Item: Baldur liked to think and work with his hands.
Item: Baldur disliked the continual backtime tampering of the Guard.
Item: Baldur could make an impact in any early or midmech culture.
Item: Baldur had taken both portable generators.
Item: No winds of time-change had accompanied his departure.
Possible conclusion: Baldur was playing a longer-range game, and the closer to the objective now his retreat was, the less likely the impacts of his efforts were to be discovered.
Thinking done, I stood up and unloaded an insulated warm suit from its insulated pack. I had it half on before I stopped. I still kept forgetting. I had all the time in the world. No one else was searching for Baldur, and I didn’t have to find him that night. I could stretch it over years …
… and I still didn’t have any way to locate him. I took off the warm suit and paced around some more.
The generators kept popping into my mind—the damned generators that had bothered me from the first. They were the key. Sometimes I’m slow, but in the late evening that answer hit me. I already had the locator gadget I needed.
Baldur took two generators, and probably a duplicator. That would allow him to make more generators, or parts to keep them running at least. That meant he was generating power, and when I’d gone to Doffissn, he’d helped me build a broad-scale energy detector. I’d given the original to Sammis for something, but the specs were still in my console.
With everyone watching me, I wasn’t about to dive into Maintenance that night. So I pulled off my clothes and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep for a long time.
The dawn snaked its way over Seneschal all too soon after my eyes actually closed … and later than I would have liked to rise, but I managed to grumble myself together and onto my feet. From that point, it wasn’t that long before I slid to the Tower and walked into Maintenance.
During the day, the backlog shrank a bit more, perhaps because
Heimdall and the Tribunes were running out of things to repair. Never, I suspected, had so many odd pieces of equipment been in such good condition.
In between the repairs I pulled out the detector specs and began to replicate the device, with a few simplifications, since this one didn’t have to function underwater and under pressure.
Right after a quick evening meal, I pulled on the insulated suit and dived from the Aerie, straight back to Midgard and the time of Baldur’s last objective assignment, in the city of Fenris. The wolf-city was more like a town, with narrow streets and open sewers.
The detector detected nothing, not even in sweeps around the area, as I froze in the ice-splintered skies, despite the warm suit. So when the chill finally got to me, I timedived back to the Aerie and fell into the waiting furs and a few hours’ sleep.
I made it to the Tower and into Maintenance at my normal time, a feat in itself after a long night of freezing in the skies of Midgard. As I studied the new additions to the repair bin and congratulated myself on making all the ends meet, Loragerd cornered me.
“I’ve been thinking …”
I didn’t want her thinking. “Dangerous occupation, thinking.”
She avoided the hint. “I know Baldur’s disappearance has upset you, but are you going to chase his ghost all over the galaxy?”
“Why does everyone keep thinking he’s a ghost?” I turned on her, grabbing her shoulders before I’d realized I’d even moved. “Is everyone so glad he’s gone? Was his honesty too much?”
“Loki! Loki! Stop yelling at me. You’re hurting my shoulders. I’m not your enemy, and I liked Baldur.”
I let go of her shoulders and found she was inside my arms, holding me. Holding me.
“Loki, for such a strong man, you’re such an idiot.”
I finally put my arms around her, but as I did she pulled back and brushed something out of her eyes.
She cleared her throat, and the sound was swallowed in the morning emptiness of the Maintenance Hall. By that point, all the Halls seemed empty, but I suspected it was me. The Guard was functioning the same way it had for centuries.
“Why is it so important for you to find Baldur?”
“Because it’s not like him to leave.”
“From what you’ve told me, it is like him. No fuss, no outcry, with all the loose ends tied up. You’re the one who likes the theatrics.”
That hurt, even from Loragerd, and she must have realized it. She looked at the glowstone floor.
We avoided looking each other in the eyes. I gestured toward the two stools by my bench. She took the lower one.
“There’s something more on your mind,” I observed.
“You’ll never love anyone, and you know it. You may be fond of me, or want Verdis, even Freyda. Yes, I know about that. Everyone knows about that. But you won’t let yourself love.”
“What does that have to do with Baldur?”
“Everything. Baldur loved. He loved everyone. And he just couldn’t stand it any more. He left. He didn’t tell Freyda, or Eranas, or Heimdall, or Odin Thor.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they’ve been following you, tracking you, wondering if you can find Baldur, half hoping you can, half hoping you can’t.”
I wasn’t exactly surprised.
“They don’t have any ideas?”
Loragerd brushed whatever it was out of her eyes again, cleared her throat, and went on. She seemed hoarse. “Freyda said … she said you ought to leave the poor bastard alone.”
“What?” Manipulating Freyda wanted anyone left alone? I didn’t believe that for an instant.
“I’d better go, Loki.”
“You just got here.”
“You have work to do, and so do I.”
She slipped off the stool into the quiet side lights and was out of Maintenance within instants.
I watched, not quite believing she had either come or gone. Finally, I swallowed, then dropped off the stool, walked over to the bin, and studied the backlog piled there. With the exception of the shield unit, Brendan and Narcissus could handle it all.
I dumped the shield assembly on my own bench and pulled up the stool. I should have left it for Brendan and gone over it with him. It would have taught him something new, but I needed something to do besides think.
Despite my intentions to farm all the repairs out, I kept a lot and ended up working straight through. Not much left to do by late afternoon.
After picking up a quick meal at Hera’s Inn, I tried to puzzle it out as I watched the sunset from the Aerie.
Baldur gone, and no one able to track him, no one wanting to. Loragerd’s appearance in the Maintenance Hall and the business about my not being able to love anyone. That had hurt, along with the crack about my theatrics.
Sammis had said to dive smart and not often, but as the twilight deepened, and the sun-reddened snow fields of Seneschal turned purple, I found myself suited and ready to timedive back to Midgard. Another night, another city—this time, Isolde.
My luck, skill, whatever, wasn’t any better in Isolde. No energy flows, and no backtime trails or other signs of Baldur.
Somehow the days and nights passed. Every night I tried a different locale on Midgard. I knew I was being monitored by the Locator section, but no one said a word.
Fifteen cities, towns, and villages, and no sign of Baldur. Isolated high forests, and rocky crags surrounded by ice, and no sign of Baldur. Day and night, and night and day, repairs and searching and sleeping, the pattern repeating day after day. Fall came and went, but I didn’t notice much of the mild change in season.
The morning after my last dive to Midgard, and I knew it was my last because there wasn’t anywhere else to look, I was staring blankly at a warm-suit power pack connection block.
“Loki.”
I knew the voice and swiveled on the stool. Dropping to my feet, I gave her an overelaborate bow.
She seldom beat around the bush. She didn’t then.
“Haven’t you tried enough?”
“Enough of what?”
“Baldur—what else?”
“What did you do to him to make him leave?” I tried a glare, but was too tired for it to make much of a dent against Freyda’s composure.
She shook her head slowly. “In such a hurry, trying to solve the universe as if you had no tomorrow. I had hoped …”
“Hoped what?”
She smiled faintly. “That is neither here nor now. I thought I might be able to help you. Why do you want to find Baldur so badly?”
“Because he shouldn’t have disappeared.”
“Did you know that Ferrin has tried every possible Locator cross-check? That even includes comparing the time length of past assignments, trying variations on Baldur’s Locator tag signal, and sending Sammis back-and foretime with portable Locator packs. There is no trace of Baldur.”
I swallowed that without commenting. No wonder the Tribunes had been content to let me poke around Midgard. They knew he wasn’t there—and were happy to let me waste my time on nonproductive searching.
“And you let me waste time …”
“Would you have believed me without trying it out yourself?”
I wasn’t sure I believed Freyda even then. “So what do you want now?”
“For you to stop wasting your energy chasing him.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Nothing. We had nothing to do with it.”
“He was a threat, and you got rid of him.”
She looked at me for a long time, eye-to-eye, and her gaze never wavered. “I was the second choice to replace Martel—a very distant second. Baldur was selected almost unanimously on the first ballot. He refused, without explaining. If you want, I’ll even open that section of the Tribune’s private records to you.”
Put in that light, I had no reason to disbelieve. I didn’t understand, but Freyda was telling me the truth—at least, the truth as she knew it.
“Why?” I caught myself just about ready to pound on my workbench. “Why would he just walk out on everything?”
“I have an answer, but I think you’ll have to find your own, Loki. Guards are human—even Counselors. We are all human, too human, for all our experience, all our ages, and all our abilities. You can exercise the powers of a god or be a human, but not both, not and stay sane. Somewhere you make a choice. Baldur chose one way, and I may have to choose another. You will too, if you haven’t already.”
The words whirled around in my head. I heard the words, about choices. And I knew my parents had made that sort of choice, and maybe Baldur had also. But why did it have to be so? Why couldn’t we be what we were born?
Looking into the darkness of the shadowed and shielded machinery, asking why, and not having any answer, I let the time ebb and flow past me before I understood that Freyda had left.
I wondered if she had ever even been there. Was her appearance a creation of my own mind?
I had to dismiss that, but I wondered how much of what I saw and heard was “real.”
Baldur had dropped from the sight of the Guard, had turned his back on me, and I had to accept that. But I still had trouble with accepting Freyda’s logic.
If I understood more behind Baldur’s reasons, I might have been able to find him. Somehow, and in some way, it had to do with the old issue of barbarians. Baldur didn’t like cultures where the “elite” were barbarians, where only a few understood the technology that underlay the civilization. But even I understood that the cultural factors came far before the technology, and I couldn’t see Baldur running off and playing
god in some pre-tech place in order to foreshadow his own kind of technological society. Besides, those changes would bring the cold change winds blowing—unless the time and place he had chosen were foretime from Query.
The only places he’d shown great interest in were Midgard and Terra, and personally I thought the Terrans were just like us, maybe worse, and too damned ruthless for someone like Baldur.
I took a deep breath as I considered the possibilities. The change winds didn’t blow backward, and there was no real way to track Baldur, or my parents, or anyone through all the foretime possibilities.
Baldur was gone. I had to accept that. So were my parents. The old names were fading from Query. Martel had stepped down. Odin Thor was a shadow growing fainter by the century. Orpheus was a shadow in the mist. My grandfather Ragnorak had been missing for centuries—had he done what Baldur had? Was he living out a meaningless life somewhere on a dustball in the void?
Were the ranks of the immortals thinning, to be replaced with techs like Ferrin, Verdis, Loragerd? Or did the system just create new names, like Gilmesh, Loki, Freyda?
I WAS PERCHED above my workbench, pondering over more changes in the layout in Maintenance. After I had moved into Baldur’s former spaces, for a time, I had left things as they were, but the fact that Baldur had been a good head taller than me had made more and more changes necessary.
Nicodemus tiptoed in. I never did understand why people tiptoed into Maintenance as if they were treading around eggshells. I was always civil, and I was still a pretty junior Guard.
“What is it?”
“Counselor Heimdall would like to see you, sir.”
“I’m not ‘sir,’ Nicodemus. I’m Loki, first, last, and always.”
“Yes, sir.”
I sighed. I wasn’t really even a supervisor, and I couldn’t understand why I rated a ‘sir’ from other junior Guards or Guards who’d been serving for centuries. Still … while Heimdall was the nominal supervisor of Assignments, which now included Maintenance, it had become apparent that I was running most things. Heimdall had larger birds to watch, although one of the older Guards might ask him to ensure I did
something quickly. Such requests were generally meaningless, since we did everything as quickly as practicable.
As Nicodemus stood there waiting, stiff, as if I were going to snap his head off, I climbed down from my high stool and straightened my black jumpsuit. I followed him up the ramp to Assignments.
Heimdall was waiting, calm, assured, with his long black hair in perfect place. He frowned and kept pulling at his chin, as he flicked his long fingers over the console in front of him while I stepped up on the platform and settled myself in the lower stool across from him.
“Do you know Patrice?” he asked without looking away from the screen.
“Went through training together.”
“She is a good diver, I gather?”
“My impression was that she was very good.”
“Sammis agrees. It makes this very disturbing.”
I waited, wondering why Heimdall wasn’t being his usual direct and blustery self.
“Locator has a fix on her twelve centuries back. A place called Toltek. She was supposed to have returned—two days ago. We sent Derron after her, fully equipped. He hasn’t returned. Both signals appear to be in the same place.”
“Toltek? Derron?” I hadn’t heard of either.
“Derron was the best diver from the Domestic Affairs Strike Force. Sammis thought someone with that sort of experience might be helpful.”
Heimdall’s assignment struck me as simple, and nasty. If Frey’s most accomplished goon couldn’t rescue one of the better divers, I wasn’t sure I wanted much to do with it.
He hadn’t answered my question about Toltek; so I asked again, politely. “I’ve never heard of Toltek. Should it be familiar?”
“Toltek?” Heimdall seemed amused. “No. It’s out beyond Faffnir, in a small cluster. Patrice did the preliminaries from deep space, then orbit, and brought back some holo shots. She went in for a closer scan.”
“And never came back, and he never came back. Now you want a double rescue?”
Heimdall’s fingers flashed over the console again before he answered. He didn’t look straight at me.
“It may not be that simple. Archives evaluated the holos Patrice brought in. There are signs of a mid-tech culture, maybe even high-tech.”
High-tech civilizations are rare, with only a handful in the time and locales surveyed by the Guard.
“High-tech?”
He nodded.
That meant that if I didn’t drag them out, at some backtime point a large sun-tunnel would be funneled through the undertime to Toltek. What was left of the planet would resemble a large cinder. So might any Guard on it—or be left breathing sudden vacuum or dust.
The idea was to destroy anyone bright enough to stumble onto the Guard, and theoretically an alert Guard might have a chance, but how much of a chance depended on a lot of variables. Sounds cruel, but it was necessary. With really good divers scarce, the Guard couldn’t afford to have them whittled down through rescue attempt after rescue attempt. We weren’t organized for massive assaults, and we really didn’t like the idea of even gadgets like wrist gauntlets and their thunderbolts falling into high-tech hands—or paws, or claws.
Moving a big sun-tunnel usually took two divers, and it took a while to plan and coordinate. Plus, if it were used, we lost access to a possible high-tech culture and goodies we might be able to exploit. All in all, it would be better for the Guard if I could pull the two out. That might not be better for me.
“Briefing?” I asked, mentally trying to catalogue what I might have to take along.
Heimdall tapped several studs and pointed to the adjacent console. I changed stools, on edge because he moved to stand behind me, and watched the script and holo shots unfold in front of me.
Patrice had blown it. Obvious to a dunderhead like me. You take it easy with planetary cultures that build lots of structures you can see from space. While some tech societies have visible long-distance-travel systems—rails, canals, roads—some do not. The difference is power. Invisible systems take far more power, much more—whether they’re tunnel ways or air transport.
Toltek was too regular. The forests, rivers, coastlines, fit into a definite pattern, almost a sculpted one. Any culture which shaped a planet for aesthetic purposes had one hell of a lot of power to spare.
“Stinks,” I said to Heimdall, more to get his reaction than to state the obvious.
“Do you recommend forgoing a rescue and implementing a sun-tunnel?” he asked in a level tone.
Common sense said yes, but I wasn’t ready to do that when I hadn’t even seen a single member of the species. If you’re going to destroy something you really ought to know what you’re destroying.
“No. I’ll see what I can do.”
I would have liked to travel back to Toltek equipped like a deep-space
dreadnought, but that wasn’t possible or practical.
According to data Patrice had recorded, the air was breathable, if higher in water vapor and oxygen. The temperature was a touch higher than on Query, and so was the gravity.
How was I going to decide on equipment? No information on planetary dangers, no description of the “people” who shaped an entire planet and imprisoned two timedivers who should be able to escape from most places—that made it difficult.
I needed a small Locator pack to narrow down Derron’s and Patrice’s shoulder tags, plus demolition cubes to cover any tracks I might leave—assuming I could pull it off.
“When are you leaving?” Heimdall interrupted my mental planning with his question.
“As soon as I gather what I need,” I replied, slipping off the stool and heading out the archway toward the ramps.
I stopped by Maintenance to pick up a small laser-cutter and some spare power cells in case Derron and Patrice needed them. I sent Brendan over to Locator for the portable directional packs and told him to meet me at the Travel Hall.
Hard as I concentrated, I couldn’t think of anything else of a special nature I ought to have taken—and if it were really special, I could always come back.
I reached the Travel Hall before Brendan and began to assemble what I needed. Improvisation was the order of the day. I started with the black bodymesh armor I’d worn to Sinopol and put it on under a standard jumpsuit. I added the laser to the equipment belt, plus a stunner, some additional ration packs, and a sheath knife.
By the time I finished, Brendan arrived with the Locator packs.
“Ferrin says good luck.”
I had to grin. “If you see him—don’t make a special trip—tell him that luck is a luxury too chancy for me.”
Brendan nodded. Seldom could anything I said surprise him.
I ambled out into the Travel Hall from the equipment room, taking my time, wondering if it were another Heimdall setup. Finally, I dived, smashing through the time-chill and arrowing out and backtime toward Toltek.
I took a flash-look at the planet from altitude.
Patrice’s holo hadn’t conveyed the greenness of the place, from the green-tinged atmosphere, to the long green grassy stuff that covered the regular fields, to the persistent green cliff walls that outlined the symmetrical green sand beaches.
After three, four, five flash-throughs around the edges of the daylight sites, I had not gotten a glimpse of a native, although the evidence of continuing planetary maintenance was always clear.
Nocturnal—that was my next thought.
I flashed through the undertime, and was rewarded when I passed over a beach on the night side. I came back for another look.
Several figures were standing on the glowing green sand under the stars. I broke out, silently, on the sand almost under one of the squared-off cliffs. I stood there for several units trying to make out the shapes—definitely not humanoid.
Abruptly, I was seized and shaken. That’s what it felt like, but there was nothing around. Just as suddenly, I was tossed head over heels into the sand. My whole body was being vibrated. I could sense that the shadow figures were moving across the sand toward my prostrate form.
The shaking and the high-pitched whine that accompanied it made concentrating as hard as hell, but I knew if I didn’t slide quickly, I wasn’t going to be sliding anywhere. I managed to blot the distractions out and stagger undertime.
Too close … way too close … and stupid. Just because I had trouble seeing at night didn’t mean they did. As usual, dumb old Loki had slid right in and announced, “Here I am.”
I broke out momentarily with a split entry high overhead, just long enough to lose the aftereffects of the whine, and dropped back into the undertime to try to get an impression of the Toltekians from a safer perspective.
Not even roughly humanoid, that seemed certain. Through the time-tension barrier, I could make out a solid “trunk” with pseudopods, I thought, propelling it, and with a fringe of tentacles at the top. The “trunk” glistened like the cliff walls around the beach, which made me think it was solid.
After gleaning what I could from the undertime and watching the Toltekians swirl around where I had disappeared, I decided on a temporary retreat. I plunked myself over to an isolated spot on Faffnir, settling on a knoll above the lifeless black sea. I sat down on a raised and smoothed chunk of ironglass, which probably dated back to the fall of High Sinopol. Hoped the rest would cure my shaking legs. They hadn’t appreciated the reception they’d gotten from the inhabitants of Toltek, or their watchdogs, or whatever.
In the atmosphere of quiet antiquity, in the afternoon light of Faffnir, I began to put together what little I’d picked up.
Item: Toltekians were nocturnal and nonhumanoid.
Item: I was assuming the beings I’d run into were Toltekians.
Item: They had picked up my appearance in the dark within unit-fractions and had shaken the hell out of me.
Item: I had barely managed to think my way undertime with the scrambling my thoughts had taken.
Item: Most divers wouldn’t have gotten clear.
My first guess was energy projection, but I hadn’t felt the power, and with my sensitivity to energy concentrations, I should have.
Second guess was directed sonics. That matched the high-pitched whine I’d heard.
If the Toltekians were a sonic-based culture, that would explain a number of things. They could have picked up my arrival, even my breathing, and reacted. The sonic assault could have been a natural defense mechanism, and an effective one, at that.
I postponed further thought while I pulled a ration stick out of my belt and munched it to quiet my shaking legs. If my assumptions were correct, and I saw no reason why they wouldn’t be, the Toltekians would be limited in how long they could and would maintain such a sound attack. Patrice and Derron should have escaped and reported. They hadn’t.
I only knew of two basic ways to imprison a good diver—either scramble thoughts or tie him or her to a chunk of something too big to carry into a dive. The second method was likely, particularly if Patrice and Derron had been rendered unconscious by the initial sonic blast.
I reached down and checked my own equipment belt for the laser-cutter. It was there. I wanted to make sure I hadn’t lost it when I’d fallen all over the beach.
Knowing the kind of Guard employed on the Strike Force, I’d have bet that Derron had homed in on Patrice’s signal and tried a frontal assault of some sort. The Toltekians had apparently been ready for Derron and potted him as well.
Sitting there in the early afternoon light of Faffnir, once I was recovered, I decided that waiting any longer wouldn’t solve my problems. I didn’t know of any equipment back on Query that would provide a defense against sonics, and the subjective clocks of both Patrice and Derron were still ticking. So it seemed like speed was the best answer. Speed and the willingness to zap a few Toltekians along the way.
I checked the Locator packs and activated them, diving undertime back to Toltek and emerging quickly and periodically to home in on the signals. They led me under one of the larger structures on the northern continent. Both signals were from the same point, from what seemed to be a chamber carved from solid rock well beneath the city above.