by Chad Oliver
Wade spent ten days in the vaults of the Center, ten days in which he never regained consciousness. He lay on his back in a sealed room, and every six hours a food capsule was placed in his mouth and a glass of water trickled down his throat. He was drugged to the gills, completely receptive, and machines fed data into him through tiny electrodes fastened to his skull.
It was an eerie business, but theoretically you weren’t supposed to remember any of it.
Just the same, Wade had had more than his share of nightmares after sessions in the Pumphouse.
For ten days, the machines were never silent.
He learned the language as it had been at that time and in that place: mostly Nahuatl, of course, but with a smattering of other Indian tongues. He learned the important cycles of the calendrical system, and he learned the sacred almanac, the tonalpohualli. He came to know the gods, and what they were like: Huitzilopochtli, the God of War, the Tlaloques, gods of the rain, and Tonatiuh, the Sun God, together with a thousand others. He learned the street plan of Tenochtitlan, and how to grow crops in the chinampas, the floating gardens.
The social system became a part of him, and he understood the priests and the farmers and what it meant to be an Eagle Knight. He learned how to chip obsidian, and what to do about a witch.
Most important of all, he learned how it felt to be alive in Central Mexico in the year 1445.
He felt the pride and the cruelty and the dignity and the laughter.
He came to understand why a man might go to his own sacrifice with joy in his heart, and how a priest felt looking down on his people from the summit of a stained pyramid….
When Wade left the Pumphouse, he was in part a different man, and would be for the rest of his life.
Heinrich Chamisso shook hands with him at the Jump Box.
“That’s quite a feather cloak you’ve got there; you be careful of it.”
Wade smiled, his teeth white against the artificial copper of his skin. He looked decidedly strange. He was dressed in a long black robe, and his hair was matted with dried blood. His ears were shredded at the lobes. He had a feather cloak of black around his shoulders.
“Good luck, Wade.”
“Be back in a century or three, Hank; don’t wait up for me.”
Wade stepped into the Jump Box and threw the relays that sealed the door.
He sat down in an armchair, carefully arranging his cloak so as not to crush the feathers, and waited.
The date was April 28, 2080.
The lights dimmed, briefly, and the year was no longer 2080.
He sat back and tried to relax.
From the inside, the Jump Box resembled nothing so much as a small apartment. The lead walls were painted a light, cheerful blue, and there was a bed, a bathroom, and a mirror. There were two pictures, chosen primarily for their utter lack of distinction. There was a shelf full of books, all of them relatively humorous in tone.
The Box always reminded Wade of a dentist’s office.
He closed his eyes, wishing he could have taken his pipe along. It would take him four hours to go back in 1445, and there was nothing for him to do but wait. There was no window to look out of, and nothing to see if there had been one.
His thoughts raced ahead of him.
His mind threaded its way back through the tangled webs of history, back beyond Hiroshima and Lincoln and herds of bison on the Plains, back beyond the time of the white man in America, back to the mountains and the jungles of Mexico before there was a Mexico …
Back from 2080 to 1445—only a little more than six centuries, some 635 years, and the United States did not even exist in imagination.
Back along the time stream—
Back to Daniel Hughes.
Time travel, he thought, was a curious business—curious and yet shielded in an almost classic simplicity.
For many years, long before travel in time became a practical possibility, thinkers of various persuasions had gotten a kick out of fooling around with some of the supposed implications of time travel. Some had been serious, some only playful, but almost all of them had concerned themselves with riddles and paradoxes of one kind or another. They worried the idea, as a cat might worry a mouse.
Suppose, they said, that you went back in time and murdered your own grandfather? (A good many of the writers, Wade had always thought, exhibited homicidal tendencies at odd moments.)
Suppose that there were parallel time streams, alternate lines of possibility?
Suppose you met yourself somewhere in time?
The reality was at once simpler and more subtle.
There are no paradoxes in nature, unless man himself is a paradox. Paradoxes exist only in logical systems, in philosophical concepts—in short, only in the minds of men.
The tortoise, singularly unconcerned with the speculations of Zeno, keeps right on losing all races with the hare.
In a way, time travel was like that.
The oldest dream of all had failed to come true: the future remained a blank wall, utterly inaccessible. In a very real sense, the future did not yet exist at any given time; that was why it was the future. Since it did not exist, it could not be penetrated. There was always a chance that there wasn’t any future.
There was only one way to move into the future. Every man, woman, and child on the Earth was a time traveller all his life—indeed, this was the very meaning of life. Together, and yet each alone, all human beings moved into the future, step by step, second by second, at a constant rate that could not be altered.
The past existed, because it had happened. It was there, written in the record.
The present existed: a tiny fluid bubble of activity, pushed along on the very tips of rigid, telescoping pencils of past development. The present, of course, was hardly more than an idea; it came and went with such speed that it was impossible to grip it, hold it, stop it, and say, “Now, right now, this instant, is the present.” Even as you spoke, present became past.
Nevertheless, the microsecond of the present was crucial. Normally, in all of history there was only one point at which change could occur—in the flashing instant of the present.
What happened if the past was changed?
Suppose, for example, that Rome had been wiped out while still a village. Suppose the Etruscans had never lived. Suppose that there had been no Roman Empire. What then?
The answer was simple enough, on the surface. There had been a Roman Empire in the past that led to the present known by Wade Dryden, That could not be changed.
If it was changed, somehow, then this present was impossible.
What was impossible ceased to exist.
It looked like a paradox, yes. If the past existed, it could not be altered and still be the same past, leading to the same future. What happened?
Computers gave the answer.
Imagine a vast tree, with many branches. Imagine a root to this tree, a deep root that cannot be killed except by digging up the root itself. Imagine twigs and leaves, each unique.
Picture a woodman and an axe. Picture the axe chopping through the trunk of the tree, changing it.
Graphically enough, the phenomenon was known to the temporal scientists as Cutoff.
From the point at which the trunk was chopped, the tree falls. All the old branches and leaves still exist, but they are dead. The upper tree, once alive, is now just so much wood: it cannot live on the new base. It exists as a dead log. It is forgotten. It rots.
At the point of Cutoff, a new tree begins to grow from the living root. It may be a similar tree, but it will not be the same tree.
The moral of all this, if you happen to have your nest in the upper branches, is clear.
Woodman, spare that tree!
Wade glanced at his watch. Two hours had gone by, inside the Jump Box. Outside, to the extent that the term had any meaning while in the stress field, over three centuries had whispered by in the shadows. Where was he, or when was he? 1776? 1700?
No mat
ter.
He shifted his position in the chair, and tried to fight off the nervousness that was growing within him.
Once Daniel Hughes had gone back to 1445, with the horses, he was there, part of the past. He could not, therefore, be stopped before he started.
There are no paradoxes in time travel.
What did those horses mean?
The first rule for a traveller in time was this: don’t be different.
If you go back to Crete in the days when her people were the wonders of the world, you must think as they thought, look as they looked, and above all do as they do.
Don’t change anything. Leave it exactly as you found it.
Altruism? Hardly.
The word was survival.
Consider those horses: horses in Mexico, in 1445.
There were no horses in the Americas in 1445, of course—not in the past that had led to the present in which Wade Dryden lived. The horse had been extinct there since the end of the Pleistocene, and would not reappear until the Spanish landed in 1519 at the site of Vera Cruz.
How important was the horse?
Well, there were at least three high civilizations in the New World before the Spanish came. The Maya had invented the concept of zero before the Hindus, and the Inca culture of Peru had actually entered the Bronze Age.
Culture evolves as energy is harnessed. Throughout the Americas, from the Eskimos of the North to the Ona of the South, the Indians were severely handicapped by their lack of efficient domesticated animals. They were growing corn by 4000 B.C., but domesticated animals were limited to the dog and the llama, together with such curiosities as the guinea pig and the turkey. Both the dog and the llama—and the related alpaca—were utilized for purposes of transportation, but they are ill-suited for the job, except under highly specialized conditions.
It is easy enough to attribute this lack of effective domesticated animals to some sort of ignorance or cultural mysticism; the facts, however, lie elsewhere. You can’t domesticate a cow if there are no cattle. You can’t tame a horse if there are no horses.
The New World abounded in game—deer, rabbits, bear, cats. But the necessary animals just didn’t happen to be there. The bison, which looked like a possibility, could not be domesticated, even by much later scientific experimenters in the twentieth-century United States.
How important was the horse?
Look at the Plains Indians. Before they obtained horses from the Spanish, the fabled Indian of the American West hardly existed. No American Indian rode a horse before 1600. The Cheyenne were growing crops in Minnesota. The Comanche were a poor Shoshonean tribe in the Great Basin. The Dakota Sioux, symbols of the Plains, were farmers from the Mississippi Valley.
The bison, or buffalo, was a source of food before the horse, but not a rich and dependable source. And the bison was the key to the Plains Indian known to American history. When the government killed the bison, they killed the Indian.
The horse came, from the Spanish in New Mexico. A cultural explosion took place. The Plains Indians became rich in food, and mobile enough to be dangerous. Many diverse peoples moved out onto the Plains. Still in the Stone Age, without knowledge of the motivations or techniques of organized European warfare, they fought the United States to a standstill until after the Civil War.
General Custer could well thank the horse for what happened to him that day on the Little Big Horn.
Now, suppose the horse had been introduced into a really high culture, before the Spanish arrived on the scene?
Cortes and his men had no easy time of it at first, despite their triggering of a native revolt against Montezuma II. Cortes, as shrewd and effective a general as ever lived, was defeated time and time again, his army cut to pieces, and he was only saved from disaster by the staunch support of his Tlaxcalan allies, who far outnumbered his own men. He finally subdued Tenochtitlan by shutting off the canals and starving the city out.
If there had been horses in Mexico in 1445, the story would have been different. There would have been cavalry, and, more importantly, a genuine empire held together, as was Rome’s, by rapid transport.
The wheel would have been more than a toy.
The toughest culture in the New World would not have been decapitated in 1521. It might have held off the thinly extended Spanish ships for a century; it might have never been beaten.
With such a past, obviously, the world Wade knew in 2080 could not exist.
Therefore, those horses must be canceled out before they could take effect. Daniel Hughes had to be stopped, cold.
The Jump Box halted. A green light flashed.
Wade did not allow himself to hesitate. He unsealed the door and stepped outside. He knew exactly where he was, and he felt it all around him.
Surely, one of the strangest cultures the world had ever seen.
Central Mexico, in 1445. The Aztecs.
IV
He stood in a clump of trees just south of Coyoacan. Bright sunshine filtered down through the leaves, and the air was warm. There was dampness from the lake, however, and he knew that by evening it would be cold enough to be uncomfortable.
He stepped clear of the trees and followed a wide path to the little village of Coyoacan. He did not pause there, but started at once across the causeway that led north over the blue waters of Lake Texcoco.
Canoes dotted the lake and the causeway itself had a scattering of foot traffic. Most of the Indians he saw were men, who wore their hair long, and who were simply dressed in loin-cloths, together with mantles knotted on one shoulder and leather sandals. Those common tribesmen gave him a wide berth, and Wade kept his eyes straight ahead. One wealthy merchant, ornately dressed and sporting ornaments of jade and turquoise, ventured to address him. Wade returned the greeting briefly, but did not linger for conversation.
His priest’s robes, of course, gave him a certain immunity to smalltalk—and most citizens were content to remain as inconspicuous as possible in his presence.
The open water on both sides of him gradually gave way to patches of green, little mud islands planted with garden crops and tended by farmers from poled dugouts. The floating farms shortly became continuous and quite solid, as roots took hold in the lake floor, and the lake itself was reduced to twin canals that bordered the causeway.
Adobe huts were sprinkled over the farms, and ahead of him, framed by the volcanic craters of distant mountains, Wade could see more substantial houses.
He saw more people now: officials crowned with feathers, idlers, runners with tumplines. Boatloads of food floated in the canals, moving slowly into the city.
More than three hundred thousand people, Wade knew, lived in the city before him. This was no simple village. And yet, the quiet was astonishing. There was only the smooth ripple of water in the canals, the rustle of breeze from the mountains, the fragile hum of low voices. There were canals instead of roads, and in all the city there was not a single wheeled vehicle or pack animal.
He heard laughter from a red-washed patio, and caught the slaps of hands shaping tortillas.
There were more priests now, and the smell of incense in the balmy air. Some of them eyed Wade curiously, but he was not molested. One of the advantages of urban life, he reflected, was that it was impossible for everyone to know everyone else.
He walked on, and now he caught the odor of something besides incense. He knew what it was, but nonetheless he started when he saw the skull racks. There were four of them, poles set into a temple courtyard, and there were thousands of human skulls threaded like vertebrae on the stakes.
It was no wonder that the people gave a priest all the walking room he needed.
Passing through a great open plaza, where temple-dotted pyramids reached upward toward the sun and the palace of the war-chief, Montezuma I sprawled across one corner, Wade walked on beside the canal until he came to the Tlaltelolco market: a square of polished pavement, ringed with shadowed alcoves where merchants displayed their wares. Vegetables,
mats, obsidian tools, feathers, jewels—each had its special place. Patient Indian women bargained and bartered, sometimes using cacao beans, and the scene had a curiously timeless, peaceful quality to it in the late afternoon sunlight.
Even here, however, the dominant motif of Aztec society could not be escaped. Past a double wall from the market were the temples of Tlaltelolco, and in the center of these buildings reared the huge pyramid of the War God, topped by a twin shrine to the squat Huitzilopochtli and the obsidian-eyed Tezcatlipoca.
The pyramids cast long, black shadows.
Wade felt oddly displaced in time. The city around him was vividly real—he could see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. The people he saw were alive and human—children, women, warriors, noblemen, slaves. There was laughter here, and horror too.
And yet he felt as though he were walking through history, as if all that he saw was somehow lost in the dust of centuries. He had walked along the route that Cortes would one day follow into the city of Tenochtitlan, the chief city of the Aztecs. And in the centuries that were still to come, Lake Texcoco would be dry and the island city of Tenochtitlan would become Mexico City, capital of Mexico, and in the fullness of time another Indian named Zapata would ride again against the Spanish….
There was a sadness here, and the weight of years.
Wade shook off the mood that had gripped him. Unless he moved, and moved fast, the history he had known would die, and a fresh history would grow from the roots of the Aztec world around him.
He kept his face impassive and walked past a rack of grinning skulls into the gloom of a large temple.
There was a surprising lack of space inside the temple. While generous enough in its overall dimensions, the massive walls took up most of the room; since the Aztecs lacked the true arch, it took some doing to support the ornate roof structures. A little light filtered in between the pillars, but it was not a pleasant place.
Wade ignored a group of children being instructed in the mysteries of the priesthood and walked into a small chamber in the right side of the temple.
The priest was there: a short, somewhat plump man with sharp, dangerous black eyes.