SALTAROS: Shadows and Light
Dec. 11th, 2016 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zzambrosius_02JUST A NOTE: If you are one who skips the sexy-times, be aware that part of this chapter is one. There is also Philosophy and some Information about the Nature of the Multiverse within that part of the chapter. So...maybe skim the sexy-text and read those parts...
CHAPTER SEVEN: A Series of Lessons, Subtle and Not
They strolled down the hallway, hands brushing against one another’s sides and backs. The big towels that they’d wrapped around themselves fell away as they reached the door: “This one,” Voukli said, breathing a little harder: “Come in...”
He was ridiculously excited. He felt some trepidation, considering how weak he’d been just two hours before. But his penis was not worried, so he put aside all thoughts of failure.
Still, he felt the need to ask: “So...um, according to the Histories I’ve been reading, War Guild custom that people more than one rank apart should not get hooked up.”
She grinned: “That’s so. But that custom was established when there were no grades to the ranks. Spathae and Magistrae were a rank apart.” She leaned towards him, putting her hands on his chest.
‘She’s almost exactly my height,’ he thought. Aloud and between her kisses, he said: “So we’re...within the...bounds of...propriety...”
She stepped back and sat on the bed-bench along the wall, suddenly serious: “Depends who you talk to. There are prudes in every culture.”
He laughed: “I’ve never given much credence to prudes.”
“Okay. By me, we’re ethically good. And I really want to get started. But if you have doubts, we should postpone this.”
He shook his head: “No need, I hope. Just answer a couple more questions.”
“Ask.”
“I want to make sure that you won’t start to go easy on me during training. My life may depend upon that.”
She looked up at him, no longer seeming to notice his nudity: “I promise. In Hellas of old, the agapimeno, the ‘teacher’s favorite’, traditionally had the hardest training and the toughest critiques of any student. That goes back to Eleni herself.”
He paused: “Good enough. How shall we start?”
She rose and caught his eye: “I want you. I want to go right at you. I want to get this first connection made, straightforwardly and without artifice.” She stepped towards him, holding his eye: “I’ve never had a barbarian before. This should be fun.”
“I’m a barbarian, am I? I suppose I am, sexually.”
“Yes. You are a barbarian, sir, but I am going to civilize you, right now.”
He didn’t laugh or grin, just gazed at her seriously: “Sounds good.”
She put her hands on him, pulling him to her. She kissed him, hard and wet. ‘Most women in my Line,’ he thought, then lost the thread.
She pushed him back onto the bed, held him by his shoulders and straddled him. As he had expected, she was strong: ‘Stronger than she looks...maybe stronger than me.’
He decided not to test that thought, but let her move him as she wished. She stoked his penis, saying: “I want this inside my kolpi, right now.”
Fortunately he was erect. She slid down onto him, groaning. She moved her hands, taking hold of his wrists and pinning them to the cushion. She rode him hard; she started squeezing his penis almost right away.
‘Peos,’ he thought: ‘It’s a peos here in Hellas...’
He lost that train of thought, too. She seemed to be coming the whole time, her face contorted and her hands sweaty where she held him down.
She slowed and looked at him: “Where are you?”
“I...I don’t know...”
“You are not here with me. You are somewhere else.”
He saw it then: “I am, but I don’t know where...”
“Be here. With me. Right now!”
“Yes...”
“Say my name!”
“Voukli!”
“Call me by my real name!”
“I don’t know it. I don’t...ahhh!”
“My name is Quanah! Say it!”
“Quanah!”
“Oh, yes! There you are!”
He had very little warning of his climax, barely time to register how close it was, and then Bam! He was shaking and pouring his semen forth. She yelled out something in Comanche, then collapsed atop him. They lay thus for some time, her kolpi occasionally grabbing at his peos. Each time he grunted as more semen emerged and the pleasure of that shivered his body and blanked his mind.
Eventually she released his wrists and put her hands by his sides. She rolled off him and then continued the roll onto her feet. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up, saying: “The hot pool is waiting, Spathos. Come over here and enjoy the fruits of civilization.”
He said nothing; he obeyed.
She slipped down into the pool with a sigh. He found himself compelled to sigh as well, as the water closed over his legs and hips and he sank into the heat of it.
Neither of them said a word for some time. Then she wriggled over next to him, and they embraced.
“Well?” she asked.
“What?”
“How was that? How do I compare to your other lovers?”
“I’m surprised that that would matter to you,” he said, puzzled.
She frowned: “Oh. I see. You thought I wanted you to put me somewhere on a hierarchy of sexual competence.”
He looked at her, as they sat close. Each of their right arms was over the other’s shoulder, and each left arm around the other’s waist. He said: “In my Line...very few women would ask that question. If one did, she would mean exactly that.”
She pursed her lips: “To me, that would imply a fair bit of insecurity.”
He shrugged. “I think that’s right.”
“Ah. I’m not insecure.”
“It would never occur to me to think that. That’s why the question surprised me.”
“Ah,” she said: “Let’s be clear. I don’t have any doubts about your level of satisfaction. I want to know about technical differences, differences of approach that indicate differences of philosophy.”
“Is the study of sexual pleasure a philosophical matter?”
She grinned: “Is it not, in your Line?”
“Not really. Perhaps it ought to be.”
“Here in the Commonwealth sex is the subject of very serious study. There is a Deme, made up mostly of members of the Thinker’s, Medical, and Technical Guilds, whose stated purpose is the study of all aspects of sex. Physical, psychological, philosophical and ethical aspects, each separately and as they interact.”
“Hmm. In my Line, each of those specialties studies, in one form or another, each of those aspects of sex and sexuality. Nowhere that I ever heard of does any such group of mixed specialists cooperate in such study. Perhaps they should.”
“Then this should be a point of inquiry for you. Begin your studies now.”
“Very well.” He paused for a long time, perhaps three minutes or more, as he pondered some things that he’d noticed (raggedly) during their encounter. She waited patiently, keeping her caresses relatively chaste so as not to distract him.
“This is uncomfortable,” he said: “But I’m gonna be honest.”
She waited again, for about half a minute, until he said: “In my Line, I think very few women would embrace a man as you are embracing me, now. Let me demonstrate.” He pushed her arms up over his shoulders, and put both of his around her waist.
She raised her head, turning her chin a little to the right. “I feel...I don’t know. Wrong, somehow. This is probably how I’d be with a person who was a lot taller than I am, or a lot shorter. We’re the same height.”
He said: “It’s not that I’ve never been the submissive partner in a bedchamber with a woman.” He reversed their arms, so his were high, and then he snuggled against her shoulder, like... ‘I was about to think, “Like a woman”,’ he pondered. ‘Like the submissive partner, that’s what I really mean.’
She stroked his back: “This is philosophically difficult for you. I hadn’t expected that.”
“Well, I am more of a barbarian than I realized. Or, at least, my Home Line is less enlightened than I always assumed. In my Line, in my experience, very few men would cuddle with a woman in this position, even at the conclusion of a session where they were submissive.”
She reversed their positions, and rubbed her face on his chest. “This is more comfortable for you?”
“Irrationally, yes.”
“It’s not irrational, Ambros, it’s your culture.”
He agreed: “And I still submit, more than I’d realized, to sexist assumptions about intimacy. I mean...” he shook his head: “It’s not as though no woman ever initiated sex with me, took the lead in kissing, or rode me to her own orgasm. But you...”
“I?”
He figured it out: “You didn’t return to, or adopt, a submissive posture when we finished.” He put his fist by his ear: “You shouldn’t! I mean: you are my size, almost exactly. You are probably stronger than me, and for sure you are a better swordfighter. You would destroy me in unarmed combat. You are a way better shot with any kind of firearm.
“You are smarter than I am,” he continued, “or at least better informed about more Timelines than I am. And you not only rank me, but you’re title is ‘Magistri’. The longer I spend in Hellas, the more I realize what a huge jump in Status and responsibility it is to go from Spathe Five to Magistre, especially in Sacred Band, and why it happens so seldom.”
He pulled her back up eye-to-eye with him, and rearranged their arms to their original position.
“The fact that you treat me as an equal in spite of all that is a huge compliment.”
“Did you never have sex with a woman who was less accomplished than yourself? Did you not afterwards treat her as an equal?”
He paused for a long time, then said: “I strove to. Maybe those women even thought I succeeded. I certainly thought so. Right at this moment, I am doubtful.”
He grinned then: “Something to think about, that’s for sure.”
She broke away from him and swam around the pool a couple times. She rolled on her back, moving her arms just enough to stay afloat. Her breasts were small, the nipples and aureoles comparatively large. She said, thoughtfully: “Since you are so often dominant (or so I gather) I guess you’re pretty good at that.”
He shrugged: “I expect so.”
She laughed: “Barbarian men are so pushy, by reputation. You’ve shown no sign of that, yet.”
“Do you want me to be pushy?”
“Do you think you can? Would you? Will you?” She got out of the water and backed up against the wall.
“Do I think I can what? Dominate you? Not a chance...unless you submit.”
She raised her hands above her head, shot her hip and licked her lips: “You say I am stronger than you are. I’m not so sure. I think you’re stronger than you know. Commonwealth medical technology and the training you have been doing...it’s all changing your body.”
He pulled himself out of the pool and approached her.
She said: “Most of my lovers have been women, or Thinkers. I’ve never been submissive.”
“Why are you inviting that now?”
“Because I’m twenty-four, and I’ve never been. Not even slightly. Is it pleasurable?”
“Did your lovers enjoy it?”
“They did.”
He stroked her cheek and she moved toward him. He stopped her, and pushed her gently back against the wall.
“Oh,” she said: “Right.”
He kissed her and she kissed back; he broke the kiss and waited a moment, then kissed her again. She put her arms around him, over his shoulders, and kissed back again.
He broke the embrace and stepped back.
She moaned: “Oh. That’s right. Oh! This is hard.” She raised her arms up again. He stepped into her and rubbed his peos against her belly. The muscles beneath were hard but her skin was amazingly soft.
He kissed her again. This time she did not return his kiss, but simply accepted his tongue. “Better,” he said. “Try this.”
He pushed on her shoulders and she dropped to her knees. She took his peos in her mouth and looked up at him as she sucked.
After a short time he raised her and took her to the bed. He placed her as he wanted her. He pressed her legs apart and began to lick her.
She squirmed a bit and he stopped, moving away. She said: “Oh...”
He laughed and went back to her. She came twice in less than a minute.
‘It’s not hard to give her an orgasm,’ he thought. ‘Of course, she has no cultural or religious inhibitions at all. I wonder...’
He mounted her. She opened her legs wider and took him in, seeming to come again almost immediately.
He began to fuck her: ‘There’s no need to do anything else, Ambros. Just do her.”
Soon his mind went blank, all thoughts and fantasies banished, and he was an animal in lust. He spilled his semen and groaned as she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed.
After a few minutes catching her breath, she said: “Well. That was indeed quite pleasurable. Difficult for me, but philosophically stimulating...”
She arched her back, turned her hips, and threw him over on his side, pushing him out of her abruptly. He laughed, then she did, and they embraced.
Back in the pool, chatting about less critical affairs than sexual philosophy, they passed a pleasant hour. Ambros explained the idea of ‘Spectacle’ to her and described the Situationists. She was impressed by some of their ideas and laughed out loud at others.
He told her: “To a Commonwealther, the idea that it would take effort, most of the time enormous, extreme effort, just to live authentically, I know that seems absurd. But in a money economy, where so many people are so close to homelessness and need every hour’s pay just to get by...people have to take stupid, unproductive jobs that do nothing for the Whole...”
“I get that, intellectually,” she said: “For such people it’s easier to just watch the world through the media, and consume, than it is to attempt original thought or action. Of course I don’t really feel it...”
Their talk returned to Timelines and the Guidelines that operatives (mostly) stuck to.
Voukli rose and stretched, her breasts bobbing a bit and her rangy lean muscles rippling. She said, apropos of their earlier conversation: “So how do you read that guideline we were discussing earlier, the one about past action operations...”
“I confess to some confusion. Help me out here,” said Ambros: “The guideline is: ‘don’t multiply Timelines unnecessarily’, but that doesn’t explain much. I don’t seem to have had an RNA lesson on it, either.”
“No, you haven’t. We don’t do this instruction RNA-style; it’s held closer than that.”
“Close enough that you won’t explain it to me?”
“No. Close enough that I haven’t yet. It is time.”
“Right. Suppose you start...” He was a little vexed.
She smiled and slipped back into the tub: “All right. Let’s do this with an example. In your Line there was a doofus named Hitler. All US Imperial Timelines diverge from the middle or the end of the war that defeated him.”
“A ‘doofus’? He killed, or at least ordered the killing of millions of people. He took over most of Europe. He’s accounted a madman, but a military genius.”
“I won’t argue the point, beyond the obvious: no genius would have ordered the invasion of Russia. That was the act of an incompetent, mad or sane.” Voukli grinned: “He’s not even a footnote in any set of Lines other than the US Imperial ones. But the example will still work.” Voukli frowned.
“I suppose you are talking about the usual speculations in all the US Imperial Lines: what if one could go back in time and assassinate Uncle Adolf?”
“That’s it, exactly.”
“Well, what if?”
“It doesn’t work; it can’t work, and it multiplies Timelines. Unnecessarily, and with complete futility.”
Ambros thought for a moment, beginning to have a clue.
“Okay, go on,” he said after a bit.
“So,” she said: “let’s imagine that President . . . Gore is it? Right. Let’s imagine that he gets his hands on a Shifter, and figures out what it is and how it works. His people do, anyway.” She waved away his response and continued: “They manage to re-attune it, and fully charge it. For the energy cost of a month of operations for a tank battalion, he sends an operative back to Germany in 1930. She pops Hitler in the skull with a pistol and Shifts home. Guess what?”
“You’re saying it doesn’t work . . .”
“Absolutely futile. You can’t change what already happened in your Line. She will have created a new Line, one where Hitler is gone; but it will not affect the History of yours at all.” Voukli grinned again, an expression he had become used to, that wry and self-deprecating look. “But worse than that . . .” she said, trailing off.
“Oh,” he said, thinking hard: “I see what you mean. At the least she’ll have created one more Line; at worst, there will be many more.”
“Maybe hundreds. Lines where she succeeded, ones where she failed, Lines where she is caught and hanged, others where she’s a hero. On and on. And here’s the really futile bit: there will as many new Lines with Hitler in them as without. Get it?”
“Yes.” After a pause, he said: “So that’s why the other side, the ATLs, also avoid ‘past action operations’ for the most part. It just muddies the waters.”
“Exactly! Now come over here, I’m getting horny again. I love men who get the picture quick.”
“That was quick?” He felt uncertain of that.
“Oh, yes,” she said: “Quick, quick, quick!”
She pushed him back to the bed, laying him down on his back again. She sucked him erect and mounted him. ‘There’s no doubt who’s in charge this time,’ he thought. His last thought for quite a while, as it turned out.
Ambros dropped in to his usual spot deep in the swamp. He checked the little campsite where he occasionally slept: his tripwires were all still as he’d set them.
‘I guess no one has found my campsite, yet,’ he thought. He stepped over the main trip hazard at the opening to the pathway. He mushed and glopped his way along until he approached Camp Arlen from the rear.
The sun had already set, and the campers had gathered around the main fire for dinner. Three concentric circles of chairs surrounded the fire, with kids and moms in the front and single men in the back. Fathers and stepfathers, whether husbands or not, dominated the center row.
Ambros stepped into the light, nodded at Arlen, and toed off his Wellingtons. He slid a pair of Berks out of his shoulder bag and slipped them on over his heavy wool socks. He shed his backpack and pulled out a bag of rice.
“Hey Red,” he hollered: “Got some long grain jasmine here for ya.”
The usual head cook, whom Ambros knew only as ‘Red’, stuck his head out of the kitchen enclosure: “Oh, hey, good stuff.” He turned his head: “MIKEY! Git yer ass out there! Bring that bag in here, ’n’ git some water on to boil. We’ll cook the whole fukin’ bag tonight and make rice puddin’ fer tommorrah.”
Mikey, a grinning lad of twenty, came mooching out of the kitchen. He took the bag off of Ambros’ hands and carried it back inside.
Ambros left his backpack by the back row of chairs, picked up his wellies and moved through the party.
He nodded at his acquaintances and shook hands or bumped fists or slapped shoulders with the people he’d come to know. He and Sergeant Arlen had a brief chat about progress on their current projects: most importantly, the bugout routes they had been devising, and the new barricades at the entrance to the swamp. Then Ambros went over to the edge of the main shelter. Arlen followed.
Ambros stared out into the rainy night. After a bit, he made out a tiny flickering light, off in the distance.
“That’s him,” Arlen said, pointing. “That’s where he sets up on the bad days, and where he stays until he’s sober-ish again.”
“I got it. Looks about halfway over to Borderboro.”
“Just about. You still wanna go sit with him?”
Ambros shrugged: “I think I oughtta. What do you think?”
Arlen paused, long enough to get Ambros worried. Then he said: “I’d hate to lose Mark. He’s a good man, when he ain’t plowed. Nothin’ I’ve done has slowed that trainwreck down, at all. Maybe you can save him.” Arlen turned Ambros by the shoulder, looked right into his eyes: “Give it yer best shot, man. Shock him, scare him, talk sense to him, I don’t care. You can’t make it worse.”
“Can’t I?”
Arlen shook his head: “You can’t. It’s like triage: he’s dying, you apply CPR. If it doesn’t work? He was gone when you got there, eh?”
“You think it’s that bad, huh?”
“Gettin’ there, anyhow.”
“Okay.”
Ambros pulled the boots back on and raised the hood of his cloak. He slogged out into the night, hearing the rain on the top of the hood and feeling the suck and give as the mud grabbed at his boots.
He approached the little camp cautiously. It sat upon a small mound, perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, where Mark had levelled it. When he could see into the area under the tarp, he grimaced: ‘Passed out drunk, I guess.’ He stepped as quietly as he could, until he could sit on a log opposite Mark. He built up the fire a bit, watching the older man carefully.
Mark snorted, coughed, spat into the fire, and then looked up blearily. “Huh? Oh, Ambros...man, you startled me.”
“Yeah.” Ambros revised his estimate: Mark had been asleep, but not passed out.
Mark leaned forward and coughed some more.
Ambros reached into the patch pocket on the right thigh of his cargoes: “Drink?” he asked, holding out a flask of Jameson’s.
“Don’ mind if I do...hey, how come yer not tellin’ me to stop drinkin’ like ever’body else does?”
“You’re a grown man, Mark. You have a job, of sorts. You’re a big help to Sarge. You wanna get sloshed now and then, it’s your business? Right?”
“Damn straight...”
Ambros waited.
Finally Mark took a pull at the flask, and then handed it back. Ambros took a sip.
Mark said: “Too much, though. Too much and too often. Gonna kill me one day.”
Ambros nodded: “Maybe sooner than you realize.”
“Sooner than I...listen, asshole, I know, I know just how far gone I am, I...” Mark ranted for a while, then trailed off.
Ambros remained quiet, staring at the flask.
Mark looked up, his eyes focusing on Ambros briefly.
“You ever...you ever kill anybody, hippie?”
Ambros shook his head: “Not until about a year ago.”
“Huh?”
“Last January. In a warehouse, in California. I laid down cover fire while my comrades shot a bunch of pimps and slavers. Didn’t actually shoot anybody myself, but I was responsible. That didn’t bother me, much. But later...”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.” Ambros stirred the little fire, and added a couple pieces of wood. The bed of coals was exceedingly hot, and the new fuel burst into flame almost right away.
He looked right at Mark, letting the old vet see his tears.
“Okay,” Mark said.
“I’ll tell you, and then you tell me, okay?”
After a long pause, Mark took another drink, this from a fifth of cheap gin he had hidden in his coat. Then he said: “Sure. Hit me with your best shot.”
Ambros let the conversation rest for a moment while he figured out how to tell the story. Finally he began: “My mentor and I, we were running through a building, a kind of outpost. A big fort sorta thing, y’know?”
“Okay.”
“So she was breaking up our side’s equipment, so it wouldn’t get captured, okay? We’d run for ten seconds, or a couple minutes, she’d stop and smash some machinery, then off we’d go again.”
“What were you doin’?”
“I was new to the situation. I just sorta watched her back.”
“Huh.”
“So, anyway: we came around a corner into rifle and pistol fire. I got hit about twenty times, knocked me back into the wall.”
“But you ain’t dead?”
“We had extremely good body armor, both of us. I had some impressive bruises from hits on the...it’s kinda like Kevlar, you know? Without that armor, I’d have been dead at least three or four times over.”
“Huh.” Mark looked at Ambros, seeing the haunted visage lit from below by the fire, and the unshed tears in his eyes.
Mark’s eyes narrowed: “Go ahead,” he said.
“So we cut loose with the...you’d call ’em machine pistols, I guess. The weapons we were carrying. The guys on the other side weren’t armored. They went down like targets in a shooting gallery.”
“I get that, man...” Mark had a sickened look on his face.
“Yeah,” said Ambros. “So the mentor and I stopped to look at what we’d slaughtered...the...people we slaughtered. They were pretty nearly all kids, just, not even twenty years old, mere teenagers. The other side sent them out there, unarmored, with mid-twentieth century style firearms...no armor, like I said...they never had a chance.”
“Yeah.” Mark nodded: “That shit is what really gets to ya. That, and when one of yer buddies takes one.”
Ambros nodded. He thought of Vorrisi: “That, too.”
Mark took another long swig of gin. He offered the bottle to Ambros.
“I better drink my whisky, gin and I don’t get along,” said Ambros, taking a mouthful from his flask. He let it sit in his mouth for a moment, savoring the feeling of the stuff against his palate.
The other man looked at Ambros, his head cocked, his expression dubious: “You tell that story like you believed it. I don’t know if I do.”
Ambros swallowed his drink, smacked his lips. “I don’t care whether you believe it or not.”
Mark laughed bitterly: “I get that, man. Just what are the two sides fighting about? It sounds like your war is still going on, somewhere in the world.”
“It is. If I tried to explain the whole thing, you’d really think I was nuts.”
Mark nodded: “Secret shit. Always somebody doin’ that.” He took a deep breath: “Sarge tell you anything about me?”
“Not much. He values your contribution to the camp.”
Mark took a smaller sip of gin, then said: “I was Special Forces.”
Ambros tipped his head to one side: “Airborne?”
“I had a Green Beret.”
“High-end soldiering.”
Mark just laughed. He sat silent again, nodding to himself.
He rolled up the sleeve of his coat, deliberately, until Ambros could see the nasty scars along the top of his left forearm. He held the arm forward, so the light of the fire illuminated the damage. Ambros guessed that Mark had about fifteen percent use of that arm and hand.
“Nasty.” Ambros caught Mark’s eye and held it.
Mark maintained the eye contact and said: “Napalm.” Then he looked away.
“Hmm. ‘Friendly fire’ then, huh?” Ambros looked away as well.
“Yeah. We had intel that some big-time VC officer was in this particular village. It was a village that the Gummint had declared ‘Pacified’, by which they meant everyone in town was more scared of us than they were of Charlie. Some of the men there had US weapons. S’posedly to defend their village from the VC.
“We heard gunfire and screaming before we even got to the edge of town. We found a bloodbath in progress. Charlie’s high command had ordered the whole village killed, as an example. ‘Don’t help the Americans or this will happen to your village, too.’ So there we were, surrounded by people shooting at each other, and at us, and the Lieutenant shouts to take cover and defend ourselves and everybody is screaming and running around. People layin’ around dead in heaps, including little kids. It was sick.” Mark chuckled a little, bitterly.
“Yeah.”
Mark let a little time pass. Then he said: “By the time we got there pretty nearly everybody was dead. The VC were retreating into the jungle. Lt. Tryon ordered cover fire into the treeline, until it was obvious that Charlie had all bugged out.
“Any survivors?” Ambros stared at the fire. He’d heard too many similar tales from people only a little older than he was, who’d gone to Nam and somehow survived to tell their stories.
“Five live ones. This woman and three little kids. And her husband, who was all shot up. We tried to call for a medevac, but the radio was down.
“Then Toby found a VC, at the edge of the village. He was cut pretty near in half, but he was alive. The lieutenant sez to me: “Finish him.”
Mark gagged a little on his next drink. He stared at the bottle and then set it down: “Maybe you got a point about gin.”
Ambros silently passed the flask of Jameson’s across the fire, and Mark took a sip. He nodded then, and said: “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Mark handed the flask back. He said: “I looked at Charlie, there on the ground. He was maybe sixteen. He could see his own guts, spread out all over the place, laying there in the mud. Tryon sez: ‘C’mon, private. One in the heart, one in the mind.’ I pointed my rifle at the kid and raised an eyebrow. He goes ‘YES! YES!’ in Gook...in Vietnamese.”
Ambros waited; he’d learned not to prompt in such circumstances. ‘Very often just makes them clam up,’ he thought.
“So I finished him,” said Mark, making a motion as if firing a rifle: “Double tap, pop, pop.” He grinned ironically: “One in the heart, one in the head.”
After a bit, Ambros said: “And the napalm?”
Mark laughed: “Typical fubar bullshit. We were trying to evac the live family, but with the radio down we were kinda crippled. Some planes came overhead and laid down a shitload of the stuff, and we were caught in the middle. Turns out, they’d been calling us back for half an hour. They got some kinda static from our radio about the medevac we called for, and they thought we’d already hit the bugout route.”
“Oh.”
“So I got this little kid in one arm and my rifle in the other and the whole jungle lights up with hellfire, and the lady didn’t want to leave her old man, and by the time we got ourselves and the kids out, I had my left arm fried. The stuff doesn’t go out, y’know. I had to drop the kid, drop my pack and harness, strip off my shirt...” Mark trailed off, gazing into the jungle in his mind.
Ambros sat silent, as silent as Mark. The night drew on towards dawn, and they finished the flask. Mark poured out the remainder of his gin, grimacing.
“I should go on the wagon for a few weeks, give my liver a rest. Whaddaya think?”
Ambros shrugged: “Your call, buddy.”
The next morning he dropped in to the War Room. Since he was not in a hurry, he walked even more slowly than usual around the room, staring at boards and listening to the talk and banter.
‘It’s almost musical, the way the activity flows around this room,’ he mused: ‘It’s as if each Timeline hums at its own frequency, and the people here are trying to tune them.’
Because he dallied, he got to see a unique event: the arrival of a ‘Very Important Person’.
His first hint of anything unusual came when six Black Warrior Guild Magistrae trooped into the War Room. Each of them took over a station at one of the boards, and they began a staccato conversation, in jargon that he barely understood. The people they displaced gathered in the seating area by the main door, grinning and making small wagers about whatever was going on.
Ambros joined them.
One of the Black Warrior Magistrae said: “Deep Space Zeos says he’s clean. They are sending him through this time.”
Some of the regular crew groaned and some hooted with joy; he watched, interested but puzzled.
He recognized Theri, whom he’d met while on the Rescue Squad. She grinned at him: “Hey Ambros, what’s up?”
He laughed: “No idea. You tell me.”
“Oh, the Hierarchists from the Prime Objectivist Line want to send us an Ambassador.” She shrugged: “We said, ‘sure, whatever’. He’s tried three times to get through. So far, each time, he carried some kind of tracking device that would have let the Objectivists find our space-time location. So we sent the guy back three times.”
“Looks like he’s coming through,” said another.
Ambros watched with interest as a single person dropped in.
He stood a little taller than average for the Commonwealth Line, and wore the sort of clothes that Ambros’ grandfather had worn on special occasions: very fancy suit with a cutaway coat, and a topcoat that looked like mohair or cashmere. He had chin whiskers but no moustache, and great bushy sideburns. In his hand, he held a top hat; he looked around, seemingly puzzled.
Megalos stepped forward and saluted; he said: “Ambassador Harvey...Welcome to Athino, Commonwealth Prime.”
The fellow frowned, displeased: ‘I rawther expected to be welcomed by the civilian authorities, old man,” he said, his accent hovering somewhere between England and Australia.
“As I told you, there are none. I have volunteered to escort you from this place to an accommodation, and to introduce you to some Deme and Guild officers. This gentleman and these women are some of my Guild comrades, of high Status in the City. Step this way, if you please: This is Magistri Andromaki...”
Ambros memorized the facial features of the Ob Prime Ambassador, on general principle, in case he needed to interact with him in the future: ‘Harvey. Mr Harvey, the Ambassador.’
“Thanks for the heads-up, Spathisi Theri. I need to go to the Library.”
“See you around,” she replied.
Hours later he sat at his usual table in Plataeo Socratosena, contemplating his afternoon’s work
He’d taken the day to rest and do some RNA-assisted reading: ‘It’s good to have the RNA for this technical stuff. Helps me remember stuff I can’t even understand.’ He allowed the schematics he’d studied to float on the surface of his mind. The Power System that kept all of the lights and electronics in the City running shone through the previously learned City Map and made a few things clear: ‘There’s a method to the circuits here in Keenafthono Prima: from the smallest thumb drive to the way the whole City is wired, and the wireless activity, too. The same pattern, the same principle. Open up any machine in this Line and you can guess where every piece and part will be. Look at the City as a machine...
‘Even the distributed parts of the power generation system hew to the pattern...Every building seems to produce a little bit of surplus.’
He pondered that. No two companies in his Line ever did things the same way. ‘It’s like there’s a law that says: “Thou shall be mutually incomprehensible”. And here...’
He spoke aloud, muttering: “In the Commonwealth, comprehensibility and user-friendliness are so admired that they are always adopted. As a default, pretty much.”
A slender woman appeared at the far side of the square. She gazed across the plaza and her eyes lighted on him: ‘Someone I don’t know,’ he thought: ‘...Something about her seems familiar.’
Her tightly curled hair shone red in the weak December sunshine. He glanced past her, looked back behind himself. She seemed intent on him alone as she crossed the plaza. He felt a powerful sexual attraction.
“Hello,” she said, in accented American. She looked to be about thirty. He recalled that she might be sixty, or in some circumstances as old as ninety.
“Do I know you?”
She raised her chin, speculatively: “By reputation only, I believe. You’ve been researching my father. My name is Nikoletí—or, you’d say: Nicolette Irene Orenhauser-Crowell.”
“That’s why you looked familiar. You take after your mother. Have a seat...”
‘I heard...Arrenji told me that you’d met her. Seen her recently.” He could see tears in her eyes.
He paused: “Yes.”
She bit her lip: “How...how is she?”
He measured every word, and her reactions: “She’s ninety-five years old. She appears to be in excellent health for a woman that age in USIT Seventeen, but still...she’s old.”
Nikoletí nodded: “Father did what he could for her, and for Aunt Ellie. He says he couldn’t bring them here—that’s true, I’ve seen the equations—so he did some medical things himself...she might live to a hundred and ten, he said. Aunt Ellie was seven years older...is she...?”
“Miss Eleanor and Miss Clementine live together in an apartment in the basement of a mansion built on Orenhauser property south of Eugene, Oregon, USA. Her grand-nephew and his wife and daughter occupy most of the house, along with some longtime family servants. During the brief meeting I had with the two, Miss Eleanor seemed, if anything, in better health than your mother.”
She pursed her lips, then nodded: “Aunt Ellie had a very strong constitution, as they said back in those days. When I knew them, I mean.”
He nodded. He stared at her in a way that might be thought rude in his own Line. She had a great deal of the physical attractiveness of her mother, but bore it in a very different, hyper-aware manner.
“Magistri Arrenji told me that you want to see my father.”
“I want the knowledge he has of what he was doing in my Line in the Thirties. Arrenji thinks I am in the need-to-know group, now.”
“I agree. Getting him to agree to see you could be difficult.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She shrugged: “He’s in very poor health. He’s two hundred and thirty-four years old, and he stopped all medical treatment twenty years ago. At this point he’s going downhill fast.”
“Hmmm.” Ambros’ math skills were way better than they had been before he started learning under RNA and hypnotics: “He was a hundred and sixty when he married your mother.”
She laughed a little sarcastically: “Yes. His ‘official’ age in that Line was forty-five. It was a bit of a scandal, the age difference. Just think what all of those Society Ladies would have thought—and said!—if they’d known his true age.”
He shook his head, smiling: “I can’t imagine.”
She gave him a curious look: “I’ll talk to my father. Don’t count on anything.”
“I hear you.”
“I’ll be in touch...”
‘Another day, another task to complete. It’s only been a day since Nicolette contacted me; I guess I’m lucky. Nikodemos is not usually so forthcoming with invites, or so rumor has it.’
Ambros shook his head as the calendars swirled in his mind: ‘The twenty-seventh of November, six days before my birthday. Eighthday of the third tenday before the Winter Solstice...’
He walked along Odo Arrendi, on the inside of the outermost Wall around Athino. He found the gate he sought, and his MPS pinged him that he was near his destination. He turned and went slowly into a maze of alleys and narrow streets, his mental map of the neighborhood guiding him in his search. ‘I wonder if this will be productive? Nikoletí must have got around her father somehow.’
He had to climb a rather steep hill, which stood just within the walls of the City. Some of the alleys had stairs where the incline demanded them.
“Ambros,” he heard a quiet voice from behind. He turned and saw Nicolette Crowell: “Come with me.”
He followed her down a ridiculously twisted alley and up two sets of stairs to an unmarked door at a dead end. She raised a finger to her lips, enjoining silence American style: “Wait here a moment.” She slipped within, closing the door behind her.
He looked around, nervous. He saw a ladder (of sorts) up to the roof of the building to his right. He moved silently over to stand by it, thinking: ‘There’s no other possible bug-out route. I hate dead ends.’
Somebody approached along the alley. He reached for his pistol, recalled that he didn’t have it: ‘Relax. You’re in the Commonwealth. There are no muggers or thieves in this Timeline; or damn few, anyway. And no enemies.’ Regulos’ sneering face crossed his mind, but he dismissed that: ‘Not really worth considering...’
Voukli and Arrenji came around the corner, and he relaxed. “You ready to meet the mystery man?” asked Voukli.
He shrugged: “As ready as I’ll get. You don’t like this guy, do you?”
Voukli shook her head: “He’s beyond my likes or dislikes. But you’re right, I find him unnecessarily abrasive. Also, I don’t agree with...I mean, some of the things he’s done…” She threw up her hands: “I don’t have all the information I’d need to critique his operations, and he won’t give it to me, and on the surface he looks like an uncontrolled…” she shrugged: “...assassin.”
Arrenji stood there, amused. Ambros quirked an eyebrow at her.
She shrugged in her turn: “Sometimes looks like that to me, as well. But then, people say the same thing about me.”
Voukli looked uncomfortable.
Nicolette Crowell opened the mystery door again and beckoned: “He’s ready. Come in.”
They filed through the door and down a narrow hall. She opened a curtain across another doorway and gestured them in.
Ambros looked around a very small room, an office of sorts with a narrow single bed against one wall. Perfectly ordinary file cabinets lined one side of the room. The walls bore a thick layer of plaster, and centuries worth of whitewashing.
‘This building has been here a long time,’ Ambros thought. A window looked out upon a steep staircase going down to a street on the hillside below. ‘There’s his bugout.’
The old man sat in a padded throne-like office chair behind an extremely small desk. His beard was long, thin, unkempt, and entirely white. One thick wad of dog-eared and thumb-damaged paper sat upon the desk, dead centered, its edges ruffled and torn. A young man stood behind Master Nikodemos. He appeared to be perhaps thirty.
“Mr Rothakis? Spathos Ambros?” The old man’s voice growled and crackled as he gazed in a semi-contemptuous way at Ambros.
“Yes,” Ambros said, and then went silent. He thought he recognized the type: ‘He won’t be impressed by verbiage or semantics. No one can bullshit him, he’ll see right through that. I should just let him lead the way…a complete egotist, and a perfectionist. But for good reasons...’
The man coughed: “I am Magistros Nikodemos. The ‘Latest’ they call me. Have a seat.” He waved the papers in the air: “I have been reading the stuff you’ve posted on the Kyklo. Clement’s been bringing it to me in hard copy.”
The younger man spoke: “I’m Clement Elton Orenhauser Crowell; here in the Commonwealth, Klementos. Dad thinks your stuff is pretty good.”
“That’s not what I said. I said his work was a worthy effort, but I have a lot of questions. Sit down, I said!”
Clement’s lips quirked as he suppressed a grin. He winked at Ambros, who remained deadpan.
Ambros sat slowly, watching the old man hawkishly. He said: “Unless I miss my guess, you are also Mr, later Sir, finally Lord Nicholas Anson Crowell, archaeologist and diplomat.”
Nikodemos looked sour: “I was. Went kinda native for a while, nearly lost my head in the process.”
“You did lose your heart.”
Silence ensued.
“Smartass.” Nikodemos smiled a little, obviously unwilling to show emotion: “How’d you figure it?”
Ambros just stared. He waited the old man out.
“Yes. Clementine was the love of my life, and I had to leave her…”
“You blew the shit out of your cover to save her, and Miss Greenlaw, from the Nazis. You snatched your kids right out from under Himmler’s nose, and you got Clem and Ellie out of Occupied Greece on a British troopship. In the Nick of time, excuse the pun.
“Clementine must have known that you’d taken the kids here, to Commonwealth Prime. She had to pretend that you had vanished, missing and presumed dead by the hand of Nazi thugs, and do the mourning thing…”
“She was in mourning,” said Clement: “She knew she’d probably never see any of us again.”
“Why? That’s what I’m here for, to find out why.”
“Why would I tell you?” Nikodemos growled.
“Why not?”
The old man slapped the pile of essays again: “Multiplying Timelines, that’s why!”
Ambros glared at the old man: “Keep talking.”
He shook his head violently, and then put his face in his hands: “I have to be so careful here, and I’m old and not always mentally alert. I’ve been forced to hide out in my own home town to avoid stupid, dangerous questions...”
Arrenji and Voulkli glanced at one another knowingly.
“I’d rather you didn’t stress him too much,” said Nicolette.
“No, let him stress me. Arrenji is correct: he’s in a needs-to-know position.”
“You’ll blow another artery if you get too worked up. Versingos said...”
“I know what the little troll said,” Nikodemos rejoined: “I don’t care. I’m not trying to extend my life any longer, or hadn’t you noticed?”
Nicolette hung her head: “I noticed.” She wiped away tears and left the room.
Nikodemos took a deep breath: “You are a native of USIT Seventeen they tell me. I can tell you things I wouldn’t tell just anyone...
“I’d started dropping in and making myself at home about 1860. I saw that the US Timeline with that particular lineage of Presidents, with Grant and all, then later, Roosevelt following McKinley, it was all incredibly unstable. I started watching that ass Hitler in nineteen twenty-two or so, and I thought he was really dangerous.
“I was spending about half my time in that Line: the one that all of the US Imperials grew out of. So, I decided I had to go native. I got another re-juve and attended Oxford. Identification was easy to forge in those times, and I made myself into a wealthy man, partly by selling antiquities that I snatched from Quiet Lines. You wouldn’t believe how much money rich people will pay for such things!”
“Actually...” Ambros grinned sarcastically at the old man: “I would.”
Nikodemos lowered his brows and said: “Huh. I guess maybe you would.
“Anyway, the problem was, by twenty-eight or so, when I realized what old Adolf actually had in mind, it was too late to just kill him.”
Ambros said: “Yeah, Voukli explained that part: it just multiplies Timelines.”
“Especially if done by a Saltaros! I could not take action! It would have made things worse. Then...along came Clementine and Eleanor.”
“And you fell in love.”
“You’d think that at one hundred and sixty years old I’d have been immune to that.”
Arrenji laughed: “Med techs cannot re-juve the rest of you without rejuvenating your balls. Clementine was hot stuff, I saw some photos.”
“You have that right.” Nikodemos looked penitent: “I looked to be about forty-five in that Line’s terms, and my peos thought I was twenty.” He shook his head: “Anyway, she turned up with child. My child. I dug in my heels, tried to make the peace thing work. Went back to the League of Nations—there was a point, earlier, when I would cheerfully have slaughtered the entire US Senate, when they betrayed Wilson and didn’t join the League—but...
“I failed. The war began. We, my family, we wound up in Salonika, where I was supposed to inspect and improve the city’s defenses.”
Ambros interrupted: “Mussolini invaded Greece. The Greeks ran him out, and took a big chunk of Albania. The Nazis attacked, and between them and the Italian Army...”
“It was hopeless. Greek traitors kidnapped the kids from our very arms, and sold them to the SS. We wound up scattered across the countryside, surrounded by Waffen SS and Gestapo types, and Eleanor Greenlaw’s name was way too Jewish-sounding.”
Nikodemos glared at Ambros: “I did the calculations every way I could, I even considered what would happen if I killed a bunch of the Nazi higher-ups. I could have done that. It was futile. If I stayed in that Line, all hell would break loose. If I took Clementine and Eleanor out of that Line...” he pulled up another stack of papers: "This is how we did it before Memory RNA became the fashionable thing: quantum abatement-rebatement equations, ciphered with the aid of analog and digital calculating machines.”
Arrenji and Voukli took the sheaf and began to pore over the pages, Voukli over Arrenji’s shoulder: “See that...he’s got a point...oh goddess, look at that...no, he couldn’t have...this assumption is flawed...he didn’t have better data...”
Ambros stared at Nikodemos. The old man said: “Arrenji can take enough RNA to hold the histories of a dozen closely-related Lines in her head, with a hundred un-manifested quantum Lines, and ease through an operation day by day, even hour by hour, aware all of the time how close she is to messing things up. I had to come back here, and run simulations, and do those calc...” He coughed for a few minutes.
When the fit passed, Ambros said: “I get it. I do.”
“I told Clementine, I showed her. She agreed that it was the only possible solution. She was a good mathematician; she didn’t really get all of the premises, but she saw that the math was right.”
Ambros frowned: “I don’t have all that much RNA, and I’m operating in Seventeen, and doing things I’d never do if not for those two.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder: “I don’t seem to be screwing things up, or multiplying Timelines...”
“You are operating in your own Line. It makes a difference.”
“Why?”
“It just does. I can’t explain it. You don’t have the mathematics to understand it, or the RNA to get it intuitively. You will.”
“Maybe.”
“You will. I know Arrenji. I know the kind of people she recruits. They are the kind of people I used to recruit.
“If you move sideways and take actions in, say Line 16 of the US Imperial family, you can get away with more than you could in Line One. In a Line like, oh, like...”
“Alcatraz Quiet,” Voukli suggested.
“Right!” the old man agreed: “No native population to mess with. You can do almost anything short of destroying a Gate in a Quiet Line. There’s no Subjective Dissonance to worry about. Get into one of the low-tech religious Lines, and you can create a whole new subset of the Multiverse just by sneezing.”
Ambros snarled: “Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not,” said Nikodemos.
“He’s not,” said Arrenji: “Not just any sneeze, but...sometimes.”
“Oh.”
Nikodemos coughed some more, then scrabbled in the top drawer of the little desk. “Here,” he said, holding out a small box.
Ambros took it: “What is it?”
“My own journals. The whole pile, on crystal drives.”
“Um...is there personal stuff on here?”
“Everything is there. Letters to and from my various Twines and children...”
Clement looked at his father, amazed.
“...stuff about my relationship with Clem and Ellie, love letters to Clem that I wrote after we parted but never dared send, all of my emotional breakdowns and my overreactions in the Nazi Lines, the stupid shit I did because I could get away with it, the money I dropped on various charities in Line Seventeen, all of it.”
“So I’m in charge of this?”
“You are now, as these witnesses can testify, my literary executor.”
Clement snarled.
Ambros nodded, eyes on the old man: “Any special requests?”
“Don’t publish it till I am dead. Don’t even show it to Nicolette or Clement.”
Clement punched the wall hard enough to crack the plaster, then stormed out of the room cursing. They could hear him continuing, in several languages, until he slammed the door at the end of the hallway.
After a long, uncomfortable silence, Arrenji said: “You are such a shit.”
Nikodemos shrugged: “So what. Live to my age, and tell yourself that you’re better. If it turns out that you can. You!” he pointed his beard at Ambros: “Any questions?”
Ambros grimaced: “Stupid thing to ask. I need to read this before I’ll have any intelligent questions.”
“You are correct.” Nikodemos growled and bent forward at the waist, letting out a high-pitched whine.
‘In a lot of pain,’ thought Ambros. He found it hard to summon any pity. He tried to put himself in the old man’s place, and found he couldn’t: ‘I just can’t imagine this old shit’s life. Two hundred and thirty years plus...the technological advances...the tough decisions...carrying the whole “license to assassinate”...or “duty to assassinate” mandate for as long as he has...’ He frowned and shook his head: ‘I guess I can feel some empathy there. Like if I’d killed old Duggins the first chance I had, how many people would still be alive from the community in Cleveland? If I could have moved from Line to Line and eliminated the bastard...’
He saw his way through: “Tell me what my three biggest questions for you will be, after I speed-read this, and then study it slowly. And then tell me the answers.”
“Smartass,” Nikodemos said, again.
Ambros waited him out. Again.
The old man grumbled for a bit, then spoke: “All right. Your first question will be, why didn’t Nikodemos stop the assassination of President McKinley? The answer will not be evident from the manuscript you have there. It’s because there were worse outcomes likely—very likely—if Roosevelt the First had to wait for the Presidency. Your second question will be, why didn’t Nikodemos prevent the adoption of the really stupid parts of the Treaty of Versailles? The punitive measures that the French, in their unreasoning animus, forced through.
“And that’s because I couldn’t manage it. I did everything I could, within the bounds of the law at that time and in that Line, and it wasn’t enough. I also resorted to bribery and intimidation, which were not legal. That, too, failed, so I just moved on.
“I didn’t foresee the full effect such punishment would have on the younger generation of Germans, or I might have taken some more radical action. By the time I realized how bad it was, it was too late. Hitler...” Nikodemos made a face, rue and fury and frustration evident.
They sat a while, and Ambros risked a glance over his shoulder. The Magistriae looked gob-smacked.
He returned his attention to the old man: “And the third question?”
Nikodemos sighed: “You’ll look over that journal, and then those calculations,” he nodded at the papers the women were still holding: “...and you’ll want to know why I didn’t shoot Himmler in the head and take Clem and Ellie and the kids to a Quiet Line for a few years, until it would be safe for them to come here, or go home to Seventeen, with me able to visit, at least occasionally.”
Silence deepened as Voukli and Arrenji perused the calculations.
“What is the answer to that question?” asked Ambros.
“I fucked up.”
“How?”
“I never considered what subtracting Himmler from the Nazi hierarchy would have done, until after the chance to kill him had come and gone,” Nikodemos said, weeping silently. Tears ran down, but he maintained his gravitas: “And I didn’t kill him, because I wasn’t sure at that moment how that would alter things.”
Ambros sat there, gradually realizing what the old man meant: “If you’d known, if you’d killed him?”
Nikodemos remained silent.
“But you couldn’t have known!” said Voukli, on the edge of tears herself: “One couldn’t, in those days, run every possible scenario...”
Nikodemos stood up. He bent forward and pounded the table, in a rage, shouting: “I didn’t need to run every gods be damned scenario, I needed to run that one! Just that one! Seventy-four years, without her.” He sat down heavily: “Just that one...just...that.” He looked at Ambros, then: “I rushed back to Germany to save my children...if I’d delayed, Himmler would likely have killed them. But maybe not, maybe not. He had a use for them, to draw Clementine out of our country house. If I’d run one more simulation, I could have stayed with Clementine. If I had run that calculation, could I still have saved the children?”
The old man leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling: “I don’t know. I’ll never know. Even now, with much greater computing power, no one can tell me. It was all hanging on the edge of disaster, and I had to consider what I knew...and didn’t know. Even then, I knew it was bad...I am the main reason for the fragmentation of the US Imperial Line after the war...my actions caused that, and I could see, even then, that the effects were starting to snowball.”
“So you acted,” Ambros said. “You acted, and you’ve never known whether you should regret the action or not. You couldn’t have faced Clementine if the children were dead...”
“And I will never know if what I did was right, or for the best.” Nikodemos shook his head, tears still falling. “Get out of here,” he snarled: “I’m done.”
“One more thing...” Ambros ventured.
“No,” said Nikomakos.
“Do Clementine and Eleanor have cognates in the other US Imperial Lines?” Ambros watched the old guy carefully.
The answer appeared on Nikodemos’ face before he said it: “No.”
Ambros looked over his shoulder at the Magistriae, who glanced at one another in amazed surmise.
Ambros nodded: “So Seventeen is really One,” he muttered: “Not that we’ll change the numeration, but that’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“Get out,” Nikodemos repeated.
They rose and filed out down the hall.
As they trudged down the alley Voukli mused: “That explains the outsized effect that Ambros’ actions have been having in the other USIT Lines.”
Ambros stared at her, frowning: “What?”
“You oughtn’t to have mentioned that,” said Arrenji.
“I guess not.”
“C’mon, don’t leave it like this...” Ambros trailed off; the implications of Voukli’s small slip-up echoed through his brain.
“I think we’ve said enough,” said Voukli.
It occurred to him that her statement could (and probably did) have multiple meanings. Then he stopped dead still in the middle of a flight of stairs, staring into the distance.
The women stood on either side of him, grinning at one another across his stunned expression.
He said: “Okay, I’ve been around you two enough to know that you’re not going to enlighten me any further. Let’s go.”
They eventually reached the Command Complex; they picked up their Shifters and passed through the great Hall.
At the elevator bank they stopped, embraced, then saluted and went their separate ways, still silent.
Ambros headed for the War Room, another task in mind: ‘Gotta get to Eugene, meet Mr Top Cop and see what he’s on about...’ He tapped his MPS into active mode and re-read Chief Black’s email: ‘Very mysterious, and a little threatening.’
He grinned: “It’s so cool that I don’t have to be scared of him...”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International
CHAPTER SEVEN: A Series of Lessons, Subtle and Not
They strolled down the hallway, hands brushing against one another’s sides and backs. The big towels that they’d wrapped around themselves fell away as they reached the door: “This one,” Voukli said, breathing a little harder: “Come in...”
He was ridiculously excited. He felt some trepidation, considering how weak he’d been just two hours before. But his penis was not worried, so he put aside all thoughts of failure.
Still, he felt the need to ask: “So...um, according to the Histories I’ve been reading, War Guild custom that people more than one rank apart should not get hooked up.”
She grinned: “That’s so. But that custom was established when there were no grades to the ranks. Spathae and Magistrae were a rank apart.” She leaned towards him, putting her hands on his chest.
‘She’s almost exactly my height,’ he thought. Aloud and between her kisses, he said: “So we’re...within the...bounds of...propriety...”
She stepped back and sat on the bed-bench along the wall, suddenly serious: “Depends who you talk to. There are prudes in every culture.”
He laughed: “I’ve never given much credence to prudes.”
“Okay. By me, we’re ethically good. And I really want to get started. But if you have doubts, we should postpone this.”
He shook his head: “No need, I hope. Just answer a couple more questions.”
“Ask.”
“I want to make sure that you won’t start to go easy on me during training. My life may depend upon that.”
She looked up at him, no longer seeming to notice his nudity: “I promise. In Hellas of old, the agapimeno, the ‘teacher’s favorite’, traditionally had the hardest training and the toughest critiques of any student. That goes back to Eleni herself.”
He paused: “Good enough. How shall we start?”
She rose and caught his eye: “I want you. I want to go right at you. I want to get this first connection made, straightforwardly and without artifice.” She stepped towards him, holding his eye: “I’ve never had a barbarian before. This should be fun.”
“I’m a barbarian, am I? I suppose I am, sexually.”
“Yes. You are a barbarian, sir, but I am going to civilize you, right now.”
He didn’t laugh or grin, just gazed at her seriously: “Sounds good.”
She put her hands on him, pulling him to her. She kissed him, hard and wet. ‘Most women in my Line,’ he thought, then lost the thread.
She pushed him back onto the bed, held him by his shoulders and straddled him. As he had expected, she was strong: ‘Stronger than she looks...maybe stronger than me.’
He decided not to test that thought, but let her move him as she wished. She stoked his penis, saying: “I want this inside my kolpi, right now.”
Fortunately he was erect. She slid down onto him, groaning. She moved her hands, taking hold of his wrists and pinning them to the cushion. She rode him hard; she started squeezing his penis almost right away.
‘Peos,’ he thought: ‘It’s a peos here in Hellas...’
He lost that train of thought, too. She seemed to be coming the whole time, her face contorted and her hands sweaty where she held him down.
She slowed and looked at him: “Where are you?”
“I...I don’t know...”
“You are not here with me. You are somewhere else.”
He saw it then: “I am, but I don’t know where...”
“Be here. With me. Right now!”
“Yes...”
“Say my name!”
“Voukli!”
“Call me by my real name!”
“I don’t know it. I don’t...ahhh!”
“My name is Quanah! Say it!”
“Quanah!”
“Oh, yes! There you are!”
He had very little warning of his climax, barely time to register how close it was, and then Bam! He was shaking and pouring his semen forth. She yelled out something in Comanche, then collapsed atop him. They lay thus for some time, her kolpi occasionally grabbing at his peos. Each time he grunted as more semen emerged and the pleasure of that shivered his body and blanked his mind.
Eventually she released his wrists and put her hands by his sides. She rolled off him and then continued the roll onto her feet. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up, saying: “The hot pool is waiting, Spathos. Come over here and enjoy the fruits of civilization.”
He said nothing; he obeyed.
She slipped down into the pool with a sigh. He found himself compelled to sigh as well, as the water closed over his legs and hips and he sank into the heat of it.
Neither of them said a word for some time. Then she wriggled over next to him, and they embraced.
“Well?” she asked.
“What?”
“How was that? How do I compare to your other lovers?”
“I’m surprised that that would matter to you,” he said, puzzled.
She frowned: “Oh. I see. You thought I wanted you to put me somewhere on a hierarchy of sexual competence.”
He looked at her, as they sat close. Each of their right arms was over the other’s shoulder, and each left arm around the other’s waist. He said: “In my Line...very few women would ask that question. If one did, she would mean exactly that.”
She pursed her lips: “To me, that would imply a fair bit of insecurity.”
He shrugged. “I think that’s right.”
“Ah. I’m not insecure.”
“It would never occur to me to think that. That’s why the question surprised me.”
“Ah,” she said: “Let’s be clear. I don’t have any doubts about your level of satisfaction. I want to know about technical differences, differences of approach that indicate differences of philosophy.”
“Is the study of sexual pleasure a philosophical matter?”
She grinned: “Is it not, in your Line?”
“Not really. Perhaps it ought to be.”
“Here in the Commonwealth sex is the subject of very serious study. There is a Deme, made up mostly of members of the Thinker’s, Medical, and Technical Guilds, whose stated purpose is the study of all aspects of sex. Physical, psychological, philosophical and ethical aspects, each separately and as they interact.”
“Hmm. In my Line, each of those specialties studies, in one form or another, each of those aspects of sex and sexuality. Nowhere that I ever heard of does any such group of mixed specialists cooperate in such study. Perhaps they should.”
“Then this should be a point of inquiry for you. Begin your studies now.”
“Very well.” He paused for a long time, perhaps three minutes or more, as he pondered some things that he’d noticed (raggedly) during their encounter. She waited patiently, keeping her caresses relatively chaste so as not to distract him.
“This is uncomfortable,” he said: “But I’m gonna be honest.”
She waited again, for about half a minute, until he said: “In my Line, I think very few women would embrace a man as you are embracing me, now. Let me demonstrate.” He pushed her arms up over his shoulders, and put both of his around her waist.
She raised her head, turning her chin a little to the right. “I feel...I don’t know. Wrong, somehow. This is probably how I’d be with a person who was a lot taller than I am, or a lot shorter. We’re the same height.”
He said: “It’s not that I’ve never been the submissive partner in a bedchamber with a woman.” He reversed their arms, so his were high, and then he snuggled against her shoulder, like... ‘I was about to think, “Like a woman”,’ he pondered. ‘Like the submissive partner, that’s what I really mean.’
She stroked his back: “This is philosophically difficult for you. I hadn’t expected that.”
“Well, I am more of a barbarian than I realized. Or, at least, my Home Line is less enlightened than I always assumed. In my Line, in my experience, very few men would cuddle with a woman in this position, even at the conclusion of a session where they were submissive.”
She reversed their positions, and rubbed her face on his chest. “This is more comfortable for you?”
“Irrationally, yes.”
“It’s not irrational, Ambros, it’s your culture.”
He agreed: “And I still submit, more than I’d realized, to sexist assumptions about intimacy. I mean...” he shook his head: “It’s not as though no woman ever initiated sex with me, took the lead in kissing, or rode me to her own orgasm. But you...”
“I?”
He figured it out: “You didn’t return to, or adopt, a submissive posture when we finished.” He put his fist by his ear: “You shouldn’t! I mean: you are my size, almost exactly. You are probably stronger than me, and for sure you are a better swordfighter. You would destroy me in unarmed combat. You are a way better shot with any kind of firearm.
“You are smarter than I am,” he continued, “or at least better informed about more Timelines than I am. And you not only rank me, but you’re title is ‘Magistri’. The longer I spend in Hellas, the more I realize what a huge jump in Status and responsibility it is to go from Spathe Five to Magistre, especially in Sacred Band, and why it happens so seldom.”
He pulled her back up eye-to-eye with him, and rearranged their arms to their original position.
“The fact that you treat me as an equal in spite of all that is a huge compliment.”
“Did you never have sex with a woman who was less accomplished than yourself? Did you not afterwards treat her as an equal?”
He paused for a long time, then said: “I strove to. Maybe those women even thought I succeeded. I certainly thought so. Right at this moment, I am doubtful.”
He grinned then: “Something to think about, that’s for sure.”
She broke away from him and swam around the pool a couple times. She rolled on her back, moving her arms just enough to stay afloat. Her breasts were small, the nipples and aureoles comparatively large. She said, thoughtfully: “Since you are so often dominant (or so I gather) I guess you’re pretty good at that.”
He shrugged: “I expect so.”
She laughed: “Barbarian men are so pushy, by reputation. You’ve shown no sign of that, yet.”
“Do you want me to be pushy?”
“Do you think you can? Would you? Will you?” She got out of the water and backed up against the wall.
“Do I think I can what? Dominate you? Not a chance...unless you submit.”
She raised her hands above her head, shot her hip and licked her lips: “You say I am stronger than you are. I’m not so sure. I think you’re stronger than you know. Commonwealth medical technology and the training you have been doing...it’s all changing your body.”
He pulled himself out of the pool and approached her.
She said: “Most of my lovers have been women, or Thinkers. I’ve never been submissive.”
“Why are you inviting that now?”
“Because I’m twenty-four, and I’ve never been. Not even slightly. Is it pleasurable?”
“Did your lovers enjoy it?”
“They did.”
He stroked her cheek and she moved toward him. He stopped her, and pushed her gently back against the wall.
“Oh,” she said: “Right.”
He kissed her and she kissed back; he broke the kiss and waited a moment, then kissed her again. She put her arms around him, over his shoulders, and kissed back again.
He broke the embrace and stepped back.
She moaned: “Oh. That’s right. Oh! This is hard.” She raised her arms up again. He stepped into her and rubbed his peos against her belly. The muscles beneath were hard but her skin was amazingly soft.
He kissed her again. This time she did not return his kiss, but simply accepted his tongue. “Better,” he said. “Try this.”
He pushed on her shoulders and she dropped to her knees. She took his peos in her mouth and looked up at him as she sucked.
After a short time he raised her and took her to the bed. He placed her as he wanted her. He pressed her legs apart and began to lick her.
She squirmed a bit and he stopped, moving away. She said: “Oh...”
He laughed and went back to her. She came twice in less than a minute.
‘It’s not hard to give her an orgasm,’ he thought. ‘Of course, she has no cultural or religious inhibitions at all. I wonder...’
He mounted her. She opened her legs wider and took him in, seeming to come again almost immediately.
He began to fuck her: ‘There’s no need to do anything else, Ambros. Just do her.”
Soon his mind went blank, all thoughts and fantasies banished, and he was an animal in lust. He spilled his semen and groaned as she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed.
After a few minutes catching her breath, she said: “Well. That was indeed quite pleasurable. Difficult for me, but philosophically stimulating...”
She arched her back, turned her hips, and threw him over on his side, pushing him out of her abruptly. He laughed, then she did, and they embraced.
Back in the pool, chatting about less critical affairs than sexual philosophy, they passed a pleasant hour. Ambros explained the idea of ‘Spectacle’ to her and described the Situationists. She was impressed by some of their ideas and laughed out loud at others.
He told her: “To a Commonwealther, the idea that it would take effort, most of the time enormous, extreme effort, just to live authentically, I know that seems absurd. But in a money economy, where so many people are so close to homelessness and need every hour’s pay just to get by...people have to take stupid, unproductive jobs that do nothing for the Whole...”
“I get that, intellectually,” she said: “For such people it’s easier to just watch the world through the media, and consume, than it is to attempt original thought or action. Of course I don’t really feel it...”
Their talk returned to Timelines and the Guidelines that operatives (mostly) stuck to.
Voukli rose and stretched, her breasts bobbing a bit and her rangy lean muscles rippling. She said, apropos of their earlier conversation: “So how do you read that guideline we were discussing earlier, the one about past action operations...”
“I confess to some confusion. Help me out here,” said Ambros: “The guideline is: ‘don’t multiply Timelines unnecessarily’, but that doesn’t explain much. I don’t seem to have had an RNA lesson on it, either.”
“No, you haven’t. We don’t do this instruction RNA-style; it’s held closer than that.”
“Close enough that you won’t explain it to me?”
“No. Close enough that I haven’t yet. It is time.”
“Right. Suppose you start...” He was a little vexed.
She smiled and slipped back into the tub: “All right. Let’s do this with an example. In your Line there was a doofus named Hitler. All US Imperial Timelines diverge from the middle or the end of the war that defeated him.”
“A ‘doofus’? He killed, or at least ordered the killing of millions of people. He took over most of Europe. He’s accounted a madman, but a military genius.”
“I won’t argue the point, beyond the obvious: no genius would have ordered the invasion of Russia. That was the act of an incompetent, mad or sane.” Voukli grinned: “He’s not even a footnote in any set of Lines other than the US Imperial ones. But the example will still work.” Voukli frowned.
“I suppose you are talking about the usual speculations in all the US Imperial Lines: what if one could go back in time and assassinate Uncle Adolf?”
“That’s it, exactly.”
“Well, what if?”
“It doesn’t work; it can’t work, and it multiplies Timelines. Unnecessarily, and with complete futility.”
Ambros thought for a moment, beginning to have a clue.
“Okay, go on,” he said after a bit.
“So,” she said: “let’s imagine that President . . . Gore is it? Right. Let’s imagine that he gets his hands on a Shifter, and figures out what it is and how it works. His people do, anyway.” She waved away his response and continued: “They manage to re-attune it, and fully charge it. For the energy cost of a month of operations for a tank battalion, he sends an operative back to Germany in 1930. She pops Hitler in the skull with a pistol and Shifts home. Guess what?”
“You’re saying it doesn’t work . . .”
“Absolutely futile. You can’t change what already happened in your Line. She will have created a new Line, one where Hitler is gone; but it will not affect the History of yours at all.” Voukli grinned again, an expression he had become used to, that wry and self-deprecating look. “But worse than that . . .” she said, trailing off.
“Oh,” he said, thinking hard: “I see what you mean. At the least she’ll have created one more Line; at worst, there will be many more.”
“Maybe hundreds. Lines where she succeeded, ones where she failed, Lines where she is caught and hanged, others where she’s a hero. On and on. And here’s the really futile bit: there will as many new Lines with Hitler in them as without. Get it?”
“Yes.” After a pause, he said: “So that’s why the other side, the ATLs, also avoid ‘past action operations’ for the most part. It just muddies the waters.”
“Exactly! Now come over here, I’m getting horny again. I love men who get the picture quick.”
“That was quick?” He felt uncertain of that.
“Oh, yes,” she said: “Quick, quick, quick!”
She pushed him back to the bed, laying him down on his back again. She sucked him erect and mounted him. ‘There’s no doubt who’s in charge this time,’ he thought. His last thought for quite a while, as it turned out.
Ambros dropped in to his usual spot deep in the swamp. He checked the little campsite where he occasionally slept: his tripwires were all still as he’d set them.
‘I guess no one has found my campsite, yet,’ he thought. He stepped over the main trip hazard at the opening to the pathway. He mushed and glopped his way along until he approached Camp Arlen from the rear.
The sun had already set, and the campers had gathered around the main fire for dinner. Three concentric circles of chairs surrounded the fire, with kids and moms in the front and single men in the back. Fathers and stepfathers, whether husbands or not, dominated the center row.
Ambros stepped into the light, nodded at Arlen, and toed off his Wellingtons. He slid a pair of Berks out of his shoulder bag and slipped them on over his heavy wool socks. He shed his backpack and pulled out a bag of rice.
“Hey Red,” he hollered: “Got some long grain jasmine here for ya.”
The usual head cook, whom Ambros knew only as ‘Red’, stuck his head out of the kitchen enclosure: “Oh, hey, good stuff.” He turned his head: “MIKEY! Git yer ass out there! Bring that bag in here, ’n’ git some water on to boil. We’ll cook the whole fukin’ bag tonight and make rice puddin’ fer tommorrah.”
Mikey, a grinning lad of twenty, came mooching out of the kitchen. He took the bag off of Ambros’ hands and carried it back inside.
Ambros left his backpack by the back row of chairs, picked up his wellies and moved through the party.
He nodded at his acquaintances and shook hands or bumped fists or slapped shoulders with the people he’d come to know. He and Sergeant Arlen had a brief chat about progress on their current projects: most importantly, the bugout routes they had been devising, and the new barricades at the entrance to the swamp. Then Ambros went over to the edge of the main shelter. Arlen followed.
Ambros stared out into the rainy night. After a bit, he made out a tiny flickering light, off in the distance.
“That’s him,” Arlen said, pointing. “That’s where he sets up on the bad days, and where he stays until he’s sober-ish again.”
“I got it. Looks about halfway over to Borderboro.”
“Just about. You still wanna go sit with him?”
Ambros shrugged: “I think I oughtta. What do you think?”
Arlen paused, long enough to get Ambros worried. Then he said: “I’d hate to lose Mark. He’s a good man, when he ain’t plowed. Nothin’ I’ve done has slowed that trainwreck down, at all. Maybe you can save him.” Arlen turned Ambros by the shoulder, looked right into his eyes: “Give it yer best shot, man. Shock him, scare him, talk sense to him, I don’t care. You can’t make it worse.”
“Can’t I?”
Arlen shook his head: “You can’t. It’s like triage: he’s dying, you apply CPR. If it doesn’t work? He was gone when you got there, eh?”
“You think it’s that bad, huh?”
“Gettin’ there, anyhow.”
“Okay.”
Ambros pulled the boots back on and raised the hood of his cloak. He slogged out into the night, hearing the rain on the top of the hood and feeling the suck and give as the mud grabbed at his boots.
He approached the little camp cautiously. It sat upon a small mound, perhaps a dozen feet in diameter, where Mark had levelled it. When he could see into the area under the tarp, he grimaced: ‘Passed out drunk, I guess.’ He stepped as quietly as he could, until he could sit on a log opposite Mark. He built up the fire a bit, watching the older man carefully.
Mark snorted, coughed, spat into the fire, and then looked up blearily. “Huh? Oh, Ambros...man, you startled me.”
“Yeah.” Ambros revised his estimate: Mark had been asleep, but not passed out.
Mark leaned forward and coughed some more.
Ambros reached into the patch pocket on the right thigh of his cargoes: “Drink?” he asked, holding out a flask of Jameson’s.
“Don’ mind if I do...hey, how come yer not tellin’ me to stop drinkin’ like ever’body else does?”
“You’re a grown man, Mark. You have a job, of sorts. You’re a big help to Sarge. You wanna get sloshed now and then, it’s your business? Right?”
“Damn straight...”
Ambros waited.
Finally Mark took a pull at the flask, and then handed it back. Ambros took a sip.
Mark said: “Too much, though. Too much and too often. Gonna kill me one day.”
Ambros nodded: “Maybe sooner than you realize.”
“Sooner than I...listen, asshole, I know, I know just how far gone I am, I...” Mark ranted for a while, then trailed off.
Ambros remained quiet, staring at the flask.
Mark looked up, his eyes focusing on Ambros briefly.
“You ever...you ever kill anybody, hippie?”
Ambros shook his head: “Not until about a year ago.”
“Huh?”
“Last January. In a warehouse, in California. I laid down cover fire while my comrades shot a bunch of pimps and slavers. Didn’t actually shoot anybody myself, but I was responsible. That didn’t bother me, much. But later...”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.” Ambros stirred the little fire, and added a couple pieces of wood. The bed of coals was exceedingly hot, and the new fuel burst into flame almost right away.
He looked right at Mark, letting the old vet see his tears.
“Okay,” Mark said.
“I’ll tell you, and then you tell me, okay?”
After a long pause, Mark took another drink, this from a fifth of cheap gin he had hidden in his coat. Then he said: “Sure. Hit me with your best shot.”
Ambros let the conversation rest for a moment while he figured out how to tell the story. Finally he began: “My mentor and I, we were running through a building, a kind of outpost. A big fort sorta thing, y’know?”
“Okay.”
“So she was breaking up our side’s equipment, so it wouldn’t get captured, okay? We’d run for ten seconds, or a couple minutes, she’d stop and smash some machinery, then off we’d go again.”
“What were you doin’?”
“I was new to the situation. I just sorta watched her back.”
“Huh.”
“So, anyway: we came around a corner into rifle and pistol fire. I got hit about twenty times, knocked me back into the wall.”
“But you ain’t dead?”
“We had extremely good body armor, both of us. I had some impressive bruises from hits on the...it’s kinda like Kevlar, you know? Without that armor, I’d have been dead at least three or four times over.”
“Huh.” Mark looked at Ambros, seeing the haunted visage lit from below by the fire, and the unshed tears in his eyes.
Mark’s eyes narrowed: “Go ahead,” he said.
“So we cut loose with the...you’d call ’em machine pistols, I guess. The weapons we were carrying. The guys on the other side weren’t armored. They went down like targets in a shooting gallery.”
“I get that, man...” Mark had a sickened look on his face.
“Yeah,” said Ambros. “So the mentor and I stopped to look at what we’d slaughtered...the...people we slaughtered. They were pretty nearly all kids, just, not even twenty years old, mere teenagers. The other side sent them out there, unarmored, with mid-twentieth century style firearms...no armor, like I said...they never had a chance.”
“Yeah.” Mark nodded: “That shit is what really gets to ya. That, and when one of yer buddies takes one.”
Ambros nodded. He thought of Vorrisi: “That, too.”
Mark took another long swig of gin. He offered the bottle to Ambros.
“I better drink my whisky, gin and I don’t get along,” said Ambros, taking a mouthful from his flask. He let it sit in his mouth for a moment, savoring the feeling of the stuff against his palate.
The other man looked at Ambros, his head cocked, his expression dubious: “You tell that story like you believed it. I don’t know if I do.”
Ambros swallowed his drink, smacked his lips. “I don’t care whether you believe it or not.”
Mark laughed bitterly: “I get that, man. Just what are the two sides fighting about? It sounds like your war is still going on, somewhere in the world.”
“It is. If I tried to explain the whole thing, you’d really think I was nuts.”
Mark nodded: “Secret shit. Always somebody doin’ that.” He took a deep breath: “Sarge tell you anything about me?”
“Not much. He values your contribution to the camp.”
Mark took a smaller sip of gin, then said: “I was Special Forces.”
Ambros tipped his head to one side: “Airborne?”
“I had a Green Beret.”
“High-end soldiering.”
Mark just laughed. He sat silent again, nodding to himself.
He rolled up the sleeve of his coat, deliberately, until Ambros could see the nasty scars along the top of his left forearm. He held the arm forward, so the light of the fire illuminated the damage. Ambros guessed that Mark had about fifteen percent use of that arm and hand.
“Nasty.” Ambros caught Mark’s eye and held it.
Mark maintained the eye contact and said: “Napalm.” Then he looked away.
“Hmm. ‘Friendly fire’ then, huh?” Ambros looked away as well.
“Yeah. We had intel that some big-time VC officer was in this particular village. It was a village that the Gummint had declared ‘Pacified’, by which they meant everyone in town was more scared of us than they were of Charlie. Some of the men there had US weapons. S’posedly to defend their village from the VC.
“We heard gunfire and screaming before we even got to the edge of town. We found a bloodbath in progress. Charlie’s high command had ordered the whole village killed, as an example. ‘Don’t help the Americans or this will happen to your village, too.’ So there we were, surrounded by people shooting at each other, and at us, and the Lieutenant shouts to take cover and defend ourselves and everybody is screaming and running around. People layin’ around dead in heaps, including little kids. It was sick.” Mark chuckled a little, bitterly.
“Yeah.”
Mark let a little time pass. Then he said: “By the time we got there pretty nearly everybody was dead. The VC were retreating into the jungle. Lt. Tryon ordered cover fire into the treeline, until it was obvious that Charlie had all bugged out.
“Any survivors?” Ambros stared at the fire. He’d heard too many similar tales from people only a little older than he was, who’d gone to Nam and somehow survived to tell their stories.
“Five live ones. This woman and three little kids. And her husband, who was all shot up. We tried to call for a medevac, but the radio was down.
“Then Toby found a VC, at the edge of the village. He was cut pretty near in half, but he was alive. The lieutenant sez to me: “Finish him.”
Mark gagged a little on his next drink. He stared at the bottle and then set it down: “Maybe you got a point about gin.”
Ambros silently passed the flask of Jameson’s across the fire, and Mark took a sip. He nodded then, and said: “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Mark handed the flask back. He said: “I looked at Charlie, there on the ground. He was maybe sixteen. He could see his own guts, spread out all over the place, laying there in the mud. Tryon sez: ‘C’mon, private. One in the heart, one in the mind.’ I pointed my rifle at the kid and raised an eyebrow. He goes ‘YES! YES!’ in Gook...in Vietnamese.”
Ambros waited; he’d learned not to prompt in such circumstances. ‘Very often just makes them clam up,’ he thought.
“So I finished him,” said Mark, making a motion as if firing a rifle: “Double tap, pop, pop.” He grinned ironically: “One in the heart, one in the head.”
After a bit, Ambros said: “And the napalm?”
Mark laughed: “Typical fubar bullshit. We were trying to evac the live family, but with the radio down we were kinda crippled. Some planes came overhead and laid down a shitload of the stuff, and we were caught in the middle. Turns out, they’d been calling us back for half an hour. They got some kinda static from our radio about the medevac we called for, and they thought we’d already hit the bugout route.”
“Oh.”
“So I got this little kid in one arm and my rifle in the other and the whole jungle lights up with hellfire, and the lady didn’t want to leave her old man, and by the time we got ourselves and the kids out, I had my left arm fried. The stuff doesn’t go out, y’know. I had to drop the kid, drop my pack and harness, strip off my shirt...” Mark trailed off, gazing into the jungle in his mind.
Ambros sat silent, as silent as Mark. The night drew on towards dawn, and they finished the flask. Mark poured out the remainder of his gin, grimacing.
“I should go on the wagon for a few weeks, give my liver a rest. Whaddaya think?”
Ambros shrugged: “Your call, buddy.”
The next morning he dropped in to the War Room. Since he was not in a hurry, he walked even more slowly than usual around the room, staring at boards and listening to the talk and banter.
‘It’s almost musical, the way the activity flows around this room,’ he mused: ‘It’s as if each Timeline hums at its own frequency, and the people here are trying to tune them.’
Because he dallied, he got to see a unique event: the arrival of a ‘Very Important Person’.
His first hint of anything unusual came when six Black Warrior Guild Magistrae trooped into the War Room. Each of them took over a station at one of the boards, and they began a staccato conversation, in jargon that he barely understood. The people they displaced gathered in the seating area by the main door, grinning and making small wagers about whatever was going on.
Ambros joined them.
One of the Black Warrior Magistrae said: “Deep Space Zeos says he’s clean. They are sending him through this time.”
Some of the regular crew groaned and some hooted with joy; he watched, interested but puzzled.
He recognized Theri, whom he’d met while on the Rescue Squad. She grinned at him: “Hey Ambros, what’s up?”
He laughed: “No idea. You tell me.”
“Oh, the Hierarchists from the Prime Objectivist Line want to send us an Ambassador.” She shrugged: “We said, ‘sure, whatever’. He’s tried three times to get through. So far, each time, he carried some kind of tracking device that would have let the Objectivists find our space-time location. So we sent the guy back three times.”
“Looks like he’s coming through,” said another.
Ambros watched with interest as a single person dropped in.
He stood a little taller than average for the Commonwealth Line, and wore the sort of clothes that Ambros’ grandfather had worn on special occasions: very fancy suit with a cutaway coat, and a topcoat that looked like mohair or cashmere. He had chin whiskers but no moustache, and great bushy sideburns. In his hand, he held a top hat; he looked around, seemingly puzzled.
Megalos stepped forward and saluted; he said: “Ambassador Harvey...Welcome to Athino, Commonwealth Prime.”
The fellow frowned, displeased: ‘I rawther expected to be welcomed by the civilian authorities, old man,” he said, his accent hovering somewhere between England and Australia.
“As I told you, there are none. I have volunteered to escort you from this place to an accommodation, and to introduce you to some Deme and Guild officers. This gentleman and these women are some of my Guild comrades, of high Status in the City. Step this way, if you please: This is Magistri Andromaki...”
Ambros memorized the facial features of the Ob Prime Ambassador, on general principle, in case he needed to interact with him in the future: ‘Harvey. Mr Harvey, the Ambassador.’
“Thanks for the heads-up, Spathisi Theri. I need to go to the Library.”
“See you around,” she replied.
Hours later he sat at his usual table in Plataeo Socratosena, contemplating his afternoon’s work
He’d taken the day to rest and do some RNA-assisted reading: ‘It’s good to have the RNA for this technical stuff. Helps me remember stuff I can’t even understand.’ He allowed the schematics he’d studied to float on the surface of his mind. The Power System that kept all of the lights and electronics in the City running shone through the previously learned City Map and made a few things clear: ‘There’s a method to the circuits here in Keenafthono Prima: from the smallest thumb drive to the way the whole City is wired, and the wireless activity, too. The same pattern, the same principle. Open up any machine in this Line and you can guess where every piece and part will be. Look at the City as a machine...
‘Even the distributed parts of the power generation system hew to the pattern...Every building seems to produce a little bit of surplus.’
He pondered that. No two companies in his Line ever did things the same way. ‘It’s like there’s a law that says: “Thou shall be mutually incomprehensible”. And here...’
He spoke aloud, muttering: “In the Commonwealth, comprehensibility and user-friendliness are so admired that they are always adopted. As a default, pretty much.”
A slender woman appeared at the far side of the square. She gazed across the plaza and her eyes lighted on him: ‘Someone I don’t know,’ he thought: ‘...Something about her seems familiar.’
Her tightly curled hair shone red in the weak December sunshine. He glanced past her, looked back behind himself. She seemed intent on him alone as she crossed the plaza. He felt a powerful sexual attraction.
“Hello,” she said, in accented American. She looked to be about thirty. He recalled that she might be sixty, or in some circumstances as old as ninety.
“Do I know you?”
She raised her chin, speculatively: “By reputation only, I believe. You’ve been researching my father. My name is Nikoletí—or, you’d say: Nicolette Irene Orenhauser-Crowell.”
“That’s why you looked familiar. You take after your mother. Have a seat...”
‘I heard...Arrenji told me that you’d met her. Seen her recently.” He could see tears in her eyes.
He paused: “Yes.”
She bit her lip: “How...how is she?”
He measured every word, and her reactions: “She’s ninety-five years old. She appears to be in excellent health for a woman that age in USIT Seventeen, but still...she’s old.”
Nikoletí nodded: “Father did what he could for her, and for Aunt Ellie. He says he couldn’t bring them here—that’s true, I’ve seen the equations—so he did some medical things himself...she might live to a hundred and ten, he said. Aunt Ellie was seven years older...is she...?”
“Miss Eleanor and Miss Clementine live together in an apartment in the basement of a mansion built on Orenhauser property south of Eugene, Oregon, USA. Her grand-nephew and his wife and daughter occupy most of the house, along with some longtime family servants. During the brief meeting I had with the two, Miss Eleanor seemed, if anything, in better health than your mother.”
She pursed her lips, then nodded: “Aunt Ellie had a very strong constitution, as they said back in those days. When I knew them, I mean.”
He nodded. He stared at her in a way that might be thought rude in his own Line. She had a great deal of the physical attractiveness of her mother, but bore it in a very different, hyper-aware manner.
“Magistri Arrenji told me that you want to see my father.”
“I want the knowledge he has of what he was doing in my Line in the Thirties. Arrenji thinks I am in the need-to-know group, now.”
“I agree. Getting him to agree to see you could be difficult.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She shrugged: “He’s in very poor health. He’s two hundred and thirty-four years old, and he stopped all medical treatment twenty years ago. At this point he’s going downhill fast.”
“Hmmm.” Ambros’ math skills were way better than they had been before he started learning under RNA and hypnotics: “He was a hundred and sixty when he married your mother.”
She laughed a little sarcastically: “Yes. His ‘official’ age in that Line was forty-five. It was a bit of a scandal, the age difference. Just think what all of those Society Ladies would have thought—and said!—if they’d known his true age.”
He shook his head, smiling: “I can’t imagine.”
She gave him a curious look: “I’ll talk to my father. Don’t count on anything.”
“I hear you.”
“I’ll be in touch...”
‘Another day, another task to complete. It’s only been a day since Nicolette contacted me; I guess I’m lucky. Nikodemos is not usually so forthcoming with invites, or so rumor has it.’
Ambros shook his head as the calendars swirled in his mind: ‘The twenty-seventh of November, six days before my birthday. Eighthday of the third tenday before the Winter Solstice...’
He walked along Odo Arrendi, on the inside of the outermost Wall around Athino. He found the gate he sought, and his MPS pinged him that he was near his destination. He turned and went slowly into a maze of alleys and narrow streets, his mental map of the neighborhood guiding him in his search. ‘I wonder if this will be productive? Nikoletí must have got around her father somehow.’
He had to climb a rather steep hill, which stood just within the walls of the City. Some of the alleys had stairs where the incline demanded them.
“Ambros,” he heard a quiet voice from behind. He turned and saw Nicolette Crowell: “Come with me.”
He followed her down a ridiculously twisted alley and up two sets of stairs to an unmarked door at a dead end. She raised a finger to her lips, enjoining silence American style: “Wait here a moment.” She slipped within, closing the door behind her.
He looked around, nervous. He saw a ladder (of sorts) up to the roof of the building to his right. He moved silently over to stand by it, thinking: ‘There’s no other possible bug-out route. I hate dead ends.’
Somebody approached along the alley. He reached for his pistol, recalled that he didn’t have it: ‘Relax. You’re in the Commonwealth. There are no muggers or thieves in this Timeline; or damn few, anyway. And no enemies.’ Regulos’ sneering face crossed his mind, but he dismissed that: ‘Not really worth considering...’
Voukli and Arrenji came around the corner, and he relaxed. “You ready to meet the mystery man?” asked Voukli.
He shrugged: “As ready as I’ll get. You don’t like this guy, do you?”
Voukli shook her head: “He’s beyond my likes or dislikes. But you’re right, I find him unnecessarily abrasive. Also, I don’t agree with...I mean, some of the things he’s done…” She threw up her hands: “I don’t have all the information I’d need to critique his operations, and he won’t give it to me, and on the surface he looks like an uncontrolled…” she shrugged: “...assassin.”
Arrenji stood there, amused. Ambros quirked an eyebrow at her.
She shrugged in her turn: “Sometimes looks like that to me, as well. But then, people say the same thing about me.”
Voukli looked uncomfortable.
Nicolette Crowell opened the mystery door again and beckoned: “He’s ready. Come in.”
They filed through the door and down a narrow hall. She opened a curtain across another doorway and gestured them in.
Ambros looked around a very small room, an office of sorts with a narrow single bed against one wall. Perfectly ordinary file cabinets lined one side of the room. The walls bore a thick layer of plaster, and centuries worth of whitewashing.
‘This building has been here a long time,’ Ambros thought. A window looked out upon a steep staircase going down to a street on the hillside below. ‘There’s his bugout.’
The old man sat in a padded throne-like office chair behind an extremely small desk. His beard was long, thin, unkempt, and entirely white. One thick wad of dog-eared and thumb-damaged paper sat upon the desk, dead centered, its edges ruffled and torn. A young man stood behind Master Nikodemos. He appeared to be perhaps thirty.
“Mr Rothakis? Spathos Ambros?” The old man’s voice growled and crackled as he gazed in a semi-contemptuous way at Ambros.
“Yes,” Ambros said, and then went silent. He thought he recognized the type: ‘He won’t be impressed by verbiage or semantics. No one can bullshit him, he’ll see right through that. I should just let him lead the way…a complete egotist, and a perfectionist. But for good reasons...’
The man coughed: “I am Magistros Nikodemos. The ‘Latest’ they call me. Have a seat.” He waved the papers in the air: “I have been reading the stuff you’ve posted on the Kyklo. Clement’s been bringing it to me in hard copy.”
The younger man spoke: “I’m Clement Elton Orenhauser Crowell; here in the Commonwealth, Klementos. Dad thinks your stuff is pretty good.”
“That’s not what I said. I said his work was a worthy effort, but I have a lot of questions. Sit down, I said!”
Clement’s lips quirked as he suppressed a grin. He winked at Ambros, who remained deadpan.
Ambros sat slowly, watching the old man hawkishly. He said: “Unless I miss my guess, you are also Mr, later Sir, finally Lord Nicholas Anson Crowell, archaeologist and diplomat.”
Nikodemos looked sour: “I was. Went kinda native for a while, nearly lost my head in the process.”
“You did lose your heart.”
Silence ensued.
“Smartass.” Nikodemos smiled a little, obviously unwilling to show emotion: “How’d you figure it?”
Ambros just stared. He waited the old man out.
“Yes. Clementine was the love of my life, and I had to leave her…”
“You blew the shit out of your cover to save her, and Miss Greenlaw, from the Nazis. You snatched your kids right out from under Himmler’s nose, and you got Clem and Ellie out of Occupied Greece on a British troopship. In the Nick of time, excuse the pun.
“Clementine must have known that you’d taken the kids here, to Commonwealth Prime. She had to pretend that you had vanished, missing and presumed dead by the hand of Nazi thugs, and do the mourning thing…”
“She was in mourning,” said Clement: “She knew she’d probably never see any of us again.”
“Why? That’s what I’m here for, to find out why.”
“Why would I tell you?” Nikodemos growled.
“Why not?”
The old man slapped the pile of essays again: “Multiplying Timelines, that’s why!”
Ambros glared at the old man: “Keep talking.”
He shook his head violently, and then put his face in his hands: “I have to be so careful here, and I’m old and not always mentally alert. I’ve been forced to hide out in my own home town to avoid stupid, dangerous questions...”
Arrenji and Voulkli glanced at one another knowingly.
“I’d rather you didn’t stress him too much,” said Nicolette.
“No, let him stress me. Arrenji is correct: he’s in a needs-to-know position.”
“You’ll blow another artery if you get too worked up. Versingos said...”
“I know what the little troll said,” Nikodemos rejoined: “I don’t care. I’m not trying to extend my life any longer, or hadn’t you noticed?”
Nicolette hung her head: “I noticed.” She wiped away tears and left the room.
Nikodemos took a deep breath: “You are a native of USIT Seventeen they tell me. I can tell you things I wouldn’t tell just anyone...
“I’d started dropping in and making myself at home about 1860. I saw that the US Timeline with that particular lineage of Presidents, with Grant and all, then later, Roosevelt following McKinley, it was all incredibly unstable. I started watching that ass Hitler in nineteen twenty-two or so, and I thought he was really dangerous.
“I was spending about half my time in that Line: the one that all of the US Imperials grew out of. So, I decided I had to go native. I got another re-juve and attended Oxford. Identification was easy to forge in those times, and I made myself into a wealthy man, partly by selling antiquities that I snatched from Quiet Lines. You wouldn’t believe how much money rich people will pay for such things!”
“Actually...” Ambros grinned sarcastically at the old man: “I would.”
Nikodemos lowered his brows and said: “Huh. I guess maybe you would.
“Anyway, the problem was, by twenty-eight or so, when I realized what old Adolf actually had in mind, it was too late to just kill him.”
Ambros said: “Yeah, Voukli explained that part: it just multiplies Timelines.”
“Especially if done by a Saltaros! I could not take action! It would have made things worse. Then...along came Clementine and Eleanor.”
“And you fell in love.”
“You’d think that at one hundred and sixty years old I’d have been immune to that.”
Arrenji laughed: “Med techs cannot re-juve the rest of you without rejuvenating your balls. Clementine was hot stuff, I saw some photos.”
“You have that right.” Nikodemos looked penitent: “I looked to be about forty-five in that Line’s terms, and my peos thought I was twenty.” He shook his head: “Anyway, she turned up with child. My child. I dug in my heels, tried to make the peace thing work. Went back to the League of Nations—there was a point, earlier, when I would cheerfully have slaughtered the entire US Senate, when they betrayed Wilson and didn’t join the League—but...
“I failed. The war began. We, my family, we wound up in Salonika, where I was supposed to inspect and improve the city’s defenses.”
Ambros interrupted: “Mussolini invaded Greece. The Greeks ran him out, and took a big chunk of Albania. The Nazis attacked, and between them and the Italian Army...”
“It was hopeless. Greek traitors kidnapped the kids from our very arms, and sold them to the SS. We wound up scattered across the countryside, surrounded by Waffen SS and Gestapo types, and Eleanor Greenlaw’s name was way too Jewish-sounding.”
Nikodemos glared at Ambros: “I did the calculations every way I could, I even considered what would happen if I killed a bunch of the Nazi higher-ups. I could have done that. It was futile. If I stayed in that Line, all hell would break loose. If I took Clementine and Eleanor out of that Line...” he pulled up another stack of papers: "This is how we did it before Memory RNA became the fashionable thing: quantum abatement-rebatement equations, ciphered with the aid of analog and digital calculating machines.”
Arrenji and Voukli took the sheaf and began to pore over the pages, Voukli over Arrenji’s shoulder: “See that...he’s got a point...oh goddess, look at that...no, he couldn’t have...this assumption is flawed...he didn’t have better data...”
Ambros stared at Nikodemos. The old man said: “Arrenji can take enough RNA to hold the histories of a dozen closely-related Lines in her head, with a hundred un-manifested quantum Lines, and ease through an operation day by day, even hour by hour, aware all of the time how close she is to messing things up. I had to come back here, and run simulations, and do those calc...” He coughed for a few minutes.
When the fit passed, Ambros said: “I get it. I do.”
“I told Clementine, I showed her. She agreed that it was the only possible solution. She was a good mathematician; she didn’t really get all of the premises, but she saw that the math was right.”
Ambros frowned: “I don’t have all that much RNA, and I’m operating in Seventeen, and doing things I’d never do if not for those two.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder: “I don’t seem to be screwing things up, or multiplying Timelines...”
“You are operating in your own Line. It makes a difference.”
“Why?”
“It just does. I can’t explain it. You don’t have the mathematics to understand it, or the RNA to get it intuitively. You will.”
“Maybe.”
“You will. I know Arrenji. I know the kind of people she recruits. They are the kind of people I used to recruit.
“If you move sideways and take actions in, say Line 16 of the US Imperial family, you can get away with more than you could in Line One. In a Line like, oh, like...”
“Alcatraz Quiet,” Voukli suggested.
“Right!” the old man agreed: “No native population to mess with. You can do almost anything short of destroying a Gate in a Quiet Line. There’s no Subjective Dissonance to worry about. Get into one of the low-tech religious Lines, and you can create a whole new subset of the Multiverse just by sneezing.”
Ambros snarled: “Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not,” said Nikodemos.
“He’s not,” said Arrenji: “Not just any sneeze, but...sometimes.”
“Oh.”
Nikodemos coughed some more, then scrabbled in the top drawer of the little desk. “Here,” he said, holding out a small box.
Ambros took it: “What is it?”
“My own journals. The whole pile, on crystal drives.”
“Um...is there personal stuff on here?”
“Everything is there. Letters to and from my various Twines and children...”
Clement looked at his father, amazed.
“...stuff about my relationship with Clem and Ellie, love letters to Clem that I wrote after we parted but never dared send, all of my emotional breakdowns and my overreactions in the Nazi Lines, the stupid shit I did because I could get away with it, the money I dropped on various charities in Line Seventeen, all of it.”
“So I’m in charge of this?”
“You are now, as these witnesses can testify, my literary executor.”
Clement snarled.
Ambros nodded, eyes on the old man: “Any special requests?”
“Don’t publish it till I am dead. Don’t even show it to Nicolette or Clement.”
Clement punched the wall hard enough to crack the plaster, then stormed out of the room cursing. They could hear him continuing, in several languages, until he slammed the door at the end of the hallway.
After a long, uncomfortable silence, Arrenji said: “You are such a shit.”
Nikodemos shrugged: “So what. Live to my age, and tell yourself that you’re better. If it turns out that you can. You!” he pointed his beard at Ambros: “Any questions?”
Ambros grimaced: “Stupid thing to ask. I need to read this before I’ll have any intelligent questions.”
“You are correct.” Nikodemos growled and bent forward at the waist, letting out a high-pitched whine.
‘In a lot of pain,’ thought Ambros. He found it hard to summon any pity. He tried to put himself in the old man’s place, and found he couldn’t: ‘I just can’t imagine this old shit’s life. Two hundred and thirty years plus...the technological advances...the tough decisions...carrying the whole “license to assassinate”...or “duty to assassinate” mandate for as long as he has...’ He frowned and shook his head: ‘I guess I can feel some empathy there. Like if I’d killed old Duggins the first chance I had, how many people would still be alive from the community in Cleveland? If I could have moved from Line to Line and eliminated the bastard...’
He saw his way through: “Tell me what my three biggest questions for you will be, after I speed-read this, and then study it slowly. And then tell me the answers.”
“Smartass,” Nikodemos said, again.
Ambros waited him out. Again.
The old man grumbled for a bit, then spoke: “All right. Your first question will be, why didn’t Nikodemos stop the assassination of President McKinley? The answer will not be evident from the manuscript you have there. It’s because there were worse outcomes likely—very likely—if Roosevelt the First had to wait for the Presidency. Your second question will be, why didn’t Nikodemos prevent the adoption of the really stupid parts of the Treaty of Versailles? The punitive measures that the French, in their unreasoning animus, forced through.
“And that’s because I couldn’t manage it. I did everything I could, within the bounds of the law at that time and in that Line, and it wasn’t enough. I also resorted to bribery and intimidation, which were not legal. That, too, failed, so I just moved on.
“I didn’t foresee the full effect such punishment would have on the younger generation of Germans, or I might have taken some more radical action. By the time I realized how bad it was, it was too late. Hitler...” Nikodemos made a face, rue and fury and frustration evident.
They sat a while, and Ambros risked a glance over his shoulder. The Magistriae looked gob-smacked.
He returned his attention to the old man: “And the third question?”
Nikodemos sighed: “You’ll look over that journal, and then those calculations,” he nodded at the papers the women were still holding: “...and you’ll want to know why I didn’t shoot Himmler in the head and take Clem and Ellie and the kids to a Quiet Line for a few years, until it would be safe for them to come here, or go home to Seventeen, with me able to visit, at least occasionally.”
Silence deepened as Voukli and Arrenji perused the calculations.
“What is the answer to that question?” asked Ambros.
“I fucked up.”
“How?”
“I never considered what subtracting Himmler from the Nazi hierarchy would have done, until after the chance to kill him had come and gone,” Nikodemos said, weeping silently. Tears ran down, but he maintained his gravitas: “And I didn’t kill him, because I wasn’t sure at that moment how that would alter things.”
Ambros sat there, gradually realizing what the old man meant: “If you’d known, if you’d killed him?”
Nikodemos remained silent.
“But you couldn’t have known!” said Voukli, on the edge of tears herself: “One couldn’t, in those days, run every possible scenario...”
Nikodemos stood up. He bent forward and pounded the table, in a rage, shouting: “I didn’t need to run every gods be damned scenario, I needed to run that one! Just that one! Seventy-four years, without her.” He sat down heavily: “Just that one...just...that.” He looked at Ambros, then: “I rushed back to Germany to save my children...if I’d delayed, Himmler would likely have killed them. But maybe not, maybe not. He had a use for them, to draw Clementine out of our country house. If I’d run one more simulation, I could have stayed with Clementine. If I had run that calculation, could I still have saved the children?”
The old man leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling: “I don’t know. I’ll never know. Even now, with much greater computing power, no one can tell me. It was all hanging on the edge of disaster, and I had to consider what I knew...and didn’t know. Even then, I knew it was bad...I am the main reason for the fragmentation of the US Imperial Line after the war...my actions caused that, and I could see, even then, that the effects were starting to snowball.”
“So you acted,” Ambros said. “You acted, and you’ve never known whether you should regret the action or not. You couldn’t have faced Clementine if the children were dead...”
“And I will never know if what I did was right, or for the best.” Nikodemos shook his head, tears still falling. “Get out of here,” he snarled: “I’m done.”
“One more thing...” Ambros ventured.
“No,” said Nikomakos.
“Do Clementine and Eleanor have cognates in the other US Imperial Lines?” Ambros watched the old guy carefully.
The answer appeared on Nikodemos’ face before he said it: “No.”
Ambros looked over his shoulder at the Magistriae, who glanced at one another in amazed surmise.
Ambros nodded: “So Seventeen is really One,” he muttered: “Not that we’ll change the numeration, but that’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“Get out,” Nikodemos repeated.
They rose and filed out down the hall.
As they trudged down the alley Voukli mused: “That explains the outsized effect that Ambros’ actions have been having in the other USIT Lines.”
Ambros stared at her, frowning: “What?”
“You oughtn’t to have mentioned that,” said Arrenji.
“I guess not.”
“C’mon, don’t leave it like this...” Ambros trailed off; the implications of Voukli’s small slip-up echoed through his brain.
“I think we’ve said enough,” said Voukli.
It occurred to him that her statement could (and probably did) have multiple meanings. Then he stopped dead still in the middle of a flight of stairs, staring into the distance.
The women stood on either side of him, grinning at one another across his stunned expression.
He said: “Okay, I’ve been around you two enough to know that you’re not going to enlighten me any further. Let’s go.”
They eventually reached the Command Complex; they picked up their Shifters and passed through the great Hall.
At the elevator bank they stopped, embraced, then saluted and went their separate ways, still silent.
Ambros headed for the War Room, another task in mind: ‘Gotta get to Eugene, meet Mr Top Cop and see what he’s on about...’ He tapped his MPS into active mode and re-read Chief Black’s email: ‘Very mysterious, and a little threatening.’
He grinned: “It’s so cool that I don’t have to be scared of him...”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International
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