Andre Norton - Time Traders 6 - Echoes In Time.pdf

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Echoes in Time by
Andre Norton and
Sherwood Smith
PROLOGUE
THE DAY'S HEAT had diminished to only a residual shimmer from the
cooling earth. The chitter and click of insects in the scrubby green brush
formed a kind of musical accompaniment to the laughing and singing of
the long, snaking line of children crouched together, one in front of the
other, knees up near their chins.
"Here is our mother!
Our mother, our mother!
Here is our harvest,
Our fruit, our harvest!
Our mother, our fruit…"
The children laughed as they sang, their bare toes scrabbling forward
in the dust as they waddled and hopped. Their dark brown skin was
mottled and streaked with painted patterns, some chalk-white, others
subtle earth tones. Sweat and dust marred the fine lines of the patterns,
not that the children cared. They were only playing. They sang and
laughed with the companionable abandon of children who know that the
time for real skin painting, when they became adults with adult
responsibilities for food and shelter, war and marriage, lay far in the
sunny future, after many harvest games such as this.
 
Saba Mariam, watching from her post beside a jumble of rocks, felt as
if she had been wafted back through time. So the children of the Surma
had played and sang for countless generations in this sere mountain
region of southwest Ethiopia.
She looked down at her hands, the skin dark against the plain khaki of
her trousers. She and her recorder were the only jarring notes in this scene
out of history, the only intrusion of modernity—though at any time an
airplane might roar overhead, causing children and adults alike to pause,
like startled deer, before they scampered off to hide.
Saba glanced at her tape recorder, working silently behind a warm gray
boulder. The Surma tolerated her strange ways because she did not
interfere with them, and she had proved that she was not in fact sent by
their age-old enemies, the Bumi. She looked strange to men and women
alike, with her ears and lips unpierced. She was, to the Surma, a child
walking around in a grown body, for she did not display the ritual
markings of a responsible adult, but they dismissed her strangeness with a
kind of humorous tolerance.
Saba had learned to sit quietly, patiently, drawing no attention to
herself. After her long stretches of neutral observance, she knew that the
people would forget her presence. She would become no more interesting
than another boulder, or a patch of scrubby grass, and it was then that she
turned on the recorder, making a record of music that had been handed
down through families over centuries and centuries of time.
It was good work. Important work. Saba was proud to be one of many
who quietly went about recording the songs and myths that had sustained
human beings since the cradle of civilization. Progress had brought to the
Earth untold advantages, but its pervasive growth was choking off in
ever-increasing numbers the very old languages, customs, and cultures of
peoples who had lived in harmony with the land since humans first
crossed the great continents.
It was indeed important work, Saba thought as one very small
three-year-old tripped and went rolling in the dust. The song broke up
into laughter. The children reformed into their line; one girl at the front
began singing again, soon joined by the others, as in the distance a group
of mothers and young unmarried women chattered and prepared food.
Important work—and involving work. It kept one busy, which in its
 
turn prevented one from worrying about those things that could not be
solved—
As she thought this, she became aware of a sound that perhaps had
warned her subliminally of approaching intrusions.
The faint hum, reminiscent of bees bumbling around flowers, resolved
into a battered old motorcycle drawing a three-wheeled side car. The rusty
machine was probably older than Saba herself.
The children heard it as well. For a moment they all went still, and then
their leader dashed through the dust to her mother. The other children
followed, some still laughing, others singing bits of song. The mothers
gathered their young and vanished into the sun-dried brush.
Saba climbed up on a boulder and shaded her eyes against the great,
bloodred late October sun. The driver of the motorcycle revved the engine
and zoomed around brush and scraggly trees, halting two meters from
Saba's rocks.
Saba held her breath as the wafting odors of petrol and exhaust blew
past, so unfamiliar after her month here in the wild mountainous region.
The driver, meanwhile, pulled off sunglasses and a tight baseball cap,
shaking free a cloud of curling brown hair. The clothing—tough,
anonymous bush garb—had made gender difficult to guess at; a gloved
hand pulled out a kerchief and mopped some of the dust and grit from a
middle-aged female face as Saba approached.
The driver looked up, shoving the kerchief into a pocket. " La Professeur
Mariam? Vous etes Saba Mariam?" she asked.
Saba nodded, adding in French, "Is there an emergency?"
" Oui " French was obviously no more the driver's native tongue than it
was Saba's, but Saba had gotten used to polyglot conversations—often in
tongues chosen because possible surrounding listeners would not
understand the conversation. Not that any listeners were around now.
The woman said, " Je m'appelle Taski Aleyescoglu. Je suis avec L'Etoile
Projet ."
Project Star.
 
For a moment Saba stood staring at the unfamiliar woman, angry at
this breach of promise.
L'Etoile Projet —Project Star—was the bland name for one of the most
secret organizations in the world, one for which Saba had given her
strength, her spirit, and nearly her life.
Saba turned her gaze on the Time Agent courier. "I was promised a
year," she said in French. "A year to recover."
"It is an emergency," Agent Aleyescoglu replied.
"Answer me this first: has Lisette Al-Aseer reported in?"
The Time Agent did not pretend to not know the name. Her lips
pressed into a line, and she shook her head. "I am sorry, Professor
Mariam."
Saba drew a deep breath. "And they expect me to cut short my recovery
time? And return?"
The agent said, "Whatever is going on is classified over my head—as is
whatever your former partner is still working on. All I was told was to find
you and bring you back. Whatever it is that has them scrambling now,
apparently only you can solve it."
Saba turned her gaze to the last limb of the sun, sinking beyond the
western peaks. Shadows blended softly now, making it difficult to see the
woman's face. If she was to leave, she'd have to go now; they were miles
from any road, and driving about at night in Ethiopia in the dark was no
simple matter.
She looked back. "Me as a musicologist?"
"You as you. That's all I was told: it must be you, it can be no other
person."
Strange. But time travel was strange, that Saba knew. Strange, alien,
and even more remorseless than the natural passage of time.
She looked over the distant clumps of trees, knowing that the Surma
crouched there, and she smiled sadly to herself. All very well to fancy that
 
she had stepped back in time while recording these people celebrating the
year's harvest. Apparently she was to be drawn back into real time travel,
in a machine designed and built by beings never born on Earth. How
many agents had been lost in the quest to understand this technology
from beyond the stars?
She shook her head.
"Can you tell me at least where this emergency is taking place?"
"I wasn't told. Of course," Taski said, settling onto the motorcycle and
pulling on her goggles. "But when I was on my way out, I overheard an
order for someone to contact the American Embassy for your visa."
"New York! So this new emergency involves the Americans?" Saba
shook her head. She knew that Project Star had originated with the
United States, but so far her connection with the Americans had been
peripheral at best.
Taski grinned as she yanked the baseball cap over her forehead. "Big
boss will probably be out here next, and you can ply him with all the
questions you like."
Saba sat back on her rock. "If there is so urgent a need," she said, "why
did he not come here instead of you?"
Taski revved the engine, which roared, sending some distant birds
flapping skyward from the shrubs. Their cries echoed back, faint as the
laughter of children, as the motor died down to an uneven growl.
"Might have," Taski called. "But he's still in Mother Russia."
Russia?
Saba mouthed the word, but did not speak. In amazement—and
apprehension—she gazed at the courier, who gave her a careless salute,
revved the engine once more, then drove off into the twilight, leaving a
cloud of light brown dust hanging in the still air.
Russia? And the Americans? Could there be a connection?
She might not have been able to conquer her bitterness, but one thing
 

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