Time's Chariot Read online

'Well, we put it on standby.'

  'Then do that now.'

  'I . . .' said Jontan, with a glance at Mr Daiho. Yes, these people were now in control; yes, they had guns; and yes, they didn't have social preparation and would no doubt use them if necessary. But sheer instinct made Jontan seek Mr Daiho's approval for any course of action.

  'Do it,' Mr Daiho said, and Jontan symbed the appropriate commands to the control module. The action also had the automatic effect of activating the forcefield that protected the gear from the wandering hands of bygoners.

  The other man, the one who seemed to be in charge, walked into the centre of the room and gazed longingly at the gear. Then he spoke again.

  'Mr Carradine says that you two journeymen are to be put under guard for the time being,' said the interpreter. The guards shouldered their weapons; hands like vices grabbed hold of the journeymen's arms; and Sarai and Jontan were frog-marched from the room.

  Scott, Daiho and Asaldra were shown into one of the hotel's meeting rooms and, finally, things were a little more civilized. They were allowed to sit down and drinks were served. Guards still stood around the room.

  Matthew Carradine sat facing the three Home Timers as if they were an interview panel.

  'We've played around enough,' he said.

  'This wasn't the agreement,' Asaldra protested. 'We arranged—'

  'Oh, shut up,' Scott murmured in their own language. Carradine speared him with a glance and Scott interpreted his comment into twenty-first century English.

  'And kindly keep it that way,' Carradine said. 'Mr . . . Asaldra, wasn't it? Yes, of course. No, it wasn't the agreement. However, as things have obviously changed at your end, I don't see why they shouldn't change at this end too. Tell me, gentlemen, what should I do with you?'

  It wasn't the question they had expected.

  'I thought you already had ideas along those lines,' Daiho said. Carradine chuckled.

  'Interrogate you, get the secret of time travel, perhaps?' He shook his head. 'No. We might pump you for everything you know, yes, but we'd be very selective about what we used and time travel wouldn't be part of it. It would be wonderful to be able to travel back and forth like you do, but your people are obviously far more advanced than we are and I can imagine what I would do in their place, if a bunch of primitives started monkeying about with my prize technology. They'd be on me like a ton of bricks. No, what I'm after is your more elementary tech. Your mind-to-mind communication. Those clothes you wear. Your amazing state of health. And anything else our surveillance hasn't picked up yet.'

  'I'm not sure there's so much we can tell you,' said Scott.

  'Of course not!' Carradine pointed up at one of the ceiling lights. 'Any more than I could describe how the power grid works. I have a pretty good idea, but actually communicating it to a savage so that the savage can make it work . . . no, I'm just a layman. As are you and Mr Daiho.' He took a swig of coffee. 'Your journeymen, on the other hand, must be wonderfully well-informed.'

  'They work for me!' Scott sounded outraged.

  'Back in the Home Time,' Carradine said calmly. He grinned. 'Where I expect they're the lowest of the low. Here, I can give them a level of luxury and freedom they've never known in their lives. They're young and they're only human. I think I can get through to them.'

  Until now he had only been looking at Daiho and Scott when he spoke. Now he looked pointedly at the third Home Timer present. 'And then there's you, Mr Asaldra. You're obviously a trained agent of your organization. You travel through time routinely. You must know a few useful things, and from those few useful things, who knows what might spin off?'

  The sudden change of subject caught Asaldra by surprise and his mouth worked a couple of times before he answered.

  'Yes, I was a Field – an, um, trained agent, but that was a long time ago,' he said.

  'And I was a Boy Scout a long time ago but I can still remember my knots,' said Carradine.

  Asaldra laughed, disbelieving, almost desperate.

  'I'm not telling you anything, Mr Carradine, so please get used to it.'

  'Whatever.' Carradine nodded to one of the guards at the back of the room. There was the buzz of a stunner and Asaldra crumpled in a heap on the floor.

  Daiho and Scott just watched, not daring to move, as two of the guards lifted their stunned colleague up and carried him from the room.

  Carradine calmly watched them go, then stood up. 'And that just leaves you two,' he said as he turned to leave. 'A philosopher, and management.

  I don't have any vacancies for philosophers and in this century we have managers coming out of our ears. However, one of my staff did tell me she'd welcome the opportunity to do a post mortem of a Home Timer, should the opportunity arise. I'll leave you to think up ways of convincing me you're more valuable than just dead meat.'

  'Come in, come in.' The barbarian who spoke their language smiled with an almost convincing display of friendliness as Sarai and Jontan were nudged at gunpoint back into the lounge. The chief barbarian was there: he snapped at someone behind them and Jontan felt the nozzle of the gun – they said they were just stunners – removed from the small of his back. 'Let's have some introductions,' said the interpreter. 'This is Mr Carradine, we all work for him. You can call me Alan. I already know that you are Sarai and Jontan.'

  They just looked back at him. He shrugged and turned to the Carradine man. More gabbling. The worst of it was, so much of what these savages said to each other sounded almost familiar. The words bounced and skimmed off the top of Jontan's understanding.

  One of the guards came forward and approached the kit, which still sat in one corner of the room, completely untouched. Jontan bit back a smile. He knew what was coming and it would be fun to watch.

  Sarai was smiling too. She reached out and took his hand.

  A zap and a bang, and the guard was thrown back across the room. Carradine was grinning too, and several of the guards were unnaturally pokerfaced as their colleague picked himself up off the floor. Watching and enjoying someone else's misfortune was a brief moment of shared humanity between civilized Home Timers and bygoner primitives.

  'I want you to turn off the forcefield,' Alan said.

  'We can't,' Sarai said. A brief exchange between the two bygoners.

  'Can't or won't?' said Alan.

  'We're not allowed to,' Jontan said. 'Mr Scott—'

  'You don't work for Mr Scott any more,' Alan said patiently. He gestured at the man standing next to him. 'You work for Mr Carradine.'

  Jontan and Sarai were shocked. 'Mr Scott is from the Holmberg-Chabani-Scott combine,' Jontan said.

  'I doubt that will mean anything to him, Jon,' Sarai said with forced patience. The point had occurred to Jontan as the words left his mouth, but it seemed so right. If only this Carradine person knew what it meant, there would be no more of this 'you work for me' nonsense.

  'Does he?' Alan pursed his lips and nodded. 'Well, well. The Holmberg-Chabani-Scott combine. We'll all certainly have to tread carefully with them, if we live long enough for them to be around, which I doubt.' He nodded at one of the guards behind them.

  Jontan yelled as a strong hand grabbed his wrist, and the yell turned to a howl as his arm was pulled behind his back to make his wrist touch his shoulder. And then a powerful shove sent him flying forward towards the kit, and he just had time to symb a turn-off command at the forcefield before he thumped into the culture tank. He lay across it for a moment and drew a couple of deep breaths, before he slowly stood up, rubbing his arm.

  Carradine was chuckling and even Sarai, he was mortified to see, looked as if she might have been amused.

  'You see? You can,' said Alan. 'And if that forcefield goes up again, we'll simply repeat the process.'

  Carradine strolled over to stand next to Jontan, hands in his pockets, surveying the kit. He said something that was obviously a question.

  'Matthew, that is, Mr Carradine wonders which of these bits and bobs controls it, a
nyway?'

  Carradine was standing right next to the control module but Jontan had no intention of telling him that.

  'Well, never mind,' Alan said. 'Our people will do a preliminary examination of this lot and in the meantime I want you two to relax a bit, spend some time together, think things over. You see, your Home Time doesn't know you're here. This is Mr Carradine's offer. We want to learn from you. You won't be journeymen any longer, you'll be world experts and we'll hang onto your every word. In return, you'll have every want supplied and you can be as close together as you want. Do what we ask and you'll be free. Do think about it.'

  He paused for a moment.

  'Well,' he said, 'free-ish.'

  Night fell. The engineering team still pored over the equipment from the Home Time. Some of Carradine's team wanted to drag the journeymen out and interrogate them on the spot. Carradine reasoned that two relaxed, well-fed journeymen with a good night's sleep behind them would be more useful than two physical and mental wrecks, and he vetoed the idea.

  Despite his promises of their being free together, he kept the two apart for the time being, each with a guard on their door. Promises could always be kept later. Neither slept much anyway.

  The entire end of the room where Asaldra had appeared – and the others, three weeks beforehand – was cordoned off. Motion detectors were set up, cued to powerful stunners. If any other Home Timers appeared there, they would be detected and shot down in a moment.

  Guards patrolled. Motion sensors cast their electronic net over the entire area. Helicopters with infra-red cameras patrolled the skies. The detectors and stunners set up around the arrival point in the lounge were checked and double checked, and an armed guard was stationed there too.

  Rico Garron arrived in the twenty-first century.

  Seventeen

  'Marje? Do you have a moment?'

  Marje looked up in surprise to see Yul Ario, Commissioner for Fieldwork, standing in the entrance to her office with a friendly smile on his face. Not a projected eidolon but the real thing.

  'Yul? What can I do for you?'

  'If you'd like to come with me, I'll show you.' His smile turned into a grin, and there was something infectious about it. Whatever it was, it seemed it could only be good. 'It's a surprise.'

  'I'm a bit old and a bit busy for surprises, Yul.'

  'You're never too old and you'll love this one.'

  And so she went with him.

  The carryfield whisked them away to the transference hall. A minute later they stepped out into what had been Daiho's Himalayan apartment. Without Security Ops crawling all over it and the knowledge of its occupant's recent death, Marje at last began to savour it for what it should have been. Tranquil, quiet, isolated: somewhere Daiho could come to get away from it all, to immerse himself in ancient philosophies and meditation.

  They stepped out into the courtyard. The fountain still chuckled, the sun still shone, the mountains still ringed the view with immense grandeur. Ario filled his lungs with the crisp, clean air, then turned to face her. For some reason, the smile was less intense, as if to emphasize an underlying solemnity.

  'Marje Orendal,' he said, 'it is my pleasant duty to inform you that your appointment as Commissioner is confirmed, and the Patrician's Guild has accepted you as a member. You're one of us in every way, Marje. Congratulations.'

  'I . . . ?' said Marje.

  'And that means, this place is yours,' Ario went on. He handed her a crystal. 'Your credentials. We're all entitled to an upstream residence, if we want one, and do forgive the morbidity but this is the only one available at the moment. If prehistoric Himalayas aren't your thing then of course you can apply for a residence to be constructed somewhere else, but in the meantime, you are mistress of all you see.'

  'I . . .' Marje said again. She was finally able to frame the only words that could actually describe what she was feeling. 'I'm overwhelmed.'

  Ario nodded, his mouth quirked on one side in an ironic half smile. 'I know.' He led her to the patio edge. One part of her mind protested at the thought of celebrating at the point where her predecessor had fallen, but otherwise she was still too a-whirl with the news. 'Take a seat. I know where Li kept his drinks: I'll be back in a moment.'

  Patrician! Marje lounged back in a recliner and looked at the great skyscraping peaks the other side of the balustrade. She had made it. She was, as Ario had said, one of them.

  Everything she could want was hers. Oh, there were responsibilities, yes. She could expect to be worked into the ground. No more of this tentative offering of provisional sponsorship to errant Field Ops. She would have to cultivate a whole new crop of sponsorees, use her power and privilege to their advantage . . .

  It was what she had always wanted. To do good, to help others and at the same time – she glanced around appreciatively – reap the rewards. A private, secluded lodge far away from the hustle and bustle of the Home Time was only the beginning. It was only scratching the surface of what was now available.

  Ario was back with the drinks. He handed her one and settled back into a recliner facing her. He held up his glass.

  'To you,' he said, and they drank.

  'It's sudden,' Marje said.

  Ario cocked an eyebrow. 'Is it?'

  'The patrician thing, anyway. I mean . . .' She remembered how she had abruptly put off the interview with the Patrician's Guild the first day on the job. 'I wasn't aware my name was in the system anyway.'

  'Of course it was,' Ario said. 'You can't do a patrician's job and not be a patrician, Marje. And the full works – you know, interview, assessment, probation period – we only give that to people we don't really like anyway.' He paused a beat. 'Well, maybe we have to keep the probation period, that's the law, but everything else in an application we can push through on the nod. You have powerful friends, Marje. You were one of Li's sponsorees. We knew we wanted you.'

  'So I'm on probation?' Marje said. Ario's face clouded.

  'Hmm. Yes,' he said, and he stood up to lean against the waist-high balustrade, palms flat against the smooth stone as he gazed out into the abyss. 'The people don't understand us, Marje. To them, things appear so black and white, so right or wrong. They can't see the pressures we're under. They can't see that sometimes we have to delve into the realms of moral ambiguity for the greater good. Do you know the Christian scriptures? "It is better for one man to die for the sake of the nation." The people can't understand that. We can.'

  Marje looked up at him, baffled. He continued to look straight ahead.

  'What I'm getting at, Marje, is that many new patricians find that they have some on-going project, some work in progress left over from their previous life that they started for all the right motives . . . but then they find that their motives were based on a distorted perspective. It turns out things weren't all they seemed. And why should they be? How can children understand the world of adults? And it turns out that their grand scheme is not only embarrassing and annoying for the rest of us but it's actively counter-productive, because they've inadvertently stuck their nose into something of great benefit to everyone, patrician and non-patrician alike. Marje, I won't go into specifics, but I will say that if there's anything in your life or your work that could conceivably rock the boat, show the patricians up in some way . . . I'd drop it. Quietly, without fuss, without fanfare.'

  Now he did look at her, and the friendly smile was back. 'And the best thing is, you don't have to explain or apologize to anyone! Look, Marje, I've got to get back to the College. I'll leave you here to look around your new home, take things in, all that.'

  Marje stayed in her seat as he left. If she had got up, she might not have trusted herself to speak.

  What Ario had just said sounded badly like a very heavy hint. And there was only one on-going project she could think of that came remotely near the kind of thing he had described.

  But it involved breaking Morbern's Code and every tenet of College life! Or did it . . . How can childr
en understand the world of adults? If she had really believed the worst straight away then surely she would have reported it straight away, rather than hire a Field Op to find out.

  That was it. She was still finding out. She had just wanted the facts. Ario was a Commissioner too – he wouldn't connive at something that struck at the heart of the College. Would he? She felt cautiously relieved . . .

  Marje realized she could argue this in circles for hours, and she had work to do. She would look round the house later. For the time being, she was needed back at the College. Without an assistant, work was piling up.

  She stood to go and the blue-outlined eidolon of the house's intelligence appeared in front of her. It was an old man with a white beard and robe: Plato or Aristotle or Socrates, one of that lot, anyway. She smiled – what else would Daiho have used?

  'Yes?' she said.

  'A message for you, Commissioner Orendal. The sender was anonymous.'

  'Show me.'

  The image was replaced by a simple field of text hovering in front of her. Whichever line Marje looked at, the field scrolled so that the text stayed in front of her. She started at the top.

  A few lines down, she frowned.

  A bit further and she gasped.

  'No!' she said when she was halfway down. She took a step back and the text vanished. Socrates was standing there again.

  'Have you finished, Commissioner?' he said.

  'Bring it back!' Marje snapped, and the text reappeared. Marje steeled herself and finished reading.

  She looked at it for a long time, then re-read it. Slowly.

  'Did Commissioner Ario leave this?' she said.

  'I have no record of who sent it,' said the eidolon. This time it was taking no chances and left the text showing.

  Marje glanced quickly through the message a third time, but she knew what it was. The first line said it all:

  'What follows shows how you could conceivably be implicated in the murder of Commissioner Daiho, were such to have taken place.'

  And from then on, the message showed precisely that. It used assorted facts and circumstantial evidence to weave together a case for the prosecution – any prosecution that wanted to show how she connived in Daiho's alleged murder so as to reach her new exalted position. The logic was inescapable, just the facts were wrong.