by Steve White
“Yes, I can see that,” she nodded her dark-auburn head. “I recall being told that we’re going to have to have this device implanted… .” A cloud shadow seemed to cross her features. Nagel looked equally troubled. Jason understood their queasiness, which practically all of society shared. It was another hangover from the Transhuman madness.
“That’s correct,” he said quietly. “It’s a very minor surgical operation, which will be performed after we get to Australia.”
“Is that really necessary?” asked Nagel peevishly. “Can’t we just carry the things?”
“Standard Temporal Service procedure dictates that—” Rutherford began. Jason motioned him to silence. He subsided huffily and let the younger man answer Nagel.
“Yes, I suppose so,” Jason conceded. “You could carry an obviously advanced device which would take a lot of explaining in the past—and which you might lose. Or it could be miniaturized as I’ve said—in which case you’d almost certainly lose it. And if you lose it, you’re stranded in the past permanently .” Jason paused to let that sink in, then put on a reassuring smile. “Anyway, this doesn’t involve any proscribed bionics. The TRD isn’t neurally interfaced with your brain in any way.”
“Then how do you activate the thing?” Nagel demanded.
“You don’t. It activates automatically, at a predetermined moment, timed by atomic decay—and you’re back on the displacer stage in Australia, in the linear present.”
A look of alarm began to awake on Nagel’s features. “But what if we should need to return to the present before that?”
“You can’t,” said Jason with finality. “This accounts for the provision in the Articles of Agreement you signed releasing the Temporal Regulatory Authority from liability.” More “legalistic boilerplate” you couldn’t be bothered with reading , he guessed. “If anything happens to you, you can’t be rushed back to a modern hospital; you’re stuck in the past for a fixed duration, with all that implies about medical care or the lack of it.” Jason decided he’d better accentuate the positive. “This way, the Authority knows exactly when to expect you back, and can make sure the stage is clear at that time. Otherwise, you might find yourself occupying the same volume as another object.” Jason didn’t elaborate on that. His listeners’ expressions showed he didn’t need to.
“Yes,” Deirdre said thoughtfully. “With only the one displacer stage in existence, I can see how ‘traffic control’ might be a problem. Bur what about our initial displacement into the past? There’s not going to be anybody back then making sure our arrival location is clear.”
“Yes!” exclaimed Nagel, to whom these problems had clearly never occurred. “And what about the air itself, in the space where we’re going to occupy when we, uh, materialize?”
“Let me address those points in reverse order. We don’t need to worry about the air, or any other matter in gaseous state; the energy release involved in the displacement suffices to shove it out of our way. And the displacement process involves a feedback feature which makes it impossible to send an object to time/space coordinates which are occupied by another solid object. If there’s anything there, it will simply default to the nearest unoccupied location. Unfortunately, this does not work for the snapping-back process when the temporal energy potential is restored. Hence our concern with ‘traffic control.’ “
“All right,” Deirdre nodded. “Understood. But isn’t it a little unsettling to suddenly find yourself back in the present, without warning?”
“Oh, it won’t be without warning,” Jason assured her. “I’ll let you know when to expect it.”
“And how will you know?” Nagel inquired archly. “Do I gather you’ll be wearing a wristwatch in the Bronze Age?”
“Scarcely, Dr. Nagel.” Jason’s voice was level and unapologetic. “In point of fact, I do have an actual, neurally interfaced computer implant.”
For a moment, there was the kind of awkward silence that always prevails when people are too polite to pronounce a bigot word that has entered unbidden into their well-bred minds—in this case, cyborg.
“The Service enjoys a special, limited exemption from the Human Integrity Act,” Jason explained, “as do certain law enforcement agencies like the Hesperian Colonial Rangers, from which I’m on temporary detached duty, in case you’ve wondered about this uniform. The implant has its uses for us. It enables us to carry around a lot of useful information. And I can use it to record whatever I see and hear—within limits, of course, since the storage capacity isn’t infinite, but it’s the only recording capability we’ll have.”
“That last feature is uniquely useful on this mission,” Rutherford interjected. “In more recent eras, paper and ink would be locally obtainable; you would be able to take notes and conveniently bring them back with you. In the Bronze Age, that is not going to be the case.” He took on a look of annoyance. “We really do need a new set of tenses for time travel, don’t we?”
“Absolutely,” Jason agreed, forestalling a digression. “But at any rate, another advantage of my implant is that I’ll always know the actual time in the linear present.”
Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez spoke briskly, as though eager to move on to another subject. “Well, then, that’s one thing we won’t have to worry about. And this is all very interesting. But you still haven’t answered my most basic question: how is it that we can travel back in time despite the paradoxes it seems to allow for? I suppose you’re going to tell me the past can’t be changed, but—”
“Oh, but the past can be changed,” said Jason blandly. “We do it all the time.”
They simply stared at him.
“In fact,” he continued, enjoying the effect he was creating, “changing the past is the basis for our one, very unsatisfactory means of communicating with the present. You see, there is no such thing as a ‘temporal radio’ or anything like that.”
“We’re not totally ignorant, you know!” snapped Nagel.
“Of course not, Doctor,” said Jason, in as soothing a tone as he could manage while snickering inwardly. “So you understand that time travelers are on their own. They can, however, leave a message—in some durable form, and well hidden—at a prearranged place and time. After that point in time rolls around in the linear present, the Authority sends somebody to that location to find it. And to answer your question before you even ask it: yes, we’ve thought of looking in such a location in advance. The message wasn’t there. After the moment in the linear present when the plan called for the message to be deposited, the location was visited again … and the message was there.”
There was an interval of uncomfortable silence.
“I was not aware of this … experiment,” Nagel finally said.
“We don’t go out of our way to publicize it,” Rutherford admitted.
Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez shook herself, and spoke almost defiantly. “Have you ever tried going to one of these locations before that ‘point in the linear present’ and staying there, watching, through that moment?”
Jason and Rutherford exchanged a look. Rutherford nodded.
“Naturally that’s been thought of,” Jason told her. “In fact, it’s been done twice. In the first case, an expedition had been sent back to 1953 to clear up the details of Stalin’s death. They were to leave a message at a particular location outside Moscow, Russia. A team was sent there to perform precisely the kind of observation you’ve suggested.”
“And … ?” she breathed with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension.
“On the way from Australia, the team’s aircar developed a malfunction. They were stuck in Calcutta until the moment was past. Then they went on to Moscow and found the message.”
Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez sat back, looking deflated and vaguely resentful.
“It was tried again when a team went back to 2021, a crucial time during the Chinese breakup. You can be sure every member of that team was required to be combat-trained! Anyway, that time the Authority made certain to have
the observers in place at the message site outside the ruins of Beijing before the team even departed, and kept them there through the prearranged linear-present moment. The message never appeared.”
“And what conclusions were drawn from that?” Deirdre asked eagerly.
“None. When the team returned—mostly in the form of corpses—the two survivors explained that they’d gotten caught up in a fire fight and had never been able to leave the message.”
This time her look of resentment was not vague. Jason’s smile only intensified it.
“I’m really not trying to be difficult.” Well, maybe just a little , he mentally hedged. “I’m leading up to the real answer to your question about paradoxes. The past can be changed, yes—but only in small ways. Ways that don’t create paradoxes. And don’t ask me why. The incidence of alcoholism among physicists and philosophers has risen since they’ve started trying to figure it out. It seems to be related to the Observer Effect—Schrödinger’s Cat, and all that. What it boils down to is that a time traveler can’t change the observed world. Nobody ever had any reason to check those message sites before, so that’s all right. But you can’t go back and kill one of your own ancestors, simply because we know he didn’t get killed.”
“But,” Nagel spluttered, “as a practical matter, what prevents you from killing him?”
“I have no idea, Dr. Nagel. But something will, if you try to. And the same goes for anything that will preclude the existence of your society. The past can be changed, but history can’t.”
Deirdre looked thoughtful. “You try to shoot Hitler in Vienna before World War I, and the gun will jam.”
“That’s one possibility. But the way these things more typically work, you’d find out later that you had shot some other bum by mistake.”
Nagel, obviously uncomfortable with this entire discussion, made a blustering effort to assert control. “Shall we turn our attention to practicalities? One thing I do know—” a withering glare at Jason “—is that we are to be supplied with the local spoken language by direct neural induction.”
“That is correct,” Rutherford nodded. “It is one of the Authority’s obligations, specified in the Articles of Agreement.”
“Well and good. But how can this be possible for the era in question? Granted, my definitive study of the subject has established beyond reasonable question—not to be confused with the questions raised by upstarts like Boudreau and Markova!—that an early form of Greek was already being spoken on the mainland, while one or more languages of the Hittite-Luwian family still prevailed on Crete and the Cyclades islands, including Santorini. But even I do not pretend to be able to provide a pronouncing gazetteer for these languages!”
Rutherford , back in his element, smiled a smile that exceeded even his usual capacity for oozing complacency. “Please rest assured that this has been taken into account, Sidney. The very fact that this expedition is being dispatched should tell you that we know… .” He let the sentence hang.
“You know? ” Nagel leaned forward with an avidity that seemed odd in one who claimed to know already. Perhaps, Jason thought, he wasn’t quite as certain of his conclusions as he pretended. “But how … ? Oh, tell me—!”
“All in good time, Sidney.” Rutherford wasn’t really a sadist, Jason reflected, but he did love his little secrets. “This will come out in the briefings you will receive in Australia . For now, I’ve asked you all to meet here in Greece so that we can examine the landscapes in question first-hand. I realize, Sidney , that this will be somewhat redundant for you. I also caution you that those landscapes will be quite different in the seventeenth century B.C. For one thing, Greece was much more extensively forested then. Still, this type of familiarization is not without value. I have an itinerary planned for tomorrow. I suggest we all make an early night of it.”
They took the hint and began filing out. As they departed, Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez gave Jason a coolly appraising look, and a challenging smile lifted the corners of her full lips.
” ‘A ship’s captain in the age of sail,’ eh? I hope you don’t plan to flog us.”
Jason returned her smile in kind. “Only when necessary.”
Chapter Three
Jason had visited Greece before—modern Greece where Rutherford had his office, and the Greece of the past where he could so easily pass for a local. But he hadn’t really spent as much time in either as one might have thought. His Service base of operations was in Australia, and temporal expeditions had—until now—ventured back only as far as the High Middle Ages, when the Byzantine Empire was still fitfully alive but Greece proper had already become an impoverished beachcomber by the shore of history. Neither in the present century nor in any other had he ever been to the places Rutherford now took them.
First they went southwest by aircar, over the Saronic Gulf with Salamis to the right, as the morning sun lay a dazzling trail on the watery grave of Xerxes’ fleets. Then they were over dry land again—very dry, for this was the austere Peloponnesus. Specifically, Rutherford informed them, they traversed the Argolid. Jason stared down, brooding, at a landscape that epitomized Earth to him, for it has been shaped by human habitation so long that the terracing of the hillsides was practically as much a natural feature as the rock formations wrought by blind geological processes.
Presently, the gleam of sunlit water appeared again, ahead and to the left—the Gulf of Argos. Their destination was short of that, not far from the mouth of a river straggling through a plain covered with olive groves and orchards and crisscrossed with eucalyptus-lined roads. They landed beside such a road, where the trees shaded the riverbed—more gravel and alluvial silt than water, at least at this early-summer time of year. A town was just visible in the distance, at the base of a mountain—Argos, according to Rutherford.
Nagel’s impatience could no longer be contained. “Kyle, why have you brought us here?”
“Because, Sidney, this is where you are going to appear in the seventeenth century B.C.” Rutherford gave a frowning headshake.
“But why here?” Nagel asked. “Why not Santorini—safely before the explosion, of course!—or Crete or one of the Cyclades islands?”
“All in good time, Sidney.” Rutherford’s serenity was as sublime as it was infuriating. Jason, knowing the futility of trying to extract information before the old boy was good and ready, held his tongue. Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez ignored the whole byplay, and simply stared at a vista utterly foreign to her experience.
“I caution you all,” Rutherford resumed, “that things will be different in the target milieu. For one thing, Greece was far more well-watered then. This river—the Inachos, by the way—was capacious. Indeed, it must have often flooded.”
“The least of these people’s worries now,” Jason commented.
“Nevertheless,” Rutherford continued, ignoring him, “the basic contours of the land are not believed to have changed fundamentally. Our time is somewhat limited, but we will familiarize ourselves with this area before departing for Crete.”
They spent most of the day doing hops around the valley, pausing for lunch at a waterfront taverna Rutherford knew at Nauplia, by the sea at the base of a cliff crowned by a fortress built by the Venetians in the medieval times to which Jason had traveled. It was a surprisingly good lunch, Jason thought—although, admittedly, he was very hungry. Deirdre, looking askance at the contents of the kitchen pots, satisfied herself with a basic Greek salad—mostly black olives, feta cheese and slices of startlingly red tomato, practically afloat in olive oil on a minimal bed of lettuce—accompanied by a peponi melon. Jason considered steering her away from resinated wine, but then suggested she try it, which she did gamely enough. He had a feeling it was probably closer to what would be available in the Bronze Age, before there were tourist palates to consider.
Afterwards they resumed their stops, pausing at each for a walk through territory of whose relevance Rutherford assured them in his usual uninformative way. Nagel made no att
empt to conceal his above-it-all disdain. Deirdre was just as open in her fascination. Jason stored away topographical data with a methodical eye, untroubled by any stirrings of ancestral memories; he didn’t think of himself as particularly Greek, nor as anything at all except Hesperian.
They didn’t stop at the sinister cyclopean ruins at Mycenae and Tiryns, merely glimpsing them from the air. Rutherford assured them that those massive fortifications hadn’t existed as such in the target era. Then they left Tiryns and nearby Nauplia behind and headed south over the sea.
At first they hugged the eastern coast of the Peloponnesus, where the Gibraltar-like mass of Monemvasia rose from the sea, before passing Cape Malea and turning southeastward across the Aegean. The sun was low in the sky when Crete—looking almost like a continent after so many diminutive islands—appeared ahead and to the right, occluding the darkening sky with its brooding, mountainous mass. By the time they grounded at Herakleion, the sun was setting behind Mount Juktas, the “Head of Zeus.”
After dinner they once again “made an early night of it” at Rutherford’s insistence. He also insisted, shortly after dawn the following morning, that they take a ground car up the valley from Herakleion to Knossos. The road was a winding, twisting one, but at least they only had to traverse a few miles—and listen to a limited amount of Nagel’s grumbling—before stopping at the screen of cypresses behind which lay the mound of Knossos. Rutherford had called ahead, and the stasis field that protected the ruins from the ages had been lifted. It was still early, and they were alone as they walked through the trees and emerged to see the Palace of Minos.
Five hundred years after Sir Arthur Evans’ excavation of this site, no one except specialists remembered the controversy that had once raged over his decision to reconstruct what he had unearthed, lest it collapse into rubble in the absence of the soil that had held it up for more than three thousand years. Nagel was such a specialist, and he muttered ritualistically about reinforced concrete columns, and frescoes that owed as much to late nineteenth century art nouveau as to the Minoan Bronze Age.
