“Hai?”
“Hai. Ya Steffens Aleksandr. Korul Yamashita ha’kalla.”
His voice activated a monitor. The guard stared at the resulting picture, then searched Stef’s face as if another, unauthorized face might be concealed beneath it. Finally he spoke to the security system, which silently opened a bronze-plated steel door.
In the public areas of the Lion House multicolored marble and crimson carvedshishi were everywhere, but here where the action was the hallways were blank, slapped together out of semiplast and floored with dusty gray mats. Light panels glowed in the ceiling, doors were blank, to confuse intruders. Stef, who knew the corridor well, counted nineteen doors and knocked.
He gasped as a stench that would have done honor to a real lion house hit him in the face. The door had been opened by a Darksider, and its furry mandrill face gazed at him with blackcat pupils set in huge around eyes the color of ripe raspberries. The creature had two big arms and two little ones; one big arm held the door, one rested on its gunbelt, and the two little ones scratched the thick fur on its chest.
“Korul Yamashita mi zhdat,”Stef managed to say without choking. Colonel Yama awaits me. The Darksider moved aside and he made his way through the dim guardroom followed by an unblinking red/ black stare. He knocked again, and at last entered Yamashita’s office.
“Hai,”said Stef, but Yama wasted no time.
“Stef, I got a problem,” he began. Everything in the office was made of black or white duroplast, as if to withstand an earthquake or a revolution. Stef slipped into a blackchair that apparently had been consciously shaped to cause discomfort.
“Why the animal outside? Can’t you afford a human guard?” asked Stef, looking around for a kif pipe and seeing none.
“Everybody important has a Darksider now. More reliable, even if they do stink. Now listen. This information is absolutely a be header, so I hope your necktingles if you ever feel an urge to divulge it. For months I been getting vague reports from the Lion Sector about terrorists who are interested in time travel. Now something’s happened here on Earth. Somebody’s pirated a wormholer from the University.”
“Oh, shit.” Since Stef hadn’t even known that a real wormholer existed, his surprise was genuine.
“The people who were responsible for the machine are now with Kathmann in the White Chamber and I assure you that if it was an inside job the Security Forces will soon know.”
“I bet they will.”
“I don’t have to spell out for you the danger if someglupetz gets at the past. Ever since the technology came along, assholes have been wanting to go back and change this, change that. They don’t understand the chaotic effect of such changes. They don’t see how things can spin out of control.”
Yamashita sat brooding, a man who had devoted his life to control.
“They think they can manage the time process. They don’t see how some little thing, some insignificant thing, can send history spinning off in some direction they haven’t foreseen, nobody’s foreseen.”
Stef nodded. He was thinking about someone monkeying with the past, suddenly causing himself, or Dzhun, or the genius who had synthesized kif to wink out of existence. It was hard to maintain Holy Indifference in the face of possibilities like that.
“What can I do?”
But Yama hadn’t finished complaining.
“Why don’t thesesvini do something useful?” he fretted.Svini meant swine. “Why don’t they try to change the future instead of the past, try to make it better?”
“Possibly because you’d execute them if they did.”
Suddenly Yama grinned. He and Stef went back a long way; the academy, service on Io, on Luna. They had been rivals once but no longer. Yama headed the Security Service at the Lion House, a fat job; the Lion Sector which it administered was a huge volume of space with hundreds of inhabited worlds stretching up the spiral arm toward the dense stars of the galactic center.
Meanwhile Stef was out on his ass, picking up small assignments to solve problems Yama didn’t want to go public with. Like the present one: Yama had no authority on Earth, but suspected a connection between a local happening and one in Far Space. As an agent, Stef had two great advantages-he was reliable and deniable.
“It’s true,” Yama went on, “I like things as they are. Humanity’s been through a lot of crap to get where it is. We need to conserve what we’ve got.”
“Absolutely.”
Yama looked suspiciously at Stef’s bland face. He didn’t like Stef to say things that might be either sincere or ironic, or might wag like a dog’s tail, back and forth.
Stef grinned just a little. “Yama, I really do agree with you. Against all logic I’m happy, and happy people don’t want change. Now, how can I find this wormholer thief?”
Yama was instantly all business again. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know,” he said.
“And not a bit more.”
“Absolutely,” said Yama, who really did have a sense of humor, colonel of security or not. He began by transferring one hundred khans to Stef’s meager bank account, knowing that Stef would promptly spend it and need more, and his need would keep him working.
As Yama talked, across the city in his big, heavily mortgaged house Professor Yang Li-Qutsai was in his study, lecturing to his mashina under staring vaporlamps.
His famous course at the University of the Universe,Origa Nash Mir (Origin of Our World), drew a thousand students every time he gave it. The reason was not profound scholarship-Yang plagiarized almost everything he said-but his brilliance as a speaker. At times he seemed to be a failed actor rather than a successful academic. His image included a long gray beard, a large polished skull, a frightening array of fingernails, and a deep, sonorous voice that made everything he said seem important, whether it was or not. A memory cube recorded his lecture for resale to the off worlds where dismal little academies under strange suns would thrill to the echoes of his wisdom.
Even as he spoke, lucidly, stabbing the air with a long thin index finger that ended in nine centimeters of nail, Yang was calculating what resale and residual rights on the lecture might bring him. Enough to purchase a villa at the fashionable south end of Lake Bai? Peace at home, among his four wives? At least an expensive whore?
On the whole, he thought, I’d better settle for the whore. Half of his two-track mind dreamed of girls even while the other half was retelling the most calamitous event in the brief, horrid history of civilized man. The first lecture of his course was always on the Time of Troubles.
“Considering that the Troubles created our world,” he declared, “it is shocking-yes, shocking-that we know so little about how the disaster began. In two brief years (2091-2093) twelve billion people died, with all their memories. Seven hundred vast cities were obliterated, with all their records; three hundred-odd governments vanished, with all their archives of hardcopy, records, discs, tapes and the first crude memory cubes. No wonder we know so little! “Where and why did the fighting start? The Nine Plagues-when did they break out? Blue Nile hemorrhagic fever and multiple-drug-resistant blackpox were raging in Africa as early as the 2070s.
Annual worldwide outbreaks of lethal influenza had become the rule by 2080. It seems that the Time of Troubles was well under way even before the outbreak of war.”
Introductions were always troublesome: students, realizing they were in for a long hour, began to sink into a trance like state accompanied by fluttering eyelids and restless movements of the pelvis. A warning light on the box glowed green and Yang headed at once into the horror stories that gave the course much of its appeal.
“But the war of 2091 produced the most spectacular effects: the destruction of the cities, the Two Year Winter, and the Great Famine. Let us take as an example the great city of Moscow, where robot excavators have recently given us an in-depth picture-if I may be pardoned a little joke-of the horrors that attended its destruction. A city of thirty million in 2090…”
Detail after horrendous detail followed: the skeleton-choked subway with its still beautiful mosaics recording the reign of Tsar Stalin the Good; the dry trench of the Moskva River whose waters had been vaporized in one glowing instant and blocked by rubble so that the present river flowed fifteen clicks away; the great Kremlin Shield of fused silicon stretching over the one time city center, with its radioactive core that would glow faintly for at least 50,000 years.
Observing with satisfaction that his indicator light was turning from unlucky green to lucky red, Professor Yang
