Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

Settlement thickened as she neared the seaboard. A small city occupied lower Manhattan. Its cathedral (?) dwarfed the St. Patrick’s she remembered. The style was foreign to her, massive, many-tiered, brutally powerful. “Enough to scare off Billy Graham,” she quavered at her mute communicator.

Several ships lay in the harbor, and she got a good look from on high, through her magnifying optical, at one that was standing out the Narrows. A broad-beamed, three-masted square-rigger, it resembled a merchantman of about 1600, according to pictures she had seen, though even to her landlubber’s eye the differences of detail were countless. A flag of lilies on a blue field flew on the staff. At the mainmast top another, yellow and white, displayed crossed keys.

Blackness surged over her. She was well out to sea before she fought halfway clear of it.

Go ahead. Scream.

That steadied her more. The trick was not to let it go on and on, feeding hysteria, but to blow off emotion till you could think again. She loosened her painfully tight grip on the handlebars, worked her shoulder blades to free up those muscles, and was into reasoning about the situation before she noticed, with a harsh little laugh, that she’d forgotten to unclench her jaw.

The cycle flew itself ever farther. Ocean heaved immense, empty, a thousand shifting greens, grays, blues. Split air rumbled and whistled. Cold eddied past the force-screen and around her.

No doubt left. The terrible thing has happened. Something has changed the past, and the world I knew — my world, Manse’s, Uncle Steve’s, everybody’s and everything’s — is gone. The Time Patrol is gone. No, I’m thinking wrongly. They never were. I exist without parents, grandparents, country, history, without cause, a random thing tossed up by quantum chaos.

She couldn’t grasp it. Though she put it into Temporal, which had a grammar made to deal with the paradoxes of time travel, the concept wouldn’t come real to her in the way that something as abstract as evolutionary biology was nevertheless real, hand-graspable. This state of affairs set logic at naught and made reality a cloud-shadow.

Oh, sure, they explained the theory to us at the Academy, but as a sketch, like a freshman general science course required of an English major. My class of cadets wasn’t being prepared for police work or anything like that. We’d be field scientists, off in prehistory, when humans were few and it was practically impossible to cause any changes that the course of events wouldn’t soon compensate for. We’d go on our expeditions in the same straightforward way that Stanley went to explore darkest Africa.

What to do, what to do?

Leap back to the Pleistocene, I guess. It should be safely far downtime. Manse should be there still. (No, “still” is meaningless, isn’t it?) He’ll take charge. He’s hinted at having already (“already”) experienced something of this kind. Maybe now I can get him to tell me what it was. (Maybe I should tell him I know he’s in love with me, the dear sweet bear. I’ve been too bashful, or afraid, or unsure of my own feelings…. God damn it, woman, will you stop this woolgathering?)

A pod of whale passed below. One spyhopped, a leap right out of the waves, water fountaining and tumbling from the mighty flanks, white under the sun.

Tamberly’s blood quickened. “Yeah,” she scoffed aloud, “run right off to the big strong man and let him kiss the universe and make it well for itsy-bitsy sweeturns.” Here she was. The least she could do was get a better idea of this world, bring back a report on it rather than a sob story. Just a few hours’ scouting, nothing reckless. Manse had said more than once, “In our job there’s no such thing as too much information.” What she discovered might give him a clue to the source of the disaster.

“In short,” said Tamberly, “we fight back.” Resolution hardened; for a moment she imagined the Liberty Bell being cast, and herself ringing it. A minute longer she pondered, then set the space jump for London and touched its button.

The hour was late, local time, but this high latitude remained daylit. The city spread wide along both sides of the Thames, hazed by coal smoke. She guessed the population as about a million. The Tower was there, and Westminster Abbey might be the same though she wasn’t sure, and the spires of other ancient churches soared above roofs; but a giant squatted on the hill of St. Paul’s. The dreary sprawl of industry and suburbs was absent. Countryside pressed close around, glowing golden-green under the long light. She wished she were in a state to appreciate the beauty.

What next? Where to? Paris, I guess. She reset.

It was larger than yonder London, maybe twice as big. A spiderweb of paved roads radiated from it. Traffic upon them and the river went heavy, walkers, horsemen, carriages, wagons drawn by oxen or mules, barges, sailboats, oared galleys on whose decks cannon gleamed. Several turreted and battlemented stone forts, if that was what they were, reared among lesser buildings. More attractive were half a dozen palaces, not wholly unlike some she had seen in Venice. The île de la Cité held one, but also a temple dwarfing its English counterpart. Tamberly’s heart thudded. Here’s where more of the action is, much more. Let’s cruise a hit.

She flew in slow outward spirals, peering. Whoever glanced upward from those tangled lanes perhaps saw a speck of brightness in the deepening blue of the sunset sky. But she, she beheld no Arc de Triomphe, no Tuileries, no Bois de Boulogne, no cheery little sidewalk cafes….

Versailles. Or thereabouts. A village clustered beside a highway, more variegated and less constricted than the peasant communities, evidently serving the city, and yes, a great dwelling two miles off amidst a parkscape of woods, lawns, and gardens. Tamberly moved in its direction.

The core of it was once a castle, she judged, a strong-hold; and fieldpieces rested in the rear courtyard. Over centuries it had been remodeled and wings had been added, large-windowed, spacious and gracious, for modern habitation. However, sentries paced to and fro on every side. They wore scarlet uniforms striped with gold, beneath fancy helmets; but the rifles on their shoulders looked plenty businesslike. From a tall staff in front, a flag rippled on the evening breeze. She recognized the sign of the keys that she had noticed on the ship.

Somebody important lives here . … Hold on. From near the western horizon, rays streamed across grass where deer and peacocks strolled, and over a formal garden around which at intervals stood trellised rose bowers. What’s that blink from inside yonder one?

Tamberly descended. If somebody noticed, what the devil could they do about it? Well, careful; they’ve got those shootin’ irons. Fifty feet aloft, she could look slantwise into the arbors opposite. Set for optical amplification—Yes, in each, another soldier. Why do they keep watch, from hidey-holes, on a garden?

She space-jumped high, flitted to a position directly overhead, and turned her viewer downward. Vision sprang at her. She jerked back. “Can’t be!”

No, it was, it was. “Stop that shivering,” she rapped at herself, with scant effect. Alertness, though, grew doubly keen. Her mind sped in lightning chains of reason, guess, hope, horror.

The grounds near the palace were of the general kind she remembered from her Versailles, strictly patterned, with graveled walks among hedges, flower beds, pollarded trees, fountains, statuary. This was the smallest of the plots, about the size of a football field. It must formerly have been like the rest; the stonework was still there. But today the layout formed one big symbol, defined by colored tiles bordering its beds. It was a stylized hourglass on a heraldic shield. A circle surrounded it and a red line slashed across.