The Empire of Time (The Chronoplane Wars Book 1) Page 18

  “I don’t agree,” said a professor who had a little too much wine. “We’ve just won our independence; we don’t intend to throw it away. With all respect, Mr. Blake, we don’t want any more interference. We have a right to live our own lives.”

  Blake laughed dangerously, a tiger of wrath encountering one of the horses of instruction.

  “Our own lives. I wonder, sir, if you know how that sounds to one whose original life was lived by someone else. Recall that Beulah has been in touch with the Futurites for over twenty years, and no Beulan has lived his own life since then. Least of all myself.” He paused, smiling.

  “I well recall the day, long ago, when a young Futurite—disagreeable fellow he was, too—appeared unannounced in my back garden, where my wife and I were sunning ourselves. Quite naked, the two of us. Wouldn’t have mattered nowadays, but then—well. The fellow was one of the first Futurites in Britain. He claimed to be a student at a university in California, of all places—named after Bishop Berkeley, of all people.

  “Well, this young man claimed to be an expert in my poetry. And he presented me with a volume of my own collected verse. I was then just thirty, and had written very little, yet here was a great thick book with my name on it—and my death mask as the frontispiece.”

  His listeners attended him in silence.

  “Most edifying, to see one’s own death mask. I was delighted to see I looked quite presentable. But the poems—ah, the poems. Reading them was—mm, rather like scanning a psychotape of a dream one has had and then forgotten. I had the strange sensation of having composed the poems without having quite written them down. Though I confess some of them I could scarcely understand until I had read the critics’ explications. Yet—there they were, my life’s literary output, compiled, annotated, printed in millions of copies.

  “I finally decided to be delighted with this event; it meant that I could turn to other projects for which I now had the time. And, after Mr. Wordsworth’s law-suit, endochronic artists were entitled to royalties from uptime publication of their works, so I found myself rather well off. My unexpected celebrity also gave me a certain influence.

  “I confess I am pleased that my propaganda for the League is usually welcomed, but I am a bit—disappointed—that my poetry is too. I half-expect to be clapped in irons and transported to a penal settlement for reading such seditious matter in public. Instead I am praised, applauded, holotaped. An ironic reward for a prophet.”

  “Would you rather have lived and died in obscurity?” the drunken professor asked pugnaciously.

  “What I would rather have done is beside the point, dear friend; I have had no choice. I did not ask for this position in life; it was thrust upon me by the Futurites—by powerful and frightened men, children of Urizen who feared the future so much that they destroyed the past. We have none of us lived our own lives these past twenty-two years. We have robbed ourselves and each other of the lives we might have had. Some, like me, know what those lives would have been; most can only speculate. But consider this: my precursor, the man whose poems I read and whose royalties I enjoy, died in 1827, at seventy, singing hymns at the top of his lungs. If the Intertemporal League fails, if there is war among the chronoplanes, I shall doubtless die much younger than that, and my last words will be: ‘Which way, please, to the fallout shelter?’ What consolation, then, to have seen my own death mask?”

  The academics were silent for a moment; then the conversation turned to other topics. Near the end of the meal, Blake leaned across the table to Pierce.

  “Are you free this afternoon, sir?”

  “I am.”

  “Perhaps we might spend a little time in private.”

  “I would be honored.”

  When they left the refectory, the snow had stopped and the sky was beginning to clear. Blake and Pierce walked across the north edge of the campus, looking down the steep slopes to the Golden Gate Pass. Here, as on many chronoplanes, a road led through the Pass and out across the Dunes to the coast. But there was no great city under Mount Farallon here, only a fishing village.

  “You made quite a bit of history around here,” Blake remarked.

  “That is one of the few drawbacks to living in Chrysopylae. The land here won’t change much in the next twenty thousand years. The river will change its course a little, the hills won’t be as bare. But it looks very much here as it does on Orc.”

  “Does that disturb you, sir?”

  “It is hard to escape one’s memories.”

  “We seek escape only from prisons.” Blake smiled at him. “You have all time to roam in, and still the past holds you. Specters hold you.”

  “Yes. I’m a true child of Urizen.”

  They entered one of the university residences, a long two-story building. Pierce’s apartment, on the first floor, was small, spare, and impersonal. He turned on the walls: the Mendocino cliffs on Ahania. The same surf broke against black rock that had broken in Judy’s apartment, long ago.

  “I could be donnish and offer you sherry, or would you prefer a very good vinho verde?”

  “Vinho verde, by all means.” Blake made himself comfortable in a rocking chair. “Thank you. Your health.”

  “And yours . . . I believe you have more than one ulterior motive for your visit to Chrysopylae.”

  “I have. You said nothing at lunch about the new League.”

  “I’m for it.”

  “Would you like to go to work for it?”

  Pierce’s face grew smooth and impassive. He stroked his graying beard. “What sort of work?”

  “A special envoy, from the League to potential members. We very much need someone like you, Mr. Pierce. You’re a Futurite who knows every chronoplane, and almost every culture. You know scores of languages. Most citizens of the League are uncouth endos like myself, or unTrainable Backsliders from Earth. We have little influence on the Futurite nations, and they are the ones who must join if the League is to survive.”

  “If you need diplomats, you’ve got Metternich.”

  “Bosh! The fellow’s an ass.”

  Pierce smiled. “That is no disqualification.”

  “It is for us. We are serious, Mr. Pierce. You Futurites have robbed us of our proper lives. We don’t propose to let you rob us of our present ones as well.”

  “Understood. But there are thousands of people at least as qualified as I am. Why choose me?”

  “There are no schools named after those thousands. There are no statues of them in the town squares.”

  Pierce looked embarrassed. “If you think you can trade on my fame, I’m afraid you’ll find your wallet nearly empty. My celebrity has evaporated, thank God.”

  “You are mistaken there, I assure you. If you ever ventured from this academic cloister, you would find yourself acclaimed everywhere you went.”

  “And shot at as well.”

  “Nonsense! You can’t seriously mean that.”

  Pierce shrugged.

  “Well, sir, what would you, then? Do you propose to remain here, peacefully teaching, until some invading army marches through the I-Screens, or a Sherlock lens turns this lovely world into another Ulro?”

  Pierce stood up and took Mendocino off the walls. He plugged in another projection tape, but paused before turning it on. “You know, of course, about the new chronoplanes they’ve discovered far downtime, in the Permian? Four of them so far.”

  “Indeed I have, sir. Truly astonishing.” Blake seemed perplexed by this change of subject.

  “I managed to have a friend of mine hired on with one of the survey expeditions on Gondor, the nearest of the Permian chronoplanes. He was an indent when I met him, but bright; went back to school and did pretty well. He sent me this tape a few days ago.”

  It was a simple, homemade one-wall holoprojection with no olfaction or tactility tracks. It showed a short, lean Black man in khaki trousers and an orange parka standing on the edge of an encampment of tents and sheds. The sun was shining with a wintry
brightness that made the Black man squint. When he spoke, wind blowing across the microphone fuzzed his voice.

  “Hi, Jerry. Welcome to Gondwanaland Junction.” The camera panned through 360 degrees, revealing that the camp sat on the edge of a plateau above a snow-streaked valley; beyond the valley, black mountains draped in glaciers rose abruptly into a deep blue sky. An orange helicopter fluttered over the valley toward some unknown destination.

  “Pretty, huh? Pretty damn cold, too. We’re only four thousand kilometers from the South Pole. It’s a lot nicer up north. But this valley is a rift—those mountains over there are going to be Africa, and right here is Patagonia. We have geologists screaming to get in here—they go right on screaming after they arrive. This place is extreme.”

  The tape shifted rapidly, showing brief glimpses of the terrain and its sparse, shrubby vegetation. Dallow’s voice continued, describing the scenes with the eager pedantry of the novice biologist. Then one scene appeared and held: a rocky stream bed somewhere down in the rift valley. There were still patches of snow in the shadows.

  Four gigantic beasts came down the stream bed toward the camera, but too far away to be seen clearly. The camera zoomed in on them. Blake gasped and leaned forward.

  “A pride of anteosaurs,” Dallow’s voice continued. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  The beasts settled down on a sunny shelf of rock above the water. The largest was perhaps the size of a lion; it must have weighed over five hundred kilos. Its massive head was covered with blue-green scales; behind its small eyes were heavy bone ridges. Its thick neck and heavy shoulders were adorned with a mane of bright blue hair; the rest of its body was covered with shorter hair, a darker blue. It idly waved its long tail.

  “That’s Big Daddy,” Dallow said. “The others are his harem. They must have a pretty big hunting territory, because we just r i into them a few days ago. This seems to be their nesting area—they haven’t left it for three days. I’m hoping we’ll be able to watch them lay their eggs soon.”

  The females, smaller and sleeker than the male, bickered for a preferred spot alongside Big Daddy. He yawned, showing great teeth, and uttered a deep bark that echoed from the rocks. Then all four went to sleep.

  The scene shifted back to Dallow at the camp. “Those are my babies, Jerry. I’m going to find out everything there is to know about ’em. And they’re just one tiny bit of this world—man, there’s so much to learn here, we’ll be busy for a thousand years. Why don’t you get yourself a leave of absence and come on down and see it for yourself?”

  He grinned and waved, and the wall went blank.

  Blake sat back and rubbed his hands on his trousers. “Many mansions,” he said quietly.

  “That’s where I’m going,” Pierce said. “But not on a leave of absence. For good.”

  “I think perhaps I understand why.”

  “I’m going to stand on the rocks of Gondwanaland, and sail the Tethys Sea,” Pierce said as if he had not heard. He put on the tape again, advancing it to the scene of the anteosaurs and stopping it there.

  “So you want to bury yourself in the past.”

  “It’s all the present now.”

  “But humanity needs you, Mr. Pierce. Very much.”

  “Humanity needs itself. It can’t rely on heroes any more. It never could.”

  Blake sighed, crossed his legs, and raised his glass in a reluctant salute. Smiling, Pierce lifted his own glass and drank. His eyes never left the great blue beast sprawled arrogantly on the rock, his proud head lifted to the sun.

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