Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks tp-6

by Poul Anderson

  “I was among the Unattached operatives dispatched to investigate. This was because I, before ever hearing of the Patrol, had kicked around some in those boonies. That gave me a slight special sense for what to do. I could never pass myself off as a Latin American, but I could be a Yankee soldier of fortune, in part starry-eyed over the liberation, in part hoping somehow to cash in on it—and, mainly, though macho enough, free of the kind of arrogance that would have put those proud people off.

  “It’s a long and generally tedious story. Believe me, my friends, 99 percent of an operation in the field amounts to patient collection of dull and usually irrelevant facts, in between interminable periods of hurry-up-and-wait. Let’s say that, aided by a good deal of luck, I managed to infiltrate, make my connections, pass out my bribes, gather my informers and my evidence. At last there was no reasonable doubt. This obscurely originating Blasco Lopez had to be from the future.

  “I called in our troops and we raided the house where he was staying in Bogota. Most of those we collared were harmless local people, hired as servants, though what they had to tell proved useful. Lopez’s mistress, accompanying him, turned out to be his associate. She told us a lot more, in exchange for comfortable accommodations when she’d go to the exile planet. But the ringleader himself had broken free and escaped.

  “One man on horseback, headed for the Cordillera Oriental that rises beyond the town—one man like ten thousand genuine Creoles—we couldn’t go after him on time hoppers. The search could too damn easily get too damn noticeable. Who knew what effect that might have? The conspirators had already made the timestream unstable…

  “I grabbed a horse, a couple of remounts, some jerky and vitamin pills for myself, and set off in pursuit.”

  Wind boomed hollowly down the mountainside. Grass and low, scattered shrubs trembled beneath its chill. Up ahead, they gave way to naked rock. Right, left, behind, peaks reared into a blue bleakness. A condor wheeled huge, on watch for any death. Snowfields on the heights above glowed beneath a declining sun.

  A musket cracked. At its distance, the noise it made was tiny, though echoes flew. Everard heard the bullet buzz. Close! He hunched down in the saddle and spurred his steed onward.

  Varagan can’t really expect to drop me at this range, passed through him. What, then? Does he hope I’ll slow down? If so, if he gains a little on me, what use is that to him? What goal has he got?

  His enemy still led him by half a mile, but Everard could see how yonder animal lurched along, exhausted. To get on Varagan’s trail had taken some while, going from this peon to that sheepherder and asking if a man of the given description had ridden by. However, Varagan had only the single horse, which he must spare if it was not to collapse under him. After Everard found the traces, a wilderness-trained eye had readily been able to follow them, and the pace of the hunt picked up.

  It was also known that Varagan had fled bearing no more than a muzzle-loader. He’d been spending powder and balls pretty freely ever since the Patrolman hove in view. Since he was a fast recharger and an excellent shot, it did have its delaying effect. But what refuge was in these wastes? Varagan appeared to be making for a particular crag. It was conspicuous, not only high but its shape suggestive of a castle tower. It was no fortress, though. If Varagan took shelter behind it, Everard could use the blaster he carried to bring the rock molten down upon his head.

  Maybe Varagan wasn’t aware the agent had such a weapon. Impossible. Varagan was a monster, yes, but not a fool.

  Everard pulled down his hatbrim and drew his poncho tight against the wind. He didn’t reach for the blaster, no point in that yet, but as if by instinct, his left hand dropped to the flintlock pistol and saber at his hip. They were mainly part of his costume, intended to make him an authority figure to the inhabitants, but there was an odd comfort in their massiveness.

  Having reined in to shoot, Varagan continued straight on uphill, this time without lingering to reload. Everard brought his own horse from trot to canter and closed the gap further. He kept alert—not tensed, but alert against contingencies, ready to swing aside or even jump down behind the beast. Nothing happened, just that lonesome trek on through the cold. Could Varagan have fired his last ammunition? Have a care, Manse, old son. The sparse alpine grass ended, save for tufts between boulders, and rock rang beneath hoofs.

  Varagan halted near the crag and sat waiting. The musket was sheathed and his hands rested empty on the saddlebow. His horse quivered and swayed, neck a-droop, utterly blown, lather swept freezingly off its hide and out of its mane.

  Everard took forth his energy gun and clattered nigh. Behind him, a remount whickered. Still Varagan waited.

  Everard stopped three yards off. “Merau Varagan, you are under arrest by the Time Patrol,” he called in Temporal.

  The other smiled. “You have the advantage of me,” he replied in a soft tone that, somehow, carried. “May I request the honor of learning your name and provenance?”

  “Uh… Manson Everard, Unattached, born in the United States of America about a hundred years uptime. No matter. You’re coming back with me. Hold on while I call a hopper. I warn you, at the least suspicion you’re about to try something, I’ll shoot. You’re too dangerous for me to be squeamish.”

  Varagan made a gentle gesture. “Really? How much do you know about me, Agent Everard, or think you know, to justify this violent an attitude?”

  “Well, when a man takes potshots at me, I reckon he’s not a very nice person.”

  “Might I perhaps have believed you were a bandit, of the sort who haunt these uplands? What crime am I alleged to have committed?”

  Everard’s free hand paused on its way to get out the little communicator in his pocket. For a moment, eerily fascinated, he stared through the wind at his prisoner.

  Merau Varagan seemed taller than he actually was, as straight as he held his athletic frame. Black hair tossed around a skin whose whiteness the sun and the weather had not tinged at all. There was no sign of beard. The face might have been a young Caesar’s, were it not too finely chiseled. The eyes were large and green, the smiling lips cherry-red. His clothes, down to the boots, were silver-trimmed black, like the cape that flapped about his shoulders. Seen against the turreted crag, he made Everard remember Dracula.

  Yet his voice remained mild: “Evidently your colleagues have extracted information from mine. I daresay you have been in touch with them as you fared. Thus you know our names and somewhat of our origin—”

  Thirty-first millennium. Outlaws after the failure of the Exaltationists to cast off the weight of a civilization grown older than the Old Stone Age was to me. During their moment of power, they possessed themselves of time machines. Their genetic heritage—

  Nietzsche might have understood them. I never will.

  “—But what do you truly know of our purpose here?”

  “You were going to change events,” Everard retorted. “We barely forestalled you. At that, our corps has a lot of tricky restoration work ahead. Why did you do it? How could you be so… so selfish?”

  “I think ‘egoistic’ might be a better word,” Varagan gibed. “The ascendancy of the ego, the unconfined will—But think. Would it have been altogether bad if Simon Bolivar had founded a true empire in Hispanic America, rather than a gaggle of quarrelsome successor states? It would have been enlightened, progressive. Imagine how much suffering and death would have been averted.”

  “Come off that!” Everard felt anger rise and rise within himself. “You must know better. It’s impossible. Bolivar hasn’t the cadre, the communications, the support. If he’s a hero to many, he’s at least got many others furious with him: like the Peruvians, after he detached Bolivia. He’ll cry on his deathbed that he ‘plowed the sea’ in all his efforts to build a stable society.

  “If you meant it about unifying even part of the continent, you’d have tried earlier and elsewhere.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Yes. The only chance. I’ve
studied the situation. In 1821 San Martin was negotiating with the Spanish in Peru, and playing with the idea of setting up a monarchy under somebody like Don Carlos, King Ferdinand’s brother. It could have included the territories of Bolivia and Ecuador, maybe later Chile and Argentina, because it would have had the advantages Bolivar’s inner sphere lacks. But why am I telling you this, you bastard, except to prove I know you’re lying? You must have done your own homework.”

  “What then do you suppose my real objective was?”

  “Obvious. To make Bolivar overreach himself. He’s an idealist, a dreamer, as well as a warrior. If he pushes too hard, everything hereabouts will break up in a chaos that could well spread to the rest of South America. And there would be your chance for seizing power!”

  Varagan shrugged, as a were-cat might have shrugged. “Concede me this much,” he said, “that such an empire would have had a certain dark magnificence.”

  The hopper flashed into being and hovered twenty feet aloft. Its rider grinned and aimed the firearm he carried. From the saddle of his horse, Merau Varagan waved at his time-traveling self.

  Everard never quite knew what happened next. Somehow he made it out of the stirrups and onto the ground. His horse screamed as an energy bolt struck. Smoke and a stench of seared flesh spurted forth. Even while the slain animal crumpled, Everard shot back from behind it.

  The enemy hopper must veer. Everard skipped clear of the falling mass and maintained fire, upward and sideways. Varagan leaped from his own horse, behind the rock. Lightnings blazed and crackled. Everard’s free hand yanked forth his communicator and thumbed the Mayday spot.

  The vehicle dropped, rearward of the crag. Displaced air made a popping noise. Wind blew away the stinging ozone.

  A Patrol machine appeared. It was too late. Merau Varagan had already borne his earlier self away to an unknowable point of space-time.

  Everard nodded heavily. “Yeah,” he finished, “that was his scheme, and it worked, God damn it. Reach an obvious landmark and note the time on his watch. That meant he’d know, later along his world line, where-when to go, in mounting his rescue operation.”

  The Zorachs were appalled. “But, but a casual loop of that sort,” Chaim stammered, “didn’t he have any idea of the dangers?”

  “Doubtless he did, including the possibility that he would make himself never have existed,” Everard replied. “But then, he’d been quite prepared to wipe out an entire future, in favor of a history where he could have ridden high. He’s totally fearless, the ultimate desperado. That was built into the genes of the Exaltationist princes.”

  He sighed. “They lack loyalty, also. Varagan, and whatever associates he had left, made no attempt to save those we’d captured. They just vanished. We’ve been wary of their reappearance ever ‘since then,’ and this new caper does bear similarities to that one. But of course—time loop hazard again—I can’t go read whatever report I’ll have filed at the conclusion of the present affair. If it has a conclusion, and if I don’t.”

  Yael patted his hand. “I’m sure you’ll prevail, Manse,” she said. “What happened next in South America?”

  “Oh, once the bad counsel, which he hadn’t recognized was bad—once that stopped, Bolivar went back to his natural ways,” Everard told them. “He made a peaceful settlement with Paez and issued a general amnesty. More troubles broke out later, but he handled them capably and humanely, too, while fostering both the interests and the culture of his people. When he died, most of the great wealth he’d inherited was gone, because he’d never taken a centavo of public money for himself. A good ruler, one of the few that humankind will ever know.

  “So’s Hiram, I gather—and now his rule is threatened likewise, by whatever devil is loose in the world.”

  When Everard emerged, sure enough, there was Pum waiting. The boy skipped to meet him.

  “Where would my glorious master go today?” he caroled. “Let his servant conduct him whithersoever he wills. Perhaps to visit Conor the amber factor?”

  “Huh?” In slight shock, the Patrolman goggled at the native. “What makes you think I’ve aught to do with… any such person?”

  Pum returned a look whose deference failed to mask its shrewdness. “Did not my lord declare this was his intention, while aboard Mago’s ship?”

  “How do you know that?” Everard barked.

  “Why, I sought out men of the crew, engaged them in talk, lured forth their memories. Not that your humble servant would pry into that which he should not hear. If I have transgressed, I abase myself and beg forgiveness. My aim was merely to learn more of my master’s plans in order that I might think how best to assist them.” Pum beamed in undiminished cockiness.

  “Oh. I see.” Everard tugged his mustache and peered around. Nobody else was in earshot. “Well, then, know that that was a pretense. My true business is different.” As you must have guessed already, from the fact of my going straight to Zakarbaal and lodging with him, he added silently. This was far from the first time that experience reminded him that people in any given era could be intrinsically as sharp as anybody futureward of them.

  “Ah, indeed! Business of the greatest moment, assuredly. The lips of my master’s servant are sealed.”

  “Understand that my aims are in no way hostile. Sidon is friendly to Tyre. Let’s say I’m involved in an effort to organize a large joint venture.”

  “To increase trade with my master’s people? Ah, but then you do want to visit your countryman Conor, no?”

  “I do not!” Everard realized he had shouted. He curbed his temper. “Conor is not my countryman, not in the way that Mago is yours. My folk have no single country. Aye, most likely Conor and I would not be understanding each other’s languages.”

  That was more than likely. Everard had too much intellectual baggage to carry as was, information about Phoenicia, to pile on a heap about the Celts. The electronic educator had simply taught him enough to pass for one among outsiders who didn’t know them intimately—he hoped.

  “What I’ve in mind,” he said, “is just to stroll about the city today, whilst Zakarbaal seeks to get me an audience with the king.” He smiled. “Sure, and for this I could well put myself in your hands, lad.”

  Pum’s laughter pealed. He clapped his palms together. “Ah, my lord is wise! Come evening, let him deem whether or not he was led to pleasure and, yes, knowledge such as he seeks, and perhaps he… will in his magnanimity see fit to bestow largesse on his guide.”

  Everard grinned. “Give me the grand tour, then.”

  Pum assumed shyness. “May we first seek the Street of the Tailors? Yesterday I took it upon myself to order new garb that should be ready now. The cost will bear hard on a poor youth, despite the munificence his master has already shown, for I must pay for speed as well as fine material. Yet it is not fitting that a great lord’s attendant should go in rags like these.”

  Everard groaned, though he didn’t really mind. “I catch your drift. Och, how I do! ’Tis unsuited to my dignity that you buy your own garments. Well, let’s go, and ’tis I will be standing you your coat of many colors.”

  Hiram did not quite resemble his average subject. He was taller, lighter-complexioned, hair and beard reddish, eyes gray, nose straight. His appearance recalled the Sea Peoples—that buccaneer horde of displaced Cretans and European barbarians, some of them from the far North, who raided Egypt a couple of centuries before, and eventually became the principal ancestors of the Philistines. A lesser number, ending up in Lebanon and Syria, interbred with certain Bedouin types who were themselves getting interested in nautical things. From that cross arose the Phoenicians. The invader blood still showed in their aristocrats.

  Solomon’s palace, of which the Bible was to boast, would when finished be a cut-rate imitation of the house in which Hiram already dwelt. The king himself, though, usually went simply clad, in a white linen kaftan with purple trim, slippers of fine leather, a gold headband and a massive ruby ring to signify
royalty. His manner, likewise, was direct and unaffected. Middle-aged, he looked younger, and his vigor remained unabated.

  He and Everard sat in a room broad, gracious, and airy, that opened on a cloister garden and fish pond. The carpet was of straw, but dyed in fine patterns. Frescos on the plaster walls had been done by an artist imported from Babylonia, depicting arbors, flowers, and winged chimeras. A low table between the men was of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It held unwatered wine in glass cups, and dishes of fruit, bread, cheese, sweets. A pretty girl in a diaphanous gown knelt nearby and strummed a lyre. Two manservants awaited orders in the background.

  “You are being right mysterious, Eborix,” murmured Hiram.

  “Sure, and ’tis not my wish to withhold aught from your highness,” Everard replied carefully. A word of command could bring in guardsmen to kill him. No, that was unlikely; a guest was sacred. But if he offended the king, his whole mission was compromised. “Aye, vague I am about certain things, but only because my knowledge of them is slight. Nor would I risk laying baseless charges against anyone, should my information prove in error.”

  Hiram bridged his fingers and frowned. “Still, you claim to bear word of danger-word which contradicts what you have said elsewhere. You are scarcely the bluff warrior you pass yourself off as.”

  Everard constructed a smile. “My lord in his wisdom knows well that an unlettered tribesman is not necessarily a fool. To him I admit having, ah, earlier shaded the truth a wee bit. ’Twas because I had to, even as any Tyrian tradesman does in the normal course of business. Is that not so?”

  Hiram laughed and relaxed. “Say on. If you are a rogue, you are at least an interesting one.”