Legacy (32 page)

Sarnac tried to speak, succeeding on the third attempt. " 'Slipped your mind' my left one!" he exploded. "Tylar, you've got a lot of explaining to do!"

The time traveller sighed. "Yes, I suppose I do owe you an explanation. But we really must be going. Your temporal-distortion implants have only a limited operating time—something had to be sacrificed in exchange for such miniaturization, you know. If I may . . ." He extended his hand to Tiraena, who wordlessly handed over her dagger. It took on the shape of a pocket-sized portal generator. Tylar laid it on the ground, standing close to it so it would be enclosed in the bubble of accelerated time that surrounded him, and the portal appeared. They stepped through to the clearing outside Nantes, where their ship had landed in what seemed like a previous life, leaving the Visigoths to find nothing but the strange woman's dagger.

The Visigoths left it lying untouched on the ground, for fear of contamination with witchcraft.

"I'm afraid I haven't . . ."

"Tylar," Sarnac said from his slumped posture in the chair in the little lakeside pavilion in Tylar's private universe, "if you tell us one more time that you're afraid you haven't been entirely candid with us, I'm going to take that thing"—he indicated the mutable device that now lay on the table—"and shove it up your ass, and we'll see what it turns into
then
!"

"Ahem! Well, your annoyance is understandable. As I've admitted, you deserve an explanation. But before I begin . . . think back a moment. In all your time in this era, you haven't asked me—or even yourselves—any of the philosophical questions implicit in the concept of time travel. Yet you're both intelligent people. Haven't you ever wondered about things like the Grandfather Paradox, as I believe it's called?" He leaned back and waited for an answer, smiling.

"Well, of course," Tiraena began.

"Sure," Sarnac chimed in, straightening up a little. "In fact, we were talking about questions like that aboard the Korvaash ship, just before you showed up. Come to think of it, didn't the subject come up right here, when we were here the first time . . . ?" His voice died, and it was as though a gauzy veil, through which he had been seeing the world, slipped away. He turned to Tiraena, mirroring her wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare.

Tylar smiled again. "Yes, I see that you remember now. When we were having our first discussion here, it was necessary to place a restraint—or perhaps 'damper' would be a better term—on your natural curiosity about these matters. It was a necessity which I genuinely regretted, for it involved a violation of the ethical restrictions we place on the use of certain . . . capabilities. I solemnly assure you that in all other respects your personalities have been left inviolate."

Sarnac barely heard him, for all the questions he had been prevented from asking, or even wondering about, now flooded in. "Yeah," he finally breathed. "All this time I've been blundering around the past like a bull in a china shop, never even wondering whether I was changing my own past, maybe killing one of my own ancestors in battle! Never even considering the question of how time travel could be possible in a universe of cause and effect! Tiraena, how did you phrase it when we were talking to the Interrogator?"

" 'Reality protects itself.' It's been a basic tenet of Raehaniv thinking on the subject for a long time."

"Well," Tylar said, "it's absolutely correct. The answer to all your questions lies in just
how
reality protects itself.

"Long before I was born, my people learned how to travel in time. Or, rather, they
will
learn." He shook his head in annoyance. "The lack of certain essential tenses in English poses a very real problem in discussions of . . ."

"Tylar," Tiraena began in a tone of awful warning.

"Well, I'll use the past tense for clarity. Those first time travellers knew that 'branches of time' and 'alternate realities' are fantasy. There is but one reality, and they believed that it could not be altered, for the past was fixed. The 'grandfather paradox' was, in their view, a chimera; one
couldn't
go back in time and shoot one's grandfather, simply because one self-evidently
hadn't
. This belief may have held an element of wishful thinking, or even self-justification, for it assured them that their temporal travels could do no harm. But the earliest experimental findings tended to confirm it, causing a philosophical crisis by calling the concept of free will into question.

"But then certain obscure hints began to pile up, leading to a growing realization that history could, indeed, be changed—and that the time travellers had, in fact, been doing it in a multitude of very small ways ever since they had first begun time travelling. Where there had been a philosophical crisis before, this discovery caused a philosophical panic—the majestic structure of reality seemed to be built on sand. But on further reflection it appeared that nothing essential had been changed. So a new theory arose, holding that history has a very tough 'fabric'; if you try to tear it you may break a few threads, but the fabric won't part.

"Then, in a famous incident involving . . . Well, the details wouldn't mean anything to you, it lies too far in your future. Suffice it to say that a certain time traveller impulsively intervened in history in a very important way—not to change it, but to
preserve
it—when faced with a situation in which things could not come out as they were supposed to, without his intervention. The intellectual impact dwarfed all that had gone before. It was realized that while the 'tough fabric' model of history is, in general, correct, there are certain periods when the fabric is weak, even frayed. During such periods, changes that would normally be inconsequential can have vast and far-reaching effects."

"So," Tiraena interrupted, "you're saying that both sides of the inevitable-course-of-history controversy are right, but for different eras?"

"You might say that. I've never much liked the 'fabric' analogy that has become an inescapable part of the jargon. I prefer to think of history as possessing tremendous inertia—but sometimes its course requires it to turn a corner. And as it is doing so, a minimal amount of force, correctly applied, could deflect that course.

"But, to continue, the incident to which I refer had a second, even more momentous intellectual consequence, which set our civilization on the road it has travelled ever since. Or, more correctly, it made us realize that on the day of our first time-travel experiment we had unwittingly set our own feet on that road, and that there was no turning back. For that history-preserving intervention forced our thinkers to recognize that the time travellers had become a
part
of the history they had thought they were merely observing. But with a very special quality: the knowledge of what had transpired—what
must
have transpired—in the history of which they were themselves the culmination. Out of sheer self-preservation, we had to not merely observe the past, but
police
it. We had to determine which were the unstable periods of history—the areas where the fabric was weak—and monitor them in case intervention was necessary to keep history on course.

"So you see, Tiraena, you're quite right: reality protects itself. I and my people are the instrument it has fashioned with which to do so."

Sarnac forced his brain, staggering under a kind of conceptual overload, to function. "But, Tylar, what does this have to do with what
we've
been put through?"

Tylar spread his hands. "Isn't that obvious? This era is one of the weakest parts of the historical fabric, which is troublesome for us because it's so poorly documented. Investigating it, we quickly determined that intervention was required to preserve certain extremely important resonances in later Western culture—specifically, the fact that Sarmatian legendry will give shape to the Arthurian story. For it became apparent that a key figure in this development was a temporally displaced person from the twenty-third century."

"You mean . . . ?"

"Yes." Tylar nodded. "You. There seemed no other possible way you could be in this time, so we had to make certain that you were. History required it." He paused reflectively. "Most of the elements of the story will be assimilated naturally. The Grail legend, for example: the Sarmatian legends of the magical cup called the
Amonga
will blend into the Christian tradition that is already present in Britain"—Tiraena nodded slowly—"and give it mythic form. But certain other elements are your doing. Oh, yes," he smiled, "Kai will get back to Britain. The story will be passed on."

"But, but Tylar, anybody could have done what I did!"

"Ah, but 'anybody'
didn't
do it.
You
did. Knowing this, we had to make certain you were there to do it."

Sarnac shook his head slowly like a punch-drunk boxer. " 'Beyond the proper ken of mortals,' " he quoted softly. "Artorius was right, Tylar. You people have taken too much upon yourselves. Haven't you ever wondered what would happen if you simply stopped policing history? Maybe reality would take care of itself."

"Perhaps—but we don't dare find out. There's an old saying that the only thing more dangerous than riding a tiger is trying to dismount."

"But you don't really know, do you? You stood by, and let Artorius fail for the sake of a theory!"

"Let him fail? If necessary I was prepared to intervene to
ensure
his failure!" He met their shocked looks with a gaze that had nothing of the absentminded professor about it.

"But why?" Sarnac groped for words. "In a world run by barbarians and fanatics, he was the only man with the inclination and the ability to do something worthwhile! Do you
want
the Dark Ages that are coming in Europe?"

"Oh, I'm quite aware of his extraordinary qualities. In fact, he's one of the few legendary personages—Charlemagne is another—who was actually greater in life than in legend. This, even though he will come through the legend mill looking better than most similar figures; Charlemagne, for example, appears in the Carolingian Cycle as a silly old fool. It was precisely his capacity for greatness that made it
necessary
that he fail." Tylar took a breath. "Recall what I said earlier about the instability of history's course in certain eras. Later ages will persuade themselves that the breakup of the Roman Empire was inevitable. And yet the Chinese Empire, which has also collapsed as a consequence of the Cavalry Revolution, will be reunited in the next century by Yang Chien. It would be harder to reunify the Roman world, which lacks China's inherent unity. But it could be done. Some later historians will speculate that Charlemagne could have played Yang Chien's role in the West by conquering Byzantium. Our projections indicate otherwise; by his lifetime, the opportunity will be gone. The 'fabric' of that era's history will be too strong to tear. But in this era, when matters are still in a state of flux . . ." He looked at them solemnly. "Those same projections—using methodology which I won't try to describe, for it would mean nothing to you—indicate that Artorius was the right man in the right place at the right time. He never really had imperial ambitions, but each of his moves led him inevitably to the next—we heard him on that subject. If his Gallic campaign had succeeded, there is a strong possibility that he would have gone on to restore the Western Empire!"

"That's bad?" Tiraena asked hesitantly.

"Catastrophic!" Tylar's vehemence wasn't like him at all. "Don't you realize . . . ? Well, perhaps you don't. But carry the analogy with China one step further. It will be reunified—but the price of unity will be stasis. The same fate would overtake a restored Western Empire. The late Roman educated class, people like Sidonius and"—a wry smile—"Tertullian, are as hostile to innovation, to any departure from an idealized Classical past, as any Neo-Confucian mandarin. But that class will now cease to exist as Europe devolves into a chaos, upon which no single pattern can be imposed. It will be ugly. But out of it will emerge that Western civilization which, for all its endemic war, its political stupidity, its regrettable tendencies toward religious and racial bigotry, will nevertheless give birth to the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the first fundamentally new departure in human history since Neolithic man thought of growing his food instead of gathering it.

"The irony is that the West will do so using Chinese inventions which China itself could not permit to be used because they would have upset its Confucian equilibrium! You see, inventiveness is not enough. There must also be a society which rewards innovation—and you have no idea how rare such societies are. One is about to arise here in Europe. If it did not, the odds are overwhelming that Varien hle'Morna would find no advanced civilization here with which to break the Korvaasha, only a world lying defenseless in its stagnant Medievalism!"

"All because the good guys won," Sarnac breathed.

"It's a not uncommon form of irony. Think back before the Battle of Angers. Given the power to do so, you would have unhesitatingly wiped out every Saxon in the world. But in future centuries the descendants of this era's Saxons are going to invent parliamentary government, trial by jury, and the language of Shakespeare!" He shook his head. "No, the only safe course for us is to preserve the history we know—the history which will produce us, far in your future, from a fusion of Terrans and Raehaniv." He smiled at their expressions. "Yes; I really am telling all, you see. Your alliance will win the war . . . thanks to you. For of all the crucial periods of history—the 'weak fabric' areas—your own age is by far the most crucial of all. We've had to be especially careful in policing that era. Never has there been, nor will there be, a time when individuals acting in their own small ways can produce such cosmic consequences. The slightest failure of anyone involved"—he met their eyes gravely—"to perform up to his or her ultimate potential would have incalculable results. In fact, I simply don't know what the outcome would be, for we would be faced with the grandfather paradox on a stupendous scale. If your two peoples failed to come together as history requires, then we could not exist . . . and therefore our Raehaniv ancestors could never have existed in the first place. After all, we created them."