Read Times Without Number Online
Authors: John Brunner
Times Without Number (5 page)
The Jesuit hesitated. Finally he said in a gruff tone, "More than
thirty Licentiates are under investigation because their incomes are
disproportionately high."
"Thirty!" Don Miguel's dismay registered in his voice. The Prince,
finding that his pipe had gone out, felt for means to relight it and
spoke up gloomily.
"It wouldn't be so bad if all that was involved were -- uh --
unofficial
observation
. I mean, I've taken my father on the odd trip myself,
without any harm being done."
"But that's not quite the same thing," Don Miguel said slowly. The Prince
chuckled.
"Yes, kings get away with a good deal! But as I've often been told by
Father Ramón -- very rightly -- divine law doesn't recognize royalty
as something special.
I
know that. The people we're talking about,
unfortunately, seem not to. It seems that they've allowed some of these
illegal travellers to bring back souvenirs of their trip."
Father Ramón nodded. "Of which this great golden mask is presumably one."
A chill passed down Don Miguel's spine. He said, "Is there then a --
a regular trade in such contraband? Why, the implications are
incalculable!"
"True," confirmed Father Ramón. "Luckily, however, this is as yet the
largest single item we've run across; the remainder have been intrinsically
valueless, mere curios." He leaned back and set his fingertips together,
elbows on the arms of his chair.
"Were it nothing more than household garbage, though, we would still need
to be worried about the importation of anything we hadn't licensed. Our
rules are specific and strict: we import only items we can establish as
having disappeared from their own day -- treasure buried by someone who
died without divulging his secret, for example, or something mentioned
in contemporary annals as having been lost without trace. This rule is of
course not entirely reliable, since we cannot be sure that some of these
'lost' items were not in fact removed by future intervention. However, we
must trust in the divine plan for the universe." He gave a skeletal smile.
"The removal of something like this mask," Don Miguel ventured, "must
inevitably have dangerous consequences . . . ?" He gestured towards
it. "The mass alone is enormous!'
"Oh, it may turn out that the mask is recorded as having been melted
down, so that the loss of simple mass -- even in the form of gold --
could pass unnoticed. I'm praying to that end, for it would offer the
simplest solution. What is truly frightening is the psychological aspect
of the matter. Such a mask as this would not have been a mere ornament,
but the object of pagan veneration, known to thousands of people in its
own time. It is not interference with things, or even with human beings,
but with the development of ideas which implies the greatest potential
alteration of history. You follow me?"
"I think so," Don Miguel muttered, feeling chilled to the marrow by the
calm unemotional words.
"Suppose we find its loss recorded, Father?" the Prince interjected. "Does
that mean we can keep it after all?"
The Jesuit shrugged. "As yet, I dare not say. We would then have to
determine whether history had in fact been changed by interference, and
if so whether truth demanded restitution of the former state of affairs."
The smile with which he accompanied the remark was actually quite pleasant,
but it was no more comforting to Don Miguel than the grin of a death's-head.
He said, "Father, I'm glad I'm involved on the practical side of the
Society. My mind boggles at the depth of these philosophical problems."
"You may not be so pleased tomorrow," rumbled the Prince. "We're charging
you with a problem which is deep enough in its own way." He swept the
others with an inquiring glance, and received confirmatory nods. "You
are to discover the origin in our time of this mask, and identify the
stranger Higgins bought it from. And you have two weeks in which to
complete the task."
Two weeks! Dismayed, Don Miguel said, "Sir, I -- I feel unworthy of such a
. . ."
The Prince snorted. "Worthy or unworthy, Navarro, you opened up the
case. We're telling you to close it as well!"
VI
In its way the assignment was a signal honour -- if the General Officers
were as concerned as Father Ramón had indicated about illicit
time-travellers and their perilous souvenirs, they would never charge
someone they didn't trust with carrying it out.
But it was also a terrifying burden, and the more Don Miguel reflected
on it, the more qualms he felt.
He was, as he had said, still under thirty; his time licence was little
more than four years old, and his experience of fieldwork had been
confined to a mere five trips, from the last of which he had returned
bearing the scar of the Macedonian battle which would mark his face
until he died, because an extratemporal infection had poisoned it and
the medicines of the Society's doctors had proved impotent to destroy
the germ. (They had found out how to cure the sufferers, but that was
after his own wound had cicatrised.)
Nonetheless, his sense of duty might have carried him to the task with
relative equanimity, had it not been for the fearful news Father Ramón
had imparted to him at the meeting. Thirty Licentiates of the Society
suspected of taking bribes? It was hardly believable! To Don Miguel
timework had something of the air of a sacred trust; one of his lifelong
heroes had always been the Society's founder, Borromeo, whose epochal
discovery in 1892 had filled him with such apprehension that he did not
rest easy until there was Papal supervision of all time apparatus and
organisations existed to control its use. In the Empire, he had founded
the Society of Time, while in the Confederacy of the East an analogous
body called the Temporal College had been established under the Treaty
of Prague.
No sane man, Don Miguel had always thought, would question the need to
regulate time-travel. But now he wondered how much of the rigorously
policed administration he was accustomed to derived from common sense,
and how much from crude raw fear, which familiarity could erode with
the passage of time.
There was no shortage of rational justifications for the Society's rule
confining time-travel to observation without interference; for example,
it had often been pointed out that if such a rule were not made and kept
time-travellers from the future, visiting what to them was the past,
would be noticed in the here-and-now. They had not been -- therefore
the rule was being obeyed.
Given almost a century of routine time-travel, though, it was scarcely
to be marvelled at if that element of caution which was founded on fear
rather than rational judgment were to fade. People were likely to grow
blasé about anything routine, even when not merely their lives but the
very history which led up to them depended on non-interference.
And if the rule were broken wholesale . . .
Don Miguel had inchoate visions of vast areas of time being swept
into some unimaginable vacuum, into the formlessness of absolute
not-being. Contemplating the consequences made his head ache. Like any
other Licentiate, he had struggled through a full three-year course in
the theory of time-travel on top of a regular university education -- for
him, the latter had included history, mathematics and natural philosophy
-- in order to graduate from Probationer to Licentiate status. He had
cracked his skull over the relationship between familiar substantive time,
in which one measured out one's daily life, and hard-to-grasp durative
time in which one experienced events during a time-journey, and he had
written his graduation thesis on the subject of so-called hypertime,
the barrier which prevented a time-traveller returning from the past
from going any further futurewards than the moment "then" reached by
the apparatus which had launched him.
But all these were as nothing compared to the hypothetical complexities
of speculative time, in which events would be otherwise than as history
recounted.
What reality would take the place of his own if someone really smashed
the non-interference rule to bits? Would Jorque be York; would an English
monarch sit the Imperial throne? Would a Mohawk Prince rule New Castile
and call his subjects braves and squaws? Would there -- could there --
be a world in which men travelled into space instead of through time,
by some undreamed-of miracle of propulsion?
But pondering such incredible speculations was not to Don Miguel's
pragmatic taste. After doing his best to discipline his mind into logical
analysis of the implications, he decided he was better employed in action
than in mentation, and accordingly set off for another interview with
the merchant, Higgins.
The guards on the door of Higgins's cell inspected his commission before
admitting him; on discovering that it was over the Prince's own seal,
they gave way with much bowing and scraping. Passing the door, he found
himself in a room which -- by prison standards -- was spacious, though
poorly lit and not at all well ventilated.
In the centre Higgins sat lolling on a chair, his head on one shoulder,
his mouth ajar. He was fastened down with leather straps. At a
table facing him were two inquisitors charged with his interrogation,
conferring in low tones. Their expressions were anxious and they frowned
continually. Upon Don Miguel's entrance they rose to greet him.
"How goes it?" demanded Don Miguel, and they exchanged glances.
"Badly," said the taller of the two at last. "We greatly fear he may
have been bewitched."
For a second Don Miguel wondered if the remark was meant for a joke.
When he realised it was not, his heart sank. Was it not bad enough
to have tangled with the paradoxes of temporal interference -- must
he now confront the shady, seldom-acknowledged borderline universe
of enchantment?
Keeping his self-control with some effort, he said, "How so?"
"We have used all means that are lawful to unlock his tongue," the
shorter inquisitor said. "We have employed liquors of divers kinds and
we have used mirrors and pendulums. Since he is not convicted of any
offence as yet we are forbidden to try more drastic methods. So far,
all we have established is that while he remembers purchasing the mask
he cannot recall the face of the man who sold it, nor his name, nor any
clue to his identity."
Don Miguel felt a pang of dismay. He had hoped that at least one fresh
clue would emerge from this interrogation. He said, "Does that mean we
still have nothing concrete except the date of the deal?"
"I'm afraid so," the shorter inquisitor sighed. "And he gave us that
truthfully of his own free will. Have you, though, inquired of the
authorities in Jorque concerning the travellers who registered with them
on or about that date?"
"Of course, but . . ." Don Miguel shrugged. "The person who brought the
mask for sale has not been traced. No doubt he ignored the requirements
of the law."
"The justification of the law lies in men's obedience thereof," said
the taller inquisitor in sententious tones. It was not an observation
which struck Don Miguel as adding very much to the discussion.
He said, "Well, at least you can tell me what kind of enchantment this
villain might have used."
"There are many possibilities. One imagines a drug of some sort, to dull
the will. Or he may have constrained Higgins to look at some bright spot
-- perhaps a reflection on the mask itself -- and then soothed him to
oblivion with gentle words."
"This kind of thing is possible?" Don Miguel demanded.
"Why, surely, sir. Though we prefer that the fact should not be noised
around; you'll understand that these are the techniques we use ourselves
in inquisition, and it would be fatal if people were forewarned about
them."
Don Miguel shook his head in wonder. He found all this barely credible;
however, the inquisitors were experts in their own field, and he was
compelled to take their word.
"Do you still hold out any hope of further progress?" he ventured.
"Very little, sir. Very little indeed -- though of course we shall
continue to try."
If the interrogation of Higgins had reached a dead end, the only thing
to do was to head back to Jorque and continue his investigations on
the spot where the mask had turned up. Accordingly, he left Londres
that same evening by fast coach, and passed a miserably uncomfortable
night in wishing that someone would hit on a safe means of adapting
time apparatus to ordinary land-travel. In extreme emergencies, theory
suggested, it could in fact be used for such a purpose, by employing
the spatial displacement factor; it was not, however, judged safe to
turn this notion into practice, because the travellers must inevitably
arrive a small fraction of a second before leaving their starting-points,
and the effects of this phenomenon were inherently unpredictable.
Therefore there were coaches, with horses to drag them along . . . and
maybe nothing more was needed than better roads, complained Don Miguel's
tortured bones as he made his way after a hasty breakfast from the
staging-inn to the Jorque office of the Society, a great house set in
spacious grounds not far from the cathedral.
Here he was received by an old-young man with a pale face and high,
hesitant voice whose eyes fastened greedily on the Prince's seal at the
foot of Don Miguel's commission. He was probably a failed Licentiate,
Don Miguel diagnosed from his manner and his tone.
"We have much discussed the problem which you are come to look into,"
said the fellow fawningly, having introduced himself as Don Pedro
Diaz. "We are all impressed with the way you saw straight to its heart."
Don Miguel was in no mood for hollow flattery. He countered brusquely,
"It was no more than anyone of intelligence fit to grace the Society must
necessarily have deduced! As yet, moreover, the heart of the matter still
eludes me. Since my departure for Londres, have you found out anything
further concerning the stranger who's alleged to have brought the mask
for sale?"
The other looked disconcerted. "Why, we were not told to do so," he
objected. "Was it not enough to have arrested the merchant Higgins and
his clerks?"
thirty Licentiates are under investigation because their incomes are
disproportionately high."
"Thirty!" Don Miguel's dismay registered in his voice. The Prince,
finding that his pipe had gone out, felt for means to relight it and
spoke up gloomily.
"It wouldn't be so bad if all that was involved were -- uh --
unofficial
observation
. I mean, I've taken my father on the odd trip myself,
without any harm being done."
"But that's not quite the same thing," Don Miguel said slowly. The Prince
chuckled.
"Yes, kings get away with a good deal! But as I've often been told by
Father Ramón -- very rightly -- divine law doesn't recognize royalty
as something special.
I
know that. The people we're talking about,
unfortunately, seem not to. It seems that they've allowed some of these
illegal travellers to bring back souvenirs of their trip."
Father Ramón nodded. "Of which this great golden mask is presumably one."
A chill passed down Don Miguel's spine. He said, "Is there then a --
a regular trade in such contraband? Why, the implications are
incalculable!"
"True," confirmed Father Ramón. "Luckily, however, this is as yet the
largest single item we've run across; the remainder have been intrinsically
valueless, mere curios." He leaned back and set his fingertips together,
elbows on the arms of his chair.
"Were it nothing more than household garbage, though, we would still need
to be worried about the importation of anything we hadn't licensed. Our
rules are specific and strict: we import only items we can establish as
having disappeared from their own day -- treasure buried by someone who
died without divulging his secret, for example, or something mentioned
in contemporary annals as having been lost without trace. This rule is of
course not entirely reliable, since we cannot be sure that some of these
'lost' items were not in fact removed by future intervention. However, we
must trust in the divine plan for the universe." He gave a skeletal smile.
"The removal of something like this mask," Don Miguel ventured, "must
inevitably have dangerous consequences . . . ?" He gestured towards
it. "The mass alone is enormous!'
"Oh, it may turn out that the mask is recorded as having been melted
down, so that the loss of simple mass -- even in the form of gold --
could pass unnoticed. I'm praying to that end, for it would offer the
simplest solution. What is truly frightening is the psychological aspect
of the matter. Such a mask as this would not have been a mere ornament,
but the object of pagan veneration, known to thousands of people in its
own time. It is not interference with things, or even with human beings,
but with the development of ideas which implies the greatest potential
alteration of history. You follow me?"
"I think so," Don Miguel muttered, feeling chilled to the marrow by the
calm unemotional words.
"Suppose we find its loss recorded, Father?" the Prince interjected. "Does
that mean we can keep it after all?"
The Jesuit shrugged. "As yet, I dare not say. We would then have to
determine whether history had in fact been changed by interference, and
if so whether truth demanded restitution of the former state of affairs."
The smile with which he accompanied the remark was actually quite pleasant,
but it was no more comforting to Don Miguel than the grin of a death's-head.
He said, "Father, I'm glad I'm involved on the practical side of the
Society. My mind boggles at the depth of these philosophical problems."
"You may not be so pleased tomorrow," rumbled the Prince. "We're charging
you with a problem which is deep enough in its own way." He swept the
others with an inquiring glance, and received confirmatory nods. "You
are to discover the origin in our time of this mask, and identify the
stranger Higgins bought it from. And you have two weeks in which to
complete the task."
Two weeks! Dismayed, Don Miguel said, "Sir, I -- I feel unworthy of such a
. . ."
The Prince snorted. "Worthy or unworthy, Navarro, you opened up the
case. We're telling you to close it as well!"
VI
In its way the assignment was a signal honour -- if the General Officers
were as concerned as Father Ramón had indicated about illicit
time-travellers and their perilous souvenirs, they would never charge
someone they didn't trust with carrying it out.
But it was also a terrifying burden, and the more Don Miguel reflected
on it, the more qualms he felt.
He was, as he had said, still under thirty; his time licence was little
more than four years old, and his experience of fieldwork had been
confined to a mere five trips, from the last of which he had returned
bearing the scar of the Macedonian battle which would mark his face
until he died, because an extratemporal infection had poisoned it and
the medicines of the Society's doctors had proved impotent to destroy
the germ. (They had found out how to cure the sufferers, but that was
after his own wound had cicatrised.)
Nonetheless, his sense of duty might have carried him to the task with
relative equanimity, had it not been for the fearful news Father Ramón
had imparted to him at the meeting. Thirty Licentiates of the Society
suspected of taking bribes? It was hardly believable! To Don Miguel
timework had something of the air of a sacred trust; one of his lifelong
heroes had always been the Society's founder, Borromeo, whose epochal
discovery in 1892 had filled him with such apprehension that he did not
rest easy until there was Papal supervision of all time apparatus and
organisations existed to control its use. In the Empire, he had founded
the Society of Time, while in the Confederacy of the East an analogous
body called the Temporal College had been established under the Treaty
of Prague.
No sane man, Don Miguel had always thought, would question the need to
regulate time-travel. But now he wondered how much of the rigorously
policed administration he was accustomed to derived from common sense,
and how much from crude raw fear, which familiarity could erode with
the passage of time.
There was no shortage of rational justifications for the Society's rule
confining time-travel to observation without interference; for example,
it had often been pointed out that if such a rule were not made and kept
time-travellers from the future, visiting what to them was the past,
would be noticed in the here-and-now. They had not been -- therefore
the rule was being obeyed.
Given almost a century of routine time-travel, though, it was scarcely
to be marvelled at if that element of caution which was founded on fear
rather than rational judgment were to fade. People were likely to grow
blasé about anything routine, even when not merely their lives but the
very history which led up to them depended on non-interference.
And if the rule were broken wholesale . . .
Don Miguel had inchoate visions of vast areas of time being swept
into some unimaginable vacuum, into the formlessness of absolute
not-being. Contemplating the consequences made his head ache. Like any
other Licentiate, he had struggled through a full three-year course in
the theory of time-travel on top of a regular university education -- for
him, the latter had included history, mathematics and natural philosophy
-- in order to graduate from Probationer to Licentiate status. He had
cracked his skull over the relationship between familiar substantive time,
in which one measured out one's daily life, and hard-to-grasp durative
time in which one experienced events during a time-journey, and he had
written his graduation thesis on the subject of so-called hypertime,
the barrier which prevented a time-traveller returning from the past
from going any further futurewards than the moment "then" reached by
the apparatus which had launched him.
But all these were as nothing compared to the hypothetical complexities
of speculative time, in which events would be otherwise than as history
recounted.
What reality would take the place of his own if someone really smashed
the non-interference rule to bits? Would Jorque be York; would an English
monarch sit the Imperial throne? Would a Mohawk Prince rule New Castile
and call his subjects braves and squaws? Would there -- could there --
be a world in which men travelled into space instead of through time,
by some undreamed-of miracle of propulsion?
But pondering such incredible speculations was not to Don Miguel's
pragmatic taste. After doing his best to discipline his mind into logical
analysis of the implications, he decided he was better employed in action
than in mentation, and accordingly set off for another interview with
the merchant, Higgins.
The guards on the door of Higgins's cell inspected his commission before
admitting him; on discovering that it was over the Prince's own seal,
they gave way with much bowing and scraping. Passing the door, he found
himself in a room which -- by prison standards -- was spacious, though
poorly lit and not at all well ventilated.
In the centre Higgins sat lolling on a chair, his head on one shoulder,
his mouth ajar. He was fastened down with leather straps. At a
table facing him were two inquisitors charged with his interrogation,
conferring in low tones. Their expressions were anxious and they frowned
continually. Upon Don Miguel's entrance they rose to greet him.
"How goes it?" demanded Don Miguel, and they exchanged glances.
"Badly," said the taller of the two at last. "We greatly fear he may
have been bewitched."
For a second Don Miguel wondered if the remark was meant for a joke.
When he realised it was not, his heart sank. Was it not bad enough
to have tangled with the paradoxes of temporal interference -- must
he now confront the shady, seldom-acknowledged borderline universe
of enchantment?
Keeping his self-control with some effort, he said, "How so?"
"We have used all means that are lawful to unlock his tongue," the
shorter inquisitor said. "We have employed liquors of divers kinds and
we have used mirrors and pendulums. Since he is not convicted of any
offence as yet we are forbidden to try more drastic methods. So far,
all we have established is that while he remembers purchasing the mask
he cannot recall the face of the man who sold it, nor his name, nor any
clue to his identity."
Don Miguel felt a pang of dismay. He had hoped that at least one fresh
clue would emerge from this interrogation. He said, "Does that mean we
still have nothing concrete except the date of the deal?"
"I'm afraid so," the shorter inquisitor sighed. "And he gave us that
truthfully of his own free will. Have you, though, inquired of the
authorities in Jorque concerning the travellers who registered with them
on or about that date?"
"Of course, but . . ." Don Miguel shrugged. "The person who brought the
mask for sale has not been traced. No doubt he ignored the requirements
of the law."
"The justification of the law lies in men's obedience thereof," said
the taller inquisitor in sententious tones. It was not an observation
which struck Don Miguel as adding very much to the discussion.
He said, "Well, at least you can tell me what kind of enchantment this
villain might have used."
"There are many possibilities. One imagines a drug of some sort, to dull
the will. Or he may have constrained Higgins to look at some bright spot
-- perhaps a reflection on the mask itself -- and then soothed him to
oblivion with gentle words."
"This kind of thing is possible?" Don Miguel demanded.
"Why, surely, sir. Though we prefer that the fact should not be noised
around; you'll understand that these are the techniques we use ourselves
in inquisition, and it would be fatal if people were forewarned about
them."
Don Miguel shook his head in wonder. He found all this barely credible;
however, the inquisitors were experts in their own field, and he was
compelled to take their word.
"Do you still hold out any hope of further progress?" he ventured.
"Very little, sir. Very little indeed -- though of course we shall
continue to try."
If the interrogation of Higgins had reached a dead end, the only thing
to do was to head back to Jorque and continue his investigations on
the spot where the mask had turned up. Accordingly, he left Londres
that same evening by fast coach, and passed a miserably uncomfortable
night in wishing that someone would hit on a safe means of adapting
time apparatus to ordinary land-travel. In extreme emergencies, theory
suggested, it could in fact be used for such a purpose, by employing
the spatial displacement factor; it was not, however, judged safe to
turn this notion into practice, because the travellers must inevitably
arrive a small fraction of a second before leaving their starting-points,
and the effects of this phenomenon were inherently unpredictable.
Therefore there were coaches, with horses to drag them along . . . and
maybe nothing more was needed than better roads, complained Don Miguel's
tortured bones as he made his way after a hasty breakfast from the
staging-inn to the Jorque office of the Society, a great house set in
spacious grounds not far from the cathedral.
Here he was received by an old-young man with a pale face and high,
hesitant voice whose eyes fastened greedily on the Prince's seal at the
foot of Don Miguel's commission. He was probably a failed Licentiate,
Don Miguel diagnosed from his manner and his tone.
"We have much discussed the problem which you are come to look into,"
said the fellow fawningly, having introduced himself as Don Pedro
Diaz. "We are all impressed with the way you saw straight to its heart."
Don Miguel was in no mood for hollow flattery. He countered brusquely,
"It was no more than anyone of intelligence fit to grace the Society must
necessarily have deduced! As yet, moreover, the heart of the matter still
eludes me. Since my departure for Londres, have you found out anything
further concerning the stranger who's alleged to have brought the mask
for sale?"
The other looked disconcerted. "Why, we were not told to do so," he
objected. "Was it not enough to have arrested the merchant Higgins and
his clerks?"
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