“I’ll try. Meanwhile you rest.” Everard was mainly aware of Tamberly’s gaze upon him. “In the continuum we aborted, Roger and his oldest, ablest son died in battle at Rignano, 1137. The prince who succeeded couldn’t cope. Roger’s enemy, Pope Innocent’s ally, Rainulf took all their mainland possessions away from the Sicilians. Soon they also lost such African conquests as they’d made. Meanwhile anti-Pope Anacletus died and Innocent reigned with a strong hand. When Rainulf died too, the Papacy became the real power in southern Italy as well as in its own states. This encouraged the election of a series of aggressive Popes. Piecemeal they acquired the rest of Italy and, along the way, Sicily.
“Otherwise, for a spell, history proceeded roughly as before. Frederick Barbarossa restored order in the Holy Roman Empire but didn’t come off so well in his quarrels with the Curia. However, in the absence of papal schisms and the presence of papal states growing constantly stronger, imperial ambitions southward were checked. They turned west instead.
“Meanwhile, same as in our world, the Fourth Crusade dropped its original objective. It captured and sacked Constantinople, and installed a Latin king. The Orthodox Church was forcibly united with the Catholic.
“The Far East was little affected as yet, the Americas and the Pacific not at all. I don’t know what happened next. This—roughly 1250—was as far as we investigated, and that only sketchily. Too much else to do, too few people for the job.”
“And you itch for the rest of the story, both of you,” Denison said, more vigorously than before. “Okay, I’ll give you a synopsis. No more. In due course I may write a book or two.”
“We need that,” Tamberly replied soberly. “We’ll learn things about ourselves we never would otherwise.”
She does have her serious side, and a damn good mind to back it up, Everard thought. Still young. But am I really old?
Denison cleared his throat. “Here goes. Barbarossa didn’t conquer France, but he gave it enough trouble that its unification process was halted, and in the course of the Plantagenet-Capetian Wars—they must correspond roughly to our Hundred Years’ War—the English prevailed, till there was an Anglo-French state. In its shadow, Spain and Portugal never amounted to a lot. And early on, the Holy Roman Empire fell apart in a welter of civil wars.”
Everard nodded. “I’d’ve expected that,” he said. “Frederick II was never born.”
“Hm?”
“Barbarossa’s grandson. Remarkable character. Pulled his ramshackle Empire back together and gave the Popes a hell of a time. But his mother was a posthumous daughter of Roger II, who in our history died in 1154.”
“I see. That explains quite a bit…. In yonder world, the Welf faction, pro-papal, generally got the upper hand, so Germany became more and more another set of papal states, in fact if not in name. Meanwhile the Mongols penetrated far into Europe, I think farther than in our world, because their internal wars left the Germans in no shape to send help against them. When they withdrew, eastern Europe was a wreck, and German colonists gradually took it over. The Italians got control of the Balkans. The French tail wagged the English dog till there wasn’t much to show except a funny pronunciation—”
Denison sighed, “No matter details. As almighty as the Catholic Church became, it suppressed all dissent. The Renaissance never happened, the Reformation, the scientific revolution. As the secular states decayed, they fell more and more under the sway of the Church. That began when the Italian city-states started picking clergymen to head their republics. There was a period of religious wars, schismatic more than doctrinal, but Rome prevailed. In the end, the Pope was supreme over all kings in Europe. A sort of Christian Caliphate.
“They were technologically backward by our standards, but did reach America in the eighteenth century. Their spread over there was very slow. The old countries didn’t have the kind of society that would support explorers or entrepreneurs on an adequate scale, and they kept their colonists on a tight leash. Also, in the nineteenth century the whole system began breaking down, rebellions and wars and depressions and general misery. When I arrived, the Mexicans and Peruvians were holding out against conquest, though their leaders were half white and half Christian. Muslim adventurers were intervening. You see, Islam was enjoying a rebirth of energy and enterprise. So was Russia. After they got rid of the Mongols, the Tsars looked more west than east, because weakened Europe was such a tempting prize.
“At the time Wanda rescued me, the Russians were close to the Rhine and the Turk-Arab alliance was pushing into the eastern Alps. Men like Archcardinal Albin tried to play one off against another. I guess they had some success for a while, because she found my garden intact in 1989, but I doubt it lasted long beyond that. I’d say the Muslims and Russians overran Europe and afterward went for each other’s throats.”
Denison sank back, finally exhausted.
“Looks like we’ve restored what was better,” Everard said awkwardly.
Tamberly stared into a corner. Listening, she had grown sober, even somber. “But we’ve done away with billions of human beings, haven’t we?” she murmured. “And their songs and jokes, loves and dreams.”
Anger touched Everard. “Together with their serfdoms, diseases, ignorances, and superstitions,” he snapped. “That world never got the idea of science, checking logic against fact. Obviously not. So it went on and on in its wretchedness, till—Except it didn’t, We prevented. I refuse to feel guilty. We made our people real again.”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes,” Tamberly breathed. “I didn’t—”
The hall door opened. They looked about. A woman stood there, seven feet tall, gaunt, long-limbed, golden-skinned, eagle-faced. “Komozino!” Everard cried. He scrambled to his feet. “Unattached agent,” he told his friends, toppling or climbing from homely English to precise Temporal.
“Like you,” she said. Her stiff courtesy shattered. “Agent Everard, I have been searching for you. We have reports from our scouts uptime. The mission has failed.”
He stood numbed.
“True, King Roger continues his days,” Komozino went on unmercifully. “He secures the Regno, extends his holdings in Africa, draws to his court some of the greatest intellects of the age, dies in bed 1154, is succeeded by his son William, yes, everything as it should be. But we still have no contact with the farther future. There is still no Patrol post established later than about the mid-twelfth century. A quick reconnaissance uptime found a world still alien to everything we knew. What now has chaos done?”
1989 β A. D.
Three timecycles hung at eagle height over the Golden Gate. Morning fog whitened the coast, the great bay shone, earth rolled inland, summer-tawny. Beside the strait, rock masses traced where walls, towers, strongholds had been. Brush grew about them. It had almost wholly reclaimed the crumbled adobe of lesser buildings. A village occupied the site of Sausalito and a few fishing smacks were out on the water.
Tamberly’s radio voice came thin beneath the whittering wind: “My guess is that the city never recovered from the 1906 quake. Maybe enemies took advantage of the broken defenses and sacked what was left. And nobody since has had the means or the heart to restore it. Shall we go downtime and see?”
Everard shook his head. “No point in that, and we’ve no right to take extra risks. Where should we next look?”
“The Central Valley ought to give us clues. In our twentieth century it was one of the world’s richest agricultural areas.” He heard the slight quaver, like a shivering in the cold.
“Okay. Pick the coordinates,” he said.