Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Temporal displacement was subject to no limitations on where, within the planetary gravity field, it could flick time travelers in the process of sending them back in time. So Jason had been able to pick his target with care.
It was, of course, equally possible to choose the time of day for arrival—but, in practice, the choice was always just after daybreak. It represented a compromise between the dark of night (which exacerbated the psychological disorientation of displacement, sometimes to a dangerous degree) and broad daylight (which would be too conspicuous).
Thus it was that Jason and his two companions found themselves among the trees of Venice’s Giardini Ex Reali, or Palace Gardens, just as the eastern sky was turning from gray to pale blue. As Jason had confidently hoped, there was no one present at this hour to be upset at the sight of figures springing into existence out of nowhere—just one snoring individual sitting propped against a tree trunk and clutching a wine bottle, whose slumbers Jason did not disturb.
All three of them were veterans, so they took little time to regain their mental equilibrium after the profoundly unnatural experience they had just undergone. Following the directions provided by Jason’s optically spliced map, they departed the formal gardens and walked down to the Riva degli Schiavoni, the walkway that led along the Grand Canal. There they turned left and walked toward the rising sun that was dispelling all but the most tenuous strings of cloud, whose undersides glowed in red and gold. On their right was the canal, its wharves lined with gondolas. To the southeast, a little over a fifth of a mile across the water, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore was clearly visible through a thin mist, the basilica with its tall brick bell tower and Andrea Palladio’s classical façade illuminated by the golden early morning sun. Adjacent to that church was the Benedictine abbey where Father Pellegrino Ernetti resided.
Presently, the Piazzetta San Marco opened up to their left in all its glory. At its far end was the Byzantine splendor of the Basilica di San Marco, with the instantly recognizable Campanile, or bell tower, to its left. Jason sardonically wondered how many tourists knew that tower had once been a place of punishment for corrupt clerics, who were suspended from it in wooden cages for as long as a year, with—or occasionally without, in extreme cases—bread and water. On its right was a magnificent Gothic fantasia: the façade of the Palazzo Ducale, the palace of the Doges who had once ruled Venice.
The palace had only begun to assume its present form in the mid-fourteenth century. But the residence of the Doges had always been there, as Jason had reason to know. He had seen it in its earlier, altogether less impressive, fortresslike incarnation in 1204, when Doge Enrico Dandolo—blind and in his nineties—had negotiated the contracts with the leaders of the Fourth Crusade that had by tortuous paths led to the sacking of Constantinople and the creation of the vacuum Venice had filled, becoming the largest and wealthiest city in Europe and the arbiter of trade between the West and the Orient.
They proceeded past the two columns supporting statues of St. Theodore and the winged lion of St. Mark, and continued on as the sun’s rays spread a golden sheen over what the twentieth-century writer Luigi Barzini had called “undoubtedly the most beautiful city built by man,” making it seem even more dreamlike. The slight chill of daybreak was now yielding to the kind of warmth to be expected in Venice in September. As they walked, Jason felt a nagging sense that something was missing. Then he realized what it was: the distinctive aroma he remembered from his experience in twentieth-century cities, densely packed with hydrocarbon-burning motor vehicles. It was bad enough in America, and even worse in Europe where emission standards were lower. But Venice was the only significant city in the world with no automobiles—nor, indeed, any streets that could have accommodated them. Here there were hardly any of the usual urban fumes, and there would have been none at all save for the vaporetti, or water buses, which (unlike the romantic but not especially practical gondolas) were how people got around.
Continuing on along the Riva degli Schiavoni, they crossed the bridge over the narrow Rio San Zulian (only the largest canals were called “canali”; each of the myriad smaller ones was a “rio”) between the palace and the Prigioni Nuove, or New Prison. Looking to their left, up the canal, they could see the enclosed marble bridge—the Ponte di Sospiri, a name coined by Lord Byron in the nineteenth century—that directly connected the palace and its torture chamber with the prison. (Jason suspected a certain irony in that name, which meant “Bridge of Sighs.”) By this time, more people were up and about, and Jason recalled that Venetians who had business in this part of the city always tried to get it done early in the morning, before the crowds of tourists thickened. He noted with relief that no one was paying the three of them any special attention. Not that he had expected anyone to; the Authority’s outfitters were past masters at producing authentic period clothing, and there was nothing especially out of the ordinary about the small overnight bags in which they carried very basic strictly in-period toiletries and a change of underwear.
They next crossed another bridge, over another narrow canal, the Rio del Vin. As with the rest of their walk, they did so slowly and carefully, in deference to the walking cane Jason was using. It would have seemed odd for more than one of them to have a cane, although Jason would have preferred more, given its special qualities.
Ordinary extratemporal research expeditions were flatly prohibited from carrying any out-of-period equipment, including weapons, into the past. But Jason had been able to argue successfully, against the horrified opposition of certain members of the Authority’s governing council, that Special Ops personnel could hardly be held to the usual guidelines when going up against enemies who were subject to no such restrictions. So there was now a workshop that specialized in concealing and disguising weaponry of the sort that the Transhumanists did not scruple to carry into the past.
Thus Jason’s cane incorporated a scaled-down version of a Takashima laser carbine. He was familiar with it, having used it in fifth century B.C. Athens—and, in fact, having had some input into its design. This one was even more miniaturized, but had the same two selectable modes: “stun,” with a low-powered laser ionizing the air along a path which carried an electrical charge; and “kill,” with the laser powered up to weapon grade. Either way, the beam was invisible, although the ionization produced a trail of sparks, and the lethal version resulted in a snap! as air rushed in to fill the vacuum drilled through it—certainly nothing like the special effects the people of the late twentieth century had been led to expect of a laser weapon by Hollywood science fiction movies. There was also a harmless visible-light setting, in case a flashlight should come in handy. The superconductor-loop energy cells that powered it were disguised as ordinary AA lead-acid batteries of the period. And it had no metal parts—an important point, in case they found themselves having to pass through one of the metal detectors that had started to come into use for security purposes in the early 1970s.
There had been a certain amount of pouting on the part of Mondrago, who thought he should be the one playing the slightly-lame role and carrying their only weapon. But Jason had pulled rank. And in truth he was the logical choice to feign lameness, having had experience with the real thing. The limp he affected reminded him all too well of the time, in the wake of the devastating Santorini explosion, he had had to trudge across the mountainous landscape of Bronze Age Crete with a broken foot. He still winced at the memory, even though twenty-fourth century medical science had long since regenerated the foot.
They had now passed the point where the water to their right was no longer the Grand Canal but had widened to become the Canale di San Marco, better known as St. Mark’s Basin, for it was actually a branch of the Lagoon of Venice. They stepped onto the pier that was the San Zaccaria terminal of the vaporetti network. There they bought tickets with authentically aged and rumpled lire and waited for the next vaporetto for San Giorgio Maggiore. San Zaccaria was a terminus of six routes, but less than twenty minutes passed before the right passenger motorboat arrived and they filed aboard, finding seats among a few passengers who had boarded at other stops. As the vaporetto chugged away from the pier, Jason permitted himself to look back and admire the incomparable view astern.
His reverie was interrupted by Casinde’s elbow jabbing him in the ribs.
“Commander!” the Jesuit whispered urgently. “Look over there.” He pointed at a fellow passenger, seated forward, who like Jason had turned his head astern to admire the view. Jason hadn’t noticed him, and indeed he was the sort of man who was easy not to notice, so inconspicuous as to be nearly invisible. He was a small man in his fifties wearing a clerical collar, with a shock of unruly salt-and-pepper hair, eyeglasses that looked as though they had been made by the Coca-Cola bottling company, and nondescript features. After a moment, he turned away again, and Casinde resumed whispering excitedly.
“I’ve only seen one photograph of Father Ernetti. But I think that may very well be—”
But Jason had abruptly ceased to listen, for at the outer edge of his field of vision a tiny blue dot had begun to flash on and off. And a quick scan of the other features revealed one man, cheaply dressed, who exhibited certain subtle indicia that Jason knew all too well.
“Yes,” he whispered back. “I’ve seen that photo too, and yes, I think that’s Father Ernetti. But there’s also an upper-level goon-caste Transhumanist aboard this boat.”