I looked at the two. It was almost evening, and the shadows were so long they were beginning to merge into twilight.
“It doesn’t end there, does it?”
“No,” said Wryan.
She condensed the story into what took perhaps no more than ten units, a short history of a bitter time.
“By tossing a sun-tunnel linked to a sun into the proximity of a Frost Giant, an energy overload was created which destroyed the Frost Giant. Odin Thor and all the others were overjoyed. And they all went hunting.
“The western continent was still the most heavily populated, even after the collapse, the riots, and the Frost Giant counterattack. With the Frost Giants still milling around Query, to kill them required sun-tunnels. The tunnels baked parts of the planet into cinders and black glass, and you can still see some of that devastation today. The Giants tried to retaliate and froze even more. No one knows how many millions more died.
“That fueled more anger and hatred, and Odin Thor and the angry divers chased the Giants across the galaxy, using sun-tunnels to destroy every Giant they could find, young or old.
“In the meantime, those back on Query tried to begin the rebuilding process, raising a Guard center and the Tower on the ruins of Inequital, the old Imperial capital. And Odin Thor continued to arm his trained marines with weapons that could destroy any diver in view, and there were still far more marines than divers.”
“So what happened?” I asked in spite of myself.
“Why,” answered Sammis, “Odin Thor decided to set up the present structure of the Guard, and to integrate marines and divers into it, with three people at the head. As the rebuilding of Query along the line of smaller self-sufficient individual communities progressed—supported by copies of the Murian fusion generator and the duplicator—it was becoming apparent that many Queryans were not aging … and either they or their children had the time-diving ability.
“So, in time, once there were more young divers, the three resigned to pave the way for elected Tribunes to carry on the work of reconstruction and the rebuilding of Query.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Remember, it’s only a story,” Wryan said gently.
“But the legends make … them … you … seem like gods …”
“‘God’ is a very relative term,” Sammis snorted. “You could easily think you were a god. You can strike down people with thunderbolts from your wrists. You can change the course of cultures and civilizations. You can cross oceans with a single step. For many people, that’s a god. Think about it, young god.”
They both got up.
“Stay as long as you like, Loki. Don’t be late tomorrow. You still need more work with the knife.”
I scarcely felt them leave as the thoughts swirled through my mind. No glorious Twilight/Frost Giant Wars? The cataclysm that leveled Query brought on by our own stupidity? Why would they tell me such a fantastic tale? Why on Query would they? What purpose would it serve?
And why had Sammis used such an ironic tone in describing Odin Thor’s supposed change from a clear military autocrat into a democrat of sorts? From what I already knew, especially from watching Heimdall, people just didn’t change that readily. I certainly didn’t.
I watched the stars above the mist for a while, listened to the roar of falling water, and tried to digest it all.
What kept coming back to me was the question of motive. If it weren’t true, why had they told me? How could two people tell a story like that, alternating without words, if they hadn’t lived it?
I toyed with the now-dry and empty beaker that had held my firejuice, attempting to puzzle things out. I even shook my head sternly to clear it, but shaking didn’t help.
At some point, I gave up and slid back to the Aerie. Even there, I couldn’t sleep, tired as I was. Gazing down into the deep valleys, knowing what caused at least some of the fused and splintered canyon walls, I asked myself about the cost of revenge. Yes, we had destroyed the Frost Giants, but what had it cost us? Did revenge always turn on the revenger?
Somehow the thoughts made me think of my father’s questions, and I wondered how he would have answered them. But he and my mother had been gone for a long time, and I still didn’t know why. Or where. All I had was a bronze bell. In the end, I asked what my father would have asked. Was I any different?
I was different. That was how I answered my question. I wasn’t a thoughtless pursuer like Odin Thor, at least I wouldn’t be after my taste
of Hell. No, I was different, but I would have my revenge on Heimdall.
Would that be enough? Was revenge on Heimdall really what I wanted?
Eventually, I drifted into an uneasy sleep in the early morning hours.
I GUESS I got a lot quieter after my long afternoon with Wryan and Sammis. I still worked with them, but we never talked much about the past after that.
I still had to deal with the backlogs generated from Frey’s outfit, and, belatedly, Justina and her Weather Observation crew decided they had lots of old equipment—years’ worth, even allowing for the stuff Baldur said we could dump on Vulcan.
For the next couple of years there were few trainees—it happens that way—and none with any mechanical ability, let alone interest. So Narcissus, Brendan, and I plodded along.
Heimdall sent all his requests through Nicodemus, which was fine with me, and my scattered diving assignments were from other departments. Usually, Heimdall left Assignments when I showed up to get briefing tapes. Either that or he buried himself in his console.
He was still cooking up things, I suspected, but he was waiting, and I kept trying to learn more about everything, but it wasn’t exactly easy all the time. Like checking out the story I got from Sammis and Wryan.
Even when I fiddled with the blocks on the Archives consoles, and twiddled through some of the sealed sections, there still wasn’t much hard information.
Sammis had put something in, but it had a scramble code that I couldn’t figure out. There was one history text, obviously copied, about the monarchy of Westron and the conflicts between the dukes of Eastron and Westron, but a lot of the cultural references I just didn’t have, and some of the words clearly didn’t mean what they used to. I mean, what was a limited chartered monarchy? Or a solicitor general? Or an investment capital shortage? I could figure out things like the metals shortage or the infeasibility of further deep-seam mining, and the mention of the lack of metallic asteroids prompted my borrowing of some deep-space armor and some sliding around our own solar system. Why no one had seriously considered factories on Query made more sense after some of my digging.
Overall, as Baldur had indicated, there was plenty of information, but it was almost all about places other than Query, even about cultures that no longer existed. The stuff about Query was boring and routine, like changes in Tribunes. So what if Saturnis had been High Tribune before Martel? Or that someone named Kerina was the first High Tribune in the records? While I kept poking around, I wasn’t finding much useful.
Of course, I kept diving, but the assignments weren’t exactly scintillating, like the one I got for Doffissn. That came from Justina, of all people.
“These weather formations that the balloon scanners show just can’t be natural, Loki.”
“Why not?” I’d foolishly asked.
She explained, in excruciating detail, about orthographic trends, topography, and prevailing winds, and how clouds could not and should not replicate identical or similar patterns under dissimilar circumstances.
I got the message—the clouds on Doffissn were weird.
So I went to Doffissn. It was a water planet, mostly, and I had to wear breathing gear, because there was crap in the air that wouldn’t have been really very good for me, besides leaving me dead for lack of oxygen, because most of the oxygen was tied up in the water, and I don’t mean as water.
First, I watched clouds form over what looked like a cobalt-blue ocean, and I sweated, because it wasn’t quite as warm as being steamed in a sauna. The hot winds didn’t help cool me, while I hung split entries across the sky.
A few other things became clear quickly. I was the only nonweather object in the sky. There were clouds and rains and winds and me.
Then I checked out the few islands and peaks. There wasn’t anything bigger than shrubs, lichens, and the local equivalents of moles and scavenger rats, and the rats, from what I could tell, fed on nodules that grew on the shrubs.
But Justina was right. The clouds were definitely weird, spinning sometimes into the sky in whirling patterns, or flattening into low walls that often arrowed toward each other, even against the wind.
I went back to Maintenance and cobbled together an energy field/ flow detector. Baldur said it should work, and it certainly indicated energy flows in and around the Tower.
It didn’t indicate anything from the skies of Doffissn.
My next bright idea was to look under the almost opaque cobalt-blue ocean. To begin with, I tried it from the undertime, but have you ever
tried to look into the water from beneath another layer of cloudy water? I couldn’t see much, but I got the feeling something was there.
So I dug out some space armor, then had to modify it so that it resisted inward pressure as well as outward, and that meant I could barely move in the stuff. Back to Doffissn—this time with a pressurized water-resistant energy detector.
I broke out, looked at the detector, but nothing happened, except it showed a faint background, more than in the air. I studied the needle and slid westward, away from the islands and toward, I suppose, the deeps, although I was staying in relatively shallow levels. The water was just as cobalt-blue opaque underneath, and I wondered if it were filled with some form of copper.
Halfway to the deeper water, I broke out again. The detector registered markedly higher, and I could sense some background vibration.
On my next breakout, I looked at the detector once more. It pegged off the end and then expired. I didn’t really have a chance to see that because the water seemed to turn into vast roaring and churning cascades of steam around me, and I went head over heels, as if I were being yanked to the depths of the ocean.
The suit wasn’t built for the depths of even a shallow ocean, and I certainly wasn’t. I left the suit behind, and appeared in underclothes back in the Aerie. I wasn’t going to show up that way in the Travel Hall.
With that, after some Sustain, and a shower to clean off the sweat and fear, I put on the more conventional jumpsuit, the breathing gear, and bounced back to Doffissn.
A rough cloud replica of my suit had formed in the sky. So I went back to Baldur, and we talked about cloud generators, but that would have taken a while. I tried a gadget that made smoke, but whoever or whatever was beneath that cobalt-blue water didn’t respond to smoke, and I recommended against taking any more dips in the ocean.
I’m extraordinarily able, but I barely got out with my skin, and I think whatever sculpted clouds from beneath the ocean was basically curious or friendly. What can you say or trade with something you can’t see, can’t talk to, and can’t even describe?
For a while, some of Justina’s trainees worked with water vapor from a squirt container I worked out, but they had to use a balloon platform, and it wasn’t very safe, because they couldn’t handle split entries. After I had to dive from Maintenance the second time to yank someone out of the water, even Justina gave up.
In the end, I guess that showed why the Guard mainly meddles with humanoid cultures. We’re opportunists, not real knowledge-seekers, and
we just don’t have the knowledge base to go beyond humanoid contacts.
So, between oddball observation assignments, I plugged along in Maintenance.
One day, Baldur asked me to give him a hand with a generator. At first, I didn’t recognize it. Then I swallowed. It was an even smaller version of the generator we’d brought back from Sinopol.
“How … ?”
“It wasn’t easy. It’s taken a long time.”
What he wanted was really just someone careful enough to recheck some work that he’d done on the intakes. By repositioning the water feed lines and a few other things, he’d been able to shrink the generator more.
“What about the insulation?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t have any. It never did. It’s all field-contained. You can’t have power without the field, and if there’s no power, there’s no emission.”
I had to take his word for it. For something that small it generated a lot of energy.
After more tests, we took it apart and duplicated it section by section until we had five. Baldur put two in Special Stores and gave one to Justina, with instructions on how to break it down and duplicate it. She thought they’d be useful in some of her smaller out-of-the-way observation posts.
Baldur also insisted I keep one. He kept his original and one other, and stored them in the big lockers adjacent to his space.
“I feel better with this than the big Murian fusactors,” he said.
How you could consider something the size of a closet big was beyond me, and I said so. “It’s big for a nomad culture that has to carry everything.” He laughed. “Call it my contribution to ensuring our future.”
“Ensuring the future?”
“Loki, the duplicator is portable; the Murian generators aren’t. This uses water and is. With a duplicator and a generator that a lot of divers can carry …” He just shook his head.
I thought about it, and he was right.
A small square object shimmered on the side of the work space. I looked at it, but it seemed curiously almost out-of-time-phase, yet it wasn’t, and it had a small screen like a console screen, except the screen was less than half the size of my palm. There were studs on it with symbols. When I picked it up, it was light, weighing less than a stylus.
“What is it?”
“A calculator,” Baldur admitted.
I looked at it, at its shimmer, and back at him. I didn’t recognize
the symbols, but it looked like a decimal system. At least there were ten studs with single symbols on them and two others with multiple symbols. Around the twelve central studs were larger studs, probably for mathematical operations, assuming it was an advanced calculator.
“It really hasn’t been invented yet. It may not be.”
I looked at him. The Guard frowned on lifting objects from foretime pararealities. They didn’t duplicate, and we usually didn’t have the ability to model and build them from scratch. After all, there is such a thing as materials science, and we’ve never had it. Or if we did, the records didn’t survive the Frost Giant catastrophe.
He grinned. “It still works.”
That bothered me, but I tapped a stud, and the symbol appeared on the screen. “Why do you need it?”
“It’s handy. I can’t carry a console.”
The portability thing again. It appeared like Baldur was getting a portability fetish. But why?
“You’re spending a lot of effort on portability.”
He shrugged. “According to the legends and a few of the old records, time-diving was initially employed to scout out other solar systems and planets where Queryans could live.”
“There’s more than enough space here,” I pointed out, more from contrariness than anything.
“But suns don’t last forever,” he responded. “What would happen if our sun decided to explode?”
He had a point, a long-time future point, but definitely a point, and we are a long-lived race.
He smiled. “I know. It may be a long time, maybe never, for all practical purposes, but …” He shrugged.
We talked a little more, and then I went back to deal with all the beat-up Weather gear, hoping it wouldn’t take too many more years to drudge through it all.