Time's Chariot (3 page)

Rico paused in the doorway because the room
was already occupied. A slight, blonde woman a few
years older than him, and a man his age; dark hair,
pale eyes. They were talking closely to each other,
voices barely more than a murmur, and Rico almost
apologized for interrupting. Then he remembered
he was masquerading as a Security Op and didn't
have to apologize to anyone, so he sidled in without
announcing himself. He sneaked a look around:
where to start?

The study was decorated with a typical Home
Time eclecticism. Fake bookshelves lined the walls,
the carpet glowed with 1960s psychedelia and in an
alcove there was a bust of Jean Morbern, founder of
the College. Rico chose a shelf at random and
started to examine what was on it.

'. . . suicide,' said the woman behind him. 'He
was so . . . so alive, Hossein. He enjoyed existing so
much. And look around you – he was so
tidy
! If Li
had wanted to kill himself he'd have used one of
the bureaux.'

'I know how much he meant to you, Marje . . .'

'And retirement! Li was going to retire any day
now! He had it all arranged . . .'

Retirement?
Rico thought, with another glance
around at this mini-palace in the Himalayas.
Retirement meant moving out into space, to one of
the retirement worlds; the one concession the
space nations made to their native Earth to prevent
their home world from being completely overrun.
Well, if Daiho had to chuck all this in . . . maybe the
suicide idea had something to it.

The man sounded like someone who wasn't used
to having to sound sympathetic. 'Let's not jump to
conclusions,' he said. 'We should wait for the
autopsy report.' Rico carefully didn't think of how
much body there would be left to perform an
autopsy on, after a fall from that height. 'For now,
Li would want you to get on with the job. Who are
you?'

Rico was only half listening and it took a
moment to realize he was being addressed. He
turned round, fingers pressed innocently to his
chest. The man and the woman were both looking
at him. The woman's eyes were red and damp: she
had taken the loss of the Commissioner hard. The
man's pale eyes were just hostile and his head was
tilted to one side, as if Rico looked familiar in some
way.

'Op Garron,' Rico said. He remembered he was
playing Security. 'And you, sir?'

The man was taken aback. 'Hossein Asaldra. I'm
the personal assistant to—'

'Me, Marje Orendal,' said the woman. 'I'm Head
of Psychological Profiles at the College . . . and
apparently I've been appointed Acting
Commissioner to replace Li. Commissioner Daiho.'

'Have we met before?' Asaldra said. He still had
that quizzical look on his face.

'You're the new Commissioner for Correspondents?'
Rico said to the woman, caught
off-guard. He hadn't expected to bluff with this
level of seniority. On the other hand, she was
sufficiently senior that he could ignore Asaldra's
question quite safely.

'Acting,' the woman repeated.

'What are you doing here?' Asaldra said,
apparently deciding, as Rico already had, that the
answer to his last question was 'no'. ' You people
have already been over this room.' He spoke
blandly, almost sounding bored, but still managed
to convey animosity.

Rico decided the truth was called for. 'I'm looking
for a field computer,' he said. 'Comm . . . the late
Commissioner booked it out and never returned it.'

The woman rolled her eyes to the ceiling.
'Bureaucracy goes on. Well, carry on looking, Op
Garron.'

'It will be returned to Fieldwork when the
Commissioner's effects are cleared,' the man said.
'Why is a field computer any concern . . .' He
paused and his face went blank for a moment.
He was symbing into the copy of the College database
held somewhere in the apartment and Rico
knew the bluff had just evaporated. 'There is no
Security Operative Garron,' he said. 'There is a
Field Operative of that name. You're not Security,
are you?'

'My partner and I made an appointment with
the household,' Rico said. 'We were expected.'

'Why's a field computer so important?' Orendal
said.

Rico gave an embarrassed grin. 'I, um, stored
data on my last field trip and never downloaded it,'
he said. 'I thought it might still be there . . .'

'Your sloppy work is your problem, not ours,'
Asaldra said. 'I think you had better leave and stop
intruding on the Acting Commissioner's grief.'

Since the Acting Commissioner was standing five
feet away from him and perfectly capable of speaking
for herself, Rico felt his blood rising.

'Of course,' he said directly to her, 'you have to
ask why the Commissioner would check out a field
computer if he was going to—'

'That will do,' Asaldra said. 'I've had enough of
this. I'm calling Security.'

'Just shout,' Rico said. 'They're everywhere.'

But a Security Op was already in the doorway.
She shot Rico a curious glance before addressing
the other two.

'Acting Commissioner, Secretary, I thought you
should know the autopsy report is in.'

'And?' Orendal said quickly.

'Commissioner Li Daiho died of an aneurysm,
ma'am. An artery in his head must have burst and
killed him immediately. He was probably dead
when he fell off the balcony.'

'It was definitely him?' Orendal gave the impression
of a woman desperately clinging onto
hope.

'The body was smashed badly but we got residual
brain patterns. It was him.'

Orendal's shoulders sagged. 'The poor man.'

'It could have happened at any time,' said
Asaldra, nodding wisely.

'So why didn't the agravs stop his body falling?'
Rico said to the Security Op. 'Someone would have
to turn them off.'

'The agravs haven't been touched since their last
routine maintenance . . . who are you?' the Op said.

'Someone who shouldn't be here,' Asaldra said.
'Kindly see that this man is escorted off the
premises. Now.'

'You're Su! Su Zo!' Orendal exclaimed suddenly.
She was looking past Rico and Su, who had been
trying to lurk in the background, reluctantly came
forward.

'Marje?' she said.

'You know this woman, Commissioner?' Asaldra
sounded somewhere between disapproving and
disappointed.

'We did our basic induction together,' Marje
said. 'How are you, Su?'

'I'm doing OK,' Su said.

'You went into Fieldwork, I heard?'

Su nodded. 'Senior Field Op. I heard about your
promotion, Marje, I'd say congratulations, but . . .'

'I know.' Orendal pursed her lips but managed a
smile. 'Thank you.'

'I'll take my partner and leave, if that's all right
with you?' Su said. She plucked at Rico's sleeve and
didn't let go.

Orendal's smile grew slightly less forced. 'It
might be wise. I'll see you around, Su.'

'That went well,' Su said as they stepped into the
courtyard. It was the first time she had trusted
herself to speak since taking their leave of Orendal
and Asaldra.

Rico grunted.

'It's not often you get the chance to be rude to
one of the most senior people in the organization
that employs you,' Su went on.

'She was Acting and I wasn't rude to her.'

'Her friend seemed to think you were.'

'Yeah, well, her friend was another matter.' Rico
thought back to those pale eyes, the hostile tone,
and decided he could live with the knowledge that
he had made an enemy. 'Pair of tossers anyway. Wait
here.'

'Now what are you—' Su said, but Rico had
already scooped up two handfuls of pebbles from
the gravel that surrounded the fountain. He walked
back to the balcony and the drop down the
mountainside, held out his left hand and opened
his fingers. The pebbles fell three inches, then
stopped in mid-air, spinning gently. They floated
back over the stone parapet and fell at Rico's feet.

'Yup, the agravs work all right,' Rico said. Then
without warning he drew back his right hand and
flung the other handful as far as he could into the
abyss. The pebbles flew out in a scattered arc and
plunged into the depths below. Rico followed them
with his eyes, leaning out over the stonework as far
as he could.

'Aha,' he said.

'Just what are you doing, Garron?' Su
demanded.

'Just testing a theory.'

'And?'

'It works but it doesn't make sense. Come on.'
They walked back across the courtyard to the recall
area, and thirty seconds later were back in the
Home Time.

The time display set into the wall of the spherical
transference chamber showed it was 15 minutes
after they had left – precisely the time they had
spent in Commissioner Daiho's apartment. The
apartment had a constant and timed stream of
transmit and recall fields going under the control
of the Register, the artificial mind that governed
transference, and this was the Register's arbitrary
way of handling the flow of cause and effect. It
could have bought them back a second after they
had left, but the rules were that however long you
spent upstream, that was how long elapsed before
you were back in the Home Time. One of the tenets
of Morbern's Code:

The span of my life is synchronised to other lives
around me. I will not abuse the power of the College to
break that synchronisation.

. . . as Rico and Su could have recited without even
thinking about it.

'I know you don't like the correspondents,' Su
said as they stepped out of the chamber. Outside,
the transference hall would have dwarfed a
cathedral. The chambers were silver spheres set
into walkways – row upon row, above, below and
beside them.

'It's not that.' Rico scowled at her. 'It's not that
she's replacing the Commissioner for Correspondents.
That's a job for politicos who might not
have had anything to do with the College.'

'Then what?'

'It's what she was. Still is. Head of Psychological
Profiles. She's the one who decides if someone's
suitable for being a correspondent or not. She's the
one who sends them out to their deaths in the first
place.'

'Funny,' Su said, 'I could have sworn you worked
for the College. You know, the organization that
employs her and pays her to send them out to their
deaths.'

Rico growled. His relationship with and feelings
towards the College were complex, and she knew it.

'Not everything the College does is bad,' he
muttered.

'Oh, Rico.' Su took his hand and looked into his
eyes. 'Look. You blew it once and you were lucky.
Please, please don't do it again.'

'I won't drag you down,' Rico said.

'It's not me I'm worried about, you cretin.'

Rico changed the subject. 'We should get to
work. What does the Register have planned for us
today?'

'Escort duty. A professor and some students to
Amazonia, C14, alpha stream.'

'Off we go, then.'

They went off to change into their fieldsuits and
to meet up with the group they were to escort. An
hour later they had again left the Home Time.

The air was warm and close under the canopy of
trees, and the ground was speckled by the sunlight
that beamed through the leaves. The hum of
life was everywhere – the humus on the ground, the
leaves up above, and the thriving chain of ecosystems
around the tree trunks that linked the two.
Life was engaged in a constant, to-the-death battle
with itself and yet was involved in an intricate
balance, every organism depending minutely on
every other.

It was also sauna-bath hot and the group of
humans who materialized out of the shadows began
to sweat buckets the moment they appeared. But
that was OK, Rico Garron thought, because they
were probably taking the same water back in with
every breath of the humid air.

A monkey swung through the branches overhead
and Rico was sure it had noticed them,
but it wasn't concerned. He and the rest of the
party were doused in neutral pheromones and they
had been inserted into the timestream with
minimal disturbance, so the monkey might have
had a brief disorientation but was otherwise undisturbed.
As it should be.

He returned his attention to the group and
listened to Su ending her Senior Field Op's spiel.
Her sleeve was rolled back and she was studying her
forearm. Her field computer was embedded there
and data symbols ran over her skin. Field Ops had
to travel unnoticed amongst bygoner people and
their equipment had to be as unobtrusive as
possible, though in this case that wasn't an issue.
They were in the middle of uninhabited jungle and
their fieldsuits were in their natural, non-camo
state: slick, dark grey gelfabric.

'We are at sixty degrees west, four degrees
south,' Su said. 'In the Home Time this is the
middle of Brasilia ecopolis. There's a tributary of
the Amazon ten miles north of us.'

'Are there predators?' said one of the students.
He was a pale, nervous young man.

Rico showed his teeth in a smile without
humour. 'Almost certainly. Everything around here
preds.' The student went even paler. Rico symbed a
command to his own field computer and a display
appeared in his vision. 'But there's nothing
dangerous at present within a quarter of a mile, and
certainly no bygoners. Your repulsion field is keyed
to the local fauna and it'll come on if anything
predatory approaches you.'

'You've had your training.' Professor Onskiro
took charge and she sounded irritated at students
who obviously hadn't listened to their briefing.
'Thank you, Field Ops. When do you want us back?'

'We'll be recalled twelve hours from now,' Su
said.

'Then we return to this location no later than
eleven hours from now,' Onskiro said. 'Give us time
for a debrief. Activate your beacons now, get into
your teams . . .'

The students huddled round their leader and,
apart from seeing that no one interfered with the
ecosystem, or wandered off into the jungle and got
lost, or removed anything other than the plant
specimens they were authorized to collect, Su and
Rico were suddenly redundant. Assuming no
emergency in the next twelve hours, their next job
would be tagging the specimens that were to be
taken back to the Home Time, sensitizing them to
the probability frequency of the recall field.

Rico tilted his head back again to admire the leaf
canopy. He lived in a community module which
had no natural views at all – he remembered with
envy the view from Daiho's place – in a block
with five million other people, and he had grown
up in a crèche, an orphan taken in and raised by
the College. Here it was hot and sticky, despite the
cooling action of his fieldsuit, but he loved it. This
wasn't the regulated and balanced ecology of an
ecopolis – this was real. Once it had been the
artificial world of the future that had been real to
him – it was where he had grown up – but then he
had gone on his first trip upstream and become a
convert to the joys of nature.

Su swung the pack off her back. 'Drink, Rico?'

'Thanks. Don't mind if I do.'

They sat cross-legged on the mulch and Su
poured out two cups. She handed one over.
'Brazilian coffee.'

'Appropriate.' They sipped their drinks. 'Su?'
Rico said.

'Yes?'

'Tell me about your friend Marje.'

'Why do you care? I thought you loathed her on
principle.'

'Humour me.'

Su shrugged. 'We don't see much of each other
and I wouldn't say she's my friend. We just joined
the College at the same time.'

'She looks older than you.'

'She is. She's a psychologist and she was a
partner in a practice, but as I recall she felt she
wasn't contributing enough to . . . I don't know, the
common good. She wanted to contribute more,
and what organization contributes the most? The
College. So, she joined, and by all appearances
hasn't done too badly for herself.' Su pierced Rico
with a look. 'Now, why do you want to know?'

Rico grinned. 'It's just that she's high up. Higher
up than that prick who was with her, and I wouldn't
ask him anyway.'

'Higher up for what?' Su said cautiously.

Rico put his cup down and lay back, propping
himself on one elbow. 'Why would a Commissioner
want a field computer?' he said.

'Did it ever occur to you it might not be any of
your business? Perhaps he wanted to show it to one
of his grandchildren.'

'And then there's the agravs. They should have
stopped him falling . . .'

'Here we go again . . .'

'It's my old-fashioned scientific mind,' Rico said,
and Su almost choked on her coffee. 'One tiny little
fact which doesn't fit the theory, and I dismiss the
theory rather than the facts.'

'So what does this have to do with Marje?' Su said.

'She has authority we could never get even if we
asked,' Rico said. 'If we could raise her suspicions
and get her to do some investigating of her own,
she could find out more than we ever will.'

'We?' Su said.

'Aren't you even remotely curious?'

'No.' Su took another swig of her coffee and put
the cup down. 'Look. Ever since you got bust down,
you've made a point of not caring about anything.
Why are you so worked up now?'

Rico narrowed his eyes. Su was one of the few
people – correct that, the only person – in the
whole of the Home Time whom he would allow to
refer so casually to his being busted. But she had a
point. Why was he so fixated?

'It just bugs me,' he said. 'That's all.'

A scream echoed through the jungle, inspiring
a responding chorus from the bird life, and
immediately Rico and Su were on their feet and
running towards its source. They knew the difference
between animal noises and terrified humans,
and they knew which sort that scream had been.

'
Go to agrav
,' Rico symbed at Su. Their fieldsuits
had in-built symb units and they could communicate
as easily here as in the Home Time. The agrav
harnesses beneath their fieldsuits came on and the
two Field Ops leaped through the undergrowth,
covering ten or twenty feet with a bound.

'
Stay low. You'll just get tangled if you get into the tree
tops
,' Rico added. He could have flown with the
agrav but there just wasn't room.

'
How lucky I am to have you
,' Su symbed back, not
breaking her step. The irony was just strong
enough to remind Rico that she was the senior, not
he. But he had been trained for harder and dirtier
missions than this, and old habits died hard, and
she knew he was better than she was at this sort of
thing.

They were near their target and the symb display
in Rico's vision indicated three Home Timers
surrounded by a large group of smaller primates.
And then he was through the leaves and in sight of
the scene, and he saw the mistake the sensors had
made. It was three Home Timers and a small group
of larger primates: human beings, to be precise.
One student writhed on the ground with an arrow
sticking from his shoulder and the other two
cowered under the spears of the natives. They were
small men, barely coming up to the shoulders of
the Home Timers; naked but for loincloths; nut
brown skin decorated with paint; dark knots of jet
black hair.

Rico let out a wild whoop at the top of his voice
and symbed the command '
full radiance
' at his fieldsuit
so that it immediately blazed with white light.
Su followed his example. It was stage one of the
standard operating procedure for frightening
bygoners from primitive cultures, and the sight of
two whooping, yelling, shining beings leaping and
bounding through the trees towards them made
most of the natives turn and flee.

Three of them, visibly terrified, still stood their
ground and brought their weapons up. For stage
two, Rico raised his right hand and sparks flew from
his fingertips, stinging two of them painfully. They
yelped, dropped their spears and followed their
friends.

The last man was made of the sternest stuff of all,
which perversely made Rico take an immediate
liking to him. He was pale beneath his naturally
dark skin, but he shifted his feet into a slightly
firmer position, braced himself, looked Rico in the
eyes and brought his spear to bear as the Field Op
touched down in front of him. Rico cancelled the
blazing light and smiled, holding his hands out:
look, no harm
. The man feinted, then lunged at him.
Rico didn't even need the fieldsuit: he twisted to
one side, caught the man as he ran past and
rendered him unconscious with a simple jab at the
right spot on the neck. The man crumpled, face
down, next to the student.

Sorry
, thought Rico.

Su was already tending to the stricken, groaning
Home Timer so Rico turned the native over, checking
him for damage. He would live.

'Kill him!'

Rico looked up in surprise at one of the other
students. A young woman, late teens or early twenties.
'Kill him!' she spat. She could have looked
attractive if her face hadn't been twisted with hate.
'He's an animal!'

Rico stood up slowly to face her, then, more
quickly than she could react, tapped her lightly on
the cheek. 'He's as human as you are, and he's
probably an ancestor, so show a bit of respect.'

'He killed Veci! He could have killed us!' Back in
the Home Time, her social preparation would have
taken over. Her symb would have transmitted her
mental condition to the central systems and
positive images of peace and calm would be pumping
into her brain right now. But here, her fear and
anger could go unchecked.

Rico glanced down at Su, still kneeling beside
the boy. She shook her head. 'They used a curare
dart on him, but he'll live,' she said.

She rose to stand next to Rico and glared at the
other two students, waving the dart she had pulled
from the boy under their noses. 'Not that he
deserves to: his suit's neutralizer and defences were
switched off. The poison would have killed him in
another minute if we hadn't got here. Weren't you
listening?'

Su and Rico had carefully briefed the students
on fieldsuit protocol and a host of other issues
before the transference. Properly managed, the suit
would have detected the incoming arrow and
switched on its repulsion field. And if any
dangerous toxins had made it into the bloodstream,
the neutralizer would have taken care of it.

'They attacked us!' the girl repeated, ignoring her.

'I'm not surprised.' Rico had just noticed what
was hanging in the bushes behind them. He didn't
know exactly what the carved bits of wood were
meant to be but he recognized a shrine when he
saw it. 'You're probably blaspheming against their
gods, or something, just by being here. We should
move.'

The girl turned to follow his line of sight. 'Oh,
that,' she said with a complete lack of interest.

'You don't think much of it?' Rico said.

The other student, a young man, spoke for the
first time.

'We have the greatest respect for their religious
practices,' he said: smooth, calm,
patronizing
in a
way that made Rico grit his teeth.

'But . . . but we know they're a load of superstitious
bygoner nonsense,' Rico said with a
friendly, baffled smile. The student chuckled, a bit
strained after his shock but trying at sophistication.

'Well, of course, we know that . . .'

'Don't have a lot of respect for them, then, do
you?' said Rico, leaving the student stranded by the
abrupt turn.

'Where were you, anyway?' the girl demanded.
'You're meant to be protecting us.'

'Are you dead?' said Rico.

'No, but . . .'

'Then what's the problem?'

'Our sensors misinterpreted the threat,' Su said
quietly. 'With all this biomass around us they can
get confused.'

'I'm suing the College when we get back!'

'Fine.' Su finally lost patience. 'We'll leave you
here. As for the moment, your friend's laziness
nearly cost him his life, and you three's disregard
for bygoner sensitivities probably provoked the
attack in the first place. As Senior Field Op, I'm
abandoning this mission. When your friend can
walk, the three of you are coming with me. Rico,
round up Onskiro and the rest and rendezvous at
the recall point.'

'I love you when you're angry.' He quickly
touched a knuckle to his forehead when Su glared
at him. 'Right away, ma'am.'

There was the usual disorientation as the shadows
of the fourteenth-century Brazilian rainforest faded
out and the lightly glowing walls of the transference
chamber appeared around them. It was a hollow
sphere with a floor provided by a carryfield that
sliced it in half. The top hemisphere in which
they stood could have held fifty adults. Even
experienced transferees like Rico and Su
always needed a moment to collect themselves,
remember where they were and what they were
doing.