by Chad Oliver
Wade greeted him formally and did his level best to act as though he had every right to be where he was.
“Well?” the priest said in Nahuatl.
Wade hammed it up a little; it wouldn’t hurt to be dramatic. “I am in the service of Tezcatlipoca at Texcoco,” he replied in the same language. “I come to you as a brother, for you are known to be wise.”
The priest snorted, unimpressed. “You have some purpose in coming to our temple, Texcocan?”
“I have brought you a message,” Wade said sonorously. “I have seen omens, and other things.”
The priest folded his arms. The black eyes looked anything but gullible. “Speak, then.”
Wade did it up brown. “In this, the age Four Earthquake,” he intoned, “I have had strange dreams and seen strange things in my city. I have seen in a dream a stranger coming among us, bringing horrible four-legged monsters such as I had never seen before. I have seen, only today, such a man in our city, and with him were fifty devil-beasts.” He watched the priest narrowly, but it was impossible to tell whether the man knew what he was talking about or not. Surely, he must know about Hughes by now? “I tell you, brother priest of Tezcatlipoca, that these demons have been sent among us by Mictlantecuhtli, Lord of the Dead. This stranger says he is our friend, but he comes to lead us all to the land given over to the dead.”
“What has that to do with us?” the priest asked, his voice emotionless. “You speak of Texcoco; this is Tlaltelolco.”
He smiled coldly and played on an ancient antagonism. The advantages of hindsight were considerable, he reflected—for he knew what the priest could not knew, namely that Tenochtitlan would conquer and assimilate Tlaltelolco in a relatively few years. “This man of whom I speak,” he said, “speaks in dreams to Montezuma of Tenochtitlan—and not only in dreams. He trains Montezuma’s warriors in the use of the devil beasts, and he covets the temple of Tezcatlipoca in Tlaltelolco.”
The priest stirred, and Wade knew he had struck home. The rivalry between Tlaltelolco and Tenochtitlan was becoming serious, and suspicions were easily aroused. “What do you want?” the priest asked bluntly.
Wade dodged that one and threw out a cloud of prophecy. “I say this to you, brother-priest: this man and the devil beasts must be destroyed. If they are not sent back to the Lord of the Dead, birds shall fly with mirrors in their heads. When the New Fire Ceremony comes ten years from now, your people will fast but the corn shall not grow. You will scarify your children, but the rain shall not come. When next the New Fire is kindled on the Hill of the Star, the fire will die and darkness everlasting shall forever reign over the land.”
The priest seemed impressed; it was hard to say. Wade didn’t tell him that there were going to be severe crop failures between 1451 and 1456, due to storms and frost, but when they came he knew his words would be remembered.
“I should like some evidence of what you say,” the priest said. Whatever else he may have been, the man was no mystic.
Wade lowered his voice., “Within one day, the demon beasts will kill their victims in Texcoco. If they are not stopped, they will come here as well.” He eyed the priest and added a practical note. “They threaten our positions,” he said.
The black eyes of the priest were inscrutable.
Wade was getting uneasy; this boy wasn’t swallowing everything by a long shot.
“Tell the others,” Wade said. “Do not mistake my power.”
He dropped two smoke pills to the stone floor behind him, and backed rapidly out through the puffs of black smoke that instantly filled the chamber.
He got outside before the priest could recover from the shock, and lost himself in the milling crowds in the plaza. So many priests were around that he was not conspicuous.
Step One had been completed, although he had no idea how successful he had been. Aztec society was a theocracy, run by the elaborate priesthood. If the priests were against you, your name was capital M-U-D.
He hurried to the shore of Lake Texcoco, appropriated a large canoe, and paddled eastward in the hush of twilight.
Ahead lay Texcoco, with its poet-king, Nezahualcoyotl.
And ahead lay the man he had come to find, Daniel Hughes.
The moon floated redly on the crests of the mountain ranges before Wade reached the town of Texcoco, eastward on the mainland. The night was still and damp, but his passage left a string of yapping dogs behind him.
He found the house of Daniel Hughes without difficulty. It was a simple wattle-and-daub home, hardly more than a hut, situated on the outskirts of Texcoco. Behind the house was a perfectly ordinary corral, built of logs.
He could see the horses, restless shadows caught in the silvering light of the rising moon.
There was nothing very sinister about them; they neither threatened nor promised. They were just there, in place, as though they belonged. They were just horses.
They didn’t look deadly, like a cobalt bomb.
They weren’t dressed for murder, like an army.
But they were, no matter what they looked like, the levers that could move a world. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that was deadly.
Wade didn’t hesitate. The horses were unguarded, and his own presence was unsuspected. There would never be a better chance than right now, and he took it.
A stallion nickered, suspiciously.
Wade moved cautiously to the log rail, spotted the water trough, and tossed half his supply of irritants into it. They made a light splash, and the horses began to mill nervously.
He backed away, careful to make no sudden motions. The irritants would not take effect for fifteen hours. They weren’t designed to kill, but they were guaranteed to make the horses mean.
The right poison, of course, would have killed at least some of the horses outright. But he couldn’t be certain that it would get all of them, and he had no way of knowing whether or not all of the horses were in the corral—Hughes might have some that Security hadn’t spotted. In any event, he wanted to make the horses into something frightening, something supernatural, so that they could never be accepted into the Indian culture before Cortes landed.
Preventive medicine was still the best medicine.
This way, he didn’t have to get all of the horses; he simply had to render them ineffective. A bunch of dead horses in the morning would just have proved that horses were vulnerable like other animals. Twenty or thirty maddened horses were something else again. Something unforgettable.
He went to the front of the house. There was no door, only a blanket hanging over a space in the wall.
He noticed a good rope with a loop in it hanging by the doorway. He smiled a little and knocked gently on the mud wall of the house next to the rope.
There was a moment of silence, then footsteps. The blanket was pushed aside.
Daniel Hughes looked out at him. He didn’t look much like his picture. The white hair had been dyed black, the skin was a copper color, and he was dressed in a loin-cloth and an over-the-shoulder mantle.
The pleasant blue eyes, however, were unchanged. The air of affability, of sophistication, remained.
“Hello Dan,” Wade said in English. “May I come in?”
The man didn’t react at all—or, if he did, he recovered himself before Wade could catch it.
“It’s rather late,” said Daniel Hughes in a soft, polite voice. “But by all means step inside. I’ve been expecting you.”
Wade was startled, to say the least, but he managed to keep it from showing. By God, he thought, I’ll be as suave as he is if it turns my upper lip into cement.
He went in.
The inside of the house fully lived up to the promise of its rather drab exterior; it was furnished with mats and stools and something that would pass for a low table. The kitchen was in an adjoining shed, and what light there was came from the embers of a fire between the house and the kitchen.
It was warm and dry, though, and not uncomfortable.
A figure�
�little more than a shadow in the half-light—stepped gracefully out of one corner and moved without a word into the kitchen shed. Wade caught just a glimpse of a striking Indian girl, perhaps twenty years old, and then she was hidden from his view.
Daniel Hughes seated himself cross-legged on a mat.
“You have the advantage of me,” he said quietly. “What is your name?”
“Dryden. Wade Dryden.”
“Wade it is, then. From the Time Security Commission, of course. Isn’t it curious to imagine that we are in something called time? I feel quite at home. Sit down, won’t you?”
Wade sat down. The charm of Dan Hughes was very real, he decided—and there was a mind back of that somewhat bland smile.
Hughes folded his hands. “Beating around the bush doesn’t amuse me, Wade,” he said. “Suppose we get right down to cases. I flatter myself that I am not feeble-minded, and therefore I have, shall we say, anticipated a visit from the TSC. Would you be interested in my line of reasoning?”
“Shoot,” Wade said, feeling that he was caught up in something he could hardly understand.
“Well,” Hughes said, his blue eyes sure and steady, “I knew the horses would be spotted sooner or later by a Security team. That was obvious. Shortly thereafter, our friend Chamisso would send someone back here with the semantically curious mission of saving the world. Naturally, the TSC would wish to disturb matters as little as possible, so I assumed the man would come alone—as, I’m happy to see, you did. Now then, Wade—what do you suppose that agent would do when he got back here?”
Wade said nothing, but he felt the sweat in the palms of his hands.
Hughes laughed, gently. “Our friend would reason that Aztec society was a theocracy, and so he would start with the priesthood. I imagined he would pass himself off as a priest, go to one of the temples, and go through some mumbo-jumbo designed to make the priests worry about the horses. Then, I reasoned, he would probably do something to stir the horses up, and after that he would come here to preach some ethics. How close am I, Mr. Dryden?”
“Not very close, I’m afraid,” Wade said.
Hughes raised one eyebrow. “Well, I went ahead on the assumption that I was correct,” he said. “I went to the priests, one by one, and made a little prophecy to the effect that a stranger would be along shortly to tell them lies about my animals. I see by the look in your eyes, which you are trying most heroically to shield, that you have already fulfilled that prophecy, thus strengthening my position here no end.”
Wade stood up, his heart hammering against his ribs.
“Do sit down, Mr. Dryden. We’ve hardly begun our little talk. I’ve made a bit of a study of the TSC, so I think I know your methods rather well. Naturally, you would underestimate me, since it is hardly admissible to your philosophy that a man like myself could be as smart as you are.” He waved a hand. “I’m not a fool, Wade. You wouldn’t dream of bringing a weapon back here, but my ethics are different. I assure you that my wife will not hesitate to use that rifle.”
Wade looked into the kitchen shed. The Indian girl stood there in the shadows behind the fire, an old-fashioned repeating rifle in her arms.
“I really can’t allow you to live through the night, Wade, but I would be singularly ungracious to cut you off without a word. What was it you came here to say?”
Wade felt little and helpless, filled with the acid of failure
Outside the hut, the moon stood high in the night, and a cold wind whispered down from the mountains.
V
Wade tried to get a grip on himself.
He had to think, he knew that. His brain was his only weapon. If he got rattled now, he was done for. There could be no question that he had been outsmarted; Hughes had checked every move he had made, before he had even made them.
Okay. Go on from there. What do you know about Dan Hughes?
For one thing, he had been a frustrated man, whether he showed it or not. He had wanted to write a novel but hadn’t been able to bring it off. He hadn’t fitted into the culture in which he had found himself, but he had brains to spare. He would be hungry for recognition, eager for anything that fed his starved ego.
And he could be hurt, when the time came.
Right now, he had to be kept talking.
Wade sat down, careful to keep his hands in front of him where they could be seen. He didn’t know what signal would be needed to make the Indian girl pull the trigger, but he knew he could never get away with anything so crude as tossing a smoke pill on the floor.
“I came here to say that you are a murderer,” he said. “You are the greatest mass murderer in history. I came here to tell you that you need medical care.”
Quite suddenly, Hughes looked less cordial. He was of course, quite sane, and it was important to him that other people should understand that too. “You say I am a murderer, Mr. Dryden. Why?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? If those horses are integrated into this culture, our own civilization as we know it becomes impossible. In 2080, America will be an Indian nation—and everything that America ever did will be canceled out. The rest of the world will be equally different; different people will be born, and they’ll live different lives. So you are murdering every human being that exists in our civilization.”
Hughes pursed his lips in an oddly academic gesture. “Come now,” he said. “You can’t really be as sophomoric as all that. Hasn’t it occurred to you that you are just as much a murderer as I am?”
The thought had occurred, unfortunately. Wade waited for the rest of it.
“You see,” Hughes said patiently, “the horses are here now; that’s a fact. If you destroy them, you’re robbing the Aztecs of their chance for life. Cortes was no saint, Mr. Dryden, and you know it. He knew more about military tactics than the Aztecs could ever know, of course, and he came from a genuine empire, not an unstable tribal alliance like we have here in Mexico. If that future Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc have horses, however, that’s enough to tip the scales against the outnumbered forces of Cortes.”
“You’re doing it deliberately, then?”
“You miss the point. As of now, it’s the Aztecs who will win, In other words, the future belongs to their civilization unless you act. It will develop, of course—our own ancestors had lots worse than human sacrifice in their past. If you kill those horses, or prevent their use, you are murdering every descendant of these people from now to the end of time. Don’t prattle about ethics to me, Wade. You’re in exactly the same spot I am, and you know it.”
“Look,” Wade said, “our civilization is the one that did exist in 2080—you can’t deny that. You’re trying to play God; the decision you’ve made is beyond your powers.”
“Nuts,” Hughes said succinctly. “The minute history can be changed, choice enters the picture. Every culture you destroy at the whim of your own, you are making a value judgment. You are saying that you are superior to anything else that could have developed. That, I submit, is egotism of a high order indeed.”
“You’re making a value judgment.”
“Certainly. I only wished to point out that you’re in the same boat. The concept of right depends to a large extent on where you’re sitting. What’s right here is wrong in the year 2080. What’s right in 2080 is just as wrong here.”
Wade let that one pass. The man was a confirmed cultural relativist, and could not be argued out of his position by rational means. Therefore, argument was a waste of time.
The devil of it was that Hughes was not stupid. His position was sound enough to be dangerous.
“Why did you decide this culture was superior to your own, Dan? Let’s just leave ethnocentrism out of it. I won’t wave any flags at you. I just want to know.”
Hughes smiled. “I don’t think the Aztecs are better than we are,” he said surprisingly. “I don’t profess to know whether one way of life is better than any other way. I don’t even know what ‘better’ means in that context.”
; “Why are you doing it then?”
Hughes met his eyes steadily. “I fell in love,” he said. “I fell in love with an Indian girl. I don’t think you can understand that, but that’s all the explanation there is.”
Wade turned slowly and looked behind him. The lovely Indian girl was still there in the shadows, the rifle cradled in her arms. For her, he thought. For her, he would kill a world.
And yet, from his point of view, why not? He had met the girl on an earlier research trip, and fallen in love with her. He could not take her back with him; she could not be smuggled into the Cincinnati station in 2080. And what was the dominant fact Wade had learned about Hughes? The man didn’t fit. He was unhappy m his work, a failure at what he wanted to do. He did not care much for his wife. He had no children. His best friend was the poet, Karpenter, who was too honest to do much ego-feeding. Why should Hughes be passionately loyal to the civilization that had spawned him?
“But look,” Wade said. “Why the horses? You can live your life here with the girl. There will be no Cortes in your lifetime. I think I could arrange for you to be let alone, if you would agree to be reasonable.”
“Have you ever loved anyone, Wade?”
Wade didn’t answer him.
“I want children,” Hughes said. “I can’t bring children into a world that’s going to blow up in their faces—l know it’s going to be wiped out; it’s not a conjecture. My wife here has given me the only happiness I’ve ever known. I’m going to do what I can for her people. If you think that’s evil, I can’t honestly say that I give a damn.”
“No,” Wade said slowly, “it’s not evil. I don’t know what it is.”
Wade looked at the mat he was sitting on. He was deeply troubled; Hughes’s arguments could not be shrugged off. He couldn’t kid himself with any simple-minded truisms. As of right now, one civilization was as “real” as the other. You couldn’t close your eyes and claim that one way was “right” because it had happened that way once. Who could say what kind of a world might have been?
There was no right or wrong in this situation.
Hughes was not evil, Wade was not a shining hero.
