No one said that much until I got to the point where I mentioned the undertime view of the spirals.
“They actually moved in the undertime?” Sammis asked.
“That’s the way I saw it. But it seemed like it only happened in high-grav undertime spots.”
“Could happen,” Wryan interjected. Heimdall looked at her and cleared his throat. She looked at him, and he closed his mouth.
The next real questions came when we got to the images.
“Why didn’t you try to communicate with them?”
“I did. I thought at them, and they didn’t hear. I waved my arms, and they didn’t pay any attention. Then they froze me in the now and started to think about dissecting me. That’s when I got out the cannon.”
“You didn’t fire at them?”
“Of course not. I fired over their heads—or tops, or whatever their high points are. But then they got upset, and I left.”
“You left the equipment?” asked Heimdall.
“If I hadn’t left the equipment, I wouldn’t have left at all. The whole undertime was turning very hot and black.”
“Why didn’t they bind you as well as the suit?” asked Sammis.
“A blind spot, I think. They don’t have any idea of the extensive use of materials.”
Sammis looked at Baldur, who shrugged.
“Sammis is probably right. If you look at the temperatures, gravities, and pressures involved …”
Sammis looked confused.
“At the surface of Anemone, ice would be harder than steel, but what would happen if you built a spaceship out of it? Or even a pressure suit?”
“We’ll have to stop them,” Heimdall insisted.
“Why?” Wryan asked. Her voice was dry. “We can send someone out to check what Loki found out about the time wall, but it would seem that their instincts are to retreat. Besides, we really don’t want to go around destroying whole systems again, do we?”
Sammis coughed loudly. Everyone looked at him. “We’re missing one simple point. If Loki couldn’t break through their time barrier, how would you propose we do anything—unless you want to backtime a lot, and how could you guarantee success? Do you really want a repeat—”
Wryan coughed loudly. Sammis blushed, and went on more softly, “For that matter, barriers like that tend to be two-way.”
“Besides, how could they hurt us?” Baldur followed on. “If they tried to break out on Query, they’d die instantly. They aren’t into materials technology, and from what Sammis has said, they can’t or won’t venture out beyond the outer limits of their own system. Our own observations showed that they were building a second gas-giant planet. You don’t go to that kind of work if there are easier alternatives.”
“A gas giant?” I blurted.
“What else could they do?” Baldur asked.
I didn’t know. I do know that the spirals hadn’t seemed particularly nasty. They had debated what to do with me, if the images I’d received were accurate, and they hadn’t chased me. They seemed to be able to move physically in the undertime, unlike us, but was that only a function of the high-gravity fields? Supposedly, time fields are linked to gravity. If we could live under ten or twenty gees, could we also move in the undertime?
There wasn’t much way to find out, not that I could see.
“We’ll have to bring this up to the Tribunes,” Heimdall insisted.
Wryan, Sammis, and Baldur looked at each other.
“Can I get back to work?” I asked. There wasn’t much I could add.
Baldur and Sammis looked at each other. Sammis shook his head, then added, “You need to file a trip report here in Assignments. Add it to the Anemone file.”
“Now?”
“In the next day or so.”
“I’ll do it now.”
“Fine, Loki,” Baldur said wearily.
So I stood up and found an empty console, and entered everything I could remember. When I was done, I looked around, but they’d all gone. So I went back to my workbench and the pile of broken gauntlets, mainly trainees’, that had been waiting for me.
WRAPPED IN FURS and close against a young lady with smooth, cool skin, I was dreaming, flying lightnings across a twilight sky. Though Loragerd lay by me, she was not within the dream, as I strode across massive black mountains to pull down night.
Fires streamed from my fingers, and the stars paled to nothing against the light I wielded …
A faint hum came from the clothes strewn behind the couches, leading me from the dream. I wondered about it, but let myself slip back into the clutches of sleep, drawing Loragerd closer.
Her black, pixie-cut hair was fluffed slightly, and the warm fragrances of trilia and cinnamon drifted from her body and enfolded us in the early morning.
Suddenly, two Guards I didn’t know were shaking me out of my sleep.
Instantly awake, I threw the smaller Guard off my shoulders and into the wall. I’d seen him before, a brown-haired ferret who usually sat at a corner console and followed Heimdall around the Tower.
The other Guard stood there and leered at Loragerd, who had drawn the covers around her, since neither of us was wearing anything.
The first Guard was staggering up out of the corner where I’d thrown him. The leering one saw me turning toward him and stammered, “Heimdall … needs you now … in Assignments … Urgent … he said …”
“So? Was this necessary?” I wanted to take both of them and drop the bastards over the Sequin Falls.
“Heimdall sent us,” apologized ferret-face, as if that excused anything and everything.
“And how did he know where we were?” I asked without thinking.
Nobody answered me, and I realized what a stupid question it had been. Heimdall had just sent them to Locator to get the coordinates, and there they were.
Looking at the pair, I noticed they were both bigger than I was. Not so big as Baldur, but big enough. I didn’t care.
“Scram!” I growled. “We’ll get there when we’re dressed, and that will be a lot sooner if you get out of here.”
The two exchanged glances, looked back at me, and winked out as they slid, presumably back to Heimdall.
I put my arms around Loragerd, who was shaking. Though the room was warm, I could feel the shivers and goose bumps on her normally satin-smooth skin.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She gave a little headshake, and I hugged her again. We didn’t say anything else. What else was there to say? We’d overslept when we should have been on duty. Junior Guards don’t have any rights. Voluntary subjection to discipline and all that.
I wasn’t shaking, but I was angry, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. As we dressed, Loragerd looked at me, a strange sort of look, but I could have been imagining it.
We didn’t even have anything to eat. She headed to Linguistics, which was her permanent assignment, and I made for Assignments.
When I got there, I could have cut the silence with a light saber, Frey’s or anyone else’s. Heimdall was slumped in his high stool, and the despair poured from him like a river.
As he caught sight of me, he straightened, opened his mouth as if to shout, then clamped it shut. He waited an instant, then began curtly, “Glammis was on Atlantea. Fifty centuries back. Locator tag wavered, just went blank.”
That meant the Locator console was receiving a signal, but one not linked to Glammis’ thought pattern, which meant she was dead, deep-stunned, or near death.
I stared at Heimdall. The whole morning made sense. If there’d been anyone Heimdall had been close to, it had to have been Glammis, the slight woman with the stern face and dark curly hair. Why had Glammis been on Atlantea? She usually presided over the trainees and the mech shop with an iron hand. Baldur supplied the philosophy, Glammis the work.
She seldom went into the field, but Baldur had once mentioned that she had been considered a crack diver, centuries ago.
Heimdall glared at me and cleared his throat. I was supposed to say something.
“You want me to find her and bring her back?”
He nodded. I understood. Heimdall wanted ability, not just any diver, and there were doubtless problems. Sammis and Wryan were
backtime and out-line, and Gilmesh was involved in a foretime plot on Curatol. So Heimdall had sent his troopers after me.
“Information?” I asked. I had a couple of units, if that.
“End console.”
If I hadn’t known Heimdall better, I would have sworn the iron Guard’s voice was ready to crack.
In a funny way, I had to admire him. Me … if that had happened to Loragerd, I’d have gone off half-cocked no matter what. Heimdall knew his limits, understood he couldn’t rescue Glammis and had to stand by helplessly as he tried to round up help.
Glammis’s mission had been simple, according to the console. The mid-island people of fifty centuries earlier had developed a broadcast power transmitter. The results were strange, to say the least, since the measured output was considerably larger than the input at times, and at times there was no output despite continued input. The project had failed, and the generator later exploded.
Glammis had been so intrigued with the possibilities, considering the ongoing power problems, that she had decided to make the dive herself. Wasn’t too surprising, when I thought about it. Divers who understood mechanical theory or engineering were few and far between. Glammis had been surprised that I knew what she was talking about even when I first started working in Maintenance.
I got the directional output from the console and headed for the Travel Hall. No waiting for languages, cosmetics, or special equipment—I threw on an equipment belt, clipped on a stunner, slipped on the wristbands, and dived.
A fast recovery, if at all. I wasn’t happy about it. Messengers who confirm bad news are likely to become the recipients of gratuitous violence.
Death on the time-lines is funny. You can loop time, change the whole pattern of another culture … but dead is dead. Our own pasts and futures could not be directly changed by our own actions backtime of the now.
Atlantea was a strange planet, although every planet has its peculiarities. Atlantea has shallow seas and metallic deposits, with no moons and no tidal forces to speak of. The combination’s not supposed to occur, especially not with intelligent life, but that’s the way it was.
And Glammis was down.
I red-flashed the back trip, skipping from timepath to timepath, homing in on Glammis’ signal from her Locator tag and power packs.
Sometimes the line between death and unconsciousness is terribly fine. If Glammis died—brain—dead death, objective time—before I had
dived clear of Quest, she was dead, but if there were any sparks, she had an outside chance.
I was aiming for a breakout point right at the instant her Locator signal had shifted from active to passive. Theoretically, I could not back-time past her “now,” but I was hoping I could power my way in sooner without the innate resistance of her conscious mind.
It was worth a try.
Undertime doesn’t really have a color, but it feels gray, and your vision is limited. You can see “outside,” or I can, into real objective time, but it’s muddled, like looking up from beneath the water, silvered over and wavering, with flashes of light darting across your field of vision like minnows. Some divers can’t see that much, and some can’t see at all.
Time tension, like water tension, exists at the moment of breakout when you are showered with a spray of moments that slide off you with the emotional shock of icy rain.
Except this time I was bounced back undertime as soon as I broke out, my head reeling with the impression of time mirrored in time. I slid sideways fractionally and came out in a corridor.
The stench was ozone. The building atmosphere spelled out “power plant.”
The directionals on the wrist gauntlets pointed toward a door closed and barred. The bar had melted, in effect welding itself to the frame.
No one was around, and from the dim light filtering through the skylights above, I figured it was either very early in the day or very late.
The feeling of time being warped grew as I walked up to the door.
I grabbed the crossbar and dived. The bar came with me—the door frame didn’t. That’s how the Law of Discrete Particles works. If the bar had been the same material as the frame, nothing would have happened.
I still couldn’t slide or dive into the room, for whatever reason. I broke out, dropped the bar, forced open the door—it was a sliding type that had a tendency to jam—and walked into the generator room. I didn’t know if that’s what it was, but that’s what it felt like.
The place was a mess. Two control stations were a fused mass, and I didn’t need more than a quick glance to see that both controllers were dead.
With the currents of time swirling around me, it took every bit of concentration to walk across the ceramic floor to the dark-haired woman sprawled on her back. She was alive and breathing. But her mouth hung open, and her wide green eyes were empty.
I picked her up, hoping she didn’t have any physical injuries, and
caught the time tide boiling out of the generating equipment to throw us undertime and foretime toward Quest.
From the total lack of resistance I had in carrying her, I suspected that Glammis had literally lost her mind, but I’d leave that determination to the medical techs.
To keep things quick and simple, I just broke out with Glammis right in the Infirmary, and I staggered into the critical-care section as Hycretis came running. He didn’t ask any stupid questions, and I helped him ease her under the regenerator and the diagnostic scan unit.
Hycretis focused on Glammis as if I weren’t even there.
I stood there for a long moment, wondering why the room was vibrating, before I understood my legs were shaking. Then I tottered toward the cabinet I knew held the Sustain and gulped down a cup. That helped, but my legs weren’t much better. So I plopped down on the edge of a vacant bed at the end of the ward. Then I lay back and closed my eyes.
“Damn you, Loki! Damn you!”
I felt myself being shaken like a rag doll. Was it a nightmare? I tried to roll over, but the buffeting wouldn’t go away.
“What did you do? Deprive me of my only joy, would-be god? Torment me with an empty shell?”
Like a slowing top, the universe began to settle, and I woke up fully to find Heimdall grabbing my harness, shaking me, and screaming, tears streaming from his eyes, and saliva drooling from the corners of his mouth.
“Answer me! Answer me, would-be god!”
Heimdall slapped my face, and it hurt.
He had me just by the harness. I slid behind him with a quick dive barely under the tension of the now. He was still holding an empty harness and staring at the vacant space where I had been when I cracked him a solid one from behind. He went down like a breaker, foaming at the mouth, but out. Out cold.
I looked down at the poor bastard. “Too much strain, I think.”
Both Hycretis and the two troopers holding him appeared stunned, for some reason.
“Let him go.” I gestured at the two Guards.
They released their hold on the medical tech, but he didn’t say anything.
“Heimdall was just under too much stress,” I announced. “He really needs some medical care and some rest.” I turned to the two thugs. “You two watch Heimdall and make sure that he gets rest. Keep out anybody
but Counselors and Tribunes.” They would anyway, and hopefully that would keep them out of further mischief.
“Hycretis, you do whatever’s necessary for Heimdall—muscle relaxants, sedatives, whatever you think is suitable.”
This time my words registered, and he nodded.
I checked the objective time. Seemed like I’d been gone forever, but the wall clock said one hundred units had elapsed from the moment I’d left the Travel Hall headed to Atlantea. I’d have bet that ninety units had been my sleep and recovery time.
“Glammis?” I asked Hycretis as he rummaged opened a cabinet and ran his eyes down the drawers.
“Physically, she’s fine. Her mind’s wiped clean. How I don’t know. She has the thought patterns of practically an unborn child.”
The Glammis we knew was gone. Heimdall had been right.
“Did you tell Heimdall?”
“How could I not tell him?” He pulled out a spray injector of something.
I thought of the two thugs behind us. Right. How could he not?
Another question was why I hadn’t noticed that Heimdall seemed to be building and using a private army. That could wait. First, I needed to talk to Baldur.
I knew the answer to the power puzzle Glammis had been investigating, I thought. Baldur would know if my surmises were correct. I went down the ramps to Maintenance not quite at a run.
Baldur glared at me as I stood respectfully outside his area, taking deep breaths and refusing to go away.