cleared Rico’s head.
‘I told them to keep zapping you the moment you looked like waking up, so you’ve got a lot to get out of your system,’ said Alan. ‘You’re probably a lot more dangerous than Hossein Asaldra.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘I imagine it’s harder without that organic box of tricks you were wearing.’
‘Slightly.’
‘And I don’t suppose you’ll be surprised to hear it’s almost evaporated. Holes appeared in it the moment we took it off you and now it’s all but gone.’
‘Of course.’ Rico did feel better. He struggled slowly up into a sitting position and leaned back against the headboard. ‘Can’t—
The agrav and field computer would have gone the same way, of course, and Rico knew his duty, painful though it was. He pulsed the mental signal that destroyed the symb network in his brain, reducing it to a cocktail of innocuous proteins that would be flushed out by his body. There was now nothing that could connect him with the Home Time: he was on his own in the early twenty-first century.
Or not entirely. ‘Asaldra?’ he said.
‘Currently spilling his guts into a waiting digital recorder,’ said Alan, ‘and very interesting it is too.’ He sat on a bedside chair and looked at Rico. Rico took exception to the half smile on his face.
‘You’re being very nice to me, all of a sudden,’ he said.
‘I’ve already established that Asaldra doesn’t like you,’ Alan said. ‘I don’t know about the rest of our former guests—’
‘Where are they?’ Rico interrupted.
‘They went. You didn’t. Is that what Asaldra called probability masking?’
Rico groaned. ‘When they shot me,’ he said, ‘did I fall on top of you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Rico muttered. The recall field hadn’t known what to make of two different probability frequencies — his and Alan’s — so close together, and as a result neither of them had been picked up. Great. Then: ‘You were saying? The rest of your former guests?’
‘I don’t know what their opinions of you might be, but any enemy of Asaldra might well be a friend of mine.’
‘It’s mutual.’
Alan raised his eyebrows. ‘That sounds heartfelt.’ Rico glared up at him.
‘Mr Asaldra decided I’d discovered his little game,’ he said, ‘so he tried to discourage me, and everything he did — he got me reprimanded, he got me beaten up — it all just led me more and more to the facts. If he’d just left me alone, I’d have gone away, and I’d never have found out. And I still don’t know exactly what he’s up to.’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Alan said casually. He crossed his legs and sat back. ‘Asaldra and his friends want to save the Home Time.’
‘From what?’ Rico said.
‘From the, um, space nations? What are they?’
‘Oh, them,’ Rico said. ‘All the colonies that declared independence. They’re way ahead of us in space technology and even though Earth’s overpopulated they won’t let us out to join them. Yeah, there’s some resentment. And?’
‘And they think the technology that made the Home Time could be used in Earth’s favour.’
‘They’re probably right, if the College would let them, which it never will.’
‘Ah!’ Alan looked pleased with himself. ‘But apparently, in your time, the Home Time has only got twenty- seven years left to run?’
Rico was about to nod, but old habits suddenly caught up with him. Maybe Asaldra had told Alan everything, but that would have been under drugs. He should be more reticent.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘This man Jean Morbern created a singularity which acts as a fixed point of reference in time, and that makes transference possible. But that singularity will expire due to quantum decay in twenty-seven years, and no one knows how to make another.’
Alan looked at him as if to confirm the facts so far: Rico still said nothing. Alan shrugged.
‘So Asaldra — though the Daiho man was actually in charge — and his colleagues went to where science began.’
‘Huh?’ said Rico.
‘They sent me back, a correspondent, with a predisposition to seek out the philosophers. And not just any philosophers but the ones whose insights, breadth of mind, lateral viewpoints laid the foundations of science. I interviewed them, Asaldra came back to record their memeplexes in crystal, and they set up a base here in the twenty-first century so that Daiho, with all his philosophical training, could recreate the science that had led to Morbern’s experiments.’
Alan finished with a satisfied smile. ‘Easy, really.’
‘That… that’s it?’ Rico said, astonished. ‘That’s it? Why all the cloak-and-dagger? Why didn’t they just say so?’
‘Apparently your Register is programmed to prevent this kind of thing. This Morbern character wanted the Home Time to end naturally. And they had other reasons. You don’t think they were going to give the secret to the whole world, do you? Does Asaldra strike you as an altruist?’ Alan’s face twisted. ‘No. He and his clique were going to monopolize the knowledge. Make Earth great among the space nations, yes, but at the same time they were going to set themselves up as kings.’
Rico snorted. ‘That’s the one unsurprising thing you’ve said. So, now he’s told you everything, what are you going to do with it?’
Alan sighed, paused, sighed again. ‘One thing Mr Asaldra is rather weak on,’ he said, ‘is the history of the Home Time. How it all came about. I don’t think he ever really needed to know. You strike me as the kind of man who likes to find things out. How are you at Home Time History 101?’
‘And what would you do with that knowledge?’ Rico said suspiciously.
‘Stop the Home Time from happening.’
Rico felt like laughing, but laughing required strength he didn’t have, so he just shook his head, very slowly in case it fell off. He did feel strong enough to get up, so he pushed back the covers and padded in his shorts to the tall bay windows. He looked out onto parkland. Tastefully landscaped gardens lay outside. Beyond them was a field with three parked helicopters; and beyond them, the rim of a natural grassy bowl where a herd of deer grazed. Trees surrounded the lip of the bowl.
‘Matthew bought the hall as headquarters for BioCarr a few years ago,’ said Alan behind him. ‘I’ve got out of some prisons in my time, but even I would find this place a challenge. The grounds are crawling with guards, the security systems are absolute state of the art, and if you can’t fly or make yourself invisible…’
‘I get the idea,’ Rico said. He turned back to Alan. ‘Um — this plan of yours…’
Alan’s expression went cold again. Rico recognized the look. This was obviously the correspondent’s way of showing strong emotion.
‘I don’t know much about the Home Time,’ Alan said, ‘but I can guess from the clues I’ve got. I think the people of the Home Time are the smuggest, most amoral bunch of hypocrites that the world will ever see.’
‘I’m with you so far,’ said Rico, but Alan ignored him.
‘They send us correspondents back, give us blithe assurances about how easy it will all be with these organic survival machines that we call bodies, but do they come themselves? Oh, no! It’s far too dangerous. And, in the meantime they lie to us, they abuse us, they take advantage of us… and they still expect us to be loyal! I saw the way Asaldra and his friends acted. They felt so superior to us thicky bygoners. And I saw the way they treated those two engineers they brought with them. That young man and young woman were the only two among them with any kind of useful skill, anything to contribute, and they treated them like dirt.’
‘And you work for BioCarr?’ Rico asked.
Alan paused, took a breath. ‘BioCarr is big and powerful,’ he said, ‘and will become much more so over the next few years, but Matthew Carradine is one hundred per cent meritocrat. Promotion is by sheer ability and no one stays promoted without constantly proving that ability. But this is all just part of it! I’ve had a long, long time to
