I didn’t want to think about it. Instead I opened the purse.
Surprisingly, it was stuffed with stellar notes. Surprising, because I had not thought such a young Hunter would have carried so much. I handed them to Baldur.
“That’s enough for us to go into phase two.”
Phase two was gambling. Simple when I thought about it, and another reason why Baldur needed a good diver with him.
Casino-style parlors were scattered throughout Sinopol. We settled on one, Rafel’s Bazaar of Chance, large enough so that substantial winnings were possible and not remarked overly, but plain and lower-class enough that minor breaches of etiquette would not result in duels.
My part started there. I jumped forward and recorded the payoff numbers and symbols on a chance gadget, logged them against the local objective time. Basically, the gadget was a gilded random-number generator, the kind that Baldur or I could have gimmicked. It was honest.
“Of course, it’s honest,” pointed out Baldur when I returned backtime with the information. “Under a duel-based society, how long would a crooked operator last … unless he was also the best fighter. Even then, someone would eventually kill him.”
Baldur had a point.
Since I couldn’t occupy the same space-time twice, after I’d given Baldur the information, I jumped ahead over my time in Rafel’s and waited for Baldur on the corner outside. Because Sammis and Freyda were always insisting on it, I left myself wide unit margins—objective time—on both sides.
Since I didn’t want to wait that long, I scanned the undertime future for Baldur’s return before I broke out and dropped out in a deserted corner before walking back into plain sight. It still seemed like forever before Baldur lumbered out of the casino, blue-black hair over his forehead, but my enthusiasm for lone exploring had been damped. He didn’t say anything, just pushed on. We took a moving slideway toward the Palace of Technology, drifting through the early evening like quiet ghosts among the laughing Faffnirians.
Two things struck me. Sinopol was clean. The term “immaculate”
even could have been applied accurately. Second, each establishment seemed to be open around the clock. Each Faffnirian apparently adjusted his individual schedule to his liking or needs.
Like all Imperial cities, Sinopol reeked of money, reeked of power—from the fountains that bent light around falling water which twisted in midair, to the men and ladies of leisure who paraded the streets flanked with bodyguards who were dressed in matched golden mesh armor and little else, to the clean air scented with trilia flowers, all overlaid with the impression of absolute bodily cleanliness.
Baldur knew exactly where he was headed as we marched from slideway to slideway, liftshaft to liftshaft.
In a moment when no one was close, I asked, “How can a society with such person-to-person dueling run an empire than spans an entire cluster?”
“How would you keep a society lean and able to function over five thousand centuries?” he asked back.
High Sinopol contained more people than all of Query, and then some, and probably had a hundred times the creative spark. For all the wealth and technology applied to the streets and corridors of the city, for all the fantastic decorations, I saw nothing of the overelegant, nothing of the decadent, of the Sertian. Not exactly austere was Sinopol, but not overdecked either.
In the middle of a narrow corridor in the Palace of Technology, Baldur stopped abruptly. The script over the slit door stated, “The Power Place.”
Baldur faced me.
“Remember, this is still Sinopol. Nothing is perfectly safe. Once I verify that the generator is complete, we’re supposed to be able to wheel it out. But be ready to grab it and dive, if necessary. You worry about the generator, not about me.”
He sounded so damned gloomy.
“You’re what counts,” I responded. “We can always get another generator.”
“I don’t think so. There’s a funny twist in time around this generator, and they don’t appear any later. Remember, Sinopol itself won’t last much longer.”
“Couldn’t we go back earlier?”
“This is as far as I can go, and I’d rather not spend even more time educating you on what to look for and how to get it. Besides, you’d end up killing a bunch of Hunters, and then Heimdall would get into the mess.” He took a deep breath.
“Let’s get on with it.”
He made it sound like a last chance. Just for one suitcase-sized fusion generator. I didn’t see the big problem, but if he wanted to think that way, that was his prerogative.
The slit door to the generator shop remained sealed until Baldur placed a black disc in the slot. He shoved me inside before the knife edges of the portal snapped shut behind us.
We stood in a small room with a number of weapons nozzles pointed at us. The walls shimmered metallic blue, devoid of features beside the weaponry, some scanners, and five closed portals.
“Baldra, Hunter of the Outer Reaches, returns for what he has ordered, Honored Craftsman.” Baldur practically groveled before the blank wall screen. I groveled too.
Energy fields crackled around the room, so much power concentrated that it probably bent the undertime. I could have made it out through the undertime before being fried … maybe … but there was no way Baldur could have.
The flow of energy waned, and another portal opened into a small showroom. Again, no one was present in the room, but a blocky object, about the size of a small trunk and covered with a shimmering black cloth, rested on a table. The table had legs wider than Baldur’s, with heavy braces. Next to the table was an open case with an attached harness. There were small wheels at the bottom of the harness, presumably so that a combat trooper could either pack it or push it. I hoped I could push. The whole business looked heavy.
“You may enter, Baldra of the Outer Reaches … with your companion.”
Baldur stepped forward. I kept a half-pace behind him. I began to see Baldur’s problem. I could have lifted it clear, but I didn’t have the faintest idea of what to look for. Baldur couldn’t time-carry it, for all his superior physical strength.
What a tenuous web the power of the Guard rested on—a duplicator and generators stolen from Muria, information storage lattices from Ydris, food synthesizers stolen from who knew where … and the Guard always reaching, always searching out the gadgets necessary to keep Query functioning.
Baldur made a quizzical gesture as he lifted the cloth that glittered with a light of its own.
I caught a glimpse of what was under the black cloth. It wasn’t any fusion generator. The unseen observer reacted, and the energy fields around us began to build. Maybe it was my imagination, but there was no room for error. I grabbed Baldur by the arm and slid undertime,
diving forward. He didn’t resist, and I brought us out into real-time near dawn in the rented room.
“That wasn’t the generator, was it?”
“No. I don’t understand what went wrong.”
I did, or thought I did. Since it might have been my fault, I evaded the question. “Baldur,” I began hesitantly, “I may be able to salvage this. I may not, but I have an idea. I’ll be back in a few units.”
I slid out undertime before he could protest.
If I was right, the actual generator had been on the table under the cloth until the time Baldur was gambling. My recovery was going to be tricky because I had a limited window. I was just lucky I’d been impatient and hadn’t wanted to wait in objective time for Baldur. That meant I could use that time. Hopefully, the operator/craftsman at the Power Place had set up the real generator before we’d won the stake at Rafel’s. If not, I’d have to try another approach.
I lucked out. From the undertime, I could tell that something had been set out. But I didn’t break out—not at that subjective point.
I needed a replacement. Searching foretime a couple of days, I found a chunk of a grayish synthetic sculpture roughly the same size as the generator. It was piled in the back of what I judged to be a warehouse. No one was likely to miss it immediately.
Toting the synthetic contraption backtime to the Power Place, I located a nearby closet and stored the sculpture even farther backtime. Next I wandered around undertime until I located the command-and-control center of the Power Place. Back foretime I dived until the room was vacant, perhaps several days. When I broke out the whole place was a shambles. I fiddled around, my ears listening for someone, but no one ever came while I was there, until I found the main power control levers on a side panel.
With another dive back to the sculpture and to the first part of my window, I located the control room, and with a quick flash-through, cut the power to the entire Power Place.
I slid into the showroom where the generator—I hoped the real generator—was waiting and lifted the shiny black cloth. It looked real enough, although it was so dark I had to sort of look through the undertime. I made the switch and hoisted the real power equipment undertime.
The damned fusion generator may have been trunk-sized, but I could barely hang onto it with my arms and hands for the instants of subjective time it took me to struggle back to our rented room not long after dawn.
I was staggering as I broke out, but Baldur picked the generator out of my arms as if it were a toy.
I collapsed into the big chair. It even felt comfortable this time. “Is that it?”
I explained how I’d made the switch.
“You made the switch
before
we got to the Power Place, but in subjective terms it was later.”
I nodded.
Baldur was no dummy. “That means that because you made the switch earlier in real-time, you had to rescue me, which meant that you had to make the switch.”
I wanted to get away from the circular logic. Because I’d made the switch, I had to make the switch. Fine.
“Baldur, I’ve got to go back and grab that carrying case. I can’t possibly hand-carry that generator back to Query without it.”
“Hold it. You say the Power Place was a shambles after you went foretime?”
“Yes. Why?” What difference did it make?
“We’d better make sure that happens too.” Baldur handed me a silver cube the size of my fist. “Energy reflector. Drop it as close to our back-time departure point as you can. It diverts energy back to the source. That’s an oversimplification, but after it works you should be able to pick up the carrying case at your leisure.”
I sighed, squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, and dived. I managed to get within a few units of the time we’d left the night before, made a flash-through breakout, and dumped the cube.
I waited for the energy flows to settle and broke out maybe thirty units before dawn. Baldur had underestimated the impact of his little cube—or the amount of energy focused on it. I doubted if a single circuit in the entire Power Place would work. Picking up the carrying case from the wreckage was a snap, and the scrapes and scars on it didn’t bother me.
Back in the room, Baldur loaded me up with the damned generator.
“I’ll see you later,” he remarked as I dived.
For a moment, I wondered what he meant, but I recalled a bit of theory that Freyda had mentioned, and it made sense. Baldur had spent less objective time away from Query than I had. With all my doubling back and forth, I actually had been in the now longer than Baldur had, and that meant he would arrive back at the Travel Hall sooner than I would.
As I vaulted from timepath to timepath back toward Query, I
couldn’t help wondering about the implications of the time-twists I’d created in Sinopol.
Baldur had been so relieved to get his new toy that he’d dismissed the paradoxes. Or maybe he was just more used to them, but I’d never snarled Time before.
There weren’t any suitcase-sized generators later in Sinopol’s time-line. Was that because we’d destroyed the one craftsman making them, or because no one else wanted anything that small?
I tried to figure out what came first. Had I caused the switch by imagining the energy buildup? Or had I reacted to actual buildup and a possible double-cross and thus set in motion the destruction of future generators?
Did that mean that we had to do what we did because we did what we did?
Then, too, there were no change winds, and that meant that we hadn’t changed what was. Did that mean what we did had been fated all along?
I gave up on that one, but I still wondered why Baldur needed the small generator so badly, and why he couldn’t just have described it and sent me after it. Or didn’t they trust me to go off alone? Why couldn’t they have waited until I knew more? Or was there something the generator was needed for now …
and
they didn’t trust me?
I gave up trying to figure it out until I knew more. In practical terms, for the moment, it didn’t matter.
By the time I broke out in the Travel Hall, Baldur had a small cart waiting for the generator. It went straight to Maintenance.
I went back to my rooms and to bed. I didn’t even eat.