Time's Chariot

work things out, Mr Garron. A long time, and I’ve decided the Home Time just doesn’t deserve to exist. That kind of society is wrong, and if I can stop it then that can only be good.’

‘You can’t stop it,’ Rico said quietly.

‘I can try! I’ll put the information on servers, I’ll write it on documents, I’ll carve it in stone, I’ll encode it in genomes, I’ll bury it in people’s subconscious, I’ll put it in so many places that your people could never get it all back.’

‘You can’t,’ Rico said, more firmly. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Then how?’ Alan said.

Rico couldn’t answer for a moment: the mental block against giving information to bygoners had come back. He had to force out the words with an effort of will.

‘If — and it’s a big if — if you could get enough power to change things, without the Home Time picking it up and stopping you, all you’d do is create a fresh timestream,’ Rico said. ‘And the stream would still inevitably end in the Home Time, because that’s how it works. Morbern accidentally created several new streams when he first transferred. And every stream contains billions of people with as much right to live their own lives as you or me, so once a stream is created, you can’t uncreate it without being as big a murderer as several thousand twentieth-century dictators rolled into one. So, ever since then, the Home Time has carefully been splicing all the streams together again. There’s no way the Home Time won’t happen.’

Alan was quiet for a few moments, digesting this. Then:

‘Morbern,’ he said. ‘Supposing I were to look up everyone of that name now living… I wouldn’t even have to use violence, just get them sterilized…’

‘He’s still several centuries off,’ Rico said. ‘I don’t even know who his parents were, let alone his triple great-grandparents, and at that generational distance, all that would happen is that someone else would be his triple great-grandma instead.’

‘Then I wait until that individual is born! I can—’

‘But you won’t be around that long,’ Rico said, surprised.

‘Why not?’ Alan asked with a frown.

‘Recall Day!’ Rico said.

He wasn’t sure what reaction he expected: Alan to slap his forehead and say he had forgotten? What he didn’t expect was:

‘Oh, that.’ Alan could not have sounded less interested. ‘That’s another Home Time myth I gave up believing a long time ago, Mr Garron.’

‘A myth?’ Rico said. ‘It’s not a myth! It’s—’

‘It’s something the Home Time told me,’ Alan said, ‘and therefore it’s another lie, like everything else they’ve said.’ He crossed to the table and pressed a button. ‘Come in now.’ He looked up. ‘I was prepared to believe you were different, Mr Garron, but if you’re as much a liar as your masters, you have nothing useful to tell me. Not of your own free will.’

The door opened and a group of very strong, very burly men in white coats came in.

‘Oh, you’re kidding!’ Rico said.

‘Take him,’ Alan said, and they pounced.

Rico aimed low, diving between their legs in one smooth motion. He had the move neatly planned in his mind’s eye: dart between the two men nearest, come out of the dive into a somersault and leap for the door. Worry about navigating the hall, its grounds and its private army in nothing but a pair of shorts later.

But his weak, drugged, zapped body betrayed him, and he ploughed into the marble tiles and stayed there. Then they were on him. He managed to get a foot into one man’s solar plexus and used the half second’s respite to get to his knees, and as another man laid hands on him he sent his assailant flying over his shoulder. But then a sheer weight of bodies fell on top of him and pinned him down, and he was lifted up and carried to the bed, fighting and struggling but with each limb held off the ground by a different man so that not even his training could help.

‘It’s true!’ he shouted. ‘Recall Day is true!’

Alan was deliberately not looking at him as he walked out of the door.

‘It was Daiho’s fall-back plan!’ Rico yelled, just as the door closed. ‘It was how he was going to get back if all else failed! Do you think he’d have relied on a lie to get back home…’

Something cold and metal touched his arm, and there was a hiss, and darkness.

Rico Garron floated in a haze. Lights flashed in his eyes, high and low frequencies vibrated in his ears and from time to time the feeling of cold metal against his skin announced the influx of another rush of fact-finding chemicals into his bloodstream. And without his fieldsuit and Home Time equipment, he could do nothing about it. He only had willpower and training to fight the constant stream of questions that dragged up information from the furthest recesses of his memory, and it was a lost battle.

– What is a correspondent?

Even in his haze, the question caught him by surprise. He had told them everything he knew of the history of the next five hundred years, up to 2593 when the Home Time was created. He had regurgitated everything he had ever heard in his training about the theory of transference. But this was a sudden non sequitur.

‘A reporter.’ Part of Rico’s mind felt smug that, though he couldn’t help answering questions, he was able to give literal answers that weren’t very helpful.

– What is a correspondent in the context of the Home Time?

‘An individual who is sent back in time to report on history.’

– How many are there?

‘Hundreds. Thousands. Don’t know.’

– How are correspondents selected?

‘They’re citizens who fail to make the grade.’

– In what way?

‘First they were the incurable psychopaths, the people who in your century would be executed or lobotomized.’

– First? What changed?

‘They caused too many problems. Their conditioning broke down and they took it out on the bygoners. Termination squads had to be sent back after them.’

– So what are they now?

‘The malcontents, or people who still find themselves unable to fit into the Home Time. People whose social preparation fails. Some volunteer…’

It seemed there wasn’t one secret of the Home Time that they didn’t already know about, Rico thought, as details of the correspondents programme came pouring out of him. Their practical immortality, their enhanced physical skills, the reporting station on the moon — everything.

– Tell us about symbing…

An amazed Matthew Carradine stood with his arms folded, head shaking slowly in wonder, and watched the scene playing out on the display in his office. The captive’s slow slur was annoying — it could take him a minute to come out with a whole sentence — but the recording had been spliced to weed out the junk and the content more than made up for any inconvenience.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘So where are they now?’

‘Back in their rooms,’ Alan replied.

‘Uh-huh.’ Carradine turned back to the display. ‘These correspondents. It’s incredible! Hundreds, thousands of incognito time travellers?’

‘Quite a clever way of getting rid of your society’s rejects,’ Alan said thoughtfully.

‘Not if you’re sending the psychos back.’

‘He said they changed that,’ Alan said, still more thoughtfully.

‘Immortals,’ Carradine marvelled. He turned to the drinks cabinet. ‘There’ve always been legends about people who never died. They probably started them.’

‘Probably. Here, let me get that, Matthew.’

‘Who told them to ask about these correspondents?’ Carradine said, stepping aside as Alan moved in to fix