Vestiges of Time (3 page)

And on one world where I spent more than a few days, a world with a more highly developed medical science than most, I found a not-too-scrupulous surgeon who removed the transmitter the Kriths had buried in my body long before. I gave the surgeon a large amount of gold and he gave me a local anesthetic, and while I watched, my hand resting on the butt of my energy pistol, he removed and destroyed the telltale. I thanked him and went on my way, hopeful that Kriths wouldn’t find me as easily as they had before, if they were still looking for me. And I suspected they were.

At last, by following leads and hints and rumors too obscure to go into now, I found the world for which I had been searching, or at least I thought I had found it. I hoped I had.

I skudded into that particular world when it was late at night in eastern North America and hid my skudder near a small town not too distant from what appeared to be the major city of the continent, VarKhohs, capital of NakrehVatee. The language here, called EKhona, was a remote kin of one I’d learned on another Line when in the service of the Kriths, so fortunately it didn’t take me too long to master the local speech. It took me a little longer to get the hang of local customs, but I managed to stay out of jail and trade some of the large quantity of finely worked gold I’d brought along for local currency. With that I was able to buy myself a computer identity that would account for my light skin, my accent, and my relative ignorance of the ways of the world: I was a mercenary soldier named HarkosNor from the Central European country of SteeMehseeh, who had bought his way out of indenture with loot gained in a brush- fire war in the Far East and who had applied for a visa to enter NakrehVatee, where he would seek permission to join the nation’s “foreign legion” and serve again as a mercenary. The man who sold me the

identity, a shady type who I hoped was more trustworthy than he looked, assured me that HarkosNor was a real person, though dead now, and that my identity would hold up under the closest scrutiny. I hoped he wasn’t lying.

So there I was, officially, if illegally, a member of the local culture. I was as ready as I’d ever be to go into the city of VarKhohs to try to find myself a time machine.

Finding what I was searching for was just about as difficult as finding this world in the first place, but there are always people around who are ready to offer information about supposedly secret things if you cross their palms in the proper fashion. Thus it was that after several weeks in VarKhohs I began spending a great deal of time in a place with an unpronounceable name that was a combination restaurant, lounge, massage parlor, steam bath, and brothel, frequented by members of a moderately-high caste and their hangers- on—the caste given over to electronic engineering and other technologies. And it was there that I made the acquaintance of a certain RyoNa, not a technician himself, but a member of one of the administrative castes and supposedly a friend of the engineers and technicians.

It would have been difficult to say exactly what time it was, getting on toward the wee hours, and both my new friend RyoNa and I were close to exhaustion. We’d eaten and drunk our fill in the lower levels of the elaborate and luxurious pleasure-house and then had moved upward to the levels devoted to the games and the girls. We’d gambled for a while, losing more than We won, and had picked up a brace of twins, girls even darker of skin than most of the locals, with long black hair and flashing black eyes, dressed in styles that revealed not only their profession but the lovely tools of their trade. As they led us off to their

bedroom apartments in the towering building, I felt a pang of guilt at betraying Sally, again, and wondered if she was being as faithful to me as I was to her. I hoped not!

We parted company, RyoNa and his girl, I and mine, and indulged ourselves in the wicked pleasures of the flesh—and I discovered that the dark-skinned girl, whose name I’d already forgotten, was a past mistress of the arts of sexual pleasure. When I’d finally told her good-bye, with a kiss and a handful of bank notes, I was totally exhausted and felt the beginnings of a hangover.

Downstairs, in one of the lounges, I found my buddy RyoNa exactly where he’d said he would be, drinking a dark, heavy liquid from a tall tumbler. A similar tumbler, this one full, was on the opposite side of the table.

“Sit down, Harkos,” RyoNa said, seemingly still amused by the outlandishness of my name. “I’ve already ordered for you.”

“I see. What is it?” I asked as I sat down.

“Try it.”

I did, and found it to be a very pleasant fruit mixture that probably would have been rated ninety proof or better on a world that rated alcoholic content in that fashion.

“Is it good?” RyoNa asked.

I grunted, nodded.

“And was she good?”

I grunted, nodded again.

“I told you she would be. Those EstarSimirian girls are just about the best around. Raised from childhood to master the arts of bed pleasure, you know.”

“I certainly wasn’t disappointed,” I told him with a weary sigh.

“And what did she think of you?”

“Me?”

RyoNa nodded, and smiled with a wicked gleam

in his eyes. “It is very rare for a fair-skinned barbarian to bed with the girls of a VarKhohs pleasure-house.”

“Oh, yeah.” I sighed, and sipped my drink again.

Though I hadn’t yet really begun to sort out the, history of this world and its many cultures, I had some idea of what he was referring to. The fair-skinned people of northern Europe, on this Line, were not the first ones to develop a technological civilization. That fell to the darker people of the eastern Mediterranean, western Asia, and northern Africa. It was they who first sailed the “Inland Sea” and learned to tack against the wind and who finally set out into the great oceans of the West and of the Southeast, who circumnavigated the globe for the first time and then began to colonize the New World, who built steam engines and invented things like the telegraph and telephone and the airplane, and who ignited the first atomic bomb somewhere in Africa and burned away the better part of a great city.

The blue-eyed blonds, of which I am one even though as a child I spoke a version of Greek, had been to the Asians as the American Indians had been to the Europeans who colonized North America in Sally’s world: savages to be dispossessed of their land for the benefit of the “more civilized” people from the South and the East. Long years of warfare followed, during which most of the natives of northern Europe were exterminated, though when the wars came to an end, the surviving Europeans, by then hardened by decades of combat, came to be a warrior caste among the spreading colonists, a people apart, to be used to wage their wars.

Such a one to them I seemed, accepted now as nearly an equal by the “enlightened modems,” but still—was I feared, or respected, or looked upon with a kind of awe by people to whom active participation in warfare was a thing of the past?

“I don’t suppose I greatly disappointed her,” I said at last, finishing my drink.'

“Another,” RyoNa said, a statement, not a question, and punched out another set of drinks on the table’s ordering keys. “I doubt you did disappoint her. By Themfo-Okketho, what a pair you two must have been! I wish I could have watched.”

“I’m exhausted,” I said.

“No doubt the girl is too.”

“She may be.”

“Oh, when I go to my tomb and journey to the Dark Lands, I’d
lik
e to take an EstarSimirian whore with me, the Dark Lords willing.”

When the drinks came, delivered by a waitress of low caste, clad as revealingly as the dark girls had been, RyoNa was silent for a while, then cast his eyes about the darkened room in a conspiratorial manner.

“I will name no names, friend Harkos,” he said, “nor state any facts. But I believe I know where to find the man you seek.”

“The man I seek? What do you mean?”

“No names. No facts. But you have let slip to me that there is a certain
thing
you would li
k
e to have access to. Is this not so?”

“Yes, there is a thing I need.”

“A thing the very existence of which is supposed to be known to only a few, is this not so?”

I nodded. We were talking about a prototype of one of the chronal-displacement devices, and we both knew it. My hints in the past had been sufficient to establish that.

“It is one of the earlier models, you know,” he said softly. “Not as refined as the ones now being tested, but it seems to do the job for which it was designed.” “Where is it?”

“Ah.” He sighed. “That I cannot say. But let me say this: it is not where it is supposed to be. It was to be sent to one of the nations allied to NakrehVatee,

a nation whose name I cannot speak. It was shipped, but it never arrived at its destination. A—shall we say, a friend of mine knows its present location.”

“Can you take me to this friend?” I asked.

“It may be possible. I must visit him myself and discuss with him the arrangements. It will be very costly.”

“I had anticipated that.”

“Very
costly.”

“How much?”

He stated a figure that would be meaningless without a knowledge of the local currency, but it was a high one, one that I thought I could just barely meet. I’d brought a lot- of gold with me.

“Very well,” RyoNa said, once I’d nodded in agreement. “When I go to visit my friend I will need a token of your good faith.”

“How much?”

“Ten per cent should suffice.”

“When?”

“The day after tomorrow, mid-afternoon. Meet me here. It must be in hard currency. No paper.”

“It wi
ll
be.”

“Very good.”

We finished our drinks in silence and then departed the pleasure-house.

At the appointed time I sat in the pleasure-house lounge with a sack that held the hard currency, small, flat bars of platinum embossed with the symbols of the highest castes of VarKhohs. I had just finished my drink when RyoNa entered, took a seat across from me, and waited while I ordered drinks for us. “You have it?”

I passed the leather sack to him under the table. I felt like a fool. What did I know of this RyoNa? How far could I trust him?

“Good,” he said. “I will drink my drink and then

I must go. Wait here for me. I should be back shortly before dark. I will then have the arrangements.” “Okay.” I sighed, and sipped my fresh drink, while he swallowed his in a single gulp and then rose and left the lounge.

After a short wait I rose to follow him. He probably expected me to.

Damned right he’d expected me to!

That’s how I’d ended up in a cell, remembering all this while I waited for his “veiy important people” to Vfeit me.

Into the Underground

It wouldn’t be correct to say that the time was interminable, but it was much
^-
longer than I would have liked, alone in the cramped room under the earth, but at last RyoNa did return and with him were three others, as well as the two black-clad guards, who may have been outside the room the whole time.

The guards entered the room first, looked me over carefully as if there were some means by which I could have gained weapons in their absence—fat chance!— and then stood on either side of the open door. RyoNa entered next and suggested I get up off the cot and remain standing. Remembering what the Shadowy Man had said, I stood up.

AkweNema, so the first man was introduced, a name that had an almost familiar ring to it, though I couldn’t recall where I’d heard it. He was a big man, larger and heavier even than RyoNa, more given to fat, with long hair of an unexpected, astonishing red and a florid cast to his swarthy complexion. This North America too was a melting pot of racial types, it seemed. His robes were rich and dazzling, of a dark red material with silvery piping that reflected the room’s dim light, and he wore the symbols of an elevated caste and of the medical profession on his chest and sparkling rings on his fingers.

AkweNema bowed slightly when introduced, a gesture he expected me to reproduce, which I did, and then he looked me over with an intelligent if somewhat piercing gaze, and with a bit of the clinical about it.

I later learned that he was, in fact, a medical doctor, among other things.

Then he nodded to RyoNa and gave him a pleasant, you-haye-done-well sort of smile. RyoNa was pleased and I felt like a side of beef that he had just procured for AkweNema’s pantry.

The second man was smaller than either AkweNema or RyoNa, a slender, almost wizened man of indeterminate age, with bright eyes set deep in their sockets under heavy eyebrows. He could have been fifty years old or he could have been seventy. He too was dressed in the luxurious robes of one of the higher castes, a technologically oriented one, I suspected from the decoration of his robe, and if I read the symbols rightly, he practiced his profession in the academic manner of a university instructor. His name was KaphNo and he carried an honorific that could just barely be translated as “professor.”

The third man was the youngest, in his late twenties, I suspected, although his full beard initially gave the impression of someone older, as did his eyes and the premature streak of gray in his long, carefully coiffured hair. Though his robes were less lavish than those of the first two, the symbols on his chest were those of one of the highest castes of all. Lord Dessa- Tyso, as he was named, stood closer to the peak of the social pyramid than did the others, although I soon began to suspect that he was in a lesser position to exercise actual power than were his two older companions. ' He affected a bored, supercilious expression and I thought that he had probably been very spoiled as a child.

That he was still spoiled, I learned later.

When the introductions were completed and the three men had finished their inspections of me, AkweNema, the headman and ringleader, spoke again. “We have no desire to constrain you against your will, Master HarkosNor”—he addressed me as a gentleman