Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

Red Wolf stopped three paces from the leader. Eyes stared into eyes. Silence stretched amidst the wind. “Greeting,” Red Wolf said at last. “Who are you?’

The bearded lips moved. What came out sounded like birds twittering. “Can they not speak?” Horsecatcher grumbled. “Are they human?”

“They are certainly hideous,” Caribou Antler said.

“Not the woman so much,” Broken Blade murmured.

Red Wolf’s gaze traveled across the maiden. Her tresses tumbled thick past a delicate face. She shivered and clutched the cape about her slight form. He pulled his attention back to the man, whom he guessed was her father. Tapping his chest, he named himself. The third time he did so, the other seemed to understand, pointed at his own breast, and uttered, “Aryuk.” Waving a hand: “Tulat.”

“Well, we know what to call them,” Red Wolf said.

“Real names?” wondered Running Fox. Among his folk, that was a secret between a man and his dream spirit.

“No matter,” Red Wolf snapped. He saw, he could Well-nigh smell, the strain in his company. It was in him too. What of that mysterious woman? They must not let fear suck away their courage. “Come, we will look about.”

He stalked onward. Aryuk and the oldest youth moved to stand side by side, to hold him off. He grinned and jabbed air with his spear. They shrank, made way, whispered among themselves. “Where is your protector today?” Red Wolf jeered. Only the wind replied. Emboldened, his men pressed at his back. The dwellers trailed them, a disordered gaggle, half frightened, half sullen.

A little farther on, the Cloud People found their home. The gulch broadened and a bluff jutted into the river above high-water mark. From the brush-grown slope behind trickled a spring—surely fresh, for the stream was too salt to drink. Three tiny shelters huddled close together. For each, their makers had piled rocks in a circle about as high as a short man’s shoulders, leaving a gap for entry, and rudely chinked them. Deadwood poles laid across the tops held slabs of peat for roofs. Sticks, lashed into bundles with gut, formed windbreaks to lean across the entrances. A banked fire, doubtless always kept burning, glowed red in the gloom of one den. Nearby was a rubbish midden, around which flies buzzed in swarthy clouds.

“Faugh, the stink!” Broken Blade snorted. “And a rabbit digs a better burrow than this.” The sod huts his people would make against winter, until someday they could build real houses, would have more room and would be kept clean. Meanwhile, their leather tents were both snug and airy.

“See what is inside,” Red Wolf ordered. “Snowstrider, stand guard by me.”

The Tulat were plainly unhappy at having their places ransacked, though only Aryuk and the oldest son dared do so much as glower. The searchers found an abundance of meat and fish, dried or smoked, as well as fine pelts and birdskins. “They are clever trappers, at least,” Red Wolf laughed. “Tulat, we will take hospitality of you.”

His men brought out what they wanted and ate well. Presently Aryuk joined them, squatting on his haunches where they sat cross-legged. He gnawed a bit of salmon and often smiled, ingratiatingly.

Afterward Red Wolf’s band explored the neighborhood above the riverbed. Their eye for tracks led them to a spot some distance off, at a brook. A patch of bare, packed soil showed that something round like a shelter, but far larger, had lately rested there. What was it? Who had made it, and why? Who had removed it, and how? From one another they hid the creeping in their flesh.

Red Wolf overcame his uneasiness first. “I think this was where the witch-woman stayed,” he told them, “but she has left. Did she fear us or our help-spirits?”

“The dwellers can tell us,” Running Fox said, “once we can talk with them “

“The dwellers can do much more than that,” Red Wolf answered slowly. Exultance leaped. “We have nothing to dread, I believe. Nothing! The spirits have brought us to a better home than we dreamed of.”

His men gaped. He did not explain at once. Entering the settlement again, he said thoughtfully, “Yes, we must learn their tongue, we must teach them … what we want them to know.” His glance went ahead, to Aryuk’s family. They stood bunched, waiting for whatever would happen. Hands gripped hands, arms lay around children. “We will begin on both these things by taking one of them along to our camp.” He smiled at the girl. Terror stared back.

On this gentle April afternoon, across the Bay in San Francisco, Wanda Tamberly was being born. Time Patrol agent or no, she must stave off a certain eeriness. Happy birthday, me.

Coincidence. Ralph Corwin had requested she visit him then because it was the earliest afternoon on which his Berkeley house would not be a-bustle. As undermanned as it was, the outfit could spare but a handful of people to trace the migrations of man into the New World, no matter how important to the future those might be. Overwhelmed by the task, they were always coming and going at his administrative base.

Like many other special offices, this was a residential building, rented for several years by persons who did actually live there. Twentieth-century America was a logical locale. Most of the workers were native to it, blending easily in. They could not well use regional headquarters in San Francisco; too much activity would make it undesirably noticeable. Berkeley in the ’60s came near being ideal. Nobody paid particular attention to an occasional oddity when everybody was being nonconformist. Eventually hysteria about drug abuse would make official surveillance too likely. However, by then the Patrol’s group would have finished their job and quit the house.

Granted, it lacked a hidden space for timecycles to appear in. Tamberly took public transportation, got off on Telegraph Avenue, strolled north on it and across the campus. The day was gorgeous and she felt curious about the decade. It had been a legend of sorts while she was growing up.

Disappointment. Scruffiness, pretentiousness, self-righteousness. When a boy in dirt-stiffened jeans and what he probably imagined was an Indian blanket thrust a leaflet of pomposities about peace at her, she remembered ahead—Cambodia, boat people—and told him, with a sweet smile, “Sorry, I’m a fascist warmonger.” Well, Manse had once reminisced about the Youth Revolution to her, in terms that she should have taken for a warning. Why care now, when cherry trees stood like sunlit snowstorms?

The address she sought was a few blocks west of the university on Grove Street (which would be solemnly renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and referred to by her generation as Milky Way). The house was modest, well maintained. A satisfied landlord would not get inquisitive. She mounted its porch and rang the bell.

The door opened. “Miss Tamberly?” After she nodded: “How do you do. Please come in.” She saw a man tall, slender, with a Roman profile and toothbrush mustache beneath sleek gray-shot hair. His tan shirt had shoulder straps and several pockets, his tan slacks were razor-creased, his feet bore Birkenstock sandals. He looked about forty, but lifeline age meant little if you had received the Patrol’s longevity treatment.

He closed the door behind her and gave a firm handshake. “I am Corwin.” He smiled. “Pardon the ‘Miss.’ I couldn’t safely call you Agent Tamberly’ when you might have been a solicitor for a worthy cause. Or do you prefer ‘Ms’?”

“Whatever,” she replied, carefully casual. “Manse Everard’s explained to me how honorifics mutate.” Let him know I’m on friendship terms with an Unattached. In case he likes playing dominance games. “Most recently—I suppose ‘recently’ is right, when I left Beringia less than a week ago, personal timespan—I was Khara-tsetuntyn-bayuk, She Who Knows Strangeness.” Show the big anthropologist that a humble naturalist is not a complete naif in his field.