The Chronocide Mission

8. EGARN

Old Marof, moving his creaky bones with determined steadiness, took twice as long to reach the ruins as he would have normally, but on this day there could be no mistake. He followed the most devious route possible, using paths and dim forest trails known only to local one-namers, and he paused repeatedly to make certain he hadn’t aroused the curiosity of a lasher patrol.

Finally he arrived at one of three locations called “checkpoints”—one of Egarn’s strange words that Marof always meditated while he waited. This “checkpoint” was located in an overgrown hollow, so why was it a point? Marof seated himself on a log, leaned back comfortably against a tree, and relaxed. Eventually, when the sentries were positive he hadn’t been followed, one of them would come for him. Egarn called the watchers above ground “sentries” and those below ground “guards,” which gave Marof more words to meditate.

Egarn also called everyone living and working there— sentries, guards, helpers, and crafters—his “team”—another strange word. Marof occasionally acted as sentry when one of the regulars was sick or had another job to do. He admired Egarn, but he preferred to work for Arne. Arne always let a helper know what was happening. Few of those on Egarn’s “team” seemed to understand what he was doing except that it was something important to all of them.

Local people had a superstitious dread of the ruins and avoided them. Marof could understand why. From his position in the hollow, he could see the mysterious tower looming above the overgrown remains of collapsed buildings like a petrified monster about to feed on them. As a sentry, on days when absolutely nothing was happening, he relieved the monotony by contemplating the tower’s graceful, curved shape and wondering how it came to be there and what purpose it could have served. Egarn knew, of course, and Wiltzon, but their answers to his questions never made sense to Marof. From his position in the hollow, the tower seemed to be intact; from the opposite side, it looked as though a larger monster had taken a bite out of it. Around its base, the ruins that cluttered the forest floor reared up from deeply delved concrete roots to flaunt their strangeness. An enigmatic people of the past had lavished long forgotten skills on them and then, for inscrutable reasons of their own, left them for time to erode.

The sentry approached soundlessly. He was Havler, a middle-aged man with a crippled leg. Like most of the members of Egarn’s team, he was a one-name refugee who had lost his family in the wars. He was an excellent sentry. He moved slowly, but he saw and heard everything.

Marof delivered his message in a whisper, made certain Havler understood it, and then left immediately. He had his own work to perform, and the sooner he reached South Wood Road and began inspecting bridges, the better.

Marof vanished into the trees; Havler turned in the opposite direction and chirped a bird call before he limped soundlessly toward the ruins. Just outside the concealed mouth of a tunnel, he whispered Marof’s message to Connol, who was serving as head sentry for the day.

Connol gestured at the ground. “I suppose they should be told.”

“Aya,” Havler agreed. “They certainly should.”

“I’ll go,” Connol said. Havler’s lame leg made him a slow messenger on stairs, and there were multitudes of stairs between them and the first of the guards stationed below. “Hold the post for me.”

Havler drew back into the trees and seated himself. He would act as head sentry until Connol returned. Arne had issued a stern order: the post could not be left unattended unless a raid were in progress—in which case the head sentry himself was to pull the alarm wire, make certain that the alarm actually sounded, and then withdraw with the other sentries, trying to distract the raiders’ attention from the ruins. The alarm wire sent a large basket of stones and scrap metal cascading down those endless flights of metal stairs, and if the racket this made was not quite loud enough to raise the dead, as the old saying went, it certainly would attract the attention of anyone below who was still living. Havler had heard the alarm tested.

The tunnel’s entrance was concealed by a layer of sod attached to a base woven of sticks. Connol pulled it open just far enough to admit him and closed it after him. There was barely enough room inside for him to crawl through the darkness on hands and knees. He made his way blindly around several obstructions, followed a sharp turning, and saw, far ahead of him, jagged patches of light that marked rents in the tunnel’s roof. The tunnel seemed to curve into infinity; actually, it went nowhere. When Connol reached a bulging rock, he scraped dirt from its edges and pressed on it until it pivoted to reveal an opening. The rock was a hollow shell fashioned of clay and fired to simulate a real rock. Connol entered and pivoted the fake rock into place behind him. On his return, he would replace the dirt.

He emerged at top of the first flight of stairs, paused to make certain the alarm system’s basket of debris was in position, and then started down at a run. An enemy would try to creep down silently, so members of the team always made as much noise as possible.

The stairwell was roofless. At middae, under a clear sky, it received enough sunlight to sketch shadows on the upper levels. By niot it was a black pit with an occasional star glimpsed directly overhead. Connol quickly descended into nether regions that were dim even by day.

Down, down he went, one flight after another. Each time he made that descent into darkness, the depth seemed more immense to him. At the bottom, a metal door stood a few inches ajar. When it was opened further, it emitted a resounding, grinding screech of protest. Beyond it was a room that must have been enormous before the upper levels collapsed into it. It was totally dark, but Connol had seen it by torchlight. Massive columns that once had supported the building protruded from the rubble like scattered sticks of firewood, and projecting from the walls were monstrous, broken pipes that showed gaping, jagged ends. Egarn had explained why such gigantic pipes had been necessary, but no one understood him.

On the other side of the room, Connol entered a broad corridor that ended far ahead of him at a barrier of light. The illumination was produced by a single dim candle in an overhead niche, but it looked blinding to one who had been fumbling through darkness. When the sun reached a certain position overhead, a small, strangely shaped patch of illumination appeared in the corridor at that point. An unlikely juxtaposition of fissures in the floors above permitted that one tiny splinter of brightness to momentarily penetrate the depths of the ruin, and this was Arne’s inspiration for an underground “checkpoint.” Every time Connol passed it, he tried to imagine light collecting somewhere far above, from tiny drippings, the way a pool of water collects, and then seeping through the ruins to reappear here as a fleeting reminder of the sun.

Connol performed the ritual required of anyone visiting Egarn’s workroom. He stood under the light, slowly counted to twenty, and then moved on. If he hadn’t done so, the exit from the corridor would have remained closed to him, and a guard would have set several silent alarms in operation. Connol moved on and stopped beside a pile of rubble. The rubble swung open; it was a concealed door.

Connol did not enter. He spoke tersely to the guard, relaying the message he had received. He made the guard repeat it twice. Then the rubble swung shut, and he heard a clunk as a bar was shoved into place. He returned to the stairs and began the long, tiring climb back to the surface.

The guard, whose name was Lanklin, made certain the bar was secure before he turned and crawled along a dark tunnel. As he approached the end, he called, “Message.” A voice demanded, “Who?”

“Red,” Lanklin replied. The color was changed daily.

A panel slid open—not at the end, as an invader might have expected, but at the side. Lanklin entered a large, torch-lit room where two more guards, Dayla and Ellar, waited.

The far end of the room was filled with strange objects. One of them, an oddly-shaped shell of wood built by Ellar, a former carpenter, was called a mock auto by Egarn, and when Lanklin was on duty in this room, he often watched Egarn instructing Roszt and Kaynor in its use. They sat on a low seat with a wheel fashioned of wood in front of one of them, and Egarn leaned in from a side that had been left open and spoke words that seemed more like a magical incantation than speech while he drilled the two scouts from Slorn in incomprehensible movements.

The mock auto represented a carriage that propelled itself, Egarn said. Real ones were in common use in the land Roszt and Kaynor would visit on their mission, and they carried people and loads without horses to pull them. Lanklin wondered what was gained by it, since the management of the thing was obviously far more complicated than driving a horse. Egarn rehearsed Roszt and Kaynor tirelessly, over and over, and never seemed satisfied.

Dayla went back up the tunnel to take Lanklin’s place at the rubbish pile. Ellar pivoted a section of brick wall to reveal yet another tunnel. This one led to the corridors and rooms used as living quarters by Egarn’s team and to a door of steel that was kept barred except to a select few.

Lanklin’s responsibility ended there, outside the door of the workroom. He removed a rag from the protruding end of a broken pipe, tapped a code, received a reply, and spoke the message into the pipe. Such was the tortuous labyrinth of defenses Arne had devised. Lanklin waited only long enough to hear the message repeated correctly. Then he turned away.

The news was alarming, but Lanklin welcomed the interruption. His “dae” consisted of sitting in total darkness waiting for intruders who never came. The rare message, the basket of supplies, the much rarer visitor brightened the gloom that enveloped him like a burst of sunlight. All of the guards working below envied the outside sentries who could enjoy the sun and rain and perform their signals with bird calls instead of clanging knocks. Assignments were rotated to give everyone an occasional breath of fresh air.

Of course Egarn and his close assistants labored tirelessly one mont after another without getting to the surface at all.

Beyond the steel door, a len grinder named Garzot, a refugee from Wymeff, immediately took the message to Inskel, Inskor’s son, who had been first len grinder at the Court of Easlon before Arne brought him to Midlow to be Egarn’s assistant. Inskel had to feign death in order to absent himself from his post, and he’d had the interesting experience of watching his own burying—from a distance—before he left.

Inskel was huddled near a large, rectangular cabinet fashioned of wood. Its supports raised it a meter above the floor. It was roughly built—Egarn had no concern at all for the exterior appearance of an apparatus as long as its functional parts were fashioned as meticulously as possible—and at one end was an enormous Honsun Len, a meter square, upon which shadowy figures and objects moved. While Inskel watched the len, Gevis, Wiltzon’s young assistant schooler, stood by the cabinet ready to make any necessary adjustments.

The len was a window on time that looked a staggering distance into the past. That distance could be approximated with involved calibrations, but Egarn had devised another method using guidelines he evolved himself. The length of a woman’s skirt, the shape of the odd horseless carriages, even the kind of buildings being erected held enormous significance for him. The others found this highly confusing, and the fact that the images were so indistinct added to their difficulties. Egarn hoped eventually to design a len that would show them the past more clearly.

Inskel’s position was slightly to one side of the len. This was Egarn’s order. There were many oddities about it no one understood, and one of them was the occasional surge of energy it released. Egarn feared this could be harmful, and he wanted no one watching a len from directly in front of it.

Garzot waited respectfully until Inskel became aware of his presence. Then he delivered the message: Midd Village raided by lashers—Roszt and Kaynor probably captured—no lashers anywhere near the ruins as yet—Arne at the village dealing with the raid as best he could. Marof had witnessed part of the raid himself, and he said the lashers were behaving viciously and pulling the village apart. Arne probably would be lashed for his efforts, and that was the worst news of all. Anyone punished when the lashers were in that mood might not survive.

Marof had cautioned the sentries to remain alert.

Sentries at the ruins were always alert, but those who heard the message were too disturbed by it to take offense. The news that Roszt and Kaynor—and possibly Arne—were in the hands of the prince’s guard staggered everyone.

Inskel heard the message incredulously, his face tense with sudden apprehension. He had to decide whether Egarn should be told. The old man was asleep in the room next door, which served as their living quarters, and he needed every moment of rest he could get. Since no lashers had approached the ruins, Inskel decided to tell him after he awoke.

But Egarn was not asleep. He was lying on his bed comfortably swathed in a mound of blankets—the cold, damp, underground air made his bones ache—and petting a large black dog that lay at this side.

The dog’s career in the ruins had begun with an unfortunate mistake. It was a child’s pet, and Egarn sucked it up accidentally when he was trying to steal clothing from a backyard clothesline. He wanted to outfit Roszt and Kaynor completely before they left. Unfortunately, the attempt hadn’t worked, and the dog jumped into the time vortex. Egarn was grateful it hadn’t been a child—a moment later a little boy was running about looking for his dog—and he resolved not to try that again.

Of course they couldn’t send the dog back. He seemed to be an intelligent creature, and he quickly made himself at home in the underground rooms. He answered to the name of Val. Actually, he answered to almost anything, but Roszt and Kaynor made a special pet of him, and they called him Val. When he heard that name, he wagged his tail with pleasure.

None of the members of Egarn’s team had ever had a pet before. Egarn had often wondered where all the domestic animals vanished to. The vicious hunting dogs of Lant were the only survivors he had seen. In the hard times following the wars, when there wasn’t enough food for people, he supposed no one could afford the luxury of feeding an animal. Probably all the dogs were eaten—and cats, too, and Guinea pigs and canaries and anything else that could serve as nourishment.

He heard the faint flurry of excitement in the next room, but he ignored it—they would tell him at once if it concerned him—and continued his reverie.

He was thinking about the Honsun Len. A lifetime of trying to understand it had convinced him he lacked a scientific mentality. He was an empiricist of some resourcefulness, an opportunist whose luck ran in streaks, but he certainly was no scientist. He tried things, building on what the Old Med had taught him and concentrating his efforts wherever a glimmer of promise appeared. Even so, the work of an abnormally long life—as lives were measured in this cursed future—had carried his knowledge a pathetically short distance beyond the legacy the Old Med had bestowed on him.

The len was made of a special glass produced by a select group of one-namers trained to that task only. They kept their guild’s secrets to themselves, rightfully feeling that their privileged position depended on this. In an earlier economic system, this would have been called job security. The little they were willing to impart to Egarn told him almost nothing. From other sources he heard vague references to the various treatments the glass was subjected to, and he suspected that important trace elements were added. Even if he’d had proper equipment for a chemical analysis, both his chemistry and his knowledge of glass were so rudimentary the results probably would have told him nothing. From the scant records that survived, he thought the len’s original inventor probably had stumbled upon some unlikely combination of ingredients by accident. That combination was now the glassmakers’ trade secret.

The glass they sent to the len grinders was black and opaque with a shiny surface. The grinders, working with unbelieveable precision for that primitive technology, formed the ripples that various types of Honsun Len called for. Egarn deeply regretted not being able to run simple laboratory tests involving standard forms of radiation on one of the lens. He had tried numerous experiments while the Old Med was still alive to advise him, but none of them were successful because he lacked basic laboratory equipment.

It had taken him years to conclude that the len emitted energy and more years to decide where it came from. It was temporal energy, the basic force of the universe. The Honsun Len absorbed and focused energy from time. No other explanation accounted for its peculiar effects. Again and again Egarn had drawn upon all of the scientific rudiments he could remember from his distant youth in an attempt to understand this, but each time they failed him.

The len emitted temporal energy. The genius of the Old Med had found a way to store that energy and release it in bursts—though he certainly hadn’t understood what he was doing. The strange, massive apparatus that looked like a photographic enlarger had a device faced with a thick, unpolished slab of Honsun Len glass that functioned like a camera shutter. Egarn reasoned that temporal energy backed up on one side of it or the other, depending on the arrangement of the lens, and rushed through when it was opened. That burst of force could push an object through time. Or, if the lens were reversed, it could suck an object from time.

It was impossible to test such a complicated device without proper laboratory equipment. He could only try different things and observe what happened. He had spent nightmarish months—monts, in this frustrating future—just trying to position his lens with the precision he knew was essential if he were to repeat experiments accurately. He searched tirelessly for ways to calibrate differences so he could make measurable adjustments. Nothing had worked satisfactorily until Arne asked the most expert wood carver in Midlow to make a system of gears for him. With these, he finally was able to move his lens accurately through small gradations.

Now he had refined the settings sufficiently to give him two identified places and two identified times in the past. He needed dozens, but from this point the experiments should proceed quickly. His present worry now was that Roszt and Kaynor would not be ready when he was. He had learned very early that he had neither the time nor the patience to teach them properly. They seemed to learn so slowly, perhaps because much they had to learn was incomprehensible to them. Wiltzon, the old schooler, had a passionate interest in history, and he suggested that Egarn teach him and let him drill the scouts. The schooler was able to assimilate information much more quickly than Roszt and Kaynor did, and he relieved Egarn of the tedium of repeating lessons over and over. But now this system had become cumbersome, and the scouts simply were not progressing rapidly enough. Egarn feared he would soon have to resume their training himself.

Wiltzon had asked him for examples of money from the past. Roszt and Kaynor were having difficulty in understanding twentieth century economics. The notion of exchanging pieces of paper or bits of metal for the goods and services they needed seemed outlandish to them. Wiltzon wanted real money for them to practice with so they could recognize different denominations of bills and coins easily and handle them without looking like befuddled aliens from another time and place.

Although the len sometimes accidently picked up objects, it was undependable in capturing items Egarn wanted for Roszt and Kaynor’s training, and he had failed utterly in his attempts to scoop out the contents of an open cash register drawer. It had been difficult enough merely to find an open drawer to practice on because he didn’t dare make the attempt when a cashier was nearby and risk abducting another human into the future. He was wondering whether he could focus on a bedroom and suck up someone’s wallet or purse. That might also provide examples of important documents for Roszt and Kaynor to familiarize themselves with—driver’s license, checkbook, credit cards, various ID cards. They had to know about all those things even though their own transactions would be on a strictly cash basis.

He hadn’t yet faced the serious problem of how they were to finance their mission. They would need a fortune by the standards Egarn remembered—thousands of dollars. It would be too cruel a fate to have them fail for the want of money after long sikes of work and preparation. He would stress the importance of their living frugally—extravagance would attract attention to them, and attention was one thing they absolutely had to avoid—but they must be able to buy anything they really needed. That included an automobile—or maybe a series of automobiles—and even if they shopped for bargains in used cars, they had to have access to a large amount of money and know how to handle it and safeguard it.

Egarn could think of only one way for them to quickly acquire the amount of money they required. They would have to rob a bank.

That would be no problem. He could teach them how to do it, easily. A miniature version of his weapon would drill a lock from any door or safe and melt a burglar alarm before it could go off. He was much more worried about their learning to drive a car. They couldn’t track down the mysterious Johnson in a large American city without their own means of transportation, but how was he to teach them with only a rough mockup for them to practice on and a knowledge of cars that came from the flickering images the Honsun Len showed them? His one attempt to describe the workings of a gasoline engine had been a fiasco. It would be far easier if he could snatch an automobile through time, but grinding lens large enough for that would pose horrendous technical problems.

He would have to figure out something.

Finally he dozed off.

By the time he awakened, a second message had been received. Roszt and Kaynor were safe; Arne had a badly cut back but otherwise was unharmed. The Prince of Midlow had been chasing a rumor that had nothing to do with them; even so, she had come dangerously close to capturing Roszt and Kaynor.

The news that she had a spy in Midd shocked and frightened them. The Secret was safe, but new precautions had to be taken at once. Roszt and Kaynor would return to the ruins that night, and other arrangements would be made about their education.

Every resident of Midd had to be scrutinized in an attempt to identify the prince’s spy.

Egarn listened quietly. “Arne will take care of everything,” he said confidently.

Arne always did. Inskor had been right in letting Egarn settle in Midlow so Arne could look after him. Without Arne, he couldn’t have found half of the scarce materials he needed. Without Arne, he couldn’t have contrived a safe place to work, and where in this brutal society could he have found reliable people to help him? He wouldn’t have known how to begin.

Arne had taken care of everything, and he would solve these new problems.

Egarn said to Inskel, “We absolutely must find some money for Roszt and Kaynor. This is what I would like to try.”

While he talked, he continued to think about Arne. The young first server’s presence here seemed like divine intervention. Nothing had gone right for Egarn until he met Arne; since then, every difficulty had been overcome as though by magic. No matter what the problem was, Arne could take care of it—and did. If humanity was to be saved, this clearly was the time and place to do it.