While he worked, and studied, and experimented, he paid little attention to the Peerdom of Lant and its people. Their lives had nothing whatsoever to do with his, which centered on the Old Med and the workroom. Egarn’s admiration and affection for the old scientist continued to grow.
Then the Prince of Lant, the peer’s eldest daughter and heir, a spiteful young lady of sixteen whom Egarn had quickly learned to avoid, inexplicably decided she was in love with him. She chose him as her consort in the casual kind of marriage that peeragers affected. In the Peerdom of Lant, only a recklessly headstrong prince would have insisted on mating with an unknown commoner; only a ruthless one could have gotten away with it.
The Old Med advised Egarn to consent. “If you refuse, you will make a permanent enemy,” he said. “A stranger like yourself can’t afford to offend the future peer. Accept her, treat her kindly, and indulge all of her whims. It won’t last long. If you can make her your friend, you will have an invaluable patron.”
The marriage lasted two years, which was far longer than peeragers’ matings usually endured. There was one child, a daughter, who died young. They parted amicably, and when Egarn returned to the Old Med’s workrooms, he had made a lifelong friend.
So involved did he and the Old Med become with problems of history and with their Honsun Len experiments that Egarn gave no further thought to social or political matters until the old med died at an advanced age. Then the prince, who now was the peer, appointed him Med of Lant. This was more astonishing than her choice of him as consort. The med was the peerdom’s public health officer with responsibilities Egarn knew nothing about despite his long association with the Old Med. The appointment carried with it the lofty rank of Warden of the Peerdom, and only a peerager, a nobleman, could hold the position. But the Old Med had recommended him, and the peer appointed him, and no one dared object.
Egarn suddenly found himself administrator of a governmental bureaucracy that was, next to the army, the peerdom’s largest. He had a complexity of duties and a huge staff of med servers to perform them for him. Since Egarn’s arrival, the Old Med had ignored those duties. Many expected Egarn to do the same, but he wrenched himself away from his studies and doggedly set to work. He had long been the accidental guest of these people of Lant. They had treated him generously and given him high honors, and he had ignored them and their problems completely even though he knew from the beginning that his life was linked with theirs until death. Now he undertook to become a conscientious and competent Med of Lant.
What he learned on his first day in office horrified him.
This primitive society of the future was made up of rigid social classes, as he already knew. There were the peeragers, the age’s aristocrats. They had two names, in which they took overweening pride, and they guarded their class lineage with vehemence. Even as consort to the prince and father of a daughter who would have become peer if she had lived, Egarn, a one-namer, was not allowed to acquire a second name.
The one-namers were the peerdom’s crafters and skilled workers. They operated the mills, they wove, they baked, they engineered the roads, they built, they repaired, they kept the civilization functioning and its pathetically scant learning alive. As servers to those peeragers who headed the various governmental departments, they formed a type of civil service and actually ran the government. They also worked as personal servants to the peeragers and looked after their households. The few things they had no connection with were agriculture, any form of rough, heavy labor, and the military.
Rough labor was the responsibility of the work-humans, the no-namers, mentally deficient brutes who performed the most rigorous and exhausting labor under the lash without whimpering.
The no-namers’ supervisors were called lashers. They, too, were no-namers, but at least they were given numbers. No-name males who had slightly more mental capacity than others of their kind became lashers, and forever afterward their cruelly flicking whips peeled flesh from the backs of their fathers and brothers and cousins—and, ultimately, sons. The military drafted its soldiers from the ranks of the lashers.
Egarn watched the brutal way the lashers drove the no-name laborers and felt revolted. He was even more horrified when he discovered the abominable basis for these class distinctions.
The Honsun Len.
And he, as Med of Lant, was responsible for its use.
Not only was the Honsun Len the foundation of the grossly superstitious medicine practiced in this civilization, but it also was used to numb the minds of no-namers and lashers and keep them subjugated. The treatments started in infancy. All babies born to no-name females received their first Honsun Len exposure shortly after birth. The mothers trustingly took their newborn babies to the med servers for what they thought were beneficial medical treatments—if the mentally impaired no-name females were able to think at all. The babies’ still unformed minds were partially destroyed by rays from the Honsun Len, which focused energy out of nowhere. Such treatments were repeated throughout the no-namers’ lives. As a result, a class of mindless humans was condemned to a lifetime of uncomplaining, totally submissive, slave labor.
The lashers received a different course of treatments. Their minds were left more alert but still sadly impaired. This probably had nothing to do with their revolting characters. The fact that their entire lives were devoted to inflicting pain on others hardened them into unfeeling monsters.
The system had originated in the aftermath of the holocaust, Egarn reasoned. One petty state managed to subjugate another and then, with fiendish cleverness, used the len on its people, thus eliminating any possibility of revolt and at the same time originating the most loathsome form of slavery ever devised. From babyhood, the minds of the slaves were bound in shackles that could never be loosened.
As the system became entrenched, work-humans were bred to achieve the stature best suited to a human draft animal. The system had functioned so efficiently that human slaves now were far less costly to breed and maintain than horses would have been.
A baby’s schedule of treatments was predetermined by its alertness and stature. No-name females were left with sufficient mentality to enable them to rear children. Husky, more aggressive males became sub-moronic lashers and soldiers. The remaining no-name males were condemned to a lifetime of incessant labor that ended only when work or sickness killed them.
This shambles of a civilization was totally dependent on the system of slavery brought into being and maintained by the Honsun Len. But where had the Honsun Len come from? Egarn returned to his studies and eventually pieced isolated scraps of information into a staggering discovery. The Honsun Len had been invented at the end of the twentieth century by a man named Johnson, who had lived in Rochester, New York. Probably he had been a specialist in optics who worked in the photographic industry there. During his lifetime, the peculiar properties of his len made it an innocent curiosity, and only a few uses were found for it in children’s toys or household gadgets. It was not a subject of serious scientific research until certain military applications were discovered.
When that happened, civilization was doomed. The Honsun Len, adapted to war, unleashed the primal energy of the universe on the planet Earth. It devastated a world and annihilated much of its population. Mounted in artificial satellites, huge Honsun Lens wiped out armies, destroyed cities, cut enormous chasms across plains, leveled hills, piled up new mountains. Coastlines and the courses of rivers were altered. The Honsun Len changed the face of the planet and almost obliterated it.
Now it was about to destroy civilization a second time— thanks, in part, to Egarn, who rediscovered the military potential of the len and unthinkingly gave a few copies of a weapon to the Peer of Lant when she convinced him her peerdom was threatened by its neighbors. In between, it had destroyed the minds of two thirds of the surviving human race.
“A great pity,” Egarn mused, “that the Johnson who inflicted this curse on humanity didn’t die young.”
I
t was then that the great idea took possession of him: He could save humanity by destroying it. He had once read a story that posed a similar problem: Is it possible to change the present by journeying through time and altering the past? In the story, the quest failed. Egarn went over his plan again and again, trying to analyze it with cold logic, and he convinced himself it could succeed.
If the Honsun Len had never been invented, the destruction of Earth in the twenty-first century could not have happened, and the hideous aftermath that produced this civilization of brain-damaged slaves would not have occurred. If Egarn could retroactively eliminate the len, what would replace it? Something better, surely. He couldn’t imagine anything worse. He had only to return to his own time, seek out this Johnson, and prevent him from inventing his insidious len or at least from giving it to the world. If it took murder to do that, so be it. It was the one way this barbaric future could be prevented: by destroying it before it happened.
He was the only person in the world who had the requisite knowledge to do that—to travel through time to a past where he knew the language, knew how to behave and function effectively, knew exactly how to commit a murder if there had to be one. He alone had sufficient knowledge, and he couldn’t use it. The mere attempt to return to the past would kill him.
He would have to train someone else to do it.
The technical problems were mind-twisting in their complexity. It was one thing to speak of sending someone into the past; it was quite another thing to send that someone to a precise year, month, day, and time of day, and even that would not be sufficient. He also would have to be sent to a precise place. If the emissary landed in New York’s Times Square at noon, his effectiveness would be severely impaired.
Egarn dedicated the remainder of his life to solving these problems. Metals were so scarce and so difficult to work that he had to fashion gears of wood, and for a long time no carver could make them with sufficient precision to produce the fine adjustments he required. He had been close to success, or so he thought, when the Peer of Lant came to him with her panicky story about Lant being invaded. Probably he had given her the weapon as much to keep his work from being interrupted as to save Lant. That error in judgment destroyed more than Lant’s neighbors. It also destroyed his last chance to save Earth—or so he had thought when he heard the Lantiff’s dogs on his trail.
Thanks to Bernal, fate had spun the wheel one more time, but where in this ghastly future could he find another time traveler, a martyr willing to immolate himself to save humanity? Because a trip through time was a one-way trip. Egarn’s own experience proved that. Not only would the emissary be marooned in what would seem like an appallingly complex civilization, but he might be imprisoned or executed for murder.
As Egarn’s delirium lessened, and the scouts came and went and worriedly discussed the intense search that was going on over their heads, he lay quietly on his bed of branches and thought about his great idea.
He not only had to find an emissary, but he had to give him a comprehensive survival course. He had to teach him what to say and do in every circumstance: instruct him about automobiles—driving one, buying one, insuring one, renting one; instruct him about auto repairs, anti-freeze, oil, lubricants; instruct him about traffic lights, pedestrian walkways, drivers’ licences; instruct him about IDs and credit cards; about tall buildings and elevators; about airplanes, trains, busses, and taxis; about fast food, motels, and self-service gas stations; about money, tipping, shopping, and supermarket checkouts; about newspapers, radio and TV; about libraries, city directories, and telephones; about advertising, shopping malls, salesmen, sizes of clothing and shoes. The emissary would have to know the rudiments of investigation—how to track down one Johnson among the hundreds to be found in any major city— and he had to know how to survive while he did it, perhaps for months. Merely understanding money wouldn’t be enough. He had to be able to acquire money when he needed it. He had to know about law and the police. He would even need coaching in breaking and entering.
The task of teaching someone from a primitive society about the complex wonders of the Twentieth Century was so enormous that Egarn hesitated even to make a beginning. He was much too old and much too tired. He had waited too long.
But he was the only man alive who could do it, and so he had to try. He would work while there was any life in him, and do his best, and pray that for once in his life he would be lucky.
“No,” he muttered. “I will need a lot more than that. Luck wouldn’t be enough. It will take a miracle.”
4.
EGARN (3)
The Peerdom of Lant was at war, but its campaigns had been little more than organized pillage. The peer began her invasions with a tiny force. Opposing generals invariably reacted to this insolent gesture by flinging every available lasher into a massive counterattack in the hope of overwhelming the Lantiff and ending the war quickly.
Strokes of lightning tore that counterattack to shreds, and claps of thunder routed the terrified survivors. Formal resistance in a newly invaded peerdom ended before battle was joined. The defending forces had neither the bravery nor the fanaticism to stand and fight against a foe that could invoke the terror of the elements. The peer’s army, which had been waiting in concealment, then moved forward to rape and loot and vandalize at leisure.
The moment it became known that Egarn had escaped, the peer called off two of her wars to turn long ranks of Lantiff toward the western mountains. She had begun her southern invasion only recently, and she was reluctant to interfere with it; but she snatched entire armies from the north and east, leaving token forces to occupy the conquered peerdoms there. By the time Egarn’s fever abated, the opportunity for flight that had existed during the first days of his escape had vanished.
His conscience-stricken gesture of destroying his weapons may have come too late—as Bernal pointed out, Lant’s swollen armies no longer needed them for their conquests—but that fact did nothing to mitigate the peer’s rage. She reacted with mindless fury and threw every available force into her search for the traitor. Now the Lantiff had sealed off all approaches to the border and were diligently combing the forested mountain slopes.
“Never mind,” Bernal told Egarn. “We still have the advantage. If the dead Lantiff have been found, the peer knows you have horses, and she is lying awake nights wondering which way you went. North, south, east, west, you could have covered a lot of ground while the hunt was getting organized. No matter what oaths her border guards may swear, she will fear you slipped through one of the passes before word of your escape reached them. In that case, you are already in Easlon, and her massive hunt is a farce.”
“If one-name foresters found the dead Lantiff, the peer will never find out what happened to them,” Roszt said. “The foresters know from bitter experience that the nearest villages would be pillaged on principle if they left the bodies for the peer’s army to find.”
“Whether they were found or not, the peer won’t rest until she catches me,” Egarn said resignedly. “She will use torture to make me restore the weapons to her, and then she will have me killed in the most painful way she can think of. She will do the same with you three, of course.”
“She will have to catch us first,” Bernal said cheerfully.
“You know how to take care of yourselves. She wouldn’t be able to catch you if you didn’t have me to look after.”
“Nonsense. There is nothing wrong with your legs, and anyway, we have the horses. As soon as you get your strength back, we will run for it.”
Egarn stretched out languidly on his rough bed and remained silent for a time. Then he said, speaking slowly and hesitantly, “I wish I were able to tell you things—and show you things—just in case you escape and I don’t. If I die without telling anyone, my life has been wasted.”
Bernal waited silently.
“It is difficult to explain,” Egarn said. “Can you grind a Honsun Len?”
Bernal chuckled. “I wouldn
’t know how to begin.”
Egarn’s voice took on a note of puzzlement. “I thought all one-name boys learned len grinding. They do in Lant, and med servers take the most talented as prentices. This civilization couldn’t survive without Honsun Len grinders. There is an oddity about the len I have never been able to figure out. Whether it is used or not, in time it loses its effectiveness. Medical lens have to be replaced every sike and sometimes oftener—which is why med servers must become expert len grinders. That is also why the peer believed me when I told her the weapons needed new lens. They didn’t, but eventually they would have. Lant’s med servers are always looking for prentices. Are things different in the Ten Peerdoms?”
“No different,” Bernal assured him. “My schooler taught len grinding to the younger boys, and a med server looked in on the classes and gave special lessons to those who had ability. He didn’t include me. Probably the talents that made me a successful scout also made it impossible for me to sit for long hours grinding meaningless ripples in glass.”
Egarn said regretfully, “Then you have never ground even one Honsun Len.”
“According to my schooler, the mutilated objects I produced didn’t bear the faintest resemblance to one. Those ripples required a precision that seemed inhuman to me. Only a few boys had both the patience and the ability, and they were sent to a special school. When we next saw them, they were wearing their prentice smocks and bragging about their futures as high servers of the peer. I wonder what they think of those futures now.”
“Don’t Easlon crafters have confidence in the future?”
The Chronocide Mission Page 4