I had low expectations for this book. I picked it off the library's "new titles"shelf becuase nothing else on the shelf looked any good either.

I was happily surprised. Black Projects, White Knights is a collection of short stories by the same author, dealing with the same universe. They are loosely tied together, but each story stands on its own. Many of the stories derive lots of humor from the idea of time travel as a vehicle for commercial gain. Black Projects, White Knights is perfect for light reading.

In the book's universe, time travel has been perfected by scientists of a future age. The people of that age use time travel to mine valuable information and artifacts from the past, generating vast profits for the mega-corporation which controls the technology.

This is the background, and it stays in the background. There's no overarching story arc, no grand conflict. Rather, the stories are concerned with the lives of the time-travellers themselves. These agents, who are practically immortal due to biological and technological enhancements, are an interesting set of characters. They are effectively slaves (having been created for a single purpose). But they do their jobs as best they can, taking a practical view. After all, immortality must carry some price, right?

The conflicts in each story stem from the unpredictable effects of human nature on the agents' missions. Mining the past is certainly lucrative, but the nature of cause & effect makes it necessary to deal with unknown consequences. Even super-intelligent future beings who do their best to minimize distubances can overlook small anomalies...

Alec entered his schoolroom, sat down at the console and logged on to St. Stephen's Primary. The surveillance cameras in the upper corners of the room followed him. The nearest one telescoped outward suddenly and sent forth a scan. Meanwhile, Alec watched the icon of the frowning headmaster appear on his console's screen. He picked up the reader and passed over the pattern of stripes in his school tie, wherein was encoded his identification. The frowning headmaster changed to a smiling one, and Alec was admitted to morning less'ons. Before he could begin, however, a gravelly voice spoke out of the cabinet to his left.

"Bloody hell, boy, whats that in yer jacket?"

As Alec turned from the console, a cone of light shot forth from the Maldecena projector on top of the cabinet. There was a flicker of code and then the form of a man materialized. He was big, with a wild black beard and a fierce and clever face. He wore a coat of scarlet broadcloth. He wore a cocked hat.

He wasn't supposed to look like that. He was supposed to look like a jolly old sea captain in a yachting cap, harmless and cheery, in keeping with the Pembroke Playfriend he had been programmed to be when it was purchased for Alec. Alec had tinkered with the Playfriend's programming, however, removing the Ethical Governor, and the Captain was far from harmless now.

"It's a pill, so I won't catch germs from the other kids tomorrow," Alec explained.

"No it ain't! The damned thing's got circuitry in it."

"It has?" Alec slipped the capsule out of his pocket and looked at it curiously.

"Get the tools out, boy," the Captain snarled. "We'd best have a look at it."

"But it's class time."

"Bugger class time! Send 2-D Alec instead this morning," the Captain told him. Alec grinned and, taking the buttonball, ordered up the two-dimensional Alec program he had designed to answer questions for him when he needed to be somewhere other than St. Stephen's.

"Aye aye, Captain sir," he said, hopping down from the console and going to his work table. He pulled out his chair and sat down, taking from his pocket his small case of terribly useful tools. The Captain hauled an adult-sized chair from cyberspace and set it beside the little table, where he bent down awkwardly to glare at the blue capsule.

After scanning it intently for a moment, he swore for forty-five seconds. Alec listened happily. He had learned a lot of interesting words from the Captain.

"Germs my arse," said the Captain. "There's a monitor in the little bastard! And I know why, by thunder. Old Lewin said you was to take this afore bedtime, I'll wager?"

"Yes."

"Hmph. What he don't know is, it's part of the goddamn PSVA." The Captain stroked his beard, considering the capsule balefully. "Once that thing's inside you, it'll transmit yer reactions to the questions themselves. The Education Committee'll get yer pulse, blood pressure, respiration, reaction times--that whole lot. Like you was hooked up to one of them old lie detectors."

"But I'm not going to tell any lies," said Alec.

"That ain't the point, son! Didn't Lewin explain about what this Sorting is for?"

Alec nodded. "It's to see what kind of person I am."

"And that's just what we don't want 'em to see, matey!"

"Oh," said Alec resignedly. "Because I'm different, right?"

Alec did not know how he was different from other people. He had drawn the conclusion that he was simply very smart, which was why he was able to do things like look at a tree and immediately say how many leaves were on it, or decrypt the site defense of a Pembroke Playfriend so it could be reprogrammed to his liking.

Only the captain knew the truth about Alec, and only some of the truth at that.

"Bloody busybodies," the Captain growled. "Wouldn't they just love to get their hooks into my boy? But we'll broadside 'em, Alec. We'll rig their little spy to tell 'em just what we want 'em to know, eh? Open it up, matey, and let's have a look."

"Okay!" Alec took out his jeweler's loupe, which had an elastic band to go around his head so he could wear it like an eyepatch. He slid it on and peered at the capsule, turning it this way and that.

"It unscrews here. Ooh, look." With a twist of his fingers he had opened the capsule and spilled its contents out on a dish: a tiny component of some kind and a quarter-teaspoon of yellow powder. "There's the spy. What's the yellow stuff?"

"That'll be the real medicine, I recon," said the Captain. "Set to leak out of that little pinprick hole. Sweep it off on the carpet! You ain't taking none of that, neither."

"But I don't want to catch germs," protested Alec, drawing out tweezers and the other tools he would need.

"You won't catch no bloody germs," muttered the Captain. Alec's brain wasn't the only thing that was different about him. "Never mind it, son. We'll need the extra room in the capsule, anyhow, to clamp on a RAT node what'll feed it false data."

"Yo ho ho!" Alec cried gleefully, pulling out a little case of node components. He set about connecting one to the spy. The Captain watched him.

"See, it ain't enough to have the right answers--though you will have, my lad, because I broke into the Ministry of Higher Education's database and got 'em last week. You'll be judged on the way you answer too, d'y'see?"

"I'm not sure."

"Take the tenth question, goes like this (the Captain made a throat-clearing noise and pursed up his mouth in a bureaucratic simper): 'You be having a lovely day at the jolly seaside. A lady walks past and the top half of her bloody bathing suit falls off. Do you (A) fetch it and give it back to her like a good lad, (B) just sit and look at her boobies, or (C) look the other way and pretend nothing ain't happened?'"

"Oh." Alec looked up from the components, going a little glazed-eyed as he imagined the scene. "Erm...I guess, A, fetch it for her, because that'd be polite."

"A, says you? Haar. Correct answer'd be C, matey. Looking the other way's what all morally correct folks does," the captain sneered. "Fetching it for her would be an insult, ' cos she'd be perfectly able to get it herself, and besides, when you handed it back you'd still get yerself a peek at her boobies, wouldn't you?"

"Yes," Alec admitted. "But you told me it was okay to think about ladies' boobies."

"Well, so it is, son, but you can't say so."

"But I wouldn't be saying so."

"But with that there spy inside you, they'd be able to tell you was thinking about 'em, see? By how long you took to answer the question and what yer heartbeat did and whether you was blushing and so on," the Captain explained.

"Oh." Alec scowled. He looked down at the components and worked away in silence a moment before inquiring, "What would they do if you answered B?"

"They'd fix on you with a spyglass, lad, certain sure. And if you answered the rest of the questions like that you'd scuttle yerself, because they'd stamp Potential Sociopath on yer file. I recon you can guess what'd happen then."

"I wouldn't get to join a Circle of Thirty?"

"Hell no," said the Captain somberly. "And you'd have to go through sessions with one of them psychiatric AI units what's got no sense of humor, for months likely, and at the end of it all'd be you'd spend the rest of yer life wearing a monitor and inputting data in a basement office somewhere. That's if you was lucky! If the test scores was bad enough, they might just ship you off to Hospital."

Alec shivered. Hospital was where bad people were sent. Even children were sent there, if they were bad; and it was supposed to be very hard to get out of Hospital, once you'd got in.

"But that ain't happening to my little Alec," said the Captain comfortingly. "Because we'll cheat the sons of bitches, won't we?"

"Aye aye, sir," said Alec. "There! All hooked up. Now, what'll we feed it?"

The Captain grinned wickedly and his eyes, which were the changeable color of the sea, went a dangerous and shifting green.

"Prepare to input code, son. On my mark, as follows..." and he gave Alec a lengthy code that would convince the tiny spy that Alec's reactions to the Sorting would be those of a bright (but not too bright) socially well-adjusted human child, fit in every way to join the ruling classes. Alec chortled and input as he was bid, wondering what it would be like to meet other children.