Time's Chariot

by Ben Jeapes

Abu Ali looked again at the maze of lines drawn in blue and red over the black, androgynous outline of an adult human. His eye traced the course of the wrist artery, and holding the diagram in one hand he felt for the beat of the blood in his own wrist with the other. Then his hand moved to his neck and again he felt his pulse.

  'And where is it you come from?' he said. 'Cathay?'

  'A good guess,' the Correspondent said.

  'Why did you send this to me?'

  'I wanted to show you my intentions were sincere. I wanted to talk to you and I would have you assured in advance that I am no charlatan.'

  'You wish to discuss medicine? I am your obedient servant.'

  'Actually, no, not medicine,' the Correspondent said. Abu Ali was a polymath, a fluent thinker in many subjects including medicine – indeed, his medical works would still be reprinted as authoritative in Europe in the seventeenth century, though before long orthodox Islamic theologians, more worried by his heresies than his habits, would have his work very well suppressed in the Arab world. That wasn't why the Correspondent was here. 'I would talk to you of the Kitab ash-Shifa.'

  'You have read it?' Abu Ali leaned forward eagerly.

  'I have.' It was a white lie – Abu Ali's Kitab ash-Shifa, the misleadingly titled Book of Healing, was a collection of treatises on Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, psychology and the natural sciences, amongst other things, and the Correspondent had a full copy of it in his head. 'I am interested in your thoughts on Actuality and Nothing. Or to be more precise, the Potentiality that lies between the two.'

  No one comes an unknown distance, perhaps from Cathay, seeks out the author of an obscure book, draws an accurate and precise map of the human circulatory system to get his attention, and then asks to talk about Potentiality. From the tilt of Abu Ali's head it was obvious he didn't believe it, but he went along with the game, perhaps out of curiosity.

  'An interesting subject with which to while away the hours,' he said. 'Potentiality? Well, we know that nothing truly changes.'

  'Do we?'

  'Of course! For change to be real, something must come out of nothing, which is plainly nonsensical. The only change can be in an object's substance –' a reasonable description of the conservation of energy, the Correspondent thought – 'yet before the change there is no sign of it.'

  'So the object must have the potentiality in it for that which it is to become?' the Correspondent said.

  'Precisely!' Abu Ali was forgetting his curiosity and talking for the love of it. He leaned forward and his eyes gleamed. 'Potentiality is what does not exist but which could—' He stopped. The Correspondent waited politely for him to continue, but Abu Ali was looking over the Correspondent's shoulder. 'Who are you?' he said. 'I . . . I did not see you come in—'

  The Correspondent turned quickly to see the newcomer for himself. He was considerably more worried than Abu Ali because even his enhanced senses had not detected anyone's approach.

  The newcomer was dressed like someone from Isfahan but he had skin paler than either Abu Ali, who was a native Arab, or the Correspondent, who looked like one. He had not come in by door or by window – the Correspondent would have heard him. The man opened his mouth and the words that came out would have been babble to Abu Ali, yet to the Correspondent they made perfect sense.

  'Is this Avicenna?' It was the language of the Home Time, and he gave the name – a Western corruption of Allah ibn Sina – by which the Arab philosopher would one day be better known, by those who knew of him at all.

  'Why, yes.' The Correspondent made to stand.

  'Stay seated,' said the man, and it was as if a heavy weight had fallen on the Correspondent's shoulders. The man raised his hand towards the philosopher and a light shone from a small, dark globe that he was carrying. Abu Ali froze, then brought his feet slowly together, letting his arms dangle limply at his sides. Hypnotized, perhaps, but not knocked out. The newcomer walked forward, took a crystal from his pocket and held it to Abu Ali's temple. The crystal changed from blue to red. 'He won't remember this.' The man pocketed the crystal again and studied the chart of the circulatory system that remained in Abu Ali's hand. 'This was a good idea, RC/1029. You had better get on with your interview.'

  'Who . . . who are you?' said the Correspondent, echoing Abu Ali but still more uncertain. 'Are you another Correspondent? Why—'

  The man smiled a mirthless smile. 'Enough questions,' he said. He held up his hand once more, the light shone again and the Correspondent's mind went blank.

  Three

  Ricardo Garron woke from a dream where someone was calling his name over and over again.

  Someone was. A familiar voice pulsed by symb into his thoughts.

  'Rico? Come on, Garron, wake up. I can't believe . . . Rico! Wake up—'

  'Su?' he mumbled into the pillow.

  'You're asleep, aren't you?' He could only hear her voice but he could picture his partner perfectly. Su Zo was a dark, oriental woman and her short frame would be trembling, unsure whether to laugh or be angry.

  'I was.' He shifted in his bed and wrapped the quilt more firmly around himself, determined to get at least another ten minutes.

  'I'm coming to get you. Taxi says I'll be there in five.'

  'Here?' Rico frowned. Something was nagging at the back of his mind. Normally he and Su met up at the College at the start of their shift, but . . .

  'Oh, frak,' he shouted as he jumped out of bed. 'Just let me shower . . .'

  'You forgot, didn't you? I can't believe you actually forgot . . .'

  'I remembered when I went to bed,' he said, defensive.

  'Five minutes, Rico.' Su cancelled the symb.

  The entfeed started automatically on his favourite channel as he went into the shower and he just caught the last few minutes of one of the leading soaps. He loved counting the anachronisms which he could then compare with Su once they got to work. Imperial Romans in motor cars, medieval knights with computers, that sort of thing. Today it was a Victorian lady going off to join a free love commune.

  'Load of crap,' he muttered, angling his head into the flow of warm air to dry his hair. The College that he worked for made all the resources of humankind's rich and glorious heritage available to a waiting world, and rubbish like the soap opera was the result. A Fossil Age writer had once used the term prolefeed, and to Rico that perfectly summed up 99 per cent of everything the College's data was used for. Yet he couldn't avoid a feeling of professional pride that he was partly responsible – he, Su and others like them. Most people in the Home Time were content to lap up what the College supplied, but he and his colleagues went out and got it.

  He was fully dressed and dry when the door chime went. The gelfabric of his suit slid around him and styled itself into the College uniform of yellow and red. He symbed for the door to open and drew himself up with a proud beam when Su stepped into the suite. She looked him up and down as if checking he had remembered to clean his teeth and put his shoes on.

  'You only just made it, didn't you?' she said.

  Rico grinned. 'Been ready for the last ten minutes. Where were you?'

  'Come on, then,' she said, and they went out to the taxi together.

  The taxi, a hollow sphere with a transparent membrane and a padded bench all around its circular cabin, rose up, and up, and up. Azania ecopolis, Rico's home, fell away and spread itself out below: a fully self-sustaining, environmentally enclosed city of fantastic shapes and colours; parks, lakes and buildings sculpted from the artificial land coral that covered most of the inhabited Earth's surface. Sparkling in the subtropical sunshine, it was a beautiful sight.

  Within a minute the taxi was too high for small details to be picked out. By the time it reached the forcefield that officially marked Azania's upper limits, the shape of the southern end of Africa – a riot of greens, browns and blues set into the darker, royal blue of the sea – had become evident. Above them the sky was dark and the brighter stars were showing. Then the taxi was through
the forcefield and had gone hypersonic, and the end of Africa fell away with noticeable speed.

  A few minutes later it braked down from transit speed as it arced down through the atmosphere towards Antarctica. Its passengers felt only a slight deceleration pressure. They knew the invisible barriers that the flying sphere was passing through. It was targeted by missiles and plasma bolts and several terawatts-worth of anti-aircraft energy weapons, and every quanta emanating from it was subjected to extreme scrutiny by the College's defences, for a sign of bogusness. The College took its security seriously.

  The dark bones of Fossil Age oil stations passed beneath them and then the College itself came into view, sparkling white like the land around it and perched like a miniature city overlooking the Ross Sea. A city, not an ecopolis; the College had been built in the era of old time cities, before the first ecopolis had been grown. The College was made of old fashioned steel and concrete and plastic, not land coral, and the outlines were straight and regular: the truncated pyramid that was the transference hall and a host of smaller shapes, like a child's collection of play bricks.

  It never seemed quite right to Rico. For the last four hundred years, and for the next twenty-seven, men and women had been able to walk in the same streets and breathe the same air as Shakespeare, Al-Nasir, Einstein, Kennedy, Genghis Khan, the Director, Beethoven, Persaud, Mozart, Galileo, Dabrowski. All those journeys started and ended in this place. Yet where were the streams of taxis bringing time travelling tourists from their ecopoloi to the holiday of a lifetime in Imperial Rome? Where were the bold hunters going on safari among the dinosaurs? Where were the eye witnesses to the Five Bomb War? They were there, but they were either College employees or rich patricians with time on their hands. The people of the Home Time were happy to feed on the correspondents' reports and to enjoy the vicarious pleasures of Earth's myriad civilizations, but only in the sanitised safety of the Home Time; only in their cosy, regulated, artificial homes. When it came to real history, the people just weren't interested.

  Two minutes later Rico and Su had arrived; ten minutes later they were no longer in the Home Time.

  Some hours earlier, Marje Orendal too woke to a symb signal, an alarm pulsing into her mind.

  'Wha—?' she mumbled. 'OK. I'm awake. What is it?'

  'Dr Orendal.' A voice she might have recognized. 'May I project?'

  'If you must . . .'

  Marje symbed the lights of her suite to come on, and sat up in bed. The eidolon of a man appeared on the other side of the room, and his eyes widened when he saw her.

  'I'm sorry! I didn't think . . .'

  'Where did you imagine I'd be, ten seconds after waking up?' Marje squinted at him. Awake, and with a face to put to the voice, she recognized him. 'What is it, Hossein?'

  Hossein Asaldra's face showed a certain hesitation before he spoke. 'I've been asked to ask you to come to the College at once,' he said.

  'Whatever for?'

  'Something I'd rather tell you face to face, Dr Orendal. May I meet you in the transference hall in twenty minutes?'

  'Are we going somewhere?' She saw just a brief shadow of irritation cross his face. 'Yes, certainly,' she said. 'Twenty minutes.'

  After he had gone, she took a quick shower and field massage, though not too quick to avoid going through her daily ritual of reciting Morbern's Code. Some things were just too important.

  The first tenet:

  I will deny to no one to whom the universe has given it the right to existence. I will respect all human life, for even that which only lives in my memory will accuse me.

  Jean Morbern and his Creator had had a special relationship. She often wondered what it had been like for him when he realized the godlike responsibilities he had suddenly acquired over millions of people, in creating the Home Time; worse, when he finally accepted he was dying and had to hand over that responsibility to the College he had founded. But he had done well; the Code had lasted 400 hundred years, as had the College that maintained it.

  The fac presented her with her clothes and she let them settle and seal themselves around her. She checked her appearance one last time in a mirrored field as she waited for the taxi to arrive. A former lover had called her slight: she preferred slim. Blonde hair in the style she wore for work: prim, no-nonsense. Dark trousers, yellow and red tunic, high collar. She liked to be formal for work – it emphasized that at the end of the day, when she shucked off the College clothes and put on the casual ones, she was then in her own time, accountable only to herself.

  A chime told her that the taxi was waiting. She took one last look at the reflection, then cancelled the field and went out to the waiting sphere.

  'Swishville,' Rico murmured as they stepped into what was technically an apartment. He and Su stood on the edge of a small courtyard with a colonnade running around the edges, and a chuckling little fountain in the middle. Through the arches opposite they could see a vast space of empty air and, beyond that, the stark dark rock and sparkling white snow of a Himalayan mountain, shoulder to shoulder with its neighbours in the range. Rico and Su had to crane their necks to see the cloud- and snow-shrouded tops. Rico peeked behind him and saw a similar mountain towering right over them – the courtyard was carved into it.

  This was the Himalayas, 5000 BC. Warmth and air provided by the Home Time and kept in place by an invisible forcebubble around the premises; setting and scenery provided by Nature. Or God. Just one perk of being a patrician of the Home Time, and a lot bigger than the little box Rico lived in.

  'Out of our league,' Su agreed.

  'Oh, come on. You and Tong will end up somewhere like this in another twenty years.'

  'I doubt it.'

  'May I help you?' The eidolon of the apartment's intelligence appeared in front of them, the standard blue outline showing that it was the projection of an artificial personality, not a real human. It was in the form of an old man, bald head, white beard and robe. Rico wondered who it was meant to be.

  'You're the household?' he said. 'Ops Garron and Zo. We made an appointment with you to collect something from Commissioner Daiho.'

  'Of course.' The eidolon bowed, and turned into a glowing ball that hung in mid-air. 'Please follow the light.'

  The light led them over to the valley side of the courtyard, where a gap in the balustrade led onto a suspended staircase that curved out into the open air, then round and down to the level below them. The apartment was set into the side of a mountain and the drop below was sheer. Rico savoured the view, and when his instincts protested at the amount of solid ground that wasn't beneath his feet he told himself the apartment would naturally have agravs to catch him if he fell.

  Still, it was a relief to step into what was presumably the apartment's main chamber. A split-level sitting room, one side open to the view and the rest of it carved out of the native rock. There was an unusual number of people there – more than Rico had expected Commissioner Daiho to have around. Being a patrician and a Commissioner of the College would mean a busy life, but this number of staff was unexpected.

  As his foot touched the floor a voice symbed into their minds. 'This area is under the jurisdiction of the Security Division. Please state your business.'

  Security? He and Su looked at each other, then Rico glanced back at the others already present. Some were waving instruments here and there, others seemed to be just lingering and chatting in small groups. So, these were Security Ops.

  'Ops Garron and Zo,' he said. 'You can check our business here with the household.'

  Presumably the voice did just that. 'You may proceed.'

  'Did the Commissioner leave instructions for us?' Su asked the ball of light.

  'I'm afraid not,' said the house's voice.

  'Can we see him, then?' Rico said.

  'I'm afraid not,' the light said again. 'The Commissioner died this morning. He fell from his balcony.'

  Rico and Su glanced at each other, then Rico edged back to the stairs and peeked into
the abyss, trying to imagine the drop. The whistling of the wind, the ground looming, the awful knowledge that in just a few more moments that would be it, the end, no comeback, body so smashed that no surgery could repair it.

  'Ouch,' he said. Suddenly he felt a lot less secure in the apartment's agrav safeties and he stepped back into the security of the room again.

  'It was tragic,' the light agreed.

  'I think we should go,' Su said.

  'Go?' Rico protested. 'But we haven't got what we came—'

  'Rico, I don't think now is a good time for removing items from the late Commissioner's apartment, do you?' Su murmured.

  Rico glanced around, then back at the light. 'We'll see ourselves out, if that's OK,' he said.

  'Of course.' Rico watched as the light moved away, then turned back to Su.

  'Look,' he said, 'the place is crawling with Ops . . .'

  'Security Ops,' Su hissed.

  '. . . so who's going to notice a couple of extra?'

  'Rico, we're Field Ops. Completely different thing.'

  Rico grinned and plucked at the tunic of his own uniform. The cut and colours – yellow, with red piping – were just the same: Security and Field Ops all worked for the College. 'If you've got it,' he said, 'use it. Su, the sooner we find what we're after, the sooner we can leave, right?' He blocked any further argument by swinging round on his heel and heading off for where he assumed the study was.

  Rico paused in the doorway because the room was already occupied. A slight, blonde woman a few years older than him, and a man his age; dark hair, pale eyes. They were talking closely to each other, voices barely more than a murmur, and Rico almost apologized for interrupting. Then he remembered he was masquerading as a Security Op and didn't have to apologize to anyone, so he sidled in without announcing himself. He sneaked a look around: where to start?

  The study was decorated with a typical Home Time eclecticism. Fake bookshelves lined the walls, the carpet glowed with 1960s psychedelia and in an alcove there was a bust of Jean Morbern, founder of the College. Rico chose a shelf at random and started to examine what was on it.