Time's Chariot (12 page)

'Saurians are too oily for my taste,' Scott said.

'Mr Scott, you have a lovely way with one-liners,'
said Carradine. 'I suppose I never really got rid of
my childhood idea that the people of the future
would dine out on a single pill that could last for a
week. Lousy science, of course, but it caught my
imagination.'

'Why on earth would they do that?' Scott laughed
in genuine disbelief. Carradine chuckled too, and
they commenced their attack on the ostrich.

Carradine's former companion appeared by
Carradine's side with a small, rectangular plastic
box in his hand. Scott looked at him curiously. The
man had been at a neighbouring table all the time
they had been there but he had vanished from
Scott's perception the moment Carradine asked
him about the flight. It was hard to notice him – he
was discretion personified. The perfect assistant.

The man whispered into Carradine's ear and
handed him the device.

'Thank you, Alan,' Carradine said, and held the
box to the side of his face. He spoke into its lower
end.

'Carradine.' His eyes widened and his jaw
dropped; then he looked up at the ceiling. 'Oh,
Christ. Right. Yes, I'll see to it.'

Scott was waiting, knife and fork poised.

Carradine looked at him, annoyance and amusement
competing with each other in his expression.
'Trouble up't'mill,' he said.

'I'm sorry?'

'Trouble back at the hotel.'

'Back to work,' said Mr Daiho. He stood up, took a
final swig from his glass of water and left the dining
room. From their journeyman's table at the other
end of the room – just eating in the same room as
the other two had been a mental wrench that none
of them had enjoyed, and Mr Scott had made his
displeasure quite obvious – Sarai and Jontan looked
at each other. Then they silently pushed back their
chairs and stood too.

They hadn't had much time to talk since the
walk, but just before they went through the door
Sarai's hand sought his and gave it a squeeze. He
risked a quick squeeze and a smile in return, before
they left the room a chaste two feet apart and the
model of journeyman propriety.

The kit was of course as they had left it, since it
was surrounded by a forcefield that could only be
symbed off. Mr Daiho had already done this and
was settling on to his couch.

'Take your places,' he said. They sat down in
their respective chairs and symbed into the systems,
with the usual mental jostle for a symb frequency
not being used by the others. Representations of
nutrient levels and energy flows filled Jontan's
mind. Then Mr Daiho activated his field computer
to make some fine adjustments, shut his eyes and
settled back on the couch. The evening session had
begun.

Jontan stole a glance to his right: Sarai's eyes
were half shut as she symbed. He reached out and
laid a gentle hand on her knee. She covered it with
her own hand, but didn't make any effort to
remove it. Nor did she look at him.

So Jontan let his gaze roam over the kit, while
half his mind continued to monitor the signals it
was sending. One of the popular entertainment
shows displayed in that box in the lounge, he had
gathered, was meant to be set in the future and
the kit there was covered with flashing lights. The
reality that they had brought with them was a
collection of abstract boxes with not a flashing light
to be seen, except for the row of seventeen red
crystals that glowed with an inner light. Unlike Mr
Daiho and his symb connection, they were
physically connected to the main culture tank – a
large flattened oval as long as an adult. What was
going on in there was anyone's guess. Jontan only
knew that it was some form of biological activity, coordinated
by Mr Daiho, and it was his and Sarai's
job to keep the culture alive and healthy.

'Watch it,' said Sarai.

'Got it,' he said. Levels of feeder-A were
dropping in the tank. He had to get a bottle from
one of the crates they had brought with them and
physically top up the contents.

'What's it for?' he murmured as he sat back
down again.

Sarai spoke but didn't answer the question. 'I'll
check that valve when he's done with this session.
The field's out of sync.'

'Oh, yeah.' A symb image of the set-up showed
Jontan what Sarai meant. He glanced again at Sarai
and, with Mr Scott absent and Mr Daiho under the
hood, decided that at last he would say what he had
been thinking for so long. 'Sa?'

'Yes?'

'The College doesn't know we're here, does it?'

Now she actually looked at him, and he felt a
paradoxical relief to see his own anxiety mirrored
in her eyes and in her heavy sigh. 'A College man
sent us here,' she said, which he suspected was her
way of saying she knew exactly what he was getting
at but wasn't going to admit it.

'Yeah, but at school they said every trip should be
accompanied by Field Ops, and I don't see any, and
that chamber was all hidden away, and the man said
something about setting charges, and I think he was
going to blow up the equipment after we went.'

'Maybe.'

'Sa?'

'Yes?'

'I think this is illegal.'

'It might be, in the Home Time.'

'Sa?'

'Yes?'

'How do we get back if he blew it up?'

Sarai held her hands up in a shrug. 'The College
has got plenty more transference chambers.'

'But—'

'Jon, I don't
know
!' Jontan recoiled from the
sharp rise in her voice as if she had hit him. His
instinct was to take umbrage, but one sideways
glance at her – she was biting her lip – made him
change his mind. He thought of something like,
you're upset, aren't you?
He tried it out in his own
mind and rejected it. There was someone in the
journeyman's barracks back on the plantation who
was always coming out with blindingly obvious statements
like that and everyone, Jontan included,
thought he was an idiot.

So, he gently put his hand back on her knee.
When it was obvious she wasn't going to throw it off
again, he said, 'Sorry.' She nodded and clasped his
hand firmly with both of hers.

'Filler-A's dropping again,' she said. 'That valve's
had it.'

The end of the session came surprisingly soon. It
was still before midnight. Mr Daiho sat up,
stretching and flexing his back. 'We're getting
somewhere,' he said, beaming at them. 'We're
really getting somewhere. Well done. I couldn't
have done it without you.'

Praise from a patrician, even one possibly
engaged in illegal activity, was a balm to their souls.
It felt like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

'We need to change a valve, sir,' Sarai said.

'Then you'd better do it, and get some sleep.
We'll start again the usual time in the morning. Is
Mr Scott back yet?'

'Um, not yet, sir,' Jontan said.

'Hmph.' Mr Daiho rumbled something that
sounded very like anger, and stood with his back to
them to gaze out of the windows down at the cliffs
and the sea. Jontan and Sarai glanced at each other,
then Sarai ducked beneath the main tank to check
the valve. It was a one-person job, phasing the
forcefield that held it in place and the forcefield
that actually did the work within it so that they
didn't interfere with each other and cause a leak.
Jontan wondered what he should do next.

'Give us a hand, Jon?' Sarai popped up briefly to
ask the question, then vanished again. Jontan
grabbed a spare phase adjuster and crouched down
to see what she wanted.

'See up there, I think it's loose . . .' she said. He
moved his head in closer to see, and then she kissed
him, full on the mouth. He almost dropped the
adjuster. It seemed to last forever and it made
praise from Mr Daiho a very secondary pleasure.
Jontan's heart pounded and he couldn't believe she
had kissed him with a patrician standing only a few
feet away, when everyone knew journeymen didn't,
but he was very glad these two just had.

'I do need you,' she said. 'Symb into the system
and tell me how this works.'

'Right,' he said, still in a daze. Again he had to
tune his thoughts to the symb junction, and to his
surprise he found his frequency of choice already
occupied.

'
LD/1919, stand by
,' said a voice he hadn't heard
before. It was flat and toneless; he was sure it was
artificial, not human. Then, '
LD/1919, transmit
.'

Another voice, and Jontan did recognize this
one. It was Mr Daiho. 'LD/1919, nothing to
report,' was all he said. Jontan lifted his head up
and sneaked a look over the tank. Mr Daiho still
hadn't moved from the window. He seemed to be
looking up at the moon.

'
Report received, LD/1919
,' said the voice. Then
contact broke and the frequency cleared. Mr Daiho
turned away, but Jontan had already ducked back
down.

'That's a correspondent's code,' said Sarai later.
They had the lounge to themselves now and were
talking about it in whispers, sitting in one corner of
the room.

'How do you know?'

'I saw a zine. They're all called something like
that, XY/1234. That's how they do it, Jon!'

'Do what?'

'That's how they talk to the Home Time. I bet
LD/1919 got killed and Mr Daiho uses the same
code, and the Register back in the Home Time
doesn't know it, so it stores the messages and
releases them one by one, like always, and . . .'

She trailed off and gazed unfocused into space,
still working it out.

'And?' he prompted.

'And, someone at that end sees the reports and
knows we're OK, and that's how Mr Daiho will ask
them to recall us.' She grinned in sheer delight.
'See? So we're safe and it's all right. We're going to
be all right!'

Then she kissed him again, and this time he was
better able to respond, sliding his arms around her
and holding her close, and for the time being that
was that, except that both occasionally cocked an
eye at the door in case Mr Daiho returned.
Eventually she tightened her grasp around him and
just hugged him tight. She rested her head on his
shoulder.

'I'm glad you're here, Jon,' she said.

Jontan started another mental search for something
un-trite to say. She spared him the trouble.
'Want to go for a walk?'

'A walk?' Romance evaporated as he glanced out
of the window. 'It's dark!'

'I know.' She wiggled her eyebrows up and down.

'But the moon's full.'

'We might . . . we might fall off the cliff . . .' he
said, feeling pathetic.

'Then we'll walk away from the cliff,' she said.
'Coming?'

Outside there was enough light not to bump into
anything, with the moon and the lights of the hotel
behind them. The wind had died down since that
afternoon and it no longer put Jontan in mind of
pressure leaks and field failures; besides, they were
in the garden, sheltered by tall conifers that took
the bite out of the gale. In fact the gentle motion
of the air past his face, soft and warm, was almost
pleasant if he tried not to remember that it had
never been anywhere near an atmospheric
scrubber and was probably laden with prehistoric
pathogens. They strolled down the garden, hand in
hand, away from the hotel. The path curved so that
before long the hotel was out of view. Then they
stopped, and she turned to him, and they kissed
again.

After a while they sat down, arms round each
other, and looked out at the valley that stretched
away from the hotel inland. It was bathed in
moonlight.

'It's gorgeous,' she said. 'I hate this time but the
view's good.'

'Sa?'

'Yes?'

'When did you decide this was a good idea?'

'Oh, a while ago.'

'How long?'

'How long?' She turned and kissed his ear.
'Maybe when Lano Chon pushed me over, and you
helped me up, and then you hit him.'

'When . . .' He frowned. He had no memory of
the incident, but he remembered Lano Chon, from
a long time before social preparation had settled
into them, back when . . .

'We were seven!' he said.

'Like I said, a while ago.'

It was coming back. 'He hit me, too,' he said.

She giggled. 'He said, look over there! And you
looked, and he hit you. I couldn't believe it.'

'So . . .' he said, wounded.

'So,' she said, and kissed him on the mouth. 'So,
I decided you were never going to be Jean
Morbern, but you were all right.'

'Huh.' He tried to think of a way to get the
initiative again. He felt the ground behind him, as
a possible prelude to inviting her to lie down. Ugh.
The air they breathed might be warm but the
ground they sat on was cold and damp and totally
uninviting. 'All right, let's— what's this?' His fingers
had closed on something like wire. He looked
closer. It was indeed wire, but not shiny and very
difficult to see in the dark. He pulled at it.

Flares blazed up into the sky, bright light burst
around them and a screaming electronic howl
filled the air. The racket of a helicopter thudded
overheard and men in dark clothes burst out of the
bushes, brandishing guns.

Utrecht, 1646

Cornelius van Crink's heart leaped when he saw
the gentleman come into the foundry. The
man peered in through the door, then stepped into
the main workshop, an island of calm amid the
noise and heat of Utrecht's finest gunsmiths going
about their work. Van Crink's practised eyes
reviewed the newcomer – embroidered cloak,
polished sword, velvet hat, general air of prosperity
and well-to-do – and he stepped smartly forward
before any of his underlings could reach the
gentleman first. Such a prospective customer
deserved nothing but the best.

The man saw him approaching. 'Are you the
master gunsmith?' he called over the racket.

'Cornelius van Crink, at your service, sir,' van
Crink acknowledged with a bow. 'How may I help
you, sir?'

A master merchant, perhaps?
he thought with glee.
He looked rich enough. It was fifty years since the
Dutch had thrown off their Spanish masters, back
in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Now the
Dutch trading empire was wrapping itself around
the world and the merchant class had come into its
own. If he was looking to fit out a ship for a trip to
the Indies . . . van Crink's heart sang.

'I'm looking for a brace of pistols,' the man said.
Van Crink carefully refused to let his disappointment
show.

'And will that be all, sir?' He had to strain his
ears to catch the man's reply, delivered with a smile:

'I choose to start small, Mr van Crink, but if I am
happy with them – who knows?'

Who indeed?
Van Crink's spirits were quite
restored. 'Then let us go somewhere more conducive
to polite conversation, sir,' he said.

Van Crink personally escorted the gentleman to
the warehouse where an underling opened the
door for them. He stood for a moment in quiet
reverence before entering. It was better even than
entering a house of worship: rows and rows of shiny
steel and hand-worked wood, the sublime smell of
wrought metal and polish.

'My warehouse, sir,' he said quietly. 'I know we
will have something to suit you. I have to ask, what
does sir have in mind for these pistols? Are they for
a duel? For hunting? For display?'

'I want something that is accurate at a range of no
more than fifteen feet. More likely ten.' The man's
eyes were also ranging along the rows of weapons and
van Crink couldn't but notice that there seemed to be
a certain casual familiarity there.

'I understand, sir.' Van Crink didn't, but he got
the gist of what the man was after. Fifteen feet?

More likely ten? Obviously a duel. Unless, of
course, it wasn't intended that the other man
should be armed at all . . . But van Crink simply sold
the weapons.

He turned to a nearby shelf. 'I have here something
that might be of interest.' He held up a single
example and lovingly presented it to his customer,
grip first. An elegant, slim barrel two feet long
resting in a beautiful walnut stock. Magnificent
carvings in both metal and wood; ornate but not
fussy. A weapon of quality.

The customer took it in, and dismissed it, at a
glance.

'No wheel-locks,' he said. 'Too unreliable.'

'Unreliable?' van Crink exclaimed. He was too
stung for a moment even to remember that the
customer's wishes were sacrosanct. His gaze
caressed the weapon's priming mechanism, and
silently he apologized to it. To fire the gun after it
had been loaded with ball and powder, the gun's
owner would use a key to wind up a steel wheel
connected to a strong spring. Pressing the trigger
caused the wheel to spin rapidly, which made it
emit sparks, which ignited the powder. A graceful,
elegant and above all
modern
device.

'I'll take a pair of match-locks,' said the
customer. 'These, perhaps.' He picked up one of
the pistols to have caught his eye and held it up,
squinting along the barrel.

'Then sir will also want some slow-match?' van
Crink said, trying not to sound sarcastic.

'It would help.' A length of permanently burning
slow-match was fixed to the gun's spring
mechanism. When the trigger was pressed, it
sprang forward and ignited the powder. An assured
spark and hence a reliable weapon – on a sunny
day.

Van Crink made one last try. 'My father fought
the Spanish, sir. The tales he told me of how his
guns were made unserviceable by the rain! "If only
I had had a decent wheel-lock in those days,
Cornelius," he would say . . .'

He came to realize that the customer was looking
speculatively down the barrel of the match-lock,
directly at him. For all that he knew the weapon
wasn't primed, and had no match attached to it, lit
or otherwise, the look in the customer's eyes meant
he suddenly felt very nervous.

'I'm sure your father fought nobly for the
Netherlands,' the customer said calmly, 'but I also
expect he fought outdoors.' Abruptly he brought
the gun up to his face, barrel pointing to the
ceiling. 'Now, about that match . . .'

The Correspondent checked the brace of pistols
for the tenth time. Both were charged and primed,
both were ready. He had owned them from new
and he had practised with them for months.
He could hit anything he chose at up to thirty feet.
It was an accuracy that would have astonished
that van Crink man, but then, the Correspondent
had access to thought processes and powers of
mental computation that would also have astonished
the fat gunsmith. And in the very unlikely
event of his missing with one barrel, he doubted his
target could move fast enough to avoid the other.

The sounds of busy Utrecht – horses, street cries,
the constant murmur of a large population –
drifted in through the window. He ignored them.
He had planned for this for so long, and the visitor
would appear if his plan worked.

It was obvious that the visitor, the man who had
appeared at every interview the Correspondent
had given in his career, was taking the co-ordinates
for his trips from the Correspondent's reports.
Well, tonight, if all went well, the Correspondent
would file a report with the lunar station to the
effect that he had interviewed René Descartes –
father of modern science; first mathematician to
classify curves according to the equations that produced
them; significant contributor to the theory
of equations; devisor of the use of indices to express
the powers of numbers; formulator of the rule of
signs for finding the numbers of positive and negative
roots for any algebraic equation – at 10 o'clock
in the morning on 30 June, 1646, here in an upper
room in this modest house of timber in Utrecht.
Descartes lived in a house, bought with his own
money, and so it was in a house that the
Correspondent had had to set his trap. Any other
location might have aroused suspicion in
their
minds. He had bought the place he was in now
twenty years ago, back in 1626; time enough for a
steady succession of tenants, time enough for
any connection that the Home Time might have
been able to make with him to blur. Then he
had carefully left Utrecht. He had made no
mention in his reports of the house purchase and
given the impression he had just been passing
through. He had continued on his travels around
Europe.

To return a month ago. To evict the current
tenants. To wait.

And there he was. With that strange sense of no
transition, as if he had always been there and it was
only the Correspondent's memory at fault, there
stood the man, dressed like a prosperous Dutch
merchant, raising his right hand.

As did the Correspondent, much more quickly,
bringing one of the match-locks to bear on a direct
line between the Correspondent's eyes and the
man's forehead. 'Don't,' he said, in the language of
the Home Time. The pistol was pointing exactly
between the visitor's eyes. 'I've seen what these can
do to a man's head, which I doubt you have.'

Realization and horror flashed across the
visitor's face. 'My god, you remembered me,' he
said, and his hand twitched upwards.

The Correspondent fired, moving his hand
slightly before he did. The crash of the gun was
deafening and smoke filled the room. When it had
cleared, the visitor was doubled over, moaning and
clutching his ear, and the Correspondent's other
gun was raised.

'I've just nicked your left ear exactly an inch
above the lowest point of the lobe,' said the
Correspondent. His one main worry was
unfounded: the man's pain showed that he wasn't
another correspondent. 'So don't doubt that I can
hit any part of you that I choose. Now, stand up and
drop the thing in your right hand.'

The visitor did so, slowly, and the small crystal
sphere that the Correspondent had glimpsed so
often in the past dropped onto the wooden floor
with a clatter. The Correspondent stooped to pick it
up.

'Now strip,' he said. The visitor's eyes widened.
'Strip completely.'

Five minutes later they were in another room,
the visitor wrapped in a robe that the
Correspondent had supplied. If he had had any
further Home Time gadgets about him that could
have helped him, they were lying in the abandoned
pile of clothing in the upper front room.

'I don't know your name,' the Correspondent
said. The visitor glared at him but said nothing.
'Herbert, I think,' said the Correspondent, 'until
you tell me otherwise. Herbert the time traveller.'

'H–how did you remember?' the visitor asked.
They sat facing each other in comfortable chairs.
The Correspondent had thought it only hospitable
to set some wine aside in readiness, and Herbert's
teeth clattered against his cup. The Correspondent
held his own cup in one hand and the second
match-lock in the other, and the barrel pointed
without wavering at Herbert's heart.

'Not important,' said the Correspondent. With
the Bacon incident in mind, he had taken the
precaution of giving the servants the day off.
'Incidentally, I've stored a written account of everything
I remember in several locations around town
and elsewhere. Even if you somehow make me forget
everything again, I'll remember again. And
again, and again, and again.'

Herbert grimaced. 'I was careless.'

'Yes,' the Correspondent agreed. 'And now you
can make up for it by taking me back to the Home
Time.' Herbert looked at him with blank surprise.
'Back to the Home Time,' the Correspondent
repeated, with more emphasis. 'When I first arrived
I was keen, fired with enthusiasm to report, a loyal
servant of my masters in the glorious, glowing
future. I knew I had a purpose, a valuable function,
and I was eager to serve. The Home Time was waiting
for my reports. They needed them. The
twenty-first century seemed a long time to wait, but
I could handle it, and of course there was no way
home, was there? You couldn't send anyone back to
get me because the equipment to do so wouldn't
exist before the twenty-first century. I had to wait, I
had no choice.

'And then,
then
, I learned the Home Time were
a bunch of lying bastards and they could come and
go as they pleased. Somehow, my motivation
just evaporated. And now, you can take me back.'

Herbert slowly put down his cup and sat back in
his chair, cold amusement doing battle on his face
with natural caution deriving from the fact that the
Correspondent still held a gun pointing at him.
'Supposing I said it was impossible?' he said.

'I wouldn't believe you. Everything else has been
a lie, hasn't it?'

'Transference doesn't need—'

'Transference?'

'Travel through time,' Herbert snapped.
'Transference doesn't need equipment for the
return journey. The Home Time sends a recall
field. But it wouldn't work on you. It's a matter of
probability frequency, which changes every time a
transference is made. The recall has to be the same
frequency as the send. We don't want to pick up any
Ops—'

'Any what?'

'Time travellers from another point in the Home
Time, you see. Now, the probability resonance of
objects can be changed, that's how we bring back
samples from other times, but that needs special
tagging equipment which I don't have on me.' He
looked the Correspondent in the eyes. 'That's why
I can't take you back. Not won't, can't.'

The Correspondent said nothing for a moment.
Then: 'You have one of these recall fields planned,
then?'

'I set it to cover the immediate area around the
original co-ordinates,' Herbert said, after a pause
during which he was plainly wondering how much
to reveal. 'If I'd had the foresight to set it to cover a
wider area, we wouldn't be having this conversation
now. I'd have just vanished.'

'It's already come on?'

'Been and gone by now. It came on two minutes
after arrival. But if I miss it it's set to come on every
hour at the same point until I do make it.' He
scowled. 'I've never missed it before.'

'Supposing I grab hold of you and hold you tight
when the field does come on?'

Herbert shook his head. 'Probability masking.
You'd get two conflicting probability resonances in
the same area, the field would be confused and
neither of us would be recalled at all.'

Another pause. 'You've lied to me about the one
main tenet of being a correspondent,' said the
Correspondent. 'No home journey until the twenty-first
century. So why should I believe you now?'

'That bit is true,' said Herbert. 'Recall Day will
be the last thing the Home Time does while transference
is still possible, and the whole world will be
bathed in every transference frequency ever used.
You'll be recalled if you live that long.'

'Why that day? And what's this about the last
thing the Home Time does?'

The visitor ticked the points off on his fingers.
'That day, because that's when a bygoner scientist
will invent equipment that could detect transference.
And soon after that, the bygoners will get
back to the moon, maybe find the lunar station.
The past becomes untenable for us after that date.
We call it the Fallow Age.'