Blood of the Heroes

by Steve White

  “Uh, I’m afraid history—”

  “—Isn’t your field. I know. So just take my word that you wouldn’t have wanted to be there to see it. Anyway, I found myself on a back street, and saw a Frankish soldier getting ready to rape a girl of no more than six. Judging from what was going on everywhere else in Constantinople that night, he probably would have killed her afterwards. Now, according to the kind of theories those old fiction writers played with, saving her life might have had imponderable consequences; she might have grown up and gotten married and given birth to a conqueror or inventor or religious reformer who changed subsequent history, or something like that. But, as you’ve pointed out, we now know that’s not the case.”

  “Oh. So you saved her.” Deirdre seemed to have an afterthought. “And, uh, what about the Frankish soldier?”

  “Well,” Jason replied obliquely, “there’s no rule that says I can’t enjoy my work.”

  Deirdre stared at him for a perceptible instant of silence, then hurried on. “Still, though, I can’t help thinking there must be more to it. Surely you must feel awe at the knowledge of what you’re seeing—and sheer curiosity. Especially what we’re about to see. I’ve read some of the speculations—”

  “Right. This island’s volcanic history came to light in the late twentieth century, when revived, half-baked mysticism was fashionable. They used the term ‘New Age’ for anything that was particularly retrograde. George Orwell would have loved that, if he’d still been alive!” Jason laughed. “They decided that Santorini was the lost world of Atlantis. Or that the side effects caused the Plagues of Egypt, and the tsunami drowned Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea!”

  “Yes, yes. But not all the ideas were that wild. Wasn’t there a fairly respectable theory that the eruption wiped out or at least crippled the Minoan civilization?” Deirdre gestured southward, toward Crete from whence they’d come. “It seems plausible. After all, Crete was less than seventy miles from this cataclysm.”

  “It does seem that way, doesn’t it? But the evidence is that Minoan society wasn’t destroyed. In fact, they’ve discovered Minoan remains right here on Santorini on top of the ash deposits; those people came back. Oh, yes, there’s still a strong probability—I’d say a near certainty—that the disaster got the Minoans started downhill. In fact, that’s something we hope to confirm.” Jason paused, and looked pensive. “I think it goes back to what Nagel was telling us at Knossos: every generation reads its own ideals, its own dreams, into those innocent-seeming faces that gaze out at us from those charming frescoes. So there’s something deliciously tragic about the thought of them being abruptly blotted out by blind natural forces.” He gave a scornful laugh and pressed on, unaware that he had let himself slip out of character. “For example, people looked at the lack of fortifications at Knossos and said, ‘Oh, wonderful! The Minoans were high-minded pacifists just like us!’ More likely, it was a case of fatheaded overconfidence in the ability of their fleets to keep any possible enemies away from Crete. Likewise, there used to be a theory that the Minoans were feminists four thousand years ahead of their times—”

  “I’ve heard that last one,” Deirdre said expressionlessly.

  “Yes, but what’s the evidence for it? Sculptures of female goddesses—something not unknown in ancient societies that we know were male-dominated. And frescoes of some really gorgeous women with expensive-looking clothes and elaborate hairdos and attitudes that suggest to us—though not necessarily to the original painters—sophistication and social status. For all we know, they could have been high-priced whores! No, it’s just another case of looking at the Minoans and seeing what we want to see, without any real written records to burst our bubbles. Now, though, maybe we’ll learn what they were really like.”

  “Maybe.” The sun had set, and the first stars had appeared, but that couldn’t account for a sudden seeming drop in temperature. Deirdre drained her wine and set the glass down with an unnecessarily loud click. “I think I’ll turn in. Thanks for the wine.”

  Nice going , Jason chided himself as he watched her depart. He stood up, got another wine, and went to lean on the balustrade. The moon had peeked over the cliff tops, and it glistened on the caldera’s unthinkably deep waters.

  Chapter Four

  Current hypersonic suborbital transports didn’t use any form of reaction engines, of course. But the term “jet lag” was still in use … and altogether too damned appropriate, Jason thought, after their three-hour flight from Greece to Australia.

  Rutherford gave them little time to recover. He had their schedule planned out to his usual degree of regimentation. After landing at the town-sized installation in the Great Sandy Desert not far northwest of Lake Mackay—about as close to the middle of nowhere as it was possible to get on today’s Earth, as Jason had intimated—they barely had time to get settled into their quarters. Deirdre and Nagel were pleasantly surprised, for as viewed from the outside, the facilities looked almost as bleak as their surroundings. Inside, the accommodations were as comfortable as late-twenty-fourth-century technology and fairly lavish funding could make them. Their biological clocks told them it was time to retire to those luxury hotel like quarters … but it was still business hours for the laboratories to which Rutherford took them.

  He had decided the implantation of their temporal retrieval devices should take place at once. This way, the two novices wouldn’t have time to brood about it and let their cultural prejudices simmer. For it was as Jason had told them: a very trivial in/out surgery, after which it was a fait accompli. Since any part of the body would do as well as any other, the out-of-the-way and easy-to-forget inner side of the left arm, not far below the armpit, was used. Jason himself had had so many of the tiny TRDs put into and taken out of himself that he’d long ago stopped worrying about it, if indeed he ever had.

  After that, Rutherford let them rest. But soon it was back to the labs for a procedure that was more elaborate and time-consuming … and which came as a surprise to Deirdre and Nagel. Deirdre in particular was taken aback. “They never mentioned this problem in any of the old fictional treatments of time travel I’ve read,” she remarked.

  “No,” Rutherford smiled at her. “I’ve sampled some of those works myself. They were full of unscrupulous people doing things like selling automatic rifles to the Confederate States of America. But those authors never seem to have considered the real threat that even the most well-meaning of time travelers would pose to the people of the past, without ever intending to do so.”

  “I’ve often wondered why they didn’t think of it,” said Jason. “Their own history told them all about the impact Europeans, with their millennia of exposure to the Old World disease pool, had had on isolated societies in Polynesia and the Americas.”

  “True. But you must remember that those writers lived during the early part of the Age of Antibiotics, before the consequences of that period’s irresponsibility were appreciated. Today, of course, we know that excessive dispensing and inept use of penicillin and the other ‘wonder drugs’ over a period of generations put disease microorganisms through an extraordinary course of forced-draft evolution. Only the most resistant strains survived … and proceeded to give rise to super-resistant ones. During the twenty-first century, it became a race between those strains and ever more highly developed antibiotics.”

  “But,” Nagel protested, “nowadays we all get broad spectrum immunization as a matter of routine public health.”

  “You’re forgetting the Immunity Gap, Sidney.”

  Nagel fell silent. Actually, no one could forget that nightmare time when humanity had seemed on the verge of losing its race with the microbes, for those years’ social chaos and apocalyptic panic had provided the soil from which the poisonous growth of the Transhuman movement had sprouted.

  “During that period,” Rutherford continued, “the human immune system had to undergo a bit of forced-draft evolution itself. So now we all harbor organisms against which the humans of
earlier eras have no defenses. The further back one goes, the worse the problem becomes—and you are going very much further back than anyone ever has. Each of you would be a veritable ‘Typhoid Mary’ in the Bronze Age. Fortunately, we are aware of the danger, and can prevent it.”

  “But,” said Nagel, his face a shade paler, “what if the discoverers of time travel hadn’t thought of this problem, and simply gone blundering ahead into the past?”

  “But they didn’t , Sidney,” Rutherford told him soothingly. “That’s the whole point of what Commander Thanou was explaining to you about time travel back in Athens . There are no paradoxes.”

  Nagel didn’t look altogether satisfied. But like his companions, he proceeded to submit to a series of treatments involving injections alternating with spells of lying down strapped into vaguely alarming-looking and -sounding machinery. The technicians who processed them were far too busy to explain it all. But Rutherford assured them that their bodies were being cleansed of all microorganisms that would endanger the population of the seventeenth century b.c., by processes which spared those organisms that served a purpose. They had little choice but to accept his word.

  After that it was time for a three-week orientation period, which gave Jason and Nagel more time to grow the beards whose lack would have been conspicuous where they were going. Rutherford’s brief tour in Greece had given them a basic familiarity with the region. Now they were force-fed detailed information about it, and about the material culture in which they would find themselves. For most of the curriculum, relatively traditional teaching techniques, reinforced by neuro-electronic stimulation of the appropriate brain centers while sleeping or in a state of induced unconsciousness, sufficed. But in the matter of language …

  “It would make no sense to send people into a past milieu without giving them the means of communicating there,” Jason explained when they met to discuss the subject. He ignored Nagel’s fidgeting. “Now, it doesn’t have to be exact. You don’t have to pass for a native of the locality where you find yourself; you can always claim to be from somewhere else where everybody knows the people talk funny. But accent or not, you have to be reasonably fluent in the language.”

  “And,” Rutherford put in, “it would take too long to acquire such fluency by conventional means. Therefore, the Authority was able to successfully make a case for another exemption from the Human Integrity Act. We are permitted to use direct neural induction to impose a language’s patterns on the speech centers. It is somewhat disorienting, and requires a period of rest under antidepressant drugs afterwards. In fact, you may have noted a waiver clause in the Articles of Agreement concerning long-term effects. I should emphasize, however, that this is strictly precautionary. Be assured that we have never had an actual incidence of such problems.”

  Nagel was clearly uninterested in any possible side effects. In fact, he could no longer contain himself. “Blast it, Kyle, I know all this! But how can you possibly have these ‘language patterns’ for the Aegean Bronze Age?”

  Rutherford evidently decided that Nagel had suffered enough. “We have been planning this expedition for some time, Sidney. It is, after all, by far the most ambitious temporal displacement we have ever undertaken— involving humans . The risks involved justified the expense of preceding it with an unmanned probe.”

  “An unmanned probe?” Deirdre echoed, too intrigued to take offense at the phraseology.

  “Yes—using a unique approach.” Rutherford’s look of sublime self-satisfaction left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to the identity of that approach’s originator. “The probe was encased in a synthetic material which—to any low-technology tools of analysis, at any rate—appeared to be rough-hewn stone, in a crudely anthropomorphic shape. It was sent back to 1710 B.C., in the Inachos valley—which we visited on our outing from Athens, as you may recall.”

  “Why there?” Jason asked.

  “The entire operation was somewhat controversial. After all, we were flinging an instrumentality into the past without any on-the-scene human oversight. In order to get approval, we had to agree to use an out-of-the-way locale where the risk of impacting observed history was minimized. But it was still within the same cultural—and, almost certainly, ethnolinguistic—zone as the more important centers.”

  Nagel, Jason thought, must have sensed where this was headed. He was practically panting.

  “The experiment succeeded,” Rutherford resumed. “The local people did precisely as we’d hoped: they found the probe, and made a god of it—or, if not a god, at least an object of worship. There are instances from recorded Greek history of objects that the immortals were believed to have flung to Earth—the Omphalos at the Oracle of Delphi, or the Palladium that the Greeks were supposed to have stolen from Troy. We counted on this particular kind of susceptibility already existing in protohistorical times.”

  Deirdre spoke with uncharacteristic hesitancy, as though frightened of what she was saying. “Is it possible that, by your experiment, you created this ‘susceptibility’?”

  “I suppose that is within the realm of possibility,” Rutherford allowed with chilling casualness. “At any rate, the locals took it to their village—which was later to grow into the town of Argos—and set it up in a shrine … and did a great deal of talking in its presence. Now, the probe was designed for ruggedness and durability above all else, for obvious reasons. It had no sophisticated cybernetic features—just basic audio and video pickups, which ran continuously for the entire duration of the mission, since we were able to give it a far higher recording capacity than Commander Thanou will have.”

  Yes , Jason thought. I have other things taking up space. A heart, lungs, kidneys, a GI tract … and, whatever Nagel thinks, a brain.

  “The probe’s TRD was set to activate at a local time in the small hours of the morning, when we hoped no one would be present to see it vanish. After we had retrieved it, we were able to study its recorded pictures and sound. We subjected them to computer analysis using universal translation programs.”

  Deirdre and Nagel didn’t look as though this meant anything in particular to them. It did to Jason. He was familiar with the devices that were used in establishing communication with newly discovered alien races. With only a few minutes’ exposure, it was possible to begin analyzing an entirely unknown language.

  “But,” Rutherford continued, “that turned out to be unnecessary in this case. The language proved to be an early form of Achaean Greek—essentially, the language of the Linear B tablets.”

  ” Yes ! ” Nagel leaped to his feet with an enthusiasm of which Jason would never have dreamed him capable. “I knew it! That for Markova and her introduction of proto-Greek by the charioteers of the Grave Circle

  dynasties at Mycenae! Ha! And villagers wouldn’t have been addressing their gods in the language of a caste of recent conquerors. The ancestral Graeco-Thracian speech must have entered the region as far back as the twenty-third century B.C. as I have theorized—probably just before the Centum-Satem rift started to occur within East Indo-European.” He turned to Rutherford, voice charged with urgency. “Kyle, you must postpone our expedition! As soon as I have had a chance to examine these findings, it is important that I prepare a monograph immediately.”

  “Now wait just a damned minute—!” Deirdre began.

  Rutherford laughed. “Do calm down, everyone! Sidney , the schedule for the expedition is set in stone, as these things tend to be. Remember Commander Thanou’s remarks about ‘traffic control’? There’ll be plenty of time to demolish Markova after you return, armed with the unique prestige of having seen the era personally.”

  “Hmm … there is that.” Nagel subsided with, for him, fairly good grace. “You won’t allow this to become general knowledge until my return, will you?”

  “Of course not. The probe’s data is included in the overall body of the expedition’s findings, for which you and Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez have exclusive publication rights, as specified in the Articles of
Agreement. So put your mind at ease while we proceed to transfer some of that data to your brain.”

  Nagel immediately perked up at the reminder that he was going to actually learn the language whose identity was a question over which oceans of ink had been spilled for half a millennium. They went back to the labs, and a new set of machines.

  For Jason, it was fairly old hat. He had acquired other tongues in the same way—including his own ancestral Demotic Greek. His initial impression was that you probably had to be a linguist to recognize this harsh language as related to it. On reflection, though, as the newly acquired patterns settled into his mind, he could glimpse occasional haunting similarities and recognize structural analogs.

  He had ample opportunity to make such connections, for Rutherford drilled them in the language mercilessly, making sure their voice boxes could implement the speech patterns their brains now held. They also spent much time studying the video record the probe had brought back. It was difficult to know how to react to those images; their gritty, grubby, unscripted reality was hard to reconcile with the realization that these entirely natural-looking people’s bones had been dust for over four thousand years.

  Most of the footage was of minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour ordinariness. But the sense of peering through a window into the distant past gave those recordings a mesmerizing quality which Rutherford—had they only known—was counting on. It kept them staring at those images, and soaking up useful impressions of how the people of that era moved, gestured and even wore their clothes. The last became relevant when they got issued their own.

  Those outfits were of a woolen fabric that was only moderately rough, and dyed in the bright colors they had seen in the recordings. Deirdre had expressed a certain surprise at that, having assumed that people impoverished, by modern standards, would dress drably. Jason knew from experience the fallacy of this common assumption; primitive people love bright primary colors. Naturally, these clothes had been left out in the weather long enough to acquire an authentic faded look. They consisted of tunics and cloaks for the men and something not too different, though longer, for Deirdre. Again, she expressed surprise, having expected something like the himation of Classical Greek times, or perhaps like the breast-exposing ankle-length flounced dresses of the Minoan ladies of the frescoes. Rutherford explained that the former was a mark of a domestic seclusion, while the latter was the particular fashion statement of a narrow class—quite possibly a class of priestesses, although this wasn’t certain. Either way, Deirdre was clearly relieved. She was less happy about the footwear; hers consisted of light sandals, while the men both had openwork high-quarter shoes with curled toes.