“Because a Guard can’t use to its fullest capabilities equipment he doesn’t understand.” That’s what he had told us in training.
Baldur laughed.
“Well … you do remember those lectures. That’s not all. I may say some things which will surprise you or shock you, but try to keep them in context. ,
“First, the Guard is composed generally of a group of polite barbarians. Second, barbarians have a tendency to destroy what they don’t understand. That includes history. Third, most past Tribunes have historically understood that, from Sammis Olon on. Fourth, most Guards don’t. Now, do you know what I mean by a polite barbarian?”
I didn’t have the faintest idea, but decided to guess. “Someone who is polite, but doesn’t understand?”
“What’s polite? Understand what?”
I shrugged.
“Look at it this way, Loki. Most Guards know that if you push the stud on a stunner and point it at someone, it knocks them out. Why?”
I shrugged again.
“Then how did someone somewhere discover how to build one—by trying every possible piece of electronic gadgetry in the universe?”
I must have looked as blank as I felt.
Baldur grinned. “Pardon me if I got on my podium, but I can get intense on this subject.”
I nodded, wondering where he was headed.
“I’ll cut it short for now. It takes an understanding of physiology and electronics to design a stunner. On Query we don’t have that knowledge. We never did. Oh, I’ve picked up the technical skills, and, like an educated animal, I can build one pretty much from scratch, given time, but I don’t know why it works. No one on Query does. How about a wrist thunderbolt?
“Do you understand the simple chemistry behind a projectile gun? A linguistics tank?”
I’d never thought about it. Probably a whole lot of Guards hadn’t either.
“That’s what I mean by barbarians. Every culture has its barbarians, but in the average culture when there get to be too many barbarians and too few individuals who understand the technology, the culture collapses to a level where more people understand the mechanics of everyday life.
“On Query, no one understands the mechanics of everyday life. Nor that the Guard structure is all that really holds our system together. In the Guard, basically three functions are critical—Maintenance, the data banks of the Archives, and Special Stores.
“Maintenance does more than maintain things; we also teach Guards
the basics of technology. You know about Special Stores, and the Archives basically store data.”
“I thought the Archives had records of our history.”
Baldur laughed softly. “A little history goes a long ways. Besides, someone has to write it. No … the data banks mainly contain hard technical information—everything from dive records to background material on out-system cultures.”
I pondered that while Baldur went on.
“One of the reasons I give trainee lectures is to emphasize the importance of understanding the technology we use, but it’s gotten harder and harder to get across, even in my lifetime. A related problem is power. Stored power can’t be run through a duplicator. So we continue to duplicate the old Murian fusactors and to import various kinds of generators—but there’s still the Law of Diminishing Output.”
He paused and looked at me.
I didn’t shrug, but I didn’t know where he was going.
“If I duplicate ethylene to run a portable generator, the total energy generated by that generator will be less than the energy required to duplicate the fuel. That’s why we need fusion power. But we have to duplicate the Murian fusactors piece by piece, and they still have to be assembled and tested.
“And Maintenance has to repair or replace all that equipment.”
Baldur paused, studied me, and sighed.
“I can see I’ve just about overloaded your rational facilities. We’ll talk more later. In the meantime, start by studying the schematics on the gauntlets until you can visualize them in your sleep. Draw them on the drafting board. If you don’t understand the reasons for the circuits, read this.” He dropped a thin book on the table.
“If you still have trouble, come find me.”
I nodded and picked up the book and walked back to my new permanent-support work area and studied schematics and began to cross-reference them to the manual. It was slow. I hadn’t gotten through more than twenty pages by the end of the day when Baldur told me to close up.
It seemed to go on like that for ten-day after ten-day, but it probably wasn’t that long before I actually began to make some repairs—and after that, the manual made more sense.
After the gauntlets, Baldur began to give me other things, like stunners and restrainer field generators. At first, learning each new system was almost as hard as the gauntlets, but I kept at it.
It was better than being in Domestic Affairs or lugging power cells—a lot better.
SAMMIS CAUGHT ME on the way into Maintenance. For some reason, a lot of things had jumbled together in my mind, from my parents’ being gone to the police duties in Southpoint to the damned portable generator from Sinopol—and the generator question, unlike the other two, I might be able to figure out. But I was still having trouble figuring out the need for such a portable generator. Sure, it was a lot smaller than the closet-sized generators that powered most Guard operations, but why did we really need it? The old regular fusion generators worked fine, and because they were bigger, they also produced more power. So even Baldur’s sermons on waste and power didn’t answer that question. We had the generators, plenty of them. That still bothered me, and I was still trying to figure out the practical implications when Sammis touched my shoulder—lightly.
“Loki, Freyda and I have an assignment for you.”
After his attitude adjustment test, even though it had been seasons earlier, I was skeptical of Senior Guard Sammis and any assignment he had.
“Yes?” I kept walking toward the dining hall in the West Barracks. Not many divers ate there, mostly trainees, but it was convenient when I didn’t feel like I wanted to be on display at one of the inns. Besides, where else would I have gone?
“It’s just an observational job on … well, we really don’t have a name for the place.”
“Then why do you need me?”
“Loki, call it part of your training.” Sammis grinned in a too-friendly fashion.
I surrendered to the inevitable. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s all on the briefing tapes in Assignments. But, in short terms, something unusual is happening in this system. Planets are being moved, but we don’t see any ships. The heat of the sun is changing, but it’s not following the stellar sequence. Locator is picking up a lot of temporal shifts that can’t be traced to the Guard.”
I waited.
“And the only sign of life is on a gas giant, pretty far out from the sun.” Sammis paused.
“Why me?”
“Because you’re young and expendable,” Sammis wisecracked back.
That was clearly all I was going to get from Senior Guard Sammis. “What am I supposed to ask Heimdall for? ‘That place Sammis mentioned’?”
“The file key is ‘Anemone.’”
“I appreciate it, Sammis.” I gave the older Guard a half-bow. “But I’ll still have to tell Baldur.”
He was gone, and I went in to tell Baldur. He nodded and told me that I could finish up with the gauntlet repairs on my bench when I got back. So I walked back up the ramps to Assignments and asked for the Anemone briefing.
Heimdall sent me off to the end console, and I began to study the package. There wasn’t much to study. About halfway through, it dawned on me, and I should have figured it out earlier, why I was expendable. Anemone wasn’t Querylike. Gas giants aren’t.
The Guard doesn’t operate off Query with any technology that can’t be carried by a single diver. So … that meant the Guard’s exploration vehicle had to be a diver who could carry a lot, including the equipment to keep him alive in the now, since it’s hard to get a real idea of a technology or a culture from the undertime. I was the exploration vehicle.
“Cumbersome” wasn’t the word for the equipment, and Baldur fussed over every bit of it.
“Remember to check the full-spectrum readouts first. Even you couldn’t survive a thermonuclear blast.”
“How would anyone know I was there?”
“If the Frost Giants had had much in the way of brains, they could have. Sometimes I wonder how we’ve been lucky so long …”
It wasn’t luck, exactly, I figured, but didn’t get a chance to say so.
Baldur kept talking. “It would be easier if we just had deep-space travel. We could drop a flitter—”
“Flitter?”
“Sorry—pressurized atmospheric travel vessel—we could drop one of those right into the atmosphere, takes holos from there.”
“It wouldn’t exactly be unobserved,” I pointed out.
Baldur laughed. “I don’t think you understand just how alien these people are.”
“They aren’t people, Sammis said.”
“In my view, anything that thinks is a person.”
I had to think about that. Didn’t flying gophers think a little? Where did you draw the line?
Finally, everything was ready, and there wasn’t that much point in waiting. I carted everything over to the Travel Hall and checked and
double-checked the equipment. Baldur fussed some more. Sammis was nowhere to be seen.
After a wave, or as much of a wave as possible in a portable man-worn tank, I twisted the helmet into place, made sure the oxygen worked, and dropped under the now, deeplining down and out.
The first sign that something was wrong occurred even before I reached the planet—a wall of time winds that shook me and my suit until we rattled. Now, undertime is subjective, but I still say that even the equipment rattled.
The whole system was like that. Black time vortices that twisted and turned in on themselves. Gold pyramids hovering in the undertime. I thought I saw a gold and black spiral turning in the undertime. I did. I saw a whole ring of them orbiting Anemone in the undertime.
I ducked away from them and dropped toward the planet, but not all the way to the ground, or whatever passed for it. The deep-space pressure suit was limited to handling about twenty atmospheres, and that meant I couldn’t break out on the planetary surface—or anyplace particularly close. About the lowest point would have been at the breakpoint between the troposphere and stratosphere. That would have been pushing it. So I hung a split entry high in the thin swirling clouds, feeling like I weighed about ten times normal, and turned on all the gadgets Baldur had hung on me.
All of them registered something—the entire electromagnetic spectrum was filled, and though I wasn’t that much of a technician or engineer, all the indicators were that something was generating a whole lot of patterns of sorts. Dealing with time energies you get the feel for energy patterns. They were there.
I looked around with my eyes. That didn’t help much, because it just looked as though I were hanging in a gray soup. After a moment, I remembered Baldur’s instructions and turned on the temperature discriminations in the suit visor.
The whole view changed.
To my right was a towering wall of slowly shifting blocks, dark green in color. To my left was another wall, but of a lighter green. In the middle, opposite me, three bluish spirals winked into existence, just as if they had popped out of the undertime.
The slight shiver in the now confirmed that.
I swallowed, recalling those gold and black spirals in orbit. What were these creatures?
The blue spirals swept in and stopped in a semicircle around where I hung, my boots sort of resting, the part that wasn’t locked undertime,
on what you might call a grassy plain between the canyon walls. Except that all of this was just a bunch of clouds.
I flicked off the discriminators for an instant and was back in the gray soup. There were three patches of darker gray towering up. Since I preferred color, I flicked back on the discriminators.
Now what? It had only taken the locals instants to find me.
A sort of static crackled around me, or my thoughts, almost like the eddies from a restrainer field, except there were images instead of static.
…
{A towering green cloud with nothingness in the center} …
… {Three perfect spirals—half-black, half-gold—turn slowly around a miniature pulsing red cube a mere fraction of the size of the spirals} …
… {From sweep of stars, mottled green/yellow tracks appear one by one leading to the cube, which turns an even uglier shade of red} …
… {Sun-black flames lick at the cube, which melts into a blue vapor and vanishes} …
… {Gold winds blow around the red cube, which fades into white and then into gold. Then the gold cube splinters into shards. Faint gold mists rise from the shards as they shrink until neither shards nor mists remain} …
… (The three perfect spirals turn and turn until the red cube slowly manifests faces which are split triangularly between black and gold} …
I could get the feel of the debate—should they burn me, freeze me, or hope I’d conduct a rational dialogue? The problem was that I could sense what they were “saying” but didn’t have the faintest notion of how to communicate with them.
Still, I tried to think at them, pushing an image of me, superimposed on top of the red cube.
Nothing happened, except more images dropped into my mind.
… {The three spirals are joined by a larger spiral, spinning more slowly} …
… {A web of lines, in spiraled grids, settles over the red cube, anchoring it between the cliffs} …
As that last image washed over me, I shuddered because I could feel the black lines falling, and I tried to dive undertime, but nothing happened.
Outside, with the discriminators, I could see that a larger blue spiral had appeared, and all four were twirling in an apparent pattern around me and my frozen suit.
Was I frozen, or the suit? I concentrated, thinking about diving under the now without the suit, and I relaxed. Whatever they had used to freeze the suit in time was linked to the suit, not to me.
I swallowed again. They apparently controlled their system through
some form of mental power. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I got the impression, as the outsider overhearing their mental images, that machinery, at least as we knew it, wasn’t exactly involved.
… {A rolling horizontal spiral, mostly black, rolls toward and over the red cube. After it passes, the cube is gone, but red streaks run through the spiral} …
The last image definitely gave me the idea of being dissected or digested for information.
I couldn’t move the suit undertime, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use the equipment. So I used one arm to dig out the portable cannon—a shell thrower of sorts—fastened to the suit’s thigh.
The shell exploded nicely above the top of the largest blue spiral.
…
{Sun-black flames flash from all four spirals toward the small red cube}
…
That made me angry. What was I supposed to do? I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear me. They tried to keep me from diving and discussed me like some bug caught in a trap.
When I began to sense the blackness of the undertime starting to vibrate, I decided that it was time to leave, even if it meant leaving suit, sensors, and information behind. So I dived right out of the suit and under the now, almost sprinting away from Anemone.
Figuratively speaking, I didn’t even look back.
I went through the change-wind barrier like a needle through coarse-woven fabric. Then I stopped, hanging outside the time walls of the system, to see if anything followed.
Nothing.
I waited in the undertime to see if any of the spirals appeared, but none did.
Without the suit and its gadgets I wasn’t equipped to break out, but I decided to go foretime and see what I could discover. Pushing toward the blue was harder than normal, but I went as far as I could before heading back in-system.
I didn’t get there. The time-wind wall was there, except it was farther in-system, and this time it was so solid I just about bounced back to Query. Then I backtimed, and discovered that the wall retreated and solidified not much after my own initial undertime track appeared, and I could sense the faint wail of the change winds.
The change winds—how can something be subjectively perceived as a wind with no objective correlation, but be based upon a multiple chronological readjustment? I thought it was a lot of jargon when we studied it, and I still did even while they were moaning behind and around me.
I felt like frowning, but you can’t frown in the undertime. At least we can’t, although I felt that the spirals could.
When I broke out in the Travel Hall, I was stark naked, and I must have blushed. Only Hightel was there, stripping off a burnoose or something and putting it in his chest.
“What happened to you?”
“I lost my equipment,” I mumbled.
“Who was she?” He grinned.
“A large blue spiral about a kay high with a desire to roll over me.”
“You play in rough company.” He shook his head.
“Not by choice.” I ducked back under the now and went straight to my room in the West Barracks. After pulling on another uniform, I dropped back to the Travel Hall. Then I went to find Sammis and Baldur.
It took a while, but we finally sat at a table in the corner of Assignments. Heimdall and Wryan, who was Sammis’ partner, also joined us, but they pulled their chairs back a little, as if to indicate they were just observers.