Times Without Number

by John Brunner

  "Did you say the girl got loose?" called Father Ramón, awkwardly scrambling from his own horse's back.

  "Yes, but was recaptured," Don Miguel answered. "Jones, take us to her quickly!"

  Kristina nearly stumbled as she ascended the steps to the entrance. He settled her comfortably in an armchair in the hallway, and saw as he was doing so that instead of turning through the open door of the anteroom in which the driver was grimly standing guard with a club over the feathered girl -- tied now with good strong rope, he noticed -- Father Ramón was heading into the interior of the building.

  "Father! The girl's down here!" he called.

  "I know -- but come with me, and be quick!"

  "Look after the lady," Don Miguel instructed Jones, and dashed in Father Ramón's wake.

  The Jesuit led him up the broad main stairway, along the adjacent gallery, past the entrance to the main reference library with its thousands and thousands of books on conventional recorded history as amplified by the researches of the Society's visitors to the past, and halted before the door of a smaller room which Don Miguel had never entered. It was kept firmly locked, and one did not have to ask to realise why. Here were the files, documents and records which the Society's General Officers in their collective wisdom deemed the world not yet ready to understand.

  "Have you ever been into the restricted room?" asked Father Ramón, fumbling under his habit for a ring of keys.

  "No, never."

  "But you know what it contains?"

  "Well -- well, one presumes data on the most sensitive periods of the past. Perhaps concerning the ministry of Our Lord . . ." Don Miguel made a vague gesture.

  "If that were all, we should not need to take such precautions to protect what's kept here," Father Ramón sighed, thrusting home the key and turning it with a click. "In spite of the strictures of so-called 'progressives' and 'rationalists,' Christ was in every aspect so remarkable as to command our eternal admiration. If he had not been, the Church would have crumbled at the first contact we made with the era he inhabited. But one knows that, from the fact that the Church has survived."

  As he spoke, he was leading Don Miguel forward among a maze of high dark metal book-stacks, with enormously thick glass doors securely locked to enclose bound volumes, loose files, stacks of periodicals marked down the spine with warning red letters indicating the degree of the contents' secrecy.

  "No," the Jesuit continued, "there are things here which comprise a far heavier burden of knowledge than simply proof that Christ was man, and ate and slept and had to relieve himself! But for the inflexible rule that no single person -- not even the Commander -- may consult these files without a witness beside him, I'd never have compelled you to accompany me. You've been burdened enough already for so young a man. But" -- and he halted before one of the padlocked stacks, producing another smaller key -- "here is where I must confirm my guess."

  Drawing back the glass doors, he reached into the case and selected a fat, bright red volume of manuscript notes. Interleaved with the close-written pages were accurate water-colour drawings. As rapidly as though he were merely looking for something he had already seen -- and presumably he was -- he turned to one such picture and held it for Don Miguel to examine.

  "Does not the woman downstairs resemble that?" he demanded.

  Don Miguel nodded slowly. The feathers pasted on the body of the girl here depicted were green, not blue, and the painted designs on her face and torso were white instead of yellow, but the style of the hair was the same, the complexion, the shoes, the beaded ornaments around her wrists.

  "Then my worst fears are fulfilled," Father Ramón muttered. He shut the book and thrust it back on the shelf. "And I must confess to you, my son, that I am totally at a loss. This disaster is so completely without precedent that it has scarcely even been speculated upon by our theorists."

  To hear Father Ramón, himself the expert of experts in this field, say such a thing shook Don Miguel to the core. Mind numb, he could find no answer worth the uttering.

  "Still, there are certain texts here which may suggest a clue, and there are calculations we shall have to perform . . ." The Jesuit turned to another of the locked cases, and began to run his eye along its contents. "Yes, we may at least expect some guidance from a few of the articles in here. Hold out your arms, Don Miguel; I'm about to impose a physical burden on you as well."

  A few minutes later, he cautiously followed Father Ramón down the stairs again, both arms full of heavy books and bound manuscripts. There was confusion in the entrance hall; Jones, who had as yet no clear conception of what was going on, was trying to calm a number of angry Licentiates who had answered the criers' call and returned from their New Year celebrations to the Headquarters Office.

  On seeing Father Ramón's grave expression, they fell silent and turned to face him. He paused five or six steps from the bottom of the staircase, where he could overlook them; Don Miguel gratefully seized the chance to rest his load on the banister.

  "Father, why were we told to come here?" one of the bolder of the Licentiates called out. "There's a riot or something in the city -- wouldn't we be better employed helping to put it down?"

  "This isn't a problem to be solved with swords and fists," Father Ramón snapped back. "Before I tell you what it is, though, you tell me something: how goes it out there at the moment?"

  "Why, there's chaos! Hordes of people came panicking into the middle of the town, bearing some crazy tale about an attempt to murder the King!"

  "But he's dead, definitely," called someone else from the far side of the hallway, and at once there was a clamour of competing voices. Father Ramón stilled it with an imperious gesture, and made them speak one by one. Listening to the picture that emerged by fragments, Don Miguel was chilled all over again, and saw that Kristina, still waiting in the chair where he had left her, had passed the boundary of her endurance and was weeping silently.

  Much of what was said he already knew: the palace burning, the river fouled with the flotsam of dead bodies. But other news was fresh, and equally terrifying: a maddened crowd of fugitives on Queen Isabela Avenue had rent a civil guard to pieces, a gang of thieves and looters had snatched the chance to raid the great merchants' stores and were setting fires of their own to distract their pursuers, two army detachments had accidentally begun to fire on each other, imagining their colleagues to be the anticipated enemy, and killed many men before their officers brought them under control . . .

  "Enough!" Father Ramón barked at last. "Come with me into the instruction hall and I will make everything clear. Don Miguel! Go through those books I've given you and mark for me every reference you can find which may assist us. I'll rejoin you when I've allotted tasks to occupy our brothers."

  The material Don Miguel had to sift through was itself as frightening -- after a different fashion -- as what he had just heard about the situation in Londres tonight. He had never dreamed of its existence. Turning the pages of book after book, he felt himself hurled headlong into an alien universe, even though the names subscribed to the various articles and letters he was reading had been familiar to him since he joined the Society and included all the General Officers, plus such outstanding Licentiates as Don Arturo Cortés and Father Terence O'Dubhlainn.

  But the subject they were discussing . . .! They dizzied him; one melted into another, and advanced mathematical formulae danced before his eyes. "The Most Probable Implications of a Short-Range Causative Loop" -- "Results of a Tentative Experiment in Quasi-Present-Time Spatial Displacement" -- "An Exception to the Ground Conditions of the Standard Equation Defining Historical Alterations" -- "Reverberative Factors Affecting Recorded Reality in Consequence of an Ink-blot on a Mediaeval Manuscript" . . .

  He was almost surprised to discover that there really was a Father Ramón in this world he inhabited, that he had returned from his briefing of the other members of the Society who had answered the emergency call, and that he was standing by the table and wa
iting for a verdict on the task he had set.

  "Well? What have you found most useful out of this lot?"

  "Practically nothing, Father," Don Miguel sighed. "The whole subject is so strange to me! I think I follow most of the reasoning -- my mathematical knowledge is strained, but the symbols and the operators are clearly enough defined -- but when it comes to arguing out the implications . . . Well, for better or worse, these are the items I've picked out for you."

  He laid four of the books in the centre of the table, each marked with a scrap of paper to locate the most promising articles they contained, and vacated his chair to let Father Ramón sit down. Impatiently he waited while the Jesuit raced through the texts.

  "I see what you mean," he admitted at length. "It's a matter of scale, naturally. It's one thing to analyse the effect of an accidental ink-blot which one suspects of having been caused through the inadvertence of a time-traveller; it's another question altogether when it comes to people being killed."

  "And there simply hasn't been a trans-temporal interference of this order before!" Don Miguel rubbed his weary eyes. "There hasn't even been a temporal feedback process worth mentioning, apart from -- "

  He stopped dead in mid-sentence, and stared at Father Ramón. After a pregnant pause, he said, "Father, I have an idea. I don't know if it will work, but at least it would mean our interfering where there's already been a disturbance of the time-line."

  A gleam of hope appeared in Father Ramón's sharp eyes. "Tell me, then!" he commanded.

  "The Mass, Father. Could we not take advantage of the Society's New Year Mass?"

  For a long moment Father Ramón stared. Then, unexpectedly, he burst into a crow of laughter.

  "Of course -- the Mass! My blessings on you, my son! That I could have been so blind as to overlook the Mass!"

  VII

  As the outline of a familiar room took shape around him, Don Miguel at long last dared to relax. There was no mistaking one of the robing-cells in the ante-section to the chapel of the Society, nor the sound of the high clear bell which was tolling somewhere outside.

  He was here.

  But was he -- now?

  There was as yet no possible means of answering that question. His ordeal was still a long way from being over. He knew as well as Father Ramón himself that he was part of a terrifying experiment, an operation such as no one in history had ever dared to conduct before, and the implications were impossible to foresee.

  Dutifully, as the Jesuit had directed, he had done his best to work them out. He had been given a computation to analyse in factors which Father Ramón had hastily scribbled down, and aided by a shy, precocious junior Probationer, aged only about seventeen but possessed of a remarkable gift for mathematics, he had struggled through to a solution. He tried as he worked to assign real-world values to the symbols, and thought that most likely he must be dealing with labels for human lives, for one by one he saw them cancel out, cancel out . . .

  The problem reduced to an undefined variable and a factor k, and he showed this result to Father Ramón, who stared at it for a long time before he sighed, closed his eyes for an instant as though formulating a prayer, and then bade him go up to the time-halls in the central tower.

  There, under the direction of white-faced, anxious technicians -- what few they had been able to assemble from their homes -- he took station between the familiar iron and silver bars. There was an intolerable period of waiting while settings were checked, re-checked and double-checked, but he endured it. He realised that he was about to be sent on such a voyage as the Society had never before attempted. Upon his departure, he would wipe out a whole abortive branch of reality.

  Suddenly the air grew very hot --

  -- and he was here in a robing-cell of the chapel, and the bell above was tolling as it had done each New Year's Eve since the Society acquired this palace as the official residence of its Commander.

  His mind raced, wondering what the significance had been of that factor k. Was it the King, perhaps, whose life or death could more radically alter reality than that of a commoner? Modesty argued for it. But he suspected that in truth the person represented was himself, whom Kristina's whim had saved from the holocaust at the palace.

  And who now had to repay that gift of Providence, with interest.

  He recognised, of course, the necessity of undoing what had been done. If left to stand unaltered, the consequences of this night of madness would be a blot forever on the records of the Society. Moreover, the death of the King and all his nearest heirs, and the Ambassador of the Confederacy and other ambassadors and so many af the nobility and gentry of the Empire, was an effect utterly disproportionate to the act.

  Yet even after ploughing through all the texts Father Ramón had selected for him he knew only one thing for sure about the effects of setting up a closed causative loop: no one could possibly predict the outcome.

  His mind swirled like water in a rotating cup. Putting his hands to his head, he struggled to think coherently. He had been trained to some extent in casuistry, and he could see the dim outlines of a logical sequence such as must have persuaded Father Ramón to take his unprecedented gamble. Postulate: the terrible women gladiators who wrought the harm originated in a non-actual world -- a world brought about by the experimental interference of Society explorers with their own recorded history. Therefore the consequences of their acts might also be regarded as non-actual, or potential. Therefore the rectification of those consequences would be not non-actual, if this was a safe case to exclude the middle . . .

  It occurred to him with blinding suddenness that unless something had gone hideously wrong all the nightmare in his memory had already not happened .

  For a moment he had a glimpse of what it must be like to be a man such as Father Ramón, all his mind lighted by a logic as piercing as sunlight, driven by a terrible, inexorable honesty to conceal nothing from himself. And he felt sweat prickle all over his body as he realised that here, now, in the rectified situation he was the possessor of a unique personal past.

  Briefly, the awareness of that paralysed him. He thought his very heart would stop; he could imagine himself dying with the shock, especially when the tolling of the bell abruptly ceased to strike his ears. Then, from the passage beyond the door of his robing-cell, he discerned the slow shuffling sound of feet, and realised the bell had stopped in . . . reality .

  If the word any longer meant anything.

  Either way, the Society was assembling for New Year Mass, for the most awful of all its formal occasions, and he would have to join the congregation. He calmed himself deliberately with deep breathing. When finally he decided he could walk without swaying, he took his own enveloping robe from the wall, slipped it on, and pulled the hood far forward over his face. Then he opened the cell door and hastened in the wake of his colleagues.

  These, tonight, were all faceless men. Only differences of height and girth could give the slightest clue to their identity: the hoods hid their features, the sleeves hid their hands, the robes fell to the ground and swished around their feet. For a reason. For the reason which only members of the Society knew, and which made this Mass the unique occasion it was.

  Grey into the grey shadows of the chapel, lit only by two candles at the east end, whose thin beams played fitfully on the gilded coats of arms mounted over the officers' stalls but were too faint to reveal the faces of the company one to another. To the solemn music of the organ the company dispersed among the pews.

  Now, this year, there were eight hundred and forty-six Probationers, Licentiates and Officers of the Society. Accordingly the pews held eight hundred and forty-six grey-garbed men.

  And any one of them might not be a present member, but someone who was doomed to die in the Society's service.

  Only the officiating priest, bringing the Host to the row of kneering brothers, would be able to see by the light of the altar candles whether one of the worshippers was a stranger, and thus tell which of the pre
sent members -- here words were lacking -- was tonight celebrating the Mass with his colleagues of an age yet to come. And the priest was masked.

  In his stall, Don Miguel thought of everything which that knowledge implied. He -- after all, he himself -- might not in fact be at the Mass of the New Year's Eve he had so far been living through. Every year the organ played the same music; every year a Papal dispensation was given to conduct the service in whispers, so that any stranger in their midst might not recognise the priest's voice as unfamiliar and thereby gain foreknowledge of approaching death. One might of course count the grey robes present to see if the total differed from what he expected --

  Don Miguel glanced round into the shadows, and shook his head. No. No man would do that. No man would dare.