The Shield of Time

THE SHIELD OF TIME

Poul Anderson

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Contents

Title Page

Gateway Introduction

Contents

PART ONE: The Stranger That Is Within Thy Gates

1987 A.D.

PART TWO: Women and Horses and Power and War

1985 A.D.

209 B.C.

1987 A.D.

209 B.C.

976 B.C.

209 B.C.

1987 A.D.

209 B.C.

1988 A.D.

209 B.C.

1902 A.D.

1985 A.D.

PART THREE: Before the Gods That Made the Gods

31,275,389 B.C.

PART FOUR: Beringia

13,212 B.C.

1965 A.D.

13,212 B.C.

1990 A.D.

13,211 B.C.

13,210 B.C.

1990 A. D.

PART FIVE: Riddle Me This

1990 A. D.

PART SIX: Amazement of the World

1137 α A. D.

1765 B. C—15,926 B. C—1765 B. C.

1980 α A. D.

18,244 B. C.

1989 α A. D.

1137 A. D.

1137 α A. D.

1138 α A. D.

1137 A. D.

1989 α A. D.

18,244 B. C.

1989 β A. D.

1137 A. D.

1146 A. D.

1245 β A. D.

1146 A. D.

1990 A. D.

Website

Also by Poul Anderson

Dedication

Author Bio

Copyright

PART ONE

THE STRANGER THAT IS WITHIN THY GATES

1987 A.D.

Maybe returning to New York on the day after he left it had been a mistake. Even here, just now, the springtime was too beautiful. A dusk like this was not one in which to sit alone, remembering. Rain had cleared the air for a while, so that through open windows drifted a ghost of blossoms and green. Lights and noises from the streets below were somehow softened, turned riverlike. Manse Everard wanted out.

He might have gone for a walk in Central Park, pocketing a stun gun in case of trouble. No policeman of this century would know it for a weapon. Better, when he had lately seen too much violence—any amount was too much—he could have strolled downtown along a safe route till he ended in one or another of the little taverns he knew, for beer and homely companionship. If he chose to get away altogether, he could requisition a time-cycle at Patrol headquarters and seek whatever era he chose, anyplace on Earth. An Unattached agent needn’t give reasons.

A phone call had trapped him. He prowled the darkening apartment, pipe a-fume between teeth, and occasionally swore at himself. Ridiculous, this mood. Sure, a letdown after action was natural; but he’d already enjoyed two easy weeks back in Hiram’s Tyre, taking care of leftover details after his mission was done. As for Bronwen, he’d provided for her, rejoining her could only destroy the measure of contentment she’d found, the calendar said that tonight she lay twenty-nine hundred years dust, and there should be an end of the matter.

The doorbell relieved him. He snapped on the lights, blinked in the sudden harshness, and admitted his visitor. “Good evening, Agent Everard,” greeted the man in subtly accented English. “I am Guion. I hope this is in fact not an inconvenient hour for you.”

“No, no. I agreed to it when you rang, didn’t I?” They shook hands. Everard doubted that the gesture occurred in Guion’s native milieu, whenever and wherever that was. “Come in.”

“You see, I thought you would wish to dispose of mundane business today, and then perhaps depart tomorrow for a holiday—ah, vacation, you Americans say, don’t you?—at some restful spot. I could have interviewed you when you got back, of course, but your memories would be less fresh. Also, frankly, I would like to get acquainted. May I invite you to dinner at a restaurant of your choice?”

While speaking, Guion had entered and taken an armchair. He was of undistinguished appearance, on the short and slender side, dressed in a plain gray suit. His head was big, though, and when you looked closely you saw that the thinly carved face wasn’t really a dark white man’s—didn’t quite belong to any race presently living on the planet. Everard wondered what powers lay behind its smile.

“Thanks,” he replied. Superficially the offer meant little. An Unattached agent of the Time Patrol drew on unlimited funds. Actually it meant a great deal. Guion wanted to spend lifespan on him. “Suppose we get the basic talking out of the way first. Care for a drink?”

The request given, he went to the bar and mixed Scotch and soda for both. Guion didn’t object to his pipe. He settled down.

“Let me repeat my congratulations on your accomplishments in Phoenicia,” his caller said. “Extraordinary.”

“I had a good team.”

“True. But it had first-class leadership. And you did the preliminary work solo, at considerable risk.”

“Is that what you’re here about?” Everard demanded. “My debriefing was pretty damn thorough. You must have seen the records. I don’t know what further I can tell.”

Guion stared into his lifted glass, as if the ice cubes were Delphic dice. “Possibly you omitted a few details you assumed are irrelevant,” he murmured. The scowl opposite him was fleeting but did not escape notice. He raised his free hand. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of intruding on your privacy. An operative who had no emotions about the human beings encountered on a mission would be … defective. Worthless, or downright dangerous. As long as we don’t let our feelings compromise our duties, they are, ah, nobody else’s affair.”

How much does he know, or suspect? wondered Everard. A sad little romance with a Celtic slave girl, foredoomed by the abyss between their birthtimes if by nothing else; his arranging at last for her manumission and marriage; farewell—I’m not about to inquire. I might learn more than I want to.

He hadn’t been informed what Guion was after, or why, or anything except that this person was at least of his own rank. Probably higher. Above its lowest echelons, the Patrol didn’t go in for organizational charts and formal hierarchies of command. By its nature, it couldn’t. The structure was much subtler and stronger than that. Quite likely none but the Danellians fully understood it.

Nevertheless Everard’s tone harshened. When he said, “We Unattached have broad discretion,” he was not merely rehashing the obvious.

“Of course, of course,” Guion responded with feline mildness. “I only hope to squeeze a few more drops of information out of what you experienced and observed. Then by all means enjoy your well-earned leisure.” Softer yet: “May I ask if your plans include Miss Wanda Tamberly?”

Everard started. He nearly slopped his drink. “Huh?” Recovery. Grab the initiative. “Is that what you’re here for, to talk about her?”

“Well, you recommended her recruitment.”

“And she’s passed the preliminary tests, hasn’t she?”

“Certainly. But you met her when she was caught up in that Peruvian episode. A brief but strenuous and revealing acquaintance.” Guion chuckled. “Since then, you have cultivated the relationship. That is no secret.”

“Not heavily,” Everard snapped. “She’s very young. But, yeah, I consider her a friend.” He paused. “A protégée of sorts, if you like.”

We’ve had a couple of dates. Then I went off to Phoenicia, and on my time line it’s been weeks … and I’ve returned to the same spring when the two of us were first together in San Francisco.

“Yes, I’ll doubtless be seeing her again,” he added. “But she has plenty else to keep her busy. Doubling back up to September in the Galapagos Islands, that she was snatched out of, and home in the usual fashion, and several months to arrange twentieth-century appearances so she can leave without raising questions in people’s minds—Arh! Why the devil am I repeating what you perfectly well know?”

Thinking aloud, I suppose. Wanda’s no Bronwen, but she may well, all unawares, help me put Bronwen behind me, as I’ve got to do. As I’ve had to do now and then before…. Everard wasn’t given to self-analysis. The realization jolted him that what he needed to regain inner peace was not another love affair but a few more times in the presence of innocence. Like a thirsty man finding a spring to drink from, high on a mountainside—Afterward, let him get on with his life, and she with her new one in the Patrol.

Chill: Unless they don’t accept her, in spite of everything. “And why are you interested, anyway? Are you concerned with personnel? Has anybody expressed doubts about her?”

Guion shook his head. “On the contrary. The psycho-probe gave her an excellent profile. Later examinations will be mainly for the usual purposes, to help guide her training and her earlier field assignments.”

“Good.” A glow kindled in Everard and eased him. He’d been smoking too hard. The tart coolness of a draught eased his tongue.

“I mentioned her simply because the events that caused your world line to intersect hers involved Exaltationists,” Guion said. The voice was most quiet, considering what it bore. “Earlier along yours, you had thwarted their effort to subvert Simόn Bolívar’s career. In the course of aiding Miss Tamberly—who defended herself so ably—you kept them from hijacking Atahuallpa’s ransom and changing the history of the Spanish Conquest. Now you have rescued ancient Tyre from them, and captured most of those who remained at large, including Merau Varagan. Wonderfully done. However, the task is not finished.”

“True,” Everard agreed as low.

“I am here to … feel out the situation,” Guion told him. “I cannot express precisely what I seek, even if I use Temporal.” His speech continued level, but he smiled no longer and something terrible stood behind the slanted eyes. “What is involved is no more amenable to symbolic logic than is the concept of mutable reality. ‘Intuition’ or ‘revelation’ are words equally inadequate. I seek … whatever measure of comprehension is possible.” After a silence in which the city noises seemed muted by remoteness: “We shall talk, in an informal fashion. I will try to get some sense of how your experiences felt to you. That is all. A reminiscent conversation, after which you will be free to go where you like.

“Yet think. Can it be entirely coincidental that you, Manson Everard, have thrice been in action against the Exaltationists? Only once did you set forth with any idea that they might be responsible for certain disturbances. Despite this, you became the nemesis of Merau Varagan, who—I can now admit—roused fear in the Middle Command. Was this happenstance? Was it accidental, too, that Wanda Tamberly got drawn into the vortex—when she already, unbeknownst to herself, had a kinsman in the Patrol?”

“He was the reason that she—” Everard’s protest trailed off. Within him shivered: Who is this, really? What is he?

“Therefore we wish to know more about you,” Guion said. “Not prying into your personal lives, but hoping for a clue to what I can only, misleadingly, call the hyper-matrix of the continuum. Such knowledge may help us plan how to track down the last Exaltationists. They are desperate and revengeful, you know. We must.”

“I see,” Everard breathed.

A pulse beat through him. He scarcely heard Guion’s coda, “And beyond that necessity, perhaps, a larger meaning, a direction and an ending—” nor how Guion chopped it short, as though he had let slip out what should not. Everard was harking back, gazing forward, abruptly hound-eager, aware that what he needed was not surcease but the completion of the hunt.

PART TWO

WOMEN AND HORSES AND POWER AND WAR

1985 A.D.

Here, where the Bear stars wheeled too low, night struck cold into blood and bone. By day, mountains closed off every horizon with stone, snow, glaciers, clouds. A man’s mouth dried as he gasped his way over the ridges, rocks rattling from beneath his boots, for he could never draw one honest breath of air. And then there was fear of the rifle bullet or the knife after dark that would spill his bit of life out on this empty land.

To Yuri Alexeievitch Garshin, the captain appeared as an angel from his grandmother’s Heaven. It was on the third day since the ambush. He had tried to head northeast, generally down though it always seemed most of his steps were upward, the weight of the earth upon them. Somewhere yonder lay the camp. His sleeping bag gave him small rest; again and again terror snatched him back to a loneliness just as cruel. Careful with what field rations were in his kit, he took few bites at a time, and hunger pangs had now dulled. Nevertheless, little remained to him. He found plenty of water for his canteen, springs or the melt of remnant snowbanks, but had nothing to heat it. The samovar in his parents’ cottage was a half-remembered dream—the whole collective farm, larksong above ryefields, wildflowers to the world’s edge, he walking hand in hand with Yelena Borisovna. Here grew only lichen on rock, thinly strewn thorn scrub, pale clumps of grass. The one sound other than his footfalls, breath, pulsebeat was the wind. A large bird rode it, well aloft. Garshin didn’t know what kind it was. A vulture, waiting for him to die? No, surely the vultures feasted on his comrades—

A crag jutted from the slope ahead. He changed course to round it, wondering how much more that threw him off the proper track to his company. All at once he saw the man who stood beneath the mass.

Enemy! He grabbed for the Kalashnikov slung at his shoulder. Then: No. That’s a Soviet outfit. A warm blind wave poured through him. His knees went soft.

When he could see again, the man had come close. His garb was clean, fresh-looking. Officer’s insignia glittered in the hard upland sunlight, yet a pack and bedroll rode on his back. He carried merely a sidearm, yet he strode unafraid and unwearied. Clearly he was no Afghan government soldier, wearing issue supplied by the ally. His body was stocky, muscular, the face beneath the helmet fair-skinned but broad in the cheekbones and a bit slanty in the eyes—from somewhere around Lake Ladoga, perhaps, Garshin thought weakly.

And I, I’m just serving out my hitch, just waiting out this miserable war till I can go home, if I live. He made a Shalten salute.

The officer halted a meter or so off. He was a captain. “Well,” he asked, “what are you doing, private?” The Finnish eyes probed like a sunset wind. However, the tone was not unkindly and the Russian was Moscow’s, the dialect you oftenest heard after they drafted you, except that his was better educated than usual.

“P-p-please, sir—” Sudden, helpless trembling and stammering. “Yu. A. Garshin, private—” Somehow he identified his unit.

“So?”

“We were … a squad, sir—reconnaissance up the pass—Blasts, gunfire, men killed right and left—” Sergei’s skull a horrible spatter and his body flung bonelessly aside, then a crash, smoke and dust, you sprawled with ears ringing so loud that you couldn’t hear anything else and a medicine taste in your mouth. “I saw … the guerrillas … no, I saw, one man, a beard and turban, he laughed. They d-didn’t see me. I was behind a bush, I think, or they were too busy—bayoneting?”

Garshin had nothing to vomit but bile. It hurt his throat.

The captain stood over him till he was done and the headache that followed had lessened. “Take some water,” the captain advised. “Swish it around. Gargle. Spit. Then swallow, not too much.”

“Yes, sir.” Garshin obeyed. It helped. He tried to get up.

“Sit for a while,” said the captain. “You’ve been through a bad time. The mujahedin had rocket launchers as well as rapid-fire weapons. You crept away when they’d gone, eh?”

“Y-yes, sir. Not to desert or, or anything, but—”

“I know. There was nothing you could do on the spot. Rather, your duty was to return to base and report what had happened. You didn’t dare go straight back down the pass. That would have been reckless anyway. You slipped uphill. You were still dazed. When you recovered, you realized you were lost. Correct?”

“I think so.” Garshin raised his glance toward the form above him. It reared dark against the sky, as alien as the crag. He was regaining his wits. “What about you, sir?”

“I am on a special mission. You are not to mention me except as I order. Understood?”

“Yes, sir. But—” Garshin sat straighter. “Sir, you talk as if you know … a good deal about my squad.”

The captain nodded. “I came by a while afterward, and reconstructed what must have occurred. The rebels were gone but the bodies were left, stripped of everything useful. I couldn’t bury them.”

He refrained from speaking of honored heroes. Garshin wasn’t sure whether he was grateful for that or not. It was amazing that an officer explained anything to an enlisted man.

“We can send a party to retrieve them,” Garshin said. “If my unit gets the news.”

“Of course. I will help. Do you feel better?” The captain offered his hand. Clinging to its strength, Garshin rose. He found himself reasonably steady on his feet.

The foreigner eyes searched him. Words hit slow, like the hammer of a careful workman. “As a matter of fact, Private Garshin, this is a fortunate encounter for both of us, and others besides. I can direct you to your base. You can take something along that badly needs taking, but which my mission doesn’t allow me time to deal with.”

Angel from Heaven indeed. Garshin snapped to attention. “Yes, sir!”

“Excellent.” Still the captain looked at him. Afar, clouds eddied around two peaks, now hiding them, now baring their fangs. Underfoot, twigs snickered in the wind. “Tell me about yourself, boy. How old are you? Where from?”

“N-nineteen, sir. A kolkhoz near Shatsk.” Emboldened: “If that means anything to you, sir. The closest real city is Ryazan.”

Once more the captain nodded. “I see. Well, you seem both intelligent and faithful. I believe you will appreciate what I want of you. It is simply to deliver an object I discovered. But it may be quite an important object.” He hooked thumbs in his pack straps. “Here, help me with this.”

They got it off, set it on the ground, and hunkered above. He opened it and took forth a box. Meanwhile his unofficerlike talkativeness continued, though almost as if to himself, peering beyond anything Garshin could see:

“This is a very ancient land. History has forgotten all the peoples who held it, came and went, fought and died, to and fro, century after century. We today are but the latest. Ours is not a popular war, at home or in the world at large. Never mind the rights or wrongs, it is hurting us in the same way their war in Vietnam hurt the Americans, when you were a kid. If we can retrieve a little honor out of it, a little credit, is that not good for the motherland? Is that not a patriotic service?”

The wind walked along Garshin’s backbone. “You talk like a professor, sir,” he whispered.

The other man shrugged. His tone flattened. “What I am in civilian life doesn’t matter. Let’s say I have an eye for certain things. I came on the scene of the ambush, and among the … objects that lay there, I saw this. The Afghans must not have noticed. They were in a hurry, and are primitive tribesmen. It must have lain a long time buried, till a rocket shellburst tossed it up. Some fragments were with it—pieces of metal and bone—but I couldn’t stop to do anything about those. Here. Take it.”

He laid the box in Garshin’s hands. It was about thirty centimeters long by ten square, gray-green with corrosion (bronze?) but preserved by the highland dryness for (how many?) centuries. The lid was wired shut and sealed by a blob of pitchy material that had formerly borne some kind of stamp. Traces of figures cast in the metal were visible.

“Careful!” the captain warned. “It’s fragile. Don’t tamper with it, whatever you do. The contents—documents, I suspect—might well crumble away, unless this is opened under strict controls by the proper scientists. Is that clear, Private Garshin?”

“Yes … yes, sir.”

“Tell your sergeant, immediately when you get back, that you must see the colonel, that it’s vital, that you have information for no ears less than his.”

Dismay. “But, sir, all I have to say is—”

“You have this to deliver, so it doesn’t get lost in the bureaucracy. Colonel Koltukhov isn’t a brainless regulation machine, like too many of his kind. He’ll understand, and do what is right. Simply tell him the truth and give him the casket. You won’t suffer for it, I promise you. He’ll want my name and more. Tell him I never told you because my own mission is so secret that anything I said would necessarily be a lie, but of course he is welcome to notify GRU or KGB and let them trace me. As for you, Private Garshin, you convey nothing except a little casket, of purely archaeological interest, which you might have stumbled upon as easily as I.” The captain laughed, though his eyes stayed altogether level.

Garshin swallowed. “I see. That’s an order, sir?”

“It is. And we’d better both get on with our business.” The captain reached into his pocket. “Take this compass. I have another. I’ll explain how to find your unit.” He pointed. “From here, bear north by northeast … so—

“—and when that peak there is exactly south-southwest—

“—and—

“Is this clear? I have a notepad, I will write it for you.

“—Good luck, boy.”

Garshin groped down the mountainside. He had wrapped the box in his bedroll. However slight the weight, he imagined he felt it on his back, like the weight of boots on his feet, the drag of the earth upon all. Behind and above, the captain stood, arms folded, watching him go. When Garshin glanced rearward, a last time, he saw sunlight from behind the helmet make a kind of halo, as if on an angel who guarded some place mysterious and forbidden.

209 B.C.

The highway followed the right bank of the River Bactrus. Travelers were glad of that. Breezes off the water, shade cast by wayside mulberry or willow, every fleeting relief came as an event when summer’s heat lay over the land. Fields of wheat and barley, orchards and vineyards in among them, even the wild poppies and purple thistles seemed bleached by the light from a sky burned empty of clouds. Nonetheless it was a rich land, the stone houses small but many, clumped in villages or strewn on farmsteads. It had been long at peace. Manse Everard wished he didn’t know that that was about to change.

The caravan plodded doggedly south. Dust puffed up around the feet of the camels. Hipponicus had shifted his wares from mules to them after he left the mountains. Ill-smelling and foul-tempered, they did carry more per animal and fared better in those arid regions that his route would trayerse. They were a breed adapted to Central Asia, scruffy now that their winter coats were shed, but one-humped. The two-humped species had not yet reached this country, from which it would take its later name. Harness creaked, metal jingled. No harness bells rang; they too were of the future.

Cheered by nearing the end of their weeks-long trek, the caravaneers chattered, japed, sang, waved at people they passed, sometimes shouted and whistled if a pretty girl was among them—or, for several, a pretty boy. They were mainly of Iranian stock, dark, slender, bearded, clad in flowing trousers, loose blouses or long coats, tall brimless hats. A couple of them were Levantine, with tunics, short hair, and shaven chins.

Hipponicus himself was a Hellene, like most present-day Bactrian aristocrats and bourgeoisie: a burly, middle-aged man with freckled face and thinning reddish hair under a flat cap. His forebears came from the Peloponnesus, where today was little of that Anatolian strain which would be prominent in the Greece of Everard’s time. On horseback, in front of the train, still he was hardly less grimy and sweaty than the rest. “No. Meander, I insist, you must stay with me,” he said. ‘I’ve already sent Clytius ahead, you know, and part of the word he carried is that my wife should prepare for a house guest. You wouldn’t make a liar of me would you? She’s got a sharp enough tongue as is, Nanno does.”

“You’re too kind,” Everard demurred. “Realty. You’ll be seeing important men in town, rich, educated, and I’m just a rough old soldier of fortune. I wouldn’t want to, uh, embarrass you.”

Hipponicus scanned his companion sideways. It had surely been difficult and expensive, finding a mount big enough for such a fellow. Otherwise Meander’s outfit was coarse and plain, apart from the sword at his hip. Nobody else bore arms any longer; the merchant had dismissed his hired guards when he reached territory reckoned safe. Meander was special.

“Listen,” Hipponicus said, “in my line of work it’s needful to be a pretty sharp judge of people. You’re bound to have learned a fair bit, knocking around the world. More than you let on. I expect you’ll interest my associates too. Frankly, that won’t hurt me any when it comes to making some deals I have in mind.”

Everard grinned. It lightened the massive features, pale blue eyes beneath brown locks, nose dented in a long-ago fight about which he had said as little as he told of his past in general. “Well, I can give them plenty of whoppers,” he drawled.

Hipponicus grew earnest. “I don’t want you for a performing bear, Meander. Please don’t believe that. We’re friends. Aren’t we? After what we’ve been through together? A man gives hospitality to his friends.”

Slowly, Everard nodded. “All right. Thanks.”

I’ve gotten fond of you in my turn, he thought. Not that we’ve shared many desperate adventures. One set-to, and then the flooding ford where we barely saved three mules, and … a few similar incidents. But it was the kind of trip that shows what your travel mates are made of—

—from Alexandria Eschates on the River Jaxartes, last and loneliest of those cities the Conqueror founded and named for himself, where Everard signed on. It lay in the realm of the Bactrian king, but on its very edge, and the nomads beyond the stream had taken to raiding across it this year, when garrisons were depleted to reinforce a threatened southwestern frontier. Hipponicus had been glad to acquire an extra guard, footloose free-lance though the newcomer be. And indeed there had been a bandit attack to beat off. Afterward the way south through Sogdiana threaded regions rugged, desolate, wild, as well as land irrigated and cultivated. Now they had crossed the Oxus and were in Bactria proper, arriving home—

—as the survey ascertained we would be. For a minute this morning, opticals aboard an unmanned spacecraft tracked us, before its orbit swung it out to a far rendezvous. That’s why I was on hand to meet you in Alexandria, Hipponicus. I’d been informed that your caravan would reach Bactra on a day that seemed right for my purposes. But, yes, I like you, you rascal, and hope to God you survive what’s ahead for your nation.

“Excellent,” the merchant said. “You weren’t anxious to spend your pay at some fleabag of an inn, were you? Take your time, look around, enjoy yourself. Quite likely you’ll find a better new job that way than through an agent.” He sighed. “I wish I could offer you a permanent billet, but Hermes knows when I’ll travel again, what with this war situation.”

Such news as they had gathered in the last few days was confused but ugly. Antiochus, king of Seleucid Syria, was invading. Euthydemus of Bactria had taken the army to meet him. Rumor said Euthydemus was now in retreat.

Hipponicus regained cheerfulness. “Ha, I know why you hung back!” he exclaimed. “Afraid you wouldn’t get a chance at our Bactran fleshpots, staying with a respectable family, weren’t you? Didn’t that little flute girl two nights ago satisfy you for a while?” He reached out to dig a thumb into Everard’s ribs. “You had her walking bowlegged next morning, you did.”

Everard stiffened. “Why are you so interested?” he snapped. “Wasn’t yours any good?”

“Ai, don’t get mad.” Hipponicus squinted at him. “You almost seem regretful. Did you wish for a boy instead? I didn’t think that was your style.”

“It isn’t.”—which was true, but also fitted Everard’s persona of a semi-barbarian adventurer, half Hellenized, from the Balkans north of Macedonia. “I just don’t care to talk about my private life.”

“No, you don’t, do you?” Hipponicus murmured. Abundance of colorful anecdotes; nothing personal.

Actually, Everard admitted, it doesn’t make sense for me to bristle at his wisecrack. Why did I? It didn’t mean a thing. After long abstinence, we were in civilized parts again, and stopped at a caravanserai where girls were available. I had a hell of a fine time with Atossa That’s all.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong, he reflected, that that was all. She’s a sweet lass. She deserves better than the life she’s got. Big eyes, small breasts, slim hips, knowing hands, yet toward dawn the wistfulness in her voice when she asked if he’d ever be back. And what he’d given her, apart from a modest fee and afterward a tip, was merely the consideration that most twentieth-century American men ordinarily tried to show a woman. Of course, hereabouts that was not ordinary.

I keep wondering what’ll become of her. She could well be gang-raped, maybe killed, maybe hauled off to slavery abroad, when Antiochus’ troops overrun the area. At best, she’ll be faded by the time she’s thirty, doing whatever drudge work she can find; worn out and toothless by forty; dead before fifty. I’ll never know.

Everard shook himself. Stop that gush! He was no fresh recruit, tenderhearted and appalled. He was a veteran, an Unattached operative of the Time Patrol, who understood full well that history is what humans endure.

Or maybe I feel the least bit guilty. Why? That makes still less sense. Who’s been hurt? Certainly not he, even potentially. The artificial viruses implanted in him destroyed any and every germ that sickened people anytime throughout the ages. So he couldn’t have passed anything on to Atossa either, besides memories. And it would not have been natural for Meander the Illyrian to forgo such an opportunity. I’ve taken more of them along my lifeline than I remember, and not always because I needed to stay in character on a mission.

Okay, okay, shortly before starting out on this one I had a date with Wanda Tamberly. So what? None of her business either, was it?

He grew aware that Hipponicus was talking: “Very well. No offense. Don’t worry, you’ll be quite free to wander around most of the time. I’ll be busy. I’ll tell you the best places to go, and maybe once in a while I can join you, but mostly you’ll be on your own. And at my house, no questions.”

“Thanks,” Everard replied. “Sorry if I was gruff. Tired, hot, thirsty.”

Good, he thought. It turns out I’m in luck. I can look up Chandrakumar without any problems, and in addition, I may well learn something useful from Hipponicus’ acquaintances. Admittedly, he’d be a trifle more conspicuous than he had planned on. However, in cosmopolitan Bactra he’d cause no sensation. He needn’t seriously fear alerting his quarry.

“We’ll soon take care of that,” the merchant promised.

As if to bear him out, the road swung sharply around a stand of chedar trees and the city which they had been glimpsing sprang into full view. Massive, turreted, tawny, its walls reared above riverside docks. From within their seven-mile perimeter lifted the smoke of hearths and workshops, drifted the noise of wheels and hoofs, while traffic flowed in and out the great gates, walking, riding, driving. Settlements clustered close around a strip kept clear for defense: houses, inns, industries, gardens.

Like the caravaneers, the dwellers were predominantly Iranian. Their ancestors founded the town, naming it Zariaspa, the City of the Horse. To the Greeks it was Bactra, and the nearer to it you came, the more Greeks you saw. Some of their kind had entered this country when the Persian Empire held it. Often that movement was involuntary, the Achaemenid shahs deporting troublesome Ionians. After Alexander took it, immigration increased, for Bactria had turned into a land of opportunity, which finally made itself an independent kingdom ruled by Hellenes. The large majority of them were in the cities, or in the military, or plying trade routes that reached west to the Mediterranean, south to India, east to China.

Everard recalled hovels, medieval ruins, impoverished farmers and herders, mostly Turkic-Mongolian Uzbegs. But that was in Afghanistan, 1970, not far below the Soviet border. A lot of change and chance would blow from the steppes in the millennia to come. Too damn much.

He clucked at his mount. Hipponicus’ had broken into a trot. The camel drivers made their own beasts shamble faster, and the men afoot happily kept pace. They were almost home.

Home to war, Everard knew.

They entered by the Scythian Gate. It stood open, but a squad of soldiers kept watch, helmets, shields, cuirasses, greaves, pikeheads ablaze in the sunlight. They turned a wary eye on everybody who passed. The bustle also seemed rather subdued, folk speaking less loudly and more curtly than was usual in the East. Pulled by oxen or donkeys, quite a few wooden carts were laden with family goods, the peasants who drove them accompanied by wives and children—seeking refuge behind the walls, if they could afford it.

Hipponicus noticed. His mouth tightened. “Bad news has come,” he opined to Everard. “Only rumors, I’m sure, but truth hard on their heels. Hermes rates a sacrifice from me, that we arrived no later than now.”

Yet everyday life went on. It always does, somehow, till the jaws close shut upon it. Between buildings generally blank-fronted but often vividly painted, people thronged the streets. Wagons, beasts of burden, porters, women balancing water jugs or market baskets on their heads, maneuvered among artisans, laborers, household slaves. A wealthy man in a litter, an officer on horseback, once a war elephant and its mahout, thrust straight through, leaving bow waves and wakes of human turbulence. Wheels groaned, hoofs clopped, sandals slapped cobblestones. Gabbling, laughter, anger, a snatch of song, a flute-lilt or drum-thump, roiled odors of sweat, dung, smoke, cookery, incense. In the shade of foodstalls, men sat cross-legged, sipping wine, playing board games, watching the world brawl past.

Along the Sacred Way were a library, an odeon, a gymnasium, marble-faced, stately with pillars and friezes. At intervals rose those ithyphallic stone posts, topped by bearded heads, known as herms. Elsewhere, Everard knew, were schools, public baths, a stadium, a hippodrome, and a royal palace modeled on the one in Seleucid Antioch. This main thoroughfare boasted side-walks, elevated above manure and garbage, with stepping stones at the crossings. Thus far had the seeds of Greek civilization spread.

Yet it mattered not that the Greeks identified Anaitis with Aphrodite Ourania and built her a fane in their own style. She remained an Asian goddess, her cult the largest; and west of Bactria the upstart kingdom of Parthia would presently create a new Persian Empire.

The temple of Anaitis loomed beside the Stoa of Nicanor, principal marketplace in town. Booths crowded the square: silk, linens, woolens, wine, spices, sweetmeats, drugs, gems, brasswork, silverwork, goldwork, ironwork, talismans—With the sellers crying their wares and the shoppers haggling over prices mingled vendors, dancers, musicians, soothsayers, wizards, prostitutes, beggars, idlers—The faces, the many-hued and many-formed garments had come from China, India, Persia, Arabia, Syria, Anatolia, Europe, the wild highlands and the savage northern plains—

To Everard the scene was eerily half-familiar. He had witnessed its like in a score of different lands, in as many different centuries. Each was unique, but a prehistorically ancient kinship vibrated in them all. He had never been here before. The Balkh of his own birthtime held scarcely a ghost of Hellenic Bactra. But he knew his way around. A subtle electronics had printed into his brain the map, the history, the chief languages, and information that was never chronicled but that Chandrakumar’s patience had gleaned.

So much preparation, so long and risky an effort, to clap hands on four fugitives.

They threatened his world’s existence.

“This way!” yelled Hipponicus, gesturing from the saddle. His caravan struggled on, into a less crowded district, to stop at a warehouse. There a couple of hours went by while the goods were unloaded, inventoried, and stored. Hipponicus gave his men five drachmas apiece on account and instructions about the stabling and care of the animals. He would meet them tomorrow at the bank where he kept most of his money and pay them off. Right now, everybody wanted to go home, hear what had been happening, celebrate as merrily as that news would allow.

Everard waited. He missed his pipe, and a cold beer would have been overwhelmingly welcome. But a Time Patrolman learned how to outlast tedium. He half observed what went on, half daydreamed. After a while, he noticed he was remembering an afternoon two thousand years and more beyond this moment.

1987 A.D.

Sunshine, soft air, and city murmur passed through an open window. Beyond it, Everard saw Palo Alto going about a holiday weekend. The apartment he sat in was a Stanford student’s, comfortably shabby furniture, cluttered desk, bookcase crowded with miscellany, a National Wildlife Federation poster thumbtacked to the opposite wall. No trace remained of last night’s violence. Wanda Tamberly had seen to the fine details of cleanup. She must not suspect anything amiss when she returned from her family outing—she, four months younger in lifespan than Wanda who sat here now, a space-time universe younger in knowledge.

Everard looked out no oftener than habitual alertness compelled. He much preferred to keep his attention on the comely California blonde. Light glowed in her hair and on the blue bathrobe that matched her eyes. Even granted that she’d slept the clock around, she’d bounced back from her experience astoundingly fast. A girl, or a boy for that matter, who’d been kidnapped by one of Pizarro’s Conquistadores and rescued in a teeth-skinning maneuver would have had every excuse for spending the next few days stupefied. Wanda had shared a large steak in her kitchen while asking intelligent questions. Here in the living room, she was still at it.

“How does time travel work, anyway? Impossible and absurd, I’ve read.”

He nodded. “According to today’s physics and logic, that’s true. They’ll learn better in the future.”

“All the same—Okay, I’m into biology, but I’ve had some physics courses and I try to keep up, sort of. Science News, Analog—” She smiled. “I’m being honest, you see. Scientific American, when the style doesn’t make me doze off. Real honest!” Her humor faded. It had been defensive, he guessed. The situation remained critical, perhaps desperate. “You jump onto something sort of like a Buck Rogers motorcycle without wheels, work the controls, rise in the air, hover, fly, then push another control and you’re instantly someplace else, anywhere, anywhen. Regardless of altitude differences or—Where does the energy come from? And the earth spins, it goes around the sun, the sun orbits through the galaxy. How about that?”

He shrugged, with a smile of his own. “E pur si muove.”

“Huh? Oh. Oh, yeah. What Galileo muttered, after they made him agree the earth sits still. ‘Nevertheless, it moves.’ Right?”

“Right. I’m surprised a, uh, a person of your generation knows the story.”

“I don’t only skindive and backpack for recreation, Mr. Everard.” He heard a tinge of resentment. “I take a book along.”

“Sure. Sorry. Uh—”

“Frankly, I’m a little surprised you’d know.”

Sure, he thought, no matter how wild the circumstances, you couldn’t mistake what I am, a plain Mid-westerner who’s never quite gotten the mud off his boots.

Her voice softened. “But of course you live history.” The honey-colored head shook. “I can’t yet get a handle on it. Time travel. It won’t come real for me, in spite of everything that’s happened. Too fabulous. Am I being slow on the uptake, Mr. Everard?”

“I thought we were using first names.” The norm of this period in America. Which, damn it, is not so alien to me. I base myself in it. I belong here too. I’m not really old. Born sixty-three years ago. Run up a lot more lifespan than that, traipsing around through time. But biologically I’m in my thirties, he wanted to tell her and mustn’t. Antisenescence treatment, preventive medicine future to this century. We Patrol agents have our perks. We need them, to carry us through some of the things we see. He wrenched his mind into an attempt at lightness. “Actually, Galileo never said what I quoted, under his breath or aloud. It’s a myth.” The kind of myth humans live by, more than they do by facts.

“Too bad.” She leaned back on the sofa and, in her turn, smiled again. “Manse. Okay, then, those timecycles or hoppers or whatever you call them, they are what they are, and if you tried to explain, scientists today wouldn’t understand.”

“They’ve got a glimmering already. Non-inertial reference frames. Quantum gravity. Energy from the vacuum. Bell’s theorem was lately violated in the laboratory, wasn’t it? Or won’t that happen for another year or two? Stuff about wormholes in the continuum, Kerr metrics, Tipler machines—Not that I understand it myself. Physics was not my best subject at the Patrol Academy, by a long shot. It’ll be many thousands of years from now when the last discoveries are made and the first working space-time vehicle is built.”

She frowned, concentrating. “And … expeditions begin. Scientific, historical, cultural—commercial, I suppose? Even military? I hope not that. But I can see where they’d soon need police, a Time Patrol, to help and advise and rescue and … keep travelers in line, so you don’t get robberies or swindles or”—she grimaced—“taking advantage of people in the past. They’d be helpless against knowledge and apparatus from the future, wouldn’t they?”

“Not always. As you can testify.”

She started, then uttered a shaky laugh. “Hoo boy, can I ever! Are there many guys in history as tough and smart as Luis Castelar?”

“Enough. Our ancestors didn’t know everything we do, but they did know things we don’t, stuff we’ve forgotten or leave moldering in our libraries. And they averaged the same brains.” Everard sat forward in his chair. “Yes, mainly we in the Patrol are cops, doing the work you mentioned, plus conducting research of our own. You see, we can’t protect the pattern of events unless we know it well. That’s our basic job, protection. That’s the reason the Danellians founded our corps.”

She lifted her brows. “Danellians?”

“English version of their name in Temporal. Temporal’s our mutual language, artificial, developed to deal with the twists and turns of time travel. The Danellians—Some of them appeared, will appear, when chronokinesis was newly developed.”

He paused. His words turned low and slow. “That must have been … awesome. I met one once, for a few minutes. Didn’t get over it for weeks. Of course, no doubt they can disguise themselves when they want to, go among us in the form of human beings, if they ever want to. I’m not sure they do. They’re what comes after us in evolution, a million or more years uptime. The way we come after apes. At least that’s what most us suppose. Nobody knows for certain.”

Her eyes went large, staring past him. “How much could Australopithecus know for certain about us?” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Everard forced prosiness back into his tone. “They appeared, and commanded the founding of the Patrol. Otherwise the world, theirs and everybody’s, was doomed. It would not simply be wrecked, it would never have existed. On purpose or by accident, time travelers would change the past so much that everything future-ward of them would be something else; and this would happen again and again till—I don’t know. Till complete chaos, or the extinction of the human race, or something like that brought a halt, and time travel had never occurred in the first place.”

She had gone pale. “But that doesn’t make sense.”

“By ordinary logic, it doesn’t. Think, though. If you go into the past, you’re as free an agent as you ever were. What mystical powers has it got to constrain your actions that the present doesn’t have? None. You, Wanda Tamberly, could kill your father before he married. Not that you’d want to. But suppose, innocently bumbling around in a year when your parents were young, you did something that kept them from ever meeting each other.”

“Would I … stop existing?”

“No. You’d still be there in that year. You’ve mentioned a sister, though. She would never be born.”

“Then where would I have come from?” Impishness flickered: “Hardly from under a cabbage leaf!” and died away.

“From nowhere. From nothing. Cause-and-effect doesn’t apply. It’s sort of like quantum mechanics, scaled up from the subatomic to the human level.”

Almost audibly, tension crackled. Everard sought to bleed it off. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Things aren’t that delicately balanced in practice. The continuum is seldom easy to distort. For instance, in the case of you and your parents, your common sense would be a protective factor. Prospective time travelers are pretty carefully screened before they’re allowed to take off unsupervised. And most of what they do makes no long-range difference. Does it matter whether you or I did or did not attend a play at the Globe Theater one of the times when Shakespeare was on stage? Even if, oh, if you did cancel your parents’ marriage and your sister’s life—with all due respect, I don’t think world history would notice. Her husband-who-would-have-been would marry somebody else, and the somebody else would … happen … to be such a person that after a few generations the gene pool would be the same as it would have been anyway. The same famous descendant would be born, several hundred years from now. And so on. Do you follow?”

“You’re throwing me curve balls till it’s my head that’s spinning. But, oh, I did learn a little about relativity. World lines, our tracks through space-time. They’re like a mesh of tough rubber bands, right? Pull on them, and they’ll try to spring back to their proper, uh, configuration.”

He whistled softly. “You do catch on fast.”

She wasn’t relieved in the least. “However, there are events, people, situations where the balance is … unstable. Aren’t there? Like if some well-meaning idiot kept Booth from shooting Lincoln, maybe that’d change everything afterward?”

He nodded.

She sat straight, shivering, and gripped her knees. “Don Luis wanted—he wants to get hold of modern weapons—go back to Perú in the sixteenth century and … take charge of the Conquest, then stamp out the Protestants in Europe and drive the Muslims out of Palestine—”

“You’ve got the idea.”

Everard leaned farther forward and caught her hands in his. She clung. Hers were cold. “Don’t be afraid, Wanda,” he urged. “Yes, it is terrifying. It could turn out that you and I never had this talk today, that we and our whole world never were, not even a dream in somebody’s sleep. It’s harder to imagine and harder to take than the idea of personal annihilation when we die. How well I know. But it isn’t going to be, Wanda. Castelar is a fluke. By a freak of chance, he got hold of a timecycle and learned how to operate it. Well, he’s one man alone, otherwise ignorant; he barely escaped from here last night; the Patrol is on his trail. We’ll nail him, Wanda, and repair any damage he may have done. That’s what we’re for. Our record is pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. And I do.”

She gulped. “Okay, I believe you, Manse.” He felt warmth begin returning to the fingers between his.

“Good girl. You’re helping us a lot, you know. Your account of your experience was excellent, full of clues to what he’ll try next. I expect to gather more hints as new questions occur to me. Quite likely you’ll have suggestions of your own.”

Further reassurance: “That’s why I’m being this open with you. As I told you earlier, ordinarily it’s forbidden to reveal to outsiders that time travel goes on. More than forbidden; we’re conditioned against it, we’re unable to. But these are rather special circumstances, and I’m what they call an Unattached agent, with authority to waive the rules.”

She withdrew her hands, gently but firmly. Cool customer, he thought. I don’t mean frigid. Independent. Guts, backbone, brains. At twenty-one years of age. Her look upon him cleared, and the slightly husky voice was again steady, unstrained. “Thanks. Thanks more than I can say. You’re rather special yourself, you know?”

“Naw. I simply happen to be the operative working on this case.” He smiled. “Too bad you didn’t draw a hotshot glamour boy, like maybe from the Planetary Engineers milieu.”

“The what?” She didn’t wait for a reply. “I gather the Patrol recruits in all periods.”

“Well, not exactly. Prior to the scientific revolution around 1600 A.D., persons capable of imagining the idea are few and far between. Castelar’s an extraordinary guy.”

“How did they find you?”

“I answered an ad and took some tests, back in—well, it was a while ago.” Not to say “1957” flat out. Why not? Because she doesn’t have the whole background. She’d think of me as ancient…. And why should that matter, Everard, you old goat? “Recruits are found in many different ways.” He stirred. “Look, I realize you have ten million questions, and I’d like to answer them for you, and maybe later I can. But right now, could we get on with business? I want more details of what happened. Time is short.”

“Really?” she murmured. “I thought you could double back to a split second before or after any moment.”

Shrewd, shrewd, “Sure we can. But—well, we in the corps have only so much lifespan to give. Sooner or later the Old Man is bound to catch up with each of us. And the Patrol has too much history to guard; we’re badly understaffed. And, okay, I personally have trouble sitting still like this when action is pending. I want to … to work my way to that point on my personal world line where the case is closed and I know we’re safe.”

“I see,” she said quickly. Then: “It doesn’t begin or end with Don Luis, does it?”

“No,” Everard admitted. “He acquired a timecycle because some bandits out of the distant future tried to hijack Atahuallpa’s ransom on a night when he was there. Those bandits are the really dangerous characters. For the present, though, let’s track down our Conquistador.”

209 B.C.

Like most well-to-do Hellenistic houses this far east, that of Hipponicus mingled Classical simplicity with Oriental lavishness. In the dining room, gilt molding framed walls on which frescoes depicted fanciful birds, beasts, and plants, gaudily hued. The same flowing lines graced the bronze candelabra whose tapers took over as daylight faded. Incense sweetened the air. Now in summer, a door stood open on the roses and fishpond of the inner court. However, the company reclined in Attic fashion, two on a couch, at a pair of small tables, wearing white tunics with little ornament. They watered their wine and ate food that was good but not elaborate, soup and soft bread followed by a dish of lamb, barley, and vegetables, lightly seasoned. The presence of any meat was somewhat special. Dessert was fresh fruit.

Normally the merchant would have made his first supper at home a family occasion, the only guest his friend Meander. The next evening would have seen a stag party complete with girls engaged to play music, dance, and otherwise entertain. This time circumstances were different. He needed an early and accurate briefing on them. The message he sent ahead bade his wife invite certain men at once. Male slaves waited on them.

He counted for enough in city affairs that the two who were able to come on such short notice did. Besides, what he had to tell from the northern frontier might be useful. They lay opposite him and Everard and, after the amenities, got directly to the way things were. It was not pleasant.

“—the latest courier,” growled Creon. “The army should get here day after tomorrow.” He was a burly, scar-faced man, second in command of the garrison left behind when King Euthydemus departed.

Hipponicus blinked. “The whole expeditionary force?”

“Minus the dead,” said Creon grimly.

“But what about the rest of the country?” asked Hipponicus, Shalten. He had hinterland properties. “If most of our men are bottled in this one city, Antiochus’ troops can plunder and burn everywhere else, unhindered.”

“First plunder, then burn!” Everard recalled. The twentieth-century joke, which doubtless had a hoary lineage, was not very funny when the reality drew nigh, but a man was apt to grab at any straw of humor.

“Fear not,” soothed Zoilus. Hipponicus had explained to Everard that this minister of the treasury had connections throughout the realm. Beneath the big nose, gaunt features creased in a pursy little smile. “Our king knows well what he does. With his forces concentrated here, the enemy must stay close by. Else we could send detachments out to take them from behind, piecemeal. Isn’t that right, Creon?”

“Not quite that simple, especially over the long haul.” The officer’s glance at his couchmate added, You civilians always fancy yourselves strategists, don’t you? “But, true, Antiochus is playing it cautious. That’s plain to see. After all, our army is still in working order, and he’s far from home.”

Everard, who had kept a respectful silence in the presence of the dignitaries, decided he could venture a query. “Just what did happen, sir? Can you tell us, from the dispatches you’ve gotten?”

Creon’s reply was slightly condescending, but amicable, as one fighting man to another. “The Syrians marched along the southern bank of the River Arius.” On the maps of Everard’s milieu, that was the Hari Rud. “Else they’d have had desert to cross. Euthydemus knew Antiochus was coming, of course. He’d expected him for a long time.”

Naturally, Everard thought. This war had been brewing six decades, since the satrap of Bactria revolted against the Seleucid monarchy and proclaimed his province independent, himself its king.

The Parthians had taken fire about the same time and done likewise. They were more nearly pure Iranian—Aryan, in the true meaning of that term—and considered themselves the heirs of the Persian Empire which Alexander had conquered and Alexander’s generals divided among each other. Long at strife with rivals in the West, the descendants of General Seleucus suddenly found an added menace at their backs.

At present, they ruled over Cilicia (south central Turkey, in Everard’s era) and Latakia along the Mediterranean seaboard. Thence their domain sprawled across most of Syria, Mesopotamia (Iraq), and Persia (Iran), holding much directly, some in vassalage. Therefore language commonly lumped it under the name “Syria,” although its lords were Graeco-Macedonian with Near Eastern admixture and their subjects wildly diverse. King Antiochus III had drawn it back together after civil and foreign wars nearly shattered it. He went on to Parthia (northeastern Iran) and chastened that new power—for the time being. Now he was come to reclaim Bactria and Sogdiana. His ambitions reached southward from them, into India….

“—and kept his spies and scouts busy. He took position at the ford he knew the Syrians would use.” Creon sighed. “But I must say Antiochus is a wily one, and as daring as he’s tough. Shortly before dawn, he sent a picked force across—”

The Bactrian troops, like the Parthian, were principally cavalry. That suited Asian traditions and, most places, the Asian land; but it left them terribly handicapped at night, when they always withdrew to what they hoped was a safe distance from the enemy.

“—and drove our pickets back on our main body. His own main body followed. Euthydemus deemed it wisest to give ground, regroup, and make for here. He’s been collecting reinforcements along the way. Antiochus has pursued, but not closely. Fighting has amounted to skirmishes.”

Hipponicus frowned. “That isn’t like Antiochus, from What I’ve heard of him,” he said.

Creon shrugged, emptied his cup, held it out to a slave for a refill. “Our intelligence is that he was wounded at the ford. Not enough to disable, obviously, but maybe enough to slow him down.”

“Still,” declared Zoilus, “he’s been unwise not to follow up his advantage immediately. Bactra is well supplied. These walls are impregnable. Once behind them, King Euthydemus—”

“Can sit and let Antiochus blockade us into starvation?” Hipponicus interrupted. “I hope not!”

Foreknowledge gave confidence for Everard to say, “That may not be what he intends. If I were your king, I’d make myself secure here, then sally forth for a pitched battle, with the city to return to in case I lost it.”

Creon nodded.

“The Trojan War over again?” Hipponicus protested. “May the gods grant a different outcome for us.” He tipped his cup and sprinkled some drops on the floor.

“Fear not,” said Zoilus. “Our king has better sense than Priam. And his eldest son, Demetrius, bids fair to become a new Alexander.” Evidently he remained a courtier wherever he went.

Yet he was not merely a sycophant, or Hipponicus would not have wanted him present. In this matter he spoke truth. Euthydemus was a self-made man, adventurer from Magnesia, usurper who seized the crown of Bactria; but he governed ably and fought cannily. In years to come, Demetrius would cross the Hindu Kush and grab off a goodly chunk of the decaying Mauryan Empire for himself.

Unless the Exaltationists prevailed in spite of everything, and that whole future from which Everard sprang was annulled.

“Well, I’d better see to my own arms,” Hipponicus said heavily. “I have … three men of fighting age in this household, besides myself. My sons—” He did not quite suppress a wince.

“Good,” rumbled Creon. “We’ve reorganized things somewhat. You’ll report to Philip, son of Xanthus, at the Orion Tower.”

Hipponicus cast Everard a look. Their forearms were in contact. The Patrolman felt a slight quiver.

Zoilus took the word, a bit maliciously: “If you don’t care for a part in our war, Meander, leave at once.”

“Not so fast, I hope, sir,” Everard answered.

“You’ll fight on our side?” Hipponicus breathed.

“Well, this takes me by surprise—” I lie like a wet rag.

Creon chuckled. “Oh, you’d been looking forward to some fun? Spend your pay on the best, then. Drink good wine while it’s to be had, and do your whoring before the army drives every street slut’s price as high as Theonis’ is now.”

“Whose?” asked Everard.

Hipponicus’ grin was sour. “Never mind. She’s out of your class and mine.”

Zoilus flushed. “She’s not for any oaf who brings a bag of gold,” he snapped. “She chooses the lovers she desires.”

Oh-ho! Everard thought. The great official has his human side, does he? But let’s avoid embarrassing him. It’ll be tricky as is, steering this conversation the way I want even for a minute or two. Kipling’s lines passed wryly through his mind:“Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.We spake of them all, but the last the most….”

He turned to Hipponicus. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’d like to stand with you, but by the time I could be enlisted, me, a foreigner, the battle that decides the victory might well be finished. In any case, I couldn’t do much. I’m not trained to fight on horseback.”

The merchant nodded. “Nor is it your fight,” he replied, more pragmatic than disappointed. “I’m sorry your welcome to my city is so poor. You’d better leave tomorrow or the day after.”

“I’ll go around town among the metics and transients,” Everard said. “Somebody may want to hire an extra guard for his trip home. Half the world passes through Bactra, doesn’t it? If I can find somebody returning to some place I’ve never been before, that would be perfect.” He had been at pains with Hipponicus to build the persona of a man who tramped around not simply because of having gotten into trouble with his tribe, but out of curiosity. Such were not uncommon in this milieu.

“You’ll meet none from the Far East,” Zoilus warned. “That trade has shriveled.”

I know, Everard recollected. China’s been under the rule of Shi Huang-Ti, the Mao of his day. Totally xenophobic. And now at his death, it’ll be turmoil till the Han Dynasty gets established. Meanwhile the Hiung-nu and other nomad gangsters prowl freely beyond the Great Wall. He shrugged. “Well, what about India, Arabia, Africa, or in Europe Rome, Areconia, or even Gaul?”

The others showed surprise. “Areconia?” Hipponicus asked.

Everard’s pulse thuttered. He kept his manner as casual as it had been when he planted the word. “You haven’t heard? Maybe you know the Areconians under a different name. I heard mention in Parthia when I passed through there, and that was second or third hand. I got the impression of occasional traders from pretty far northwest. Sounded interesting.”

“What are they like?” Creon inquired, still fairly genial toward him.

“Unusual-looking, I was told. Tall, slim, handsome as gods, black hair but skin like alabaster and eyes light; and the men don’t grow beards, their cheeks are as smooth as a girl’s.”

Hipponicus wrinkled brows, then shook his head. Zoilus tautened. Creon rubbed his own bristly chin and murmured, “I seem to have heard talk, these past months—Wait!” he exclaimed. “That sounds like Theonis. Not that she’d have a beard, whatever she is, but hasn’t she got men like that with her? Does anybody really know where she’s from?”

Hipponicus went thoughtful. “I gather she set up in business about a year ago, very quietly,” he said. “She’d have needed permits and so forth. There was no fuss about them, no, nor any gossip to speak of. All at once, here she was.” He laughed. “A powerful protector, I suppose, who takes it out in trade.”

A chill tingle passed along Everard’s scalp. Topflight courtesan, yeah, that’s how a woman could get full freedom of action in these surroundings. I sort of expected it. He bent his mouth upward. “Think she’d at least talk to a homely vagabond?” he asked. “If she does have kin-folk here, or if she herself thinks best to leave, well, my sword is for hire.”

Zoilus’ palm cracked onto his couch. “No!” he yelled. The rest stared. He collected himself and challenged Everard, raggedly: “Why are you so interested, if you know so little about these … Areconians, did you call them? I didn’t think a hardheaded mercenary would chase after… a fairy tale.”

Hoy, I’ve touched a nerve, haven’t I? Back off! Everard raised a hand. “Please, it was just a notion of mine. Not worth making a fuss about. I’ll inquire around town in a general way tomorrow, if I may. Meanwhile, you gentlemen have more important things to talk about, don’t you?”

Creon’s lips thinned. “We do,” he said.

Nonetheless, throughout that evening Zoilus’ glance kept straying toward Meander the Illyrian.

976 B.C.

After their attack on the Exaltationists, the Patrol squadron flitted to an uninhabited island in the Aegean to rest, care for the wounded, and assess the operation. It had gone as well as Everard dared hope: four bandit timecycles shot down, seven prisoners taken off the foundering ship on which they had left Phoenicia. True, three riders had flashed away into space-time before an energy beam could strike. His heart would have no real ease until the last of their breed was captured or slain. Still, there could be very few remaining at large, and today he had—finally, finally—nabbed the ringleader.

Merau Varagan walked some yards off from the group, to a cliff edge, where he stood looking out over the sea. The Patrolmen on guard let him. They had snapped a neuroinduction collar around the neck of each prisoner. At the first sign of any suspicious move, a remote-control switch would activate it and the wearer would collapse paralyzed. On impulse. Everard went to join him.

Water sparkled blue, flecked with white, dusted with radiance. Sunlight called pungencies out of dittany underfoot. A breeze ruffled Varagan’s hair, which sheened obsidian black. He had shed his drenched robe and stood like a marble statue newly from the hand of Phidias. His face might also have been the ideal of a Hellas not yet born, except that it was too fine-chiseled and nothing Apollonian dwelt in the great green eyes or on the blood-red mouth. Dionysian, perhaps….

He nodded at Everard. “A lovely vista,” he said in American English, which his voice turned into music. The tone was calm, almost nonchalant. “May I savor it while we are here?”

“Sure,” agreed the Patrolman, “though we’ll leave pretty soon.”

“Does the exile planet offer anything comparable?”

“I don’t know. They don’t tell us.”

“To make it more feared, I daresay. That un-discover’d country from whose bourn No traveler returns.’” Sardonically: “You needn’t persuade me not to escape it by leaping off this verge, no matter how relieved some of your companions might feel.”

“As a matter of fact, we’d cuss. It wouldn’t be nice of you, putting us to all the trouble of fishing out your carcass and reviving it.”

“In order to subject me to the kyradex.”

“Yeah. You’ve got a headful of information we want.”

“I fear you will be disappointed. We have taken care that none of us shall know much about any other’s resources, capabilities, or contingency plans.”

“Uh-huh. Natural-born loners, the bunch of you.”

“And the genetic engineers of the thirty-first millennium set themselves to bring forth a race of supermen, bred to adventure on the cosmic frontier,” Shalten said once, “and lo, they found they had begotten Lucifer.” He sometimes talks in that vaguely Biblical style. Otherwise nothing about him is vague.

“Well, I will preserve what dignity I can,” Varagan said. “Once on the planet”—he smiled—“who knows what may be possible?”

Physical weariness and letdown after excitement left Everard vulnerable to emotion. “Why do you do it?” he blurted. “You lived like gods—”

Varagan nodded. “Very much like gods. Have you ever considered the fact that that includes changelessness, trapped in a myth, ultimate meaninglessness? Our civilization was older to us than the Stone Age was to yours. In the end, that made it unendurable.”

So you tried to overthrow it, and failed, but some of you had managed to seize timecycles, and fled back into the past. “You could have left it peacefully. The Patrol, for instance, would’ve been overjoyed to have people with your abilities as recruits; and for your part, I swear you’d never have been bored.”

“We would have been what is worse, perverting our innermost natures. The Patrol exists to conserve one version of history.”

“And you’ve kept trying to destroy it! In God’s name, why?”

“So stupid a question is unworthy of you. You know quite well why. We have tried to remake time in order that we may rule it; and we have desired to rule in order that our wills may be wholly free. Enough.”

Haughtiness departed, lightness returned. Varagan trilled a laugh. “The stodgy have triumphed again, it seems. Congratulations. You’ve done a remarkable piece of detective work, tracking us. Would you tell me how? I’ll be most interested.”

“Ah, it’d take too long,” and parts of it would hurt too much.

The arched brows lifted higher. “Your mood has shifted, has it? You seemed amiable a minute ago. I still feel thus. You’ve been a rather exciting enemy, Everard. In Colombia-to-be,” where Varagan came close to taking over Simón Bolívar’s government, “in Perú,” where his gang tried to steal Atahuallpa’s ransom from Pizarro and change the course of the Spanish Conquest, “and now in Tyre,” which they had threatened to blow up, were they not given an instrumentality that could have made them nearly omnipotent, “we have played our game, you and I. Where-when else, less directly?”

A dull anger had in fact come upon Everard. “It was no game to me, buster,” he snapped, “and you’re well out of it.”

Irritation flicked back at him: “As you wish. Then kindly leave me to my thoughts. Among them is the reflection that you have not caught the last Exaltationist yet. In a certain sense, you have not caught me.”

Everard bunched his fists. “Huh?”

Varagan regained self-possession, the will to cruelty. “I may as well explain. The interrogation machine will bring it out. Among the remnants of us is Raor. She was not on this expedition, because women are hampered in the Phoenician milieu, but she has taken part in others. My clone mate, Everard. She has her ways of finding out what went wrong here. She will be as vengeful as she always was ambitious. Pleasant dreams.” He smiled and turned his back, again gazing out at sea and sky.

The Patrolman left him but, for a while, sought solitude also. He walked to the other side of the islet, sat down on a rock, brought out pipe and tobacco, got a smoke started.

Staircase wit, he thought. I should’ve retorted, “Suppose she succeeds. Suppose she does blot out the future. You’ll be in it, remember? You’ll stop ever having existed.”

Except, of course, in those bits of space-time pastward of that change moment, in which he was engaged on his pranks. He’d’ve pointed that out with some glee, maybe. Or maybe not. In any case, I doubt he fears obliteration. The ultimate nihilist.

To hell with it. Repartee never was my long suit. Let me just go back to Tyre, tie up the loose ends there—

Bronwen. No. I’ve got to make provision for her, but that’s a matter of common decency, nothing more. After that, we’d better both start learning how to stop missing each other. For me the best place will be my familiar old twentieth-century USA, where I can put my feet up for a while.

He often felt that the privilege of an Unattached agent, essentially to make his or her own assignments, was worth the risks and responsibilities that the status entailed. I might want to pursue this Exaltationist business further, once I’ve had a good rest. I might.

He shifted about on his rock. Not too good a rest! Some activity, some fun.

That girl who got caught in the Peruvian events, Wanda Tamberly—Across months of his personal lifespan and three millennia of history, memory rose bright. Why, sure. No problem. She accepted the Patrol’s invitation to join. If I can catch her between that dinner I took her to and the day she leaves for the Academy—Cradle robbing? No, damn it. Just to enjoy myself, giving her a cheerful send-off, and then I’ll get on with the raunchy part of my furlough.

209 B.C.

At last the teaching of Gautama Buddha would ebb from his native India until there it was all but forgotten. Today it still flourished, and the tide of it flowed strongly outward. Thus far, converts in Bactria were scarce. The topes and stupas whose ruins Everard saw in twentieth-century Afghanistan would not be built for generations. However, Bactra city numbered sufficient believers to maintain a vihara, at which visiting coreligionists usually called and sometimes stayed; and those merchants, caravaneers, guards, mendicants, monks, and other travelers were numerous, hailing from a wide range of territories. Hence it made a superb listening post, a principal reliance of the historical study project.

Everard sought it the morning after his arrival. The sanctuary-cum-hostel was a modest adobe building, a former tenement, in Ion’s Lane off the Street of the Weavers, distinguished from the neighbors crammed wall to wall against it largely by motifs painted on the whitewash, lotus, jewel, flame. When he knocked, a brown man in a yellow robe opened the door and gave benign greeting. Everard inquired about Chandrakumar of Pa-taliputra. He learned that the esteemed philosopher did indeed live here, but was off on his accustomed Socratic argufying, unless he had settled down someplace to meditate. He should return by evening.

“Thank you,” said Everard aloud, and Damn! to himself. Not that the news ought to surprise him. He’d had no way to make an advance appointment. Chandra-kumar’s job was to learn what the meager chronicles that survived had omitted, not only details of politics but economics, social structure, cultural activity, multifarious and ever-mutable everyday life. You did that largely by mingling.

Everard wandered away. Maybe he’d come upon his man. Or he might find some clues on his own. Partly he wished he weren’t so conspicuous, towering above the average of this time and place, with features more suggestive of a barbarian Gaul than of a Greek or even an Illyrian. (A German would have been closer still, but nobody in Asia had ever heard of Angles, Saxons, or any of that lot.) A detective did best when he could fade into his background. On the other hand, curiosity about him should make it easy to strike up conversations; and the Exaltationists should have no reason to suspect the Patrol was on their trail.

If the Exaltationists were here. Quite possibly they had never winded the bait set out for them, or had been too wary to go after it.

Anyway, as for his appearance, no one else with equivalent ability and experience had been available for the groundside part of the operation. The joke was well-worn among English-speaking members of the Patrol, that their corps was chronically overextended. You used whomever and whatever came to hand.

The streets seethed. Beneath its permanent reeks, the air stank of anxiety-sweat. Criers were going about, announcing the imminent return of glorious King Euthydemus and his army. They did not say it was in defeat, but the populace already had a good idea.

Nobody panicked. Men and women continued their ordinary work or their emergency preparations. They spoke little or not at all about the thoughts that crawled in them, siege, hunger, epidemic, sack. That would have been like clawing at one’s flesh. Besides, most people in the ancient world were more or less fatalistic. Events to come might work out for the better instead of the worst. Undoubtedly many a mind was occupied with schemes to make an extra profit from the situation.

Still, talk was apt to be loud, gestures jerky, laughter shrill. Foodstuffs disappeared from the bazaars as hoarders grabbed what had not gone into the royal storehouses. Fortune-tellers, charm vendors, and shrines did land-office business. Everard had no difficulty making acquaintances. On the contrary, he never bought a drink for himself. Men panted for any fresh word from outside.

In streets, marketplace arcades, wineshops, foodshops, a public bath where he took refuge for a while, he fielded questions as noncommittally and kindly as he was able. What he got in exchange was scant. Nobody knew anything about “Areconians.” That was to be expected; but only three or four said they had seen a person of such appearance, and they were vague about it. Maybe someone was correct, but it had been an individual belonging in this milieu, a stray tribesman from afar who happened to fit an imperfectly understood description. Maybe memory was at fault. Maybe the respondent simply told Meander what he supposed Meander wanted to hear; that was an immemorial Oriental custom.

So much for the dash and derring-do of the Time Patrol, Everard said dryly to his recollection of Wanda. Ninety-nine percent of our efforts are slogwork, same as for any other police force.

He did finally luck out, to the extent of gaining information marginally more definite. In the bath he met one Timotheus, a dealer in slaves, plump, hairy, quick to set his worries aside and discuss lechery when Meander offered that gambit. Theonis’ name entered readily. “I’ve heard tell about her. I’m not sure what to believe.”

“So am I. So are most of us. Seems too good to be true, what gossip says.” Timotheus wiped his brow and stared before him into the gloom, as if to conjure her from the steam-clouds. “An avatar of Anaitis.” Hastily, he sketched a symbol with his forefinger. “No disrespect to the goddess. What I know is only what filters forth to the world, by way of friends and servants and such. Her lovers are few, and higher-ups, every one of them. They don’t say much about her. I guess she doesn’t want them to. Else she’d be as widely spoke of as Phryne or Aspasia or Lais. But her men do let words slip now and then, and those words pass on. Maybe growing in the telling. I don’t know.”

“Face and form like Aphrodite’s, voice like song, skin like snow, gait like a panther’s. Midnight hair. Eyes the green of a fire where copper is about to melt. That’s what they say.”

“I’ve never seen her. Few have. She seldom leaves her house, and then it’s in a curtained litter. But, yes, so the song goes. A tavern song. Unfortunately, we can’t do more than sing about her, we commoners. And it could well be exaggerated.” Timotheus sniggered. “Maybe the bard was just wet-dreaming in public.”

If she is Raor, it is not exaggerated. For Everard, the room suddenly lost its heat. He forced his tone to stay casual. “Where’s she from? Any kin here with her?”

Timotheus turned his face to the big man. “Why so inquisitive? She’s not for you, my friend, no, not if you offered a thousand staters. For one thing, the patrons she’s got would be jealous. That could get unhealthy.”

Everard shrugged. “I’m only curious. Somebody out of nowhere, almost overnight fascinating ministers of the king—”

Timotheus looked uneasy. “They do whisper she’s a sorceress.” Fast: “I’m not backbiting her, mind you. Listen, she’s endowed a small temple of Poseidon outside town. A pious work.” He couldn’t resist cynicism. “It gives employment to her kinsman Nicomachus, its priest. But then, he was here before her, I don’t know what he was doing, and maybe he prepared her way.” Quickly again: “No disrespect. For all I know, she is a goddess among us. Let’s change the subject.”

Poseidon? wondered Everard. This far inland? … Oh, yes. As well as the sea, he’s god of horses and earthquakes, and this is a country of both.

Toward evening, he figured Chandrakumar would be back. First he stilled hunger at a vendor’s brazier, with lentils and onions dished into a folded chapatti. Tomatoes, green pepper, and a roast ear of corn on the side were for the future. He would have liked coffee, too, but must settle for diluted sour wine. Another need he took care of in an alley that happened to be unoccupied. That amenity of civilization, the French pissoir, stood equally far uptime, and all too briefly.

The sun was under the ramparts and streets were cooling off in shadow when he reached the vihara. This time the monk led him to a room inside. Rather, it was a cell, tiny, windowless, a thin curtain across the doorway for privacy. A clay lamp on a shelf gave barely enough flickery, odorous light for Everard to pick his way over a floor whose sole furniture was a straw tick and a bit of rug on which a man sat cross-legged.

Eyeballs gleamed through murk as Chandrakumar looked up. He was small, thin, chocolate-skinned, with the delicate features and full lips of a Hindu—born in the late nineteenth century, Everard knew, a university graduate whose thesis on Indo-Bactrian society had led to the Patrol seeking him out with an offer to conduct his further studies in person. Here his garb was a white dhoti, his hair hung long, and he was holding near his mouth an object that Everard deduced was not really an amulet.

“Rejoice,” he said uncertainly.

Everard returned the greeting in the same Greek. “Rejoice.” The monk’s footfalls dwindled away. Everard spoke softly, in Temporal: “Can we talk without anybody trying to listen?”

“You are an agent?” The question trembled. Chandrakumar made to rise. Everard waved him back and lowered his own bulk to the clay.

“Correct,” he said. “Things are getting urgent.”

“I should hope so.” Chandrakumar had recovered equilibrium. Though he was a researcher, not a constable, field specialists too must needs be tough and quick-witted. His voice held an edge. “I have spent this past year wondering when somebody would arrive. We are now at the very crisis point.” Pause. “Are we not?” A spectacular episode in history was not necessarily one on which the whole future hinged.

Everard gestured at the disc on its chain. “Best turn that off. We don’t want to risk our conversation falling into the wrong hands.” It doubtless contained a molecular-level recorder, into which Chandrakumar had been whispering notes on this day’s observations. His communicator and other, similarly disguised equipment were stowed somewhere else.

When the medallion dangled loose, Everard proceeded: “I’m passing for Meander, an Illyrian soldier of fortune. What I am is Specialist Jack Holbrook, born 1975, Toronto.” On a mission as damnable as his, you didn’t tell even an ally more than he had to know. Everard shook hands, the polite thing for men of their natal backgrounds to do. “And you are … Benegal Dass?”

“At home. Chandrakumar is the name I currently use here. You caused me a bit of trouble about that, you know. Before, I was ‘Rajneesh.’ Wasn’t reasonable he should pop up so soon after he left for home, so I had to concoct a jolly good kinship story to explain why I look just like him.”

They had slipped into English, almost unconsciously, a breath of the commonplace in this darkness. Perhaps for the same reason, they did not go immediately to the point.

“I was surprised to learn you hadn’t meant to be present,” Everard said. “Famous siege. You could fill in all the lacunae and correct the errors in Polybius, and whatever other fragments of chronicle will survive.”

Chandrakumar spread his palms. “Given my limited resources and finite lifespan, I did not care to squander any of it on a war. Bloodshed, waste, misery, and after two years, what result? Antiochus can’t take the city and doesn’t wish or dare to stay bogged down before it any longer. He makes a peace that is sealed by betrothing a daughter of his to Prince Demetrius, and proceeds on south to India. The evolution of a society is what matters. Wars are nothing but its pathologies.”

Everard refrained from expressing disagreement. Not that he liked wars; he had seen too many. By the same token, though, they must be as much a norm of history as blizzards were of Arctic weather; and all too often, their outcomes did make a difference.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “but we required an expert observer on the spot, and you’re it. Uh, as Chandrakumar, you’re a Buddhist pilgrim, am I right?”

“Not precisely. The vihara does possess a few holy objects, but nothing extraordinary. However, Chandrakumar seeks enlightenment, and the letters that his cousin Rajneesh sent from the silk dealership where he worked in Bactra, those decided Chandrakumar on studying the wisdom of the West as well as the East. For example, Heraclitus was approximately contemporary with the Buddha, and some of his thought shows close parallels. This is a good place for an Indian to learn about the Hellenes.”

Everard nodded. In one identity after another, normally separated by timespans of a length to preclude recognition, Benegal Dass spent years adding up into decades among the Bactrians. Each arrival and departure was by the slow, difficult, dangerous means of the era; a hopper, anything that might seem strange, would have destroyed his usefulness and run afoul of the Patrol’s prime directive. He had watched this city grow great, and he would watch it die. The end product of his labors was the story of it, deep and wide-ranging but never seen except by a handful of interested individuals within the corps or up in the far distant future. When he took furlough in his native country and century, he must lie to family and friends about what he did for a living. Surely no monk had ever accepted an existence harder, lonelier, or more devoted. I don’t have that kind of fortitude, Everard confessed.

Chandrakumar laughed nervously. “Pardon me,” he said. “I delay matters. Long-windedness, the scholar’s disease. And of course I’m rather in suspense myself, don’t you know. What is afoot?” After a moment: “Well?”

“I’m afraid you won’t like this,” Everard answered heavily. “You’ve been put to a lot of trouble for what’s just a sideshow, if it’s that much. But the main event is so important that every bit of information counts, including negative information.”

It was hard to see whether Chandrakumar bit his lip. His voice went cold. “Oh, really? What is this main event, may I ask?”

“Take too long to explain in detail. Not that I know a lot myself. I’m only acting as a liaison with you, a messenger boy. What the Patrol has to prevent is several years uptime. A sort of … equivalent of the Sassanian dynasty … rising and taking over Persia. Soon.”

The little man stiffened where he sat. “What? Impossible!”

Everard’s grin was skewed. “That’s what we have to make it. I repeat, I can’t say much. In intelligence work, operatives don’t get told anything they don’t need to know. But, roughly, as I understand it, the plot they’ve uncovered is for King Arsaces of Parthia to be overthrown by a usurper who denounces the peace treaty with Antiochus, attacks the Seleucid army when it’s on its way back from India, routs it and kills Antiochus himself.”

“The consequences—” Chandrakumar susurrated.

“Yeah. The Seleucid realm would very likely fall apart. It’s always on the brink of civil war. That should give the Romans a leg up in the eastern Mediterranean, unless Parthians eager to avenge the humiliation Antiochus handed them sweep east through the power vacuum, restoring the Persian Empire three and a half centuries before the Sassanians are scheduled to do so. What could come of that is anybody’s guess, but it won’t be the history you and I studied.”

“This usurper … a time traveler?”

Everard nodded. “We think so. Again, I’ve been told hardly anything. I get the impression the Patrol has clues to a small band of fanatics who’ve somehow obtained two or three vehicles and want to—I don’t know what. Lay a groundwork for Mohammed and the ayatollahs to take over the world? That’s probably farfetched; though the truth may be farther fetched yet. At any rate, an operation is under way to forestall them, without tearing up the continuum ourselves in the process.”

“Caution, yes…. Of course I am ready to do whatever I can. Your role, sir?”

“Well, as I told you, I’m a field researcher too, though my area is military, Hellenistic warfare to be exact. I’d intended to observe this siege anyway. It is more interesting than you care to admit. The Patrol ordered me to change my plans slightly, same as it did you. I was to come into town, contact you, and take whatever relevant information you’ve gathered during this past year. Tomorrow I’ll leave, make my way to the invaders, and en-list with them. I’m too big for a cavalryman on present-day horses, but the Syrians make heavy use of infantry still—the good old Macedonian phalanx—and a pikeman my size will be welcome. In due course a Patrolman will contact me and I’ll pass your data on. After the peace with Euthydemus, I’ll accompany the Syrian army to India and then back west. A Patrol agent will have slipped me an energy weapon, and I’ll try to protect Antiochus’ life if things look desperate. Naturally, we hope it won’t come to that. We hope the usurpation can be smoothly aborted, and all I need do is collect details about how the Syrians manage a campaign.”

“I see.” Everard heard the reluctance. Waging war against Chandrakumar’s beloved Bactrians? However, he could accept a necessity and inquire: “But I say, why so roundabout? This kingdom doesn’t seem involved. In any case, someone could simply arrive on a hopper in a discreet location and get in touch with me.”

“Precaution. The enemy may have a watchman here, who’d probably be able to detect an arrival or departure nearby. We don’t want to risk alerting anybody like that. If they don’t know we’re aware of their existence, we can more handily bag thern. And Bactria does have its role in history. While it exists as a military power, it helps keep the Parthians more cautious than they might otherwise be.” That much, at least, is true. Now for more mendacity. “Maybe, as part of the plot, the gang wants to undermine Bactria somehow. Or maybe not—they can only be a few individuals—but we’re coppering every bet we can. Before you left base, you were told to keep an eye out for any visitors who seemed peculiar. I’m here to get that information from you.”

“I see,” Chandrakumar repeated, but in friendly wise, now eager to help. The vision Everard presented terrified him, as it certainly should. He stayed calm, though, tugged his chin, stared into the dimness around them. “Hard to tell. This city is such a potpourri of races. I’d be sorry if I cause the corps to waste effort on quite harmless persons.”

“Never mind. Tell me everything. They’ll evaluate it uptime.”

“If you could give me some notion—”

“For openers: who stopped by this house, paid his respects, and in the course of chitchat found out what’s been going on—whether any other oddball strangers were in town, for instance?”

“Several, off and on. An establishment like this is a sort of verbal bulletin board, you know, and not only for Buddhists.”

Right. That’s why the Patrol quietly helped found it, half a century ago. In medieval Europe we do the same for certain monasteries. “Go on. Get specific. Please.”

“Well, as per instructions, I have maintained myself here, not moved to more comfortable quarters, so I have been in a position to pay heed. Generally, I would call them unsuspicious, those who dropped in. I do wish you could indicate a little better what you have in mind.”

“Individuals who don’t seem to belong anywhere in this milieu, whether racially or culturally or … any hallmark that struck your notice. I was told the gang may be a mixed bunch.”

Lamplight flickered over a bleak smile. “You, coming from when you do, think of Arab terrorists? No, there were a pair of Arabs, but I have no reason to believe they were anything but the spice dealers they said they were. Irishmen, however—Yes, conceivably two Irishmen. Black hair, marble-white skin as if this Asian sun had never touched it, fine features. If they are of that stock, they cannot well be contemporary, can they? The Irish at present are barbarian headhunters.”

Everard must struggle to show no more interest than Holbrook would in any other potential suspects. He trusted the Indian, but when you stalked such an enemy as his, you didn’t willingly add the slightest hazard to those you already confronted. The Exaltationists surely realized that at least one historical worker was intermittently in town. If they decided there was reason to take the trouble, they might well manage to identify him. Cover your own trail!

“What did they themselves claim to be, do you know?” he asked.

“I didn’t listen to their talk with Zenodotus. He’s a Greek convert, the most active mundanely of these monks. I tried to pump him afterward, but of course I was under orders never to show excessive curiosity. He did tell me that they had told him they were Gauls—civilized Gauls, from the neighborhood of Marseilles.”

“Could be. A long ways from home, but wanderings like that aren’t unheard of. Like this persona of mine.”

“True. It was mainly their appearance that set me wondering. Shouldn’t southern Gauls more or less resemble southern Frenchmen of our time? Well, perhaps their family immigrated from the North. They told Zenodotus they liked this city and inquired about the prospects of starting a horse-breeding farm in the hinterland. I haven’t heard that anything came of the idea. Since then I have glimpsed them, or persons remarkably like them, in the streets a time or two. Judging by gossip, a courtesan who has recently gained notoriety may have been of their party. That is all I can say about them. Is it of any use?”

“I dunno,” Everard grunted. “My job is only to pass whatever you tell me on to the real operatives.” Cover up, cover up. “What more? Any strangers who called themselves Libyans, Egyptians, Jews, Armenians, Scythians—any kind of exotic—but didn’t seem quite to fit the nationality?”

“I have paid close attention, round about in the city as well as at this house. Mind you, I am scarcely qualified to identify anomalies in most persons. Greeks and Iranians have ample ethnic complexities for me to cope with. However, there was a man from Jerusalem, let me think, about three months ago. I’ll give you my recorded notes. Palestine is under Ptolemy of Egypt, you know, with whom Antiochus has been at loggerheads. This man said nothing about difficulties in traversing Syrian territory—”

Everard half listened. He felt sure the “Gauls” and Theonis were the objects of his hunt. But he didn’t want to give Chandrakumar that impression. “—a half-dozen Tocharian tribesmen from beyond the Jaxartes, who’d come down through Sogdiana with furs to trade. How they got permission to enter—”

Somebody cried out. Feet fled down the corridor. Behind them, hobnails thudded and metal rattled.

“What the devil!” Everard surged to his feet. He’d come forth weaponless, as a civilian must, and his secret gear also rested in the house of Hipponicus, lest somehow it give him away. It’s for you, Manse, he cried to himself, crazily, foreknowing.

A hand ripped the curtain aside. Vague light shimmered on a helmet, breastplate, greaves, drawn sword. Two other men hulked shadowy at the back of the first. Maybe more were in the hallway. “City guard,” rapped the leader in Greek. “Meander of Illyria, you’re under arrest.”

They’d’ve learned at the front door what room I’m in, but how do they know what name to call me by? “Great Heracles!” Everard yelped. “Whatever for? I haven’t done anything.” Chandrakumar crouched into a corner.

“You’re charged with being a spy for the Syrians.” Law did not require the squad chief to tell, but the unease that harshened his voice made him talkative. “Step out.” His blade gestured. He’d need a single stride and a thrust to put it in the belly of a resister.

Exaltationists behind this, got to be, but how’d they know, how’d they arrange, and so fast?

He who hesitates is bossed. Everard flung an arm around and knocked the lamp from its shelf. Oil blazed for half a second and went out. Everard had already shifted his weight the opposite way and dropped to a squat. Suddenly blind, the Macedonian roared and lunged. Everard’s eyes, adapted to gloom, found shapes in this deeper dark. He rose with the upward-rocketing heel of his hand. It crashed into bone. The other man’s head snapped back. His blade clattered free. He lurched against his followers and collapsed in a tangle among them.

A fist would have meant broken knuckles if it had connected wrongly, when Everard had only the barest vision and neither time nor room to maneuver. Across his mind flitted a hope that he hadn’t killed a man who was merely doing his duty, who doubtless had wife and kids—It was gone. His mass smote the confusion at the entrance. Seizing and twisting with his hands, levering with a shin, he got past them. Ahead of him a fourth guard yelled and flailed about, bare-handed, afraid his steel might strike a comrade but able to delay escape long enough for them to act. Light-colored, his kilt was a visible mark. Everard gave him the knee. His shouts became screams. Everard heard another soldier stumble over him where he writhed.

By then the Patrolman was in a common room. Three monks scrambled aside, aghast. He charged by, through the front door, out.

The map in his head told him what he should do—turn left at the first corner, take the third lane beyond because it met an alley which joined a jumble of similar crooked paths—Distant halloos. A lean-to, booth for cheap wares during business hours, that looked fairly sturdy. Chin yourself up and lie flat on top, in case a pursuer comes past.

None did. After a while Everard descended.

Twilight was thickening into night. One by one, more and more, stars glimmered forth above shadow-cliff walls. Quiet had fallen; before streetlights, most people were indoors by dark. The air had cooled. He snatched it into his lungs and started off….

The Street of the Gemini stretched satisfactorily gloomy, well-nigh deserted. Once he passed a boy with a torch, once a man with a horn-paned lantern. He himself now went at the pace of a reputable citizen, belated unexpectedly and thus forced to walk by star-glow, trying not to step in too much muck. He did carry a flashlight, his sole anachronism. It lay among the coins in the purse at his waist, disguised as a religious charm. But it was for extreme emergency. Did somebody see it shine, he couldn’t explain that away as he could the rankness of sweat in his tunic.

Occasional windows faced the street, mostly in upper stories. They were shuttered, but light leaked yellow through cracks. Behind them the dwellers would be eating a light cold supper, drinking a nightcap, swapping news of the day, playing a game, telling a bedtime story to a child, making love. A harp twanged. A snatch of minor-key song drifted like a breeze. All seemed more remote than the stars.

Everard’s heart slugged at its wonted beat. He had willed the tension out of his muscles. Reaction wouldn’t set in till he allowed it to. He could think.

Why the trumped-up charge and the attempt to haul him off? Mistaken identity? That was implausible at best, and the fact that the squad knew his name denied it altogether. Somebody had told them it in connection with giving the orders, along with a physical description. Obviously the idea was to avoid possible foulups which could alert him or any companions he might have. The Exaltationists were as anxious to stay undercover as he was.

Exaltationists—yeah, who else? But they scarcely had secret control of the government… yet. They could not dispatch bullyboys disguised as garrison troops; too risky. Nor could they personally send legitimate soldiers. No, they worked through somebody who did have the power, or at least the political influence, to make such arrangements.

Who? Well, that led back to the question of who had fingered Everard.

Zoilus. I see it now, with the dazzling clarity of hindsight. A big wheel, and an infatuated customer of Theonis. She must’ve given him a song and dance about enemies who’d seek her out even in this distant refuge. He was to tell her if any newcomer started inquiring after foreigners of her peculiar type. With a wide acquaintance among a gossipy people, he had a good chance of hearing about that.

By sheer bad luck, Zoilus was one of Hipponicus’ guests yesterday and heard personally, immediately. Everard muttered lurid phrases.

So today, I guess, he informed her. Though he probably didn’t think Meander had been anything but idly curious, she—suspecting otherwise—talked him into sending the squad after me. That’d take some hours. He isn’t in the army himself; he’d have to scare up an officer he can control. Especially since everything must be kept very discreet.

My size and looks make me noticeable enough that the men could eventually track me down.

Everard sighed. They’ll bring Chandrakumar in. Possible accessory; and they’ve got to show some result, if they don’t want to suffer worse than five or six lashes with a weighted whip for letting me skite off. Poor little guy.

He hardened his feelings. Once the Exaltationists have established that he’s conditioned to silence, they’ll know there’s no point in torture, unless for fun. Of course, the fact of the conditioning will prove he’s from uptime. If they have a kyradex to break it—well, the beans he spills will be fake. My good luck is that Shalten coached me before I left, gave me a supply of red herrings to strew around.

His other assets—training, knowledge, strength, agility, mother wit, a well-stocked purse of money—were also on hand, for whatever they were worth. He had more, but aside from the flashlight, they lay in Hipponicus’ house. A finger ring held a transmitter for brief messages. The wattage was proportionately minuscule, but Patrol receivers could handle individual photons, and no manmade interference existed today. A medallion of Athena’s owl was a more powerful, two-way communicator. In the hilt of a knife rested a stun beam projector with charges for twenty shots. The haft of his sword doubled as an energy gun.

He was not alone on Earth. Historical investigators like Chandrakumar, other kinds of scientists, entrepreneurs, esthetes, esoterics numbered in the hundreds around the globe. More to the point, the Patrol kept stations in Rome, Egyptian Alexandria, Syrian Antioch, Hecatompylos, Patalipushtra, Hien-yang, Cuicuilco … and regional posts in between. They were aware of this operation. A distress call would bring help on the instant.

If he could recover the means to make it.

At best that would be a desperation move. The Exaltationists must be taking every precaution available to them. Everard didn’t know what they had in the way of detectors, but at the minimum they could surely monitor local electronics for nearby transmissions and tell when a timecycle appeared in this vicinity. They’d keep ready to scramble, flee into tracklessness, at the first sign that the Patrol might be after them.

Probably not every one of them at every instant could skip on half a minute’s notice. Their activities were often bound to take them, individually, away from their vehicles. But probably, too, they were never all of them gone at any given moment. A single one who escaped would be too many, an ongoing mortal danger.

Mental map or no, it wasn’t easy finding your way with neither lamps nor signs. Everard lost his a couple of times, and cursed. He was in a hurry. When the Exaltationists learned the arrest had failed, they’d surely, through Zoilus, send the men on to Hipponicus’ place to confiscate Meander’s belongings and lie in wait for him. Everard had to get there ahead of them, feed the merchant some story, gather his gear, and clear out.

He didn’t think a second group had gone there separately. Zoilus would have had problems aplenty, cashing in favors, obtaining the services of four guards. Moreover, two bands would double the risk of an uncorrupted officer finding out and demanding to know what the hell went on—which would compromise Theonis.

Regardless, I’d better be careful. Good thing the telephone hasn’t been invented yet.

He slammed to a halt. His guts contracted. “Oh, heavens to Betsy,” he groaned, for no swear word sufficed. Where was my brain? On vacation in Bermuda?

At least it didn’t return absolutely too late. He stepped aside, into the darkness under a wall, pressed himself against rough stucco, gnawed his lip and beat fist in palm.

The night had grown coldly brilliant with stars and a gibbous moon had risen over the Eagle Tower. The street where Hipponicus dwelt would be equally illuminated. He would be clearly visible as he arrived, knocked on the door, waited for a slave porter to come unbar it and admit him.

He glanced up. Vega glinted in Lyra. Nothing stirred but the trembling of the stars. A timecycle could hang unseeably high while its opticals brought the ground close and day-clear to the rider. A touch on a control, and it would instantly be down there. No lethal shot; a stun beam, the fallen man slung over a saddle, and off to interrogation with him.

Sure. When she learned what had happened at the vihara, which she soon would, Raor could dispatch a comrade of hers downtime to lurk above the merchant’s dwelling until the fugitive showed up or the troopers came in ordinary wise. The Patrol had no vehicle anywhere close, and Everard had no way to call one in. Not that he would. Nabbing the rider wasn’t worth alarming the rest into flight.

Maybe she won’t think of it. I almost didn’t.

Everard gusted a sigh. Too dicey. The Exaltationists may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid. If anything, their weakness is oversubtlety. I’m just going to have to let my outfit fall into their hands.

What would they make of it? They might or might not have the equipment to probe its secrets. If they did, well, they wouldn’t discover anything they didn’t know already, except that Jack Holbrook was not a complete fool.

Small consolation, when Manse Everard was completely disarmed.

What to do? Depart the city before the Syrians reached it, strike out for the nearest Patrol station? Hundreds of miles, and he’d likeliest leave his bones along them, the scraps of knowledge he had gained blown away on a desert wind. If he did survive the journey, the corps couldn’t well hop him back to carry on where he’d left off. Nor could it spend more man-years on insinuating a different agent by the same kind of tortuous devices as for him. He’d used up all the good opportunities.

That wouldn’t matter to Raor, if she faced this dilemma. She’d double through time, annul her original attempt, and start on a fresh one. To hell with the possibility of generating a causal vortex, unforeseeable and uncontrollable consequences to the course of events. Chaos is what the Exaltationists want. Out of it they’ll make their kingdom.

If I quit here, and somehow convey a warning to the Patrol, it can only come in force, an escadrille of timecycles swooping secretly into this night. Probably it can rescue Chandrakumar. Certainly it can put a stop to Raor’s plot. But she and her buddies will escape, to try again at a place and year we’ll know nothing about.

Everard shrugged. Not much choice for me, is there?

He changed direction, toward the waterfront. According to his neural briefing, yonder lay several low-life taverns, any of which could provide a doss, a hidey-hole, and perhaps some more palaver about Theonis. Tomorrow—Tomorrow the king came home, the enemy at his heels.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised at how things have worked out. Shalten and company crafted a fine scheme. But every officer knows, or should know, that in every action, the first casualty is your own battle plan.

1987 A.D.

The house was in a bedroom community outside Oakland, where you encountered your neighbors as little as you chose. It was small, screened by pines and live oaks at the end of an uphill driveway. Entering, Everard found the interior cool, dim, anachronistic. Mahogany, marble, embroidered upholstery, deep carpet, maroon hangings, leather-bound books with gold-stamped French titles, molecularly perfect copies from Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, hadn’t much business nowabouts, did they?

Shalten noticed him noticing. “Ah, yes,” he said in English whose accent Everard couldn’t identify, “my preferred pied-à-terre is Paris of the Belle Époque. Refinement that will turn into revulsion, innovation that will turn into insanity, and thus, for the foreknowledgeable observer, piquancy becoming poignancy. When required to work away from it, I take souvenirs along. Welcome. Have a seat while I fetch refreshment.”

He offered his hand, which Everard clasped. It felt bony and dry, like a bird’s foot. Unattached agent Shalten was a wisp of a man, features wizened on a huge bald head. He wore pajamas, slippers, a faded dressing gown, and, though he was presumably not Jewish, a skullcap. When the arrangements for this meeting were being made at milieu HQ, Everard asked where-when his host-to-be originated. “You don’t need to know” was the answer.

Still, Shalten bustled about hospitably enough. Everard took an overstuffed armchair, declined Scotch because later he must drive back to his hotel but accepted a Nevada Pale. Shalten’s tea with Amaretto and Triple Sec didn’t fit his French affection; he seemed uninterested in personal consistency. “I will remain standing, if you do not mind,” said his rusty voice. A churchwarden lay beside a humidor on a bureau. He filled it and kindled a rather nauseatingly perfumed tobacco. Partly in self-defense, Everard stoked his briar. Nevertheless the atmosphere was companionable.

Well, they shared a purpose, and belike Shalten was wise to tone grimness down.

Gab about weather, traffic strangulation, and the food at Tadich’s in San Francisco occupied the first minutes. Then he turned oddly luminous yellow-green eyes on his visitor and said, tone unchanged, “So. You have thwarted the Exaltationists in Peru and disposed of several. You have captured your runaway Spanish Conquistador and put him back in his proper setting. You have thwarted the Exaltationists again in Phoenicia and, again, disposed of several.” Lifting a hand: “No, please, no modesty. It required well-coordinated teams, yes. Yet though the cells of the body be many, the works of the body are naught save that the spirit order them. Not only did you lead these undertakings, when necessary you worked solo. My compliments. The question is simply, have you since had sufficient free time, on your world line, to recuperate?”

Everard nodded.

“Are you certain?” Shalten persisted. “We can allow you more. The stress was undoubtedly considerable. The next stage that we contemplate is likely to be still more dangerous and taxing.” He sketched a smile. “Or, on the basis of what I have heard about your political views, perhaps I should say ‘dangerous and demanding.’”

Everard laughed. “Thanks! No, really, I’m raring to go. Why else should I claim privilege? It bothers me that Exaltationists are still running loose.” In English, his remark was ridiculous; but Temporal, alone among languages, had the grammatical structure to handle chronokinesis. Unless precision was essential, Everard favored his mother tongue. Both men knew what he meant. “Let’s finish this job before they finish us.”

“You need not have insisted on taking a key part, you know,” Shalten said. “Your qualifications for it made the Middle Command hope very much you would volunteer, but it was not required of you.”

“I wanted,” Everard growled. He gripped his pipe bowl tightly, warm between his fingers. “Okay, what is your plan and how do I fit in?”

Shalten blew smoke of his own. “Background first. We know the Exaltationists were in northern California on the thirteenth of June 1980. At any rate, one of them was, in connection with their Phoenician devilry. They took adequate precautions, used legitimate crosstemporal activity to help camouflage theirs, et cetera. We have no prospect of finding them. The fact of their presence might give us a way of playing some kind of trick, except that, in the nature of the case, they know that we know. That day they were certainly on the qui vive, avoiding everything of which they were not absolutely assured.”

“Uh-huh. Obvious.”

“Well, upon studying the matter, I realized that there is another little space-time region in which one or more Exaltationists probably lurk. It is not guaranteed, and the precise dates are unknowable, but it is well worth considering.” The long pipestem jabbed in Everard’s direction. “Can you guess what?”

“Why, m-m … why, here and now, because you are.”

“Correct.” Shalten grimaced. “Wherefore I pass weeks in this abominable milieu, nursing the development of my trap along, detail by daily detail. And perhaps all for naught. How often does man, vain of his intellect, find that the harvest of his efforts is vanity! Whether mine bear fruit shall be for you to discover.” He sent another leisurely stream of smoke from his lips. “Can you guess how I concluded this miniperiod might have potentialities for us?”

Everard stared as if the gnome standing before him had turned into a rattlesnake. “My God,” he whispered. “Wanda Tamberly.”

“The young contemporary lady caught up in the Peruvian case, yes, indeed.” Shalten nodded and went on, maddeningly deliberate: “Let me spell out my reasoning, although given this hint, you can doubtless reconstruct it unaided. You will recall that, when their attempt to commandeer Atahuallpa’s ransom failed, the Exaltationists bore off as captives the two men whose presence had—momentarily, they hoped—frustrated them, Don Luis Castelar and our disguised Specialist Stephen Tamberly. They identified the latter as a Patrolman and, in their hiding place, interrogated him at great length under kyradex. When Castelar broke free and escaped on a timecycle, bearing Tamberly with him, the Exaltationists had gained considerable detailed information about our man and his background. Your team struck at them immediately afterward, and killed or captured most.”

Of course I recall, God damn it! Everard snarled in his head.

“Now consider the situation from the viewpoint of those who got away, or who had not been there at the instant of your raid,” Shalten went on. “Something had gone hideously wrong. They must most passionately have desired to know what. Was the scent onto which the Patrol had gotten now cold, or might it lead the Patrol onward to the rest of them?

“They are bold and all too intelligent. They would follow every clue of their own that they dared. We have no way to prevent it. We cannot mount guard over every moment of the rest of the lives of the persons concerned. They could come back to Perú years after 1533 and, making veiled inquiries, learn the later biography of Castelar. Likewise, to a lesser extent, for Agent Tamberly. Granted, they could not acquire a full account of the merry chase that Castelar led us, or how we recovered Tamberly, or how his niece was swept along by events. Their data would be fragmentary, their deductions correspondingly incomplete and ambiguous. However, it is clear that they decided they were in no further proximate danger—as witness the fact that they went on to the Phoenician escapade.

“First, I am sure, they carried out some investigation of everybody Tamberly had spoken of during that skilled, ruthless interrogation. Associates, acquaintances, relatives. Looking in on years subsequent to this one, they may well have found reason to suspect his niece Wanda became involved, and as a consequence was invited to join the Patrol. They could have traced the date of that involvement to sometime in May 1987—”

“And we sit here doing nothing?” Everard shouted.

Shalten lifted a hand. “Compose yourself, my friend, I pray you. Why should they strike at her, or at anyone else? The damage is done. They are without conscience, cat-cruel, but not foolishly vindictive. The Tamberly family poses no further threat per se to them. On the contrary, they proceed very, very carefully—for they can well imagine the Patrol keeping surreptitious watch on, say, Miss Wanda (I will not employ that preposterous ‘Ms.’ appellation) in hopes that she will draw them to her. After all, they themselves would have no compunctions about setting out a human lure. No, they do nothing but nibble at the fringes of observation, gather what few data they can, and retreat else when.”

“Just the same—!”

“As a matter of fact, she is under our observation, against that contingency. I deem the contingency vanishingly improbable and the guarding to be a waste of precious lifespan. But headquarters insisted. Do set your mind at ease.”

“All right, all right,” Everard grumbled, though gladness welled up in him. Why do I care so much? Oh, she’s gallant and bright and good-looking, but still, a single girl, out of a million years of our species on earth—“Is this enough preliminaries? Can we please get to the point?”

Shalten sipped his drink. “The end result of my reasoning,” he said, “is what I told you at the outset. Quite likely one or more Exaltationists are in the San Francisco Bay area during some days of this month, May 1987. They are being so circumspect that we have no chance of finding them. What we can do instead, and are doing, is to bait our real trap.”

Everard tossed off his ale and hunched forward, his tobacco fuming. “How?”

“Have you noticed the matter of the Bactrian letter?” Shalten responded.

“The what?” Everard considered. “No, I … don’t think I have. Something in the news? I’ve only been around for a short timespan, and mighty busy.”

The big skull nodded. “I understand. You have pursued the Peruvian affair to a conclusion, and paid attention to the charming young lady, and when one knows what lies ahead in history, one’s incentive to follow the daily news is slight. I thought you might have caught mention nonetheless. It is no mere local sensation. It is, in a subdued, scholarly, but publicly interesting fashion, a small international nine days’ wonder.”

“Which you manage so it develops exactly as you want,” Everard deduced. His heart knocked.

“I told you that was why I reside here.”

How does he do it? A webwork of connections, operations, carefully engineered stories fed to carefully chosen journalists—and this shrimp shepherding it all? Even with the computer power he’s got backing him up, it is to be awed. But don’t ask him, my boy, don’t ask him, or he’ll talk through the middle of next week.

“Please fill me in,” Everard said.

“We might have chosen June 1980, when we know positively that Exaltationists are present,” Shalten explained, “but I decided that, besides their wariness lest we play some trick then, that presence was probably too brief. The odds were that they would not notice our bait. This year is better, provided that they do also visit it. They must necessarily conduct their investigation of the Tamberly family piecemeal, making appearances through a period of several days at least. Disguised as ordinary twentieth-century individuals, they cannot avoid spending hours on end in lodgings, on omnibuses—tedium which they will naturally relieve with the help of newspapers, television, et cetera. Besides, theirs are lively intelligences. They will feel curiosity about their surroundings, which to them are immemorially ancient. And … as I said, the story that I hope will attract their attention is in the news. Only for a short while, of course; then the public forgets. But if they are intrigued, they can pursue it, obtaining scholarly publications and the like.”

Everard sighed. “Could I ask you for another beer?”

“My pleasure.”

When he was settled again, Shalten still standing with his churchwarden, grotesque in front of the beautiful old bureau, Everard heard: “What do you know about the Greek kingdom of Bactria?”

“Hm? Uh—let me think—” His historical information was intense concerning societies where he had worked, spotty about everything peripheral. “In what’s now northern Afghanistan. Alexander the Great passed through and made it part of his empire. Greek colonists moved in. Later they declared themselves independent and conquered … m-m … most of the rest of Afghanistan and a chunk of northwestern India.”

Shalten nodded. “Rather good, on no notice. You shall learn much more, of course. You should also reconnoiter the terrain—I suggest in 1970, before Afghanistan’s current troubles, when you can pose as a tourist.”

He drew air into his narrow chest and proceeded. “Two years ago, a Russian soldier in the mountains of the Hindu Kush came upon a box dating back to the Hellenistic era, evidently unearthed by guerrilla shellfire. That is a provocative story in its own right. The vagueness of official accounts, while attributable to habitual Soviet secretiveness, spices it. The point is, this man turned his find over to superior officers, and at length it reached an institute of Oriental studies in Moscow. Now one Professor L. P. Soloviev has published the result of his studies. He has no doubt that the object is genuine, and that it throws significant light on a period about which historians know little. Much of what information they do have is derived from nothing better than coins.”

“What was in the box?”

“Pray let me outline the context first. Bactria occupied, approximately, the region between the Hindu Kush and the Amu Darya. North of it lay Sogdiana, bounded by the Syr Darya—today in the Soviet Union—also under the suzerainty of the Bactrian kings.

“They had broken away from the Seleucid Empire. In the year 209 before Christian reckoning, Antiochus III marched east across Asia to regain this rich territory. He defeated his rival Euthydemus in battle and besieged him in his capital, Bactra, but failed to take the city. After two years he gave up, made peace, and departed southward, to assert his power in India—although there, again, he concluded with a treaty rather than a conquest. While the siege of Bactra became as famous in its day as the siege of Belfort did in my France, no details about it have come down to later times.

“Well, the casket that the Russian soldier brought in held a papyrus, most of the text still legible. Radiocarbon tests, et cetera, established authenticity. It grew clear that this was a letter from Antiochus to someone south-westward. The courier and his presumed escort must have come to grief, perhaps victims of mountaineer footpads. Drifting soil buried the box, which the killers tossed aside after realizing it contained no treasure, and the dry climate preserved the document fairly well.”

Shalten finished his blueberry tea and pottered off to the kitchen and liquor cabinet to make another. Everard practiced patience.

“What did this dispatch say?”

“You shall have your opportunity to examine a copy. Briefly put, it describes how, soon after Antiochus arrived at the gates of Bactra, Euthydemus and his dashing son Demetrius led out a sally in force. It drove a deep salient into the Syrian ranks before it was beaten back and retreated behind the walls. Had it succeeded, the Bactrians might have ended the war then and there, victoriously. Yet it was a wild venture. The letter relates how Euthydemus and Demetrius themselves, in the vanguard of their army, were nearly killed when Antiochus counterattacked. A rousing story, which I imagine you will enjoy.”

Everard, who had seen men scream on the ground as blood and bowels spilled from them, asked merely, “Who was Antiochus writing to?”

“That part is missing. It may have been to a general of his, stationed as an ‘ally’ in the puppet realm Gedrosia on the Persian Gulf, or it may have been to a satrap in his own easternmost province—Whatever, he explains that this clash has convinced him the Bactrian war cannot be won quickly, and therefore plans for an attack on India from the west must be shelved. In the event, they were discarded.”

“I see.” Everard’s pipe had gone out. He tamped the bowl and struck a fresh match. “That sally, the fight that followed, was more than an incident, then.”

“Precisely,” Shalten said. “Professor Soloviev elaborates on the idea, in an article for the Literaturnaya Gazeta, and this is what has triggered general interest.”

He puffed, sipped, and went on: “Antiochus III is known to history as Antiochus the Great. Inheriting an empire in collapse, he hammered it back together and recovered most of what had fallen away. At the battle of Raphia he lost Phoenicia and Palestine to Ptolemy of Egypt, but eventually he was to win them back. He put the Parthians in check. He campaigned as far as Greece. He gave refuge to Hannibal after the Second Punic War. At last the Romans trounced him, and he left to his son less than he himself had ruled, but it still was an enormous domain. His cultural and legal innovations were no less important. A seminal figure.”

Everard suppressed a remark about Antiochus’ love life. “You mean, if he’d gotten killed at Bactra—”

“The dispatch gives no indication that he was ever in danger. His enemies Euthydemus and Demetrius were. And, obscure though their country later became, their resistance changed the course of Antiochus’ career.”

Shalten knocked the dottle from his pipe, laid it aside, clasped hands behind back, continued his parched lecture; and chill went up and down Everard’s spine.

“Professor Soloviev, in his article, speculates at some length, with the weight of authority. He has, for the moment, caught popular fancy around the globe. The thesis is intriguing. The circumstances of the discovery are romantic. And, to be sure, albeit subtly, the professor by implication questions Marxist determinism. He implies that sheer accident—whether a given man does or does not die in a battle—can decide the whole future. That this can be published, and prominently, is a minor sensation itself. It is an early example of the glasnost that M. Gorbachev is proclaiming. Widespread attention is very natural.”

“Well, I look forward to reading it,” Everard said, almost mechanically. Most of him stood in a wind down which blew the scent of tiger … man-eater. “Does the idea really stand up, though?”

“Imagine. Bactria falls to Antiochus, early on. That frees the resources he needs for an outright conquest in western India. This in turn strengthens him against Egypt and, more significantly, Rome. One can well visualize him retaining his gains north of the Taurus and assisting Carthage sufficiently that it survives the Third Punic War. Although he himself is tolerant, a descendant of his attempted to crush Judaism in Palestine, as you may read in First and Second Maccabees. Given total power in Asia Minor, that attempt may well succeed. If so, then Christianity never arises. Therefore the entire world that brought you and me into being is a phantom, a might-have-been, which, conceivably, an alternate Time Patrol keeps suppressed.”

Everard whistled. “Yeah. And Exaltationists who got themselves an in with Antiochus—and showed up again among later generations of the Seleucids—they’d have a pretty good shot at creating a world to suit themselves, wouldn’t they?”

“The thought should occur to them,” Shalten said. “First, we know, they will make their Phoenician effort. When that too fails, the remnants of them may remember Bactria.”

209 B.C.

With a roar and a rattle that clamored for hours, the army of King Euthydemus re-entered the City of the Horse. Dust smoked over the land to the south, cast up by hoofs and feet, swirled by wind and human tumult. A cloud of it hazed that horizon, where the Bactrian rear guard staved off the foremost Syrians. Trumpets rang, drums boomed, mounts and pack animals neighed, men’s voices lifted raw.

Everard mingled with the throngs. He had bought a hooded cloak to obscure his features. In the heat and crowding, such a garment was as unusual as his size, but today nobody paid heed. He worked his way quietly through street and stoa, around the city—casing the joint, he told himself; shaping what plans he could, for every set of circumstances he could imagine, within the constraints of what he saw.

Whip-wielding riders cleared ways from gates to barracks. After them came the soldiers, gray with dust, slumped with weariness, mute with thirst. Nonetheless they moved smartly. Most went on horseback, in light armor, lanceheads nodding bright above pennons and regimental standards, ax or bow and quiver at the saddle. They were seldom used as shock troops, for the stirrup was unknown to them, but they sat like centaurs or Comanches, and their hit-run-hit tactics recalled an onslaught by wolves. The infantry that stiffened them was a mixed bag, mercenaries, no few from Ionia or Greece itself; a ripple went over their long, serried pikes, the cadence of their march. The officers riding in crested helmet and figured cuirass seemed mainly Greek or Macedonian.

Jammed against walls, leaning out of windows and over rooftops, folk watched them go past, waved, cheered, wept. Women held infants up, crying against all hope, “See! See your child,——” and a beloved name. Oldsters blinked, peered, shook their heads, more nearly resigned to the caprices of the gods. Boys shouted loudest, sure that the enemy’s doom would soon be upon him.

The soldiers never stopped. They were bound for their quarters, a gulp of water, assignments, immediate duty for some on the ramparts. Later, if the foe did not try to storm the gates, they’d get brief leaves in rotation. Then wineshops and joyhouses would fill.

That wasn’t going to last, Everard knew. If nothing else, the city could not long feed so many animals. Zoilus and Creon had declared that granaries were well-stocked. The siege would not be a total encirclement. Properly guarded, people could take water from the river. Antiochus might try interdicting traffic on the stream with catapults, but he couldn’t stop many supply-laden barges. Under strong escort, an occasional caravan might actually make it overland from other parts of the kingdom. Still, there would only be fodder for a limited number of horses, mules, and camels. The rest must be slaughtered—unless Euthydemus used them in an early effort to break the Syrians.

Short commons for the next couple of years. I’m sure glad I won’t be stuck here. Though how I’ll get out is, urn, problematical.

Once this operation was completed, whether or not it had caught any Exaltationists, the Patrol would come in surreptitious fashion to look for Everard, if he hadn’t already called in; and, of course, they’d check to see whether Chandrakumar was okay, and remove their agent in Antiochus’ army. Until then, however, all were expendable. It mattered not that Everard was Unattached, thus more valuable than the other two, who made their respective careers as scientist and constable in this milieu. Everard was inside Bactra precisely because his capabilities were equal to a wide variety of unforeseeable situations. Shalten judged it likeliest by far that Raor would base herself here. Unless something went wildly awry, the man who accompanied Antiochus was a backup, no more. But rank made no difference now. What counted was getting the job done. If that cost the life of an Unattached agent, the loss to the corps would be heavy; but the gain was a future saved, everybody who would ever be born and everything they would ever do, learn, create, become. Not a bad bargain. His friends could grieve at their leisure.

This is assuming we do block the bandits and, preferably, nail them.

Records uptime said that the Patrol did succeed, at least in the first objective. But if it should fail, then those records had never existed, the Patrol was never founded, Manse Everard never lived…. He pushed the thought off, as he always did when it came to haunt him, and concentrated on his work.

Rumor fanned agitation, Eastern excitability broke into flame, and turmoil filled the streets from gate to gate. It was camouflage for Everard as he went around and around, observing detail after detail, annotating the map in his head.

Repeatedly he passed the house he had ascertained was Theonis’. Two-storied, it obviously surrounded a courtyard like other dwellings of the well-to-do. Though rather small of its kind, much less than Hipponicus’, it was faced with polished stone rather than stucco and boasted a porch, narrow but colonnaded beneath a basrelief frieze. Alleys separated it from its neighbors. The street on which it fronted held the mixture of residences and shops common in an absence of zoning laws. None of the nearby businesses were of a sort to stay open after dark, unless you counted Theonis’ own, and it did not advertise itself. That suited her purposes best. Good. It suits me too. His plan of action was taking shape.

The populace couldn’t sit still. They sought friends, milled aimlessly about, consoled themselves at foodstalls and wineshops where prices had gone into orbit. Hookers, of either sex or none, and cutpurses did a booming trade. Everard had some trouble late in the day finding places open that would sell him what he wanted, mainly a knife and a long rope. He too paid more than he should; the sellers were in no mood to haggle much. The city was hysterical. In due course it would settle down to the long grind of beleaguerment.

Unless Euthydemus sallies and wins. No, no way can he do that. But if he dies trying, and Antiochus enters—the Syrians will doubtless sack Bactra. Poor Hipponicus and family. Poor city. Poor future.

When racket of battle surfed unmistakable over the walls, Everard saw panic erupt. He betook himself elsewhere, fast, but spied guardsmen making for the scene. They must have quelled the disturbance before it touched off a riot, for the swarms began ebbing out of the streets. People realized they’d best get home, or wherever they might find shelter, and stay put.

Presently the noise receded. Trumpets pealed triumph on the battlements. It wasn’t really, he knew. The Syrians had merely harassed the Bactrian rear guard until the last of it went through and archers kept off further attack long enough for the gates to be shut. Thereupon the invaders withdrew to make camp. The sun was almost down, the pavements overshadowed. On that account, as well as being emotionally wrung dry, few inhabitants ventured back outside to celebrate.

Everard found a foodstall not yet closed, ate and drank sparingly, sat down on the plinth of a statue’s base and rested. That was easier for his body than his mind. He sorely missed his pipe.

Dusk deepened until the city brimmed with night. Coolness descended from stars and Milky Way. Everard got moving. Though he went as unobtrusively as he was able, in the quiet his footfalls sounded loud to him.

Gandarian Street seemed empty of all but shadows. He slouched past Theonis’ house to make sure, before he returned to take stance a short distance from one corner of the porch. Now it was to act fast.

He let the coiled fifty feet of hempen rope slither from his arm to the ground. In the end that he kept he had made a running noose. A cornice jutted from the entablature, wan against heaven. Adapted, his eyes saw it pretty clearly, though distances were tricky to gauge. The noose widened as he swung it around his head. At the right moment, he let fly.

Damn! Not quite the right moment. He tautened, ready to flee. Nothing happened. Nobody had heard the slight impact. He drew the lasso back. On his third try, he caught the cornice and gave a silent whoop when the cord snugged tight. Not bad, considering.

He wasn’t a celebrity hound, but after he’d decided roping was an art that might come in handy, he’d gone to the trouble of making acquaintance with an expert in 1910, who agreed to teach him. His hours with Will Rogers were among the pleasantest of his life.

If he hadn’t seen a projection on the house, he’d have used some other way to get up, such as a ladder. He figured this was the least unsafe. Once he’d made his entry—what he did next depended on what he found. His hope was to retrieve some or all of his Patrol gear. If perchance then the whole Exaltationist gang were together for him to gun down—Hardly.

He swarmed aloft and pulled the rope after him. Crouched on the tiles, he removed his sandals and tucked them into a fold of the cloak, which he rolled together and secured to his belt with a short length cut off the cord. The lariat itself he left fast, carrying a bight along as he padded to the ridge above the courtyard.

There he stopped short. He had expected a well of blackness. Instead, light reached yellow fingers from the opposite side. They touched shrubbery around a pool where starlight glimmered. Oh, oh! Do I roost here till whoever that is has gone to bed, or what?

After a moment: No. This might be too good to pass up. If I’m caught—he touched his sheathed knife—I should manage not to get taken alive. Bleakness blew away. And if I can pull it off, what a stunt! Toujours I’audace and damn the torpedoes.

Nevertheless he lowered the rope, and at last himself, inch by inch.

Jasmine kissed his face, night-fragrant. He used the hedge for cover while he wormed his way around. It was forever and it was an eyeblink before he hunched in a position to watch and listen.

The heat of the day must still be oppressive inside, for a window stood open, uncurtained. From his blind of leaves, he saw straight into the room beyond, and voices floated clear. Luck, luck, luck! Ungratefully: About time I had some. His efforts had left him sweaty, dry-mouthed, skinned on an ankle, and itching in a dozen places he dared not scratch.

He forgot that, observing.

Raor alone could make a man forget everything else.

The chamber was small, for intimate meetings. Wax tapers in gilt papyrus-shape candlesticks, extravagantly many, cast glow across a Persian rug; furnishings of ebony and rosewood inlaid with nacre; subtly erotic murals that would have done Alicia Austin proud. A man occupied a stool, the woman a couch. A girl was setting a tray of fruits and wine down on a table between them.

Everard barely noticed her. Theonis lounged before him. She wore little jewelry; perhaps what gleamed on fingers, wrist, and bosom held electronics. The gown that fitted the curves and litheness of her was simply cut, thinly woven. She herself was the female of Merau Varagan, his clone mate, his anima. Enough.

“You may go, Cassa,” her low voice sang more than said. “You and the other slaves are not to leave your quarters before dawn tonight, unless I call.” The eyes narrowed very slightly. It was as if their green shifted for a moment from the hue of malachite to that of seas breaking over a reef. “This is a strict command. Tell them.”

Everard thought, though he wasn’t sure, that the girl shuddered. “Very good, my lady.” She backed out. He supposed the household staff lived dormitory style upstairs.

Raor took a goblet and sipped. The man stirred on his seat. Clad in a blue-bordered white robe, he resembled her sufficiently to identify his race. The gray in his hair was probably artificial. The personality that spoke was forceful, though without the Varagan vividness. “Isn’t Sauvo back yet?”

He used his birthtime language, which Everard had long since gotten imprinted. When this hunt ended, if it ever did, the Patrolman would be almost sorry to have those trills and purrs scrubbed from his brain. Not only was the tongue euphonious, it was precise and concise, so much so that a sentence might require an English paragraph to translate it, as if the speakers actually were telling each other what they both knew quite well.

However, he couldn’t retain everything he learned in the course of his job. Memory capacity is finite, and there would be other hunts to come. There always were.

“At any moment,” Raor said easily. “You are too impatient, Draganizu.”

“We have spent years of lifespan already—”

“Not much more than one.”

“For you and Sauvo. For me, five, establishing this identity.”

“Spend a few more days to protect the investment.” Raor smiled, and Everard’s heart missed a beat. “Fuming ill becomes a priest of Poseidon.”

Oh-ho! Then that’s his alias. Theonis’ “kinsman.” Everard laid hold on the fact, gripped hard, stopped his slide down into infatuation.

“And Buleni even longer, often in hardship and danger,” Draganizu continued.

“The merrier for him,” Raor jested.

“If Sauvo, then, can’t be troubled to time his arrivals—”

Raor lifted a hand that Botticelli could have painted. Her dark-tressed head cocked. “Ah, I think that is he.”

Another male Exaltationist entered. His beauty was harsher than Draganizu’s. He wore an ordinary tunic and sandals. Raor leaned a little forward, mercurially intent. “Did you lock the door behind you?” she demanded. “I didn’t hear.”

“Of course,” Sauvo answered. “I’ve never forgotten, have I?” Discomfort crossed Draganizu’s visage. Maybe he had been absentminded in that respect. Once. Raor would have seen to it that he never was afterward. “Especially when the Patrol is on the prowl,” Sauvo added.

So, Everard thought, their garage for timecycles is in a Bluebeard room on this floor … toward the rear, since that’s where Sauvo came from. …

Draganizu half rose, sat back down, and asked anxiously, “It is, then? You have established it is active here-now?”

Sauvo took another stool; in the ancient world, chairs with backs were rare, mostly for royalty. He helped himself to wine and a fig. “Not to fear, camarado. Whatever clues they came upon, they’ve misread. They think the trouble spot is elsewhere, years uptime. They sent a man to inquire here-now merely in the interests of thoroughness.”

He related the story that Everard had told in the vihara. He got to Chandrakumar in prison and used a kyradex on him, the Patrolman realized. No secrets any more. But most of what Sauvo learned ain’t so. Thanks, Shalten.

“Another change-scheme!” Draganizu exclaimed.

“Ours will nullify it and its operators,” Raor murmured. “But first, yes, it would be interesting to learn more about them. Perhaps even to contact them—” Her words stole off into silence, like a snake after prey.

“First,” Draganizu said sharply, “we have the fact that this … Holbrook … broke free and is running loose.”

Raor recalled herself to immediacy. “At ease, at ease. We have his weapons and communication equipment.”

“When he doesn’t report in—”

“I doubt the Patrol expects to hear from him at once. Set him aside for the present, together with those conspirators. We have more urgent matters at hand.”

Draganizu turned to Sauvo and asked, “How did you obtain privacy for interrogation?”

“You haven’t heard?” His fellow was faintly surprised.

“I only got here a few minutes ago. I have been busy with affairs of my Nicomachus persona. Raor’s note said nothing but ‘Come.’”

Hand-delivered by a slave, Everard deduced. No radio. Maybe she feels confident still, but the “Holbrook” business has made her ultra-cautious.

Silken shoulders rose and fell. “I had persuaded Zoilus to arrange solitary detention for any prisoners taken in this matter,” Raor said. “I told him that my connections led me to believe they are dangerous spies.”

And when guards and prisoners at the hoosegow were mostly asleep, Sauvo used a timecycle to pop into the cell. Raor was willing to allow that much risk; she didn’t figure it was likely the Patrol had anyone in Bactra besides Chandrakumar and Holbrook, one now locked away, the other deprived of his gear and on the lam. Sauvo gave Chandrakumar a stun beam, clapped the kyradex on his head, and when he came to, interviewed him. Thoroughly.

I hope he left the little guy alive. Yes, he doubtless did. Why make the jailers wonder? What could Chandrakumar tell them tomorrow that’d show them he was anything but a lunatic?

Draganizu stared at Raor. “You do have him besotted, do you not?” he said.

“Him and several more,” Sauvo responded, while Raor demurely sipped her wine. He laughed. “The seething, jealous looks that Majordomo Xeniades gets! And I’m only supposed to be her employee, not her pimp.”

Ah. Sauvo is Xeniades, chief of the household staff. Worth remembering…. I sympathize with Zoilus and company. Wouldn’t I love to get milady in the sack myself? Everard’s grin twisted. Though I wouldn’t dare fall asleep in her arms. She might have a hypo of cyanide tucked away in those raven locks.

“The Greeks are holding Chandrakumar for us, then,” Draganizu said. “But what of the equipment that Holbrook had?”

“He left it behind when he went out, at the house of the man in whose company he arrived,” Raor explained. “That person is simply a local merchant. He was dismayed when the squad came to say his guest is a spy and confiscate the guest’s baggage. We have no reason to make further trouble for this Hipponicus, and in fact, obviously, it would be unwise.” That’s a relief! “As for the baggage, it is here.” Her smile curved feline. “That took a little persuasion too, but Zoilus obliged. He has his ways. I have passed instruments over the property. Most is of this era. Some contains Patrol apparatus.”

I guess she stowed it with the timecycles.

Raor set her goblet down and sat straight. Metal rang in the liquid tones. “It shows we must be warier than ever. Overleaping space-time to get access to the prisoner was taking a necessary chance.”

“Not a substantial one.” Sauvo presumably wanted to remind her, and perhaps inform Draganizu, that he had maintained this beforehand and that events had justified him. “Holbrook was no more than a courier, and of low grade. Physically formidable, but now his teeth are drawn, and it is clear that his intellect is limited.”

Thanks, buddy.

“Still,” Raor said, “we must track him down and dispose of him before he somehow gets in touch with others, or before the Patrol takes alarm and comes looking for him.”

“They won’t know where to look. They will need days merely to gather the first clues.”

“We need not help them,” Raor clipped. “If we can detect electronics, nucleonics, gravitronics, chronokinesis in action, so can they, and at much greater range. We must not give them any hint that any time travelers other than themselves are present. Between tonight and the climax, we use no more high technology. Is that understood?”

“Unless in emergency,” Sauvo persisted. Yeah, he’s trying to assert himself, trying not to be overwhelmed by the Varagan.

“That emergency would likely be so extreme that our only course is to abandon this whole effort and scuttle off.” Raor’s scorn softened. “Which would be a pity. It’s gone gloriously thus far.”

Draganizu had his own self-assertion to make, in his own more querulous style. “Glorious, pleasurable, for you.”

He got a look that could have frozen helium. “If you think I enjoy the attentions of Zoilus and his kind, you are welcome to them.”

Their nerves are wearing thin, after all the long underground toil. They’re mortal too. It encouraged.

Raor relaxed again, took up her wine, crooned, “I admit the puppeting of them has its interest.”

Evidently Draganizu reckoned it prudent to return to practicalities. “Do you even forbid radio? If we cannot call Buleni, how shall we coordinate action?”

Raor arched her brows. “Why, you shall carry our messages. Did we not make the arrangement precisely in order to have a communication line in reserve? Siege or no, the Bactrians will let the priest of Poseidon go out on business of his temple, and the Syrians will let him fare in peace. Buleni will see to it that they respect the temenos, whatever they do elsewhere.”

Sauvo stroked his chin. “Ye-es,” he mused aloud. The three must have been over this same ground and over it during the past year; but they weren’t so inhuman that they didn’t find comfort in repeating things to each other, and in their language it was quickly done. “An aide to King Antiochus can exert that sort of authority.”

It jolted through Everard. My God! Buleni sure worked his way up, didn’t he? Our man among the Syrians hasn’t got anything like that rank. Slowly: Well, Draganizu mentioned Buleni’s been at it for more than five years. The Patrol didn’t figure it could spend that much lifespan.

“Indeed,” Raor added, “it is natural that Polydorus come personally to the temple and make an offering.”

Buleni’s played his Polydorus role as a Poseidon devotee, Everard deduced.

“Ah-ha!” chuckled, quite humanly, Draganizu, otherwise known as Nicomachus, priest at the rural temple of the god.

Raor’s words fell crisp. At last they were getting down to brass tacks. “He should be on the alert for your possible arrival. When his pickets inform him you are on your way out of the city, he will go there himself, and engage you in private conversation. This will be late tomorrow, I think, although first we must see how circumstances have evolved.”

Draganizu turned uneasy. “Why so soon? Zoilus can’t give you Euthydemus’ battle plan before he knows it himself. At the moment, surely, Euthydemus has none.”

“We must establish the liaison in local eyes,” Raor told him. “Besides, you can inform Buleni of the situation here and he can give you the latest details about the Syrians.” After a moment, carefully: “The two of you must make certain that King Antiochus is aware of your meeting.”

Sauvo nodded. “Ah, yes. Confirming for him that Polydorus does have ties to persons within the city, yes, yes.”

Comprehension shivered in Everard: “Polydorus” has told Antiochus that he has kinfolk inside Bactra with such a grudge against Euthydemus—resulting, maybe, from the usurpation—that they are ready and eager to betray their king. Antiochus must be inclined to believe. After all, he has Polydorus there for a hostage, and Nicomachus will come out from behind the walls. If things go right, Nicomachus will presently give Polydorus the plans according to which Euthydemus means to sally forth. Tipped off, Antiochus stands to win a quick victory. He’ll be impressed, and grateful, and ready to accept Polydorus’ family into his court. I daresay the lovely Theonis has her intentions concerning him. Be that as it may, the Exaltationists will have their foothold … in a world without Danellians or anything but shards of a Time Patrol … and they can go on and try to mold it however they want.

The rumors about Theonis’ witchcraft won’t hurt. Everard’s skin crawled.

“You will have to meet him a second time at least, to convey what Euthydemus means to do, once Zoilus has told me,” she was saying. “If nothing else, we want no significant doubts in the mind of Antiochus about the intelligence we supply.

“Of course, at the critical moment, it will again be electronic communications and timecycle surveillance for us. If necessary, energy weapons. I hope, though, that Antiochus will dispose of his rivals in a normal way.” Laughter rippled. “We do not want too sorcerous a reputation.”

“That would attract the Time Patrol,” Draganizu agreed.

“No, the Patrol will be nothing, from the instant when Euthydemus dies,” Sauvo replied.

“Its remnants downtime will not vanish, remember,” Draganizu pointed out, needlessly except to emphasize what followed. “They will not be negligible. The fewer clues to ourselves we leave, the safer we will be, until we have grown too powerful for anything they might attempt. But that will be the work of centuries.”

“And what centuries!” burst from Raor. “We four, the last four who are left, become creator gods!” After a moment, deep in her throat: “It is the challenge itself. If we fail and perish, we will still have lived in Exaltation.” She sprang to her feet. “And we will pull the world down with us, aflame.”

Everard clamped his teeth together till his jaws hurt.

The men in the room rose too. Abruptly Raor went fluid. Her lashes drooped, her lips curved upward and swelled, she beckoned. “Before the next hard and dangerous days begin,” she sighed, “this night is ours. Shall we take it?”

The blood leaped and throbbed in Everard. He dug fingers into soil and hung on, as if to anchor himself before he splintered the door and seized her. When he could see clearly and the thunder had faded from his ears, she was departing, an arm around either companion’s waist.

Each man carried a candle. They had blown out the rest. Raor left the room, and night possessed it.

Wait. Wait. Give them time to settle down to their fun. Those two lucky bastards—No, I’m not supposed to think like that, am I? Everard considered the stars above him.

What to do? He’d stumbled into a treasure hoard of information. Some repeated what he already knew, some merely satisfied curiosity, but some was beyond valuation. If he could communicate it to the Patrol. Which he could not. Unless he found a transmitter. Should he risk trying, or should he retreat pronto?

Slowly, as he squatted among the blossoms, doubt hardened into decision. He was on his own, isolated. Whatever he did was a gamble. Complete recklessness amounted to dereliction of duty, but he thought he dared raise the ante by a chip or two.

He judged that almost an hour had passed. Raor and her boys would be well engaged, their alertness to the outside world set aside. Alarms must be spotted throughout the house, but probably not against entry. Those would be too liable to go off unnecessarily, when slaves or visitors went in and out; and that incident would be hard to explain away to them.

He rose, flexed cramped muscles, approached the still open window. From his purse he took the flashlight. About four inches long, it bore the appearance of an Apollo figurine carved in ivory, such as people often carried. When he squeezed the ankles, a pencil beam sprang from the head. What he had heard tonight confirmed what he suspected, that detectors were set to register electric currents, or other anachronistic forces, in this vicinity. He assumed the Exaltationists bore signal receivers on their persons that would inform them. This little gadget, though, was a photonic fuel cell, its action no different in principle from his breathing.

Guided by brief flashes, he slipped over the sill, into the room, out to a corridor. Lynx-footed, he passed a pair of open entries and took glimpses. The chambers beyond were furnished with ordinary opulence. Two more had interior doors, shut. The panels of the first were wood sculpture; nymphs and satyrs seemed to leap when the light touched them. He doused it, and the muffled sounds he heard were like their gibing merriment. On the other side, clearly, was where Theonis entertained her gentlemen friends. Everard stood for a minute, Shalten by desire, before he could move on.

What the hell is it about her? Looks, behavior, or does she give off something that works like a pheromone? He forced a smile. That’d be an Exaltationist sort of trick, all right.

The other door was plain and massive. The room it led to evidently occupied the whole rear of the house. Yeah, this has got to be where their hoppers and other gadgets and weapons are. He wasn’t about to try picking the clumsy lock. It was for show. The real lock would sense him and scream.

He padded upstairs but stopped at the landing. A few flashes cast around sufficed to verify his guess that this level was everyday utilitarian. Theonis would quite naturally seal off one chamber, where she kept the costly gifts that a meretrix of her class received. Any other visible secrecy would have excited comment.

Everard returned to ground level. I’d better steal away while I can. Too bad that “away” is all I’m managing to steal. However, a gun or a communicator lying loose was more than I had a right to expect. I’ve learned the layout here, which is pretty good booty.

Not that such embryonic plans as he had involved it. But you never knew.

From the courtyard he climbed back onto the roof. At the cornice he drew his knife. With his light to see by, he carefully cut the noose until only a few fibers remained. Then he cast the rope’s end to the street, took hold, and slid earthward.

If the line parted when he was halfway down, he shouldn’t land too noisily. As was, it held, and he must give several fierce tugs before it broke. There had better be no trace of his visit. He withdrew to an alley, where he put sandals and cloak back on, recoiled the rope and again made a lariat of it.

Okay. Now to skip town. That may be less easy. The gates were barred and manned, the sentinels posted thickly on walls and turrets.

During the day he had marked the likeliest place. It was at the river, of course, the side that could not be attacked by surprise, therefore lightly held. Still, those men were nervous too, wide awake, suspicious of everything that moved, and well armed. What he had going for him was size, strength, combat skills undreamed of here, and desperation.

Plus bullheadedness. One reason I could do my caper at Raor’s was that she never looked for anything so unsubtle.

Near the target site he chose a lane opening on the pomoerium, in the murk of which he could stand and wait for an opportunity. That was a long wait. The moon rose and climbed. Twice he almost acted when somebody passed by, but assessed the situation and decided against it. He didn’t mind too much, or seethe. The patience of the tiger was upon him.

His chance arrived at last, a soldier walking along the pavement, alone, on his way to report for his watch, and nobody else in sight. Doubtless he’d sneaked from barracks to be with a girl or whomever till a clepsydra, or the stars, or an innate time sense that clockless folk sometimes developed, told him he’d better get going. His hobnails rang on the flags. Moonlight tinged helmet and mail. Everard surged forth after him.

The boy never saw or heard. From behind, great hands closed on his neck and fingers bore down on his carotids. For a moment he struggled, unable to cry out. His heels drummed. He slumped, and Everard dragged him back to the alley.

The Patrolman poised, tense for escape. Nobody came running, nobody shouted. He’d pulled it off. The boy stirred, moaned, sucked in air, groped back toward consciousness.

The sensible thing was to stick the knife in him. But moonlight fell on his face, and he was quite young, and whatever his age, Everard bore him no grudge. The blade gleamed before his eyes. “Behave yourself and you’ll live,” he heard.

Luckily for him and for Everard’s conscience, he did. In the morning he’d be discovered, lying bound with pieces of rope and gagged with pieces of his kilt. He might be whipped, or might be given pack drill—no matter. As for the robbery, that was an incident his superiors would not want publicized.

Without its coif, his helmet went onto the robber’s head, just barely. His mail would never fit, but Everard didn’t intend getting near enough to anyone else for that to be noticed. If it happened anyway, come worst to worst, a sword was now at his hip.

In the event, he went unchallenged up the stairs to the top of the wall and along it till he reached a suitable spot. Others saw him glimpsewise by poor light, and he stepped briskly, a man on some special errand who should not be hindered. The point at which he stopped lay between two sentry posts, both sufficiently far off that he was a shadow which, maybe, neither guard observed. A patrol on its rounds was farther yet.

The lariat had been around his shoulder. In a single swift movement he secured it to a merlon and cast the end free. Plenty remained to reach the strip of ground between wall and wharf. Immediately he swung himself over the edge and went down. They’d find the rope and wonder whether it was a spy or a hunted criminal who’d exited, but the news was unlikely to reach Theonis.

On the way, he cast his glance about. Dwellings and countryside reached into night-gray that became black, save where houses that had been torched still smoldered red. Elsewhere were brighter points of light, enemy campfires. From the opposite side of the city he would have seen many, many, hemming Bactra in against its river.

His feet struck turf. It was steeply slanted, he nearly lost his balance. Somewhere a dog howled. He made haste, around the rampart, forth into the hinterland.

First let’s find a haystack or something and grab a few hours’ sleep. Christ, I’m tired! Tomorrow morning the order of business will be water, food if possible, and—whatever seems indicated. We know the song we want, but we’re singing strictly by ear, and one sour note could get us booed off the stage. California of the late twentieth century seemed more distant than the stars.

Why the devil am I remembering California?

1988 A.D.

When the phone rang in his New York apartment, he muttered a curse and was tempted to let his answering machine handle it. The music was bearing him upward and up on its tide. But the matter could be important. He didn’t unthinkingly give out his unlisted number. He left the armchair, put receiver to ear, and grunted, “Manse Everard speaking.”

“Hello,” said the slightly burred contralto, “this is Wanda Tamberly,” and he was glad he had responded. “I, I hope I haven’t … interrupted you.”

“No, no,” he told her, “a quiet evening at home alone. What can I do for you?”

Her words stumbled. “Manse, I feel awful about this, but—that date of ours—could we possibly change it?”

“Why, sure. What’s the problem, may I ask?”

“It’s, oh, my parents, they want to take me and my sister on a weekend excursion … a family farewell party, before I go off to m-my new job—Bad enough, lying to them,” she blurted, “w-without hurting them. They wouldn’t blame me or anything, but, but it would seem like I didn’t care much. Wouldn’t it?”

“Of course, of course. No difficulty at all.” Everard laughed. “For a minute there, I was afraid you were going to stand me up.”

“Huh? Me, turn you down, after everything you’ve done and—” She attempted humor. “A new recruitie, on the eve of entering the Academy of the Time Patrol, cancels her date with an Unattached agent who wants to give her a jolly send-off. It might earn me a certain amount of awe, but that kind I can do without.” The jauntiness broke down. “Sir, you—Manse—you’ve been so kind. Could I ask one thing more? I don’t want to be grabby or, or a wimp, but—could we talk when you get here, just talk, a couple of hours, maybe? Instead of going to dinner, if you’re short on time or, well, growing bored. I can understand if you are, though you’re too nice ever to say it. But I do need … advice, and I’ll try real hard not to cry on your shoulder.”

“You’re welcome to. I’m sorry you’re having trouble. I’ll bring an extra big handkerchief. And I assure you, I am not bored. On the contrary, I insist we have dinner afterward.”

“Oh, gosh, Manse, you—Well, it needn’t be anything F and E. I mean, you’ve taken me to a couple of great places, but I don’t have to drink Dom Perignon w-with my beluga caviar.”

He chuckled. “Tell you what, you pick the spot. You’re the San Franciscan. Surprise me.”

“Why, I—”

“Which, makes no difference to me,” he said. “I suspect, though, you’d prefer something small and relaxed this time. You see, I’ve got a notion of what your problem is. Anyway, I’m mostly a beer and clam chowder type myself. Or whatever you feel like.”

“Manse, the truth is, uh.—”

“No, please, the phone’s no damn good for what I think you have on your mind. Which is normal and innocent and does you credit. I can meet you whenever you want. Perk of being a time traveler, you know. When suits? Meanwhile, cheer up.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.” He appreciated the dignity of that, and the way she went straight on to consider arrangements. A swell kid. An extremely swell kid, in the process of becoming one hell of a woman. When they said goodnight, he found that the interruption had not broken his enjoyment of the music, complex though the counterpoint was in this section. Rather, he was borne into its majesty as never before. His dreams afterward were happy.

Next day, impatient, he checked out a vehicle and skipped directly to San Francisco on the date agreed, a few hours early. “I expect I’ll return home tonight, but late, maybe well into the middle-sized hours,” he informed the agent. “Don’t worry if my hopper’s gone when you come in in the morning.” He obtained an alarm-nullifying key, which he would leave in a certain drawer, and caught a city bus to the nearest car rental open twenty-four hours. Then he went to Golden Gate Park and walked off some restlessness.

The early January dusk was falling when he called for Wanda at her parents’ home. She met him at the door and continued out, a “’Bye” flung over her shoulder. Streetlight glowed on the blond hair. Her garb was sweater, jacket, tweed skirt, low shoes; evidently he had guessed right about the sort of restaurant she preferred this evening. She smiled, her handclasp was firm, but what he saw in her eyes made him escort her directly to the car. “Good to see you,” he said.

He barely heard: “Oh, you don’t know how good it is to see you.”

Nevertheless, as they climbed in, he remarked, “I feel a little rude, not saying hello to your folks.”

She bit her lip. “I rushed you. It’s okay. They’re glad to have me staying with them again, before I leave, but they wouldn’t want to keep me waiting when I’m on a heavy date.”

He started the motor. “I’d only have swapped a few words, in my old-fashioned way.”

“I know, but—Well, I wasn’t sure I could’ve stood it. They don’t pry, but they are interested in this, uh, somewhat mysterious man I’ve met, even though they’ve only seen him twice before. I’d’ve had to … pretend—”

“Uh-huh. As a liar, you have neither talent, experience, nor desire.”

“Right.” Briefly, she touched his arm. “And I’m doing it to them,”

“The price we pay. I should have put you in touch with your uncle Steve. He could make you feel better about it.”

“I thought of that, but you—well—”

He smiled ruefully. “Father figure?”

“I don’t know. I truly don’t. I mean, well, yes, you’re high in the Patrol and you rescued me and you’ve sponsored me and, and everything, but I—It’s hard getting in touch with my feelings—Psychobabble! I think I want to think of you as a friend but don’t quite dare.”

“Let’s see what we can do about that,” he suggested, calmer on the outside than the inside. Damn, but she’s attractive.

She looked around her. “Where are you headed?”

“I thought we could park on Twin Peaks and talk. The sky’s clear, the view’s superb, and nobody else who happens to be there will pay any attention to us.”

She hesitated an instant. “Okay.”

Could be preliminary to a seduction. Which’ d be fine under different circumstances. However, as is—“When we’re finished, I look forward to the beanery you’ve picked. Then, if you aren’t too tired, I know an Irish pub off lower Clement Street where they blarney and sing and two or three middle-aged, gentlemanly working stiffs will doubtless ask you to dance.”

He could hear that she understood what he was saying. “Sounds great. I never heard of it. You do get around, don’t you?”

“In random fashion.” He kept conversation easy while he drove, and sensed that already her spirits were lifting.

Magnificence spread below the mountain, city like a galaxy of million-hued stars, bridges a-soar over shimmering waters toward heights where homes gleamed beyond counting. Wind boomed, full of sea. It was too cold to stand in for long. While they did, her hand sought his. When they took shelter in the car, soon she leaned against him and he put an arm about her shoulder; and at last, gently, once, they kissed.

What she had to say was what he had awaited. Demons needed exorcising. Her guilt toward her family was genuine, yet also the mask of a hundred fears. The first excitement, that she—she!—could join the Time Patrol, had inevitably waned. Nobody was able to sustain such joy. There followed the interviews, tests, preliminary study material, and the thinking, the thinking.

All is flux. Reality eddies changeful upon ultimate quantum chaos. Not only is your life forever in danger, the fact of your ever having lived is, with the whole world and its history that you know.

You will be denied foreknowledge of your triumphs, because that would make more likely your disasters. As nearly as may be, you shall work from cause to effect, without turn or twist, like any other mortal. Paradox is the enemy.

You will have the capability of going back and visiting again your beloved dead, but you shall not, for you might feel temptation to fend off death from them, and you would surely feel your heart torn asunder.

Over and over, helpless to help, you will dwell amidst sorrow and horror.

We guard what is. We may not ask whether it should be. We had best not ask what “is” means.

“I don’t know, Manse, I just don’t know. Do I have the strength? The wisdom, the discipline, the … the hardness? Should I quit while I can, take silence conditioning, go back to the life … my folks hoped I’d have?”

“Aw, now, things aren’t that bad, they just seem that way. And ought to, at this stage. If you didn’t have the intelligence and sensitivity to wonder, worry, yes, fear—why, you wouldn’t belong in the corps.

“—doing science, studying prehistoric life. I more’n half envy you. Earth was a planet fit for gods, unbelievable, before civilization mucked it up.

“—no harm to your parents or anybody. Just a secret you keep from them. Don’t tell me you were always absolutely frank at home! And in fact, there’ll be undercover helps you can give them that’d be impossible otherwise.

“—centuries of lifespan, and never sick a single day.

“—friendship. Some pretty splendid people in our ranks.

“—fun. Experiences. Living to the hilt. Come a furlough, how’d you like to see the Parthenon when it was new or Chrysopolis when it will be new, on Mars? Camp out in Yellowstone before Columbus sailed, then stand on the dock at Huelva and wave him bon voyage? Watch Nijinksy dance or Garrick play Lear or Michelangelo paint? You name it, and within reasonable limits, you’ve got an excellent chance it can be arranged. Not to mention parties we throw among ourselves. Imagine what a mixed gang!

“—you know damn well you won’t back out. It’s not in your nature. So go for broke.”

—until she hugged him a final time and said shakily, between tears and laughter, “Yes. You’re right. Oh, thank you, Manse, thank you. You’ve put my head straight, and in … in … why, less than two hours, hasn’t it been?”

“Naw, I didn’t do much, except nudge you toward the decision you were bound to reach.” Everard shifted his legs, cramped after sitting. “It made me hungry, though. How about that dinner?”

“You know it!” she exclaimed, as eager as he for escape into lightness. “You mentioned clam chowder on the phone—”

“Doesn’t have to be,” he said, touched that she remembered. “Whatever you want. Name it.”

“Well, we were talking small and unfancy, plus delicious, and I thought of Ernie’s Neptune Fish Grotto on Irving Street.”

“Tally-ho.” He started the car.

As they wound downward, losing the galaxy and the wind that roared above it, she turned pensive. “Manse?”

“Yes?”

“When I called you in New York, some music was playing in the background. I suppose you were having yourself a concert.” She smiled. “I can see you, shoes off, feet up, pipe in one hand and beer mug in the other. What was it? Something Baroque, sounded like, and I imagined I knew Baroque, sort of, but this was strange to me and … and beautiful, and I’d like to get a copy of that cassette.”

He harked back. “Not exactly a cassette. I use equipment from uptime when I’m alone. But, sure, I’ll be glad to transcribe for you. It’s Bach. The St. Mark Passion.”

“What? Wait a minute!”

Everard nodded. “Yeah. It doesn’t exist today, apart from a few fragments. Never published. But on Good Friday, 1731, a time traveler brought disguised recording gear to the cathedral in Leipzig.”

She shivered. “That makes goose bumps.”

“Uh-huh. Another value of chronokinesis, and another perk of being in the Patrol.”

She turned her head and considered him. “You aren’t the simple Garrison Keillor farm boy you claim to be, are you?” she murmured. “No, not at all.”

He shrugged. “Why can’t a farm boy enjoy Bach along with his meat and potatoes?”

209 B.C.

About four miles northeast of Bactra, a spring rose in a grove of poplars, halfway up a low hill. It had long been sacred to the god of underground waters. Folk brought offerings there in hopes of protection from earthquake, drought, and murrain on their livestock. When Theonis endowed remodeling of the shrine and rededication to Poseidon, with a regular priest coming out of the city from time to time to conduct rites, no one objected. They simply identified this deity with theirs, continued using the old name if they wished, and felt they might well have gained some special benefits for their horses.

Approaching, Everard saw the trees first. Their leaves shivered silvery in the morning airs. They surrounded a low earthen wall with an entry but no gate. It simply defined the temenos, the holy ground. Uncounted generations of feet had beaten hard the path toward it.

Elsewhere stretched trampled fields where some farmsteads stood intact but abandoned; others had become smoldering ash and blackened adobe. The invaders hadn’t begun systematically plundering, nor had they ventured against the settlements close to the city. That would soon happen.

Their camp stood two miles south, thence reaching in ordered ranks of tents within a ditch and embankment. The royal pavilion lifted gaudily hued above the plain leather that housed the grunts. Pennons fluttered and standards gleamed. Metal flashed too, on men at their posts. Smoke drifted from fires. A muted surf of noise came to Everard, tramping, shouting, neighing, clangor. Afar, several parties of mounted scouts raised dust clouds as they cantered about.

Nobody had molested him, but he had bided his time, watchful, till none were near his route. Else he might have gotten killed on general principles; he didn’t think the Syrians were ready yet to take captives for the slave market. Nor were they prepared to hazard Poseidon’s wrath—especially after the king’s aide Polydorus issued orders to that effect. It was a relief to enter the grove. The shade against the rising heat of the day was like a benison itself.

It scarcely eased the grimness within him.

The temple occupied most of its unpaved court although it was not much bigger now than when it had been just a shrine. Three steps led to a portico supported by four Corinthian columns, before a windowless building. The pillars were stone, perhaps veneer, and the roof ruddy tile. Everything else was whitewashed mud brick. Nothing fancier was expected at such a minor halidom, and of course to Raor it would have served its entire purpose when it had been the scene of two or three meetings between Draganizu and Buleni.

Two women squatted in a corner of the temenos. The young one held a baby to her breast. The old one clutched a half-eaten round of chapatti that, with a clay water jug, must be the entire rations they had. Their peasant gowns were torn and dirtied. When Everard appeared, they huddled back against the wall and terror overrode the exhaustion in their faces.

A man emerged from the temple’s single entrance. He wore a plain but decent white tunic. Shuffling bent, almost toothless, squinting and blinking, he could be as old as sixty or as young as forty. Before scientific medicine, unless you were upper class you needed a lot of luck to reach middle age still in good health, if you reached it at all. Twentieth-century intellectuals call technofixes dehumanizing, Everard recollected.

The man wasn’t senile, however. “Rejoice, O stranger, if you come peacefully,” he said in Greek. “Know that this precinct is sacred, and though the Kings Antiochus and Euthydemus be at war, both have declared it sanctuary.”

Everard lifted his palm, saluting. “I am a pilgrim, reverend father,” he averred.

“Eh? Not me, not me. I’m no priest, only the caretaker here, Dolon, slave to the priest Nicomachus,” replied the other. Evidently he lived in a hut somewhere nearby and was present during the day. “Truly a pilgrim? How did you ever hear of our little naos? Are you sure you’ve not gone astray?” He drew close, stopped, peered dubiously. “Are you indeed a pilgrim? We can’t let anybody in for warlike purposes.”

“I am no soldier.” Everard’s cloak draped over his sword, not that a traveler could be blamed for going armed. “I’ve come a weary way to find the temple of Poseidon that stands outside the City of the Horse.”

Dolon shook his head. “Have you food along? I can offer nothing. Supplies are cut off. I’ve no idea when anything will get through to sustain me, let alone anybody else.” He glanced at the women. “I dreaded a pack of fugitives, but it seems most countryfolk got into town or elsewhere in time.”

Everard’s belly growled. He ignored it and the pang. A man in good shape and properly trained could go several days without eating before he weakened significantly. “I ask for no more than water.”

“Holy water, from the god’s own well, remember. What brings you here?” Suspicion sharpened. “How can you know about this temple when it’s only been Poseidon’s these past few months?”

Everard had his story prepared. “I am Androcles from Thrace,” he said. That half-barbarian region, its interior little known to Greeks, could plausibly have bred a man his size. “An oracle there told me last year that if I came to Bactria, I’d find a temple of the god outside the royal city, and help for my trouble. I mustn’t tell you about that trouble, except that I haven’t sinned, I’m not impure.”

“A prophecy, then, a foreseeing of the future,” Dolon breathed. He wasn’t awed into immediate acceptance. “Did you travel all that way alone? Hundreds of parasangs, wasn’t it?”

“No, no, I paid to accompany caravans and the like. I was in one such, bound for Bactra at last, when news came of a hostile army moving in. The caravan master turned back. I couldn’t bear to, but rode on, believing the god I seek would look after me. Yesterday a robber band—peasants made homeless and desperate, I think—waylaid me. They got my horse and baggage mule, but by the god’s grace I escaped, and continued afoot. So here I am.”

“You’ve suffered many woes indeed,” said Dolon, turning sympathetic. “What must you do now?”

“Wait till the god gives me, uh, further instructions. I suppose that will be in a dream.”

“Well, now—well—I don’t know. This is, is irregular. Ask the priest. He’s in the city, but they should let him come out to … see to things.”

“No, please! I told you I’m vowed to silence. If the priest asks questions, and I refuse to answer, and he insists—wouldn’t the Earthshaker be angered?”

“Well, but—”

“See here,” Everard proposed, hoping he came across as both forceful and friendly, “I have a purse of money left. Once I’ve gotten my sign from the god, I mean to make a substantial donation. A gold stater.” It was the rough equivalent of a thousand 1980’s U.S. dollars, insofar as comparisons of purchasing power between different milieus meant anything. “I should think that would let you—the temple buy what you need from the Syrians for a long time to come.”

Dolon hesitated.

“It’s the god’s will at work,” Everard pursued. “You wouldn’t thwart his will, I’m sure. He helps me, I help you. All I ask is to wait in peace till the miracle happens. Call me a fugitive. See.” He reached down, opened the purse, took forth several drachmas. “Plenty of money, if nothing else. Let me give you this for yourself. You deserve it. For me, it’s a deed of piety.”

Dolon trembled a moment more, reached decision, and held out his hands. “Very well, very well, pilgrim. The gods do move in mysterious ways.”

Everard paid him. “Let me go inside now, to pray and to drink of the god’s bounty, become his guest in truth. Afterward I’ll sit quietly out here and bother nobody.”

The cool dimness kissed sweaty, dusty skin and dry lips. The spring bubbled up at the center, out of a slope on which the foundation rested. It partly filled a hole in the floor, then drained through a pipe inside the masonry, which must lead under the temenos wall to a rivulet in its natural channel. Behind was a rough stone block, the ancient altar. The image of Poseidon stood painted on the rear wall, barely discernible in this light. Elsewhere on the floor lay a clutter of offerings, mostly crude clay models of houses, beasts, or human organs that the god was thought to have aided. No doubt priest Nicomachus took whatever was perishable or valuable back with him when he returned to town from his visits.

Your simple faith hasn’t availed you much, folks, has it? Everard thought sadly.

Dolon made reverence. Everard followed suit as best he was able, about as well as you would expect of a Thracian. Kneeling, the caretaker dipped a cup of water and gave it to the suppliant. In Everard’s present state, the icy tang was more welcome than a beer. His prayer of thanks came close to sincerity.

“I will leave you alone with the god for a while,” Dolon said. “You may fill yonder jug for yourself and, duly grateful, carry it out.” Bowing to the icon, he left.

I’d better not take long, the Patrolman realized. However, a little comfort and privacy, a chance to think—

His plans were vague. The objective was to get into the Syrian camp and find the military surgeon Caletor of Oinoparas, known at home as Hyman Birnbaum and, like Everard, long since given a regenerative procedure enabling him to live among pagans without drawing comment. Maybe they could invent some excuse to go off together, maybe Birnbaum could arrange for Everard’s unhindered departure. What counted was to take a transceiver sufficiently many miles away that the Exaltationist instruments wouldn’t detect a call, above the faint intermittent background of communication between unheeding time travelers elsewhere in the world. Let the Patrol know what Everard had learned, so it could prepare a trap.

Though judging by what I’ve discovered about their precautions, the likelihood of our bagging all four is very small Damn. God damn.

Never mind. The immediate need was to reach Birnbaum, with enemy troops apt to skewer a stranger on sight. He might deter them by shouting that he bore a vital message, but then he’d be haled before officers who’d want to know what it was, and if he named Caletor, the surgeon would surely be examined too—under torture, when it turned out neither man had anything convincing to say.

He’d come to the temple in hopes of finding somebody in charge with more authority than the slave, an under-priest or acolyte or whatever. From such a person he might have gotten religious tokens, an escort, or the like, passing him through the Syrian pickets tomorrow. If he demonstrated his flashlight and said Poseidon had personally given it to him in the night—Of course, that must wait till Nicomachus-Draganizu had met with Polydorus-Buleni and both had left again. Everard had considered not arriving here before then; but skulking about this countryside meanwhile was at least as dangerous as sitting unobtrusively in the court, and he just might observe something useful—

The scheme had been precarious at best. Now it looked ridiculous. Well, maybe a fresh notion will occur. He grinned, largely a snarl. An action too unsubtle for them, same as yesterday only more so.

He went out into sunlight that briefly overwhelmed vision. “I think already I felt the god’s nearness, strengthening me,” he said weightily. “I believe I am doing what he wants, and you are, Dolon. Let’s not go astray.”

“No, no.” In a hasty mutter, the caretaker cautioned him against defiling the temenos—there was a privy on the far side of the grove—and hobbled back to shelter.

Everard sought the corner where the women sat. Fear no longer stared up at him. Instead he saw grief dulled by fatigue and despair. He couldn’t bring himself to greet them with “Rejoice.”

“May I join you?” he asked.

“We can’t forbid you,” mumbled the old woman (forty years of life behind her?).

He lowered himself to the ground beside the young one. She had been good-looking a day or two ago, before her spirit was shattered. “I too await the will of the god,” he said.

“We only wait,” she answered tonelessly.

“Uh, my name is Androcles, a pilgrim. You live hereabouts?”

“We did.”

The crone stirred. For a minute, a bitter vitality flickered. “Our home was downstream, so far that we didn’t get warning till late,” she told him. “My son said we must load an oxcart full of what we could take off the farm, or we’d be beggars in the city. Horsemen caught us on the road. They killed him and the boys. They ravished his wife. At least they didn’t kill us also. We found the gates shut. We thought the Earthshaker might give us refuge.”

“I wish they had killed us,” the young woman said in her dead voice. The infant began to cry. Mechanically, she bared a breast and gave suck. Her free hand stretched a fold of sleeve across to screen against the sun and the flies.

“I’m sorry” was all Everard could think of. That’s war for you, the thing that governments do best. “I’ll name you in my prayers to him.”

They didn’t reply. Well, numbness was a mercy of sorts. He raised his hood and leaned back. Poplars gave scant shade. The heat in the wall baked through his cloak.

Hours passed. As often before during a long and uncertain wait—though oftenest in future centuries—he withdrew into memories. Occasionally he drank some lukewarm water, occasionally he catnapped. The sun trudged up the sky and started down.

—clouds racing on the wind, light stabbing between them to blaze off the waves, cordage a-thrum, chill salt spray as the ship plunges through seas that thunder green, gray, white-maned, and “Ha!” Bjarni Herjulfsson shouts at the steering oar. “A gull,” promise of the new land ahead—

The end came slowly at first, then in a rush. Everard heard noises grow, hoofbeats, voices, clatter. His flesh tingled. Instantly alert, he pulled the hood further forward to shadow his face, lifted his knees, and slumped his shoulders to look as apathetic as the women still were.

Respecting sanctity, the Syrians dismounted outside the grove. Six of them, armed and armored, followed a man into the temenos. Like them, he went in mail and greaves, sword at side, but a horsehair plume stood tall on his helmet, a red mantle hung from his shoulders, an ivory baton was in his hand, held like a swagger stick, and he overtopped his followers by inches. The features within the iron were as if carved by Praxiteles in alabaster.

Dolon hurried down the steps and prostrated himself. When Alexander prevailed over Asia, the Orient took Hellas over. Rome would have the same experience, unless the Exaltationists aborted its destiny. They won’t. One way or another, we’ll stop them. Energy blazed from Buleni-Polydorus. But Christ if they give us the slip again, with this experience for a lesson—

“You may rise,” said the aide of King Antiochus. He glanced at those who hunched in the angle of the wall. “Who are they?”

“Fugitives, master,” Dolon quavered. “They claim sanctuary.”

The splendid one shrugged. “Well, let the priest decide what to do about them. He’s on his way. We require the temple for a private conference.”

“Certainly, master, certainly.”

Obedient to snapped orders, the soldiers took stance on either side of the entry and beneath the stairs. Buleni went inside. Dolon joined Everard and the women, keeping his feet, nervous, perhaps finding comfort in even such wretched company as was theirs.

Yeah. Nicomachus spoke to the authorities inside Bactra. He may or may not have needed a little help from Zoilus; Theonis would take care of that. The priest must go out and see to his temple. Best would be if a ranking enemy officer could meet him there and they discuss terms more precisely. Neither side in the war wants to offend the Earthshaker. Heralds negotiated. It went easily. Among other considerations, King Antiochus knows his ADC Polydorus is in league with a disaffected element inside the city, and this will establish the espionage link.