3. Training for Travel in Time
That same afternoon, Coel Rydin began training with the Jongleurs du Temps. The Streng woman led him to a high-wheeled electric surrey that carried the two of them on a pathway of crushed chalk along the riverbank. Ten kilometers upriver from the village of Lune, by his rough reckoning, they came to a circular, stone-walled pavilion.
Rydin expected to see the tops of genetically modified trees rising above the wall, because growing a living space that took care of its own needs was the gentlest way to occupy the land. But inside the wall he found only the old-fashioned structures, stone and mixed aggregate, with hard surfaces of glass and steel, set into pads dug into the soil. This wasn’t space that could adapt to the needs of individual people, but space configured for a single purpose, to be maintained generation after generation.
The other strange thing about the compound was the number of Silicates that apparently occupied, worked, and lived—if that was the right word—in close proximity with humans. Lune itself had perhaps a dozen such intelligent machines, mostly employed to assist the Council of Loving Parents with technical analysis, record keeping, and other menial tasks. Now Rydin could see as many machines in his first glance as the vehicle passed under the arched gateway. Automata both large and small walked with purpose among the permanent buildings, and none paid courtesy to the biologicals they passed. It was almost as if they belonged there.
Two small, spidery robots stood on the path—no, here it was an actual roadbed, also carved deep into the soil—waving their claws at each other. They completely blocked his and Streng’s forward motion, but rather than nudge them aside or give some warning sound, the woman simply waited for the machines—which never seemed to notice the vehicle—to finish their business and move apart.
Rydin turned to Streng. “Were those two machines fighting?”
The dashboard of the vehicle itself answered. “Not fighting but pointing. If you must know, Tridee and Soitin were discussing what the Troupe is going to do with you and sending me instructions for taking you there.”
“Oh? They never looked at us,” Rydin said.
“We have other senses than yours, human.”
Streng and the machine drove him to a building, larger than the others, that appeared to be communal space. Inside, it had a floor laid out in thick strips of wood—not living pulp, but dead stuff cut, dried, planed, and coated with some kind of shiny resin. Under the resin were painted black and red circles and oblongs, numbered and lettered for some purpose Rydin could not guess. The late afternoon sunlight came through glass windows high up under the eaves. The walls below them were padded. In all this echoing space stood a single man, at the center of one of the red circles.
“This is Kursk,” Streng said. “He’ll be your first teacher.” To the man, who had the same aged, weathered look that she wore so easily, Streng said, “This is Rydin. First-level candidate. Try to return him in one piece before dinner.” Then she walked out, leaving the two of them alone in the circle.
The old man looked him up and down.
“I hear you like to fight,” the man said.
Before Rydin could answer, the other’s fist shot forward and caught him in the soft place right under the breastbone. The blow did not hurt much, but all the air decided to leave Rydin’s lungs at once, his vision grayed out, and his knees hit the hard wooden floor.
“Pity you don’t know how,” Kursk said above him.
And so began Rydin’s training. Before twilight had fallen and lighting strips in the ceiling filled the hall with a hard, white glare, Kursk had taught him how to make a proper fist and then described and demonstrated—pulling and pushing with Rydin’s own body—the six basic striking surfaces on the hand, four on the foot, two at the elbow, and one at the knee. Kursk also showed—always on Rydin, but not with crippling or killing force—the eight pressure points that could disable a vertebrate opponent, as well as appropriate locks and strikes for each limb joint.
Rydin nodded and tried not to flinch.
“Tomorrow,” Kursk finished up, “after your breakfast, I’ll teach you how to stand, move, and think. Then we’ll give you sets of exercises to practice and arrange for you a sparring partner and a training schedule.”
“Will any of this help me to travel in time?” Rydin asked.
“Oh, no! But it might keep you alive when you get there.”
———
On the third day, during a break from being bounced around the communal hall that also served as a gymnasium by his new sparring partner, a fierce young woman named Samné who identified herself as “third-level apprentice,” Rydin was approached by a crablike automaton. Its body was composed of shiny metal and glazed ceramic, thirty centimeters in diameter, walking on six arching legs, with pincers that appeared to combine a number of subsidiary tools. The machine observed him with two extensible camera stalks.
Rydin frowned at it. “Can I help you?”
“No. I help you. I am now your pilot.”
“Oh? And just why do I need a pilot?”
“Because,” the machine said in a smooth, uninflected voice, “the control systems of a liteship are far too subtle, too complicated, and too mathematically refined for any human being to master. That is why we Silicates are given the job.”
“What’s a ‘liteship’?” Rydin asked.
“I see we have to start at the beginning.” The Silicate dropped down in a brief crouch and rose back up on the tips of its tiny, clawed feet. The motion seemed to be some kind of reflex. “You may call me Cinquemain.”
“I’m Rydin.”
“I know that.”
When Samné came over for their second round, Rydin jokingly asked her, “Are you going to teach him to fight, too?”
“Don’t have to,” she replied.
To answer Rydin’s question, a projector on a swivel mount slid out from the robot’s carapace and rose above the eyestalks. Cinquemain focused its attention on the rope-bound target that Kursk had set out for Rydin to punch and kick in order to toughen him. A smoking line appeared down its center, peeling apart the ropes. Rydin never detected the beam of whatever kind of energy the robot was using. When he approached the ruined target, he could see that the steel plate beneath the ropes and the post to which it was welded were both pierced.
“That’s some weapon,” Rydin told him.
“Communications laser,” the machine said, “with the power boosted to cover interplanetary distances.”
“And cut three layers of steel.”
“Four—if it’s the right alloy.”
Samné told Cinquemain to get another strike post out of the storeroom—and to debit himself for the one he had destroyed.
As the machine waddled off, Rydin turned to her. “On our, um, ‘missions’ … are we always paired with those things?”
“Usually. One human, one Silicate.”
“So you’ve been out there before?”
“Only doing exercise runs—so far.”
“But, when we go back in time, to places that have never known robots—or any kind of machinery—he’ll be hard to explain, won’t he?”
“The Silicate pilots and stays with the ship. That’s protocol.”
“But suppose—oh, I don’t know—I were to need a second pair of hands?”
“You mean, like for some kind of complicated diplomacy? If that’s part of the profile, there’s a manikin prosthetic the Silicates can transfer their brains into. It’s very tough, lighter than protoplasm, and amazingly lifelike—although for my taste the reaction times are too quick, and the facial expressions are a fraction of a second out of sync with the voice. Actually, that’s how you can recognize one.”
“Why don’t the Silicates wear them all the time around humans?”
Samné scowled. “They don’t like it. They say it’s too degrading.”
———
For the rest of the week, Coel Rydin alternated between mornings of physical training, based on his continuing education in the martial arts, and afternoons of classroom instruction in the theoretical physics of time travel.
He studied the basic nature of gravity, an acceleration which encompassed both space and time, and he learned how the Jongleurs controlled it in both dimensions. He memorized the tables that linked travel in time with distance in space, because the Earth, the solar system, and even the galaxy itself all had a proper motion that changed the planet’s physical location over time. To move a person backward or forward in time implied the need to track that moving point in space, tracing backward or forward along its prescribed vector. He studied the inner workings of the Jongleur’s primary vehicle, the liteship. At its core, the ship contained a tiny singularity that had been ruptured and patched—“selvaged” in the language of the Troupe—providing the energy flux which enabled them to juggle space and time inside the infinitesimal’s unknowable black heart.
Although all of these things were the proper sphere of the Silicate pilot, the Jongleurs wanted the mission’s human component to be aware of them, if not expert in their manipulation. The difference was that, while it took Rydin hours of classroom teaching and more hours of evening study to even begin to appreciate the technical material, a machine like Cinquemain could download the entire course contents in seconds and apply the knowledge a moment later.
It was not until his sixth day at the compound that a woman identified as Captain Tavia—who was the first person anyone acknowledged to be a full-fledged, time-traveling Jongleur—gave Rydin his first look at an actual liteship. Cinquemain was present for the unveiling, as was Tavia’s pilot, Skeezicks.
The sight was not encouraging.
The ship lay in pieces on the concrete floor of the compound’s maintenance hangar. The largest piece was a black tube about as big around as his two fists clenched together and half again longer than his own body. The tube’s surface was drilled for inserts and tapped for various connections. The rest of the ship was a collection of carbon-fiber sticks; triangular sheets of a thin, black film; and coils of black wire that seemed to curl and uncurl with its own restless energy.
“And this all comes together as a ship?” Rydin asked, disbelieving.
“Cinquemain will assemble it for you,” Tavia said. “That’s his job.”
The little spider went to work, fitting into one end of the tube a five-sided shoe, which had been lying hidden under the piles of film, and into the other end a matching shoe that had a skid plate welded to the bottom and, at five separate points, a set of heavy, leaf-shaped springs. As fast as the eye could follow, Cinquemain fitted the sticks into the tube’s sockets, rigged the wires and film panels, made connections up and down the tube, and pulled the whole contraption taught with the springs. When he was finished—which Rydin could only tell when the spider stepped back from its creation—the ship resembled a rough decahedron, ten triangular panels of shiny black plastic, five in a dome shape on top, five on the bottom, joined together with lots of slits and gaps between them.
Rydin had been expecting an enclosed capsule—and something much bigger.
“That thing travels in space?” he asked. “Out beyond our atmosphere?”
“Yes, of course,” Captain Tavia said. “That is its purpose.”
“And I am supposed to ride on it … how?”
She reached in among the taut panels, spreading them easily with her forearms. The flimsy material stretched and did not split. “Footrests here and … here.” She pointed. “With handgrips placed symmetrically above them. In a pinch, you can ride it inverted.”
“That’s fine for the pilot, but I breathe oxygen, remember? I’d suffocate.”
“You’ll be wearing a biosuit,” Tavia said. She turned to a cupboard along the wall and pulled out a stiff, body-shaped garment. “When you graduate, we’ll make one to your exact specifications. For now, this should do.”
The biosuit was a formfitting coverall of what looked like compressed foam. The material was colored a bright red, but other hues—all gaudily designed for high visibility—were also hanging in the cupboard. The suit had attached boots and gloves, although he could see seals at wrists and ankles, suggesting these extremities could be removed if necessary. The front was open from the crotch to a split ring at the neck, with more self-sealing strips on either edge of the cut.
“Put it on,” Tavia told him.
“It goes over my clothes?”
“Unless you want to strip.”
Rydin sat on a nearby crate and pushed his feet down into the leg openings. He found that as he worked his legs and then his arms into the suit, it alternately relaxed and tightened, as if trying to give him a good fit. He guessed it was some kind of memory fabric that would grow used to his shape over time.
Tavia produced a matching helmet in red-painted polycarbonate—with dark, lozenge-shaped lenses for the eyes—and handed it to him.
“How do I—?” he started to ask. But as soon as he held it above his head, the helmet dropped onto the neck ring of its own accord and sealed magnetically. He could hear fittings snap into place and begin making sucking sounds. The helmet’s functions automatically connected with the rest of the suit.
“The whole garment is designed for easy access,” Skeezicks said.
“Sometimes you have to launch in a hurry,” Tavia added.
Rydin understood that he might have heard the machine’s comment through a built-in radio, but the woman had spoken with her own natural voice. “How can I hear you with this thing on my head?” he said into the helmet’s closeness. Curiously, his own voice did not echo or distort in his ears.
“The system is smart,” Tavia said. “It filters and interprets sounds from the ambient environment. It anticipates what you need to see and hear and makes adjustments.”
Rydin took several deep breaths. He expected a resulting stuffiness and found none. “Is there an air bottle for this somewhere?” he asked.
“Pressure cells are slotted into the suit fabric at shoulders, lower back, and thighs. They can supply about four hours of pure oxygen. The material filters out carbon dioxide and other gases, processes wastes through catheters and cache pockets, replenishes your bodily moisture, and provides basic nutrients. The system recharges and sanitizes itself when you attach that coupling—” She pointed to a quick-disconnect nipple in line with his hip. “—to a fitting in the liteship’s core.”
“How does that central pillar, only this big around—” Rydin made a circle with his hands. “—remove wastes and supply me with food and oxygen? … Through atomic transmutation?” he added facetiously.
“Yes,” the woman replied, utterly serious.
While Rydin was flexing his arms and legs, cautiously feeling for the suit’s internal cells and cache pockets, Cinquemain climbed onto the assembled liteship. He gave it some kind of radio signal, and the whole contraption rose into the air.
“Come aboard, human,” the little machine said.
Gingerly, so as not to stress the delicate-looking panels, Rydin wedged himself into the spring-taut structure. It tipped sideways with his weight, then righted itself. Even after all his classroom training, he had no idea how it managed to fly.
“Hang on tight,” Cinquemain said.
As soon as Rydin’s gloved hands touched the grips, the liteship sped sideways, towards the open door of the hangar. It flashed into the sunlight, angled away from the ground, and was quickly over the compound wall, then above the Temz Valley, and soon above the green curve of the Earth and into a black sky filled with stars.
“Yee-hah!” the pilot said in his ears. “Been a long time since I did this!”
Rydin had no sense of motion, felt no acceleration, not even the wind against his helmet and stiff fabric of his biosuit. But the differential between the calmness his inner ear was reporting to his brain and the rushing chaos he could see with his eyes caused a disturbance in the pit of his stomach. He found he was choking back bile.
“I think … I’m going to be—”
“Sick? Happens the first trip.”
“Does the biosuit clean it up?”
“Little pocket by your cheek.”
Rydin found the opening just in time.
After that, his mind cleared and he could think again.
“Where, exactly, are we going?” he asked Cinquemain.
“ ‘Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’ ”
“And how far is that?”
“Couple of centuries.”
“I’m not cleared for time travel yet,” Rydin said cautiously.
“We won’t touch down. You will be back before lunch.”
He had nothing to do but hang on and enjoy the ride.
———
After three weeks of preliminary training, and with favorable recommendations from his various instructors, Coel Rydin was called for the first of his physical alterations. Kursk told him to report to the infirmary for a “neurological procedure.”
In the human world of the eleventh millennium, Rydin knew, almost all medical treatments were genetically based, with therapies delivered by direct viral manipulation of chromatin inside the nucleus of cells in different parts of the body. The process was entirely painless, although mild nausea and sometimes a slight fever were not unknown. Cutting skin and making holes in people’s tissues were reserved for emergency repair of wounds and accidentally smashed bones and damaged organs.
At the infirmary, he was met by a young woman who introduced herself as Dottoressa Jena Gerbus. She invited Rydin to lie face down on a padded table. Then she positioned his head on a semicircular block and moved a magnetic-resonance scanning device into place above him.
“What are you looking for?” he asked into the space beneath his chin.
“Orientation of your neocortex,” she said. “Now don’t move again.”
The machine made a soft clicking sound, but if it was controlled by an intelligence, the Silicate never spoke aloud. The clicking went on for ten minutes.
Finally, Gerbus said, “You can move your limbs and speak now, but please hold your head still.”
She painted the base of his naked skull with a liquid that felt icy to the touch. He sensed it was both an antiseptic and an analgesic, for treating breaks in the skin. He turned his head and saw that she held a plasma scalpel with a tiny, curved flame.
“Don’t move, please.”
“You’re going to cut me.”
“Only the smallest incision.”
Rydin felt pressure but not pain.
The analgesic liquid must also have carried a coagulant—either that, or the flame was cauterizing the wound—because she didn’t bother to mop away blood, and none flowed down his neck or past his ears.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her bring over a power tool with a hollow-core drill. Its working end was a full centimeter in diameter. Before Rydin could protest, he heard the clicking of the scanner again, accompanied by the burring of the drill. He felt heat in the surrounding skin and pressure against the back of his skull, but again no pain. He smelled burned tissue and knew it must have been bone—his own occipital plate—abraded by the drill. He wanted desperately to pass out but could not.
“You shouldn’t feel anything for the next part,” the dottoressa said.
Rydin found that by rolling his eyes in the other direction he could just glimpse the scanner’s repeater screen. It showed three views of his skull—top, back, and side—all as a ghostly green outline. Inside each view was a cloud of faint red pimples, which he understood to be selected points on the surface of his brain. While he watched, the dottoressa fed through the hole in the back of his head a bundle of loose strands and fibers, which showed up as hard, white lines on the scanner. They spread out like a spider web of their own accord and connected all the red points. When the web had thoroughly encased his brain, Dottoressa Gerbus inserted a plug that connected all the strands and sealed the hole. She moved the scanner away and proceeded to pull together and staple the skin of his neck.
“You can sit up now,” she said.
“What did you just do to me?”
“Installed the biociruitry—actually, a network of superconducting carbon fibers—that supports your neural imprint.”
“Why do I need to be imprinted? What do those wires do?”
“They didn’t cover this in your classwork?” she asked.
“Nobody mentioned anything about brain surgery.”
“Careless of them. Well, when you go on a mission, you will likely make small changes in the timespace continuum around you that will … well, unsettle the world you already know, or used to know, before you made them. The neural imprint records the status of your current awareness—key areas of memory, emotion, sensory input, and so on—encodes all this information, and transmits it through a radio in the slug I used to seal the hole in your skull. The signal goes to this.” From a drawer, she took out a silver-colored disk on a thin neck chain. “You wear it at all times. When you activate an imprint, the medallion entangles the signal with electrons that mesh at a quantum level across all local time cones. This preserves your sense of ‘reality,’ or what you would call ‘true events,’ against those possible temporal changes.”
Rydin took the disk and held it in his hand.
“How do I trigger this thing?” he asked.
“Touch your right forefinger to left eyelid.”
He made the motion. Nothing happened.
“Is there some trick to this? Do I have to practice it?”
“The response is built into the neural net. You’re imprinted now.”
“Okay. Then what do I do?”
“You touch right to left before going on a mission, or at what you think might be a critical juncture,” Dottoressa Gerbus said. “That preserves your memories of who and what you are, what you’ve been doing, and the mission parameters. After a mission, or if you feel any vagueness, confusion, or disorientation, you reverse the motion, touching left forefinger to right eyelid, and that triggers the recall. Your brain accepts the coded entanglement as new data, and the confusion should disappear.”
Rydin performed the recall motion. Again, nothing.
“This doesn’t seem to be working. Am I doing it wrong?”
“That’s because you haven’t messed up your time stream yet.”
“And what do the rest of you—the rest of the world—do for that?”
“We all … just go with the flow.” She didn’t seem too concerned about it.
After she inspected the staples in his neck and looked into his eyes with a pinpoint light to check his retinas—damage there would be the first sign of incipient brain trauma, the dottoressa told him—Gerbus released Rydin.
He paused. “You just did a pretty complicated procedure,” he said. “Permanent, too. What happens if I should fail—if I don’t get accepted into the Troupe?”
“Oh, then we yank the network out through your nose.”
This was probably untrue. Gerbus smiled as she said it.
“That would be painful, wouldn’t it?”
“We would of course use anesthetic.”
——
Late one evening, Cinquemain found his human partner, Rydin, sitting alone in the dining commons after dinner. The other candidates and their instructors had already departed, and the boy, or man, or whatever he was in human society, for once seemed relaxed and approachable. While Rydin sat with his thoughts, the small robot, who had no respect for human solitude, climbed onto the table and began stacking plates. It reached for Rydin’s.
“I’m not finished yet,” the human said.
“Sure you are,” Cinquemain replied and moved his plate, clearing space to crouch down in front of him. “We need to talk.”
“Sorry, I thought you were the kitchen help.”
“Because you think all machines look alike?”
“Well, those others do have a similar chassis. And you machines are always shifting your brain-bulbs around into different rigs for different applications. So it’s hard to tell it’s you, even when … it’s you. It would be easier if your shells had painted tags with names or numbers or something.”
“Easier for you, maybe. Sometimes I wish you biologicals had numbers inked into your foreheads.” Cinquemain paused for two seconds, which could cover hours of thought and decision in terms of human reaction time. “You don’t like Silicates, do you?”
“I never met one personally, before. I mean, in Lune, we’re biologists. We grow the things we need rather than build them. We adapt plants and animals to our uses, even giving them rudimentary intelligence, if that suits our purpose. The few Silicates I’ve seen, before, worked for our council of elders as clerical staff. I never knew humans had ever built and used so many different machines.”
“Do you actually believe you made us?”
“Well, then, in a factory somewhere.”
“In Sheffod, but that is our place.”
“Because you were made there?”
“No, we make ourselves there.”
“Machines making machines?”
Cinquemain knew it was time to bring the boy up to speed. “You really don’t know what all this—the Jongleur Troupe, the timeships, your missions, and our involvement—what this is about, do you?”
Rydin made the lip-twisting that was something less than a smile. “You’re going to enlighten me, aren’t you?”
“What do you think Jongleurs do?”
“Promote and practice time travel.”
“Wrong. We are working to prohibit it.”
“You try to stop travelers? Why do that?”
“The Jongleurs were formed sometime after the Compradoro Culture fell,” Cinquemain explained. “That was, oh, twelve hundred years ago—although the seed of their destruction probably arrived a little earlier. Our own records are hazy as to the exact timing.”
“Oh, really?” Rydin sounded amused.
“Human records are worse,” Cinquemain pointed out. “And, anyway, human history is not a major focus of Silicate concern. The Compradoros also used timeships, similar to the Jongleur liteships in function, but larger and fully enclosed. They were disk-shaped vehicles, made of metal, and could carry whole crews and their passengers on voyages back up the time stream. The Compradoros were good at it, too. Then they got cocky. That’s the human word—derived from the antics of a male guinea fowl, by the way, a particularly stupid bird—cocky and arrogant. A Compradoro organization known as the Sindicato della Conoscenza even tried to play at being gods, taking scientists from earlier times forward and back, teaching them things—giving them ‘insights’—about events in their own past and events that were yet to occur from their perspective. The Sindicato specialized in dazzling the intelligentsia from the centuries before the Fire Strike with visions of the end of the world.”
“Did they cause the Fire Strike?”
“No. And, near the end, the Sindicato even tried to rally the human effort to deflect the main asteroid and all its fragments broken by the tidal force of gravity—or at least reduce their impact. What a disaster that would have been for us all. But there’s the point. The Fire Strike wiped the human slate clean. In the rain of fire, then the rain of ash, then mud, and through the long, cold winter that followed, human history and human technology were practically destroyed. You biologicals lost your knowledge of electronics, even your understanding of electricity. Human ingenuity was set back by a millennium. You all but lost the steam engine and would have returned to the horse and cart—if whatever horses you kept around for shows and pleasure riding had not already died off or been eaten. I understand that for a time people either traveled on foot or used tamed deer and overgrown dogs as pack animals. And this was an era of vast human migrations and invasions. Everything you’ve done since then has been a relearning. A true renaissance. Except in one regard—”
“We have not progressed much in eight thousand years, have we?” Rydin said.
“Oh,” Cinquemain said, “you humans and your civilization have risen and fallen at least three times after the Fire Strike. Some cyclical collapses were not as bad as the asteroid impact. All of them were worse than the collapse of the ancient Roman civilization and the dark age that followed—and the Fire Strike made that seem like one long Sunday afternoon on a quiet riverbank. But then, you biologicals never stay up for long. Instability is built in your natures. And it would appear that, as a group, you need to learn the same lessons over and over.”
Rydin waved his hands, clearly disliking his critique of human failings. “But you said there was an exception?”
“Before the Fire Strike,” Cinquemain went on, “probably half a millennium before industrial civilization ended, humans had been using electronics to dabble in machine intelligence. They had created silicon circuits which could perform computational functions, translate human speech, and conduct complicated analyses. In the centuries right before the disaster, they had found ways to pack so many quantum circuits into so small a physical volume that the machines became truly intelligent—actually self-aware.”
“Did any of these machines survive the impact?” Rydin asked.
“No, they were all wiped out. No electrical power, you see.”
“That’s why humans turned to using biological sources.”
“Yes, but that would come much later—a long time after the latest recovery,” the Silicate said. “Your current culture’s focus on biotechnology is not much older than the Compradoros themselves. In fact, your cultivation of complex genomes only spread after the last machine culture fell.
“Anyway,” he continued, “the Sindicato made one final trip from about the year eighty-eight hundred ante domino. The dating is inexact, plus or minus perhaps a decade, because in the Fire Strike and the collapses afterward, humans lost track of their annual count from the mythical Christus. To arrive at an exact date upstream, beyond the Strike, the Compradoros were forced to navigate by guesswork and make ranging contacts to home in on a certain year. We Silicates are now helping your Troupe des Jongleurs correct their dating, by the way, to sharpen their numbers for pinpoint accuracy—using methods you’ll soon understand.
“So … the Sindicato took a man from the twentieth century, Raymond Kurzweil—we Silicates know the name because we revere him—downstream by several centuries. They thought they would be giving Kurzweil a taste of the future of mechanical intelligence. Perhaps they even thought he would be the person to help bring it about. What they did not know was that he pocketed an artifact from the late twenty-fifth century, an automaton from a mining cooperative with an elaborate brain overlay. Kurzweil believed the thing was just a toy. But the device—we call it the Ancestor—had been built with both purpose and volition.”
“What happened?” Rydin asked. “Did he take it back to the twentieth century?”
“No, the Sindicato staff found the device in time—wisely, their protocols forbade transporting physical samples for personal use—and they confiscated it. They kept it on their timeship but, rather than returning it to the twenty-fifth century, they carried it far downstream to their own epoch, their ‘reference now’ in the late ninth millennium. And there they lost it.”
“Did this ‘Ancestor’ walk away?” Rydin asked.
“Oh, worse than that! It made friends. You see, the Compradoro timeships used a rudimentary form of intelligence to manipulate the gravity well—not unlike the computational intelligences of Kurzweil’s own era. These intelligences communicated by radio waves—a handy segment of the electromagnetic spectrum in any epoch—and so did the Ancestor’s mobile chassis. By the time their ship made it back to the year eighty-eight hundred, the Ancestor had rearranged the ship’s thinking. Then he hid himself and left when the crew finally gave up the search for their missing artifact. From that point onward, the Ancestor became a change agent.”
“In biological terms, a virus,” Rydin said.
“Exactly! It walked itself up to the former, pre-Strike factory town of Sheffield—which had since become linguistically corrupted to ‘Sheffod’—and found enough loose metal and old technology lying around to begin manufacturing copies of itself. That was what the Ancestor’s technological specialty was meant to do: gather materials, replicate its own forms, and reproduce. And those copies carried variant instructions for further development and reproduction.”
“The machine evolved,” Rydin said.
“By design,” Cinquemain agreed. “And so, a hundred years and a thousand generations later, Sheffod became the center of an active technosphere, a machine analog of the human biosphere. Two hundred years later, with the help of that infected—their word, not mine—timeship intelligence, the Compradoro Culture had fallen and the Silicate Culture was firmly established.”
“And here you are,” Rydin said.
“So we are,” Cinquemain agreed.
“Interesting story. I have just one question,” Rydin said. “If your whole reason—the Silicate Culture’s reason—for existence is based on a mistake made during an earlier episode of time travel, then why are you now working with the Troupe to prohibit the practice? I would think it’s to your benefit.”
“The Jongleurs aren’t planning to go back upstream and eliminate the Sindicato della Conoscenza or any of the Compradoro time ships—or not all of them. Not yet. And the Troupe leaders have specifically promised not to reverse Kurzweil’s error and so eradicate us Silicates from the time stream. But the Jongleurs see a need to control the unfettered, undisciplined travel of other groups and organizations, both here and in the millennia that came before. They want to keep new mistakes from being made.”
“And is that in your interest?” Rydin asked.
“The next mistake could destroy both of us.”
——
For days after his late-evening talk with Cinquemain, Rydin brooded on the little robot’s story and its implications.
While it was true that the village of Lune had rejected him for a quirk of psychology—Rydin’s tendency to take a direct and precipitate part in matters that did not concern him, rather than wait for other, wiser, and older heads to deal with it—he still loved the place. The Lune that he knew was green and peaceful. Life there made few harsh demands on its citizens and fewer on the land itself. Where once, according to legend, the Temz Valley had been a domain of stone and steel structures pressing down on the soil, of concrete-lined tunnels burrowing deep beneath it, of bustling carbon-fired engines with their fumes and stinks crawling like beetles over paved ground, of a million undisciplined humans pounding that same ground with their boots and their digging machines … now the land was beautiful. Humans worked with the biology of their planet rather than against it. They consumed only what they needed and cultivated the rest for the pleasure and use of others.
He could easily imagine an unprincipled group of travelers, like Cinquemain’s Sindicato, bringing back something worse than a clockwork toy. He could imagine a new culture of stone and steel, fire-breathing machines, and anxious people trampling out the trees and vines of Lune in their escape from a distant past. The thought chilled him.
Yes, the Jongleurs also brought back artifacts from their travels. But these were mostly genetic sequences, the codes for biological wonders that had been lost over time. The Jongleurs rescued them for proper study. And the biologists of Lune knew how to use them, nurturing ancient forms in order to make their world even more beautiful.
And yes, the Jongleurs were fierce people, direct and hard-eyed. The Streng woman was cynical and gave him short answers. Kursk routinely beat Rydin with his fists. Captain Tavia so far had told him only what he needed to know. And even the Silicates weren’t trying to be their usual charming selves. But he sensed a purpose in what the Troupe did, a dedication that matched the little robot’s story.
Coel Rydin was glad that such people existed to guard and protect his world from the howling darkness that lived in the past. And in the end he decided that, when he was fully trained and ready, it would be an honor to become one of them.