Times Without Number

by John Brunner

  Over the past decade or so a group of fanatical Indians out here in the very far west of North America had sought means to drive a wedge between the uneasy allies. A first and obvious step was to approach the Confederacy and let it be understood that they and their supporters would switch their allegiance in return for help. But the Confederacy was reluctant, seeing little profit for themselves in having friends on the Pacific Coast of America when they had no seaboard of their own on that ocean; the Cathayans had exercised sound strategic judgment and barred all the available routes.

  What persuaded them in the end was the offer of secret survey data, prepared on behalf of the Empire by Indian mineralogists like Two Dogs, showing rich veins of gold, silver and copper ore as yet unexploited by the Imperial miners. A single season's work in the past could yield hundreds of tons of valuable metal. The gamble was worth taking, especially since the Indians promised to conceal all traces of their interference. Even if by mischance some of them eventually came to light, they argued, the only consequence would be to show the world the truth about the flimsiness of the Empire-Mohawk alliance, which would splinter, and at least some of those splinters could be picked up by the Confederacy.

  In return, the Indians were to be supplied with arms and money enabling them to declare a new independent state of Shasklapima, with its frontier on the Sierra Maestra, extending from Nootka Sound in the north to the southernmost tip of the California peninsula.

  At least, that was the ostensible goal of the operation. In fact, as was known only to a small inner group of conspirators, there was no intention of concealing the Confederacy's theft of ore from the past. The real plan called for the deed to be pinned squarely on the perpetrators as soon as possible, and Don Miguel's arrival in New Madrid on his way to spend a furlough in California suggested an ideal opportunity.

  But for the fact that Father Ramón's agents had traced the purchase of the broken drill-bit and reported it as having been bought by a Mohawk -- a Mohawk subject, rather -- the outcome would have been precisely what the Indians expected, especially in view of the panicky shooting of Roan Horse. A formal charge of temporal contrabandage would have been brought, and tried in a Vatican court. The only possible verdict must be one of guilty, and the Confederacy would be ordered to give an undertaking that they would never again attempt a similiar operation.

  Whereupon the Indians would produce evidence upon evidence that they had broken their pledge. All over the continent there were mining sites cunningly faked by Indian time-travellers, salted with such incontrovertible proof of Confederate responsibility as knives of Augsburg steel, ale-bottles overlooked in a heap of ore-failings, the odd coin that fell from a worker's pocket . . .

  In the face of the Confederacy's frantic denials of guilt, more and more evidence of wholesale plundering would be found. Suspicion would mount, accusations would fly, perhaps even the Vatican might be deceived and support the Empire in their dispute. The injured innocence of the Confederacy would no doubt eventually turn to cynicism, determination to be hanged for a sheep rather than a nonexistent lamb.

  So the likeliest outcome would be war. The millstones across the sea were to be set grinding again, and from between them -- so it was assumed in the grandiose vision to which Two Dogs had dedicated himself -- the unwilling subjects of the Mohawk Nation would escape into the freedom they craved. Not for them a piddling little new republic, forced to bend the knee despite its nominal independence before the world's two most powerful nations -- they wanted to see the Empire and the Confederacy destroy each other, and leave Indians the masters of their own continent.

  Stunned by the ingenuity of the plan and the narrowness of their escape, Don Miguel put one last question to Bloody Axe. Suppose the plan was discovered and thwarted, as indeed it had been?

  The answer struck cold and hurtful as that chopping blade for which he had been named. "We took our solemn oath upon the war-drum. In that event -- rather than endure the Empire's vengeance -- we have sworn to bring it down around your ears, and all of history with it if need be!"

  VIII

  "We have to deal with a madman!" cried the Prince.

  Don Miguel swallowed hard and gave a nod. "There's little doubt of that, sir. Two Dogs is a megalomaniac, whose ambitions have wiped out all traces of empathy from his mind."

  "But why didn't the Holy Offrice detect this when he was a student at the Mexicological Institute? Surely insanity on that scale must have shown up like a beacon-fire on a hill-top! Brother Vasco, what have you got to say about that?"

  Beside Don Miguel the Dominican shifted uneasily in his chair. In a defensive tone he said, "It appears that the full onset of his condition must be recent. Our investigations have shown that he covered his tracks very cleverly, and used many aliases which he picked according to the old Indian custom whereby a child is named for the first ominous thing the father sees after leaving the birth-teepee. He has been variously known as Broken Tree, Hundred Scalps, Storm of Rain, Puma Claw, and -- oh, the list is longer than I can recall. As for Bloody Axe, who passed as Red Cloud when he became a Licentiate of the Society, his career is nearly as chequered. Worse yet, almost sixty of the Licentiates granted their time-licences in New Castile have proved to be associated with one or other of these two."

  "Then we have to deal not only with one madman, but with a conspiracy of lunaticst" snapped Red Bear. His long coppery face was shiny with sweat, and his braided hair hung lank and dull as though tarnished with strain and worry. No one could question his allegiance to the Empire and the Mohawk Nation -- he was pure Mohawk for ten generations back -- but it was clear he took this crisis as a personal affront. "Moreover it seems there are lunatics outside the conspiracy too: I mean in the Confederacy! That was what impelled me to take a decision independently of the Full Council of the Society, and authorise the creation of local causative loops in order to bring us together via time apparatus rather than waiting for the slow Atlantic passage of a ship."

  Don Miguel started. Though he had been astonished to find the General Officers here in New Madrid, he had not realised that was how they had made the journey; he had assumed that the Prince had sent for them some time in the past, perhaps a month ago, and they had just reached the city. Burromeo had sternly forbidden the use of time apparatus for present-time journeys, and until now the rule had been obeyed because the effect of travellers arriving fractions of a second before they left could not be calculated.

  But this crisis, granted, was without precedent . . .

  "I think it right that you should be told," Red Bear continued, "that we passed news of this calamity via diplomatic contacts to the Confederacy as soon as possible, and some -- some fools over there are hindering the co-operation of the Temporal College with us, arguing that for the Empire to crash about our ears would be no bad thing for the Confederacy."

  "They're out of their minds!" moaned the Prince. His face was grey with pure unmitigated terror; it was the first time Don Miguel had seen a man's face literally lose all colour. One day, he suspected, he might look in the glass on rising from one of his sleepless nights and see that same greyness on his own tanned skin.

  And expressions of equal dismay were to be found on every side. This assembly was no mere private meeting in the Prince's chamber of audience; this was the first meeting of the Full Council of the Society to be held in New Madrid since the one called to establish the New Castile Chapter, sixty years ago. And, as Red Bear had just announced to those who were not party to the secret, many of them had arrived here before they left Londres. It was that much of an emergency. There had never been one like it. There might never be another similar -- never, until the Last Judgment.

  These were the sober, just and upright men appointed under the bull De tenebris temporalibus . . . and they were quaking in their shoes. In Don Miguel's imagination the spheres of the universe ground against each other like clockwork after a bucket of sand had been tipped in.

  Mastering himself, the Prince pu
t his trembling hands out of sight under the table and spoke again.

  "Father Terence!" he exclaimed. "We must turn to you as we formerly turned to your late predecessor Father Ramón -- may he rest in peace. What say you about this crisis?"

  The man next to Red Bear gave a shrug. He was most of the things that Father Ramón had not been -- tall, heavily built, with a thatch of fair hair -- and he spoke with a strong Irish accent. This was someone whose name had long been familiar to Don Miguel but whom he had not previously met: Father Terence O'Dubhlainn, newly senior among the Society's theoreticians.

  "Doubtless Father Ramón had laid plans before his murder," he replied. "And it's probable they were apt to the situation. Deprived of his unparalleled insight, we must make what shift we can. What is absolutely certain is this: any attempt to eliminate the Indian, Two Dogs, by intervention from present time -- by assassination, for example -- will create a closed loop with incalculable consequences and we can regard it only as a last resort. There is no precedent for arrest and execution in past time, and it's a violation of the most cherished canons of the Society. We must accordingly elect a less dangerous alternative."

  "But there's no precedent for anything until it's done the first time!" snapped Don Miguel. For a long moment he feared he had gone too far in voicing the cynical platitude; Father Terence flushed and bridled, where Father Ramón would have inclined his head and spoken with gentle reproof.

  "You presume too much!" he barked. "I said we must choose a less dangerous alternative! Before shouting me down, why not hear whether we have yet discovered one?"

  Memory of that New Year's Eve when Father Ramón had knowingly condemned himself to an intellectual torture whose refinement passed imagining -- being responsible for actions he had not committed -- drove hot words to Don Miguel's tongue-tip. But he bit them back. He was, after all, twenty years the junior of Father Terence and most of his companions.

  After a final glare at his interrupter, Father Terence resumed. "One must grant that it's a first-order probability Two Dogs will decide to carry out his boast about bringing down the Empire. Accordingly, having analysed the studies he pursued under the name of Broken Tree at the Mexicological Institute and the University of New Castile, and having taken into account what Navarro tells us about his recent conversations on related subjects, we've compiled a list of probable points at which he might conclude the Empire's history was especially vulnerable. We do not exclude the risk of interference in Europe rather than the New World."

  "Have you nothing more concrete to go on than these vague deductions?" the Prince demanded.

  "We are lucky to have stumbled on the existence of this secret inner group of oath-bound fanatics. According to Bloody Axe there were never more than eight or ten of them all told; the remainder of the conspirators had been fobbed off with this yarn about the foundation of an independent republic and appear to have believed it sincerely." Father Terence coughed behind his hand.

  "Now it's notorious that only one crucial event stood between us and oblivion in the sixteenth century. Had we not conquered England, had the Armada not made the seas safe for our invasion forces from the Netherlands, it can be logically argued that there would never have been an Empire. The renewed Moorish attacks in Spain would have reduced us to a mere satrapy of the Mediterranean Caliphate."

  Them were scowls of impatience around the table. Every Probationer knew what Father Terence was rehearsing at such length; the key period of the conquest of England was invariably the subject of hours of discussion and several examination questions in a first-year course of instruction, and it had been exhaustively studied by time-travellers for nearly a century.

  Aware of his listeners' eagerness, Father Terence cut his discourse short. He said bluntly, "Accordingly, we recommend that all the Licentiates we can muster be set to stand guard over the events leading up to the conquest. If we fail to detect interference by Two Dogs there, we must sift through the lesser alternatives until we discover him. And only if we determine that some alteration has actually been caused in our known history should we attempt more direct action and have him arrested or assassinated."

  "But if he's already interfered with history -- " the Prince began.

  "How will we have time to counteract the deed?" Father Terence completed the sentence for him. "It's a matter of the skewed relationship between time past and time present, sir. There's a diagonal component of durative time which will ensure a margin of error factorially dependent on the time between Two Dogs's arrival in the past and the commission of the fatal act. It will probably amount to only a few hours, but that should suffice."

  "And we jump in and sabotage his trick?"

  "Ideally, yes, because this will result in the past remaining unaffected."

  "Hmm!" The Prince 'looked and sounded dubious, but he knew very well he owed his status as Commander of the Society to his royal birth rather than to any special brilliance in the field of temporal science. He turned to Red Bear and breached a different subject.

  "What steps have you taken to prevent Two Dogs reaching the past?"

  "Loyal men are guarding all our time apparatus, but . . ." Red Bear scowled. "The machines are so simple to build! And even if his cronies haven't the materials to assemble their own, I wouldn't put it past those idiots in the Confederacy to help him travel back. We must assume he's already left; there are only a few grains of sand left in our hourglass, and then the scythe will descend."

  There was a dull silence. The Prince broke it with a bang of his fist on the table.

  "Enough talk!" he burst out. "Go find this man, in the name of God, before he wipes us all out of the universe!"

  And it could happen . . . All of them knew that in theory; the General Officers and most senior Licentiates such as Don Arturo and Don Rodrigo knew it thanks to the expeditions to parallel branches of time which the Society had conducted over the past forty years -- but only Don Miguel knew it in the marrow of his bones, from actual personal experience in this contemporary world. Now that Father Ramón was dead, no one else shared his recollection of that New Year's night of horror and bloodshed which, in a single bold stroke, the Jesuit had abolished from reality.

  That was the kind of action this crisis called for, he was convinced: prompt, direct, incisive! Not this pussyfooting caution, like friends consulting about a game of correspondence chess! He had talked to Two Dogs for long hours, far away in California; he had formulated an opinion of him as a man, as a personality, and he knew this was a man who would not utter empty threats, but someone whose pride would compel him to the ultimate blasphemy of believing that he was uniquely right.

  But he had no hope, he realised sickly, of persuading the General Officers to his own way of thinking. The best he could look forward to was the survival of his world by what would amount to a miracle, and resumption of his normal life as a Licentiate with a trifle more experience, and a great deal more notoriety, than the average run of his colleagues.

  It was a slender bulwark to erect in his mind against the doom-laden grinding of the heavenly spheres that night by night made his skull ring so loudly he could not rest -- only dream terrible and dreadful dreams.

  A mere couple of days elapsed -- though it felt like eternity -- before orders were issued for himself and his friend Don Felipe. Like the majority of the younger Licentiates, their brief was to patrol, in disguise and with feigued identities, the path of events immediately preceding the departure of the Armada from Cadiz. It made excellent sense to protect that of all historical nexi from interference -- yet somehow he could not believe that Two Dogs would be so blatant in his attack . . .

  Which was why, the evening before his departure, he met with Don Felipe in the drinking-shop currently most popular among the younger members of the Society in New Madrid, and mentioned that he had written a letter.

  "To Kristina?" Don Felipe said, his dark eyes darting back and forth between the folded paper and Don Miguel's face. "Yes, I've written also
." Feeling in the pouch at his belt, he produced a letter that might have been the twin of Don Miguel's except that the superscription was to the Lady Ingeborg. "But do you think there's any point in mailing them?"

  Don Miguel thought of the high-masted handsome trans-Atlantic liners that daily bowed out of the port here into the harsh hands of the ocean gale, and gave a shrug.

  "I don't know. But I felt relieved that I had set my thoughts on paper, even though they may never now be read. How do you imagine it will happen, if it does? Will there be a period of fading, or instant obliteration?"

  Don Felipe's face darkened. "I hope," he said soberly, "we shan't know anything . . . But there is one minor advantage, I suppose."

  "What?"

  "Well, according to my confessor, a soul in a potential world is classed as limbo-fodder. Which means that if Two Dogs succeeds, we shan't need to worry about paying for our little lapses from grace. Indeed we'll be kicking ourselves for not having had a bit more fun."

  "Do you find that amusing?" Don Miguel said.