Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“Anytime, anywhere. I’m taking leave.” She stopped. Others might overhear. “Vacation, I mean. Whatever’s convenient for you, sir.”

“The bookshop, then. Let’s say three o’clock.” While her parents weren’t necessarily aware that he was not in the Bay Area at this moment, best was not to rush matters as perceived by them. “Can you save the evening for me too?” Everard blurted.

“Why, why, of course.” Both abruptly shy, they exchanged only a few more words before hanging up.

He did need a night’s sleep, and there was in fact considerable accumulated business to handle. Another twilight had fallen, cold and dun around hectic lights, when he entered city headquarters. In the secret room beneath, he checked out a hopper, mounted the saddle, set his destination, touched the controls. The cellar garage that blinked into existence for him was smaller. He went out the camouflaged door and upstairs. Daylight poured through windows.

This front was a high-class used bookstore. He saw her looking at a volume; she had arrived early. Her hair was sun-bright amidst the freighted shelves, and a dress the color of her eyes fitted close. He approached. “Hello,” he said.

Almost, she gasped. “Oh! How d-do you do, Agent … Everard.” Strain vibrated through the sounds.

“Sh,” he cautioned. “Come on back where we can talk.” Two or three customers watched them go down the aisle, but simply with a bit of envy; they were male. “Howdy, Nick,” Everard said as he came to the proprietor. “Okay?” The little man smiled and nodded, though solemnity stared through thick lenses. Everard had sent a message in advance, commandeering his office.

It too held nothing overtly unusual. Along the walls, filing cabinets squeezed in between more bookcases. Boxes cluttered the floor, papers and tomes the table that acted as a desk. Nick was a genuine bibliophile; perhaps his main reason for serving the Patrol in this small but vital capacity was the ability he gained to go questing in other milieus. Some recent acquisitions, Victorian to judge by their appearance, lay next to the ostensible computer. Everard glanced over the titles. He made no pretense of being an intellectual, but he liked books. The Origin of Tree Worship, British Birds, Catullus, The Holy War —no doubt stuff that some collector would snap up, if the proprietor didn’t decide to keep them for himself.

“Sit down,” he invited, and pulled out a chair for Tamberly.

“Thank you.” When she smiled she seemed all at once easier, more herself. Not that anybody ever is, ever again, We can dance around in time all we want, but we don’t escape duration. “You still have your old-fashioned manners, I see.”

“Country boy. I’m trying to unlearn. Ladies these days have snapped my head off for being condescending, when I thought I was just being polite.” Everard went around the table and seated himself opposite her.

“Yes,” she sighed, “I suppose it can be harder to keep track of your birth century than to learn your way around in a whole past civilization. I’m finding that out, a little.”

“How’ve you been? Do you enjoy your work?”

Enthusiasm flashed. “Mostly super. Terrific. Splendiferous. No, language doesn’t reach to it.” A shadow fell. She looked away from him. “The drawbacks, well, you understand. I was getting toughened to them. Until now, this thing.”

He delayed coming to the point. First let him work the worst tension out of her, if he could. “It’s been a spell. I last saw you shortly after your graduation.”—from the Academy; on her personal time line. They’d gone to dinner in Paris, 1925, and afterward wandered along the Seine and around in the Rive Gauche, through a spring evening, and when they stopped for a drink at the Deux Magots a couple of her literary idols were at the same sidewalk café, two tables over, and when he bade her goodnight and goodbye at her parents’ door, 1988, she kissed him. “Nigh on three years since then, for you, hasn’t it been?”

She nodded. “Busy years for us both, I guess.”

“Well, the time for me wasn’t that long. I’ve had only two missions worth mentioning.”

“Really?” she asked, surprised. “Didn’t you return to your place in New York in ’88 when you were through? I mean, you didn’t let it stand months vacant, did you?”

“I lent—officially, sublet—it to an operative who needed such a base for a task of her own. They’ve got rent control there in these decades, you know. Always guarantees slums, plus decent housing in such short supply that to become a new tenant you’ve got to show more money than is wise for a Patrol agent.”

“I see.”

Tamberly had stiffened a little. “Her,” she’s thinking.

It’s also unwise for a Patrol agent to explain too much. Especially in a case like this. “Messages to me from fellow members were robotically bucked on. If you’d called before yesterday—”

Whatever pique she felt had dissipated. Her gaze dropped to hands that caught each other in her lap. “I had no reason to, sir,” she said low. “You’d been awfully kind, generous, but … I didn’t want to get pushy.”

“Nor did I.” The great Unattached overawing the new recruit Unfair. Could be resented. “Though if I’d known so much time was going by for you— ”

Much time indeed, less in lifespan measured by pulsebeats than in life lived, newnesses, strangenesses, troubles, triumphs, gaieties, griefs. And loves? Her form had grown fuller, Everard saw, not in fat but muscle. The bones stood out more strongly than before in a face that weather had often savaged. The real change was subtler. She had been a girl—a young woman, if today’s feminists insisted, but how very young. The girl in her had not died; he doubted she ever quite would. The person across from him remained youthful: yet wholly a woman. His own pulse stumbled.

He achieved a laugh. “Okay, let’s drop the Alphonse-Gastonette act,” he said. “And please remember, my name isn’t ‘sir.’ Here, by ourselves, we can relax. Wanda.”

She rallied fast. “Thanks, Manse. I kind of expected this.”

He drew pipe and tobacco pouch out of his pockets. “And this? If you don’t mind.”

“No, go ahead.” She smiled. “Since we are not in public.” Unspoken: Bad example, among people for whom smoking’s lethal. Patrol medicine heads off or heals anything that doesn’t kill us outright. You were born in 1924, Manse. You look about forty. But how much duration have you endured? What is your real age?

He didn’t wish to tell her. Not today. “I raised your file yesterday,” he said. ‘You’ve been doing a crackerjack job.”

She grew sober. Her eyes took level aim at him. “And will I in my future?”

“I didn’t ask for that information,” he replied fast. “Discourteous, unethical, and it wouldn’t have been given me unless I could show a damn valid reason. We don’t look into our tomorrows, nor into our friends’.”

“And nevertheless,” she murmured, “the information is there. Everything you or I will ever do—everything I’ll discover about the life of the past—is known to them uptime.”

“Hey, we’re talking English, not Temporal. The paradoxes—”

The tawny head nodded. “Oh, yes. The work has to be done. Has to have been done, somewhere along the line. No point in my doing it if I already knew; and the danger of setting up a cause-and-effect whirlpool—”

“Besides, neither the past nor the future is cast in concrete. That’s why the Patrol exists. Have we repeated enough indoctrination lecture?”

“I’m sorry. It’s still sometimes hard for me to, well, comprehend. I have to replay the basic principles in my mind. My work is … straightforward. Like going to an unexplored continent. Nothing to remind me of the problems you cope with.”