CHAPTER ONE
The immense dome rose above the center of a wide expanse of office buildings, machine shops, living quarters and other facilities, the size of a medium-sized town. Dwarfing even the dome was the antimatter power plant—the only one of its kind allowed on the surface of Earth or any other inhabited planet. Its presence was the reason the installation was located in Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, northwest of Lake Mackay, a region that was practically uninhabited even in the late twenty-fourth century.
All this was what time travel required—or so the Temporal Regulatory Authority had believed until recently.
* * *
“I don’t like it,” muttered Alistair Kung nervously to his two companions, for at least the third time.
They stood in a glass-walled mezzanine, high up inside the dome and overlooking the circular thirty-foot platform that occupied the dome’s center and was its reason for existence. Terraced concentric circles of instrument panels, control consoles and other devices of less obvious function surrounded the platform, giving it the aspect of the stage of a circular theater. Adding to that impression was the tense fixation with which the “audience” of technicians stared at the stage, even though it was pristinely empty of scenery and actors.
“I don’t like it,” Kung repeated. “It’s been too long.” With his portly figure and round Asian-featured face, he suggested an image of Buddha without the serenity; one had to somehow imagine a jittery Buddha. “Besides, I’ve never approved of this business of temporal retrieval devices that can be activated at the mission leader’s discretion. It’s dangerous! I ask you, what’s wrong with the way things have always been done?”
Kyle Rutherford sighed, but kept his sigh inconspicuous. He himself was chief of operations for the Temporal Regulatory Authority, with broad powers. But Kung was a prominent member of the Authority’s governing council. He had to be handled carefully.
“Nothing whatever, Alistair,” he assured Kung smoothly. “And as you know, our normal research expeditions still use the traditional TRDs, set to activate at a prearranged time so we’ll know precisely when to keep the stage clear.” He permitted himself a frosty chuckle, stroking his equally frosty Vandyke. “Wouldn’t do to have two objects occupying the same space at the same time, you know—least of all if one or both of them are living human bodies.”
“Precisely my point! Now we seem to have thrown caution to the winds!”
“This has all been discussed exhaustively before the full council, Alistair,” Rutherford reminded him. “In order for the Temporal Service’s new Special Operations Section to function in its intended role, the mission leader must be given an unprecedented degree of latitude to make decisions on the basis of the actual situation in the field, which only he can know.”
“Ah, yes…the Special Operations Section.” This, clearly, was something else of which Kung did not approve. He had been a moving force behind the formation of a select committee of the council to oversee the Section’s activities. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you, Kyle, about some of the people who’ve been recruited for it lately. Hooligans and roughnecks!”
“Isn’t that a bit strong, Alistair?” Rutherford admonished mildly.
“By no means! Granted, our standards for Temporal Service personnel have always been, of necessity, somewhat elastic. But really—!”
“I grant you that the Special Operations Section’s peculiar functions sometimes require blunt instruments,” Rutherford conceded. “But remember, all personnel selections are subject to a veto by Jason Thanou, the head of the Section. And every Special Operations mission is under the strict control of a Service officer of proven experience and probity. In the case of this particular mission, whose return we are awaiting, the mission leader is Commander Thanou himself.”
“Hmmm.” Kung subsided somewhat, for this was a difficult argument to rebut. “Yes, I suppose Commander Thanou’s record speaks for itself. And of course we all have utmost confidence in him, even though he is, after all, an outworlder.” Kung suddenly and belatedly recalled that the third person present was from the colony world of Arcadia, Zeta Draconis A II. He turned to her with an agonizingly embarrassed smile. “Of course I did not mean to imply that—”
“Of course not, sir.” Chantal Frey showed no signs of having taken offense at Kung’s gaffe. She was a slender, youngish woman with straight dark-brown hair and pale, regular features. Her nondescript appearance was matched by a personality that was quiet to the point of diffidence. But she could be stubborn in her mild way. And she seemed undisturbed by—indeed, barely even conscious of—her somewhat ambivalent status as a returned defector.
She had been a member of an extratemporal expedition Jason Thanou had led to the Greece of 490 B.C. There they had made the shattering discovery that had led to the formation of the Special Operations Section: the Authority was not operating the only temporal displacer on Earth as it had always believed. There was another, using technology that allowed it to be small and energy-efficient enough to be concealable. Even worse, it was operated by a surviving cadre of the Transhuman movement which had been thought to have been extirpated over a century before.
The Transhumanist plot they had uncovered in connection with the Battle of Marathon had been a devious and clever one, and its leader—a certain Franco, Category Five, Seventy-Sixth Degree—had possessed a distinct Satanic charm. Chantal could testify to that, having been seduced by him.
“I understand your concerns, sir,” she assured Kung. “But as you know, procedures have been put in place to minimize the risks. Our research expeditions still proceed as before, committed to the past for a set time, after which their TRDs return them to the displacer stage. But now when they uncover evidence of Transhumanist activity they immediately inform the Authority via message drops.” The leaving of written messages, on extremely durable media, in prearranged and out-of-the-way locations was the only way extratemporal travelers had to communicate with the era from which they had been displaced backward in time. “When such a message is received, a Special Operations unit using the new ‘controllable’ TRDs is sent back to that precise point in time to deal with the situation.”
“At least,” said Kung grudgingly, “it’s not the same people you’re sending back.” One of the Authority’s cardinal rules forbade sending time travellers back to overlapping time frames where they might possibly encounter their own slightly younger selves. He gave Rutherford a look of still-unappeased indignation over the one egregious violation of that rule Rutherford and Jason Thanou had engineered.
“No indeed,” agreed Chantal. “Of course, they work with the academic expedition that is already in place in the milieu, but there can be no objection to that.”
“Possibly not. But…blast it, Kyle, they’re allowed to take modern weapons and equipment into the past! It’s unprecedented!”
“Only very well-disguised weapons and equipment, Alistair, as you know. There’s a workshop here that does nothing but produce such items. And we can hardly limit our people to in-period technology and expect them to go up against the Transhumanists, who have no scruples about such things.”
“And,” Chantal added, “these Special Operations missions, aimed at specific targets, can be accomplished in only a few hours or, at most days. So they are given rigid time limits, which none of them have ever exceeded, and therefore it is not particularly burdensome to keep the displacer stage here open for their return. So you see, sir, all your concerns have been addressed.” All at once, she allowed Kung a glimpse of her easily overlooked determination. “And at any rate, you may recall an old saying about desperate times calling for desperate measures. Remember, it is Transhumanists we are dealing with.”
Kung said nothing, for what she was saying tapped into cultural imperatives so deep as to be beyond argument.
By the last years of the twenty-first century, genetic engineering, bionics, direct neural computer interfacing and nanotechnology had advanced to a level with potentialities that made those of atomic energy seem almost trivial by comparison, for they enabled the human race to transform itself into something other than human. Many in those confused times had reacted with avidity rather than revulsion. The upshot had been the Transhuman movement, which had seized power after a generation and then, for another three generations, made Earth a hell. Weird abominations had proliferated as the Tranhsumanist ruling elite had sought to transform themselves into supermen ruling an anthill society of specialized subhuman castes. The cleansing of Earth—sparked by extrasolar colonists whose ancestors had departed on slower-than-light ships to escape what they could see coming in the early days of the Transhumanist madness, and who now returned on the wings of the negative-mass drive invented on a colony world—had required a bloodbath beyond any in history. Afterwards, the Human Integrity Act had banned all tinkering with the human genotype, all bionic melding of human and machine, and all nanotechnology except for industrial uses, preferably in orbital factories. Never again would humanity listen to the siren song of “improving” itself. Man would remain Man.
Then Jason Thanou had returned from the fifth century B.C. with the news that had ended a century of complacency.
The Transhumanist time travelers could no more change history than anyone else—the poorly understood “Observer Effect” precluded that—but they could subvert it. The past could be changed in ways that created no paradoxes, as the “message drop” system demonstrated. This left the Transhumanists ample scope for the creation of a “secret history,” as they filled the past’s blank spaces with conspiratorial secret societies, genetic time bombs, and so forth—all very long-term, and all timed so as to come to fruition at a future date known as The Day, when it would become apparent that known history had never been anything all along but a façade behind which real history had been slowly and quietly building toward an inevitable Transhumanist triumph.
All this Jason Thanou and his expedition had learned. Chantal, in particular, had learned a great deal from Franco—more than she had thought she had, as it had turned out when professional debriefers had finished with her. Unfortunately, it was all of a general nature. Most unfortunately of all, she had not learned when The Day was scheduled to occur. Franco hadn’t been about to reveal that to any Pug (“product of unregulated genetics,” the scornful Transhumanist epithet for everyone but themselves), however infatuated she might seem.
Pondering the Transhumanists brought a new thought bubbling to the surface of Kung’s mind. “See here, Kyle…if Transhumanist time travelers are operating from the present—“
“We don’t absolutely know that,” Rutherford cautioned. “The Transhumanist expedition Commander Thanou encountered came from slightly in our past…fortunately for him, if you think about it.”
“Yes, yes. But why can’t they go back in time a couple of centuries, to the era when their ideology ruled Earth, and make contact with those rulers, and…?” Kung trailed to a halt, reduced to speechlessness by the implications.
“You forget, Alistair,” said Rutherford in a calming tone, “temporal displacement of objects of significant mass is uncontrollable for a temporal ‘distance’ of three hundred years into the past.” (And only the past, he did not need to add; even Kung understood that travel into one’s own future was impossible, for reasons inherent in the fundamental nature of temporal energy potential.) “So, as a practical matter, no one can be displaced from the present to any date more recent than about 2080.”
Kung looked relieved, but Chantal Frey looked thoughtful. “That,” she mused, “was only a few years before the first recorded appearance of the Transhumanist movement. And there is much that is obscure about its origins. Assuming—and we dare not assume otherwise—that the surviving underground Transhumanists are still operating their displacer at the present time or a little in our future, then perhaps they founded their own movement.”
Kung went pale, and Rutherford was heard to mutter what sounded like a literary quote—something about “that man’s father is my father’s son.” It was the sort of thing that gave the Authority nightmares.
“And then, of course,” Chantal continued even more thoughtfully, “assuming that they will continue to operate their displacer still further in our future…”
Kung shook himself with a force that set his wattles to jiggling. “Well, these speculations are all very interesting. But the point is that the Special Operations unit we are awaiting is late in returning.”
“Not yet past its deadline,” Rutherford admonished. But he sounded worried. It was getting close. And the rules were strict: after that deadline, it would be assumed that the unit had been lost, and the displacer stage would no longer be kept clear for them. If they should happen to return after that…
At that moment the display boards at the control consoles surrounding the central stage suddenly burst into a flashing light-show.
The Fujiwara-Weintraub Temporal Displacer could cancel the “temporal energy potential” that kept an object (living or otherwise) anchored in its own time—but only at the cost of a titanic energy surge, hence the huge and somewhat worrisome power plant in this (everyone hoped) safely remote location. The Authority’s scientific staff was digging frantically for the flaw in Fujiwara’s mathematics that the Transhumanist underground had discovered, enabling them to operate with far more energy efficiency. But however it was done, the restoration of temporal energy potential was almost incredibly easy, requiring a device—the “Temporal Retrieval Device” or TRD—barely larger than a ball bearing and drawing an undetectably tiny amount of energy.
Hence there was never any warning when a time traveler returned to the displacer stage at the time he had departed plus the time he had spent in the past—the “linear present” as it was called. At exactly the same instant the data displays awoke, five soldiers of the army of the Confederate States of America appeared on the stage. One of them, obviously wounded, was being supported by two of the others. All exhibited the disorientation of temporal transition…but only momentarily, for they were veterans.
Rutherford, followed by his two companions, hurried down to the main floor. The medical personnel who were kept continuously on alert while a Special Operations mission was in progress had already taken charge of the wounded man, whose injury was clearly not serious. They stepped up to greet a man with a Confederate captain’s insignia on the sleeves of his gray coat.
“Welcome back…Captain Devereux,” said Rutherford with an ironic lift of one eyebrow. “You had us a bit worried.”
“I think you look rather dashing in that uniform,” said Chantal Frey, smiling at the man who had, uniquely in the annals of time travel, brought her back to her own time despite the loss of her TRD.
Jason Thanou smiled raffishly under his broad-brimmed slouch hat and stroked the mustache and goatee Rutherford had ordered him to grow for this mission. (Special Ops teams could spend as much time as they wanted preparing; it didn’t matter when they departed from the present.) Then he took off the hat and wiped away the sweat of the humid Virginia April day from which he had departed mere moments before in his heavy wool uniform. It was the uniform of a Louisiana regiment, which was appropriate to Jason’s looks and those of his second-in-command Alexandre Mondrago. It had also helped account for any oddities in their pronunciation of neurally imprinted nineteenth-century American English, by the standards of the Virginians and North Carolinians they had found themselves among. All of which struck some Special Ops people as excessive caution for missions of such limited duration. But Rutherford, who had to deal with the council, would never yield an inch on such precautions. He was fussily insistent that they be able to blend, however brief their sojourns in the past were expected to be.
“All done,” Jason reported. “That’s just a scratch that Corbett has got, and it’s from a local weapon—we did a clean job on the Transhumanists before they had a chance to use any of their out-of-period stuff. Pauline had done an outstanding job of getting all the relevant information into the message drop, and of course she was a great help after we made contact with her.”
He was referring to Pauline da Cunha, one of the charter members of the Special Operations Section, who was now (in terms of the linear present, of course) leading a research expedition to Virginia, North America, in February through early April of 1865 to study the last days of the Confederacy. It was unusual for such an expedition to have a Special Ops officer as mission leader, but this one was out of the ordinary. In addition to its ostensible purpose, it was also charged with pursuing certain leads from certain sources (including Chantal Frey’s debriefing) that pointed toward Transhumanist activity amid the collapsing South.
A short, dark, wiry man with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve and an impressive nose on his face grinned wickedly. “Yeah. It was worth it just to see Pauline having to pass as a Creole belle!”
“You always did have a sadistic streak,” Jason reproved, giving Alexandre Mondrago a look of bogus sternness. The Corsican-descended ex-mercenary had been with Jason in fifth century B.C. Greece, saving his life on one occasion. “And as I recall, she was some little help to you, getting across that bridge over the James River near the Tredegar Iron Works while Richmond burned.” Mondrago had the grace to look abashed. “It’s true, though, that after sustaining that role for two and a half months, I imagine she’ll come back here in a very bad mood, even though she’ll have gotten to witness Lincoln’s visit to the ruins of Richmond.” Abruptly, Jason sobered. “But the point is, she was absolutely right. What we found was worse than what we thought we were looking for. In fact, it was worse than she thought.”
Rutherford went pale. They had believed the Transhumanists were planting the seeds of one of their secret societies—a kind of sociological supervirus developing undetectably within the relatively harmless (if repellent) historically attested Ku Klux Klan, much as they had attempted to plant one within the cult of Pan in ancient Greece. Da Cunha had thought they were really planting something far more insidious.
“I know what she thought,” Rutherford said. “She thought they were planting one of their retroactive plagues.” Now Kung also went pale, for he knew of the Transhumanist technique of spreading mutagens containing a genetic time clock over the plant life of an area they wished to turn toxic on or just before The Day. The Authority’s only countermeasure was the expensive one of sending an expedition back to spread anti-mutagens. “But…Jason, did I understand you to say worse than that?”
“You did. This was a nanotechnological time bomb. Nanobots in huge numbers, timed to begin corroding metal, turning plastics to goo, infecting computer systems, interfering with connections and whatever. Evidently, the Transhumanists’ strategy calls for large expanses of North America to revert to a pretechnological level on The Day.” Jason surveyed his listeners. Rutherford had gone an even paler shade. Kung seemed to be experiencing difficulty breathing. Chantal, who had heard of such things, simply looked grim. “Don’t worry,” he assured them hastily. “We were able to abort this at an early stage and destroy the stockpiles before the actual process had commenced.”
Kung found his voice. “But how could you be so incompetent as to fail to bring any of these, er, nanobots back with you for study? Perhaps their time sequence could have led us to inferences concerning The Day!”
Rutherford held his breath. Jason Thanou’s relationship with the Authority had always had its ups and downs, and more of the latter than of the former—unsurprisingly considering that he had never troubled to conceal his opinion of the governing council. But now he kept his face expressionless and spoke with a mildness Rutherford knew him well enough to recognize as deceptive.
“Aside from the dangers involved—built-in booby traps whose consequences wouldn’t bear thinking about—there would be no point. We’ve learned of the extreme care the Transhumanists put into security. I assure you that any such attempt would have caused the nanobots to instantly go permanently inert.”
“Er, yes, I seem to recall reading about this sort of thing. But surely—”
“The same philosophy extends even to their personnel, Alistair,” Rutherford reminded him. “As you are aware, the few Transhumanists who have been apprehended in the present day have had implants which killed them—destroyed their brains, in fact—upon capture.”
Kung subsided, for he was indeed aware of it. Law enforcement agencies were naturally engaged in a planetwide search for the Transhumanists and—especially—their temporal displacer. But the investigation was hampered by bureaucratic insistence that it be carried on in strict secrecy, to avoid alarming the populace, and the results had been disappointing. They would undoubtedly have been even more disappointing without the leads provided by Chantal Frey.
“Yes,” she nodded. “After more than a century of operating underground, secrecy has become compulsive with them. You all know how little of any real value Franco revealed to me, not just while he was planning to let me return as a ‘mole’ but even afterwards, when my TRD was gone and he had absolutely no reason to think I would ever be able to return to the present.”
“Well,” Jason broke the gloomy silence that followed, “I’m going to check on Corbett in sick bay. Afterwards, Kyle, I’ll give you my full report. And after that…I could use some R&R. And,” he added, with a hard look at Rutherford, “I believe I’ve got quite a lot of unused leave accumulated.”