"Right. Now, before we go any further, there's something I need to know. Conrad, I can take you home now. If you want, you can be back at your desk at the Katowice Machinery Works tomorrow morning.

Do you want to go?"

Now, that was a kick in the head! Did I want to leave this brutal world and go back to my safe little home? I had to think about it, and Tom was silent while I thought. The serving girl refilled our gla.s.ses and left in silence. There was my mother there. How would she take my loss? Yet there were so many people here that needed me, people that I loved. And while I really don't care much about material things, could I go back to standing in lines at the government stores after my loyal troops had slaughtered millions of the enemy? Could I give up my wife and servants, my world-shaping plans, and go back to designing nothing but machine tool controls? Did I really want to become unimportant again? No, by G.o.d, I did not!

"I think that I have a better life here, Tom. I'll stay. But try and do something for my mother, okay?"

"I'll do better than that. I'll give her back her son. You see, when you split the world in that snowy woods, you split yourself, too. Your mundane, less heroic self, the one who obeyed his employer and abandoned a child to freeze to death, did not make out as well as you did. I found him in poor straits in Legnica, and he was most eager to go home to his mother. He can warm your chair at the factory and tell himself that it was all some crazy dream."

"Well, that's settled, then. But look, Tom, I have a battle to conduct soon, and the morning is not far away."

"We have all the time we want. It's my stock-in-trade, after all. When you go out that door, not a minute will have gone by in the world outside. Why don't you stick around for a while longer. There's more to discuss, and I'd like you to have a medical checkup while I'm here. If you're tired, there's a spare bedroom with a modern bed, and the wench will get you anything you need."

"Can I have a cup of coffee in the morning? You can't imagine how many times I've dreamed of a cup of coffee."

"We stock the best."

"Then I'll stay, cousin."

I was deadly tired, and in my years in the Middle Ages I had never gotten around to making a really decent box spring mattress. The girl came out a poor third in my priorities, but then, I really hadn't been offered her.

Chapter Thirty-three.

Tom was gone the next morning, but he'd left me a note saying that he would be away for a while. The girl served a gorgeous breakfast with maple syrup and real Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. After that, there were books to read that I hadn't written myself, a good stereo system, and a fine videotape library.

Heaven after so many years in the wilds.

I tried repeatedly to strike up a conversation with the serving girl, but no luck, aside from getting her name, which was Maude. She was always smiling, but it was the fixed, artificial sort of smile that you see on a salesman or waitress, not a show of genuine pleasure. At first I thought it odd that Tom should choose such a strange person for a companion. Eventually I realized that she was not a companion in the ordinary sense but just another accessory in this place. She was certainly pretty and very useful, but she seemed to have about the personality of a tape deck. Still, I tried hard to be nice to her, even if she did seem to be emotionally handicapped. As the days went on, I discovered that she responded best when I treated her like Anna, my old mount, with lots of compliments and friendly banter. In time I even tried scratching her behind the ear the way Anna liked, and she smiled with a sort of twinkle in her eye that told me that she was really happy. Although she stayed naked, even of pubic hair, she never made any overt s.e.xual advances, and while I thought that she would not reject mine, I felt it best simply to keep it friendly.

I spent seven days with her in the strange, windowless sealed-off apartment, reading up on all the bits of technology that I had needed and had forgotten or had never learned, listening to good music, and watching all the movies I had missed. It was a marvelously restful vacation, and it gave me time to think.

I got to considering the events of the past ten years, and it slowly sank into me how incredibly successful I had been in modernizing medieval Poland. I had started a primitive country on the way to industrialization and had done it without coercion, without fanaticism, and almost without pain. Looking back, I think we all had a good time doing it.

Compared to the bloodshed and suffering that Russia or almost any other country went through in turning a nation of peasants into a modem society, what I had done had been astoundingly easy and painless. I had gotten us going in ten years, not the fifty or seventy-five years that all the other nations had needed in trying to modernize. And I had done it without any outside help but a pocketful of seeds and the little knowledge that I had in my own head.

I had formulated no dogma, told no one of my long-term plans, and made as few speeches as possible.

That is to say, I had made no promises. I had just gone ahead and done the best I could, and that had made all the difference.

When other people tried to change the world, Lenin and his crowd, for example, they started by publishing grandiose promises, outlining their program and claiming that all sorts of wondrous things would come of it if everybody went along in lockstep. They claimed that soon everyone would work only a few hours a week, because these silly academicians thought that work is something that no would want to do. Yet with their program, everybody would have free food, free medical help, free vacations, and so forth. They would move mountains, though n.o.body seems to have asked why a mountain should want to be someplace else.

Well, people are smart enough to notice after a while that magic doesn't happen. If you want more things, you have to make and distribute more things, and that means that at least for the first few generations you have to work harder and more efficiently.

I just offered people a low-paying job with long hours and hard work and did what I could to make that work seem meaningful to them. Once a good man or woman sees that what he is doing is good and important, work becomes a pleasure, one far more enjoyable than any silly game or amus.e.m.e.nt. The only promise I made was that we would all eat the same, and I didn't really even promise that. I just did it, and enough people responded to get the job done.

I never tried to get everybody into the program. I just took on those who wanted to help and never wasted any energy on the rest. In so doing, I made very few enemies, and I never had to set up a huge, expensive, and hated police force to coerce those who didn't want to take part. The guilds, the n.o.bility, and the Church all went their own ways with my blessings, except for those few occasions when they got in my way. My father told me that it takes all kinds, and I've always believed that.

I never published a vast scheme of things, so I was never blamed for anything when things didn't go right.

I made a lot of mistakes, but very few people noticed them, while my successes were fairly obvious.

I am convinced that the reason why things have gone so well is not so much the things that I have done but rather the things that I haven't done.

I've just been an engineer, a simple man with a job to do.

Tom returned one day in time for supper, which was a pile of fresh Maine lobsters with all the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs.

The apartment had a time locker that was used as a sort of refrigerator. It not only kept things fresh, it could keep them alive. The girl was an amazing cook, even if she couldn't carry on a conversation.

"Where have you been, Tom?"

"Nowhere. I just went into stasis for a few days to give you a small vacation in a bit of the modem world."

"Thank you. I've really enjoyed it, but it's time to talk some more. A few days ago you said that you couldn't come to get me until after the time you saw me at the Battle of Chmielnick. Well, I wasn't at the Battle of Chmielnick. There wasn't any Battle of Chmielnick! I was at the Battle of Sandomierz, and when I was there, I saw you get killed. There was a Mongol spear that went right through your eye and out the back of your helmet. You weren't breathing, and you didn't have a pulse. Do you want to explain these things?"

"It's like I said, the shredding around the battlefields was the worst. Yes, that really was me, and I really did die. It was a me from some other subjective timeline, I hope, although it could possibly be a me from my own subjective future, so I avoid that time slot. As to whether the Mongols were killed at Sandomierz or Chmielnick, well, in a thousand years it won't make any difference. Maybe the historians will argue about it, maybe not."

"Isn't it confusing with a lot of you running around?" I said.

"No more than it is for you. There was one of you at Chmielnick, after all. And none of this shredding was ever noticed until you came along."

"Is that why you waited a year after the battle before talking to me? To wait for the shredding to settle down?"

"Yes, of course," he said.

"Then why do you come now on the eve of another battle? Won't that cause problems?"

"This thing with the Crossmen isn't a battle, it's an execution, and they were all dead before you got back to your trailer. But now, if you are through with that chocolate eclair, we'll give you a medical checkup."

In a side room that had been locked before there was a thing that looked like Spock's coffin, with an attached keyboard. In it was a frightening number of mostly concealed tubes, needles, and little knives.

"Are you sure that you know how to work this thing?" I said.

"Relax. It happens that among other thing, I'm a doctor of medicine. In nine hundred years you become a lot of things. Get in."

I didn't love the idea, but I'm supposed to be a hero, so I got in. The lid came down on me, and it got dark, and then the lid came up, and I got out.

"There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" Tom said.

The first thing I noticed was my eyesight. I could see as well as I could when I was a teenager. I put a hand over my left eye, and I could see out of my right. I wasn't half-blind anymore!

"It turned out to be easier to regrow a whole new right eye rather than trying to repair the severed optic nerve. And from there it was only a matter of hitting another b.u.t.ton to regrow them both," Tom said.

"Your arthritis is gone, along with your hemorrhoids, and so is a small cancer that you didn't know about.. Your immunizations have been updated, and I've done a general rejuvenation treatment on you.

You look the same, but your ladies will be able to tell the difference."

"Wow. I feel great! You did all that in a few seconds?"

"No, it took me three hours to set it up, and inside the machine's time field you spent four months on the program, or your body did. There wasn't any point in boring your mind with the procedure, so I shut that down for the duration. "

"Huh. Well, thanks, Tom."

"No charge. All part of the service. You've been a pain in the a.s.s, but the trouble you've caused has been the first decent challenge we've seen in centuries. What's more, what you have done is very important. Think about it. A whole new world! A whole doubling of the human experience! As time goes on, this branch will develop its own arts, its own sciences, and its own technologies. What new music will they play, what new insights will they have, what new things will they build? I tell you that there are glorious possibilities here, and we intend to explore them! Maybe we'll even try to split one off for ourselves."

"Well, don't rush it, Tom."

"We never have to hurry. Well, now, do you. feel ready to go back to the world you've created?"

Maude left the room, and I said, "In a minute. Just a few more questions. What is it with this servant of yours? She's one of the strangest women I've ever met."

"Well, that's why! She's not a woman. She's a bioengineered creation, just like that neohorse I gave you.

They were designed in the same studio and have much in common chemically. She's not a modified human if that's what you're worried about. I'd never allow anything like that. Her equivalent of DNA was built up entirely out of simple chemicals, and she was designed to be attractive, industrious, and completely contented with her lot. Human servants are naturally resentful, doing a demeaning job.

Wenches work out much better."

"She has a lot of Anna's traits? Racial memory and all that?"

"Oh yes, along with multiple births and a similar sensory apparatus. She doesn't need a neohorse's remarkable digestive system, though, being designed for a civilized environment, and she can talk, of course, whereas if a horse talked to one of our field researchers, it could get him into trouble. But basically, the two designs are similar except for outward appearance. "

"Interesting. I suspected something like that. Another thing. Once my life was saved by some golden arrows coming down out of the sky. Was that your doing?"

"Who else?"

"Who? G.o.d, of course."

"Don't be absurd. There's no such thing."

"You're so sure of that? Maybe that's why you can't change the time stream. Have you ever thought of praying?"

"I'm not even going to answer that one, Conrad."

"Huh. One last question. The afternoon before I rode your time machine, I met a girl at a seed store, a redhead. She was supposed to meet me that night, but she didn't. What happened to her?"

"Somehow I knew you'd ask that. She wanted to come, but her installation director got word of a surprise inspection the next day by the a.s.sistant secretary for agricultural research. Her whole outfit spent the night cleaning the place and waxing the floors."

"Huh. I'd forgotten what bureaucracies were like."

"If you say so. Don't you know that they do the same thing at your factories before you show up?"

"Perish the thought! I'll put an end to that! Oh, yes. You've been telling me what a wonderful person I am. Could this wonderful person have a present or two to take back with him?"

"Like what? You want the wench?"

"No, I've got plenty of those, and mine are real. Anyway, I doubt if you have one who can speak Polish."

"True. "

Maude came back and was waiting attentively.

"Then I imagine that she'd be pretty lonely in Poland. But how about some of that coffee?"

"Fine, I'll have her get all you can carry."

"Thank you. And how about some reference texts, an encyclopedia, for example? And I'd give a lot for a Handbook of Chemistry and Physics."

"Are you sure that it would be wise, Conrad? You've made remarkable progress here, mostly because your people have had to think out and solve their own problems. This has put practical working people in charge of things. But when one culture tries to learn from another one, the sort of people who succeed and take control are the academic, unworldly sort, and history has repeatedly proved that it is easier and quicker to invent it all for yourself. I mean it! The United States developed a world cla.s.s technology in the fifty years between the Civil War and World War 1. It took j.a.pan, Russia, and a dozen other places seventy-five years to do the same thing by copying them, and they had a much harder time doing it. You are progressing just fine on your own."

"If you say so. How about some modern farm animals? Or even just some prize sperm?"

"Same thing. You'll do it better on your own!"

It was a polite no but a no just the same. Well, I tried. Maude came in casually, lightly carrying two huge leather suitcases, almost trunks. I peeked inside one of them, and it was full of freeze-dried instant in vacuum cans. Yet when I picked up the suitcases, it was a strain. That little girl-like thing was incredibly strong!

"Well, good-bye, Tom, and thank you again. Keep in better touch from now on."

"Good-bye for a while. I'll be keeping an eye on you, don't worry."

And so I stepped back through the looking gla.s.s, or at least my closet. My last view was of the wench smiling at me with that special twinkle in her eye. I closed the door, and when I opened it again, there was nothing there but my clothes.

I called my servants in and went to bed. And yes, the girls could tell the difference in my rejuvenated self! All of them. Several times.

In the morning the weather was still dead calm. I had Sonya bring me a cup of boiling water to show her how to make instant coffee. But packed between two big cans inside the second suitcase was a copy of The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Maude certainly had a lot in common with Anna and was not the automaton that Tom thought she was. Nice kid!

After enjoying my coffee, I crossed the river. We waited until the sun was fully up, and then I had the siege guns blow down both of the main gates. It took only one round from each of the guns. It wouldn't have taken even that, but the other gunners weren't about to go through the battle without firing a single shot.

The delegates watched all this through the telescopes that Boris Novacek had provided them with-at strictly retail prices, at my insistence and over his earnest objections. Boris figured that we could get away with charging double.

A greenish-yellow gas flowed stickily through the shattered gates, and the gunners ran for high ground as they had been taught. It flowed down the road, through a gutter, and was eventually absorbed into the cool waters of the Vistula.

We waited until the middle of the afternoon, and then Baron Vladimir sent in a few volunteers. They came out saying that the place stank but that the Crossmen were all dead.

They weren't quite right.

After we entered, a group of Teutonic Knights in chain mail and black and white surcoats started shooting crossbows at us from one of the towers. They wounded two men, though not seriously. As he was being carried away, one of them mugged, "What? True belted knights shooting crossbows? How unchivalrous!"

We all laughed.

Then we just fell back and called in the artillery. The gunners had fun knocking down the tower. They were taking bets as to which crew would hit it first. Number six got it on the second round. They still weren't much on accuracy, but what they hit stayed hit.

Then we looted the place. It stank with chlorine but also with the stench of ten thousand unwashed bodies. I decided that the city-fort wasn't worth keeping.