Nevertheless Everard’s tone harshened. When he said, “We Unattached have broad discretion,” he was not merely rehashing the obvious.
“Of course, of course,” Guion responded with feline mildness. “I only hope to squeeze a few more drops of information out of what you experienced and observed. Then by all means enjoy your well-earned leisure.” Softer yet: “May I ask if your plans include Miss Wanda Tamberly?”
Everard started. He nearly slopped his drink. “Huh?” Recovery. Grab the initiative. “Is that what you’re here for, to talk about her?”
“Well, you recommended her recruitment.”
“And she’s passed the preliminary tests, hasn’t she?”
“Certainly. But you met her when she was caught up in that Peruvian episode. A brief but strenuous and revealing acquaintance.” Guion chuckled. “Since then, you have cultivated the relationship. That is no secret.”
“Not heavily,” Everard snapped. “She’s very young. But, yeah, I consider her a friend.” He paused. “A protégée of sorts, if you like.”
We’ve had a couple of dates. Then I went off to Phoenicia, and on my time line it’s been weeks … and I’ve returned to the same spring when the two of us were first together in San Francisco.
“Yes, I’ll doubtless be seeing her again,” he added. “But she has plenty else to keep her busy. Doubling back up to September in the Galapagos Islands, that she was snatched out of, and home in the usual fashion, and several months to arrange twentieth-century appearances so she can leave without raising questions in people’s minds—Arh! Why the devil am I repeating what you perfectly well know?”
Thinking aloud, I suppose. Wanda’s no Bronwen, but she may well, all unawares, help me put Bronwen behind me, as I’ve got to do. As I’ve had to do now and then before…. Everard wasn’t given to self-analysis. The realization jolted him that what he needed to regain inner peace was not another love affair but a few more times in the presence of innocence. Like a thirsty man finding a spring to drink from, high on a mountainside—Afterward, let him get on with his life, and she with her new one in the Patrol.
Chilclass="underline" Unless they don’t accept her, in spite of everything. “And why are you interested, anyway? Are you concerned with personnel? Has anybody expressed doubts about her?”
Guion shook his head. “On the contrary. The psycho-probe gave her an excellent profile. Later examinations will be mainly for the usual purposes, to help guide her training and her earlier field assignments.”
“Good.” A glow kindled in Everard and eased him. He’d been smoking too hard. The tart coolness of a draught eased his tongue.
“I mentioned her simply because the events that caused your world line to intersect hers involved Exaltationists,” Guion said. The voice was most quiet, considering what it bore. “Earlier along yours, you had thwarted their effort to subvert Simόn Bolívar’s career. In the course of aiding Miss Tamberly—who defended herself so ably—you kept them from hijacking Atahuallpa’s ransom and changing the history of the Spanish Conquest. Now you have rescued ancient Tyre from them, and captured most of those who remained at large, including Merau Varagan. Wonderfully done. However, the task is not finished.”
“True,” Everard agreed as low.
“I am here to … feel out the situation,” Guion told him. “I cannot express precisely what I seek, even if I use Temporal.” His speech continued level, but he smiled no longer and something terrible stood behind the slanted eyes. “What is involved is no more amenable to symbolic logic than is the concept of mutable reality. ‘Intuition’ or ‘revelation’ are words equally inadequate. I seek … whatever measure of comprehension is possible.” After a silence in which the city noises seemed muted by remoteness: “We shall talk, in an informal fashion. I will try to get some sense of how your experiences felt to you. That is all. A reminiscent conversation, after which you will be free to go where you like.
“Yet think. Can it be entirely coincidental that you, Manson Everard, have thrice been in action against the Exaltationists? Only once did you set forth with any idea that they might be responsible for certain disturbances. Despite this, you became the nemesis of Merau Varagan, who—I can now admit—roused fear in the Middle Command. Was this happenstance? Was it accidental, too, that Wanda Tamberly got drawn into the vortex—when she already, unbeknownst to herself, had a kinsman in the Patrol?”
“He was the reason that she—” Everard’s protest trailed off. Within him shivered: Who is this, really? What is he?
“Therefore we wish to know more about you,” Guion said. “Not prying into your personal lives, but hoping for a clue to what I can only, misleadingly, call the hyper-matrix of the continuum. Such knowledge may help us plan how to track down the last Exaltationists. They are desperate and revengeful, you know. We must.”
“I see,” Everard breathed.
A pulse beat through him. He scarcely heard Guion’s coda, “And beyond that necessity, perhaps, a larger meaning, a direction and an ending—” nor how Guion chopped it short, as though he had let slip out what should not. Everard was harking back, gazing forward, abruptly hound-eager, aware that what he needed was not surcease but the completion of the hunt.
PART TWO
WOMEN AND HORSES AND POWER AND WAR
1985 A.D.
Here, where the Bear stars wheeled too low, night struck cold into blood and bone. By day, mountains closed off every horizon with stone, snow, glaciers, clouds. A man’s mouth dried as he gasped his way over the ridges, rocks rattling from beneath his boots, for he could never draw one honest breath of air. And then there was fear of the rifle bullet or the knife after dark that would spill his bit of life out on this empty land.
To Yuri Alexeievitch Garshin, the captain appeared as an angel from his grandmother’s Heaven. It was on the third day since the ambush. He had tried to head northeast, generally down though it always seemed most of his steps were upward, the weight of the earth upon them. Somewhere yonder lay the camp. His sleeping bag gave him small rest; again and again terror snatched him back to a loneliness just as cruel. Careful with what field rations were in his kit, he took few bites at a time, and hunger pangs had now dulled. Nevertheless, little remained to him. He found plenty of water for his canteen, springs or the melt of remnant snowbanks, but had nothing to heat it. The samovar in his parents’ cottage was a half-remembered dream—the whole collective farm, larksong above ryefields, wildflowers to the world’s edge, he walking hand in hand with Yelena Borisovna. Here grew only lichen on rock, thinly strewn thorn scrub, pale clumps of grass. The one sound other than his footfalls, breath, pulsebeat was the wind. A large bird rode it, well aloft. Garshin didn’t know what kind it was. A vulture, waiting for him to die? No, surely the vultures feasted on his comrades—
A crag jutted from the slope ahead. He changed course to round it, wondering how much more that threw him off the proper track to his company. All at once he saw the man who stood beneath the mass.
Enemy! He grabbed for the Kalashnikov slung at his shoulder. Then: No. That’s a Soviet outfit. A warm blind wave poured through him. His knees went soft.
When he could see again, the man had come close. His garb was clean, fresh-looking. Officer’s insignia glittered in the hard upland sunlight, yet a pack and bedroll rode on his back. He carried merely a sidearm, yet he strode unafraid and unwearied. Clearly he was no Afghan government soldier, wearing issue supplied by the ally. His body was stocky, muscular, the face beneath the helmet fair-skinned but broad in the cheekbones and a bit slanty in the eyes—from somewhere around Lake Ladoga, perhaps, Garshin thought weakly.