Halcyon and I made the pickup, burnooses adjusted properly, and turned the two cases of power cells over to the Special Stores supply desk, where a Senior Guard named Quetzal logged them in and shooed us away.
Halcyon wanted dinner. I wanted to face the music with Athene before logging out with Personnel for the day. My stomach was knotted up. I didn’t like upsetting the Counselors, but I didn’t know why. And Athene was a Counselor, maybe the oldest.
I presented myself at the archway into her corner of the Special Stores Hall.
“Loki, our talk will have to wait. Martel has announced his decision to step down.”
I didn’t understand, and my face must have mirrored my lack of comprehension. I just wanted to get it over with.
Athene walked over, and with the high boots and formal Counselor’s blacks, she looked down at me by half a head or more. She half lifted her hand … let it drop. I thought she was going to ruffle my hair, and almost as if I weren’t even there, she shook her head. Then she straightened and explained.
“If Martel steps down, we need to select a new Tribune.”
Everything clicked. The new Tribune had to be a Counselor. So the Senior Guards balloted for a Senior Guard to be a Counselor. Then the ten existing Counselors and the new one decided among themselves who would be the new Tribune, and that could be anyone except the newest
Counselor. Once the new Tribune was selected, the three Tribunes selected who would be High Tribune. There was always a new High Tribune when a Tribune stepped down.
That was an oversimplification, but a roughly accurate summary, without going into the various ballots or the single right of refusal by the two remaining Tribunes.
Athene was getting prepared for her part in the selection. So she didn’t have the time to put a junior Guard through her logical wringer, for which I should have been grateful. I wasn’t. I wanted to get it over with.
More to delay her than for any other reason, I asked, “Have the Senior Guards selected the new Counselor?”
“No. I suspect Heimdall will be the one they pick.”
She didn’t elaborate. I couldn’t see Heimdall as a Counselor, but since I wasn’t a Senior Guard, it wasn’t any of my business.
The Counselor selection process was over in a couple of days. How could it not be? Out of the two hundred Senior Guards, all but a handful were on Query or could be reached quickly. The others were recalled if they could be, and with almost everyone able to meet in the Hall of Justice, they picked Heimdall, just as Athene had predicted, within a few hundred units.
In the meantime, the Guard functioned. While it didn’t happen too often, picking a Tribune wasn’t such a big deal to the average Guard. At least, it wasn’t to me. The office, rather than the holder, generated the respect.
With all my rationalization, I wasn’t particularly happy to see Heimdall picked as the new Counselor.
I did not know all of the Counselors, and some I’d met in the course of my duties, without knowing they were Counselors until later. I was familiar with Freyda, Athene, Baldur, who’d taught us Maintenance as trainees, and now, of course, Heimdall.
Baldur had never said a word to indicate his position, and I couldn’t recall him wearing the gold-edged black star of a Counselor. Maybe I did, and I hadn’t noticed it.
The second day of the selection, while eleven Counselors and the two Tribunes were holed up picking a successor to Martel, I had lunch with Loragerd at Hera’s Inn. It’s always been a favorite with the younger Guards.
“What do you hear about the selection? How do they narrow it down from the ten?”
“Loki, sometimes you’re so naive.” She smiled and reached across the table to ruffle my hair. I liked that when she did it.
“What do you mean?”
“The choice is never that open. They’ve already narrowed it to a couple. I’d say Baldur or Justina.”
“Justina?” The name was familiar, but I couldn’t place her.
“You know, the stern, let-us-do-what-is-right-for-the-people type who runs Weather? She gave us the indoctrination, but left all the training up to Pertwees.”
I had a hazy mental picture of a dark-haired woman, still, cold, and full of herself, a female version of Heimdall, in a way.
“Didn’t know she was a Counselor.”
“Can you imagine any Guard running such a tedious operation without some reward?”
“Some of the satellites are pretty run-down,” I mentioned, recalling the one Sammis had stuck into my attitude adjustment test. “Where did they ever get them anyway?”
“Sometimes I think you do your best to forget history, especially if it doesn’t square with legend. The stations predate the Guard. Some say that they’re all the same station, duplicated piece by piece by the early Guard.”
“Now, that’s a legend.”
She shook her head. “Can you imagine us building one today?”
I thought about it. I couldn’t. I was still interested in the selection; so I changed the subject back.
“Which one do you think they’ll pick?”
Loragerd took a sip of the dark ale she liked so much before answering. She was still wearing her hair as short as the first day we met as new trainees. “Baldur. He’s fair and doesn’t pick fights. A lot of the Counselors owe Justina something, but just considering her will pay that debt. I don’t think they’d really pick a justice-over-mercy type for Tribune.”
The logic made sense to me.
We were both wrong. When we reported back to Assignments for another round of cleaning off consoles and racking old tapes, after lingering longer over lunch than we should have, Heimdall was back in his high stool on the platform, with his new gold-edged black star in place.
“Who?” we asked in unison.
“Freyda,” he answered. He seemed pleased, but who wouldn’t after having been elected Counselor?
Glammis was sitting next to him, smiling broadly. That was one of the few times I’d seen her smile, not that I ran across her very often. She was the assistant supervisor of Maintenance, usually quite reserved.
She and Heimdall spent a lot of time together, but Loragerd told me that they’d never been contract-mates or even shared quarters.
Heimdall was in a good mood. He beamed at Glammis, even smiled at us.
“Loragerd, you can take off the afternoon. Loki, as far as I’m concerned, you’re free also—but I understand Athene wants a word with you first.”
I didn’t think the Senior Guards or Counselors ever forgot anything. I trudged down the ramp from Assignments to Special Stores.
Athene was expecting me, and she didn’t waste any time. “Loki, I’ve been thinking. I’ve had a chance to talk it over with Heimdall and Gilmesh, and some of the other Counselors, and the Tribunes. We all agree you need a permanent assignment. Since this assignment was my idea, I thought I ought to be the one who told you.”
My stomach rolled into a tight little knot. When the powers-that-were didn’t want to convey the good news themselves, it wasn’t good news.
“We’ve decided on your first permanent support assignment.”
She was repeating herself. I waited for the other boot to fall. Except for Ferrin, no one out of my trainee class had been made permanent. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad. I felt I could take Assignments, Special Stores, even Weather, or Archives.
“Maintenance.”
I must have cringed.
“It’s not that bad. Baldur says you’re one of the few newer Guards with any mechanical aptitude at all. Besides, Heimdall thinks it will keep you busy.”
Why was Heimdall so interested in keeping me busy?
“When do I report?”
“I’d say today, but the afternoon’s basically a holiday. Make it first thing tomorrow. I’ll tell Baldur to expect you then. Gilmesh already knows.”
I bowed and said thank you. I was a bit dazed. Like Patrice had said years ago, divers didn’t work in Maintenance, especially not crackerjack divers. And I was becoming a damned good diver, if not one of the best. Everyone said so. So why had they all decided to stuff me away in Maintenance?
I ran down Loragerd at Hera’s Inn and asked the same question. She wasn’t terribly sympathetic, but that might have been because she and Halcyon had been comparing notes on something, and I’d burst in.
“You’re favored with one of the first permanent Tower assignments, while Halcyon and I are still carting perfume and power cells around,
and immediately you slide here to tell us what’s wrong with it. What did you want? Special assistant to Freyda in view of your past services?”
Loragerd was high on the dark ale, I figured, but the crack hurt.
“That’s not it at all.”
“Not completely anyway,” chipped in Halcyon.
Loragerd brushed Halcyon’s comment away with a wave and turned full face to me. “Sometimes you’re so dense. Don’t you see? All support jobs are dull. Do you want to lug supplies across time and keep records for Athene? How about keeping reports on population shifts for Gilmesh in Personnel? Or would you rather listen to citizen complaints at Domestic Affairs? Didn’t you already get enough of that? Or do you want to listen to Frey’s boasts and worry about getting sliced with that saber when he’s not watching where he twirls it?”
I had to chuckle at the last. Loragerd always makes so much sense. Why couldn’t I see it that way?
She reached over and touched my arm briefly.
“Other things will change too, Loki. Remember that.”
What did she mean?
Then Loragerd switched the conversation back to the selection process. I didn’t have a chance to comment. Halcyon looked peeved for a moment, but relaxed as Tyron and Ferrin wandered over.
“You know,” began Tyron, dumping gossip on the table like a chunk of rockwood, “there’s a rumor that the first Counselor selected for Tribune refused the election …”
“Who was it?” I snapped.
“Was it Justina?” asked Loragerd.
“Corbell? Athene? Baldur?”
Tyron shrugged. “I don’t know. No one’s saying, but it’s never happened before, not that anyone can remember or that the Archives mention.”
“But that sort of thing wouldn’t be in the Archives,” protested Ferrin.
I sipped my firejuice and let them discuss it. Despite the furor over the rumor, I was thinking about reporting to Maintenance. No one really understood. What real diver wanted to stand ankle-deep in oil and grease?
I left early, while the others were still singing and talking.
First, I slid up to a little ledge under Seneschal, high in the Bardwalls, and stared at the silver rivers in the canyons below. That ledge was the sort of place where I intended to have my own private retreat some day, a place where the only sound was the occasional hiss and flap of a night eagle or the whistling of the wind.
In my thin jumpsuit, I soon grew cold and slid back to my own quarters in the Citadel.
After a solid night’s sleep, I reported to Baldur the next morning with my heart in my hands, so to speak.
He didn’t let me voice my misgivings, and, sitting back in his plain stool, he started right in.
“A lot of Guards have the feeling that Maintenance is grubby, that we work ankle-deep in grease, oil, and grit. Now, take a good look around …”
Baldur stood a good head and a half taller than me, and with his light blue eyes and silver-blond hair, looked like a gentle sort of giant. His voice was mid-toned, a light baritone that cut through noise and distractions without being raised and without annoying. Baldur was instantly likable, yet conveyed solidity. But somehow no description really did him justice.
That morning, as he outlined Maintenance, I wished they had selected him Tribune, forgetting that, if they had, he wouldn’t have been running Maintenance.
“Do you see any oil and grease?” he asked.
I didn’t. At first glance, the huge Maintenance Hall seemed as light and airy as any of the other major Halls.
Baldur led the way to a corner area, well lighted and with a clear worktable and a comfortably padded, high-backed stool.
“Here’s your space. The work you’ll start with is replacing or repairing microcircuitry in wrist gauntlets and stunners. They get banged up so often it’s simpler for us to repair than replace. Within the year, you will be able to repair any of the circuitry you see here from scratch. Then we’ll go into more elaborate work.”
That sounded elaborate enough.
The technical side was straightforward enough. Baldur demonstrated the console reference guides for the information on gauntlets and stunners, the micro-magnifier and the step-down microcircuit waldoes, and pointed out the bin where what I had to handle would be placed.
Next came a guided and detailed tour of the Hall, and we ended up back in his spaces.
“Sit down.” He pointed at a vacant stool. I sat.
“Why is an understanding of machinery and electronics important to a Guard?”