The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  The Shield of Time

  Poul Anderson

  THE SHIELD OF TIME

  Poul Anderson

  www.sf-gateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  PART ONE: The Stranger That Is Within Thy Gates

  1987 A.D.

  PART TWO: Women and Horses and Power and War

  1985 A.D.

  209 B.C.

  1987 A.D.

  209 B.C.

  976 B.C.

  209 B.C.

  1987 A.D.

  209 B.C.

  1988 A.D.

  209 B.C.

  1902 A.D.

  1985 A.D.

  PART THREE: Before the Gods That Made the Gods

  31,275,389 B.C.

  PART FOUR: Beringia

  13,212 B.C.

  1965 A.D.

  13,212 B.C.

  1990 A.D.

  13,211 B.C.

  13,210 B.C.

  1990 A. D.

  PART FIVE: Riddle Me This

  1990 A. D.

  PART SIX: Amazement of the World

  1137 α A. D.

  1765 B. C—15,926 B. C—1765 B. C.

  1980 α A. D.

  18,244 B. C.

  1989 α A. D.

  1137 A. D.

  1137 α A. D.

  1138 α A. D.

  1137 A. D.

  1989 α A. D.

  18,244 B. C.

  1989 β A. D.

  1137 A. D.

  1146 A. D.

  1245 β A. D.

  1146 A. D.

  1990 A. D.

  Website

  Also by Poul Anderson

  Dedication

  Author Bio

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  THE STRANGER THAT IS WITHIN THY GATES

  1987 A.D.

  Maybe returning to New York on the day after he left it had been a mistake. Even here, just now, the springtime was too beautiful. A dusk like this was not one in which to sit alone, remembering. Rain had cleared the air for a while, so that through open windows drifted a ghost of blossoms and green. Lights and noises from the streets below were somehow softened, turned riverlike. Manse Everard wanted out.

  He might have gone for a walk in Central Park, pocketing a stun gun in case of trouble. No policeman of this century would know it for a weapon. Better, when he had lately seen too much violence—any amount was too much—he could have strolled downtown along a safe route till he ended in one or another of the little taverns he knew, for beer and homely companionship. If he chose to get away altogether, he could requisition a time-cycle at Patrol headquarters and seek whatever era he chose, anyplace on Earth. An Unattached agent needn’t give reasons.

  A phone call had trapped him. He prowled the darkening apartment, pipe a-fume between teeth, and occasionally swore at himself. Ridiculous, this mood. Sure, a letdown after action was natural; but he’d already enjoyed two easy weeks back in Hiram’s Tyre, taking care of leftover details after his mission was done. As for Bronwen, he’d provided for her, rejoining her could only destroy the measure of contentment she’d found, the calendar said that tonight she lay twenty-nine hundred years dust, and there should be an end of the matter.

  The doorbell relieved him. He snapped on the lights, blinked in the sudden harshness, and admitted his visitor. “Good evening, Agent Everard,” greeted the man in subtly accented English. “I am Guion. I hope this is in fact not an inconvenient hour for you.”

  “No, no. I agreed to it when you rang, didn’t I?” They shook hands. Everard doubted that the gesture occurred in Guion’s native milieu, whenever and wherever that was. “Come in.”

  “You see, I thought you would wish to dispose of mundane business today, and then perhaps depart tomorrow for a holiday—ah, vacation, you Americans say, don’t you?—at some restful spot. I could have interviewed you when you got back, of course, but your memories would be less fresh. Also, frankly, I would like to get acquainted. May I invite you to dinner at a restaurant of your choice?”

  While speaking, Guion had entered and taken an armchair. He was of undistinguished appearance, on the short and slender side, dressed in a plain gray suit. His head was big, though, and when you looked closely you saw that the thinly carved face wasn’t really a dark white man’s—didn’t quite belong to any race presently living on the planet. Everard wondered what powers lay behind its smile.

  “Thanks,” he replied. Superficially the offer meant little. An Unattached agent of the Time Patrol drew on unlimited funds. Actually it meant a great deal. Guion wanted to spend lifespan on him. “Suppose we get the basic talking out of the way first. Care for a drink?”

  The request given, he went to the bar and mixed Scotch and soda for both. Guion didn’t object to his pipe. He settled down.

  “Let me repeat my congratulations on your accomplishments in Phoenicia,” his caller said. “Extraordinary.”

  “I had a good team.”

  “True. But it had first-class leadership. And you did the preliminary work solo, at considerable risk.”

  “Is that what you’re here about?” Everard demanded. “My debriefing was pretty damn thorough. You must have seen the records. I don’t know what further I can tell.”

  Guion stared into his lifted glass, as if the ice cubes were Delphic dice. “Possibly you omitted a few details you assumed are irrelevant,” he murmured. The scowl opposite him was fleeting but did not escape notice. He raised his free hand. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of intruding on your privacy. An operative who had no emotions about the human beings encountered on a mission would be … defective. Worthless, or downright dangerous. As long as we don’t let our feelings compromise our duties, they are, ah, nobody else’s affair.”

  How much does he know, or suspect? wondered Everard. A sad little romance with a Celtic slave girl, foredoomed by the abyss between their birthtimes if by nothing else; his arranging at last for her manumission and marriage; farewell—I’m not about to inquire. I might learn more than I want to.

  He hadn’t been informed what Guion was after, or why, or anything exce
pt that this person was at least of his own rank. Probably higher. Above its lowest echelons, the Patrol didn’t go in for organizational charts and formal hierarchies of command. By its nature, it couldn’t. The structure was much subtler and stronger than that. Quite likely none but the Danellians fully understood it.

  Nevertheless Everard’s tone harshened. When he said, “We Unattached have broad discretion,” he was not merely rehashing the obvious.

  “Of course, of course,” Guion responded with feline mildness. “I only hope to squeeze a few more drops of information out of what you experienced and observed. Then by all means enjoy your well-earned leisure.” Softer yet: “May I ask if your plans include Miss Wanda Tamberly?”

  Everard started. He nearly slopped his drink. “Huh?” Recovery. Grab the initiative. “Is that what you’re here for, to talk about her?”

  “Well, you recommended her recruitment.”

  “And she’s passed the preliminary tests, hasn’t she?”

  “Certainly. But you met her when she was caught up in that Peruvian episode. A brief but strenuous and revealing acquaintance.” Guion chuckled. “Since then, you have cultivated the relationship. That is no secret.”

  “Not heavily,” Everard snapped. “She’s very young. But, yeah, I consider her a friend.” He paused. “A protégée of sorts, if you like.”

  We’ve had a couple of dates. Then I went off to Phoenicia, and on my time line it’s been weeks … and I’ve returned to the same spring when the two of us were first together in San Francisco.

  “Yes, I’ll doubtless be seeing her again,” he added. “But she has plenty else to keep her busy. Doubling back up to September in the Galapagos Islands, that she was snatched out of, and home in the usual fashion, and several months to arrange twentieth-century appearances so she can leave without raising questions in people’s minds—Arh! Why the devil am I repeating what you perfectly well know?”

  Thinking aloud, I suppose. Wanda’s no Bronwen, but she may well, all unawares, help me put Bronwen behind me, as I’ve got to do. As I’ve had to do now and then before…. Everard wasn’t given to self-analysis. The realization jolted him that what he needed to regain inner peace was not another love affair but a few more times in the presence of innocence. Like a thirsty man finding a spring to drink from, high on a mountainside—Afterward, let him get on with his life, and she with her new one in the Patrol.

  Chill: Unless they don’t accept her, in spite of everything. “And why are you interested, anyway? Are you concerned with personnel? Has anybody expressed doubts about her?”

  Guion shook his head. “On the contrary. The psycho-probe gave her an excellent profile. Later examinations will be mainly for the usual purposes, to help guide her training and her earlier field assignments.”

  “Good.” A glow kindled in Everard and eased him. He’d been smoking too hard. The tart coolness of a draught eased his tongue.

  “I mentioned her simply because the events that caused your world line to intersect hers involved Exaltationists,” Guion said. The voice was most quiet, considering what it bore. “Earlier along yours, you had thwarted their effort to subvert Simόn Bolívar’s career. In the course of aiding Miss Tamberly—who defended herself so ably—you kept them from hijacking Atahuallpa’s ransom and changing the history of the Spanish Conquest. Now you have rescued ancient Tyre from them, and captured most of those who remained at large, including Merau Varagan. Wonderfully done. However, the task is not finished.”

  “True,” Everard agreed as low.

  “I am here to … feel out the situation,” Guion told him. “I cannot express precisely what I seek, even if I use Temporal.” His speech continued level, but he smiled no longer and something terrible stood behind the slanted eyes. “What is involved is no more amenable to symbolic logic than is the concept of mutable reality. ‘Intuition’ or ‘revelation’ are words equally inadequate. I seek … whatever measure of comprehension is possible.” After a silence in which the city noises seemed muted by remoteness: “We shall talk, in an informal fashion. I will try to get some sense of how your experiences felt to you. That is all. A reminiscent conversation, after which you will be free to go where you like.

  “Yet think. Can it be entirely coincidental that you, Manson Everard, have thrice been in action against the Exaltationists? Only once did you set forth with any idea that they might be responsible for certain disturbances. Despite this, you became the nemesis of Merau Varagan, who—I can now admit—roused fear in the Middle Command. Was this happenstance? Was it accidental, too, that Wanda Tamberly got drawn into the vortex—when she already, unbeknownst to herself, had a kinsman in the Patrol?”

  “He was the reason that she—” Everard’s protest trailed off. Within him shivered: Who is this, really? What is he?

  “Therefore we wish to know more about you,” Guion said. “Not prying into your personal lives, but hoping for a clue to what I can only, misleadingly, call the hyper-matrix of the continuum. Such knowledge may help us plan how to track down the last Exaltationists. They are desperate and revengeful, you know. We must.”

  “I see,” Everard breathed.

  A pulse beat through him. He scarcely heard Guion’s coda, “And beyond that necessity, perhaps, a larger meaning, a direction and an ending—” nor how Guion chopped it short, as though he had let slip out what should not. Everard was harking back, gazing forward, abruptly hound-eager, aware that what he needed was not surcease but the completion of the hunt.

  PART TWO

  WOMEN AND HORSES AND POWER AND WAR

  1985 A.D.

  Here, where the Bear stars wheeled too low, night struck cold into blood and bone. By day, mountains closed off every horizon with stone, snow, glaciers, clouds. A man’s mouth dried as he gasped his way over the ridges, rocks rattling from beneath his boots, for he could never draw one honest breath of air. And then there was fear of the rifle bullet or the knife after dark that would spill his bit of life out on this empty land.

  To Yuri Alexeievitch Garshin, the captain appeared as an angel from his grandmother’s Heaven. It was on the third day since the ambush. He had tried to head northeast, generally down though it always seemed most of his steps were upward, the weight of the earth upon them. Somewhere yonder lay the camp. His sleeping bag gave him small rest; again and again terror snatched him back to a loneliness just as cruel. Careful with what field rations were in his kit, he took few bites at a time, and hunger pangs had now dulled. Nevertheless, little remained to him. He found plenty of water for his canteen, springs or the melt of remnant snowbanks, but had nothing to heat it. The samovar in his parents’ cottage was a half-remembered dream—the whole collective farm, larksong above ryefields, wildflowers to the world’s edge, he walking hand in hand with Yelena Borisovna. Here grew only lichen on rock, thinly strewn thorn scrub, pale clumps of grass. The one sound other than his footfalls, breath, pulsebeat was the wind. A large bird rode it, well aloft. Garshin didn’t know what kind it was. A vulture, waiting for him to die? No, surely the vultures feasted on his comrades—

  A crag jutted from the slope ahead. He changed course to round it, wondering how much more that threw him off the proper track to his company. All at once he saw the man who stood beneath the mass.

  Enemy! He grabbed for the Kalashnikov slung at his shoulder. Then: No. That’s a Soviet outfit. A warm blind wave poured through him. His knees went soft.

  When he could see again, the man had come close. His garb was clean, fresh-looking. Officer’s insignia glittered in the hard upland sunlight, yet a pack and bedroll rode on his back. He carried merely a sidearm, yet he strode unafraid and unwearied. Clearly he was no Afghan government soldier, wearing issue supplied by the ally. His body was stocky, muscular, the face beneath the helmet fair-skinned but broad in the cheekbones and a bit slanty in the eyes—from somewhere around Lake Ladoga, perhaps, Garshin thought weakly.

  And I, I’m just serving out my hitch, just waiting out this miserable wa
r till I can go home, if I live. He made a Shalten salute.

  The officer halted a meter or so off. He was a captain. “Well,” he asked, “what are you doing, private?” The Finnish eyes probed like a sunset wind. However, the tone was not unkindly and the Russian was Moscow’s, the dialect you oftenest heard after they drafted you, except that his was better educated than usual.

  “P-p-please, sir—” Sudden, helpless trembling and stammering. “Yu. A. Garshin, private—” Somehow he identified his unit.

  “So?”

  “We were … a squad, sir—reconnaissance up the pass—Blasts, gunfire, men killed right and left—” Sergei’s skull a horrible spatter and his body flung bonelessly aside, then a crash, smoke and dust, you sprawled with ears ringing so loud that you couldn’t hear anything else and a medicine taste in your mouth. “I saw … the guerrillas … no, I saw, one man, a beard and turban, he laughed. They d-didn’t see me. I was behind a bush, I think, or they were too busy—bayoneting?”

  Garshin had nothing to vomit but bile. It hurt his throat.

  The captain stood over him till he was done and the headache that followed had lessened. “Take some water,” the captain advised. “Swish it around. Gargle. Spit. Then swallow, not too much.”

  “Yes, sir.” Garshin obeyed. It helped. He tried to get up.

  “Sit for a while,” said the captain. “You’ve been through a bad time. The mujahedin had rocket launchers as well as rapid-fire weapons. You crept away when they’d gone, eh?”

  “Y-yes, sir. Not to desert or, or anything, but—”

  “I know. There was nothing you could do on the spot. Rather, your duty was to return to base and report what had happened. You didn’t dare go straight back down the pass. That would have been reckless anyway. You slipped uphill. You were still dazed. When you recovered, you realized you were lost. Correct?”