by John Barnes
“And boy, did they talk all the time,” Chrysamen said, grinning. “Okay, lover, I can buy that explanation. You think he’s trying to put a fast one over on us, morally speaking, right?”
“I don’t so much think that as I know it in my bones. And look at what he’s saying, too, Chrys. ‘Oh, sure, maybe we’ve won, and that’s swell, but what if we didn’t beat the Closers in a way that we would approve of.’ Meaning, what if he doesn’t approve of the way the ATN would have to change to win. But the only reason ATN exists is to fight back against the Closers. ATN never meddles in the affairs of a member timeline, or at least that’s what they always tell all of us. Don’t you see how peculiar that is? If I had to make a guess, it’s that the Athenian timeline has a big bureaucracy, by now, with quite a bit invested in keeping the war going. I would guess the timelines war is big business for a lot of our good, generous, civilized Athenians.”
She looked more than a bit startled. “Mark, you can’t be serious. Your timeline and mine both owe everything to the Athenians. If they hadn’t fought back, and developed the time machines themselves, and then organized and helped everyone else, we’d all be under the Closer heel. We even named our son after Perikles!”
I nodded. “You see how uncomfortable it is? But let’s face facts, wars involve a lot of money, and the money flows through a central point somewhere. The central point always gets its hands on a lot of the money. That all makes common sense, doesn’t it? So somewhere in the Athenian timeline, there are people with jobs or property who are going to lose out when the war ends. Since that wasn’t supposed to happen for thousands of years, nobody thought about what to do when it was over. Now there’s the scary prospect of peace real soon. And nobody is ready for it.
“But our boy Thebenides knows a voter’s interest—or maybe a campaign donor’s? I don’t know how they finance their elections—he knows what they have at stake. Any good political hack does. And he’s not going to let them get hurt. That’s the first given. And the second given—well, so whatever timelines are now drawing close to our own, they seem to just possibly have it in for the Closers. That strikes me as just fine and a high personal recommendation.
“But good old Thebenides sees it differently. He’s afraid that whatever is out there might not like ATN either. Which is quite possible. And considering we have member timelines that are absolute monarchies, and Communist dictatorships, and hell, there’s even a couple of reformed Nazi timelines that joined up … well, maybe we just don’t look all that good to the Intertemporal Good Guys. Maybe all the other little compromises that Thebenides and his crew have made would make us look not different enough from the Closers …
“Or maybe the new timelines are actually really bad guys, even worse than Closers.”
I sighed and shrugged, holding Chrys tight. “Don’t you see how much of a mess this is, at least potentially?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Do you mean you’re afraid Thebenides wants to make an alliance with the Closers?”
“I’m afraid he wants to leave the door open to it, anyway, and I don’t like that one bit. I’m also afraid that he may have worse than that in mind. Like he wants to bargain out some balance-of-power deal. Like he suggests that if the new guys do turn out to be friendly, we keep the Closers around ‘just in case’ or ‘for the balance of power.’ You see the kind of thing I mean?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, jeez. It’s not easy to put into words. The whole idea of having a principle is that it’s something to guide your actions, isn’t it? And if at the first sign of things getting complicated or difficult, you decide to throw the principle over the side, there’s only two reasons—either it was always a bad principle, or you’ve decided to do a bad thing. I don’t think he wants to do anything consciously evil, but I think he’s like politicians in my timeline—he wants to have the option. He doesn’t care enough about right and wrong to let them get in the way of anything he wants to do.”
“Well, it is practical politics, Mark.” She looked straight into my eyes. “I mean, I come from a very impractical timeline. We were completely pacifist. We were taken over, exploited, slaughtered, wrecked, and we never varied from our principles until we finally made one huge massacre. And if we hadn’t been willing to do that when ATN showed up and armed us … well, you can imagine. I’d probably have never been born—we’d have died out a generation or more before I was born. You can’t be completely principled about these things.”
“You can’t be completely unprincipled, either,” I said. “Look, it probably is just the experience of history. When I think about the deals my nation made to win World War II—deals with Russia that gave millions of refugees back to Stalin, deals with France that eventually got us into Vietnam, deals with Britain that got the USA into the business of preserving a colonial empire … well. During my lifetime we were so practical that we backed any murdering dictator who said he wasn’t a Communist, and turned a blind eye to torture, murder, and repression anywhere that they’d let McDonald’s sell a hamburger or Disney put on a movie. That’s what ‘practical’ got us.”
She nodded, and her face looked serious and far away. “I understand the problem, I guess. You think he talked like one of your politicians, and you don’t trust them at all.”
“You don’t know ’em like I do,” I pointed out, “and there’s a certain analogy about the whole thing, too. In my timeline, we had just won a huge war, and we were sitting on top of the world, and then the wealthy and powerful grabbed the whole show for themselves and managed to make us roundly hated everywhere within a generation. Nobody was more liked and respected in 1945, and thanks to a few thousand dorks in suits whose only interest was in making money, nobody was more hated by 1965. I’d hate to think that after the war is over ATN would do anything except hunt down whatever Closer bases are still hidden, and then dissolve.”
“Hmm. And Thebenides set off all those feelings in you?”
“Yeah, all those and more. See, the other problem is, the son of a bitch just comes across as a greasy liar.”
At that, she finally laughed a little, which I found encouraging. I put an arm around her waist, and we kissed, long and slow. It occurred to me that there was at least one good way to kill an hour or so in a room alone with Chrysamen. Gently, I stroked her skirt up her thigh; she kissed me more firmly.
We were both most of the way naked and beginning to get to the intense parts when the little loudspeaker in the room said, “Agents Strang and ja N’wook, please acknowledge.”
“Here,” we said, together.
“Report in ten minutes to Conference Level 2, Wing 3, Conference Room 7,” the voice said.
Oh, well, getting dressed in a hurry always gives me more energy for a long boring meeting. We caught the escalators back down and discovered that they deposited us right by the door of the conference room; we were even about half a minute early.
In the conference room were Ariadne Lao, Citizen-senator Thebenides, and General Malecela. I figured my confidence in whatever was to follow was at just under 67 percent.
They were polite, but they got down to business right away. I had already realized that if three people that senior were explaining the mission to us, it must be unusually important even for senior Crux Ops.
Without preface, Ariadne Lao said, “The new timelines that are going to assist us in this war—”
Thebenides cleared his throat and Malecela glared at him.
Ariadne Lao began again. “It seems to be clear that our new allies will contact us through timelines which are derived from the ones in which Porter Brunreich becomes a figure of major importance. I therefore must apologize for assigning you to your own time, but it’s become abundantly clear why they are targeting Porter Brunreich—the timelines that are our bridge to our new allies all spring from her.”
“And let me underline and highlight that,” Malecela added. “She must not only survive, but she must survive as the sort of person whose l
egacy will include trust rather than suspicion.
“Therefore—and I know it’s not as interesting or exciting an assignment as it could be, but it’s certainly the most vital—both of you are assigned at once to return to your own timeline and organize around-the-clock in-depth protection for Porter Brunreich.”
“She’s had that since she was thirteen,” I pointed out, “but we can step that up several levels. And don’t worry, it’s the job we’d rather be doing. How soon can we leave?”
“We thought you might like a decent meal and a night’s rest,” Malecela said, “but you can go right after breakfast tomorrow if you like. We’ve sent one of our on-the-spot fronts to get your things from your hotel and get them shipped over to Europe; we can have you meet her in Weimar, just before her concert there. We’ve arranged, via your bodyguard agency, for her to get to Weimar by helicopter—you’ll go by ground transport, but you’ll get there a bit before her.”
“Good,” Chrys said, and since there wasn’t anything more to add, we both got up to go.
But Citizen-senator Thebenides still had something to add. “And do your best to recall that not only are the Porter Brunreich timelines vital to our defense and to our contact with, er, the other new timelines, but since so often the culture of a given timeline is simply one person’s prejudices writ large, I would hope that when you talk to Citizen Brunreich you will keep in mind the values of ATN and of Attika generally, and—”
“We usually suggest that she ought to do what’s right,” I said, without much trace of patience.
We were all the way back to the room, and beginning to mess around where we had left off, when Chrysamen whispered into my ear, “Okay, I see your point about Thebenides. Still, it’s obvious that Ariadne Lao, and for that matter General Malecela, despise the man. I don’t know how much harm he can do in the circumstances.”
“Ever hear of civilian control of the military? He’s the boss.”
“He’s one of a lot of bosses, Mark. Not necessarily the most important one, either. I agree, if he were really in charge, I’d be worried silly. He’s slippery and greasy, and that’s his most attractive feature. But right now we have a lot more to worry about.”
“Funny,” I said, “but it’s easier to worry about Thebenides, who is merely an asshole, than about Porter and the future of all those timelines.”
“I wasn’t going to worry about Porter either. We’ll be there to meet her plane, and if the Closers can’t get a bomb to a Crux Op meeting, when they know the location and time, and when it would only be across time—they aren’t going to get anything that can shoot down an airplane all the way back to a couple of critical hours in the twentieth century. We’ve got other things to worry about.” She kissed me, then, very firmly.
“Such as what?” I knew she was right—Thebenides was minor, Porter was important but not anything we could do anything about—but now I didn’t know what she thought we should be worrying about.
“Such as that a few weeks ago Perry wanted to know why he was an only child and suggested we get working on it.” Now she slipped her arms around me and pressed her body to mine.
“Should’ve named that kid Aristotle,” I muttered. “His major interest seems to be biology.”
4
The next morning breakfast was what it usually is in that timeline—dense, heavy bread served warm, big chunks of feta cheese, olive paste, and coffee so strong it etches your teeth. We ate quickly and reviewed instructions; they would be putting us in through the usual channels, our bags were already in place, our briefcases and passports waiting on the airliner. They had appropriate clothing waiting for us as well.
“Will you look at this?” I said to Chrysamen. “I look like a yuppie instead of a goon. I think they set me up with Brooks Brothers Number Four, Corporate Boring.”
She grinned at me. “My feeling exactly. How are they going to tell me from the flight attendant?” She gestured at the blue suit with its simple skirt, silk blouse, and string tie. “They must have gotten this out of a costume handbook or something. Though I have to concede I’m at least going to be inconspicuous. I’ll look like every other female biz nerd on the flight. All the ones that everyone suspects are being exploited by their bosses.”
A few minutes later we made the crossover. A gate opened in front of us, and the ATN couriers stepped through, handing each of us our ticket and passport. I noted with amusement that the male courier was about four inches shorter than I was and that the female courier was about three shades lighter than Chrysamen in skin tone—and had her hair tied up tightly in a scarf, which probably meant she didn’t wear it anything like Chrys did. Well, supposedly this was a short commuter flight from Frankfurt to Leipzig; probably everyone would be reading, and no one would look closely at us.
We stepped into the gate. The world faded to gray, weightless silence; there was a timeless interval when we didn’t exist; then light came back, and sound, and weight, and finally color—though there was little enough of that in an airliner bathroom.
We came out of the bathroom and everyone was staring at us; it then suddenly occurred to me that they had noticed a man and a woman going into an airliner bathroom, staying there several minutes, and emerging out of breath.
It was a very long walk back to our seats; fortunately our opposite numbers had left English-language newspapers for us there, though we felt more like hiding under them than reading them.
By the time the plane landed, people had mostly stopped staring at us, or at least stopped being quite so overt about it. Almost you might have imagined we were any other passengers—though a lot of the men on board certainly stared holes in Chrys’s clothing on our way out.
Leipzig Airport is one of the world’s uglier airports, thanks to a remarkably uninspired set of Communist architects, and it’s extremely busy all the time. That’s a bad combination because one thing a Communist architect never figured on was heavy traffic. They do all seem to have figured that people would be standing in line a lot and would want some nice blank gray walls to stare at, and wouldn’t want to wonder about where the seats were, so they didn’t put too many of those in …
As always, the ATN couriers had been much too efficient, and gotten our bags on the airliner in Frankfurt first, so of course they were last getting off. While they were getting off I surreptitiously checked our passports and determined that we had officially been stamped through the day before. Once again those guys had thought of everything.
Which made me suspect that the trick of having us both come out of the same bathroom after a delay was a function of their sense of humor rather than their carelessness. “You know,” I muttered to Chrys, “I won’t have time to write a report on those guys for days and days, and by that time, I’ll probably think it was funny.”
“Then you’d better let me write the report.”
“Absolutely. Is that your suitcase?”
It wasn’t; just the third one like it on that flight. But the next one was hers, and then there was mine, and at last we were on our way.
The Fodor’s people say that rail service in what used to be East Germany still has “one foot in the steam age.” Every time we take a train through that area—and Chrys and I do often, because if you have money and an opera-crazed spouse, there’s nowhere more attractive on Earth than that area where what used to be East Germany borders what used to be Czechoslovakia—I wonder just what age the other foot is in. Possibly the Late Stone Age.
The trip to Weimar was mercifully brief, all the same, and the fact that it was Weimar was a compensation. That little city is so small compared to its importance in art, theatre, and music that if you know any of its history, it’s a constant shock to realize how close together everything happened … Goethe and Schiller didn’t just live here at the same time, their families probably borrowed sugar from each other.
Porter was playing at the National Theater; we had been there a few times. The place has a strange effect on the visitor;
the building is beautiful, and about as good a smaller auditorium as you’re apt to find for opera, concert, or theatre—then suddenly you realize just how much of European intellectual history happened there. There’s a statue of Goethe with his hand on Schiller’s shoulder out front, and that reminds you … but you still have to think for a moment to realize that Franz Liszt and Carl Maria von Weber lived and made music here, both Cranachs painted there, Wagner’s Lohengrin opened there, Gropius came up with the designs that half the modern world is built to—it goes on and on. All that in a little town smaller than Great Falls, Montana, and a lot of it right there in the National Theater.
The cab from the railway station carried us on past, and I finally looked down at the note they had given me to show the driver. “Upscale all the way this time,” I told Chrys. “They’re putting us up in the Elephant.”
We had always figured sometime when we came here for a concert or opera, we’d stay there, but only as an indulgence—the place is expensive. What do you expect for a three-hundred-year-old hotel that can claim, “Hitler always stayed here when he was in town?”
It was about two hours till Porter was due, so we got checked in and had the fun of playing dumb tourist, checking out the appointments in the room, for a while before we got down to business.