That surprised me. I’d never actually seen Ian praying. Then again, I’d never seen him shitting either. I guess that they were both very private occupations with him.
“The inn is another matter. Our people, the historians, are going to have to spend much of their time traveling around. They are going to want to see everything that goes on, but not draw too much attention to themselves. Now I ask you, where is the one place where a stranger is not much noticed? Obviously, at a hotel or inn. And where are other travelers most likely to gather and swap their stories? At a bar in an inn, of course. Therefore, the centers that the Historical Core will build and use will have to be inns. Eventually, we’ll need to build thousands of these, in every age and culture the world has known. And to make sure that our agents can find those inns, we are going to mark them all with a bright red front door, and all of them are going to named ‘The Red Gate Inn,’ or some variation of that in the local language.”
“It sounds like a program,” I said. “Do you suppose that the Red Gate Inn, back in the twentieth century, is one of your Historical Core centers?”
“I expect that it might be. We’ll probably decide that the history of the island is just as important as the history of every place else.”
“You keep saying ‘we,’ but you know, Ian, it’s really your program. I mean, I’d be happy to help out and all, but you are the one who is so fascinated with history. I’m interested in what happened in the past, but it’s nothing that I want to spend my whole life working on.”
“Huh. Then what do you want to spend your life doing?”
“I really can’t tell you. I’ve never had anything like a life plan. So far, I’ve been like most people, just doing what comes to me, and trying to roll with the punches. We’ve still got years and years of work ahead of us, developing this time travel thing, and after that, well, who knows?”
“Agreed. But what do you yourself want to do. What really turns you on?”
“You know, before we built this town, I wouldn’t have believed it, but I find that I enjoy the hell out of building things. You know, we could have turned this job over to a bigger, better equipped crew months ago, but nobody has suggested that we do so. I think that everybody here has been having as much fun as I have.”
“It’s been a real vacation, and no mistake,” Ian said. “But if what you want to do is to build things, well, there’s the whole culture and city that the Smoothies come from. Somebody’s got to build that.”
“Let Hasenpfeffer do it. I still think that that whole sick culture is all his fault, anyway. I mean, I may not be a Christian, but I’m not totally immoral, either! Do you think that I want to be responsible for creating a civilization full of people who are as absolutely uncreative as those Smoothies are?”
“They can’t be that bad. You married one of them, didn’t you?”
“Yes, and it’s not turning out as well as I’d hoped it would.”
“Like, what’s the trouble?”
“Mostly, it’s the way she won’t let me see our kids. They’re already six years old, somewhen back there, and I haven’t met my own children.”
“Huh. But then, we each must have hundreds of children, what with all the fornicating we’ve been doing, and I haven’t seen any of mine, either.”
“I know I’m not being rational, but somehow, it’s just not the same thing. Barbara is my wife, and not just another bedmate.”
“Well, if it’s really bothering you, when we get back, we’ll both do something about it.”
“It is bothering me, and I thank you. It is very good to have a real friend, Ian.”
“And I love you, too. So just what is it that you want to build?”
“I think that I want to build a culture, all right, but I want it to be a place where intelligent, creative people can enjoy themselves being intelligent and creative.”
“And how would that be possible if they have time travel? It’s the fact that they know their own futures that makes the Smoothies what they are, and what they aren’t.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve got some ideas, but they’re too hazy just now to be worth talking about.”
“Well, you keep thinking about it, and when you’re ready to talk, I’ll be ready to listen. For me, well, I haven’t been staying here for the joy of getting my hands dirty. The real reason that I’ve been hanging around is that I’ve been hoping that some ship will come sailing into our new harbor, and we can make contact with the locals. The civilized locals, I mean, although I’m almost ready to go out and look for those cannibals of yours, I’m getting that frustrated.”
“A ship will happen by eventually, and when they do, they’re all yours. Do you have any idea how you’re going to explain how this town just sort of popped up one night like a mushroom?”
“I plan to wing it on that one. I mean, if we find out that nobody much has been here for fifty years, there’s nothing to explain. If the guy was by here three months ago, we’ll have to convince him that he was someplace else, I suppose. I’m smart. I’ll figure something out.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Visitors
Two weeks later, I was in what was now the carpentry shop in what would later be the town hall, making table legs. Three thousand people end up requiring over a thousand tables, and that means four thousand table legs. It was a matter of taking a four by four from one stack, putting it in a homemade lathe, spinning it up and making one swipe with a temporal sword sliding along a bumpy template, then taking it out and handing it to Ian, who was cutting some slots in the big end for the tabletop supports to go into.
Farther on, two more guys were assembling the tables, using wooden pegs but modern glue, and painting them with twentieth-century polyurethane varnish. Cutting with temporal tools, everything was so smooth and accurate that we didn’t have to bother with sandpaper. We wanted everything to look authentic, but it wasn’t like anybody was going to send this stuff out for chemical analasys.
This was not intellectually stimulating work, but we’d done all the fun things first. Like making four thousand chairs. Maybe in the eighteenth century, they wouldn’t have made them all identical, on a production line, but our carpenter assured us that using green wood the way we were, everything would soon warp all to hell, and then it would all would look as individualistic as you could possibly want.
I felt a definite relief when one of the sentries ran in and shouted that a ship had been sighted. Ian ran out to get a look at it, while I told everybody else to hide everything anachronistic, and then clean the place and themselves up, in that order.
I found Ian on the fighting top of one of the harbor forts, holding his body rigid and staring out to sea.
Besides being able to see clearly under water, our new eyes had another trick, but we didn’t know about it until Lieutenant McMahon had showed us how to use it, a few weeks before. We had telescopic vision, just like an eagle. It didn’t come naturally, like the underwater thing. You had to hold yourself very still, and concentrate on it, but when you got the hang of it, it was better than a pair of twenty power binoculars.
“He’s a Frenchman,” Ian said. “At least, that’s an eighteenth-century French flag on his mizzenmast.”
“No. The flag on top has some kind of a cross on it. That’s got to be one of the Scandinavian countries, doesn’t it?”
“That’s probably the house flag of the merchant company it belongs to. On these old sailing ships, it isn’t the highest flag that counts, but the one nearest the poop deck.”
Our flag poles all flew a blue flag with a gold emblem of Ian’s own invention on it. The girls had made them up rather than getting involved with building furniture.
“He’s taking in his sails.”
“And getting ready to drop anchor,” Ian said.
“Why doesn’t he just sail in?”
“He probably doesn’t know that he can. There didn’t use to be a deep-water harbor here. Also, he doesn’t know if we’re friendly or not, so he’s staying out of gun range.”
Sergeant Kuhn and a squad of Killers were setting up some of our temporal weapons out of sight, behind the battlements: a mortar and two heavy, tripod-mounted temporal swords with telescopic sights. Across the canal, on the other fort, Lieuteant McMahon was getting similar things done.