by Ben Jeapes
'They've gone,' he said.
Alan was gazing around him in confusion. 'Why are you still here, then?'
And Rico suddenly realized the former correspondent hadn't quite understood after all.
'I'm sorry. The helicopter was at the recall point,' he said. 'Now they're back, they'll send a field to these co-ordinates to pick the rest of us up.'
'How long?'
'Could be thirty seconds, could be five minutes . . .'
Alan filled his lungs. 'Guards!' he bellowed.
Rico looked at him in shocked dismay. 'But . . .'
'You and the youngsters can go,' Alan said quietly as the doors burst open. 'But the equipment stays.' Then: 'You!' to the cohort of guards that had just come in. 'Get that gear out of here, now. Get it as far away from here as you can. Now! Move!'
Rico leaped to stand between the advancing guards and the cowering Jontan and Sarai.
'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I can't possibly let you do that.'
'Stun that idiot,' Alan said.
'Shut your eyes!' Rico shouted in the Home Time tongue, for the benefit of the kids, and squeezed his own tightly closed as he did. Full radiance, he symbed at his fieldsuit, and at once he was transformed into a man-shaped blazing white sun. Men yelled as the white light showed red through his eyelids, and when he opened them again it was to see the guards staggering back, hands covering their faces.
And Alan, looking at him. Either the former correspondent had also obeyed Rico's command or his enhanced eyes had been able to cope with the light, but the effect was the same.
A dropped stunner lay between them.
Rico met Alan's direct, calculating gaze.
A pause.
'There's no need . . .' he said and Alan moved – fast, a blur, towards the stunner. Rico was too slow to get there first but not to get there before Alan could raise it. He leaped at the correspondent's gun arm; Alan swatted him casually off and sent him flying across the room.
Rico landed in a crouch and raised an arm at Alan. His fieldsuit let loose a full stun charge, and the correspondent's body absorbed it without effort. Rico sprang forward and caught Alan in a tackle around the waist, bringing him to the floor by sheer momentum. Rico sat on top of his prone rival and used the moment of shock to grab both his opponent's wrists and pull them behind his back, before Alan could use his correspondent's strength to pull them apart again. He locked his hands over the crossed wrists and told the fieldsuit to freeze itself in that position. Alan lay face down, not even breathing heavily but straining at his bonds.
'Listen,' Rico said urgently, 'you've got to—'
'Over here,' Alan called. His face was pressed into the floor but he could see across the room with one eye. Rico turned his head to follow the line of sight. A guard – still blinking, tears still streaming down his face – had retrieved his stunner and was waving it about uncertainly.
'More to the right – that's it! – down a bit . . .'
The stunner was pointing directly at them.
'. . . And fire!'
And as his body twisted under the stun charges for the second time that day, Rico felt the recall field take hold of him, and this time his closing thoughts were of satisfaction.
But when he awoke some hours later, he was still in the twenty-first century.
Twenty-two
Hossein Asaldra looked up when the door opened, and he knew the time had come. Two guards with stunners levelled, and a third with a pair of cuffs.
This was where his Field Op's training should have come flooding back. A couple of swipes and kicks to render the guards unconscious and with one bound he would have been free. But he hadn't trained for a long time, he wasn't wearing a fieldsuit – he wasn't even wearing his gelfabric day-to-day clothes, which had been taken away from him and replaced with a simple one-piece boiler suit – and so all he could do was stand up slowly.
The chief guard nodded approvingly. 'That's right, don't make a fuss, sir. We just want to ask you some questions. Unless you're going to try and bribe us . . . ?' He actually sounded hopeful.
'Bribe you?' Asaldra said in disbelief.
'It's just that if someone tries to bribe us, Mr Carradine routinely offers us the same bribe plus ten per cent,' the guard said. 'That's how he deals with all the industrial spies we get sent.'
'Nice Christmas bonus,' one of the others agreed.
Asaldra snorted. 'You've really no idea who or what I am, have you?'
'Doesn't matter,' the chief said casually, but there was unyielding steel behind the cheerful mask. 'Mr Carradine wants you questioned. Are you coming, or do we drag you?'
'I'm coming,' Asaldra muttered, and stepped forward.
They hustled him along narrow corridors and down deep, tight staircases. They were taking him via the servant's route, the network of passages designed to keep the staff invisible in the days when Carradine's home had been the dwelling place of aristocracy. They still served their purpose: as well as his private army, Matthew Carradine no doubt employed perfectly ordinary, decent people who would raise at least an eyebrow when they saw someone clearly being held prisoner.
Asaldra wasn't sure what to expect at the end of their journey, but he knew it wouldn't match with what his imagination told him it should be, because nothing else had either. He should have woken up in a grimy cell somewhere – he had woken up in a lavishly furnished guest suite. He should have been in some windswept castle, or at the top of a windblown, creaky tower, or down in a dungeon somewhere – he was, he knew, in the stately home that was the headquarters of BioCarr.
But they were heading for the basement, so maybe the dungeon scenario wasn't too far out.
The room they showed him into was just like any well-maintained, antiseptic, brightly-lit surgery, with a barrel roof that showed its origins as a wine vault. Bottles and various medical instruments were neatly stored in racks along one wall and a reclining, three-part chair sat in the middle. Various hypodermics and small ampoules of different coloured liquids were laid out on a tray next to it. In one corner, a man with a video camera was busy taking light readings.
A woman in a white coat stood next to the chair and beside her stood the little man Asaldra had seen back at the hotel. Carradine's assistant.
'Good,' the man said cheerfully. 'Let's begin.'
'What . . .' Asaldra swallowed. He had been going to say, 'What are you going to do?' but his mouth was dry and the first word came out as a squeak. He tried again and this time got the question out.
'We're going to ask you some questions,' the woman said.
'We're going to ask you a lot of questions,' the man said. 'Don't worry, it won't hurt and you'll make a full recovery. Interrogation techniques are pretty sophisticated in 2022, even for we bygoners.'
'I . . .' Asaldra couldn't take his eyes off the chair.
On one level, yes, he knew it probably wouldn't hurt. And they probably weren't going to torture him or harm him – they had no need to do so, when the right concoction of pharmaceuticals could get everything they wanted straight out of him. But he was going to be strapped to a chair in a distant, underground room and interrogated, and that resonated with enough images in his mind to terrify him. He so, so badly did not want to go through with this.
'I'm not sure there's so much I can tell you,' he said.
'Let us be the judge of that,' Alan said, and he nodded at the guards. They seized Asaldra by the arms and frog-marched him towards the chair. He was trying hard to remember what Field Ops were told to do in the event of their ever being captured by bygoners. They had mental blocks installed that prevented them from revealing the existence of the Home Time under interrogation . . . but he was going to be asked questions by people who already knew that the Home Time existed and he suspected the blocks weren't going to work.
His training wasn't going to be any help. He was going to spill secrets to bygoners with who knew what effect on the timestreams, and the Specifics didn't know where he was, and
there was no chance of doing what he had originally planned when he contacted Carradine, which was to blank his memory once their business had been completed . . .
'Oh God, help me,' he prayed silently, as the hypo touched his skin and the chemicals flooded in.
This time Rico came awake with a splitting headache, which immediately told him he wasn't in the Home Time. It took a further half a second to work out he wasn't wearing his fieldsuit any more.
'Oh, God,' he muttered, and let his head sink back onto the pillow.
Pillow?
He forced his eyes open and looked around as best he could without dislocating his head. He took in the marbled walls; the pearly, indirect lighting; the silk sheets he lay in, smooth against his skin.
'Swish,' he muttered.
'It's one of the hall's executive guest apartments,' said a familiar voice. Alan moved into his field of vision. 'Try this.'
He put one hand behind Rico's head and helped him drink from a plastic cup. The stuff was sickly sweet but it cleared Rico's head.
'I told them to keep zapping you the moment you looked like waking up, so you've got a lot to get out of your system,' said Alan. 'You're probably a lot more dangerous than Hossein Asaldra.' He looked thoughtful. 'I imagine it's harder without that organic box of tricks you were wearing.'
'Slightly.'
'And I don't suppose you'll be surprised to hear it's almost evaporated. Holes appeared in it the moment we took it off you and now it's all but gone.'
'Of course.' Rico did feel better. He struggled slowly up into a sitting position and leaned back against the headboard. 'Can't—aagh!' A particularly strong streak of pain jabbed into his brain. 'Can't let Home Time tech fall into the hands of the bygoners.'
The agrav and field computer would have gone the same way, of course, and Rico knew his duty, painful though it was. He pulsed the mental signal that destroyed the symb network in his brain, reducing it to a cocktail of innocuous proteins that would be flushed out by his body. There was now nothing that could connect him with the Home Time: he was on his own in the early twenty-first century.
Or not entirely. 'Asaldra?' he said.
'Currently spilling his guts into a waiting digital recorder,' said Alan, 'and very interesting it is too.' He sat on a bedside chair and looked at Rico. Rico took exception to the half smile on his face.
'You're being very nice to me, all of a sudden,' he said.
'I've already established that Asaldra doesn't like you,' Alan said. 'I don't know about the rest of our former guests—'
'Where are they?' Rico interrupted.
'They went. You didn't. Is that what Asaldra called probability masking?'
Rico groaned. 'When they shot me,' he said, 'did I fall on top of you?'
'That's right.'
'Yeah, that's it,' Rico muttered. The recall field hadn't known what to make of two different probability frequencies – his and Alan's – so close together, and as a result neither of them had been picked up. Great. Then: 'You were saying? The rest of your former guests?'
'I don't know what their opinions of you might be, but any enemy of Asaldra might well be a friend of mine.'
'It's mutual.'
Alan raised his eyebrows. 'That sounds heartfelt.' Rico glared up at him.
'Mr Asaldra decided I'd discovered his little game,' he said, 'so he tried to discourage me, and everything he did – he got me reprimanded, he got me beaten up – it all just led me more and more to the facts. If he'd just left me alone, I'd have gone away, and I'd never have found out. And I still don't know exactly what he's up to.'
'Oh, that's easy,' Alan said casually. He crossed his legs and sat back. 'Asaldra and his friends want to save the Home Time.'
'From what?' Rico said.
'From the, um, space nations? What are they?'
'Oh, them,' Rico said. 'All the colonies that declared independence. They're way ahead of us in space technology and even though Earth's overpopulated they won't let us out to join them. Yeah, there's some resentment. And?'
'And they think the technology that made the Home Time could be used in Earth's favour.'
'They're probably right, if the College would let them, which it never will.'
'Ah!' Alan looked pleased with himself. 'But apparently, in your time, the Home Time has only got twenty-seven years left to run?'
Rico was about to nod, but old habits suddenly caught up with him. Maybe Asaldra had told Alan everything, but that would have been under drugs. He should be more reticent.
'Go on,' he said.
'This man Jean Morbern created a singularity which acts as a fixed point of reference in time, and that makes transference possible. But that singularity will expire due to quantum decay in twenty-seven years, and no one knows how to make another.'
Alan looked at him as if to confirm the facts so far: Rico still said nothing. Alan shrugged.
'So Asaldra – though the Daiho man was actually in charge – and his colleagues went to where science began.'
'Huh?' said Rico.
'They sent me back, a correspondent, with a predisposition to seek out the philosophers. And not just any philosophers but the ones whose insights, breadth of mind, lateral viewpoints laid the foundations of science. I interviewed them, Asaldra came back to record their memeplexes in crystal, and they set up a base here in the twenty-first century so that Daiho, with all his philosophical training, could recreate the science that had led to Morbern's experiments.'
Alan finished with a satisfied smile. 'Easy, really.'
'That . . . that's it?' Rico said, astonished. 'That's it? Why all the cloak-and-dagger? Why didn't they just say so?'
'Apparently your Register is programmed to prevent this kind of thing. This Morbern character wanted the Home Time to end naturally. And they had other reasons. You don't think they were going to give the secret to the whole world, do you? Does Asaldra strike you as an altruist?' Alan's face twisted. 'No. He and his clique were going to monopolize the knowledge. Make Earth great among the space nations, yes, but at the same time they were going to set themselves up as kings.'
Rico snorted. 'That's the one unsurprising thing you've said. So, now he's told you everything, what are you going to do with it?'
Alan sighed, paused, sighed again. 'One thing Mr Asaldra is rather weak on,' he said, 'is the history of the Home Time. How it all came about. I don't think he ever really needed to know. You strike me as the kind of man who likes to find things out. How are you at Home Time History 101?'
'And what would you do with that knowledge?' Rico said suspiciously.
'Stop the Home Time from happening.'
Rico felt like laughing, but laughing required strength he didn't have, so he just shook his head, very slowly in case it fell off. He did feel strong enough to get up, so he pushed back the covers and padded in his shorts to the tall bay windows. He looked out onto parkland. Tastefully landscaped gardens lay outside. Beyond them was a field with three parked helicopters; and beyond them, the rim of a natural grassy bowl where a herd of deer grazed. Trees surrounded the lip of the bowl.
'Matthew bought the hall as headquarters for BioCarr a few years ago,' said Alan behind him. 'I've got out of some prisons in my time, but even I would find this place a challenge. The grounds are crawling with guards, the security systems are absolute state of the art, and if you can't fly or make yourself invisible . . .'
'I get the idea,' Rico said. He turned back to Alan. 'Um – this plan of yours . . .'
Alan's expression went cold again. Rico recognized the look. This was obviously the correspondent's way of showing strong emotion.
'I don't know much about the Home Time,' Alan said, 'but I can guess from the clues I've got. I think the people of the Home Time are the smuggest, most amoral bunch of hypocrites that the world will ever see.'
'I'm with you so far,' said Rico, but Alan ignored him.
'They send us correspondents back, give us blithe assurances about how easy it
will all be with these organic survival machines that we call bodies, but do they come themselves? Oh, no! It's far too dangerous. And, in the meantime they lie to us, they abuse us, they take advantage of us . . . and they still expect us to be loyal! I saw the way Asaldra and his friends acted. They felt so superior to us thicky bygoners. And I saw the way they treated those two engineers they brought with them. That young man and young woman were the only two among them with any kind of useful skill, anything to contribute, and they treated them like dirt.'
'And you work for BioCarr?' Rico asked.
Alan paused, took a breath. 'BioCarr is big and powerful,' he said, 'and will become much more so over the next few years, but Matthew Carradine is one hundred per cent meritocrat. Promotion is by sheer ability and no one stays promoted without constantly proving that ability. But this is all just part of it! I've had a long, long time to work things out, Mr Garron. A long time, and I've decided the Home Time just doesn't deserve to exist. That kind of society is wrong, and if I can stop it then that can only be good.'
'You can't stop it,' Rico said quietly.
'I can try! I'll put the information on servers, I'll write it on documents, I'll carve it in stone, I'll encode it in genomes, I'll bury it in people's subconscious, I'll put it in so many places that your people could never get it all back.'
'You can't,' Rico said, more firmly. 'It doesn't work like that.'
'Then how?' Alan said.
Rico couldn't answer for a moment: the mental block against giving information to bygoners had come back. He had to force out the words with an effort of will.
'If – and it's a big if – if you could get enough power to change things, without the Home Time picking it up and stopping you, all you'd do is create a fresh timestream,' Rico said. 'And the stream would still inevitably end in the Home Time, because that's how it works. Morbern accidentally created several new streams when he first transferred. And every stream contains billions of people with as much right to live their own lives as you or me, so once a stream is created, you can't uncreate it without being as big a murderer as several thousand twentieth-century dictators rolled into one. So, ever since then, the Home Time has carefully been splicing all the streams together again. There's no way the Home Time won't happen.'
