Varagan halted near the crag and sat waiting. The musket was sheathed and his hands rested empty on the saddlebow. His horse quivered and swayed, neck a-droop, utterly blown, lather swept freezingly off its hide and out of its mane.
Everard took forth his energy gun and clattered nigh. Behind him, a remount whickered. Still Varagan waited.
Everard stopped three yards off. “Merau Varagan, you are under arrest by the Time Patrol,” he called in Temporal.
The other smiled. “You have the advantage of me,” he replied in a soft tone that, somehow, carried. “May I request the honor of learning your name and provenance?”
“Uh… Manson Everard, Unattached, born in the United States of America about a hundred years uptime. No matter. You’re coming back with me. Hold on while I call a hopper. I warn you, at the least suspicion you’re about to try something, I’ll shoot. You’re too dangerous for me to be squeamish.”
Varagan made a gentle gesture. “Really? How much do you know about me, Agent Everard, or think you know, to justify this violent an attitude?”
“Well, when a man takes potshots at me, I reckon he’s not a very nice person.”
“Might I perhaps have believed you were a bandit, of the sort who haunt these uplands? What crime am I alleged to have committed?”
Everard’s free hand paused on its way to get out the little communicator in his pocket. For a moment, eerily fascinated, he stared through the wind at his prisoner.
Merau Varagan seemed taller than he actually was, as straight as he held his athletic frame. Black hair tossed around a skin whose whiteness the sun and the weather had not tinged at all. There was no sign of beard. The face might have been a young Caesar’s, were it not too finely chiseled. The eyes were large and green, the smiling lips cherry-red. His clothes, down to the boots, were silver-trimmed black, like the cape that flapped about his shoulders. Seen against the turreted crag, he made Everard remember Dracula.
Yet his voice remained mild: “Evidently your colleagues have extracted information from mine. I daresay you have been in touch with them as you fared. Thus you know our names and somewhat of our origin—”
Thirty-first millennium. Outlaws after the failure of the Exaltationists to cast off the weight of a civilization grown older than the Old Stone Age was to me. During their moment of power, they possessed themselves of time machines. Their genetic heritage—
Nietzsche might have understood them. I never will.
“—But what do you truly know of our purpose here?”
“You were going to change events,” Everard retorted. “We barely forestalled you. At that, our corps has a lot of tricky restoration work ahead. Why did you do it? How could you be so… so selfish?”
“I think ‘egoistic’ might be a better word,” Varagan gibed. “The ascendancy of the ego, the unconfined will—But think. Would it have been altogether bad if Simon Bolivar had founded a true empire in Hispanic America, rather than a gaggle of quarrelsome successor states? It would have been enlightened, progressive. Imagine how much suffering and death would have been averted.”
“Come off that!” Everard felt anger rise and rise within himself. “You must know better. It’s impossible. Bolivar hasn’t the cadre, the communications, the support. If he’s a hero to many, he’s at least got many others furious with him: like the Peruvians, after he detached Bolivia. He’ll cry on his deathbed that he ‘plowed the sea’ in all his efforts to build a stable society.
“If you meant it about unifying even part of the continent, you’d have tried earlier and elsewhere.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes. The only chance. I’ve studied the situation. In 1821 San Martin was negotiating with the Spanish in Peru, and playing with the idea of setting up a monarchy under somebody like Don Carlos, King Ferdinand’s brother. It could have included the territories of Bolivia and Ecuador, maybe later Chile and Argentina, because it would have had the advantages Bolivar’s inner sphere lacks. But why am I telling you this, you bastard, except to prove I know you’re lying? You must have done your own homework.”
“What then do you suppose my real objective was?”
“Obvious. To make Bolivar overreach himself. He’s an idealist, a dreamer, as well as a warrior. If he pushes too hard, everything hereabouts will break up in a chaos that could well spread to the rest of South America. And there would be your chance for seizing power!”
Varagan shrugged, as a were-cat might have shrugged. “Concede me this much,” he said, “that such an empire would have had a certain dark magnificence.”
The hopper flashed into being and hovered twenty feet aloft. Its rider grinned and aimed the firearm he carried. From the saddle of his horse, Merau Varagan waved at his time-traveling self.
Everard never quite knew what happened next. Somehow he made it out of the stirrups and onto the ground. His horse screamed as an energy bolt struck. Smoke and a stench of seared flesh spurted forth. Even while the slain animal crumpled, Everard shot back from behind it.
The enemy hopper must veer. Everard skipped clear of the falling mass and maintained fire, upward and sideways. Varagan leaped from his own horse, behind the rock. Lightnings blazed and crackled. Everard’s free hand yanked forth his communicator and thumbed the Mayday spot.
The vehicle dropped, rearward of the crag. Displaced air made a popping noise. Wind blew away the stinging ozone.
A Patrol machine appeared. It was too late. Merau Varagan had already borne his earlier self away to an unknowable point of space-time.
Everard nodded heavily. “Yeah,” he finished, “that was his scheme, and it worked, God damn it. Reach an obvious landmark and note the time on his watch. That meant he’d know, later along his world line, where-when to go, in mounting his rescue operation.”
The Zorachs were appalled. “But, but a casual loop of that sort,” Chaim stammered, “didn’t he have any idea of the dangers?”
“Doubtless he did, including the possibility that he would make himself never have existed,” Everard replied. “But then, he’d been quite prepared to wipe out an entire future, in favor of a history where he could have ridden high. He’s totally fearless, the ultimate desperado. That was built into the genes of the Exaltationist princes.”
He sighed. “They lack loyalty, also. Varagan, and whatever associates he had left, made no attempt to save those we’d captured. They just vanished. We’ve been wary of their reappearance ever ‘since then,’ and this new caper does bear similarities to that one. But of course—time loop hazard again—I can’t go read whatever report I’ll have filed at the conclusion of the present affair. If it has a conclusion, and if I don’t.”
Yael patted his hand. “I’m sure you’ll prevail, Manse,” she said. “What happened next in South America?”
“Oh, once the bad counsel, which he hadn’t recognized was bad—once that stopped, Bolivar went back to his natural ways,” Everard told them. “He made a peaceful settlement with Paez and issued a general amnesty. More troubles broke out later, but he handled them capably and humanely, too, while fostering both the interests and the culture of his people. When he died, most of the great wealth he’d inherited was gone, because he’d never taken a centavo of public money for himself. A good ruler, one of the few that humankind will ever know.