Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Page 9

  “Do I have to take her back to nineteen twenty-six, mark, II? That world’s going to blink out of existence. It’s sort of like dropping her in a volcano.”

  It was one thing for Deirdre van Sarawak to outlive the history that had produced her; she’d had a place to go and someone to look after her. And anyway Piet had rescued her on impulse when Manse snatched him out of captivity, in a future in which Carthage had won the Punic Wars thanks to a couple of ambitious Neldorians with energy rifles hiring on with Hannibal. This poor woman . . .

  I can’t just take her back. It’s personal. I picked her just because we have about the same dress size! Dammit, that doesn’t make sense but it’s the way I feel.

  Wanda transferred her belongings to the unconscious woman’s purse, all but some jewelry she’d had along, then turned the thong of her own around the snoring figure’s wrist. They should fetch the equivalent of ten or fifteen thousand dollars anywhere in the earlier twentieth century; and even in Central Europe in those days you just didn’t need much in the way of identity documents.

  It’s the best I can do; if you keep your mouth shut you won’t end up in the booby hatch right away, you’ve got a stake. Or maybe the Patrol can retroactively pick you up a minute after this and fix something for you. I was right when I joined up, I’m not cut out to be a time-cop. Mammoths and sabertooths I can do. Offing someone I can’t, not unless it’s self-defense. Not face to face, not even this way.

  She studied the menus, and did another hop; this time to a quiet, leafy upper-class suburb of Munich in August of 1910, just before dawn and well before the change-point. The woman was beginning to come to as Wanda tipped her onto a wealthy family’s lawn and blinked out of existence.

  Vienna again, and a park not far from the building where Manse was being held. It was a governmental district, quiet after dark, but well-patrolled. She stepped off the timecycle and touched her watch; the nanoscale controls slaved to the communicator sent the vehicle skyward, hovering invisibly on antigrav until she summoned it. Closer, closer . . . people were walking by outside the building, giving the guards curious looks; evidently that wasn’t standard. The soldiers carried rifles with fixed bayonets and their noncoms had machine-pistols; they were older than your average farmboy conscript, and looked harder-faced and more alert, probably some sort of special brute squad.

  Wanda bought a copy of the Reichpost. The newsboy gave her a curious glance when she waved away the change from a krone coin, and then a delighted grin when he realized she was serious, and thanked her with a thickly accented danke and a sentence in some Slavic language.

  The paper gave her something to hold up as she sat on a bench across the street. The little machine built into her watch could project a pseudo-screen in the air in front of her, but that would be just a bit conspicuous without camouflage. Right now, and at this distance, it showed Manse’s stunner and his communicator, like hers concealed in a watch. They were close together, probably no more than a few feet, and neither was moving.

  She waited an hour while the sun fell and the streetlamps came on, reading the paper to keep the fear at bay, the knowledge that the world around her and herself and Manse could—very well might—just stop at any instant. That it would bring Monica back and that the Van Sarawaks would take good care of her was some consolation, but not much.

  In the paper . . .

  The Three Emperors were meeting to consolidate the peace of the Middle European and Near Eastern zone; the editorial writer solemnly assured his readers that this grouping was the pillar of world order and progress. Kaiser Wilhelm was present, plus Emperor (and King of Hungary) Franz Ferdinand, and Mehmed VI Vahid ed-din of the Ottoman Empire, as well as what the editorial page called an ‘unspeakable rabble’ of Balkan leaders, subordinate puppets and satellites from the sound of it.

  The British Prime Minister Lord Milner was reported to be considering lifting martial law in Ireland if there were no more outrages; Russia was in the middle of something more than riots but a little less than a civil war that had been going on for years, and the Reichpost was not-so-quietly happy about the way it defused the “Pan-Slav menace.”

  Bolivia and Paraguay were fighting over some stretch of scrub; the Austrian government had granted the Grand Cross of the Royal Hungarian Order of Saint Stephen to the President of Mexico, who was called Félix Díaz Velasco and was continuing the wise and stable policies of his predecessors Victoriano Huerta and his great uncle Porfirio Diaz; someone she’d never heard of named Andrew Mellon was President of the US; the new Emperor of China, Yuan Keilang, was at loggerheads with the British-backed Japanese; there was a list of scheduled airship flights that included New York, Rio, Dar es-Salam, and Singapore among their destinations . . .

  There it goes!

  The stunner and the communicator were moving away from each other, at walking pace. The communicator was moving towards a room on the third floor, the top floor of the floridly neo-Baroque building. Manse would have been working to bust the situation loose, and once things started to shift she had a chance.

  Wanda slipped the display into her purse and rose, dropping the paper on the bench. A wintry keenness filled her as she walked back towards the park. No need for much caution; this wasn’t a history the Patrol wanted to preserve.

  It probably doesn’t have a Holocaust in its future, though things just as bad will happen eventually. Offhand it looks like a world that’s a paradise for old rich European men with waxed mustaches and chests full of medals and orders. But better or worse it’s standing between me and my man and me and my daughter, and I’m an agent of the Patrol.

  Something whispered through the night above, something huge. She broke into a trot.

  VI:

  Vienna

  Austro-Hungarian Empire

  June 3rd, 1926 AD

  There was a sound outside the door, a muffled scuffle and a thud; then Manse Everard turned off the lamp and rolled off the bed. The door swung open; the Turkish officer stepped through quickly and moved to one side to avoid being silhouetted against the light. He gave a slight grim smile at the sight of the Time Patrol agent awake, alert, and fully dressed, in a fighter’s crouch close enough to leap at anyone in the vicinity of the door.

  The pistol in his hand wasn’t quite aimed at Everard, but then again it wasn’t not aimed at him, either.

  Wanda, Monica, I’m on my way!

  “That conceited braying ass von Starnberg was right, I think,” the Turk said. “You are a dangerous man, and in more ways than one, Herr Everard . . . no, you speak Turkish, don’t you?” he went on, shifting to that language. “A notable accomplishment, for a Frank.”

  “I speak a little, esteemed Binbaşı,” Everard said in that tongue, deliberately keeping the sentence simple and hoping the oddness of his speech would pass as an accent.

  In fact he spoke Turkish perfectly, legacy of a hypno for a mission in Istanbul in 2043 that he hadn’t bothered to have scrubbed from his brain yet, but it was a twenty-first-century variety. The language had gone through an upheaval about “now” in the past of Everard’s world, one which evidently hadn’t happened here. This Colonel Mustafa was speaking the old-fashioned Ottoman service-speech, full of Arabic and Persian and Albanian loan-words and curious constructions.

  “Better we use German,” Manse went on.

  Which will keep the questions to a minimum. I need to get out of this building!

  If the Patrol hadn’t sent an assault team in to snatch him they probably weren’t going to. That left Wanda, who didn’t have combat training beyond the basic Academy course and was on a commercial-model timecycle designed with all sorts of amateur-proof safety locks to prevent things like emerging with your head in the roof of a room when you tried to jump into a confined space. She’d need a good long clear run in the open to get at him. Unfortunately there was no chance at all she’d just skeddadle for a Patrol base in the deep past; he knew his wife. The only thing he could do was decrease the risk for
both of them.

  Men in Turkish uniform came through the door, dragging the limp, bleeding forms of the guards and dumping them unceremoniously; the iron-copper-seawater smell of blood was strong. A sergeant was wiping the blade of a curved knife on the hair of one of the bodies and chuckling, murmuring something in what was probably Kurdish.

  Yeah, the Three Emperor’s League is just one big love-feast, Manse thought. They may not have had World War One here, but it wasn’t because they’re a bunch of Quakers.

  “Wrap them in blankets so they don’t spill too much,” Mustafa snapped at his men in their language. “And get their rapid-fire weapons.”

  To Everard, in German: “Quickly, please, mein Herr.”

  The corridors were even more deserted, and mostly very dark; there was the still vacant feeling of a building after working hours, amid a smell of old carpets and strong coffee and tobacco soaked into the walls. A metal staircase led them up and out onto the flat roof. Something huge overhung it; it took a moment for Everard to realize it was an airship, and large only by ordinary standards, nothing like the giant he’d seen on his first day.

  Blimp, he thought, seeing the gondola slung below the gasbag. Semirigid. And Turkish colors, they didn’t have time to paint those out, but it won’t be obvious in the dark.

  Four men were on the roof, with cables snagged around convenient projections; the gondola and gasbag swayed and creaked alarmingly, and the two engine pods gave a growling rasp as they idled, and a gasoline stink. The Turkish party began a rush towards the ladder that led up ten feet to refuge . . . and stopped abruptly.

  “So, you lying pigdog,” von Stumm said as he stepped out of the shadows, a squad at his back. “Did you think your Asiatic treachery wouldn’t be noticed?”

  The Turkish officer recovered from frozen shock almost instantly. His smile showed white in the dimness.

  “Do you like the prospect of a firefight under that?” he said, jerking his pistol upwards.

  From the scowl on von Stumm’s face, he didn’t. A hail of bullets might not set off the tens of thousands of cubic meters of hydrogen hanging over them like a fiery sword. Then again, it very well might, in which case the whole building would vanish in a fireball.

  “Or you could call the Austrians for help,” Mustafa pointed out. “Since they love their Christian brothers so well.”

  Evidently von Stumm didn’t like that thought either. “Cold steel!” he bellowed to his men. “At them!”

  He whipped out the saber at his side; Mustafa did likewise with his. Metal flashed and glimmered in the dimness, bayonet and clubbed rifle, sword and knife, fists and boots and teeth. Shouts of Allah! Allah! met Hoch! and Hail Victory!; gave way to animal screams of pain and rage as the groups collided in a wave of violence.

  The Germans had numbers on their side, but the Ottomans had Manse Everard, moving through the dimness in a striking blur with the strength and speed of youth, nearly a century of field experience, and training in fighting arts selected from a million years of slaughterhouse human history. He snapped a kick into a knee with unmerciful precision and broke it, slashed the edge of his bladed palm into the angle of neck and jaw, ruptured a sternum with a thrust of stiffened fingers, slapped a bayoneted rifle aside and tossed the man over his hip in a throw that sent him head-first into a rooftop ventilator with a gruesome crack of breaking bone.

  Less than two minutes later von Stumm was alone, backing, sweat gleaming on his shaven head as Mustafa Kemal came forward in a whirlwind of steel. Manse was close enough to see the German accept a cut to the shoulder, drop the sword and yank out his pistol to fire point-blank with the muzzle pressed to Mustafa’s body.

  Before he could von Starnberg was there; the projection cone of the Time Patrol stunner was only a foot from the German’s head when he pressed the firing stud. Von Stumm dropped with a limp finality at the edge of the roof, half across the coping. The Austrian’s boot gave him a helpful shove, and the body slipped out into space to fall three long stories to the pavement below. Manse winced slightly at the sound, coming erect and suddenly conscious of the sting of a minor cut on his left forearm.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” the Austrian officer said with satisfaction. “So ein arrogantes, störendes preussisches Schwein.”

  Mustafa shook off the punch-to-the-jaw effect of being on the edge of the sonic stunner’s field. “I would say arrogant, meddling Prussian swine is quite accurate. But his death will create a stir.”

  “Then let us depart, my dear Binbaşı,” von Starnberg said.

  The surviving Turks and the Austrian squad climbed quickly up the ladder into the gondola; even with the dead left behind it was a crowded metal space, like a giant canoe with the controls at a glassed-in area of the front, and crawlspaces for mechanics to creep out and maintain the engines.

  Which are probably very unreliable indeed, Manse thought.

  Dim riding lights behind heavy frosted glass gave the men inside a ghastly semblance like animated corpses, fitting accompaniment for the smell of blood and the moans of the injured. There was a rumble of water being released from the ballast tanks as the growl of the engines rose to a roar, and a rising-elevator sensation as the blimp surged upwards. Von Starnberg made a motion towards his cigarette case and then halted it, looking upward and laughing. Instead he took out a flask and drank, offering it to Mustafa.

  “Cognac,” he said.

  “It is forbidden,” the man said. “But thank you.”

  Forbidden when you’re in public, Manse thought, as he accepted it himself; he’d seen the flick of the Turkish officer’s eyes towards his men.

  The brandy wasn’t as good as he would have expected from an obvious dandy and bon viveur like the Austrian, but it had alcohol in it and that was what he wanted just now. Meanwhile an Austrian medic attended to the wounded, bandaging and dusting wounds with antiseptic and administering morphine. Von Starnberg spoke sharply to one of his men, who unslung his pack and brought out wrapped parcels and several bottles.

  “Now this is just lemonade,” von Starnberg said, swigging deeply from one, wiping the mouth and handing it on to Mustafa as his soldier gave out the other bottles. “And here we have cold chicken, bread, cheese, and chocolate—no pork products, I assure you, gentlemen. Drink, eat; fighting is thirsty, hungry work.”

  There was a murmur as one of the Turks translated for the benefit of his monoglot comrades. Mustafa’s manner thawed somewhat.

  “That was considerate of you, Freiherr,” he said. “On behalf of my men, I thank you. And for the medical attention.”

  Von Starnberg’s smile was charming. “No, no, I assure you, it was the least I could do.”

  VII:

  100 meters altitude

  Lake Balaton

  Austro-Hungarian Empire

  June 4th, 1926 AD

  Wanda Everard’s frustration turned to horror as the first of the bodies dropped from the gondola. The blimp was running without lights, only the dim red glow of the exhausts showing. The naked corpses struck the water and sank instantly; they must be weighed down. The lights of towns and villas and resorts shone cruelly indifferent from the low southern shore.

  Then the aircraft pointed its nose upward and began to climb. She followed automatically, her hands on the bars that controlled normal-space flight.

  That couldn’t have been Manse. They could have killed him in Vienna. This is some sort of internal quarrel, they’re fighting over him, they’re advanced enough here/now to understand what the technology they’ve seen must mean . . .

  The blimp rose to a thousand meters and accelerated to about sixty miles an hour, crawling eastward through the night.

  VIII:

  Transylvania

  Austro-Hungarian Empire

  June 5th, 1926

  “Für einen Türken is der Mustafa ein schlauer Kerl. Ich werde schau’n, dass er die Schuld an allem kriegt,” von Starnberg explained cheerfully.

  “For a Turk, Mustafa was a very cl
ever fellow. I intend to see that he will get all the blame. A pity, he might have been a great man anywhere but Turkey. Still, the Turks are barbarians and strain themselves to manufacture rifle cartridges. We Austrians have the means to take advantage of your knowledge, Herr Everard. I’ve arranged for a very comfortable schloss near Kronstadt, and soon the world will be surprised, eh?”

  “You used thallium in the lemonade?” Everard asked grimly, looking at the stinking stains on the gondola’s floor.

  “Yes, rat poison. I’ve been taking Prussian Blue . . . appropriate, nein? . . . for several days now. There was more antidote in the brandy, just in case.”

  “What if Mustafa had accepted the brandy?”

  “Then he would have been merely uncomfortable while his men fell dead, and alive when he went into the water,” Von Starnberg said cheerfully. “Ah, we’re nearly there. Come, take a look at your temporary residence, Herr Everard . . . may I call you Manse? Not too bad a place; they make their pastries too sweet and the coffee is vile, but some of the wines are excellent and the Rumanian girls clean up nicely. And cheer up! I will be a very great man when this project succeeds, the next thing to a king, and I know how to reward good service. Money, power, women, estates, titles? You will be able to take your pick.”

  Except for wondering about the lemonade, Manse thought, and licked his lips as he came to stand beside the Austrian in the opened door.

  The wind wasn’t too bad as the blimp slowed, and it was nearly dawn. A pale colorless light showed densely forested mountains below, low but steep, and on a height the towers of a fairytale Gothic castle, massive towers and courtyards, with a few lights showing in the windows.