Debt of Ages

by Steve White

  Sarnac came out of his paralysis with a jolt. “What? Tylar, what the hell are you talking about? We left the Korvaasha eating our dust at Sirius! Nothing happened on our trip from there to Sol; it was almost anticlimactic.”

  “Yes,” Tylar nodded. “So you remember. It was at the instant before the Korvaasha overhauled you in the outliers of the Solar System that we cut off your memories. The battlecruiser you thought you had eluded had in fact followed you from Sirius using a captured Raehaniv continuous-displacement drive. It was commanded by a Korvaash officer with whom you had previously crossed swords, on Danu.”

  A chill struck into Sarnac. “The Interrogator!”

  “Yes, I believe that was what he called himself. At any rate, we maneuvered a temportal, as we call it, into the path of the Korvaash ship, thus transposing them—and you—seventeen centuries into the past. You see, we had need of you in the fifth century of the Christian Era, for reasons I later explained to you. Afterwards, we regrettably had to delete your memories of everything except your humdrum voyage from Sirius. We then returned you to your own time, on course for Sol. After which you, to use a traditional and deservedly popular phrase, lived happily ever after… except for the recurring dreams that resulted from a faulty job of memory erasure.”

  For a long moment, the silence stretched to the snapping point. Then Sarnac spoke in a voice choked with rising fury.

  “So you used me and Tiraena for God-knows-what purposes of your own, and then stole our memories! Why, you cynical, dishonest, manipulative old bastard!”

  “Actually, I’m not all that old—at least not on the standards of my own society. And it would be more accurate to say I borrowed your memories.” His sheepish look would have been funny on anyone else under any other circumstances. “You see, while your minds still held those memories I took the liberty of recording them. It wasn’t exactly ‘by the book,’ as I believe you’d put it, but it seemed a shame to let them simply vanish into oblivion.”

  “So on top of everything else you’re a mental voyeur!”

  “My dear fellow, I should think you’d be grateful to me.” Tylar sounded deeply hurt. “If I hadn’t artificially preserved your memories, it wouldn’t be possible to restore them to you, as I now propose to do.”

  “What? You can do that? You can, uh, ‘play back’ recorded memories into the brain?”

  “Yes… with some difficulty, and some initial disorientation for the individual involved. You’ll still have your memories of the years since then, of course; so you’ll remember fifteen years of not remembering the events you’ll now remember! I’m told it can be quite disconcerting at first. Knowing this, are you willing to undergo it? I’ll not compel you.”

  Another interval of strained silence passed. Then Sarnac grinned crookedly. “Yeah… you know damned well you don’t have to compel me, don’t you? There’s no way I could possibly turn back now.”

  “Well then,” Tylar beamed, “shall we?” He gestured toward a foot path, and they proceeded toward the villa.

  The brutally massive Korvaash ship looming impossibly astern, laden with its cargo of nightmare…

  The torus of reality-distortion they flashed through, and the impossible little ship that overtook them at a substantial fraction of lightspeed and then stopped dead and tractored the great hulking Korvaash battlecruiser…

  Tylar being his inimitable self… “We were so concerned, after this dreadful mix-up… Dear me! This is going to be even more difficult to explain than I thought… It occurs to me that if you prefer to make some use of your time in this era, you could perhaps assist us in our research …”

  The three of them, moving dreamlike through the nearly forgotten Gallic campaign of the British High King Riothamus: Tylar as Tertullian, secretary to tinsel-age litterateur Sidonius Apottinaris; Tiraena as Lucasta, a lady-in-waiting to Riothamus’ consort; and Sarnac as the British soldier of fortune Bedwyr, bodyguard to Tertullian and later confidant of sorts to Riothamus…

  His dawning realization of just who Riothamus really was…

  The Battle of Bourg-de-Deols, where Riothamus fell victim to treachery …

  The mountain lake and the thrown sword that had flashed in the westering sun so many times in his dreams … and after he had thrown it, his words to his friend Kai, welling up from he knew not where: “His name will live longer than you can possibly imagine … in a way, he can never die …”

  Tylar’s final explanation of what they had been put through, and of his own people’s policing of the past to assure that history followed the course that had eventuated in their own existence—including their planting of the ancestral humans on Raehan, where history said they had to be present in defiance of all evolutionary logic…

  “Tylar… aren’t you going to change history by returning us to our own time. I mean, when we get back there knowing what we now know, knowing all you’ve just told us…”

  “Ah, but do you?”

  And the sinking into unconsciousness, as Tylar looked on with unmistakeable sadness…

  “How are we feeling today?”

  “What’s this ‘we’ stuff?” Sarnac growled as Tylar entered his quarters. He wasn’t about to give over being mad at the time traveler, but he couldn’t complain about the accommodations.

  He was sitting in a kind of solarium, suffused with simulated sunlight from the holoprojection that was the “sky” of this few-kilometers-wide pocket universe. It was midmorning of the local twenty-four-hour day—Sarnac wondered if that was for his benefit—and he was digesting both his breakfast and his new knowledge.

  Tylar crossed the inner living room and joined him in the solarium, obviously in no hurry. Sarnac allowed himself only a moments glare before giving in and answering the time travelers question.

  “Pretty good. You didn’t exaggerate about the ‘initial disorientation,’ that’s for sure. Besides the problems you mentioned, there’s the freshness of these fifteen-year-old memories—I can remember it all more clearly than I can the births of my children, or things that happened just last year!”

  “But you’re over the sensation by now, I trust?”

  “Yeah, I’ve gotten things more or less sorted out.” He gave the time traveler a hard, level look. “And I’ve been doing some thinking.”

  “Oh?” Tylar seated himself across the low table from Sarnac, as though settling in for a discussion he had known was coming.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Sarnac repeated, “about the reason you wiped our memories: we couldn’t be allowed back into our own historical period with knowledge like the origin of Raehaniv humanity that our era isn’t supposed to have. And yet you had to let us return, because your history said we had gotten through to Sol. I suppose that’s why I’m not exactly slobbering with gratitude for your having saved us from the Korvaasha. You had your own reasons; in fact, you needed us as much as we needed you.”

  Tylar spread his hands. “What can I say? You’re correct, of course—as far as you go. But I hope you can also remember that my motivations regarding you and Tiraena were, at bottom, benign.”

  “Oh, yes, I can accept that. And I think I’ve more or less gotten over being pissed at you. But that’s not the point now.” He leaned forward intently. “The point is that the same reasons for not letting anybody with the knowledge you’ve just given back to me run around loose in the twenty-third century still apply with equal force. So why have you given me back the memories? And please don’t tell me it’s out of an altruistic desire to relieve me from my nagging dreams!”

  “Ah.” Tylar settled back in his chair, steepling his fingers in a gesture Sarnac now remembered. “Well, I’m afraid I haven’t been entirely candid with you…”

  Sarnac lowered his head into his hands with a low moan and spoke without looking up. “Tylar, one of the things I remember is that every time you say that I end up taking a barge pole up the ass!”

  “Oh, nothing as alarming as all that, my dear fellow! It’s just tha
t you needed to have the memories restored in order to fulfill a certain obligation.”

  “Obligation?”

  “Yes. An ethical obligation—an extremely important one. I should add that it’s primarily mine. But it is in some small part yours as well. And it is my intention to give you the opportunity to set matters aright—to pay a debt that you otherwise wouldn’t even have realized you owed.”

  He actually looks proud of himself, Sarnac thought in a haze of unreality, as though he’s doing me some tremendous favor. “Uh, Tylar, maybe you’d better explain things one at a time… starting with just what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Of course. In fact, I’m waiting for someone who will help me with the explanation… Ah, here he is now.”

  “May I come in, Admiral?” a familiar deep, resonant baritone spoke from the entrance.

  Sarnac sprang out of his chair and whirled to face the figure in Fleet uniform. “Captain Draco! What are you doing here… ?” His voice jolted to a halt and he grasped his chair for support as belated recognition crashed into him.

  How could I have not made the connection with “Captain Geoffrey Draco” as soon as Tylar poured the memories back into my skull? Well, he does look different without a beard. And I’m still integrating all these suddenly reacquired memories with my subsequent life…

  Even as the strangely calm thoughts were making their unhurried way through the storm center of his brain ‘t his throat struggled to form words. “But… but… but you died!” he finally got out.

  “Ah, but you know what people say about me! You should; it’s largely because of you that they say it!”

  Tylar cleared his throat. “I suppose I should have given you some warning, Robert. You see, we evacuated him and took care of his wounds. I’d intended to mention it to you and Tiraena, but…”

  “But it somehow slipped your mind. Right.” Sarnac gave the time traveler a quick, poisonous look and then addressed his operations officer.” ‘Draco.’ Of course. Cute. But where did the ‘Geoffrey’ come from?”

  “Oh, that. Well, its my way of paying tribute to Geoffrey of Monmouth. His account of my life was highly fictionalized, but I rather like it.”

  “You would! You always had a vain streak, as I recall. Not that I would have said so out loud, back then. I wasn’t exactly on your social level.”

  “No, you weren’t,” Draco acknowledged affably. “But now we’re both officers and gentlemen of the Pan-Human League.” The voice held not a hint of irony. “In fact, you outrank me! I’ll have to wait for you to invite me in.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Sure.” Sarnac gestured expansively at the table and chairs. “Come on in! Mi casa es su casa, and all that! Make yourself at home…” He realized he was babbling, but he thought he was doing about as well as could be expected under the circumstances.

  After all, he told himself, it’s not every day you invite King Arthur into your quarters.

  “So those three ladies who came to take you to the convent in the town were Tylar’s people?” Sarnac fortified himself with another sip of the wine Tylar had earned his relieved gratitude by supplying. He was remembering with special vividness the Britons’ retreat into the Burgundian lands with their mortally wounded High King, ending outside a town perched on a crag at the eastern end of a valley… the town called Avallon.

  “Precisely,” said Draco—or was it Artorius? (Arthur? Somehow, no.) “You were gone at the time.”

  “Yeah, tossing your pig-sticker into that lake. By the way, what should I be calling you?”

  “Oh, make it ‘Artorius’; it is my birth name, after all. Anything but that honorific ‘Riothamus,’ which I never much liked.” He took a sip of wine. “And I’ve been wanting to thank you for that business with the sword. As you gathered at the time, it meant a lot to me. I was intermittently delirious by then, and my mind kept returning to the old Sarmatian hero-tales I’d grown up on.”

  “Tales that I implanted into the Western tradition, dressed in Celtic clothes—as you intended all along,” Sarnac added with a sideways glare that didn’t put a dent in Tylar’s visible self-satisfaction.

  “Yes,” the time traveler nodded. “It was necessary. And the whole episode worked out very well indeed, from the standpoint of establishing the mythic elements of the story. It was a nice touch, if I do say so myself, to simulate those three ladies who’ve kept turning up in myth—finding Christ’s tomb empty, for example—ever since the Bronze Age.”

  Sarnac, a lapsed Catholic, wasn’t offended. “Only, they didn’t really take King Arthur off to Avalon, however you spell it. They took him through your portals to a sickbay where his wounds were a snap to fix. As much as I hate to admit it, that was pretty decent of you.”

  “True,” Tylar allowed. “But I can’t claim it was pure, disinterested altruism. The fact is, Artorius was simply too valuable to be allowed to die. I really am a historical researcher, you know—among other things. And in the course of our time in Gaul in 469 and 470 I came to the conclusion that he was an even more remarkable individual than we had previously thought.”

  “Yeah, I remember you mentioning something about it, at the Battle of Angers,” Sarnac said. Artorius, he noted, was handling all this very well. But then, it was hard to imagine him not doing so. Never mind the Romans and their Sarmatian cavalry auxiliaries crowding the Celts in his family tree, he thought, as he often had in the fifth century. This guy wrote the book on the charm of the western isles.

  “So,” Tylar continued, “after restoring him to physical health, we gave him an up-to-date education and employed him as a field agent You see, our experience with you and Tiraena had convinced us of the usefulness of operatives from prim—ah, from backgrounds more typical of most of human history than our own. We expected Artorius to display tremendous aptitude for the work. I might add that he’s more than fulfilled those expectations. Indeed, he’s made himself indispensable to me in the years that have followed—more subjective years, by the way, than the fifteen that have passed for you.”

  Sarnac nodded. He was still readjusting to the consequences of time travel. And he noted that Artorius seemed no older than he remembered. Well, with the kind of medical science Tylar’s people must have … and of course anybody looks younger clean-shaven than with a heard. …

  “It must have been a hell of an adjustment for you,” he suggested to the former High King of the Britons.

  “It was all of that,” Artorius agreed with the emphatic nod that Sarnac recalled. The shadow of a wind-blown cloud seemed to cross the strongly marked features. “At first it was like a continuation of the delirium. Afterwards… I can’t tell you what it was like, because I can’t clearly remember myself. It would have been worse, I think, if I’d been taken directly into your world. There would have been just enough that was, if not familiar, at least comprehensible, to make the rest seem wrong. And the wrongness might have driven me mad. But in his world, where everything is beyond dreams, I could just… let go, and accept things as I found them.”

  “Yes,” Tylar nodded. “You could. Not everyone would have been so resilient. In this, too, you lived up to our expectations. I for one wasn’t surprised in the least at your subsequent success in the field.”

  “Well,” Artorius said easily, “I’ve tried to do well by you, for I owe you a debt. Not just for saving my life, but for giving me a new one, one which is…” For the first time since Sarnac had known him—in any century—he was at a loss for words. “The things I’ve seen,” he finally half-whispered.

  “I can certainly vouch for how good you are,” Sarnac said. “Your performance as my ops officer… well!” He paused for a moment while they all partook of the wine.

  “Satisfy my curiosity about something. When did you tumble to me?”

  Artorius raised one dark brow. ‘Tumble… ?”

  “Maybe you don’t remember it clearly, but at the end you told me you knew I wasn’t just a simple mere. How long had you known? And what g
ave me away?”

  For a moment their eyes held each other, and Sarnac remembered those same eyes staring out of a blood-stained face while the dying High King whispered, “Bedwyr, I know you’re not what you claim to be, though I know not what you really are—nor do I wish to know, for I believe that knowledge lies beyond the proper ken of mortals.”

  “There had been a lot of little things,” Artorius finally answered. “But what finally convinced me was the exchange we had just before the army set out from Bourges. It was obvious that you knew more than you were telling. You wanted to persuade me not to advance into Berry without waiting for reinforcements from Soissons, but you couldn’t say so openly. It kept nagging at me. And, of course, when your unspoken prophecy came true…” He let his voice trail off with a shrug.

  Sarnac remembered very well that spring morning in Bourges, looking up into the face of the man he must watch be destroyed as history required. The forbidden hint had been out of his mouth before he could shut it.

  “Artorius,” he asked softly, “have you ever wished, in the years since then, that you could just say to hell with history and go back to that morning and act on my not-quite-advice? Wait inside the walls of Bourges for the Romans and Franks, then go out and kick the Visigoths’ butts…”

  “No!” The vehemence rocked Sarnac physically back in his chair, and he saw in that face what many others had seen above a shield-rim across a battlefield, though far fewer had lived to remember seeing it. And then Artorius’ smile was like the sun breaking through thunderclouds.

  “Sony, old man, but you’re talking about things that mustn’t even be spoken of. Besides, I’ve learned a lot about history since then, and I know what a calamity it would have been if I had succeeded.”

  “Yes,” Sarnac nodded. “Tylar explained it to me and Tiraena. In defeat you bequeathed the emerging Western culture a legend that helped give it shape. If you had won…”