NONE OF THE divers really liked the whole plan. Mellorie liked getting away from the ConFeds, but protested the idea that she would have to help build the new divers’ village, with her own hands yet. Arlean liked leaving the ConFeds and the walls, but disliked the isolated location on the other side of Mount Persnol, and hated the idea of leaving the library where it was. But she didn’t want to hand-carry it, along with all the equipment, to the village.
Gerloc protested having to be a porter, perhaps because he didn’t want to admit he was relatively fragile as a diver. Jerlyk didn’t like having to set up defenses for the new village—minor as they were—when the apparent protection of old Camp Persnol had been so great. Amenda said nothing, but looked relieved and sad simultaneously.
Deric protested the loudest.
“ … most absurd … idiotic idea … throwing away a generation of research … going back to nature … mind over matter doesn’t work without technology …”
By the time he had repeated himself three times, even Gerloc and Arlean were looking away.
Then there was me. I protested, too, about the self-centeredness of everyone else, one afternoon as we stood in the far hills comparing on-site progress with the plans Deric had reluctantly developed. “Why do we have to drag everything out of everyone? Why can’t they just understand? They’re all hanging onto a time that’s dead.”
“Are you sure you don’t see this new community as an easy way to bury the past and avoid facing unpleasant memories?” asked Wryan, turning toward me so that she didn’t squint into the setting sun. Though it was late in the afternoon and the sun was about to drop behind Mount Persnol, the spring air was still warm.
“Of course not.”
Wryan looked at me.
I shrugged. “A little, maybe.”
“You realize we need more divers.” Wryan continued as if she had not mentioned unpleasant memories.
“Why do we need more divers?” I kicked a small limb away from the stone foundation.
She gestured around the foundation stones, mortar troughs, and stacked beams that were eventually supposed to be a divers’ cottage. A rutted muddy track in front of the foundations showed on the neatly drafted plans as a stone-paved roadway.
“Not enough people,” I ventured.
“You just might show signs of brilliance, Sammis.”
From her tone, I gathered I had missed more than I had grasped. So I tried again. “If Odin Thor is going to succeed, he needs more than we can get …”
That wasn’t it. Wryan just kept looking from the plans and to the foundations.
“If Odin Thor doesn’t succeed …” That wasn’t it either. Finally, I rubbed my shoulder—still aching at the end of long days—and thought. “Oh … if he
does
succeed …”
Wryan nodded. “Correct. Can you take some time tomorrow morning to get this back on track?” She pointed to the plans. “Then you can start searching in the afternoon. Work with the crews in the morning, and search in the afternoon. We can’t exactly forget that the Frost Giants are still out there, and we don’t have enough divers if they return.”
“Damned recipe for exhaustion …”
“You’re brilliantly correct about that as well.” She rolled up the plans. “These aren’t getting built the way they should. I’ll follow up on your searches in the morning, and work with the crews in the afternoon.”
That was what happened. The building part was the easiest, actually less energy-consuming than diving, and gave me a few new muscles, lots of aches and blisters, and more than a few headaches.
“Why do we have to use so much stone … ?”
“ … not enough power tools … .”
“ … who made you Verlyt …”
“ … liked the old quarters better …”
Searching for new divers was almost a relief after those mornings. I didn’t have to actually make the contacts—Wryan and Amenda handled that. In practice, it turned out to be simple … and time-consuming.
I could see the time energy controls through the undertime. That was the easy part. After that, I had to find out exactly who possessed the talent, which wasn’t exactly easy when most of them didn’t know they had it, didn’t want to know, or tried to suppress it.
Then Wryan and Amenda had to decide how to approach the diver, or his or her parents or both.
“Let the parents come here, if they want.” That had been Jerlyk’s solution.
Not a bad idea, but—like so many good ideas—a little hard to sell. As a compromise, we ended up building two villages, separated by a fairly imposing ridge, and connected by a single narrow road. Originally, one location had been an Imperial forest research station and the other a Seco recreation center. Both were in poor shape.
One village, initially the Seco recreation center and somewhat larger, was for non-divers who wanted to stay with us, for young divers and their families, and for any relations of divers. The other was for divers alone. I hoped the distinctions would blur over time.
Needless to say, the mixed diver/non-diver village got underway much more quickly, once we actually transported the non-divers on site. It was nearly a day from the old camp by steamer, up through so many switchbacks on a narrow road that arrival anywhere would have been a relief.
One way or another, we struggled through the spring and early summer, finally finishing three good-sized cottages in the divers’ village, with several others nearing completion. A small water-driven generator supplied some power, intermittently, although Wryan insisted on complete wiring.
The garden idea went better than the cottages, probably because by the end of spring, everyone was sick of flourcakes, dried chysts, and all the staples. Amenda spent almost every free instant in the sunlight, seemingly happy for the first time since I had arrived.
Once the first cottages were completed, most of us moved, except for Deric, who, surprisingly, had taken charge of quietly teaching Odin Thor how to be a diver.
By midsummer, we had located an additional two dozen divers, mostly with families. All but a handful lived in the mixed village.
Also by midsummer, Odin Thor was demanding the metals, goods, weapons, and technology I had promised.
ONE THING LEADS to another, and pretty soon everything gets complicated. After the complications arrive, then anyone can screw it up. The idea I had proposed to Odin Thor had seemed simple—use time-diving to skim the surplus off other high-tech cultures in order to help rebuild
Query and to figure out how to deal with the Frost Giants.
Explaining doesn’t explain anything.
The day after I could no longer ignore Odin Thor’s demands, I fitted myself out with what I considered a diving uniform—tight—fitting black exercise trousers and tunic, with a light pair of black hiking boots, and an old thermal windbreaker from the bunkers under the old fort. I wore an equipment belt, the kind with concealed pouches and pockets, as well as the obvious gear, such as a small-caliber pistol, a knife, and some rope. The windbreaker was also black and long enough to cover the belt, knife, pistol and all. On top of it all I carried a small backpack, empty except for several days’ dried foods, mostly fruits with some jerky.
Then there was the thin notebook, based on all the notes from Wryan and the other timedivers, which laid out a sort of map of the nearer stellar systems. My idea was simple enough, just to skim through the backtime to see if any cultures had developed ideas or items we could use—and carry. That was the big problem. Unless a timediver could lift an item, he or she couldn’t bring it back. Some divers were barely strong enough to carry themselves, let alone additional loads.
The kitchen was empty when I sat down for a bite of breakfast—cheese and bread, washed down with some citril. Outside the flat and mismatched panes, the purple of early dawn faded toward gray as the sun neared the underside of the horizon. No one else was awake. Wryan would probably be the next one up, but I intended to be gone before she rose.
Saying good-bye to her was getting too hard, and there would be all too many good-byes over the days and seasons ahead.
I sliced off another hunk of cheese, sealed the wedge, and put it back in the cooler. The battery charge was running low, but there wasn’t time to fix that right then. We missed the luxury of the broadcast power that had been one of the first casualties of the Frost Giant attack.
Paring the cheese into smaller slices, I put them on the second slice of rough grain bread and began to eat, finally washing the remnants down with the last of the citril in my mug.
The gray dawn became a grayer morning as I stood, seeing that there would be no sunrise, not with the heavy clouds overhead and the promise of more rain. After I rinsed out the mug and stacked it in the rack, I swung up my backpack.
“Ready to go, I see.” Wryan stood by the open archway that led to the room the three women shared. Her sandy hair was tousled, and her small feet were bare, as if she had pulled on the sweater and trousers on the run.
“No sense in wasting time.” I looked at her, nearly my size, almost eye to eye, and set the pack on the chair.
She smiled sadly.
I smiled back.
She grinned.
I grinned. “Not much good at good-bye.”
“Neither am I.”
Somehow, this time I knew what to do. I reached for her and pulled her close. In the end, she was holding me as tightly as I held her. She was shaking, as if she were crying.
I wanted to say something, but couldn’t. So I kissed her forehead, and brushed away some tears.
Funny, it took me until then to realize I was shaking too, but Wryan touched my cheek and leaned back to look at me. I kissed her, but, again, she kissed me even as my lips reached for hers.
That was the first time we had held each other, or kissed.
For a long time after that lasting kiss, neither one of us could do anything but hold the other.
“You deserve better …” I had to say it. What was I but an undereducated and spoiled gentry brat who could time-dive and survive trouble? “ … and I’m too young, too shallow for you …”
“Let me worry about that, Sammis. The age doesn’t matter, not at all, not the way things are looking …”
“True …” I had to grin ruefully, but lost it when I felt she meant something else. “What do you mean?”
“That’s my secret until you come back …”
“Working on my curiosity, then, Lady?”
Her arms were tighter around me, and I gave in, letting my lips find hers.
How much time passed, I did not know, but it was definitely later when we let go, except for two hands tightly intertwined.
“When you come back, we’ll talk about it.”
“About it?”
“My secret, as you call it. It’s already becoming obvious, but …”
I nodded. Whatever she had discovered was not something that should get to Odin Thor, at least not until we had worked out how to handle it. That was becoming more and more our operating style.
She disengaged her hand from mine and straightened her sweater. “Now get out of here while we’re still relatively intact.”
I knew exactly what she meant. So I leaned toward her and brushed her lips, then leaned back and grabbed my pack. And I was undertime,
knowing she was crying again and that I wasn’t in much better shape.
That’s why the first dive wasn’t much of a dive, just enough to get me into the abandoned polar space station. I’d checked earlier, and it still had an atmosphere.
Staggering out of the undertime, I was ready to bolt if the air had disappeared or turned foul, but neither had happened. So there I was, hovering in the old operations center, swaying from side to side, ready to fall, except for the fact that I was weightless.
From the station’s size and equipment, it had to have been the base from which the ill-fated Mithradan planet-forming had been launched and supported. While I could have floated as easily as finding a place to light, I felt better with the illusion of sitting and strapped myself into one of the operations’ center chairs, in front of a dull black screen.
My hands were still shaking, and that had never happened before. Then again, something like Wryan had never happened before. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that, tousled as she had been that morning, she looked more like my age than hers. Yet she had to be more like four times my age—at least.
But then, no one believed I was my own age either. People still thought of me as a school-age brat when they first saw me.
My thoughts were wandering because I did not want to deal with my entanglement with Wryan. So I pulled out the thin notebook and began to study the stellar/time maps I had so carefully tried to integrate.
Too many of the systems were blanks, meaning that they were either uninhabited or we had no information.
We couldn’t risk losing any divers, and that was a circular problem too. A good diver could skip undertime without getting frozen stiff or suffocated, but the good divers were those who could transport what we needed.
At that point, I groaned. Once again, I had missed the obvious. Sitting in an orbital space station filled with space suits designed for at least some hostile environments, I had a solution.
I dropped undertime and popped back into the kitchen where Wryan was staring out the window over a cup of something.
“Don’t move. I shouldn’t be back, but here’s an idea for the information we need—”
She looked at me, and from even across the room I could see her eyes were bloodshot.
“—on other systems.” I had to plunge on or I’d stop, and then I’d never leave. “You know the big orbital station? The one involved in the Mithrada fiasco? It’s got a bunch of space suits in it—not just one or
two like you had in the lab. Put the marginal divers in suits and get them to scout systems. Just present time. If they find traces of civilizations or cultures, then someone else can follow up.”
“Like you?”
“Or you,” I added.
“Next time, we go together, Sammis Arloff Olon. Or you don’t go.”
I thought about that. “Let me think that over.”
“Please do, and I’ll put together a plan for your mapping idea while you follow the leads you have. Now kindly get on your way … and be careful.”
I nodded and ducked undertime, swallowing as I did. I couldn’t finish the swallow until I popped back out in the space station. Then I began looking at the maps.
Sertis was first on the list, a mere two stellar systems away.