Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  “Ay-yeh. Could’a been worse. An’ what the jabber, I got plen’y life to go. . . . Here we are.”

  They tied their horses in a small meadow which fronted on a brook. Trees behind it and across the swirling, bubbling brown water stood fair against heaven; grass grew thick and soft, starred with late wildflowers. Leonce unpacked the lunch she had commanded to be prepared, a hearty enough collection of sandwiches and fruit that Havig doubted he could get around his whole share. Well, they wanted a rest and a drink first any­way. He joined her, shoulder to shoulder; they leaned back against a bole and poured wine into silver cups.

  “Go on,” he reminded. “I want to hear about you.”

  Her lashes fluttered. He observed the tiny freckles across cheekbones and nose. “Aw, nothin’ nex’ to you, Jack.”

  “Please. I’m interested.”

  She laughed for delight. Yet the tale she gave him, in matter-of-fact phrases that begged no sympathy, had its grimness.

  In most respects a Glacier family, which turned such fangs to the outer world, was affectionate and close-knit. An earlier tradition of equality between the sexes had never died there, or else had revived in an age when any woman might at any mo­ment have to hunt or do battle. Of course, some specialization existed. Thus men took the heaviest manual labor, women the work demanding most patience. Men always offered the sacri­fices; but what Leonce called skuling was a prerogative of the female only, if she showed a bent for it. “Foreknowin’,” she explained. “Unravehin’ dreams. Readin’ an’ writin’. Healin’ some kinds o’ sickness. Drivin’ black fogs out o’ heads. Sendin’ ghosts back where they belong. That kind o’ job. An’ … m-m-m ... ways to trick the eye, fool the mind-you know?” But hers was no sleight-of-hand or ritual performance. No older self came to warn that child about keeping secrecy.

  Her father was (would be) Wolfskin-Jem, a warrior of note. He died fighting off an attack whipped up by the Dafy kin, os­tensibly to kill the “thing” which had been born to him, actually to end a long-smoldering feud. But his wife Onda escaped with their children, to find refuge among the Donnal troop. There followed years of guerrifia war and intrigue, before the Ranyans got allies and made their crushing comeback. Leonce, as a spy through time, played a key role. Inevitably, she became the new Skula.

  Among friends she was regarded initially with respect, not dread. She learned and practiced the normal skills, the normal sports. But her gift marked her out, and awe grew around her as her ability did. From Onda she learned to be sparing of it. (Also, despite stoic fatalism, it hurt to foreknow the misfor­tunes of those she cared about.) Nevertheless, having such a Skula, Wahorn waxed mighty.

  And Leonce, ever more, became lonely. Her siblings mar­ried and moved away, leaving her and Onda by themselves in Jem’s old lodge. Both took lovers, as was the custom of un­wedded women, but none of Leonce’s sought marriage, if only because she seemed to be barren, and gradually they stopped seeking her at all. Former playmates sought her for help and advice, never pleasure. Reaching after comradeship, she insisted on accompanying and fighting in raids on the lowlands. The kindred of those who fell shunned her and mumbled ques­tions about why the Skula had allowed deaths that surely one of her powers could have forbidden--or did she want them--? Then Onda died.

  Not much later, Eyrie scouts tracked down a far-flung rumor to the source, herself. She welcomed them with tears and jubilation. Wahorn would never see her again.

  “My God.” Havig laid an arm around her. “You have had it cruel.”

  “Aw, was plen’y good huntin’, skim’, feastin’, singin’, lots o’ jokin’ once I’d gotten here.” She had downed a quantity of wine. It made her breath fragrant as she nuzzled him. “I don’t sing bad. Wanna hear?”

  “Sure.”

  She bounded to fetch an instrument like a dwarf guitar from a saddlebag, and was back in a second. “I play a bone flute too, but can’t sing ‘long o’ that, hm? Here’s a song I made myself. I used to pass a lot o’ lone-time makin’ songs.”

  A little to his astonishment, she was excellent. “-Ride w’ere strides a rattle o’ rocks, / Thunder ‘e sun down t’ dance on your lance-” What he could follow raised gooseflesh on him.

  “Wow,” he said low when she had finished. “What else do you do?”

  “Well, I can read an’ write, sort o’. Play chess. Rules changed some from home to here, but I take mos’ games anyhow. An’ Austin taught me poker; I win a lot. An’ I joke.”

  “Hm?”

  She grinned and leaned into his embrace. “Figgered we’d joke after lunch, Jack, honeybee,” she murmured. “But w’y not ‘fore an’ after? Hm-m-m-m?”

  He discovered, with glee which turned to glory, that one more word would in the course of generations change its meaning.

  “Yeah,” he told me. “We moved in together. It lasted till I left. Several months. Mostly they were fine. I really liked that girl.”

  “Not loved, evidently,” I observed.

  “N-n-no. I suppose not. Though what is love, anyway? doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and muta­tions and quantum jumps that--Never mind.” He stared into the night which filled the windows of the room where we sat. “We had our fights, roof-shattering quarrels she’d end by strik­ing me and taunting me because I wouldn’t strike back, till she rushed out. Touchy as a fulminate cap, my Leonce. The reconciliations were every bit as wild.” He rubbed weary eyes. “Not suitable to my temperament, eh, Doc? And I’ll admit I was jealous, my jealousy brought on a lot of the trouble. She’d slept with many agents, and commoners for that matter, before I arrived, not to mention her highland lads earlier. She went on doing it too, not often, but if she particularly liked a man, this was her way to be kind and get closer to him. I had the same freedom, naturally, with other women, but ... I ... didn’t want it.”

  “Why didn’t she get pregnant by an, uh, agent?”

  His mouth twitched upward. “When she heard in the Eyrie what the situation was, she insisted on being taken to the last High Years, partly for a look around, like me going to Pericles’ Greece or Michelangelo’s Italy, but also to get a reversible ­sterilization shot. She wanted children in due course, when she felt ready to settle down--Glacier wives are chaste, it seems--but that wasn’t yet and meanwhile she enjoyed sex, same as she enjoyed everything else in life. Judas priest, what a lay she was!”

  “If she mainly stayed with you, however, there must have been a strong attraction on both sides,” I said.

  “There was. I’ve tried, as near as my privacy fetish will let me, to tell you what held me to her. From Leonce’s side … hard to be sure. How well did we actually know each other? How well have any man and woman ever?--My learning and, yes, intelligence excited her. She had a fine mind, hit-or-miss educated but fine. And, I’ll be frank, I doubtless had the top job in the Eyrie. Then, too, I suppose we felt the attraction of opposites. She called me sweet and gentle--not patronizingly, because I did do pretty well in games and exercises, being from a better-nourished era than average--but I was no stark moun­taineer or roughneck Renaissance mercenary.”

  Again ghosts dwelt in his smile. “On the whole,” he said, “she gave me the second best part of my life, so far and I think probably forever. I’ll always be grateful to her, for that and for what followed.”

  Havig’s suspicions developed slowly. He fought them. But piece by piece, the evidence accumulated that something was being withheld from him. It lay in the evasion of certain topics, the brushoff of certain questions, whether with Austin Cald­well’s embarrassment, or Coenraad van Heuvel’s brusque “I may not say what I have been told,” or Reuel Orrick’s chang­ing the subject and proceeding to get weeping drunk, or the mild “In God’s good time all shall be revealed to you, my son” of Padre Diego the Inquisitor, or an obscene command to shut up from various warrior types.

  He was not alone in this isolation. Of those others whom he approached about it, most were complaisant, whether from prudence
or indifference. But young Jerry Jennings exclaimed, “By Jove, you’re right!”

  So did Leonce, in more pungent words. Then after a mo­ment she said: “Well, they can’t give us new ‘uns ever’thing in a single chaw, can they?”

  “Coenraad’s as new as I am,” he protested. “Newer than you …”

  Her curiosity piqued, she found her own methods of investi­gation. They were not what you’d think. She could match a tough, woman-despising man-at-arms goblet for goblet till he was sodden and pliable, while her head remained ice-clear. She could trap a sober person by an adroit question; it helped hav­ing been a shaman. And she appalled Havig by whispering to him at night, amidst schoolgirl giggles, how she had done what was strictly forbidden without permission, slipped into different periods of the Eyrie’s existence to snoop, pry, and eavesdrop.

  She concluded: “Near’s I can learn, ol’ Walls’s jus’ feared you an’ ‘em like you might get mad at what some o’ the agents do in some times an’ places. Anyhow, till you’re more used to the idear.”

  “I was arriving at the same notion myself,” Havig said bleakly. “I’ve seen what earlier ages are like, what personalities they breed. The travelers who respond to his come-ons, or make themselves conspicuous enough for his searchers to hear about, are apt to be the bold--which in most cases means the ruthless. Coming here doesn’t change them.”

  “Seems like orders is, you got to be led slow to the truth. I s’pose I’m only kep’ from it ‘cause of bein’ by you.” She kissed him. “‘S ‘kay, darlya.”

  “You mean you’d condone robbery and--”

  “Hush. We got to use who we can get. Maybe they do be rough. Your folk, they never were?”

  Sickly, he remembered how ... from Wounded Knee to My Lai, and before and after ... he never disowned his nation. For where and when--if it had not abdicated all responsibility for the future-existed a better society?

  (Denmark, maybe? Well, the Danes boasted about Viking ancestors, who were comfortably distant in time, but stayed notably silent about what happened during the slave uprising in the Virgin Islands, 1848, or less directly in Greenland. By 1950 or so, of course, they were free to relax into a smugness shared by the Swedes, who had not only traded with Hitler but let his troop trains roll through their land. And yet these were countries which did much good in the world.)

  “‘Sides,” Leonce said candidly, “the weak go down, ‘less they’re lucky an’ got somebody strong to guard ‘em. An’ in the end, come the 01’ Man, we’re all weak.” She thought for a min­ute. “Could be,” she mused, “was I undyin’, I’d never kill more’n a spud, an’ it only for food. But I will die. I’m in the game too. So’re you, darlya. Let’s play for the best score we can make, hm?”

  He pondered long upon that.

  “But if nothing else,” he told me, and I heard his anguish, “I had to try and make certain the gold was worth more than the tailings.”

  “Or the end could justify the means?” I responded. “Sure, I follow. To say it never does is a counsel of perfection. In the real world, you usually must choose the lesser evil. Speaking as an old doctor—no--well, yes, I’ll admit I’ve given my share of those shots which end the incurable pain; and sometimes the choice has been harder. Go on, please do.”

  “I’d been promised a survey of the Maurai epoch,” he said, “so I could satisfy myself it was, at best, a transition period, whose leaders became tyrants and tried to freeze the world. So I could agree that, when the Maurai hegemony began to crum­ble-perhaps hastened by our subversion--we ought to inter­vene, seize power, help turn men back toward achievement and advancement.”

  “Not openly, surely,” I objected. “That, the sudden mass ap­pearance of time travelers, would produce headlines nobody could mistake.”

  “True, true. We were to spend centuries building our strength in secret, till we were ready to act in disguise. It wasn’t made clear exactly what disguise; but it was admitted that in­formation was still sparse, because of the usual difficulties. Be­sides, I heard long philosophical arguments from guys like Padre Diego, about free will and the rest. I thought the logic stank, but said nothing.”

  “Had, urn, Leonce already been taken uptime?”

  “Yes. That’s why she basically favored Wallis, in spite of her occasional naughtinesses. She told me about a world where progress had been made, more and more peaceful-looking for a long span of history. Except she could not agree this was necessarily progress. Granted, that world did have fleets of efficient sailing ships and electric-powered dirigibles, ocean ranches, solar energy screens charging accumulators, widescale use of bacterial fuel cells which ran off the wastes of living organisms, new developments in both theoretical and applied science, especially biology--”

  He stopped for breath and I tried to inject a light note:

  “Don’t tell me your pet Valkyrie used such terms!”

  “No, no.” He continued earnest. “I’m anticipating what I saw or had explained to me. Her impressions were more gen­eral. But she had that huntress and sorceress knack of close observation. She was quite able to trace the basic course of events.”

  “Which was?”

  “Men did not go on to any fresh peak. Instead, what they reached was a plateau, where they stayed. The bio-technological culture didn’t improve further, it merely spread further. ”

  “That was scarcely her ideal of the High Years restored, or Wallis’s of unlimited growth and accomplishment.”

  “The tour skimmed fast through a later phase of what ap­peared to be retrogression and general violence. Eyrie agents don’t dare explore it in detail till they have a larger and stronger organization. Nor can they understand what lies beyond. It seems peaceful once more, but it’s not comprehensible. From the glimpse I had, I’m prepared to believe that.”

  “What was it like?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

  “Very little.” His tone fell rough. “I haven’t time. Sound strange, coming from me? Well, it’s true. I’m a fugitive, re­member.”

  “I gather your trip uptime did not remove your skepticism about Wallis’s intentions,” I said, more calmly than I felt. “Why?”

  He ran fingers through his blond, sweat-dankened hair. “I’m a child of this century,” he replied. “Think, Doc. Recall how intelligent men like, well, Bertrand Russell or Henry Wallace took extensive tours of Stalin’s Russia, and came home to report that it did have its problems but those had been exaggerated and were entirely due to extraneous factors and a benev­olent government was coping with everything. Don’t forget, either, the chances are that most of their guides did think this, and were in full sincerity obeying instructions to shield a for­eign visitor from what he might misinterpret.” His grin was un­pleasant. “Maybe the curse of my life is that I’ve lost the will to believe.”

  “You mean,” I said, “you wondered if the world really would benefit from the rule of the Eyrie? And if maybe the Maurai were being slandered, you being shown nothing except untypi­cal badness?”

  “No, not exactly that, either. Depends on interpretation and--oh, here’s a prime example.”

  Not every recruit was given as thorough a tour as Havig. Plainly Wallis deemed him to be both of particular potential value and in particular need of convincing.

  By doubling back and forth through chronology, he got a look at documents in ultra-secret files. (He could puzzle them out, since Ingliss was an official second language of the Fed­eration and spelling had changed less than pronunciation.) One told how scientists in Hinduraj had clandestinely devel­oped a hydrogen-fusion generator which would end Earth’s fuel shortage, and the Maurai had as clandestinely learned of it, sabotaged it, and applied such politico-economic pressures that the truth never became public.

  The motive given was that this revolutionary innovation would have upset the Pax. Worse, it would have made possible a rebirth of the ancient rapacious machine culture, which the planet could not endure.

  And yet ... up
time of the Maurai dominion, Havig saw huge silent devices and energies ... and men, beasts, grass, trees, stars bright through crystalline air ...

  “Were the Pacific sociologists and admirals sincere in their belief?” he said in a harsh whisper. “Or were they only preserv­ing their top-dog status? Or both, or neither, or what?

  “And is that farther future good? It could be a smooth-running monstrosity, you know, or it could be undermining the basis of all life’s existence, or--How could I tell?”

  “What did you ask your guides?” I responded.

  “Those same questions. The leader was Austin Caldwell, by the way, an honest man, hard as the Indians who once hunted his scalp but nevertheless honest.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “To stop my goddam quibbling and trust the Sachem. The Sachem had done grand thus far, hadn’t he? The Sachem had studied and thought about these matters; he didn’t pretend to know everything himself, but we’d share the wisdom he was gathering as it became ready, and he would lead us onto the right paths.”

  “As for me, Austin said, I’d better remember how slow and awkward it was, getting around like this, having to return across centuries whenever we needed transportation to a new area. I’d already had as much lifespan and trouble spent on me as I was worth, anyhow at my present stage of development. If I couldn’t accept the discipline that an outfit must have which is embarked on dangerous endeavors-well, I was free to re­sign, but I’d better never show my hide near the Eyrie again.”

  “What could I do? I apologized and came back with them.”

  9

  HE WAS GWEN a couple of days off, which he spent regaining his spirits in Leonce’s company. The period of his training and indoctrination had brought winter’s chances for old-fashioned sports outdoors and indoors. Thereafter he was assigned to re­read Wallis’s history of the future, ponder it in the light of what he had witnessed, and discuss any questions with Waclaw Krasicki, who was the most scholarly of the garrison’s current directorate.