Time's Chariot

by Ben Jeapes

  'They never say, Matthew.' Now Alan looked at his notes. 'Scott and Daiho only ever refer to the Home Time. We've no idea if this is a period of history, or a specific date, or a place, or what. They don't give dates and they don't give a timescale. I don't think they're being perverse – I think it's just their way, where, whenever they come from. As for the kids, they don't even mention the Home Time. Between themselves, they speak about "home", "the plantation", "the College", "Appalachia" . . .'

  'Well, I know where that is.'

  'Likewise, though their accent isn't recognizably American. But even so, we're learning a great deal just from the few facts we know about them.'

  'Like?'

  'Well, like the social set-up in the Home Time. The kids are journeymen, which suggests a fairly rigid social structure, like a medieval guild of some kind. They're more than mere apprentices, they're qualified in whatever they do, but they're way down the scale from the other two. Scott and Daiho are very reticent about what they say in our presence, whereas Romeo and Juliet can babble away without a word of rebuke from their superiors. I really don't think it's occurred to the men that the kids would be able to say anything of interest to us. They're not stupid, it's just something outside their mindsets. And that alone says interesting things about their world. The lower orders don't think for themselves, or are not perceived to do so by the higher ones.'

  'Yes . . .' Carradine said. He shook his head in wonder. 'Those journeymen are at the bottom of their ladder and yet I'll bet they have more proficiency in their subjects than our scientists ever will.'

  'That's another point, Matthew. They're clearly good at their job – Scott isn't the kind to tolerate shoddy work – but apart from that their education is abysmal. They can read, write, as far as we know do simple arithmetic but . . . do you know, they still have no idea where they are? The boy thinks this may be the Middle Ages and he doesn't hide his opinion that we're all barbarians. The girl is closer – she knows the steam engine was invented in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, so she thinks that's where we are.'

  Gerard spoke again. 'Given that some children born this century have never heard of Adolf Hitler, it could mean they're from no distance in the future at all,' she said.

  'Believe me,' Carradine said with feeling, 'they're from far enough ahead for our most guarded secrets to be in their museums.' He recoiled inwardly from the memory of Scott blithely identifying a top secret document. That had been a calculated demonstration of power, and Carradine appreciated it. 'From all this, I take it we don't have difficulty understanding them?'

  'In a way,' Alan said. He looked at Visconti, the linguistic specialist, who coughed.

  'Scott and Daiho speak English perfectly,' the man said, 'but their natural language – the only one the two youngsters speak – is very different. A layman that they spoke to would have extreme difficulty understanding them. They speak something very like English, but it's as close to modern English as modern English is to Chaucer's version. It's peppered with non-English words and constructs, some of which I just can't decipher, some of which seem to come from other languages. Mandarin and Spanish are the two main ones. There's scatterings of Latin, Greek . . .'

  'So there's linguistic drift,' Carradine said. 'Could that tell us when this Home Time is?'

  'No, sir. If the Chaucer analogy holds then we could be talking another thousand years, give or take. But then, they obviously come from a very technologically automated time. If the world's one global village, everyone could be picking up everyone else's language and incorporating it into the lingua franca, and that could be, oh, just a century ahead of us. Or, and this is where my head begins to hurt –' he paused and the others looked at him in expectation – 'perhaps they speak a version of English which has been distorted by time travellers from their own far future, speaking an even more distorted form of English—'

  'Stop there, please,' said Carradine. He shook his head to clear it. 'Alan, I want you to learn their language to a passable degree.'

  'Already working on it, Matthew,' Alan said simply.

  'Of course you are. Carry on.'

  Alan smiled and Carradine was happy. Alan only smiled that smile when he was pleased with himself, and in Carradine's experience that only happened when he had pulled off a coup on behalf of BioCarr.

  'I've been saving the best till last,' Alan said. 'The aim of all of this, ultimately, has been to see what they could give us that they haven't already. First of all, please look at this recording of the boy getting dressed in the morning.'

  Carradine pulled a face. 'Watching young men in states of undress isn't my idea of fun, you know.'

  'It's in the interests of science, Matthew. Watch.'

  An image appeared of a sleepy Jontan Baiget stumbling from his bathroom. He was wearing what looked like a vest and shorts. He stretched, yawned, then reached out and pulled on his overalls.

  'Keep watching,' said Alan, and the image slowed down. With his overalls hanging loosely off his gangly frame, Baiget appeared to walk like an astronaut towards the door. Carradine frowned, blinked and looked closer. His overalls were moving. By the time the boy reached the door, what had been a loose and baggy tent slung around him had metamorphosed into a still slightly baggy but much better fitting body-suit.

  The image froze.

  'They brought no changes of clothes with them,' Alan said, 'and yet, when we checked their clothes after knocking them out, they were as clean and fresh as if they were just back from the cleaners. Both journeymen have these shifting overalls. Scott and Daiho must have the next generation of gear because they appear in a different outfit each morning, even though it appears they also brought this one overall item. Ladies and gentlemen, these clothes are intelligent. No power source, nothing that looks like a central processing unit or any kind of electronics. I think the intelligence, the programming, is in the molecular structure of the fabric.'

  'I want one,' Carradine murmured.

  'And it gets better.' Alan had obviously been saving the very best until the very last. He beamed at them all before continuing. 'Now, all four of them have, at least once, walked into a dark room and said "lights on". Then they look foolish and fumble for the light switch . . . it took the journeymen longer to grasp this concept than the other two. They all had difficulty with hot and cold taps, too – they kept talking to them. We took this at first as evidence of living in a very automated society.'

  'Voice recognition?' said Carradine.

  'Precisely. Nothing special there. And Daiho occasionally asks something called Register to record something, or to provide information, then remembers that Register isn't there. The other day, Scott was on his own and he suddenly said –' he scrolled through his notes quickly – ' "journeyman Baiget, could you . . . oh, damn." Then he stood up and walked out of the room to deliver his message to Baiget verbally.'

  'A constantly monitoring artificial intelligence?' said Carradine.

  'Accessible mentally,' said Alan. Carradine's eyes widened and he continued. 'Our recordings of the kids at work are eerie. They hardly say a word but they work together like a machine. One wants a tool, the other hands it over, just like that. They have to be communicating – it's more than just good teamwork. But – and this is the big one – it's only in the hotel lounge, where all the equipment is. Outside the lounge, they speak out loud.'

  'They're telepathic?' said someone. Alan's glance withered him.

  'No, or they'd be able to communicate anywhere,' he said.

  'You conclude?' Carradine said quietly.

  'There's clearly some kind of universally available mechanism in the Home Time,' said Alan, 'and a local example is in their equipment, though I don't know which of the many bits and pieces it is. But it seemed reasonable to assume there's something in their own heads that makes the connection. And so, I asked Dr Gerard to X-ray their skulls.'

  'And?' Carradine said. All eyes turned back to Gerard.

  'There's something in the
re,' she said. 'There's a cloudiness in all of their brains that isn't natural. I showed it to a neurosurgeon and he immediately diagnosed widely distributed brain cancer, which is incorrect. As it is, I think it's something implanted, which has since grown inside them. I'd . . .' She coughed. 'I'd need to do a post mortem on one of them to know more.'

  'I see.' The silence around the table was absolute. Then Carradine pushed back his chair and stood. 'Thank you, everyone. Alan, that was truly fascinating, and if the opportunity for a post mortem turns up, we can discuss things further. You'll let me have a copy of your report, of course?'

  Fifteen

  Rico Garron arrived in seventeenth-century France ten minutes before the list said Daiho was scheduled to appear in exactly the same place. The site was a back alley in Port-Royal-des-Champs near Paris in 1657, and the ambience of unwashed humans and plentiful livestock hit him like a slap in the face.

  All around him the town was buzzing and – in more ways than one – humming, but here in the alley he was alone. 'Good choice,' he said to himself, looking approvingly around. Yes, it stank and it was gloomy and an open sewer ran down the middle, but it was secluded and it was an excellent transference point. Home Time smart drugs in his system would deal with any diseases. All he had to do was put up with the smell.

  The one disadvantage was that when Daiho appeared there was no way Rico could hide somewhere nearby, so he would have to lurk at a discreet distance. He squared his shoulders and walked down the alley and out into the France of 1657. His fieldsuit had tailored itself to make him look as close as the France of the day could come to the middle classes: a bygoner would think he was maybe a factotum for some rich household, maybe slightly seedy. Not rich and dressed out in glowing finery, but not struck down with poverty either. He nodded to a black-robed clergyman who turned into the alley as he turned out of it: the priest bowed slightly back.

  Rico cast a glance back at the priest. If Daiho appeared in front of him . . .

  Well, one of the advantages of transference was that it cut both ways. Tampering with probability so as to insert the travellers into the timestream disoriented the transferee but it also confused any observer. Still, he steeled himself for any surprised yells and cries of witchcraft. He might have to help out a fellow Home Time citizen, albeit one engaged in dodgy activity.

  He leaned against a wall and watched seventeenth-century France go by. Smelly, crawling with germs – he loved it. Yes, the rich were very rich and the poor were very poor; yes, people were starving; yes, children were dying of disease and malnutrition; and if he were somehow to get into the French court then, yes, he knew he would find a level of pomp and formality that made the Home Time's patricians look like children in a nursery. But out here, out on the street, it was all so refreshingly not the Home Time that he was prepared to forgive its shortcomings.

  Ten minutes later he was back at the entrance to the alley, just as his field computer told him that the transference he was awaiting was taking place. Daiho was now in there and Rico lurked as only a Specific or a correspondent can lurk, in plain view and completely anonymous.

  'How far to the convent?'

  'A mile or so.' The voices came out of the alleyway and made Rico frown. He hadn't been expecting two of them. Daiho must have brought a friend. Rico poised himself casually to follow them when they came out.

  'Why are we so far from it?'

  'So that you need me to guide you there and back, of course. You don't think I trust you, do you?'

  'It stinks here.'

  'I thought you might like to savour the atmosphere. I have to live in it, remember. And now, parlez Français.'

  And two people appeared at the end of the alley, talking together in seventeenth-century French like old friends. They looked casually around, then set off down the road away from Rico. One was the priest and the other was Hossein Asaldra.

  'You?' Rico muttered, eyes wide. He and Marje had assumed that because Daiho authorized the transferences, therefore it was Daiho doing the transferring. But no.

  And who was the priest? 'He met up with a bygoner?' Rico murmured. No, the other man was speaking the same language as Rico and Asaldra always spoke. Therefore, the clergyman must be another Home Timer. So why hadn't they transferred together? Why had they met up here?

  Radiating indifference, Rico followed the couple.

  Following in a straight line would be too obvious: it only worked in the adventure zines. Rico set off on a zig-zag route whose average course took him after the two Home Timers. He would wander across the road; study some livestock; engage total strangers in conversation, actually asking for directions but making it look from a distance like they were old friends.

  The disadvantage was that he was seldom near enough to Asaldra and his companion to hear what they were saying, and he really did need to know. They seemed engrossed in one another: maybe they wouldn't notice if he drew nearer. He began to catch up, slowly and without fuss, and came within earshot as they were passing a church. The tower was covered with wooden scaffolding and a gang of workmen swarmed over it.

  'The Jansenists are very similar to Calvinists,' the priest was saying, 'but they say they're strictly Catholic—'

  A shout of alarm and a snapping twang from above made the priest, Asaldra and Rico all look up together. A load of bricks was being hauled up to the top of the tower and the pallet was spinning dangerously while a snapped rope dangled beneath it. Then another twang, another rope gave, and the bricks began to fall. Asaldra and his companion were directly beneath.

  Rico's training took over.

  'Look out!' he shouted, already halfway to the two others before the words were out of his mouth, arms outstretched to push the two away from the danger. All his senses slowed down, taking in every datum, every aspect of what was happening.

  The bricks were halfway to the ground, and suddenly the priest and Asaldra weren't there any more. The priest had grabbed the frozen Asaldra round the waist and spun them both out of the way. Rico couldn't check his momentum and now he was the only one in any danger. The bricks were directly above him.

  The priest, who had already moved impossibly fast, moved faster. He let go of Asaldra, turned and leaped back, catching Rico in a flying tackle around the waist that knocked him backwards and jarred the breath out of his body.

  And the world returned to its normal speed as the bricks crashed loudly onto the spot where the men had been standing. Rico and the priest lay in the dirt and looked thoughtfully at the heap for a moment.

  The priest climbed to his feet, brushing down his gown with one hand and holding the other out to Rico.

  'You move quickly, my son,' he said.

  'You move quicker, Father,' said Rico. He took the hand and let the priest help him to his feet.

  'Yes,' the priest said simply.

  'Is your friend hurt?' Rico said. The priest looked calmly at Asaldra, who leaned against the wall, staring at the bricks. His eyes were wild, his hair dishevelled and he was breathing fast.

  'No,' the priest said. He walked over to Asaldra and patted him on the back. 'Just a little shaken,' the priest added.

  'Father!' It had all happened so quickly that the workmen in the scaffolding had only just got to the ground. The foreman ran up to the priest, twisting his cap between his hands. 'Father, are you hurt? I must apologize for the neglect of my men . . .'

  'No harm done,' the priest said mildly.

  'But to have interrupted your journey with this . . .'

  'You didn't interrupt; we're where we want to be.' The priest put his hands on Asaldra's shoulders and guided him towards a door in the wall. Then he looked back at the foreman and at Rico. 'Thank you for your assistance, my son. Good day.'

  The door shut behind them, leaving Rico and the foreman looking at each other blankly. The foreman, determined to apologize to someone, began to apologize to Rico, who wasn't listening. He was running through what he had just seen, and thinking about it.

 
; 'Oh my God,' he thought.

  'He was a correspondent,' Rico said.

  'Nonsense,' Marje said.

  'He was a correspondent!' Rico insisted. 'I saw how fast he moved. I couldn't have done it, and I've been trained for Specific Operations. No one could. I tell you, he was a correspondent.'

  'So.' Marje pinched the bridge of her nose. 'You are saying Hossein Asaldra has befriended a correspondent? You are saying Hossein has broken every code of conduct in the book? You are saying—'

  'You're still not getting it,' Rico said. 'The correspondent saved my life when he thought I was just another bygoner. He got involved, Commissioner. I would say his conditioning has been quite severely compromised, presumably by Mr Asaldra.' He saw the look of irritation sweep across Marje's face and got to his feet. 'What the hell. You wanted me to do a mission, I did it. Use the results as you will.'

  'I haven't dismissed you,' Marje said to his back, bringing him up short.

  He turned round slowly, and gave an ironic bow. 'I didn't ask you to,' he said.

  'You didn't complete your mission, either,' Marje said, and fury swept through Rico. Being treated like a servant was one thing, but attacking his professionalism . . .

  'You didn't find out what Li Daiho was doing there because it turned out he didn't appear,' Marje continued, 'but did you bother to find out what Hossein was doing there instead?'

  'Actually, yes,' Rico said sweetly, 'but you won't believe it, just as you don't believe my professional opinion that your friend was talking to a correspondent.' He turned to go again and this time reached the door.

  'Tell me. Please, tell me,' Marje said. The sudden meekness in her tone made him stop. 'And I apologize for doubting your professional opinion.' He grinned, then carefully wiped the grin off his face before turning round once more.

  'Well, now you're talking.' Rico sauntered to a chair. 'And this is why I came to make my report in person, Commissioner, because I really didn't want to say this over symb.'

  'Blaise Pascal,' Marje said a bit later. 'No, I haven't heard of him.'