Time's Chariot (11 page)

The verdict and the sentence came very soon
after, and while the Correspondent could have
broken free, he chose not to. Too many people, a
major hue and cry if he got away, more likely
a pistol ball in the back. And then came that crack
to the head that caught even him by surprise, and
he woke up in the cell.

Robert Marks stirred in his sleep, looked up and
convulsed. The Correspondent reached down and
hauled him out of bed. The woman next to Marks
opened her mouth to scream, and the
Correspondent squeezed her throat with his free
hand just long enough to make her pass out harmlessly.
Then he looked back at Marks, and smiled.

'Wh–who are you?' Marks whispered, and only
then did it occur to the Correspondent that all the
bygoner could see with his normal, unaugmented
vision was a shadow.

'Don't you remember me, Mr Marks?' he said
pleasantly. He had had no idea where Marks might
live; it had seemed a reasonable guess to look up in
the attic of Bacon's own residence, and it had paid
off.

'You!' There was total despair in the man's
moan. The witch he had sent to the gallows had
come for him. 'I am dead.'

'That's a point of view.' The Correspondent
looked around him. The room was not large and
the bed took up most of it. 'We'll sit here, Mr
Marks, and at the slightest hint of resistance on
your part, the tiniest thought of raising a hue and
cry, I will kill you and drag your soul down to be
feasted upon by my lord the master of darkness and
chaos. I make myself clear?'

They sat facing each other on the edge of the
bed. Marks was bolt upright, rigid in the moonlight.

'Mr Marks, you have compromised my mission.
My masters were most definite that I should remain
undetected,' the Correspondent said truthfully.
'However, I will let you live if you answer some
questions. Tell me about the third man you saw in
your lord's room with us.'

Marks' eyes bulged. 'Sir?'

'A simple enough question. Tell me about him.
What did he look like?'

'Look like, sir?'

'For God's sake answer the question, man, it's
simple enough!' the Correspondent snapped. He
used the language of the Home Time, and to Marks
it was the unearthly gabble of Hades. The steward
almost fainted. 'Do not provoke me, Mr Marks,' the
Correspondent said more quietly, in English. 'Now,
what was this man wearing?'

'He was – he was dressed like . . . like you, sir. A
doublet, a tunic, a sword . . .'

'He was unremarkable? You would walk past him
in the street and not notice?'

'Why, yes, sir.'

The Correspondent had to remember that
Marks had only seen the man through a crack in
the door. A perfect description was unlikely. 'You
said at the trial that I shouted,' he said.

'Yes, sir . . .'

'In this strange language.'

'Yes, sir.' Marks' voice trembled.

The Correspondent shut his eyes as he tried,
desperately tried, to remember. There was the ring
of conviction in Marks' tone: the steward still
believed everything he was saying. And the
Correspondent, who had been perhaps one tenth
convinced when he gained entry to the Marks'
room that evening, was now nine tenths convinced.

He tried for another five minutes, but could get
nothing more out of the man that had not already
been said in court.

'I am leaving now, Mr Marks,' he said. 'I'm bored
of this world and I am returning to the nether
regions of fire and damnation, where the demons
play with their pitchforks and the souls of men who
betray them. Do not mention to anyone that I was
here.'

He reached out and sent Marks the same way as
his wife. Then he walked to the window and looked
up at the moon. He made contact and the familiar
tone rang out between his ears.

'RC/1029,' he said, 'requesting assistance.'

'
State nature of problem, RC/1029
,' said the neutral
voice in his head. It was as uninterested as ever. The
Correspondent had thought that for this, his first
ever contact that wasn't just to file a report, it might
be different. Clearly not.

'I have a problem with my memory,' he said. 'I
am having difficulty remembering an individual.'

'
Diagnostic solutions are available for downloading
,'
said the voice of the lunar station.

'Please download them. How do I run them?'

'
They are self executing. Downloading and running
now
.' There was a pause, and then it was as if the
blood was roaring in his ears. The noise grew
louder and louder. He winced, and gritted his
teeth, and put his hands over his ears but to no
avail. Now the noise seemed to be vibrating his
entire cranium from the inside.

Suddenly it stopped.

'
Existence of short and long term memory block confirmed
,'
said the lunar station. '
Cause of blockage
unknown
.'

'Can you remove it?'

'
It is possible blockage may be self-induced due to
previous psychic trauma
,' said the station. '
A defence
mechanism exists in all Correspondents for such an
eventuality
.'

In other words, he might have flipped and the
block was the only thing keeping him sane. The
Correspondent shut his eyes. 'Do it,' he said.

'
It is done
.'

'I don't feel any different.'

'
Effects will become noticeable over a short period of
time. Diagnostic solutions are now removed
.'

'Thank you,' the Correspondent said. 'RC/1029
signing off.'

He turned from the window to look at the two
still forms on the bed, then left the house. By sunrise
he was out of London, heading north into
Hertfordshire.

And by sunrise he had remembered. It had all
come back. He remembered the man appearing,
and he remembered it hadn't been the first time.
For six centuries he had been roaming this earth,
obeying the promptings at the back of his mind to
seek out certain people of a philosophical bent and
interview them; and every time he had interviewed
a philosopher, the man had appeared with his
mind-jamming device and his blue crystal. The
Middle East, France, Germany, Spain, Africa,
England – the man had always been there.
Avicenna, Anselm, Abelard, Maimonides, Albertus
Magnus, Roger Bacon, Siger, Scotas . . . and others,
most lately Francis Bacon.

This time-travelling Home Timer. This lying
time-travelling Home Timer, because one of the
things that had kept the Correspondent going
when times got hard had been the promise that if
he made it to the twenty-first century, he would
return to the Home Time, and there was no other
way home. But now it seemed he could be brought
back at any time.

He still had no idea what the man's mission was.
Did every correspondent get this treatment? Were
the messages he had been sending to the lunar
station a waste of time?

No, because the stranger had done nothing to
him, the Correspondent, except take his memory
of each event. It had always been the philosopher
who received his fuller attentions – a blue crystal,
which turned red when applied to the head.

So the stranger's purpose was a mystery, but the
Correspondent remembered him now. He remembered,
and he was already planning what to do next
time, because now he had seen the pattern he had
a pretty good idea when the next time might be.

The air that gusted past Jontan's face was heavy
with moisture and laced with salt that kept his
mouth permanently dry. It roared in his ears. In
his experience, air moved at a sedate pace at the
whims of the weather monitoring stations: it was
horrible to imagine it rushing by like this naturally.

Everything was grey: the clouds overhead, the
sea to his left and the coarse, scrubby grass he was
walking on along the cliff path. The one consolation
– no, two consolations were that Sarai was
there too, and she was walking slightly ahead of
him, which meant he could indulge in his usual
favourite pastime of looking at her. Like him, she
was wearing a borrowed thick, wind- and waterproof
jacket. It did her no justice, but he knew the
outline within well enough to let his imagination
do the rest.

She stopped and looked back along the cliff
path. They both had caps on with flaps pulled down
over the ears and she peered at him from under the
peak of hers. 'Come on, Jon,' she said. He trotted
the next couple of steps to catch her up, and
together they followed after Mr – 'I doubt I'm a
Commissioner any more' – Daiho, who strolled
thirty feet ahead.

It was he who had insisted they come for a walk
with him before their evening meal – 'before we all
go stir crazy'. Mr Daiho's patrician instincts seemed
to be taking over and with no one else to sponsor
here in the Dark Ages, he had naturally adopted
them, even though Mr Scott was their actual
employer. Patricians, Jontan thought vaguely, could
probably sponsor whom they liked. He had never
thought it might be an issue in his own life.

And Mr Daiho had a point. He had been spending
fifteen, twenty hours a day for the last month
symbed up to the kit they had brought with them,
taxing their one symb junction to its limits, while
the two journeymen did their best in these
primitive conditions to keep the gear going and the
cultures in the tank alive. (As opposed to Mr Scott,
Jontan thought as darkly as he dared, who as far
as Jontan could see had come along to this
benighted time purely for the fun of it.) Perhaps
they indeed needed the break.

But going on a walk in this storm was another
matter, though Mr Daiho said it was a perfectly
normal May day. Maybe they were going stir crazy,
but at least back in the hotel they were indoors and
protected from the elements and supplied with
such creature comforts as this whenever-it-was time
could provide. But when a patrician suggested
something . . .

A stone pillar loomed on the cliff top ahead, and
he wondered if this was their destination. Jontan
fixed his mind on the pillar and carefully put everything
else out of his mind: the men who walked a
discreet distance behind them on the coast path;
the flying machine – telihop— . . . helit— . . . helicopter,
that was it – that hovered to their left over
the sea; the precipitous drop over the edge of the
cliffs next to them, without any form of agrav for
public safety . . . why, he just had to wander some
twenty feet off course and he would fall horribly to
his death on the rocks below.

'Look at this!' Mr Daiho had, indeed, stopped at
the pillar and was waiting for them to catch up. It
was twice his height and four-sided, and it sat on a
stone base by the edge of the cliff. 'I brought you
two here for a reason.'

They looked politely at the pillar. The escort and
the helicopter had both stopped as well, still keeping
their relative distances. There was a plaque on
each side of the pillar, engraved metal lettering
which Jontan couldn't read.

'We were all born in the Home Time,' Mr Daiho
said, 'and we're used to being able to symb any item
of information from any part of the world. Can you
imagine a world where that isn't possible?'

Yes, because we're in one
, Jontan thought. He was
getting used to it but it was like losing one of his
natural senses. He still caught himself trying to
symb a simple command to the lighting, or put a
message through to Sarai. The kit they had brought
with them only had a few frequencies available,
supported by the symb junction. It wasn't intended
for idle chit-chat.

'But our world was without anything like that for
thousands of years,' Mr Daiho went on. 'At the end
of the century before this one the bygoners finally
got the hang of global networking and they owed it
all to a man named Marconi, who arranged for the
first radio signal to be sent across the Atlantic ocean
to Newfoundland.' They both looked blank.
'Designated wilderness area north of Appalachia,'
he said. He pointed out to sea. 'Keep going west,
and you'll get there eventually. The signal was sent
from this point. Remember, no satellites in those
days. No cabling. No signal boosters every ten feet.
This was literally just an electromagnetic wave, no
words, no images, no text. It went up into the
atmosphere, and it bounced off the ionosphere,
and it came down to earth two thousand miles away.
It was sent and received by machinery that weighed
a ton and was powered by generators which burnt
fossil fuel. And it was a technical triumph, an
unprecedented application of technology, every bit
as significant as Morbern's work or the work we're
doing here. I thought you should see this because
it's part of the heritage of every human being who
has lived since.'

He looked fondly at the monument for a while,
then reached out to touch it. He stood in silent
reverie for a moment longer while the journeymen
shuffled their feet, then turned back the way they
had come. 'Back we go,' he said. He threw a glance
at the escort and the helicopter. 'We don't want to
inconvenience our hosts, do we?' He set off back
down the cliff path without a backwards glance.
Jontan and Sarai looked at each other, then turned
to follow.

The path dipped down into a sandy bay and rose
up on the other side. The white bulk of the hotel
stood at the end of it, at the top of the cliff. As they
started on the downward leg to the beach, Jontan
finally grew tired of the fact that his elbow was
constantly rubbing Sarai's as they walked, so he
pulled his hand from his pocket and took hold of
hers. She seemed surprised but then she smiled at
him and they continued walking like that in silence,
while suddenly the day seemed less grey than
before.

Over the tinkle of glasses, the gentle background
violins and the soft hum of chatting, laughing
voices there was something else. Phenuel Scott
sneaked a glimpse past the guard who stood at the
entrance of the alcove and took in his fellow diners.

Yes, there was something else, and that something
was power. These bygoners were the
patricians of the day. There was a casual authority
about them all, shown in the calm way they could
deal with the waiters that fussed and served around
them. It showed in the sheer lack of ostentation: at
this point in the twenty-first century, flummery had
gone out of fashion and both sexes wore variations
on the theme of dinner jackets. No one here had to
impress or flaunt themselves. These people were
the rulers, and Scott felt that he had come home.

'Mr Scott?' Two men had come into the alcove
and the lead one fairly reeked of power. Scott
recognized him from his pictures. A square, broad-shouldered
man, holding out his hand. 'Matthew
Carradine. It's a pleasure to meet you at last.'

He turned briefly to the man at his side – the
same height but managing to look smaller, nondescript
– and murmured something. The other
nodded and withdrew to a nearby table while
Carradine turned his attention to his guest.

A waiter materialized to pull Carradine's chair
out for him and one of the richest men on Earth,
whose corporation would soon dominate half of
what the bygoners called the western world, sat
down opposite Scott.

'And how was the flight from Cornwall?'
Carradine said.

'Very pleasant,' said Scott. 'A bit longer than I'm
used to.' A Home Time taxi could have done the
trip from Cornwall to Paris in a couple of minutes,
far more quietly and in a lot more comfort.

'I'm sorry.' Carradine gestured for the crew of
waiters lurking in the background to begin. One
of them poured the drinks, others laid out cutlery
and plates and served the aperitifs. Carradine
raised his glass. 'To you and your work, Mr Scott,
whatever that is.'

Scott returned the toast and, since Carradine was
so openly appraising him, trying to assess him, he
returned the favour.

'We must seem very primitive,' Carradine said,
eyebrow raised and a slight smile on his face.

'BioCarr? The height of sophistication for this
time,' said Scott.

Carradine seemed to sense he was being very
gently mocked. 'We're very proud of what we've
accomplished but there's still a lot of work to be
done,' he said.

Scott looked up at the ceiling, hamming the look
of concentration on his face. 'Let's see,' he said.
'Phase One – take the governments of the western
world out of the world economy and create your
own. An amazing application of economics and
information technology. Of course, it will ruin
several economies of countries not in the club, but
they will only have to apply for entry.'

Carradine's smile was more fixed. 'Go on,' he said.

'Ah-hum. Work still to be done,' Scott said. 'If I
remember correctly, your present strategy is outlined
in the document
Tactical advance into the
burgeoning economies of South America, eyes Grade
fifteen-plus only
. The first wave will be in the form of
artificial intelligences to be released into the net
on—' He looked down; Carradine was almost
choking on his wine. 'Did I get it right?'

'You know you did.' Carradine dabbed his
napkin to his lips. 'That's top secret. I suppose you
saw it in a museum somewhere?'

'Something like that.' Scott kept his gaze steady.
Carradine would know the importance of powerplay.
He would understand what was going on.

Sure enough, Carradine was half smiling back,
and with genuine amusement. 'This is fascinating,'
he said. 'You know the full history of BioCarr before
it's even happened. You know if the next phase will
work. You know how long BioCarr will last. You
probably know when and how I die.'

'Not how, but otherwise, all of the above,' Scott
said.

'And you're not going to tell me.'

'It would make no difference if I did, but no, I'm
not.'

'Your emissary did lay down a few conditions,'
Carradine said, thoughtful. 'If we lay one hand on
you – for example to torture the information I want
out of you, though we'd use something far more
sophisticated and reliable – you call down legions
of angels to smite us. You probably could. On the
other hand, it could be bluff. I do get the feeling
your Home Time doesn't know you're here.'

'I'm sure you have the need-to-know principle in
this century too,' Scott said calmly, and Carradine
leaned back in his seat and shouted with laughter.
Any hint of tension evaporated.

'Mr Scott, we understand each other perfectly.
You've paid us, we provide a service, we don't have
to understand or like it. Pure capitalism.'

The first course arrived; bowls containing a
brown, translucent liquid with a fragrance that was
to die for.

'Beef consommé,' Carradine said. 'I took the
liberty of ordering in advance because I wasn't sure
how familiar you would be with our menus.'

'Thank you,' Scott said, and cautiously dipped
his spoon in. He was an instant convert to bygoner
cuisine after just a few drops on his tongue. The
flavour was suspended with such delicacy that he
felt the liquid in the bowl would flip over into
another state of matter if he touched it. They drank
it in silence.

'Time travel. It's fascinating. It's truly fascinating.'
Carradine shook his head as he put down his
spoon and the waiters rematerialized. 'And I've had
sleepless nights wondering why you came here, of
all the times available to you.'

'You've probably had teams of experts working
on the problem,' Scott said.

'I certainly have. The consensus is that you
wanted to go as far away from your Home Time as
you could, while keeping to a certain technological
minimum –' he looked hopefully at Scott, who kept
his expression deliberately bland – 'but that still
doesn't explain what you want.'

'No, it doesn't,' Scott said.

Carradine changed the subject. 'I was wondering
if your colleagues would be coming this evening,
too.'

Colleagues? For a moment Scott was confused by
the plural, until he realized Carradine was including
Killin and Baiget. They would be fish out of
water here.

'No,' he said, 'they all have work to do.' And
Daiho, the one whom Scott did regard as a
colleague, had made it quite clear that he disapproved
of Scott going off on this trip. The
problem with some College people was that they
couldn't imagine transference actually being any
fun.

'But you don't?'

'The youngsters are our technicians, Mr Daiho is
our . . .' Scott paused for thought. What exactly was
Daiho in the set-up? 'Our philosopher. I'm
management and this is by way of getting to know
our hosts. Good relations.'

'Naturally.'

The second course came. 'This is steak of
ostrich,' Carradine said. 'That's a large bird . . .'

'I do know what an ostrich is,' Scott said, twisting
his mouth in a smile to take any sting out of his
words.

'I'd thought they might be extinct by your time.'

'Nothing's extinct in the Home Time,' Scott
said, and let Carradine work it out for himself. After
a couple of moments the man groaned.

'
Duh
, of course,' he said. 'I wasn't thinking.
Presumably you regularly tuck into filet au
brontosaurus and woolly mammoth steak?'