Poul Anderson: Star of the Sea

“Uh, Veleda?”

“The sibyl. She’s called on every tribe to rise. Rome is doomed, the goddess tells her, and ours shall be the victory.” The Batavian squared his shoulders. “Do what you like to me, Roman. You’re a dead man, you with your whole stinking Empire.”

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, a minor export-import business fronted for the Amsterdam office of the Time Patrol. Its warehouse, with attached office, was in the Indische Buurt, where exotic-looking people drew scant attention.

Manse Everard’s timecycle appeared in the secret part of the building early one May morning. He had to wait a minute or so at the exit when the door indicated that somebody was passing by on the other side who shouldn’t see that it wasn’t merely a wainscot—doubtless an ordinary employee of the company. Then it opened to his key. The arrangement seemed a bit clumsy to him, but he supposed it suited local conditions.

He found his way to the manager, who was also chief of Patrol operations throughout this corner of Europe. Those were usually routine, or as routine as is possible when you deal with traffic up and down the lanes of history. This wasn’t milieu headquarters, after all. It hadn’t even appeared to be overseeing an especially important sector, till now.

“We weren’t expecting you yet, sir,” said Willem Ten Brink, surprised. “Shall I call Agent Floris?”

“No, thanks,” Everard replied. “I’ll meet her later as arranged. Just thought I’d first look around the city a little. Haven’t been here since, uh, 1952, when I spent a few days on a vacation trip. I liked it.”

“Well, I hope you enjoy yourself. Things have changed, you know. Do you wish a guide, a car, any kind of assistance? No? What about facilities for your conference?”

“No need, I think. Her message said she could best explain matters, at least to start with, at her place.” Despite the other man’s obvious disappointment, Everard let forth no hint of what the matters were. They were plenty delicate without leaking information to anybody who didn’t require it and didn’t work outside his birth era. Besides, Everard wasn’t quite sure what did threaten.

Equipped with a map, a walletful of gulden, and a few practical cues, he strolled off. At a tobacconist’s he bought refills for his pipe and a strippenkart for the public transit system. He hadn’t had Dutch instilled, but everybody he encountered possessed excellent English. Footloose, he drifted.

Thirty-four years was a long absence. (Longer than that on his personal world line, of course. He had meanwhile joined the Patrol and become an Unattached agent and snaked around through the ages, across most of the planet. Now the London of Elizabeth the First or the Pasargadae of Cyrus the Great stood him nearer than did the streets he would walk today. Had that summer really been so golden, or had he simply been young, unburdened with too much knowledge?) He half dreaded what he might find.

The following hours relieved him. Amsterdam had not become the sewer that some people nowadays called it. From the Dam to the Central Station, it pullulated with scruffy youth, but he saw no one making trouble. In alleys directly off the Damrak you could idle a delightful while in a sidewalk café or a small bar with a huge beer selection. The sleaze shops were at fairly wide intervals, tucked in among ordinary businesses and extraordinary bookstores. When he took a canal tour and the guide insouciantly pointed out the red-light district, what Everard saw was more of the centuried houses that dignified the entire old part of town. He’d been warned about pickpockets but had no need to take precautions against muggers. He’d breathed worse smog in New York and dodged more dog droppings around Gramercy Park than in any residential section here. For lunch he found a friendly little place where they cooked a mean dish of eel. The Stedelijke Museum was a letdown—as regarded modern art, he admitted being an unreconstructed philistine—but he lost himself in the Rijks, forgetting all else, till closing time.

By then he was soon due at Floris’s. The hour had been his suggestion, in their preliminary phone conversation. She hadn’t demurred. A field agent, Specialist second class, ranked fairly high, but still didn’t normally argue with an Unattached. It wasn’t too eccentric a time of day anyhow, when you could hop straight to it from whenever you were. Probably she’d skipped uptime shortly after breakfast.

For his part, this relaxed interlude hadn’t dulled alertness. On the contrary. Also, by giving him some slight acquaintance with her hometown, the background whence she sprang, it started him on a knowledge of her. He needed that. They might be working very closely together.

His route afoot from the Museumplein took him along the Singelgracht and down through part of Vondelpark. Water gleamed, leaves and grass glowed with sunlight. A boy paddled a hired canoe, his girl in the bow before his eyes; a gray-haired couple walked hand in hand under trees with more years than themselves; a band of bicyclists swept by him in a storm of shouts and laughter. He harked back to the Oude Kerk, the Rembrandts, yes, the Van Goghs he hadn’t yet seen, all the life that pulsed in the city today and in past and future, everything that begot and nourished it. And he knew their whole reality for a spectral flickering, diffraction rings across abstract, unstable space-time, a manifold brightness that at any instant could not only cease to be but cease ever having been.

No! He must never let himself brood so. It would merely shake him in his duty, which was to get on with whatever pragmatic, prosaic operations were necessary to safeguard this existence. He lengthened his stride.

The apartment building he sought was one of a row on a quiet street, handsome relics from around 1910. A directory in the entry told him that Janne Floris lived on the fourth floor. It gave her profession vaguely as bestuurder , administrator; for purposes of maintaining a local persona, she was on the payroll of Ten Brink’s company.

Otherwise Everard knew only that she did field research in the Roman Iron Age, that period when the archaeology of northern Europe began fitfully merging with recorded history. He’d been tempted to call up her service record, which he had authority to do within limits. That was surely no easy milieu for a woman of any kind, let alone a scientist from its future. He’d decided against it, at any rate till they’d talked. Better that his first impression be direct. Also, the business might turn out not to be a real crisis. Maybe investigation would show nothing worse than some kind of mistake or misunderstanding, with no corrective action required.

He found her door and pushed the bell. She opened it. For a moment they stood mute.

Was she taken aback too? Had she expected the Unattached agent to be something more impressive than a big, homely guy with a battle-dented nose and still, after all he’d been through, “Midwesterner” written upon him? He’d certainly not awaited as goodly a sight as this tall blonde in her elegantly understated gown.

“How do you do,” he managed in English. “I am—”

She smiled, broad mouth baring large teeth. Snub-nosed, heavy-browed, her features weren’t conventionally pretty, apart from eyes of changeable turquoise, but he admired them, and her figure could have belonged to an athletic Juno. “Agent Everard,” she finished for him. “An honor, sir.” The tone was warm without being subservient and she shook hands as if with an equal. “Welcome.”