Conrad Starguard - The High-Tech Knight Part 18

Yes-no.

"I guess I deserved that ' Are the above two communication symbols acceptable to you?"

Yes.

She was as literal-minded as a computer. "Eventually, we're going to have some long talks, but for now, is there anything that you are unhappy with that I can do something about?"

Yes.

It took another round of "twenty questions," but I found out what it was. She thought the food was fine and she didn't mind the work. People treated her well enough and she liked traveling. She didn't mind a saddle but the bridle annoyed the h.e.l.l out of her. Would I please take the d.a.m.n thing off?

"Happy to, my friend. Of course, you never paid much attention to it anyway."

We continued south, and higher into the High Tatras, a part of the Carpathians.

Some purists claim that Tatras are part of the Beskids and the Beskids are part of the Carpathians, but call them what you will, they're half again higher than anything in New England. To me, they are the most beautiful mountains in the world, and I have loved them ever since my father took me up there when I was a little boy.

It was a bright day with clear mountain skies and clean highland air. Anna was making good speed and many Slavic songs were written to be sung on horseback, to the rhythm of the horse's hooves. I was singing "The Polish Patrol" and in a fine mood when I came across the most dejected-looking man I'd ever seen. He was sitting by the road with his arms on his knees and his head on his arms.

I brought Anna to a halt. Actually, I just thought about stopping, and Anna picked it up from the way I must have changed my body position on her back.

"I know you, don't I?" I said.

He looked up at me, but no hint of recollection lit in his eyes.

"Of course I know you," I said as I dismounted. "You are Ivan Targ. You let me in your home last winter when I was lost in the cold."

"Yes, now I remember. You were the giant with the priest." His head dropped back down to his arms.

"Tell me, my friend, why do you look so sad? What is this terrible thing that has happened?" I sat down beside him.

"That." He pointed to a field. It took me a moment to realize what was wrong with it. It was common to plant two types of grain in the same field at the same time, in that case wheat and rye. If the weather conditions weren't right for wheat, maybe the rye would do well, and vice versa. Most Polish breads are made from mixed-grain flour, so there was never any need to separate the grains after harvest. But in his field, every stalk of grain had been flattened to the ground.

"The rains did that?" I asked.

"Hail. Last night we had a hailstorm."

"A pity. That will cost you a great deal of money."

"That will cost me my life. Mine and my family's."

"Surely your other fields will carry you through."

"That is my only field. That is all the land we have been able to clear in two years'

hard work. This crop was- all I had. If it had ripened, I could have fed my family through the winter and had extra to sell to the merchants. Now, I have nothing, my family has nothing. "

"This is a disaster, but it doesn't have to cost your life. Surely your lord will help you through the winter."

"I have no lord! Don't you see! I came to these mountains to be done with lords! I was sick of paying half of what I grew just to keep a fat man in his big house from having to work! I came here to be free, and now I will die for it."

He was serious. This was not the wailing of a businessman over lost profits. This was a man who was looking death in the face.

"Once you let me in from the cold, and gave me a spot by your family's fire.

Without you, I might have frozen to death." I got out my pouch and poured about five hundred pence into my hand. It was a trifling amount for me, but enough to feed him and his family until spring. "You didn't know it at the time, but you were throwing bread onto the waters."

Ivan stared at the money, then he stared at me. He was literally speechless. In a single morning, he had gone out expecting to find his field ripening, his plans prospering. He had found instead absolute disaster. And then, just as he had accepted the ultimate tragedy, a man he barely knew had come along and saved everything. His mind was not up to handling it all, and I had the feeling that he would continue sitting there for hours.

"It is not a big thing," I said, "I've been lucky this last year. If you ever want to pay me back, I am Sir Conrad Stargard, and I live at Three Walls, near Cieszyn. If you ever decide that you want a lord again, you can come see me about that, too."

He nodded dumbly. I mounted up and rode off, feeling good inside. One of the nicest things about wealth is that sometimes you can do some good in the world.

In under an hour, we were approaching the inn, or at least where I had remembered the inn to be. What I found a hole in the ground. A blast crater more than two hundred yards across. I was dumbfounded as we climbed the rim and looked down into it. Anna stirred uneasily.

There was the clean smell of a thundershower in the air, and this was a sunny day. The not-unpleasant smell of sparking relay contacts. Ozone.

"Ozone! Radiation! Anna, get us out of here! This place has been hit with an atomic bomb!"

Interlude Two I hit the red STOP b.u.t.ton. Movement on the screen froze in mid-action.

"Oh Jesus Christ, Tom! You nuked the inn?" I said. "For the love of G.o.d, why?"

"Sit down, son. I didn't bomb that place, and neither did anybody else. It was an accident."

"An accidental nuclear explosion in the thirteenth century?"

"It wasn't all nuclear. More than half the energy in that blast was kinetic, and most of the rest was chemical. "

"Even so-"

"You know how our temporal transporters work. A canister arriving from another time has to arrive in a precisely defined volume of hard vacuum. If there's anything at all in that volume, you have two sets of atoms coexisting in the same s.p.a.ce. A small percentage of the nuclei will be close enough to fuse, giving you some d.a.m.n strange isotopes. Some of those are radioactive, and that caused the ionizing radiation that caused the ozone that my cousin smelled. I got quite a dose myself, once, in the early days when we were first working on time travel."

"Many of the electrons interact with the electrons of other atoms, producing a lot of strange chemicals. Some of those chemicals are explosive. Some are poisonous."

All of the atoms repel each other vigorously, and that caused the bulk of the explosion, sixty-nine percent of it, anyway.

"A canister arriving at the inn three months after Conrad's first visit apparently emerged into solid rock, over eighteen feet out of registration."

"Wow. Some sort of failure in the controls?"

"I wish it had been that simple. We knew the explosion occurred, and site investigation showed a typical reemergence explosion. You know we use the reemergence effect under controlled conditions to generate all of our power and most of our basic materials. We understand the process completely, so there couldn't be any doubt about what happened."

"The only trouble was that none of our canisters was missing."

"Weirder things started happening. The investigation team we sent from Hungary came back twice. Two identical teams of men returned, one a few days after the other. And the men in each team claimed that those in the other were imposters."

"Also at that point, I had just returned from 124 1, and had met Conrad at the Battle of Chmielnick, which, contrary to written history, the Poles won."

"But that can't be-time is a single linear continuum. Our people have made millions of temporal transfers, and we know that it's all in one straight line. There are no branches. The same battle can't have been both won and lost."

"I'm glad you're so positive of that. Because you're wrong. The correct statement is that everybody knew that branching is impossible. They don't know it anymore.

Cousin Conrad, d.a.m.n his soul, has done the impossible and kicked the underpinnings out from under everything just when I was getting ready to retire."

"But how--?"

"How, I don't know. The theory people have been in conniptions for months. No telling when they'll settle down. Maybe never."

"But we have the where and the when down pat. The split didn't start when Conrad first got to the Middle Ages. It happened a month after that, when Conrad had to make a difficult decision. For good and sufficient reasons, his employer ordered him to abandon a baby in a snowstorm. Conrad both saved and abandoned that child."

"In our timeline, he obeyed orders. On arriving at Okoitz, however, Count Lambert's ladies didn't treat him like a hero. By their lights, anybody who would allow a kid to freeze to death was a b.u.m, and unworthy of their services. Those are my feelings as well."

"Their influence on Lambert was such that he was not much impressed with Conrad, either. Conrad left Okoitz with his employer, but soon argued with him.

They split up and Conrad continued, alone, westward to Wroclaw."

"There he was promptly robbed of his booty, and had a rough time of it for many years. He eventually got involved in copper mining but never really amounted to much. When we tracked him down, he jumped at the chance to return to the twentieth century."

I was still trying to absorb just what a split in the timeline meant.

"Everything was doubled? Where did it all come from? What about the conservation of ma.s.s and energy?"

"It's right out the window! Along with just about every other law of physics. When Conrad kicked out the supports, he didn't mess around!"

I was so fl.u.s.tered that I didn't notice the naked wench who announced lunch.

Tom took me by the hand and led me from the screening room.

In an hour we were back at the doc.u.mentary.

Chapter Fourteen.

Without stopping we rode to the inn we had left in the morning. The innkeeper gave me an artificial smile. "Did you find the Red Gate Inn, Sir Conrad?"

"You know what I found. A hole in the ground."

"Is that what's there? The merchants who reported it to me were very unclear.

Does it have devils?"

"Worse devils than you'll ever imagine. You're a b.a.s.t.a.r.d for not telling me about it, but keep on warning people away from that hole. People can die just from looking at it."

My party was eager to head back to Cracow, and it was still early in the afternoon, but Sir Vladimir talked us out of leaving until the next morning. It seems that there wasn't another decent inn within six hours; if we left then, we'd have to camp out again, and considering our last experience with camping, we weren't eager. Leaving in the morning, we could easily reach Uncle Felix's by the afternoon.

Uncle Felix didn't have time to kill another fatted calf, so he had to make do with a slab of beef, three geese, a suckling pig, and a whole lamb, plus the usual tons of extras.

He protested vigorously when I insisted on leaving first thing in the morning, but I wanted to get to the salt mines at Wieliczka as early as possible. We got there that afternoon, with Tadaos complaining the whole way about having to ride an unsaddled mule.

In the twentieth century, the salt mines are a tourist attraction par excellence: fifty generations of miners have cut nine hundred miles of tunnels, pa.s.sageways, galleries, and chambers. And what does a salt miner do on his day off? He mines salt, of course. Only he gets artistic about it. Down there the miners have hollowed out two churches plus a "chapel" as big as a cathedral, each encrusted with statuary and carvings ranging in style from the romanesque to the modern.

The annual miner's ball takes place on a dance floor that can accommodate thousands. Tennis tournaments are held in a chamber more than forty stories underground.

There are natural wonders besides. There is a briny lake down there, and the "growths" in the Crystal Grotto are a natural phenomenon without equal anywhere else in the world.

There are even species of plants and animals that have adapted themselves to living underground. They have a museum to show it all to you.

In the thirteenth century, they had a ways to go, but even then the miners had been at work for at least three hundred years; the caverns were already pretty impressive.

Not that Annastashia and Krystyana were all that impressed. They wanted to get to Cracow, and Sir Vladimir had been to the mines before. But it was my vacation and I was footing the bills.

We were watching a walking-beam pump, a device similar to that which we built at Three Walls to saw wood. But for pumping water, my condensing steam engine was far more efficient. I called the works manager over and started to explain my pump to him.

He cut me off with, "What? You're a miner?"

"Well, not exactly, but-"

"Well I am. And my father was a miner, and his father before him. We've been miners for over four hundred years."

"That's very nice, but about my pump--"

"I know everything there is to know about mining. I don't need to know about your foolish ideas."

"But it's not just some pipe dream! I have one running at Three Walls!"

"Three Walls? I never heard of a mine at any 'Three Walls."' And he turned and walked away. Arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

The price of salt was about equal to the cost of chopping it out and hauling it to the surface, pretty cheap. By loading down the mules, slinging sacks across the backs of all four horses, and letting Tadaos walk, we were able to take a ton and a half back with us-about two kilos Per capita, probably enough to last us until spring. These people ate a lot of salt, maybe because of all the beer they drank.

We had been gone from Cracow for less than a week, but there was a major change in the Vistula waterfront. The ferrymaster had taken my suggestion about using river power to move his ferryboat. A long st.u.r.dy rope ran from his boat to the tree I'd suggested, and he'd come up with an efficient block-and-tackle system that let him effectively move the rope from one side of the boat to the other with only the power of his own arms.

He let us ride it free, in thanks for my suggestion, but he was still getting full fare from everyone else. Business had been better than ever, with many people riding it just for the novelty of moving in a boat without oarsmen.

He no longer had to pay a dozen men, and eventually someone would see his vast profits, go into compet.i.tion with him and drive his fares down. But just then he.

was in heaven.

1, too, was very pleased. Think of it. Because of an idea of mine and the few minutes it had taken to explain it, twelve men were released from the drudgery of paddling that boat back and forth across the river. Twelve men had been given their whole lives to do more productive, more enjoyable work.

Actually, it was far more than twelve, for there must be many ferryboats operating on the Vistula. Word of the improvement would get around quickly.

And there were many other rivers. And it wasn't just those men, but their children and grandchildren had also been set free.