Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (9 page)

No more than a handful of Agents in the vast, labyrinthine organization that guarded a million years of history from homo erectus to the post-human Danellians had seen an alteration, an actual divergence in the time-stream. She was one; Manse Everard was another. Now she’d seen two, and equaled his record. Nobody had seen more than that. It was an honor she could have done without, and horror clawed at the edge of vision like things scuttling in the corners of her eyes.

“I will
not
think about Monica,” she told herself.

Monica who now would never have existed, future-ward of
that
Vienna.

She could call the Patrol here; the standing-wave beacons were registering on the timecycle’s control screens when she queried them.

Everything pastward of the moment of change would still exist. There were agents in every milieu, clandestine headquarters in cities, bases on the moon, spaceships inconspicuously orbiting, the Academy in the Oligocene, places like the resort in the Old Stone Age Pyrenees where she’d gone on her first long date with Manse. Tourists and traders and scientists . . . There was virtually no year since the emergence of the human race when the Patrol wasn’t more-or-less active, and there were researchers farther back than that.

“Every step you take, I’ll be watching you,” she murmured, from the lyrics of a golden oldie she remembered from her childhood. “I never understood why anyone considered that a romantic song.”

But I’m not a police type,
she thought, as her hand halted on its way to call for help.
I’m a scientist, a Specialist and not even a Specialist in a period of history; I study ancient ecologies and the only humans I deal with are Pleistocene primitives. I’ll be cut out of the loop, stashed somewhere safe—last time Manse had me involved only because
he
was in charge of the rescue project. They may decide that it’s too risky to go after him, they may write him off. Monica needs her father too! Manse will be furious, but to be furious, he’ll have to be rescued.

Decision firmed, and she shoved emotion aside with an effort like hauling herself up a rock-face; the Patrol had its regulations, but you could get around them . . . if your insubordination
worked
. Then you were a hero. If it didn’t . . . you were the goat.

“I’ll be a
dead
goat if I can’t pull it off,” she told the bright spring morning of 180 AD. “Or never have existed. No need to worry about the exile planet!”

Which is full of Neldorian bandits and Exaltationists and similar low-lifes.

Patrol Court was the least of her problems. Other agents would be heading futurward “now”, for a value of “now” that only the Temporal language could express, across the wave-front of actuating upheaval. They’d see the altered future; some of them would flit straight back downtime. They’d gather, assess the situation, and then they’d act. They might or might not spare crucial effort and personnel on rescuing those stranded here. Their first duty was to the timestream that led to the Danellians, after all. You didn’t age in the Patrol and you never got sick, but you were most assuredly expendable.

She examined her mount. About four-tenths charge on the cells, which used a principle she didn’t even begin to understand and which made nuclear fusion look like a water-clock. Hopping interplanetary distances as well as through time had drained them a bit, but they would be ample as long as she didn’t go off-planet again. Her hand touched the controls, summoning menus, then tapped the actuator. This time she was over Vienna again, and in nineteen twenty-six once more, but at fifteen thousand feet and near sundown of the same day.

The city of the Habsburg emperors spread out below, the river gray, a haze of industrial smog merely giving it a blur. The machine detected a surprising amount of air traffic for this year, but most of it was well below her. Her optics cut through the gritty air, and the machine’s memory showed . . .

About an eighty-six percent correspondence between what Vienna
should
have been and what’s below me now. Most of that difference is additional buildings on greenfield sites, and some redevelopment closer in.

This city was bigger than it should have been. She’d uploaded information as part of her preparation for the week-long vacation they’d planned, before flitting back to Venus and Monica and returning on home to the Bay Area of the 1990s after dinner. Vienna had plunged from over two million people and rising in 1914 to about one and a half million after the end of the war, when it went from the capital of an Empire larger than France to an absurdly overdeveloped head on a minor Alpine republic’s Heidiesque yodeling-and-goat-milk body. It had stayed around that number for the rest of the twentieth century and most of the twenty-first.

So that shrinkage didn’t happen.
This
city has something like two and a quarter, two and a half million people; and it’s growing fast at the edges, flourishing, new factories and apartment buildings and suburbs. And there are five or six big dirigbles within detector range and that huge airport-hanger thingie there with a tramcar line running out to it. That’s more airships than were ever in operation at the same time. Count Zeppelin would be over the moon. Something . . . I’d say something prevented the First World War. Either that or the Central Powers won it, and fast.

She remembered a picture she’d seen once, of a mule belly-deep in the mud of the Western Front, its eyes full of the same weary terror and despair as the man who tried to haul it forward. A rotting body lay not far away in a shell-hole, and the cratered, corpse-saturated mud stretched away on every side, broken only by the occasional skeleton of a tree. And another picture, of a noisy crowd in Munich celebrating the outbreak of war, with a blurred but unmistakable Adolf Hitler waving his straw boater and cheering.

But that’s the history that produced my parents and sister and me, and Manse, and our daughter. And the Danellians and the Patrol and everyone I’ve ever known and loved or liked or even detested.

She couldn’t just scan and find where Manse was, though there were instruments that could. This was a scooter like countless thousands that plied the timelanes, not a special-operations reconnaissance vehicle. She had nothing but the modest sensors on it and another sonic stunner in the compartment that held the emergency medical kit and field rations.

But . . .

Yes. If they store his gear in the same location he’s in . . . that’s a big if but the impulse of whoever got their hands on him would be to keep everything safe and secret . . .

IV:

Vienna

Austro-Hungarian Empire

June 3rd, 1926 AD

“Come
with us!”

A voice speaking German, but with a melodic Magyar accent.

The guards were sweating-nervous, and they clutched ugly bulky machine pistols with side-mounted drums. The muzzles in their perforated barrel-shrouds never wavered. Rumors about him must be circulating, but these were brave men and well-trained. More waited in the corridor outside, carefully not getting in each other’s line of fire. Those weapons could chew him into hamburger in seconds and there were a couple of rifles with fixed bayonets just in case.

Manse Everard felt like groaning as he came to his feet. His neatly bandaged hand was still throbbing, but he could use it if he had to. They’d locked him in this cell that was like a room in a not-too-bad 20’s hotel, and he’d seen nobody but a doctor who ignored everything but his injury, and silent orderlies who brought in good if rather heavy meals.

Now they went down corridors that were either unoccupied or cleared so that nobody would see him pass, and into an interrogation room that had the dingy beige ambience that bureaucracies seemed to prefer. Only one barred window showed, small and overlooking a paved courtyard; the lights were electric and harsh. One of them shone in his eyes as he approached the table where the officers sat, probably by no coincidence whatsoever.

“We will keep two of the guards,” the man sitting in the center seat across the table said. “That is a dangerous man, if I’ve ever seen one. Agád, Lajos,
guard
.”

He was about Manse’s age, in an Austrian colonel’s undress uniform; not quite the same as Manse knew from past missions in the early twentieth century, but still elaborate with braid and medals; all three of the officers had sword and pistol at their belts. Tall and slim, hazel eyes, a small brown mustache, sleek hair, an air of ironic detachment.

“They might hear things they shouldn’t,” the one to his left said, with a Mecklenberger rasp to his German.

Plain
feldgrau
Imperial German uniform with General Staff tabs, a captain by rank; massive pear-shaped head shaved bald above a bull neck, hands that could probably bend horseshoes, a monocle, an old saber-scar and one more recent that looked like the result of a shell-fragment. Those gorilla hands fondled a riding crop that had a steel core from the way it flexed.

The Austrian shrugged. “They speak only Magyar, apart from the words of command,” he said. “As useful as mutes, in their way.”

“We are wasting time,” the third man said, his German fluent but with a harsh choppy accent that said it wasn’t his native language. “This matter will be taken out of our hands soon. And probably lost for months if not years in quarrels over jurisdiction, and the incredulity of idiots who will try to fit this . . . extraordinary occurrence . . . into something they can understand. We have waited days as it is.”

He was a square-faced blond with very cold light eyes, older than the other two and looking as much like a Balkan Slav as anything; the unadorned brown Ottoman uniform said
Turkish
, and a brimless Astrakhan hat was on the table before him. The face had a teasing familiarity.

“Very acute, my dear Mustafa,” the Austrian said. “
Das is ein Murks, aber gottseidank sind wir ja net in Berlin.
”

Which meant
It’s a screwup, but we’re not in Berlin, thank God.

From the way the Mecklenberger snorted he was thinking the same thing, in a fashion much less complementary to his hosts. His lips formed something like
Schlamperei
silently.

The Austrian went on to Manse: “I can just see trying to explain this to the All-Highest . . . Do sit, Herr Everard. I understand you speak German?”

“Yes, I do,” Manse said.

Absolutely no percentage in backing down before this bunch,
he thought.
Central European heavies straight from Central Casting. But the genuine article off the Ruritanian Express, the thing all the books and movies were imitating or mocking.

A slight eeriness gripped him as he looked at the hard, intelligent faces. If what he suspected . . . was virtually certain of . . . had happened, he was looking at men who had no right to be alive.

The German would probably have died sometime in 1916, hammered into the mud of the Somme or vanished without trace in Falkenhayn’s corpse-factory around Verdun, where two whole nations had bled to death; the Austrian would have led his hussars into machine-gun fire trying to break the siege of Przemyśl or sweated and shivered to death with typhus in the mountains of Serbia; the Turk would have taken an Australian bayonet in the gut in the hills above Suba Bay or frozen rock-hard in the Caucasus snows or been bombed into bleeding fragments in the retreat from Meddigo.

I’m talking to ghosts that haven’t died.

“Why have you detained me in this lawless manner?” he went on, doing his best to register starchy indignation.

The Austrian smiled. “Not only good German, but excellent Viennese!” he said, flicking a monogrammed lighter and extending a slim gold cigarette case to either side and then—surprisingly—to Everard. The Patrol agent took it; Turkish tobacco, and very high quality, soothing as he dragged the smoke in. Plus the Danellian-era longevity treatment made you immune to cancer, heart disease, and pretty well everything else.

Then the Austrian gave a little tuck of the head that was the seated equivalent of a bow and heel-click before he blew a cloud of fragrant smoke:

“Permit me; I am Colonel Freiherr—” Baron, roughly “—Rudolf von Starnberg of the Imperial and Royal Army. My colleagues are Hauptman Ritter Horst von Stumm of the German Reich, and
Binba
şı
Mustafa Kemal of the Ottoman Empire. All from the Intelligence sections of our respective services, of course, and here for the Three Emperors conference to keep watch for foreign agents, domestic anarchists, Serbs, and similar vermin.”

“Why have I been detained?” Everard demanded again.

I should have taken the hypno for standard German
, he thought; complete fluency in the idiosyncratic local version looked suspicious now.
But this was supposed to be a vacation, not a mission!

“
Sie brauchen mi echt net für an Trottel halten, Herr Everard
,” Von Starnberg said, and held up a hand.

“Please don’t insult my intelligence. Before we waste time with a tiresome protestation of how you are an innocent tourist from . . . Wisconsin, is it called? Please examine these.”

He slid a folder across the table with one finger. Manse opened it and sighed. The stills were a little blurred, taken from the reel of a movie camera, doubtless the one on the flatbed. They were clear enough to show him and Wanda: him using the stunner, Wanda leaning forward and her hand streaking towards the controls; the timecycle there and then
not
there.

Girl, get back to the Academy soonest,
he thought, in what he knew was probably a futile hope.

That made his heart race until he used Patrol technique to calm it. Either a Patrol rescue team would arrive to break him out in a flourish of energy guns, able to be as blatant as they pleased since this wasn’t a history they had any desire to preserve . . . or he’d vanish when this world was cancelled.

You’ve done that twice,
he told himself.
Uncounted billions of human beings wiped out as you restored the
real
history, which in a sense makes you a mass murderer on a scale even Hitler or Stalin or Stantel V couldn’t imagine. Perhaps there’s a certain ironic justice to it . . . but that future that needs restoring contains Wanda and Monica. So to hell with it.