by John Barnes
The assembly hall here wasn’t nearly so comfortable. There were no refreshments, but I doubt that anyone was hungry or thirsty.
We milled around for a moment, and then General Malecela came in. When he took the podium, everyone fell silent.
“Let me begin,” he said, “by asking you all to take a moment to reflect on your fallen comrades, to ask any deity in which you believe to take care of them, and to calm yourselves and get ready for the next step.”
The room was plunged into excruciating silence for a long time; finally Malecela spoke again. “First of all, I want you all to know that I’m proud to be one of you. Collectively your quick reflexes and speed in maneuver held our casualties far lower than they might have otherwise been, and, moreover, the returned fire was very intelligently executed—some of you may have noted that I tossed two PRAMIACS through that gate. I had set one for ten megatons, to go off whenever the gate closed, and the other for a couple of tons of explosive in hopes of destroying the generator. I discovered that the rest of you had already tossed in at least forty PRAMIACS set for the maximum, to blow off when the gate closed, and, moreover, several of you tossed various charges and fired various programmed rounds in there that collectively must have ensured that the gate generator would fail. In other words, we couldn’t have done that better if we had planned it.
“Another detail is more significant, if you think about it. There has been no further attack on the base on the back side of the moon, and our probes into the immediate future show none as far as we can trace. Yet, having lost the battle, why did they not toss a bomb through at us? It would have taken almost nothing at all, compared with their known resources, to open another gate from a military facility somewhere, push through a nuclear bomb or a large mass of antimatter, and switch off the gate.
“The answer to that can only be one thing. They didn’t do it on the first shot because they wanted to capture at least some of us—several of the bodies had stun weapons among their equipment. They know by now that we don’t negotiate for hostages, so they were looking for someone to interrogate—and they chose to try to get prisoners from the most dangerous possible time and location they could have picked. That means that, from the standpoint of whoever planned this thing, the prisoners had to be taken from that meeting—probably the only place they could identify where the information they needed could be found.
“Moreover, there’s only one reason we can think of that the Closers would mount such an inept expedition, and then not even follow up with a bomb … we think that it’s because they couldn’t. What we were attacked by was something thrown together at the last moment, a last-ditch effort by some isolated Closer base. Which, thanks to you all, just received about four hundred megatons in return.”
There was a very long, stunned silence.
“Yes, you are thinking accurately,” Malecela said, repeating himself, then looking up and grinning at us. “That attack was from the last Closer base capable of mounting an attack. The evidence is that sometime very soon—and god knows we don’t know how just yet—we are about to win this war.”
The place broke into the wildest applause I’ve ever seen in my life; even people whose faces were still streaked with tears for their dead were cheering. It took a long time before there was enough quiet for Malecela to be heard again.
“Now,” he said, “we’ve managed to get enough staff and personnel into this base to get some sort of quarters ready for all of you. We’ll give you a couple of hours to settle in and clean up—which also gives us a little time to do some planning and arranging—and then, after that, we’ll be meeting with you individually and in small groups. Right now I don’t have the foggiest idea of what you will be doing, but I do know that given the number of timelines we must investigate at once, there won’t be enough of you.
“That’s all for now. If you’ll file out to my left and place your thumbs on the reader, you’ll receive directions to your rooms.”
There wasn’t much to say, but everyone was saying it loudly and rapidly. Chrys and I could barely hear each other and gave up trying, figuring it would be easier to talk once we got to our room.
The thumbprint reader told us that we were on Level 8, Wing 4, Room 80; before we had time to ask where that might be, we saw a bank of escalators, labeled with “Level 2” up through “Level 8.”
“They put us in the penthouse,” I said.
“Not much of a view here,” Chrysamen pointed out. “That means eight levels up from the outer edge of the spinning asteroid. We’re deeper inside than anyone else.”
“People get penthouses either for the view or for the privacy,” I pointed out.
“You’re incorrigible.”
The escalator ride was a strange sensation because when you use centrifugal force for artificial gravity, the gravity falls off very rapidly as you move in toward the center, and at the same time the apparent Coriolis force gets more noticeable. The total effect was that if you shut your eyes, it felt like the escalator was twisting upward to the left, about to curl right over and dump you off. We both hung on, though Chrys seemed to be getting a kick out of shutting her eyes and letting go momentarily.
But then she enjoys parachute drops and roller coasters. Chrys is close, but nobody’s perfect.
“You really ought to try this,” she said, grinning at me.
“No thanks. I prefer only to be scared to death when there’s actually something to be scared of.”
She shrugged. “Think of it as staying in practice.”
At the top of the escalator, there were moving sidewalks like the things they have in airports, fanning out from the escalator head, and one of them was clearly marked for “Wing 4.” It was enough to make me wonder if all this had been sitting here waiting for centuries (it might well have been) or if they had suddenly realized they would need it, dropped a construction team back five years in time, and then built it right after the attack on the back side of the moon. In principle the only way to tell would be by asking.
The room was in that gray range between hospital, barracks, and hotel, clearly not a place intended as anyone’s home but not entirely devoid of comfort either. They had provided us with some simple tunic-and-pants uniforms, since we had no bags—those were “still” back at the Wellington in New York in my home timeline, god knows how many years crosstime but at least 850 years back. Supposedly after this mission we’d be returned to that time and place—where Paula was on her way to cover Porter, where Robbie was in a hospital bed in Oslo, where with Paula gone, the second team would have to cover my son, father, and sister.
Time travel costs a lot of money; probably if it hadn’t been for the Closers, it would have been millennia after it was discovered before anyone did it regularly. In principle they could have sent back a probe to see how it all came out and let me know whether my family and friends were all right. In principle, if it’s before noon, you could be in Paris tomorrow morning from almost anywhere in the United States. It would merely cost you so much that you wouldn’t think of doing it. In the same way, unless there was a remarkably good reason other than the nerves of two senior Crux Ops, they weren’t going to do that. And being able to know is not at all the same thing as actually knowing.
I was about to work my way up into a fine fret, since there was nothing else to do until they called us, and I don’t respond well to having a lot on my mind and nothing I can do. So I took a shower and changed, as Chrys did, and then I started to work on developing a fine fret.
Maybe because she recognized the warning signs, Chrysamen abruptly asked, “So, just before the meeting was extremely rudely interrupted”—the funny twist in her mouth told me the joke was supposed to make me a little more relaxed and easy to talk to—“you were acting like there was a snake in your pants leg. And you were focusing a lot of your strange squirmy energy, my dear husband, on Citizen-senator Thebenides. So I think you didn’t like what you were hearing, but unfortunately I think you made that very
clear to everyone else.”
“Hmmm.” I sat down on the bed, kicked off my shoes, and stretched out. She did the same and lay in my arms. After a couple long breaths and a false start, I began, “So I suppose that if I start out by admitting that it’s just a funny feeling, even if it’s a very intense funny feeling, you’re not going to be pleased?”
She made a face, twisting her mouth a little sideways, and then said, “Mark, you know I know you, and you know I love you, and by now I know you don’t act up in public without a good reason. And you were really acting up, and I really couldn’t see the reason. So if it’s purely a gut feeling, I assume it’s a very strong gut feeling, and if it’s something more than that, it’s probably important, but anyway—what I want to know is, what did you see that bothered you so much? You and I stay alive on our hunches and our feel for evidence, sweetheart. If there’s something the matter, share it. I trust you.”
I hunched up onto one shoulder so I could look at her face more closely, which also gave me an excuse to push some of her dark curls back from her face a little. She was so beautiful, even now … after all those years, after all the usual marital hassles … and, of course, after more than a dozen dangerous missions together. We’d seen each other shot and bleeding, fought side by side in worlds you can’t imagine, and all I had to do was explain to her that Thebenides gave me the creeps. How complicated could that be? As she said, if I couldn’t trust her …
“Look,” I began, “I think part of it is a matter of where and when I grew up. In my time and timeline, we weren’t great trusters of politicians. I know that nobody is, but us particularly. We knew a little too well that when someone starts talking about how principles are all very well, but you’ve got to be practical, he means that he’s going to do something he thinks you won’t approve of, and he wants to head off your argument. Nobody ever says, ‘Look, let’s just get practical here’ if he’s talking about feeding or housing people, or about giving good jobs to vets or something. The ‘I’m just a practical guy—let’s all be practical together and not pay too much attention to those pointy-headed intellectuals’ dodge usually only comes along when a politician is cooking up something so disgusting that it can’t be justified in the normal way. It’s the way Truman talked about dropping the bomb, the way Johnson talked about getting into Vietnam, the way Nixon talked about law and order, and the way Bush and Clinton talked all the time.”
“And boy, did they talk all the time,” Chrysamen said, grinning. “Okay, lover, I can buy that explanation. You think he’s trying to put a fast one over on us, morally speaking, right?”
“I don’t so much think that as I know it in my bones. And look at what he’s saying, too, Chrys. ‘Oh, sure, maybe we’ve won, and that’s swell, but what if we didn’t beat the Closers in a way that we would approve of.’ Meaning, what if he doesn’t approve of the way the ATN would have to change to win. But the only reason ATN exists is to fight back against the Closers. ATN never meddles in the affairs of a member timeline, or at least that’s what they always tell all of us. Don’t you see how peculiar that is? If I had to make a guess, it’s that the Athenian timeline has a big bureaucracy, by now, with quite a bit invested in keeping the war going. I would guess the timelines war is big business for a lot of our good, generous, civilized Athenians.”
She looked more than a bit startled. “Mark, you can’t be serious. Your timeline and mine both owe everything to the Athenians. If they hadn’t fought back, and developed the time machines themselves, and then organized and helped everyone else, we’d all be under the Closer heel. We even named our son after Perikles!”
I nodded. “You see how uncomfortable it is? But let’s face facts, wars involve a lot of money, and the money flows through a central point somewhere. The central point always gets its hands on a lot of the money. That all makes common sense, doesn’t it? So somewhere in the Athenian timeline, there are people with jobs or property who are going to lose out when the war ends. Since that wasn’t supposed to happen for thousands of years, nobody thought about what to do when it was over. Now there’s the scary prospect of peace real soon. And nobody is ready for it.
“But our boy Thebenides knows a voter’s interest—or maybe a campaign donor’s? I don’t know how they finance their elections—he knows what they have at stake. Any good political hack does. And he’s not going to let them get hurt. That’s the first given. And the second given—well, so whatever timelines are now drawing close to our own, they seem to just possibly have it in for the Closers. That strikes me as just fine and a high personal recommendation.
“But good old Thebenides sees it differently. He’s afraid that whatever is out there might not like ATN either. Which is quite possible. And considering we have member timelines that are absolute monarchies, and Communist dictatorships, and hell, there’s even a couple of reformed Nazi timelines that joined up … well, maybe we just don’t look all that good to the Intertemporal Good Guys. Maybe all the other little compromises that Thebenides and his crew have made would make us look not different enough from the Closers …
“Or maybe the new timelines are actually really bad guys, even worse than Closers.”
I sighed and shrugged, holding Chrys tight. “Don’t you see how much of a mess this is, at least potentially?”
“Maybe,” she said. “Do you mean you’re afraid Thebenides wants to make an alliance with the Closers?”
“I’m afraid he wants to leave the door open to it, anyway, and I don’t like that one bit. I’m also afraid that he may have worse than that in mind. Like he wants to bargain out some balance-of-power deal. Like he suggests that if the new guys do turn out to be friendly, we keep the Closers around ‘just in case’ or ‘for the balance of power.’ You see the kind of thing I mean?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, jeez. It’s not easy to put into words. The whole idea of having a principle is that it’s something to guide your actions, isn’t it? And if at the first sign of things getting complicated or difficult, you decide to throw the principle over the side, there’s only two reasons—either it was always a bad principle, or you’ve decided to do a bad thing. I don’t think he wants to do anything consciously evil, but I think he’s like politicians in my timeline—he wants to have the option. He doesn’t care enough about right and wrong to let them get in the way of anything he wants to do.”
“Well, it is practical politics, Mark.” She looked straight into my eyes. “I mean, I come from a very impractical timeline. We were completely pacifist. We were taken over, exploited, slaughtered, wrecked, and we never varied from our principles until we finally made one huge massacre. And if we hadn’t been willing to do that when ATN showed up and armed us … well, you can imagine. I’d probably have never been born—we’d have died out a generation or more before I was born. You can’t be completely principled about these things.”
“You can’t be completely unprincipled, either,” I said. “Look, it probably is just the experience of history. When I think about the deals my nation made to win World War II—deals with Russia that gave millions of refugees back to Stalin, deals with France that eventually got us into Vietnam, deals with Britain that got the USA into the business of preserving a colonial empire … well. During my lifetime we were so practical that we backed any murdering dictator who said he wasn’t a Communist, and turned a blind eye to torture, murder, and repression anywhere that they’d let McDonald’s sell a hamburger or Disney put on a movie. That’s what ‘practical’ got us.”
She nodded, and her face looked serious and far away. “I understand the problem, I guess. You think he talked like one of your politicians, and you don’t trust them at all.”
“You don’t know ’em like I do,” I pointed out, “and there’s a certain analogy about the whole thing, too. In my timeline, we had just won a huge war, and we were sitting on top of the world, and then the wealthy and powerful grabbed the whole show for themselves and managed to make us roundly hated
everywhere within a generation. Nobody was more liked and respected in 1945, and thanks to a few thousand dorks in suits whose only interest was in making money, nobody was more hated by 1965. I’d hate to think that after the war is over ATN would do anything except hunt down whatever Closer bases are still hidden, and then dissolve.”
“Hmm. And Thebenides set off all those feelings in you?”
“Yeah, all those and more. See, the other problem is, the son of a bitch just comes across as a greasy liar.”
At that, she finally laughed a little, which I found encouraging. I put an arm around her waist, and we kissed, long and slow. It occurred to me that there was at least one good way to kill an hour or so in a room alone with Chrysamen. Gently, I stroked her skirt up her thigh; she kissed me more firmly.
We were both most of the way naked and beginning to get to the intense parts when the little loudspeaker in the room said, “Agents Strang and ja N’wook, please acknowledge.”
“Here,” we said, together.
“Report in ten minutes to Conference Level 2, Wing 3, Conference Room 7,” the voice said.
Oh, well, getting dressed in a hurry always gives me more energy for a long boring meeting. We caught the escalators back down and discovered that they deposited us right by the door of the conference room; we were even about half a minute early.
In the conference room were Ariadne Lao, Citizen-senator Thebenides, and General Malecela. I figured my confidence in whatever was to follow was at just under 67 percent.
They were polite, but they got down to business right away. I had already realized that if three people that senior were explaining the mission to us, it must be unusually important even for senior Crux Ops.
Without preface, Ariadne Lao said, “The new timelines that are going to assist us in this war—”
Thebenides cleared his throat and Malecela glared at him.
