The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson Read Free Book Online

Labrys down in Crete, centuries ago. Only herself.
    Storm squatted and opened one of the bundles from the cabinet. Lockridge took the opportunity to start changing behind her
     back. She glanced around. ‘We will need contemporary clothes,’ she said. ‘Our gear will excite sufficient gossip. Take the
     other costume.’
    He could not resent her ordering him about, but undid the package. The wrapping proved to be a short cloak of loosely woven
     wool, blue from some vegetable dye, with a thorn brooch. The main garment was a sleeveless bast tunic that he pulled over
     his head and belted with a thong. Sandals tied onto his feet and a birdskin fillet ornamented in a zigzag pattern went around
     his head. In addition he got a necklace, bear’s claws alternating with shells, and a leaf-shaped dagger of flint so finely
     worked as to look almost metallic. The haft was wrapped in leather, the sheath was birchbark.
    Storm surveyed him. He did the same to her. Female dress was no more than sandals, headband, necklace of raw amber, a foxskin
     purse slung from the shoulder, and a brief skirt decorated with feathers. But he scarcely noticed those details.
    ‘You will do,’ she said. ‘Actually, we are an anachronism. We are dressed like well-to-do clanfolk of the Tenil Orugaray,
     the Sea People, the aborigines. But you have short hair and are clean-shaven, and my racial type – still, no matter. We will
     be travelers who have had to purchase our clothes locally when the old ones wore out. That practice is common. Besides, these
     primitives have small sense for logical consistency.’
    She pointed to a little box that had also been in the bundle. ‘Open that.’ He picked it up, but she had to show him how to
     squeeze to make the lid curl back. Within lay a transparent globule. ‘Put that in an ear,’ she said.
    Throwing aside a midnight lock of hair, she demonstrated with a similar object. He remembered now the thing she wore in her
     own left ear, that he had taken for a hearing aid, and inserted his. It did not impair his perception of sound, but felt oddly
     cool, a momentary tingle ran over his scalp and down his neck.
    ‘Do you understand me?’ Storm asked.
    ‘Why, naturally—’ He strangled on the words. They had not been in English.
    Not in anything!
    Storm laughed. ‘Take good care of your diaglossa. You will find it rather more valuable than a gun.’
    Lockridge wrenched his mind back to observation and reason. What had she actually said?
Gun
had been English and
diaglossa
didn’t fit the pattern of the rest. Which was — Gradually, as he used the language, he would find it to be agglutinative,
     with a complex grammar and many fine distinctions unknown to civilized man. There were, for instance, some twenty different
     words for water, depending on what kind might be involved under what circumstances. On the other hand, he was unable to express
     in it such concepts as ‘mass,’ ‘government,’ or ‘monotheism’: at least, not without the most elaborate circumlocutions. Only
     slowly, in the days that followed, would he notice how different from his own were notions like ‘cause,’ ‘time,’ ‘self,’ and
     ‘death.’
    ‘The device is a molecular encoder,’ Storm said in English. ‘It stores the important languages and basic customs of an era
     and an area – in this case, northern Europe from what will someday be Ireland to what will be Esthonia, plus some outside
     ones that might be encountered like Iberia and Crete. It draws energy from body heat, and meshes its output with the nerve
     flow of the brain. In effect, you have an artificial memory center added to your natural one.’
    ‘All that, in this cotton-pickin’ little thing?’ Lockridge asked weakly.
    Storm’s wide smooth shoulders lifted and fell. ‘A chromosome is smaller and carries more information. Make us some food.’
    Lockridge was downright glad to escape to the everydayness of camp cooking. Besides, he had gone