The Empire Of Time Part 21

"I confess I am pleased that my propaganda for the League is usually welcomed, but I am a bit-disappointed-that my poetry is too. I half-expect to be clapped in irons and transported to a penal settlement for reading such seditious matter in public. Instead I am praised, applauded, holotaped. An ironic reward for a prophet."

"Would you rather have lived and died in obscurity?" the drunken professor asked pugnaciously.

"What I would rather have done is beside the point, dear friend; I have had no choice. I did not ask for this position in life; it was thrust upon me by the Futurites-by powerful and frightened men, children of Urizen who feared the future so much that they destroyed the past. We have none of us lived our own lives these past twenty-two years. We have robbed ourselves and each other of the lives we might have had. Some, like me, know what those lives would have been; most can only speculate. But consider this: my precursor, the man whose poems I read and whose royalties I enjoy, died in 1827, at seventy, singing hymns at the top of his lungs. If the Intertemporal League fails, if there is war among the chronoplanes, I shall doubtless die much younger than that, and my last words will be: 'Which way, please, to the fallout shelter?' What consolation, then, to have seen my own death mask?"

The academics were silent for a moment; then the conversation turned to other topics. Near the end of the meal, Blake leaned across the table to Pierce.

"Are you free this afternoon, sir?"

"I am."

"Perhaps we might spend a little time in private."

"I would be honored."

When they left the refectory, the snow had stopped and the sky was beginning to

clear. Blake and Pierce walked across the north edge of the campus, looking down the steep slopes to the Golden Gate Pa.s.s. Here, as on many chronoplanes, a road led through the Pa.s.s and out across the Dunes to the coast. But there was no great city under Mount Farallon here, only a fishing village.

"You made quite a bit of history around here," Blake remarked.

"That is one of the few drawbacks to living in Chrysopylae. The land here won't

change much in the next twenty thousand years. The river will change its course a little, the hills won't be as bare. But it looks very much here as it does on Ore."

"Does that disturb you, sir?"

"It is hard to escape one's memories."

"We seek escape only from prisons." Blake smiled at him. "You have all time to

roam in, and still the past holds you. Specters hold you."

"Yes. I'm a true child of Urizen."

They entered one of the university residences, a long two-story building. Pierce's apartment, on the first floor, was small, spare, and impersonal. He turned on the walls: the Mendocino cliffs on Ahania. The same surf broke against black rock that had broken in Judy's apartment, long ago.

"I could be donnish and offer you sherry, or would you prefer a very good vinho verde?"

"Vinho verde, by all means." Blake made himself comfortable in a rocking chair. "Thank you. Your health."

"And yours... I believe you have more than one ulterior motive for your visit to Chrysopylae." . "I have. You said nothing at lunch about the new League."

"I'm for it."

"Would you like to go to work for it?"

Pierce's face grew smooth and impa.s.sive. He stroked his graying beard. "What sort of work?"

"A special envoy, from the League to potential members. We very much need someone like you, Mr. Pierce. You're a Futurite who knows every chrono-plane, and almost every culture. You know scores of languages. Most citizens of the League are uncouth en-dos like myself, or unTrainable Backsliders from Earth.

We have little influence on the Futurite nations, and they are the ones who must join if the League is to survive."

"If you need diplomats, you've got Metternich."

"Bosh! The fellow's an a.s.s."

Pierce smiled. "That is no disqualification."

"It is for us. We are serious, Mr. Pierce. You Futurites have robbed us of our proper lives. We don't propose to let you rob us of our present ones as well."

"Understood. But there are thousands of people at least as qualified as I am. Why

choose me?"

"There are no schools named after those thousands. There are no statues of them in the town squares."

Pierce looked embarra.s.sed. "If you think you can trade on my fame, I'm afraid

you'll find your wallet nearly empty. My celebrity has evaporated, thank G.o.d."

"You are mistaken there, I a.s.sure you. If you ever ventured from this academic cloister, you would find yourself acclaimed everywhere you went."

"And shot at as well."

"Nonsense! You can't seriously mean that."

Pierce shrugged.

"Well, sir, what would you, then? Do you propose to remain here, peacefully teaching, until some invading army marches through the I-Screens, or a Sherlock lens turns this lovely world into another Ulro?"

Pierce stood up and took Mendocino off the walls. He plugged in another projection tape, but paused before turning it on. "You know, of course, about the new chronoplanes they've discovered far downtime, in the Permian? Four of them so far."

"Indeed I have, sir. Truly astonishing." Blake seemed perplexed by this change of subject.

"I managed to have a friend of mine hired on with one of the survey expeditions on Gondor, the nearest of the Permian chronoplanes. He was an indent when I met him, but bright; went back to school and did pretty well. He sent me this tape a few days ago."

It was a simple, homemade one-wall holoprojection with no olfaction or tactility tracks. It showed a short, lean Black man in khaki trousers and an orange parka standing on the edge of an encampment of tents and sheds. The sun was shining with a wintry brightness that made the Black man squint. When he spoke, wind blowing across the microphone fuzzed his voice.

"Hi, Jerry. Welcome to Gondwa.n.a.land Junction."

The camera panned through 360 degrees, revealing that the camp sat on the edge of a plateau above a snow-streaked valley; beyond the valley, black mountains draped in glaciers rose abruptly into a deep blue sky. An orange helicopter fluttered over the valley toward some unknown destination.

"Pretty, huh? Pretty d.a.m.n cold, too. We're only four thousand kilometers from the South Pole. It's a lot nicer up north. But this valley is a rift-those mountains over there are going to be Africa, and right here is Patagonia. We have geologists screaming to get in here-they go right on screaming after they arrive. This place is extreme."

The tape shifted rapidly, showing brief glimpses of the terrain and its spa.r.s.e, shrubby vegetation. Dallow's voice continued, describing the scenes with the eager pedantry of the novice biologist. Then one scene appeared and held: a rocky stream bed somewhere down in the rift valley. There were still patches of snow in the shadows.

Four gigantic beasts came down the stream bed toward the camera, but too far away to be seen clearly. The camera zoomed in on them. Blake gasped and leaned forward.

"A pride of anteosaurs," Dallow's voice continued. "Aren't they beautiful?"

The beasts settled down on a sunny shelf of rock above the water. The largest was perhaps the size of a lion; it must have weighed over five hundred kilos. Its ma.s.sive head was covered with blue-green scales; behind its small eyes were heavy bone ridges. Its thick neck and heavy shoulders were adorned with a mane of bright blue hair; the rest of its body was covered with shorter hair, a darker blue. It idly waved its long tail.

"That's Big Daddy," Dallow said. "The others are his harem. They must have a pretty big hunting territory, because we just ran into them a few days ago. This seems to be their nesting area-they haven't left it for three days. I'm hoping we'll be able to watch them lay their eggs soon."

The females, smaller and sleeker than the male, bickered for a preferred spot

alongside Big Daddy. He yawned, showing great teeth, and uttered a deep bark that echoed from the rocks. Then all four went to sleep. The scene shifted back to Dallow at the camp. "Those are my babies, Jerry. I'm going to find out everything there is to know about 'em. And they're just one tiny bit of this world-man, there's so much to learn here, we'll be busy for a thousand years. Why don't you get yourself a leave of absence and come on down and see it for yourself?"

He grinned and waved, and the wall went blank.

Blake sat back and rubbed his hands on his trousers. "Many mansions," he said quietly.

"That's where I'm going," Pierce said. "But not on a leave of absence. For good."

"I think perhaps I understand why."

"I'm going to stand on the rocks of Gondwa.n.a.land, and sail the Tethys Sea,"

Pierce said as if he had not heard. He put on the tape again, advancing it to the scene of the anteosaurs and stopping it there.

"So you want to bury yourself in the past."

"It's all the present now."

"But humanity needs you, Mr. Pierce. Very much."

"Humanity needs itself. It can't rely on heroes any more. It never could."

Blake sighed, crossed his legs, and raised his gla.s.s in a reluctant salute. Smiling, Pierce lifted his own gla.s.s and drank. His eyes never left the great blue beast sprawled arrogantly on the rock, his proud head lifted to the sun.

About the Author.

Crawford Kilian was born in New York in 1941. Raised in Los Angeles and Mexico City, he is a naturalized Canadian citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, Alice, and daughters, Anna and Margaret Formerly a technical writer-editor at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, he has taught English at Capilano College in North Vancouver since 1968. His writing background includes two children's books (Wonders Inc. and The Last Vikings); critical articles on Charles d.i.c.kens and the Canadian writer James De Mille; several radio plays broadcast by the CBC; and Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.