Times Without Number (13 page)

"This isn't a problem to be solved with swords and fists," Father Ramón
snapped back. "Before I tell you what it is, though, you tell me something:
how goes it out there at the moment?"
"Why, there's chaos! Hordes of people came panicking into the middle of
the town, bearing some crazy tale about an attempt to murder the King!"
"But he's dead, definitely," called someone else from the far side of
the hallway, and at once there was a clamour of competing voices. Father
Ramón stilled it with an imperious gesture, and made them speak one
by one. Listening to the picture that emerged by fragments, Don Miguel
was chilled all over again, and saw that Kristina, still waiting in the
chair where he had left her, had passed the boundary of her endurance
and was weeping silently.
Much of what was said he already knew: the palace burning, the river
fouled with the flotsam of dead bodies. But other news was fresh,
and equally terrifying: a maddened crowd of fugitives on Queen Isabela
Avenue had rent a civil guard to pieces, a gang of thieves and looters had
snatched the chance to raid the great merchants' stores and were setting
fires of their own to distract their pursuers, two army detachments had
accidentally begun to fire on each other, imagining their colleagues
to be the anticipated enemy, and killed many men before their officers
brought them under control . . .
"Enough!" Father Ramón barked at last. "Come with me into the instruction
hall and I will make everything clear. Don Miguel! Go through those
books I've given you and mark for me every reference you can find which
may assist us. I'll rejoin you when I've allotted tasks to occupy our
brothers."
The material Don Miguel had to sift through was itself as frightening --
after a different fashion -- as what he had just heard about the situation
in Londres tonight. He had never dreamed of its existence. Turning the
pages of book after book, he felt himself hurled headlong into an alien
universe, even though the names subscribed to the various articles and
letters he was reading had been familiar to him since he joined the
Society and included all the General Officers, plus such outstanding
Licentiates as Don Arturo Cortés and Father Terence O'Dubhlainn.
But the subject they were discussing . . .! They dizzied him; one melted
into another, and advanced mathematical formulae danced before his
eyes. "The Most Probable Implications of a Short-Range Causative Loop"
-- "Results of a Tentative Experiment in Quasi-Present-Time Spatial
Displacement" -- "An Exception to the Ground Conditions of the Standard
Equation Defining Historical Alterations" -- "Reverberative Factors
Affecting Recorded Reality in Consequence of an Ink-blot on a Mediaeval
Manuscript" . . .
He was almost surprised to discover that there really was a Father Ramón
in this world he inhabited, that he had returned from his briefing of
the other members of the Society who had answered the emergency call,
and that he was standing by the table and waiting for a verdict on the
task he had set.
"Well? What have you found most useful out of this lot?"
"Practically nothing, Father," Don Miguel sighed. "The whole subject is so
strange to me! I think I follow most of the reasoning -- my mathematical
knowledge is strained, but the symbols and the operators are clearly
enough defined -- but when it comes to arguing out the implications . . .
Well, for better or worse, these are the items I've picked out for you."
He laid four of the books in the centre of the table, each marked with
a scrap of paper to locate the most promising articles they contained,
and vacated his chair to let Father Ramón sit down. Impatiently he waited
while the Jesuit raced through the texts.
"I see what you mean," he admitted at length. "It's a matter of scale,
naturally. It's one thing to analyse the effect of an accidental ink-blot
which one suspects of having been caused through the inadvertence of a
time-traveller; it's another question altogether when it comes to people
being killed."
"And there simply hasn't been a trans-temporal interference of this order
before!" Don Miguel rubbed his weary eyes. "There hasn't even been a
temporal feedback process worth mentioning, apart from -- "
He stopped dead in mid-sentence, and stared at Father Ramón. After a
pregnant pause, he said, "Father, I have an idea. I don't know if it
will work, but at least it would mean our interfering where there's
already been a disturbance of the time-line."
A gleam of hope appeared in Father Ramón's sharp eyes. "Tell me, then!"
he commanded.
"The Mass, Father. Could we not take advantage of the Society's New
Year Mass?"
For a long moment Father Ramón stared. Then, unexpectedly, he burst into
a crow of laughter.
"Of course -- the Mass! My blessings on you, my son! That I could have
been so blind as to overlook the Mass!"
VII
As the outline of a familiar room took shape around him, Don Miguel at
long last dared to relax. There was no mistaking one of the robing-cells
in the ante-section to the chapel of the Society, nor the sound of the
high clear bell which was tolling somewhere outside.
He was here.
But was he -- now?
There was as yet no possible means of answering that question. His ordeal
was still a long way from being over. He knew as well as Father Ramón
himself that he was part of a terrifying experiment, an operation such as
no one in history had ever dared to conduct before, and the implications
were impossible to foresee.
Dutifully, as the Jesuit had directed, he had done his best to work them
out. He had been given a computation to analyse in factors which Father
Ramón had hastily scribbled down, and aided by a shy, precocious junior
Probationer, aged only about seventeen but possessed of a remarkable
gift for mathematics, he had struggled through to a solution. He tried
as he worked to assign real-world values to the symbols, and thought
that most likely he must be dealing with labels for human lives, for
one by one he saw them cancel out, cancel out . . .
The problem reduced to an undefined variable and a factor k, and he showed
this result to Father Ramón, who stared at it for a long time before he
sighed, closed his eyes for an instant as though formulating a prayer,
and then bade him go up to the time-halls in the central tower.
There, under the direction of white-faced, anxious technicians -- what
few they had been able to assemble from their homes -- he took station
between the familiar iron and silver bars. There was an intolerable period
of waiting while settings were checked, re-checked and double-checked,
but he endured it. He realised that he was about to be sent on such a
voyage as the Society had never before attempted. Upon his departure,
he would wipe out a whole abortive branch of reality.
Suddenly the air grew very hot --
-- and he was here in a robing-cell of the chapel, and the bell above
was tolling as it had done each New Year's Eve since the Society acquired
this palace as the official residence of its Commander.
His mind raced, wondering what the significance had been of that factor
k. Was it the King, perhaps, whose life or death could more radically
alter reality than that of a commoner? Modesty argued for it. But he
suspected that in truth the person represented was himself, whom
Kristina's whim had saved from the holocaust at the palace.
And who now had to repay that gift of Providence, with interest.
He recognised, of course, the necessity of undoing what had been
done. If left to stand unaltered, the consequences of this night of
madness would be a blot forever on the records of the Society. Moreover,
the death of the King and all his nearest heirs, and the Ambassador of
the Confederacy and other ambassadors and so many af the nobility and
gentry of the Empire, was an effect utterly disproportionate to the act.
Yet even after ploughing through all the texts Father Ramón had selected
for him he knew only one thing for sure about the effects of setting up
a closed causative loop: no one could possibly predict the outcome.
His mind swirled like water in a rotating cup. Putting his hands
to his head, he struggled to think coherently. He had been trained
to some extent in casuistry, and he could see the dim outlines of a
logical sequence such as must have persuaded Father Ramón to take his
unprecedented gamble. Postulate: the terrible women gladiators who
wrought the harm originated in a non-actual world -- a world brought
about by the experimental interference of Society explorers with their
own recorded history. Therefore the consequences of their acts might also
be regarded as non-actual, or potential. Therefore the rectification of
those consequences would be
not
non-actual, if this was a safe case to
exclude the middle . . .
It occurred to him with blinding suddenness that unless something had gone
hideously wrong all the nightmare in his memory had
already not happened
.
For a moment he had a glimpse of what it must be like to be a man
such as Father Ramón, all his mind lighted by a logic as piercing as
sunlight, driven by a terrible, inexorable honesty to conceal nothing
from himself. And he felt sweat prickle all over his body as he realised
that here, now, in the rectified situation he was the possessor of a
unique personal past.
Briefly, the awareness of that paralysed him. He thought his very heart
would stop; he could imagine himself dying with the shock, especially
when the tolling of the bell abruptly ceased to strike his ears. Then,
from the passage beyond the door of his robing-cell, he discerned the
slow shuffling sound of feet, and realised the bell had stopped in
. . .
reality
.
If the word any longer meant anything.
Either way, the Society was assembling for New Year Mass, for the
most awful of all its formal occasions, and he would have to join the
congregation. He calmed himself deliberately with deep breathing. When
finally he decided he could walk without swaying, he took his own
enveloping robe from the wall, slipped it on, and pulled the hood far
forward over his face. Then he opened the cell door and hastened in the
wake of his colleagues.
These, tonight, were all faceless men. Only differences of height and girth
could give the slightest clue to their identity: the hoods hid their
features, the sleeves hid their hands, the robes fell to the ground and
swished around their feet. For a reason. For the reason which only members
of the Society knew, and which made this Mass the unique occasion it was.
Grey into the grey shadows of the chapel, lit only by two candles at
the east end, whose thin beams played fitfully on the gilded coats of
arms mounted over the officers' stalls but were too faint to reveal the
faces of the company one to another. To the solemn music of the organ
the company dispersed among the pews.
Now, this year, there were eight hundred and forty-six Probationers,
Licentiates and Officers of the Society. Accordingly the pews held eight
hundred and forty-six grey-garbed men.
And any one of them might not be a present member, but someone who was
doomed to die in the Society's service.
Only the officiating priest, bringing the Host to the row of kneering
brothers, would be able to see by the light of the altar candles whether
one of the worshippers was a stranger, and thus tell which of the present
members -- here words were lacking -- was
tonight
celebrating the Mass
with his colleagues of an age yet to come. And the priest was masked.
In his stall, Don Miguel thought of everything which that knowledge implied.
He -- after all, he himself -- might not in fact be at the Mass of the
New Year's Eve he had so far been living through. Every year the organ
played the same music; every year a Papal dispensation was given to
conduct the service in whispers, so that any stranger in their midst
might not recognise the priest's voice as unfamiliar and thereby gain
foreknowledge of approaching death. One might of course count the grey
robes present to see if the total differed from what he expected --
Don Miguel glanced round into the shadows, and shook his head. No. No man
would do that. No man would dare.
There was a shuffling. The grey robes rose, and the masked priest came
forth before the altar.
VIII
By the time the service was over, he had worked out what he must now do.
He filed out of the chapel with the rest of the Society and returned to
his robing-cell. The purpose of isolating the members from each other
for a few minutes before and after the service, of course, was not
merely to afford them a chance for a moment of private meditation; it
was also to facilitate the transfer from this time-location of whoever
had been selected to partake of a New Years Mass in a future age, and
his subsequent return. There was never any way of detecting the process.
But, of course, it was only convenient to operate the transfer from a
robing-cell. It wasn't necessary.
And tonight, if he had reached the correct conclusion, an exception would
have been made. He was virtually certain he knew whom it had affected.
A kind of grim excitement began to displace his former apprehension
as he stripped off his robes. He barely spared time to hang it tidily
on its peg before leaving the cell -- ahead of most of his colleagues,
who were doubtless spending a while in prayer before returning to the
reception at the palace.
Following a cold, stone-flagged passage, he passed the chapel and made for
the vestry at the other end. Hurrying more and more, against his will,
his heels clicking on the floor, he came at last to the door which was
his destination. There he halted. Shivers traced down his spine.
Suppose -- just suppose -- some unforeseeable error had nullified the
plan; suppose, when he knocked, it was another voice than Father Ramón's
that invited him to enter!
Well, there was only one way to find out. He raised his fist to hammer
on the wood, and his heart pounded in answer as he recognised that it
was indeed Father Ramón who was within.
He twisted the handle and stepped over the threshold.
The Jesuit was alone in the starkly furnished little room, standing close
to a table with one thin hand laid on its polished top, his eyes bright
and sharp in his bird-like face. On recognising his visitor he smiled.