Poul Anderson - The Year of the Ransom

“What an adventure! I should adapt. We didn’t plan on remaining Victorians forever.”

“And you’ve ruled out twentieth-century America. Hm, what about his ties there?”

“He comes from an old California family. It has distant Peruvian connections. A great-grandfather of his was a sea captain who married a young lady in Lima and brought her home with him. Perhaps that helped interest him in early Peru. I suppose you know he became an anthropologist, later practiced archaeology down there. He has a married brother in San Francisco. His own first marriage ended in divorce, shortly before he enlisted in the Patrol. That was—will be—in 1968. Subsequently he resigned his professorship and told everyone he had a grant from a learned institution, which would enable him to do independent research. This explains his frequent prolonged absences. He does still keep bachelor quarters, so as to remain in touch with kin and friends, and has no plans at present to phase out of their lives. At last he must, and knows it, but—” She smiled. “He has talked about seeing his favorite niece get married and have a baby. He says he wants to enjoy being a granduncle.”

Everard ignored the scrambled tenses. It was inevitable when you spoke any language but Temporal. “Favorite niece, eh?” he murmured. “That kind of person is often useful, apt to know a lot and tell it freely without getting suspicious. What do you know about her?”

“Her name is Wanda, and she was born in 1965. The last several mentions of her that Stephen made to me, she was, m-m, a student of biology at a place called Stanford University. As a matter of fact, he scheduled his departure on this last mission from California rather than London so he could first see his relatives there in, oh, yes, 1986.”

“I had better interview her.”

A knock sounded on the door. “Come in,” the woman called.

The maid entered. “There is a person who asks to see you, missus,” she announced. “Mr. Basscase, he says is his name.” With frosty disapproval: “A gentleman of color.”

“That’s the other agent,” Everard muttered to his hostess. “Earlier than I expected.”

“Send him in,” she directed.

Julio Vasquez did indeed look out of place: short, stocky, bronze of skin, black of hair, with wide features and arched nose. He was almost pure native Andean, though born in the twenty-second century, Everard knew. Still, this neighborhood had doubtless grown somewhat accustomed to exotic visitors. Not only was London the center of a planet-wide empire, York Place divided Baker Street.

Helen Tamberly received the newcomer graciously, and now she did send for tea. The Patrol had cured her of any Victorian racism. Necessarily, the language became Temporal, for she had no Spanish (or Quechua!) and English was not important enough in Vasquez’s life, either before or after he joined the Patrol, for him to acquire more than some stock phrases.

“I have learned very little,” he said. “It was an especially difficult undertaking, the more so on such short notice. To the Spaniards I was merely another Indian. How could I approach one, let alone make inquiries of him? I could have been flogged for insolence, or killed out of hand.”

“The Conquistadores were a bunch of bas—of hellhounds, all right,” Everard remarked. “As I recall, after Atahualpa’s ransom was in, Pizarro didn’t let him go. No, he put him before a kangaroo court on a bunch of trumped-up charges and sentenced him to death. To be burned alive, wasn’t it?”

“It was commuted to strangling when he accepted baptism,” Vasquez said, “and a number of the Spanish, including Pizarro himself, felt guilty about the matter afterward. They had been afraid Atahualpa, set free, would stir up a revolt against them. Their later puppet Inca, Manco, did.” He paused. “Yes, the Conquest was ghastly, slaughters, lootings, enslavements. But, my friends, you were taught history in anglophone schools, and Spain was for centuries England’s rival. Propaganda from that conflict has endured. The truth is that the Spaniards, Inquisition and all, were no worse than anyone else of that era, and better than many. Some, such as Cortes himself, and even Torquemada, tried to get a measure of justice for the natives. It is worth remembering that those populations survived throughout most of Latin America, on ancestral soil, whereas the English, with their yanqui and Canadian successors, made a nearly clean sweep.”

“Touché,” said Everard wryly.

“Please,” Helen Tamberly whispered.

“My apologies, señora.” Vasquez gave her a bow from his chair. “I did not mean to tantalize you, only to explain why I could find out very little. Apparently the friar and a soldier went into the house where the hoard was kept one night. When they did not reappear by dawn, the guards grew nervous and opened the door. They were not inside. Every door had been watched. Sensational rumors flew. What I heard was through the Indies, and I could not query them either. Remember, I was a stranger among them, and they hardly ever traveled away from home. The upheaval in progress allowed me to concoct a story accounting for my presence in the city, but it would not have withstood examination, had anyone grown interested in me.”

Everard puffed hard on his pipe. “Hm,” he said around it, “I gather that Tamberly, as the friar, had access to each new load of treasure, to pray over it or whatever. Actually, he took holograms of the artwork, for future people’s information and enjoyment. But what about that soldier?”

Vasquez shrugged. “I heard his name, Luis Castelar, and that he was a cavalry officer who had distinguished himself in the campaign. Some said he might have plotted to steal the wealth, but others replied that that was unthinkable of so honorable a knight, not to mention good-hearted Fray Tanaquil. Pizarro interrogated the sentries at length but, I heard, satisfied himself about their honesty. After all, the hoard was still there. When I left, the general idea was that sorcerers had been at work. Hysteria was building rapidly. It could have hideous consequences.”

“Which are not in the history we learned,” Everard growled. “How critical is that exact piece of space-time?”

“The Conquest as a whole, certainly vital, a key part of world events. This one episode—who knows? We have not ceased to exist, in spite of being uptime of it.”

“Which doesn’t mean we can’t cease,” said Everard roughly. We can have never been, ourselves and the whole world that begot us. It’s a perishing more absolute than death. “The Patrol shall concentrate everything it can spare on that span of days or weeks. And proceed with extreme caution,” he added to Helen Tamberly. “What could have happened? Have you any clues, Agent Vasquez?”

“I may have a slender one,” the other man told them. “I suspect that somebody with a time vehicle had in mind hijacking the ransom.”

“Yeah, that’s a fair guess. One of Tamberly’s assignments was to keep an eye on developments and let the Patrol know of anything suspicious.”

“How could he before he returned uptime?” the woman wondered aloud.

“He left recorded messages in what looked like ordinary rocks, but which emitted identifying Y-radiation,” Everard explained. “The agreed-on spots were checked, but nothing was there except brief, routine reports on what he’d been experiencing.”

“I was taken from my real mission for this investigation,” Vasquez went on. “My work was a generation earlier, in the reign of Huayna Capac, father of Atahualpa and Huáscar. We can’t understand the Conquest without an understanding of the great and complex civilization that it destroyed.” An imperium reaching from Ecuador deep into Chile, and from the Pacific seaboard to the headwaters of the Amazon. “And . . . it seems that strangers appeared at the court of that Inca in 1524, about a year before his death. They resembled Europeans and were taken to be such; the realm had heard rumors of men from afar. They left after a while, nobody knew where or how. But when I was called back uptime, I had begun to get intimations that they tried to persuade Huayna not to give Atahualpa such power that he could rival Huáscar. They failed; the old man was stubborn. But that the attempt was made is significant, no?”