Conrad Starguard - Lord Conrad's Lady Part 18

"If you wish, I will visit Turon and examine it. Mind you, I won't do any spying for you. We've talked over my opposition to this war often enough. But I will do what I can to prevent injury to the innocent."

"Good, Father, because I want you to convey an offer to the Crossmen for me. I will pay them one thousand pence in army currency, silver or gold, as they desire, for every noncombatant that comes out of the city on the day before the battle. I'll pay an additional one hundred pence to each person as they leave. I'll even pay the Crossmen one hundred pence for every domestic animal, as well, and guarantee that all these people and beasts will be fed and housed well at my own expense until the issue is settled. If you wish, I will pay the Church for their upkeep, and you can see to it that it is properly done."

"That is a generous offer, Conrad."

"I'm just trying to save my soul, Father. Those siege cannons aren't the most deadly weapons that I have.

Anyway, I'll be getting most of it back as booty once I win the battle. "

"Very well, Conrad, I'll see what I can do, and I'll get the archbishop involved in this as well. However, I notice that you are again calling your weapons of war 'canons.' A canon is a law of the Church, and while your strange use of the term was funny at first, the joke has gone stale. I want you to stop it. "

"Yes, Father."

"On another matter, you have not been living with your wife. This is not good. You were joined together by G.o.d, after all."

"Father, she is still angry because I did not make her the Queen of Poland. I didn't do that and I won't do that, because I don't want to be the king. Henryk is far better qualified than I am, and anybody sane can see it! I've asked her to come back and told her that there will always be a place for her. What more can I do?"

"You could be a bit more vigorous in your invitation, my son. "

"You're saying that I should use force?"

"The Church allows it, within reason."

"The Church allows it, but G.o.d doesn't demand it! I'm not going to beat her or shackle her to the kitchen stove. Good men didn't do that sort of thing in my time."

"Well, think on it, my son. Meanwhile, I shall see what can be done with the Teutonic Knights."

The bishop returned to me the next day with word that the Crossmen had accepted my offer and he had worked out with them a system where there wouldn't be much cheating. They also offered me their war-horses on the same terms at a thousand pence a head, with the understanding that they could get them back at any time by repaying the money should the battle prove to be protracted. I went along with that. There was no point killing dumb animals, I'd be getting the money back, and we could probably train most of those chargers to pull railroad cars. From the Crossmen's point of view, the Church would be taking care of their horses at my expense until they were needed, but let them have their dreams.

The time was dragging slowly, and the troops were getting antsy. Finally, I talked to my partner about it.

"Henryk, I don't want to rush you, but it's been more than three weeks now. Do you realize that I am paying the salaries of over fifty thousand men while many of them sit idle every day?"

"Yes, Conrad, and I well know how you hate waste. But this is not time wasted. Prince Swientopelk is starting to come around. The Baltic seacoast could be ours! What would you think of having not one but two seaports, one at the mouth of the Vistula and one at the Odra?"

"It would be fine, and I've often dreamed of building oceangoing steamships. We could buy and sell abroad, explore the world, and spread the faith. We could even find coffee and rubber! But we could not start doing it for years yet. We have commitments that will take us years to fulfill. We are too overextended now to even consider further expansion at this time. You know that."

"But the iron is hot now, Conrad, and it might grow cold in five years. We need not promise to do much until then. Just some little show of support might be enough. Your reputation alone could do it. Have I ever told you that putting those Mongol heads up on pikes was a stroke of genius?"

"Not in so many words, and thank you. But what can I tell my men? When can we start the battle?"

"A week, Conrad. Can you give me another week?"

"A week. Very well, I'll hold them back until then. But a week from this morning I'm opening fire!"

Chapter Thirty-two.

The next week was simultaneously hectic and boring. A few dozen people tried to put their mark on history by playing the peacemaker. They ran back and forth between me and the Crossmen and Henryk, carrying absurd peace offers. None of us took these fools seriously, but none of us wished to appear to be unreasonable warmongers, either. My best offer to them was that if the Crossmen would go back to the Holy Land, where they'd started from, and never come back, I'd call the whole thing off, let them march out with their weapons and treasure, and let them all live, besides. Their best offer to me was less polite.

Bishop Ignacy did a good job getting the noncombatants out of Turon. There were over 500 of them, servants, stable boys, and prost.i.tutes, mostly. He also got us 1,900 horses, all of them in very good shape. It turned out that the Crossmen had sent most of their chargers away before we got there and had kept only the best, because of a lack of hay to feed all of them during a protracted siege. There were a remarkable number of dogs, cats, and caged birds that I paid for, but I drew the line at "pet" rats and mice. They figured that it had been worth a try.

At just before noon on the scheduled day we opened up on them with our swivel guns, shooting just enough to teach them to keep under cover. Half our guns were available for targets of opportunity, but each one of the other half had its own a.s.signed target: a window, a doorway, a s.p.a.ce between two merlons on the wall. They were bore-sighted and packed between sandbags, and in the course of the day, by trial and error, they got their targets down pat. This was to teach the Crossmen the art of not being seen. All through the next night the sandbagged guns fired occasionally at random, teaching the same lesson at night: Stay down! The few slit windows in the outer walls were soon plugged up tight with timbers by the defenders, nicely sealing the entire structure, which was the purpose of the exercise. This stopped the bullets, because this year we were firing cartridges with far less gunpowder than last year's.

Six inches of pine could stop our rounds cold. I didn't want to put holes in anything. Quite the opposite.

The random firing continued the next day, except when the gunners actually had a target, an increasingly rare event. Around noon we took a few trial shots with the mortars, using dummy rounds loaded with sand. They did very little damage, but they let us know that our aim was good enough. Small-arms fire continued into the second night, and I was sure that by then the garrison was very low on sleep. An hour before midnight the small-arms fire slackened off.

It was a sultry night and almost completely calm. It would work tonight if it was going to work at all. I had the smallarms fire stop completely and allowed the Crossmen a quarter hour to get to sleep.

Then we opened up with the mortars, firing as fast as their crews could load them, one round a minute each. This continued for only twelve minutes and then stopped. They were out of ammunition, which relieved me. Having that stuff sit around for weeks in the sun and in public made me nervous.

The mortar rounds were a yard in diameter and two yards high. They were made of a thin iron sh.e.l.l with a blown-in gla.s.s lining. When the sh.e.l.l struck, the gla.s.s broke and the pressurized liquid chlorine inside was released. If the lining broke in the course of being fired, it didn't matter, for the metal sh.e.l.l kept it together long enough to-get the poison into the sleeping city.

The delegates were encouraged to watch the sh.e.l.ling, and when it was over, I told them that I thought that we had just won the battle. When they asked me how that was possible, I told them that wars were ugly things and it was best to get them over as soon as possible. Then I suggested that they all go to sleep. Nothing else should happen until morning.

The army troops couldn't sleep, however. At first they stood to their guns with slow flares lit in front of them in case the Crossmen came pouring out of the city. Then they were all standing on top of their war carts in case something far more deadly than enemy troops came pouring out. More of the deadly gas might have leaked out than I had calculated. Chlorine is heavy stuff, almost three times heavier than air. I figured that it should fill the city up to the top of the walls, like soup in a bowl, and hug the ground until it was absorbed by the dew.

The warriors heard a few shouts and screams from the Crossmen, but soon the city was quiet. They had a boring night, but I hadn't told them to come.

I was still across the river, safe from the chlorine. I went back to my big railroad car to sleep. At the doorway of my car a foreign knight waited, standing in the yellow torchlight.

He was dressed in old-fashioned chain mail, though it looked to be washed with gold. There was quite a bit of solid gold on his outfit as well. And there was something very familiar about the man.

"What can I do for you?" I asked.

"I think it is time that we had a talk," he said in Polish but with a strong American English accent!

He was identical to the man I had seen killed on the battlefield a year ago, except he had all his hair. He had to be somehow connected to the time machine that had brought me here over ten years earlier.

"Yes," I said. "I would like that. Won't you come in?"

"Thank you," he said, entering and nodding to my servants. "Perhaps it would be best if you dismissed your people. "

"Very well." I motioned them all out, and they obeyed.

"Good. I think here would be best. " He went to my stand-up clothes closet, opened the door, and walked through. The closet was standing along the wall of the car, and there was nothing on the other side of it. In fact, I had just walked past that wall, and I knew that nothing had been set up on the other side of it. Yet when I looked into the closet, there was a modem living room in there! It had wall-to-wall carpeting, electric lights, and comfortable looking leather furniture. There was even a cheerful fire going in a fieldstone fireplace. This was impossible!

I went to the side of the closet, moved it away from the wall, and looked behind it. The back of the closet was solid, and the railroad car didn't have a hole in it. Yet from the front, you could see ten yards into it!

But I wanted to get some answers out of this man, and I dared not turn coward now. I took a deep breath and stepped in. The door closed behind me with a solid click.

"Have a seat, cousin," he said in English. "Surely you recognize me. I'm your rich American relative, Tom Kolczykrenski. I put you through college, remember?"

I sat. "Yes, I remember now, but what are you doing here? And what is here doing here?" I said in my rusty English.

"This room, you mean? Well, you must understand that when you control time, you control s.p.a.ce as well. They're really all part of the same thing, you know."

"No, I don't know."

"Then you will soon," he said. A very beautiful young woman came into the room completely naked, carrying a tray with drinks on it. "Have a martini. I'll bet it's been years since you had an olive."

"Thank you." For ten years a thousand questions had been racking my brain, but at the moment I couldn't think of a single one. "What can I do for you, Tom?"

"Well, it's not what you can do for me but what I can do for you that matters here. You see, in a way it's partly my fault that you were dumped into this barbaric century, and now finally I can do something about it."

The girl left the room, and my eyes followed her.

"Yes, Conrad, my tastes are pretty much like your own. But she's not what we should be talking about.

Do you want to ask questions, or should I just tell you about what happened?"

"How about if you talk, and I'll ask questions as they come up."

"Good enough. More years ago than I like to think about, working with two partners, I invented a time machine. That's how we got rich in the first place, you know, playing the stock market with next week's Wall Street Journal in our hands. After a while, subjectively, we all grew up a bit, and we each started working on our own projects. I spent my time building a fine, rational civilization in the distant past, where it wouldn't upset our present at all, and Jim did something similar, but with a different slant on things, being a psychologist."

"But Ian's main interest was history, and he runs something called the Historical Corps, which is writing the definitive history of mankind. The Red Gate Inn that you got drunk in so many years ago was one of Ian's installations."

"He usually places inns over his time transporters, since strangers aren't much noticed around one. It was some of his people that screwed up, with your drunken help. Instead of finding the rest room, you managed to go down one flight of steps too many and fell asleep in a time transporter. You went through a series of open doors that never should have been open, and even if they had been, the site director should have noticed it on his readouts. But screwups happen, and n.o.body noticed you at all. More snafu happened at the thirteenth-century end of the line, and you weren't seen sneaking out of the inn."

"What happened to the people who screwed up and sent me here?"

"Oh, they were punished, never fear. Punished more than they deserved, actually. We seem to have lost them a few million years ago in Africa. The search goes on, though. "

"So it was all an accident? But if you have time travel, why couldn't you go back to the time I came out of the inn and put me back into the time machine?"

"Because of causality. You were not noticed until I went to observe the Polish defeat at the Battle of Chmielnick. I didn't see you until you had been in this century for almost ten years! I saw you with what was, for this time, advanced technology. That was a fact, and you can't change established facts, or so we thought at the time, anyway."

"At the time?"

"Standard English is not well suited to talking about time travel. We use a few extra tenses to cover it all properly, but there isn't any point in teaching you a new language right now. Suffice it to say that we had been operating for eight hundred subjective years on certain principles that always worked. That's eight hundred years of my own life, as I lived it. Our medical people are quite advanced, you see. Anyway, we knew that you couldn't change the time stream. We knew that time was a single, linear continuum and that nothing we could do could possibly change it. Furthermore, from the very beginning, we were very careful not to change things. We didn't want to play G.o.d, after all. My partners and I are pretty staunch individualists, but we're not crazy! We never tried to see what would happen if we killed off our grandfathers, for example. We're not murderers, after all. Anyway, my grandfathers are both very fine gentlemen, and I wouldn't dream of hurting them."

"So you're saying that you knew that you couldn't change the past, so you never tried to?" I said. "That's ridiculous! "

"Is it? Tell me, what would happen to an engineer at your old Katowice Machinery Works if he started spending all of his time and the company's money working on a perpetual-motion machine?"

"Why, they'd send him to a mental inst.i.tution if they didn't fire him first."

"Right. And what if the boss of the outfit started working on the same project?"

"The same thing, I suppose, although they might take more time doing it. Everybody knows that perpetual-motion machines are impossible. They violate the second law of thermodynamics! "

"True. And what if, say, the U.S. government started a major research effort to develop perpetual motion?"

"This is a stupid line of questions. No government would ever do anything like that! The second law is absolutely correct. We've been using it for a hundred years, and it's always right!" I shouted.

"Fine. Then what if I told you that it was possible to build a machine that took in tap water and produced electricity and ice cubes?"

"I'd say that you were lying."

"You'd be wrong. Such a type two perpetual-motion machine is quite possible, and in fact this 'apartment' that we're in right now is powered by one. After all, we're in a temporal loop here, so there's no place we could possibly put a radiator. Without our 'impossible' power source, it would get pretty warm in here after a while. What I'm trying to tell you is that cultures all develop blind spots, things that they don't even think about because they know the truth about them. Your blind belief in the absurd second law is a case in point. Something similar on a bigger scale stopped the ancient Romans from developing science at all, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that for a time we fell into the same mental trap, until you shook us out of it."

"It was all my doing?" I asked.

"Correct. You came along and threw all our theories right out of the window! Do you realize that you have created an entirely new world here? That you have not only duplicated most of the eastern hemisphere but that in some places you have shredded it? Made dozens of worlds? And that the shredding in some cases went back for thousands of years?"

"Huh. I think I follow you except for these 'shreds' going backward in time," I said.

"They can do that if you are taking information, artifacts, and people from several parallel timelines back down to what had been a single line. When that happens, you shred the past, and oscillations can be set up."

"Oh. Okay. So then the other thirteenth century, the one in my own past, still exists? I was worried about that," I said.

"You should have been. You have caused us no end of trouble and damage. I managed to give you sufficient wealth for you to survive comfortably until we could pick you up. You didn't have to tear a hole in the whole universe!"

"Tom, all I did was try to survive. If I've hurt you, well, I never asked to come here. The fault is yours, not mine."

"You're mostly right. But you could have just left for France and lived a pleasant life. Western Europe was fairly peaceful in this century. You never had to build factories and steamboats! "

"You're saying that I should have abandoned my country to the Mongols? That I should have stood by and watched half the babies born die because of a lack of simple sanitation? What kind of a man do you think I am?"

"I know exactly what kind of man you are, Conrad. You're a hero, and you do the things that heroes do.

Anyway, we're getting a handle on the time-shredding problem, and things are starting to settle out."

"I still don't understand this multiple shredding that you're talking about. What did I do to start things coming apart?"

"We don't understand it all that well ourselves, and the math is such that even I have trouble following it.

You see, the world we know isn't just one single world. It's a finite but astronomically large number of worlds, lying close to one another like the pages of a book. These worlds interact with one another and tend to keep one another identical. Philosophically, they are normally one single world with slight variations. As a crude a.n.a.logy, think of a book that has been left out in the rain and then dried. The pages are wrinkled and dimpled, but they still fit into one another fairly well. That is to say, to a certain extent they interact with one another. What you did was to make two pages pop apart from each other and get some different dimples, to be slightly different from each other. Going down the page, in the direction of the normal direction of time, they continued to separate and become more different. It isn't just one page, though. You seem to have taken half the book with you! In some places, especially around the battlefields, several pages came apart, although they are starting to converge now."

"Somehow, this smacks of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle."

"Uh, sort of, as a theory, although most people misunderstand Heisenberg. He was not saying that a thing can be and not be at the same time. He was only saying that there are limits to what we can know.

One of the philosophical stupidities of the twentieth century was the confusion of what we think we know with what actually is, but that's not what we should be talking about now. Yes, there is a divergence principle. Small changes happen all the time between the pages of that ruined book I was talking about.

A coin comes up heads or tails, a seed is eaten by a bug of grows into a tree, and so on. It even happens all the time in our own human experience. Have you ever been sure that you had your keys in your pocket, only to find out that they were still on your dresser? Well, some of the time you really did both put them in your pocket and leave them behind."

"You see, there is also a convergence principle operating here, a.n.a.logous to the force that is trying to force the pages of the ruined book into the same shape. The vast majority of differences are soon smoothed out. In the end, the small changes settle out and make no difference at all. The time line is not so much a monolithic pillar as a rope made of millions of fibers that are all going in the same general direction."

"Except where you are concerned. There's something about you, cousin, that makes you different. We don't know what it is, but with you, things don't settle out. The first split that you caused happened a month after you got to this century, when you had to decide whether to abandon a child in a snowy woods or try to save her, even though it looked impossible. Well, you did both. And that's the point where you split the world in half!"

"I remember that. I didn't know if it was a boy or a girl, and I christened her Ignacy," I said.