“Please sit down,” Floris urged. “Smoke if you wish. I have made coffee, or tea can be ready in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, coffee will be fine.” Everard took an armchair. She brought pot, cups, cream, sugar from the kitchen, put them on a low table, and settled on the couch opposite him.
“Do you prefer we use English or Temporal?” she asked.
He liked her approach, straightforward yet not brusque. “English for now,” he decided. The Patrol speech had a grammar capable of handling chronokinesis, variable time, and the associated paradoxes, but when it came to human things was as weak as artificial languages generally are. (An Esperantist who hits his thumb with a hammer will not likely yell, “Excremento!”) “I’m after a sketchy, preliminary understanding of what this is about.”
“Why, I thought you would arrive prepared. What I have here that is not at the office is—oh, pictures, small objects, the kind of things one brings back from missions, things that have no particular value to science or anyone else but hold memories. Doesn’t one?” Everard nodded. “Well, I thought if I took them from their drawer they might help give you a better feel for the milieu, or remind me of observations I made that you may find useful.”
He sipped. The coffee was the way he preferred it, hot and strong. “Good thinking. We’ll look them over later. But whenever it’s practicable, I’d rather start by hearing about a case in direct, first-hand terms. The precise details, the scholarly analysis, the broad picture, those mean more to me afterward.” In other words, I’m not an intellectual, I’m a farm boy who became first an engineer and then a cop.
“But I have not been on the scene either,” she said.
“I know. None of the corps have yet, have they? However, you’ve been informed of the problem in some circumstantiality, and I’m sure you’ve given it much thought in the light of your experience, your particular expertise. That makes you the closest thing to an observer we’ve got.”
Everard leaned forward. “Okay,” he went on, “what I can tell you is this. The Middle Command asked me if I’d investigate. They’d received a report of inconsistencies in a chronicle of Tacitus’s, and it has them worried. The events concerned evidently center on the Low Countries in the first century A.D. That happens to be your field, and you and I are more or less contemporaries”—a generation between our births, is it?—“so we should be able to cooperate more or less efficiently. That’s why I’m the Unattached agent they contacted.” Everard gestured at David Copperfield. He’d show her the two of them had something more in common. “Barkis is willin’. I called Ten Brink and then you almost immediately, and followed close behind. Maybe I should first have studied my Tacitus. I’d read him, of course, but quite a while ago on my world line and it’s gotten vague. I did glance over the material again, but just a glance, and he gets sort of convoluted, doesn’t he? Go ahead and fill me in from the ground up. If you repeat something I already know, what harm?”
Floris smiled. “You have a most disarming manner, sir,” she murmured. “Is it on purpose?” Momentarily he wondered if she was being flirtatious; but she tautened and proceeded, businesslike, well-nigh academic:
“You are certainly aware that both the Annals and the Histories came down to later centuries incomplete. Of the Histories, the oldest copy that survived contained only four books of the original twelve, and part of the fifth. That part broke off in the middle of describing what we have become troubled about. Naturally, when time travel is developed, an expedition will in due course go to his era and recover the lost sections. They are much desired. Tacitus is not the most reliable chronicler who ever wrote, but he is a notable stylist, a moralist—and for some occurrences, the single written source of any importance.”
Everard nodded. “Yeah. Explorers read the historians for clues to what they should look for and look out for, before they set off to chart what really happened.” He coughed. “Why am I telling you your business? Pardon me. Mind if I light a pipe?”
“Not at all,” Floris said absently before she continued. “Yes, the complete Histories, as well as the Germania, have been among my principal guides. I found countless details are different from what he wrote, but that is to be expected. In broad outline, and usually in particulars, his account of the great rebellion and its aftermath is trustworthy.”
She paused, then, stubbornly honest: “I have not done my research alone, you realize. Far from it. Others are busy in hundreds of years before and after my special period, in areas from Russia to Ireland. And there are those, the truly indispensable ones, who sit at home to assemble, correlate, and analyze our reports. But it chances that I operate in and around what are now the Netherlands and the nearby parts of Belgium and Germany, during the time when the Celtic influence was dying away—after the Roman conquest of Gaul—and the Germanic peoples were beginning to develop truly distinctive cultures. It is not much we have learned, either, set beside everything we do not know. We are too few.”
Too few indeed, Everard thought. With half a million years or more to guard, the Patrol’s forever undermanned, stretched thin, compromising, improvising. We get some help from civilian scientists, but most of them work out of civilizations millennia uptime; their interests are often too alien. And yet we’ve got to uncover the hidden truths of history, to have an inkling of what the moments are when it could too easily be changed. . . . From a god’s-eye viewpoint, Janne Floris, you’re probably worth more to the cause of preserving the reality that brought us into being than I am.
Her rueful laugh pulled him back from his recollections. He felt grateful; they kept recurring to plague him. “How professorish, no?” she exclaimed. “And how shopworn obvious. Please believe I generally talk better to the point. Today I am nervous.” Humor faded. Did she shiver? “I am not used to this. Confronting death, yes, but oblivion, the nothingness of everything I ever knew—” Her mouth firmed. She sat straight. “Forgive me.”
Having stoked his pipe, Everard struck a match and sent the first pungency across his tongue. “You’ll find you’re plenty tough,” he assured her. “You’ve proved it. I want to hear about your field experiences.”
“Later.” For an instant she looked away. He thought he saw hauntedness. Her gaze returned to him, her words became crisp. “Three days ago a special agent had me in for a long consultation. A research team had obtained their own text of the Histories. You heard?”
“Uh-huh.” Brief though his briefing was, Everard had been told. Sheer happenstance; or was it? (Causality can double back on itself in strange ways.) Sociologists studying Rome, early second century A.D., found on short notice that they needed to know what the upper classes thought of the Emperor Domitian, who died a couple of decades earlier. Did they really remember him as a Stalin, or concede that he’d done a few worthwhile things? The later sections of Tacitus eloquently expressed the negative view. It seemed easier to borrow his work from a private library and surreptitiously duplicate it than to send uptime for a data file. “They noticed differences from the standard version as they remembered it—if it is the standard version—and comparison showed the differences are radical.”
“Far beyond copyist’s errors, author’s revisions, or anything else reasonable,” Floris emphasized. “Detective work proved it was not a forgery, but an authentic copy of a manuscript by Tacitus himself. And, while the phrasing varies between them, as one would expect if they led toward two separate endings—the chronicle as such, the narrative line, does not split until the fifth book, very soon after the scene where the copy that survived breaks off. Is this coincidence?”