Time's Chariot

by Ben Jeapes

  '. . . suicide,' said the woman behind him. 'He was so . . . so alive, Hossein. He enjoyed existing so much. And look around you – he was so tidy! If Li had wanted to kill himself he'd have used one of the bureaux.'

  'I know how much he meant to you, Marje . . .'

  'And retirement! Li was going to retire any day now! He had it all arranged . . .'

  Retirement? Rico thought, with another glance around at this mini-palace in the Himalayas. Retirement meant moving out into space, to one of the retirement worlds; the one concession the space nations made to their native Earth to prevent their home world from being completely overrun. Well, if Daiho had to chuck all this in . . . maybe the suicide idea had something to it.

  The man sounded like someone who wasn't used to having to sound sympathetic. 'Let's not jump to conclusions,' he said. 'We should wait for the autopsy report.' Rico carefully didn't think of how much body there would be left to perform an autopsy on, after a fall from that height. 'For now, Li would want you to get on with the job. Who are you?'

  Rico was only half listening and it took a moment to realize he was being addressed. He turned round, fingers pressed innocently to his chest. The man and the woman were both looking at him. The woman's eyes were red and damp: she had taken the loss of the Commissioner hard. The man's pale eyes were just hostile and his head was tilted to one side, as if Rico looked familiar in some way.

  'Op Garron,' Rico said. He remembered he was playing Security. 'And you, sir?'

  The man was taken aback. 'Hossein Asaldra. I'm the personal assistant to—'

  'Me, Marje Orendal,' said the woman. 'I'm Head of Psychological Profiles at the College . . . and apparently I've been appointed Acting Commissioner to replace Li. Commissioner Daiho.'

  'Have we met before?' Asaldra said. He still had that quizzical look on his face.

  'You're the new Commissioner for Correspondents?' Rico said to the woman, caught off-guard. He hadn't expected to bluff with this level of seniority. On the other hand, she was sufficiently senior that he could ignore Asaldra's question quite safely.

  'Acting,' the woman repeated.

  'What are you doing here?' Asaldra said, apparently deciding, as Rico already had, that the answer to his last question was 'no'. ' You people have already been over this room.' He spoke blandly, almost sounding bored, but still managed to convey animosity.

  Rico decided the truth was called for. 'I'm looking for a field computer,' he said. 'Comm . . . the late Commissioner booked it out and never returned it.'

  The woman rolled her eyes to the ceiling. 'Bureaucracy goes on. Well, carry on looking, Op Garron.'

  'It will be returned to Fieldwork when the Commissioner's effects are cleared,' the man said. 'Why is a field computer any concern . . .' He paused and his face went blank for a moment. He was symbing into the copy of the College database held somewhere in the apartment and Rico knew the bluff had just evaporated. 'There is no Security Operative Garron,' he said. 'There is a Field Operative of that name. You're not Security, are you?'

  'My partner and I made an appointment with the household,' Rico said. 'We were expected.'

  'Why's a field computer so important?' Orendal said.

  Rico gave an embarrassed grin. 'I, um, stored data on my last field trip and never downloaded it,' he said. 'I thought it might still be there . . .'

  'Your sloppy work is your problem, not ours,' Asaldra said. 'I think you had better leave and stop intruding on the Acting Commissioner's grief.'

  Since the Acting Commissioner was standing five feet away from him and perfectly capable of speaking for herself, Rico felt his blood rising.

  'Of course,' he said directly to her, 'you have to ask why the Commissioner would check out a field computer if he was going to—'

  'That will do,' Asaldra said. 'I've had enough of this. I'm calling Security.'

  'Just shout,' Rico said. 'They're everywhere.'

  But a Security Op was already in the doorway. She shot Rico a curious glance before addressing the other two.

  'Acting Commissioner, Secretary, I thought you should know the autopsy report is in.'

  'And?' Orendal said quickly.

  'Commissioner Li Daiho died of an aneurysm, ma'am. An artery in his head must have burst and killed him immediately. He was probably dead when he fell off the balcony.'

  'It was definitely him?' Orendal gave the impression of a woman desperately clinging onto hope.

  'The body was smashed badly but we got residual brain patterns. It was him.'

  Orendal's shoulders sagged. 'The poor man.'

  'It could have happened at any time,' said Asaldra, nodding wisely.

  'So why didn't the agravs stop his body falling?' Rico said to the Security Op. 'Someone would have to turn them off.'

  'The agravs haven't been touched since their last routine maintenance . . . who are you?' the Op said.

  'Someone who shouldn't be here,' Asaldra said. 'Kindly see that this man is escorted off the premises. Now.'

  'You're Su! Su Zo!' Orendal exclaimed suddenly. She was looking past Rico and Su, who had been trying to lurk in the background, reluctantly came forward.

  'Marje?' she said.

  'You know this woman, Commissioner?' Asaldra sounded somewhere between disapproving and disappointed.

  'We did our basic induction together,' Marje said. 'How are you, Su?'

  'I'm doing OK,' Su said.

  'You went into Fieldwork, I heard?'

  Su nodded. 'Senior Field Op. I heard about your promotion, Marje, I'd say congratulations, but . . .'

  'I know.' Orendal pursed her lips but managed a smile. 'Thank you.'

  'I'll take my partner and leave, if that's all right with you?' Su said. She plucked at Rico's sleeve and didn't let go.

  Orendal's smile grew slightly less forced. 'It might be wise. I'll see you around, Su.'

  'That went well,' Su said as they stepped into the courtyard. It was the first time she had trusted herself to speak since taking their leave of Orendal and Asaldra.

  Rico grunted.

  'It's not often you get the chance to be rude to one of the most senior people in the organization that employs you,' Su went on.

  'She was Acting and I wasn't rude to her.'

  'Her friend seemed to think you were.'

  'Yeah, well, her friend was another matter.' Rico thought back to those pale eyes, the hostile tone, and decided he could live with the knowledge that he had made an enemy. 'Pair of tossers anyway. Wait here.'

  'Now what are you—' Su said, but Rico had already scooped up two handfuls of pebbles from the gravel that surrounded the fountain. He walked back to the balcony and the drop down the mountainside, held out his left hand and opened his fingers. The pebbles fell three inches, then stopped in mid-air, spinning gently. They floated back over the stone parapet and fell at Rico's feet.

  'Yup, the agravs work all right,' Rico said. Then without warning he drew back his right hand and flung the other handful as far as he could into the abyss. The pebbles flew out in a scattered arc and plunged into the depths below. Rico followed them with his eyes, leaning out over the stonework as far as he could.

  'Aha,' he said.

  'Just what are you doing, Garron?' Su demanded.

  'Just testing a theory.'

  'And?'

  'It works but it doesn't make sense. Come on.' They walked back across the courtyard to the recall area, and thirty seconds later were back in the Home Time.

  The time display set into the wall of the spherical transference chamber showed it was 15 minutes after they had left – precisely the time they had spent in Commissioner Daiho's apartment. The apartment had a constant and timed stream of transmit and recall fields going under the control of the Register, the artificial mind that governed transference, and this was the Register's arbitrary way of handling the flow of cause and effect. It could have bought them back a second after they had left, but the rules were that however long you spent upstream, that w
as how long elapsed before you were back in the Home Time. One of the tenets of Morbern's Code:

  The span of my life is synchronised to other lives around me. I will not abuse the power of the College to break that synchronisation.

  . . . as Rico and Su could have recited without even thinking about it.

  'I know you don't like the correspondents,' Su said as they stepped out of the chamber. Outside, the transference hall would have dwarfed a cathedral. The chambers were silver spheres set into walkways – row upon row, above, below and beside them.

  'It's not that.' Rico scowled at her. 'It's not that she's replacing the Commissioner for Correspondents. That's a job for politicos who might not have had anything to do with the College.'

  'Then what?'

  'It's what she was. Still is. Head of Psychological Profiles. She's the one who decides if someone's suitable for being a correspondent or not. She's the one who sends them out to their deaths in the first place.'

  'Funny,' Su said, 'I could have sworn you worked for the College. You know, the organization that employs her and pays her to send them out to their deaths.'

  Rico growled. His relationship with and feelings towards the College were complex, and she knew it.

  'Not everything the College does is bad,' he muttered.

  'Oh, Rico.' Su took his hand and looked into his eyes. 'Look. You blew it once and you were lucky. Please, please don't do it again.'

  'I won't drag you down,' Rico said.

  'It's not me I'm worried about, you cretin.'

  Rico changed the subject. 'We should get to work. What does the Register have planned for us today?'

  'Escort duty. A professor and some students to Amazonia, C14, alpha stream.'

  'Off we go, then.'

  They went off to change into their fieldsuits and to meet up with the group they were to escort. An hour later they had again left the Home Time.

  Four

  The air was warm and close under the canopy of trees, and the ground was speckled by the sunlight that beamed through the leaves. The hum of life was everywhere – the humus on the ground, the leaves up above, and the thriving chain of ecosystems around the tree trunks that linked the two. Life was engaged in a constant, to-the-death battle with itself and yet was involved in an intricate balance, every organism depending minutely on every other.

  It was also sauna-bath hot and the group of humans who materialized out of the shadows began to sweat buckets the moment they appeared. But that was OK, Rico Garron thought, because they were probably taking the same water back in with every breath of the humid air.

  A monkey swung through the branches overhead and Rico was sure it had noticed them, but it wasn't concerned. He and the rest of the party were doused in neutral pheromones and they had been inserted into the timestream with minimal disturbance, so the monkey might have had a brief disorientation but was otherwise undisturbed. As it should be.

  He returned his attention to the group and listened to Su ending her Senior Field Op's spiel. Her sleeve was rolled back and she was studying her forearm. Her field computer was embedded there and data symbols ran over her skin. Field Ops had to travel unnoticed amongst bygoner people and their equipment had to be as unobtrusive as possible, though in this case that wasn't an issue. They were in the middle of uninhabited jungle and their fieldsuits were in their natural, non-camo state: slick, dark grey gelfabric.

  'We are at sixty degrees west, four degrees south,' Su said. 'In the Home Time this is the middle of Brasilia ecopolis. There's a tributary of the Amazon ten miles north of us.'

  'Are there predators?' said one of the students. He was a pale, nervous young man.

  Rico showed his teeth in a smile without humour. 'Almost certainly. Everything around here preds.' The student went even paler. Rico symbed a command to his own field computer and a display appeared in his vision. 'But there's nothing dangerous at present within a quarter of a mile, and certainly no bygoners. Your repulsion field is keyed to the local fauna and it'll come on if anything predatory approaches you.'

  'You've had your training.' Professor Onskiro took charge and she sounded irritated at students who obviously hadn't listened to their briefing. 'Thank you, Field Ops. When do you want us back?'

  'We'll be recalled twelve hours from now,' Su said.

  'Then we return to this location no later than eleven hours from now,' Onskiro said. 'Give us time for a debrief. Activate your beacons now, get into your teams . . .'

  The students huddled round their leader and, apart from seeing that no one interfered with the ecosystem, or wandered off into the jungle and got lost, or removed anything other than the plant specimens they were authorized to collect, Su and Rico were suddenly redundant. Assuming no emergency in the next twelve hours, their next job would be tagging the specimens that were to be taken back to the Home Time, sensitizing them to the probability frequency of the recall field.

  Rico tilted his head back again to admire the leaf canopy. He lived in a community module which had no natural views at all – he remembered with envy the view from Daiho's place – in a block with five million other people, and he had grown up in a crèche, an orphan taken in and raised by the College. Here it was hot and sticky, despite the cooling action of his fieldsuit, but he loved it. This wasn't the regulated and balanced ecology of an ecopolis – this was real. Once it had been the artificial world of the future that had been real to him – it was where he had grown up – but then he had gone on his first trip upstream and become a convert to the joys of nature.

  Su swung the pack off her back. 'Drink, Rico?'

  'Thanks. Don't mind if I do.'

  They sat cross-legged on the mulch and Su poured out two cups. She handed one over. 'Brazilian coffee.'

  'Appropriate.' They sipped their drinks. 'Su?' Rico said.

  'Yes?'

  'Tell me about your friend Marje.'

  'Why do you care? I thought you loathed her on principle.'

  'Humour me.'

  Su shrugged. 'We don't see much of each other and I wouldn't say she's my friend. We just joined the College at the same time.'

  'She looks older than you.'

  'She is. She's a psychologist and she was a partner in a practice, but as I recall she felt she wasn't contributing enough to . . . I don't know, the common good. She wanted to contribute more, and what organization contributes the most? The College. So, she joined, and by all appearances hasn't done too badly for herself.' Su pierced Rico with a look. 'Now, why do you want to know?'

  Rico grinned. 'It's just that she's high up. Higher up than that prick who was with her, and I wouldn't ask him anyway.'

  'Higher up for what?' Su said cautiously.

  Rico put his cup down and lay back, propping himself on one elbow. 'Why would a Commissioner want a field computer?' he said.

  'Did it ever occur to you it might not be any of your business? Perhaps he wanted to show it to one of his grandchildren.'

  'And then there's the agravs. They should have stopped him falling . . .'

  'Here we go again . . .'

  'It's my old-fashioned scientific mind,' Rico said, and Su almost choked on her coffee. 'One tiny little fact which doesn't fit the theory, and I dismiss the theory rather than the facts.'

  'So what does this have to do with Marje?' Su said.

  'She has authority we could never get even if we asked,' Rico said. 'If we could raise her suspicions and get her to do some investigating of her own, she could find out more than we ever will.'

  'We?' Su said.

  'Aren't you even remotely curious?'

  'No.' Su took another swig of her coffee and put the cup down. 'Look. Ever since you got bust down, you've made a point of not caring about anything. Why are you so worked up now?'

  Rico narrowed his eyes. Su was one of the few people – correct that, the only person – in the whole of the Home Time whom he would allow to refer so casually to his being busted. But she had a point. Why was he so fixated?
>
  'It just bugs me,' he said. 'That's all.'

  A scream echoed through the jungle, inspiring a responding chorus from the bird life, and immediately Rico and Su were on their feet and running towards its source. They knew the difference between animal noises and terrified humans, and they knew which sort that scream had been.

  'Go to agrav,' Rico symbed at Su. Their fieldsuits had in-built symb units and they could communicate as easily here as in the Home Time. The agrav harnesses beneath their fieldsuits came on and the two Field Ops leaped through the undergrowth, covering ten or twenty feet with a bound.

  'Stay low. You'll just get tangled if you get into the tree tops,' Rico added. He could have flown with the agrav but there just wasn't room.

  'How lucky I am to have you,' Su symbed back, not breaking her step. The irony was just strong enough to remind Rico that she was the senior, not he. But he had been trained for harder and dirtier missions than this, and old habits died hard, and she knew he was better than she was at this sort of thing.

  They were near their target and the symb display in Rico's vision indicated three Home Timers surrounded by a large group of smaller primates. And then he was through the leaves and in sight of the scene, and he saw the mistake the sensors had made. It was three Home Timers and a small group of larger primates: human beings, to be precise. One student writhed on the ground with an arrow sticking from his shoulder and the other two cowered under the spears of the natives. They were small men, barely coming up to the shoulders of the Home Timers; naked but for loincloths; nut brown skin decorated with paint; dark knots of jet black hair.

  Rico let out a wild whoop at the top of his voice and symbed the command 'full radiance' at his fieldsuit so that it immediately blazed with white light. Su followed his example. It was stage one of the standard operating procedure for frightening bygoners from primitive cultures, and the sight of two whooping, yelling, shining beings leaping and bounding through the trees towards them made most of the natives turn and flee.

  Three of them, visibly terrified, still stood their ground and brought their weapons up. For stage two, Rico raised his right hand and sparks flew from his fingertips, stinging two of them painfully. They yelped, dropped their spears and followed their friends.