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

  “Harry,” Gersen said to McGowan, “would you get out the champagne, please? And glasses.” He smiled faintly at Pierce. “We were saving it to celebrate.”

  “Jerry-missanan’kaa, what now?” Klasayat called.

  “Come and sit with us.”

  Klasayat joined them smiling as he settled himself gingerly into a chair. Brown and McGowan looked disgusted; Pierce realized the endo smelled pretty powerfully of smoke and raw liver and unwashed deerhide. Oblivious, Klasayat flourished his cigarette and lighter, and savored the splash of cognac Pierce gave him.

  “Sit in stillness,” Pierce muttered, “but be ready. I do not know what the men who come will do.”

  “Hai.”

  The heavy door swung open; the three colonels strode in with Wigner in their wake. He looked more like an aging NCO than the superior of field-grade officers.

  The room was very quiet except for the clump of the newcomers’ boots. Pierce saw one of the colonels recognize him and turn to Wigner. Wigner saw him now, and smiled through his mustache.

  “Hi, Jerry.”

  “Hi, Eric.”

  There was some fuss as more chairs were found and champagne was poured. On the holovision, the pad and gantry still burned.

  “Nothing pleasanter than a drink by the fireside with good company,” Wigner remarked. The colonels laughed heavily. No one else did. “I gather you beat us to the punch, Jerry.”

  “Mm.”

  “Damned resourceful. We very nearly didn’t get downtime at all, thanks to your little computer stunt. The Federation Executive Council tried to dismiss me, just on principle.”

  “It would be the first time they ever did anything on principle. I’m sure you charmed them.”

  “Charm had nothing to do with it. I had to kick some sense into them. Took time.” He sighed as he sipped his champagne. “Well, well. And what in hell has happened to you?”

  “I’ve been Cleared, Eric. All the blocks are gone. I remember everything.”

  Wigner nodded. “Carmody?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lovely girl. Too bad. She was the best thing that ever happened to you, Jerry.”

  “No.” He felt a dull, deadly pressure growing behind his eyes. It took terrible control to keep from pouncing on Wigner, killing him. “The best thing was Anita !Kosi. Philon killed her yesterday.”

  Just for a moment, alarm shone in Wigner’s eyes. He grimaced. “I’m very sorry. I didn’t know she was—”

  “You don’t even know what you lost when your cat’s-paw shot her, Eric. But I know what I lost.”

  Wigner hurled his glass at the holovision in sudden fury. “Damn you for a self-pitying moron! Don’t you know what humanity has lost? D’you have any idea? Earth is already turning into a goddamn zoo. Riots, protests, fucking insurrections! They’ve burned down Paris Transferpoint. Fifteen countries screaming for immediate changes in the IF, or else. Hundreds of deaths. And the Colonies sure to start breaking away, sure to start fighting Earth and each other. Jerry, you idiot, you’ve thrown us back into the middle of the twentieth century.”

  Pierce finished his champagne. Slowly, carefully, he put his glass down.

  “Eric. Eric. You chew me out, congratulate yourself, and miss the point, all in one tantrum. You think you’ve been doing humanity a favor, even if you’ve had to kill a few million people in the process. And you still think you could’ve gone on doing it, even after you knew Doomsday would never come—”

  “If you hadn’t acted independently, there was a slim but definite chance of maintaining the status quo. Any chance at all was better than facing anarchy. We decided to take that chance.”

  “We? Who decided?”

  “The Minister and the Advisory Committee.”

  “Who all trust you implicitly—they have to, you give them all their data. You decided, Eric. You acted independently to turn Doomsday from a mistake into a hoax, and you’re so goddamned insulated from reality, you actually thought it would work.” The pressure behind his eyes was building. “The Agency is a shambles, the Colonies are concentration camps with indoor plumbing. When Earth was going to pieces twenty years ago, when you and I were smart-ass kids, we looked pretty good because we kept everything propped up for a while—for a while. Ishizawa saved our asses, and we thought we had the right to go on running things.”

  “What if we hadn’t?”

  “Why, then, Eric, we’d’ve enjoyed the benefits of our collective wisdom, or gone under through our collective stupidity. The way we will now.”

  Wigner shook his head contemptuously. “You’re too old for that sort of idealistic crap.”

  “Yeah. I’m still an eighteen-year-old, thanks to Dr. Suad. I still get a kick out of zapping bad guys.”

  “Well, that’s one pleasure you’ll be giving up.” Wigner scratched himself absent-mindedly, and a short-barreled pistol appeared in his hand. “Old son, you’re under arrest. So are the rest of—”

  Klasayat had understood nothing, but he knew a firearm. Two rounds from the AK-47 threw Wigner back into his chair; he rebounded across the table, scattering bottles and glasses, his back spurting blood. The colonels died in the next second.

  The shots seemed to ring in Pierce’s ears for a long time. The technicians, somewhere far away, were crying.

  “Peace, Klasayat-missanan’kaa. Peace. Your people are avenged.”

  “I would take trophies, Jerry-missanan’kaa.”

  Pierce got up slowly, aware of the gold locket in his coat. He yanked a shoulderboard from each of the dead officers. Wigner’s uniform had no insignia; his unfired pistol would do.

  “They are not flesh trophies,” Klasayat protested.

  “They are enough. Never has a man struck so high, Klasayat”

  “Holy Mary,” McGowan whispered. He and the others sat as if paralyzed. “How in hell’s name do we get out of this? The bloody Gurkhas will think we put him up to it. Christ, they’ll cut our balls off, they do that, you know, bloody endo’s got us all in the shit—”

  Pierce ignored him. He looked down at Wigner, who seemed small and slightly pathetic in death.

  —I liked you a lot, Eric, he thought. You were all the friend and family I had. But what a crazy fool you were, and what a lot of harm we did together.

  He lifted Wigner’s hand, checked the frequency of his ringmike, and gently put the hand down again. Tuning his own mike, he spoke into it:

  “Sergeant.”

  “Sah!” The Gurkha’s voice crackled in his ear.

  “This is Dr. Wigner. The prisoners will be coming out with Senior Field Agent Pierce as their guard. They’re to be flown out to Farallon City at once.”

  “Yes, sah! Shall I detail an escort squad, sah?”

  “Only to the airfield, thank you. They can use our personnel carrier. The officers and I will be inspecting this facility for the next hour or so, and I’d be grateful if we weren’t disturbed, Sergeant. There’s a lot of information to be studied here.”

  “Of course, sah. No one will disturb you. Will that be all, sah?”

  “Oh—an endochronic will be coming out also. He’s to be escorted to the wire and allowed to leave the area. We have no need for him.”

  “Very good, sah!”

  Pierce turned to the others. “Keep a straight face and we’ll be out of here without much trouble. Once we’re in the clear, it’ll just be a matter of waiting for the Agency to collapse.” He explained the plan to Klasayat.

  “Great is your guile, Jerry-missanan’kaa.”

  “Judge my guile when your feet are far away. Soon this will be your land again—I swear it, Klasayat.”

  “I will judge your promise when my feet are here again. It has been a great raid, Jerry-missanan’kaa, and our names will live in all the camps of the Grasslanders.”

  “That is something worth having, Klasayat my friend.” To the others: “Ready?”

  Gersen, McGowan, and Brown filed out, followed by the three technicians and Klas
ayat.

  Their escape was anticlimactically eventless. Klasayat rode with them as far as the main gate; he bade them farewell and, smiling, patted the pouch that held his trophies. At the airfield, two of the technicians asked to stay behind with their families; the rest of the party went aboard a small, sleek Boeing 905 that had come through an I-Screen with the Agency forces.

  The sky was turning from black to purple and the almost-full Moon was setting as the plane lifted from the long runway. The scar from the Sherlock beam had cooled to a dark gray; one had to search for it now.

  Pierce went forward to the pilot’s cabin. “There’s been a change of plans,” he told her. “We’re to take the prisoners to Mexicopolis, not Farallon.”

  The pilot was a plump, motherly French-Canadian. “Okay, Mr. Pierce. We’ll be there in two hours.”

  The Boeing turned through the paling sky. Below, just beginning to emerge from the night, the forests and grasslands of Orc stretched empty and endless.

  Pierce went back into the cabin, where his companions sat in a state of mild shock. Well, it had been a rough time for everyone. Had it been only five days ago that he stepped from the Earth/Beulah shuttle and froze? Had Anita still been alive twenty four hours ago?

  He sat down opposite Gersen and Brown. Brown began shaking his head and giggling unpleasantly. “What a bluff, what a bluff. Pierce, you’re a genius. You fall into shit and come up smelling like a goddamn rose. You’re a bastard and a nuisance, but we owe you a lot.”

  “Shut up.”

  Pierce closed his eyes, repelled by their smooth, taut faces, and listened to the soft thunder of the jets. Somewhere down there, where the thunder had already faded away, Klasayat was back among his men, making the greatest boast ever heard on the grasslands. Soon he would begin planning the restoration of his people, the marriage negotiations with the men of the mountains. Pierce did not know how to contrive to have Mojave Verde restored to the Grasslanders, but he would manage somehow. Destroyed, Klasayat had lived to triumph; his destroyer, in the same hour, felt only sorrow and exhaustion. Trainables were great ironists, but nevertheless Pierce wished he were down there with Klasayat.

  Far away at the edge of the world, the sun rose over red Orc’s dark wilderness and turned the plane and its passengers to gold.

  Chapter Twelve

  Thirty-two thousand years downtime from Earth, Vala was nearing the end of an interstadial. The ice sheets still armored much of Europe and North America; soon they would advance again, reconquering their lost provinces.

  For this reason, Vala had relatively few colonists—sixty million, perhaps. Most of them were crowded into the great cities of the tropics: Touréville, São Sebastião, Mashongi, New Carthage, Ciudad Guevara. But some settlers chose to live close to the ice, to tolerate long winters and rainy summers. Fifty thousand of them lived in Chrysopylae, on the hills where San Francisco stood on Earth.

  A small, compact city, Chrysopylae lived by logging, ranching, and mining. It was separated from the tropical markets by distance and bad weather; most of its products went by I-Screen to San Francisco and other uptime centers. In this anxious year of 2020, many Chrysopylans were worried about the likelihood of a war uptime, for if San Francisco should be attacked, the local economy would collapse.

  The news from Earth was ominous enough. Russia, China, and the United States were quarreling about their respective spheres of influence on several chronoplanes, including Earth itself. The New Incas, a nationalist movement led by Peruvian and Bolivian Indians, had taken Mendoza and were advancing rapidly on Buenos Aires. Indonesia had just crushed a neocommunist revolt; half a million rebels had been slaughtered, and another three million driven empty-handed through the I-Screens to Tharmas. And the International Federation, with its membership down to twenty three countries, was meeting in Geneva to dissolve itself.

  Though many Chrysopylans were natives of the nations in conflict uptime, they got along well. Most were Americans and Canadians, with some Swedes and Finns and a lively community of Siberians. And there were many culties: New Luddites, Fifth Monarchists, Sokagakkai, Ishizawa’s Witnesses. The mayor, now in her second term, was a Sapphist. In most respects, therefore, it was a typical backwater town.

  Chrysopylae’s university, however, was the largest on Vala, and one of the best on any chronoplane. Over a thousand students attended in person on its campus above the Golden Gate Pass; over a quarter million more studied by cinevision, flickerscreen, and video cassette. Less than ten years old, it already had the kind of prestige once enjoyed by Oxford and the Sorbonne.

  Pierce had been on the faculty for three years now. For a year after the Sherlock affair, he had been kept under house arrest in Mexicopolis while several jurisdictions wrangled over who could try him, and for what. The IF, increasingly preoccupied by its own internal problems, failed to have him extradited; the infant Republic of Orc was in no hurry to charge the man who had rescued its first President, Bengt Gersen. At last he had been released, untried and unpunished, and had gone to court himself to sue the Republic for restoration of Mojave Verde to the Grasslanders. He had won, but Klasayat was dead by then, killed in a raid on the town Pierce had promised him. He had been too impatient.

  Like most Trainable professors, Pierce had no specialty; he taught what interested him and his students. His colleagues found him reserved and impossible to involve in faculty politics. His students liked him: he had over seven hundred taking one or more of the twenty-eight courses he was teaching this semester. They recalled that he had been involved in the big Agency scandal a few years ago, but few seemed impressed by his celebrity. There had been many scandals, many crises, since then.

  It was early May, a gray noon, and snowing hard. The campus, with its steeply pitched roofs and snow-mantled quadrangles, seemed pleasantly medieval. Despite the weather, there were more people around than usual; most of them were converging on the theater building. There was to be a poetry reading today.

  The theater could hold two thousand, and was almost full. Holo and cinevision cameras had been set up to record the reading; the poet’s image, in two or three dimensions, would glow in the walls of thousands of homes all over the world, and like thunder, his voice would be heard somewhere on Vala at every moment for a long time to come.

  The Rector of the University came out onto the bare stage, smiling broadly, and said: “Good afternoon. I have the pleasure of introducing Mr. William Blake.”

  Blake appeared onstage to a crash of applause. He was a stocky, prosperous-looking man of fifty-two, of medium height, in a dull-brown Beulan suit. He shook the Rector’s hand, turned to the audience, and bowed. At last the applause died down.

  “Thank you. Thank you. As many of you may know, I am here with an ulterior motive.” He spoke with an accent that sounded remarkably like modern Bostonian. “My country, the United Republic of Great Britain, is a founding member of the Intertemporal League. The League is a free association of nations, both Futurite and endochronic; we hope your own North Valan Commonwealth, and the other sovereign states of Vala, will soon join us. Like Lord Byron, and Keats, and others, I am presently a sort of roving propagandist for the League. I do not intend, however, to belabor you with arguments on this occasion; if you wish to be belabored, you will have to watch me on the Six O’Clock News tonight.” There was a ripple of laughter. “I gather I am to be interviewed by one of your local controversialists. For now, however, I would like to recite some of the poems of William Blake.”

  His arms spread wide; he seemed to grow larger. His blunt features glowed.

  “Hear the voice of the Bard!

  Who Present, Past, & Future, sees;

  Whose ears have heard

  The Holy Word

  That walk’d among the ancient trees . . .”

  That voice was a great shout, a growl, elemental as rain and fire. The words crashed out; no matter how familiar the lines, how often-heard the poet’s voice, the words pounded like surf over the listene
rs.

  The poems followed one another with scarcely a break; there was no applause. But a murmur like the wind before storm rose from the darkened seats, and Blake’s voice rode on it like a soaring eagle: first a few, then more and more, hundreds were whispering the words that Blake roared out. He spoke, chanted, sang, crooned, howled: of chimneysweeps and whores, of the echoing green, of the worm in the night, of mind-forged manacles, of Urizen and Orc turning endlessly into each other, of the infinity in a grain of sand, of the eternity in an hour. With each poem more voices joined in, until Blake’s was almost lost.

  He stopped.

  “Turn on the lights.”

  The lights blazed down on them, burning like haloes on the listeners’ heads. People blinked, smiled tentatively at one another. An uncertain patter of applause broke out, then stopped as Blake began to sing Jerusalem. His strong, untrained baritone filled the hall, unaccompanied for the first three verses; for the last, all joined in.

  “I will not cease from Mental Fight

  Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

  Till we have built Jerusalem

  In England’s green & pleasant Land.”

  After the reading, Pierce was among the two dozen faculty members who lunched with the university’s guest in an unpretentious refectory. The poet who had been so effectively dramatic on stage was quite another man now: he was full of jokes, a first-class mimic, a good listener. For all his Beulan traits, he was very aware of events on other chronoplanes; when the talk turned to politics, he was more optimistic than his hosts.

  “I have great hopes for our new League,” he said. “Already most of the nations of Beulah and Eden have joined; Ahanian Rome is about to, and many of the former Colonies far downtime.”

  “I am afraid there’s little chance of our Commonwealth joining.” The Rector sighed. “The government in Habana Grande is too jealous of its new power.”

  “That, dear friend, is of course why I accepted your kind invitation. And there are more of us than a handful of English poets. Look at Goethe: he has single-handedly drawn in four German states, and the Germanies of Earth are about to follow. Look at Jefferson, calling the Americans back to themselves. And who is there to oppose such men but a pack of knaves and fools?”