cover

Author’s Foreword

Old saws: time changes everything; timing is everything.

Some history …

Children of the Rainbow, originally issued in 1992 by McClelland & Stewart, was, at the time, a signal event: an SF novel published as a mainstream book rather than as a genre title by Canada’s largest publisher. Their involvement, greeted with much hope, heralded the possibility of a new literary acceptance and distribution for the form in Canada. But, alas, instead of being the seed that flowered into a tradition, it became the sole blossom of its kind, seeing only Canadian publication, and at M&S the decision to continue in this direction was abandoned.

The reasons for this are integral to the business side of writing, rather than the quality of the work—a situation more common than casual observers might suspect. Truth be told, M&S didn’t know anything about SF—what it was, how to market it. A few enthusiastic members of the firm (at the acquisition and editorial level) wanted to get into the field, but it was never sufficiently supported at the top, so the book’s life was short and its readership never international. Sometimes this is the way the business goes.

So when I received Rob Sawyer’s recent unsolicited call saying that he would very much like to reissue the novel under his “Robert J. Sawyer Books” imprint from Fitzhenry & Whiteside, I was delighted, for Rob does indeed know the field, and there is definite support at the top. Fitzhenry & Whiteside has international distribution, so for the first time the novel will be available worldwide, published and promoted by people who know and care about what they are doing in the field.

Time changes everything; timing is everything.

A tradition, some precedents: Robert A. Heinlein’s The Day After Tomorrow (1949) appeared originally as Sixth Column (1941); Cordwainer Smith’s The Boy Who Bought Old Earth, which appeared in magazine version in 1964 reappeared in book form as The Planet Buyer (1964), and eventually combined (some editing and linking additions) with his posthumously published The Underpeople (1968) to form Norstrilia (1975), the definitive novel of Smith’s saga; Alfred Bester’s marvelous (and I use the word in its literal meaning of wonderful, extraordinary and improbable as well as excellent, splendid and fine) The Stars My Destination (1956) appeared that same year in the U.K. under the title Tiger! Tiger! Robert J. Sawyer himself had Hobson’s Choice (serialized in Analog magazine, 1994-95) transformed into the Nebula Award winning novel The Terminal Experiment (1995); finally, Arthur C. Clarke had the opportunity to reissue his 1953 novel Against the Fall of Night, and ended up rewriting it as The City and the Stars (and as Sir Arthur noted in his 1956 preface, speaking of his readers: “I hope they will grant an author the right to have second thoughts.”)

I trust my readers are as generous.

Invited to go over the story and see if there were any changes I’d like to make to the manuscript for this new edition, slowly, surreptitiously, over a period of some months—in the film tradition of the “Director’s Cut”—I saw many (small) things that would indeed benefit the novel, the least of which was not, like so many of my predecessors, a new title. So renewed opportunity offers the chance for a new presentation, and suddenly I find myself, along with you, on a new/old voyage, sailing time’s ocean …

—Terence M. Green

2006

One

AUCKLAND
28 April, 1972

Finally, thought McTaggart. It’s happening. We’re going, at last.

The thirty-eight foot ketch Vega, renamed Greenpeace III, eased out toward Matiamatia Bay as dusk fell and the temperature dropped. Winter was creeping into the South Pacific and the wind that filled the sails was beginning to bite. McTaggart did not notice, though. He’d been waiting too long for this moment, wanting it too badly for the weather to interfere with his exhilaration.

The shore disappeared.

“Course east northeast,” called Nigel.

McTaggart turned and smiled at him. “A month of this, eh?”

“There are worse ways to spend one’s time.”

“Don’t I know it.” Squinting at him through weathered lids, McTaggart added, “Is there anything you’d rather be doing?”

“Not a thing.” Nigel paused, savoring the moment. “Not a damn thing.”

Radio Hauraki was soft in the background, muffled by the ancient music of ship and sea, suffused by the gray, wintry sky.

McTaggart turned back toward the sea and the night and the horizon. Flooding his mind were images and memories, both recent and old. He couldn’t yet shake the anger and outrage of being harassed by the Kiwis over the trumped-up smuggling charges, of being purposely detained by Customs, courts, and the Marine Department. It had all been new, even astounding, to this Canadian, who, until recently, had eschewed politics in favor of what he thought of as conservative common sense.

But that was all gone now. Gone like his three daughters whom he had lost in his divorce. At the thought of them, a pang of anguish and love shot through him, siphoning up primal longings that often made his own life seem small. And in the tangle of images that hovered in his brain, he knew that there was indeed some ethereal link between his daughters, his precipitous advance toward the age of forty, and his persistent decision to challenge both the sea and the French government.

And the bomb.

It was all ahead.

McTaggart knew that he was operating from the heart, and that a more realistic man would have assessed the enemy in its various guises more carefully. He shrugged. It was not his nature. He was ignorant of the vast political forces that were against him, blind to the monies changing hands between the Conservative government in Wellington and Paris, unaware of the uranium deals between Ottawa and France, and thus naive to the extent to which people might go to try and stop him. Somehow, much of it didn’t matter. For, in an abstract way, he knew that the true object of his challenge was himself, as it always must be, and that the externals were manifestations of this, no matter how awesome.

Even Peru had been bought, he knew, by the promise of $60 million US for loan. The Lima government had exposed itself as only another prostitute, willing to sell its integrity and the possible genetic future of its citizenry for cash on demand.

And General de Gaulle would have his nuclear force de frappe at all costs.

Out there in the gathering darkness lay the Mururoa Atoll, le Centre d’Experimentations Nucliaires du Pacifique, thirty-five hundred miles away. I wonder, thought McTaggart, if I’ll be lucky enough to actually see forty?

Like a thoroughbred stretching its reins, in a sensuous display of life and vigour, Vega, the new Greenpeace III, replete with its crew of two Canadians, two Englishmen, and an Australian, yawed toward the Kermadec Trench and the International Date Line, its modest length and twelve-and-a-half-foot beam representing the inanimate half of the vast synergy between vessel and human spirit that had launched her.

Out there, unseen and lying in wait, was a nuclear bomb. Ten megatons. Two hundred and fifty times the size of the one that had vaporized Hiroshima.

Two

CUZCO, PERU
7 June, 2056

Pope Alejandro I, Venezuela’s pride, entered the ceremonial chamber slowly and with a display of ritual as elaborate as that of his host. His entourage consisted of two cardinals and three laymen, his usual advisers and security.

The heavy wooden doors shut silently behind them.

Pope Alejandro had expected to see his host seated regally on a throne, in keeping with the trappings so far. He was mildly surprised to see him at the head of a large table in the center of the room—a table that gave the proceedings more the air of a corporate meeting than a meeting between world religious leaders.

Accompanied by three of his confidants, Huascar, the seventy-one-year-old mystic whose name denoted the brilliant red hummingbird whose feathers were used to adorn Incan princes, sat waiting, without expression. Alejandro’s presence—here in this room, with him—at last gave him the leap in credibility that he had been waiting for.

The New Inca Church would rise without hindrance now. No longer could the Roman Catholic pontiff dismiss it as a cult. Huascar saw the Pope’s stranglehold on South America open wide in his mind’s eye, saw the natural legacy of the Incas resume its rightful place in history, felt the restoration of a heritage that would lead all people into proper communion with nature and its gods.

For the Pope, too, believed.

That was why he was here.

Alejandro’s coffee was strong and rich. Across the table, Huascar, resplendent in a cream robe and ornate gold necklace, the white hair a shocking contrast with his bronzed face, stared with piercing, ancient eyes at his guest—his rival for the souls of his people. This Pope’s god, he knew, made the Incan obsession with sacred huacas pale by comparison. Saints, shrines, holy water. … He had studied it all, found it all incredible. There was only the Incan way. It had finally been proven.

Huascar sipped his coffee, joining his guest.

“I have spoken at length with Bartolome de las Salas, your president,” said Alejandro.

“You mean Peru’s president.” Huascar spoke in a low voice that came from deep within him. “The New Inca Church, of which I am head, does not know political boundaries. It is a vision, a way of life, the spirit of a people with a special destiny.”

Pope Alejandro was silent a moment, then shrugged. He did not wish to be drawn in to this area. “Nevertheless, I have great respect for de las Salas, both as a man and as a leader. I have known him for more than thirty years—back to the time when he was a young lawyer who helped with church holdings in Lima and Caracas. A bright, insightful man. And an honorable one.”

Huascar nodded.

“He says you can do it.” The two men stared at each other in silence.

“I can,” said Huascar. “Our time has come.”

Alejandro chose his words carefully. “I approach you with an open mind.”

Huascar smiled. The twinkle in his eyes was the pleasure of righteousness, of fulfillment achieved at long last. To have the Pope here, coming to him, afforded him a satisfaction that was profound. Eventually, he knew, they would all come to him. They would all be under his wing. The New Incas would rise triumphant, the instrument of the gods in shaping man’s lot.

Huascar could not help the small vanity that allowed him to enjoy this. It was too exquisite to ignore.

None of it bothered Alejandro the way Huascar thought it might. The face of the Catholic pontiff betrayed nothing but a kind of philosophical largesse. Alejandro was the right man in the right place, Huascar thought. The gods know well what they do.

“If you approach us with an open mind, then it will happen.”

“How does it happen? What makes it work?” Alejandro’s questions were simple and to the point.

“It happens because it is time for it to happen. All things happen for this reason. It is like opening a door. It is like discovering that one’s house contains many more rooms than one ever suspected. One goes from room to room, eventually arriving back at the point of departure, but with a new understanding of one’s route through one’s space and time.”

“And the meteor falls throughout South America?”

“Signs,” said Huascar.

Alejandro waited.

“Signs from the sun god.” He watched Alejandro carefully. The pontiff displayed none of the skeptical cynicism to which Huascar was inured. This is good, he thought. This man is everything that I have heard.

“The meteors near Antofagasta, Chile, five years ago, started the power surging. The fall last year near Sao Paulo closed the circuit. The energy began to discharge. I am its medium.” He shrugged, humbly. “You, surely, understand the concept of an earthly medium for a divine source. Was not your Jesus Christ such a medium? Do you not accept that he was capable of seemingly miraculous feats? Raising the dead? Water into wine? Surviving his own death?”

“Are you claiming divinity?”

Huascar watched the Pope’s face carefully. There was no mockery there. It was an honest question.

“No,” he said. “I am very human. I make no such claim.”

“Why you, then?”

“Why Jesus? Why Mohammed? Why Gandhi? How can anyone know why one person becomes a catalyst for powerful historical and spiritual forces?” Again, he shrugged. “It merely is, that is all. I only know that this is something that I can do, something that I understand how to do. I don’t know that I have been chosen. I only know that I have discovered the fact of my power. The ‘why’ of it will elude me, perhaps forever, or perhaps only until the picture becomes larger. I cannot see the whole picture yet. I may never see it, personally. It may be too vast.

“The meteors lie along the Tropic of Capricorn. How is this important?”

“I do not know.”

“Is their size significant?”

“I do not know.”

Alejandro paused, thinking. “But you can do it?”

“I have done it. Several times.”

Alejandro nodded. There had been many claims, but only the much-heralded testimony of de las Salas had brought the New Incas to the attention of the world media.

To travel back in time.

“De las Salas says that he visited his grandfather. He says that he spent a week with him in the year 1956.”

Huascar nodded. “I believe this to be true. He disappeared, in front of more than four hundred people. Then, after seven days, he reappeared and told his story. I believe him. I believed the others. They do disappear. They do come back. Where do they go? Why? It is always one hundred years in the past. Yet they do not consult with each other.”

Pope Alejandro I stared hard at the Incan mystic.

Huascar gazed back at him, unwaveringly.

No one else said anything. The room was silent.

“I wish to try it,” Alejandro said.

Huascar smiled. Then he nodded. “I would regard it as a great honor.” He tilted his head respectfully. To send Alejandro back in time, he knew, would make him the new world religious leader. To succeed in this endeavor would assure the conversion of countless millions to the New Incas. It would signal the end of Catholicism as a force in South America—perhaps the world.

Alejandro was going to meet him head-on. If Huascar was a phony, then this would be the end of him. If he was truly capable of doing the thing he said he could, then Alejandro, too, knew what he was risking. To his credit, he placed truth above power and, with that ethic, there was no real risk.

If he can actually do this thing, Alejandro thought, then we should be following him.

“Who would you like to visit? An ancestor?”

“One of the great saints of our church. One of the truly selfless people of history.”

Huascar waited without changing expression. He had cultivated patience to a fine art.

“Mother Teresa. Calcutta. One hundred years ago.”

Even Huascar’s inscrutable and weathered face brightened pleasantly at the challenge.

Three days later, the moon full, the communion meal taken, on the dais—the usno—in the center of Haucaypata Square, Pope Alejandro I, surrounded by four hundred New Incas and a sea of pageantry, shimmered, wavered, and disappeared from the sight of all.

Into the past.

Huascar smiled. The moment was his. Now, he thought.

They will all follow.

All.

Three

NORFOLK ISLAND, SOUTH PACIFIC
BRITISH PENAL COLONY
2 February, 1835

“There’s a new book in this month’s shipment, Harriet. Something I shall look forward to reading.” Major Joseph Anderson, Commandant of Norfolk Island, opened the volume on his lap and turned the pages with care. His wife continued with her work in the kitchen, offering only a polite “Oh?”

“A new angle on the Bounty disappearance. Looks fascinating.”

Harriet Anderson had some difficulty drumming up the required enthusiasm for her husband’s naval interests, but understood, nevertheless, its importance for him. She knew, too, the pleasure such accounts afforded him—especially here, since his commission to Norfolk. Intellectual activity was something they both sorely missed. The books sent from London always helped.

“Didn’t they send you a book on the Bounty already?”

“Yes. They did. Three months ago.” He looked up and smiled a mock smile. “The so-called ‘official’ version: The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of the Bounty. It was published anonymously four years ago in London.” He continued the mock smile. “It’s public knowledge now, though, that it was written by Sir John Barrow, Secretary of the Admiralty—not exactly an objective account. Interesting, though. Tends to totally exonerate Bligh and condemn Fletcher Christian. Only natural, I guess, given the authorship.”

“What’s this one?”

Without his spectacles, he held the book at arm’s length to read the title exactly. “Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Bering Strait. Written by a Captain F W. Beechey.” He flipped to the title page. “Published in London, 1831.” He riffled a few more pages, pausing here and there. “Seems this Beechey fellow called in at Pitcairn in 1825 aboard the H.M.S. Blossom, and actually had an opportunity to peruse the fragmentary diary that Midshipman Young kept on the island.” He glanced up at Harriet. “Sounds delightfully intriguing.” His smile now was genuine.

“You don’t like Bligh, do you?”

“It’s not that at all.” He seemed offended. “He was, by all accounts, a master seaman. It’s not a case of liking or disliking him. It’s a case of trying to understand how he must have erred in his judgement regarding the exercise of his authority. The line between firm discipline and respect and its obverse side, mutiny and rebellion, is a fine one. Bligh miscalculated, in the most infamous way. How? Why?”

He paused, musing. The questions were not idle to the commandant of Britain’s most notorious penal colony.

Harriet entered the parlor from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. She smiled at him benignly.

She was still a fine figure of a woman, he thought. There was gray in her hair after nineteen years of marriage and two children and innumerable assignments to the far-flung reaches of the globe with her husband. But she had borne her lot graciously, and his daughters did not seem the worse for their exotic travels and esoteric education. For all of this he loved her. And his daughters.

But the navy and his work were his first passion. His loyalty was to them. They had given him everything that he had wanted in life. He would not fail queen and country. He had learned much operating the prison in Van Diemen’s Land, and what he had learned he wanted to apply here, on Norfolk.

He would study Bligh, find his error.

He would not fail.

At ten o’clock that morning, Major Anderson stood among four guards outside a low row of cells covered with a roof of mossy shingles. The turnkey opened the door. A yellow exhalation emerged, the produce of the bodies caged therein. Waiting until it dissipated, Anderson entered the room, flanked by the guards. Five men were chained to a traversing bar.

They were waiting to find out if they would live or die.

The stench of the cell was overwhelming, and Anderson fought back a wave of nausea as he stood there. Stepping aside, he let one of the guards pass and unlock the loose chain that held them to the wall. The three other guards, rifles poised, stayed as close to the door and the fresh air as they could.

Shackled now only by leg chains, the five men were led outside and into the center of the compound, where the ritual announcement could be made public. The prisoners who were not the objects of this particular sentence arrayed themselves at a prudent distance, yet close enough to view the spectacle and hear the pronouncements.

Anderson set his feet firmly and took a sheet of paper from his pocket. The prisoners stared at him with vacant eyes, unmoving.

“In the matter of the attempted escape from Norfolk Island and the attendant slaying of guard Peter Greenside, the council in Sydney, having heard and weighed the evidence, has reached the following verdicts. John Parker, Harry Douglas, and Malcolm Cooper—you are hereby sentenced to death by hanging, five days from now, on February 7, 1835. Robin Budd and Edward Grimble, you are hereby sentenced to serve an additional ten years each, here on Norfolk Island, upon the expiration of your initial sentences.”

From an isolated corner of the compound, Bran Michael Dalton, the Irishman who was relatively new to Norfolk, watched the procedure. Every day brought him new and stunning information about this hellhole. But what he saw now topped them all.

He watched, shocked, as the three men who had just been sentenced to death fell to their knees, and with dry eyes, thanked God.

The two who had just heard their reprieve from the scaffold and their sentence of another ten years on Norfolk, slumped to the ground and wept bitterly.

Dalton began to understand the horrors of his new environment. And even though he was a grown man, he wished his Da was here with him now, to help him, to protect him, to comfort him, as he always had done.

But he was alone. There was not going to be any help.

It was taking a long time, but he was beginning to understand that.

Four

SOUTH PACIFIC
1 June, 1972

“We’re there, David.”

McTaggart lifted his head from the charts he had been studying and stared at Grant, who was standing in the cabin entranceway. The swell that rocked them was gentle in comparison to the gales that had detained them for eight days in Rarotonga.

“The one-hundred-mile limit,” he commented wryly. Grant nodded.

“In defiance of all international law, they demand and expect an established ‘off-limits’ area of one hundred thousand square miles.” He shook his head, grimacing. Then he glanced back at Grant, who was still waiting with a sense of anticipation for some sort of ceremonial signal of their penetration into the French cordon.

His face broke into a smile that he only half felt. “How does it feel to be entering the eye of the hurricane?”

“I think,” said Grant, “that your metaphor is conservative.” From behind his back he produced the bottle of champagne they had been saving. “Nigel and the others will be here shortly. Care for a drink?”

McTaggart smiled. “Yes. I think the occasion calls for it.” He stood and went to get glasses from the cupboard. Standing with his back to Grant, his mind roamed freely for a few seconds, conjuring up the Mururoa Atoll out there in the night, some one hundred miles distant, the Uranium 235 mass an obscene blot on its tropical green and white lushness.

“Think we’ve been spotted yet?” he asked.

Grant shrugged. “Don’t know. I guess so. They know we’re coming. And they’ll be patrolling the limits as a matter of form. No sign of them yet, though.”

“Mm.”

“What do you think they’ll do? I mean, really?”

They had discussed the issue ad nauseam before leaving Auckland, but it had not been spoken of since. Only now did it seem real, now that they were here.

McTaggart eyed the Australian with affection, wondering what he had gotten this young man into. Then he remembered himself at the same age and smiled inwardly, knowing that no one got anyone into anything at that age—a twenty-six-year-old was completely capable of getting himself into everything. And then he thought of Ann-Marie, the lover he had left behind in Auckland, and felt a further sense of helplessness and loss sweep over him momentarily. He realized that only someone as wild and previously uncommitted as himself would get so completely and so spontaneously involved. Nevertheless, he now understood the arrogance and myopia of the French position—understood it more clearly as each day passed. He knew how the French had been testing atomic weapons for the past seven years over Mururoa, consciously ignoring the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty signed by the U.S.A., Russia, and Great Britain in 1963. And he felt something akin to kismet summoning him, and searched constantly for its source without ever finding it.

Its source was out there.

Out there with the shoals and reefs, storms and high seas, military bases and guns, corvettes and helium balloons, and minesweepers and warships.

Out there.

“They can’t explode the thing as long as we’re around.” Grant derailed his reverie.

They looked at each other in silence.

“Can they?”

McTaggart smiled whimsically, a faraway look in his eyes, his fingers tracing the new white that had been settling the past year in his sideburns.

Five

LIMA, PERU
14 June, 2072

Fletcher Christian IV, along with his wife, Liana, was not surprised at the throng of reporters that descended upon them at the international airport. Their arrival, after all, was well-anticipated, and their intentions had made both eagerly-devoured soft and hard copy from Paris to Los Angeles to Cape Horn. Add to this the photogenic faultlessness of Liana’s dusky Eurasian symmetry, and the only question that remained was merely the size of the media horde, not its appearance.

Nevertheless, it upset him. And his feelings, he knew, were as irrational in many ways as were his motives for coming. He could evince, both to himself and to others, rational, scientific inquiry as the primal pulse, and make it credible. But everyone, himself included, knew that there was more to it. He was, after all, Fletcher Christian IV, not John Doe, and his name glittered in the media with the aura of romance that his ancient forebear had bequeathed as his legacy for the last three hundred years.

Liana met his eyes, and he gripped her hand.

Flashes popped. The quartz lights for video and holo glared madly.

“Mr. Christian!” A voice rang out above the bustle. Airport security had created a V-shaped wedge for them to slide through to the waiting helicopter. “Are you really going to try to get back at Bligh? Or do you just want to sail on the Bounty for yourself?”

Christian stopped. Liana looked up at the lean, dark face that hinted at his heritage, worried that any crank utterance could disturb him. The surrounding horde quieted, waiting for his response.

His eyes searched the crowd. All the faces were the same, the source of the questions drowned in the potpourri of reporters. It’s the heat, he thought. “At the gallery interview,” he shouted back with the poise and control that had gotten him this far. “I’ll deal with all questions there.” And like visiting royalty, he even managed a smile and a brief wave, picking up stride once again with his wife, gripping her hand just a little too tightly for comfort.

The Atahualpa Gallery in central Lima had been chosen as the site of the televised interview for several reasons—reasons aesthetic, historical, and last but not least, theatrical.

Christian wandered about the spacious room, admiring the tastefully arrayed objets d’art that bespoke the heritage that was being reborn everywhere the Incas had held dominion: Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and much of Bolivia and Argentina. It was this very renaissance that was the manifestation of what had brought him here, to this land of humid mystery, to confront the ancient Huascar, and to see for himself.

Remarkably preserved ornate cooking vessels, bone flutes, wooden dolls, clay figurines from centuries ago—these were all displayed alongside more modern variations on similar themes: silver and gold wrought llamas, no taller than ten centimeters; reproduction textiles with Incan art, as had been found in mummy bundles; lacquered wooden beakers, intricate reproductions from the colonial period. He was entranced before a two-meter-square cloth panel unit that displayed—in the bright yet muted tones of the period of The Thirteen Emperors, some seven centuries ago—elaborate detail from a queru, the dance with the golden chain, when he heard his name.

Before turning to see who had summoned him so deferentially, he felt the hand on his elbow, comforting and friendly. It was the speaker—Alfred de Baudin, the expatriate Frenchman. He would be interviewing him, with unmatched linguistic fluency, in Christian’s native English.

He smiled at the shorter man, who indicated with a tilt of his greying head the twin seats centered before the cameras. They were on.

Christian felt nervous, and was surprised. There was no reason for his anxiety: he was and always had been used to the media, and his own public-speaking itinerary was always full. The same apprehension had struck him upon landing at the airport, and he could only account for it by the magnitude of the expectations for his visit here. And the media seemed to sense it.

With a fully professional mien, de Baudin began. The event was live video—no taping—a rarity. Reporters, journalists, and other interpolators and intercessors for the world vidnetwork were hovering in the wings, shadows that would illuminate his mission for the vicarious pleasure of all.

“Fletcher Christian IV has graciously consented to discuss with us the momentous occasion of his visit to our fair land today.” De Baudin turned his friendly visage toward Christian. “And we welcome you to Peru, Fletcher.” He extended his hand in a demure ceremonial gesture.

Christian accepted the hand, shaking it firmly. “The pleasure’s mine, Alfred.”

“You’re here to see Huascar.” He was wasting no time.

Christian smiled. “I am.”

“I think most of us know why—or, at least, some of the reasons. Perhaps the viewers might enjoy a little background on yourself—background that led up to the reasons for your visit here.”

“Lots of things led me here. Which would you like to discuss?”

“You are, by profession, a scientist. Would you tell us about that?”

“Certainly.” He shifted in the chair, adjusted his microphone. “I’m currently on sabbatical from my position as professor of Life Sciences at the University of Toronto. Before I became associated with the university, I was a project leader with the U.S.-Canada National Space-Time Administration Research Team. Last year I divided most of my time between teaching science history at the university and being science adviser to the president of Brazil. And I’m also president of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life.”

“This is quite a litany of impressive posts, Fletcher, for a man so young.”

“I wish I was as young as you apparently think I am.” He smiled. “Sometimes I feel a lot older than my birth certificate indicates,” he added, chuckling quietly. Out of the corner of his eye, off in the blurred recesses anterior to the glare of the video lights, he spotted Liana, and she smiled warmly, raising a hand; suddenly he didn’t feel old at all. She had that effect on him.

“Tell us a bit more about the last post you cited—the one about the origin of life. I find it fascinating, and I’m sure viewers and listeners will too.”

“It’s quite an old and venerable society. The International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life held its first meeting over a century ago, in Moscow. It was 1957. The thirty-sixth conference was held two years ago, in Canberra. I’m currently preparing for the thirty-seventh conference, to be held next year, July 2073, in Kampala. The first few meetings of the society were sporadic, but for the past century we’ve held them like clockwork every three years.”

“And all this is somehow tied in with your visit to Peru?”

“Oh, yes. Very much so.” He paused. “Huascar and what appears to be his legitimate temporal transmissions are justifiably exciting. It’s ironic, of course, that a society as firmly planted in science as ours, should eventually turn to methodology that is usually held askance by strict adherents to the `scientific method’—of which I have always considered myself one. In defense, I can only say that the real superstition consists of rejecting things unexamined. There appears to be enough evidence to conclude that something very real is in fact occurring at Cuzco, under the auspices of Huascar. By the way,” he added, “Huascar makes me feel young.”

De Baudin smiled. “He’s eighty-seven, according to what I can recall. And Fletcher, how old are you, for the record?”

“I’m forty-six.”

“And your lovely wife?”

“Let’s just say that youth still shines kindly and brightly on her, Alfred, and that I am the beneficiary of the glow that reflects from her.”

“Spoken like a poet.”

“I’m a great admirer of poetic truth. Quite often the truth is clearer on an intuitive level than it can ever be on a scientific level.” His eyes met Liana’s, infusing his blood with the reality of his words. She smiled back, a smile only for him.

“Your visit here, then, could be seen as a radical departure from your previous courses of investigation, as well as the courses followed over the years by other members of the society.”

Bounty

“Why do you think these Tropic zones figure so prominently in the transmissions?”

“We simply don’t know yet. They represent the boundaries of the equatorial zone, the planet’s warmest tract. This, apparently, has great bearing on Huascar’s ability. The reasons, at this point, are purely speculative.”

“This ties in neatly with the New Inca’s belief in the sun god, and its power on earth.”

Christian shrugged. “It does.”

“But you don’t give the notion much credence.”

“The sun seems to have an effect. What more can I say?” “And how does it figure in your own quest?”

“If you study a map of the world, or even of a prescribed area of the South Pacific from South America to Australia, you’ll see that the Tropic of Capricorn passes through many of the places associated with my own ancestors. Well, not literally through such places but close enough to polarize whatever temporal transmissions might pierce the area. It pervades Pitcairn Island, where the Bounty mutineers eventually settled; it passes within range of Tahiti, where the episode began and whence Fletcher Christian took his wife, Mi’Mitti; and it is not overly far from Norfolk Island, which Britain offered to the Pitcairners for resettlement after it had been abandoned as a penal colony in 1855. In short, it seems to penetrate my ancestral past with uncanny precision. Given my position as president of the society, my unique ancestry, and the coincidence of the Capricorn Connection, it seems to be a form of inescapable kismet, all channeled toward me.” He paused. “It is, you must admit, rather exciting.”

“For onlookers as well, Fletcher, I assure you.”

“Yes. I guess so.” He looked back down at his folded hands. “Is it true that Huascar is still the only one of his circle who can effect the transmissions?”

“It would appear so.”

“He’s eighty-seven. What happens when he’s gone?”

“This is one of the reasons why we must strive to understand the process as soon as possible. It is one of the reasons why I am here now. If we do not use our time efficiently, we may never apprehend Time at all.”

Sailing Time’s Ocean

Terence M. Green

Afterword by Robert J. Sawyer