Vestiges of Time Read Online Free Page A

western Asia, and northern Africa. It was they who first sailed the “Inland Sea” and learned to tack against the wind and who finally set out into the great oceans of the West and of the Southeast, who circumnavigated the globe for the first time and then began to colonize the New World, who built steam engines and invented things like the telegraph and telephone and the airplane, and who ignited the first atomic bomb somewhere in Africa and burned away the better part of a great city.
    The blue-eyed blonds, of which I am one even though as a child I spoke a version of Greek, had been to the Asians as the American Indians had been to the Europeans who colonized North America in Sally’s world: savages to be dispossessed of their land for the benefit of the “more civilized” people from the South and the East. Long years of warfare followed, during which most of the natives of northern Europe were exterminated, though when the wars came to an end, the surviving Europeans, by then hardened by decades of combat, came to be a warrior caste among the spreading colonists, a people apart, to be used to wage their wars.
    Such a one to them I seemed, accepted now as nearly an equal by the “enlightened modems,” but still—was I feared, or respected, or looked upon with a kind of awe by people to whom active participation in warfare was a thing of the past?
    “I don’t suppose I greatly disappointed her,” I said at last, finishing my drink.'
    “Another,” RyoNa said, a statement, not a question, and punched out another set of drinks on the table’s ordering keys. “I doubt you did disappoint her. By Themfo-Okketho, what a pair you two must have been! I wish I could have watched.”
    “I’m exhausted,” I said.
    “No doubt the girl is too.”
    “She may be.”
    “Oh, when I go to my tomb and journey to the Dark Lands, I’d lik e to take an EstarSimirian whore with me, the Dark Lords willing.”
    When the drinks came, delivered by a waitress of low caste, clad as revealingly as the dark girls had been, RyoNa was silent for a while, then cast his eyes about the darkened room in a conspiratorial manner.
    “I will name no names, friend Harkos,” he said, “nor state any facts. But I believe I know where to find the man you seek.”
    “The man I seek? What do you mean?”
    “No names. No facts. But you have let slip to me that there is a certain thing you would li k e to have access to. Is this not so?”
    “Yes, there is a thing I need.”
    “A thing the very existence of which is supposed to be known to only a few, is this not so?”
    I nodded. We were talking about a prototype of one of the chronal-displacement devices, and we both knew it. My hints in the past had been sufficient to establish that.
    “It is one of the earlier models, you know,” he said softly. “Not as refined as the ones now being tested, but it seems to do the job for which it was designed.” “Where is it?”
    “Ah.” He sighed. “That I cannot say. But let me say this: it is not where it is supposed to be. It was to be sent to one of the nations allied to NakrehVatee,
    a nation whose name I cannot speak. It was shipped, but it never arrived at its destination. A—shall we say, a friend of mine knows its present location.”
    “Can you take me to this friend?” I asked.
    “It may be possible. I must visit him myself and discuss with him the arrangements. It will be very costly.”
    “I had anticipated that.”
    “Very costly.”
    “How much?”
    He stated a figure that would be meaningless without a knowledge of the local currency, but it was a high one, one that I thought I could just barely meet. I’d brought a lot- of gold with me.
    “Very well,” RyoNa said, once I’d nodded in agreement. “When I go to visit my friend I will need a token of your good faith.”
    “How much?”
    “Ten per cent should suffice.”
    “When?”
    “The day after tomorrow, mid-afternoon. Meet me here. It must be in hard currency.