AFTER MY MYSTERIOUS assignment supporting Domestic Affairs, I thought my probationary work there would be interesting, certainly more interesting than tracking down strayed four-year-olds.
Things didn’t turn out that way. My first assignment was inventorying, because I was a strong diver.
Marsten was a plain Guard, gold four-pointed star, who had completed the minimum fifteen-year term necessary for personal privileges. You could leave the Guard anytime after your service time exceeded your training time, but you didn’t get privileges until after fifteen years. Anyway, Marsten was sticking around for a while, even though he didn’t have to, maybe just until some more trainees graduated.
He plunked down a list on the table in front of me. “This is what each regional office is supposed to have in equipment. Your job is to make sure it’s all there and operating. If it isn’t, you come back to Stores or our main duplicator downstairs, and draw it or duplicate it, and charge it to that office on the main records, and then cart it out there.”
He plunked down another list, a shorter one, but still several pages long. “Here are the regional offices. Just start at the beginning, and work your way through. You should average a couple of offices a day, maybe more when you get to the smaller ones.”
I picked up the list of offices. There must have been close to a hundred. I hesitated, then asked, “Why do we have so many offices? Most people can get anywhere on Query.”
Marsten just sighed.
I waited for an answer, and finally he did.
“Sure, hotshot, they can. Do you want two hundred or four hundred citizens milling around in one place all the time? Can’t you see what a mess that would be?”
I felt stupid, but I just hadn’t seen it. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
“Sorry.”
So I took the lists and studied them. The inventory lists separated items by big stuff and little stuff. The big stuff was obvious—things like fusion power system, small duplicator, data lattice system (fourteen lattices). Some of the small items were clear enough, things like stunners and batteries, but others seemed odd. Why would every Domestic Affairs office need twenty jugs of distilled water? Five would have been more than enough with a duplicator.
Then I picked the first office on the list, packed my inventory list into my jumpsuit, and slid out to Abiort, a two-room office halfway between Southpoint and the Callerin Peninsula. It was open only days, not nights, the way the seventy or so smaller offices were.
The duty Guard looked up, saw the green-edged star, and asked, “Inventory?”
I nodded, and she grinned. I wasn’t sure I liked the grin, but I pulled out the list.
“Go to it,” she said. “I can tell you that we’re short of the mid-batteries and one stunner. Hystan dropped it into the river last ten-day.”
I must have frowned.
“It happens. What’s your name?”
“Loki.”
“Look … we’re a two-person office. If one of us takes off time to get supplies, that means we have to do all the inputting at headquarters, and that takes time, and then carry it back. What happens if there’s a problem? The office isn’t covered.”
I looked toward the emergency stud on the front door.
“How do you think Frey would feel if the main office had to handle a local problem, or if the locals got the idea to bypass us?”
I got the idea. The whole inventory system was nothing more than the use of trainees to keep supplies updated, particularly in the smaller offices.
Abiort wasn’t too bad. It took me a while, because I didn’t know
where things were, but, after going through it all, I added two jugs of water for the fusactor, the missing stunner with batteries. The big problem was carting in the sections for the battery recharging system and helping assemble that.
Part of the inventory system was also just make-work. With their duplicator, things like recording tapes for the holo cameras could be duplicated on the spot, but it seemed like the offices just let those slide until the trainees came along.
Then, after I checked off everything, I went back to Domestic Affairs in Quest and logged in the inventory approval and the replacement of the battery charging system. Batteries and power cells were always a real problem.
The duplicators have the nasty habit of exploding if you try to duplicate anything that stores energy. That means you can’t duplicate most batteries, even uncharged, or equipment that has things like capacitors, without making a mess. Most Guard equipment doesn’t have capacitors.
The Guard actually owns a battery factory on Sertis, and junior Guards get to ferry them back to Query, lots of them.
After the Abiort station came Addyma—halfway around the globe, about a thousand kilos north of the Sand Hills. Addyma was a larger regional office with perhaps five Guards permanently assigned and a round-the-day-and-night operation.
Addyma didn’t need anything except a few large batteries, but the duty Guard—it was local midnight—wanted to talk.
“What was your last rotation?” she asked.
“Locator.”
“That bothered me. I always wondered if I could find them fast enough, especially the children.”
“Did you?” I asked that mostly out of courtesy, but partly out of curiosity.
She shrugged and looked out into the night, out beyond the glow lights that lit the path to the station. “I guess I was lucky. Some trainees weren’t. Jystel—she came back to the Barracks so upset—some little boy wandered out of the house at night. His family had a place on the Faustools, you know the islands off of Point Hindrian?”
I nodded. I knew the Point, but not the islands. I hadn’t studied every island on the planet. Who had?
“She didn’t get there soon enough. He went over the cliff. She said the worst part was the father screaming at her like it was her fault that she didn’t get to the boy fast enough. They didn’t watch the child, and it’s our fault.”
“People expect a lot from the Guard.”
“Too much, sometimes.” She looked at me and the list. “You’d better get the batteries and get on with it. We’re number two, and you’ve got another hundred and three to go.”
“How do you know?”
“We all did inventory once.” She grinned.
I went back and got the batteries, and she grinned again when I popped out with them. She had a nice smile, but I didn’t ask her name, and I never saw her again.
I still had to go back and log in the batteries into the inventory before I took off for Aldfa—except it was another day station, and it was closed because it was halfway around the globe also. The same held true for Baisra. So much for doing things in order.
Basically, everything that happened while I was doing my probationary work in Domestic Affairs was like the inventory—dull and routine.
Even when somebody got called out of the regional offices, like Southpoint, in the middle of the night, all we did was wait at the regional duty desk and, if trouble showed, run to get a full Guard. I did some standby stints, but never even saw a citizen in trouble.
Then, the next day, I’d be back doing inventories or something equally stimulating or worse, like the trash detail.
Query’s a clean planet. We like it that way, but we don’t have any industry, even though we use a lot of equipment per person. So what happens to the old stuff? When you’re young, it just disappears. Except it doesn’t. Someone takes it somewhere.
The organic stuff goes down those little compact units in the sink which essentially use lasers to reduce it to its original, mostly harmless atoms. And because people put the wrong things down there, some get injured, and a lot of replacement units are drawn from the regional duplicator offices.
The busted units, along with everything from broken chairs to ripped linens, are supposed to be carried to the dumps on Vulcan. It’s the nearest planet outside our system with no people and a breathable atmosphere. Probably two thirds of all Queryans can make the dive. That doesn’t mean they all do. I’ve seen houses surrounded with piles of junk. Some people are slobs.
Other people can’t carry stuff, especially heavy stuff, and they’re supposed to put that in the bins outside the local Domestic Affairs offices. That makes the Guard, specifically the senior trainees like I was, the garbage disposers of last resort. Usually after you’ve done something
stupid, like forgetting to carry supplies to someone, or oversleeping, you get outfitted with a nice heavy sack, a laser-cutter, and a list of Domestic Affairs stations.
So I’d slide out to Hyspol or Nurt or someplace I’d never heard of before I became a trainee for Domestic Affairs and land in front of a pile of junk, and slice and dice until I had a pile of smaller junk that fit in the sack. Then I’d slide out to Vulcan and dump it in this huge canyon, must have been a hundred kilos long. According to Baldur, the canyon’s going to get filled with lava in another couple of million years anyway.
Then I’d go back and slice and dice, and cart another load. It really made you think about doing stupid things. Sometimes we got behind, and all the trainees and even some junior Guards got called in for a ten-day or so, and that’s all we did. I hated it, but so did everyone else.
I mean, divers carting garbage around? That was the worst, but even that didn’t last forever, and inventorying seemed a lot more desirable after the trash detail.
Then, one day, it was over—no more trash, no more inventory, no more probation. We weren’t trainees.
Of course, for the actual induction into the Guard, there was a formal ceremony. Gilmesh, in his capacity as head of Personnel, made sure we showed up in formal blacks and marched the seven of us into the Hall of Justice and out before the Tribunes.
There actually were several hundred Guards in the Hall, the most I’d ever seen together at one time, and most of the Counselors. The Counselors all sat in the front row of the Guard section.
Gilmesh got up there before us and turned to the Tribunes. “I have the honor of presenting to the honored Tribunes and to the Temporal Guard assembled seven new Guards.”
He read out our names and gave a brief statement about how we had completed all the requirements and were fully qualified to assume all duties of a Guard.
Then Martel addressed each of us one by one. The formula was exactly the same.
“Loki, do you understand the requirements of your duties, and that you voluntarily place yourself under the absolute strictures of your office and of the Guard for the duration of your service to Query?”
“I do.” That was what we’d been told the proper response was.
After that Gilmesh pinned on—surprisingly awkwardly—the gold four-pointed star, and I stepped down, and Loragerd stepped up, and Martel went through the same formula with her.
After everyone got a star, Gilmesh stepped up again and made another short speech, a charge to us, really.
“You are now full members of the Temporal Guard, with all the privileges and responsibilities that accompany your position. Because responsibility can never be delegated, but only assumed, you and you alone are responsible for your actions. You have great powers, and equally great responsibilities, and you will be judged, not only by the Guard but by the Laws of Time, on the accomplishment of those responsibilities.”
Then Martel made an even briefer statement.
“A single lapse in temporal responsibility almost allowed the Frost Giants to destroy Query. There are no responsibilities too small for your concern, nor none too great to be borne. Bear them both well.”
Then we bowed to the Tribunes, turned and bowed to the Guard, and marched out.
That was it. I was a full Temporal Guard, and I really didn’t feel that different.
IN THE MIDDAY sun, a dwelling crouches in a overgrown meadow, its back to the trees. Beyond the meadow, a rocky ridge climbs toward a higher jumble of rock.
The intermittent splatters on the still-bright unfinished wood and the dusty permaglass testify that the dwelling is vacant. Tattered lynia flowers droop their violet fronds across the barely visible stones of the walk, those that the moss has not already crept over.
A breeze whispers its course across the open ground with the restrained promise that it will whistle when the clouds now hugging the horizon arrive later in the afternoon.
From thin air, a young man wearing a one-piece black jumpsuit appears in front of the structure.
He gawks at the building, at the dust-streaked panes, the overgrown stone walk that leads nowhere, as if he had not expected the desertion.
After a moment of hesitation, he walks briskly up the low steps to the porch and to the door.
“Greetings!” he bellows. A gust of wind heralding the clouds in the distance ruffles his bright red hair as he waits for a response.
The arched door opens at his touch.
He steps inside, and the hall echoes as his black boots strike the floor.
The house, for it could be termed that despite the years of desertion, is small,
with hygiene facilities and a pair of bedrooms on the upper level and three rooms on the main level.
Dust blankets the simple furniture, the once-polished stone and wood floors that shine beneath the covering bestowed on them by time.
So well-built and preserved is the structure that the dust seems out of place.
The man in black, his face smooth and unlined enough to be considered that of a man scarcely more than a youth, tours the rooms in silence.
He returns to the dining area and looks at the polished table, which bears only a bronze bell. On the handle is a legend in a language he does not know.
After regarding the bell for a long time, a time long enough that the distant clouds are no longer so distant, he pockets the bell and returns to the front hall, face blank, shaking his head.
“Totally gone,” he comments to no one, because there is no one to hear him. “just vanished. Left everything … and didn’t even tell me. Not even a note.”
He frowns and takes out the bell. He replaces it in a pocket and shakes his head again. Then, after stepping onto the narrow stone front porch and carefully closing the heavy door behind him, he vanishes into thin air.
The clouds and rain have not arrived, but they will.