The Empire of Time (The Chronoplane Wars Book 1) Read online

  THE EMPIRE OF TIME

  Crawford Kilian

  © Crawford Kilian 1978

  Crawford Kilian has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1978 by Ballantine Books, USA.

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For my daughters,

  Anna and Margaret

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The intertemporal shuttle between Earth/2015 and Beulah/1804 was an old subway train. For decades, its three cars had carried passengers on the old IRT line up and down Manhattan; now they sat on a hundred-meter strip of track in a tunnel in Flushing, on the basement level of the New York Transferpoint Building. Twice every hour, the I-Screen was turned on at the end of the tunnel, and the three cars rumbled through the screen toward an identical tunnel on Beulah. The cars were painted in Agency blue and white, and defaced by emigrants’ graffiti, scratched, chalked, inked, and sprayed on every surface: Lois & Bill, Jan. 27, 2015. Backsliders rule. AID is no help. 1804 or bust. The Agency for Intertemporal Development did not care; these were, after all, the parting shots of people who would no longer be a nuisance.

  Jerry Pierce was one of the few passengers coming uptime on the shuttle, but over a hundred people were waiting on the shuttle platform for the trip back. Some were emigrants, dressed in blue-and-white Agency-issue fatigues and clutching their shabby luggage. Most, however, were Trainables on official business: civil servants, technicians, and scholars. Some ostentatiously wore flickreaders pushed up on their foreheads, like sunglasses, as if their civilian clothes and attaché cases were not enough to proclaim their privileged status.

  The shuttle came through the Screen and screeched to a halt. Pierce was the first one off. He announced nothing. In his dusty buckle shoes, knee breeches, and tailcoat, he looked like a visiting endochronic—possibly a senior bureaucrat in President Jefferson’s administration, traveling to the twenty-first century to beg favors from the Agency. He ignored the Trainables’ patronizing smiles—and the emigrants’ sullen stares—as he handed his suitcase to a porter and shot his cuff, flashing his wrist ID.

  “Seventy-second floor, please. Apartment 72006.”

  “Yes, sir!” The porter was impressed. All apartments above the seventieth floor were reserved for top Agency staff. Pierce tipped the porter and started down the long platform to the escalators.

  As he took his fifth step, time seemed to stop. Pierce’s perceptions heightened and intensified, as if he had just undergone some impossible quintupling of sensory-input synthesis. He could pick out individual conversations amid the gabble and shuffle of a hundred people, but everyone was speaking so slowly that their words made no sense. A dozen different scents swirled around him. Pierce noted that exactly nine small tiles were missing from the abstract mosaic that covered the tunnel walls. He was aware of the temperature difference between his ankles and his face, and estimated it correctly at 2°C. The holoposters set into the walls blazed mindlessly at him:

  what are you doing about doomsday?

  there’s a future for you in the colonial police!

  levy’s rye—the toast of twelve chronoplanes

  what are you doing about doomsday?

  Nothing moved.

  Pierce was frightened, but observed the phenomenon with an Agent’s Trained dispassion. Here was a “freeze”—an occupational hazard of Trainable Agents after years of psychoconditioning. Its onset meant the Trainable’s usefulness was nearing its end.

  Almost twenty years, he thought. I must be due for it. But this is just the first freeze; I could go for years without experiencing another one. I’m thirty-five; another two or three years left, anyway. An image of a cabin on the California coast, or on Thel or Ahania or even all the way back to Tharmas, flashed through his mind—a cabin with apricot and cherry trees around it: The stereotypical retirement for a used-up Agent. He would go mad with boredom. But some Agents went a whole lifetime without freezing. Wigner. Well, he’s only thirty-nine, and he’s got himself insulated. The bastard could spend half his time frozen solid in his office, and no one would know.

  The freeze was wearing off. Down the platform, Pierce saw a young man approaching him, and worried. Had he noticed anything? The freeze could not have lasted more than a second or two; the young man could not have noticed.

  Pierce recognized him at once, though they had never met. The young man was a tall, heavyset, shaggy blond and tailored denims and a white silk shirt; an agate bolo tie glinted under his short beard. He was Philon Richardson, a Trainable Climber from Los, born 985 bc in Thrace, of Dorian stock. Tested four years ago at age sixteen, and brought uptime with his equally Trainable sister for his education. Took his Trainer’s family name, as did most Climbers. Under Philon’s foppish appearance was still a hint of the arrogant warrior-thug he would have become if the Agency had not tapped him: a barbarian princeling, carousing in the ruins of Nestor’s palace. Instead, he had become a twenty-first-century organization man—an errand boy now—but he was destined to wield more power with his fichewriter than his father ever dreamed of wielding with a sword. Still, it was interesting that anything at all was left of Philon’s background. The psychoconditioners knew their job.

  They greeted each other with a nod. Accustomed to high-speed data acquisition through the flickreader, Trainables found normal speech tedious; among themselves they spoke elliptically, or else imbued normal speech with irony and ambiguity. On this occasion, as relative strangers surrounded by a crowd of unTrainables, courtesy dictated the latter form of speech.

  “Good morning, Mr. Pierce. Welcome home.”

  “Good morning, Philon. Thank you; it’s good to be back.”

  They strolled through the crowd to the escalators. The only lingering effect of the freeze, so far as Pierce could tell, was a slight euphoria.

  “Wigner must be eager to see me.”

  “Very eager, Mr. Pierce.”

  “Too bad. I was hoping to catch up on my sleep before reporting in.”

  Philon smiled sympathetically and made amiable small talk: the clammy New York winter weather, the latest Agency gossip, the nasty new flu virus that had slipped in from one of the Paleolithic chronoplanes and taken 150,000 lives in the past month, mostly in the slums of Rio, São Paulo, and Asunción. Pierce said little, nodding absently.

  They ascended the escalator to the Transferpoint Concourse, a circular roofed plaza 250 meters in diameter. The main exit led outside to New York, Earth/2015. The other exits, spaced around the plaza’s circumference and marked by glowing holoposters, led to:

  New-York, Beulah/1804;

  Vikingshaven, Eden/1180;

  Port Palisades, Ahania/107;

  Chronoport, Los/965 bc;

  Ishizawa City, Albion/8127 bc;

  Glaciopolis, Orc/12,165 bc;

  Simpsonville, Luvah/22,233 bc;

  Johnson Station, Urthona/26,991 bc;

  Hudson Valley, Vala 34,468 bc;

  Welcome, Thel/47,114 bc;

  Lindsay City, Tharmas/70,787 bc.

  There were, of course, no shuttles to Ulro/2239 or Urizen/3571. The dead worlds upti
me were visited only through special I-Screens by highly trained scavengers who darted into the ruined cities seeking clues to the nature of Doomsday.

  Thousands poured through the Concourse. Philon and Pierce ignored them as they headed for the elevators to the upper floors of the Transferpoint Building. They stepped alone into the VIP elevator, and Philon inserted a key into the control panel. He pressed 112: Operations Division, Wigner’s floor. The doors sighed shut, and Pierce sank into one of the easy chairs, stretching his long legs. He smiled tiredly at Philon, who smiled back and remained standing.

  “You’re new with the Agency, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right, sir. I’ve been with the Director’s Office about a month now. It’s a good place to work.”

  “And how long have you been on Earth?”

  Philon’s smile faded a little. To continue normal speech in private was proper enough between one of Pierce’s rank and one of Philon’s, but it was rude to ask about what should already be known.

  “Three years. My sister and I were Tested in ’06 and brought uptime in ’07. She’s interning now in a hospital in Montevideo. As I suppose you know.” He had spelled it all out—a counterinsult.

  “How does she like it? Better than being the property of some asshole in a bronze jockstrap, hey?”

  Philon watched the floor numbers flashing above the door. “Hmm,” he replied. He did not like having his endochronic background thrown in his face. Such rudeness was to be expected from Backsliders, unTrainables who were being crowded off Earth to make room for Climbers like himself, but for a Senior Field Agent to talk this way was too much.

  Pierce was wryly aware of the reasons for his deliberate discourtesy. Philon reminded him of himself at twenty: an apprentice hatchetman, pleasantly aware of his elite status but not yet experienced enough to begin to doubt the value of his job. Something else about the young Dorian also bothered him, but he couldn’t identify it. A slight kinesic tension, a glint of hostility in the respectful smile. He had seen it many times, usually in men preparing to try to kill him. But in Philon such tension made no sense. Let it pass: an aftereffect, no doubt, of the freeze.

  The door opened, and Pierce stood up.

  “After you, Philon.”

  “That’s all right, I’m going on up to one twenty-one. Glad to have met you, Mr. Pierce. I hope we’ll meet again soon.” Pierce waved a vague good-bye, and walked into Wigner’s outer office. For some reason, he did not entirely relax until the elevator doors had closed behind him.

  Floor 112 had for Pierce a pleasant air of lived-in luxury: good teak tables with coffee rings marring their elegant surfaces; some early Booth cartoons, originals, tacked on official bulletin boards; thick Danish carpets a bit overdue for cleaning. Two dozen clerks, men and women, were running floods of data through the flickertube terminals evenly spaced around the large main office. The meter-square screens shimmered with a dozen colors, like high-speed kaleidoscopes. The clerks were dressed in overalls, chitons, jeans, brocade robes; their only common denominators seemed to be youth and a passion for houseplants, which adorned the terminals like ivy on gravestones.

  Holograms glowed on most walls and partitions: second-century Rome from the air; the scrub forests of the Dogger Plain, where the Thames and Rhine merged and flowed north to the Norwegian Bight on Tharmas; a twelfth-century Buddhist monk in Kyoto, all jolliness and wrinkles; a Paleo-Indian band celebrating a good hunt in an Albionese Arizona swamp. The pictures had all been taken by the staff of Floor 112, while vacationing; working Field Agents had no time for travelogue holography.

  There were no windows on Floor 112. The Operations Division was interested only in the worlds downtime whose affairs it guided, and in the worlds up-time whose fate it sought to escape.

  Pierce walked up to Judy Willems, Wigner’s staff coordinator.

  “Married yet?” A running gag between them, and all the greeting he needed to give her.

  “Not yet.” A dazzling smile. She was twenty-four and very good-looking. No lipstick or breast powder—she needed no cosmetics—and her dark tan and thick yellow hair were nicely set off by her warm-gold sarong. “Pooped?”

  “Mph.”

  “Dinner tonight?”

  “My place or yours?” Another running gag.

  “Mine. The squalor you live in makes me want to wash dishes and scrub floors.”

  “Atavist! When?”

  “Oh—1930ish.”

  “Why not earlier?”

  “You won’t be through until 1800; you have an all-day appointment with Dr. Suad.”

  “Oh boy. How can Wigner send me out again when I’ve just got back? What’s up?”

  She shrugged. “Something to do with Colonials. I don’t know the details.” He could tell, though, that she knew enough to make her nervous.

  “Christ. Rather deal with endos.” He shrugged too. “Tell him I’m here.”

  Eric Wigner’s office, at first glance, could have belonged to an Agency Librarian (Grade 6). It was windowless, rather small, and cluttered with computer cartridges, microfiche cards, and the inevitable houseplants; Wigner seemed to be particularly fond of piggyback plants, grape ivy, and maidenhair fern. Then one noticed his century-old rolltop desk, the shelves filled with genuine hardcover books (including a first edition of 1984), the battered couch covered with real leather, and realized that one was indeed dealing with the Agency’s Permanent Deputy for Operations, a man who could found or topple empires, and often did.

  Pierce walked in, kicked off his shoes, and collapsed on the couch. “What is this shit?”

  Wigner tilted back in his swivel chair and put his slippered feet up on the desk. He grinned through his bushy gray mustache. He was a middle-sized man, bald, pink-cheeked, and physically unimpressive. Pierce was some fifteen centimeters taller, and had the physique of a racing-shell oarsman, but there was no question who was boss.

  “It’s always the same shit,” Wigner replied. He chose normal speech, and even inflated it slightly. “When I heard about this problem, Jerry, I asked myself: Who among my many fine Senior Field Agents has the brains, the guts, the determination for this arduous and demanding assignment? Those were my exact words. And of course the answer was you.”

  “How so?”

  “In a minute. Tell me about Brother Thomas.”

  Pierce pulled a cassette from his breast pocket and scaled it across the office. Wigner caught it with startling quickness.

  “All on tape. The meeting went pretty well. Domestic politics: he wanted to switch some Agency funds from medicare to highways and transport. A lot of his people are unhappy about equal medical treatment for Black and Indian kids. They really resent it when Testing time comes and we take just as many Blacks and Indians as whites—”

  “Some of whom will later come back to Beulah as Trained administrators.”

  “They do hate to see those Blacks using flickreaders and telling ’em not to pee in the soup.”

  “You brought Jefferson around?”

  “Not really sure. The money stays in medicare, but we agreed—I agreed—to ease up on our antislavery campaign. That may have been just what he was after in the first place. Very complicated man, Mr. Jefferson. Pity we couldn’t have Tested him in his teens. Never saw a more obvious wasted Trainable.”

  Wigner shrugged. “They can maintain slavery as long as they like, for all I care. Just so they sell us the Trainable slaves at age sixteen.” He snorted. “The only reason we bitch about slavery is because people here on Earth expect us to. Domestic politics.”

  Pierce noticed a new snapshot on Wigner’s desk and sat up for a closer look. It was a cheap Polaroid 3-D photo, not a real hologram, that showed Wigner and Napoleon Bonaparte sitting at a little table in a formal garden. Both men were squinting amiably into the sun, and the photographer’s shadow had fallen across the table.

  “When was that taken?”

  “Yesterday,” Wigner replied innocently.

  “On Beul
ah without informing me?”

  “Well—you were busy with Jefferson, and something came up—I just popped back for the weekend. Yes, I should’ve notified you.”

  “What’s Boney want now?”

  “We’re helping him raid London next month. He wants a freer hand.”

  “I thought the Brits were coming round.”

  “Some are. Cabinet’s split. Boney’s raid should bring Pitt down. But he wants to establish a proper beachhead and take over.”

  “Does he, now?”

  “Endos are like babies—testing, testing. We’ll stage the raid our way, and in return we get complete control of the French schools—”

  “And the Brits will finally allow us to Test their kids.”

  “Mm. Think of the valuable personnel we’ve lost through their pigheadedness.”

  “From Pitt’s point of view, we’ll do to them what they did to the Scots—co-opt their best people and turn the whole country to our purposes.”

  “You’re too fair. A blind man has no point of view.” Wigner gestured to the hologram on the wall behind him. “Pitt’s seen that picture, but he doesn’t understand that it makes his petty nationalism pointless.”

  The hologram, a meter on a side, was a view of Ulro taken by a drone space probe. The continents—North America, Europe, part of Africa—were pinkish-brown and sharply outlined against the dirty gray of the empty ocean basins. Everything looked very clear, because there was almost no atmosphere on the Earth of the twenty-third century. In the hologram, noon was about on the meridian of London. In its ruined streets, the temperature would be close to 100°C. A thin, fierce CO2 wind would be hissing over the fused rubble. Pierce knew what it was like in that London; he had been there once, and elsewhere on Ulro four other times.

  Wigner, meditating, filled his pipe and lit it.

  “Sometimes,” he finally said, “I think the historic chronoplanes are more trouble than they’re worth. Too stable, too backward—nothing but raw materials and Trainable manpower. Can’t even colonize much—start getting endo revolts . . . Imagine a chronoplane between 1920, 1950? Get Fermi and Oppenheimer working on the Doomsday problem.”