Chapter Four
Chapter Four
“So,” asked Jason, setting his empty glass down on the bar of displacer installation’s lounge, “how is the good Father coming along?”
“Not bad,” Alexandre Mondrago admitted. “Remember, as a Service officer, he’s had some training. After all, it was his job to keep the members of expeditions he led alive. The expeditions he’s led generally haven’t been the kind that were likely to get involved in anything violent. But still, he’s had to be prepared for all eventualities.”
“Right.” Jason nodded, and touched the glowing LED display on the surface of the bar to order another Scotch and soda. “It was part of the agreement by which he was allowed to join the Temporal Service. He had to pass some courses in purely defensive forms of martial arts.”
The Corsican gave a rather cynical grin. “’Offensive’ and ‘defensive’ aren’t ‘pure’ concepts. They’re relative terms when it comes to weapons; it all depends on how you use them—”
“True. I wouldn’t want to get banged over the head with a sixteen-pound hoplon shield like the one I carried when we were in the fifth century B.C.”
“—and I suspect the same goes for martial arts. Anyway, I’ve been teaching him some new tricks. He’s physically fit—a Service officer has to be—and he’s a quick learner. And if he has any qualms, he must have rationalized them away.”
Jason smiled as he snagged his drink from a tray that floated over on grav repulsion. “Jesuits have always had a reputation for being able to justify all sorts of things, to themselves as well as to others. Casuisitic justification, it was called. Historically, their image has sometimes been almost a sinister one, at least among non-Catholics. Even within the Church, they had their ups and downs. In the eighteenth century, they were suppressed in various countries, and between 1773 and 1814 the Order was officially abolished.”
“Still, he can’t completely get around his vows about shedding of blood. So I’ve had to limit it to non-lethal stuff—although, there again, a sharp enough blow of the knuckles to somebody’s temple . . . Well, anyway, he knows we’re going to be looking for Transhumanists, and you can just imagine how he feels about them.”
“Yes. He told me what a transcendent experience it had been for him to see the Vatican in the twentieth century, before the Transhuman Dispensation got hold of it.” The Transhumanists had used nano-disassemblers. St. Peter’s Basilica . . . the Sistine Chapel . . . the Laocoön . . . the Apollo Belvedere . . . Michelangelo’s Pieta . . . not to mention the bones of St. Peter . . . all reduced to the same gray sludge as other such places in Jerusalem and Mecca and Benares. Jason was not religious, even by his era’s lenient standards, but he was looking forward to the opportunity to see that vanished grandeur at first hand.
“So,” he said, changing the subject, “has he gotten his controllable Special Ops TRD implanted yet?”
“Yes, last night. He also had his brain implant deactivated. He wasn’t quite as happy about that.”
“Nobody ever is.” The exemption from the Human Integrity Act that allowed Temporal Service officers to use neurally interfaced brain implants was hedged about with restrictions. For one thing, it was strictly limited to current mission leaders—in this case, Jason. It was a bit of nitpicking he had often cursed, for there had been times when it would have been very useful to have more than one member of a team who knew the locations of all the other members, marked on an optically projected map by means of the microscopic tracking devices incorporated in their TRDs. But the taboo involved was too powerful to be fought.
“Anyway,” Jason continued, “he doesn’t require as much preparation as we do, having just gotten back from his last mission. For one thing, he’s already got the language from his last mission.” It was another area in which the rules of the Human Integrity Act were slightly bent for the benefit of time travelers. The language of their target milieu was imprinted on the speech centers of their brains by direct neural induction, a process that required buffering with drugs and a period of rest thereafter, followed by intense practice in actually forming the sounds. Jason and Mondrago had only just emerged from all that after acquiring twentieth-century Italian, which had come relatively easily to them given their familiarity with Romance languages. Mondrago had also had to undergo an in-depth orientation (by more or less conventional teaching techniques; again, the taboos were violated only when absolutely necessary) concerning twentieth-century civilization. Jason, who was practically an old hand in that century, had at least been able to skip all of that except the specifically Italian portions, and of course Casinde hadn’t needed it at all.
“Anyway,” said Jason, “let’s drink up. It’s almost time for the informal mission briefing.”
“The expedition will consist only of the three of us,” Jason said to Mondrago and Casinde. “It’s simpler that way. For one thing, we’ve all already had our biological ‘cleansing.’” It was a necessity, to protect the people of earlier eras from centuries-evolved microbes against which they would have been as vulnerable as the Amerindians had been against smallpox. “Also, it happens that we will all be physically inconspicuous in the milieu, which isn’t the case with any of the other Special Ops personnel who’re available at the moment.” It was a perennial problem, and not even Jason would have advocated using genetic nanoviruses to tailor time travelers’ ethnic appearance to order for the purpose of blending. The horrors of the Transhuman Dispensation had placed such things so far beyond the pale of acceptability that the Human Integrity Act’s prohibition was almost superfluous.
“Remember, Commander,” said Casinde, “by the late twentieth-century, Western Europe was already becoming a fairly cosmopolitan place. An African or an Asian walking down an Italian street in 1978 wouldn’t have raised nearly as many eyebrows as he would have just a generation earlier. And North American and northern European tourists were a common sight.”
“Still, we always like to have as little explaining to do as possible—preferably, none. And in our case, we can even use our own names. You’ll be, essentially, yourself: a Jesuit priest visiting Venice after a time among the small Catholic community in Greece, the people who observe the traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church while obeying the Pope of Rome. Alexandre and I will be acquaintances of yours from there—of French extraction, in Alexandre’s case. That will help explain any oddities in our Italian pronunciation.” It was another problem the Authority always had to deal with, even in eras when recorded sound had existed and really accurate simulation of the local language was possible. Direct neural induction was not magic. So wherever they were, time travelers always claimed to be from somewhere else.
“We’ll arrive in Venice on September 26, 1978, two days before John Paul I’s death. By dropping the name of that Father Brune you mentioned, we ought to be able to get in to see Father Ernetti—all the while remaining on the alert for Transhumanists.” With my implant as the only one we’ll have for detecting functioning bionics, Jason grumpily added to himself. It was yet another reason why he wished his two companions’ implants hadn’t had to be deactivated. But Rutherford, who had to answer to the Authority’s hidebound governing council, had refused to budge.
“And if nothing comes of that?” Casinde inquired.
“Then we’ll proceed to Rome, where you got your first indications of Transhumanist activity anyway.”
“You realize, of course—”
“—That you and your expedition were there during that same time period,” Jason finished for the Jesuit. It had given Rutherford a case of the cold sweats which, in Jason’s opinion, served him right. “Fortunately, you know where you were at any given time, so if we’re careful we ought to be able to avoid stubbing our toes on the Observer Effect. And hopefully the problem won’t arise because we’ll be able to wrap things up in Venice.”
“Speaking of Venice,” said Mondrago, “are we going to go there for a familiarization tour?” It was a frequent means of supplementing virtual tours in preparation for extratemporal expeditions, at least in cases where the locale hadn’t changed so much over the centuries as to make it impossible to get any sense of what it had been like in the target time-frame.
“We can if you want to. Venice is still more or less recognizable today. But Julian is already familiar with it. And I’ve seen it in both the present time and the thirteenth century. 1978 ought to be sort of a compromise between the two.”
“Never mind, then. I’ll just soak up the computer simulation. I’ve heard that even now it’s a very picturesque place.”
“Oh, yes,” said Casinde with a reminiscent smile. “Of course, nowadays the picturesqueness is somewhat artificial—carefully maintained for the tourists. To a certain extent, that was probably already starting in 1978.”
“Well, we’re not going there as tourists anyway,” Jason said firmly. “And we need to get busy on the final stages of our orientation. Our schedule is as follows . . .”
Not so very long ago, the enormous domed structure at the center of the facility had housed the Authority’s only temporal displacer, a massive installation powered by the only antimatter reactor permitted on the surface of Earth or any inhabited planet. All that, as everyone knew, had been necessary to cancel the temporal energy potential of significant objects like human bodies, with an energy surge so prodigious as to send them back three hundred years into the past before it became controllable. (Only into the past. The future—that is, what lay beyond the constantly advancing wave-front known as “the present” was, in an absolute sense, nonexistent until it happened.)
But now, thanks to Jason, the Authority had reverse-engineered the Transhumanist Underground’s time-travel technology. The three-hundred-year limit still obtained—but it was now possible to construct temporal displacers orders of magnitude less massive and energy-gluttonous than the old one.
A ring of such displacers now circled the old displacer installation. This was a very good thing for the Special Operations Section, for in the past extratemporal expeditions had had to be tied to prearranged retrieval times at the one existing displacer stage, for simultaneous appearance of matter in the same volume was a risk that could not be taken. But now a Special Ops mission leader could be allowed to exercise his own discretion as to retrieval, for a displacer stage could be placed at his exclusive disposal. Jason was thankful for this flexibility in their present mission, given the vagueness of his hints as to the Transhumanist presence in 1978 Italy.
The new multiplicity of displacers did, however, complicate Rutherford’s traditional ritual of a farewell handshake with departing time travelers. Still, he managed it.
“You will, of course, not remain any longer than necessary,” he admonished Jason, not for the first time. “The impossibility of your communicating with us—”
“Yes, I know, Kyle.” The only way of communicating across time was the “message drop” system of writing on some very durable material and leaving it in a prearranged place so remote that it would lie undisturbed until the twenty-fourth century. It was highly unsatisfactory at best, and out of the question in northern and central Italy, as Jason would hardly have the opportunity to scramble up to some Apennine mountaintop.
“And do take all precautions,” Rutherford continued in the same jittery way. “This expedition is, I fear, somewhat undermanned, and—”
“Hey, Kyle, you know how cautious I am.”
Rutherford was still spluttering when the indescribable sensation of temporal displacement took Jason, and the interior of the displacer installation faded like the memory of a dream, and they were standing in a Mediterranean garden just after daybreak.