by John Brunner
"No. No, honestly I don't. But I think after a few drinks I might -- and what better medicine is there than laughter?"
So they called for wine and brandy, and spent their final evening together inventing ridiculous toasts to the end of the world.
IX
Within the range over which time apparatus afforded fair accuracy -- about two and a half thousand years -- there were three zones of history which had exercised an obsessive fascination on temporal explorers ever since the Society was founded. One, inevitably, was the beginning of the Christian era . . . but access to Palestine of that day was severely restricted for fear that even the presence of non-intervening observers should draw the attention of the Roman authorities to the remarkable interest being generated by an unknown holy man, and cause Pilate to act earlier than the Sanhedrin, according to the written record, had desired.
The next was the downfall of Rome before the barbarian invasions; the Empire was the greatest single power to appear on Earth since the Roman heyday, and there was always the haunting suspicion that it too might be laid low. If there were clues and hints to aid survival that might be discovered by the study of their predecessors' fate, the Imperial government wanted to hear them.
And, third, there was the year of 1588 when Britain had been conquered and the existence of the Empire had thereby been rendered possible. This nexus of events was by far the most thoroughly documented period of explorable time. For that reason, when Don Miguel arrived between the crystal pillars along with the iron and silver frame which had transported him four hundred and one years into the past, he could say to himself, "Now the Armada is assembling! Despite the valiant efforts of the English who have raided its ports and tried to burn its galleons, work proceeds apace. The Duke of Parma will have a force of more than a hundred ships; he'll muster six thousand sailors and twenty thousand soldiers, and waiting in the Netherlands are as many more to launch the invasion of England."
Put in such concrete terms, the danger he had been sent here to counteract suddenly became unreal. He looked around the gracious, airy, Moorish-style courtyard of the house in which the Society had established a temporary base for the duration of the operation -- purely to conceal the arrival of so many strangers, they needed a convincing cover, and could not rely on the isolation far from any town or village which ordinarily served them well enough -- and felt a sense of what might be called solidity in the world. How, after all, could one man wipe out the whole of history for four mortal centuries? Two Dogs could scarcely command the weather so that the storm brewing at invasion time favoured the English rather than the Spanish fleet! He'd said so himself to some questioner or other, not many months ago -- when? A brief frown crossed his face; then he remembered that it had been during the Marquesa di Jorque's party.
And he was suddenly afraid all over again. The Society had almost panicked over the matter of the contraband mask; a contraband man, so to speak, could cause infinite harm . . . say by sowing pestilence among the soldiers, by poisoning their water-barrels, by sinking a ship to block the harbour and allowing the English a chance to attack once more.
Yes, indeed, there were terrible risks to face. But it was imperative not to despair. Leaving the vicinity of the time apparatus, he spoke to the advance guard of Licentiates who had been here for three days already, local time, preparing equipment and collecting news, and was given reassuring answers to his questions.
"Yes, the work's proceeding normally. No, there's no sickness been reported. Here are your contemporary clothes and contemporary sword, and here's a briefing sheet with your instructions and a map."
The wrought-iron grilles protecting the villa the Society had rented clanged shut behind him, and he set off down the road in the direction of the harbour. Cadiz was a fair-sized city, even this far back, and it was a considerable walk to his destination, especially since the streets were thronged with foot-passengers, pack-animals and wagons too large for the width of the carriageway, but the more he saw of his surroundings the better he felt. There was absolutely no difference between this bustling city and what the historical record showed; this was the place that had launched the Armada . . . in spite of the threats of Two Dogs. Besides, this was a more reassuring area of the past to visit than the others he'd been sent to: Imperial Rome, Macedonia under Alexander, Texcoco to replace the stolen mask. He was speaking a form of Spanish, though he had to be careful to amend his accent if he spoke to one of the natives and avoid anachronistic words; he was walking ground some of his ancestors had doubtless also trodden, and for the first time, moreover. He began to imagine that he might once again remember how to be cheerful.
His brief had been short and pointed: he was to go to the barbour and tour it from end to end, hunting for the least discrepancy that might betray interference. Despite the noon-tide heat he did so, unchallenged because he was garbed as an obviously wealthy minor noble and wore a sword meant for use rather than show, with a dent or two in the guard at its hilt. Protected from over-close scrutiny by his deliberately arrogant manner, he maintained a slightly bored expression as he walked, but in fact he was marvelling at the spectacle. Those galleons with their high proud masts, those gun-ports ready to snort death, those tidily drilled soldiers carrying their kit aboard by platoons, all those hogsheads of pickled meat and barrels of water and biscuit, all those great wagonloads of powder and shot -- real! Solid! Unchanged from what they should have been!
Three hours passed, and at last he dared to let himself hope. Here, at least, the effect of anything Two Dogs might have tried was not apparent. Possibly he had failed in his endeavours; it was risky for untrained traveliers to wander about the past -- perilous enough, indeed, for the Society's hand-picked Licentiates. But that was being over-optimistic. More likely, he'd realised that the Society would hasten to patrol this weakest spot in the Empire's history and chosen a second-best point of attack. But there was nowhere that offered a satisfactory alternative. With this particular episode protected, the Empire was like a man wearing good sound body-armour; immune to stabs in the heart or belly or lungs, he need fear only injury, not certain death.
His spirits lightening as he reached this conclusion, and extremely thirsty after his three-hour tour of the harbour, Don Miguel turned into a humble wine-shop whose proprietor almost fainted to see such a finely-dressed customer and fawned over him nauseatingly, uttering many oaths concerning the quality of his wine and the cleanliness of his premises. In fact the wine was nasty and the whole place was smeared with grime, but Don Miguel was in no mood to worry over trifles.
"Of course, your honour, we've been so busy lately," the landlord muttered as he strove vainly to mop enough dirt off a chair-seat to save it marking Don Miguel's breeches. "All day and all night they've been coming in, the soldiers and sailors, and not a few of their officers as well . . . Wine, your honour! Here it comes -- let me pour it for you . . ." He did so with an inept flourish. "Would you care for tapas ? We have good crayfish today, and mussels too!"
Thinking of the raw sewage that poured into the sea where the shellfish grew, Don Miguel refused, but gulped the wine gratefully; lemon-juice would have helped his thirst, and this was not quite so sour.
"Is your honour one of the officers sailing with the fleet, then?" the landlord probed. Silence had overtaken his three other customers all of them petty merchants, by their appearance, probably suppliers contracting for provisions to stock the ships -- and he seemed a little nervous.
"No, but I came to look over the preparations and to drink to their good fortune." Dun Miguel raised his mug cheerfully in the direction of his fellow-customers. "How say you to that, my friends?"
"Why, your honour, no loyal Spaniard or good Catholic would do otherwise than echo you!" answered the nearest of them, a beetle-browed fellow with one shoulder higher than the other. "But let me ask your honour this, first! Though of course the true faith is bound to triumph, are you honestly sanguine of this venture?"
A tremor of apprehension prickled on
Don Miguel's nape. He said, "Indeed I am! Why in the world should we not foresee a great victory for the Armada?"
"With a commander who's sick at the least lurching of his ship?" The beetle-browed man swigged his wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'm of a seafaring family myself, your honour, though now I've been forced to work ashore thanks to this bad back of mine." He jerked his high shoulder back and forth. "And I've been told all my life, by my father and his father before him: a ship's crew is only as good as the captain. And isn't the same thing true of a fleet?"
Don Miguel said faintly, "His Grace the Duke of Parma -- "
"Parma? What are you talking about?" Instantly the entire company was alert: the beetle-browed man, his two companions, the landlord and even the small boy armed with a jug and a greasy rag who stood hidden in the shadows by the racked wine-barrels at the rear of the shop. "Parma's in the Netherlands, your honour! Medina Sidonia's in charge of this fleet, and a worse sea-commander could hardly be picked in the whole of Spain!"
With those words, Dun Miguel Navarro became the first man to realise that the universe was crumbling about him, except always for Two Dogs, and Two Dogs had desired it should be so.
The Duke of Parma in the Netherlands? This wasn't history! The Duke of Parma, Spain's finest military commander of the century, took the Armada to sea! Medina Sidonia -- who was he? A nonentity, an entry in the footnotes of the history books! And the Netherlands were secured permanently for Spain and its heir the Empire by that brilliant unorthodox master of strategy, the Scottish Catholic Earl of Barton, who when the Armada broke the English resistance at sea was prepared with his hundreds of flat-bottomed barges to land an army of fifteen thousand men in Kent and shatter the resistance on land as well.
Why in the name of all that was holy had they been persuaded to waste Parma on a footling land-war?
He said after such a pause he fancied he had heard the grinding of Earth on its axis, "And the Earl of Barton -- does he serve with Parma in the Netherlands?"
By now the others in the wine-shop were exchanging puzzled glances, at a loss to know how a finely-dressed gentleman could be so out of touch with the news. Uncertainly the landlord said, "Perhaps, perhaps! It's not a name I know."
"To me it sounds like an English name!" The beetle-browed man rose to his feet. Moving away from his table, he went on, "Who are you, that you ask such peculiar questions?" He had abandoned the formal "your honour."
"Ah . . ." Trying to appear calm, Don Miguel drained his wine-mug and also rose. "I've been traveling. A long time. I just reached Cadiz and welcomed the chance to see the fleet before it sailed. But now I have pressing business. My score, landlord!"
"Not so quickly," the beetle-browed man snapped. "Landlord, we should fetch a patrol, in my view. For all we know this fellow may be an English spy."
"Nonsense!" Don Miguel tossed a gold coin towards the landlord. "But -- "
"You speak strangely. Doesn't he speak strangely?" The beetle-browed man appealed to the others. "I think we ought to hold him until he's been interrogated!"
Don Miguel's patience broke, and he darted for the door. The beetle-browed man tried to stop him, hobbling to block the way, but as well as being deformed he limped, and he was too slow -- Don Miguel slipped past him and out into the street at a headlong run.
Although reason told him running could do little to speed his purpose.
X
Mind pounding faster than his feet, he outstripped even the shouts the suspicious men in the wine-shop hurled after him on the way back to the villa the Society had picked for its local base. This was what he had wanted to say to the General Officers, and been unable to cast into words that would gain their attention: that Two Dogs was devious and brilliant, that he would strike where the Empire was most vulnerable -- but he would not do it in the way the Society most expected. Not for him the crudity of the bludgeon. He preferred the delicacy of a scalpel.
And he'd found one. Before God he'd found one so sharp its wound would kill before the feather-touch of the blade was felt!
He'd taken out of history a man about whom almost nothing was known.
Or to be exact, about whom little was known except legend . . .
As they learned the tales of El Cid or Roland and Oliver, all schoolboys in the Empire could recount how the Earl of Barton had made his first appearance on the world scene: a youth of twenty owning his clothes, a horse and a sword, claiming to be related on the wrong side of the blanket to the House of Stewart -- like countless others -- and determined to revenge the extermination of his Catholic relatives in Scotland by troops of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Given his opportunity thanks to the death of his general during a battle in which he rallied the Catholic forces from almost certain defeat, he proved himself the finest strategist of his age, and his troops developed an almost superstitious loyalty to him. When Parma was recalled to command the Armada, he was the obvious choice as deputy, and made sure for ever of the Netherlands in sixteen weeks of whirlwind campaigning which laid the enemy low like wheat before the reaper's scythe.
Take him away, and . . . who was left instead?
That must be the point at which Two Dogs had struck -- not here, by any means as crude as poisonlng the water-barrels.
Surely, though, someone who had exerted such an influence on the establishment of the Empire must have been the subject of exhaustive study by the Society? Probably his movements from birth to death had been secretly documented. All it would take would be half an hour's research, and the Licentiates deployed here at Cadiz and over in England could be dispatched instead to guard --
-- a man who already had never existed .
For a second that realisation stopped him in his tracks, like a physical blow. He grew briefly aware that the townsfolk were staring at him, wondering what made a finely-dressed gentleman race through their streets as though pursued by devils, and ignored them. Breaking anew into a run, he struggled to discipline his mind back into the laboriously learned techniques of five-dimensional thinking he had been drilled through as a Probationer in the Society.
Two Dogs had almost certainly killed the Earl of Barton; he would have wanted to make his work definitive. Perhaps he'd located the Earl as a child, or on his way to join the Spanish forces in the Netherlands. It didn't matter. At this juncture, June of 1588, the consequences of the action were already being experienced. They must be welling down the ages ahead of him like an incoming tide, along the curious skew-axis of hypothetical or speculative time -- the medium in which existed improbable alternative worlds such as Father Ramón had told him of. There was a sort of inertia implicit in the process; the alteration of history was a sluggish event because it was not an event -- it did not occur in ordinary time.
Up ahead in the twentieth century, there might even yet be time apparatus under the control of Red Bear and Father Terence, waiting to fetch back Licentiates from Cadiz in the sixteenth century. If so, if only the echo of the murder of Lord Barton had not "by now" durated to destroy the Society altogether, he still stood a slim chance of warning them in time and having Two Dogs killed before he could leave for the past -- if necessary having him shot off the back of the horse he'd ridden away from his mine in California. That too would alter history, but at least it would be altered back towards the unmodified version.
Whereupon there would once again be an Earl of Barton and everything would revert to normal.
Perhaps!
He stormed up the final slope to the Society's rented villa and screamed at the gate-keeper to hurry and let him in. Not waiting for the formalities, he thrust past the man and shouted at the top of his lungs to everyone in earshot, "There isn't an Earl of Barton in this world!"
The impact was immediate. Busy with a score of different tasks, Licentiates and worried young Probationers dashed to the courtyard in the centre of the house where the time apparatus stood, and heard the story in fragments from Don Miguel as the technicians rapidly reversed t
heir equipment and arranged his return to the future. There was no point in sending a message; a man would get there just as quickly and would be more informative.
Don Miguel was almost crying with impatience when at last the settings were correct and his surroundings suddenly looked as though they were melting, indicating that he was being twisted in the continuum, that time was becoming a direction along which the forces constrained within the frame of iron and silver drove him like a metal rod between the closing blades of a pair of scissors. The distorted outline of the cage bars itself became more visible, more convincing , as he was hurtled forward.
No time apparatus could go further towards the future than the moment at which it was energised, nor could an object or a person contained within it. The mere fact that he had left Cadiz meant that, up ahead, at "this" moment there still must be a Society of Time, for this was the same apparatus as one in the Society's office at New Madrid; he merely occupied it at a different moment.
A vast relief overcame him, yet did not completely dispel his anxiety. He fretted and fumed at the length of the journey and wished there was room for him to pace up and down; it was going to take some while to arrive, because he was being displaced through space to New Castile as well as towards the future, and inside the cage space was experienced as though it were ordinary time.