I WAS BORN in Bremarlyn, which no longer exists, like most of the cities and towns of Westron, the great western continent. Then it stood about one hundred kays east of Inequital.
Bremarlyn had little to distinguish it except that it contained the regional revenue office of the Imperial Government. My father was a solicitor in the service of the Crown, and he served as the local tax prosecutor of a government and a world that has passed into history.
My thoughts, scattered as they are, will be included in the sealed section of the Archives, while I still retain the power to ensure both their inclusion and the sealing of the records. Some things are best lost, but vanity being what it is, I have settled for censorship over oblivion. Anyone who does unlock the seals will, I trust, also read the factual supplements and data before coming to a final judgment on my follies.
Consecrated to the Temple as Sammis Arloff Olon, I still go by Sammis, although some persist in trying to distinguish me by using my original surname. That too shall pass, at least in another dozen millennia. Time flows more slowly these days, now that Query has left the seasons of the single-night moth and entered the long afternoon of the Immortals.
Why did it happen? How?
No one can answer the first question. As for the second, for me, it began with a dream.
In the dream I stood above four roads. There were no vehicles, no power wagons, no silent steamers, no gliding electrovans, just four roads.
One was gold, cold as the dark between stars.
One was black, and the heat rose from it as from the Grand Highway in summer.
One was red and smelled like memories.
And the last was blue, bright blue like tomorrow’s dawn.
Despite the dream of these roads, then I had no special love of travel, nor do I yet. Everything I needed was in Bremarlyn—from the creek where I built dams to see how high I could raise the water behind my assembly of stones and sand to the fields where we played centreslot. No, I cannot say I had close friends, but we all played together most of the time, and, when we did not play, we fought.
In my first dream of the crossroads, I merely stood there paralyzed and unable to set foot on any road. Fear did not prevent me from taking
that step. I could not move. Nor could I speak nor sigh. So I watched the four roads, somehow suspended above them, as each disappeared into its colored distance.
The four were not a crossroads exactly, and in the distance that was not distance, each split and splintered into hundreds of different directions, until each created its own horizon—blue, red, black, and gold. Yet all directions were the same, and every road went in all directions.
Wherever I was, watching the roads, it was cold, bonechilling cold.
Then, abruptly, as I wished to return to my bed and its comfort, I was there, sprawled on cold quilts. Cold quilts, as if I had not been sleeping there during my dream.
Feeling exhausted, though I had done nothing in my dream but watch, I slept … deeply. And I did not dream. Not then.
While I seldom remembered most of my dreams, the four roads remained with me, with their promise of anticipation and memory, heat and chill, long after I had roused myself from my quilts, long after I pulled on my Academy uniform and trudged off to classes.
“MALFUNCTION ON SENSOR, alpha three, quad four, red.” The metallic tone of the speaker reverberated through the module.
The monitoring officer’s fingers seemed to meld with the keyboard while she accessed the network controlling the defective sensor. Her eyes widened as the data scripted out on the bluish screen before her. The sensor showed a temperature of 3° absolute positive, barely above absolute zero. On Mithrada, less than 120 million kays from the sun, that was patently impossible, not on a planetary surface so hot that water had never occurred in liquid form.
Shaking her head as if to clear her thoughts, she keyed the reset function.
Bleep.
The remote readings from the sensor on the planet below remained the same, long after the fractional units it took for the reset command to travel to the remote command network on the high plateau of Mithrada’s northern hemisphere.
She took one deep breath, then another, before glancing at the sealed portal that separated the monitoring module from the rest of the planetary reformation station.
“Malfunction on sensor, beta six, quad three, orange … .
“Malfunction on sensor, gamma three …
“Malfunction on sensor, omicron eight …
The console before her blazed with maroon malfunction lights, bright points of brilliance that seared at her senses.
“Malfunction on sensor, delta four …”
With a sigh, she returned her attention to the original malfunctioning sensor and keyed the reset function again. And waited, ignoring the rising maroon tide that turned the module twilight-colored. And waited.
Bleep.
The sensor now registered a reading of 60° AP with a trend rate indicating a return to normal, for Mithrada, of close to 800° AP within one standard unit.
“Malfunction on sensor …”
The number of maroon lights continued to increase, even as the temperature on the first sensor continued to rise.
The monitoring officer ignored the more recent failures, finally blanking the row of screens above her on which the lights had flared. Then she returned her attention to the first failure, shaking her head slowly.
“Lorinda? What in Hell is going on planetside?” The intercom speaker carried a male voice.
“Tell you in a demistan. It looks like an impossible planetary cold wave.” Her voice was hard, clipped, her eyes still on the sensor data.
“A cold wave? Are you all right?”
“Stop patronizing me, Harlon. This many data points don’t lie. We’ve lost all temperature-sensitive remotes in four dozen subsectors. They all showed near-instantaneous temperature drops of eight hundred degrees.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Malfunction in sensor, epsilon five …
“Malfunction in sensor …”
Lorinda cut off the audio warning system.
“Did you hear those, Harlon? Tell me which is less impossible—identical malfunctions of nearly a hundred randomly located sensors on eight different remote nets … simultaneously? Or one hundred severe temperature anomalies?”
“The whole system must be shot to hell …” came his reply.
“That could be, but there’s an easy enough way to check. Have meteorology check the changes in surface winds. If it’s not the sensors, there will be severe local changes.”
“You think so?”
“I know so … if it’s climate-caused. Check it out.”
She shifted her monitoring to another early malfunction, which
showed the same pattern of abrupt heat loss, followed by a gradual return toward normal Mithradan levels.
Her fingers began a series of calculations, based on the proximity of the apparent temperature drops to each other. With each input, and the resultant analysis, the frown on her face became more severe.
She removed the damper from the bank of display screens, and the module turned twilight-purple again. The light was so depressing that she immediately reblanked the screens. Lorinda hesitated a moment when the last screen analysis scripted out in front of her. Then she touched the intercom.
“Control central, this is monitoring. Analysis of sensor malfunction patterns indicates event is planet-based and not created from system failure.”
“How do you know, monitoring?”
“Analysis of temperature gradients between malfunctions. Something … somethings … are acting like an absolute heat sink.”
“Infraheat scan supports that, control central. So does preliminary met data …”
“Great … so rather than an understandable catastrophic equipment malfunction, we now have an impossible natural occurrence.”
Lorinda shook her head in the privacy of the monitoring module. Not impossible—it had happened. And certainly not natural. Of that, she was all too sure.
THE SCIENTIST IN the pale blue tunic ran her left hand through her short-cut sandy hair, then tapped the light stylus on the console.
Looking up for a moment around the small windowless room, she pursed her lips. The gesture gave her face an elfin cast, which vanished as she concentrated and touched the keyboard.
On the screen before her, a title appeared in the formal script of Westra: “Project Vanish—Case III.”
Her fingers played the keyboard again, and the angled script disappeared, replaced by a full-length view of a tall woman standing on a raised platform, surrounded by monitoring equipment. The subject wore a wide belt clustered with sensors over a plain singlesuit.
Abruptly, the woman on the screen vanished, leaving the platform empty.
The sandy-haired woman viewing the screen froze the image and
studied it. Then she backtracked the visual, instant by instant. In one scan, the subject was present. In the next she was not.
Finally, the scientist touched the keyboard to remove the visual and replace it with the data from the monitoring equipment. The data readouts showed the same pattern. The subject’s disappearance was instantaneous. No faded signals, no attenuation, only an absolute cut-off simultaneous on all equipment through the entire monitoring range.
The woman in blue pursed her lips again, ignoring the notation at the bottom of the arrayed data.
“Subject A-102-Green failed to return. No body found. No explosions noted simultaneously with disappearance. No other coordinated energy phenomena. Chronological analysis inconclusive.”
Her fingers touched the console, almost as if independently of her thoughts, and the index returned to the screen. For a time, she regarded the first page of the lengthy index.
Evidence—that there was plenty of—but verifiable, measurable results indicating success? None to date—except her own personal observations, and they would not be considered objective, not to mention the questions they would raise.
At last, she blanked the index and stood, a woman with an almost elfin, face, wearing the pale blue of a scientist. The severity of her hair and clothing hinted at the age she might have been. The smoothness of her complexion and the pale fairness of her skin indicated an age far younger than the expression in her eyes or the position which she held in the scientific hierarchy.
She sighed so softly that the expression was nearly soundless as she pressed the stud which put the computer system on standby. Just as soundlessly, she rose and stood before the darkened console, her eyes sweeping over the equipment for a last time, as if such a search could uncover the key she continued to seek.
Her steps were light, but slow, as they whispered her departure from the small modest office on an afternoon when most others had celebrated the holiday proclaimed by the emperor.
“ALL THE ANOMALIES center here.” The technician pointed to a circled area on the screen. “The general direction of movement is toward the planetary southwest—right along that line.”
The officer frowned and gestured toward a series of triangles farther
along in the direction outlined by the technician. “I assume those represent our planetary stocks.”
“Just what we have there, sir.”
“How much metal and support gear there?”
“About six months’ worth. That’s an estimate.”
“And if whatever these things are freeze that, we lose six months of production equipment?”
“More than that. Don’t forget we had to soft-land all of that, and we lost two of the landers doing it.”
“Verlyt!” For a time, the slender man studied the screen and the gradual motions, and the abrupt temperature drops. Then he pointed again. “What’s here, if anything?”
“That’s the break between the two networks.”
“Could we direct the equatorial laser and the microwave collector to focus on that point when the sensors indicate that’s where these … these …”
“Frost Giants is what the recon types call them.”
“ … things … these things are centered?”
“You want to fry them when they hit that point?”
“That’s the idea. We can get plenty of energy from the orbital stations. What we don’t have is more equipment, and for some reason that’s exactly what your Frost Giants are interested in freezing.”
“Do we know what will happen, sir?”
“No. But it can’t be much worse than losing the entire planet-forming project, can it?”
The technician frowned. “I guess not, sir. I guess not. But what if the Frost Giants object?”
“It’s their planet. If they kick us off, they kick us off, but there can’t be more than a few. We may have to rethink, and maybe we can’t complete the project, but we need to keep them away from the soft-landed equipment.
“That’s my first objective. Then we’ll see what happens.”