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  Ashe only extended a hand, and the two started toward the steep trail zigzagging up the great mountain around the back of the city.

  Ross extended a hand, using the same gesture, and Eveleen smiled at his irony. She unpacked one of the sample bolts of the linen that would be her entry to talk to people in the market.

  Together they started up the shore toward the city, to begin investigating there. As he walked, Ross wondered who was the greater enemy, the Baldies or Nature.

  CHAPTER 6

  AS ALWAYS, THE Time Agents were to interact on a personal level as little as possible. Gordon Ashe had kept himself alive by learning to blend in, and to keep his own counsel. His partners, on most runs, had been men; in most parts of die world during prehistory, women had not had the freedom of movement that the Time Agents required.

  Of course there were female agents as well, and they'd been successfully deployed in places where they were needed. All those women, like Eveleen, had gone through training, and they, too, had learned to blend in, and to keep their own counsel.

  So he watched, uncomfortable, when Linnea held out a hand to stop an older woman. She gestured, then said the ancient Hittite word that Jonathan's team had decided meant "oracle."

  The older woman shook her head, looking puzzled. So Linnea repeated the word, only in Ancient Greek.

  The woman's face cleared, and she let out a voluble stream, her hands swooping up the path behind her and gesturing to indicate what Ashe thought meant a cave.

  "Please! More slow," Linnea said.

  "We have only the one oracle who speaks to us from the Earth Goddess, through the Priestesses of the Serpent," the woman replied, enunciating very clearly and slowly. 'Where are you from?"

  "I come with traders, from Kemt." She gave the correct form for "the Black Land," the Nile Valley, which Egyptians differentiated from "the Red Land," the desert.

  "Ah! Well, then. That explains it." The woman adjusted her robe, and wiped her forehead. "I have heard that you have many great oracles over the sea. Well, but here we have the one, and even the islanders come to our mountain to consult." She pointed up the steep cliffs behind Akrotiri.

  "Has the oracle told people to go away from the island?" Linnea asked in a careful voice.

  "Our goddess foretold the battle of the Great Snakes the season my daughter bore her first son, and many have gone to the far islands, including my daughter.” The woman opened her hands, an age-old gesture of acceptance. "Me? It is my home here, for too many seasons to change, just because the earth spirits cannot rest, and the snake clouds form. They are distant, not here in our city."

  "Many thanks, and blessings." Linnea's language was correct, but her body language was self-conscious, unnatural, as if she were very much aware of playing a part—as if she felt silly.

  Ashe was relieved when the woman smiled sympathetically, repeated in a slow voice her directions, and added a wish for blessings in a soft voice. Sympathy, not suspicion.

  His relief was short-lived.

  They started at once up the path. Linnea seemed to relax now that they were alone. So did Ashe, but when his old and admired friend looked around and smiled and made exclamations from time to time in English, at first Ashe did not know what to do.

  They began trudging up the sharply angled path that zig-zagged up the side of the great mountain. Their going was slow, partly because it would not do to go jogging straight up the mountain in what was going to be a very hot, humid day, partly because just ahead of them on the trail was a woman leading a laden donkey, and also because Linnea kept stopping in order to gaze at the half-ruined city of Akrotiri, which spread grandly along the base of the mountain.

  "Oh, to explore every building!" she murmured softly.

  Ashe did not answer. He kept moving.

  Linnea turned her head, saw him a ways along the trail, and bustled to catch up.

  Again they walked in silence, Ashe from time to time glancing up the mountain. From this angle he could see at least one great vent, from which smoke rose in lazy curls to join the thick haze higher up. He was not sure if there were others within his view, or if what seemed to be smoke was just air currents moving what had already risen.

  "Oh! Here comes someone," Linnea whispered—again in English.

  Ashe said nothing. He increased his pace slightly, to narrow the gap between them and the woman with the donkey.

  An older man escorting two young girls came round the trail, the girls' earrings and skirts swinging. The younger one was chattering, apparently not noticing the looks of concern on the older girl's and the man's faces.

  As they neared the woman on the donkey, they pressed into single file.

  The woman looked up at the sky, as if noting the time, then said—in Ancient Greek—what sounded like, "You are today's first seeker, no? Did the goddess speak?"

  "Not in a way I understand," the man said slowly, sighing. "And the priestesses only shake their heads and repeat what I was told by the goddess: that a shadow flies across the sun, and another shadow flies beyond that, silencing the earth spirits. She can hear nothing."

  The younger girl looked up at the bright blue sky with a fearful glance and then they passed.

  Ashe glanced once at Linnea. She had slipped behind him, her lips compressed, her eyes excited.

  When the people were safely around the curve below, she murmured in a voice of delight, "Did you hear them? Just like that old lady. I understood! I comprehended! The accent we have learned for the Ancient Greek is not so very far off, no more than, say, BBC English is from a Texas accent." She smiled at Ashe, the old smile of discovery.

  But mostly he was annoyed. So much so that he hesitated to speak.

  Now the trail leveled out for a time, and even widened for what had to be a little rest stop under the shade of three scrabbled, pumice-dusted olive trees. Just behind them was a cracked basin, carved from the same lovely marble like rock that most of the city was built of, with dolphins carved above it. They paused to look at it, saw the reddish marks of oxidation, realized it was there to catch runoff during the rainy season.

  Ashe glanced down into the bottom of it, saw a wet layer of sediment mixed with the gray pebbly pumice they had seen everywhere else. It had rained, and fairly recently.

  A shudder underfoot, and a low rumble, so low it was almost off the scale of human perception, startled them both. Tiny rocks came clattering down from above. One stung Ashe's cheek, and he saw Linnea bat at something and then turn her back.

  The quake subsided, though the noise didn't. More people came down the trail, this time two older women.

  And again the woman with the laden donkey said, "The goddess, did she speak to you?"

  "Only of silence, a silence of shadows," one of the women said, and the other pursed her lips, looking out at the sea. "The same we have been hearing this three moons and past."

  Twice more they encountered people coining down the trail, one of them riding a donkey, and with each the woman ahead asked her question, though with those she spoke a language that Ashe couldn't comprehend. But to her questions the people responded with headshakes and shrugs, age-old gestures.

  Finally, just after the last one had vanished on the trail below, Linnea said—in English—"The 'oracle' seems to have nothing to say."

  And Ashe said, in Ancient Greek, emulating the accent they had been hearing, "I do not understand you."

  Linnea looked up with a brief smile that faded when she saw his expression. Her eyes narrowed, her expression now reflective.

  She looked down at her sandals winking in and out below the hem of her bravely colored garment, and at last she said, in Greek this time, "I was wrong. It is not real to me."

  To which Ashe replied, "It must become real. There is no record of a woman speaking a foreign tongue, surprising people with things that never have been."

  Linnea's cheeks reddened. Again she ducked her head, and Ashe's irritation vanished. It wasn't as if she were the first to
think of their guises as mere playacting.

  Linnea Edel was a superb archaeologist whose specialtywas volcanic sites. She'd been cramming, during their own training period, with all the new technology' used by vulcanists.

  She said, in a low voice, "I did not think about being a woman of the time, only seeing others of the time." A pause, and then, "I envisioned myself invisible to the people now, but I am not, am I?"

  Ashe said, "You will be invisible, that is. leave no memory, if you behave as they expect."

  Linnea nodded once.

  Up ahead, the woman until the donkey said to a family starting down the trail, "Did the goddess speak to you?"

  "No," said the family, even the children. The wife added, with a sour glance back, "We even offered our very best fish, fresh caught. But all she spoke of was silence and shadows. She did not forewarn us of the rock rain three moons ago." And, with a sidelong glance at her husband, she said, "I think the goddess has gone away, with the snake fires. I think we ought to hire a boat and go south with my family."

  The husband did not respond, and the family moved on down the trail.

  Ashe and Linnea kept walking. Not long after, they arrived at the top of a long shelf. A whisper of breeze came off the sea, cooling to their damp faces, but not quite diminishing the whiff of sulfur.

  A small number of people stood before a great crack in the rock above the cliff, from which floated the faint sounds of young girls' voices rising and falling in a chant.

  Striations of multicolored stone outlined the cave, whose mouth was dark. At the apex of this triangular cave faint wisps of vapor puffed out, swiftly dispersing; inside the cave somewhere had to be a hot stream.

  That explained why the unseen oracle, or at least the oracle's attendants, had chosen that place. Water year-round in this climate, hot for cold days, plentiful (if slightly sulfuric) for the long rainless summers, would be important.

  Ashe and Linnea edged round the back of the crowd waiting patiently. The woman with the donkey was, for the moment, the only one besides them moving. She plodded straight into the cave as one who had the right.

  For a moment Ashe glimpsed robes dyed a robin's egg blue: a priestess. Then the woman had vanished inside, with the first of the waiting people.

  Ashe stood in the lee of a great piece of sun-bleached pumice, probably from a blast a million years before, and glanced around. Ah. The smoke came from over there.

  He touched Linnea's arm, and tipped his chin.

  Her glance of longing was unmistakable, but she turned with no apparent resentment. Ashe felt a surge of relief, even gratitude. He had not wanted to admonish her; the risk was that the assumption of superiority would somehow cross professional lines into the personal. And maybe with a very young agent, it would have. They tended to take things personally, even if it was inadvertent.

  Linnea just cast back one last glance of yearning. The archaeologist in her was intensely curious about the living ritual concerning an oracle. But now was not the time to witness it.

  They edged along a narrow goat trail and began climbing up along the mountainside, away from the cliffside cave. They were very quickly out of sight of anyone below.

  Up and up. The smell of sulfur got considerably stronger. Ashe stopped, holding his breath. Linnea, who had climbed behind him, winced, and mimed putting their breathing masks on.

  It was a question. Ashe looked about and saw no one. He nodded, taking out his mask, and said in English, "There is nothing up here but rock and volcanic ash. I think the hydrogen sulfide would drive even the hardiest away—and the locals must know by now how swiftly death can come from these vents."

  Linnea nodded, passed a hand inside her robes, and pulled out the cloth-disguised breather that the scientific team had fashioned for her.

  Ashe had on his own. The air smelled of plastic, and slightly stale, but the mask successfully absorbed the potentially deadly gases. A small strip of chemplast, visible from the corner of his vision, would change color if the concentration became too much for the mask to handle; another indicated the mask's remaining capacity. Both were green.

  They climbed on, easing around a crumbling rock, and felt intense heat. The hardy little tufts of grass and weed that they had seen here and there, more evidence that the rainy season had begun, had long since withered away.

  Another ten paces and air shimmered from escaping heat. Ashe paused to glance out toward the sea. Tiny boats and single-masted ships dotted the horizon.

  "Go ahead," he said. "I'll do a visual scan."

  Linnea nodded once, her intense investigative expression widening her eyes again, She opened her robe, revealing plain cotton shorts and a fine cotton-silk undershirt beneath. Round her waist she wore a sturdy belt, onto which, like a superhero of the comic books, she'd attached pouches and holders.

  She unclipped several vulcanology instruments—infrared thermosensor, a sensitive sniffer to measure gas types and concentrations, and other devices Ashe didn't recognize— then edged closer to the vent in order to start recording.

  Ashe turned in the other direction, pulled out the mini-field glasses the science team had furnished him, and shaded them with one hand so the glass wouldn't glint in the sun as he closely and minutely swept the bay.

  Bravely decorated boats circled about, some hung with decorations from prow to stern, others painted along the sides with leaping dolphins and swarming octopi, some with stylized lilies and crocuses. The people, flattened by the distance, talked back and forth or rowed, or sailed, or fished, or gazed off into the distance. These, then, were the people the scientists called "the squatters"—the people who remained behind after the first great quake that destroyed parts of the city and who had begun to rebuild.

  What exactly was he seeking? Some anomaly, some sign that there were others here, perhaps in disguise as well, from the future.

  A sigh made him turn around. Linnea was holding one of the instruments he hadn't recognized, a flattened ovoid with a pistol grip. He saw the tendons in her hand flex as she pulled the trigger: a click, a whirr, and several sets of antennae uncurled from the front and fanned out rigidly. She stared down at the instruments and then pulled the trigger again, and the antennae curled back into the casing.

  Linnea crossed to his side. "Well, the brains at home will love these readings," she said. "Isotope concentrations and types, gas readings, just about everything is either off the scale or close as makes no difference." She hefted the odd instrument. "The piezo-EM strain detector, too—and it's not terribly sensitive."

  "Meaning?" Ashe asked, though he knew.

  "Even without strain readings from fixed laser interferometers, which we didn't bring because we don't have time for them, everything points to a big blow, bigger than anything recorded in modern times. Far bigger," she added seriously.

  So it was time for Ashe's own test.

  He unclipped from his belt a flat meter that was about the size of a video cam. Inside it, though, was a little of the strange tech that had come from the future by way of the past, about which they were still learning. The materials, how they produced their strange effects, including their signature temporal distortion, were still largely a mystery, but scientists, patiently experimenting for twenty-five years, had learned to use the tech for several applications useful to Project Star.

  He tabbed the power on and watched the little LED screen light up. Then it was his turn to brave the ferocious heat of the vent, as close as he could get, holding out his meter.

  The graph bar on it trembled but did not move.

  They looked at each other. Despite the danger, he'd have to get closer.

  Ashe edged closer, hearing a whooshing rumble deep below, as if air were being forced through inconceivably big compressors.

  Suddenly the graph bar flickered and then leaped halfway across the little screen.

  Ashe moved the meter in a slow half circle, just to make certain. The graph bar held . . . held . . . diminished down to nothing
when he moved it away from the vent.

  Back again. And again, it snapped into a long rectangle, which meant only one thing.

  He edged back down to where Linnea waited. He did not know what his face showed, but she seemed to read something there, for she said, "You found it?"

  He nodded once. "Somewhere in that vent is Baldy tech."

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ENTIRE WESTERN horizon was a deep crimson, the bottoms of the approaching march of sheep-backed clouds bluish, the tops the gold of fire. It was a spectacular sunset, almost garish and almost sinister in its intensity.

  A volcanic sunset. But none of the six Time Agents noticed it; they were all staring in grim dismay at the destruction of their campsite. Destruction and disappearance: their tents, bedrolls, and the food that the Greek agents had unloaded were all gone. Everything else lay scattered about—broken open by violent hands, rifled through, and then discarded.

  "Everything?" Ross asked finally, turning over a pottery fragment with his sandaled foot. He recognized that pot: it had held their oatmeal mix, carefully made to look like regular oats, but vitamin and protein fortified.

  "Everything," Stavros said. "Except the last load from the ship." He jerked a thumb behind him at the cloth-wrapped burdens he and Kosta had set down when they discovered the ruined site. "Our gear." He said the words in a low voice, in English: their radio and recording equipment, which would never be left alone.

  Ashe, Boss, and Eveleen spontaneously turned, looking outward for signs of incipient attack. Linnea Edel stood, hands cradling her elbows, looking apprehensive.

  There was nothing to be seen except the smoke-pall over the sky, the greenish choppy sea, and the barren land stretching in folds toward the sudden, dramatic cliffs along which was built Akrotiri. Behind the warehouse, the desolate land stretched away, dotted with quake-cracked hills and falls of rock, as seabirds circled overhead.