The Year of the Ransom

3 November 1885

A hansom cab brought Manse Everard from Dalhousie & Roberts, Importers—which was also the Time Patrol’s London base in this milieu—to the house on York Place. He mounted the stairs through a dense yellowish fog and turned the handle on a doorbell. A maidservant let him into a wainscoted anteroom. He gave her a card. She was back in a minute to say that Mrs. Tamberly would be pleased to receive him. He left his hat and overcoat on a rack and followed her. Interior heating failed to keep out all the dank chill, which made him for once glad to be dressed like a Victorian gentleman. Usually he found such clothes abominably uncomfortable. Otherwise this was, on the whole, a marvelous era to live in, if you had money, enjoyed robust health, and could pass for an Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

The parlor was a pleasant, gaslit room, lined with books and not overly cluttered with bric—a-brac. A coal fire burned low. Helen Tamberly stood close, as if in need of what cheer it offered. She was a small reddish-blond woman; the full dress subtly emphasized a figure that many doubtless envied. Her voice made the Queen’s English musical. It wavered a little, though. “How do you do, Mr. Everard. Please be seated. Would you care for tea?”

“No, thanks, ma’m, unless you want some.” He made no effort to dissemble his American accent. “Another man is due here shortly. Maybe after we’ve talked with him?”

“Certainly.” She nodded dismissal to the maid, who left the door open behind her. Helen Tamberly went to close it. “I hope this doesn’t shock Jenkins too badly,” she said with a wan smile.

“I daresay she’s grown used to somewhat unconventional ways around here,” Everard responded in an effort to match her self-possession.

“Well, we try not to be too outré. People tolerate a certain amount of eccentricity. If our front were upper class, rather than well-to-do bourgeois, we could get away with anything; but then we’d be too much in the public eye.” She stepped across the carpet to stand before him, fists clenched at her sides. “Enough of that,” she said desperately. “You’re from the Patrol. An Unattached agent, am I right? It’s about Stephen. Must be. Tell me.”

Without fear of eavesdroppers, he continued in the English language, which might sound gentler in her ears than Temporal. “Yes. Now we don’t yet know anything for sure. He’s—missing. Failed to report in. I suppose you remember that was to have been in Lima late in 1535, several months after Pizarro founded it. We have an outpost there. Discreet inquiries turned up the fact that the friar Estebán Tanaquil vanished mysteriously two years before, in Cajamarca. Vanished, mind you, not died in some accident or affray or whatever.” Bleakly: “Nothing as simple as that.”

“But he could be alive?” she cried.

“We may hope. I can’t promise more than that the Patrol will try its damnedest—uh, pardon me.”

She gave a broken laugh. “That’s all right. If you’re from Stephen’s milieu, everybody’s careless with speech, true?”

“Well, he and I were both born and raised in the USA, middle twentieth century. That’s why I’ve been asked to lead this investigation. A background shared with your husband just might give me some useful insight.”

“You were asked,” she murmured. “Nobody gives orders to an Unattached agent, nobody less than a Danellian.”

“That’s not quite correct,” he said awkwardly. Sometimes his status—assigned to no particular milieu, but free to go anywhere and anywhen there was need and act on his own judgment—embarrassed him. He was by nature unpretentious, a meat—and-potatoes kind of man.

“Good of you to agree,” she said, and blinked hard against tears. “Do please be seated. Smoke if you wish. Are you quite sure you wouldn’t care for tea and biscuits or perhaps a spot of brandy?”

“Maybe later, thanks. But I will avail myself of my pipe.” He waited till she sat down by the hearth to take the armchair opposite, which must be Steve Tamberly’s. The fire quivered blue between them.

“I’ve been in on a few cases like this in the past—my lifeline past, that is,” he began cautiously. “It’s desirable to start by learning as much as possible about the person concerned. That means talking with those close to him or her. So I’ve come a tad early today, hoping we could get acquainted. An agent who’s been on the spot will be along in a while to tell us what he discovered. I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”

“Oh, no.” She drew breath. “But tell me, please. I’ve always had difficulty understanding, even when I think in Temporal. My father was a physics don, and it’s hard to set aside the strict logic of cause and effect he drilled into me. Stephen . . . encountered trouble somehow, in sixteenth-century Peru. Maybe the Patrol can save him, maybe it can’t. Whatever, though, whatever the result is . . . the Patrol will know. There’ll be a report in the files. Can’t you go at once and read it? Or, or skip ahead in time and ask your future self? Why must we go through this?”

Upbringing or no, she must be hideously shaken to raise such a question, she who had also been trained at that academy back in the Oligocene period—back before there was any human history for its existence to upset. Everard didn’t think the less of her. Rather, it made him appreciate the courage that maintained calmness. And, after all, her work did not expose her to the paradoxes and hazards of mutable time. Nor had Tamberly experienced them—he had been a straightforward, if disguised, observer—till suddenly they laid hold on him.

“You know that’s forbidden.” He kept his tone soft. “Causal loops can too easily turn into temporal vortices. Annulment of the whole effort would be the least of the disasters we’d risk. And it’d be futile, anyway. Those records, those memories could be of something that never happened. Just think how our actions would be influenced by what we believed was foreknowledge. No, we’ve got to go through with our jobs in as nearly causational a way as we possibly can, in order to make our successes or failures real.”

For reality is conditional. It is like a wave pattern on a sea. Let the waves—the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos—change their rhythm, and abruptly that tracery of ripples and foam-swirls will be gone, transformed into another. Already in the twentieth century, physicists had a dim glimmering of this. But not until time travel came to be did the fact of it stab into human lives.

If you have gone into the past, you have made it your present. You have the same free will as always. You have laid no special constraints on yourself. Inevitably, you influence what happens.

Ordinarily the effects are slight. It’s as if the space-time continuum were like a mesh of tough rubber bands, restoring its configuration after it’s felt some disturbing force. Indeed, ordinarily you are a part of that past. There really was a man who traveled with Pizarro and called himself Brother Tanaquil. That was “always” true, and the fact that he wasn’t born in that century, but long afterward, is incidental. If he does minor anachronistic things, they don’t matter; they may excite comment, but memory of them will die out. It’s a philosophical question whether or not reality keeps flickering through such insignificant changes.

Some acts, though, do make a difference. What if a lunatic went back to the fifth century and provided Attila the Hun with machine guns? That kind of thing is so obvious it’s fairly easy to guard against. But subtler changes—The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came near failing. Only the energy and genius of Lenin pulled it through. What if you traveled to the nineteenth century and quietly, harmlessly prevented Lenin’s parents from ever meeting each other? Whatever else the Russian Empire later became, it would not be the Soviet Union, and the consequences of that would pervade all history afterward. You, pastward of the change, would still be there; but returning futureward, you’d find a totally different world, a world in which you yourself were probably never born. You’d exist, but as an effect without a cause, thrown up into existence by that anarchy which is at its foundation.

When the first time machine had been built, the Danellians appeared, the superhumans who inhabit the remote future. They ordained the rules of time traffic and established the Patrol to enforce these. Like other police, we mostly assist people on their lawful occasions; we get them out of tight spots when we can; we give what help and kindness we dare to the victims of history. But always our basic mission is to protect and preserve that history, because it is what shall finally bring forth the glorious Danellians.

“I’m sorry,” Helen Tamberly said. “That was idiotic of me. But I’ve been . . . so worried. Stephen was only supposed to be gone three days. Six years for him, three days for me. He wanted that much time merely to reaccustom himself to this milieu. He meant to wander about incognito, getting back into Victorian habits, so he wouldn’t absent-mindedly do something that would surprise the servants or our local friends. It’s been a week!” She bit her lip. “Forgive me. I’m still babbling, am I not?”

“Far from it.” Everard took forth pipe and tobacco pouch. He wanted that small comfort in the face of this anguish. “Loving couples like you make a bachelor like me feel wistful. But let’s get down to business. Best for us both. You’re native to England of this century, aren’t you?”

She nodded. “Born in Cambridge, 1856. I was orphaned at seventeen, left with modest independent means, studied classics, became rather a bluestocking, eventually was recruited into the Patrol. Stephen and I met at the Academy. In spite of the age difference—which doesn’t matter for us, thank God—we . . . hit it off, and married after we graduated. He didn’t think I would like his birthtime.” She grimaced. “I visited it, and he was right. For his part, he felt—feels happy here and now. His persona is that of an American employee of the import firm. When I go off to my own work, or bring some home with me, well, it is unusual for a woman to have scholarly interests, but not extraordinary. Marie Sklodowska—Madame Curie—will enroll in the Sorbonne just a few years hence.”

“And people in this milieu are better at minding their own affairs than they are in mine.” Everard occupied himself with tamping his briar full. “Uh, I daresay you two do more things together than is common for man and wife these days.”

“Oh, yes.” Her eagerness was pathetic to hear. “Beginning with our holidays, in this era and that. We fell quite in love with archaic Japan, and have been back several times.” Everard concluded that that was a country isolated enough, with a population small and unsophisticated enough, illiterate, that the Patrol allowed occasional visits by blatant outsiders. “We’ve taken up handicrafts; pottery, for example; that ashtray beside you is his work—” Her voice died away.

Hastily, he queried onward. “Your field is ancient Greece?” The man who met him at the base hadn’t been sure.

“The Ionian colonies, chiefly in the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ.” She sighed. “It’s ironic that there the Patrol cannot admit me, a Nordic woman.” She tried to rally. “But as I said, we’ve seen much else that is wonderful.” Suitably outfitted, carefully guided. “No, I mustn’t complain.” The stoicism cracked. “If Stephen—if you do bring him back—do you think he can be persuaded to settle down and do research in place, like me?”

Everard’s match cast a loud scrit across the silence that followed. He rolled smoke over his tongue and cradled the rough wood in his hand. “Don’t count on it,” he said. “Besides, good field historians are scarce. Good people of every kind are. You may not be fully aware of how undermanned we are in the corps. Your sort make it possible for his sort to operate. And mine. Normally we came home safe.”

Patrol work was anything but bravado and derring-do. It depended on exact knowledge. Agents like Steve collected most of that on the spot, but they too required the patient labor of those like Helen, who collated the reports. Thus, observers in Ionia brought back immensely more information than those chronicles and relics that survived into the nineteenth century had ever contained; but they could not do her job, which was to put it all together, interpret, arrange, and prepare briefings for the next expeditions.

“Someday he must find something safer.” She blushed. “I refuse to start a family until he does.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll move into an administrative post in due course,” Everard answered. If we can save him. “He’ll have gotten far too much experience for us to let him go on grubbing around. Instead, he’ll direct the efforts of newer people. Um, that may well require his assuming a Spanish colonial persona for a few decades. It’d be easiest if you could join him.”

“What an adventure! I should adapt. We didn’t plan on remaining Victorians forever.”

“And you’ve ruled out twentieth-century America. Hm, what about his ties there?”

“He comes from an old California family. It has distant Peruvian connections. A great-grandfather of his was a sea captain who married a young lady in Lima and brought her home with him. Perhaps that helped interest him in early Peru. I suppose you know he became an anthropologist, later practiced archaeology down there. He has a married brother in San Francisco. His own first marriage ended in divorce, shortly before he enlisted in the Patrol. That was—will be—in 1968. Subsequently he resigned his professorship and told everyone he had a grant from a learned institution, which would enable him to do independent research. This explains his frequent prolonged absences. He does still keep bachelor quarters, so as to remain in touch with kin and friends, and has no plans at present to phase out of their lives. At last he must, and knows it, but—” She smiled. “He has talked about seeing his favorite niece get married and have a baby. He says he wants to enjoy being a granduncle.”

Everard ignored the scrambled tenses. It was inevitable when you spoke any language but Temporal. “Favorite niece, eh?” he murmured. “That kind of person is often useful, apt to know a lot and tell it freely without getting suspicious. What do you know about her?”

“Her name is Wanda, and she was born in 1965. The last several mentions of her that Stephen made to me, she was, m-m, a student of biology at a place called Stanford University. As a matter of fact, he scheduled his departure on this last mission from California rather than London so he could first see his relatives there in, oh, yes, 1986.”

“I had better interview her.”

A knock sounded on the door. “Come in,” the woman called.

The maid entered. “There is a person who asks to see you, missus,” she announced. “Mr. Basscase, he says is his name.” With frosty disapproval: “A gentleman of color.”

“That’s the other agent,” Everard muttered to his hostess. “Earlier than I expected.”

“Send him in,” she directed.

Julio Vasquez did indeed look out of place: short, stocky, bronze of skin, black of hair, with wide features and arched nose. He was almost pure native Andean, though born in the twenty-second century, Everard knew. Still, this neighborhood had doubtless grown somewhat accustomed to exotic visitors. Not only was London the center of a planet-wide empire, York Place divided Baker Street.

Helen Tamberly received the newcomer graciously, and now she did send for tea. The Patrol had cured her of any Victorian racism. Necessarily, the language became Temporal, for she had no Spanish (or Quechua!) and English was not important enough in Vasquez’s life, either before or after he joined the Patrol, for him to acquire more than some stock phrases.

“I have learned very little,” he said. “It was an especially difficult undertaking, the more so on such short notice. To the Spaniards I was merely another Indian. How could I approach one, let alone make inquiries of him? I could have been flogged for insolence, or killed out of hand.”

“The Conquistadores were a bunch of bas—of hellhounds, all right,” Everard remarked. “As I recall, after Atahualpa’s ransom was in, Pizarro didn’t let him go. No, he put him before a kangaroo court on a bunch of trumped-up charges and sentenced him to death. To be burned alive, wasn’t it?”

“It was commuted to strangling when he accepted baptism,” Vasquez said, “and a number of the Spanish, including Pizarro himself, felt guilty about the matter afterward. They had been afraid Atahualpa, set free, would stir up a revolt against them. Their later puppet Inca, Manco, did.” He paused. “Yes, the Conquest was ghastly, slaughters, lootings, enslavements. But, my friends, you were taught history in anglophone schools, and Spain was for centuries England’s rival. Propaganda from that conflict has endured. The truth is that the Spaniards, Inquisition and all, were no worse than anyone else of that era, and better than many. Some, such as Cortes himself, and even Torquemada, tried to get a measure of justice for the natives. It is worth remembering that those populations survived throughout most of Latin America, on ancestral soil, whereas the English, with their yanqui and Canadian successors, made a nearly clean sweep.”

“Touché,” said Everard wryly.

“Please,” Helen Tamberly whispered.

“My apologies, señora.” Vasquez gave her a bow from his chair. “I did not mean to tantalize you, only to explain why I could find out very little. Apparently the friar and a soldier went into the house where the hoard was kept one night. When they did not reappear by dawn, the guards grew nervous and opened the door. They were not inside. Every door had been watched. Sensational rumors flew. What I heard was through the Indies, and I could not query them either. Remember, I was a stranger among them, and they hardly ever traveled away from home. The upheaval in progress allowed me to concoct a story accounting for my presence in the city, but it would not have withstood examination, had anyone grown interested in me.”

Everard puffed hard on his pipe. “Hm,” he said around it, “I gather that Tamberly, as the friar, had access to each new load of treasure, to pray over it or whatever. Actually, he took holograms of the artwork, for future people’s information and enjoyment. But what about that soldier?”

Vasquez shrugged. “I heard his name, Luis Castelar, and that he was a cavalry officer who had distinguished himself in the campaign. Some said he might have plotted to steal the wealth, but others replied that that was unthinkable of so honorable a knight, not to mention good-hearted Fray Tanaquil. Pizarro interrogated the sentries at length but, I heard, satisfied himself about their honesty. After all, the hoard was still there. When I left, the general idea was that sorcerers had been at work. Hysteria was building rapidly. It could have hideous consequences.”

“Which are not in the history we learned,” Everard growled. “How critical is that exact piece of space-time?”

“The Conquest as a whole, certainly vital, a key part of world events. This one episode—who knows? We have not ceased to exist, in spite of being uptime of it.”

“Which doesn’t mean we can’t cease,” said Everard roughly. We can have never been, ourselves and the whole world that begot us. It’s a perishing more absolute than death. “The Patrol shall concentrate everything it can spare on that span of days or weeks. And proceed with extreme caution,” he added to Helen Tamberly. “What could have happened? Have you any clues, Agent Vasquez?”

“I may have a slender one,” the other man told them. “I suspect that somebody with a time vehicle had in mind hijacking the ransom.”

“Yeah, that’s a fair guess. One of Tamberly’s assignments was to keep an eye on developments and let the Patrol know of anything suspicious.”

“How could he before he returned uptime?” the woman wondered aloud.

“He left recorded messages in what looked like ordinary rocks, but which emitted identifying Y-radiation,” Everard explained. “The agreed-on spots were checked, but nothing was there except brief, routine reports on what he’d been experiencing.”

“I was taken from my real mission for this investigation,” Vasquez went on. “My work was a generation earlier, in the reign of Huayna Capac, father of Atahualpa and Huáscar. We can’t understand the Conquest without an understanding of the great and complex civilization that it destroyed.” An imperium reaching from Ecuador deep into Chile, and from the Pacific seaboard to the headwaters of the Amazon. “And . . . it seems that strangers appeared at the court of that Inca in 1524, about a year before his death. They resembled Europeans and were taken to be such; the realm had heard rumors of men from afar. They left after a while, nobody knew where or how. But when I was called back uptime, I had begun to get intimations that they tried to persuade Huayna not to give Atahualpa such power that he could rival Huáscar. They failed; the old man was stubborn. But that the attempt was made is significant, no?”

Everard whistled. “God, yes! Did you get any hint as to who those visitors might have been?”

“No. Nothing worthwhile. That entire milieu is exceptionally hard to penetrate.” Vasquez made a crooked smile. “Having defended the Spaniards against the charge of having been monsters, by sixteenth-century standards, I must say that the Inca state was not a nation of peaceful innocents. It was aggressively expanding in every possible direction. And it was totalitarian; it regulated life down to the last detail. Not unkindly; if you conformed, you were provided for. But woe betide you if you did not. The very nobles lacked any freedom worth mentioning. Only the Inca, the god-king, had that. You can see the difficulties an outsider confronts, regardless of whether he belongs to the same race. In Caxamalca I said I had been sent to report on my district to the bureaucracy. Before Pizarro upset the reign, I could never have made that story stick. As it was, all I got to hear was second- and third-hand gossip.”

Everard nodded. Like practically everything in history, the Spanish Conquest was neither entirely bad nor entirely good. Cortes at least put an end to the grisly massacre—sacrifices of the Aztecs, and Pizarro opened the way for a concept of individual dignity and worth. Both invaders had Indian allies, who joined them for excellent reasons.

Well, a Patrolman had no business moralizing. His duty was to preserve what was, from end to end of time, and to stand by his comrades.

“Let’s talk about whatever we can think of that might conceivably be of help,” he proposed. “Mrs. Tamberly, we will not abandon your husband to his fate. Maybe we can’t rescue him, but we’re sure going to give it our best try.”

Jenkins brought in tea.