The Empire of Time Read online

  “Why not take this new Trainability test?” his high-school counselor suggested as Jerry neared sixteen. Looks like a pretty promising field. If you’ve got the talent for it, you’re sure to get a commission in the service. Sure beats foot-slogging.” To Jerry, who was big, healthy, and athletic, it sounded good.

  Training was only a few years old then, a half-understood technique that enabled those with the talent to absorb and retain incredible amounts of information in a very short time. Only about one person in six or seven had potential Trainability, though, and Testing wasn’t yet mandatory. Trainables had to be spotted in midadolescence, when the talent matured, and Training had to begin almost at once. Those who postponed it for more than a year or two usually lost the ability; the best they could get from Training was higher reading speed.

  But Trainables had already made enough of an impact on society to be unpopular. A seventeen-year-old Trainable and a desktop computer could process as much information in a day as a whole platoon of unTrainable clerks could manage in a month. One precocious fifteen-year-old girl, starting with five-hundred dollars borrowed from her father, had taken just two years to make six million dollars in the commodities market. A nineteen-year-old Italian—one of the first to acquire a medical degree through Training—had spent a mere six months absorbing the entire world literature on cancer research and was then able to isolate twelve separate cancer-triggering mechanisms and identify the means for neutralizing ten of them. A year later, brushing up on the literature inspired by his own findings, he found the neutralizers for the remaining two.

  These were not universally admired achievements in a world already overpopulated and on the edge of economic collapse. But the Trainables seemed unstoppable. Most of them found immediate work in administering the vast, rickety social structures that sheltered the rest of mankind. Their sheer knowledge kept the food growing, the trains running, the turbines spinning. Even the worldwide antiTrainable riots of ’92 failed to stop the takeover. Wars were endemic all over the planet; famine had become permanent in South America, Africa, India, and Indonesia. Over 6.2 billion people, half of them under twenty-five, were struggling for bare subsistence. “It is us or catastrophe,” a Trainable French diplomat warned the UN in 1995.

  A year after passing his Trainability test—with an Alpha-18, one of the highest scores ever recorded in the United States—Jerry became a (T)-Colonel in the U. S. Army. He held the equivalents of four master’s degrees, and was working on three Ph.D.s. Thanks to the Civil Emergency Act of 1995, his powers far exceeded those normal for his rank. The Continental Army Command was the chief arm of government in most areas of the United States, and Jerry found himself, at age seventeen, the de facto dictator of eastern Oregon and all of Idaho.

  He had no illusions, however, about his probable future. “It is us and catastrophe,” he often said to himself. The system was breaking down, and only a Trainable could really know how swift the process was. In a year, or two, or five, the real die-off would hit. He took an adolescent’s glum relish in private debates with fellow Trainables: would it be a nuclear war, with an inevitable attendant destruction of the ozone layer? A wild mutant virus, natural or man-made, spreading unstoppably through the world’s undernourished billions? A poisoning of the seas? A blend of all these?

  He carried out his job with the impersonal pleasure of a skilled craftsman and viewed his successes with ironic detachment. Why, after all, seek to preserve the lives of the doomed? Why shoot the robber who must die soon in any case? He could moralize as well as anyone, but under all the cant about law and order and making the system work he recognized in himself only one real motive: personal stubbornness. He would shoot looters and jail refugees because he had the power to do so, and the will. He would protect his people because doing so was a challenge, a test of his new skills. He liked the work, but knew it couldn’t last.

  Of course, he as well as everyone else was taken completely by surprise when the crisis ended in the fall of 1998 with the accidental discovery of an emergency exit for all mankind.

  That October, a graduate physics student named Richard Ishizawa—one of the last unTrainables in the United States to be granted a Ph.D.—set up a novel hypermagnetic array in Cave 9 of the Fermi Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. It should have created a field capable of deflecting an extremely high-energy particle beam in any desired direction with very little energy loss. Ishizawa hoped to produce a focused beam of unprecedented intensity with which quarks might be flushed out of the subatomic underbrush more easily than earlier techniques permitted.

  His experiment should have worked perfectly, as was later determined by very hard detective work, on the future chronoplanes of Ulro and Urizen, Ishizawa had indeed produced his field and found his quarks. He later died in a food riot in 2007, during the last convulsions of the old social order.

  On Earth, however, a microcircuit failed, as Ishizawa himself discovered very quickly. As a result of that failure, a very different field was created, and the vacuum in Cave 9 abruptly filled with air, leaf debris, and soil particles. Ishizawa had opened the first I-Screen, and the TV monitor in Cave 9 gave him a fine view of an eighteenth-century Illinois forest.

  Every other project at Fermi lab stopped dead. A security cloak fell over the Laboratory, and urgent, discreet calls went out to other physicists, to chemists, botanists, astronomers, and anthropologists. Cautiously, they followed Ishizawa through the Screen into what was first called a “topological singularity,” then a “temporal incongruity.” A lover of the poetry of William Blake, Ishizawa called his new world Beulah—and was astonished when Beulah turned out to be Earth in the summer of 1787, when Blake was still very much alive.

  A kind of hysteria struck the Fermi lab scientists and spread to the government—then to other governments. Pierce learned of the discovery in November, when most Trainables did, and he kept close track of developments. This was easy, since most Trainables had already lost their loyalties to national authorities and routinely informed one another of important events their governments were trying to keep secret.

  By Christmas, I-Screen theory was well advanced, but it was not to progress much further for a generation. The theory was simple, but its implications had literally changed history. At the point of the initial big bang, cosmologists speculated, every particle in the universe had undergone singular forces so intense that it had oscillated in time. A single cosmos transformed itself into a series, each cosmos virtually identical except for its chronoplane, or location on the time line.

  Ishizawa’s major contribution to this theory was to predict the “Heisenberg cascade”—the effect of subatomic particles’ being in different places or carrying different energies, on different chronoplanes. In a few cases, a cascade would produce detectable differences between chronoplanes. There might, Ishizawa speculated, be species on Beulah that were unknown to Earth. Furthermore, persons important in the history of Earth might never have lived on Beulah. Ishizawa did not know, and never lived to learn, that his failed microcircuit itself resulted from just such a Heisenberg cascade.

  His theory also predicted that proper modulation of the I-Screen would reveal other chronoplanes. Such modulations, on a trial-and-error basis, were carried out. But most tests produced nothing but the kind of field Ishizawa had been trying to produce in the first place. Gradually, however, other chronoplanes were located—twelve altogether, falling at more and more widely scattered points in the past. Each was given a name from Blake’s poetic mythology.

  However, Ishizawa never lived to see them all. While several teams were probing the past, he sought the future. After a six-week search, he died discovering Ulro, then at 2215 ad. The I-Screen was operating in an ordinary lab when it opened on Ulro, and the vacuum on the other side imploded the whole room. Before the array collapsed, killing the Screen, enough radiation came through to contaminate the whole building. But a shielded VTR tape was retrieved, giving Earth its first glimpse of Doomsday
: the ruins of what was clearly the Fermi Accelerator Laboratory, blazing under the Sun in a black, airless sky.

  Four months of secret preparation went into the next probe to Ulro, at the end of which a robot tank was finally sent through. After a four-day round trip to Evanston, the tank returned to the Batavia ruins and fired a canister of tapes and photos through the I-Screen. The vehicle itself was too radioactive to return.

  Scientists now entered the field of genuine futurology and tried to determine, from evidence as ambiguous as an oracle’s warning, just what was going to happen to cause that cataclysm. Once the manned tank probes ventured into the future, they learned a few things very quickly.

  Doomsday had occurred on April 22, 2089. Something had struck a world with a population of only three billion, most of whom were Trainables. They were living in a world commonwealth of peaceful but regimented societies that had emerged, after the turn of the millennium, from the wreckage of the unTrainable order. These societies were technically far ahead of the 1990s, and the broken bits of their technologies were as tantalizing and mysterious as a cassette tape would have been to Leonardo da Vinci.

  But the people of Ulro without doubt had been ignorant of the I-Screen, and of the existence of the chronoplanes. This crucial fact offered Earth at least a fighting chance of avoiding Ulro’s fate.

  So I-Screens were secretly set up elsewhere on Earth and they opened onto Ulro—and, a little later, onto Urizen in the late thirty-third century. At a high cost in lives and equipment, the nature of the cataclysm became clearer.

  On Doomsday, an intense beam of energy more than three-thousand kilometers in diameter had struck the planet’s dayside at the equator off the west coast of South America and then traveled west across the Pacific. The beam had probably remained stationary, while the planet rotated beneath it. The ocean had been vaporized under that beam, and a gigantic flower of superheated steam and pulverized rock had risen a thousand kilometers before it blossomed in space. As the beam traveled, the flower became a curtain, a wall of vaporized water, soil, and stone that followed the beam around the planet and gradually drifted into space in what must have been a gloriously beautiful white spiral. No one would have lived long enough to see it, however. All life on the surface must have perished within hours of the beam’s first impact, for the shock wave it generated smashed and buried virtually everything on the planet under an atmospheric tsunami of debris.

  The beam traveled seventeen times around the world before abruptly and inexplicably disappearing. By that time the entire atmosphere and all surface water had been blown into space. Somehow the Van Allen Belt had vanished, allowing a steady downpour of ionizing radiation to reach the surface. Violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions had broken out everywhere as the crust rebounded under the dead ocean floors. The vast, irregular trench cut by the beam soon filled with magma, like blood clotting in a wound. Meteorites, most of them quite small, began to lunarize the dead planet.

  On Urizen, over a thousand years after Doomsday, volcanic outgasing had begun to replace the lost atmosphere with a tenuous envelope of CO2 and water vapor. In the polar regions, there was enough winter precipitation to sustain a few colonies of tough lichens whose spores had somehow survived. In a million centuries, life might arise again in the Earth’s shallow new seas—or it might not.

  Telescopes set up on Ulro and Urizen revealed the existence of a dead colony on the Moon, and documents indicated that on Doomsday a manned base had also existed on Mars, but these outposts had evidently not long survived. Manned space probes might have been sent out, but were not. Too much evidence existed to suggest that Doomsday had been caused by alien intruders, who might still be in the neighborhood. Attracting their attention might lead to their discovery of the downtime chronoplanes.

  Other Doomsday theories postulated less sinister mechanisms: collision with an antimatter planetoid, a “macroflare” ejected from the sun or a scientific experiment gone hideously wrong. Each had its exponents, but nothing was certain except that on two chronoplanes, life had been expunged on April 22, 2089.

  Of necessity secrecy was finally dropped altogether. What had been discovered was brought before the moribund United Nations, and in less than a year the UN had dissolved itself and the International Federation had been established in its place. As the first world government, the IF held extraordinary powers; not only did it rule the nations of Earth, it extended its power into the other chronoplanes. The IF held one purpose paramount: discovering the nature of Doomsday and, if possible preventing its occurring on Earth and the downtime chronoplanes. If Doomsday were found to be inevitable, the IF would carry out the evacuation of Earth and, eventually, the other chronoplanes in an organized retreat.

  This overriding mission guided all IF policy. Elite teams, more idolized than the old astronauts ever were, made scavenge jumps into the future, bringing back the shattered toys and tools of their great-grandchildren. Gigantic scientific efforts were launched to force-grow a technology equal or superior to that of the next century. As a result, there was an instant shortage of useful labor. Trainability Testing became mandatory for every adolescent on Earth, and teams began to ransack the downtime worlds for Trainables among the endochronics. At the same time, Earth’s hungry unTrainables began to pour into the sparsely populated worlds of the past, building new cities, plowing virgin soil, drilling for oil and digging for minerals to sustain the garrison world that Earth was fast becoming.

  Pierce quickly became involved. The Agency for Intertemporal Development was one of the IFs first creations, and it needed plenty of Trainables. His first assignment was in late ’99 as chief of a Testing and Recruitment team in the Caucasus on Luvah, where they ambushed Paleolithic tribes with tranquilizing darts, Tested the adolescents, and carried off those with Trainability. It was hard work, because the first scouts on Luvah—as on other chronoplanes—had accidentally spread a variety of twentieth century viruses that wiped out sixty percent of Luvah’s endos in less than three years. Pierce’s T&R team found more corpses than live bodies in the caves and campsites they prowled.

  Those, of course, had been the bad old days, when Earth was still learning to cope with its new discoveries and millions died because of ignorance or accident. But with AID’s growing expertise, Earth had come through the first decade fairly well; almost two billion emigrants had colonized the past, and millions more were going through the I-Screens every day. They fished the teeming glacial seas of Vala and Thel; logged the endless redwood forests of Luvah and Urthona; grazed a million head of cattle on the Sahara grasslands of Albion and Ore. And every day, a thousand Trainable endos, Climbers, came uptime to help prepare Earth against Doomsday.

  Jerry Pierce advanced through the ranks quickly in those years, becoming something of a legend in the Agency. He would have been even more famous if the Agency hadn’t been so reticent about his activities. After all, who but Pierce had directed the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, four centuries ahead of schedule? Who but Pierce had negotiated the oil-rights treaties between Petroleos Mexicanos and the Mayans? Who but Pierce had garroted an obscure Mongol chieftain named Temujin, before the man could become a problem?

  And who but Pierce always carried a couple of chocolate bars, and dutifully wrote to his mother twice a month?

  Chapter Three

  The February evening fell in a flutter of wet snow that melted as it hit. New York glowed golden in the deepening grayness. For kilometer after kilometer, the highrises of Queens and Brooklyn blazed like pillars of fire. In some of the apartments, workers were just getting home, stripping off their clothes with sighs of relief, savoring the aroma of lamb chops or mastodon steak. After dinner, the Trainables could look forward to a pleasant evening of polychannel holovision; there was regular cinevision for the unTrainables.

  Most of the apartments were empty, though lights inside burned brightly. The custom was wasteful, of course, but it was good for morale. After the austerity years, lights had become
as compulsive a luxury as the animal protein everyone ate in too-great quantities. Besides, lighting only the occupied flats would have made the city look like the ghost town it had become. Most New Yorkers had long since moved to the suburbs of the past, where even the humblest home squatted on a huge lot whose lawn took all weekend to mow. Not all the residents had gone willingly: two out of five were drafted emigrants who cursed the perfect weather of Tharman Egypt or Urthonan Brazil and yearned for the stink and uproar of Flatbush Tower’s eighty-fifth floor.

  The city streets were wet and quiet when computer programmer Eusebio Macapagal walked into a bar a few blocks from the Transferpoint Building, where he had just left work. Two men in rain ponchos followed him in. They watched him put away a big steam-table supper and a couple of liters of beer. They nodded to each other.

  In the Transferpoint, there was a brief surge of traffic as the afternoon shift left and the evening shift came on. Most were Agency people, moving with easy confidence. At work, they sat in offices adorned with Doomsday plaques and holographs of Ulro, and composed memofiches to one another: we need seventy-five thousand Chinese farm workers on Vala by the end of next month; the Caliph of Baghdad has become a liability and must be removed; the World Anthropological Association has protested the Agency’s treatment of endochronics on Los, and we must prepare a counterpropaganda campaign; we are calling a conference to discuss the rising Colonial birthrates. Each memo initiated an action, changed a million lives, founded or toppled an empire.

  Austerity’s children, they dressed soberly, even dully. The men tended to prefer checked tweed slacks, pleated white shirts, and blue or maroon blazers; the women, paisley-print sarongs or kilts and tunics. An occasional fop in embroidered denim strutted by, swinging his attaché case.