Poul Anderson - Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks

Underneath the business of the minute, fading pain and shock from the assault, exhilaration of survival, grimness rose. After all his elaborate precautions, within an hour of arrival, his cover was blown. The enemy had not only had Patrol headquarters staked out, somehow their agent had instantly seen that it was no ordinary wanderer come into this street, and had not hesitated a second before trying to kill him.

This was a hairy mission for sure. And more was at stake than Everard liked to think about—first the existence of Tyre, later the destiny of the world.

Zakarbaal closed the door to his inner chambers and latched it. Turning around, he held out his hand in the manner of Western civilization. “Welcome,” he said in Temporal, the Patrol language. “My name, you may remember, is Chaim Zorach. May I present my wife Yael?”

They were both of Levantine appearance and in Canaanite garb, but here, shut away from office staff and household servants, their entire bearing changed, posture, gait, facial expressions, tone of voice. Everard would have recognized them as being of the twentieth century even if he had not been told. The atmosphere was as refreshing to him as a wind off the sea.

He introduced himself. “I am the Unattached agent you sent for,” he added.

Yael Zorach’s eyes widened. “Oh! An honor. You… you are the first such I have met. The others who’ve been investigating, they are just technicians.”

Everard grimaced. “Don’t be too awe-struck. I’m afraid I haven’t made much of a showing so far.”

He described his journey and the contretemps at its end. She offered him some painkiller, but he said he was pretty well over hurting, and her husband thereupon produced what was better anyway, a bottle of Scotch. Presently they were seated at their ease.

The chairs were comfortable, not unlike those of home-a luxury in this milieu, but then, Zakarbaal was supposed to be a wealthy man, with access to every kind of imported goods. Otherwise the apartment was austere by future standards, though frescos, draperies, lamps, furnishings were tasteful.

It was cool and dim; a window opening on a small cloister garden had been curtained against the heat of the day.

“Why don’t we relax a while and get acquainted before we buckle down to duty?” Everard suggested.

Zorach scowled. “You can do that right after you almost got killed?”

His wife smiled. “I think he might need to all the more, dear,” she murmured. “We too. The menace can wait a little longer. It’s been waiting, hasn’t it?”

From the pouch at his belt, Everard drew anachronisms he had permitted himself, hitherto used only in solitude: pipe, tobacco, lighter. Zorach’s tension eased a trifle, he chuckled and fetched cigarettes out of a locked coffer which held various such comforts. His language changed to Brooklyn-accented English: “You’re American, aren’t you, Agent Everard?”

“Yes. Recruited in 1954.” How many years of his lifespan had passed “since” he answered an ad, took certain tests, and learned of an organization that guarded a traffic through the epochs? He hadn’t added them up lately. It didn’t matter much, when he and his fellows were the beneficiaries of a treatment that kept them unaging. “Uh, I thought you two were Israelis.”

“We are,” Zorach explained. “In fact, Yael’s a sabra. Me, though, I didn’t immigrate till I’d been doing archaeology there for a spell and had met her. That was in 1971. We got recruited into the Patrol four years later.”

“How’d that happen, if I may ask?”

“We were approached, sounded out, finally told the truth. Naturally, we jumped at the chance. The work’s often hard and lonesome—twice as lonesome, in a way, when we’re home on furlough and can’t tell our old friends and colleagues what we’ve been up to—but it’s totally fascinating.” Zorach winced. His words became a near mumble. “Also, well, this post is special for us. We don’t just maintain a base and its cover business, we manage to help local people now and then. Or we try to, as much as we can without causing anybody to suspect there’s anything peculiar about us. That makes up, somehow, a little bit, for… for what our countrymen will do hereabouts, far uptime.”

Everard nodded. The pattern was familiar to him. Most field agents were specialists like these, passing their careers in a single milieu. They had to be, if they were to learn it thoroughly enough to serve the Patrol’s purposes. What a help it would be to have native-born personnel! But such were very rare before the eighteenth century A.D., or still later in most parts of the world. How could a person who hadn’t grown up in a scientific-industrial society even grasp the idea of automatic machinery, let alone vehicles that jumped in a blink from place to place and year to year? An occasional genius, of course; however, most identifiable geniuses carved niches for themselves in history, and you didn’t dare tell them the facts for fear of making changes…

“Yeah,” Everard said. “In a way, a free operative like me has it easier. Husband-and-wife teams, or women generally—Not to pry, but what do you do about children?”

“Oh, we have two at home in Tel Aviv,” Yael Zorach answered. “We time our returns so we’ve never been gone from them for more than a few days of their lives.” She sighed. “It is strange, of course, when to us months have passed.” Brightening: “Well, when they’re of age, they’re going to join the outfit too. Our regional recruiter has examined them already and decided they’ll be fine material.”

If not, Everard thought, could you stand it, watching them grow old, suffer the horrors that will come, finally die, while you are still young of body? Such a prospect had made him shy away from marriage, more than once.

“I think Agent Everard means children here in Tyre,” Chaim Zorach said. “Before traveling from Sidon—we took ship, like you, because we were going to become moderately conspicuous—we quietly bought a couple of infants from a slave dealer, took them along, and have been passing them off as ours. They’ll have lives as good as we can arrange.” Unspoken was the likelihood that servants had the actual raising of those two; their foster parents would not dare invest much love in them. “That keeps us from appearing somehow unnatural. If my wife’s womb has since closed, why, it’s a common misfortune. I do get twitted about not taking a second wife or at least a concubine, but on the whole, Phoenicians mind their own business pretty well.”

“You like them, then?” Everard inquired.

“Oh, yes, by and large, we do. We have excellent friends among them. We’d better—as important a nexus as this is.”

Everard frowned and puffed hard on his pipe. The bowl had grown consolingly warm in his clasp, aglow like a tiny hearthfire. “You think that’s correct?”

The Zorachs were surprised. “Of course!” Yael said. “We know it is. Didn’t they explain to you?”

Everard chose his words with care. “Yes and no. After I’d been asked to look into this matter, and agreed, I got myself crammed full of information about the milieu. In a way, too full; it became hard to see the forest for the trees. However, my experience has been that I do best to avoid grand generalizations in advance of a mission. It could get hard to see the trees for the forest, so to speak. My idea was, once I’d been dropped off in Sicily and taken ship for Tyre, I’d have leisure to digest the information and form my own ideas. But that didn’t quite work out, because the captain and crew were infernally curious about me; my mental energy went into answering their questions, which were often sharp, without letting any cat out of the bag.” He paused. “To be sure, the role of Phoenicia in general, and Tyre in particular, in Jewish history—that’s obvious.”