John Barnes is known for his SF novels and stories. Kaleidescope Century, Finity, and many more. He lives in Gunnison, Colorado, and teaches theatre at Western State Collegeand practices what he teaches. How he finds the energy to do all this mystifies me. It must be the extra oxygen in the lowland air. (I live at 7,200 feet, myself.)
John has also written a series of alternate-history, crosstime-travel romps featuring his hero Mark Strang, the art-historian turned gun for hire and interdimensional scourge of tyrants: Washington's Dirigible, Caesar's Bicycle, and Patton's Spaceship.
One of the great things about a multiverse of alternate timelines is that if anything possible happens, virtually everything will, somewhere.
So Mark Strang takes time off from the war against the Closerssadistic descendants of the Carthaginians who rule a million timelines, all of them badlyto meet the gene-engineered Draka.
The Closers love to torment their helpless, hating slaves. To the Draka, that would seem crude; they consider making their subjects love them the ultimate domination. Mark Strang isn't enchanted with either approach, and shows it . . .
"Admit it, Mark, you're bored," Chrysamen said.
"I have no problem with admitting it." I poured myself another cup of coffee from the maker in our kitchen and took an absent-minded sip. "I just have problems with any possible way out of it, is all. Now, if you'll excuse me, our son is waiting patiently for his chance at checkmate, which I think he'll get in about ten moves."
"Six," Perry said from the other room.
I went back out into the living-dining room. Perry had moved the chessboard a little to the side. He was reading some comic that had both Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk on the cover. His feet, gigantic in proportion to the skinny rest of him, were up on the table, next to the chessboard. He looked the picture of eleven-year-old contentment.
I gently lifted his feet to the side with one hand, and set my coffee cup down on the table. Perry sat upright, grumbling that there was no place around here where a guy could get comfortable.
I remembered making the same grumble to my own father, so I used his line. "If being comfortable means destroying good furniture, then you're right. There's no place here where you can get comfortable. Better start saving to move out."
"Aw, Pop. That's Grandpa's line."
"Uh-huh. And that's your grandmother's table. Which means, as I don't really have to tell you, Perry, that it means a lot to Grandpa Strang." I looked at my son intently for half a minute; then he shrugged and nodded. My mother, Perry's grandmother, was murdered in front of Dad and me, years before Perry was born, just before I went into my present line of work. Dad's as recovered as he's going to get, but he'll never be over it. If Perry had scratched the table that Mother had once found at a yard sale and spent those summer hours refinishing, Dad would never have said a hard word to either of us about itbut all the same, it would have been an addition to the heap of pain inside him, and neither Perry nor I could shrug that off.
Salvaging a little pride, Perry said, "Anyway, I wasn't going to scratch the table or hurt it, Pop. And besides, it will be out of danger in no timeI've got mate in six."
"I'm afraid he's right, Mark," a familiar voice said behind and above me; I felt the friendly hand on my shoulder even as I was saying "Walks!"
"Yep."
I turned around and stood up to greet him with a hug. Walks in His Shadow Caldwell is about six foot two, with what I think is an exceptionally handsome facehigh-ridged nose, cheekbones wide and high, dark eyes, skin a copper-beige color. At least he was handsome by the standards of America in the early 2000s. I had no idea what they thought of him a few thousand timelines over, where he came froma timeline where the assassination of Andrew Jackson prevented the Trail of Tears, the German Fever devastated the North, and Napoleon fils cut off European emigration for more than forty years. I'd been there once, on a training trip; the USA of 1960 had less than a hundred million people, and they were about one-third Native, one-third Euro, and one-third African in ancestry. Pretty country, but empty.
Walks was an old friend, but still, it was hardly usual for him to turn up in my house on July third. Nobody crosses timelines other than by necessity, because every crossing is detectable and could give away the position of both the starting and the ending timeline to the bad guys. ATN protocol restricts crossings to emergencies; ATN is the outfit that Walks, Chrysamen, and I all work for. Just think of us as "the good guys."
Chrysamen came out with a tray of iced teaoddly, one of the few common tastes between Walks's timeline and mine. One of the iced teas was in a paper cup, which she handed to Perry and said, "Perry, if it actually is certain that you have mate in six moves, maybe you can spare your father total humiliation and let us get on with the adult business by, er"
"Leaving," Perry finished for her, getting up, taking a gulp that half-emptied the glass, and starting for the door. He stopped, turned, and said, "Hey, could I have gotten mate in four?"
Walks beamed. "Great question, but no. See, you'd have to expose yourself to check to do it." As he talked, his hands played over the chessboard, showing things to Perry much too fast for me to follow. "That would happen in any of the three ways that were otherwise possible, so no, there's not a legal way to do it. That leaves two more moves you always have to go througheither an exchange for his white bishop, so that your king can move, or a jump around the problem with this knight. Either way, six moves is your minimum."
I did my best to pretend I had any idea what Walks was showing him. Perry seemed to get it at once, however, thanked "Mr. Walks," and was out the door just fast enough so that I couldn't tell him not to slam the screen door.
After we'd all jumped at the bang, and settled back down, I said, "Kids," and Walks said "Bless'em," and the ever-practical Chrysamen said, "All right, so what's the proposed job?"
Walks chuckled. "Well, it's a job for Mark, rather than for you two as a team. So if you want to decline it because you wouldn't be working together, I'll certainly understand that. In fact, to sweeten the deal a little, Mark, we've authorized a short-term exchange for this mission, so you'll be gone only about a half day here, but it might be as much as six months over in the timeline we'd be going to. I told Lao and Malecela and the other brass that giving you a short time exchange would be more likely to get you to take the job."
"Well, you might be right," I said, "if you would just tell me what the job is."
"Be my bodyguard on a diplomatic mission. If you don't mind being flattered a little bit, I requested you specifically, because I needed a senior crux op with clearance for all kinds of security, and with some bodyguarding experienceand it needed to be someone I was sure I could trust, because for this job, especially, I wanted someone with a proven record of saving my life, which each of you had."
"Then why not both of us as a team? That's how we usually work, and we can get somebody to look after Perry on ten minutes' notice"
Walks shook his head and said, "This is not just diplomatic bodyguarding. This isn't even just dangerous diplomatic bodyguarding. We're going to go put our heads in the lion's mouthand the lion says that it only wants two of us. Now, if you'll take the deal, Mark, we'll just open a gate into your bedroom and get going. I'm sorry to sound impatient but I'd like to start. You'll be back for supperif you're back at all."
That last reference was what told me that this job was really dangerous, not just the usual dangers of being a crux op. Usually crux ops don't talk about dying, and one reason is because when we do, we get maudlin about it, generally while drunk or right after sex. I suppose that's the way life gets in an excessively romantic job.
I'd have thought, many years ago, that I had become a realist, probably too much of a realist. Most of my family had been killed in what appeared to be a pointless political murder. I'd gone through a deep depression and come out the other end as a professional bodyguard, dedicated to keeping assholes away from nice people, which not at all incidentally gave me an excuse to occasionally beat up people that needed beating up. I spent much of my time keeping scum at bay. I thought I was facing the real world, which was gritty and "realist."
Then I'd fallen through into the real real world, which is even grittierbut desperately romantic. More than a million timelines held down by the Closers, a whole culture devoted to the joyful practice of slavery. More timelines in a loose alliance called ATN, facing themabout even with the Closers when I started, but we have twice as many timelines now, and in those millions of timelines, every bizarre thing you could think of has happened. Buck Rogers science, storybook settings, desperate quests, mad tyrants, unspeakable crimes, ineffable beauty, all of your childhood heroesI'd been on one mission with George Washington and Leonardo da Vinci as co-agents, but that's a long and different story . . . well. I learned, a couple of decades ago, that although I'd seen most of the dark corners of my own world, I'd only been living in a bad black and white polaroid of that big bold technicolor reality.
ATN was still mostly secret in our timeline; the public was being prepared for the news, but it would probably be a generation or so until we were ready to be open about it. It was scheduled for the presidency-to-come, twenty years or so in the future, of my ward Porter Brunreich. (That was the U.S. Presidency . . . that young lady doesn't settle for half measures.)
Meanwhile, I continued in my occupation as bodyguard for Porter and as part-time crux op. Seven hundred years in the future, time travel remains expensive, even for civilizations that can move whole planets around, and so most of the action involves small numbers of scouts, pioneers, agents, and liaisons; every so often one of those temporal explorers, agents, or diplomats goes missing, in circumstances that might be due to enemy action. When that happens, a crux op goes into the last known time and place location for the missing person, and the crux op is bound by just three rules:
Rule One: Find the missing person, or the body.
Rule Two: Make sure the original mission gets completed.
Rule Three: No other rules apply.
We went back into the bedroom suite, where Chrys and I have a space that is always kept empty so that a gate can be projected there from ATN headquarters at Hyper Athens (a space station that will never exist in our timeline, but is just a few centuries forward and several possibilities to the side). Chrysamen grabbed me for just an instant, gave me a long, deep kiss, and said, "Come back."
Privately, Chrys and I call that Rule Zero.
A moment later in subjective time, Walks and I were standing in the receiving area at ATN, shaking hands with a whole committee of people. Walks in His Shadow was one of the most valued people ATN has because he'd done so many different things. He'd been spectacularly effective as a time scout, on the mission that had turned the tide of the war and promised to let us eventually rid all the timelines of Closers. He'd worked as a crux op himself. He'd held a bunch of command and staff jobs in everything from pre-imperial Roman legions to a 23rd-century LithuPolish Pentaku, and fought in everything from one-on-one epée quarrels to commanding a regiment of capsuleers in one of the Irish Empire's invasions of Mars. His multiply rebuilt body housed a mind with at least two centuries of adult experienceand much of that was in contact and diplomacy.
So if the Senate of Citizens had chosen him to make our first contact with this new family of timelines on this mission, it could be no ordinary mission.
As soon as we arrived, Walks immediately went off for a last-minute briefing. Ariadne Lao, an old friend and my usual boss, took me to a discreet little cafe that we both liked, to do the high level briefing and not incidentally to get reacquainted with the moussaka. "This place is still secure," she explained, as we sat down, near a window tuned to the outside, where we could watch the big, gleaming Earth roll by on one side, and the twinkles of dozens of spacecraft on the other, as Hyper Athens slowly tumbled.
"All right," I said. "Then tell me everything."
"We wish we knew more, obviously," she said, "but here's the basics. We've run into a civilizationto use the term very looselythat has just found the technique of crossing timelines, within the last thirty years, and begun to explore outwards from its home timeline. A timeline fairly close to both yours and Plenipotentiary Caldwell's native timelines" it took me a moment to realize my built-in translator chip had translated Walks's title from Lao's always-polite speech.
"Basically, in this new family of timelines, there's an enormous and frightening great power that never occurred in either your timeline or Walks's." She looked down at her notes; she was from the timeline where ATN had originated, and from her standpoint the whole settlement of North America from Europe was an aberration. "The difference was that after the American Revolution, the Loyalists went to South Africa instead of Canada, and in the fullness of time, grew up to be the nation that conquered the world, enslaved everybody, and bioengineered themselves into a new species. They call themselves Draka, which derives, distantly, from Drake having explored that part of the world."
I shuddered. "So in their timeline, unmodified human beings are slaves?"
"Extinct. We think. We know that there's a lot they're not telling us. As far as we can tell, there might be a hundred human-derived species in those timelines. All created entirely for the amusement and convenience of the drakenses."
"Plural of drakensis?"
"Right. Anyway, some of them might look like usthe Draka themselves do, superficiallybut they're all designed, and the worlds they're designed for are mostly empty, with just a few masters in them."
I sighed. "They sound more like natural allies of the Closers, but I suppose if we can use them as allies, we'll have to."
"You know the basic principle. Any timeline that doesn't try to control other timelines is okay, even if their major civilization bakes babies for breakfast." She sighed. "Not that I'm happy about that principle just at the moment. Mark, this is one of those cases where I really wonder if any end can justify the means. Unofficially, yes, the Draka are quite unattractive, but officially, they have potential to help us shorten the war, and that's not something we can afford to pass up the chance at.
"Now, this next thing is a note of some importance. One aspect of their extraordinarily well-advanced genetic engineering is that they have have modified themselves to have voluntary control of their pheremones. They can make themselves smell like friends, or like dangerous predators, or whatever. They are quite capable, for example, of causing a non-resistant human to fall madly into sexual infatuation with them, at will. That is, at Draka will. The ordinary human doesn't have much in the way of a will, once the Draka get done with him.
"This is one reason why Plenipotentiary Caldwell is going in with a bodyguard. Part of your job is to watch each other. We think we can give you a shot of nanos that will protect you against Draka control. But if it should failif one of you falls under the sway of a Drakonthen the job of the other one is to get you both out of there, right then, before the Draka can gain any more information about ATN, and most especially before you both end up as puppets. Is that clear?"
"Does Walks know that's my job? Dragging him out of there if needed?"
"He thinks hiring you was his idea. And it was. But we already had it in mind, and we contrived a few situations that would reinforce the idea for him, to which, I must say, he responded beautifully. So yes, it was his idea, but it was ours before it was his."
"These Draka aren't the only people that practice mind control, are they?"
Lao didn't answer, but she seemed annoyed, and she's a good boss and an old friend I don't want to offend, so I dropped that line of conversation and we got down to business; she gave me the basic reports to have down cold before we left. ATN are good people, but when it comes to talking about means and ends, they can get as touchy as anybody.
The next day, while I was going over the material, and finding more and more things not to like about the Draka, Ariadne dropped by the guest apartment where I was staying. She apologized for having been abrupt with me the day before, and said it had a great deal to do with how much the ATN leadership had already been arguing about whether to open any kind of relations with the Draka at all; several of the citizen-senators described the Draka as "Super-Closers" and suggested that we should simply shove a planet-wrecking bomb through the gate and be done with them. "So they've thrashed through all the conflicts, and argued and screamed and so on for a long time, and now they've hit on a policy," she said, "which may or may not work, but if it doesn't work, all the ones who didn't favor it will be able to jump on our organization and blame us for it. So I'm afraid that for these last few days I've been hypersensitive."
"That's understandable," I said, pouring tea for both of us. "But I can't believe you went to the bother of coming in person just to apologize."
"Well, no, I didn't. I came to bring you a new toy for your expeditionyou'll be the first crux op to carry one, ever. It hasn't been used by any agent in any real emergency, but the field tests have been very successful, and it's rated as fully ready to go."
"Unh-hunh. I hope the mission doesn't depend on it," I said. I have any normal person's horror of using experimental equipment in dangerous situations; heck, besides all the next-millenium hardware that ATN gives me, I always try to pack along a Model 1911A "Army automatic," because I know I can trust it.
She laughed. "No, absolutely not. It just gives you another option." She handed me something that looked a little like a modern concussion grenadean aluminum egg with a pin in it. "They made your version of the gadget look like a grenade exactly so you'd be nervous about pulling the pin, because it's strictly for desperate situations," she said. "What it is, is a gate generator that forms the gate around you. If you pull the pin, the energy source insidewhich stores about a gigajoule, so it's a big onepowers up a gate that encloses anything within three meters of the object. It does a very high speed search for oxygen and dry land, so that it won't dump you someplace you can't survive. Then it kicks you and whatever's with you through the gate, and sends out an amplified shockwave in probability space so that we can find you easily."
"Where exactly does it send me?"
"The first timeline that its search finds, in which you can survive, that's a minimum distance from where you were. Think of it as like the parachutes in your crude airplanes; it doesn't deliver you anywhere in particular, but sometimes where you are is so dangerous that anywhere else is worth trying."
I sighed. "Yeah, I've been places like that. So it's nondirectional, just a bailout device?"
"That's right," she said. "No time for rethinking, eitherthe gate forms the instant the pin is pulled."
"If it's all the same to ATN, I think I'll tape that pin down," I said. "How much force does it take to pull it?"
"Two newtons. You can do it with one finger."
"Then I'm definitely taping it down."
Walks and I bounced through nine timelines in ninety seconds on our way to the Draka timeline where negotiations were to happen. That's a routine precaution; by putting the bounces close together, their signals overlap in a way thatthe physicists tell mecan't be decomposed to find individual timelines. This way the Draka wouldn't be in any position to come looking for us, should negotiations go sourwhich I was privately hoping they'd do, after what I'd read of them. ATN already has some pretty grim member timelinessome descended from Nazi and Communist world-states that liberalized, and a stomach-turning one that resulted from the Confederacy conquering the world before it was overthrown by theocrats. I didn't like those timelines much, though some very good agents came from them. There are people that you just don't want on your side, when you come right down to it, and I'd never seen anything that fit that description better than the Draka.
The blur of colors and the whirl of suns in the sky went away, and we stood on a platform in what would have been in South Africa in my timeline or Nouvelle Provence in Walks's. We were facing two remarkably beautiful redheads, who could easily have been sisters.
"Hello," the slightly taller one said, "I am Chief Negotiator Sabrina de Koenigen, and this is my assistant, Ailantha Rossignol."
The translator in my head made her words clear while another part of my mind recognized it as English of a sortmaybe about as close to my English as Flemish would be in my own world. It sounded like the thickest Southern drawl I'd ever heard, but the rhythm was different, somehow.
Walks stepped forward and bowed slightly. "I am Plenipotentiary Walks in His Shadow Caldwell, and this is my assistant, Mark Strang."
There were the usual interminable pleasantries about whether or not we were comfortable (how can you get uncomfortable on a less-than-two-minute trip?), and then about settling us into guest quarters. They played the game of pretending that they needed a couple of hours to be ready for us, and we sat in there quietly, assuming that our rooms were bugged, that listening devices were always trained on us, and that therefore we were to have no communication with each other that we couldn't have in front of Draka Security. We had some inconsequential discussion, figured out the sanitary facilities, and unpacked our one bag each.
The Draka hadn't really seemed to care that I would be armed; apparently if the situations were reversed, they would have expected and demanded it. Besides, what could Walks and I possibly do with just my hand weapons, no matter how potent? Even with an atom bomb in my suitcase, I could have done very little harm to a whole planet of them. Any act of violence I did would have gained us little and would only have put them on alert that our intentions weren't friendly.
Presumably, after enough listening, they were satisfied that we wouldn't blurt out everything as soon as it looked like we were alone. Then Rossignol came by to get us. She was good looking enough, with deep blue eyes and an athletic build, but I realized after we had walked a hundred meters or so that the anti-pheromone nanos in my bloodstream were doing their job; I was aware that her smell was saying "Trust me Love Me Do What I Say" into my noseoverlaid with occasional bits of "Wanna Fuck?"but I didn't feel any need to do anything about any of it, except to pretend to be vaguely interested.
The basic procedure for the negotiations was that de Koenigen and Walks would slowly exchange information with each other, while Rossignol and I sat in opposite corners of the room, took notes, and watched each other for treachery. After three hours of polite exchangesthings like "I am authorized to tell you that we maintain a solar system with a very low population and we are not accepting settlers at this time" from de Koenigen, or "I have been instructed to tell you that we have a policy of strict noninterference by every member timeline in every other member timeline's affairs" from Walksde Koenigen suggested that we have dinner and just get acquainted informally. Given that I was already bored out of my mind, and Rossignol looked like she desperately wanted to go to sleep, there were two votes in the room for it immediately, and Walks assented as well.
The place where we ate, was "famous not only in Archona but throughout the Domination," we were informed. Knowing the Draka background, I was moderatelyand very privatelyamused that much of the meal, which they assured me was traditional with them, dating back to their earliest days, was what I would call "soul food."
You can get a lot of intelligence out of casual conversation, especially when investigating another timeline, and that was what they were trying on us. I knew that when we told them that Walks and I were not from the same timelines, this information would be squirreled away somewhere: Inter-timeline travel is routine for them. When I mentioned the death of my first wife, my mother, and my brother, in an act of violence, a note would record Strang's world has endemic terrorism or violent crime. They were drawing conclusions about sizes of families, social customs, economics, and all the rest, just as quickly as they could ask us questions.
We were playing the same game, and the more I heard, the more I realized that being a serf for the Drakaspecifically being a servus, their genetically-controlled utility workerswas probably indistinguishable from being a slave of the Closers. The only difference was that the servus were bred to like it and need it; the Closers, who were a whole culture of brutal sadists, often as rough on each other and their own children as they were on their slaves, preferred to own and torment something that was able to hate them, I guess because it enhanced the experience. I wasn't sure whether I found the pragmatic Draka or the sadistic Closers less attractive.
I think I managed dinner with them rather well. I did have to work to hold a bite of fried chicken down when, right after I swallowed, Rossignol began talking about the teenage girl she had picked to implant with a cloned egg, creating a little Rossignol inside her bed partner.
I was careful to keep thinking "Rossignol" even though, by that time, we were all on a first-name basis; I was willing to call her "Ailantha" at her request, to be polite, but if it came down to it, I'd rather have to kill "Rossignol," or better yet, "That nasty Drakon bitch."
Both de Koenigen and Rossignol must have been putting out pheromones for all they were worth, because I could feel it whispering in my bloodstream. The wine they kept orderingand filling our glasses withdidn't seem to bother my nanos one bit, though. So though I was feeling the booze a little, drinking it faster than the artificial scrubber built into my kidney could deal with, the signal getting to me was a faint whispering in the back of my mind"I Love You I've Always Wanted Someone Like You Adore Me Trust Me Wanna Fuck?" I played along, mildly; I kind of thought Walks was overdoing it, and by the end of dinner he'd let de Koenigen rest a hand on his arm for quite a while.
We staggered back to our quartersone thing you can say for totalitarian states, the streets are safe at any hourand sacked out. By the time we got back to our own door, of course, the alcohol was gone from our systems, but we kept right on playing drunkor at least I was playing. I was starting to wonder if maybe there was something wrong in Walks's scrubber, or if he was just a too-thorough actor.
Stretched out on my bunk in the dark, I practiced my old habit of privately thanking whoever or whatever beings might rule the multiple universes; I thanked them for my chance at a second life in a wider world, and for people to love and take care of like Porter, and for good friends and comrades like Walks, and of course for Chrysamen. I always finished with her. Then I set my mind to drift off to sleep.
I was mildly disturbed by a little noise from Walks, in the next room; it took me a second to realize that I hadn't heard that sound since the days when I'd lived in the frat house. He was masturbating like a crazy monkey, but trying to be quiet about it.
Well, maybe his pheromone screen wasn't as good as mine, or perhaps he had a major thing for redheaded lady wrestlers. It was, so to speak, no skin off mine.
The next morning, I'd have sworn that Walks had an actual hangover, which seemed all the strangerthat shouldn't happen to anyone with a scrubber. Maybe his wasn't workingand that led to the equally horrifying thought that perhaps all of his biochemical defenses were malfunctioning. I had no way to ask him; not only did we have to assume that audio was bugged, but there was no way even to write a note to him, or to tap his shoulder in Morse code, or do any other trick to avoid surveillance. We had no way of knowing what their surveillance capabilities might be; for all I knew there could be a camera in the lamp I wrote under, or a monitoring system in any hard surface I might write on, or any number of subtle listening devices anywhere in the rooms. Certainly if Draka representatives had come to ATN, we'd have bugged them in all of those ways, and half a dozen more as well.
It hadn't seemed like such a serious problem in the abstract, back at Hyper Athens, when we'd discussed and reviewed procedure, and noted that we could not and must not have any communication about any covert matter until we were out of the Draka timeline. But now . . . was Walks all right? I'd never seen him having visible problems before. Was this part of a ruse? If so, how should I react?
My dread only got worse when, halfway through the morning, de Koenigen suggested a long break to take a walk through a park. To judge by the sheen of sweat on Walks's forehead, my friend's pheromone resistance was failing just as badly as his alcohol scrubbers had. Someone had screwed up royally on the whole mission; as soon as Walks and I got back to our quarters, I'd have to officially pull out my emergency orders, and request a recall. I was tempted to do that now, but I couldn't risk embarrassing our envoy in front of the other side, and besides, as yet, Walks in His Shadow hadn't quite done anything that could make me certain he'd actually lost control.
Still, I was also worried by how fast he agreed to the walk, and by the smile he gave de Koenigen.
Somehow or other the walk through the park would first require going back to our guest quarters, and when we got there, Walks went in, and Sabrina de Koenigen went in after him, and just like that, I was separated from himRossignol stepped in between the door and me and said "I think they badly want to be alone."
Her pheromones were now sending "Obey me" and "Get hard" at about equal intensities.
I didn't quite have an excuse to pick a fight with her, and frankly didn't like my chances if I dida Drakon is as strong as an ape or a bear, and I'd get taken apart, while achieving nothing for the cause. I didn't have any way to argue with her about them wanting to be alone; in fact, Walks was making a number of strange noises that made me think that he'd probably rather not be rescued for a few minutes, anyway. Softly, Rossignol said, "You know that all the damage is done already. We can tell you have some kind of resistance system, Mark, and that Mister Caldwell has one that doesn't work. You can't get to him because if you try, I'll kill you. And he won't want to get away from Sabrina for another hour at least. So we're going to learn what we're going to learn. Now, you and I can stand here and face each other at this doorway, or we can go somewhere comfortable and sit. Which will it be?"
"Let's keep the faceoff going," I said.
"You know perfectly well that I won't tire as fast as you will," Rossignol said, smiling. "And incidentally, even out here in public, we have some privacy. No one will be coming by. Want to see what it's like with one of us? Are you sure you want Caldwell to have all the stories?" I couldn't entirely tell if she was only teasing, or if she was just looking for something to do during a dull watch.
Meanwhile, inside, I heard Walks howling with pleasure. I did my best to ignore it.
I thought about agreeing to have sex, and then pulling out the .45 and shooting her. My guess was that with her strength and reflexes, she could probably take the gun away from me, use me, and kill me, faster than I could draw the gun.
"You're right, it wouldn't work," Rossignol said evenly.
I admit I gaped at her.
"We don't read minds," she said, "but you obviously thought of something for a moment and then gave up on it. The way your body moves. The way you smell. It's not hard to tell."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked. "Assaulting and interrogating an envoy is a good way to start a war. Do you want to fight a million timelines?"
"Well, the million may be exaggerated," she said, "or it may not, but I'm willing to agree there are more of you than there are of us. Part of the sport, you might say. A bigger challenge. And after all, mostly you came here to get to know us. Well, you're finding out. We don't bargain with feral humans, any more than you bargain with cattle. The real question is just how soon you'll be serfs. That son you mentioned at dinner last night will have a tattoo on his neck one day."
I kept my voice low and even, but I stared at her with complete disgust. "A tattoo on his neck?" I asked. "Is that how you mark serfs?"
Her pheromones were now sending a bunch of signals intended to rile me up; she must be under orders to get me into some kind of a fight or something, I thought. Perhaps I needed to be killed while attacking her.
But the thought of Perry with a neck tattoo . . . I ran my hand over my own throat, trying to imagine that, and kept an eye on her while I did.
"Oh, he'll wear it," she said. "You'll see the tattoo on any captured serf. But not where you're touching yourself." With a cruel little smile, she turned her head to show me. "The serf tattoo extends across here"
She drew a line with her finger, and as she drew it, I pulled the .45, thrust it forward, and fired three times into her neck.
Later on I found out that they all have what amounts to a Kevlar underskin; the rounds penetrated only because it was at point blank range, and without much force. Chances are she survived with the mother of all headaches and some bed rest. But the impact of the heavy rounds was enough to throw her backward against the doorframe, and to daze and disorient her. I kicked her hard to knock her to the ground and pressed my thumb against the door's reader plate. There was some mercy in the universe; it popped open, and I rolled inside.
De Koenigen came at me, hands reaching to break my neck, and I put the rest of the clip into her face. I wasn't as close to her as I had been to Rossignol, so I don't think it had much more effect on her than being whacked hard with a broom handle in the face would on meit stunned and stalled her, but I don't think she was really hurt.
Still, she took a step back. I dove forward, onto the bed, and had just an instant to realize that Walks was tied out in a naked spread-eagle, and that he had pretty obviously been having a very good time. I landed on top of him, reached into my pocket, and pulled the pin on the new escape device. The world turned a weird noncolor, and we were out of there.
The landing was a bit rough; whatever hunting the device did apparently didn't care about a two-foot drop in a bed whose legs had been severed at uneven lengths. We were outdoors in bright sunlight, probably the same place and time of day as before, but if the gadget had worked correctly, we were out of Draka territory.
Or at least we would have different Draka to cope with.
I pulled out my knife and cut his bonds. Walks, still naked, sat up and drew a deep breath, sobbing.
"Can you move?" I asked, "Because"
There was a loud thunder and a brief darkness. I looked up to see an aircraft belly slide over us, perhaps a hundred feet overhead, and the shape and insignia told me instantly.
"Uh, because I think we're on the runway of a Closer airport," I said.
That got his attention. We ran for the nearest building, and barefoot and naked though he was, he got there ahead of me. There was an open doorway and we rushed into that; there was still no evidence that we'd been seen, but surely there must be alarms sounding in the terminal and a gang of armed men on their way. "Inventory," Walks said, gasping. "Oh, god, her pheromones are still all over me; I've never been so horny in my life. Inventory, Mark, what do we have?"
"You've got nothing," I said. "I've got the .45 and a NIF. If I spray it around now, we can probably knock off the whole airport around us, but that's going to cause attention."
"You got any better plans?" he asked.
"Nope."
The NIFNeural Induction Flechetteis a weapon that shoots little needles that take over the nervous system. They're self-guiding and will go looking for human beings to hit; you can select any effect from mild itching to immediate cardiac shutdown. In this case, I just stepped out the door, drew mineit looked a bit like a cordless drill with a keyboardset it to hit everywhere that wasn't us for a kilometer around, and fired it up into the air. To maximize the effect, I set them to killquickly and painlessly, but all the same, anybody who wasn't in an airtight room would be dropping dead.
I slipped back into the building and listened to the explosions and crashes outsidepresumably driverless vehicles plowing into things, and aircraft with dead pilots crashing. Walks was frantically rubbing himself with oily rags he'd found. "Oh, god, I can't believe it, I really can't," he said. "None of my protection worked at all. And they grabbed our personal computers, and . . . um, well, I told her everything she asked. We're absolutely screwed, Mark."
"Well, almost absolutely," Chrysamen said. She stepped out of the shadows. "And at least Walks is dressed for it. I'm here to bring you guys home."
She pressed the button on a hand-held gate call, and abruptly there were bursts of no-color alternated with colors and lights; we ran through another deception set, and there we were, back at Hyper Athens, two days older and much the worse for the wear.
By tradition, in my family, we have a little review of the past year every Fourth of July. My father is just about the most patriotic person I know, and the Fourth is always our biggest holiday, by far. After we watch the Frick Park fireworks, and the various children are sent off to bed, Dad and I, my sister Carrie, and of course since she married into the family, Chrysamen as well, all gather in Dad's study, to talk a bit about what's happened in the last year, and what we hope will happen, and so forth. Sometimes it's been about dangers, and sometimes about opportunities, and most years, more often than not, it's just been a pleasant, satisfactory review of all the things that have gone right with our lives.
This time, though, I had a story to tell. Thanks to the short-term exchange they had granted me, so that I didn't have to be away from my timeline on a day-per-day basis, though I had experienced being away for about six weeks, including all the debriefing time at Hyper Athens, I had gotten back home only an hour after I'd left, on the third. Now I'd had a good night's sleep and a soothing family holiday, and was feeling rested and ready to talk. So I did, with Chrysamen filling in many parts, because, of course, she knew much more of the story.
We talked for a long time, in the warm glow of Dad's study; in the lamplight, the sharp angles made the old pockmarks from the long-ago bullet holes more visible, and I tended to get lost in looking at them, and thinking, even after all these years and even with my very rewarding family life, how life might have been different if we'd seen the attacks coming.
"So that was really all it was," Dad said. "The old standard way of planting disinformationhave it carried by someone who believes it and will try to guard it. Neither Walks nor Mark knew that they were doing anything other than what they were ordered to dobut Ariadne Lao set Mark up with that escape device, so that when things got desperate enough, he'd `accidentally' bounce right over to a major Closer military base. That must have caused some excitement."
"It did," I said, and described the situation of popping onto a runway with Walks naked, and then of massacring the population around the airport. "Anyway, the one thing that Lao didn't lie about," I said, "was about the amplification of the timeline-crossing shock wave. The Closers got a real good fix on that Draka timeline, I'm sure. And the Drakaif their physics is up to itknow where the Closers are, as well. I should have figured that that escape device couldn't possibly work the way they were describing it, anyway. Why have something that has to look for a safe place to set you down? Why not just design it to always take you somewhere safe?"
Dad nodded. "Because that's the basic technique for planting disinformation. Don't let anything that actually is important sound like it is. Lao gave you a plausible explanation for something you weren't supposed to need, and with so much else going on, you didn't worry about the fine details." He sighed and took a sip of brandy. "Anyway, as a guy who once followed the activities of a few espionage outfits, I have to admire this as a sheer piece of trade craft. How much of it did you know about, Chrys?"
"All of it, once Mark was already on his way," she said. "Always assuming they're not running some scam on me, as well. Ariadne Lao came and saw me ten minutes after Mark left. They sent Mark and Walks in there, deliberately vulnerable, and knowing full well that the Draka were apt to just grab them and try to extract intelligence information. They knew that Mark would get both of them outthey hoped, leaving the documents and a lot of hints behindand that the device would take them very noticeably through Closer territory. The whole operation was one big setup to insure that the Closers and the Draka were going to find each other, and not in a friendly way . . . . "
My sister Carrie sat up a little straighter in her wheelchair. "But don't you have to worry about them allying with each other?"
Dad chuckled. "I suppose it's possible, but consider who's involved. Totalitarian states with a long record of treachery. Both eager to find whole timelines to enslave. The Closers were just hit with an unprovoked attack that apparently originated among the Draka; the Draka know that we're now hostile, and they think that Mark and Walks in His Shadow escaped into the Closer timeline. So my guess is that whichever side crosses over first will go in shooting."
Chrys beamed at him. "Not bad," she said. "But it's more than that. How will the Closers react to a threat like the Draka? They do know their limitationsthey know that a slave society like theirs tends to stagnation. But they also know that when you're dealing with a secrecy-minded aggressive bunch of totalitarians, you need to be even more paranoid and secretive than they are. So they'll liberalize a few timelines, hoping that in those timelines they'll get some basic research done. And they'll tighten up in others, to make them better defended. Now you've got a crackdown in one part of the Closer domain, and a loosening up elsewhere . . ."
"Cultural drift and conflict, maybe leading to civil war?" Dad asked.
"Maybe. At least a lot of internal tension. Look, the Closers have been dependent on ATN for new technology for a long time, and essentially their whole system of a million timelines has been a parasite on the ATN system. A very costly, dangerous parasite. Well, we're giving them one of their own. The Draka probably only had a dozen timelines at the point where we introduced them, and they already seem to be stagnant, so we're giving them the chance to loot the Closersafter all, better them than us. Now either the Closers will wipe out the Draka menace, ormore likelythe Draka will bleed the Closers for centuries. Good for us, no matter how you look at it."
"Well, not quite good for everybody," I said, leaning back and taking another sip of brandy. "It's not really much fun to think of yourself as easily fooledand to fool them, ATN had to fool both Walks in His Shadow and me. And then too, there's another little problem . . . Walks is married, you know, back in his timeline. I don't think his wife knows what he does for a living, but I bet she can spot guilt as well as any other woman. And Walks is pretty guilty about it all."
"Oh, I have faith in a trained agent," Chrys said, sitting on the arm of my chair. "He'll manage to lie well enough so that she doesn't have to know anything was amiss."
"I don't know." I put an arm around her and said, "If it had been me in his situation, could I have lied well enough to keep the secret from you?"
She shrugged. "But it wasn't. You never know what might have been, now, do you?"