Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

Verkan Wall, his story finished, relaxed in his chair. There was no direct light on this terrace, only a sky-reflection from the city lights below, so dim that the tips of their cigarettes glowed visibly.

There were four of them. the Chief of Paratime Police, the Director of the Paratime Commission, the Chairman of the Paratemporal Board of Trade, and Chief’s Assistant Verkan Wall, who would be chief in another hundred days.

“You took no action about him?” the director asked.

“None at all. The man’s no threat to the Paratime Secret. He knows he isn’t in his own past, and from things he ought to find and hasn’t he knows he isn’t in his own future. So he knows he’s in the corresponding present in a second time dimension, and he knows that somebody else is able to travel laterally in time. I grant that. But he’s keeping it to himself. On Aryan-Transpacific, in the idiom of his original time-line, he has it made. He won’t take any chances on unmaking it.

“Look what he has that the Europo-American Sector could never give him. He is a great nobleman; they’re out of fashion on Europo-American, where the Common Man is the ideal. He’s going to marry a beautiful princess, that’s even out of fashion for children’s fairy tales. He’s a sword-swinging soldier of fortune, and they’ve vanished from his own nuclear-weapons world. He’s in command of a good little army, and making a better one out of it, and he has a cause worth fighting for. Any speculations about what space-time continuum he’s in he’ll keep inside his own skull.

“Look at the story he put out. He told Xentos that he had been thrown into the past from a time in the far future by sorcery. Sorcery, on that timeline, is a perfectly valid scientific explanation of anything. Xentos, with his permission, passed the story on, under oath of secrecy, to Ptosphes, Rylla, and Chartiphon. The story they gave out is that he’s an exiled prince from a country outside local geographical knowledge. Regular defense in depth, all wrapped around the real secret, and everybody has an acceptable explanation.”

“How’d you get it, then?” the Board Chairman asked.

“From Xentos, at the feast. I got him into a theological discussion, and slipped some hypno truth-drug into his wine. He doesn’t remember, now, that he told me.”

“Well, nobody else on that time-line’ll get it that way,” the Commission director agreed. “But didn’t you take a chance getting those things of Morrison’s out of the temple? Was that necessary?”

“No. We ran a conveyer in the night of the feast, when the temple was empty. The next morning, the priests all cried, ‘A miracle! Dralm has accepted the offering!” I was there and saw it.

Morrison doesn’t believe that, he thinks some of these pack traders who left Hostigos the next morning stole the stuff. I know Harmakros’ cavalrymen were stopping people and searching wagons and packs.

Publicly, of course, he has to believe in the miracle.

“As to the necessity, yes. This stuff will be found on Morrison’s original time-line, first the clothing, with the numbered badge still on the tunic, and, later, in connection with some crime we’ll arrange for the purpose, the revolver.

They won’t explain anything, they’ll make more of a mystery, but it will be a mystery in normal terms of what’s locally accepted as possible.”

“Well, this is all very interesting,” the Trade Board chairman said, “but what have I to do with it, officially?”

“Trenth, you disappoint me,” the Commission director said. “This Styphon’s House racket is perfect for penetration of that subsector, and in a couple of centuries it’ll be a very valuable subsector to have penetrated.

We’ll just move in on Styphon’s House, and take it over, the way we did the Yat-Zar temples on the Hulgun Sector, and build that up to general economic and political control.”

“You’ll have to stay off Morrison’s time-line, though,” Tortha Karf said.

“You certainly will!” He was vehement about it. “We’ll turn that timeline over to the University, here, for study, and quarantine it absolutely to everybody else. And about five adjoining time-lines, for control study. You know what we have here?” He was becoming excited about it. “We have the start of an entirely new subsector, and we have the divarication point absolutely identified, the first time we’ve been able to do that except from history. Now, here; I’ve already established myself with those people as Verkan the Grefftscharr trader. I’ll get back, now and then, about as frequently as plausible for traveling by horse, and set up a trading depot. A building big enough to put a conveyer head into ...”

Tortha Karf began laughing. “I knew it,” he said. “You’d find some way!”

“All right. We all have hobbies; yours is fruit-growing and rabbit-hunting on Fifth Level Sicily. Well, my hobby farm is going to be the Kalvan Subsector, Fourth Level Aryan-Transpacific. I’m only a hundred and twenty years old, now. In a couple of centuries, when I’m ready to retire ...”

Ursula K. Le Guin is so universally respected as a writer these days, and so honored as one of science fiction’s most profound thinkers and complex and subtle artists, that it’s sometimes forgotten that when she first appeared, the writer that she was most often compared to was Leigh Brackett—indeed, she was referred to on at least one occasion as “the New Leigh Brackett.” It’s often also forgotten these days that her first few books— Rocannon World , the strongly van Vogtian City of Illusions , and her best early book, the underrated and still largely overlooked (even by Le Guin fans) Planet of Exile —were published by Ace as pulp-adventure Space Opera of the most basic, lowest—common denominator sort (much as Samuel R. Delany’s first books were also being published as stock Space Opera, at about the same time, by the same publishing house), with garish pulp covers and lurid pulp blurbs such as “Wherever he went, his superscience made him a legendary figure!” and “Was he a human meteor or a time-bomb from the stars?”

As it turned out, Le Guin had a greater destiny to fulfill than to become merely the new Queen Of The Space-Ways—but although she became more than that, and explored literary territories far beyond the purview of Space Opera, the New Leigh Brackett lurks somewhere in her still, a vital component part of her artistic makeup. Indeed, her recent return to the star-spanning, Hainish-settled interstellar community known as the Ekumen (the fictional universe that provided the setting for those early novels) in stories such as “Forgiveness Day” and “A Woman’s Liberation” and “Another Story” demonstrates that she can still spin a tale of Interplanetary Adventure and Intrigue as fast-paced and compelling and compulsively readable as any ever produced by anyone anywhere. with the additional benefit of being able to explore politics, human sexuality, competing social modes and models for civilization, and the fundamental questions of life, death, and moral responsibility, perhaps a bit more fully and more complexly than that early Le Guin of the garish Ace Doubles would have been allowed to do. But then, one thing she has in common with Brackett, and perhaps the thing that made critics compare Le Guin to her in the first place, is that Le Guin rarely if ever forgets about Story, and the fact that the deep heart of any story is provided by the people who live in it.

A lesson she already knew well at the very beginning of her career, as the haunting and yet suspenseful story that follows, one of her first sales, demonstrates very well ...