I put down the armor. “I can’t practice.”
Wryan looked at Sammis. He nodded. She smiled.
“How about Loratini’s?” she asked.
We stowed the armor and slid.
I’d never been to Loratini’s Inn, the oldest inn on Query. You had to be invited to be welcome. Rumor was that no Counselors, Tribunes, or trainees were ever invited.
An odd place, it seemed to me, with separate balconies for each table, with each balcony, maybe twenty in all, set in stone and overlooking the Falls. Officially the Falls were called Loratini Falls and had been well visited once upon a time. Only the inn and a small outbuilding farther down on the edge of the canyon remained.
The three of us sat around the circular table. I had opted for firejuice. They had beers. Wryan’s was dark, and Sammis’s light.
“What do you know about the Frost Giant Wars?” asked Wryan.
“Only the legend—that they almost destroyed Query and the Guard fought them and destroyed them.”
Sammis snorted.
A pair, a real pair, they were, like a set of gauntlets perfectly matched. Even looked like each other—both with the light brown hair, the faint tiny lines close to the corners of their eyes, with pointed chins and elvish faces, though Sammis’s features were a shade heavier, and Wryan seemed a trace bigger physically.
Both had piercing green eyes, set off by even tans. All of us tan easily and fairly darkly with a bronze cast.
I studied Sammis and waited.
“Legends never tell the whole story,” said Sammis.
The more I thought about it, the more confusing it became. There I was, with two people who were former Tribunes, who’d controlled the Guard and given it up to work for millions of years at standard Guard assignments. Why? And why didn’t anyone say anything?
“Because,” Wryan answered my unspoken question, “no one really wants to know the full history. Because they don’t, and because you won’t either, let’s just call it a story, a child’s bedtime story, like those your father told you.”
I shifted my weight on the stool, wondering whether to protest that I was better than other people. Instead, I just listened.
“Odin Thor is the strongest diver—except for you—the Guard has ever had. Unfortunately, he came out of the worst possible background—the Marines of the Imperial ConFederation—and his morality is nonexistent, and his directional senses are worse. But let’s guess a little bit more about the Frost Giants—it was called the Twilight War for a time because it was the twilight of Westron, the only unified
government in Queryan history before the Guard. Remember, this is a story, and only a story.”
Wryan paused, and Sammis continued where she had left off even though a word had not passed between them.
“It really wasn’t a war. It all started when the Imperial government sent a planoforming expedition to Mithrada—”
“But why? We don’t need to change planets around …”
“Listen,” suggested Wryan, and I took a sip of firejuice.
“ … and parts of Mithrada began to freeze. That was because the Frost Giants lived on heat energy, and when they fed, they withdrew all the ambient energy from their surroundings. What made it worse was that the Giants traveled through space and time, and there were only a handful of divers …”
“Only a handful? But …”
Sammis held up a hand, before continuing.
I was beginning to believe that it
was
just a child’s story.
The Frost Giants stood only a head or so taller than the tallest Queryan and were not giants in any real sense, though they had four arms and considerably more mass.
The Frost Giants demonstrated another adaptation of the time-diving talent, noted Wryan as she took up the tale. While they had definite range limits, a Giant could time-dive to any point in the Galaxy which existed during his, hers, or its own objective life. Giants seemed to have lived several millennia. Not only could they time-dive, but basically the adults had to because they would have starved if they had been restricted to one place or time. In effect, they were cosmic energy grazers, although considerably brighter than most grazing animals.
I hadn’t asked for a dissertation on the Frost Giants, and I certainly found it hard to believe that they were mere dumb animals bouncing through time. But remembering my training thrashings from Sammis, I decided to let them make their point in whatever obscure fashion pleased them.
Giants went through two phases. In childhood they were planet bound after their parent left until they physically matured. Adults had the ability to time-dive and place-slide. If a maturing “child” did not learn time-diving or have the talent, he, she, it, died of old age in less than a century.
The Frost Giants needed no gross physical food, but absorbed heat energy. How they drank it in without burning it up none of the Queryan scientists could figure out.
“Yes, we had scientists,” explained Wryan.
The more the explanations went on, the more confused I got. “The
Frost Giants were big, and when they matured, if they matured, they could time-dive, and when they dived they fed and absorbed energy, which left some planet or locale with a frozen chunk. Is that the idea?” I asked.
Sammis nodded and kept talking.
Then, time-diving was a talent new to Query, so new that only a few seemed to possess it and were often called witches. The empire of Westron ruled the planet and about one billion people, with a civilization based largely on solar and satellite power and complex nonmetallic technology.
“Why isn’t this in the Archives?” I asked.
“Someone has to have the time, the ability, and the desire to write history,” Sammis said gently. “By the time the disaster was over, there were few indeed who could meet those qualifications.”
When the abnormal temperature drops on Mithrada threatened the expedition, some bright scientist plotted the drops, located a handful of Frost Giants, and lobbed a thermonuclear warhead into the area. Energy grazers or not, the Frost Giants retaliated by freezing large chunks of Query, including all of Quest, then the Imperial capital.
The longer the story got, the more questions I had. I bottled them up. But I really wanted to know why a planetary government at peace needed a military establishment with thermonuclear weapons.
Sammis took another sip of the light beer and continued.
Among the survivors were two military factions, one headed by a ConFed Marine colonel named Augurt Odin Thor. Odin Thor used the military structure to attempt to reestablish order in Westra, the central part of Westron, the western continent that had been the basis of the empire.
At the same time, the other military faction had been seeking out and eliminating the old educated aristocracy that had administered the empire for the Imperial family.
Just prior to the expedition to Mithrada, at a relatively isolated government installation, the Imperial government had also begun a project to investigate the time-diving talent that existed in perhaps a dozen or so documented cases. The program, under the direction of a Dr. Wryan Relorn, had been employing the timedivers to scout out possible interstellar colonies … since it appeared that the majority of the Queryan people could not travel in time or use mental abilities to place-slide.
Threatened by one faction, Dr. Relorn had opened the installation to Colonel Odin Thor. Odin Thor then used the divers to scout out the other military faction, eventually to destroy its underground headquarters, and to consolidate the marines’ hold on central Westra.
“None of this is in the Archives,” I tried to point out reasonably.
“Certainly not in the open section,” Sammis agreed.
“Let’s just keep calling it a story,” said Wryan, “just a made-up story.”
“All right. But we’ve got Frost Giants freezing chunks of Query because somebody bombed one of them, military adventurers taking over the planet, and a few scattered timedivers under a nutty doctor …”
“She’s still not nutty,” said Sammis quietly.
I’d almost had enough. Now Sammis was insinuating that his partner Wryan was this Dr. Wryan Relorn and that she had sailed to the rescue of the Query by creating the timedivers, right? Sammis and Wryan were good Guards, and maybe they’d been around since forever, but nothing quite matched. I must have muttered my objections half-aloud without realizing that I had.
“No. The Guard came later, much later,” said Wryan. “Try to understand, Loki. Millions of people lived within kilos of where we sit. Most died with the first wave of freezings. Those who were left were the less educated, or the well-off and isolated farmers, or the people in small towns. There was nothing holding anything together. Add to that a tremendous suppressed hatred of the educated aristocracy, and when most of the larger cities were frozen, everything disintegrated, literally and figuratively. When the Giants froze something it went to almost absolute zero, and when it thawed it fell apart in rubble and dust. Going that close to absolute zero does that, you know.”
I just had to shrug and take another swallow of firejuice.
So the Imperial Marines under Odin Thor just cobbled together a regional government and tried to work with Dr. Relorn to keep things going. They tried to step up time-diving abilities, although they had only thought initially about the ability as place-sliding until a young ConFed Marine appeared from nowhere in Dr. Relorn’s laboratory.
The diver suggested trying to find technology on other planets to support the marines and the attempt to hold things together.
“And this was Sammis?” I asked, not quite sarcastically.
“Of course,” Wryan said, continuing almost as if I had not asked.
Technology was hard to find, especially without directional guides, gauntlets, and all the other gadgets later bought, borrowed, or stolen by the Guard, and the small towns resented the troops, and the farmers resented the townies and the troops.
Towns refused to support the new government, and fighting broke out between townies and farmers, and the townspeople even attacked marine outposts. Finally, even scarce seed grains and livestock were torched and looted and burned.
“People just wouldn’t do that!” I protested.
They both stared at me, and I began to feel how old they really were. For that instant, the masks of youth that covered the depths of their eyes slipped, and I saw another kind of Hell, one a lot more lasting than my brief torment.
“Just say they did,” I temporized. “What happened next?”
The timedivers recorded the chaos, the lootings and the burnings, and showed other towns, and for a time, the rebuilding progressed. Sammis found the duplicator and the Murian fusion generator. A start was made on building the Tower, and a village for the divers begun. Odin Thor began to arm his marines with more and more deadly weapons and to assert greater authority.
Then the Frost Giants returned—just one, but it froze a diver’s family, and the divers and the marines panicked, demanding that Sammis and Dr. Relorn do something. But the weapons which Sammis had found could not concentrate energy enough to immobilize or kill a Giant.
Odin Thor used the incident, and his power as head of the sole remaining military force on the continent, to whip up sentiment among the other divers to develop a crusade against the Frost Giants, with him in charge. He ignored the advice of Dr. Relorn and the young Sammis, and used one of the remaining thermonuclear warheads to trap and destroy another Giant.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I protested again.
“A great deal of what people do when they’re scared doesn’t make sense,” said Wryan tersely. “Remember that everything most of these people grew up with had been destroyed, and that a Frost Giant could appear from nowhere and freeze you solid before you could flee. Was it the wisest thing you ever did to blow off Heimdall’s wrist?”
I shut up and listened some more.
The shadows crossing the mists from the Falls were getting longer, but more than half my firejuice remained. I took a sip and concentrated.
The Giants returned and froze most of Query solid.
The total of the disasters mounted, and the population of Query dropped from nearly a billion people to more like fifty million within a few years. The divers could avoid the Frost Giants, but most Queryans could not.
In the meantime, Sammis Olon kept scouting and trying to find better weapons, even as the Giants milled around Query, freezing more and more of the planet into dust.
Finding the Giants was the easy part. In the undertime, they left a jagged vibrating trail. The difficulty remained in figuring out what to
do with the Giants. Past experience indicated that no known energy weapon short of a thermonuclear warhead or a dreadnought-class laser was effective. And there were far more Giants than warheads. Besides, no diver could carry either a warhead or a powerful enough laser.
In the end, with all the grubby persistence that the Guard still personified, Sammis Olon himself found the device … nothing more than a glorified sun-tunnel with special circuitry.