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"No
enemy But winter and rough weather" ("As you like it") NO ENEMY (Chrondisp 3)
Chapter 1 We were driving through a silent white
tunnel. Snow was a blinding glare in the twin thrusting halogens, resolving
into white dots accelerating at us like flak. The misses zoomed smoothly away
and over as they found the boundary layer on the hood; the hits flopped heavily
onto the tinted triplex, to be impatiently waved aside by the over-worked
droning wipers. Jim's
square face in profile was devilish in the underlighting, eyes hidden in black
holes like Torquemada. His hand reached out of the gloom to push yet again at
the heating gate. "10:17pm
Friday" the dash clock read; "7:17am Saturday" my wrist watch
would read, as jet-lagged I fought hot-eyed against the hypnotic wipers and the
warm air blasting back from the
windscreen. Another
car slowly overtook us; thrown up sludge slamming on our 467 Merc and
immediately we were at the bottom of a black greasy ocean. `The
prick,' Jim muttered, flashing his main beam. The note of the wipers deepened,
laboured and gradually we rose to the surface. The overtaking car's green
number-plate froze for a moment in our headlights - "California - The
Sunshine State". Pushing
technology to the limit, the Airbus 770 had dropped vertically through the
blizzard with screaming jets into LA exactly on schedule. But immediately after
touchdown we had run out of technology. Lines of Mexicans with shovels were
pushing aside the snow and an unknown Edison had clamped a plank to a forklift
truck. There are no snowploughs in Los Angeles. Hundreds
of stranded passengers impatiently speaking into hundreds of cellular had
blocked all channels. The display on my phone read: "Welcome CA, hope
arrive Gate 4 white Mercedes 467 convertible 8:45pm. Jim." His ETA had
slipped three times before I saw him. I had splashed across in the slush
outside Gate 4 as he shoved open the car door. I had climbed into the dimly lit
warm interior and thrown my luggage onto the rear seat. `Weather's all shot to hell,' was
his greeting. He had invited me from "frozen Munich to tank up with some
good old Californian sunshine." I could see he was pissed off that it was
snowing here for the first time since records had been taken, and was expecting
sarcasm. I had kindly refrained, slammed the door, turned towards him and we
had shaken hands. Scowling
he had driven to the downtown Sheraton where I had booked in and showered. I
hadn’t unpacked; all I had was leisure clothing - in this weather I would stick
with the heavy suit I had left Munich in. Now
he was taking me to one of the famous California "Singles' Bars". An
opalescent glow appeared through the blizzard to the right. The automatic
changed down and snow crunching under the deep-tread Michelins we shouldered
our way off the Santa Ana Freeway into a big parking lot, only half-full. The
wipers still working hard, we drove past aluminium hitching rails up to the tall
carved portals of a hacienda and climbed out. Yellow flaring torches mounted at
each side hissed as snow flakes landed. A keen-face young man in a shiny green
cape slid into the seat of the Merc and disappeared with it into the blizzard.
Valet parking. You don't see that much in Germany. We turned and a blast of hot
air and music ballooned out as the door opened. We entered hastily and the door
closed automatically behind us, hissing in the fallen snow. Thumping
120db disco music slammed at us, edging the pain threshold and resonating in my
chest cavity. In front and below us was a vast dance floor filled with
teenagers doing an arm-waving dance under flickering strobes, like an old black
and white movie. I
turned round and for the first time had a chance to look at Jim since his visit
to me in Munich three months ago. Ex-US
Marine Lieutenant James Prince PhD had peeled off his ski suit and was dressed
in blue jeans tucked into cowboy boots, a narrow waisted check shirt
emphasising quarter-back shoulders, a thin gold chain with a shark's tooth on
it around his neck. Tall and good-looking, blond hair swept back, he looked
nothing like the popular image of a computer scientist. Shit. In my dark suit,
black shoes, white poplin shirt and striped tie I felt like an undertaker in
this vital atmosphere. If I took the coat off and loosened my tie? `We
want through,' shouted Jim in my ear, edge of hand chopping towards the far
side of the dance floor. He could have walked round the mass of bouncing
dancers but typically he just bulled straight through. Before his tall figure
the dancers parted, beautiful teenagers with barely adhering brief dresses
smiled up as he grinningly did a few exaggerated steps with them on his way
across the dance floor. The dancers closed behind him as he passed but had to
double take and resentfully part again for me struggling along in his wake, hot
and bad tempered in my thick suit. Through
another door and as it closed behind us the disco music cut off in mid beat.
Another world. Bright spots hit our eyes and we were at the top of a broad
staircase like the last act in Aida, curving down into a pool of velvet
darkness. About fifty people were sitting and standing at a horse-shoe shaped
bar and there was a sudden silence as they turned to watch us descend, shading
our eyes like suspects at a police line-up. At the bottom thick carpets, dim
lights, soft rhythmical music and to the left a small stage on which a couple
were doing everything but copulate. I
could see the bar was populated entirely by Hollywood Californians. Confident
broad-shouldered gods with sun-bleached hair, torn jeans and leather plaited
thongs around their wrists were making smooth passes at slim articulate
bold-eyed goddesses. It was hot, my suit was itchy and I felt totally out of
place. Jim
was joshing a suave character wearing a dark blue silk tuxedo and with a
sparkling jewel mounted in the middle of his goatee beard. He had a cellular
phone in each hand and was speaking into them alternately. `What
the hell, Marge. You know I'd be there if I could but we gotta tie up the final
draft for Monday ...' he said into his left hand. He listened a moment, held it
against his side and spoke into his right hand. `Yeah,
sure I do hon, but I couldn't get too excited about that clown you were sitting
with.' He listened a moment, rolling up his eyes at Jim. `He's into you for 40?
So let go that beach hut you've never gotten around to furnishing since you met
Marvin ...' He put the left hand phone up to his mouth again but I tore my
attention away and turned to Jim who had touched my arm. `...
and this is Kim,' he said, `we were at USC together.' Before us were two
beautiful girls of about thirty-five, made up in geisha-like detail. Kim was
small and blond with green eyes, her hair swinging forwards in two high-lighted
wings, which curled up under a little pointed chin. The taller one, whose name
I never learnt, was dark and athletic looking with brown slightly slanting
eyes, full lips and wearing a striped leotard. I shook hands formally,
automatically nodding my head and saying "Digby" in the German style.
I mumbled replies to their politely bored questions until Kim leant forwards
and ran one slim manicured finger down my cheek. `Hey,
is that for real?' she asked surprised. I looked at her. `Are
you military?' the leotard asked impatiently. `Well,
yes, I was actually, but now I'm in the Reserve,' I replied. I thought the
laser scar would be invisible in this light. Their faces changed. `I
was first,' said Kim, the petite blond. `Ah,
cummon, we always cut,' said the sporty-looking brunette. Kim
asked the barman, obviously gay, for a pack of cards. They cut and the brunette
drew high. A quick whispered conversation and some keys changed hands. The
brunette slipped her arm into mine and looked into my eyes. `I
just adore the Bridish pronunciation,' she said. `I gotta grandfather from
"Clan" something. That's in England, isn't it?' `Wales,
I should imagine,' I said, leaning on the accent. `I
was a soldier too, ectually,' said Jim, but they ignored him. After
that things moved quickly. So quickly that in less than thirty minutes by my
wrist-watch I found myself lying naked on a bed watching while my dark-haired
partner, also naked, had her leg up on a chair and was leaning forwards
rhythmically touching her head to her knee, doing stretching exercises. `Not
you?' she asked curiously. `Well, I guess you Limey's are always in good shape.
We drive around all the time here,' she explained conversationally, stretching
out the other leg. She snapped an elastic tube bandage over her left knee like
she was about to play squash, and jumped onto the bed with me. `What's
so funny?' she said, `I don't wanna twist it, do I?' Apart
from this interesting regional variation, I am pleased to be able to report
that everything went fairly normally and the honour of the British Commonwealth
was adequately defended. Normally, that is if you exclude her asking me to
repeat various expressions, expressions I was more accustomed to hear from the
lips of an enraged sergeant-major on the parade ground. `Oh,
this is like a Bond movie - I just adore that English accent!' she squealed. * The
next day I was sitting with Jim on a rocky outcrop in Laguna Beach, Southern
California, sleepily recovering from the previous evening. The long rollers of
the Pacific boomed in, crashed on the beach and slurped out, the pebbles
rattling hollowly in the undertow. I looked around the white empty beach and
scooped up a handful of tiny granules. The storm had wound itself up into a
tight spiral and unwound over San Francisco, depositing a foot of snow over
most of California - snow that normally
fell on the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. The sun was hidden behind the
high ragged remains of the blown out anticyclone. `Climate's
all screwed up,' grunted Jim for about the tenth time, sitting beside me. He
pulled up his anorak collar against the freezing wind and I let the cold white
granules trickle out of my hand. Snow!
Snow in California. Some eccentric was slowly making his way across the beach
in the strange swinging gait of the cross-country skier. I
glanced across at Jim who was looking out to sea broodingly. There had been a
long period of calm in the struggle between Westblock and Asiablock and Jim,
who spends most of his working hours before computer screens deep underneath
the Sahara desert at the Westblock "Institute for Chronological
Displacement", or "Chrondisp", had needed a break. He had taken
the time off to show me California, where he had gone to College. But
he had brought a problem with him. `They're
up to something, but we can't see what!' he said, slapping his hand down on the
rock. A seagull that had been gracefully hovering overhead in the stiff sea
breeze jerked backwards, stalled, recovered and departed with an irritated
clatter of wings. `We've checked the dates and places backwards and forwards
trying to correlate them with world events, lives of famous families,
astronomical records - anything. But zilch.' He
was justifiably bitter. A Time Inserter is a man-made lightning-flash
generator, and like a natural lightning flash, produces a radio pulse that
could be picked up from space. Chrondisp had found that by analysing this
signal, this "signature", they could calculate where and when the
rival Asiablock Time Inserter was sending their Observers. But now they had
this information, it wasn't doing them any good. `Okay,'
Jim continued, his fine blond hair blowing out horizontally, `we can see them
sending guys back, beavering away on all this historical crap - what Stalin
said to Lenin, what Confucius thought about Zen, how much Henry the Eighth paid
his gardeners...' `Duluth
once said "The Chinese believe that history is the main store of human
wisdom", I quoted. `Asiablock is driven by their Faith: "Tao".
You'd expect them to be researching it.'
He
grunted. `He
also said "the materialistic West always under-estimates the power of a
faith,"' I added. Jim
flapped his hand dismissively. `The slant-eyes are up to something,'
he repeated grimly. And
he was probably right. Through their Inserters both Westblock and Asiablock had
access to the whole "Databank of History" as the western media called
it, but while we were allocating time to historians, geneticists, etc. and in
general choosing targets for the greater good, Asiablock was predictably using
the Chronological Displacement technique as a weapon - highlighting and
virtuously publishing the more juicy feudal and capitalistic excesses of the
past. "Tao", (The Way), the Asiablock
state religion, had started like most new religions as a gentle "help your
weaker neighbour" creed. But technology, and perhaps the Asian
paternalistic tradition, had enabled enormous power to become rapidly
concentrated into a few (male) hands and corruption had set in. Corruption
and terror. The Committee for Ethical Re-education, the dreaded CERE, was the
Asian equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. Its agents were everywhere in the
countries of the Federation and any hint of heresy meant a visit to one of its
clinics, run by perverts. It was rumoured that those who had been to one would
often commit suicide after they were released, unable to forget what they had
seen. "The
Way" was now for export and those terrible old beliefs that appeared so
often in human history had resurfaced ...."The world has to be converted
for its own good" ... "The end justifies the means"... Six years ago I had fought in a small but
bitter war, the "Pakistan Affair", to defend the sloppy Westblock way
of doing things. History has shown many times over that Democracy is a terribly inefficient system of government,
but for human beings there is no other.
Today
however, I was on holiday and such thoughts were not for me. `And
what proportion of Insertions can't you identify?' I asked idly. Jim looked
across at me, squinting in the white glare. `We've
been watching them for three years and to start with we could usually find a
reason for each Insertion. But in the last three months they've doubled up their
Insertion rate and we can't account for any of these goddamn Missions.' He
looked round surreptitiously but we were quite alone. `All this is top secret
by the way, Dig,' he said seriously, `I shouldn't really have told you.' I
made a gesture of acceptance. I was surely one of the last to betray
Chrondisp's secrets. `So
what are Chrondisp going to do?' I asked. `If you know where and when they've
gone, can't you follow them in with your own Observers?' `Yeah,
we thought of that, but it ain't so easy. A lot of our Insertions, and our
budget too, are in the public domain now. Like space shots, we get full media
coverage before and after. So if we don't do it on tiptoe Asiablock are going
to put two and two together and realise we can look over their shoulders.
Bugger it.' He made a snowball and threw it far out to sea. We
stood up and squeaked back through the snow, past a beach hut closed and
shuttered, a small drift of snow piled against the sign advertising
"Ice-cream 22 flavors" and made for the car park. We sat in his car
with the heater roaring. The
next day the weather brusquely flipped back to normal. I tried to contact the
brunette again but Jim said she had gone back East. So he drove me around
showing me the sights or we just lay around on the now almost normally warm
beaches, played tennis, chatted and ate sea-food. A few days later we parted, he back to his computers, me back to a small
"Weapons" shop I own in Munich in partnership with a Bavarian,
Dieter. But by the way Jim absently said goodbye to me at the airport I had a
feeling I would soon be seeing him. |