The Chronocide Mission

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  “But of course.”

  “I’ve never heard of Ebeneser Johnson. You’re shaking the wrong family tree.”

  “We speak of a time more than two hundred years ago. You could have had eight, or ten, or twelve ancesters since then. Just give us the names and principal places of residence of your Johnson forebears as far back as you can remember. Our genealogist will connect you if he can.”

  “And what does this cost me?”

  “Nothing. The estate pays all expenses.”

  “In that case, there won’t be anything left for the heirs,” Johnson said sourly, but he provided names and addresses for his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather.

  Roszt and Kaynor returned to their car, which was parked around the corner, and discussed Mr. Randell Johnson. He seemed like a most unlikely inventer of the Honsun Len; on the other hand, he owned an obviously successful camera and photographic supply business. He sold lens, and there was nothing to indicate that he didn’t make them himself.

  Doubtfully they turned to the next name, and as they slowly worked through their “most likely” list—Johnsons whose backgrounds made them immediately suspect—they also began sampling the Johnsons on their general list. Egarn had said many people in this civilization had private pastimes, and unbeknownst to friends and neighbors the Honsun Len Johnson might be an amateur len grinder. This confronted them with the task of discovering not only known occupations but also secret hobbies.

  They visited the George Eastman House, the splendid mansion once occupied by the famous photographic inventor and industrialist and now the home of the International Museum of Photography. There they confounded a guard by asking to see the lens invented by Mr. Johnson. After investigating, the guard informed them that the museum had no record of such a lens.

  They visited Johnson Center, an enormous old house on Mt. Hope Avenue near the university, which proved to be headquarters for various social services that had no discernable connection with anyone named Johnson. In studying a map of the area, they found a Johnson Road—near the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory, which was suggestive—but as far as they could determine, no one named Johnson lived on or near it.

  When finally it became obvious that their inquiries were leading nowhere, they moved to the next step of their investigation: breaking and entering. They broke into buildings where a Johnson lived or worked and searched for evidence of an interest in lens—instruments or equipment using lens, drawings of lens, devices that could be used for len grinding.

  Egarn had feared that their search would come to this, and he instructed them accordingly. They were to spread their activity as widely as possible and make it so varied that the police wouldn’t perceive the connection. They also were not to burglarize any Johnson they had called on recently. If they did, someone would be certain to associate the two events.

  Thus began the most peculiar series of crimes in the history of the Rochester Police Department. Burglars for whom no lock or alarm system was a deterent broke in wherever and whenever they chose and left the premises as tidily secure as when they entered. Burglar alarms mysteriously malfunctioned in their presence. Surveillance cameras turned out blank photographs. There were no fingerprints because the burglars always wore gloves.

  Even more bewildering was the fact that they took nothing. They sometimes made a mess in their search, as though they were looking for something of value, but after checking carefully, the perplexed owners always had to report nothing missing.

  They took nothing because they found nothing—nothing, that is, that connected anyone with the Honsun Len. In a very short time they became so proficient at breaking and entering that they could literally do it under the noses of the police without arousing a wiff of suspicion. Each night they crossed more names off their list. The list, unfortunately, was a long one.

  Two kinds of places gave them difficulty. With apartment buildings, they first had trouble figuring out addresses—often they were unable to determine the precise apartment the bewildering array of letters and numbers referred to. Next there was the problem of reaching an apartment through a common building entrance and passing numerous doors of other apartments without being seen. Until they discovered the telephone, they had a problem finding out in advance whether anyone was home. Large houses also posed a problem because of the constant presence of servants. There always seemed to be someone home in a mansion.

  As they worked, their worry about Egarn and his team grew. They had heard nothing from him. The methods he devised for sending them messages and picking up the messages they left for him hadn’t worked. Each morning and night they searched their room, but always there was nothing. The messages they left for him—in an envelope attached to a weight placed at the center of an otherwise bare table where it could be picked up easily—were never disturbed.

  Each night before retiring they signalled with a flashlight, using the code Egarn had taught them, but they received no sign at all that he was still watching. As the daez passed, they became tormented by fear that the Lantiff had returned to butcher everyone in the ruins as they had those at court and in the villages, leaving them completely on their own with a world to save.

  16. ARNEAND DELINE

  One-namers from the western peerdoms were devastated by the news Arne brought, but fate of Midlow Court affected Deline hardly at all. She had resented her mother, she had hardly known her sister, and—she remarked with a toss of her head—most of the peeragers weren’t worth bothering about anyway.

  Only the ravaging of Midd Village distressed her. Midlow’s one-namers had been kind to her, and she wept for them, but her eyes were dry with anger. “The trouble with this war is that we aren’t killing enough Lantiff,” she said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  It was a different war, now. The little army was no longer defending the Ten Peerdoms. Half of these were gone; others were crumbling. Easlon, with its brilliant peer and prince, still stood, and both peerager and one-namer refugees who’d had the good fortune to escape the Lantiff circled far around the armies of Lant and arrived exhausted and starving. The one-namers, at least, were fiercely determined to sell their lives dearly and take as many Lantiff with them as possible. Like Arne, they joined Inskor’s army. Even the lashers of the Ten Peerdoms, impaired though their minds were, dimly perceived that their lives under the Peer of Lant would be far worse than anything they had experienced, and some of them, too, took the long trek around the war to reach Easlon where they could fight for their survival.

  The fighting was a brutal repetition of all that Arne had experienced, but in that, too, he quickly noticed differences. For one, the Lantiff had a new weapon. It sent out beams of light that looked similar to those produced by Egarn’s weapon but were silent and harmless. They lit up a battlefield spectacularly, but if the object was to frighten the enemy, Inskor’s army scorned it.

  The Lantiff also began to use new tactics. When their vanguard was ambushed, the following ranks, instead of riding furiously into the same trap, dismounted, left their horses, and took to the wooded hills on foot. Trees provided cover for them and made Egarn’s weapon less effective. The Lantiff tried to work close enough to use their weapon, the one that stunned the enemy, and the defenders, always outnumbered, had to withdraw before that could happen. The diminutive army of the Ten Peerdoms continued to kill enormous numbers of Lantiff, but fewer than before, and dae by dae it was forced backward.

  Arne’s relationship with Deline also was changing. The war had brought them together; now it began to tear them apart.

  He already had learned he was no warrior. He was a far more efficient commander than Inskor—he ran a battle the same way he had run the Peerdom of Midlow, methodically mastering every detail, overlooking nothing, anticipating the enemy’s moves for that dae, and the next, and for tenites to come—but he had none of Inskor’s craftiness, nor did he have Deline’s elan. She was still the magnificent warrior, and she quickly became Inskor’s valued deputy.
There was no battlefield crisis she could not master, and she blunted every Lantian breakthrough, rallying the defenders and terrifying the enemy. The two of them, Inskor and Deline, gradually divided the army’s command between them, leaving Arne with no role at all in the fighting.

  This did not disturb him. He moved easily into the position of first server to the Peer of Easlon. He organized and managed food supplies, took charge of transport, sent foraging parties into the conquered territories to bring out loads of food from hidden storage bins the Lantiff had overlooked, and ran a scouting system that located refugees, guided them around the army of Lant to safety, and trained them as reserve troops.

  It was when the press of work began to keep him from the battlefront that his estrangement from Deline became serious. She expected him to continue the war at her side, fighting as they had before—under her command, now, since he had none of his own. She seemed unable to comprehend that managing an army’s supplies and training new troops required the same dedicated efficiency as managing a battle. Arne’s talents were uniquely valuable—as the Peer of Easlon remarked, there were many who could fight, and several who could lead an army, but only Arne knew how to keep an army fighting—but Deline had nothing but contempt for one who fought his battles in the rear.

  She had formed her own guard of twenty carefully-chosen lashers. They had no distinguishing uniform, but neither did anyone else in this war except the Lantiff. She emphasized severe discipline and bold action, and she pleaded with Arne to organize a similar guard and join her in battle. Their meetings were spent in argument rather than love until she stopped her nightly visits to him and began to denounce him publically as a coward who hid far from the battlefield while pretending to assist with the war.

  She also resented the fact that he, a non-fighter, conferred regularly with Inskor and with the peer and prince about tactics and strategy, while she, who fought brilliantly, was allowed no voice at all in the war’s planning. She thought the other commanders—most of them grim scouts who had been fighting Lant all of their adult lives—kept her out of a battle until their own stupid plans and leadership went amiss, at which time they came pleading to her to save them. Otherwise, they ignored her suggestions and gave her no credit for her achievements.

  Because Arne was in charge of so many things, she began to bring all of these complaints to him, as though every problem she encountered was his responsibility, and he listened patiently and did whatever could be done. Often that was nothing at all. He couldn’t furnish special uniforms for her guard. He had difficulties enough finding clothing for the refugees. The food was often as bad as she alleged it to be, but Arne’s resourcefulness was taxed to the utmost in ensuring that army, refugees, and the civilian population of Easlon were adequately fed, and in hording sufficient reserves so the war could continue. He couldn’t supply the weather-proof shelters she wanted for her troops. There was nothing to build them with and no point in elaborate constructions when their lines of defense had to be abandoned almost as soon as they were occupied. A battle was nothing more than a slow retreat as the Lantiff steadily pushed the war eastward.

  He did what he could, resignedly accepted her incessant complaining about things that could not be changed, and tried to keep keep her discontent from affecting the rest of the army. Rumors of it finally reached Inskor, and he came to Arne for suggestions.

  “There is nothing that can be done,” Arne said.

  “I suppose former princes make very poor subordinates,” Inskor said resignedly.

  Arne shook his head. “No, that can’t be the reason. She was an excellent subordinate when she was my assistant in Midlow. Whatever the cause, if we need her—and we do—we must put up with her.”

  Her private life became a public scandal. It was rumored that young Hutter, who accompanied her everywhere, shared her bed as well. It was also rumored that she had recruited the husky lashers of her personal guard for their sexual prowess and that it required all twenty of them to satisfy her insatiable appetite. All of that may have been true, or none of it, but in the chaos of war, no one except Arne really cared what her private life was. The rumors gave the army something to gossip about.

  In battle, she was invaluable. With the faithful Hutter at her side and her ferocious guard following, she appeared where least expected, rallied defenders, put attackers to flight. Her very recklessness inspired terror in the Lantiff. A glimpse of her on the skyline—erect on a tall white horse that the Peer of Easlon had given to her, hair flying, black and white uniform flashing—brought the most relentless Lantian attack to a halt.

  Twice she led her guard too close to the enemy and was knocked unconscious by the weapon of Lant. This should have rallied the Lantiff; instead, the fall of the foe they most dreaded seemed to appall them. They waivered; Deline’s guard charged with renewed fury, routed the Lantiff, and carried her to safety, where she regained consciousness with a bruised and aching body but no other symptoms of her experience except a burning desire to lead another attack.

  Inskor was sufficiently concerned about Deline’s conduct to mention it to the peer, and she sent for Arne and received him in the large tent she used when she visited the army. The dumpy little woman was an unlikely-looking ruler, but each time Arne met her he was more deeply impressed with her astuteness. She signaled him to rise and asked her server to bring a chair for him—indication she had much to say to him.

  “Inskor told me about the trouble you have been having with Deline,” she said with a smile. “He finds it bewildering, but that is to be expected of an old scout who has never had anything to do with court society. He thought perhaps a peerager might better understand what has gone wrong. He is right. I understand Deline perfectly. The problem is that she is in love with you.”

  “Her behavior seems very strange for one who is in love, Majesty,” Arne murmured politely.

  “Not for one who is in love and doesn’t want to admit it. I have been observing these things all my life. When I was a child, my mother told me kindly that no one would ever think me beautiful or even pretty. Very few men would love me, but a great many would court me because of what I could do for them as prince or peer. If I didn’t want to be crassly used by my lovers, I had to understand their motives. She told me to observe all the court romances and study the conduct of women as well as men. The knowledge I gained from this has been invaluable to me.” She added, “My mother was right, of course. It took a long time for me to find a consort who was interested in me instead of what he could gain through my position.”

  Arne said politely, “Majesty, I don’t understand what that could have to do with Deline. There is nothing either of us stands to gain from the other.”

  “It has nothing to do with her,” the peer said. “It has to do with me. I am explaining why I understand Deline. I have been studying romances, and broken romances, and love—requited and unrequited—since I was a child. Deline was the most unpleasant prince I have ever met—obsessed with her position and beauty without a thought in her head for her responsibilities. It is a great tragedy. She could have been a brilliant prince and peer.” She smiled at Arne’s puzzlement. “I had excellent sources of information, you see. The other peers often brought their troubles to me. The peer her mother asked me what she should do about Deline, and I told her—she must take away one of Deline’s names and make her second daughter the prince and heir. This was the only possible solution to an impossible situation, but the peer thought it unnecessarily severe. Long afterward, when Deline raided Midd Village with the guard she wasn’t supposed to have, her mother had to do what I had suggested. It must have been a wrenching experience for everyone but especially for Deline. How did she react?”

  “She was stunned,” Arne said. “For a time she seemed to go through the motions of living without feeling anything at all. But she recovered well. She did excellent work, and I know she enjoyed it.”

  “Of course. She always had the intelligence to accomplish anything she
wanted, but she never wanted anything beyond her own pleasure. Now I will tell you what happened. She had lost everything that mattered to her, she was alone among strangers and reduced to performing menial labor, but fate gave her the most capable, the most conscientious and honorable, the most dedicated, the most wholly admirable man in the peerdom to work with.”

  The peer raised a hand to stop Arne’s protest. “Your modesty is as remarkable as your devotion to duty. Never mind. That is how you appeared to her. She had to admire your ability and the way you worked, and admiration is as good a basis as any for love. Unfortunately, the more deeply she fell in love with you, the more she realized you were far more interested in your work than in her and always would be. She finally decided you would never love anyone.”

  “But I did love her,” Arne protested. “I asked her to wive me.”

  The peer stared at him. “I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have suspected it. What did she say?”

  “I was about to visit the other peerdoms to ask for help in forming an army. She said she would tell me when I returned.”

  “And?”

  “Before I had a chance to talk with her, the land warden told me the prince her sister wanted me to be her consort.”

  “But if you loved Deline, surely you weren’t compelled to—” She paused. Then she continued slowly, “I see. Now I understand. When a prince invites a one-namer to be her consort, he is compelled. Poor Deline. Poor Arne. If that mating with her sister had been a brief one, as peerager matings often are, perhaps you could have resumed your happiness. But you and Elone Jermile were both dedicated to Midlow and got on well, the prince became pregnant, and the mating seemed likely to last a long time. It gradually dawned on Deline that she had lost you.

  “Then the Lantiff came, and you fought and loved together, the two being more than twice as exhilarating in combination. Her sister was dead, and she thought she couldn’t lose you again, but this time you lost each other—to the war—because she slipped naturally into all of her old ways, and suddenly, without any official notice, she was a prince again. She couldn’t possibly consider wiving you after that, but she would have accepted you as her consort if you had been willing to remain her humble subject, follow her about obediently, charge into battle with her, and attend her when it was over. Since you couldn’t do any of that, her reaction was to blame you for all of her troubles, real or imagined. Poor Arne. Poor Deline.”