“Have you read and understood this?”
I read it again, then tapped in a Yes.
This time another question scripted out, an obscure calculation involving the Sinopol generator. I didn’t remember one of the parameters,
and I went to the storage locker where Baldur had kept the two of them. Neither was there, and that meant I had to go back to my spaces.
Even after I got the numbers, it took me a unit or so to work out the calculation, and when I inputted it, the screen blanked back to the standard directory—without the High Sinopol entry. I tried again, but the whole file had disappeared.
I went back to my space and slowly plowed through repairs, trying to digest what Baldur’s note had meant. He’d been planning for a long time—and the portable generators were certainly part of it.
I was still pondering two days later when the Tribunes arrived—all three of them—Freyda, Eranas, and Kranos. After scrambling off the stool, I bowed slightly in welcome.
“We have a problem,” began Eranas.
I knew what their problem was, but decided to let them tell me.
“With Baldur’s departure, the Guard is left without a Maintenance supervisor with appropriate knowledge and seniority. While no one doubts your unquestioned technical ability, to say nothing of your skill as a diver, your impetuousness and lack of seniority are equally demonstrable. At the same time, no Senior Guard having mechanical talents is available, and it will be a number of years before you will be eligible for Senior Guard status.”
Eranas obviously wanted some acknowledgment from me.
“I can understand the problem.”
“We explored a number of alternatives—including making you the nominal head of Maintenance with supervision by the Tribunes personally. But the unwise precedent that could be set by making a junior Guard a department head and the fact that such supervision could be somewhat time-consuming …”
In short, Loki, young fellow, I translated, you’ve already given us too many headaches.
“ … leads us to another temporary expedient, which we will review on a periodic basis. Assignments and Maintenance will be consolidated under Heimdall, but you will in fact take charge of and be fully responsible for the daily operations of Maintenance, and Heimdall will continue to direct Assignments.”
All three waited for me to react.
I couldn’t say I was surprised. Heimdall was a Counselor, and no other Senior Guard would have touched the job for anything if what Loragerd had told me about the gossip was half-true. Hell, I didn’t understand why everyone thought I was so difficult to deal with. I just wanted to do it right. Except, as Baldur’s note had said, success was dangerous.
“Not much I can say, honored Tribunes. While Heimdall and I certainly have not seen eye-to-eye in the past, I am confident we will develop a working relationship of mutual understanding.”
Translate that any way you want, I thought.
“So long as that remains a working relationship,” commented Kranos in his deep bass voice, “all of us will be pleased, I am sure.”
Freyda moved her head minutely. Eranas stared at me.
I bowed slightly once more. “I appreciate the trust you have put in me.”
With as little ceremony as when they arrived, the three left.
One or two things would happen, I decided. Either Heimdall would ignore me while figuring out how to undo me, or he would be politely civil and wait for me to fall on my face. Neither would change anything.
As Baldur had said so often, most of the Guards were barbarians, even the Tribunes and Counselors. None of them appreciated the power in purely mechanical devices, not even Heimdall, and since Baldur hadn’t made that point, I certainly wasn’t about to. But I still wanted to at least find where he’d gone. Was that to prove that I could or to ensure he was all right? Or some of each? I wasn’t sure, but, after the entourage of higher-ups departed for their sanctified quarters elsewhere in the Tower, I studied the printout of Baldur’s past assignments.
On the average, he had taken a diving assignment once a year, and that worked out to over twenty thousand. At first, it seemed preposterous, until I thought about it. The Guard monitored well over a million systems on some sort of continuing basis, and that, of course, was why we were often backtiming to solve problems. There weren’t that many Guards.
The physical printout was notational, with each assignment and its duration, objective time, on a line or less. Twenty thousand assignments meant twenty thousand lines, or a few hundred thin pages.
How was I going to find him when the Locator tag system couldn’t? The Locator got a fix on every fore- and backtime point where a diver is or has been. The now position was determined mainly by eliminating past assignments with a cross-index, which is why the records of all dives were rigorously maintained by Locator.
The rules of Time are inflexible. No diver could occupy the same time slot in more than one place in one solar system. I never understood why a diver could occupy the same time point in different solar systems, unless time is a partly subjective property of each sun, but that was the way it worked. Since the diver’s “self” in an objective locale has “priority,” no breakout is possible in a time area where the diver has already been.
That meant Baldur couldn’t be where he’d already been, not at the same time. But what if he’d recorded a dive he’d never made? Baldur was certainly capable of planning that far ahead—and how could I ever find out which one it had been?
But because Baldur was hung up on doing something constructive, I might be able to figure out something. Constructive work, given his background, meant a mid-tech culture and someplace he wanted to stay for a while. Might even be coincident with the objective now, but I doubted that.
My first step in trying to track down Baldur, after polishing off the continuing maintenance waiting in my bin and farming it out to Brendan and Narcissus, would be to program my idea of Baldur’s ideal home into the Archives data banks and request a list, hard copy. If it weren’t too lengthy, I could compare it at leisure with his past assignments.
Might have been simpler to use the Locator system again, but Locator, unlike Maintenance, was staffed around the clock. If Baldur had gone to such pains to circumvent Locator, I would have felt lower than a grounded gopher if I’d tipped off Frey to my ideas.
Great insights or not, I still also had a day-to-day job to get done, and Heimdall would probably be looking over my shoulder.
The Maintenance load suddenly became greater. A lot of it was junk, dusty, unused for decades. Coincidences like that weren’t. Some of it I did dump on Vulcan, and I was ready to explain that it was either obsolete or so old that we couldn’t even justify the time to create spare parts. But no one asked. I wasn’t sure whether the Tribunes wanted to keep me busy or whether Heimdall was up to his old tricks.
I rated midday breaks, regardless of work load. So when I got things halfway stabilized, I took the time to trot up to the Guard section of the Archives, instead of sliding out to an inn or the Aerie to eat.
I’d already decided to ask for the narrowest search possible, figuring I could widen it step by step if the parameters didn’t touch on one of Baldur’s earlier assignments. Sitting there in the golden glow of the black-walled cube, waiting for the screen display and ready to punch the print stud, another thought struck me. I asked the Archives data system if anyone else were indexing the same data.
“Affirmative,” scripted the screen.
“What command?” I pursued.
“Duplicate all requests, LKI-30, Red.”
I struck the side of the cubicle, hammered my fist against the unyielding plastic, but the sharp lance of pain up my arm dissuaded me from further banging. That plastic was hard.
If they wanted to know what I was up to, I’d give them more than
enough information. Scramble their schemes that way.
In the meantime, the information began displaying on the screen. Theoretically, each time/culture met the parameters I’d outlined. All in all, there were about two hundred.
I ordered a printout, then went ahead with my decision to muddle the waters by widening the search. I lowered the tech level by one magnitude which boosted the numbers considerably—up to two thousand time locales. Then I canceled the hold on the first group, ordered a printout on the second, and left the second list on recall hold under my personal code. I hoped that would give the impression that I’d found what I wanted in the second grouping, rather than in the first.
I ambled back down the ramp to Maintenance. The repairs piled in the bin seemed to have grown even in the time I’d been gone.
Another thought occurred to me as I pitched in on a portable atmosphere regenerator which had definitely seen better days—it reminded me of uptime Terran manufacture, lots of plastic, excess backup circuits to cover the sloppy construction, but it was from Weindre.
Baldur had been a Counselor, even though he’d missed his share of meetings. Certainly, Gilmesh, as his replacement, wouldn’t. But maybe he’d gotten tired of the plotting, the maneuvering. He’d always preferred what he called real work.
I plowed through the work on the regenerator, finished it off, improving the workmanship in the process, and started in on a set of camp barriers, followed by what seemed to be a child’s deep-space suit that hadn’t been used in centuries. More and more of what had recently landed in the bin was no longer used or necessary for the Guard, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue. What I could toss safely I did. The rest got fixed. Argument had turned out as a very poor survival technique.
I gritted my teeth and did the best I could, making a pretty good dent in the pile. Some of the easier garbage I continued to farm out. The nature of the stuff in the bin told me that sooner or later I was going to get ahead of them because even Frey couldn’t break things as fast as we three could fix them. And it would look pretty stupid if they all went around breaking things to keep me busy.
The equipment the Guard used was durable and resisted most bumping and thumping—and the average Guard just didn’t have that much equipment. He or she couldn’t carry it.
The night when I got the printouts, when I left the Tower at twilight, I smiled at everyone I passed, even Heimdall. I place-slid to the Aerie, the two sets of printouts tucked into my jumpsuit.
At the Aerie it was dark, but I’d grown used to the sun position differences over the years. I set the printouts on the table next to the
permaglass window and grabbed some fruits and nuts from the keeper, along with a beaker of firejuice.
After pulling up the stool, I started in on a quick comparison of the Archives’ short list with Baldur’s assignments. I’d expected only a few matches, but I was disappointed. A quick scan showed ten matches—requiring dives and explorations and searches of ten planets—if not more.
By the time I made ten timedives, someone in Locator—and by then I felt everyone was monitoring my every move—would figure out what I was doing. One or two I could get away with, but not ten planets or more.
Dive smart, not often, Sammis had said. I might have to do more thinking, I figured as I munched my way through the printouts. I laid out a couple of assumptions. Number one: If Baldur really liked one culture, he would have made more than one dive there. Number two: The culture had to be something where his knowledge and his type of knowledge were useful and likely to be accepted, and that meant not a totally closed system.
I went through the ten assignments that seemed to match the short list and came up with two systems that might match. Baldur had visited both more than twice.
The Atlantean Empire on Terra, twelve centuries back, real objective time, was the first. The second was the third early mech period of Midgard, five centuries back.
Both were within Baldur’s time-diving range.
My guess was Midgard. Baldur just seemed that he’d opt out with the hope of bequeathing a future on the culture, a pass-on of some sort.
The Atlantean Empire of close backtime Terra, as I recalled, ended up playing too loose and fast with plate tectonics, and hadn’t left much of anything to anybody.
So Midgard was tops on the list, if I went searching at all. But I was missing something. I just wanted to pull on equipment and go. I didn’t have to go to the Travel Hall. That was just a formality for me anyway.
I had duplicates of most of the equipment I used stashed in the spare room in the Aerie. As soon as I’d finished building it, I’d begun to stock the back room with supplies pilfered from the back storerooms of the Tower, and once I’d installed my own duplicator, I’d begun to copy a lot of normal gear. Not everything—I hadn’t seen the point in mindless copying.
Midgard was a relatively small and dense planet, and the backtime era where I suspected Baldur had grounded himself was relatively underpopulated.
But even small planets are huge when you’re looking for one person, and it would take forever just to look for some sort of hints.
So I curbed my impatience and looked into the darkness, resisting the urge to chew through my fingernails. I didn’t have much practice at analytical thinking about people, but it was clearly time to start.