Times Without Number (15 page)

Don Miguel strode across the floor, his heart abrim with sudden pity,
and halted before Don Arturo. "Your hand, brother!" he exclaimed. "Let
me wish you a happy new year!"
For an instant Don Arturo's haunted eyes locked with his and he seemed
not to understand the words. Then, convulsively, he let fall his wineglass
with a crash and seized Don Miguel's hand in both of his. He said nothing,
but his smile was bright.
A prompt slave came to snatch up the fragments of glass and wipe away
the wasted wine. Drawing back from Don Arturo's grip, Don Miguel heard
his name called in a familiar voice.
"Ah, there you are, Miguel! What's kept you so long?"
Only a few paces distant around the floor, there was Kristina standing
between her father and her sister, vigorously waving to him. His heart
turned over, and he hastened to comply with her beckoning. After a rapid
bow to the Duke, he addressed her.
"I'm so sorry, Lady Kristina. I've been -- ah -- having a few words with
Father Ramón in his vestry."
She looked slightly puzzled at his use of her title, and then seemed to
hit on an explanation. "Oh, Papa doesn't mind people calling me Kristina,
Miguel, if that's what you're thinking. He's just had to get used to it --
haven't you?" she added, nudging her father playfully.
The Duke of Scania chuckled. "Indeed I have," he admitted. "I've even
had to put up with her so-called progressive friends addressing me as
'Duke' pure and simple. Well, I never cared much for starchy formalities
myself." He looked quizzically at Don Miguel. "I take it you and my
daughter have been getting on all right -- at any rate, I've hardly seen
either of you all the evening."
Kristina bubbled mischievously. "Miguel's been wonderful, Papal We got
dreadfully bored, so he found a way for us to slip out, and we've been
all around the city mixing with the people and having a marvellous time.
You'd never think it to look at him, but he's got quite a sense of
humour behind that grim scarred face. Of course, Miguel, I suppose
because you're really very stern, the reason you wanted to see Father
Ramón was to confess how wicked you'd been this evening -- escorting an
unchaperoned girl!"
"Kristina!" the Duke said reprovingly. "How often must I tell you? You
don't make jokes about other people's religious belief!"
A sort of strange light-headedness was overcoming Don Miguel now. Already
the gruesome events he had thought to be indelibly engraved on his memory
were receding, becoming unreal, fading as chalk-marks fade under a wet
sponge until the words are as though they had never been written. He said,
"Heavens, no, Kristina! I could never regret enjoying an evening with
you. Let me prove it by asking you for another dance, and this time I
hope it won't be rudely cut short like the first."
He bowed his leave of the Duke and led her out on the floor. Taking her
hand, he murmured to himself, "Everything for the best in the best of
all possible worlds."
"What was that, Miguel? I didn't quite catch -- "
"Nothing. Just a rather bitter anti-clerical joke. It doesn't matter."
"Oh, explain it!" she urged.
A look of sadness passing over his face, he shook his head. "Believe me,
Kristina, I couldn't. Nobody could. Forget it, and let's just dance."
PART THREE
The Fullness of Time
I
"Your people," said the long-faced Mohawk who managed the mines, "came
to what you call the New World hungry for gold. You came looking for
fabulous kingdoms -- Cibola, Quivira, Norumbega, Texas. And so keenly
were you disappointed when you found they didn't exist, you set about
creating them."
He waved at the hillside opposite, where the mine galleries ran like holes
into ripe cheese. Don Miguel followed the gesture with his eyes. Here where
he sat with the manager -- whose name was Two Dogs -- it was cool under the
shadow of woven reed awnings, on the verandah of the plain mud-plastered
house which served as both home and administrative offices. But there
the fury of the sun lay full, and the Indian labourers emerging from the
mouths of the galleries with their baskets full of crushed rock, to be
tipped into sluices for sedimentation, wiped their dusty faces, swigged
water from leathern bottles, and seemed glad to escape underground again.
The heat of the air was such that the world felt silent, although there
were always noises: the monotonous creaking of the pumps bringing up
water for the sluices, the droning of flies, the cries of the overseers
in a local dialect that Don Miguel did not understand. But taken together
they constituted no more of an irritation than birdsong. Half a world
away from home, Don Miguel was contentedly able to relax.
"More wine?" Two Dogs suggested, raising the jug from the table between
them.
"Willingly," Don Miguel returned, holding out his glass. "It's very good.
You grow the grapes locally, I understand."
Two Dogs nodded, pouring for his visitor and himself. "Our climate here
in California is very good for vines. This cheese also is local -- take
a piece. The flavours mingle well." He set down the jug and offered
a large baked-clay platter on which a wedge of yellow cheese stood,
stuck with a silver knife.
"Speaking of which," he continued, "the very name of California is an
instance of what I mean. Am I not correct in saying that it commemorates
the legend of a non-existent queen named Calaf, whom your early explorers
fondly believed to rule over an island populated exclusively by women?"
"I've heard some such tale," Don Miguel agreed, and tried a crumb of the
cheese; finding it to his liking, he cut a piece as big as his palm and
bit into its edge. "Indeed, I seem to recall that there was opposition
to the adoption of that name for this province on the grounds that
'California' was notoriously mythical and no one would wish to emigrate
and settle in a place that didn't exist."
He chuckled. To his surprise, he realised after a moment that Two Dogs
looked the reverse of amused, and broke off, hoping he had not committed a
major social gaffe. Apart from the very much Europeanised Mohawks whom he
had met in Londres and New Madrid, he had made the acquaintance of hardly
any Indians, and here -- three thousand miles further west on the American
continent that he had ever travelled before -- he was only sketchily
informed concerning customs, etiquette aud formal behaviour. Of course,
dealing as he did with traders and industrial middlemen from the east,
Two Dogs must be used to foreign manners in his guests, but there was
no point in imposing on his goodwill. Don Miguel counted himself lucky
to have run across him -- he was an interesting talker and surprisingly
widely read in view of his rather humdrum profession.
He said now, "In that case we can be grateful that the name was selected.
Perhaps that's what kept down the number of immigrants to a level we can
tolerate . . . after a fashion."
"Do you not have many European residents hereabouts?" Don Miguel asked.
"A handful." Two Dogs shrugged. "Some of whom one is compelled to put
up with, such as the priests; some of whom are acceptably useful in the
community, such as our two doctors -- one of them more than the other,
because he's prepared to listen to what we can tell him about our local
herbs and medicinal plants while the other won't pay attention to any
remedy not vouched for by a journal from Londres with the Imprimatur on
it! And a few others most of whom do your people no credit: several are
dishonest and many of them are drunkards."
Don Miguel stirred uneasily in his chair. He said, "Well, of course,
from the point of view of you Mohawks, we must seem -- "
"Correction," interrupted Two Dogs with a thin-lipped smile. He was a very
striking man to look at, taller than Don Miguel and with a rangy leanness
that made his visitor think of a fast racehorse. "I'm only by courtesy a
Mohawk -- about an eighth of my ancestry, as near as I can work out. The
rest is mostly Sioux, Apache and Paiute. And that's another thing which
annoys me about you Imperials. For example, take your own case. You bear
a Spanish name, you speak a variety of Spanish rather heavily salted
with English, French and even some Dutch phrases -- but are you
Spanish
?"
"I see what you mean," admitted Don Miguel. "I am mostly Spanish, but my
father's mother was French and my mother's mother was half-English. Which
is presumably why one talks about Imperials rather than Spaniards nowadays
-- apart from the fact that we were displaced from our homeland, remember."
"And are you the only ones?" Two Dogs sighed. "You talk of me as Mohawk.
Look at a map. Mohawks of a pure strain can be found only some two and
a half thousand miles to the east of where we're sitting. The rest are
diluted across the continent thanks to the mere accident which resulted
in your cementing an alliance with them and giving them the necessary
horses and guns to set forth on a wave of conquest. It could as easily
have been -- oh -- their neighbours the Mohicans, couldn't it?"
Something seemed to sound a warning bell in Don Miguel's mind. Was it pure
coincidence that Two Dogs had put that hypothesis to him, a time-traveller
who might give an authoritative answer?
It must be! No one for a thousand miles was supposed to know the identity
of this visitor from Londres. That was the whole point of coming so far
for his furlough -- to get away, even if only for a month or so, from
the oppressive demands of his job and the nightmarish recollection of
what a single error could do to the fabric of reality.
Damn Two Dogs, anyway. The last thing Don Miguel wanted to think about
right now was the question of speculative time. Since the appearance of
Father Ramón's recent article, "An Analysis of the Probable Implications
of Cross-Temporal Human Contact," no one at the Headquarters Office seemed
to have talked about any other subject, and with his own unsharable burden
of secret knowledge, Don Miguel was unable to enter into argument with
the enthusiasm practically all his colleagues displayed.
But . . . Well, yes, it could have been the Mohicans instead of the Mohawks.
Very easily. If Chief Tallfeather had been killed in the Battle of Twin
Creek instead of Chief Storm, the latter -- who was nearly as brilliant
a strategist -- would almost certainly have received the crucial embassy
from the Governor of New Madrid. And from then on things would have
continued in pretty much the same fashion.
I might even be here, now, being told off for calling some
quasi-counterpart of Two Dogs a Mohican when he was actually Comanche,
Pima and Shoshone!
Determinedly he drove the subject from his mind. He was sick of it, and
what he'd been through last New Year was still giving him nightmares
months afterwards. He made a vain attempt to turn the conversation by
asking about the miners across the valley, but Two Dogs was equally set
on sticking to the subject . . . and, being the host, won, thanks to
Don Miguel's desire not to cause offence.
"It was, of course, in one sense at least a fortunate accident. One need
only look south past the Isthmus to see what the alternative might have
been -- hm?"
Embarrassed, Don Miguel cast around for a neutral reply. It was always
upsetting for an Imperial citizen to be reminded of the fate of the great
civilisations of Central and South America, sacrificed on the altar of
European greed. He said at last, "There has never been change without
suffering -- it's the way of the world, I'm afraid."
"And as you people saw it, it might as well be the provincials who
suffered," suggested Two Dogs. "You spoke a moment ago of emigrants
who might decide not to come here because the name you'd given the
area suggested that it didn't exist. I find myself tempted to enquire:
what emigrants? Are they emigrants who are crouching and sweating in the
mine galleries yonder? Or are they natives, dispossessed from their old
hunting-grounds and compelled to adopt this miserable means of earning
their living?"
What have I stumbled across -- some revanchist fanatic? Don Miguel
was tempted to revise his opinion of Two Dogs from start to finish on
that basis alone. But he held his peace, and cut another slice of cheese.
"As I see it," the mine manager pursued, "you conceive of yourselves as
looking from the centre outwards. Europe is the heart of the world and
the other continents are -- what would one call them? -- its outskirts,
perhaps. Of course, in one way that's become a self-fulfilling prophecy;
at least, over the past five hundred years, a great many local squabbles
in Europe have created changes out of all proportion here, in Africa and
in Asia. It's taught people like me to be grateful for small mercies. We
don't seem to have had any big ones for quite a while."
The words dug into Don Miguel's mind like the touch of an eagle's claw.
Feeling little premonitory tinglings on the nape of his neck, he said,
"I'm not entirely certain that I follow you."
"Don't you? Well, here's an example of what I'd call a small mercy.
Suppose your Empire hadn't won its greatest victory. Suppose there
hadn't been a strong power in Western Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and -- like Eastern Europe -- the area had split
into petty principalities, because you'd lost the Netherlands before
you could use them as a launching-site for your invasion of England,
and when the Moors reconquered Spain you had nowhere to go. Wouldn't we
Indians then have had four or more gangs of Europeans fighting over our
hunting-grounds like dogs over a bone?"
Don Miguel was by this time convinced that he was being needled. In a last
desperate effort to prove that his identity was not suspected, he said,
"It's an interesting argument. Obviously you've made a study of history."
"So have you," Two Dogs said, and looked him straight in the eye. "You
are a Licentiate of the Society of Time, aren't you?"
II
Don Miguel uttered a long succession of colourful curses in the next few
seconds -- but under his breath. Finally, he reached for the wine-jug and
refilled his glass without asking permission. Not looking at the other,
he said, "Can't I get away from it