Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“I know,” said Everard, annoyed.

“I did not mean to patronize you,” Shalten replied blandly, “only to make clear my point. Greek Bactria was as safe a piece of history as we could find to lure the Exaltationists to. It had never much mattered to the rest of the world, and an extraordinary concatenation of fantastically implausible occurrences, not just there but around the entire Hellenistic sphere, would have been required to change this. Therefore, by the law of action and reaction, its own mesh of world lines is especially stable, especially hard to distort. Of course, we were at pains to give the Exaltationists the opposite impression.”

Everard sank back in his chair. “I’ll … be … damned.” Probably, gibed his mind.

Shalten’s parched little smile twitched. “And now,” he said, “we must terminate the deception. As I recall, the expression in your natal period is ‘tie up the loose ends.’ In your position among us, you need to know the whole truth. For you to learn it later in this century could pose a hazard. Causational loops can be very subtle. Your experiences and accomplishments in Bactria must continue to have happened. Therefore you must be informed well pastward of our preparations for them. I thought you would enjoy a visit to my Belle Époque.”

“Uh, you mean, uh, that letter the Russian soldier found in Afghanistan, that became the bait in our trap—it was a fake?”

“Exactly. Did the thought never occur to you?”

“But—you had a million years or more to find some suitable incident—”

“Better to create one to specifications. Eh? Well, it has served its purpose. Prudence dictates that it be removed, annulled. There shall never have been a letter to find.”

Everard sat straight. The stem of his pipe broke in his fist. He ignored the coals that fell onto the lush carpet. “Wait a minute!” he cried. “You’ve been tinkering with reality yourself?”

“Under authorization,” he heard; and his jaws locked on silence.

Here, where the Bear stars wheeled too low, night struck cold into blood and bone. By day, mountains closed off every horizon with stone, snow, glaciers, clouds. A man’s mouth dried as he gasped his way over the ridges, rocks rattling from beneath his boots, for he could never draw one honest breath of air. And then there was fear of the rifle bullet or the knife after, dark that would spill his bit of life out on this empty land. Yuri Alexeievitch Garshin stumbled lost and alone.

“Oh!” Wanda Tamberly cried. “Oh, look!”

Her horse snorted and shied. Hands and knees worked for her, quieting it, while she herself leaned forward, sight grabbing what it could as the marvel passed by. Alarmed at the approach of the great beasts, a dozen animals had bolted from the underbrush on her left. Brightness flashed over mottled coats, bodies of wolfhound size, trifurcate hoofs, heads eerily equine. Then they were across the trail and lost again in wilderness. Tu Sequeira laughed. “Ancestors?” He touched his mount and hers, as though to demonstrate he knew that man’s forebears were snuffling and scuttling about in African jungles. On their way back, his fingers stroked across her thigh.

She hardly noticed. Happiness bubbled and danced. Earth of the Oligocene epoch was a paleontologist’s paradise. “Mesohippus?” she wondered aloud. “I think not, not quite. Nor miohippus; too early for that, isn’t it? But they know so little, really. Even with time machines, they’ve learned so little. An intermediate species? If only I’d brought a camera!”

“A what?” he asked. Unthinkingly, she had thrown the English word into the Temporal that was, thus far, their sole common language.

“An optical recording device.” The act of explaining drew off most of her excitement. After all, today she had spied any number of creatures. Patrol folk could not avoid an impact on the surroundings of their Academy, a thinning out of nature. If nothing else, lionlike nimravus and saber-toothed eusmilus had long since been shot by holiday makers whom they attacked; and that affected the entire local ecology. However, when cadets had more than a single day free, they generally flitted to some distant region, a mountain to climb, a scenic path to hike, an idyllic island. On the whole, humankind touched very lightly the ages before humankind evolved. To Tamberly this region seemed still almost virginal, set against the Sierra or the Yellowstone of her birthtime.

“You’ll have to learn about cameras,” she said, “and a lot of other crude gadgets. Whew! Suddenly I get a notion of just how much you have got to learn.”

“We all do,” he replied. “I’d be hard put to master everything you must.”

Modesty wasn’t his usual style. The thought crossed her mind that maybe he was realizing that, although she enjoyed his flamboyancy, it wasn’t the sort of thing that could hold her for long. Or—an inward shrug—maybe he’d decided to start practicing a more subdued manner. He’d need that capability in the career ahead of him.

Whichever, he spoke truth. The Patrol took education techniques from the far future of both their eras. In a couple of hours you could gain fluency in any language, directly imprinted in your memory; and that was a minor example. Nevertheless the intensity of training and education pushed the edge of human endurance. Any respite came, and went, like sunshine striking into a hurricane’s eye. She had joined Sequeira on this excursion because she’d slightly rather do that than sleep.

“Well, but I’ll be dealing with critters,” she demurred. The Americanism dropped into her Temporal before she noticed. “People are what’s complicated, and they’ll be your problem.”

Born on Mars in the Solar Commonwealth, after graduation he would be among those who studied and monitored the earliest stages of spacefaring. To work one’s way into such places as Peenemünde, White Sands, and Tyuratam meant not only personal risk. It meant any sacrifice necessary to preserve the course of events heavy with consequences for history.

Sequeira’s lips crinkled upward. “Speaking of people and complications, we don’t have to report for class till 0800 tomorrow.”

She felt the blood rise and beat in her face. What cadets did on their own scant time was their own business, provided it didn’t make them unfit. Temptation, oh, my. A fling before the next long grind — But do I want any such involvement? “At the moment the mess hall calls,” she said fast. They ate well there, often gloriously. The staff had the cuisines of the ages at their command.

He laughed again. “Far be it from me to stand in your way. I could get a Wanda-sized hole through me, couldn’t I? Afterward—Let’s go!” The trail was barely wide enough for them to sit side by side, knees touching. He put heels to his horse and set off at a brisk canter. Following, she thought that his litheness should not be clad in a plain issue coverall; a scarlet cloak ought to ripple from those shoulders. Hey, gal, ease off.

They left the woods and descended steeply out of the hills. An eastward view opened to her. For a moment she lost everything but the awe and the wonder of being here, now, she herself, thirty million years before she was born.

Light streamed golden across a prairie reaching beyond sight. Wildflower-starred, grass rippled and, she knew, rustled under the wind. In places, a grove or a thicket interrupted immensity, and in the distance trees lined a great brown river. She knew also how its water and its mud surged with life, larvae, insects, fish, frogs, snakes, waterfowl, herds of rooting merycoidodon like giant hogs or small slender hippopotami. Wings filled heaven.