Ben Jeapes - Time's Chariot

‘It was definitely him?’ Orendal gave the impression of a woman desperately clinging onto hope.

‘The body was smashed badly but we got residual brain patterns. It was him.’

Orendal’s shoulders sagged. ‘The poor man.’

‘It could have happened at any time,’ said Asaldra, nodding wisely.

‘So why didn’t the agravs stop his body falling?’ Rico said to the Security Op. ‘Someone would have to turn them off.’

‘The agravs haven’t been touched since their last routine maintenance… who are you?’ the Op said.

‘Someone who shouldn’t be here,’ Asaldra said. ‘Kindly see that this man is escorted off the premises. Now.’

‘You’re Su! Su Zo!’ Orendal exclaimed suddenly. She was looking past Rico and Su, who had been trying to lurk in the background, reluctantly came forward.

‘Marje?’ she said.

‘You know this woman, Commissioner?’ Asaldra sounded somewhere between disapproving and disappointed.

‘We did our basic induction together,’ Marje said. ‘How are you, Su?’

‘I’m doing OK,’ Su said.

‘You went into Fieldwork, I heard?’

Su nodded. ‘Senior Field Op. I heard about your promotion, Marje, I’d say congratulations, but…’

‘I know.’ Orendal pursed her lips but managed a smile. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll take my partner and leave, if that’s all right with you?’ Su said. She plucked at Rico’s sleeve and didn’t let go.

Orendal’s smile grew slightly less forced. ‘It might be wise. I’ll see you around, Su.’

‘That went well,’ Su said as they stepped into the courtyard. It was the first time she had trusted herself to speak since taking their leave of Orendal and Asaldra.

Rico grunted.

‘It’s not often you get the chance to be rude to one of the most senior people in the organization that employs you,’ Su went on.

‘She was Acting and I wasn’t rude to her.’

‘Her friend seemed to think you were.’

‘Yeah, well, her friend was another matter.’ Rico thought back to those pale eyes, the hostile tone, and decided he could live with the knowledge that he had made an enemy. ‘Pair of tossers anyway. Wait here.’

‘Now what are you—’ Su said, but Rico had already scooped up two handfuls of pebbles from the gravel that surrounded the fountain. He walked back to the balcony and the drop down the mountainside, held out his left hand and opened his fingers. The pebbles fell three inches, then stopped in mid-air, spinning gently. They floated back over the stone parapet and fell at Rico’s feet.

‘Yup, the agravs work all right,’ Rico said. Then without warning he drew back his right hand and flung the other handful as far as he could into the abyss. The pebbles flew out in a scattered arc and plunged into the depths below. Rico followed them with his eyes, leaning out over the stonework as far as he could.

‘Aha,’ he said.

‘Just what are you doing, Garron?’ Su demanded.

‘Just testing a theory.’

‘And?’

‘It works but it doesn’t make sense. Come on.’ They walked back across the courtyard to the recall area, and thirty seconds later were back in the Home Time.

The time display set into the wall of the spherical transference chamber showed it was 15 minutes after they had left — precisely the time they had spent in Commissioner Daiho’s apartment. The apartment had a constant and timed stream of transmit and recall fields going under the control of the Register, the artificial mind that governed transference, and this was the Register’s arbitrary way of handling the flow of cause and effect. It could have bought them back a second after they had left, but the rules were that however long you spent upstream, that was how long elapsed before you were back in the Home Time. One of the tenets of Morbern’s Code:

The span of my life is synchronised to other lives around me. I will not abuse the power of the College to break that synchronisation.

… as Rico and Su could have recited without even thinking about it.

‘I know you don’t like the correspondents,’ Su said as they stepped out of the chamber. Outside, the transference hall would have dwarfed a cathedral. The chambers were silver spheres set into walkways — row upon row, above, below and beside them.

‘It’s not that.’ Rico scowled at her. ‘It’s not that she’s replacing the Commissioner for Correspondents. That’s a job for politicos who might not have had anything to do with the College.’

‘Then what?’

‘It’s what she was. Still is. Head of Psychological Profiles. She’s the one who decides if someone’s suitable for being a correspondent or not. She’s the one who sends them out to their deaths in the first place.’

‘Funny,’ Su said, ‘I could have sworn you worked for the College. You know, the organization that employs her and pays her to send them out to their deaths.’

Rico growled. His relationship with and feelings towards the College were complex, and she knew it.

‘Not everything the College does is bad,’ he muttered.

‘Oh, Rico.’ Su took his hand and looked into his eyes. ‘Look. You blew it once and you were lucky. Please, please don’t do it again.’

‘I won’t drag you down,’ Rico said.

‘It’s not me I’m worried about, you cretin.’

Rico changed the subject. ‘We should get to work. What does the Register have planned for us today?’

‘Escort duty. A professor and some students to Amazonia, C14, alpha stream.’

‘Off we go, then.’

They went off to change into their fieldsuits and to meet up with the group they were to escort. An hour later they had again left the Home Time.

The air was warm and close under the canopy of trees, and the ground was speckled by the sunlight that beamed through the leaves. The hum of life was everywhere — the humus on the ground, the leaves up above, and the thriving chain of ecosystems around the tree trunks that linked the two. Life was engaged in a constant, to-the-death battle with itself and yet was involved in an intricate balance, every organism depending minutely on every other.

It was also sauna-bath hot and the group of humans who materialized out of the shadows began to sweat buckets the moment they appeared. But that was OK, Rico Garron thought, because they were probably taking the same water back in with every breath of the humid air.

A monkey swung through the branches overhead and Rico was sure it had noticed them, but it wasn’t concerned. He and the rest of the party were doused in neutral pheromones and they had been inserted into the timestream with minimal disturbance, so the monkey might have had a brief disorientation but was otherwise undisturbed. As it should be.

He returned his attention to the group and listened to Su ending her Senior Field Op’s spiel. Her sleeve was rolled back and she was studying her forearm. Her field computer was embedded there and data symbols ran over her skin. Field Ops had to travel unnoticed amongst bygoner people and their equipment had to be as unobtrusive as possible, though in this case that wasn’t an issue. They were in the middle of uninhabited jungle and their fieldsuits were in their natural, non-camo state: slick, dark grey gelfabric.

‘We are at sixty degrees west, four degrees south,’ Su said. ‘In the Home Time this is the middle of Brasilia ecopolis. There’s a tributary of the Amazon ten miles north of us.’

‘Are there predators?’ said one of the students. He was a pale, nervous young man.

Rico showed his teeth in a smile without humour. ‘Almost certainly. Everything around here preds.’ The student went even paler. Rico symbed a command to his own field computer and a display appeared in his vision. ‘But there’s nothing dangerous at present within a quarter of a mile, and certainly no bygoners. Your repulsion field is keyed to the local fauna and it’ll come on if anything predatory approaches you.’