L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02

1 The Temporal Authorities

We were in our private sunlit grove of trees at
the edge of endless meadows, the breezes fresh as they stirred the knee-high grasses around us. We stood beneath a spreading, ancient oak, my beloved and I, a songbird warbling in the leafy branches overhead. She leaned against the age-roughened bark, her warm, smooth hands in mine. I gazed deeply into her
—

The girl of my dreams
doesn’t
have six hundred and fifty-three pistachio-colored tentacles.
Nor
a ropy orange neck slithering up to a single, glittering, faceted eye. And I can tell you, right here and now, she
ain’t
got a body like a fluorescent-pink Army helmet.

So what in Contradiction was this Sterno-drinker’s nightmare doing perched in the middle of my solar plexus, interrupting a promisingly-prurient transmission from my subconscious? I reached up and jerked off the DreamCap, letting it dangle by the cable overhead, and remembered: it was my turn to be God this week.

The alien shifted several dozen of its little legs politely and tried peering into both of my perfectly ordinary optics at the same time. Gimme a pain in the bridge of my nose.

“These printouts, Captain—” I
jumped
at the unexpected voice whining through the bulkhead door behind me. “—where should I put them?” Rand Heplar, the new Apprentice/Observer the Powers-That-Be had saddled me with, lugged a two-foot stack of computer-excretions, weighing them down with his chin, onto the flight deck. Heplar was a greasy little specimen, the sort you always suspected of having a secret collection of wingless flies in a bottle somewhere. Guess I’d told him sixty or a hundred times
never
to call me Captain.

I slid a dark-green uniform cuff back from my hairy wrist:

Display on the right face showed the century, month, and GMT back home—Ochskahrt Memorial Academy, Tsiol-kovsky, Luna. Left side gave the date and local time. The watch? A graduation present. Finished sixteenth in a crowd of six-thousand-odd,
including
Spacers—the ones who
like
being called Captain—with their regulation-issue nobly-cleft chins and pansy powder-blue jumpsuits.

Fumbling in my coverall for a stogie, I happily contemplated telling the idiot
precisely
where he could put all that red tape, but settled on spurious civility to keep him off balance. “Dump ’em in the ’cycler, kid. I dunno why y’ran ’em off in the first place.
Georgie
memorizes everything important that comes in.” The turtle-shaped alien shifted again, craning its leathery periscope at my nose.
“An' get this teratoid tortoise ojfa my torso!”

Heplar gave a self-righteous gasp. “Why,
Captain!
You mustn’t talk about the Yamaguchian Ambassador that way, and right in front of him, too!” He made little scandalized bustling noises as he fed the useless printouts into the recycler. Next time we saw 'em, they’d probably be tortilla chips.

“Tell y’what.” I grunted. “
Show
me this overgrown barnacle’s front, an’ I’ll stop talkin’ about him at all!” Avoiding contact with his numberless miniature appendages, I lifted the Ambassador by the edges of his shell, swung off my pilot’s recliner, set him gently on the deck—gentler than I felt, anyway—and lit my cigar, filling the cabin with aromatic blue-gray smoke.

“Him” and “his” were just a guess, anyway. Three of these...
things
underfoot aboard my ship, just perfect for tripping over when you were feeling too sure of yourself, and frigging lucky it wasn’t the full complement of seventeen my bosses’d
wanted
to send along.

One of each sex, believe it or not.

“How about it, Your Ambassadorship? You give a fast flying fardle how I talk about you?” Not a centimeter over fifteen inches tall, it lifted an adoring eyeball toward me, emitting an ecstatic squeal, exactly like a kid’s balloon when you stretch the nozzle and let the air shrill out. “Just what I need,” I confided under my breath to its glittering optic. “A nervous, creepy assistant, three alien kid-glove VIPs, and a handful of greenhorn passengers down Earthside stumbling through an EVA that seven different risk-computers regarded as ‘marginally lethal’!”

Heplar sniffed, a quizzical expression on his semipsy-chotic mug. “Did you say something, Captain?” He turned, eyeballed my
El Ropo
in full smolder, grimaced, and went back to work manufacturing confetti.

“Nothin’, Igor, only talkin’ to myself.”

Talking to myself. Swell: a twenty-third century Norman Bates shuffling around behind me wearing the same Temporal Green livery which graced my own wiry frame; a trio of psychedelic pasties for the Gorgon Medusa who’d decided
I
was their Deity; and a flock of bulgy-domed academics whose only link to my vessel up here—and home-— was the telemetric toilet paper I had Heplar paying back into the recyclers. Enough to give me gray hair, if I hadn’t lost most of it already to this much-overrated profession. Why me? Why was it
always
—

Me? I’m Bernie.. .okay, make it
Captain
Bernard M. Gruenblum, ODF(T)532779-687659921-A, late of the Academy’s Temporal Division, and master (putatively speaking) of
789 George Herbert.

In short, a bus driver—if you happen to consider a time machine a bus.

That’s how
Georgie
and I happened to be here at the moment, hovering invisibly, 30,000 feet above the site of Hideyoshi’s Tokyo in ancient Nippon of the 1590s a.d., waiting to pick up our paying customers.

Bright idea’d been to ferry out this load of eggheads— representing institutes of higher sinecure all over our beloved Solar Dominion—to find out just what made medieval Japanese society go back
en masse
to sharp, pointy, sweat-powered weapons and “give up the gun.”

Lotta birdbrains
still
think it was some kinda Noble Experiment.

Rats, I coulda told ’em: ever see what newly-firearmed peasants do to the expensively-armored aristocrats whose ancestors have been “protecting” them out of everything they’ve got for centuries? Japan’s Nobunaga gang, here, was merely quicker on the uptake (an’ a
whole
lot fast-and-fancier-talking) than the feudal Tammany of Europe. Shucks, there ain’t a political situation
anywhen
that couldn’t be improved with a couple million Saturday Night Specials. Naturally, the self-appointed bigwigs
always
have a vested interest in a Sullivan Act of some kind.

But no one ever asks the bus-driver, me, who’s seen more fresh history being made, carmine-hued and smoky in the morning chill, than anybody else. Instead, they send these pointy-heads out—all classroom theory and no pragmatics—-after training ’em for months to look, act, talk, and
think
whatever way the locals do it. Speak the language, eat the food, pick your nose with the socially correct finger.

Some of this makes sense. We can’t afford taking chances in this racket, for some pretty good reasons:

First, the past may be Prologue to you, but to us, it’s
plastic.
One misplaced pebble on the Road to Mandalay, and the future we go back to
might
not be the present we took off from. No idea how much of a change it’d take, and we
never
wanna find out. Solipsistic suicide: everything gone up there but me and thee—an’ I wouldn’t care to be
thy
insurance agent.

Naturally, the Academy takes precautions. There’s a pair of stationary time-field generators buried under Tsiolkov-sky, concentricked one around the other, forming a sort of
reality-lock.
Inside, the great-granddaddy of all databanks contains every historical fact they can punch into a memory chip. Outside, an identical set-up constantly checks itself against the first, ensuring personkind’s past—and the Academy’s
present
—stays
put.

Every now and again, one of my sloppier colleagues flubs it, generally by letting the yokels way-back-when glom an eyeful of his timebuggy. Easy to let happen:
Georgie
's a ninety-foot discoid packing enough spare horsepower to make planetoids outa planets. Even with half her output diverted into protective fields, she’ll leave big purple blotches on your retinas when she’s wound up for a century-sized jump.

Some eras see our little mistakes as Holy Manifestations, others just as UFOs. On account of that
and
the color of our uniforms, those finger-waved cretins in SpaceDiv sneer-ingly call us “Little Green Men.” In either case, such apparitions tend to get talked about—whole careers have been devoted to writing them up—and this alters what was “really” supposed to happen. The reality-inspectors under Tsiolkov-sky notice things like that, and the Academy sees it as a General Court-Martial, usually meriting a pilgrimage by Shank’s mare to the base of Spectacular Ochskahrt Memorial Pylon, over two miles tall, with a brightly-glowing beacon visible from the Asteroids on a clear night.

And out there, it’s
always
a clear night.

It’s merely a fifty-kilometer hike, a piece of cake in Luna’s one-sixth gee. Trouble is, it’s straight across the bottom of Spectacular Ochskahrt Memorial Crater. That’s where Herr Professor Himschlag von Ochskahrt made his Great Discovery (time-travel and a faster-than light drive)
and
his Big Blooper, back in
A.D.
2007. We still haven’t figured out where he went wrong, but the crater’s a couple thousand meters deep and so radioactive that the Asteroiders can damn near see
it
glowing, too. By the time the court-martialed victim makes it to the Pylon, his prognosis ain’t so hot, but everything else is.

There followeth a decent lead-lined burial; the Academy humanely leaves
this
shit-detail to gorillas and chimpanzees with electronic control implants, elderly ones who’ve outlived their usefulness as janitors, factory assemblers—we even employ
genuine
grease-monkeys. Then the computers get cranked up to assess the risks of undoing whatever caused all the hoorah, and a flunky (yours truly, f’rinstance) gets sent back to counterbalance the original error. Sometimes it’s pretty lame and off-the-cuff—like the twenty-three inconvenient witnesses in Dallas one November I recall or the phony government commission we set up to declare that flying saucers are “swamp gas”—the stories I could tell.

But mostly I just drive the bus, chauffering ivory-tower types: geologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, pret’near every kinda -ologist you can shake a stick at, not one with half the practical education I got in my left pinky.

Ignoring Heplar’s scowl of disapproval, I stretched across the cabin toward the custom walltap I’d installed myself, pouring my first beer of the afternoon. A green light chose that instant to start winking, accompanied by an irritating
bleep-bleep-bleep
—clowns who design things like that oughta have to listen to ’em. 1645:00.0—’least this load of tenderfeet was punctual.

“There’s Recall, kid. Mind y’strap down anything loose.” I flopped the beer onto the console—it sloshed and gurgled invitingly at me—took a final nicotinic drag, and limbered up my button-pushing fingers like a pinball virtuoso going for another free game.

“Very well, Captain.” Somehow the punk managed a sneer and a snivel at the same time. “Anything else, Captain?”

“Yeah, see to the Ambassador an’ his fellow whatcha-macallits.. . and Heplar?”

He looked up from collecting aliens, eyebrows doing a little dance in and out of his hairline at the unaccustomed sweetness of my tone. “Yes, Captain?”

“DON’T CALL ME CAPTAIN!"
I keyed the sequence; wasn’t all that much to it, just a reminder to
Georgie
that I wanted her to follow a string of prepunched instructions. We vanished from our present location with a little blue
pop!
while I dedicated all my professional expertise to sifting us gently back into existence 30,000 feet lower—decorative grove of trees just outside the city—practically phasing us in a single molecule at a time. Show me any Spacer who could accomplish
that
by the seat of his fancy azure ascot!