I WAS STILL stunned at the disappearance of my parents. Not that long after I became a full Guard—or when they knew I’d make it—they’d just vanished. What was the significance of the strange bronze bell on the table? Did it have any?
I’d worried about it, and finally I’d gone to Locator and asked if they could trace my parents. It took a while to dig up their codes, because I’d only known their names, but the Locator computers eventually did come up with full names and codes—and promptly informed me that my parents had ceased to exist a full season before.
They hadn’t died—they just disappeared from the system.
But why? I just didn’t understand. I’d talked to Ferrin, and he hadn’t helped, and Loragerd had held me and talked, and that had helped, but I still didn’t understand.
Then, on top of that, Gilmesh had summoned me into his office.
“You’re going to spend a tour in the Domestic Affairs office in Southpoint,” he informed me.
After diving across suns, and retrieving heavy metal generators from High Sinopol a million years past … I was going to local police duty? I couldn’t believe it, and it must have showed.
“Everyone does Domestic Affairs at some time, sometimes before they get roving time-assignments,” Gilmesh told me. “Even hotshot divers. Patrice is, just like you. You do well here, and then we’ll see.”
That just wasn’t true, and we both knew it. Almost everyone else who had trained with me was in the junior Guard assignment pool—except for poor Patrice. Whenever some office needed something done or an extra body, they asked Gilmesh, and he assigned them. When they weren’t diving, they did clerical and other routine chores—but they were in the Tower.
But we were lower than that, and I didn’t know why.
“You’re going to Southpoint. That’s a major station.”
That also meant more scutwork, I could tell. Major stations were open all the time, and I didn’t have any doubts who would be handling the late shifts. At least, as a full Guard, I now had two rooms in the Citadel to go back to after duty.
Patrice went to another major station, except she was on the other big continent—Eastron—in a place called Ronwic.
The head Guard at Southpoint was Bossul. He’d just been made a Senior Guard after a good century of local patrol duty, and I doubted if he could have backtimed more than a few dozen centuries. He was dark, muscular, and he didn’t like me. He didn’t care that I knew it either.
“You’re here for one reason, hotshot, and one reason only. You’ve got a reputation as a good diver and a mean bastard. We’re going to use that for a while. Your job is real simple. You get to take care of the troublemakers and cart them off to detention.”
I guess my parents had sheltered me. Troublemakers? The only troublemakers I’d ever run across were people like Ayren, or the woman in the green jumpsuit who didn’t exist. And I wasn’t even sure whether they were the best or worst in troublemakers.
“What kind of troublemakers?”
“All kinds.” He had a nasty smile. “You’ll find out.”
And I did.
It couldn’t have been much past sunset when a local citizen dropped out of nowhere and gaped at me. “Where’s Bossul?”
“He’s off duty, citizen. May I help you?”
He wasn’t exactly convinced by my lack of age and mass, and the black uniform didn’t seem to count for much, but he stammered out his problem. His name was Edwye, and he and his family lived on a lagoon north of Southpoint. Edwye and his contract-mate had a daughter.
From there even I could read the script, between the harried look on his face and his words. The daughter was attractive, or someone thought
so, and vandalism and a nasty sort of Peeping Tomism were taking place. Someone had just left a nude picture of her, taken while she was bathing, with more than merely suggestive remarks, and promising to be there for a midnight rendezvous.
I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much else to do but take a look. I flashed up to headquarters and asked for a standby. They sent a trainee down, and I followed Edwye out to the lagoon. The sands of the lagoon were silver in the starlight, and even the whitecaps on the ocean beyond glimmered in the early evening.
The house was long and narrow and old, but neat and clean—at least the main room where I met Mirte and Gyrlla was. The daughter was Mirte, and I could see the attraction. She was petite, with soft blue eyes, and honey skin, and white-blond hair, and a figure that had my heart racing. The picture the mother handed me didn’t help. Mirte definitely had it all. But I swallowed and got on with it.
“When did this arrive?”
“Just a few units before I slid to get you.”
I thought. There was a chance, just a chance, that an undertime trail might remain. The briefs said it was possible.
“I’ll be back in an instant,” I said, and dropped undertime, concentrating hard. The books were right. There was a trail … sort of … and it didn’t go all that far—just over the hill and into a larger house on some sort of stilts that overlooked the river that wound into Southpoint.
I didn’t break out, but looked into the now as well as I could. A bearded man was looking down at something that I was willing to bet was a duplicate of the picture dropped on poor Mirte. I checked the rest of the place from the undertime, but didn’t see or feel anyone else around.
I slid back to Edwye’s house. Everyone looked up.
“You weren’t gone very long.”
“I didn’t need to be.” I swallowed. Now what was I going to do? Did I wait? Or did I grab the guy? I decided to ask someone—that’s an advantage of being able to dive. “I need to check out one more thing. It will take a couple of units. You should be all right.”
They looked doubtful.
“Trust me,” I said patiently, and I was gone.
Marsten’s replacement was Zegl, an equally stolid woman, and she was the duty supervisor I dropped in on. She glared at me. “Now what?”
I explained in quick sentences and asked, “Do I grab him and his picture, or what?”
“Of course. We’ll get the evidence after that. What if he dives out-system?”
I didn’t mention that that wasn’t a problem. I just thanked her and dropped out of the now next to the unnamed man who was still drooling over the picture of Mirte.
Drooling he might have been, but that didn’t stop him from trying to stick me with a long thin knife. I used Sammis’s training to break his wrist, stunned him with the standard-issue stunner, and checked the place again, this time in the now, but he still seemed to live alone. After that, I carted him off to detention in the Tower.
Zegl took charge of the miscreant there, and I gave the coordinates to the techs who would gather the evidence. One came with me to take holo statements from Edwye and his family. Zegl insisted that the holo tech for the family be a woman.
“It’s all taken care of,” I said. “This is Harleen. She’ll need to take holo statements for the trial, and she’ll take the picture for evidence.”
“Who … what … who was it?” stammered Edwye.
“I don’t know the fellow’s name, but he has a beard and lives in a house on stilts on the other side of the hill toward the river. He also tried to put a rather long knife in me.”
“But … how did you know?”
I shrugged. How could I explain, exactly? I temporized. “I found a duplicate of the picture … actually not a duplicate, but one like it.”
“Smazal will kill us,” mumbled the girl.
“I doubt that,” I said. “He’s in detention in the Tower with a broken wrist.”
They looked blank.
Harleen looked at me. “You’d better get back to the office. After I’m done here, I’ll stop there and get your statement.”
So I slid back to the office and sent the trainee back to Quest. Nothing had happened while I was gone, and nothing happened the rest of my duty that night.
The next night, when I came on, Bossul was waiting.
“Pleased, hotshot?”
“About what?” I was confused.
“Every punkout in Southpoint is going to try something now, just to prove that they’re better than Domestic Affairs.”
“Why?”
“Because, hotshot, they hate the damned Guard, and don’t you forget it.”
“So what was I supposed to do?”
“Just what you did, but it’s just the beginning. Good luck.”
He still didn’t like me, but he was right, and the warning helped. Nothing happened that night, but the next night, right after I sat down
at the desk, I understood why there is a wall between the door and duty office.
Two sharp explosions occurred, and one of the front glow-bulbs shattered. Thanks to Bossul’s warning, I went under the now and literally caught the perpetrator as he dropped into the now in his own basement, more like an arsenal.
He didn’t even have a chance to look surprised when I stunned him.
Zegl actually looked pleased when she saw the arsenal. “Dumb luck and brute skill, but I like the results.”
Frey, of course, never showed up or said a word, even if he were the head of Domestic Affairs. And I wasn’t sure I liked the term “brute skill,” but Bossul didn’t bother me for a while.
The next time was worse. It was maybe a ten-day later. This time a man charged into the office with a Guard stunner—they were forbidden to civilians, even ex-Guards. I was so nervous that, when the door opened, I dropped under the now. So I wasn’t there when the bolt went through where I should have been.
I got him from behind.
I also was beginning to get mad, but I couldn’t figure out what to do. Did I have to keep being a sitting duck? So scared that I had to hide in the undertime in my own office?
I stayed scared, and I lost weight, and ate more, and worked out like hell with every exercise Sammis ever invented. And with each night and every sound, I ducked under the now.
In the end, I put twenty punkouts, as Bossul called them, into detention. They all got sentences to Hell and chronolobotomies. Southpoint got a lot more peaceful, but not even the rest of the Guards in the office talked to me much. But when they had an all-out trash cleanup, no one suggested I be assigned, even if I was junior.
I still had trouble figuring why the local toughs were so concerned about making a statement against Domestic Affairs. With duplicators, food synthesizers, and the like, no one had to go without or go hungry. So it wasn’t as though they had a real reason for trying theft or vandalism or sexual assault. They were bound to lose, and they had to know it. Didn’t they?
I never did answer that question, but finally, Frey sent a trainee for me. The head of Domestic Affairs was shaking his head when I came in.
“You sent for me?” I asked.
“You’re coming back to the Tower. Pick up your gear from Southpoint and report to Gilmesh in the morning.”
I couldn’t figure that one, but I wasn’t about to complain, not at all.
Bossul was waiting at Southpoint. I smiled politely at him, and I was nice. I just said, “I’ve learned a lot here, and I wish you well.”
He responded in kind. “Good luck, hotshot. You’ll need more than skill in the big-time ‘now.’” He shook his head and walked back into his little office.
Tyrkas gave me a quick smile, the only one I ever got from her.
That was it. I slid under the now and back to Quest. After I had the first solid sleep in seasons, I freshened up in my room in the Citadel, pulled on a clean uniform, and walked back to Gilmesh’s office.
He saw me for about twenty words’ worth.
“Clean out the cabinets in the storage room. When you finish, tell Dorma and do whatever she wants until someone needs a diving errand.”
That put me back in the real Guard, cleaning cabinets, fetching batteries from Sertis, and occasionally carrying recording equipment for some research operation. Those sounded wonderful, but they were dull, dull, dull, and tedious. All you did was lug holo equipment to some place and point, unpack it, let it record, pack it up, and bring it home. Usually, it was in deep space somewhere, which meant space armor, which was heavy and smelly. Then, after you brought the stuff back, someone analyzed it to make sure something wasn’t going wrong somewhere in time or space.
But that was better than cleaning cabinets, detaining punkouts in Southpoint, or doing trash detail. I still remembered that with a shudder.
AFTER WHAT SEEMED years of running around fetching batteries and perfumes and exotic foods, I finally got an independent search mission—a special search of Heaven IV.
Although I was more than happy to do something more challenging, I wondered why, since I was still a very junior Guard, a fact that Gilmesh was always more than happy to reinforce. I thought Freyda might know and had gone to find her to see if she could answer the question. Sometimes she could help, and sometimes she couldn’t. When I’d asked her about my parents’ disappearance, she pointed out that it probably had to have been their choice. With Locator tags placed at birth or shortly thereafter in everyone’s shoulder blades, and my parents’ diving abilities, foul play, while it could not be ruled out, was unlikely. But she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain much further, except to say that sometimes people
did wish to leave the protections of Query and managed to do so.
Still, she would talk to me, possibly more about a strange duty assignment than missing parents, but it had to be on duty hours because she made a policy, at least with me, of never talking about the Guard in a private setting.
She was outside of Personnel when I caught up with her.
“Why the Heaven IV search mission for me?”
“It’s not for your charm, dear Loki. You’re just about the only young Guard who can handle a split entry. It’s a rare ability, as I keep telling you. You’ll need it on Heaven IV. Anyway, it’s a simple mission. Have fun.”
She gave me a wry smile as she left me standing there. Freyda could always leave me speechless in those early years.
I headed for Assignments. The Assignments Hall is just inside the main part of the Tower, and the back side of the Hall follows the curve of the dome. Heimdall, the head of Assignments, had carefully placed his console in the middle of the curve on a low platform, with two lines of smaller consoles radiating out from his. Ostensibly, the arrangement allowed Guards consoles to study the briefing materials while being close enough to Heimdall to draw on his experience.
Interestingly enough, the access keys to the briefing files could only be actuated in the Assignments Hall, or by the private codes of the Counselors or the Tribunes.
Heimdall pointed at one of the consoles at the far end of the right row. “Heaven IV.”
I pulled the stool up to the console screen and attempted to absorb the information on Heaven IV. The briefing was simple enough. A random holo surveillance of a “religious” meeting on Heaven IV had turned up what seemed to be mentions of miraculous appearances and disappearances from the skies.
To the suspicious Tribunes, any strange disappearance indicated the possibility of time-diving or planet-sliding—or other high technology—needing further investigation. Heaven IV was normally monitored by balloon-borne miniature holos, and the tapes weren’t all that good. Because of the time lags in recovering the tapes and processing them, the reputed events had taken place some three hundred years earlier. My job was to confirm or deny the reports.
Heaven IV is at the edge of the area regularly monitored by the Guard, closer in to galactic center, and an odd planet to boot. The angels had a loosely held social structure, basically nontech, and for good reason, since they were peak dwellers and had limited access to the minerals of the planet.
They shared Heaven IV with the goblins, who were surface dwellers in the hot—and it was hot—lower levels. Heaven IV is a metal-poor, rugged planet with a thick graduated atmosphere.
The rest of the briefing was technical.
After struggling through it, I headed down to Special Stores, where the techs fitted me with a full-seal warm suit and supplied me with a miniature time discontinuity detector. Supposedly, the gismo was designed to point toward sudden changes in time fields, which would enable me to track down the case of the mysterious appearances and disappearances—if they even existed.
How did a population of less than ten million people support such high-tech gadgets? For the most part we didn’t. We bought or took them, and sometimes improved on them, from various times and places.
Even stealing takes effort, information, and hard work. For example, scattered throughout the Guard were linguists who knew the major languages in use in each high-tech humanoid world in our sector.
Some of them lived there and learned the languages, but if the people were humanoid enough, we just kidnapped one and hooked him, her, or it into the input side of a language tank. That wasn’t usually enough for the tank to give full fluency, and after that, one of the poor linguists ended up on a long-time assignment surviving and becoming fluent in the tongue.
The business of getting specific technology could be cutthroat at times, like when the Guard needed miniature weapons. The old Guard manipulated Ydris from mid-tech to high-tech with backtime tampering. Unfortunately, the higher technology also resulted in turning most of Ydris into fused glass.
Most people would rather forget that, and it was a long, long time ago.
Anyway, after I got all the gadgetry in hand, I pulled on the formfitting warm suit, and took the rest of my standard diving equipment out of my storage chest with care. In the mid-afternoon, the equipment room we junior Guards shared was empty. So was the Travel Hall. I liked it that way.
The timedive back to the Heaven IV of three hundred years earlier was uneventful, smooth as silver, and breakout was on the dot. I expected that of myself, tried to avoid sloppiness. I always have.
The sky of Heaven is blue, bluer than the bluest sky of Terra, bluer than the bluest sea of Atlantea, and the pink clouds tower like foamed castles into the never-ending sky.
Angels on widespread wings soar from cloud to cloud, half resting on the semisolid cloud edges on their flights to and from the scattered
mountain citadels that rear tall into the domain of the angels.
I looked down, and I could see a hell under the dark clouds below, the red shadows of the surface, and the squat black cities of the goblins.
I had the split-entry technique down pat, and I hung there with my toes tucked into the undertime, poised in midair.
After some units just soaking up the feel of the unlimited skies, I studied the time discontinuity detector dial which I was wearing above my wrist gauntlets. The needle was supposed to point to any discontinuity.
Every once in a while it would quiver, and I’d duck understream to narrow the distance. Whoever or whatever was causing the disturbances was doing it in short bursts, like a planet-slide, or quick in-and-outs. After having wasted more than a hundred units, I still hadn’t succeeded in narrowing the area.
So I marked the real-time coordinates and set them into my gauntlets. Then I dived back foretime to Query.
The Travel Hall was deserted. I packed up my gear and started out of the Tower to get a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. Hanging in chill midair, warm suit or not, was tiring, even for me.
Freyda intercepted me as I was heading for the West Portal. I answered the unasked question. “No. Took me all this time just to get within a revolution or two and half a planet. The detector’s pretty rough.”
“A few others have said that.” She sounded relieved, maybe that I could get it to work at all. Then she inclined her head questioningly.
I knew what she meant. We walked out of the Tower of Immortals together, preserving the decorum of not sliding out of the Tower, and onto the west ramp that led through the fireflowers into the late twilight.
As we reached the edge of the glowing scarlet, Freyda stretched out her hand, and I took it, and we slid to her city quarters, high in the Citadel. She insisted on cooking, and for being a Counselor, Freyda is a good cook. She used simple food, simple recipes, the kind where skill is more important than the ingredients.
A contract wasn’t in the offing, not between a very junior Guard and a Counselor. There wasn’t just the age difference, but the status and experience differences.
Sometimes we talked together. Sometimes we slept together, but most times we went our own ways. We never talked about the Guard, and we never talked policy or politics, and it was probably a good thing for me we didn’t.
For all her apparent gentleness off the job, Freyda believed with heart,
soul, and body in the Tribunes and their powers, the Guard, and the system as it stood.
“Heaven IV?” she asked as we lay across from each other on the two low couches. The view of the Tower from her rooms in the Citadel was picture perfect. The spire of the Tower glittered like an arrow of light poised in front of the hills.
The Citadel was one of the few multiple dwellings in Quest and dated almost as far back as the Tower itself. Many Guards, like me, kept rooms there, and many, unlike me, had retreats elsewhere on Query. I had two rooms on a much lower level with almost no view, except of the side of the West Barracks. My rooms were too cramped for me, and I knew I’d eventually have to get a larger and more private place. But I had all the time in the world and was spending my free days exploring the tangles of time and the remote reaches of Query.
I spent a lot of time on mountaintops, in the quiet high forests under the Bardwalls. I’ve needed places alone as far back as I could remember, and before that. My mother told me I was sliding into strange corners around our isolated mountain home even before I could complete a full sentence.
I was also retrieved five times by the Locator section before I could talk, or so I was told. Some of that might have been parental exaggeration, but I doubt it. They didn’t exaggerate much. Maybe I was a late talker.
“Loki?” Freyda asked. I realized I’d forgotten where I was, with my thoughts out on the empty needle peaks of Eastron.
I picked up a fistful of nuts before answering her question.
“Blue. Never seen such blue,” I mumbled while chomping.
“I remember it,” she said softly. “Years ago, Ragnorak took me. You’re so like him, Loki. I couldn’t hold a split jump, and he held me there in the air so I could see it—the cloud towers, the angels … If we were only angels, instead of temporal administrators of the galaxy.”
“Just part of it,” I reminded her. I already knew the galaxy was big.
She shook her head, and her eyes seemed less deep. “How do you like being a god, Loki?”
“No god, just a simple Guard.”
She laughed, with overtones to her voice like a harsh silver bell and a sweet golden one at the same time. “No Guard, just a simple god, is more like you.”
“Then you’re a complicated goddess.”
Times, she was all flame, like me, and times she was colder than the ice computer on Frost. Never knew which would come, fire or ice, but that night was fire, perhaps foreshadowing the future.
Freyda was gone when I woke the next morning, and that was strange … for her to leave her rooms to me. On those few times I had stayed the night, she’d at least wakened me before she left.
As I thought about it, I realized she’d never been to my quarters, nor had I ever been to her retreat, not even when she’d had me for dinner back when I had been in basic training. I knew she had a place in the hills overlooking Quest. I’d heard Heimdall saying it had a fabulous view, but I’d never been there at all.
You can know so little about your lovers, I guess, even your very first.
I had to get back to the Travel Hall, back to Heaven IV, before Heimdall rattled me for goofing off. After gulping down a few swigs of firejuice, some cheese, and a piece of fruit, I cleaned up and pulled on a new black jumpsuit Freyda had brought back from Textra for me. I dropped the dirty one in my rooms and jumped as close to the Tower as I dared.
Heimdall was checking the logs in the Travel Hall and smiled that brilliant and meaningless grin of his when I walked in. “Back to Heaven, or from it?”
I shrugged. We all had to put up with his crass mannerisms. He was good at trend projections and organizing assignments. He was a lousy diver. The older Guards called him “all-seeing,” not quite mockingly.
I thought he talked too much and too sharply, but that could have been because I disliked him.
“Heaven IV” was all I said.
He didn’t respond, and I went into the equipment room and suited up.
If anything, the blue sky was bluer, and the cloud towers pinker. All in the mind, because I’d dived to a point not more than a few dozen units after I’d left the day before.
I was in the right real-time. The needle on the detector kept jumping and twitching.
After fifty units sliding around the blue skies, feeling colder and colder, warm suit or not, watching angels soaring, occasionally fighting with those black ice lances, ducking under the darker shadows of the pink clouds, I decided I was making little or no progress.
I backtimed and broke out far enough earlier to see if I could discover when the time discontinuities started. So wrapped up in my own thoughts was I that I slipped out under a cloud shadow right next to a pair of youngsters of opposite sexes, engaged as such youngsters are often wont to be.