Time Patrol (81 page)

SAN FRANCISCO, THURSDAY,
8 MARCH 1990

Manse Everard returned to Wanda Tamberly near sunset. Light streamed through the Golden Gate. From their suite they saw cable cars go clanging down toward the waterfront, islands and the farther shore rising steep from a silver-blue bay, sails like wings of some wandering flock. They had hoped to be out there themselves.

When he came in, she read his battered face and said quietly, "You're on a new mission, aren't you?"

He nodded. "It was pretty clear that was what HQ had in mind when Nick phoned."

She could not keep all resentment out of her voice. Their time together had been less than two months. "They never leave you alone, do they? How many other Unattached agents has the Patrol got, anyway?"

"Nowhere near enough. I didn't have to accept, you know. But after studying the report, I did have to agree I'm probably the best man available for this job." That was what had kept him since morning. The report was the equivalent of a library, most of it not text or audiovisual but direct brain input—history, language, law, customs, dangers.

"Ol' noblesse oblige." Wanda sighed. She met him, laid her cheek on his breast, pressed close against the big body. "Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Get it done and pop back to the same hour you tell me good-bye, you hear?"

He grinned. "My idea exactly." He stroked the blond hair. "But look, I don't have to leave right away. I would like to get it behind me"—on his intricately looping world line—"but let's first make whoopee from now through tomorrow night."

"Best offer I've had all day." She raised her lips toward his and for a while the only sound in the room was murmurs.

Stepping back at last, she said, "Hey, that was fine, but before we get down to serious business, suppose you explain what the hell your assignment is." Her voice did not sound altogether steady.

"Sure," he answered. "Over beer?" When she nodded, he fetched two Sierra Nevada Pale. She settled down on the couch with hers. Restless, he kept his feet and loaded his pipe.

"Paris, early fourteenth century," he began. "A field scientist, Hugh Marlow by name, has gotten himself in deep yogurt and we need to haul him out." Speaking English rather than Temporal, he perforce used tenses and moods ill-suited to chronokinetics. "I've had medieval European experience." She shivered slightly. They had shared a part of it. "Also, he's my contemporary by birth—not American: British, but a twentieth-century Western man who must think pretty much like me. That might help a bit." A few generations can make aliens of ancestor and descendant.

"What kind of trouble?" she asked.

"He was studying the Templars, there in France where they were centered at the time, though they had chapters all over. You remember who they were?"

"Just vaguely, I'm afraid."

Everard struck fire to tobacco, drank smoke, and followed it with ale. "One of the military religious orders founded during the Crusades. After those failed, the Templars continued to be a power, almost sovereign, in fact. Besides war, they went in for banking, and ended up mainly doing that. The outfit got hog-rich. Apparently, though, most of its members stayed pretty austere, and many remained soldiers or sailors. They made themselves unpopular, being a hard and overbearing lot even by the standards of that era, but they seem to have been essentially innocent of the charges that were finally brought against them. You see, among other things King Philip the Fair wanted their treasury. He'd wrung all the gold he could out of the Jews and Lombards, and his ambitions were huge. The Pope, Clement V, was his creature and would back him up. On October thirteenth, 1307, every Templar in France who didn't manage a getaway was arrested in a set of very well-organized surprise raids. The accusations included idolatry, blasphemy, sodomy, you name it. Torture produced the confessions the king wanted. What followed is a long and complicated story. The upshot was that the Templar organization was destroyed and a number of its members, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake."

Wanda grimaced. "Poor bastards. Why'd anybody want to research them?"

"Well, they were important." Everard left unspoken that the Time Patrol required full and accurate information on the ages it guarded. She knew. Oh, but she knew! "They did keep certain of their rites and gatherings secret, for more than a century—quite a feat, huh? Of course, in the end that proved helpful to getting them railroaded.

"But what really went on? The chronicles don't say anything reliable. It'd be interesting to know, and the data might be significant. For instance, could surviving Templars, scattered across Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, have influenced, underground, the development of Christian heresies and Muslim sects? Quite a few of them joined the Moors."

Everard puffed for a minute and admired Wanda's head, bright against the deepening sky, before he proceeded.

"Marlow established an identity and enlisted in the Order. He spent a dozen years working his way up in it, till he became a close companion of a ranking knight and was let into the secrets. Then, on the eve of Philip's hit, that knight seized him and confined him incommunicado in a house. Marlow'd talked too much."

"What?" she wondered, puzzled. "He was—is—conditioned, isn't he?"

"Sure. Incapable of telling any unauthorized person he's from the future. But you have to give operatives plenty of leeway, let 'em use their own judgment as situations arise, and—" Everard shrugged. "Marlow's a scientist, an academic type, not a cop. Softhearted, maybe."

"Still, he'd have to be tough and smart to survive in that filthy period, wouldn't he?" she said.

"Uh-huh. I'll be downright eager to quiz him and learn what beans he did spill, and how." Everard paused. "To be quite fair, he did have to show a bit of occult power—forecasting events now and then, that kind of thing, if he was to advance within the Templars in anything like a reasonable time. Similar claims were common throughout the Middle Ages, and winked at if a blueblood thought they were genuine and useful to him. Marlow had permission to do it. Probably he overdid it.

"Anyhow, he got this knight, one Fulk de Buchy, believing that disaster with the king and the Inquisition was imminent. The conditioning wouldn't let him go into detail, and my guess is that Fulk realized it'd take impossibly long to get the ear of the Grand Master and convince him, if it could be done at all. However that is, what happened was that Fulk nabbed Marlow, with the idea of turning him over to the authorities as a sorcerer if the dire prediction came true. He could hope it'd count in the Templars' favor, show they actually were good Christians and so on."

"Hmm." Wanda frowned. "How does the Patrol know this?"

"Why, naturally, Marlow has a miniature radiophone in a crucifix he always carries. Nobody would take that away from him. Once he was locked up alone, he called the milieu base and told them his problem."

"Sorry. I'm being stupid."

"Nonsense." Everard strode across to lay a hand on her shoulder. She smiled at him. "You're simply not accustomed to the devious ways of the Patrol, even after the experiences you've had."

Her smile vanished. "I hope this operation of yours will be . . . devious, not dangerous," she said slowly.

"Aw, now, don't worry. You don't get paid for it. All I have to do is snatch Marlow out of his room."

"Then why do they want
you
to do it?" she challenged. "Any officer could hop a timecycle into there, take him aboard, and hop back out."

"Um-m, the situation is a bit delicate."

"How?"

Everard sought his drink again and paced as he talked. "That's a critical point in a critical timespan. Philip isn't simply wrecking the Templars, he's undermining his feudal lords, drawing more and more power to himself. The Church, too. I said he has Pope Clement in his pocket. The Babylonian Captivity of the Popes in Avignon begins during Philip's reign. They'll return to Rome eventually, but they'll never be the same. In other words, what's in embryo there is the modern, almighty state, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Stalin, IRS." Everard considered. "I don't say that aborting it might not be a nice idea in principle, but it's part of our history, the one the Patrol is here to preserve."

"I see," Wanda replied low. "This calls for a top-notch operator. All kinds of hysteria about the Templars, fanned by the king's party. Any incident that looked like sorcery in action—or divine intervention, for that matter, I suppose—it could make the whole scene explode. With unforeseeable consequences to later events. We can't afford to blunder."

"Yeah. You are a smart girl. At the same time, you understand, we've got to rescue Marlow. He's one of ours. Besides, if he gets questioned under torture . . . he can't admit to the fact of time travel, but what the Inquisition can wring out of him could lead it to our other agents. They'd skip, sure, but that would be the end of our presence in Philip's France. And it is, I repeat, a milieu we need to keep a close eye on."

"We did remain there, though. Didn't we?"

"Yes. In our history. That doesn't mean we inevitably did. I have to make certain."

Wanda shuddered. Then she rose, went to him, took his pipe from him and laid it in an ashtray, caught both his hands in hers, and said almost calmly, "You'll come home safe and successful, Manse. I know you."

She did not know that he would. The hazards of paradox and the wounds to the soul would be overmuch, did Time Patrol people go back to visit their beloved dead or forward to see what was to become of their beloved living.

HARFLEUR, WEDNESDAY, 11 OCTOBER 1307

The chief seaport of northwestern France was a logical site for operations headquarters. Where men and cargoes arrived from many different lands and internationally ranging bargains were struck, occasional strange features, manners, or doings drew relatively scant attention. Inland, all except criminals lived in a tightly pulled net of regulations, duties, social standing, tax collection, expectations of how to act and speak and think—"sort of like late twentieth-century USA," Everard grumbled to himself. It made discretion difficult, often precarious.

Not that it was ever easy, even in Harfleur. Since first Boniface Reynaud came here from his birthtime nine hundred years futureward, he had spent two decades creating the career of Reinault Bodel, who worked his way from youthful obscurity to the status of a respectable dealer in wool. He did it so well that nobody wondered much about a dockside shed that he kept locked. Suffice it that he had freely shown the proper officials it was empty; if it stood idle, that was his affair, and indeed he talked about someday expanding his business. Nor did anybody grow unduly suspicious of the outsiders who came and went, conferring alone with him. He had chosen his servants, laborers, apprentices, and wife most carefully. To his children he was a kindly father, as medieval fathers went.

Everard's timecycle appeared in the secret space about 9 A.M. He let himself out with a Patrol key and walked to the merchant's place. Big in his own era, gigantic in this, he left a wake of stares. However, his rough garb suggested he was a mariner, likeliest English, not one to mess with. He had sent a dispatch capsule ahead and was admitted immediately to Maistre Bodel's upstairs parlor. Its door closed behind him.

In one corner were a high stool and a table cluttered with things pertaining to business and religion or personal items—ledgers, quills, an inkwell, assorted knives, a fanciful map, a small image of the Virgin, on and on. Otherwise the chamber was rather stately. A single window admitted sufficient light but no real view of the outside, for the glass in the cames, although reasonably clear, was blurringly wavy. It was noise that seeped through, Asianlike clamor of the street below, mumble and bustle of work within, once bell-thunder from the cathedral nearby. Smells were of wool, smoke, bodies, and clothes not washed very often. Yet, beneath everything, Everard had a sense of crackling energy. Harfleur—Hareflot, they still called it, as had its Norman founders—was a rookery of merchant adventurers. From harbors like this, a few lifetimes hence, men would set sail for the New World.

He took a chair across the table from Reynaud's. They had backs, armrests, and cushions, an unusual luxury. After a few hasty courtesies, he snapped in Temporal, "What can you tell me about Marlow and his situation?"

"When last he called, the situation appeared unchanged," replied the portly man in the fur-trimmed robe. "He is confined to the strongroom. It has a pallet for him to sleep on. His guards bring him food and water twice a day, and at such times a boy empties his chamber pot for him. They speak to him no more than is barely necessary. I think my message described the neighbors as being wary of the Templars and therefore leaving them strictly alone."

"M-hm. But what about Marlow? Has he told you how much information he let slip, and in what style he did it?"

"That is our main concern, of course. Correct?" Reynaud rubbed his chin. Everard heard the bristles scratching; contemporary razors didn't shave smooth. "He dares not speak to us at length or often. A listener at the door could too easily realize that he isn't actually at prayer, and so may be talking to a familiar spirit or casting a spell or the like. From what he has said, and what he earlier entered in his periodic reports—until recently, he was careful. You know he had leave to make a few predictions, describe a few events in distant places, et cetera. He explained this to the Templars partly as dreams and visions, partly as astrology. Both are everywhere taken seriously; and the Templars are especially disposed to occultism."

Everard raised his brows. "You mean they are, in fact, doing forbidden things?"

Reynaud shook his head. "No. At least, not to any great degree. Everybody nowadays is superstitious. Heresy is widespread, if mostly covert; likewise witchcraft and other pagan survivals. Heterodoxy in a thousand different forms is almost universal among the illiterate majority, ignorant of orthodox theology. The Templars have long been exposed to Islam, not always in a hostile fashion, and the Muslim world is full of magicians. It is no surprise that their leaders, their intellectuals, developed certain ideas and practices that they feel are legitimate but had better not be made public. Marlow's accounts of these are fascinating."