Timeline - Michael Crichton [74]
Everything he saw was accurate, down to the smallest detail. Everything was real.
He was here.
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Kate Erickson stared at Castelgard with a sense of puzzlement. Beside her, Marek was sighing like a lover, but she wasn’t sure why. Of course, Castelgard was now a lively village, restored to its former glory, its houses and castle complete. But overall, the scene before her didn’t look that different from any rural French landscape. Perhaps a little more backward than most, with horses and oxen instead of tractors. But otherwise . . . well, it just wasn’t that different.
Architecturally, the biggest difference she saw in the scene before her and the present was that all the houses had lauzes roofs, made of stacked black stone. These stone roofs were incredibly heavy and required a great deal of internal bracing, which was why houses in the Périgord no longer used them, except in tourist areas. She was accustomed to seeing French houses with ocher roofs of curved Roman tile, or the flat tile of the French style.
Yet here, lauzes roofs were everywhere. There was no tile at all.
As she continued to look at the scene, she slowly noticed other details. For example, there were a lot of horses: really a lot, when you considered the horses in the fields, the horses at the tournament, the horses ridden on the dirt roads, and the horses put out to pasture. There must be a hundred horses in her view right now, she thought. She couldn’t remember seeing so many horses at one time, even in her native Colorado. All kinds of horses, from beautiful sleek warhorses at the tournament to barnyard nags in the fields.
And while many of the people working in the fields were drably dressed, others wore colors so brilliant they almost reminded her of the Caribbean. These clothes were patched and patched again, but always in a contrasting color, so that the patchwork was visible even from a distance. It became a kind of design.
Then, too, she became aware of a clear demarcation between the relatively small areas of human habitation—towns and fields—and the surrounding forest, a dense, vast green carpet, stretching away in all directions. In this landscape, the forest predominated. She had the sense of encompassing wilderness, in which human beings were interlopers. And minor interlopers at that.
And as she looked again at the town of Castelgard itself, she sensed there was something odd that she couldn’t put her finger on. Until she finally realized, there were no chimneys!
No chimneys anywhere.
The peasant houses simply had holes in the thatched roofs from which smoke issued. Within the town, the houses were similar, even though their roofs were stone: the smoke issued from a hole, or from a vent in a wall. The castle lacked chimneys, too.
She was looking at a time before chimneys appeared in this part of France. For some reason this trivial architectural detail made her shiver with a kind of horror. A world before chimneys. When had chimneys been invented, anyway? She couldn’t remember exactly. Certainly by 1600, they were common. But that was a long time from now.
This “now,” she reminded herself.
Behind her, she heard Gomez say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
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Kate looked back and saw that the surly guy, Baretto, had arrived. His single cage was visible on the other side of the path, a few yards back in the woods.
“I’ll do what I damn well want to do,” he said to Gomez.
He had pulled up his burlap tunic, revealing a heavy leather belt with a holstered pistol and two black grenades. He was checking the pistol.
“If we’re going into the world,” Baretto said, “I’m going to be prepared.”
“You’re not bringing that stuff with you,” Gomez said.
“The hell I’m not, sister.”
“You’re not. You know that’s not allowed. Gordon would never permit modern weapons to be taken into the world.”
“But Gordon’s not here, is he?” Baretto said.
“Look, goddamn it,” Gomez said, and she pulled out her white ceramic marker, waving it at Baretto.
It looked as if she was threatening to go back.
36:50:22
In the control room, one of the