Time's Chariot (23 page)

'And you work for BioCarr?' Rico asked.

Alan paused, took a breath. 'BioCarr is big and
powerful,' he said, 'and will become much more so
over the next few years, but Matthew Carradine is
one hundred per cent meritocrat. Promotion is by
sheer ability and no one stays promoted without
constantly proving that ability. But this is all just
part of it! I've had a long, long time to work things
out, Mr Garron. A long time, and I've decided the
Home Time just doesn't deserve to exist. That kind
of society is wrong, and if I can stop it then that can
only be good.'

'You can't stop it,' Rico said quietly.

'I can try! I'll put the information on servers, I'll
write it on documents, I'll carve it in stone,
I'll encode it in genomes, I'll bury it in people's
subconscious, I'll put it in so many places that your
people could never get it all back.'

'You can't,' Rico said, more firmly. 'It doesn't
work like that.'

'Then how?' Alan said.

Rico couldn't answer for a moment: the mental
block against giving information to bygoners had
come back. He had to force out the words with an
effort of will.

'If – and it's a big if –
if
you could get enough
power to change things, without the Home Time
picking it up and stopping you, all you'd do is
create a fresh timestream,' Rico said. 'And the
stream would still inevitably end in the Home Time,
because that's how it works. Morbern accidentally
created several new streams when he first transferred.
And every stream contains billions of people
with as much right to live their own lives as you or
me, so once a stream is created, you can't uncreate
it without being as big a murderer as several
thousand twentieth-century dictators rolled into
one. So, ever since then, the Home Time has carefully
been splicing all the streams together again.
There's no way the Home Time won't happen.'

Alan was quiet for a few moments, digesting this.
Then:

'Morbern,' he said. 'Supposing I were to look up
everyone of that name now living . . . I wouldn't
even have to use violence, just get them
sterilized . . .'

'He's still several centuries off,' Rico said. 'I
don't even know who his parents were, let alone his
triple great-grandparents, and at that generational
distance, all that would happen is that someone
else would be his triple great-grandma instead.'

'Then I wait until that individual is born! I can—'

'But you won't be around that long,' Rico said,
surprised.

'Why not?' Alan asked with a frown.

'Recall Day!' Rico said.

He wasn't sure what reaction he expected: Alan
to slap his forehead and say he had forgotten? What
he didn't expect was:

'Oh, that.' Alan could not have sounded less
interested. 'That's another Home Time myth I gave
up believing a long time ago, Mr Garron.'

'A myth?' Rico said. 'It's not a myth! It's—'

'It's something the Home Time told me,' Alan
said, 'and therefore it's another lie, like everything
else they've said.' He crossed to the table and
pressed a button. 'Come in now.' He looked up. 'I
was prepared to believe you were different, Mr
Garron, but if you're as much a liar as your masters,
you have nothing useful to tell me. Not of your own
free will.'

The door opened and a group of very strong,
very burly men in white coats came in.

'Oh, you're kidding!' Rico said.

'Take him,' Alan said, and they pounced.

Rico aimed low, diving between their legs in one
smooth motion. He had the move neatly planned
in his mind's eye: dart between the two men
nearest, come out of the dive into a somersault and
leap for the door. Worry about navigating the hall,
its grounds and its private army in nothing but a
pair of shorts later.

But his weak, drugged, zapped body betrayed
him, and he ploughed into the marble tiles and
stayed there. Then they were on him. He managed
to get a foot into one man's solar plexus and used
the half second's respite to get to his knees, and as
another man laid hands on him he sent his
assailant flying over his shoulder. But then a sheer
weight of bodies fell on top of him and pinned him
down, and he was lifted up and carried to the bed,
fighting and struggling but with each limb held off
the ground by a different man so that not even his
training could help.

'It's true!' he shouted. 'Recall Day is true!'

Alan was deliberately not looking at him as he
walked out of the door.

'It was Daiho's fall-back plan!' Rico yelled, just as
the door closed. 'It was how he was going to get
back if all else failed! Do you think he'd have relied
on a lie to get back home . . .'

Something cold and metal touched his arm, and
there was a hiss, and darkness.

Rico Garron floated in a haze. Lights flashed in his
eyes, high and low frequencies vibrated in his ears
and from time to time the feeling of cold metal
against his skin announced the influx of another
rush of fact-finding chemicals into his bloodstream.
And without his fieldsuit and Home Time equipment,
he could do nothing about it. He only had
willpower and training to fight the constant stream
of questions that dragged up information from the
furthest recesses of his memory, and it was a lost
battle.

– What is a correspondent?

Even in his haze, the question caught him by
surprise. He had told them everything he knew of
the history of the next five hundred years, up to
2593 when the Home Time was created. He had
regurgitated everything he had ever heard in his
training about the theory of transference. But this
was a sudden
non sequitur
.

'A reporter.' Part of Rico's mind felt smug that,
though he couldn't help answering questions, he
was able to give literal answers that weren't very
helpful.

– What is a correspondent in the context of the Home
Time?

'An individual who is sent back in time to report
on history.'

– How many are there?

'Hundreds. Thousands. Don't know.'

– How are correspondents selected?

'They're citizens who fail to make the grade.'

– In what way?

'First they were the incurable psychopaths, the
people who in your century would be executed or
lobotomized.'

– First? What changed?

'They caused too many problems. Their conditioning
broke down and they took it out on the
bygoners. Termination squads had to be sent back
after them.'

– So what are they now?

'The malcontents, or people who still find themselves
unable to fit into the Home Time. People
whose social preparation fails. Some volunteer . . .'

It seemed there wasn't one secret of the Home
Time that they didn't already know about, Rico
thought, as details of the correspondents programme
came pouring out of him. Their practical
immortality, their enhanced physical skills, the
reporting station on the moon – everything.

– Tell us about symbing . . .

An amazed Matthew Carradine stood with his arms
folded, head shaking slowly in wonder, and watched
the scene playing out on the display in his office.
The captive's slow slur was annoying – it could take
him a minute to come out with a whole sentence –
but the recording had been spliced to weed out the
junk and the content more than made up for any
inconvenience.

'My God,' he said. 'So where are they now?'

'Back in their rooms,' Alan replied.

'Uh-huh.' Carradine turned back to the display.
'These correspondents. It's incredible! Hundreds,
thousands of incognito time travellers?'

'Quite a clever way of getting rid of your society's
rejects,' Alan said thoughtfully.

'Not if you're sending the psychos back.'

'He said they changed that,' Alan said, still more
thoughtfully.

'Immortals,' Carradine marvelled. He turned to
the drinks cabinet. 'There've always been legends
about people who never died. They probably
started them.'

'Probably. Here, let me get that, Matthew.'

'Who told them to ask about these
correspondents?' Carradine said, stepping aside as
Alan moved in to fix the drinks.

'I did.'

'Oh?'

'Something the others in the hotel said. I wanted
to know more.' Alan handed Carradine a drink and
raised his own. 'To the future.'

'The future,' Carradine agreed, and drank. 'I
wonder if anyone we know of was really a correspondent?
You know, anyone famous.'

'I got the impression their conditioning forbade
that. They would always be quiet, unobtrusive.
Behind-the-scenes workers.'

'They'd be good to have on your staff,'
Carradine said, laughing. 'They'd know the market,
they'd know how things were going to turn out –
just the fact that they chose to work for you at all
would be a testament that you were going to
succeed.'

'Exactly,' said Alan, and stepped quickly forward.
With one hand he took Carradine's glass away; with
the other, he caught his suddenly crumpling
employer and lowered him gently to the ground.

He put the glass with its drugged contents down
and lifted Carradine up onto the black leather sofa.
Then he pressed the intercom on Carradine's desk.
'We're taking the private way out. No calls or
visitors.'

He went into the en suite bathroom and poured
the drink he had fixed, in more ways than one,
into the basin. Lastly he crossed to the bookcase
and pressed the spine of one of the titles: the case
moved aside to reveal Carradine's private exit.

Alan took one last look around. He had said
goodbye to a lot of places over the last thousand
years; some with a sense of regret, others with
decided relief. This place . . .

'Goodbye, Matthew,' he said quietly to the still
form on the couch, and set off on his rescue
mission.

They solidified into the transference chamber,
standing on the carryfield that provided a transparent
floor within the steel sphere.

They looked at each other: Daiho bowed slightly
to Su.

'Thank you for the lift, Op Zo,' he said. 'Before
long, you'll realize that you've been of great help to
the Home Time.' He looked around. 'Now, if you'll
just open the doors . . .'

'Decon,' said Su.

'Of course.' He shut his eyes.

'That won't be necessary,' Su said. She touched a
panel on the gleaming, curved wall and it dilated to
show a small med scanner in the recess.

'This is ridiculous!' Daiho said. 'Just call up the
decon field.'

'You were in an unauthorized area, unaccompanied
by a Field Op. The standard decon
field might not be enough,' Su said. She turned
him and scrutinized him with the scanner. 'Hold
still.'

'Listen, I insist—'

'Mr Daiho, you're legally dead and you're in a
transference chamber, and in that place you are
indisputably under my authority. I can keep you
here as long as I like.'

Daiho sighed. 'Have your little revenge. It won't
matter in the long run.'

Right, just for that
. . . Su thought, but ten minutes
later even she had to admit she had run out of
excuses. She didn't trust herself to speak; she just
signalled for the clam doors of the chamber to
open and the two of them filed out, with her bringing
up the rear.

And they were back in the transference hall; one
small, unremarkable couple, insignificant among all
the transferees coming and going through the many,
many chambers arranged in tiers all around them.

'Almost an anticlimax,' Daiho said, looking
around him and dusting his hands together. He
turned to Su again. 'And now, I'm at your mercy.
What do you intend to do with me? I can understand
you might want to place me under formal
arrest and turn me in, and I couldn't stop you, but
I have to warn you, the matter wouldn't get much
further than that.'

Su boiled within. She could grasp the obvious
and she didn't need things pointed out to her.

'I'll submit my report,' she said, 'and we'll see
what happens.'

Daiho nodded. 'If you don't mind,' he said, 'I'd
like to hang around while you recall the others.
That equipment is valuable.'

Su glared at him with pure loathing, but there
would be time enough for hate later.

'Register,' she said, 'I request a recall field from
this chamber . . .'

She symbed the co-ordinates of the lounge that
she had acquired from Rico. A minute later the
doors of the transference chamber swung open and
Su dodged inside.

'Well, Rico—'

She blinked. A boy and a girl, looking as if they
were ready to fall on their knees and kiss the carryfield,
and a pile of equipment. No Rico.

'Where did he go?' she demanded.

Their grins vanished. 'H-he was here, miss,' the
boy stammered. 'He was lying right where you're
standing when the recall came on, and—'

'—here we are,' the girl said.

Su fought down the urge to look for Rico behind
the equipment.

'Right,' she said. 'Wait there.' She put them
through the same decon scan she had given Daiho,
but this time hurrying. 'Now, help me get that stuff
out of here.'

There was no need to hurry, of course; she could
have waited a year and still sent a recall field back
to that precise time and place again. But she was
acquainted with Rico's ability to find trouble in
small spaces of time and it was psychologically
impossible to go slow.

With half her attention, Su uploaded her report
to the Register, and then she turned her full
attention to helping the kids. Jontan filled her in
on his perception of what had happened just
before the recall, one eye always on Daiho who was
hovering in the background.

'He made his suit shine and he blinded
the guards, but then he was fighting with the
correspondent . . .'

'What correspondent?' Daiho said blankly.

Jontan flushed. 'Um, the one who spoke our
language, sir . . .'

'Give me a hand,' said Su, 'and keep talking.'

Even Daiho helped moved the gear out of the
chamber. Five minutes later it was empty and
generating a second recall field, timed for thirty
seconds after the last and expanding the range by a
mile in all directions.

The doors opened and Su ran in. The sodden
body of Phenuel Scott lay on the floor: otherwise it
was empty. Jontan and Sarai stared at the corpse
with horrified fascination.

'Well, we should be getting back . . .' Daiho said.

'You stay there!' Su snapped, earning the undying
respect of Sarai and Jontan. She symbed a
notification that there was a corpse in the chamber
that needed clearing up, then propped herself
against the chamber wall with one hand. She took a
couple of breaths to clear her mind, then looked
up.

'Exactly where was Rico?' she said. 'What was he
doing? And I mean
exactly
.'

Jontan and Sarai glanced at each other.

'He was, um—' Sarai said.

'—sitting on top of the correspondent,' Jontan
said.

'No,' said Sarai, 'remember? He got shot by one
of the guards.'

'Shot?' Su exclaimed.

'It would have been another stun shot.' The
comment came from Daiho, who was leaning
against the barrier at the edge of the tier of
chambers and looking bored. 'None of them had
lethal weapons.'

'And then?' Su said, looking back at the
youngsters.

'He, um, fell,' said Jontan.

'On top of the correspondent,' Sarai added. Su
began to suspect.

'Right on top? I mean, body to body, feet to feet,
head to head?' she said.

'Um, yes, something like that, I mean, just
about . . .'

'Oh, crap,' Su muttered to herself. Then: 'OK,'
she said quietly. 'You can go.'

'The equipment . . .' Daiho said.

'No one's going to steal it.'

'You're quite right,' Daiho said. 'That is very
valuable property of the Holmberg-Chabani-Scott
combine and absolutely no one is going to wander
off with it.'

'And I'm impounding it pending investigation
into this entire affair,' Su said.

To her surprise, Daiho shrugged. 'It can wait a
little longer, I suppose. It'll be just as safe in your
hands.'

'Just get out of my sight,' Su said.

Probability masking – it had to be. Of course,
Rico and the correspondent wouldn't have stayed
that close forever, but the bygoners would have
learned their lesson from the last time they had
Rico in their power: get him into a helicopter and
just fly, fly anywhere away from the hotel at max.

Wearily, she uploaded an addendum to her
report to say there was a Field Op lost upstream. So
now it would be a job for the Specifics, Rico's old
comrades.

'You've done it this time, Garron,' she muttered.

So, where to now?

Facing Marje Orendal was something she had no
particular desire to do, but it was something that
had to be done. Toning up with a shower and
massage would give her the energy, she reasoned,
so she headed for the Rec room.

She had taken three steps away from the
chamber when a confinement field came down
around her, seizing her and forcing her to stand
still. She tried to move but it was like being cased in
soft concrete.

'
Do not resist
,' said a voice in her head, and her
eyes widened with horror as she felt something
worming into her mind through the symb; a cloud
that blotted out her vision and left her suspended
in a dark limbo.

Jontan and Sarai walked behind Daiho, hand in
hand. Jontan peeked over at her and got a radiant
smile in return.

'We're back,' she whispered. 'We're safe.'

'I never want to leave the Home Time again,'
Jontan agreed.

'No reason why you should, Mr Baiget,' said
Daiho, and they dropped each other's hands
quickly as he turned to face them. But he, too,
seemed in a pretty good mood. He almost smiled at
them. 'I've got catching up to do here,' he said.
'I'm sorry about your employer. I suggest you get
back to the consulate, have something to eat and
wait for further instructions.'

'Mr Scott was going to fine us when we got back,'
Jontan murmured when they were a safe distance
away.

'Sssh!'

But before they could reach the consulate, a soft
wall seemed to close around them and they
couldn't walk any further.

'I can't move!' Sarai said, her voice rising in
panic.

'Nor can I . . .' Jontan said, and the darkness
came.

Li Daiho stood in what had been his office, facing
the eidolon of Ekat Hoon.

'A Field Op named Garron?' Hoon said.

'That's right. But, Ekat, he did everything he
could . . .'

Hoon shrugged. 'I doubt the combine will see it
that way,' she said. 'They won't be happy to lose a
family member.

'I understand he's lost upstream as well as
Hossein,' Daiho said.

'So the Specifics can get them out,' Hoon said
casually. 'But if I were this Garron, I'd stay there.
He's made powerful enemies. So, Li, how did the
mission go?'

Daiho blinked. The woman had lost a friend,
and her husband was lost upstream, and she could
have been talking about the weather. 'We accomplished
what was planned,' he said.

'Apart from losing Phenuel.'

'History will call him a martyr,' Daiho said,
pulling an ironic face, 'which just goes to show that
being a martyr isn't necessarily a big deal.'

'Can you keep the Ops quiet?' Hoon said.

'No, of course I can't keep them quiet. Garron
didn't strike me as the kind of man to do as he's
told. But even if he gets back, he'll find it's no good.
It'll be like shouting into a space so wide open you
don't even get an echo. Nothing will come of it.' He
dismissed the matter with a gesture. 'And now, I
really should let the others know I'm back.' He
tapped his head. 'Got some goods to deliver.'

'It's all there?'

'It's all been there for a couple of days now. I was
doing some final test runs when everything went
pear-shaped, but I've got enough.'

'Li!'

Marje Orendal stood in the doorway, and looked
as if she had seen a ghost.

'Ah, Marje. Hello.' Daiho looked embarrassed.
'Our reunion, um, wasn't meant to be like this, but
now it is . . . well, hello.'

Marje took one step towards him, wonderment
on her face, and suddenly froze . . .

After a period of she didn't know how long, Marje
made out spots of light in the darkness. It was as if
she stood in a darkened room with a handful of
other people, each illuminated by a dim spotlight
that showed their bodies and nothing more – a fully
lit upper half, a lower half fading away into the
surrounding darkness.

On her right, Daiho; opposite her, Su Zo; on her
left, two young people she didn't know. All parties
were looking around with equal confusion; all presumably
were like her, pinned down somewhere in
the College by a containment field and represented
here in symb only.

Daiho seemed to recover first.

'Well, that was quick,' he remarked.

A calm, strong voice spoke to all of them out of
the dark. 'Testimony has been received from Field
Operative Su Zo that has led to the convening of
this emergency hearing to investigate possible
malfeasance.'

'And you are?'

'We are the World Executive.'

Wow
, Marje thought. The World Executive was
the only thing higher than the patrician class: the
collective consciousness of the ecopoloi, formed
from the collective thoughts and desires and
memeplexes of the millions of residence clusters
and billions of inhabitants.

'And this wrongdoing is?' Daiho said.

'Endangering the security and stability of the
timestreams, in violation of the first article of
Morbern's Code,' said the calm voice.

'What!' Daiho exclaimed. Marje frowned: it
wasn't as if he were outraged to hear of malfeasance,
but that he had expected something
completely different.

'We will begin. The following report was received
from correspondent RC/1029 . . .'

And Marje suddenly
knew
, as the knowledge was
taken from Su and symbed into her brain. This was
the story that had been told to Rico Garron, and
symbed to Su Zo, and uploaded in her report upon
her arrival back in the Home Time. She knew about
RC/1029's arrival in Persia. She knew about the
interrupted interview with Avicenna, and she recognized
the newcomer as Hossein Asaldra. She knew
about the correspondent's further wanderings, all
his other interviews, and Asaldra's attendance at
all of them too, throughout the next six centuries.
Until Descartes in 1646, where it all went wrong,
and Asaldra told the correspondent what was
happening. Marje winced as she saw the secrets of
the Home Time poured out to a bygoner, but it got
worse with the far chummier rendezvous after that.
Pascal in 1657. Spinoza in 1670. Malebranche in
1698. And Leibnitz in 1700.

'Oh, Hossein,' Daiho murmured, shaking his
head when he saw how that last had ended. 'Oh,
Hossein, you idiot.'

'How do you respond, Li Daiho?'

'I take full responsibility for the actions of myself
and of all my associates in this affair,' Daiho said
simply.

The testimony went on: how the correspondent
had thought upon the few clues left by Asaldra as to
the nature of the Home Time, and his work. How
he had plotted and planned for the next three
hundred years; how he had identified BioCarr as a
likely target; and how, right on schedule, Hossein
Asaldra had appeared to Matthew Carradine and
made his proposal.

Morbern's Code lay in pieces.

The World Executive went around everyone else
to take their own memories. From Daiho, the entire
plan to rekindle the Home Time at the appropriate
time, which had meant enlisting the help of a
powerful group of patricians to deal with the nitty
gritty. For one thing, the plan would lead to an
open-ended disappearance from the present, with
no guarantee of returning: so he had procured a
clone of himself from Holmberg-Chabani-Scott and
instilled his own basic brain pattern in it, so that
from a forensic point of view there would be
absolutely no doubt that it was the body of Li Daiho
lying at the foot of the mountain.