The Empire of Time Read online

  Pierce laughed briefly. “If they were Trainable.”

  Wigner grinned around his pipe. “Levelheaded Jerry!”

  “What’s all this Colonial business?”

  “You’ve talked to Judy. Mm. When were you last on Orc?”

  “Two years ago—as you should know. That Secessionist mob in the Colonial Police. Routine.”

  “Let’s hope this is too. The Commissioner there—Gersen—has sent me a report on suspected sabotage at the Weapons Development Site. He wants us to check it out.”

  “Sabotage the WDS? Who? Culties?”

  “Nobody colonizes Ore unless they’re screened-out loyals.”

  “Knotholers—any illegal I-Screens detected?”

  Wigner shook his head. “Probably just poor administration. Or—”

  “Domestic politics.”

  “Yup. After all, unTrainables administering Trainables . . .” Wigner looked sour. Pierce nodded; it was an old irritation. Colonies were governed by and for unTrainables. The WDS was too vulnerable, and too dangerous, to be placed on Earth. Problems were inevitable.

  Wigner picked up a microfiche in a pink Top Secret envelope and handed it to Pierce. “Take a look; tell me what you think.”

  Pierce inserted the 3×10cm microfiche in his flickreader and switched it on. The fifty-five-page memorandum took him less than thirty seconds to read and assimilate. He gave it back to Wigner, who dropped the microfiche in his desktop shredder.

  “Well, well,” said Pierce.

  “Mm. Go take some Briefing and Conditioning and head downtime to Orc in the morning.”

  “Now look, Eric. I deserve a rest after six weeks among the rednecks. Is the situation that urgent?”

  “It is.”

  “Why?”

  “Now, come on, Jerry.” Wigner spoke in the soft murmur his subordinates knew well. His words had a certain rote quality; he had repeated this often. “Doomsday is still on schedule, just seventy-four years away. We still don’t know what will cause it. If it turns out to be an alien attack, Earth must be able to defend itself.”

  “I don’t need the whole sermon.”

  “Of course not.” They both knew that Pierce’s conditioning had been reinforced by Wigner’s cueing. That conditioning would make him miserable if he remained on Earth for even an extra day.

  “Is it too early for a drink?” Pierce asked.

  “Ah. Gives me an excuse to show off the Napoleon brandy I brought back.”

  “Nice change from Tom Jefferson’s white lightning.”

  Sitting in the small, disordered office surrounded by houseplants, the two men sipped brandy from styro-foam cups. “Well, it’s not bad,” said Wigner, “but it’s certainly not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Give it another century.”

  “Let’s discuss your trip. If you catch the first jet tomorrow from Kennedy—”

  Pierce shook his head. “I’d rather shuttle back from here to Glaciopolis, and fly across to Farallon City.”

  “Waste of time. There’s only one transcontinental flight a day on Ore. Even with the best connections, you’ll have a three-hour wait at the Glaciopolis airport.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’ll let me see what sort of changes the Colonials are making. From Farallon City I can take the noon flight to Los Alamitos.”

  Wigner shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll have Gersen’s staff advised, and you can meet him in Farallon before you fly down.”

  “Good. I assume this is not a covert investigation.”

  “No. It’s a small world at Los Alamitos. Any new face is sure to attract attention. You could fake it fairly well as a scientist, of course, at least for a few days. But the cover would keep you pinned down to one project. So just be your normal inquisitive self, and see everything.” He stood up, ending the interview. “Break a leg, Jerry.”

  “Thanks, Eric.” They shook hands; Wigner held on a moment longer than he needed to. Pierce felt a small glow of affection. Wigner liked most people only as they were useful to him and to the Agency. It was somehow touching to find a hint of personal fondness coming through.

  Back at Judy’s desk, Pierce found his documents already prepared: a new Senior Official’s visa for his intertemporal passport, an Agency credit card, and part of his medical papers.

  “You get the rest of Medical Doc when you finish B&C,” she told him. “New routine.”

  “Fine. Is Dr. Suad ready for me?”

  She whispered into her ringmike, then looked into space for a moment as the answer whispered back through the receiver hidden in her ear. “All set. Have a good session. See you tonight.”

  They gave each other a friendly kiss, and Pierce headed for the elevator. On Floor 130, he stepped into a very different atmosphere. It looked something like a doctor’s waiting room, circa 1955 U.S., complete with contemporary magazines: Life, The Saturday Evening Post, a Collier’s special issue describing a Third World War that never happened. Suad enjoyed collecting such things, and on his Agency salary he could afford to.

  The nurse-receptionist, however, clashed with the decor. He was a burly young man in hospital-green linen blouse and brown corduroy slacks. He sat behind a little sliding window, flickreading. Pierce reached silently through the window and picked up the microfiche envelope. It displayed a glossy, lurid photo of two gladiators disemboweling each other in the Colosseum, under the title Blood-Slaves of Caesar, by Proculus Gratianus as told to Bert Schwartz.

  Pierce laughed. “Shame on you, reading this crap.” The nurse whipped off the flickreader and grinned sheepishly.

  “Oh, uh, hi, Mr. Pierce.”

  “Lost in a fog of carnography.” Pierce shook his head in mock horror. “Isn’t there enough perversion in these old magazines your boss is so fond of?”

  “Those? Never even look at ’em.”

  “Is that so?”

  “They’re—you know—unTrainable media.”

  “Ah.”

  The nurse had already pushed a button on his desk intercom, and Dr. Suad appeared quietly through a side door. He was stocky, with coarse black hair to his shoulders and heavy, cleanshaven jowls—an affectation now that beards were fashionable. Pierce wished he had his whiskers again; they had been sacrificed in deference to the style of Jefferson’s era, which was self-consciously rigid about resisting twenty-first-century fashions.

  “Hello, Mr. Pierce. How do you do, sir?” A firm, dry handshake. “How are we today?” Always formal, as befitted a B&C man; flippancy in a brainwasher would be intolerable.

  “Dr. Suad. I am very well, thank you.” Pierce had very nearly blanked out his memory of the freeze, and no hint of dishonesty appeared in his voice. He offered Dr. Suad a slight tilt of the head, for even Senior Field Agents must defer to this man and his colleagues. “I believe we have a great deal to do today.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s get on with it.”

  “Of course.” Suad invited him into the darkened room behind. It was furnished sparely: a narrow water bed covered with an institutional-blue sheet; a light Finnish armchair; a teak cabinet and matching wardrobe. Three walls were painted flat white; on the fourth, behind the head of the bed, was a computer terminal.

  “Please make yourself comfortable, Mr. Pierce.”

  Pierce stripped off his clothes and hung them in the wardrobe. For almost three minutes he sat on the edge of the bed, hyperventilating. Meanwhile, Suad punched a code on the computer keyboard; it replied at once by slapping a sheaf of microfiche cards into the hardcopy hopper.

  Pierce stretched out on the bed, his body seeming gaunt in the dimness. He had removed his wig, revealing a short mat of brown-black hair on a long, narrow skull.

  Saud ignored him for the moment. He wore a flickreader, and fed microfiche cards into it with the same impassive efficiency his nurse had used in devouring Blood-Slaves of Caesar. After the machine had devoured the last card, he removed his flickreader and took a hypospray pistol from the teak cabin
et. He loaded it with six cartridges and pressed its flat muzzle against Pierce’s arm.

  “Yes, a long session, Mr. Pierce.”

  Pierce said nothing. Suad lowered a flickertube over Pierce’s face; the tube would transmit data directly from the computer.

  “Count to ten, please.”

  “One . . . two . . . three . . .” Pierce was out. Briefing required suspension of consciousness. This was high-speed Training, and a conscious mind would only impede the process. What would take seven or eight days to absorb by flickreading—or two or three years for an unTrainable to read and comprehend—Pierce would learn in four hours. The flickertube was focused on the inside of his eye, and transmitted information as fast as the optic nerve could carry it. Since Suad had given him 100 ccs of buffered nikethamide, that was very fast indeed. The spectrum of RNA catalysts which preceded the nerve stimulant would ensure that each datum was recorded in retrievable form.

  The flickertube went on, but from Suad’s point of view nothing could be seen but a rapidly shifting blur of colors around Pierce’s eyes: green, yellow, red, purple, green, red, blue, green. Every time Pierce blinked, the tube cut out for an instant.

  Unhurriedly, Suad taped electrodes to Pierce’s temples, throat, wrists, and ankles. He hummed tunelessly as a readout bank came to life on the computer wall, quantifying Pierce’s physiological status. The computer flashed a long prescription, and a few seconds later a small plastic box glided out of a chute and onto a shelf in the cabinet. Suad opened the box, withdrew the fifteen cartridges it contained, and loaded them into his pistol. He began to inject them in carefully timed sequence, keeping constant watch on the computer dials that recorded the changes induced by the drugs. He saw nothing unexpected or untoward.

  An hour passed. Suad sprayed solvent on a small area beneath Pierce’s left nipple. A patch of what looked like skin suddenly dissolved, revealing a plastic ring, three centimeters in diameter, embedded between two ribs. Suad peered into the ring with a modified otoscope. The ring was the mouth of a cylinder, seven and a half centimeters long, sealed at the other end. Suad inserted a smaller version of a regular hypospray cartridge into the cylinder, where it fit very snugly. Another spray; the ring was once again hidden under a pseudoderm patch.

  Still humming, Suad left the room. He slouched into an easy chair in the waiting room and picked up one of his beloved old magazines, a Galaxy from the early ’50’s. The cover and pages had been preserved with a compound related to pseudoderm.

  “Pretty slow afternoon,” his nurse remarked.

  “Mm-hm.”

  Two other Agents came in for B&C during the afternoon, but they were relatively routine jobs, finished before Pierce was even half through. When Pierce did begin to stir, Suad was waiting beside his bed. There was one last injection, a mild tranquilizer. Suad removed the electrodes, swung the flickertube back into the computer wall, and waited.

  “Four . . . five . . .” Pierce blinked awake. He sighed, then sat up and swung his feet to the floor. He snorted, coughed, scratched at the sticky patch an electrode had left on one wrist.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Mm-hm. You’re not an Alpha-class Trainable for nothing, Mr. Pierce. There might be, mm, three other people in the whole Agency who can equal you for receptivity to B&C.”

  Suad deliberately fumbled with the hypospray pistol, letting it slip from his fingers. Pierce moved off the bed like a striking snake, and caught the pistol before it had fallen half a meter.

  “Hyped reflexes,” Pierce remarked casually, handing back the pistol.

  Suad nodded. “Grade Twelve reflexes and tripled sensory-input synthesis.”

  Pierce strode to the wardrobe and slid open the door, just a little too hard.

  “Why?”

  “I couldn’t say, Mr. Pierce. I just fill prescriptions.”

  “Have you ever had hyped reflexes, Dr. Suad?”

  “Of course. In med school. Grade Four, for a few hours.”

  Pierce smiled wryly as he pulled on his stockings and knee breeches. He gave Suad a half-second’s eye contact, reminding him of what they both knew: Pierce was a natural Grade 4.

  “Well, Dr. Suad, on some slow afternoon you ought to ask your nurse to hype you up to Nine or Ten.” He yanked his shirt on, and tied the stock with irritable, abrupt gestures. “It’s miserable. You’re always hungry, but food tastes—metallic. Sometimes there’s a hell of a ringing in your ears. You fidget all the time.”

  “Mm-hm. Well, remember to do your breathing exercises; they should help reduce the fidgeting.”

  He ushered Pierce into the waiting room. It was empty; the nurse had gone home. Saud and Pierce shook hands, a little relieved to be out of each other’s company; then Pierce took the elevator down to his residential floor.

  Why Grade 12? And why the tripled SIS? Pierce was sourly aware that B&C had put him in a condition closely resembling this morning’s freeze: everything had once more become painfully sharp and clear. Vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch (heat, pressure, texture), balance—all were focused uncomfortably tightly, and it would take time to adapt. When his tripled SIS was eventually cleared, the world would again seem drab and insubstantial until he had adapted. His sense of smell seemed especially sharp: he could detect six different perfume residues in the elevator, mixed with the characteristic body odors of perhaps ten or twelve men and as many women. There was a whiff of marijuana, and a trace of flatulence.

  You don’t get Grade 12 and tripled SIS unless you need them, he reflected. (Would the elevator never reach his floor?) Wigner must be expecting trouble. What kind of trouble could there be?

  A stroboscopic memory of the last time he’d had Grade 12, a good five years earlier: a winter night in Gaul, on Ahania, with snow thick on the ground. The tent of an obstreperous Roman general, four guards outside dying swiftly and silently, the snow squeaking a little as they fall into it. Inside the tent, the general quick enough to reach for his gun but dead before his fingers can close around the butt; his boy lover, too terrified to shriek, peeping out of the blankets still warm from the general’s body. He gasps as Pierce turns the pistol toward him and the flechettes strike.

  What the hell kind of trouble could there be? He reviewed his Briefing, or started to, as the elevator door finally slid open on his floor.

  —I’ve been blocked. He fumbled for his door key, let himself in, and stripped off his clothes. Why blocked? Maybe Judy would know.

  He felt a bit shaky. Blocked Briefing; tripled SIS; Grade 12. Pierce shivered with the chill of fear, mixed pleasantly with anticipation. I’m too old for this Special Operations commando crap—Christ, thirty-five, had my first freeze, I’m no kid any more. But they don’t think I’m too old, and the adrenalin trip is as sweet as ever and sure to improve, because I’ve been loaded and cocked and I’m going to Orc to zap a bad guy. He remembered the euphoria he’d felt in Gaul stealing through the snowbound camp to the tent with the eagerness of the trysting lover.

  Breathing exercises. He stood naked in the middle of his modestly furnished living room, breathing in a rhythm designed to metabolize the adrenalin, relax the muscles. After a minute or two he calmed down, laughed aloud at himself, and headed for the shower.

  Chapter Two

  Pierce’s earliest memories were of the mid-’80s, when he was three or four. The Piggly Wiggly supermarket in Taos: its high windows cracked and boarded over, the parking lot full of squatters’ tents and squatters’ trash; the broad stumps of the cottonwoods that once screened the lot from the road. He would clamber up on a stump, run recklessly around the edge, and then run on to the next one, until his mother lost patience and dragged him into the lot and through the doors that no longer opened automatically. The aisles were interestingly dirty, the half-empty shelves spooky in the dim light. Market guards, usually Anglos, wore holstered revolvers and carried handcuffs at their belts; one of the guards once gave him a stick of gum. His mother’s ration book had a gree
n plastic cover, dull and cracked, with interesting stamps inside: blue ones with an eagle on them, green ones with a smiling man, red ones with a rocket.

  Those were very early memories, from the first austerity years. Another memory, a painful one, from the late ’80s: coming home from the Piggly Wiggly—now Federal Foodstuffs Dispensary 1207—with his mother. Each of them carried a small shopping bag with the week’s rations—flour, synthetic sugar, soy bacon, cabbage—and in his bag was a special treat, a chocolate bar his mother had paid three stamps for. A gang of Hispano kids, just a couple of years older than Jerry, jumped them, snatched the shopping bags, and sprinted off. One of the boys was Pete Gomez, who lived in the condominium next door. He was big for his age, and he knocked Jerry’s mother off her feet.

  “Jerry, are you all right?” his mother asked shakily as she pulled herself up. Her skirt was torn at the hem.

  “Yeah. But they took my chocolate bar. I want my chocolate bar, Ma.”

  “And I want my groceries, goddamn it.”

  But Mrs. Gomez denied everything, screamed at them, threatened. Pete wasn’t around at all the rest of the day. Next morning, Pete told Jerry they’d eaten the chocolate and bacon, and scattered the rest around an empty lot.

  “Dumb bastard,” sneered Ramiro Espinosa, who was thirteen or fourteen. “Coulda sold that stuff for plenty.”

  The next week they were ambushed again. Jerry tried to fight, but Pete knocked him flat. This time, his mother cried; they had no more stamps until the end of the month.

  In 1990, the Ethnic Integrity Act imposed de jure residential segregation, and the Chavez family had to move into an all-Hispano district. Jerry’s mother married a police sergeant, and things improved. But one night in 1992, his stepfather was run off the road near Arroyo Hondo. He died a week later. After that they lived on a pension, while Jerry grew up enough to enter high school and begin worrying about the draft. The Venezuelan war was technically over, but a thousand Americans a month were still dying in the Pacification Zones. American “consultants” in Canada were being sniped at. The Polish revolt was still on, threatening to spread into a general European war.