It may be that this fired Geberic, however forcefully the king had already gone forth. He spent a few more years rallying the East Goths; then he summoned them to follow him and make an end of the Vandal pest.
Dagobert had by now decided he would indeed move south. The Wanderer had told him that that would not be unwise; it was the fate of the Goths, and he might as well be early and get a better pick of holdings. He went about talking this over with yeomen great and small, for he knew his grandfather was right about going in strength. Yet when the war arrow came, in honor he could not but heed. He rode off at the head of better than a hundred men.
That was a grim struggle, ending in a battle which fattened wolves and ravens. There fell the Vandal King Visimar. There too died the older sons of Winnithar, who had hoped to be off with Dagobert. He himself lived, not even badly wounded, and won ringing fame by his doughtiness. Some said that the Wanderer had warded him on the field, spearing foemen, but this he denied. “My father was there, yes, to be with me on the night before the last clash—naught else. We spoke of many and strange things. I asked him not to demean me by doing my fighting for me, and he said that was not the will of Weard.”
The upshot was that the Vandals were routed, overrun, and forced to depart their lands. After scouring to and fro for several years beyond the River Danube, dangerous but wretched, they besought the Emperor Constantine for leave to settle in his realm. Not loth to have fresh warriors guarding his marches, he let them cross into Pannonia.
Meanwhile Dagobert found himself the leader of the Teurings, through his marriage, his inheritance, and the name he had won. He spent a time making them ready, and thereupon took them south.
Few stayed behind, so glittering was the hope. Among those who did were old Winnithar and Salvalindis.
When the wagons had creaked away, the Wanderer sought those two out, one last time, and was kind to them, for the sake of what had been and of her who slept by the River Vistula.
1980
Manse Everard was not the officer who raked me over the coals for my recklessness, and barely agreed to let me continue in the mission—largely, he grumbled, at Herbert Ganz’s urging, because there was nobody to replace me. Everard had his reasons for holding back. Those eventually became evident, as did the fact he’d been studying my reports.
Between the fourth century and the twentieth, I’d passed about two years of personal lifespan since losing Jorith. My grief had dwindled to wistfulness—if only she could have had more of the life she loved and made lovely!—except once in a while when it rose in full force and struck again. In her quiet way, Laurie had helped me toward acceptance. Never before had I understood in full what a wonderful person she was.
I was at home on furlough, New York, 1932, when Everard called and asked for another conference. “Just a few questions, a couple hours’ bullshooting,” he said, “and afterward we can go out on the town. Your wife too, of course. Ever see Lola Montez in her heyday? I’ve got tickets, Paris, 1843.”
Winter had fallen uptime. Snow tumbled past the windows of his apartment, making a cave of white stillness for us. He gave me a toddy and inquired what I particularly liked in the way of music. We agreed on a koto performance, by a player in medieval Japan whose name the chronicles have forgotten but who was the finest that ever lived. Time travel has its rewards as well as its pains.
Everard made a production of stuffing and lighting his pipe. “You never filed an account of your relationship to Jorith,” he said in a tone almost casual. “It only came out in the course of the inquiry, after you’d sent for Mendoza. Why?”
“It was… personal,” I answered. “Didn’t see that it was anybody else’s business. Oh, they cautioned us about that sort of thing at the Academy, but regs don’t actually forbid it.”
Looking at his dark, bowed head, I had the eerie knowledge that he must have read everything I would write. He knew my personal future as I did not—as I would not until I had been through it. The rule is very seldom waived that keeps an agent from learning his or her destiny; a causal loop is the least undesirable thing that could all too easily result.
“Well, I don’t aim to repeat a scolding you’ve already had,” Everard said. “In fact, between the two of us, I feel that Coordinator Abdullah got needlessly stuffy. Operatives must have discretion, or they’d never get their jobs done, and plenty of them have sailed closer to the wind than you did.”
He spent a minute kindling his tobacco before he went on, through the blue haze: “However, I would like to ask you about a couple of details. More to get your reaction than on any deep philosophical grounds—though I admit to being curious, too. You see, on that basis, maybe I can give you a few useful procedural suggestions. I’m not a scientist myself, but I have kicked around history, prehistory, and even posthistory, quite a lot.”
“You have that,” I agreed with enormous respect. “Well, okay, for openers, the most obvious. Early on, you intervened in a war between Goths and Vandals. How do you justify that?”
“I answered that question at the inquiry, sir… Manse. I knew better than to kill anybody, since my own life was never in jeopardy. I helped organize, I collected intelligence, I inspired fear in the enemy—flying around on antigrav, throwing illusions, projecting subsonic beams. If anything, by making them panic, I saved lives on both sides. But my essential reason was that I’d spent a lot of effort—Patrol effort—establishing a base in the society I was supposed to study, and the Vandals threatened to destroy that base.”
“You weren’t afraid of touching off a change in uptime events?”
“No. Oh, perhaps I should have thought it over more carefully, and gotten expert opinions, before acting. But it did look like almost a textbook case. That was merely a large-scale raid the Vandals were mounting. Nowhere did history record it. The outcome either way was insignificant… except to individuals, certain of whom were important to my mission as well as me. And as for the lives of those individuals—and the line of descent that I started myself, back yonder—why, those are minor statistical fluctuations in the gene pool. They soon average out.”
Everard scowled. “You’re giving me the standard arguments, Carl, same as you did the board of inquiry. They got you off the hook there. But don’t bother today. What I’m trying to make you know, not in your forebrain but in your marrow, is that reality never conforms very well to the textbooks, and sometimes it doesn’t conform at all.”
“I believe I am beginning to see that.” My humility was genuine. “In the lives I’ve been following downtime. We have no right to take people over, do we?”
Everard smiled, and I felt free to savor a long draught from my glass. “Good. Let’s drop generalities and get into the details of what you’re actually after. For instance, you gave your Goths things they’d never have had without you. The physical presents are not to worry about; those’ll rust or rot or be lost quickly enough. But accounts of the world and stories from foreign cultures.”
“I had to make myself interesting, didn’t I? Why else should they recite old, familiar stuff for me?”
“M-m, yeah, sure. But look, wouldn’t whatever you told them get into their folklore, alter the very matter you went to study?”
I allowed myself a chuckle. “No. There I did have a psychosocial calculation run in advance, and used it for a guide. Turns out that societies of this kind have highly selective collective memories. Remember, they’re illiterate, and they live in a mental world where marvels are commonplace.