Times Without Number (21 page)

De tenebris temporalibus . . . and they were quaking in their shoes.
In Don Miguel's imagination the spheres of the universe ground against
each other like clockwork after a bucket of sand had been tipped in.
Mastering himself, the Prince put his trembling hands out of sight under
the table and spoke again.
"Father Terence!" he exclaimed. "We must turn to you as we formerly turned
to your late predecessor Father Ramón -- may he rest in peace. What say you
about this crisis?"
The man next to Red Bear gave a shrug. He was most of the things that
Father Ramón had not been -- tall, heavily built, with a thatch of
fair hair -- and he spoke with a strong Irish accent. This was someone
whose name had long been familiar to Don Miguel but whom he had not
previously met: Father Terence O'Dubhlainn, newly senior among the
Society's theoreticians.
"Doubtless Father Ramón had laid plans before his murder," he replied.
"And it's probable they were apt to the situation. Deprived of his
unparalleled insight, we must make what shift we can. What is absolutely
certain is this: any attempt to eliminate the Indian, Two Dogs, by
intervention from present time -- by assassination, for example -- will
create a closed loop with incalculable consequences and we can regard it
only as a last resort. There is no precedent for arrest and execution
in past time, and it's a violation of the most cherished canons of the
Society. We must accordingly elect a less dangerous alternative."
"But there's no precedent for anything until it's done the first time!"
snapped Don Miguel. For a long moment he feared he had gone too far in
voicing the cynical platitude; Father Terence flushed and bridled, where
Father Ramón would have inclined his head and spoken with gentle reproof.
"You presume too much!" he barked. "I said we must choose a less dangerous
alternative! Before shouting me down, why not hear whether we have yet
discovered one?"
Memory of that New Year's Eve when Father Ramón had knowingly condemned
himself to an intellectual torture whose refinement passed imagining --
being responsible for actions he had not committed -- drove hot words
to Don Miguel's tongue-tip. But he bit them back. He was, after all,
twenty years the junior of Father Terence and most of his companions.
After a final glare at his interrupter, Father Terence resumed. "One must
grant that it's a first-order probability Two Dogs will decide to carry
out his boast about bringing down the Empire. Accordingly, having analysed
the studies he pursued under the name of Broken Tree at the Mexicological
Institute and the University of New Castile, and having taken into account
what Navarro tells us about his recent conversations on related subjects,
we've compiled a list of probable points at which he might conclude the
Empire's history was especially vulnerable. We do not exclude the risk
of interference in Europe rather than the New World."
"Have you nothing more concrete to go on than these vague deductions?"
the Prince demanded.
"We are lucky to have stumbled on the existence of this secret inner group
of oath-bound fanatics. According to Bloody Axe there were never more than
eight or ten of them all told; the remainder of the conspirators had been
fobbed off with this yarn about the foundation of an independent republic
and appear to have believed it sincerely." Father Terence coughed behind
his hand.
"Now it's notorious that only one crucial event stood between us
and oblivion in the sixteenth century. Had we not conquered England,
had the Armada not made the seas safe for our invasion forces from the
Netherlands, it can be logically argued that there would never have been
an Empire. The renewed Moorish attacks in Spain would have reduced us
to a mere satrapy of the Mediterranean Caliphate."
Them were scowls of impatience around the table. Every Probationer knew
what Father Terence was rehearsing at such length; the key period of the
conquest of England was invariably the subject of hours of discussion and
several examination questions in a first-year course of instruction, and
it had been exhaustively studied by time-travellers for nearly a century.
Aware of his listeners' eagerness, Father Terence cut his discourse short.
He said bluntly, "Accordingly, we recommend that all the Licentiates we
can muster be set to stand guard over the events leading up to the conquest.
If we fail to detect interference by Two Dogs there, we must sift through
the lesser alternatives until we discover him. And only if we determine
that some alteration has actually been caused in our known history should
we attempt more direct action and have him arrested or assassinated."
"But if he's already interfered with history -- " the Prince began.
"How will we have time to counteract the deed?" Father Terence completed
the sentence for him. "It's a matter of the skewed relationship between
time past and time present, sir. There's a diagonal component of durative
time which will ensure a margin of error factorially dependent on the
time between Two Dogs's arrival in the past and the commission of the
fatal act. It will probably amount to only a few hours, but that should
suffice."
"And we jump in and sabotage his trick?"
"Ideally, yes, because this will result in the past remaining unaffected."
"Hmm!" The Prince 'looked and sounded dubious, but he knew very well he
owed his status as Commander of the Society to his royal birth rather
than to any special brilliance in the field of temporal science. He
turned to Red Bear and breached a different subject.
"What steps have you taken to prevent Two Dogs reaching the past?"
"Loyal men are guarding all our time apparatus, but . . ." Red Bear scowled.
"The machines are so simple to build! And even if his cronies haven't the
materials to assemble their own, I wouldn't put it past those idiots in
the Confederacy to help him travel back. We must assume he's already left;
there are only a few grains of sand left in our hourglass, and then the
scythe will descend."
There was a dull silence. The Prince broke it with a bang of his fist
on the table.
"Enough talk!" he burst out. "Go find this man, in the name of God,
before he wipes us all out of the universe!"
And it could happen . . . All of them knew that in theory; the General
Officers and most senior Licentiates such as Don Arturo and Don Rodrigo
knew it thanks to the expeditions to parallel branches of time which the
Society had conducted over the past forty years -- but only Don Miguel
knew it in the marrow of his bones, from actual personal experience in
this contemporary world. Now that Father Ramón was dead, no one else
shared his recollection of that New Year's night of horror and bloodshed
which, in a single bold stroke, the Jesuit had abolished from reality.
That was the kind of action this crisis called for, he was convinced:
prompt, direct, incisive! Not this pussyfooting caution, like friends
consulting about a game of correspondence chess! He had talked to Two Dogs
for long hours, far away in California; he had formulated an opinion of
him as a man, as a personality, and he
knew
this was a man who would
not utter empty threats, but someone whose pride would compel him to
the ultimate blasphemy of believing that he was uniquely right.
But he had no hope, he realised sickly, of persuading the General Officers
to his own way of thinking. The best he could look forward to was the
survival of his world by what would amount to a miracle, and resumption
of his normal life as a Licentiate with a trifle more experience, and
a great deal more notoriety, than the average run of his colleagues.
It was a slender bulwark to erect in his mind against the doom-laden
grinding of the heavenly spheres that night by night made his skull ring
so loudly he could not rest -- only dream terrible and dreadful dreams.
A mere couple of days elapsed -- though it felt like eternity --
before orders were issued for himself and his friend Don Felipe. Like
the majority of the younger Licentiates, their brief was to patrol,
in disguise and with feigued identities, the path of events immediately
preceding the departure of the Armada from Cadiz. It made excellent sense
to protect that of all historical nexi from interference -- yet somehow
he could not believe that Two Dogs would be so blatant in his attack . . .
Which was why, the evening before his departure, he met with Don Felipe
in the drinking-shop currently most popular among the younger members
of the Society in New Madrid, and mentioned that he had written a letter.
"To Kristina?" Don Felipe said, his dark eyes darting back and forth
between the folded paper and Don Miguel's face. "Yes, I've written
also." Feeling in the pouch at his belt, he produced a letter that might
have been the twin of Don Miguel's except that the superscription was to
the Lady Ingeborg. "But do you think there's any point in mailing them?"
Don Miguel thought of the high-masted handsome trans-Atlantic liners that
daily bowed out of the port here into the harsh hands of the ocean gale,
and gave a shrug.
"I don't know. But I felt relieved that I had set my thoughts on paper,
even though they may never now be read. How do you imagine it will happen,
if it does? Will there be a period of fading, or instant obliteration?"
Don Felipe's face darkened. "I hope," he said soberly, "we shan't know
anything . . . But there is one minor advantage, I suppose."
"What?"
"Well, according to my confessor, a soul in a potential world is classed
as limbo-fodder. Which means that if Two Dogs succeeds, we shan't need
to worry about paying for our little lapses from grace. Indeed we'll be
kicking ourselves for not having had a bit more fun."
"Do you find that amusing?" Don Miguel said.
"No. No, honestly I don't. But I think after a few drinks I might --
and what better medicine is there than laughter?"
So they called for wine and brandy, and spent their final evening together
inventing ridiculous toasts to the end of the world.
IX
Within the range over which time apparatus afforded fair accuracy --
about two and a half thousand years -- there were three zones of history
which had exercised an obsessive fascination on temporal explorers ever
since the Society was founded. One, inevitably, was the beginning of
the Christian era . . . but access to Palestine of that day was severely
restricted for fear that even the presence of non-intervening observers
should draw the attention of the Roman authorities to the remarkable
interest being generated by an unknown holy man, and cause Pilate to act
earlier than the Sanhedrin, according to the written record, had desired.
The next was the downfall of Rome before the barbarian invasions; the
Empire was the greatest single power to appear on Earth since the Roman
heyday, and there was always the haunting suspicion that it too might
be laid low. If there were clues and hints to aid survival that might
be discovered by the study of their predecessors' fate, the Imperial
government wanted to hear them.
And, third, there was the year of 1588 when Britain had been conquered
and the existence of the Empire had thereby been rendered possible. This
nexus of events was by far the most thoroughly documented period of
explorable time. For that reason, when Don Miguel arrived between the
crystal pillars along with the iron and silver frame which had transported
him four hundred and one years into the past, he could say to himself,
"Now the Armada is assembling! Despite the valiant efforts of the English
who have raided its ports and tried to burn its galleons, work proceeds
apace. The Duke of Parma will have a force of more than a hundred
ships; he'll muster six thousand sailors and twenty thousand soldiers,
and waiting in the Netherlands are as many more to launch the invasion
of England."
Put in such concrete terms, the danger he had been sent here to counteract
suddenly became unreal. He looked around the gracious, airy, Moorish-style
courtyard of the house in which the Society had established a temporary
base for the duration of the operation -- purely to conceal the arrival of
so many strangers, they needed a convincing cover, and could not rely on
the isolation far from any town or village which ordinarily served them
well enough -- and felt a sense of what might be called solidity in the
world. How, after all, could one man wipe out the whole of history for
four mortal centuries? Two Dogs could scarcely command the weather so
that the storm brewing at invasion time favoured the English rather than
the Spanish fleet! He'd said so himself to some questioner or other,
not many months ago -- when? A brief frown crossed his face; then he
remembered that it had been during the Marquesa di Jorque's party.
And he was suddenly afraid all over again. The Society had almost panicked
over the matter of the contraband mask; a contraband man, so to speak,
could cause infinite harm . . . say by sowing pestilence among the
soldiers, by poisoning their water-barrels, by sinking a ship to block
the harbour and allowing the English a chance to attack once more.
Yes, indeed, there were terrible risks to face. But it was imperative
not to despair. Leaving the vicinity of the time apparatus, he spoke
to the advance guard of Licentiates who had been here for three days
already, local time, preparing equipment and collecting news, and was
given reassuring answers to his questions.
"Yes, the work's proceeding normally. No, there's no sickness been
reported. Here are your contemporary clothes and contemporary sword,
and here's a briefing sheet with your instructions and a map."
The wrought-iron grilles protecting the villa the Society had rented
clanged shut behind him, and he set off down the road in the direction
of the harbour. Cadiz was a fair-sized city, even this far back, and it
was a considerable walk to his destination, especially since the streets
were thronged with foot-passengers, pack-animals and wagons too large for
the width of the carriageway, but the more he saw of his surroundings the
better he felt. There was absolutely no difference between this bustling
city and what the historical record showed; this was the place that had
launched the Armada . . . in spite of the threats of Two Dogs. Besides,
this was a more reassuring area of the past to visit than the others
he'd been sent to: Imperial Rome, Macedonia under Alexander, Texcoco to
replace the stolen mask. He was speaking a form of Spanish, though he had
to be careful to amend his accent if he spoke to one of the natives and
avoid anachronistic words; he was walking ground some of his ancestors
had doubtless also trodden, and for the first time, moreover. He began
to imagine that he might once again remember how to be cheerful.