Ghosts of Time

by Steve White

  “Well … er… .”

  “What deliberately inconspicuous ‘special circumstances’ or ‘emergency contingency’ clause is it this time, Irving?” Jason’s voice grew even milder. “I know from experience that you can quote me Part, Article, Paragraph and Subparagraph.”

  “Director Rutherford thought that, in this instance, perhaps you would want to voluntarily cut your leave short.”

  “Did he indeed?”

  “Yes. You see, the matter at hand concerns your next-to-last mission.”

  “What?” Jason blinked with surprise. “You mean the one to April, 1865?” Jason had only just brought a Special Ops team back from the final cataclysm of the Confederate States of America, where he had foiled a Transhumanist plot while Richmond burned, and departed for Hesperia on leave when Nesbit had been sent to summon him back to Earth for the seventeenth-century Caribbean expedition.

  “The same. I’m not privy to the details—‘need to know’ and all that sort of thing—but it seems that evidence had come to light suggesting that at some point in our own near future the Transhumanists will launch an expedition back to a point in time earlier in 1865 than their previous expedition, in an effort to undo your work.”

  Jason stared. “Irving, do you realize what this means? This was one of their nanotech time bombs, deigned to disable technologically advanced equipment! On The Day it would have sent much of North America back to the nineteenth century—only worse, because people in the nineteenth century knew how to cope with such conditions.”

  “This is precisely why the Authority views the matter with such seriousness. You must be on hand in that time period, in the latter phases of the American Civil War, to counter this new attempt to put their nefarious plan into effect.”

  “Why me in particular?”

  “It is obviously a job for the Special Operations Section. And Director Rutherford feels that you, as leader of the previous expedition, will be in the best position to deal with this threat. After all, you have already received orientation in the period, including language and—”

  “All well and good. But has it occurred to anyone that—depending on the exact dates to which I’m temporally displaced—this might result in me being present in the same area and timeframe as myself? That’s only happened once in the history of the Authority, and you of all people ought to remember what a flap that caused.”

  “I certainly do.” Nesbit suddenly took on a look of crafty calculation. “Councilor Kung will no doubt be absolutely livid.”

  Jason’s face lit up. “Yes, he will, won’t he?”

  “In fact,” Nesbit continued with careful expressionlessness, “he might even have a stroke.”

  “That could be a danger, couldn’t it?” Jason brightened still further. “Especially considering how overweight he is.”

  “I would be deeply concerned for his health,” said Nesbit solemnly.

  “As should we all,” Jason intoned with equal solemnity.

  “He would be a great loss.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Jason was smiling broadly now. He walked over to a side table which held a cut-glass decanter filled with Hesperian rum from the easternmost islands of the Verdant Sea, where sugarcane had successfully taken root. It wasn’t competitive with the mellow products of Earth’s present-day West Indies, but it was a considerably smoother article than the ferocious kill-devil the two of them had somehow survived drinking in their days among the buccaneers of the Spanish Main. He opened the decanter and poured two glasses.

  “I believe the sun is over the yardarm, Irving. Now, tell me more about this mission.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Jason and Nesbit landed at Earth’s Pontic Spaceport on the steppes north of the Black Sea, Rutherford happened to be at his Athens office rather than the Authority’s displacer facility and operations center in Australia’s Great Sandy Desert.

  So they separated, and as Nesbit departed for the far side of the world by suborbital transport, Jason took a short aircar hop to the southwest. Presently he passed over the Aegean, into haunted regions where the memory of human experience reached back beyond history into myth. Jason, who had witnessed the origins of both, gazed downward and brooded over the things he had seen and done.

  His mood intensified as Athens came into view. The last time he had seen it, it had been an early fifth century B.C. huddle of perhaps seven and a half thousand people clustered around the Acropolis—an unprepossessing womb within which the future had gestated. That future would have been aborted had the Athenians not triumphed at the Battle of Marathon. Jason himself had fought in that battle. How much difference his individual contribution had made was impossible to guess. But there was no such uncertainty about what he had done in 1628 B.C., arranging for the older generation of Teloi to be trapped forever in their artificial “pocket dimension” along with most of the advanced technology that had enabled them to masquerade as gods.

  Jason wasn’t the only one who had ever brooded over the philosophical implications. Indeed, such questions were never far from the Authority’s thoughts, although no one had ever come up with satisfactory answers. It stood to reason that time travelers must surely change the past whenever they took any actions, however small. But it was an established fact that observed, recorded history could not be changed. The activities of time travelers always seemed to have outcomes that resulted in the world from which the time travelers had come. Something always prevented any act that might do otherwise. No one could cause the Persians to win at Marathon, or kill one of his own ancestors. There were no paradoxes.

  This was the famous “Observer Effect” that afforded the Authority a degree of comfort. Evidently, anything a time traveler caused to happen in the past had always happened. Most people, not wishing to think about that which didn’t bear thinking about, comforted themselves with the catch-phrase “reality protects itself.” But some continued to be troubled by the uncomfortable realization that there had to be a gaping hole in the logic. And the matter had become still more troubling—urgently so—with the discovery that the Transhumanists were also at work in the past.

  Jason shook his head to clear it of concerns that could become mind-eating obsessions if dwelt on. He concentrated on transmitting his destination to Athens traffic control as he entered its purview. He brought the aircar into the orderly streams of aerial traffic that flowed around the Acropolis, serene within the faint shimmer of its protective temporal stasis bubble. He looked down and smiled, for he knew the secrets a collapsed tunnel under that hill held, and he remembered the unnatural being whose grave it was—a gene-engineered replica of the Greek god Pan, created by the Transhumanists and their Teloi allies for their own twisted purposes. Then he brought his mind back to the present and lowered the aircar onto the landing stage atop a building just beyond the Philopappos Hill. Not a very tall one—Athenian building regulations saw to that—and Rutherford’s office was on its top floor. Jason had called ahead, and there were no delays as he was ushered in.

  As always, the first thing Jason noticed when entering the office was the wide virtual window which offered a view of the Acropolis from a considerably higher level than that which the office in fact occupied. Only then did he turn to the left of the door, where Rutherford sat behind his desk against a backdrop of display cases filled with objects snatched from the past. He already had two visitors, one of whom Jason instantly recognized.

  “Alexandre!” Jason exclaimed, extending his hand to the short, dark, wiry, Corsican who had saved his life on more than one occasion.

  “I sent for Superintendent Mondrago,” Rutherford explained, giving his silvery Vandyke his patented self-congratulatory preening, “because I anticipated you would want him assigned to you, especially inasmuch as he was with you on your last jaunt into the American Civil War.”

  “You think of everything,” said Jason sourly. “Anyway, Alexandre, congratulations on your overdue promotion.”

  “Thanks, Co
mmander,” said the ex-mercenary with a grin that made his face engagingly ugly instead of merely ugly. “But I still haven’t quite gotten used to the brain implant … or to the title. ‘Superintendent’ doesn’t seem to be a very good fit for what I do—even worse than when I was an ‘Inspector’.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jason commiserated with a grin of his own. The Temporal Service had always taken a certain pride in its ability to function without formalized rank titles. That had changed with the advent of the Special Operations Section, which had needed a structured hierarchy for the same reasons as every other military or paramilitary organization. But the Authority had continued to shrink from admitting that the Section was, in fact, anything so horrid. So, to avoid any tincture of militaristic flavor, it had borrowed the system used by the Colonial Rangers, which in turn was a streamlined descendant of that of the London Metropolitan Police, which Sir Robert Peel had devised five and a half centuries earlier for exactly the same purpose. When the Section grew big enough to require another level of management at the top, higher than “Commander,” they would have to make Jason a “Commissioner.”

  “And this,” said Rutherford, indicating his other visitor, “is Dr. Carlos Dabney, a recognized authority on the history of the American Civil War.”

  “More properly, the War Between the States. Or the War of the Northern Aggression, as certain of my ancestors on the paternal side would have called it,” said Dabney with a smile, standing up and shaking hands with Jason. He seemed fairly young to be a “recognized authority” on anything, but that was typical of the academics who passed the Authority’s physical requirements to endure the hardships of Earth’s earlier eras. He spoke Standard International English with a North American accent. His appearance was predominantly Caucasoid and entirely nondescript, but Jason felt there was something oddly familiar about him.

  “Have we met before, Doctor?”

  “Once, very briefly. I was a member of the expedition led by your Inspector Da Cunha, at the time you and your Special Operations team appeared at the fall of Richmond, North America.”

  “This is precisely why he is here, Jason,” Rutherford interjected. “It works out very conveniently. He has already met the Authority’s requirements, including acquisition of the local idiom, which will expedite matters.”

  “What? You mean he’s going with us?”

  “Precisely. I’m aware that it is highly unusual—unprecedented, in fact—for a non-Service member to go on more than one extratemporal expedition. But you are going to need an expert on the period. And no one could be better qualified. After all, he has already had some exposure by his participation in Da Cunha’s expedition.”

  Jason was silent, for a cloud passed over his mind as it always did at the mention of Pauline Da Cunha. He turned to Rutherford, and their eyes met. The two of them had known each other long enough for words to sometimes be unnecessary. Jason’s eyes asked, Does he know? Rutherford’s eyes replied, No.

  Jason turned back to the visibly puzzled Dabney, and his expression cleared. “Excuse me, Doctor. I know it’s annoying to have people discuss you in the third person in your presence. But I need to know if you are aware of the dangers you may be getting into.”

  “I read and signed the Articles of Agreement before my previous temporal displacement, and have done so again now,” said Dabney, sounding slightly miffed. “So I’m aware of the clauses releasing the Authority from liability for my safety.”

  “You don’t understand. Those boilerplate provisions of the Articles refer to random danger and primitive conditions in backward, violent epochs. They were written with academic research expeditions in mind, like the one you originally signed on for. The Special Operations Section operates quite differently. We will be going back in time with a very specific objective: to abort a conspiracy of the Transhumanist underground. This may bring us into direct conflict with some utterly ruthless and brutal people—if, indeed, the word ‘people’ is applicable, as to which I admit a degree of skepticism. May I ask if you have ever had any form of military training or experience?”

  “No,” Dabney admitted, somewhat crestfallen. “But at the same time, I have always had a hobby of collecting antique firearms from the Civil War period—and firing modern made-to-specification replicas of them. In fact, I hold marksmanship trophies in that specialized field. I may not be quite as useless as you suppose, Commander Thanou.”

  “Well and good. But the Transhumanists are far less hesitant than we are about taking modern weapons and equipment into the past. In order to combat them, the Special Operations Section has been granted a limited exemption from the traditional prohibitions, allowing us certain very carefully disguised items.” Out of the corner of his eye, Jason saw Rutherford wince at the reminder of something to which he had never fully adjusted. “What I’m saying is that, while I don’t doubt that you’ll be able to handle in-period weapons, you may be facing far more dangerous stuff than that, wielded by persons who are utterly indifferent to human life.”

  “Director Rutherford has explained all this to me, Commander. I assure you that I’m willing to accept the risks. Seeing the era first-hand was the fulfillment of a lifetime’s dream. In exchange for a second opportunity, I’ll face Transhumanists or anything else!”

  Jason was momentarily silent. He had encountered this kind of selfless academic fanaticism before, and he didn’t underrate it as a motivator. “I’m sure you mean what you say. But,” he continued, turning to Rutherford, “Special Ops missions normally last only a few days or sometimes hours. They don’t involve a lengthy stay in the past, so we don’t have to endanger an historian.” And burden ourselves with the need to keep him alive, he did not add.

  “Actually, Jason,” said Rutherford, looking slightly apologetic, “this isn’t going to be one of your brief, tightly focused Special Operations raids. It’s going to have to be more along the lines of your last expedition, the one to the seventeenth-century Caribbean.”

  Jason went expressionless. “A fixed-duration expedition, in other words, using the standard TRDs.”

  Rutherford’s nod was still more apologetic.

  The Fujiwara-Weintraub Temporal Displacer required a gargantuan installation, and a power surge that only an antimatter reactor could supply, to cancel the “temporal energy potential” that kept a living or nonliving object anchored in time, thereby casting it controllably adrift three hundred years or more in the past. (Not the future; that wasn’t even a theoretical possibility.) Time travel would have been self-evidently impractical except as a one-way trip if the same requirements had applied to returning the time traveler to his proper time at the location (relative to the local gravity field) from which he had been displaced. Fortunately, temporal displacement was such a fundamentally and outrageously unnatural state that reversing it required negligible energy, and a pea-sized “temporal retrieval device” or TRD that could be subdermally implanted. Until recently, all TRDs had been set to activate at a pre-set time, so extratemporal expeditions were committed to the past for a fixed time and reappeared on the Authority’s displacer stage at a predictable moment, thus assuring that the stage would be clear of any other objects with which the returning time travelers might find themselves occupying the same volume. But the new Special Operations Section required more operational flexibility than that. So, in yet another outrage to the governing council’s conservative instincts, a special “controllable” TRD had been devised which the mission leader could activate at will through direct neural interfacing when the mission was complete. Such missions were, of necessity, of short duration, for the displacer stage had to be kept clear at all times until the expedition’s return. There could be no dawdling in the past.

  It was the way Jason preferred to operate. But then he had been forced to revert to the traditional way of doing things when a wrecked spacecraft in Haiti dating from the 1660s had presented a mystery which offered no narrowly delineated timeframe as a Special Ops target. An
d now… .

  “I thought, Kyle, that we had an understanding. I was supposed to be through with this sort of thing when I agreed to head Special Ops for you.” It was too much like the nursemaiding of academic expeditions on which Jason had long since burned out.

  “I know, Jason,” said Rutherford soothingly. “And I wouldn’t ask this of you if there was any alternative. But once again you’re going to have to find your target before you can even attempt to deal with it.”

  “All right. Why don’t you tell me the details?”

  “As you recall, your mission to 1865 Richmond was occasioned by an accidental discovery by Inspector Da Cunha.”

  “Yes. She informed us by message drop.” It was a standard technique. Some out-of-the-way location off the superhighway of history would be specified in advance, and a message on some durable medium would be left there, to wait for centuries before being found in the twenty-fourth century, when the site was periodically inspected. It was one more example of the way the past could be changed but not really changed, and it was the sole means time travelers had of communicating with the Authority.

  “You’ll also recall that, after planting that message drop and before your arrival, she had discovered the true nature of the threat—a nanotechnological time bomb—by means of the detection features of her recently installed brain implant.”

  “Yes,” nodded Jason, wincing at the recollection of Da Cunha’s excitement at receiving her implant. After the Transhuman Dispensation had been extirpated—or, rather, been thought to have been extirpated—a little over a century before, the Human Integrity Act had been passed, forbidding all the nanotechnological and biotechnological and cybernetic techniques that distorted the human genome or blurred the distinction between life and nonlife, man and machine, brain and computer. But the Temporal Service, like certain law enforcement agencies, possessed limited exemptions. One was the tiny but extremely versatile computer implant in the head of any Service officer qualified as a mission leader. Mondrago had gotten one along with his promotion. Pauline Da Cunha had been cleared for it on an accelerated basis, while still only an Inspector. It had been a proud moment for her. “It was sheer good luck that she detected the nanobots.”