Maybe Varagan wasn’t aware the agent had such a weapon. Impossible. Varagan was a monster, yes, but not a fool.
Everard pulled down his hatbrim and drew his poncho tight against the wind. He didn’t reach for the blaster, no point in that yet, but as if by instinct, his left hand dropped to the flintlock pistol and saber at his hip. They were mainly part of his costume, intended to make him an authority figure to the inhabitants, but there was an odd comfort in their massiveness.
Having reined in to shoot, Varagan continued straight on uphill, this time without lingering to reload. Everard brought his own horse from trot to canter and closed the gap further. He kept alert – not tensed, but alert against contingencies, ready to swing aside or even jump down behind the beast. Nothing happened, just that lonesome trek on through the cold. Could Varagan have fired his last ammunition? Have a care, Manse, old son. The sparse alpine grass ended, save for tufts between boulders, and rock rang beneath hoofs.
Varagan halted near the crag and sat waiting. The musket was sheathed and his hands rested empty on the saddlebow. His horse quivered and swayed, neck a-droop, utterly blown, lather swept freezingly off its hide and out of its mane.
Everard took forth his energy gun and clattered nigh. Behind him, a remount whickered. Still Varagan waited.
Everard stopped three yards off. “Merau Varagan, you are under arrest by the Time Patrol,” he called in Temporal.
The other smiled. “You have the advantage of me,” he replied in a soft tone that, somehow, carried. “May I request the honor of learning your name and provenance?”
“Uh… Manson Everard, Unattached, born in the United States of America about a hundred years uptime. No matter. You’re coming back with me. Hold on while I call a hopper. I warn you, at the least suspicion you’re about to try something, I’ll shoot. You’re too dangerous for me to be squeamish.”
Varagan made a gentle gesture. “Really? How much do you know about me, Agent Everard, or think you know, to justify this violent an attitude?”
“Well, when a man takes potshots at me, I reckon he’s not a very nice person.”
“Might I perhaps have believed you were a bandit, of the sort who haunt these uplands? What crime am I alleged to have committed?”
Everard’s free hand paused on its way to get out the little communicator in his pocket. For a moment, eerily fascinated, he stared through the wind at his prisoner.
Merau Varagan seemed taller than he actually was, as straight as he held his athletic frame. Black hair tossed around a skin whose whiteness the sun and the weather had not tinged at all. There was no sign of beard. The face might have been a young Caesar’s, were it not too finely chiseled. The eyes were large and green, the smiling lips cherry-red. His clothes, down to the boots, were silver-trimmed black, like the cape that flapped about his shoulders. Seen against the turreted crag, he made Everard remember Dracula.
Yet his voice remained mild: “Evidently your colleagues have extracted information from mine. I daresay you have been in touch with them as you fared. Thus you know our names and somewhat of our origin – ”
Thirty-first millennium. Outlaws after the failure of the Exaltationists to cast off the weight of a civilization grown older than the Old Stone Age was to me. During their moment of power, they possessed themselves of time machines. Their genetic heritage –
Nietzsche might have understood them. I never will.
“- But what do you truly know of our purpose here?”
“You were going to change events,” Everard retorted. “We barely forestalled you. At that, our corps has a lot of tricky restoration work ahead. Why did you do it? How could you be so… so selfish?”
“I think ‘egoistic’ might be a better word,” Varagan gibed. “The ascendancy of the ego, the unconfined will – But think. Would it have been altogether bad if Simon Bolivar had founded a true empire in Hispanic America, rather than a gaggle of quarrelsome successor states? It would have been enlightened, progressive. Imagine how much suffering and death would have been averted.”