by Ben Jeapes
'Don't you remember me, Mr Marks?' he said pleasantly. He had had no idea where Marks might live; it had seemed a reasonable guess to look up in the attic of Bacon's own residence, and it had paid off.
'You!' There was total despair in the man's moan. The witch he had sent to the gallows had come for him. 'I am dead.'
'That's a point of view.' The Correspondent looked around him. The room was not large and the bed took up most of it. 'We'll sit here, Mr Marks, and at the slightest hint of resistance on your part, the tiniest thought of raising a hue and cry, I will kill you and drag your soul down to be feasted upon by my lord the master of darkness and chaos. I make myself clear?'
They sat facing each other on the edge of the bed. Marks was bolt upright, rigid in the moonlight.
'Mr Marks, you have compromised my mission. My masters were most definite that I should remain undetected,' the Correspondent said truthfully. 'However, I will let you live if you answer some questions. Tell me about the third man you saw in your lord's room with us.'
Marks' eyes bulged. 'Sir?'
'A simple enough question. Tell me about him. What did he look like?'
'Look like, sir?'
'For God's sake answer the question, man, it's simple enough!' the Correspondent snapped. He used the language of the Home Time, and to Marks it was the unearthly gabble of Hades. The steward almost fainted. 'Do not provoke me, Mr Marks,' the Correspondent said more quietly, in English. 'Now, what was this man wearing?'
'He was – he was dressed like . . . like you, sir. A doublet, a tunic, a sword . . .'
'He was unremarkable? You would walk past him in the street and not notice?'
'Why, yes, sir.'
The Correspondent had to remember that Marks had only seen the man through a crack in the door. A perfect description was unlikely. 'You said at the trial that I shouted,' he said.
'Yes, sir . . .'
'In this strange language.'
'Yes, sir.' Marks' voice trembled.
The Correspondent shut his eyes as he tried, desperately tried, to remember. There was the ring of conviction in Marks' tone: the steward still believed everything he was saying. And the Correspondent, who had been perhaps one tenth convinced when he gained entry to the Marks' room that evening, was now nine tenths convinced.
He tried for another five minutes, but could get nothing more out of the man that had not already been said in court.
'I am leaving now, Mr Marks,' he said. 'I'm bored of this world and I am returning to the nether regions of fire and damnation, where the demons play with their pitchforks and the souls of men who betray them. Do not mention to anyone that I was here.'
He reached out and sent Marks the same way as his wife. Then he walked to the window and looked up at the moon. He made contact and the familiar tone rang out between his ears.
'RC/1029,' he said, 'requesting assistance.'
'State nature of problem, RC/1029,' said the neutral voice in his head. It was as uninterested as ever. The Correspondent had thought that for this, his first ever contact that wasn't just to file a report, it might be different. Clearly not.
'I have a problem with my memory,' he said. 'I am having difficulty remembering an individual.'
'Diagnostic solutions are available for downloading,' said the voice of the lunar station.
'Please download them. How do I run them?'
'They are self executing. Downloading and running now.' There was a pause, and then it was as if the blood was roaring in his ears. The noise grew louder and louder. He winced, and gritted his teeth, and put his hands over his ears but to no avail. Now the noise seemed to be vibrating his entire cranium from the inside.
Suddenly it stopped.
'Existence of short and long term memory block confirmed,' said the lunar station. 'Cause of blockage unknown.'
'Can you remove it?'
'It is possible blockage may be self-induced due to previous psychic trauma,' said the station. 'A defence mechanism exists in all Correspondents for such an eventuality.'
In other words, he might have flipped and the block was the only thing keeping him sane. The Correspondent shut his eyes. 'Do it,' he said.
'It is done.'
'I don't feel any different.'
'Effects will become noticeable over a short period of time. Diagnostic solutions are now removed.'
'Thank you,' the Correspondent said. 'RC/1029 signing off.'
He turned from the window to look at the two still forms on the bed, then left the house. By sunrise he was out of London, heading north into Hertfordshire.
And by sunrise he had remembered. It had all come back. He remembered the man appearing, and he remembered it hadn't been the first time. For six centuries he had been roaming this earth, obeying the promptings at the back of his mind to seek out certain people of a philosophical bent and interview them; and every time he had interviewed a philosopher, the man had appeared with his mind-jamming device and his blue crystal. The Middle East, France, Germany, Spain, Africa, England – the man had always been there. Avicenna, Anselm, Abelard, Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Siger, Scotas . . . and others, most lately Francis Bacon.
This time-travelling Home Timer. This lying time-travelling Home Timer, because one of the things that had kept the Correspondent going when times got hard had been the promise that if he made it to the twenty-first century, he would return to the Home Time, and there was no other way home. But now it seemed he could be brought back at any time.
He still had no idea what the man's mission was. Did every correspondent get this treatment? Were the messages he had been sending to the lunar station a waste of time?
No, because the stranger had done nothing to him, the Correspondent, except take his memory of each event. It had always been the philosopher who received his fuller attentions – a blue crystal, which turned red when applied to the head.
So the stranger's purpose was a mystery, but the Correspondent remembered him now. He remembered, and he was already planning what to do next time, because now he had seen the pattern he had a pretty good idea when the next time might be.
Eleven
The air that gusted past Jontan's face was heavy with moisture and laced with salt that kept his mouth permanently dry. It roared in his ears. In his experience, air moved at a sedate pace at the whims of the weather monitoring stations: it was horrible to imagine it rushing by like this naturally.
Everything was grey: the clouds overhead, the sea to his left and the coarse, scrubby grass he was walking on along the cliff path. The one consolation – no, two consolations were that Sarai was there too, and she was walking slightly ahead of him, which meant he could indulge in his usual favourite pastime of looking at her. Like him, she was wearing a borrowed thick, wind- and waterproof jacket. It did her no justice, but he knew the outline within well enough to let his imagination do the rest.
She stopped and looked back along the cliff path. They both had caps on with flaps pulled down over the ears and she peered at him from under the peak of hers. 'Come on, Jon,' she said. He trotted the next couple of steps to catch her up, and together they followed after Mr – 'I doubt I'm a Commissioner any more' – Daiho, who strolled thirty feet ahead.
It was he who had insisted they come for a walk with him before their evening meal – 'before we all go stir crazy'. Mr Daiho's patrician instincts seemed to be taking over and with no one else to sponsor here in the Dark Ages, he had naturally adopted them, even though Mr Scott was their actual employer. Patricians, Jontan thought vaguely, could probably sponsor whom they liked. He had never thought it might be an issue in his own life.
And Mr Daiho had a point. He had been spending fifteen, twenty hours a day for the last month symbed up to the kit they had brought with them, taxing their one symb junction to its limits, while the two journeymen did their best in these primitive conditions to keep the gear going and the cultures in the tank alive. (As opposed to Mr Scott, Jontan thought as darkl
y as he dared, who as far as Jontan could see had come along to this benighted time purely for the fun of it.) Perhaps they indeed needed the break.
But going on a walk in this storm was another matter, though Mr Daiho said it was a perfectly normal May day. Maybe they were going stir crazy, but at least back in the hotel they were indoors and protected from the elements and supplied with such creature comforts as this whenever-it-was time could provide. But when a patrician suggested something . . .
A stone pillar loomed on the cliff top ahead, and he wondered if this was their destination. Jontan fixed his mind on the pillar and carefully put everything else out of his mind: the men who walked a discreet distance behind them on the coast path; the flying machine – telihop— . . . helit— . . . helicopter, that was it – that hovered to their left over the sea; the precipitous drop over the edge of the cliffs next to them, without any form of agrav for public safety . . . why, he just had to wander some twenty feet off course and he would fall horribly to his death on the rocks below.
'Look at this!' Mr Daiho had, indeed, stopped at the pillar and was waiting for them to catch up. It was twice his height and four-sided, and it sat on a stone base by the edge of the cliff. 'I brought you two here for a reason.'
They looked politely at the pillar. The escort and the helicopter had both stopped as well, still keeping their relative distances. There was a plaque on each side of the pillar, engraved metal lettering which Jontan couldn't read.
'We were all born in the Home Time,' Mr Daiho said, 'and we're used to being able to symb any item of information from any part of the world. Can you imagine a world where that isn't possible?'
Yes, because we're in one, Jontan thought. He was getting used to it but it was like losing one of his natural senses. He still caught himself trying to symb a simple command to the lighting, or put a message through to Sarai. The kit they had brought with them only had a few frequencies available, supported by the symb junction. It wasn't intended for idle chit-chat.
'But our world was without anything like that for thousands of years,' Mr Daiho went on. 'At the end of the century before this one the bygoners finally got the hang of global networking and they owed it all to a man named Marconi, who arranged for the first radio signal to be sent across the Atlantic ocean to Newfoundland.' They both looked blank. 'Designated wilderness area north of Appalachia,' he said. He pointed out to sea. 'Keep going west, and you'll get there eventually. The signal was sent from this point. Remember, no satellites in those days. No cabling. No signal boosters every ten feet. This was literally just an electromagnetic wave, no words, no images, no text. It went up into the atmosphere, and it bounced off the ionosphere, and it came down to earth two thousand miles away. It was sent and received by machinery that weighed a ton and was powered by generators which burnt fossil fuel. And it was a technical triumph, an unprecedented application of technology, every bit as significant as Morbern's work or the work we're doing here. I thought you should see this because it's part of the heritage of every human being who has lived since.'
He looked fondly at the monument for a while, then reached out to touch it. He stood in silent reverie for a moment longer while the journeymen shuffled their feet, then turned back the way they had come. 'Back we go,' he said. He threw a glance at the escort and the helicopter. 'We don't want to inconvenience our hosts, do we?' He set off back down the cliff path without a backwards glance. Jontan and Sarai looked at each other, then turned to follow.
The path dipped down into a sandy bay and rose up on the other side. The white bulk of the hotel stood at the end of it, at the top of the cliff. As they started on the downward leg to the beach, Jontan finally grew tired of the fact that his elbow was constantly rubbing Sarai's as they walked, so he pulled his hand from his pocket and took hold of hers. She seemed surprised but then she smiled at him and they continued walking like that in silence, while suddenly the day seemed less grey than before.
Over the tinkle of glasses, the gentle background violins and the soft hum of chatting, laughing voices there was something else. Phenuel Scott sneaked a glimpse past the guard who stood at the entrance of the alcove and took in his fellow diners.
Yes, there was something else, and that something was power. These bygoners were the patricians of the day. There was a casual authority about them all, shown in the calm way they could deal with the waiters that fussed and served around them. It showed in the sheer lack of ostentation: at this point in the twenty-first century, flummery had gone out of fashion and both sexes wore variations on the theme of dinner jackets. No one here had to impress or flaunt themselves. These people were the rulers, and Scott felt that he had come home.
'Mr Scott?' Two men had come into the alcove and the lead one fairly reeked of power. Scott recognized him from his pictures. A square, broad-shouldered man, holding out his hand. 'Matthew Carradine. It's a pleasure to meet you at last.'
He turned briefly to the man at his side – the same height but managing to look smaller, nondescript – and murmured something. The other nodded and withdrew to a nearby table while Carradine turned his attention to his guest.
A waiter materialized to pull Carradine's chair out for him and one of the richest men on Earth, whose corporation would soon dominate half of what the bygoners called the western world, sat down opposite Scott.
'And how was the flight from Cornwall?' Carradine said.
'Very pleasant,' said Scott. 'A bit longer than I'm used to.' A Home Time taxi could have done the trip from Cornwall to Paris in a couple of minutes, far more quietly and in a lot more comfort.
'I'm sorry.' Carradine gestured for the crew of waiters lurking in the background to begin. One of them poured the drinks, others laid out cutlery and plates and served the aperitifs. Carradine raised his glass. 'To you and your work, Mr Scott, whatever that is.'
Scott returned the toast and, since Carradine was so openly appraising him, trying to assess him, he returned the favour.
'We must seem very primitive,' Carradine said, eyebrow raised and a slight smile on his face.
'BioCarr? The height of sophistication for this time,' said Scott.
Carradine seemed to sense he was being very gently mocked. 'We're very proud of what we've accomplished but there's still a lot of work to be done,' he said.
Scott looked up at the ceiling, hamming the look of concentration on his face. 'Let's see,' he said. 'Phase One – take the governments of the western world out of the world economy and create your own. An amazing application of economics and information technology. Of course, it will ruin several economies of countries not in the club, but they will only have to apply for entry.'
Carradine's smile was more fixed. 'Go on,' he said.
'Ah-hum. Work still to be done,' Scott said. 'If I remember correctly, your present strategy is outlined in the document Tactical advance into the burgeoning economies of South America, eyes Grade fifteen-plus only. The first wave will be in the form of artificial intelligences to be released into the net on—' He looked down; Carradine was almost choking on his wine. 'Did I get it right?'
'You know you did.' Carradine dabbed his napkin to his lips. 'That's top secret. I suppose you saw it in a museum somewhere?'
'Something like that.' Scott kept his gaze steady. Carradine would know the importance of powerplay. He would understand what was going on.
Sure enough, Carradine was half smiling back, and with genuine amusement. 'This is fascinating,' he said. 'You know the full history of BioCarr before it's even happened. You know if the next phase will work. You know how long BioCarr will last. You probably know when and how I die.'
'Not how, but otherwise, all of the above,' Scott said.
'And you're not going to tell me.'
'It would make no difference if I did, but no, I'm not.'
'Your emissary did lay down a few conditions,' Carradine said, thoughtful. 'If we lay one hand on you – for example to torture the information I want out of you, though we'd use so
mething far more sophisticated and reliable – you call down legions of angels to smite us. You probably could. On the other hand, it could be bluff. I do get the feeling your Home Time doesn't know you're here.'
'I'm sure you have the need-to-know principle in this century too,' Scott said calmly, and Carradine leaned back in his seat and shouted with laughter. Any hint of tension evaporated.
'Mr Scott, we understand each other perfectly. You've paid us, we provide a service, we don't have to understand or like it. Pure capitalism.'
The first course arrived; bowls containing a brown, translucent liquid with a fragrance that was to die for.
'Beef consommé,' Carradine said. 'I took the liberty of ordering in advance because I wasn't sure how familiar you would be with our menus.'
'Thank you,' Scott said, and cautiously dipped his spoon in. He was an instant convert to bygoner cuisine after just a few drops on his tongue. The flavour was suspended with such delicacy that he felt the liquid in the bowl would flip over into another state of matter if he touched it. They drank it in silence.
'Time travel. It's fascinating. It's truly fascinating.' Carradine shook his head as he put down his spoon and the waiters rematerialized. 'And I've had sleepless nights wondering why you came here, of all the times available to you.'
'You've probably had teams of experts working on the problem,' Scott said.
'I certainly have. The consensus is that you wanted to go as far away from your Home Time as you could, while keeping to a certain technological minimum –' he looked hopefully at Scott, who kept his expression deliberately bland – 'but that still doesn't explain what you want.'
'No, it doesn't,' Scott said.
Carradine changed the subject. 'I was wondering if your colleagues would be coming this evening, too.'
Colleagues? For a moment Scott was confused by the plural, until he realized Carradine was including Killin and Baiget. They would be fish out of water here.
