth? Say a
quarter of one per cent of them go wrong each
year, and conveniently none of them has friends or
families who'll miss them. So, that's a mere fifty
million people whose lives are torn apart. A
pinprick.'

'It's considerably less than that,' Orendal said
quietly. 'Mistakes were made in the past, yes.
Psychopathic failures were sent through on the
nod. Nowadays, everyone gets at least one try at
help and rehabilitation. They enter the programme
if all other means have failed. Making them correspondents
actually increases their chances of
survival.'

'Maybe you should try harder,' Rico said. 'Out of
interest, what are the figures? Do as many patricians
enter the programme as, say, level fives?'

A hit
, he thought with satisfaction, because he
could see Orendal control her expression and
change the subject.

'Op Garron, you lost control once in the field,'
she said. 'Can you be trusted not to do it again,
without the restraining influence of Op Zo?'

Rico was taken aback. 'I hope so. Yes. It depends
on the circumstances. Why?'

'Because you're on suspension and off the active
list, but that doesn't preclude you doing private
work for a sponsor. Now –' she held up a hand to
ward off any comments he might have been about
to make, but truth to tell, he was too surprised to
make any – 'I offered to sponsor you once and you
turned it down. This needn't be a permanent
arrangement, just while you're suspended. You'll
still be putting in your hours pending the tribunal,
and at the tribunal, it won't do you any harm to
say you've been contracted by one of the
Commissioners. Are you interested?'

'Can I ask what work you have in mind?' he said,
if only to play for time while he tried to work out
her game.

'Looking at you, I imagine you're rated for
Europe, tenth to twentieth century?'

'Sure.' There were combinations of geographical
area and time period that certain Ops couldn't work
in because their ethnic background would make
them stand out, but Rico was essentially Caucasian
and good for Europe in any period.

'Commissioner Daiho,' Orendal said. 'I want to
find out about him.'

'Find out what?'

'You know that he made some transferences
quite recently – you learned that when you and
your partner were going through his things. Op Zo
made a report to me.'

'I remember.'

'We have co-ordinates for those transferences. I
want you to be there too, to observe. Not to
interact, you understand.'

'Of course,' Rico said. Interacting would mean
bringing Home Timers from two different periods
together, and Morbern's Code had definite views
on that. But incognito observing was quite in order.

Orendal kept talking. 'For reasons of my own, I
want to find out more about him, and I want
reasons for any and all unusual behaviour. Can you
manage that?'

This was a lifeline! The same woman who had
inadvertently contributed to his suspension was
giving him a chance to make good. She had pitched
it just right: it would keep him active, it would keep
up his hours, it would impress the tribunal – and
there was just the slightest hint of mystery, though
no doubt Daiho had had perfectly good reasons for
his transferences which were frankly neither his
business nor hers.

'I can manage that,' he said.

Now there was no mistaking her smile, or its
warmth. 'I'm glad,' she said. She stood up and held
out a hand. 'I'd like you to get started as soon as
you can. You'll need to prepare so I'll give you
authorization for all the records you need . . .' She
stopped and glanced behind him. 'Yes, Hossein?'

Rico turned round. He hadn't heard anyone else
come in – the thick carpet had hidden the footsteps.

The newcomer had the slightest hint of a
sneer and large, cool eyes which now widened in
surprise.

'I, um, I'm sorry, Commissioner, I didn't know
you were busy,' he said. He looked curiously at
Rico, as if trying to place him.

'We've met before,' Rico said.

'Of course you have. At Li's place. This is Op
Garron,' Orendal said. 'You might remember him.
He's going to do some field work for me. Op
Garron, Hossein Asaldra. Can I help you, Hossein?'

'It was nothing, Commissioner. I'll come back.'
Asaldra nodded to them both and backed out.

'Mr Asaldra,' said Orendal, one corner of her
mouth turned up, 'will be speaking at your
tribunal.'

'I'll look forward to it,' Rico said. He almost
returned her almost-smile, before he remembered
who she was. Not just the one in charge of the
correspondents but the one who sent them out.
'Show me these co-ordinates of yours.'

Orendal symbed the list at him. 'Would you be
able to start at the beginning?'

'Um . . .' Rico studied the list, then shook his
head. 'No. Nothing like it. They're all enclosed
spaces. Rooms in houses. There might be other
people about and I won't be able to hide anywhere.'
He frowned at her. 'Presumably he knew
that?'

'Presumably,' Orendal said neutrally. Rico shook
his head and turned his attention back to the list.

'Look. From number thirteen onwards, it gets
better. He started transferring to outside coordinates,
and that means I'll be able to turn up
early and hide somewhere.'

'So you'll start at number thirteen?' she said
eagerly.

'It looks like it,' Rico agreed. 'France, 1657. I'll
go and get ready.'

'I have never known anything like it!' Scott raged.
'What were you thinking? How dare you? You're
meant to be journeymen! You were brought here to
do a job, not go wandering off on moonlit
walks . . .'

'They were off duty,' Daiho murmured, just loud
enough for Scott to hear.

'That's not important!' Scott glared at the two
recalcitrants, pictures of misery. Some bygoner
guards still milled about in the background,
making no effort to conceal their smirks. This, this
was what he had been brought back from Paris for.
Two of his idiot employees showing him up,
neglecting their duties and . . .

His imagination filled in some extra details. No,
probably not. The guards seemed to have found
them fully dressed.

'Do you know,' he said, 'do you have any idea
how badly you endangered this project? Supposing
one of the guards had shot you, eh?'

'They've only got stunners,' Daiho murmured
again. 'Nothing lethal.'

Scott swung round. 'That is completely missing
the point,' he snapped. He turned back to
the other two. 'You're confined indoors for the
duration of our stay,' he said, 'and when we get
back to the Home Time you will each be fined a
week's pay. That's all. Now get to your rooms.'

They shuffled out and Scott turned to Daiho.
'What were you doing, letting them go off like that?'

'They're not my staff,' Daiho said mildly.
'Perhaps they just need proper leadership.'

'Is that supposed to mean something?'

'I think the mating season's begun all round,'
Daiho said with a sweet smile, his eyes on someone
behind Scott. He walked off and Scott turned
round with a sinking feeling to face Ms Holliss, the
manager of the hotel.

'Good evening, Ms Holliss,' he said, switching to
twenty-first century English. 'I apologize for this
upset . . .'

'Please call me Edith, Mr Scott. And I should
apologize.' Ms Holliss was standing far too close to
him, as she usually did, her head tilted right back
to look at him. Her eyes looked deformed behind
her anachronistic glasses, but from the way she
batted her eyelashes that was probably not the idea.
'I had no idea Internal Security had wired this place
quite so closely. It was a breakdown in communication,
you see.'

'Was it.'

'Of course, I've had to discipline staff too,
sometimes . . .'

'How interesting,' Scott said. 'Excuse me, it is
late and I need my sleep. Good night.'

The gentle sound of the waves was like a lullaby. On
previous nights Jontan Baiget had fallen asleep
listening to them. They reminded him of the pump
mechanism in a hydroponics plant, and with every
surge it was like another wave of lassitude sweeping
over him until eventually sleep took him
completely.

But not tonight. He had rather been hoping not
to be alone, but apparently it wasn't to be.

Their rooms were on the very top floor of the
hotel and they had walked up the stairs to Sarai's
door. And she had flung herself into his arms.

'I've never been so afraid.' Her voice was a
desperate whisper. 'They'd have killed us. They
would!'

'Um . . .' he had said.

'Jon, they've never had social preparation. They
would have! Think of Lano Chon. They're all Lano
Chon, only he had preparation like us when he
grew up, and they never did, no one in this world
has, they could all kill us . . .'

'And they don't have basic hygiene . . .' he
agreed.

'Guns and those flying things . . .'

'No symbing . . .'

'We could be killed tomorrow . . .'

And they had looked at each other, and Jontan
had felt his heart pounding,
this is it, this is surely it
,
but then she had given him one last kiss – a very
pleasant, lingering one, he had to admit – and gone
into her room. And, just as he was plucking up his
courage to follow her, shut the door firmly.

He had banged his head deliberately against the
doorpost – which hurt – and gone into his own
adjoining room. Where, now, slumber seemed as
far away as ever.

Then, to his surprise, drowsiness came quite
suddenly, and he was actually aware of it. His
thoughts began to disassociate and his eyes grew
heavy, even while a small and rational part of his
mind thought how unusual this was. There was a
faint smell in the air, a sweet and rosy smell getting
stronger, and his last waking thought was that
maybe Sarai had changed her mind . . .

Matthew Carradine took his place at the end of the
table and the members of the investigative team sat
down when he nodded. Alan sat at the other end of
the table, chairing the meeting of the team he had
headed.

A display on the wall showed the four Home
Timers, each snapped by a spy camera and blown
up, enhanced by computer to remove fuzziness.
The same four who had been knocked out by gas
in the early hours, letting Alan's investigators
pounce. The investigators hadn't even taken them
out of their beds, instead performing all their tests
on the spot with mobile equipment. The Home
Timers had woken up at the normal time and
suspected nothing. A beautifully timed and
executed operation.

'Hit me with it, Alan,' Carradine said. 'Are they
human?'

His assistant nodded. 'They're
Homo sapiens
, yes.
Their DNA holds no surprises at all. We can't tell
how far in the future they're from, but it's not long
enough for our species to have undergone any
major changes.'

'So they're just the same as us?'

'I didn't say that, Matthew. Dr Gerard?' Alan
nodded at Madeleine Gerard, who was normally
Carradine's personal physician, and she consulted
her notes.

'All four have perfect teeth – no crowns, fillings,
bridge work, whatever,' she said. 'None of them have
wisdom teeth but there's no sign of their having
been removed. All four have perfect, twenty-twenty
vision. Not short-sighted, not long-sighted. All four
have the optimum body weight for their metabolism.
There isn't a single scar on any of them. If they've
ever had broken bones then they've healed perfectly.
Scott has a beard but neither of the other two males
even produces facial hair, though they have the
follicles for it. All four are fertile – they could make
babies any time they chose, including the oldest one,
this Daiho. He's even more interesting. He shows no
real signs of age, yet I gather from overheard
conversation that he must be at least in his seventies.
No physical or mental deterioration, no wrinkling, no
wear and tear on the joints.

'Now, in any one individual, all this would be
odd but not unknown. In a group of four, it's
statistically very unusual. So, to answer your original
question, sir, they're as human as we are but they're
not necessarily just the same as us. They've all been
well looked after. Their technology can do wonderful
things.'

'I think I'd deduced that from the fact that they
can time travel,' Carradine said. He looked back at
the pictures. 'And there's no way of telling how far
in the future they're from?'

'They never say, Matthew.' Now Alan looked at
his notes. 'Scott and Daiho only ever refer to the
Home Time. We've no idea if this is a period of
history, or a specific date, or a place, or what. They
don't give dates and they don't give a timescale.
I don't think they're being perverse – I think it's
just their way, where, whenever they come from. As
for the kids, they don't even mention the Home
Time. Between themselves, they speak about
"home", "the plantation", "the College",
"Appalachia" . . .'

'Well, I know where that is.'

'Likewise, though their accent isn't recognizably
American. But even so, we're learning a great deal
just from the few facts we know about them.'

'Like?'

'Well, like the social set-up in the Home Time.
The kids are journeymen, which suggests a fairly
rigid social structure, like a medieval guild of some
kind. They're more than mere apprentices, they're
qualified in whatever they do, but they're way down
the scale from the other two. Scott and Daiho are
very reticent about what they say in our presence,
whereas Romeo and Juliet can babble away without
a word of rebuke from their superiors. I really don't
think it's occurred to the men that the kids would
be able to say anything of interest to us. They're not
stupid, it's just something outside their mindsets.
And that alone says interesting things about their
world. The lower orders don't think for themselves,
or are not perceived to do so by the higher ones.'

'Yes . . .' Carradine said. He shook his head in
wonder. 'Those journeymen are at the bottom of
their ladder and yet I'll bet they have more
proficiency in their subjects than our scientists ever
will.'

'That's another point, Matthew. They're clearly
good at their job – Scott isn't the kind to tolerate
shoddy work – but apart from that their education
is abysmal. They can read, write, as far as we know
do simple arithmetic but . . . do you know, they still
have no idea where they are? The boy thinks this
may be the Middle Ages and he doesn't hide his
opinion that we're all barbarians. The girl is closer
– she knows the steam engine was invented in the
eighteenth or nineteenth century, so she thinks
that's where we are.'

Gerard spoke again. 'Given that some children
born this century have never heard of Adolf Hitler,
it could mean they're from no distance in the
future at all,' she said.

'Believe me,' Carradine said with feeling,
'they're from far enough ahead for our most
guarded secrets to be in their museums.' He
recoiled inwardly from the memory of Scott blithely
identifying a top secret document. That had been a
calculated demonstration of power, and Carradine
appreciated it. 'From all this, I take it we don't have
difficulty understanding them?'

'In a way,' Alan said. He looked at Visconti, the
linguistic specialist, who coughed.

'Scott and Daiho speak English perfectly,' the
man said, 'but their natural language – the only
one the two youngsters speak – is very different. A
layman that they spoke to would have extreme
difficulty understanding them. They speak something
very like English, but it's as close to modern
English as modern English is to Chaucer's version.
It's peppered with non-English words and
constructs, some of which I just can't decipher,
some of which seem to come from other languages.
Mandarin and Spanish are the two main ones.
There's scatterings of Latin, Greek . . .'

'So there's linguistic drift,' Carradine said.
'Could that tell us when this Home Time is?'

'No, sir. If the Chaucer analogy holds then we
could be talking another thousand years, give or
take. But then, they obviously come from a very
technologically automated time. If the world's one
global village, everyone could be picking up everyone
else's language and incorporating it into the
lingua franca, and that could be, oh, just a century
ahead of us. Or, and this is where my head begins
to hurt –' he paused and the others looked at him
in expectation – 'perhaps they speak a version of
English which has been distorted by time travellers
from their own far future, speaking an even more
distorted form of English—'

'Stop there, please,' said Carradine. He shook
his head to clear it. 'Alan, I want you to learn their
language to a passable degree.'

'Already working on it, Matthew,' Alan said
simply.

'Of course you are. Carry on.'

Alan smiled and Carradine was happy. Alan only
smiled that smile when he was pleased with himself,
and in Carradine's experience that only happened
when he had pulled off a coup on behalf of
BioCarr.

'I've been saving the best till last,' Alan said. 'The
aim of all of this, ultimately, has been to see what
they could give us that they haven't already. First of
all, please look at this recording of the boy getting
dressed in the morning.'

Carradine pulled a face. 'Watching young men
in states of undress isn't my idea of fun, you know.'

'It's in the interests of science, Matthew. Watch.'

An image appeared of a sleepy Jontan Baiget
stumbling from his bathroom. He was wearing what
looked like a vest and shorts. He stretched, yawned,
then reached out and pulled on his overalls.

'Keep watching,' said Alan, and the image
slowed down. With his overalls hanging loosely off
his gangly frame, Baiget appeared to walk like an
astronaut towards the door. Carradine frowned,
blinked and looked closer. His overalls were
moving
.
By the time the boy reached the door, what had
been a loose and baggy tent slung around him had
metamorphosed into a still slightly baggy but much
better fitting body-suit.

The image froze.

'They brought no changes of clothes with them,'
Alan said, 'and yet, when we checked their clothes
after knocking them out, they were as clean and
fresh as if they were just back from the cleaners.
Both journeymen have these shifting overalls. Scott
and Daiho must have the next generation of gear
because they appear in a different outfit each
morning, even though it appears they also brought
this one overall item. Ladies and gentlemen, these
clothes are intelligent. No power source, nothing
that looks like a central processing unit or any
kind of electronics. I think the intelligence, the
programming, is in the molecular structure of
the fabric.'

'I want one,' Carradine murmured.

'And it gets better.' Alan had obviously been
saving the very best until the very last. He beamed
at them all before continuing. 'Now, all four of
them have, at least once, walked into a dark room
and said "lights on". Then they look foolish and
fumble for the light switch . . . it took the journeymen
longer to grasp this concept than the other
two. They all had difficulty with hot and cold taps,
too – they kept talking to them. We took this at first
as evidence of living in a very automated society.'