Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read online

  Still, it didn’t sound right. It was too glib. It sounded like the sort of thing that an instructor would tell a bothersome trainee at the Academy to shut him up when it was necessary to get on with the day’s lesson. If the Patrol had been removed at its point of origin in the Cambrian, how could anything, anything at all, still be remotely the same here in twentieth-century Paris? That bothered him very much.

  And also Ben-Eytan’s bland assurance that the problem wasn’t manifesting itself here because they had/would have already fixed it. So far as he was concerned, they hadn’t fixed it, not yet. Even when he tried to think it through in Temporal he knew something had to be fishy. Some part of his mind wanted to protest that nothing in the time-flow ever was permanent, that no event could ever be permanently and finally unhappened. Ben-Eytan had just said so himself. The time-line is fluid. Everything’s conditional. Whatever they went back to Gondwanaland to fix could just as quickly be unfixed all over again. The past, as that great writer Faulkner had so shrewdly said, is never dead. It’s not even past, he’d said. How, then, Everard asked himself, could he be certain of his own continued existence, and of the continued existence of everything he held to be real?

  And then, another problem—

  “It seems to me,” he said, “that if the Founding Convocation gets snuffed out, and all our succeeding interventions with them, then the Danellians themselves get snuffed out too, a million years or however long it is up from here. So how can they send us back to fix things?”

  “They don’t get snuffed out, Manse. Remember, even in the pre-Patrol world the Danellians did evolve, a million or so years from now, even though there hadn’t been any Time Patrol in the original time-line and time travel had existed for hundreds of thousands of years before they appeared.”

  Everard nodded. That was one of the things that one preferred not to think too hard about. “Yes. Of course. Founding the Patrol was a major intervention, the kind you and I would be prohibited from enacting. It could be argued that it was done purely for the sake of saving their own superior skins.”

  “Precisely. One way or another, the evolutionary trend of humanity culminates in the Danellians. They will emerge no matter what. That’s not the issue. We believe that the stated purpose of the Patrol is to insure the preservation of the ‘real’ time-line—and in our more cynical moments we like to tell ourselves that our whole organization was created just to make sure that everything occurs in proper fashion throughout all of history in order to bring them into existence. But the fact seems to be that even without the Patrol they will emerge onto the scene in due course anyway.”

  “So their existence is assured, no matter what permutations get built into the history that precedes them?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Then why did/do they bother to flange up the Patrol at all, if their own existence isn’t what’s at risk?”

  The Israeli shrugged. “I have no idea. I have more sense than to waste precious brain cells trying to understand the minds of the Danellians. They’re so far beyond us in development that it’s pointless even to try.”

  Yes, Everard thought. They may be our descendants, but we are to them as mice are to humans, or even less, and mice don’t try to figure out the motivations of the humans whose abodes they share.

  He knew that. He had had his own occasional encounters with Danellians over the years.

  He said, “All right. Let’s take it as a given that their destiny-line survives this terrorist attack. Shall we stipulate that what worries them is that everything between us and them will be hopelessly messed up—which, I suppose, must have some effect on their own precious existences too? Or are they simply displaying compassion for a million years’ worth of their primitive forebears?”

  “Have you ever noticed the Danellians being guilty of compassion before?” Ben-Eytan asked. “Or even revealing any understanding of the concept?”

  “I may have a higher opinion of Danellian nature than you do, Dan. I’m sure I do.”

  “You probably do, Manse. You do have that big streak of sincerity running right down your middle. But, be that as it may, they want things put back to rights at Alpha Point, and they have chosen the five of us to fix the damage, and the fact that you and I are sitting here talking right now is proof that we will succeed in doing so.”

  “And do we survive the process of working the fix?”

  “We have no way of knowing,” Ben-Eytan said. “And they’re certainly not going to tell us.” He drained the last of his absinthe in one macho gulp. “Do you want to have a look at the disaster scene, now?”

  With Ben-Eytan piloting the time-hopper and Everard sitting in the saddle beside him, they made the spatio-temporal leap that even now, with so many decades of Patrol service under his belt, Everard had not ceased to think of as miraculous, and emerged instantaneously in the Cambrian Epoch. The infinitely unfamiliar Earth of half a billion years prior to Hemingway’s Paris lay spread out beneath them. Everard had never gone back this far in time before. He had never had any reason to. Of course Alpha Point itself was off limits to members of the Patrol who had not been part of the Founding Convocation. And he had not been invited to the Convocation. Only the supremes of the supreme had been there, and he did not flatter himself by thinking that he had ever been one of those. And it would hardly be appropriate for lesser members of the Patrol to show up simply as tourists who wanted to peer at this legendary event. It would almost be like being present at the Creation—not the creation of the world, of course, but the creation of the Time Patrol, an event far from trivial in its own right. To drop in simply to gawk while that was going on would be, well, wrong.

  But Gondwanaland had endured as a unified continent for hundreds of millions of years apart from the brief existence of Alpha Point, and he had not dropped in on any of those years either, or even considered it, even though he was free to go anywhere he chose, or almost anywhere, when he was off duty. Perhaps a geologist might want to go there, but Everard, though he had been many things in a long and highly unusual life, had never been a geologist. And with all the vastness of the time-line available to him as an Unattached agent, he had chosen far more enticing places to visit on his furloughs: the Rome of Augustus, for example, or the London of Shakespeare. Or Paris in the days of the Lost Generation.

  There was nothing here but an immense bleakness. What would be the seven continents of the world he knew lay huddled into a single supercontinental blob. Geologists of later eras had given it various names—Pangaea, Rodinia, Pannotia—but for convenience’s sake the Patrol knew it simply as Gondwanaland, which was what the first twentieth-century advocates of the theory of continental drift had called it. It was not an enticing place. There was a faintly nostril-nipping strangeness about the air, an odd chemical smell that must mean a slightly different mix of oxygen and nitrogen than Everard was accustomed to. A terrible silence prevailed, a silence so intense that it hammered at the eardrums. The sky was gray. The sea that lapped the shores of the great monocontinent was gray. The land itself was a barren raw shield of glossy rock that looked as though it had congealed from the primal magma about a day and a half ago, broken only by occasional sparse patches of newly formed soil and a few zones of green moss. Land life had not yet evolved. This world was the kingdom of the trilobites and of other primordial seagoing creatures even stranger than they were.

  That was why the Danellians had chosen to stage the Founding Convocation of the Time Patrol here. The time-stream was resilient to change, yes, capable of being deflected from its course only by the mightiest of interventions. But, even so, it was always best to avoid interference with the flow. A time when the world was still largely uninhabited was the ideal choice. So when the Danellians, those greatly evolved descendants of humanity, had decided to meet the challenge to the integrity of the time-stream that the invention of time travel had posed, they had picked Gondwanaland as the site of the very first organizing session of the Time Patrol that wo
uld police the many thousands of centuries preceding their own advent and keep everything happening as it should. Once it had been founded the Patrol had/would establish its training school in the Oligocene, a humid place where sabertooths and titanotheres roamed the virgin forests. That was far enough back in the past so that its presence would cause no significant time-flow perturbations. When he was undergoing his training at the Academy Everard had thought it was mighty impressive to be living twenty million years back in what in those days he still thought of as “the past.” But from the perspective of Gondwanaland, the Oligocene was only the day before yesterday. There were no sabertooths here, no titanotheres—not even mosquitoes, yet.

  Everard let his eyes roam across that rocky shield, out to sea and back again. Everything was so gray that it was all but impossible to see where the sky ended and the sea began. It was the sort of soulless emptiness that would make the Sahara look like the Garden of Eden.

  Ben-Eytan said, “Some day, I understand, what you see below us is going to be Buenos Aires. Just for the fun of it, I ran a date calculation. This is January 15, Umpty Hundred Billion B.C. The Convocation began about three weeks ago—on the first day of Hanukkah, I am happy to tell you. Also Christmas Day. It happens that Hanukkah and Christmas come out on the same day in Umpty Hundred Billion B.C.”

  Everard ignored all that. He had never found Ben-Eytan’s brand of humor particularly amusing. Perhaps it was for some sin in a past life that the Patrol had assigned him to work so frequently with the Israeli. That little job in Kublai Khan’s Peking, and the one in San Francisco in ’06, and that very nasty business in Sarajevo, where Ben-Eytan had gleefully seen to it that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on schedule—

  “This is all new to me, this far back,” Everard said. “Have you ever seen it before?”

  “Not until this mission,” Ben-Eytan said. “Nasty, isn’t it? But there’s Alpha Point right below us. I can go lower, but I’m not sure how much lower is safe, at least with us not shielded. There’s probably still some hovering remnant of the toxic cloud that wiped everybody out.”

  “They’re really all dead?”

  “All,” Ben-Eytan said.

  The hopper swooped downward. The buildings of Alpha Point began to take form out of the gray mists below.

  Everard was surprised to see how flimsy everything looked. The Academy in the Oligocene, which he had visited many times, first as a trainee and then as an instructor, was a substantial place of long, low, solidly constructed buildings, as well it should have been, considering that it had been intended to remain in service for half a million years. But everything about this much older place, this Alpha Point that was the fons et origo of the Time Patrol, cried out its temporary nature. It had been needed only for a few weeks, after all. The Danellians had been content to fling up a large insubstantial-looking dome on the hump of a promontory overlooking the torpid leaden-hued sea, and to surround it with a semicircle of tent-like plastic blisters that were, Everard supposed, the residential quarters for the fifty or sixty greatest leaders of the Time Patrol throughout its long history, all of whom had been swooped up from their various eras by the Danellians and assembled back here at the dawn of time to be told about the organization to which they were going to devote their entire lives.

  Ben-Eytan nudged the hopper’s controls. They moved around the periphery of the base, out toward the sea and back to the land again, taking in the entire site. There was no sign of life anywhere about, though Everard did see, and shuddered at the sight, three motionless figures sprawled face-down in different parts of the camp.

  “Those ones were caught by the cloud as they were moving between buildings,” Ben-Eytan said. “The others are all inside the main building, but they’re just as dead. We’ve sent people in to have a look. It’s not something you really want to see.” To Everard, just then, the Boulevard Saint-Germain and its cafes seemed impossibly remote. The whole world did: the world that had/would contain Galileo and Einstein, Mozart and Bach, the Roman Empire and the Third Reich, the Athens of Socrates and the London of Shakespeare, the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and everything else. Suddenly all that lay beyond some impenetrable barrier, not just because the unthinkable treeless bleakness that stretched off to the horizon here was so unutterably alien of aspect, though it was, but because he knew that if the horrific event that had taken place in this convocation-hall at the dawn of time was allowed actually to happen, everything that he thought of as the history of the world was going to be altered. Everything. He was here at one end of the time-line and the Danellians were at the other, and, with the Time Patrol removed from the equation, everything in between, subject now to a million years of manipulation by vandals equipped with time machines and completely deficient when it came to consciences, was/would be/has been subject to incomprehensible transformation and retransformation.

  “Had enough?” Ben-Eytan said, after Everard had been silent a long while. “I could risk going a little lower, I guess.”

  “No. No. Not necessary. Do we know how it was done?”

  “We think we do,” said the Israeli. “Let’s go find the others and we’ll fill you in on what we believe we understand.”

  Team headquarters, Everard discovered when the hopper made its next leap, had been established in the Prague of October, 1910. It was plainly the early twentieth-century—he could tell that by the black-and-gold Hapsburg banners fluttering everywhere and the quaint, clumsy automobiles he saw puttering around Wenceslas Square—but those were greatly outnumbered by horse-drawn carriages, many of them splendid baroque vehicles redolent of the glorious empire of the Kaiser Franz Joseph that was due for complete and heartbreaking ruination in another few years. This was the district known as the New Town, Everard recalled, dating back to the fourteenth century or so but mostly constructed much more recently than that. The handsome Art Nouveau buildings that Everard remembered from a visit here not long after the fall of Communism, badly in need of cleaning then but still beautiful, looked brand new now. Some were still under construction. Their tawny, ornately bedecked facades were shining brightly in the autumn sunlight. After his brief visit to Gondwanaland this was heavenly. It almost atoned for the untimely way Ben-Eytan had ripped him out of Paris.

  Ben-Eytan must have been the one who picked this as team head-quarters, Everard thought. He loved this era, the last great flourish of European civilization before the disasters of the twentieth-century fell upon it, the two great wars and the two great totalitarian tyrannies. Everard remembered the Israeli’s innocent joy as they had wandered around Sarajevo in ’14 waiting for the doomed Archduke’s motorcade to arrive. The architecture had interested him far more than the cataclysmic moment of history that they were about to help bring into being. So Ben-Eytan was probably the leader of the group, and had chosen his favorite epoch for their base. His privilege, Everard conceded. As team leader, he had the option to put the headquarters anywhere he liked.

  The operations center itself was right on the square, an upstairs suite at the Grand Hotel Europa, a splendid building with an intricately decorated facade and stained glass windows and astounding fin-de-siecle ornamentation, that could not have been more than three or four years old.

  “I hardly need to make introductions, do I?” Ben-Eytan said, gesturing to the three agents waiting within.

  “Hardly,” said Everard.

  He was the only twentieth-century agent in the group, but he was used to that. Most of the Patrol had birthtimes well uptime of his own, because it was so difficult to recruit people from pre-industrial cultures, where not only the concept of “time machine” but even just the concept of “machine” itself was a difficult thing for them to swallow, and sometimes “time” as well. So he was accustomed to rubbing shoulders with agents who had been born hundreds—or, in some cases, many thousands—of years after himself.

  And he had worked with all three of these before. Elio Gonzalez was the closest in era of origin t
o him, practically his birth-time contemporary: late twenty-first-century, and would have been a member of the generation of his great-great-grandchildren, Everard supposed, if only he had bothered to get married in the late 1940s when he was done with his military service and had started siring children somewhere in the mid-1950s. But of course he hadn’t done that, since the Time Patrol had swept him up into its service in 1954, and although it was not uncommon for agents to marry and have families, the fast and furious time-hopping nature of Everard’s career as an Unattached agent of the Patrol had led him to believe he would be a bad bet for that sort of life, and he had wisely obeyed his intuition there. Doubtless he had scattered plenty of offspring up and down the time-line in his travels, since he had never felt it important to be a model of chastity and in some cases it had been downright obligatory for him to get involved with members of the opposite sex in the course of carrying out an assignment. But of the identity and location in time of those children he knew nothing, and preferred it that way.

  Gonzalez, at least, was probably no descendant of his, for Everard was big and burly and dark-haired, a powerfully built man somewhat ponderous of affect, and Elio, the product of a genetic mix that had strayed very far from the Latino original from which he derived his name, was a wiry little fair-haired man, blue-eyed, with an athlete’s slippery suppleness. He rose and gave Everard a quick open-handed slap of greeting. They had had two tours of duty together, one in the England of William II, the other in the Rome of Constantine the Great.

  Hideko Nakamura was even farther from his ancestral genes than Gonzalez was. Not much remained in him of the DNA carried by the Nakamuras of Yokohama or Kyoto or whatever the starting point of his family had been. His name was authentically Japanese, yes, but that was just a sentimental retro touch, the sort of thing that post-Japanese like Nakamura liked to go in for. He was of the eightieth-century, six thousand years into the era of genetic manipulation, and although he could readily enough be recognized as human even by a twentieth-century agent like Everard, he would surely startle anyone of that century less familiar with mankind’s future than Everard was, and probably would be hunted down and destroyed as a monster in most earlier eras, a fact that limited his usefulness as an agent to a certain degree. Two arms, two legs, and a head, yes, five fingers on each hand, five toes on each foot, but after that the resemblance ended. His features were minimalistic in design, mere hints at lips and nose and chin, though his eyes were Japanese enough, the epicanthic fold deliberately, playfully, enhanced. His skin was thick and dark and glossy, like a seal’s. He was graceful beyond belief, moving with a wriggling serpentine ease as though he had no bones, though of course he did, just as any serpent did. But when he crossed the room to touch fingertips to Everard’s he seemed to float or swim rather than to walk.