L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 Read online

  1 The Temporal Authorities

  We were in our private sunlit grove of trees at the edge of endless meadows, the breezes fresh as they stirred the knee-high grasses around us. We stood beneath a spreading, ancient oak, my beloved and I, a songbird warbling in the leafy branches overhead. She leaned against the age-roughened bark, her warm, smooth hands in mine. I gazed deeply into her—

  The girl of my dreams doesn’t have six hundred and fifty-three pistachio-colored tentacles. Nor a ropy orange neck slithering up to a single, glittering, faceted eye. And I can tell you, right here and now, she ain’t got a body like a fluorescent-pink Army helmet.

  So what in Contradiction was this Sterno-drinker’s nightmare doing perched in the middle of my solar plexus, interrupting a promisingly-prurient transmission from my subconscious? I reached up and jerked off the DreamCap, letting it dangle by the cable overhead, and remembered: it was my turn to be God this week.

  The alien shifted several dozen of its little legs politely and tried peering into both of my perfectly ordinary optics at the same time. Gimme a pain in the bridge of my nose.

  “These printouts, Captain—” I jumped at the unexpected voice whining through the bulkhead door behind me. “—where should I put them?” Rand Heplar, the new Apprentice/Observer the Powers-That-Be had saddled me with, lugged a two-foot stack of computer-excretions, weighing them down with his chin, onto the flight deck. Heplar was a greasy little specimen, the sort you always suspected of having a secret collection of wingless flies in a bottle somewhere. Guess I’d told him sixty or a hundred times never to call me Captain.

  I slid a dark-green uniform cuff back from my hairy wrist:

  Display on the right face showed the century, month, and GMT back home—Ochskahrt Memorial Academy, Tsiol-kovsky, Luna. Left side gave the date and local time. The watch? A graduation present. Finished sixteenth in a crowd of six-thousand-odd, including Spacers—the ones who like being called Captain—with their regulation-issue nobly-cleft chins and pansy powder-blue jumpsuits.

  Fumbling in my coverall for a stogie, I happily contemplated telling the idiot precisely where he could put all that red tape, but settled on spurious civility to keep him off balance. “Dump ’em in the ’cycler, kid. I dunno why y’ran ’em off in the first place. Georgie memorizes everything important that comes in.” The turtle-shaped alien shifted again, craning its leathery periscope at my nose. “An' get this teratoid tortoise ojfa my torso!”

  Heplar gave a self-righteous gasp. “Why, Captain! You mustn’t talk about the Yamaguchian Ambassador that way, and right in front of him, too!” He made little scandalized bustling noises as he fed the useless printouts into the recycler. Next time we saw 'em, they’d probably be tortilla chips.

  “Tell y’what.” I grunted. “Show me this overgrown barnacle’s front, an’ I’ll stop talkin’ about him at all!” Avoiding contact with his numberless miniature appendages, I lifted the Ambassador by the edges of his shell, swung off my pilot’s recliner, set him gently on the deck—gentler than I felt, anyway—and lit my cigar, filling the cabin with aromatic blue-gray smoke.

  “Him” and “his” were just a guess, anyway. Three of these... things underfoot aboard my ship, just perfect for tripping over when you were feeling too sure of yourself, and frigging lucky it wasn’t the full complement of seventeen my bosses’d wanted to send along.

  One of each sex, believe it or not.

  “How about it, Your Ambassadorship? You give a fast flying fardle how I talk about you?” Not a centimeter over fifteen inches tall, it lifted an adoring eyeball toward me, emitting an ecstatic squeal, exactly like a kid’s balloon when you stretch the nozzle and let the air shrill out. “Just what I need,” I confided under my breath to its glittering optic. “A nervous, creepy assistant, three alien kid-glove VIPs, and a handful of greenhorn passengers down Earthside stumbling through an EVA that seven different risk-computers regarded as ‘marginally lethal’!”

  Heplar sniffed, a quizzical expression on his semipsy-chotic mug. “Did you say something, Captain?” He turned, eyeballed my El Ropo in full smolder, grimaced, and went back to work manufacturing confetti.

  “Nothin’, Igor, only talkin’ to myself.”

  Talking to myself. Swell: a twenty-third century Norman Bates shuffling around behind me wearing the same Temporal Green livery which graced my own wiry frame; a trio of psychedelic pasties for the Gorgon Medusa who’d decided I was their Deity; and a flock of bulgy-domed academics whose only link to my vessel up here—and home-— was the telemetric toilet paper I had Heplar paying back into the recyclers. Enough to give me gray hair, if I hadn’t lost most of it already to this much-overrated profession. Why me? Why was it always—

  Me? I’m Bernie.. .okay, make it Captain Bernard M. Gruenblum, ODF(T)532779-687659921-A, late of the Academy’s Temporal Division, and master (putatively speaking) of 789 George Herbert.

  In short, a bus driver—if you happen to consider a time machine a bus.

  That’s how Georgie and I happened to be here at the moment, hovering invisibly, 30,000 feet above the site of Hideyoshi’s Tokyo in ancient Nippon of the 1590s a.d., waiting to pick up our paying customers.

  Bright idea’d been to ferry out this load of eggheads— representing institutes of higher sinecure all over our beloved Solar Dominion—to find out just what made medieval Japanese society go back en masse to sharp, pointy, sweat-powered weapons and “give up the gun.”

  Lotta birdbrains still think it was some kinda Noble Experiment.

  Rats, I coulda told ’em: ever see what newly-firearmed peasants do to the expensively-armored aristocrats whose ancestors have been “protecting” them out of everything they’ve got for centuries? Japan’s Nobunaga gang, here, was merely quicker on the uptake (an’ a whole lot fast-and-fancier-talking) than the feudal Tammany of Europe. Shucks, there ain’t a political situation anywhen that couldn’t be improved with a couple million Saturday Night Specials. Naturally, the self-appointed bigwigs always have a vested interest in a Sullivan Act of some kind.

  But no one ever asks the bus-driver, me, who’s seen more fresh history being made, carmine-hued and smoky in the morning chill, than anybody else. Instead, they send these pointy-heads out—all classroom theory and no pragmatics—-after training ’em for months to look, act, talk, and think whatever way the locals do it. Speak the language, eat the food, pick your nose with the socially correct finger.

  Some of this makes sense. We can’t afford taking chances in this racket, for some pretty good reasons:

  First, the past may be Prologue to you, but to us, it’s plastic. One misplaced pebble on the Road to Mandalay, and the future we go back to might not be the present we took off from. No idea how much of a change it’d take, and we never wanna find out. Solipsistic suicide: everything gone up there but me and thee—an’ I wouldn’t care to be thy insurance agent.

  Naturally, the Academy takes precautions. There’s a pair of stationary time-field generators buried under Tsiolkov-sky, concentricked one around the other, forming a sort of reality-lock. Inside, the great-granddaddy of all databanks contains every historical fact they can punch into a memory chip. Outside, an identical set-up constantly checks itself against the first, ensuring personkind’s past—and the Academy’s present—stays put.

  Every now and again, one of my sloppier colleagues flubs it, generally by letting the yokels way-back-when glom an eyeful of his timebuggy. Easy to let happen: Georgie's a ninety-foot discoid packing enough spare horsepower to make planetoids outa planets. Even with half her output diverted into protective fields, she’ll leave big purple blotches on your retinas
when she’s wound up for a century-sized jump.

  Some eras see our little mistakes as Holy Manifestations, others just as UFOs. On account of that and the color of our uniforms, those finger-waved cretins in SpaceDiv sneer-ingly call us “Little Green Men.” In either case, such apparitions tend to get talked about—whole careers have been devoted to writing them up—and this alters what was “really” supposed to happen. The reality-inspectors under Tsiolkov-sky notice things like that, and the Academy sees it as a General Court-Martial, usually meriting a pilgrimage by Shank’s mare to the base of Spectacular Ochskahrt Memorial Pylon, over two miles tall, with a brightly-glowing beacon visible from the Asteroids on a clear night.

  And out there, it’s always a clear night.

  It’s merely a fifty-kilometer hike, a piece of cake in Luna’s one-sixth gee. Trouble is, it’s straight across the bottom of Spectacular Ochskahrt Memorial Crater. That’s where Herr Professor Himschlag von Ochskahrt made his Great Discovery (time-travel and a faster-than light drive) and his Big Blooper, back in A.D. 2007. We still haven’t figured out where he went wrong, but the crater’s a couple thousand meters deep and so radioactive that the Asteroiders can damn near see it glowing, too. By the time the court-martialed victim makes it to the Pylon, his prognosis ain’t so hot, but everything else is.

  There followeth a decent lead-lined burial; the Academy humanely leaves this shit-detail to gorillas and chimpanzees with electronic control implants, elderly ones who’ve outlived their usefulness as janitors, factory assemblers—we even employ genuine grease-monkeys. Then the computers get cranked up to assess the risks of undoing whatever caused all the hoorah, and a flunky (yours truly, f’rinstance) gets sent back to counterbalance the original error. Sometimes it’s pretty lame and off-the-cuff—like the twenty-three inconvenient witnesses in Dallas one November I recall or the phony government commission we set up to declare that flying saucers are “swamp gas”—the stories I could tell.

  But mostly I just drive the bus, chauffering ivory-tower types: geologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, pret’near every kinda -ologist you can shake a stick at, not one with half the practical education I got in my left pinky.

  Ignoring Heplar’s scowl of disapproval, I stretched across the cabin toward the custom walltap I’d installed myself, pouring my first beer of the afternoon. A green light chose that instant to start winking, accompanied by an irritating bleep-bleep-bleep—clowns who design things like that oughta have to listen to ’em. 1645:00.0—’least this load of tenderfeet was punctual.

  “There’s Recall, kid. Mind y’strap down anything loose.” I flopped the beer onto the console—it sloshed and gurgled invitingly at me—took a final nicotinic drag, and limbered up my button-pushing fingers like a pinball virtuoso going for another free game.

  “Very well, Captain.” Somehow the punk managed a sneer and a snivel at the same time. “Anything else, Captain?”

  “Yeah, see to the Ambassador an’ his fellow whatcha-macallits.. . and Heplar?”

  He looked up from collecting aliens, eyebrows doing a little dance in and out of his hairline at the unaccustomed sweetness of my tone. “Yes, Captain?”

  “DON’T CALL ME CAPTAIN!" I keyed the sequence; wasn’t all that much to it, just a reminder to Georgie that I wanted her to follow a string of prepunched instructions. We vanished from our present location with a little blue pop! while I dedicated all my professional expertise to sifting us gently back into existence 30,000 feet lower—decorative grove of trees just outside the city—practically phasing us in a single molecule at a time. Show me any Spacer who could accomplish that by the seat of his fancy azure ascot!

  Gear down, Georgie ran out the boarding ladder. Didn't personally plan leaving the control deck this time, but from sheer reflexive precaution, I patted my left armpit, making sure that, underneath the overall, the hammer was locked back on my antique Gold Cup .45. The one the Academy and I pretend they don’t know about. Hell, they understand:

  I won’t mess history up ’less it tries messin’ me up first. The pistol’s a tad more’n four centuries obsolete, but unlike a laser or even its contemporary .357 Magnum, it’ll stop a man dead without necessarily killing him—and make a sabertooth kitty real sick.

  The big wraparound viewscreens were full of autumn leaves. Bet that clearing hadn’t twenty centimeters more diameter than Georgie herself. Grass, late-blooming flowers, tiny skittering things in the branches. Lotsa birds. “Welcome our sightseers in, kid.”

  Heplar unstrapped himself, stepped over a Yamaguchian or two, and left the cabin with another “Very well, Captain” I coulda cheerfully strangled him for. Instead, I kept my eyes glued to the board, fingers hovering over the Emergency Drive button, just in case. It’s a brutally simple mechanism, won’t take you any when back or forth in time, just three or four hundred klicks away, in any old direction, fast.

  Found my cigar in the ashtray and relit it, drawing smoke. Hafta think about transferring Heplar; this relationship of ours just wasn’t working out. My other hand had started setting up a course for home: upward in space, forward in history, all in one clean four-dimensional curve, to where the Ochskahrt Memorial man-in-the-moon’s supposed to show up, ’long about May of 2285. Took some concentration.

  A belowdecks monitor in the vicinity of my left elbow gave me a view from back of the boarding hatch downstairs.

  I could see the nape of Heplar’s vulture neck as he waited for our EVA party. Seconds later, he was joined by Professors Merwin and Hulbert, two old ducks in yellow academic union-suits I’d plumb near forgotten about. Though too elderly for field work, they weren’t aboard ’cause they were useless. Either one of ’em could flick the back edge of a samurai sword with his fingernail, listen to it ring, and tell you how many laminations in the blade. Ancient weapons experts—(however you wanna interpret that)—from the Academy’s own museum.

  Never quite figured out who was Merwin and who was Hulbert.

  Naturally, the first one through the pressure-gasketing was Dr. Edna Janof, an extremely tempting little confection, very shapely, the effect spoiled by an oddly cruel expression which flickered across her otherwise kissable features whenever she didn’t think she was being watched—kinda careless for an anthropologist. She shucked off her local disguise, as Heplar and the two professors jostled each other to hand her in, and turned to impress some vital philosophical observation upon her current flame, Dr. Denny Kent, a tall, postboyish sorta gink, neatly and semipermanently wrapped around Edna’s long-nailed little finger.

  Kent was in the econometrics biz, a MarxoFriedmanite Neo-Revisionist of the Old School, he’d informed me earlier as we were getting more acquainted than I’d wanted to. A little paunchy around his center of gravity, always grinning like he expected the girls t’swoon at the glimmer of his bicuspids blowin’ in the breeze. None of ’em had for some while, but he was too good a sport to notice. A ne'er-do-well gone to seed, with a face like an overcooked pot roast.

  Anyone for tennis?

  Janof and Kent were followed by the Boffin-in-Charge, Dr. Ab Cromney (more Ph.D.s around here lately than a compost-heap), inches taller than Kent, but spindly and sparrow-chested, with a hank of hair like a shaving-brush, distinguished gray, but all of it straight up like he was taking high voltage. Political science, to abuse the latter word, was his game, but he had an annoying habit—abetted by Edna and Denny, who seemed to hang on his every phoneme— of making serious pronouncements obviously well outside his field of expertise.

  Cromney’d initiated this oriental outing; applying through official channels it takes months—even years, sometimes— to navigate. Temporal, after all, makes up only the thinnest slice of the Qchskahrt Academy’s Memorial interests. Most roads—-and appropriations, it seems—lead to SpaceDiv and the Glorious Frontier they’re out there ruining. Neglected as we are, our little green calendar gets pretty damned crowded.

  But there’s a lot more to it: each mission proposal bums up zillion
s of silicon-hours just making sure in advance that nobody jerks history out from under us like a cheap hallway carpet.

  This time, however, the Academy shocked everybody by expediting Cromney’s crackpot proposal in a scant five weeks, bumping worthier applicants and upsetting scheduling for years to come. I’d learned that Cromney took this as some kind of sign, but I knew the truth.

  It was all for Little Old Me—or rather for my faithful worshippers, the Yamaguchians. Cromney and his people didn’t figure in it at all.

  One by one they divested themselves of pseudo-Nipponese habiliment, trotting off down the companionway and out of camera range. Professors Merwin and Hulbert were beside themselves (and each other) gathering up all the factory-fresh antique weaponry their colleagues had collected for them. Pushing half a ton of high-grade steel and low-grade technology on an antigravitic handcart, they made themselves scarce in the direction of the messroom. Heplar, being a good boy, dogged down the door when he and his little playmates were through with it; his mother woulda been proud of him.

  Back upstairs where I keep the steering wheel, the Ambassador or one of his facsimiles, was making more nuisance of himself than usual, figure-eighting in and out between my feet like a housecat, as I continued with my temporagational arithmetic. He gave out high-pitched bleating noises at the upper limit of my hearing and temperament, swiveling his eyestalk around and around like a lawn sprinkler.

  He stopped abruptly in his multilegged tracks, and I followed his stare to the after bulkhead where another of his kind was mountaineering clumsily over the doorsill. They met in the center of the cabin between a pair of jump-seats, skiddling into each other like a pair of friendly miniature Sherman tanks.

  More rubbernecking and squealing. Thought I was gonna witness some impromptu alien illicitude—not that I’m interested in that sort of thing—but I had work to do. Instead, I turned back to the console, dialing another sack of beer to replace the one that’d gotten warm, and peered into the plotting tank, punching knobs and twisting buttons.