Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (30 page)

The operations center itself was right on the square, an upstairs suite at the Grand Hotel Europa, a splendid building with an intricately decorated facade and stained glass windows and astounding fin-de-siecle ornamentation, that could not have been more than three or four years old.

“I hardly need to make introductions, do I?” Ben-Eytan said, gesturing to the three agents waiting within.

“Hardly,” said Everard.

He was the only twentieth-century agent in the group, but he was used to that. Most of the Patrol had birthtimes well uptime of his own, because it was so difficult to recruit people from pre-industrial cultures, where not only the concept of “time machine” but even just the concept of “machine” itself was a difficult thing for them to swallow, and sometimes “time” as well. So he was accustomed to rubbing shoulders with agents who had been born hundreds—or, in some cases, many thousands—of years after himself.

And he had worked with all three of these before. Elio Gonzalez was the closest in era of origin to him, practically his birth-time contemporary: late twenty-first-century, and would have been a member of the generation of his great-great-grandchildren, Everard supposed, if only he had bothered to get married in the late 1940s when he was done with his military service and had started siring children somewhere in the mid-1950s. But of course he hadn’t done that, since the Time Patrol had swept him up into its service in 1954, and although it was not uncommon for agents to marry and have families, the fast and furious time-hopping nature of Everard’s career as an Unattached agent of the Patrol had led him to believe he would be a bad bet for that sort of life, and he had wisely obeyed his intuition there. Doubtless he had scattered plenty of offspring up and down the time-line in his travels, since he had never felt it important to be a model of chastity and in some cases it had been downright obligatory for him to get involved with members of the opposite sex in the course of carrying out an assignment. But of the identity and location in time of those children he knew nothing, and preferred it that way.

Gonzalez, at least, was probably no descendant of his, for Everard was big and burly and dark-haired, a powerfully built man somewhat ponderous of affect, and Elio, the product of a genetic mix that had strayed very far from the Latino original from which he derived his name, was a wiry little fair-haired man, blue-eyed, with an athlete’s slippery suppleness. He rose and gave Everard a quick open-handed slap of greeting. They had had two tours of duty together, one in the England of William II, the other in the Rome of Constantine the Great.

Hideko Nakamura was even farther from his ancestral genes than Gonzalez was. Not much remained in him of the DNA carried by the Nakamuras of Yokohama or Kyoto or whatever the starting point of his family had been. His name was authentically Japanese, yes, but that was just a sentimental retro touch, the sort of thing that post-Japanese like Nakamura liked to go in for. He was of the eightieth-century, six thousand years into the era of genetic manipulation, and although he could readily enough be recognized as human even by a twentieth-century agent like Everard, he would surely startle anyone of that century less familiar with mankind’s future than Everard was, and probably would be hunted down and destroyed as a monster in most earlier eras, a fact that limited his usefulness as an agent to a certain degree. Two arms, two legs, and a head, yes, five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, but after that the resemblance ended. His features were minimalistic in design, mere hints at lips and nose and chin, though his eyes were Japanese enough, the epicanthic fold deliberately, playfully, enhanced. His skin was thick and dark and glossy, like a seal’s. He was graceful beyond belief, moving with a wriggling serpentine ease as though he had no bones, though of course he did, just as any serpent did. But when he crossed the room to touch fingertips to Everard’s he seemed to float or swim rather than to walk.

“How good to see you again,” he said softly. Their paths had crossed in Nakamura’s own century, when Everard had journeyed far uptime to play a necessary role in a job that required a visiting representative of primitive man.

Lora Spallanzani, the fifth member of the team, belonged to the twenty-fourth-century in point of birthtime, or so Everard recalled, but there was nothing particularly futuristic-looking about her physical appearance. Drop her down in Milan or Rome of 1966 and she would pass without comment: tall, with long waves of thick black hair, and buxom in the way that Italian women seemed to specialize in. Only a certain unfeminine glint about her eyes and a certain tight-set look about her lips might signal to the street-lounger of 1966 Milan or Rome that trying any of the traditional mid-century pinching stuff with her might prove to be a seriously bad idea. She and Everard had worked briefly together on Galileo’s rescue from that pious but misguided lynch mob, thus sparing the great man to complete his work on sunspots that proved Copernicus right and Ptolemy wrong about the movements of the Earth. “Well, here we are,” said Ben-Eytan redundantly. He spoke in Temporal, the only language the five of them had in common. “For the benefit of Unattached Agent Everard, shall we review what we already know, before we set out to do something about it?”

He nodded toward Lora Spallanzani.

“
Ebbene. La situazione e—ah, scusi.”
Everard smiled. Sometimes, jumping hastily from one location to another, it wasn’t all that easy to switch languages. Continuing in Temporal, she said, looking straight at Everard, “What we know is that an attack has been/will be made upon the Founding Convocation at Alpha Point, that all the Founders have been/will be assassinated by the timed release of some unknown poison, and that the Patrol as we understand it was thereby obliterated in its initial moment. Therefore it becomes necessary—”

“Wait a minute,” Everard said. “I asked Daniel about this in Paris, but I didn’t get a satisfactory answer. If we’re now in a continuum where there’s never been a Patrol, where there’s been unfettered temporal manipulation ever since time travel came into being, why are twentieth-century Paris and Prague still pretty much as I remember them, and, for that matter, why are we ourselves still around? Hasn’t the act of wiping out Alpha Point seen to it that everything since the beginning of time been thoroughly messed up by all the foolish or venal or just plain vicious interventions that various time travelers have inflicted on the time-stream—and by the absence of the Patrol to set things to rights?”

Spallanzani looked baffled. “Hasn’t Daniel told you about Time Patrol II?”

“Time Patrol II?” Now it was Everard’s turn to blink in confusion. “What’s
that
?”

“I will explain,” said Ben-Eytan quickly, and at least he had the good grace to blush beneath his swarthy Mediterranean hide.

It was exactly as Everard had thought. Ben-Eytan, always sublimely indifferent to the distinction between ends and means, had simply not bothered to tell him, back in Paris, that the Danellians had brought a
second
Time Patrol into existence after the extermination of the original leadership cadre at Alpha Point. Just as an instructor at the Academy does not want to overload a trainee all at once with the complex details of Patrol life, Ben-Eytan had blithely skipped around one highly significant part of the story, the one that explained everything else, in fact. And Everard felt like a goose for not having worked it out for himself in the first stunned moments after Ben-Eytan had presented himself to him on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. He realized that the news about Alpha Point must have left him too shaken, just then, to think the thing through the way a veteran Unattached agent like himself should have been able to do.

There had been a gap of over a million years between the development of time travel by the group known as the Nine in 19352 A.D. and the advent of the superhuman humans who called themselves the Danellians, far away in uptime. During that long span of time, originally, no Time Patrol had existed. Nevertheless, though, through luck, divine providence, the sheer resilience of the time-stream, or some other factor unknown to mortal minds, the highly evolved Danellians had come into being despite whatever monkey business unrestricted time-travelers had managed to indulge in along the time-line. Or, even,
because
of all that monkey business. Nobody could ever know.

But, as though fearing that some retroactive intervention of gigantic scope might scramble history behind them so thoroughly that they themselves would never evolve, the Danellians had created the Time Patrol, an organization devoted to tracking down and correcting every deviation from the “true” course of world events, by which they meant the course of events that culminated in the emergence of the Danellians. Danellian representatives, using one disguise or another to shield the eyes of their primitive ancestors from their full godlike magnificence, had jumped back across the eons, selecting an extraordinary group of men and women whose birthtimes ranged from the nineteenth-century A.D. to the year 25,000 or so, and hoisting the whole crew of them back to a hastily rigged camp in Cambrian Gondwanaland so that they could, jointly, sweat out a set of rules and regulations by which the Patrol would be governed.

Spallanzani’s eyes met Everard’s. “
Capito?
”

“
Si
,” he said. All this was kindergarten stuff to him.

“Now,” she continued, reverting to Temporal, “there has been this fatal attack on the Founding Convocation. The Patrol is removed from existence at its outset. Our world still emerges from the matrix of time, and mostly it emerges the same way as before. Mostly. There surely are differences, but we five still get born. Most people do. Not all.”

Most
, Everard thought.
Not all
. Wanda, for example? Does she get born? No telling. He couldn’t very well go jumping up to the late twentieth century to find out, not right now.

Spallanzani was still speaking. “This colossal intervention has occurred. The Patrol does not get organized. The time-stream is at menace. The Danellians cannot have that. So what do they do? They do the whole job all over again. They gather an entirely different set of Founders—or perhaps even some of the same ones; at this moment we have no way of knowing that—and carry them off to some new Alpha Point, maybe in some other part of Gondwanaland at some other time, or maybe on Mars or Venus, for all we know, and that group works out the governing principles of what we here are calling Time Patrol II. That Patrol proceeds to carry out all the fixes that the original Patrol did, or enough of them, at any rate, so that the world descending from the time-line of the second Alpha Point closely resembles the one that we used to live in.”

Used to live in.

Even in Temporal, she had said that in the past tense. Instantly Everard grasped the full situation.

“So the five of us have been pinched off into a pocket continuum of our own,” he said. “The whole original Patrol has. As you say, our world-line descends from the Alpha Point Convocation; the Patrol that’s running things now descends from a different one. We are outsiders, strangers, perhaps even regarded as enemies who need to be located and removed. And so—” he glared at Ben-Eytan now—“so what we have come together to save is not the unaltered flow of the greater time-stream, but our
personal
time-stream. The post-Cambrian, post-Alpha Point world has/will develop right on schedule, with the one little difference that we ourselves have no place in that world. Other people are doing our work there, maybe even more competently than we’ve been doing it. We’re just a little bunch of free-floating entities who have no official affiliation with what passes for the Time Patrol here. Which is to say what we are trying to save is our own skins by means of whatever intervention we’ve assembled here to plan. Doesn’t all of that sound just a bit ugly to you? Destroying an entire continuum just so we remain okay?”

There was a long stinging silence in the room.

“You put it a little broadly, Manse,” Gonzalez said, finally. “You make it sound as though this is nothing but an exercise in pure selfishness on the part of one little group of agents. I remind you that we are sworn to maintain the integrity of the time-stream. There’s been an unauthorized intervention at Alpha Point and it’s our job to put things to rights. Period. No moral hesitations about the effects that a cancel will have on the continuum that’s canceled. That we personally will be beneficiaries of what we do is irrelevant. The fact that a second Time Patrol has been called into being and is doing our job right now, might even be doing it better than we’ve been doing, is none of our affair. From our point of view, that Time Patrol exists in a parallel world that must not be allowed to remain in existence. You know that, Manse. Despite what you’ve just said to us, you know that in your bones.”

He paused to let that sink in. It did, and his face flamed with recognition of how wrong he was. He had rarely ever been so wrong throughout his career as he was right now.

Everard realized that in his anger he had grossly overstated the case. Gonzalez was correct: it was not their business to decide which of several possible time-streams might be the ideal one. There was only
one
ideal time-stream, and that was the one they had sworn to defend.

Everard looked from Gonzalez to Spallanzani, from Spallanzani to Nakamura, from Nakamura to Ben-Eytan.

“Yes. I see it now,” he said. “Yes, of course. You bastard, Dan, why didn’t you tell me all this in Paris?”

“I didn’t think I needed to. All I had to do was tell you that there was an important assignment waiting for you. You could pick up the secondary details later on.”

“Secondary details? Wiping out a whole time-stream with its own Time Patrol is
secondary
?”

“Please, Manse,” Nakamura said. “Now that you know the full background story there’s no point quibbling over Daniel’s tactics. We need to get on with things. Are you with us or aren’t you, Manse?”

He hesitated only a fraction of an instant. Then he signaled his assent with a quick, impatient gesture. “Of course I am.”