‘They knew of you: Coptic and Meelan. She spoke your name when they saw you running towards them… Traveller.’
With no evident movement from Saphothere, the round door suddenly released from its surrounding metal frame and hissed inwards, revealing a well-lit room stacked with equipment.
‘The Umbrathane should know my name—for most of my life I’ve been hunting and killing them across half a billion years.’
Saphothere led the way past the stored equipment and into a spartan living area. Here, there were rough wooden chairs around a table, bunks for four people, equipment that might have been equally domestic or the control system for launching atomic weapons for all Tack knew, and supply boxes containing packets of food and drink. Saphothere touched a console as he walked past it, and a horizontal bar rose above it, dragging up behind it a screen of translucent film on which image-enhanced exterior scenes were instantly displayed, along with scrolling pictographic script and mobile Euclidian shapes that meant nothing to Tack.
Glancing towards him, Saphothere explained, ‘Security system—but of an order of magnitude more efficient than the pathetic one that guarded Pig City.’ He dropped into a seat and rubbed his eyes. ‘Getting to that place was more difficult than destroying it. I hadn’t realized they had so much energy to squander.’
Tack dropped against a wall the pack that had belonged to Coptic and Meelan. Saphothere, after already checking through its contents, had returned it to him with the injunction not to use any of the more complex devices it contained without instruction. Still eyeing the pack possessively, Tack took a seat on the other side of the table.
‘I don’t understand,’ Tack began.
Saphothere looked up. ‘Those enteledonts were from twenty million years in the future, and by establishing them as guards, the Umbrathane pushed their city far downslope. It has been difficult for me to bring us back to the main line. To reach here we travelled sideways in time.’ Saphothere was studying him carefully, perhaps waiting for questions his explanation would no doubt provoke from a linear mind.
But Tack understood. ‘Where did they get their energy from?’ he asked instead.
Saphothere nodded in approval. ‘They used fusion reactors dismounted from their spaceships, and perhaps some sort of parasitism on the wormhole. Easy enough, as energy is projected along it from New London all the time—it’s what our mantisals recharge from, mostly—and its available abundance in the ages between there and Sauros is the reason we were able to jump so accurately to here.’ Saphothere gestured at their surroundings. Then with a nasty smile he added, ‘Though such accurate time-shifting raises the danger of running into yourself, which would cause a short-circuit paradox—something you could only risk inside the temporal barriers of somewhere like Sauros.’
Tack absorbed this for a moment then asked, ‘So the time tunnel, the wormhole, is a conduit for this energy… the energy you all use?’
‘You might say that. Better to say, though, that the time tunnel is the energy—it’s comprised of that.’
Tack nodded slowly. He understood only a fraction of this now, but hoped to grasp more as his relationship with Saphothere progressed. He no longer felt desperate for immediate answers now he knew they would be forthcoming anyway.
‘You need food and rest now,’ Tack said, gesturing to the nearby stocks. ‘That’s food?’
‘It is, but I’ll have to show you how—’
‘I’ll learn,’ said Tack, standing up. And Saphothere was too tired himself to even be annoyed about the interruption. He rested his forehead on his arms, while Tack taught himself how to cook with the alien equipment. Finally he brought a lavish meal to the table, and they ate in silence, Saphothere growing visibly stronger with each mouthful he consumed. When they had finished, Saphothere got up and brought a bottle of amber liquid and two glasses to the table.
‘One of the better products of your time… well… quite near to your time. In the nineteenth century Sauros sat for a while in the sea underneath the Arctic ice cap. I managed to acquire five or six crates of this before our next shift. I don’t have much left now,’ he explained.
Tack and Traveller proceeded to drink malt whisky—for Tack a first-ever experience.
The Emperor was persistent in his attempts at communicating, the watcher noted. He sat impatiently on the edge of his couch, rather than reclining on it like his subordinates did on theirs. But the words were becoming increasingly mangled in his mouth as the wine flowed, and Polly was unsurprisingly showing signs of confusion, despite the fact that the AI device she carried was obviously offering some sort of translation. Perhaps it could not explain to her why the Romans seemed both excited and scared upon hearing her name. The watcher herself ran a search through her own database and came to the conclusion that this was because of its similarity to ‘Apollyon’—the Greek name for the Lord of the Abyss, Satan.
Then Polly said out loud, ‘So they think I’m some sort of demon now?’
Demon, messenger, oracle… they don’t seem able to make up their minds, the watcher opined, noting the slave standing behind the girl, scribbling down her every utterance on a piece of parchment. Talking out loud to her AI companion, had probably been what had clinched it because it was quite obviously not an act.
Now also sitting on the edge of her couch, the girl listened and responded as best she could when Claudius addressed her. Otherwise, her attention was inevitably focused on the platters of food the slaves kept bringing: fish served in a fragrant sauce, meats with sweet and crunchy coatings, dried figs and fresh apples. She even worked her way through a whole platter of oysters. Noting Claudius eating his way through a large plate of mushrooms, and then checking her database again, the watcher whispered to herself, Now that’s a preference he’ll come to regret.
But there was little enough going on here, and tracking forward the watcher observed that guests not yet departed were falling asleep on their couches. Claudius himself was snoring like a malfunctioning chainsaw and soon four slaves came in to pick up his couch, and carry it out of the tent—the troop of Germanic guards falling in behind. Two female slaves entered silently, but shortly made it understood that Polly should accompany them. She was led off to another tent, lit by an oil lamp, and containing a bed covered with furs and silks. The girl imperiously waved away the slaves when they attempted to undress her and, taking off only her boots, collapsed and was instantly asleep.
Enjoy it while you can.
The watcher skipped over the night into the next day and observed the killing.
‘About two thousand years in your future,’ Saphothere replied to the question Tack would have liked to have asked him long ago. ‘After the Muslim jihad and the ensuing resource wars, after the nuclear winter that resulted from those wars, and after the fall of your whole civilization through your tendency to breed weak humans and strong plagues.’
Tack dared to reach out for the bottle and topped up Saphothere’s then his own glass. ‘Weak humans, strong plagues?’
Saphothere took up his glass and downed half its contents. ‘You were already witnessing it in your age: hospital superbugs, variant pneumonias, air-transmitted HIVs. Ignoring the fundamental facts of evolution, you used antibiotics in excess, by this artificial selection process thus producing bacteria resistant to antibiotics. And that is only one small example.’