Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  “I haven’t thanked you for what you did,” he said awk­wardly. “I’ll never be able to thank you.”

  “You bugbrain!” She cast arms around him. “Why do you think I hauled you out o’ there?”

  “But-but-Leonce, I’ve seen my wife die--”

  “Sure,” she sobbed. “How I . . . I’d like to go back … an’ meet that girl. If she made you happy--Can’t be, I know. Well, I’ll wait, Jack. As long as needful, I’ll wait.”

  They weren’t equipped to stay more than a short while in ancient America. They could have gone uptime, bought gear, ferried it back. But after what they had suffered, no idle idyll was possible for them.

  More important was the state of Havig’s being. The wound in him healed slowly, but it healed, and left a hard scar: the re­solve to make war upon the Eyrie.

  He didn’t think it was merely a desire for vengeance upon Xenia’s murderers. Leonce assumed this, and leagued herself with him because a Glacier woman stood by her man. He ad­mitted that to a degree she was correct. (Is the impulse always evil? It can take the form of exacting justice.) Mainly, he be­lieved that he believed, a brigand gang must be done away with. The ghastlinesses it had already made, and would make, were unchangeable; but could not the sum of that hurt be stopped from mounting, could not the remoter future be spared?

  “A thing to puzzle over,” he told Leonce, “is that no time travelers seem to be born in the Maurai era or afterward. They might stay incognito, sure, same as the majority of them prob­ably do in earlier history--too frightened or too crafty to reveal their uniqueness. Nevertheless ... every single one? Hardly sounds plausible, does it?”

  “Did you investigate?” she asked.

  They were in a mid-twentieth-century hotel. Kansas City banged and winked around them, early at night. He was avoid­ing his former resorts until he could be sure that Wallis’s men would not discover these. The lamplight glowed soft over Le­once where she sat, knees drawn close to chin, in bed. She wore a translucent peignoir. Otherwise she gave him no sign that she was anything more in her heart than his sisterlike companion. A huntress learns patience, a Skula learns to read souls.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve told you about Carelo Keajimu. He has connections across the globe. If he can’t turn up a traveler, no­body can. And he drew blank.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “I don’t know, except--Leonce, we’ve got to take the risk. We’ve got to make an expedition uptime of the Maurai.”

  Again practical problems consumed lifespan.

  Think. One epoch does not suddenly and entirely replace another. Every trend is blurred by numberless counter-currents. Thus, Martin Luther was not the first Protestant in the true sense--doctrinal as well as political--of that word. He was sim­ply the first who made it stick. And his success was built on the failures of centuries, Hussites, Lollards, Albigensians, on and on to the heresies of Christendom’s dawn; and those had origins more ancient yet. Likewise, the thermonuclear reactor and associated machines were introduced, and spread widely, while mysticism out of Asia was denying, in millions of minds, that science could answer the questions that mattered.

  If you want to study an epoch, in what year do you begin? You can move through time, but once at your goal, what have you besides your feet for crossing space? Where do you shelter? How do you eat?

  It took a number of quick trips futureward to find the start of a plan.

  Details are unimportant. On the west coast of thirty-first­-century North America, a hybrid Ingliss-Maurai-Spanyol had not evolved too far for Havig to grope his way along in it. He took back a grammar, a dictionary, and assorted reading ma­terial. By individual concentration and mutual practice, he and Leonce acquired some fluency.

  Enough atomic-powered robot-crewed commerce brought enough visitors from overseas that two more obvious foreigners would attract no undue attention. This was the more true be­cause Sancisco was a favorite goal of pilgrimages; there the guru Duago Samito had had his revelation. Nobody believed in miracles. People did believe that, if you stood on the man-sculptured hills and looked down into the chalice which was the Bay, and let yourself become one with heaven and earth and water, you could hope for insight.

  Pilgrims needed no credit account in the financial world-machine. The age was, in its austere fashion, prosperous. A wayside householder could easily spare the food and sleeping room that would earn virtue for him and travelers’ tales for his children.

  “If you seek the Star Masters--” said the dark, gentle man who housed them one night. “Yes, they keep an outpost nigh. But surely some are in your land.”

  “We are curious to see if the Star Masters here are like those we know at home,” Havig replied. “I have heard they number many kinds.”

  “Correct. Correct.”

  “It does not add undue kilometers to our journey.”

  “You need not walk there. A call will do.” Havig’s host in­dicated the holographic communicator which stood in a corner of a room whose proportions were as alien--and as satisfying--to his guests as a Japanese temple would have been to a medieval European or a Gothic church to a Japanese.

  “Though I doubt their station is manned at present,” he con­tinued. “They do not come often, you know.”

  “At least we can touch it,” Havig said.

  The dark man nodded. “Aye. A full-sense savoring ... aye, you do well. Go in God, then, and be God, happily.”

  In the morning, after an hour’s chanting and meditation, the family returned to their daily round. Father hand-cultivated his vegetable garden; the reason for that seemed more likely depth-psychological than economic. Mother continued her work upon a paramathematical theorem too esoteric for Havig to grasp. Children immersed themselves in an electronic educa­tional network which might be planetwide and might involve a kind of artificial telepathy. Yet the house was small, unpreten­tious except for the usual scrimshaw and Oriental sweep of roof, nearly alone in a great tawny hillscape.

  Trudging down a dirt road, where dust whoofed around her boots while a many-armed automaton whispered through the sky overhead, Leonce sighed: “You’re right. I do not un­derstand these people.”

  “That could take a lifetime,” Havig agreed. “Something new has entered history. It needn’t be bad, but it’s surely new.”

  After a space he added: “Has happened before. Could your paleolithic hunter really understand your neolithic farmer? How much alike were a man who lived under the divine right of kings and a man who lived under the welfare state? I don’t always fol­low your mind, Leonce.”

  “Nor I yours.” She caught his hand. “Let’s keep tryin’.”

  “It seems--” Havig said, “I repeat, it seems--these Star Mas­ters occupy the ultra-mechanized, energy-flashing bases and the enormous flying craft and everything else we’ve glimpsed which contrasts so sharply with the rest of Earth. They come irregularly. Otherwise their outposts lie empty; does sound like time travelers, hey?”

  “But they’re kind o’, well, good. Aren’t they?”

  “Therefore they can’t be Eyrie? Why not? In origin, anyhow. The grandson of a conquering pirate may be an enlightened king.” Havig marshaled his thoughts. “True, the Star Masters act differently from what one would expect. As near as I can make out--remember, I don’t follow this modern language any more closely than you do, and besides, there are a million taken-for-granted concepts behind it--as near as I can make out, they come to trade: ideas and knowledge more than ma­terial goods. Their influence on Earth is subtle but pervasive. My trips beyond this year suggest their influence will grow, till a new civilization--or post-civilization--has arisen which I can­not fathom.”

  “Don’t the locals describe ‘em as bein’ sometimes human an’ sometimes not?”

  “I have that impression too. Maybe we’ve garbled a figure of speech.”

  “You’ll make it out,” she said.

  He glanced at her. The glance lingered. Sunlight lay on
her hair and the tiny drops of sweat across her face. He caught the friendly odor of her flesh. The pilgrim’s robe molded itself to long limbs. Timeless above a cornfield, a red-winged blackbird whistled.

  “We’ll see if we can,” he said.

  She smiled.

  Clustered spires and subtly curved domes were deserted when they arrived. An invisible barrier held them off. They moved uptime. When they glimpsed a ship among the shadows, they halted.

  At that point, the vessel had made groundfall. The crew were coming down an immaterial ramp. Havig saw men and women in close-fitting garments which sparkled as if with constella­tions. And he saw shapes which Earth could never have brought forth, not in the age of the dinosaurs nor in the last age when a swollen red sun would burn her barren.

  A shellbacked thing which bore claws and nothing identifia­ble as a head conversed with a man in notes of music. The man was laughing.

  Leonce screamed. Havig barely grabbed her before she was gone, fleeing downtime.

  “But don’t you see?” he told her, over and over. “Don’t you realize the marvel of it?”

  And at last he got her to seek night. They stood on a high ridge. Uncountable stars gleamed from horizon to zenith to horizon. Often a meteor flashed. The air was cold, their breath smoked wan, she huddled in his embrace. Quietness enclosed them: “the eternal silence of yonder infinite spaces.”

  “Look up,” he said. “Each of those lights is a sun. Did you think ours is the single living planet in the universe?”

  She shuddered. “What we saw--”

  “What we saw was different. Magnificently different.” He searched for words. His whole youth had borne a vision which hers had known only as a legend. The fact that it was not for­ever lost sang in his blood. “Where else can newness, adven­ture, rebirth of spirit, where else can they come from except difference? The age beyond the Maurai is not turned inward on itself. No, it’s begun to turn further outward than ever men did before!”

  “Tell me,” she begged. “Help me.”

  He found himself kissing her. And they sought a place of their own and were one.

  But there are no happy endings. There are no endings of any kind. At most, we are given happy moments.

  The morning came when Havig awakened beside Leonce. She slept, warm and silky and musky, an arm thrown across his breast. This time his body did not desert her. His thinking did.

  “Doc,” he was to tell me, his voice harsh with desperation, “I could not stay where we were--in a kind of Renaissance Eden--I couldn’t stay there, or anywhere else, and let destiny happen.”

  “I believe the future has taken a hopeful direction. But how can I be sure? Yes, yes, the name is Jack, not Jesus; my respon­sibility must end somewhere; but exactly where?”

  “And even if that was a good eon to be alive in, by what route did men arrive there? Maybe you remember, I once gave you my opinion, Napoleon ought to have succeeded in bringing Europe together. This does not mean Hitler ought to have. The chimney stacks of Belsen say different. What about the Eyrie?”

  He roused Leonce. She girded herself to fare beside her man.

  They might have visited Carelo Keajimu. But he was, in a way, too innocent. Though he lived in a century of disintegra­tion, the Maurai rule had always been mild, had never provoked our organized unpity. Furthermore, he was too promi­nent, his lifetime too likely to be watched.

  It was insignificant me whom Jack Havig and Leonce of Wahorn sought out.

  14

  APRIL 12, 1970. Where I dwelt that was a day of new-springing greenness wet from the night’s rain, clouds scudding white before a wind which ruffled the puddles in my driveway, earth cool and thick in my fingers as I knelt and planted bulbs of iris.

  Gravel scrunched beneath wheels. A car pulled in, to stop beneath a great old chestnut tree which dominated the lawn. I didn’t recognize the vehicle and swore a bit while I rose; it’s never pleasant getting rid of salesmen. Then they stepped out, and I knew him and guessed who she must be.

  “Doc!” Havig ran to hug me. “God, I’m glad to see you!”

  I was not vastly surprised. In the months since last he was here, I had been expecting him back if he lived. But at this minute I realized how much I’d fretted about him.

  “How’s your wife?” I asked.

  The joy died out of his face. “She didn’t live. I’ll tell you about it ... later.”

  “Oh, Jack, I’m sorry--”

  “Well, for me it happened a year and a half ago.” When he turned to the rangy redhead approaching us, he could again smile. “Doc, Leonce, you’ve both heard plenty about each other. Now meet.”

  Like him, she was careless of my muddy handclasp. I found it at first an unsettling encounter. Never before had I seen someone from out of time; Havig didn’t quite count. And, while he hadn’t told me much concerning her, enough of the otherness had come through in his narrative. She did not think or act or exist remotely like any woman, any human creature, born into my epoch. Did she?

  Yet the huntress, tribal councilor, she-shaman, casual lover and unrepentant killer of--how many?--men, wore an ordinary dress and, yes, nylon stockings and high-heeled shoes, car­ried a purse, smiled with a deftly lipsticked mouth, and said in English not too different from my own: “How do you do, Dr. Anderson? I have looked forward to this pleasure.”

  “Come on inside,” I said weakly. “Let’s get washed and, and I’ll make a pot of tea.”

  Leonce tried hard to stay demure, and failed. While Havig talked she kept leaving her chair, prowling to the windows and peering out at my quiet residential street. “Calm down,” he told her at length. “We checked uptime, remember? No Eyrie agents.”

  “We couldn’t check every minute,” she answered.

  “No, but--well, Doc, about a week hence I’ll phone you and ask if we had any trouble, and you’ll tell me no.”

  “They could be readyin’ somethin’,” Leonce said.

  “Unlikely.” Havig’s manner was a bit exasperated; obviously they’d been over this ground before. “We’re written off. I’m certain of it.”

  “I s’pose I got nervous habits when I was a girl.”

  Havig hesitated before he said, “If they are after us, and onto Doc’s being our contact, wouldn’t they strike through him? Well, they haven’t.” To me: “Hard to admit I’ve knowingly ex­posed you to a hazard. It’s why I avoid my mother.”

  “That’s okay, Jack.” I attempted a laugh. “Gives me an interesting hobby in my retirement.”

  “Well, you will be all right,” he insisted. “I made sure.”

  Leonce drew a sharp breath. For a time nothing spoke ex­cept the soughing in the branches outside. A cloud shadow came and went.

  “You mean,” I said at last, “you verified I’ll live quietly till I die.”

  He nodded.

  “You know the date of that,” I said.

  He sat unmoving.

  “Well, don’t tell me,” I finished. “Not that I’m scared. How­ever, I’d just as soon keep on enjoying myself in the old-fashioned mortal style. I don’t envy you--that you can lose a friend twice.”

  My teakettle whistled.

  “And so,” I said after hours had gone by, “you don’t propose to stay passive? You mean to do something about the Eyrie?”

  “If we can,” Havig said low.

  Leonce, seated beside him, gripped his arm. “What, though?” she almost cried. “I been uptime myself-quick-like, but the place is bigger’n ever, an’ I saw Cal Wallis step from an aircraft--they got robotic factories built by then--an’ he was gettin’ old but he was there.” Fingers crooked into talons. “Nobody’d killed the bastard, not in that whole while.”

  I lumped my pipe. We had eaten, and sat among my books and pictures, and I’d declared the sun sufficiently near a non­existent yardarm that whiskey might be poured. But in those two remained no simple enjoyment of a call paid on an old ac­quaintance, or for her a new one; this had faded, t
he underlying grief and anger stood forth like stones.

  “You have no complete account of the Eyrie’s future career,” I said.

  “Well, we’ve read Wallis’s book and listened to his words,” Havig answered. “We don’t believe he’s lying. His kind of ego­tist wouldn’t, not on such a topic.”

  “You miss my point.” I wagged my pipestem at them. “The question is, Have you personally made a year-by-year inspec­tion?”

  “No,” Leonce replied. “Originally no reason to, an’ now too dangerous.” Her gaze steadied on me. She was a bright lass. “You aimin’ at somethin’, Doctor?”

  “Maybe.” I scratched a match and got my tobacco lit. The small hearthfire would be a comfort in my hand. “Jack, I’ve spent a lot of thought on what you told me on your previous visit. That’s natural. I have the leisure to think and study and--You’ve come back in the hope I might have an idea. True?”

  He nodded. Beneath his shirt he quivered.

  “I have no grand solution to your problems,” I warned them. “What I have done is ponder a remark you made: that our free­dom lies in the unknown.”

  “Go on!” Leonce urged. She sat with fists clenched.

  “Well,” I said between puffs, “your latest account kind of reinforces my notion. That is, Wallis believes his organization, modified but basically the thing he founded, he believes it will be in essential charge of the post-Maurai world. What you’ve discovered there doesn’t make this seem any too plausible, hey? Ergo, somewhere, somewhen is an inconsistency. And. . . for what happened in between, you do merely have the word of Caleb Wallis, who is vainglorious and was born more than a hundred years ago.”

  “What’s his birth got to do with the matter?” Havig de­manded.

  “Quite a bit,” I said. “Ours has been a bitter century. Hard lessons have been learned which Wallis’s generation never needed, never imagined. He may have heard about concepts like operations analysis, but he doesn’t use them, they aren’t in his marrow.”