The Anomaly

The agency is threatened when an agent saves a child from the past.

                                                                            Chapter Two

                                      The Anomaly

 

The agency recognized that what one person discovers another will discover. When receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics, Doctor Foley had spoken of the dangers inherent in his discovery and the need to use it with utmost discretion. He announced that he was placing the portal and all of his research with the United Nations.  Out of that gift had sprung the agency. Foley had also pointed out that restricting the use of the portal would be as important as ensuring its proper usage.  

Two possible threats, one unintentional, the other intentional, had to be considered.   An explorer could inadvertently destroy part of the past, and by that action affect the future. The plucking of a flower could result in the subsequent loss of millions of its offspring, the butterfly principle.   The second threat however was far more ominous. Any radical religious or political group seeking victory for their cause might try to find it in the past. A portal in the wrong hands would be as dangerous as a miniaturized atomic weapon planted in the centre of Manhattan or Tokyo.

 An international flotilla of ships and planes ringed Pitcairn Island.  Always remote, the island now became inaccessible to anyone outside the agency. Any attempt to approach the island in force would trigger instant intervention by forces based in the kingdom of Tahiti.  They had found no attempt to alter the time-line yet the fear of such an attempt shaped every mission, every budget, and every decision. Fifty percent of the agency’s budget went into security. If they delayed or cancelled an occasional project due to insufficient funding, so be it. The sanctity of man’s past came first.

Doctor Foley had presided over the first seven years of the agency’s life.  Many veterans would recall that period as the golden age of the agency. Every day had brought new finds about the past. This flood of information forced the rewriting of every archaeological and historical text. Billions of rapt viewers followed the lives of great religious and historical figures. A record attendance in holovision viewing was set with the broadcasting of the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays.  Then public interest faded.

The broadcasts had not been without their critics.  Viewers complained of poor sound quality and distractions from hawkers in the pit.  Texts and discs showing ancient cities as they had looked outsold every other form of entertainment, except romantic fiction. Yet soon this popularity began to wane. Romance had been taken out of the past. Fabled civilisations seemed primitive to modern eyes. The past the portal offered, while remaining of interest to scholars and amateur historians, the general public viewed with growing indifference. It was, many complained, too uncomfortable. The recession of the twenty-thirties had brought with it the first of many budget cuts.     Space travel had brought practical benefits. What had time travel brought, except new history books, and a few programs? The public soon became aware that time travel would not become as common as jetting around the globe. Public fear grew over possible manipulation of the time-line by unnamed sinister forces, usually from the future.  Demands increased for the dismantling of the portal.  The cries received further impetus after the showing of videos of religious leaders. Viewing Christ, Mohamed, and the Buddha as ordinary human beings with frailties and bodily functions, led to denunciations of the agency as irreligious. In many cities assaults against agency personnel became commonplace.

Doctor Foley’s resignation was greeted with public indifference.  He retired to a secluded island in Lake Ontario. Although he remained as titular head until the Dzingira affair, he refused to attend agency functions or hold interviews. Rarely stepping off his island, the old man disappeared from public view.  Years later, public interest brightened for a moment at the news that he had died in a fire that had gutted his home on Pigeon Island..

Chief Director Delisle told his agents that the present era required caution. The Adamstown Agreement had pushed the agency in a direction the directors did not wish to take it.  Being women and gentlemen of honour, they would not revoke the agreement. Instead they would shape it, adapting to the agency’s needs. The agency declared the islanders to be their children. They possessed no civil rights, as they were not citizens of any state. They could not marry, bear children, own land, travel anywhere in the world of the twenty-first century. Home would be the tiny island group of Pitcairn, Ducie and Oeno.  The past and Pitcairn were the only homes that they would ever know.  Bureaucrats spoke of weeding the higher paid mainlanders out, of entrusting the exploration of the past entirely to the islanders. Joanna discounted the rumours.  One thing she had learned from the past. The ruling class never gave power to slaves.

                           ***

Joanna stood by the copter, as Sean and Susan wheeled the small blanket -covered body to the operating tent. She looked at the lifeless hand hanging below the blanket.  Sean had held that hand all the way to the base as if he could push his own life force into the child’s.  Joanna’s proper agency training told her that their efforts were not a waste. The corpse would be of some limited historical use. They would take specimens of blood and body tissue.  They would do an autopsy; an analysis made of his stomach contents.   Another tiny fragment could be added to their understanding of the past.  Joanna slumped away to her tent.  She pulled out a smuggled bottle of Glenlivet from her small fridge.  The genius of Doctor Foley and of the agency had granted man the wonder of time travel. To this great gift she owed her life and the purpose of that life.   She would drink to that.

As a little girl, she had devoured tales about the wonders awaiting time travellers.  She remembered Ray Bradbury’s “Sound of Thunder,” the story of a man punished for violating the time-line.  The careless hunter had stepped off the prescribed path, treading upon a butterfly with catastrophic effects for the future.   The trod-on butterfly became the symbol of the agency, its credo marking its agents.  Joanna wore it as a pendant around her neck.

Joanna had studied the twentieth-century imaginings of Time Travel, reading Wells, Bradbury, Asimov, and  Anderson. She had lived the adventures of the time patrol walking with those men and women as they protected it from those seeking to subvert it. In secondary school she began reading technical papers. In simplistic terms they explained the principles of the space-time continuum, the morass of plasma and quantum physics, the mechanics of wormholes and the journals kept by Doctor Foley and the first agents.

Through all of them flitted the butterfly principle.  Any damage to the past could cause the present to shift.  When taught this, she could not keep from asking of her teacher why Doctor Foley had invented the time portal. Her teaching replied with the proper agency answer. He had invented it to protect the time line and to learn from it.  “We must follow his example,” the teacher told her.

The past, a place full of wonder, great events and personalities, anchored the present.  She should consider herself fortunate to help defend it.  The books and teachers had not lied to her, she admitted, her face pressed against her glass of whiskey. Wonders existed but the books and teachers had not told her the entire truth.  None of them had  explained what it would be like to see a small child ripped apart by lions. They had not told her how to  walk through the charred ruins of a home and feel nothing.    They had not told her how to walk away from the dead knowing that she could save them.   Agency psychiatrists and chaplains would offer explanations and prayers.  For now she could find an answer only in the whiskey.

“Want some company?”

She looked up at Sean, still dressed in his surgical gown. A smear of blood stained the front of the gown.  She tried not to think of where it had come from.  Instead, she pushed the bottle towards him.   After her third drink, Joanna decided to speak to the director.  After his first, Sean agreed to go with her.

                           ***

“Five minutes, Sam.  Just give us five minutes.”

Sam Habib scratched at his thick beard, curled in the best Sumerian style. He concentrated on looking out of the window of his tent. He admired Susan’s dark body climbing onto the rocks towering above the water hole. As he watched Susan’s body knifing through the water, he tried to think about their lovemaking.  It seemed a more pleasant prospect then looking at Joanna and remembering the video clip of the lions mauling a doomed child. Joanna, being a novice, sometimes found it difficult accepting the grimier parts of the past.   He did not blame her. That video clip had left him shaken.  Sam could forgive her anger.  He could not forgive the smell of whiskey on her breath.

“We can do it,” Joanna added. “We know the oasis from where he came. Before the lions find him, we pick him up at the date grove.  He’s dead in his own time.  What difference would it make?”

“The lions won’t starve,” Sean added.  “They just chose him because he couldn’t run as fast as the onagers.”

Sam shook his head. “Pitcairn would never approve. The onager the lions choose instead of the boy, what about it’s descendents?  No descendents would mean a disruption of the time line,, the creation of an anomaly.”

“What do you think we are?” Joanna asked.

“That’s different.”

“Why” Joanna asked, “because we have a choice?”

Susan raised herself out of the water. Sam studied the drops clinging to her breasts, the curve of her back, the tapering of her legs. Joanna would go to her and inform her of his decision. Susan would side with her. He would sleep in a cold bed tonight.

As a nine-year-old schoolboy in Beirut, Sam had read his first book on archaeology, The Romance of the Past. With photos of ruins, it had also contained coloured drawings of the ancient peoples. They had all looked so cheerful, well-fed and clean, no scars, no marks of famine, and no mutilations.  Those scholars in their book-lined studies had dreamed of a tidy past, divided into tidy eras. Sam Habib, a merchant’s son from Beirut, had walked that past.  He had seen its dirt, and brutality.  Now Sam dreamed of the day that he could leave it, and retire to his small villa beside the sea.   For every agent who loved the past, ten hated it. The further back the assignment, the less popular it seemed.  With the Sargon expedition the agency had made its deepest probe into the past. Every member of the expedition, islander and mainlander, looked forward to seeing it end.

The agency psychiatrists theorised that this historical antithesis had something to do with the way that human beings looked at their world. The ancients, whether Egyptian, Sumerian or Elizabethan English, had a casual acceptance of brutality that agents raised in the twenty-first century found hard to accept.  Agents could understand the reasons for the brutality.  They could look upon it with indifference but twenty-first century revulsion remained.   They passed lines of emaciated prisoners, ropes strung through their noses.  Agents witnessed mutilating, impaling, hanging and beheading of both sexes and  of all ages.  Such scenes were not, the directors conceded, beneficial to morale.  Nevertheless they were part of the societies the agents were studying and were unavoidable. The modern age had its own fair share of brutality but its history had shown a growing revulsion to it.   On the plains of  Sumer no such revulsion existed.   Acceptance of the unacceptable became the mark of a good agent.  The acceptance came at a price, the slow wearing down of an agent’s enthusiasm for his or her work.

                           ***

“From his stomach contents the child had eaten dates.  A small date grove lies about two miles south of where we found him,” said Sean. “We could pick up him up there.”

“I’m not saying that you couldn’t do it,” said Sam, “but Pitcairn will never approve. We’ve committed our resources to studying Kish and Sharrumkin. Anything else needs their approval.”

“That child was the only survivor of his people,” said Joanna. “We could learn so much, his language, customs. . . .”

“That’s not why you want to do this, Joanna,” said Sam turning to face her.

“No,” she admitted. Then she gave him a knowing smile.  “It’s what you’ll tell Pitcairn though, isn’t it?”

Sam knew that the proper thing to do would be to assert his leadership. He should tell her no but Sam, as had Joanna, had seen too many burnt villages, and could not forget the image of the lions tearing at their prey.

“The portal will open in three days,” he said “I’ll go to Adamstown and submit my recommendation that they allow you to try. It’s the best I can do. Maybe they will go along with it. Meanwhile, “ Sam sat on his camp stool and began stabbing at the laptop computer  on his desk, “we have the festival of Inanna to concentrate on. I’d appreciate it if you let me get back to work.”

Sam drove through the portal three days later, returning after ten minutes. He had stayed in Adamstown for a week. He brought back fresh supplies; a new assortment of holotapes, more fuel for the copter and new instructions from the agency.  The instructions included a brief notation.  Under no conditions, would there to be any attempt to alter the time line. Understanding Sharrumkin and the city of Kish remained the primary mission.

Joanna heard the news in silence. As she slipped out of Sam’s tent she longed to blame someone, but whom?   She could not blame Sam, the agency, or even the lions. Joanna busied herself with refuellng the copter and cleaning the engine. As she worked, she tried not to think of the body that they had buried behind the encampment. At least not returning it to the lions had been considered safe.  When Daniel called her in for lunch, she closed her toolbox.  Joanna poked at her food, smiling mechanically as Sam rattled on about the gossip in Pitcairn, about who was  in and was  out. The strawberries and New Zealand peaches, she tasted, out of politeness to Sam.  At the first convenient moment she slipped out and returned to her tent. Undressing, she lay down on her cot.  When she knew that no one could see, she began to cry. She must have fallen asleep for she awoke to find Sean sitting in the camp stool next to her cot. “I didn’t want to disturb you. Anyway, the cot’s not big enough for two.  Are you all right?”

As she sat up, the blankets dropped away giving Sean a warming view of her breasts. “Am I a stupid person, Sean?”

“You? No. A little thick headed from time to time, but that’s a matter of temperament not intelligence. Why?”

“I can’t help thinking that we have learned just as much about the past from that boy as we can from studying Sargon. Why can’t they see that?”

“Because Sargon made it into the history books, the boy didn’t. The year after Benjamin brought you back to Pitcairn, agents brought in eighteen children, including me. Last year, with more agents, a bigger budget, more experience, we managed to net three.   If there’s a problem, Joanna, it’s not with you.”

                           ***

The night of the first new moon of the autumn had come. Today, in Kish and in the other cities of Sumeria they would celebrate the festival of Inanna.  The festival however had not brought the agents and neither had the city of Kish.  Ur, Shinar and the other cities of the delta were larger and more impressive.   Apart from its geographic position as a northern outpost of Sumeria, the city had only one other reason for attracting the agents, Sharrumkin. His ascendancy to power still lay a few more years into the future. For the present, Sam shared a bench and a pot of beer with Joanna and Sean. They sucked at the beer, Sumerian style, through reed straws. The thick liquid reminded Joanna of  Chibuku, the maize beer that Benjamin would send her from Zimbabwe.   Tomorrow they would see the festival, filming it for posterity’s sake.   Sargon would be there in the train of the ensi Ur Zabadda.  Until then they let the hours pass, sipping from a pot of beer, eating roasted lamb and listening to the other customers.

The small, mud-plastered, windowless room with its beaten earth floor seemed the perfect place for them. The tavern, inconspicuous and informative, sat among the narrow alleyways close to the main gate. Sam had questioned the gatekeeper who had gaped at the traveller’s classical Sumerian.  Amused by the eccentric foreigners, the sentry pointed his spear at a narrow lane squeezed between a row of two storied flat-roofed mud brick buildings. The three agents and their donkeys pushed through the crowd that choked the narrow lane. They reached the entrance of the tavern, an entrance flanked by animal and human dung, broken pottery and rotting foodstuffs.

Moderns assumed that Sumerian architecture, based upon clay brick, had a dull appearance. Whatever else Kish might be; it was not dull.  The Sumerian love of bright colours, the need to proclaim each shop’s purpose for an illiterate population, coupled with the need to placate the Gods, resulted in a plethora of drawings drawn upon the painted walls of the houses. The Sumerians possessed a casual attitude about certain basic human needs. In front of the tavern two pictures drawn in charcoal, one of men sitting around a beer pot the other of a man and woman with legs intertwined.

If you want to learn about a culture, Sam told his agents, go where the locals indulge in their vices and listen. Having paid in silver for a room, they ordered beer.  As they sipped their beer, they taped farmers discussing their crops, and merchants complaining about rising costs, and increased taxes.  In the opposite corner of the room, two drunken soldiers tried to impress one of the inn’s serving girls with their military exploits.

 It took a few minutes but Sam recognised the two. They had been with Sharrumkin, on his raid to the north.

“Animals,” the first soldier told the tavern girl. “All they are.”

Typical frontier mentality thought Sam.  Kish stood at the northern edge of Sumerian civilisation. At the edge hostility towards the outsiders was always deepest.  Sharrumkin had recruited, not from the wealthy, but from the poor farmers and labourers, most of them frontiersmen.  Armies would not change for another five thousand years.

Joanna sucked at her straw and stared at the grey mud of the wall. She tried not to think that the two soldiers had shown how civilised they were by cutting babies throats.

One of the soldiers lurched to his feet and staggered over to a corner of the room.  He loosened his woollen skirt and urinated, ignoring the innkeeper’s complaints that he should have stepped outside. His friend began nuzzling the tavern’s girl breasts. Giggling she pulled away ducking behind the innkeeper’s squat form.  His arms folded, the barechested man demanded payment.  The soldier growled, “Sharrumkin’ll burn this place down around your ears, Shabat, you go insulting his men.”

“No one’s insulting anyone,” the innkeeper told him, trying to placate him.  “This is business.  You have your fun, you pay for it and don’t go pissing in a respectable place.  You’re not that much of a fool to insult the goddess by making trouble the evening before her festival.”

It may have been the hilt of the bronze dagger at the innkeeper’s waist, or the mention of the goddess that sobered the man. It might also have been the knowledge that Sharrumkin would impale any of his men that disturbed the peace. Sharrumkin’s men could match the soldiers of the ensi but one did not challenge the Gods. Ur Zabbada might have the mind of a dullard, but as ensi he remained under Inanna’s protection.  In offending the ensi, one risked offending her and Sharrumkin. The prospect of a stake thrust up his bowels gave the soldier pause.  He opened his pouch and tossed over a copper ring.  The innkeeper examined it and nodded at the girl. She and the two soldiers disappeared into a small side chamber.

“Do you have much trouble here?” Sam asked, when the innkeeper brought a fresh serving of roast lamb and barley bread.

Shabat shrugged. “They’re not too bad. Sharrumkin keeps good control over his men.”

“What about the ensi?”

Shabat grimaced, “what about him?”

Sam nodded and fell silent. Best, he thought, to concentrate on his food.

The procession began in the early morning. The three agents followed the crowd surging towards the open square in front of the ziggurat. Hidden beneath their woollen cloaks were video recorders, cloak pins concealing lens. Sam noticed how Joanna could not keep a look of distaste from crossing her face as they passed the slave pen. Men, women and children, all naked, all bound, stared out with empty eyes at the crowd surging past. Sam and Sean  had learned to  look upon the captives as the rest of the city’s population did, with causal disinterest. The agency would note Joanna’s failure to do so. It would do little to enhance her status with the agency. Still, that would be a problem for the future.   For now they had to find a good viewing place from which to observe the ceremony.

Innana’s union with Dummuzi, the goddess of peace uniting with the god of war, celebrated the year coming to its full cycle. The high priest, shorn of body hair and naked except for a red woollen cloak, stepped out of the gateway of the ensi’s palace. Following him, clad only in a loincloth, came Ur-Zabbada, his sagging pink flesh perspiring. Behind him, bearing offerings of grain, beer and wine, and bound sheep, walked the temple priests, all shorn, all naked. As the procession made its way down the town’s main street towards the temple, Joanna looked at the  small group of wealthy nobles and merchants standing on the other side of the street.   In their centre, flanked by his son, and by his aged godfather, Aqqi, stood Sharrumkin.  His height, hooked nose and piercing eyes made him unmistakable. In that tall, dignified man she could sense what could not be found in the pudgy Ur-Zabbada, power. Behind Sharrunmkin she could see his principal ally and friend, Marduk. The butchers, she muttered under her breath.

As Sharrumkin turned his head to whisper to Aqqi, Joanna caught a brief glimpse of a young man standing behind the cupbearer. His beard was still new,   not yet having attained the fullness prized by all upper class Sumerian males. The youth seemed not to be looking at the procession but through it, at her. Then Sharrumkin turned back towards the procession. The young man’s face disappeared behind Sharrumkin. A young man had stared at a young woman. Some things did not change, even after five thousand years.  Joanna dismissed him, concentrating on the high priestess now visible at the summit of the ziggurat.

As she stepped out of her quarters high above the city, she shimmered in the sun, a goddess appearing from the heavens. Clad only in gold headdress, earrings and gold trimmed cape, she waited for her lover, the god Dummuzi, lord of the land, to approach her. Their successful union would ensure that  the union of heaven and earth would continue undisturbed.  The god, not used to such exercise, waddled manfully up the steps of the temple. The necks of the crowd craned to see him ascend. All prayed fervently that he would not stumble. As Joanna glanced furtively at Sharrumkin, she wondered what the man was thinking but then scolded herself. Religious hypocrisy remained a notion foreign to this time. However ruthless the man, however soaring his ambition, he remained a Sumerian. Sharrumkin’s prayers for the ensi’s success were as sincere as any other believer.  To him Ur-Zabbada had become the personification of Dummuzi.

Ur-Zabadda/Dummuzi disappeared into the priestess’s chamber. The crowd waited in fervent expectation. The three agents caught up in the excitement, stared upwards as the familiar chubby figure emerged. As the ensi raised his hands in prayer to show success, a great cheer arose from the crowd.    Then unnoticed by the agents, Sharrumkin slapped the back of his neck.  As the cupbearer bobbed his head, Joanna could see the young man standing behind him stepping back.  When the crowd began to chant, he disappeared behind Marduk.

Joanna  watched the ensi descend the steps of the ziggurat.  Sean nudged her.

“Look.”

He pointed at Sharrumkin’s party. Sharrumkin, the future king of Akkad , of Kish, ruler of the land of two rivers, had sagged forward.  His son and Aqqi held him by his arms. They hurried away, Sharrumkin’s sandaled feet dragging, leaving two grooves in the dirt. Marduk and their attendants followed. Joanna looked for the young man who had stared at her.  She could not see him. From the expressions on the faces of Sharrumkin’s supporters something was very wrong.  As Sam led them back to the tavern, they overheard the murmuring spreading among the crowd, Sharrrumkin the cupbearer, had been struck down by the gods. In their room, squatting on reed mats, the three agents discussed what they were to do. “A sudden illness, stomach upset, who knows what, “ grumbled Sam. “There’s no reason to suspect anything more than that.”

“Sharrumkin’s not the type to be seen complaining of an illness,” said Sean. “Is there anything to suggest that he might be epileptic?”

Sam shrugged. “We know so little about him. The earliest written records were seven hundred years after his time. What we know is largely legend, maybe just propaganda. We do know that he survived, so whatever it is can’t be that serious.”  

A burst of noise sounded from revellers in the main room of the inn. “They don’t think that it’s serious,” Sam added. “We’ll know more tomorrow.”

                           ***

As they munched on a breakfast of barley cakes, the agents overheard the innkeeper chatting with a neighbour. The tavern keeper murmured and shook his head. “Sharrumkin died in his sleep.”

                           ***

Shabat wondered what he had done to offend his guests. The woollen merchant from Ur had told him that he had intended to stay a month. Barely a week gone by, and the man and his companions were heading off again, on the very day of Sharrumkin’s funeral.  Enjoyable guests too, quiet, no trouble at all. Probably the death of Sharrumkin had given the three a fright.  He admitted that it had shaken him as well. The Gods had reached down to strike the man for his arrogance. He had made himself head of the city’s host. Everyone knew that he was already scheming to become the vizier. Shabat nodded. A man should not try to rise too far, too fast. It went against me, the proper order of things. He thought of Gilgamesh who had striven for the flower of immortality only to have it stolen from him by a serpent.

The gods read the thoughts of men, punishing anyone who threatened the natural order of things. Perhaps the merchant from Ur had his conscience troubled by Sharrumkin’s fate? More likely the man sensed that uncertain times meant bad business. There would be jostling between the city nobles and wealthy merchants, each man trying to fill the vacuum filled by Sharrumkin’s death. Marduk would attempt to defend his own position and that of  Sharrumkin’s son.   He was no fool, Marduk, but no Sharrumkin either. The innkeeper did know one thing. When Gods and great men troubled the land, ordinary folk should keep their heads down and pray for better times.

The reed boat scudded down the river, its square sail filled by a strong wind. Sam sat at the bow. His black eyebrows bristled. He tried to think of where they had gone wrong. He clung to one feeble theory, the only alternative to what he did not want to admit. The three agents had sat up deep into the night in their windowless room.  They had debated the possible effects of Sharrumkin’s reported death. Joanna had seen it as a ruse, an attempt by the cupbearer to increase public sympathy for him before making a bid for greater power. Possible Sam admitted, but doubtful. Sumerians respected craftiness but strength even more. Sharrumkin’s reputation had rested as much on his size and physical brawn as it had on his intelligence.  Any appearance of illness and his followers would begin to drop away.

“If he is dead,” said Sean, “we have the wrong man in the wrong time. No written records from his time have survived.  Being exact is hard.”

“How many Sharrumkins were found in baskets by gardeners named Aqqi?” asked Sam. “Lugulzaggishi is the lord of Ereck. He is supposed to die in a neck yoke chained beside the main gate of Akkad, the city built by Sharrumkin. How does that happen now if Sharrumkin is dead?”

“It happens because Sharrumkin is still alive,” said Joanna. “Suppose he should reappear resurrected by the Gods? Wouldn’t that squash whatever resistance there is to him?”

“Perhaps,” Sam agreed. It did seem reasonable from the twenty-first century point of view, but from that of Sharrunmkin? Such an act would be tantamount to more then sacrilege. It would threaten the very essence of the Sumerian universe, the idea of me. No matter how intelligent and ruthless the man, he remained bound by the ethos of his time. No. Sharrumkin would not have violated the sanctity of the goddess’s festival for political purposes.   That left only one other possibility. Again, Sam replayed the videos showing the procession. Sean’s and his were almost identical.  Joanna’s was different. Her lens had turned with her to view Sharrumkin. Again he stood, proud, aware that the power of the city, lay within his hands, flanked by his friends and the only person that he loved, the gardener Aqqi. Again they could see him slapping the back of his neck as if warding off a mosquito. Sam watched the man crumple, his son and his godfather holding him up. Behind him Marduk reached out for his friend and called to whom? Soldiers and attendants for support, or for the young man that Joanna had looked upon, who alone of all the members of Sharrumkin’s party had disappeared.   The man, according to Joanna had seemed to recognise her. Had he seen them on their way to the city, or could there be another reason?

“There’s only one way to know what’s happened, “said Sam. “We’ll contact the base.  We’ll leave the city tomorrow.”

What Sam did not mention was their greatest fear.  The loss of Sharrumkin had changed their future.  In that new future, the portal might not exist.  They could be stranded in this era.   When the portal opened, the agents knew that the crisis was not as bad they feared.  Pitcairn remained Pitcairn.  The agency remained the agency.  The directors puzzled over Sam’s report on Sharrumkin.

Sargon remained entrenched on the king lists of Sumeria and Assyria.  According to writings dating back to late Sumerian times, Sargon had won the support of the merchants. With that he had established his own kingdom. Sargon had built Akkad. Habib, the directors agreed, had over-reacted. Rumoured to be dead he had obviously recovered. Yet it did not explain what had happened in the square.  

 The agency sent two other agents back to the square during the feast of Innana.   They stood in on the one spot not recorded by the earlier videos, at the rear of Sharrumkin’s party. They would film the happenings from the rear, each agent shooting at a different angle.  Computers would examine the pictures to learn the exact events leading up to Sharrumkin’s collapse. The agents waited, eyeing each member of Sharrumkin’s party.  The one they eyed the most was the young man in a blue robe, identified by Joanna.  He stood behind Marduk, holding the hand of a young girl.  He seemed cheerful, concentrating as much upon the girl as upon the ceremony. 

The agents waited.  Nothing happened.  Once the ceremony ended,  Sharrumkin turned, and chatting with Aqqi walked past the agents, followed by his friends and bodyguards.  The young man and the girl formed part of the group. Puzzled, the agents returned to Pitcairn. Sharrumkin had collapsed. So it had been had recorded. Now he was walking away as strong as when he had come. Another discrepency. Sam, Joanna and Sean had been in the square during the collapse and yet there had been no sign of them.

Both teams viewed the two videos. After the viewing Sam called for comments.

“Curiouser and curiouser” said Sean. “It’s as if we weren’t there.”

“So where were we,” asked Joanna.

“It’s a big crowd Joanna,” said Daniel Lemoine the leader of the second team. . “Maybe we just missed us.  Simplest explanation is usually the best.”

                “Only if you’re simple minded,” grumbled Joanna. She wanted to say more but the expression on Sam’s face caused her to sink into silence.

That night Sam composed his report of Delisle. He outlined three possible explanations for the discrepancy. The second team had arrived at the wrong time due to some unexplainable problem of the portal. General Diagnostics had revealed nothing amiss but tests were continuing. The second possibility, someone, possibly from the future was tampering with the timeline. The remaining possibility, the first team had stumbled into an alternative timeline.  The last he rejected as being a patent absurdity making of twentieth-century science fiction; creating universes out of nothing. The timeline was one. The timeline was linear. Even if one did concede that multiple universes were possible it would make no difference as far as Delisle was concerned.  His responsibility lay with protecting the sanctity of the timeline. Delisle would discuss the report with Brussels.   More consultations with New York and Washington and then a decision would be made, about Sharrumkim and about Habib.

Delisle had already recommended to Brussels that Habib should be given early retirement. The Arab did not fit the agency’s image it wanted to create for its personnel.  Too old, Too heavy. Too familiar. He shut the author away in a back drawer of his mind and studied the report.  

                ***

Six rows, each containing seven chairs. They faced a raised dais. On it sat five men and women, the four other directors of the agency and Sam Habib. Two of the chairs on the dais were empty. One belonged to Delisle. The other was off to the right side. In the sixty-three chairs sat the agents, all called in for a special address from Chief director Delisle. Joanna sat with other junior agents in the back row of seats, half-listening as the director explained how the agency planned to deal with the problem posed by the two differing videos. It would be, Delisle told the assembled agents and directors, the most ambitious project yet attempted. They must protect the timeline against anyone who sought to interfere with it. To do that the agency would spare no expense, leave no stone. . . .    

“How many other cliches does the old fart have” Joanna murmured, glancing over at Sean. Sean looked back at her, shrugged and concentrated on the director’s face. Joanna returned to her thoughts. There seemed emptiness to the room. It lacked the smell of life. Deodorants applied to human skin, room fresheners, the crisp scent of fresh plastic and artificially grown flowers, it all seemed unreal. She remembered no aromas in Sumeria, just smells, smells of donkey and sheep and of human beings living without the benefits of synthetic aromas.   Many smells had repelled her but at least, they had been  real. Joanna had hated the past. Now she wanted to go back if only to break free of the aromas stifling her nostrils.  

Delisle was proud of his people.  The mainlanders, he had hired and trained. The islanders owed him their existence, except for one. That quiet, brown-haired woman at the back owed nothing to him. Delisle knew that whenever Joanna looked at him, she thought of a father that they would never allow her to touch.   The woman had never offered active opposition.  That did not matter. What mattered was that she offered a potential source of opposition. A good agent’s family had to be the agency. He did not fear disloyalty for himself.   Delisle remained unimportant. All-important was the time-line. From what he had read of Habib’s reports concerning the woman’s attitudes, Joanna had never understood that. She was too much like her father. She seemed to have a problem with alcohol.  He would look into that. Something more suitable would be found for an agent of her limitations.

Joanna thought of a letter that her father had sent her. In it he had written that to understand African history it was important to remember that the Africans, defeated, ill-used, impoverished, were reluctant to hate the Europeans.  Most of them never had. They had felt sorry for the white man. They had found the paleness of their skin repulsive but far more repulsive had been the paleness of their lives.   Benjamin had remembered sitting with his sekuru, his grandfather, next a small fire. From across the field they could see the lights shining in the windows of the baas’ house. Why, his sekuru had asked, did the whites need such a bright light? How could one see the stars? Foolishness.

Joanna turned back to look at the director. Robert Delisle had dominated the agency long before Doctor Foley’s resignation. Foley might have invented the portal. Delisle had done something of far greater difficulty. He had persuaded New York to support it.   Delisle had created and had presided over the bureaucratic structure that had protected the portal.  Joanna knew that she had no reason to dislike the man. He had never said an unkind word to her, nor to anyone else.  Scrupulous in the performance of his duties they could not question his sincerity. Sam had told her how he had explained in impeccable logic, why the time line could not be bent to allow them to save that unknown child’s life.  Perhaps she disliked him because of Jane.

If Benjamin was her father, Jane Christian was her mother. The last true Pitcairner, the last nurse, the last teacher, the last administrator, she had seen her two hundred and fifty-year-old community shrivel under the benevolent rule of the agency. Old Pitcairn, she conceded would have died anyway but if the pakeha had not come, it would have died as it had lived, in freedom, with dignity. She could not forgive the agency for the taking away of that freedom.

Delisle pointed at the projected map of Kish.  Between walls that surrounded a space not much larger then Adamstown lived twenty-five thousand people. Among those existed a force that might be attempting to change the natural course of history. As guardians of the time-line the agency had to track that force down and neutralise it, while careful not to harm the inhabitants.   They would take blood samples over a course of nights from which they could compare DNA samples. Such samples could pinpoint whoever was responsible for the aberration.

“Assuming that the personage responsible belonged to the household of either Sharrumkin or of Marduk we will begin there the night before the festival of Innana. We will then work our way out examining each sector of the city.”

It was the most ridiculous thing that she had ever heard, thought Joanna.    Even assuming that they could account for every individual within the city, how would its citizens remain unaware of the strangers slipping through night after night? Even if it worked, then  what? A scan would not detect an agent from the future. The cost of deploying enough agents would cripple any immediate research projects. Shelved was the plan to examine the village of Jarmo, the first agricultural settlement in the Fertile Crescent.  As for “we” Delisle would remain in his air-conditioned office in Adamstown. New recruits unfamiliar with the city or with the culture would conduct the actual operation.  They could never, physically or culturally, appear as anything else then strangers. Sam Habib should be the natural leader, but he, Sean and the other members of the first expedition could lend only technical advice. The agency decided against sending them back. Grasping the intellectual complexities of time travel was difficult enough but two different Sams?

Sam whispered to Susan and then rose from his seat in the front row. "Isn't it possible, director that our entire view of Sharrumkin might be somewhat off?"

"Explain please."

"Well the only records we have of him date from Assyrian times two thousand years after his death, and they were composed during the reign of Sargon the Great of Assyria.  The history of the original Sargon might just be official Assyrian propaganda."

"There may be something in what you say," Delilse replied.  "But the point remains, we are faced with an anomaly that we have not been able to explain. "

How, Joanna wondered, did Delisle intend to do this without waking up half Sumeria? Copters bringing agents back and forth, the amount of supplies, and the size of the base camp; how could they not notice us?

Delisle noticed the hand raised in the back. “Agent Dzingira?”

“Sir, I’m a copter pilot. You can’t bring those machines anywhere  near a settled area without attracting attention.”

As Delisle nodded, he recalled the report that Chief Agent Habib had submitted concerning her character profile. She had shown undue emotion concerning the agency’s policy regarding non-interference. She had  proposed that the agency waste its time and energy  on the retrieval of nonessential data. For once, she had done him a favour by giving him the opportunity to impress the agents with the agency’s newest achievement.

“You’re quite right. We can’t. However, then we won’t be needing copters on this trip, perhaps on any other. The directors have decided that it is too clumsy an instrument.”

“But sir, to set up the portal . . . ”

“Director Isukuru, would you please explain our new modifications?”

As the room lights darkened, on the wall behind the directors the image of the portal appeared, the large circular frame known to every agent. In front of them stepped the four-foot-ten inch figure of Professor Yukiko Isukuru. She bowed at Director Delisle. She then bowed at the agents. In her high-pitched singsong voice she recited the brief history of the portal since its inception by Doctor Foley.   Improvements made on the portal both by Doctor Foley and since his death, by the agency, but the basic form remained the same, a large complex structure. The size of the portal restricted the size of any object going through. Large pieces of equipment such as a copter had to taken apart and reassembled to allow passage. Due to the size of the portal it had to be placed remote from the population of the period under examination. This required the need for overland vehicles and copters to haul personnel to and from target sites.

The image of the familiar circle shimmered and vanished.  The overhead lights brightened.  Professor Isukuru stepped up to the empty chair beside Director Delisle. She pulled out a small rectangular remote from her coat pocket. She studied the buttons for a moment and then punched out a combination.

Joanna was looking at the professor and waiting to see what she would do next, when Sean nudged her. She looked at the chair.  Perched on it sat a small brownish pigeon. Every agent in the room could identify it. It had last been alive in 1912. The passenger pigeon stared at the strange view and then fluttered up searching for an escape. Unable to find one, it settled on the exit sign.

As Joanna watched the small bird soaring above her, she thought of the tale of Gilgamesh. Utnapistim, the Noah of Sumeria released a raven. When the raven failed to return, Utnapistim knew that the world had begun anew.  As she looked back at the benign smugness of Delisle waiting for the excited chattering to subside, she wished that she could see in his face the reverence and humility that old Utnapistim had possessed.

Liquid molecular engineering, Professor Isuruku had allowed for a complete redesign of the portal, shrinking it to as fraction of its former size.  “It is laser surgery compared to amputation by a bone saw,” said Professor Isukuru. “The portal gave us a doorway. This gives us both a doorway and transportation.”

No more copters, Joanna thought. It would make Delisle’s scheme practical. It would make possible the saving of that unknown child, and who knew how many others. Perhaps.  The new portal had also made her redundant.  Why would they need copter pilots as agents?

                           ***

Sam looked down at Susan still asleep in the bed.  The wonder of her love still awed him. It still struck him as being so incongruous. She would have had her pick of others far younger and more attractive than he. Every morning in the bathroom he would look at his rotund form and wonder why she continued to love him. What was he after all? Half Christian half Moslem. Half-Lebanese; half-Palestinian. The Lebanese half, his father, killed by a Syrian patrol, the Palestinian half, his mother, killed by an Israeli air raid. Both accidents unnoticed by a larger world. He had been accepted by the agency as a sop to Arab opinion.   Someday Susan would outgrow him, settle down with another islander. He would go back to Beirut. They understood that. For now they had one another.

He left her and tiptoed out of the room. As he stepped out onto his glass-shielded sunroom, he peered down into darkness. Six stories below, only a few feet from the front of the building the cliffs fell away   three hundred feet to the ocean.  He could neither see the waves nor hear them  crashing  against the rocks, but he knew that they were there.    Three centuries before they had brought a small group of men and women here to this tiny island in search of  a refuge. He had proposed once, half-seriously to the directors, that it might be interesting to have a film crew watching the Bounty as it approached. They had smiled the smiles of tolerant men with minds on more important things. With all of his other suggestions this had drifted into oblivion.

Sam stepped back into his living room. Instead of returning to bed, he settled down in front of his computer.   For the past day he had entered   the results of the blood samples gathered by Delisle’s teams.   Night after night, or the same night as far as Kish was concerned, the agents slipped into house after house gathering as many samples as they could. The  painless process, conducted while the inhabitants slept passed unnoticed by the citizens of Kish.  Now all that remained was to do  the analysis.

From the very beginning Sam knew that they might find nothing. If the man who had struck down Sharrumkin came from the future, his DNA sample would not be on file. Eventually though, they would find him. Time did not matter. The likeliest suspect, the young man noted by Joanna, they found in Marduk’s house, sharing a bed with one of Marduk’s daughters. That seemed a mark in the young man’s favour. If   from the future, he would have fled once he struck Sharrumkin down.  Why strike him down at all? What could they gain by favouring Marduk?  How did that explain the fact that Sharrumkin appeared live and well on the second visitation?

Sam’s fingers tapped the plastiwood of his desk as the computer hummed. The processing  began. This could go on for hours he told himself. The computer would  compare billions of samples searching for a match. As he  rose to get himself a cup  of coffee,  the computer beeped, signalling that it had found a match. Surprised,  Sam punched enter.  On the screen, the matching DNA analysis appeared. Below it appeared an identifying number and a name. Sam looked at it for a moment. Behind him he could hear Susan stirring, calling to him. He sank back into his chair. There had to be a mistake. Jabbing at the keyboard he ordered the computer to copy and double  check the results, knowing as he did so, that the computer could not have erred. It had not. The result remained the same.

“Sam?”

He could hear Susan’s bare feet stepping on the floor. He could feel her standing behind him, at the doorway to his study.  Sam shaded the name of the person from whom the DNA sample had been  drawn.

Susan  placed her arms on his back. “Did you find anything?”

Sam pressed delete. “Nothing.”

Islands in Time  Amazon

 

Author's Note

Written in Canadian English