The Shield of Time (17 page)

And, yes, he might well enjoy a meal and conversation with a young woman who wasn’t bad-looking. Then why shouldn’t she enjoy too? What might
she
learn about
him
and the world from which he hailed?

As it turned out, nothing.

Guion was affable. She could almost call him charming, in his detached scholastic fashion. He made no display of his authority, but left her in no doubt of it, much like her father during her childhood.
(Oh, Dad, who’ll never know!)
Instead, he drew her out about herself, her life, Everard, asking for no confidences but nonetheless so deftly that only later did she realize she had told him more than she meant to. At first, after bidding him adieu, she knew simply that she had had an interesting dinner date. He didn’t imply they would meet anymore.

Walking back to her room on paths now deserted, among the night scents of ancient Earth, she found herself, oddly, thinking less about him, not to mention Sequeira, than about big, soft-spoken, and—she believed—rather lonely Manse Everard.

I

She stopped when she reached her shelter and stood a moment, looking around her and back the way she had come.
Why?
she wondered.
As though this is the last time ever.
With an unawaited pang:
Well, maybe it is, almost
Southwesterly the sun hung low above the sea, but would not sink for hours yet, and then only briefly. Its rays washed chill gold over cumulus clouds towering in the east and set the waters agleam, half a mile away. Thence land rose steeply toward northern ridges. It was wan with summer’s short grass, broken here and there by intense greens and browns of peat moss. Leaves shivered pale on stands of stunted aspen. Elsewhere grew thick patches of scrub willow, seldom more than ankle-high. Sedges rippled and rustled along a nearby brook. It tinkled down to a river not very wide either, sunken from her sight in a ravine. She could see the tops of dwarf alder clustered on the sides. Smoke tatters blew from the dens of Aryuk and his family.

A wind had risen off the sea. It made her face tingle. The boisterous damp quenched some of the weariness in her but roused hunger; she had tramped quite a ways today. Cries cut through, from birds aloft in their hundreds, gulls, ducks, geese, cranes, swans, plover, snipe, curlews, an eagle high at hover. After two years she still found marvel in the lavishness of life, at the very gates of the Ice. Not before leaving her home world had she really known how impoverished it was.

“Sorry, friends,” she murmured. “My teapot and crackerbox are calling me.”
After which I’d better do up my report. Dinner can wait.
She grimaced.
Reporting won’t be the kind of fun it used to be.

She stiffened.
Naw, why’re you so spooky about what’s happened?
she demanded.
A big event, sure, but not necessarily a big bad one. Premonitions? Scat! Listen, gal, it’s natural to talk to yourself now and then, and okay to talk to the fauna just a bit, but when your bugaboos start talking to you, quite likely you have been in the field long enough.

Unsealing the dome, she entered and closed it again. The interior was dim until she activated a transparency. (Nobody around to peep in it at her, not that the dear We ever would without her leave.) Warmth let her slip off her parka, sit down to remove boots and stockings, wiggle her toes.

There wasn’t much else she could move freely, as cramped as the place was. Her timecycle occupied a large part of the floor, under a shelf on which she kept mattress pad and sleeping bag. The single chair stood at the single table, where a computer and auxiliary apparatus claimed half the top. Alongside was a unit for cooking, washing, et cetera. Miscellaneous boxes and cabinets completed the circle. Two held clothes and other personal possessions; the rest were full of stuff related to her mission. Policy required the dome be as small, as unobtrusive in the land and lives of the natives, as possible. Outdoors was plenty of space, elbows few and far between.

Having set water to boil, she undid her gun belt and put the pistols, stunner and killer, away beside the long weapons. For the first time, they felt ugly in her hands. She had seldom killed, just for meat and when she reluctantly deemed it necessary to take a specimen—and, once, a snow lion that Ulungu’s family at Bubbling Springs told her had turned man-eater.
Humans? Nonsense! Judas priest, but you’ve gotten edgy all of a sudden.

Recognizing the exclamation in her mind, she smiled. She’d picked it up from Manse Everard. He tried to keep his language polite in the presence of women, as he’d been taught. She’d noticed that he was more comfortable if she curbed hers likewise, and obliged him except when she forgot.

Some music ought to soothe. She touched the computer. “Mozart,” she said. “Uh,
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.”
The strains lilted forth. Only then did she notice, with faint surprise, what she had ordered. Not that she didn’t like Mozart, but she’d been remembering Manse and he detested rock.
Well, probably this’ll work better anyway.

A cup of Darjeeling and an oatmeal cookie wrought their own wonders. Presently she could settle down to record. Nevertheless, after speaking her preamble she played it back before going on, to find whether it was as unwontedly awkward as it had sounded to her.

From the screen, blue eyes under blond brows gazed out of a countenance blunt-nosed, strong of cheekbones and chin. Hair irregularly sun-bleached fell tousled to the jawline, past skin tanned darker than ever on a California beach.
Oh, dear, have I actually gotten to look like that? You’d think I was thirty, and I am only—I’m not born yet.
The thin-worn joke somehow heartened.
Once I’m back, beauty parlor, here I come.

A slightly husky contralto said: “Wanda Tamberly, Specialist second class, scientific field agent, at—” Chronological and geographical identification followed, in the coordinates used by the Time Patrol. The spoken language was its Temporal.

“I suspect a crisis is in the making. As, uh, as reference to my previous reports shows, hitherto, throughout the duration in which I have made my visits—”

“Dry up!” she told the image, and blanked it.
Since when has the Patrol wanted academese? You’re overwrought, girl. Reverting to the classroom. Don’t. It’s four whole years since you were an undergrad. Lifeline years, full of experience and history. Prehistory.
She took several deep breaths, consciously relaxed herself muscle by muscle, and thought about a certain koan. Though she wasn’t into Zen or anything like that, some of the tricks were helpful. Starting over:

“I think they’ve got troubles ahead of them here. You remember how these people are the only ones in the world, as far as they are concerned. I’m the first outsider they’ve met.” The explorers who learned how to talk with them and something of their ways had touched down three centuries ago and were totally forgotten, unless a wisp of folk memory had slipped into myth. “Well, today Aryuk and I found some newcomers.

“I’ll take it from the beginning. Yesterday his son Dzuryan returned from a bachelor wandering. That was experimental, adolescent; the kid’s no more than twelve or thirteen, I’d guess, not seriously looking for a mate. Never mind. Dzuryan returned and among other things told how he’d seen a herd of mammoth at Bison Swale.”

The designation would suffice. She had already sent uptime the maps she sketched as she ranged around. Place names were her own. Those that the We bestowed often varied according to who was talking. They did tell the same stories about sites, over and over. (“In this hollow, in the spring after the Great Hard Winter, Khongan saw a pack of wolves bringing down a bison. He fetched men from two camps. With stones and torches they drove the wolves off. They carried the meat home and everybody feasted. They left the head for the spirits.”)

“I got pretty excited.”
Hoo boy, did If
“Mammoth seldom come within twenty miles of the coast, never this close before. Why? When I said I’d go look, Aryuk in
sisted on accompanying me personally.”
He’s a darling, so concerned about his guest, his miracle-working, tale-telling, land-ignorant klutz.
“Well, I certainly didn’t mind a partner. I’m not much acquainted with that area. We set off today at sunrise.”

Tamberly reached up to remove her headband. She popped out the thumbnail-sized instrument that had captured everything she saw and heard, plugged it into the databox, ran fingers over keyboard. The whole contents would go into the record, but for this report she should enter only what was immediately relevant. However, as hours unreeled in minutes, she could not resist slowing down for an occasional scene.

A southern hillside gave shelter from wind. She and Aryuk had stopped to drink at a spring welling out of it Watching, she remembered how cold the water was and how it tasted of earth and stone; she remembered sunlight on her back and the pungencies that it baked from small herbs. Soil lay soft underfoot, still wet from springtime’s melt. Mosquitoes whined innumerable.

Aryuk filled his hands and slurped. Drops glistened in the black beard that fell to his breast. “You want to rest a while?” he asked.

“No, let’s push on, I’m eager.” That was approximately what Tamberly said. Still less than Temporal—which, being devised for time travelers, at least originated in a high-tech culture—did the Tula language have English equivalents. It was a trilling, clucking tongue, agglutinative, embodying concepts at whose subtleties she could only guess. For a single instance, the genders were seven, four pertaining to certain plants, weather phenomena, the heavenly bodies, and the dead.

Aryuk laughed, revealing the absence of various teeth. “Your strength is boundless. You wear an old man out.”

The Tulat, a word that she rendered as “We,” didn’t keep track of days or years. She gauged him as being in his middle or late thirties. Few among his people got much past forty. Already he had two living grandchildren. His body, thin but whipcord tough, continued
in good shape, aside from the scars left by injuries that got infected. He stood three inches shorter than she, but then, she was a fairly tall woman in the twentieth-century United States. All was plain to see, for he went quite nude. Ordinarily at this season he might have worn a grass poncho as protection against the mosquitoes. Today he traveled with Her Who Knows Strangeness. They never came near her. Tamberly hadn’t tried to explain how a little gadget on her belt worked. She wasn’t too sure herself; it was from the future of her birthtime. Supersonics?

Aryuk cocked his shock head and glanced at her from beneath heavy brow ridges. “You could wear me out in ways more fun than walking,” he suggested.

When she waved dismissal, the weathered, big-nosed visage crinkled with more laughter. It had been evident that his proposition was mere teasing. Quick to realize that the foreigner meant them no harm, and indeed could occasionally use her powers to relieve distress, the We were soon joking and frolicking in her presence. She was mysterious, true, but so was well-nigh everything else in their world.

“We shall go on,” she said.

Volatile, Aryuk sobered and agreed. “Wisest. If we make haste, we can be home before sundown.” He flinched. “Yonder is not our territory. Perhaps you know what ghosts prowl it after dark. I do not.” That mood also breezed away. “Perhaps I will knock down a rabbit. Tseshu”—his woman—“loves rabbit.”

He picked up the rudely chipped, almond-shaped stone he carried along, missile and knife and bone-cracker. Other tools were as primitive and little more specialized. The style traced to the Mousterian or a similar tradition, Neanderthal man’s. Of course, Aryuk was fully Homo sapiens, archaic Caucasoid; his ancestors had drifted here from western Asia. Tamberly had sometimes reflected on the irony that the very first Americans were closer to being white than anything else.

At a swinging, energy-conserving, mile-devouring
pace, he and she had proceeded northwest. In the dome, she fast-forwarded.
Why’d I stop for that scene? Nothing significant. Unless it’s the last of its kind for me, ever.

She let herself relive two more. Once she saw a herd of wild ponies, shaggy and long-headed, gallop on a ridge against the sky. Once she saw, afar, a herd of Pleistocene bison, the lead bull eight feet at the hump. To those mighty ones Aryuk sang a song of awe.

His folk were not really hunters. They took fish from the rivers and lakes with their hands or in crude weirs. They collected shellfish, eggs, nestlings, grubs, roots, berries in season. They snared birds, rodents, other small game. Now and then they came upon a fawn, calf, whelp, or upon a large carcass still edible; in the latter case they took the hide too. It was no wonder they were scarce and had left hardly a trace of their presence, even in lands far south of the glacier.

A flicker in the screen caught Tamberly’s eye. She stopped the playback, recognized the view, nodded. Restarting the record function, she moistened lips gone suddenly dry and said, “About noon, we reached what we were after.” Distorted molecules held a notation of the precise local time. “I will enter this unedited.” She could have done so in a fractional second, but decided to sit back and watch it through. Maybe she’d notice details that had escaped her before or think of a new interpretation. In any event, it was wise to refresh memory. At mission headquarters she was bound to get a skinningly intense debriefing.

Again she saw where she had been. The scattered woodlands of the seaboard were behind her. Watery though it was, this open country was better called steppe than tundra. Herbal growth spread like a carpet, dull greens occasionally interrupted by a few scrub willows or silvery patches of reindeer moss. In the offing were some birch, not much larger than the willows but densely clustered, vanguards of an invasion. Pools and sedgy marshes glinted manifold. Two hawks cruised the wind, theirs the only wings in sight; grouse, ptarmigan, and the rest must
be lying as low as the muskrats and lemmings. The mammoths moved slowly, feeding, less than a mile away. Stomach rumbles rolled across the distance.