The Chronocide Mission

2. EGARN (1)

Egarn remembered little about the first daez in hiding. His fever worsened, and Bernal told him later he had been circling much of the time, which meant deranged or out of his head. His dim awareness of the cave—of Bernal anxiously changing the dressing on his mangled arm and brewing herbal poultices for it; of the two scouts from Slorn just as anxiously discussing the gathering fury of the peer’s search—was less vivid than his nightmarish recollections of the distant past.

During those first confused days, when he easily could have been spirited to safety beyond the mountains, he lay in helpless delirium and could not be moved. While the worried scouts watched over him, and he ranted wildly, sometimes in words incomprehensible to them, his feverish mind passed a lifetime in review.

His name was Vladislav Kuznetsov, and he had been a twenty-one-year-old student at Mount Harwell College in Mount Harwell, Ohio. On a Friday afternoon, March 24, 2001, he succumbed to a sudden attack of spring fever and cut his classes for a stroll in a public park near the campus. Even after fifty years and several hundred centuries, he remembered it as vividly as though it had happened an hour before.

It was a warm, fresh day with a promise of spring—the first really pleasant day of the year after the usual vagaries of a midwest winter. He strolled leisurely through the park, thinking with shameless delight of the stuffy classrooms he was avoiding. Eventually he seated himself on a patch of greening grass with a convenient tree to lean against and enjoyed the soft breeze and the peaceful surroundings while he absently whittled on a twig he had picked up. He felt sleepy. Probably he dozed off.

For decades afterward he relived that afternoon again and again with retrospective editing: What if he had not cut classes, what if he had turned in the opposite direction and avoided the park, what if he had not sat down to rest, what if he had not fallen asleep?

He was awakened by a violently squealing and squirming young pig that had landed in his lap. The pig’s fore and hind legs were tied together with strips of leather. Kuznetsov knew at once he was on the receiving end of a heavy-handed practical joke, and he also knew the ones responsible. He had been the victim of their pranks often enough. Before looking about for the culprits, he good-naturedly set about freeing the pig. His open jackknife was still in his hand, and he quickly sliced the leather restraints. He hoped the pranksters would have to spend the afternoon trying to catch it, which would deftly turn the joke on them.

The pig scurried for cover. Kuznetsov looked after it in puzzlement, wondering what unlikely porcine species it belonged to. He had never seen a pig with long hair before. Perhaps he had unfairly maligned his practical-joking friends. The animal looked peculiar enough to have come straight out of another dimension. So many odd things had happened to him in his short lifetime that he would have felt more resigned than surprised to find himself the target for a materializing pig.

As a child, he had blamed all of his misfortunes on his name. It had blighted his life in so many ways. Not even a boy’s best friend could be expected to call him Vladislav Kuznetsov, and the changes rung on it varied from the humiliating to the obscene. As he grew older, some of his friends began to call him Wally Kuznet, which seemed like a substantial improvement but failed to alter his life an iota.

He finally accepted the fact that his luck was going to be bad no matter what people called him. A snowball thrown into a crowd unerringly sought out his nose, which was broken three times before he finished grammar school. A bully always acquired a yen for beating up a smaller boy a moment before Kuznetsov innocently walked into view. Teachers invariably scheduled surprise quizes on the one day of the term he failed to prepare an assignment. If, after timidly admiring a girl for months, he finally nerved himself to ask her for a date, it always turned out she had agreed only the day before to go steady with a star halfback. Every job he applied for had three relatives of the employer in line just ahead of him. Nothing overwhelmingly bad ever happened to him, but he found life a long succession of increasingly intolerable frustrations and petty failures.

He’d had a single-minded passion for space engineering. By the time he reached college, the space program had been curtailed, and he’d had to face the bitter fact that with so many experienced engineers out of work, a brand new degree in space engineering wouldn’t even qualify him for a job as bus driver at Cape Canaveral. Reluctantly he switched to something solid, conservative, and perpetually reliable: automotive engineering. It would not surprise him in the least, now that he was about to graduate, if the auto industry suddenly collapsed and his brand new degree would not even qualify him to drive a bus in Detroit.

He was a good-looking blond youth, popular with those who knew him well. Though all of his disappointments, he learned to persist and face life with an attitude of calm resignation and determination. Bullies quickly learned to avoid him when he began judo lessons, and he worked hard until he became an expert. In college he was an excellent student, but his deeply ingrained inferiority complex meant that success in his studies failed utterly to compensate for his sense of failure in life. Deep in his subconscious, he probably expected that sooner or later fate would dump a hairy pig into his lap.

The pig ran off with deep grunts of piggish satisfaction, and—after glancing about for sniggering practical jokers and seeing none—Kuznetsov decided he had better get back to the dorm and study. Then came a tremendous jerk, like having a chair pulled from under him at the same instant that a truck hit him, and he almost lost consciousness. He landed with a painful bump and skidded for a short distance along a very rough wood floor. He still held his open jackknife in his hand.

For a moment he sat gazing about him dazedly. He had been abruptly translated from his seat on the ground in a pleasant park on a lovely spring day to a seat on a wood floor in a large, dim room with a thunderstorm raging outside. He had a distinct impression that the two scenes had been linked by an earthquake. He tried hard to focus his thoughts, staring first at a table where a candle burned brightly and then at an animal tied to one of the table’s legs by a short leash. It was another hairy pig. He raised his eyes to the room’s two small, water-streaked windows and saw nothing beyond but branches swaying in a strong wind.

There was only one other person in the room, and he was staring at Kuznetsov with profound astonishment. He was elderly and wizened, with a deeply wrinkled face and amusing tufts of hair scattered about his overly large head. His skin had a mildly oriental, or perhaps a southern European, tinge. He wore white clothing and a white apron, and he smoothed the apron with nervous fingers while his mouth worked soundlessly.

Finally he produced words. He mouthed them strangely and ran them together, and Kuznetsov’s impression was of a wholly alien language.

“Where am I?” Kuznetsov demanded.

Again the man spoke unintelligible sounds. Kuznetsov struggled unsuccessfully to make a meaningful arrangement of them. Another repetition, and the sounds began to suggest a blurred question. “Who are you?”

Kuznetsov looked about him perplexedly. He knew who he was, and he also knew his identity would mean nothing to this character. He wanted to know where he was, and how he had got there, and why. He had been sitting on the grass in the park, and a hairy pig landed in his lap, and immediately after he released it, the jerk hit him. Now he was somewhere else.

He didn’t want to believe it. He started the thought again and went through the sequence slowly, wondering whether any part of it could have been cause and effect. Then he went through it a third time. He had been sitting on the grass in the park, and the next thing he knew…

His mind seized on the strangely placid animal that was tied to the table leg. An identical hairy pig had landed in his lap. That could only mean it had come from here, after which—perhaps in an attempt to recover it—this old villain had snatched Kuznetsov instead. He didn’t want to believe that, either, but surely the pig tied to the table was the spitting piggish image of the strangely hairy one Kuznetsov had released in the park.

He got to his feet. He towered over the stooped old man, holding his open jackknife like a weapon. The forceful anger he displayed was genuine. “Send me back!” he demanded sternly.

The old man’s features continued to register astonishment.

“Your pig landed in my lap,” Kuznetsov said accusingly.

“Peeg?”

Kuznetsov pointed. “Pig. That’s a pig. One just like it landed in my lap. The next thing I knew, I was here. Send me back.”

The old man suddenly became articulate. His jabbered response engulfed Kuznetsov like an rampaging Niagara. Any meaning his words carried was swept along on the same current, and both words and meaning washed over Kuznetsov unintelligibly. Finally Kuznetsov put an end to the torrent by shouting at the top of his voice. He didn’t know where he was, or why, but he had already decided he didn’t like it.

“Send me back!” he demanded again. “Back. Where I came from.” Then, as he began to grasp the full implications of his predicament, he modified his tone. “Please send me back.”

The old man seemed to understand. He walked to the far corner of the room. Staring after him into the dim light, Kuznetsov made out something that looked like an enormous, crudely built photographic enlarger. On the floor, a series of concentric circles had been burned into the wood, and these were divided into segments by chalk lines, some of which had been partially obliterated by Kuznetsov’s sliding entrance. The old man stood Kuznetsov in the central circle. Then he brought a short wood stepladder, climbed up to his apparatus, and began fussing with it. Kuznetsov had the sensation of having landed in a perverted Hollywood hodgepodge that blended Frankenstein and The Wizard of Oz, and it wouldn’t have surprised him if the old man had next handed him a bottle labeled, “Drink me,” but he stood waiting patiently.

The old man climbed down again, pushed the ladder aside, and took a dangling cord in his hand. He looked preposterously like an old-time photographer about to take a picture with an overhead, sadly obsolescent camera. He pulled the cord.

Kuznetsov screamed. His instinctive leap as the wave of torment swept over him probably saved his life. He collapsed on the floor a short distance away, writhing in unendurable agony. The intense pain quickly swept him into unconsciousness.

The agony persisted for days. He floated in a delirium of pain. His bones ached, his head throbbed, his ears rang, and his vision seemed blurred and distorted. He felt as though he had been flayed, and any hand, any finger that touched his flesh was a dagger stabbing him viciously. A woman came and went, and her hideously misshapen face gave Kuznetsov nightmares about being condemned to live forever in a world of grotesque distortions. Then the old man came, and his face was as Kuznetsov remembered it. Kuznetsov’s vision was normal. The old woman’s face really was hideously deformed.

Words were spoken to him, or spoken in his presence, and as time passed, some of them began to make sense. Even as he struggled out of the all-enveloping fog of pain, his mind was subconsciously learning or adapting to a language. There were familiar words pronounced differently and unfamiliar words that sounded confusingly familiar, and gradually he got them sorted out. Kuznetsov wasn’t good at languages, and the ease with which he assimilated this one seemed proof enough that it was somehow related to English.

His systematic study began with his quest for a date. It had been March 24, 2001 when he went to the park. When he began to recover, he wanted to know how long he had been delirious.

“Month” should have been an easy place to start, but the old man failed to recognize the word. Neither could Kuznetsov discover an equivalent for “March,” or “April” or any other month, or for “year,” or “week.”

Learning words for table and chair, for clothing, for food was easy. Kuznetsov pointed; the old man said the word. It was his attempt to relate the calendar he was familiar with to whatever system the old man used that tantalized and frustrated him. Winter, spring, summer, fall or autumn apparently had no analogies. Not until he accidentally happened on the word for “season,” which was “esun,” did he begin to make progress.

The calendar in this strange civilization was closely tied to the agricultural year. There were seasons of planting, of growing, of harvesting, and of resting, named Plao, Gero, Haro, and Reso. With that beginning, he was able to form an outline, and the old man quickly filled in the blanks once he understood what Kuznetsov wanted.

The year began—or ended—with a five day holiday, six days every fourth year, that undoubtedly had originated as a period of supplication to the gods for prosperity in the year to come. Kuznetsov was in no way surprised to discover that the original religious basis for the festival had been all but forgotten, and it had degenerated into five or six days of dissipation. Then came the first season, Plao, the season of planting, starting early in the March of Kuznetsov’s time reference. Each season was divided into three unnamed months of thirty days, called monts. They were designated Plao 1, Plao 2, Plao 3. “Days” were daez, “nights” niots, but weeks did not exist. Instead, each mont was divided into three tenites. Second Plao 2 referred to the second tenite of the second mont of planting.

Years were called sikes, and once Kuznetsov learned that, he quickly found out what year it was—A.T. 301, meaning “301 sikes after the troubles,” which told him nothing at all.

Gradually he acquired a vocabulary and became able to converse.

As soon as he could walk again, he began helping the old man with his experiments, and he made an astonishing discovery. This wrinkled, comic-opera looking gaffer possessed a spectacular scientific genius. He worked without electricity, without engineering—instruments and tools were fashioned with pathetic crudeness—without chemistry, without physics except for an unaccountable precision in lens grinding, and he accomplished miracles.

Kuznetsov also learned that the old man was a person of transcendent importance in this strange land, which was called Lant. He was Med of Lant, and visitors to his laboratory bowed to him as though he were a high nobleman, which he actually turned out to be. Everyone called him the Old Med, an astonishing license with a person of his rank. It indicated at the same time affection, awe, and reverence.

While Kuznetsov’s education went forward slowly, the Old Med was making an astonishing discovery of his own. This young stranger was an ideal research assistant. He was a college-trained engineer, and despite the lack of almost everything to work with, he could build instruments and tools with a precision the old man had not even imagined. Further, in a land where very little was known about anything, the knowledge of even a college undergraduate was beyond price.

The old man quickly gave Kuznetsov honored status as his principal assistant, and, when difficulties arose over what to call him—Kuznetsov naturally didn’t want the same name blighting his existence in this new incarnation—the Med shared a name of his own with him. He called him Egarn.

One fact had been burned into Kuznetsov’s consciousness indelibly. He could never go back. The attempt to return had come within an eyelash of killing him. Wherever he was, and however he had got here, it had been a one-way trip.

He savored his new name—Egarn, he liked the sound of it—and gradually he began to grasp the possibility of a career in this strangely primitive Peerdom of Lant. It was already evident that the Old Med wanted him to continue his research after he died. The newly christened Egarn resolved to accept that legacy as a sacred trust. He would devote his life to advancing the Old Med’s discoveries. Genuine scientific and technological achievement would be impossible with such limited resources, but there were many simple inventions and discoveries he could make that would transform his newly adopted land. Just for a beginning, he intended to give its people the germ theory of disease. If he could find anything to use for wire, he might even invent electricity.

His techniques would be as crude as those of a medieval alchemist, but his alchemy would work. There would be no meaningless dissolving and crystallizing and coagulating such as occupied the old alchemists for entire lifetimes. His discoveries would have genuine value, and his inventions would be aimed at specific needs.

In return, he confidently expected distinctions far beyond anything he had dreamed of at Mount Harwell College. Already he was accorded enormous respect as the Med of Lant’s assistant. As his successor, the highest material rewards a primitive land could offer would be his for the asking or—he had quickly grasped the role of the elite in this Peerdom of Lant—for the taking. He could marry whenever he found a girl he liked. Any daughter of commoners would be eager to mate with the Med of Lant’s assistant. He would pass his days in the Old Med’s comfortable workroom, a rambling log building in a delightfully rustic setting. When he wanted a vacation from work, there would be tramps in the woods with a fascinating, strangely distorted botany and biology to study, rides about the countryside—the Peer of Lant’s own stables provided a horse whenever he wanted one—or an occasional wild porkley hunt with lance or bow and arrow. He never could have achieved such serenity in the frenzy of twenty-first century America. Gradually Kuznetsov—now comfortably answering to the name Egarn— began to look forward to it.

Of course no society, no social structure, offered Elysium, and this one had some ominous imperfections. The old woman with the disfigured face had been mercilessly whipped. Kuznetsov never learned why or by whom, but very early he grasped the fact that Lant’s was a slave economy, and both slaves and commoners could be—and often were—treated with unbelievable harshness.

But the only commoners Kuznetsov came in contact with were the Old Med’s trusted servants. They received not only kindness and consideration but even affection, and they gave a full measure of devotion in return. What happened elsewhere had nothing whatsoever to do with him.