The Chronocide Mission

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  Although the len sometimes accidently picked up objects, it was undependable in capturing items Egarn wanted for Roszt and Kaynor’s training, and he had failed utterly in his attempts to scoop out the contents of an open cash register drawer. It had been difficult enough merely to find an open drawer to practice on because he didn’t dare make the attempt when a cashier was nearby and risk abducting another human into the future. He was wondering whether he could focus on a bedroom and suck up someone’s wallet or purse. That might also provide examples of important documents for Roszt and Kaynor to familiarize themselves with—driver’s license, checkbook, credit cards, various ID cards. They had to know about all those things even though their own transactions would be on a strictly cash basis.

  He hadn’t yet faced the serious problem of how they were to finance their mission. They would need a fortune by the standards Egarn remembered—thousands of dollars. It would be too cruel a fate to have them fail for the want of money after long sikes of work and preparation. He would stress the importance of their living frugally—extravagance would attract attention to them, and attention was one thing they absolutely had to avoid—but they must be able to buy anything they really needed. That included an automobile—or maybe a series of automobiles—and even if they shopped for bargains in used cars, they had to have access to a large amount of money and know how to handle it and safeguard it.

  Egarn could think of only one way for them to quickly acquire the amount of money they required. They would have to rob a bank.

  That would be no problem. He could teach them how to do it, easily. A miniature version of his weapon would drill a lock from any door or safe and melt a burglar alarm before it could go off. He was much more worried about their learning to drive a car. They couldn’t track down the mysterious Johnson in a large American city without their own means of transportation, but how was he to teach them with only a rough mockup for them to practice on and a knowledge of cars that came from the flickering images the Honsun Len showed them? His one attempt to describe the workings of a gasoline engine had been a fiasco. It would be far easier if he could snatch an automobile through time, but grinding lens large enough for that would pose horrendous technical problems.

  He would have to figure out something.

  Finally he dozed off.

  By the time he awakened, a second message had been received. Roszt and Kaynor were safe; Arne had a badly cut back but otherwise was unharmed. The Prince of Midlow had been chasing a rumor that had nothing to do with them; even so, she had come dangerously close to capturing Roszt and Kaynor.

  The news that she had a spy in Midd shocked and frightened them. The Secret was safe, but new precautions had to be taken at once. Roszt and Kaynor would return to the ruins that night, and other arrangements would be made about their education.

  Every resident of Midd had to be scrutinized in an attempt to identify the prince’s spy.

  Egarn listened quietly. “Arne will take care of everything,” he said confidently.

  Arne always did. Inskor had been right in letting Egarn settle in Midlow so Arne could look after him. Without Arne, he couldn’t have found half of the scarce materials he needed. Without Arne, he couldn’t have contrived a safe place to work, and where in this brutal society could he have found reliable people to help him? He wouldn’t have known how to begin.

  Arne had taken care of everything, and he would solve these new problems.

  Egarn said to Inskel, “We absolutely must find some money for Roszt and Kaynor. This is what I would like to try.”

  While he talked, he continued to think about Arne. The young first server’s presence here seemed like divine intervention. Nothing had gone right for Egarn until he met Arne; since then, every difficulty had been overcome as though by magic. No matter what the problem was, Arne could take care of it—and did. If humanity was to be saved, this clearly was the time and place to do it.

  9. ARNE (1)

  There were many who confidently relied on Arne to take care of everything—not only in Midlow but throughout the Ten Peerdoms. One-namers everywhere were acquainted with him; peeragers, even those who had never seen him, were aware of his importance.

  Only a few people—such as Inskor or Wiltzon—knew him well and had an inkling of how he had become what he was.

  He had been a celebrity before he was born. The peer herself came to his naming and chose his name, which she formed by combining the names of Arjov, his father, and Lonne, his mother. Lonne was only seventeen—young for a one-name mother in Midlow. Arjov was beyond the usual age for fatherhood. He had lost his family in a fire when he was still a young man, and he had never been wived again nor wanted to be; but the peer said to him, “Arjov, I won’t command you, but I implore it. My peerdom has need of a son of yours.”

  Arjov protested he had no idea how to court a wife at his age, so the peer did it for him, choosing Lonne, already a master weaver despite her youth, a pretty, intelligent girl who was liked by everyone. The son of Arjov, the peer’s first server, was the most favored one-name child in the Ten Peerdoms, just as his father was the most favored and highest ranking one-name adult. The position of first server had been invented for Arjov. The office was unknown elsewhere because no other peerdom had a one-namer capable of filling it.

  Other children envied Arne—and Arne envied them their freedom to be children. One of the earliest lessons his father taught him concerned the high price that must be paid for favoritism and rank. These might be given freely, sometimes even ceremoniously, but after that they had to be earned, over and over.

  From infancy, Arne was trained and educated to succeed his father. While other children were still at play, he was sternly put to his lessons by Wiltzon the schooler. Later he worked among the prentices of all of the crafters in turn.

  He was only four years old when he learned the transcendent importance of his name—his one-name. West Road was being extended to the peerdom border to link up with a road the Peer of Weslon was building. In Weslon this road was called East Road, a contradiction the four-year-old boy found delightful. His father went to inspect the work force and took Arne along. It was the boy’s first close look at no-namers and their lashers.

  To a four-year-old boy, the lashers looked enormous. When his father questioned crew chiefs about the work or gave them instructions, his slender frame looked so fragile beside their hefty bodies that Arne feared for his safety. But the lashers treated Arjov with immense respect, answered his questions, listened to what he said, and then, if it concerned something that needed doing, took their no-namers and did it. The no-namers plodded about their work, never tiring, never hurrying, and carved a road through the forest with brute strength and the few tools they knew how to use.

  At frequent intervals, often for no apparent reason, the no-namers were lashed. A flick of the wrist, and the multi-stranded tips of the lashers’ strange whips raked a no-namer’s back, leaving a tangled network of fine lines that oozed blood. All of their backs had the viciousness of a brutal age delineated on them in scar tissue. They paid so little attention to this cruelty that Arne wondered whether they actually felt the whip at all. They certainly were incapable of thought.

  Arne, who delighted in his own ability to think, was both perplexed and bewildered by this sudden encounter with non-thinking. Set to clearing tree sprouts, a no-namer would impassively jerk up one after the other until he chanced to grip a young tree too large to be pulled up by hand. He would haul on it futilely until a lasher came and, with strokes of a whip, redirected his attention to the sprouts. Then he would work until another young tree stood in his way, to be hauled at brainlessly. One no-namer attempted to pull up a tree with a trunk twelve centimeters in diameter.

  The alert four-year-old wanted to know why.

  “They have no minds,” Arjov said. “They can’t think for themselves, so someone must impress thoughts on them with whips.”

  Arne stared up at his father with immense puzzleme
nt. “Why do they have no minds?” he asked.

  His father grinned down at him and ruffled his hair. “Aha. Do they have no minds because they are slaves, or are they slaves because they have no minds? Once long ago people worried about questions like that. Wiltzon can tell you about it. Now we struggle to keep the little knowledge we have left, and we can’t afford the time to play games with words.”

  Arne’s face puckered with concern over these humans who had no minds. He wanted to know who and what and why they were and where they came from.

  “They are the nameless ones.” Arjov said. “The work-humans. To the peeragers, they are just another species of animal—to be bred and trained and made use of in the most effective way possible. I suspect their life fire is the same as ours, but for some reason it doesn’t burn purely. Lashers are the numbered ones. They also are nameless, but every lasher has his own number, and they are different in other ways. They have minds of a sort, but I have always considered them far more bestial than the no-namers. Lashers practice cruelty as a workcraft. They exult in it. No animal does such a thing, and no man’s humanity can long survive that. We one-namers never speak to a lasher unless we have to.”

  After that first journey, Arne frequently accompanied his father on travels about the peerdom. Wherever they went, he saw no-namers laboriously plodding through the sike with lashers expertly inscribing each day’s history on their bare backs. In Plao, the season of planting, they worked the peerdom’s farms, pulling plow and cultivation frames. In Gero, the warm season of growth, the cultivation continued, but they also worked on roads and cleared new land for farming. In Haro, the season of harvesting, they helped to gather crops. During Reso, the cold season when the land rested, the no-namers did not. Whatever rough work was needed, whenever it was needed, they did it. They dug drainage ditches, built roads, and cleared fields. They hauled rock and leveled ground. They cut ice and hauled it to deep storage where it would be available for peeragers’ hot weather refreshment. Throughout the sike they did everything that brute strength and a dead mind could handle, always with lashers standing by and flicking their whips.

  The sight of them affected Arne strangely. In the Peerdom of Midlow, no-namers and lashers came from the same racial stock as the one-namers. They possessed taller, more robust bodies—the result of generations of selective breeding over the same period of time that one-namers were developing their minds and dexterity—but their appearances were similar. A no-namer seemed to feel nothing at all when a lash flecked his back, but Arne did. Arne felt the pain intensely.

  The no-namers, men and women, were slaves; the lashers were their masters, and lashers also furnished peeragers with their guards and the peerdom with its army if it had one. Both lashers and no-namers were fathered on no-name women by lashers. All of the female no-namers were breeding stock. They were bred at the earliest possible age and kept pregnant throughout their short adult lives. They tended to die young, usually in childbirth. Med servers selected the larger, healthier, stronger male children to be brought up as lashers; the other males began their lives of slavery as soon as they were able to do useful work.

  Arne experienced a lashing himself at a young age, and that intensified his concern for the no-namers. It happened the same year his father began to take him traveling. They went together to visit the peer. Arne had seen her before as a lofty, inaccessible figure surrounded by one-name servers and other peeragers. On this day his father’s visit was informal, and the peer received them in her private lodge with only her own family present.

  It was a revelation to Arne. The peer, her consort, and her children looked no different from his father and himself except for fancy clothing that even he could see was unsuitable for any kind of work—but of course he had never seen a peerager working. He wondered if their clothing could be the reason. The only other differences he could discover were that peeragers lived in ornate dwellings surrounded by gardens and had servers standing by anxiously to wait on them. Arne’s mind gave another turn to the riddle his father had posed concerning no-namers: Were peeragers elevated above ordinary humans like his father and himself because they were somehow special, or were they special only because they were peeragers?

  It was the peer’s second daughter who introduced Arne to the lash. She was far, far prettier than her older sister, the prince. He thought her a marvelous creature, so soft-looking in her long, frothy dress, so unlike the little one-name girls he knew who wore plain, practical clothing and had hands already roughened by work. She floated over the ground in a way that reminded him of the tales elderly persons told about angels that flew through the air. He wondered whether this second daughter of the peer was an angel.

  While he sat waiting for his father, she invited him to play with her. He trailed after her in mute ecstasy, and she led him across the palace grounds to a small, secluded glade. His euphoria vanished when she produced a whip. “You are a no-namer,” she announced. “I am going to whip you.”

  “I am not!” Arne protested indignantly.

  “You are because I said so, and I am a peerling. If you don’t let me, my mother will send a lasher to do it.”

  She began to lash him. Fortunately it was not a real whip but only one she had fashioned for herself with pieces of string. Even so, its strokes stung severely when his bare arms and face were touched, and Arne didn’t know what to do about it. He could only stand, smouldering with anger, and receive the blows, for a one-namer could not lift a hand against a peerager.

  There was no telling how it might have ended had not the peer’s eldest daughter chanced to see what was happening. She ran for her mother, and the peer herself administered a different kind of lashing to her second daughter—with the flat of her bare hand. Arne was permitted to watch, and the girl glared venomously at him all the time the punishment was being inflicted.

  “Too bad,” Arne’s father said afterward. “I am afraid the peer has made you a lifelong enemy. Never mind, it wasn’t your fault. There was nothing else you could have done. That second daughter has a vicious temperament, and she seems fated to be everyone’s enemy. Probably it doesn’t matter. Second daughters of peers aren’t very important.”

  But a few years later the eldest daughter, an intelligent girl very like her mother, died of an illness, and the second daughter became Prince of Midlow and its future peer. The fact that she hated all one-namers and had spent her childhood pretending they were no-namers began to matter a great deal.

  Arne never again mistook her identity. She definitely was not an angel; she much more closely resembled another strange being from the tales of the elderly, a devil.

  Arne continued to work with the prentices of one crafter after another. When he had a solid grounding in every craft practiced in Midlow, he went through the entire cycle again. He was not expected to perform any of the crafts well, though his father urged him to become as proficient as possible. His object was to learn as much as he could about their problems and techniques. Evenings he continued his studies with Wiltzon. He also traveled with his father whenever Arjov thought the experience would be useful to him.

  He puzzled over his father’s “work.” Arjov never seemed to do anything, but he always knew what had to be done, and how to do it, and he was able to tell others. Arne gradually came to realize his father was as unique as the peer, and that it was Arjov’s own unusual abilities that made the position of first server possible.

  Suddenly his father grew old. Overniot, or so it seemed to Arne, Arjov’s hair turned white and he was unable to move about easily. More and more frequently, Arne was sent to perform his father’s work. He inspected buildings or bridges or roads requiring repairs and decided what must be done, and how to do it, and what tools or supplies were needed. Then he requisitioned crews of no-namers, or he appointed eligible one-namers to tasks that no-namers could not perform, carefully entering their names and work credits in his father’s ledger. Every adult one-namer owed a sikely debt in work credits to the pe
er.

  One-namers were permitted to drive a wagon when their work required it, but they were forbidden to ride a horse or travel in a carriage without a special pass signed by every peerager on the peer’s council. The peer pooh-poohed that and sent his father a two-wheeled carriage and a team of horses. For a time Arjov traveled freely wherever the roads could take him, and Arne went with him; but soon the old man became too weak to ride in the carriage. Arne was the peer’s first server in all but the title before he was fifteen, with his father—now an invalid—advising him when he was able.

  Arne had known about the hiding places from infancy because there was one in his own home. From time to time strangers visited Midd Village, arriving and leaving by darkness and sometimes resting there for a few daez. Several of the dwellings on High Street, the street at the top of the village, had secret rooms designed to accommodate such visitors. The dwellings were connected by underground passages, and concealed doors in their garden walls provided escape routes into the thick forest that grew just above the village.

  Arne didn’t learn about the League of One-Namers until he began to act as his father’s assistant and had to meet with these mysterious visitors himself. Most of them were League messengers, and he knew without being told that the momentous secret they represented must be guarded with his life and never mentioned.

  Visitors of a different sort passed through the village once or twice a sike. Sometimes there were families among them with young children. When they left, the villagers gave what they could from their surpluses to replenish the travelers’ supplies. Sometimes one or two families from Arne’s village—inconspicuous families that were unlikely to be missed—left with them. They were never mentioned again.