Times Without Number

by John Brunner

  He found himself able to relax a little also.

  The Prince fumbled a large pipe from a pouch at his belt and stuffed it with tobacco in coarse-cut hunks. Lighting it, he mumbled around the stem.

  "Well, young Navarro, I don't mind telling you that you put the cat in the pigeoncote with this rash act of yours!"

  A harsh grunt, as though to say "understatement!", came from Red Bear, whose long Indian face was framed in elegantly dressed black braids as slick as oil.

  Father Ramón, seated between Red Bear and the Prince, passed a thin hand over his bald cranium in a way that suggested he had acquired in youth the habit of running his fingers through his hair and still expected subconsciously to find some on his scalp. His face reminded Don Miguel of a bird, with the skin stretched tight around a beaky nose and little, very bright eyes.

  He said quietly, "Sir, it may have been an unavoidable cat."

  The Prince shrugged, his pipe pouting out smoke like a bonfire. "I'd be inclined to dispute that . . . if I didn't know better than to dispute with one of your Order, Father! What I mean, though, is what I say: I hold that Navarro has caused us a deal of unnecessary botheration."

  The Jesuit looked worried. "Again, I can't agree. In my view he has so far acted sensibly, apart from taking the Marquesa di Jorque into custody." He turned to face Don Miguel directly.

  "How old are you, my son?"

  "Ah . . . I'm nearly thirty, Father."

  "In that case you should by now be better able to judge people. I think five minutes' conversation with the Marquesa should have sufficed to inform you that she would never in a million years have thought to inquire of the Society's office about the mask she'd been given. Like a child with a new toy, she'd have been too afraid of losing it."

  It hardly seemed to Don Miguel that the greed of a fading beauty should be allowed to excuse an infringement of the Society's rules; however, he was glad that the Jesuies reproof had been so mild, and held his peace.

  "On the other hand," Father Ramón continued, "I confess I'm greatly puzzled by the story which the merchant tells. I seem to recall seeing in his deposition that our brother Navarro admired feeling annoyed with the Marquesa because she was showing him off like a performing animal to her other guests. That remark struck home, because -- as I hardly need to remind you -- the work of the Society itself runs the risk of being turned into a mere spectacle for sensation-seekers."

  Like a spark and gunpowder, two facts came together in Don Miguel's mind and shot him forward on his chair. He said explosively, "Then it's true!"

  The curious gaze of the General Officers fixed on him again, but only Father Ramón seemed to understand the comment without explanation. He said, "You have heard about this disgrace to the Society?"

  "I -- I only know what the Marquesa herself said to me: that certain people have been taken in this quatrocentennial year to witness the victory of Armada."

  "Hah!" said Red Bear. "If it stopped there! If that were all!"

  "Then it is true?" pressed Don Miguel. "But how could such a thing be allowed to happen?"

  The Prince coughed. "Father, as usual I'll defer to your judgment -- but is this wholly wise?"

  "To give our brother the facts? I think so. In the matter currently before us he's displayed considerable moral courage -- it's not every Licentiate who would have defied a powerful noblewoman, alas!" Having delivered himself of this verdict, the Jesuit turned back to Don Miguel and resumed.

  "You ask how such a thing could be allowed to happen! Well, it is of course not allowed; on the contrary it's completely forbidden. However certain Licentiates have stumbled on a trick which has thus far enable them to escape retribution -- though I promise you when they're discovered their licenses will last an even shorter time than their freedom! You must be acquainted with the normal operation of time apparatus, but are you familiar with the effect of increasing the spatial components of the drive-field?"

  Don Miguel frowned. He said, "Superficially, Father; I mean, I know that proper choice of factors permits objects to be drawn into a time-field from a distance or set down at a distance from the apparatus's location . . . Oh!"

  "I think you understand what I'm referring to to," Father Ramón said, pleased. "The trick I mentioned works after this fashion, then. The corruptible Licentiates accept payment secretly from clients who wish to witness the victory of the Armada, or the Coliseum games, or the Battle of the Guinea Coast, or the disgusting acts in the temples of Egypt -- or whatever -- and then plan an innocent field-trip, which is approved as routine by our brother Red Bear. The trip is always to a more distant time than their real destination. They then collect their clients from a time and place when the latter are unobserved, deliver them where they want to be, continue to conduct their fieldword further back, and rejoin their clients on the way back to the present -- where, naturally, they replace them at the very second of their departure. Put so elaborately, it seems complicated; in effect, it can be devilishly simple. Who can tell, for instance, from which direction a traveller through time is arriving?"

  "And the people are using the Society's own time apparatus for this -- this knavery ?" Don Miguel's mind was reeling with the impact of the Jesuit's revelation.

  "They would hardly dare to construct illicit apparatus of their own, easy though that might be. And why should they, anyhow? This had been going on for well over a year before we realised."

  "Had -- had many of us been tempted to take bribes?"

  The Jesuit hesitated. Finally he said in a gruff tone, "More than thirty Licentiates are under investigation because their incomes are disproportionately high."

  "Thirty!" Don Miguel's dismay registered in his voice. The Prince, finding that his pipe had gone out, felt for means to relight it and spoke up gloomily.

  "It wouldn't be so bad if all that was involved were -- uh -- unofficial observation . I mean, I've taken my father on the odd trip myself, without any harm being done."

  "But that's not quite the same thing," Don Miguel said slowly. The Prince chuckled.

  "Yes, kings get away with a good deal! But as I've often been told by Father Ramón -- very rightly -- divine law doesn't recognize royalty as something special. I know that. The people we're talking about, unfortunately, seem not to. It seems that they've allowed some of these illegal travellers to bring back souvenirs of their trip."

  Father Ramón nodded. "Of which this great golden mask is presumably one."

  A chill passed down Don Miguel's spine. He said, "Is there then a -- a regular trade in such contraband? Why, the implications are incalculable!"

  "True," confirmed Father Ramón. "Luckily, however, this is as yet the largest single item we've run across; the remainder have been intrinsically valueless, mere curios." He leaned back and set his fingertips together, elbows on the arms of his chair.

  "Were it nothing more than household garbage, though, we would still need to be worried about the importation of anything we hadn't licensed. Our rules are specific and strict: we import only items we can establish as having disappeared from their own day -- treasure buried by someone who died without divulging his secret, for example, or something mentioned in contemporary annals as having been lost without trace. This rule is of course not entirely reliable, since we cannot be sure that some of these 'lost' items were not in fact removed by future intervention. However, we must trust in the divine plan for the universe." He gave a skeletal smile.

  "The removal of something like this mask," Don Miguel ventured, "must inevitably have dangerous consequences . . . ?" He gestured towards it. "The mass alone is enormous!'

  "Oh, it may turn out that the mask is recorded as having been melted down, so that the loss of simple mass -- even in the form of gold -- could pass unnoticed. I'm praying to that end, for it would offer the simplest solution. What is truly frightening is the psychological aspect of the matter. Such a mask as this would not have been a mere ornament, but the object of pagan veneration, known to thousands of
people in its own time. It is not interference with things, or even with human beings, but with the development of ideas which implies the greatest potential alteration of history. You follow me?"

  "I think so," Don Miguel muttered, feeling chilled to the marrow by the calm unemotional words.

  "Suppose we find its loss recorded, Father?" the Prince interjected. "Does that mean we can keep it after all?"

  The Jesuit shrugged. "As yet, I dare not say. We would then have to determine whether history had in fact been changed by interference, and if so whether truth demanded restitution of the former state of affairs."

  The smile with which he accompanied the remark was actually quite pleasant, but it was no more comforting to Don Miguel than the grin of a death's-head. He said, "Father, I'm glad I'm involved on the practical side of the Society. My mind boggles at the depth of these philosophical problems."

  "You may not be so pleased tomorrow," rumbled the Prince. "We're charging you with a problem which is deep enough in its own way." He swept the others with an inquiring glance, and received confirmatory nods. "You are to discover the origin in our time of this mask, and identify the stranger Higgins bought it from. And you have two weeks in which to complete the task."

  Two weeks! Dismayed, Don Miguel said, "Sir, I -- I feel unworthy of such a . . ."

  The Prince snorted. "Worthy or unworthy, Navarro, you opened up the case. We're telling you to close it as well!"

  VI

  In its way the assignment was a signal honour -- if the General Officers were as concerned as Father Ramón had indicated about illicit time-travellers and their perilous souvenirs, they would never charge someone they didn't trust with carrying it out.

  But it was also a terrifying burden, and the more Don Miguel reflected on it, the more qualms he felt.

  He was, as he had said, still under thirty; his time licence was little more than four years old, and his experience of fieldwork had been confined to a mere five trips, from the last of which he had returned bearing the scar of the Macedonian battle which would mark his face until he died, because an extratemporal infection had poisoned it and the medicines of the Society's doctors had proved impotent to destroy the germ. (They had found out how to cure the sufferers, but that was after his own wound had cicatrised.)

  Nonetheless, his sense of duty might have carried him to the task with relative equanimity, had it not been for the fearful news Father Ramón had imparted to him at the meeting. Thirty Licentiates of the Society suspected of taking bribes? It was hardly believable! To Don Miguel timework had something of the air of a sacred trust; one of his lifelong heroes had always been the Society's founder, Borromeo, whose epochal discovery in 1892 had filled him with such apprehension that he did not rest easy until there was Papal supervision of all time apparatus and organisations existed to control its use. In the Empire, he had founded the Society of Time, while in the Confederacy of the East an analogous body called the Temporal College had been established under the Treaty of Prague.

  No sane man, Don Miguel had always thought, would question the need to regulate time-travel. But now he wondered how much of the rigorously policed administration he was accustomed to derived from common sense, and how much from crude raw fear, which familiarity could erode with the passage of time.

  There was no shortage of rational justifications for the Society's rule confining time-travel to observation without interference; for example, it had often been pointed out that if such a rule were not made and kept time-travellers from the future, visiting what to them was the past, would be noticed in the here-and-now. They had not been -- therefore the rule was being obeyed.

  Given almost a century of routine time-travel, though, it was scarcely to be marvelled at if that element of caution which was founded on fear rather than rational judgment were to fade. People were likely to grow blasé about anything routine, even when not merely their lives but the very history which led up to them depended on non-interference.

  And if the rule were broken wholesale . . .

  Don Miguel had inchoate visions of vast areas of time being swept into some unimaginable vacuum, into the formlessness of absolute not-being. Contemplating the consequences made his head ache. Like any other Licentiate, he had struggled through a full three-year course in the theory of time-travel on top of a regular university education -- for him, the latter had included history, mathematics and natural philosophy -- in order to graduate from Probationer to Licentiate status. He had cracked his skull over the relationship between familiar substantive time, in which one measured out one's daily life, and hard-to-grasp durative time in which one experienced events during a time-journey, and he had written his graduation thesis on the subject of so-called hypertime, the barrier which prevented a time-traveller returning from the past from going any further futurewards than the moment "then" reached by the apparatus which had launched him.

  But all these were as nothing compared to the hypothetical complexities of speculative time, in which events would be otherwise than as history recounted.

  What reality would take the place of his own if someone really smashed the non-interference rule to bits? Would Jorque be York; would an English monarch sit the Imperial throne? Would a Mohawk Prince rule New Castile and call his subjects braves and squaws? Would there -- could there -- be a world in which men travelled into space instead of through time, by some undreamed-of miracle of propulsion?

  But pondering such incredible speculations was not to Don Miguel's pragmatic taste. After doing his best to discipline his mind into logical analysis of the implications, he decided he was better employed in action than in mentation, and accordingly set off for another interview with the merchant, Higgins.

  The guards on the door of Higgins's cell inspected his commission before admitting him; on discovering that it was over the Prince's own seal, they gave way with much bowing and scraping. Passing the door, he found himself in a room which -- by prison standards -- was spacious, though poorly lit and not at all well ventilated.

  In the centre Higgins sat lolling on a chair, his head on one shoulder, his mouth ajar. He was fastened down with leather straps. At a table facing him were two inquisitors charged with his interrogation, conferring in low tones. Their expressions were anxious and they frowned continually. Upon Don Miguel's entrance they rose to greet him.

  "How goes it?" demanded Don Miguel, and they exchanged glances.

  "Badly," said the taller of the two at last. "We greatly fear he may have been bewitched."

  For a second Don Miguel wondered if the remark was meant for a joke. When he realised it was not, his heart sank. Was it not bad enough to have tangled with the paradoxes of temporal interference -- must he now confront the shady, seldom-acknowledged borderline universe of enchantment?

  Keeping his self-control with some effort, he said, "How so?"

  "We have used all means that are lawful to unlock his tongue," the shorter inquisitor said. "We have employed liquors of divers kinds and we have used mirrors and pendulums. Since he is not convicted of any offence as yet we are forbidden to try more drastic methods. So far, all we have established is that while he remembers purchasing the mask he cannot recall the face of the man who sold it, nor his name, nor any clue to his identity."

  Don Miguel felt a pang of dismay. He had hoped that at least one fresh clue would emerge from this interrogation. He said, "Does that mean we still have nothing concrete except the date of the deal?"

  "I'm afraid so," the shorter inquisitor sighed. "And he gave us that truthfully of his own free will. Have you, though, inquired of the authorities in Jorque concerning the travellers who registered with them on or about that date?"

  "Of course, but . . ." Don Miguel shrugged. "The person who brought the mask for sale has not been traced. No doubt he ignored the requirements of the law."

  "The justification of the law lies in men's obedience thereof," said the taller inquisitor in sententious tones. It was not an observation which struck D
on Miguel as adding very much to the discussion.

  He said, "Well, at least you can tell me what kind of enchantment this villain might have used."

  "There are many possibilities. One imagines a drug of some sort, to dull the will. Or he may have constrained Higgins to look at some bright spot -- perhaps a reflection on the mask itself -- and then soothed him to oblivion with gentle words."

  "This kind of thing is possible?" Don Miguel demanded.

  "Why, surely, sir. Though we prefer that the fact should not be noised around; you'll understand that these are the techniques we use ourselves in inquisition, and it would be fatal if people were forewarned about them."

  Don Miguel shook his head in wonder. He found all this barely credible; however, the inquisitors were experts in their own field, and he was compelled to take their word.

  "Do you still hold out any hope of further progress?" he ventured.

  "Very little, sir. Very little indeed -- though of course we shall continue to try."