SERTIS—WHAT SHOULD I say about the place?
Crowded, at least in the cities. I picked the largest one, at the intersection of a large river and a wide bay filled with a range of vessels. Some were powered with energy flows I could sense from the undertime. Others were clearly sailing ships.
With each dive I had become more and more sensitive to the flows of energy from the now, perceived from the undertime. None of the other timedivers could sense them, but I suspected some would develop the ability with more experience. That made homing in on large energy concentrations easy; cities particularly.
That was about the only easy part.
First, I’m not a linguist. The gabble of voices was just that—verbal confusion. Second, the signs and written languages were even worse. Third, what I was wearing was clearly enough to attract unwanted attention. The Sertians apparently were strong on flowing robes and hoods. The men were mostly bearded, and the women wore colorful scarves.
The clothing was the easiest to remedy. Slipping under the now, I located and liberated an appropriately-sized cloak, along with an exterior belt and purse. After the Llordian mess, I was more than a little apprehensive about walking alone in places where my disposal would be easy from a distance. So I stayed with the crowds near what seemed to be an open market. The air was like an oven. Only the lack of humidity made
either the temperature or the odor bearable. And I had thought the damps were rank!
“Hslop?” A ragged child grinned at me. His face was almost squarish, and his hair was black and tight-curled around an olive face.
Since I didn’t know what the urchin meant, I scowled.
“Hslop? Hslop?”
I just turned away, ducking between two substantial matrons, and moving toward a line of stands, each draped in purple.
Despite my hopes, I was still staggered. The first stand had a wide range of steel knives, real steel, laid out. I nodded and passed by.
“Hssilinglop?” asked the woman tending the stand.
I ignored her, wishing I could understand the language.
The second stand was more interesting, with an assortment of hand tools. I watched as the owner and a thin young man bargained over a hatchet. Finally, I drifted on, noting that the urchins still trailed me, at a distance.
A quarter of the way around the market, past the food stands and the fabrics, I found the power tools. Some of them looked like they ran on etheline, or some liquid hydrocarbon. One or two were battery-powered, but they were covered with a film of dust. Several were not familiar, but one looked like a tree saw. I could make out another saw with an assortment of circular blades that looked as though it would cut finished timbers and boards, and a power drill.
“Hssilinglop?” asked the stall tender.
I pointed to the circular saw, thinking that we could try it out. If it worked, someone like Gerloc could get some more.
“Res thorp.”
Not knowing what “res thorp” meant, I pawed around in the purse that I had liberated, and offered a small silver coin—far less than an earlier customer had paid for the tree saw.
He held up four fingers, pointing to the silver coin. I didn’t have four of them, but I did have a gold piece of some sort. So I held up two fingers. He gave me a sad face. I shrugged.
Finally, he held up three.
I winced, thinking about having to show the gold piece.
He shrugged and gave me two and a crooked finger. I guessed that was a half.
I scrabbled through the purse and came up with two silvers, and a quarter of a silver, it looked like, plus some smaller and lighter coins. I put them all on the wooden counter.
He shrugged, trying not to smile too much, and took them. I think
the smaller coins added up to more than half a silver because he dragged out a carrying case and threw in all the blades, plus a wrench and a small can of lubricant.
I walked to the nearest alley and disappeared undertime. Someone else could certainly handle Sertis, even if I had to write a manual. That would provide goodies for both the divers and Odin Thor.
COLLECTING WEAPONS is hard work for a timediver. A knife I could carry, but it would be useless against a Frost Giant. A projectile rifle presented the same problem.
Nuclear weapons worked effectively on the Frost Giants. But nukes also destroyed large chunks of real estate and possessed too much mass for a timediver to carry. From what Wryan had determined, particle beams also would work, but not lasers. The difference was academic, since any particle beam ever built by Westron with enough force to fragment a Frost Giant wouldn’t fit on a steamer, much less on a timediver’s back.
Only high-tech worlds can build small and destructive weapons, and high-technology cultures tend to be shortlived because they are complex and require a continuing high level of education. There are always exceptions, but the exceptions presented another problem.
Not that either kind of high-tech system was hard for me to find because their energy use beat through the undertime like a flare.
High-tech meant unstable and short-lived or stable and lasting. The first of the longline high-tech cultures I found was Muria. That’s what I called it, but who knows what they called themselves?
Tall and slender people, bipedal, with brains and eyes in their heads, finely scaled green skin and white silk hair. Scales and hair don’t go together? On Muria they did.
Three sexes, or maybe four, and they all looked alike. The Murians had created a paradise. Golden-fronded trees lined paths that were permanent, yet cushioned every footstep and wound between close-linked clusters of hive houses. Each hive house group was separated from other groups by a varying mixture of orchards, forests, and low-effort cultivated fields. All their nourishment seemed to come from vegetation, but some of the fruits or vegetables looked more like meat.
It rained on Muria just enough, and the cloud patterns kept a favorable range of temperature and breezes. Just enough Murians were born,
so that while the settlements changed, the total number of them stayed about the same. Murian medicine, or genetics, or culture, provided long lives, and Murian science had reduced power generation to small fusion generators. Too big to carry, but small enough to fit into a large closet. They were fusion powered, that I could tell from the energy flows.
I couldn’t believe the planet. So I went backtime for two or three centuries. I couldn’t see any differences. Then I went foretime, and there wasn’t much change there, except that the locations of some towns changed.
After that, I started looking for weapons, and I couldn’t find any. I could dive into hidden places, but those were very few. I could seize any document or text, but I couldn’t read them. I could disassemble any machine, but those I understood I didn’t need, and those I didn’t understand I couldn’t figure out.
Understand, these Murian people were intelligent—and nonviolent. Short of creating a one-person crime wave, there didn’t seem to be any way I could persuade them to employ force. Violence was becoming a last resort for me, not that I hadn’t employed it effectively.
The Murians had an interstellar drive, and a few explorers who used it. That was where I focused my efforts and where I came up with the duplicator, an accident if ever there was one, since I was looking for weapons.
Their interstellar ships were small, too small to handle distances without supplies and more spare parts and equipment. But they did well, quite well. So I continued to watch from the undertime until I discovered the strange gadget in the ship that duplicated everything from food to tools, with apparently no input except electrical power.
Then the real work began. I tracked a new ship backtime to its construction until I could watch a team of Murians install the duplicator. That night it was my turn.
The shell of the ship was quiet as I broke out of the undertime. No alarms, no bells, not even any energy flows. With my recently acquired Murian tools, I studied the duplicator up close—an elongated octagonal donut that fit on a cabinet about half the size of the kitchen table in our cottage. The central “hole” was where they put items to be duplicated and at first glance seemed limited to items about two handspans square. Because the Murians built most equipment in modular form, the size limit probably didn’t cause that many problems. In any case, it was better than anything we had, because we had nothing to speak of, and less on the way.
The duplicator was in a separate compartment next to what I figured were the fusion generators. A glistening blue wire ran from the octagonal
machine into a square junction box. In a few moments I had removed the cover of the junction box and set it out of the way on the green-gray deck.
The Murians liked their planet humid, and inside the ship was no exception. I stopped and wiped the sweat off my forehead and out of my eyes. A deep breath followed, and I ignored the musky smell that was part me, part leftover Murians.
Inside the junction box the glistening blue wire split into three smaller insulated filaments. The uncovered end of each filament was purplish. Each was wound around a metal plug the size of my thumb. With some effort, I carefully unhooked the insulated filament wires from the three plugs and withdrew the wire through the side opening in the junction box.
Now the duplicator was free of the power system, and all I had to do was release it from its mountings. That meant standing nearly on my head to release the bolts anchoring the machine to the built-in counter. There were eight bolts, and I had to rest after twisting each one free. Rested and wiped my forehead and tried to get the sweaty salt out of my eyes.
My tunic was dripping, and the ship definitely smelled like sweating human being by the time I twisted the last bolt free and laid it on the floor next to the seven others.
After wiping my forehead again, I tried to lift the duplicator. I could not break it free of the counter, although it seemed to wobble sideways. I let go and sat on the deck to catch my breath and to think.
One Murian had carried the device, and they weren’t that much bigger than I was.
I took a swig from my small water bottle. Not that I really needed it in most circumstances, but it did make me feel more comfortable.
Next I checked under the counter, looking for another bolt or fastening. There weren’t any. Then I studied the eight-sided machine itself, to see if there were brackets holding it on the sides. Nothing.
I pulled on it. Again, no result. I pushed it toward the bulkhead, losing my balance because it slid so quickly, then stopped cold just before hitting the bulkhead, apparently locked in place.
After some more experimentation, I discovered that it had been threaded through a series of “lock” positions on the metallic plastic bench top. Once I finally maneuvered it free, still having to stop to wipe the sweat off my forehead, I set it on the deck.
I rested, wondering if it would take this long for everything I attempted to make off with. Standing up, I checked the counter surface on which the duplicator had rested, running my fingers over the flat
metallic plastic or plastic metal. The surface was absolutely smooth to my touch—absolutely.
I ran the Murian screwdriver, which had a triangular blade, over the surface. Again, nothing. Then I had another thought and pulled my own knife from my belt and drew it over the surface. It ran into a faint, barely detectable tackiness.
I frowned. The Murians had forged what amounted to a lock. More important, they had established some sort of directional bonds that weren’t magnetic and which only operated in certain positions in certain directions. The duplicator could not have been lifted off that counter without destroying both duplicator and counter. The bolts had been there just to keep it from sliding around accidentally.
Looking down at the eight-sided machine with its short glistening blue wire, I had the feeling my troubles were only beginning. After repacking the Murian tools into my belt pouch, I picked up the duplicator and staggered undertime.
While it had taken me one straight dive to Muria from the Queryan orbital station, it took three subjective days and twenty rest breaks to get back to camp, breaking out in the small work room Wryan shared with me. I carefully eased the duplicator onto a solid bench and turned around to see Wryan coming through the doorway.
“You look like hell,” she observed.
“Hell probably feels better.”
“What did you bring back?”
“A duplicator. If we can get it to work.”
“Duplicator?”
“It copies anything you put in the middle there—fish, fowl, or electronic components.”
“How?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. But the only input is ship power.”
“How much power? What kind? Alternating, direct, burst?”
I shrugged again. “How would I know? I never even finished the Academy. It does take a lot of power. A whole lot. I could feel that when the Murians used it.”
“Murians?”
“Intelligent amphibian descended. Very cultured. Very advanced.”
Wryan fingered the blue wiring. “Getting it to work could be a real problem. If this is the only power input, and it takes as much power as you say, we could be in trouble. And we’ll probably need two anyway.”
“Took me everything I had to get
one
of them back here.”
“Even if it is a duplicator, how can we duplicate it? We’ll need more than one.”
My shoulders sagged. I hadn’t thought about that, but she was right.
“Don’t worry about it now. I’m going to have to study this first, and I’ll probably need you to study one in operation to make sure we set this up right.”
Since I didn’t exactly feel like dragging another one of the duplicators across the galaxy any time soon, and since I would have gone to hell for Wryan, I just nodded. “In a day or so.”
She looked at me. “In a week or so. Maybe longer. You need something to eat, and then some rest.” Her eyes radiated concern, and, tired as I was, I only wished that they had radiated more than just that.
A thought struck me belatedly. “How did you know I was back?”
“I just knew.”
I wanted to pursue that but couldn’t figure out how, and besides, the room seemed shaky. I sat down on the bench.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
She had an arm around me, helping me up. “You need something to eat. No blood sugar and no rest. Just lean on me.”
So I did. Concern was better than nothing, if less than what I really wanted. We made it to the kitchen, and I slumped into a chair.
“What about the duplicator?”
“It can wait,” answered Wryan as she began pulling items from the cooler. “It can wait.”