Not all humanoids are dual-sexed, but most are. It must go with hemispherical symmetry.
After the shock passed—me seeing them, and them seeing this wingless being looking much like them standing in midair—I shrugged it off and decided to confuse the issue. I threw a thunderbolt from my gauntlets at a passing birdlike creature. Perhaps it was the local equivalent of an eagle, but I vaporized it with one bolt.
Then I smiled at the pair and slid elsewhere—more carefully. Hopefully, no one would believe them if they talked. I knew the lingo, but they hadn’t let out so much as a cheep.
The damned wrist time detector just wasn’t accurate enough. If I couldn’t find the perpetrator of the time discontinuities, I was positive no Guard could.
I dived back to Query and pooped out in the Travel Hall. After storing my gear, I located Heimdall. Not difficult, because he was reigning over the Assignments Hall from his central console.
I explained.
He called in Freyda, Frey, Gilmesh, and Kranos.
I explained again.
“Sterilize the whole atmosphere,” recommended Heimdall.
Freyda frowned at that.
Frey, Freyda’s son, was walking around the consoles twirling the light saber. He’d picked that up from some obscure group of galactic-wide do-gooders from near the end of his backtime limits. Watching his nervous gestures, I wondered who his father might have been. For that matter, I wondered how Freyda had entered five contracts. I couldn’t imagine her in
one
.
Frey stopped pacing.
“What about a virus?” he asked.
“What?”
“Just find an angel and stun it. Take a tissue sample and bring it back. The gene laboratories on Weldin ought to be able to synthesize a virus that’s fatal.”
“Ingenious,” muttered Heimdall. “Are you sure it won’t be fatal to something else, like us?”
“If the biological engineers on Weldin can’t do it right, no one can,” Frey announced dogmatically.
I thought there were holes big enough in Frey’s plan to march the whole Guard through, but no one was asking my opinion. I decided not to volunteer it.
“Why don’t we just see what happens first?” asked Freyda. “Maybe it’s just a fluke.”
Kranos and Gilmesh nodded.
“See what you can find out, Loki.”
I hadn’t had much to eat before I’d left that morning; so before I headed back to Travel Hall, I slid out to Hera’s Inn for a bite or three.
Ferrin was sitting at a table with Verdis, and they were so intent that neither looked up. A redhead a few years older than me, Verdis worked in Personnel when she wasn’t diving.
Ferrin had been the first of our trainee class to get a real permanent assignment—Patrice’s and my stints in Domestic Affairs local office didn’t count. While I was playing local policeman in the depths of night in Southpoint or later running odd errands across Query and time for the Guard, and that meant Heimdall or Frey most of the time, Ferrin had been assigned to Locator. I hoped my turn would come before long—but not for something dull like Weather or Personnel.
As far as Ferrin and Verdis went, however, it wasn’t romantic attachment that kept them from noticing me. Verdis was gesticulating, even pounded the table once. Ferrin wasn’t grinning.
Since they obviously didn’t want company, I picked out a scampig fillet from the synthesizer and wolfed it down with a beaker of firejuice. Both of them were as intent as ever when I left.
Patrice was the only one in the Guard equipment room when I got back to the Travel Hall. She was finishing her suit-up.
“Destination?” I asked casually.
“Sertis. Where else? Do they ever send junior Guards anywhere but to ferry batteries and delicacies?”
“Isn’t it better than Ronwic?”
She shook her head. “There, I actually helped people who needed it and couldn’t do it themselves.”
“It’ll get better,” I said inanely.
“It better.” She left without another word.
What she said about Ronwic nagged me. Why hadn’t I felt that way? I’d just been a hired thug to put the local punkouts in line. I’d learned a bunch about tracing people through the undertime, but what was there to show for it? Twenty punkouts on Hell?
As I pulled on my warm suit and other gear, I wondered. Still, after less than two years in full Guard status, I was on independent search. Patrice was unhappy about being a porter, but I did that too, and I’d probably go back to it after Heaven IV.
No reason to be that bitter, I figured. We had time.
On Heaven IV, the sky was still blue, a thousand years foretime, the clouds pink, and the angels still flew.
Fewer angels than centuries before, it seemed, but plenty.
I checked the time discontinuity detector. Not once did it quiver. I quartered the planet, spent another fifty units, but didn’t get one twitch on the detector.
I backtimed, splitting the difference. That brought me out about two hundred years foretime of real-time Query.
Same blue sky and pink clouds … fewer angels … no quivers on the detector. Quartered the planet again—but no time discontinuities registered on the detector. None.
There was a different feeling about this time, a feeling of aftermath, but I couldn’t pin it down. Something had happened, I was convinced. I dived farther backtime, the realtime equivalent of Query “now.”
On breakout, I found plenty of angels, plenty of pink clouds. Some of the pink cloud towers struck me as angular, regular, as if they’d been shaped.
I slid into one, found it hollow and filled with angels bearing pink ice lances. I dropped undertime before my presence registered, I thought.
I tried another survey of Heaven IV.
Something was brewing. The discontent, if I could call it that, permeated the endless skies.
Half the angels had the pink ice lances, and half were carrying black ones. The black lancers and the pink lancers avoided each other. But still nothing registered on the time detector.
I ducked undertime and emerged about a year later, more from curiosity than anything.
Everything was over but the moans. Damned few angels anywhere.
I backtimed about half a year and broke out in the middle of a pitched battle of the pink lances against the black lances.
I didn’t believe it. All the information on Heaven IV stated that the angels were basic pacifists, and that only the goblins below had the warlike traits.
But believe or not, I was hanging in the middle of a war raging across the skies of Heaven.
I studied the time detector and found nothing.
I had a good idea I was never going to find anything, but I coppered my bets by trying a good double-dozen times/locales for spot checks. Nothing.
That’s what I told Heimdall and Freyda.
“So now what should I do?” I asked.
“Drop it,” ordered Heimdall.
“If it doesn’t show up again,” added Freyda, “there’s no reason to worry. We’ll just up the routine surveillance.”
I had a funny feeling that the whole mess was self-fulfilling, but wasn’t sure I could explain why. I didn’t try either.
And part of the reason I didn’t was that Freyda’s voice seemed so distant. I could have been imagining it.
“Loki, report to Athene.” Heimdall dismissed me.
As a very junior Guard, with no permanent assignment, I was shuffled from pillar to post. Sometimes it was Maintenance, sometimes Assignments, where Heimdall had me help prepare briefing tapes, but most often it was Special Stores.
Athene used a lot of the unassigned Guards. Special Stores was in charge of procurement, responsible for getting the items we couldn’t make by sending Guards off to buy, beg, borrow, or steal what was necessary.
Not that it was a bad section to work for, although the planets and times we saw were all stable and settled, and the junior Guards like me all dealt in simple ferrying operations or cash transactions, but after a while I wondered if there couldn’t have been a better way to do it.
The more senior Guards came up with the cash and did the “steal” operations. Most non-time-diving people store valuables in locked enclosures. It’s very simple for a trained Guard to dive directly inside and remove a portion of what passes for currency.
Usually we don’t take much. What with our simplified culture, low population, and the use of the duplicating technology, we don’t need many items.
After my fifth or sixth trip to Sertis to buy power cells, however, I had some questions. Not about the power cells and batteries. Some items don’t duplicate, like anything that stores energy. The Guard who tried to duplicate a power cell was likely to end up with a fried duplicator and some holes in him. Perfumes don’t duplicate either, for some reason, and a few foods can’t be synthesized, but normally we just do without those.
But the power cell and battery operation was such a charade. I mean, I’d put on one of those burnoose things they wear on Sertis, dive there to a factory the Guard owned, walk in and lay down the currency for what was on the order, and pick up the batteries. Then I’d walk out and far enough away to disappear.
Perhaps because it was so late in the afternoon, perhaps because I was still unhappy with the outcome of the Heaven IV mission, I wondered a bit too loudly for Counselor Athene.
Athene was a bit of a tradition. According to my father, she had been the Counselor and in charge of Special Stores back when his father had been a trainee.
“Can’t we ever make anything? Why didn’t we just build a factory on Query?” I’d asked Halcyon.
We’d just finished checking the posting sheets to discover we’d been assigned a whole lot of trips to Sertis for power cells.
“What do you mean?” asked Athene.
I must have jumped. I hadn’t realized anyone else was around.
“Well … uh … seems like we have to gather a lot from everywhere, and that we make nothing …”
“There is that,” Athene said.
Halcyon stepped back. The twinkle in her eye told me that I was on my own. Not nastily—Halcyon’s not like that—but she had sort of a “now you’ve stepped into it” look with mischief in it. That was the only way I could describe it, and maybe it wasn’t quite like that. I really didn’t understand women. That was getting clear.
I should have followed Halcyon’s example and kept my mouth shut, but it was too late.
“Who do you think ought to make all the materials we import, and how?” Athene asked in her gentle voice.
Athene was one of those deceptive-looking Guards. Taller than I was, slender as a willow, with softly curled hair like spun gold, a small nose, put together with a soft voice, a stubbornness harder than the Bardwalls’ granite, and slate-gray eyes that could burn hotter than a nova—that was Athene. I didn’t think she ever forgot.
I didn’t have a ready answer. I just didn’t like the charades involved in getting power cells. I mean, why steal money to pay for a product produced by your own factory? And I didn’t know who ought to manufacture power cells, batteries, perfumes, and the other things I’d already had to ferry across time and space. I just thought there had to be a better way.
“Do you have any suggestions, Loki?”
“Maintenance …” I suggested lamely, forgetting my resolve to keep my mouth shut.
“Not a bad idea. I wonder what Baldur would think about it.”
I didn’t care for the tone of speculation in her voice, but this time I didn’t say a word.
“After you make your pickup this afternoon, I’d like to talk to you again. And remember to drape the burnoose properly. Don’t wear it like you threw a blanket over you.”
“Yes, Counselor,” I said politely. Then I noted the rest of the details from the posting sheet, signed for the Sertian currency, and trudged down the ramp to the Travel Hall.
From nowhere, Halcyon joined me. “You had to open your head, didn’t you?”
“Wasn’t too sharp,” I admitted. “Wonder what she’s got in store for me when I get back.”
We didn’t say much as we got ready to dive. What else was there to say?
Sertis is high mid-tech or low high-tech—at least it has been for most of its recent history, and we basically just slipped from the now on Query to the now on Sertis.
In training once, I asked why we made so many trips there, but Gilmesh answered my question with a question: How much can you carry on a dive or slide? And that’s the problem. So far the Guard hadn’t run across any mechanical time-diving equipment. Just people, and that meant that anything that got carried across time was carried by some poor Guard, usually some poor junior Guard or trainee.
Needless to say, that limitation had a profound influence on the culture I grew up in.
The dive was as uneventful as usual. Just boring, in fact.