Chapter Twelve
UNQUILL WAS SHORT.
He knew that he shouldn't be ashamed of his height.
Eight feet tall had been the utmost maximum many humans throughout history could be said to expect to grow into. Yet, with the standard height of ten feet tall, eleven at most, Unquill had always been aware of his size.
Everyone looked down at him. He could tell when they did this, for each person, irrespective of gender or age, always possessed that same odd glint in their eye.
Unquill couldn't explain it.
He often felt as though everyone went about patronizing him.
In his first hundred years of life, when he'd tried to fit in as a normal member of society, the camaraderie he'd experienced with his colleagues always left him feeling inadequate. He knew that how he used his body mattered more than what his body looked like, yet he also knew that, even after many thousands of years of recorded history, the human race remained a species which always judged books by their covers.
Unquill didn't like his cover. He often wished people would look inside, even if only for a little while.
These thoughts crept through his mind while he performed the mind-numbing task of trying to determine what the problem was with the computer.
It would still let him play games, though, if he wanted. He could enter a command to enter the world of Battleship Centaurs, yet any serious search activity of the computer always produced the same maddening sets of repeating images.
When the plan to retrieve the two small human children from their time had been conceived at the highest levels of the Temporal Constabulary, Unquill had made no comment.
He'd seen them in his future.
They all seen the children in their future, impossibly short, always loud, always eating, always needing to use the bathroom.
They had been thought defective at first. Beings which produced noise without substance could be no better than animals.
Yet, when Unquill had been asked to give his opinion, he had stated that he could find no two citizens with greater significance to history than the two selected.
The Constabulary had seen his evidence.
They could not dispute it.
Nor did they try.
However, with the search function not presently working, Unquill wondered if time was indeed absolute as he'd always been taught.
The whole basis of the project was to prove that it was not, after all.
If he had seen the destruction of the human race as an event that had already happened, what would then occur if the destruction could be prevented?
Unquill wondered at the implications of that.
Preventing the destruction of the human race would mean that he, at various points in the past, would never have seen it.
He then would have never taken steps to avert it.
If such steps weren't taken, then the destruction would happen anyway, which would mean...
Paradoxes hadn't been his specialty.
Within the Constabulary-a group already perceived as rule-mongering pencil-pushers-he had been a journeyman. He had always been the one to wear the protective suits that kept him safe while a tunnel through time opened around him. He had traveled to various points in history, just to see if such places warranted further investigation.
Moreover, given the planet's rotation about the sun, calculations for spatial displacement had to be applied as well. At every time landing, Unquill came close to passing out. He always arrived just at the edge of unconsciousness before his body's natural processes asserted themselves.
The historians-those individuals who spent long stretches of their lives within the times in which they visited-didn't experience the same repeated sensations that a journeyman like Unquill did.
If he'd paid more attention in his ten-year theory course, perhaps things might have turned out differently.
Remembering temporal theory gave Unquill a jolt.
He stopped typing. He looked at the screen, which continued to flash the same images at lightning-fast speed.
He recalled a lesson where, sitting outside in a chair too big for him, he'd heard the instructor talk about the Causality Paradox.
First discovered in the 64th century, journeymen and historians alike had the ability to go forward in time in order to see how they solved any complicated problem. Seeing how they solved it, they then went back in time to apply their solution. However, as the instructor had been careful to point out, depriving the mind of its ability to work out the problem by itself could lead to the problem not being solved in the correct manner. What the time traveler perceived as a solution might, in fact, complicate matters.
Unquill could, in theory, test the Causality Paradox concerning the matter of Hinjo.
He could go forward to see if a solution had indeed been found.
If events could be changed, such information would prove revolutionary.
Every respected theorist, of which there were many, agreed that the time stream could only be known, not changed.
Knowing this, Unquill wondered why he'd been allowed to stomp about in that room of stone and wood before taking history's two most significant citizens.
Had he always taken them?
He could not say for certain.
Perhaps the people with greater levels of responsibility than himself knew something he didn't.
Some minutes had passed while Unquill had stood lost in his thoughts.
The images on the screen slowed.
A primitive bicycle, a great roaring beast, a remote-controlled machine moving along a world of red sand.
His eyes widened when the computer did something it hadn't done before.
It stopped flashing images past.
It showed, in clear detail, the image of Hinjo Junta, as the future historians had recorded him, emaciated and dying.
Unquill pressed the escape key.
Nothing happened.
SAVANNAH AWOKE TO the sound of a man whooping in excitement.
She knew she hadn't been asleep long, for she'd developed the headache she always got whenever someone interrupted her sleep.
She saw the image of a man, his skin stretched tight around his face, his eyes dull, emotionless.
To her, this was the image of a man who had given up on life.
She felt sorry for him, for she knew that he would soon die.
She turned her face away, unable to look at the man.
A flicker of recognition in the back of her mind told her that she'd seen this man somewhere before.
Even while Unquill shouted the name Hinjo, she knew it had to be true.
Here was a man who would, according to Unquill, destroy the human race, yet she had met him before.
He had to have been a time traveler, she thought.
She looked up to catch Kenneth staring at her.
She stuck his tongue out at him.
He turned his face away, pouting.
Savannah stood up, feeling the weariness in her bones.
Her mother had often said that Savannah had no business being tired or sore since she was so young, yet Savannah couldn't help it. She had caught the insomnia bug earlier in the year. Now, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't sleep more than three or four hours a night. As a result, she found herself growling at Unquill's exclamation, who, when he turned about to give her his good news, looked abashed.
"What's going on?" Savannah asked.
"This man, this is Hinjo," Unquill said.
Kenneth stood up. "Really? He doesn't look that dangerous to me."
Unquill smiled.
To Savannah, the smile looked rather sad.
"This is an image taken at the end of his life. No other images of him exist because he had not come to be known among us before he made his choice. We tried locating him before this, but with no success."
They all studied the image for a while. Savannah couldn't shake the feeling that she'd seen the man somewhere before.
Though his his hair lay in tufts about his head, his chin and forehead retained a certain something to it.
At that moment, Savannah happened to look at Unquill.
She saw that, where he hadn't bothered brushing his hair in the back, Unquill had the same pattern of tufts that Hinjo did.
Savannah swallowed.
She took a deep breath before speaking. "Unquill, that man-it's you."
Unquill's mouth hung open in shock.
He approached Savannah until he stood in front of her.
Then he knelt before her.
Their eyes met.
Unquill's eyes retained the animation of life whereas Hinjo's did not.
Yet, they were the same color.
Up close, so close that Savannah could feel the heat of his breath on her face, she became ever more sure of herself.
Unquill backed off.
He pulled a weapon from his belt. "You believe what you say. I don't see any deception in you. Then, if you are right, I will kill myself here and now. That will end all the problems once and for all."
Kenneth spoke up. "No, it won't."
Savannah turned to look at him. "What do you mean?"
"Do we know how old Hinjo was when the photograph was taken?"
"Surely, all you need to do is calculate how old I am now, together with how many years will pass between now and then," Unquill said.
Savannah picked up Kenneth's train of thought. "Unless you factor in how many years you'd been alive while traveling to some other time. That might explain why you can't find, well, yourself. It's because you popped back in right at the moment when everything got started. You've been expecting Hinjo to live a normal life in obscurity like everyone else, right? What if that's not how it is? What if Hinjo travels-traveled-from a point in the past or future to the critical point you've been worried about?"
Unquill said, "Such things are forbidden. One must always return to the precise point from which one has left. To do otherwise would lead to a banishment from the Constabulary for all time. Some have tried it, believe me. All have failed."
Kenneth scratched his nose, then his chin, deep in thought. "If you went forward to study a future in which people don't exist anymore, you could just use their thingies whenever you wanted, couldn't you? No one would stop you."
Unquill's eyes widened for a moment. "I had not considered that. Perhaps it's time we put this matter before the Council of Thirds. If indeed it is I, then-"
The more Savannah looked at Unquill, standing before her and Hinjo on the screen, the more she felt certain that Unquill and Hinjo were the same person.