4. Training for the Fifteenth Century
The following morning at ten o’clock, after Rolf Pohl and Anja Varden had taken an autotaxi back to the ITS facility, they were met just inside the warehouse’s blank metal door by the woman Silvestri. For once, she was smiling.
“Does this mean we’ve been accepted for the position?” Rolf asked.
“It does indeed!” she said. “And welcome!”
She led them down the entry corridor, past the interview room, and through a door at the end that put them inside a large space with a maze of partitioned cubicles. The walls were lined with the mouths of hallways leading off in all directions.
“For the next three weeks,” Silvestri said, “you will train here at the Centre to prepare for your assignments. In your next free period—and you won’t have many!—you should contact your families to say you’ll be gone for that length of time. The Centre will also notify the Österholm Municipal Court—” Here she gave Rolf a wink. “—that you both have found paid, full-time employment. For the interim, we will provide you with room, board, and all necessities.” The woman started walking down one of the branching hallways. “We call this ‘deep immersion,’ but there is really no other way to learn all you need to know.”
“How many people have been through your program?” Anja asked.
Silvestri looked at her sharply, then smiled. “Oh … many! We’ve cycled several family members through the Roman node. None of our assignments necessarily lasts forever.”
The doors along this hall were numbered in the three hundreds. Rolf was mentally turned around and no longer sure he could find his way back to the street. Behind one of the doors that Silvestri opened was an apartment somewhat larger than their one-room in Österholm, with similar toilet arrangements but no cooking facilities and, of course, no windows.
“Leave your bags here,” the woman said. “You both have classes in ten minutes on the other side of the building.”
“And what, exactly, are we studying?” Rolf asked.
“Everything! A whole new way of life.”
——
From that point forward, Anja Varden attended three classes a day, each about two hours long. They all were held in a barnlike room within the warehouse and under the tutelage of a grandmotherly woman who introduced herself as Dame Agnes.
The coursework was actually more like a hands-on demonstration—and always with Anja’s own hands. Dame Agnes taught her how to cook over fires burning precious hardwoods—the kind everyone else in the eighth millennium used for making rare and beautiful furniture. She also learned to cook with a dark stone called “coal” and a smelly kind of dirt called “peat.” Cooking included roasting small animal carcasses—but only after she had killed the animal herself with a hatchet, cut it open with a knife, removed the entrails, and spitted it on a rod of black iron. She learned how to boil anything in a similarly blackened pot and to knead dough on a wooden board and bake it in a brick oven heated by those same open flames.
A few days later, she learned to brew beer from a cereal mash she mixed herself and wine from grapes she had plucked from a potted vine on the back lot behind the warehouse and crushed with her own hands. Dame Agnes also taught her how to isolate and nurture the yeast cultures she would need—both for fermenting and to make her dough rise—by putting fruit skins and vegetable peels in a jar with water and leaving them in a warm, dark place overnight. Everything else in the woman’s kitchen was made from scratch, from materials you could find on a patch of scrubland or boggy ground or growing deep in the forest.
Anja learned how to curry wool and soften flax fibers, twist them into thread with a drop spindle, and weave them into cloth. Then she learned basic tailoring: the cut of garments, when and where to pull the cloth tight across the human form, when to leave it loose, and different stitches for sewing seams and hems.
At one point, Anja asked, “Why do I have to learn how to cook and bake, clean and sew, while Rolf is over there learning all about the technicalities of running an inn, serving customers, changing money. We talk about these things, you know, at night. I can do all those things, too.”
Dame Agnes just laughed. “Yes, and you should—in any enlightened society anywhere in eighth-millennium Europa. But you’re traveling to the dark ages, my dear, in which gender roles are tightly regulated. Men manage the family business. Women manage the household.”
“In the fifteenth century only the men get to run time-travel machines?”
“Oh, you’ll learn the basics of that, too. You’ll power the node and navigate the mirror-maze in emergencies. But you need to get your mind around the social structure. If you step outside it, you could jeopardize the entire enterprise.”
Anja also learned the fundamentals of human anatomy and medicine: how to diagnose simple illnesses and injuries, and to offer the appropriate treatments—mostly on the level of rudimentary first aid. But rather than using modern instruments and techniques, she practiced with iron knives and needles, sutures cut from strips of dried animal gut, fragrant poultices which she concocted herself, and rough linen bandages. Antibiotics and antiseptics were conspicuously absent. Instead, Anja learned about herbs and how to grow them for medicinal purposes as well as for seasoning, along with the vegetables she would plant in her kitchen garden.
“We can inoculate you against the ancient diseases—those for which your genome isn’t already prepared,” Dame Agnes said. “But you’ll just have to get used to the food, the bathroom arrangements, the gut flora, and the fleas.”
“What about birth control?” Anja asked. “Do I get to take along supplements? Or do I have to use herbs for that as well?”
“Not much use for birth control,” the old woman said. “The Centre encourages you to start a family right away. And you should plan for a big one, because not all babies can make it in the wild.”
And that lifted a weight from Anja’s mind. She decided to tell this matronly woman her secret. “Does it matter, then, if I’m already pregnant?”
Dame Agnes broke out in smiles and gave her a hug. “Not at all! But how far along are you? You don’t show.”
“Second month, I think,” Anja said. “Even Rolf doesn’t know yet.”
“In a few days we’ll start working on obstetrics and midwifery.”
“I had thought to wait—until we came back to this century.”
“And did someone actually say you were coming back?”
“Well, not in so many words. But it was implied.”
“Oh-ho-ho! Really?” Dame Agnes laughed.
“What … do you mean?” Anja asked.
“Yours is a lifetime commitment.”
“But I was led to believe—”
“Then more fool you!”
——
While Anja studied fifteenth-century housekeeping, Rolf Pohl attended two classes a day, each about three hours long, in a workshop conducted by an elderly man with rough hands whom Rolf was to address as Sergeant Junge.
The training started with the hierarchical structure of the medieval English society into which he and Anja would infiltrate and try to emulate. This included the positions and functions of lords, knights, squires, bailiffs, yeomen, and serfs, as well as the degrees and elevations of the royal court. Junge also touched on church rituals, observances, feast days, and obligations, because the Catholic—Rolf learned to say it correctly with the th diphthong—Church was an important factor in medieval life. From there, they progressed to the money system of pounds and pence, all based on the weight of metal, and then on to land grants, taxes, and tithes.
In between lectures about politics and economics, Sergeant Junge taught Rolf how to heat black iron in a charcoal fire until it was red hot and then shape it to the hoof of a horse—but working on a resin casting, because there were no horses in the eighth millennium.
“Why are you teaching me this?” Rolf asked.
“Taking care of travelers in the fifteenth century includes taking care of their mounts,” Junge said. “Your inn will be out in the country, to start with, so you must know how to stable and care for their horses. And that includes replacing lost shoes.”
“Horses wear shoes.” Rolf said deadpan, thinking it was a joke.
“Horses need a lot of things. You can’t contract this work out.”
Next, Junge taught Rolf the practical business of building an inn—literally, raising a multi-room structure on a field of rammed earth. By turns, the old man showed him how to chisel round stones from a riverbed—using samples imported from the lower Rhine—into square blocks for a solid foundation. Then Rolf learned to cut and strip the bark from slender tree branches, called “wattles”—the specimens he practiced with came from Nord Franx—and weave them into strong mats that could be stood upright and daubed with clay to make weathertight walls. He learned to cut and plane thicker wood from tree trunks to make beams and planks, as well as build cabinets and other furniture. And finally, he learned to dry and bundle reeds—his samples had been taken along the shores of Genevra’s own lake—and fashion them into a sloping roof that would keep out the rain.
“What does all this have to do with running a time station?” Rolf asked.
“Did you think you were moving into a going concern?” Junge replied.
“Well, yes. We’re supposed to be managing a hotel.”
“And this hotel is in England, outside London?”
“Yes, that’s what Signore Pescatore said.”
“And you will travel there how?”
“Through a node in Rome.”
“But none in England.”
“So we have to … what? Walk across the continent?”
“And build your station in place when you get there.”
——
Along with their deep immersion in medieval life, Anja and Rolf were introduced to the mechanics of time travel. These were longer classes held in different parts of the building with representatives from different departments at InterTime Systems. They also had further written materials for them to study—and sometimes memorize—in the evenings.
They learned the mathematics of time cones and probabilistic pathways, but always in what Dr. Piero Porfiri reminded them was a simplified and rudimentary format. Anja learned that ITS had developed a method for traveling the internal pathways of a dimension, or a concatenated series of dimensions, which lay somewhere between and outside of the three spatial dimensions—up, down, and sideways—and the one dimension of time that she had learned about in school. These pathways existed independent of the minds of the scientists who studied them and the mathematics they used. Unlike so much of the modern physics in Anja’s and Rolf’s undergraduate coursework, these pathways—collectively called the “time stream”—had been shown by physical experimentation to have real substance. They had always been there. And the ITS scientists had simply found a way to open a doorway into them.
The door was called a “node.” Once it was established—again through complex mathematics—the node existed from that moment forward as an enduring point in the time stream. Opening and closing the door was a matter of applying a certain amount of energy. But the potential for that opening and closing theoretically existed in that place forever.
“We say ‘theoretically,’ ” Porfiri offered as an aside, “because no one here has any reason to experiment with cutting the power. If that happened, we might ‘lose the thread,’ so to speak. That would strand the station keeper out of time, and we don’t want that. So we keep the portal fed at all times with a portable generator run on isotopes with long half-lives.”
A day or two later, after she had absorbed all this, Anja had a question. “Do you ever go forward in time?”
Piero Porfiri hesitated. “For us, in this place, working from this point in time, the flow from upstream extends only as far as the current moment. The decisions we make and the random events that occur to generate new time cones—points of divergence that in turn will shape and deflect the downstream flow—are only happening now. The actual course of the time stream from this point forward is unknowable. It’s not even probabilistic.”
“But someone in the future—yourself, say, ten years or a century from now—don’t they exist in that same time stream?” Rolf asked.
“They exist in many variable, branching time streams.”
“But they can come back to visit us here. So why can’t we go there?”
“We can, if they come to guide us to the stream that is their own particular future,” Porfiri said. “Their stream has already been fixed.”
“I don’t understand,” Rolf said. “The stream obviously runs in both directions. So why can’t we navigate it?”
“The answer to that,” the man answered, becoming visibly nettled, “is embedded in the mathematics of tensor fields. What an ancient scientist from the twentieth century once called ‘time’s arrow.’ Our best minds have devoted years to analyzing the forces shaping the stream and limiting their effects. … Is this an area you are prepared to study?”
“Well, no, but certainly—”
“It will take you about ten years of post-graduate work,” Porfiri warned. “But first you will need an advanced degree.”
“I just told you!” Rolf was obviously becoming nettled himself. “No!”
“Then you must trust me when I say your question has no logical answer.”
Rolf had already told Anja about his conversation with the old sergeant: that the job they had signed up for was more than simply keeping the London station open. They would carry a mechanical device back upstream to the node in Rome during the middle fourteen hundreds and then travel overland to London.
The device—Porfiri called it a “seed”—would open another portal in a precisely calculated time and place. Anja and Rolf would be given instruments—a sextant, star chart, and magnetic compass—and taught how to find the exact location for which the seed was designed. But then, once the seed was set and the node activated, travelers from their own eighth millennium would simply walk through the interdimensional pathways and arrive in London any time after that.
Thinking about and discussing this proposition, the couple had another question. Rolf elected to ask it: “Why do you need us—Anja and me—to walk over the ground from Rome to London carrying this seed? That’s going to be difficult and—if what I’m learning about the period in my immersion class across the hall is correct—extremely dangerous. Wouldn’t it just be easier, and safer, to go straight back from here through the time stream itself and arrive wherever and whenever you want to set this thing down?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” replied their other technical instructor, Dr. Gaetana Agata. “The seed must be positioned from outside, at a physical location in an established time stream.”
“But you’re doing it all with mathematics, aren’t you?” Rolf said in what Anja thought was a reasonable tone. “That’s scientifically precise, isn’t it? So why not trace back from inside the stream? How did you set the Roman node in the first place? You didn’t travel back to—when was it? Three centuries before the Christus?—on some kind of magic carpet and drop the seed.”
“No,” Agata said. “The Roman seed was placed almost at random, from within the stream. But that was only the first point in what we now understand is a complex maze. To establish the second and succeeding points, yours in London and others still to come, and to have them all link to our time—to our version of our time—and be of any use to us, these nodes must connect with the version of Rome from the same time stream, the same branch of the river, as defined by that first node. Different events in the physical universe, different decisions by people living in each period, shape different time cones, bend the course of the existing time stream, and open different spheres of reality.
“We know of a parallel Rome, for example,” Dr. Agata went on, “that was never ruled by the Caesars. In this particular branch of the stream, the first man of note from that family, the original Julius, was wounded by an arrow in Gaul and died of fever in the year fifty-four before the Christus. The Roman civil wars and the rise of imperial power still happened, of course, because they were politically inevitable, but the first emperor was Pompey Septimus. He arose a full decade, as years are measured, after the ruler that our stream knows as Octavian or Augustus. Details change downstream from that point forward. For example, in that branch of time, the German kings a hundred generations later were known as the ‘Pompeur’ rather than the ‘Kaiser,’ and Russian kings of about the same period were called ‘Poyar’ instead of ‘Tsar.’
“To connect with the original seed in the time stream that we recognize as historical,” the woman concluded, “inside a course of events which leads however tenuously to our own, we must physically set succeeding seeds in the branch which is a probabilistic outgrowth of that original node’s position. Otherwise, we become lost in the tributaries of other time cones. We would remain forever out of sync with the Rome in which that first seed was founded.”
——
Rolf’s and Anja’s history lessons were no more satisfying than the technical training with Porfiri and Agata. The ITS Planning Department had decided to place the London node in the year 1455 after Christus. Evidently, the Centre felt the city would be large enough by then, and sufficiently acclimatized to world trade, that its residents could accommodate strangers exhibiting minor differences in speech, dress, and manner—although he and Anja were also taking lessons in Middle English—without too much comment or agitation. This had been a problem when the Roman node was randomly placed in a primitive Etruscan village along a bend in the Tiber River at a time when Alexander the Great was still a boy in Macedonia and the nearest civilization was the Greek colony of Syracuse on the island of Sicily.
London in the fifteenth century was no prize, either. Apparently, the government was unsettled, with two rival branches, both heirs from the extended family of Edward the Third, who had lived a century earlier. From these rival families, first one claimant then another serially occupied the throne and periodically pushed the other branch off it. The dispute had something to do with the planting of rosebushes, red varietals and white varietals. This was eerily reminiscent of another unsettled time, occurring later in the German lowlands, where the focus was on tulip bulbs—although there the dispute seemed to be economic rather than political.
“Why do you send us into such troubled times?” Rolf asked.
“Because they’re interesting!” replied the history teacher, Dr. Millie Mirafiori. “Besides, that’s exactly the time when no one will be looking too closely at you. When kings are at war with each other and focused on their own troubles, they have no energy to spare for the common people, for humble innkeepers like yourselves. Instead, they’re too busy running a police state and tracking down internal spies and pretenders.”
“And we won’t be seen as any of those things?” Anja asked.
“Only if you draw attention to yourselves,” Mirafiori said.
Rolf thought about that for a moment. “What if we change something—change history? Wouldn’t that generate a new time cone and change the future—the one we now inhabit? Isn’t there a possibility we could wipe ourselves out?”
“Oh, sure,” Dr. Mirafiori said. “Well, some possibility—insignificant, really. Little time cones are being generated all over the place. You create them every day as you decide what to have for breakfast or when to change your hairstyle. But our mathematics have shown that these causes have only limited effects, which tend to remain on a personal level and almost always die out.
“Not long after your target point in the fifteenth century,” she went on, “humans began pondering the nature of probability and predictability. They came up with a branch of study they called ‘chaos theory’—that the world was unpredictable and responded rapidly to perturbations and turbulence, as described by the complex mathematics of fractals. Their favorite metaphor involved a butterfly flapping its wings in North America to create storms on the other side of the world in China. But the world is not so delicately balanced. The time stream is not so fragile. And anyway, the major chains of causation—the long periods of quiet that you and I think of as ‘history’—have been serially truncated, first, in the Fire Strike, and then in the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations since then.
“Each of these catastrophes throws enough dice—introduces enough probabilistic chaos, creates enough nonlinear cause and effect—that personal family histories, political consequences, and technological nuances become disconnected from and temporally irrelevant to later times. It isn’t the single event that wipes out cause and effect, but rather the unprecedented scale of disruption and simultaneous introduction of unpredictable results. Besides, anomalies and paradoxes generally don’t reinforce each other and build over time, like a wave in standing water. Instead, they contradict each other and cancel out, like random voices in a crowded room. It’s a wonder that any individual person, artifact, or event survives to be recognized at all by future history.
“No, Rolf.” Mirafiori concluded. “Unless something you do in the fifteenth century leads to someone’s great-great-exponentially-great-grandchild finding a way to deflect the Fire Strike in the twenty-seventh century, your personal actions won’t much matter.”
——
Anja and Rolf were trained together in self-defense, including a beginner’s course in modern Ju Hando Sento—or “Ten Handed Combat”—by a gray-haired woman introduced to them as Master Lee.
“Nothing like this method of fighting is known in the fifteenth century,” she said. “Or not in the Europa of that time. Some of the blocks and strikes, as well as the holds and their breaks, are derived from the fighting styles of ancient Nippon. But even though that island group and its unique military culture existed in your England’s time frame, no one from there ever visited medieval Europa.”
“Why are you teaching us all this?” Anja asked after a bruising throw.
“Because you will be traveling to a violent place,” Master Lee said.
“And we won’t have access to modern weapons,” Rolf supplied.
“Ju Hando Sento,” the master went on, “will be unexpected—and the movements unanticipated—by anyone who might attack you. That will be your best protection: surprise and speed to counter native strength and skill.”
She drilled them in exercise routines and forms they were advised to practice every day, both together and singly. The woman explained that they would not become proficient before they left for England but, with time and persistence—and by working against each other, strength against developing strength—they might survive their first tangle with a drunken native cutpurse. But she smirked as she said that.
Because Anja, as a woman, was the smaller and physically weaker of the two, Master Lee also taught her how to hold and strike with a knife. “You will have similar blades in your kitchen. I suggest you carry one in your bodice as well.” Confused, Anja asked what this “bodice” might be. When Master Lee described it, she recognized the stiff, tight-fitting garment covering a woman’s upper body, because Dame Agnes made her wear one, along with a flowing, ankle-length skirt, while performing her household chores.
“Why don’t you teach us real weapons?” Rolf asked. “Swords, for example.”
“Because you are innkeepers, not soldiers,” Master Lee said. “You are going to be entering a society governed by a caste system. War is the work of the nobility, or for paid professionals. Common folk and country yeoman—farmers and such—might know how to shoot with a bow, say, for hunting. But sword fighting requires specialized training, plus a suit of armor, plus—usually—a horse with its own equipage. And then you would be fighting mostly with a lance from horseback. Without all those things, you wouldn’t stand a chance against a real soldier.”
“Are we likely to meet many of those?” Anja asked.
Master Lee smiled—all teeth. “Just pray you don’t.”
The couple also took classes together in the basics of language and culture in preparation for survival in fifteenth-century England. For two hours a day they studied and practiced Middle English with a jovial man who introduced himself as Squire Dunstan—although Anja did not believe that was a real name.
To her ear, the language had weird, flattened vowels that slipped around under her tongue like loose paving stones under foot. The consonants were hard and stonelike, too. Occasionally, among the words and their meanings, she could hear echoes resembling ancient Norsk, the roots of her native dialect. But most of Middle English was a jumble of strange sounds and stranger concepts.
To go along with the language, the two of them learned to write in a rounded script that Dunstan called “uncial.” The alphabet was distantly related to the block lettering used in writing panEuropan, but uncial had strange characters for sounds that had long ago been discarded in their language. The script looked at first glance like a repeated series of the small letter “o,” but with hooks and slashes coming off at odd angles.
Squire Dunstan worked Rolf hard on the language and the script, correcting small errors and demanding constant repetition. He gave Anja an easier time, praising her spoken English and only glancing at her attempts at writing.
Finally, she told him, “You don’t really care how I speak and write.”
“You have a good ear and a quick tongue,” the man offered.
“But you spend more time with Rolf,” she pointed out.
“Of course. Rolf will be the innkeeper. He will interface with the public and with the local lord and the magistrates. He will keep the records—and believe me, in the fifteenth century, it will be a wonder to everyone that a commoner like him even knows how to write. Such things are reserved for monks and scholars. As for you—” Dunstan shrugged. “—no one expects much from a woman.”
The man was not looking at Anja when he said it, so he could not see her eyes narrow in anger. She was just glad one of her “kitchen knives” wasn’t lying around.
As part of this training, Squire Dunstan introduced Anja and Rolf to a stylus cut from a bird’s feather—a “goose,” he called it—and a kind of paper made from the skin of a domestic animal, a “sheep.”
“You will keep all your records, make your calculations, and maintain the diary of temporal transactions through the node with these tools,” Dunstan said.
Rolf tried moving the sharply cut end of the feather across the opaque brown surface. “Nothing happens.”
“That’s because you first need to dip it in ink,” the man replied.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to take along a vocoder?” Anja asked.
“And connect it to what?” their teacher countered. “They use books and pens in the fifteenth century. No grid power. No electricity. No connection to our vast information resources. And besides, you can’t take anything with you that is not from the period—or that can be reasonably attributed to the period. Even a writing tablet—but one that was automated and responded with images and voices when you touched it, rather than a blank slate and a piece of chalk—would get you burned at the stake as a witch. You don’t want that, do you?”
Evidently, what Rolf and Anja did created no perceivable risk, but leaving modern technology like electronic tablets lying around could upset the natives and interrupt the flow of technological development.
“Can I write on this—” Rolf touched the brown skin. “—in my native pan-Europan? Or would that get me burned, too?”
“As a heretic, perhaps. Our digital alphabet would look like Greek letters or Nordic runes to scholars of the medieval period. They couldn’t read it. Stick to Middle English.”
“This is going to be really hard,” Rolf said.
“If it were easy, we’d send someone else.”
——
When they had completed their training, Rolf and Anja met one last time with the dark-haired woman, Silvestri. The meeting took place in the same room with a table and chairs where Signore Pescatore had first interviewed them, weeks before. This time, however, the two chairs were positioned in front of the inner door, and Silvestri sat in the third chair guarding the door that led to the outside corridor and the street.
“Here is a contract for you to sign and seal with your thumbprints,” Silvestri said, holding out a tablet.
Rolf took it and angled the surface so that Anja could read along with him.
In page after page, the document specified their relationship—or rather, apparent lack of it—with InterTime Systems. The organization was providing them with employment, per the panEuropan Convention of 7812, and thereby removing them from the public stipend for the period of their service. The contract, however, specifically omitted any place, date, term of service, or salary for this employment—all of which were required by law. The only definition of work was simply “station keeper,” with no mention of hours, overtime, or special compensation for hazardous conditions—again as required by law. By signing, Rolf Pohl and Anja Varden agreed to these altered conditions of employment. What was clear were the penalties they would pay for failure to complete the contract, and the lack of a guarantee on the part of InterTime Systems to effect a return from their unspecified work location, even after they applied for dispensation and repatriation.
The two of them read through this thickly worded agreement, page after page, in which ITS offered them virtually nothing and failed to provide them with anything. And as they read, Silvestri waited impatiently, tapping her fingers on the tabletop.
“Do you mind if we finish this?” Rolf asked, annoyed.
“Oh, take your time,” the woman said. “Take your time.”
When he was done, he looked at Anja, who shook her head.
“This isn’t very fair, you know,” he said, handing the tablet back.
“It is a true statement of your employment, under the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?” he asked.
“You know the risks—you’ve been training for them. You will be working in a foreign country, virtually on another planet in another time frame. You will have to make your own way, provide for your own subsistence, and rely on your own resources. InterTime Systems is prepared to be generous. We will, of course, supply you with everything you need to start out—so long as it doesn’t compromise your temporal identity. For example, if you need money, it will have to be paid in gold or silver, unalloyed and not guaranteed to meet present metallurgical standards, and it will be struck in the coinage of your current time and place. We can’t provide you with modern machinery, medicines, special foods, or the lifestyle to which you’ve become accustomed. And we can’t protect you.”
“Suppose we don’t agree to these terms?” Anja suggested.
“Then you sign a quitclaim and nondisclosure agreement.”
“And if we refuse even that much?” Rolf said, angry now.
“It’s the price of walking through that door,” Silvestri said.
Rolf looked hard at Anja, and she just stared back at him.
“It will be the adventure of a lifetime,” she said, eyes bleak.
“But we say good-bye forever to everything and everyone.”
Silvestri laughed at this, and it came out harsher than she probably intended. “Is that what you think? That you’re going away permanently?”
“Well, aren’t we?” Rolf demanded.
“We make the terms explicit,” the woman said, “so potential station keepers don’t think the job is one long holiday. For routine assignments—running the station in Rome, for example—we require a minimum commitment of three years. That gets a person acclimatized to the language and culture so they can function adequately as part of the economic background. We have rewards for staying longer on site, of course, and for raising a family in the posting, like the Farandellis.
“You two have an unusual assignment, however,” Silvestri said. “From the day you step beyond the walls of Rome, you will be carrying your fate in your hands. You’ll transport the seed of a new node to a distant country. We can’t promise how long that will take you or what dangers you will meet and have to overcome. You might be a year or two just getting on site. And then you have to establish the node—with our help, of course, once the link to the maze is established—and then you will learn to operate it. In subjective time, say, three to five years.”
“ ‘Subjective time’?” Anja asked.
“From your point of view, you spend five years in a distant land. Then you come back through the node—in our time—the day after tomorrow. Contemporaneity is one of the benefits of time travel.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Rolf said.
“And then you will have invaluable experience,” Silvestri said. “You could be teachers or guides here at the Centre, if you like, or you would qualify for positions teaching history at almost any university.”
Rolf took the tablet, made a squiggle with his fingertip, and sealed it with his thumb. He passed the device to Anja, who repeated the process. “Now what?” he asked.
“You go back to Österholm,” the woman said. “You’ll want to spend some time with your families and friends, collect your things, have a little holiday. You’ll be saying good-bye for a while—from your point of view.”
“But we’ll be coming back the next day,” Rolf said.
“Exactly! No one there will even know you’re gone.”