by Greg Bear
“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 int
egrity 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.”
“As we expected you would be. Lora, will you continue?”
“Certo.” Speaking directly to Everard, she said, “We think the terrorists came from near the beginning of the period of the Chorite Heresiarchy, but we aren’t sure of that. It doesn’t matter. We can’t search all of time for them. They are nihilists of some sort, unscrupulous adventurers, criminals, madmen—whatever. Perhaps something like the Exaltationists or the Neldorians, but they seem to be a different group not previously known to us. What they have done, apparently, is to establish a base camp just prior to the founding of Alpha Point—and no, we haven’t located it yet—and make microleaps into the Convocation site itself, staying no more than a millisecond or so, just long enough to stick capsules of some sort of toxic substance or substances here and there around the camp. When everything is properly planted, they make a second series of microleaps and touch off the poison bombs, evidently doing it in a specific order of release so that the final capsule potentiates all the others and floods the entire Alpha Point area with lethal gas. At least, that’s our theory at the moment. We don’t have all the information. But Hideko and Daniel have made several visits to Alpha Point in the period just prior to the moment of the attack—Christmas Day is the name we use as our reference point for the time of the attack—and have detected the barely detectable blurs of these microleaps.”
Everard raised his eyebrows at that. Ben-Eytan had risked going there at the very time of the attack, risking the chance that he would land right in the middle of a cloud of poison gas? He may be a bastard, Everard thought, but at least he’s a brave one.
“And now?” he asked.
It was Ben-Eytan who answered. “Now we get going on the next round of surveillance, and hope to come up with a better picture of what the enemy is up to. And then we get about the job of doing the fix.”
“While praying that we don’t attract the attention of Time Patrol II while we go about our work,” Everard said.
“Good point, Manse. If Patrol II detects the signs of a counter-intervention, it will surely try to counter that. It has to. Its life, the life of its entire time-line, is at stake.”
Everard closed his eyes for a moment. The whole thing was like a dream, a very bad dream, the attack on Alpha Point and now this talk of two contending Time Patrols battling each other to protect the existence of their particular time-lines. He wanted to think that everything would come out all right, that the true and proper Patrol would triumph, that the correct fix would happen because everything he remembered of his long career in the Patrol had such vivid reality in his mind that he could not help believing that it had really happened. Therefore the fix had been successful, the enemy intervention had been canceled—the thing thus legitimizing itself in his mind, the universe saved by a wonderful act of circularity.
Hogwash, he told himself.
The thing wasn’t done until it was done. His vivid memories of a full, useful life in the Patrol meant nothing at all. Neither did the scars he bore. Those scars, those memories, were, at the moment, effects without causes, free-floating artifacts of a past life in a continuum whose current existence was merely conditional. Everything, he knew, having learned it over and over again with every job he had ever done, was subject to constant revision. Everything was in need of constant protection, unceasing vigilance.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
There was a lot of work ahead for them.
“When do we get started?” Everard asked.
Because it was his first surveillance trip to Alpha Point he went with a companion, Elio Gonzalez, and Gonzalez would do the driving. They clambered into the two-seat hopper and a moment later they were half a billion years back in the past, sitting in the sky three thousand feet above Alpha Point.
The air up here was cool but not chilly, springtime-cool, and the view, far out to the horizon, was one of emptiness, emptiness, and more emptiness. The sun, dimly visible through the gray murk, seemed mysteriously wrong, the color not quite the proper shade of yellow, its apparent diameter different also. The only indication that life had ever existed on this planet was the puny scattering of buildings clustered higgledy-piggledy immediately below.
“What we’re doing,” Gonzalez said, “is trying to bracket the time of the attack. We think we have zero hour pegged by now—noon on Christmas Day, give or take a few seconds, so far as we know. That still needs full confirmation, though. We’re much less certain about the time of the planting of the devices. So we’re exploring the two or three days leading up to the event.”
“We can’t just go back to their base camp and cut things off right there?”
“That would be a permissible intervention in an extreme situation like this, I guess,” Gonzalez conceded. “The trouble is, we don’t know where their base camp is. It could be anywhere. If they’ve located it in early geological history, it would be located, we assume, somewhere on this continent and somewhere in the last billion years or so, because any earlier than that and atmospheric conditions are so much different on Earth that they’d need to mess around with special breathing equipment. Probably they wouldn’t have bothered with that. But we can’t go searching through a billion years and across an area that’s essentially the size of the entire world to find the camp. And for all we know they don’t even have a base camp in ancient times, but are simply hopping back and forth from their own era, whenever that is.”
“Those are phrases I keep hearing: ‘so far as we know’ and ‘probably’ and ‘we assume’ and ‘for all we know.’ We don’t seem actually to know very much.”
“Not yet,” said Gonzalez.
Everard stared down at the strikingly unimpressive string of shoddy-looking buildings within which the governing structure of the Time Patrol had been/would/might be forged. Today, Gonzalez had told him, was December 24 on the Gondwandaland calendar that their little Patrol group had flanged up. Ben-Eytan’s counter-intervention group had already established that the lethal capsules had been planted at various times on Christmas Eve and that the attackers had returned in some significantly sequential ord
er the next day to detonate them. They had been designed, Ben-Eytan said, to undergo biodegrading immediately upon detonation, so that there was no evidence left afterward.
Through his optical Everard saw people moving around down there, going from one building to another. The Founders, they were. The awesome demigods who had brought the Patrol into being. All of them destined to die the next day, unless—unless—
Incredible. Inconceivable. The actual Founders, going about the task of creating the Time Patrol, altogether unaware of the dark fate that was cruising toward them.
“Won’t they notice us up here?” he asked.
“Only if they look, Manse. And they won’t look. There aren’t any birdwatchers in the group, you know, and there aren’t any birds, either. There’s nothing at all to see in the Gondwanaland sky except clouds. Anyway, if they do see a scooter up here, they’ll just assume it’s somebody going somewhere on official business. Why should they suspect anything?”
“I suppose.”